Working online has made me more digitally literate. More than that, as I share what I've learned with others in various workshops and presentations I've been struck how my thinking about teaching has evolved to include a storytelling element and become more and more visually based. I've begun to think differently. flickr is the place I go looking for inspiration and metaphors to use in my classroom each day and in the presentations I give.

A number of people I know have taken D'Arcy Norman's lead and joined his 366 Days flickr group. Many report that after a while they experience a change in the way the view the world around them. I don't think I have the stamina to go 366 days (and I missed the start date for 2008) so I'm trying out my own experiment. One picture each day for the 31 days of March; taken with my cell phone. March is a month of dramatic change in the weather here in Winnipeg. We'll see how this plays out in my little experiment.

Also, my students have all begun their first flickr photo assignments for this semester. Since I'm asking them to look at their world differently I thought it only fair that I do something similar. I'm thinking my next photo experiment, in another month, might be to take a photo a day somehow connected to noticing the math in the world around me.

For now, here is the bucket full of photos I've taken so far. New pictures will be added daily and this slideshow will update itself automatically.

I wonder if 31 days is long enough for me to experience the change in visual perception I've heard others describe?

Great post by Liz Kolb over at her From Toy to Tool blog. I just wanted to archive a mirror of it here. I wish the video was portable. ;-)

Photo credit: making "Dontcha Wish Your Cell Phone Was Hot Like Me?" by Steve Rhodes

I've avoiding signing up for a twitter account. I don’t see the attraction at all. I don’t see the value in it; personally or as a tool I can use with students. I can't imagine anyone being interested that I'm drinking chocolate milk as I write this (Chocolate Caramel Quick, and lots of it, actually).

Twitter has spread quickly across the blogosphere and I've been uncomprehending as I've watched this happen. Alan has been writing a lot about twitter. In a recent post I asked him about it and he wrote a great reply. (Thanks for that.)

The tipping point for me was Alan's comment: "you cannot really talk about the game of ed tech as a spectator."

So, now I've got a twitter account. To properly appreciate the twitter experience you need a friends list. So, I started off "befriending" a number of people. Given my recent post about Friends, I guess this makes me a hypocrite.

I'm also thinking that twitter has at least one potential benefit to the classroom. It also provides a means to get students using their cell phones in an educationally meaningful way. Using twittercamp to display people's twits (?) (if that's the right vernacular it's most unfortunate ;-)) can be a way to give voice to the quieter students in class. If I have them working in groups on a problem and at least one student in the group has a cell phone, they can twit their ideas and we can have them displayed for all the class to see on the SmartBoard. (Any type of projection screen should work just as well.) This also aligns well with the the atelier model I've been working hard to bring into my teaching.

I guess I'd need them to all get twitter accounts and teach them how to use their cell phones to twit but I think there's some potential here. Hopefully it's not a long distance call to twit.