A WikiPlaces First!!!!

Have you every been to Hafford, Saskatchewan in Canada?
Here is your chance...

Students from grade 2 and grade 5/6 have collaborated on a page in WikiPlaces. They have created an illustrated alphabet of their town from Asphalt through Water. They have taken the photos themselves. This is the most complete page in the entire WikiPlaces wiki. Drop by and leave them a comment.

Three cheers also go out to their teacher who stuck with the project despite numerous technical challenges and unintentional misinformation from me.

(And if seeing their page inspires you, create a free Wetpaint account and add your own page or add on to someone else's. If you'd like to add a page with your class, click here for teacher suggestions.)

Do You Make Step-by-Step Directions on a Mac?

If you spend time making illustrated, step-by-step directions to show your staff how to complete certain tech tasks, then let me share a few programs I started using.

At work on my Windows XP machine I have SnagIt! which is a great screen capture program that lets you highlight, add arrows, and add text to the image after you capture it. It does a lot more than that, actually, but that is how I am using it.

Now that my parents have a Mac at home, I find myself wanting to send them directions but hated the thought of taking all those screen captures, importing them into a word processor, and then saving them out as a PDF or JPEG. I found it especially annoying that using the screen capture tools built into OS X creates a PDF instead of a JPEG. You can open the image in Preview and save it into a different format, but you lose image quality. And you could pull it into Photoshop or Graphic Converter, but I just want to send them some quick directions, not take on a big project.

The good folks at the EdTech listserv gave me good suggestions and I found a few on my own. Let me share them.

InstantShot! from Digital Waters is a free tool for creating screen captures and saving them into the format you want, including JPEG, TIFF and PNG. It is simple to use and works well. Using it already seems like second nature.

However, InstantShot! does not let you mark up the image, so I invested in FlySketch from Flying Meat which cost $20. It is powerful but not as intuitive as I'd hoped. However, they have a good manual and it gets the job done.


After buying it I heard about ImageWell and it is my new favorite tool. It is free and it lets you mark up an image. It also makes it really easy to resize an image and save it into the format you want. It watermarks and adds drop shadows. It packs many features into a compact window and even has iDisk integration. There are other features available for a fee, such as batch processing and being able to work with more than one image at a time.
(Note: This is NOT an image capture program. It works with images that you have already captured.)

I've already used it to make nifty directions and to add speech balloons to family photos -- my cats have never been so talkative.

Finally a Use for a Wiki

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may have noticed two recurrent themes: wikis and inspirational procrastination. Today saw the convergence of those themes into one useful project.

Last week I read this great blog article at Common Craft about using a wiki to plan a group trip. I jumped on the idea because I am hoping to meet my sister and parents in New Zealand at some time during the 2007-2008 school year.

Planning this trip could be a bit tricky. None of us have been there. I don't yet know my school calendar for that year, and we are living on different continents. Using a wiki to plan the trip seemed like just the tool to get us organized and to let me get my feet wet using a Wikispaces for a real project. We could plan it all via Skype and email, but this way, information is in one common place rather than spread across inboxes in different email accounts.

Which wiki to use? For more than a year, I've been exploring wikis, looking for the killer platform. For now, I've decided that their isn't one best wiki platform; they each have their strengths which makes different ones "best" for different jobs.

I chose Wikispaces for this project, instead of PBWiki or Wetpaint because I wanted to be able to upload more files and images than they allow. I wanted to embed gadgets. I also like being able to download a backup of the entire wiki. Finally, this wiki doesn't need to be lovely, but it does need to be easy to use, which ruled out some of the other wiki platforms that don't have easy editors.

I'm not going to link to my wiki from here to protect my family's privacy, but I will share a few nifty things I did. The first was create a trip tools page. On that page, I embedded a number of Google gadgets, such as a currency converter set to convert US dollars to New Zealand dollars. Another showed gadget placed time zone clocks on the page so at a glance we can tell the current time in Minnesota, New Zealand and Singapore.

Another nifty gadget was an editable calendar. We can add meetings and to-dos as we search for common travel dates. Eventually we can plan the itinerary on it.
There are thousands of these gadgets available. They could easily be added to blogs. Blogger now has a module for adding them. Even if your blog doesn't have a special tool for adding them, if you have access to your blog's template code, you could paste in the snippets of code for the gadgets. The gadgets generate their own code; all you need to do is paste it into your template where you want it to appear. (NOTE: The two gadgets I've shown here are just screen captures. I cannot insert a gadget into a post; they can only be inserted into the sidebars and possibly the footer.)

I added a number of other types of pages. One section is for brainstorming and it has places to brainstorm what we'd like to see, do, and visit. Related to that is a place for clippings of things we find online. For example, I get a Page-A-Day calendar via email and the other day it highlighted Marlbourough Sound on the south island. I pasted that into the wiki for my family to see. (Of course I linked back to the actual calendar page.)

Another section is for actual web resources, such as New Zealand tourism pages, guidebook websites, and airfare search engines. Still another section that is empty at this point, is where we can start uploading our itinerary information as it develops, including links to accommodations, tours we plan to take, etc.

A final section is for to-do lists and to-bring lists. My thought is that having online to-bring lists may help us each remember things we might not have thought to bring, and to prevent duplication of items (e.g. we really don't each need to bring a first aid kit).

Getting up to speed was painless. My only frustrations were that I still can't get tables to work. They won't retain their formatting. It also took me a bit of searching to figure out how to track all changes to the wiki via RSS. However, I did figure it out eventually. That will be an essential piece -- I hope I can get my parents using some sort of RSS reader. I may need to find a good one that is an extension of Firefox. Can anyone recommend a good one that will run in Firefox on a Mac? Is anyone else using a wiki to plan a family trip? Any suggestions for me? How about must-see places in New Zealand?

(This was much more fun than working on my lesson plans.)

5 Things Meme

Yikes! In finally getting caught up on my blogroll, I find I was tagged. Here goes...

1. My first car was a '72 Dodge Dart. It was a generous hand-me-down from my sister. It had a slant 6 engine and wing vents. (In my opinion, wing vents are way better than sliced bread. ) It was a 12 year old car by the time I started driving it so I learned a fair amount about cars as parts of it wore out. When it died, it made sure I knew it, spewing oil, brake fluid and coolant on that final drive home -- its way of saying, "Stop putting money into me! You have tuition to pay." I found this Creative Commons photo of a 74 Dart. Same color. Same white walls and wing vents., but far less rusty than my Dart. -- Thanks BreakfastPirate for Flickring this image.



2. Lest the previous bit mislead you, I am one of the least mechanical people on earth. It was so bad that back in college, I used to get locked into people's cars unable to figure out the new style of door locks to free myself. Careful study has solved that particular problem, but new ones arise constantly. Most recently, I've noticed that Kent quietly assembles any furniture I haul home. He's never said anything about my lack of ability, but I guess he's tired of perching precariously on the rickety things I have assembled.



3. My family name was Sedrowski. When my great grandparents immigrated to the US from Poland, immigration officials suggested they shorten it. Family legend has it they looked in an atlas and saw Sedro-Woolley, Utah which inspired them to shorted the name to Sedro.



4. Three different summers in the 1990s I took part in the Ride Across Minnesota for Multiple Sclerosis. It involves biking 300-350 miles in five days for a very worthy cause. Along the way you meet great people and get to tent on a lot of small town football fields and in parks. Even if you've never done any sort of long distance riding, consider taking part in this ride. It is worth it-- and you end up with great biker legs for the rest of the summer.



5. I am short for an American. I am 5 feet O inches tall. I am so short that when I unexpectedly catch sight of myself in a shopping mall mirror, I don't think, "Hey, That's me!", I think "Whoa! That woman is really short!" and THEN I realize it is me. Living in Asia has been a real trip because for the first time in my adult life I blend right in, can see at parades and movie theaters, and can reach the handles on kitchen cupboards. Of course, I still can't find clothes that fit me here either, but that would be hoping for too much.
   

There. Now let's hear from Annie Donwerth Chikamatsu, Kim Cofino, Dr. Bruce, and Stephen Lazar.

Need Help From a Bloglines User

I have long envied the spiffy blogrolls some edubloggers have in their sidebar. I've found many good blogs from them. I want to add one to my sidebar.

I have a Bloglines account so I used the wizard in their Share feature. It generates a snippet of code that I added to my sidebar. It sounds simple, but every time I try I get the following error message in my sidebar:

The user name you are using to access this blogroll is incorrect. Be sure you use your Bloglines user name and not your email address. Click here to create or edit your user name.

The link takes you right into my accounts page in Bloglines. I get this message regardless of whether I use my login email address or what seems like the logical user name derived from it. I've search through all the options and account info, but nothing else seems to be a user name.

Next I tried to follow the Bloglines method of viewing a person's public blogroll

http://www.bloglines.com/public/USERNAME

However, regardless of what I type as user name, I get the following message,

You have entered an incorrect user name.

Then I wondered if maybe none of my blogroll is public. I search all through their help files and the settings again, but couldn't find a way to make things public. Next, I tried creating a folder titled public and dragging things into it, but that doesn't seem to solve the problem either. I even tried renaming the folder to /public but Bloglines wouldn't accept that.

Anyone know how to fix this problem? Please let me know. I've spent far too much time on it.

Hey! Take part in the survey!

If you are an educational blogger, you've probably read about Dr. Scott McLeod 's survey in 15 other places already. But have you filled it out already? If not, read on to see what he said at his blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, and then follow the link.

Hear ye! Hear ye!

All education bloggers are hereby invited and encouraged to...

1. complete the short and completely unscientific, but hopefully interesting, education blogosphere survey;
2. forward the URL of said survey to all other known education bloggers to ensure decent representation of the education blogosphere; and
3. publicize said survey URL on their own blogs to foster greater participation in this most noble endeavor.

Survey results received by Sunday, January 14, shall be posted in the town square on Wednesday, January 17.

Those solicited who choose not to participate shalt be labeled both publicly and widely as dastardly scoundrels, notty-pated hedgepigs, or beslubbering, doghearted, maggot-ridden canker-blossoms!

Fanning the Flames of Your RSS Addiction

Kent and I each bought a MacHeist bundle, which was a Good Thing and brought me lots of new apps to explore. I let Kent choose my Pangea game since he'd be the one playing it, but yesterday I dug into NewsFire, the shareware RSS reader that was part of the bundle.

I've been using NetNewsWire Lite, which was doing a pretty good job of meeting my needs. I didn't expect this one to be very different, but since it wasn't free, I expected it to have a few more bells and whistles. I decided to give it a whirl.

What a whirl! What it does best is keep your unread feeds at the top of the list so you don't waste time scrolling through them. To do this, as soon as you finish reading one feed, it drops down the list and the next unread feed slides into first place. At first all this motion is a bit disconcerting, but that feeling soon gives way to appreciation for how efficient this is.

Another thing it does well is grouping. I was able to easily organize my feeds into groups, and now as I add new feeds, I get a nice drop down menu that lets me select which group to add them to.

It has good keyboard shortcuts to make your feed reading efficient. Many of its behaviors can be configured from the preference pane. The more I use it, the more I find the software becomes invisible because it is doing its job well.

The MacHeist deal is over, but you can buy Newsfire at the NewsFire website.

Does Your Blog Have a Gender?

Today, Lancerlord shares information about The Gender Genie. Paste a chunk of text from your blog into the Gender Genie, and it will make an educated guess as to whether the chunk was written by a male or female.

How does it work? The site says...

Inspired by an article in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author.

I tried it with a short entry that was judged far more feminine than masculine. Then I read that it works best on text with 500 or more words, so I plunked in a larger text and that was much more masculine than feminine. Dejá vu! Way back in college, the professional inventories I took listed me as scoring similarly as male teachers who liked their jobs, but not female teachers who did. Whatever.

Give it a try. Let us know how it did with your writing.

Switching Templates Again/Trying Out Blogger's New Custom Templates

All right. Since the switch to the new Blogger went so smoothly, I decide to play around with one of the new features, custom layouts. I was hoping that there would be a few new templates in there to play with, but there aren't. Despite that I switched to a new, old template. Green again. I seem to have a thing for green templates.

I got brave and included a photo this time. Over the years I've enjoyed finally seeing photos of other bloggers, so I decided to include mine. Unfortunately, most photos I have of myself were taken on holidays, and I only seem to travel to really hot, humid places, which don't make for a portrait you'd want to hang on a blog. This photo is a crop out from a snapshot taken at school, hence the arm growing out of my head. It's also a bit fuzzy, but it's the best I have at the moment.

But that is more than enough about me. More important are these new custom layouts. They are pretty slick. You get to build your page in a modular way. You have lots of options of things to add to your sidebar, such as lists of links, photos, logos, feeds from other sites, and HTML code from other sites, such as counters. Once you've created these modules, you can drag and drop them to where you want them. It's all very simple and doesn't require any special technical knowledge beyond knowing how to cut and paste.You've always been able to make these sorts of changes if you knew HTML code. This new system removes the need to know it.

Other changes are a redesigned Dashboard that is easier to use, posts publish much more quickly, and the spell check is less cumbersome and has a larger dictionary. Since Blogger is part of the Google empire, you do need to switch from your old login to a Google login.

The only trouble I've had was trying to access comments using Flock. However, our Internet is still a bit dodgy due to the severed cables near Taiwan, so all that may straighten out once we are back to full speed.

All in all, the new Blogger seems to be largely improved. It makes the old Blogger seem slow and outdated. Give it a try if you still haven't made the move.

Updated to the New Blogger

I haven't heard anyone complaining lately about the new Blogger causing them grief. And I heard that those of us who didn't upgrade on our own would have it thrust upon us, so I have upgraded this blog to the new Blogger. Please let me know if you experience any negative consequences from this upgrade. Thanks.

Blogger Bliss

At long last I have a bit of down time. My school has an amazing three weeks off over the holiday. I had time for a quick dash to the US to see family and friends and snow. Now I'm back in Singapore, battling jet lag and trying to finally organize and decorate the apartment-- we haven't hung any of the 30+ framed pieces of art we brought with us, much less organize any drawer or closet. It is definitely time to dig in.

However, despite tending to assorted home chores, I've been in blogger bliss because I've finally had a chance to get caught up on most of the blog feeds in my NetNewsWire Lite. I hadn't realized how much I was missing those complex, passionate, divergent, inspiring voices. I won't summarize or synthesize their posts here; one day's immersion doesn't give me enough processing time to have anything meaningful to add to the conversation. However, I will send out a HUGE generic thanks to all of you for taking the time to write, and write well. My life is richer because of you. May your new year be full of good health, enjoyable work, and time with those you love.

What Am I Doing Wrong With Trackback?

Can anyone help me with Trackback. In the previous post, I was repling to Bud Hunt and the others who posted comments on his Bud the Teacher blog. At the end of his post, there is this Trackback URL: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/7326870

I assumed that I should use that instead of the permalink for that entry when I linked back to his blog. However, when I tried to follow that link, I received the following error message:

1Trackback pings and Comments must use HTTP POST

I did a bit of searching online, but everything I read made me think I was doing it correctly. That makes it sound like a problem with Bud's blog, and maybe in this case it is, but I don't think so because I've NEVER gotten a Trackback URL to work.

Next I researched HTTP POST and found what it does but not how to use it-- it must be too complex for the WebMonkey Cheat Sheet to list.

Anyone have any suggestions?

The Homogenizing Effect of Groups?

Today over at Bud Hunt's blog, his raises the issue of whether or not we need more groups on the internet. He notes the proliferation of some seemingly closed door groups, such as tech women or young teachers*. He wonders...

At what point does joining a group mean closing a door, rather than opening one?

This is, of course, a complex issue. Many moons ago, the Utne Reader devoted an issue to the topic of salons. If I am remembering correctly, they made the argument that instead of fostering diversity, the easier technology made communication, the fewer diverse opinions we were exposed to.

In the past, we often lived in communities that were diverse because they were comprised of people of different ethnic backgrounds, different occupations, etc. Sitting on the front stoop at night, they were exposed to a variety of opinions. Now, given a variety of factors such as more free time than 100 years ago, more people having cars, etc, people are leaving their neighborhoods to find like-minded communities of people who share their values and interests. They may be talking to people from all over the city but they are hearing less variety of ideas. The Utne's answer was to create a series of salons to put people back into heterogeneous groups to expose them to wider opinion, making them better informed.

In a similar way, online groups can be networks of like-minded people, or they can be doorways to new ideas and view points. In my opinion, the best online groups are both. Most of the online education or tech groups that I have stumbled across are trying to be both.

So then, why the gate? I don't know, but I have a few ideas:

1. Seven years ago I read an article about a survey that was done. Even back then when the Internet was much smaller, and less widely- used, 80% of teachers surveyed were more likely to seek mentoring and assistance online that from the teacher in the next room. Of course, after all this time I don't remember the source and I didn't know the methodology, such as maybe it was an Internet survey which would have slanted the results. In any case, that article has stuck with me all this time because of what it says about schools and about the power of the internet.
   
   
   
2. My first year in Malaysia, I was invited to be part of a women's group. The coordinator brought together eight women from our pre K-12 school. We met once a week to do something. We took turns leading, so that something ranged from discussions to feasts to flower arranging. The coordinator intentionally limited the membership to eight because that is an effective group size for discussions. She hand selected the members because she wanted diversity. The group was pure delight and I looked forward to it each week both for the fun of it and for feeling that I belonged somewhere. The group was small enough that I mattered and I was known as an individual.
   
   
   
3. I think most of us have had the misfortune to be on a committee whose membership was too diverse and its charge too poorly defined. Committees like that lack the common ground needed for clear communication, and there is often too little trust among member for them to be comfortable delegating. As a result, everyone slogs through all of it together, and the differences of opinion become paralyzing.
   

My point? The world is big. We all need to feel we belong somewhere. Ideally, the groups we join stretch and challenge us while also making us welcome. Hopefully these new online groups that are arising will be of that best sort. I hope they are focused enough to meet their goals, and diverse enough to stretch their members. I wish them success.

*[NOTE: I said seemingly closed door groups because the women's tech group allows men to join, and possibly the age-defined group actually allows people of any age to join.]

Virtual Blogging

Aiyoh! (as we say in Singapore) How can a month have passed since I last blogged? Does blogging in my mind count? If so, here's what I blogged about since November 18...

• how my students coding web pages project has gone, including what they've learned , what I learned, and how I plan to work with it next school year
• budgets, budgeting, and the gleeful feeling that arises when the budgets are done
• server quotas, server quota software, and what happens when automatic warnings regarding people's accounts being too full are blocked by the malware catchers
• the next twist in our interactive whiteboard pilot
• CustomTyping.com
• Questions about structuring effective professional development for the big things and the small things

I'd really blog about those things now, but tomorrow is our last day of school before the winter holiday. Sunday at 6:00 am I climb on a plane to head to Minnesota. Life just keeps moving!

Kidpixing in their Zone of Proximal Development

Two weeks ago I had the good fun of introducing (or reviewing) all the main tools in Kidpix to my third grade classes. I felt like Santa Claus as they oohed and ahhed over each new tool.

This week, they needed to use those tools to create an illustration. Exactly what they needed to create varied by class. Some teachers wanted them to create an illustration for a story they typed. Others wanted a picture of something from their assembly. Still others were creating cards.

In all cases, I told the kids that this was a graphic art and design unit, so we weren't going to use the stickers, stamps, animations and backgrounds that are already in Kidpix. Those are off limits because they are now learning to create their own.

The assignment was challenging. They've been using Kidpix for years, but relying on those ready-made elements. This pushed them to really get to know the tools, to experiment with different sizes of lines, different brushes and textures.

Most kids were frustrated. Give them a crayon or a marker and they could have translated their idea to paper in 15 minutes. Here they worked for 30 minutes and most were just starting to find their way by the end of the session. However, I could tell they were in their Zone of Proximal Development because they weren't quiting. It was tough, but it was an interesting challenge.

I was pleased to see a number of things.

1. Few children were erasing the entire picture if their was one mistake-- they were able to use the small erasers and make revisions.
2. They are starting to make efficient use of the tools, such as using the fill buckets to fill large areas rather than coloring it all by hand.
3. They are exploring and refining their skills. I watched them figuring out and then staying with the most effective line sizes, types of media, etc.
4. They are learning from each other. One child used the pattern fill bucket to create a design on a person's shirt. Soon we had patterned carpets, buildings, etc.
5. Very few gave up or were so distracted by the bells and whistles in KidPix that they couldn't stay on task.

We should finish up the pictures this week. I think we need to follow up with another assignment that is "same same but different" as they say in Thailand.

Wikis + Webquests = Perfect Union?

I was replying to a post on the EdTech listserv the other day, when I came up with an idea I like... why not make Webquests using a wiki?

For those of you who teach teachers to create web quests, it gives you a lot more bang for your buck because you are helping them become familiar with wikis while also creating web quests. Your students (and you) will be able to comment on each other's works in progress. And they will see each other's works which may raise the over all level of quality as one good idea leads to another. It would also support teachers working together on the same web quest if you offer that option.

You could create a class wiki and within that create a page for that term. All your students could create a link on that term page to their own web quest wiki, giving your class a one-stop place from which to reach each others' wikis-in-progress.

At the end of the term, you could have them place a link to their wiki on a category page in your wiki (e.g. Science Webquests, Elementary Math Webquests). This would give you an ever-growing library of examples for future classes to explore and build upon.

I think the teachers should create their own wikis (especially since Wikispaces gives teachers free, ad-free) wikis rather than make each of theirs an actual part of your class wiki. That way, they have their own wiki when the class is over. They can continue to add to it, use it with their students, etc.

There is a lot to be said for adding web quests to some of the repositories already in existence, but if you don't do that with your classes, try this-- and let me know how it worked, since I'm not teaching any college courses this year.

No More WebGenies; Welcome the WebMonkies!

Tonight I was actually using the HTML tags that I've been teaching the kids. I was creating a survey in Zoomerang and using the tags to format the text and lists.

Unfortunately, the font was being dodgy. The title was in a different font than the rest of the page, so I decided to go into WebGenies (which I wrote about earlier this week) to find the tag for setting the font.

Imagine my horror when I received this message...

After 5 years WebGenies: Website Design for Kids has now closed. Thank you to all those people who emailed to say they found it useful.

For excellent information on website design for kids please see WebMonkey for kids

Talk about bad timing! Fortunately, the WebMonkey site is excellent and it even goes into a much more detailed explanation of tables, which I know my students will need to help them with layout.

"Web Page Success!" or "Why I Love Teaching Fourth and Fifth Graders"

A big thanks to everyone who commented on my idea of teaching my students to write HTML code rather than using FrontPage to create their student web sites. I appreciate your insights.

Based on your feedback, I have decided to go ahead and teach my fourth and fifth graders how to code their own pages. We may eventually switch back to FrontPage, but for now we are working in Wordpad and previewing in Internet Explorer (because that is the only browser we HAVE.)

I am using a site called WebGenies as the backbone of my lessons. Thus far, it is written at just the right level, or rather, it is in their Zone of Proximal Development, which is just what I want.

In lesson 2 it gives them guidelines for designing their site. After reading those, students fired up Inspiration and began to develop their web plan. For now, those plans are long on ideas and short on actual content, but at least the students have begun thinking.

Next, we jumped ahead to lessons 6-8 which introduce HTML, first the idea, and then the actual tags. It steps them through coding a really simple web page.

I do a lot of modeling. For example, today I showed them how to line up two different windows on their desktop so that they can see the directions and their code at the same time. I modeled right-clicking on their index.html file so they can "open with" Wordpad and Internet Explorer. I modeled typing the opening and closing tags for a section first, and then clicking between them to insert content. Most importantly, I modeled the repeated process of re-saving the Wordpad document and then refreshing their browser window so they can view changes.

I figure this first page is the most difficult because they need to get their brains around the idea of a computer language, of tags, of opening and closing tags. To my delight, they are getting it.

I worried that these tech savvy kids would be underwhelmed by their efforts to code, since most have already used FrontPage to some degree and they all visit complicated sites on the web. Thus far my fears were unfounded.

My hopes that because coding is a constructive, generative process, that the children would see the value and experience success have proven accurate. The class sessions are full of Ahas! In typical nine-and-ten-year-old fashion, cries of "Yes! I rock!" can be heard when they first view their very simple page in Internet Explorer. I've seen a few happy dances and a great many broad smiles of self-delight.

One fifth grader took an after school class last year that involved coding web pages. She remembers a bit of it and is already one of our "experts". In general, I am delighted that kids are starting to develop a playful, "I wonder what happens if I do this?" attitude, which is just what is needed, both in this activity and in life. Many of our students, especially our Asian students, are afraid to take risks so I rejoice to see them boldly tweaking tags and quickly refreshing their browser to see the results.

The class sessions fly by because I am so busy. We are just starting to grow our own experts so for now, I am in big demand. I worried that the kids would get frustrated waiting for me, but many of them have said as they walked out, "Class was short today" or "Was that really 45 minutes?"

Our next lesson helps us spice up our page with formatting tags such as bold, italic and color. After that, we need to go back to planning, figuring out the navigation links they need on each page and on the home page. We'll also learn how to create a template so that they aren't coding each page from scratch. I am thinking I should create a few resources on the server as well, such as writing the code for a basic table so that they can copy that and paste it in. I'd rather have them tweak that code than spend days creating their own from scratch. I only get to work with them once per week, and this is one project that their teachers won't be able to work on outside of class, at least not until we have a few more student experts.

[UPDATE: The WebGenies site just closed! Fortunately, they recommend using WebMonkey which is another excellent resource.]

Kayaking for Airfares

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
I'm 0-2 so far with travel agents here in Singapore. We used one agent for our Depavali trip and he messed up costing us a bunch. I used a different agent to book my trip back to the USA for Christmas. I booked back in August. Due to some lack of communication between Northwest Airlines and my agent, my ticket has now doubled in price. I am not amused.

And so, I spent a chunk of time online tonight to see if I could find replacement airfare. In the process I learned three things...

1. Many of the discount airfare sites such as Travelocity and Orbitz can only book flights originating in the USA.
2. As bad as the new price for my ticket is, my travel agent was quoting me the cheapest current price.
3. Kayak.com finds the most flights at the best prices.

Kayak is an interesting site. It really is a meta search engine. It checked over 300 airlines. It found far more flights from far more carriers than the other flight search engines I tried, and I tried a bunch of them. It found prices as cheap as the carriers' web sites which usually boast that they have the cheapest flights. Kayak's price quotes include all airport taxes.

I hope you never find yourself in my position. But if you do, check, Kayak. They also book hotels and rental cars.

Protect Your Creativity and Share Your Ideas and Work

Wonderful Creative Commons has made it even easier to license your work. In the past, copyright was your only way to protect your work. Now there is Creative Commons which is free and much more flexible. The licenses run the full range from almost total protect under copyright to total permission of Public Domain, and everything in-between. It applies to all types of creative work including audio, video, images, text and educational materials. To get a feel for it, scroll down to see the nifty new Creative Commons banner in my sidebar. Click on it and you can see the license I've placed on this blog.

I love the idea of Creative Commons because I believe the increasingly restrictive copyright laws in the US are stiffling creativity and the movement of ideas. However, I've also watched as generous educators freely shared their work online, only to have it picked up and sold commercially by unscrupulous companies who provide no support to the original author. Creative Commons allows you to prevent that type of abuse, or at least gives you recourse if it occurs.

I also love Creative Commons because it allows me to bring my students to places like Flickr and use Flickr's Creative Commons search section to find images that we absolutely, positively have permission to use, and it makes it easy for us to give the creator credit for their work.

To add a spiffy Creative Commons license and banner to your blog, wiki or other creative work, the Creative Commons website has a really easy to use tool to create your own license. It asks you questions, and then based on your responses creates your license and spits out the code so you can add it to your blog or wiki.

To add the banner and link to your blog or wiki, you do need access to your blog or wiki's code (e.g. In Blogger, I go to my Dashboard and click on the template tab.) Alternately, you can save the banner as a graphic, and just upload it to your blog or wiki and then make that image a link back to the Creative Commons license of your choice on the Creative Commons website. I had to take that route on my WikiPlaces project. All Wetpaint wikis are protected under a Creative Commons license, but I wanted it to be visible on my wiki so I added it that way.

And as long as we are talking about Creative Commons, it is their annual fundraising time. If you are so inspired, you can support them financially. You can also support them by spreading the word. They have this nifty banner on their web site to help you do that.

Google has added Jotspot to its Web 2.0 Empire

Google has acquired Jotspot, so now Google has a wiki as part of it's Web 2.0 empire. Jotspot is not accepting new users as it migrates to Google, but you can leave your address at Jotspot's old home page and they will recontact you when it opens. I read notice about it today (which now I can't find it so I can provide a linktation to it) that said the wikis would be free. However, I'm betting they won't be Google Ad-free.

Thoughts on Student Web Pages

Our fourth and fifth graders create web sites using FrontPage. The focus of the page varies from class to class. Some teachers want the site to be an eportfolio. Some tie in with a science or social studies unit. Others are open to student choice.

I'm liking how enthusiastic students are about the project. They are busy creating backgrounds in Kidpix and creating logos at FlamingText.com. However, they are already comfortable using Microsoft Word and Powerpoint. They aren't learning much by creating web sites using FrontPage. It does the coding for them, so at the end of the unit, they really won't know much about creating a web page.

I've been toying with the idea of teaching them to write the pages from scratch. I see a number of benefits in this...

• Being able to create something from nothing is empowering.
• Coding web pages is more constructive, more generative than using a WYSIWYG editor.
  
• Pages will only be as complex as students learn to make them-- this may motivate students to learn on their own, to learn by reading.
• As motivated students learn new skills, they will become experts in the class and other students will come to them for assistance. Although it sounds like that could be destructive to a classroom community, I find it usually has the opposite effect.
• Being able to read and write HTML source code is a transferable skill. Even though I use a tool as easy as Blogger for creating this blog, I still need to be able to read code to add items to the sidebar. Knowing basic HTML tags comes in handy when posting to bulletin boards and forums. It transfers to working with other Web 2.0 tools such as wikis and Moodle.
  
• It is a programming language of sorts. Our elementary curriculum does not have any programming in it yet.
• Microsoft Office 2007 will not use the proprietary formats we are used to such as .doc or .xls. The new Office applications will save as XML, a mark up language. It isn't the same as HTML, but from what I read about it, having experience coding HTML will make XML easier to understand. (Makes me think of the days when I used Word Perfect and would use the Reveal Codes command to troubleshoot when something wasn't working correctly.)
  

Of course, in this day and age, part of me says it's daft to code by hand. No one does it. It is too tedious, too easy to mistype something and then spend ages pouring through code to find the error. I'm also turning an easy to teach unit into something much more challenging to teach. I seem to do that often.

I did look at using a combination of blogs and wikis instead of creating web pages. However, that was presenting hurdles that I don't have time to resolve at the moment. For example, none of the school-friendly wiki platforms work well at my school due to how tightly the computers are locked down and because we only have Internet Explorer which often seems to play poorly with Web 2.0 apps. There are battles worth fighting in there, but I can't do it all right now.

So what do you think? Do the benefits outweigh the hassles? Is HTML a dying language or a valuable skill for the future? Is it age appropriate for 9- 11 year olds?

Free Weather Stickers For Your Site

Living in the tropics is a bit of a stretch for a Minnesotan like me. Minnesota still has many farms, and the weather in Minnesota can change drastically from day to day, even from morning to night. As a result, Minnesotans talk about the weather. Often.

When I moved to KL, I found that I didn't know how to start conversations because no one discussed the weather. No one discussed it because it was always pretty much the same.

Eventually I got over it, but now that I'm back in S.E. Asia, I found myself thinking about weather. To my delight, I discovered free weather stickers for your website from Wunderground. I've chosen a pretty basic one here with a white background so that it will be visible in my sidebar. However, they have all sorts of spiffy ones. Some are even interactive.

I'm thinking my students would really enjoy putting these on their web sites. Living overseas seems to make many children patriotic. They could put their hometown instead of Singapore.

To get your own banner ...

1. Go to http://www.wunderground.com/
2. Enter your city (or country) in the search field at the top of the page.
3. When it takes you to your place's weather page, scroll down to almost the bottom of the page to the link for Free Weather Stickers for your Homepage.
4. Choose the style you would like.
5. Copy the code that is generated into your blog or web site's template.
   

Google for Educators

I received an announcement today that Google has an outreach program for educators. To quote from their web site...

Google recognizes the central role that teachers play in breaking down the barriers between people and information, and we support educators who work each day to empower their students and expand the frontiers of human knowledge. This website is one of the ways we're working to bolster that support and explore how Google and educators can work together.

Read more about it here:
http://www.google.com/educators/index.html.

WikiPlaces: the Essence of Your Favorite Places

Do any of your classes study a country or a city? Study your own community or neighborhood? Does your school have a photography class that needs a focus? If so, they may be interested in a free, online project titled WikiPlaces: The Essence of Your Favorite Places.

This project is open to all ages. Participants are asked to help us see the essence of a place by creating an alphabet book page for that place. For each letter, tell us a word and include a photo of that object. This may be a simple type of alphabet book with just the word and its image (e.g. M is for Mosque) or it may include information about the object (e.g. H is for Hornbill. Hornbills live in the tropical rain forests of S.E. Asia. They are important members of the rain forest ecosystem because of the role they play in seed dispersal.)

Participants are not required to address all 26 letters for their place. In fact, leaving some letters blank invites others to add to your pages. Pages are easily edited and revised.

The project is built on the WetPaint wiki platform. WetPaint was chosen because of its EasyEdit interface, its elegant page look, and its ease of working with images. No wiki programming is required. After clicking on a page's edit button, you are given a toolbar which allows you to add links, add video and images, and make formatting changes.

Registration at Wetpaint is required. Registration is free and does not lead to spam. Teachers may register a class as one user; multiple people may be logged in under the same username.


How to Take Part
(Note: If you are viewing this as plain text and cannot access the links in these directions, they are listed again at the end of the page.)

1. Go to http://wikiplaces.wetpaint.com.
   
   
2. Explore the site, especially the home page, the Getting Started page and a page in progress, such as Egypt. If you are new to using a wiki, you may want to look at the Wetpaint help page.
   
   
3. Choose a place. It could be a country, a region, a city, a neighborhood, a building or even a room.
   
   
4. Brainstorm what features, elements, objects make that place unique -- or what makes it special to you.
   
   
5. Gather images. You could take photos, use a drawing program to draw your own JPEG pictures, or find photos via Creative Commons in Flickr. Make certain your images are no larger than 400 x 500 pixels and that your file size is no larger than 500 K. If you are using someone else's images, make certain you have permission to do so. Make sure you have their URL so that you can link back to the original- that's showing good net manners.
   
   
6. Go to http://wikiplaces.wetpaint.com and register. Registration is free and doesn't lead to spam. Teachers can create a class account-- multiple people can be logged in at one time on the same account. (Note: We are requiring registration to cut down on spam and malicious edits.)
   
   
7. Login and start adding to WikiPlaces. If there is already a page in progress for your place, add to it. Don't worry that you are editing someone else's page. That's how wikis work. Or, if you'd rather, create another page for that place.
   
   If there isn't already a page, add one. You might want to copy and paste this template text onto your page to get your page going quickly.
   
   
8. Celebrate by inviting friends and family to view and leave comments on the pages you created.
   

What You Need

• digital images (from a digital camera, scanned, created in a drawing program, from an online site such as Flickr)
• a way to reduce your images to no larger than 400 by 500 pixels. File size should be no larger than 500 k.
  
• Internet access
• a reasonably current web browser:
• Firefox 1.0.7 and higher for PCs and Macs
  
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 for the PC
• Flock
  
• Some functions of Wetpaint are supported on Safari, others are not.
  

A Word on Internet Safety
Taking part in this project should not compromise your students security in any way. Students do not sign their wiki entries. People who view the page history can see who has made edits to that page. However, they only see the user name. Since participants are not identified by name or by image, no special parental permission should be required for taking part in this project.

Please share this notice with colleagues.

Links
WikiPlaces home page: http://wikiplaces.wetpaint.com
Getting Started page: http://wikiplaces.wetpaint.com/page/Getting+Started
WikiPlaces Egypt page: http://wikiplaces.wetpaint.com/page/Egypt
WikiPlaces template: http://wikiplaces.wetpaint.com/page/Template
Wetpaint Help Page: http://faq.wetpaint.com/help#top

The Check-In Problem Solved

Bud Hunt hit it right on the head... there were ways to solve our check in problem using our existing systems. He suggested voice mail and a clipboard. That's pretty close to what we've put in place.

I brought my dilemma to our Friday IT Coordinators meeting. We bandied a few ideas back and forth until Judy said, "Just schedule it as a meeting in Outlook and invite the entire staff." Duh! I was making this more difficult than it needed to be because I had forgotten Outlook's meeting schedule feature. Most staff do not use the calendar section of Outlook, and most meetings are recurring so we don't receive invitations to them. However, that feature is built right in.

This is a brilliant solution for many reasons, including...

• all our staff are familiar with our email system (possibly too familiar!)
• staff can easily access their email account via our web page (so no new web address or logins to learn)
• our staff email address book is very current; new staff members have an email address before I even know they have been hired
• we can create mail rule filters so that all the responses sort into one folder, making them easy to tally
• one person who is traveling with other school colleagues can inform us that all of them are safe: they do not all need to tie up Internet access contacting the school.

One weak point is that not all local staff has internet access at home. However, administration will tell all staff at our meetings this week that they need to check in if there is ever another disaster while we are on holiday. They may check in online via email or they may call the deputy principal. We all have his phone number and have been encouraged to take all the administration numbers when we travel.

Does your staff have a check in system in place? A phone tree may not work over the holidays when families are traveling.

Checking-In at Times of Danger

Yesterday, my administrator charged me with having in place by Monday's staff meeting a very simple online system that we can use for staff to check-in if we should have another disaster such as the tsunami.

It doesn't work to just have staff tell us their travel plans ahead of time because the staff is too large and plans change too easily. We need a super simple, online way for staff to quickly and easily check-in to let us know they are safe, and maybe give contact information for where they are on their holiday.

As I try to get my brain around what this should look like, We've come up with the following criteria.

• Should be linked to our school web site or have such an easy URL that staff will remember it.
• Should allow one person to check-in everyone they are traveling with. (Yes, this can lead to problems--everything related to user-entered data has potential for problems. It is all a balancing game.)
• Should have a comments field.
• Should have a password, but it should be one we all know- fortunately we have one of those.
  
• Should allow administrators to easily sort to determine who is not yet checked in.
• The basic login should take them to a form that helps them search for their record. However, users should be able to browse through the database in list view so that they can see that colleagues are safe.
  

I won't allow users to delete records, but I may need to allow them to add a new user since our school is large and I am not automatically notified when someone new is added to our division. However, that almost guarantees that users already in the database will re-enter themselves. Maybe users should have to option to search by name or by their school email address. Hopefully we won't have both their name and their email address incorrectly entered into the database.

I've checked out a number of applications. I first thought to use Google's spreadsheet tool, since Google's servers are so stable. However, it leaves the data too vulnerable. It's too easy for users to accidentally delete data.

Next I looked at ZohoCreator. I love the idea of that tool, but I find it terribly confusing. Every time I try to use it I watch the demo videos, and I still find myself endlessly generating views and forms and never quite getting what I expect. Despite my struggles with it, this tool could work. It allows me to create a private database and then add users to it. I can group the users and give different groups different privileges, so that staff could enter data, and administration could do more with it. ZohoCreator has the added benefit that I can embed the form on a web page or blog and still have the data stored at Zoho. We could add a page to our website and embed the form on it, making it easy for staff to use.

Then I realized that we are able to access our FileMaker server via our web site. The down side is that it is not pretty; the user is given a rather cryptic list of databases from which to choose. Another challenge is that the passwords for accessing that are already set and not as easily remembered as I want. However, I may be able to change that.

Filemaker is an appealing tool because we already have it and I've been trying to increase my abilities to create databases using it. It is powerful enough to allow us different access for different users. I can make the pages visually easy to use. I think it is the tool for the job. I can easily set up something basic, and as I have time, I can improve upon it. Wish me luck.

I welcome words of wisdom regarding the project in general or Filemaker in particular. I've taken good Filemaker courses, but I have very little experience actually creating databases.

Photos the Easy Way on Blogger

Another example of me being under rock while I figured out my life in Singapore -- I hadn't heard that Blogger changed their photo options. Now you can upload photos from your computer; you no longer need to pull them from an online location, such as a Flickr account. Possibly this option was available a long time ago for Windows, but last winter I didn't see it when uploading photos from my Mac.

When you upload them, it lets you set the alignment (left, centered, or right aligned). I had struggled to get the alignment right when I'd upload photos from Flickr.

Here's a photo I took with my camera phone on the way to work. I remember in Minnesota when I'd go into a flower shop to buy flowers to make an arrangement, flowers such as this were too dear for my budget. Here they grow everywhere. Notice the snail making a breakfast of the flower; I hadn't seen one so far out of its shell before.

New Look; Same Blog

Yep. It was time to change my blog's template. The old shade of green was making me wince each time I saw it. Not sure if this one is my final choice either. It will do for tonight.

I wonder if the color even matters anymore... does anyone actually visit blogs these days or is everyone using an RSS reader of some sort? That's a question to ponder another night, as well.

Teaching Hacks for Teachers and Tech Coordinators

I've been researching wiki platforms (again) and in the process, I rediscovered a really great resource for teachers and tech coordinators. It is a wiki titled Teaching Hacks. I think I must have visited it before because I discovered it in my own set of del.icioi.us bookmarks -- nice to see that I find such good resources :D

In any case, it has become a most impressive resource. The page with information about wikis in education is well organized and stuffed full of useful information. Here is a partial list of it's contents.

1. What is a Wiki?
2. Quick Ideas Around Classroom Uses of Wikis.
3. Pedagogy
4. Software (hosted wikis, server-side wikis, desktop wikis)
5. Practical Advice for Classroom Use (including model collaboration, assigning roles, assigning tasks, looking at contributions, recording accomplishments, using the style guide)

The actual list is much longer than this, so check it out yourself. That last item I listed really has my attention. As I read through it, I got a bunch of practical ideas for how to make wikis work in my curriculum. These aren't project ideas; they are process ideas. That information always feels like a set of power tools when I am lucky enough to find it. It jump starts me into a successful project.

And here is a list of the entire wiki's main contents. (Note: I pasted it here. Clicking on any link will take you to the actual wiki's table of contents where you make find and click any of these individual links for real.) Enjoy!

K-12 Educators Guide To Web 2.0
Weblogs in Education Alpha Stage
Social Bookmarking Tools in Education Ideas Stage
Folksonomy and Tagging Ideas Stage
Wiki: Collaborative Editing in Education Beta Stage
RSS Ideas in Education Beta Stage
Creative Commons Ideas Stage
Instant Messaging Ideas Stage
Geocaching for Educators
Information Literacy Ideas Stage
Photo Sharing in Education Ideas Stage
Video Sharing in Education Ideas Stage
Google Earth 101 for Educators
Cyberbullying 101 for Educators
Ideas for Repurposing Online Tools Ideas Stage

A Blogging Webquest

Anne Davis, one of my original inspirations to start blogging with kids, has created a great blogging webquest for students. She used Bernie Dodge's Quest Garden to create it. She uses a read, pair, share strategy as the process. In her evaluation section, she even has a 6Trait Blogging rubric. It's a great tool and I am eager to use it with children.

A Few Tips for Getting Started With New Technologies

I'm enjoying Kim Cofino's blog. She's been reading Will's book and she's diving into using new, collaborative technologies with students.

Today she blogs about being overwhelmed. At the moment, she seems to be faced with insurmountable options; there are so many good things to try, what should she try next?

Her post got me thinking about a few lessons I've learned as a technology specialist. As I typed them as a comment into her blog, I decided to also post them here.

I don't know that it so much matters where you start. Just keep these things in mind...

1. It takes three years to get most new ventures really solid. The second year is better, but the third year is golden. Multiply this by 3 if you are trying to move an entire school in a new direction instead of just yourself. (And so, be patient with yourself.)
   
2. Start small so that you don't have to fix each mistake 32 times (as in, for each of your 32 classes.
3. Keep it simple until the kids make it complex. I've seen too many tech projects on which the teachers did most of the learning (and most of the work) because the project was too big and too complex for the students. The final product looked great because the teacher did good work. On the flip side, I've seen great things happen when a few students ran with an idea. They showed up before school, after school, during recess because they were caught up in what they were doing. I don't make them keep it simple :)
   
4. Start with one really enthusiastic teacher. Again and again, I've found that one excited classroom teacher who had a good success with a new technology has far more power to get other teachers on board than you will ever have as the tech specialist.
5. If possible, keep on adding things in for your pilot class. What I find is that once they have an understanding of blogging, adding wikis or Moodle or something else doesn't take as much start up time. I found that each new thing I added (within reason) required less start up time than the one before it. It doesn't sound equitable, but remember that this is a pilot and that you'll be using what you learn to involve more classes at a later time.
6. There isn't time to fully document what you are doing. The two most important things to try to write down are your sequence (e.g. week 1 we showed the kids the blogs, set up the accounts and got everyone logged in), and to keep a notebook that is just a list of what to change for next year. It doesn't need to be pretty or organized. It just needs to be ONE place to track all those Ahas! of how you should do it differently next time. -- And DON'T wait to do it all at the end of the unit. You will have forgotten half of it, and you'll be too busy gearing up for the next unit to write.

There. None of these are earth-shattering. All of them have been said better by someone before. Now they are here. I hope they help someone.

Back to Flock

I was using Flock as my main browser for many months. Then a month or two ago, it developed a bad habit. When I was surfing, it kept popping up a window related to del.ico.us.api, asking for my login name and password. It was doing this on all sorts of sites, even some sites that don't require a user name and password. Not only would it ask for that information, but it was slow to ask for it and then would complain via other pop up windows when I wouldn't give it the information. It was making the browser unusable.

I wracked my brain...

Am I running an old version of Flock? Nope.
Is this a virus on my iBook? If it was, it was Flock-specific.
Is this some extension gone bad? I kept looking in my list of Flock extensions trying to figure out what could be causing it. Being in a new country and working in a new job, I didn't have time to keep dealing with it, so I switched back to Firefox.

Before switching I submitted a bug report to Flock. To my amazed delight, I received a very informative letter in response to that report. One bit of information was especially helpful. It mentioned that del.icio.us was making some changes on its end. That gave me hope that it wasn't really a Flock problem, but just something related to some extension that was using del.icio.us.

Today, while trying to fix my RSS feed problems, I opened Flock again. As usual, the pop up windows began demanding information. I gritted my teeth, opened up the extensions list, and deleted all but my most trusted extensions. I restarted the application and for the first time in months, was NOT greeted with a pop up window. Were I a good scientist, I would have deleted the extensions one at a time to identify the culprit. Instead, I'm a harried tech coordinator who is delighted to have this item checked off my to-do list.

To celebrate, I'm drafting this blog entry using the Flock blogging tools. It feels good to be using this rich tool again.

[P.S. In the end, I couldn't get it to publish via Flock and had to cut it and paste it directly into Blogger. I guess all problems aren't solved. ]

Elusive RSS

When I first started aggregating blog feeds to make it easier to keep up with my favorite blogs, I often had trouble finding the correct subscription address.  This was complicated by Pluck.  I was using an early version of it and when I would click on a link to someone's RSS feed, Pluck would feel obliged to launch and complicate matters, since I didn't want to store the feed in Pluck.

Over time, as Pluck matured and became a stable tool, I came to rely on it to help me find elusive RSS feeds.  I would then copy the address into my NetNewsWire Lite.  This has worked well for the past year. 

Now I am having troubles again.  Numerous times in the past week I've wanted to subscribe to the feeds on new blogs, but haven't been able to get the real feed URL.  The one that Pluck gives me doesn't work in NetNewsWIre.  I tried using the Live Bookmark feature in Firefox instead, but that was no better. I tried finding it using Flock, a web browser designed to play nicely with social web technologies, but that isn't working either. 

I thought it might be a problem with NetNewsWire Lite.  In the forums I see people are having trouble with the latest version- it isn't always updating feeds.  However, I  see no mention of my particular problem, and my feeds seem to be refreshing just fine.

I'm wondering if some of the problem is arising from new bloggers using templates with built in feed links.  It may be that they haven't activated the RSS feed feature.  I'm especially having trouble with Edublogger blog feeds, which would make sense as new teachers, not familiar with RSS, make their first attempts at blogging.

Is anyone else having this problem lately?  Anyone found a solution? I'd love to hear about it.

technorati tags:RSS, edublogs

Blogged with Flock

Geography Alert: Minnesota Suddenly Moves Closer to Singapore!

One of the most difficult aspects of living in Singapore is being so far from my family and friends back home.

One solution has been using instant messaging and VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocal) programs such as iChat or the free Skype program. I also put money into a Skype Out account so that I could use my computer to call people's telephones. To get a Skype Out account, I just followed the link within Skype. I used a credit card to purchase ten euros worth of talk time. I'm paying USD $0.02 cents per minute when I call the USA. [NOTE: Skype Out is free until the end of 2006 for making calls from computers in the USA to telephones within the USA.]

Sound quality with Skype Out is better than it was with many of the calling cards I used to purchase in Malaysia. It helps that Kent purchased an Altec Lansing headphone/ microphone combination. It plugs into a USB port and greatly improves the sound. Without a headphone, the microphone would pick up the other person's end of the conversation that was playing through the speakers. This caused annoying echoes.

When I first arrived in Singapore, I discovered that my iBook G4 didn't play nicely with Skype when running on battery. It would work fine for a few minutes, but then the person I was talking to would suddenly not be able to hear me at all. I could hear them, but nothing, including hanging up and calling them again, would restore the sound for them. Kent didn't experience this problem on his Powerbook.

Recently, Skype became even better. There is a beta version out that allows people using Macs to video chat. Although it is a beta, we have found it to be stable and easy to use. The video capabilities have been available in the Windows version of Skype for a while, so it's good to see it finally available for the Mac.

In the past week, my life took a good turn. Since moving to Singapore, I had not had much contact with my parents. I did not yet have a telephone in my home, and my parents had virus-plagued, old Windows computers so they were not able to get onto the internet at home. Tired of this situation, I bit the bullet and purchased a refurbished iMac for my parents. A great friend back home configured it and spent a few hours helping them make it play nicely with their Comcast account. This is their first foray into broadband. This is also their first Mac.

The day she brought them the computer, I received a photo they snapped of themselves using the built-in iSight camera. I am now receiving regular emails from them, and they are having fun exploring the iapps such as iTunes.

The best part came two days ago. I had the pleasure of opening Skype and seeing that my parents were online. I called their computer and within moments, I could see them and they could see me. I was able to turn my camera around so they could see my apartment and watch the cats scampering past. I could see them sitting at the desk in my childhood home. All of sudden, Minnesota feels much closer to Singapore.

USB Printer + Airport Express + Rendezvous = Wireless Printing

Did you know that if you plug a regular old USB printer into the USB port on an Airport Express base station, it will show up on your home network? You need to turn on Rendezvous, which is built into the Mac OS. As soon as you do that, voilá! The printer shows up in your printer control panel and everyone on your wireless network can access it.

We hadn't know this would work, but I noticed the USB port on the base station and had a chat with a friendly technician at the Apple Store on Orchard Road. He confirmed my suspicions and we were able to buy a Canon Pixma IP4200 instead of purchasing the more expensive wireless model or passing the printer cable back and forth when we need to print. Gotta like that!

Steep Learning Curve

Today I was amazed to realize that almost a month had passed since my previous post. I could have sworn I posted just last week. However, that is typical here. Each day rushes by and before I know it, another week has passed

As you would expect, my to-do list continues to grow each day despite my own increases in productivity. My new job is a fascinating mix of roles. Within my division, I am the web master, the first stop for all tech problems, head of technology-related professional development (especially in the form of just-in-time, one-on-one instruction). I am expected to provide vision, balancing he wishes of teachers, students, and administrators, with the need to keep the network stable and feasible to maintain. I am in charge of the tech budget and the tech inventory. I am the liaison between my division and the school's tech department and other technology divisions. The list goes on and on. In addition to my coordinator duties, I teacher 15 student classes per week.

I am loving it, but dearly wishing that I were not new. I think that in the past, this position has most often been recruited from within. Since I am new, I have had to get up to speed while also getting settled in a new country and learning the structures and procedures in a new school.

On top of that, this is my first tech job in a Windows environment. It has been humbling to go back to step one. Now I am the person watching in awe as my tech colleagues zip through short cuts while I plodding search menus for needed commands. It has been good-- helps me relate better to the teachers who are not comfortable with technology.

I love all the learning I am doing. With the help of an excellent team of assistants, teachers, technicians, web masters and engineers I am now proficient at using the Active Directory to manage user accounts. I've started receiving email copies of all the work requests, so I'm getting a handle on the range of tech problems in my division and how they were resolved. Our web site permissions problems are resolved and I am easily helping teachers with their sites and getting better at updating our division's site. I am starting to get up to speed with our SmartBoards-- we have six as a pilot program. Finally, I'm learning the quirks of students using Windows so I recognize what they probably did to cause a problem, giving me a clue how to resolve it.

All this learning, along with my own teaching, planning, meetings and such leaves me feeling chronically behind. The need to get settled in our home keeps me from working as late into each night as I would wish. I vascillate between relishing the progress I have made, and quailing at how far I have yet to go before I'm good at this job.

However, all things considered, we are pleased we made this move. This is an excellent school and we are both growing personally and professionally. We are loving Singapore. Who could ask for anything more?

Lessons Learned about Clickers

Clickers, wireless presentation remotes - call them what you will, we unexpectedly gathered the following data when we borrowed 20 of them so that all our teachers could use their new data projectors on Back to School Night. You probably won't ever use the exact same ones we had, but I suspect there are universal clicker truths to be gleaned...

1. If the clicker isn't working try the following...
1. Check the batteries (many of ours didn't have batteries installed)
2. Check for an on/off switch
3. Check the receiver. The clicker is wireless so it needs a receiver- this is usually a small USB device or a larger USB device. You need to plug it in before the clicker will work.
   
   
2. If the clicker is working erratically...
1. Unplug and then replug the receiver
2. Click the "connect" buttons on the clicker and the receiver
3. Put in fresh batteries
4. Check for hidden force fields between you and the computer, such as things with motors or high voltage in the ceiling or floor or wall
   
   
3. If the clicker's forward and back buttons aren't working correctly...
1. Try other buttons. I think the clickers we borrowed were programmable but hadn't been programmed, so on some of ours the buttons worked fine, on others, you had to push the pause or some other button to advance the slide show
   
   
4. If your clicker also has a little trackball that enables you to use it like a mouse...
1. STAY away from the trackball during your presentation -- it might just open up other applications or do other things you aren't expecting.
   
   
5. And of course, anyone using a clicker needs to be prepared for Plan B: ask a parent to sit at your computer and push the forward key.

Our teachers, being consummate professionals, all tested their clickers before hand so we were able to learn and pass on this information prior to their parent meetings. I hope this information saves others some frustration-- or at least gives them a laugh as they envision 30+ teachers discovering these "truths".