Last MEMSET for the year and perhaps forever!
Posted: May 9, 2012 Filed under: Professional Development | Tags: MEMSET Leave a commentWell, that is a bit dramatic, but true on one level. The Massachusetts Elementary and Middle School Educators using Technology (or Educational Technologists) met for the last time today at BB&N Middle School. It is amazing to sit in a room of teachers and tech specialists talking about independent elementary and middle school technology topics.
One thing we recently ran up against was that the acronym MEMSET has been taken, so we can not get the com or org domain. We need to rebrand to move forward. Thus, MEMSET will be no more. We will be another group next year–the group formerly known as MEMSET.
Tonight’s discussion covered benchmarks/standards, how they are integrated in the classrooms, how they are reported, and how different constituents are held accountable for them. Then over dinner, we had presentations from different members on tech integration projects. One particular one struck me. A third grade project using conductive thread to create circuits on a quilt echoed the many articles I have been seeing on wearable electronics.
I look forward to this group, under its new name, continuing the great work next year.
Reflection, Stepping Back at #131
Posted: May 8, 2012 Filed under: blogging Leave a commentThis is blog post #131 of an almost daily habit I started over winter break. My original purposes for this and my parenting blog was to carve out space in my day, daily, for writing. I also wanted to use the time to grow as a technology teacher and to be held accountable for reflective practice in my parenting. All of these things have happened, and I am pretty proud of the accomplishment of getting two blog posts completed daily.
However, my writing is not what I really wanted from this time. Now that I have wrested it from the TV and other distractions, I want to refocus my writing. I have a children’s novel that has languished for over a decade and other book ideas I want to see if I can take a swing at.
With the two blogs, I find that my freshest writing is happening in my parenting one, and this one is running on fumes. I have lit a charge in my growth as a technology educator, and that is going well. I am, however, deeply engrossed in several big projects at school, and they are not the type of daily update material I was hoping to use in this blog. So, I will scale this blog back a bit. I will write when I am excited about some technology growth I have made. I imagine that this will happen roughly weekly, but I am not going to hold myself to a rigid schedule. This way, I hope to just convey thing about which I am truly enthusiastic and that might be more relevant for the followers of this blog.
Until the next big thing, then.
Teacher Appreciation Week
Posted: May 7, 2012 Filed under: Teaching | Tags: Teacher Appreciation Week 1 CommentThis week is teacher appreciation week, and I am very fortunate to be in a place where teachers are really appreciated. This has not been the case in every teaching job I have had. I started my career in Philly where new teachers were human resources and not much more. After teaching four grade levels in three buildings in two years, I decided to take a break.
When showing appreciation for your teachers, your children’s teachers, your former teachers, technology can play a role. From finding people on Facebook or person finders to email and skype, tech can serve as a link and communication tool.
However, I vastly prefer the hand-made cards and heartfelt conversations I have had over the years.
I have now found an email for my AP physics teacher in high school. I hope it is current and finds him. What an amazing teacher.
Cultivating Evernote
Posted: May 6, 2012 Filed under: Apps, Web tools | Tags: Evernote, gardening 1 Comment
To assist this, I have created an Evernote notebook about gardening in which to collect my findings. I hope to get a few things grown this year, but mostly I am learning. Part of the learning happens outside with my hands in the dirt, and part of it happens with my nose in a book or looking up info.
My goal is to find a good garden planner, a source of info about when to plant different veggies, resources for improving my soil and using containers for gardening. I hope to make next year’s garden much better, and part of that is the experimentation that happens this year. Let me know if you have good garden resources, digital or otherwise.
Basecamp
Posted: May 5, 2012 Filed under: Tools, Web tools | Tags: Basecamp, project management Leave a commentMy school’s web project is being managed in Basecamp. In some ways this is a nifty tools to increase communication and create a workflow to complete a project in time. However, in that one-size-fits-all way that many solutions have, it is lacking some features that would make it more useful. One can get around these by uploading files, but that necessitates clicking and opening. I’d love native support for viewing PDFs and much more. Luckily, I only have to use it for a short while.
I wonder how the state of project management will evolve as web capabilities continue to expand.
The Evernoting Story 3: If Disney Can, So Can I
Posted: May 4, 2012 Filed under: Apps, Web tools | Tags: Evernote Leave a comment
Yes, I can drag this story out into a series of poorly crafted, straight to TV posts. But I won’t. This is probably my last one until I have more time under my belt with this app.
However, I did want to share what seems to be one of my biggest growing uses of Evernote so far. After installing the app on my iPhone, I found the voice memo feature and began recording memos about what blog posts I wanted to make. I know there are so many other apps that can do the same, but this allows me write comments on them and add photos, etc. For the time being, this will probably drive my use of Evernote with more uses building from here.
The Evernoting Story
Posted: May 2, 2012 Filed under: Apps, Web tools | Tags: bookmarks, Evernote, Neverending Story, Tron 4 CommentsUnlike The Neverending Story, the web is not being destroyed by the Nothing. Quite the opposite, in fact. The web is rapidly being expanded, and no flying, furry luckdragon could possibly fly all of the way across it. Tron, himself, would find it hard to navigate the ever expanding infoscape.
I have made attempts to filter this boiling sea of data and only direct pertinent info toward me. It is still far too much to see all of, so finding a way to dip in when I want to, to not miss the really important stuff, and to curate things I want to find again has been my major focus this year. My journey has taken me from Diigo, to Delicious, to Springpad, and now to Evernote. I am not yet sold on this being the solution for me.
So far I have created an account, installed the web clipper, watched a few videos, and made a few test notes. I can easily see many uses, but I really need to get my hands dirty by using it for a few weeks. I would love to hear how others are using Evernote or how they have decided not to and what they are using instead.
The First Shovel
Posted: May 1, 2012 Filed under: blogging, Professional Development | Tags: blog, blogs, Education Bloggers, FaceBook, handle, Twitter 4 CommentsWhen I was early in my teen years, a neighbor hired me to do some construction which amounted to digging ditches around a house to relay drainage pipes. After the first few shovels of dirt hit the small pile, the immensity of the task ahead of me became glaringly apparent. As a young teen, this was no big deal; in fact, it probably served to blow off some of that excess energy. Where did that stuff go?
Walking away from #edcampbos, I was energized in the way only good professional development can. I haven’t made my way through hardly any of the copious resources put out by that day of collective sharing, learning, and teaching. The one area I have started to make some movement on is the education bloggers group on Facebook. I managed to get two docs in that group organized a bit, to follow all of the Twitter handles, and to subscribe to all of the listed blogs. My goal after this blog and my other is to settle in with my iPad and get some nice reading done while I work on a scanning project that gets amazingly tedious without another task to occupy my mind.
Unlike my youthful experience with shovel and mattock, this project is something of my own choosing, and it excites me. There is a lot of work, none of which is critical, but all of which I want to do. It is just a matter of selecting where to dig in for greatest effect because I cannot do everything I see to do already. I am sure as I get going, the scale of opportunity will only increase.
Tossing Disposable Addresses
Posted: April 30, 2012 Filed under: Email | Tags: addresses, disposable, disposable addresses, email, Gmail, Yahoo Mail Leave a comment
Years ago, I signed up for Yahoo Plus (or whatever that service was called), and I am still paying for it. This service allowed me, among other things, to create disposable addresses using a base-hyphen-identifier naming system. Since that time, I have also set up a secondary Gmail account and have used their base-plus-indentifier naming system.
Yahoo’s was an early system. I had to go into their admin panel and set up each unique junk email before the account would accept it. Google’s is much more user friendly on that account, accepting any email with the correct base. On the other hand, many websites prohibit the plus sign in emails, so the Gmail disposable feature is useless on about 30% of sites I have tried. This has led me to keeping the Yahoo account and paying a nominal fee annually. That and just the sheer work of moving emails from accounts over to another system.
Recently, however, I have run into a situation several times that makes me rethink my whole strategy of using disposable addresses. While it is useful to have that unique identifier to block when it gets too much spam, this is not really an issue anymore. Both Gmail and Yahoo mail do a pretty good job of spam detection, and it is easy enough to mark as spam a particular sender whose unsubscribe does not work. However, having signed up for a service under one disposable name and then having to access it or send from that particular email can be problematic. I got snarled up with a magazine subscription and Zinio not talking to each other. I think this is a flaw on Zinio’s part not being able to accept subscriptions to an account that come from other email addresses, but they and many other services have this issue. In addition, I was unable to send from my disposable account from my iPad because I could not add the “+identifier” easily to the email sender address. This caused problems.
I will probably move toward just using a generic email address, separate from my personal one, for signups, subscriptions, and the such. The unique identifier may be a relic from the past and a feature that current apps and sites are not designed to handle well.
technologicalontogeny 