Here are some links discussing Social Media in Schools:

• Social Media Educators Need to Use and Know It
• Twitter and Facebook – Are they useful in Education?
• Blogs & Wiki’s at the Elementary School Level
• Delicious as a Tool for Teachers
• Blogging as Part of Your Class
• Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom

Social Media, Twitter, Facebook, Education

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I’ve been using Delicious for a while now for saving web sites that I find useful in solving technology problems. After I fix something most people say “I don’t know how you know all this information.” and I say, “I don’t know it all, I know where to find it and where to save it.” Google is your friend, it helps you find what you need and Delicious helps you save it for when you need it. I would never carry a book or expect myself to remember all the data that I need to fix the things I’m responsible for.

At the same time, teachers shouldn’t have to memorize all their curriculum or items that enhance it either. They should be able to get the information, save it to Delicious, then retrieve it at a later time when they need it for a class. Could you see a teacher being able to log into Delicious, search a tag and come up with a web site in seconds for a class on the spur of a moment. That enhances the learning experience for the students. It gives them something extra and teaches them another way to use the resources at hand to get information relevant to a subject they are studying.

Another way to use Social Media to our advantage teaching students with current technology.

Delicious, Social Media

I’m not going to speak to this issue, instead I will let the original article that inspired me to blog this do the talking.

Are iPod-banning schools cheating our kids?

The larger, more interesting question is: Why do we devote so much time and energy teaching kids to memorize facts we know they’ll forget? We should instead teach critical thinking, creative decision-making and sophisticated information retrieval.

Education, Technology, K12 Education

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The teachers and students are on winter break and the 12 month employees are working through the 23rd. I am taking the time to clean ActivBoard filters, catch up on some cleaning and other basic housekeeping. We sent information on what to turn off for the two week break so as I’ve been walking the campus for the filters, I’ve been checking on those technology items that needed to be turned off.

I’ve found that the worst offender of not being turned off in a room is the printer, followed by the monitor. According to the Office Equipment Energy Savings Calculator, LBL the following table shows that you can save $30 per printer annually by turning them off at night and logically more if you turn them off during breaks and on weekends. You can save an amazing $42 per monitor!

So lets just take these numbers and not consider that they are turned off for 2 weeks during the winter break and the 2 months of summer because they are usually left on during the weekends for the duration of the 10 month school year that teachers are here. Now, I’m going to use my school which is above 700 students but below 1000. With 4 computers per classroom with approximately 50 instructional rooms, 89 lab computers and 25 miscellaneous desktops on campus that would be 314 monitors and a savings of $13,188.00/year. As for the printers, we have 1 team printer per grade level, 1 per classroom, 3 in the labs and 25 for other staff. These numbers are approximate, which leads to a savings of $2,550.00/year for 85 printers.

Okay, my school is smaller and of course the high schools will be a lot larger, but I am going to just use my figures for our whole district. Lets take the total savings of $15,738.00 times the 43 elementary, middle and high schools we have and that is a savings of: $676,734.00 annually. That is on the low side because most of the other schools are larger than my school, especially the middle and high schools. But, if you look at that number you can see how saving that amount on just monitors and printers could be spent on something else in our currently tight fiscal situation as a district.

Think about it…

In our district the school technology support professionals have a limited account and an administrative account in the Active Directory. While most of the time I can administer my campus and users from the limited account, there are times when I need to access the administrative account for just one thing. An example of this is looking up a staff or student ID for a program they need access to.

In this case the steps for this simple thing are:

1. logging off
2. logging into the admin account
3. running the program to look up the ID
4. doing the look up
5. logging off
6. logging back into the limited account
7. adding the user into whatever I need to

Now, that is way too much to do for something so simple. So, my solution is to use “runas” in a batch file to run the program I need as the admin account. This saves all the wasted steps, while letting me be secure in my limited account. Security, plus ease and working smarter is what it’s all about.

So, what does the batch file look like? Here it is:

runas /user:adminusername@domainname “C:Directory pathFilename [any commands to send to the program]“

Okay, now here is a visual example:

runas /user:edutechation@edutechation.com “C:Program FilesInternet Exploreriexplore http://mysite/admin”

The batch file will open a command window to ask you to input the admin password and if the password is correct it will launch Internet Explorer to the web site mysite/admin as the admin account with admin privileges. When you exit IE it drops the admin privileges so the next time you open IE it will be as the limited user account you are logged in as.

The time this saves me is invaluable. Try it, you’ll like it. If you would like to read about the runas command at Microsoft click here

Technorati Tags: RUNAS, Network Administration, Educational Technology

This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who is an industry critic on Devry University review. She invites your feedback at:

heatherjohnson2323@gmail.com

Teachers who are interested in blended learning are seeing many new Web 2.0 tools come and go these days. One of the most promising tools that recently launched is haiku LMS. This learning management system delivers a robust series of features so that teachers can seamlessly integrate the Web with classroom instruction. As the makers of haiku LMS say, “The message, not the medium, is what we are about.”

The user-friendly interface of haiku LMS means that teachers and students can adopt the new system with little to no training. Individual teachers can create and administer course content, assignments and assessments. Both students and teachers can easily collaborate through the system, exchanging messages and homework assignments.

haiku LMS offers enterprise-level service and support. Administrators can even implement the system throughout a school, rather than starting an account for a single class. Naturally, there are different fees attached to the various levels of support. Although there are open-source content management systems available for free, some teachers may opt for a commercial service like haiku LMS, if only for the professional support.

There has been a lot of positive feedback on this streamlined management system (self-described as “zen-like”). Various testimonials from educators are advertised on the site’s homepage, as people have been testing the system since its 1.0 launch in 2006. Things are constantly being updated and improved on with haiku LMS and I highly recommend it to teachers everywhere. A 60-day free trial, completely risk free is offered.

Note: All views are those of the guest blogger. The author of this blog does not endorse any products or services mentioned in the post unless otherwise noted. The reader is responsible for checking all offers and link authenticity before entering into any agreements or purchases.

I am interested in accepting submissions for guest posts. My position has increased in responsibility which has cut down on free time to write, so I have decided to accept guest posts to keep the content flowing until I have settled into my new position.

I will not be able to use everyone’s submissions, and the one’s that I do use will be spread out over the course of the next month. I will try to use as many as I can, but I hope to be comfortable enough in my new position by July 4th.

Here is what am I looking for:

• Anything related to education and how it relates to technology.
• Posts of any length are acceptable, as long as they follow the theme of the post and relate helpful information.
• I prefer the focus of the posts on k12 education, but I will also accept higher education.
• I’m looking for content not published elsewhere.

How to Submit Your Post:

• Please write your post in MS Word
• Give the post a title (I may change it)
• Attach the post to an email addressed to guestposts.edutechation@gmail.com
• In the email include a byline and a link to your blog and/or any educational institution that you belong to or own. I will include this in your post, but please do not be a big self promoter. Your words should promote you.

Lastly, I reserve the right to edit a posts content for grammar, spelling, and non-factual or biased information. I will not post anything that oversteps the guidelines of ethics in education or public sensibilities. In short, use common sense and write something that would be allowed to be read in a school.

I look forward to seeing some great posts soon.

As with all technology you have growing pains when you put something into real world application. ActivBoards are no different. You have to look at what ends up running on a laptop in a classroom compared to testing at a controlled lab. We have had different issues with our ActivBoards over the last year, but they have been worked out through proper troubleshooting. Some problems would be the pen would freeze in the middle of a lesson or the sound was distorted.

I always upgrade in batches of test boards numbering 5 to 10. This helps me keep the damage of a bad upgrade to a minimum, while keeping a small number of boards as a control group after everyone else is updated. Problems will grow in the beginning of a release as more teachers use the boards on a regular basis because that is just a statistical fact. But, if you keep up with troubleshooting you will find that you can stop issues before they start.

I always go through a multi step troubleshooting process. My troubleshooting process began with listing all the things the problems had in common. In the freezing issue two things stood out on this list: boosted USB cables, and the ActivDriver version. So, for test number one I ran a non-boosted USB cable from the logic board straight to the laptop. This worked and I thought I had an answer, but I also wanted to try the software solution.

I definitely knew the 3.0.6 was rock solid even though it had to be manually installed for any port that you wanted to plug the USB cable into. As I found, there were some issues with one of the updates to the USB ActivDriver which was solved by doing a rollback to 3.0.6 until a new update was released. The newest 4.13.18 works great and fixes this issue, but working through the problem with my resources with the district, Logical Choice and Promethean we were able to work through any issues.

A lot of people like to use difficulties as tools or ammunition to tear down a good project or program like the ActivBoards. It is ashame that people are more concerned with their best interests and not our children. The ActivBoards and the Next Generation Learning program that our district are using are a good thing. FCAT testing began this week and will conclude in March. Please watch the results, I believe you will be surprised at the improvement this year because of the ActivBoards and Next Generation Learning.

I received an email from the editor of the blog Open Education pointing to a post they had written about a British study on students and technology. I’ve taken the time to read over the post and its conclusions, coming to my own views. Here is a quote from Open Educations blog:

To absolutely no one’s surprise, youngsters prefer interactive systems to passive ones. Therefore they love technology and yes, they do exhibit fairly strong basic technology skills.

However, the report indicated that these users are anything but “expert searchers.” In fact, the report indicates that younger users have real difficulty choosing good search terms.

Source: Student Shortcomings – Anything but Masters of Technology — Open Education

What I see everyday is that the students are told to search for information, but are not taught how to search. Yes, the kids today can use the technology, but have they been taught to use it efficiently? They have been given the tools, but not taught how use them. It’s the same as giving someone a baseball, a bat and glove, then telling them to go play baseball. Of course they can’t do it because we haven’t given them the proper training.

Media centers, or libraries are not teaching how to do research anymore. I had a lot of training in the Dewy Decimal system, how to use the periodicals and microfilm while I was growing up. Why aren’t we teaching our kids how to do a good online search or how to research something? If we want our children to do better, to get better grades, to be able to do better in the world we need to give them the knowledge of how to find what they need and how to sift through the data to get the best information.

It’s not about passing tests because you can teach to a test. It’s about teaching them how to read, how to write and how to use the tools to get the proper information to make informed decisions.