Wikis frustrate me. Back in ’91 when Tim Berners-Lee created the first web site, his focus was on an interactive medium. The web was meant to be a forum where everyone could be a publisher, everyone could contribute to the collective knowledge, and everyone could benefit from others’ contributions. It didn’t work out that way. The technical limitations to putting a web site online were … Continue reading Wet Paint

A subset of my tech team met today to work on the implementation of the Technology Academic Content Standards. These standards have been adopted by the Ohio Department of Education. While school districts are not technically required to use them, it is strongly recommended that we do so. In fact, the tool that school districts are required to use to develop our technology plans forces … Continue reading Have to Have to

We’re finally making some progress in the online learning environment. When I started teaching in 1993, I wanted to find a way to use the social, collaborative atmosphere of usenet in education. I was only interested in asynchronous communication — message boards — where people could contribute at different times. The advantages were easy to see. You could have longer discussions, and get into the … Continue reading Making Progress

I had the good fortune to attend a presentation by Mrs. Hricik’s first grade class at Woodland Elementary School last week. Her students have been working on their presentations for the last few weeks. Working individually or in pairs, they selected animals to study.  They used Google to find information about the animal, its habitat, diet, and other interesting facts. They also found pictures of … Continue reading Raising the Bar

I was accused of being too nice to Microsoft yesterday. Before I get too MS-friendly, I should point out that they also have a suite of tools available to help students become more productive. Microsoft Student is a suite of tools that includes a graphing calculator, photo organizer, search tools, a dictionary, and an encyclopedia. Their book summaries include "over one thousand in-depth guides [to] … Continue reading Fair and Balanced

I don’t often speak highly of Microsoft, but they do occasionally manage to do some neat things. A long time ago, they produced the Microsoft Office Classroom Tools. This pathetically publicized collection of templates and resources helped students and teachers use the Office 97 and 2000 tools for student and teacher centered activities. They’ve updated the products for Office XP and 2003 with Learning Essentials. … Continue reading Learning Essentials

Add this one to your list of primary source resources. The Collaborative Digitization Program is a project begun by the Colorado State Library that stives to achieve high quality digital access to cultural heritage collections. Their focus is on the American west. Partnering with museums and libraries throughout the west, the project highlights best practices for digitzing, archiving, indexing, and storing historical content. The collections … Continue reading More Primary Sources

I’ve been writing so much about podcasting that I decided that it should have its own category. I added it yesterday, and went back and updated all of the posts so they show up in the right places. Previously, I had lumped Podcasting into the Web 2.0 category. But it’s not really Web 2.0. Will Richardson was talking on Ed Tech Talk last week about … Continue reading Podcasting is Old School

We’re going to try to claim this site on Technorati one more time. Does anyone else have this many problems with it? Technorati Profile Continue reading One More Time

So far today, our mail server has tagged about 1950 email messages as spam. It’s still early. In a typical day, we see about 4500 spam messages. That’s about 56% of our total email volume. Every week, I field questions about spam. What can we do? How do we get on these lists? Don’t we have a filter that takes care of this stuff? The … Continue reading Spam Works

Looking for an energy-efficient vehicle? The hybrids may not be the best bet. With gas prices soaring at $3 per gallon and higher, many people are turning to hybrid vehicles to help with the energy crunch. If we can all do our part to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil…. CNY Marketing Research, a quirky research company in the northwest, undertook a long range "Dust … Continue reading Dust to Dust: Hybrids Aren't So Hot

Online maps are a dime a dozen. You can go to Mapquest or Google Maps or Yahoo Maps and get pretty good maps of most of the United States. Some of them have driving directions. Some have satellite photos. The interfaces are all intuitive and easy. If that’s not good enough, you can get Google Earth and do maps on steroids. There’s no reason to … Continue reading Welcome to Wherever You Are