The Moss-Free Stone

I was reading an article about yet another school district banning yet another social technology this morning, as Hattiesburg has protected its citizens by banning student-teacher communication via text messaging or social networks. No need to bother wasting precious testing-time crafting creative applications of such tools in order to take advantage of their popularity in [...]

At the Decatur Jump! event last week and, for that matter, anytime I share with any group a sampling of Web 2.0 technologies, I reminded participants not to be overwhelmed, but to consider their own curriculum and their own students and to try to identify 2 or 3 tools which would be most beneficial to [...]

Firefox is continuing to grow in user numbers, with over 8 million users downloading the 3rd version of the browser on its June 18th release day, a world record for a software download. The worldwide market share of Firefox topped 19% by the end of June (story). One of the biggest appeals of Firefox for [...]

I finally was successful at uploading a video of some interviews I conducted this spring with students who published their writing to a class blog this year. In just six months, the students’ blog had over 1,000 visitors from six continents! What an effective way to motivate our students to write! The blog also includes [...]

Live blog (as long as my battery lasts…) of Steve Hargadon’s session at NECC.

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Here is a short, well-crafted slideshow created by Sacha Chua, an enterprise 2.0 specialist with IBM. It lists some very practical steps to blogging effectively for work, including doing lots of reading, sharing knowledge through writing, and tooting one’s own horn, so to speak, by sharing successes and accomplishments. Great focus on how blogs can [...]

I used the Google Documents survey tool to create a brief survey over the use of Internet tools by educators in our district. Seventy teachers responded. The survey turned out as expected, generally, with a few surprises. Some of the results:
Time spent online away from work:

31% <2 hours
37% 2-5 hours
16% 5-10 hours
16% [...]

For any educators out there who like the idea of Web 2.0 and recognize its importance, but are too intimidated or otherwise reluctant to dive right in, I offer the following list of 5 things to try first. I think these tools will give you an idea of how simple it is to create online [...]

Google Documents has added a great new feature to their spreadsheet tool. Now you can easily create online surveys, forms, even quizzes. The video below shows how to use the tool. I used it to create a short Internet use survey for the teachers in my district in just a few minutes. Participants are invited [...]