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.

Here’s what I found at The NY Times: “The thing that concerned me most about it was it seemed like a direct channel from the president of the United States into the classroom, to my child,”  said a father in Texas. What? I feel like I am living on another planet right now. Maybe I was raised wrong, but my mother taught me that the President of The United States was someone to admire and respect. (Okay, so I haven’t always felt admiration and respect for a president).

Or this from CNN: "Thinking about my kids in school having to listen to that just really upsets me," suburban Colorado mother Shanneen Barron told CNN Denver affiliate KMGH. "I’m an American. They are Americans, and I don’t feel that’s OK. I feel very scared to be in this country with our leadership right now."

Seriously, what am I missing here? This man is our Commander In Chief. He is our president who wants to tell children that the best thing they can do for themselves and our country is to get an education. How is that grounds for keeping your child home, or flooding your school with calls inquiring as to whether or not they will be showing the broadcast, or calling the whole thing a socialist plot?

Alright, lets get down to the nitty-gritty here, shall we? This isn’t about politics. This is about racism. That’s the ugly, nasty truth. These people don’t give a darn what their kids watch, it’s all about having a black man for our president. This is why I really and truly believe that…

I start school on Wednesday and this year we have Channel 1 at our school. In my opinion Channel 1 is just another way for bad teachers to show more videos, but besides that Channel 1 requires us to show TEN MINUTES of ads each and everyday! So now my students will start every day by watching ads that we have absolutely no control over. We must keep them on, and we must keep the volume up, otherwise we lose all those fabulous free videos.

This is madness! Parents are worried about the child watching our President, the leader of the free world, but I have not heard of one parent complain about their child being held captive by a series of ads, IN SCHOOL! Please help me understand this.

I truly want to weep right now for the anger and shame that I feel toward this situation. I love my country, and for the first time in 8 years I love our president, but right now, I’m ashamed to be called an American.

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.

BTW, if you don’t have OneNote in your MS Office suite. You can download a trial copy. It’s good for 60 days, and if you find that you don’t want to purchase it, just transfer all that stuff into a Word document. OneNote makes it really easy.  Remember, Microsoft offers teacher and student versions of for reduced prices.

So check back often, and I hope you find something useful in my OneNote notebooks.

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!)