CEMaT Ed Tech Connection

PBS Frontline just aired an important episode called Growing Up Online.  It explores how the Internet is “transforming the experience of childhood” for some youths.  If you missed it, you can view the entire program online (high bandwidth needed) at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/
In addition to the episode, the site also offers extended interviews with experts, links to helpful resources, a chance for viewers to post their ideas to a discussion board (a fascinating read) and more.  The Growing Up Online Teachers’ Guide should be ready for people to access in February.

What are the implications of the topics explored in the episode for Lenawee County residents?

Last week the Library of Congress announced on its blog that it has joined the Web 2.0 shift with a pilot project that resulted in uploading to the photo-sharing site Flickr more than 3,000 photos from two collections of its vast holdings (over “14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials”). The historic images, in both black and white and color, are from the 1910s, 1930s, and 1940s and include a huge variety of subjects from agriculture to World War II to sports.

 
Delano, J. Going to town on Saturday afternoon, Greene Co., Ga.  Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 1941.

What does this mean to the average person? LoC sees this project as leading to increased access to their informative collections. “No copyright restrictions are known to exist.” This is good news for education, but users still need to cite sources when downloading or linking to the photos. Folks with Flickr accounts can help tag the images with meaningful words or phrases. They can also leave comments about the images or add notes, opening the door to knowledge sharing or questions and answers. Many images already contain many comments, tags and notes.  People can also subscribe to a feed that automatically announces when LoC posts new photos.

Library of Congress Blog:  http://www.loc.gov/blog/?p=233

The free K12 Online Conference started on Monday, Oct. 8th and is now in full swing. According to conference organizers, “This is a conference by educators for educators around the world interested in integrating emerging technologies into classroom practice. A goal of the conference is to help educators make sense of and meet the needs of a continually changing learning landscape.”

It is not too late to get things streaming. Some sessions are live. All sessions are archived. Check out the conference schedule here. First time attendees will find this section of the conference wiki helpful.

The latest edition of Smithsonian Magazine contained a 1-page write up about a new initiative that the Smithsonian is partnering with other organizations on called the Encyclopedia of Life. The project is unique in many ways, some of which are briefly outlined below:

• The goal of the Encyclopedia of Life is to document all known species (some 1.8 million!) each on a media-rich web page including still images, maps, video, text, sound recordings and so forth.  According to the current web site of the Encyclopedia of Life, it has been estimated that the project will take roughly 10 years to complete.  Dynamic content will be authenticated by a team of scientists from various organizations around the world.  Page development started in 2007.  Some parts of the Encyclopedia of Life may be available to the public in mid-2008.

• The site will be interactive. There will be a chat feature and access to experts.  It will feature an interactive classification map of species.  And, importantly, users will be able to contribute content.  Think of the possibilities for classroom studies and projects!

• The Encyclopedia of Life will allow for personalization and customizable browsing. Users will be able to change the level of complexity of the text (think differentiation).  And people who create accounts will be able to bookmark pages, make tags, and take notes.

For an intriguing video, previews of a few species’ pages and more info, see the current web site: Encyclopedia of Life
( http://www.eol.org )

The National Educational Computing Conference put together each year by ISTE recently took place in Atlanta, GA. ISTE has posted tons of great media online from NECC 2007 that you can access for free. Check out the wealth of info and share with other educators:

Video webcasts of various sessions
Highly recommend if you only have time for 1 or 2:

• Thinkfinity (formerly MarcoPolo) overview of free interactive web resources
• Closing keynote w/ Dr. Tim Tyson and students from Mabry Middle School, GA (start at 8:00 min.)

Podcasts
(When I try to play these audio files through the Apple Learning web site, they are making my browsers, Firefox and IE, crash. Try accessing them from iTunes > search: conference connections) Highly recommended: Ian Jukes, Mitchel Resnick

Links to people who blogged NECC 2007

Lastly, you can search for presenters’ handouts

Enjoy! ~ Greg

Dates have been posted for the K-12 Online Conference 2007. This is the second occurrence of this innovative conference. It will happen during the weeks of Oct. 15 and Oct. 22, 2007. Virtual presenters will include very credible educators like David Warlick, Alan Levine, Clarence Fisher, Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman, Derek Wenmouth, and Brian Cosby. For more info, go to http://k12onlineconference.org/.

Frank Miracola is a highly respected educational technologist at Macomb ISD. He often speaks at state and national conferences. Frank has created a new web page to compliment his “Free is Good” PD session. At this time, the site features 10 free video tutorials that focus on free software applications that can be used by teachers or students. They all feature Frank’s genial style. Want to learn how to use Photo Story 3 or Rubric Maker and Citation Creator? Check out Frank’s FIG site.

If you are a person who is really getting in to reading various blogs or listening to podcasts, it may be hard to keep up. Perhaps it is time to start looking at using the power of technology to send updates on all of those blogs and podcasts and whatnot to one place - an RSS feed reader. Here’s a quick description of RSS from Trey Martindale as written on his blog Teachable Moment -

Essentially, it is a new way to get information. It is an automated service that retrieves what you request, and then arranges the content so that you can peruse it at your leisure (and who doesn’t love leisurely perusing?). RSS is akin to having a cadre of personal librarians at your beck and call. And these librarians never tire from scampering around the Net, collecting all the news, updates, articles, search results, podcasts, multimedia, and other stuff you request. Here’s one more analogy–it’s like having your own completely personalized newspaper, brought to your doorstep daily (or hourly, for that matter).

RSS feed readers let you subscribe to RSS feeds from sites that you may frequent. Some RSS feed readers cost money and some are free. One popular, free RSS feed reader is Bloglines. If you are interested in setting up a free Bloglines account and subscribing to some RSS feeds, here’s a pdf handout from the 2006 MACUL conference and a Lenawee ISD Web 2.0 workshop to help you: Creating a Bloglines account and subscribing to an RSS feed

Here’s another resource from Will Richardson, who writes the blog Weblogg-ed the read/write web in the classroom, formerly with Hunterdon HS in NJ - RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators