Washington Post Storify (Photo credit: cfpereda)

This year, I’m teaching Year 10 English. In our team discussions early on, we decided to apply some SAMR thinking to modify a task that was normally completed as a paper folio, with pictures pasted in and students adding their comments as handwritten text or something that was computer generated pasted in. Over the past year, I’ve used Storify to help compile tweets and thoughts from conferences I’ve attended.  Storify is a wonderful curation tool being used by journalists, newspaper organisations, noted figures from Social Media circles, and even the British Monarchy and The White House!

Our focus this term is a thematic study about power and greed, perfect as a lead in to out text study of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. We introduced Storify to our students, with the intention of them curating resources of their choosing that they feel link to this theme. Storify is pretty simple to use; you make your stories by accessing tools of the social web that are handily searchable in a sidebar and can be dragged into your story space. It’s best to see it in action, so take a look at this explanatory video.

The students have adopted it quickly and find it intuitive to use. We have asked them to provide explanations for their choices; they do this by adding text after each embedded resource. We have discovered that it doesn’t seem to work well with Internet Explorer (for those with PC’s), and I’ve been recommending they use the Chrome browser as it seems to save properly using this. Because we plan as a team, this means all of our Year 10 students are using Storify. We’re also using a Ning for discussion and as a place to store curriculum related videos, photos and links. From my perspective, that’s pretty good exposure to some very useful platforms. Both help these students gain a deeper understanding of communication tools that can be applied to other subject areas, and maybe even further, into their tertiary studies or working lives.

I can see us using Storify for other purposes throughout the school year. Our students need to study issues in the media, and it’s the perfect vehicle for the curation of an issue. Whenever you use a new application, there’s always the perceived danger that the kids might see it as passe after awhile. To me, an application like Storify is something that could be an essential part of any English classroom, just like the pen and paper or folio of old!

Our students have blogs they use as ePortfolios. I’m hoping the embed code you are provided with will work on their Edublog, otherwise we may try the export to WordPress method available. Edublogs is on a WordPress Multi User platform, so it may just work.

Obviously, Storify could be used in a myriad of classroom settings. Do explore it – I’m sure you will see the benefits. Just today, they released their Storify iPad app, so those of you with iPads in your classrooms will find it to be a fabulous addition as a creation tool. Sign up, play around with it yourself, and see just how easy it is. You’ll be a Storify convert before you know it.

Here’s one of the commercials that was aired for the first time during the Super Bowl in America. It’s the new Volkswagon commercial, ‘The Dog Strikes Back‘, and it pays homage to the Darth Vadar commercial they aired last year. Take another look at that one (makes me laugh every time I see that kid jolt at the end!) and see if you think the new commercial holds its own against the newbie.

Now watch this. Your appreciation for ‘The Dog Strikes Back‘, will be heightened, when you see the effort that went into it’s creation. Bolt (the dog) is one truly impressive canine, and I was pleased to see it was his Australian Shepard heritage that was attributed to his impressive intelligence. And how about the recreation of the Star Wars Cantina! Just how much money is committed to television commercials these days?

My appreciation for my soft pillow is what I’m looking forward to after a hectic working week. I’m off to a work colleague’s party tomorrow night and have to adhere to the 60′s clothing theme she’s prescribed. A visit to Savers tonight found me the unflattering attire I’ll adorn for the occasion, but I’m betting it’s going to be a lot of fun. I hope your weekend finds you having fun too, somewhere along the line.

Enjoy. : )

OK, a departure from the norm. It’s the sign of a busy week when I don’t get a School’s out Friday post up. I just could not keep my eyes open last night, and now I’m feeling bad. So, for those of you with nothing to do on a Saturday night, here, for your viewing pleasure, is ‘Star Wars Uncut‘. All 2 hours and three minutes of it on YouTube. Casey Pugh was the mastermind behind this project, where members of the public were invited to create 15 seconds of footage fron Star Wars episode IV (you know, the good one, none of that episode I – III rubbish) all of which was then then edited to recreate the original film. It’s a celebration of creativity!

Enjoy the weekend. It’s 10.23pm here on Saturday night, and my eyes are closing again. Best get myself the sleep I need so I can face another busy week ahead. : )

I had the privilege this afternoon to listen to  danah boyd * deliver a talk entitled, ‘Privacy in Networked Publics’, at RMIT. danah is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, a Research Assistant Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, a Visting Researcher at Harvard Law School, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. I’ve long admired danah’s work, and regularly read her blog, danah boyd | apophenia. If you’re looking to understand what teenagers are thinking about when it comes to their behaviours in social networks, then danah’s research findings are the place to start.

danah presents at a blistering pace, and I took copious notes along the way. I’m not going to recount all of what was said, and you’ll be able to check into the RMIT website to listen to the podcast yourself when it is loaded there in the very near future. What I will do is discuss some of the things she said that resonated with me.

danah described teenagers’ participation in social networks as ‘social grooming’. We are seeing our children form and sustain friendships in public spaces on the Internet. I can vouch for this. When I was a teenager, I was out and about with friends on the weekend and after school, and my friendships were formed in what were public spaces, but often private in terms of my parent’s knowledge of what I was doing. The same can’t be said for my own children. They are home a lot of the time, escorted to events and picked up by their parents. Their social lives are lived in large part in online spaces like Facebook and through games where they play online with other kids they know. One thing I’m not doing is friending them in their networks. We have open discussions about their participation and I hammer home the need for control of privacy settings, but I don’t look over their shoulders and peer deeply into their social lives. I respect their need for their own development. They will make mistakes, I’m quite sure of it, but that’s part of the learning curve of life I figure.   I know that I needed space to become my own person when I was a teenager, and they need the same.

danah talked of ‘bedroom culture’ being a feature of participation, and suggested it is a natural extension of what has always been. Once again, I could relate. The only space that was truly mine as a teenager was my room; it was where I practised the latest dance moves in front of the mirror, experimented with make-up, read, slept, did homework, and dumped my clothes all over the floor. It was where my friends and I went when they visited. It was my space and it was important to me. I watch my daughter and see similar patterns, especially the clothes all over the floor. She has a laptop and we have a wireless home connection. She spends time with her friends in online spaces in the environment that she owns. I respect her need to do that. It’s her space, and its important to her.

danah made some interesting points about kids she has interviewed who have their parents as friends on sites like Facebook. She talked of teenagers ‘hiding in plain sight’. One teenager’s comment was ‘everyone disappears after the Mum post’, referring to parents who reply to their kid’s status updates. danah made reference to coded messages teenagers use to achieve a level of privacy for themselves and admitted that even she, who spends so much time examining these networks, can’t work out the coded nature of wall posts. Her overarching message was a need for open dialogue with your children, and a level of trust. She spoke of how kids today are learning to live in a world of surveillance, and are trying to carve out a level of privacy for themselves in these environments. Some have moved away from the very public Facebook to networks like Twitter, where they can make locked accounts and add only who they want into their network. There they feel more sure that what they say will not be escalated to wide scale broadcasting, and nor will they have people they don’t want peering into their conversations.

Her comments on the idea of sexual predators online were really interesting. She said, if my notes are accurate, the ‘Sexual predator statistically doesn’t exist’. The point being, there are few of these instances occurring given the fact that 93% of teenagers are operating in social networks of one form or another. She spoke of conducting 400 studies with all the evidence pointing towards less danger in online spaces than what was imagined, and was told to go back and conduct more research! What we do see is our television and newspaper media honing in on incidents and giving the impression there is danger in every interaction online. She spoke of Australia being “one of the only places competing with the US on fear mongering”. Strong words, and quite possibly, the truth.

danah spoke of how she sees us grappling with a culture of fear and it intersecting with the attention economy we find ourselves living in. Her final points were prompted from a question from Camilla Elliott about how we as educators deal with all of this in schools today. She spoke of the necessity for digital literacy teaching in our schools, and stressed that we should be looking at it with a health and wellbeing focus in mind. She said there is a case for teachers violating the rules of Facebook and setting up second accounts, separate from their own personal accounts. You would share the password to the account with your school principal. Here, teachers could accept friend requests from students, but not request that students become their friends. This space would be where teachers could operate with an eyes wide open approach to safety for kids.  An interesting thought, one that would certainly be at odds with much of what is recommended to teachers today in terms of Facebook use.

danah asked the question to us all, “How do you deal with a world that is messy?” Some of how we go about doing that is looking to the kids themselves and noting how they are managing their online lives. For those of us dealing with this head on in schools, I think it’s about dialogue. It’s about making time in our curriculums to have these conversations, it’s about creating safe spaces where kids feel OK about sharing their concerns, it’s about using social tools/spaces within curriculum so we can model behaviours. It’s a big job, and we need people to do it. That means we need teachers who are willing to be well versed in social networks themselves, and who are willing to commit themselves to learning from experts like danah who have spent years immersed in their understanding.

Thanks danah, for a stimulating presentation. Neurons are firing. I hope what I’ve written here is true to the intentions of your presentation. Please do correct me if there is anything here I have misconstrued.

*why is danah’s name always in lower case? She explains it on her ‘about me’ page.

My birth name was “danah michele mattas” (spelled all funky because my mother loved typographical balance). Two years later, my brother Ryan was born. My parents divorced when i was five and my mother, brother and i set off for York, Pennsylvania. My mother re-married when i was in the third grade and we moved to Lancaster. Shortly afterwards, all of us changed our name to “Beard.” My mother and step-father divorced when i was in the 9th grade, but we stayed in Lancaster. In college, i changed my last name to “boyd” to honor my grandfather. When doing the legal paperwork, i switched back to a lower-cased style to reflect my mother’s original balancing and to satisfy my own political irritation at the importance of capitalization.

Ever played Angry Birds? I became addicted while I was travelling through Italy last year. I had no Internet access in my room at night, and the only game on my phone was Angry Birds, something my kids had played. I opened it up one night and lost myself in the quest to blow up pigs with a repertoire of birds with hidden talents. I reckon I’d have a lot of fun playing it live in Barcelona too.

There’s no time for Angry Birds now. School resumed this week, and it’s full on. I’ve loved seeing our students return and have enjoyed showing our Year 7 & 8 students the Overdrive platform for ebooks and audiobooks. Right now though, I’m exhausted and am looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow morning.

Beautiful weather awaits us here in Melbourne this weekend. I’m looking forward to spending some time sitting outside and soaking up a few rays.

Enjoy whatever comes your way. : )

Tired.

Just tweeted that I felt overwhelmed.

It’s the first day back.

No kids, just meetings.

Laying out the year ahead.

Thinking about all that needs to be done.

Overwhelmed.

Tomorrow, more meetings.

I’ll be overwhelmed.

Wednesday will be different.

Kids will be there.

I won’t feel overwhelmed.

I’ll be invigorated by a smile.

I’ll be touched by a ‘hello’.

I’ll be lifted by excited voices.

I’ll see people at their best.

I’ll feel connected to something important.

I’ll see purpose in my work.

I’ll be home.

This is the winner of the 2012 Chevy Superbowl competition, designed to outsource production of a commercial that would appear during the American NFL Superbowl final. Interestingly, one of the comments in the YouTube comment thread was this,

“Ok, I counted at least 24 occurrences of the US Flag in the background. How many did u count?” Bmbhere

It made me go back to watch it again as it was something I hadn’t picked up on when I first viewed it. I bet you take a second look too!

Beautiful weather here in Melbourne at the moment. A glorious weekend awaits, as does a return to school on Monday. That’ll be a bit of a shock to the system after what has been a wonderful and restful holiday break.

Make the most of your weekend. Hope the sun shines on you. : )

Today, I was reading an answer on Quora, and it made mention of Alexander the Great and Bucephalus. I was immediately taken back to my obsession with all things Ancient Greek in my first year at Teacher’s College. But once again, it had me wondering. How many times a day do we not entirely grasp the full intentions of information we read or view, because we don’t have enough context to understand it in it’s entirety? How much does our formal education play a part in our general knowledge base, and is that determined by the teachers you had or your ability to ferret for information yourself?

In Victoria’s VCE English curriculum, Area of Study 2 requires students to study a central theme or idea, and be inspired to write from a variety of texts, be they print or visual. I’m teaching Year 10 English this year, and we are beginning our course with a thematic study in a similar vein to what the student’s will encounter in Area of Study 2 in VCE. In past years, students have created a hard copy folio of stimulas material, but this year, we are going to have our students use Storify for the same purpose. Storify is a fantastic curation tool, and is currently being used by individuals, corporations and news organisations around the world to report on current events.

I can’t help but think that the students with a broad general knowledge base have the advantage over others when it comes to formulating a response to Area of Study 2. Hopefully, the use of a tool like Storify will help our students comprehend the importance of reading widely and accessing a variety of sources to help formulate understanding.

I know that when I introduce this topic, I’ll be talking about the importance of being well read and able to contextualise life. School’s purpose is not just to get students through the final exams of year 12 with a decent enough ATAR score to get them into University courses. We’re helping to prepare these young people for the rest of their lives, and we want them to know how important it is to have context for understanding. I think I might just get Cam and Marlon to help me make my point.

Cyber crime expect Mikko Hypponen delivered a talk at the TEDxBrussels event that has made it this week onto the TED site. If you’re at all interested in conversations surrounding privacy in this digital age, then it’s 10 minutes well invested.

As teachers, we need to understand the implications of our use of the Internet and we should be helping our students understand it too. Mikko makes the comment in this talk that he believes you are more likely to become a victim of crime in the online world than in the real world. How many of us think about whether or not trojan viruses have infected our computers after visiting a site? Do we ever think that our keystrokes may be being monitored by a criminal hoping to gain password or credit card details?

How many people have any understanding of what a https site is in the first place and how you know if a site has an extended validation certificate? If you’re unclear, head over to “20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web“, a really helpful guide written in easy to understand language that won’t befuddle you. It was published by the Google Chrome team in 2010, and is a very handy reference point for anyone wanting to know more about the code, browsers, security risks, and a myriad of other eye opening details about how the Web works. I teach a Yr 7 Information Technology class and I’ve found it very helpful to support my understanding, and the understanding of the students I teach.

Mikko identifies three types of online attacks threatening our privacy and data. Criminals, looking for avenues to steal our money, hacktivists, (groups like Anonymous) who hack as means of protesting, and Nation States, who are apparently willingly infecting suspected citizens computers in order to collect information about them. Worrying, huh? I think so, and I believe it’s important that we as teachers impart this kind of information to our students. We need informed citizens who are capable of making decisions and defending their rights.

Mikko ends his talk stating the issue at hand is ‘Freedom vs Control’, and speculates whether we will spend the next 50 years wondering if we are able to trust our Governments. He’s got me thinking, I can tell you. I bet your students would find it fascinating too. We need to find avenues in our curriculums today to teach these important understandings that have implications for all of us.

IKEA Heights from DaveAOK on Vimeo.

If you’re in the mood for a good laugh, look no further than Ikea Heights. This is a melodrama shot entirely in the Burbank California Ikea Store without the store knowing. My daughter and I were in hysterics last night watching the drama played out with the cast using the store as their set and regular unknowing customers and Ikea staff as extras. There are seven parts available on Vimeo. Here’s part two to keep you going until you hit the Vimeo site. (Thanks go to JoKay and Lucy Barrow for sharing the link on Twitter last night)

Ikea Heights (Episode #2) from DaveAOK on Vimeo.

In my later high school days and early College years, during holiday periods and free days I found myself drawn to daytime television. Days of our Lives was the soap opera that consumed me. These were the days of the Salem Strangler, and it seemed like most people I knew were watching and talking about this drawn out plot line. I even remember the College Cafeteria having a television screening it, and there was silence as we watched, punctuated by collective gasps as the next plot turn was spelled out. What was always a constant, was the fact that you could miss a run of episodes, and the next time you tuned in, it was like nothing much had transpired. Incredulously, looking at the website today, it seems that plenty of actors from those days are still in the show. I’m pretty sure if I tuned in, I’d be up with the current plot line in no time!

For those of you who harbour similar memories, here’s a stroll down memory lane with some classic emotions on display from Dr. Marlena Evans.

Holidays are in the process of evaporating quickly here. The shock of returning to school was tempered today when I made what was going to be a quick visit into a four hour stint! Next week will be occupied with preparation for the start of the school year. Best make the most a sunny weekend I figure!

Enjoy your weekend. I hope it’s a good one. : )