iSean

I am missing much of Thursday and i had 2 sessions i really wanted to see. dang. but later today and tomorrow i have a full day planned.

Thursday
• I Can Do What With Moodle? in the Vandenberg B room (4:00 pm- 5:00 pm)

Friday
• Evaluating K-12 One-to-One Laptop Initiatives in Lower West Michigan in the Nelson room (8:30 am- 9:30 am) *I am a presenter
• Resources for Assisting in the Transition to Online Learning in the Nelson room (10:00 am-11:00 am)
• Twitter: #Teaching #Learning in the Emerald B room (11:30 am-12:30 pm) *I am a presenter
• Transforming Our Classrooms With a One-to-One Laptop Program in the Grand Gallery B room (1:00 pm- 2:00 pm)

perhaps i’ll see you around at MACUL 2010.

i am a fairly geeky guy (if it wasn’t obvious). but  before i had an iPhone i had never sent a text message. i just couldn’t see the enjoyment in hitting the #2 three times to type the letter C. my phone didn’t get email so it really was just a phone. while that’s great for voice conversations, i had email for something less synchronized and i figured i had my bases covered. well, i upgraded to an iPhone as soon as the price dropped big on the first generation. i didn’t have anyone to text at first, but we soon bought my wife an iPhone as well. that’s when things took off. then, Apple opened the app store, which allowed us to customize our phones like never before. i haven’t gone overboard, but i do have 4 pages of apps added to my iPhone and i frequently delete apps that i find i am not using after trying them for a spell.

last year, we went to Europe for a few months. my wife and i took our iPhones and they were great, but we had to pay a bundle to have audio and also web access while in Europe. last week, we went to Canada and our trip was about hiking and canoeing and exploring the northern shores of Lake Superior (we even saw a bear).

a black bear

i decided we’d leave our iPhones turned completely off. this was a back to nature vacation and i didn’t want to be bothered with work and the other nuances of life for a spell. turns out, this was asking quite a lot. i hadn’t realized how ingrained my phone had become into my life. even little things like using it as a watch for the time were missed. i didn’t realize how often i check my email as i would habitually reach for my pocket to grab my iPhone only to find it was not there. each morning, i use my iPhone to check the weather forecast for the day. i like to scan through twitter updates periodically as well. i check the headlines a few times each day. i typically log into my bank to see my credit card activity and then off to check the stock market and a few individual stocks i follow. i am also a bit obsessed with checking currency exchange rates, which is even better to do while vacationing in another country. yet, i had access to none of this. and. it. was. difficult. “honey, where do you want to eat” my wife would ask. “just a minute and i’ll jump on Yelp to see what’s around” — not available. doh!

i didn’t realize how wired i was. it’s just become a part of me. and losing my connectivity felt a bit like the time i had been on broadband for more than a year and then moved to a new house that only had dial-up (summer of 2000). at least with dial-up i still had access, but it was so slow compared to broadband that i’d frequently just wait until i got to the office for any real work. but to drop my iPhone entirely was even more difficult. i love instant access. love it. and, for those of you wondering . . . yes, i really enjoyed our vacation and had a grand time roughing it. i just didn’t anticipate that it would be so difficult to go without being wired for just over a week. that’s a long, long time in these days of everything being instantaneous.

is it bad that we’re becoming so dependent on these technologies?

well i’ve downloaded the wordpress app for my iphone . . . and given my last 3 posts i am starting to wonder whether we might be becomming too connected? is that even possible?

this is my first official post on my new domain site. I never intended for my blog to be on my atticmooses.com testing server. when i originally made it, i started it on my testing server and then couldn’t figure out how to move it. my knowledge for this kind of database stuff has improved greatly and i finally decided to shift over to seanlancaster.com/blog so here we are and hopefully this move is permanent. i finally bring together all of my online worlds (at least the ones that i control).

well i have certainly been enjoying the spring thus far. my kids are 8 and 6 and we are turning into bike riding fools. we’ve also taken a liking to geocaching as i noted last summer here. the more we seek treasures and find them, the more i see educational uses for geocaching. when we started last summer, i was pretty much the guy in charge. i controlled the Garmin 60CSx GPS unit and did all of the precursor work finding which caches we’d hunt, etc. I now allow my kids to use the GPS unit to follow the compass and map built into the unit as well as help plan the route we’ll take on our bikes and once we get off of our bikes. they are learning how to read a map and how to use the map. When we get home, we can transfer the data from the GPS and load it into Google Earth to show others the exact path we covered from home back to home (the GPS drops virtual breadcrumbs ever 30 seconds — that’s the settings we use). yesterday we headed downtown along the river next to my office and found a few caches. here is an example from the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum grounds of how one might be hidden:

the rock that my son’s hand is on was actually covering the cylinder. once the cylinder is opened there is a peanut butter jar inside with the cache. we signed the log book and removed a golf ball and left a little something for the next geocacher to find it. we then carefully placed the rock back over the closed cache and headed off for the next find.

some of the caches can be hidden so cleverly that it can take a long time to find the cache even when you know the exact coordinates. this one above took us about 5 minutes once we arrived. you can’t see it here, but there are small trees and evergreens all around us so i spent much time looking up. there are many rocks larger than the one seen here and my kids scurried around looking to and fro.

i recommend signing up to use the website geocaching.com. it’s free; though, you can pay about $30/year for some special search features and an email alert for new caches, etc. i think it’s worth paying just to support the site as it’s quite well done. i like searching for caches using Google maps as shown here from my area:

and then you find one and you can narrow in on it and even have the website send the information directly to your GPS (at least with my Garmin this works):

you can see the difficulty is 3 stars out of 5. look at the photo far above and you can see how this might be difficult to find. sometimes the caches is very easy once you arrive. my kids are getting to the point where we like to look for 3 stars and above for difficulty, but we’ll make exceptions if the terrain is at least 2 stars or so. our favorite caches are the multiple-stage caches. these typically have many steps to find the final treasure. since the steps along the way don’t have a treasure, the hiding places can be much more difficult. for example, last year we did one where the first 4 stages were just giving us the coordinates to potentially find the next coordinates. the creator was able to put these coordinates in creative and hidden places. for example, here was a stage that had the coordinates hidden behind the number 5 on a signpost along a path. the 5 was hanging on by a nail and it was sheer luck that we figured it out (you can barely see the black writing under where the 5 rests):

and another showing the final prize hidden in an ammo box that is stuffed in a cement base from a thrown out pole in an area with a lot of trash and debris. this was hard to find as well because you just don’t think that there’d be a hollow area in the cement base until you roll it over:

anyway, this has quickly become a favorite hobby for my kids and me. i like getting them out on their bikes and getting exercise while also exercising our brains to solve problems, etc. highly recommended.

one of the biggest barriers to technology integration into the classroom by k-12 teachers is the lack of time. i am experiencing it right now myself. i decided to take an overload section of a course and I also took 8 thesis students on top of that. egads!! what was i thinking (or not)? classes are going well, but my free time is dwindling. i used to love adding to my blog because i was spending time reading other blogs and keeping abreast of the happenings in the field, etc. Now my blog seems like a burden. and this is what happens with regard to using technology in the classroom for some teachers. i wish i had answers for this, but i don’t.

i have my students each post stuff to their own blog. i also have them find other ed tech professionals who keep a blog and my students are to read and respond (and maybe even participate in a dialog with these other professionals). this activity goes well, but the physical act of managing 70 students commenting on 70 blogs is extremely time consuming. i have my students use a code name (e.g., tom205) if they want and then they post the URL to their comment and the name they used. so, to manage this i am using now free NetNewWire — one of the most popular RSS readers on any platform even though it only works on a Mac. i had to enter all 70 student blog addresses into my reader. i then have to check each entry to find the link to the blog where they commented. inevitably, some of the students will post their URL wrong where they commented (e.g., http://blogger.com/add_comment) and i’ll have to contact them to find out the actual URL. i try to and respond to every single student, particularly if the other ed tech professional does not respond to the comment my student left. while i think this is a valuable assignment and gives my students to hear other voices in the field beside my voice, i also recognize that this is eating up my time. i have 7 discussion groups for my students using phpBB forums. here we are just 6 weeks in and look at the number of posts I’ve had to read thus far and a preview of just a screenshot from one discussion to see how my forum looks:

i am approaching 2000 posts and I have very thoughtful students who put much effort into our class discussions. just for the heck of it, i pretended to print just one group discussion on 1 of our two topics this week — it was about open source software. the print preview was 23 pages. keep in mind that i have 7 groups and there were 2 discussion questions. my point is that teaching can get overwhelming and this is true at every level of teaching particularly for teachers who are new to the field and just starting out. so, technology can quickly take a back seat and then these new teachers start forming habits that do not include using technologies and eventually it gets harder and harder to shift these practices to teaching with technology. i wish i had answers for this, but right now i am wearing a life jacket myself. doh.

one key, i think, is to help students realize that technology can save time in the long run even if it takes more time in the short run. sure, we might be struggling to keep our head above water this year, but every little bit we can do to save time in the future is time gained in the future. ooh, i see a new version of WordPress is now available and i am encouraged to update right now. that update might be just what i need to help keep my site that much more secure in te future. off to do it now. ;~)

holy gee whiz, you wouldn’t believe the hosting/server issues i’ve had over the past week+. i am using 4 different hosting services for various domain names i manage. 2 of the 4 hosting services have really failed me this week. first, the domain i have for my courses went down the day before classes started. this included all of my phpBB forum installations. doh. these were on a site using iPowerweb (no link as I don’t want to promote them). to make matters worse, here we are almost a week later and they still haven’t resolved the issue. i talked with various people and tried online chats, email, etc. to no avail. they are working on it. apparently, they moved me to a new server and missed about 60% of my content so everything was broken. i tried to copy stuff over for them, but the mySQL database stuff was all broken. i quickly registered the .net version of my .com site for my classes and set up everything with a new host. really crummy that i had to do this at the last second — the setup time alone took me probably 10 hours that i had already spent on the old and broken site.

but that wasn’t my only issue. this site has been down for nearly a week as well. this site is hosted with bluehost (again, no link). they’ve been pretty good until now, but this outage is far too long. this site hosts my blog, but also some class stuff (e.g., drupal installations for class content). i don’t really have this stuff backed up and i have another week’s worth of material due to my students on Monday. I have been doing it from scratch and i hope to have it ready by Monday but i’ll be working late tonight, tomorrow and Sunday night unless Bluehost can get my site working again (and, if this is posted on Friday night then they got it working and i was able to post this draft — EDIT 2:15 Saturday and it’s working). okay, they have things mostly working again, but my blog has a mySQL table missing and that’s causing an error. apparently, they upgraded PHP and Apache recently and my site has been down since then. so both issues with hosting companies is because of an upgrade. i never upgrade any tools i use during a semester, but i couldn’t stop the hosting companies from upgrading their equipment, etc. crummy that this all hit at once.

the worst thing about iPowerweb is the length of time it takes to get someone on the phone. i had old phones, but i was on the phone for over 1/2 hour without getting a person and my phone died. i ended up ordering new phone set on Amazon with overnight delivery and now i have 17 hours of talk time. watch out tech support, you’re now going to hear from me . . . and i can sit on hold for a long time. doh. i should point out that Bluehost had me talking with tech support in about 5 minutes of holding. that’s world’s and world’s better than iPowerweb. i think i’ll drop iPowerweb ASAP. i just have to figure out how to move a phpBB database from one phpBB installation on one host to another phpBB installation on a different host. if i can do that then iPowerweb will soon be dead to me.

Technorati Tags: blogs, hosting, mySQL

we have finals next week and i had many projects and assignments due here at the end of the semester, which i’ve been grading like crazy. sooooo, i’ll be back next week around wednesday.

i have some neat trends in data from my weekly class surveys to share.

cheers!

i don’t often post Apple Macintosh specific stuff here. In fact, I use both a Mac and a PC; though, the PC is on my Mac. heh. but the newest operating system for the Mac is being released tomorrow and it’s supposed to be a great upgrade. i know on the PC side that many folks are less than enthusiastic about Vista with many folks choosing to stick with XP for now (and that includes me). but i’ll be upgrading my computers tomorrow when the fedex driver drops my new software off at my house. you can read about the 300+ new features in the OS release here, but one thing has me most excited . . . and it has to do with iChat.

i rarely use video chatting that’s built into iChat, but i now have some new folks to add to my buddy list. last week my dad’s Dell died. i helped him upgrade to a new Mac. yesterday my brother’s Dell died and he’ll be buying a new Mac laptop this weekend. both intend to use video chatting to talk with me and also to my children. but i am looking at this from another angle. every time they’d have problems in the past and give me a call, i’d have to talk them through what to do without knowing exactly what was on their screen. the new iChat has VCN built into the application. in other words, i will be able to chat with them and then have them click a single button on the iChat window interface to that allows me to see their screen and even take it over. this is going to make my tech support life much smoother.

i anticipate my father needing this much more than my brother. in fact, my brother did a quick search the other day and found a Mac using lawyer’s blog. this lawyer talks about all of the applications he uses to succeed so just reading this convinced my brother. my brother will be fine. but my dad is a whole different ball game. my dad helps to keep me grounded as i teach technology. i don’t think i can ever encounter a student who has technology skills that are below my father’s. i think my father has had a computer and a broadband connection for about 3 years now and he’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between being in Outlook Express and Internet Explorer. Most of the tech support I’d provide will be just helping him to learn how to do pretty basic stuff, but my hope is that this stuff is simple enough that it starts to be understood and that he stops fearing technology. anyway, here’s the quick description of screen sharing.

# Screen Sharing

Collaborate with a buddy via iChat. Work on a Keynote presentation together, surf the web as a team, or help each other with an iMovie project. iChat initiates the connection (asking permission first) with an audio chat so you can talk things through as you work or play. Trade views of each other’s desktops. Even drag files from one computer to the other.

i also bought a new external HD to accompany the new OS. i’ll be using this for Time Machine:

#Back Up Everything
Automatic backup, built right into your Mac. Never worry about losing a file again. Time Machine stores an up-to-date copy of all your Mac’s files on an external hard drive, personal file sharing volume, or Mac OS X Server. That includes system files, applications, accounts, preferences, music, photos, movies, and documents.

# Go Back In Time
See what your computer looked like in the past. Select a specific date and let Time Machine find your most recent changes, or do a Spotlight search to find exactly the file you’re looking for. Once you do, click Restore and Time Machine brings it back to the present.

my copy is scheduled to be delivered by 10:30 AM tomorrow. i need to get as much grading done today as i can. ;~)

Technorati Tags: Apple, Macintosh, leopard

well, i applied to do a sabbatical a year from now and i have passed the first round already. the personnel committee unanimously supported my proposal. faculty vote comes monday and then it’s on to divisional and through the channels. i wrote months ago about wanting to do research in Europe, but i couldn’t get anything off of the ground. my wife certainly did. she also applied for a sabbatical and has contacts in Italy, Paris, Amsterdam and even in Prague. i had nothing. so i decided to switch my focus to a non location specific project. i am going to be writing a Wiki-based textbook.

i previously wrote about wikitextbooks as far back as early 2006 here (Feb.) and here (Jan.). i tried hard to get a wikitextbook off of the ground and running, but i just did’t have the time. i now might have the time to get the infrastructure in place and even a decent version up and running. i have given it a lot of thought since my initial efforts. i have explored current wikitextbook projects that are in the works. one thing i’ve noticed about other projects is that they’ve been in the works for a long time. wikitextbooks are very similar to open source software, yet open source software seems to be having better success at getting projects up and running. in my sabbatical proposal, i explore why this is and why a wiki like Wikipedia can realize incredible success while wikitextbooks cannot. i don’t think the wikipedia model can work on a wikitextbook and my model will be a modified version of what Wikipedia uses. of course this won’t make wiki purists very happy, but they can stick to their guns and not see a wikitextbook realized all they want. heh.

my proposal takes the position that textbooks should be accessible to all students. an electronic version of a textbook can be much more accessible than a paper version. the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) is dedicated to Universal Design in Learning (UDL) and UDL is all about making instruction and content accessible to all students. Cast describes UDL as:

* Multiple means of representation, to give learners various ways of acquiring information and knowledge,
* Multiple means of expression, to provide learners alternatives for demonstrating what they know,
* Multiple means of engagement, to tap into learners’ interests, offer appropriate challenges, and increase motivation.

UDL is at the heart of my proposal. personally, i think all textbooks should be provided in electronic format so that all students can more easily access the content. if a blind student wanted to use a screen reader then that could happen with an e-version. if a student with a learning disability wanted to listen then the same tools could apply for that. a student with low vision might just want the font size increased, etc. one textbook can be designed to work with all students instead of the paper model that has to be special made for some students. bleh.

i’ll be talking more about my proposal as it makes it way through the channels. if ultimately accepted then i can start work as soon as possible so i’ll rely on the few folks who read my blog to give me some feedback on various directions i’ve chosen. exciting times ahead . . .

Technorati Tags: CAST, ed tech, open source, textbook, universal design, wiki, wikitextbook