Kent Brooks, the director of technology at Western Oklahoma State College (WOSC) out in Altus, wrote a great post on his Ning last week following an Adobe connect brainstorming session called, “Open Content, Peer Production and Creativity, STEM and School Culture Transformation in Oklahoma.” This built on the ideas in my post, “Let’s build openly
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Most of the assessments for my “Technology 4 Teachers” course this term have been short one to three question quizzes in WebCT / Blackboard which asked students to provide a direct link to their blog, where they responded to an assignment. This has made the assessment process fairly speedy for me, since I could readily
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This evening on the University of Central Oklahoma’s main announcements page on the faculty/staff/students portal, I noticed a message titled, “Textbook Rental Program Available Fall 2010.” It reads: Beginning with the Fall 2010 semester, Central students will have the option of renting textbooks from the UCO Barnes and Noble Bookstore. Students will have the option
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This morning in our 5th grade Sunday school class, several students were able to use the free program “PaperDesk LITE for iPad” to share illustrations on our LCD projector which they drew to help visualize some of the vocabulary words and concepts which were a part of our lesson. I was delighted to find this
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Word processing documents in Google Docs cannot presently be edited in the Safari web browser on an iPad “because Mobile Safari does not support contentEditable, which is needed for rich text editing.” (Apple Developer library reference) Office2 Pro is an $8 iPad application which supports editing MS Word and Excel File editing, as well as
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I watch almost zero television these days, but thanks to this Open Culture post I was able to watch 45 minutes of Conan O’Brien from his visit to Google last week. I watched this as a full screen video on my iPad. This is the future of TV, today. Get your own valid XHTML YouTube
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The more I use my iPad, the more I love it. Yes, there are certainly issues I think limit the platform and I hope will change someday… but overall, I really DO think the iPad is a gamechanger. The proliferation of apps for the device is a big reason. My favorite thing thing about the
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Two years when our middle daughter was in second grade, she actually had to check out a dictionary from school to complete an assigned worksheet because it required students to write down the “guide words” at the top of different pages. We don’t currently keep a paper dictionary in our house, but we have multiple
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We’ve unfortunately always had people in our communities who are bullies and seem to enjoy hurting other people. What’s changed is that gossip which used to remain local has now gone global, and gossip can now be confirmed with images and video. Bullying which used to be limited by time and place can now take
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The following photographs could likely be taken at almost any College of Education today in the United States. I’m not sharing this to be harshly critical of the current institution for which I am teaching as an adjunct instructor: Rather I’m sharing these images because they reflect the assessment status quo for many professors / instructors
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Today as anticipated, Ning announced a new pricing structure for its websites which will be implemented in July 2010. Free sites will be phased out, and options will be provided for current site owners (who do not want to start paying) to export their content for re-use elsewhere. The Ning Announcement page includes the following
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Helping people of any age become writers and authors is a BIG deal. In this post, I’ll explain how I used a WordPress blog last night and a free account with iPadio to publish the text of a student-created story as well as an audio recording of the student reading her story orally. It took
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I need to update the WordPress theme Karen Montgomery and I are using on our Powerful Ingredients 4 Blended Learning site, to make it easier / clearer for visitors to get information about our “Digital Magic Tricks Workshop” for educators and register directly for the June 21-22 workshop we’re planning to offer in Oklahoma City
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This week I’ll be brainstorming with other Oklahoma educators working on a Race To The Top (RTTT) federal grant application. When it comes to technology integration and STEM, one of the best ideas I can suggest is providing opportunities for teachers to build digital curriculum together. If these online curriculum materials are published on the
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This weekend I had an opportunity to read the first half of Diane Ravitch’s excellent new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” I will be writing at much greater length in upcoming weeks about the book, the research it presents, and the implications
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This week I received a phone call from a friend in a large Texas school district, who I met about five years ago when I created a series of videos about technology leadership as part of the Gates-funded Texas Technology Leadership Academy. He asked me my opinion about purchasing iPads for school administrators in his
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