PBS Frontline’s digital_nation: life on the virtual frontier is a fantastic program as well as media-rich website filled with videos, articles, and information about our digital youth culture. The documentary premieres this week on February 2nd, but the website is already filled with outstanding resources. One of my favorites is project’s Digital Native Map, an
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This evening I recorded a five minute introduction for my Technology 4 Teacher’s class this week, since I’ll be absent and a guest presenter / professor will be leading my class on Wednesday. I recorded this video using QuickTime Player 7 on my MacBook Pro and a USB 2.0 Hue Webcam. There was a slight
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Electronic polling websites can by utilized in a variety of creative as well as mundane ways. One way I’m using them in my Technology 4 Teachers course at the University of Central Oklahoma this semester is to take daily attendance. This functionality may have been available for awhile, but I just noticed this evening that
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The last two days we’ve been hit by an ice and snow storm here in central Oklahoma. Thankfully we have not lost electricity where we live, but many Oklahomans have not been so fortunate. Snow days (as Thursday and Friday were for both Oklahoma City Public Schools and Edmond Public Schools) are MUCH less fun
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I shared the following as a comment today on Kevin Gaugler’s post, “In which the second edition of the textbook might be an app.” Kevin wrote: Before Apple’s big announcement today, I made a prediction that Apple’s device would disrupt the textbook industry and consequently education, particularly language education, as we know it. Apple has
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Students in my Technology 4 Teachers (T4T) course are creating short VoiceThread digital stories as their first “miniproject” this semester. To assist them (and potentially help you) I created a seven-part screencast series this evening, demonstrating how to find copyright friendly images (using CompFight and FlickrStorm) as well as how to use VoiceThread to create
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Today’s USA Today article, “Tennessee teen expelled for Facebook posting,” highlights the need we have in ALL our schools for social media guidelines. According to the article: Taylor Cummings was a popular basketball star on the verge of graduating from one of Nashville’s most prestigious high schools until a post on Facebook got him expelled.
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I have not yet watched all of Steve Jobs’ presentation from Wednesday announcing the new Apple iPad. I have, however, listened to the first nine minutes. Steve said two things in his introduction with which I respectfully disagree. At 6:43 of his presentation, Steve said: All of us use laptops and smartphones now. Everybody uses
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Today for week 3 of my “Technology 4 Teachers” class, I introduced students to a backchannel using Etherpad. This was my first time to use Etherpad with students, previously I’ve used Chatzy as well as the chat feature within Google Presentations. The first big surprise was there is a 16 simultaneous user limit for Etherpad
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The Pope is encouraging priests worldwide to blog. This is a significant announcement from a relatively old international organization that traditionally is very conservative. What about teachers in your school? What about students as they complete assignments for classes? Who is blogging with the formal endorsement and support of school officials? Perhaps school officials in
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This evening our family attended an evening presentation at Wilson Elementary in Oklahoma City Public Schools for families entitled, “Arts Integration at Wilson Elementary.” The interactive workshop was led by Randy Barron, a “Kennedy Center Teaching Artist” who has been working with Wilson teachers the past three days as their interpretive dance integration coach and
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Before sharing more of my own speculations about Apple’s highly anticipated product announcement coming this Wednesday, I’ll echo those of John Siracusa in his New Year’s post, “Antacid tablet:” I have no inside information. All of the predictions below are purely speculative. If you don’t want to read yet another blog post about what someone
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These are my notes from our Oklahoma City WordPress User’s Group tonight. The new OC network intrusion detection system prevented everyone at the meeting except one person from accessing the Internet as a guest-user. Ugh! Very painful. We survived not having Internet access, however, thanks to prepared slides and pre-loaded browser tabs by presenters. MY
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Almost all of the fifty undergraduate college students this semester enrolled in my Techology 4 Teachers class have cell phones with text messaging plans. Given this available technology, it makes sense to use SMS messaging as one of several communication tools to keep students updated about changes as well as reminders related to our class.
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We need a populist political movement in the United States, powered in part by the social media tools now at our fingertips, to curb the influence of corporations in our government, economy, and lives. The organization Change Congress is poised to be a key catalyst in this movement, and deserves our time as well as
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I am impressed with the ability of the iPhone / iPod Touch application Instapaper Free to create offline, mobile-friendly versions of any webpage. The following five minute screencast demonstrates how you can do this on an iPhone or iPod Touch. You’ll want to download the Instapaper Free application first and create a free Instapaper account.
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Thanks to some just-in-time Twitter assistance from Lucy Gray this evening, I was able to use the Appolicious App Library Builder to automatically build a sharable and ratable list of our family’s installed iPhone Applications for FREE. Previously I’ve taken screenshots within iTunes using Skitch and saved them to a Google Site, but Appolicious is
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These are my notes from Katie Bader and Diane Bilcer’s presentation, “From One Computer Lab to 1:1 – Best Practices of Technology Integration” at the One to One Institute‘s conference on November 9, 2009 conference in Chicago, Illinois. MY THOUGHTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. I recorded this session and may share it as a podcast
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Christopher Stewart’s article, “The Lost Boy” in the February 2010 issue of Wired magazine (not yet available online, apparently) relates horrifying tales of abuse in Chinese “Internet Addiction Camps” for youth. Since 2002 when state-run newspapers started sharing stories about the dangers of Internet addiction, thousands of worried Chinese parents have sent their allegedly Internet-addicted
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