I was playing with Notebook LM a few weeks ago. This is an AI tool, developed by Google, that is supposed to help people interact with documents and resources. You can give it a bunch of content, and then summarize that content and ask questions about it. It has a cool feature that creates AI-generated audio overviews in a conversational, podcast-like format. So I fed … Continue reading What’s Next?
It’s a casual throwaway line. You can listen to us anywhere that you get your podcasts… It is a radical statement. It is a political statement. It is a technical architectural statement. Because what it represents is a system that was designed to let anybody run their own podcast, and to be able to consume it without regard to one company controlling it… I have … Continue reading Anywhere You Get Your Podcasts
Last month, I was asked to talk with our new staff about their use of social media. The school district wants teachers to share the awesome things they’re doing. We have a strong online community of teachers, parents, and school supporters, and we want our new folks to be part of that. There are dangers, certainly. Some students can’t be photographed. We generally don’t identify … Continue reading Navigating the Sharing
We’re almost back to normal. Last night, we biked a few miles to a local restaurant, ate dinner inside, and stopped for ice cream on the way home. I didn’t even take a mask, much less wear one. Most of the people we encountered were maskless as well, and the social distancing markers on the floor were more suggestions than mandates. Right now, Ohio is … Continue reading Almost Back to Normal
I don’t attend many professional conferences. In a normal year, I’ll make it to one state-level educational technology conference, and maybe 2-3 smaller one-day regional conferences. Once every 4-5 years, I’m able to attend a national event, as long as it’s not too far away. It’s not that I don’t find them valuable. I’m nearly always able to walk away with new ideas and new … Continue reading Two Places
I started this blog experiment 15 years ago. I was looking for a way for my teachers to quickly and easily share information with students. They wanted web sites. We didn’t have a good way of doing web sites. WordPress seemed to fit the bill. It was easy to set up quickly without a big learning curve. The blogs looked nice, and worked on any … Continue reading Reflecting on Reflecting
I can’t believe how far we’ve come. To say that 2020 has been challenging is certainly an understatement. We’ve seen our world upended to an extent that was unfathomable a year ago. I remember that we couldn’t wait to get out of 2019, and there were a lot of online jokes and memes about “2020 vision.” But I can’t remember what was so bad about … Continue reading Impossible
I’m struggling with the idea that the best place for kids is in school. Maybe it’s because my most robust, most meaningful, most memorable learning experiences didn’t happen in school. I’ve written in the past about my experience with personal learning networks, and how the concept of meaningful professional growth seems to contradict the credentialing process. You can learn valuable things, or you can get … Continue reading Introverting the classroom
Steve Sasson had a brilliant idea. He started with a movie camera lens. He added an array of capacitors, a basic processor, and a cassette tape recorder. After hooking up some batteries, he had the first “portable” digital camera. Sure, by today’s standards, it wasn’t even usable. It’s resolution was 100×100 pixels, it was black and white, it weighed eight pounds, and it took 23 … Continue reading Our Kodak Moment
It’s time to face reality: school is not going back to “normal” any time soon. There are a lot of factors at play here. But looking at the reality of the pandemic, anyone who is advocating for “business as usual” is not putting public safety at the top of the priority list. At the state level, we did really well in Ohio this spring. We … Continue reading We’re Not Going Back
My wife and I have been doing jigsaw puzzles lately. In April, we finished a puzzle that had been languishing in its barely-started state for years. Then, we moved on to others, and have just completed our third puzzle. We have a lot of strategies that we use to fit the pieces together. We group pieces by color or texture. I’ll take a group of … Continue reading Puzzle Pieces
Schools are trying to figure out what fall looks like. Are we going to be back in the classroom like we were last fall? That seems very unlikely. Will we still be completely online like we’ve been for the last two months? That’s possible, but it’s more likely that we’re going to try to get teachers and students back in our buildings this fall. Most … Continue reading Designing Hybrid Learning
Taste of Tech 