Blog Assignment

Your assignment is to create a blog. Decide upon a plan for using a blog in your classroom and setup a basic scaffolding for your blog there. Share with the rest of us, using your blog, what your vision and plan for a blog for class would be. Some of you might decide to create a blog that is not focused on your classroom, but on other topics of interest to educators. I’m happy to be flexible with the exact focus. My primary objective is that you have an opportunity to setup a new blog that is professionally oriented around topics such as teaching, learning, your classroom, educational technology, school administration, etc.

Once you have setup your blog, please share the link to it in our Blog Discussion Forum in FoxTALE.

If you have any questions about the assignment, please use the Blog Discussion Forum.

2010
01/31
POSTED BY
Sean McKay
CATEGORY
Blogging
Teaching
Tools
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First impressions of Google Wave

First look at Google Wave

First look at Google Wave

I received my Google Wave invitation last night and promptly setup my account. Here are my first impressions:

  • At first glance, I love the interface. It’s very clean and easy on the eyes.
  • Waves seem to be a mashup of wiki pages, blog postings, IM messages, and emails all rolled into one interface. Right now I have no one to Wave with (I have sent out a few invitations though…). I’m looking forward to seeing how tracking multiple waves works — will it be difficult to keep track of all of the data.
  • One very impressive feature is that you can go offline with Google Wave and then reconnect to sync your waves back up to the server. Finally, I have a cross-platform Groove-like solution that I asked for back in 2005.
  • Now I just need the invites that I sent out to be delivered so I can work with someone else…
  • This would be a brilliant way for our professors and students to work together on collaborative writing projects. In our M.Ed. program, when writing one’s action research project, you have critical colleagues who work with you to critique and edit your drafts in an iterative approach to building your thesis project.
  • I wonder what security is like. My connection to wave.google.com is over an https connection. As extensions are developed, it will be important to review them to ensure that connections to the extension provider are made over an https connection. Additionally, if authentication for third party services is shared (Twitter, WordPress, Evernote, etc), how will users make sure that their account credentials are not passed over a cleartext connection?

That’s all for now. I’ll post more once I have someone to Wave with…

2009
10/01
POSTED BY
Sean McKay
CATEGORY
Applications
Tools
Web 2.0
TAGS


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Google Docs as not-quite-offline blog editor

Not to be outdone by Word 2007, it appears that Google Docs can also publish directly to your blog. I’ve just discovered when perusing the share functionality in Google Docs that you can post a word processing document to your blog. This is a brief post to test its functionality–I’ll expand on this once I’m done testing.

2009
07/06
POSTED BY
Sean McKay
CATEGORY
Applications
Blogging
Tools
Web 2.0
TAGS


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Desktop or local wiki solutions

I’m thinking about offline or local wiki solutions that can run in a lab or on a classroom computer. Next week, we’ll be discussing web-based solutions that can work in the classroom and I’m hoping to put together a list of solutions that will work even in a classroom with only one computer.

So far, I have the following solutions:

  • Swiki (http://wiki.squeak.org/swiki/)–the first wiki I ever deployed. It has served us well for many years and can run on just about any old computer (Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Windows 2000-Vista).
  • Tiddlywiki (http://www.tiddlywiki.com)–a new favorite. This gem can be run from your local hard drive or uploaded to a server and served up over HTTP.
  • MoinMoin desktop edition–This is a Python based wiki that is quite functional. I have not had a chance to use it much though.

What are you using for a standalone wiki engine?

2009
06/23
POSTED BY
Sean McKay
CATEGORY
Applications
Learning Technology
Open Source
Teaching
Technology
Tools
Wiki
TAGS


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Found a great offline blog editor

I’m working on the next issue of the ICCTE Journal, which I recently moved from Plone to WordPress. We generally have our copy ready articles in either RTF or Word format. To prepare them for production in a web environment, I have relied upon a number of methods in the past from hand coding to using the HTML editor in Moodle to purge Word’s HTML cruft before posting the production ready copy into my CMS.

This will be our second issue in WordPress so I was rethinking my workflow and how I could most efficiently convert from Word and RTF format into WordPress. After a quick Google search for offline blog editors, I found a reference to the fact that Word 2007 can be used as an offline blog editor to post directly to your blog (it supports WordPress and a number of other blog engines).

Now, I know what your thinking–Word as offline HTML/blog editor? What is that going to do to my HTML? Well, surprisingly enough, with careful use of the Clear Formatting tool in Word, you can achieve extremely clean HTML in your postings.

So far, I’m very happy and very greatful that I can prepare a document directly in Word and then use the Publsh command to upload it to WordPress. Unfortunately, right now it doesn’t let me specifiy whether I want it to create a page or a post, but I can live with that.

Compared to my experience before with offline blog editors, Word 2007 is an excellent option, particularly if it’s already part of your workflow.

2009
06/20
POSTED BY
Sean McKay
CATEGORY
Applications
Blogging
Blogs
Windows
TAGS
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Spotlight search on iPhone 3.0

So, the next killer tool in iPhone 3.0 is the ability to search globally on the entire device. I coincidentally needed to find an email from someone on my iPhone last night. Usually, when I need to any searching for an email, I’ll fire up my computer and pull up either Outlook or Gmail (depending on the account) and search there. This time, I entered their name in the global search tool from the home screen on the iPhone and was amazed by both the results that it gave and the incredible speed at which it found items on the device. Not only did it find all of my recent emails associate with this person, it found all calendar events, contacts, and notes that had their name. Very impressive!

Spotlight search results for "it"

Spotlight search results for "it"

2009
06/18
POSTED BY
Sean McKay
CATEGORY
Apple
Mobile Computing
Technology
Tools
TAGS



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First thoughts on Voice Memos in iPhone 3.0

Quality is fantastic using the new Voice Memos app on the 3.0 os. Interface is very intuitive. Previously, I had been using iTalk Free and it worked very well. I do appreciate though that with Voice Memos, I won’t have to use a desktop app to get the memos off of my phone.

It seems to me that this may prove to be a decent podcasting solution.

2009
06/17
POSTED BY
Sean McKay
CATEGORY
Apple
Mobile Computing
Podcasting
Technology
Tools
TAGS



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iPhone 3.0 + Exchange + CalDAV + Google = Sweet solution

So I just upgraded my original iPhone to 3.0 and it’s working great so far. The thing that I was most waiting for with 3.0 was the ability to connect to both my Exchange calendar at work and my personal Google Calendar. It only took a few minutes to get it setup. After deleting my former Exchange connection from my phone to Google Calendar, I setup a new Exchange connection to our server, enabling Mail and Calendar. After that, I setup a new CalDAV account for Google Calendar. The settings that worked for me were:

CalDAV Setup for Google Calendar

CalDAV Setup for Google Calendar

Once you save the settings, tap on the Advanced Settings button and confirm that Use SSL is turned on to ensure that your account credentials are being passed to Google over an encrypted connection.

CalDAV Advanced Settings for Google Calendar

CalDAV Advanced Settings for Google Calendar

2009
06/17
POSTED BY
Sean McKay
CATEGORY
Apple
Mobile Computing
Technology
TAGS




2 comments

EeePC 1000HE Continued

I’ve installed UNR 9.04 several times on this fine netbook so far. In fact, I travelled very comfortably with just the netbook on a quick trip to Denver last month. Ubuntu worked quite well for notetaking and checking email. Performance was not so great watching videos on YouTube or Hulu though.

Over the past week or so though I have installed Windows XP Home using the recovery partition that’s built-in on machine. (I left the recovery partition in place when I installed Ubuntu, just in case.) Well, I’m pleased to say that this device runs just as well, if not better than with Linux. Why? Couple of reasons:

  • Drivers and software to control the performance settings on the processor. With Windows, I’m able to select from Super Perfomance Mode, High Performance Mode, or Power Saving Mode. Can’t do that (at least out of the box) with Ubuntu. I bet there are some kernel tweaks and some tools for managing this that I just need to find out on the net. However, it’s hard to beat it just working in XP.
  • Chrome — my new favorite browser runs on Windows but not really on Linux yet.
  • Outlook — I know, I know. Unfortunately at work, we’re still on Exchange server and Outlook is still the best email client (outside of Gmail) that’s available on the PC. Evolution’s performance in Ubuntu is unreliable. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
  • Audio/video drivers just work. We use the iVocalize web-conferencing system at work and 1) the pulse audio system causes problems and won’t work with iVocalize’s Java based system, and 2) you don’t have full functionality with the applet on Linux. Running iVocalize on Windows worked just fine–no driver issues for either video or audio.

So, would I prefer to be running on Ubuntu. Absolutely. Right now, though, the sheer practicality of things just working on Windows is out-weighing the benefits of Linux (course, I don’t know that I’ll be singing the same tune after getting a virus or spyware).

2009
06/17
POSTED BY
Sean McKay
CATEGORY
Email
Linux
Mobile Computing
Open Source
Technology
Tools
Windows
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Posting via email

I don’t know how long this has been available, but someone at WordPress just blogged that it’s possible to post to your blog via email now. To enable the feature, login to WordPress.com, click on the My Blogs link, and then click on the enable button next to the blog you’d like to enable post via email on.

Have fun!

2009
05/28
POSTED BY
Sean McKay
CATEGORY
Blogging
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