Monthly Archives: July 2004

Weblog and Moodle hosting

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I’ve been meaning to put in a plug for TeacherHosting.com since getting back from NECC. I get questions occasionally from teachers who want to know how to get started with blogs, and I’ve usually recommended Typepad. That’s a great system, but TeacherHosting.com has even better prices for an unlimited number of weblogs. You can add Moodle hosting too, and the price is still very reasonable. An added benefit is that Thor Prichard, CEO of the outfit, is a cool guy who coordinated the blogging project at NECC.

STLI

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I haven’t posted anything this week until now because I’ve been up to my ears in graduate school work at the U. of Minnesota. This week is the second and final on-campus experience of the School Technology Leadership Initiative, a program in the College of Education. According to the STLI Website:

The University of Minnesota School Technology Leadership Initiative is addressing the nationwide shortage of school administrators who can effectively facilitate the implementation of technology in schools and school districts. The only academic program in the country based on the National Educational Technology Standards for Administrators (NETS-A), the STLI is at the national forefront of technology preparation for K-12 school leaders.

The program is cohort-based and combines on-site classroom work with online courses during the regular school year. Definitely worth checking out if you are interested in expanding your tech leadership skills. As soon as I get some breathing room, I’ll post some nuggets from this week’s work.

Canonical Wiki list

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I continue to consider how wikis can be used with students and have been second guessing my decision to install Mediawiki, the software that runs the Wikipedia. Not that Mediawiki isn’t powerful software, it’s just that it may be a little too complex. Now that Moodle has a built-in wiki module I’m also thinking that using Moodle’s authentication, and thereby keeping the “bad guys” away from our educational wikis, would ease the concerns of many. In searching for alternative wiki engines, I discovered the so-called canonical list of wiki engines. I knew there were a lot of wiki engines to choose from, but I had no idea that there were that many.

GIS data sources

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I’ve continued reading up on GIS and its potential educational uses. I’ve called around to all of the cities that the Hopkins School District serves and even Hennepin County to ask about getting access to their GIS data. All of the people I talked to seemed intrigued that the idea of using GIS in schools. I suspect I’ll get something from them.

The other big discovery was the Minnesota DNR’s Data Deli, an great source of map data for Minnesota. I downloaded some maps and loaded them up in the free copy of ESRI’s ArcExplorer software that I picked up at NECC. Everything seemed to work well. Now I need to arrange an introductory session for our social studies teachers.

Teachers jazzed

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We had our first meeting with the group of teachers who will be participating in our 1:1 computing pilot project next year. I think I mentioned this before, but we’ll have about 550 students and 23 teachers with 24×7 access to Apple iBook laptops beginning in January 2005. The purpose of our meeting this week was to answer teachers’ questions about the project and, certainly most interesting to them, distribute their shiny, new 15″ Apple PowerBooks.

I had met nearly all of the teachers previosly, so I knew we had a good group. This meeting was one of the most exciting things I’ve done in the year I’ve been in Hopkins. The teachers came up with tons of great tech integration ideas right away, they asked great questions, and had such great attitudes that I’m sure this project is going to be a success.

I will use this space to keep everyone posted on some project developments.