Category Archives: Web

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.

Reading Blogs

Scott Mcleod of the Dangerously Irrelevant blog has been responding to a challenge by Miguel Guhlin to find “new voices” and has been showcasing educator bloggers for the last week. I have been reading and growing my feed list with each addition. Tonight I read the blogs of Dave Sherman and Pete Reilly. Mr. Sherman talks about “developing self directed learners” and ties it together with the kind of “what if?” questions that kids ask.

Mr. Reilly challenges each of us with this premise:

What would happen to our schools and our world if every teacher, administrator, and staff member lived and acted from his purpose each day? A purpose rooted in the deepest parts of his mind, body, and soul.

He also spoke of his own learning experience as he reacted to a post of Mr. Guhlin’s and in another post he listed the items he would include in the technology plan if he were leading a district. He also has a wiki for technology planning.

There are so many voices to listen to, to reflect on, react to, and include in our “circle of wisdom” The amazing thing is how many of these voices resonate with the same truths. These bloggers are not necessarily on the “A” list of bloggers. We are all so busy and tend to read the blogs that are easy to find or are written by faces we recognize, who have presented to large groups of educators and maybe have published books but as I try to achieve some kind of balance with the amount of reading I do I will definitely be including some of these writers. They challenge me, humble me, and make me thankful for a technology that allows me to hear their thoughts and learn from them. Thanks to Scott Mcleod for sharing.

One way we can find these voices is through the use of wikis. David Warlick uses a wiki page to embed blog posts from people who attend his presentations. Using the read/write tools that are available we can model the collaboration skills we need to be teaching our students be collaborating in becoming life-long learners ourselves and discover the bloggers and educators in each individual’s way is trying to find the best ways to prepare their students for the future.
Another wiki I visited this week is The Thousand and One Flat World Tales project. The premise is that an alien race has come to earth and angry that they are not finding humans doing any of the things they expect they send a message over the internet for countries to send their best storytellers and they then hold them hostage on their ship while they tell their stories and if the aliens find them interesting they will not destroy the human race. Different grades and schools from anywhere can participate and build this wiki by adding the stories of their own cultures.
I also learned of a new online tool. It converts videos like the ones you find on YouTube to AVI, MOV, Mp4 and several other formats that you can then save to your computer. It can be found at Vixy.net – this will be a useful site!

“Presently” – New Google App?

Internet rumors say Google is working on a new application – “Presently” their presentation component. I will be excited to see it in action. I use Google Docs (Writely) occasionally and I love Gmail and Google Notebook. I’m fairly new to Google Notebook and am in the process of learning more about it. I saw several presenters at TCEA who used it for their presentation pieces and I have seen some examples of public google notebooks. I watched as Wes Fryer reorganized prior to his session. I see it as a very useful tool that I have not paid enough attention to.

I also use my personalized google page for the blogs I read most often. My bloglines account suffers from serious bloat and I seem to do better with the visual approach of having the blogs I read most often laid out on the page showing the most recent posts. I tend to move the feeds around so the ones I find myself returning to most often end up at the top of the page. I also have them arranged with tagged pages with a page devoted to local friends, one for education, and so on. My home page has my email, calendar, local weather and TV guide – things of that sort. It also contains a widget for Google Notebook so I have a constant reminder of what I’m working on right now.

Google has an extension for Firefox which allows you to select something on a webpage, right-click and get an option to “note-it” which puts the clip or page directly on your Notebook. As you research on the internet you can save pictures and snips of information along with the url for citing your sources.
I hope there will be compatibility between Notebook and Presently – what a powerful tool that will be! A cross-browser, cross-operating system presentation tool that would allow you to pull images and text from your notebook to give you the pieces you need anytime as long as you have an internet connection.

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History and Present Day Connectivity

I’m sitting here watching “Flags of Our Fathers” . The movie is based on a true story about the famous photograph of the flag being raised on Iwo Jima and the stories about the men involved.

“Flags of Our Fathers follows James Bradley’s book, telling the story of what happened to the three men who were used – and it would be fair to say abused – in a publicity campaign in which all those intimately involved understood to be based on a misleading photograph. The film also shows how the men were treated like movie stars only to be discarded and ignored after they’d served their purpose.”

I am wondering if the way that history is recorded will be forever changed by the capability we now have to transmit information as it happens. All the secrets surrounding John Kennedy ‘s assassination for example, email and blog posts and pictures taken with camera phones would have been flying over the internet faster than you can spell cover-up.  Instead of the media controlling information, people everywhere have become the media.  History will always be skewed by the viewpoint of the teller but I find it somewhat comforting to know that in many situations there will be more than one “teller” and that gives us more of a chance of piecing together an accurate sense of events.

Unfortunately the same connectivity makes it possible that if the American flag were being raised on Iwo Jima today, there would be pieces of it for sale on Ebay tomorrow.  If information is so freely and easily accessible does it retain it’s value?

Dr. Mary Ann Bell at TCEA

If you have never met Dr. Bell you are missing a treat. Fiesty, fun, and way ahead of her time. She recently started her own blog and voiced concern about how schools are blocking many of the web 2.0 sites that she was planning to talk abou tin her TCEA presentation.

Dr. Bell’s presentation was called Fun, New and Free Ideas and Services Via the Internet. If you click on her name above it will take you to the portal to her site where you can access the links she shared as well as previous presentations.

She gives links to all kinds of useful sites as well as complete text professional online journals.

One link Dr. Bell showed was Starfall, a site for elementary phonics and reading . She recommended some blogs to read and I will list them but let you check out the rest on the handout on her site.

alibraryisalibrary

blogwithoutalibrary

One of the library blogs led me to a great Geography resource – Library of Congress Portals to the World.

Dr. Bell also mentioned Bernie Poole‘s site where you can find tons of resources and if you click on the link on the left side title online books you can download entire books he has written including several wonderful tutorials on using Microsoft Office.

Nancy Pearl was with her as usual. Nancy Pearl is the fabulous “shushing” librarian figurine that travels everywhere with Dr. Bell and gets her picture taken in the most interesting places. You can find her photos on Flickr.

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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!

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!

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!

Holiday Season Starts and Learning GIMP

I managed to do some Christmas shopping this weekend. The stores were crowded, too warm, and made me remember why I wish I would get an earlier start on my shopping. We went to the Christmas parade and watched the high school bands and Santa. My daughter played in one of the bands and we picked her and her friend up afterwards and took them to ring bells for the Salvation Army. Kinsey was at a debate meet and brought home two medals. I am proud of him and I am so glad that he had the opportunity to do something he enjoys and excels at and got recognition for it. Everyone needs that from time to time. The tree is up and I made a pot full of homemade soup. All in all a nice peaceful weekend. No great excitement but there is something to say for a chance to refuel every now and then.

I ran across some tutorials for GIMP which I have been trying hard to love. I have a lot of experience with PaintShop Pro and found it difficult to make the switch. I found some tutorials that walked you through the creation of a graphic step-by-step. I learn best by doing so those are my preferred kind of tutorial. I have a long way to go before I reach the level of proficiency I need for web graphics but at least I made some progress. The graphic wasn’t anything useful – just a cloth textured background and a circle that appears glassy and raised. Still it allowed me to get familiar with a few tools and it wasn’t totally ugly.

If I hadn’t had the time to refuel I wouldn’t have gotten focused enough to find the appropriate tutorial and complete it. Completing the tutorial gave me some confidence and a little excitement which will motivate me to learn more. GIMP seems to be a powerful piece of software but it lacks the community that has existed in the past for PaintShop Pro. There were groups and literally hundreds of tutorials and plenty of folks willing to share their expertise. There was something for every level from complete beginner to expert. I would like to see more of that sort of thing with GIMP. There is a community of Open Source users but they seem to be limited to people who are fairly comfortable with computers and who have that need to learn new software and the time to do it. I have seen a few books on using GIMP but walk in to any bookstore that carries computer books and you will usually find several choices for PaintShop Pro and PhotoShop and often several for different versions.

What makes one software package attract writers and usergroups while another that is just as good and often cheaper (in the case of GIMP free!) remains in the shadows by comparison? It took me a long time to get started and I know partly because I don’t like change. I wanted GIMP to act like PaintShop Pro and everytime I sat down to work with it I would end up frustrated. It wasn’t the software’s fault – it was my inability a adjust to the difference. What changed was that I found instructions that struck a familiar chord and provided a kind of “rosetta stone” that helped unlock my mental block.

In learning about GIMP I also learned something about my own learning style. Maybe when I understand GIMP a little better I can put that piece of information to good use and create some tutorials of my own.