Lee LeFever over at CommonCraft has produced another great “in plain English” video: social networking. I always enjoy these videos because they distill a huge, confusing topic into easily understood ideas. LeFever has produced several videos using this format, which he calls Paperworks. Apparently a lot of folks have asked him about the limitations of [...]
Archive for the ‘k12’ Category
I liked this article, the Web 2.0 Backpack: Web Apps for Students (thanks Lifehacker!). The big players like Google Docs and Spreadsheets or Wikipedia are there, as you might expect. I am interested in checking out the note taking category because I’m curious to know how an online option beats Notepad.
For my school, I recently installed Dansguardian web filter and Squid web proxy/cache. on the Dell desktop computer shown at bottom in this photo.The server is configured as an Ethernet bridge using Ubuntu’s bridge-utils package. That way, the machine is invisible on the network so I don’t have to reconfigure the clients behind the filter. [...]
I have about 100 users and 3 network printers in my school. About two years ago, I installed PaperCut to manage print quotas for students and teachers. PaperCut is set to limit students to printing 50 pages per week and teachers to 100 pages per week. For everyone, I opted to limit any single print [...]
Apple launched iTunes U at the end of May. It’s a dedicated area inside the iTunes store. About 16 colleges and universities are currently publishing content in the U. According to an article in THE Journal On the K-12 side of things, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and Arizona State University (ASU) are providing [...]
While listening to Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing podcast, I learned about the chance to submit essays to This I Believe. Selected essays are read by their authors on NPR. I’ve heard the NPR program a few times and have been really moved by several of the essays. When I visited [...]
Thanks to 43 Folders for the link to this one: An Interview with Ze Frank. For a year, starting in March 2006, Ze Frank produced a daily video called The Show. I found episodes at times thought provoking or enlightening but always funny. Several episodes merited my showing them to high school students (see the [...]
Thanks to a new book on the project, I’ve been reminded of the 1000 journals project. The idea is simple: an artist going by the moniker “Someguy” sent one thousand blank journal books into the world. They would travel from place to place, from person to person, collecting stories. It’s being called a collaborative art [...]
Susan Dunn’s book, Design Technology: Children’s Engineering, provides me with great ideas for bringing engineering design into the classroom. The book appears to be out of print, but I had no problem finding a used copy on Amazon’s marketplace. Last spring, I built cam operated toys because of the book. We investigated how cams operate [...]
I showed the movie Gattaca today at school as a vehicle for a day of ethics conversations. The film was released in 1997 and tells the story of a man who masquerades as genetically modified in a society where it’s the only way to the best jobs — including that of navigating a space mission [...]
