I like the idea. It makes sense to me. It explains my preferred method of learning. Generally, I don’t like courses. I much prefer to learn a new piece of software through trial and error. I learned iMovie by editing videos of my kids. The first “movie” I made was of my son and his friends doing bike stunts.

I learned Wordpress and Drupal by installing them on an old computer at home. I read a lot of on-line manuals and watched tutorials but not before I’d mucked around with each program first. I do read manuals but only once I’ve mucked around first. By playing with something first it gives the manual the context I need to understand it. 

We need to give kids more time to tinker. In the current standards driven climate in which we practice, it’s not easy.

This looks like a good use of Google Forms in a PE class. Personally, I find opportunities for enhancing instruction with ict limited. I think I’ll follow this blog for a while to see what other good ideas float to the surface.

My concern is that I don’t see schools–at least international schools–preparing kids to be self-employed. Schools should not follow business models. Nor do I think the role of schools is just to prepare kids to be good employees but I do think they should have enough business savvy at the end of high school that they have the confidence and skills that they can start the process of becoming self-employed. I suspect that most teachers–myself included–do not have the skills or the knowledge to teach this but it still needs to be done.

Rip: A Remix Manifesto takes a different view. Instead it suggests that culture has always been built by building on the work of others. It’s just been in the last 30 years or so that copyright laws have made it illegal.

Food for thought.

I’m not surprised it’s getting shut down. Of all the apps I use with students and teachers it’s the least understood. Many people are happy just to make their notes in Google Docs. Though Docs and Notebooks are similar I like the ability to right click on content and have it saved to a notebook. Regardless of how one feels about Google Notebook it points out the potential downside of cloud computing.

Cloud computing put users at the mercy of others. Other than more traditional websites that schools control, cloud based sites can be shuttered quickly and with no guaranteed input from users.

I find the concept of cloud computing very attractive. Someone else has to worry about the cost of storage and data backup. Also, it makes client software support easy because it’s browser based. But as attractive as I find it, the fact that someone else controls accessibility makes it not a viable option for schools as a primary solution. Anyone who suggests otherwise has their head in the clouds

The areas of learning are:

Perhaps it’s not a matter of making it work completely but more we need to move institutions in the directions he suggests. We need to trend them in the direction of syndication, PLE’s, openness, or re-use.

“Lesson? If a project depends on teacher training, it will likely fail.”

As a tech coordinator, I’m very careful when recommending sites or tools to teachers. They’re busy. I see my role as doing some of the leg work–finding worthwhile tools and helping them see ways to apply them to their teaching.