Back in the classroom. Teaching mathematics to east side Austin fifth graders. Or maybe just making a very feeble attempt.

Nothing seems new. In this thing called school. Little room to actually teach. But that room is plenty.

It is a very complex reality (psycho-socially speaking), this thing called school. A family system, of sorts, of course. Desperately in need of something like psychoanalyzing. But there’s no money in that these days.

So, slowly, I’m getting settled in.

And slowly, as we get the numbers in, the adding, subtracting and all the parts of a whole discussion, I’ll throw in some scratch, sketchUP and then, of course, con them into trying to teach this stuff themselves.

A guru of mine, john maeda, speaks a lot about simplicity and the humanizing of technology.

I wonder if there will be a day when visual literacy becomes a part of what we simply call “literacy” and earns a place in our curriculum, alongside reading, math and science?

I hope so. But I doubt it’ll happen in my lifetime.

I sure hope so.

I just received my invite for the new sliderocket beta and have fallen in love.

It’s definitely not perfect. It has some quirks and kinks here and there but I guess that’s why they call it a beta.

I’m not sure if this product is in any way associated with adobe but it sure does have some interface similarities to the new Photoshop Express. Perhaps that’s just because both are built using Flex/Actionscript.

Speaking of presentation software, I just read PresentationZen, sitting at a local bookstore.It amazes me to hear how many teachers think they’re “teaching” students to create presentations simply by showing students how to use Power Point.Presentation Zen should be basic and required subject matter for anyone learning how to use presentation software, especially in K12 settings.

If only I would have had access to the new swf object code and wizards when I was creating the home page for hattech.net.

Apart from finding a job in my new home (Austin,TX), my summer “break” consists of trying to complete my Client-Side Web Programming Certificate (fancy name for: he knows javascript) and getting webspeaky completed.

So, I think squidbrains will have to wait. Flash is moving too fast for me and I’m not a full-time flashie. So, I’ve got work to do.

So much for a summer break! However, Austin makes it good. I love this city.

I love this little app.

Although I do need to state that I am not much of a twitter fan for some reason. It’s probably not so much twitter itself, per se, but it’s users. It’s like Marx and Marxists, or Christ and Christians. Twitter and Twitterians.

Regardless, there’s something simply special about this little app that speaks to the spirit of our time. It reminded me of the following talk on ted. It’s more socio-cultural and spiritual than techie, more educational in a right brain kind of way. It speaks to the much needed integration into our classrooms, not of technology, per se, but of the right and left brain hemispheres.

I’m loving tools like weebly. Many of our teachers at hattech love it and are beginning to use it on a daily basis. I think professional web designers and developers are going to have to pick up the ante a bit if they’re going to want to keep up with tools like this.

Maybe with tools like weebly we’ll finally be able to rid ourselves of the plethora of horrid sites out there. Sites created by people suffering from the fact that our educational system thinks color, design, layout aesthetics are peripheral subjects, at best.

Circular thinking. Right brain processes. Imagination. Creativity. Real critical thought. Intelligent humor.

These are all characteristics that seem missing from a school culture dominated by a high stakes, standardized testing worldview and practice. Data is not bad in and of itself. Data can be beautiful, actually.

And perhaps Web2.0 and creative enterprises like Google are hopeful signs that there might be some hope for an educational system that truly values right and left brain integration.

And perhaps data can become relevant, real and meaningful to kids. Real data, even that data that is so hard to quantify.

And perhaps the trickle down effect from enterprise to education will happen faster this time, thanks to our new systems of information consumption.

And perhaps instead of simply mimicking the enterprise, the educational system may actually be innovative enough to break new ground and develop new paradigms of how to do business in this new world.

But perhaps not.

And so, one can only hope.

With stuff like this becoming aplenty and so easily and freely available, it’s hard to be encouraged to continue working on projects like flashbytes.

I think I’ve given up on it. Like the old Hobbit site that seemed to be coming out so well.

Anyway, School is hectic. It’s TAKS testing time and, of course, teachers are stressed, to say the least. Regardless, they’re are creating some cool websites using weebly and video podcasts over at hattech.net.

Despite leaving flashbytes behind, I may create something similar soon that I’ll call webSpeaky, a tutorial site on user-friendly web2.0 tools like weebly that teachers can use to get started quickly setting up their class web sites, podcasts, etc. We’ll see what time and circumstances permit.

For now, I’m enjoying a good dose of television. Adobe television, that is.

vuvox and voicethread are both really cool, new tools that would help out any K12 educator document the classroom learning experience. vuvox provides drag and drop photo/video features that I thought animoto would be providing by now. Animoto is good for photos alone but it’s limited in the choice of templates, design, etc and provides no video support. Enter vuvox. I love the concept and rest assured, there will be more.

Here’s a slideshow I created in about a minute from a flickr feed. The combination and integration of these tools like flickr and rss is stellar for any teacher seeking to quickly display student work, events, etc.