Archives for “Schools and Technology”

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus – Here Comes Everybody: Clay Shirky has a post up this morning that is a transcription of a speech he recently gave at the Web 2.0 conference. He discusses the social surplus that for the last 50 years has been consumed by television watching and is now being used by [...]

He also has a Drupal site set up for his school, Flushing International High School. With the ongoing New York transit strike, it is a good example of how a school can use a site to provide timely information to its community.

Tim Wilson points to Stellarium an open source desktop planetarium for Linux/Unix, Windows and MacOSX.... I've wanted to include an astronomy tool like this on our disk image at Lewis, but could not afford to pay the licensing fee for something like Starry Night.

The New Literacies Research Team at the University of Connecticut is a continually evolving consortium of professors, graduate research assistants, school districts, organizations, policy makers, teachers, and school leaders who seek to prepare students for the new learning and literacy skills required by information and communication technologies such as the Internet. I have known and worked with Don since my days as a kindergarten teacher at Buckman Elementary and I look forward to learning more about the work of his team and following their New Literacies Team Blog...

This morning, Eamonn Sullivan has a very good post about children and the Internet. He outlines some ideas for keeping children safe while using the Internet and suggests some strategies for monitoring and more importantly discussing with children their life on the Internet, and their lives in general.

Over at AssortedStuff, Tim Stahmer has a great post about the current state of most school, and school district web sites and the thinking, or lack of, behind them...... It’s actually a very appropriate title since many school, and central office, sites are updated as often as most museums."

Boards Get Brains, Chalk Vanishes: “Schools across the country dump dusty chalkboards for touch-sensitive whiteboards connected to computers. Kids can solve problems, surf the web and even edit video with their fingertips…” Today Wired reports on the rise in popularity of interactive whiteboards. At Lewis Elementary we currently have 6 classrooms equipped with these and [...]

With Irreverence and an iPod, Recreating the Museum Tour: “The rise of podcasting is now enabling museumgoers to concoct their own unofficial audio guides and tours.” Today the New York Times has a piece about the rise of do it yourself museum audio tours. Instead of renting the museum audio device, you might download to [...]

College Libraries Set Aside Books in a Digital Age: “Books are being cleared away to make room for digital learning laboratories, a phenomenon that is transforming research and study on campuses around the country.” (Via NYT > Most E-mailed Articles.)

Liz Lane Lawley is teaching a graduate course entitled Current Themes in Information Technology. It’s a distance learning course and she is using a course weblog to organize and present content and is having her students create weblogs where they post their assignments. She has subscribed to their RSS feeds so can easily see when [...]

NPR : Wikipedia’s Growth Comes with Concerns This morning National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition had a piece on Wikipedia, its growth over the past four years, and the usual pros and cons concerning accuracy and editorial control. I have a longer post about this over at eSchoolNews….

Something Less Than A Cadillac Tim Stahmer has a great post today about a computer based literacy program that Los Angeles Unified invested over $50 million dollars in and found that their results are less than stellar… Tim asks some very good questions… Is it really a good thing to have five and six-year olds [...]

Idea Lab: Life Way After Head Start” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/magazine/21IDEA.html?oref=login”>The New York Times Magazine > Idea Lab: Life Way After Head Start Not only has the Perry study set records for longevity, but it also asks the truly pertinent question: what is the impact of preschool, not on the test scores of 7-year-olds but on their life [...]

Our music teacher at Lewis, Mr. Jamesbarry, had a great idea that we recently implemented. Last year we had talked about setting up a server to share some of the music he uses with classrooms. This summer when we moved all of our machines to OS X, he got the idea of setting up a [...]

AssortedStuff: It’s The School’s Fault Again While this report sounds like another industry lobbying group trying to scare Congress into giving their companies lots of money, they do make one good point. We don’t do a good job of math and science instruction in this country. Part of the blame for that goes to society [...]

Tom points to a post by a teacher at Lincoln School in Providence. She talks of an inter-connected school/district web site that utilizes RSS and such to make Small Pieces, Loosely Joined… I imagine a network of school websites, or portals, which are independently maintained but are interconnected using RSS feeds. Imagine a school district [...]

SXSW /interactive/panels As Tom Hoffman mentioned, I’ll be on a panel at SXSW along with Tom and Kaye Trammell. The topic is Blogucation 101. The panel is moderated and organzied by Mike Sloan. Am looking forward to visting Austin and seeing Tom again, and meeting Kaye and Mike.

To paraphrase Phil Windley: school communities will usually get the websites they deserve. [Tuttle SVC] Tom Hoffman responds to Will’s post about his frustration with publishing approval issues that are getting in the way of having more teachers publish at Will’s high school. My district has purchased a content management system that promised this kind [...]

Tuttle SVC: January 04, 2004 Archives Tom lays out a wishlist for 2004 related to technology and education. One that stands out for me is his wish for thin clients.

Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Home The Mars Exploration Rover Mission Home is a good starting point for information on yesterday’s landing of Spirit on Mars.

The wardriver and the cop Jon Udell has an interesting story about finding himself parked in front of a junior high school in Michigan and trying to explain to a police officer exactly what he was doing there…