Yesterday I came across Blackle for the first time. I wasn’t sure if it was a hoax or a real attempt to get people thinking taking tiny steps to reduce energy consumption. Google must be on people’s screens for huge amounts of time.
What if there could be a tiny energy reduction every time it was accessed?
As they say:

How can you help?

We encourage you to set Blackle as your home page. This way every time you load your Internet browser you will save a little bit of energy. Remember every bit counts! You will also be reminded about the need to save energy each time you see the Blackle page load.

Help us spread the word about Blackle by telling your friends and family to set it as their home page. If you have a blog then give us a mention. Or put the following text in your email signature: “Blackle.com – Saving energy one search at a time”.

White or other bright colours on black was a web design that I used to find very appealing. Even now, as a dyslexic, I find it easier to read sites with either a darker background or at least a colour other than white.
To return to the energy saving theme Piers over at monkeymagic found this from the US department of energy. It suggests there could be considerable energy savings if everyone set their desk top, and presumably web site backgrounds, to one of these colours:

I’m setting up a couple of new blogs (details later) and thinking of redesigning this one so this has come at a good moment for me. Food for thought….. What do others think?
Up Date: Loopzilla via email sent me this from the Numbers Guy

On LCD displays, color may confer no benefit at all. In response to my inquiry, Steve Ryan, program manager for Energy Star’s power-management program, asked consulting firm Cadmus Group to run a quick test by loading Blackle, Google and the Web site of the New York Times (which is, like Google, mostly white on-screen) on two monitors — one CRT, one LCD — and connecting a power meter to both. “We found that the color on screen mattered very little to the energy color consumption of the LCD monitor,” said David Korn, principal at Cadmus, which specializes in energy and environment, and does work for the government. The changes were so slight as to be within the margin of error for the power meter.

Plus Andy scoffed at the whole notion of tiny actions making a difference but refused to take the bait and add a comment here!
So there you go – if you’ve got an LCD screen you can have any colour you like. As you were.

Using Flickr photos from the Classroom Displays Group I made this in 30 seconds. Neat. It uses the Flickr slideshow format and you can post it to Facebook too.

Following on from Will’s post comes a suggestion of another route to teacher and headteachers grasping the power of blogging.Monkeymagic

A different way, which might be easier, is to reverse that. By doing so, the teachers and staff can learn from the ways the children use the technology.

I think this can happen too, especially with teachers who have the confidence to let the children become the experts.

Piers (MonkeyMagic) set up a blog for the children at his school to use with litttle or no teacher intervention beyond a little initial “hand-holding”. He didn’t publicise the blog in any way but handed ownership over to the children. Wow – powerful stuff ownership Their byline “Our News. Our Views” says it all.

..one boy called Max had done a little ‘viral’ marketing campaign round the school. He printed out some stickers and stuck them on friends jumpers, asking them to pass them on to a friend.

The blog started to get comments from teachers, pupils and parents.
Now here’s the crunch:

By watching how the children were using it day to day, it was much easier for staff to translate research and factoids about social computing to ideas for integrating it into the classroom.
And the big result was one of Roberta Linehan’s comments.

“I think this is a great site! Can teachers have one too?”

Roberta happens to be the head teacher.

On a side note Piers also says:

Ali Lim, the art teacher, has begun to use Flickr as another way of displaying the children’s work.

I know! I know! I saw it when she first started posting. They just happen to be members of Classroom Displays Group too
For a real treat have a look at the slideshow of their vision of London in 2057

Weblogg-ed » Why is it so Hard for Educators to Focus on Their Own Learning?

Will is writing about teachers who just can’t quite grasp what blogging could really do for their own practice. This is where I came in One of the main reasons for setting up The Classroom Displays Blog was to influence positively teachers to start seeing how blogging could change their learning landscape. But it’s a slow process and we’re asking an awful lot of people who are already feeling hard pressed. Will says:

And even as I sit in this session with Tim Tyson at Building Learning Communities, one principal says “I want to learn more about these tools so I can help my teachers use them in the classroom.” I want to jump up and say “No! You are missing a step! You want to learn more about these tools for yourself so you can help your teachers learn from them too.”

Quite! Until people actually experience the power of connected learning it’s hard for them to grasp.
Will goes on:

So what’s that all about? Is it just habit? Is it just such a focus on curriculum delivery that “learning” is all about how to do that job better? Is changing the way we do our own business just too darn hard? Or is this such a huge shift, this idea that we can actually learn through the use of technology that most people just don’t think they have to go there, that they can just keep using it as a way to communicate without the surrounding connective tissue where the real learning takes place?

It is a huge shift and maybe people are being asked to do it in too much of a hurry. That head’s desire to ‘get’ it straight away sounds very familiar. There’s no time for teachers to learn this stuff themselves first. They assume they can just teach it, without going through the process themselves. How many times have we seen teachers asked to do this sort of thing before? Non-specialist teaching languages for example? How are they supposed to grasp that this is a paradigm shift after a couple of training sessions?
Listen to Ewan, see what John is saying in your comments. Have a look at what Scotland is up to and you might get a better idea of what is needed:

• Support, frequent, ongoing, online and face to face support from people who do ‘get it’,
• Time to pay attention to their own learning,
• Meaningful solutions to their day to day issues (like “What shall I do with that (*) wall this time?”)
• and ideally an element of playfulness to sugar the pill and stop them scrunching up their faces in agony.

Or, maybe it’s just me…

No, it’s definitely not just you Will and it’s not just the US either!

Engineers without Fears responds to Andy’s post about creative thought and chimed quite nicely with my own thoughts about reading.

And another thing: more on social creativity
I listen to others perform & I also read their work (reading is a paradoxically private and social activity)

Reading often feels like the ultimate asynchronous conversation. By reading a book I can engage with a long dead author yet in my mind I hear his (her) voice and have my emotions touched by their words. They can make laugh, cry or shiver. I find myself debating with them, sometimes impressed by the power of their argument, sometimes enraged by it.
The same is often true of the blogs I read but there’s a subtle yet huge difference. I now have an audible voice. I can argue back or tell them how much I agree. I can thank them for their insights or rebuke them for their lack. And, just sometimes, I can enter into a longer conversation with them.
I came across this lovely quote yesterday in the Charles Lamb pub in Islington (celebrating Bastile Day but that’s another story)

What is reading, but silent conversation?
Charles Lamb

Spot on Charles, even if you said it at least 150 years ago