The air is crisp (actually sort of damp in LA), pumpkins are peeking out at the corner. Autumn is nigh, and soon will come November in Nashville. I’m looking forward to this almost more than Thanksgiving. When you think of it, Tech Matters is a kind of Thanksgiving too. I will never get over the joy of having the Writing Project meld with technology. When things have gotten draggy and droopy here, I think of the summer and it helps renew the spirit.

Next week at UCLA is a special event at The Center for Digital Humanities. Dr. Julian Lombardi from Duke University is coming to introduce Croquet, an Open Source meta-medium. The advance word is that this architecture takes collaboration to a new level. If you know who Alan Kay is, he is a collaborator on this project. Kay was one of the founding geniuses at Xerox Parc in Palo Alto. He’s generally credited with making computer interface user-friendly and more or less like we see it today. I’m going to try to trade sub time with someone so I can make it.

Mary, I thought your CD looked marvelous. The poetry of PowerPoint was so evocative. I know it must have been a rich experience for the participants.

Looking forward to seeing all of you. Time is definitely flying.

Either I am getting slower or the SI participants are getting better with multiple pieces for the CD anthology.  I love doing the anthology on a CD but every year I find more ways to add more to it.  I create it like a web page with an index of each participants names which link to their pages.  On the CD given to the participants the links are active, linking to their pieces.  When this is loaded on the PLWP web site we remove the link to the individual  pieces because some of the teachers have written about students and used students true names.  Myself, the site director, and the SI director made the decision not to activiely link the pieces.  I burn each participant a CD to take home.

We held our final finish of the SI on Oct. 7.  It is combined with a Saturday Seminar.  There are about 10 or 11 workshops offered in 3 rounds.  At the luncheon 3 or 4 SI participants are ask to read one of their pieces.  I did a workshop on Write Me a Poem in PowerPoint.  We have teachers who do not want to attempt using digital presentations for student work.  One of my open institute participants wrote a poem about her children during an afternoon writing marathon.  She also scanned pictures and then the next day revised the poem with the help of a poet who can in to do a poetry revison presentation.  On the final day Addie worked very hard to get her piece into PowerPoint.  She backed it with a lullaby, but we can not seem to get that to play on the site web page.  See Addie to view this piece at http://www.missouriwestern.edu/prairielands/wtca/examples.htm  Between putting the eAnthology together, burning 20 CDs, getting my workshop put together it seems the Fall is speeding by quickly.  Three individuals, myself included, are traveling to Alanta Georgia this coming weekend for a meeting of the TI sites.  Karen do you know if the Lead sites will be there?  With a farmer husband Fall can be a busy time and if I am available he can find something for me to do.  Lynn I guess that is one of my retirement perks, working with him.  I did get a lot of tomatoes canned in late August and made some wild elderberry jelly last week.  Yesterday I planted some more Fall bulbs.  I also planted a fall garden, so when the stores had bad spinach I just go out and pick my own.  I try to log on occassionally.  I was at a PLWP sponsored blogging Saturday workshop when edublog was down so I created a blog on blogger.  http://reflect44.blogspot.com is what I created that day.  I spent more time taking pictures of our two Professional Learning Communities that I didn’t get much done myself.  Most of the other 20 some people there wanted a picture of one PLC or the other to put on their blog.  I started out just connecting my camera to their computer and downloading a copy to their desktop for them to use.  Finally I post them on my blog and had them get the copy that way.  I love the work I do at PLWP.  If I don’t see you in Atlanta I will see you in Nashville. 

Mary

Problems with Edublogs continue to be substantial. Two other teachers and I took the time to set up blogs for 300 students. We made ourselves administrators and created links to the kids’ blogs. The blogs quit working one morning at school and haven’t worked since on site, though kids can still access them at home. One energetic teacher simply re- created  blogs for her kids on Edublogs. I’ve encouraged kids to comment on my blog…and on theirs at home, since starting the blogs takes time I don’t have. If you are just getting underway, Bonnie, be careful about recommending Edublogs.
Meanwhile, excitedly, my TECH TEAM UCLA met today in person for the first time. We only have 6, but…wow!…how dynamic and diverse they are. I loved meeting face-to-face.  It is LA, so one person drove 3 hours to get there this morning!
I set up an agenda and added everyone as a collaborator on Writely. Luckily, that worked and engaged them thoroughly. Edublogs, however, had a strange welcome page called Citizen and no apparent way to set up a new blog.  Luckily, my colleague and I could show and demonstrate our edublogs. People got familiar and tantalized, but I’m truly thinking something has gone haywire. I’ve had people check from all over the district…and learnerblogs doesn’t work.  If it were a firewall problem, it wouldn’t have mattered at UCLA, but they didn’t work there either.  I had hoped our team would be able to log-on and get a blog, but it didn’t happen.  Stick with Writely is my advice, for now.  I’m lurking at Elgg, hoping something else will turn up and be better.  The kids loved being able to choose a presentation; it was a big drawing card. (sigh)
Bonnie, I can’t be too much help with Writely other than to say add all your people as collaborators.  I wound up cutting and pasting from the NWP agenda…Why reinvent the wheel when it worked so well for us:)  Hanging in there…

I am still at it. Despite frustrations such as losing my settings on Firefox, I am plugging away. I started a blog for students and parents and listed it on the blogroll. (Free-range Thinking). Invited students to peek at it and 15 comments showed up. This week, I’m hoping to start all 100 of mine on a blog.

On other subjects. The grant is in and we’ve begun working on it as though the money is in the bank. We sent out an announcement to about 100 fellows looking for six who would like to follow up and become the tech leadership development team. We have ambitious plans. So far two people have contacted me to say they’re interested. They have to be hogtied by the end of September.
Miss hearing from all of you. I do read (and enjoy)  Bonnie’s movie reviews…they remind me of the personal element in this.

I wish I understood “trackbacks” and “meta.” Karen, can you clear it up?   Best to all.

Hi Gals,

Was just looking at Bonnie’s latest post on her tech team blog and had a though that might be of interest to you. Bonnie could encourage her tech team to be posting on their blogs while pulling that all together on the tech team blog. This can be done with those beautiful sidebar widgets that some of the themes are taking advantage of.

Take a look at http://mccomas.wordpress.com/ where I have used a sidebar widget to pull in the postings from Bonnie’s Tech Team blog. It’s an rss widget and you can have several of those on your site (see presentation –> sidebar widgets; most of them have only one rss but scroll down the page and you can choose to have more). Bonnie could set up a sidebar widget for each member of her tech team and have the topics of their postings showing up on the tech team blog. This might be an added incentive for them to post some things….

I figure our main group will recognize the title’s illusion…September is coming right over the edge of the next few days and four of this week’s days are prof dev for our school. I hadn’t realized so specifically how late we begin school in California. It seems like many of our TM06 folks are already up and running.

I’ve had the luxury of doing the grant without school breathing down my back. We’re putting the finishing touches on ours this afternoon. I’ve got a few dates to check and some budget things…and about 70 words to cut…and off it goes. I hope it won’t sound ungrateful when I say that it really isn’t much money…but it is amazing the effect it has had. I think our directors are really excited this time. I wish they had the time to learn some of these tech-savvy ways of communicating, but I think that may be asking too much. For now, they are excited about technology and writing coming together, and it is really vitalizing for me to sense this support.

Mary, I hope I can try out some of those resources soon. They seem very exciting. …And, Bonnie I’m sorry I didn’t respond to your question about “moodles.”  Moodle is open source course management software. It lets you set up forums and blogs within a framework so that you can manage classes. Leastwise that’s what I’m up to speed on.  I won’t know until my classes start how useful I can make it this year. But, I’m going to try!

Meanwhile, one last recommendation: I just finished a terrific book entitled: High Noon: 20 Global Problems; 20 Years to Solve Them. (author: J.F. Rischard)  I know just the title alone sounds depressing, but it is not, not, not. Amazingly, this book has helped me to understand so many processes that are underway in the world that I actually feel more hopeful than I have for a long time. The man who wrote the book is a vice-president of the World Bank, and he has a keen ability to condense sweeping information into clear, coherent frameworks without minimizing or over-simplifying. The book is really helpful in understanding how networks are changing the social and political institutions that have held sway in the world so long.  If you like “big idea” books, you’ll love this one.

I hope everyone is enjoying last days of summer and looking forward to a great autumn. I still miss you, Chico, and the fun of summer.  I started with a song illusion, so I’ll end with one.  Chico…we’ll come together…

Below are the list of resources and credit info 

Missouri Writing Project Network 

Workshop by Marcia Hansen, mmh989@mizzou.edu

Blogger.com Help/Resources

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41641

Find out how to post pictures to your Blogger.com blog

Learn how to create audio blog posts:

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42367&topic=8936

Photos

http://openphoto.net/

Searchable database of images with different use licenses (it could facilitate a discussion of copyright and citation practices)

Photoshop Support

http://www.photoshopsupport.com/index.html

Photoshop tutorials

Audio

Freeplaymusic

http://freeplaymusic.com

Free music to use with your audio posts

Audacity

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Use audacity to edit audio recordings

Odeo

http://odeo.com

You can use odeo to create audio posts, no need for audio recorders

Video

YouTube

http://youtube.com/

Watch, upload, tag, and share video

Google Video

http://video.google.com/

Upload and search for comedy, music, sports, animation, and TV shows

Screencasting ( a closely related topic)

http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/digitalmedia/2005/11/16/what-is-screencasting.html?page=1

Education Bloggers

Edublog Insights by Anne Davis

http://anne.teachesme.com

Beblog-ed-the read write web in the classroom by Will Richardson

http://www.weblogg-ed.com/

gbblogging by Barbra Ganley

http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganley/bgblogging/

Resources on Blogging

http://kairosnews.org/blogbib

Difference between blogging and posting by Will Richardson

http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2004/11/21

I just got brave enough to try posting on this blog.  I really like the presentation you chose for this site Lynn.  I am looking for one that will be easy for an institute next summer that we plan to use our mini grant to fund.  All Prairie Lands Writing Project (PLWP)  fellows are users of the sites Web board as a way of shareing and asking for revision comments on writings.  I have learned a great deal just by reading the discussions of our group.  I will also be setting up a blog for the Missouri Writing Project Network sometime in the near future.  My site director, who is the most techno geekish of the Missouri directors and I just need to get together and discuss this issue.  I emailed the draft mini grant to my site director for her to take a look at it and to do the budget.  As the TL I do not do budgets and that is the way I like it.  I attended a breakout session at our Missouri Writing Project Network retreat that had a lot of resources, some we got at Tech 06 and some we did not.  I will post them to a separate post.

Mary

As usual, my eyes have been bigger than my stomach. (My grandmother defined that tendency when I was 3.) I’ve explored Moodles (have one and am finding it amazing but lots to learn). I’ve installed Open Office on my MacBookPro. (very proud of that one; took lots of new skill and had to reinstall system software). Open source provides much new fascination for future exploration. I’ve worked photos over from Flickr to Photobucket to .Mac and find something to like in all. (.Mac photocasting lets you put in some cool backgrounds). I’ve created several Writely pages for different projects and presentations. And, I’ve found two pieces that I’m going to use to create my first classroom podcast. (I’m taking three teachers to a seminar on podcasting at a local school next week). On top of that, I’ve had some very cool ideas for the tech grant which I’m taking to a meeting next Monday to discuss with our directors. (They liked them well enough to pay for my parking…a very big deal at UCLA).

So, why am I posting about this…to toot my horn? Maybe a little. I’m excited and proud of what I’ve learned this summer. But, I know the excitement will have to be channeled and focused if I am to manage to incorporate the technology at school and with the teachers in the project. Many of my colleagues I respect and admire the most don’t like technology. Yesterday, I went to a professional development meeting at school, and the first time I mentioned the fact that we could do something that was being kicked around…looking at data…using some online resources…there was a distinct coolness in the air…They all said, “oh…yes, that would be cool.” But, it had the air of … “we could do that in some other world that I don’t like to live in very much…” I felt very constrained at the meeting…and wondered just how much I could contribute in that setting, given the circumstances.

Today, I listened to Alan November’s podcast from last year on Leadership and Technology. He says that we need to start with two factors with teachers…two questions: “What do you like to teach?” He says alligning technology to what people are passionate about is important…and, his 2nd question: “What are the kids having the most trouble with?” He says that question opens the door for technology in ways it can really make a difference.

So, I put it out there for anyone who is reading this: are those good focusing questions? Could there be even better ones for our purposes? I think his questions will help a lot when I come to the table with the directors on Monday to discuss and shape our mini-grant, by the way.

My head is spinning today. I listened to the last two NECC 2006 podcasts on my iPod. It’s amazing what is going on. I’ve heard Nicholas Negroponte on the $100.00 laptop for kids, David Thornburgh on Open Source software in the K-12 classroom, Gary Stager on one-on-one in the US, and an amazing presentation by some Canadians on Taking it Global. This one costs some money after six months but provides opportunity for kids to interact, blog, create games, and do other miraculous things in multiple languages and cross cultures!

So, why am I posting a “query for Karen?” Because…when we were in Chico, I asked about setting up classroom-to-classroom interactions…across country or state. My tech team at my school wants to involve kids that way ASAP after the semester starts. We have lots of “essential questions” that our thematic units involve, and the teachers want to network kids with other kids to discuss issues, plan projects…etc. I’d love to have some suggestions and help with this one, Karen. Did you mention someone named Gail who might help me set something up? Do you know anything about TiGed? http://www.takingitglobal.org/tiged/
Hope all of you are enjoying the dogdays of August….Lynne