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

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.

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

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?

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?

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

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.

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!

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