Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Anyone starting a weblog (or wanting to redesign one) should give Open Source Web Design a look-see. You can browse the designs by date, rating, and number of downloads. Now I’m itching to do a redesign…

Via digg.

From Ula at Blog blog comes this link to an article Across the blogosphere from Anne Bartlett-Bragg, Lecturer, Faculty of Education at the University of Technology in Sydney, on her PhD on the use of weblogs for developing knowledge and collabo…

Today we crept over the 1100 number in course site request for Illinois Compass (our instance of WebCT Vista). These requests flow in daily. The first day of class was a week ago, and I believe we’ve had more than 200 course site requests since th…

Last spring the New Media Consortium (working with Adobe Systems and the George Lucas Foundation) convened a summit to discuss 21st century literacy and how to expand use of these skills in K-12 and post secondary education. As a result of this meeting, a report entitled A Global Imperative: The…

So it’s taken me until now to really start digging into Manila 9.5. I’m starting to set up sites for teachers and students for the news school year, and I’m just realizing how much more Manila can do in terms of determining who sees what and how. It’s going to take some time to play, and I’m already trying to enlist some teacher volunteers to push the envelope a bit for me here, but here are some pretty cool aspects right out of the box:

Just in time for the start of the academic year, the American Council on Education has sent a letter to its 1,600 member institutions, urging them to dissuade students from pirating copyrighted material online. The letter — signed by David…

There’s an interesting story on /. today about a blogger facing a lawsuit over comments posted to his website. These comments made some very nasty remarks about a competitor and are alleged to contain secret, proprietary information. However, it’s not quite as clear-cut as all that–the owner also took to casually bashing his competitor. In short, the whole situation is a bit muddy, but, nevertheless, this is the sort of thing that could prove disastrous for educators using blogs.

Secretary Spellings unveiled “Hispanic Tool Kits” during a visit to Chaparral Elementary School in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The Recording Industry Association of America has filed another monthly batch of antipiracy lawsuits against 754 John Doe defendants. But no campus file-swapping suspects were named. Campus officials may well be bracing themselves for next month’s suits, though: Last year…

Education Daily for Tuesday, August 30, 2005, has an article about a computer use study conducted by CDW-G, Inc., a technology services provider to government and educators. The study provides interesting statistics relating to the use of computers by teachers. Not surprisingly, according to Education Daily, 86 percent of teachers…

Whether, how, and how much educators should deploy technology to help special-needs students on high-stakes tests are complex issues in the era of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). As mandated by the federal law, teac…

Many of the multicolored images charting Hurricane Katrina’s path that have appeared on Web sites and TV are the work of meteorologists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The Web site for the university’s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite…

Scott Wilson takes the handoff from Will and advances Will’s “Morning at RSS-Blog-Furl High School” vision with some nice wireframes of possible user interface elements (people, activities, resources) and commentary. These contributions make Will’s ideas more concrete and technologically grounded. Scott does a great job of creating these “signpost” entries that end up being referred to again and again and…