Cool Cat Teacher Blog is at coolcatteacher.com

I came across this neat video on Viddler by Goldie . I do like the viddler format in that it allows others to comment on the video and add remarks and clarifications (you'll see them pop up as you watch the tutorial.)

Just playing with something new. Thanks to Willem Karssenberg (Trendmatcher in the Netherlands (Hey, Willem, your post did go through to wiffiti!) It has been up and down all day, however, when it is up, the text messages go live within moments. How to use it: I've been playing with it. First, you DO NOT NEED to sign up for an account! 1) Text the word name and the username you want to 25622 Eg. I typed in 25622 and send message, my message was "name coolcatteacher" 2) Write on my wiffiti board eg. I typed in 25622 and send message, my message was "@coolcatteacher I learned green screen from dean this week" Now, you try! Go in and write whatever you've learned this week in technology from your cell phone! What I like about this: 1) You can rate it 2) It has a built in content manager 3) I can delete messages I don't want. 4) I have the option to just take messages from my "friends" -- so you could have a class wiffiti board. What I want...

It amazes me how many parents complain about school's blogging when they allow their kids to play Xbox live unsupervised. Do they not know that as their eight year old boy annihilates the 40 year old at Halo 3 and enables live conversation, that it is common to hear a lot of profanity. We cannot say a cross word without getting calls from parents, and yet living gaming areas are basically unsupervised. It floors me that myspace and facebook receive all of the complaints when I see greater risk in live gaming. So, when Jason Fournier contacted me recently and told me that Xbox live has parental controls and then told me how to do it, I thought I would share it. It is great! I am sharing this with permission! There are two ways to configure your XBox 360's family controls. One has to do with offline play and one has to do with XBox Live (online play). For off-line play, parents can change some settings, such as what ESRB rated games can be played on the 360, and then they set a...

I think that the del.icio.us is one of the great unharnessed resources and that every educator should use this service. Ryan Bretag has challenged many to share the last five bookmarks they have made. I would take it one step further. Those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed know that you get to see my bookmarks. This is how I do it: 1) I signed up for a free Feedburner account. 2) After enabling the feed and previewing it. Click on Optimize and then LinkSplicer. This service will take: del.icio.us , furl , bloglines clips , Digg , ma.gnolia.com , and several other services. (And remember, you can still mark any bookmark as private and only accessible to you!) Note: And if you do this, I also encourage adding feedflare which has some really cool new features. You can then specify the frequency. Now, this will mean directing your visitors to another feed. So, when I set this up (several months a go) here is how I did it. 1) I removed the other feed from the top left of my blog...

Welcome to Computer Country ! This is the new youtube channel created by my computer fundamentals class to teach the world about Office 2007. I'm working hard to review and upload the 20+ videos that take you through the basics of this software, we have two videos uploaded to start. Some things are a little blurry and I'm working so hard to make sure the copyrights are OK. It is difficult. No teacher can be expected to be a copyright researcher. I'm doing my best to double check my students but they get the music from sources that have creative commons share alike non commercial, however, I'm not going back past that level to see if those issuing that license has the right. Copyrights are so convoluted and difficult to handle and teach in a web2 classroom. So, join us at computer country. If you have a class learning Office 2007, perhaps you could post a video response to some of these videos and/or comments evaluating the videos. It will be a great introduction...