Teach42

Mashable reports that Adobe has officially announced their intention to create an online photo editing app…. and it’s going to be free. Obviously it won’t be as powerful as Photoshop or even Elements, but that’s still a pretty interesting announcement with implications for EdTech budgets everywhere. I already promote the usage of tools like Picnik for very basic editing needs, times when Photoshop is just overkill. But if an official app from Adobe were out there, and if it played well with the desktop version… well, you gotta imagine that might take over the top spot in the online editing world. Something to keep an eye out for…

I probably should have posted this one a few weeks ago, letting everyone know where I was going to be and when, but somehow it slipped my mind!

I was at METC yesterday for a quick presentation and dinner with a bunch of DEN folks. The presentation was on Blogging and Podcasting, and was only 1 hour long. Far too much yummy juicy information to cover in a mere 60 minutes, so I narrowed it down to what I felt were the most important subjects. For blogging I covered the ideas behind blogging and how to get connected and inspired, and for podcasting I covered subscribing, Audacity and then crammed GCast in right at the bell. It’s just so hard drawing the line where there’s so much you want to share!

Best part of the conference by far was seeing people I hadn’t seen for quite a long while now, like Dave Warlick, Wesley Fryer, Eric Langhorst, Meg Ormiston, Cindy Lane, and many others. I wish I had more time to hang out, but that was a quickie for me so I could get back home to the wife and baby.

Tomorrow is one of the highlights of the conference season for me though, IL-TCE Conference. I’ll be doing two sessions there: Top 10 FREE Web 2.0 Sites (which is probably going to be cut down to Top 5 due to time constraints!) and The New Permanent Record. Discovery Education is camping out in the Topaz room, so the rest of the time I’ll probably be hanging out there. If you’re going to be at IL-TCE, swing by the room and say hello!

After that, I’ll be heading up to Detroit for MACUL! I’ll be doing four presentations there: The New Permanent Record, Going Mobile: Cellphones Handhelds and Gameboys in the classroom, The Ten Best FREE Web 2.0 sites (which will also probably be knocked down to 5!) and then a session on the various Builder’s in unitedstreaming. I’ve never been to MACUL so I’m really looking forward to seeing what Michigan has to offer. I’ve been to a couple other conferences there before and they’ve all been fantastic experiences.

That’s about it for the near future. If you’re going to be at IL-TCE or MACUL, let me know so we can try to carve out some time to chat!

So I’m digging WordSource, as I mentioned in my last blog post. I’m thinking that an easy to use bookmarklet would be really handy for it and wishing somebody would create one for me.

Then I think to myself, well…. People create bookmarklets, right? It’s just code, right? How hard can it possibly be?

So I take a close look at two of my favorite bookmarklets, for del.icio.us and for WordPress. I paste the code into Notepad and examine what’s there. Then I actually use the one for WordPress and examine the result. While I don’t quite understand things like “navigator.userAgent.indexof” or things like “Q=document.selection?document.selection.createrange()”, I do clearly recognize where it takes the text I’ve highlighted and puts it in the URL. And I clearly see where it references my own blog and sticks in that URL.

SO, I start deleting some things that look like they’re extraneous and then I change references from my blog to “wordsource.sc”. I copy the whole thing, create a new bookmark from it and try it out. And guess what??????? I failed miserably.

Heh. Oops. Typo. It isn’t Wordsource.sc, it’s just Word.sc. I correct the typo and………….

Success! Time to do the happy Snoopy dance.

As I’ve said before, I don’t know javascript, I don’t know programming, but its amazing what a little confidence, logical thinking and perseverance [syn: doggedness, persistence, persistency, tenacity, tenaciousness, pertinacity] will do for you!

Oh yeah, if you’d like a copy of the bookmarklet, you’ll have to email me. For some reason I’m having trouble getting it to work correctly in WordPress. Gotta spend more time geeking out I guess

I just checked out WordSource and so far I’m digging it (meaning that I like it and that I voted for it on Digg). It’s a social dictionary, or as they put it, “The Online Dictionary is Reborn”. The byline is “Never leave your browsers address bar. Go to word.sc/[yourwordhere]” and that’s pretty much how it works. So if you want to lookup the definition of impetuous (and no, it is not Senator Matt Murphy), you just go to http://word.sc/impetuous and you’ll learn that it means,

characterized by undue haste and lack of thought or deliberation; “a hotheaded decision”

Pretty cool, eh? Well, not really. Handy, but not cool. Yet. You can also vote whether you like the word or not, which is cute. Want more to vote on? Well, you can tag whether the word makes you feel good, whether you have trouble spelling it, who thinks they embody that word, and even who faileda spelling test because of that word. Some of those are just interesting, but unremarkable. However, take all the words that people have marked that they have trouble spelling and you have a great new word wall for the classroom.

Additionally, and this is my favorite feature, you can add photos to the word! So for example, if you look up the word puppy, you’ll see that someone added a digital photo of their puppy. There aren’t very many images in there yet, but as people add more and more I think this could be a really nice little resource for students.

I know what you’re thinking, what’s to stop somebody from uploading pornographic images to definitions. Well, it seems as though all image uploads are reviewed by the staff before they go live. So even though it is built by the people for the people, there is some degree of supervision to make sure that images are clean and appropriate.

Are there ‘naughty words’? Well, yes. Just like in the dictionary. What’re ya gonna do? Unfortunately, I just don’t think there’s any way to stop students from giggling when they look up what the word scrotum means. Hey, better they look it up on a dictionary, than on Technorati. If you don’t know what I’m refering to, then read this article.

Regardless, I love the site. Now will somebody who’s more geeky than I am create an easy to use bookmarklet, so that when I highlight a word and click on the bookmarklet, it’ll take me to the definition on WordSource? Thanks!

Illinois is the new hot spot for DOPA-like legislation. As first reported by Michael Stephens, Senator Matt Murphy is seeking to ban all social networking websites from schools and libraries. What’s a social networking website? Well, why restrict yourself by defining it?

I learned today through Jenny’s blog that Senator Murphy has a blog of his own! A few nights ago, he had a ‘live chat’ of the strangest nature. I’m not trying to be critical here or anything, but if I were going to organize a live chat, I’d actually create a chat room. It isn’t hard, and I could point him to some free solutions for doing so. Regardless, his ‘chat’ was actually a series of comments left on a blog post. It was pretty confusing to wade through. Some people wrote elegant speeches imploring him to reconsider the bill, to which he would make a brief reply. Jenny did identify a true highlight of the conversation though:

…the 12th comment, in which Detective Bob Riordan, who is working with Murphy on this legislation, notes that Blogger is in the list of “top 10 social networking sites.”

What site is Murphy’s blog on? Blogger. So apparently, Murphy’s current bill would ban his own site – where he hosted the “live chat” to discuss banning social networking sites in libraries – from being accessed in libraries, even by adults.

Personally, I would love to add my two cents to the conversation, but apparently comments were only open for two hours on Thursday night. In fact, despite the fact that Blogger is in the top 10 social networking sites, Senator Murphy isn’t feeling too social at the moment. Comments have been turned off throughout the entire blog, and there is no direct way to contact him. Obviously he values your input, but only when he has time in his schedule to allow you to give it.

He does emphasize throughout the conversation that the bill is not a final draft and that he has two primary goals for it. “First, I want to raise awareness of the threat predators on these sites pose to our kids. Second, I want to advance a dialogue on how we can minimize this threat.”

While that sounds nice, if that’s truly the case then I respect him even less for just tossing out there a piece of legislation that has the potential to do tremendous harm to school’s ability to educate students about internet safety and appropriate usage. The only analogy that comes to mind is someone standing up in a theater and yelling “FIRE” in order to start a conversation about improving fire safety there.

As I pointed out before, there’s another internet bill in Illinois right now that’s up for discussion. I strongly suggest that people raise awareness of Dan Kotowski’s Internet Safety in Education Act. It’s very well thought out and much more deserving of our attention than that social networking garbage. Don’t bring attention to the bad, without mentioning the alternative!

Periodically I scan through my logs to see how many people have visited the site, what pages are getting hits, and how people arrive here. The search terms are always interesting, the list of terms that people use to arrive here really crack me up sometimes. However today I saw a search that was honestly just a little disturbing.

Somebody did a search for the words, “Describe the skills or attributes you believe are necessary to be an outstanding teacher.” For those of you that haven’t applied for a teaching job for a few years, that’s basically the standard essay question that just about every school application seems to have (at least here in Illinois). I blogged about how difficult it was for me to answer it a little over a year ago, and that blog post comes up as the 4th hit in the search.

I can only think of one reason somebody would do a search for that phrase, and that’s because they’re trying to find somebody who has posted their own answer to it online, probably so they can ‘borrow’ from their answer. That in itself is a little disturbing to me, but what’s even worse is that the top hit for the search is from Google Answers. It’s a few years old, but in 2003, somebody paid $2.00 to have people answer the question. The answer isn’t exactly stellar, so maybe $2.00 was the appropriate price for it, but even so I find it both fascinating and bothersome that this is what new teachers are resorting to.

I do understand the pressure involved with the job application process, but if a teacher can’t come up with their own answer to that question, then maybe they ought to rethink their choice of careers. It’s not that I’m saying it’s easy, heck my blog post was about how difficult it can be putting your gut feeling into words, but if a teacher gives up and resorts to Google searches and bribery that easily, then I would worry about their competency in the classroom.

I wonder if they’re going to have to start logging teacher’s responses to essay questions on job applications on TurnItIn.com soon….

I just got an email from someone who mentioned that she was surprised she didn’t know I was blogging over at Digital Passports as well, so I thought I’d take a minute to pimp my other blog.

Basically over at Digital Passports I’m exploring the wacky world of online apps, Web 2.0 and the like. If I think there’s a chance that an educator might get some use out of it, then it might get reviewed over there.

In the past couple of months, I’ve posted about Slideshare, Floola, Skrbl Pad, MyPictr, PicNik, YouSendIt, BubblePly, YourDraft, PBWiki, del.icio.us, Pim Pam Pum, and Yugma.

So if you dig the world of Web 2.0 and want to join me as I try to separate the good ones form the…. well, not so good ones, then tag along at Digital Passports as well as here.

If it’s good enough for Ewan, it’s good enough for me! Someone has come up with a way to back up your entire iTunes library online. I gotta admit, that sounds insane, but it isn’t a free service, so I guess they can find a way to make ends meet. I’m really curious to know how they do it though. I mean, it seems really inefficient to me to have 1,000 users all save a seperate copy of Stairway to Heaven. Would make much more sense to save one copy of it, and then note that each of those 1,000 users has that song. But whatever, that’s for smarter minds than me.

The basic gist of it is, the service is called Bandwagon, and while it’ll be a pay service, they’re offering a free 1 year account to any blogger that pimps their site. Pretty smart. Especially if we all get hooked on it and decide to renew. I have no idea what the pricing is, or whether it’s any good, but I’ll pimp just about anything for free schwag. What can I say? I like the freebies.

So here’s the official trackback to their post, and here’s the logo:

Bah, there’s two sites that I’m interested in checking out, but both are private right now and I don’t have a stoopid invitation.

The first is called Mindmeister , currently in alpha. Looks like an online version of Mindmanager Pro, which I was a huge fan of, but couldn’t really use because I needed an online version of it. Looks really promising though. Like inspiration, but for secondary students and adults (I’m not saying you can’t use Inspiration as an adult, but you know what I mean).

The second is called Nownow, and it looks like Amazon.com owns them. It sounds pretty similar to ChaCha, which I blogged about recently, but it’s designed to work off of a mobile platform. Text in your question, and up to three humans will research it and send you answers back. Personally, I’m really digging these man/machine mashups! Once again, private invitation only beta, so I can’t get in to check them out.

Bah. If anyone’s involved in either of those two, see if you can score me an invite!

I was first alerted to this through Will’s blog. Apparently, Michael Stephens noticed an article detailing an Illinois state senate bill that was submitted shortly before the deadline. The bill is called the Social Networking Web site Prohibition Act. Can you guess what it does?

Provides that each public library must prohibit access to social networking websites on all computers made available to the public in the library. Provides that each public school must prohibit access to social networking websites on all computers made available to students in the school. Provides for enforcement by the Attorney General or a citizen.

Well now, isn’t that lovely. A new DOPA, just for Illinois. I wonder if it’s just a coincidence that the bill was submitted by Senator Matt Murphy, a republican, just a few days after Barack Obama (also from Illinois) comes out with a social networking website to support his bid for the presidency. Regardless, the bill is moronic in nature. As a commenter on Michael’s post noticed,

Reading the legislation, I find it puzzling that “administrative unit,” “public library,” “school,” “school board,” and even “computer” are needed to be defined. However, the most nebulous term: “social networking” website, is left to interpretation by those charged with oversight and enforcement.

I know Will says that he thinks things may get worse before they get better, but I did notice something while exploring the Illinois General Assembly website that gives me a little bit of hope. Matt Murphy wasn’t the only one to submit an bill to protect children from the internet that day.

Senator Dan Kotowski also submitted an act, this one titled the Internet Safety Education Act. Sounds good already doesn’t it? It has the word Internet accompanied by ‘Safety’ and ‘Education’. Now, that doesn’t sound as flashy as Deleting Online Predators, or Social Networking Website Prohibition Act, but maybe something good can come of it. Let’s check out the summary.

Creates the Internet Safety Education Act to inform and protect students from inappropriate or illegal communications and solicitation and to require school districts to provide education about Internet threats and risks. Creates the Internet Safety Education Alliance under the authority of the Office of the Attorney General. Amends the State Finance Act to create the Internet Safety Education Fund. Amends the School Code to mandate the provision by every public school of instruction and discussion on effective methods by which students may recognize and report inappropriate, illegal, or threatening communications on the Internet on or before the start of the 2008-2009 school year.

You should really read through the entire bill. There’s quotable gems throughout it. For example, it states that “children have easy access to the Internet at home, school, and public places.” Acknowledging that kids access the internet in locations other than school and libraries is a pretty novel concept. Another favorite is ” Education is an effective method for preventing children from falling prey to online predators and other dangers.” So there’s actually something we can do about this besides just trying to keep our kids off the internet. Incredible!

He calls for the creation of an Alliance composed of teachers, principals, government officials, and representatives from law enforcement that will oversee the development of curriculum for schools. He also calls for a fund to be created to implement these changes.

I’m not going to say that this is a perfect solution to internet safety problems, but I will say that it is the most promising sounding government action, state or national, that I’ve heard yet. I’m not exactly sure how we can support the bill proposed by Dan Kotowski has file but I intend to find out. Or if you have any ideas, please leave them as comments.

Considering how much attention DOPA and other ignorant bills with negative implications have received, I hope that people pass this one along. I’ve read many edu-bloggers mention that maybe we should take a stand somewhere politically and try to make something positive happen. Well, even though this is only at the state level, this sounds like a model that we can all support as an example of positive legislation focusing on education over prohibition.

I rarely ask this of people who read this blog, but please take the time to share this with your own readers. I think it’s important that people find out about it.