What makes someone tech savvy?

This.  The ability to try things out and fail.  Then you might need to fail some more, ask someone a fraction of your age for help, and try it again.  THAT's what makes someone tech savvy-- actually that's what makes someone a learner.  If you put a set of K'nex in front of me WITH the step-by-step directions, and I will have the thing built by, oh, Y3K.  That same set, in the hands of a former former fifth grader who read on a first grade level-- he had that thing built in 10 minutes flat with an itemized list of the pieces I was missing.

Forgive my harsh words (and this word is one of my LEAST favorites), but at the recent BEST conference, we teachers joked that we all suck at something-- and we need to embrace our suckiness and ask for help in order to overcome it.  Kids need to know that it's okay to suck at things, and it's okay to admit that you suck.  That's how we know what we need to learn.

Rock on, Grandma.

Do you 2.0 and Avatar Fun!

I have been playing around with various web2.0 tools this week, and evaluating which I might want to use with my class this coming year.  First, I played with Voki.  It was easy to set up an account, but once I tried to create my avatar, I was very frustrated.  The free avatar choices were not very good-- I didn't want to pay the yearly fee just to get an avatar I liked.

My favorite avatar style is one that looks like the Wii Mii's (maybe that's what they're called), and a person I follow on Twitter now (thanks to the Dynamic Landscapes Conference) is Jennifer LaGarde-- or as she is known by her twitter handle:

I love the style of her avatar... cartoonish, and cute, and looks just like the real person (minus the cartoonish part).

I have been searching the net off and on for months trying to figure out how to make an avatar in that style-- which clearly was a big old brain fart on my part.  Why did I not just tweet her to find out?  So I have now done just that!

And ironically, LibraryGirl, just tweeted this-- literally 5 minutes before I tweeted her:

The link will bring you to a page describing 20 different ways to create an avatar, and one of them will even put your head in a jar.  Seriously...check it out here.  I think I even found the way to make the cute wii mii person like LibraryGirl.

I have also been playing around with Edmodo.  It was super easy to set up an account and I was quickly able to set up my page.  I like that it looks like a Facebook page-- I have a feeling that my class this coming year is fairly savvy with Facebook.  I need to play around with it more to see what it is capable of.  Maybe I'll send out a tweet to see what other teachers think.

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Ok... so I'm now back a couple of hours later to say that I am absolutely having sooooooo much fun playing with avatars.  Here are the one's I have played with from the link found above:

My lego avatar

My Simpsons Avatar

I Picasso'd my face

   and my favorite so far

Wee Mee

And I still find myself playing.  The kids would really love to "Wimp" themselves at www.wimpyourself.com!  Here's my wimp avatar: 

Here, I played on www.clayyourself.com and made a clay avatar:

Google Apps for Ed and Learning

This week, as part of my Summer Techsploration class, I was asked to play around with some of Google's apps for education.  The first app I started with was MAPS.  By customizing a map, I am able to create my own interactive map.  We always begin the year with a study of the US Government, so I was right away intrigued by mapping out the three main buildings in Washington D.C. that represent the three branches of government.   I love the way Google Maps make you feel like you are standing in the middle of the street, or in another case, in the middle of the White House.  This is a great way for Vermont students to take a virtual tour of our government buildings.

There is nothing like looking at some of the actual places we study.  It was also interesting to see where the buildings were in relation to each other.  Using the draw tool, I connected the three buildings.  In the future, I might ask the kids to find Dothan Brook School in order to put the location into perspective.