Thing 16: LibraryThing

What's in YOUR shelves? LibraryThing is a much better way to catalog what's on your bookshelves than Shelfari as far as I can tell. And it has a better networking system, better cataloging, better groups, better searches, just better all the way around. They have over 30,000,000 titles in their system, which is amazing.

I could use LibraryThing to catalog my personal library; it's been far too large for too long. My husband is a retired Professor of English. We've actually begun to give away books to scale down. But what is left could stand to be catalogued so that we know what we have, whether there are duplicates, how old, etc.

But the TIME to do it? Now that's another thing . . .

Thing 15: Is it delicious, or just tasty?

I've had my Delicious account for awhile, and I've added some new websites to it. For me, the problem is remembering it's THERE, and remembering to go back and utilize it. With all of the new technologies available, especially with Web 2.0, and being anxious to try every new technogadget on the web, I'm really terrible about going back and perfecting the ones that could help me the most in my classroom. I have not fully used Delicious in the ways I'm sure it could be used to its full advantage. Over Christmas I've going to revisit it and see if I can come up with a more meaningful way to visit it more often to remind myself of the value it can bring to my teaching and to my students. My Delicious account is:

http://delicious.com/vanderven1

Thing 15: A Kiva Christmas

In my Google Reader, under The Fischbowl, I learned about a great website that is just the charitable giving site I've been looking for during the past year. I've wanted to substitute some gift giving with global impact project, but hadn't found just the right site to do this through (Heiffer International is a good one, but I didn't feel connected enough to a person). Kiva, at www.kiva.org is a website where, for a minimum of $25 you can choose who you want your microloan to go to in the world. It gives an outline of the person, his or her project, the expected loan length, etc. They have a 97% repayment rate. At the end of the loan you have three choices: You can choose to put your money back into the loan pot again for another person, donate it to Kiva, or get your money back. Where else can you get that kind of deal?

If you do join, assign your gift to the Team called: SHIFT HAPPENS. Karl Fisch would just like to see how much impact his blog for teachers has had.

So, do the world a favor this year at Christmas--Look outside yourself (and maybe your family, too) and see the wide world in need. Give a gift certificate or a handful and help a neighbor across the ocean.

Thing 14: Writeboard WriteNow

The Web 2.0 tool I chose to explore is called Writeboard. It is a collaborative tool, and where I think I would use it most is with student writing. We don't do a lot of prewriting because it's so laborious to read it. My students do all of their writing online, upload their papers online, and I have a grading program that allows me to mark their papers and reupload them. But it's all time-consuming. This may be a way around all of that.

Thing 13: Creating a Globally Connected Classroom

I am playing catch-up, and so I didn't get to hear the "live" presentation of this (only the iPod downloaded version), but the presenter went so fast in the downloaded segment that it would take a superhuman to gather up all the information she was putting out there. I think that creating a globally connected classroom sounds like a fabulous idea, but from the idea stage to the implementation stage, it sounded like a tremendous amount of work, when really it's no different than what we do, as teachers, for any of our classes, especially if we're using technology.

Thing 12: Ode on a Grecian . . . Wiki?

In Thing 12 we were to make a slide show using Creative Commons photographs from Flickr, and so I chose photos that I thought represented the first stanza of John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in some way.

Come visit my Wiki to see my two slide shows at:

https://vanderven.wikispaces.com/

Thing 11: To Be or Not to Be Flikr'd

Durante el ensayo de "Hamlet, por poner un ejemplo" de la compañía Factoría Teatro de Madrid.
by Julio César (FunKa-Lerele), Flikr

Studying Hamlet right now in British Literature represents a real challenge to my seniors, so I look for as many things to make it real to them as possible. This photo of Hamlet in a wheelchair could provide a lot of interesting dialogue starters.

Both a strength and a weakness of Flikr is the way that each photograph links you to the photographer's entire portfolio. Chances are if you like the photo that you chose to open or use, you will like any number of others he or she has to offer, and you can spend hours perusing just that one site, which equals a huge time consumption--an always present danger while web browsing as it is.

That aside, Flikr offers great possibilities for all kinds of PowerPoint and other presentations for the classroom because virtually any search of any topic I did yielded pertinent photographs. I think people in this world have traveled (and taken photographs) everywhere!!

Thing 10: Uncommonly Creative with Creative Commons

Wow!  So that's how MIT was able to put all those courses up on the web.  I have taken advantage of some of their materials during the past year (always giving proper credit, of course), and have thought that it was just such a swell thing for them to do, but never understanding how they could put all that material out there and not worry about a zillion people running off with their copyrighted research, etc.  So CC was the way.

I'm sorry I haven't noticed the CC logo until now.  I know I'm not the most observant person in the world, but I hate letting technology stuff slip by me.  Especially when it comes to copyright issues.  And I have to admit that I thought putting a URL with a photo in your online material was enough credit as long as its author had not expressly forbidden it to be used.  Yeesh; I hate 20/20 hindsight, but it's better than no sight.

Learning about CC will come in so handy for my classes because my students are constantly asking how to cite this or that.  They really are worried about plagiarism, especially with the Honor Code we have at our school; no one wants to be called up on Honor Code violations, even if it's unintentional.  So they watch their Ps and Qs, and this will help tremendously.

Draw, Pardner!

I did this drawing of my husband quickly while he was napping in his recliner using a FaceBook application called "Graffiti."  To see the full drawing, click "view on facebook" because part of it is cut off for some reason.

A Time to Build and a Time to Tear Down . . .

This past week was Trip Week at Lakeview, and I was privileged to accompany our sophomore class to Mountaintop Camp in Altamont, Tennessee, where we helped three families and the Mountaintop Camp itself with some building and repair projects.

Mountaintop Camp is actually made up of something like six or seven camps, interdenominational in nature, but they also work with non-religious groups like our school as well.  They have what they call a "three-legged stool" approach to working with their communities:  they contact businesses to donate materials; churches, colleges, or people like our school donate free labor; and they work with federal agencies to arrange extremely low-interest loans to the communities for home remodeling projects or ground-up home building projects.

In our short time there, we divided into three teams.  One team was assigned to build a small deck with a porch & roof, one team was assigned to build a 22-ft. wheelchair ramp and to put a roof on an existing small deck, and my group was assigned to build a porch roof on an existing deck built last summer.  If there were too many people to be working on any one job at a time, we were to ask the homeowners if there was anything else they wanted us to do.  Our team worked for Mr. Leonard Gross, an 87-year-old WWII veteran--a spry, witty man living in a mobile home at the back of the brick home that he had built for his son 15 years earlier for $10,000 and donated beige brick.  

Mr. Leonard, as I called him, was proud of three things:  his WWII service in the Pacific, mainly in India as a medic to the mules used to haul cannon into Burma; the fact that he'd started the Rescue Squad in Grundy County some years earlier by figuring out where a lost vehicle had been left behind, stranded in the river by two lost city folk who'd walked out onto his mountain, giving him some local notoriety; and that he'd played softball until he was 76-years-old.

The boys and men on our team did most of the cutting, hammering, and nailing since we were under such a time constraint to get our job completed, though they did let the girls have a turn at learning the circular saw, the drill, and what it was like to hammer into iron-hard, untreated, rough-sawn, nail-bending, twisted and warped oak.  The girls and I quickly went to cleaning the yard of brush, cement blocks, old insulation, and moving a trailer-load of lumber full of rusted nails to a pile behind the barn.  The only thing they complained about were the slugs, bugs, and spiders, but that never deterred them from picking up one piece of lumber and stacking it neatly some feet away.

Mr. Leonard asked if we could repair the torn insulation underneath his trailer.  Someone had cut it open looking for a leaking pipe, and as I looked through an opening in the latticework bordering the bottom of the trailer, I could see the fiberglass falling out onto the ground in several places.  On the second afternoon, during a lag in the work, I grabbed a roll of duct tape and a box cutter, went over to the opening, got onto my back, and shimmied my way under the trailer.  The sun at that time of the afternoon provided pretty good lighting to the middle of the trailer where I needed to work.  I was thankful to find that it was dry, hard-packed dirt, not wet or musty-smelling, and it wasn't buggy or cob-webby.  I was pretty close to one end of the trailer, and I tried not to look down too far toward the [very] dark end where I could imagine there were [very large] insects.  The insulation was dirty and matted, and the black plastic liner had badly spaced pieces of old duct tape hanging down where someone had tried to patch it before.  I surveyed the large torn area for several minutes, thinking through the best method of repair, then set to work, cutting first small pieces of tape just to put the insulation back in its place and tack the lining edges back together, then somewhat larger pieces to begin mending the tears, and last, long strips in a crosshatch to hopefully hold the large areas to one another so they wouldn't begin peeling and coming apart again.

What I didn't notice was that at this time of year the sun shifts pretty quickly, and my good light began failing.  My eyes were having to work harder and harder to see what I was doing.  With each decrease of light, I noticed there was an increase in small, shuffling sounds under the trailer--much too large for insects I might add.  I only hoped they were mice.  It was only after I came out from my cubbyhole, the skin on my back and sides already itching from the fiberglass, that Mr. Leonard said to me, "Waal, didja see any snakes in thar?"

Oh, yeah.

The only mishap on the job was not human, but kitty.  There had to be twenty to thirty cats and kittens wandering the homestead as we pulled in, and the kids immediately began telling me that the kittens were mostly blind.  As I looked at them, I saw that they weren't born blind, but that almost all of them had eye infections that were largely untreated, though Mr. Leonard said they had been treating them with boric acid or something similar.  At a break, I took the worst small kitten I saw, probably only five or six weeks old, whose eyes were completely sealed closed by hardened matter.  I worked for twenty minutes with a moist towelette from my purse to first soften the hardened matter, then to work it loose from her eyes.  She only fought the last several minutes as I pulled the last of the small chunks from her fur and her eyes began to open to the bright sunlight for the first time in who knows how long.  She then began to follow me around like I was her mother.  Perhaps that was why, in the long run, she was killed.  She came up on the deck several times with me, so I kept putting her down on the ground so she wouldn't get stepped on.  But on one of my trips down the ramp, I saw her lying on her side at the base, bleeding and writhing, and I knew that she'd been stepped on inadvertently by someone coming or going.  So many kittens abounded, it was almost impossible not to step on one, so it would be impossible to say who stepped on her.  Nor would it matter; it was an accident.  But it was as if we all spotted her at once; we all gathered around her.  Someone said, "Is she dying?"

"Well, yeah!  Can't you tell?  Look at the blood!"

"Ohhhh!"

"Maybe she's just sleeping."

"C'mon...  Don't be dumb."

"No.  Someone stepped on her.  Look.  She's having seizures."

I said, "Someone get me a shovel."  They all just stood there, staring.  "NOW!"  Several kids went running, thankful, I think, to have something else to do.  About that time, the kitten had one last seizure, looking like a last, lazy stretch, like cats just do, and then she was still.  Cree had named her Jeff, not knowing he was a she.

One of the guys ventured, "Well . . . that was interesting."   

I took a shovel from someone, picked her up and placed her on it, then kicked some dirt and leaves over the bloody spot on the ground.  The kids asked what I was going to do with her, and I looked at them, probably, as if I thought they were crazy.  What else do you do with an expired animal?  An expired anything?  You bury it, of course, which is what I told them.  One of them followed me at a short distance about halfway, then turned and went back to the group.  I don't know if they thought I wanted to be alone or what.  I didn't, really, but I don't know why I didn't invite them to the burial.  I guess I didn't want them to feel awkward.  I took her to the very back of the huge property, dug a hole in the surprisingly sandy soil, placed her in it, covered her over, and replaced the tall grass like she never existed.  I don't think Mr. Leonard or his son will miss her.  I won't forget her.

I never got to see our finished roof with its tin because I had to take the girls and begin painting the pavillion at Mountaintop.  I hugged Mr. Leonard good-bye and told him I wouldn't be seeing him again.  He had a little catch in his voice as he said good-bye and hugged me tightly.  His hands on my shoulders were strong for someone 87-years-old, I thought.  But what do I really know about what 87 years of hard work in the Tennessee mountains would do for any of us?

What I do know is that our kids worked harder than I've ever seen them work, and though they came back to camp each evening exhausted, they always rallied and played hard in the evening with each other and us.  They were in good spirits, they joked, played harmless pranks, played their music, were respectful of adults with their music and language, they asked permission, and if something needed correcting (which was always very minor), they were quick to apologize and correct whatever it was.  They had their share of whining occasionally, and their share of disagreements with each other--any family does.  But that's what they reminded me of: a big, boisterous family who ended up settling their differences or working them out in their own ways or keeping them to themselves--no harm, no foul.  They volunteered to help when needed, and even when not.  They were just great.  I'd take them anywhere, on any trip, with never a second thought, and I don't say that about just any group of students.  Well done, Sophs!