Category Archives: technology

Some Great Online Applications Part 1

Vicki Davis pointed me to these articles by Brian Benzinger. I have spent some time looking over some of the online apps mentioned on Solution Watch and thought I would add my two cents on some of them. Some were already familiar to me and some were new. The one I found most intriquing was Mayomi – an online mindmapping tool. I signed up for a free account and spent some time looking around. I think the idea is great but the site is all flash and kind of wonky to me. The interface while pretty is not the most intuititve nor is the search capability.
When I tried to create a simple mind map of the colors from primary to tertiary I couldn’t figure out how to get several forks added to one keyword. I think this site will need a little more work before it is easily usable.

Another site for making diagrams on-line is Gliffy and this one seems more user friendly and fun to use. You can copy, paste, and undo. Gliffy allows you to save, publish a read-only version of your drawing, or invite people to collaborate with you. You can choose shapes, colors, connectors and fonts. It seems fairly easy to use with most of the terms and tools familiar. You can export your completed diagram as an image file in several different formats so you can print it out, insert it into another document or presentation.
Competitious has an interesting application. You can create a graphic representation of the features of different items. It would be interesting for a government class to research platforms of different candidates, or an English class to make a graphic representation of characters in a book. Students can also save “clippings” from sites they research on the web.

These were all I had time for today but there is so much more out there. In part two I will look at some of the online word processors and note-taking programs.

What I’m Reading Now

Some wonderful things to read:

Solution Watch – young blogger takes on web 2.0 online applications and websites that are great tools for students and teachers!

K12 Online Conference – The best conference I never attended. There are tutorials, podcasts, articles, videocasts, keynote speeches and a ton of great, thought-provoking material all over the world and you can take part and never leave your living room!

Sun Associates Best Practices in Educational Technology Integration

Great stuff at all three of these sites. I’ll still be reading tomorrow!

What the heck is web 2.0?

I found a great definition for the “social” web on the NetSquared conference blog site. With all the buzz about web 2.0 which I have never really understood, this make sense to me.

“the social web is ‘the adaptation of internet tools for human interaction, communication and activism.”I’ve recently started reading “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. Every once in awhile a book comes along that seems to polarize people and the opinions I have read range from thinking it is brilliant to thinking it is total garbage so I had to see for myself.

I’ve just begun it and it is already interesting. In some ways the playing field is being leveled. The ease of communication and collaboration between people over any distance because of the internet makes it possible for many projects to be outsourced to many different places at once. A guy in India can work on one aspect while someone in Britain another and so on. This is pretty cool but the flip side means that people with angry and evil intentions can also use the same venue.

The playing field needs to be leveled in ways that can never happen on the internet though. The student with poor reading skills can’t get anything more out of the web than he can a book. The child with little parental guidance in real life will not have the skills to discern between helpful sites and sites that are anything but. We can’t improve our personal relationships through technology and no matter how good our intentions are, the virtual world reflects the real world and while there are wonderful positive things on the web there are some terrible things as well.

How does this new landscape translate for the student sitting in your classroom that isn’t getting enough to eat or lives in a home where violence and drugs are a normal thing. I guess I’ll have to finish the book but I have a feeling that those questions won’t be answered.

About K12 Online Conference

There is an interesting event happening online. It is an online conference.

“The “K12 Online Conference” is for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice! This year’s conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, Oct. 23-27 and Oct. 30- Nov. 3 and will include a preconference keynote. The conference theme is “Unleashing the Potential.”

The starting point can be found here and the agenda can be found here. I’ve listened to most of the keynote and while I’m a little behind getting started it is very interesting so far. David Warlick uses the analogy of being on a train and everyone on the rail facing the same way. In a traditional conference the speaker is in front and everyone is facing the same way (on a rail!) and everyone is in the same place at the same time. Education has traditionally been the same way. This type of conference allows for “side trips” and the speakers and attendees hold ongoing conversations all happening from different places in different times.This is the read write web at it’s best. Everyone learning from each other and adding their unique viewpoints, reading, reflecting, and sharing their thoughts. I hope to squeeze as much out of this as time and computer access allows and blog about it here. Hope to “see” you there!

Open Office for Macs!

I am taking a little time to do some reading. The laundry is piling up and the dishes need to be washed but it will all be there tomorrow so here goes.

There was an article about Open Office soon running natively on Macs. I’m looking forward to it. I have always liked Open Office because it is something students can put on their home computers when they can’t afford the big expensive office suite and save their work so that it is compatible with said office suite. I should mention that teachers can put it on their home computers as well. There are no site licensing issues to worry about.

I have been able to use it on laptops running Linux and ported to OSX but now I won’t have to worry about porting it. It’s a shame more software isn’t this versatile.

I still have the other office suite running on computers at home and at work but I find myself using it less and less. It’s a habit I am working hard to break. If I am going to promote it I need to learn it well enough to teach it.

There is resistance to using it widespread and I don’t know if it is a matter of people being afraid of trying something new or an attitude of thinking that it must not be as good if it doesn’t cost anything, or a combination of both.

A quote from a DIGG comment “you would think schools would ask for programs to be made in other OS’s.” I would think software companies would want to make their programs in other operating systems. Oh wait – Open Office already does that – hmmm….

Teacher Work Day

Yesterday was the only day this week designated for teachers to work in their rooms. I heard my name over the intercom about ten times and people found me wherever I was working and added their needs to my growing list. People emailed me which was problematic because there wasn’t much time to check email.

Students start Monday and teachers needed GradeBook and e-Attendance working. They needed computers moved and E-mail set up. I new it would be crazy and it was. By the end of the day I was mean, mad, tired and not done. I had to leave on time because it was a dialysis night. I was grouchy with my kids when I got home and I know Monday will still be a day of running around like a chicken, trying to get everyone’s problems solved.

Every year I learn something new and work towards adding that to my list of things to prioritize but I think that if I ever get it right, it will all change and I will have to start over.

For next year I have got to remember that new teachers (or teachers on new computers) need to be added as administrators on their computers or e-attendance won’t play nice. I think E-mail and attendance need to be the priorities and Gradebook can be taken care of after all that is done. They need E-mail as soon as possible so they can keep up with the announcements as they are sent out and they have to have attendance the first day. Setting them up as administrators can be done without them being there so I need a list early in the week of where everyone is going to be. That was another problem for me this year. I had no list til late yesterday. If I have the list of who and where, I can check off what and when.

Lab scheduling issues were coming up and the lab itself has a ton of work to be done so Monday it all begins again. My promise to myself is I will try not to get so mean and mad and to remember that there is always another day.

Tech Fair is Over

I was honored to do a morning and afternoon session and there were some good questions, great participation, and a few people who created their own blogs. If I’m honest I think I was better in the morning than the afternoon – more energy. The afternoon group didn’t seem to have as many questions. I have added a link on my wiki to a bloglines tutorial for those who are interested. I walked both groups through the process of setting up an account but I did not provide a handout for this part so if you need something to refer back to you can try this link.

The only drawback to TechFair is that the presenters are busy presenting and so can’t attend other sessions. I would really like to have sat in on the Elmo presentation and the MySpace presentation. We are going to have to start recording in video or at least in audio. It would be great to podcast some of these sessions. With the proximity of several school districts it would be fun to have one big event over several days and have folks from other districts present as well.

Monday I co-presented with our awesome librarian on email, copyright issues, lab scheduling, computer repairs, and library resources. I created the first part of our slides in OpenOffice using a laptop that runs Ubuntu. I saved it as a .ppt file and sent my part to our librarian who was able to add her slides without even knowing that it hadn’t originated in Powerpoint. I have had no problem tranferring documents back and forth between Microsoft and Ubuntu and so far I am very pleased with Ubuntu.

My Favorite Firefox Features

I have been using Firefox for several years and have always been an advocate for the browser. Lately I have used one feature more than any other. From the main menu click view, text size, increase. I do this several times til the text is easy for me to read without so much eye-strain. This may not be a big news flash for some of you but it has become a necessity for me!

Tabbed browsing has become second nature and I don’t know what I did before I had it. I always have at least four tabs open switching between them constantly. I keep one tab open to google so I can zip over and search for anything that catches my eye on the other websites I am currently browsing.

My bookmarks Toolbar is another essential feature. I have my everyday links listed there so I can just go to the menu and click a button and read the local paper, check my gmail account, or subcribe to a blog with bloglines.

Del.icio.us has a plugin for Firefox that places buttons on your browser that let you click a button to either tag a webpage or go to your del.icio.us page to browse your saved tags. I used to send links from home to work or vice versa. Now instead of clogging my email I can tag it and find it from anywhere I have internet access.

Firefox not only lets you have a searchbox for google right on your toolbar, but you can add search engines to it so you just click on the icon in the left side of the box and bring up a list of search engines. I have Ebay, Amazon, Food Network Recipes, Weather Channel, Wikipedia, and more. If I am reading an article by a favorite blogger and they reference a book that sounds interesting I can open up a new tab, click in the search engine box and change to Amazon and put the book title in to find the pricing, reviews, and if I like it, add it to my Amazon growing wishlist.

These are other Firefox tools I use but these are my everyday, can’t do without, A-list.

Interesting Times

I read a post by David Jakes that likened all the fuss about blogging being the way we will change education as one big taffy pull.

I get excited about new things whether it is software, gadgets, a new book by a favorite author, and yes – blogging. I don’t see it as the answer to all the things that are wrong with education.

I see it as an appropriate tool to enhance what is right with education. It is a fairly new tool and like anything new, we will experience growing pains and we will change it and mold it according to what works for us and it will eventually evolve or be discarded for the next new tool.

That’s what technology does. It changes. Change isn’t inherently good or bad. That’s why we have to constantly learn, test, evaluate, and adjust.

Our young people constantly dive into the pool without always checking the depth of the water. We can’t always stand on the side waving a warning they will find relevant if we refuse to go into the water ourselves.

Kathy Sierra has a post that talks about the space between the notes – where the music is. The important pause, the time to reflect.

“But real learning takes place between exposures to content! Long-term memory from learning happens after the training. The space between the lessons and practice is where the learning is made permanent. If we don’t leave that space, new content keeps rushing in to overwrite the previous content, before the learner’s brain has a chance to pause, reflect, and synthesize the proteins needed for long-term memory storage. “

I’m glad that there are people like Mr. Jakes who caution us to stop and look around as we try to navigate the ever-changing landscape of technology. I’m glad that there are people like Kathy Sierra who urge us to take time and space to reflect on where we have been and where we are going. I’m also grateful for the folks that urge us to wade in and get our feet wet.

We live in interesting times….

Hard Lesson Learned

I am a very disorganized fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of person. I am constantly fighting this side of my nature. Today I learned a hard lesson. I went in to school to try to get some work done and as soon as I walked in I realized something was not right. Someone broke in and took some of the nicer equipment from the lab.

I just this year gave in and ordered a large flat screen monitor for myself. I hate to spend budget money on something that only benefits me but a good part of many of my days is spent staring at spreadsheets and I was having a lot of headaches. My computer, monitor, and mouse were gone. Also gone was the data projector, an older digital camera, an older but larger computer that the lab had just inherited, plus a couple of older laptops. I haven’t gone through my desk yet and may not even remember some smaller items. The laptop cart door was pried open and so were my desk drawers.

It seems like whoever did this didn’t have anything out for me personally. All my pictures and some wooden things I had painted and had sitting on my computer were all just set aside. Nothing was actually torn up except what was needed to gain access. I am thankful for that.

What hurts is that money that could have been used to upgrade out-of-date equipment will now have to go towards replacing what was stolen. My dreams for this lab are for the benefit of all our students and staff. I wish for cutting edge technology that will help our students get ready for the outside world, allow them to express their creativity, and furnish tools that instructors can use to enhance lessons. I am so sad that this happened. In the big picture it may not seem like much but in my little picture, my second home was broken into and things entrusted to my care to help others use were taken with no thought of how others might be affected.

If this stuff were to show up on my front porch in the middle of the night I would not look any further and I would know that the person or persons who took it realized that in the long run they were hurting every student at the school and felt bad about it. I know it isn’t realistic to hope for that but I will pray about it.

In the meantime I am slowly realizing that now I have lost many of my email addresses and documents I have saved that pertained to the lab and other aspects of my job. I also lost four years worth of stuff that I can’t begin to remember never mind replace. I will probably keep anything important on a laptop that goes with me from now on and I may ask Santa for an external hard drive that I could back up everything to and store somewhere safe. I also have learned that I should password protect anything and everything. I will clean out files on a more regular basis so I can remember what I have, and I will not let this make me not trust people.

Do We Guide Them Or Just Hope For The Best?

Students on the internet mean students will get off task sometimes. I live with two high school students. They belong to me. One of the hardest parenting responsibilities with teenagers deals with how much to let go and how much to hold on. Once your child gets that drivers license you realize how little control you have over their time and how it is spent. Once they walk out the door and get into that car – they drive off to 1. the place they told you they were going, 2. for the length of time they old you they would be there, and 3. for the purpose they told you they were going (and of course they go no where else). You also trust that all those driving lessons and talks about safety on the road will be taken to heart. I know my child would not get distracted tuning in the radio or finding the perfect song on his mp3 player while he was driving and I know he would not get frustrated with the slow driver in front of him and hotrod to get around them. Okay – you can stop laughing now. My point is you have to trust them because you have no other choice. They are moving away from you as a parent and making their own choices which hopefully will be ones they can live with in the long run. This prepares them for living their own lives. We as parents have already given them the skills they need (we hope) and now we just guide when they will let us and pray that we haven’t left out that one important thing that we should have taught but didn’t.

The same thing goes for our students and technology. If we don’t teach them – what choices will they make and who will then be responsible?

Vicki Davis puts in succinctly:

” Zero tolerance for mistakes is limiting our growth

I also think that the legal system in America will hold back our schools from giving such liberty to students. We will bleed on the cutting edge, however, we’ve create a zero tolerance for allowing mistakes to happen. Kids should be informed up front of expectations and consequences. Their behavior should be monitored vigilantly. When they do not meet expectations, they should experience consequences. Thus, we create net citizens who realize that their actions on the Internet have consequences.

The Trapeze Artist Metaphor

If our students don’t understand that there are consequences to their blog postings, it would be like a trapeze artist who trained with nets until he was 18. Every time he fell, he landed in the soft net. When he turned 19 and went to a circus, no one told him that there was no net. So, he was unafraid of the consequences of falling. And when he fell, it did permanent damage. He knew how to use the tools but did not understand consequences of making mistakes.

Conclusion

We need to teach effectively. We also need to create good New Net Citizens.”

We have the gift of an opportunity to reach far into the future as well as making the present much more pleasant. The concept of blogging doesn’t work if it doesn’t happen in the context of a community. If I was the only one who ever read this (and sometimes I think I am) then there wouldn’t be much of a point to it. I could keep a journal on my computer using any wordprocessor and add to it whenever I take a notion. To me the point of blogging is to network with others, to have an ongoing learning learning experience by reading, writing, commenting, and receiving feedback. It means that we become inspired by reading others thoughts and as we process what we read, we filter it through our own experience and viewpoint and write the results of that process. If we leave no room for mistakes then we leave no room for learning.

Timely Information

Vicki Davis has an article about Myspace on her blog – good stuff to know.

“Amazingly, THERE IS A WAY to remove things from Google cache. And with the National Association for College Admissions’s recent article on Myspace in College Admission, this will be a great thing for you to teach students to do after they clean up or delete their myspace accounts.”

Vicki has also been blogging the NECC 2006 conference and has tons of great information. I have enjoyed wandering through her notes and links. The same process during SXSW in Austin is what hooked me on blogging to begin with. I read everything I could find that was being blogged at that conference and discovered some of my favorite bloggers and web designers. At that time I was in the process of becoming a beginner at Cascading Style Sheets and while I am still definitely a beginner at least I know where to go for resources when I have time. Vicki is a great resource on blogging in education. Blogging is a great way to share conference notes with the folks back home who were unable to go. I hope that next year we will have some teachers blogging from TCEA!

Word Hanging Indent

Students working on term papers in the lab have to cite their sources. Often this requires using a hanging indent which seems to give everyone trouble. It isn’t hard to do but it also isn’t easy to find if you don’t know it’s there. The easiest way I have found is to go ahead and type your sources with no indent. Double space between each source. When you have them all typed, highlight the entire section and go to format/paragraph on the menu bar. A new menu will pop up.

Click the drop down arrow next to the word “special” and choose “hanging”. Your entire section should now be formatted with hanging indents for the first line of each section. See? Easy to do – not exactly intuitive to find.

Blogging is like Shopping

Reading blogs online seems a lot like shopping for clothes. Guys may not get this but ladies will. Sometimes you can shop and shop and see things that are sort of what you are looking for but not quite. You see things in other store windows and continue to roam around finding almost but not the perfect outfit. Then there are those times when you walk in and there are multiple items that would be perfect and they are “gasp” all on sale for half price! That’s the feeling I got this morning. I have been searching the internet for resources to put together the quintessential presentation on blogging in education. I want to wow everyone, generate enthusiasm, and have them walking out the door talking excitedly about the plans they have for blogging with their students, already making mental lists of uses that will take them far beyond the starting point I give them!

Presenting to groups is not my strong point. I am better at one-on-one instruction, so I plan to have very clear material and step-by-step instructions as well as some wonderful examples to show to try to make up for that.

This morning I read a post that really shows what the end product can be. Konrad Glogowski has a post about his eighth grade students blogging that shows how an instructor can use blogs to share what they are doing and how students can be blogging as a unique learning and research experience. Read the post to see why I am excited.

The teacher describes how his students are researching separate topics and learning from each other’s research and how it relates to their own. Other students reading and commenting on each other’s blogs created debates and caused each student to build on his own topic.

Instead of students simply responding to a teacher-directed topic they have moved on to become researchers and are motivating each other to continue the learning process. To me this is exactly what we want to see happen. This is my ultimate goal.

Technology Academy

A group of us spent the last three days discussing technology integration and planning the tech fair for fall. It was a fun time and I think some good ideas came out of it. We have begun a wiki of resources for online technology integrated lesson plans. I think this wiki will grow as we all learn and get a little more comfortable with the collaboration process. I will eventually put a link to it on my blog.
I’m very excited to be presenting on blogging this fall. I am fairly new to blogging myself and lately I have been realizing that more of the public is peeking in. It inspires me to try constantly to improve the content. If people read and comment there is almost an implied contract that you as the author promises to have articles worth reading. It also causes me to rethink blogging as a whole. Who is your intended audience? Do you write for yourself or to share with others? Up til now I have posted on whatever was most on my mind at the moment and so as I look back over my posts it looks as though I have two entirely different blogs mashed together. Matbe I need to have a separate place to put personal stuff. I will spend a little time looking around and some other folk’s blogs with this thought in mind and try to decide if I want to change the way I have been approaching this. If anyone has any thoughts on that please share.

Don’t Use Powerpoint As a Weapon!

I was reading some articles about PowerPoint today on Presentation Zen and stumbled on a few good things to remember. First was one I had heard before – the 10-20-30 rule. Ten slides, twenty minutes, thirty point font. Someone asked Guy Kawasaki at a presentation what to do if you have to use an hour for your presentation and he said not to worry – it would take forty minutes to get the projector to work with your Windows laptop. How true!

The second article had to do with design and the author described the rule of thirds. You divide your slide into vertical and horizontal thirds. Position text and images along these invisible lines for a more interesting design. Use the image to draw the eye to your text. He had some great examples.

I’d like to see our students better educated in the proper use of PowerPoint. When I see students attempting to put an entire term paper on a presentation I ask them to pretend they are driving down the highway reading billboards. Would they be able to read their slide do 50 miles an hour without causing a ten car pile-up? If not they probably have too much information.

Another problem some students have is getting past playing with the bells and whistles to gathering the actual research done and putting the information on their slides. I tell them to imagine they have been asked to bring a Birthday Cake to a party. You don’t frost and decorate a cake before you bake it so the same principle holds true with presentations. Make the cake and then using good design ideas – decorate it!

Linux???

I promised an update on using linux and while I haven’t had as much time to play as I would like I have to say that I have had no problems. While at the hospital with Dale this time I was not able to get internet access but the few times I could get to the Health Science Library I took my trusty jump drive and would quickly save entire webpages I wanted to read on to it and then back in the room I would transfer them to the laptop. I saved them to a folder on my desktop and could right click on a file, tell it to open it with Firefox and take my time reading. I kept an Open Office document open to make notes and a few times used Abiword the same way. I wrote my post on Blogging as Staff Development that way and saved it to my jump drive. When I got back to the Library to upload it I found I had a little problem with compatibility but I ended up opening it in wordpad, saving it as an RTF file and then just had to delete a little leftover formatting code before I could copy and paste it into my blog to upload. If I had stuck with Open Office I wouldn’t have had that many steps – it would have opened it Word no problem. I will remember in the future to either use Open Office or save the original in RTF – lesson learned. All in all I was pretty pleased. I spent a little time trying to learn Scribus which is a desktop publishing program much like Adobe PageMaker (which I have not used) and found that the tutorial I had saved to my laptop was for an earlier version so I need to go looking for more up-to-date tutorials. I played with GIMP a little too but time was limited and if you have ever been in the hospital you know that there are a lot of interruptions – don’t go there planning to rest – sheesh.

One thing about reading and writing offline, I found that I took more time and thought out what I wanted to say and edited myself several times before I felt my post was complete. I usually tend to write stream of conciousness style and then look back and make sure there are no glaring errors LOL. Sitting there propped up on my “chair/bed” (ugh – those things work but end up being uncomfortable both as a chair and a bed) while Dale napped, I found I enjoyed thinking, reading what I had written, thinking some more, making changes and just walking through the process instead of running as fast as my fingers will type.

I think both ways are fun and I want to remember to make that point when I teach others about blogging. The versatility of blogging lets you determine how involved you get according to the time you have or want to put into it.

I’d like to take a class in the basics of Linux just because I would like to understand how things work behind the scenes a little but for now I’m just doing the normal things the average person does on a computer – surf the web, compose and read email, write, and oh let’s not forget play little time wasting games! There is one called Anagramrama that my daughter is addicted to. It gives you a word and times you as you try to make as many words as you can out of it before the time runs out. It displays your words in blanks below with blanks shown for the possible words and when the time runs out displays all the words you could have made. I still fall back on mahjong and the old standby – solitaire which has a ton of variations on the linux version.

My daughter wanted to check it all out before we left for the hospital and she loves it. When I opened it up at the hospital for the first time I saw that she had created a picture and saved it. I found that changing your desktop wallpaper is easy and now I have a black background with neon looking letters that say “I love You Mom, Jessica”

On a side note, I am watching the news about all the fires in Arizona. Years ago when Dale worked on the pipeline we traveled through Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon and it breaks my heart watching these areas that are burning. It was some of the most beautiful country I have ever seen. I wanted to live there in a little cabin and just paint and sit on my porch and look at the scenery, maybe sell my paintings in a little studio in Sedona.

Blogging As Staff Development

We offer staff development classes that are aligned with 8th grade student technology skills and we approach technology staff development as though it were something we have completed after everyone has taken their assessments and demonstrated their proficiency.  The truth is that technology is changing so rapidly that there needs to be continual education for learners.  Arranging a staff development class entails arranging time, place, and trainer.  It is often frustrating to the learner because there is either too much information or not enough depending on the users level of knowledge and interest.

Learning often takes place in a more permanent and efficient way when it happens at the exact point that it is needed.   A lesson plan calls for a specific task and a teacher needs instructions on how to complete that task.  If the experience is successful then there will be repeat experiences and the initial knowledge will be a basis to build on.  If that teacher is supplied with a vehicle in which to communicate that experience that is not only easy to use but allows for relevant sharing of information then the knowledge base will grow and be enhanced by the input of others with similar experiences.

The vehicle of blogging gives anyone with access to a computer a voice and the system of allowing comments offers immediate feedback. This can take place in a protected environment limited to a community of our choice, or it can be open to the entire world which gives access to a much more diverse source of knowledge.  The convenience of being able to enter the dialog any time or place would promote integration of staff development.  Instead of having to take several hours or an entire day, staff development is embedded in our job experience and tailored to individual needs.  Users can link to specific information or print what they need.

Accountability and collaboration happen naturally as bloggers benefit from being a part of a community of lifelong learners that develops with the give and take of comments and shared expertise. Our mission statement is to create lifelong learners and blogging about our experiences with technology and it’s use in education is one way we can model that for our students.

Would like to hear more opinions about this.