I have long been a big NPR listener. When audiobooks dropped “All Things Considered” as a monthly purchase option, I dropped my audiobook subscription (no idea whose fault that was). Lately, I have listened to the podcast of “All Songs Considered” and end up expanding my iTunes library way more than I should.
Nov. 7, NPR expanded its podcast options. (NPR description of new ventures). There is lots of quality content here.
Speak Up Day is intended to offer K-12 students the opportunity to suggest how technology should be used in education. Speak Up Day is sponsored by NetDay (too many days for me). NetDay would like to involve at least 250,000 in this project. Registration by Nov. 18 is required. We follow this project because if offers some data (although based on a biased sampling procedure) on student behavior.
A more detailed description and related links can be found at eSchool News.
FireFox offers a new extension that allows users to highlight content within web pages and then copy and paste the highlighted material.
Once the extension is installed, the process is simple. Select content, right-click to highlight/copy, and then paste into another application.
The paste function includes the web address the comment was taken from (see below) so this will be a great system for online research.
I.A Technology integrated into content-area instruction.This theme concerns the knowledge and skills students will learn. Our emphasis is on applications of technology that are useful in helping students learn traditional academic subjects. We recognize that “computer literacy” is important and potentially a new and unique academic subject. However, computer literacy is not a central theme and many “literacy skills” will be picked up as students make use of technology in their own learning.
(Source URL: http://studytools.psych.und.nodak.edu/book5/chapter1.html)
A new (11/2/05) PEW Report (this is the PDF) describes teens as content creators. Approximately
For those of us promoting “multimedia authoring to learn”, it would seem we do not have to convince many students to become involved in such activities. The challenges would seem to be convincing and preparing teachers to take advantage of this interest.
What is this blog about? Good question. I have my own opinion, but what about the perspective of an impartial (and nonhuman) observer.
TagCloud takes advantage of the Yahoo! content analysis system to extract key terms from titles and descriptions. The result is a tag cloud. Click on a tag and the system will offer access to the articles associated with that term.
The TagCloud for this blog (actually it appears the tags cover the posts to the main blog page – the past month) can be located at http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/Grabe/default/30. Google and Open Source appear to be popular topics in my posts.
Just passing this request along. ISTE is urging members to contact representatives to support EETT (Enhancing Education Through Technology). EETT money goes to states and districts. EETT reportedly provides the only technology money in a number of states.
Additional information is provided at the Action Network site.
Justification for such cuts involves the tremendous costs of the hurricane damage, the war, etc. No doubt all of these issues are important and the costs cannot be avoided. Raise taxes! What kind of weird political position assumes such costs need not be counted as part of the financial responsibility of the American people. Attempting to cut educational support only shifts responsibility to the local level. This is not a true savings because many local districts will raise the mill levy and those districts which cannot respond will fall behind. Off-loading the cost of education only increases inequities across districts. What about NCLB? What more obvious way to support ALL students than to make the education of all students the responsibility of all citizens.
When we first began writing about the Internet, we tried to make the point to educators that the Internet was not developed for you. The Internet is for everyone and serves a wide variety of purposes. Some material may have been developed for the purpose you have in mind, but much of the material would have been developed for other purposes.
I am reminded of this same point today. USA Today has an article describing adolescent blogs and the type of information that is contained in such blogs. In commenting on this article Will Richardson takes issue with the use of the term blog and attempts to differentiate journal from blog. I understand the distinction, but many will not care. It is blogging software, the content is hosted on sites described as blog sites, so participants describe what they are doing as blogging.
Schools are caught in a difficult position. While they may see the educational benefits of blogging, they may prefer that students within the school walls not read the other material that is posted to blogs. What can I say – it is the Internet and it has no priority customers.
Perhaps special purpose and protected blogs are the answer for some. However, like the Internet in general, a protected approach will eliminate access to both bad and good stuff.