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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...

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...