Monthly Archives: December 2005

Podcasting is hot, hot, hot

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Everyone’s posting about “podcast” being selected as the Word of the Year for 2005 by the New Oxford American Dictionary. (This follows “blog” which was selected as the 2004 word of the year by Merriam-Webster Online.)

Podcasting was easily the hottest topic at the recent TIES Conference. My session, Podcasting 101, had nearly 300 attendees, and every other podcast-related session was full too. (It was really cool to present in one of the large rooms on a huge screen.) As I said in my talk, I haven’t seen anything catch the imagination of teachers and students like podcasting has in the last year.

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2nd VPN experiment

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I posted recently about using HotSpotVPN to secure my wireless Internet connection while traveling. Once I had the VPN configured I started up Ethernal to see if my traffic really was encrypted. I was disappointed to find that some of my network traffic, including my .Mac email password, was still visible. I’m not sure if I misconfigured something, but clearly that’s not going to do the job.

I did some more digging and signed up for a month-long trial with PublicVPN. This service differs significantly from HotSpotVPN in that it utilizes standard VPN protocols instead of tunneling over SSL. As a result, access to the PublicVPN service may be blocked by hotel or coffee shop firewalls just when you need it most. (SSL VPNs are almost never blocked because doing so would prevent Web surfers from using secure sites for shopping, email, banking, etc.) PublicVPN works flawlessly with OS X and Windows using the built-in VPN clients. I did some more packet sniffing and all passwords appear to be encrypted. Another plus is that the PublicVPN service is cheaper at $5.95/month or $59.95/year.

OS X Internet Connect screenshot

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Michael Searson: Pre-service teacher education

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Dr. Michael Searson is the Dean of the College of Education at Kean University in Union, NJ. We met last July in San Jose, CA at the ADE Summer Institute and I knew right away that Mike would be a thought-provoking podcast guest.

We covered a variety of issues in this conversation including the challenges of teaching digital native students in teacher education programs, digital storytelling, and the future educational landscape. I’ll bet Mike would be willing to interact with anyone who posts a comment, so don’t hesitate to put in your $0.02.

Download: STP-MichaelSearson (24.6 MB, 45:54)

podcast, kean, teacher education

TIES: Teaching the Five Minute Film

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The presenter for this session at the TIES Conference is James McLellan from Oak Park High School in Winnipeg. I attended a session that James presented a couple years ago and thought I would come to this one to see what’s new. Plus, with our 1-to-1 initiative I’m getting a lot more interest from teachers who want to get their students making short films.

James’s recommendations for teaching video content:

  • Classes should be balanced with theory and practice
  • Discovery learning should not be the major vehicle for receiving new information
  • Avoid shooting during school hours if possible. Class time is for teaching or editing.
  • Give lead time for students to shoot outside of class. Make sure students are planning for due dates and build in adequate time.
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ITIL: An enterprise planning framework

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I was listening to an IT Conversations podcast of Michael Disabato’s talk from the Burton Group Catalyst Conference recently and discovered a fantastic resource. ITIL is the IT Infrastructural Library and the ITIL Website describes it as:

ITIL (the IT Infrastructure Library) is essentially a series of documents that are used to aid the implementation of a framework for IT Service Management. This customisable framework defines how Service Management is applied within an organisation.

It’s clear that schools don’t operate their IT systems like businesses, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Schools and businesses have different outcomes in mind. But at the same time I recognize that schools have a lot to learn from large enterprises who have learned an enormous amount about how to build and maintain complex technology systems. The ITIL Toolkit is a comprehensive set of planning guides that are intended to help enterprises establish best practices. The Toolkit costs $199 and can be purchased from the Web site. Given what I heard in the podcast and what I’ve seen of the Toolkit online, I think that would be $199 well spent to make some significant improvements in a school’s IT department.

Latest ETC2C

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Steve Burt and I sat down for a chat last month at the NSBA conference in Denver. We discussed the conference and got off on a smartboard tangent for a while. You can find this episode of Ed Tech Coast to Coast at edtechcoasttocoast.com. I’m not going to publish them anymore on this blog, so if you want to hear our rantings and ravings I would encourage you to subscribe to the feed. [Subscription links: iTunes, RSS]

The next episode is already “in the can” so there should be more ETC2C on the way soon.

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