Lightning in a Bottle

For those of you in the Pacific Northwest, the 2005 Digitalkies Film Festival competition is now open. Sponsored by NCCE (Northwest Council for Computers in Education), this contest is open to K-12 students to create and submit 3-minute films. Winners will be announced at the spring NCCE Conference in Seattle March 16-19. The announcement website has all the details, categories, and scoring rubrics. You can also view previous winners for inspiration.

The George Lucas Educational Foundation has long maintained a nice resource web site called EduTopia. Educational technology is not the sole focus, but one of the empasized areas. In addition to the web resources, they have created a variety of print and video-based materials as well.

The foundation has now launched a print magazine, and the subscription is free for educators. You can check out the table of contents and read articles from the first issue online. If you looks like something you’d benefit from, it’s pretty hard to beat free when it comes to paying for it. (Just make sure you click the last checkbox on the registration page that asks them not to share your email address…)

The NetDay organization is again surveying students about their thoughts on educational technology. Last year over 200,000 students completed the survey, and the results made for interesting reading. So far this year over 40,000 students have filled out the survey. The site will remain up until Nov. 21 for students to put in their opinions and ideas about how technology can and should be used in their schools.

So get your kids logged in and participating - if they haven’t already!

HP has announced their next round of the HP Technology for Teaching grant initiative. They will select 75 teams of five teachers each from schools across the country, and each team will receive a package of equipment and training worth about $30,000. It will include:

• an HP Tablet PC with Microsoft? Windows? XP Tablet PC Edition
• an HP multimedia projector
• an HP digital camera
• a $500 stipend
• customized professional development opportunities to support the use of technology in their teaching and support from a mentor with experience integrating technology in the K-12 environment
• The team will share use of an HP all-in-one printer/copier/scanner machine

There is much more info at the site. Applications will start being accepted in early January, but you can register your intent to apply now.

There is a very interesting series of reports published in the Baltimore Sun profiling the largest educational software companies and how they are leveraging NCLB into software sales. For instance, this article looks at how companies use questionable research to sell large volumes of software to schools struggling with “adequate yearly progress.”. (Free registration is necessary to view the article. All of the other articles in the series and associated sidebar graphics are linked from this page as well.) It’s kind of disturbing to see how much money some schools and districts are spending on these products, based on claims that are most charitably described as “dubious.”

These reports should be required reading for every parent, principal, superintendent, and school board.

The Washington Post has an article today about online tutoring. (Free registration required.) The profile is of Prince George’s Memorial Library system and its use of Tutor.com. The library buys a regional license to the service, which provides live online tutors from 2 p.m. to midnight every day. (For those of you from the Seattle area, there is a similar arrangement through the King County Library system at www.kcls.org. Other library systems subscribing to Tutor.com are listed at this page at their website.)

It sounds promising. According to recent reports, many kids actually communicate more through chatting online than sending email.

The Christian Science Monitor today has an article about online lesson plans. It gives an overview of several sites and the kinds of resources you can find on the thousands of web pages that have these materials available for use. (Where was this stuff when I was a student teacher?!)

Indiana University has put together an impressive online learning program focused on technology integration. The Learning to Teach with Technology Studio has several dozen 1-credit courses that cover a variety of curriculum-specific topics. What I like about the structure of the courses is that they are built around essential teaching questions, such as:

• Scientific Graphs and Charts: How can my students use technology to organize and present their inquiry data?

• Using Internet-based Simulations to Explore Probability: How can I create a probability lesson that incorporates Internet-based simulations?
• Storytelling as Communication: How can I use technology to help my students improve writing and presentation skills?
  

It’s nice to see courses that don’t just focus on technology skills, but instead provides specific direction on effective strategies with students.

Registration is available to individuals, or a school/district can order site-based subscriptions.

The overlapping functions of digital still cameras and video cameras continues to blur the lines between these two kinds of devices. There is a pretty good article on this topic today at USA Today. The truth is that no camera does both well - they either take better still images than video, or better video than still images. However, the quality of the video captured by a still camera (or the quality of stills captured by video cameras) continues to improve to the point that for many users, the quality is good enough to trade for the simplicity of carrying around one device instead of two.

Looking at educational purposes, if the point of a video is to capture a student sharing thoughts about their work to put into an electronic portfolio, many of the newer digital still cameras will do an acceptable job. It may not be good enough for the evening news, but it captures the content you need quite efficiently. And as time goes on, this quality will continue to improve. (I have seen few electronic technologies improve faster than digital photography.)

Heck, my new Palm not only keeps track of my calendar and contacts, it also takes digital pictures and video. It’s not great quality, but it’s passable. In two or three years the equivalent models will be as good as a standalone camera is today. In essence, the camera will be free!

So, is the stuff on your hard drive important to you? How would you feel if it was all suddenly, irretrevably lost? Have you done anything to protect your data?

There I was last week, doing some reading at my desk, when my desktop computer starting making a noise like someone bouncing a golf ball on the tabletop. I tapped the keyboard to wake the computer up to see what was going on, and it wouldn’t respond. I pressed the reset key to restart the computer, and got nothing but a plain grey screen. After various ways of working the problem, it became clear what was wrong - my hard drive had crashed. Utterly, totally gone, with all 12 gigabytes of data. No preliminary symptoms or warnings, no evil virus or deadly attack, just a four-year-old piece of hardware that reached the end of it’s life cycle.

This sounds like a total disaster, of course, and it would be but for one thing - I had virtually everything important backed up. Actually, most of it is backed up twice. I have an external hard drive on my desk, and we have a file server for network backup as well. While it was a mild hassle to install a new hard drive and re-install the necessary applications, it wasn’t all that difficult. (Twenty minutes to put the new hard drive in, and it would have taken less if I hadn’t left the RAM out when I first put it back together. OS X took about 30 minutes to install, and the other major apps took another 45 minutes.)

It always pays to have a disaster plan in place, because it’s not a question of if your computer breaks down, it’s a question of when. How many documents, or pictures, or web bookmarks would you lose? If you have a CD or DVD burner on your computer, take a few minutes each month and record a copy of your most important files. The disks are fairly inexpensive, and certainly cost a lot less than trying to re-create any files that are lost. Then store them somewhere else - it won’t help if you computer is destroyed in a fire if the CDs are destroyed, too.

On a more humorous note, one of my favorite comic strips is Foxtrot. They touched on this topic last week, and you can see the strip at www.ucomics.com/foxtrot/2004/04/09/.