If you are a GVSU reader and pre-service teacher, the implications are chilling: sometime in the near future, a giant publishing corporation could determine whether you are certified or not. Read on.

May 6, 2012
Move to Outsource Teacher Licensing Process Draws Protest
By MICHAEL WINERIP
The idea that a handful of college instructors and student teachers in the school of education at the University of Massachusetts could slow the corporatization of public education in America is both quaint and ridiculous.

Sixty-seven of the 68 students studying to be teachers at the middle and high school levels at the Amherst campus are protesting a new national licensure procedure being developed by Stanford University with the education company Pearson.

The UMass students say that their professors and the classroom teachers who observe them for six months in real school settings can do a better job judging their skills than a corporation that has never seen them.

They have refused to send Pearson two 10-minute videos of themselves teaching, as well as a 40-page take-home test, requirements of an assessment that will soon be necessary for licensure in several states.

“This is something complex and we don’t like seeing it taken out of human hands,” said Barbara Madeloni, who runs the university’s high school teacher training program. “We are putting a stick in the gears.”

Lily Waites, 25, who is getting a master’s degree to teach biology, found that the process of reducing 270 minutes of recorded classroom teaching to 20 minutes of video was demeaning and frustrating, made worse because she had never edited video before. “I don’t think it showed in any way who I am as a teacher,” she said. “It felt so stilted.”

Pearson advertises that it is paying scorers $75 per assessment, with work “available seven days a week” for current or retired licensed teachers or administrators. This makes Amy Lanham wonder how thorough the grading will be. “I don’t think you can have a genuine reflective process from a calibrated scorer,” said Ms. Lanham, 28, who plans to teach English.

At this point the Teacher Performance Assessment that Pearson and Stanford are developing is still in the pilot stage, being tested by 200 universities in more than two dozen states. While it is meant to supplement traditional assessment methods like classroom observation, in reality it would be the final word for states that adopt it. Student teachers who do not pass would not be licensed.

Stanford officials say that, to the best of their knowledge, the UMass program is the only case of resistance.

The student teachers at UMass complain that they were being told to take part in the pilot program by university officials without their consent and that there were inadequate confidentiality protections for the schoolchildren appearing in the videos being sent to Pearson.

“As a parent, I wouldn’t give my permission to videotape my child and send it off into the twilight,” said Kristin Sanzone, 33, who is getting a master’s degree.

In previous years, parents had given permission to have their children videotaped for use by UMass instructors. But Ms. Madeloni said student teachers and principals had told her that they felt differently about sending videos off to a big company.

“If there are concerns about UMass, there’s someone nearby they can go to,” she said. “How do you complain to a corporation?”

Four local school districts that train student teachers declined to participate when they learned how the video would be used.

This year, when Ms. Madeloni questioned UMass administrators, they played down the need for consent from the student teachers and school districts. One dean wrote in February that Pearson was doing a “field test,” and “not a field research study,” and so no special consent was required.

In March, university officials reversed themselves, acknowledging that special consent forms were needed.

An associate dean offered books of Post-its as prizes for the first six student teachers who turned in consent forms.

The Post-its did not turn the tide.

Jerri Willett, the chairwoman of the department of teacher education and curriculum studies, said because it was a pilot program, it had taken time to develop procedures. She said officials were meeting to develop a statewide policy for confidentiality and consent.

Asked why so many students had refused to take part, Ms. Willett said they may have felt “forced” by faculty members. (None of those who posed for a photograph or were interviewed by this reporter said they had felt pressured.)

While Massachusetts has not made a decision about whether to require the Teacher Performance Assessment, six states — New York, Illinois, Minnesota, Ohio, Tennessee and Washington — have committed to adopting it in the next few years.

Ms. Willett said the education reform movement had been highly critical of teacher education programs, complaining that not enough weak candidates were being eliminated. An independent measure should reassure the public, she said.

She is one of hundreds of educators who have been consulted by Stanford to develop the new assessment. The 40-page test requires student teachers to submit several lesson plans and explain how they measure learning and adapt lessons to their special-needs students. “Until now we’ve assessed what students know about teaching,” she said. “This assesses teaching.”

Raymond Pecheone, a Stanford professor, said he had worked closely with Pearson to ensure extensive confidentiality protections. He said the student videos can’t be downloaded or duplicated by scorers, nor used for marketing and promotion or training teachers.

Pearson plans to hold onto the videos for up to two years in case there are legal challenges, he said.

Mr. Pecheone said Pearson, which describes itself as the biggest education company in North America, was one of six to bid to work with Stanford. Pearson was chosen in part because it was the only company willing to provide enough seed money for a nationwide pilot program. “We needed an operating partner,” he said.

In states that choose Pearson-Stanford to manage the licensing, student teachers are expected to pay the company up to $300 apiece.

Washington State will require teaching candidates to pass the assessment next year. Wayne Au, a University of Washington professor, said based on the pilot, this approach was a considerably more sophisticated measure than traditional standardized tests. But because it is a mass-produced assessment, he said, students have already learned to manipulate it. “Their answers are shaped by what the test requires,” he said. “They’re not expressing who they are as teachers. It will do bad things.”

In New York, Pearson will be able to test a teacher’s worth from start to finish. The company currently administers the test students must pass to be admitted to a teaching program and is developing the testing system that will be used to calculate each teacher’s annual performance score.

How much impact any of this will have on teacher quality is debatable. California has had a performance assessment program in place for 10 years. According to Mr. Pecheone, 10 to 15 percent fail to get their license on the first try. When students retake the test, he said, only 1 to 2 percent fail to get a license.

At UMass, 1 to 2 percent of student teachers are weeded out of the program each year, according to Ms. Willett.

As for the idea that having an independent licensing test like California’s will improve the public’s opinion of teachers — no way. Politicians and businesspeople bash teachers in sunny California as much as they do in cloudy states. There is a whole education industry that is flourishing because it is built on the denigration of public schoolteachers.

Now Google is, finally, getting into the cloud drive business, following Apple iCloud (which I have but never use) and other services such as Sugar Sync. I just downloaded the software and started using it. So far, Google Drive works much like Dropbox, though the interface is not as pretty. I’m not sure Google ever does anything beautifully, with the possible exception of their sleek browser, Chrome.

The cool part about Google Drive is the amount of free space it offers: a whopping 5 GB. That is a whole lot of text files. Or about 1500 music files. Or about 5 full length movies. And getting more space is cheaper than with Dropbox, almost by half, as this comparison chart from Digital Inspiration shows (hat tip: Kevin). I don’t think I’ll switch. I might just use Google Drive to store some biggish files that are currently hogging space in my Dropbox account. I guess if I were a little more savvy, I would have multiple accounts from different services, backing up everything piece by piece. That would be complicated, though, and that kind of defeats the purpose of behind-the-scenes file syncing.

Here is the moral of the story: students should never lose data again. Tell your students to set up Google Drive accounts at home. Make it a part of your course requirements. They’ll never blame flash drives again.

Braid, on the other hand, is close. It includes traditional narrative devices: linear textual pieces that reveal a broken relationship between Tim, the protagonist of the story, and the Princess, whom he must rescue. As fiction, these bits and pieces are a little overwritten, but they are much, much better than the typically unbearable “plot” sequences interjected between levels on most video games. You know–the parts you skip. At the same time, Braid offers some really cool puzzles that Tim must figure out if he is to get his girl back. Each world presents Tim with a series of puzzles–he solves them by reclaiming puzzle pieces from diabolic traps, and then reassembling the puzzle pieces into a larger image. The interesting part is that Tim can reverse time to help him solve the puzzles. The game flows backwards; Tim gets another chance at the puzzle. Blow is clearly playing around with the idea of narrative linearity, but doing so in a way that makes more sense than hypertext. After all, what do we do when a relationship ends? Relive it again and again, stuck in perpetual rewind.

The artistry is amazing–the backdrops have the feel of breathing paintings. Created by David Hellman, these tapestry of light and color explode the medium. Game developers usually give us grey dungeons, but not here. The explicit goal of most new video games is realism: the more realistic, the better. Hellman and Blow challenge this idea that the entire gaming industry seems to have bought into. There is also a classical score accompanying the gameplay–no more mind-numbing, repetitive soundtrack. It makes me excited to think what Witness might be like. For now, the good news is that Braid is only $3.99 at the Apple store.

Braid is a really cool combination of story telling and game playing–well worth your time. It might also be worth talking about in a literature class.

I use Hackasaurus in my Teaching of Writing class, where I use it as a way of teaching argument–both visual and verbal argument. Students choose a web site to hack with Hackasaurus, changing a key visual element or text to make a argument. I encouraged students to think about social justice, so that they might “hack” web sites that promote a particular ideology–patriarchy or capitalism, for example.

That said, I am getting a little bolder, particularly as I read more. Lawrence Lessig’s free book Remix is a great place to start for thinking about copyright in new ways. Lessig, a long-time advocate of free cultural exchange, essentially argues that digital technology has changed us into a read/write culture, where read-only copyright laws no longer apply. And resources such as The Center for Social Media have also assembled terrific resources on copyright, such as this video on remix culture and this accessible code of best practices for online video.

There is certainly a movement toward a broader, more inclusive idea of fair use. I am encouraged by this–perhaps even emboldened to discuss the challenges of copyright in given contexts. In this light, I have recently developed a materials the GVSU English department, drawing on some copyrighted material. You can see the new campaign on the bulletin board on the first floor of Lake Huron Hall. If you do stop by, let me know what you think.

More recently, I thought about trying to design a version of the game for smart phones. But until developing applications gets a little more user-friendly, this option is off the table.

So, instead, I went backwards, designing a 6-10 player board game with the indie game publisher The Game Crafter. This is an amazing service, whether you are into games (like me) or not. It allows you to design custom card games or board game, with no real restraints except your imagination and your budget. You’ll need some time: I’m embarassed to admit how many late nights I spent designing Thoughtcrime. And you’ll definitely need a high-end image editor like Photoshop to create a professional-looking game. But I’m kind of geeked to get the game in the mail, and to see if I can round up enough people for an inaugural playing (though versions of the game have already been played).

If you teach 1984 and want to try the game, you can follow the link below. I was hoping the final product would be a little cheaper (even with its steepish price tag, my profit is about $1.00 per unit sold). But I think it might be a blast for British literature students, AP literature students, or literature geeks. If you are at all interested, check out the game here. You can download the instructions and get a better understanding of how the game works. Or, you might try designing your own literary game. In browsing the site, I saw a playable Hamlet that looks like lots of fun.

No more teaching The Tempest, which apparently address race and ethnicity just a little too directly. And certainly no Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire’s foundational text on social justice and education.

My suggestion would be to fill all of those empty spaces on the shelves with copies of Fahrenheit 451.

The iPad 2, for all of its fanciness, is not really set up for this purpose. To date, there is no Microsoft Word app for the iPad (makes sense), but Apple does offer an anemic app version of Pages, its underwhelming word processing software. I guess the idea is that no one is really going to spend time typing on the iPad. So why would we need tables or section breaks?

So here’s my workaround. First, I downloaded the Dropbox App for the iPad. If you are not using Dropbox to backup and sync your data, you should be. The Dropbox app allows you to grab your document from your synced folder.

Then, I reluctantly purchased the Pages app. Total waste of $10.00, except that it does open Word documents. So, when you download from Dropbox, Pages will open up your document.

Here’s where it gets a little tricky. As usual, Apple is not keen on anyone using non-Apple products in conjunction with their iPads. That means that the iPad does not recognized printers that are not part of their Airprint line. My Samsung wireless printer is not, off course. Enter the Airprint Hactivator from Neputing.

This cool piece of software tricks your iPad into thinking that your printer is indeed an Airprint printer, allowing you to print your documents, via Pages, to the printer you already have. The instructions for installing and using are here. Be sure to use version 2, since version one no longer works. And enjoy printing from your iPad (and sticking it to the man, Apple, with due deference).

The curb appeal of the iPad 2 is amazing: it is so sleek and so light, you can barely resist picking it up. It has been a very popular item at our house, as my wife and my first-grader fight for screen time. I’ve also spent a few (ahem) hours or possibly days plugged into the iPad. I can’t see any student not being motivated, at least initially, to get his or her hands on this beautiful machine.

A few other observations–First, surfing the web is amazing, via either Safari or Google. What’s cool about the iPad is its portability. Set it on the counter, lean it up against the wall, or hold it with one hand. Everywhere you need the web, the iPad can go. And the quality of the browsing is amazing, every bit as good as with a laptop.

As a reading device, the iPad probably comes in second to the Kindle or Kindle Fire, since these have been designed to reduce eye strain. But still, you can get the Kindle App to make all of Amazon’s library accessible. Same with the Google Books Reader. iBooks, the built-in reader for the iPad, looks pretty good, though I have yet to download any books with it. THus far, I’ve stuck with the free Google Books.

As a writing device, well, you’ve just gotta get used to the virtual keyboard. It has a few surprising oversights–like the position of the apostrophe on the secondary number page–but overall, it does a decent job. You can also buy an accompanying keyboard, either via Apple or a cheaper vendor. These connect into the main port of the iPad, and make typing a whole lot easier.
There is no built-in word processor, and most in the App Store are not free, so I’ve been using Google Docs, which works nicely on the iPad format.

For media consumption and production, the iPad is nicely equipped with a built-in webcam that is capable of recording high-def video. There is no suite of software such as Garageband or iMovie, but there are a few freebies (VidEditorFree) that can help out. Still, it would be nice to have these included instead of having to pay $14.99 at the App store.

And that brings me to the next point: money. As much as I respect Steve Jobs, his real legacy may be the monetization of what was formerly available for free. Everything good in the App store costs money. This is a sharp contrast to the Android Market, where most apps are free. There are buy-ins for the free software, too: you want the next level of that game? Just purchase for $2.99 at the App store. This is a disappointment, but it is the Apple model. When you do purchase something, it works, which is more than I can say for the dozens of busted freebies I’ve downloaded from the Android Market.

A few favorites so far: Adobe Photoshop Express, Flipbook, G-Whiz Google Browser, and Pandora. My son likes the Niinjago game, Angry Birds, and Rainbow Draw.

I’m writing this from my Macbook, which is looking a little jealous these days.

But what is really fun, I think, is engaging in what Rob Pope calls “textual intervention,” or the deliberate and meaningful manipulation of an existing text (in this case, a web site) to change its purpose or audience. Hackasaurus is really the ideal tool for this. Just change an image or language and publish your result. Hackasaurus even provides the URL. I’m planning on using Hackasaurus in my writing methods courses as a part of our study of critical pedagogy. One quick caution: be aware that Mozilla, to date, has not really explained whether a hacked site violates copyright law.

What I would do in a secondary writing environment is get students to write about why they changed things and what resulted from their changes. To be safe, I’d say have students do a screen capture rather than publish the hack to the site. But this tool is definitely worth checking out.

• Graphic novels are here to stay. Ten years ago, I would have been hard-pressed to find graphic novels at the NCTE Convention. Then, graphics novels (except perhaps for Maus) were not really a part of English language arts teaching. This time, all of the big publishers had their imprint of graphic novels, and many of the featured authors were actually illustrators. I picked up a few new titles, including a graphic take on Anne Frank–the The Anne Frank Authorized Biography by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon, the creative pair that gave us the graphic version of the 9/11 Commission Report. I also picked up a new graphic adaptation of The Odyssey by the artist Gareth Hinds, who was kind enough to sign my book. There were dozens of sessions on graphic novels, too, along with practitioner texts on how to teach them. And here’s a quick plug for a course I’m offering this spring–if you want to learn more about graphic novels, consider taking my English 624: The Graphic Novel in Contemporary Culture. Undergraduates are welcome.
• The 2.0 revolution is over . . . and we’ve won. Digital technology has become transparent in the ELA classroom, at least for the most part. Teachers are using 2.0 tools galore–podcasts, blogs, wikis, social networks, social bookmarking sites, photo sharing, and even Twitter have become commonplace. Second Life, alas, has not. But English teachers everywhere know that they must use digital tools in their literature and writing classroom. In 2011, it is unthinkable not to.
• Tablets are not here yet. I looked in vain for good sessions on tablets. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough. But I think only the really cutting edge people are using them right now. They are still very expensive for what they offer (as laptops were in 2000 or so), and no one can really figure out how to write on them. As keyboards improve and tablet prices decrease, we’ll see a steady flow of tablets into schools, so that by 2015 or so, they will be just as commonplace as laptops are today. But for now, we are still waiting. Someone needs to write the book on using tablets in ELA.

On the way home, I was mulling over other forms of assessment, and I began to think about the relatively new concept of badges. If you haven’t heard of a badge–other than the kind that police officers wear–the idea seems to have emerged from the open-source culture on the web. The most substantial badge project is the Mozilla Open Badge project

A badge is a reward for an achievement of distinction, given by a professional organization or entity that is removed from traditional educational settings. Badges are developed by companies are other entities that want to encourage particular kinds of skills or accomplishments.

So, for example, if a student creates a brilliant YouTUbe parody, he theoretically could submit his work to a badge-granting organization who could evaluate his work and reward the badge. The student could then display the badge or multiple badges on a range of social media, including Facebook and Twitter.

The whole thing sounds just a bit like the Boy Scouts, but I like the idea as an alternative or addition to a traditional grade. I also like the idea of students creating badges, judging submissions, and rewarding badges. This could be pretty easy to do in a course management system, a multiuser blog, or a wiki for that matter.

If you’ve ever worked collaboratively on a project that produces huge files (e.g. video), then you know what a pain it can be to share those files. Sure, there are great cloud-based sync and data backup services like Dropbox, but these all involve uploading the file, sharing it, and hoping that the person on the other end is savvy enough to download it. Most email programs don’t do well with big files, either, setting fairly low limits on size and bandwidth. Enter Justbeamit.

For those of us who grew up using Napster before it was regulated, the idea of Justbeamit makes a ton of sense: it’s simple peer-to-peer file sharing, whereby one user is downloading a file directly from another user’s computer. If you have a 5 GB video file, for example, you can head to Justbeamit, drag and drop your file, and send it to an email address. The receiver gets a download link which grabs the file directly from the sender’s computer. Presumably, all this data transfer is happening in a secure way.

Check it out.

And the changes keep coming: soon, FB will roll out a new timeline feature which will let users extend their acts of complicated online sharing all the way back through time. Let’s see: should I share my 7th birthday party pictures with my close friends or just my acquaintances?

Google Plus, the soon-to-be-extinct rival of Facebook, is not much simpler to use, despite the claims of its advocates. The circle feature was novel–and interesting enough for Facebook to copy with its new lists–but never intuitive. Let’s get this straight: I add you to a circle of mine, but you can’t see the stream of the other people in my circle, unless you add them to your own circle? Now Google has added a “share circle” feature, which lets other users grab the circle for themselves. You might also just be “following” someone–that is, getting their posts without having them in a circle. Don’t forget to setup your “sparks,” or areas of interest, and feel free to “hangout” with anybody you choose. And pay attention to those notifications! People could have added you to a circle without your knowledge.

Remember me? The original Facebook interface

From a Darwinian point of view, Facebook, Google Plus, and perhaps even Twitter have become overspecialized. Originally, remember, FB offered a cleaner interface than MySpace. The first publicly available FB was minimalistic (see image), even spartan in comparison to the many-tentacled monster it has become. I’d like to say that natural selection would take over, with FB getting eaten by some rough beast with no real-time ticker. But its domination is too complete for that to happen.

Not that I’ll leave, of course. I’ll just sit around and tell long, rambling stories about the good old days.

Update: Looks like I’m not the only crank. Here’s the same rant, from Mashable.

On Thursday, I’m meeting with Pete Coco and Matthew Reidsma, both library tech people at GVSU, to talk a little about application development. I’m thinking about tools that allow for easier collaboration between GVSU students, the vast majority of whom have smart phones. I’d like to see an app that lets students form groups easily, share files, and send search results (via text) to one another. I’ve seen students scrambling to write down email addresses of group members–and wondering if a group member would show up for a presentation. So, that’s one idea.

What other apps would make academic life at GVSU a little easier?

< script type="text/javascript">// < ![CDATA[
var mobile = (/iphone|ipad|ipod|android|blackberry|mini|windows\sce|palm/i.test(navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase()));
if (mobile) {
document.location = "http://gvsu.edu/english/mobile";
}
// ]]>< /script>

This detects whether the incoming browser is a smartphone or a regular web browser. Next, I coded a new index page for the mobile site, using the following tag at the top, again snagging the snippet from an online source. What can I say: I’m a hack at best. Here it is:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.2//EN"
"http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/DTD/xhtml-mobile12.dtd">

This tells the browser that this is a site specifically designed for mobile browsers, if that makes sense. Then, it was just a matter of finding content to include. The sensibility on mobile sites is lean and mean: include only what is absolutely necessary. The result are shown in the image here.

If you point your iPhone or Droid at the regular English site (http://www.gvsu.edu/english), you should automatically be redirected to this mobile version. I’m the happiest with the “Who We Are” page, which includes clickable phone numbers that should bring up your phone’s dialer.

restricts private online communication between a teacher and a student and may make it illegal for teachers to have students as friends on Facebook.

I agree that friending students on Facebook is not a good idea. Just too many awkward situations can result, and no one is really sure what legal rights both teachers and students have on Facebook or anywhere else online. Can a teacher bust a student for posting pictures of a party where underage drinking occurred? What happens when a teacher posts a political statement that offends students or members of the community? Better to avoid all of this, in my opinion, by using Ning, perhaps Google Plus (I know I said it would die), Edumodo, or another service.

But trying to outlaw teacher/student friending is senseless posturing that shows just how behind-the-times the MO legislature really is. To begin, I’m not sure if legislating is the right way of preventing untoward teacher/student relationships, which seems to be the goal of the law. What about educating teachers about online etiquette? To my mind, this means illustrating how powerful social networking can be in an educational context, rather than scaring teachers about the dangers of Facebook. They are probably scared enough already.

What is also strange here is how late to the party this law seems. Facebook and Twitter have become engrained into culture–not just in America, but internationally. Nearly all students and most teachers are already using it, and have been using it for years now. Yes, there is potential for bad judgment on the part of teachers and students, but placing the blame on “private online communications” in 2011 seems a little like outlawing telephone calls in 1985. We are living in an interconnected, widely networked culture. Teachers should be shown how to situate learning within this culture.

Necessity. The lesson Google should have learned from Wave is simple: if an application serves no immediate purpose beyond what other services provide, it will not succeed. Sure, there are occasionally new tools that reinvent us, but in general, the truth is that we know what we need. We didn’t need the awkward marriage of chat and email that was Wave. And looking at the promotional presentation on Plus, I’m anticipating that no one really needs to “hang out” with multiple friends in a synchronous chat. Or tailor particular information for particular groups of friends. Check that last one: we do need this. Facebook is probably got this feature in the works already. Which brings us to the second reason:

Critical Mass. I’m not even checking the membership numbers for Facebook. My guess is that there are at least half a billion users worldwide. Am I really going to convince my social circle to migrate to or moonlight on another social network? Even if Plus were absolutely astonishing–and I’m not convinced it will be–there is simply too much user inertia, too much time invested, too much to do to even consider bailing on Facebook at this point. Right now, I’m wracking my brain to remember some alternative, startup social network that I signed up for a couple of years ago. It had some kind of aspirational name: Panacea? Got it now: Diaspora. I’ll start believing in Facebook alternatives the day someone tells me he “Binged” himself. Ain’t gonna happen.

I love Google. Really, I do. But for now, it might concentrate its efforts on the things it does best, such as indexing massive amounts of information and making it all available to the average Joe with a laptop, tablet, or smart phone.

Then again, I could be wrong. But Google Plus feels like another futile effort.

• Google Maps and Navigator (free) is a great tool for people who want a limited-use GPS. Used it this past weekend driving around Chicago.
• Google Books (free) All the booky goodness of Google Books, on a surprisingly asy-to-read screen. Read e-books or classics from the public domain. Wuthering Heights on the bus, anyone?
• Pandora (free) Your favorite streaming music station, now on your phone. Why bother with an iPod? Caution: this one eats data plans for breakfast.
• Grooveshark (free). Not officially part of the Droid market, this app lets you listen to your Grooveshark playlists on your mobile.
• YouTube (free) Screaming kids? Plug in the headphones and boot up the YouTube app. Search for Thomas the Tank Engine.
• Dropbox (free) You need a Dropbox account for this one, but man this app is cool. Access your Dropbox files, download documents, and edit on the spot with the tiny, tiny keyboard.
• Cloudprint (beta–free) Want to print from your mobile? Set up a printer via Google, install this app, and you are good to go. Not many apps allow for printing, at least not yet
• Jambox (free) is a nice tool for guitarists. Shows you chords and scales. Does not, alas, make you better at major fourth barre chords

There you have it. At least so far. What apps do you like?

Two sites that help me deal with competing formats and browsers are Video Toolbox and Online-Convert. Both of these are free, and both are pretty powerful. Video Toolbox is a terrific tool that lets you upload video files (up to 600MB) and cut, split, merge, add audio, convert, and do other useful things to them. The best tool I found in this set was the crop feature. Videos come in a range of resolution sizes and aspect ratios. If you are working in 4:3 but have a 16:9 file, you can use the crop tool to pare down the video. I recently used this site to trim a very unwieldy high definition video with a variable aspect ratio (geek talk for weird size) down to a tidy 4:3. I would have used the site to convert the video to an html-friendly .ogg format, but .ogg is not one of the many options offered (hint hint).

No worries, though. I just headed to Online-Convert, which sounds like sounds like a religious site, but is actually a really useful service for video and audio conversions. Here too, you simply upload your file, select the format you’d like, and wait a minute or two for the converted file to pop up, ready for download. You can also grab video that is already online by plugging in the URL (didn’t work with YouTube for me), a feature that Video Toolbox also includes. I converted the .flv to .ogg, and I was good to go.

Both of these sites also have quite a few extras: not sure you could weave straw into gold, but just about any other change is no problem. This includes all manner of text documents and ebooks, too. Check out both of these sources. They are the best that the cloud has to offer.

• Brittani Sticker’s Class Management Site
• Sarah Welch’s Class Management Site
• Matt Golzynski’s Class Management Site
• Beccah Rathaus’s ToonDoo
• Abby Greulich, Audra Fantin, and Brian Rowell’s Dynamic Literature Content Site
• Maria Pohl’s Class Management Site
• Steve Annese’s Class Management Site

Update: I’m embedding the Toondoo created by Beccah.

What happens to Craig and Raina? Raina suddenly has too much to do–she takes care of two mentally impaired siblings, her parents are divorcing, and her sister frequently asks her to babysit. Craig is crushed. His faith also crumbles with the dissolution of the relationship.

And that’s about it. Except that there is much more. I’ll admit part was pure nostalgia for me: the author looks to be about my age, the cultural references (Grunge) resonate with me, and Craig reminds me a little of myself at 18. But beyond this, the novel is intimate, personal, and very real. It generates an unexpected emotional response.

Not sure it is ultimately teachable, though you might use it in upper-level high school. But it is worth checking out.

In any case, design matters. And thanks to Visual Mess, you (and your students) can create cleaner, more attractive documents. The site outlines some basic rules to follow–and provides instructive examples. It’s really quite a remarkable, helpful site. Check out Visual Mess. And then check out the Michigan Department of Education. And then go back to Visual Mess. Open two tabs if it’s helpful. Then write an angry email to the Michigan Department of Education.

That took me to lunch. After lunch, I fiddled around with some other pieces, dug back into the transcripts, and kind of wasted time until I found some interesting radio interviews with one of the RUF’s most feared commanders, Sam “Mosquito” Bockarie. Tomorrow, I’m hoping to compile some of these interviews into a piece.

So what’s the count now? 83 separate pieces, 110 pages. Hopefully, my head will clear by tomorrow. Think I’m going to dig in the dirt for a while tonight.

My goal this week is to get within striking distance of finishing this long-term book project. The project has been on hold this semester, as grading, prepping for class, and other realities have interfered with it. But I am back at it.

Here’s what I did today: made a master list (lists are always good) of the pieces I still think I need–there are eight or nine of them, some artwork, some writing. I also need to conduct at least one more interview with some of the family members. Beyond the list making, I finished a short piece on the history of Monrovia, compiled a really cool piece from the trial of Charles Taylor, finalized the last piece of the work, started a piece on the fates of the major warlords, and figured out a strategy for ending the book. Oh yeah: if you’re not familiar with my project, it’s a multigenre work on a refugee family from Sierra Leone.

I’m over 100 pages into the manuscript, somewhere around 80 pieces. If I were Rob Bell, I could turn this into two or three books, I suppose (have you seen the spacing and font in Love Wins? ). I’m working with an artist on the key illustrations for the text. Tomorrow, I hope to finish the warlord piece, fine tune others, and dig back into the transcripts for more stuff.