Monthly Archives: July 2009

Jul 17 2009

links for 2009-07-16

Jul 16 2009

Online Transparency

I went in search of some reading this morning.  Now, I was too lazy to head to the library or the book store so I went online.  A favourite place of mine to read and share documents is Scribd.  Here, any document that folks upload is converted to iPaper and you can read it online in your browser, provided you have a recent copy of the Flash player installed.

There are other alternatives as well.  You can download the documents in PDF or TXT formats for offline reading.

Like most sites of this genre, when you land on the doorstep, there are teasers there to get you to dig into the site or perhaps even create your own account so that you can add your own content. 

This morning, as I scanned the “Explore” section, I saw a number of documents about Michael Jackson, including the one embedded below.

This program is a celebration of the talents and impact that this article had on the world.  The images and words inside remind us how many of us grew up with Mr. Jackson and followed his development into the artist that we last remember.

It’s impressive that a tool like Scribd can provide such resources for a world to view, if it wishes.  Finding a document like this would take some effort with a regular search engine.

Like a regular search engine, you’ll get everything, including some things that you may not have an interest in.  For example, his last will and testament is online there as well. 

Such is the price that we pay for transparency.

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Jul 16 2009

links for 2009-07-15

Jul 15 2009

4 Rs

Fellow blogger and educational colleague Paul from Quoteflections has tagged me in his blog on a new meme asking bloggers to identify four posts from their blog in the categories of:

  • Rants
  • Resources
  • Reflections
  • Revelations

This meme according to Paul originated by Dr. Joyce Valenza and Doug Johnson at the NECC Conference.  I’ve actually met both of these folks, in addition to Paul, so I’ll support the cause by continuing the meme.  A couple of trivia notes about each – I had the opportunity to Tweet with Dr. Valenza at the NECC Conference where she sent out a query about whether or not there were empty seats in a session I was already in and I met Mr. Johnson when I engaged him to be a keynote speaker at the Western RCAC Symposium a couple of years back.

When you have so many blog entries, it’s tough to remember them all so I’m scanning the recesses of my mind to answer these.

Ranting – I’ll nominate a post from October 3 of last year entitled “A Pair of Debates – and a Baseball Game“.  I didn’t really rant about much – I didn’t think.  I was just commenting on the difference between the Canadian Prime Minister and the United States Vice-Presidential debate.  But, you never know who reads your blog – in this case the Christian Science Monitor noted my post and called me “snooty” in their blog.  I guess when a post affects someone else, it’s ranting.

Resources – This one is easy and something that I work on daily.  Delicious allows you to scrape your daily bookmarked entries into a blog entry.  As I find interesting internet resources and bookmark them, they are plopped into an entry in my blog.  What’s interesting is that I’ll note after the fact that I get on a particular tangent and a bunch of bookmarks on a particular day will be on a specific theme.  It’s going to be helpful to others – this September a new Computer Science curriculum must be implemented and so I’ve been collecting and tagging websites with icsxx to help the cause.

Reflections – I was captured and intellectually and emotionally held hostage by a Grade 7 class at our Gore Hill Public School this year.  The teacher there went way out on a limb with faith that what I was talking about with Web 2.0 activities would motivate and engage these students.  Before my presentation to the Ontario Educators’ Meetup, I went and got some inspiration from the class and it was the basis for this entry.

Revelations – This is hard because every day is a revelation if you learn online.  There’s so much to learn and so little time if you wish to maintain a balanced life.  So, being unbalanced helps but learning with computers is my passion so I don’t really need to apologize.  Lately, I’ve been delving into becoming productive with a Netbook and its smaller screen.  With the new web based Seesmic Twitter interface, I thought about whether or not a separate Twitter client is necessary.

So, there’s my walk through the past in response to Paul’s call to meme.  The rules are:

1. Scan your posts for your own personal favorites.
2. Choose one post in any/each of the four categories:

  • Rants
  • Resources
  • Reflections
  • Revelations

I leave it to you folks to define these terms, but my instinct is that we could treat these loosely. You are welcome to suggest new categories if these don’t fit.
3. In a blog post, list those posts and very briefly describe

  • why it was important,
  • why it had lasting value or impact,
  • how you would update it for today.

4. Select five (or so) other bloggers to tap with this meme.
5. Tag all of your post with #postsofthepast

To continue the meme, I’m going to tag five Canadian Educational Bloggers who have recent entries indicating an active blog.  You may wish to bookmark and follow these educational thinkers after this meme passes. What the hey…I’ll tag more than five.

The danger with creating a list like this is omitting someone.  If you’re a Canadian blogger and not identified above, consider yourself tagged.

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Jul 15 2009

links for 2009-07-14

Jul 14 2009

Ontario Educator Meetup #7

Another perk for summer holidays – the Ontario Educator Meetup was held in the afternoon instead of our regular evening meeting times.  Yesterday afternoon, Jeff O’Hara (zemote) hosted the session and took the group that peeked at about 15  through the Edmodo website.

Edmodo is an online community specifically developed for education.  Logins are either via a teacher or student portal and, once landed, you have access to all of the communities you have membership in.  Teachers can create their own community and only subscribe those students to their class.  Jeff was quick to point out that Edmodo only requires a minimum of information to create user accounts.

Once you’re in your community, you have access to many of the elements that you would expect in a read/write web environment.  You’ve got your basic status updates and replies.  However, Edmodo goes further than that, incorporating many of the elements that you would expect to see in an educational environment.

Check out the latest in class assignments, upcoming events (due dates?), etc.  File transfers and embedding of videos from services like YouTube let teachers control the online environment for the classroom community.  Embeds are empowered using the Scribd service.  On the fly through the presentation, Jeff created a community for the Ontario Educator Meetup and we were in and posting as we multi-tasked our way through his presentation.The service is free and I’m always curious about how services like this are funded so I asked.  Jeff answered no to advertising and that the current service is free.  They are working on a collection of premium services to be released in the fall.  In addition to the functionality that is currently available, Jeff gave us a sneak preview of the new features that are in development for a fall release.

If many social networking resources are blocked at your school district, Edmodo looks to be really attractive with its safely guarded environment and total commitment to education.  What was especially cool during the presentation were the testimonials given by a couple of educators who used the product last year – one from Ontario and the other from the United Kingdom.  Their experiences were very positive.

Thanks to Jeff for sharing an hour of his time to give us a tour of this resource.

The presentation, as are all of the previous sessions are archived at the Ontario Educator Meetup website.  You can follow updates on Twitter by looking for the hashtag  #OntMeetup.  Upcoming sessions are announced on the website and through this account.

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Jul 14 2009

links for 2009-07-13

Jul 13 2009

Technical Writing

When you have limited resources available to your class, you want to make sure that you get the maximum benefit from them.  If you have to wait in line for the DVD player, or access to the gymnasium, or even to computers and technology, there’s nothing less helpful than trivial time wasting activities.  Why not go for the gusto?  The resulting engagement and relevancy will capture students’ fancy and result in better overall satisfaction with the activity.

I would suggest that the actual writing part is probably the easiest component.  After all, often it’s just a matter of opening a word processor and typing from your revised draft.  It should come as no surprise that boredom sets in quickly.  If that’s the case, I am a real fan of learning technology while writing about it.

At a recent CIESC meeting (Computers in Education School Contacts), we worked through an activity that served to introduce new skills, new software, and ended up with some interesting products.

Divided into groups, the task was to explore a Web 2.0 activity with the idea that each group would be doing a small presentation about what the web application did.  However, we formalized the process.  Each group not only had to explore the application but they used SMART Ideas to made and explode their activities and ideas for classroom applications.  After a suitable time of exploring the web resource, they turned to the mind maps that were created in SMART Ideas and then revisited the web resource.  This time, it wasn’t for exploration; it was to take screen captures of the salient screens, bring them into Adobe Photoshop Elements to enhance (add arrows, annotate, spot light, etc.) the image.  Finally, these images along with instructional text were assembled in Comic Life to create a 1-2 page summary of the resource.

At the conclusion, not only had the group learned about some new Web 2.0 resource, but they had dug deeper into Comic Life, Photoshop Elements, and SMART Ideas than if we had done some sort of activity highlighting any of the applications.  The resulting documents can then be posted around the room for future reference for others.  What was so affirming to me was that many of the teachers returned to their classrooms to do the same activity with their students.

Ontario educators have so many resources for doing this sort of activity in their classroom.  Through the OESS initiative, software titles are licensed so that they are available for every computer and every student in the province.  Most include teacher takehome rights so that you can practice before you go live in the classroom.  There are some wonderful titles licensed that work nicely into the concept of technical writing.

Even with this fine collection of titles, there are so many other online web resources to do the same sort of thing.  I’m thinking that web resources like the following compliment the concept nicely.

What I like about the concept of Technical Writing is the requirement that it be precise, succinct and written with a specific purpose for an audience known or unknown.  I think that it’s also the perfect vehicle for teaching and reinforcing some higher level computer concepts in a motivating fashion that will stick with students.

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Jul 13 2009

links for 2009-07-12