Thing # 19

Flock – I looked, I Saw, I downloaded….Flock is a really cool, albeit still a little incompletely mysterious, application…Incomplete because I have just begun to use it and don’t quite yet get how I can get it to contain my Google reader….but I digress….it bundles your stuff and puts it in an easily accessible side bar so I can see well, all my stuff…except my feeds from Google reader…but I’ll crack that nut if it’s the last thing I DO! This is useful as an attempt to put all your cool stuff in one place, more of a personal secretary and organizer rather than a teaching tool
Tu Diabetes – a social networking site for diabetics – a category of folk to which I sadly belong. I see no application to school other than a resource for personal health maintenance, education and support.
Stumble Upon – A tool which puts you in touch with things according to broad category and lets you vote up or down the sight you have Stumbled Upon….I looks like it works like the iTunes Genius bar in that your votes direct the selections chosen for future stumbling. The main application for schools is to facilitate the broadening of horizons as individuals, subject specialists, colleagues and mentors. It seems to fall into the category of Play that Daniel Pink suggests as an essential aptitude for the rise of The Conceptual Age…
One Sentence – no better words than from the horse’s mouth:
One Sentence is an experiment in brevity. Most of the best stories that we tell from our lives have one really, really good part that make the rest of the boring story worth it.
This is about that one line.
This is about telling the most interesting or poignant story possible in the fewest number of words.
This is about small bite-sized pieces of extraordinary lives and ordinary lives alike... the happy, the sad, the funny, the depressing.

A part of learning to write it learning to use one’s voice in the written form. A big part of that is learning to be precise and concise….I love the “other practices in conciseness” I placed it securely in my Diigo Teach_Writing list + on the home page there are links to several challenge writing sites, many of which found their way to the same list… These are for your viewing (You are out there, aren’t you?)….Some work, some don’t…