Friday, July 15th, 2005
The first group at the Summer Institute is talking about ways to do online collaboration. Has anyone really tried this in the wild? Our tech department at work has used a wiki with great success for online collaboration. (We're using MediaWiki, the engine behind Wikipedia.) It's not real-time, but we've ...
Posted in School Communications, Wikis | Comments Off
Wednesday, July 13th, 2005
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 ...
Posted in Emerging Technologies | 1 Comment »
Monday, June 20th, 2005
I'll be at the TIES Technology Leadership Camp tomorrow presenting a full-day session called "Introducing the Read-Write Web: Blogging, Wikis and RSS." We're going to explore Bloglines, Furl, del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, PubSub, Blogger.com, Wikipedia, Instiki, podcasting, and who knows what else. (Do you think we'll get to half of it?)
Posted in Blogging, Conferences, Wikis | Comments Off
Tuesday, June 7th, 2005
I just finished a session called "Geocaching in Your Classroom" by Monte Gaukler, a Middle School Curriculum Technology Partner from Grand Forks. The group had a great time talking about how geocaching could find uses in a variety of subjects across a K-12 school district. Need to know a bit ...
Posted in Conferences, Curriculum Resources | Comments Off
Friday, May 20th, 2005
Do you need a content management system (CMS) for your school or district Web site? Absolutely. In a world where Plone, Drupal, Mambo, and many other free and open source solutions exist, you would need to convince me that you shouldn't use a CMS. It's clear to me that individually ...
Posted in IT Infrastructure, Web technology | 7 Comments »
Monday, May 9th, 2005
It's impossible to keep up with the acronyms that appear on the Web these days. One of the latest to show up on my radar screen is AJAX which stands for "Asynchronous Javascript and XML." In a nutshell, AJAX describes a technique for building web applications that don't necessarily act ...
Posted in Emerging Technologies | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, May 4th, 2005
I have now emerged from the geek cave. Actually, my Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) installation went smoothly and I've been chugging along quite successfully since I finished the install last Saturday. There are a ton of new features, but my favorite so far is Spotlight, Apple's system search tool. It's ...
Posted in Tips and Tricks | Comments Off
Monday, April 25th, 2005
The success of Frank Miller's Sin City in theaters has brought the comic book genre into the spotlight. As a former Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and Daredevil fan I was quite intrigued when I heard about Comic Life on the MAKE:DIYcast podcast this morning. Comic Life is a Mac OS X ...
Posted in One-to-one Computing, Tips and Tricks | 3 Comments »
Sunday, April 17th, 2005
I installed Moodle on a spare server last June as an experiment. Since my district was an online learning pioneer in Minnesota and continues to work in that area as part of the Northern Star Online collaborative, it seemed logical to see if some of our teachers who have gained ...
Posted in Curriculum Resources, Online learning | 5 Comments »
Friday, March 18th, 2005
I got the word on Wednesday that I've been selected as an Apple Distinguished Educator for 2005. I'll be heading out to Apple HQ in Cupertino in July for a week of professional development and will probably have opportunities to represent Apple at a few conferences here and there. I ...
Posted in General | 2 Comments »
Thursday, March 3rd, 2005
Saw this today on Jon Udell's weblog. It seems that with enough knowledge of javascripting, Flash, and access to a handheld GPS unit, it's possible to create semi-animated walking or driving tour using the new Google Maps service. Jon, inspired by Matt's work, has created a five-minute guided tour of ...
Posted in Curriculum Resources, Emerging Technologies, Web technology | Comments Off
Thursday, March 3rd, 2005
We're starting to get some traction with wikis in our district. One of our social studies teachers is using Moodle's wiki module in her 7th grade geography class for a unit on Asia. She created a skeleton outline in the wiki, providing a bulleted list of topics like landforms, climate, ...
Posted in Wikis | 2 Comments »
