$100 Laptop

I've been following MIT's $100 Laptop .

MIT just unveiled the prototype on 11/16 in Tunisia.

The laptops will be used to provide access were it is typically missing.

The MIT Media Lab does great work!

What is the $100 Laptop, really?
The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop that will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data. This rugged laptop will be WiFi-enabled and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel.

Things Have Changed

Our 1200 teachers each have their own laptop.
They each have a video projector and Dcam in their classroom.
Our principals each have a laptop with a replicator.
Principals and District Admin each have a Treo 650.
We are adding computers for 20,000 students this year and next.
Like most places the infrastructure is questionable and tech support needs improvement.
Professional development offerings are exceptional.

I am my District’s Director of Technology Planning.
We are the 9th largest district in Washington.
My job is to dream, determine and evangelize the desired future for integrated technologies in our 32 schools.

I went to Philadelphia and the NECC conference this summer.
I’ve read the World is Flat and watched the MIT online lecture by Thomas Friedman.
I switched to Firefox and Thunderbird.
I read WWWEDU.
I set up my del.icio.us account.
I set up my PortaPortal account.
I now receive 253 RSS feeds on Bloglines.
I tried a couple of other aggregators and didn’t like them.
I set up a few blogs on Blogger.
I set up a myspace account to watch my own children, shocking.
I set up a protopage account.
I set up my Technorati account where I found all of my blogs rank 979,918 with 0 links from 0 sites.
I set up a Zoto & Flickr account.
I set up a Gmail account.
I set up an All Consuming account.
I have a 43 things, 43 Places account.
I set up maps on Frappr, Wayfaring, & YourGMap.
I explored the world with Google, Virtual, & Flash Earth.
I further explored the world with Yahoo Local, a9, maplandia, USAphotoMaps, Worldwind and literally dozens of other maps.
I set up wikis on PB, Jot, Schtuff, Seed, Mozilla, Media, Spaces & Wikipedia.I bought an ipod and now listen to podcasts in my car and on my bike.
I use a Treo 650. I set up a SplashBlog & ODEO.
I set up a Digital Divide Network account.
I set up a ELGG account.
I set up a My Tube account.
I set up an Upcoming account.
I’ve found over 1000 geocaches with my 3 GPS receivers.
I read the bible on Bible Gateway.
I read the newspaper through RSS.
I’ve taken a class on Blackboard.
I set up seldom used accounts on Writely, Xanga, LiveJournal, Digg, Furl, SuperGlu, Plazes, Vizu, & Moodle.
I have a Yahoo & a Yahoo 360 Account.
I set up a Skype account (GEMalone) and talked to one person; although I see him at work every day.
I have chat accounts with AIM, GTalk, MSN & Yahoo and have integrated them with Trillian & Meebo.

After all of this; even though I sold TRS 80’s for a living, even though I was one of the very first owners of the Wozniak Edition IIGS, even though I could write programs in Basic, Logo, and Pascal (emphasis on could). Even though I’ve been an adjunct professor for major universities teaching classes on Laser Discs & LogoWriter. I have to admit, it didn't take long for me to determine that I am not the techno-nerd I used to be. Things have changed since I was last teaching in a 5th grade classroom in 1989. Demands are different. Heck, things have changed since I was last an elementary principal in 2003. Actually things have changed a great deal since my visit to Philadelphia in July!

Here are my questions…
How do you keep up? How do you keep current? How do you find and focus on the very best? How do you get principals and teachers to try this stuff without being overwhelmed? How do you determine the right stuff? Where did you start? Where should a newbie start? How do you get educators to realize it’s not about integrating tech anymore? How do you teach old dogs? Student engagement is impacted without question but where’s the connection to student achievement?

Top 20 EduBlogs Follow up

It is interesting to see that in just 3 days 20 folks have posted the "Top 20 EduBlogs" list to their del.icio.us bookmark account.

This speaks volumns about the messenger and the audience. It's apparent that Petershiem is respected and has a large readership...why he/she was reading Where's Glenn I'll never know. It also points to the need to be very careful with what you read and what you publish on the web.

Nevertheless, John was on to something when he created that list of 20 edublogs on his wiki.

The reaction to my post illustrates the desire for a definitive & authoritative Top 20 EduBlogs list. Most folks want to cut to the chase and not wade through the "Where's Glenn" Blog crap. They need to get right to the meat of the content, the good stuff...or do they? and what rubric do we use? Is blog analyse based on content? style? what?... Josie Frasier and James Farmer provide 10 categories but no criteria, the rubric is up to you. But at least its better than nothing...oh wait we do have The "Where's Glenn" Top 20 EduBlogs and you already know how that got started.

Top 20 Edublogs

The world is flat!

Here’s my recent encounter with the "steroids" Friedman describes as flattener #10.

Last week I posted a list of what I called the “Top 20 EduBlogs” on a blog called “Where’s Glenn”. The list of 20 was remixed from John Pederson’s wiki in Minnesota.

Within a few days my post was found by 1000’s and reposted around the world.

From Germany Petersheim writes:

Einige Bekannte, vielleicht ist der Begriff auch unscharf - auf jeden Fall scheint dies ein Stoff für lange Winterabende zu sein. Was ist eigentlich mit den deutschsprachigen Edublogs?

From Sweden Fredrik Paulsson writes:

This list is however not complete since frepa.blog is not there.

From Australia James Farmer writes:

This as one of the top 20 edublogs… c’mon, lay off the arse-suckery and get your nominations into the edublog awards!

From Portugal Antonio Granado writes:

"Aqui ESTÁ uma interessante lista dos Top 20 EduBlogs."

From Venezuela Alfredo Ascanio writes:

"Estos son los mejores 20 blogs dedicados al tema de la educación."

From Ireland Miriam Metzgar writes:

Nice, balanced and considered thoughts on learning and technology with particular relevance to Elementary level education in Ireland.

From Canada George Siemens writes:

…while I agree with the names on the list (my connectivism blog included :)), there are so many excellent edu-tech bloggers, I would have a hard time narrowing it down to 20.

From New Zealand Brent writes:

Well, i'm going to add my blog to the list, not because it's offered any great insights into education or been all that popular amongst the blogoshpere heavyweight edubloggers, but to my credit I have been blogging longer than most: fist post, Jan. 2004.

From Australia Tama Leaver writes:

My edublog is new, but seems to fit on the list.

From Minnesota John Pederson writes:

A few weeks ago I put a list of 20 edublogs out on my wiki with some directions for newbies to import them into Bloglines. I never intended it to be a “Top 20″ list. It looks like the list got a little “remix” over here, and has sparked a little conversation.

From Bangalore, India Rishu Khushu writes:

The Learned Man seems to be a good one too.

By the end of the day 2462 bloggers from around the world had read and many responded to my post on my blog written in my bedroom in Graham, Washington.

WOW! The world really is flat and getting flatter everyday.

Pioneer Room Improvements

Over the next 2 days Saxton Bradley will be working in the Pioneer Room @ ESC.

They are installing new equipment: 1 Smart Board, Sound Field System, & ceiling mounted projectors (2 needed for a room this size).

This equipment matches the new Tech Ed Spec for the typical new classrooms @ #22 #23 & #7 KJH & AJH.

The Pioneer room is our district's "classroom". This will be a fantastic test opportunity prior to installing a much larger quantity of similar equipment in the new schools. The design is based on a similar mock classroom project we did last spring at WOO, KJH, FJH, & BRO.

We'll add this same equipment to the Evergreen room on December 9.

Other districts are ahead of us in using this equipment to equip classrooms. New Tacoma Elem #37 has this same set up in every classroom and Bellevue has begun installing this setup in every classroom.

You'll be getting more info on how to use this equipment for your meetings at ESC very soon, this will also give you a chance to see and explore some of new technologies available for our classrooms today.

SLIS Presentation

Slide 1
Here's the PowerPoint I used for the SLIS meeting this morning.

What's a Blog?

Influenced & info collected from:
Lesser, November, Warrick, Friedman, Technorati,
Weinberg, Wikipedia, Blogger, Google, NY Times & Prensky

Slide 2
Blog

Slide 3
Weblog

Slide 4
Blogging

Slide 5
Social Networking

Slide 6
Knowledge is Conversational

Slide 7
Technorati

Slide 8
21.4 Million

Slide 9
70,000 a day

Slide 10
The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day About a new weblog is created each second 2% - 8% of new weblogs per day are fake or spam weblogs Between 700,000 and 1.3 million posts are made each day About 33,000 posts are created per hour, or 9.2 posts per second An additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are from spam or fake blogs, on average
Slide 11
1 every second

Slide 12
Can I join?
Slide 13
8.7 Million ~ Live Journal ~ $1 Million

Slide 14
6 Million ~ Facebook ~ $100 Million

Slide 15
20 Million ~ Friendster

Slide 16
31 Million ~ Xanga

Slide 17
38 Million ~ My Space ~ 585 Million

Slide 18
Google ~ Blogger

Slide 19
I don’t have time!

Slide 20
RSS

Slide 21
Bloglines

Slide 22
What about the natives?

Slide 23
“57 % of all teenagers between 12 and 17who are active online
12 MillionCreate digital content, from building web pages to sharing original artwork, photos and stories to remixing content found elsewhere on the Web. 20 % publish their own Weblogs.” ~ NY Times

Slide 24
“From school libraries and living rooms, MILLIONS of teenagers are staking out cyberterritory in places like MySpace.com, Xanga.com and Livejournal.com, where they matter-of-factly construct their individual online presence, often to the chagrin of parents and schoolteachers who have belatedly discovered whole nations of teenagers churning out content under their noses.” ~ NY Times
Slide 25
Security Alert ~ Sparta, New Jersey

Slide 26
“Pope John XXIII Regional High School, Effective immediately, and over student complaints, the teens were told to dismantle their My Space accounts or similar sites with personal profiles and blogs. Defy the order and face suspension, students were told.
     While public and private schools routinely block access to noneducational Web sites on school computers, Pope John’s order reaches into students’ homes.
     The primary impetus behind the ban is to protect students, McHugh said. The Web sites, popular forums for students to blog about their lives and feelings about their teachers and schools, are fertile ground for sexual predators to gather information about children, he said.”
Slide 27
What are your kids doing?

Slide 28
Engagement!

Slide 29
What can we do to engage the Digital Natives?

Slide 30
What are you doing to learn the language?

Slide 31
The Natives are getting restless!

Arturo @ 6:35 am

Arturo and I met this morning to discuss the Web 2.0...he looked like this when we left....

Spam: Junk E-Mail

Nice email from Jay McSweeney regarding Spam today!

In October 2005, over 332,990 email messages were sent to District recipients from Internet sources. Of these, our system identified and blocked 208,571 messages (over 62%) because they were spam or infected with a virus. Currently, we are 99.6% successful at blocking spam messages, but with this kind of volume, some are bound to make it through.

Spammers are always finding new ways to defeat spam blockers and spam filters, since it's in their best interest to do so and they have more time available to figure out how to circumvent any safeguards and more to gain by devoting full time efforts to invent new ways to get around those safeguards. Our blocking technology is always being updated to counter these new techniques. There is no way to completely eliminate spam without rejecting some percentage of legitimate email. Currently, we believe it's more important to make sure ALL legitimate email gets through at the risk of having a small percentage of spam enter our system.

At home you receive paper junk mail and you simply throw it away without reading it. How did you get into this habit? You realized reading it was a waste of time. You need to take the same approach with your electronic junk mail. Trash it without reading it.

Washington State has one of the toughest anti-spam laws in the nation. If you have a complaint about a particular sender, or message, you can log on here to read about your possible recourse or to file a complaint.

He also sent this reminder today:

A recent increase in the number of unofficial email messages sent to the PSD-All list as well as certain building-level mail lists reminds us that now is a good time to remember that the District email system is for official use only.

Not only is it a violation of district Policy 2022, and Regulation 2022R, it is a waste of precious bandwidth and server storage space when unofficial messages are sent via the District's email system.

If you have any questions about whether or not the message you are about to send is within proper and acceptable use guidlines, I encourage you to visit the official Puyallup School District's Board Policies web page and review these documents under the "2000 Series" link.

Jay continues to do great work for Puyallup Kids! Thanks Jay!

Thank a Vet!

This post is a living tribute to my father, William G. Malone,
who served in the United States Air Force from 1959 - 1967.


I was able to travel with him as a USAF Brat.

He began his career @ Lowry AFB, Denver, Colorado
Then I was born in Fairborne, Ohio @ Wright Patterson AFB.
Then we moved back to Lowry AFB, Denver, Colorado
On to Itazuke AFB, Japan
Kindergarten @ Yokota AFB, Japan
1st Grade @ Nellis AFB, Las Vegas, Nevada

Thanks Dad & Vets!

GLE's and the Work Ahead

Check out this post from Scott Brittain the principal of RHS on his blog called The Ram Review.

In particular, he addresses this question posed by his staff:

How can my writing activities in isolation help me increase student achievement?

and I love his closing:

...(in) the closing scenes from Apollo 13. While Mission Control was stating all the things and disasters that could occur with the final re-entry of the Apollo capsule, Gene Krantz had the courage and faith enough to stand up to everyone else to make the statement, "I believe this could be our finest hour". For us, this really will be the very best time to be a RAM!

It's worth your time to read...Bravo Scott!

Saving E-mail as a Word Doc

Have you ever wanted to save your email beyond the 90 days in GroupWise?

Would you like to have access to important information contained in emails when not connected?

Would you like to be able to save important email conversations with parents for documentation?

Well here's a tip from Alicia Nosworthy:

The steps below will guide you through the process of saving your email as a Word document (without cutting, copying or pasting).

• While the email you wish to save is open, click the disk icon(save) on the toolbar.
• In the window that appears, click Browse to choose where you want to save the document.
• In the new window that appears, navigate to the desired location and click OK.
  
• You will return to the previous window but note that the information in the Current directory: box has changed. Highlight the components of the email you want saved. Click Save.
• Note: It won’t hurt anything but you don’t need to save HTML Message or Attachment Mime.
• The email will be saved as a Word document in the designated location.
  

Basmati, SWIFT & Edline

Should we consider the Standards Based Version Beta Testing of Easy Grade Pro 4.0 ?
Should we consider Excelsior or find another way to post grades on-line?
Should we look at the AJH way or the SJH way or the ERHS way?

Other options include:
SWIFT (Simplified Web Interface for Teachers) by PSESD 121
Classroom Website Tool Just for Teachers which creates a comprehensive, interactive classroom website in minutes, a browser-based content management system designed exclusively for teachers. No new software installations or training is needed — you can build your site from any computer with Internet access.
Built-in features such as a calendar, quiz builder and a discussion board make it simple to create an interactive classroom site that is a dynamic communications tool for you, your students and parents. With SWIFT, it is easy to quickly build a comprehensive and interactive site for your classroom. Knowledge of HTML or additional software is not required! With SWIFT, student learning can continue outside the classroom and you can keep parents involved with what is taking place in the classroom.

SWIFT Schools:
Mercer Island SD Tahoma SD Tacoma SD Highline SD

SWIFT Costs: $18,500 to start with ongoing annual maintenance of 18%

Basmati (Academic Progress Software for the Internet) supported by NWESD 189
Basmati is a set of open-source PHP scripts that allows parents, students, and teachers to privately view classroom grades via the internet. Basmati interfaces with Orbis Software's Easy Grade Pro. Basmati is a program developed by Jim Bassett, a teacher in the Arlington School District. Basmati securely displays student grades to the Internet by working with Easy Grade Pro. After Basmati is installed and set up, students and parents can view student grades online at any time, from school or from home, with a private and secure login/password combination. The software is very easy to use and requires only brief training.
The Basmati software must be installed on a web server and teachers must have access to that server through a Internet connection. Districts have several options for hosting Basmati software: they can have the software installed on a district server which they are responsible for, they can subscribe to the ESD189 Basmati hosting, or they can choose one of the other Basmati hosting sites.

Basmati Schools
Blaine SD Edmonds SD Ferndale SD Issaquah SD Kent SD Lakewood SD Lake Stevens SD Lynden SD Mount Vernon SD Nooksack SD Oak Harbor SD Renton SDSan Juan SD

Basmati Costs: Free Open Source with Optional Hosting fees of $520 annually

Edline
Provides website hosting and portal solution for K12 schools. At Edline, they help schools improve the information flow between parents, students, and teacher by tapping into our Pentamation information and posting that information on the internet.

Edline Schools:
Clark County Nevada

Edline Costs:
$2 per kid per year. $40,000 annually

Treo Talk this Morning

Treo Talk at 7:45 this morning.

3 New Graduates!

OSPI Resources

Have you ever lost that important OSPI memo or bulletin?

Want to check your OSPI school report card?

Want to download the EALRs/GLEs?

Need grade level resources?

The OSPI wesite is thick with good information an it's a good starting point for most online educational information.

Check it out!

Hey Bloggers

Blogger has a cool add-on for Microsoft® Word: Blogger for Word. After you complete the download you’ll see a Blogger menu toolbar in Word that will allow you to publish straight to the web from word.

In fact, this post was done and published from a Microsoft® Word doc.

Plan for Portland

NCCE (Northwest Council for Computer Education) 2006 conference is in Portland, Oregon this February 7 -10.

Last year our district had over 70 participants.Check out this Wednesday evening 3 hour workshop WE71 Geo Mania! taught by yours truly :)

You won't want to miss it!