Cool Cat Teacher Blog is at coolcatteacher.com

horizonproject2008 » Video Specifications This page outlines how we are sharing video on the Horizon project this year. After literally hours of testing to overcome the "youtube barrier" we have worked out how to use Ning as our video sharing and embedding platform. Using tools like a firefox plug in that allows downloading of any video AND zamzar, these 7 videos literally show you how you may "snag" and edit any video. Just remember to follow copyright laws when you do this. This innovation was quite an epiphany for us and the videos were our effort to make it easy and take the video sharing aspect of the project out of the teacher's hands. tags: education , video , hz08 , edu_newapp , technology , techintegrator , professionaldevelopment foobar2000 This handy music player converts between ALL formats of music. I needed to take a song to put into a movie and converted it here. There are some robust tweaks that let you make your music sound better that I hav...

Here are some upcoming events (some free and some not) I'd like to share with you. All of them have live elements that you may want to join! Sounding Board Informational Meeting Kim Cofino Wed April 30th at 11:00 am UTC ( see local times here) . You can access the session via the link on the Sounding Board page . There is still time to sign up your classroom to be a peer review classroom for the horizon project . Innovative Uses of Technology in the Classroom Friday, May 2nd 10:30 am - Noon EDT Free Ustream of Panel Discussion This Friday, May 2nd, I'm very excited to be at Princeton this Friday at " Students and Electronic Media: Teaching in the Technological Age " on a panel with Kevin Jarrett (about Second Life) and Daniel McVeigh ( Ocean of Know ). I'll be ustreaming our panel and we'll have a backchannel chat (check my blog Friday morning for instructions) If you're near Princeton, this is free and registration is still open. (I think.) See ...

techLEARNING.com | Technology & Learning - The Resource for Education Technology Leaders This webinar is Monday about Web 2.0 and I'm co-presenting. If you attend, you'll receive a 3 month free trial subscription to Atomic Learning. Preregister here. This will give you access to the series I did on Web 2.0 and how to set up an RSS reader, etc. Also, the new one I've done on Flattening your classroom will be available as well. tags: education , brightideas , professionaldevelopment , edu_news , techintegrator , technology

Happy Birthday to Me! Wow! Your twitters, skypes, little e-mail notes and more have really made today special. In addition, my family was wonderful and my amazing husband sent me flowers. Although I still have a stack of grading from here to Qatar - I had a good day. So, I thought that today, I'd give 38 presents to you for you to open and enjoy. One for each year of this amazing blessed life the good Lord has seen fit to give me. All of these are free and so so cool! I challenge you to pick a present today, open it in my honor, and let me know what you think! Songbird - This is THE cool opensource alternative to iTunes and it is connected with Skreemr , the music search engine. Timebridge - This scheduling system plugs into google calendar or outlook and lets you invite people to a meeting, select four time alternatives, and then it books the meeting time that everyone can attend and puts it on your calendar. It reminds them and it rocks!! Get Atomic Learning Free for 3...

Home - Microsoft Popfly Microsoft Popfly lets you make mashups and build web pages without knowing code. I am to the point I don't teach the detailed web site creation coding I used to. I teach RSS, embedding, creating wikis, uploading media of all kinds, but I just don't know how important coding is any more at the basic level. I want to spend some time tinkering with this. tags: mashup , microsoft , education , ad4dcss , geeks4 , edu_newapp , technology , techintegrator , hz08 , hzmeta , govt_business Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson : Popfly Coin Flip Mashup Tutorial This is a fascinating blog post about how Alfred Thompson used PopFly to create a mashup activity for a classroom demo for teachers. He also took this document from word into Live writer to make a blog post. It is important to look at many ways to do things. I found this information very insightful and cool. tags: computerscience_teacher , education , edu_newapp , less...

Intel® Mash Maker Intel Mashmaker is a tool that you download and "mashup" sites together. It is supposed to allow average everyday people to be able to mashup google sites, flickr, almost anything with what programmers call an api. tags: hzmeta , mashup , education , techintegrator

You got the love? My week at Suffern Middle School | Welcome to NCS-Tech! Kevin Jarrett talks about his week at one of the leaders in innovative technology, suffern Middle School. An excellent read to see what this digital revolution is all about. Wow! tags: education , bestpractice , digital_access , digital_literacy , ad4dcss , blocked_blogs , bestpractices , edu_trends , techintegrator Wikinomics » Blog Archive » How mass collaboration changes education Just found this citation from Anthony D. Williams about flat classroom project and how "mass collaboration changes education." It is an older article, but makes a lot of sense. tags: inthenews , education , flat_classroom_attributions , flat_classroom

In this, I see so much of what happens when I work with students. Sometimes, we do our best to warn students and yet, they make mistakes and fall. But we love them anyway. The classroom should be a place where mistakes (of the non life-threatening kind) are allowed and welcomed. If they already know it all, then why are we teaching it? I needed to hear this song this week. It is just beautiful and I see what happens in my classroom and life in this beautiful performance by Cirque du Soleil . Oh, and the singer, Josh Groban is only 27 ! What does this moving song and performance mean to you? tag: Cirque du Soleil , inspiration , teaching , learning , mistakes , perfection , imperfection

Reaching Out With Your Conference | 2¢ Worth Excellent article for conference organizers from David Warlick. He has some great recommendations and links to the works from a conference in California this week. Conferences are setting up social networks as a best practice. As these handy sites go mainstream, effective use of such networks seems to be increasingly an important understanding for students as behavior on these sites is very different from the "social" social networks in their personal lives. tags: bestpractice , digital_communication , education , professionaldevelopment , edu_trends , curriculum ad4dcss » Video We're starting a video contest -- nominate the videos that you think best advocate digital citizenship, safety or success in schools. We plan to have some surveys in the future to let you vote. tags: ad4dcss , education , video britannicanet.com » Registration Link to the page for bloggers to get Brittanica for free from Brittanica webshare. tags: e...

I'm very excited about the upcoming " Students and Electronic Media: Teaching in the Technological Age " at Princeton on May 2nd on May 2nd. I will be presenting along with some other amazing speakers. Also, I plan to make an appearance at the free Parent Seminar the night before (May 1 from 7 - 9 pm,) although I have no formal part, I want to see how they handle this and discuss it with parents. The conference on May 2nd has the following purpose: " Electronic media has become an integral part of students’ lives and a major point of interest for educators. Questions about the impact of electronic media on student learning and wellbeing have led many school districts to question how and why they should be using technology. The purpose of this conference is to showcase innovative uses of technology in the classroom and provide school district with ways that they can enhance their classroom curriculums and professional development programs. An overview of the rese...

We are working to add the 10 BEST videos on educational change to the wiki . What are they? Where should they go (looking for the best on each topic.) When we give people these videos, we're giving them something that helps them "sell" what they are doing . I suggest showing these videos for professional development, school boards, and anyone who cares about education. We've started a page for your nominations for the best videos. If we get too many, we may have some sort of voting thing (which would be great to have that much interest!) tag: ad4dcss , education , change , reform , innovation , learning

wikisinEFL » Wikis in EFL A website with examples of best practices of wikis used in EFL (english as a foreign language) classes. Excellent. Kudos to this! tags: education , ad4dcss , digital_communication , bestpractice , case_studies frontierlict » home This is a wiki being built for a digital literacy program for teachers within a school division. This approach is a great one for districts and is a way to reach everyone with current information. I also wish they had a blog to compliment it, but sharing these sorts of websites are great. It would be nice if we had a template of information that people could copy to get started. tags: professionaldevelopment , education , curriculum , techintegrator , digital_literacy , ad4dcss openpd » home Open professional development by Darren Draper and Friends. These opportunities will let you open up your classroom and join in with others to learn collaboratively about blogs, wikis, and more. Take a look at it. tags: ad4dcss , digital_liter...

Just got home late from a track meet and came in to check the Digiteen and Horizon Project nings. I found this amusing blog entry from Nyomi L at the Baccalaureate School for Global Education (NYC - USA) entitled " Sick Day ." "Alright well, today I missed school to go to the doctor to deal with some breathing problems that I've been troubled with and after that, I happened to see a copy of Wikinomics staring at me from behind a Barnes and Nobles window. It wasn't actually on display but someone had left a copy near the window. Anyway, I took it as a sign that I should take it upon myself to buy and read the book. After all, if I really didn't like it, I could always return it after I finished. Well, I started where I had left off in ITGS and found myself surprising interested. I read it all the way home and for the next couple of hours and found myself interested, inspired and far more excited about the Horizon Project than I've ever been. It's qu...

Blogdimension - The Web 2.0 search engine! A search engine that just aggregates web 2.0 stuff. I found this interesting. tags: brightideas , education , edu_newapp , tools Artsonia Kids Art Museum — The Largest Student Art Gallery on the Web! This site claims to be the largest student arts gallery on the web! Looks fascinating. Not sure how they use first names and locations and get away with it. I'd like to know what those who have used it think about it. tags: art , education , arts_entertainment , hz08 , hzmeta , usercontent , connectingpeople , curriculum , edu_newapp , digital_access , ideas Iditarod-Collaborative-Project » home - Annotated Elementary classrooms connecting about the Iditarod. From USA, Canada, and Lebanon. They will be re-running this project again next year. tags: hz08 , connectingpeople , education , virtualcollab , edu_news , technology , curriculum , digital_access , case_studies princecaspianproject wiki - Annotated An excellent project for 4th - 6...

a cross post at the Advocates for Digital Citizenship, Safety, and Success blog Since this project is now 72 hours old, I thought we'd give a few stats for what is happening! We have 27 people signed up on the Advocates public list . 16 Readers for our Blog (Feed set up 24 hours a go.) Over 1200 views of the wiki, with 70 edits, and visits from 9 countries and more than 300 unique visitors and 64 members . 74 bookmarks sent to the diigo group with 40 members . 52 members of the Google Group with 24 discussions being tossed around Slowly percolating in the blogosphere with 7 posts so far . We can do better than this, maybe some people are waiting a bit. Lots of tweets beginning to share although I must admit a few of us are hogging the tweets. A logo design and another on the way for us to share and discuss. A set of tags for sharing and facilitating exchange of data and links An aggregation page for all of this (it is my personal launch page to start this.) Two projects that...

Technology Integration Matrix - Annotated Technology integration matrix from Florida. This amazing resource was picked up from Lucy Gray. Really amazing. tags: education , techintegrator , technology , curriculum , digital_literacy , bestpractice , ad4dcss Welcome to the Webby Awards Webby awards voting is open now. Very cool. Voting closes May 1st and some cool things are there. How about having students vote (but check the sites in a category first!) tags: education , brightideas , edu_news , technology Remember The Milk for Gmail Screencast Remember the milk -- an add in for gmail and google calendar that has come highly recommended from Sharon Peters. tags: edu_newapp , education , brightideas Do You Read Blocked Blogs? at Change Agency - Annotated Bud the Teacher and Stephanie Sandifer are planning an I read blocked blogs day. This is going to be an event for educators advocating access. It would also be a great time to talk about ways to monitor when you provide access. T...

simulpost with Advocates 4 Digital Citizenship, Safety, and Success blog Just a quick update on this. I'll still keep my focus over here, but we're starting a group blog that I think will end up being much bigger than I. We're looking for a few passionate bloggers to join the group over there with me. Drop me a line! We've created one page to monitor all of the activities for this project - http://www.netvibes.com/coolcatteacher#Ad4dcss Where we're sharing We've also got a wiki started at http://ad4dcss.wikispaces.com The wiki uses the links we create in diigo and feeds the resources to the 9 major categories of digital citizenship that we're addressing. (See wiki for those.) We have a diigo group for bookmarking. at http://groups.diigo.com/groups/Ad4dcss This blog is where we'll list major announcements AND resource links, so it will be a good place to follow the activities. Where YOU can volunteer We have a donated Moodle space and Kate Olson is org...

Following are some comments from students on the Horizon Project They are making great points. Again, when we involve students in discussions, we get some fascinating answers and points. (They sound a little bit like us!" Unprecedented Force for Change"-Dan Tapscott's Keynote - Horizon Project 2008 - Annotated Student #1 wrote on her blog Dan Tapscott , Horizon Project 2008’s keynote speaker , gave me insight and inspiration for the project. His knowledgeable comments on the baby boom generation were incredible and it amazed me that he decided to make his entire living on the study of the digital generation, the generation that I am a part of. I am a part of the generation that is an “unprecedented force for change,” and we are actively inducing and creating change that will be beneficial and relevant to the world today and tomorrow. I agree that technology must be at the center of this change in...

I just set up a gcast podcast channel . I don't have time to record and edit podcasts, but gcast lets me make phone calls to you and that is what I did last night. I wanted to give you insight into why we need Advocates for Digital Citizenship, Safety, and Success and a little background on some of the people involved in the initial conversations as well as my ideas for what may need to happen. I hope you'll listen.

FOXNews.com - Trading Nude Photos Via Mobile Phone Now Part of Teen Dating, Experts Say - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News - Annotated Teens are really moving a lot of their relationships to cell phones as Danah Boyd said recently on a Wow2 show. This example of teenage habits of sharing photographs on cell phones is an example. Discussions of cell phone use should be a part of what parents and teachers do with kids. This makes me think twice about allowing cell phone cameras on my children's phones, but I'd rather help them be wise in using it. tags: case_studies , digital_safety , ad4dcss , digital_responsibilities , education , digitalcitizenship

Since I have not yet responded to the Passion Quilt Meme , I've been prompted yet again. This seems a time to unleash my biggest passion for teaching today's students. Forgive me, I may get emotional. My heart breaks for these parents who are struggling with the kidnapping and beating of their child for the sake of Youtube popularity. This news show outlines what happens and talked to a psychologist. My Prediction We have a small window of opportunity to suggest and create structures of what WE , the educators who use these technologies, suggest we should do about the whole digital citizenship, safety, and success issue. Then, we will be TOLD what to do because of our lack of action. And we know how that goes. This came up Sunday Morning, when many of us came together in a little impromptu meeting with Sue Waters and Al Upton in elluminate (I'll post the link to the recording when it is released.) These are the brainstorming whiteboard pages (unedited). NOte that the...