Blog Juice for Educational Technology

On the Media from May 19, 2006 had a segment entitled “Fair Use Follies” that attempted to highlight some of the challenges faced by documentary filmmakers who are finding it increasingly difficult to decide when their use of copyrighted work constitutes fair use. It was an interesting discussion, and one of the speakers led me […]

It’s official as of tonight’s school board meeting. My job search is over.
Starting July 1st I will be Director of Technology for the Buffalo-Hanover-Montrose Schools. Buffalo is a growing school district of almost 5,000 students just to the west of the Twin Cities metro area. As Director, I’ll be responsible for all aspects of technology […]

I took a walk down Michigan Avenue to the Apple Store tonight. My hotel doesn’t have wireless so I decided to pick up an AirPort Express to create my own wireless network in my room. Why is it that the nicer the hotel, the worse their network seems to be?
The Apple Store in Chicago is […]

This isn’t quite as earth shattering as Chapter 2, but the personal reinvention continues with the end, finally, of my Manila blog and the beginning of my new space served up by James Farmer at Edublogs. I have mostly good things to say about my three-plus years with Manila, but I’ve just had Word Press […]

Education Week is running a story titled “Educators Experiment With Student-Written ‘Wikis’: Malleable, Open-ended Web Sites Seen as Aids to Collaborative Learning” that highlights some of the work being done by the likes of Tim Lauer, Paul Allison and others. Here’s a snip that I thought was pretty interesting:
“You can�t do the cookie-cutter essay anymore, […]

The Higher Ed BloggerCon seemed like a pretty cool idea when it was first announced and it’s absolutely fulfilling my expectations, through Day 3 at least. It’s a month long event that features two screencasted presentations a day, and it kicked off this week with the teaching strand. I’ve learned something from everything that’s been […]

So this 7th grade “Exploring Our Dynamic Earth” blog (with the very appropriate tag line of “Using blogs to learn”) is an interesting example of how RSS can be woven into the work. The front matter is all done by placing feeds from a host of class blogs and a few science news feeds (including […]

Just when we started figuring out exactly what the heck MySpace really is, now it’s destined for the trash heap. At least that’s according to some of Jeff Utecht’s students:
�It became something you HAD to do, people were going crazy, and you had to write something or people would say �Yeah, you haven�t written anything […]

How much fun is it to say that?
If you’re here because of today’s series of stories in the Washington Post on educators blogging, let me take this opportunity to welcome you to the “edublogosphere” and to a really great conversation about how blogs and wikis and podcasts and other Web publishing tools are changing what […]

I love Bloglines, but this article in TechCrunch has me looking at the alternatives. One that I really want to like is Rojo, which has all sorts of social Web goodness built into it. I LOVE the fact that I can tag individual posts…kind of like a built in del.icio.us. Of course, every tag has […]

Some good news from the New York Times:
African-Americans are steadily gaining access to and ease with the Internet, signaling a remarkable closing of the “digital divide” that many experts had worried would be a crippling disadvantage in achieving success.
Civil rights leaders, educators and national policy makers warned for years that the Internet was bypassing blacks […]

MySpace has been in the news again, this time because of the role it played in organizing the recent protests across the country (but primarily in California and Arizona) against the immigration bill. The first thing that jumps out to me, at least is that MySpace is now officially a “social networking site,” not just […]

The folks over at the CCCC Blogging SIG are taking the blog by the horns in terms of beginning to gather some empirical research about the effects of blogs in the classroom. I still think it’s weird that no one has published any results of studies with this tool yet. I may have to carve […]