The Pre-Service Teacher Blog

After 3 years I've finally finished my coursework, and I'm ready for 26 weeks of student teaching sometime in the next academic year. First, however, I have to take a couple of state competency tests on July 7th that will entirely eat a summer Saturday.

So, this summer will be about playing with my daughters, nieces, and nephews, preparing for tests and the fall, and staying up late making palm applications and other tech endeavors.

Its going to be a great summer!

This is the cover I created for a portfolio I turned in last week. I used the mindmap creation site bubbl.us to create My.Resume, My.Philosophy, My.Learners, and My.KWL.Tech.Mind/Map and several other segments found in the portfolio. I augmented each of these bubbl.us creations with a more traditional format later on in the portfolio.

Labels: art, portfolio

Here is the home of my pre-teaching mashup. I started it this morning so right now it only has a couple of audio tools on it and, unfortunately, I have a busy day today so I won't have much of a chance to work on it until tonight. This is just a prototype of something I hope to be able to use when I have a classroom and it won't be a "finished" product until I actually figure out the specific needs of the class.

This is a little late so I'll make the excuse that I was extremely busy and caught up in my schoolwork, but last month I had a great experience as a guest on the Soft Reset podcast hosted by Tony Vincent and Mike Curtis. I hope I was a decent guest who didn't say "UHHH" too much, repeat a point several times (my wife always points that trait out), and had good relevant information. As stated in the show notes, if anyone has any requests, questions about developing their own apps, or any of the software mentioned in the podcast feel free to contact me.

Note: This is an adaptation from Tony's TonyVincent.Info. Tumblr is a really cool microblogging tool that allows you to update in content several ways, but a text message through a mobile device isn't one of them. That's where Twitter comes in. Tony's twitter/Tumblr setup allows him to update his tumblelog via twitter using a mobile device, and if you go to TonyVincent.Info you can see how he uses it.

I want to use Tumblr in a classroom as a class log, but there is real possibility that the site is blocked through the ISD server. There's a widget on the Tumblr site that allows Mac users to update their tumblelog without actually logging on and now I've found a pair of similar option for Windows' users. Except that these desktop tools, called TriQQr and Twitteroo, are for twitter, and that's where Tony's twitter/Tumblr RSS setup comes in handy. Soooo.....

In my classroom I want to have a PC or Mac that constantly runs either the Tumbler Widget or TriQQr/Twitteroo. Every so often I want a student (I have several ideas for procedures) to create an entry using these tools about what is going on in the classroom. I'd like to windup with about 10 entries a day from different students. I don't view the fact that students can't read the tumblelog at that time as a negative. In fact, I think it would be an incentive for the digital kids that I'm going to teach to go home and see what their peers are saying. In Addition, I will be able to update the tumblelog with some my information, and hopefully that will get the parents involved.

Anyways, I have this setup with Triqqr/Twitteroo and Twitter working. It can be viewed at here and I hope to start putting some more interesting info up shortly.

Update: Twitteroo is a little nicer, IMHO, than TriQQr.

Disposable e-mail helps you eliminate spam by giving sites that require registration a pseudo-fake email address.

There are a couple of basic different strategies for disposable e-mail,

1. the disposable e-mail account lasts for specific amount of time and you can use to complete a registration process or correspond with the site.
2. the disposable e-mail accounts forwards correspondence to your real email, and if spam starts getting forwarded you delete the disposable one (and you know who sells to spammers).

Many of them allow you to pick the address you provide, so you can do something like dalePalmGearRegistration@"Whatever the disposable email site uses"
Here is a pretty good list of sites that provide disposable e-mail accounts

Information like this will certainly be part of any Internet-safety unit I teach to students.

Labels: internet, internet safety

I've been really enjoying these two fun, free animation programs

Similar to the freeware PalmOS application Boneman, Pivot is a downloaded program that allows the user to manipulate the bend points of a human stick figure. From what I've seen, you can also import background images.

Linerider is a web-based application. In Linerider the user creates a course that a character on a sled follows. You can make extremely dynamic course where the character does all sorts of flips and loops.

I really see all sorts of potential using these tools throughout a curriculum in the form of animated chains (food and life cycle), time-lines and sequences. Perhaps animate a Haiku or take a ride through some math facts.......

Here is a Pivot sample from a group of 3rd graders



and here is a very involved Linerider clip entitled "Jagged Peak Adventure"



There are quite a few tutorials on YouTube for creating really involved courses on YouTube. Just do a search for Linerider.