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Going wireless

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By the end of next week all seven of our elementary schools will be completely wireless campuses. This project is part of our district one-to-one computing pilot project that I mentioned previously. Creating a wireless campus presents all sorts of... [The Savvy Technologist]

Tim Wilson discusses his district's effort to provide students and teachers with access to laptops on a one to one basis. Quite an ambitious initiative. It should be fun to watch.

This week at my school, Lewis Elementary, we are installing wireless access points that should basically produce a wireless cloud that will cover the entire building. This, in addition to the purchase of SmartBoards, laptops and dataprojectors for 7 of our 11 classrooms, installation of an X Serve, our upgrades of all our iMacs to OS X 10.3.5, and the redesign of our computer lab, should provide a good foundation for some interesting work with technology this year.

In a couple of weeks our teachers report back and we will have a few inservice sessions to help them get started with the technology.

The wireless cloud in the building will be great for me. I anticipate being able to spend a lot more time in classrooms, but at the same time be connected to the office. Our school secretary and I are already connected via iChat. Having access to district email, and all the tools I have come to rely on, while not having them tied to a desk, will allow for more observing and participation in classrooms.

Bill Martin Jr.

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Arts > Bill Martin Jr., 88, Reading Expert Who Drew on His Own Experience, Dies" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/14/arts/14martin.html">The New York Times > Arts > Bill Martin Jr., 88, Reading Expert Who Drew on His Own Experience, Dies Bill Martin Jr., who could not read more than a sentence at a time until he was in college but later earned a doctorate in early childhood education and led generations of young children to reading with simple stories like "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" and "Chicka, Chicka, Boom, Boom," died at his home in Commerce, Tex., on Aug. 11. He was 88.

Successful Uses of Wikis...

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Big IDEA » Is a specialized wiki the way to go? So this is my thought about wikis: maybe they need to be really specific to a small set of people to be successful. (Wikipedia, then, would be an exception.) This kind of jibes with some ideas I've been playing with a wiki cheat sheet for linux commands I can never remember, one as something of a learning journal but only for a single topic or theme in a class, one for group decision making. In short, what you might call a hit-and-run wiki, one that lives only for a short time to serve some specific purpose and then possibly dies. This wiki doesn't want to be big.

Todd Slater states what I think to be the best method for successful use of wikis. There has to be a reason to use one... I have been working with one of my 5th grade teachers who runs our after school publishing class. Last year we had students write their pieces in Word, save them in a directory on the server and then review them and make changes... This process was in a word unsuccessful.

After spending some time looking at things like MediaWiki and Instiki, we have decided to use a Wiki for students to post their stories. Our teacher, Mrs. Gould will create a Wiki page with sub pages for each of the monthly articles. Students will write and edit their stories and receive feedback via the Talk feature. Once the final drafts are published, they will also be printed as a traditional newsletter. Once published, this particular Wiki will stop being active and we will move on to the next month's issue.

Crow Show

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Crow ShowCrow Show, originally uploaded by timlauer. During the summer months, just before sunset, the crows that live in our neighborhood fly over our house to their evening roost... They make quite a racket... My son and daughter call it "The Crow Show."

John Merrow on Superintendent Searches

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Can D.C.'s Search Make the Grade? (washingtonpost.com) Typically, a new superintendent arrives in a city, hailed as the answer to every problem -- low test scores, poor attendance, embarrassing graduation rates. When change does not occur overnight, or perhaps at all, disappointment sets in. The superintendent departs for the next school district, and the cycle begins anew. [by way of...AssortedStuff]

In keeping with my superintendent theme... Tim Stahmer points to an article by PBS education reporter John Merrow about the methodology used by most urban school district when searching for a new superintendent. Tim points out a very interesting quote from the article...

School districts hire just one person, not a team, and when that individual arrives, he has to spend a lot of time and energy figuring out which of the colleagues he has inherited are trustworthy and competent, and which are not. Who resents regime change, and who welcomes it? It's a minefield that has destroyed many capable leaders.

Portland's New Superintendent Starts Today

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The city's longest to-do list W ith August still simmering along, today is Vicki Phillips' first day of school. The new superintendent of Portland Public Schools may soon feel like the kid who gets loaded down with five homework assignments, a pop quiz and a term paper before figuring out the bus schedule.

The editorial in our local paper, The Oregonian, points out some of the challenges that face our my school district and our new superintendent, Dr. Vicki L. Phillips.

Hypermedia to help you tell your story...

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Tom Hoffman points to an O'Reilly Network article by Jon Udell talking about the convergence of weblogs, which are mostly text, and the posting of various media types such as music, audio interviews, pictures and video. I've been thinking about how multipurpose devices are allowing people to share their experience with not only still images, but video and audio. The nature of tools such as Moveable Type make it very easy to upload these media items and then wrap them around some text with a bit of context and share them with others. In late July I visited Chicago with my oldest daughter and we went to Millennium Park. I used my Canon S50 to take some pictures and also some AVI video. This particular camera, like many today, will allow you to take short video clips. While the files are not broadcast quality, they are just fine for sharing a bit of the experience with those who might stumble on to your weblog. I did a quick import into iMovie and the result is the little 975k clip linked to the right. On this particular afternoon there was a tremendous thunderstorm. The still images I took captured some of this, but the ability to capture the motion and the audio gave our family back home a much better idea of how hard it was raining.

Having a device that will allow you to capture not only stills, but moving images and audio allows one to begin to think differently about how we share our experience with others. In the classroom this can be very interesting. While digital video with a DV camera is something that has been around for a few years, I have found that the whole process of plugging in cables and such to be a limiting factor. If I can give students digital cameras that also have video capabilities, then getting those files into the computer is just a USB cable away.

This year we plan to work with some of our older students on projects involving the creation of weblogs that capture the daily experience of what goes on at Lewis Elementary. We hope to include video, audio, still images and text to give people an idea of what school is like at Lewis.

Speaking of daily experience. A very interesting implementation of video and a weblog is Mike Sloan’s Daily Experience video blog…

Knee Surgery

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Knee Surgery_02Aug04Knee Surgery_02Aug04, originally uploaded by timlauer. Yesterday I had arthroscopic knee surgery on my left knee. Am now spending the next few days sitting on the couch with my knee up on a pillow. I came across a great article that pretty much describes what I had done and what I can expect in terms of recovery. The meniscus tear was hurting such that I had to stop running. Am hoping I can get back to doing that in a month or so.

Your Classroom Wiki

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One cool thing that you could easily do with a Instiki wiki is use it to run a wiki in your classroom, off the teacher's desktop or laptop (can you run Ruby on a Pocket PC? It'll work off your phone in a few years...). Anyhow, without bothering your school or district sys admin. Of course, you can do this with any open source wiki or weblog, but Instiki is an unusually simple and (so far) well behaved server.[by way of...Tuttle SVC]

Tom Hoffman points to this very interesting wiki and it was a snap to install. His idea of a teacher installing this on his or her classroom machine is something I plan to share with my teachers when they return to school next month.

Stanescu Family...

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PortlandTribune.com | Community mourns loss of family The girls were all students at Meriwether Lewis Elementary School, a short walk from their house in Southeast Portland's Woodstock neighborhood.

This links to a nice article on how the community is dealing with the loss of 5 members of the Stanescu family. Last night we held a meeting at the school for students, parents and staff to come together and begin to deal with the loss of the Stanescu family.

Stanescu Family...

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Lewis Elementary School: Letter to the Lewis Community Concerning The Stanescu Family I have hesitated to write about this but after talking with Tom Hoffman, I decided to go ahead and let people who might stumble on this weblog know about a tragedy that hit the Lewis School community this past weekend.

On Friday, July 16 five members of the Stanescu family were killed in an automobile accident in Northern California. Lewis parents, George and Daniela Stanescu along with 3 of their daughters, Jessica, Tabitha and Miriam were killed in the accident. 3 other Stanescu children were injured in the accident with Ema still in critical condition and on life support. Ema and her there sisters were all students at my school, Lewis Elementary. As you can imagine this a very sorrowful time for our community.

A fund has been set up to help support the surviving Stanescu children. Anyone wishing to donate may send checks to the Stanescu Family Fund, c/o Wells Fargo Bank, 12005 S.E. Division St., Portland, OR 97266.

Feed Splicing...

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FlickrBlog Splicing gives people the ability to offer a single RSS feed which contains a chronologically ordered arrangement of their photostream from Flickr and the feed from their existing blog (so you might end up with something like blog post, blog post, photo, photo, photo, blog post, photo, blog post, photo, photo, and so on).

This is pretty slick and easy to set up. I have a new "spliced" feed on the right side of this weblog noted with the Feedburner icon. This feed is a spliced feed with content from my MT weblog and my Flickr photostream. Basically it combines both feeds into one and puts it in chronological order...

Cyprien's best conference moment.../Flickr

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My best conference moment last year involved Hydra (now SubEthaEdit), bloggers, rendezvous and macs.
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Cyprien Lomas, who I met at the conference he references, talks about SubEthaEdit and Rendezvous. Cyprien also was at the recent BlogTalk in Vienna and has lots of great pictures up on his flickr site...

Speaking of Flickr... Flickr is a photo sharing/community tool that has all kinds of interesting features. For example it utilizes RSS all over the place, photos, comments, comment threads... all have RSS feeds in various flavors including Atom. Here is the RSS 2.0 feed for my public photostream.

The chat interface is nice and it allows for the posting of images in the conversation area and then discussion can take place around the image. Also it has a very slick hook into the XMLRPC blogging interface which allows you to make posts to your weblog and include images from right within the flickr chat area, or from any flickr gallery. It also allows for posting by email. Another nice feature is that you can tag images with terms. For example, upload an image of something, give it a tag, then it becomes associated with that group. Example, tag a public image "blue" and it becomes part of this group...

Another nice feature is the calendar view, which allows you to see a visual recored of images and when they were uploaded.

I am going to play with Flickr with some of our students and teachers. Am thinking we could use it for our publishing club photographers to share and discuss images for the student newspaper...