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In the interest of putting my money where my mouth is, I am going to push myself to post more regularly. This year has been busy, often in good ways. My daughter is an incredibly active 19 month old, keeping up with her is a full time job. The class I am teaching at Pace on Standards Based Technology in the Curriculum has been invigorating. My students are bright and and quick to challenge, which is wonderful. They are keeping me on my toes and inspire fantastic conversations. I am working on some interesting projects inTarrytown , which I will blog about soon. All of these factors has made blogging complicated, but not impossible. It’s like anything else, once your routine is disrupted it is easy to let things slide. I need to stop my slide and get back into blogging!
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I want to share a great tool I found for my teachers. As I mentioned before, every elementary teacher has a SMARTboard. Teachers love their boards, but teacher want diagrams and organizers that are completed in class to be available throughout the day. Chart paper can be hung on the wall, but when aSMARTboard turns off the beautiful organizer disappears with it. In the past I would export a notebook page to Powerpoint and copy/paste it into Publisher, then create a poster. This was a time consuming and awkward process. I have found a better solution! (Collective “Yay!”)
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While I was surfing on SourceForge.com I found Poster Razor; freeware that provides a very simple way of turning an image file into a poster of any size. It works great for the SMARTboard. This is what you need to do:
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1. In Notebook, go to File>Export>Image Files.
2. I usually choose JPGs, then specify the largest size: 1024X768
3. Export the files to a location. Unfortunately, SMARTnotebook will export every slide. You can delete the sides you don’t need before you export, just don’t save.
4. Open Poster Razor
5. Find the image of the slide you want to turn into a poster and follow the directions.

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Poster Razor will make a poster out of any image - it is very easy. The application will output your poster as a PDF to be printed later or saved. Try it out! I also looked at Poster Printer, which is also a promising app. Poster Printer is a virtual printer that will print out a poster. Unfortunately, it seemed unable to handle SMARTnotebook’s handwritten lines, disqualifying it for use.

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Professionally, I had a great summer. There were so many ideas germinating. Summer is an invigorating time to recharge and I met the the new school year with anticipation. The new year, in turn, met me like a brick wall. My plans were derailed on every front. Our Technology Director left the district, leaving the technology department in a state of transition. The district’s new Student Information System co-opted the majority of my time. Finally, like our students, my teachers suffered from summertime regression; one step forward and two steps back.

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These circumstances left me busy, and frankly, demoralized. I separated from my blog and my network. My daily grind didn’t contribute to interesting blogging. To write a post that was worthy of reading took more effort than I felt I could give. I was getting a dose of what my teachers complain about when I encourage them to blog. An educator’s life is often overwhelming; technology evangelists must always keep that in mind when they preach.

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Thankfully, the holiday recess is another time to recharge and regroup. Without my network I have felt myself getting stale. I didn’t connect it until the break. Without blogging, getting my ideas out and reflecting on them, I have been less clear headed. I m not a great writer, but I am humbled at how important the process of reading, reflecting, and writing is to me as a professional.

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Recently, I have been asked to teach a course about integrating technology into the curriculum for Pace University’s school of education. It’s a flattering opportunity and I am going to convey the importance of being productive part of a network. For my part, I am going to rejoin and rebuild my own network, starting with my students.

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Here are more lessons learned from the “Pageflakes in the Classroom” project I have been working on. I was able to present the curriculum pages to my primary teachers last Tuesday - it was met with great enthusiasm! The teachers will need more time to play with the various resources that are featured, but many used the portal on the first two days of school. The most popular feature so far has been the Tumblebooks access.
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I learned about Tumble Books from Quentin D’Souza’s blog last year. It’s a wonderful service that provides ebooks online. The books can be narrated or read manually. As the narrator reads, illustrations animate and sentences are highlighted. They have a new feature which propels Tumblebooks into the web 2.0 world: students can write book reviews and submit them which is nice. For those of you with SMARTboards in primary grades, this is a wonderful resource. By putting the site’s link with an embedded password and username into a Pageflakes page, teachers have immediate access to the books. 231 books were looked at last week alone (I think First Day Jitters was the most popular.) If you want to make a trial account click here, you’ll also be helping my district because they have some sort of affiliate program.
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Now a mistake that I made. During my kindergarten orientation, an intrepid teacher clicked on the logo in the top corner of the nice Bulova clock widget I had selected. I picked it because it was clean and easy to read. Unfortunately, the company that provides the widget has a big handgun clock featured on their homepage. When you click the logo, that is what you see. It’s a bummer, now I have to find another good clock widget. Fortunately, I wanted the teachers to be comfortable with Pageflakes before it was made public to the community. Ah, the merits of a pilot program, this Kindergarten teacher saved me from a potential gaff.
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There are a few other things I am waiting for from Pageflakes. We are going to be given a sub-domain with an education instance of Pageflakes. This instance will have hand picked flakes that are appropriate to education, I’ve talked about this before. They are also going to disable the random pagecast link at the top of the page. Like many educators, I hate those random link type of things. (Special thanks to Mike who left a comment and brought this to my attention.) Unfortunately, Pageflakes hasn’t been able to do this yet. Until I get that sub-domain, I can’t have students make their own pages and I’m hesitant to offer what I have widely to the community. Hopefully soon…

I’ll take whatever time I can get to speak to teachers on Staff Development days. Schedules are always so tight and the endless stream of initiatives compete for face time. Today, I got an hour with kindergarten and the first grade, and an unfortunate 25 minutes with the second and third grade combined. Needless to say, the second and third grade teachers are less prepared to use the fantastic new resources that are available to them. It would be great if I were involved in the curriculum specific development, as opposed to being an also ran at the end of the day. Let’s truly integrate! Like many districts, we pay consultants to help with ELA and mathematics development. They are talented educators and do a good job, but technology is not their strength. Why not ask them to meet beforehand with the technology specialists to provide an integrated approach? It’s worth asking administration about this for the next staff development day.
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I will be able to discuss possibilities during team planning meetings and while pushing into classrooms. This said, September always seems to be a write off. The equipment is torn apart during the summer clean up. There are always problems with printers and passwords. No matter how hard I try to prevent this chaos, it always happens. The result: most of September putting the pieces back together. Many of the problems haven’t been found yet - the next two days will determine the the next two weeks!

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Sorry it’s been a while in between posts. I’ve been particularly busy this August preparing for September, thank you for sticking in there! I thought it might be useful to share a few of the things I’ve learned while building the k-3 curriculum pages in Pageflakes. I’ve made a few mistakes that don’t need to be repeated by folks interested in doing something similar.
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I have a lot of link collections for the teachers and students to use. I occasionally used the Top Links flake because it’s columns made better use of space. Never again. I use the Bookmarks flake by Kishore Senji almost exclusively, and pull links from the district Del.icio.us account. It is so much easier to have centralized control, especially because some links appear on pages for different grades.
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I really liked the Grazr widget. I thought it would be a great way to track of student and teacher blogs, but IE 7 killed it for me. I upgraded the browsers in my district from 6 to 7 this summer. I thought tabbed browsing and improved AJAX support would be a good step forward. Little did I know how slow it would render certain pages. According to the Scobleizer, it seems to have a particularly hard time with Blog Readers, like Google Reader. So, upgrading to IE 7 was a mistake, and now I have to get rid of Grazr because I’ve already upgraded. Fortunately, I also installed Firefox!
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Flickr is amazing, I love it. That said, be careful with your tags! Be specific, and use multiple descriptors, separated by commas.
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My Pageflakes page is the new home page in classrooms k-3. From here, teachers and students can click on any specific grade level page. As teachers and students build their own Pageflake pages, they will be added to the home page as well. This creates one page, regardless of the grade level. Unfortunately, this was too much of a change for some teachers and principals. I needed to provide a scaffolded start; one that isn’t too different from the original experience, at least until there is a higher comfort level. Now I’ve got the Tarrytown homepage in a flake on the Pageflakes page, providing a window of familiarity.
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I’m sure there will be many more mistakes, but this is a small list of my first. I can’t wait to show this to the teachers when we start next week and get wider feedback. I’m even more excited to see what the teachers and students do on their own, especially in the Social Studies classes. I know one teacher who is making a Pageflake Webquest - I’ll keep you posted…
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Photo Credit: sister72

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Google Earth continues to impress me by adding a star gazing component to it’s most recent update. One strength of this addition comes from the included layers. The layers make it easy to navigate important celestial phenomena, allowing easy access for a teacher or student. For me, the features that distinguishes this tool from Celestia and Stellarium are the same features that elevate Google Earth in general: the ability to create your own content. A student can locate galaxies, add place marks, write descriptions, and contribute to the Google community. I also love the incredibly rich satellite photography. The number of galaxies out there always amazes me; how can anyone suggest that we’re alone?
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In all this Google hype, don’t count Stellarium out. It has advantages that Google still can’t beat. For one, Stellarium allows you to set the place of your star gazing experience. I’ve set it to our school’s Latitude and Longitude, making the sky in Stellarium the same as the one above our student’s heads. I’ve created a 360 degree panorama, using Hugin, from the roof of one of my elementary buildings. Stellarium allows me to use this custom pano as a skin, creating a wonderfully concrete experience for our young students. There’s nothing better than using physical landmarks, like the church steeple in the middle of town, to reference stars and planets. Stellarium also includes the rotation of the Earth and adds the fourth dimension of time to the star gazing experience. This is a critical component, especially if you want your students to find the stars outside of school.
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Kudos to Google’s continuing pursuit of excellence. I’m looking forward to exploring Google Stars. Having said that, don’t discount the power of Stellarium in the classroom.

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I just got my first meme from Chris Lehman! Perhaps that’s not a big deal, but I think it’s pretty cool.
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So, Eight Random Facts:
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The rules:
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1. Post these rules before you give your facts
2. List 8 random facts about yourself
3. At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them
4. Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged
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My Eight:
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1. I have a new baby girl, Caroline, who just turned 1 last month. She teaches me something new every day.
2. I have been a bronze sculptor’s apprentice. It remains one of the best experiences of my life and built the foundation for my belief in experiential learning.
3. I helped produce two PC games in the 90’s: Casper’s Interactive Adventure, and Kristi Yamaguchi’s Fantasy Ice Skating. I discovered that the production cycle of a video game is sometimes equated with a death march (shiver.)
4. I can touch my nose with my tongue. It’s true.
5. Chuck Close and Paul Cezanne are my favorite artists.
6. I can play “Intelligence Cube” like a pro…if there was such a thing as professional Intelligence Cube playing.
7. I always wanted to build the hover cart advertised in the back of Boy’s Life magazine. Did anyone ever build that thing?
8. I believe kindness always beats selfishness.
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Consider yourself tagged:
Jasper Fox
Chris Craft
Quentin D’Souza
Michele Martin
Bill Mackenty
Cory Peppler
Ben Wilkoff
Alice Mercer

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This is an interesting article from Wired magazine that reveals another way wikipedia can be used to teach media literacy. Virgil Griffith, a Cal Tech neural-systems graduate student, used the IP address records of Wikipedia’s anonymous edits and crossed referenced them with various net-address lookup services. He was curious to see how often corporations like Walmart and Haliburton, not to mention politicians, make self-serving changes. His results were interesting, ranging from Diebold deleting paragraphs about security concerns and their voting machines, to someone at the CIA updating song lyrics from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Our tax dollars at work.) This is the sort of media literacy our students need. Wikipedia’s transparency enables us to illustrate the importance of critical reading better than ever before. Virgil Griffith has published his findings on Wikipedia Scanner, a searchable database of 34.4 million edits. I love transparency! This teaches more about the world than the static perspective of a Social Social studies text. It certainly uses more high order thinking.

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August has arrived and the usual preparations for the new year have begun. I’m moving rooms this year, so I’ve started the hum-drum process of setting up new digs. There are a few purchase orders that seem to have slipped though the cracks and I’m tracking them down. Usernames have to be set and passwords created. In addition to the routine, we are also preparing for some new things. One of the most exciting developments is fiber between building and to the net (Ya baby!) This giant leap opens opportunities to use web-based apps without slowdowns. Over the next few days I’m going to talk about some of the tools we are planing to use, starting with our new typing program.
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Online typing - back to reality
Our typing program will now be web based, using a tool called TypingWeb. It isn’t a particularly fun thing to teach (IMO), especially when the curriculum is already busting at the seams. I’m hoping that this new web-based tool will provide flexibility, build a home/school connection, and makes learning to type more fun. TypingWeb has some engaging games with decent graphics and sound, I’m going to encourage play at home to boost scores. Keeping profiles from building to building as students move up will be easy and the reporting features are robust.
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In addition, we have several students who require single handed typing and TypingWeb is integrating Lilly Walter’s method into their program. We have used Ms. Walter’s system for teaching one-handed QWERTY and I’ve found it to be a great solution for students while providing a least restrictive environment.
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Some say that traditional typing instruction is obsolete. Innovations such as text to speech, mobile keyboarding (thumbing), and multi-touch screens are changing the landscape. The prognosis may be true, but let’s face it, the way we type hasn’t changed YET. We start keyboarding in the third grade and it does make a difference for student productivity. It’s also an incredible life skill - at least until the world changes.
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Photo Credit: Gear (II)

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Pageflakes finally released their “Blizzard” update, and so far it is pretty cool. I certainly can appreciate the ability to brand pages. For schools this has several benefits, teachers can make pages more child centered, and students can personalize their own. I haven’t tapped into the “Anything Flake” yet, but it allows you to use code to create your own widgets. That has big potential and some students could do great things with it. Another cool feature: when you subscribe to a page it acts like a template, making it easy to share work and build upon the work of others. There is a lot of collaborative potential with this service. For my elementary students, I’m thinking Webquest 2.0!
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I am still waiting for the Flake Admin panel that Pageflakes has told me they would create for schools. They said it would be a few weeks after the update, because all of their efforts were focused on Blizzard. The panel is supposed to allow schools to turn off flakes they don’t want students to use, such as the “bar crawl flake.” I’m not too concerned; our plan is roll Pageflakes out with teachers first - build an understanding with them, then open it up for students. Regardless, it’s scary to plan on promises!