What Do You Want in a Flickr CC Search Engine for Schools?

Glenn over at History Tech blog has been using Compfight to find CC images in Flickr. Like me, he discovered that the safe search isn't really safe enough for student use, so he contacted them. The good folks at Compfight are considering creating a truly school-friendly Flickr CC search tool and are asking for input.

For the elementary students I work with the ultimate Flickr search engines would have the following attributes.

• Light, not resource intensive because schools often have old computers and slow networks.
  
  
• Basic interface, Compfight is brilliant because it is such a clean interface, nowhere for the children to get lost or distracted. Kids are instantly successful.
  
  
• Large thumbnails. 8 and 9 year olds tend to like words and pictures on their screen to be big. They make their fonts size 18 and put extra space between words to make them easier to see, not just to fill the page. Compfights are a good size. FlickrCC is a bit small. I'd include fewer images to make the thumbnails a bit bigger.
  
  
• Split screen like FlickrCC. On one side we see thumbnails of the hits. On the other side, we see an individual image, its URL, photographer's name, and links to the other sizes of the image. I like FlickrCC but it is missing a key feature, the name of the photographer. According to Flickr, to use the CC images, you need to credit the source by listing the name of the photographer and provide a link back to the image. FlickrCC lacks that and as a result, my wee ones are having to navigate through multiple pages. That is really tough for some of them. Being able to grab URL and photographer's name off one clear page before they go to get a larger or small size of the image would be much easier for them.
  
  
• Open links in a new tab. If a child needs a larger size of the image and follows that link, it should open in a new tab so that after they download the image, they can close the tab and they are right back at the search engine.
  
  
• Safe Search. No filter is perfect. Some photographers are wily in how they tag their photos. However, one that blocks 95% of nudity, sex, and violence would be great. A second grade girl who types in kitties doesn't want a screen full of sex kittens. Naked toddlers, victims of floods standing amidst the ruins of their home with only rags on their body aren't the problem. It is the art photos of nudity and the pornographic ones that are making our searches problematic. We haven't had a problem of accidentally pulling up pictures of violence in Flickr, but we don't want to start having one either.
  
  
• Free. I am currently working overseas at a private school. I have a budget and could pay for this feature. However, most of my career has been in the public schools in the US and then it was only me on a teacher's salary paying for things we needed. I could do it because I don't have children of my own, but many teachers couldn't pay anything.

What would you like to see in a school-friendly search tool for the Creative Commons section of Flickr? Give Compfight your feedback by posting on Glenn's blog or by contacting them directly via the link under the About button at the bottom of their site. And drop by Glenn's blog for a good read and to thank him for taking the initiative to start this discussion with the Compfight folks.

Need Ideas on Ultimate Intro Flipcharts

In a week, my staff returns for a week of workshops and then the start of teaching. 14 of my staff will have a Promethean IWB for the first time. Between now and our Back to School Night in mid-August, they will be in a huge number of inservices not involving IWBs. I'm having trouble finding a time to do more than show them the most basic tools. However, parents will want to see the board in use at Back to School Night.

I'd like to set my teachers up to look great and feel confident. Since I haven't figured out how to add hours to the days, I'm thinking I'd like to create a few flip charts for them. The first would be a flipchart that they could all use with their students to help the students learn to use the board. It should be fun, engaging, and help to meet some of the teacher's first week's of school needs, such as community building, formative assessment or the establishing of routines.

The second flipchart would be a specific to each grade level. It would include a few activities to use with parents that showed how the board will be used to teach some of the content their children will be learning during the year. For example, it could have a container activity where participants recycle the fractions that are not equivalent to 2/3. Another activity could involve using the transparency feature with two photos of glaciers to create a time lapse effect to show their melting retreat. Another could be a self-checking vocabulary matching idea. And so on.

Searching the newly remodeled Promethean Planet, I was suprised to not find what I needed. I did find a few good resources to use with my teachers. You will need to create a free account at PrometheanPlanet to follow these links.

• Activstudio Benefits was created to show off the uses of an IWB. Original target was school boards and other funding sources, but it would also be a great tool to use with teachers to give them idea of how to use their IWB.
  
  
• Creating in Activstudio shows different techniques to designing flipcharts.
  
  
• Layers and Groups Resource Pack includes 15 activities with detailed notes on how to use them and to adapt them to your own uses.
  
  
• Reviewing Activstudio would be great to use after you have given your teachers some training. It uses the format of the game show Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader to review concepts such as layering and the use of various tools.

So now I'd appreciate your help. I'd love to hear your ideas of what I can include in the student flipchart and the parent flipchart. I'd love to see any reasources that you have created which meet these needs.

Embed Live Spreadsheet into a Web Page

I just had a Geek Moment...

As my family plans our trip to New Zealand, the need arose to have a place on the wiki to record expenses as they are accrued. For example, much to her surprise, my sister just discovered that the hotel rooms she booked for us on Stewart Island have already appeared on her Visa bill.

My first thought was to create a table on the wiki. It wouldn't have formulas, but we can all handle the math. However, as much as I love Wetpaint as a wiki platform, their tables aren't full featured. I can't figure out how to add a new row to a table that has already been created. Tabbing doesn't work. I can't find a hot place or menu that allows me to expand the table. If you know of one, please tell me.

Since that didn't seem to be a good option, I started thinking of ways to embed a spreadsheet into the wiki. I know you can embed a Google Form into a wiki and even show a live chart as people add data, but I didn't find a way to do that with Google Sheets.

Fortunately a web search pulled up an article on the Zoho blog that lead me to this post on the Digital Inspiration blog. It shows step-by-step directions for embedding a live spreadsheet onto a webpage using Zoho Sheet, a free, online spreadsheet. It even provides a link which allows viewers to download a copy of the spreadsheet to their computer.

I already have a Zoho account. I think their suite of online applications is far superior to Google's. So I...

1. Logged in to ZohoSheet.
2. Created a spreadsheet. (Or I could have uploaded one from my computer.)
   
3. Clicked on the menu item to created code to embed the spreadsheet.
4. Copied the code to my clipboard.
5. Using the toolbar on my wikipage, I clicked the tool to allow me to embed a widget.
6. I pasted the code in the box that appeared, chose whether I wanted to change the size or justification of the spreadsheet on the page, and clicked "OK."

When I saved the wiki page, the live spreadsheet appeared on the page. It is like magic! I can scroll around, add data, click on the tabs. My lovely colors, bolds, filled formulas, etc. are all there because the spreadsheet is embedded using an I-frame - something you web design gurus will understand.



As I experimented, I learned the follow things.

• If I change the spreadsheet in Zoho Sheet, and save my changes, those changes appear on the wiki when I refresh the wiki page.
• If I make changes to the spreadsheet on the wiki, those changes are not reflected in Zoho Sheet.

I can forsee a few potential problems embedding spreadsheets this way. First, to embed a spreadsheet you must make it public. That means that even though my wiki is private, it is humanly possible that someone could find the public spreadsheet and mess with our data. However, they would need to know the unpublished URL to get to it. This doesn't seem likely.

Another problem is that Zoho's servers can be a bit slow. That was a big problem in the past, but now I'm finding them to work just fine. I suspect they upgraded to eliminate that problem.

A final problem is that not all blogs or wikis allow you to embed i-frames. I was able to do so in Wetpaint via the "insert widget" button and here in Blogger by clicking the "Edit Html" tab and then pasting the code where I wanted the spreadsheet to appear. Check your platform's editing toolbar to see if you have that option.

So, give it a try. Add some data to my spreadsheet. And let me know if you have found other or better ways to embed a live spreadsheet into a web page.

[UPDATE: Bad news. My sister tried using it on our wiki, and as old math man says here in the comments, the spreadsheet works great until you navigate away from the page. At that point, all your data is lost. So, this is an elegant solution for data that you don't want to keep. For example, making a web site on the solar system and allowing visitors to enter their own weight in pounds or kg to find out how much they would weigh on different planets.

Can you think of any other times you wouldn't want to retain the data after the visitor leaves your site?]

FlickrCC - Another Flickr Creative Commons Search Tool

A few weeks ago I wrote about Compfight, a helpful search engine for finding images in the Creative Commons section of Flickr. Today, on one of my groups in Diigo, I learned about FlickrCC. (Sorry, I deleted the original message so I can't say which group or who posted it.)

I really like the speed and layout of FlickrCC. Simple search field with tick boxes to indicate if you want photos you can edit and/or use commercially. Your search results appear on the left half of the window. Click on a thumbnail and the image appears on the right side of the screen. Attribribution and URL appear with it, along with links to allow you to edit the image in Picnik or on your computer. Along the bottom are links to the other sizes of the image.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

I plan use this for myself. However, since it does not have a safe search feature, I plan to use Compfight with students. Do you have a favorite way to locate images in the Creative Commons domain?

A Ning for Promethean Users

One of my challenges for the coming school year is to help my teachers and myself use our Promethean boards in powerful ways. Since we already have wireless mice and keyboards and data projectors, we can already perform low-level interactive white board tasks without IWBs. However, we'll have more than 20 boards in our division next year so it is time for the pilot to gain momentum, for us to use the boards for higher order thinking and deep learning.

I had hoped to garnish great ideas at NECC, but I was unable to get into most of the IWB sessions I had planned on attending. Fortunately, I stumbled across two resources via Diigo. The first is Ms. Jruczak's Instructional Technology blog. Although the blog does not yet have many entries, each one is a gem full of useful information. It is not focused specifically on IWB uses, but it worth a look.

The second resource is only hours old but I'm hoping it will grow into a rich source of support. Kim Jurczak has started a Ning for Promethean IWB users. Her vision is for this Ning to be a place where users of the Promethean IWB Activclassroom tools can collaborate and share ideas for classroom use.

Since I am needing just such a community, I joined as soon as I found it, making me member #2. Despite my poor track record with other Nings, will make an effort to be an active member. How about you? Will you be member #3?

Another Spiffy Wetpaint Feature

I've long been a fan of the Wetpaint wiki platform. I was originally drawn to it because it is one of the only wikis that creates visually appealing websites. Often, when I have a need for a wiki, I turn to them because their feature set is good and the wiki is so easy to use.

My family is planning a trip to New Zealand. Unfortunately, most of the planning will be done with me in Singapore and the rest of them in the USA. Right from the start, I thought this was a great use for a wiki, but other family members thought Google Docs would be easier. A few weeks ago I started a number of documents and shared them, but we've had lots of trouble with permissions and people needing to sign up for Google. (That seems to be a change. Last fall I was able to invite people who didn't have Gmail accounts to edit Google documents and they were successful. Now it wants my family members to create Google accounts to view or edit the documents.)

Last night, tired of the hassles, I set up a private Wetpaint wiki. Since it is private, my family members will need to sign up with Wetpaint, but that is quick and easy and ends right there.

As I copied the pages over, I was amazed to discover...

• Graphics in my Google docs copied right into the wiki. No need to upload and insert them.
  
  
• When websurfing, I could highlight diagrams from the internet and copy them directly onto the wiki. They came in as images so formatting was preserved.

In both cases, a message appeared briefly on the screen informing me that the item was being reformatted and then Voilá! It was there looking great.

I only encountered two problems. The first was when copying Google Docs tables. They did copy legibly, but not attractively. The second was with tables in Wetpaint. Unlike other wikis, I wasn't able to add a new row by tabbing. As a result, I decided to make lists for our to-dos instead of handy tables.

My mom and I worked a bit later than everyone else and already the wiki was proving useful as we captured airfare searches, flight time tables and other useful bits of info. The pages are quickly turning into a mishmash of data. They aren't pretty with all the fonts and colors from different web sites, but they are a goldmine of useful info.

What wiki platform are you using? Is it meeting your needs? What features doesn't it have that you'd like to see?

Help End the Julie Amero Debacle

Who hasn't heard of the terrible story of substitute teacher Julie Amero? If you have felt as helpless as I have to take action to help her, click on the link below to sign a petition. The link was posted to the EdTech listserv by Nancy Willard. She encourages us to sign the petition to let the prosecutors in Connecticut know that the rest of the world has not lost interest in this case.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/57/Justice-for-Julie-Amero


For more information on the case...
The case against Julie Amero needs to be deleted

Let's end teacher's long nightmare

Engagingly H.O.T. Comics

Notes from the NECC session by Bernajean Porter on using graphic novels in the classroom.

Oh I wish I had more notes! This was a great session. Bernajean really focuses on raising the bar (or making it H.O.T.ter, as she calls it. However, I was filming the session using my new Flip Mino which filled half way through the Comic Life tutorial. )


Graphic Novels cover a wide range of content areas - much wider than I realized.

Comics are an American invention, something we gave to the world. In 1954 US Senate investigates relationship between comic books and juvenile delinquency. Art Speigelman won Pultizer Prize for Maus I, an examination of the Holocaust. He uses a metaphor of mice and cats.

Her website: http://www.digitales.us
complete with rubrics and other useful tools.

Don't let your students remain information consumers; move them into producing.
Start with the content up front, before touching the comic software. After the storyline/content, have them decide on the emotion for each frame. Only then are they ready to gather info
ign off the content at the storyboard level to ensure the rigor.

Craftmanship

Pre-Production Phase

1. Writing a narrative script
2. Planning the project
3. Organizing project folders

Production Phase

1. Making the voiceover
2. Gathering and preparing media resources

Post Production Phase

1. Putting it ALL together

Distribution Phase
Applause! Applause!


Comic Life
www.plasq.com

A Quicker, Safer Way to Access Flickr CC Photos

This past semester, most of the classes I work with used the Creative Commons section of Flickr to find photos for their Voicethreads, wikis, websites and other projects.

For the most part, I was pleased. Students found great insect photos to illustrate their insect life cycle diagrams. Other students found powerful photos to put on their Read to Feed brochure that they were creating to solicit sponsors. Still others created movies about problems affecting the oceans using still photos from Flickr CC. The list goes on and on.

However, all was not as good as it could be...

• Flickr pages can be really, really slow to load
  
  
• Some kids would forget and use the search field at the top of each Flickr page instead of returning to the Flickr Creative Commons search page. Then they would find photos with all right reserved. Sometimes they could save these photos, but they woudn't insert into projects. It took me quite a while to figure out what was going on.
  
  
• Our process of searching, then saving the photo and copying the source information to give proper credit to the photographer was complex. Some third graders never mastered it.
  
  
• We started to find inappropriate images. I had prepared the children for that possibility. We had reviewed what they should always do if they come across inappropriate content. The children did a good job of using those few opportunities to practice safe internet use, but I don't like taking elementary children to a site that I know has inappropriate material.
  

Given these limitations, you can imagine my delight to read about Compfight. It is a very simple, very fast way to search Flickr.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

See the little search field at the top? That's what you see when you go to the site.
Click on the...

• Tags button to toggle between searching tags only or all text
• Creative Commons link to toggle between all, off, or commercial searches
  
• Seek Original link to choose whether or not you are only looking for original images
• Safe Search link to make searching safer for young users

As you can imagine, that last item has me thrilled. I plunked in some of the innocuous search terms (such as books) that brought up inappropriate images but all the hits were appropriate for my students.

I hope the searches are as quick at school as they are from my NECC hotel room. Photos start appearing withing a second of me hitting enter. The search results are posted many to a page instead of the ten that are on a typical Flickr search results page.

I think this tool is going to solve many problems for us. Give it a try and let me know what you think. Any idea what the name Compfight has to do with searching Flickr? That one has me stumped.

A big thanks to Sue Waters for her post at The Edublogger that introduced me to Compfight.

Cybersafety Workshop

Great workshop with Davina Pruit-Mentle and Nancy Willard
These are very incomplete notes. Please check out their website for great information. Even better, go hear them speak.

Tactics that don't work to keep kids safe...
Fear-based Tactics

• stranger danger warnings
• kids view adults as not knowing what is really going on with teh internet

Misleading Use of Data

• 1 in 7 youth have been sexually solicieted online - not true
• generally received by teenagers from other teens

Reliance on Filtering

• won't block porn traps
• won't protect against online communication
• won't deter determined teens because they know how to bypass the filter
• frequently blocks appropriate sites
• over reliance on this has created false security and doesn't teach kids safety skills, responsible choices

Simplistic Rules

• "Don't post personal information online."
• "Just say no" didn't work with drugs
• Simple rules are appropriate for children but not tweens and teens

Sole Reliance on Adults

• Tell an adult if you feel uncomfortable - assumes adults know what to do
• Teens won't tell adults if they think the adults will blame them, restrict their online access, or make the problem workse
• Most at-risk kids don't have great relationships with adults so they don't have someone they can go to for help. We need to educate those savvy teens on how to protect themselves and their less able friends

Avoiding Uncomfortable Information

• Some programs don't discuss the intentions of predators, behaviors of the teen that might attract predators...

Successful Tactics
Children should not be out surfing the internet. Period. They don't have the cognitive capacity to independently make good choices online.

For middle school students, teach them practical problem solving. Teach them the values and standards they should uses in their ethical decision making. (Nancy has a great list of ethical decision-making questions.)

Risk Prevention Approach- we are pretty good at addressing the needs of the naive kids. We are failing at addressing the needs of the at-risk kids. Needs to happen at school, district, state and national level. People who understand technology often don't understand what they need to know about youth risk, and vice versa.

Finally Diving into Diigo

More notes. This time an informal Edubloggercon session to get us started with Diigo. Alice Mercer along with Margaret Tsai who is one of the developers of Diigo and Jen Dorman who has been using it with her students.

(I know. I'm probably the last person to look at Diigo. What can I say? I was busy and Del.icio.us was mostly meeting my needs. And I admit I quelled a bit at the thought of yet another social network.)

Plays Well With Others
Lots of options for sharing your Diigo info, including auto post to blog or Twitter and share with your Del.icio.us account. Can also import your Delicious accounts.

Groups
Can be public, private, moderated. Can share tags. Can create student accounts using linked Gmail addresses.

Lists
We are familiar with tagging, but sometimes you want to present specific lists of URLs. We can create lists and then "add to list" is one of the Diigo options.

So, my take? I don't need it for use with students. If I were a classroom teacher then yes. But as a specialist in a school that has not embraced Diigo, then no. I also don't need another social network. I'm not doing that well keeping up with the ones I'm already in. I think its strength is in searching things people have already bookmarked, which is the same as with Delicious. Other strenght is huge-- ability to mark up the page and share the annotations. I can see that being really powerful for personal and class use.

Web 2.0 Smackdown!

Sitting here at the NECC 2008 Edubloggercon. This post is just notes I'm taking for myself.

• Pollseverywhere.com allows participants to text in multiple choice answers to a poll.
  
• Animoto - free teacher accounts allow us to download 1 minute videos free.
• Piclens.com allows you to take a set of photos or videos and create a photowall that lets you scroll around. Need a really good internet connection to make it work well. Looks like that thing from the TED talks.
• Free Mosquito Ring Tones.com: adults can't hear it so kids use it as a ring tone to receive calls in class unnoticed.
• CoverItLive allows live blogging as part of a conference.
  
• Qik.com used to only be available for Nokia phones but now also works with some Windows Mobile devices. Allows you to create live streams. (Thanks Steve Dembo)
  
• Handipoints.com allows you to create kid's chore lists or other criteria and share it with teachers, grandparents, etc. Can be a nice conversation piece. (Thanks Lucy Gray)
  
• Diigo is a blogger's friend. The education group in Diigo is growing quickly. They have a set of common tags.
  
• Peggy's new island... Peggy Shehe (sp?) has 3 islands in the teen grid of Second Life, a multimedia island, a language island, and a ~.
• Webcast Academy a place to learn to create your own webcasts.
• Make Beliefs Comics is a simple cartooning site. No ads. Limited feature set prevents kids from getting lost in the details.
• Ajaxim allows you to create a free, IM network. Teach basic IM etiquette to kids in a safe environment.
• Doodle quickly poll a group to schedule a meeting. No sign in required. You can send them the link or a discrete URL.
  
• TimeBridge also allows you to schedule meetings and it talks to Google Calendar and Outlook.
• TagGalaxy mines flicker tags
  
• Webkinz can be used by a class to help kids learn about digital citizenship.
• exolead
  
• Plurk is a twitter-like social networking app. It has a timeline. You can have real conversations.
  

Dippity, Second Life, Diigo,

Anyone for a Little NECCing?

This is my big year; I'm attending NECC for the first time. I think I'm more excited about meeting people face to face than I am about the sessions, workshops, vendors, etc. There are many bloggers I am eager to meet. Others I know from Twitter. Of course, given the thousands of people that attend, I wonder how many people I'll actually run into.

I do have some other goals related to NECC...

• Look for professional development models that are working.
• Look for tech integration models that are working, exploring both the process and the hardware requirements.
  
• Look for ways to help my staff find powerful uses for their IWBs.
• Visit Second Life. (Anyone want to bring me in and show me around?)

Are you going to NECC? Have you joined the NECC Ning? What are your goals and expectations for NECC 2008?

Media-Rich Interactive Quizes

MyStudiyo is a website that lets you create interactive quizes to add to your website or blog. You are able to upload a logo to brand it. Quiz questions can contain graphics, audio or video clips. Quizes can be embedded or take at the MyStudio.com website. You can also send out a URL via their invitation feature. You can take the quick quiz I created to learn more about the service.

One feature I find interesting, is that you have two choices of ending. One is to show the participants score. The other is to allow the participant to add a question. I think the latter could be powerful (or dangerous) if used with students.

Participants do not need to login. However if they do have an account and login, the results of registered participants appears filtered out from the anonymous participants. As per usual, registering requires an email address. However, registration is instant, no need to confirm registering by clicking a link sent via email. I didn't try registering with a linked Gmail account. If that works, it could be used with elementary students.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

The service is free while the site is in beta. At some point it will no longer be free but the quizzes created during the beta period will still be free to take.

An Alternative to the Flip Video

Video is the bane of my existence. I inherited all sorts of baggage with it, from cameras that can't connect to our computers, to lack of software to work with the video on the cameras, to poorly written programs like Pinnacle. Few problems in our Windows XP environment have made me long for a Mac lab as much as this one has.

Most of the video my teachers take is informal. Most commonly they record student presentations such a book reports and social studies presentations. A few capture students at work. These video clips are just a few seconds in length, shot close to the subject in decent lighting. We should be able to just use our point and shoot cameras since they all have a movie mode. Digital camera video clips aren't stellar quality, but the convenience of being able to use the classroom camera outweighs the decline in video quality. And truth be told, most of the time YouTube quality is more than adequate for these uses.

However, we have found that anything over 3 minutes tends to corrupt. I first thought it was just the battery running out since shooting video really chews through the batteries. However, shorter clips on the same card shot after the corrupted long clips, are just fine. Interestingly enough, we were able to use the corrupted file on a Mac. The Windows machines couldn't even download it, but iPhoto sucked it right in and played it, so if you run into that problem try a Mac. Unfortunately, we don't have Macs in my division.

So, video from point and shoot cameras wasn't the answer, but it seemed like it should be. Enter the Flip Video camera produced by Pure Digital. I think they are brilliant. Even the most technophobic people I've handed it to have gone from, "Don't give me this... I don't know how to... Oh!" in a matter of seconds and then they are recording (and looking delighted.) I handed it to students and within seconds they were recording their podcasts. After I showed them once how to locate the camera on the computer when it was plugged in, they were able to do it on their own.

As with the digital cameras, the quality isn't stellar-- this is 640 x 480 video we are talking about, after all. The audio won't win any awards, but it was much clearer than I expected. The children were truly delighted. It had the most trouble with moving targets, such as a person walking across the room.

The only problem is the cost. In the US, they are around $140 from Amazon.com. That's less than a point and shoot digital camera. Unfortunately, our local vendors are unable to get them and Amazon won't ship them here. Only Soninc.com was willing to do it at a much steeper price plus shipping.

Therefore, it is with MUCH excitement that I read about the new Creative Vado.

The Vado is similar in size, shape and quality to the Flip, but it has a 2 GB hard drive and a flexible, integrated USB connector as opposed to the Flip's rigid one. It has a lithium ion rechargeable battery instead of the convenient AA batteries, but the battery is removable so you could buy a second battery.

I searched at Causeway Point and down on Orchard Road but no one seems to have heard of them, much less have them in stock. Maybe by next school year they will be available. I'd love to hear from anyone who has used one. Are they rugged enough to be used with students? How good is the video and audio quality? Would you buy it for yourself?

In the Soggy Quiet Places

As I try to bring blogging back into my life, I realize that one reason I've been writing is less is because I've been thinking less, or rather, deep thinking less.

My frantic schedule at work doesn't allow many bathroom breaks, much less thought breaks as I dash from teaching to tech support to meeting. It's all good, but none of it is meditative.

Being a specialist who only sees the students once per week for 40 minutes, I don't have the luxury of routines that provide breathing space such as I had when I was a classroom teacher. I've even worked to move much of the keyboarding from school-based programs such as Type to Learn and Mavis Beacon to Custom Typing which is an online subscription. I didn't move them to eliminate my breathing space, but that has been one of the results. Keyboarding time was really the only activity that approximated down time when teaching, since there are just so many times you can adjust a child's posture without driving them crazy.

On top of being busy at work, my ipod, which has taken the drudgery out of washing the dishes and cleaning the litter box, also helps to keep me from slowing down my thoughts. Likewise, I no longer live alone, so there is that (wonderful) distraction. I can tell that even when I sleep lately my thoughts are still too active.

Therefore, I've started swimming in silence. In the past I avoided doing that. I'd get too bored and then I would quit swimming so I used to wear my ipod in its waterproof case. Now, I'm finding that my brain is so full that the 40 minutes of silence fly by. I'm not even having deep thoughts then; by the end of the swim I'm just slowing down, not yet to the point of sustain concentration.

In the past, I've meditated, journaled, done yoga. I've gotten away from those things. Maybe it is time to bring some of them back into my life to raise the quality of it.

So how do you make space for deeper thinking? Are you able to pondering deeper thoughts in the midst of business or do you need a clear mental space for it? What strategies have been working for you? Frenetic minds want to know!

We Go Both Ways...

Our school began its IWB adventure with Smartboards. However, despite good local service, when problems were escalated to the US support team, we wouldn't hear from them for weeks while the boards sat unusable. Therefore, after our first year of the pilot, we began switching to Promethean boards.

Our local vendor allowed us to swap x number of Smartboards for every y number Activboards that we purchased. By next year, we'll only have one Smarboard left. I left it because the new teacher in that room won't be using it. That will allow me to swap it out the next year for free if all goes as planned.

However, that's meant that this year I was trying to support teachers using two different platforms. Earlier this year I'd heard that you could open Smart notebooks on an Activboard. By the time we got around to following up, the place I'd originally read it had pulled the info, but one of my teachers gave it a try and voilá! It worked. We were using Smart Notebook 9, not the new 10, but this now gives us even more options for ready made flipcharts.

Has anyone else had success using the notebooks/ flipcharts cross platform?

All We Wanted Were Book Club Forums

Last night was one of THOSE nights, the type where you start on what you think is a simple task and many hours later, you are still trying to accomplish it.

All we wanted was an online venue where the elementary summer school students could have ongoing, asynchronous book discussions. Our school has a Blackboard CMS so it should have been no problem. However, this summer our Blackboard will undergo major changes which will take it off line during part of the summer school session.

I wasn't heartbroken to realize that. Neither this teacher nor most of the students are experienced Blackboard users, and I find elementary children often have trouble navigating Blackboard. The forums are especially confusing since when you try to read a post, the header fills the entire screen, so children can't see the body of the post unless they scroll down, and children always think they should save rather than submit the post. As a result, it never shows up in the forum.

My next thought was to create a private Ning. I knew of other elementary teachers who had created the student accounts using linked Gmail accounts. Unfortunately, despite numerous attempts throughout the day and evening, these were failing. I could send the invitation, but when I clicked on the confirmation link in the Gmail message, it would say I was ineligible no matter what the birth date was. I know plenty of other teachers who have used linked Gmail accounts to create Ning accounts, so hopefully it was just a technical problem.

(And yes, I did say "birth date". Ning was out of compliance with COPPA since some elementary children were participating in networks. Now Ning is needing to gather birth date data so they can not allow users under the age of 13 to participate in Nings. (Steve Hardagon has some updated information and possible work arounds on his blog. However, using a Ning was becoming impractical.)

Next I tried Wetpaint, since they have great forums, but I couldn't make the wiki private, and linked Gmail accounts didn't work.

So I asked my PLN what to try and one tweet suggested Imbee. I hadn't checked out that site before. It is a social networking site for children. It is an interesting site and has safe guards in place to make it a healthy environment in which kids can learn to be responsible social networkers. The site has teacher materials and encourages classroom use, but I didn't see any way to make a private network within it, and the teacher doesn't want everyone in there to be able to be part of the book discussions.

Finally I decided to try pbwiki. I think that was the very first wiki platform I ever used. I knew we couldn't use actual wiki pages for the forums because only one person could edit a page at a time. However, I was pleased to see that each page now has a comments tab. I played around in there and it looks like it will work for book discussions.

I was disappointed to see that having the invite key is no longer the only thing you need to access a private pbwiki. I tried using a different browser and going directly to the wiki. A login screen appeared, but in addition to entering the invite key, I had to enter my name (so people can track my revisions) and an email address. It no longer lets you skip adding the email address.

Next, I sent an invitation using a linked Gmail account. That worked just fine as long as I entered the wiki via the link in the email. Otherwise, I need to enter an email address, name and invite key to enter. We can have children do that using the linked Gmail address, but it is a bit more putzy.

I'll show the entire system to the teacher next week to see if it meets his needs. If it doesn't, what suggestions do you have for a free, private venue for online book discussions, that works with linked Gmail accounts for the email addresses?

"Oil Can"

Anyone recognize that quote? I'm pretty sure it's what the Tin Man said to Dorothy when she first meets him in the Wizard of Oz movie.

I'm feeling like I should be uttering those words to readers of this blog. For a variety of reasons and excuses, I've done very little posting for a long while. I'm hoping that is about to change. My head is full of topics and I'm eager to get back to it. To begin with, I'm not even going to worry if they are worthy-- I'm just diving in.

Thank you to those of you who kept dropping by during the drought. I hope the upcoming monsoon makes it worth your while.

Photo credits: Oil Cans by Peter Shiffman used under Creative Commons "By" license

Lessons Learned As the Student Podcasts Arrive

A creative, tech-savvy music teacher at my school gave her students the assignment to create a podcast about gamelan music, since that is what they have been studying. She sent a letter home to the families explaining the project and the due date.

To her delight, a few days later, the first podcast came in and it was far better than she had expected. We figured out how to easily attach it to her web site and waited for the rest to arrive.

Now that they are pouring in, we are needing to overcome some technical difficulties. Here are a few things we discovered.

• iTunes, or at least our flavor of it, wasn't liking the disks that came in in audio CD format. I assume they had been burned on a program such as Nero. Fortunately, we discovered that Real Player not only plays them, but by tweaking a preference, it will save them as mp3 files. This nicely compressed format was easy to upload to the website.

• Audacity is a great tool for podcasting, but its files aren't portable. Saving Audacity projects generates both a .aup file and a separate data file. We have a student who keeps bringing in the .aup file. Since he doesn't have the LAME encoder plugin for Audacity at home, we are trying to get him to use Audacity's export command to turn it into a .WAV file. From what we read online, that should make the file portable.
  

• Internet Explorer 7 doesn't have a very good upload engine; files move better with Firefox.
  

• mp4 files play with in Real Player. For some reason, the podcast that arrived in this format plays fine on the teacher's computer, but when we attach it to the web page, the link isn't playable in the browser and when you try to right-click it to download it, you get a page not found error. We are trying to use www.zamzar.com to convert it to mp3.

No word yet from the teacher as to whether or not Zamzar did the trick. It is a handy website that lets you upload a media file or enter a URL (think YouTube video), select a format you want, and then enter your email address. The site converts the file to the selected format and then sends you a download link.

This is one of many ways you can download YouTube videos. I haven't tried it in it's latest version. Our system engineers tell me it works well, but slowly. It took 3 hours to capture a 4o MB YouTube video, but it worked.

Anyone else assigning podcasts as homework for elementary students? How did it go? How did most students record them? What format were they saved in?

I'll post the URL when the teacher is ready for visitors.