This is from the San Francisco Zoo, sometime in 2006. It's a good example of my typical work - usually flowers in a nearly abstract way. Some of it comes from a Georgia O'Keefe influence, her flower paintings are always very powerful to me. Some of my style just comes from (as my art professor deduced in college) looking though a microscope one too many times - I like to really focus in on a detail of the image, enlarge it, and let everything else get lost out of focus. I believe it was a compliment.
Bookmarking tools are useful for any researcher, or research-based profession. The Internet is not only a wealth of information, but can be an overwhelming source of information. Trying to sort through all of the results of a search, or even just the countless daily headlines available as more and more local newspapers 'go live' with their own websites can be a daunting task. As a science teacher, it is important for me to stay up-to-date on new discoveries, research and technology. Often, I read a good article, and want to remember to apply it a class later, but can't remember where I found it. Thanks to social bookmarking sites like Furl, this becomes significantly easier.
The Pros: In my previous post, I talked about how it's great that iGoogle (and RSS feeds in general) will search out the newest headlines on any topic of my choice. Here is the tool that I can then use to save them, so that even as they're replaced in a feed by newer headlines, I can still access them, tagged and annotated to help sort for relevancy. Furl, with it's quick and easy toolbar add-on, makes it easy to save something now and come back to it when I have time. And you never lose an article - because Furl archives a complete copy of the page's html, it can't be lost due to outdated or broken links. Also, easy tagging with topics/keywords for future searching is a big bonus. In terms of using technology for teaching, this isn't a bad way to find articles to assign for additional reading.
The Cons: It may seem petty, but I find the site visually unappealing. I feel like I'm reading a bunch of Google text ads and not a list of my favorite articles. This is an important reminder: you can have the most relevant, useful, high-quality content and usability out there, but if your website isn't appealing, the negative associations destroy what you've set out to do.
That's not to say I won't use it. I'm sure I can adjust to the layout in time. Certainly as a tool for tracking articles for future reading and reference, it has a valuable place in teaching.
References: Furl.net, Wikipedia:Furl
As a dedicated Google-geek already, I find the addition of an iGoogle page to my extensive digital footprint easy. In fact, as I was setting it up I was wondering why I didn't already have one.
It's pretty, things move around easily, it has gadgets for tracking or displaying anything one can think of, and a thousand things you never considered wanting to keep on your homepage for daily viewing. Who wouldn't want one of these?
Then I remembered - I haven't found these types of things particularly useful in the past. I had a My Yahoo page for a decade, and in the past year have given up checking it. Despite the edition of RSS feeds to my favorite blogs, Daily Pictures, weather and more, it had become the place I went to to find out if I had mail. And I stopped using my Yahoo mail account due to the overwhelming spam that came to the inbox after 10+ years of distributing that email address across cyberspace.
To be fair to iGoogle, their variety of gadgets alone makes this page a dozen times more interesting already then the quickly forgotten My Yahoo, yet it still seems as though in the effort to consolidate, to expedite the browsing process, we go looking for more to distract us. Do I really need the "Art of the Day" gadget? No, but it makes my page look pretty and I feel like I'm learning something by being exposed to it. Yet, as I go to my iGoogle page to get the day's headlines, check my email and the weather, I look right past it - it's already become background noise.
As someone who has a life with so many facets that it can often seem chaotic, I have mixed feelings about these pages. I love them for their opportunity, their hope that in one page I can find simplicity, all of my daily needs presented to me in one quick location. Show me which of the blogs I track have new posts, show me my calendar, my to-do list, show me the day's headlines, what's the teaching tip of the day? Great. All in one place, easy to find, a good use of technology to simplify life and give each day a starting point. But does it really help keep it all organized? Couldn't I just set up Bookmarks in Firefox for my favorite sites, my mail, and the MySOU page that's supposed to help me keep all things school-related together? How would this help me find new information for teaching any better than just doing a Google search when I have ideas that need more research?
So I explored the idea of the tabs. Not a new idea by any means. Look at that first screenshot again, I have a dozen tabs open already. Again, why not just use my browser to help me keep things organized? Okay, iGoogle, what have you got that's going to impress me? I started to break out the items into tabs: items that are relevant to the student-me on tab 2; news and headlines from around the world on tab 3 for when I have time to explore the world beyond work or school. I even created a "Science and Teaching" tab, then used Google's famous "I'm feeling lucky" button to let it select gadgets for me.
That's when I started to get hooked. This might be different enough that I can get excited about it. I started out thinking "it's all too much, I'll forget to check it, get bored with it." Now, I'm excited. Look! Headlines from a dozen different good science and teaching sites. Updated every day with something new! I don't need to go browse those sites, I can read their headlines and go from there. Clean, neat. Organized by topic and relevancy. This I can get excited about. New ideas, topics, discussions. Things that help me learn more and that I can apply in the classroom to help my students - all easy to find thanks to iGoogle. And that's what makes this a step above bookmarks and browser tabs - as the sites update, so do the gadgets on these pages. I don't have to go looking for what's new at Discover Channel or ScienceNOW, it updates here for me to see, and in just a quick click I can read more. That's where this becomes a time-saver and innovative tool in broadening my daily browsing into a daily dose of research. And that's what teaching and learning is - a daily exposure to new things and using that information to learn more.
Welcome to the newest blog for Stephanie Farrell. There have been others, Facebook, LiveJournal, my own Frontlight.com, and even brief jaunts through Friendster and MySpace. But this one is something different - it's a class assignment. So it is likely to remain well updated and current, at least for the next few weeks.
First, a bit about me. I have several passions; science, photography, and education among them. I am currently a grad student in the MAT-PT program at Southern Oregon University. For those not familiar with the abbreviation, that's the Master of Arts in Teaching, 2 year/part-time program. Teaching is not just academic for me, however. I put it into practice nearly every day as the Science Inquiry Outreach Coordinator for ScienceWorks Hands-On Museum in Ashland, Oregon.
This blog will serve as both a home for posting class assignments and as a learning tool while developing my own sense of using technology while teaching. This topic is extremely relevant to me in many ways. In the forefront, I'm teaching a summer camp next week called "Play, Invent, Explore" which will use the PicoCrickets technology developed by MIT and LEGO. This is a really interesting program, but using it in a way that develops some further understanding in the kids of what can be done with technology will be the challenging part. There's too much of a desire to just have fun with it. Though even by just having fun they should hopefully learn something through the creative process.
"Teaching through technology" is the theme of our current class. There will be much to learn, and some of it will just be re-learning how to approach some of the technology I already use to see how it can be applied to teaching. There will be reviews of the various technologies we'll be testing as we go, stay tuned!
