Schools and Technology

School Communities Will Usually Get the Websites They Deserve

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To paraphrase Phil Windley: school communities will usually get the websites they deserve.

[Tuttle SVC]

Tom Hoffman responds to Will's post about his frustration with publishing approval issues that are getting in the way of having more teachers publish at Will's high school.

My district has purchased a content management system that promised this kind of work flow, but in reality doesn't deliver it. (It also doesn't work very well with anything but Internet Explorer 6, but that is another story... ) Their idea was that the principal, or the principal's designee would sit as some sort of managing editor. Not exactly the best way to get people sharing information in a timely manner

I never understood how school districts can trust a teacher with a classroom full of six year olds, but not trust them to use good judgment when posting homework, field trip notices, or hamster birth announcements on a classroom web site.

Whittier GIS Project

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EdBlogger Praxis: Whittier School contemplates use of blogs for NSF project.Al Delgado's school in Chicago is involved with an NSF project looking at using geographical information systems with his elementary students. The official title is... "Designing Learning Environments for Teaching Scientific Argumentation and Mathematical Reasoning with Geographic Data." A description of the project can be found here.

Al has been asked to help integrate the use of web logs into the project.

Cyprien Lomas...

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Cyprien Lomas Discover SubEthaEdit (formerly Hydra)One of the folks I met this weekend at edBlogger was Cyprien Lomas. He a Research Associate with Skylight: The Science Centre for Learning and Teaching at the Faculty of Science at University of British Columbia. Cyprien was one of the folks using SubEthaEdit to take collaborative notes during the sessions. It was kind of fun to be sitting up on the panel talking and at the same time watch as people take notes on what was being said.

Lewis Elementary...

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At Lewis Elementary we are in the process of updating our computer lab. We have a lab of 16 iMacs that we are moving to OS X. We also plan to set up a server so that our we can offer a home folder for each of our students, accessable from any computer in the building. After the lab is done, we plan to update all the iMacs to OS X. We are getting some help from Dick McPartland. Dick has just recently retired from Lincoln High School in Portland where he served as Technology Coordinator. Dick has been playing with tools such as Movable Type, Manila and Open Source solutions for student/teaching publishing, for a number of years.

Looking for information on Open Source Library Systems

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oss4lib : Open Source Systems for LibrariesIn addition to work on the computer lab and updating our iMacs to OS X, we are beginning to talk about automating our library. Our district library supervisor shared with us the costs associated with using the Dynix system that is the current school district solution. Very expensive... We got a ballpark figure of $5000 to $6000!, plus ongoing support costs...

So got to thinking there must be Open Source solutions. After a quick Google search I came across this site. Looks interesting, will have to some more research on this topic. Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated...