Additions To The Fischbowl

Blogger recently added the option to subscribe to a particular comments thread via email. This makes it much easier to follow a conversation on a particular post. When you comment, there’s now an option to get all follow-up comments to that post emailed to you. While other blogging software has had this for awhile, this is a nice addition for those of us who use Blogger. (Of course, if you’re really a glutton, you can subscribe via RSS or email to all the comments on The Fischbowl.)

For the three of you who actually visit The Fischbowl web page itself, as opposed to reading it in your aggregator, I’ve also added a few features.

I added the AnswerTips feature, which allows you to double-click on any word and small bubbles of information pop up from Answers.com. If you try it out, let me know how it works for you. If you have your own blog, here’s where you get the code to enable this on your blog. If you use Firefox, you can download an extension that will allow you to do this on any web page by alt-clicking (or right-clicking and choosing from the menu that appears). If you use Windows, you can enable this in all of your applications by installing this little app. Mac users can get a dashboard widget or enable it in their apps. I think this could be a handy little tool for students as they read unfamiliar words on their computers (in addition to the reading strategies we already teach them.)

I also added to the sidebar links to the latest five posts from the blogs of the cohort 1 teachers in my staff development, the cohort 2 teachers, and from their class blogs (scroll down a little to see them all). This is in addition to the links to the blogs themselves that were already there. Since there are a lot of blogs and some of the folks aren’t particularly prolific, this allows visitors to see at a glance who’s posted lately. I’m still thinking about how to incorporate this onto our Learning Network page on our school’s website (which currently has just my shared Google Reader items on it).

Western Civilization Is Changing

A while back I remember Vicki Davis posting that effective bloggers should come up with good titles for their blog posts to grab the reader's attention. How'd I do?

In this case, Western Civilization refers to a class we teach at my high school. Amanda recently posted this request for help from the blogosphere:

I am thinking of teaching Western Civ (European History from the Greeks to the present) without a textbook next year. I already use many outside sources, but I am thinking of just going with outside sources (subscription services, primary and secondary sources, etc.) entirely next year. I want to do this for two reasons: I don't think that textbooks in their traditional form are going to exist much longer, and I really don't think that they are useful because they necessarily summarize information that otherwise is very interesting.

So, I am thinking of having a web-based class, in the sense that students will be given broad guiding questions and links from my website to other websites that they can explore in preparation for class. They will decide what is ultimately important about the people and times we study. I think that other teachers are probably doing this in some sense, and I'd rather not totally reinvent the wheel, so I would like to hear from other teachers. Which online resources do you use to teach Western Civ? If you would like to see the types of materials that I currently use, here is the link to my Unit I page - click on "Unit I (Greece)"

I think a class like Western Civ is a great one to utilize the resources of the Internet, so we don't limit our students to the "necessarily summarized" information that a textbook can present. By setting a goal of not using the textbook, I think that forces Amanda - or any teacher - to really look at what they are teaching and the resources they are using to see if they make sense. I think too often a textbook can serve as a crutch, a safety-net for the teacher so that they don't have to take a hard look at what they are teaching. And I think we all should be taking a really hard look at what we are teaching.

Amanda has already developed a pretty good list of resources, and will undoubtedly come up with some more before next fall, but if anyone out there has some good suggestions, please head over to her post and comment.

Zoho Notebook

Via Will Richardson (as well as many others).

Readers outside of my district have undoubtedly already seen this, but I'm reposting it for my folks. I - as well as a couple of other people in my district - have been pushing our district to start exploring options as alternatives to Microsoft Office. It's not that I'm anti-Microsoft Office, but we currently pay somewhere around $56 per year, per machine. (I'm not sure of the exact figure because it's bundled with an anti-virus license fee for a total of $65 per year, per machine.) That includes (I believe) licensing for Windows OS, client access licenses to servers, etc., so it's not just Office. District-wide I'm betting that comes out to over $300,000 per year. When you combine that expense with the - currently - limited collaboration features (at least compared to online options like Google Docs or Zoho), I'm not sure it's the best choice either from a financial standpoint or from a preparing-our-students-for-a-flat-world-global-collaboration-use -and-understand-social-media point of view.

Zoho Notebook is still in alpha stage, and I don't know if it will be free or not (most of their other offerings at the moment are free), but it certainly offers a look at what I think our students should be using now or in the very near future. Whether it's Zoho, or Google (maybe they'll buy Zoho?), or Microsoft or whomever, as broadband access become ubiquitous and online collaboration becomes even more seamless and necessary in a flat world, our students need to be using these tools from the get go.

The demo movie below is 3:10 - I highly recommend you watch it.