This is a short article I wrote for the November Educational Technology Newsletter of Gadsten City Schools in Alabama. Feel free to republish this with attribution. Personal computers have been with us for over thirty years.1 In the last five years, mobile devices like smartphones and mp3 players have become much more common in our
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You can’t put a pricetag on the value of your own child’s voice, sharing an exciting moment or explaining something in their own words. We publish a lot of things over on “Learning Signs,” our family learning blog, but one of the most important things we do is record and share our voices. Two weeks
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Apple’s iPad may be taking the world by storm and have overtaken Microsoft in market cap, but some things regarding Apple aren’t changing: Apple products are still banned in the home of Bill and Melinda Gates. Melinda confirmed in a New Times interview last week the same family policy in place in March 2009. In
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Last night I had the opportunity to share five minutes of passion and ideas about BalancedFiltering.org at OpenBeta5 in Oklahoma City. The lightning talks were recorded, and I’m hoping will be posted to YouTube soon. I’ll link and embed my talk here when it’s published. One of the exciting things I learned about at OpenBeta was we’re
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Lots of great ideas and points in: Overview presentations: 6 reasons why you shouldn’t give onehttp://speakingaboutpresenting.com/content/overview-presentation/ My favorite: “Anyone can give an overview of a topic. Only an expert can deliver an in-depth exploration.“ This is very instructive to me as I consider different ideas for breakout sessions at conferences and in other professional development
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It’s almost election time, and Oklahoma voters statewide will be voting on “state question 744″ next week on November 2nd. Given the HUGE importance and impact of this proposed state constitutional amendment to the educational future of our state, it seems quite odd the “backstory” to this initiative has not (to my knowledge) received more
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This CSM article makes the interesting claim that gridlock in US federal politics may be a good thing because it promotes political stability. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/1028/Election-2010-What-gets-done-… This reminds me of the pride I’ve heard some Texans share about how their legislature only meets bi-annually. (Every two years) This cuts the opportunities for state politicians to screw things
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I love documentary films, PBS, and my iPad. Small surprise that I love the new, free PBS iPad app which was released October 25th. Among many other things, users can now watch full length documentaries via the app like the five part “We Shall Remain” series. It’s a great day to be a learner. -
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These are my notes from Bill Roberts’ presentation on Parenting and Family Life at the “Family Matters” class on 27 October 2010 at First Presbyterian Church in Edmond, Oklahoma. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. Tonight we’re going to talk about parenting and generational differences, based on several books and some Internet resources
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Many good stories, whether we read them in books, hear other people tell them, or watch them in movies use the “story arc” or “dramatic structure.” This is a photo I snapped last week in Holland, Michigan, of a story arc drawing a teacher was using. Freytag’s pyramid is a five part model also referred
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Today I had an opportunity to spend the morning with Dr. Gerald Knezek visiting with educators in Irving ISD. There are lots of things to share which I’m thinking about now as a result of our conversations, but since I don’t have time to write them in a post at present I recorded a twelve
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The department at the University of North Texas for which I’m teaching this semester (The Department of Learning Technologies, within the College of Information) has a new resource for faculty / instructors to checkout for student use: A set of 24 Flip video camcorders! Specifically, we have 8 GB Flip Ultra HD cameras. I’ve checked
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Remember conducting library research using microfiche? I’m here to tell you, when it comes to OLDER dissertations at some colleges, microfiche is still alive and well! I recorded a 3.5 minute video in the library at the University of North Texas today documenting my process of scanning a 139 page microfiche-based dissertation. The main glaring
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Greyson Chance is a twelve year old from Edmond, Oklahoma, whose 3.5 minutes of YouTube fame at a local church talent show singing a Lady Gaga song in April 2010 catapulted him to the Ellen Show and a musical recording contract. According a tweet by Ellen last week, retweeted by Greyson, he’ll will be back
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Shanghai American School, a large international school in China, utilizes Social Media by MediaScripts.com for their own, in-house YouTube clone website for video sharing. Their site (portal.saschina.org/video/) not only supports video uploading, transcoding to Flash and playback, but also embedding and commenting just like other video sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Blip, DotSub, SchoolTube, TeacherTube,
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I’m hoping to publish my first “blog book” soon and am thinking about the best options for facilitating online conversations about it. I did work around the mySQL database problems I wrote about recently, by downgrading an offline copy of my blog to WordPress 2.9 running off a local MAMP install and exporting all my
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These are my notes from Sandra Plair’s session “Action Research: What Do We Know About Learning in the Cloud” at the “Teaching and Learning in the Cloud Conference” in Holland, Michigan on 21 Oct 2010. MY THOUGHTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. Session description: We often consider the technologies we use to be beneficial for teaching
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These are my notes from Rushton Hurley‘s afternoon featured session on “Powerful and Free Tools from the Cloud” at the “Teaching and Learning in the Cloud Conference” in Holland, Michigan on 21 Oct 2010. MY THOUGHTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. All session resources are on Rushton’s Google Site. Rushton is @rushtonh on Twitter and the
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These are my notes from Stephen Best‘s presentation, “Do the Mash: Mixing Tools to Create a Custom Cloud-Based Learning Tool” at the “Teaching and Learning in the Cloud Conference” in Holland, Michigan on 21 Oct 2010. MY THOUGHTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. All of Stephen’s resources are listed on his conference session page. THIS IS
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