So there’s a contest put on by the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages. I entered it with this submission.

The goal was to personify Spanish a bit and make it a bit ghostly. This is almost entirely student-done, with only minor help from me in shooting it. I was allowed to help with some of the finer technical details, so I did.

One note, it had to be 2 minutes or less, hence the shortness. I’m thinking about making a longer version, but my time to do so runs thin.

You’ll want to turn the sound up to get the full creepy feeling.

Below the Youtube is the TeacherTube embed. Enjoy!

Youtube direct link
Teachertube direct link

Update: Added suggestion to turn sound up, moved links to above.

Tagged with: mysteriousmiddleschool • student video entry
3 Comments »

Cathy Nelson has a marvelously interesting post today about her school/district’s restrictive new IT policy.

She writes (emphasis mine):

What did I say? I said, “This is not real-world. How am I going to teach students to be ready for the 21st century if normal computer standards like desktop icons and right click are not available?” Yes I distinctly remember putting voice to that comment. And only now do I realize how keenly the crowd that gathers in the library each morning listens to me. You see we have an 8th grade current events exploratory class. The class is creating a newsletter for students–target audience–> students. One of my morning “regulars” is in that class, and his group is creating a “critic’s corner” for their newsletter. After getting a “no” on anything that might criticize a specific teacher or student, and getting shot down on love, sex, drugs, or profanity, the group has finally come up with a new topic they are enthusiastically researching for their contribution. It will be a critique of the new student login and restrictions on the computer. The plan to write about blocked sites, no icons, the inability to make a workspace that is “theirs” (translated they want a cool background on their desktop, their own bookmarks, etc.) and get this: they are going to QUOTE me making my statement.

Here is my response, also left as a comment…

Hi Cathy…

I have a couple thoughts about this…

1. Don’t let them use your quote at all. First, it makes you seem like you’re wanting to openly start a bit of a rebellion.

2. The quote is not correct. Sure kids can have all the desktop love they want at home, but the reality is in the corporate world many IT departments have severely restrictive policies in place. I have a friend who works for a major corporation and his privileges are nonexistent on the machine he uses all day long. He has to resort to running portable apps on a flash drive until they blocked USB port access. So the truth is, what they are experiencing is in large part overly protective IT management policies that are, in fact, real world.

3. This is not the way to enact change. With this being so new, naturally the school/district/IT folks have made the policies far too restrictive out of fear. Fine, have the kids convince them there’s a low risk to allowing them to change desktops, etc. Instead of a CRITIQUE (read: puts the admin on the defensive) have them play political (teachable moment here) and have them survey the student body and report back that 99.95435324 percent of the kids would like the chance to change the background or whatever. Then have them explore the possible risks, why did the IT dept decide to do this, etc. Then have them counter argue. Critique sounds whiny, critique sounds attacking, make this more of a Student Response.

Ok so that’s a lot, but it’s my thinking…

Chris

Tagged with: cathyjonelson • technotuesday
5 Comments »

I’ve been having a few issues recently that I’ve been able to fix in the wee hours of the morning and I wanted to share the fixes with you in case you’re having any of these problems.

1. FoxMarks wouldn’t synchronize when I upgraded to FoxMarks 2.0.34.

Solution: I had to upgrade to 2.0.36 and then change the auto proxy settings for Firefox. It had to be set to Direct Internet connection. I also had to find the download by going to FoxMarks.com and seeing the link to the wiki.

2. Wordpress quit sending comment notifications following upgrade to 2.3.1. I upgraded to 2.3.2.

Solution: It turns out that I had to enable a forwarding email address in the form of wordpress @ myblogaddress.com and forward it on to my gmail acccount. There was a change in there somewhere that caused this.

Maybe this doesn’t affect you, but maybe it does. If this helps, well, good.

Chris

Tagged with: bugfixes • foxmarks • wordpress
No Comments »

I have a pretty nice home office setup. I’ve got a 20″ iMac and a 19″ LCD Dell 1905FPS LCD monitor sitting next to it. It’s a really nice monitor and accepts two inputs. On the analog side, I’ve got my Windows XP box which hardly ever gets turned on any more. On the DVI side I’ve got my iMac plugged in as a second monitor. I used to leave the LCD off most of the time until yesterday when I got some revelation that I could actually put it to use.

Here’s what it looks like now…

Useful, eh? Here’s how I did it..

I first heard about GeekTool some time ago from Lifehacker. I remember having tried to get it to work once before but failing. My issues, I was sure, so I attacked it again. Also credit Lifehacker for the script to embed Skype contacts you’ll see below..

Once Geektool was installed, I copied and pasted the shell command as per Lifehacker’s suggestions and it popped right up. I configured the script a bit for my liking and it was good to go!

I had also thought about a plain text todo list which I’ve heard from a few folks is a good idea. I had issues making it work with TextEdit, though, since it always tried to save as an .rtf file. Through a few twitter direct messages, I learned that you can force a plain text file by adding .txt to the file name.

It still didn’t work.

Turns out I had to set the encoding as shown below…this only worked for me once I created a file in Windows notepad.exe and copied it over. I couldn’t make this work solely on the Mac side.

Ok then, once I did this, I set the Geektool up to see the file. To monitor your machine’s console log, it defaults to seeing it like this…

I did this and it worked nicely when looking at my plain text todo list. The only trouble is when I changed the text file it didn’t change on the screen. That’s no good. I had to log off and log back on for GeekTool to recognize the change. That’s not cool.

I went searching and stumbled across this thread which lead me to this post. Eureka!

Once I right clicked, went to Open With, and used Firefox, I got the local URL for my todo list! I pasted that along with a curl command, set the refresh to 30 seconds and voila!

The command looks like this –> curl file:///Users/username/Desktop/todo.txt and it automatically refreshes at the interval selected.

So now I had my solution and a darned useful second monitor! I’ve still got plenty of screen real estate left to delegate to other stuff if needed, and will do that on an as-needed basis.

Here’s what my second monitor looks like now, click for a larger version with skitch’ed details.

As you can see, I’m leaving Colloquy open on the edublogosphere IRC channel (irc.edublogosphere.com and channel #edublogosphere) just in case anyone stops by.

Any other GeekTool’ers out there that can suggest a cool uptime command or anything else I can be doing with GeekTool to be even geekier? Did you set this up yourself? Shout out in the comments!

Tagged with: colloquy • edublogosphere • geektook • lifehacker • multiple monitors • skype
1 Comment »

Got this in my email inbox from someone at Google, sounds like good open source stuff!

Announcement:
November 28, 2007

Google announces first open source contest for pre-university students

Who doesn’t love a contest? We certainly do. Google believes strongly in
students having opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math,
and today at the Open Source Developers’ Conference in Brisbane, Australia
we’re pleased to announce the Google Highly Open Participation Contest to help
introduce secondary school and high school students to open source software
development.

Students can now visit http://code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8/ to write
code and documentation, prepare training materials, conduct user-experience
research, and win prizes — t-shirts, cash, or, for ten grand-prize winners, a
chance to visit the Googleplex in Mountain View, Ca.

For the past three years college students have participated in Google Summer of
Code (http://code.google.com/soc/) with great results: hundreds of college
students have been introduced to open source software, thousands of people
across the globe have begun development together, and millions of lines of open
code have been produced. As we thought about what we could do to help encourage
students before university and build a pipeline of future talent, we developed
the Google Highly Open Participation Contest — the first contest from our open
source team exclusively for secondary school and high school students.

Google will work with ten open source organizations — Apache Software
Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python
Software Foundation, and SilverStripe CMS — for this pilot effort, each of
which will provide a list of tasks to be completed by the student participants.
Tasks typically fall into the following categories: code, documentation,
research, outreach, quality assurance, training, translation, and user
interface, so there should be something for everyone, and parents and educators
can help by sharing this opportunity with their children and students.

The contest is open to students age 13 and older who have not yet begun
university studies, and contestants will be able to claim tasks until 12:00
a.m. Pacific Time on January 22, 2008. We hope that students who participate
will be long-term contributors to these and other open source projects in the
future, and we look forward to announcing the grand-prize winners on February
11.

For more information, please visit http://code.google.com/opensource

No Comments »

I eat lunch alone most every day. Truth be told, I enjoy the solitude and since my wife sends me tasty lunch, I usually only venture to the cafeteria for a social visit and maybe a side item.

That said (and aren’t you glad I said it?!) I do like to find somethings to watch during my lunch hour (30 minutes-ish)

Here is what I’ll be watching today…

They’re done downloading now, and they should be at that rockin’ bandwidth.

And yes, that’s here at school. We’ve got a good thing going, I’m just glad I’m not hosting those whopper files. I hope they’re tracking the number of downloads and bandwidth used, those would make for fun post-conference stats.

3 Comments »

I am so grateful for the feedback I received regarding my first version of the handout for NECC. I am so thankful for a learning network like you all!

Here is version 2.2, with lots of changes and improvements. I learned from David Jakes that consistency is important, as is a flair of formality. Counsel taken.

I also decided to go greyscale style, because I didn’t want to risk bad copies if printed on a laser printer.

I found some spots where bullets were different sizes, and the like. I also created this pdf on my Mac, so the graphics look a bit better (well, the one CC graphic, anyway).

So, what do you think?

NECC Handout Version 2.2

5 Comments »

This popped up in my email, and it’s interesting.

In the Google Educators Discussion Group (did you even know it existed?) an educator asked this question..

Is there a way to use tools such as google docs without an email address?

To which a Google employee replied…

Great question! Currently, you do need an email address to use Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
If you need an email address, you’re welcome to create a Gmail account at www.gmail.com .  You’ll get over 2,500 megabytes of free storage (so you’ll never need to delete another message), plus the power of Google search in your inbox!

To which I added…

I think the problem is so many of our students, especially the younger ones, do not have email addresses and signing all of them up for a gmail account would possibly be a violation of the TOS.
Can you clarify?
Thanks…
Chris

To which the Google employee responded…

Great point, and one that likely affects many teachers. One easy way to bring Google tools such as Gmail and Page Creator into the classroom (or your entire school district) is through our Google Apps Education Edition.
Using Google Apps, you can give each of your students, teachers, and administrators their own Gmail account, plus access to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Calendar, Page Creator and Talk. And best of all, it’s free!
For more info, feel free to visit http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/edu_benefits.html
. Also, learn how other schools, from K-12 to college, are using
Google Apps in the classroom at http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/customers.html#edu

Reading through the Google Apps for Education TOS it doesn’t seem to mention age. Even so, is this a good idea? Is Google correct that this is ok? Isn’t there a law here?

6 Comments »

I just wanted to let you all know that edublogosphere.com is no defunt. I registered it some time ago and would be happy to put it to good use.

I had pligg installed, a digg clone that we all could use to submit ed tech stories, but it’s always tough to get buy in to something like that, and I didn’t promote it much.

It seems those sites don’t last much. The crispynews site (http://edbloggernews.crispynews.com/) seems to be gone.

I recall having heard of another pligg site for ed tech, and I would happily point the edublogosphere.com domain there, or maybe to another site.

Any suggestions? It’s a cool domain, what do I do with it?

No Comments »

Kim Cofino has been skype video conferencing with New Zealand. Needless to say, that piqued my interest since I desire to do the same with other classes. Sadly, no one comes calling!

Anyway, I was impressed with Kim’s post and it’s worth a read if you’re considering doing this at any point. I think the idea of  a “hot seat” is golden, as well as her idea of moving the video conference away from center as they become more commonplace. Go read her!

always learning » 4 Steps to a Skype-tastic Video Conference

4 Comments »