Archive for April, 2011:


Fatherhood & Faith: Rearing Good Kids in a Secular Society

These are my notes from “Fatherhood & Faith: Rearing Good Kids in a Secular Society” by George Holden, a psychology professor at SMU at the 2011 MoRanch Men’s Conference near Hunt, Texas. http://www.moranch.com More of my notes from the MoRanch Conference are available on Eyes Right: http://eyesright.speedofcreativity.org/ Opening Quotations from: Rev Timothy Dwight Clarence Darrow

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Kyle Nelson on Social Media

These are my notes from Kyle Nelson’s presentation “Social Media” at the 2011 MoRanch Men’s Conference near Hunt, Texas. The focus of Kyle’s presentation was helping Presbyterian Church leaders and members to better understand social media and how it can be leveraged to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. http://www.moranch.com Kyle works with LaunchFish http://launchfish.com

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Using iPadio to Create a Final Exam Study Guide Phonecast

This semester in my two undergraduate sections of “Technology 4 Teachers” at the University of Central Oklahoma, I’m having my students take a 20 question multiple choice final exam. This is the only multiple choice assessment I’m giving all semester, as the rest of the course is project based with six different themes. I decided

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Connect your laptop to a TV

This evening at our church following a “partnering with parents” meeting to discuss changes to our youth ministries programs and classes, I had a conversation with another dad interested in using his new MacBook laptop in lessons he teaches on Sunday mornings. He has never connected it to a TV or projector, so I showed

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A Call to Action: Waging a War to Save our Republic

In his 11 minute presentation at Harvard’s Think Big 2 Event, Larry Lessig shared a passionate call for us to become “root strikers,” in the parlance of Henry David Thoreau, to wage a war to save our republic from the funders who now buy influence in Washington DC as a normal matter of course. Take

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Using Copyright-friendly Images Effectively in Presentations

Yesterday on April 25, 2011, I shared a workshop for faculty and staff at Western Oklahoma State College in Altus titled, “Using Copyright-friendly Images Effectively in Presentations.” The recorded audio from this workshop is available in two parts on my secondary “Fuel for Educational Change Agents” podcast channel. (part 1 and part 2) Referenced resources

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Is your school network ready for multi-platform collaboration?

Many of the networks in our K-12 schools are in dire need of substantial upgrades. Like electricity, Internet bandwidth has become a necessary part of the ‘basic utilities’ 21st century learners and knowledge workers expect and need to do daily work. Many school (as well as business) leaders have not yet understood the vital role

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Digitally Resurrecting the 1957 Wyoming 4A Football Finals

Thanks to a high school classmate who was able to digitize ancient silent movie footage of the 1957 Wyoming 4A Football Finals and Semifinals, my dad has been reliving his glory days as a high school quarterback for the Powell Panthers. This evening after watching both games on DVD, I asked if he’d like to

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Spectacular Scenes of Controlled Burning on the Kansas Prairie

Today driving up for a Storychasers‘”Celebrate Kansas Voices” digital storytelling workshop in Manhattan, I witnessed some dramatic scenes of controlled burning on the prairie just south of Junction City along US 77. I don’t think these images do the landscape justice. In addition to photos taken with the default camera app of my iPhone4, I

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Podcast377: iPad Stylus Recommendations from Kevin Helmer

This podcast is an interview with Kevin Helmer, iPad artist and digital road warrior, at the Celebrate Texas Voices digital storytelling workshop in Lubbock, Texas, on April 19, 2011. Kevin discusses four different “capacitive” stylus pens he uses with his iPad and their relative merits. He also discusses several apps he’s used and likes

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Super Digital Stories from Celebrate Texas Voices in Lubbock

This week was historic: the first workshop for “Celebrate Texas Voices” was held at Region 17 Service Center in Lubbock. Twenty five educators from around West Texas gathered for two days to learn how to create digital stories using a “digital backpack” of equipment and free software. Here are a few of the wonderful stories

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Use a cell phone supporting 3 way calling to record audio interviews

Today in our “Celebrate Texas Voices” workshop for Storychasers in Lubbock, Don Wilson and I showed teachers how they could use any cell phone supporting 3 way calling and the free website, iPadio.com, to record an audio interview with another person. Of course, as is the case with all audio recording, it’s important to get

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Create a Moderated Classroom Phonecasting Channel with iPadio

Any time teachers or librarians ask students to submit media files for web publication, it’s a good idea (conservatively speaking) to utilize tools which permit MODERATION of content. This means the educator gets to PREVIEW submitted content and approve it before it “goes live” online. VoiceThread is a great example of a web-based digital storytelling

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Proposed K12 virtual school legislation in Florida a sign of things to come

Last Friday, on April 16, 2011, a bill passed the Florida legislature’s House appropriation’s committee which would substantially open the door to public funding of virtual learning not only for students enrolled in the state’s public schools to take online classes from the state’s virtual school, but also from other sources. According to the article,

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TMobile Claims iPhone Users Pay AT&T More to Be Slower

The current TMobile advertisement for their 4G network data plans, “Step Up to Nationwide 4G Without Losing Your Shirt,” is pretty funny– particularly their portrayal of the AT&T exec. The setup for the advertisement is a direct play on Apple’s “Get a Mac” ad campaign featuring John Hodgman as PC and Justin Long as Mac.

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Configure WordPress to auto-correct HTML nested tag errors

Today enroute to Lubbock for our first “Celebrate Texas Voices” digital storytelling workshop offered by Storychasers, I helped Don Wilson fix a strange error he’d been having on his WordPress blog. After making a new post several weeks ago, the sidebar on his Twenty Ten WordPress theme started showing up at the bottom of the

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Science is a Contact Sport with the Brightest Minds in the World @GovInternships

How are you going to help the students you teach get more interested, motivated, and excited THIS WEEK about becoming scholars in the areas of STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering and Math? Consider sharing the following six minute video and discussing it. Multiple researchers (including post-doc students) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (in Tennessee) describe

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Multipoint Videoconferencing: H.323 & Skype on the Blue Jeans Network

Videoconferencing has continued to improve dramatically in the past several years. One sign of this improvement is that fact that in a group of twenty US educators today, at least one is likely to have participated in a free videoconference with someone in another country thanks to Skype. Before Skype and iChat, however, we had

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Tips for adding images to Custom Google Maps #gct

I received an email this evening from a participant in my half-day workshop, “GeoApps for Learning: Google Maps and Google Earth,” which I presented in early March at the Heartland eLearning Conference. He is running into trouble getting his students to add images to their shared, custom Google Map. These are a few tips I

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Great Historical, Interpretive Remix Videos

Is your school or school district still blocking access to YouTube (even for teachers) and ignoring the ethical need to promote balanced content filtering? Perhaps some of these videos, available on the “History for Music Lovers” YouTube channel, can help you “change hearts and minds” of your administration to understand the constructive value of digital

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