Some weekend reading for those who are interesting. There’s a lot here, but it looks worthwhile.

My wife is only days away from receiving her exciting new new-to-her Kindle, which is to say that I expect soon to get my hands on a Kindle 2. Meanwhile this note from a good friend about the machine’s effect in his household:

An (unreported?) Kindle phenomenon: 11-year old girl, drove parents crazy by not reading books because totally addicted to electronics, has now transferred total addiction to Kindle 2 – and now does nothing, ever, but read books, one after another. In bed, in the car, while eating – while crossing streets!

[My wife] says, “Let’s buy Amazon stock. In six months, the world will have discovered this particular phenomenon.” (She is the one who had the sudden insight that this might work for [our daughter].)

This from one of my favorite writers who blogs for The Atlantic Monthly magazine, from yesterday. Perhaps the Kindle and other e-readers will spark an interest in reading for some students? Having approached the issue of reading before, this one got me to thinking is all . . . .

Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind – ChronicleReview.com
When Jakob Nielsen, a Web researcher, tested 232 people for how they read pages on screens, a curious disposition emerged. Dubbed by The New York Times “the guru of Web page ‘usability,’” Nielsen has gauged user habits and screen experiences for years, charting people’s online navigations and aims, using eye-tracking tools to map how vision moves and rests. In this study, he found that people took in hundreds of pages “in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.” It looks like a capital letter F. At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored. It happens quickly, too. “F for fast,” Nielsen wrote in a column. “That’s how users read your precious content.”

I read this article recently and it got me to thinking about how we design web sites and pages. I also find this type of research really intriguing and interesting, believe it or not. As we consider how the web is used and how we use the web it is important to consider how people read while online. I wonder if the way we read web pages changes as humans age. In other words, does a first grader read a page the same way a high school student does, or a middle aged person does? Hopefully more research will be done in this area and the evolution of our interaction with online worlds will improve. Now, please go and remove anything located in the lower right corner of your website. No one will notice it, anyways.

I would probably use these ahead of the Professional Development workshop to help see what it is that people want and need to learn. I really don’t like to waste people’s time or give them things that they’ve already had before. These tools can help to get around those two issues. Hopefully they’ll help you. As they say,

Share and Enjoy!

Share More! Wiki » Online Polling Tools?

How do collect data via a survey or poll?

Conducting surveys and polls is great. When I need to conduct a survey, I try to use tools that give me control of the survey data (e.g. UCCASS or Moodle’s built-in survey feature). However, sometimes that level of security just is not needed.

The hardest part about surveys is not collecting the data. Rather, it is designing the surveys and then analyzing the data. Although it would be too much to hope for to simplify both ends of the process—the design of the survey and data analysis—what if the latter could be made easier?

Here are 10 alternative online poll/survey sites you can take advantage of, all at no-cost:

* Poll Daddy – http://www.polldaddy.com/
* Cool Web Toys – http://www.coolwebtoys.com/
* Vizu.com – http://vizu.com/
* Blogflux – http://www.blogflux.com/
* Quimble – http://quimble.com/
* SurveyMonkey – http://www.surveymonkey.com/
* Zoomerang – http://info.zoomerang.com/
* Survey Gizmo – http://www.surveygizmo.com/
* Ballot-Box – http://www.ballot-box.net/
* Easy Poll – http://www.easy-poll.com/

via: practical theory

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I’ve become a fan of lately of good web design, especially simple web design. It’s not too difficult to put up a website nowadays, especially for teachers. The trick, I think, is to make the site navigable in a simple sort of way. Part of the issue in helping teachers to develop their site is that they don’t have a lot of extra time to learn a bunch about web design, so using a simple program or even a blog type of software can be helpful. If someone wants to learn more about how to create a simple, clean and clear website, then the link above might be very helpful. It is for me, anyways. Some thoughts about it all–keep navigation simple, consider how visually pleasing the site is and make it so that the links make sense as to where people will go when they click on them.

Hope this helps a bit!

Make it a good day– 

Do you twitter? I’ve been trying this out for a bit, feeling both excited about it and also a ‘what’s the point?’ type of thing. I think that as I follow more education folks though, it starts to make sense . . . .check it out if you haven’t!

More info at: http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com