1) I display the ad, and donate the revenue that it generates from the first year to an education charity of some sort. I’m sure Beth Kanter can recommend a few
2) I display the ad and donate the revenue that it generates from a specific period of time back to the audience. For example, maybe give away a few Flickr Pro accounts, or podcasting equipment or something along those lines. Basically, give it back to the people that are generating it.
3) I keep the darn thing off the blog.

What do you think? Cast your vote!

So this morning, when I checked my email, I got a message that I assumed had to be spam. The subject was “You ranked #8 in out top 100 language blogs list!” Yes, I too found it ironic that the subject line announcing that I was a top language blog had a typo in it. But that’s besides the point. Or is it?

Like I said, I assumed that it had to be spam. It wasn’t. I followed the link over to Lexiophiles.com, and checked out their Top 100 Language blogs page. Lo and behold, there I was:

At first I assumed that this was just a publicity stunt per se, and that they must have just done some keywords searches and put them in some random order. However, they do have a page explaining how they picked the sites, what their criteria was and how they judged them. Not only that, but they claim that they sifted it down from a larger list, and even have a link containing all the blogs that didn’t quite make the list. And beyond even THAT, they’ve created a poll where you can vote for your own favorites, so if they got it wrong, the community can help correct the problem (of course I threw in a vote for Teach42 while I was there).

So what does all this mean? Well, it certainly wasn’t all automated. This took some serious time by at least a few people. Looking through the site does reflect that time and effort was spent creating it. It’s NOT spam. And while they are sponsored by Bab.La, there’s just one small add on the page. Pretty subtle if they’re really behind it. Although, their image WAS attached to the email I received. Despite all this, there’s still just one thing that doesn’t quite add up…

How the heck did somebody review Teach42 and decide that it was the 8th best LANGUAGE blog on the internet??? I don’t even talk about language much, besides mentioning a few tools that could be used by ESL teachers! I’m completely boggled by this one. There are some great sites on there that I recognize that actually focus on language, and ESL learning and so on. Mine doesn’t. So to put Teach42 ahead of blogs like EFL Geek is just crazy! They deserve to be on the list. I can’t for the life of me figure out why I’m there.

I guess the lesson in this is once again that we always need to be looking at our sources and questioning them. Who’s the expert? What are their credentials? What are the ulterior motives if any? And after evaluating it all, does it feel right to you? The internet is a slippery place to hang out.

The funny thing is that I’ll probably get taken off the list for spouting off like this. And that would make me feel sad, melancholy, sorrowful, doleful, woebegone, and desolate. Think that amazing use of language will keep me on there?

Oh, and if you’re from Lexophiles and reading this right now, welcome! Love your site! And I’d love to hear what the real story is.

I’m a high school teacher. Like all high schools, we are dealing with a problem that sucks time, energy, and resources like a black hole: cellphones. We waged a similar battle a few years back with iPods, and although stakes seem much higher now, the fundamental argument is the same. The argument is:

1] cellphones are a distraction
2] cellphones present a potential liability in terms of cheating on tests
3] cellphones are a distraction
…
So I’m asking for some insight on how to sell this to an administration that is overwhelmed with a hundred more important things, and to a school board that feels that two $500 computers are twice as good as one $1,000 machine. What’s the answer?

I’m so fed up with these arguments. Paper clips are a distraction. Spiral notebooks are a distraction. And as we’ve seen recently, students certainly do NOT need a cell phone to cheat on an exam.

So off the top of my head, I decided to rattle off a few things that cell phones could be good for.

Such as…
1) Check the spelling/definition of a word
2) Research a topic
3) Look up reference images
4) Pull up maps (even with satellite imagery)
5) Document a science lab with built in digital camera/video
6) Fact check on the fly
7) Mail questions to the teacher that they might be embarrassed to ask
Classroom response system
9) Take quizzes
10) Record and/or listen to podcasts

And that’s off the top of my head, spur of the moment. Give me some time and I’m sure we can come up with a much more comprehensive list.

So let’s stop exerting so much energy trying to ‘bust’ students for carrying the same devices the rest of us carry. Rather, let’s start focusing on how we can use them to improve education in the classroom. You know, prepare them for the world and such…

For those of you that don’t know, TinyURL let’s you plugin in a really long URL and it’ll give you a teeny tiny shortcut to it. For example, if I wanted to tell my parents where to find photos of Aiden, I could tell him to go to http://flickr.com/photos/teach42/tags/aiden/ That’s a pretty long URL though. By using TinyURL, I can shorten that to http://tinyurl.com/2pbnyn It may not be pretty, but it’s MUCH easier to share with someone. And this can be particularly valuable when you’re trying to share a link to something like a Google Map of Wrigley Field:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&q
=wrigley+field,+chicago,+il&ie=UTF8&ll=41.94812,-87.65532&spn=0.002055,0
.005879&t=h&z=18&om=1

Trouble is, many schools block TinyURL. Some are worried about people not being able to see what’s behind that URL until they click on it. Others consider it a method to get around filters (although that one has always boggled me a bit). And let’s face it, TinyURL is just so bland… Wouldn’t it be nice of there was a sleeker, shinier, more Edu-friendly way to shorten your URLs?

Well, just in time for the holidays I’ve got a little present for you! The Teach42 Magic URL Shrinker! Wouldn’t you rather have Teach42.com/go as a shortened URL than TinyURL? I know I would!

Some of you may be thinking… “But Steve, isn’t Teach42.com/go a few characters more than TinyURL.com? Well yes, but TinyURL adds 6 more characters to give you a unique URL. Mine will only add on 1 or 2 characters. So for the first 3800 URLs people shrink, it will be as small or smaller than TinyURL. So I think we’re in good shape for a while!

Oh yeah, and the Teach42 Magic URL Shrinker comes in two different flavors. The first flavor is the traditional, quick method. Plug in a URL, it gives you the Teach42 shrunken version of it. The other version has a few safety features for people who are concerned about security. When someone clicks on the URL, it doesn’t take them directly to the destination. Instead, it takes to an intermediary page that gives people a warning and let’s them see what the destination URL is before they decide whether or not to click on it. Same short URL, but a little more edu-friendly for the security conscious among us. Both flavors are full of Teach42 karma though.

I didn’t write the code for this. Full credit for that goes to TopHat Stuff Go! It was very easy to install and not too difficult to tweak to my needs. If you’d prefer to have your own URL shortener, feel free to download the code and install it yourself! Otherwise, go ahead and take advantage of the Teach42 Magic URL Shrinker. It’s there at your disposal. Oh, and for those of you worried about how long it’s going to be available, I’ll make sure that it’s up and active as long as Teach42 is around. And trust me when I say i’m not going anywhere

I started this blog entry yesterday, and in between starting it and finishing it, turns out I wasn’t the only one who was noticing just how exceptional this blog is.  Turns out he was chosen as RedOrbit‘s site of the day!  So congrats to Ben, and if you aren’t familiar with his site yet, check it out.  Definitely worth a visit.

Technorati Tags: education, techsavvyed, technology, blog, science, dembo

The reason I bring it up right now is that I just posted this massive article (well, massive for me) about the potential for students to use Wikipedia to cheat and was debating with myself whether to post it here as well. Obviously I’ve decided not to.

Anyway, the point is, if you enjoy the stuff I write you should keep an eye on that blog as well. Scott Kinney, Hall Davidson and Betsy Whalen are also exercising their blogging skills over there, so it’s pretty active. Once I figure out exactly where that line between the DEN blog and here is drawn, I’ll be sure to let you know. And if you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them!

Nice. Very nice.
But I like your guestbook the most.
Unfortunately there’s too much spam in it.

I may not have the guestbook, but I like the idea of a spammer complaining about there being too much spam.

Hey, it made me smile as I deleted it. If you’re going to be a splogger, at least have some fun with it I guess. Or don’t do it at all. That’d be even better.

From my days as a tech director, we found ourselves sort of reinventing the wheel, trying to figure out what we needed and where we should be ordering it from. We spent a ton of time trying to find the right equipment and often started off going about things the wrong way. This list would have been a huge resource to us.

Check it out and add a few of your own suggestions if you notice anything missing.

Want to see an example of the garbage in Wikipedia – go to the entry for the Leonard Peltier
controversy.

I say garbage in, garbage out – and Wikipedia has a wicked propensity for garbage in.

I’m not exactly sure why it’s not an acceptable college source, so long as they cite it properly. I would think that it depends on the professor, the class and the purpose. It is certainly a good place to get broad information about a topic.

The example that Kate brings up is the Leonard Peltier controversy. I’ll trust Kate that it’s absolute garbage, but I’m not really sure why. I must confess that I was ignorant of the issue, somehow I had never heard of Leonard Peltier before. However, now I have a broad idea of who he is, what happened to him, why some people feel he’s guilty and why others feel he’s innocent. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert, but I am definitely much better informed about it than I was now. The description of the actual events sounded slightly skewed toward those who feel he must be guilty, but other than that the article maintains a neutral tone.

Interestingly, when I went to look for further information to compare this entry to, I had a great deal of difficulty finding information from an unbiased source. The vast majority of the sites I found were created by organizations who want to free Peltier, or by sites that support the FBI’s stance. I was unable to find a reasonable description of the events from a neutral standpoint without going to old AP articles.

The weakness of Wikipedia is that anybody can write an article and skew the information to serve their needs. The greatest strength of Wikipedia is that if someone sees a ‘slanted’ entry, they can go in and correct it. If it gets skewed too far the other way, someone else can come back in and correct that. Hopefully, a neutral balance will be achieved.

I’m not exactly sure why Kate thinks that the Peltier entry is garbage, but I hope that she either explains to me why or even better, goes in and corrects the entry herself. Both should take about the same amount of effort.

I’m not going to say that the Wikipedia is the greatest source of information in the world. However, I do believe that it’s considerably better than many web sites on the internet. In the coming years, the definition of an ‘expert’ is being completely rewritten. I hope that colleges are evolving to accommodate the changes in how information is created, modified and distributed.

The problem isn’t sites like Wikipedia, it’s how we teach students to use them. I would admonish any student who solely uses Wikipedia as their only source of information about a topic just as strongly as I would a student who only uses the encyclopedia as their only source. The source isn’t the problem, it’s the critical thinking skills that guide how we use it.

Anybody else in the EduPodoSphere planning on coming by? If so, let me know so we can try to meet up there!

Yahoo announced today that they’ve built an RSS aggregator in to Yahoo Mail. Since it’s only available to people in the Beta, I couldn’t try it out but it looks pretty darn sweet. Yes, you can read your RSS feeds in the same place you read your email. Yes, it’s a full fledged aggregator, so you can just click on a feed and read whatever new content is there. It looks incredibly easy to forward articles on (and obviously you can use your address book and groups to do so), and you can also drag and drop blog posts into your regular mail folders. I dig that feature big time.

I still feel like one of the biggest problems with blogs is that you still need to be mildly geeky to understand RSS and what you do with those cryptic pages of XML code in order to subscribe to a feed. I don’t personally use My Yahoo, but I do love the fact that they created a one-click method to subscribe to blogs and add them to a user’s My Yahoo page. I wouldn’t be surprised if they come up with something similar to subscribe to blogs in yahoo mail as well (hopefully using the same mechanism so people don’t have to change their buttons).

I wish the screenshots were a bit better. Anyone have access to the Beta and want to get some better shots?

As I’ve said before, I do work for Discovery now. Yes, Discovery as in the Discovery Channel. They have a division called Discovery Education that’s been around for about a year and makes all kinds of cool things for schools, including a huge number of educational DVD’s, laserdiscs and VHS tapes. Discovery also bought unitedstreaming, which if you haven’t heard about yet you really should check into. It’s a massive video library, all online, that can be streamed, downloaded, and many of them can even be edited for use in movies and digital stories. I’m not going to waste time telling you much about that product, but let’s just say that it’s cool enough that New York, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Iowa, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Rhode Island bought state wide licenses for their teachers (so if you’re in those states, you already own it).

Obviously Discovery Education has a vested interested in the educational community and they’ve really tried to take the initiative when it comes to helping teachers get digital media in their classrooms. However, this isn’t really a company that sits back on its laurels and pats itself on the back over a job well done. They like to stay on the cutting edge and tried to figure out what the next step would be.

Since Discovery already has their hands in the digital media pie, it just makes sense to keep moving forward along those lines. As more and more schools have a computer connected to the internet in every classroom, the barriers to teachers using digital media quickly and easily are eroding. From using multimedia to increase understanding and retention to digital storytelling, teachers are jumping at the chance to take advantage of this stuff. Clearly a big deal in the education world right now.

Enter, the Discovery Educator Network. The official description is “The Discovery Educator Network is a global community of educators who are excited by the power of digital media and want to collaborate and share resources with other teachers.” But what does it really mean? We want to provide support to teachers who are using digital media and hook them up with other educators who have a common interest. We want to provide a place for experts to work with each other to blaze a new trail forward. We also want to create a support forum for people who are just getting started. Teachers connecting with teachers. Novel idea, eh?

Anyway, there are two pieces to this. One is creating a network of expert teachers, ‘certified’ teachers who are leading the way when it comes to digital media in the educational environment. We want to recognize their efforts and provide them with opportunities to share their knowledge with other people. It’s not all about us, it’s about finding those heroes of the classroom and giving them a soapbox to hop up on and share their knowledge. That part is going on right now. People can head over to the web site and apply to join the network. Heck, if you use digital media in just about any way at all, I strongly suggest that you throw in an application. You’d be in pretty darn good company.

The second piece is the web site that we’re in the process of building right now. It’s being designed to facilitate conversation, support, and collaboration around the subject of digital media. Sort of a home away from home for 21st century teachers. There’s going to be a message board, a multimedia resource database, a blog engine, and potential for a heck of alot more. It’s just a beginning, a launching point of sorts. We haven’t even launched the new site, but we’re already planning for how we can improve it.

In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, that’s where I come in. The official title is “Online Community Manager” and it really encompasses just about all things online related to the Discovery Educator Network. Right now we have a small, but growing network of blogs. Every regional manager that’s hired gets a blog where they can keep people in their state posted about local events, contests, conferences and other tidbits that might interest them. Most of them have never blogged before so they’re busy getting the hang of it and finding their own voices. One thing that definitely comes through as you read through what they have though is that there’s a buzz, a sense of excitement, a clear feeling that something big is in the works. Obviously, another part of my job is going to be supporting our growing blogging community.

So where’s the catch? There really isn’t much of one. Pure and simple, we’ve got one of the best products out there for digital media, unitedstreaming. Bazillions of districts already have bought a subscription, but many of the teachers in those districts don’t even know it! So this will hopefully help prod a few people into trying something new, particularly if their district has already bought into it. If their district hasn’t, maybe this will provide a little impetus to help sell a few more licenses. Regardless though, we figure that if we’re doing something to genuinely help move the world of education forward, nothing but good things can come of it.

The other question I’ve been asked a million times is where the line is being drawn between Teach42 and the Discovery Educator Network. That’s a tough one and I’m still figuring that out. The current plan is to just keep on keeping on. Teach42 will continue on as it has, but I’ll also be blogging on behalf of Discovery Education at the national blog. We’ll see how it goes, but don’t worry about this site selling out. If I can’t be honest and straightforward here, I’d rather hang up the spurs and move on. That much I can promise you.

The thing is, I’m excited about it. I wouldn’t have taken the job if I thought I was going to be turned into a sales agent. Discovery Education is doing some really cool stuff and I’m having a blast just being a part of it. If I share it with you here, it’s because I think it’s something you folks will get a kick out of too. And trust me when I say, there’s plenty of that sort of stuff in the works!

Oh yeah, one other thing, we’re still looking for quite a few Field Managers. So if you do happen to be looking for a new line of work, check out the careers page for more information. Trust me, it’s a heck of a place to work!