On Thursday afternoon I had the opportunity to join take part in a discussion via Skype involving Tim Wilson, Will Richardson and Steve Burt. Kind of a poor man’s IT Conversations. Tim recorded the session and wrapped it up as one of his Savvy Technologist Podcasts. The sound file is can be had a number of ways including as part of Tim’s Podcast Subscription on iTunes and also as a MP3 download.

We plan to do these on a regular basis. While the recording may be of interest to about 15 people, I found just having a chance to talk with folks who are also experimenting with technology in their schools and districts to be quite nice.

Technorati Tags: podcasts

adaptive path » an interview with flickr’s eric costello :

Over at Adaptive Path, Jesse James Garrett interviews Eric Costello of Flickr. The article discusses the evolution of Flickr from The Game Neverending, what was to be a massively multiplayer web-based online game, to the original Flash based Flickr Live, into its current form as a photo sharing and community site. An interesting bit of information is that the Neopets site was an early inspiration for what eventually became Flickr…

Technorati Tags: flickr, neopets

The Focus on Effectiveness web site brings together research about effective instructional practices, and carefully selected technology tools and recommendations for their use.

Created by the Northwest Educational Technology Consortium and the Learning Innovation & Technology Consortium, the site builds on the work of educational researchers Robert J. Marzano, Debra Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock, authors of “Classroom Instruction That Works”. The site highlights their key research findings and provides examples of how technology can be used to enhance or expand on these practices.

(Via Jeff Allen…)

Technorati Tags: instruction

Portlandjazzjams.com Podshow:

Very nice web site with a Podcast feed of live Jazz performances recorded at Portland area clubs.

Technorati Tags: jazz, podcasts, music

Citation Machine — The Landmark Project:

Alan Levine pointed me to David Warlick’s Citation Machine.

Citation Machine is an interactive Web tool designed to assist teachers in modeling the proper use of information property.

This will be something I will share with my teachers before the beginning of the school year. David indicates that he plans on making the code available so that schools can host the Citation Machine on their own servers if they like…

Technorati Tags: citations, levine, warlick

Calling All Luddites - New York Times

The world is moving to an Internet-based platform for commerce, education, innovation and entertainment. Wealth and productivity will go to those countries or companies that get more of their innovators, educators, students, workers and suppliers connected to this platform via computers, phones and P.D.A.’s.

Friedman has a great column today about how the US is falling behind in the technologies and access to technologies that are key in driving the wealth and productivity of our economy…

Over at Cogdogblog, Alan Levine points to FeedDigest, a tool for remixing RSS feeds. This is an interesting tool which allows you to mix up various feeds and create a single feed that captures all their activity. At Lewis Elementary we are running 6 active weblogs. These include our staff bulletin, the public web page, a Flickr photo gallery, a multi-author classroom notes site, book recommendations from our library, and a weblog to power our reader board. I currently subscribe to all 7 of these RSS feeds. With a tool like FeedDigest, I can mix them into one RSS feed that will give me a chronological look at the weblog activity at Lewis, all in one place…

Another interesting use for this is to use a tool such as Alan’s Feed2JS tool to create a webpage that displays the feed to share the activity with folks on staff who aren’t yet using an RSS reader… Which would be almost all of them…

Technorati Tags: FeedDigest, rss tools