2007 EduBlog Award Nominee
Just a quick note that our blog has been nominated for best group edublog 2007. We appreciate the recognition and your support of our project. A year ago, we set out to create a place where instructional technology theory met practical, creative ideas. Your frequent visits and thought-provoking comments are evidence that we have achieved some measure of success. Thanks for stopping by.
Related posts
Considering Making Digital Sociology Tools
First off, I believe that websites that help you think are tools. Websites that help you author media are also tools. So when I say “tools” that’s what I mean. I will also likely call them sites. That’s also what I mean. I like to start off posts like these establishing the fact that I’m not going to try very hard to make sense to you but at least I’m explicit about it. I’ve had a couple of conversations recently that have me close to building these with or without a faculty/course attached. #metoo Movies This started when I was watching one of the original Star Wars movies with my kids. I’d never really watched them closely as an adult. It really seemed like Han Solo was a textbook example of a person acting out some pretty specific examples of sexual harassment. Repeatedly Leia tells him to stop touching her and he ignores her etc. I ended up talking to some friends at a school function about it and the conversation expanded into the idea of a database of clips like this that both act as a lens on that time/space/movie and as examples of particular patterns that might be of interest more broadly. For example here’s Han being creepy . . . In order to write this post, I’ve […]
Google Earth – Proof of Concept Stuff
A while back I posted about using GoogleLookup to get data quickly and easily to make and put into Google Earth via Google Spreadsheets. The example file is at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pGAYO0Q5WpT8_Rsss6Uw2LQ&output=txt&gid=2&range=a1. It’s a network link. In Google Earth- click Add– Network Link and paste the URL into the Link box. Here’s some information on how to do this if you’re interested. Put Info into Google Earth from a Google Spreadsheet Things ended up being far easier than I anticipated. The last time I did a networked KML link from a spreadsheet (sounds way fancier than it is) I had to make it myself and go through a different service. Now Google has a nice template all set up to make things work well and it makes things pretty as well. Adding GoogleLookup to the Template So the next thing I did was play around a little with the lookup function. I didn’t do too much. I was just playing around to make sure it would work. This wouldn’t save you much time as it’s only five cities but it you wanted to plot all this information for 50 cities things would start to get a lot more interesting. I just added a few columns at the end of the spreadsheet and then set up the following formulas. I put the lookup […]
A Future Intro
I made this so we could talk to our staff about the TIP Chart (our technology integration progress rubric- which is pretty good). It’d work well for parents as well. It’s pretty interactive and fun in the beginning with a number of pretty funny questions mocking our ability to predict the future. The intro slide sets the tone. I basically say “Where is my jet pack?” Then I try to get people talking about what they expected to have in the “future” that hasn’t materialized. I then pose this question and then invite guesses from the audience as to why this eminent scientist believed high speed train travel would be impossible. After a while I show them the answer. The key is that it gets people engaged at the beginning and it’s pretty funny- yet it is amazing how quickly things change. The presentation then segues into what’s going on now. Since we can’t predict the future very well, we might as well show the “futuristic” things going on now. I showed brief selections from a few TED videos that I thought were cool and relevant to the topic. We hit parts of – Do schools kill creativity? Hans Rosling on poverty – both to touch on globalization and to show how the data is presented Will Wright’s Spore It’d […]
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[…] your classroom and what isn’t when it comes to copyright infringement. He also blogs over at BionicTeaching with the help of Jim Coe, an English Language Arts instructor. Together, they have been nominated […]
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Comments on this post
Congratulations! You two definitely deserve the nomination and the award, too. We miss you guys!
🙂
Great job – you deserve it!
You guys are up to 30% in the voting, and TechLearning is down from 41% to 39%. Keep up the voting!