Colonial Williamsburg: Past to Present: Podcasts The Colonial Williamsburg site has podcasts. Their audio files feature special interviews and presentations available only to their Web users.
(Via Scripting News.)
Last week at NECC, Apple sponsored a team of their Distinguished Educators to provide podcasts from the conference. These include an interview with Bernie Dodge who talks about Webquests, Podcasts, Wikis and Weblogs and their use in education. A nice example of a good quality podcast. I have said before I see more possibilities for this type of use of podcasting than others.
Another nice example is their walking tour of historical Philadelphia. Susan Kellogg of All About Philadelphia Tours takes Barnaby Wasson on a walking through historical Old Philadelphia
Both of these podcasts also take advantage of something that Apple has added to iTunes and that is the ability to add chapters to podcast broadcasts. For example the Dodge interview is divided into three sections and you can easily navigate to those chapters by activating the drop-down chapter menu.
The walking tour podcast uses chapters to highlight the various tour locations and also includes photographs of the areas being discussed. Interested in jumping to the section where the guide describes the history and signifigance of the Liberty Bell? Just highlight the chapter menu and mouse down to the chapter and it begins to play.
Olympic ESD 114 Ed Tech Blog | perceptum meditates partis Jeff Allen, Director of Educational Technology at Olympic Educational Service District 114, in Bremerton, WA is blogging. Jeff is also President of NCCE...
StormReportMap.Com - An Interactive Look at the Latest Storm Reports:
Yesterday leaving from Philadelphia my flight was delayed on the runway for over an hour because of storms between Philadelphia and Chicago. Thanks to stormreportmap.com I can visually see why they were holding us up. The site uses data from the Storm Prediction Center and hooks it into Google Maps to provide an interactive map of storm activity across the United States.
Podiobooks - Serialized audio books in podcast form
"Authors receive one half of all the proceeds from the donations from listeners. The other half goes to the maintenance and upkeep of podiobooks.com."
Kind of like the Radio Reader for your iPod...
While many technology using educators are at NECC, another interesting conference is taking place in California. Where 2.0 is a conference sponsored by O'Reilly Media and its topic is...
the curious new ecosystem forming at the interstices of mapping portals, GIS systems, ubiquitous GPS devices, open source, and the Web 2.0.
Several interesting announcements were made there yesterday. Amazon announced a new visual Yellow Pages interface. I did a search for coffee shops in my neighborhood in Portland and easily found several. Many had an image of the business associated with the listing. Following the link to the business you'll get a larger image of the business along with phone and address information. Above the business image are a set of arrows which allow you to visually stroll up and down the street. Great for checking out parking restrictions near the business. It's not as slick as the Google Maps interface where you just drag your mouse to slide the image, but can't imagine they aren't working on this too.
Speaking of Google Maps, yesterday they announced an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows developers the hooks they need to utilize Google Maps for making other web applications. Examples include ChicagoCrime.org which maps criminal activity using data from the Chicago Police Department and Housingmaps.com which takes housing listings from Craigslist and combines it with Google Maps. Now that there is an official API from Google we should be able to see some smart uses in education such as bus route maps and safe routes to schools and such.
More Where 2.0 conference coverage can be found on the O'Reilly Radar weblog...
GarageBand Support - Recording your Podcast
Apple has published instructions for recording podcasts with GarageBand. Lots of tips and tricks to help you create a recording that sounds professional.
(Via Lifehacker.)
Dilworth House - Philadelphia
Originally uploaded by timlauer.
Was out for a walk this morning and came by this house across from Washington Square near Independence Hall. Noticed that the house is scheduled to be demolished. Next to the demolition notice a Dr. R.E. Booth Jr. posted a poem about the house and its history.
I was surprised to see less than an hour later that Mike Cramer, who lives in Philadelphia, responded with a comment adding more context to my post. Am wondering how he stumbled on to that picture...
The Educational Mac: Adding to the Chorus of Boos
Over at The Educational Mac, Kelly Dumont laments the spotty Wi-Fi coverage at NECC. Turns out many of the session rooms do not have access. With all the emphasis on weblogs this year, and with a very large number of folks actively blogging the conference you would think there would be better coverage. Maybe time for a bit of guerrilla networking. Maybe go up and offer to help the speaker set up their laptop as an access point...
Kelly is also posting podcasts about NECC... His feed is now available from within Apple's iTunes which now allows you to subscribe to Podcasts.
Google Map links for Unesco World Heritage Sites
Brad Templeton has created a page that links Google Maps satellite imagery to UNESCO's World Heritage sites index.
Network Security at William Penn High
Originally uploaded by timlauer.
This morning, Steve Burt, Tom Hoffman, Ben Harris and I presented a workshop about weblogs and their use in education. We had a great group of folks in the workshop. A very informed group. Afterward Tom and I talked about how there is much more weblog awareness at this NECC compared to last year.
The lab worked well except for a few network hiccups which can be explained by the fact that the guy responsible for creating the site, was messing with it as we were presenting. Not a good idea.
Max of Philadelphia Public Schools did a fine job providing technical support. Unfortunately he couldn't do anything about the heat and humidity... it was like presenting in a sauna...
Screen grab of classroom notes...
Tag Subscriptions
Brent Simmons writes about a new feature of NetNewsWire (his most excellent Mac OS X RSS reader) called tag subscriptions. Tag subscriptions let you subscribe to feeds on a given topic from sites such as Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Technorati. For example lots of folks at NECC are tagging weblog and Flickr posts with terms such as NECC, NECC05 and one I hope to add tomorrow, Free+Dinner. This feature of NetNewsWire makes it easy to subscribe to RSS feeds that match these tags.
(Via Ranchero)
del.icio.us direc.tor An alternative web-based rich UI for del.icio.us. Features: * In-browser handling of del.icio.us bookmarks (tested up to 12,000 records) * Find-as-you-type searching of all your bookmarks, with basic search operators * Sort by description, tags, or timestamp * Ad-hoc tag browser
Wikipedia Animate is a Greasemonkey Firefox script that allows you to animate the revision history of Wikipedia entries.
(Via Jon Udell.)
NECC Talking Points: flickr4schools...
Over at eSchoolNew ETI, Tom Hoffman discusses the use of tools such as Flickr by teachers and schools, and suggests that school district IT departments need to start thinking of providing similar services.
Tom goes on to make the point that...
"Schools need to start taking seriously their responsibility to maintain a student's digital content from K through 12."
At Lewis Elementary, we utilize Flickr to document student work and events that are shared on our web site. With my camera phone I capture images several times a week, and then post them via email to Flickr. Mainly it's just a way to easily add images to our web site, but imagine a system similar to Flickr that allowed you to capture student work and then upload it to a portfolio... Think of how a teacher could use tags to organize and categorize student work.
I'd also add social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us and Furl to the list of tools schools should be taking a look at. A problem I run into is having students find good web resources, then lose them, or worse yet just print out a bunch of web pages. Even had one teacher having her students write down in a folder the web addresses of the pages they found. While Furl and del.icio.us are great tools, I can't have my 4th and 5th grade students sign up for these services.
We have been looking at some Open Source del.icio.us alternatives such as de.lirio.us and Scuttle. Have decided to give de.lirio.us a try, and this summer we are working to set it up on our intranet. We will also be re-imaging our computers and plan to add a de.lirio.us bookmarklet to the tool bar on our browsers. Another advantage of this is exploring with students the social aspect of these tools and seeing how they work with one another to share the resources they find.
The Montager is a web app that takes pictures from Flickr and creates a montage of clickable tiles. Just type in a tag and it returns a montage made of images associated with that tag. Drag your mouse over the image and the tiles enlarge. Click a tile, and the Montager creates a new montage based in that image... Another Flickr toy...
Via Lifehacker
Step Aside, CNN!
A session on Podcasting has been added to the NECC program. On the final day of NECC, David Warlick will be presenting a session entitled Step Asside CNN: I’m Listening to my Podcast. He will also be doing a daily podcast update from the conference. It can be found at Connect Learning.
NECC Talking Points:
Blogging in the Classroom
Over at eSchoolNews ETI, Tom Hoffman answers viewer mail regarding the use of weblogs in the classroom. Tom discusses Pat Delaney's idea of weblogs and wikis as digital paper. I tend to agree.
This year at Lewis Elementary four teachers have been using wikis installed on their laptops to provide digital paper to their students. If you would like to learn more about our use of Instiki, take a look here and here, and can listen to our O'Reilly talk here.
Next school year we plan to have weblogs set up for students running on our internal network. On Monday our X Serve was upgraded to 10.4.0 Tiger. The Tiger version of X Serve comes with a built in weblogging package called Blojsom. Blojsom is based on the Blosxom weblog tool that was developed by Rael Dornfest.
Today I spent a few minutes on the server, clicked a few check boxes, and in a matter of minutes I had set it up so that every user on our server has a weblog. Over the summer we plan to add accounts for all of our 4th and 5th grade students and provide them with this digital paper. We will also spend some time with the teachers sharing tools such as RSS readers and showing them how easily they can keep track of student work and make timely responses.
Am looking forward to attending NECC next week and having some time to talk to folks at Apple and learning more about this feature of OS X Server.
Tom Hoffman, Steve Burt, Will Richardson and I will be presenting a 3 hour workshop at NECC (National Educational Computing Conference) next week in Philadelphia. With the rather long title of... TA307 Effective Weblogs in Education: How to Create, Manage, and Communicate! the workshop session will discuss and demonstrate how schools are using weblogs and discuss the strategies and solutions for challenges created by their instructional use. We are hoping that Anne Davis can also join us via a video hookup... We did a similar workshop last year at NECC and I'm looking forward to working with Will, Tom, Anne and Steve again...