Archive for March, 2011:


Spots available for April 2011 Storychasers Workshops

Spots are still available for teachers, librarians, and other educators to register for Storychaser workshops in April 2011. These opportunities include: A “Celebrate Oklahoma Voices” digital storytelling and oral history workshop April 7-8 in Midwest City, Oklahoma, to be held in MidDel Public Schools A “Celebrate Texas Voices” digital storytelling and oral history workshop April

(Read More…)

OKC WordPress Users’ Group March 2011 Meeting Notes

These are my notes from the March 28, 2010 Oklahoma City WordPress User’s Group meeting held on the campus of Oklahoma Christian University in Edmond. Our group meets the last Monday evening of every month. My thoughts and comments are in all caps. I presented on mobile tools for posting to WordPress (including Posterous) and

(Read More…)

US Army Moving to Embrace iPhones, iPads, and Blended Learning

The official US Army video on YouTube, “Army Learning Concept 2015,” dramatizes a vision of learning for the future soldier filled with iPhone and iPad use which reminds me of Abilene Christian University’s video “Connected” which was published several years ago. The music reminds me of the battle scene music in trailer for “The Lion,

(Read More…)

Shifting from Writing to Videography

Andrew B. Watt here… Over the last few months, I’ve made a shift in my online footprint, from being a blogger to a video-maker. It started as a foray into video work but it’s become a part of my classroom process, homework review process, and online activity. Wes asked me to write a

(Read More…)

Digital Citizenship Lesson from Gilbert Gottfried: The (former) Voice of the Aflac Duck

Chances are your students may not recognize the name Gilbert Gottfried, but they all recognize his voice. Until he posted controversial tweets this week, Gottfried was the official voice of the Aflac duck. photo © 2005 Olaf Gradin | more info (via: Wylio)   See the posts, “Gilbert Gottfried Apologizes for Offensive Japan Tweets” and

(Read More…)

iPad as an Interactive White Board for $5 or $10

School leaders around the United States continue to spend HUGE amounts of money on interactive whiteboards for classrooms, despite the fact that these devices universally FAIL to empower students to become more independent, self-directed and engaged learners in the way mobile learning devices (like laptops, tablets or other personal digital learning tools) can. Please do

(Read More…)

Moderate comments on a Posterous Blog

If you use a blog for any purpose, including a class blog students access, it’s VERY important to configure it with comment moderation enabled. One of the easiest (and free) ways to create a blog today and share rich media (images, audio and video) as well as text with hyperlinks is to use Posterous. When

(Read More…)

iPhone Tethering, Cellular Bandwidth Consumption, & the Home / School Internet Access Divide

Last week’s Engadget article, “AT&T tells customers using unauthorized tethering methods to pay up or stop” got me wondering, just how much mobile bandwidth IS our family utilizing each month now that we have three iPhones among us? This month, with 18 days left to go in our billing cycle, I’m definitely on my way

(Read More…)

Volunteer Your Site to Host a Summer 2011 Storychasers’ Workshop

Are you interested in providing an outstanding, two or 2.5 day opportunity for educators in your area to learn about digital storytelling and oral history? If so, please consider “volunteering your site” to host a summer 2011 Storychasers’ workshop! We are providing workshops in Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas in 2011 to support the Celebrate Oklahoma

(Read More…)

Digital Footprints Can Include PDF Authorship Details

Your “digital footprint” online can include many different kinds of digital activities. These can not only include updates to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, photos posted and “tagged” online, and websites authored by you, but also DOCUMENTS you author which are posted online. These documents can include hidden “evidence” you created a document,

(Read More…)

How to win at Plants versus Zombies

My kids and I recorded this 21.5 minute audio podcast on an iPad today during the last leg of our car trip back to Oklahoma from California, discussing tips for winning the game, “Plants Versus Zombies.” This is currently one of our favorite games to play on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Enjoy and

(Read More…)

Helping Children Deal with Anger

These are my notes from the presentation “Helping Children Deal with Anger” by Scott Turansky and Joanne Miller at the 2011 Children’s Pastors Conference in San Diego, California on March 16, 2011. (I listened to an audio recording of this session today with my wife, who attended the conference in person.) Among others their websites

(Read More…)

Plant Your Flag in the Sand and Claim It

I had an opportunity to take some photographs at the beach this week in California. In thinking digitally, these images seem to ask: What does your digital footprint look like? You talking with media yet? How about your students? The best way to proactively take charge of your digital footprint is to publish “claimed” content

(Read More…)

Descending into the clouds at sunset (video)

On March 9th, I posted some photos of an amazing sunset over a beautiful cloud deck over Memphis, Tennessee, in the post, “Sunset over a sea of clouds.” Today I shared (on Flickr) a 44 second video of our plane descending just below the cloud layer from that same evening. It’s easy, as a regular

(Read More…)

Microsoft Copying Apple Store Experience

The clearest message communicated by the Microsoft Store in Fashion Valley Mall in San Diego seems to be: Redmond wants to offer shopping experiences like Cupertino. Remember days in the not-so-distant past when Windows-based laptops for sale by franchises like Office Depot and Best Buy were not connected to the Internet? That’s not the case

(Read More…)

Feedburner Feed and Yahoo Pipe Updated (no longer frozen on Feb 18th post)

A few weeks ago I noticed the Feedburner feed for my blog was not updating. Since changes to my WordPress blog can take awhile, and are “not to be taken lightly” since a mess-up can render my blog inaccessible, I delayed an investigation of the problems creating this situation at the time. Recently my mom

(Read More…)

Terms of Service Agreements Users Don’t Read

When lawyers create extensively long documents which can have a significant impact on the lives of others, yet the documents themselves are too complex and long for “regular folks” to read and understand, something is amiss. That was the case with the 2010 health care legislation in the United States, which was over 2000 pages

(Read More…)

Narrated iPhone Photos Edited & Published on iPad

Today my girls made a short, 72 second narrated video on an iPad with photos we took using an iPhone. In this post I’ll share the applications we used as well as some lessons learned. Get your own valid XHTML YouTube embed code Since we were taking photos on a beach by the ocean, I

(Read More…)

Public Education isn’t a war

Stan Stamper, editor of the local newspaper in Hugo, Oklahoma, misses the boat big time in his editorial today, “Are we losing the education war?” Education isn’t a war and shouldn’t be construed as such, anymore than our struggles to combat terrorism globally or counter illicit drugs should be. Wrong metaphor, and poor policy recommendations

(Read More…)

Mobile Videography on an iPad2 with iMovie

As expected and hoped, the iPad 2 with iMovie for iPad software is a wonderful platform for mobile videography. My girls (ages 7 and 10) shot the following five minute video on an iPad 2 at a dinosaur museum, acting as virtual docents. I edited this with iMovie for iPad and published it to their

(Read More…)

© Creative Commons License