iSean

I have moved my blog. This will be the last post at this site as the blog can now be found here:

http://seanlancaster.com/blog/ OR for you RSS reader: http://seanlancaster.com/blog/?feed=rss2

the house version of the economic stimulus package included a provision for $1 billion new dollars going to Title II D of NCLB, Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT). this program currently has about $267 million so this would be an incredibly substantial improvement. a good portion of this new money would go toward competitive grants and another 25% largely focused on staff development. this money could appear by this summer. that being said, the stimulus must still get through congress and much can still happen . . . and then it will most certainly get tweaked in the Department of Education. but seeing this renewed focus on technology in education is promising. and, we should also see the infrastructure put in place to bring broadband to rural areas of the country, which is great news for helping to close the digital divide for schools and students in rural areas.

Ubuntu is going just swell. the biggest annoyance of switching over is that i didn’t have all of my bookmarks and i had to set up my mail account in evolution mail . . . and none of my contacts were there. this stuff is no different than getting a new computer. if i had wanted, i probably could have exported my contacts and imported them into my new email. and, i could do the same thing in Firefox. as annoying as it was to not have that stuff, starting from scratch gave me a chance to cut the fat. my kids have used it and they have no clue that they’re not even using a Mac . . . it’s just a computer and it’s doing what they want it to do.

in other news, i borrowed a netbook — ASUS Eee PC running linux. this is a small little machine at 8.9″. i was borrowing it to see if i wanted one. i used it for about 10 minutes and realized that this is not the machine for me. i am not a big guy by any stretch, but this tiny keyboard is nearly impossible for me to use. i can’t make it more than 2 words or so without a typo. the keys are just too tiny. i gave it to my kids and my 7 year old son just absolutely loves it. perhaps this would be a way for schools to save money??? at least in elementary schools while the hands are still small.

i have been a strong proponent of having schools switch to open source over using Macs or PCs. the money saved on operating systems for each computer in a building would be significant and then add the software like Open Office versus MS Office. switch the whole district and our tax dollars can start going towards other academic pursuits. i started writing a letter to the editor of our local newspaper about this very topic today when i realized that i’ve only fiddled with Ubuntu from time to time, but i’ve never really made it my working operating system. i thought i should be able to speak from experience. so tomorrow i am switching to Ubuntu and using it for a whole month on my Macbook (via Parallels). i am already exploring some extra apps to add to Ubuntu to make my experience more enjoyable. once i use it for a month then i’ll feel much more confident in making the recommendation to area schools . . . even though i know of schools that have done it successfully already.

so, now that Obama is going to be president, what does that mean for those of us in educational technology? i had to search through many archives to find him address technology in the classroom and came across this:

“Without a workforce trained in math, science, and technology, and the other skills of the 21st century, our companies will innovate less, our economy will grow less, and our nation will be less competitive. If we want to out-compete the world tomorrow, we must out-educate the world today,” Obama said.

He added: “While technology has transformed just about every aspect of our lives–from the way we travel, to the way we communicate, to the way we look after our health–one of the places where we’ve failed to seize its full potential is in the classroom.

“Imagine a future where our children are more motivated because they aren’t just learning on blackboards, but on new whiteboards with digital touch screens; where every student in a classroom has a laptop at [his or her] desk; where [students] don’t just do book reports but design PowerPoint presentations; where they don’t just write papers, but they build web sites; where research isn’t done just by taking a book out of the library, but by eMailing experts in the field; and where teachers are less a source of knowledge than a coach for how best to use it and obtain knowledge. By fostering innovation, we can help make sure every school in America is a school of the future.

“And that’s what we’re going to do when I’m president. We will help schools integrate technology into their curriculum, so we can make sure public school students are fluent in the digital language of the 21st-century economy. We’ll teach our students not only math and science, but teamwork and critical thinking and communication skills, because that’s how we’ll make sure they’re prepared for today’s workplace.”

this is encouraging. this was said back September. as we all know, much has happened since September and there are MANY priorities that supersede educational technology . . . as if it was ever a priority. sigh. but eventually the stimulus packages will pass, the various appointments will be made, and the Iraq war will be addressed. perhaps some of these campaign promises will come to fruition. we can hope, eh? i certainly hope that our national educational efforts begin to realize the importance of information literacy in today’s economy. we continue to focus our big attention on the core subjects like math and English and science, etc. as these are what the No Child Left Behind tests in various states are measuring. however, knowledge workers (including teachers) are often required to use skills beyond the core subjects. for example, a teacher might find effective supplementary lesson materials via an online search. having a teaching workforce that is information literate is crucial to even begin thinking about bringing our students up to a proficiency level that is adequate for the future. i’ll be keeping a close eye on the progression of educational technology efforts from Obama, congress, and the Department of Education. in the meantime, you can share your feedback , advice, and concerns here.

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?