Computer Applications For Educational Administration and beyond

I have been off-line for a while, but that has not stopped me from doing my homework and research about how technology can help educators.  Being an educator myself, I am exposed to many children who are naturally sick with colds etc…  Normally I try to tough  it out until I know that I can’t win a battle against a cold, flu or virus.  Recently I was  sick and was prescribed some cough medicine which was not supposed to interact with any other medicine I was given, unfortunately it did, and I became more ill from the cure than the cause.

Plenty of rest, lemon and water restored me to health.  While recuperating I caught up on managing my photographs.  I used a free photo sharing storage program called  Picasa, the link is http://picasa.google.com  from Google.com.  It allows you to organize, modify, store, and send photographs, and or upload them to web-based photo albums for private viewing or to share with friends or the public.  Maybe even more???
I find it very easy to do all of these things mentioned above.  You can start off by getting a free email account from Gmail or Picasa Mail, then download the Picasa program onto your computer and jump right in-fingers first.  You can manage the photo’s on your computer, flash drive or portable hard drive-just open up the program and getting started.

There are several other programs out there worth mentioning that I’ve read about and which friends and family of mine use; Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, Flickr, and Photobucket.  A Wall Street Journal print article on August 1, 2007 goes into more detail about these programs and the author Katherine Boehret liked Flicker.

What do you think?  I’d like to hear from you!

Suggestions for Improvement  The ultimate goal for administrators and teachers is to engage students to use all their skills, knowledge and creativity to employ higher order thinking skills while learning new skills for the 21^st century.   Involve all community members administration, teachers and parents to review our policy on Information Technology, Instructional Technology and Internet usage. 

Determine if we are meeting our students technology needs for the  21st Century Content Skills. Gather metric data to determine who is actually using the system, how often, and for what purposes!   

Develop a plan to improve smart technology usage in an efficient and effective process involving all stakeholders, and communicate it to them!  Benchmark other schools and organizations to see how that they are successfully using and developing technology and instructional programs and continue to follow industry trends. Plan and institute a Long-term, sustained Professional Development and Training program for our staff to learn about and use technology. 

Implement Web 2.0 technologies: Web Logs (Blogs), Wiki´s, Teacher Tube, You Tube and Google Video to get students involved.

What do you think?  I´d like to hear from you!

Yesterday I pulled up Will Richardsons blog ¨Weblogg¨ http://www.weblogg-ed.com/   to research what he and others had to say about must haves for Urban Elementary Schools regarding Web 2.0 applications. 

I linked to another blogger which led me to a report by the Center on Educaiton Policy http://www.cep-dc.org/  whose mission statement reads; 

The Center on Education Policy is a national, independent advocate for public education and for more effective public schools.  Makes sense no?

I was not too suprised to read in the 2007 report:  Choices, Changes and Challenges: Curriculum and Instruction in the NCLB Era-¨about 62% of districts reported that they have increased time for English langauage arts…cutting time from one or more other subjects or activities…¨

Working in an urban school myself, I can believe this, however I also believe that my own district does a good job at balancing time for social studies, science, art and music.  We all need to continually examine what we do, how we do it, and work smarter to improve the overall educational experience. 

 This leads me back to using technology in better and in smarter ways, hence: Web 2.0 and blogging.  My own school district says in the Educational Technology Plan 2007-2010 that ¨Research has found that low-achieveing and at risk students learn more quickly and with greater retention when learning with the aid of technolog.¨

According to educational blog pages, teachers accross the country are turning to blogging to engage children to write, publish, take ownership and pride in what their doing.  Makes sense to me.  How about you? Jump in and give it a try! 

 What do you think?  I´d like to hear from you!   

If I ever get bored of travelling, reading, biking, swimming or whatever and I want to drop out, hide or take a vacation, I think I´ll just head off to the virtual world of  Second Life http://secondlife.com/  It is one of the virtual worlds to be found on the internet. 

 To begin, you have to register with your real name, and some real personal information, then choose a Second Life name, then choose your gender or identity.  After that you choose from one of several worlds or communities to be in.  After that, you can do just about anything you would do in real life including getting married!  This all sounds interesting and it is. 

There are virtual worlds for teenagers also, but I did not explore them, however teachers can get involved with their students to create projects and monitor them.  Educational gaming is another virtual world of sorts where students can play games, create projects and it can be an educationally enriching experience for them.

 You can find links to some of these places in my Virtual Worlds category.

 What do you think?  I´d like to hear from you.

As an occasional college ESL instructor, I found it frustrating that some students chose to plagiarise their assignments instead of taking up my offer to stay after class and help them work through their concerns.  In some cases it may have been a communication misunderstanding, in any event, it doesn´t help them to let it pass.   

According to Craig Kapp, ¨plagiarism detection software is a class of software that works in a manner similar to an Internet search engine – the software isolates sentences and passages from a student’s paper and attempts to find matching text that could potentially be considered plagiarised.  Most plagiarism detection packages compare documents against a number of databases, including online peer reviewed journals, popular periodicals and the web in general.¨ 

Pride and a desire to be liked, and successful sometimes leads to shortcuts.  Keep it in mind to treat everyone gently, they just may recognize the errors of their ways!

 Turnitin.com : A fairly expensive subscription service that boasts one of the largest databases of student work.  They have been scrutinized in the past for questionable copyright practices (storing student papers in their databases to use in future searches without the expressed permission of the author).  TCNJ has a site licence with Turnitin and all current students can access the package via SOCS.

1. EVE 2 : A desktop based software package that compares the student’s work against the web.  One of the most inexpensive plagiarism solutions (currently $29.99 for unlimited use)
2. Google.com : The largest search engine in the world can also effectively identify signs of plagiarism.  “Googling” suspect sentences is sometimes the best place to start when trying to identify suspect content.
3. Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program : An interesting take on plagiarism detection – this package removes every fifth word of a student’s paper and replaces them with a “blank”.  The student is then asked to fill in these blanks – the software calculates the accuracy of the student’s respones along with a number of other factors to present a “plagiarism possibility” score to the instructor.

Teachers, students and people all over the world are getting their message out to everyone else by using Web 2.0 technology.  What are you waiting for?  Here is a an example of what some elementry school children think about blogging, I found it at Teacher Tube in a search of their videos.  You can also find a link to Teacher Tube under Instructional Resources.
Download Video: Posted by rachelboyd at TeacherTube.com.
 Some other examples of Web 2.0 tools:

1. Technorati: A vast search engine for the blog community
2. del.icio.us: A social bookmarking site that allows users to self-organize content around a given topic
3. Google Docs: An online word processing & spreadsheet application that allows you to publish your documents to the web. It also allows you to set up collaboration relationships with anyone else in the world.
4. Google Calendar: An online calendar that allows you to schedule events and share calendars with others
5. Google Books: An incredible search engine that allows you to search within printed books
6. Rubistar: A resource for teachers who would like to assess student performance using rubrics
7. Gradefix: A homework management system for students
8. Gliffy: An online diagram creation program that allows users to collaborate
9. Chalksite: A free online course management system
10. Clickcaster:A free online site that allows you to manage and maintain your own podcasts
11. Talkr: A really cool service that will turn any “text” blog into a podcast!

Some examples of Web 2.0 video applications:

1. Google Video
2. Youtube
3. Teachertube

Today I learned about Photoshop, by ADOBE Corporation.  http://www.adobe.com/

I viewed a tutorial created by Photoshop Guru named John and the link to his web page is : http://www.johnkuiphoff.com/courses/photoshop/index.html

You can also find this link in my Tutorials. 

Photoshop is the defacto photo manipulation software in the world!  The tutorial walks you through the basics of how to use the program, but the learning curve is different for everyone, so it may be frustrating at first but very rewarding once you learn a few tricks. 

You can restore old or damaged photographs, create art or media images and many more things that I´ve yet to learn.  Most importantly is, that it is a tremendous educational tool for students to learn since the practical applications are endless.  Below you can see the collage I created reflecting my interest in history, architecture, biology, fishing, sports and entimology?

Finally I recommend you see Revenge of The Nerds Part III.  It it is a documentary interview of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the key players of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft including others from the early years of the computer industry in the 80´s.

Food for thought!  What would you rather do for a living, sell sugar water or change the world?

 Let me know what you think.

Today I tried to pinpoint all the places that I´ve been on this beautiful Earth using Google Earth, unfortunately I found out that I had too little time to finish identifying all of my destinations today. Thank God for tomorrow!  I did make some progress though and now you can be given a guided tour and see some of my European haunts if you click on the ¨Places That I´ve Been Around the WORLD!¨  Just remember to create a file in Google Earth and save that file to a source;  computer, travel drive, portable hard drive or just email it to yourself at and save it to your Google Mail account for storage.

 The tricky part was to…do it yourself!

 Google Earth

1. Go into your blog dashboard
2. Click on Plugins
3. Click ‘Activate’ next to the DivShare plugin
4. Click on Write
5. Write a new posting and upload you file using the new DivShare upload interface
6. Copy the link that appears and paste it into your blog posting
7. You can switch off the DivShare plugin if you’d like to go back to your previous upload interface

and it´s that simple according to Craig!

 Next I added some more RSS widges, added, deleted and changed around some more RSS news feeds after that.  I finally settled on the NY Times Education News Feed, and Eduwonk.  Finally I fiddled around with other plugins and widgets.

So what do you think?  I´d like to hear from you.

Thanks for checking in and leaving your thoughts for improvement.  Tony

http://www.divshare.com/download/1364821-06e