This is a really intriguing video showing one way to collaborate with Google Docs spreadsheets. I’m not an art teacher, but I’d really like to come up with an excuse to try this.

After writing about Twitter yesterday, I stumbled across this article about how one university prof uses Twitter in education. My principal likes to say “it’s all about the relationships” and that seems to be what this university prof is saying. I don’t think I did justice to that part of Twitter in my blog post yesterday, so in fairness, this article presents another side of the story.

A few weeks ago I decided I was going to give Twitter a real try. A friend of mine in Lethbridge had decided he was going to be a Twitterer and convinced me to revive my long dormant account.

I came into it all fairly skeptically. After all, Twitter is not a forum meant for deep thought. You can type messages that are a maximum of 140 characters or about 28 words. It’s a format that lends itself to fleeting thoughts like, “Roast beef for supper,” or “My students sure worked hard today” rather than thought provoking commentary.

That said, I think I’m hooked on Twitter because I’ve discovered that it is a place where learning can occur.  Over the past few weeks I’ve managed to find  a couple of dozen educators and other people (and three NASA missions) that are all giving short, snappy updates on whatever they’re doing. These people are doing interesting things. They may not all report every day, but they’re all involved in pedagogically interesting projects. As they give updates of what they’re doing (and often links to posted projects), I’m learning and getting ideas.

Not all the people I’ve selected have worked out well. I dropped one guy who is not posting about the interesting stuff he is doing in his class (and other sources say he is doing really neat stuff), but seems to be continually posting messages (tweets) about his breakfast, returning from the airport, or other minutiae of his life. While I’m sure these are fascinating details for some people, I don’t know him and learning about his breakfast doesn’t help me learn.

That said, I’m learning to post snippets that might help other educators. Evaluating your own tweets with a view as to whether anyone might care is a bit humbling. I think I’ve said a few interesting things in the past couple of weeks, but I’m not posting a lot just because I don’t want to bore people. After all, does anyone really care what I had for breakfast? (I went to McDonald’s and had the breakfast burrito, if you do care.)

Twitter can be an opportunity to be vain or voyeuristic, but it can also unite a lot of professionals or friends and give an opportunity for learning or quickly helping others out with a problem.

I’m a fan of Twitter.

I set my students to work to do a little research using online primary resources using this assignment on Canadian newspapers. It seemed like a simple way to get them to poke around primary sources and see what they could do with them.

Unfortunately for the kids, old newspapers aren’t indexed and the search engine on one of the two sites we used is, well, inefficient would be the kindest thing you could say about it. This means you need to know the date of the event you’re researching, and you need to read through a lot of articles in quite a few newspapers in order to find the fairly small amount of information you need to do the assignment. It takes quite a bit of time. It’s annoying, but research is like that sometimes.

This presented quite a challenge for my students who can’t recall a time when Google couldn’t give them instant answers. After poking around in the newspapers for about 10 minutes, they claimed they couldn’t find anything and started trying to search the wider Web in order to (unsuccessfully) find appropriate newspaper articles or (worse yet) secondary sources.

As a guy who studied history and spent endless hours reading rolls of microfilm in dimly lit library rooms, I was surprised by the kids’ reaction until it occurred to me that they’ve probably never had this problem before. They’ve never had to carefully examine document after document to find one elusive answer. Examining countless documents takes a lot of patience, and that may be one thing that the easy access to instant information has taken away from them.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m endlessly fascinated by the possibilities that the Internet offers education. Yet to give easy and quick answers too often seems to have limited the patience of at least a few of my 16 year old students. While that might not matter too much in school, there are endless occasions in life when you need to patiently sift for an answer, whether that’s correcting a minor error in you programming code, or interviewing applicant after applicant to find just the right teacher or pastor. You need to be able to search intensely, moving slowly, and not getting frustrated.

Immediate access to all the knowledge on the planet offers a lot, but it takes a bit away, too.

Early this morning I stumbled across a neat site, Great Summary (thank you, Delicious). The website does exactly what the name suggests; it provides a great summary of text you paste in, or webpages whose URL you give it.

I’ve only tried a few pages, but the summary does seem pretty good. How well this website may summarize your pages probably depends a lot of how well written they were, but you’re probably not having your students learn from really disorganized websites anyways.

If this site works as well as my initial tests, it should be really useful helping weaker students glean information, or even stronger students working with material that’s a bit above their heads.

I’m looking for an excuse to play with this site.