Stewart Mader of Wiki in Education talks with Joe Kraus of JotSpot about their acquisition by Google. Google is becoming the main supplier of software for my students and staff…(Google Earth, SketchUp, Google Docs, Gmail…) This may or may not be a problem in the future, but for now I am getting great tools for my students and teachers with great support, for basically nothing. What I would like to see is some way for me to set up accounts for students on Google Docs without having students register with an email address. I can work around this a bit by using Google hosted GMail, but still it would be nice if they created an education version that allowed a teacher to create and edit accounts. Also it would be nice if a feature set was created that focused on educational uses.

MoinX is a Mac OS X desktop wiki.

MoinX gives you a full blown and unmodified MoinMoin wiki without forcing you to run a full blown web server. Instead MoinX is bundled with the high performance Twisted webserver.

It can run as a private wiki, available only on your computer, or it can be set up as a public wiki available over your local network. It also can take advantage of Apple’s Bonjour/Zero Configuration networking, so that a MoinX wiki configured on a teacher’s computer can be set up to be automatically seen by students using the Safari or Camino browsers (both support Bonjour), or from within Internet Explorer and Windows using Bonjour for Windows.

For the past two years some teachers in my school have been using Instiki, another lightweight desktop wiki, in a similar fashion. The classroom wiki space is installed on the teacher’s laptop and is available discoverable from anywhere on our network. Students can access and create pages and complete assignments using the web browser and wiki interface. As I have written before, we find this implementation of a wiki to be very easy for both our teachers and students to understand and utilize.

Technorati Tags: bonjour, moinx, wiki, instiki

Stewart Mader and several other co-writers have published a book, Using Wiki in Education , detailing 10 case studies written by teachers describing how they are utilizing wikis in their course work and classrooms. The introduction and first chapter are available for free download, with access to the entire book, including a PDF copy, available for a fee.

Technorati Tags: wiki in education, stewart mader, wiki

John Pederson points to Google Co-op. Basically a build your own do it yourself search engine. John points out some educational uses including dumping your list of search links into Google Co-op and making the list of vetted web sites into a custom search tool using Google as the front end. For example a teacher who has researched and found appropriate sites for her students to visit could create a Google Co-op search tool that returned search results from those specific sites only. There is also a collaborate feature that allows you to invite others to edit and add to your custom search tool.

Below is an example I threw together this morning. It returns search results from several kid friendly search sites. I’ve invited our technology teacher, Tony Jamesbarry to also edit the tool with me, and anticipate sharing it with staff later this week.

One nice feature is that non-profits can turn off adwords, so the results returned are free of advertisements. Also there are tools for customizing the look of the search box and easy cut and paste javascript for including the search box in your own web page.

Lucy Gray points to five notetaking applications to help students keep and organize notes from their research. In addition to those mentioned by Lucy, Kairosnews recently pointed to Zotero. Zotero is a free Firefox 2.0 extension/add-on that enables note taking organization from within Firefox.

…helps you gather and organize resources (whether bibliography or the full text of articles), and then lets you to annotate, organize, and share the results of your research. It includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store full reference information in author, title, and publication fields and to export that as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software such as del.icio.us or iTunes, like the ability to sort, tag, and search in advanced ways. Using its unique ability to sense when you are viewing a book, article, or other resource on the web, Zotero will—on many major research sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for you in the correct fields.

Zotero is a production of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Technorati Tags: Firefox 2.0, notetaking, Zotero

For the past few years we have been using Excel spreadsheets to keep track of student reading data. Our school district prepares the spreadsheets for each primary level teacher. The spreadsheet includes cells to record various reading achievement data based on our reading assessments. These include DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment) reading level, phonemic awareness assessments, spelling assessments and a phonics survey among others. Three times each year I am required to distribute and then gather up the assessments from teachers and then email them to the central office. We also utilize the data internally to make support decisions and to deploy support based on classroom need.

I know… Some type of web application would make this process a lot easier for everyone involved. Well, rather than wait for one to be built we are going to use one “off the shelf.” We are utilizing Google Spreadsheets to collect and share this information within our building staff.

It is very easy to import the existing Excel spreadsheet into Google Spreadsheet. The Google Spreadsheet interface is pretty spartan, and since it is saved to my Google account, I can not only share it with the individual teachers, I can also share the sheets with our reading support teachers. Thinking in a larger view, I could also share the data with school district specialists. Using RSS, I can keep track of student data as it is entered.

With the introduction today of Google Docs, I can see more and more schools turning to these kind of tools to collect, and share school information.

This morning I went to Google Spreadsheets and discovered that Google has changed the interface a bit, combining the spreadsheet function and the Writely word processing function into something called Google Docs. Now the spreadsheet and word processing documents that I have created using the Google tools are combined in one place. The interface also allows tagging of documents. Also the collaborative features integrate will with GMail. My address book is easily accessible so it is very easy to share documents with friends and colleagues. Now what I’m waiting for is some kind of RSS integration so I can subscribe to shared documents. Here it is…

Technorati Tags: google docs