Awesome

Awesome Highlighter lets you basically create bookmarks within an existing Web page. You’re limited to highlighting two-thousand characters, but that is enough to get students where you need them to be on a given Web page. You can add sticky notes to a page, change highlight colors, and even track who accesses your highlights, when, and from where. Register and you have a list of all your highlights.

Highlight

Students working on roots comment to me that Word Information helps them when their homework asks them to find derivatives for our weekly roots. Another site could prove useful for the same thing, but their list of roots is pretty far down the page. How to get a link to that spot on the page? Done.

Er

I know that 2008 called, they want their cool site back, yeah, yeah. I’m super late to this party. Got it. For the record, though, I knew about this back in 2008 too. I just didn’t blog about it back then and forgot about it until I needed it today. That realization, and the path I took to digging this site out of my memory, could be its own post since it replicates how much of our curriculum sticks in a kid’s head, only to pop out years later when it’s actually needed and seem not worth remembering back when it’s not.Similar Posts:

• Another Way – Delicious
• All In A Day’s Work
• A Look At Coudal
• In-Class Computer Lab Use
• Punctuation Videos

The fact that I can’t name ten (and that you likely can’t either) suggests a few things to me:

1. The Internet isn’t as full of great information as we think;
2. We don’t use Web sites in instruction;
3. We don’t know how to find what we want;
4. What we want isn’t out there.

I’m going with option four on this. My typical search finds me cobbling lots of different pieces together with an idea I’ve had for the last two years along with a little something I got from watching SNL this weekend attached to the core of an idea I got from a discussion with some friends last month. I rarely find resources online that fit right into what I’m doing or that hit on what I want to address. I wish they were out there, but not even Discovery Education or any of the lesson plan warehouse sites cut it. Lots of chaff to sort through there and I worry about my return on time invested.

I found an online index to the text of The Things They Carried. It looks like a cool resource, but I’m not sure how my students would even begin to use it. Much of what I find is just like that — nice to look at, but without a practical application that makes it useful.

Here’s where you’ll find all ten of your sites, though: the most excellent Web sites for your subject area are the ones that make you question what you do and that let you do what you do better than you did yesterday.Similar Posts:

• All About Communication
• Getting Ready To NECC
• Another Quick Use Of A Good Site
• Need Timelines?
• Perils Of Surfing?

It’s nice to have a URL that’s short, but it doesn’t do much good if no one can remember it.

TinyURL has stepped it up: instead of creating something short and meaningless like tinyurl.com/2tx (a link to someone moving to Texas?), create something short and descriptive, like tinyurl.com/google. Using their new custom alias option, type in a meaningful phrase that will become the link, provided that it’s not already taken (like tinyurl.com/seal — imagine my disappointment). Now we can give students short and memorable links to important sites.Similar Posts:

• Another Quick Use Of A Good Site
• Too Much Tech!?
• Perils Of Surfing?
• Vocabulary Via RSS
• Online Writing Drafts

Arrive at 7:43am, far later than I like to arrive but about as early as I can these days. My night owl ways take a toll on arrival time.

From 8:13 to 2:45, my classes run like normal. Group survey presentations in Speech. A few Greek/Latin roots, STAR prep, and reading Richard Wright’s Black Boy in English 3.

3:00 to about 4:00, I work with my friend and colleague on department matters (which we never settle, by the bye). We also run through how to create an answer sheet using the district online data system. She’s a step closer to having the sophomore released STAR questions in the system – all neat, computerized, and aligned.

From 4:00 to roughly 5:00, my OCD kicks in and I work on typing someone else’s perfectly good speech outline organizer into my own Word document. I do this because I want to change a few references in the margin. The document will be mostly finished before I see how ridiculous this is. The absurdity is compounded by the stack of copies of the already-existing organizer sitting on the desk next to me, ready to go. I finally stop work on that Word document. The outline that already exists will do just fine. I acknowledge that it took me almost an hour to realize this with a shake of my head as I glance at the clock.

5 to 6 and the OCD is still strong. I print out at least six copies of this next handout as I work on the seventh iteration. Each of the six, no one can tell the difference between them, certainly not at first glance. Maybe not even at fourth glance. The tenth version is the one that goes to print.

It gets really dicey at about 6. My Speech class is working on impromptu speaking next. I need to improve the way I approached some of these ideas last semester. Organization is incredibly important in this style of speaking and I didn’t deliver that message well last time.

Begin Thought Stream

I’ll create lists of keywords, all of them ideas about a given topic. So pets is a good first topic. I’ll write a list of possible pets on the board and begin class by looking at that list, asking students what the topic of that speech would be. Yeah. Then a list of drinks right next to a list of vacation possibilities. This’ll be a nice way to talk about organization. This is a lot of writing.

Hmm… it would be better if those lists were each jumbled, requiring students to put the words in order as well as figure out the topic. But that’s a lot of writing. And what if one group has a good reason for keeping the list in this order, while the rest of the class wants it in that order?

So maybe write these words on index cards. But that’s a lot of writing. And I have to write these big enough so students can see from the back of the room. Or I could print out each word. Magnets would keep them on the whiteboard and let me move them around.

Wait! Type them up in Word and use the projector. Students call out the order and I just highlight-n-drag words around. That could work. And no writing. Still, I’m at the front leading the conversation. The same kids who always talk will contribute. And there’s no remnant of the conversation other than the Word document on my machine.

Hang on… I used this thing to help create the English master schedule last summer. The page had a bunch of boxes on it that I could click and drag around. That would be perfect here. It’d be the same as lists on the whiteboard, just lists on a Web page. Lots of boxes with keywords in them and students can move them around on any one of the computers in the room. Then we debrief with each group reading off their order. And if I put a textbox at the top of each set of keywords, groups can even type in a topic for each batch of words. That’s good. I like it.

Where did I put it? What was it called?

End Stream

I find it and put it to use, but it ends up costing me quite some time to arrange, debug, and write. I think I went overboard on this one.

The idea for this blog entry hits me, but it’s far too late to write it. It’ll wait.

It’s 8:13pm as I head out to my car. I have not eaten since lunch.

Evening highlight: walking into Cosentino’s, U2′s “Two Hearts Beat As One” is on. I love early U2.Similar Posts:

• Vocabulary Via RSS
• Vocabulary Blogs
• Opinions Are Like… Ideas And Problems: Everyone’s Got ‘Em
• Too Much Tech!?
• Visual Essay: Classroom Application

The New

xtimeline

Time Required: Little
Intuitive/Student Friendly: Yes
Storage: Online, Free
This is the best of all possibilities: an interface that’s easy to use and understand, something that students can work with, the ability to embed video and images, along with free online storage. Creation of timelines requires an account, but anyone can view. And the site is a bit YouTube in look-n-feel, so that should make things easy on one level. Plus, if you’re a teacher who’s into the whole collaborative editing movement, group timelines are possible, turning this into a wiki-ish venture.

The Old

Flash Timeline Creator

Time Required: Massive
Intuitive/Student Friendly: Not Quite
Storage: Online, At Your Expense
An interface here makes creation almost easy, but there are some finer details that confuse. This takes some time up front, though, so use this only if timelines really help your students learn content. That said, once you get used to it, it’s not so bad. I wouldn’t put this into the hands of students… again. They get frustrated very quickly (sorry, class of ’07).

JavaScript And XML Timeline

Time Required: Gargantuan
Intuitive/Student Friendly: Certainly Not
Storage: Online, At Your Expense
Do not use this unless you are a programmer. There’s no easy interface to enter information; it takes a lot of coding to make things happen. This requires an even more significant investment of time for creation than the previous one. And this is far too complex for the average kid to add to.

Excel Timeline

Time Required: Little
Intuitive/Student Friendly: Yes
Storage: Local, So Free
The best option of the old guard, this one is also the most limited. While the previous two allow links and images for each timeline item, Excel doesn’t go in for such things; you’re locked in to using text only. However, once you get a timeline set up (you’ll likely need to modify the given template), this is easy to hand over to students for their own use.

xtimeline comes via a WordPress News item in my dashboard this morning. If you have any more to add to this short list, let me know.Similar Posts:

• Online Writing Drafts
• It’s All About The Tools
• Tell-A-Student
• Copy This
• Ten Sites, Huh?