daveragsdale.com

Steve DeCoste and I are leading a training on blogs, wikis and podcasts. Here are the  relevant links:

http://bwd.wikispaces.com

http://dragsdale.edublogs.org

http://del.icio.us/sdecoste 

I learned about edublogs.org at CUE 2007. It looked like an easy way for teachers to set up and maintain their own Wordpress blogs so I showed it to some of our teachers on campus. Eventually, I would like to get the multi-user version of Wordpress running on our own server. But at last check, Wordpress MU required Apache webserver and we’re running IIS. So far three teachers have started using edublogs.org. They are using it primarily as a class website; however, as they become more comfortable with the technology, I’m certain that they will find other innovative ways to integrate blogs into their teaching. Here are links to their blogs:

http://mscoons.edublogs.org/
http://msleal.edublogs.org/
http://kverardo.edublogs.org/

A week has passed since CUE started and I still haven’t reviewed all the session I wanted to review. I have been swamped since I got back and haven’t had much time to reflect on what I learned. One unexpected thing that I took away from CUE 2007 was a cool productivity trick that I saw in Jason Galeener’s session, The Very Best of Microsoft. I know that the MS haters out there will claim that Microsoft has too few superlatives to fit into a forty-five minute presentation. All I can say to them is: “Stop channeling the bitterness of Steve Jobs and relax. I think that black turtle neck has made you a little hot under the collar.” Moving along… like it or not, it’s almost impossible to avoid Office no matter what platform you’re using, so why not learn to use it more efficiently. Jason is a dynamic presenter with a great sense of humor. He showed the packed Ventura Room a lot of great tricks that would benefit any teacher. You can find the handout for his session here. Unfortunately, this handout does not really do justice to the innovative uses Jason has found for the AutoCorrect feature in Word. He uses it almost like a macro. Within the AutoCorrect Jason assigns a small string of text like “=head” to be replaced by a much larger chunk, such as the header for a letter or a worksheet. Although this cool trick doesn’t have many far-reaching implications for pedagogy, it certainly has the ability to help teachers work more efficiently. Jason’s website looks to have a lot of great resources; check it out here.

I left another presentation early and headed over to Smoketree to see Chris Walsh. I enjoyed his presentations at CUE 2006 and was looking forward to hearing what he had to say this year. Chris is a wired guy. He is able to connect pop culture, technology, and instruction in a meaningful way. I was not disappointed. His presentation included references to the Colbert Report, a book called Everything Bad is Good, the TWiT podcast, and a new video game from Maxis entitled Spore. Chris’s thesis seemed to be that new media like video games, Web 2.0, and television programs with multi-threaded plots are complex and offer students new avenues for learning that in some cases (not all) may be more relevant than what we teach in school. I loved this because I watch the Colbert Report, subscribe to TWiT, and have read Everything Bad is Good. Although I found what he said relevant to my personal life, I am still at an impasse on how this all affects instruction. Are we to make instruction look more like these new media? This sounds logical, but I think competing for students’ attention would ultimately be a losing proposition. Perhaps we should just adopt the best of what these technologies offer and use them to meet our instructional needs. For more info check out Chris’s bookmarks for this presentation: http://del.icio.us/fitzwalsh/LEAT

Barbara Bray reviewed some cool web 2.0 sites that can be integrated to support a variety of subject areas and grade levels. By far my favorite was the Wayback Machine which allows users to access archives of websites. Click here to see archives of daveragsdale.com going back to 2003.

On the recommendation of Mark Wagner, I went to see Hall Davidson present. His topic was Winners from the 40th California Media and Multimedia Festival. I was impressed with these student-generated short films. Students used combinations of stills, stock footage and self-generated content to create their films. I know students get a lot of completing projects like this. I think creating an entry for next year’s competition might be a good assignment for my technology interns.

Mark Wagner presented an overview of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and how it can be used by teachers and, apparently, normal people too. I was excited to see him present because I have read his blog in the past. For some reason I no longer subscribe to it, but I plan to remedy that. He talked about feed readers like Google Reader and Bloglines. He also presented Furl, which is a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us. I think the most promising RSS related site he showed for use at our school was edublogs.org. It’s a simple way to set up your own Wordpress blog with just a few clicks, which is a lot simpler than setting one up from scratch like this one. Edublogs appears to support creating blogs for students, as well as teachers. For teachers whose students maintain blogs, Mark pointed out that subscribing to the RSS feeds for those blogs is an excellent way to track new content and check whether students have completed assignments. He also talked about techorati as a way to search blogs for specific content. I’m going to have to look into how to add technorati tags to this blog.

I arrived at 8:00 a.m. today for registration. I did not sign up for any hands-on workshops. Maybe I’ll try that next year. The volunteers who work registration were very friendly and the woman who gave me my bag insisted that I register for the HDTV . The first pop-up sessions start at 9:30.

This week Apple CEO Steve Jobs blasted teacher unions as a major impediment to educational reform. Normally, Steve’s motives seem pretty transparent. His recent “Thoughts on Music” posting on the Apple website appeared designed to deflect European anti-DRM litigation away from Apple onto record companies. However, I’m not certain what he hoped to accomplish with this outburst. I wonder if this will impact enthusiasm for Apple products at this year’s CUE.

I’m on my way to CUE 2007 this afternoon and since I haven’t blogged anything in about a year, this seems like the perfect time to begin again. This time around I will try to give more thorough coverage to all the sessions I attend. Since I have this Wordpress site up in running in advance (unlike last year), I should be able to blog something during each session. Of course that will depend a lot on the wifi situation at the conference. Last year’s coverage seemed spotty and inconsistent. I heard several attendees complain about it so I’m pretty sure it was not my own stupidity that kept me offline.