Charter of Rights and Freedoms via Wordle

A couple of months ago I posted about a program called Wordle which allows you to create "word clouds" from a body of text or a blog. I had a couple of ideas but hadn't really thought that much more about it.

I was just listening to Eric Langhorst's podcast over at Speaking of History and he instantly got me interested in it again. Teaching about American government, he ran the US constitution through Wordle and created a great starting point for a class discussion. It's fun and engaging and immediately provides a windown into the focus of the document.

So of course I reached for our Canadian equivalent and ran the Charter of Rights and Freedoms through Wordle and got the following result:

Click on the link and try putting your own historical documents into Wordle - let's see what other results we can come up with.

Meet the Teachers

Each year Canada's National History Society presents the Governor General's Awards for Excellence in Teaching Canadian History. Last year we piloted a new program to record interviews with our recipients and share them with a wider audience. 

The results were positive and this year we have improved the quality significantly. Meeting and sharing ideas seems so key to the online experience and it just shows how easy it has become to share the work of these tremendous teachers.

Rather than reading a bio, we now have the opportunity to step into the classroom and meet the teachers, to see their projects and personalities shine through. There are six video's in total, but I posted Mike Ward's below. Reading about his project of creating a table with a settler community is one thing, but seeing it in action is totally different. Each of the videos brings that life forward.

A special thanks to our videographer Jayson Go for his help with each of the videos.

Also a thank you to Philip Ling, Shephanie Ha, and Geoff Ives, in Ottawa who did a great job on a short timeline helping with the video interview of Jean-Pierre Frigon.

History Flash

Ok Historians, you know you would have fun with a little flash tool like this.

I watched the election results through the New York Times as well. There website is just so far ahead of everything else.

The Collaborative Project

David Suzuki has me inspired. Not just to build an organic garden, but to build programs and projects that are worthy of the technology available to us. 

The David Suzuki Digs My Garden project used Flickr and online video as a way to make this contest a little bit different. From across Canada people entered their gardens by uploading their images to the official contest Flickr group. To enter the contest I joined the group and added my own garden images that were already posted on my own Flickr group.

On my own image I was able to tag all of the different plants in our pesticide free garden - from the tango lettuce to the organic catnip to our cat Mister T. Online programs are about presenting, storing and registering information in ways that were not previously possible.

Not only that but we also received a really cool video thank you from David Suzuki as well. This is how new projects can use technology in a collaborative and inspiring way. By sharing gardens from across Canada we not only created a historical record of gardening in the year 2008, we also provide a knowledge exchange.

Strangely enough at the same time another photo on Flickr was also being targeted by an online collaborative project. Schmap is a digital map program that provides information about cities from around the world. 

The map makers from the city of Minneapolis had taged two of my photos from our trip to the city this past summer. The photos had been chosen for a contest (there is always a hook) and they would like to know if I would be interested in entering the photo. The "winning" images will be used for a photo guide to the city.

Like most folks I'm happy to have the pictures used and happily clicked yes. Together all of these images can form a collaborative project, from hundreds of people. Not only that, suddenly I know Schmap exists, I'm going to tell my friends to all go and look for my picture, and maybe I will use this website in the future. 

By giving me a role and involvement, by helping me feel like a collaborator rather than a user, I suddenly am considerably more connected to this website.

David Suzuki Digs My Garden

David Suzuki ran a great contest this summer to encourage Canadians to grow organic and pesticide free gardens. We live in an appartment here in Winnipeg and kept our organic garden going all summer - with some great tomatoes to show for it!

Our garden won in the Balcony category and we received this special message from David Suzuki (unfortunately we submitted our picture via flickr and my account name there is generalamazo, thus the thank you). But it's pretty cool and the whole contest had a great digital component that I will talk about more in the next day or two.

Political Junkie Part Two

I'm not sure how I watched politics without the internet. The Museum of the Moving Image has a great website, The Living Room Candidate, with campaign ads from every election going back to 1952.



You said it Ike!

Election Fever - Apathy is Boring

Canada, as you have noticed, is in the middle of an election at the moment. And one of the best places for helping your students get involved and active is Apathy is Boring. They are a great organization that works to get young people not just voting but engaged in the political process.

What also makes this organization so terrific is the way they use technology. They are creating new ways for students to interact with politicians and to get information about platforms and policies. Why should we expect that students want to learn about politics the same way as previous generations?

They have just released a candidates guide to reaching young people. The guide was sent to candidates of all parties to help them use technology to reach and engage young people.

The guide should be mandatory reading for all candidates and their election teams. But if you go through and replace the word candidate with teacher, there is also a lot of lessons to be learned for the classroom.......

If my Mom can blog update

I was home over the weekend and was working with my mom on her blog and flickr page. In the summer we got her started with a blog, flickr, and delicious account.

Now her class, Geography of Northern Canada, is off to a great start and the online components are coming quickly. My mom has hundreds of great slides from trip sand living in the north. Rather than lug around the old projector this year, she had them all transferred digital copies and we uploaded them on to her flickr site. Then we added a flickr badge to share them on her blog. (That's me in the white in Arviat)


But best of all we used a new program called Issuu to publish her syllabus. Rather than just posting a link to an online document or hiding it away somewhere, Issuu allows us to store an online copy that you can flick through easily. You can also print and download straight from the program.

Best of all these programs and documents are accessible from anywhere - a digital work station. No slide projects, no flash drives, no laptops. Just a linked up classroom that can be moved anywhere.