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Showing posts from May, 2009

My Bookmarks and Annotations 05/30/2009

Dangerously Irrelevant: Top 20 TED Talks podcasts for busy school administrators tags : TED , education , podcasts , TEDtalks , administrators , administration Posted from Diigo . The rest of my favorite links are here.

What Did I Do - May 29, 2009

Just a quick note on how I am writing these posts. I am doing some of it throughout the day as an open email and then closing them at the end of a day. At some point I will email them to my blog. Therefore there may be tense issues in one post... It will be part of the ride I guess. Here goes WDID for today: Friday's always seem to be weird in this role. They take one of 3 possible paths 1. Meetings 2. Disasters 3. Catch up/ close out the week Thank God today is a #3. As of 9:47 I have been closing out a list of tasks. A couple of letter's of recommendation for some co-workers, some research on the Illinois Virtual High School, and a couple of other tasks. I am about to turn my attention to my Google Reader and catch up on the happenings in the tech world. I also will be writing a blog post on how we put together bids/quotes here and the savings we tend to see from it. You should see that post elsewhere in my blog early next week. Ok it is 11:23 - gave up on Google reader. We

The RFQ Process Part 1

One of the biggest responsibilities that a Tech Director has is using their budget correctly to meet the needs of their school(s). For the 2009-10 school year I have a fabulous budget of $2,843,405 to meet all of the technology needs of our district (about $400 per student). This is a larger number than year's past (except last year) and is greater than we plan to spend each year over the next 10 years (the long term plan is about $315 per student per year). We are currently in the process of catching technology up in areas that we fell behind from the late 90's through 2006 due to a lack of funding for technology initiatives. We have in place a 3 year plan from 2008-2011 that was approved by the Board of Education that outlines our budget for each of those years. We built out our expected expenditures based on a long visioning and planning process last year. Now in year 2 we revisited those plans and put together a budget plan. We then shared that plan with all of the staf

SET Connections May Newsletter Article

Here is what I submitted for my May Newsletter Article for SetConnections . SETConnections is an organization dedicated to helping educators use technology to better meet the needs of students with individual special needs. My favorite tool for anything online is Google. I am not talking about Google Documents, Calendar, Tasks, Maps, Sites, Blogger, Moderator, Sketch-Up, iGoogle pages, or any of the other applications they offer (FOR FREE!!!). I am referring to the good old Google search. – you know – www.google .com. What is so great about it? We all know that if you search for something you can get back something that is probably related in a split second. Actually you usually get millions of pages of information that are related. There are a couple of tips out there for making these searches better. Google has several pages put together to help you use this powerful tool better. Here are some you might want to visit and some highlights associated with each: Bas

So What I Did - May 28, 2009

A lot of conversation today about 1:1 student laptops. We are trying to determine the procedures and details for a 1:1 student pilot. We think we have a couple of curricular areas that match up to try this out. We are going to use netbooks for the pilot - which ones and exactly how are TBD. I will post details on this topic when more is solidified. We are also finishing up deciding winners for our first request for quote (RFQ). More details to come on this tomorrow when the winners are announced. Kyle has been kicking butt on this and we are seeing some great pricing. Other than that Mark and I spent the day trying to pull data out of Eduphoria to determine who has not yet submitted an electronic form. I think we both learned a lot about the database and how we can leverage it for data in the future. I talked with Google today. They want to use Maine 207 in a case study for how we use Google Documents/Google Apps for Education. That should be a fun project. I finished the day off

Blog Shift in Focus

In a lot of ways I have been ignoring my blogging. Twitter has gotten most of my attention, but I think I have stumbled on a new focus for this blog. I am going to start focusing on my job. In the past I have focused on the theories behind my role as a Technology Director and the resources that support that role. However, little of that is what I actually do. Sure, visioning and theory is powerful - but what we actually do with it is what matters. From here on out you are going to read mostly about the day to day (week to week - or month to month - depending on when I can write) activities of me as a tech director. Hopefully this will serve as a record for me to reflect back on and can perhaps serve as somewhere for other directors to look at and see what someone else is doing - or perhaps a place for others to see what this job entails. For those of you following - I hope this serves a purpose for you.

My Bookmarks and Annotations 05/28/2009

Educational Podcasting in Woodland Park Colorado A clip from Channel 11 in Colorado Springs regarding the use of video podcasting (vodcasting) at Woodland Park High School. This is the brainchild of Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams who teach at WPHS tags : podcasting , education , homework , vodcasting Posted from Diigo . The rest of my favorite links are here.

My Bookmarks and Annotations 05/09/2009

MPAA to teachers: don't rip DVDs, just record your television with a camcorder - Boing Boing The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann sez, "Hearings for the DMCA triennial rulemaking are going on this week in DC, where the educational community is asking for an exemption to rip DVDs to take clips for classroom use. The MPAA responded with a video showing how to camcord (!) movies from a flat screen monitor, arguing that educators and students should do this instead of ripping DVDs. In the words of media literacy researcher Martine Courant Rife, that's like typing up a quote from a book, taking it outside, chiseling the words in a rock, photographing the rock, scanning the photo, and running OCR on it. And for what?" tags : copyright Posted from Diigo . The rest of my favorite links are here.

My Bookmarks and Annotations 05/05/2009

Pete Seeger: Ain't No One Like Him As part of a nationwide festival of tributes to the balladeer and songleader in 2005, The Nation published this Studs Terkel essay to mark Pete Seeger's 86th birthday. tags : Music YouTube - What Did You Learn in School Today? - Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton Pete Seeger sings Tom Paxton's song live on the "Tonight In Person" Show (1964). Here's some of the "best" lyrics: I learned that Washington never told a lie. I learned that soldiers seldom die. I learned that everybody's free. And that's what the teacher said to me. That's what I learned in school today. That's what I learned in school. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? tags : Music protagonize: collaborative story & creative fiction writing community Protagonize is an online community originally dedicated to the (nearly) lost art of the addventure (yes, that's spelled right), a very specific type of collaborative fiction. Recently, the site ha

My Bookmarks and Annotations 05/02/2009

WikiAnswers - How do you get handwriting recognition windows xp How do you get handwriting recognition windows xp? tags : no_tag Posted from Diigo . The rest of my favorite links are here.