And the winner is:

In the excitement of Orientation Week, I forgot to announce the winner of the iPad!

We had close to 300 comments on the blog, with each comment earning ONE ticket into the raffle. Patrick Naick just happened to be in McCabe at the time of drawing, and he pulled KIM PIERSON's entry out of the pile. Kim is the new owner of an iPad mini + case. Congratulations!

Thanks to everyone who participated. I enjoyed reading the vast perspectives in comments!

Week 13: We have arrived!

We're just a week away from meeting the newest crop of Kohawks. It's an exciting time of year; a time that makes me think both about my own experiences as a college freshman and about the experiences our new students are bringing in with them.

Take a moment right now to think about the technologies you had with you when you moved in to your freshman dorm (or wherever you lived for your first semester of college).  I had an account on
the South Dakota State Telephone Network (SDSTN) in my dorm room with long distance costing ten cents a minute and a Snoopy phone I'd won selling magazines. I brought a Brother daisy wheel typewriter (I was a terrible typist and hated every key stroke on that thing!) and my newly purchased Jansport backpack. By second semester, I'd learned about the computer lab in Briggs Library and spent most of my writing time there. And, luckily my second year roommate (also Lisa) showed up with an awesome new word processing device: I could actually read about two paragraphs of text on the screen before committing to print!

Now let's think about what those new students are moving in with next week. If recent history repeats, we know almost every one of them will have computer - most will have laptops. Less than 1% will not have a smartphone. Many will have multiple devices; an iPad, a laptop, a smartphone, gaming devices and more. They'll use them in ways we might not get (I know a student who composed a five page paper on his phone).

I think it's helpful to put our students life experiences, age and a few thoughts about how they have interacted in our world into perspective before they arrive. I have two articles to share this week that will make us think about our incoming Kohawks. The first is a blog post by the Tenured Radical (written by Claire Potter) on the Chronicle of Higher Education. Two weeks ago, Potter posted Bye-Bye Birdie: Sending the Kids Away to College. It's a casual post giving advice to parents on how to prepare their kids for college.  She writes about some touchy topics (creating separation by NOT calling your child multiple times a day and talking about drugs and alcohol) and some topics we probably wish were mandatory reading for ALL parents and incoming students (college is different than high school!). If you could add to the the list for parents, what topics would you include?

The second article is the Beliot Mindset List. I've been reading this list since starting at Coe. It's a list of popular cultural, political and historical references to help "place" the incoming (traditional) first year students. The list is published by Beliot College and started in 2002. Here's what Beliot says about their list:

"What started as a witty way of saying to faculty colleagues "beware of hardening of the references," has turned into a globally reported and utilized guide to the intelligent if unprepared adolescent consciousness. It is requested by thousands of readers, reprinted in hundreds of print and electronic publications, and used for a wide variety of purposes. It has caught the imagination of the public and has drawn responses from around the world, including more than a million visitors to the website annually."

The Class of 2018 List will be published in three weeks (according to the Mindset Facebook page), which is just a little late for us. Fortunately, much of the 2017 Mindset List can also ring true. A few key elements of the list that struck me:

• Eminem and LL Cool J could show up at parents’ weekend. 
• As kids they may well have seen Chicken Run but probably never got chicken pox.
• Their TV screens keep getting smaller as their parents’ screens grow ever larger.
• Rites of passage have more to do with having their own cell phone and Skype accounts than with getting a driver’s license and car.
• With GPS, they have never needed directions to get someplace, just an address.
• They have always been able to plug into USB ports

Two years ago, after sending detailed instructions for getting to my house to a new babysitter from the Student Association's list of house/animal/kid helpers, I realized I'd been wasting time compiling these instructions. I asked our new sitter if my directions had been OK, and she said she didn't even read them, just plugged the address into her phone. It's a hard habit to break, but I've restricted myself to just saying "it's a brown house."

How do you get yourself into the mindset of a 21st Century, born-in-1996 student? 

Week 12: Collections of Stuff

Almost every day I read something online that makes me think one of the following thoughts:

• "This would be perfect for class next fall!"
• "This article falls right in line with the project Joe Smith and I are working on."
• "I'd love to read this when I have more time."
• "I need to read this again when I'm 70 (or next summer, or when I'm ready to prep a new class, or before I buy a car.)"

Then, I do one of three things:

1. I bookmark the article using my Delicious account. Admittedly it's an OLD tool and I have an account that's somehow stuck around through multiple iterations of Delicious (all the way back to when it was delicio.us and it was tied to Yahoo). *
2. I email the link to myself, forever to be lost in the ether of my inbox.
3. I email the link to someone else, forever to be lost in the ether of his/her inbox.

*I've also occasionally created a Google Doc and copied a number of links on to the document. Just recently I opened up an old Google Doc I'd labeled "references" and it contained two websites that are no longer even online. I have no idea why I saved them!

Now, I'm experimenting with a few different tools to help me organize and share my collections. I'll share some of the tools I'm experimenting with; perhaps you'll find them useful, too.

 


LiveBinders calls itself 'your 3-ring binder for the web.' It allows you to create a "binder" of content (with notes to yourself!). You can share the content of each binder or keep it private. Picture it as a shelf in your office with multiple binders based on a topic of your choosing. Some users choose to make their binders public, a way of publishing collections for the greater good, if you will. Check out the "featured" binders for examples. At a recent conference, one of the presenters shared her LiveBinder full of resources she'd mentioned in her presentation, the presentation itself and many other related resources. It was a nice take-away.

PROs: I like the organization functions. I'm creating LiveBinders for a Tech Lab I'm teaching. I have a binder for PE teachers using technology and another binder for elementary teachers using technology. I have tabs for PE in the news, PE educators to follow (links to blogs or Twitter feeds or websites created by PE teachers) and PE Tech Tools. I can add websites, images or videos (with a paid subscription, I could upload content). I've changed the layout of my binders to add a text box next to everything I put in, so I can write my own commentary. I can make the binder public, or require a pass code to see the binder. Students can add comments.

CONS: Haven't found any yet!

Padlet (formerly known as Wallwisher) is the digital version of your office corkboard filled with post-it notes. Create a "wall" and then populate it with sticky notes containing URLs, embedded videos, images and upload files. You can have lots of walls - one for each subject matter you're collecting. You can allow other users to post to your wall, you can make your wall public or you can just keep them all to yourself.

In addition to using Padlet as a collection spot, I've used it collect input from students. In this Padlet, I've asked each student in a Reading Methods class to post a link to an eBook he/she created, listen/read the ebooks posted by peers, and then give each other feedback - all on one wall.

PROS: I like this tool because it has multiple purposes (which can also be a CON). The ability to upload documents is nice. Items can be tagged and no one is required to log in (unless the creator of the wall requires it).

CONS: walls can get filled up and there's no search function within a wall.

Dropbox is a nice alternative to Google Docs. It seems a bit cleaner and more straightforward (there are folders that look like folders and are called folders!).  I can create a folder for each collection of content I'm interesting in keeping. I can share the folder or the individual documents within the folder. Two major downfalls for me:  1) having to use a 3rd party add-on (URL Droplet) to add weblinks, and 2) the inability to attach a note to any of the elements within my Dropbox.

What do you use to collect your digital things?