Oh-oh! The downside of doing an interview is living up to it! (Down to it?) I was contacted by Harris Salat over at Visual Thesaurus a few months back. He interviewed me over the phone and here’s the finished product.
Oh-oh! The downside of doing an interview is living up to it! (Down to it?) I was contacted by Harris Salat over at Visual Thesaurus a few months back. He interviewed me over the phone and here’s the finished product.
It’s a great interview, Brian. Congratulations! …And a good idea for using Filamentality, too. Can we see that project somewhere?
Doug – Thanks for the comment. This was one of those convergence, twilight zone experiences. After you asked about seeing the Animal Ark Project I had a student – now 19 come by my class after school today, he worked on that project and one of the first things out of his mouth was “Where can I still see that? I’ve looked on the web and can’t find it.” I had to inform him that the web site went down about 5 months ago before I could archive it – however I spent some time tonight searching and I have found some copies of the pages the class made and I have an idea where I might find the whole Kaboodle on an old laptop. Maybe I’ll try to repost them unlinked so I can use them as examples. I’ll let you know. The somewhat scary thing is we made that web site over 7 years ago on some of the original Power Macs and if we made it today it would still be fairly cutting edge as far as what most students are exposed to. Each group of 4 student made 3 “Fil” pages on 3 different animals. We took digital photos of the less shy animals and drew some fantastic illustrations of the rest. I was teaching a 4-5-6 image class then with fairly equal numbers of each grade. The page won numerous awards and a local TV station gave them an award for community service and took them back out to Animal Ark to film a story about the web page – definitely a highlight project. I’ll try to get some of the pages up so you can see them. Thanks for the interest.
I am definitely interested. I appreciate the effort you’re putting into my inquiry. The thing that intrigues me about this is that I saw Filamentality for the first time a couple of years ago, and didn’t recognize any direct applications to the classroom other than the support it provided for webquest-building for teachers. So I’m curious to see how you used it with students. I’m wondering about similar projects that might be accomplished with hosted wiki sites, or other web services that offer web space with minimal barriers to entry.
The beginning of the year is a challenge, and I can’t manage to get nearly as much done every day as I think I should, so it will be a while yet before I’m ready to bite on a project that involves many kids and many computers. For the first few weeks they don’t even understand simple English – someone asked me what “seldom” meant, the other day. Don’t put too much effort into answering my question unless you have another reason for bothering about it.
Thanks. Again. Oh yeah, my 15 seconds with Harris Salat will happen in a couple of weeks. Pretty cool, huh?
Doug – Challenge is right. Don’t fret … I want to ressurect a few pages from the site so I can use them in inservices and presentations, so it’s something I need to do in the next several weeks anyhow. Once I do I hope to post about the experience and I will discuss what the kids got from the experience. A Wiki page would have advantages over “Fil” pages (although I have yet to “WIKI” myself). I still present about Filamentality because teachers leave with a page posted on the net when they leave the presentation and they end up using searching tools and have multiple windows open and cut and paste URLs between pages, all which is mind blowing for so many. I get more email from attendees to presentations I do about “Fil” pages they’ve made or had their kids make than anything else I show them – I think because they get that thrill of being published (So getting them to blog might be the next step).
I’ll be watching for your “Harris” article.
This message is for Brian, i think.
I am a volunteer docent at Animal Ark in Reno, NV and looking for a website designed by children several years back that featured the animals at the Ark. I don’t remember the last time I saw it but can’t find it.
We were told to check it out again but not given an address.
Are you the teacher who had that website up? If so, it seems that according to your posting with Doug that it has been retired.
I am just checking to avoid frustration for folks who are being told that it is there.
thanks so much
joann phillips
Joann – We did have the Animal Ark site. It went off line about a year
ago. We hadn’t been able to keep it updated and we changed web site
providers. However – I’m teaching fourth grade this year and we are
going to Animal Ark in a month and hope to make a new page about the
animals there. Note I said hope to. It will probably be a wiki page with
links to other web pages about all the different animals at animal ark.
Let me know if you want more information. I have always loved Animal Ark
and have very much missed going there the last several years. Maybe we
will see you there – we are scheduled for April 27th.