Monthly Archives: April 2007

On a personal note…

A year ago today Dale was in the hospital at the beginning of the worst summer of our lives. Tomorrow we go for his first round of tests for kidney transplant which means we are back where we started a year ago. He is stronger and in better shape that I would have ever thought he would be after the peritonitis. His spirit and his sheer hardheadedness is amazing. Our first appointment is at 8:20 in the morning which means we will leave the house at about 5:30. The last appointment is at 3:20 and we have to go to a total of three different facilities during the course of the day. They are predicting rain and I am hoping the worst of it will pass us – I’m not terribly comfortable driving in Dallas (especially when I am going to places I have never had to find before) and I’m definitely not comfortable driving in storms so I’m keeping my fingers and toes crossed.

I shouldn’t complain at all – I’m not the one who will be poked, prodded, and x-rayed all day. We will spend part of the day in a transplant education class so I’ll be moving to the next chapter of everything you never wanted to know about kidney failure and were afraid to ask. I’m praying for no bad surprises. If he is told he cannot have a transplant it means a life sentence of dialysis which means for him 4 hours a day three days a week being hooked to a machine that filters your blood. It means feeling really crappy those days. It means having to be on a very strict diet, being more susceptible to all kinds of serious illness. If that is the verdict we’ll deal. If he gets the green light the next step will be having his sisters tested to see if one of them can be a donor. If not we get on the list and stay prepared for a phone call.

We will appreciate prayers – we’ve been blessed throughout all of this and part of me knows that those blessings will continue, The other part of me is weak and worries and gets very cranky and stressed. I wish I could be that person that everyone admires for their strength and grace. Unfortunately I happen to be a big bundle of crybaby nerves instead, who takes it out on the kids, or tries to stay busy to try to outrun it.

Okay – enough whining. We will do this just like you eat an elephant – one bite at a time. I’m turning in early – that alarm clock is not going to be my friend tomorrow!

Video on Rss In Plain English and News Reading Feast Link

I’ve been busy with real life this week and trying to catch up on some rest at the same time. I am working on some things I plan to post on in the future but I had to share this great video with you.

Once again I can’t embed the video without the whole page going wonky so I will give you the link. If you have had any desire to gain a general knowledge of how RSS works take a look!

Rss in Plain English

I also wanted to share a link a friend showed me – PopUrls. If you like to read the news and find yourself wandering through several sites to do so check this site out. DIGG, Reddit, Flickr, del.icio.us, flickr, Wired, and so much more all on one shiny page!

Web 2.0 In Nine Weeks

The Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County has set up a blog called Learning 2.0. This blog contains a list of links containing 23 learning 2.0 things. The list is spread over a nine week period and contains links and tutorials to help you learn about blogging, Flickr, rss feeds and feedreaders, online image generators, library blogs, tagging and del.icio.us, technorati, wikis, online productivity sites, YouTube, and some sites for finding podcasts. The blog targets librarians but anyone who would like to get a “big picture” kind of tour, would find this a great starting place. If you follow the list of 23 things the way it is presented you will start your own blog and as you go through the rest of the list you will post on what you are learning.

If you go to their site make sure you check out the 7 and 1/2 Habits of Lifelong Learners presentation – it’s a wonderful presentation and the mission statement of the website is “Expanding Minds, Empowering Individuals, and Enriching the Community. You don’t have to take nine weeks to go through the list, but it is a great way to break down the pieces and give yourself a little time to reflect and play with what you learn. I love the way it is broken down and plan to learn from their example when I take some of these tools to my own campus. Thanks to them for doing such a great job! Thanks to Off The Shelf blog for point me to this great resource.
If you are confused about all this talk about web 2.0 or just want to let out your “inner geek” click over to this website and join in the fun.

Second Life Discussion and Resources

I have tried to like Second Life and it is interesting in that a lot of time and money goes into the different creations. The complexity of the design is fascinating to me but to be honest I get bored very quickly. I would rather chat or visit a forum if talking to people is the goal and it seems to use a lot of resources on my MacBook. That said I can see how students might enjoy it as a learning interface just because they are the avatar, chat, video gaming generation. I’m afraid that students would get caught up more in creating and dressing their avatars more than they would spend the time learning.

I keep coming back to technology should make things easier and it seems to me like this is more an example of making things more time consuming. I also have some reservations about the amount of money that changes hands. I will continue to check it out from time to time just in case I am absolutely wrong.

In the meantime there are some resources if you want to try things out yourself. The first is a forum for educators. You can sign up and receive emails about educational activities and places to go in Second Life.

There is a video tutorial on how to build things in Second Life that can be found here. Second Life educators have created a wiki.

There is an area strictly for teens on Second Life – the only adults that are allowed on there must be able to prove they are teachers. When a youth turns 18 they leave the teen area forever and are moved to the main “grid” There is a blog article and video here about a popular youth and her last day in teen life. The participants were on actually crying on skype and at the end the sunsets and the girl just disappears. Very dramatic video and shows how involved the kids are in this virtual world. The video actually ends like a funeral and the last frame has the girls name and dates like a memorial.

There is a video overview by the New media Consortium here and a blog (SecondLifeInsider) with article about the financial aspect as well as everything Second Life.
I found a comment response on a blog asking about Teen Second Life responses to the Virginia Tech shooting and felt that this was a positive way to utilize Second Life – as an outlet and empowering experience for the participants. The suggestions ranged from a workshop on teen violence to an area set aside for kids to place their creations like pictures, letters, and cards and even a suggestion of a t-shirt creation contest where they could purchase the t-shirts for their avatars and the money would go to a Virginia Tech charity. This was on the blog for the Global Kids Media Initiative.

I ran across a new word machinima which is actually a blend of machine and cinema and pertains to machine animation or productions created from using computer generated imagery usually on PCs. The video of the youth leaving teen life for the main grid is an example of machinima.

Some educational applications include:

“The ability to build 3-D objects collaboratively and in real time with others in the same world has enormous potential for teaching building, design, and art principles. Because Second Life is a rough simulation of the natural world, with meteorological and gravitational systems, the possibilities of experimenting with natural and physical sciences are endless. Meanwhile, the ability to interact with people from all over the globe enables political and cultural exchange and research in a safe and controlled environment.”

(from the School of Second Life Blog)Moodle and Second Life have mashed together an online learning system that incorporates both of them called sloodle which allows students to post to a blog directly from within Second Life. There seem to be courses you can enroll in but you have to sign in to see them.

I have rambled in this post and tried to give a balanced list of places you can go to learn about Second Life and education for yourself. It will be interesting to see what happens with Second Life in the future but for the time being I say it’s a nice place for a short visit but I don’t think I’d want to live there. I have enough trouble trying to balance everything in RL which is real life in SL speak.

Wikimapia – Let’s Describe The Whole World!

Wikimapia is a fun site that lets you easily annotate google maps by marking off a specific site, adding a title, some facts, and even a picture. According to their FAQ:

“WikiMapia is a Web 2.0 project to describe the whole planet Earth. It was created by Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev, inspired by Google maps and Wikipedia.”

The actual process is pretty straightforward.

  • click view and choose maps, satellite, or hybrid
  • Click in the search box on the right side of the page and type the name of the place
  • You will see a list of possible matching sites – click the one that best fits your search
  • When you find a place that you want to add a description to click “add place”
  • You will see a transparent resizeable, box with squares at the corners – move it and resize it to cover your site then click save
  • This brings up a box that allows you to type in a title, a short description, choose tags, and add a Wikipedia link if one exists.
  • When you are finished click save
  • You can now click menu and if you have a photograph of the site that you would like to share click edit and choose add/manage photos
  • You can click browse and navigate to the location of your photo and click upload. You will get a message telling you if you were successful. Click on the X to exit from this menu.

Now if you hover your cursor over the site a small box appears with the title you added. If you click that box it will show your description and the photo you added!

Our tech director told us about a class project where the students were formed into groups. They had iPods with clues to lead them to geographic places, GPS to help them get there, and digital cameras to take pictures at the destination. They also had the Tunetalk piece that would allow the students to record voice as they searched for their site. I think that you could take this a step farther and have them go online and put their information on the map using Wikimapia. You might want to add a collaboration piece by working with a class in another part of the world and letting the students exchange data on their respective sites.
If you have Google Earth installed you can click on the link in the FAQ for the Wikimapia data layer and you will be able to download the file to allow you to see the Wikimapia data in Google Earth.

Google Presentations are Unofficially Officially On Their Way

According to the Official Google Blog they are going to be releasing their presentation piece soon. I haven’t seen a date yet but knowing Google if the word is out then it really shouldn’t be long. According to a blog on ZDnet by Garret Rogers there will now be more compatibility between Google Docs and Microsoft products due to a new company Google has acquired called Tonic.

While Google claims to not be in competition with Microsoft these pieces together make a nice substitute for students who don’t have access to pricey office suites and make it much easier to collaborate.

Google has also acquired JotSpot – a wiki application, though as far as I can find, it is not out to use yet.  It would be great if it would integrate easily with Google Notebook.  Sounds like some interesting new tools this summer!

Pageflakes for Reading Online

I am reading about web 2.0 in education and want to thank the comment contributors that gave me suggestions for places to look. As usual, when I start searching I end up going down rabbit trails and this one led me to check out page flakes. I have tried several feed readers and ended up using my Google personalized home page as a place to read my favorites. After I discovered that you could add tagged pages I was hooked. I like the visual layout of having the feeds I read all the time showing all over the page so I can just quickly skim down through the headlines and read the ones that catch my attention. Last night I may have found a new way to get all my reading goodness,

I checked out Pageflakes and after playing with it for a few minutes, signed up for an account and started creating pages and adding feeds. The layout looks very similar to the way the feeds display on my Google page but right away I found I could create more pages to help me organize my feeds by category. I was able to find feeds through their website and also copy and paste the urls for the sites I wanted and have it discover the feed and add it to my page. I was able drag and drop feeds into different tags and arrange them on the page.

Another reason to love Pageflakes is that once you have the feed on your page you can click on edit and choose export and Pageflakes creates the html file that will allow you to insert the “flake” onto another webpage. There is an example of my work blog on my footer. I tried to embed it in this post but it made the page go all wonky so I will need to work on that.

Web 2.0 Staff Development

I have some questions. If you were going to learn about three web 2.0 tools to use in education, what would your top three choices be? My choices were blogging, wikis, and podcasting.
What staff development or technology class or presentation have you attended that stuck in your mind the most and what made it special? I am especially looking for ways it was FUN!
What motivates you to attend this type of class? Does your district require so many hours? What is the payoff if any?

This is a short post but I know there are some incredible teachers and learners out there and I hope to pick your brains!

I’m Watching TV….

On my laptop! I have visited several sites where you can watch videos on the web but tonight I am watching a video on “Beginning Excel in the Classroom” on Pyro TV You don’t have to sign up for an account, but if you do you can save your favorite channels. The channels can be searched by Featured, Popular, Genre, and People. The one I am watching is by TILT (Teachers Improving Learning with Technology). The link will take you to the blog but you can also view the video by going to Pyro.TV and searching by genre, education and clicking on TILT. You will see a list of all their videocasts including Episode 2 – Digital Pictures in the Classroom and TILT Episode 7 – Multimedia Animation Using PowerPoint and more! I also like GeekBrief and Photoshop Tips. There is also a channel for comedy, Kids and Family (Digikid has movies that have moved over into the public domain category like The Three Stooges in Order in the Court) , Arts, News and Politics and more.
Since we are rapidly approaching the season of summer reruns this might be a great time to turn to the internet and be entertained and maybe feed your brain too! Be aware that not everything is kid-rated and when I signed up for an account there was no question about age.

If you prefer all educational videos produced by students and educators check out the channels on TeacherTube. The site is growing everyday with more to choose from. The videos are groups by subject (with a brand new category for Student Products) and there is a contest going on right now – sign up for an account for a chance to win a laptop and get another entry for each friend you invite that signs up! Maybe they will throw in a chance for me since I’m blogging about them. You can also join groups that focus on specific interests. You can embed their videos and link to them. You could save the link in your lesson plan and have access to the video without your district having to host it on the server. When you sign up for an account you are asked to certify that you are over 18 and you must agree to their terms of use and privacy policy. I’m in awe of the talent out there!

You may already be watching TV on your computer and if you have a link to a great resource I’d love to hear about it!

I am working on a tutorial for setting up blogs on our district server and I started it in PowerPoint but was recently told by a friend that you can open a PowerPoint in KeyNote on the Mac, export it as a Quicktime Video and even add audio using GarageBand. I am going to give it a whirl and I will blog about the outcome later.

Comments?

seenoevil Just a short note – on the very slim chance that you actually subscribe to this blog, there was a nasty link left in comments some time ago. I have a feed for comments on my google page and while I removed the actual comment, it still shows up in my feed on google. It may have something to do with google and how it caches pages. If this is happening to you I apologize but am unable to remove it from the feed for some reason. I don’t know if this has happened in bloglines or any other feed reader so if you subscribe and don’t have the porn comment showing then I am glad – if you do, cruise by and leave a comment or two and maybe it will move far enough down the list to not be staring you in the eye LOL