I’ve arrived in St. Charles, IL for this year’s IL-TCE conference. I’m presenting a day-long podcasting workshop tomorrow and a spotlight session about Web 2.0 on Thursday and Friday. I’ll also be doing some recording for the new Conference Connections podcast channel I’ve been working on. Come say hello if you’re at the conference.
Monthly Archives: February 2007
Great ideas in the Google Earth Sightseer
I don’t exactly know how I got on the mailing list, but I’ve been receiving the Google Earth Sightseer in my email inbox. Make sure you subscribe if you’re using Google Earth in your classroom or would like some great ideas about how to get started. The February 2007 issue alone has articles about new Google Earth search capabilities, studying human rights issues with maps, and satellite photography. Most of the articles include links to KML files that will launch in Google Earth to display the relative points of interest. The new Google Earth search is particularly interesting. From the newsletter:
Search is at the heart of everything we do here at Google. That’s why we’re excited to announce a new search innovation that’s available today in Google Earth. Now you can now search through all of the world’s Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files, making the millions of Google Earth KML files on the Web instantly accessible for geobrowsing and exploration.
So if your students are creating KML files, you can post them on your district Web site and they will become searchable for all the world to see. It’s another great way to share and collaborate.
My district is hiring
I’ve never done a post like this before, but I figured it’s another way to get the word out.
I’m looking for a Service Desk Manager to fill out my staff at the district office. I’ve posted the details on Craigslist, but you can also find it and apply on the school district site here. If you’re in the central Minnesota/Twin Cities area (or would like to be), please have a look and consider applying.
This is what scares Bill
Google launched another salvo against Microsoft last Thursday when it announced Google Apps Premier Edition, a subscription service that offers enterprise support for Google’s email, chat, word processing, spreadsheet, and web page creation tools. Wired has a short article that describes some of the pros and cons of the Google Apps package. Everyone knew this was coming, and the fact that Google has signed up some huge corporations gives them a little more credibility right off the bat.
So is this a good deal for a school district? There would have to be a significant discount over the current $50/user/year cost. I pay about $35 for a copy of Microsoft Office currently and that doesn’t expire after 12 months. I love the collaborative features of Google Docs, and I think it would meet the needs of our staff and students 99% of the time.
Other concerns:
- We have to upgrade our district’s bandwidth anyway, but we would need a lot more to support extensive use of Google Apps. That would add even more to the cost.
- Would it be legal to store confidential information about students on Google’s servers?
- We’d need something to replace PowerPoint for teacher and student presentations. It wouldn’t break my heart to give up PowerPoint though.
- I’m not sure where I’d start trying to convince teachers that changing to a web-based office suite is a good idea.
I’ll be keeping my eyes open for news of educational pricing from Google.
Update: Within minutes of posting this I found a reference to Google Apps Education Edition. You can remove ads from Gmail for students, and they claim to support single sign-on. I’ll sign up and report back with a review.
Update again: It looks like the Education Edition is limited to post-secondary institutions. I tried to sign up and found that they require a .edu domain name.
Jimbo on Wikipedia reliability
Jimmy Wales joined Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur on net@nite recently. It was a pretty standard conversation about Wikipedia that wouldn’t surprise anyone who frequents the site. There were a couple quotes worth noting, however. I’ll keep these handy when I do presentations that mention Wikipedia and the inevitable question about reliability gets asked.
Amber asked how Jimmy would respond to people who say that Wikipedia can’t be trusted (at 31:41 of the recording). He replied:
People do need to approach Wikipedia with some understanding of where it comes from and how to use it. Certainly if you’re a regular user of Wikipedia and you’ve tested it against your other knowledge and against other sources, most people will report it’s actually really pretty good overall. At the same time because it is live editing and anything can be changed at any time you have to be a little cautious. If you read something a little crazy or suspicious you should always check it out. And there are a lot of techniques as an advanced user. You can look in the history. You can look at the discussion page to see if some point has been debated. Check the references at the bottom. You can always tag something. If it sounds suspicious to you, tag it with a tag that says this fact needs a cite or something.
One of Leo’s interns who happens to be a sophomore in high school asked how Jimmy would recommend convincing schools to accept Wikipedia as a trusted source (at 53:02 of the recording). Jimmy’s advice:
Be careful how you use Wikipedia. It really isn’t a trusted source. It really is edited real-time and it could be full of mistakes. That really isn’t the right role for an encyclopedia in the educational process. I think it basically should be fine in schools, it should be acceptable, to add a footnote saying I did a lot of my preliminary research in Wikipedia just to acknowledge where you got a lot of knowledge. But in terms of citing specific facts, you really should go to the sources and look it up there. Because that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. The encyclopedia is supposed to give you the broad overview not be a primary research tool.
This is exactly the advice I give when asked. Perhaps having the quote right from the horse’s mouth will be useful.
Web 2.0 video
I’m giving an informal talk about Skype and Web 2.0 technologies at TIES for the Key Instructional Contacts group. This video by Prof. Michael Wesch from Kansas State University gives a pretty nice overview of the concept.
WordPress upgrade
It was long overdue. I’d been using the very old WP 1.5.x series forever and I finally took the morning on Saturday to upgrade my blog to the shiny new 2.1 series. Wow, lots of cool new stuff here.
I love the use of AJAX in the admin interface, particularly the drag and drop way to arrange WordPress “widgets” in the sidebar. I’ve been playing with different themes and haven’t settled on one I really like yet. The clock sure seems to move quickly while one is searching for and testing new blog themes!