Mr. Szymanski

I just came across an interesting Google feature. It is called “Trends”. It lets you search for different terms and gives you a chart comparing how much the word(s) have been searched for with Google’s search engine.

http://www.google.com/trends

Searching

Google

I attended the CECA 2006 conference yesterday (www.ceca-ct.org). There were many excellent workshops on a wide variety of educational technology. Below are my notes from the sessions that I attended.

Keynote Links

Presentor: Davide Warlick
http://davidwarlick.com
Handouts: http://handouts.davidwarlick.com/
One of the main points of his presentation focused on the legitimacy of the information that we find on the internet. The site martinlutherking.com was used as an example. Even though the site looks legitimate on the surface, if you look at the webmaster’s email address the domain is actually from a “White Power” Site. The information that used to be presented to students before the Internet was mostly legitimate information (Library resources mostly). Now, what the Internet has added is a need for teachers/students to be able to discern what information is legitimate and called “truth”.

Some links that he mentioned in his presentation that might be worth reviewing…
The Long Tail: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
Blog: http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/

First Session
Communicating Safely in Online Environments
Antoinette Bruciati, Ph.D & María Lizano-DiMare, Ed.D – Sacred Heart University
Teach safe and responsible use of the Internet. Many students are unaware of the
dangers that await them online. This presentation will cover a variety of cyber security
topics including peer-to peer communication, Internet predators, and cyber bullying. A
list of Internet resources and links to classroom activities will be provided.

This session was an informational session that covered a lot of things that I am aware of already, but there were a couple things that have come about since the last time I researched this subject.

Second Session
Behind the Scenes Look at a Podcasting Server
Devin McLaughlin – Senior Systems Engineer, Apple Computer
Finished recording your podcast, but not sure how to get it on the web? Please join us
for this behind the scenes look at getting your podcast on the web. A variety of subjects
will be covered during the session from what type of server is needed, to what the
difference is between an RSS stream or subscribing to a Podcast. This informative
session will get you up and going in no time with plenty of time for questions and
answers.
This was a technical look at the nitty-gritty stuff behind a podcast. I won’t bore you with the technical details. He did mention some Macintosh only software that did sound interesting. It is called: Profcast. It Records the presentation of PowerPoint or keynote slides as the presentation is being delivered. Afterwards it gives you a GarageBand project that can be exported as a podcast.

Third Session
An Educator’s Guide to Weblogs – Warlick
It is a sign of our times that such an awkward term as “blogging” should integrate itself
so quickly and so powerfully into our culture. This session will acquaint educators with
the concept of weblogs (blogs), ways that they are affecting many aspects of our
culture, and strategies for using weblogs to promote better teaching and learning.
Participants will also learn how to provide a safe and secure blogging experience for
students.

This was an interesting session that discussed the use of web blogs in the classroom. The main conclusion was that including the “blogisphere” which students are familiar with is an excellent way to encourage writing. Security concerns seemed to be the main concern. How to protect student identities and keep the bad that comes with the Internet out can be a major problem with blogging. Solutions such as Moodle and classblogmeister.com others where mentioned as a solution to this concern. The other main concern that came up was whether or not grammatical correctness should be required. Listen in to the podcast on his site to hear the discussion. Personally I like what I write on the internet to be a correct as possible. I feel that ideas can be expressed much more clearly if the reader does not have to guess at how to interpret what is being written. That is why I used the draft feature (this keeps the text from public view) in Moodle’s blog to write my notes all day and today I just cleaned it up in word to post on my main site.

Links…
http://handouts.davidwarlick.com/
http://classblogmeister.com/ (Designed by the presentor)
http://edublogs.org/
“Free blogs for teachers, trainers, lecturers, librarians and other edu professionals”.

You are logged onto a linux machine and need to download something from the internet when in the terminal, but you cannot because it is not using a proxy and your corporate network does not allow direct connections to the internet (A good thing). For instance using a program such a wget. To solve this type these commands at the terminal..

export http_proxy="http://192.168.1.1:8080"
export ftp_proxy="http://192.168.1.1:8080"

Linux

Command Line

Proxy

wget