Still testing

I am still testing how to best integrate blogs, twitter, Google Reader, facebook, diigo and the other tools out there. Ideally, I want to make one posting or bookmark or tweet (forgive me!), and it propagates to all of the web faces I have out there. For facebook, I want the blog items to show up as status updates so people will see short notes that the info is out there (i.e. not just on my Profile).

Blog -> (RSS feed) -> Twitter -> (facebook twitter app) -> facebook status update

Twitter -> (RSS) -> Google Reader
Blog -> (RSS) -> Google Reader (so duplicates the Twitter update!)

Diigo -> (RSS) -> Blog -> [see above, to Twitter and from there to Facebook]

Twitter -> (facebook twitter app) -> facebook status update

facebook link, events, notes -> (facebook widget) -> blog [these are links back to facebook; user needs a facebook account to see the info, so not ideal]

blog -> (facebook RSS setting (via Profile page) ) -> facebook Profile page [but not status update! -- this is redundant to the Twitter status update -- I am also checking out the Simply RSS app on Facebook, to see how it works -- which as the rationale for this post!]

I know I have missed some things. The above begs for a graphic to show the different flows.

Testing 1-2-3.

jd

Diigo in education

After learning about Diigo in a Web 2.0 class a couple of weeks ago, I have been impressed with what it does (bookmarking / social bookmarking). I have especially been impressed with the links I am receiving everyday from the "Diigo in education" group -- Diigo lets you create groups, which others can join, and new bookmarks submitted by anyone in the group are sent out in a periodic (user-controlled) mailing.

Here are some samples from today's email:

The Top 10 Tech Skills Your Teen Needs Now

A People's History of the United States

Multiple Intelligences -- Assessment

Slums around the world

The Sect of Homokaasu - The Rasterbator (this is kinda neat -- you can take a picture and it makes it really big, printing a portion on many 8.5x11 sheets of paper, which you then assemble -- at least that's what I think it does...)

Dimdim: free web conferencing

Etc. etc. etc.

jd

Doing away with Microsoft

The New York Times today has an article of note on Zoho (the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/business/05digi.html), which provides a rich suite of online applications. Zoho's offering may appear redundant to Google docs, but the NYT reviewer liked the writing app better and Zoho evidently provides offline editing tools which sounds nice and useful.

CPS's provided email and collaboration tool, FirstClass, also provides a writing app, and is available via the web, although it is slow and cumbersome and has the very very annoying shortcoming of throwing away your work if you press the backspace key with the focus in the wrong spot (the browser takes you to the previous page, sans your work).

And then there is OpenOffice, the open source suite of productivity tools. Our Macs did not come with Microsoft Office on the Mac OS side (it did have the awful Office 2007 on the Windows partition -- how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways...), so I though OpenOffice would be a viable solution for our Macs. And it has worked okay -- the Aqua version for the Mac uses the native Mac interface, but there are odd inconsistencies and silly bugs and not so silly ones that are irritating. (Specifically, and off the top of my head: keyboard mapping is consistent I think with OpenOffice on other platforms, but not with the Mac, in particular the laptop keyboard, e.g. Option-Down Arrow to page down -- I cannot figure out how to page down on the MacBook; the RTF save option omits, or rather, screws up simple formatting stuff like centered text; the autocorrection has some oddities; Page Setup is not of the File Menu where I am pretty sure it is for every other app in the universe, instead it is on the Format menu; and we had a very difficult time with the presentation software hanging, but it is better with version 3.0.1). BUT... It is a free and feature-rich offering with a large user and developer community behind it. I am forcing myself to use OpenOffice just to know it and to see if there really is a fulfilling life post-Microsoft. And for the most part, yes, there is life after MSFT.

So why bother with the expense and general trauma of wrestling with Microsoft Office? Mainly because of the dead weight of history, that incredible inertia of user base and training and curriculum material specific to MSFT and .doc files and .ppt files that use some peculiar MSFT feature not ported to the online and open source alternatives. Eventually I think blunders like the Office 2007 interface catastrophe and plain old price will wean educators away from the MSFT teat. In the meantime, us tech teachers should be ecumenical in our approach to applications -- we should be teaching word processing and not Word; spreadsheets and not Excel; presentation software and not PowerPoint. I have found students to be very flexible in moving across platforms and applications.

The biggest obstacle I see right now for going to online tools in the classroom is the legal one of age restrictions on the accounts for students. Related to this is the potential issue, if student accounts come with public email accounts, of Internet safety. But is this really an issue? Don't the students already have their yahoo and hotmail accounts? I don't know. FirstClass could be a good solution, since student email accounts cannot receive email from outside of FirstClass, but the writing app is so difficult to use, and the other main tools, spreadsheets and presentation software in particular as far as I can tell are missing. There is also some risk that the online services will at some point change their terms of use or pricing models. Are they a safe basket to store eggs?

Anyway I have sent an email to Zoho regarding classroom use and student accounts.

jd

Chicago Consortium on School Research

Seen on the very good weekly Scout Report e-mailing: A writeup of the Chicago Consortium on School Research website. Some examples of research reports available:

Changing Schools: A Look at Student Mobility Trends in Chicago Public Schools Since 1995

Making the Transition: How Each Elementary School's Eighth-Grade Graduates Are Doing in High School

Lessons from High Performing Small High Schools in Chicago

jd

One iPhone per Child

As the happy owner of a new Apple iPhone, I am intrigued about its possibilities in the classroom. The iPhone includes many, if not most, of the features of the various bits of technology that were part of our program through CPS's Office of Academic Enhancement; but it also includes additional features that suggest additional uses.

The iPhone has web access for do just about everything one does on wih a web browser. As a sound player, it can do everything an iPod can do, including play video and audio (including podcast lectures and other offerings from iTune U). The iPhone includes a decent scientificThe iPhone includes a camera. Free software turns the iPhone into a sound recorder. The GPS chip provides positioning information, and the motion detector suggests other possibilities (math and science possibilities).

In addition, there are many, many applications (25,000 and growing according to Apple), many of which are free, and many of which have either explicit or implicit education uses. (What about textbooks on the iPhone?)

Better yet, the announced summer 2009 3.0 operating system upgrade will include collaboration features. There are obvious uses for gaming, but the Apple video of the developer announcement meeting showed two developers playing music together using their iPhones.

I called a representative from Apple in their education support program. The conversation went something like this:

Me: How can I explore using the iPhone in the classroom?
Apple: You don't want to use the iPhone, you want to use the iPod Touch.
Me: But what about the features that the iPhone has that the Touch doesn't, like the camera or GPS?
Apple: Why pay the AT&T phone charges just to have a camera?
Me: Are there no options for controlling the phone service fees?
Apple: Without phone service the iPhone is inert. You want to use the iTouch.
Me: Is there some way to control this?
Apple: You want to use the iTouch.

The conversation went around like that for a minute or so. Now I may be exaggerating slightly here, but this was my sense of the conversation, and a sense I have had in the past talking to people from large organizations -- this is what is available period, and that's that. It was clear that the rep was unable or unwilling to consider or explore possible ways around the AT&T service issue. And my school is, after all, a small fish. Her answer was the iPod Touch, period. Obviously, I would need to talk to AT&T about whatever programs they might have or consider for iPhone use in the classroom. A rep at Chicago's Apple Store echoed that, since as he point out, with the iPhone we are dealing with two providers, Apple and AT&T, and the latter is handling the cell network connectivity which is a vital part of the iPhone.

But why not use the iTouch? The iTouch does not have the camera, the GPS sensing, the microphone (although there is a way around this), or the Bluetooth ability. I don't know exactly what technologies are needed for collaboration -- maybe WiFi connectivity will be all that is needed. The camera is a biggish thing though, and the microphone, and there are a number of possibilities with GPS (although I need to experiment with GPS signal reception in our school building; I am able to get a good signal in my upstairs room at home.)

Now an iPod Touch that included the camera, microphone, GPS and Bluetooth -- that would be ideal for the classroom.

I set up a Diigo group and a Diigo list for links on iPhones and the iPod Touch in education, if you want to track links I find.

More on this as I find out more.

jd

More twiddling with Blogger, this time with Diigo

I have been playing around with Diigo, a nice social bookmarking site. My only complaint so far is that when you are logged in to Diigo, it takes the liberty of putting little post-it crap on the browser screen from other Diigo users. Maybe there is a way to turn this off, I haven't looked into it enough.


Diigo has a feature where you can include an RSS-type feed from your Diigo bookmarks on another website, which I have added to the right-hand panel of this blog. These are called Enhanced Linkrolls. Use the Tools option (located on a drop-down menu under your username) to customize the HTML code that Diigo generates. I added an HTML widget to the blog (on the Layout tab when customizing the blog, and pasted in the Diigo script code.

I had some problems matching up the background colors from Diigo's code with the blog's colors. I resolved this by generating custom code in Diigo, then looking at the source code for the blog page, locating the sidebar background color (called the "Top Sidebar"), and pasting it into the Diigo code. There was another small wrinkle here -- Blogger used three-digit hexadecimal color codes, instead of the six hexadecimal codes I was familiar with. After some poking around, I found that the three-digit hex codes can be converted to the corresponding six-digit hex code by adding another digit for each digit in the three digit color code. So -- Blogger's background color was #9b5, so I removed the "#", and repeated each character like so: 99bb55 in the Diigo HTML. This gave me the same background color for my widget as for the rest of the sidebar.

Correct picture size for right-hand column on Blogger

This took some experimenting. I added a picture to the right-hand column, but it bled out to past the edge of the column (Blogger said that it would resize the picture to 240 pixels wide, but that is too wide for the template I am using, "Rounder 4" I think.)

The height of the picture in the template is 160 pixels, but no width is specified. It turns out that the width of the column, allowing for margins (or, the width of the dashed line) is 216 pixels.

So -- resize or crop the photo to 160 pixels high by 216 pixels wide for a properly laid-out photo.

jd