BBC Content to be Made Available

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Wired News: BBC to Open Content Floodgates The British Broadcasting Corporation's Creative Archive, one of the most ambitious free digital content projects to date, is set to launch this fall with thousands of three-minute clips of nature programming. The effort could goad other organizations to share their professionally produced content with Web users.

The project, announced last year, will make thousands of audio and video clips available to the public for noncommercial viewing, sharing and editing. It will debut with natural-history programming, including clips that focus on plants, animals and birds.

This looks very interesting. A method for teachers and students to legally use source material for presentations and research reports... but at this point only for those accessing from Great Britain...

iPod as Pirate Radio Station...

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iPodlounge | All Things iPod

Tune into iPod-FM pirate radio Oregon Yesterday we reported that a columnist at engadget.com had written a how-to on creating your own pirate radio station using a modified iTrip mini. Today we noticed on the boing boing blog that a reader was actually doing it from his car with an iTrip and his iPod. "I've been running around for the past several months with this bumper sticker on my car. It's an ink-jet job and as you can see, it's getting a little faded. I figure that anyone that can read the bumper sticker-- on the I-5, at a stop light-- if intrigued could tune in and listen to whatever I'm listening to."

Have been thinking one of these would make a nice Father's Day gift...

NECC Weblog...

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Edweblogs.org: NECC 2004NECC starts next weekend and again Clarity Innovations will be sponsoring a community weblog to share information about the conference and sessions. Yesterday, Steve Burt and I spent some time working on the NECC weblog and looking for NECC related posts on Feedster.

Feedster has an interesting feature... you can do a search and then when the search is returned, you also get an RSS feed of that search... combined with a tool such as Feedroll... you can have a subject specific aggregator... I didn't know it did that... Here is the link to the RSS for a Feedster search on the terms "NECC" "New Orleans" . The post below uses Feedroll to display the RSS feed... Any posts with NECC and NEW ORLEANS should roll into the feed...

NECC New Orleans...

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I'll be attending NECC (National Education Computing Conference) in New Orleans later this month. I'll be doing a workshop and also contributing to a group weblog: necc.edweblogs.org. Am looking forward to seeing some of the folks I met last year in Seattle...

Beacon School...

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Technology Integration and the Beacon School Portal Another key part of our theory is that this system has grown organically, not as part of a pre-packaged software package, but created, whenever possible, using free software tools and written by myself and the students of Beacon. In fact, a student and I used a Linux-based programming language and database tool to write all portions of the "portal" software. Again, the philosophy behind the portal software must be in line with the pedagogy of our school. We don't want to merely use technology; we want our students to be creators of technological innovation, just as we don't want our students to just memorize facts but want them to have the skills to apply knowledge. The portal was created as a community effort, with that very pedagogy in mind.

This article from Technology and Learning by Chris Lehman highlights web use at The Beacon School in New York. I like the philosophy behind this... free and/or inexpensive tools that are selected for an education purpose. Not a solution that is imposed on a program, but solutions that come from the users as the need arises.

Anne Davis on Blogs and NECC...

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I'm putting the final touches on my NECC concurrent session, Weblogs in Education: The Possibilities Are Limitless! I'll be presenting with Sandy Peters.

I work all next week. Then I'm taking off a week early for a "much-looked forward to" vacation prior to the conference. The conference is going to be fun. I hope lots of you are going. I plan to use some student video clips. I thought you might enjoy the blogging rap my Wrinkles' students created. I'll also be participating in a NECC 2004:Blogs@School workshop with Tim Lauer, Will Richardson, Steve Burt and Tom Hoffman. They'll be a whole of blogging going on! Yep, weblogs are off the chart![EduBlog Insights]

Anne Davis points to her concurrent session at NECC and also to the 3 hour workshop that she will be taking part in along with Steve Burt, Tom Hoffman, Will Richardson and myself. If you go to the NECC program site and search under the term weblogs, you'll find 6 sessions listed.

Tom Hoffman Proposes a Conference For The Rest of Us...

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I think this article should earn Matt an imaginary invitation to present his work at a fake educational technology conference I'm pretending to begin planning. The working title is "Why doesn't all this "stuff" work? 2004." The imaginary theme is "Cheap, robust technologies to make the computers actually work in your school." Or something like that. Topics would hypothetically include Rendezvous, K12LTSP, LDAP, RSS, weblogs and wikis, wifi, when to use PHP, where you can use Python, how to buy gear on EBay, how to figure our what's wrong with and return that new computer that crashes intermittently but persistently but passes all the manufacturer's diagnostics, etc. I'll round up some imaginary sponsors at NECC.

Tom starts off by pointing to a review of USB pen drives and then proposes a conference for the ed-tech community geared toward making all this wonderful technology work. I'm hoping to help him round up sponsors at NECC in New Orleans later this month... Maybe some of the ISTE 40 or so...