Contest - Technology poem / song

Okay, I’ve got one more contest in me this summer... As usual, the winner gets everlasting fame and a CASTLE mug. I’ll also throw in three great books: It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools, Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope, and The Emergency Teacher: The Inspirational Story of a New Teacher in an Inner City School.

Technology poem / song contest!

Create a technology-related (or, even better, an educational technology-related) poem or song. It can be a short piece (limerick, sonnet, a single verse or chorus) or something longer (anyone up for a ballad?). It doesn’t have to rhyme…

Here’s a poem example:

Haiku

Error messages.
Twitter, please buy more servers.
Followers miss me.

Here’s a song example:

[sing to Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others, The Smiths]

iPhones are better than others.
iPhones are better than others.
I haaave an iPhone,
and you don’t have one, you loser.

I know you can do better than these!

Guidelines

• Submit your entry as a comment to this blog post. Your comment can be the entry itself or it can be a link back to your blog or web site.
• Multiple entries are welcome.
• Extra points for creativity, humor, cleverness, etc.
• Feel free to use the image above to spread the word about the contest (click on it for a larger version).
• You’ve got about a week and a half. Entry deadline is midnight, August 13, 2008.

Can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Comments

[Marshall]

1.

OK, Scott, I'm up for some self-humiliation and fun. To the tune of "Come Dancing" by the Kinks. If you are under 40, Google it.

They put a wiki on a piece of land
Where the cell phone tower used to stand.
Before that they initiated charter
On the site that used to be the brick and mortar.
That’s where teachers use to go each day.
And to the students you could always hear them say.

Come learning,
The administration used to call.
Why not come learning, its only natural?

And now it’s Monday-time to log on for my classes.
But I can’t seem to find my reading glasses.
It doesn’t matter I can log on after lunch,
Learn any time that I get the hunch.
Social interaction may be lacking,
So what - I have financial backing.

Come learning,
My parents did it and theirs did it before,
When they said, “come learning”,
They never asked for more.

Now I’m grown up and working in a school,
And NCLB just really isn’t cool.
It isn’t that the thought is to be scoffed.
It’s more the regulations are all off.
Our legislators mess with things they never should,
But if I asked them I wonder if they would,

Come learning,
Come on people, the world is getting small.
Don’t be afraid to come learning,
Its only natural.

Come learning,
Imagine all the things you never could.
Everybody come learning,
Where the brick and mortar stood.

[MTN]

2.

99 gigs of space on my drive
99 gigs of space
download some songs, pass 'em along
98 gigs of space on my drive!

98 gigs of ...

[Greg Cruey]

3.

(Sung to the tune of "You are my sinshine")

You are my SmartBoard
My only SmartBoard.
You make me happy
When kids are grey.
You'll never know, dear
How much I love you.
Please don't take my SmartBoard away!

[Kevin W. Riley]

4.

Here is a free verse entry that has no accompanying sound track. You have to create your own melody from the words. It is called "I am MySpace" and is supposed to have a sobering theme.

"I am MySpace"

Even if my hands were locked in stone they would not be silent.
I write. I touch.
I carve silent letters in the dust that only the wild rabbits read--
I scratch lines across paper with ancient lead.
I write in color,
Or in wet streaks that turn first to ice then disappear.
I wrote in ash… even after the fire fled.
I write with cave-black imagery…words that puzzle and taunt…
Words that flash and flash as if illuminating the darkness of a lonely roadside motel:
“No vacancy!”
“No vacancy!”
"No vacancy!"

In my school there are child-writer-poets who have
the spirit of revolutionaries.
They can read by candlelight but they don’t need to.
They bark loud sonnets across centuries of youthful cynics
who had to find their voice
wherever they could find their voice…

“I am MySpace,I...”

…wrote Gabriel when assigned to translate
the energy of his peers into a Haiku:

"At night, lives are connected…
I add two new souls."

I can write Haiku in the tongue of WB Yeats.
But Gabriel can stride across the great technological divide
That otherwise denies poor children access to laptops
and the other salient tools of his time …

He may have inherited the poverty of his fathers,
But he is blessed with the gift of a generation
fused to Intel buttons
and a wireless passion to redeem--
-- as the prophet Naisbitt promised two decades before…
the burden of High Tech -- High Touch.

MySpace.

[Bill O'Neal]

5.

Windows Lament
by Bill O'Neal

She suffered a score of releases,
of Windows- each version increases
in size unperfected,
'til last she elected
to rend her poor pc to pieces!

[mrsdurff]

6.

I asked the social networks to help me out & this is the collaborative effort of many (I only wrote the first line):

There once was a plurker, not much of a lurker,
Typing and tweeting all day,
Quick to share,
And show she cares,
She never slept, but she fret that her cyber friends would not rhyme.

One day she awoke to find Twitter was broke,
And all of her comments were lost
She got onto her network
And boy they did not shirk,
Soon Twitter ...... came forth
With all of its worth
To give advice and consolation
To ensure that not all had been lost.

With past conversation
changing the kids' education
in Social Networks galore,
The Plurkers and Twits
threw the greatest of fits
inside schools behind firewalled doors!

She suffered a score of releases,
of Windows- each version increases
in size unperfected,
'til last she elected
to rend her poor pc to pieces!

There's a nice gif on the page at the end too!

[Kevin Hodgson]

7.

Hi Scott
Here is a song I wrote as I pull back a bit from the digital world and then I recorded it, too. (http://www.box.net/shared/static/7okeibdkw8.mp3)

Digging Out of the Digital World

Take your Macs and mainframes and toss them into the sea
There's no PC compatible with the likes of me
I'm living up in the clouds -- I surf a data storm
When the world goes wireless -- nobody's at home

I'm a cell phone connection and a blackberry man
I'm on call 24/7 -- I'm always on demand
I need voice recognition to lighten up my days
so you can take all my power cords and toss 'em all away

Microsoft, Apple, chip, bit, byte, ram
I'm digging in the information highway, I hope it ain't a scam
You can find me on Twitter, My Tumbler is alive and well,
I'm moving out of MySpace into the Second Life hotel

Somewhere out on the horizon – something new comes along
Something strange that will change the way we think we belong
Information to the left of me – Innovation to the right
I’m so connected now -- I can't tell day from night

Microsoft, Apple, chip, bit, byte, ram
I'm digging in the information highway, I hope it ain't just a scam
You can find me on Twitter, My Tumbler is alive and well,
I'm moving out of MySpace into the Second Life hotel

-- Kevin

[hall monitor]

8.

Real Simple. To the tune of "Twinkle, twinkle, little star." (It's about a school-aged teen)

Google, Google, Facebook, Wii
Cell phone, iPod, PS3

Never walked a library floor
That’s what Wikipedia’s for

Google, Google, Facebook, Wii
...Why my homework’s incomplete

Hall Monitor
http://detentionslip.org

[Gilbert Halcrow]

9.

With full apologies to Paul, John, George (x2) and Ringo

Listen on http://soundclick.com/share?songid=6787562

The long and winding blog

1.
The long and winding thread,
That leads to your blog
Will never disappeared,
You back tracked that comment before
RSS feeds me here, Edublogsphere
2
The wild and woolly post, That nobody reads
Make technorati. Rating hit the floor
I need an idea fast, For my next podcast

Bridge
We blog about technology,
and Twitter all our minds
We challenge pedagogy
a conversation at a time

3
And still and resisters cry.
In long and whining tones
"The kids know more than me,
I feel I lost control
Don’t leave me standing here,
Alone with Web 2.0"

4
Administrators muse,
In long and winding ways
"The Parent body feels,
A social networks and bad idea"
Save me my PLN, Edublogsphere

Short of pedagogy it scans like a dream

[Jeffrey Mordan]

10.

During the end of the year faculty and staff tech meetings, we played various games (tech bingo for old hardware, etc.). One game focused on taking Beatles songs and changing the lyrics to focus on technology. Here is one example.

Let It Be
When I find myself with no connection
Who will come and rescue me?
Speaking words of wisdom, just restart.

And in my hour of darkness
with the spinning wheel in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, just restart.

Just restart, just restart, just restart or force quit,
Whisper words of wisdom, just restart.

And when the broken ancient printer
leaves me with my work undone,
There will be an answer, just restart.

For though they may be broken there is
Still a chance that they will work
There will be an answer, just restart.

Just restart, just restart, just restart or force quit,

There will be an answer, just restart.

And when our Senior Systems fails us,
I’ll just close and walk away,
Give up till tomorrow, just restart.

I wake up to the ping of email
Tech folks come to rescue me,
Emailed words of wisdom, just restart.

Just restart, just restart.
Tech folks has an answer, just restart.
Just restart, just restart,
Tech folks words of wisdom, just restart.
Just restart, just restart.
Tech folks will find an answer, just restart.

[tsakshaug]

11.

The server blues from my blog
http://tsakshaug-nonesense.blogspot.com/2008/05/server-blues.html

Server Blues
Woke up this mornin'…
Back up was sending me a warnin'….
A server did not connect…
It was not runnin'…

I got the broke down server blues.

Opened the server room..
The air smelled funky…
Ozone in the air..
The machine was dead, it ain’t fair

I got the broke down server blues.

Power supply was shot…
We need the machine a lot…
Technology classes with out files..
Sever based programs, out for awhile….

I got the broke down server blues.

Contacted the vender….
A power supply he will render…
Tuesday will have it Fed-ex
Then I can relax

I got the broke down server blues.

[Kathy]

12.

found poem
by Kathy S.

electric selectric
electrified eclectic
eclectech Solana's favorite
IM cool proficient
up-to-date
I
dial up
upgrade
in chat rooms eternal