Category Archives: technology

Blogs and Wikis for a Collaborative Classroom at TCEA

Presenter Jamie Gustin Elementary Technology Coach at Magnolia ISD

Co-presenter Chris Turik employed by November Learning

Most of the November Learning employees use skype -rarely physically in an office -said this is growing as a busness model

Magnolia blogging district-wide, infused into the learning environment

Wiki-how – how to manuals anyone can write and edit good example of use of a wiki
URL http://magnoliaisdcommunities.org/communities/jgustin/

Their experience – teachers usually begin blog as upcoming events and homework, slowly evolve into two-way conversations with commenting

Started blogs in conjunction with teacher webpage, starts static phases in to collaborative (about 600 at Magnolia blogging)

Some teachers working on theme unit about mysteries

Mr. Gustin was going on a one day vacation with his family and using the blog students had to figure out where he was going. He started out with a clue and the students had to use the commenting section to ask questions that would “trick” him into giving more clues. He used his cell phone camera to leave photo clues on Flickr that would appear on the blog via rss feed

Use of cell phone one example of connectivity without a computer

two thirds of the comments were outside of school hours – one was at seven a.m. Stutdents were reading everyone elses comments trying to solve the mystery

He was able to moderate the comments quickly so if someone figured out the answer too quick the answer could remain hidden to give more time for others to solve

resources skype (one example of VOIP)

CILC distance learning message board – can post on looking for a class to collaborate with on a specific subject

ePals another collaborative resource

Fourth grade classes using a wiki to collaborate on a chapter book – one class writes a chapter – another class writes the next chapter and so on

Moodle

Classes set up a wiki on the solar system – using information on different planets students try to create life forms that would be able to survive in the environment (discovered only one student can have a wiki open at a time on moodle)

challenge – teachers has to think about all the processes the student will need to complete the tasks

storyboard helpful

be prepared to edit as they go along

a third grader spotted a factual mistake on a website (chance to talk about validating information)

teach “polite” editing

using the moodle wiki taught the students the mechanics of a wiki before they used wikipedia

community building, collaboration

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Digital Media Academy

I was fortunate to attend several sessions by the DMA people. Beth Corwin was awesome and I would love to attend one of their week-long “bootcamp” classes. They had 25 dual-boot iMacs set up for hands-on learning and they were lightening-fast 45 minute bare bones tutorials but they gave enough info to get you started with some great hints and tips thrown in.

I attended iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and Garageband as well as Flash 8 and Adobe Photoshop. I sat in on Motion as well. I learned after the first day to get signed up on their list as they had plenty of chairs but if you signed up you got to “drive” the computer. I will add more about some of the sessions later when I have had time to go over my notes and get what little I had time to take into a more coherent form but the best to me were the ones on Garageband and iDVD. We played a little with creating music in Garageband but also created our own short podcast and that was the part I was most interested in. We used loops for background music, recorded with the built-in microphone, added a few sound-effects and voila!

Mine was pretty lame but it was fun and not too terrible. I definitely would plan to script it if I was doing it for real but you can also edit within Garageband so you could delete any tracks you want to disappear. I discovered I can be just as nervous and giggly as high school girls having to record their French homework for the first time. It’s a whole new ballgame when it is you faced with the mic .

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Beyond Four Walls

Notes on I.T.S. Beyond Four Walls

Presenter Ms. LaDonna Conner from Carrolton-Farmers Branch

I actually ended up in this session through a happy accident. The session I was planning to attend was full and this was in the room where the next on my schedule would be presented. I was so glad I got to hear this one.

They have given all of their teachers iPods and traing on how to use them. They purchased a podcast server and the teachers commit to producing 4 podcasts a year.

They invested a lot of hours in training and had everything broken down into steps.

They use podcasting for staff development, staff meetings, communicating with parents and the community, lessons that can be subscribed to, and interactivity for their school website.

http://www.cfbisd.edu/

They had a device called a Belkin Tune Talk that you plug your iPod into and it makes it a recording device. As a teacher you hit record, set it on your desk and continue your lecture and you end up with an audio file you can edit in Audacity and create a finished podcast!

Imagine having your lectures saved so when a student is absent and comes to you to find out what they missed, you point them to your podcast and they get to hear the entire lecture.

Imagine a student missed taking notes on part of your lecture and having the ability to replay it to fill in any gaps in their notes. I’m so glad I “accidently” got to learn about their program.

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Some Mid-TCEA Conference Reflections

I have been enjoying TCEA but some of it has just been a blur trying to rush from one presentation to the next. I’ve been to some that were specific tutorials for Flash, iMovie, iPhoto and tomorrow I’m looking forward to iDVD and GarageBand.

It has been wonderful to learn some new tricks and also to drool over the lab set up for the tutorials – 25 bright, shiny iMacs.

The highlights for me have been listening to the new vocabulary that permeates the discussions on technology integration and the changes that education is going to have to address if we are going to give our kids the skills they will need for tomorrow. I hear the terms web 2.0, read/write web, conversation versus static webpage, community building, collaborating, social networks, and mash-ups.

Over all it would seem that while we are working hard to integrate technology, students are already way ahead of us. Computers, cell phones, mp3 players are as much a part of their daily environment as the microwave, dishwasher, and tv remote have become part of ours. They already ARE integrated. We are the ones running along behind.

But educators are catching up. The debates are all over the web and while many districts still block blogs as a matter of course, others are doing the blogging themselves. More and more districts are moving into the 1:1 computing venue.

I went to hear Dr. Mary Ann Bell speak on Fun and Free Internet tools and the links that were shared were mostly Web 2.0. She also touched on the subject of how many of these sites may be blocked at the district level.

When I was in school I never really thought of teachers as rebels but these days it seems that more and more are trying to help bring about the changes that we all know will have to come eventually. I was encouraged to hear all who spoke of teaching “literacy” included ethics. So many adults are confused about what is permissible and valid on the web. It’s easier for us to blanket block things than it is to learn to utilize them properly but at what cost? Our kids are already collaborating on MySpace, communicating with Instant Messaging, playing games online connected to multiple players in different geographic locations, recording audio and pictures on their phones and accessing the internet to share those files from the same phones. They think we just don’t get it, and maybe we don’t – but we’re working on it.

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Wes Fryer at TCEA

My notes on Wes Fryer’s presentation – The Case for 1:1 Computing

I will add the link to the podcast when he puts it up on his site.

Share a vision

Some great tools for saving clips from the web and accessing for presentations
Flickr creative commons
Google notebook

Journey we are on these days has incredible speed
1:1 learning
online podcast 15 minutes on school 2.0

silver bullet? There is no panacea that solves all the problems in education
1995 “prisoners of time” document
http://www.ed.gov/pubs/PrisonersOfTime/Dimensions.html

many things need to change
years from now people will be sitting around n nursing homes laughing about the debate way back on laptops in the classroom

the new phones (iPhone) more powerful than the computers that took us to the moon.

www.uthtv.com

20th century was a read-only culture
21st century will continue to have read-only content but there will also be read-write
need to learn to use blogs to cultivate student writing safely

three main things
1. Majority of jobs in future will not involve a factory
2. Digital curriculum rocks!
3. Need fro RW & RO
4. Education (“v” and “t” words
5. Constructivism and constructionism

Who opposes this?

What changes your mind
Relationships and conversations

Echo chamber (in blogosphere this is hanging out with just people who agree with you)

“the Rise of the Creative class and A Whole New Mind – books to read

How are we paid – not based on how our kids do
We are paid by seat time
Bell defines learning – starts and stops
Learning doesn’t happen according to a fixed schedule
School controlling the time and place where you learn
You have to come to this place, at this time to learn

What will it take to thrive in 2065?
Sir Ken Robinson http://cjournal.concordia.ca/journalarchives/2005-06/oct_27/005225.shtml
Conference

With all the technology we have – we have no idea what the future work place will be like

Teach kids to do jobs that haven’t been invented to solve problems that haven’t been thought of

Not like a factory where you do a repetitive task, closely monitored

Robotics, building a robot, writing a program – constructionism
Thomas Friedman we are going to have to able to be flexible and be able to learn and unlearn

Who is going to solve the aids crisis, who will rid us of dependency on fossil fuel

Cooperation instead of competition with China and Pakistan

Presentation on Did You Know? http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/08/did-you-know.html

Dan Pink author A Whole New Mind

Why the right brained folks are going to rule the world

We need to value creativity the way we value literacy
In a one to one environment where all students are able to pull down the world,

Wes fryer value add to the district is when he can take ideas and remix them and add productivity

Create
Evaluate
Analyze
Apply
Understand – describe, explain
Knowledge – remember

Critical thinking

Self directed work ethic (this is how students will get staff development in the future at work)
(online courses)

eMints.org

Wes Fryer

http://www.speedofcreativity.org/

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TCEA and David Warlick

My notes on TCEA session Navigating the Digital Information landscape: The New Basics by David Warlick

Redefining literacy in the 21st Century. David’s goal for the presentation – get all the way through without mentioning technology. Session is about information (synonymous with technology)

Web2.0 document handout is a wiki – David uses his wiki handout to show use of a wiki.
Can be edited and updates as people edit it.
Can add blogs after attending presentation through editing wiki
2.0 conversation as opposed to old web – library

Future – What do we know about the workplace? Picture of an office in the future
Information age – last ten months more and more people have given up the telephone that sits on the table for the one that you can carry around in your pocket.
After conference go home and go to grocery store – more men with cell phones
We have made the decision that we want our communication something we can carry with us
(cuts table phone out of picture
5 exobytes information generated in 2003 but only 0.01% got printed
Cut paper out of picture
Webcams cut chairs out of picture
In future we may be wearing our technology – jacket in Europe marketed by levi straus – built in mp3 player, headphones, gps, phone rings gps toe rings
Cut computer out of the picture
Almost nothing left of the future office. This is about what we know of the future we are preparing our children for – almost nothing.

What do children need to be learning today to prepare for the future

Conclusion – stop integrating technology – integrate literacy
Teach our kids how to teach themselves

The three Rs are the same literacy taught in the 50s – we need reading. How to teach students to be able to validate information

Wikipedia has warnings about info that may be inaccurate – do newspapers and text books?

We have been taught to read whatever was handed to us by someone we trusted. Our kids are reading online – anyone, anywhere can publish. We have to teach literacy to be able to read text but also skills for exposing truth,
Example how many planets in solar system? Look in text book and Pluto is included – wikipedia has already been updated. It was updated in less than a minute.
Wikipedia and books – not a competition. Understanding what your library and the web is really good at and teaching student how to decide how to make a decision about which is appropriate at a particular time

Other skills

– Find information
– -decode it
– critically evaluate it, and
– organize it into personal digital libraries
We don’t replace literacy – we expand it

Arithmetic – all children need to understand the language of numbers
2 things have happened – solving a problem now is maybe a thousand numbers digital

Raw data – columns and rows of numbers from all over- searchable databases
Example data on earthquakes in a certain year range.
Highlight data, past into excel
Everything goes into first cell’
Convert text to columns – wizard finds column breaks and formats
Can tell it not to import entire columns
Imported info – made a graph scatter plot – showed a map of earthquake activity – world map tsunami
Arithmetic expands into employing information – raw material
Keyboard (piano) number generator
Compose music – process information

Writing – long tail (need to research this some more – many definitions out there)
Anatomy of the long tail
New media industry – rhapsody amazon netflix
Counted up number of products each sold and number of each product sole – created a graph which they expected to see but at the point where you couldn’t make money there was a long tail that showed ones that couldn’t be sold. (according to their larger percentages)This tail goes on because there is a new digital market for artists
Rhapsody makes 20% of revenue from the long tail – point being that anyone can make money on the internet selling their book, art, whatever. Maybe not enough to completely pay the bills but you could write and market a book that would sell enough to pay for kids college tuition (which David Warlick as done)

6.7 gig over the internet in 58 seconds – more than 200 sets of encyclopedia Britannica or 4 hours of dvd quality video
how do you get your message through in that storm of information – have to successfully compete with media for kids attention

writing expands into expressing ideas compellingly

sfett video student created a video showing corporations that use child labor and sweatchops – very powerful music with images and facts done by a fifteen year old as an alternative to writing a paper

writing – quality of information expression translate to video multimedia music communicates powerfully

need to teach the thread that stitches the other expansions together – ETHICS
information flows today without containers – not in pages in books. Nothing to keep it form growing larger and larger
teachers and librarians used to be gatekeepers – they stand at the gate not realizing that the walls are gone. We need to teach our kids to become their own gatekeepers –
ethical use of information should be an integral part of any literacy discussion

redefine literacy and integrate that

computers are now the pencil and paper of their day

David’s son – image with ipod, hooked into playstation, playing collaboratively online and instant messaging at the same time. We see this as technology – son would say this is information , he wouldn’t say a word about it being technology (youth everyday normal environment)
We need to be thinking less about the machine and more about the information

Why this is important – we are notinvesting in the next century- in our classrooms

china will surpass us in broadband by 2006
US has fallen to 21th in household broadband
US will be passed by slovenia in 2007

1983 nation at risk report
education reform has been happening ever since

in industrial age the curriculum didn’t change – now the world is the curriculum and it changes everyday.

“we will have achieved education reform when no teacher thinks they can teach the same thing the same way every day”

http://landmark-project.com
http://davidwarlick.com

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Online Class Solution

Before I cruise down to Austin for TCEA I want to catch up on a project I’ve been involved in. Some students are beginning to take a foreign language class online. This is a first time situation and as I have absolutely no knowledge when it comes to speaking a foreign language they are truly on their own as far as content and being accountable.

My part has been helping them learn the procedures that will allow them to complete the class. They have had to learn how to login and use Blackboard and an online workbook on Quia. They have also had to learn how to use recording software and save their recording mp3 to their folder. They then have to attach it as a submission on Blackbboard.

After the initial giggling over having to record with others in the room, they picked up on the procedure quickly. I’m cheering for them to do well on this experiment and I’m a little anxious about abandoning them for the week while I attend the conference. They are using free demo software called Audio Wizard. In the demo version you are allowed three minutes of recording time and it is very simple to use. They click one button and a box pops up that allows them to name their file and designate where to save it. As soon as they click save they are recording. They click one more button to stop recording. Another button lets them play back the recording and make sure it is just how they want before they submit. If they don’t like it, they just click remove from disk and start the process over again.

They stay in contact with the instructor via email so they recieve feedback and can ask questions. The submissions are graded and the grades are then up on Blackboard where they can also see announcements and future assignments.

I plan to stay in touch with them and the instructor by email while I’m at the conference so for us this is breaking new ground. It will allow us to stay connected and for me to offer some long distance support even if it is mainly moral support!

DSL Troubles

I finally took the plunge. After 5 years of dial-up I signed up with DSL. I got all my equipment in the mail, managed to hook everything up, and all the laptops in the house work great but I can’t get my PC Desktop to work with it. I think it may be the ethernet card which hasn’t been used since we bought the computer. I can use laptops running Linux, OSX, and Windows XP but no desktop. I’m typing on the Linux laptop right now which is hooked up directly to the ethernet cable and it’s chugging along fine. It’s nice to be able to stay on the internet and use the phone at the same time and it is definitely faster so it will be worth fixing the desktop to work with it. It’s also nice to be able to sit in the comfy recliner with wireless.

It will be nice to be able to email home while I’m at TCEA this year. Last year I didn’t have a laptop and I’m looking forward to blogging at the conference and staying in contact at home too. I have my list of presentations I want to attend and I already don’t know how I’m going to take time to eat! I especially want to attend some of the presentations on GarageBand, IMovie, and PodCasting and of course Blogging. I’m also looking forward to putting faces with bloggers I’ve been reading over the past year.
I’m in a last minute rush trying to get two classes of students comfortable with the procedures they need to complete lessons online. I feel like I’m abandoning them but I know I will return recharged and enthusiastic so the payoff will be worthwhile.

One group records online and saves their recordings as MP3s. The other group has to use cassette recorders and as I read the instructions I thought to myself “how old school”. I’m starting to sound like the kids.

Podcasts Can Educate

This year I have been introduced to podcasts. Wikipedia defines podcasts as “media files that are distributed over the internet using syndication feeds for playback on mobile devices or computers.”
For some time I have been enjoying listening to podcasts through iTunes on my MacBook. Yesterday CNN had an article on one of my favorites – Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing. Grammar Girl was created by Arizona Technical Writer Mignon Fogarty who takes one topic and explains it on each podcast.

Today’s topic on her website is “lay” versus “lie” Grammar Girl reminds you –

Eric Clapton, and his song Lay Down Sally can actually help you remember the difference between lay and lie… [record screeching sound] because he’s wrong.

To say “lay down Sally” would imply that someone should grab Sally and lay her down. If he wanted Sally to rest in his arms on her own, the correct line would be “lie down Sally.”

Now I can improve my grammar while laying my mp3 player on the seat next to me in the car or when I am lie on the couch! Please don’t blame Grammar Girl or my high school English teacher for any errors on this blog – the errors are all mine.

For more educational podcasts you can check out Open Culture – There is an entire library of podcasts on all kinds of subjects.  Happy Listening!

Cell Phones in School

Some students were discussing their cell phones this week and asked me to look up a particular phone on the internet for them. They compared features and discussed prices and when I expresses shock over the three hundred dollar price tag on the phone they had me search for I learned that many of them carry two and three hundred dollar phones around with them. Though cell phone use is against the rules at school they can be carried for use after school as long as they are kept out of sight.

That night I was reading an article by Vickie Davis at Cool Cat Teacher blog about students surreptitiously recording teachers and those recordings ending up on YouTube and other places on the internet.

It was just a few years ago that I was involved with a church where some angry members brought a tape recorder to a meeting (that was open to anyone) and had everyone up in arms because of the statement it made. At least that was out in the open. If she had been a part of this cell phone generation she could have just clicked a button on her phone and no one would have realized what was happening.

In post 911 paranoia times we have given up some of our rights for a false sense of “Homeland Security” If we have freedom to make choices we also have to use responsibility in making them and also be accountable for the outcome. By giving up freedom we are in effect saying that we want someone else to be responsible for making decisions for us. Responsibility is elusive to teach. You can teach that actions have consequences but that’s more a law of physics. Taking on responsibility is an inner response to a situation. I hope we have not gotten so complacent or maybe just lazy that we aren’t willing to teach responsibility by modeling it.

As Vickie makes the comparison – our kids have toys that would be better suited to James Bond movies and they know how to use them. They have the freedom of the how but do they have the responsibility of the when?
Even though the year 1984 has long passed I think the era has just arrived. There really is no such thing as privacy anymore. I wonder what George Orwell would think.

Google Has Tabs!

I have used my Google homepage for over a year but discovered something new (at least to me) last night. You can use tabs to organize your web content. While I use Bloglines, like most people who read blogs I have so many that I subscribe to that there isn’t always time to read them all. I keep my favorites on Google so I can just skim the headlines and read the most interesting. Up until last night I had all my content on one page. At this time Google only allows 6 tabs but you can put a lot of information on each page. Using tabs I was able to group by subject and make it easy to see new posts.
If you are new to Google you can sign in to your personalized homepage using your gmail login. Google has tons of widgets that you can add just by clicking but you can also add feeds by clicking on add stuff and then choosing add URL. If you have the link for the sites rss feed you can paste it into the provided form and google adds it to your page. If you don’t know the address for the feed you can try typing in the web address of the page and click the button that will search homepage content. If you presently have all your content one page it is easy to create tabs and then just drag items to the different tabs.

google page

I learned another trick while I was playing on Google. You can search Google blogs for blogs related to a particular subject you are interested in. Last night I did a search on blogs on TCEA. On the left side of the results page there was a link for the RSS feed. I added that feed to my Google page, clicked edit on the header and typed in 9 which is the most entries it will show and now I have a feed that will show me blogs that mention TCEA. You can do the same by searching on Technorati . Just enter your information into the search box and then look for a button that says RSS or Subscribe. Right click on it and choose properties. Copy the address on the properties box and paste that into the “add URL” box on google and click ADD.

I hope you find these little hints helpful. There is a weather prediction of freezing rain here tonight and tomorrow so I plan on staying by the fireplace and if the power stays on – reading online!

Preparing To Blog TCEA

I am reading an article on blogging a conference by Josh Hallett and since I am planning to blog the TCEA conference in February I found the article to be useful. His suggestions are broken down into hardware and software and they include a laptop, connectivity, a digital camera, and voice recorder. I have the first three covered but I’m going to have to think about the voice recorder. I don’t have one at this point and I’m not sure how useful it would be. The presentations can be spread out and if you are wanting to make it to one on the other side of the convention center there is no time to do anything but run. They are 45 minutes long and often crowded so time and space are limited for dealing with equipment. I see myself struggling with tangled cables, camera, laptop, notepad and pen. I don’t think I could manage a voice recorder too.

The software Mr. Hallett lists includes an offline blog editor, a Flickr account for pictures and Flickr upload software. Also included are FTP software, audio editing software, and Technorati to track other blogs about the conference.

Because of the short time frames of the presentations I plan to use free note-taking software on my Mac Book called Journler. I like the application for it’s simplicity of use. I don’t want to spend a lot of time learning how to use the software – I just want to take notes. and Journler fills the bill for me.

There is wireless at the Hotel so I plan to edit my notes and upload at night. That will also give me time to edit photos (if I manage to get any) and get them uploaded to Flickr. I haven’t used the digital camera with the Mac Book yet, nor have I uploaded to flickr from the Mac so I will do a trial run on both before the conference.

Other parts of the post deal with assembling your blogging team, planning, and prewriting parts. I am going to try to at least start an outline of the presentations I want to attend and that way I can plug in the actual information when I get there. I hadn’t even thought of that and though I know there can be last minute changes and there will also be some presentations I want to go to but won’t make, I can have plan A and plan B ready so I will be working on that over the next few weeks. TCEA does a wonderful job on their website of letting everyone know what is happening and when. There are links to all the presentation and after the conference most of those links will include downloads of the handouts.
There is much more to Mr. Hallett’s article and if you are planning to blog a conference I would recommend his article and doing some planning in order to get the most out of your time and to help share with the folks in your organization who are not attending.

Happenings!

A friend and colleague has started a new blog. It’s called Paris Reads and will catalog the books she reads throughout the year. She is the librarian at our High School and I am looking forward to her recommendations! You can click on the link in this post or find her in my “Friends” blogroll.

I’d really like to see a community of local bloggers grow. We have varied interests but share a geographical commonality and concern for our community.

Coming up in February is the TCEA Conference in Austin. This will be my second time to go and my first with a laptop so my plan is to blog from the conference. I hope some of my fellow conference attendees will do the same and tag their posts so everyone can find them. I am particularly excited about listening to Keynote speaker Erin Gruwell of “Freedom Writers” fame.

New Blog for Computer Lab

I have finally gotten started on a blog for the 406 Project Computer Lab. The link is on the sidebar and I have a feed for the weeks schedule on it. It just has a welcome post and the calendar feed so far – I haven’t even done anything to personalize it. I hope to add pictures and articles and am looking forward to seeing how blogger grows throughout the next year. I tried to use google calendar with it and couldn’t get the feed to work so I ended up using an online calendar called kiko. I would have thought since google now owns blogger that it would be simple to integrate and it may work eventually but I spent a half hour trying with google and it took ten minutes with kiko including signing up for a free account.

This is one of the things I hope will improve with time. I like that google has added more control over viewing and commenting so I’m sure more improvements are on the horizon. If you check out the Blogger “known issues” page you will see quite a few errors related to using Internet Explorer 7.  Who knew?

In the meantime I am looking for suggestions on what should be included on the lab blog so let me know if you have any ideas!

Setting Up a Classroom Blog

I have been searching for a way for teachers to ease into using blogs for classroom activities. We do not have student email at this time and so I wanted to come up with a way for students and teachers to blog without it being complicated. This is what I have come up with for a beginning.

Setting up the blog:

Go to http://learnerblogs.org/

Register a blog for yourself.

  • There are some tutorials you can go through if you like.
  • You can come to the lab and I will help you set it up.
  • You will be the administrator and monitor all comments.

Create a rubric

Create a post that your students must respond to.

You can also require students to respond to one other student’s comment on the post Some suggestions for comment requirements:

  • Comment must relate to the post.
  • Comment must not contain any inappropriate material
  • Comments must not contain instant messaging language, must use proper grammar, correct spelling and punctuation.

Before you have your students post their comments spend some time discussing what you feel is appropriate and what you expect. You can show them some examples of some educational blogs (see me if you need some links to use) to illustrate how this can be done.

Create a spreadsheet of student names and elements from the rubric and anything else you want to base your grades on.

  • Open your spreadsheet and check off the elements as you read the student comments.

This is a starting point that that will allow you to use a classroom blog using student comments. If you want to include some posts by the students you as the administrator will have to post for them. They could write their post and save it to their folder on the server and I can retrieve it and send it to you so you can post it to the blog. I can point you to some class blogs for some examples of how other teachers have utilized blogging with their classes. I would appreciate any suggestions out there.

All of this information came from other sources. In particular I want to thank http://mhetherington.net/blogs/ and http://anne.teachesme.com/

My Tech Meeting Shares

Four Links To Share


World History For Us All
http://worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu/dev/default.htm“World History for Us All is a comprehensive model curriculum for teaching world history in middle and high schools.”This curriculum:

  • offers a treasury of teaching units, lesson plans, activities, and resources.
  • introduces educators to an integrative approach to world history, culture, and geography.
  • presents the human past as a single story rather than unconnected stories of many civilizations.
  • helps teachers meet state and national standards.
  • helps students relate the histories of particular regions to world history as a whole.
  • enables teachers to survey world history without excluding major peoples, regions, or time periods.
  • helps students understand the past by connecting specific subject matter to larger historical patterns.
  • draws on up-to-date research in comparative, cross-cultural, and global history.
  • may be readily adapted to a variety of world history programs.


World History for Us All is a national collaboration of K-12 teachers, college and university instructors, and educational technology specialists. It is a project of San Diego State University in cooperation with the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA. World History for Us All is a continuing project. Elements under development will appear on the site in the coming months.”

ZohoWriter

http://www.zohowriter.com

  • “Create, format, & edit documents online with a powerful WYSIWIG editor
  • Access & share your documents from anywhere using just your browser
  • Lock your documents while in shared mode
  • Post to your blogs (Blogger/Typepad/LiveJournal) from within ZohoWriter
  • Export your docs in word, pdf & sxw formats
  • Periodic auto-saving of your documents to prevent data loss
  • Spell check, tag your documents for ease of use”

K12Station Educational Site of the Day
http://www.k12station.blogspot.com

A Blog featuring educational websites.

30Boxes
http://30boxes.com
An online calendar with features for color coded multiple calendars.

  • “organize your day and your web stuff
  • share the things that you want to share (like parts of your schedule on your blog or myspace)
  • follow your buddies’ myspace, flickr, webshots, livejournal, heck, any personal blog”


Online Web part 2

Someone else did all the work and did a great job! Jonas Back has a blog titled myuninstalledlife where he looks into the feasibility of uninstalling desktop software and doing everything on the web. This is something I’ve thought about a lot and he has some great articles and howto’s on his blog. You can check out different online word processors here and he also mentions some new applications that are still in beta but look promising. One is an online calendar called Scribe that is supposed to work offline without installing anything. I signed up for an invite so I hope to try it out soon. Another drawing program that looks good is Cumulate Draw also talked about on Mr. Back’s blog. He suggests this and Gliffy as replacements for Visio for flowcharts and network drawings. You can save your drawings in several formats to insert into other documents.

If you go to his main page he has everything broken down into categories of software to replace and you can navigate to the articles about the individual apps from there. Mr. Back also challenges the technology. He gives an example of a request:

“I want to have a fully blown Adobe Premiere alternative (video editor) on the web and nothing installed on my PC. It shouldn’t take more than 2 seconds to load.“

An online app that would take the place of Photoshop would be my dream! I look forward to his future articles and on seeing what the future web will be like.

Another link for tonight that isn’t an application but another online community. Recipe Thing is a site similar to online bookmarking only for recipes. You can register and tag your recipes, save them to your recipe box, share your favorites, and even have it find recipes according to what you have in your pantry. For the times when I actually get off the computer and cook, this is a fun and handy place to start cooking. Now if I can just find an online community that will clean my house….

Google strikes again – JotSpot

I promised a post on online word processors and that is coming but tonight I wanted to write about google. I read tonight that they have acquired JotSpot – a wiki site. Coming on the heels of YouTube and Google Docs (formerly writely) they have grown to a very impressive collection of web applications. They also have a pretty comprehensive spreadsheet application. Add to that Blogger, Gmail, Orkut, Google Talk, Picasa, Google Reader and a comprehensive list of specialized search engines and you have what constitutes a massive amount of data!

There is a convenience factor having just one password to login to all those services. If you don’t have an expensive office program you can do most of what you need online (add a database and a presentation program, some graphics apps and oops, throw in a browser and an operating system – wait, that’s microsoft LOL) and with all the open source software available you can complete the picture for little or no cost for software. I wonder where this will go in the future. And I wonder about all the data floating around out there. In high school I read the book “1984” and we used to talk a lot about “big brother” is watching you (that was the early seventies and we meant the government and whoever else we felt was part of the establishment). In some ways it seems to me that we have helped bring about the reality of what was a slightly paranoid reaction to a generational gap. We vote away our rights to obtain a temporary peace of mind and we do our banking, bill paying, purchasing, and journal keeping on the internet. Our kids share some of the most intimate details of their lives with complete strangers and corporations and college recruiters look at those details before making decisions about their offline futures.

I love having a front-row seat to all the changes and I hope that we pay close attention and make the technology work for us instead of the other way around. We are a society of busy people running from one end of the day to the other. I recently had some very bad experiences with the medical profession and most of what happened was due to people not paying attention. I think that sums up a lot of what is wrong with our world these days. We are in such a hurry that we are not paying attention and sooner or later those things that slip by have a way of catching up with us. My mother used to tell us “the chickens always come home to roost”. It’s funny how the older I get the more wisdom she seemed to possess. I think that the faster things change the more we need to pay attention to where we are and where we want to go.

Google isn’t good or bad – it’s just big and fast. It’s a tool and and a very powerful one. Power tools are wonderful and each one has a specific purpose. My experience with power tools is that you have to respect them. You should learn the proper way to use them and take safety precautions. You should use them for the purpose they were intended for, you don’t leave them on around unattended children and you don’t let them take over the garage.