BLC05 : Better than baking soda?

I don’t know what the name of the software is yet, but it definitely sounds interesting. It’s an online tool, Free and Open Source, that provides you with your own URL, 100mb of storage, public and private aspects, blogging, polling, links, chat, discussion, WYSIWYG web page creation, and more. Oh yeah, and it’s ad free.

So, what exactly is it? I still don’t know! I have to tell you, if he’s really trying to hook us in, he’s doing a great job of it. Definitely piqued my interest.

Ok, the list of what it does isn’t done yet. It can do a formative assessment against all state standards throughout the year. I’d make some sort of snide remark along the lines of “all that and the kitchen sink” but the title of the session is Better Than Baking Soda, which seems to describe it pretty well. I would imagine that we’ll get to the actual tool sometime soon

Bah, I had to step out to use the restroom and missed him getting started on it. So I just stepped back into the room and everyone in the room is ooo’ing, aaaahhh’ing and whispering amongst each other. Definitely sounds like people are digging this so far. Looks like the site is MyEdesk Reference Desk.

Ok, a few quick links to samples. Bakerstrail.rwlo.org, pstudent.rwlo.org, polarissda.rwlo.org, mbaker.rwlo.org, germanexperience.rwlo.org What does RWLO stand for? Real World Learning Organizer? I still don’t have a great feel for what exactly it is, but like I said I missed out on a small but important chunk.

Here’s the blurb from the main page:

The PT3 Pathways Project is funded by the US Department of Education through its Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers with Technology program. This project adapts a proven set of P-12 training materials and Internet-based curricula for use in math, science, language arts, and educational technology in community college courses taken by pre-service teachers. This site will house an online library of technology-based learning objects to promote constructivist learning in the community colleges. Faculty from thirty community colleges are to participate in a face-to-face/online training and development program and will be supported by mentors in an online learning community to promote institutionalization.

Ok, now he’s saying that this e-desk is basically like iDisk on steroids. iDisk??? What the heck IS this thing??

This is pretty amusing. Right now he has Skyped in somebody in Utah who is also sharing the screen via Breeze. So he can see what we’re looking at and talk to the crowd. He’s taken over the presentation at this point and is doing the presenting. Every once in a while, he asks the actual human being in here and says, “Can you flip me to the next slide?” It’s cracking me up.

We just took an IQ test that was created using this tool. Sounds like Utips.org is a new version of e-desk. Or something like that. This seems interesting, but everything is really confusing which kind of undermines the effectiveness of the presentation.

We’re looking at the results of the IQ test. You really can pull up the data in every way possible. You can see how everyone did in general, in raw data or as a chart. You can drill down to individual questions and see how each individual student did on any given question. It’s a pretty decent interface, very intuitive. You can even align the questions to standards, so you can see how students did against certain standards throughout the test. I’m assuming that with multiple testing opportunities, you can track them over time as well.

You can create your own tests as individuals, or the school/district/state can do it as a group.

Let me reiterate, the software is Free and Open Source. The backend is SQL, so you if you already have your questions and standards, you can import your stuff in. I like the way they put it, “If you have a big enough geek, you can certainly do it”.

They did a nice job with Javascript, making the pages pretty quick and dynamic. He’s demo’ing how one goes about creating a test and it has some nice options, like the ability to make it “open book” meaning you can try an answer and if you get it wrong you can guess again until you get it right. He just built a test in about 3 minutes. They already had questions created that were aligned to standards. Basically, he said I want 5 questions addressing this standard, 5 questions for that standard, put in a few options and voila! You have a test.

I do want to point out that this is a very high tech way to do very traditional testing. In that sense, I feel a small sense of disappointment. I bet it will also make a killer worksheet. I’m not saying the tool isn’t cool, because it is. But I don’t think that it really pushes us forward. However, we do have tests, we do have quizzes, and this is the type of thing that teachers do on a regular basis. So this tool would definitely be valuable to teachers and schools. Considering how many sessions I saw this week that emphasized moving forward and changing the way we educate our children, this session stands out markedly as not following suit. This is an innovative tool to do something very traditional. Ideally, we want to make drastic changes to education. This is something you can use in your classroom tomorrow, and every day until we get there.

If you want your own copy, you can email cody@myedesk.org. It’s Free and Open Source, did I mention that? So you can host your own copy if you want. If you want to do it on their server, head to rwlo.org and sign up for a free account. They have tutorials there as well.

Beginning on September first, e-desk and utips are merging. That explains some of the confusion.

Unfortunately, I have to catch a plane now so I won’t be able to see the demo.

This is a very cool, practical tool that you teachers can take right back to the classroom and start using from day one. The presentation was a little confusing and I’m still a bit confused by it, but I definitely see a lot of potential here.

2 Comments

Kelly Dumont
7/21/2005

Steve,
I am intimately familiar with both My eDesk and UTIPS. I have trained about 500 teachers in using UTIPs in the past year. It is pretty much as you describe, but our schools are finding it valuable as a benchmarking tool. I hope it was Cody Spendlove they Skyped you into, because he is awsome. We don’t have as many teachers using My eDesk but statewide it has been a very popular tool as well.

Teaching Generation Z » Real World Learning Objects
12/22/2005

[...] could access it from anyplace that had a web connection and I got the original link from a Steve Dembo post. I hadn’t even really poked around the rest of the site m [...]

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