MuseForJews

muse: n. a source of inspiration

Shame on you, Congress…

When I was sixteen, I embarrassed my mother by wearing a pair of jeans with a patch on the butt that said “War is not healthy for children and other living things.”

I propose an update:

guns

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April 18, 2013 Posted by | Just sayin' | Leave a comment

Test, test, test

So my 6th graders are finishing up their Discovery 2012 projects. We gave them lots of time in February to research the topic of their choice and then they prepare a final project in whatever medium they choose. So the computer lab becomes a little chaotic…with kids making movies, creating Keynote presentations, writing books and creating wikis.

This time I had one young man who created a timeline using Timeliner. I see that there’s a new “multimedia-rich” version, but, alas, that’s not the version we have. I wanted something a little flashier for him, so I had the bright idea for him to recreate it using an online timeline website. So I did the unforgivable: I did a search for online timeline and jumped into having him use Dipity.com to create his timeline. Without testing it first.

What a disaster. For one thing, I’ve had few websites that load as slowly as this one, which often led to him wasting class time waiting to get in. And now that he’s done, and we’re getting ready to share our projects at parent/teacher conferences, I’ve had numerous problems getting in. I keep getting some internal server error. Oy.

A disaster.

Thank goodness I have that old, boring, Timeliner version saved. And hopefully I’m upgrading to the new one for next year.

And no more jumping into using a website with a student without testing, testing, testing.

March 14, 2012 Posted by | Just sayin', Thinking | , | Leave a comment

Who cares?

The JTA publishes a list of 100 influential Jewish tweeters – just came out.

Recently there was a tweet asking for suggestions for a list of great women tweeters. I believe the word “influential” was used as well.

Got me to thinking…

What makes a tweet great? What makes a tweeter influential?

The JTA (and I certainly don’t mean to pick on the JTA…) shows you how they came to their conclusion here. Numbers, data…

How do we really gauge influence? Do we really think that we can distill it down to a bunch of numbers? Followers? Links passed along? God forbid – number of tweets?

I’m a huge believer in social media, Internet networking, Twitter, electronic communication, blogging… all that stuff.

I love to gather links and pass them along to my colleagues.

But I’m not sure about the whole influential thing.

What does that mean?

In the final analysis, I believe that influence means you had an impact on someone; helped them change, got them to think about something in a new way… And I think we’re fooling ourselves if we think that tweeting will do that.

Recently I got a Facebook message from a former student who told me that she wouldn’t have gotten through middle school if it hadn’t been for me.

Now that’s influence.

And nary a tweet was heard.

Just sayin’

January 6, 2011 Posted by | Just sayin', Social Technologies, Twitter | , , , | Leave a comment

   

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