Monthly Archives: August 2009

Aug 10 2009

Preparations

I know that it seems like heresy since we had the first really nice warm day of the summer but August will be filled with teachers going in and out of school to get prepared for the start of the school year late August and then it gets serious for September.  There’s already a great deal of chatter happening on our FirstClass conferencing system.

It’s time to get bulletin boards updated, make sure that there are enough desks and chairs, chalkboards prepped, etc.

Just like you want to make sure that the room is prepared after it gets its annual cleaning, successful computer use will make sure that the computers are prepared and ready to go for success.  Your technician will have imaged each one of them over the summer to refresh old software and install new title.

Now, our context is that we use Windows computers and IBM’s School Connect to manage the classes so some of this will be unique to us but some items on this list apply everywhere.

  1. Make sure that all of your laptops/computers actually start up and connect to the network.  It may seem like a simple thing but no connections can be immediate class management issues.  Nothing worse than a crimped cable or a wireless switch turned off.
  2. Make sure that your teacher account is active and take the time to create your class(es).  Using the software management tool, put the one or two applications you need for the first day into your class.  Avoid adding them all!
  3. Grab your class list and select all of the students that you have in your class so that when they log in, they’re ready to go.
  4. Check the printer.  Make sure that you can print to it and that there’s paper ready to go.
  5. Hop onto the internet and check some sites inside the firewall and outside.  http://www.gecdsb.on.ca/d&g/ is good and http://dougpete.pbworks.com is good too.  That’s not too self-serving, is it?
  6. Check that the occasional teacher account is functional.  If you assign computer tasks when you’re away from class, add this account to your class.
  7. Check out the new software titles.  Comic Life and Adobe Premiere Elements are a couple that will find a nice home in your classroom this year.
  8. Check out the old software titles.  If you’ve used Microsoft Publisher in the past or Fathom or Tinkerplots, make sure that they’re good to go too.  There are enough surprises in the computer world!
  9. Check the SMART Board and data projector.  There are more connections there that could jiggle or have a gremlin attach over the summer.
  10. Restore your report card comment libraries.  You won’t need them right away but if there are problems, it’s best to get at resolving them.

Finally, for #7 and #8, take a look at BookIT and see when PD offerings for any titles that you wish to have more information and experience with before going live with students.  It will be great to have you out for a workshop or to book some time for me to visit your classroom.

Best wishes for a great computing new school year.

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Aug 10 2009

links for 2009-08-09

Aug 9 2009

The Cure

The cure is sometimes worse that the disease, I guess.

It’s been a few days since the Lights Went Out at Twitter.  Service has been restored – well sort of.

Checking the timeline will reveal that many applications that access data through the Twitter API are still not working.  I’m impacted as I use Twitterfeed to scrape content from my blog to Twitter to let my friends know that I’ve rambled on about something.  For the past couple of days, I’ve been posting the announcements manually.

Fortunately, Delicious has been able to continue doing its thing.  However, a quick check this morning reveals that it didn’t work.  I’m seeing other services posting advisories that they are still adversely affected.  We can only assume that, as Twitter recovers from the denial of services attacks, that tighter access to its API continue to challenge services in their attempts to do their thing.

Canadian blogger Joan Vinall-Cox was so hyper when she couldn’t get connected.

It was easier to visualize when there was no service.  There was a problem.  They’re working on it, deal with it.  But, as the cures are put into place, some services work and some don’t.  From a user perspective, it’s difficult to try and understand what’s working and what’s not.

Let’s hope that the problems are soon resolved and that things can get back to working the way that they were before, only safer.

In the meantime, we’ll all have to take the pills for the cure with a little applesauce and hope that they slide down smoothly!

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Aug 9 2009

links for 2009-08-08

Aug 8 2009

Reporting From …

Awwww, Saturday morning.  I was looking forward to a little grass cutting but the rain has delayed these plans.  So, I’m just sitting in the rec room watching CMT.  In the mornings on the weekends, the show “Pure Country” plays some of the old classic videos.  One of my favourites came on.

hank williams jr and sr – theres a tear in my beer

It’s a duet with Hank Williams Sr and Hank Williams Jr doing one of the anthems that we think of when we think of Hank Sr.  Other than one of the great country songs of all time, what was unique was that he died when Hank Williams Jr was quite young so this duet never happened in real life.  But, with the use of editing techniques, the producers were able to place Hank Jr into the same video as Hank Sr.  The results are so memorable.  For $.99, it’s a steal through iTunes.

What’s cool about this technique is that with the OSAPAC recommendation, the Ontario Ministry of Education has licensed Adobe Premiere Elements 7.0 for all publically funded schools.  This means that the same sort of thing can be done in Ontario classrooms.

At the final CIESC Meetings in May, the technique and how simple it is was explored by the Computers in Education School Contacts.  Premiere Elements features Green Screen, Blue Screen, and Chroma Key effects in the Video effects menu.  This is going to be fun.

Of course, I had to test out all of the features first before going live.  So, I’m in the lesson room looking for some inspiration.  I have my RCA Small Wonder camera (all of our 87 locations have one purchased centrally so this is replicable everywhere).  I also have my $9.99 tripod that I picked up in one of my wandering sessions at a local super store.

Thanks, M@rio Rossi

Thanks, M@rio Rossi

What to do?  Then, it hit me.  One of the things being discussed this spring was how many home runs were being hit at the new Yankee Stadium.  So, I get on the internet and download some footage from there.  That will be my background.  We live in a layered world so the concept is just to record myself with the camera with a green background.  Using the effects from Premiere Elements, I’ll just make the green background transparent and put myself on top of the Yankee Stadium footage.  Looking around, I see that the walls are painted beige and are covered with those posters that hours were spent designing.  Now, with some previous planning, I could have bought the official equipment but I want this to be replicable.

In fact, as I look around the room, the only big area without stuff on it was the SMART Board.  Bingo!  I turn on the data projector, load the SMART Notebook software, turn the background green, and go full screen.  Instant green screen and since all the schools have this technology, they can do it.  I mess around with the lighting a bit, hit record on the camera, position myself in front of the screen, and give it a shot.  After 2 or 3 tries, I finally get it right so that I’m on the left side of the screen like a real reporter and do my report.

Now, this would work better as a team effort but how do you describe this goofy little whim to someone else and then take them through all of the trials and errors until you get it right?  I was actually quite impressed with what I was able to do locked in a room by myself.

Looking through my camera, I see that I had taken some footage of Will Richardson at the Expanding Our Boundaries conference in February.  Sure enough, I was able to put myself on the stage with Will and co-present.

The power of this should not be lost in the classroom.  There’s all kinds of room for this activity in research projects.  Imagine students reporting live from the beaches of Normandy.  Imagine students reporting on the opening of the Olympics.  Imagine students reporting from the Space Shuttle.  Imagine …  In fact, anywhere you can grab video, it serves as a suitable background with students as reporters or totally immersed in the moment.  How about footage from a web cam?  Imagine doing a traffic or pollution report with the 401 across the top of Toronto in the background?

As with good instructional practice, beware of the “low hanging fruit”.  Just like podcasting or blogging, this is an activity to be done after careful planning, research, writing, editing, coaching, and most assuredly practice.  The mechanics can be accomplished in a short period of time but quality learning comes from everything else.

There are some interesting web resources to help the cause.

Ideas for using this in all subjects abound.

Aug 8 2009

links for 2009-08-07

Aug 7 2009

The Night the Lights went out at Twitter

Much has been written about the outage that happened to access to Twitter yesterday.  The popular micro-blogging service was hit by a denial of service attack.  At about 9 am yesterday, access to the service stopped.  I happened to be working on a project and typically have Seesmic Deskop open in another window to scan when I need a break in concentration.

I was so focused on what I was doing that I hadn’t noticed a lack of updates until about 10:30.  A quick “test” message from zbpipe was the first indication to me that something was amiss.  I tried to send her back a smart aleck response but it failed.  I did my typical reboot of the program and when the timeline failed to load, I knew that something was up.  (or down, actually)  A few minutes later, something did come through – it was a message from kentmanning that indicated that Twitter had been attacked with a denial of service.

Now, I started to get really inerested and turned my attention to getting details.  Details were everywhere, except on Twitter, of course.

Twitter’s status blog revealed the details.  In the meantime, people had taken to Friendfeed or Plurk to continue their conversations.  Later on, service to Twitter was restored although at times, it seemed like the proverbial sucking peanut butter up a straw.  When things like this happen, you can always check Pingdom to see if things are functional.  Kudos have to go out to the Twitter team in their immediate efforts to get their service back online.

So, service is restored and by late last night, conversations were flowing again.  Back to normal?

Hardly.

Digging deeper reveals just how much we and others rely on ancillary services.  While Twitter may have been functional, other services that rely on it working were affected.  The solution to solving denial of service attacks involves filtering the good IP requests from the bad IP requests.  Legitimate services will have to be whitelisted to allow them through with the logic being that others are rendered useless.  So, some services are offline and, if you rely on them, you’re offline too.  Seesmic Desktop was quick to get through but, as I write this, Tweetdeck is twittering that parts of its services remain affected.  Hootsuite isn’t working – when you load it, you get a message that Twitter is still having problems.  My screensaver Twittearth isn’t working either.  I use Delicious to post messages about what web pages I visited yesterday and it’s functional and a post was made over night as per normal.  Twitterfeed, which provided the information above is still affected adversely as well.

While we don’t know all of the details behind this, I’m sure that we’ll find out over time.  In the meantime, the events have served to remind us about how intertwined internet resources can be.  So many services and people are affected since they all tie in to this service directly and require unfettered service in order to do whatever it is that they do.  Friend MindShareLearn summed it up very nicely last night in a tweet.  What’s your Plan B?

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Aug 7 2009

links for 2009-08-06

Aug 6 2009

A Couple of Suggestions for Twitter Improvement

In the beginning, I was so delighted to have people, any people, follow me on Twitter.  I recall the exhilaration when I hit 100 followers.  Wow, there are actually 100 people that want to follow me and my conversation?  How cool.  Dutifully, I would follow them back because it seemed like the courteous thing to do.

I then found that by using services like SocialToo that I didn’t have to have to work at it at all.  I could just use this service and automatically follow anyone who had elected to follow me.  Early on, this was a great idea.  Now, I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of years now and so I think there are probably a couple of explanations for why that worked for me.  Firstly, I was just a semi-blip in the big timeline scheme of things.  Undoubtedly, I was of no real interest to most people.  Secondly, it was right after Twitter got started.  I was an early adopter and others were still in love with MySpace and other popular networks of the time.  A couple of years ago, Twitter was hardly the mainstream force that it is today and just wasn’t attracting many folks.

Things are considerably different now.  Educators are using it to cultivate their own personalized learning networks; businesses are using it to support their products; news and sports services announce breaking stories minutes after they happen; social media people are rallying social groups around their brand; new leaders are teaching and leading using this media; real estate professionals are reaching new contacts near and far; people just wanting to chat with other folks are doing so; back channels for meetings and presentations are online; professional discussions abound, and … the true test of an online communication source … spammers are spamming.

Given all this, automatically following people just doesn’t cut it for me anymore.  Capturing the discussion of hundreds of folks dilutes the original concept and reason why I wanted to use the service.  I understand the business aspect of touching as far as your can reach, but I’m here to make contacts and to learn.  Chris Brogan has some great advice for building the type of network that you’d like to be a part of.  Having been a member of Twitter for a couple of years now, it’s how I try to operate.  For newbies, this should be required reading.  This lets you create your network in the manner that you wish.  You’d hate to let it get out of hand lest you get into the same situation as Mark Shaw and have to take the same drastic measures that he blogs about.

Thanks Robutrix

And yet, Twitter remains the king of serendipity.  I can’t begin to enumerate the incredible people that I’ve “met” online and learned so much from.  For example, folks like jeffpulver, pcornqueen, paulina1, aforgrave, kimberanna_com, ErnieEaster, zbpipe, and so many more are people that I would never have met otherwise.  This just begins to tap into the power of the folks that I learn with.  In addition, there are others that fit into the same category. Then there are folks that I have met personally who stay in touch regularly.  I have a good collection of news services to stay on top of the news.  It’s far more convenient than trying to find a television to get the latest!

If I only followed people that I know, my list would be short and very myopic.  I rely on the fact that I stumble upon people to follow from a good Twitter conversation and I also rely on the fact that people are somehow interested in what I’m talking about and elect to follow me.  I now have turned off the auto follow feature of SocialToo and have gone back to the old manual way of looking at people that are following me.  From my mailbox, I’ll get a message when someone follows me.  I’ll click through to their profile (which is a redirect that requires approval from Firefox); skim their profile, check out a few of their posts and then decide whether or not to follow.  It’s not a quick process and each has to be done individually.

I’d like to suggest a couple of better ways to do this.  These ways are not available presently through Twitter to the best of my knowledge – if there is a third party utility that does this, I’d really like to know.

1)  What would really be helpful is a batch add of users.  When someone follows, add them to an approval page for me on the Twitter site.  You can include some of the details (follows, followers, tweets) and perhaps even a mouse over to bring up profile details.  A simple checkbox as you scroll up and down the list lets you cherry pick those to follow.  Submit and a process could do these adds in one fell swoop.  That would be so convenient.

2)  Probation.  I’m really liking this concept.  When someone wants to follow me, create a new list of folks who are “on probation” for a period of time.  Say 5 days.  During that 5 days, I could watch what they’re tweeting and determine whether this would be a good person to have in my community.  Within that 5 days, I have the opportunity to formalize the follow and they’re in.  if I do nothing within the 5 days, then just remove them from the probationary list and that’s that.  Particularly in the summer when teachers are doing professional development and learning about Twitter, I see a spike in followers.  That’s great and I’ll add them to the list to encourage them to have the same success that I’ve had. Unfortunately, though, after the professional development event lapses, so does the interest in maintaining the account.  You have to manually find and delete these folks.

Twitter is a great service and an awesome space in which to learn, play and stay informed.  With a little more focus on user management, it would be so much more functional.  Less time on management and more on learning works for me.

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Aug 6 2009

links for 2009-08-05