iSean

well, if you notice that some of my articles have comments being added en masse daily, that’s because i am having my students read through a specific category of my blog entries this week and choose one entry to add a comment to. previously, i was getting mass comments because of spammers, so this is much better.

this is one way to draw traffic to my site, but that’s not the reason i do it . . . i have only a limited amount of time to spend with my students and there is much i’d like to discuss with them if given more time. using my blog allows me to comment on stories and subjects briefly and then to have my students sift through these various blog entries to find the one they wish to discuss further. the end result is that my students and i have a chance to ineract on a stories that pertain to our curriculum, but that provide an alternative means to cover this material and hopefully my students find the exercise to be worthwhile.

in the future, i am going to have my students visit other blogs that cover material and comment on those blogs. after posting a comment, my students are instructed to post a message on the class discussion board explaining where they commented so that i can check up on it easily. it’s a nice little system for getting my students involved with the online world in a productive manner.

Technorati Tags: blogging, teaching online

blog_spam

Originally uploaded by atticmooses.

well, you can imagine my surprise when i checked a rarely used email account today and found about 30 comments to my blog (the one you’re reading). i looked at the first comment and it said something to the effect, “great blog site. i hope you keep updating it.” i was flattered. i noticed some spam type stuff at the end of his/her message, but i quickly attributed it to the email program he/she was using (e.g., some free email sites add advertisements). well, come to find out, they all had spam built into them. the messages were all similar and they all had spam attached. i’ve been the victim of a spam attack on my blog site. aauuugh! i suppose i need to turn off the ability to link in the comments section. dang!

at least someone found my blog (or, some bot anyway). ;~)

this is my blog entry live in front of my ED 205 class using my new Flock browser.

i am using the Flock browser more and more and liking it more and more. i felt like adding a blog entry and i am doing this without visiting my site. i just took a screenshot so i’ll add it to my flickr account and see if i can add it to the post after doing so.

i don’t have much new to add except that i miss having the spell check built into the browser, but this is a .4 release, so there is MUCH time before we even see 1.0.

here’s the image from my browser (flock):

School Laptops: Save or delete?

The critics were right and just as predicted, seventh- and eighth-graders in Maine are using their state-issued laptops for games and for entertainment, not just tests and homework assignments.
(Anecdotal stories mentioned — edited out by Sean) . . .as Maine’s One-to-One Laptop Program draws to a close. The $37.2 million program, which started in January 2002 under the wing of then Gov. Angus King, ends in early 2006.

That means the 37,000 iBook laptops in the states’ middle schools today (seventh- and eight-graders have 34,000 of them, their teachers have 3,000) are supposed to go back to Apple Computer Inc. at the end of the school year.

i just read the full article and it doesn’t bode well for those people who want to see laptop initiatives happen. as i mentioned earlier, assessing these program according to NCLB is the wrong way to measure whether they are effective or not, but that’s what’s going to happen. it also doesn’t help to hear about kids wasting time on the machines, but most adults waste time on these machines as well. in fact, i read recently that adults waste hours of each work day on their computers (e.g., web, email, IM, etc).

so, i suppose it will be interesting to read the final report once the laptop program ends at the end of this year. soon, decisions will need to be made regarding whether to extend the program and i think it’s a hard pill to swallow when the economy is not doing as well as it was when this program started. i don’t know much about the teacher training that went into Maine’s program, but i would bet that very little training (or none) would be enough to see a program like this fail miserably. on the other hand, the Detroit program I mentioned a few weeks ago has training as an integral part of their program, so i hold out hope that they realize more success. Time will tell, eh?

and, moments after posting that last entry, i actually read the ed tech posse paragraph that contained spurl and realize that it appears as though furl was more highly regarded. LookSmart’s Furl - About Furl

Furl is a free service that saves the important items you find on the Web and enables you to quickly find them again. Furl archives a personal copy of every page you save. When you want to recall it, you can find it instantly by searching the full text your archived items. Each member has a personal archive of 5 gigabytes (GB), large enough to store tens of thousands of searchable items.
Furl recommends new Web pages that may interest you, guided by the sites you’ve already “Furled,” or saved.
Furl also offers the best ways to share the content you find on the Web. Send a daily email newsletter of links to friends and colleagues, use Furl to generate RSS feeds for your links, or integrate them quickly and easily into an existing Web site.

personally, i am still trying to figure out the value of social bookmarking for myself.

okay, i just came across a new (new to me anyway) tool on the internet that helps to make browsing something that anyone can manage from any connected computer. while this isn’t much use to me since i have a laptop that i take everywhere i go, i do think this is something that many of my students could benefit from using . . . especially those students who find themselves using lab computers from time to time. the service is called spurl.net and it’s free. what is it? i’ll let them answer: Spurl.net 1.0 - Free online bookmarks with so much more…

Spurl.net is a free on-line bookmarking service and search engine. It allows you to store and quickly access again all the interesting pages you find on the web from any Internet connected computer.
With Spurl.net you will never have to lose a good link again. You can search your links, notes and in fact the entire text of all the pages you’ve ever “spurled”.
You can start by uploading the bookmarks from all your computers - after that all your bookmarks will be accessible in one place.
And because thousands of other users are using Spurl.net as well, you will discover interesting links through recommendations, hot lists and more.

fwiw, i found this tool by visiting the ed tech posse website (link over on the right), so you might visit their site to find their latest podcast where they discuss this tool and others.

week 1 is now behind us. as i’ve written earlier, i am teaching 3 sections of our undergraduate ed tech course (ED 205 — Computers in Education). two of sections are online courses and 1 section is face-to-face. i have given all of my students the option of attending the face-to-face session whenever they want OR completing the online session whenever they want. should be interesting to see how things play out over time.

in our first session, we covered much. we went over the syllabus, discussion parameters, took a survey on technology proficiency and how that relates to teaching, learned how to use the phpBB forums, and got signed up for the blogsome blogging tool. i think most students are figuring things out, but the blogging tool appears to be the most confusing part of the first week. as students signed up to use it, i would guess that the site just failed (e.g., critical database errors) with about 3 - 4 students per 25. nothing seemed to work and they were forced to just create a whole new account. other students received 2 passwords (they likely hit submit twice) and found that neither password then worked. i am not sure how this gets fixed. i’ve suggested requesting another new password, but they might be forced to create a new account as well. so, needless-to-say, i am holding off on our first blogging activities until we get the accounts set up completely. that’s really the only bump in the road.

i do survey my students at the end of each week. i learn much from the anonymous responses. for example, this week i saw more of this than i’d like, “Everything worked fine with the web site and with the class discussion forum. (If that is the right term). But I had a lot of trouble creating and logging into my Blog site.” i know i could have used Blackboard and this would have been a tool that most of my students were familiar with. it would also have been a tool that our university IT staff could have provided technical support to my students, but i really, really want my students (future teachers) to see that there are alternatives on the Internet that they can implement on their own, especially if their school does not provide Blackboard or similar tools to them. i also want them to see how i help them work through difficulties and how they can figure many things out on their own when push comes to shove. all in all, i think the blogsome site will work well, but it’s certainly not without its little bumps in the road early on.

now this is a story worth writing about. i think this is a preview into the future and i couldn’t be happier.

VAIL, Ariz. — Students at Empire High School here started class this year with no textbooks, but it wasn’t because of a funding crisis.

Instead, the school issued iBooks — laptop computers made by Apple Computer — to each of its 340 students, becoming one of the first U.S. public schools to shun printed textbooks.

what a great forward looking school. obviously, the vast majority of schools are nowhere close to being ready to do this, but i also think many schools could get ready fairly quickly if they knew it was coming. i thought it was encouraging to read that the rest of the district is traditional with textbooks and yet this iBook school has a waiting list of students wanting to get in. and, kudos to the district for choosing Apple’s iBooks. ;~)

the article talks about how the classrooms are paperless, which is something i try and do as well. the one thing i don’t do electronically is the textbook i use. in fact, i wrote the textbook and i am stuck using it in paper form from the publisher even though i have the PDFs of all 12 or 13 chapters. i earn 50 cents a copy on this textbook and i would love to make nothing if i could give the content away; although, my contract does not allow me to do that, nor can i make a competing textbook. i’ve learned lessons the hard way this first time. but, enough about that, this school has dropped using all textbooks and the teachers now find many resources online. what a terrific way to prepare students better for their future of trying to evaluate materials found online and seeing how materials found online can be productive. i hope we hear more from this school as they progress through the school year. i’d love to hear the progress they make along with the barriers they encounter.

google news customization

Originally uploaded by atticmooses.

my internet start page is news.google.com. i like to run through the various headlines from time to time during the day and Google’s news gives me access to tens of thousands of sources. Great!

but, what about that specialized news that doesn’t often fit into the generic headlines that Google supplies? have no fear, google has got your back. the news is customizable. you can have as many special categories as you’d like. i set up many customized news searches. in the image enclosed (you may have to click it to see a close up version), you can see two of the categories that i am using: computers & schools; and, internet & teach. any current news articles that contain the two specified words will appear in my search results. it’s as simple as it looks. try it out. ;~)