Have you asked Ms. Dewey about our President?

You have to meet Ms. Dewey! Yup. An essential web experience! Ask her questions, she not only gives you actual links to sites, she herself is a sight!. Way too much fun.

Glogging with Boogle

So it looks like Google ate Blogger. If you want to blog with blogger.com, you have to also be a Googler with google.com. This means you need to have a Google account. Well that's OK, you get their gmail account along with it and a google start page, etc.... but it begins to feel creepy right about now. Everything connected to Google. They've got my house on Google Earth, my thoughts on blogger, and my mail on gmail....... and they totally know anything about everything, just ask them.
Soon all my blogs will move to the new location. They will put a click box on my login to let me know it's my turn to switch over to Glogging with Boogle, or something like that.
In the meantime check out MsDewey.

Born Again......

I started a new life this weekend. I'm seriously having fun, exploring this world. A MMORG (massively multiplayer online Roleplaying Game) could take over your real life I suppose, but I'm trying to imagine this as a viable tool in education. Wouldn't it be so exciting to actually learn about things is such a stimulating interactive environment where you can talk to people, build things, work together to make communities, etc. So many avatars (people) I met helped me learn how to navigate, get things I needed and be able to operate there. Humm....... this could become addictive I'm sure.

Skills for Learning?

I read this today on Will's blog.
Wow. Play in school? Adopt alternative identities? Use content, not regurgitate it. Wouldn't it be loverly?

A Read/Write Web Learning Curriculum

Clarence summarizes the points in Henry Jenkins’ latest white paper and adds more fuel to the conversation in terms of moving away from teaching content simply to regurgitate it and moving toward teaching content in the context of developing skills for learning, and I think they are worth repeating here:

• Play— the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
• Performance— the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
• Simulation— the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
• Appropriation— the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Multitasking— the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
• Distributed Cognition— the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
• Collective Intelligence— the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
• Judgment— the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
• Transmedia Navigation— the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
• Networking— the ability to search for,synthesize,and disseminate information
• Negotiation— the ability to travel across diverse
  communities,discerning and respecting multiple perspectives,and
  grasping and following alternative norms.

Creativity - What's missing in Ed - U - K - shun

Watch this video of a speech given by Ken Robinson given at the TED Conference 2/06. This just about gets at what scares me so much about what's happening in our schools.

Free online storage - 1 Gig!

Have your students set up an account here. It's better than a floppy or even a flash drive. It's a place to put all the files, documents, photos, etc. they may need for projects at school. Easy to use and available anywhere, any platform.

Found Flock

Just loaded Flock to my new iMac Intel. It looks pretty neat. I had to open Flock using Rosetta Stone. I found out about this at the plugin site. I couldn't view the flash content when I opened Flock, but the plugin site had directions on how to set Flock to open in Rosetta. I like the instant access to photos from my Flickr collection. I can also publish instantly to this blog, or any other that I chose as the default blog.

Blogged with Flock

eyespot.com

Just made this little bitty video totally online with eyespot.... my camera, my photo collection and some sound from the site. Not bad

Posting a movie to a blog

It is possible to link a movie file to your blog. To do this I had to load my finished movie to a server. I used my FirstClass web account on our server at school. I Upload-ed the movie file to my HomePage folder. I then created this post and used my webpage address, ending with the name of the movie file stored in the HomePage folder. The movie downloads to the viewer's machine and they may view it with Windows Media Player or other media player. The movie I used is the sample project for the Word-Video class in Windows MovieMaker2 I recently offered my MEET team at BHS. It defines the word tome.

Tastes Great!

I've been working to update my Backflip online collection to del.icio.us. I love the way you can sort the tags and also collaborate with others to create collections. This has great potential for school. Teachers and students could work together to make lists of resources for research projects. You have to work with it a bit to get the sense of it. But it WORKS! Make sure you use Firefox as the menu icons for tagging and accessing your page are really helpful. Can also use I.E.

PowerGramo to record Skype conversations

PowerGramo is a powerful realtime recording solution for Skype. You can record and replay any Skype call easily and simply.

This free download is available for PC platform only at this point. I have not tried it, but thought it sounded very interesting. I listened to a conversation on a blog that had been recorded using it. The conversation was very clear. The directions suggest you transfer the PowerGramo .wav file to an mp3 file using Audacity. If you post to a blogger.com blog, you'll need to save the mp3 file to a web server for blogger to access.

Blog Safety

Blog Safety has many links for teens, parents, teachers and adult bloggers to learn about the benefits of safe blogging. Good tips, rules and advice presented well for teens and parents.

Podcasting - Directions to start

Blogger is not our first choice for weblog-based podcasting. Movable Type and Wordpress are better solutions for many podcasters, because they offer better support for podcasting, more power and greater flexibility.
Nevertheless, many podcasters are finding Blogger to be a good starting place to experiment with podcasting. Blogger is a free service, and getting started is as easy as filling out some forms on the web.
Here's a quick guide to building a podcast with Blogger. You should be able to set up a podcast using Blogger and FeedBurner in about the time it takes for all the images on this page to finish loading!
The directions also suggest you use Audacity (a free download) to create your podcast. You need to link to the saved .MP3 file that you've stored on a server.

Seedwiki

seedwiki -to start a wiki or a blog you need an account, accounts are free, with no limits on the number of wikis or blogs or the number of participants the only information required is your name and email address
I've just started a wiki to help keep track of the wireless laptop cart in the BHS library. People will be able to reserve the cart by adding their name to a calendar that I made on the wiki. Others can freely change the page to keep track of the usage of the cart.

Sir Tim has a blog!

Go read how the world so loves Sir Tim and the weely wonderful web he wove for us!

Tim Talking in Lexington

Tim Berners-Lee speaking in Lexington 12/10/05

Tim Talks in Lexington

Waiting to hear Tim Berners-Lee begin speaking at the Museum of Our American Heritage, Lexington, MA on Saturday, Dec. 10, 2005.

Setting up a blog for high school students

An English teacher in Arlington did this for her class. The kids didn't know each other's usernames, but she did. They knew she knew, but they didn't know who was who.
What I did to set up the blogs was a little labor intensive but saved me some headaches down the road. Basically, I set them all up and made passwords myself, then just gave the students their usernames and passwords. Blogger doesn't require that the email addresses be unique, so I set up a free dummy account on Yahoo and used that for all of the invitations ... the trick is that each invite only works once so you have to send the invite (while logged on to your blogger site), use it to set up that account (create username and password), and then send the next invite, repeat, repeat. So it really helped to set up all usernames and passwords in advance and put them in an Excel table so it was just "copy, switch apps, paste, tab," etc, etc. The other trick is to use two different browsers or even two computers side by side so that you don't have to log in and out of your own account each time.

Then I used that Excel table to do a mail merge in Word so that each student had some simple instructions to go with. I'll attach what that file looked like in case it can be of use.

No Nav Bar

If you don't want the top most navigation bar on your blog you can paste code into the template of your blog and remove it. This gets rid of the, Go to Next Blog option which may not always be a desirable option, especially with young bloggers. Click on the title to take you to the code directions.

Skype

Skype is a little program for making free calls over the internet to anyone else who also has Skype. It’s free and easy to download and use, and works with most computers.
I have loaded it to my 6 year old G3 at home and am looking for people to "skype" with. My name is su02420 (those are zeros, not o's as in my zipcode). The sound of the person you are talking to comes through the computer's speakers and is much like talking on a speaker phone. I have a mic plugged in and just sitting on my desktop and I can talk and type. We are planning to try Skype in Kindergarten classes to see if kids would be able to communicate between classrooms. There is a search feature that lets you see who else in online and interesting in having a chat. And they are ALL over the world! Definitely worth a try.