Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

Came back from vacation down to Yellowstone last night. A big thanks to Wes for guestblogging. As expected, he did an outstanding job and of course manage to post some great stuff.

Looking back at our holiday, there were a number of ways technology was used to create a better vacation.

• Wiki. We travelled with another family and used a wiki to plan out the details. While I basically did all the editing, everyone viewed it many times prior to the trip and we all sat down and used it to finalize things. When travelling with another family, it was nice to have many things pre-planned.
• Flickr. Friends and family members loved being able to keep up with things along the way. In addition, it enabled me to deal with all the pictures in smaller chunks rather than doing it all after the fact. I also found a great little bookmarklet that easily adds a geotag to your photos. I also incorporated a little tip found at photojojo.com that we had a lot of fun with.

• Youtube. I was even able to create a short video and upload it to youtube.
• Blog. Providing short updates rather than emailing, allowed me to describe some of the details of our trip.
• Geocaching. Had the opportunity to do a few geocaches which led us to some interesting places we may not have found otherwise…Ousell Falls being one.
• Cellphones and text messaging. We needed to text message each other throughout the trip as the US charges $1 a minute for cellphone use.

I’ll definitely use these again for future vacations.

I am often on the hunt for great new podcasts, and today in my 3 or so hours of driving to and from Wewoka, Oklahoma, I listened to my first System Trash podcast. Yes, these guys are real geeks, but they are also fun to listen to and I learned a fair bit– even though I listened to an episode about an operating system I think I know a good deal about (Macintosh OS X.)

The podcast series focuses primarily upon different variants (distributions) of Linux, and the slogan of the show is:

Ain’t no system we can’t trash.

Interestingly, I don’t think the podcast about Mac OS X ended up being very “trashy.” These guys obviously have a LOT more perspective than I do about operating system differences– and they definitely found more to like than trash with the Free-BSD based Macintosh OS X.

The much anticipated (and perhaps much dreaded) upcoming release of Windows Vista from Redmond is going to make the next 6 - 12 months quite interesting in the operating system world. As virtualization software continues to improve and more educators (including IT support staff personnel) begin to see the light of open source in schools, I think our educational technology environment is going to be more dynamic than ever!

If you’re looking to improve your knowledge and understanding of these events, you might check out the System Trash podcast. After all, it’s a free podcast– and if you don’t like it, you can trash it!

Dean and his family are having a great vacation in Montana, and will be soon (if they are not already) enjoying Yellowstone National Park. He dropped me an email today with a link to his family blog, “The Shareski Blogging Experiment.” Dean’s daughter Martha is also blogging about her vacation experiences separately. Looks like an excellent adventure is being had by all so far!

Bob Sprankle’s “Bit by Bit” podcast is one of my favorites to listen to, and I always enjoy the “Seedlings” episodes that Bob creates collaboratively with Cheryl Oakes and Alice Barr. Today in my 4 hours of driving to and from a small school in southern Oklahoma, the last three “Bit by Bit” episodes were some of the first podcasts I listened to. Bob, Cheryl and Alice generally share “geek of the week” sites, and I was particularly interested to learn in the first part of their latest series about Delibar (a del.icio.us desktop client for Mac OS X) and Roy: Tale of a Singing Zebra. I’m sharing a workshop with teachers on interactive whiteboards this Thursday, and I’m going to use Roy as an example of great, free digital curriculum now available online that is perfect for classrooms equipped with interactive whiteboards!

Thanks Bob, Cheryl and Alice for continuing to share your discoveries and educational journey with us all!

College students and the environments in which they live and play are changing, so it makes sense that the orientation sessions for new college freshmen are also different in some locations. According to the CNN article “College students warned about Internet postings” from August 2nd:

From large public schools such as Western Kentucky to smaller private ones like Birmingham-Southern and Smith, colleges around the country have revamped their orientation talks to students and parents to include online behavior. Others, Susquehanna University and Washington University in St. Louis among them, have new role-playing skits on the topic that students will watch and then break into smaller groups to discuss.

College students are not the only ones who need this sort of practical orientation to Internet safety and safe digital social networking (DSN.) All students who are using the Internet need to be having these types of discussions with adults, and the conversations must go beyond a lame, digital immigrant plea of “don’t use those websites.”

Of course students are going to keep using digital social networking websites. The updated English WikiPedia list of social networking websites is an eye-opener: It claims (with citations) 40 million users on Xanga, 22 million users on Bebo, over 7 million users on Facebook, and almost 100 million users on MySpace. Plus many, many more. Amazing. And those numbers are most likely only going to continue to grow.

One of the big messages teens and others need to understand and start to live out regards the importance of not giving out TOO MUCH information online, since most social networking websites are globally accessible to anyone: including both potential and actual friends, enemies, criminals and predators. As this CNN article points out, however, the issues at hand are not only focused on Internet safety: They also regard the “permanent record” which people who are “writing the web” are creating about themselves that will likely be referenced by future employers, educational institutions, potential boyfriends/girlfriends, and others.

Saint Andrew’s School in California is offering the following tips for parents, to make DSN sites like MySpace safer for their children:

• Become a member. It’s quick, easy, free and will give you access to more material on the site.
• Do a “Friend Finder” search for your child or his or her friends. Make sure to use their first and last names.
• A person’s MySpace profile page won’t always tell you the person’s full or real name, as many users only list their first name or go under a pseudonym. If you do a “Friend Finder” search using someone’s first and last name, you can usually pull up their profile if they are members.
• Searches by such criteria as the name of the school a student attends, e-mail address and ZIP code also are possible.
• Go through your child’s profile with him or her and identify and remove any items that provide specific information that would allow someone to assume his or her identity or be able to identify where the child can be found at any particular time.
• Have your child set his or her profile to “private” to prevent strangers from accessing it.
• Check out the safety tips from WiredSafety and The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children listed below. Both sites offer ways to keep our children safe while they explore the online world.

Whether you’re about to start the fall school term in the northern hemisphere or you’re in the middle of winter term in the southern hemisphere, consider sharing similar suggestions with the parents of the students you teach.

I am becoming convinced that all, or at least most, of the professional development sessions we participate in as educators and share with others should be organized via linked wikis. Dean did a great job modeling this last month in his multi-day digital storytelling workshop. I attempted this in June when I shared several workshops with teachers in College Station, Texas (Bryan ISD) focused on digital literacy– primarily the use of blogs and podcasts to help students develop both traditional and 21st century literacy skills. I started a blogging tools wiki a few weeks ago after an engaging skypecast on this topic, and the MTI 2006 conference I attended 2 weeks ago in Winfield, Kansas utilized a conference wiki that a fair number of folks have contributed to successfully.

So, why all this educational wiki-use? I think the answers are pretty straightforward:

1. Wikis are collaborative, and one of the ideas we want students and teachers to both understand and LIVE is the idea that groups of people can generally come up with better ideas and solutions than people working in isolation.
2. Wikis are iterative, meaning that they improve over time. They are not a single snapshot or a static creation, but rather a dynamic, living creation that can continue to grow as ideas change and evolve over time.
3. Wikis are free. As teachers, we like free stuff. And wikis don’t cost anything to create in our present climate of abundant web 2.0 free tools.
4. Wikis are RSS subscribable, which makes them easier to track and update. More information services in the coming years will embrace RSS for good reason: Pulling information of interest to you is much more preferable than having information PUSHED to you that may or may not be desired.
5. We learn best by experiencing pedagogy and technology: Using wikis permits teachers to take on the role of learners, and directly experience how powerful but yet simple wikis are and can be for instruction– and especially group work.
6. Wikis are fast to create and update. I’ve been making webpages to accompany my educational technology workshops since the mid-1990s, but I’ve never used anything as fast and easy as a wiki. Yes, using a tool like Dreamweaver I can create a website with many more bells and whistles– but our focus in education should generally be more on CONTENT and IDEAS rather than bells and whistles. (Vendors and our own students may lose sight of that idea often, but as the teachers in the room we shouldn’t.)
7. Wikis can emphasize the idea that learning is ongoing rather than one-shot, and enable conversations and idea threads to continue long after the staff development session or group project deadline is over.

I am probably going to create a wiki for all the workshops that I’ll be doing for educators from now on. Thanks to Dean for already modeling this for us with his digital storytelling wiki. I’m guessing Dean and many others will be creating more wikis for use in professional development settings in the months to come! If so, we can look forward to continuing these conversations as we learn and share together.

I love the international idea exchanges that are empowered by the edublogosphere and more broadly by read/write web tools. Not only is it amazing to have the chance to learn from and even collaborate with other educators in other nations, but it is also interesting to observe differences in speech, behavior, and perspectives.

A few weeks ago I participated in an international skypecast about blogging tools, which involved around 25 people (not all educators, incidentally) from different parts of the world. We had North American participants from the US and Canada, and even a couple Australian voices in the dialog.

One issue which came up during our skypecast conversations was whether there are international differences in the ways blogging is being used in the classroom, and which tools are therefore most appropriate for teachers and students to use. In the United States, I perceive we have comparatively more litigation and liability fears/issues in society in general, including in education. I think this can and does have a significant chilling effect on educational innovation in some contexts, and specifically with blogging causes some (or many) administrators to not even consider letting teachers and students under their authority engage in classroom blogging.

Have you observed international differences in the ways web 2.0 tools are used in classrooms, and specifically differences in the uses of blog tools? What are those differences, and what impact do you think they have for student learning and engagement? What should we be learning from other educators in other countries, where the context and environment for education may be different than our own?

Hello from Edmond, Oklahoma, where my family and I have started the rather overwhelming task of sorting out boxes from our previous residence and finding new places for all this “stuff.”

Sorting out your possessions when moving, particularly as we are going from a 4 bedroom to a 3 bedroom home for awhile, is challenging but also worthwhile in many ways. Like our new garage that is filled with boxes, our brains become laden with ideas as we peruse the edublogosphere. Rather than spending time acquiring more “stuff” in the form of ideas, it is often quite helpful to sort through the ideas we already have, organize them, toss out those that are no longer relevant or of interest– and at times, discover lost “nuggets” which we have either forgotten or many not have ever discovered in the first place, even though they were buried somewhere in our mind (or garage.)

Thanks to Dean for giving me an opportunity to guest blog here on “Thoughts and Ideas of an EdTech.” This will give me a good excuse to blog periodically as I’m otherwise occupied at home with REAL boxes to unpack– and also likely provide a good chance to sift through some older posts and thoughts that deserve further attention and reflection.

I’m also planning on delving into Dean’s blog archives– sifting through and holding up some of the many “nuggests” which he has reflected on and posted here. It will be fun to do this together, and I’ll (as always) be inviting your thoughts and feedback as well. Hope you will join me in the upcoming days as Dean takes a well-deserved break from his blog!