EdBlogger SF-03

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From the SFUSD press release about EdBlogger SF-03

Galileo staff and students, U.C. Berkeley Bay Area Writing Project, KCSOS Web Team, and teachers from kindergarten through university levels from across the country.

This event will be taking place over the weekend at Galileo Academy of Science and Technology. I'll be taking part in this, and will be working with several others to facilitate the second roundtable, Blogging in the classroom, lab, library and school

This should be an interesting gathering. An opportunity to reconnect with some folks I have already met, and others whose work I have been following through their weblogs.

From the small world department. I got an email yesterday from a Portland colleague (who has not been following any of the weblogs in education conversations) whose mother has been raving about her school's new librarian. Turns out her mom works at Galileo, and the said librarian is EdBlogger SF-03 organizer Pat Delaney.

NYTimes Magazine: Remote Possibilities

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Remote Possibilities

No, today's phones are about having a cyborglike connection to every aspect of your network. It's like having an extra limb. Your phone collects your e-mail from work; it zaps tiny text messages to friends far or near. It captures exquisitely embarrassing pictures from drunken office parties. It feeds your cat. The mobile phone has become, in essence, a remote control for life. ''We call it 'the device formerly known as the cellphone,'''

Interesting article on the evolution of the cell phone. I'm finding my Nokia 3650 to be very useful. I can sync contacts and calendars from my laptop via Bluetooth. Also when in a pinch can use it as a modem to connect my laptop to the web. The image quality on the camera leaves a bit to be desired, but the ability to snap a picture and transfer it to the web, or send it by email is kind of fun.

Chicago: Hancock Building & The Water Tower

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The RSS feed from Chicago Uncommon is one of the sites I visit often with my aggregator, NetNewsWire. Dawn Mikulich, the author of Chicago Uncommon, uses MoveableType to manage her weblog, posting new images from time to time. Inspired by her site, we have been cataloging images from Lewis Elementary School using MoveableType and incorporating images from this photoblog on our main web site. This is accomplished using a MoveableType plugin called Otherblog. This plugin allows you to incorporate posts from other blogs running under the same installation of MoveableType. We use this to incorporate other information in our main page (PTA, Music, Newsletter...) coming from other Lewis weblogs.

Amazon's Book Search

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Wired News: The Great Library of Amazonia

An ingenious attempt to illuminate the dark region of books is under way at Amazon.com. Over the past spring and summer, the company created an unrivaled digital archive of more than 120,000 books. The goal is to quickly add most of Amazon's multimillion-title catalog. The entire collection, which went live Oct. 23, is searchable, and every page is viewable.

This month's Wired has an article about Amazon's book search database. Lot's of interesting possibilites, but I understand that cook book authors aren't too thrilled...

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.