Year: 2007
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Whitelisting websites – what a pain!
It’s a shame I have to do this, but c’est la vie with current content filtering methods in many school districts. This whitelist is for Monday’s workshops on “Digital Storytelling” and “Using Google and Yahoo Tools for Educational Research and Collaboration.”
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Quick iTunes Backup
This is a useful trick I learned recently: iTunes (on both Windows and Macintosh platforms) includes built-in support for backing up all the songs and videos in your iTunes library to writeable media CDs or DVDs. This is ALWAYS a good idea, since hard drives can crash and laptops can be stolen… but this is…
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Striving to encourage natural learning at School
It is a delightful pleasure, as well as highly instructive, to be reading Seymour Papert’s 1993 text “The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer.” After having just finished “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” last night, perhaps I am thinking a bit more about “immortality” than usual. It strikes me that…
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Report from EduComm 2007
An article I wrote in June for District Administration magazine titled “Report from EduComm 2007” is now online at their site. The photo on page 2 of the article next to the heading “The Power of Digital Photography and Music” is of Scott Perloff (another EduComm ’07 presenter) giving me a fast lesson in MicroWorlds…
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1st Scratch Lesson with Alexander
Alexander (my 9 year old) gave me my first lesson on how to program in Scratch today – WOW! I am so amazed. Our first lesson lasted 45 minutes long. Alexander is the “expert” on Scratch in our house because he’s spent a total of 4-5 hours playing with the program so far. I had…
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Great themes in HP5 movie (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)
J.K. Rowling is a master-storyteller, and director David Yates has done the best job to-date bringing one of Rowling’s books to the movie screen in “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.” My love for the fictional works and worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis is strong. While I still enjoy the greater…
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Let’s work together, shall we?!
I love this new Creative Commons film about working together! I also love the website where I found it: dotSUB, an all-volunteer effort to encourage multi-language closed captioning of video content. Give the video a try: It is currently 100% available in 12 languages, and the German version is about one-third complete. Click the arrows…
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A digital playground of dreams?
The July 18, 2007, Christian Science Monitor article “Why children need to learn to play” resonated deeply with me. The author includes several quotations from David Elkind, author of “Power of Play” and “The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon.” According to the article: “Over the past two decades, children have lost 12…
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Beware the dangers of multi-tasking
Whoa – this just in via Karen Montgomery: Beware the dangers of multi-tasking! 😉 This is a great video to use for teacher professional development– for tips on downloading an offline copy of this to share, see my post “Capturing offline copies of YouTube videos.”