NECC 2009 Interview

After my presentation on Tuesday, ISTE asked to interview me about a few things for the home audience who were watching via Ustream. That video is below. After watching it, I have adopted a couple of new rules for myself.

1. Don't give an interview directly after presenting to 1500 people. The adrenalin is still flowing and I seem a tad frenetic!
2. Don't give an interview in a referee's uniform (or any costume for that matter!)
3. Learn to control my hand movements, thought this will probably be unlikely.
4. I know I slow down my speech when I present, but, boy, I was whipping through this interview!
5. Go get lunch first, then do the interview...

However, I don't think I did too bad with the content, so I am happy with that, anyhow!

Google Apps for Education overview

I receive lots of questions and see lots of posts about the effective use of Google Apps for Education in the K-12 environment. Following are some of my thoughts.

• We used a separate domain for the staff and students since staff mail had to be archived (as per the eDiscovery regulations) and student email does not. We purchased staff email archiving from Gaggle who have a Googlemail API that makes it simple. We do not use Gaggle for email accounts, however.

• Google Apps for Education works the same way as Google Apps Premier, with a tad less online storage space per user. The wonderful things about it is that any user can limit any publication to just those who are on the domain, if they wish. We use this when we are publishing something for only district staff. In addition, users can always selectively choose outside users (like our students on the other domain) to see their Docs, Calendars, Sites, etc.

• When you administer Google Apps for Education, you can chose to allow access (or dis-allow access) to the suite of tools -- Email, Calendar, Docs, Talk, Sites, Video, and Web Pages -- for all users. Google Groups and Blogger are not in the suite, but, of course may be easily used.

• We received explicit permission from our parents in grades 6-8 to give their students email accounts. Here is the permission slip we used for this special purpose. If I were to set this up again, I might simply create three domains-- one for staff, one for the middle and high school students with email turned on, and one for the younger students with email turned off, but with log-in access to Docs and Sites, to allow collaborative work to take place in a closed environment. You do not need to have email turned on to use these tools.

• We used the last two digits of YOG-last name-first initial for the student accounts. In addition, so their real name did not show up in the header of mail they sent, when setting up the accounts, I used the YOG-last name for the last name of the student and their first initial for their first name.

The use of these Google Apps has moved technology ahead rapidly in our district. Between shared calendars for school-based meetings to internal Google Sites acting as mini-Moodle packages, both teachers and students have made good use of the apps for communication, collaboration, and creation.

Here are some links to Nauset Google pages:

• Superintendent's Newsletter : this is coded to look like one of our Web pages, but is a Google Doc that the Superintendent's assistant updates each month. This is an easy way to distribute some of the updating of Web page info to others. She simply overwrites the content in the Google Doc each month and republishes, thus the hyperlink on the Web page remains the same.
  

• Cache the Wave: this is a summer professional development announcement and sign-up Google Site with embedded Google forms

• Google Goodies: this is a Google site with three parts-- a round-up of a weekly tip I sent to all staff and students, embedded screencasts for the basic Google Apps usage, and an RSS workshop I created for our adminstrators.

• Middle School Newsletter: although dated, this can give you some idea on how to distribute the work involved in your school-produced newsletter since each user can update their own pages of the shared Site. There is one thing different about Sites than Docs, though. When you make a change to a Google Sites page, it automatically goes live and with Docs you can choose to do it that same way or manually publish it when you are ready.
  

Wolfram Alpha thoughts

I have spent quite a bit of time with Wolfram Alpha today. It is going to be interesting to introduce this to teachers and students. The user really needs to think about the appropriate time to choose this tool for information.

I suggest you spend a bit of time on the examples page. As you click through the examples, there is a description of the type of search that can be conducted in the search box based on the topic you have chosen. This is a great way to help users to learn the most appropriate use of the tool and the proper syntax for searches.

I have discovered a couple of really cool features about Wolfram Alpha. First, at least on the Mac side, in both Firefox and Safari, a student can simply drag any of the information boxes off of the WA site and the item winds up as a GIF on their computer desktop. It can easily be inserted in a project. (Even all the tables wind up being GIFS!) The student can then add the citation information needed for the GIF they are using.

Secondly, all of the source information (both Web-based and print) consulted for that topic is included as a link at the bottom of the results page to both allow for further research and for determining the reliability and credibility of the results. I so love this!!!

Images source:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=icosahedron

Twitter is not for email

During the past month or so, I have realized people are beginning to use Twitter as their main form of communication. I am a regular Twitter user and follower, but do not keep it open on my desktop all day. I use it how it is intended to be used-- to post quick items of interest or respond with a short message to someone seeking help on a topic. And I think carefully before I answer, to determine whether the response is only useful for the questioner (and DM the answer) or if others might also benefit from the answer (and reply with the @questioner). I try not to clutter up the list with responses that are meaningless to most others. That is part of the Twetiquette (Twitter etiquette).

(Addendum: I was not implying above that people should not post "meaningless" (read "fun") items to Twitter. What I was referring to is the practice of replying to a post via an @username on the list when the actual answer only makes sense to the person who asked the question. It often does not make sense when one sees only an answer.)

I am starting to receive some of the reference questions I receive regularly from educators via Twitter. The direct messages from Twitter show up in my email inbox, and I then have to go open my Twitter client, locate the DM, and respond to the questioner.

It is easy to ask a question in 140 characters, but not so easy to answer with anything meaningful in that number of characters. So, I wind up DM'ing three or four separate messages to the questioner, including having to shorten a URL or two in the Twitter messages.

Twitter is not the place for that kind of communication, in my opinion. If you have a question that you want answered which you know will require me to search the Web and do some research, please don't send it via Twitter.

I am easy enough to find on the Web, and, if you don't have it, here is my email address: kathy@kathyschrock.net

I am always glad to help, but not always in 140-character bursts!

My two favorite things-- shopping and the iPhone

I just download a new application from the iPhone app store called Coupon Sherpa which defines itself as an "in-store coupon application for the iPhone."

You simply browse for a store or restaurant by category or check the alphabetical list for your favorites. Most coupons show up with barcodes that can be scanned in at the register when checking out. (Others lead you to the offer on the vendor's Web site.) As of this posting, there are 178 coupons in 111 stores in Coupon Sherpa, including many major retailers.

The app is only $1.99, but, in celebration of Earth Day, and to highlight one of Coupon Sherpa's goals "to reduce the amount of paper that is wasted by printing coupons", the application is free until this Friday, April 29. (But well-worth the cost of the app anytime!)

I cannot wait to try it out later today when I go shopping. It will be interesting to see how handing the iPhone to the cashier will go over, but I think they had better get used to it!

YouTube is great!

I can (seemingly) find anything I want to on YouTube! I find myself searching YouTube for things that come up in general conversation the same way I do with the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).

Having "primary source" information when having a discussion about old television shows, segments on Sesame Street that one remembers, or old footage of a favorite rock band is great! (And this is in addition to the huge number of educational videos to be found there, too.)

Here is today's sequence of events that led to YouTube and continued to amaze me as to its breadth....

1. Talking about the NCAA Final Four championship game with two colleagues.

2. Continued the discussion about the women's Final Four game tonight.

(My son is a UConn student and a rabid fan and is in St. Louis for the game.)

3. He had told me, if UConn men had made the Final Four, that Dale, the "blue and white" guy, was going to try to get back and forth between the women's and the men's games.

4. My colleagues and I then moved on to conversations about other famous "painted" people, most notably the Tin Man and Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz.

5. We discussed how scared we were when Margaret Hamilton would come out as the witch, and one colleague remembered watching an interview with her on Mr. Rogers. She remembered how kind and gentle Ms. Hamilton was during the interview, and how she tried to humanize the witch to make the character less scary for children.

6. One quick search, and I had the clip to show her.

YouTube rocks! (And why is it blocked in so many schools?)

April Fools' Day or not?

In the "old" days, I used to love the creative things Web page creators came up with on April 1st. The items were always clever and easily understood to be spoofs.

However, with the changes in technology moving so fast in the last few years, I found myself, while doing real work on April 1, trying to decide if the information I was viewing was true or not! It was kinda scary that I could not tell. Are the spoofs getting better? Or is technology changing so fast that I will believe anything?

However, people still continue to amaze me with their creativity on April 1. Here are a few of my favorites from the day.


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