Random
Went to the Tigers vs. Braves game last night with some friends. This is the view from the upper deck in right field at Turner Field. Like most modern ball parks, it is a baseball field built around a food court.
Barnabu blog discusses how to add a sky with clouds over any spot on earth using Google Earth and a network link he has provided. He has created a half dome in Google Sketchup with diameter of 50 miles and placed a cloud texture within the dome. He then made this object a network link which will grab your current view and place the skydome model around that location. I navigated to Atlanta in Google Earth, invoked the skydome link and then turned on 3d images to get this view of Atlanta complete with a cloudy background. Sketchup is an amazing piece of software that teachers and students can utilize in very creative ways.
By way of Google Earth Blog...
Over at Read/Write Web Josh Catone has a great roundup of web based applications for students. While geared towards college students, this piece gives a good overview of these tools and how they can be utilized by students. Everything from word processors to calculators is covered.
iPhoney: Until you get your real iPhone...
Tim Wilson points to the Apple Learning Interchange Conference Connections page. It provides podcasts from leading educational conferences. You can listen to a single episode or subscribe to the whole feed.
At Lewis we have been working to finish the ecoroof for our outdoor classroom. With the help of volunteers and members of GRIP (Growing Roofs in Portland) the project is just about complete. We have a few more plants and seedlings to plant, and the irrigation system will be installed later in the week.
Technorati Tags: ecoroof, grip, Growing Roofs in Portland
Friday was our last day of school with students. We closed out the year with an all school assembly where we said goodbye to retiring staff members and to our 5th grade students going on to middle school. The teachers and staff produced a video farewell.
Technorati Tags: lewis, lewiselementary, farewell
Journler is a daily notebook and entry based information manager. It features iLife integration, audio and video entries, document importing and instantaneous searching and filtering and AppleScript, Quicksilver and Spotlight support. I'm testing it out as my note taking and information manager. It includes tagging and smart folders. It has been described as iTunes for text files...
Lots of folks are posting about their plans for the upcoming NECC in Atlanta. While reading Tom Hoffman's weblog this morning I was struck by how true the following statement is... We've got a situation akin to letting the clerks in the purchasing department decide whether or not the books ordered by teachers and librarians are acceptable.
And not only decisions about filtering, but also platform and software issues. Teachers, administrators and community members should be driving these discussions and in all too many districts they are not... I'm looking forward to NECC and the chance to connect with others and learn how they are dealing with these issues...
At lunch I was looking through my newsreader and saw a post by Chris Craft about a web based screencasting tool called screencast-o-matic. I took a look and boy is this thing impressive. With just a few mouse clicks you can create a good quality screencast with audio. You can designate if your screencast is public or private, add notes at specific sections, embed your screencast in a web page or blog, or export it as a static file. This is about as easy as it gets. Below is a quick example. A tool like this allows you to very quickly create screencasts and changes my thinking about how to use them. For example, if I get an email from a teacher regarding a technology question, or with an inquiry about how to do something, I can now very quickly access this tool, create a quick little tutorial with audio narration and then post it to our staff blog, or send an email link to the screencast.
Alan Levine has a great post about how he has created and borrowed several tools for use at the upcoming NMC conference. Taking a lead from the Future of Education conference folks, he is using a web tool called attendr. This is a mash up for a (un)conference, gathering, meeting, class, party... that provides the following:
It takes advantage of API's from Flickr, Technorati, Yahoo Geocoder, and Google Maps to throw together a tool that allows attendees to follow conference happenings and facilitate meeting face to face. This should be fun to play with at NECC later this month in Atlanta. I went ahead and created an attendr page for the NECC pre-conference Edubloggercon that is taking place on June 23, 2007. If you want to play along you can go to http://attendr.com/neccedubloggercon and add yourself to the list of attendees.
Alan has also customized Daniel Dura's Twittercamp for use at the NMC conference. This is something I want to see happen at NECC. As Alan points out, it is pretty easy to customize the interface of Twittercamp to match an event. I threw together a version of Twittercamp with a bit of the NECC look and feel and went ahead and registered a Twitter user called NECC. Once in Atlanta, I would love to see a large screen display hooked up where folks can point Twitter posts to @NECC and they will show up on the display. Kind of an interactive bulletin board for all those meet me at the such and such entrance messages.
NECC will be the first opportunity for me to attend a conference and utilize tools like Twitter or Jaiku. I'm looking forward to playing around with both of them and also with attendr. To facilitate this, I went on the EduBloggerCon wiki and added a page where folks can add their Twitter or Jaiku usernames.
neccedubloggercon
Technorati Tags: edubloggercon, neccedubloggercon, edubloggercon, NECC07, NECC, ISTE, twittercamp, Alan Levine, attendr, twitter, jaiku, Atlanta
Lots of folks are talking about Google Gears, an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:
This is Google's project to make their online products such as Reader, Docs and such work offline. Reader is the first of their products to do so. Am looking forward to the ability to do this with Google Docs.
Jim Gates points to a new PopTech video. This one is by Blaine Brownell an architect and cataloguer of sustainable building materials. He is the editor of the book Transmaterial: A Catalog of Materials that Redefine our Physical Environment, and a columnist for World Changing. In this talk he discusses and shares products made from repurposed materials and provides a look at building practices and materials that help create a sustainable future.