A Few Quick Thoughts about Tech Inservices

A frustration of my current job is that I haven't figured out the staff inservice piece. Back in KL, I was pleased with the after school drop in sessions Kent and I held for staff. I think they worked because...

• No advance registration was required. Teachers didn't feel they were committing to something.


• Weekly session were held. Teachers started holding non-critical questions for the drop in session. This meant I could safely run to the loo between classes without fearing being dragged into a classroom to provide support.


• Reminders were sent. I sent out a reminder email and posted signs in the canteen each week on the day of the session.


• Studio approach rather than set agenda was used. People came in to work on projects and we were there to support them.


• Teacher-student ratio was high enough. Often Kent, Suganthy and I were all there rushing about to provide just-in-time support.


• We were a trusted source. Suganthy, Kent and I had been there long enough that teachers felt safe dropping in for support.
  

I don't think the same approach would be successful at this school because their are more initiatives vying for people's time. I've tried offering after school sessions when needs arise, but teachers are so tired that it isn't a great time for them to learn something new.

I've tried sessions during their team planning time. I felt my inservice wasn't very good, but I can work on that. I plan to do more with this option next year.

I've tried giving brief teasers during staff meetings on new items that I think can be of real use to many people, such as a very easy way to resize photos to free up more space in their server quota. This has worked well and people ask for more info, but this venue only works for very specific types of information.

Therefore, I was delighted by an idea I heard tonight. The technology directors from various international schools in Singapore try to meet monthly to discuss instructional technology. Tonight, the director from the Australian school shared an idea that I think is brilliant. Next year he is going to offer full day professional development sessions for staff members. He will lead them in house. As he said, we often send people out for professional development. Why not keep them in?

There is much to love about this idea...

• Cost effective.
• Total control over content so able to tailor exactly to the users' needs.
• Teachers will be learning when they have more energy, not at the end of the day.
• Sufficient practice time can be provided in class.
• It builds support networks among the users; after the class they can ask their classmates for support.
• It is on our computers so everything will look the same when they return to use it on their classrooms.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea (and my level of enthusiasm). To make it even better, he proposes we all do this and open our sessions up to each other's schools. Only cost will be for subs. Of course, I'd need to find lab space and at the moment, that's an insurmountable barrier. Hopefully I'll soon be back in my own lab.

Are any of you using this model in your school/district? Is it working?

How do you support your music teachers?

This year, we've been forging new ground integrating technology into our elementary music curriculum. I'd love to take credit for it, but I can't; all the good ideas are coming from the music teachers themselves.

I'm new, but what they tell me is that one of the recommendations from the mid-term WASC visit (that's our accrediting agency) was to integrate technology into the music curriculum. They have taken that recommendation to heart.

One tool is Music Ace. I think I've mentioned it before. It is a music theory computer program for elementary-aged children. We've had a heap-load of trouble getting it running smoothly, but it is a sound addition to the curriculum. The students really enjoy it and the teachers are pleased with the learning they've seen so far. Now if we only had enough lab space for them to make a part of their music rotation for grades 1 - 5, we'd be set.

Another bit of integration has to do with the music on CD-ROM that comes with the music series. Each teacher has approximately 115 CDs. That's around 6 GB of music! Even using a multi-disk CD player, using the disks while teaching was tedious because they were constantly queuing up different disks.

One of the new teachers this year works part time and doesn't have her own classroom. She ends up teaching off a cart using whichever music room is available at that time. To preserve her sanity, she ripped all the CDs onto her computer and organizes the music into playlists to support that week's lesson or that class' upcoming concert.* She uploads those to her iPod. In class, she plugs the iPod into an iPod speaker system and she's ready to teach.

We have budgeted to purchase iPods for each of the music teachers for next year. However, we didn't purchase iPod speaker systems because each classroom already has a receiver that connects to surround sound speakers. We wanted to get the sound going through those. However, the teachers didn't want to be tethered to the corner of the room with the receiver.

We borrowed a number of FM transmitters. I have one that I use in my car and I really like it. However, when we were listening through those high quality speakers, we realized that while the sound quality is fine for listening to podcasts while driving, it is too full of hiss and crackle for use in the music room. We have read about Bluetooth devices for connecting iPods to stereos, but they are still in the development stage. We hope they will eventually be the perfect solution, but in the mean time, we needed something to fill the gap.

Each of our classrooms has a data projector. The computers can be connected to the stereo so we decided to not use iPods at all, just use the computer. We thought they could use Bluetooth mice to roam the room and using the image from the data projector, they could use their iTunes playlists. The teachers didn't love the thought of having the data projectors on all day with that light in their eyes, but it was worth a try.

Unfortunately, the network connections for the computers are in the opposite corner from the connections for the surround sound speakers. And we could use the wall speakers that every classroom has, but once again, the sound quality is too low for their needs.

And so for now, I have bought one teacher an iPod so she can pilot using it this spring. We've moved her iTunes library to a removable hard drive. Each day it backs up to the C: drive on her computer. Next year, all the teachers will have their iTunes libraries mapped to one network-able hard drive. (Can anyone recommend a good network-able hard drive? A 300 GB one will suffice.)

For now, the teacher will plug the iPod into the stereo and operate it from there. Hopefully by next school year, we will have all the kinks out so that we can bring the other teachers on board smoothly.

*(By the way, we did meet with a Singapore copyright specialist. Since each teacher has their own set of the 115 music series CDs, and since the company does not offer the music already on a hard drive, we are not defrauding anyone of profit, so this is acceptable fair educational use by a not-for-profit school.)

Skype in Your Letterhead?

This evening I received a quotation for purchasing an iPod for my music department. The vendor is a local Singaporean reseller. In the signature area, along with all the things I'm used to seeing, such as address, phone and FAX, this vendor also listed their Skype ID. I've never seen that before.

What does it say about their company? To me it suggests that they are small, and care about being accessible. I suspect they are forward thinking and open to new ideas.

Clarence was just writing about how the students in the International Teen Life project have moved beyond the formal communication channels set up by the teachers, such as video, email and Skype. They are now using IM, Email and wikis to chat, on their own time, with the other students in the project who are scattered across the globe.

If I were a classroom teacher, I might be thinking of putting my Skype ID on my syllabus next fall. I can see a few kids abusing it, but I can see more kids appreciating it.

It may work better for me as an international teacher. Before I went overseas, I didn't know many people who weren't living in my town, so I had no one to Skype with. Now that I'm overseas, I use it with family back home and with friends and colleagues all over. As a result, I usually have Skype open if my computer is on at home.

Would you consider giving your Skype ID to your students? Do you have one?

When is helping unhelpful?

I have great respect for the tech coordinators of the other divisions at work. The middle school tech coordinator seems especially well respected. He is hardworking and knowedgeable. He can see the big picture and has enough history in the job to quickly identify key issues when we are discussing options.

Being new, I have especially appreciated how patiently he answers questions. He is unfailingly supportive. Therefore, it has come as a surprise to me how often in our coordinator meetings, he will make suggestions that I view as harsh towards our users.

Since I respect him so much, this has given me something to think about. It is making me realize that often my view is too short. I may be doing too much hand-holding in my division. My actions may be inspired by kindness , but they don't help my users grow. They don't help me work myself out of a job, as Jeff Utecht would say.

I put this to the test yesterday afternoon. A third grade teacher came to me to discuss an upcoming project. She had seen a colleague's student brochure project and was impressed. She wanted to try something similar with her class. As we talked, she decided to use Microsoft Publisher. For this first project, we would give the students a template to follow. For the next project, we would let them create it from scratch.

This teacher is new to Publisher. She used it earlier this year to create a personal project, so she has some experience, but not much. My instinct said to sit with her, help her create the template for her students. Instead, I stepped back. I showed her how to access the pre-made brochure templates, and then told her to create what she wanted and I would use it with her students on Tuesday. She is a trooper and although she looked a bit surprised, she went off to give it a try. Hopefully she feels I am confident in her ability, and that feels like support instead of abandonment.

This is all making me realize I do a much better job of stretching the children I work with than the adults. I think of how often I ask children what they have tried, how they could figure it out. I do less of that with adults. Teachers are so busy that I tend to want to just fix the problem so they can get back to work. However, if they had been able to fix it themselves without contacting me, that would have been even quicker. I need to keep thinking about this. I need to think of this at a systems level. I don't know how to do that yet.

Zoho Wiki

I've mentioned Zoho before. It keeps rolling out wonderful web apps. The latest that I've noticed is it now has a wiki. I gave it a try over the weekend. I'm pleased to announce that like PB Wiki, it has a table feature that actually works. I like it much better than the PB Wiki one which looks fine when you save a page but is not correctly assembled as you work with it.

I made a wiki to keep track of all the handy info posted in our Want Ads mailing list at work. The list doesn't have an archive and so people are constantly asking questions that were asked before such as, "Anyone know a good electrician in Woodlands?" Now I have a handy place to put all the info from there that I want to save. I can access it from home and school.

Actually, I should qualify that last statement. I haven't used any Zoho products in a while and I am finding that at work the wiki pages are incredibly slow to load, and I don't have anything in the wiki besides text. No photos. No files. No sounds. Just text. Pages can take minutes to load. They are quicker to open when I click the edit button. I thought this was another proxy problem at work, but I'm finding it slow from home as well. Maybe Zoho is having technical difficulties. If it doesn't speed up, I'll transfer it the wiki to another platform. This wiki doesn't need tables so no need to suffer through slow pages. Anyone else having this slow Zoho experience?

[UPDATE: ZohoWiki was down for upgrading over the weekend. This week my pages are loading much faster.]

Social Networking for the Under-14 Crowd

Will Richardson posted today that Nickelodeon and Disney are entering the social networking market. Their target is the under-14 crowd. Nickelodeon's site launched in January. Disney's is still in beta. Will links to an article at USA Today that provides a comparison table.

I plan to spend some time checking these out. Many of our students use Neopets and Club Penguin so I've been thinking I need to go check them out. Now I have four sites to check out. I am wondering if/how I'll need to revamp our internet safety strand in our curriculum in response to these sites. This year, it seemed that few of our third graders spent much time online. That seems to change over the year. Last fall some fourth graders knew what chat and IM were. Most of the fifth graders knew and at least half were using those tools. I predict that is all about to change with Disney in the game.

A Promethean Task?

Trial by fire this past week. Tomorrow will mark my one week anniversary of being relocated while unexpected repairs have forced the closure of my office, my lab and the other rooms in my wing.

With the closure of my lab, I took over one of the drop-in labs. This has been a real problem for teachers because they have project in progress and now can't get lab time to finish. The tech teachers are accommodating them as much as we can, but it is a distant second best.

The primary school has saved the day by giving us complete access to their drop in lab. This is especially good because our music department just began to use Music Ace. They alone can completely fill a lab, so the timing isn't great, even though the growth of the kids is.

The librarian gave my assistant and me shelter on the lovely top floor of the library. I spend a lot of time running up and down floors between lab and office. Good exercise but bad for my productivity.

The workmen all over the building are inadvertently taking computers off-line, so when I'm not teaching I'm rushing around trying to get the remaining labs and classroom computers back online.

On top of that, it is the time of year to work with administration to pull next year's budget into shape.

In the midst of all of this, I forgot that Promethean was loaning us an interactive white board to trial starting today through Feb. 23. It arrived this afternoon and we weren't able to put it where we wanted to place it so it is now in the lab I am teaching in. Not the best timing, since there isn't a blank moment in the lab during or after school between now and when the boards leave, especially since Monday and Tuesday are the Lunar Holiday.

However, despite what this may sound like, I'm not complaining. Every minute of every day is exciting and varied and puts me in contact with kids and teachers. After this, any job besides special agent is going to feel slow.

Tagging Troubles

I've been using del.icio.us for a few years now. I really like how it works. Before that I'd used Backflip, but tagging works better for me than filing. Therefore, I'm glad tagging is slowly expanding to other apps. I can tag my photos in iPhoto, and my mail in Gmail. In fact, in the apps that don't have it, I keep losing things-- for example, I wish our Outlook at work could tag. I wish my Mail.app and even the Finder at home could, although Spotlight usually does find what I need eventually.

Given my success with tagging, it surprises me that in the past few weeks, I keep finding myself at a loss for a tag. Usually what happens is that reading a blog post leads me to a website that I want to tag. I'll hit the del.icio.us tool on my web browser which takes me to my del.icio.us account, and there I sit. I can't figure out what tags to give the page.

I think my problem lies in that given my new job, I'm often now sure of why or how I'm going to use the information. I know it is good stuff and I'll want to get to it again, but I don't yet have a big enough picture to foresee where.

Another piece of the problem is that my tags are so full, are so broad, that they are starting to feel less useful. For example, two years ago I started to use a web_apps tag. Back then I was adding a page or two a month using that tag. Now I could add a few a week. The tag is too broad to be useful, but I don't really want to start breaking the apps down by type. I need a different way to organize them, but I can't see what it is.

I'm experiencing that same confusion in many areas. For example, there have been a number of interesting education manifestos on the web and samples of next generation tech planning. How to tag those beyond ed_change and tech_coord? I've tried seeing how other people have tagged the same sites, but that hasn't given me any better ideas yet. Is anyone else experiencing this tagging block? Has anyone found a way around it?

Google Ads Humor

(Warning! This post is way off topic. I'm just in a mood to bark today.)

I've long been an advertiser's nightmare. The few times I do find a commercial memorable enough to tell someone else about it, I generally have to preface the story with, "I don't remember what it was advertising, but..."

This total disregard for ads has carried over the Internet. On blogs and wikis, I don't notice the Google Ads in the sidebar. I mean REALLY don't notice them-- to the extent that I hadn't even realized that one of MY OWN wikis had Google Ads on it until another teacher complained about them.

Therefore, it surprises me that I eventually noticed that in my Gmail account, the Spam folder lacks the usual Google Ads in the sidebar but does have a single ad just above the message window. Being a Google Ad, it is trying to match the ad to the content of the messages. And since these are Spam messages, the only ads Google can find to put on the page, are SPAM recipes.

For those of you not familiar with SPAM, it is a spiced ham product sold in tins by Hormel, a company based in Austin, Minnesota. Or, you may be familiar with "Spamalot!", the Monty Python musical which features the Spam song.

I've eaten many a SPAM dish and actually enjoyed a number of them, but for some reason, I seem to find great humor in the recipe titles. Each new SPAM recipe title that appears sounds worse than the previous one to me. I grimaced when I read "Spam Potato Casserole" yesterday, but today's "Spam Veggie Pita Pockets" sounds even worse. Or, how about the "Spicy Spam Kabobs"?

You may not find these Google Ads as funny as I do, but it makes me realize that there could be some pretty funny mismatches in other places. based on letter content. I hate to admit it but now I am going to start watching to see if the ads get it really wrong sometimes.

(BTW, someone had WAY too much fun creating the Spam website. Stop by and watch a tin of Spam ascend into the heavens atop cloud radiating light.)

Flatworld Teens Save the World! Details in Ten (Years)

Ms. Kim Cofino over at always learning wrote a post about Naomi Kline's book No Logo. One thing that struck Kim while reading the book was how similar to each other are the lives of middle class students around the world, how flat their world already is thanks to their Levi's and backpacks and music and McDonald's.

It makes me think about Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever by John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade. It is a book about the effects of video gaming on business culture. Part of the first chapter is devoted to showing old fogies like me just how ubiquitous video games, are. There were video arcade games when I was in high school, but within five years of that time, gaming reached the lives of almost all American children and there it has stayed. The book then goes on to look at the implications of this. It is an interesting read and quite enlightening for old folks like me.

So on one level, you have all these middle class kids around the world leading similar lives. It puts them all in the same club because of their shared experiences and similar tech language. And then I think about the divide between them and the kids without a digital aspect to their lives. This gap could make it nearly impossible for the two groups to understand each other. Will they find a common language? Will they be able to find global solutions to world problems when they cannot identify with the people living there? What about the troubled countries where conflict and poverty have prevented the rise of middle class and its globally homogenizing effect? Will they have any voice?

I guess, they don't have much voice now, so this might not change anything. And I shouldn't sell today's youth short. Statically they seem to be much more service focused than the GenXers. Maybe so many youths worldwide speaking a similar tech and pop culture language will give them enough in common that they can help each other understand their corners of the world.

If they can build those types of bridges, maybe they work together in much more successful ways than NATO and the UN and those types of organizations. Maybe the flat classroom projects that are springing up will start providing the connections needed to make it all happen. Maybe their collective wisdom will be a match for all the global messes they are inheriting.

It sounds like a long shot, but I welcome this chance to think optimistically about the future. Now, as a tech coordinator, I need to get myself in gear and figure out how to do my part. Here's a big thanks to all the edubloggers out there like Clarence Fisher, Kim Cofino, Vicki Davis and so many others who are showing me the way.

The War in Iraq Bleeds Through into My Hallway

Walking back to my classroom after lunch yesterday, I came upon a third grade child sobbing in the hallway. She was being comforted by a few friends, but I stopped to see if I could help her. With tears streaming down her cheeks she choked out,

My daddys in Iraq and we haven't heard from him. We don't know where he is. We don't know! ...I WANT my daddy...

What do you say to that?
If he's still alive, chances are great that he IS in harm's way. She's 12,000 miles from home.
That's a lot to carry at any age,
but especially when you are eight years old.

Wiki Ethics

A post over at Tech Crunch intrigued me today. It was a post regarding Microsoft paying someone to edit certain pages relating to Open Office Standards in Wikipedia. Microsoft did not tell the person what to write, but this behavior was controversial nonetheless.

As Michael Arrington explained in his post, Microsoft is in an interesting position. Editing a Wikipedia page about yourself is frowned upon. Hiring someone else to edit the page is also a bad idea. The proper way to deal with this is to clear the record in the discussions portion of that page.

I find all of this interesting for a number of reasons.

1. I am just starting to work with wikis. I had never even thought about this sticky situation before, but now I can see a need to teach my students about this type of wiki-etiquette.



2. I've never spent any time reading the discussion section of any page I was using in Wikipedia. Now I see this might be a powerful way to teach students about the strengths and challenges of using Wikipedia as a resource. It could give them clues about how to interrogate a source. It could also help them unpack whatever they were researching in the first place.
   



3. I hadn't realized that companies such a Microsoft thought Wikipedia had enough impact to warrant this type of intervention.
   

These are new thoughts for me and I think I'm going to chew on them for a while and to see where they take me. I welcome your comments on it all.

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.