Technology in Education

Big brother seems to be gaining ground.  I am working to create the digital footprint for myself and for my students.  Until we reach a certain level of public awareness (Palin) we can largely control what “the world” knows about us.  It is one of the few things in life we do control.

Teaching students that they DO have a voice and to use it effectively is the challenge for me this school year.

Well, I am starting my third year as Web Design teacher here at Seymour High School.  I have come to the point where I really need to figure out what I am doing.

I am exploring using the ning system this year and moving away from blogmeister.  I am trying to get this set-up.  Blogmeister worked great for us but you can upload video and music much easier on the ning.  I will need help on monitoring student work.  Blogmeister was easy because it came right to my email.

Getting this working in our system is a challenge.  We are told to try new things and to use the newest technology but I get so much push back. 

My push this year is to insist on collaboration and I want to find a way to track this data.  I haven’t been able to quite put my finger on what collaboration is.  How do you measure it?  If students “work together” did they actually “collaborate”?  Plenty of thinking to do….

I am giving a technology workshop on reading and writing tomorrow and only three people are signed up.  It should be fun, but I have had to make the activity much more fluid.  I also just wrote an article and found it very difficult to write in two dimensions without using links and examples to describe this technology.  “Showing” has become much easier for me than “telling”.

I have been completing my technology portfolio for my Educational Leadership degree.  This has been a taxing process.  I disagree with the symbolism of printing out a technology portfolio.  I made the effort and spoke up that I thought this portfolio was a bit of a time capsule.  Now I have been asked to make a proposal for changes.

The technology standards for administrators are fairly clear, but how should they be measured in a prep program?  Should they be embedded in coursework?  I am grappling with how to design a program that can change with the times.  Deciding whether video, mobile technology, wikis, blogs, and social networks should be included is a challenge. 

Google is beta testing a web design software that comes with 100MB of space.  I tried it out and it is set up a lot like google-docs.

cross posted on shsweb

I have been working on my family history. I have a relatively small family. Both of my sets of grandparents had two children. My sister and I are their only grandchildren. I had a fair amount of history on my father’s side, but only back to around 1880 or so when that part of the family arrived from Germany and Ireland.

By using familysearch I was able to go back an additional generation, which was kind of exciting. But last night I started to work on my maternal grandmother’s side. I had a name Thaddeus Stocker and that he lived during the Revolutionary War. From that name I was able to use the site to travel back an additional ten generations!! I got all the way back to 1470 in England (John Wyllie). Needless to say this was pretty amazing to me.

I found out that our family lived in Fairfield, CT (Henry Jackson, Mary Morehouse, etc..) for over 150 years and were among the first European settlers. I found that parts of the family were Tories and parts were fighting in the Continental Army. And this was only in about an hours worth of work. I am probably related to half of Connecticut.

Much of this was inspired by the amazing PBS series by Henry Louis Gates which traced the history of several African-Americans. Now history can be enlightening, powerful, and painful. But the internet is a VERY powerful tool in this regard. I urge you to try to connect with your past.

Update: I think I got back to the year 1256!! Alexander de Forbes in Scotland.

Update#2: I think I can back to the year 50! Godwulf.

We published our first book on Lulu!  A Beginner’s Guide to Web Design.  This was totally student written and edited.  It was an interesting process.  I can’t wait to get the book in my hands (10-15 days).

Just bumping this page.  I have been doing most of my work on the class blog.

I am not writing that often in this blog.  I am doing most of my writing in my School Blog.  I felt I was duplicating many items over here.  Perhaps things will pick up later in the year.  If you are a regular reader of this blog, please switch your links to the above blog.

Thanks.