el/ed/tech

Yesterday I was at the store and instead of seeing a traditional paper shredder I saw this instead…

Would this have caught your eye as well?

The other day my wife, son, and I traveled upstate to spend some time with our family. Along the way we listened to a couple TED talks. These talks are free to download via the TED website or you can subscribe to a feed through iTunes. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design and their annual conference brings together some of the most interesting speakers from around the world. These individuals range from famous politicians to scientists doing some amazing work. They are given 18 minutes to give the “talk of their lives.” Often I look for talks related to education or technology but somehow a talk on classical music slipped in.

We had finished listening to four other talks when I decided we should give the last one a listen.

We listened and we loved it.

The talk was given by Benjamin Zander and the most memorable part of the talk is when he speaks about “shiny eyes”. He relates his experiences as a conductor and his personal realization that he wanted to consistently “awaken possibilities in other people.” In order to assess how he was “awakening” these possibilities all he had to do was look at their eyes to see if they were “shining”.

“Who am I being if my players eyes are not shining?”

For parents, relatives, and teachers…

“Who am I being that my children’s eyes are not shining?”

As a parent and a teacher this caused me to pause and think about what I do daily to awaken possibilities in my son’s life and the lives of my students. Often we can get caught up in the daily grind leading to the simple things and glorious opportunities passing us by.

Take a listen to the talk and enjoy. We loved it and I hope you do too!

Pretty exciting news came my way via Kelly Dumont.

iTunes U, a wonderful free service full of rich content from universities and community colleges across the nation, is now spreading to K-12!

Kelly has a great post on his blog where he talks a little bit about the program.

“I believe this project will be somewhat of a game changer. Here K12 ed will have a central gathering place for resources, be they audio, video, text-based, etc.” - Kelly Dumont

In order to check out some of the schools and state programs who were part of the the launch you can find the K-12 link within iTunes. Once you have launched iTunes and the iTunes Store all you need to do is click on “iTunes U”

Then click on “K-12″…

After you have navigated your way through you can select one of the schools or organizations from the list. For right now the list is short but I am sure the list and interface will grow with time.

Here is a look at Michigan’s MILearning page…

While you are checking out the K-12 content you should definitely take some time to explore the university content. Neat stuff!

Tonight is my last night of class for a ten session graduate class at SUNY New Paltz which is part of the Classroom Technology Institute (CTI) summer classes. The title of the course is Google Applications for Teachers. I had a lot of fun taking this course! Here is a list of some of the different Google tools that we have explored.

GMail

Google Calendar

Google Documents

Google SketchUp

Picasa

Google Reader

Google Earth

Blogger

and iGoogle

Quite a bit of these web-based applications I am familiar with and use. Regardless of what I use I find there is always new things to learn about these types of tools. It is interesting hearing from other teachers how they look to use these tools in their classrooms.

One tool I had a lot of fun playing and working with was Google SketchUp. This application brings me back to my technical drawing classes back in high school!

Here is a quick snapshot I took from the project I worked on for the course. I decided to try my best at drafting up a model of the school I teach in.

On the left monitor is an aerial view of my school via Google Earth. On the right screen I tried my best to draw the different portions. It is amazing how powerful a free application such as this is. Kevin Jarrett informed me via Twitter that Google SketchUp Pro is free for educators. I look forward to going through the process of obtaining one of these free teacher licenses in order to see the type of features that are present in the Pro version.

Enough about me…

My question for teachers out there is…what Google tool do you use the most personally? Also, which is your favorite to use with your students?

I hope everyone is having a wonderful summer!

Found these free apps the other day when looking for presentation support software.

One is called Desktop Curtain which displays a blank desktop right in front of your cluttered desktop.

The other application is called Plainview. Plainview is a full screen web browser.

Both are free and both work great. I am the type of user who does not like anything on my desktop but I still leave folders and files there that I am working on. Sometimes I just turn on the Desktop Curtain in order to “forget” about what it is I probably should be working on!

I am evil…at least in the eyes of the music industry. For my evilness they have slapped my wrist.

1 year and 8 months ago I made a video containing short clips of my son’s first four months. I also added in 5 minutes of Lynryd Skynrd’s song “Simple Man” as a background track. I shared the video with family members and on a whim decided to add it to Youtube along with clips of my son’s first Halloween and first words. This is where I messed up. It is a mistake many make, and probably do not realize they are making.

I foolishly thought my little video would be seen only by my own family and the friends they shared the video with. I knew the risks. I knew online videos are open to everyone unless the user makes their videos private. But I decided to fight the law and see what would happen. (In reality, I was just naive, and did not feel there was a threat to my video).

Even after I started learning more about content online and copyright issues, I did not take the video down because I was curious to see if it would be noticed.

Almost two years later my video has performed as I predicted…

With 300+ views I can tell you that 90% were from my own mother showing the video to her friends. Regardless, this does not excuse my usage of protected works.

Today I received notification from Youtube that this video had been found to contain music belonging to Universal Music Group. Or at least, I assume “UMG” stands for Universal.

Here is a screenshot of the email that was sent to me…

As you can see my punishment is weak. Their claim allows them to include advertisements on my video page. At first I was relieved my little video could still stay up. This seemed very fair, until I visited my page and saw this…

I have since removed the video and hope to hear from others. Has this happened to you?

How can we as educators share an experience such as this with our students as they venture out and create digital projects?

It seems like it was forever ago when I last updated this blog! The end of the school year has been hectic but I plan on getting back into the swing of things soon.

For now I hope that everyone is having a wonderful end of the school year and keep checking back for new content!

Just received this email from Derek Baird from the Yahoo! Teachers team and I wanted to pass it along to my readers.

Hello Everyone!

We’ve been working hard integrating all your great “sugs” (and fixing bugs) from our summer workshops and getting Yahoo! For Teachers Beta ready to launch.

We are looking for more teachers to join our beta program. If you know an educator who is interested in joining us, have them shoot an email to: yteachersinvite@yahoo.com Feel free to share this information in a newsletter or in a blog post.

If you have any questions, or need help with Yahoo! For Teachers, please don’t hesitate to let us know!

Thanks!

Derek

If you have any questions about the program feel free to comment!

I have used tools such as Celestia and Stellarium before but this one truly looks like I can slide these two to the side. Excitement aside, we will just have to wait and see how it works once it is released and how it can be integrated into a learning environment.

When you visit the TEDTalks website there is a little button on the bottom for downloading the video as a Mp4. I have already popped it into iTunes so I can show some teachers at school today!

TED | Talks | Roy Gould: WorldWide Telescope

“Science educator Roy Gould gives an astonishing sneak preview of Microsoft’s new WorldWide Telescope — a technology that combines feds from satellites and telescopes all over the world and the heavens, and builds a comprehensive view of our universe. (Yes, it’s the technology that made Robert Scoble cry.)”

(Via TED Talks.)

So what do you think?

I saw this new plugin mentioned by Tim, so I decided to test it out from within my Wordpress account. The installation of the plugin went smooth and once I migrate everything over from Blogger to here I am looking forward to utilizing it! I really love the way it automatically places in the citation. At first I did not like how it only showed 5 pictures at a time, so within the options pane I found that you can increase the number of photos shown as well as change the selection to display the “most interesting” photos first.All the instructions for using the plugin can be found here.Wordpress + Flickr + Creative Commons = Awesome New Plugin for Bloggers

“Adding photos to your blog is one of the best ways to enhance your content and attract attention to your writings. The only problem is that finding quality photos to use can be difficult. Bloggers end up going with one of three options: stealing, buying, or using Creative Commons licensed photos. Now, that third option just got easier with the introduction of the Photo Dropper Wordpress plugin. This new plugin searches flickr for Creative Commons licensed photos for you to add to your Wordpress blog.There are millions of Creative Commons photos in flickr’s database, but finding the right one can take time. The new Photo Dropper plugin simplifies the process by adding a panel to the ‘Write Post’ screen that allows you to search flickr’s database for Creative Commons photos.After entering in your keyword and clicking ’search,’ the plugin will return photos from flickr matching your search terms. Underneath each photo are four links. Three links, ‘S’, ‘M’, and ‘L’, allow you to post that size photo into your blog. The fourth link will open the flickr page in a new window, so you can double-check the licensing requirements if necessary.The photo which is placed into your blog automatically has text appended underneath it that says ‘photo credit’ and links to the user who is licensing the photo. The small Creative Commons logo precedes the text as well.Photo Dropper also offers an option for commercial users. In the Options section, they can check the ‘commercial’ check box to exclude photos whose license contains a non-commercial limitation.You can download Photo Dropper for free from here.”(Via ReadWriteWeb.) Read the rest…