Open Source Radio & School Improvement Plans...

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Open Source Radio Tod Maffin's latest radio piece for CBC Radio was done in an Open Source manner. He solicited ideas and suggestions from readers and listeners throughout the creative process. A kind of a public editing. This got me thinking in terms of my school and our School Improvement Planning process. I'd like to incorporate some of the methods Tod and others have used to share our work with the larger school community and gain ideas and feedback on the plan as we are writing it... More later…

Another Interesting Use of RSS...

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Technology > Circuits > Resource: How Did They Vote? Updates by E-Mail of Congressional Ayes and Nays" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/technology/circuits/27reso.html">The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Resource: How Did They Vote? Updates by E-Mail of Congressional Ayes and Nays

GovTrack lets users track activity of specific legislators. It can also send updates via RSS, or Real Simple Syndication. The site collects information from Thomas (thomas.loc.gov), the Library of Congress's legislation-tracking site, and the official sites of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

PowerPoint Keynote Goes to the Science Fair

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Technology > Circuits > PowerPoint Goes to the Fair" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/technology/circuits/27fair.html">The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > PowerPoint Goes to the Fair

Technology is changing that annual academic ritual, the science project, as more students abandon poster-board displays in favor of computer presentations.

Nando's Science Project I didn't see too much evidence of this at the recent Glencoe Elementary Science Fair, but would imagine I would see more of this at a high school event. My son is in second grade at Gelncoe and his display was a bit of a hybrid involving a cardboard display and a laptop. We worked on an animation project that utilized traditional animation techniques such as flip books, and also a digital version using a program called iStopMotion. A very nice stop animation program from Boinx Software.

NPR : When Web Rumors Run Amok

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NPR : When Web Rumors Run AmokScott Simon talks with Henry Farrell about weblogs, rumors and international affairs. Farrell has co-written an article, Web of Influence, published in Foreign Policy. From the article...

Every day, millions of online diarists, or “bloggers,” share their opinions with a global audience. Drawing upon the content of the international media and the World Wide Web, they weave together an elaborate network with agenda-setting power on issues ranging from human rights in China to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. What began as a hobby is evolving into a new medium that is changing the landscape for journalists and policymakers alike.

Farrell also writes for Crooked Timber...

Safari U: Create Your Own Technology Textbook

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Orginally posted at Ed-Tech Insider...Ed-Tech Insider: Safari U: Create Your Own Technology Textbook Safari U Imagine you are asked to teach a class or workshop about a particular technology topic. Immediately you think of all the books and texts you have read about the particular topic and think of the best sections or chapters that you would like to share with your students. You wish you could just pull the relevant information for your students and produce a text that allowed you to share with them the best of what you have found...

Well now you can. O'Reilly Publishing has recently introduced a technology that allows a teacher or professor to pull information relevant to their particular course and produce a unique book that captures the information that needs to be shared in the course. While currently this is limted to O'Reilly content, other publishers are to be added to the system to allow teachers and professors to produce textbooks that pull content from a variety of sources that meet the needs of the course. I have recently created one such book for use with my staff. As O’Reilly adds additional publishers to their system, I look forward to using this service for both in-service classes with my staff, and for workshops and classes I teach.

Dr. King Day

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Dr.King TImeline Monday is the Dr. King Holiday. The image to the left is by a young man named Jackson and is part of the, The Dr. King Timeline, a project I did with my kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade students in 1995. We read a book call My Dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr by Faith Ringgold and in the back of the book was a timeline of major events in his life. We used the timeline as the basis for a classrom book and also for a web site about the life of Dr. King. The web site has been up for 10 years and the last time I looked was the most accessed page on our school district web site. The students who did this work are all now in high school.

iPod Shuffle vs. Podcasters

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Rui Carmo of The Tao of Mac discusses the new Apple offerings from the past week and make an interesting comment about podcasters and complaints about the iPod Shuffle. I found the quote below pretty funny...

Valid points, however, are not being made by the kind of raving lunatics that have such a distorted sense of reality as to go around posting that the iPod Shuffle stifles podcasting - as if podcasting was a driver for any sort of MP3 player sales. Or, let's be honest, of any real interest except for the propagation of self-centric blogosphere memes. The spool, as usual, hits the nail on the head, carefully avoiding the use of the quaint English term "w*nkers".