Wikisky

Wikisky, an web based detailed sky map. Works a bit like Google Maps...

More Outdoor Classroom at Lewis

On Friday the concrete floor of our outdoor classroom at Lewis Elementary was poured. Helping with this effort were Lewis parents, Antonio Chavez, Ed Sisson, Darcie and Reed McIntosh, and Gregory MacNaughton. The group worked into the evening to set and finish the concrete and the result is a great looking floor in our outdoor classroom space. 3rd grade student Antonia helped us document the work and you can view some photographs she took over at Flickr...

Technorati Tags: Lewis Elementary, Outdoor Classroom

Outdoor Classroom at Lewis

Last spring we started to create an outdoor classroom space at Lewis. We got as far as the structure itself, but still needed to pour a concrete pad and also finish the roof. This spring we were awarded a grant to install an eco roof/green roof on the structure and plan to do so later this spring. This left the pouring of the pad which we anticipated would cost about $800 when all was said and done. Finding the $800 was proving to be a problem, that is until last Thursday. It turns out that Lakeshore Entertainment is in Portland filming a movie titled Untraceable. One of their sets is in the Lewis neighborhood and they needed a place for cast and crew to park their cars while filming this week. Since this week is spring break in Portland, it worked out that they could use our parking lot, and in return they have made a donation to the school that will cover the cost of the concrete and pumper truck. I have rounded up a few of our parents who know how to pour and finish concrete, so this afternoon we will finish framing the pad, and tomorrow afternoon the concrete truck is scheduled to show up around 3:00 and we will pour the pad.

Jott.com - Mobile Note Taking and Hands-Free Messaging

Jott.com - Mobile Note Taking and Hands-Free Messaging:
Jott allows you to call a phone number, and leave a voice mail message that is then transcribed into an email and sent to you or to others. Great for to-do lists and such, especially for stuff I want to remember later, but don't have time to write down at the moment. The messages come as text with a link to voice message. I'm impressed with how well it transcribes your voice message into text. With a little creative filtering in my email I can organize reminders for home and for work. Also you can easily import your address book into Jott and use the service to send messages to others just by calling a number, saying the recipients name, and then recording the message. Jott transcribes the message and sends it as an email or a text message.

Technorati Tags: Jott, voicemail

Lewis Drama Club

On Friday evening and again on Saturday, the Lewis Elementary Drama Club presented their their production of A Hairy Tale. Under the direction of Mrs. Keefer, Mrs. Ross, Mr. Jamesbarry, and Ms. Padellford, the students put on a great show. Also helping with the production was Michael Wehrli, our drama teacher in residence, part of our Artists in Residence program supported by our annual Run For the Arts. Our Drama Club meets weekly starting in January and then puts on their production right before our Spring Break. Students from our Orff Ensemble perform all the music, and parents, teachers and other community folks volunteer their time helping with things like costumes, sets, concessions, and general organization.

www.flickr.com

Technorati Tags: drama club, lewis elementary

Netequality.com

While several cities are involved in high profile wireless initiatives, including Portland, an organization called Netequality is working to provide access using a different approach. Today GigaOM has a report ( Really Plug and play WiFi ) about the marketing of low cost routers and repeaters that are being used to provide access to apartment complexes and neighborhoods. Netequality have come up with a plug-n-play version of Meraki’s wireless mesh router, that can be plugged into a power socket. This is an interesting and low cost approach to providing access. Basically a mesh network that shares an Internet connection. On the Netequality web site they document several of their current projects.

I am very interested in playing around with this and have ordered one of the plug-in devices, along with one of their routers. When I have it set up I'll post an update.

OnePipe: the Single-Button Generic Feed Filtering Bookmarklet

OnePipe allows you to create custom RSS feeds of sites based on a keyword or phrase through a simple bookmarklet. There are several sites that allow you to create filtered feeds, but this tool allows you to create them from within your browser and without any type of login or registration. Combined with text message alerts, you can create a system that alerts you when a particular web site posts about a specific topic or term. The post linked above outlines several possible scenarios for using this tool.

By way of Lifehacker...

Technorati Tags: onepipe

Garden Work Party at Lewis

At Lewis we are fortunate to have adjacent to the building a garden area we call the Outdoor Center. This space provides an outdoor classroom for our students and a garden area where students grow vegetables and other plants. Today was a very nice day in Portland and by chance we had scheduled a work party in the outdoor center. About 12 parents and students showed up and spent the time weeding, cleaning out beds, and helping haul wood chips and dirt. Below are a few images from the work party.

www.flickr.com

NCAA Bracket

Oregon Public Broadcasting Report on the TESA Mess

Oregon Public Broadcasting has an interesting report on the dispute between Vantage Learning and the Oregon Department of Education...

Ed Dennis is Oregon's deputy schools' superintendent. He says the extra bills came after Vantage learned it was going to have to compete against other companies, to renew its contract through an RFP -- or "Request For Proposals" process.

Ed Dennis: "Vantage suggested that if the RFP process went away -- if they didn't have to participate, they suggested that would be a good thing. When we said that wasn't the way the state works, then, they produced this $2 million in back invoices."

Dennis says that's also when the technical problems started.

Technorati Tags: TESA, ODE, Vantage Learning

News Release - Oregon Department of Education

News Releases - Oregon Department of Education:
The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) announced today that all Oregon schools will use paper-and-pencil assessment tests in math and reading for the remainder of the 2006-07 school year. This action is necessary because ODE's contractor for TESA, Vantage Learning, has declined to continue performing services required under the contract. ODE exhausted every option to continue with TESA until the end of the school year. ODE is working with the Oregon Department of Justice to explore its legal options.

Below is a screen grab of what you find if you visit the TESA page. The page that schools used to log into the system for testing.

By the way as of this posting, Vantage Learning still notes TESA and the work they did for the Oregon Department of Education as one of their "Success Stories".... From where I'm sitting, thinking of administering paper pencil tests to my students, it sure does not sound like one.

Technorati Tags: TESA, Vantage Learning

More Testing Mess...

My previous two posts have concerned TESA, the Oregon online testing system developed and operated by Vantage Learning, and the technical issues that have come up that have forced the Oregon Department of Education to suspend testing using the system, which might force all Oregon schools to administer paper/pencil tests this spring.

I took a look at the Vantage Learning web site this morning hoping to find information from the company explaining their side of the issue. I did not find anything. I do find it a bit ironic that under the heading Success Stories, the first item listed it TESA, the Oregon State Achievement Testing system. The system that because of errors and technical issues has been deemed unusable by the Oregon Department of Education.

Technorati Tags: testing, ODE, Vantage Learning, TESA

More Oregon Testing and Vantage Learning

Below is the text of an email that was sent out by the Oregon Department of Education regarding the situation with Vantage Learning and the Oregon State Achievement Tests. I wonder what other state education departments or school districts work with these folks and if they are aware of this situation...

For the past several weeks, we have been working to maintain the integrity and stability of Oregon's assessment system - TESA - while dealing with performance and contractual issues that could disrupt our capacity to administer tests through the end of the school year.

Vantage has informed Oregon that because of a dispute over financial issues, it will terminate its work with us before the end of our scheduled testing window. Oregon maintains that Vantage has failed to meet its contractual obligations for service and deliverables.

ODE has made extensive efforts to resolve the issues with Vantage, including traveling to the company's offices in Pennsylvania. We have not, to date, reached a successful conclusion of the dispute.

More information will be communicated as it becomes available today.

Ed Dennis, Deputy Superintendent
Oregon Department of Education

Technorati Tags: Vantage Learning, TESA

Oregon State Testing Problems

In Oregon we have the option of conducting our state achievement testing using an online web based system called TESA. It is produced by a company called Vantage Learning. Recently we have been experiencing problems with the test. The web site that we connect to has been having many technical problems and on Wednesday the Oregon Department of Education announced they were suspending the test until they could get assurances from the vendor that the testing system was going to run properly. If they don't get it working properly, then we are looking at giving paper/pencil tests to all of our students. What fun... You can read more about this in this article from the Oregon Statesman Journal.

Technorati Tags: testing, Vantage Learning

Lewis Elementary Auction

The school where I work, Lewis Elementary, is holding an auction on March 15. The goal is to raise money to help fund things like our Americorps position and other school activities. If you are in Portland and would like to help, please consider attending. More information is available on the Lewis web site. If you do attend, you can bid on cool stuff like this chair painted by Mrs. Logue's kindergarten students.

Voicemail in your email...

I have often found myself wading through the voicemail on my mobile phone and wishing I could visually see a list of the messages and listen to them in a non linear fashion. The Apple iPhone will have this feature, but now through a free service called CallWave, you can accomplish the same thing with your mobile phone.

CallWave is a service that allows you to hear and respond to your mobile phone messages in your email. The free service sends a copy of your mobile phone message to your email, allowing you to:

• Sort and prioritize messages from your email in-box - viewing caller names and message lengths in the subject line.
• Listen and respond to messages instantly with powerful text reply and call back features.
• Be notified of new messages via detailed SMS alerts on your handset.
• Permanently save your messages on your computer.

I've been looking for something like this. Basically all your voicemail now comes to your email account. You can still access voicemail from your phone, but now also get a detailed email message indicating who called, the length of the message, and the option of listening to the message from your mail. You also have the option to call back the number that left the voice message. The service will call your mobile phone and connect you to the number that left the message. If the call came from a mobile phone, you also have the option to send a text message to the caller.

By way of Photo Matt

Technorati Tags: callwave, mobile phones, voicemail

DIY Coloring Book?

Dumpr is a collection of tools for manipulating images found on Flickr. One that looks interesting is the sketch tool. Kind of a do it yourself coloring book creator.

by way of CogDogBlog

Google Maps Transparencies

Google Maps Transparencies is a Google Maps mash-up that allows you to overlay a satellite and street map view while browsing Google Maps. You can toggle between views having the map overlay the satellite view, or the satellite view overlay the map. Great for getting your bearings in a new location.

by way of Digital Geography...

Technorati Tags: google maps

Post From IMified...

I am posting this from my iChat client using a service called IMified.

Imified is an instant messenger buddy that works across all major IM networks and offers access to a growing number of web applications, as well as productivity tools like notes, reminders, and todo's. Imified helps you get things done faster.

Basically IMified gives you access to various web services (Google Calendar, Wordpress, Basecamp, blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, Remember the milk...) via your IM client. So this post is coming from iChat on my MacBook, but it could also be posted from my phone using my AIM client, or from Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, or Google Talk. At Lewis we have a reader board that displays an RSS ticker of upcoming events. The events are powered by a WordPress.com weblog. I can now update the events ticker just using my IM client.

From reading their support forums, it looks like they are at work on a metaweblog api implementation which means I should be able to add my Drupal sites and post to them too. A pretty nice little tool...

More BatchGeoCoder...

Cross posted on TechLearning.com...
In my school district we are beginning our staffing and enrollment planning for the next school year. In the case of my school we have a new boundary change which has added a new level of uncertainty based on the fact that while kindergarten aged students in the new area are automatically slotted for my school, students living in that area already enrolled in our district have the option of staying at their current school or moving to my school. The process for this decision making plays out over the next six weeks so I will have to make some staffing and grade level configuration decisions based on the best information available at this time. To help with with this decision making process I have plotted the addresses of the students in question in Google Earth. By visually seeing where these students live I can get a better idea of how close they live to my school and how likely they are to make the move based on things like walking distance and transportation options. To do this I took the addresses of the students in question and plotted them with tool called the batchgeocoder (batchgeocoder.com). This web tool created by Phillip Holmstrand allows you to...

"map any kind of street address list, for example copied from Excel, and geocode the addresses to get latitude and longitude coordinates using the tool below. The data can then be mapped in your browser, downloaded into Google Earth, saved to a web page, or transferred back into your spreadsheet. You can also use this tool to calculate distances to multiple addresses from a single point, or get quick driving directions to multiple destinations. Mapping multiple locations with your own custom data takes seconds, just follow the 6 steps below to plot your own data on a fully interactive multi-point map..."

By using this information, along with other information from my school district, I can begin this process with a few more educated assumptions and in the process make better decisions for my program and students.

Technorati Tags: Batchgeocoder, Google Earth