Blog Juice for Educational Technology

One thing today’s fine article in eSchool News on Connexions fails to mention is that the underlying software for the system is all free. Connexions is built on the open source Zope application server. The Connexions-specific code, known as Rhaptos, is freely available available, along with sundry extensions, accessories and tools.To be sure, Connexions and Rhaptos are significant pieces of…

Noting that “despite advances in electronic media, many schools have lagged behind in their electronic communications,” SchoolSpan Vice President Elliot Levine and Chief Communications Officer of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Nora Carr (couldn’t find a web page to link to for her) have published a “Building Blocks to Electronic Communication: A Rubric for School Web Development & Management.” That schools lag behind…

I’ve got this hypothesis that in order for an educational technology to be very widely adopted, it has to have a property I call “robustness.” It is pretty likely that someone else has already thought of this and given it a different name. If so, let me know. But my definition of “robust” educational technology is a technology which is…

Brian Crosby’s class started working this week on Marsopolis, a seven week project involving 500 4th to 9th grade students in 9 schools across the Washoe County (Reno, Nevada) School District. Brian writes: The students will work together to design the systems needed to survive on Mars (air, water, food, waste, communication, recreation, transportation and temperature control). Each 4 student…

Over a year ago, I put up a post concerning my fear of screencasting being stressed as opposed to blogging. I’ve spent the better part of this school year experimenting with combining various types of software to create an instructional learning experience. As a musician, I spend a great deal of time working with Finale. To incorporate technology into the…

I think Suson Brooks-Young’s answer to a “Leaders’ Edge” question about how many batteries you need to buy per laptop in a cart over on techLEARNING is incomplete. She’s right about the somewhat obvious fact that if you expect to use the laptop continuously for longer than the life of one of its batteries, you’ll need two batteries per student….

This is the K-12 ed tech conventional wisdom as I see it: It isn’t about the technology, it is about what we do with it; i.e., it is about teaching and learning. Teaching and learning must fundamentally change to keep up with technology driven changes in society. These two premises lead one to an oddly uncritical space. You don’t have…

The state of the art in blogging by teachers. I’ve been waiting for a model of a truly professional blog on classroom practice. This is it….

You know, if we keep this “information literacy” conversation going long enough, we may catch up to where Central Park East was a decade ago. From Understanding by Design (1998): Central Park East Secondary School in New York, the school founded by Deborah Meier, builds its entire curriculum around a set of such essential questions linked to key “habits of…

Ewan McIntosh pointed me to this amazing poetry podcast from Sandaig Primary in Glasgow, Scotland. The students celebrated National Poetry day 2005 by writing a Keepers Poem. The poem was inspired by The Keepers Poetry Project which is inspired by the original Keepers poem by Phil Whitehead. John Johnston is the teacher who put this incredible project together. These children…

Chris Lehmann, former English teacher, tech coordinator and administrator at The Beacon School in Manhattan, was one of the first people to grasp the potential of open source software in education, in particular the opportunity to have students involved in writing software and in sharing their work with other schools. Their early work was an inspiration to me when I…

Andy Carvin has a big honking thread going on the general question of “Are Educators Hostile to Wikipedia?” but specifically asking practitioners: …is Wikipedia something you’d want your students using in the classroom? Do you consider it an appropriate teaching tool? If so, how? If not, why not? What sometimes gets lost in this argument is that the end product…

Last spring, I made an entry concerning the use of Camtasia Studio for creating Screencasts in lieu of actual, true Blogging. At that time, I stated that I was not in favor of using this program to dilute the true intention/rationale for blogging but, I was planning to use Camtasia at the beginning of the next school year for some…