Author Archives: Dee

About Dee

I am a working wife, geek, and mother of two with opinions about just about everything which I plan to share here.

Weekend Tips and Links

Vicki Davis has a new look to her blog and a new video site – Teachertube! There isn’t a lot there yet but a few good things can be found so I will keep checking. Here is a video tutorial for creating a poster using Excel.

Excel Poster Video
I tried to embed it even though WordPress was not on the list of sites it stated it works on but no luck. Hopefully they will get it working soon.

Google has a new option out for Picasa for Mac users – Picasa Web Albums. You can upload from your computer or export directly from iPhoto. You get 1GB storage and you can designate whether the albums are public or private.

I learned another tip for Macs tonight. Veteran Mac users may already know this but I’m still relatively new to macs and still find some great surprises! I do a lot of cutting and pasting, sending or saving bits and pieces of web stuff and now I can highlight some text and drag it to Mail App and it will open with the text already in the body of the message ready for me to add an address and click send.

This also works for TextEdit, Stickies, and you can even drag the text onto the Safari icon in the dock and Safari will open with the google search results.

Reflecting on Web 2.0 and where We Are going

I read blogs. I read constantly. I read while I am watching TV at night and before I go to sleep. I read in the morning while I am drinking that first cup of coffee and getting ready to start the day. There is so much to read and every day it seems like I find a new resource on the internet. I search, I check out other blogger’s blogrolls, I create google alerts to help keep up.
It seems to me that while the points of view are varied, the themes are similar and so much work is being duplicated. It takes passion and reflection for the amount of writing that gets done and while I love blogging, I can’t help but wonder if this is just a step in a process that will at some point make all these little sparks of light come together in a more cohesive manner.

The majority of blogs that I read are written by educators but when I step back, the picture looks more like a great, spread out class of students, all trying to move ahead but because of the size and distance and time – the direction is unclear and the pieces are hard to put together.

It’s wonderful that we have so many choices for web 2.0 tools but paradoxically those same choices seem to slow the journey. As soon as I think I’m getting the feel for a new tool there is another one to learn. I’m grateful that there are voices out there willing to share what they are learning but I can’t help but think it is all part of a transition and that we aren’t quite “there” yet. I’m not even sure what “there” is.

The collaboration that goes into wikis is a step and the blogs that have guest bloggers or are written by several people is a step. The conversations that grow with the comments and links back to other posts on other blogs are a step. Online conferences are another piece. It just seems like we should be moving towards something that gathers these pieces into a less unwieldy unit.

RSS has taken us to a new level where we can pick and choose what information comes to us and because of it, the information gets there so much faster and easily than it used to. Tags are also a part of the process. I can’t help but think that at some point we will have a more efficient system of grouping the information as it comes to us in a way that allows us to see where work has already been done or is being done simultaneously so that we can quickly see what needs to be built on or tweaked to fit our particular school or situation.

How many of the new web 2.0 tools will be around in a year? Five years? Ten? Look back five years and try to remember where your school was on the technology adoption timeline. We’ve come a long way kids and we are moving forward faster all the time. How can we share more efficiently? If we are heading somewhere – where will that be? What will information literacy look like in the near future? What will happen to primary sources if the writing that takes place is mainly on the internet? Do you as a blogger keep hard copies of posts?

Help Site Done Right!

I spend a lot of time looking for answers to computer questions on the internet and I usually find what I’m looking for but help websites are not usually fun. Technology Ninja is a great resource with a definite coolness factor. It is only for Macs and I will be spending some time looking around there. I wish there were similar sites for Windows and Linux.

The site has a very dramatic color scheme and a very cute Ninja character that oversees the question and answer format. You can access the archives through the category list on the sidebar or use the searchbox to search by keyword.

It looks like students ask most of the questions and I can see how this would be valuable in a one-to-one computer situation.

The site is actually a blog so you can subscribe and read the latest questions and answers in your feed reader but it is worth it just to go look around on the website.

Google Does Some New and Not So New Tricks

I went to my personalized Google homepage this morning just like every morning. My “must-reads” are there as well as a quick peek at my Gmail inbox, and the day’s weather report. There was a new present from Google this morning! Themes for my page. I confess to liking pretty wallpaper, screensavers, and themes so this was a fun new toy. The themes seem to be customized for your zipcode – they get darker at night or with bad weather.

Google advanced search also does something that was new at least to me – you can specify usage rights! The choices are – not filtered by usage, free to use or share, free to use or share – even commercially, free to use – share – or modify, free to use – share – modify – even commercially. This is a great thing to share with your students, I would advise that they still check for license issues but it will certainly narrow down the possiblities of accidently violating copyright.

A lot of the options that are available from the main searchbox if you know the syntax are also available here. If you don’t know the syntax or don’t want to be bothered with looking it up you can still narrow down your search results by making use of the advanced search page and just selecting the options you want from the drop down and check boxes.

Another nice tool is available if you click More at the right side of the main searchbox and then click Still More you get a list of other Google places you can go to. Click on Alerts to create a search that sends you updates on the topic of your choice. This is a great research tool. You type in your search terms and then specify news, blogs, web, groups, or comprehensive. Then tell Google how often you want to be updated, enter your email address and you will get everything you always wanted to know about your topic right in your inbox, You can edit the alert if you find your results need a bit of tweaking, and you can even place a module on your Google homepage so you can see your information anytime.

A Continuing Conversation about Student Blogging and Possibilities

The conversation that about students posting online has continued both at Assorted Stuff and at The Not So Distant Future . This is such a hot button issue for everyone involved and I hope we can continue to approach it from a positive perspective. Maybe the next discussion after asking questions about how students would feel if various people in their lives were to be the audience for their post, should be the why. We know that part of a student blog is going to be for the grade, but as well as an accidental audience there are also hidden surprises.

For me it is when someone else responds to a post or a comment I’ve written and the gains can be the connectedness, the respect of my peers, friendship that grows from the communication, a clarification of my own thoughts – those sort of things that you don’t think about going into it.  It can be the sense of community and the gratification that comes from finding that others are having the same thoughts, fears, ideas, and experiences that I am and the excitement that you get from sharing those things with others.  They are also not really things we can tell students about because the experience is going to be different for everyone. So how can we get them thinking about the possibilities?
1. Why are they writing?

2. What do they want to get out of it?

3. When they reread what they have written, how do they feel?

4. Would they take the time to read it if it was written by someone else?

5. Do they care about what they have written?

6. What are they passionate about?

7. What stories do they have to tell?

8.  What are they saying between the lines?

9. If their blog entry was a time capsule, what would they want to say to their future self?

10. How can reflection and commenting help them in their educational experience?

Any ideas for additions to this list?

You CAN Teach An Old Handyman New Tricks

My husband is learning to cook. He watches the Food Network and the Take Home Chef and once a week designates a family night and he cooks something special. Last week he made “Elegant Chicken”. It was something he made up and it really was delicious. I was not home while he worked on his creation but he told me all about the process that evening. He wanted to flatten chicken breasts and cover them with cream cheese and chives and roll them up. The first step was to flatten the chicken breasts. Now, he has always been a “tool guy” and the garage and shop are still his domain and since he couldn’t find the meat tenderizing hammer, he improvised. You guessed it – he went to the garage and got a rubber mallet. He did have the chicken between two pieces of plastic wrap and he swears he washed the hammer.

The next step called for the actual flattening and his first swing was a little more powerful than he needed. He said the chicken just sort of went splat and he realized immediately that he would have to be a little more gentle. He finished flattening the chicken and was ready for the next step.

When he was shopping for the ingredients he found the little containers of softened cream and chives and he thought they looked a little TOO small so he bought two thinking about half a container per chicken breast. He opened the container and scooped about half onto the chicken breast and spread it out. He knew immediately that three quarters of an inch of cream cheese was too much for one quarter inch thick chicken so he revised his recipe and used much less. he then proceeded to roll up the chicken.

He also bought prosciutto to wrap around it and found that thinly sliced prosciutto does not peel apart easily. It stuck together and tore into shreds so in the end he said he just kind of crammed it around the chicken. When I got home he already had it on the broiler pan all wrapped in foil and ready to bake. We had to bake it for over an hour because the pieces ended up very large but it turned out great.

If I had done this it would have been an inedible pile of something you couldn’t get the dog to eat but he pulled it off. We may need to think about writing a cookbook. I would never have even attempted something so labor-intensive. It just goes to show you – if someone thinks they can do something, they probably can – given the right tools.

This post will probably be blocked by many due to the some of the chicken terminology, but I found out today that I’m blocked in china anyway.

A Day of Relaxation

What a beautiful day we had yesterday! My husband, daughter, and a friend drove up through the mountains in Arkansas and spent the day wandering and taking pictures. It was sunny most of the day and while the wind was kind of cool in the morning it warmed up in the afternoon and we just went where we wanted to and stopped when we felt like it. We have taken this trip several times but Dale has always driven before.  This time he got to be the passenger and not worry about anything but looking at the scenery.
ozarksky

Here is a picture of our friend, the fearless photographer!

fearless photographer! You can find his photos on Flickr. I go to his site for desktop wallpaper – he does some beautiful work! This is a rare photo because he does NOT like to have his picture taken, preferring to stay on the other end of the lens. I will probably be in trouble over this one.
Here is one more I took. No great photography techniques – just a lovely, calming view.

ark 07

We also stopped at a place that sold all kinds of rocks. Nothing fancy, the man had a small shop and about fifteen plywood tables outside displaying rocks and crystals of different sizes for sale. He was one of those people that loves to talk about his hobby and he wandered around with us telling us what the names of the different rocks were and where they came from. I bought a quartz crystal because it was pretty.

We had lunch at the Skyline Cafe in Mena, Arkansas which I highly recommend if you ever get up there. Go for breakfast or lunch though, they close at 2:30 in the afternoon. The salad bar is small but has a lot of choices, the food is good, reasonable, and plentiful, the waitresses are friendly, and you are on the road that leads out of town – up into the mountains.
We left the house about 8:30 in the morning and returned about 9:00 last night, tired and glad we went.

Student Blogging With Positive Online Image

I’ve been doing some reading about student blogging and giving some thought on how to help students look at what they post to promote a positive image online. In particular this post on Assorted Stuff made me realize the need to be more intentional about communicating the things we should be thinking about. This is aside from abiding by a school’s Acceptable Use Policy and whatever a teacher decides to include in a rubric. This is more in the form of discussion with students about how and why they should filter what they post online.
Here are some ideas I’m thinking about:
As a student blogger, before you post, read what you have written with the following in mind:

  • What if a future or present employer read this?
  • What if a family member or friend read this?
  • What if this were printed in a local newspaper?
  • What if this were written by someone else – what opinions might you form about the writer?
  • What if a teacher or student at another school read this?
  • What if your future teenage child or grandchild was reading this?
  • What if this comment were on a screen in front of an educators conference?
  • What if you were trying to find the person who wrote this – are there any personal clues?
  • What if a family member read this?
  • What if your future spouse read this?

Even if commenting on a blog is restricted, you can be quoted and a discussion about your post or comment can find it’s way to another blog. Everything on the internet is searchable, clickable, and quotable so it is always a good idea to step back and look at what you have written with an objective eye.

Google some people to see how clickable they are. If you are a “blogging” teacher you could even Google yourself or someone else in the community that would be familiar to the students.

Any ideas to add to this? I would be glad to hear them.

My Personal Reasons For Blogging

The internet reflects how fickle people are. I have been reading about blogging. Some say it’s the be all, end all. Some say that it’s already history and are already off to the next greatest new thing. There are opinions about what should be in a blog, how to drive traffic to your blog, how to make money on your blog. Some writers say you shouldn’t post personal articles on your professional blog. There are some blogs I read for pure enjoyment of the writing, some I read for information, and some to make me think.

A post by Doctor Bell made some of the thoughts I have had about all this bubble up to the surface. E-mail was discussed in another post and I have some thoughts about that as well.

I am easier to reach by e-mail than I am by phone. I use it constantly and have long passed from the stage where I forwarded every story that came down the electronic pike and rarely have time to read all the forwards that are sent to me. I try though and for a very personal reason. I recently had a relative in another state who had had a heart condition for years. She had stents, by-pass surgery, valve replacement, and through all that kept going as much as possible. She sent several email forwards a day and usually I just read them and deleted but tried to answer a few from time to time with a note. Last month one of her replies led me to realize that she was on hospice care. several weeks later we got news that she had passed. My inbox is emptier and the crazy thing is – I miss it.

That said, I want to list my reasons for blogging. I started out again, for personal reasons. My husband was very ill and we spent almost two months altogether in the hospital. I stayed with him and the hospital was nearly a hundred miles from my kids, my job, my church, and my friends. I felt completely overwhelmed during that time, and very much alone with my fear for my husband, my worries about my kids, bills, and the future. Writing and reading became my survival. I wrote about what was happening so I could look at it and say “okay – that’s that – now move on”

As Dale recovered, I was able to read and think about other things. It helped to think and write about a future I was starting to believe might exist. I was starting to hope again.

I know that there are probably only a handful of posts that have anything of any real value to people not actually related to me and even fewer that have any real original thinking in them, but I also see a growth process happening.

Blogging has become a habit I enjoy. The reasons are varied and in trying to break it down it comes out like this:

1. To crystalize my thoughts about something I am learning.

2. To share something I have learned with others. Even if I am reiterating information I think of it like rain on the pond. Each person posting on a topic is a drop and the ripples spread out from their little drop. Eventually the whole pond gets covered.

3. To pass on a memory, hopefully to my kids or to share with my brothers who live in other states and who I don’t see nearly enough.

4. To keep a record, maybe just for myself of what is going on in my life and around me.

5. To have conversations with people that can teach me, who I would never have the chance to get to know any other way.

6. To satisfy my addiction to note-taking (in a place where I can always find them LOL)

7. To make it pretty – it’s just fun for me to play with. I will occasionally change the theme and in the process of changing and adding things I learn more and more about the mechanics of the software.

WordPress and the Akismet feature do a great job keeping spam away. I will get the occasional spam comment entry but so far I have gotten an email telling me to moderate the entry every time.

My little corner of the blogosphere isn’t going to shake the world or make me rich. I will post occasionally about the personal daily muddling of my life. My grammar will NOT be perfect and I may even let a spelling error get through now and then. If you come here expecting some deep thought provoking conversation and find it, no one will be more surprised than me. It could happen – life is funny. I hope Ma Bell will keep blogging as well – her part of the pond needs it’s raindrops. If blogging is becoming old hat then so be it – I like old hats. They keep the rain off my head.

Google Custom Search Engine

I played around with a tool that’s fairly new to me today. I now have a Google custom search box at the bottom of this page that will let you search this blog and my work blog. I wanted to see how easy it was to create a custom search engine using Google’s Co-op and found it completely painless. You follow the link and the click on the custom search engine link and then just follow the steps. They consist basically of giving your search engine a name, a brief description, keywords, and URLs you want it to search. Google creates the code and you paste it into your blog where you wish it to show up. The only thing I changed was adding tags to get it to display in the center of the footer.

I will make one that searches all my favorite blogs. I’m not sure if there is a limit to how many URLs you can add but I wouldn’t be surprised as there was a limit to the suggested keywords you could associate with your search engine (7). The search box is wider than I would like for my sidebar which is why it lives at the bottom of the page. You can even “brand” your searchbox with an image you have uploaded to the web if you like. You can open it up for people to collaborate – either publicly or just those you invite. There is also an option to have it added to your personalized Google homepage.

Combining this custom search engine tool with Google Notebook, Google Calendar, GMail, Google Docs and Spreadsheets and tabs on your personalized homepage gives you a free and very practical research and productivity center.
It would be useful to add a custom search box to a classroom blog that limited your students research to sites you designate. This requires you being able to edit the theme of your blog. Some other ways to use this tool would be to create a search engine to browse items you are looking to buy and limit the search to places like ebay, amazon, and buy.com. A search engine that only returned results from designated newspapers would be useful for debate students.

I hope you found some useful information here and that you will give the Google customized search engine a test-drive. Search some blogs from my education category

Google Custom Search

Link, App, and Information Overload

The TechChickTips blog had a list of Links and one in particular caught my attention. It’s called Litesum and it was created by high school freshman Jake Jarvis. You type a topic in the searchbox and it brings up a summary of the corresponding wikipedia page. This led me to start searching for web apps or mashups that were created by students. While that search took my down several very interesting rabbit holes I didn’t have a lot of luck. I am still searching and if anyone out in the blogosphere knows of more I would be very interested in hearing about them.

One of the sites I found while I was searching for student created apps was called TerraClues. TerraClues is a game played using google maps. There are already some games created but you can create your own too. Using text, pictures, and maps you leave clues that send the player on a search of google maps to find whatever you want anywhere in the world. There is even a teacher area where you could use the game with your class. There is a tutorial game that you can run through without signing on for an account that gives you examples of the type of clues and how it works. Fun stuff!

Another great idea that I was led to was on the Tech Savvy Educator site (which will rapidly be on my blogroll – great stuff here). To recycle keyboards take the keys off and use them for scrabble! The board is created using excel and there is even a hint to tell you that the squares need to be 3/4 inch. I just happen to have a collection of dead keyboards and if anyone at school is interested in giving this a whirl I would be glad to supply them with a sack full of keys!

This site led me to a lesson plan and directions for students creating “MySpace Like” webpages on Medieval characters. The link to the directions is here and the link to the students’ completed pages is here.

This landed me finally at Think:Lab, a blog I plan to spend a lot more time! Lots of food for the brain there. I read a post there that taught me a new term – Participation Culture. You can click and go to an online presentation by Steve Borsch of Connecting the Dots. This term makes more sense to me that web 2.0.

Our students are completely at home with technology. They’ve never known a time without computers and the internet is a part of normal life for them. As they navigate through the information and often as in the case of Jake Jarvis, not only participate but create new ways to utilize it, I look ahead with anticipation to see just where technology will take us next. The interesting question is who will be driving the bus?

A day With Debate Students and a Link

Imagine spending an entire Saturday with a group of teenagers all in business suits (including the ladies) going room to room with carts and dollies full of file boxes (their research and case cards) and hearing snippets of conversation involving politics, the latest unemployment figures, and vocabulary that includes hegemony, solvency and paradigms.

Sounds kind of surreal doesn’t it? That’s debate. A bunch of smart stress puppies putting in many hours (along with their exhausted coaches) and traveling many miles hoping to get just a few extra speaker points and maybe end up with a college scholarship.

In general I found a great bunch of kids, able to hold their own in a conversation better than many adults. They support each other, fight like cats and dogs, critique each other and whoa to anyone from the outside that treats one of them badly. Teams from different schools pass each other in the halls asking how they did in their last round and commiserate on the shortcomings of their last judge. I love their humor and drive.
I got to watch two rounds and as always was amazed at the speed and the level of intensity. I was tired and I didn’t have to do anything but listen!

One student shared a link with me that I want to pass on. The site is called Progressive U and their opening paragraph on their about page says the following:

Do you want to regenerate brain cells killed by countless hours on MySpace?*Do you need rehab to cure your Facebook addiction?

Are you exhausted from wading through piles of nonsense on Xanga and LiveJournal?

Stop banging your head against a wall of pictures, and put your brain to good use!

Progressive U is a blogging site for teens with a vision:

The mission of Progressive U is to provide young people with opportunities to discover, analyze, and discuss the values and democratic principles that promote a healthy, just society.

Youth can also earn scholarship money here. A $1000 and two $500 scholarships are available. The rules are available on the site.
This is a great use of blogging and as they say on their site ” Friends don’t let friends waste all their time on Myspace”

I’m off to bed now, watching debate wears me out and time springs forward tonight.

One Foot in the Future, One Class Stuck in the Past

I’m going to do a little complaining and the names have been omitted to protect whoever!

scenario 1: A class that entails completing paper lessons and recording audio on cassette recorders and sending them through the mail to be graded. The students must purchase said cassette recorders and blank tapes, record themselves, put the cassettes in envelopes and then postage has to be paid to send them to the appropriate person who must then put the tape in another cassette player and listen to grade the student. Several processes, several costs, and quite a bit of time is entailed here.
scenario 2: Student records audio on a Mac using GarageBand, sends it to iTunes, exports it as an mp3 file and I upload it to a webpage where the appropriate person needs to do nothing but click to listen. Or the student can record on a PC using Audacity and saves as an mp3. No extra cost, no extra procedure comments could be added immediately with each assignment.

The world may be flat but some colleges prefer scenario 1.

We are trying to bring our teachers and students into an age of literacy at the high school level but how frustrated will they be when they get to college and find out that those skills won’t be put to use? Probably as frustrated as I am right now.

Combining RSS Feeds and Organization

There are several tools out there for combining your RSS feeds and I just happened to try Feedblendr tonight. There was no registration necessary and you simply type in a title for your new feed and then enter URLs for the feeds you want to combine and presto – you have a new feed that you can enter into your reader and it will now display the headers for articles of all the feeds you combined. Tonight I created one called the Dynamic Trio – I entered the links for the blogs of Wes Fryer, David Warlick, and Miguel Guhlin and ended up with one feed that displayed all three of their headers. You also have the option to display it as a webpage and read it right then. It was fun to play with and hopefully will be another tool in my battle to tame the wild blog bloat. I want to read more than I have time for and I want to organize but at the same time I don’t want to miss anything. I’m planning to create a few more tonight and do a little consolidating.

This is part of my resolution to pare down, down size, organize, and clean out. Maybe it’s spring, maybe it’s the growing pile of things I want to get to but can’t and they keep calling to me and distracting me. I recently started making notes on colored index cards. I bought myself an accordian file folder sized for the cards with tabbed dividers and a card file box. The folder is fairly flat and goes with me in my laptop case and as it gets full I transfer cards to the file box. I have a card in the front of the folder and one in the front of the box with the color coding legend and I am slowly trying to shrink the piles of printouts of articles I have saved because of some bit of information or ideas I knew I would want to refer back to by transferring the information to my cards and filing it. I keep a supply of blank cards in the front of the folder and extras to replenish my supply in the file box. The price is reasonable and for a terminal note taker like myself it gives me a place to keep and find all those bits and pieces of information. Now I have mentioned this system in my blog for the whole world to see, I’m hoping it will keep me motivated. Besides, if I get more organized I will have more time to read all those newly combined feeds!
Now if I could just come up with a better system for my closet…..

Random Weekend Tips

These are not my own ideas – they’re bits and pieces of things I read this week that I have found useful. I’m so thankful for folks who freely share their knowledge on their blogs. This post is more a reminder to myself about the things I have found and need to put to work.
Gmail – I love it and use it all the time. I read a post this weekend though that made me slap my forehead. I send email to myself On links that I want to check out later or if I’m on the PC and find something that pertains to the mac or linux, I email it to my Gmail account so I can refer to it when I’m on the machine it relates to. I often forget about the post or forget which post it is and I have used the search function in Gmail to find it later but semantic keywords or tags in my subject line to make the process easier and quicker. I will from now on! The article I was reading suggested using the Google toolbar for the Gmail it option. I have resisted this one little Google option thus far but I may have to give it another look.
FireFox – I have used FireFox for several years. The only time I use IE is when I need to check for updates on a PC. I constantly have multiple tags open and in the morning, after I have made my latte and I’m ready to spend a few moments reading and waking up before the rest of the family starts to appear, I open my usual morning reads. Gmail, my work email account, google homepage, and DIGG, and sometimes the local paper. I have a brand new folder on my bookmarks toolbar named MorningReads that contains the bookmarks to those items. When I click on the folder it lists them with one extra item on the bottom – Open All in Tabs. I can now click that one item and all my usual links open in tabs across my browser window. As I excitedly tell my kids about this little trick they roll their eyes and tell me I’m such a geek. They think that they are insulting me but I can’t help it if the idea of clicking once instead of four times makes me grin!

Google Notebook – I have been using it for several weeks and have fallen in love with it. You can install an extension so that you can right click on any webpage and a contextual menu item called Note-it is now a choice. “Noting it” saves it to your Google Notebook. It can be an entire webpage, a picture, a quote, a URL or anything else you can right click on. I have been saving items to one big notebook, knowing there had to be a better way to organize but not knowing quite how. This weekend I learned that you can drag-and-drop anything anywhere in the notebook. I spent the last hour creating new notebooks, adding section headers, and dragging things around to organize them. You also have the choice of keeping your notebook private or sharing it publicly. You can export items directly to Google docs and spreadsheets, you can print a notebook, and you can add a note and just type or paste a note directly into the application – great for research, organizing a project, or collaboration. If you have a Gmail account you automatically have access to this application and if you don’t have Gmail it’s worth it just to have access to all the Google apps. I still use a main notebook to capture and then open my notebook and move things around to make them easier to find. I also have the Google Notebook widget on my personalized Google homepage so everything is right there and visible which just seems to work best for me.  There is a great information and tutorial Powerpoint to download here. (warning clicking starts the download)
New Online Application – Mindomo. Online mindmapping. You have to sign up for an account but it’s free. I’d like to see Google add something like this to it’s suite of apps (along with a presentation piece which I’ve already mentioned on this blog). I made a little practice map and it was very straight-forward and simple to follow.

Support Net Neutrality

The very fact that I can publish on this blog makes me a supporter of Net Neutrality. I am going to make an intentional effort to learn more and be more vocal about this issue because to me the internet is the last place people have where freedom of speech truly exists. We read newspapers, listen to radio stations, and watch news shows on TV stations that are all controlled for the most part, by large media companies and so we see, hear, and read, what they want to put out there.

While there are issues in education dealing with kids safety online, validation and quality of information, copyright issues and more, I would rather we work to teach our students how to deal with those issues than open up my browser and find nothing but what my provider decides is appropriate or newsworthy.

I want to be able to choose for myself, and even if no one ever reads what I write, I want to be able to publish it. I want those same things for my kids. If you are interested in learning more about Net Neutrality there is a video you can watch that will give you some food for thought. It’s a little long so get a cup of coffee and have a notepad handy in case you want to jot something down.


Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

Second Life

I ventured into Second Life for the first time tonight. It was interesting to find out how inept I am – they may ban me from driving altogether there, I was that bad. I spent about two hours and still haven’t managed to get past the part where you are learning and must perform several tasks to get your passport to the main world.

My observations so far:

  • There seem to be way more men than women in Second Life
  • Men hit on you as though you really are the character (trust me – I DON”T look my character LOL)
  • People seem just as confused and socially inept in a virtual world as they are in the real world
  • Playing on a MacBook without the mouse attached may be a little different – control-click never seemed to produce a right-click result (Command Click works!)
  • F1 does not seem to summon help in a Mac
  • At this point I can’t imagine why anyone would actually spend money here

It’s pretty and I will give it some more time. My daughter also created a character and I am hoping to meet up with her there. I think that would be kind of interesting. I have heard of conference-like events being held there and would be interested in participating if I can ever get past the beginning. If anyone has any helpful hints I’m all ears!

Added March 03, 2007

Since I posted this Vickie Davis has written a post that contains a lot of great information on Second Life and how it is being used in education as well as reasons why it may not be ready for education.  There are links to blogs of folks who are using it and videos, and other resources.  The post is not only about Second Life but about  Virtual Worlds and the future of the web with 3D. Mrs. Davis even mentions something I have been concerned about – the actual real world money that is spent in Second Life and what happens to it.  There are ways that you can be banned from Second Life but like the real world there are definite places that I would avoid because of the “adult” content.

Before jumping off the fence on Second Life I would spend a little time researching and  Vickie’s article is a great place to start.  Another resource mentioned in this same article is a blogging college English teacher who also has a great videocast on primary and secondary research ethics and a blog dedicated to Second life.

Update and My Recent SBC Problems Solved

SBC sent me an email customer satisfaction survey and I filled it out a couple of nights ago. I was obviously not satisfied and let them know. I still had not been able to get my PC to connect. They must have gotten my survey because a very nice gentleman called and walked me through some procedures. The upshot was that it was either my network card or the modem. The laptops at my house connect but I told him that the speed, while much faster than dial-up was not what I was promised by the original person who explained the service to me. He checked my line and said that it did seem a little slow but not to far from average for my area so I guess the maximum speed they quote is dependent on your area. I took my PC in to work and tried to connect on the network and no luck so I made a little trip to Office Max and twenty dollars later I have internet. It was no big deal to put the new card in though the old one didn’t seem to want to leave it’s home – it took a bit of tugging.

After I installed the new card, I hooked everything back up, turned it on and followed the instructions to update the driver from their cd. I clicked on FireFox and did the happy dance. My daughter is now happily surfing MySpace and chatting on MSN messenger. Hmmm, maybe I should have left out the new card.

I will be calling SBC back and thanking them for their help. I really am not angry that I had problems. It wasn’t even their fault. What I am angry about is that they were going to charge me $100 to help me until I filled out my little survey. How many people would have bit the bullet and paid the fee? I remember when you could get service by being polite and nice and it seems that more often than I like, you now have to be mean and aggressive.

I don’t know if it is because we have become so accustomed to rudeness that we are immune to anything else or if we are just so caught up in our own routine that it takes rudeness to get our attention. My mama always said “you catch more flies with honey”. It seems to me that nowadays you do better if you sting like a bee. I hate getting angry and I always try to be polite. It makes me tired to do otherwise.

I would recommend SBC now but I would add a few disclaimers and I would ask some questions about the computer they would be using. I would also warn people about the possible extra fees.

Dale has a cold and had some minor surgery in Dallas this week so we are not running full blast right now. A cold for him is a bigger deal that it is for most people. Dialysis patients immune systems are not very strong and they don’t have a lot of reserves for fighting off even minor illness so he feels terrible and we feel bad right along with him. The DSL problems took a back seat for awhile but at least that was something I could fix.

I’ll take a win even if it’s a little one.