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Cell Phone + Internet = Happy Marriage August 25, 2008

Posted by lcrosswe in Google, Technology.
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Please do not e-mail me with questions regarding this post.  The proper net etiquette is to stick your questions, praise, complaints, etc. as a comment at the end of this post. Thanks.

Take a second and think about whatever computer you and/or your family owned 10 years ago. Did you realize that the odds are good that the cell phone in your pocket or purse is a more powerful computing machine than your old computer? All you have to do is to learn how to successfully integrate your cell phones with the Internet to unleash this power.

Today I will be highlighting two powerful services available to your cell phone. Let me paint two pictures for you to demonstrate how these services can help:

Photo 1: Your favorite college football team (Insert name here) is playing a game on Saturday that is not being broadcast. Even if it were being broadcast, you have to go to the wedding of your neighbor’s cousin’s maid’s brother and you are dying to know what is going on in the football game. How can you discretely find out what is happening?

ANSWER: 4info.net to the rescue. 4info is a free (yes you read that right) service that sends you short message service (or SMS for short) messages to your cell phone. The process here is

  1. Sign up at 4info.net
  2. Set your alert on their site. Specify what you want and when you want to get it.
  3. The time of day or event you registered for will trigger an alert.
  4. When this happens, a text message with your info will be sent to your phone.

4info

As an example, I am signed up with 4info to receive scoring updates from all Florida State football games this fall. When I picked FSU football, I had to choose which alerts I wanted to receive. My options were to receive an alert when:

You can choose as many options as you want on this site. Here are some of the other services that I think are neat (note that this isn’t the entire listing from their site):

Picture 2: You and your significant other are out on the town and decide that you might like to see a movie. The only problem is that you don’t know what time each theater in Mt. Pleasant is playing this movie. Will you have to call each theater and listen to their infinitely long recordings of movie times? Will you just drive to the theater and keep your fingers crossed? What is the easiest answer?

ANSWER: Google - isn’t this always the answer with the Internet? Google offers a free SMS service named Google Mobile SMS (catchy, isn’t it?) Here is a brief video (only visible away from school) with a description of the service:

What can you search with Google Mobile SMS? Well you could find your movie time by texting “movies 29464″ to 466453 (GOOGLE) and you would receive a text message back with all the movie choices in Mt. Pleasant. You pick the number of the movie you want, reply with that number and Google will send you a text message with all the theaters that have that movie and the showtimes. You can test drive the SMS service from Google on this webpage (scroll down and you will see the search box). You can do lots of other searches with this service including:

Don’t be afraid to link up the power of your cell phone with the power of the Internet! Any phone that has texting capabilities can utilize the two services that have been highlighted here.

Next week’s posting will be about Mozilla Firefox (which most of you probably have) and the add-ons and extensions that make it the best web browser that exists.

Please feel free to leave questions in the comment section OR please leave a comment if you find another way to use these services that others might find interesting.

Who are our students? August 22, 2008

Posted by lcrosswe in Uncategorized.
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After watching the "Did You Know" video presentation at the opening faculty meeting it occurred to me that it is possible that we don’t really know/understand the historical background that our students are coming from.  Fortunately for us Beloit College just published their annual recap of history as their incoming freshman (18 year olds) know it.  This document is a great summary of the world that these students grew up in, and it reinforces (at least for me) the fact that we are really going to have to change in order to understand them.  Here is the list.  My favorite highlights from it include the following:

For these students, Sammy Davis Jr., Jim Henson, Ryan White, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Freddy Krueger have always been dead.

GPS satellite navigation systems have always been available.

Coke and Pepsi have always used recycled plastic bottles.

The Warsaw Pact is as hazy for them as the League of Nations was for their parents.

Clarence Thomas has always sat on the Supreme Court.

The Tonight Show has always been hosted by Jay Leno and started at 11:35 EST.

Summer Reading June 22, 2008

Posted by lcrosswe in Uncategorized.
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Inspired by several of my edubloggers, here is my summer reading list - before I get started let me say that I was just introduced to Vince Flynn by a colleague and have been devouring his books:

Fiction:

Non-Fiction

In addition I read Newsweek and Sports Illustrated weekly and Wired and PC World monthly.  I am looking forward to a great summer of reading!

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody May 8, 2008

Posted by lcrosswe in Education, Technology.
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image

I just finished reading a blog entry named Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. It was writtten by Clay Shirky, author of the book “Here Comes Everybody,” which I had the pleasure to read over spring break. In this post Shirky talks about how the post WWII/industrilized world in America gave us a commodity that was new to most of the population: free time. He discusses how that new commodity has been utilized since WWII and he focuses on TV viewing. He goes on to make the argument that due to the rise of the Internet, TV viewership has decreased and that participatory interaction between humans has increased (see Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, blogging, social bookmarking, Wikipedia, etc.)

Here is the quote from his blog that really got me thinking:

if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

I think that I would go further than he does with what this means in terms of our students. I believe that the entire way that they receive media is different than any other generation that is alive today. Their consumption habits have changed. They are still excited about a new album release from their favorite bands. Unlike us (college grads and older) though, they don’t have to trek down to the music store and buy the CD there. They can instantly download it online and stick it on their mp3 player. In some instances they can get the music for free - legally (see Radiohead.)

Think about your TV viewing habits. Have they changed in the last 5 years? Has TiVo caused change? What about the Internet, has it caused your habits to change? I know that it has changed my viewing habits. For example I:

Our students are watching less TV and viewing more on the Internet. You might think that this is not really a shift, but it most certainly is. They can pause their show at any moment to chat with their friends. It takes less time to view because there are only a few commercials (if any at all.)

What does this mean for us? We need to encourage and show our students how to do educational, useful, and fun activities with their new found free time. Encourage them to do any of the following:

What else can you think of for our students to do?

Are we a technology showcase school? April 6, 2008

Posted by lcrosswe in Education, Technology.
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[Note: much of this post has been prompted by listening to the podcast series "SOS: Shifting Our Schools"]

In August of 2004 the new Wando High School was opened and CCSD touted it as a “Technology Showcase School.” At the time the designation was understandable. CCSD spent loads of money getting a laptop for every teacher in the building, installing huge TVs in every room that the computer screen could be projected onto, placing a minimum of 4 student computers in each classroom, and buying interactive white boards for every teacher that wanted one (more or less.) It seems to me that we were being awarded this label based on the hardware in the building. Was this label slightly presumptuous on the part of CCSD? I can understand why they would give us this label based on the amount of money they sunk into technology. Our school was blessed with much technology. It is at times like this that I am reminded of a series of sermons that my pastor preached several years ago centered around the theme of “to whom much is given, much is expected.” With this in mind I would ask if we have done enough to qualify ourselves as a “Technology Showcase School”? Have we done what CCSD and our community expected us to do with this technology?

I would ask the following guiding questions to help us arrive at a useful answer:

And here is the kicker (in my mind):

I would be embarrassed to venture a guess on the majority of these benchmarks for our faculty. Let me be clear that I include myself as a failure in the majority of these categories. I do not feel that I am doing enough to warrant the label of a “Technology Showcase School.” This is an area where staff development would be most helpful. I know about blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc. I am having a tremendous problem figuring out how to implement them in a meaningful way into my mathematics courses. I am certain that my students do not leave my class with any sort of technological advantage over their peers who are in comparable classes in other schools.

Over the last few years we have worked with SREB in becoming one of their “High Schools That Work” sites. One of the messages that I have heard loud and clear from their national conference and their local in-services at Wando is that project-based assessments that are integrated across the curriculum are most meaningful to students. If we could figure out how to create these projects and then have a video or podcast or wiki page (or all) as the assessment then we have just hit an educational grand slam. A meaningful project where the students enjoy learning and then have to create (highest level of Bloom’s) something to show what they have learned.

I refuse to accept the argument that we can’t do these type of projects that involve a 21st century technological assessment because not all of our students have computers at home with Internet access. I have taught tons of low SES students in the computer labs at Wando and watched them skirt the CCSD filter to access their MySpace page (which I shut down immediately upon seeing it.) Please don’t try to argue that these kids cannot learn how to write a blog entry, edit a wiki page, or record a podcast if they can set up a MySpace page, edit their background (known as “pimping out” their page), and skirt the school filter.

We as a faculty need to make a commitment to creating new assessments or modifying old ones that make them more meaningful to our students. I believe that Wando has a long way to go in order to live up to our title of being a “Technology Showcase School.” I also believe that every school needs to work to achieve this goal in order for our students to be able to compete in a global economy when they finish their education.

How can we achieve this?

Google Reader Part 2 March 29, 2008

Posted by lcrosswe in Education.
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By now I hope that you are subscribed to a few feeds that you like and are wading through the various posts as time presents itself.  Today I would like to discuss what to do with your posts when you finish reading them.  If you don’t care to save a post or find it again, then just do nothing.  However, if you want to save a post for future reference there are two things that you can do:

  1. The easiest way to mark something as important is to "star" it.  You can find the star at the top of the article as well as the bottom of the article.  Just click in the star to note the article as one that you care about.  If you look in the left column of Reader you should see a link to "Starred Items."  Click on that to see all the articles that you have starred.
  2. Another choice (which I prefer) is to tag your favorite articles.  A tag can be any word or group of words that helps you sort items.  Some example tags could be vague such as English, history, math, etc.  You could also be more specific with tags such as Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, etc.  An article can have as many tags as you might like to give it.  You can assign tags to an article at the bottom of the article.  Look for the area that says "Edit Tags" and click on it.  You can then type in as many tags as you want (just separate them by commas).  MAKE SURE TO CLICK SAVE WHEN YOU ARE DONE!  Once you finish that you should see the tags appear in the left column in Reader.  Tags are great because Reader remembers your old tags and will pull them up for you when tagging something new.  For example, in my Reader I have a tag for "history education."  It would not be fun for me to have to retype the entire tag every time I wanted to add it.  Thankfully Reader does it for me.  All I have to do is click Edit Tags and then type in the letter "h."  Since this is the only tag that begins with the letter "h" it pulls right up and I just have to hit the tab key to add it (you may have to hit the down arrow key if you have several tags that begin with "h.") 
    Once this is done you can just click on the tags on the left and see all that articles that you wanted to save for that particular tag.

Please let me know if you have any questions about these topics.  The next post will be about sharing articles and/or tags in Reader.

Extending the Personal Learning Network - Part 1 March 12, 2008

Posted by lcrosswe in Education, Technology.
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I hope that you are all now integrating yourselves with Google Reader.  It is a great tool and is accessible through the CCSD filter, which is good news for us.  I have two items for you to look at today.  The first is a timely blog post from Vicki Davis, a teacher in GA whose blog I subscribe to.  Her post is in my shared items and is talking about getting up to speed on the changes in the Internet.  It goes right along with our discussion from yesterday afternoon.

The second item to look at is her list of bookmarks on del.icio.us.  Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site where you can save your bookmarks.  You can choose to make your bookmarks private or public (most people select public) and share them with the world.  It is a great way to share knowledge.  Vicki has sorted her bookmarks in a fashion that is easily accessible to us.  You can find her bookmarks here.

Please let me know if you are having problems with getting your Google Reader account off the ground.  If you are feeling adventurous, then please feel free to search the help topics in Google Reader.  Their help section is very clear and pretty easy to follow.

Freshmen in the 21st Century November 17, 2007

Posted by lcrosswe in Education.
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In a nutshell, here is what I believe that every freshmen should have/be required to do as they enter high school:

  1. Get a Google account (free) - Google is not going away and while they are a cash cow, they also seem to be dedicated to providing quality products that are free and seamlessly integrated. A Google account allows students to have GMail, GTalk, GDocuments, GCalendar, and most importantly of all, Google Reader. All of these are tools that encourage collaboration.
  2. All students must establish a blog at learnerblogs through either their freshmen focus class or their English I class. Ideally this would replace some (if not all) journal entries that students would turn into their teachers.

These three steps would put our students on the pathway to being digitally literate, however they are not enough. Several lessons must be taught along the way in order for students to understand what it means to be a digital citizen and how to establish their own personal learning network. For example:

The only way that we will be able to teach these concepts is if teachers know what they are talking about. We as professionals must learn this new material and come up with creative ways to integrate it into our existing curriculum. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, but we can always try to improve the design of the wheel.

Where did the Crosswell Class Blog go? November 17, 2007

Posted by lcrosswe in Education.
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If you happen to be one of my students, you are probably curious where the blog went that we have been using.  I have relocated it to a new location.  Please go there by clicking here and make sure to update your bookmarks.