James Gates :: Blog
http://tipline.blogspot.com/2010/09/new-personnel-should-never-be-e When a new building principal or tech director enters a district, it should NEVER, EVER, be acceptable to allow that person to move the district backwards. And, in my opinion, allowing that person to shut down access to YouTube (for faculty) or to Google Docs, or Glogster or Voicethread, etc IS a step backwards. That's a hill I'd fight for. We can NEVER allow our schools to move backwards.
http://tipline.blogspot.com/2010/08/post-weekly-weekly.html -
Eye Opener | Learning Is Messy – Blog A favorite blog post about student learning and reviewing and peer reviewing tags: learning -
Total-Immersion @Home Demos Some VERY cool demos of Augmented Reality. Print the markers and have fun! tags: augmented reality -
We spend 80% of our classroom time on the skills needed for 10% of our jobs | Dangerously Irrelevant - Annotated Interesting post and an interesting notion tags: blogs -
It’s 2010, and the vast majority of American jobs are in the services sector. Yet we continue to spend 80% of our classroom time (or more) on the skills needed for 10% of our jobs. Principals, superintendents, school board members, and policymakers: Could the problem be any clearer? Isn’t this a pretty damning indictment of our inability to change? Aren’t you all supposed to be leaders? -
YouTube - TEDxDenverEd- Brian Crosby- Back to the Future -
Mouse Pointer Spotlight keep your audience focused. Like Mousepose for the Mac, this app gives you a spotlight tags: spotlight -
YouTube - Digilog Book Another VERY cool augmented reality book. What fun! tags: augmented reality -
twitter4teachers / FrontPage "This wiki was created to easily help educators find other educators on Twitter that have the same interests as them (that teach in the same content area). Check out the list of educators on the pages linked below and add your Twitter name to the appropriate list too. " tags: twitter -
Google Earth Outreach "Google Earth Outreach gives non-profits and public benefit organizations the knowledge and resources they need to visualize their cause and tell their story in Google Earth & Maps to the hundreds of millions of people who use them. " tags: GoogleEarth google -
Hotseat at Purdue University "Hotseat, a social networking-powered mobile Web application, creates a collaborative classroom, allowing students to provide near real-time feedback during class and enabling professors to adjust the course content and improve the learning experience. Students can post messages to Hotseat using their Facebook or Twitter accounts, sending text messages, or logging in to the Hotseat Web site." tags: backchannel -
Purdue U Brings Social Networking to the Classroom -- Campus Technology "In most classrooms around the world, using cell phones to send text messages and laptops to access sites like Facebook and Twitter are very much discouraged. Considered a high-tech distraction that impedes the learning environment, such actions often end in the student being reprimanded, penalized and even having their devices confiscated." tags: socialnetworking Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
http://tipline.blogspot.com/2010/08/this-cant-be-what-they-had-in-m Today on Twitter I posted, "What do these have in common: WallWisher, Skype, Wordle, Shelfari? Give up? They're all blocked in some schools. Did you hear me scream?" Later, one person tweeted back, "Add iTunes to that list." And, we also know of districts that block Google Docs and Wikispaces and PBWorks. Not all Districts, to be sure, but that only makes it more frustrating. Heck, I heard tell of one district that decided to block Wikispaces when a student in A DIFFERENT DISTRICT misused it. Yes, that's right. Someone ELSE - someWHERE else - misused it, so we're going to block it. Does anyone TRULY believe that the politicians who wrote and signed the CIPA laws were doing so to protect us (our students) from sites like that Wallwisher and Wordle? Were they thinking, "They've got to block wikis because someone MIGHT post a naughty picture there." Or, "You've got to block Wordle because some of the word clouds contain some naughty words." (Right - as if most of them would know what a word cloud was if it hit 'em between the eyes!) "And that Wallwisher - that's just ASKING for trouble, right there." That simply COULD NOT have been their intention. If fixing the Education system in this country is so important then we absolutely MUST STOP THIS NONSENSE. Nationwide we've got 1/3 of our kids dropping out of school - and we're worried about WORDS in a wordle, or that the kids might use Google Docs to chat? How did all this manage to get SO screwed up and twisted? Is THIS what some schools are calling, as I keep demanding, "A World Class Education?" This is just lunacy! There is too much at stake for this to continue. What's it going to take to start focusing on how we can best provide tools to educate our students to compete in this global marketplace/flat world? We're FAR too content worrying about standardized test scores and NOT about a world class education. Anything short of that SHOULD be totally unacceptable. There. Did you hear me screaming? :)
http://tipline.blogspot.com/2010/08/reflecting-on-your-reflections. A friend of mine is going through a doctoral program, and her current assignment is to reflect on her reflections for the semester. At first I thought that it sounded like such a silly assignment. But then I thought, "It's the PERFECT assignment to affect change in that person." What happens when you reflect? You think back on what you've done and how you felt about it and how, if at all, it changed you. Right? What happens when you reflect on those reflections? You start to think about the way you learn, and about how you are impacted by what you read and hear. At first, you tell about how you feel about something. It moved you. You disagreed with it. You're not sure about it, etc. But, when you reflect back on the sum total of all those thoughts, you think, "I used to think this way, but now I'm not so sure." Or, "I can see how my thoughts have changed throughout this experience." Or, "I have grown in so many ways because of what I've been exposed to." I love this assignment. Think about it. Do you ask your students to reflect on their learning? What if, at the end of a marking period, you asked them to reflect upon their reflections. "Read back through your blog posts and tell me what you see." I love it, It may not appear on any PSSA test or Keystone exam, but I LOVE the task.
http://tipline.blogspot.com/2010/07/my-turn-to-appolgize.html I won't go into the details, as they're all too public. I won't offer excuses. "Don't give excuses. Your enemies won't believe them, and your friends don't need them." But, I am embarrassed and sincerely apologetic for my sophomoric behavior at the ISTE keynote. At the very best, it was enormously unprofessional. To my twitter followers, I assure you that it won't happen again. And now we return to our regularly scheduled blog. Creative Commons licensed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/orinrobertjohn/4389498322/
http://tipline.blogspot.com/2010/07/post-weekly-weekly.html -
YouTube - Experience Fantasmic 3D from your Desktop! Watch these kids demonstrate an augmented reality book. Very cool tags: augmented reality -
Diigo V5: Read, Highlight, Collect, Share...anything from anywhere on Vimeo Video showing features in Diigo V 5 tags: diigo -
GE | Plug Into the Smart Grid augmented reality sample tags: augmented reality -
ZoomIt Windows software to zoom in on screen tags: tools presentation software zoom zoomit -
Explain the world with maps. - UUorld "UUorld (pronounced "world") provides an immersive mapping environment, high-quality data, and critical analysis tools.
Great explanations are unfortunately scarce, but UUorld makes them easier to achieve through interactive four-dimensional maps." tags: data visualization -
SHOW®USA - A New Way To Look At The USA interesting site to show country data tags: data visualization -
Pageflakes another aggregator tags: rss aggregator -
Netvibes one of many aggregators for subscribing to RSS feeds tags: rss aggregator -
Education | Diigo Get started with Diigo accounts especially for education here tags: Diigo education -
Interactive online Google tutorial and references - Google Guide "Google Guide is an online interactive tutorial and reference for experienced users, novices, and everyone in between. I developed Google Guide because I wanted more information about Google's capabilties, features, and services than I found on Google's website. --Nancy Blachman " tags: google tutorial -
Country code top-level domain - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country (a sovereign state or a dependent territory).
All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all two-letter top-level domains are ccTLDs. Currently there are four internationalized country code TLDs, consisting in two Cyrillic letters or several Arabic letters. Creation and delegation of ccTLDs is performed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) as described in RFC 1591, corresponding to ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes with few exceptions explained below." tags: domains -
http://www.windowslive.com Windows apps - now on the web tags: office -
Resizr - Free Online Image, Photo, & Pictures Resize, Crop & Editing Software for MySpace "Resizr is a free online image resize and crop tool with lots of extras! " tags: resize photos -
Flickr: Creative Commons "Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license." tags: flickr creativecommons -
Behold | Search High Quality Flickr Images Site to find images tagged with the Creative Commons license tags: CreativeCommons -
Creative Commons Search Find images, videos, sounds, and more - all to use tags: creativecommons -
Yahoo Advanced Images Searcch Note the options for Creative Commons there, too tags: creativecommons -
Google Advanced Image Search Note the options in the Usage Rights area tags: creativecommons -
ISTE Learning ISTE Learning is an anytime, anywhere online community for professional development where educators can sample free concepts, buy cool resources and exchange creative ideas. This space provides relevant learning experiences in multiple formats to strengthen the teaching experience and grow digital literacy. tags: iste -
Instapaper Great little browser button to allow you to save web articles to read late. tags: tools -
YouTube - Editing in the cloud: Meet the YouTube Video Editor Edit the video clips that you've uploaded to youtube. This is a youtube video that explains how to do it. tags: youtube editing Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
http://tipline.blogspot.com/2010/07/qr-codes-made-easy-at-delivrcom A while back I wrote about one of PA's finest students and her outstanding teacher and how Allison's video on QR codes won 1st Prize in this year's SIGML (Special Interest Group for Mobile Learning) contest. I also had a chance to talk to Allison during her student showcase, and she taught me how to make my own QR codes. (You may want to go watch Allison's video first so you know what's going on here.) Here are ymy two examples. The first will give my contact information. The mobile phone app that I'm using is called QRky Scan, and when I scan that qr code it will even allow me to add that contact to my phone. Here's that qr code: The second just links to my website. If you don't yet have a QR code reader for your smart phone, visit this page to find your phone's manufacturer and then to a list of apps that will work for that phone. Once you've got an app installed, go to this excellent site: http://delivr.com/qr-code-generator and see how easy it is to make one of your own. I'd love to see one that you make.
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