iSean

i can’t expect anyone to be reading this, but if you come across it and have experimented with wikis, i’d like some advice on the best wiki to use when writing a textbook. i am fiddling with dokuwiki, but i am not sure it’s best. i read it was good for writing technical manuals, which isn’t the same thing as an ed tech textbook, but at least it’s something. i am probably going to fiddle with some other options this week and even look at some non wiki options (e.g., Drupal book module). hmmm.

i am on sabbatical until January. i have to do a lot of writing. i may or may not find time to post to this blog until then. sorry (to the 2 of you who may actually check here . . . on accident).

so, i have a family site, a personal website, a blog, and various class websites. oh, i also have a generic domain pertaining to integrating technology where i hope to host my wiki-based free textbook. but my point is that i have a lot of websites and each one has its own domain name. when i set these sites up, i have been spending time trying to find the best hosting services (shared hosting, it’s what i can afford). many years ago, i used tigertech.net. my family site was small and tigertech met my needs. well it didn’t take long to realize i wanted to fiddle with databases and tigertech wasn’t set up easily for that. so i found iPowerweb. they were great back then. i hosted all of my class stuff with them as well as my personal website. eventually, their cheap rates and need to add more and more customers caught up to them. after sitting on tech support for over 40 minutes, i immediately sought a new solution. i found bluehost and they were great until i had all of my students use one of my tools at the same time — crash. that wasn’t good enough. so i’ve now found lunarpages. whew. i am keeping bluehost and lunarpages for now. i like to run a ghost backup of each of my class sites. each week, i download my class discussion forum database and restore it on the other hosted site, which is hidden. if something were to happen to my main site and it went down, i could quickly switch to my backup in a matter of minutes. i didn’t do that for my first 6 years of teaching online sessions and classes, but i was stupid back then. heh.

anyway, i also still have my family site on the tigertech.net hosted servers. i have 11 days. i have a family blog that has entries back to 2000 hosted there. it’s now in wordpress so i have easily moved it to bluehost. however, i also have all family photos in a tool called Gallery 2. it was a great tool many years ago in the days before Flickr and other online photo sharing sites. well, this is where my problem comes into play. to move my family site, i’d have to also move this Gallery database of years and years of photos. unlike Wordpress and just about every other mySQL database / open source solution, Gallery does not have an easily transferrable method. i cannot transfer the photos from the old site to the new site easily. i cannot import the photos from the old to the the new either. there are very difficult directions to move the database, but my initial attempt failed. so now i am 11 days away from being forced to stick with tigertech for another year. i have already started the transfer process to bluehost, but i will not complete it unless i get the new site up and running first. my students took their final exam today for the spring summer class i was teaching so i guess i have some thesis students and time on my hands. if it’s possible for my feeble mind, i’ll be down to just 2 hosting services (and save $$$ along the way) in the next week. fingers crossed!

well i have certainly been enjoying the spring thus far. my kids are 8 and 6 and we are turning into bike riding fools. we’ve also taken a liking to geocaching as i noted last summer here. the more we seek treasures and find them, the more i see educational uses for geocaching. when we started last summer, i was pretty much the guy in charge. i controlled the Garmin 60CSx GPS unit and did all of the precursor work finding which caches we’d hunt, etc. I now allow my kids to use the GPS unit to follow the compass and map built into the unit as well as help plan the route we’ll take on our bikes and once we get off of our bikes. they are learning how to read a map and how to use the map. When we get home, we can transfer the data from the GPS and load it into Google Earth to show others the exact path we covered from home back to home (the GPS drops virtual breadcrumbs ever 30 seconds — that’s the settings we use). yesterday we headed downtown along the river next to my office and found a few caches. here is an example from the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum grounds of how one might be hidden:

the rock that my son’s hand is on was actually covering the cylinder. once the cylinder is opened there is a peanut butter jar inside with the cache. we signed the log book and removed a golf ball and left a little something for the next geocacher to find it. we then carefully placed the rock back over the closed cache and headed off for the next find.

some of the caches can be hidden so cleverly that it can take a long time to find the cache even when you know the exact coordinates. this one above took us about 5 minutes once we arrived. you can’t see it here, but there are small trees and evergreens all around us so i spent much time looking up. there are many rocks larger than the one seen here and my kids scurried around looking to and fro.

i recommend signing up to use the website geocaching.com. it’s free; though, you can pay about $30/year for some special search features and an email alert for new caches, etc. i think it’s worth paying just to support the site as it’s quite well done. i like searching for caches using Google maps as shown here from my area:

and then you find one and you can narrow in on it and even have the website send the information directly to your GPS (at least with my Garmin this works):

you can see the difficulty is 3 stars out of 5. look at the photo far above and you can see how this might be difficult to find. sometimes the caches is very easy once you arrive. my kids are getting to the point where we like to look for 3 stars and above for difficulty, but we’ll make exceptions if the terrain is at least 2 stars or so. our favorite caches are the multiple-stage caches. these typically have many steps to find the final treasure. since the steps along the way don’t have a treasure, the hiding places can be much more difficult. for example, last year we did one where the first 4 stages were just giving us the coordinates to potentially find the next coordinates. the creator was able to put these coordinates in creative and hidden places. for example, here was a stage that had the coordinates hidden behind the number 5 on a signpost along a path. the 5 was hanging on by a nail and it was sheer luck that we figured it out (you can barely see the black writing under where the 5 rests):

and another showing the final prize hidden in an ammo box that is stuffed in a cement base from a thrown out pole in an area with a lot of trash and debris. this was hard to find as well because you just don’t think that there’d be a hollow area in the cement base until you roll it over:

anyway, this has quickly become a favorite hobby for my kids and me. i like getting them out on their bikes and getting exercise while also exercising our brains to solve problems, etc. highly recommended.

the International Society for Technology in Education released new National Educational Technology Standards for students last summer as seen here:

new standards for teachers will emerge early this summer. the previous NETS-S and NETS-T were very similar. i participated in dialog sessions and in providing feedback on the new teacher standards and there will be some overlap with the student model above, but the whole model is going to be much more individualized to teachers this time around. that being said, i want to address an observation that i made when i was sitting in the MACUL session on NETS with the deputy CEO of ISTE 2 months ago. we began by going around the room introducing ourselves and came to a woman sitting off to the side. she explained that she was filling in at the last minute for another teacher who had wanted to attend MACUL and couldn’t make it. this woman is a school teacher. she had never heard of the NETS and had no idea they were being refreshed. she described how overwhelmed she feels with standards — she reeled off the names of a few she knows that they follow, etc.

this woman ended up joining my group and helping to provide feedback. our group consisted of two education professors and technology director for a k-12 school along with this high school teacher. she didn’t contribute much, but i was struck by how new these educational technology standards were to this teacher. this is a teacher who ended up going to a technology conference for educators and she didn’t even realize there were technology standards. it’s easy to forget that these teachers exist or even that this teacher represents the vast majority of teachers out there. i teach graduate students who are getting a master’s in educational technology so of course they are aware of the standards and these tend to be the teachers i interact with the most . . . but what about the other master’s programs? they don’t have a required technology course.

i coordinate the undergraduate program and i integrate the NETS-T into the core of the curriculum as these standards drive the curricular decisions i make. i make sure i explain this to my students and to make them aware of the NETS-S and their responsibility for meeting these standards in their future classrooms. unfortunately, most of my students are at least a year or 2 away from student teaching and then they won’t have a teaching job until the year after that. fat chance they’ll remember the ISTE NETS.

i wonder what ISTE is doing to better position the NETS so that K-12 schools are meeting the standards that are posted and linked in detail above. it would be great if NCLB suddenly found an interest in technology standards and even if they incorporated components (e.g., information literacy skills) into the annual testing, etc., but it is not happening any time soon. so i wonder out loud whether ISTE even has an initiative to promote the NETS in place — outside of NCLB, how do we promote the importance of the NETS-S? what’s our plan of action?

i am always on the lookout for tools that I can use in my teaching. i recently had a colleague make a very neat YouTube style video using Sony Vegas. . . but it’s only for PC users. technically I have a PC on my Mac, but I’d have to start up and select the XP partition. that’s fine and my Mac literally becomes a PC. unfortunately, i have all of the files and websites on my Mac side that I’d want to use. so, I’d have to transfer everything over and then restart into the PC just to make a screencast. yuck.

well i just came across a neat new app for Mac user called ScreenFlow. wow! this is a terrific application for screen and podcasting. i can run a Keynote or PowerPoint presentation and have it recorded while recording myself talking about the presentation content. Later I can show the presentation and the video of me at the same time or switch back and forth or only use the audio, etc. — there’s much more it can do and many neat editing features. It only works in the latest version of the Mac OS because it takes advantage of the features built into the OS including Core Animation, QuickLook, Spotlight, QTKit, Quartz Composer, OpenGL, Core Data, etc. Using the OS allows the app to be very lightweight and still very powerful. i am going to try and make something for this semester and perhaps i can post a sample here just for kicks. stay tuned.

so a few years ago i decided to spend a little of my professional development funds on SurveyMonkey. Surveymonkey.com is a site that provides a tool for making surveys. pretty simple stuff really, but they do the job they claim and they do it well. i first subscribed because i was tired of the end of semester evaluations that students complete getting turned in and then not getting the results until a month after the next semester started. if there were any changes recommended to improve my teaching and my classes then I would not get that feedback until well into the next semester. so i wanted to take matters into my own hands. i used my professional development money and subscribed to surveymonkey.com and have been using it ever since.

now that i am realizing the benefits of more instant feedback, particularly as compared to the typical end of semester evaluation, i am going overboard with surveys. i now use surveymonkey to conduct key formative assessments each week and my students complete for participation points. so every week i send out a survey of about 20 questions that range from the time my students spent on various components of the class to questions about the content that was taught that week to questions about how people are accessing my online sessions (e.g. dial-up, cable) to the kinds of equipment people are using and whether they are traveling, etc. — I try and get a nice profile of students, but I also ask about satisfaction levels with parts of the class. and i have open-ended questions about how they’d improve the session/class, etc. they are going to be future teachers so i like putting them in my shoes from time to time. a great thing about surveying my students at the end of the week and through the weekend is that i am now able to change my course and teaching nearly instantly instead of waiting for January. and next semester when i go to teach a particular lesson i can look back at the feedback my students made this past semester.

a nice thing about surveymonkey is that you can use it for free, right now. anyone can create an account and use the service for as long as you need for free as long as you are not getting more than 100 responses per survey (most of us don’t teach more than 30 or so in any given class). unfortunately, the free version only allows up to 10 questions per survey. but free is free. the professional and unlimited version is $200/year. i now have years of data collected in surveymonkey to compare and some of it is quite fascinating — e.g., i used to have nearly everyone on dial-up and now very few people have stuck with dial-up. i can’t reveal the specifics of my data because that would be considered publishing it and i haven’t gone through our institutional review board for human subjects review. i am actually on the IRB committee at my university so i need to be particularly careful.

so i attended the Michigan Association of Computer Users in Learning (MACUL) conference this week. i had 2 presentations and they went just swell. but the fun for me was attending a session by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Deputy CEO Leslie Conery. she held a session for an hour and a half to discuss the new draft of the NETS for teachers. These standards are set to be released this June, but they are seeking feedback right now. much of the session was devoted to small group work to look through the proposed standards and provide constructive feedback. our little group made some suggestions for organizing the standards better and for improving some of the wording of the indicators for various standards. the ISTE bigwigs will be gathering together next week for a few days to go over all of the feedback they’ve received to develop the final version of the standards. i would love to have been in involved in that process just to have a few days to devote to these new standards, but it’s sort of late in the game to think about it a week before it happens {sigh}. i regret not forcing myself to spend more time in evaluating the draft. in any regard, i am excited about the changes to the NETS. in July of 2006 i posted about hoping to see the NETS get “refreshed” so now that it’s happening i really appreciate being able to be a part of the process even if i will miss the nitty gritty next week. i gave feedback to the developers last month when i found the draft of the NETS for teachers and then again at the session yesterday, but now that i have spent more time with the draft i am seeing other changes and recommendations i’d like to make . . . and i am running out of time. doh. if you’re interested in seeing the current draft of the NETS for teachers, you can find it on this website and you can provide feedback before the group meets next week at this website.

back on October of 2006 I wrote about the Blackboard and Desire2Learn patent dispute — Blackboard had gone after Desire2Learn in court over a copyright infringement. Blackboard is the largest provider of online learning management systems (LMSs) or online course management services (CMSs) and Desire2Learn is a similar company on a much smaller scale. a jury in Texas this past Friday gave the first step of the battle to Blackboard. this is more of an FYI since the article linked explains what happened beyond my headline. this is crummy, but D2L still has their patent pending, so there’s that.

one of the biggest barriers to technology integration into the classroom by k-12 teachers is the lack of time. i am experiencing it right now myself. i decided to take an overload section of a course and I also took 8 thesis students on top of that. egads!! what was i thinking (or not)? classes are going well, but my free time is dwindling. i used to love adding to my blog because i was spending time reading other blogs and keeping abreast of the happenings in the field, etc. Now my blog seems like a burden. and this is what happens with regard to using technology in the classroom for some teachers. i wish i had answers for this, but i don’t.

i have my students each post stuff to their own blog. i also have them find other ed tech professionals who keep a blog and my students are to read and respond (and maybe even participate in a dialog with these other professionals). this activity goes well, but the physical act of managing 70 students commenting on 70 blogs is extremely time consuming. i have my students use a code name (e.g., tom205) if they want and then they post the URL to their comment and the name they used. so, to manage this i am using now free NetNewWire — one of the most popular RSS readers on any platform even though it only works on a Mac. i had to enter all 70 student blog addresses into my reader. i then have to check each entry to find the link to the blog where they commented. inevitably, some of the students will post their URL wrong where they commented (e.g., http://blogger.com/add_comment) and i’ll have to contact them to find out the actual URL. i try to and respond to every single student, particularly if the other ed tech professional does not respond to the comment my student left. while i think this is a valuable assignment and gives my students to hear other voices in the field beside my voice, i also recognize that this is eating up my time. i have 7 discussion groups for my students using phpBB forums. here we are just 6 weeks in and look at the number of posts I’ve had to read thus far and a preview of just a screenshot from one discussion to see how my forum looks:

i am approaching 2000 posts and I have very thoughtful students who put much effort into our class discussions. just for the heck of it, i pretended to print just one group discussion on 1 of our two topics this week — it was about open source software. the print preview was 23 pages. keep in mind that i have 7 groups and there were 2 discussion questions. my point is that teaching can get overwhelming and this is true at every level of teaching particularly for teachers who are new to the field and just starting out. so, technology can quickly take a back seat and then these new teachers start forming habits that do not include using technologies and eventually it gets harder and harder to shift these practices to teaching with technology. i wish i had answers for this, but right now i am wearing a life jacket myself. doh.

one key, i think, is to help students realize that technology can save time in the long run even if it takes more time in the short run. sure, we might be struggling to keep our head above water this year, but every little bit we can do to save time in the future is time gained in the future. ooh, i see a new version of WordPress is now available and i am encouraged to update right now. that update might be just what i need to help keep my site that much more secure in te future. off to do it now. ;~)