For Thursday, February 25, 1999 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 719 words

Computer Potpourri

Last week I taught an inservice for teachers called Computer Potpourri . The goal was to learn how to have fun with computers, like kids do. Instead of using computers as work stations, we turned them into play stations.

Speaking from personal experience, I have learned more about computers by playing games than I have from typing letters. In fact, my early game playing improved my letter writing. All the exploration, the trial and error, and the problem solving involved in the games made me more comfortable exploring and problem solving other software and the computer itself.

So that was my theme for the day -- play with computers and learn cool stuff. Kid around.

Let me share some of the fun we had. As I'm free to pick my metaphors, I'll call it a four-waterslide tour.

Down the first slide we learned all about Internet Music and how to turn our home computers into jukeboxes. We learned how to download legal MP3 music (from MP3.com) and how to play it with WinAmp (from winamp.com). We learned how to pull songs off our own CDs and store them on our computers.

At the splash pool of that session we played Name That Tune. The computer was again the centerpiece. For music we played theme songs from 50 old TV shows, downloaded off the Internet. We projected WinAmp onto the big screen so everyone but the contestants could see the answers ahead of time. Ten teams of two competed for prizes -- copies of You Don't Know Jack, the zany party trivia software game.

After break we explored the second slide -- cool web sites. Where does everybody go? Our first loop-de-loop was a visit to a place relatively new to the Internet: the concentric cornucopia of web sites collectively known as Web Rings. Web Rings are a new way to organize information on the Web, different from Search Engines.

It all starts at www.webring.org. People with web sites of a similar nature join the same Web Ring. There are millions of sites connected to thousands of rings inside of hundreds of categories, Once any surfer happens onto a site that is part of a Web Ring, he can follow that ring all the way around.

How do you spot a Web Ring site? Look at the bottom of the pages you visit for a Web Ring banner. The banners have hot clicks for Next, Previous, Random, and Join. I joined one for creative writers to test it out.

Other sites we slid by on that ride included a reverse phone directory; a parallel search engine; archives of novels and lesson plans; a place to watch cartoons; download sites for software, sound effects, video; and listings of hundreds of good research sites.

The splash pool was free time to surf around once we'd skimmed over all the cool sites. Teachers had a chance to go back or beyond.

The third slide was a demonstration of the coolest free utilities I've collected over the years -- nifty timers, file organizers, duplicate-file removers, font viewers, and such. The splash pool was a detailed dive into the functions of the ever-popular and still free ICQ.

The last slide was called cool tips and tricks for Windows. The details of that slide don't translate well into column format, but we had lots of fun going Ooooh and Aaaaah as we made Windows do cool things. I shared all the hotkeys and shortcuts gathered from a multitude of tip manuals. You can find a lot of them in the tips.txt file in your windows directory.

This slide had no splash pool. It just shot us right out the door to lunch because we ran out of time. The course could easily have lasted eight hours.

I don't know how much of what we learned can be taken directly back into the classroom. It was more about personal enrichment, though I'm sure the classroom will be positively affected indirectly.

A few more teachers have found a few more sites and utilities to simplify their jobs. A few more teachers may listen to soothing tunes while at home typing up lesson plans, and the lesson plans might flow a little better because of it.

But it doesn't really matter. The day was an end without any means.

Closing note: all mentioned web sites are listed on my personal portal at home.inreach.com/gibbo/port.html