Who Thinks Up This Stuff?

After discovering Easter eggs (one of the coolest, and probably one of the most useless discoveries on the Palm!), learning Quizzler, and discussing ways to download materials, we were turned loose on the computers in the lab. Our job? To explore Palm freeware and shareware sites. It was amazing! I found information on wines and foods, applications that didn't work, a database to keep track of your lovers (which, I suppose, could come in rather handy if you dated a lot of people who looked alike), a database to keep track of your cats (which I completed right away - like our instructor, I do have a love of felines!), and a couple of music applications that I couldn't figure out at all!

Tony's idea of posting a Palm application wish list on his web site is a fabulous one. I think the possibilities are endless and if we could all come up with ideas specific to our field, and give those ideas to those who love to write programs, we could have a continuous supply of ways to integrate the Palms into our teaching.

I've been playing with HanDBase a bit and really like the setup. I'd love to use it with my 5th graders and help them develop a database to keep track of all of the musicians and composers we study during the year. The problem is that it's $30 - and that would be for every student - so the cost is prohibitive. Tony suggested using Address Book and just changing the fields. What I haven't quite figured out is - can you have more than one address book so that one could still be dedicated to actuall addresses and the other turned into a completely different type of database?

Dinner tomorrow night is White Chicken Chili, Mardi Gras Salad, and Kahlua Cake. They're 3 of my favorites, so I hope you like them, too!

A Blogging Explosion

Blogs kind of remind me of reality tv shows. They both seem to represent a microcosm of life that is displayed for the world to see - some parts interesting and others hardly worth our time. There's a blog for every subject and for every opinion under the sun. A local news blog absolutely blasts a couple of morning anchors - in a rather mean-spirited and hurtful manner. So it made me wonder - how will the ability to praise or blast, help or harm, comment or rant, impact on the future of our society?

I think that, as a society, we have become less polite, kind, and tactful in the last 15 or so years. As the internet has grown and blogging has skyrocketed, we have an entire "cyber culture" that is guaranteed anonymity. Anything can be said, however damaging or enlightening. Is that positive?

Many of us grew up in homes that taught "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." That almost seems to be a thing of the past. Is honesty always the best policy if it is hurtful? And is it really honesty, or is it opinion. I worry about the future of our youth. Many at the elementary level don't seem to have a real understanding of accountability and responsibility. We teach the importance of our "Character Counts" system and then our kids log on to the internet and discover a very worldly and sometimes negative view of many things. There's an amazing wealth of technology that is so positive, but my concern is that blogging offers a forum to everyone - and while everyone may deserve the right to be heard, there's little that can be done to validate the positive and discount the negative. The most recent school shooting points to a young man who made comments on a number of Hitler youth sites. No one realized the importance of his musings. How do we help kids? How do we know who needs our help?

It is, at the very least, a conundrum. The world-wide dissemination of information and opinion is one of our greatest achievements and one of our most frightening challenges.

Overload!

During break I thought a lot about the lesson plan I would like to write for this class. I have, to date, 14 post-it notes, 2 notebooks, and 3 pages of last week's newspapers, all with notes about things I could do for this assignment. The problem? I can't decide which one to do - or, more to the point, I can't decide which one is doable. I'm at that stage where "a little information is a dangerous thing." I get stuck on one idea; move to another; don't like that one; retrace my steps on the first one; and then think - perhaps taking a break and having a glass of wine will help. Five days and five glasses of wine later, I'm still no closer.

What's the problem? Are any of you experiencing this? I've finally decided that there are so many possibilities, some of which require more knowledge of handhelds than I've been able to stuff into my head - that I get stuck and get frustrated. So, my job for tonight is to choose one plan and go with it. Don't let those eyes wander to post-it note 12 or page 17A of last Thursday's Weird-Herald. Save it for summer which, amazingly enough, is only 10 weeks away and always offers time for reflection and renewed vigor. And whatever happens, don't cork a bottle of wine!

Skills with Sketchy

I so hated missing class last week; even more so, because of attending the funeral of a good friend I had known since high school. I was glad that you didn't get to HanDBase. I'm excited to learn more about it and happy I didn't miss that class!

I've been spending lots of time with Sketchy, finding ways to incorporate it into music class. One of the things we spend lots of time with is rhythm patterns, time signatures, writing rhythms, clapping them correctly and so on. Kids easily get confused with quarter vs. half notes and so on - and it gets even more confusing once the corresponding rests are added to the equation. With Sketchy, I can give each note and/or rest its own color, and then I can manipulate the animation so that just the eighth note moves, or quarter note, and so on. Patterns can be beamed to students; they can identify the jumping note, or the yellow note, and so on. It creates a sort of working flash card program. The kids can create their own patterns in various time signatures and beam them to classmates and to me. I'm REALLY liking Sketchy!!!

I took my 5th graders to the computer lab this week so they could begin to design their own garage band project. They were SO quiet and attentive! I told Tony I want his job - the kids seem to be really in to anything connected with computers! They had a great time. Tony explained a few things about saving their compositions; I showed them a few different kinds of samples, and then we let them experiment with sounds, instruments, melodies, and patterns as they created their own compositions. We gave very few guidelines - I know that, for myself, I learn the most when I just go in and play around with an application. Their compositions, after only about 20 minutes, are amazing! Tony mentioned that we might come up with a CD of scary pieces, dramatic pieces, comedic pieces, and so on, that could be used to accompany WillowCam and our WebRadio program. The plus of that, aside from learning more about both technology and music, is that music becomes more important as it becomes more closely connected and integrated into other subjects and projects.

I become more amazed with each new application and am in awe of the technology that my students have absorbed. They truly are like sponges; I think, in part, because they don't question why - they just do it!