Hintonblogger

Well, I have been absent for a while from my blog, but it certainly was for a reason. The past few months have been a blur to some degree. In January I left the Arizona Department of Education and took a position with Remote-Learner.net. After spending a little over 6 weeks in that position, I realized that I had made a mistake. I should clarify that the mistake had nothing to do whatsoever with Remote-Learner. It was entirely my own mistake. They are a terrific company, both to provide services and to work for. My mistake was not understanding that my true occupational passion is for K-12 education, with a healthy secondary interest in the technology side of things. Fortunately, in the middle of March the Department of Education (most especially Cathy Poplin and Nan Williams) were willing to let me return and continue in the great work that they are doing there.

My biggest regret in this whole journey is the tremendous inconvenience I caused both the Department of Education and, most especially, Remote-Learner. Sometimes, we have no other way to find things out about ourselves than by experience (which can be painful and it was for me). I appreciate tremendously how professionally the folks at Remote-Learner (and the Department of Education) handled this situation and certainly appreciate their understanding. It only increases my admiration of the company and the quality of the people that work for them.

With that backstory, that is why I have been more absent than normal from my blog. Things have finally settled down after these couple of job changes, finalizing the new Arizona Educational Technology Plan and a myriad of other things.

I have several blog post ideas in draft form, including some new thoughts about twitter and the echo chamber of educational technology. As always, NECC provides the backdrop for some thinking and great new ideas and so I'll likely be sharing some of those as well. I will also be doing some rearranging of my hintonweb blogs and sites as I try to better organize things for me, my thoughts, interests, and professional portfolio. I'm looking forward to things.....

So I came across this article at http://www.lifehacker.com about the One Hundred Push Ups Takes You from Zero to a Hundred in Six Weeks.

The article is interesting, the comments are priceless, I've included some of the comments here (hang with it to the end, you'll get a good laugh):

Well, I certainly applaud anyone wanting to do a hundred pushups, but take it from this old gym rat, I've spent my entire adult life in the gym, and a program like this one can do more harm than good.

If you only train one part of your body (and that's all a single exercise like pushups is going to do for you), you're setting yourself up for injuries down the road. I've seen it a hundred times.

It's like putting a powerful engine in a stock Toyota Tercel. What will you accomplish? You'll blow out the drive train, the clutch, the transmission, etc., because those factory parts aren't designed to handle the power of an engine much more powerful than the factory installed engine.

Push-ups basically only train the chest muscles and to some extent, the triceps. What you really want to do is train your entire body, all the major muscle groups (chest, back, abdomen, legs, shoulders and arms) at the same time, over the course of a workout. And don't forget your cardiovascular work!

I'm proud of you guys wanting to do this. Three cheers! Falling in love with exercise, eating right, etc., is one of the greatest things you can do for yourself. And you WILL fall in love with it if you can just force yourself to stick with it a year or two and experience the amazing progress you'll make.

But do it right, okay?

My advice, find a good gym, with qualified trainers who will design your programs for you (especially in the beginning, until you get the hang of it yourself) and guide you in your quest for physical fitness. Thirty to 45 minutes a day, three days a week, is all you'll ever need to do (I refuse to believe anyone is so busy that he or she cannot make time for that, especially considering how important it is).

And don't worry about being embarrassed or not being in shape the first time you walk into the gym. You have to start somewhere and almost every one of us were there ourselves at one time. So no one will say anything to you and very, very quickly you will progress way beyond that stage anyway.

Now get out there and do it! :-)

A follow-up comment:

I bet I can eat 100 Big Macs.

And finally:

"Well, I certainly applaud anyone wanting to eat 100 big Macs, but take it from this old McDonald's rat, I've spent my entire adult life eating at McDonnald's, and a program like this one can do more harm than good.

If you only eat big Macs one part of your body (and that's all a single burger type like Big Mac is going to do for you), you're setting yourself up for injuries down the road. I've seen it a hundred times.

Big Macs basically only train the gut muscles and to some extent, the esophagus. What you really want to do is train your entire digestive system, all the major gut groups (esophagus, stomach, colon, liver, and kidneys) at the same time, over the course of a Big Mac meal. So, you will need to add large Big fries, and Large coke with it. Ask for the "Go Big" program.

I'm proud of you guys wanting to do this. Three big meals! Falling in love with eating big Macs, etc., is one of the greatest things you can do for yourself. And you WILL fall in love with it if you can just force yourself to stick with it a year or two and experience the amazing progress you'll make.

But do it right, okay?

My advice, find any McDonnald near you, with qualified burger flippers who will design your burger for you (especially in the beginning, until you get the hang of it yourself) and guide you in your quest for physical fatness. Three to 5 burgers a day, three days a week, is all you'll ever need to do (I refuse to believe anyone is so busy that he or she cannot make time for that, especially considering how important it is).

And don't worry about being embarrassed or not being out of shape the first time you walk into McDonnalds. You have to start somewhere and almost every one of us were there ourselves at one time. So no one will say anything to you and very, very quickly you will progress way beyond that stage anyway.

Now get out there and get fat! :-) "

First, welcome to a 2009 project of mine called the Daily Photo Project. This journey consists of taking at least one picture of something each day of the year. I had heard about this project that others had done and really liked the idea. Every day is a gift and there are so many things that happen daily that are remarkable in their own way. This project is a way to help make us stop and remember that and to document it. I was inspired by Darcy Norman doing it and really like the explanation about the project you can find here. You can check out my 2009/365 project album as it evolves at http://www.picasaweb.com/bretthintons.

I decided to create an additional project called 2009/52 Weeks where I create a collage of pictures from the week (since I obviously take more than 1 a day to try and get a good picture for the day) that represents some of our family activities. You can also check out the evolving results at our Picasaweb site (see link above) and our family blog (http://family.hintonweb.com).

Really quickly, here some notes on the session (live blog is available in replay).

The big finance issue that came out here is that ADM formulas for per pupil funding don't handle the flexibility of online programs. Since students can (and do) enroll in more than just 4 classes (which is what ADM is typically calculated on), it is hard to identify how to fund those extra classes. Part-time programs are harder to fund, largely because they are dependent on special appropriations, grant money, or simply excess budget funds (and who has those these days!).

Another deterrent seems to be the reluctance of traditional high schools to lose their ADM (makes sense) and so they are resistance to letting students take online courses if it is going to siphon off a part of their ADM to pay for those courses.

Live blog replay/notes are below the jump. (See the read more link)

Legislative work is all about relationships, relationships, relationships - in the summer especially when they are off-session. The quality of those relationships will determine if they call on you for info when a vote is up in the legislature. Term limited legislators rely more heavily on lobbyists and staff - so you should target those people in term limit states.

Next Question: What should you never do in working with legislators? Don't go in just with you handout - you need a compelling elevator speech to explain simply, quickly, and powerfully. If you don't know something, don't BS - tell them I don't know, but I will find out and get back to them quickly.

3rd Question: How do you go about creating your value proposition for your initiative?

Quantify, Quantify, Quantify - if you don't have something similar - use data from like populations that do have data as a basis.

No one wants to be a backwater - you can trot out comparisons with other states if you need some firepower

Keep your value proposition simple and succinct.

(cross posted to Virtual Schools Symposium wiki at http://vss2008.wikispaces.com)

Utah Electronic High School

It is a credit-granting organization (different from many other states. It is open-entry/open-exit school and they finid that 50% of their enrollments are credit acceleration.

They are implementing proctoring - not many of the individuals raised their hand when asked if their virtual schools had implemented proctoring. Kathy Webb, the principal of UEH, said she thought we all will be doing that in order to be accredited.

They have 3 secretaries, 1 admin, part-time counselor, 73 licensed teachers. Staffing is very low compared to volume. She recommended not duplicating this. Their funding comes from a line-item - it has grown to 2 million per year. Schools do not lose funding because of students attending UEH.

They have a 6-month window to finish a quarter-credit class.

Pain Points:

• Lots of kids who want accounts but are finishing. Basically completion percentage.
• Accreditation process
• Managing staffing ratios and reporting
• Open entry/open exit process is not supported well in the LMS arena
• Vendor lock-in / commercial tool costs
• Proctor demands for out-of-state kids

Partnering with TAA - The American Academy - Rebekah Richards One of the big challenges they faced in helping their own company and the online high school was secure proctoring.

Custom-designed hybrid of an LMS/CMS/SIS. That turned me off right there - how are they supporting non-custom developed content? Does it support SCORM and SIF? Why would you custom-design things rather than leverage what others have done? How can they fund development for new features over time? Doesn't it make sense to build solutions that allow for greater flexibility - It seems like UEH is moving towards the same vendor lock-in but with another vendor? After hearing Kathy and Rebekah talk more, it sounds like they are using open-source technologies and frameworks so most of my questions are invalidated based on that info

Once again, a vendor who seems to be embedding the content, delivery, and reporting tool into one monolithic tool. Do they build their own content or buy it?

Their model is School as a Service.

Back to Kathy -

One of the challenges is working with the cost of multi-media learning objects. Talked about converting text-based elements into multimedia elements. That's a start, but will can it compare in quality to stuff that people like Pearson and their instructional and flash designers can produce.

Content is free - they are looking at creative commons licensing versus DRM stuff.

Kathy and I share many ideas here. However this is quite a challenging issue to deal with.

Pay for Teachers: Teachers provide a minimum number of hours a day - pay $535 a month for an hour a day. Interesting concept.

Inevitably I seem to run into situations where I have a video in one format and need to get it into another. Windows Media Video file (WMV) into Flash or Quicktime, back the other way, or to simply squeeze the size down a bit.

This has happened twice to me in the last day - once with a video clip (1.2 gb) from my mythtv box and another with a Windows Movie Maker generated WMV file. In the first case Mpeg Streamclip helped me take that 1.2 gb tv recording and shrink it to around a 20mb Quicktime file that could be viewed via the web. In the second case, I used MediaCoder to take a 5mb WMV file of a family "commercial" we created (you can see that one at http://family.hintonweb.com) into a 3.5 mb FLV file to embed in our family blog.

These two programs are like my video (and audio) converter swiss army knifes and are well worth their install. I have tried the whole range of video converters (both paid and free) and I haven't seen any that do things quite as well as these two. They just seem to come in handy!

P.S. I also use Handbrake occasionally when I might need to grab a clip from a DVD.

"This above all: to thine own self be true". - (Hamlet Act I, Scene III)

I attended a session that I was really disappointed in yesterday and I think there is an important lesson to learn here from the experience. Sometimes sessions don't connect with us, that's a reality and okay. The problem I ran into yesterday was I attended a session that said it was going to cover a particular topic and covered something completely different.

We all want people to attend our sessions when we present (I know I do). Likewise, we attend sessions because something about the topic interests us. The whole point of these sessions is to have the attendees come away satisfied, having received something they were looking for. When that happens, the session/workshop is successful. Both presenter and attendee got what they wanted.

As attendees, we have to go into a session with a level of trust that what we read in the description is what is going to be covered. When a description says one thing and covers something completely different, that breaks the trust between the presenter and attendee and, generally, the attendee will leave feeling deceived and unsatisfied. Of course any good session description and title with have a little marketing savvy to them. There are so many good sessions that you have "sell" your session a little bit to grab someone's interest. The challenge in doing this is to not market your session as something it is not.

So the lesson here is: Trust in what you have to share, people will come.

Yesterday went pretty well, but I'm thinking today will be even better. Here's what I'm planning for today:

• 7:00 - 8:00am Learning.com Breakfast with Robert Zucker (Marriott Rivercenter Salon A/B)
• 8:30 - 9:45am Tuesday Keynote (HGCC Ballroom C)
• 10:00 - 11:00am ISTE Observation Tool (Grand Hyatt Bowie B)
• 11:00 - 12:00am Seven Habits of Effective Tech Directors (Grand Hyatt Crockett C/D)
• 12:30 - 1:30pm Understanding Digital Learners (Grand Hyatt Texas Ballroom D)
• 2:00 - 3:00pm Learning.com Presentation (Marriott Rivercenter Conference Rm 15)
• 3:30 - 4:30pm Math A-Z (HGCC 102 A)
• 5:00 - 7:00pm AzTEA Affiliate Reception (Rio-Rio Cantina)

Another full day, lots of good stuff. I'm especially excited to see Ian Juke's Understanding Digital Learners session, as well as the Seven Habits of Effective Tech Directors. I've got some notes and thoughts about a couple of sessions from yesterday that I'll be posting shortly.

So it is crazy early here in San Antonio and I should be in bed by now. Of course, instead I'm tweaking my schedule and wondering how to fit in all the neat sessions and events. It is looking to be a terrific conference and it is an annual event I look forward to for months.

As I reflected on Jen Wagner's post "Take the Conference Challenge", I've decided that for NECC this year I've officially declared myself FREE.

Free to not be to everything or everywhere. Free to miss a session I really want to attend for another that is equally as good and to not feel guilty about it. Free to enjoy sitting down with some friends and reconnecting with them and to understand what they are finding of value here. And finally, FREE to have fun and realize that NECC is only the beginning, and thanks to NECC's Ning network and to Classroom 2.0 I can always catch up later. Thanks Network!

I'm not free apparently to get to sleep early though - always room for improvement I suppose. Here's tomorrow's schedule - always subject to change, but looking pretty good thus far :)

• 7am - Get Registered
• 7:30 - 8:30am SETDA Breakfast at Marriott Rivercenter
• 8:30 - 10:30am CoSN Council Leadership Forum (emphasis - Digital Content)
• 10:30 - 11:30am Federal Program Meeting (EETT - SETDA)
• 11 - 12pm Virtual Classroom: Hybrid Learning in Action (HGCC 214 C/D)
• 12:30 - 1:30pm Literacy Isn't Enough: Digital Fluency in the Age of InfoWhelm (Grand Hyatt Texas Ballroom D)
• 2 -3pm Moving the Texas Vision 2020 to Reality Takes Planning! (HGCC 001 B)
• 3:30 - 4:30pm Scholastic Administrator's Hottest Trends in Edtech (Grand Hyatt Lone Star Ballroom E)
• 4:45 - 5:45pm A Meeting of Moodlers (Grand Hyatt Lone Star Ballroom B)
• 7:00pm - 9:00pm SEDTA-iTunesU K12 initiative kickoff event (Grand Hyatt San Antonio, Texas Ballroom E/F)

When I'm not in a session I'm aiming to hit the Blogger's Cafe and see some of NECC Unplugged (impromptu presentations by NECC attendees - see the schedule for more details - you may have to scroll the page a bit to get to the actual schedule), as well as the poster sessions. Hope to see people around!

The abundance of information today is truly a blessing to all. At the same time, for many of us, the neverending supply of it makes it difficult to keep up. (When was the last time you thought or said - i just can't keep up with the ... insert RSS feeds, websites, email, etc). Web 2.0 has only increased this burden with the onslaught of content production that is occurring by anybody that has a web browser. Don't misunderstand me, I love Web 2.0 and the concept of user-created content - it just makes for more potentially great ideas and information out there.

Maybe you feel overwhelmed as I sometimes do - I love to hear the different ways in which people filter information so they don't get overwhelmed. Ultimately, for me, is that the ability of the tools to help me find and see only the content that is relevant to me has to catch up with the abundance of tools for producing that content.

There is a great article I came across at Yahoo News, "Once shunned by academics, Wikipedia now a teaching tool". I have long been a fan of Wikipedia and it is often the first place I turn to begin the learning process about a particular topic. What has repeatedly surprised me, however, is the particular vehemence that many teachers seem to feel about its use in the classroom. This smacks of the "ivory tower" syndrome to which we, as teachers, can often fall victim. This recent story should be a reminder that most writing exhibits some type of bias either in tone, selection of topic, or otherwise. I'm okay with the fact that Wikipedia is not necessarily a source that has enough inherent validity to be cited in a paper, but that certainly doesn't mean it can't be a useful tool in the learning process.

To the point of the article, however, it was nice to see a university recognize a great benefit that Wikipedia brings to an educational activity, that of relevance and audience. Rather than write a term paper about a topic, what better thing to do than to write that article for the world's open encyclopedia. The students have an instant audience and a significantly more relevant reason to write that article well - especially with over 680 million visits a year.

Consider the educational activities - foreign language students can write (and read) articles about a myriad of topics, social studies students can write, expand, or correct articles about a variety of historical events, or literature students can write an analysis of the books that they are studying (the example from the article above).

I guess the biggest lesson that Wikipedia has taught me is that the new contributive web makes it so our students no longer have to perform just for the audience of one (me the teacher) rather their audience can be truly the world.

This is, for me, the "Ultimate Syncing Solution" and I've found it. It allows me to do the following things:

1. Have a work calendar
2. Have a personal calendar
3. See both my work and my personal calendar in Outlook
4. My work colleagues only see my work events
5. My contacts are on my phone, in Outlook, and in my Windows Live Hotmail account and they are always in Sync
6. My calendar is available in Outlook, on my phone, and in Google Calendar and they are always in sync.

This represents "Sync Nirvana" for me. While the solution isn't overly hard, it certainly could have been a little bit easier.

To accomplish it I use Plaxo in Outlook to sync my contacts with Windows Live and ActiveSync my contacts to my phone. My tasks and notes also ActiveSync to my device.

The calendar is a bit more complex. For this I had to purchase a product called OggSync, but it now allows me to have my calendar auto-update (using the "calendar in the cloud" capability of Google Calendar) from my phone, Outlook, and Google Calendar. Here is the article that explains the details. I did experience a duplicate events blip, but since then it has been smooth sailing.

On the bus, at home, work, or wherever I'm at my information is right there at my fingertips.

In a post back in December, I compared Google and Microsoft's offerings for the Web 2.0/mobile phone realm and how they were stacking up for me.. At least two significant things have changed since that ranking. The first was the release of Google's Gdata API for Contacts. While I'm excited about it's potential, it still has very few any real products using it and the one that I tried (which I like for Google Calendar sync), I was less than impressed. Also, Microsoft released Windows Live for Windows Mobile for all Windows Mobile users (minus Live Messenger as a feature). That now allows any Windows Mobile user to benefit from Hotmail and contact sync.

Now some commentary...In the intervening 4 months I have experienced nothing but headache in trying to sync my contacts with the cloud. The only provider that seemed to be able to do this reliably was Plaxo. The new release of Windows Live for mobile has changed that (at least it appears so) and the contact sync is working properly on both Windows Mobile 5 and WM6 devices. And I'm happy again. Now my contacts truly can live on my mobile device, in Outlook, and on the Web - all seemlessly. Hotmail is fast becoming my hub for email, with contact sync working properly and Windows Live for mobile offering push email access without requiring a Blackberry - it seems like maybe, just maybe Windows Mobile might be living up to is potential.

Of course flash videos on Youtube still aren't working so I guess life isn't perfect yet....

No, I'm not actually going back to Facebook yet and yes I did actually "deactivate" my account with them. As far as I know I should be "unreachable" in Facebook (someone tell me if I'm a wrong). Rather this post outlines what I wish I could see in Facebook (and other social networks) to help remedy the problem I described earlier.

Images

Dealing with offensive images is actually the easiest part. The first step Facebook (or again any social network) could take would be to simply allow users to mark an image explicit or suggestive. Maybe an AJAX-type control that appears when you mouse over an image for example. This control should be available universally for images (ads, uploaded images on pages, profile images, etc). Likewise, whenever an image was uploaded the opportunity to mark that image as explicit or suggestive should also be presented. These images thus marked would then not show up for me, perhaps replaced by a generic image icon saying it is a blocked explicit picture or perhaps rotating to another ad or piece of content depending on the situation. As a basic level this gives me control over what I see in my social network (that sounds reasonable doesn't it).

Realizing that Facebook and other social networks make money by learning about you and presenting relevant ads, this would actually be a good thing. Why would Facebook want to present me with things that are offensive, explicit, or otherwise unwanted by me - wouldn't that accomplish just the opposite of its marketing/money-making strategy? Again, at a very basic level this gives individuals in the community some additional control over the content they are presented with.

The One Preference to Rule Them All...

It becomes even more powerful and useful a tool when combined with a preference to leverage the community at large. For example, say the previous "explicit" option was combined with a "not explicit" and a "not rated" option. Any image would then have those 3 options and would default to "not rated". When individuals encountered an offensive image they could mark it thus, while an individual who didn't think it was explicit could mark it "not explicit". An individual could go into their account and set a preference indicating the "explicitness" level of images they would be willing to see.

But isn't that censorship you might say....No, it isn't censorship, it's self-censorship which is different and is something we already do. When we encounter things we don't like or that are offensive to us we elect to not participate, read, watch, or whatever. Enabling a system like I described would actually allow this same practice we already have with movies, books, and music to extend to our social networks. It would continue to allow users to freely interact while providing a means for us to more finely-tune the type of interactions and content we might encounter. For both users and social network creators this would seem a win-win solution - leveraging the community to reduce things that might limit participation, because, ultimately, it is in the participation where we derive value from our social networks and the networks themselves are able to increase their ad revenue.

I hope to sometime be back to Facebook, until then I'll catch up with you on some other network I suppose (Twitter anyone)?

I'm member of many different social networks (Classroom 2.0 on Ning, LinkedIN, Twitter, Facebook, and other communities like Drupal.org and Moodle.org among others). Social networks, like other mediums of media, are successful that more people view or participate in them. In large part they are judged successful by how capable they are of connecting you with people or things that you are interested in. Likewise, they tend to fail when they are unable to help you make those connections. One of the powerful new "technologies" is that ability of these social networks to suggest people, events, or other resources based on what it knows about you. I think this is a tremendously useful tool in helping us connect with things or people very easily. So why am I leaving Facebook - especially when I would maintain that it does or has helped me connect with people and things that I have an interest in (family, friends, people who share my interests, etc)?

The ultimate reason is that Facebook, in connecting me with my friends, family members, and other events and subjects I was interested in, also presented me with things that are horribly offensive to me. So offensive that those things completely outweigh the other things it was doing well. This lead me to the decision that my only choice was to choose not to participate. So I'll be closing my Facebook account (which I hear is not that easy to do actually). In the final judgement, Facebook failed me, it connected me to things that I didn't want exposure to often enough that it wasn't worth continuing my participation. My only question (which I'm going to Twitter and email to friends shortly) is how they put up with the exposure to pornographic images as they use Facebook - do they encounter them frequently? I would be doing unrelated things and then BAM! an add with a slew of pornographic images would appear on a sidebar. Once a event that was advertised in the Phoenix, AZ network had a very objectionable picture. I couldn't get it off my page until I changed networks, completely leaving the Phoenix, AZ network, even then the Phoenix, AZ network info (including the picture) didn't immediately disappear.

I'm not a novice to the Internet or social networks here. I realize that occasionally, no matter how skilled or wise an Internet user you are, that you may run into an image or two, in those cases you ignore it and just move away from the pages. I tried those things with Facebook, I even used Firefox's ability to block images from certain URLs and still ran into things that were objectionable. I wanted to use it, I really did. I think Facebook has value - but it simply wasn't worth it for the content I kept running into.

Allowing users to contribute content is a powerful new tool provided by the Internet today. Social networks success will depend on their how well they let users (and the social networks) select content that users want to see and avoid people and content that they don't. I have some ideas on how Facebook could get me back, which I think would hold true for many others as well. That post will have to wait until after work however...

Until then, for now, goodbye Facebook......

I know this is kind of a line of product releases, but Moodle, Drupal, and CiviCRM are just awesome pieces of software that help make the Internet an incredible tool for collaboration and communication. I have to give them a shoutout when they deserve it, and CiviCRM's 2.0 release definitely deserves it.

I built a member registration site for our local ISTE affiliate here in Arizona, AzTEA. Of course I used Drupal and, since they were wanting a customer contact manager that allowed registration signups, membership renewals, etc, I thought CiviCRM would be a natural fit.

There have certainly been some growing pains, but overall, it certainly is bringing some order into a space that has been unwieldy to manage previously. One of my biggest hangups has been CiviCRMs inability to handle online signups while tracking an offline payment option (check or purchase order being the two major ones). With the release of the new CiviCRM 2.0 release, that hangup has been taken care of as well as numerous other improvements.

Combining those improvements with moving the site to a new VPS on Wiredtree, and toss in a new Drupal module called Resource Conflict (which will aid in the scheduling of presentations at our conferences) and I think the AzTEA member site will continue to be more useful as a membership coordination tool. I'm looking forward to the site upgrade and move to the new VPS as well as implementing the new features. I'll let you know how it goes.

Well I just got the exciting news that Moodle 1.9 has been released. The release notes for 1.9 look awesome and I'm excited to get the final release installed over at HintonWEB Learning Center to start playing with it. Here are the features that I'm most excited about having:

1. New Gradebook - the new gradebook looks like it has many of the features that are important for basic gradebook functionality and offers a good starting point to continue to grow the quality of the Moodle Gradebook
2. Outcomes - tying learning outcomes to educational activities is important, especially in an environment where so much emphasis is placed on teaching to "standards"
3. Enhancing the statistics module (and fixing its bugs), improving scalability, tagging, and the beautiful new curvy corners them by Urs Hunkler

I'm becoming more convinced that Moodle's blogging feature will be obsoleted at this point (especially considering the lack of addition of comments in this version). The integration with the Mahara portfolio system may offer a glimpse at how blogs best fit in, as pieces of a student portfolio developed over time. In playing with Mahara just briefly, it looks to offer an impressive, but simple way for students to aggregate different types of learning artifacts over time, including their blog posts.

Congratulations to Martin Dougiamas and everybody that helps make Moodle one of the best learning tools out there.

Sometimes I wonder what all to post here on my blog. My interests are varied, but I'm pretty passionate about them. I love technology (when I'm not having to fix it) and am a big sports fan, especially of BYU and the professional sports teams here in Phoenix (Suns, D-backs, maybe the Cardinals this year, we'll see). I love to read too and enjoy learning new things. As a Social Studies teacher at heart, politics and history are always a favorite topic. I started this blog to focus on education items primarily, and it will likely always be that way, but I also have a lot of things about technology, politics, that I also wanted to share.

I've hesitated to put this other stuff up here, but found that mainly meant I didn't blog as much. So I'm back to blogging about what I feel passionate to write about, and hope that it's useful to someone (perhaps no one as much as me though). If I find that over time my posts are less about education and more about other things, than maybe I'll have to reflect on whether I'm really an "educational" blogger, or some other type.

Since this is my creative and reflective outlet, I'm going to use it as such. To help someone who might be just focused on education stuff, I'm including a small list of the main site feeds on the sidebar to the far right. That way you can subscribe just to the education feed if you want to, rather than the main one.

Lots of exciting things going on, never enough time.... It's all about the journey though isn't it?

Well this is my first post Gilbert Public Schools blog post. I left GPS last week after 6.5 years and took a new job as an Education Program Specialist in the Arizona Department of Education educational technology section. I am sad to leave the great people I worked with at GPS, but am looking forward to the new challenges and opportunities I will have. Some of my duties will include coordinating E-Rate efforts for schools statewide, assisting with the EETT state grants for ED Tech, and helping work with the collaborative learning communities and other projects within IDEAL. There are already some neat things brewing and I'm looking forward to the launch of the new IDEAL portal in the middle of January.

I've been riding the bus to my office downtown, and, while the commute isn't terrific, it's nice to let someone else do the driving. I've enjoyed making use of the time to read, play with my new Internet-enabled Alltel 6800, and using it to write this blog article for example!

Just a quick update on my going ons. Happy Holidays!

versus

I just got a new PDA phone, an Alltel HTC 6800, and this has prompted a re-evaluation of how I use the Internet, email, and calendaring solutions in this Web 2.0 data-enabled world. The concept of "syncing in the clouds" where data is available online, on the desktop, and on the mobile device in a format that is optimized for each environment (i.e. rich client on the desktop, rich web client, and easy-to-use mobile version) holds tremendous potential (and frustration at times). There are various Web 2.0 companies that provide multiple pieces of my ultimate productivity suite, (Zoho is a great example), but Google and Microsoft are the only ones that offer integrated solutions. My brother has been a long-time proponent of Microsoft's solutions, but I think they have been playing catch-up to the rest, Google especially, but MS seems like they may be clueing into things lately.From my experience here is how the Google-MS office/productivity/collaboration tools offering compares:

The score is (each "win" counts as 1 point): Google - 5, Microsoft - 4, so the winner is.....Microsoft! What you say? Is this math according to Microsoft? The answer comes down to mobile integration with contacts pure and simple. I refuse to maintain contact information in two places and I need it accessible so that I can call it on my phone, as well as use it to email and I don't want to have to bother with exporting/importing when things change. Gmail's lack of contact sync (which has been requested here) is a killer for me here. The mobile device integration is also slightly slanted towards Microsoft at this point (though Google's Android initiative and purported intent to bid on the 700mhz spectrum seem to indicate lots of new competition for the future). I'll post some more detail (i.e. my rationale for the scoring) over a few posts in the next couple of weeks.

My previous post and Will Richardson's recent post about "Network Learning Practice" has fueled some thinking about how I manage the sources of learning I use. The other significant factor has been through my experimenting with a wide variety of social/learning networks that are out there. I have accounts/pages on Facebook, Linked-In, Ning (through the Classroom 2.0 ning group), and others I'm sure I've forgotten. I understand the concept of being apart of "like" groups of people or for searching out or staying in contact with people. What I have failed to "get" until now is ""Twitter". I just didn't get it, I probably still don't entirely, but there is some understanding where there wasn't any before.

When my brother, a software developer and information connoisseur, and I were discussing Twitter, his comment (which I agreed with at the time) was that it was just "noise", as in non-useful information. But now I understand that Twitter really isn't about noise, or status updates, or incessant "Tweets" about the smallest little things. It is about a dialogue with "your network", about creating a conversation and recording it in a way that attaches it to you. Plaxo Pulse is another type of this, but attached to your other "connections" online. Twitter's flexibility in the way it allows individuals and groups to interact with other in particular in conjunction with mobile phones/messaging is probably what drives it's popularity, as well as the tremendous "noise" it generates.

Basically, the way I've come to understand it is that Twitter (or Tumblr, etc) is like comments might be on blogs. "Tweets" are short (like comments typically) and they organically form into a conversation that can go in a variety of ways. The difference is that the comments get posted to our own "comment" blog (call it a micro-blog if you want) and we can add friends so that we can easily follow their comments too and these comments can be about whatever is on our mind, or happening in the moment. In some cases this allows the dialogue among friends to occur around a particular topic. Thinking of it another way, it is kind of like a mass text message to a particular group. Twitter makes this possible by allowing us to turn notifications on or off, so that we get notified when our friends are commenting on something when we want to (though we can always go back and see online what they've said).

One easy way I thought this could be used (in a non-educational setting) would be around the BYU (my alma mater) and the Utah (our archrival) football game. My friends who are BYU fans and I can all turn on notifications for our group and when something great happens then you can tweet and respond to tweets and engage in an instant conversation about it. In concept, Twitter isn't really that different than what we have had in group instant messaging chats, but what it allows is for this to happen on the web or (even more mobile) via our cell phones, get notified from only the people we want to be notified of, and then archives that on a webpage so we can always review it.

Educationally (putting aside for a moment the obvious privacy issues), it allows individuals to discuss events, ideas, homework problems instantly. The backchannel conversation (I think that is the term being bandied around) that can occur through twitter is an interesting concept. I wonder what teachers/professors would think of the "backchannel" conversations that occur in class (I'm sure there are plenty of college students that twitter from their classes). If nothing else, I see a lot of potential value in Twitter where previously I only saw noise. I still won't be "tweeting" what I'm having for breakfast tomorrow though.

The true challenge of the 21st-century seems to be the ability to identify and assimilate valuable information and then to apply it appropriately. The difficulty lies in the incredible proliferation of information sources which constantly compete for our attention. This situation threatens us with the condition of running from one new thing to the next without ever contextualizing the importance of these new things in the framework of previous knowledge and actions (i.e. it becomes unmanageable). For example of, do you find yourself frequently saying, "I'm so behind the times, I can never keep up," or "My {email/RSS feeds} are overloaded, I'll never get caught up with the {email/posts} I haven't read."

I believe the challenge we face with these elements of our lives are similar in principle to the challenges our students face from slick media marketing and the barrage of "connectedness" from their cell phones, music players, and internet access. As I face this challenge myself, I've reflected upon 3 principles of effective information management that help me to "own" the information (and use it to my advantage) rather than being at the mercy of it.

Quantity

The information/interaction I consume or experience has to be in a certain range where I feel confident in my abilities to consistently assimilate or contextualize what I encounter. If it is far above a manageable range then the information I am bombarded with can actually be paralyzing, rather than empowering. If needed, make the hard decision and prune sources of information or interaction to a manageable level.

Variety

As quantity is maintained at a manageable level, it is critical that variety be preserved. Without some variety in your information/interaction we run the risk of fostering a narrow/closed range of sources. This can be an even more dangerous condition than information overload, as we can narrow ourselves to irrelevancy.

Quality

Physically, we are largely products of our diet. Intellectually we are byproducts of the quality of our input and interaction. Never skimp on quality!

The question remains for all of us as to how we manage the information/interaction in our lives (especially the online kind which is so prolific). As I prune the number of feeds I read, prioritize them, and explore new information and interactive sources (such as Twitter) I find myself coming back to these questions:

How is the quality of what I'm reading? Is it really worth the time I'm trading for it? How relevant is it to me? Does my learning network have sufficient breadth of topic(s), as well as depth? Is there so much there that it is distracting, rather than useful?

It is quite simply a daily challenge of living in the 21st Century. Are our kids ready for a lifetime of this?

UPDATE: Just ran across a recent post by Will Richardson titled "Network Learning Practice" that has some excellent thoughts about this topic. One of the key quotes that stood out in his post was this statement:

"I find myself reflecting really deeply of late about how we build these connections, how we manage them, how we leverage them."

-AMEN!

There is a great article in the August 2006 edition of the Scientific American titled The Expert Mind. It is a rather lengthy, but fascinating article about the process in which we become experts at something and it basically focuses on learning theory. It's premise is that "effortful study" (i.e. studying with motivation and structure) over time produces significant learning progress in a particular topic):

The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert--in chess, music and a host of other subjects--sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study that will improve their reading and math skills?

It concludes with this paragraph:

Roland G. Fryer, Jr., an economist at Harvard University, has experimented with offering monetary rewards to motivate students in underperforming schools in New York City and Dallas. In one ongoing program in New York, for example, teachers test the students every three weeks and award small amounts--on the order of $10 or $20--to those who score well. The early results have been promising. Instead of perpetually pondering the question, "Why can't Johnny read?" perhaps educators should ask, "Why should there be anything in the world he can't learn to do?"

Is that all it takes, finding the motivation factor? What about the students who aren't motivated, or motivated enough, by the offer of money? How do we find the motivating factors that preclude or cause the "effortful study" and can external motivational factors (such as monetary rewards) generate the effort required for success (i.e. "effortful study")? Lots of good questions for me to mull over the turkey this weekend!

The Expert Mind, an article certainly worth reading.

I finally figured out how to auto-boot an iMac as a Thin Client to Ubuntu. The Open Firmware commands are:

setenv boot-device enet:"ip of LTSP server",yaboot (without the quotes)

Now it auto boots as a thin client whenever it is started up, there's one more thing off my to figure out list.

I'm going to be giving a Poster Presentation at the WOW conference about Thin-Clients. It's a technology education has to be looking at considering what Web 2.0 allows to do using just a browser and the realities of budgetary constraints on education. Passing Bonds are not a reliable or stable funding source for technology. In order to really have a technology vision or plan it would be nice to get some stable funding sources that reflect the realities of what we need to teach the students.

From a school/district perspective I really think we have to ask ourselves what our use cases are for technology and if we can justify by "fat clients" for our students.

I would like to see the day come that we had a budget for 1-1 laptop initiatives because I believe that is ultimately where we need to go with education. The funding commitment throughout education doesn't exist, however, for such an undertaking. Perhaps thin clients can be a technology that will help us bridge that gap.

This is a long overdue post that I wanted to get up to my blog. It comes from attending a previous NECC and talks about some of the ideas that I came across that have directed my professional development efforts over the last year or so.

In between sessions I went to the Poster Gallery where they had people with poster/computer displays about varying topics. I went by several that had to do with professional development and had to share some of the great ideas that are coming out about creative technology staff development options.

Tech Academy Immersive, week long program.

Job Embedded Training Stafford County Schools (in Virginia?) and Pendergast Schools in Arizona shared the concept of embedding training with an on-site technology integration specialist. Pendergast furthered that idea with the concept of using Library Media Specialists as resources as well.

Ed Tech Specialist Certifications This is my own idea, but is basically a certification concept that awards teachers a certificate/qualification for completing a certain number of classes on a particular topic.

8 One Liners That Stick: "George Bernard Shaw once said that ‘The problem with communication … is the illusion that it has been accomplished.’"

(Via lifehack.org.)

I got this via my feeds this morning and thought how true it is (my wife surely would agree :) - I love you honey!).

My first lesson from NECC is an old one, have patience. I went into my first set of sessions and hopped from one to the other and then again. Now I wish I hadn't. I'm realizing that the conversations/presentations that occur here in person at NECC work a little differently than the ones that happen virtually (I know, duh!).

I have grown far to accustomed to skipping and skimming information as I try to keep up with the virtual discussion over the past year. I think I went into my first session that same way. What I found (and will have to keep reminding myself) is that I have to give the conversation time to develop. It's like I have to slow down my "twitch" reaction to conversations in order to get value out of them.

Has anybody else noticed this? Perhaps it is because I'm looking for the large and flashy, when I should be looking for small, but significant understandings?

Well I'm back at NECC and looking forward to another great learning and networking experience. I think what the addition of the Hot Topic Lounges this year (including the blogger's cafe that I'm writing this from) were great ideas. I'm looking forward to heading over to the Second Life area later this morning to see if I can learn how to "fly" better, edit my avatar, and, in general, become better acquainted with moving around and interacting there.

I'm presenting in the Open-Source Lab on Drupal, as well as presenting a session in there about Moodle, both of which are on Wednesday. I was up late last night trying to finalize my schedule and am excited about today's sessions I'll be attending.

My primary goals for this year's conference is to identify areas of change in the way I service my schools, teachers, and students in integrating technology. The biggest challenge for me at NECC, where this is a plethora of great ideas and conversations, is to focus things down to implementable items (you can't do everything). So that will be part of my goal as I blog NECC, to try and narrow the scope of the various sessions to distill 3 or less actionable items.

My areas of concentration are:

• Effective School-wide Integration Practices/Programs
• Engaging Professional Development Strategies
• 1:1 Tips and Strategies

Sometimes you wonder where you have been for the last year. I just read several posts about Google Co-op and the ability to create a customizable search engine. What a find! Doesn't this sound like exactly the type of education tool we want. The ability to teach search strategies while only searching a set of reviewed websites.

If you haven't heard of Google Co-op it bears a look at. I'm having visions of teaching teachers how to build custom search engines prior to major projects and then embedding the link to that search engine (or even the search engine itself) in a teacher's Moodle course. That way the students can leverage going to the same site they always visit in Moodle and use the teachers custom search engine.

"I love it when a plan comes together" - Hannibal from the A-team

Has anyone felt like that? As I try valiantly to get my understanding around the principles of Learning 2.0 and engage in the discussion I feel so overwhelmed sometimes. The discussion and development of this concept is swirling around so fast that sometimes when you feel you have it in your grasp it moves out of your reach and you're left trying to catch up (with both work and the conversation). I really appreciate Steve Hargadon's efforts to provide some type of unifying location for the conversation to continue and to hopefully form some type of basic structure to all of the development of these "2.0" ideas that a floating around. I'm not sure how it will all shake out in the end, but it seems to be a good start.

In particular, I feel like there is a need to provide some scaffolding for educators who are new to the ideas behind Education et al 2.0 so that they can make the transition to both the technology and the pedagogy that is driving this movement.

Two great tools in this can be classroom20.ning.com and classroom20.net. I think each could benefit from a guiding mission statement. For example, I think classroom20.net could be a great introduction and jumping off point for new educators to introduce and share practical ideas behind this movement. Classroom20.ning.com seems like an ideal point to invite educators into as they begin to incorporate Classroom 2.0 ideas so they can benefit from the dialog and perspective of other educators. Dumping educators into our "ning" community that are new to the concepts and movement, however, might end up overwhelming them. As we continue to develop these ideas, I would like to continue the dialog about how we can aid the process of bringing in educators (old and new).

Another idea I have had and have been trying to find time to implement is to publish a regular (monthly) e-zine in PDF format about Teaching with Technology in the Gilbert Public School district. The articles would be published to CoreWEB, our instructional technology resource site, but we would also send it out via email as a PDF (probably produced in Pages, though we could do it in Scribus or Publisher too).

The purpose and value of this is, obviously, that this effort is more traditional push-marketing. We can send this out to all of our teachers via email, as well as post it in teacher lounges at schools, in order to increase our likelihood of getting some "face-time" with them for our technology integration ideas and news. Some of the content items I think would be valuable are:

1. Primary and Secondary technology teaching tip features
2. "Sweet Sites" highlighting web resources across various disciplines and grade levels (basically so we can try and ensure that everyone will find something in the e-zine they could possibly use or go look at).
3. News items relating to technology from GPS
4. Question/Answer column to highlight questions teachers are having which many other teachers probably also have but haven't asked yet
5. Teacher/Project highlight - a regular feature highlighting the cool things happening in various classrooms around the district

On a side note, by publishing these in a searchable, organized format on CoreWEB, we are also helping in our knowledge management efforts to make what we know and what we can do easier for others to learn from and build upon.

NOTE: If you are not familiar with RSS you really should be, check out these links to learn more about this great technology, (PDF warning)here and here.

One of the ways I think we can get the word out is by aggregating interesting, valuable articles (via RSS) on our main CoreWEB resource site and in some of the online professional development courses we are running with our teachers. By putting relevant information in places that people already frequent, we get greater likelihood of click-thru. This is especially true of teachers, who are notoriously a curious bunch. The effect of this can probably be accentuated as we restrict the display of articles to items relevant to what the user is currently viewing.

An example of my efforts in this regard came as I was working on an upcoming 30-hour professional development course we will be launching (about Moodle-we refer to it as Virtual Classroom). I was wondering what valuable RSS feeds could be included in the course that highlight Moodle "good teaching" practices. Of course there are the Moodle forums, but what I was looking for was really more blog-focused. It's not that the discussion forums aren't valuable, they are. But what I wanted to expose my teachers to in this course was well-written, comprehensive ideas, techniques, and tips for using Moodle effectively with students, as opposed to the more lengthy, conversation-style format of the Moodle forums.

Unfortunately, even with using Google blogsearch and technorati I didn't find anything that stood out. From that experience, then, came my decision to post weekly an article about best practices for teaching with Moodle (open to other's comments too) that is targeted at the classroom teacher using Moodle. I will be tagging my posts with teaching and moodle tags so that in technorati these combination of tags will be subscribable.

Look for my first post in this regard (i.e. Moodle teaching strategies) coming later in this week (after Thursday-which is the launch date for our 6-week Moodle training program). I would also love to have other Moodlers contribute so we can all benefit from that great things that I know are going on out there-just tag your blog entries with Moodle and teaching and technorati will take care of the rest. I'm also going to check the blogs hosted on Moodle.org to see what might be available there.

Another way to read this title is: Getting the word out to the classroom teacher

I have been thinking how we could better disseminate our technology integration best practices ideas to the teachers in our district. This is one of the hardest challenges I face right now. How do we get the good ideas and spread them around so more can benefit from them? Even in my own working group that is a challenging thing to do with each other (and most often falls to the back of a crowded agenda - read: we rarely get to that agenda item). My next two posts highlight two ideas I have to had and am trying to implement to address this.

In an effort to streamline my blogging efforts, and to get a more full-featured blogging experience, I starting to use MarsEdit. My only issue is with the category support. MarsEdit doesn't seem to support free-tagging, which is what I'd really like to use. So I will experiment a little in the future with getting support for categories to work.

I highly recommend MarsEdit, by the way, though I've also heard that Ecto is good.

“Does paper represent an adequate tool for learning skills related to a digital networked information world?”

from David Warlick at http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2007/03/19/are-computer-a-tool/

More on this later, but what a terrific question!

I recently was reading through a backlog of Will Richardson's posts and came across one that struck a cord that I felt I needed to express.

His post about his NECC workshop, titled Empowering Practice: Leveraging the Read/Write Web for Professional Growth, highlights in his approach from applying Read/Write Web concepts to classroom practice towards a greater emphasis on professional practice among educators.

Now, I really hope to attend that session at NECC, and here's why. I think one the biggest challenges we face in leveraging technology in our schools and learning activities today is that teachers (old and young alike) don't have experience using them. More particularly, they don't have experience using them in a meaningful way that will help them scaffold their learning and application of these new technologies from personal use into educational activities. I think, for what it's worth, that his apparent change in focus will be a positive move.

As educators become aware and utilize these Web 2.0 tools in meaningful ways in their own professional activities, they will have the needed background and understanding to begin seeing greater application of these tools for their classrooms.

Hopefully I can get into his workshop (I'm sure it is going to be very well attended). I look forward to hearing his ideas and experiences with how to help teachers become users of these great new learning tools.

Well I have finally gotten my act together (for today anyway :) ) and moved all of the content from my previous blogging experience over here to the new home for hintonblogger. I'm really liking Drupal as a blogging platform - it is just so incredibly flexible. With Drupal 5.0 coming out and the ability to have distributions specific to different tasks, I think Drupal as a blogging platform will continue to grow in popularity.

As I had the chance to re-read my previous posts I realized why I love to blog. For me at least, it helps my own learning process, especially in applying other's great ideas to my own situations.

I look forward to following up in the next couple of weeks with posts on the following topics:

• My experience with MythTV (i.e. Tivo)
• Upcoming conferences I have been accepted to present at (including NECC)
• Publishing my blogroll
• A current projects update highlighting some of the cool things I've had a opportunity to work on
• Adding a little del.icio.us integration to my site to highlight some great websites I've found recently
• and more to come.....

I just am checking to see how well my blog can ping technorati. This is one area where I think Drupal can improve on the blogging front - integration with common blogging features (the ping concept especially). Right now Drupal only pings ping-o-matic by default and you can only add ping services by adding a module or hard-coding the changes in the ping module.

While I agree with the concept of keeping the Drupal core lean and mean, it seems to make sense that the ping module is configurable. If a person is going to use the ping module (which is part of Drupal core), Drupal should allow that person to choose sites to ping. Perhaps Drupal could offer a default set of sites to ping (and perhaps ping-o-matic is simply the default option). Of course if it really bothered me, I would put in an issue into the ping module asking for that feature (and/or sponsor an enhancement of that module).

I've had a significant hiatus from blogging and I am chomping at the bit to get back into things (not to mention having a significant backlog of draft blog entries to clear). Part of the hiatus has been because things have been crazy busy, between beginning some contract work with Remote-Learner, the start of the craziest school year yet, and, finally, migrating my blog over to Drupal, something I've been wanting to do for a long time.

If you happen along to my site, please give things a whirl for me, add a comment, try out my contact page, etc. It will help troubleshoot what issues I still need to iron as I migrate the little content I had on my previous blog site (run by Wordpress). I'm especially hoping my setup will allow me to avoid what may be the inevitable onslaught of comment spam, etc, and only get the important stuff - your comments.

Anyway, welcome back, thanks for stopping by.

This started out as an email to my brother about something I had mentioned to him earlier, but I soon realized that I needed to blog about this and he could read it there.
I don't know if you create a lot of off-line documents (I do, especially training guides) but today I wanted to classify/save a document two ways, one as category and the other as a specific date 2006-07 and wondered what folder to create to put it in - just the category or to nest the category(folder) inside of a 2006-07 folder, etc. A little conundrum. Obviously tagging my document in much the same way I would a blog post would be one potential solution, but I didn't know how I could easily (or if at all) do that. I figured somebody else had to have problems with this so I googled "tagging files with metadata categories" to see what solutions to the problem I could find.

I need to add that I know a lot of effort has been made in the last few years to bring great search capability to both the PC and the Mac platforms. Google Desktop, Windows Desktop Search, as well as Apple's OS X Spotlight capability. Microsoft's WinFS improvements seemed to be moving along this road as well as Apple's Smart Folders, but I still think that is different than having the capability to tag files on save. It's nice to be able to use awesome searching tools to find documents, but I still like to feel I have some control over where documents go, or at least appear to go. In minds eye, I visualize file structure being not necessarily reflective of actual storage locations, which are limited to one, but for me merging the concept of smart folders (with the capability of nesting smart folders to resemble an artificial directory tree) and tagging can lead to a truly powerful, totally customizable file structure for each user. Ideally this will be a capability built-in to the system so that any program (from which a save dialog box is called) automatically can offer the user the option to tag his document upon save. I also think it should be free tagging, though maybe there is a benefit to a pre-created category option as well, provided a user would go through the hassle/preparation of thinking of any and all tags he or she might want to use, before they have to actually use them.

I'm a new reader to lifehacker.com but they have some good articles about how to work better in this digital age and sure enough, in my google search the sixth article mentioned was from Lifehacker. Another article that was useful and more specific to MS Windows is from Big IDEA. Good stuff and definitely worth keeping my eye on, now if only there were a right now solution that didn't involve using Quicksilver.

I attended a session on creating Online Communities for Novice Teachers and decreasing Teacher Dropouts. One key point that was shared was that if teachers did something 3 times, they would be much more likely to do it and do it well the fourth time.

Another element they discussed was Tapped In. I'm not very familiar with it, but from what I understand is that it is a flexible synchronous and asynchronous community that teachers can participate in. I just wonder what advantage it provides over tools that have a discussion forum/chat - is it because it is a hosted solution that varied groups can participate in with very little advance planning?

Unfortunately, for me, much of what they talked about was using acronyms and, since I had arrived late from some other presentations I had been attending, I didn't get the acrononyms (it kind of sounded like another language). However, there were some interesting elements that came out of this.

1. Just-in-time answers to questions - a lady from Microsoft (I'm not sure how she was associated with this whole teacher group) shared her experience about joining Microsoft 1.5 years ago. She talked about some of the challenges of integrating into a 63,000 person company. The key point she mentioned was an HR JIT answer line that guaranteed a 24-hour answer to questions that had been submitted. I thought that that was a great idea for new teachers - use the online community/discussion forum as a 24-hour answer line and guarantee that if they have questions they can post their question (or message it privately) and receive an answer, suggestion, or offer for help.

2. Establish a relationship with student teaching groups/pre-service teachers at local universities (i.e. ASU, Rio Salado, Univ. of Phoenix) and look at involving them to join in the communication with the first-year teachers.

3. Make it an advantage and not a drain on them.

How do you accomplish #3? My thought is to provide the JIT answer line and also to post a monthly sharing prompt (classroom management problems/suggestions, lesson sharing, rewards) and request/require teachers to respond to that and to respond to one other person. (i.e. post a response by the end of the first week and a reply by the end of the 2nd week).

I'm working with our New Teacher Program coordinator Vicki Jones on designing this and this could help us be more successful.

The New Story presentation that David Warlick is sharing is compelling, but it seems there must be some intermediary steps in order to get there.

One of the best examples is that the road to the New Story about education has to accommodate some of the institutionalized aspects of Industrialized education, at least initially. So the question is how we can begin the new story in education, defined by flexibility, communication and collaboration, and authentic learning while the social limits brought by our industrial society.

Here are some examples of what I mean.

School Day
The rigidity of the school day has long been based on the bell structure originated in industrial factories. How can we accommodate the fact that schools must take care of children during the work day, while breaking from the rigid structure that seems inconsistent with the flexibility required by the information society we are transforming into.

Funding Models

Another example is the fact the funding is traditionally driven by daily attendance rates (how do you measure attendance in online schooling?)?

One of my biggest problems with the New Story and other models of the new type of learning processes we see emerging today is the role of the teacher. When a teacher no longer has the authority as the "fount" of knowledge in the classroom, what maintains the order? I agree that we need to help get out of the way of the learning process some times, but I don't believe in the idea that when left to themselves kids will just learn (the Lord of the Flies comes to mind). I guess what I'm saying is that the New Story can be uncomfortable even as it is exciting, I think that is a good thing. Here are my questions about this New Story:

Questions about the New Story

What role in this new story do teachers take? What is their value?
What does the student-teacher interaction look like?

There are other questions too, but will leave those for another day. I can see I'm going to have to spend some more time on David's New Story wiki to get a better look of his ideas on all of this:)

Nicholas Negroponte gave the principal keynote at NECC 2006 and spoke about the $100 laptop. He started off by talking about the types of education throughout the world and some of the challenges they face.

*No power
*No Teachers
*No roads sometimes

He gave some economic details about how the laptop was going to be made. He also commented briefly on the criticism he had received from Microsoft and Intel about the laptop. The crowd generally gave him an ovation whenever he mentioned that criticism. Which leads me to ask why people insist on berating Microsoft in particular, especially in the education environment? Most of the people in the room were doing to Microsoft what many in the press have done to Mr. Negroponte, they were berating an idea without understanding the details behind it. The people in that room were booing Microsoft without a clue as to why, because Mr. Negroponte offered no details of their criticism. Could it possibly be that the Microsoft and Intel simply have a different idea of what will work and are different ideas so wrong? Consider what Mr. Negroponte is saying or proposing with his idea? It really is transformational and a potential game-changer. Why should we expect (or disapprove) of companies that see someone threatening their "turf" and react to it, don't we do the same thing in our own lives?

Moving on, I really like Mr. Negroponte's ideas and his laptop. There is much to the project and he and his group have obviously worked through some enormously challenging issues, from lcd display issues, power consumption, ruggedness, all the way to global supply chain issues. For a long time (okay for a couple years at least), I have maintained that a simple computer that allows for internet connectivity and some basic "office" functionality would be "good enough" to accomplish the vast majority of what is needed in education.

One of the key ideas he talked about is feature bloat in current day applications. He is right of course, to some degree, but there is a lot to consider in these issues. My next blog post will be about Learning and the $100 laptop and I'll deal with feature bloat and concept of next generation education. There is just too much there and it's worthy of its own posting. It was an interesting keynote and when combined with a few other ideas I have heard about and been considering it will make for some interesting thinking.

Back to Blogging with Gusto! I'm back at NECC and loving my first day of sessions and activities. I was fortunate enough this year to be able to present at NECC on Strategies for using Moodle effectively in the classroom and it was an awesome experience. I'll blog a little more about that later. Now about my first day at NECC:

I was nervous about presenting, but decided I needed to take advantage of being here and planned a full schedule for today. The first session I attended was about Virtual Schools and really looked at the concept of online learning and virtual schools from an institutional perspective. It was presented by people from the Southern Regional Education Board. For me the biggest impact was the reminder that online courses, learning, and teaching is expanding and not going away, in fact, as the presenters shared, it is a viable learning option for students. I started feeling a little panicked (and not because I was presenting next). The reason is that I want to be a part of this great new learning opportunity and I feel like I'm somewhat unprepared and I don't want to be left behind.

One of my questions is how can I get involved in teaching online? (I've taught one class so far) Another is how I can I help influence the direction of online learning in my state and school district? Who is making the decisions about online learning possibilities and are they listening to people like those in this session who have been carrying out online learning successfully?

After playing with CVS off and on over the last 6 months, and trying to find an Mac OS X CVS client I could understand, I've finally found one. SmartCVS really helps make CVS more intuitive on the Mac. I've gotten further with my source code control in the half-day I've been using it, then in working with other clients for several months. I'm sure user error comes into play here, but I've tried LinCVS (now called something else) MacCVSclient, and a couple of others. If you're looking for a GUI for CVS on the Mac, then SmartCVS is a solid, "smart" choice. They have a professional version but the Foundation (read Free) version has a solid feature set and seems robust enough for my needs. You can get it here: http://www.syntevo.com/index.jsp

For a CVS novice (which I am) this client sure makes things easy. Now I can finally stop hitting my head against the CVS wall and move on to improving my applications.

I'm blogging David Warlick's keynote at WOW today. He is talking about blogging, wikis, and the new way knowledge is being consumed and how Web 2.0 is helping us find, consume, discuss, and add information to the educational landscape. I'm using this keynote to jump back into blogging again (he invited us to blog about his keynote so I decided I would).
The part that I enjoyed the most were his comments about learning from the conversation. He made a statement indicating that as teachers we needs to stop teaching our students to assume authority and instead help them learn how to prove authority. Why is this is a good thing? One reason is because exploration is exciting and helping students learn how to prove authority is actually a process of exploration. In fact, I honestly believe that exploration is one of the truest forms of learning. It is encountering something new and making it something known. In fact, isn't that one of the goals of education. The great thing about exploration is that, by its very nature, it is exciting and we explore those things in which we have interest.

I'll add more later when I have a chance to think through some of the other ideas that Mr. Warlick shared. He is spot on with what he shared, the key is to not let his voice go unheeded.

Blogthings - Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

Thought this was an interesting question and it was fun to do (amazing to say). I really enjoy algebra now, though trig and geometry not so much. Go on and give a try, it really is a little tricky and I took at little bit of time (5 minutes maybe) to go through it. Here are my results, hmmm.... I wonder where my 8th grade Math teacher (Mrs. Gonzalez) is. I may have to email her my results to let her know she did a good job.

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!
Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

I know it has been a long time since I've posted, and, like everyone else, I have just been super busy. My family and I moved so that my commute time would be less and we have enjoyed it tremendously. The house is nice and we are loving it.

I should also mention that I've been searching for a CMS solution that I really liked. I thought I liked Mamob/Joomla, but the split concerned me and brought to light several limitations of Mambo that i had known of but simply overlooked. I still like Mambo and it is a terrific system. Based on preliminary testing, however, (very preliminary I might add) I think I'm going to go with Drupal. I love the flexibility it is being built to have and (aside from the wrapper feature from within Mambo) I like what I see.

I've also had the opportunity to work much more extensively with Moodle as an online learning environment. What a terrific open-source educational product. It is built (and licensed) the way educational products should be. I have begun some testing with 4th graders at one of my schools, and going to begin doing so with some Mesquite Junior High classes. We are just beginning to explore all that Moodle can do. It is most certainly still a maturing product and development on a number of key modules is still moving a little fast and free for my liking (i.e. requiring dependencies on another module with that module also changing rapidly) but for a 1.5.x release it is terrific. I already have teachers who are excited about the interactivity with students at home that it might allow. While there is certainly privacy and protection issues with that type of work and access, I think it is a terrific step at helping students realize that learning extends far beyond the classroom walls.

Yes, I'm still alive. Though after a 2am work session for the San Tan Incorporation Committee website I am wondering. Today while setting up Greenfield Junior High for the upcoming school year, we ran into a problem of how to update thirty wireless laptops with the latest OS X updates (almost 235mb worth of stuff). There were 12 different updates with 5 or 6 separate updates that required restarts.

A colleague of mine and myself found a program called, Iceberg, that allows the user to create a metapackage - a collection of packages. Iceberg allowed us to group sets of updates together, minimizing the restart time and baby-sitting of the update process. While it took a little while to learn the program and then troubleshoot the correct sequence of updates, I think it was well worth the time spent. Once we got the twelve updates narrowed down to two metapackages, we were able to quickly distribute those packages via firewire hard drives and the update process was completed an hour and a half later.

Now that I understand the process I can quickly group pre-built packages into a metapackage to ease distribution and speed up the install process. Of course, creating a package from scratch (i.e. from application and support files) would be nice too. I guess that will have to wait though, as for now, I recommend checking out Iceberg if you administer any Macs....

I have been in my current position (Instructional Technologist) for a year now, and am very grateful to my school district (Gilbert Public Schools in Arizona) for the opportunity to attend NECC. The whole conference opened my eyes to a different paradigm of learning and to consider that the student perspective, with the advent of technology, might really have shifted effective educational techniques more than I had been willing to admit. The sessions I attended not only helped expose my to that paradigm, but also provided some potential short-term actions I could do to help begin meeting the challenge of educating today's students, who are truly digital natives.

The part of NECC I want to highlight today are the Wednesday morning keynote, The Natives are Restless, given by Deneen Frazier Brown and the Thursday afternoon keynote by Mark Prensky entitled Engage Me or Enrage Me: Educating Today's Digital Native Learners. Deneen's presentation was absolutely terrific and, in an engaging way, helps open up educators to the possibility that are Digital Natives are capable of much more than we are requiring of them. Both presentations make the point that technology has the potential to help us make learning more meaningful, not just more exciting. Many educators, including myself, fall into the thought that technology is enrichment or enhancement of a lesson, rather than the framework around which learning can occur. A previous keynote, the opening keynote on Monday night by David Weinburger, made the point that the learning process is rapidly evolving to a conversational process rather than one of assimilating facts. Rather than memorizing information, which is easily accessible in fractions of a second via numerous digital sources, student engagement of the material should now take greater precedent. Is content still important, absolutely, but now the context the content is placed in is of much greater importance. Gone are the days when we could get away with teaching content devoid of context or relevance.

Students have access to more information and activities than ever before and they are able to communicate and act on a greater scale and in more ways than previously possible. Each of the three keynotes, which were by far the most engaging and relevant keynotes of any education conference I've ever attended, made the case for these issues, just in their own, unique way. The fact that each of the presenters were sharing was that technology has truly revolutionized education and learning, but education has largely been left behind. This is a generalization of education as an industry, there are certainly pockets of teachers, maybe even schools, who "get" this concept and are "educating" their students. For the vast majority of us, however, we are faced with the daunting task of rexamining the basis upon which we carry forward the learning process. While it sounds daunting (and rightly so), it also exciting. We are at an educational crossroads: the tools for individualized instruction, enriched, contextual learning, and meaningful application of content are here, we just have to find them and then develop a plan to deploy them.

Okay, perhaps I'm getting a little too grandiose, my only defense is that I've been listening to others with that same vision, and its contagious. If you want to get an enriching, engaging learning experience watch the webcast of the keynotes (each is about 1 hour and 15 minutes). I know it sounds like a long time to dedicate to "watching" a keynote, but it will be worth it, if it isn't come back and add a comment so other's will know. My wife, who isn't a professional educator - but does a great job teaching our two children - started watching Deneen's presentation and couldn't help but finish it. I would recommend watching it in the following order to maximize your engagment - Deneen's >The Natives are Restless, Mark's Engage Me or Enrage Me, and finally David Weinburger's A New Shape or Knowledge. It's an exciting time and there are some great ideas out there. One of my goals in this blog is to help point out some terrific educational technology resources that help share the vision for what is possible. I welcome other opinions or suggestions for resources because the kind of change required will not necessarily be easy, especially for teachers who "fear" the technology. I believe we need to do what we can to help present a convincing and engaging plan, with plenty of "helps" along the way.

No, I didn't run out of blogging steam from NECC or my brief sightseeing trip to Washington D.C. I am simply swamped trying to catch up with Master's course work that took a back burner while I was at NECC (and really since I left for vacation on June 11th - it's kind of hard to keep up with an online catch when your Internet access options are changing day to day - and most regularly are dial-up dependent). I also spent one day trying to see everything there was to see on the Mall in Washington D.C. For those of you who have been there, you know that such a task is an impossibility, there is much too much to see. If could've spent a week going through the different buildings and tours that were available. However, since I had exactly 24 hours, of which 6 hours travel time coming from and returning to Philadelphia, as well as 6-7 hours of sleeping time, had to be subtracted, I was pressed for time to say the least.

As it was I wore my sneakers (Doc Martens actually) out walking up and down that place and visited all the major things I wanted to see. I'll be posting a brief travel photoblog entry when I get a little more time. I have tons of things from NECC to share. All six of the sessions I covered for eSchool News need to be posted here on this blog too, though I'm waiting for them to get posted to eSchool News's site. Lots of cool ideas.

It was a terrific side trip to DC and a great conference in Philly, but I'm ready to be home and see my wife and kids. I've been away from them for a week now and that is far too long. From talking on the phone to my son and daughter it seems like they have learned so many new things since I've been gone. My son told me yesterday that he had ridden on a backhoe (courtesy of my father-in-law who is a home builder in Pocatello, Idaho ). The amazing thing is that my son knows what a backhoe is and can say the word! I'm excited to be heading home to see them - they are the best wife and kids I could ever ask for. See ya guys in a few hours.

I've decided to move my full-time blog to a more full-featured blogging interface.  I was looking for the option to email blogposts and to allow for comments, as well as some categorization features.  I'm running Wordpress at http://blog.hintonweb.com and want to invite you over there to take a look and leave comments, whatever you feel like.  If you do leave comments there is a registration required, however it's free and your information is totally confidential.  It's just a formality to allow the system to track posts.  For those who found my blog from the NECC website, my posts from NECC are up over there as well, and I will continue to blog there about some other NECC ideas and sessions that I haven't gotten to yet.  So check out hintonblogger (the name of my blog - I know really inventive).

You hate to jinx yourself, but I have to say that today worked out great and I'm really grateful. I hit all three sessions I wanted to get to and each one of them was awesome in their own right. The three I attended were:

1. Enhancing Teacher Quality with Online Professional Development
2. Delivering Educational Tasks with Online Portals - MyBPS
3. Use your Noodle - Learn Moodle!

My brother would have liked the MyBPS presentation as they shared how they streamlined their workflow by developing a portal in .NET. I will be filing a report on the session with eSchool News and there will be more on that session in my report. These people are truly doing some amazing things with streamlining the educational workflow and exchange of ideas. Their site is closed to user login only, but the presentation showed some of the site interior and examples of the types of content it contained. The one thing I found amazing was that with all the work they went through and go through to have an incredibly usable portal internally, they mentioned they have no plan or requirement for their schools to have an external presence. My only guess for the "why" of that is because parents have access to MyBPS and the information that an external school website typically contains is in MyBPS.

Both the Enhancing Teacher Quality with Online Professional Development and the Moodle workshops were absolutely terrific. The big issues in technology and education are connectivity, education when you want it, free exchange of data and ideas, communication, and interactivity. It is those issues on which I believe technology in education must stake there claim. Those ideas are where the power of technology shines and really has no equal. Inspiration is a great product, I like it and would probably use it. However, there is always the part of me that says I could be drawing this on a piece of paper too. I know all the arguments for using Inspiration and I make those arguments too, but we must also be honest and admit there is a paper-based alternative that, while perhaps less feature rich and less exciting, can do that same job (without needing several hours to teach kids how to use the Inspiration program). The difference with the examples or issues I mentioned above is that technology allows us to do things in those areas that we simply cannot do nearly as well any way else. Technology offers us (both in education and in the "real" world) a huge advantage in those areas compared with alternatives. Perhaps one of the reasons technology has really not transformed education (perhaps it has transformed it, but it hasn't revolutionized it....yet) is because up until now we really haven't been able to apply it in the areas where it can have its truly revolutionary impact. Perhaps it was the technology we were waiting for, maybe the bandwidth, processor power, or cheap and excellent connectivity software wasn't available. I firmly believe it is now and that we can be truly transformational. If we will just jump on.....

Here is my report I filed with eSchool News.  I haven't seen any of the two reports I've filed with them posted yet, but I'll keep you posted.  Here are my notes from the terrific morning workshop I attended.  It provided some great ideas and motivation for rolling out online professional development in our school district.  I even had the opportunity to begin setting up my own sample online professional development class in Blackboard. It is an excellent system.  I'm looking forward to the Moodle workshop that is starting right, so I better go...

An almost full class met at William Penn High school for this morning’s workshop.  After a round of introductions, we jumped into the online learning environment (OLE) the instructors had setup at http://edc.blackboard.com.

Barbara Treacy and Liz Farmer, the workshop facilitators, began by discussing the rationale for using an online learning environment such as Blackboard, WebCT, or open-source OLEs such as Moodle.  A short discussion ensued about the benefits of some of the commercial OLE packages versus the free open-source tools that are available.

The first activity we engaged in was a brief online survey about previous involvement with online courses, both taking and teaching those courses, as well as to gauge the participant’s interest level in developing online professional development programs.  After taking the survey, we reviewed the results and found, quite predictably, a high level of interest and experience with online professional development offerings.  It was a little interesting to see that almost 30% of participants had facilitated an online course, while 20% had actually developed a course.

The question that went unasked was why people with experience developing or facilitating courses would attend a course like this.  One possible answer could be the challenges and unique skills that online learning environments require.  The newness of web-based learning environments lead one to repeatedly ask “What am I missing?” or “How can I make our online courses easier and more effective for our teachers and students who may find the requirements and interface of online learning unfamiliar?”

We next explored various sample courses as a examination of best practices for developing and deploying online learning solutions for students (K-12), teachers, and administrators.  A lengthy discussion ensued over general practices for design of courses and for effective facilitation.  One of the general conclusions the group came to was that facilitated courses with weekly deadlines were more effective than self-paced courses.  While self-paced courses seem more convenient, one participant described a recent self-paced pilot online course as a “disaster” because there were no completion guidelines for the students.  Not only was the discussion not as rich, but the facilitation was extremely difficult because the facilitator had to be omni-present in all weeks throughout the duration of the course.  Barbara Treacy and Liz Farmer affirmed that their experience had demonstrated the effectiveness of facilitated, weekly-paced courses over self-paced ones.

One of main concepts of the workshop was to do whatever was necessary to get teachers, students, whoever the participants are, talking with each other in the discussion forums because that is where much of the learning and insights will be gained.  The flexibility of the online learning environment in letting students complete weekly assignments at different times and in a personally-unique sequence are some of ways online learning helps make differentiation of instruction easier.  Workshop participants were then exposed to different discussion facilitation scenarios to which they had to respond in the online discussion forum.  The six scenarios presented included such things as slow computers, offensive posts, lack of posting, as well as how to encourage participants to post thoughtful versus superficial responses.  Participation was brisk with over 70 responses posted in the brief 10 minutes the participants were given to respond.  That equates to about three responses per participant with some terrific ideas shared.

            One of the richest conversations that occurred revolved around the value of superficial responses to discussion questions or even if the numerous similar responses to one discussion question were useful.  There were a wide variety of responses, including a value of similar responses as a way of checking for understanding, as well as different strategies for an instructor to seed or encourage more thoughtful replies to the initial postings.  Both workshop facilitators mentioned that there are on-going discussions in their own online professional development group about what level of the “I agree” responses are acceptable.

            The last half-hour of this packed, energetic workshop was devoted to the creation of individual sample online learning courses.  The facilitators provided each participant an empty course shell that we could manipulate and practice course design while they went around to answer questions.

            The workshop was high energy, information packed, and well worth the time.  Its content was focused more towards intermediate online learning experience, those who have taken an online course or perhaps facilitated a few courses.  While those who had more advanced experience may have already known much of the material, the discussion and interaction within the diverse group of participants surely made it time well spent.

One other quick thought from today's sessions.  The keynote tonight was by David Weinberger and he addressed "The New Shape of Knowledge." His most interesting concept was that knowledge today is in many ways conversation.  He set up the idea very well and is an engaging speaker.  While that concept may sound a bit relativistic, I don't think it necessarily dismisses that fact that there are absolutes out there.  The argument he made was that today, with the decentralized acquisition of information made possible by the Internet and global communication, the knowledge we gain is not made in isolation but by the ties and interaction that technology has thrust upon us.  Blogs, the Internet, global audio and video communication, wikis have made producers of knowledge out of those who were previously only consumers and that we are richer for it.  He compared wikipedia.com to the current Encyclopedia Brittanica and that fact that wikipedia.com has 600,000 articles on different topics, while the Encyclopedia has only 65,000 (and at 32 volumes the print version simply cannot get any bigger).  Because of this interconnectivity, we are seeing an expansion of knowledge as well as (in his opinion) the improvement of our knowledge.  Check out http://www.wikipedia.org and tell me if you think our knowledge is really expanding and improving (I'll be checking it out too)?

P.S. For those who don't know what a wiki is, it is essentially user-contributed documentation.  Meaning anyone can go on Wikipedia.com and post or even edit articles with very little restrictions.  While you may expect complete garbage or bizarre of-the-wall things, I think you'll be surprised of the quality of much of what is there.  Drop me a line to let me know your thoughts at or check out the new home for my blog and leave a comment - something you can't do here at bloglines.  I'm going to continue blogging here at bloglines through NECC and then continue posting over at hintonblogger.  For now I'll be posting at both places.

Well it is about midnight here in Philadelphia on Monday, June 27th, 2005.  I'm excited for NECC to start today and am trying to put last minute plans together to start the day of successfully.

I'm looking forward to a number of sessions about Online Learning, including using Moodle as an open source alternative to Blackboard.  I hope to get a number of ideas on effectively blending traditional face-to-face learning with the online learning environment in Blackboard or Moodle.  There are many powerful advantages to blending face-to-face and virtual learning for both student learning and professional development for teachers, and yet it is an area that is fairly underdeveloped in K-12 education.

There is another session about delivering educational content through web portals that was intriguing. The web is such a great delivery tool for content and resources, especially for the busy parent(s) of students today.  My greatest interest for this conference lies in ways to deliver web-based content, activities, and training to students, teachers, and parents.  We really have just touched the tip of the iceberg with virtual learning environments.

 I was also selected to be a correspondent for eSchool news and will be filing reports for them on some of the sessions I attend. Check out eSchool News Online's coverage, for my official reports for them.  It is a good incentive to take notes and develop some concrete ideas and responses to the sessions I attend.  Of course, I will be blogging each day's events here as well.  One oversight of bloglines blog offering is the lack of a comments section, so if you happen to read one of my posts and have some thoughts, attended a similar session, or just have a comment or two, I would welcome your email and I'm sure will respond back to you as well

This being my first big technology conference, I'm hoping I learn a lot and establish some links with people that I can continue to collaborate with in the future.  Even as I was on the shuttle to my hotel from the airport I could hear people talking about educational technology and the "goods" and the "bads" of how their schools was utilizing technology in the classroom.  You could certainly tell they were going to NECC.

On a personal note, I should also give a big shout-out to my wonderful wife who is taking care of our two great kids while I'm away having fun with computers.  She's terrific.

Let it begin....

Here is my first report I sent to eSchool News as a volunteer correspondent.  You can follow the different sessions (as well as my reports on the ones I was assigned - I have at least one every day) throughout the week at http://www.eschoolnews.com/cic/. 

MF235 – Drive for 2005 – 100% Participation Workshop Report

Monday --- Tom March (http://ozline.com) was the presenter for this full-day session which focused on hotlists, webquests, and developing classroom portals (referred to as class-act portals) which are based on the WordPress blogging software.  His presentation wasn’t a how-to class on each of those elements, though.  He provided a well-laid out plan for helping encourage all teachers to really begin integrating technology into their curriculum. This plan (see http://drivefor2005.org) provides a framework for helping the “reluctant” teacher to begin making easy steps into utilizing technology in their lessons.

For those teachers who haven’t begun integrating technology into their lessons yet, they might begin by utilizing hotlists of sites with rich and relevant content.  As a teacher begins to feel comfortable with hotlists, they could then move on to using web resources (such as a brief online video clip or visiting an interesting web animation/site) to cause students to stop and think about a topic or perhaps to prompt a brief discussion. The next step is utilizing a “class act” portal to begin increasing the amount of collaboration students do using technology. 

Along with a class act portal, a teacher might begin using Knowledge Hunt activities or activities Tom labels as Samplers.  The Knowledge Hunt and Sampler web activities are both essentially hotlists with a question or feedback component built in.  The Knowledge Hunt activity asks knowledge acquisition questions, while the Sampler activity focuses on activating the students’ affective domain.  The last step Tom suggests for teachers to jump into technology integration is to being utilizing webquests in class.

            The nice element to this session was that, in addition, to providing a vision, plan, and useful lesson ideas for the everyday teacher, Tom has helped develop web-based software that makes creating these activities easy to do. Check out filamentality.com and web-and-flow.com for excellent web-based software that help make it easier to create hotlists, samplers, and webquests.

This workshop was well worth the day of time spent.  Tom’s ideas are solidly-based in good pedagogy as well as cutting edge technology.  I highly recommend visiting the following websites for more information on the Drive for 2005 and on how we can elevate the quality and quantity of technology integration in our schools.

Relevant URLs:

http://ozline.com

http://drivefor2005.org

http://bestwebquests.com

http://classactportal.com

http://anew3rs.

Tom March really was a terrific presenter.  I find myself following into the rut of pushing technology without backing it with the proper pedagogical foundational.  This session helped me better recognize where that foundation is and to realize that we shouldn't just be clamoring for more technology (which would be nice), but also more effective utilization of the technology we have.  Don't get me wrong the web/technology isn't a panacea for all of the challenges of education, but there are some pretty great ideas out there and it's time we got on board.

Now that school is out I should find myself with plenty of time to do anything I wanted, Right? There are simply too many cool things to do in the short time available. Does that sound familiar? Not that I'm complaining though, the summer has been great so far and I'm looking forward to all of the fun reunions and trips we have planned. It has also been great to spend a lot more time with my kids and wife. (My son and daughter are probably wondering why "Daddy" is around so much.)

In addition to NECC, I will be at the Rick Hinton reunion in San Diego, my brother Travis' wedding in the Salt Lake City temple, the Darris Ellis reunion at Bear Lake, ID, and the Lavar Hinton family in St. George/Hurricane, UT. All of that before the 4th of July, whew! (Oh and I'm trying to fit going up to Scout Camp for a couple of days with the Scout group I'm a Scoutmaster for!)

Ok, with the aforementioned events, I'm loving the extra few moments I can squeeze to learn more about PHP, web design, and creating dynamic websites. Here's a quick list of some of the different projects I'm working on:

1. Lavarhintons.com - I've been able to setup a script that will accept input to an email address and post it to my database, as well as forwarding that email address onto a family mailing list. Thanks to my great web host, Dreamhost, I was able to get things setup and working great. I have a lot more work to do here, including finalizing the site template, implementing a login/security system, and establishing some more content areas in addition to the family news update page.
2. photographybycamille.com - This is a site I update and maintain for my sister-in-law, who is an excellent photographer in Pocatello, ID. I have a lot planned for the site, including tweaking the front page, revamping the gallery pages for each type of photos she takes (this will involve using the PHP front-end to ImageMagick article I found recently) and a little Javascript added in. I'm going to expand the navigation a little and make the prices section include all of the different types of photos on one page, with an expanded section about each type of photography on its own page. There is also some layout "stuff" that I'm going to simplify and make more cross-browser friendly.
3. Santancity.net - I'm helping out with the City of San Tan, Arizona incorporation committee and in particular have worked with Lance Milner to setup a website to convey information about the incorporation effort. I have a number of ideas here to automate submission of news articles about the area and the incorporation process. Obviously I'm working in conjunction with others so a lot will depend on their input and what the needs of the incorporation effort are. My hope is to get to more of this come middle of July. This is as much civic involvement as it is web design work/practice, but the political process has always been fascinating to me so I don't mind.
4. TigerNET - This is an internal Gilbert Public Schools project that involves making administration of the PRIDE program a little easier for teachers and administrators. The idea of TigerNET has expanded (at least in my mind) to potentially fulfilling the role of an internal school-specific intranet site that teachers/administrators/students will use. Some of the features that I'd like to finish this summer to present to my bosses come next fall are a login system, complete with user administration (I have a canned script for this that I think will work), implementing an easy to use interface for teachers to create weblink lists to share with students. The other feature I think would be neat is to provide an online faculty handbook in PDF form. GJHS has requested that feature.

Another major push this summer for me, as far as expanding my knowledge of PHP and other web technologies, has been to identify "best practices" for receiving user input, validating it, and posting it to a database. I have read a "ton" of articles about SQL injection attacks and believe I have identified an effective strategy to implement across the different sites I manage. Authentication schemes and website/data structure are other techniques I've been reading up on. Well, here is a not-so-brief update on current projects and ideas that have been floating around my head. I'm planning some future posts about all of the neat PHP stuff I've been learning as well as responses to the Apple/Intel cooperation.

I recently got word that my school district was sending me and several other people to NECC 2005 in Philadelphia. What a great opportunity! The hardest part is narrowing down what things to attend. It would be great to get some feedback from previous NECC attendees about which parts they found to be most instructive. (i.e. workshops, concurrent sessions, others..)

I've never been back East either so am taking the opportunity to see take a tour or two while I'm there and see Philadelphia. I'm also extending my stay a couple of days following the conference so I can go visit Washington D.C. - I wish there was more time to see New York and Boston but that will have to wait for another trip.

Some of my areas of interest for educational technology include blogging and its uses in a classroom environment, online staff development - especially using Moodle - as well as how integrating an online class environment with the traditional face-to-face instruction can enrich instruction and discourse among students.

I'm already excited about next year's NECC (in San Diego) and am looking forward to volunteering and attending that one as well. I'll be blogging this year's NECC, at least once a day but more often if the chance arises and look forward to the opportunity to share ideas and learn a bunch from fellow educators.

See you at NECC!

Welcome to my new Blog! I haven't decided if I will use it for much, but at least I've begun my blogging career. I want to thank all the little people (important is a nicer word) who have made this possible, especially my wife and kids.