I have to applaud the federal government being for being so with the times by starting their new site Apps.gov. However, am I the only one who sees the irony with the fact that YouTube is prominently posted under their Social Media Apps section, yet pretty much no school site in America can access YouTube? So YouTube is too evil for our schools, but not to evil for our government employees? All I can say is LOL!

So what’s been keeping me so busy? I now have 145 student blogs up and running. Whew! I can tell you that many times over the past couple of weeks I kept asking myself if I was out of my mind! When I came up with the idea of setting my students up with blogs I figured I would start with two classes. Then, almost without thinking, I jumped in with both feet, hands, and every other appendage, and now all five of my classes are blogging.  So here’s the question…has all this work (see my reflections) been worth it? I can easily say “oh yeah”.

Here’s what I am seeing with my students blogs (blogs are listed on the right side of the home page):

1.  Excitement. My students were given an assignment that I started last year. The Weekly Reader, which I got from Jim Burke, is an incredible assignment that I enjoyed grading each week. However the students seemed to dread it. But now what I am sensing is an excitement from them. Now they know that I am not the only person who’s reading their work. Now there is so much more a sense of ownership because they are producing work and ideas that are being shared with the world, rather than “just their English teacher”.

2. Community. What I told my students is that blogging is a community thing. That the idea is you read what I say and comment. I read what you say and comment, and then maybe blog about what you’ve written, etc., etc.  I did not make it a requirement that students go to other blogs and make comments. Yet every blog that I go to seems to have anywhere between one and three comments. It’s fantastic! They are creating a community on their own that I don’t think I could have created had I tried to.

3. Teacher Involvement. Okay, admit it, mostly if something doesn’t involve us directly we don’t put much energy into it. Well, I took a chance and announced my student blogs at our last faculty meeting. My thought was really and truly no one would take the time to even glance at them. Boy was I wrong! Not only have teachers been visiting the student blogs, they have been taking time to make comments on the blogs! Wow! Seriously, I don’t even need to address what kind of message this sends to the students.

Right now I am riding high. Looking back at the immense amount of time put into this entire thing I can say it was more than worth it. Actually I have no words to express how worth it this whole thing is. What my students are getting from this is amazing and priceless.

So in closing I want to thank all of my colleagues who have supported and continue to support OUR students; and I would ask all my readers (my PLN) to click on over to Lahaise’s Lair and check out my student blogs. Hey, you might even want to comment on one or two.

Reflections:

(I’m all about the process, but if you just want the bottom line, keep scrolling to my conclusions.)

1. I set-up two websites, one for my students and this blog.

2. After working hours upon hours to set everything-up on our home server we realized it might be better to pay the few dollars per month and get professional hosting. That required more hours of set-up and learning a whole new system.

3. I’m ultra picky and just had to tweek every little aspect of the websites style sheets. Just one tiny detail: before 2 months ago I knew absolutely, positively nothing about html or CSS code or even what a style sheet was!

4. Staring at code, learning it one your own, is hard. Ultimately I was victorious and can now open up a style sheet and start playing around with relatively good results. I “broke” my site often in the beginning, not so much recently.

5. I spent hours and hours and more hours finding just the right and perfect theme for each site, only to change them over and over again (I just made another major change yesterday in fact). So was all of that a waste of time? As I reflect I say no. What better way to learn something than to dig into it over and over?

6. Although I’m continually behind, I’ve read about 100 posts from my RSS feeds per day.

7. I will literally return to work with skin paler then when my vacation started as a result of sitting at my computer approximately 16 hours per day (some days more!).

8. While I was good to my mind, I wasn’t good to my body and didn’t ride my bike once. Oh those first few days of commuting to school will be tough.

9. I set-up a website for a colleague who plans on directing the entire school there for leadership announcements, etc. (see more about this in my conclusions).

10. Each of my 1st period students has been set-up with their own blog, all ready for them to start posting as soon as their permission slips are returned.

11. Got a SmartBoard and began learning the software. Also began looking into tips and tricks from the online community.

12. Researched and tried a plethora of new online tools!

13. Spent many, many nights chatting with former (and a few current) students on Facebook.

14. My goal of a post per day on Paige’s Prose didn’t quite happen.

So all of that leads me to…

My Conclusions:

If you look at my list above what stands out is a monumental amount of learning on many fronts. One of the most prolific changes (or possibly just a shift) that occurred in me this summer came from all the fantastic posts and articles I’ve been reading. I’ve been lucky enough to find some amazing colleagues and feel privileged to glean knowledge and ideas from them (see my Blogs I Follow). What I’ve learned from them has helped me, but also frustrated me.

Here’s what I’ve always believed, but now more than ever before:

No one person should control the technology of a school.

I spent yesterday with a co-worker setting up a site similar to mine for her students. As we talked through her goals she came to one that made me pause. You see she is the leadership teacher at our school, so all leadership based events are scheduled through her. What she eventually wants for the site we set-up is that it to be the go-to place for the entire student body. She’s setting up a calendar and different pages for each grade level. Very cool.

But what’s wrong with this picture? Why are we doing this? Why did I spend (literally) my entire vacation doing this? Isn’t this stuff supposed to be on the school website? That would be a logical thought, but unfortunately reality hasn’t played out that way. Our school website is pretty sad. (why do you think I am paying to have my own?) This is a result of one person controlling every aspect of technology for a “community” of about 2000 (not including parents)! This is seriously wrong.

So here’s what I’ve come to believe:

1. School site technology should be monitored by consortium of individuals. Certainly at every school there are a few people who are completely capable, and almost as important, willing, to “assist” with the technology responsibilities. If it takes a year to get a piece of software loaded onto a computer, or the antivirus updates happen every three years, isn’t that a bad sign?

2. More trust needs to be put into the hands of teachers. It is a bit insulting that as a highly-educated, professional, adult, we are not “allowed” to monitor certain things ourselves (i.e. using YouTube or GMail).

3. The technology leaders of the school must be given time to train the teachers who are not tech savvy. That’s the only way we will ever progress. If there is a problem with teachers “abusing” certain things I believe it stems from not being properly trained.

So now what? What’s the answer? I truly wish I had one (and hoping some of you do!). In 12 days I return to school, and while I’ve taken little time to re-charge, I have learned an awful lot. Maybe just enough to make my job more frustrating than it already is.

I would love to hear how things work at your school.

What do you think? Possible? Desirable?

Thanks so much to Darren @ A Difference, for turning me on to this great video!

I spent the better of this past week going through the software, searching online for extras, watching video tutorials and essentially thinking about how I will incorporate this “tool” into my daily lessons. You see I found out this board, and all the accessories, cost the school about $8000, so I feel a huge sense of responsibility for using the heck out of it.

After spending the some time doing all of those things a thought hit me: why do I want this? I’m already a good teacher, without any technology in my (physical) classroom. How is this going to make me a better teacher? How will this make my students better?

Then as I’m thinking about all of this I start going through some old blog posts that I am (very!) behind in reading and there is this one at The Tempered Radical , Bill Ferriter’s blog, that further confuses things. His post about technology in the classroom is actually a spin-off from another blog I follow, Will Richardson’s, Weblogg-ed.  You should most definitely click over to those posts, but the gist is a back-and-forth conversation about technology being useful in the classroom. Bill quotes Marc Prensky’s comment which essentially says that verbs are skills and nouns are the tools we use to teach those skills. Verbs are essentially static, changing little over time, yet the nouns will continually be dynamic. Bill response to that was what really hit me:

Prensky’s right when he argues that fixating on individual tools is a dangerous trap that schools fall into.
Look around any building in your community and you’re bound to see thousands of dollars of wasted resources: Classrooms outfitted with interactive whiteboards that students never touch, sets of student responders used to ask low-level knowledge and understanding questions.

Now I have all these thoughts swimming in my mind. Add to that the realization that if I really am going to use this tool properly it requires an immense amount of pre-work. It isn’t like walking up to a whiteboard and writing a journal topic. There are slides that have to be pre-programmed, etc., etc. Sure, there are some pretty cool things I’ve found, but they all require pre-planning like I’ve never done before.

So here’s my bottom line… I have to wonder, is this going to turn into a “be careful what you wish for”, or am I just not seeing the big picture yet, and once I get into the school year will find my new IWB to be the best “noun” since sliced bread?

I would love to hear your thoughts!

Now, instead of feeding them in via Google Reader and Diigo, I am inputting everything myself. I realize this isn’t the ideal solution due to all the labor involved, but the feed situation wasn’t working for me. I didn’t like that all the links were not available here, and more importantly there was no order to them.

If you go to the Ed-Tech Links page you will now see all the links that I bookmark. The main difference from before is that I can now categorize them by type. I think this makes more sense, but if you still like seeing them the Diigo way, don’t fret I am still updating through that site. You can access them here. Or, if you prefer adding them to your RSS reader, go here.

Also, with this new system I am able to add comments regarding the various blogs I subscribe to. That way you can know a bit about it before you click through. But even cooler than that are the two little buttons to the right of my comments: . If you click on the first button you will get the RSS feed for that particular blog/site. The really neat feature is the second button. If you click on that you can read the most recent three entries for that site. So now you can sit back, relax and preview the site before you even go there or subscribe to it. I think that’s pretty slick!

As of the time of this posting I am still working out a few “bugs”, and I have a few more links to add, but overall I hope you like the new changes and find them to be easily navigable. As always, I am very much open to comments and/or suggestions.

A big thanks to Yannick for making the WordPress plug-in, Link Library, which makes this all possible.

Before I get into the nitty-gritty of my topic I want to preface everything with a couple of very important facts: I have been using the Internet since the beginning of AOL (16 years ago?). I have owned multiple computers, ALL running Windows OS. This is the really important part…I HAVE NEVER, EVER HAD ANY KIND OF VIRUS ON MY COMPUTER…EVER! (take that MAC lovers :p ). In addition, nearly all of my shopping is done online, and frankly much of my off teaching hours are spent online. I’ve gone (and go to) chat rooms and dating sites; I download tons and tons of applications, files, etc., and not once have I had a problem. Have I just been lucky? No, I know the right software to use, and the proper safety steps to take to ensure a pleasant cyber experience. These are what I hope to share with all of you. Now that you understand (hopefully) where I am coming from, I’ll continue.

Over the years, I, like most people, have used Norton anti-virus systems. And over the years, I, as I’m sure many of you, have experienced my computer slowing down to a crawl. I could never figure out the problem, that is until I started dating computer geeks. Finally one of them said “what on earth are you doing with that anti-virus?” Huh? Wait, I have to have protection, so what do I do? Here’s what you do: you uninstall every single bit of that bloatware and go to AVG Free, download and install one of the best programs you will ever own.

Symantec (Norton’s parent) wants you to believe that any free program is by definition going to cause you problems. You get what you pay for right? Usually yes, but in AVG’s case, no. If you don’t know what you are doing, sure Symantec’s points might seem valid, but think about them a bit deeper and you can see that the logic is flawed.

Let’s look for a moment at all the “extra features” you DO NOT necessarily need:

• Firewall: If you are running Windows OS you have firewall protection already built-in. Go to your control panel and activate it. It’s especially powerful in Vista and Win 7.
• Downloads: You don’t need extra software to screen your downloads. What you do is save the file, then once it is on your computer right click and scan it with the protection program. Actually, with AVG free, my experience has been that it catches a problem as soon as I click on the file. BTW…my husband and I are heavy users and download hundreds of files each week.
• E-mail protection: If you are using one of the major web mail programs like AOL, Yahoo, GMail, Hotmail, etc. they are already handling the spam and attachment issue for you. But again, if you get an attachment you download it, then scan it.
• Web Browsing: Well, isn’t this why the browser companies keep updating their products touting safety and protection? They are pretty much on top of it. I can’t tell you how many times I have been told a certificate doesn’t match the site (actually I get that for one of my own sites, so it can be a bit annoying when it goes too far). However, AVG does address this. When you do a search (because the assumption is you are going to a new site) it shows you little symbols letting you know the site is safe to go to.
• Applications like Flash, Quicktime & Realplayer: Admittedly I personally do not use these programs too often. However, I am constantly being notified that there is a security patch, etc. (just got a new one yesterday) that needs to be downloaded so as to update the software. These are big companies, they are on top of this stuff. It’s their reputation on the line and they have a lot to lose if they let users get infected.

BTW, I teach my AP Lang students about fallacies. I think I’ll start this school year off going over the interview with the Norton exec. (linked above). In addition to the points I’ve already mentioned he states that you cannot trust a product that a company gives away for free. I don’t think I have enough space or time right now to go into why that is just so wrong. Maybe one of my students will blog about it in September, I’ll keep you posted if they do.

When I used Norton running scans on my computer was a joke, to say the least. I simply just didn’t do it because my computer would become unusable. Well, as I type this I have 3 browsers open, Paint Shop Pro, a text editor and MS Money AND my AVG is scanning my computer. Bottom line: I feel no performance loss while the scan is running.

Seriously, I’m a bit afraid of installing any piece of software that puts so much junk on my system that people have had to make tools just to uninstall it! Read this post for further explanation.

Ok, Norton 2009 edition is supposed to be “leaner”, however you are still paying $40 for something you get free with AVG. If you really feel you must have all that extra protection, AVG’s full featured software is still only$55/year, compared to Norton’s at $99/year, and it won’t hog your computer.

So here’s the bottom line: Paying for anti-virus software is just silly. AVG offers a product that does what you need it to do. You, the end user, need to be aware of what you do. Meaning, scan what you download and watch what sites you go to. Be pro-active and you will be fine!

Please understand that the above is from my personal experiences. I cannot be held responsible for anything that may happen to you while using any piece of software I recommend.

I was reminded today about one of my very favorite iPhone apps, Simplify Media.  Simplify Media allows you to stream music from your desktop computer to your iPhone or Touch. Why is this important? Because it means that you don’t have to install all your music on your device. This awesome little app made it so I could buy the 8 GB iPhone and never think twice about having enough room for all my media.

It’s really simple actually…you download either the original version ($3.99) or version 2 ($5.99) from iTunes. BTW, just go for version 2, you get extra features that you are going to want. After you have that you go to Simplify’s site and download the desktop app. Then you sign up and tell the desktop app what file to grab your media from, and watch it start synchronizing. Then when you go to your iPhone or Touch app you will see all the songs available to play. It’s that simple. It’s that amazing!

Today I finally got to use a fun feature for the first time: sharing. Here’s the way it works: I get to share my music with up to 5 30 other people. All I have to do is put in their username and we start syncing.

(Sorry about the black-outs. I hope you understand.)

Once the files are synced we all have access to every song, audiobook, etc. that is available. As you can see just between the two of us we have over 45, 000 files available!!

Then you go into your iPhone or Touch and open the app. If you have a lot of files it will take a bit to update, but once it does you can listen to all the available files! See my phone shot (I apologize again for the the black-outs):

So what’s the bottom line here? This is a great app for a small amount of money. You can take your tunes anywhere (oh, I forgot it works on WIFI or 3G), which means you don’t need a super amount of storage on your device. All you have to do is keep your computer running and you are good to go. Add in 5 30 (wow was I wrong in my first post!) of your friends and you literally have thousands upon thousands of titles at your fingertips!

I ride my bike to work almost everyday and I wouldn’t want to live without this app. Then when I get to work I simply plug my iPhone into my desktop speakers and I am good to go. Over 40 THOUSAND titles! How awesome is that?

(BTW, I haven’t even touched on all the features. Take a few minutes and see everything Simplify has to offer!)

Google Apps has been around since 2006, but I always thought it was strictly for businesses. I was definitely wrong.  Google Apps offers all the normal Google products like GMail, Docs, Google Talk, Sites and Calendar. The difference is they are all rolled-up into one and managed by an administrator.

One of the incredible features is that you can use your own domain name. What if you don’t have your own domain? No worries, when you sign-up with Google Apps they give you the option to purchase a domain name for $10 (that’s half the cost that I paid).  Think about how cool that is. For $10 you can have your apps under whatever name you choose. Maybe you have a class name, or a mascot, or it can be as simple as your last name.

Now that you have your name and your apps site, what’s next? Why is this the big educator find? Because with your main account you get 50 user accounts, each with 7GB of storage! So let’s say you are a teacher with 30 students, you can offer each of them an account under your domain. For example, if I sign a student up she can have the account name of “sandy@lahaiseslair.com”. She then has access to all those cool apps.

Maybe at this point you are thinking “okay, so what, why do I want to do this when they can just go to the regular Google sites and sign up for the same services, just not under my name?” Because with Google Apps under your domain your students can collaborate on documents and websites, all under your control.

This is a screenshot of my administrator dashboard, the control center for all the accounts (if you want to see it larger just click on the picture):

All of those areas have places where you can control things like who sees what, and what gets shared (and where).  For example in the docs settings, here’s what you can do:

Sure, Google Docs can’t compare to MS Word, and Google Sites doesn’t compare to other, full-fledged blogging sites like Blogger or WordPress. But what you get here is a suite of products ready for collaboration. Or not. Actually I don’t know if I will use them for collaboration, but I like that I can offer my students Google backed products with my name attached.

Here are some of the highlights related to each app. (If you have used any of them already, this is nothing new).

Docs

• You can create a document in Google Docs and download it as a Word file (I think that is an awesome feature!). This is handy for those people that don’t have Word, yet need to submit a document somewhere. For example our school computers can’t convert Works files, but many of our students only have Works.
• Creating, uploading and storing documents means no more “I forgot my work”.
• You can create really neat things with forms. I created this poll for my students. You can easily create different kinds of tests, all which can be embedded, or simply printed out.
• Users can collaborate on a document, so there is no need to continually send it back and forth for revisions. Google saves the revisions so if there is a need to revert back it’s easy.

GMail

• Full e-mail system. Lots of storage space. On one of my e-mail accounts I have a couple of thousand e-mails sitting in the trash and/or archive and I have only used less than 1% of my storage capacity.
• GMail system shines when it comes to multiple e-mails with one person. It layers them so that you can easily see the “discussion”. It’s hard to explain, more like something you need to experience.
• Check-out Google’s Ninja guide for using GMail.

Sites

• Super easy way to get your students (or yourself) into the blogging world. See the super quick sample I made.
• Videos and pictures can easily be embedded.
• Students can collaborate and turn it into a Wiki.
• Remember with your Google Apps account you get to control the privacy level!

Calendar (this is my workhorse that I wouldn’t want to live without!)

• Put all homework and/or notices on the calendar. (Remember you can set-up multiple calendars).
• Embed the calendar in your website (example) and/or share it with users in your domain.

Chat

• Allows students to chat in a safe environment. You can control whether they can chat with someone outside of Google Chat and/or outside of your domain.
• You can choose to have a written log of the chats.
• You could set-up a chat time with students to answer questions about a particular lesson, etc.

I will say there is one MAJOR flaw with Google Apps: no RSS reader. I am extremely disappointed with that. I am starting all my students using readers in the fall, and not having that app makes it more challenging.  Although, I did find a cool trick for add RSS feeds into Docs (as of this first writing I have not experimented with it though).

Honestly, I signed up because I wanted to have my own e-mail addresses that matched my website domains, but after looking at the apps I am seeing more and more ways I can use them with my students. Consider this post a beginning look at the system. When we get back to school and I really start using everything, I will certainly update you as to how it all comes together.

In the meantime you should go see things for yourself. Set-up is pretty quick and easy if you follow Google’s instructions. If you already have a domain name, its all free. And if you don’t, $10 really isn’t that much considering what you get.

Frequently I have students who want to challenge my technical knowledge and one of the few ways they try is with the web browser. Honestly up until yesterday I had never really sat down and analyzed the browsers and their actual speeds. I have used all the major browsers: IE (all versions), Firefox (all versions), Opera 8 & 9 (mini & full), Chrome, and Safari (only 3 & 4). My current browser is Firefox, which I have been using for some time. So now that Firefox is claiming this huge speed increase I thought I would see for myself. I found two sites that have speed tests and went at it.

These tests were done on my computer running Windows 7 RC1. Please note that these tests are not scientific in any way shape or form, I ran them simply for my own amusement and so that I could be better informed as to the products I use. Obviously, because you have a different system, your results will vary from mine.

I tested Safari 4 , Chrome, Firefox 3.5 , Opera 9.64 , and IE 8 on July 24 & 25. Here are my results:

The first test site I went to was SunSpider. I ran the test several times over the two days, on all browsers, with similar results each time (the numbers below represent the best of each, they are not averaged).

Firefox 3.5:     Total:     2728.4ms +/- 11.6%

IE 8:                Total:    24853.6ms +/- 21.4%

Safari 4:          Total:    1795.0ms +/- 19.7%

Chrome:          Total:    3541.2ms +/- 32.0%

Opera:             Total:     12468.2ms +/- 23.5%

Please don’t ask me what the numbers mean (anyone who wants to help with that by all means). What you need to know about the numbers is the SMALLER the better. I have to say I was pretty shocked at the results. I have been reading that IE is a “dog”, but what about those Firefox numbers? Well, I wasn’t satisfied so I found another site, with a different test:

Web Browser Javascript Benchmark. Again, running the test over 2 days. This time I followed the sites directions and ran the test 10 times on each browser and took the average. Here are my results on July 25, 2009:

Firefox 3.5:      540 ms

IE8:                   1356.1 ms

Safari 4:          401 ms

Chrome:          778 ms

Opera:             762 ms

Again, don’t worry so much about what the number stands for, just know that the lower the number the better.

I am actually pretty suprised by my findings. Espcially since Safari 4 felt slower than all of them, and IE 8 felt faster.

Unfortunately there are other factors to consider when choosing a browser besides speed. I would love to switch to a faster browser, like Opera, but I am tied to the add-ons that I can only have with Firefox. That makes a switch for me unlikely. The issue of security is also a major one when considering a browser. I have read that IE is has security holes, and Firefox is a much safer browser.

So what’s the bottom line: While I might not be switching browsers anytime soon, at least I can hold my own in a browser debate. I can confidently say that I have tested them out and know which browser works the best for my machine. Most people simply use the default browser (IE or Safari) and think nothing more about it. I encourage you to take 30 min (or less) and perform your tests. Then next time a student (or colleague) wants to debate the merits of your browser, you’ll be ready. Remember, knowledge is power!