Mission Hill School: Going for Depth Instead of Prep...

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Going for Depth Instead of Prep Joe Luft points to this NY Times article about Deborah Meier and her work in Boston at Mission Hill School.

This is what Ms. Meier, 72, is fighting, "top down standardization," bred by state testing programs that she sees as pushing public education toward mediocrity. She is offended that many politicians leading the standardized testing charge, including President Bush and his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, (graduates of Phillips Academy in nearby Andover, Mass.), are products of private schools that are exempt from state testing. "It's like they're saying a safe, mediocre education is good enough for public schools. After 35 years, I'm not willing to settle for that. We can make city schools as good as good private schools."

Blogshop: Weblog Workshop

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MLX Item #843 Alan Levine of Maricopa Learning Exchange has developed an

online workshop on "blogging" (hence "blogshop") was designed to introduce faculty to the world of weblogs and to provide them basic steps for creating their own blog using MovableType.

Follow the link to the blogshop. The entries are a great outline for anyone interested in doing a workshop on Movable Type. In this entry:An Idea:Blogfolios, he discusses using weblogs as a porfolio tool.

One of the primary reasons is the blog platform is one that is generally geared toward personal reflection AND is chronologically organized, so one could develop it over time and benchmark growth. Blogs as we have seen, can include any sort of electronic file as an artifact. And the comment features allow feedback from the outside world.

[ by way of...Anne Davis: EduBlog Insights]

Mozile: in-browser editor

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mozdev.org - mozile: index

Mozilla Inline Editor is an in-browser, context-sensitive, XHTML editor that allows a user to edit all or just specific editable sections of any XHTML page from the comfort of his own browser. It can act as the client-side of a content-editing system or as a self-contained "web word processor".

Tom Hoffman pointed to this the other day. For those of you who use Internet Explorer on the PC, this is not a big deal, but for anyone who uses another browser on the PC, or uses a Mac to publish their weblog, Mozile is a great add-on for those looking for a simple html editor.

It is a JavaScript, so it needs to be saved on your server and then called by your page. I'm not sure how to edit the "new entry" templates in Moveable Type so I could take advantage of it. Any ideas?

Visit to Joe Luft's Classroom

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Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit with Joe Luft and the students and staff of Brooklyn International High School. Will Richardson also was there and we got to spend most of the day in Joe's classroom. As Joe has mentioned, it was interesting to share common issues and also unique situations.

Am heading back to Portland this afternoon. The visits to Providence and Brooklyn have been a great opportunity to think about schools as I begin to move back to a building after a few years in a central support role and also as I finish up this year on leave.

I really appreciate the opportunity to be able to visit with folks like Tom Hoffman, Joe Luft and Will Richardson,and am looking forward to seeing Will at NECC and meeting up with other educators utilizing technology in their classrooms.

Visit to Providence Schools...

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Today I had the opportunity to visit with Tom Hoffman and some of the faculty he works with at Fortes Elementary and Feinstein High School in Providence, RI. It has been a busy day, full of visits to classrooms and discussions about technology use with assessment.

Fortes has a facinating museum program and a very interesting history. Mrs. Weinberg demonstarted STEP, an assessment visualization tool being piloted from Inquirium.

Feinstein has a program that is grounded in performance based assessment. KC Perry and Tom Hoffman demonstrated their homegrown system for tracking student progress.

The system is built on Python and Zope and is web accessable.

More to write later, but it has been a very interesting day. Tomorrow I leave for New York to hook up with Will Richardson and to visit Joe Luft and the Brooklyn International School.

Private Directories with Movable Type

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This past week was a good example of why I like weblogs. Will Richardson started a discussion about student publishing that was picked up by serveral other folks. With comments and trackback the conversation took off. Greg Ritter over at Ten Reason's Why has listed a nice chronology of the discussion. This morning Matt Jadud wrote to me to suggest...

The fastest way to hide your content on the webserver (password protect it, etc.) will be to do it via an .htaccess file... (assuming you're running Apache)

I have been able to have MT save the alternate index file in the seperate directory, now will look into what Matt has suggested. Over the weekend I'll work to set up a demo...

Bloggers at NECC

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This past year, I have been on leave from Portland Public Schools, and have had the opportunity to work in Intel's education web group. The folks in the group are interested in learning more about the use of weblogs in education and have offered to sponsor an informal birds of a feather type meeting at NECC (National Education Computing Conference) in Seattle. I'm hoping to get an idea of the number of folks that are going to NECC and would also be interested in getting together on Monday evening (June 30, 2003) for an informal gathering of webloggers.

If you plan on attending NECC and would like to hook up with others, please let me know via a comment, trackback or email. Once I get a better idea of those interested, I'll finalize the location and then post more information.

A Web Server on your phone...

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Erik and Mark Baard: May 2003 Archives The personal server runs as a Web server on Intel's 400MHz XScale processor, and connects to PCs and wireless "information beacons" via Bluetooth and wi-fi. The device also takes advantage of the motes radio technology developed at UC Berkeley.

The personal server also makes efficient use of power: it can stream video for 4 1/2 hours without running out of juice.

Want said in a recent interview that the uptake in wi-fi, the introduction of Bluetooth into mobile phones, and the miniaturization of storage media will contribute to the commercialization of his new product. At the moment, the personal server is a stand-alone device, but Want envisions it becoming a part of mobile phones, eventually.

Student Publising and Privacy...

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Ten Reasons Why: Student Publishing and Privacy, Take Two In the past week or so several folks (James Farmer, Will Richardson, Greg Ritter) have been talking about the use of weblogs with students and the publishing of student work. Legal issues revolving around COPPA and FERPA are being discussed along with pedagogical issues.

I have been thinking of this as I work with Barbara Lüscher at Buckman Elementary and plan for the use of weblogs with her and her 5th grade students this coming fall. Am thinking that we will want to have students publish two sites. One public, and one behind a login. The public site could be for final published pieces. Pieces the student chooses to share with the public . The private site can be the site where comments are enabled to facilitate peer review, and places for drafts to be saved. Am trying to figure out how to do this in Movable Type. With the creation of an alternate index template in Movable Type, and the use of category tags, I should be able to create two sites with one blog.

One problem I haven't figured out is how to save the alternate index file into a private directory, or make it only readable behind a login. I believe LiveJournal has a feature like this. Regular posts are published to the public site, but special "friends only" posts can be enabled that only "friends" can view. Something like this in a weblogging tool would be very nice to have. Some way to designate public and private posts. Maybe I'll post something up on the LazyWeb site.

Update: Tom Hoffman adds some more to the discussion. Looks like Plone might be the tool I am looking for... Also just discovered that Movable Type will do what I want it to do. Just did a little experiment. I created two index files, one gets saved in the regular directory, one in the private directory. With a little bit of work using category tags, I should be able to create two templates. One with all of a student's posts (the private area) and one with items in the category that is published to the public site. But I still have to mess with file permissions...

New Weblog Tools: Expressions and Rantelop

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My-ExpressionsExpressions! is a hosted media blogging system that makes it easy for anyone to create and maintain their very own photo or media blog. It has been designed and developed by fellow photographers, artists and bloggers to meet your specific needs. [by way of... Ben Hammersley.com]

Hammersley also points to a new blogging tool - Rantelope a standards-compliant weblogging and content management tool written in the object oriented scripting language, python.

We intend to combine the best features of Movable Type™, Blogger™, Radio Userland, and Blosxom (as well as our own ideas!) into a single, flexible system that's easy for users and developers alike.