Book Study Blog Reflection

This is our first experience using a blog instead of face to face interaction in a book study. How do you feel about it? Would you like to continue in this manner instead of meeting face to face?

GT Book Study Question 4

Being an educator and/or a parent, what skills would you need to develop in order to live, work, or create an educational environment of highly gifted. Why?

GT Book Study Question 3

This book is designed to share practical information and stories from those who have lived and or worked with profoundly gifted children. Which story, section, or piece of practical information did you like best or left an impression with you…and why? Don't forget to give page numbers.

GT Book Study Question 2

Chapter 5, pages 48 – 64, discussing different instruments for identifying the profoundly gifted. After reading this section, describe your belief as to the importance in correctly identifying these students. How do you see SBISD now and in the future serving the highly gifted?

GT Book Study Question 1

What was your overall impression of the first part of the book…and why? (Be specific with your answer and if giving an example from the book, remember to site the page(s)).

GT Book Study - High IQ Kids - Directions

SBISD educators participating in the fall GT Book Study on High IQ Kids are to post their responses to the first assigned reading. The questions will follow these directions. Each participant must respond to each posted question, then comment on at least 2 other people's responses.

Make sure you claim your responses! Don't post anonymously because you can't get credit that way!

The deadline to respond is October 20th.

Thing #14 - Technorati

This thing just didn't get me excited. I will say that I like the new layout of Technorati. When I visited earlier it was visually too busy and I just didn't want to deal with it. I'm a real sucker for a nice layout.

I did find a new blog that I had not found before, The "More" Child, so I appreciate that. I will visit periodically, but I'm having trouble coming up with ways to use it.

I like that Technorati has two-word tags unlike Del.icio.us. I have trouble getting it down to one word. I just need more practice with tags to improve my facilities in using them. It's a bit of a different way of thinking.

I am claiming my blog on Technorati:
Technorati Profile

Thing #13 - Tagging and Del.icio.us

Well that took forever! But all my bookmarks from my desk computer are in my del.icio.us account. I'm not looking foward to entering the bookmarks from my laptop, but there are much fewer sites marked and some will be duplicates. It has always been annoying to go the bookmarks on my laptop, only to discover the sites I was looking for were marked on my desk computer! This will really help.

I don't seem to be able to get the code needed to put a del.icio.us link on the sidebar of this blog. When I go to the link rolls page, the code never comes up. I can choose some things at the bottom, but code never appears in the box. Since I couldn't figure out how to make that work, I decided to try just adding the network badge. I copied the code in the box, pasted it in the html/Java box in my blog layout page, but nothing showed up! If you look at my side bar, you'll see blank spot where it should be. Any suggestions?

I like the flexibility of the tagging and I love being able to see other people's tags. I think this could be a great resource. I finally understand how to interpret those clouds! For me, they are very busy and bit frenetic to view, but they make a lot more sense now!

Publishing a link roll on your blog would be an interesting way for parents or teachers to keep track of a kid's interests. Rather than doing an interest inventory, you could view a kid's link roll or tag roll and see what they're bookmarking and tagging most often. It would also be a good way to keep track of internet research that kids are doing. It could be part of an assessment of a product.

Thing #12 - Commenting

Point 1 - Contribute to the discussion. When you read a post with which you connect, comment. I tend to be a lurker. I think it's because I'm nervous about making a comment that goes into the permanent public record. I started thinking about this when I was reading some of the comments made in Draper's Takes interaction included in my previous post today. Ryan Bretag commented

...participatory media does not allow K-12 students to make mistakes within a smaller culture.... The thing is that my mistakes, heated situations, odd conversations, etc. weren't there for the world to see. This mistake (not really the best description of the situation but stick with me) is now there for the world to see and is part of his virtual footprint.

I'm paranoid about even silly things like typos, let alone my post being misinterpreted. Of course, it goes deeper than that to my insecurities and vanity. How will this post make me appear to others? Needless to say, I have been very hesitant to comment.

Point 2 - Respond to comments and appropriately manage comments on your own blog. Not a big issue for me, so far, not many hits! (I do have one I need to get to immediately - sorry lauraann) But I have noticed that the few times I was moved to comment on someone else's blog, they came to mine and contacted me. It was very exciting to make that connection! It was a reward for being brave enough to risk making the comment.

I'm starting to think more about putting my name out there. Of course, it's accessible via the email I'm using. Still, I'd like to read more about the pros and cons of this.

When I've commented...

• Creative doubt - My Google Alert picked up on Joylene Nowell Butler's post on Doubt, Self-Deprivation, and Creativity. I immediately connected to her comments and felt moved to respond. Maybe all creative women doubt their abilities. I think most gifted females feel like frauds - that any time now everyone will figure out I'm not as smart as they seem to think I am. Joylene responded to my comment by commenting on my Thing #3 post.
• Asynchronous development - As I mentioned above and in previous post, I was terribly excited as I read the interaction on Drape's Takes. I was nervous about responding directly on that blog, though. I was concerned that my comment would start a totally different thread - though that might be a good thing. Instead, I commented on The Tempered Radical's post.

The suggested readings for this Thing were very helpful. I was losing my momentum in this learning experience, but am rejuvenated. I'm getting excited about the opportunity to connect with others and expand my opportunities for growth.

A real world example of Asynchronous Development

This is a non-thing post! My Google Reader alerted me to a fascinating discussion that was very current. I track The Tempered Reader who I find to provide wonderful thought provoking posts.

As a newbie, this post (The Price of Student 2.0?) got me more excited about the blogosphere than anything else I've encountered so far. The interaction at Drape's Takes resulted in such a varied and rich reaction. There are threads about social networking skills and communication skills, and many other technology threads. But my point-of-view is from gifted education and my knowledge of the 2.0 tools is quite limited. In the interaction, I saw the opportunity to discuss the needs and experiences of a gifted kid. As adults, we are not usually constantly barraged by people blatantly providing direct instruction. Kids are. As adults, we would get really tired of everyone acting like we're clueless about everything. To some degree, I think many kids start to feel this way as they enter adolescence. It’s part of growing up. But gifted kids feel this way much more often – and often they DO know more than the adults around them.

This interaction also exemplifies the asynchronous development of gifted kids. Most people have similar levels of development in their cognitive, social, emotional, and physical abilities. High achieving people are included – those darn folks who just seem a little better at everything! But gifted folks aren’t like that. They have some areas in which they are much more developed than others. The area(s) develop(s) more rapidly than the others. So in some areas they are much “older” than in others. They think at the level of an adult when it comes to content, but not when it comes to social interaction, for example.

Thank you to Arthus for allowing the discussion to continue. Thank you to the Tempered Radical for sharing it on his blog. I think this interaction contains lessons for all of us.

Thing #11 - LibraryThing

What a great tool! I love the community aspect of LibraryThing. It's like a huge book club with tons of little sub-groups. I can't wait to share this with my husband. He's a much more involved reader than I. He reads several book reviews and keeps a long on-going list of books he wants to read. LibraryThing can help him get other perspectives on the books and manage his lists.

I can really see teachers getting a lot out of this in preparing to teach novels. They can have a book discussion with others and benefit from the multiple points of view in preparing lessons. You can certainly connect with others who are teaching the novels and maybe share lessons that way.

I have a Caldecott collection. I now have all of the award winners and most of the honor books. It took me a long time to get Mei Li, as it is out of print and most who are willing to sell their copies wanted a fortune. It was really easy to put together a list in Amazon of Caldecott winners and then import the list into LibraryThing. I also entered some of my baby's favorite books. I couldn't believe how fast the process was once I found the import options. Now I'm anxious to get the rest of my picture book collection catalogued. This is exciting for the organizer in me!

I also added a LibraryThing widget and search widget to this blog. (Scroll down the side bar.) I'm really looking forward to joining some groups and finding good book recommendations for GT kids and my little one!

Thing #10 - Image Generators

Fun, yet frustrating.

I had some trouble with the Custom Sign Generator tools. I couldn't manipulate the images quite like I wanted them. I may have had unrealistic expectations.

I love Image Chef! Easy to use, visually attractive site, great ideas! I used the Visual Poetry option to create the image of my baby in the heart. Image Chef has all kinds of great options in their catalog. I really like the capability of writing a message on a piece of toast! You could get a really high level of thinking out of kids if you pushed them. The symbolism that could be done is really cool. There are many opportunities for depth in putting text with images. Great point-of-view product, too.

The Templates for Kids were neat, also. It has great backgrounds on which younger students can put messages. (See my Etch-a-Sketch image.)

The Happy Face Generator was fun, playful, and easy to use. I think kids would enjoy it. You could have them do ads for books they enjoyed or summarize a community problem using these tools. I can also see fun additions to newsletters being created here. (See my Happy Face Comic.)

Similarly, the Comic Strip Generator was easy to use. It really takes a lot of thought (not saying mine did) to do a good job. It's an open-ended product to some degree because kids can take it to different levels of depth depending on their understanding of symbolism and their capacity for humor. I love Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin is one of the most gifted kids in the press. I'm sure he'd be a ball in a GT classroom, though he might have trouble getting identified.

My second favorite, after Image Chef, is Wordle. It wasn't listed in our guide, but I saw one on a blog during an earlier "Thing". It may come up in future "Things". I think Wordle is a wonderful collage type product. Visual poetry for sure! The ability to manipulate the size of words by the frequency of occurrence is interesting. In looking through the Gallery, there is a lot of variety and seems to be just as much value in using a few words as in using many. One caution... there are a number of inappropriate Wordles for kids that appear in the Gallery. You might need to prepare elementary students not to react to body part words or avoid the Gallery with them. I also had some difficulty posting it to my blog. I had to save it as a PDF and then figure out how to get it into a different format to post here. That was tricky and the quality isn't so good.

Thing # 9 - More RSS Feeds

Which method of finding feeds did you find easiest to use?

Going through the Edublogs' award winners worked best for me. It gave me a place to start building my "Circle of the Wise", particularly those from outside my immediate field.

Which Search tool was the easiest for you?

I liked Google Blog Search the best; although, I had to be careful that I linked to the appropriate sites. It pulled up articles of interest, but linked to the broader publication which was WAY off topic. It is probably better to get the articles through Google Alerts rather than link to a feed that is usually not of interest.

Which was more confusing?

Topix.net had lots of errors on the page so that made it difficult to use. Probably our internal blocking mechanisms caused the problems. I also found Syndic8 to be overwhelming.

What kind of useful feeds did you find in your travels? Or what kind of unusual ones did you find?

I am excited about some the parenting resources I found. There seem to be several blogs where parents share tips about everything under the sun. I also found some interesting resources from Prufrock for Gifted Education. I knew the publisher was forward thinking, and they have some good things posted. What I found most unusual was what I didn't find. I haven't found many feeds specific to Gifted Education. It may be my limited ability to do a thorough search, but I'm not confident of that. My colleagues and I should be out there, easy to find!

What other tools or ways did you find to locate newsfeeds?

I don't have a good answer here. Ms. Whatsit recommended I look at feeds on various blogs that I find, so I'm taking that advice. It just takes time :)

Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jek-a-go-go/251903749/sizes/m/

Thing #8 - Information Overload (Otherwise known as RSS Feeds)

I chose Google Reader since we've done so much else with Google. I like the one-stop shopping! I like that I don't have to browse multiple sites to get the information. It's great to have it coming to me. I also like the ease of adding and deleting feeds. That way, I can try out some information sources and easily delete them if they don't pan out. It will be a HUGE help in keeping up with various blogs. I would never have the patience and time to check on multiple blogs just see if anything had been posted. This makes it much more practical.

Like many of these tools, the benefit is in the connections it facilitates. I can learn from others in the same field or with similar interests by reading their posted thoughts or applicable news articles. I can also connect with them personally through email. I don't have to pay conference registration fees and sit at a conference lunch to meet new people and benefit from their ideas! I can get ideas on curriculum, activities for parents, new books for kids, etc. (I also picked up a few tips for managing a 12 month-old on an upcoming plane ride across the US.)

I do have some questions, though...

1. Does the Google Reader keep the hits it finds forever? I didn't see a delete button, only ways to mark things as read/unread and starring/sharing/tagging options.
2. How do you manage all the new information coming in? With Alerts and Google Reader, I now have TONS of things to read. I already had trouble managing my email! (And I didn't get to much today since I was playing and learning here for several hours.)
3. If I subscribe to a post(atom) in a blog for comments, how do I unsubscribe? Does this question even make sense to others?

Thanks!

Thing #7 - Google Tools

I played around with several of the tools. Before we had VPN and Share folders, Google Calendar and Docs would have been very helpful. Much of what they allow you to do we now can do within our district. However, I can see a number of benefits in using these tools for sharing among my colleagues in various districts. We could put the Houston Co-op schedule on the Calendar and keep all the forms in the Docs application. It would make the information more "self-serve".

I have a lot of trouble uploading photos. I've had the same issue with aborted uploads in Animoto, Flickr, and now Picasa. They often work if I just do one or two photos at a time instead of a large group. I'm just very impatient and want to do it all at once!

I've put together an iGoogle page and marked it as my home page. It will be nice to have all the applications I use regularly on the same page instead of having to open multiple browser sites repeatedly. I've also signed up for several Alerts to notify me of updates in Gifted Education. It will be interesting to see what updates I get. This will be a great help to staying current.

Classroom applications -

• Alerts - I would have used this to help me find current topics for discussion or debate based on the content I was teaching at the time. It would help you bring back big issues after you'd finished a unit. It could be a fun place to get journal ideas or current events.
• Calendar - I would set up a classroom calendar so parents had easy access to know what was happening. It's flexible enough you can change it so parents get a good understanding of the ebb and flow in teaching. You could post what you plan (very generally) and then edit it to account for the teachable moments when you veered off your original plan in response to student interest.
• Docs - This is a great way to get kids connected for group projects done at home.

Thing #6 - Mashups

Love these new technical terms!

My experience with mashups are quite recent and from a personal perspective rather than work. I used Zazzle, which interfaces with Flickr, to make postcards for my baby's first birthday invitation. I even had postcard stamps made with his picture on them. Fun!

I think the trading card maker is very simplistic. You can't edit much, the space is limited... I just don't see great applications for it because of the limits. That being noted, we did include some basic trading cards for primary age students in the new Primary Gifted Program Curriculum.

I think the magazine cover has greater potential for gifted kids because of the article titles. You can get more depth out of this application. It could be a fun, quick product for a research project on any topic.

I see the mosaic maker as a modern collage, without the overlap. Collecting all the images would take a great deal of time, but it could be used in the same way. Selecting symbolic images can be a high level activity and the ensuing discussion would be rich.

Thing #5 - Flickr

Searching for permissible photos is very cumbersome. It takes quite a while to search each option. But without searching that way, I couldn't tell what permissions were available. I think this would take a lot of time in class.

Of course, I couldn't decide what I pictures I wanted or even what key words to start searching. I also played with uploading my little one's pictures. They're too big, though, so I need to use software at home to make them smaller files. At least, I think that's the problem. I really like that you can share photos and determine your own level of security for them. Also, others can download them for free. I need to move all the baby pics here and get the family to join the group.

Regarding education, I can see giving a photo assignment and having kids comment on them within a group. It would also be neat to take photos of products and post them here for parents.

I couldn't figure out how to get a text box beside the photo to give credit. I decided to hotlink the photo to the Flickr site when I couldn't figure out another solution.

Thing #3 - My First Blog

Templates are a wonderful thing. I can't believe how easy it was to set up this blog. I tend to be very picky about lay-out and colors, so I may spend more time fiddling with those. Of course, I spent an inordinate amount of time working on a name. I hope to continue to use this blog after the Library2Play class is over, so I wanted a name that would facilitate that. I'm not overly thrilled with 2BGT, but it is somewhat open to interpretation which is good, in my opinion. I'm curious about all the blogs who have the dozen names I tried first.

I debated a bit about the Avatar - go with realistic or totally fantasy. I opted for realistic (though the hair is what I think would be fun to have). It's nice to have the freedom to change it. Though it's a real time zapper - I have no idea how long I spent trying different things. I'm going to check out the Avatars of my classmates to see if they went for realism.

Thing #2 - Lifelong Learning

I can't imagine not being a life-long learner. Who doesn't learn new things? I don't know how someone could be successful in his/her job or personal life without continuing to learn. To me, it seems to be part of the human condition. I think we're hard-wired to continue learning. We are constantly taking in new information - trying to fit it with what we already know or changing our thinking based on the new information. (Most people do more of the former and less of the latter.)

I think about people I know well and consider if they are life-long learners. Who is isn't a life-long learner? Even my 84 year-old grandparents are continuing to learn things. They have satellite TV and debit cards, negotiate social security and medicare, deal with new health issues from a host of medical professionals, and navigate through a growing city for visits with those medical professionals. The scope of what they are learning may not be as broad as my own, but they are learning. Much of what they are learning isn't so much by choice. Perhaps that's the qualitative difference... how much of the learning is by choice and how much is simply for survival.

Thing #2 - Hardest

There are several habits on the list of 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners that are difficult for me. My self talk isn't always positive (Habit #4) and I'm not very big into purposeful goal setting (Habit #1). I have goals, but I don't sit down and think them out. This is particularly true for personal goals. I'm better at goal setting for projects at work. I know where I want the program to go and have a good feel for how to get there (it takes a lot of time). Taking all of this into account, I think Habit #3 is the hardest for me.

Habit #3: View problems as challenges.

I worry and stew over problems. It isn't until after I've resolved them that I reflect upon them as an opportunity to learn and grow. I like challenges, it's part of what keeps life interesting. I just would prefer lots of time to mull them over. I'm often caught up in the timeliness of trying to get a solutions that meets everyone's needs quickly, which is very hard to do - sometimes impossible.

Thing #2 - Easiest

Of the 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners, Habit 2 is easiest for me.

Habit 2: Accept responsibility for your own learning.

I have always loved learning. It may be because learning new information is usually easy for me. I'm great at school-type learning, which is probably why I enjoyed getting my Ph.D. One of the best things about being a classroom teacher was reviewing the material before teaching it to the students. I always dug a little deeper into whatever I was going to teach, so I learned more about it. It was part of the preparation I did before every unit I taught. It made the content interesting and helped keep me ready to make things interesting for my students. Of course, the students kept me learning, too. They always took me off into directions I hadn't planned, which required more research on my part.

PS - This blog has been started as part of the Library2Play online class offered in my school district. I hope it will evolve into a tool I can use with parents and teachers in my district.