The Worldbridges community is planning a an Equinox Webcastathon this weekend (September 21-23) to give webcast academy participants the opportunity to hone their skills. I’ll answer your questions now. What is “the Worldbridges community?” Worldbridges is a collection of communities that use new media tools to help people connect, learn, and collaborate. Let’s say you have a group of people who are all interested in … Continue reading Equinox Webcastathon
I know. We have to prepare our students for a future we can’t even imagine. They’re going to be doing jobs that don’t exist yet using technologies that haven’t been invented in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems. I’ve heard this from Karl Fisch and Ian Jukes and a bunch of people who stole it from them. Our students have to … Continue reading Defining 21st Century Skills
In an online discussion in July, we were talking about Moodle hosting. I commented that self-hosting a Moodle server is fairly easy for most school districts, but that you do need someone on staff who has a pretty good understanding of what’s going on. Others in the discussion felt that a hosted solution would be better, because the teachers could focus on the coursework and … Continue reading Mondays
Here it is: View Larger Map Continue reading Test of Google Map Embed
I’ve tried many times to switch to Linux for my primary desktop operating system. I’ve tried Red Hat, Fedora, Mandrake, White Box, CentOS, Ubuntu, Edubuntu, you name it. I always get stuck in the same places. There’s a device driver I can’t get. Or there’s a software application I have to run that won’t work. Or the user interface is just a little to clunky. … Continue reading Virtual Desktops
I was talking with our high school media specialist this morning about anti-plagiarism tools. We’ve been subscribing to Turnitin.Com for the last few years, but we really haven’t used it enough to justify the expense. Based on last year’s use statistics, it looks like we paid about $7.50 per paper to have it checked for plagiarism. I remembered an EdTechWeekly episode from last winter where … Continue reading Combatting Plagiarism
When I was in high school, we spent a lot of time on the “correct” format for citing sources in research papers. We had to learn where to put commas and periods and parentheses, the order in which things like author, title, publication date, and page numbers went, and when to use underlining and quotation marks. My English teacher was a stickler for formatting, and … Continue reading OttoBib
This picture should automatically be resized. Continue reading Image Scaler Test
Fifty-eight people registered for my blog yesterday. You don’t have to register to read the blog, but you do have to have an account in order to post comments. Mostly, I do that to keep people from anonymously posting inappropriate material. It also helps to keep the comment spam to a minimum. Considering that I haven’t had 58 people register for my blog ever, yesterday’s … Continue reading Welcome, Students
It’s getting harder and harder to use the web in schools, and we’re getitng close to a breaking point. Friday afternoon, a teacher came in to my office. “Who do I need to yell at? The principal? Will that work? Should I call the superintendent?” She’s generally pretty easy-going, and it took a little while to figure out what she was talking about. It turns … Continue reading Web Filter Band-Aids
The Cleveland Public Schools started school last week. New this year are four new single-gender schools: two for girls, and two for boys. All four schools serve grades K-2. The district is promoting the new schools as a way to “help students build confidence, try new things and develop a sense of belonging. ” WKSU’s Kevin Niedermier reported on the new schools on Thursday. They’re … Continue reading Separate but Equal
Taste of Tech 