Teach42

I just wrote and deleted an entire entry about how frustrated I am with the red tape here at my school. I don’t want to get into it, but the feedback that i’m getting from my Head of School is basically, “Glad your so excited about it, let’s discuss it further. Sometime. Later. Eventually.” It’s rather depressing.

However, I don’t intend for this site to be about me whining. I want it to focus on the positives that are out there. Even the things that I can’t take advantage here (yet). There are so many opportunities for education with respect to technology.

So instead of going on and on and on about how frustrated I am, I’m going to ask you folks ‘out there’ for some advice. Are you using blogs in your school? If so, how did you get your administration to approve of their usage? Got any tips for someone who’s struggling with this? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

:confused:
Maybe I’ll create a sub page gathering up articles and posts around the web support the use of blogs in schools.

An article on SchoolBlogs.com referenced a great argument regarding why someone might want to use Weblogs in schools. The original article can be found on The FordLog, and is quite a lengthy post. Definitely worth the read. Some of the highlights for me though were:

Christina was in the process of researching her weblog-based project on the Rainforests when she received a message via her weblog’s built-in discussion board from someone who was trekking through forests in Costa Rica. He gave her a firsthand account to work with. Students in my class also posted advice and comments about the project. I could also guide her thoughts and direction using the discussion feature. The weblog software did not magically make the project perfect. It was still written by a ten-year old. It was a ten year-old though, who had genuinely collaborated with her peers as well as others across the globe.

How cool is that? It’s authentic. It’s REAL. It has value above and beyond a simple classroom assignment. What a fantastic incentive for continuing to share your research! It’s not just about publishing, it’s about collaborating, getting feedback, simply sharing your thoughts with the rest of the world.

Writing for a real audience not only encourages students to become habitual writers, but also to take seriously the responsibility of writing to the web. Involvement with weblogs helps students realize that they are adding to the rag-tag body of knowledge that makes up the Internet. Search engines index weblog content and even when a project produced as a weblog is finished, it is still accessed many hundreds of times each year by people looking for information using search engines. Every book review completed by a student on their personal weblog adds to the body of online knowledge of that work. Pupils are always amazed to see, via their referrers log, that their writing has been pointed to by a search engine as a potential answer to someone’s question.

Blogs provide students the opportunity to become the expert for other people ‘out there’. Their ideas have value. Their worth extends beyond a letter grade. Someone besides their teacher and parents may find their work valuable.

dults and children, whether we like it or not, are destined to have a presence on the Web in years to come. The sooner they are prepared for that eventuality, the better. Weblogging offers students a real context in which these crucial life-skills can be developed.

This hits on what Alan November has been preaching about for so long. This is the reality of what these children are growing up in. They won’t remember life before cell phones. They won’t remember vinyl, 8 tracks or life before MP3′s. Nor will they remember when the internet was a solitary experience. Social hardware and software are connecting people in ways that never existed before. Instant and text messaging are primary forms of communication. Blogs are becoming commonplace. This is the world we need to prepare them for.

The simple nature of weblogging means that it can immediately make an impact. Teachers start to think about how they can use weblog to complement their own subject expertise and start to explore ways of using the internet for themselves. Skills that are often hidden behind a closed classroom door become visible online for others to benefit from. It helps foster a climate of collaboration.

In the past, there was always a technological barrier barring people from taking ownership of the web. That’s no longer the case. Anyone, and I do mean anyone, can share the experiences of their classroom with the rest of the world with little to no effort. They can request feedback, provide insight into their own successes and failures, even collaborate with teachers they’ve never had any personal contact with. And the same goes for students. It only begs the question, why wouldn’t you want to share?

A not-so-silent publishing revolution is taking place in cyberspace that could positively impact our schools and classrooms in the near future. Weblogging is taking publishing to the web out of the exclusive control of the high priesthood of technical experts and powerful corporate entities and putting it into the hands of the masses. Individuals are being empowered with an online voice and afforded a potentially vast audience for their thoughts, opinions and information.

’nuff said.

Abject Learning did the first WikiCast that I know of. Basically it’s a podcast but with interactive visual aids. It’s really fantastic, and shows the potential for the evolution of presentations. Powerpoint was a great tool for presenters, but really when you get right down to it, it’s no more than overglorified overhead projector slides. Sound effects, video, and animations are neat, but it all comes right back to a presenter droning on and on with visual aids.

What I love about the WikiCast is that it begins to break down the barrier between presenter and presentee. While viewing the WikiCast, the presentee can be reading alongside the wiki and can even modify the presentation itself by editing the Wiki. If you show a powerpoint 30 times, it’ll still have the exact same content. While the audio can’t be changed right now, the content you read along with it can be modified by the viewer, altering (and hopefully enhancing) the experience for future audiences.

Certainly something to think about. What will really be great is when there’s a truly mobile version of this. Engadget.com is working on PhotoPodcasts, pictures to go along with their podcasts. I’m thinking more along the lines of a winksite, so you can listen to the MP3 and browse content on your mobile phone/pda while on the bus. There’s potential there.

Ok, maybe it’s just because I didn’t get enough attention as a child, but I feel really proud when I see that someone else out there is excited by something that I wrote. :Anne posted on Ed-Tech Insider about Why Weblogs Work. I’m still pretty new to blogging and this site hasn’t really been around for too long yet (exactly two weeks to be exact), so I still don’t generate very much traffic. I have noticed though that my traffic is becoming more and more diverse. It used to come exclusively from home and school, now I don’t recognize about 2/3 of the sites listed in my site meter.

Don’t worry Mom, I was just kidding about not getting enough attention as a child. But I wasn’t kidding about getting a thrill that someone ‘out there’ finds what I have to say interesting!

From Ed-Tech Insider

The bad news came today via email from our state Deptartment of Education. The 2005 Omnibus Appropriations Bill approved by the House and Senate over the weekend includes large cuts in educational technology funding. The biggest cut comes to the State Education Technology Block Grant (Title II Part D) which will be cut from $692 million last year to $500 million this year, a 28% decrease in funding. Those Title II funds provide resources for professional development and technology integration to nearly every school district in the country.

This really is a shame. I mean, a horrible shame. Our school is incredibly well off on the whole, but there are still tons of areas that we simply can’t afford to put technology funds in to. The money from Title IID has funded our Jewish Studies computer lab, assistive technology for students with learning disabilities, and looks like it will be funding our initial investment into curriculum mapping. Those funds also paid for the workshops we hosted here at the Day School two summers ago which helped train about 50 or so teachers from independent schools. Last year, through pooled Title IID funds about 20 of us from here in the greater Chicago area all attended the Building Learning Communities conference. I’m not kidding when I say that it was a conference that changed the way I think about education, particularly as technology relates to it.

As I said, our school is pretty well off. There are hundreds of schools that depend on this money to fund their technology programs. A 28% cut is a pretty hefty chunk of change

I’ve been delving deeper and deeper into del.icio.us lately and really liking what it offers. For one thing, I’m finding it easier to keep track of my bookmarks on multiple computers. Between different browsers on different machines, I have about 6 sets of bookmarks. I’m slowly but surely moving all of them over to del.icio.us because I can access them anywhere, organize them with tags and even subscribe to them via RSS! Why is that so cool? Let’s say you as a teacher want to create a list of bookmarks for the class. Students can subscribe to your list, and whenever you add a new one your students will automatically recieve it.

There were times when I got a little stumped while trying to figure out which tags to apply to a specific post. That’s where Nutr.itio.us comes in. It just adds a few extra options to the way that you add bookmarks to del.icio.us. It will list common tags that other people have used for the site you are bookmarking as well as show you a list of your own keywords. You can even drag and drop the keywords into the Tags field. Pretty simple, but a nice little improvement. Helps to take advantage of the collective knowledge of the masses!

Finally, there’s Foxylicious. This is an exention for Firefox that integrates your bookmarks from del.icio.us into Firefox’s bookmarks. It adds a del.icio.us folder to your bookmarks, and when you select it you see a list of all your keywords. Makes it really easy to find bookmarks in a pinch. Of course, if you have too many keywords, it makes things a little cluttered. It emphasize to me the importance of choosing good keywords. For example, having weblogs, blogs, and blog as tags is just a bit redundant. Gotta consolidate!

They all integrate together pretty well and I’m really getting into the whole social bookmarking thing. Want to check mine out? You can find it listed under teach42 of course!

I recently got myself a GMail account and have been toying around with it. So far, I’m sold. Yes, it’s just another email account, and no it won’t wash the dishes for you, but it does have some very nice time saving features.

My first day of test driving it, I had a lovely conversation with my wife through email. A total of 13 emails were sent back and forth between the two of us. It kept the entire conversation in one nice neat package in my inbox. With one click, I could follow the entire conversation back. Not only that, but since we both leave the ‘quote’ feature on, there’s a whole lot of wasted space being taken up by quoted text. It hides all of that by default. So all you see are what the person most recently wrote. Slick, eh? So even though I didn’t delete a single email from her that day, it still only appeared as one line in my inbox. And that one line included the emails that I sent to her as well.

What else do I like about it? The fact that you add labels to emails instead of putting them into folders. Yes, in most email programs you can put an email into more than one folder, but usually you create duplicates of them all. Gmail doesn’t create a duplicate of emails, it just adds labels to them. It’s very similar to del.icio.us. Once you get the hang of it, it’s a far superior way to keep things organized.

Finally, perhaps what I like best about it is the search capabilities. My wife Jess loves the search capabilities of Outlook. Jon loves the little search window for doing quick searches through a folder. I can’t stand either of them. Here’s my beef. I started a search through my deleted items folder about 20 minutes ago. I have about 10,000 items in there. It’s around halfway done now. It really takes forever. With Google, it seems to be able to do such searches in seconds. My issue with the quicksearch window in Outlook has to do with the way it searches. If I have it search the From: field for a name there, I expect it to pull out emails that begin with the name, contain the name, have the name in the email address or have the name as the label (for example <"Steve Dembo" steve@dembo.org>. Outlook doesn’t do that. I can’t remember which it actually pulls, but I know I’ve had to do multiple searches to find an email from a specific person who’s email address I actually know already. Drives me crazy. Google handles those kinds of searches in a superior manner.

Point being? I’m still playing with it, but I think Google really has a fantastic product here. Leaps and bounds better than Yahoo and Hotmail, and IMHO it’s eve better than full featured email clients like Outlook and Entourage. Go figure, eh?

I love walking the dog. Know why? I’ll tell you! Because I get to listen to a Podcast. It’s probably the best time to listen to one because most of them are the perfect length. Today I listed to the Nov. 14th broadcast from Dave Slusher. I’ve listed to a few of his previous podcasts and I keep listening even though I’m not sure why. I think I was pretty close to just filing him away and moving on when he really hit me with a major idea about podcasting and innovation.

Many people are quick to dismiss podcasting as a fad or at best a cute use of technology, but nothing serious. During an interview on the Gilmore Gang, they discuss the idea that podcasting might not have a future because there’s no business model for it. Currently, there’s no obvious way to turn a profit. Dave responds by saying that the beauty of Podcasting is that it doesn’t NEED a business model.
In order for a radio station to succeed, they need to study demographics, get advertisers, promote their shows and so on. Right from the start, they have huge overhead. Licensing, broadcasting, equipment, even the physical structure all cost money. If the station doesn’t turn a profit quick, it doesn’t last long.
If a podcast doesn’t succeed, someone is just out about an hour of their life. That’s it. People can experiment with style and format all they want. If they don’t like having a rock podcast, they can try talk. If that doesn’t go well, switch to Jazz. Don’t like that? Try something else. There’s unlimited possibilities.
As Dave points out, for every invention or innovation, there were a few hundred failures usually by the same person. Rome wasn’t built in a day. People initially thought the internet was doomed to fail because there was no way to make a profit on it. Podcasting is simple, it’s free, and it’s accessible to anyone with an ounce of intiative.
Therefore, I am going to create a Podcast. Over the weekend, most likely on Football Sunday, I am going to post my first podcast. Then I’m going to try to see just how I can work it into the school curriculum. I think the students will jump all over this. It would be great as a real neat way to ‘publish’ a school newspaper, to review books, to do digital story telling and more. Perhaps we’ll have to create a podcasting club after school or something. I just see so much potential there and so few barriers to trying it out.

Speaking of barriers, Dave really hit me with one other idea. He wanted to ask for the rights to his opening theme song from the Gentle Readers (the band who performs the song). He talked about how he wanted to ask them for the rights to play the rest of their songs, and the rights to do this and the rights to do that. Instead, he just asked for the rights to the opening theme. He mentioned that it was more important to get that first Yes before asking for more.

It really got me thinking about how I’ve been going about trying to get blogging approved at my school. I want the world. When someone says, that’s a great idea but blah blah blah, I immediately start trying to defend why blah blah blah is an important piece of blogging and can’t be left out. And my attitude is getting in the way I think. I really believe I need to mellow out a bit and get that first yes. I know that blogging would be perfect to add to the toolbox our teachers have available to them, I just need to get my foot in the door and give the administrators a chance to see our students in action. However, I won’t be able to give them that chance if I maintain an everything or nothing attitude.

So there are my two goals for the near future. I’m going to mellow out and just try to get my foot in the door with regards to blogging and I’m going to try my hand at podcasting. Now all I need is a catchy name for my podcast.

Alan posted about a new search site today, A9.com.

It’s been about a Google years since I got interested or even raised an eyebrow at a new search engine, but this one is worth a click. If I can scan the docs right, it is “powered by Amazon” (uses Amazon logins and likely for looking among books). Yup just clicked the A9 sign in link, and was prompted for my Amazon.com user name, the sanem familiar Amazon interface. Niiiiiice integration.

And A9 uses Guru.net for looking up reference queries, it uses Google for doing web and Image searches. Internet Movie Database provides movie results. Alexa comes into play somewhere- I think for the recommending or “Discover” feature. Accounts allow you to save searches or recall a search history, and I think add notes via a “diary”

I have to admit, I think he’s right. A9 really is something else. I usually use google for my searches anyway. Over the last few years I’ve really turned google searches into a science. So I love the fact that it does it’s web searches and image searches through google. The interface is easy, it’s really convenient, and it can be your default search in the upper right for Firefox. Not only that, but it saves a history of your searches, which is pretty cool. I highly reccomend you take a look at it.

While driving home and listening to :Will’s second :podcast, something he said struck a chord with me (besides the shoutout!). He was mentioning that the conference he was returning from, the Conference for Managers of Information Technology, recorded the conference in blog format. They used Blogspot.com, I’m assuming because it’s both free and easy.

It got me thinking though. I went to NECC this summer which had a conference blog. I also went to Building Learning Communities which also had a conference blog. In the past few weeks, I followed the conference blog for a conference that I was unable to attend, the NSBA’s Technology and Leading and Learning. These three conference blogs were all hosted by Edweblogs.org which is a project of Clarity Innovation, Inc. They’ve also hosted blogs for a few other conferences as well, which you can find on their site.

All of these weblogs have a few things in common. They are all great examples of collaboration, discussion and reflection. They are a rather useful resource to the attendees of the conferences, by providing notes, links, and handouts online. However, they all have one other thing in common as well.

They all ‘died’ realtively soon after the conference ended.

I think this is a tragedy. Perhaps that’s too strong a word, but it’s definitely a wasted opportunity. Thousands of people come together at a conference like NECC. They share ideas, collaborate, inspire and become inspired. The blogs are a wonderful way for people to record all of that. However, surely there must be a way to maintain some of those relationships and continue some of that collaboration.

Additionally, conferences generally repeat every year. Wouldn’t it be nice if the blog itself were ongoing? That as new dates are set, keynotes are chosen, and presenters register their sessions, couldn’t all that be up on the blog?

Imagine this: Attendees providing presenters with feedback BEFORE the actual session. How’s that for a radical idea? I know, I know, people put a lot of work into their presentations and can’t change it to accomodate everyone’s needs. However, let’s say as a presenter you post a few paragraphs about your session on a conference blog. People could then have the opportunity to make comments aobut what would be helpful to them, to ask what level you are targeting, whether your session only applies to Windows computers and so on. It would provide presenters the opportunity to do what Jenny, the Shifted Librarian did for the conference she’s at right now: assign her attendees homework.

As a conference attendee, one of the biggest complaints that I always hear is that so many sessions are hit or miss. It’s not that the content isn’t valuable, but often it’s not valuable to some of the individuals who happen to be in the audience. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to know more than 3 sentances about a session? To be able to ask the presenter if they’ll be covering information that will be pertinent to you? To be able to let them know that you’d love to get the handout before the conference so you can look up related research and try to get more out of the session?

This post has gotten a little out of control and gone the stream of consciousness route. There’s a few other ideas bouncing around in my head, but I think I’ll continue on with them later. For now I’ll leave you with this question: Should evaluation only occur after an event is over?