Teach42

I don’t follow Twitter all that closely anymore most days. I pop in when I have time, I ignore it when I don’t. However, it’s amazing just how much info passes through my TwitterStream on a daily basis.

Just how much info? Let’s see. Here’s what I have learned, solely through Twitter, in the past 12 hours.

• Barbara Ganely is having her students respond to ‘essays without words’.
• Steve Ruble uses his camerphone as a todo list by taking photos of things that he has run out of. The picture serves as a visual reminder of something he needs to buy.
• Lisa Parisi has created a wiki for introducing people to the wide world of Web 2.0.
• Kristin Hokanson shared a presentation on del.icio.us using Google’s presentation tool. A ton of fellow Twits attended it virtually.
• Julie Lindsay was looking for ideas of what the Classroom of the Future should look like. Claudia Ceraso resonded, as did TechnoLibrary.
• Chris Craft discovered a new blogging tool call Airpress.
• Jeff Utecht has been playing with some new blog themes for WordPress.
• Brian Smith is doing some Geocaching today despite the lack of perfect weather.
• David Jakes is at the Regional Office of Education working on Illinois’ state technology plan. Mark Wagner suggested putting it on a wiki and shared the link to the Palm Springs Tech Plan wiki that he worked on last week.
• Mstina will be doing a presentation for students on Facebook next month. They want to know the dangers.
• David Warlick is meeting with the Director of North Carolina’s Education Technology conference and introducing him to Twitter.
• John Pederson is checking out del.icio.us’s 2.0 preview release.
• Tonia Johnson has a second laptop go missing at her school and is trying to figure out how to deal with it.
• Bud the Teacher participated in a discussion about how they can use Skype in the classroom.
• Mr Belshaw shared a blog post detailing three ways for using Twitter with students.
• Carolyn Foote asked for people to share “One trait of a good staff development workshop”, and Stephanie Sandifer and Chris Lehman responded.
• Susan Sedro got Twitter unblocked at school.
• Digimom is frustrated after learning that a colleague of hers has never taken her laptop out of its case yet this year.
• Darren Draper learned that his school is moving from PowerSchool to Skyward and was wondering if anyone had any experience with it. Robin Ellis is moving TO PowerSchool right now. Carolyn Foote uses Skyward.
• Steve Hargadon lets people know that CUE is going 2.0 all the way. Social networking, Blogger’s Cafe, Edubloggercon and more.
• Chris Lehmann wants to know how people would respond to a parent that wants to put monitoring software on a student’s laptop. He gets a slew of responses.
• Amy Lundstrom is discussing “What do we think it means to prepare students for the 21st Century?”
• Mike Bryant has learned about GeoRSS feeds which will allow geotagged photos to appear in Google Earth dynamically.
• John Blake is trying to get a Nintendo Wii to use for teaching character education and is looking for examples of others using the Wii in school settings.
• I requested people contact me if they use blogs and wikis in their classroom so I could ask them about their school policies. I got about 6 responses.
• Sylvia Martinez shares a fundraiser that pays you for collecting old technology.
• Amy Bellinger’s 78 year old father created a Facebook account so he can keep up with the grandkids.
• Dale Basler wonders whether there’s any value to teaching students how to convert MPH to KMH, vs just letting them use Google to do it.
• My wife is nervous about starting her job on Monday and putting Aiden back in daycare.

These Tweets took place between 5:00AM and 5:00PM CST. This is a very short recap of them. In reality, there were around 460 tweets during that time, solely from educators. Some of them were rather inane, and others quite thought provoking.

12 hours.

This wasn’t a staff development day. It wasn’t a workshop. It wasn’t a conference or even a meeting. This was simply Thursday. A day in the life of an educator who happens to be connected to a virtual teachers lounge (credit to ArtGuy for the analogy). This is nothing more than daily conversation. And yet it’s also miraculous in so many ways.

Darren asked me what I learned from all this. Quite simply: There is nothing more important to teach educators about technology, than how to network.

Decisions, decisions…

Here’s a handy chart that might make the decision a little easier, whether to keep the hacked iPhone or to upgrade to version 1.1.1 Via GadgetLab

Conference season is coming up and I’m putting together a bazillion new presentations. However, there’s a couple of them that I could really use some examples for that I’m having trouble finding.

1) School policies that practice what we preach. While there are tons of examples of teachers who are using Web 2.0 and interactive technologies to improve student learning, there are alarmingly few schools that have updated their written policies accordingly. If your school policy addresses any of the following (besides simply outright banning), I’d love to see a copy: Blogging, Wikis, Podcasting, Social Networks (Facebook, MySpace and such), IM, YouTube, Flickr, and so on… How does your school address the use of these technologies?

2) I’m putting together a presentation for how Web2.0 can be used in an early childhood/early elementary setting. I’ve got a ton of ideas, but I’d love to share some concrete examples of people who are putting theory into practice. Are you or do you know of a PK-3rd grade teacher using Web2.0 in the classroom? If so, let me know who.

Feel free to contact me via email (sdembo at gmail dot com), Skype (teach42), Twitter (teach42), or smoke signals (send them towards Chicago).

Thanks!

Every elementary classroom needs an alphabet chart, right?

Found via apophenia:
So what did you do today online?

I hate SPAM. I hate SPAM’ers even more. But what I really hate is sites that dupe me into spamming everyone I know.

I got about 7 or 8 invites from people to check out a site called Quechup (no, I don’t intend to link to that @#$!%!#@ site). People that I knew, trusted and respected. I looked like another social networking site, so I signed up for it. I wasn’t that impressed, but many sites aren’t impressive until you immerse yourself in them (like twitter). So I tried to find a few friends to link up to. I couldn’t find too many people, so when I saw that it would check for friends based on my Gmail account, I jumped at it.

Oops.

You see, many social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) provide you a chance to put in your email account information, whereupon they will scan your address book and provide you with a list of people you know that have already signed up for the site. Then you can add them as friends. You’re also given the chance to email invitations out to people who aren’t currently site members. It works pretty darn well and on the whole I’ve used that feature quite often and loved it.

Then along came Quechup. I put in my username and password, just like the other sites. I saw a couple of names, added a few friends, and then quit the site. I didn’t think about it again until Friday, when I started getting a few emails. Quechup was sending invites TO me from other people I knew. And then people started emailing me and saying things like, “Thanks for telling me about the site! I’ll go give it a try.” And then the emails starting coming in by the hundred.

Essentially, Quechup raped my address book. It sent invitations to join to every single contact in my address book. I started getting emails from people I sold exercise equipment to on Craigslist three years ago asking who the heck I was and why I was recommending that site. I got emails from technical support websites letting me know that my email had been logged and would be responded to in a few days. I got emails from people that I barely knew thanking me for turning them on to a new site.

YIKES. It was out of control. I logged in and canceled my Quechup account, but I dare say the damage has already been done.

So I decided that I should probably email everyone I know and warn them NOT to sign up for that cursed site, lest they get into the same trouble I did. I logged into Gmail and clicked to view my entire contacts list. 1758 contacts. Phew. I selected them all, pasted them into an email and tried to send out an apology letter. Unfortunately I got an error saying that I could only send emails out to 500 people at a time. Fine, I copied them out into a word document and started breaking it up into several emails. I got about 1/3 of the way through my list of 1758 when Gmail kindly told me that I’d hit my cap. I can no longer send emails for 24 hours.

Huh? Have you ever heard of that one? It seems as though to prevent spam, GMail wouldn’t let me send out my emails to people, warning them against the dangers of the spam site! Ironic, doncha think? I guess I’ll try again tomorrow, or from some other email account.

The interesting side effect of this has been that it has put me in touch with dozens of people that I have lost contact with for one reason or another. People that I haven’t communicated with for years are coming out of the woodwork and we’re getting reacquainted! It’s actually been rather pleasant! Makes me think that I should go through my address book more often and reconnect with people.

So I guess it’s a little bittersweet, but it’s left a pleasant aftertaste to a very bitter experience. I can’t wait to email those people back…… once Gmail lets my account send emails again.