SEEDlings

In 1991, I started at Mt. Valley High School in Room 220. I had a wonderful time in Room 220, but eventually switched rooms and ultimately left MVHS.

I’m pleased to say that in a few short weeks I’ll be entering another Room 220, but this one is in Dirigo High School.

I’ve accepted a position teaching history. I’m very excited to put into practice everything I’ve learned from my SEEDling friends and Center colleagues in the past five years. I consider my time at the Center a practical Ph. D program. I’ve done and learned a great deal, but it’s time to apply it. I’m looking forward to the 2 minute walk to work, although it’s going to force me to rethink how I listen to all my favorite podcasts. I love the challenge of creating cool stuff with students.

I still can be reached at mnolette@mainecenter.org.

Anyone know where I can get some lesson plans?

Last week I was working on a laptop trying to “unsync” it from our network. At the Center, when a laptop comes into the office the server gets all excited to see it’s old friend and syncs the laptop with a copy on the server.

It’s awesome! Someone has a machine go to out for repair after say dropping it in a parking lot. You grab the spare and login in at the office presto chango your stuff is back. Very handy.

Unsyncing a machine is a bear, which gets to the point of this post. My uber geek friends (Daryl from Apple and Sean Tennant) hadn’t attempted this task, so I was a bit out of my depth.

As I worked my way through the problem I found myself in NetInfo manager deleting line after line of instructions. I was almost home and misclicked. Said yes, to the “Are you sure?” and deleted the user account. The machine ran for awhile, but it was a chicken with it’s head cut off. Running slower and more unpredictably by the CPU cycle.

Thankfully, I had backed up the data, backed it up again, and hide some stuff in a .Mac account. When back up one failed. I was still able to completely reconstruct the machine without having to resync it and have the initial problem all over again.

The lesson and the ultimate point of this post. Please back up your data today. Not today, more NOW!

Happy computing.

I believe there exists a myth in public education and I’d love to know if the group can confirm or deny it’s existence.

Let’s call the myth “Out with the cranky and in with the solution.”

It’s hiring season and I’ve often heard people say, “In 10, 5, 3 more years we’ll replaced all the dead wood and we’ll have this young staff full of energy and problem ‘x’ will be solved.” I’ve heard this in two different contexts in the past week and it’s struck me as sadder than it has in the past. It’s akin to saying, “I can’t fix this today, but in 10, 5, 3 years all our problems will walk out the door and the solution will walk in.”

Has anyone ever seen this trick pulled off? Or is this an example of the necessity to put the The Stockdale Principle to work?

Hi all. As I prepare to give laptops to my staff, I’m thinking about the training session they must participate in to get their laptops for the summer. You know, care and feeding of your machine. Does anyone have a basic outline of what they’ve used in the past? Hate to reinvent the wheel and know that so many of you have done this many times before…Thanks in advance for any help, tips/tricks, warnings, or suggestions you have to offer! ~Steph.

John C. Dvorak wrote an article for PC Magazine entitled, “Knowing What to Know - The Cheating Debate.”

Here’s an interesting excerpt from it.

Today’s educational systems just do not get modernity. And by that I don’t mean that people shouldn’t learn calculus or Roman history. I mean they should be encouraged to use the most modern tools available to them to gather, organize, and present information.

That’s the point about not cheating. Let a student go online while taking a test. Why not? Let them do research on the fly while taking a test. What’s the point of memorizing that Ben Franklin was born in 1706 when that tidbit is available online? And knowing the fact itself proves nothing. Higher-education mavens tell us how important it is to learn how to learn. How about knowing what to know? Isn’t that just as important? You wouldn’t think so, as this debate rages.

One thing I can guarantee you: The eventual winner of the debate will be the folks on the modern-technology side of the aisle. Unfortunately, the celebration in the victory circle is still a ways away, and kids will suffer in the meantime.

What are the skills that teachers need to let go of? Are we still doing “old things in old ways” as Marc Prensky would say? Are our students suffering as Dvorak states?

As technology integrators we need to find ways to get teachers thinking about education in the 21st century. I posted a link to this article in our school news on FirstClass and had a great conversation with a teacher in my building about the concepts presented in it. While she didn’t agree with Dvorak, she did rethink some of her thoughts after our discussion.

Some pretty interesting educational goodies (and some not so educational) tucked in among these 10th Annual Webby Awards links.

This is a great web site for those of you who want to know about up and coming technology. It features “webheads in action”. Cheryl is a recent graduate.

Worldbridges

Bookmarking is old school. Everyone has them. Everyone wishes theirs’ were better organized. Everyone has their own. One way to build a killer, organized set of bookmarks is to use Del.icio.us. (I know it’s a stupid name, especially since you have to remember where the periods are to get the site to pop up.) However, with it you can create a set of social bookmarks. You can share it with your colleagues, you can subscribe to the bookmarks of other people and/or everyone can maintain their own list of bookmarks and build a network. You can even “tag” the bookmarks and keep them organized.

Steph Estes sent me this great link this morning, which explains del.icio.us well and will save me a bunch of typing -

TeacherSource | learning.now . Tag - You’re Delicious! | PBS

If you have a del.icio.us account, let me know and we’ll add you the SEEDling network.

In an effort to prompt our little community I went looking for a quick way to export my existing bookmarks into my del.icio.us account and using wikepedia I found the free Safarilicious. It worked great and even allowed me to “pretag” everything before I exported it. It does allow you to exclude bookmark folders from your up export. A bit of advice - the exclude bookmark folders is case sensitive. I have a folder called “Games” which has links to a bunch of fantasy baseball sites, which I didn’t really want to share with the world. I wrote the exclude test as “games” and watched them get sent to the web.

StyleMac.com » Safarilicious - Export your Safari Bookmarks To del.icio.us

Del.icio.us - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In an email, Mike Arsenault raised the issues of creating a “tagging convention.” Without some predefined thinking our social bookmarking could get a little crazy. Image how many terms you could come up with for a David Warlick podcast. (david warlick, warlick, podcast, podcasting, Podcast, Podcasting, etc) I’ve asked Mike to share his thoughts about what a convention might look like.

Welcome to the SEEDlings blog.

This blog and accompanying wiki is for educators interested in learning how to use technology to achieve Maine’s Learning Results.

This is an open blog and everyone is welcome into the garden.

So, what’s with the name?

The name stems from a bunch of Maine educators that just won’t let go! Recently, a group of educators most of whom has connections to SEED (http://seed.mainecenter.org) gathered and expressed the desire to continue working and playing together.

So, where’s this going?

Frankly, I have no idea, but I’m in.

So, who are you?

I was the technology facilitator for SEED and I believe the person who started using the term “SEEDling” on a regular basis. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.

So, what’s next?
Hopefully, a bunch of posts from old and new friends.