Liz Lane Lawley is teaching a graduate course entitled Current Themes in Information Technology. It’s a distance learning course and she is using a course weblog to organize and present content and is having her students create weblogs where they post their assignments. She has subscribed to their RSS feeds so can easily see when students "turn in" assignments. Office hours are via instant messenger and class discussions take place on IRC. By using "off the shelf" tools such as weblogs, IM and IRC, she has constructed a course space at a fraction of what it would cost to use such tools as WebCT or Blackboard.
Yahoo 360: Yahoo's Blogging and Photo Tool
in Blogging
Yahoo! 360° - What is Yahoo! 360°? Yahoo is soon to release Yahoo! 360, their photo sharing and blogging tool...
O'Reilly ETech...
This past week I had the opportunity to travel to San Diego to attend and present at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. Tom Hoffman and I presented a short talk entitled, From the Classroom: Remixing Wikis with Rendezvous, Web Services and SchoolTool. Chris Jablonski of ZD-Net has a nice summary of our talk. Tom did a great job introducing SchoolTool, the open source student information system, to the audience and pointed them to the just released SchoolBell, the stand alone calendar component of SchoolTool. Over spring break, I plan to install SchoolBell to run a web based calendar for scheduling resources (computer lab, gym, cafeteria...) at Lewis Elementary.
While I won't be able to run SchoolTool as our student information system, I am very happy to see it being developed and supported. I am looking forward to the day when I can point people to a school in the developing world that is keeping track of student information using SchoolTool, and point out how they are doing so using a tool that is customizable and extendable and is free... Take that A.L.L. ...
Guerilla room reorganization
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"LiveJournaler rinku has some simple but effective advice on how to get your space in order. Make a big pile of stuff that isn't where it belongs, and then tackle it.From that pile, everything that you don't need and will likely never use in the next 4 years or so, throw or give away. This includes valuable things, sentimental objects, cobwebs, and so forth. The bits about putting things where they contextually make sense - pen near paper, a clock where it's visible - may seem obvious, but the huge difference it makes when you grab a pad and need a pen is not.the best way to organize your room [rinku's LiveJournal]
"
(Via Lifehacker.)
Ok, I'll give this one a try...
Sy Wexler, Maker of Ubiquitous Classroom Films, Dies at 88
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Sy Wexler, an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose educational movies - from "Squeak the Squirrel" to "Teeth Are for Life" - flickered for decades in darkened classrooms around the world, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 88 and lived in Hollywood.
As a member of the Edison Elementary School AV club, I bet I showed a few of Mr. Wexler's films while in elementary school... The AV club was responsible for showing movies in classrooms. Teachers would request a film and then one of the AV Club students would be sent with the film and projector to set up and show the film. It was a great way to get out of class...
Libraries Are Essential...
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Libraries are an essential service, too | csmonitor.comWilliam Ecenbarger writes in The Christian Science Monitor about libraries and their essential place in our society.
But in fact, libraries are essential. Reading is still the most basic survival skill in today's information-driven society. Moreover, the gap between rich and poor is widening, and the libraries level the playing field.
Portland is very fortunate to have the Multnomah County Library as a resource for our families and students. They offer a wide variety of online and face to face services including book groups, story times, access to periodicals and encyclopedias, and homework help.
At Lewis Elementary we have shared with our families resources such as Jon Udell’s Library Lookup Tool. The Lookup Tool is a bookmarklet written in JavaScript code that extracts the ISBN number from the URL on a bookseller's page, then goes to a library catalog (in our case, the Multnomah County Library) and searches by ISBN. If the library owns the book, the record pops up. It allows our staff to point parents to our local library to find copies of popular books that are being shared in class.
L C Presentation
in Random
QOOP
in Random
QOOP Web-based remote print and publish. This looks pretty interesting. I saw a link to this on Caterina Fake's Flickr blog. Remote publishing of any digital file. Am thinking this might be interesting for school. We could create books and photo albums associated with school events and activities, and then make them available to familes for purchase. For an example take a look at the Flickr blog...
Wired Article About Wikipedia
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Wired 13.03: The Book Stops Here
Jimmy Wales wanted to build a free encyclopedia on the Internet. So he raised an army of amateurs and created the self-organizing, self-repairing, hyperaddictive library of the future called Wikipedia...Now Wales has brought forth a third model - call it One for All. Instead of one really smart guy, Wikipedia draws on thousands of fairly smart guys and gals - because in the metamathematics of encyclopedias, 500 Kvarans equals one Pliny the Elder...
This month's Wired has a very good article about Wikipedia and some of the people who write the articles found there. I found the story of Einar Kvaran to be interesting and instructive about the authors and their motivations for writing for Wikipedia. According the article Kvaran is currently unemployed, but spends about six hours a day reading and writing about public art and sculpture and publishes his work in Wikipedia...