They need your vote!

The teacher and class featured in my recent post It's a Low Tech Life has made it to the finals! Please go vote for that class!

You can vote here.

Flickr, Foldr Monitr, and Fulbright

My boss earned a Fulbright Fellowship to Japan and has been gone for a couple of weeks now. Before she left, she worked with several classes in our elementary school to create "packets" of information about the United States and Texas to take to students in Japan. Along with that she also took a series of questions that our students wanted to learn. We chronicled all of this information via video tape.

Finally, she took along a digital camera. Armed with a Flickr account and the program, Foldr Monitr, she uploaded pictures of the trip. Then I had already created a Flickr Slide Show and entered the code into a HTML block in our school's Moodle. As she adds pictures to the Flickr account (automatically through Foldr Monitr), our students see the pictures in real time. Now our students can access the district's Moodle and watch the stream of pictures go by that detail her trip.

Here is the slide show:

My (Daughters') WebKinz

So I was in the elementary library after school a few weeks back talking to the librarian and her daughter came into the room and told her "I can't get to WebKinz from here...". I had heard about this site and did not quite get a grasp of the scope of it so I took the chance to pose a few questions. After getting a basic understanding of what the site was about I went on with my business, but never really forgot about it. The whole idea of the online environment just for kids kept swirling around my brain and I really wanted to see how similar to other online environments it really was - so I went to a Hallmark store and promptly bought each of my children their very own Webkin (at approximately $14 a piece).

Now here is where it gets interesting because my 4-year-old twin girls thought daddy had just bought them another stuffed animal (which of course they loved and immediately became their favorite toy - at least for the next few days or so). But when we got home, my wife fired up her laptop and I jumped on my tablet pc and we each took a girl and entered the world of Webkins. I am surprised that someone in the neighborhood didn't call the police when our daughters saw the virtual rendition of the stuffed animal they were holding on the computer because the excitement almost spilled out into the street.

At first, they were satisfied with watching mommy and daddy play the games, buy things, and arrange furniture, etc., but eventually they wanted to take control of their own private virtual living space themselves. My wife came up with the idea of putting a heart sticker on the left button of a little USB travel mouse I carry in my bag so they could remember which button to push (laptop tracks pads are difficult for 4-year-old fingers apparently), then a little instruction on drag-and-drop and they were off. They only thing that my wife or I do now is to log them in (while they can type their own names, the extra long/unique user names for the site give them a little trouble).

Tonight, I watched one of my daughters mine for gems, hunt for charms in Charm Forest, play several games, and buy two chairs at the shop. Then she placed the chairs in her WebKinz rooms. The only question she asked me during this whole process was if she had enough money (KinzCash) to buy both chairs. My other daughter clicked on her charcoal grill, opened the cook book, memorized the ingredients, went to the shop, bought the ingredients, and cooked up a special food for one of her WebKinz….all with little interference from me (she forgot to click "buy" the first time she went into the W Shop).

Many of the games are educational - one of my personal favorites is one where you take random letters and try to put them together to spell words. Depending on how you put them together you get more points - don't get enough points and you don't advance another level. Another game teaches spatial placement by setting up pathways to get the "pets" on one side of the screen to their "homes" on the other. You have to click on each piece of the pathway to make them flip until the pathway is complete - and the possibilities are endless (no two game boards are the same).

With the purchase of a WebKinz, you get 1 year of free web site access…I don't know what happens after that year is up…or how much it costs (EEK!). BTW - My wife and I find several of the games as good methods of winding down at the end of the day...now who's WebKinz are they again?

As for allowing WebKinz through the content filter...I'm not sold yet. There is a chat area that I have not fully explored and I wouldn't want anyone with malicious intent contacting our elementary students while they are under our supervision (obviously they should be watched by the parents while they are at home).

Aruba Wireless Networks

Another presentation I heard while attending the local area technology director/coordinator meeting was by David Bentner of Aruba Networks.

At first, I was a bit standoffish of what I perceived to by a competitor to the Cisco equipment I currently purchase, install, and utilize in our network, but he said something that drew me in…

"You can configure all of the wireless access points from a single location…"

What? You mean that if one wireless access point is compromised that we do not have to reconfigure every access point in the network? And what if someone stole one of those Cisco AiroNet access points that we would have to change all of the security settings for the entire network (not to mention the costs of replacement for the stolen equipment). Apparently, with the Aruba wireless set-up, the access control information is stored on a centralized wireless LAN controller. If someone were to breech the security of the wireless network then the reconfiguration of every wireless access point could be done in a matter of minutes. Not only that, the "thin" access points (as they call them) are a fraction of the cost of a Cisco model.

They can transmit multiple SSIDs creating guest access areas throughout your network that is sectioned off onto separate VLANs. Additionally the guest access could only last for certain times of the day.

Aruba claims to have built a wireless technology that was built with mobility in mind. They work to provide the following five basic services:

• Identify the user
• Classify the traffic
• Control access per user
• Optimize the air
• Follow the user

In light of the fifth point - they even have access points that you can send home with your students/employees that would allow them to work at home with the same network resources they would have at school.

Aruba seems to have a product that addresses the weaknesses of many of the other companies out there. David also showed us different "research" that showed the reliability of their equipment. I'm not completely sold here….but my interest is definitely peaked!

Thinkfinity

I attended our local area technology director/coordinator meeting this past Thursday and heard several interesting presentations. The first one was from Karen Horn from Thinkfinity.

Thinkfinity is the result of the consolidation of Marco Polo and Verizon's Literacy Network. Basically, it acts as a portal for teachers to use to find resources (activities, web sites, lesson plans, etc.) created by one of the several member organizations. There are 8 member organizations. The Kennedy Center (ArtsEdge), National Council on Economic Education (EconEdLink), National Endowment for the Humanities (EdSiteMent), National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (Illuminations), International Reading Council & National Council of Teachers of English (Read Write Think), American Association for the Advancement of Science (Science NetLinks), National Geographic (Xpeditions) and the newest addition, The National Museum of American History (http://americanhistory.si.edu/).

Ultimately, Thinkfinity only acts as a entry-point into the member organizations individual sites. So while you might find reference to something you like on the Thinkfinity site, you click on it and it takes you out to one of the member sites. That's not really a problem (since linking is part of the power of the Internet afterall!). While each site is supposed to adhere to certain guidelines for creating and posting lesson plans, during the demonstration by our presenter the ArtsEdge web site linked us out to a solar system model located elsewhere. Along with the solar system model was a banner ad which handily loaded some pop-ups. One of the pop-ups had a cartoon style girl standing in her underwear. Most older age students would probably have just clicked it closed without even a bat of the eye, a younger audience might have something more to talk about. This particular lesson was aimed as grades 3-5. While pop-ups can happen to almost anyone, the ArtsEdge site was not very careful in picking a site with advertisements as a selected online educational resource.

Is there good stuff to be found here? I think so (they claim over 55,000 resources). Just make sure your teachers preview the lessons before trying to use them in their classrooms (like they shouldn't have already been doing that?). Also, its probably a good idea to spend some time with the site to get used to the layout and how you navigate the portals.

It's a Low-Tech Life...

Interwrite Learning and TeacherTube have sponsored a contest where teachers and students create music videos where they take songs and rewrite the lyrics.

The following is a link to a submission from a teacher in my school district:

Mrs. Rose's Third Grade Class: It's a Low Tech Life

I think her class did an awesome job with the video and lyric writing, I just wish that it wasn't true. The new elementary will be ready next year and the building she is in currently is scheduled to be refitted - so even if she doesn't win the contest, there is a digital projector in their future.

URL Change

I am changing from www.edtecher.com to www.aswiftlytiltingplanet.com

My Feedburner feed has already been updated, but it appears the Blogger feed is being difficult. Hopefully time will straighten out the DNS stuff, if not, I hope you readers out there find me.

Free Moodle!

Want to use Moodle but don't have the time/patience/money to set up a server?

Then try out http://www.globalclassroom.us/ - they are giving away Moodle courses to teachers. I signed up with no problem, but the link between the main site and the Texas-based Moodle was broken and my course did not autocreate - I emailed Joe Thibault (Jthibault@globalclassroom.us) and viola! Fixed!

I have a course going right now that I plan to use with a community college course I teach in November.

Thanks to the "It's Elementary" folks over on Edtechtalk for this tip.

Drill & Kill Game is better then Flash Cards?

Here goes another gaming post - the elementary librarian (AKA media specialist) found a multiplication game called Timez Attack that is pretty interesting. It is basically an adventure style game that requires the player to answer multiplication problems to solve problems and beat opponents. I played the game for about ten minutes the other day and found it to be a bit repetitive for me, but I guess it would be much more interesting than the ole flash cards that I used as a child. It is a method of drill and practice, but how are we still learning multiplication tables? (One of you elementary type teachers educate me here)

I found several posts on Technorati that suggested that a lot of homeschooling parents are using this game as a method of reinforcement. One mother discussed having her son play the game on a laptop while they were on a road trip.

You can download the free version of the game and find out more here: Big Brainz

Spore!

I've put this post off for far too long but I guess I keep hoping that someone at Electronic Arts/Maxis would respond to my several emails, but alas I guess it is not to be.

Spore is a very exciting upcoming game due to be released in the Spring of 2008. I am not going to delve into the game play, you can read that on the Spore website or on the previous Wikipedia link, but I am going to say that as a former Biology teacher I could not be more excited about the possibilities of using this game in class to teach the basics of the theory of evolution.

Now I do not really want to get into the validity of evolution(I definitely do not want to open that can of worms here) but it is a teaching objective identified by state and national science standards and most Biology textbooks are written on the underlying principle that it evolution exists - so why not take students to the computer lab, have them play the game , THEN talk about the processes involved as speciation occurs without ever mentioning the word evolution? Personally, I say its awesome.

Now not all aspects of game play are suitable for the Biology classroom, but the later game scenarios could be used in Social Studies and Geography, right?

Let me know what you think :)