Learning & Leading with Technology Weblogs are featured in the September 2003 issue of ISTE's journal, Learning and Leading with Technology. Will's blog is highlighted, but it looks as if they didn't talk to him. The authors point out the potential of the medium for use by students as a journaling tool. The article is not available online.
Thanks to free blog publishing software that masks the programming code underlying Web Log creation, virtually anyone can "blog" or practice "blogging," that is, create a Web Log and update it with daily postings.
Teachers learn new tricks as the Internet expands their professional horizons. [New York Times: Education]
Nothing new or earth shattering, but a nice overview of how some teachers are using the Internet as a communication vehicle, and as a resource for lesson planning.
The New York Times: Circuits Several interesting pieces today about technology and learning. Included is a piece called Can Johnny Blog?, which highlights the work of Will Richardson...
Movable Type in Education Al Delgado has a new Typepad site up. The topic is the use of Movable Type in education. Al is the author of the very useful Disruptive Technology weblog...
http://lewiselementary.org
I have been working on a web page for Lewis Elementary School. I have just recently started working there as the principal. Lewis is located in Portland, Oregon, and is part of Portland Public Schools. I am using Movable Type to run the site, but for the most part it will not be a weblog, but rather I am using Movable Type as a content management system. It is very much in the beginning stages, but hope to incorportate RSS feeds and such in the near furture.
Google News Alerts are sent by email when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify.
This is very nice. I have one set up to alert me to articles about my school district. Another to alert me when the sky is falling...
Weblogg-ed Vol.2: Using Weblogs in Education Will Richardson points to a response by Seb Fiedler to Liz Lawley's experiments with MT as a CMS for one of her courses. I found Seb's point about mastering easily transferable tools (Examples include MovableType, Manila, Typepad... ) to be very similar to my own thinking.
I would rather spend my time mastering skills for the use of personal Webpublishing technologies than working my way through one of the industry packages that I will never be able to afford for any small scale project I might be interested in. Personal Webpublishing is about the empowerment of the individual and small teams... what do you personally get from mastering WebCT, BlackBoard, etc.? Will they travel with you? Will you be able to use them for your own interests once you have left your R1 institution?
I am the principal at Lewis Elementary School in Portland, Oregon. I use this site mainly to make notes to myself about technology and how it can be used by teachers and students to gain a greater understanding of their world, and as a means to tell their stories...
Questions or comments can be addressed to
tim at lauer dot com
Books and Publications
"Innovative Approaches To Literacy Education: Using The Internet To Support New Literacies" (International Reading Association), Contributor, Chapter 10, Bee Stings, Wooden Blocks, and Web Browsers
Scott Foresman Internet Guide:
ISBN 0-673-62225-8
Recent Articles/Interviews
"What is a Blog? Educators Discover the Newest From of Immediate Communication",
by Craig Colgan , American School Board Journal, July 2005
“Google Maps inspire creativity”
by Corey Murray, eSchool News Online, June 15, 2005.
“How do you communicate with students who have grown up with
technology? Schools are looking to technology for the answer.” by Kevin
Delaney, Wall Street Journal, Jan 17, 2005, pp R4.
Recent Presentations
Lessons Learned: A Panel Discussion about Creating Educational Communities Online,
National Education Computing Conference - June 30, 2005
Effective Weblogs in Education: How to Create, Manage, and Communicate!
National Education Computing Conference - June 28, 2005
Remixing Wikis with Rendezvous, Web Services and SchoolTool,
O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference - March 16, 2005
Oyez! The Supreme Court, Now on MP3
Mr. Goldman, a professor of political science at Northwestern University, is taking the original audio recordings of the Supreme Court and turning them into MP3 files for free distribution on the Web.
Something else to add to my iPod playlist...MP3 files of Supreme Court arguments from oyez.com.
Intel's Odyssey web site has an article on Joe Luft's classroom at Brooklyn International High School.
Liz Lane Lawley discusses a presentation by demographer Dr. Harold (“Bud”) Hodgkinson about the number of children living in poverty in the US.
Particularly striking—and distressing—were the numbers reflecting child poverty. Twenty-two percent of children in the United States live in poverty. Twenty-two percent. That’s the highest rate of any developed nation. And yet, as Hodgkinson pointed out, there’s little or no public outcry or outrage over this horrifying number... [mamamusings]
A Whole Lotta Features:Beyound the Blog... Matt Haughey writes about using Movable Type as more than just a weblog tool. Lots of good ideas and examples... At Buckman Elementary School we use Movable Type to power the teacher pages and the main school web page. For the most part the teacher pages are just blogs, but a few teachers have tweaked their templates and they have more of a look of a traditional page. The main page is also set up not to look like a blog. I plan to do some more work with this before the school year begins.
I've been playing with the Typepad beta. So far I'm pretty impressed. Very nice interface for page design, editing and such. Very easy to do things like blogrolls, and book and music lists... Take a look... http://lauer.typepad.com/weblog
I have encountered a few issues with the css layouts. (At least on my PC at home, the page doesn't load correctly in IE. ) It will be interesting to see how they price this...
Ed Tech Dev: Microsoft vs. Open Source at NECC
I think educators and the general public still largely know nothing about OpenOffice, because if they did they'd realize there is no need to purchase Microsoft Office. They may not realize that OpenOffice and other free and open source software work just fine on Windows and MacOS too. Trying open source software doesn't require immediately leaping over to Linux and dropping Windows completely.
Over at Ed Tech Dev they discuss an article from the Seattle Post Intellgencer about the large Microsoft presence at NECC. While you had to hunt to find them, Paul Nelson of Riverdale High School had a group of students there in the poster session area running a Linux Terminal Server lab. He had quite a bit of traffic, even though you really had to hike to find the room. Maybe next year we can get someone to underwrite a booth for them on the exhibit floor. Maybe right across from Apple and Microsoft... :-)
I took two teachers from my school to visit his set up and they were very impressed. The lack of the ability to run Microsoft Office did not concern them As one of them said; "A word processor is a word processor. As long as my kids can browse the web and write, I really don't need much more than that."
She also was very impressed with the whole thin client set up. Each student has a login and can work from any terminal. You can even boot to it from Windows boxes and it will run in Mac OS X. This fall we are planning to set it up for her classroom and for our other 5th grade classes at Buckman.
BuzzMachine... by Jeff JarvisJeff Jarvis reports on his sneak peak of AOL's upcoming entry into the weblog world...
ieSpell - Spell Checker add-on for Internet Explorer
ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage. It should come in particularly handy for users who do a lot of web-based text entry (e.g. web mails, forums, blogs, diaries).
Laura Gibbs, of XPLANA points to this Internet Explorer extention for Windows users that adds spell checking cabilities to browser.
For Mac OS X users, Safari 1.0 has the ability to spell check web forms. The tool is off by default and needs to be enabled. To do so, open a web form page, insert the cursor, then go to the Edit menu and choose: Spelling > Check Spelling as you Type... [by way of...Steve Gillmor's Emerging Opps]
For as long as we have lived in our house, there has been a 4th of July parade in the neighborhood. A local firetruck comes and as the truck drives slowly through the neighborhood, kids follow behind on bikes, wagons and on foot. Today was no exception. The image above is a panoramic image of the goings on at SE Salmon and 58th in Portland earlier this morning.
Happy 4th of July...
