Useful Sites, How-Tos, Student Samples
Earlier this year I wrote a proposal called “Science by the Netbook” and submitted it to the Qwest foundation. They were kind enough to grant it and the shiny blue Acer Aspire 1 netbooks arrived in late June. They came with Windows 7 starter and I had some students help me get them set up [...]
The crafty folks at Edublogs just got my money. I’ve used my edublog for the past few years as a quick way to post content (videos, instructions, review games) for my students. Since I don’t use it much in the summer, I was surprised when I got an email from a colleague saying she couldn’t [...]
Over the past couple weeks I’ve run into a couple Wordpress issues - one with Edublogs and another with a school-hosted Wordpress (not my school, but a colleague’s). The problem that I’ve experienced, along with several other, is that iframe embeds won’t work on Edublogs, which uses Wordpress. My colleague had the same [...]
Crocodoc was released earlier this year and I didn’t give it much consideration. After all, I’m a Google Docs junkie and didn’t need an app to help me collaborate on documents with my students. This summer though, while teaching EDU 601, I realized that I probably needed to provide the student/teachers with some options beyond [...]
Over the course of the summer, I’ve noticed some new features on sites here and there. Usually, other people write about these new features before I catch them, but I haven’t seen much about some of these so I thought I’d share.
The first new trick comes from Diigo. If you’ve never used it, Diigo allows [...]
I just finished teaching EDU 601. It’s a graduate ed. tech class I teach at Creighton University and it’s consumed the majority of my non-family time the last month. This is the second summer I’ve taught the course and I find it to be a wonderful learning experience for myself and very rewarding to work [...]
Tomorrow marks the last day I will get to serve under the principal at my school, Mr. Connelly. We arrived at JMSO together six years ago and earlier this year he announced his retirement. He has a been a wonderful mentor to me and a guiding force for our school the last six years and [...]
Note: For an explanation of brickiness, see Brickiness: Part 1 - Solar Ovens
We’re a long ways from the Gulf here in Nebraska, but that didn’t stop us from experimenting with some ways to clean it up. After a little research, the students came up with a few solutions of their own and we worked [...]
In his book “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell recounts a study out of a prep school in England. The students were asked to come up with a list of uses for a brick. In the book, Gladwell highlights the responses of two students in particular: a student singled out by the faculty as the most [...]
We’re in the midst of summer school right now and it’s a lot of fun. I’ve been blessed with the ‘enrichment’ students, all of whom are very excited about learning. Since the students are there by choice, I try and make it worth their while. Because of the smaller numbers and some [...]