Random
I'll be attending NECC (National Education Computing Conference) in New Orleans later this month. I'll be doing a workshop and also contributing to a group weblog: necc.edweblogs.org. Am looking forward to seeing some of the folks I met last year in Seattle...
Technology Integration and the Beacon School Portal Another key part of our theory is that this system has grown organically, not as part of a pre-packaged software package, but created, whenever possible, using free software tools and written by myself and the students of Beacon. In fact, a student and I used a Linux-based programming language and database tool to write all portions of the "portal" software. Again, the philosophy behind the portal software must be in line with the pedagogy of our school. We don't want to merely use technology; we want our students to be creators of technological innovation, just as we don't want our students to just memorize facts but want them to have the skills to apply knowledge. The portal was created as a community effort, with that very pedagogy in mind.
This article from Technology and Learning by Chris Lehman highlights web use at The Beacon School in New York. I like the philosophy behind this... free and/or inexpensive tools that are selected for an education purpose. Not a solution that is imposed on a program, but solutions that come from the users as the need arises.
Nigritude Ultramarine: Nigritude Ultramarine
a contest to see who is the first Google result for the (previously unlinked) phrase Nigritude Ultramarine
I'm putting the final touches on my NECC concurrent session, Weblogs in Education: The Possibilities Are Limitless! I'll be presenting with Sandy Peters.
I work all next week. Then I'm taking off a week early for a "much-looked forward to" vacation prior to the conference. The conference is going to be fun. I hope lots of you are going. I plan to use some student video clips. I thought you might enjoy the blogging rap my Wrinkles' students created. I'll also be participating in a NECC 2004:Blogs@School workshop with Tim Lauer, Will Richardson, Steve Burt and Tom Hoffman. They'll be a whole of blogging going on! Yep, weblogs are off the chart![EduBlog Insights]
Anne Davis points to her concurrent session at NECC and also to the 3 hour workshop that she will be taking part in along with Steve Burt, Tom Hoffman, Will Richardson and myself. If you go to the NECC program site and search under the term weblogs, you'll find 6 sessions listed.
I think this article should earn Matt an imaginary invitation to present his work at a fake educational technology conference I'm pretending to begin planning. The working title is "Why doesn't all this "stuff" work? 2004." The imaginary theme is "Cheap, robust technologies to make the computers actually work in your school." Or something like that. Topics would hypothetically include Rendezvous, K12LTSP, LDAP, RSS, weblogs and wikis, wifi, when to use PHP, where you can use Python, how to buy gear on EBay, how to figure our what's wrong with and return that new computer that crashes intermittently but persistently but passes all the manufacturer's diagnostics, etc. I'll round up some imaginary sponsors at NECC.
Tom starts off by pointing to a review of USB pen drives and then proposes a conference for the ed-tech community geared toward making all this wonderful technology work. I'm hoping to help him round up sponsors at NECC in New Orleans later this month... Maybe some of the ISTE 40 or so...
PortlandTribune.com | Some enchanted evening
There are 18 residents at the prom this evening, out of a total of 58 who live full time at the Center for Medically Fragile Children. Part of the Providence Portland Child Center, it’s the only facility of its kind in the Pacific Northwest, having started several decades ago as an orphanage operated by the Sisters of Providence. The orphanage closed in the 1960s but the center still serves children from birth to age 21, some coming from as far away as Idaho and Montana.
The Portland Tribune has a very nice article about young people who live at the Providence Portland’s Center for Medically Fragile Children. These students are medically fragile with complex medical needs. Most are unable to communicate verbally, and all are physically disabled to a profound degree. Lewis Elementary has a classroom that serves several of the 58 students who live at the Providence Center. The teacher, nurse, and paraprofessionals who work in this classroom are exceptional people doing exceptional work.
UBCWiki: SmallPiecesLooselyJoined/AboutSmallPieces
Colloboration via the net does not necessarilty require monolithic, expensive tool suites that aim to do everything under one umbrella. We will share and demonstrate the use of readily available, mostly free, discrete sets of "small" and "loosely joined" technologies - weblogs, wikis, instant messaging, audio/video chat. The loose joining means that how they are connected are not necessarily in the programming of the software, but the ways people can use them in a social context that is an environment of dynamic, changing relationships and connections, rather than the rigid, limited ones defined by computer code...
Alan Levine, Brian Lamb and D'Arcy Norman will be presenting a very interesting session at the NMC 2004 - New Media Consortium 2004 Summer Conference. They are looking for participation by others who will not be at the session. I will be taking part in a video chat session during the session.
I like the idea of encouraging and experimenting with the use of free/low cost and readily available technologies such as weblogs, wiki's, and chat. I also like the philosophy behind this experimentation... Maybe they can add a tool such as Flickr to the mix. More later...
I got a new phone this week, a Treo 600. Testing...
TheFeature :: VoIP goes Mobile Here's how the MG-3 works: first, you have to sign up for VoIP service with a company that resells i2 Telecom's hardware and network access. You'll get the MG-3, a little plastic box stuffed with microchips, which you plug into your broadband connection and existing phone line. Then, when you want to make a long distance call with your mobile, you just call your home number. The MG-3 will recognize the mobile's number using Caller ID, and connect you to i2 Telecom's VoIP network. You get a second dial tone, and you can make your overseas call. Want to talk to somebody in China? You'll get charged 5 cents a minute. Cingular has been having a great time charging you $3.49 a minute for making the same call. (Wanna bet they're screaming at their lawyers right now to cook up a way to kill this in court?) [by way of: Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
The Feature has an interesting article about a company that has developed a system for the use of VoIP by your mobile phone. Am thinking if something like this could be used in schools. In Portland, very few classrooms have telephone access. I know that our IT folks are looking at VoIP as one method of providing this to our teachers. Adding mobile phones to mix is interesting.
If you are curious about your neighbors political donations, a new Web site follows the money in your hometown, address by address. Not everyone is pleased. [NY Times Technology]
This is pretty amazing... Type in your zip code and see who in your neighborhood contributed to which candidates, and how much... or type in a name and see if that person contributed how much to which candidate...
But if you take my fairly high-tech, well supported (technology-wise) school as an example, it just ain't going to happen here any time soon. Call it dancing with the girl you brought to the prom (or whatever that silly metaphor is,) but Linux on it's surface just seems too "out there" when you've got something that works pretty well already, the resources to change are slim, and no one has any time to learn something new. [weblogged News]
Will's latest post points to Tom Hoffman's discussion of his installation of the SUSE Linux distribution. Will wonders outloud about the viability of the use of Linux in school environments. I think the key point here is...
But if you take my fairly high-tech, well supported (technology-wise) school as an example, it just ain't going to happen here any time soon...when you've got something that works pretty well already, the resources to change are slim, and no one has any time to learn something new.
Tom, and our mutual friend Ben, are working with very limited resources. Machines that will barely run Windows 98, let alone XP or Longhorn. Linux is a very viable and proven solution. The Linux Terminal Server Project is built from the ground up for use in the K-12 environment. For an excellent example of the use of Linux in a high school, see Paul Nelson's work at Riverdale High School in Portland.
As for Will's list of terms and acronyms that seems to be confusing his technicians? I'll add to the list...
Blog
Feed
RSS
Radio
Manila
MoveableType
Blosoxm
Atom
Furling
and my favorite...
Moblogging
:-)
My new favorite fast food joint | A Whole Lotta NothingMatt Haughey, a recently arrived Oregonian, talks of Burgerville, a very unique Northwest fast food outlet. Not only is the food good and very unlike most fast food places, but their kids' meals include things lilke garden tools and seeds instead of the standard plastic toy junk.
The Dave Kingman Web SiteTonight my son and I were playing catch, or as some folks say... having catch. Anyway he wanted popups. So i start to throw him popups. As he catches them he asks which of the Chicago Cubs he caught it like. So as he made catches he'd ask... "Which one?" I'd say..."Andre Dawson"... "Billy Williams"... "Adolfo Phillips"... "Sammy Sosa"... "Jim Hickman"... and the game would continue. When he would drop one, or not quite get to it he's ask, "Which One?" and for some reason I said ...."Dave Kingman" Now Kingman did hit a lot of home runs, 442 to be exact... but for some reason I have visions of him in left field at Wrigley having trouble with some flyballs. Anyway, the game we play is now called... "Not Dave Kingman..." I'll make a point of showing Nando the Dave Kingman web site, and point out that he was a pretty darn good hitter...
But just a minute-- It is not like any of our beautifully running installations of MT 2.6 and earlier will suddenly blink out or self-destruct in 5 minutes, Mr. Phelps. This insane rush to upgrade or jump seems awfully.... hasty. Sure down the road, there are going to perhaps be compelling technical, feature reasons to upgrade or switch blog platforms, but there is nothing wrong with staying where you are at. MT 2.X still works, eh? It's not broken, eh? [cogdogblog]
Alan Levine sums up very well the whole MT 3.0 bloodletting.
NECC 2004:Blogs@School Next month I will have the opportunity to work with Will Richardson, Anne Davis, Tom Hoffman and Steve Burt at NECC helping conduct a 3 hour workshop on weblog use in education. Am looking forward to the conference and the workshop.
We've known these changes were coming down the pike for a while, but a little advance warning about the actual changeover would have been helpful.
We managed to get them to keep the old connection open for the time being, and after some confusion caused by the power cord falling out of a switch, we're still on line, but this is really just the first step in being assimilated into the borg.
I laughed when I read Tom's post tonight. Today our CTO (I think that means Chief Technology Officer...) came to visit Lewis. Was worried a bit about the visit. Was afraid he would notice all those iMacs we updated to OS X. Turns out he had some interesting ideas to share. One thing he wants to do is create a sandbox environment segmented off the main admin network, for teachers and students to work in. (Am thinking of things like Plone, student blogs, web based assessment databases and such...) I have always felt it necessary for schools to have a bit of freedom to explore uses of technology that go beyond just record keeping. From what he said today, it looks like he thinks the same. I refrained from sharing our web site. Will do that next time I meet with him...
Tom says it very well.
Microsoft is expected to recommend that the "average" Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.
via Airbag.
The second factor is Will Novell Adopt the Linux Terminal Server Project?
At Lewis, we have mostly iMacs. With a RAM upgrade, all of the iMacs can and will soon run the latest version of OS X. So as long as the Macs are running we will go the route or OS X. If I had come to a school with a majority of PC's we would of worked to move to LTSP. Of the 2 instructional PC's none have the specs to run XP, let alone Longhorn...
Well I think it went well. You just are not 100% sure doing an online presentation who is snoring at the other end. But we had some good discussion and some folks finally popped some images to a Conference PhotoBlog-- oops, I forgot the context... [by way of cogdogblog]
Alan Levine talks of his experiences doing an online photoblog workshop... He also points to Robert Burget's experiences using Buzznet in a community college class... see his experiences blogged as Testing the Waters and his shared Buzznet Gallery for his students' work, ART 177 Side Show
This week on the back of the Lewis Elementary newsletter we published a short update from each classroom teacher, and from our support teachers. These classroom notes are designed to give families a quick update of upcoming events, curriculum activities and topical information about our classrooms. The way we accomplished this is that we set up a community weblog using Moveable Type and had each teacher write a short piece about upcoming events for the coming week. We then edited the index page for the community blog and set it up so that each teacher's most recent post was listed on that page. Then we just copied and pasted the content into a Word template for publication. The interesting part of this is we did this because we wanted to easily collect the content in one place and as a result we now have a community weblog for our classrooms. Next we plan to create individual pages based on category tags in Moveable Type. This will allow each teacher to have a very simple web page with their weekly notes in the center and other content flowing into the sidebars.
PHP iCalendar is a php-based iCal file parser. Its based on v2.0 of the IETF spec. It displays iCal files in a nice logical, clean manner with day, week, month, and year navigation, printer view, RSS-enabled, and searchable. It supports 12 languages, is fully theme-able, and has complete timezone support.
We are using this on the Lewis Elementary site to share our school calendar. Our school secretary is using the calendar tool in Mozilla to keep track of school events. The iCal file that is created is published to the calendar directory on the server and the pages are created by PHP iCalendar. It also creates RSS files in daily, weekly and monthly format. Using the weekly RSS feed, we are also able to automatically post events for the current week on the main web page.