“One small step for man, One giant leap for mankind.” Forty years ago on June 16th, history was made.  I was only 7 months old when the lunar landing was made, but it inspired many many dreams that I had and still have today.  Talk about a time of inspiration.  I remember when I was 7 or 8 and “wall murals” (basically giant wall paper scenes) were “in fashion,” one entire side of my room was turned into the lunar surface looking back onto the Earth in all of the beautiful blue and green glory.

Over the last week I have been learning more and more about the lunar mission.  The goals and dreams of the mission, the challenges, I have even been witness to the launch and landing replayed in real-time.  What an amazing achievement.  Here are a few resources that have come in handy for me if you are looking to get a fix for your astronaut jones…

We Choose the Moon

Live Blog of the Moon Landing

Moon in Google Earth

40 Year Anniversary Lunar Landing Edition (Video Compilation by Crunchgear)

For those of you who are skeptics, or know skeptics of the lunar landing, Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter just sent back the first pictures of the landing sites… Really skeptics… REALLY? time to find another conspiracy theory…

What an amazing time we live in.  The fact that 40 years ago we could “beam” images back from the moon (or even land on it) to today where we can relive those moments in real time courtesy of technology… think of what the next 40 years will hold.  For those educators out there who will be teaching lessons with this material, I would love for you to drop a line on what you are doing.  If I can help in any way working to tie our schools together in a collaborative project on the Lunar Missions please let me know.

Today, I had a great time working with my direct counterparts in my district to discuss the merits and limitations of two online resources: Google (docs and sites) and Zoho suite (office suite, wiki and Zoho Business which pulls them all together in a nice dashboardrd package).

Effectively for about 3 1/2 hours we discused the applications and possibilities for time investment as classroom resources, our own personal use, the future direction of our district, and the possible Microsoft alternative with the launch of the Tech Preview on Office 2010 yesterday.

Some background: As a district we make a significant yearly investment (~$140k) in Microsoft applications. Additionally, this summer we are undergoing a Novell to Microsoft NOS transition to better position us for planned future application and platform enhancents. All of these initiatives seem to be both driving us toward a client based application platform as well as toward a desired cloud based environment. Especially if we begin to realize our planning for a 1:1 computing environment for our staff and 13,000 students. Lowering costs by moving to a cloud based office application suite will help offset the increased hardware need to satisify 1:1…

Our goal for the day was to end up with a strong enough argument to choose one platform (Google or Zoho) and commit to it’s a group for our collaborative use for the next two years. This coupled with a strong desire to have a flexible enough environment that will allow for our sharing outside of the group via a wiki type interface with other members of our community (faculty, staff, and possibly students) on an as needed basis. The last part of the challenge was/is to have a relatively secure enough environment to share some material that may be considered sensitive by some, irrelevant by others, and critical by a few…

While the discussions themselves were great, I was left disappointed that even I struggled to be able to make a full committment to an online resource. I was even more frustrated that some of counterparts were only willing to invest time in a limited subset of applications as opposed to committing fully to a suite in a completely collaborative environment. I was especially saddened because some of the arguments each of us used (myself included) were the same arguments we struggle against when working with faculty and staff in general regarding technology and change: don’t want to complicate things by adding “more,” I don’t need another email account, let’s keep this simple, I don’t have time to learn all of this… blah, blah, blah…

What I am struggling with is the fact that if we (the people looking to drive dynamic change within our curriculum’s and the ones responsible for leading the way into learning centers leveraging technology) cannot move ourselves from the “known” (Office Suite) to the somewhat “unknown” a fully collaborative environment leveraging outstanding web-based applications, how can we ever expect to help move a hesitant, reluctant, faculty and students into this arena?  Is there a compelling enough reason to leverage these technologies on a full-time basis for educational and personal use, or is there not?  Are gravity and fear of change enough to overcome compelling reason? Can you preach without practice? What will be a significant enough factor that will influence this change?

Will Richardson’s post on “Tinkering with Utopia” hit home today after my experience.  His reflections of Phillip Schlechty’s book “Leading for Learning: How to Transform Schools into Learning Organizations” make me concerned about change in the educational arena overall.

Schlechty refers to past efforts at reform as “tinkering toward utopia” and says that if we continue to introduce change at the edges, we’ll continue to spin our wheels.

I know I am just taking a snippet of Will’s thoughts and the actual direction for his post are divergent from mine, but there are definite undercurrents of change happening in education today… However, in practice I fear those currents are having the overall impact of canceling each other out. I question whether we can possibly learn as leaders to begin to really align some of those currents to become mutually beneficial to effect the real change that Will and many others are looking towards. Are we spinning our wheels?

Photo “graffiti struggle” from zen on Flickr

– Post From My iPhone

Ok, it is easier for the first day at least.  I’ll let you know when I hit day 30 or 60… I wil say that there is nothing better to help you succeed at something than forcing yourself to do it…

Today I ran exclusively on Zoho applications (except for my corporate email).  I know that this is not really new, but in a way I feel that it was.  In the past I always had Microsoft Office 2007 installed on my tablet pc.  It was an easy fall back, really easy.  Let me explain.  Three times today, I needed to open an existing document, spreadsheet, and presentation… in the past, I would unconsciously just double-click the file I needed and poof, the associated application would open.  However, without having Office installed, I needed to think twice, and react in a new way. 

First thing this morning, I needed to revise the quantity of a parts order.  I had the data in a Excel spreadsheet.  Oops… No Excel on this tablet anymore… for a second I actually had to pause to think of what I needed to do about this.  Then, I opened Zoho Sheet, and simply clicked the "import button" and browsed right to my file.  It kind of felt like opening Excel, and then clicking "file open." In about 15 seconds poof the file opened, and I was able to update the quantities, with all of the formulas importing correctly and recaltulating the totals instantly.  Pretty cool.  As a side benefit, I now had/have that particular spreadsheet available via my iPhone.  This came in handy later in the day when a collegue of mind needed information from that same sheet.  I was able to bring it up when we were away from our PC’s…

My second, opportunity to interact with Zoho in a completely "Office-like" situation was when I needed to fill out a point of contact document for a video conference call I have with Pearl Harbor this Friday.  I saved the attachment from email, and then "imported" it into Zoho Writer.  After providing a bit of information, I was ready to send the file back to my contacts at Pearl. This time, instead of going through the "normal" process of saving a document and then "attaching" it to an email, I simply clicked "Share" and "Email Out" in Zoho Writer.  I entered a few email addresses, and off the edited document went as the body of the email right from my zoho mail account.  Nice.

Finally, later in the day, I reviewed an old PowerPoint presentation for some information that I need for a presentation I will be doing for my Board of Education.  This time there was no uncomfortableness in what I needed to do.  I launched Zoho Show from the desktop links I created earlier in the day, and imported my presentation, in about a minute, I was moving through the information with ease… All in all it was a really easy day living in the cloud.

The air is nice up here, anyone want to join me?

Well it is a new day, and we have “Sprung Forward” (Day Light Savings Time, US) so I am continuing my adventures in the cloud… I almost feel like I am renewing a new year’s resolution.  Interesting feeling…

Im my press forward to continue my adventures, I recently needed to do a clean install of my OS as, even against Microsoft’s own recommendation, I upgraded my Tablet’s Vista Ultimate install to Windows 7.  While the Upgrade went very smoothly, I had a some software that just did not want to play well in the Win7 environment… Also, it just reinforced why I never recommend a upgrading an OS, ALWAYS do a clean install!  Interestingly, one of Microsoft’s own packages (Live One Care – AV-Firewall-Anti-Spam) in not compatible with Win7 and it let me know that all the time.

So last week, I migrated all of my data to my 16GB Corsair USB Drive, and performed a clean install of Windows 7.  Ok, well I actually did the install twice. The first time, I upgraded to the 32bit version and it only took about 15 minutes total (now that was pretty cool).  However, I have a 64bit Intel Core2Duo processor, and I wanted to try out a 64bit OS, so I went through the OS install again with the Windows 7 64bit installer this time.  It took about 25 minutes for the 64bit install (again not to shabby).

Now, up into the “Clouds.”  I am really working hard NOT to install Microsoft Office 2007 at this point.  As I know that this will force me to truely use an online office suite.  My choice (not any big guess for this choice for those of you who know me) for an online office suite is Zoho.com.  While there are a number of reasons or this choice, Number 174 is blogging right from Zoho Writer, and Zoho’s use of Google Gears for “offline” editing and document creation, and Number 190 Zoho’s support for the iPhone which gives me access to almost ALL of Zoho’s application suite right on my iPhone! That said, to simplify my life a bit, I am using Outlook 2007 because it is allowing me to leverage Apple’s Mobile Me application to join my corporate email / calendar to my iPhone. I tried hard to use Zoho’s business suite (with mail and calender), but I found that I need my phone to “ping” me when I have an upcoming appointment… if it doesn’t, I sometimes don’t get where I need to be :0( I have put the word out to Zoho that I would really appreciate it if they could develop a true iPhone application that would sync with the iPhone mail / calendar / contacts… for now, I check my Zoho Business account regularly, but not enought to keep me from missing meetings.

Tomorrow will be a real test for me I think.   am going to be converting my current inventory database into Zoho DB and Creator so that I can begin running reports against the data to start planning for my technology bid and summer moves and technology repurposing. With the clean install of Windows 7 and Zoho Business Suite, so far I can say, the air is fine up here “in the cloud” want to come up and join me?

Photo Attribution: People, Clouds, and Triumph by cuellar

While I have not b

een a huge fan of Google Notebook, I have used it and showcased it in a presentation on Digital Notebooks at the IETC 2008 Conference last November.  I know that many educators really liked using Google Notebook.  Now overall for existing users it appears that Google will maintain the Notebook service as it is:

we’ll continue to maintain service for those of you who’ve already signed up. As part of this plan, however, we will no longer support the Notebook Extension, but as always users who have already signed up will continue to have access to their data via the web interface at http://www.google.com/notebook. – Raj Krishnan, Product Manager, Google Notebook

The loss of the Notebook extension I think will be a bigger hit to users as it made it so easy to grab thoughts and ideas… Ironically, on January 12, 2009 Will Richardson blogged about his reading practices and archiving the snippets of web-based thought that challenge him:

I’m growing increasingly enamored withe Google Notebook as a way to capture the best snippets and ideas for a variety of purposes. More and more, I read with an ear for saving the most salient parts, which is really challenging me to think of my own organizational schemes in a good, but somewhat frustrating way. – Will Richardson, Weblogg-ed.com

I hope that everyone finds a new tool that meets their needs for gathering, organizing, and leveraging digital content.  I would like to provide a an alternative, that to those of you who know me well will not be surprised… Zoho Notebook… I have always felt that Zoho provided a much more robust tool for gathering a plethora of different types of information be it text, audio, video, embedded, graphical and much more.  Additionally, 6 days after Google’s announcement Raju Vegesna, Zoho Evangelist, posted that Zoho had altered the Zoho Notebook firefox plugin to enable an import from a users Google Notebooks into Zoho Notebook.  Detailed directions are included in his post, but for some reason, the link within my Zoho Notebook in Flock did not take me to the location I needed… So, here are the instructions if you are looking to try.  The add-on worked flawlessly for me within Flock:

To import with ease, you can use our add-on for Mozilla Firefox.
Install or upgrade to Zoho Notebook Helper 1.0b2
On restarting Firefox, please point your browser to chrome://zoho-notebook/content/g2z.html and follow the instructions given there.

OR

To import your notebooks from Google Notebook into Zoho Notebook, please upload Google Notebook as Atom(.xml).
You can export your Google Notebook as Atom in Google Notebook’s interface.
Step 1: Click Manage notebooks on the left hand side.
Step 2: Click export on which notebook you want to export.
Step 3: Click Atom, You will be prompted to save a file. Save that file to your disk.
Step 4: Now click Browse or Choose file button provided below, to select the saved file.
Step 5: Click Import.

I also have heard (but not confirmed) that Evernote is looking to develop a similar import tool.

On a final note, Google is stopping it’s print ads business as well… In no way is Google hurting, but this is the first time I have seen them pull back … many are speculating what else will be getting cut as well… We all know 2009 will be a difficult year for everyone, but together we can and will get through these hard times.  For the last two years I have been enamored with Zoho, and hope that you will give Zoho Notebook a try.

Stunning! 

What a great find, I compliment my wife for making me aware of it.  It is a great message especially coming on the heels of President Obama’s Inaugural Speech (below of you have not seen it).

For those of you who read here occasionally, or that know me, know that I am NEVER without my phone.  That said, I rarely being my 7.1MP camera along… I often wish I did, however, well… I don’t. That said, I ALWAYS have my phone and my recent acquisition of the iPhone 3G has not changed that… in fact, I seem to be carrying the iPhone more that even mt Motorola Q and I can count on one hand the number of times I think I was without that phone.  Now, starting with my Moto Razor, I entered the world of cellular photography… I upgraded to a 2.0MP camera with my MotoQ, and stayed right there with the iPhone.  However, with the MotoQ at least I was able to change some of the lighting, timing, white balance, etc. right in camera. heck it even had an LED flash… All that is gone with the iPhone… basically you get a point and shoot 2.0MP camera (that is often subject to simple human jitters…)

Even with the lighting issues, and the occasional “soft focus” from my unsteady hand, I have taken approximately 1200 pictures since December 23, 2008… Ya think I love my kids? (ok 202 pics are of my livingroom photosynth (future post).

Now one day I was looking for a quick way to crop a photo (on my iPhone) that I wanted to upload to facebook and I stumbled across Photogene.  What a blessing I found.  I honestly bought it for cropping that (and planned future photos) … hey it was $2.99 at the app store. Photogene has become one of my most used apps on the iPhone.  Al right I hear you… why not just upload your pics to  the PC and then do all of your editing there… yes I can, but I am doing less and less on an actual computer now and reallying liking it… so since I take a lot of pictures on the iPhone, I might as well do a bit of touch up work

there too… Photogene handles a ton of work almost effortlessly, and it is pretty gosh darn intiutive as well.

When you first open the app, it asks you whether you want to take a picture and then edit it, or of you wish to edit one from your camera roll, or photos that are stored on your phone.

From there you can choose your photo as I have and then you can adjust color and lighting:

From there you can select a “frame” … I really like the soft rounded edges:

Here is the adjusted photo:

Finally in a touch of the silly, you can even add “bubble thoughts” or captions to your photos…

and then simply save your edited work of art!  Photogene saves the new creation right back into your camera roll.

This is really a great tool for those of us who live a very mobile life.  Now you will have to go back into your PC or camera roll to delete the originals if you would like or keep the duplicates, but what a difference Photogene can make.  Below are a few of my originals and the adjusted versions. As you can see mainly I “auto” adjusted the color and removed the hard photo border.  As a final note, you can accomplish all of what I state above in under 30 seconds… Too cool!

]]> http://vanishingpoint.edublogs.org/2009/01/20/photogene-for-the-iphone/feed/ 0 http://vanishingpoint.edublogs.org/2008/11/21/student-engagement-in-the-digital-age/ http://vanishingpoint.edublogs.org/2008/11/21/student-engagement-in-the-digital-age/#comments Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:08:08 +0000 vanishingpoint http://vanishingpoint.edublogs.org/?p=167 Wow… I have to say I felt that this was a stunning session :0) (Even if I do say so myself as I was presenting).  I want to thank everyone who attended and participated.  I hope that each f you took something away from the session.  Now that said remember this was a DISCUSSION session, not a SOLUTION session… there is a difference.

If we were working toward a SOLUTION session, I would be meeting with you (preferably individually) and working with you to adapt your curriculum, teaching practices, and focus toward your goals.  Really, the goal of that type of a session would not only be to provide insight and ideas and to encourage and motivate you, but would also be to assist you in developing the patterns and habits to empower you to achieve the skills based curricular changes and adoption necessary to reach the level of student engagement you desire.  That is not something that I can do in a 50 minute session :0)  But if you are interested in continuing discussions along those lines, please drop me a note I’d love to help.

Ok, I promised that I would post the presentation and some other material for you… Embedding is being “wonky” <– that is a technical term… seriously…) right now.  Remember our engagement lesson with the cell phones? did that go smoothly (there was an object lesson there :0) I set you all up  – wanted to point that out incase you missed it… heehee… I kill me! anyway instead of fighting with wordpress, I created a shared Zoho Notebook for you to access the presentation notes, information and resources.  The additional neat thing, is that I can add information there over time and you will have access to it as soon as I save.  If anyone would like to collaborate on providing information email me and I will give you rights to add content too. I love Zoho!

Here is a link to the notebook: http://notebook.zoho.com/nb/public/sweidig/book/3946000000038225

~ Scott

Now that said, I did have a Twitter exchange with Steve Dembo (Teach42) regarding geocaching that then led to something startling involving Qik.  Steve owns the Nokia N95 (a phone that I have been demoing from WOM World / Nokia for the last week and a half) and he has been using it for geocaching.  So at the end of the day when he said that he might look stream his bike ride home, I assumed that somehow he was going to be uStreaming his voyage…

Then a few minutes later I received a tweet from him that he was streaming live so I grabbed my Motorola Q Global (as I was driving – well I WAS stopped at a light) and launched Skyfire my new favorite mobile browser and jumped to his uStream page and he was not there… I checked the link I received through TinyTwitter (my mobile Twitter client) and it referenced www.qik.com.

Since I was rolling by now, I put my phone aside, but when I got home, I checked TinyTwitter again, and Mark Wagner had tweeted that Steve was live with 42 people watching his stream.  I bounced out to Qik and followed Steve most of the way home via Qik and his Nokia N95.  He was even talking about the brewings at Capitol Hill.  This was really cool!  Oh and Steve, I am proud of your for being “biking attired” helmet and all! Now this was truly the MOBILE web!

So, I now wanted to know more about Qik and how I might be able to get it on my phone.  As I mentioned, for the next week I still have a Nokia N95, and I will have my Motorola Q Global until my contract ends in November and I decide there is something else out there I need to have. I didn’t know if it would even work on my Q.  Well it does!

Qik is a streaming video service that leverages the cellular networks around the world.  While it WILL work on a 2G network, it is MUCH better when you are running on a 3G connection.  Now Qik is still in open Beta, and a number of their FAQ, About etc. pages return server error apology notices, but they DO list a phone number to CALL them if you have questions… how’s that for service.  Also, Qik has contracted with www.getsatisfaction.com a web service support forum where both company employees and other users provide support and information to people needing help.  Qik has 6 employees working with Qik users to help folks out… which is pretty interesting seeing as how twitter, flock, mozilla, and… GOOGLE… have either 6 or 7 employees monitoring their services and supporting users via www.getsatisfaction.com. The best way I found out information was simply to “sign up”.  Below is a list of cell phones that are currently supported by Qik:

What phones do we support?

In Beta

    * Motorola Q9c
    * Motorola Q9h (my Q Global)
    * Nokia 3250
    * Nokia 5320 XpressMusic
    * Nokia 5500
    * Nokia 5700 XpressMusic
    * Nokia 6110 Navigator
    * Nokia 6120 Classic
    * Nokia 6121 Classic
    * Nokia 6124 Classic
    * Nokia 6210 Navigator
    * Nokia 6220 Classic
    * Nokia 6290
    * Nokia E50
    * Nokia E51
    * Nokia E61i
    * Nokia E65
    * Nokia E66
    * Nokia E70
    * Nokia E71
    * Nokia E90
    * Nokia N71
    * Nokia N73
    * Nokia N75
    * Nokia N76
    * Nokia N77
    * Nokia N78
    * Nokia N80
    * Nokia N81
    * Nokia N81 8GB
    * Nokia N82
    * Nokia N91
    * Nokia N91 8GB
    * Nokia N92
    * Nokia N93
    * Nokia N93i
    * Nokia N95
    * Nokia N95 8GB
    * Nokia N95-3 NAM
    * Nokia N96
    * Samsung SGH-I600
    * Samsung Blackjack II

In Alpha

    * iPhone 2G

Coming Soon

    * iPhone 3G
    * HTC Shift
    * HTC Touch
    * HTC Touch Diamond
    * HTC TyTN II

They seem to love Nokia… or is it that Nokia is really moving their phones into the digital space big time?!

So, set up my account and within 1 minute I was streaming via my cellphone.  to Setup, you simple enter your cellular phone number and then Qik sends you an SMS with information about downloading the client.  Once the client is installed, you run Qik for the first time, and when it makes the connection to the Qik servers, your browser automatically advances to the next step of setting up a username and other information and finalizes your account.  While this was all pretty easy, it was not all that intuitive to do… (leave everything alone and let the service take care of itself)… but that is what you need to do.  You might run into something that I did.  While it took my username, it would not allow me to enter a password… I simply needed to click the “forgot password” link and Qik reset it and provided the information via SMS.

Here is my first video:

Now, the video that I shot was actually about 4 minutes streamed, but I had a “Delay of 2:30″ on my phone when shooting.  Unfortunately, I did not know what this meant at the time, so when I closed the application, I actually deleted most of the stream BEFORE it was sent up to the servers.  There are a couple of quality settings I have since learned that will help with that, but I also now know that when you are done streaming, you simple need to let any Qik delay lapse and say “upload complete” before you close out the application on your phone.  I plan on streaming more to test, but I can see potential HUGE applications in the educational environment. 

Now before I start throwing out ideas, I would like to hear from you… in what ways do you feel that Qik might be able to be used by students and teachers to impact instruction and authentic learning?

~Scott