iSean

not long ago, i was told that our department had technology money to spend and i was asked to help figure out how it could be best used. the course i coordinate is an undergraduate course for future teachers. we have about 20 sections of this course that we offer each semester, so it’s a pretty large undertaking to coordinate the hiring of instructors and making sure resources are available, etc. things tend to work out just swell. well, this program has many technology needs and that was my first concern when the funds became available. we ordered new hard drives for some video editing labs we do and we obtained some software to supplement other labs in our program. however, the funds allocated were more than our class needed. there are many other classes and many other professors in this department, so the money was sure to dry up quickly.

the money did not dry up quickly. in fact, i was able to justify a new iPod. that’s right, i received a 60 GB iPod that will play video. i did explain that i use podcasting in my classes and that i also create video podcasts and even some screencasting. in other words, i implement a lot of the tools that an iPod is best suited for handling. i thought it would be nice to have an iPod to demonstrate to students how to use the various tools and resources that i will implement. this was approved. yipee!

the iPod arrived this week. and that’s my dilemma. i read that the current iPods have reached the end of their life and that new iPods will be released soon. this may or may not be true, but if it’s true then i shouldn’t open my new iPod in the hopes of exchanging it when the new model is released as soon as next week. well, to exchange the iPod, i would guess that it has to happen within a certain number of days of purchase. i have no clue how long our IT department held onto my iPod before delivering it to me so that return date may have passed. further, i might need a receipt to exchange the gadget. so, my option appears to be selling the thing on EBAY and setting the minimum amount at the education price so that i can be assured of having enough money to buy the new model at the education price.

now, don’t get me wrong . . . i am extremely grateful to have received this device in the first place. i want to tear it open right now and just use it. but, being the geek that i am, i also want to have the latest and greatest as well. what a terrific dilemma to have, eh? materialism for geeks. ;~)

Tags: iPod

I learned HTML by playing with code that was already created. This is probably not too unlike most people. When I wanted to move beyond HTML, I learned CSS the same way. However, some things I never took the time to learn because I could just squeak by if I just got the gist of them. For example, on this blog there is a lot of PHP code in various places. I have learned enough to move menus around and to add sections (e.g., my one banner add on the right). MySQL and PHPmyAdmin . . . same thing. Sure, I screw up, but I get it figured out for the most part. I feel confident that I would have spent far more time really learning than I spend trying to figure out how to tweak and fix things when I mess up.

One thing that I have meant to learn is JavaScripting. It’s not difficult and it can really extend HTML on websites. Like many other Internet-related tools, I fiddled with javascript and learned just enough to tweak. And, that brings me to my dilemma today. In my weekly survey with my students two weeks ago, I noticed a comment about how difficult it was to read black text on a white background. So this past week, I added a question for all of my students asking whether they wanted alternatives to to the standard style for pages that I use. About 25% requested something different and about 75% of those students wanted a dark-based background with light text.

And this takes me back to the problem I now have with how I’ve done things. I have had a family website since the 1990s. I registered our last name and have kept a journal (mostly about my kids) for the grandparents and other family and friends. We get A LOT of hits on this site. In the old days, I used this site for experimentation (now, my atticmooses site is for testing, but somehow I snuck my blog on here instead of my professional site???). For the first many years, the whole family site was coded in HTML. I used BBEdit to write all of my html. Somewhere along the way, I discovered Dreamweaver and that’s been my tool of choice (or a combo) ever since. In 2001 or so, I switched to PostNuke (a Content Management System). And, just last month, I converted it all and switched to WordPress (same as this blog). That being said, when the site was all HTML-based, I added a neat feature that would allow my users to go to a control panel-like page and choose 1 of 4 styles for the whole website. I used Javascript to set a cookie and the chosen style would last for as long as they visited my site, but they could also change it any time. This took a bit of time to figure out.

And therein lies my problem. I no longer have the code I used. I have to sit down and research things and try and figure it all out again. Of course, Google back then versus Google today is no contest. I’ll likely do a search and find something that will guide me or greatly assist my efforts much easier than it happened back then. But, it sure would have been nice to have kept that old code because it’s exactly what I am going to be doing for my students right now. My class sites are made with HTML and CSS only. I just don’t like “systems” for this content as I feel a bit constricted by the limitations (e.g., I like everything students need each week on one, easy to view webpage in a numbered, annotated list). For the time being, I am creating two pages for the webpages that have a lot of reading and I provide two links. Each pages is the same except they link to different stylesheets (a light and a dark). My fingers are crossed that I can get this figured out quickly.

Tags: Javascript, CSS, stylesheets, HTML

this week, i have been working on updating my unit on copyright and fair use in education. i had a lesson that i thought was a bit dry, so i wanted something that was more interesting. i came across a comic book on copyright and fair use. this is made at Duke University (law school). i am not sure i can tell who the target audience would be . . . and, i doubt i use it in my own classes. that being said, someone put in a lot of hours to create this thing. the link is worth visiting just to play with the Flash version of the comic. you can physically turn pages with your mouse and you can use a zoom tool to get close-ups, etc.

personally, i think comic books are a poor choice of information dissemination for the masses, but perhaps there is an audience who will appreciate this. i found myself needing to use the zoom feature too much. i wish i could have just increased the size of the whole file to better fit on my larger display. oh well. it’s hard to complain about free, eh?

Tags: copyright, fair use

you know, part of my job is to keep up with current technologies and try and see how these technologies might best be used in education or why they aren’t going to work in the classroom, etc. i spend a good deal of time trying various new tools and trying to find an application to my own classroom or to k-12 classrooms. i told you previously that i use listmixer to keep these resources in my short-term memory (so to speak). but, i am finding that this tool just creates more and more stuff to add to my To Do lists that i’ll likely forget about before i ever visit again.  i just don’t have the time to keep up with all of the various tools i want to explore. so, what to do? well, for one, i stopped trying to find everything on my own. i previously mentioned that i use NetNewsWire as an RSS reader. well, i try and limit the number of blogs and RSS feeds that i subscribe to; however, one that i’ve found that has been well worth including is the EDU RSS feed (from Stephen Downs). it’s a very active aggregation of a great many related RSS feeds pertaining to ed tech-type topics. i can quickly scan through hundreds of other blogs each day and only stop to read those headlines that look interesting (and, i am quite selective). this is saving me much time each day. and, maybe my little blog will someday be included in the EDU_RSS feed??? i can only hope. ;~)

Tags: stephen downs, listmixer, netnewswire, information overload

a month or so ago, i was touting the potential i saw in writely (http://writely.com/) as a potential MS Word replacement for elementary schools around the country. it’s free (for now anyway) and does most of what young kids learning about word processors would need.

well, i discovered today that Google has acquired writely. I don’t know whether this is good or not yet. Google took over Blogger.com and largely stopped work on it . . . at least from what i can tell. on the other hand, GMail is pretty nice and Google is . . . ah . . . well, Google is Google. i have no complaints about the services they provide, nor the price.

writely.com blog discussing Google. hopefully this is good news for writely.

Technorati Tags: writely.com, google, word processing

This is spring break week for me. What could be more fun during spring break than learning how to program? Heh heh. That’s what I am doing. I bought this book (called learn to program). It’s all about teaching Ruby to the newbies of the world. I am a newbie. The last “programming” I did was back in the 80s when BASIC was popular. I loved BASIC, but the other language I explored since then have been far from basic.

So, I got Ruby installed on my Mac (along with several other necessities). I am already up to page 71 of 140+ and so far so good. It’s making sense and I think much of it is easier than I expected. Of course, I can’t really do much at this point.

Why am I learning Ruby? I want to build Web 2.0 applications that are useful to me and Ruby tends to be preferred by many developers. Plus, I watched a demo of a programmer making his own blogging tool and it literally took about 15 minutes to create and he was explaining what he was doing along the way. The actual code could have been completed by him in about 5 minutes (58 lines of code). I want a browser window that opens each of my student’s blogs and allows me to add comments, but it should also have check boxes that I can click to indicate whether the blog entry was completed or not and whether any points were deducted. And, I want it to create a comma-delimited text file that I can download and import into Excel to transfer to Blackboard (Bb), which is the tool I use to keep track of student grades. My process is fairly cumbersome right now and I use a lot of tabbed browsing to try and view and grade the blog entries. It’s fairly easy to lose my place and all that jazz, so hopefully this programming experiment pays off. I am hoping to figure it out by spring semester (May).

Fortunately, my hosting company (BlueHost) supports Ruby on Rails. So, once I get things tested on my Mac, I should be able to transfer code to the server fairly seamlessly. Fingers crossed.

Tags: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, programming, Bluehost

i recently received a troubling email from a former student of mine who now teaches in a high school. his email reads, in part:

hey Sean, we are running into A LOT of problems at school with students writing threats on their Xanga sites (other personal websites like myspace.com etc.). I had the sites blocked by our filter a while ago, BUT students are making threats on their sites and the issues are trickling over into schools causing more issues. One mom was up at school yesterday ordering us to do something about one girl threatening her daughter on a Xanga site. Also, some of their sites seemed to have students being photographed in EVERY classroom in our building.

this is an issue that is popping up more and more in the news. even our local district was able to suspend about 15 - 20 high school students who posted pictures from a party showing the teens with alcohol. the student who contacted me wanted to know what a school is supposed to do and what they can do. i provided him with snippets on current court cases and what other schools are doing in similar situations, but this really comes down to the old adage about an ounce of prevention . . . i think the key for any school is to have rules and consequences explicitly stated. in other words, a school/district should consider revising their Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) and making this policy very clear to students and to the parents/public. having a visible policy in place is really the best way to then deal with enforcement and any legal action that might be taken.

my experience with district technology plans comes largely from an assignment i have teachers in one of my graduates classes complete. that being said, i have read enough of the technology plans to verify what my students are finding in their own evaluations. most technology plans appear to be put into place as a way to make the State happy. only a small percentage of districts develop a living and breathing document that really guides technology in that district. and unfortunately, the AUP is often developed with the same sense of urgency (or lack thereof). a well developed AUP would have helped these current schools more easily deal with the problems of social networking websites. of course the problem would still persist, but the schools would have the means to take quick action.

Tags: AUP, myspace, xanga, schools