Disconnected for a day

Yesterday, half of the schools in my district were without email because an Outlook Exchange server was on the fritz. Normally, these issues are resolved by county technicians within a couple of hours at most, but whatever the problem this time, my entire school was email-free. (With one exception - me, being on a different Exchange server.)

In speaking with folks and asking around at the end of the day, I learned some interesting things:

• Almost unanimously, teachers felt like they were more productive without the constant distraction of email. The few exceptions were the fact that if they had documents they had to send to someone else, they weren't able to do so (unless they used their personal email).
• The few teachers who said that it didn't make a difference to them commented on the fact that they rarely sit in front of their computers checking their email - even during their planning periods. (I know from observation and experience that we have a range of teaching "locations" - from in front of their computer to up at the board constantly.)
• Most administrators, secretaries, and support personnel felt they were only somewhat less productive - there were plenty of things they could work on that didn't involve email, but the fact that they were out of touch with their normal circles made work a little more interesting.

One teacher longed nostalgically for the first school she taught at - it didn't have email, but instead had a large announcements board posted in the faculty workrooms for communicating with staff.

While email is an incredibly convenient communcation method, I think the point is taken that we (educators, technologists, people) can get "addicted" to it fairly easily. It takes some effort to simply close your email program for an extended period - however, that may be for a variety of reasons: you need your email "fix," much of your job function depends on email, users expect you to reply fairly quickly, etc. I wondered to some of my teachers how it would go over if our county adopted a one-day-a-week moratorium on email, or at least a school-wide pact on not checking it on a particular day of the week.

Not everybody was against it...

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Cartooning for the Artistically Challenged

I stumbled upon a very cool site tonight - ToonDoo, where you can use a very robust Flash tool to create panel cartoons from scratch. With a wide selection of backgrounds, characters, and scene accoutrements, there's a lot of fodder there for creative students to tell a story using comics. You can also upload images of your own and even draw objects from within the program (and save them for later use).

by techieteachr | Create your own Cartoon at www.toondoo.com

I spent about 30 minutes playing around with the program, and as I did, it reiterated the idea that creating media like this must be planned first - I didn't really create anything of quality until I had come up with the idea for the comic. Once I did, it only took me about 15 minutes to create the actual cartoon. Once created, you can embed the toons in blogs and websites, email them to others, post to Twitter or Facebook, or even download it to your computer. Very cool.

The only thing about it that bugged me - someone beat me to my user ID, so I had to go with techieteachr. Not really even a large learning curve, given about 30 minutes just to play.

Hope you like it - it's a humorous way to comment on some of the things I hear at work. Maybe it'll become a semi-regular feature!

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TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

I stumbled upon TED a while back when looking for other video resources besides YouTube and Google Video (both of which are blocked by my district's internet filters). It's a sleek website containing videos on Technology, Entertainment and Design from people in all areas related to those three categories - futurists, computer gamers, scientists, educators, artists, etc.

There are some very interesting and thought-provoking topics, but more importantly, the video interface has some nice features that aren't found in some other video sites. Many of the videos have closed captions (most in English, some in other languages) that can be played in real-time along with the video. Many also have interactive transcripts, in which a user can click on a portion of text and have the video jump right to that segment of the video - ideal for teachers who find part of a video which is appropriate for class, but doesn't need the whole thing.

Here's one that I particularly like: creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson discusses how modern-day school systems are killing creativity. I've embedded it below, but to check out the interactive transcript, closed captioning (in 30! languages), and even to download it as an MP4, you have to visit the video's page itself.

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