Wikis...

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I continue to consider how wikis can be used with students and have been second guessing my decision to install Mediawiki, the software that runs the Wikipedia. Not that Mediawiki isn't powerful software, it's just that it may be a... [The Savvy Technologist]

Tim Wilson, who I had the opportunity to meet in New Orleans at NECC, talked yesterday about installing Mediawiki and then coming across a canonical list of wiki engines. Will points to him this morning wondering about "the collaborative construction of content..." using Wikis.

Tim also noted that Moodle has a Wiki module. He makes a good point that this might be a nice middle ground for us in K-12 who want to take advantage of the Wiki interface and methodology, but worry a bit about having open access and also getting it approved by IT departments and such.

When I got back from NECC, I installed Mediawiki, the backend of Wikipedia. The installation was pretty easy. I'm now messing around trying to understand how it handles styles and such. Whichever Wiki engine we end up using at Lewis, I'm thinking our first use of it will be with our 4th and 5th grade Publishing Club. The Publishing Club students work with our 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Gould and a parent, Mrs. Meskel, who also happens to work for our local paper, The Oregonian. They produce a monthly newspaper about school events and such.

This past year they utilized a shared directory and had students save stories into the directory. This did not work very well, with a number of stories being lost or saved in the wrong place. It took a lot of work by Mrs. Gould and Mrs. Meskel and I had been thinking of setting up something for them with Moveable Type to handle the work flow. After playing around with the Wiki interface, I am pretty sure I'll just set up a Wiki for them and they can use it to have students submit stories, and then use it to edit the stories. It will be great for them to have access to the Page History to keep track of the edits. The Diff feature, which can highlight the changes between two revisions will allow students and their teachers to see the edits between two differnet revisions. The discussion feature will allow writers to talk about the edits and make suggestions. Once the stories are finished, we will do a simple copy and paste into the newspaper template.

The more I think about the Wiki interface and all of its features, the more I am excited about using it with my students and teachers.

Talk of the Nation...

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NPR : Talk of the Nation Thursday, July 1, 2004 E-mail scams, Internet worms, spyware programs and e-outlaws who thrive on the frontiers of cyberspace. It's enough to make angry web citizens take the law into their own hands (or keyboards). From counter-scamming to spamming the spamsters, we discuss Internet vigilantes.

Am currently listening to NPR's Talk of the Nation. A good conversation about the most recent Windows Internet Explorer security hole and Internet vigilantes...

Conference Presentation Via iChat

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On Monday morning I gave a short talk in Connecticut before I went to work in Portland. Normally that would be a tough commute, but we were using iChat AV. Don Leu, an education professor at the University of Connecticut, asked me to talk about weblogs and their use in schools to a group of teachers and administrators at a statewide technology conference.

I first met Don about 7 years ago when he approached me about a book he was writing about Internet use in elementary classrooms. The book, Teaching with the Internet K-12: New Literacies for New Times, is now in its 4th printing.

Don is one of those folks who you wished had a weblog... Gotta work on that...

Ok, Well, Blojsom Then?

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Essentially, if you've got blogging turned on your Tiger server, every user you create will get a folder inside their home folder for their blog posts, and any text file they put in there (whether manually, through a web interface or via the Atom API), will appear as a post on their blog.

[Tuttle SVC]

Tom very neatly explains the significance of Apple including blogging in Mac OS X Tiger server. This is exactly what I want to do at Lewis. Create accounts for a bunch of 5th graders on the server, and in the process have blogs enabled for them. I like the fact that it is based on Blosxom. That is the blogging software that Tom uses. I use it locally on my Powerbook for note taking at meetings. It is a great little application.

At Lewis this summer we are moving all our iMacs to OS X Panther. Our school district IT department is installing an X Serve. We will have logins for our 4th and 5th grade students. Am looking forward to next summer and upgrading to Tiger.

Newsmap: Google News Displayed as a Treemap

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newsmap Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe. [Via The Tao of Mac]

The visual representation of the Google News page. Larger text indicates more news articles, lighter color represents most recent updates. Requires Flash.

NECC Keynotes...

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NECC has three keynotes going this morning. Intel come up with an innovative approach to ensure a full house for CEO Craig Barrett... Give away stuff... As predicted, the keynote by Craig Barrett was full...

Play Ball...

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Play ball! Lewis Elementary School is no cornfield, and Shoeless Joe won't be showing up in Southeast Portland anytime soon. But the Sellwood Junior Baseball League's Field of Dreams has a more pragmatic message than the "If you build it, they will come" mantra of that film: If you want to play, just build it.

A nice story about the volunteers who fixed up our Lewis Elementary baseball field...

Edutopia Online Education Radio...

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Radio Show Archive "Edutopia" is a weekly Internet radio talk show from The George Lucas Educational Foundation, hosted by GLEF Executive Director Milton Chen. The one-hour talk show features key educators and students, as well as business, government, and community leaders, discussing educational innovation.

GLEF, the George Lucas Educational Foundation, provides a very rich web site of education related articles and video/audio media that helps to disseminate models of the most innovative practices in k-12 schools... They produce a weekly 1 hour radio show that features key educators and students, as well as business, government, and community leaders, discussing educational innovation. Available as an audio stream, or for download as an MP3 file. Perfect for listening to on your iPod...

BBC Content to be Made Available

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Wired News: BBC to Open Content Floodgates The British Broadcasting Corporation's Creative Archive, one of the most ambitious free digital content projects to date, is set to launch this fall with thousands of three-minute clips of nature programming. The effort could goad other organizations to share their professionally produced content with Web users.

The project, announced last year, will make thousands of audio and video clips available to the public for noncommercial viewing, sharing and editing. It will debut with natural-history programming, including clips that focus on plants, animals and birds.

This looks very interesting. A method for teachers and students to legally use source material for presentations and research reports... but at this point only for those accessing from Great Britain...

iPod as Pirate Radio Station...

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iPodlounge | All Things iPod

Tune into iPod-FM pirate radio Oregon Yesterday we reported that a columnist at engadget.com had written a how-to on creating your own pirate radio station using a modified iTrip mini. Today we noticed on the boing boing blog that a reader was actually doing it from his car with an iTrip and his iPod. "I've been running around for the past several months with this bumper sticker on my car. It's an ink-jet job and as you can see, it's getting a little faded. I figure that anyone that can read the bumper sticker-- on the I-5, at a stop light-- if intrigued could tune in and listen to whatever I'm listening to."

Have been thinking one of these would make a nice Father's Day gift...

NECC Weblog...

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Edweblogs.org: NECC 2004NECC starts next weekend and again Clarity Innovations will be sponsoring a community weblog to share information about the conference and sessions. Yesterday, Steve Burt and I spent some time working on the NECC weblog and looking for NECC related posts on Feedster.

Feedster has an interesting feature... you can do a search and then when the search is returned, you also get an RSS feed of that search... combined with a tool such as Feedroll... you can have a subject specific aggregator... I didn't know it did that... Here is the link to the RSS for a Feedster search on the terms "NECC" "New Orleans" . The post below uses Feedroll to display the RSS feed... Any posts with NECC and NEW ORLEANS should roll into the feed...

NECC New Orleans...

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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...

Beacon School...

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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.