I sat down for a chat with David Baugh in the wee hours of Thursday morning. We talked about his digital video Web site, DV in Education, and how he’s using Moodle in the schools he works with. Enjoy.
Download: STP-DavidBaugh (5.4 MB, 11:41)
If you’re using Flickr and iPhoto, you need Fraser Speirs’s Flickr Export Plugin for iPhoto. It makes uploading photos from iPhoto to Flickr, tagging them, and adding descriptions as easy as it could possibly be.
I do workshops about blogging pretty frequently and I always have the participants create their own blogs. I used to encourage people to use Blogger, but there are some limitations to Blogger that quickly become a pain in the rear. Among them are the difficulties with including photos and other media, limited support for tagging posts with Technorati-compatible tags, lack of categories for posts, and no trackback. There are others and most of these aren’t apparent right away, but if you get serious about blogging you’ll run into them before long.
So I suggest you skip Blogger all together and get a free account with a more robust blogging system. There are two great options: James Farmer’s IncSub and Alan November’s November Learning site. Both are free for educators and provide a much more robust environment that will grow with you as you get more adventurous with your blogging.
The keynote for Tuesday’s session at the Summer Institute was Alan November. This was my first opportunity to hear him, and I was especially interested since so many others had found him thought provoking and inspiring.
After talking a bit about Wikipedia, Flickr, blogs, RSS, and Creative Commons, he turned to the meat of his talk and gave us four challenges under the topic “Fearless learners and courageous leaders.”
Alan really challenged the ADEs in the room to push the envelope. I overheard more than a couple attendees talking about whether they were inspired or mad following the session. My sense is that Alan likes to push buttons, and I enjoy that kind of talk. I wish I had more time right now to reflect a bit and post more about the talk, but it’s the middle of one of our sessions and I need to start paying attention now.
We had a brief presentation by Neeru Paharia from the Creative Commons organization tonight. She had a video explaining the history of Creative Commons and went on to talk about some specific Web resources to help users find Creative Commons-licensed content. Her suggestions:
She also highlighted two Creative Commons tools. The first, ccPublisher, helps users tag content with the proper Creative Commons license and then uploads the content to the Internet Archive. The second, ccMixter, is a tool to build a music sharing site that can be linked to other ccMixter sites on the Internet. She talked about the potential for building a ccMixter for teacher lesson plans.
I haven’t mentioned this yet in my musing about developing our curriculum sharing tool, but I plan to lobby our district administration to license all of the curriculum materials with a Creative Commons license by default. Shouldn’t sharing be the default anyway?
Tim points to a post at O’Reilly Radar that has a nice summary of about 15 Google Maps hacks. I predict an explosion of these types of hacks now that Google has released an official API. (I’m really sticking my neck out on that one!) 
More importantly, we need to have some tools to make it easier to create annotated maps. I want to make maps with pushpins stuck in points of local historical significance. I want to have students create maps to accompany the perennial “what I did on my summer vacation” essays. I want to use Google Maps to show me where I can find free wi-fi in my city. And I don’t want to have to edit a raw XML file to do it!
This caught me by surprise… We spent the first big block of time here at the ADE Summer Institute with “The Improv Lady” Rebecca Stockley learning some improvisation games and techniques. Among other clients, Rebecca works with Pixar animators to help them develop their stories and characters. She’s been a fixture at the ADE events for a couple years now helping the participants learn about the importance of listening carefully, going with the flow, and thinking creatively. In retrospect, it’s right up Apple’s alley.
There was one direct curriculum example in there. (Carlyn, this one’s for you.) Rebecca presented “The Story Spine,” an improv game in which each participant takes turns completing a sentence of the “spine” and creates the basis for a complete story in the process. If you teach the writing process then try having your students pair up and complete these sentences:
You don’t have to look too hard to see that these questions outline the development, conflict, and resolution of a story. It would be fun to have students work on these questions in improv style, out loud and anything goes. For more serious work teachers could create Inspiration templates that the students would complete as they work out a more complete narrative.
If you’re reading this you’ll know that I have landed safely in San Jose, CA for a week of intense training at the Apple Distinguished Educator Summer Institute. I’m not quite sure what to expect actually, but I’m confident that it will be top-knotch. Ever since I was selected as an Apple Distinguished Educator this spring I have been consistently impressed with the quality of the ADE community. I’m looking forward to geeking out with some real tech wizards, and, of course, I’ll be blogging and podcasting as much as I can.