Google Print

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1. What is Google Print?Google Print enables publishers to promote their books on Google. Google scans the full text of participating publishers' titles so that Google users can see books that match the topics that they are searching on. When a user clicks on a book search result, they're taken to a Google-hosted web page displaying a scanned image of the relevant page from the book. Each page also contains multiple 'Buy this Book' links, allowing users to purchase the book from online retailers.

Here is an example...

Bill Z Finds Himself Blogging...

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Saturday, October 2, 2004 - News: "

On Saturday, I attended the first session of the Ed 436: Technology Across the Curriculum course that I am taking as part of the MAT Flex program at Pacific University. That's why I now find myself blogging.

I am again this fall teacher a technology class for preservice teachers at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. In the past I set up Moveable Type weblogs for the participants, but in light of the recent user interface upgrades at Blogger I decided to just have them set up their own weblog using Blogger. As part of the course I have made it a requirement to post a few times a week to their blog. I'm finding the experience a great way to learn more about each student. For example I had no idea that Bill was a Tri-Met driver. The # 14 route he writes of is near my house...

I have their blog feeds in a special folder set up in my RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire and can easily see when they post something new. Next session I'll turn them on to Bloglines...

IM goes Mobile... And Grows Up...

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Technology > Circuits > Flip Open That Cellphone: It's IM on the Move" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/technology/circuits/07mess.html?oref=login">The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Flip Open That Cellphone: It's IM on the Move It looks more and more as if IM has outgrown its exclamatory roots in teenage chatter. The Washington-based Pew Internet and American Life Project estimated in early September that 53 million adults use the technology.

I'd say so too. It has gotten to the point where I have to remind some of my staff to close their wireless laptops during some parts of our staff meetings.

Flickr DNS Issues...

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FlickrBlog Flickr Unavailable Flickr has been only sporadically available since Sunday morning and was completely off the map for about 5 hours. You may still be experiencing difficulty accessing the site — if you are, try going through www1.flickr.com, www2.flickr.com, www3.flickr.com or www4.flickr.com.

Looks like you can still get to it from the alternative sites...

iTunes Jukebox at Lewis

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Our music teacher at Lewis, Mr. Jamesbarry, had a great idea that we recently implemented. Last year we had talked about setting up a server to share some of the music he uses with classrooms. This summer when we moved all of our machines to OS X, he got the idea of setting up a machine with iTunes and loading it with all the music he uses in his music program. With the music installed on the music classroom machine, and running under iTunes, it can be set up so that the music on that machine is available to any other machine on the network via iTunes music sharing and Rendezvous. Now Mr. Jamesbarry can point our classroom teachers to the selections on our iTunes jukebox that correspond to the lessons he has shared with our students. Again, ZeroConfig/Rendezvous provides a very easy way to share our resources within the building without any of us having to be a networking genius. Just boot up iTunes and you’ll find Mr. Jamesbarry’s music. Not much U2, but he does have all those cool tunes that go with 5th grade square dancing unit...

Dowser: Research Tool For The Web...

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DowserDowser is a research tool for the web. It clusters results from major search engines, associates words that appear in previous searches, and keeps a local cache of all the results you click on in a searchable database. It helps you keep track of what you find on the web.

(Via The Tao of Mac.)

This is another interesting tool that runs locally on your computer. It basically catalogs your web searches on your local computer and creates a searchable local database of your searches. Now I can search my searches. Requires Python...

PSU Community Service Project...

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Portland State | News | PSU Students and Alumni to Participate in Community Service Project at Lewis Elementary Spent yesterday morning at Lewis Elementary with a group of Portland State University students who were helping us with a number of projects. At Lewis we have a very large amount of cyclone fence that surrounds our playground and ball fields. One of our PTA members had the idea of having students paint flowers and other designs on wooden discs, and then hang them on the fence. This was accomplished and the PSU group helped us hang them. They also worked in our outdoor center cleaning up yard debris, and rebuilding our fish pond.

Tim Stahmer's Weblog Noted in Technology and Learning

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> The Back Page > September 15, 2004" href="http://www.techlearning.com/story/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=BAL5OOAXZXEUMQSNDBGCKHQ?articleID=47204073">Techlearning > > The Back Page > September 15, 2004 Online For all you blogophiles out there, instructional technology specialist Tim Stahmer's Assorted Stuff is one of the more compelling Web logs covering K-12 education. In addition to waxing eloquent about the latest education news in the general press, his day-to-day experiences as an educator, and his thoughts on Apple iMovie versus Windows Movie Maker, Stahmer, who works in the staff development department of the Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, touches on politics, life in the District of Columbia, The Daily Show, and other, well, assorted stuff. What's appealing about the site is that it captures the essence of what a blog should be-timely, opinionated, and well-written-without being overly self-promotional. And OK, it's also got some pretty good rants.

Tim's weblog, Assorted Stuff, gets a nice mention in Technology and Learning.

Dr. Donald Leu

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I had mentioned that last week at Lewis we held some inservice sessions with staff. One session involved a talk (via iChatAV ) by Dr. Donald Leu of the University of Connecticut. Dr. Leu is well known for his research on New Literacies . His work addresses issues of both theory and practice as the Internet redefines what it means to become literate. I have worked on several presentations with Dr. Leu and asked him if you could speak to my staff as part of our inservice week. He agreed and we connected via iChat and he spoke for about 15 minutes and then took questions from the staff. The presentation then lead to a lab session on iChat. Again using Rendezvous, teachers could easily connect to each other and had a good time experimenting with the text and audio features...

School Starts This Week

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It has been a busy last couple of weeks as the summer break winds down and we get ready for a new school year at Lewis Elementary. Teachers officially returned this past week and we held several inservice activities around our move to OS X. Our 3rd, 4th and 5th grade teachers all received iBooks, data projectors and SmartBoards for use in their classrooms and training was held to get them familiar with their new equipment. With the help of my friend Dick McPartland, we have worked this summer to move all of our computers to OS X and to organize the technology lab. We now have 27 computers in our lab running OS X Panther. We spent most of the day on Friday arranging the lab and cleaning up cables and such. The school district I.T. folks are installing an OS X server and we should soon have everyone set up to save into class and private directories soon.

sjwiki.jpg A few weeks back Tom Hoffman pointed me to Instiki. Instiki is a wiki that runs on a local machine. I have it installed on my laptop and use it to take notes and such. Tom mentioned that it would be nice if Instiki supported Rendezvous. We started talking and came up with the following idea. If we enabled web sharing on the teacher's laptop, then we could edit the index.html page on the teacher machine to redirect to the teacher's wiki. The way it works is that students use the OS X Safari browser (which supports Rendezvous browsing) to easily navigate to their teacher's wiki/web page. No need to book mark the teacher's laptop location on each lab machine. The students just look under the Rendezvous menu on Safari and they see their teacher's wiki listed. I have it working on two of the teacher machines and should have the others set up tomorrow.

The way I explained it to my teachers is that the Instiki wiki is always running on their laptop. They can use it to post links, lab assignments, anything they want, and it will automatically show up when ever the teacher's laptop is in the building. Since we have wireless throughout the building, basically as long as their computer is running, students will be able to get to their classroom wiki... (Note: Instiki also supports static publishing, so just as teachers leave lesson plans when they plan to be out of the building , I can see them uploading their static wiki/web pages to out internal server... :-) )

Now we need to do a bit of work helping them become familiar with the interface and such, but since most of them are pretty comfortable composing email, there should not be too much of a learning curve. The interesting part will be to see how they start to use this with their students and how they start to use it to share information with each other.

Shrook 2 - RSS and Atom for Mac OS X

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Shrook 2, and OS X RSS/Atom reader, looks very interesting. The Smart Group feature is very nice. Similar to Smart Playlists in iTunes. For example I just set up a Smart Group to track all the Lewis Elementary site feeds. Can set up SmartGroups to track just about anything. Also it will load my feeds on my iPod. Not that I plan to read RSS feeds on my iPod, but just the idea is pretty interesting.

[by way of...D'Arcy Norman's Learning Commons Weblog]

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.