It's not even in Hittite!

The Tech Tools in Use Presentation that stands out the most for me was the Padlet one. Padlet seems like it will be the most flexible and useful. I just opened up the one I made in class that day. There it is. Pretty cool I'd say. It is the one thing out of all the Tech Tools in Use presentations that I walked away from with something I could use tomorrow. It's a matching quiz on different kinds of media, from cuneiform tablets to floppy disks. You can make quizzes on Socrative, but I don't think you could make I quiz like this. I for sure couldn't. When I made this I was thinking about a lecture I suggested I to the Senior Humanities team at Huron—teachers of Literature (my mentor), History, and Art. I was thinking about the fragility of knowledge. The seniors have read some Gilgamesh, some Homer, some Virgil (some Plato and Thucydides) and seen and heard about all kinds of buildings, mosaics, statues and pottery. I think as far as the art goes the students have a fair idea what a crap shoot our artistic inheritance from past cultures has been. Mr. Benedict has told them about Goths hacking out faces on the sculptural relief of the Arch of Titus, how arms and legs go missing on classical sculptures, how a few canon balls seemed much preferable to some lost wax Olympian. And so on. But it takes quite a bit more abstraction, I think, to imagine that the raggedy paperback in your hands from the Pioneer book depository was originally a single surviving manuscript. Or a bunch of clay tablets dug up in Iraq from three thousand years ago. That's what I want to talk about. That floppy disc, too. Nobody can read it these days. And not because what's on it is in Hittite. 

Hittite sphinx from Tell Alaf, Syria. Photo: Charles & Josette Lenars/Corbis.

 

I may even use a padlet for my presentation. Why not? I also like the notion of using Padlet as a planning tool. Having all my (virtual) stuff right there in front of me! That way I wouldn't keep loosing stuff.