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

Microsoft announces that Office will be “taken to the web” in the next release of the Office Suite.  Make no mistake, there will always be an office “rich-client” for the desktop, however, there will also be a thin web-based client that will be browser independent as well.  Check this out though… as you watch the video, Microsoft has FINALLY brought real collaboration into the Office Suite.  A shared document, spreadsheet, PowerPoint, or OneNote Notebook will be able to be worked on simultaneously by multiple users, AND it will be able to have realt-ime updates and messaging for collaboration.  Pretty cool.  Now does this impact GDocs, Zoho, and the other cloud suites?  I’d say yes, but we will have to see over time how the service holds up. If you’d ask me to predict: pretty well.

We are approaching our winter round of NEWA’s MAP testing.  with that in mind, I needed to begin building a schedule for testing lab assignments.  I fired up Zoho Sheet, and then quickly decided NOT to re-invent the wheel.  I opened my network drive, got my fall round schedule and went to upload it into Sheet to begin making the necessary changes… The easy thing would have simply been to open the spreadsheet from my network and make changes… However, that would NOT be in keeping with my “Cloud-Time” goals…  So, I looked to import my file into Sheet… MMmmm nope… while Zoho can export to .xlsx (Office 2007 format, it cannot import the .xlsx (or .docx or .pptx)… well that caused me to have to launck Excel 2007 and then “save as” into Excel 97-2003 format. (Easily done, but a bit annoying, time consuming, and defeated the purpose of trying NOT to use Office 2007…  I guess I could not have been lazy and simply re-created the simple schedule, but where is the fun in that… If I am going to work at something, I might as well learn from it.

Ok, file converted, here we go … import… nope… original still on the network, and the import keeps crashing… OK… copy to desktop and import! Woohoo imported successfully! Import Completed, time to edit… well sort of… Hmm I have 4 cells merged in one area and want to do that in another… can’t figure that out… 10 minutes of looking and still no idea, (nope no easy help button either). Can’t figure it out… [scratch head] well maybe I can copy and paste the one that is already merged. Bingo done! [mental note: got to figure out how to merge cells].

Editing.  Overall editing the sheet was SIMPLE almost all functions and editing work very similarly to Excel.  With even a few added bonuses when you highlight and right click.  (ex. I was able to resize all row heights with a single click…  I could even add 40 rows with a click if I wanted too).

Schedule finished, now how to get it to all of the different folks who will have classes testing.  In the past I have either attached the sheet to an email, or copied and pasted it right into an email… However, with Zoho, I simply “published” the sheet (nothing private or sensitive here) and popped the link out to all of the users.  One click and they can view it… Additionally, as I update the sheet it will change for them dynamically pretty cool. 

The only frustration I did have publishing was Zoho refused to use the updated name for the publish after I renamed the sheet… additionally, because I have a business account at Zoho as well often when i went to publish the sheet it picked up the /corporate/ publish instead of the /public/ link format.  Unpublishing and re-publishing corrected each time, but there is little bug there Raju.  On the positive side, while I was publishing and unpublishing I did discover the “Merge Cells” button!  Woohoo… 

All in all, keeping with the education tradition, I would give the experience today a B+.  Which in my book is quite good.  I remember the first time I used Excel 2007, it took me 20 minutes to locate the “Find” function (little binoculars if you are wondering), and then I resorted to using the “help” in Office to pin it down.  Heehee…

See you tomorrow!

~Scott

Coming out of the IETC Conference in Springfield, IL. I have been doing some thinking about my personal practices and how I use the Microsoft Office suite.  I have to say that I LOVE Office 2007.  There are some truly amazing things that you can do so easily in 2007 some of which cannot even be done in other products.  However, that said, I also feel that there are a number of limitations in Office because it simply lives offline.  YOu need to discount what Microsoft says about "Office Live" it is NOT really live, or online in any other way than acting like a file storage area… According to my discussions with Microsoft, Office will be releasing true online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote in the next year or so… we’ll see how that goes. 

On to my premise and the reason behind this post. I gave two presentations at IETC that were really based on "the cloud."  Most if not all of the resources that I referred to in the presentations were completely web-based.  Additionally, almost all of the source material for the presentations came from the net… So, I got to thinking… I use Zoho for some limited docs, I use Zoho Notebook for all of my conference sessions and notebooks as well as for a number of other things, I use Zoho wiki for my personal and VP’s wiki. Slideshare puked on all 3 of my presentation uploads, but Zoho Show not only accepted them, but I used it to embed them into my session blog posts without an issue… (even though one was 4MB over their "recommended upload size of 10MB), I use Zoho Creator for 2 small applications, and just last week I began using Zoho’s 24×7 site monitoring service to keep tabs on my school’s website.

However, I use each of them when I have a need, not as part of my every day activities… This week I am going to attempt to change that pattern.  This week, I am going to exclusively use the Zoho suite of products for all of my Office activities, minus email (even though Zoho has a great email client) as I need my email / calendar integration to my Motorola Q to survive.

Ok, the question that usually come up at this point is "why Zoho and not Google?" well… while I have used Google’s "Docs and more" apps, they are not nearly as refined or as well integrated as Zoho’s.  Additionally, while Google has a ton of tools geared around their strength of search, Zoho’s tools are completely geared around Business apps and the Office suite.  They are tighter and more robust as well…

Please feel free to argue with me on that point.  I am always open to learning more about any tool that will assist student learning and increase efficiency.

I will update with challenges and successes in the coming days. I will tell you it was great to see that with very small changes to the slide master for each of my IETC presentations they were easily uploaded, converted, and embedded into this blog without issue. WTG Zoho!

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

That said, each of the 4 tools that I didn’t have entirely enough time to present is a powerful tool in it’s own right.  The most robust being Zoho Notebook, and Microsoft OneNote 2007. However, Evernote and Google Notebook are nice in their own right.  As I mentioned, I use Evernote quite often when I need access to information from my mobile phone (both to upload and retrieve information).  When I do this presentation in the future, I think that I will use 2-4 slides (not PPTPlex as well) instead of the nine, and then I will move more quickly into the tools themselves.  I did not even get to show you all how easy it is to add an RSS feed into Zoho, use drawing tools, review and update a live document and spreadsheet… But, that said it was really cool that except for I think one person, everyone stayed 5 minutes into the prep for the next session.  I guess I also owe a drink to the presenters for the session that follow mine for cutting into their time.

If anyone would like more information about how a Digital Notebook could work for your specific situation please do not hesitate to contact me at vanishingpoint@live.com. These are really amazing tools that can aid students in organization, and honestly using higher order thinking skills.

If you we not able to attend, here is the uStream from the session:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/881104 (sorry embed is not working right now…)

Also, Presentation Information can be found on the Zoho Notobook at: http://notebook.zoho.com/nb/public/sweidig/book/3946000000036053 (By the way that is a Digital Notebook :0)

~ Scott

• I am 2 staff members short for the busiest time of our year for prepping the building…
• The majority of my administrative staff has been vacationing while I am worried about a major main office move and construction cut over…
• I have been creating a mitigation plan for images this year as it looks like the individual responsible for them (see above) will not return to work for 2-4 more months…
• My wife began a new Masters Program (her 3rd) in library science and I have been a single father (again)…
• Both of my children (see pictures and videos on the left) have recently decided that sleep is an option they would rather not exercise at this moment…
• I got a Wii and Wii Fit in the last 2 weeks, and cannot seem to stop playing Tiger Woods 08 golf and the Wii Fit in my little free time… or Lego Indiana Jones if my wife is around… she is hooked!
• My family is starting and struggling with Geocaching (but in love with it)…
• General laziness… feeling that when there is time, I have been too tired

Ok, maybe it is the little Wii Balance Board that nicely chastises me, “Oh, too busy to work out yesterday?” when I miss a body test each day. Or simply that I need to procrastinate and avoid doing any real work for a bit so I can put pressure on myself in the future, but I need to start getting thoughts, ideas, and information out of my head for cathartic reasons.

Here are some coming posts:

• Contacted my Nokia… going to test the N95
• RSSing my Reader…
• A Digital Notebook by any other name…
• Do you Jott?
• The building of a conference…
• Go  Web? … Are you looking?
• Wii wants to Play…
• Do you have the Cache?
• … more …

Looking forward to building conversations.  Hope you all are having a great summer!

-Scott

I left a long comment and it got me thinking about my use of Zoho’s myriad of applications and how they might be better used in conjunction with embedding, for classrooms projects and collaborations.  For those of you who do read my blog, you already know that I am a big fan of the folks at Zoho and all they have done "in the cloud." But, I am also a big fan of Microsoft and all of it’s products and the interoperability of their tools set.  I am a huge fan of Office 2007 and OneNote 2007 is about the the best resource any individual and group can have. However, Greg’s post stirred my creative thoughts, and I am currently warring with a paradigm shift my brain is trying to undergo.

At one point in his post Greg made the comment:

Today, I had a chance to try to embed a Gdoc (word file). No luck. Google doesn’t give you an embed code, only a link to a webpage. I wasn’t happy with this  as I want everything inside the security of Moodle. So, I tried Zoho.com, and they DO provide an embed code, not only for their writer, but also their spreadsheets (they may do this for other types,  I haven’t tried it out yet). My co-teacher was really excited about the spreadsheet because when you embed the spreadsheet in a Moodle web page, students can enter data right there online, and there is a link to download to excel right there.

Regarding Zoho… ALL of their apps have an embed feature. every darn one of them!  Anything that you can create in Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show, Creator, Projects, DB, Notebook, Planner, and Chat can be shared, collaborated upon, and embedded into other resources … That is an amazing set of interoperable tools that are all "in the cloud."  Additionally, last December (2007) Zoho leveraged  Google Gears giving Writer the ability to edit offline as well as online.  This allows you to take 15 documents offline, edit them, and when you are back online, they will sync back to Zoho’s servers. 

I  really like the ability to move into and out of all of the applications with ease, as well as the ability to bring some Zoho apps into other Zoho apps…

With Zoho Show you can even conduct remote presentations where your clients / viewers can "login" to the presentation anywhere in the world and you can conduct a presentation controlling the slides for everyone at the same time. Pretty cool.

Let’s look at a some educational opportunities:

With Greg looking at Moodle for security options I will use that as a springboard for the ideas below.

Think of this for a class activity. Have your class collaborate in groups in Zoho writer… then they can embed the doc in Moodle… Now what they are collaborating on is a review guide for each of your units… each person in each group takes turns updating each day and if they want they can be in the doc at the same time. Now at the end of the unit, all groups have a tailored review sheet. The best part is:

• With the shared doc you can see the additions/edits/changes by each with history…
• With the embed each time there are changes the entire group sees it immediately
• If you want you can set up the groups to restrict or allow access to the others “view” to compare.
• With the google gears link they don’t even have to be online to access/update. Next time they are online it will automatically update.

Note: you can do the same thing with a Zoho wiki when you show them RSS etc… (no Google gears yet but they do allow backups to local drive)

Now, do that with presentations as well… with the embed you can watch the presentation grow and then make the Moodle page active when your students are active presenting… no “projects” left at home / bad disk / etc

Now, considering a digital portfolio for your kids for the year? Step into the world of Zoho Notebook… You can embed all of their docs, presentations (Show), sheets, plus text / video / audio / ENTIRE LIVE WEBSITES / research for building each of those… EDIT AND UPDATE Writer, Sheet, Show RIGHT FROM WITHIN THE NOTEBOOK!

What to hear a really cool twist. Once everything is in a Zoho Notebook, you can “share" the notebook with read or read/write access (group editing / review)… and you can embed the entire darn notebook into Moodle! How about that for digital learning, archiving, portfolio management… and the best part update any of the originals and poof the Notebook and all else is up to date!

Here are a couple of examples of Zoho Notebook’s capabilities.

My Notes from IL-TCE 2008 Lucy Grey’s "Going Global" Presentation Notebook

Here is a Notebook I created: Think of the Possibilities

Can Google Docs do that? 

Zoho Rocks… oh and some of the Zoho apps have Skype and or chat capabilities built right in… You need any help or ideas/thoughts just drop me a line.

Scott

Related Posts

I saw Robin Ellis’ blog post and was moved to continue to build this “Passion Quilt” so here is my contribution. The title I have given this picture is “Admire the Night.” I have chosen this photograph of a fireworks show which I find amazing because both man and nature and competing for the beauty of the night while others are observing the contest. This image reflects my belief of the power and passion that lifetime learning can make on anyone’s life. You have the dichotomy of the power of nature (or natural talent) and creation as well as all of the observers (learners) of both processes. My hope is the inspiration that student creativity builds will be leveraged by others to help them continuously expand their natural talents. With hope anything is possible even challenging nature itself.

Scott

Here are Robin’s rules:

1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry and Robin’s.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

Now I will tag the following friends:

Henry Thiele

Michael Bachrodt

Jennifer Jones – a 366 photo perhaps?

Katie Choudhary

Lori Abrahams

Image Source Flickr: Credit: blueforce4116

Teaching is often looked at as a reflective process, and as such we often view it in almost the light of scientific methodology. We begin with a skill or concept that is going to be taught (Define the question). We develop a lesson or unit with curricula to engage and convey the concept (Hypothesis and data gathering). We teach the lesson/unit (Perform) We develop a formative assessment to gauge learning and assess student comprehension and achievement. Then we “reflect” (oh, how I hate that word) on the entire process to internalize the lesson/unit and it outcomes and begin planning adjustments. While this is not a bad model for lessons and units, when it is used with making technology integral to teaching, in my experience it simply breaks the process.

Students do not have this internalization process. They simply utilize whatever is at hand… be it a technology or anything else. In the retail world we would call them the ultimate consumer. Today’s students ultimately use a “SEE IT, USE IT, TEACH IT” methodology. Ryan Bretag tweeted yesterday about how he helped his mom learn how to use skype… then he corrected himself and said he sat back and watch his niece and nephew use and model skype while he sat back and watched. Another example, I was attending a conference last year where Wes Fryer was presenting and he told a story of how a group of students had developed an online presentation and an hour before they were due to present the District blocked that resource… Now for a teacher that would possible be a crushing blow and cause a major hiccup in their lesson for the day and tarnish that type of tool for future use, the students simply found a different online presentation tools, and in 20 minutes moved their entire presentation over to the new resource and they were ready for class…

As an educator how would you have reacted to that situation? There is not time to internalize a new tool…

This is the difference! We need to move away from the need to internalize or we begin to lose engagement.

Too often I have seen teachers look at a tool, and simply refuse to do anything with it “because no one has shown me how to use it” (<- that is a future post I will be making.) or they are given training or investigate a technology and determine that at this time there is too much on their plate to focus their attention on it at this time… then they simply file it away regardless of the impact it could have on students… (or worse they don’t know anything about it and they assign a projects with the use of the tool as a requirement for the output but cannot support students when they have questions – here the rational I have heard is “that they are young they can figure it out”) but I digress… now the knowledge for this tool is rattling around in his or her brain for a use… then comes the time where they are hard pressed for “something” because the demands of their class / curriculum require something… (internalization) and OH YEAH! I remember something about “X” that can help here… Hello new tool! However, also quite often they do not remember how to use the technology or have not truly made it integral to their teaching, but use it as an alternative methodology… with the world we live in today this simply does not work. We need to begin to investigate, adapt, accept, and embrace at a gut level.

I realize that with technology, teachers often fear “breaking” something, or feel they do not have TIME to be open to learning something new as it “adds” to their workload. (as opposed to replacing or enhancing their current instruction) OK, I know that this post will feel like I am coming down on teachers, and in a way I am. I also know that there are a LOT of great teachers out there embracing technology and driving their students to the edge of capacity, but there are also a great number of educators who simply do not want to even think about 21st Century skills because they have their curriculum established and opening that door makes revision necessary. There are a lot of folks out there that discuss the issues with teaching or education reform… unfortunately too often those in the spotlight are NOT educators themselves, but we [educators] have to live with the decisions uneducated lawmakers impose on education. However, often the people who really get in the way of educational reform are teachers ourselves.

Ok, I said it, kill me now and let the flamewar begin.

We are so caught up in content or standards that we are not looking at what is crucial to the world today and how our students will need to interact on a global level when they stop being OUR students and need to have skills to survive beyond the educational process. David Warlick has had a number of great posts along these lines one on Pedagogy Getting in the way of Learning and a more recent one on What Would you have Them Say. Additionally, Marc Prensky is speaking around the country with his Engage Me or Enrage Me topic set. While some (including myself) challenge some of the extravagant statistics he throws around, and well sorry Marc horrible ugly slides, his message is sound. The students we are teaching today are growing up in a global connected authentic world. I presented on this topic myself last November.

Ok, so the questions that keep bouncing around in my head are:

• Where do we go from here?
• How do we create (or re-find) that childhood love of investigation for all educators?
• How do we break down the fear barrier?
• How do we become comfortable moving away from [canned] curriculum?
• How do we meet the needs of 21st Century learners?
• What is it really going to take to make technology integral to learning?

I would like your thought and comments… even negative ones. We all learn best from our mistakes.

Scott

Photo from Flickr: Comte de Cagliostro