Months in the making, Ed Tech Insider at eSchoolNews had it’s official launch yesterday. Yay! I’ll be interested to see what the site stats are, but regardless it should be a great way of spreading the word about the Internet technologies that I’m interested in. Ed Tech Insider topics will cover more than just blogs, but the fact that it’s a blog ought to do much to get educators thinking. I feel really honored to have been asked to participate.

You can help by joining in our discussions to show how blogs can build community and push all of our thinking.
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I’m doing some blogvangelism today at the New York State Association of Independent Schools Conference for Managers on Information Technology. And the best part is it’s being held at beautiful Mohonk Mountain House, where I probably had as good a night’s sleep as I’ve had in months. (A roaring fireplace in the room will do that…) And even better than that, IT’S SNOWING! Oy.

Here is the conference blog, by the way.

Anyway, this is a little demo on how to post to a Weblog. More later, I’m sure…

You knew that sooner or later all of these fun little disparate tools would start coming together in one app, and it looks like Onfolio has taken a first step in that direction.

Fully integrated with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Office, Onfolio has tools for capturing a wide range of content including links, text snippets, images, web pages, and documents. Onfolio lets you organize and find captured content quickly and easily. And with Onfolio, you can easily share your research in documents, presentations, emails, and research reports.

It’s an RSS reader too, so here’s a blend of Furl, Webnote and Bloglines. The feature list is pretty impressive, and it has something that seems to be trying to quack like a blog too:

Website Publish* – Publish your research in a Website, with selected links, comments and content that you’ve captured. Automatically, include an RSS feed as part of the output.

Hmmm…verrry interesting. But, aye, here’s the rub: I don’t work on one machine. I have the desktop in my office, my laptop, the desktop at my wife’s office…you get the picture. How do I synch up all of this stuff, huh?

When we get to Onfolio Web, I’ll really sit up and take notice. But don’t fret…it won’t be long.
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Jon Udell goes into great depth about the potential for using del.icio.us
as a collaborative tool. My head hurts after reading it, but I actually
think I see some of the interesting ways that del.icio.us can connect
ideas and interests. Just one example; I didn’t realize that it not
only tells you who else posted the same bookmark, but it also tells you
how they tagged that bookmark so you can potentially easily subscribe
to that narrow topic via RSS feed. Not so with Furl, I don’t think.

He also suggests saving your own posts, which is something I had started to do with Furl
a while back. It didn’t last, however. The idea of going back and
tagging each post with keywords is daunting, but I can see the
reasoning behind it, I guess. It’s the index to the blog, more or less,
and I really like that concept. I do wish it was easier to retreive
certain ideas and posts that were written many moons ago now (I can’t
believe I’ve got almost three years worth of writing here…oy.)

But one obvious classroom use of either Furl or del.icio.us is having
students subscribe to to one of the teacher’s topic feeds. What a great
way to disctribute information. Phil Windley posted something similar a couple of days ago:

I’ve found Del.icio.us to be a great way to organize bookmarks and,
using the RSS feeds, have my students follow what I’m book marking.
When I want to bring something to their attention, I can just bookmark
it in Del.icio.us and they see it in their feedreader. Very easy to do.

I think this whole concept has some great applications,
but I’m not sure my feeble brain can sort through all the different
ways to make it happen. I’m feeling like that overload point is near
again…

Maybe I should do a Podcast.

This Podcasting thing has really piqued my interest for now, especially since I was actually able to figure out how to do one without too much sweat. I even got the RSS feed for any future Podcasts up and running via FeedBurner thanks to an e-mail from Dave Gilbert (who by the way has a class blog up and running…check out the “Study Guide Blogs” in the right hand column.) This just keeps on getting more and more fun.

“Every tool should have a way to publish.”

So I’ve started listening to Podcasts as a part of my multitasking life, and there is some good stuff out there. (Adam Curry’s presentation at Bloggercon III is downloading as I write this.) And as today’s EnGadget Podcast was playing this morning, one of the hosts said “Every tool should have a way to publish.” I basically stopped in my tracks. Now how cool would that be? Publish right to your blog or to a classroom site with one click in Word or Powerpoint or Photoshop. Or send the latest movie of your kid winning a trophy in his first BMX race to Grandma via a click to RSS feed in iMovie. Or…

And the best part of this all is that this content creation stuff just keeps getting easier to do. I think I babbled on about this in my Podcast yesterday, but the potential of the read/write Web is just going to keep growing as the barriers to access keep getting lower and lower. And while I’ve been writing and thinking and talking a lot about the whole digital natives and immigrants thing lately, what I’m realizing is that gap may actually be able to close more quickly and more easily than I’ve thought. At some point, even the teacher-immigrants are going to be able to do all of this. I mean only a couple of years ago, most of these technologies were WAY out of reach for most people. Now, even my seven year old gets it.

That’s cause for optimism, and excitement. The more people thinking and experimenting and doing, the more great ideas that will follow. The more great ideas, the more people will be willing to think and experiment and do.
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Now this is a trend I’d like to see continue:

Datacasting, radio frequency identification (RFID) chips, student web logs (blogs), and intelligent essay graders are among a dozen technologies likely to emerge as must-have solutions in the nation’s schools, according to a report unveiled Nov. 3 by the Washington, D.C.-based Consortium for School Networking (CoSN).

CoSN names blogs as one of the “Hot Technologies for K-12 Schools” but doesn’t go so far as saying they’ll redefine education as we know it (which is, of course, what will happen.) In fact, they seem to be plugging blogs more as communication tools rather than learning tools.

Rolfes also touched on the growing importance of comprehensive student information systems used to track and monitor student progress, as well as the use of blogs as an increasingly popular tool for building stronger school communities–spurring much-needed communication among students, parents, and educators.

Regardless, I’ll take it. It’s official. Blogs are “hot.”
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Well, here it is, my first attempt at “Podcasting.” And I have to say, it feels kinda weird. If you choose to listen, please remember the following:

I have no idea what I’m doing.

I had no script…rambling ahead.

I say “ah” and “um” a lot.

Adam Curry was on MTV, not VH1.

It’s Audacity, not Audigy. My bad.

I have no idea what I’m doing.

But having said that, I think the concept is pretty cool. I just know that there are at least 100 kids at my school that would LOVE to do this. And it’s not hard. I did a little digging, finally found a site that suggested Audacity, found one fairly good support document, did about 10 takes, and voilà!

Now, two questions. First, anyone have any clues on how to “enclose” this is an RSS feed??? And two, is it really a Podcast if no one listens to it on their iPod?
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Sarah Lohnes was an early member of our edblogger community and she’s doing some RSS and blogvangelism once again now that she’s well into her PhD program at Columbia. In the most recent edition of the NITLE newsletter, she has a great article aimed at the uninitiated about RSS and using it to manage information. And today she’s presenting on blogs and RSS at the NITLE conference in Chicago. Can’t wait to see the Powerpoint…

Here’s an e-mail that I got today from one of my teachers:

Hello,
Fellow Bloglines user tmchale@hcrhs.k12.nj.us has recommended the following blogs. You can choose to add some or all of these blogs to your Bloglines account.

tmchale@hcrhs.k12.nj.us has included the following message:

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Look at me. I’m bloglining and furling! I seemed to have figured out how to furl stories from my blogline account and have them show up in the box you created for me on the Lamp staff weblog. I need to organize my blogline subscriptions to make this process more efficient. When you have a chance, could you take a look at the stories I’m posting (central.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/lamp) and my blogline subscriptions and suggest any sites that I should add? I’m trying to provide the staff with models for writing along with topics that might help generate story ideas. Thanks, Tom

Oh, yeah. He gets it. I keep thinking that if teachers just put a little time into this, they’d see the potential. But it does take some investment, and I know it’s not easy to carve out an extra 15 or 20 minutes in a day that’s already way too full. Stuff like this gives me a little hope.

And stuff like the weekend I just spent with a group of 30+ Seton Hall Ed. D. students. We did a full 12 hours of that blogwikirssfurl thing, and I think for the most part they got it, too. (Here’s the blog we started.) We spent the last hour yesterday just going around the room and talking about the ways they could implement these technologies at their own schools, and their ideas were great; a lot of collaboration and articulation…and genuine excitement. The Student Teacher to Teacher Connection is just one example. Their ideas really pumped me up.

But, as always, now the true test…will they keep blogging? Will they be successful in their own blogvangelism? Will they find the time to make it to where Tom is, where the applications are working and reaping benefits? We’ll see…
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Doesn’t look like BloggerCon gets blogs in schools.

From my perspective this session was a bit disappointing. The focus was limited to what I regard as a narrow view of academic blogging: blogging as viewed from the perspective of academic publishing. In other words, how does blogging fit into the peer review scheme, should academics blog (!), is it good or bad for academic dialog to directly reach a broader audience via blogs, and so on.

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Here is the Seton Hall wiki.
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I know this whole I-Pod/Podcasting thing kind of strays away from the main focus of this blog, but it’s just been so interesting to watch the ways in which this particular little piece of hardware has exploded. And, I just can’t resist when I see people finding ways to adopt any of these tools into the classroom.

Hence this link to an article in Campus Technology about the ways that some professors are bringing the I-Pod into their teaching.

Several members of GC&SU’s faculty quickly rose to the challenge. According to Hank Edmondson, professor of Government, “My first vision for the iPod was to integrate music into a couple of my classes, so I started with War, Politics, and Shakespeare, downloading songs about war—from patriotic to protest—and adding some Elizabethan music. We also used the iPod to record the students presenting speeches they had chosen from one of the plays we were studying. After each reading, all of the iPods were updated for the benefit of the entire class; all of the students were made responsible for the material recorded by their peers.”

“Next,” Edmondson continues, “I incorporated the iPod into my freshman Ethics and Society class where I cover, in an historical organization, the leading moral philosophies. A big challenge in such a class is to convince the students that the material is relevant. The iPod is a tremendous help because I can choose a lot of popular music and associate different songs with different philosophies, showing the students how their own music reflects the ideas we are studying. Jim Morrison and the Doors were, by their own admission, influenced by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.”

Now I think that’s pretty cool, and it’s a good example of technology improving the delivery of the curriculum. Not a big leap to think about how this might work on the 8-12 level either.

Here’s where to go if you want some more detail on how it all works.
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George Mayo is a first year English teacher in Virginia Beach, Va. who has his sixth graders blogging in the “M & M Online Magazine.” It’s basically a series of 15 individual student blogs connected by a magazine homepage. It’s just coming together, but the best part of it is that his kids are obviously blogging about their passions: fashion, the NFL, skateboarding, video games, etc. And, they’re obviously not just writing for themselves:

Good evening every one this is Jean-Herbert R. writing. Today I will be writing about Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. In this video game you could be Harry, Hermonie, and Ron. The main idea of this game is that you have to fight the evil Dementors and you have another promblems…

In an e-mail, George writes:

Its been a great experience so far. I’m amazed at the care that most of the students are taking with their writing. Its also amazing to watch them spontaneously peer edit each other’s work.

It CAN be pretty amazing when kids are allowed to practice writing with topics that they are really interested in. Throw in a pinch of an audience, and this is a formula that would seem to be pretty conducive to enhancing a student’s ability to write.
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Tess was in my lap as I wrote the last post, and she was asking me all sorts of questions like “Where do you find stuff to write about?” and “Why do you do this, daddy?” and “Why is Tucker (her brother) such a pain?” The first two were easy.

Anyway, she’s not in my lap any longer. She’s fired up her Blogger account and is writing about her grandma being here, Halloween, and who knows what else. Can’t wait to read it…
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