May 2007 Blog Posts (125)

A Spark Plug

Yesterday evening, I began facilitating a six-week online class for EDC called Learning & Teaching with the Read/Write Web. I was excited to begin the course, but I was also inspired by how much each participant contributed in terms of ideas and projects they planned or have implemented using various Web 2.0 tools.

In a way, it gave me renewed energy to continue doing what I do. I have questioned on occasion why I do so much professional…

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Added by John Rivera on May 8, 2007 at 9:31am — 2 Comments

Reading suggestions

I'm reading Wikinomics by Don Tapscott right now. It's about the new trend of mass collaboration and is really a great read. It's creating all kinds of ideastorms in my brain.

What other Web 2.0-related books have you all read lately that you'd recommend?

Added by Karen Fasimpaur on May 7, 2007 at 5:30pm — 4 Comments

Too much salt!

Ever been to a restaurant for a meal and realize that just a bit more salt would really add to the taste of the great meal you ordered. You have

the salt passed to you. You take some time to figure out exactly where

you will start with the salt and then you begin only to find that some

joker has loosened the cap so you end up with the whole shaker on your

plate!

How do you feel? What do you do? How do you react?

Well, that is how…

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Added by Kelly Christopherson on May 7, 2007 at 10:42am — 2 Comments

Mac Users and Web 2.0

Investment analysts at ThinkEquity Partners LLC are . . . citing recent studies that show Mac users are twice as active in the Web 2.0 ecosystem and purchase better technology than their PC counterparts

for the full article

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/05/04/mac_users_web_2_0_affinity_seen_driving_apple_share_gains.html

Added by Youssef Elias on May 6, 2007 at 9:53pm — No Comments

Better to be boring than silent!

I had my first "Intro to Web 2.0" class last Thursday and I think it was a success. I created a ning social network for the class and we are going to use that to blog and have discussions. We do not use moodle in my district, so that was not an option. I felt like using ning for the class would prepare my students well for joining this group which they will do in the next few weeks. First classes are always crazy, and this one was no exception, but everyone (there are 16 people in the group)… Continue

Added by Elizabeth Davis on May 6, 2007 at 7:28pm — No Comments

Our Children's Monsters

I can't take too much time to think about this or I could get caught in all of the messy mistakes we experience as parents.

In my earlier post I referred to a book I bought in 2003 called "The Monster Under The Bed". It's purchase was influenced after reading from a recommended book list from a cohort group of individuals who struggles with resistance to mediocrity in the continuous work of building and sustaining learning communities (aka. EdTech programs). I continue to learn from… Continue

Added by Karla Murray on May 6, 2007 at 12:06pm — No Comments

Exciting upcoming podcasts!

Doug Johnson will join me next Thursday of Friday. He has been the Director of Media and Technology for the Mankato Public Schools since 1991 and has served as an adjunct faculty member of Minnesota State University, Mankato since 1990. His teaching experience has included work in grades K-12 in schools both here and in Saudi Arabia. He is the author of four books: The Indispensable Librarian, The Indispensable Teacher's Guide to Computer Skills, Teaching Right from Wrong in the Digital Age and… Continue

Added by Kevin on May 6, 2007 at 11:29am — 4 Comments

Students working on Typo3

Two students of my institution are working on Tpyo3 with their classmates. They are teaching as eTutors within my ICT-courses. The results of all participants are pretty good!

Added by Hans Feldmeier on May 6, 2007 at 2:11am — 2 Comments

WWWEDU Post

The following was originally posted to the wwwedu@yahoogroups.com list in response to observations of girls being harrassed online. I see a much more pervasive problem and posted accordingly:…

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Added by Jeff Cooper on May 4, 2007 at 6:22pm — No Comments

Are we finally over "STUDENT + LAPTOP = SUCCESS"?

UPDATE: Steve has some thoughts about this piece HERE

Interesting piece about several public schools who have decided to discontinue their programs that give/rent laptops to students. Title: "Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops" by Winnie Hu.

“After seven years, there was literally no… Continue

Added by McClain Watson on May 4, 2007 at 11:55am — 3 Comments

Throw out the baby with the bath water!!

YouTube is an incredible phenomenon! Would you agree? Hate it or love it, you can not deny it's impact on our students perspectives about the world they live in.

School districts across the country are banning access to the YouTube site because of the amount of garbage that's posted. Overall, this garbage is such a small percentage of the videos that are available. However it's the garbage that get the press coverage . . . . . I'll stoop there- I'm entering rant mode.

What we… Continue

Added by Youssef Elias on May 4, 2007 at 10:36am — No Comments

Grand Ideas!

As you, no doubt, already know, I saw a presentation on Wednesday

from Tim Magner, ed tech guy from the U.S. Department of Education.

I’ve already written a good bit about that presentation and the even

better showcase from classrooms across North Carolina. I’ve even

commented on some comments that I received, including one expressing

disappointment that Tim was not offering some “grand idea” for bringing classrooms and school into the current… Continue

Added by David Warlick on May 4, 2007 at 9:05am — 2 Comments

TLt IT Summit07

This morning we have the pleasure of listening to Dr. Elizabeth Murphy from Memorial University of Newfoundland where she is an Associate Professor of Education-Technology. Her presentation began

with a review of the changes that are taking place in the digital

world. The background was a look at “then” and “now”.

She then moved onto discuss her study of e-learning in Newfoundland using activity theory to guide her study. She interviewed 18 teachers who had various…

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Added by Kelly Christopherson on May 3, 2007 at 10:47pm — 1 Comment

The Real Digital Divide

I was thinking about the "Digital Divide" in terms of working with teachers and professional development. It seems to me that the divides exists between teachers and students. Our students are just fine with the technology around them. They walk right up to an interactive white board and starting working. They all have iPods, YouTube and MySpace accounts. Blogging is not a new concept to them, they do it every night, at home, on MySpace.

If teachers can just "let go" (of their old… Continue

Added by Youssef Elias on May 3, 2007 at 10:00pm — No Comments

Situational Awareness

My husband is a retired Air Force Master Sergeant, and even though we’re a few years out from living that wild, wonderful, crazy existence of being in the military, we have children in the military now and still try to follow what is going on in that world.

One thing that never changes is the use of Jargon. No one does it better than the United States Military. A recent quote in the newspaper, from a Major (whom we know personally) talking about a bombing error by a pilot that resulted… Continue

Added by Linda Loder on May 3, 2007 at 8:14pm — 4 Comments

I like it

Stumbled on this while googling C. Nelson (I can never remember the name of your school and I wanted to link you!).

I'm here to play and learn and explore. All of the people I admire for their skills are here, so it must be a good place to be!

Added by valbyrd on May 3, 2007 at 6:44pm — 2 Comments

Moodle is great

Lately I have installed Moodle which is a kind of e-learning platform where teachers cant setup entire course content and have the students to enroll in their class, check it out at moodle.org. I have installed it on my web server at school running on Apache with the xampp package (really cool package for everybody like me who comes from a Microsoft platform background). The installation went very smooth, I had to go and change some settings in my php.ini file but other than that it was a…

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Added by Maxime Viens on May 3, 2007 at 2:50pm — 2 Comments

Information Integration

I’m in a session with Donna Desroche from North Battleford. She was a library technologist and, just recently became a technology coordinator. She was having a great time doing this presentation!

Institutional Context - Comprehensive Community School that is very

diverse with an alternate option and AP courses. The school was using

Linux/redhat - made the change in 2000. This created…

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Added by Kelly Christopherson on May 3, 2007 at 10:54am — 1 Comment

Writing Project Practices Using TrailFire And Google Documents

The weather in New York City has been a bit off this year. Snow in

April followed by heavy thunder and lightning two weeks later have had

an effect on the telephone lines that run through the backyards of my

brownstone neighborhood in central Brooklyn. It was during last night's

storm that i attempted to try outTrailFire but lost my Internet connection so many times that I just gave up.

The next morning in school I thought to test what I wanted to do on… Continue

Added by Ken Stein on May 3, 2007 at 6:34am — 4 Comments

Content vs. Context

Hi everbody. I think that this post may give a good discussion since society and education is under a turnover, as new technologies such as social software appear to be the most important cause of this changing paradigm. As Steve Hargadon wrote on his blog, school and most of all educational forms as we know them are based on reading and receiving content from the teacher. Unfortunately, "The Age of…

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Added by Nelson on May 2, 2007 at 6:21pm — No Comments