The Village Green

• The Innovative Educator: 5 Things You Can Do to Begin Developing Your Personal Learning Network
  5 ways to start developing a personal learning network.
  (tags: PLN)

• JakesOnline!-Photostory 3 Tutorials
  David Jakes tutorials on digital storytelling using Photostory 3
  (tags: digital_storytelling tutorial photostory3)

• Skoolaborate
  Skoolaborate is a global project that uses a blend of technolocies including, blogs, an LMS, wiki’s and ‘virtual worlds’ for collaborative learning of both teachers and students.
  (tags: virtual_worlds collaboration online-projects)

Brian Crosby is taking his kids to Mars on Wednesday, May 7th, and if all goes well, you’ll be able to go along with them as he has plans to Ustream the event.

Here is the Ustream link: Marsopolis 2008 Reno, Nevada, Ustream.TV: 350 fourth grade through eighth grade students participating in. Education

Here is the Learning Is Messy blog post link: Learning Is Messy - Blog » Blog Archive » Marsopolis … Messy Learning … And I’ll Ustream It?

eSchool News is reporting that a recent Pew Internet study revealed a link between writing attitudes, habits, amounts, and blogging. I’m not surprised by the results, but what I’d really like to know is if the act of blogging instills a positive writing value, or if those kids that already have a positive writing value are they just more likely to make use of a modern means of publishing their writing by blogging.

Top News - Blogging helps encourage teen writing

• CSS2 Reference
  
  Complete CSS2 reference from W3Schools
  (tags: CSS html)
• The Man in Blue > footerStickAlt: A more robust method of positioning a footer
  
  CSS footer positioning from The Man in Blue.
  (tags: CSS html)
• del.icio.us/url
  
  Search tool in del.icio.us for a URL. See who bookmarked it and when.
  (tags: del.icio.us)

CNET News is reporting that Cuba is allowing individuals to buy home computers. While we might find this a little odd, think of your home, and how different it might be if you were not allowed to own a computer, or (also recently allowed in Cuba) couldn’t purchase a cell phone. I think it is important for everyone to be included in the on-going conversation that is the Internet, and am glad to see that a close neighbor will finally get a better chance to be included. If any voice is to have value in the conversation, then ultimately all voices must have the opportunity to be heard.

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9935007-7.html 

I love animated movies, and especially those from Pixar. So I was very interested when a note came up in my RSS reader about a Brad Bird interview. In the excerpts of the interview presented by GigaOM, many of them apply well to education and thinking about the classroom in new ways. I see innovation as a good way to describe what I believe about education. Here are a couple of samples.

Lesson Four: Innovation Doesn’t happen in a VacuumThe Quarterly: How do you build and lead a team?Brad Bird: I got everybody in a room. This was different from what the previous guy had done; he had reviewed the work in private, generated notes, and sent them to the person… I said, “Look, this is a young team. As individual animators, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, but if we can interconnect all our strengths, we are collectively the greatest animator on earth. So I want you guys to speak up and drop your drawers. We’re going to look at your scenes in front of everybody. Everyone will get humiliated and encouraged together…

Seems like a great description for setting up group work. It also sounds like a view of assessment that is counter to the current classroom norm. Instead of papers graded in isolation, everyone is grading everyone because the point of the learning is to do the best with the task at hand. Of course that also means we need to rethink the task.

Lesson Six: Dont Try To “Protect your success”The Quarterly: Engagement, morale—what else is critical for stimulating innovative thinking?Brad Bird: The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. … “You don’t play it safe—you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.”

I’ve tried to describe this before and don’t think I’ve done it justice, but too often education is stuck thinking about doing the job the way we’ve already done it instead of trying to make the impossible possible.There are also examples of lessons from the interview that have no easy corollary to the classroom. Lesson Eight is ‘Get Rid of Weak Links’ which refers to removing passive-aggressive people from the team. When we work with students in public education, you can’t just fire a student from your room.Check out the interview excerpts and the whole interview if you have time. Also, think about how focusing on innovation informs the practice of teaching, of how together, you and your students can be the smartest person in the world.http://gigaom.com/2008/04/17/pixars-brad-bird-on-fostering-innovation/

• Convert Word Docs to Web Pages - Wired How-To Wiki
  Info on how to make Word web pages that aren’t so awful.
  (tags: Word html wiki)

Or rather, spam’s birthday. A lot seems to happen at the end of April and the first part of May. The BBC is reporting that the first spam was sent out 30 years ago this weekend. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another 30 years before the last spam is sent out!

BBC NEWS | Technology | Spam reaches 30-year anniversary

Interesting contrast between a Wired Blog Network post with video of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and a CNET News post about the world of technology in the year 2050. For the numbers people reading this post, that’s a difference of 201 years on the same day.

Exclusive Video: Babbage’s Mechanical Calculator Comes to Life | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

Imagining the tech world in 2050 | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com

• TeacherTube - Teach the World
  Copyright information from Teacher Tube.
  (tags: video copyright)

If you are looking for award winning educational software, ComputED Learning Center has announced their 14th annual Best Educational Software Awards.

ComputED Gazette’s 2008 BESSIE Awards

Who knew that today, May 1, is also the birthday of the first BASIC program? Wired News I guess. I also didn’t know that BASIC is actually an acronym for Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. And all this time I thought it was basic because it was simple!

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/dayintech_0501