“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

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.

So, if you troll along here and see things looking out of sorts, please be kind and return as the dust should be settling shortly…

~Scott

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/2008/12/16/the-digital-generation/ http://vanishingpoint.edublogs.org/2008/12/16/the-digital-generation/#comments Tue, 16 Dec 2008 20:11:01 +0000 vanishingpoint http://vanishingpoint.edublogs.org/2008/12/16/the-digital-generation/ Sorry for the bad lighting here.  I was walking by my boys room, and I see this.  Joshua (4yoa – left) and Noah (15mos – right) are sitting on Joshua’s bed… both enthralled with what they are watching, and often watching each others’ screen. 

Joshua is using my Gateway E155C Tablet watching Inspector Gadget from Netflix, and Noah is watching Scooby Doo on a 8″ portable DVD player.  Now on one hand it would be better if say they were doing something creatively educational, but on the other they are both fully manipulating the devices to get the results they want… Skills?  For the last two weeks or so I have to say that I have been toying with the idea to get Joshua a NetBook for Christmas.  Seeing this only draws me closer.  (Also, self serving as I would have a new toy to play with too…) The question is: Is our current / future educational system ready for these kids?

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

• Student Engagement in the Digital Age

• Resources to Know and Love

• Using Digital Notebooks for Research, Clarity, and Organization

You can find out more information about each of these presentations by clicking on the IETC 2008 Presentations page above, or on the titles above themselves.  I will be adding the actual presentation decks and any handouts / resources to those pages over the next month.  If you have anything you would be interested in me addressing during these sessions or questions, just drop me a comment.

Below is the conference early-bird announcement.  If you are interested in attending the IETC, or will already be there, look below for some great savings on the conference registration and hotel information. 

See you at IETC 2008!

IETC CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT

The “Early-Bird” reduced conference fee rate for the Illinois Education &
Technology Conference (IETC) is quickly approaching — OCTOBER 10th!
Register online (http://www.il-edtech.org) and postmark your conference fee
payment by Oct. 10 and you’ll be able to attend both days of the conference
for only $125!  (One day registration at the early-bird rate is only $85!)

DATES OF CONFERENCE:  Thursday, Nov. 20 – Friday, Nov. 21, 2008

WHERE:  Crowne Plaza Hotel, Springfield, IL

WHAT IS IETC?  This conference is an exciting opportunity which will offer
educators, technology coordinators, administrators, and others interested in
improving the quality of education, an opportunity to gain information and
exchange ideas on the application of educational technology in our schools.

REGISTRATION:  Register online at http://www.il-edtech.org.  Register AND
mail conference fees by OCTOBER 10 for a reduced conference rate of $125 for
two-day registration or $85 for one-day registration!  (All conference fees
postmarked after October 10th must be made payable at the “Regular”
registration rate of $170 for two-day registration or $95 for one-day
registration.)
The conference fee includes entrance to the conference (140+ concurrent
sessions from which to choose over the course of the two days), continental
breakfasts, keynote luncheons, evening receptions, and entrance to the
exhibit hall Wednesday evening or Thursday. (The exhibit hall closes
Thursday evening.)

WHO SHOULD ATTEND IETC?  Teachers, Technology Coordinators, Administrators, Curriculum Specialists, Media Specialists, Special Education Instructors, School Technical Staff, Business Managers, Community Leaders, Legislators — anyone interested in educational technology!

SESSIONS/KEYNOTES:  140+ concurrent sessions will be offered, and many
sessions will be hands-on in our three computer labs.  Luncheon keynote
addresses will be provided by Vicki Davis on Thursday, Nov. 20, and Hall
Davidson on Friday, Nov. 21.  For keynote information and session offerings,
please visit http://www.il-edtech.org/highlights.html.

EXHIBIT HALL:  The exhibit hall will be open the evening of Wednesday, Nov.
19 (6-8pm) and Thursday, Nov. 20 (7:30am-5:15pm).  Evening receptions in the
exhibit hall will be offered both Wednesday and Thursday evenings.

CONFERENCE INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION:  Visit the conference website at http://www.il-edtech.org for current conference information.

Hope to see you there!

-IETC Planning Committee
http://www.il-edtech.org