Monthly Archives: February 2010

Feb 14 2010

links for 2010-02-13

Feb 13 2010

Just so I can say I did It

This entry probably has even less important content than most but I just want to type something.  You see, I’m on an airplane headed to San Francisco.  No Internet access; just my tunes playing to keep me company.  So, when this gets posted tomorrow morning, my blog can officially say that it’s a member of the mile high blogging club whatever that means.  For me, I also set a record for the highest elevation blue screen of death on a machine.  I wonder what happened.  i was just reading a PDF file.

Tomorrow, I’ll be spending the day planning this year’s Computer Science and Information Technology Symposium.  It’s one of the things that I’ve really enjoyed doing for a number of years now.  Normally, the CSIT is tacked on to the NECC or ISTE Conference.  This year, it’s a separate event in July.    The date is July, hmmm, without internet access I can’t bring up my calendar.  Well, it’s in July sometime and it’s always a terrific event for Computer Studies teacher to set aside a day for quality professional learning.  This year’s event will be held at the Google complex and there’s a promise of a tour so that adds an extra element to things.

It’s interesting to try to make an airplane your office.  I’m in coach with all the little leg room that offers.  Instead of being smart and bringing my notebook computer, I packed my big IBM laptop.  You see, I’m using it to read the session proposals, as part of the day tomorrow will be evaluating and selecting the sessions that will be offered to those who attend.  It’s a great committee to work with and I’m looking forward to catching up with Pat,  Philip, Chris, Betsy, @mfh, and @alfredtwo.  In addition, I’m looking forward to meeting the new committee members. 

It should be a great day.

OK, that’s it.  There’s not enough room here to actually be able to read the screen with the crazy angle that you get with the snack tray.  I just keep typing and look for underlined text indicating that I’ve made a typo.  To make things worse, the pilot has just indicated that we’re over the Rockies and will be experiencing some turbulence.  Time to put this computer to sleep so that the buffeting doesn’t cause another blue screen. 

Next stop, SFO.  But, I can now say that I’ve blogged at altitude.

Feb 12 2010

Icebreakers

Recently, a friend of mine attended a coaching clinic and we got a chance to talk about the concepts that were covered there.  One of the things that she mentioned was the concept of icebreakers at the beginning of a PD session. 

Now, I have a love-hate relationship with this sort of activity.  I recall one infamous incident where, in a room of 200 people, we got to “meet each other” by going around and finding someone else who has the same kind of pet as you.  Now, first of all, there’s nobody on the face of the planet that has a pet like Beauregard, the wonder dog.  But, as we spent half an hour doing that, I just kept getting frustrated when I started to think of what else I could be doing.  When it was over, then we got started doing things and there was never any followup with the activity and the facilitator complained that he was running out of time towards the end.

Now, I know that I’m a very task oriented person but I see nothing wrong with an icebreaker that has a purpose. 

This week, as always, during our computer contact meetings, we do have our little icebreaker in order to get to know who everyone is and they have a question to answer about their local issues.  But, I also sent them to this quiz and we had a little competition. 

The quiz tests your ability to understand computer acronyms.  As computer users, we live in a world of acronyms.  I can tell you that this nerd got 18/20 the first time through it.  The scores for the past couple of days were a bit lower, in the 13-16 range.  I also used the quiz with my Computer Studies class for Teacher Candidates where they got even lower scores, in the 10-12 range. 

Now, is this a sign of the times?  Do the younger people not put a value or even know the types of acronyms that those of us who’ve been around a while thrive on?  Or, is it a sign of what computer use is evolving to?  Do we put more value on being able to use the technology for productivity and to get the job done rather than understanding the innards of the machine?  It’s an interesting question to ask.  We’re all prepared to understand that society and values change over time.  Is this one of them?  Do people really need to know what SQL represents?  Is it more important to know how to work with the end product instead? 

What do you think?

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Feb 12 2010

links for 2010-02-11

Feb 11 2010

Late to the Party

Yesterday was a pretty intense day working with the first wave of elementary school computer contacts.  We introduced Frames 4 to the group, did an activity with Adobe Premiere Elements, talked about Posterous and my account there, did our regular review of a number of Web 2.0 sites and more.  In the meantime, there was something else a-buzz.

Google had released its newest tool for us, Google Buzz.  After this full-day event, I was off to work with our eLearning teachers and students and managed to take a quick sneak at my iPhone while we were waiting for their session to begin.  Twitter was “a-buzz” with people commenting about this new offering.  A quick skim reveals that there was nothing that I could do anyway since it’s tied to Gmail and that service is blocked at work anyway.

Eventually, my long work day ended and I headed home to fire up my computer and find out what all the excitement was about.  According to my reading, not all accounts were ready to go so I was pleasantly surprised to see that mine was.  Not only was it active but my buddy @pbeens had already friended me and sent me a message.  Within moments, a couple of other people were on my list.  This was pretty impressive so I figured that I might as well find out what’s happening here.

Picture when I first logged in…

So, I started reading.  First stop, the Google Site.  Then, Lifehacker provided some interesting information about Google Buzz and instructions about how to put it on your device.  Later, from Lifehacker again, there are instructions about how to hide Buzz updates.  There’s even instructions about how to add a Buzz button to your blog.  All the while, people were both excited about it and also hating it and describing how to opt out on Twitter.

So, I was truly late to the party learning about this.  But, I started to play around and, more importantly, spending some time reading all that I could about it.

In terms of adoption, I’ve got to think about this.  I’m really happy with what Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail are currently doing for me.  There are already people talking about how to cross-post – actually a fairly easy thing to do when you consider than RSS is the backbone that can tie all of this together.  Do I need another service to add into the fray?  Is Google late to the party or is the offering so feature rich that people will jump on board?

What about you?  Are you a-buzz?

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Feb 11 2010

links for 2010-02-10

Feb 10 2010

Thank you

I want to express a big thank you to those of you who follow me for your assistance yesterday.  I was in a meeting with just my iPhone and the question came up about designing a document that has “flippable” pages with mouse control.

I’ve bookmarked a bunch on my Delicious account.  However, did I mention that I had my iPhone?  I could find some of the links but couldn’t actually test them out.  Did I mention I was on my iPhone?  No Flash there!

So, I put out a plea for help and help came from all over the place.  Thank you so much.  The sites that were suggested were:

The responses were almost immediate and very helpful.  Since my Twitter messages are copied over to Facebook, I had some help from a former high school friend, Paul Anstett.

http://turn-page.com/online-interactive-publications/index.php

So, thanks to everyone that helped bail me out.  I owe you!
Feb 10 2010

links for 2010-02-09

Feb 9 2010

Feeling Good and Bad

I had kind of mixed feelings of being incredibly flighty within the past week.  I know that it’s a trait of myself and I admit it openly.  I like to explore and I’m often abandoning ship on one piece of technology whether it be hardware or software.  I find it really euphoric to find something new that has the potential for changing the way that I do things.  I’m always on the hunt for something new with the potential of making me more productive or to give me deeper insights to an existing practice.

A few years ago, I really clued in on the message from Dr. Elliot Soloway in terms of portable technology for students.  I looked at many of the pieces of software that he was using and talking about and said – this is good.  This is very good.  I really like the concept of the portable technology and the Palm was the solution.  I approached my science colleague and we put together a pretty decent package for our students.  You can read about it here.  http://www.gecdsb.on.ca/d&g/probes.htm.  The package is still in place; we still lend them to schools; the probes and the data gathering pieces of software let students monitor their experiments and hopefully gain some deeper insights to exactly what principles are being taught.  It still remains second to none for flexibility and portability.

So powerful were the collection of resources that we put together that my colleague bought his own Palm and, until this past weekend, it was his main portable device.  You see, last week, he had the misfortune of having me drop in to his office for a chat.  I caught him mid-sync as he was bringing his FirstClass calendar to his Palm.  After he was done, as we were chatting, he was bemoaning the fact that his stylus wasn’t as functional and his Palm not as responsive as it once was.  I pulled out my current choice for portable computing and pulled up the page above and noted that the machines in the project were about 7-8 years old and so his machine had to be at least a year older than that.

The machines have been incredibly durable.  With the odd need to reinstall software, they remain as functional and true to the cause of science learning as they ever did.  But, his needs have changed.  Like so many of us, he needs to carry his calendar and contacts with him for quick and easy reference.  Entries need to be made on the fly with immediate synchronization.

Now, he knew that I owned an iPod and had bought one for my kids last Christmas.  In passing, I had shown him a couple of things that the device can do.  In our media rich world, everyone has a sense of what the iPod/iPhone can do with the funky television ads but it takes a concerted effort to sit down and take a look at real applications in an internet connected environment to truly understand the power for productivity instead of the power to play games or find the nearest restaurant.

We spent some time looking at some of my favourite science apps that are on my Palm.  Things like my RPN Calculator, my converter for temperature, measurement, distance, the FirstClass client, access to seismic data, health outbreaks, etc.  (I didn’t realize that I had so many sciency apps installed)

He was interested and we checked out current pricing at Walmart and BestBuy.

As it turns out, he was more than interested.  He was sold and stopped somewhere on the way home Friday night to get his own device.  I knew first thing Saturday morning with the start of a number of email messages asking questions.  But, I wasn’t his best resource; he has a teenage son!  Monday morning, I get to see his nice shiny device.  I looked down at my screen scratched, grease covered device thinking that it was time to upgrade – no wait, my lovely wife should probably have a say in this.

So, we spent some time looking at applications, getting him on the guest network so that he can attach at any school in the district, put my directory of schools app on his machine, navigated the App Store for a bit, and more before his battery wore out.  The clock has just his 8am and so we both then clicked in to work mode and went our separate ways.

I dropped in for a quick chat after 4 as I was on my way to a workshop and got a chance to talk about how the device had changed his way of doing business during that one day.  We exchanged a few more “app stories” and I was off to lead my workshop and he continued working on his projects.  I’m sure that our conversation will continue shortly today when we land at work.

It’s a mixed moments experience.  After all, I led him to productivity with one product and he embraced it as a professional and lifestyle piece of device.  In one fell swoop, we did a complete portable makeover.  He’s happier than ever and that’s a good thing.  I do feel badly though to see an entire technological era pass for someone else.  I do it all the time, but it was quite another experience to live it alongside a good friend who takes whatever advice I can offer as good advice.  I sure hope that his excitement continues.

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