Kevin Honeycutt at TCEA TECSIG 2010 Spring Meeting

I had the pleasure of hearing Kevin Honeycutt (http://kevinhoneycutt.org/ and @kevinhoneycutt) share his ideas at the TCEA TECSIG Spring meeting this year. I have to say, he was a wonderful presenter. He was the keynote speaker and he also did a break out session.

It was reassuring to hear him talk about working with students, and the lengths he would do to try to help them be successful. He talked a lot about technology and how it has changed the way our students learn. He also played a few wicked guitar solos! :) You can see a uStream of his keynote below.

Keynote - http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/6358905

Here is a great you tube video he made:

Here is a uStream of his breakout session. It is audio only and I think it was recorded from an iPhone in the back of the room so the audio isn't that great.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/6362715

I thought the breakout session was really good. One of the key points he made was that administrators must protect innovation. He also talked about the importance of project based learning. He cautioned that these projects can't be driven by one personality. In order to achieve long term success they must be driven by the system.

He also gave a demonstration of a very cool tool called AR media. This is an amazing plugin for Google Sketchup that allows users to visualize their 3-D models using augmented reality. You can get more information at their website:

http://www.inglobetechnologies.com/en/products/arplugin_su/info.php

I can see this being used for so many things in the classroom. I can't wait to spend some time testing it. You can see a demo below:

How to add a footer to blogger

ant to add a footer to your blogger.com blog? Here's how to do it:

1. Go to the dashboard
2. Select the layout option for the blog you want to add the footer to
3. Click the edit HTML tab
4. In the HTML editor box, scroll all the way to the bottom
5. Look for this line:
6. Underneath that line add in the text for your footer
7. Click the preview button to verify the text is in the right location
8. Close the preview window
9. Click save template

The code for the footer on this blog looks like this:

How to change the max upload size for Moodle

These instructions will depend on your OS, and moodle version.

Our Moodle installation:

Cent OS 5.4

Apache v2.2.3

MySQL v5.0.77

PHP v5.1

Moodle v1.9.8

In order to change our max upload size we had to change 2 variables in our php.ini file. The php.ini file is located in the /etc directory. I use the nano editor to edit the file.

Here are the steps:

1. cd etc
2. nano php.ini (opens the php.ini file in the nano editor)
3. look for the post_max_size variable and change it as follows
4. post_max_size = 30M (change the 30 to whatever size you want)
5. look for the upload_max_filesize variable and change it as follows
6. upload_max_filesize = 30M (change the 30 to the same size as the post_max_size variable)
7. ctrl-x (to exit the nano editor)
8. Y (to save the file)
9. Restart your box

That should do it. When the server comes back up you will be able to upload and post up-to 30MB files.

A balloon

At the TECSIG 2010 Spring meeting I had the pleasure of listening to Kevin Honeycutt speak. He made many thought provoking comments, but this one stood out:

"If you push on a balloon, when you let go it goes back to the way it was."

This idea and the conversation surrounding it made me start thinking. He was talking about systemic change. The idea being that if only one person is pushing on the balloon (fighting the status quo), you are in big trouble when they leave. How do we get the system to push on the balloon? If not the system there must at least be a core group of people who are responsible for being change agents. Otherwise there will never be any real change.

I thought this was a great piece of imagery, and a wonderful topic for discussion. I hope to use it in future presentations myself!

Google Alerts?

Who knew about google alerts? Not me. This sounds like the greatest idea ever...

Just head over to http://www.google.com/alerts and fill out the form. You basically setup a search query, and Google will email (or send as a feed to your feed reader) any time that query returns new results. Talk about training the information to come to you!

Possible uses:

Following a news story

Keeping tabs on what people are saying about you

Following certain sports or sporting events

Keeping up with technology

You can set it up to email you in three different modes:

1. As it happens
2. Daily
3. Weekly

You have the ability to chose how many results you want to see in each alert. In addition you can focus the query in on certain types of media, like just blogs or videos.

I can't wait to start setting up alerts!

Google Apps for Education - New Features!

On April 15th Google rolled out some new features for Google Docs. You can read about these new features here. Or you can watch the video below.

I was curious if these new features would be available in Google Apps for Education. After a little digging I found out that they are! You just have to enable them for your domain. You can follow the directions below to do this.

1. Login as an administrator for your account
2. From the administrative dashboard click on domain settings
3. About half way down check the option to enable pre-release settings

Now each user in your domain will have the option to turn the new features on. The steps to do this are listed below.

To turn on the new document editor:

1. Login to your Google Apps for Education docs account
2. Click on settings up at the top right
3. Click on the editing tab
4. Select new version of google documents

To turn on the new features for spreadsheets:

1. Login to your Google Apps for Education docs account
2. Create a spreadsheet
3. Click on new version up at the top right

Student Interview

Last week I finally got a web cam to play with. I wanted to start testing out options for integrating web cams into instruction. It just so happened that the day before I got it a middle school teacher asked me if one of her students could interview me for a class project. I asked if they would be interested in trying to use Skype to do the interview. They said yes and we set it all up. We had a few technical difficulties and I wasn't able to record the conference but, overall it worked out well. My video feed of the student froze early on, but I could still hear her, and she could see and hear me.

The student wanted to interview me about our student laptop initiative. I really thought she had some great questions. In one question she wanted to know why we didn't get a smaller device. At first I thought it was because she wanted a PDA or a phone instead, but later I realized it was more the bulk of the laptop she didn't like. I explained how the weight of the laptop played into our decision, and that at the time netbooks weren't around. What was interesting was I don't think a netbook would have made her much happier. She really seemed to want a more portable and less bulky device. This really made me believe that to our students laptops and even netbooks are old school. :)

My question now is: How do we get our students a smaller more portable device (maybe a cross between a phone and a netbook?) that is small enough to satisfy the students, but big enough to meet the needs of our state online testing requirements?