Nov
22
2009
Twittering, podcasting, blogging, posting, reading, researching, keeping up with the news and sports, finding and communicating with friends, making new friends, buying and selling, comparing, writing, mashing, googling, binging, banking, investing, learning, sharing…. While reading my tweets today, I was reminded how much is available to us through technology. Take a few minutes to view a few of these links:
Nov
08
2009
Project Gutenberg is an Internet site that allows you without cost to read online or download (to your computer, iPod, Kindle or other device) over 30,000 ebooks. The books are ones whose copyrights have expired. There are other sites listed here http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Partners,_Affiliates_and_Resources and libraries like one of the oldest at the University of Virginia that also offer this resource.
How long as it been since you have read Goethe’s Faust or another classic? There is no need to leave the comfort of your home; just visit one of the sites to read it online or download it.
Jun
14
2009
As a parent and an educator, I am outraged at the lack of common sense exhibited by the Virginia Department of Education in its refusal to grant a waiver to the SOL requirements to Ms. Lauren Cootes at Frank W. Cox High School in Virginia Beach. Please read the following article if you are unaware of the situation involving her illness and inability to take an SOL test. “Give the girl her diploma.” Does anyone at VDOE have any common sense? Is there no compassion in Richmond? What in the world is wrong with educated people in power that they have no ability to use common sense in an exceptional situation?
Congratulations to Kerry Dougherty of the Virginian-Pilot for shedding light on this travesty. SOL standards have been established to ensure that our graduating seniors have a minimum amount of knowledge as they leave our high schools; certainly this is not the case here. I have asked the governor to please “use [his] influence to overturn the decision made by some idiot in the Virginia Department of Education. Failure to graduate Lauren Cootes from Frank W. Cox High School would be a mockery of what we in education expect of our students.”
Mar
14
2009
In my last post, I referenced SoftChalk, a very simple program for creating interactive Web pages. This week, the marketing fashion teacher introduced it to her students, distributed headphones for watching three short introductory videos, and provided them with guidelines for a marketing project using SoftChalk. The students were engaged instantaneously; by the end of the first 90-minute block, one student had almost completed his multi-page assignment using many of the tools offered by SoftChalk, and the others were well on their way to producing a finished product — a testimony to the simplicity of the software tool and to the readiness of students to use technology. Our marketing teacher and her students have quickly become the in-house experts for this software and are ready to help others.
VBCPS has a site license for SoftChalk, and our teachers may install it on a home computer (PC or Mac) obtaining the activations code from the Intranet (under Department of Technology, Instructional Resources, and SoftChalk); for everyone else, there is a 30-day free trial. Engage your students using SoftChalk; it is easy to learn, especially if you take a few minutes to watch three short videos on the help menu.
Jan
18
2009
Reading Richard Byrne’s blog Free Technology for Teachers, I am reminded of how fortunate I am to work in a school district that supports and encourages the use of technology by providing great resources. In a school district with more than 70,000 students, the challenge to maintain and keep the technology resources current is daunting. As Microsoft prepares to introduce a new operating system, our school district is testing Vista with our current hardware and software and preparing to migrate to Vista and Microsoft Office 2007, while some of our students are already using Office 2008 at home. In addition to the paid resources provided by the district, Richard Byrne’s blog provides a great source of free information for teachers; one recent article will help you sort through the information available online and help you to avoid wasting time, a precious commodity for educators.
When you find a site on the Internet that you would like to revisit, you have several options available to you, one of which is to bookmark the page in your Web browser. These bookmarks can become almost unmanageable, even though there is an organization function; and bookmarks on one computer are not available on another, unless you export them from one to import to another. Another option is to keep your bookmarks online at sites such as portaportal, pageflakes, or delicious; you can share your bookmarks with others as I have at portaportal. These bookmarks are available only when you are online unless you download them to your computer, which is only a concern to those who may have links to internal sites on their networks.
Finally, the point of this posting – RSS communicates information that you select to you! Instead of you searching through old bookmarks to try to find updated topics or sites of interest, RSS provides them for you to review and read. RSS – What is it? was posted by Richard Byrne to provide a guide to RSS. You will see how easy it is to use, and perhaps you will try it by using the RSS feed on this site to subscribe to my newsletter.
We all get busy and may forget to read the feeds subscribed through RSS, but then at your leisure you can go back and read what you have missed. Google Reader and Outlook are the venues I have chosen to read my feeds, but there are a host of others. Richard Byrne has included a video about RSS on his site along with applications for education. Visiting this link is well worth your time; and for more information, Google has published a simple, straightforward explanation of feeds and RSS.
