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NYTimes Magazine: Remote Possibilities

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Remote Possibilities

No, today's phones are about having a cyborglike connection to every aspect of your network. It's like having an extra limb. Your phone collects your e-mail from work; it zaps tiny text messages to friends far or near. It captures exquisitely embarrassing pictures from drunken office parties. It feeds your cat. The mobile phone has become, in essence, a remote control for life. ''We call it 'the device formerly known as the cellphone,'''

Interesting article on the evolution of the cell phone. I'm finding my Nokia 3650 to be very useful. I can sync contacts and calendars from my laptop via Bluetooth. Also when in a pinch can use it as a modem to connect my laptop to the web. The image quality on the camera leaves a bit to be desired, but the ability to snap a picture and transfer it to the web, or send it by email is kind of fun.

Chicago: Hancock Building & The Water Tower

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The RSS feed from Chicago Uncommon is one of the sites I visit often with my aggregator, NetNewsWire. Dawn Mikulich, the author of Chicago Uncommon, uses MoveableType to manage her weblog, posting new images from time to time. Inspired by her site, we have been cataloging images from Lewis Elementary School using MoveableType and incorporating images from this photoblog on our main web site. This is accomplished using a MoveableType plugin called Otherblog. This plugin allows you to incorporate posts from other blogs running under the same installation of MoveableType. We use this to incorporate other information in our main page (PTA, Music, Newsletter...) coming from other Lewis weblogs.

Amazon's Book Search

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Wired News: The Great Library of Amazonia

An ingenious attempt to illuminate the dark region of books is under way at Amazon.com. Over the past spring and summer, the company created an unrivaled digital archive of more than 120,000 books. The goal is to quickly add most of Amazon's multimillion-title catalog. The entire collection, which went live Oct. 23, is searchable, and every page is viewable.

This month's Wired has an article about Amazon's book search database. Lot's of interesting possibilites, but I understand that cook book authors aren't too thrilled...

Google Halloween...

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Lewis Elementary School, we are in the process of creating new landscaping around the entrance to the school. Through the efforts of many of our parent community this project is reaching a critical step... Today the concrete will be poured for the new sidewalk. This necessitated ordering some temporary fencing from the school distict to protect the new concrete. I was tasked with determining how much fencing to ordering. Looking around the school, I could not find a tape measure, but was able to round up a meter stick. (Very similar to a "Yard Stick" except it is a meter in length... :-) ) Using the meter stick, I was able to determine we needed 47 meters of fencing to protect the work area. I needed to convert meters to feet. Here comes the Google connection... Went to Google... Typed in the following..

"How many feet in 47 meters"

Google responded.... "47 meters = 154.199475 feet"

Other interesting Google tools can be found at Google Labs...

Interesting Book

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Booknoise.net | The Flickering Mind The Flickering Mind The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved By Todd Oppenheimer

An interesting web site for an interesting looking book. For a flavor of what Oppenheimer thinks of some of the uses of technology in our classrooms, take a look at this excerpt...

I'm going to go pick up the book today. From reading the reviews and looking around the web site, I'm thinking I'm inclined to agree with him. The realy interesting uses of technology, where I believe it is relevant and useful is in the arts (photography, video, animation, writing...) but most of the folks I work with have latched on to computers as a glorified workbooks... And don't get me started on the insanity of PowerPoint...

What is Time Warner Thinking...

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After the Cubs won tonight, I checked Sports Illustrated's site for the results of the Woman's World Cup game between USA and Germany. I found the link just fine. What bothered me was that the ads displayed along with the story were all about bimbos in bathing suits. Take a look at the screen grab... What the heck are they thinking???

Thanks for the Warning...

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Today Sarah Lohnes points to the CTELL project site.

an on-going research effort to develop and study the use of multimedia cases of best practice instruction for pre-service education in early literacy.

I am familiar with the project and have worked with one of the principal investigators, Don Leu. I was surprised though when I visited the site and discovered the pages could only be viewed with a Microsoft browser. (click the screen shot to see what was displayed)

I can't really understand why a project such as this would limit itself to being viewed only by a certain browser, and also only on devices that Microsoft supports. This not only locks out folks who don't run Microsoft browsers (Lynix, Safari, Mozilla...) but also folks who use Palm handhelds and cell phones. More and more I view web content not on a computer but on other devices. My Nokia 3650 does a pretty good job of displaying web content. Can't understand why they would do that...

My Tiger Woods Moment...

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Always wanted to receive one of those big checks you see the winner at a golf tournament receive. Well this past week at the Lewis Open House, the local representative from Washington Mutual ( a savings and loan) presented the school with a donation of $1000. Finally got my Tiger Woods moment... Also have a principal page up on the Lewis site.. http://lewiselementary.org/principal.html I still need to work a bit on the template, but plan to just fix things as I go. For the most part it will be school information and district information. Stuff that doesn't really fit on the school home page.

MT as a CMS

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Lewis Elementary School Spent some time this weekend learning about MTOtherBlog, a Moveable Type plugin that allows for the placement of MT entries from one blog into another. I worked on the Lewis Elementary web site and now incorporate entries from the music teacher's site and a photoblog on the front page of the main Lewis web site.

Weblog Gathering and Weblogs at Lewis

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MT Gathering in New York Ben and Mena Trott will be in New York on Saturday for a gathering of Movable Type and TypePad users. Maybe Joe Luft can hop on the subway and then give us a report... Speaking of MT, I have set up the Lewis Elementary web site using Movable Type and also have moved the staff bulletin from a weekly email that was sent to staff, to a MT weblog. Now as important announcements, and district edicts, come in, they are added to the Staff Bulletin Weblog by myself or the school secretary. The staff is getting comfortable with checking the site several times a day. Several teachers have expressed interest in setting up classroom sites, so hope to have that in place by the beginning of next week.

More Al Delgado...

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Educational Weblogs Al Delgado has been very busy working with TypePad and creating some great sites for folks interested in web publishing/weblogging tools and their use in education. His Edblogger Praxis site has quickly become a great community blog with a wide variety of authors posting there. I have been using TypePad and can see why Al is excited about it. It has a great tool set that can allow a teacher to easily create a site to share information about his or her classroom. It's visual and graphical tools make it very easy to design a site in a matter of minutes. While I am using TypePad's sibling product, Movable Type for the Lewis Elementary site and for an internal Lewis Staff Bulletin site, if I were new to this,( or did not work in a school where the principal knew how to install and configure Movable Type :-) )Typepad would be what I would use. For a teacher wishing to quickly create a site, I can't think of a better tool.

I have also found Typepad to be a very good compliment to Movable Type in that I can use its online template and style tools to easily and very quickly create (and preview!) template files. These template files are usable within Movable Type. I was having trouble with the design of the Lewis Staff Bulletin site, and discovered that I could create a template (a set of files that are used by Movable Type and also Typepad that define the look and feel of the site) in TypePad and export it to Movable Type. This is going to save me a lot of time.