Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Month: November 2011

  • A High School Student Tweet Heard ‘Round Kansas

    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…

  • 2011 #k12online Conference Starts Monday

    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…

  • Creating a Customized URL Shortener with YOURLS

    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…

  • Give eBook Copies of Playing with Media to Educators at a Discount

    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…

  • WordPress CSS Help Needed

    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,…

  • Advocating for Balanced Content Filtering in Oklahoma City Public Schools

    (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,…

  • Help Needed from Urban Educators: Are Evernote, GDocs & Edmodo Blocked for Your Students?

    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…

  • Lessons Learned using VoiceThread for iPad

    (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…

  • Embedding Flash Audio on WordPress.com with an iPad

    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…

  • You Could Only Make this Video on a Mobile Phone

    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…