EdTech Avenue

Great article from THE Journal online – free publication for educators!
http://thejournal.com/articles/2010/01/20/14-technologies-educators-should-watch-in-2010.aspx

FANTASTIC short blogposting about skills vs tools – FANTASTIC graphic there, too!
http://www.techlearning.com/blogs/26916

notes from a short workshop earlier this week. Some tools I did not know about, but will be utilizing some. Anyone out there using interactive whiteboards? If so, what do you recommend for a school if they have opportunity to purchase one. Should it go to an empty room and have teachers come to it, go in a lucky teacher room, or lastly, the computer lab?

this workshop: demonstrate technology to aid and encourage collaboration with colleagues and students, and to try out the learner response systems and other solutions-oriented interactive white board products from FirstTech. South Central Service Cooperative http://www.mnscsc.org/ November 16, 2009
Presenters:

Mary Hillmann, mhillmann@mnscsc.org

Pat Branstad, pbranstad@mnscsc.org

&

FirstTech- http://www.firsttech.com/ – Promethean whiteboard, demo- John Hyde

What: Doodle

Where: http://www.doodle.com/

Why: online scheduling (meetings), make choices

Other: only the creator needs to have a doodle acct. Easy to set up.

What: eFolio

Where: http://www.efoliominnesota.com/

Why: free

Other: changing to version 2.

What: Google Docs

Where: www.google.com

Why: create, edit, share online. FREE

Other; Anyplace anywhere. Great help

What: WikiSpaces

Where: www.wikispaces.com

Why: communicate, collaborate

Other: great example http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/

What: social bookmarking

Where: http://delicious.com/

Why: cause you can’t always remember your bookmarks, or take them with you.

Other: I don’t utilize this feature to its advantage – still have way too many bookmarks.

What: Flickr

Where: www.flickr.com/

Why: online sharing of photos.

Other:

What: Screencast-o-matic

Where: http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/

Why: FREE, small video file size

Other: this is a GREAT, FREE screen capture tool. When you need to make a QUICK tutorial. No user acct needed.

What: Jing

Where: http://www.jingproject.com/

Why: screen capture/video, free

Other: need user acct. Have not explored this yet.

What: Thinkfinity

Where: http://www.thinkfinity.org/

Why: lesson plans, educational resources

Other:

What: Children’s Digital Library

Where: http://en.childrenslibrary.org/

Why: free online access to digital library of outstanding children’s book from around the world; promote toerance and understanding of cultural differences, provide all children with access to literature in their mother tongue.

Other: free

What: Wordle

Where: http://www.wordle.net/

Why: visually display what you are REALLY saying.

Other: your words take shape. Use with an interactive whiteboard – such as kindergarteners being able to find words from their word wall and move.

What: Blabberize

Where: http://blabberize.com/

Why:

Other: ok, don’t understand purpose of this one…even though have seen before….

They didn’t go to kindergarten, but with some convincing, these two platforms have finally learned sharing nicely the space on my external hard drive.

I have this huge drive that would easily fit a backup for both my PC and Mac, but it took some time and research (and a little luck perhaps), to get it to do what I want.  I knew I could format a FAT32 partition to be read by my PC, but my backup file using XP Backup would be much larger than that.  My plan was to create multiple backup jobs (as undesirable as that was).  I created two partitions using my Mac’s Disk Utility – one FAT32 for my PC backup, and one MacOS partition for Time Machine.  I had it working that way but decided I wasn’t satisfied.

Then I thought about using SwissKnife made by CompuApps.  It’s a free partition and formatting software for Windows.  I used a couple months ago to format a hard drive to FAT32 to use with Symantec Ghost for work.  When I opened the drive on SwissKnife, it showed the FAT32 partition, but it showed the rest as free space.  When I tried deleting the FAT32 partition with the intent to replace it with a NTFS partition, it made it all free space and in essence made my MacOS partition magically disappear into the crowd.  Back to square one.

My next thought was to do the initial formatting on my PC.  I used SwissKnife to format an NTFS partition for my PC, then also created a FAT32 partition for my Mac.  Then I connected the drive to my Mac to see if it found the drive, which it did… good… keep going…  I used Disk Utility to then erase the FAT32 partition and create a MacOS partition instead.  So far so good!  I have connected back to my PC, and the NTFS partition is still intact.  I was able to perform an XP backup onto it, creating a file MUCH larger than the FAT32 file size limit.  And it is currently connected to my Mac running a Time Machine backup.

Perhaps there may have been an easier way to achieve this?  But regardless, I win!

Wisconsin  http://dpi.wi.gov/standards/pdf/infotech.pdf

Massachusetts  http://www.doe.mass.edu/edtech/standards/itstand.pdf

Thanks to the TIES conference my questions about eDiscovery have been cleared. If you have any info to add please comment.

What I found out: The eDiscovery laws were passed by the Supreme Court of the US in December 2006. This law states that all school districts need to have an archive of email and instant message (IM) conversations.  They left how long this information needs to be archived to the states. Minnesota requires email (with attachments) and IM conversations be kept for 3 years.To read about relevant information for eDiscovery laws go to: ediscoverylaw.com. To see a full PDF file on Minnesota’s laws go to Click Here.

Private Schools: You may be asking, we’re a private school do we still have to comply? Private schools were specifically addressed in the group discussion. It was stated that since private school teachers are still public officials the private school system would need to comply.

What to do? As a group there were a few ideas on what to do being discussed.
- The first option was to sit and wait. There were a few schools that are going to wait and see what happens to another school in an eDiscovery case. At this time there is little enforcement of the eDiscovery law. On top of that court cases involving the eDiscovery law are not wide spread.  They would then implement a solution based on a court ruling. This may not work for you if you’re the first eDiscovery case in Minnesota.
- The second option was to purchase an in-house message archiver. Message archivers can be purchased from most resellers (CDWG and Cadan Computers carry them). A Barracuda Archiver with 1 year of maintenance and updates will run you about $6,000. There are also software archivers that reside on your mail server. These options include the GFI mail archiver. The GFI mail archiver sells for about $2,000 and has a reoccurring annual maintenance fee.
- The final option was to use an online service to archive messages. Gaggle.net will archive messages off of many email systems (including Exchange server and gmail) for around $7 per email box. This covers the collection of new data and keeping it for 1 year. To keep emails for more than 1 year you will need to pay an extra $2 per box. As you can see Gaggle.net would be $7 for the 1st year, $9 for the 2nd, $11 for the 3rd year per email address. Rumor has it that gmail has an option to archive in it’s apps for education but I am not officially aware of anything.

An added bonus? This burden of having to archive emails may have an added bonus for it. You can look at it as having an added, real-time email backup system. If your email server crashes chances are good that you will have even your most recent emails saved in an archiver (with the exception of GFI’s archiver since it resides on the mail server). You can restore the lost email using your email archiver.

This 1/2 day training was VERY helpful to me. The 3 hours went past in 10 Minutes. If you ever get a chance to take her class DO IT!

http://anicholson.edublogs.org/ties-workshop/

If anyone is looking for a good spelling website check out spellingcity.com. Teachers who register for a free account at this website can pre-type and save word lists for their students. You can also access other word lists such as Christmas vocabulary etc. If you prefer students can type in their own word lists to use for a single session. The website is divided into 3 parts: learning the word, testing, and play games. The teachers at my school have also used this website to teach students vocabulary for subjects such as social studies and science. We have used it with students from grade one on up. The real hook is that the kids love doing it and don’t realize how much they are learning!