Organization | Apace of Change

4 March 2009

Portfolios & Digital Identity

Some time in late fall or early winter, I got the bright idea to re-vamp my professional portfolio. Little did I know at the time what kind of a rabbit hole I’d be going down, but now that I’ve (more or less) come out the other side, I wanted to blog my thought process (as well as the design/implementation process) in order to:

present my thoughts to you for pushback, tweaking, challenge, & discussion
provide a model to anyone who is considering making the leap to an online portfolio (including all the undergrad education majors and graduate students who’ll be finishing their degrees in two months and on the job hunt)

I’m planning on covering a number of facets of this process over the course of four or five blog posts in March, so I hope you’ll follow and contribute your insights to my experiences. As I’ve learned is so often the case with all things “ed tech”, the technology isn’t much without a supporting philosophy. I’ll expound on that more over the course of the month, but whether you’re putting together your first online portfolio, or, like me, have one but are in the mood to try something new, I hope you’ll join in the conversation.

26 February 2009

Tools of the Trade: Evernote

Evernote is one of those tools I really wanted to like and use when I first heard of it, but after playing with it for a while, I decided I really had no need for it. I was teaching then, and I had all the files I needed organized neatly in folders and synced between my tablet and my home desktop. Cool concept, right tool, wrong time.

Fast forward to September 2008: I’m now a school psychologist, responsible for a case management load of over 70 students. I started using one of my first “Web 2.0″ loves, Tiddlywiki, to help keep my notes on each student organized. As much as I liked it for maintaining plain text notes, that’s really all it could do without further tinkering. Linking to local files was too time-consuming, and God forbid I move a file – broken & useless link.

When I switched schools in January, I also switched note-keeping tools. Looking for something a little more robust than Tiddlywiki, I dusted off my Evernote install, updated to the latest version, and began to play. My trial period turned into a love affair.

How We Roll

Within a given account, Evernote allows you to create “notebooks”, and within each notebook, you have “notes” – think of them as a neverending stack of index cards. Like Tiddlywiki, these notes can accommodate plain text, hyperlinks, bullets, number lists, etc., but Evernote also allows you to drag and drop files into your “index cards”. Users with free accounts are restricted to dragging and dropping images, audio, ink, and PDF files, but if you are a paying user ($5/mo or $45/yr), you can drag any kind of file AND have Evernote synchronize so that your files are accessible from any computer with Evernote installed, the Evernote website, or your mobile phone (via either a mobile site, Windows Mobile app, or iPhone app).

In my quest to go as paperless as possible at work, I scan a lot of documents to PDF. When I drag them into Evernote, I can view the document directly in Evernote via their baked-in PDF viewer (courtesy the good folks at Foxit, maker of my PDF viewer of choice).

Relevance to School Psychology

Ours is a profession that depends greatly on paper trails and written documentation. Evernote is a convenient, paper-free method of storing information in just about any medium you may use. From an organizational standpoint, here’s an example of how I’ve set up some notebooks on general topics:

Evernote

This screenshot is from my home computer. The notebooks with greyed-out icons are local-only; the green icons indicated synchronized folders (I access these from my computer at work, too). As you can see, I’ve set up separate notebooks for business cards, documentation regarding my certification status in both NJ and PA, information on doctoral programs, our local Polytech program, and even a repository of research articles I have encountered over the years.

Beneath these notebooks are individual notebooks for each student on my caseload. Any time I need to record pertinent information for or about a student, it goes directly into Evernote. I have a clipboard & pen that saves my written notes as PDFs, so even when I am without my computer (e.g., a classroom observation), I can still write down what I need to, save it to PDF, and drop it from the clipboard’s SD card right into Evernote.

I have even been able to digitally record important information, compress the wav file, and archive it here. Who needs a stack of cassette tapes lying around when you can keep it all here?

Even if you don’t wish to set up several notebooks, you can use Evernote as a “brain dump” and use their search function to find what you need when you need it. Their OCR technology even allows you to search the text in PDFs and photographs.

Of course, privacy and confidentiality are also important. Evernote blogged about this here, and they also post their privacy policy online. As an additional security precaution, information within notes is encryptable.

Denouement

Evernote has been a great organizational tool for this psychologist over the two months I’ve been using it. It’s essentially a digital file cabinet that I’ll never even get close to filling – I’m a paid member, and even after syncing a ton of PDFs and quite a few zipped .wav files, I still only used 160 MB of my 500 MB monthly limit this month (free members get 40 MB/mo). Maybe a good analogy is to think of Evernote as an iTunes for your notes and documents – sure, you could open up separate folders and click on individual mp3s to listen to music, but isn’t it easier to manage them all in one central location?

6 January 2009

T3: Cutting Up in the Classroom

Rebecca Bell over at Notes from the School Psychologist recently started a blog carnival called Teaching Tips Tuesdays (or T3). This is my contribution to this week’s edition (but linked to last week’s T3, since there isn’t one up for this week yet), and will be cross-posted to/linked from her blog (I think!).

As an English teacher, I taught many sections of our tenth-grade English II course that were designated as In-Class Support (ICS). In these classes, we would have as many as 10 students with learning disabilities along with another 10-15 students who did not have learning disabilities. The goal of the ICS model is to allow special education to be as inclusive as possible by assigning two teachers to a classroom, one content area teacher and one special education teacher. The course content is identical to that of non-ICS general education courses.

Given the high co-morbidity rate of ADHD and other learning disabilities, it’s not uncommon to have students in these classes who comprehend the material well enough, but have serious trouble organizing their thoughts in writing. This can be difficult enough for 15-year-olds without any other influences, but when you throw ADHD and other SLDs into the mix, the writing process can become incredibly frustrating for both student and teacher.

About five years ago, I had a student who was experiencing great difficulty writing a research paper. He knew what he wanted to say, but told me he just couldn’t make sense of what was in his head to get it on paper. Rough drafts were due that week, so I told him to bring in a rough draft and I’d work with him after school to try to help him.

When we sat down together to look at his draft, I saw exactly what he meant. The paragraphs themselves were more or less focused on a single topic, but reading the paper as a whole, the topics shifted from this to that back to this again. It was incredibly difficult to follow his train of thought and the defense of his thesis.

I tried explaining why the paragraphs didn’t make sense in the order they were in, but the student wasn’t getting me. I don’t know how I got the idea, but I eventually got up, walked over to the teacher’s desk, grabbed a pair of scissors, and returned to the student. After getting his permission, I proceeded to cut his essay up by paragraph. I then asked him to put all the paragraphs that deal with Topic A in a pile (whatever Topic A was), all the Topic B paragraphs in another pile, and all the Topic C paragraphs in a third pile.

I will never forget the look in his eyes and the widening “O” his mouth made as he uttered he magic words: “Ohhh, I GET it now! Thanks, Mr. B!” He reorganized his paper that weekend and, if I remember correctly, received an A or B on the final draft.

Cliff’s Notes Version: Physical manipulatives can be great for getting kids (and teachers!) to grasp abstract concepts like writing or mathematics, and they can be found (or made) in the least likely places.

3 May 2008

Party Like It’s 1989 – Turn Your Computer into a Fax Machine!

Although this probably sounds about as appealing to most of us as turning our cars into horse-drawn carriages, the reality of business communication today is that the fax is alive and well. Until the rest of the business world catches up with email, scanned documents, digital signatures, and the like, you’ll likely find yourself faxing forms to a health insurance provider, government agency, or some similar organization at least a few times this year. I refuse to purchase a machine that I would use so infrequently, but getting to Staples to send faxes is inconvenient for me (and not cheap, either). A little digging around on the web has turned up the tools necessary to meet most people’s basic faxing needs (for free, of course).

File-hosting site Drop.io just added a “fax this” option – you can send any DOC or PDF file you store there directly to a fax machine (sorry, no ODF support yet). It’s similar to the service that FaxZero provides, but Drop.io’s restrictions are much more lax: 20 page per fax limit w/no stated daily limit on faxes sent, as opposed to FaxZero’s 3 page fax max, twice per day (with an ad on the cover page, too). There is a process by which you can receive incoming faxes to your Drop.io account, too, but the process is a little more involved (but still free).

Whenever I have to email important documents (e.g., my resume), I always prefer to send a PDF (no real justification; it just feels right). CutePDF offers a free utility that installs itself as a printer option. Just hit “print” from your document, spreadsheet, web page, etc., and select “CutePDF” from the dropdown printer menu. Your document will “print” to a PDF file that you can now send to Drop.io to be faxed (of course, if you were using OpenOffice you could just hit “Print to PDF” and not even need CutePDF in the first place).

My recent purchase of a scanner (finally, I know), along with these free utilities, has significantly reduced, if not eliminated, the odds of me having to send another costly fax from my local Staples’ dodgy fax machine ever again. It’s the small victories in life that make it worth living.

Next time, we’ll explore jailbreaking your iPhone to use as a corded rotary landline.

3 November 2007

Using Cell Phones for Good, Not Evil

As receptive as I am to practical applications of tech in the classroom, I’ve never been big on mobile phones in school. Not that I’m inherently against their use; I just haven’t seen much that’s convinced me there’s that great a need for them in the classroom. A few tools I’ve come across in the last month or so have convinced me, however, that phones can come in very handy as far as helping students get organized (a skill that we teachers often require but rarely teach).

Organizational support is especially important for our students with learning disabilities, many of whom also exhibit symptoms of ADHD (there’s anywhere from a 15-80% comorbidity rate of LD & ADHD, depending on who you ask). Many of these students are so lacking in organizational strategies that the help of an aide or special ed teacher is explicitly written into their IEPs. I’m wondering if offering them an organizational tool in the form of a familiar, comfortable technology might empower them to take more ownership of this aspect of their learning.

Our kids use cell phones every day to communicate with friends and family. Can we teach them to harness the power of voice and text communication for organizational purposes? Here are three FREE services I use to help me remember important tasks:

Jott (public beta)

This service allows you to call a (US) toll-free number (probably irrelevant in this age of standard US nationwide calling plans; there’s a local 647 number for Canuckistani Jotters) and dictate text to be sent to any email address in your Jott addressbook. You can also use Jott’s contact manager to create groups of recipients (e.g., Family, Soccer Team, Period 1 Students).

Set up an account at Jott.com. You’ll be asked for an email address and a phone number to associate with your account. When you call Jott, you’ll be asked, “Who do you want to Jott?” Say the name of any contact or group in your account (Say “Me” or “Myself” to Jott yourself). After the beep, leave a quick message (“Vocabulary homework; read Chapters 3 and 4″). Your message will be transcribed by either voice-recognition software or a human transcriptionist and sent to the contact’s email address.

For bonus tech geekery, do what I do and have a Gmail filter/label combo set up for Jotts (click thru for a cleaner pic):

Wakerupper (private beta)

Wakerupper is marketed as a free wake-up call service. Use the drop-down time menu and calendar to schedule calls; Wakerupper’s text-to-voice software can even play a recording of a short typed message.

This is a much more “bare bones” approach to reminders than Jott, and could be valuable for students who don’t spend much time on email, but can access the site to schedule some reminder calls. I’ve never scheduled a reminder call for more than a day in advance, but the calendar doesn’t seem to have a defined time limit. Wakerupper’s site says you can schedule reminder calls via phone, too, but as yet, I haven’t been able to locate that number. (Edit: Wakerupper customer support sez the schedule-by-phone option has been removed until it can be further refined)

Wakerupper is still in private beta testing, and you must email them at beta@wakerupper.com to request an account. This isn’t like some other beta sites, though – I got my account within minutes of requesting it.

TextMemos

Similar to Wakerupper, TextMemos allows you to advance-schedule text messages for most major mobile carriers. The only catch here is that if you’re not in the US, you must know the recipient’s mobile carrier (not a problem if you’re texting yourself). Type in your text message, set the date and time, choose the carrier, and away you go.

So which one is best? As always, depends on the needs of the user. I love Jott, but I have easy access to email through much of my day, and it’s my “command center”. Students who have limited computer (but ubiquitous mobile) access would probably be better served by Wakerupper or TextMemos, and even then it’s a question of personal preference of text or voice.

Privacy concerns here are valid. All three services have stringent privacy policies, but I still probably wouldn’t use any of these services to convey sensitive information (if they want to tell the world that I ran out of milk this morning, they’re welcome to).

My students are glued to their mobile phones (overheard in homeroom one day: “You can’t just… NOT text. That’s ridiculous.”), so I think it makes sense to put them to some good use. I doubt I’ll be requiring them to txt in their homework anytime soon, but I wonder if using these tools for automated reminders would help them in any way.

All services are available in the US and Canadia (English only); TextMemos is currently the only one that can be used outside these countries.

EDIT: I think it’s important to note that I have no vested business interest in or connections to any of these companies, other than as a very satisfied consumer of their respective products. Just in case the Edublogger’s Ethics Committee comes knocking…

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