Notes from Everywhere: Tinkering as the Minutes Tick Away

I hear people say things like "I can't believe it's already July!" or "Is it really Wednesday?  The week's flying by!" all the time.  Such remarks are insubstantial but reassuring, the conversational equivalent of literary cliche; they remind us that we're civilized members of a society, literate in its basic conventions.  For example, "Hello, how are you?--I'm doing well.--Have a good night" is the "conversation" I regularly have with the security guard who lingers outside the doors to my residence hall at night.  Is it substantive?  No.  Even if either of us was suffering through an objectively hideous day--having been caught in the rain on the way to work, then having dropped the house keys down a storm drain--our exchange would remain pretty much unchanged.

I'm aware of the artificiality of many person-to-person exchanges, the formulaic nature of many stock phrases.  And yet--unable to convey my disbelief in any other way, I find myself asking:  do we really only have three classes left?  Is tomorrow really the first day of August?

Despite the progress each of us has made in class, I've been feeling more inundated with information than ever.  Since I joined Twitter, especially, it's been coming not as the slow, manageable river Karen described, but as a torrent of water gushing from a widening crevice in a collapsing cave.  A tsumani of hashtags, links, and blogs.  A veritable hurricane, a threatening wall of water--

My way of putting on a safety vest and picking up an oar is to A) remind myself to take a deep breath.  Of course I'm not going to master the internet in a six-week summer course; it's enough to have started to familiarize myself with tools that could be useful in future, and contacts who can continue to keep me appraised of the latest trends; and B) to use this tinkering blog to explore three (a concrete, manageable number) tools I've been hearing about for the past few weeks but haven't yet had the occasion to check out.

Since (A) is mostly an internal process, it's not here.  But (B), my brief account of experiments with Edmodo, Goodreads, and Evernote, is split into three respective summaries below:

The tagline for Edmodo is "make your classroom a community."  Although I'm more than enthusiastic about anything related to classroom-as-community, I was a little skeptical after watching the introductory film. At first, Edmodo seemed like it was offering a glorified class website:  teachers with accounts can post assignments, quizzes, and alerts.  These capabilities are nice, and maybe streamlined, but not innovative enough to justify the site to me in Web 2.0 terms.  After giving it a little more time, however, I came to see that Edmoto proposes to do for classroom management tools what Google has done for tools used by the social and private sectors:  consolidate them.  It offers a cloud-based storage system for document, picture, music, and video (like Google Docs) which perhaps makes my Dropbox redundant; teachers can share documents and other media with students this way.  A site calendar (like Google Calendar) allows teachers to share events with both students and their parents; a site gradebook presumably makes grades available to select parties as well.  What may be coolest about Edmodo, however, has less to do with students and more to do with professional networking (for which a parallel doesn't quite exist in Google, though I know Google+ has represented the most recent attempt).  Certain features permit educators to convene, via the web, in "Subject Area" and "Partner" communities for support and feedback.  If my future district were to join the site, teachers in all subject areas could participate in what the site calls "district-wide collaboration." Finally, Edmodo offers different methods of data-crunching to determine degree of program effectiveness and level of classroom engagement, making it useful for teachers as well as administrators.  Like every site, I suppose, this is one that can be used as intensively or as lightly as one desires.  But I think I'd use this in the classroom quite frequently to consolidate my reaching-out to parents, students, and colleagues.

I thought to explore Goodreads after reading about what Jen has done with it in the ninth grade classroom, a project she describes on her blog.  I'd heard of the site before but hadn't visited it:  since I generally operate on limited time (who doesn't?), I prefer to spend it actually reading.  However, the site seems great, and I might use it if I'm ever in need of a good book recommendation or even a chat with other book lovers (though usually I can get plenty of those in person, since many of my friends are/were English majors or are affiliated with English as a discipline in some way).  The best thing about Goodreads might be its sly literary evangelism (Alex, you gave this word its currency for our class).  From what Jen describes on her blog, all kinds of students potentially become invested in the site, which allows students to list the books they've read, review them, find similar titles, and take a peek at the virtual bookshelves of their friends.  It seems like a great way to build a reading community within the classroom--and outside of it.

Evernote operates, like Edmodo, on the cloud platform:  like Dropbox, it promises to store your documents (and pictures, and music, and video) wherever you are, synced to all of your devices.  It's quickly becoming clear to me that soon, saying things like "I forgot--that document's saved on my home computer" will be as archaic as saying something like "We can't watch that home video now--the tape untangled from the feeder and we have to wind it back in" (remember the days?).  Anyway, Evernote seems like something I'd use personally rather than professionally (if a niche in my web bookmarking list still exists, at that point, for the personal).  Some features unique to Evernote:  "Evernote Clearly" proposes to make reading online "distraction-free" by clearing away the "clutter" that exists, as a rule of the internet, synchronously with text on most pages.  "Evernote Web Clipper" seems to function much like a bookmarks bar or bookmarking site like Delicious or Diigo--meaning I could take it or leave it--but "Evernote Peek" seems like it could be a cool study aide (if one limited to the iPad), and "Evernote Hello" a wonderful phone app to organize contacts and events and pictures related to those contacts.

Speaking of contacts and social interaction--I think we've come full circle.  As we've learned in class, it's not the technology that makes a lesson great.  Similarly, I guess, tools meant for building community in the classroom can't ever be guaranteed to do so on their own, simply by virtue of existing.  I'm still eager to learn tips and tricks for educators intent--with or without technology--on fostering a sense of community in the classroom.  Part of this, I know, means living by example (my Philosophies of Education had a good discussion about this today using Nietzsche, although his definition of living by example was more of a "let your inner essence emit itself" philosophy rather than a "let your actions speak louder than words" type of thing).  Which means that part of this means relying on convention as a means for conversation as infrequently as possible.  So, yes--it is really Wednesday.  The week's going pretty fast.  How are you, and--oh, here, I found these--did you drop your keys?