How "green" is your car?

File this under "Your Tax Dollar$ at Work"... from the U.S. Dept. of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, this website provides Gas mileage (MPG), greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution ratings, and safety information for new and used cars and trucks. Compare vehicles side by side, find your car's Energy Impact Score, get tips on gas mileage, investigate the best and worst MPG vehicle ratings, link to local gas prices, and more. Visit: www.fueleconomy.gov

How geeks show they care...

... is the byline of GeoGreetings, a website that creates a message composed with "letter shaped" images (roofs of buildings for example) from Google Earth's satellite imagery. Type up to 40 characters and copy the url into an email to send your message. And, to make it easy for others to access the link, shorten it using "tinyurl.com" -- so instead of the 53 character link of: http://www.geogreeting.com/view.html?zdCW33*D+cuUhiZi, Tiny URL shortened my greeting to: http://tinyurl.com/y6gctk -- see what message the surface of the earth holds for you!

My best "find" of 2006!

Ureka! For more than a year (well, not steadily, but off and on), I have been searching for a convenient and economical method for converting certain files (specifically created by Microsoft Works, Microsoft Publisher and Corel's Word Perfect) to PDF. Being a Mac user, I have had little, if any, success in viewing these -- until now.

While I was researching and preparing for several sessions I will be presenting at the NICE Mini-Conference on Jan. 27, and the IL-TCE (Illinois Technology Conference for Educators) at the end of Feb., I landed on the Technology & Learning's Podcast Archives -- which sadly seems to have halted production in Aug. 2006. Texas educator Miguel Guhlin's entry on Feb. 13, 2006, a PDF Primer, lists several web-based conversion programs, including a free Online PDF Converter from Neevia: http://convert.neevia.com. Miguel writes, "While this online PDF converter has a 1 megabyte limit per file--which may limit you if you have a document that has lots of images -- you can convert from a wide variety of formats (easily over 50) to PDF. Two nice features is that it allows you to add a watermark image of any text you enter on multiple pages. It also enables you to encrypt your PDF document."

Using the Neevia converter, I was able to view several student papers created using Works, and a club flyer created with Publisher. This is one helpful tool for those of us supporting educational technology!

Happy Holidays!

Here's a little holiday "freeware" treat for Mac users called SantaSnaps, created by iClip developer John Casasanta for the Cocoa Duel charity programming competition, with graphics and program icon created by Adam Betts.

SantaSnaps a Photo Booth clone with a holiday twist, and works with your external iSight camera if you don't have one of the new Intel Macs with the built-in iSight. Launch SantaSnaps, select a Santa beard, glasses, and hat, then position yourself behind the props. (Requires OS 10.3 or higher). Cheers!
http://macheist.com/SantaSnaps/SantaSnaps.zip

Comment from Manolo

Get Firefox... how do they do it?

Firefox 2.0 is now available. Their website states this version is "now faster, more secure, and fully customizable to your online life. With Firefox 2, we’ve added powerful new features that make your online experience even better."

I updated my version last week and I am experimenting and enjoying some of the improved features. My favorite discovery happened yesterday when my computer was shut down unexpectedly. Once I restarted and launched Firefox, I was presented with a message asking whether I would like to resume browsing the page(s) that were open before the shut down.

This feature is called "Session Restore" and is explained on their "new features" website: "Session Restore: Losing your place while you’re doing things on the Web is a pain. Now, with Session Restore, if Firefox has to restart or closes when it comes back you’ll pick up exactly where you left off. The windows and tabs you were using, the text you typed into forms, and the in-progress downloads you had running will all be restored. You can even set Firefox 2 to always restore your previous session instead of loading a home page, so you’ll never lose your place again." What a concept! Read about other new features at: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/features.html#experience

There are also more than 1,000 add-ons for personalizing your web browsing experience. Check out: https://addons.mozilla.org/

Download your new version at: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Enjoy!

It's the little things...

A major portion of my day is answering questions about the "little things" that people are sometimes "stuck" on. Someone said I should publish a tip book, but I don't think anyone would actually read it... I'm sure I would still get calls. So, I thought I would do the next best thing and publish a few pearls of wisdom here.

Soft Paragraph Return
Many computer users are unaware of this common "Word Processing" feature. A soft return is explained on Wikipedia as: "one can manually enter a soft return by pushing shift and enter instead of simply enter." (On the Mac, that would be Shift + Return.) A major benefit of a soft return is to begin typing on a new line, without starting a new paragraph. In most cases, you would want a new paragraph, but if you were using the bullets and numbering feature in Word for example, sometimes you would like to itemize your thoughts without starting new bullets or numbers. Try it!!

Lost House, a.k.a. ... There's No Place Like Home!
(File this one under OSX tips). Someone recently explained how their "House" on the dock accidentally got "poofed" when attempting to move a file to the trash. Efforts to restore the House on the Dock by dragging it from the left shortcut pane in the Finder only made it "poof" from there as well. Where is your House when you need it?

Your "House" is your home directory in OSX's file structure. It can be located by opening (double-clicking) the Macintosh HD and then opening the "Users" folder. Every user who logs into the computer has his or her very own "house." Drag the House from the Users folder to the dock (to the right of the vertical line) for a new shortcut. You can drag it into the left window pane for an instant shortcut there too!


Your Window Doesn't Look Like My Window?
This is a tip for PC users who are unfamiliar with navigating on the Mac. The small "bubble" that is at the top right corner of every Mac "window" (technically called a widget -- but not the same as the Widgets available in Dashboard), when clicked, will hide all the tools or shortcut icons at the top and left panel of a window. Go ahead, click it now in your browser! When you want your tools to return, click it again. PC users intuitively click here to close a window and then wonder, "What happened?"

Enjoy!

Print Your Own Graph Paper -- free!

Credit to fellow ADE Lucy Gray for posting these to her blog!

* Free Online Graph Paper from Incompetech.com
Make PDFs of just about any kind of paper you might need in a school setting here. This site is not just about the graphing kind!
Visit: http://www.incompetech.com/beta/plainGraphPaper/

* PDF Pad
This is a fairly basic graph paper generator that allows you to specify type of paper and size.
Visit: http://www.pdfpad.com/graphpaper/

* Downloadable Graph Paper and Measurement Tools
Not only can you print graph paper at this math and science site, but you can also find printable measurement tools such as centimeter rulers and protractors. It looks like other math and science resources cited here might be worth browsing as well.
Visit: http://www.csun.edu/science/ref/measurement/data/graph_paper.html

* Graphing Worksheets from Teachnology
This site includes printable graph paper as well as graphing activities.
Visit: http://www.teach-nology.com/worksheets/math/graph/

Keeping up with technology...

Do you ever feel that technology is advancing too quickly? Do you have a hard time keeping up with the latest trends?

Here are two websites you may want to check out.

ICT Leaders & Learners is a great place to visit for the latest in educational technology. You will discover tools for teachers and students, as well as "people to watch" and links to educational conference webcasts.
http://www.qesnrecit.qc.ca/leader/index.php

Also of interest from Alex Bosworth, is Live Marks. Not specifically for education, this website provides a "live" scrolling feed of websites that are being bookmarked in del.icio.us. It's amazing to watch.
http://sandbox.sourcelabs.com/livemarks/

Information Overload?

Did you know...
• It's been said that a single issue of the Sunday New York Times contains more information than a person living in the 18th Century came across in their lifetime?!
In researching the source of this factoid I found several references, such as an article by Ian Jukes (http://ianjukes.com/infosavvy/education/handouts/fgtg.pdf ) who cited the Richard Wurman book, "Information Anxiety."

• There are more than 2.7 billion searches in Google each month, and a total of 6.4 billion searches asked of the top Internet search tools!? (http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2156461)
To whom were these questions asked before the Internet?

If information about information is interesting to you, check out "Google Trends" (http://www.google.com/trends). With Google Trends, you can compare the world's interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they've been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.

Google for Educators!

In July I attended ISTE's National Education Computing Conference (NECC) in San Diego. There was a Google booth and some folks taking names and email addresses for a new "teacher" connection planned for Google. This week, I received my first "Google Teacher Newsletter" which stated, in part,

Visit us at: http://www.google.com/educators for a teacher's guide to 12 Google products. You'll find information about each tool, examples of how educators are using them, and lesson ideas. You'll also find lesson plans and videos from our partners at DiscoveryEducation focusing on two of our most popular teaching tools: Google Earth and Google SketchUp.

We think of the site as a basic platform of teaching resources -- for everything from blogging and videos to geographical search tools and 3-D modeling software -- and we want you to fill it in with your great ideas. You can explore a Google tool you've never tried before, then tell us what you think about it. Or road test our lesson ideas, then follow the links to submit your own. And if you'd like to share your expertise with fellow educators, we encourage you to send us your story -- we'd love to feature it in this newsletter or on the site.

Google Earth's direct education link is http://www.google.com/educators/p_earth.html. Visit this site for some exemplary education examples, including using resources from our subscription-based video on demand server, unitedstreaming, and an inspiring message from the Discovery Educator Network Directory, Hall Davidson, "Google Earth enables teachers and communities to easily create tremendous collections of work integrating video, 3D buildings, photos, podcasts, or NPR stories."

PLCs in Pinckney... they "get it!"

Many schools across the nation are either investigating or adopting the Professional Learning Community model, based on the works of DuFour and Eaker. As a regular listener of David Warlick's podcasts, I recently learned about one such school in Pinckney, Michigan (Episode 70, David Gets Geek!ed!). I followed the show links and discovered a wonderful posting by Tom McCurdy and Michael Partridge on "Podcasting and Professional Learning Communities" -- which details their work on adopting the PLC model at an administrative retreat:

"This summer (2006) we were able to apply podcasting to Professional Learning Communities at a leadership workshop in Pinckney, Michigan. We had small groups of school leaders collaborate on questions that challenge PLC’s. We started by using traditional group strategies. Groups discussed a PLC question, recorded their responses on a flip chart, and reported their result to the bigger group. Then we turned on the tech! We gave each group brief instructions in the use of recording software and clustered each group around a microphone and laptop. We let them know that they had twenty minutes to discuss the next PLC question…and the resulting audio file would be posted for the world to subscribe to! The results were stunning. When the groups shared their reactions to being recorded, they unanimously responded that the quality of the conversations increased. The groups were more focused. They were not burdened with trying to record on paper what was being recorded for them. They also felt that they had to rise to a more professional place in these conversations. They reported that they were less likely to verbalize 'stream of thought.' Instead, they more carefully constructed their thinking before speaking. They also reported that they listened to each other more carefully. After the activity, when it was announced that each school would receive a microphone, there was an audible expression of excitement from them. Imagine that."

Thanks for sharing Pinckney! Yours is a great model for demonstrating how technology can enhance the learning of our students (or our adults). Podcasting (and blogging) allow students to experience truly authentic learning by providing them with a "real" audience -- not to mention that it's a global one. Students will be challenged to be more focused, concentrate on a higher standard of conversation, and enhance their listening skills. Why would you NOT want to try this in your classroom?

Also, worth a listen: Geek!ed! Podcast Episode 034:
http://coverpage.pcs.k12.mi.us/geeked/?page_id=76

Update on "Unleashing the Potential" -- First Annual K12 Online Conference

Here'a an update on the Online Conference...

There is now a website (http://k12onlineconference.org/) with conference FAQs, profiles of the conference presenters and a link to submit a proposal to present. Proposals are due 9/30/06!

Some great keynoters are lined up... David Warlick, Bud Hunt, Alan Levine, Ewan McIntosh and Anne Davis!

Some "Fireside Chats" will also be available via Elluminate
* Oct 16th at 6 pm Eastern - David Warlick and 4 Conveners
* Oct 26th at 7 pm Eastern: Bud and Allan, Conveners and any Week 1 Presenters
* Oct 28th For Ewan and Ann, and any Week 2 presenters: 11 am Eastern
* Closing Event: The 24 hour continuous K-12 Online Skypecast! (sign-ups will be on an upcoming wiki)

Thanks to organizers Darren Kuropatwa, Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach, Will Richardson and Wesley Fryer!

If you have any questions about any part of this, please feel free to email one of them:
* Darren Kuropatwa: dkuropatwa {at} gmail {dot} com
* Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach: snbeach {at} cox {dot} net
* Will Richardson: weblogged {at} gmail {dot} com
* Wesley Fryer: wesfryer {at} pobox {dot} com

Please duplicate this post and distribute it far and wide across the blogosphere. Feel free to republish it on your own blog.

Conference Tags: k12online, K12online06

"Unleashing the Potential" at the first annual K12 Online convention!

Announcing the first annual "K12 Online 2006" convention for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice. This year's conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, Oct. 23-27 and Oct. 30- Nov. 3 with the theme "Unleashing the Potential." There will be four "conference strands"-- two each week. Two presentations will be published in each strand each day, Monday - Friday, so four new presentations will be available each day over the course of the two-weeks. Each presentation will be given in podcast or screencast format and released via the conference blog (URL: TBA).

THE FOUR STRANDS ARE:

Week 1
Strand A: A Week In The Classroom
These presentations will focus on the practical pedagogical uses of online social tools (Web 2.0) giving concrete examples of how teachers are using the tools in their classes. They will also show how teachers plan for using these tools in the delivery of their curricular objectives.

Strand B: Basic/Advanced Training (one of each per day)
Basic training is "how to" information on tool use in an educational setting, especially for newcomers.
Advanced training is for teachers who have already started using Web 2.0 tools in their classes and are looking for: (a) advanced technology training (eg. how to write your own blog template or hack existing ones), (b) new tools they can make use of in their classes, (c) teaching ideas on how to mash tools together to create "something new," (d) a pedagogical understanding of how technologies such as Weblogs, wikis, podcasts, social bookmarking sites, RSS feeds and others can deepen learning and increase student achievement, or (e) use of assessment tools to measure the effectiveness of Read/Write Web technologies in their personal practice and with their students.

Week 2
Strand A: Personal Professional Development
Tips, ideas and resources on how to orchestrate your own professional development online; the tools that support Professional Learning Environments (PLEs); how to create opportunities to bring these technologies to the larger school community; how to effectively incorporate the tools into your personal or professional practice; or how to create a supportive, reflective virtual professional community around school-based goals.

Strand B: Overcoming Obstacles
Tips, ideas and resources on how to deal with issues like: lack of access to tools/computers, filtering, parental/district concerns for online safety, and other IT concerns while trying to focus on best practice in the use of Web 2.0 tools.

Stay tuned for further details.

Today.. a tale of technology woes...

I love technology... when it works. Technology is not always reliable... after all, it's just a bunch of ones and zeros that have been manipulated in a variety of ways by programmers so that I can create and edit movies, download and edit digital photographs, create documents, and communicate through a variety of methods (voice, email, web, chat, etc).

The past 2 days have been a bit challenging. In the midst of backing up my files to a portable hard drive early Monday morning (after working through the weekend on a variety of back to school tasks) ... the hard drive on my Powerbook stopped responding when I tried to stop the copying process since it was taking longer than I had expected. When I couldn't stop the process, I chose to "force quit" and relaunch the Finder to get out of the "copying" mode. The computer would not cooperate and I needed to leave for work, so I chose to simply "shut down" the computer.

And now, so sad to report, I have not been able to start it back up. I haven't had a great deal of time to try the various utilities (such as Disk Warrior), but preliminary measures (booting in "target" mode and Safe booting) have been fruitless. I am becoming less confident that I will actually be able to get my data back. I am pretty diligent about backing up at least monthly, and usually archive important files as I create them (to a server or some portable device), just in case of a technolgy failure, so I only stand to lose a few weeks worth of work.

We were also plagued by network glitches today. Our well-planned roll out of Tiger, and Open Directory services has taught us a thing or two. Teachers and staff are becoming restless, it's amazing how much we actually depend on this stuff.

To top it off, I created a nifty movie to present to our back to school celebration this evening, and when playing in full screen mode from iMovie, through a data projector, the soundtrack would simply not keep up with the video... what's with that!? I was presenting from a brand new MacBook with nothing else running, and having almost 30 GBs of free hard drive space. How disappointing and a tad embarassing, since I "am" the technology person.

Oh well, unless you're dead, you can recover from the worst that happens. I hope tomorrow is less problematic.

Videogrunt and Podgrunt --

From the Silicon Valley in California, comes the "grunt" series. I learned about this in the periodic "Apple news" email that I receive. These short episodes are creatively presented in plain English! Whether you are a new or seasoned user of video, this is a great series.

"Videogrunt is an innovative, free video podcast--illustrates the basics of digital video, delivered in short snippets. The informative 'grunt' clips are produced in high-definition video and then scaled down to size for viewing on the gruntmedia website, your personal computer or a video-capable iPod."

http://gruntmedia.com/videogrunt_main.html

Learn something new about video by watching the first four "videogrunt" podcasts.
http://gruntmedia.com/videogrunt_directory.html

And, if you follow the links on this page, you will be able also subscribe to the "podgrunt" series.
http://gruntmedia.com/videogrunt_directory.html

What a great introductory series on the basics of video and audio to share with teachers and students!

Classroom collaboration online

Last Friday I presented a workshop for the ICE summer series on Classroom Collaboration Tools. Our focus was primarily the use of blogs and wikis, although we briefly looked at the social bookmarking and photo sharing sites (mentioned here previously).

I am particularly fond of wikis as a classroom tool. Teachers can easily create a wiki page for their classrooms and assign student (individually or in teams) to the task of being the "scribe" or notetakers for the day. The wiki environment allows teachers and other students to make corrections, or add to the work of the scribe.

Students can visit the wiki to review the class notes, or answer questions that may need to be clarified. At the end of the course, there is a day to day, or week to week record of what was covered. Wikis can be password protected, editors can elect to have changes emailed to them, and the history of changes and additions make it easy to manage.

Two online sources for creating wikis are pbwiki.com and wikispaces.com. For the summer workshop, I created a pbwiki page at: http://summer-ice.pbwiki.com -- when you visit the pbwiki site, you will discover that it literally takes only 10 seconds to create a wiki page! The other source I would recommend is wikispaces.com, which allows the wiki owner to password protect the information, plus limit who can view the wiki. Check out this Georgia teacher's wikispace for ideas on how wikis can catapult your classroom into the 21st century!

What are your favorite websites?

I was recently asked to list my ten most favorite websites. Narrowing the list to 10 is no easy task, since I am always on the lookout for new sites, especially those that may be helpful for educators.

Some of my favorites have been listed in this blog, and a majority are "Web 2.0-based" -- social sites used for collaborating, such as Bloglines, del.icio.us, Furl, Flickr, pbwiki, Wikispaces, and Writeboard.

A great site for educators is USA Today Education Online
which advertises across the banner head, "Improving student performance through relevant, timely, real-world resources." The "Daily Lesson Plan" link (published Tuesdays and Thursdays over the summer) provides a printable 2-page handout for your classroom.

Another site I have recently discovered is NoodleTools. Created by teacher-librarian Debbie Abilock and her son, Damon, NoodleTools provides subscription-based services for schools, although many resources are available on their public website. Send your students to Information Literacy: Search Strategies or NoodleQuest to help them gather resources for their academic research. NoodleQuest is a "Search Strategy Wizard" containing a short form of 9 questions to help students get started.

What are some of your favorite sites?

In over my head... but determined...

I've spent a good deal of time in unfamiliar territory ... "Terminal" land. The quest began earlier today when several teachers in the lab were in search of a calendar template for their classroom planning. We have several "calendar" tools on hand: iCal, Now Up-to-Date, Palm, and Entourage. Each of these are great calendar programs in their own right. And, all seem to require creating and defining "events" which then become listed in the corresponding dates of the calendar.

In the past, teachers have used the nifty "Calendar Assistant" in AppleWorks which creates an AppleWorks Drawing document containing a table with the dates of the specific Month and Year entered when stepping through the assistant. Once the assistant has created the document, in a few clicks, you can change the page set-up to landscape, and drag the corner of the table to fill the page. Text and graphics are easily added by typing in the "dated" cells and inserting clip art from the clippings menu. When finished, the file can be printed to paper, or pdf, or saved as a .jpg file which is suitable for posting to the web (See http://www6.district125.k12.il.us/staffdev/train.html for the summer calendar). Alas, we are standardizing on the "Office" apps and moving away from AppleWorks, since it is being phased out by Apple. I will dearly miss this simple, and elegant application!

So, after a quick review of the templates included with Office, and not finding any calendars, we searched the Microsoft website and located the "Calendars, Labels, Planners, and Stationery" link. The selection looked promising, as there were several "2006-07 academic year" calendar templates among the 28 templates available in the "2007 Calendars" category. The templates are provided for a variety of Microsoft file formats; Visio and Publisher (PC-only), and Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

After locating several that looked good, I clicked the "Download" button only to end up on a page that stated "Your operating system does not meet system requirements. This template could not be downloaded automatically because your operating system does not meet the requirements for downloading Office Online templates." (The files are compressed in the .CAB format, which is not supported on Macintosh.) At the bottom of the page however states, "If you are using a Macintosh operating system, you can find templates at Mactopia Tools on the Web." Ok, so off to Mactopia Tools where we found 437 templates available, but not ONE calendar file for teachers or students (there was one meal planner calendar, but that was it).

So, returning to the "Calendars, Labels, Planners, and Stationery" link, I proceeding to download several of the .cab files. A Google search of "extract CAB files on Macintosh" led me to FileJuicer a program that could decompress the .cab files and also provides several other helpful conversion and extraction tools. FileJuicer is a shareware program, and for $12, seems like a good basic "tool" to own.

Further "Googling" pointed me to an open source (="free") file named "cabextract" that would run as a package for Fink. (The Fink project is an effort to port popular Unix programs to Mac OS X).

So, I proceeded to download and install Fink, and Fink Commander (GUI menu interface) to be able to use cabextract. This is where the scary part comes in. I have used the Terminal application in a few instances, but I am not a UNIX geek by any means, so I basically crossed my fingers and clicked through a series of prompts and was able to get cabextract installed. (I am not sure it's in the best place, but it is working).

In the end, I was able to open Terminal and enter the commands (as listed in the "--help" page) to extract the .cab files into their Word, PowerPoint and Excel templates, which I have re-saved as non-template Office files.

May I whine?! H-E-L-L-O! I think that Microsoft could at least provide these Office templates in a format that can be read and used by Macintosh users. All in all, I suppose that since I learned a little more about UNIX commands and using Terminal, it was worth the time and effort -- and now I have some calendar samples to share with everyone!

NECC-ing in San Diego

Lori, Judy and me at NECC

From July 5-7, I spent a whirlwind 3 days at NECC. You too can "attend virtually!"

Listen and learn...
Take a few moments to search the iTunes "Podcast" channel for "NECC" and you will find 19 podcast episodes from sessions at the conference including the keynote address by Nicholas Negroponte who talked about the $100 laptop initiative. View additional pictures on the OLPC wiki page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home



There are additional podcast selections as well, such as "NECC Live" from Kidz Online, "NECC 2006 Poster Sessions from WestEd" and "In the NECC of Time" from Instructional Technology Specialists in update western New York.

Watch and learn...
Be sure to check out the Webcasts from WestEd, available on the NECC website:
http://web.uoregon.edu/ISTE/NECC2006/program/video_on_demand.php

Read and learn...
Many presenters have posted handouts from their sessions online. Browse or search through the NECC Presenters Handouts and Research Papers web page to view the many presentation topics.

And, finally, many NECC-ers have posted their pictures on Flickr... more than 700 (tagged as NECC06) are at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/necc06/ and about 600+ (tagged NECC2006) are at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/necc2006/

What a great way to virtually attend NECC! Enjoy!
Thanks to ISTE!