Tell Congress to Preserve EETT Funding in the FY11 Budget

Spread the word:

Tell Congress to Preserve EETT Funding in the FY11 Budget The fate of FY11 funding for the Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program may be determined as early as next week. When Congress returns to work on November 15th for a very short Lame Duck Session, they will attempt to complete work on all FY11 Appropriations bills, including the bill that funds Department of Education programs and EETT. Even though the House and Senate draft versions of FY11 education spending bills provided $100 million for EETT, the same level as in FY10, these upcoming negotiations on a final bill may result in cuts to EETT or even its outright elimination. We can't let that happen! It is critical that we maintain funding for EETT! Failure to fund EETT will undermine investments in school infrastructure and teacher training already made through EETT and hinder efforts to prepare our students to compete in the academic and employment arenas. Email your Congressional members today and ask them to provide EETT with at least $100 million in FY11.

ETAN updates are brought to you by the Consortium for School Networking and the International Society for Technology in Education.

Google's Big News: Google Instant #google #googleinstant

If you missed Google's big announcement today, they unveiled their new search feature - Google Instant. They are rolling this out to the US today, and the UK next week. They are also planning to roll this out to mobile devices later this fall.

What is Google Instant? It is an interactive feature that is designed to get you to your desired results more quickly. There are three main aspects:

1. Dynamic Results
2. Predictions
3. Scroll to search

You can find out more details straight from the horse's mouth here on Google's blog:

http://bit.ly/dtqM53

This is great for when you want to get a quick answer. But how will this affect student research? Will it hurt by requiring even less effort to find results? Or will it help to more easily find higher quality results?

What do you think?

Jailbreak your #iPad and use DisplayOut

Do you wish you could show more than just the Keynote or Photos app through your projector cable on your iPad? I did!

We recently had an iPad training session and I really wanted to be able to show the live iPad screen on the projector instead of just showing them screen shots. I heard you could show the live screen if you jailbroke your iPad. So a couple of weeks ago I started looking into the possibility.

I started by talking to a few of the iPhone fans I know. They suggested trying this jailbreak:

http://jailbreakme.com

A quick note: This jailbreak will only work on iOS 3.2.1 and older. The iOS 3.2.2 update patches the PDF flaw that this jailbreak uses.

If you go to the above link from your iPad browser, it will give you the option to jailbreak it right over the web. No fancy tricks, or downloading software and messing with iTunes. It just asks you to swipe on the screen and then it starts the jailbreak. It took me about 2 minutes while it downloaded and ran the jailbreak. Then it asked me to restart my iPad. I got the little Apple logo, and some rainbow colored dots on one edge of the screen. When it restarted everything looked normal but now the Cydia app was installed. Cydia is an app store that you can download (and buy) apps from for your jailbroken device. Don't worry, you can still download/buy them from iTunes as well!

In order to get your live iPad screen to show over the projector you will also need to install an app that will make it possible. We know that iTunes doesn't have an app for that. So you have to look in Cydia. I tried three different apps. The one that worked was $1.99 and is called DisplayOut. You don't actually get an app on your home screen, it just puts a new section into your settings. You can turn the display out on or off, and change a few basic settings. You can see an image of what it looks like here: http://bit.ly/dg8g1n

This worked out great for me, and our training session was awesome! Have Fun!

EETT Funding Restored in House and Senate Bills at $100 Million

Got this email this morning:

EETT Funding Restored in House and Senate Bills at $100 Million

Earlier this summer we reached out to you about the zeroing out of the Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program in President Obama’s proposed 2011 budget. To save the program, we asked you to contact your Representatives and Senators to let them know how important the program was to your school and district. And you answered that call!

Since then, over 1,700 people have sent more than 5,200 letters to their Congressional representatives highlighting the importance of the EETT program. Additionally, on Tweet for Ed Tech day in May, 700 educators sent 1,550 messages demanding that Congress fund EETT.

Because of your efforts, last week the House and Senate approved appropriations bills that continued funding the EETT program at $100 million in FY11. Although this does not mean that funding for the program is certain (both bills must still be reconciled in conference), it does mean that it is likely that the EETT program will not be zeroed out next year. In a time when many programs have been dealt funding cuts, maintaining funding for the EETT program at this stage is a big success. Thank you for your efforts!!

ETAN updates are brought to you by the Consortium for School Networking and the International Society for Technology in Education.

Digital Learning Farm - Alan November #ISTE10

I had the opportunity to attend one of Alan November's sessions at ISTE2010. The session was entitled: Digital Learning Farm (Students as contributors). This was my first opportunity to hear Alan November, and I thought he was a great presenter with a great message. My main take aways from his presentation were:

1. Because the majority of students will ask their friends for help before they ask their teachers, their success is somewhat dependent on who their friends are.
2. Giving grades over time puts creativity in decline, as students will begin to do only what is required to get an A.
3. Assign students jobs in your classroom. Always have at least one official researcher for the day. He/She is in charge of finding the worlds best resources for the content that is being covered. This way at least one student is learning great research skills every day!
4. The teacher's knowledge shouldn't be the limit for a student's learning.

This was a great presentation that has left me with much to think about. He also talked about doing purposeful work, and tied this into Daniel Pink's new book Drive. Since the presentation I have also found two great videos that you can watch to get some more information.

Alan November - Myths and Opportunities

Daniel Pink - Drive Animated

And finally, here are my notes from the presentation:

How to triple boot a MacBook Air

Here is the guide I followed in order to triple boot my new MacBook Air. It is a great guide from Lifehacker. It uses rEFIt as the boot manager which works great! However, I did run into a few problems. My ultimate goal was to have OS X, Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), and Windows 7. I have had all three running on my MacBook successfully and here is what I learned:

1. If you are installing XP (either instead of 7 or before you upgrade to 7) you can't have another partition after the XP partition. Either leave the space for the linux partition unallocated, or create it ahead of the XP partition. Otherwise XP won't boot.
2. The first time you successfully boot into Windows make sure you install the bootcamp drivers. I joined my Windows 7 install to a domain and then couldn't ctrl-alt-del to login because of the Mac keyboard not supporting that key combo.
3. I had some unresolved issues with my Ubuntu install not shutting down correctly. Sometimes it would just hang at a black screen with a blinking cursor after going through the shutdown tasks. I'm not sure how to solve this yet.
4. Make sure you follow the instructions in the guide about installing the grub boot loader to the Ubuntu partition and not to the master boot record of the drive. The second time I loaded Ubuntu I forgot to do this and it has been a headache. Luckily one of our techs was able to reload the master boot record and I can get back into Windows 7 now, but we had to delete the Ubuntu partition during the process.

Google Apps Education News: July 2010

Just got this email from Google and thought I would share...