What do you do if you’re a high school administrator and one of your students uses a personal Twitter account to criticize your state governor? What do you do if you’re the state governor who was criticized? How about the director of communications for the criticized governor? The answer might be “nothing,” but that was
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The ‘regular week’ presentations of the 2011 K-12 Online Conference start tomorrow on Monday, November 28th, at 8 am EST! Please check our conference schedule the next two weeks for daily updates, Monday through Friday! 4 new presentations will be published daily, focusing on our theme, “Purposeful Play.” Professional development certificates for participation are available this
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This evening I took some time to create a custom URL shortener, using the open source tool yourls. I’ve seen Tony Vincent use custom URLs in his tweets and at conferences for several years. Tony has setup the domain and website tonyv.me for his custom URLs. I setup wfryer.me. I won’t exhaustively detail all the
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With the recent release of the Kindle Fire by Amazon.com as well as Barnes & Noble’s color tablet, more people than ever are reading and interested in eBooks. Apple’s iPad remains (IMHO) the unquestioned leader in the touch tablet computing world, but the increasing number of eReaders and tablet devices at lower price points will
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If you work with CSS and WordPress, I’m hoping you can provide me with some quick advice for a minor page template change I need to make. On the K-12 Online Conference website, we’re currently using the WordPress theme “Permanent 3.0″ by NewWpThemes.com. By default I have the site pages set to use three columns,
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(cross-posted from balancedfiltering.org) Today I had an opportunity to meet with the superintendent and CIO of Oklahoma City Public Schools to discuss my concerns as a parent in the district about the overblocking of Internet websites. I had heard a great deal from other people about the district’s policies and the reasons for those policies,
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If you work in a large school district (defined by student population, say 40,000 students or more) I need your help with a quick survey. I met with the superintendent and CIO of our school district in Oklahoma today, and will have an opportunity this evening to address our school board for three minutes as
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(Cross-posted from Playing with Media) The free VoiceThread for iPad app has been available for awhile, but this afternoon was the first opportunity I’ve had to play with it at length. Rachel, my 8 year old daughter, just finished reading “Christmas in Camelot” (a Magic Treehouse book) this weekend and was VERY excited to tell
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WordPress.com is a free, flexible blogging service but has some drawbacks. One of those limitations is the inability to directly include EMBED code in posts. To “protect” authors and blog visitors from potentially malicious code sometimes disguised as legitimate embed code, by default WordPress.com “strips out” embed code from posts when authors save and publish
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My 8 year old accompanied me on my trip to Lubbock, Texas, this weekend, and we made our way back to Oklahoma City this afternoon. At the eastbound I-40 rest stop about an hour east of Amarillo, we recorded a two minute video watching some of the contrails and beautiful clouds overhead at sunset. As
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Thanks SO much for all the uplifting words of support and encouragement shared today after I successfully defended my dissertation for my PhD! There were so many kind comments shared I can’t reply individually to all of you tonight. It was an overwhelming response, and I am filled with thankfulness for the support of many
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DEFINITION: “Phonecasting is a portmanteau of telephone and podcasting, and simply means recording and listening to podcasts with a phone.” This is the slidecast (synchronized audio and presentation slides) for my final dissertation defense in Curriculum and Instruction at Texas Tech University today. The title of my dissertation was, “Impact Analysis of Phonecasted Lecture Summaries.”
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We need to be investing MORE in education today, not less, in part to ramp up workforce skills. Consider this perspective: The problem is that not enough people know how to use the new tools of the Internet, mobile, and cloud computing. The workforce as a whole does not have the right mix of skills.
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So you finally got an iPad, but you’d like to increase the quality of audio recordings in your videos as well as audio interviews? Here are 3 different external microphone options for iPad to consider. The iRig microphone ($60) is my top recommendation and the only microphone of these three options I’ve personally used as
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Necessity can motivate us to learn new things, and that was the case today as I finalize my dissertation and my “List of Tables” following my table of contents. Although I’ve been using the provided “table of contents” feature of my word processor to automate pagination of major paper sections, I hadn’t figured out (until
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(cross-posted from balancedfiltering.org) Update 11/16: Note the original title of this article has been changed, my intent in writing this is not to personally attack the reporter who wrote the article, but rather call attention to these issues which desperately need clarifying in our communities. Update 11/17: After reaching out to the newspaper reporter via
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Here is a quotation worth considering in our communications landscape awash in information: From “Democracy and education: an introduction to the philosophy of education” by John Dewey, published in 1916. In Chapter Fifteen: “Play and Work in the Curriculum” he wrote: Doubtless the fact that children normally engage in play and work out of school
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A new two hour documentary film was released in select U.S. theaters this fall about teaching and public education: American Teacher. It’s a direct response to last year’s “Waiting for Superman” movie, which (among other things) cast teacher unions as demons in educational improvement debates. See my October 2010 post, “Waiting For Superman: A Good
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Last week I created a new WordPress website (learn.playingwithmedia.com) for the series of workshops I’m offering both face-to-face and via videoconference in December focusing on skills from my eBook, “Playing with Media: simple ideas for powerful sharing.” The main website for my book (playingwithmedia.com) is hosted for free by Posterous.com. The learn.playingwithmedia.com site, however, is
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I’m working with an Oklahoma teacher who helped her students conduct multiple interviews last week and this weekend with U.S. military veterans for Veteran’s Day. She is exploring several project ideas for students using these recorded interviews, and I’m brainstorming with her to figure out how students could create oral history interview videos (like those
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