Crow Show
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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.
National Governors Association Clearinghouse of Ed. Policy Issues
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KM in EducationLiz Lian points to a policy primer on Closing the Achievement Gap from the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices Education Division. The Closing the Achievement Gap document, and supporting documents, are good summaries of the issues and possible solutions that states are employing as they deal with achievement gap issues in their respective states.
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_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...
Tom Hoffman's Talk to the Brown English MAT's
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More on this later, for now, here's the link.
Tom was going to have iChat up and going with a video stream of his presentation, but it looks like the Brown firewall must be in the way... or maybe they are having him give a talk about the Internet in a room without any connectivity... Come to think of it, that one might be more likely... :-)
Cyprien's best conference moment.../Flickr
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My best conference moment last year involved Hydra (now SubEthaEdit), bloggers, rendezvous and macs.
[42/0]
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...
Convention Bloggers...
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CyberJournalist.net: Convention bloggers named The Democrats have started issuing credentials to bloggers.
I guess that's all well and good, but I'm wondering if any of the delegates have weblogs? Will there be blog posts from delegates rather than just A List bloggers. Would be kind of interesting to have delegates writing about the conventions...
Flickr
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This is a test post from 
, a fancy photo sharing thing.
4th of July
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Another Nice Flickr Feature
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Flickr, the photo sharing discussion tool, also has some very interesting features that allow for easy inclusion of photos in your weblog. One I just became aware of is Daily Zeitgeist. It is built in Flash, and displays recent photos from Flickr. I have mine set up to grab recent images from my account and display them in the box below.
var zg_nsids = '37996574045@N01';
This and other cool features of Flickr can be found the on the Flickr Blog.
Flickr
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This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.
NewTen, install packages from Mac OS X on your Newton
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Let us travel back in time, 10 years ago, when the Apple logo was still a rainbow and the only PDA worth talking about was the Newton. Sure, by today’s standards it’s not the smallest PDA, but many people agree, it’s still one of the best. Now, welcome back to 2004, still got that Newton and want to install stuff on it from your Mac? Now you can with NewTen (and without Classic, too!).
[Via Cult of the Mac and
I found an eMate, which is basically a Newton, in a cabinet at Lewis. Now I have one more thing to play with rather than finish the duty schedule...
Lunch Duty Blimp...
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And for a mere $100 US, who could resist one of these Takara SkyShips?[by way of...Engadget and Akihabara News]
Equipped with a camera, I could do lunch duty remotely... :-)
July 4 on Salmon Street
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Each year on July 4th in our neighborhood there is a local parade lead by a fire truck from the local fire house. The kids follow behind the truck on their bikes, scotters and wagons as the fire truck does a few laps around the block. After the parade the fire fighters give tours of the truck, and then turn on the hoses. Click the image to the right for a short movie. Quicktime required...
July4Us