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?

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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?

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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

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I’ve been thinking a lot about groups lately. Back in December, Bud Hunt posted about whether more groups were really needed. We’ll set the impetus for that post aside, I raise the point only to say that I am now asking the same question…

In the last few months, Ning has offered an ease of creation that has fostered lots of little groups. Steve Hargadon has started a few. There’s one on cyberbullying, and a host of others. I got invited to join this one, and now this one.

This is getting ridiculous.

I’ve been thinking lots about Doug Belshaw’s experiences with HistoryShareForum.

I want to raise two points…

1. The level of conversation found recently on the two Hargadon ning sites could me much more appropriately supported using traditional forum software. The use of friends, chatterboxes, and the like is not sufficient to overcome the lacking functionalities of the forum built into ning. Not to mention Steve is paying 20 dollars per month for the ad-free site when he could have installed one of the two open source boards or payed for vbulletin and came out ahead.

We as the edublogosphere need to rally around one central giant bulletin board if we want to have discussions on this level. The amount of discussion on Steve’s nings has been a bit dizzying, and the RSS feeds are greatly lacking. Why wait for Ning to fix this when we already have more appropriate solutions?

2. I am not sure why folks keep creating their own little networks on Ning and then inviting others to “join the discussion”. It is a great deal of work to find these other networks and decide to participate.  If this were a more traditional forum, it would scale based on our need.

I realize that these are not web 2.0 ideas in terms of the technology, but if conversation and collaboration are at the heart of web 2.0 (as per O’Reilly), why are we waiting for Ning to reach a level where it fits us as opposed to using a more appropriate tool?

We need to unite as educators, not only in regards to tech, but writ large. We need a central hub where we can meet for collaboration, discussion, and good times. We need a community pub at the center of town where folks walk in for a bite, a pint, and a sit down. Ning is not that.

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I am trying to find out how many courses are being taught predominantly in Second Life. For this paper, I am defining course as a class that lasts for at least one collegiate semester, is taught by at least a Master’s level instructor, and counts for some sort of degree-seeking college credit. This naturally rules out anything dealing with the SL scripting language, and the like.

Boy is this ever hard to come across!

Any ideas?

I’ve sent emails to the SLED list, so far to no avail. I am trying to locate someone at Linden Labs to help, with no success.

I have seen the Sim Teach list of Universities and Organizations but not all of them actually teach in SL, seems like more of an advertising and marketing venture to me.

So I find myself at a loss. Pathfinder…wherefore art thou?

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I am working on a few major research papers for grad school, so I have been thinking about how to best help myself stay organized in dealing with all of the research articles I am sifting through and notes I need to take, not to mention the painstaking process of citing all those articles! I have been looking for good tools to help me, especially web 2.0 tools that might keep me a bit more sane. Here is my progress…

I began thinking that a good start would be Google Docs & Spreadsheets. It appeals to me because I am already familiar with the interface, have tags set up for each course, and can access the document from any computer. It has great formatting, and seamlessly integrates with my daily Gmail and other Google obsessions. Because I enjoy security, I make sure to log in to https://docs.google.com, adding the s to make it secure. Ok, so I will draft my papers in Google Docs.

I also use Google Notebook to keep track of interesting websites I come across. Tragically, I tend to note them and then never go back to check it out. Sometimes I go search my notebook when I think I might have noted something previously, but it ends up being pretty much a black hole. It’s still fun to note stuff, though. How much will this help me with my research, though? Well, theoretically as I am searching Google Scholar I can annotate pages that I come across for later review. What I end up doing more often than not, however, is downloading everything I find that looks relevant, and then sifting through it later. I have a folder full of twenty or so PDF files that I am sifting through now, so no real need to Google Notebook it.

So I did a quick search in Google using the query APA +Firefox, since I am writing my papers in the APA Format. I do have the Publication Manual handy, but I still could use some help with citation formatting, etc.

An aside: Here is a rockin APA crib sheet (pdf).

The search results led me to Zotero. I found this tool also by searching for “research” in the Firefox addons section. Zotero is nice, and very easy to use. Trouble is I am not always going to be at one computer when I am doing research. I want to be able to have all my citations and bibliography handy wherever I am. After all, part of this web 2.0 world is having access to your information when you need it, right?

If Zotero had a Foxmarks-like syncing capability, we’d be in business. Maybe I overlooked it. Nope. Here is what the Zotero FAQ says…

In the near future, there will be ways of storing and syncing Zotero collections remotely.

Ok, so moving along. Zotero’s exporting citations feature felt a little clunky to me. Not sure why. Maybe it’s the browser integration. Blogging from Performancing feels odd, but works well. Probably my perception that needs to change?

At the end of the second page of search results I came across this link to NoodleBib’s FAQ page. Never having heard of NoodleBib, I erased the second part of the URL and got the home page to NoodleTools. Boy, am I impressed!

This is a nice suite of software, I have to admit. It feels very web 2.0 but in an early-startup kind of way. The reflective graphic they use in the header seems a bit off, but nonetheless it’s a solid-looking site. Here’s the scoop…

NoodleTools offers a variety of tools that look promising…

NoodleBib bills itself as, “The Web’s most comprehensive and accurate MLA and APA bibliography composer with a fully-integrated note-taking component”. Sounds tasty! I dug around some more and found NoodleBib Express, a free citation generator. I traditionally have used Son of Citation Machine, but think it might be giving incorrect citations. More on that later…

I kept digging and found this information about the company…

NoodleTools, Inc., a California company incorporated in 2002, was co-founded in 1999 by mother and son team Debbie and Damon Abilock. NoodleTools’ flagship product, NoodleBib, has emerged as the leading bibliography software on the Internet, transforming bibliographic instruction methodologies in thousands of subscribing schools and libraries.

Sounds nice, doesn’t it! The About Us page even has a nice photo of mom and son.

One word caught me, though, subscribing.

Uh oh. They want money. Shoot. I’m really poor cash-strapped these days. Grad school + stay-at-home-wife + two daughters + teacher’s salary = not much cash

How much do they want?

Eight dollars for a year. It’s a good value. Here is the total pricing package for individual subscriptions…

Subscription Rate: $4.00 for 3 months, $6.00 for 6 months (25% discount), or $8.00 for one year (12 months, 50% discount).

Whew. That might work in the household budget. What do I get for my ocho buckaroos?

All I can say is take the tour…

It offers me a central spot to store my citations, which they help me generate (same interface as the express free version), which I can then export into a .doc file (other formats available), and quickly cite parenthetically.

I can also take notes (aptly called notecards) which will allow me to digitally annotate my references. They even have a heck of a little Knowledgebase that has answers to lots of hard-hitting questions about how to cite this, do I cite that, etc.

It looks like a heck of a solution to my problem, and I am ready to sign up! I am curious, though, do any of you have any other suggestions? Something I overlooked? Sound off in the comments! (last line thieved from lifehacker, shame on me!)

Hope this has been helpful, I gotta go. My 5 year-old just told me she’s hungry. I need to get her some take out, cook her some supper. Wish me luck!

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I am prepping for a pretty major online collaboration project between my kids and kids in a few different countries, and I need a bit of help with my Skype setup. When I skyped with Peru, the setup was pretty good, but kids could not really hear what was being said. Let me lay it out for you…

Two laptops, one running Skype and the other with the wiki showing. The laptops are older and I didn’t want to crash one…hence two.
A headset plugged into the headphones and mic jacks on the laptop running Skype.
Sony mini DV camera running usb 2.0 streaming for the video portion.

So it worked well as long as we had no desire for the rest of the class to be involved.

I do have a surround-sound system in my room, but of course when I hooked that up the echo got mean!

So, how can I have a setup with a central mic, and a system loud enough for nearly 30 kids (!) to hear it? Is there some sort of echo-killing device? Do I stream it out and then have a participating station and a listening station?

Thanks in advance for all your help! I will keep you all posted on my efforts!

Technorati Tags: christophercraft, international_collaboration, skype

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While mine might not be as trumpeted as others (just kidding) my kids are working on a cool project that speaks to the flat world concept! We are in contact with an American school in Lima Peru. My kids have been working on a wiki to prepare for a live Skype videoconference with that school on December 4, 2006.

My kids spent time in class researching common topic of their creation about Peruvian culture. They researched topics such as food, sports, and others. Have a look at our wiki to see for yourself!

I emailed my contact at the school about a dry run, which we scheduled for today. I waited until lunch time, and then switched my Skype status from invisible to online. I waited patiently for her to come online. I hooked up the Sony Digicam (basic low level mini DV camera) via mini USB to an older Dell laptop and tested the video out. As usual, I made a test call to echo123 to test the sound. All was working fine, although there was an echo since I have my laptop hooked up through a stereo system so my kids could hear. No problem, echo is acceptable.

When she came online, we connected immediately, but no video. She could see me, I couldn’t see her. We disconnected and connected and pressed on. I bemoaned it, thinking it was due to a firewall issue. Maybe the ports are blocked for incoming video? Who knows.

Miraculously (and keeping in tune with some noted inconsistencies with Skype) it began to work! My kids were well into class watching me mess with this, and I let them watch. It was a great side trip, a la Warlick.

When the video flipped on the class went wild. They quickly settled down and we chatted with a teacher down there. My kids were nervous but thrilled! They stepped up to the mic (figuratively and literally) and did a great job muddling through basic Spanish. The teacher there spoke perfect English, and she was gracious about it.

Then the cool stuff happened. Her room started to fill up with kids.

Then my kids got to talk to their kids.

That was cool to watch.

The coolest part was seeing the multiple races. We met a young man originally from Korea who was living there and spoke great Spanish, too.

The best part was seeing a young blonde boy. Turned out he was from…ready for it…

North Carolina.

My kids were in awe that a kid from North Carolina was in Lima, Peru attending school.

Since we’re in South Carolina, the Carolina connection was made. Priceless.

We are scheduled for our live video conference (what I call it to the kids) on 12.04.06 in the middle of the day. I am going to video tape it and if I get permission, I am going to make a gently nudging video for the foreign language teachers that I am going to present to in February at the SCFLTA conference. It will be sort of a here’s-what-we-did-today-in-my-class, what-did-your-kids-do type presentation, not intended to offend, rather to stimulate.

Sorry for the cross posting, but this was too good to not share in as many venues as possible. If you decide to link to this, please do so from the new blog, since this isn’t really open source related!

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes! Watch for more updates on the other blog! Have you subscribed yet?

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Today my kids are going to embark on one of my favorite projects that they will do in their time with me. They are going to record commercials advertising Spanish class!

When I was a student, I ofted asked the question, “Why do I need to learn this?” albeit markedly less articulate.

My method of combating this is to have them create commercials advertising the benefits of learning Spanish in sixth grade. I am going to do it using Audacity 1.2.5 and beat up old computers running Windows 98. This version was just released on 10.30.06 and I am curious to see the bug fixes of which it speaks. I am avoiding the new 1.3.2 Beta version because these old machines can’t handle anything beta, except fish. Well, maybe.

This project caught the attention of Steve Hargadon some time ago and he recorded the first (and so far only) interview for a series called Take 5. I imagine it’s because Steve is so busy. Nonetheless, he seemed to like the idea of my kids recording audio and publishing it. I am going to create a slew of Gcast feeds and then upload the audio directly from these computers into the Gcast feed when the kids finish. No copying to a thumb drive, no having to copy via network, just straight to the publishing with them! I will certainly screen the, but don’t anticipate any problems. I am going to create one feed per block, and I am going to begin this new wave with two blocks today. So keep checking back, I will announce when they have been published for your listening pleasure.

On a side note, my upgrade to the stable version of Moodle 1.7 went swimmingly. No troubles yet! So we keep trucking with it, but I still would like more feedback, so let me know what you think!

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I am working on a new blog, to be announced soon. If I have learned anything from this blog (which will continue, but return back to the real core purpose of promoting free and/or open source software in k12 education) it’s that folks are out to get me.

By that I mean trackback/comment/comment form spammers. It’s been unreal! I can’t imagine what a real ed blogger that’s halfway decent in the rankings deals with. According to technorati, I don’t even make it into the top 100,000. Can’t say I’m terribly concerned, although I suppose it would be an ego boost if it happened. Maybe the new blog will be the trick! I’ll be announcing that shortly, once I finish getting the theme just right, the plugins installed, and some other fine tuning done. I think it will be good.

I want to ask a question before I continue, though. What do you think are absolutely mission critical Wordpress plugins? Here is a list of the plugins I either use or have modified for use. Do you have any that you think I should add to the list? For what it’s worth, I am using the newest version (2.0.5) of Wordpress and all these plugins seem to work fine.

• Akismet - Spam Protection - installed by default with Wordpress.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior - Helps me tag my posts with ease.
  
• PodPress - It’s the gold standard for Wordpress and podcasting. Works wonderfully and recent improvements have knocked out some of the bugs that caused me lots of grief in months past.
• Feedburner Feed Replacement Plugin - theoretically redirects all feed traffic to feedburner.
• EdBlogger News Submit Link - Automatically adds a submit link for EdBlogger News. I actually modified this one from a plugin called Sol-Digg , by Bas Wenneker, which I don’t think is bring developed any more. So I say I did it! Jokingly more than anything, I give credit where credit is due. You can see this in action below each post.
• EduBlogoSphere Submit Plugin - I modified the above one to work for a new service, located at EduBlogosphere.com. In the interest of full disclosure, I sort of run the edublogosphere.com domain using an open source piece of software called pligg. I am thinking it would be a cool way to unite the edblogger community, but not sure I would ever get buy-in and enough traffic. So it sits there.
• Google Analytics - Helps me see the underworkings of my site’s traffic. Haven’t fully harnessed this one yet.
• Spam Karma 2 - This helps where Akismet does not, for trackback validation. I was getting LOADS of trackback spam until SK2 took control. I doubt I need both Akismet and SK2 but they don’t seem to be fighting each other.
• Wordpress Database Backup - This is also a default plugin, but a good one.
• WP Contact Form - I use this so that folks can contact me without me revealing my email address, a defense against spam, naturally. Although, I am finding out that LOTS of bots seem to be able to use this form, so now I am getting a bunch of contact form spam. I think I need a new contact form option with some sort of image validation-type check to it. Going to be looking into a new solution for this one…
• XD Forum - I wanted this more to learn how to do it than anything else. I have figured out a blog is not a great spot for discussion outside of the comments realm. My forum never got going, and was originally a bit hard to read. I fiddled with bbpress when it was first released a few weeks ago, and never could quite get it to work with my theme wrapped around it. It works nicely alone, and can integrate with WP logins, etc, but I had trouble truly integrating it, and my sites are fractured enough as it is.
• BlogLiner - I don’t use this on this blog, although I should. My blogroll is sadly out of date. BlogLiner spits my Bloglines blogroll into a fancy little sidebar widget. I had to trim the list, since there are a good many feeds in my account. I made the majority private and left the ones I think would be the most useful.

I think all of these are available on the newly redesigned WP-Plugins.net site, which I think can be a fun site to explore.

So that is the list compiled from my own surfing. I decided that if I was to find a more comprehensive list I might need to look to the blogging community, writ large. Via Bloggingpro I came across this article from John C Chow. After reading his list, I decided to add two to my list, and have installed them since beginning the draft of this post. They are:

• Digg Click - I previously used Cybernet’s Digg Button plugin but found that I had to turn off the Visual Editor each and every time I intended to include a Digg Button. Digg Click, as you can see from my implementation, has a nice feature of not requiring a post to have been previously “dugg” before it displays the button.
• Related Posts - This plugin is obvious. It seems to work based on the title of the post, and has a feature where you can add keywords (not tags) to help the plugin better match what it calls related to the current post. You can see that it works, although not terribly well. That is a fault of my desire to create witty titles that sometimes are a bit non-sequitor to the post content. Do I need to shape up? Well…maybe.

So that’s my list. Did I miss something? If you comment, please make sure to provide a link to your favorite plugin! I will be announcing my new blog soon, to much fanfare I am sure! Thanks for standing by me.

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