Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Here’s yet another cool product from Google. It seems that they recently purchased SketchUp, an easy-to-use 3D modeling tool that I played with a bit a few months ago. The new product, Google SketchUp, is now free for personal use and integrated with Google Earth. Unfortunately for me, like Google Earth, Google SketchUp is only […]

I have been following up a bit on my “open” Pacesetter idea from last week. I got an email from Phoenix Wang, a Program Officer at The Hewlett Foundation and had a conversation with her on the phone. She understood the opportunity here, comparing the situation with Pacesetter to Apple’s abandonment of the Newton, which I think is apt. Unless…

In a recent post I introduced the idea of seeking to have the Pacesetter English curriculum released under an open content license, such as a Creative Commons license. It is a rather complex idea, more than can really be jammed into one blog post, so I’m going to try to clarify it further in some subsequent posts. The most obvious…

There is a lot of talk about generating curricula using open source methodologies, that is, roughly, allowing free distribution of curriculum materials while inviting outside contributions to the work, both on the grassroots level and engaging some big guns like IBM and the Hewlett Foundation. While I’m certainly philosophically supportive of these ideas and initiatives, I haven’t seen anything yet…

Lately I’ve been poking around the various open source game development libraries available for the Python language. It is pretty cool to think that I could write a game using the same language and techniques we use to write SchoolTool. Not that I have much faith that I’ll ever find the time to do any game programming (although I’ve got…

Lately I’ve been poking around the various open source game development libraries available for the Python language. It is pretty cool to think that I could write a game using the same language and techniques we use to write SchoolTool. Not that I have much faith that I’ll ever find the time to do any game programming (although I’ve got…

I posted a while ago about the Prelinger Archive, a wonderful collection of old public domain video. Thanks to Google Video and the National Archives, you can add a bookmark to NARA on Google Video to your collection of go-to resources. The first page has links to old NASA footage, United newsreels, and Department of […]

On the Media is one of my favorite shows on public radio. I’m rarely around a radio when it’s on my local NPR affiliate, but thanks to the forward-thinking, media-savvy folks at OTM I can listen to their weekly podcast. In a segment on their program from August 26th entitled “Museum Heist,” host Brooke Gladstone describes a really cool course…

The destruction and suffering caused by Hurricane Katrina is on everyone’s mind. I did my graduate work in Louisianna at NSULA (Northewestern State University of LA). This tragedy has been more upsetting to me than if I hadn’t been to New Orleans and didn’t know people from that area. I have been trying to provide our teachers with good resources…

While at NECC I stopped by the ESRI booth as one of my goals for the past several years has been to put their GIS (Geographic Information System) product ArcView to use. We have sent several classroom teachers and even one of our tech staff to training but have never gotten to the point of adding our own district data….

Last week at NECC, many of the insiders (myself, Tim Lauer, Tom Hoffman, and Anne Davis) presented a workshop on weblogs in education. The workshop went great and I think a number of attendess really enjoyed it (and, I hope got something out of it). In preparation for the event, I knew that Anne Davis wouldn’t be able to attend…

Last week at NECC, many of the insiders (myself, Tim Lauer, Tom Hoffman, and Anne Davis) presented a workshop on weblogs in education. The workshop went great and I think a number of attendess really enjoyed it (and, I hope got something out of it). In preparation for the event, I knew that Anne Davis wouldn’t be able to attend…

Being a WebQuest and Bernie Dodge fan, I couldn’t pass up his 11:00 am session today (Tuesday) at NECC. Not only was the session better than expected, Bernie blew the doors off the creation of WebQuests with the introduction of his new tool, QuestGarden. QuestGarden is where WebQuests can be grown and nurished. Bernie’s new tool will be available September…