Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

Now we have a wiki. Google has acquired Jotspot. I’ve been enjoying Docs and Spreadsheets, not to mention my Calendar, now my wiki’s all in one place….whatever happend to small pieces loosely joined? They’re tightening up!

Read the full story

I created a little story about geocaching using BubbleShare. BubbleShare is an essential in digital storytelling. I’ve used it before and also RockYou but the features in Bubbleshare make it #1 in photo stories online.

Start a class discussion with this video.

Campaign for Real Beauty

Like most who would read this blog using an aggregator, I spend the majority of my time reading educational blogs and sources. But who else do you read? How diverse are your feeds?

I keep a list of librarians, administrators and other school related bloggers in my aggregator, not because I’m particularly interested but I like to be able to show others what is possible. If we believe that students will be able to transfer the experiences and skills associated with blogging, we need examples of real world of bloggers that cross cultural, societal and vocational lines. Do you know of blogging doctors? lawyers (beside Larry Lessig)? mechanics? parents? plumbers? store owners? car salesman?

My list of non-educational bloggers is pretty weak. Here are a few:

• Dave Weinberger: technologist and commentator (this one really doesn’t count)
• Scott Hodge: Pastor from Chicago. Stumbled across his blog a year or so ago and enjoy his passion for Starbucks coffee and his church
• Freakonomics:authors of the best selling book continue to see the world from a very different perspective.

This list isn’t very diverse. Is yours? Does your mechanic blog?

Bud posted this on his blog and 2 things caught my attention. The first is somewhat insignificant to the post but the fact that Bud asked the student to use their cell phone to call the number on the book made me think about the ease and natural way we could be using this technology. The second thing I like about this is that I love the way this book appears to be intergrating traditional media with digital media. Writing a book that requires folks to seemlessly move from online information to group problem solving is really interesting.

Written by one of the creators of I Love Bees, an early incarnation of an ARG (alternate reality game), Cathy’s Book is a puzzle wrapped inside a book and scattered around lots of voice mail boxes, collections of documents, websites, and . . . well, we’re not sure what else yet. We just know it’s addictive and contagious. At least one other student here at school is waiting to read the book, and we’re all reading voraciously; we even met up today during lunch to check in on the progress that we’ve each made. (All of us had discovered different clues that allowed us to access various hidden puzzles. We needed each other to make the picture begin to be complete. VERY COOL.)

I like the idea of a novel that uses a narrative that exists in lots of places. I’ve written this before, but I really, really think there’s potential in these types of stories, stories where we have to access different types of information and begin to make sense of what’s real, what’s relevant, and what’s important to the story.

After only a day of reading Cathy’s Book, I’m hooked, as are my students. The only problem I see with that excitement is that in a week or two, we’re going to need another book that engages us in this way.

I’m currently writing a chapter for the new Coming of Age book on geocaching. One of the things I love about geocaching is the way it naturally involves physical activity, problem solving and physical activity. These are both very natural ways of learning and experiencing the world where technology is critical but sits nicely in the background.

My wife has always wanted a VW beetle. I pretty well do what she wants so we got a 2007 red Beetle. I would have been happy with a 1995 Ford Focus but we got the beetle.

Anyway, besides the fact that it was way more than I wanted to spend, I discovered one little feature that might make the whole thing worthwhile.  A tiny auxilary jack located next to the stereo allows me to plug in my mp3 player. So my drives around my school division are now the perfect opportunity to get caught up with podcasts. Yesterday the 100km trip back and forth from Assiniboia allowed me to listen to:

• David Warlick talking to teachers in Northern Ontario. I was actually amazed at the resistance and skeptism by the teachers.
• TED TALKS with Jimmy Wales
• TED TALKS with Nicholas Negroponte.  My favourite line was in regards to school districts who asked about piloting his laptops for smaller sizes, “Screw you! Get to the back of the line!”
• Wes Fryer’s free digital curriculum talk. I always get good stuff from Wes.

I guess we’ll keep the bug.

Yesterday I did a presentation on the Read/Write Web. It was an introductory presentation to encourage folks to commit to some followup sessions on the specifics.

I prefaced my talk by stating I didn’t want to begin with the tools since without context they can be meaningless. The analogy I used was that as someone with no understanding of carpentry, someone could show me all the latest tools at Home Depot and it wouldn’t mean much to me. But show me that you can create cupboards and I might be interested. (In reality, even that for me wouldn’t do it…I’d just hire someone) So I told them I was going to be showing them cupboards.
There were supposed to be few more than what turned out so it’s a very intimate setting. For the benefit of those unable to attend and for others interested, here’s it is. I just ran the video camera and basically captured the screen. I could have used a screen capturing program but am a bit leary when it’s a long and uses multiple applications. Because of the length, I had to use alot of compression on the video. So if you want a clearer picture of the slides, here they are. It’s really more of an enhanced podcast. So if you’ve got a spare 42 minutes….here you go.

I spoke to about 80 school based and senior administrators last week about blogging. I only recorded the first 12 minutes but the link to the slides has all the slides.

The focus of my talk was on creating connections. Evidence that my talk resonated was the fact that after I invited them to begin reading conversations using Bloglines, over 30 of them requested invites. Now like anything, I’m not sure all will make this part of their routine but even if 10 begin reading the conversations that are taking place, it’s going to make a difference.

The audio ends at slide 22 of 44.