Sep
27
2007
K-12 Online Conference!
“The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from all educators from around the world who are interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This is a FREE conference run by volunteers and open to everyone, no registration is required. The conference theme is “Playing with Boundaries”. The 2007 conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 8, 2007. The following two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations.”1
What is Web 2.0 and how does it relate to education? Social networking, blogging, podcasting, wikis — sound familiar? Read the following links where O’Reilly discusses the origin, Wikipedia expounds on its meaning, and finally Bryan Alexander (in pdf form) discusses its impact on education.
1 http://k12onlineconference.org/
Sep
20
2007
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Technology is absolutely mind-boggling! How are we to keep up with what is happening? Everything technology-related is occurring at warp speed! Postings of video, creation of Web pages, what we do daily and how we do it is growing exponentially! We need to get on the bandwagon quickly,as many of our students are already light years ahead of us. |
| Yesterday, I was able to use my cell phone, a Palm Treo 700p, as a modem for my laptop (called tethering) to work in the car and at MCV/VCU Medical Center. I was able to check my email, work on my lessons for PBS, remote into my computer at school, chat wicth my father, check in with my VBCPS friends and chat on Live Messenger, etc., etc., etc… The computer charged the smartphone, so its battery was not an issue; the computer battery lasted for several hours, which was sufficient for me yesterday — I see the purchase of a second battery in my future. The setup process was minimal — download a program, attach the modem, configure it following simple step-by-step directions, and voila! — it worked! |
Sep
14
2007
Your Internet favorites, bookmarks, links (or whatever you call them) can become unmanageable and rarely are the same at home, at school or at work. Consider using one of the many sites on the Internet to store and organize your bookmarks for free. I am currently using the portaportal site; you may access one of my bookmark sites to see what it looks like and how it works by typing “vbcacrs” (without the quotes) into the Guest box on the right side of the portaportal Web page. One nice feature offered is the ability to upload your current bookmarks, which organizes them on the portaportal site the same way you have them organized at home or work. Although it takes more than one click to add to your portaportal site, it is always available whenever and wherever you are on the Internet.
There are other sites such as mybookmarks and del.icio.us, some of which are more user friendly than others. iGoogle offers a place to save bookmarks, but it encourages the use of the Google toolbar (we do not add toolbars to our school computers).
Sep
03
2007
Watching No Reservations, as Anthony Bourdain explored the food and culture of Peru, brought to mind the endless possibilities afforded by the new media lab. Our alternative students may never travel out of the Hampton Roads area, but a virtual field trip to almost anywhere in the world can expose them to the history, the geography, the climate, the arts, the culture, the food and the people they may never see.
All humans must eat to survive; what we eat depends upon where we live. One might begin a discussion on any famous person from Pythagoras to Nas with the quote by Claude Fischler “If you are what you eat and you don’t know what you’re eating, do you know who you are?” or James Russell Lowell’s “The wise man travels to discover himself.”
