Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I had a great time on Thursday afternoon recording an episode of my podcast in front of a live audience.
My first guest was Sonny Portacio, geocacher and Director of Technology for the Escondido Union High School District. Sonny has been doing a ton of work with geocaching lately. He’s created a wiki site for collecting […]

Here are links to all of the sites I’ll be mentioning in my talk at NECC on Wednesday (and even some ones I probably won’t have time to mention). I’ll post more once I’m done.
Blogging

Mabryonline.org with Dr. Tim Tyson
Lewis Elementary School (Principal Tim Lauer)

Google Maps mashups

Tour de France live updates
Gmaps pedometer
Housing Maps
Chicago Crime
Google Sketchup examples

Technorati […]

My family and I arrived in San Diego last night, and I’m busily putting the final touches on my presentations for this year’s NECC. If you’re interested in seeing a session that I’ll be doing, check out one of the following:

Introducing the Read/Write Web: Challenges, Opportunities, and Implications, July 5, 2:00–3:00, Room 6D
Learning To Go: […]

ESPN has an interested article about how a few major league baseball players have discovered that their video iPods are giving them a competitive advantage. Hitters are using video iPods to analyze their swings and pitchers are studying batters to look for weaknesses. From the article:
The Rockies have downloaded video clips into the iPods of […]

There’s a battle royale brewing in the telecom world. Skype just announced that SkypeOut calls to U.S. and Canadian numbers will be free through the end of 2006. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, SkypeOut allows you to call a standard landline number from your computer using the Skype VoIP service. (Skype is a free, […]

The ed tech blogosphere is buzzing about this so I feel compelled to add my $0.02.
Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick (R. of PA) has introduced legislation called the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA). I saw the news first in an article at News.com entitled Congress targets social network sites. (You’ll find the actual bill online in PDF […]

David seems to still be having problems with his Son of Citation Engine. Since he doesn’t want to open source his code, I can’t directly help, but I can offer some advice. Basically, the Citation Machine is a perfect candidate to use Ajax, arguably the key technical advance underlying Web 2.0, a subject on which David is purportedly an authority….

Rather than explaining it, why don’t you just try it out? To install and start using the GTD TiddlyWiki, follow these steps: Right click on this link and select ‘Save link as…’ or ‘Save target as…’ Open that file in your web browser (File > Open file…). That’s it. You’ve now got a nice little wiki based organizer, entirely implemented…

I’m at a meeting of local ed tech people today learning about VBrick. VBrick is a video distribution system that the Edina Public Schools purchased recently to replace their aging system of racks of VCRs. They passed a bond in their community that funded the system, including hundreds of LCD projectors in classrooms. They are […]

My old mobile phone was acting up so I picked up a new one a few days ago. The Samsung T809 is pretty cool on its own, but I’ve had the most fun playing with Google SMS. If you haven’t ever tried text messaging, find a teenager somewhere and ask him or her for a […]

Clearing out the NetNewsWire tabs: Experiences with CDD’s: Centralised operated Skolelinux installations at many schools. Some hard numbers on the cost savings and other benefits from the use of Linux thin clients in schools in Norway, by Knut Yrvin. Chalksite. The first web app for educators written entirely from the 37 Signals style guide. Cleanly and prettily plucks some low-hanging…

For some reason I missed this the first time around, but it has gotten surprisingly little play in the ed-tech blogosphere. Intel has a prototype of a laptop they’re projecting for sale next year in the developing world at $400. This would be more of a normal, Windows (Vista?) running laptop than the OLPC laptop. Of course, Intel doesn’t actually…

Excerpt from an article by Patty Miller of the Edmond Sun:
Computer software technology that started out as a popular “learn-to-sing tool” is now creating a great new harmony in other areas of education. “Unintended consequences” is the term given by Chief Operating Officer Ken Speigel of the higher literacy and reading scores that have […]