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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John Chow has a blog post about a site offering to donate 100% of the proceeds from book sales to the victims of the Australian fires. This is a worth while cause, please read and help if you can.

Read about it here:

Get 5 books for The Price of 1 And Help People Too | John Chow dot Com

Australia, WildFires

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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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With $40 million needing to be cut from the school district budget, the school board has approved cuts of $31 million this week. Part of the cuts include Data and Literacy coaches that work with students that are having trouble keeping on grade level or need extra attention to complete the material to move forward with the needed achievement. Also going are the ITT’s or Instructional Technology Trainers. This takes the district from 43 in the 2007-08 school year to 17 in 08-09 to zero in 09-10.

While we continue to here that the cuts are supposed to not impact the students directly. I don’t see how the above cuts fall into that line. Certain School Board members have been quoted as saying that these cuts are not to be excuses for not continuing to achieve higher or better scores next year, but with all the structure that has already been placed on the teachers in their teaching day, I don’t know where they are going to find the time to add what is being taken away. Reading blocks, writing blocks, mandated 150 minutes of PE a day, lunch, testing, the list of things the teachers have to do is long and barely fits into the 7.5 hour day. Teachers are going to be overwhelmed, scores are going to plummet, they are going to stop using the new technology because they are not getting the continued training, or they don’t have time to call the service desk to get a piece of broken equipment fixed.

Here are some ideas for things to cut:

• The extra busing to the Gifted school
• All Field Trips
• Extracurricular activities in middle schools
• The $12 million for the AS400 upgrade
• Sports that are not breaking even
• Extra sports assistant coaches
• Administrative positions like the school district police force
• Energy savings like I suggest in the post: Holidays, Technology and Energy

The energy savings alone add up to $676,000.

Our district has Facebook and Twitter blocked for reasons I don’t know. I’ve been using Facebook for a while, but just started using it regularly in the last 3 months. I’ve been cautious in how I use it, especially with whom I have as friends. I only have 15 friends and most are either school related, people I work with or people in the technology field. I only have 2 people that I know as personal friends on Facebook and I also have a few people that are blogging people like
John Chow at John Chow Dot Com.

I am also on Twitter, which I have been using quite a lot recently. I see a use for these in a classroom setting, along with a need for the school systems to teach proper online use with these programs to our students. Seeing that you can communicate with a large group of people using both sites, I think that it would be a great idea to have an elective class on it’s use and a have them used in any class as a way to communicate ideas, or schedules or even homework.

What do you think? Answer the poll and leave a comment.

Facebook, Twitter, Education, Social Media

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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…

So, it looks like Mr. Obama isn’t as honest Abe as everyone thought. He has hired back, after the election the adviser that called Mrs. Clinton a ‘monster’.

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time – Blogs from CNN.com

Samantha Power, the Obama foreign policy adviser who stepped down from her post earlier this year after labeling Sen. Hillary Clinton a “monster,” is now working for the president-elect’s transition team.

Okay, so where is the change? Where is are the morals?

Technorati Tags: President, Obama

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

What are we telling our children when we want less honesty, less scrutiny, less forthright politicians? Are we telling them it’s okay to cheat a little bit, we don’t need to know everything? This is a small quote from a CNN article:

Obama’s vetting could chase away candidates – CNN.com

some political observers say the president-elect’s similar caution with respect to recruiting new administration officials and key high-level advisers may be turning away a string of qualified candidates wary of subjecting themselves and their families to the most rigid presidential vetting process on record.

So, what does this say about these people? Why should we care about people that don’t want to go through a rigorous process? If they have nothing to hide then they shouldn’t care. This is the type of change that we need in Washington. This is the type of change that will bring the trust back to the White House.

Technorati tags: Obama, President