Beyond School

Ignore this, or if you see “Technorati Links: litjourneys” at the bottom of this post and want the same for your Blogger or WordPress (MU included) blog, go drag Oddiophile’s Technorati Bookmarklet into your bookmarks toolbar (at least on Firefox 2.0).

I don’t know if this is redundant or not, but it doesn’t hurt.

Technorati Tags: litjourneys

[Update: I notice that I could have saved money by getting a FREE domain name when signing up with PowWeb, instead of paying $20 for two years with GoDaddy. Live and learn. Also, PowWeb needs 24 hours to set up my account before I can install WordPress MU, so hold tight. More: you can’t hear my students on this screencast - it didn’t record the Yugma-Skype conference audio. Even more: you’ll see Diigo website highlighting and annotating at work when you watch the screencast. If you don’t use it, you’re missing out. It auto-forwards your bookmarks and tags to del.icio.us (if you set it up to in preferences), and gives you annotating and highlighting and sharing power that del.icio.us itself doesn’t give. Finally *pant* - thanks to Wesley Fryer for the PowWeb tip and other advice he gave in Shanghai.)

If you’re interested in how to buy your own domain name (web address), and buy a webhost server package so you can run your own website, here’s the first of two screencasts walking Christina and Daniel, two of the Project Global Cooling members at my school, through setting up our Project Global Cooling website with WordPress MU at http://projectglobalcooling.org. The site won’t be up until we install WPMU, which we’re about to do. (Do yourself a favor and watch the large size on the Screencast-o-matic.com channel. Much easier on the eyes, and you can leave comments.)

Head on over to Patrick Higgins‘ Voicethread for his staff development workshop to both explore one very nifty educational tool and to have fun helping Patrick at the same time!

(Yes, the W.C. Fields icon is mine.)

(click for larger image)

I have to wake up in five hours to run this conference tomorrow, so I’ll probably be worthless. But the opening session - an hour-and-a-half warmer - will consist largely of this competition, in four-person faculty teams led by one captain each, to race through this wiki page and be first to equip their MacBooks with the “Eleven Essential Accounts for the Read-Write Web.” Each member of the winning team gets a $10 gift certificate for Starbucks. (Politically, I’m not sure how I feel about that. But it was my idea.)

Note: they’ll have already joined our Twitter group and taken the Multiple Intelligences questionnaire, plus had a brief opening “Why Web 2.0?” presentation, before starting this activity. (That Twitter slice explains the inclusion of TinyURL as an “essential tool.”)

I talked with my principal, and we arrived at this post-workshop reflective “assignment”: create a digital expression, using whatever multimedia mode you’re pulled to play with, of your most valuable take-away from this conference - this could be simple creative play, since “unlocking teacher creativity” is a primary goal here. Post it on the Ning, and we’ll rank entries as a staff. The winning entry receives the grand prize: an iPod Nano. They have a week. I look forward to seeing, reading, hearing, watching all the various forms of creative digital expression from our staff.

But we’ll see how the reality shakes out.

Anyway, the wiki was text-only, and murderously intimidating for that. So I spent a couple or three hours adding graphics.

You’re welcome to take a look. Feedback in the comments section are welcome. Please don’t edit it, though! (And the Diigo activity will not work until I add the magic touches right before the workshop starts.)

I’d love it if anybody would visit our twitter account and make an appearance on our Twitter Badge. You can find it by searching for “create21” or “KIS Staff.” (Twitter was acting up tonight, though.) We’re at GMT +9, and will go live from 8a. to 3p.

I’ll have Skype up, too, so if you’re available for a casual “call-in” appearance, I would both enjoy and appreciate that. Send me a chat message at cburell on Skype if you’re open to an appearance in Seoul!

‘Night, Tweets.

That has to be the geekiest title I’ve ever written. I promise it’s English. Anyway:

Just a little tutorial share about one of the million reasons I love Firefox web-browser (and curse at my students lovingly when they open things in Internet Explorer, or even Safari). I’m talking about Firefox Addons.

This 4 minute tutorial simply shows people a handy little addon called “MeasureIt,” which is a ruler for quick pixel-measurements of screen areas. I use it to embed a Group Twitter Badge for our school’s professional development Ning (and yes, I’m flattering Jeff Utecht by stealing his use of this handy idea at the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference last month. He’s still my guru now and then, without even realizing it).

So here it is. Enjoy (and by the way, use the “embed” code, not the “html” code that I use in the tutorial - or try both and choose the one that’s best for you).