To Learn Twice

Question-Answering Service, Yahoo BOSS allows developers to create their own customized search apps based on Yahoo’s search engine, and the Google App Engine is a platform for hosting apps. Vik Singh, the engineer who leads the Yahoo Boss project (and a former Google engineer) created a simple Question-Answering Service, where you put in a question, and it tries to come up with the answer based on the top 50 results from Yahoo. (So, if you ask, “Who invented the light bulb?,” it looks for the most popular dates in the top 50 results and returns: “Thomas Edison”). tags: search , google , Yahoo! , q&a

Kinda live blogging Hall's presentation - trying to "catch the gist" "High School Girls Can do More with a Phone in a Bag than you can Ever Imagine" Parents are going to start requiring that their kids carry cellphones in schools because parents want to track monitor stalk tether etc... their kids Schools are losing the debate about whether or not a kid can carry a cellphone Cellphones are turning over quickly and they are changing. Nokia is largest manufacturer of digital cameras and media players US is 3-4 years behind the tech world in cellphone use Third world countries use cellphones - even Cuba The Taliban forbids cellphones and so does a High School near you. Hall demonstrates a live video feed from Qik with the help of Steve Dembo Ideas Send in lesson plans via video Announcements - video messages that anyone can see Pre and post assignments with your kids Cellphones will all have video soon. We should start thinking about how we will use this in educat...

Several of my colleagues at NECC have been asking how the website is coming. I thought I would just blog an update... The tools are coming together better than we ever imagined. Teachers will have 8 tools to add information to their website. Each of these buttons opens a form based interface that allows teachers to input specific information very quickly. This is a sample of the teacher's page where their information is populated. Here is the cool part: We are also building a personalized page where information from all of a student's classrooms and activities is collated in one place. 1 stop shopping for students and parents. You can see the student page graphical design here .

After a lot of planning yesterday's presentation went real well. I got some great feedback from the participant's evaluations, and have several things to adapt, but it went well. I still want to add podcasting resources, more on google groups, make mention to second live and VLE's, and some other things I left out. It is amazing how fast 8 hours can go. It was great to be in front of a class again. I really miss that everyday.

Following up on my Web 2.0 presentation using Zoho Notebook I have collated together a collection of my favorite Digital Storytelling resources in a new notebook for a presentation later this week. The challenge of this presentation is that I am running it in 2 labs at the same time. So here is the plan: Intro about the power of storytelling and follow it up with the added advantages that telling it digitally does. Demo the basics of how photostory works Individuals work on their own story for about an hour. Quick Q&A - share successes. More playtime Close by letting people circulate and show off their work in progress. What do you think? Is there anything I am missing?

I am working on a presentation on Web 2.0 Tools and how to use them in education. I am trying something new and using Zoho notebook as the presentation tool. I have really liked how easy it is to insert video and webpages directly into the pages. Once I got more comfortable with the UI and where to click I was able to put stuff together quite quickly. Of course I am borrowing and stealing from across the web. You can see the presentation here I am open for suggestions or stuff I missed. I am going to start one on digital storytelling next.