Learning, Teaching & Technology

I’m back from a few days ‘away’ and I have quite a stack of backlog in twitters and blogs. I had just been puzzling how to get some movies back off of DVDs we’d made to store them when allanahk listed handbrake as just the tool to do that. My blueweb’n update led me to new Yahoo tools so I setup jumpcut. Next I need to try animoto and the potential of the privacy options of vimeo. Teachers in my USM course this summer loved voicethread; it’s easy to learn to use and has many applications for the primary grades and ELL students as well as older students. The whole realm of digital storytelling is opening up more and more for access by students. The task ahead for me is to figure out the logistics of student logins, shared accounts, etc. so that elementary age students who don’t have email accounts can be as independent as possible.

I’m headed to the lake pictured on the left hand sidebar of this blog for a few days away. I once considered enrolling in a graduate program in Environmental Education at Cornell and the professor I would have studied with was researching the ways people construct the concept “away”. In his realm it was more the out-of-sight out-of-mind aspect of surging growth in garbage disposals, remote incinerators and the ever-hidden barges of waste that leave our shores for places who accept our money in exchange for our contaminants. My time “away” has now come to mean a place that has less emphasis on electronic screens and volume and a focus on quiet time in a multi-sensory tactile world of textures, lights, temperatures and a wider variety of sounds.

I love both worlds and the world with the electronic devices allows me more and more opportunities to read about and listen to ideas that add to my options in that world. The environmental educator in me needs to sometimes move to the place that doesn’t have phones, satellites and the option to “be on” at all times.

So, those are my thoughts as I join family for some time in that world before returning for the final week of getting ready for school.