8 posts tagged “education”
Dteve Dembo asked for Eduversions of popular web 2.0 sites, and it looks like he's already found one!
TeacherTube seems slower than it's mainstream counterpart, but the videos appear safe.
Steve, Rachel, Cristi, and I just finished recording Episode 2 of Teachers 2.0, and other than Cristi's ISP being a pain it was a good show.
Over the weekend I'll be taking the 40+ minute file and hopefully editing it down to 30 minutes or less to make it "commute friendly." We have enough idle banter throughout the show to make such an edit possible, I think.
That being said I think it was much better than our first attempt, which seemed to be plagued with both hardware and software problems that plagued our audio recording capabilities.
I'm not sure if this could be considered good news or bad, but the Fairfax County School Board and the Board of Supervisors have decided to stop adhering to No Child Left Behind.
The good news is that they've decided to think for themselves, rather than just do what the federal government tells them to do. The bad news is that they'll probably have to kiss any and all federal funding goodbye.
On the other hand, according to the story they've been spending more money trying to stay NCLB complaint than they've been reimbursed. (To the tune of $120 million vs. $17 million.)
But on the other, other hand, will they be losing other federal funds because of this? The reimbursement is nothing more than additional funding on top of the money they already get from the feds.
Hm, I really should look into the answer to that.
[Update]: The story continues here. To sum it up, everyone's complaining.
(Taken from Dangerously Irrelevant)
All education bloggers are hereby invited and encouraged to...
- complete the short and completely unscientific, but hopefully interesting, education blogosphere survey;
- forward the URL of said survey to all other known education bloggers to ensure decent representation of the education blogosphere; and
- publicize said survey URL on their own blogs to foster greater participation in this most noble endeavor.
Survey results received by Sunday, January 14, shall be posted in the town square on Wednesday, January 17.
Those solicited who choose not to participate shalt be labeled both publicly and widely as dastardly scoundrels, notty-pated hedgepigs, or beslubbering, doghearted, maggot-ridden canker-blossoms!
Via the Infinite Thinking Machine:
I scoffed a bit when they started Google Education, but if they're going to have meetings in more locations then perhaps it's not such a bad idea...The next Google Teacher Academy will be held in New York City on February 15, 2007
In any case, ITM's blog post on the subject gives a lot more information on the Academy. If you're a teacher in the tri-state area you may wish to check it out.
Ok, I'm far from finished building the site (I'm still not happy with the color scheme, and I haven't installed anything to improve it beyond Drupal's basic functionality), but thanks to Chris Craft the Tech Education Network is up and running!
...or at least that's what I'm calling it until someone thinks of a better name. Seriously, I'm open to suggestions. Once we have a good name I'll register a domain name for the site. Until then you can find it here.
Please check it out, kick the tires, and let me know what you think. If you like it, please pass this along to others who might be interested. If you think something should be changed, then post something in the forums or send me an email at theartguy@gmail.com .
... and please, don't judge it by its current color scheme template. I'm still working on that.
I'm looking into open source software that can be used to help build an online community - sort of like Vox, except it would be only for people working in the educational field. I've had friends try out Elgg, but they didn't like it. I've heard good things about Drupal, but there seems to be some criticism over its ease of use.
So now I'm also looking into Mambo and Plone.
Plone has some demonstration videos on its site, and I must say it looks rather sweet. I haven't played with any of these yet, but I think I really need to.
I'll be running workshops on PowerPoint design and blogging (& podcasting netcasting) at this weekend's Powering Up With Technology Conference, and I am looking forward to it, but I just got notice asking for presenters at this year's MICCA Convention and I don't want to do the same thing as last year.
So how about a workshop on two way teaching? The concept's been around for a while, but there are a lot of websites and other tools that can help make two way teaching a LOT easier.
Info:
K12 Online Conference Presentation on 2WT (The presentation that made me think this would be a good topic.)
Two Way Teaching Wiki (As of this posting it's very sparse, but could grow if it gets some help from others.)
