Edublog Awards November 24, 2009
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Opinion.add a comment
The end of the year must be getting close since the ‘annual awards’ announcements are popping up. Edublog Awards puts together a nice collection of the important and influencial each year in the realm of educational Internet. This years’ categories:
- Best individual blog
- Best individual tweeter
- Best group blog
- Best new blog
- Best class blog
- Best student blog
- Best resource sharing blog
- Most influential blog post
- Most influential tweet / series of tweets / tweet based discussion
- Best teacher blog
- Best librarian / library blog
- Best educational tech support blog
- Best elearning / corporate education blog
- Best educational use of audio
- Best educational use of video / visual
- Best educational wiki
- Best educational use of a social networking service
- Best educational use of a virtual world
- Lifetime achievement
Great categories to be sure, but I think we need to include a few more:
- Most laughter from a site that you can share at work
- New online tool you shared with others the most
- RSS feed you added this year that you think everyone should follow
- Best new open source solution
- Best new technology that you can put in the hands of your students
I’m sure there are other categories to consider as well. What would you include in your ‘end-of-year-awards’?
Chording Mouse? November 7, 2009
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Hardware.1 comment so far
I’d almost think this was a practical joke, except this isn’t April. OpenOffice now has a mouse, the OpenOfficeMouse comes with 18 programmable buttons. I think there is plenty of room for alternative input devices, and the mouse can definitely use some improvements, but I’m not sure 18 buttons is the right idea. It sort of reminded me of the one-handed or ‘chording‘ keyboards, but combined with a mouse. Take a look. Can you, or your students, come up with something better?
OpenOfficeMouse: The Multi-Button Application Mouse for OpenOffice.org
With thanks for the tip from Daring Fireball
T+L 2009 November 2, 2009
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Conference Sessions.2 comments
Last week I had the pleasure to attend the NSBA T+L 2009 Conference. I spent much of my time on the vendor floor trying to see if there was anything I should know about. I was surprised at the number of vendors who provide district/school/teacher web sites these days. Someone must be making money off of that market. One of the highlights from the vendor floor was the opportunity to meet Moby, the robot from Brainpop. He didn’t have much to say, but if you know Moby, that’s to be expected.
Moby
I attended a session from Steve Hargadon from Elluminate He reviewed some of the trends in technology and their impacts on education. Some of his conclusions include:
- Must use Linux to afford the OS for ubiquitous computing.
- Must start using collaborative tools including open source software.
- Must provide real world authentic audience environments for students.
Steve Hargadon
I also attended a session from David Thornburg who brought his depth of historical perspective to provide us with the insight that we need to be preparing for the transition from smart devices to smart networks. We’ll need a lot more bandwidth if we want to provide our students with the sort of access and tools they will need, not necessarily an expensive laptop and individual computing power. The computing power will come from the network.
David Thornburg
