Yahoo Digital Citizenship Summit-Panel Presenter Recording

I recorded several Internet Safety experts/panelists as they gave short, 7 minute overviews on their programs and Internet safety/digital citizenship in general. This was a part of the Yahoo Digital Citizenship Summit at the Yahoo campus in Sunnyvale, CA on Friday, October 3rd. Larry Magid, co-author of Myspace Unraveled, gives the first 7 minute talk and I would say it is a MUST listen for anyone who has children and/or works with children. It is interesting how the message is turning from one of panic and fear to one that is more rationale and grounded. It was a breath of fresh air to hear these panelists reiterate over and over again that the Internet is not the dangerous place that our media makes it out to be.

Finally, I just want to say a huge thank you to the team at Yahoo for putting on this conference. The keynote and break-out sessions were outstanding (the food wasn't bad either!!) Thank you for providing this opportunity to educators for free.





Link to original recording

Dean Shareski on Parents as Partners this coming Monday night (9 PM Eastern)

Please join the Parents as Partners webcasting crew this coming Monday as we talk with Dean Shareski about issues of digital citizenship, students as content creators on the open web, and what we all can do to help mentor young people as they develop their online profiles/footprints. We're pretty much centering our talk on a slidecast that Dean created and posted on his blog a few months back. Check his slidecast out here. Dean is a fun dude and this should be a fun conversation.

Please join the webcast and invite other parents to join in the conversation by doing the following:

1. Go to http://www.edtechtalk.com/live at 9:00 PM Eastern Time.
2. Sign into the chat room with your first name/last name...no password is required.
3. Click one of the little audio player icons and the live audio will play in one of your media players (iTunes, Windows Media player, etc). See picture below:



4. People in the chat are really friendly and enjoy 'meeting' new people and engaging in coversation.

Hope to 'see you' for the Parents as Partners broadcast this coming Monday with Dean!!

Chris Lehmann at Yahoo Digital Citizenship Summit

More thoughts on this later, but below you'll find a link to the audio file from Chris Lehmann's keynote talk today.



Link to recording of Chris' talk

Yahoo Digicitizenship Summit Live Blog...

I attended this summit today at the Yahoo campus in Sunnyvale, CA. Below is the live blog coverage of a series of panelists speaking to the issue of digital citizenship. Please excuse the spelling errors and please note that I'm mostly paraphrasing what the presenters mentioned as they spoke.

To read this blog, you'll have to click on some of the text and then use your arrow up/down keys to move through this live blog....

Why Linux in K12?

Minhaj Rehman, whom I met via Worldbridges and the Webcast Academy, sent out a Facebook update today with a link to an article titled, "100 Reasons Linux Beats Windows." I'm an open source evangelist and for years, I've been attempting to convince IT folks that Linux and open source software need to be a part of the K12 computing mix. Inspired by Minhaaj's update and David Williams' excellent column over at the IT Wire, I thought I'd take a stab at listing out reasons why Linux and open source need to be a large part of the K12/K20 experience:

1. Equity-schools have always been about equity. Whether it is a school serving low income families or a private, tuition based schools, all schools deal with issues of equity on a regular basis. Linux evens the game, giving all students the opportunity to use the same powerful tools at home as they use at school.

2. At a minimum, students need to be exposed to the open source software development model. This model is growing rapidly and providing more and more opportunities to those who understand it. Last year we had a doctoral candadiate in robotics come speak with our student body and she mentioned that they primarily use open source software in the world of robotics. She asked the students if they knew what open source software was and out of 350 students, I don't think one hand was raised. This needs to change.

3. Open source provides students with highly authentic learning opportunities. Imagine young students who create a game using Scratch and then upload it to the online Scratch community so others can take the code, modify it, and improve on it. These are the kinds of authentic opportunities that young people may participate in NOW.

4. Let's face it, schools don't have the budgets that they should have...and this probably isn't going to change any time soon. Why not take all of the money that is spent on proprietary software and use it for the things that really count?? I'm talking about professional development and teacher salary enhancement.

5. "Linux plays well with others." Linux runs efficiently on old hardware and schools have alot of old hardware. Vista, on the other hand, is ridiculously high maintenance when it comes to hardware requirements. As a matter of fact, if you don't have the latest greatest hardware, Vista won't play with it. At some point in the near future Microsoft is going to stop its full support of XP, which will undoubtedly make many schools feel compelled to jump to Vista (or whatever is the next flavor of their OS). This means refreshing hardware in the school if this is the direction they will go. Instead of refreshing the hardware line, how about dumping Windows on the desktop in favor of Linux, which will play nicely on older equipment.

6. Do we really need all the garbage that comes with Vista?? 95% of the creative things that we do with our students can be done with a browser and some no-cost client software.

7. Like David Williams mentioned in his article, "Do we really want to give Jerry Seinfeld 10 million more dollars?"

Please feel free to add any additional reasons why Linux and open source should be a part of the K12 experience for students...

**Photo courtesy of Pitel on flickr (creative commons non-commerical)

Comic Life for Educators

I kind of missed the boat over the past few years on the software, "Comic Life." Here at my new school we have a site license for this program and I hope to begin experimenting with it and using it more in the next few weeks. Today I found out about an interesting resource co-written by Judi Epcke that I'm going to try to pick up pretty soon. For more info on this resource, visit the publisher's website.

Blog Update

Well, it has been nearly two months since I've posted anything of interest here. This is primarily due to the fact that my wife and I just relocated from the Milwaukee area to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I'll be working as the instructional technology coordinator (grades 6-12) for the Castilleja School, which is located in Palo Alto.

I've been thinking about whether or not I'm going to keep my blog at blogger, what I should change the focus/name of my blog to, etc. If I was still at University School of Milwaukee I most likely would've moved my blog space over to the WordPress Multiple User network that we've been constructing with our consultant, "Compujeramey on Twitter," this summer (this project is really turning out nicely...it creates the capacity for all students and teachers at USM to have their own personal blog space. I'll most likely keep my blog space here for a while, but hopefully in the next week or so I'll have an idea of how I would like to proceed.

We Can Solve It

Consider joining and participating in the "We Can Solve It" climate change action campaign. Great video below...consider embedding this video in your blog, myspace, etc in order to help spread awareness about We Can Solve It:

Eliminating Servers/Best Platform for a New School

I've been watching a thread over on the ISED listserv develop over the past week or so dealing with the title of this post as the subject. It has been absolutely fascinating. The thread mostly started out as a "platform war" type of thing, but then Derrel Fincher contributed a really interesting reply earlier this week...my reply to Derrel's excellent, visionary post is included further below in this blog entry:

Just a few additional thoughts:

1. Spend on bandwidth until it hurts.
2. If you are providing laptops to students, forget about having a traditional network except for authentication, and then just let them plug into the Internet and access your printers through the Internet, and even find a hosting service for file storage. The individual platform is not so important, but a good infrastructure is.
3. Plan on eliminating all servers. Difficult, if not impossible, but go in with the ideas that you don't need them. Instead, look for hosted solutions (ASP) for your needs. Most are designed to be accessed through a browser for most functions so the platform for the majority of your users is irrelevant. For the few power users that need a client instead of a browser, buy whatever the client supports. (Hosted may look like it costs more, but you don't need IT people with really deep skills--you need those with broad skills).
4. For your clerical staff, and even many of your teachers, spring for dual monitors and put in plenty of memory. Those two together have been the biggest productivity improvement for the buck and your clerical staff will love you. (People will tell you they don't need two until they actually use two--I've only had a couple tell me to remove the second monitor.

My contribution to this thread from Friday, June 13th:

I'm amazed at the number of projects that our students and teachers have created over the past 24 months that require little to no local area network storage. I might also add that they've managed to do so using tools that are mostly free. I can't help but think that these kinds of projects will only proliferate going forward. Most of the large, media projects that our students create (movies, audio files, working on raw images) all get saved to the local hard drive of the iMacs anyway. Students then archive their finished pieces to their wikis, YouTube, DVDs, etc if they want to keep their project when they are done with it.

Most of the things that students save on network file servers include things like word files and powerpoints, and we've been transitioning the students to google docs for these types of things over the past year.

Here are a few projects that have required zero data storage on the LAN:

1. 5th grade school tour podcasts-students took pictures, wrote scripts in google docs, and then recorded their narration in garage band. With the exception of the google doc script, all media was saved to the local hard drive. Completed projects were then uploaded to my .mac account at: http://web.mac.com/mjmonty/Site/Podcast/Podcast.html

2. 7th grade booktalk voicethread projects...all media, including pictures and audio, is saved on voicethread.com. To view some of these projects, visit: http://usmenglish7.blogspot.com/2008/01/seventh-periods-book-talks.html

3. Famous Faces of Slavery projects completed by teams of 8th grade students in english class...all files saved on a wiki: http://famousfacesofslavery.wikispaces.com

4. 8th grade french class voicethread projects...students created their voicethreads and embedded them on their teacher's wiki page as a way to turn in their projects. Again, everything saved in voicethread and the wiki: http://usmfrench.wikispaces.com/Les+voicethreads

5. 8th Grade Washington DC Blog...we used this to chronicle our trip to DC this past spring. We uploaded gigs and gigs worth of photos and video to our middle school flickr account on a nightly basis. We also had a few students post cell phone photos live as they experienced the trip (this was really cool). See the blog at: http://usmdc2008.blogspot.com/

6. French class oral language samples recorded on portable voice recorders (Olympus WS110s) and posted to the class wiki: http://usmfrench.wikispaces.com/Interro+orale+15-4

7. Students in film class created an "Office" parody featuring many of the teachers at my school. They worked locally on the file and then posted to YouTube to share: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5k6pfNHQno Students in the same class did a digital story about the Lincoln's assassination with the "Captain O Captain" poem by Whitman: http://youtube.com/watch?v=QBfq_6eVzBM

8. Students in 7th grade art class worked in teams to research an artist and genre and then created a collaborative google doc presentation to share with the class.

9. For their final unit of the year in American History class, students in Chuck Taft's 8th grade US history teacher maintained their traditional 3 ring binder with a wiki. Students created oral histories, videos, voicethread stories, participated in a "Civil Rights Era Facebook Community, etc using web based tools. Project home page: http://turningpoints08.wikispaces.com/

I could go on and on and on here, but you get the point. None of these projects required any network storage at all. Derrel's idea of purchasing as much bandwidth as possible makes a great deal of sense. All of the money saved by not having to purchase expensive LAN storage systems could be diverted to paying for increased bandwidth. Perhaps even some of that could be used for professional development and/or faculty enhancement!!!

Going forward, we are currently working with a consultant to setup an off site hosted Word Press MU network which will give all interested students and teachers a blog space with powerful podcasting capabilities. After the audio files are created, students and teachers will be able to upload them to their blogs as a podcast file. The audio files will live on a server in California. This system gives us 100 GB of storage with 1 TB of monthly bandwidth throughput...all for the very reasonable cost of $600 annually!!!

I've enjoyed this thread. Thanks for sharing everyone.

Cheers!!

Matt Montagne

Office 2007 and Open Source email to faculty

I just sent the following email out to the faculty that I work with here at the University School of Milwaukee. I wanted to share it in this blog post in the event that this could be of use to some of you. I really believe in the power of open source as a means to address issues of equity and social justice. Office 2007, to me, is bloated, expensive, and has way too many unnecessary features for student use.

Anyway, enough of that...here is the email:

Here are the bookmarks Steve and I assembled for you to peruse as you’re getting acquainted with the new office interface:

http://del.icio.us/mjmonty/usmoffice2007

For any of you delicious users, if you find any good Office 2007 professional dev sites, tag them “usmoffice2007” and they’ll show up at the following link:

http://del.icio.us/tag/usmoffice2007

Cheers!

Matt

Additionally, I spoke with a few of you about some free and open source office options to Office 2007. Office 2007 licensing is extremely expensive, so you might consider taking a look at some of the following tools. I’ve used all of them and have found them to be great alternatives to paying for software:

Free and/or open source software options:

NeoOffice (for Mac) - http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

OpenOffice (Mac, Linux and Windows) - http://www.openoffice.org/

Google Docs (for any computer that can connect to the Internet): http://docs.google.com - google docs now offers the option of accessing your files without having to be connected to the Internet

If you’d like to read more about the value of open source and how it addresses issues of equity and social justice, visit:

http://www.infinitethinking.org/2008/02/promoting-digital-equity-with-web-20.html