Technology in Education

This week is an exercise in positive thinking.  Our superintendent has forwarded a 0% increase budget to the Board of Education which has resulted in 18 job losses.  Yours truly included.  

A new job was desired.  I spent the previous two years earning a new degree and administrative certificate.  Now a new job is inevitable.  I am trying to leverage all that I have learned in the past three years teaching and leading technology change into a new path for a career.

Needless to say, not where I thought I would be, but I do think new doors will be opened.  Forced open.

I’ve been spending some time in Change.gov during this transition.  I am amazed at the speed and transparency of all this.  They are using a Google Moderator type function to have a discussion.  600,000 votes from 100,000 people rank the top questions.  That very day the Obama team prepare a YouTube video answering the question.

Now, I don’t know if most of the people on these sites are loyal “Blues” or “Reds”.  But we should entertain the thought that people from around the world are part of this community.  If nothing else it has a very democratic (small d!) feel to it.

I find it fascinating that the government is leading this.  What if General Motors or Fannie Mae (or the school where I work for that matter) had operated the same way?

Barack Obama is using Creative Commons license.  I have been teaching this, but it is not common knowledge that it exists (10% of teachers use it??).  This will help.

Cool sites:

Museum Box

Time Rime

Wordle

I just discovered Fora.tv.  Wow, what a resource.  Combine that with TED and I could be set up for a long time.  What a wealth of knowledge.  I like that really smart people can act as my filter on these sites.

My Big Moment

I’m in this. Forgot all about it. They called the union asking for “musicians”. They sent over 12 trombone players. Fooled them! Notice the eyes of everyone watching the one violin player in the first row so we get the bowings right. I wasnt “Latin” enough so I got the back row.

Cool resource of links.  I like the Chemistry through cooking from MIT.

Well, I’m sold on Chrome, Google’s new browser.  I am using at home exclusively now. 

At work, It has some issues with our filter which I need to figure out.  It seems it gets stuck whenever there is a form on the site.  Our filter doesn’t like that.

But it is so easy to use.  I like the feature that displays the most commonly viewed pages on the intro screen (although i wish there was more flexibility on this).

I discovered Pandora while searching for internet radio.  Really cool application using ads to broadcast music.

There is little user control, you pretty much get what they give you, but you can create new “stations” like “Rolling Stones” or “New Country” and supposedly they use an algorithm to improve your station based on if you click the “I like it” box.  Pretty cool.

Is there a site that incorporates this type of function with an iTunes type database?