I am a bit concerned about a slideshare feature that seems inocuous, but upon further review could potentially cause me, and you, trouble.

Inside my Moodle installation I embed my slide presentations straight from slideshare. My concern is noted in this skitch screenshot…

While slideshare is blocked from my school, what if a kid clicks this link from home, and quickly lands here.

And in two clicks, he or she has seen images of a rave party with suspected drug use, and if he or she clicks on the home page,  we see anything from a caricature of Bruce Willis smoking to a sultry anime lady who is barely dressed to other inappropriate material. I can just see an otherwise innocent student (can I remind you my students are 11-12 years old?! and yes, some are quite innocent) seeing this!?

It’s not worth my job.

I voiced this concern to Jonathan Boutelle, who has been kind enough to hear me out in the past in regards to slideshare being blocked all over the place. I have encouraged him to provide a safer service for teachers, who have turned out to be supporters of his site. They listened, and promised to get back to me. For me, this is along the lines of the bloglines image wall that got Miguel all up in arms some months ago.

For me, I am going to have to go back to swf-based presentations until Slideshare helps me by removing that link. It’s far too dangerous to continue use. My Moodle has been in maintenance mode all summer hoping Jonathan would do something to help the teachers out that use Slideshare with kids. So far, nothing.

Sorry Slideshare, I love your service but can’t risk my job.

I just saw this at the bottom of my Gmail page.

Is it my Better Gmail plugin going crazy? Is it just a glitch?

Or is Gmail subtely increasing storage space.

When I log out, I see this…

Any news here?

So there’s this site that has a product I like a lot. It’s a web-based tool that would make for a nice addition to my class site.

Nothing crucial, just something that would add a nice touch.

They offer the basic version for free and an upgraded version for like $10 per month. They’ve offered to give me the upgraded version for free if I give them a great testimonial to use on their page and tell everyone I know how much I like the service.

Is that ethical?

Would they take it away if I neglect to blog about the service? Should I stoop to being a blogging billboard just because I don’t see enough value to spend $10 a month (nor am I in a position to do so?!)

Seems sketchy, what do you think?

This typo is the one that should not have been.

Did you catch it?

It’s so easy, it’s happened to all of us. I just hope when it happens to me it’s on my to-do list, not a web site visited by millions.

I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for a good story. David Jakes turned me onto a story told by some high school students and showed it to me at NECC.

Good stuff.

The work my kids produced last year was not up to par, in my opinion, because my assignment lacked something. I figure that something is the personal connection. Previously, I had kids working in groups, the perfect antidote to a good, personal story. This is partly due to a lack of equipment.

While I was in Peru, I bought 30 headphones with inline mic’s, the kind that are all over Peru in Internet cabinas. These are designed to hold up over time, oh, and they only cost me around $3 a piece, far cheaper than I can find them here. They are imported from China, and I cannot even find them to buy here.

So this time around, each kid gets his or her own PC and headphones/mic. I’ll reserve time in the computer lab for this project, and offer them two entire class periods to finish (with some prep time beforehand).

I intend to download a slew of creative commons licensed pictures from flickr and maybe another source or two and provide them to kids as a picture pool. They will need a minimum of x pictures, but I’ll give them many more. I may do this with music as well, or I may just allow them to use the canned photo story music (no macs in my school!).

What I need is a good assignment.

So I’m asking you.

Remember, I teach Spanish and Latin, and the assignment needs to incorporate that in some regard. Not sure how. This can’t be about technology, this has to be about kids telling their story and it needs to relate to my content. I have a few ideas, but the truth is they are cheesy and exactly what you’d expect me to come up with. So rather than spoil you with my lame ideas, I need help with a good lesson idea. I can implement like crazy but this is where I get stuck.

So, ideas?