Jan 27 2012

The Village Gets Bigger

Remember the proverb “It takes a village to raise a child”?  I’m happy to note that the Ontario educational blogging village got bigger this week.  Check out the LiveBinder or the Scoopit page for the latest.  From the Scoopit page, you’ll see the entries in LIFO (Last In, First Out) format.  i.e. the latest additions at the top.  If you check the LiveBinder site, you’ll notice that there’s a new tab.

This is a new category.  While we are all advocates at our various level, there was a whole group on the Ontario scene who had been excluded.  With the advice of @ShannoninOttawa, I’ve opened up this new category to recognize the blogs of people who aren’t directly employed by the educational system and yet have a deep interest in making sure that students in the province receive a superior education.  Please welcome them to the fold.

OurSchool.ca
Lorna Costantini was keeping an eye on my old stomping groups – the Avon Maitland District School Board and Director Ted Doherty’s inclusion of parents in their strategic planning.

All school districts struggle with all kinds of issues.  What a progressive concept to reach out in this manner to invite parents in the process.  After all, it only makes sense – they provide the student bodies that make the district what it is.

Safety 4 our Schools
The latest issue here revolves around school districts that don’t require background checks for volunteers in schools.  The body of a message from the Minister of Education appears in the latest post and there’s a table identifying which school districts require and which don’t require background checks.  Interesting.

SheilaSpeaking

There’s more about parent involvement in schools from Sheila Stewart’s blog.  Her current entry is Part II of a series examining the state of Parent Involvement Committees in the province.  They are legislated; but how effect are they?  Do they even have a significant existance?

I think that the addition of this new group of bloggers will enrich the messages that we have the opportunity to read regularly.  Please welcome to the group and certainly feel free to head over to their blogs and comment on their messages.  They have some pretty strong messages as advocates and may well be our political friends at some level in the future.

Jan 27 2012

OTR Links 01/27/2012

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

By dougpete • Posted in Links
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Jan 26 2012

Vindictive — and a Discovery

I should acknowledge right from the beginning, it was my fault.  I have nobody to blame but myself.  But, what followed, was a very pleasant discovery.

My fault – I very seldom turn my computers off.  I just close the lids and let them go to sleep.  Doesn’t everyone?  It’s just that they really should be rebooted from time to time just to have a fresh start.  But, I’m bad and don’t until I get a crash or a Microsoft update that needs to reboot the computer so that the new updates can take effect.

So, having said all this, you know what happened.  I was entering some marks for my class into LibreOffice, my spreadsheet of choice, when I guess I asked it to do something it didn’t like.  I asked it to round off the calculations to one decimal place.  Who knew that would cause such grief.  Now, we all tell students “save early, save often”, but we never do it ourselves – right?  At least not me.

So, LibreOffice crashed and I lost about half an hour’s work and I’m kicking myself for not saving.  Of course, LibreOffice will restore from crashed memory upon restart but I wasn’t having of that.  Earlier that morning, I had read about Kingsoft Office Suite.  So, I figured; what the hey, I’ll use this as an opportunity to download it and kick the tires.  After all, the folks at Cnet had given it a glowing review.  The author had indicated that they had created a ribbon interface that rivalled Microsoft’s.  So, I decided to give it a shot.

I was pleasantly surprised with the software.  It was relatively small in size and gives a product that does word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.  Unlike the original article though, there was no ribbon interface on the free version.  Instead, it was a throwback to Office 2003.  But, it did a nice job and I got my work done.  I played around with it for a while and was impressed with how nicely it worked and, importantly, how quickly it loaded.  The other point of note is the discussion at the end of the Cnet article.  Want to know thoughts about software developed off-shore, which came first Word or WordPerfect, some other free alternatives, – wade your way through the comments.

The one area that I enjoyed focusing on was the interface and I thought of the tools that I regularly use.

Google Docs

GoogleDocs

LibreOffice

libre

Word Web App

WordWeb

Microsoft Word Starter

WordStarter

and now, Kingsoft Office.

king

Each of the titles has its own benefits and drawbacks.  One of the things that does bother me is how slow a wordprocessor is to start.  It was there that the Kingsoft Office really excelled.  I was up and running in no time.  Of all of them, LibreOffice is the only product that has everything.  Each of the others can always have more features once you present a credit card. 

But, hey, it was fun.  If you’re looking for a change of pace, take a look at Kingsoft Office.  I’d be interested in your thoughts.

Jan 26 2012

OTR Links 01/26/2012

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

By dougpete • Posted in Links
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Jan 25 2012

Ontario LiveBinders

I was very happy to read that the developers at LiveBinders had created a version of their product for the iPad.  Of course, I had to have it and downloaded it right away.  It’s not that navigating through the site on the iPad is a tough thing; it’s the idea that I could pull in resources from the iPad without dealing with the web.  So, I fired it up and soon realized that my thoughts about this application were different than what I had expected.  I expected much of the same functionality that I would get from the web from inside the application.  That functionality is there but it spawns Safari to get it done.

What you do get is a product that lets you manage your stuff on the LiveBinder site.  But, that’s OK – I do have access to my things, public and private, and LiveBinders that I’m collaborating on.  Not a bad start for a version 1.0 of the product.  But, I was hoping to do some searching and browsing of others’ works.  I’m just not seeing it.  It is a handy way to access and keep tabs on your own content though.

Photo 2012-01-24 1 44 50 PM

As I clicked the icon in the bottom left, I left the application and was on the LiveBinder site on the web.  From that point on, it was LiveBindering as usual.  From the recesses of my memory, there was one thing that I’d always wanted to do at the site but kept forgetting.  I wanted to know what resources had been created and shared to support the Ontario Curriculum.  I was nicely pleased with the results.  Sadly, judging from the number of hits, these resources don’t seem to be all that well known.

Ontario

For the rest of this post, I’d like to highlight what you’ll find if you search for “Ontario”.

That’s certainly an interesting collection.  If the curriculum shoe fits, give one a try and see if this offers a useful collection for your classroom.

Oh, and I had created one public collection as well.

Jan 25 2012

OTR Links 01/25/2012

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

By dougpete • Posted in Links
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Jan 24 2012

About Plan B

It was with great interest that I read the article “The Ethics of Mobile Learning: Troubling and Complex” this morning.  The author shares some thoughts about societal norms and attitudes in a discussion about mobile technology as a possible answer to educational issues in developing countries.  It’s an interesting read and I can’t comment on the societal aspect as my knowledge is limited to what I’ve read and not what I’ve experienced.

But, I can comment on my own experience with technology and education.  You can’t read any article about technology infusion into a school system that doesn’t include massive amounts of professional development for teachers.  It’s necessary everywhere to create that culture of eager technology learners.  Nobody is apologetic about it.  Teachers just want to do the best that they can.  So, is working the Web 2.0 tools the answer?  In a perfect world, it offers so much.

Do we live in a perfect world?

Mmmm.  No.

It was last night that I read this message from @mbteach, a pretty sharp educator from Philadelphia.  She’s very active on social networks and when she shares some of the amazing things that she’s doing with her students, you can’t help but be so impressed.  Obviously, she teaches in a perfect world, right?  After all, Philadelphia is a pretty sophisticated city.  It was with surprise that I read this Twitter message from her last evening.

There’s at least two things to take away from this.

  • She’s planning ahead, knowing the limitations of her situation;
  • She’s reaching out to her vast network of almost 10 000 for new and innovative ideas for her Plan B.

You’ve got to love the web.  Even those of us who think we live online know that things can go south in a moment’s notice.  I know that when I’m using the web, I always have a Plan B in my pocket.  A classic example would be the Great OSLA Faceoff with my friend @zbpipe.  Here we are at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in the big hall set for 5 000 people.  You’ve got to believe that internet access wouldn’t get much better.  And yet, before we went live, we cached everything that we were going to do as our Plan B.  In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of any internet presentation that I’ve done that I didn’t have something backed up on my computer or a USB key or something.

In fact, any experienced teacher has a Plan B in her/his pocket.  Only someone incredibly naive would rely totally on technology and connections when it’s show time.  Could you imagine a school district that licenses a piece of lesson plan software and then mandates every teacher in the system to use it and only it?  It’s a recipe for disaster.

Even with this post, I’m writing it offline because of my pathetically slow and unreliable internet connection and just hope that I can upload it later.

As a teacher in that classroom, you’ve got two alternatives when things go wrong.

  • Implement your Plan B;
  • Click harder, bang the monitor, check the cables, wiggle the keyboard, scream “I told you it wouldn’t work”, weep.

Back to the original story – yes, we have to deal with the ethics, society and norms, but a complete discussion needs to talk about never-ending professional learning opportunities, including options for Plan B.

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Jan 24 2012

OTR Links 01/24/2012

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

By dougpete • Posted in Links
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Jan 23 2012

Make a Cat

The dog and I had some quality time to spend yesterday while waiting for the football to start.  We had the house to ourselves for a kickoff at 1pm but we didn’t read the memo that the first game didn’t start until 3.  That gives us lots of time to experiment with the computer.  We decided to build our ideal cat to chase.

We decided to use the Catoonizer.  It’s a fun little program from the folks at Cartoon My Pet.  The Catoonizer is a simple little application to use.  Just load it and there are a couple of things that you can change.  Features and Markings (Grrrr, I’ll give you markings…) are all elements there for building your perfect cat.  (Grrrr, the only good cat is a treed cat)

So, we played around with the elements and decided that this would be his ideal cat.  Stationary and easy to catch and we played around with most of the things that we could configure.  Unlike the real world cats that we’ve run across, this one didn’t reach out and try to claw us.  

There is an export option to save your cat online.  This is a commercial product so you could export the image to your water dish so something but we drew the line at that!

It’s a fun little website and I could see the potential for students who need to create their own cat for a story.  It does require Flash in order to work but within a few seconds, you’re able to create your own customized cat.

Jan 23 2012

OTR Links 01/23/2012

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

By dougpete • Posted in Links
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