Stephen’s Untold Stories

Keeping kids in school is a great benefit of having these laptops. If they aren’t careful, they might even learn something before it’s done.

Immokalee, Fla., is the largest center for migrant farmworkers on the East Coast. Juan Medina, a former agricultural worker, worked the fields with his family, planting onions in west Texas and picking tomatoes in Homestead, Fla.

Medina now works for the Florida Department of Education, trying to help the children of migrant workers deal with the challenges of migrant life.

He is part of a town effort to help the children in school. His new tool is free laptops.

Link to article and radio program

An actual research study on social networking? Really??

Outstanding!!

In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered the educational benefits of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The same study found that low-income students are in many ways just as technologically proficient as their counterparts, going against what results from previous studies have suggested.

The study found that, of the students observed, 94 percent used the Internet, 82 percent go online at home and 77 percent had a profile on a social networking site. When asked what they learn from using social networking sites, the students listed technology skills as the top lesson, followed by creativity, being open to new or diverse views and communication skills.

Data were collected over six months this year from students, ages 16 to 18, in thirteen urban high schools in the Midwest. Beyond the surveyed students, a follow-up, randomly selected subset were asked questions about their Internet activity as they navigated MySpace, an online forum that provides users with e-mail, web communities and audio and video capabilities.

“What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today,” said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university’s College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of the study. “Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout. They’re also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology. The Web sites offer tremendous educational potential.”

Link to article

This is nothing short of amazing.

WebAnywhere is a web-based screen reader for the web. It requires no special software to be installed on the client machine and, therefore, enables blind people to access the web from any computer they happen to have access to that has a sound card. No $1000 software program required!

WebAnywhere’s will run on any machine, even heavily locked-down public terminals, regardless of what operating system it is running and regardless of what browsers are installed.

Please read our WebAnywhere Paper for more information about the system.

Link to WebAnywhere

If YouTube is blocked where you are, you can hear the audio here. (MP3 file)

Now this would really be something.

George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars franchise and head of a nonprofit group designed to encourage innovation in schools, called on lawmakers June 24 to create a free, “third internet” that would be used solely for educational use, PC Magazine reports. “As we move into the future, most everything’s going to end up wireless and as it ends up wireless, [the government is] going to be auctioning off bandwidth,” Lucas told the House Energy and Commerce’s subcommittee on telecommunications and the internet. “As you auction this off, why don’t you just hold some back for schools and libraries?” Lucas appeared at a hearing about the federal Universal Service Fund (USF), which is intended to provide all Americans with access to telecommunications service.

Link to article

I’ve used several of these, but a few were new to me.

• http://www.investintech.com/articles/tenwordalternatives

I use Google Docs almost daily. Zoho is also very good. ThinkFree is very powerful, but seems to be a bit sluggish at times.

Very cool story from New Mexico.

Students at a rural New Mexico school made a unique pledge last winter: Right hands raised, they promised to take care of their Zunes.

This past semester, nearly every one of the roughly 100 students at Fort Sumner High School was outfitted with the Microsoft media player, similar to Apple’s iPod, enabling them to watch videos and listen to recorded lectures created or recommended by teachers and fellow students. Fort Sumner High was one of two schools nationwide taking part in the project.

The students were encouraged to use their devices during class hours, on bus rides home, and on school trips. Teachers got a $400 bonus for coming up with lessons to identify 20 downloadable digital lectures that supported their lessons and to develop five of their own.

“My main hope is it’s going to save us lost class time,” said English teacher Pam Richards. “We are small, and the kids are involved in so many things.”

Link to article

Saw a bunch of them on Springer Mountain. Please leave a comment if you know.

Click each image for a larger version.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

I took a trip up to Springer Mountain, which is the southern terminus for the Appalachian Trail. The weather was perfect!

Click each image for a larger version.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

PicLens turns your browser into a 3D slide show of some of your favorite sites (including this one!). You can install it on either FireFox or Internet Explorer, and it works on sites like Amazon, Flickr, and Google Image Search. You can even launch it when you’re not on a supported site and it will present you with a gallery of movies and images from a variety of categories.

You can also enable it on your blog. If you look at the Flood Photos post right beneath this one, you will see a link that says “Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite.” Even if you haven’t installed PicLens in your browser you can still see a slide show of the photos in that post. In addition to enabling it on this blog, I enabled it on the Georgia Photos Blog I share with three fellow Georgia educators.

If you have installed PicLens in FireFox and you find yourself on a PicLens enabled site, you will see a small icon in the bottom left corner of photos on that site. You can click that icon to launch the full slide show, or you can click the PicLens icon in your browser toolbar. In Internet Explorer you’ll just need to click the icon in the toolbar.

Get PicLens here! (Yes, it’s free!)

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

I am at a complete loss for words.

Link to complete gallery

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I expect (and hope) to see more of this in other states.

Minnesota Virtual High School (MVHS) graduated its first class of 43 students last Friday. The school, a partnership between Minnesota Transitions Charter School of Minneapolis and Advanced Academics, was launched in 2007 and serves more than 1,000 students from all over the state.

A free online public high school, the program serves state residents in grades 9 to 12, offering a flexible schedule, a free laptop to new full-time students, as well as a monthly Internet stipend. Students also have the ability to participate in the Passport2College program offered by DeVry University. The program allows eligible juniors and seniors to take up to two college credit classes tuition-free at DeVry.

In addition to one-on-one access to Minnesota certified teachers, around-the-clock student support, and a full curriculum, students graduating from MVHS earn their high school diploma, issued by a local Minnesota school district.

Link to article

Yes, it’s a somewhat unfortunate name, but it does some cool stuff.

Here is a Rubik’s Cube effect of a photo I took of the Tybee Island Lighthouse.

http://www.dumpr.net

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Great work!

Denisa McBee’s fifth-grade class was just perfect this year.

All 21 of the students in her Mathis Intermediate School class in Corpus Christi earned perfect attendance honors, answering a challenge that began after no one missed class for the first two weeks. McBee challenged them to make it six weeks, then a semester, then a year.

And they did it — for 175 days.

“The kids felt awful some days but were determined to do this,” McBee said in a story for Monday’s Corpus Christi Caller-Times. “One child was in a car accident with his father on a Sunday. We had Monday off, but he came limping in on Tuesday,” McBee said.

She said the students learned about dedication and commitment, their grade-point averages increased and she never had to re-teach a lesson to absent students.

McBee said she never had to bribe the students.

“It wasn’t like if you do it, you get this,” she said. “All they got was recognition, and that was enough for them.”

Link to article

A little over a month ago the city of Macon was hit hard by a tornado. Macon State College suffered a lot of damage, but the cleanup has gone well. Here are some before and after photos.

Note: It looks like their site is down fro a while. Hopefully it will be back soon.

More photos here.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

This has been one of my favorite Firefox tools.

It was a tough call, but we decided to phase out support for Browser Sync. Since the team has moved on to other projects that are keeping them busy, we don’t have time to update the extension to work with Firefox 3 or to continue to maintain it.

Link to announcement from Google.

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Of course Alaska is not included in the U.S. portion, but you can still see that Africa is quite large.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Here is an amazing photo collection taken by on the most recent Space Shuttle flight.

Click each image for a larger version.

Link to complete gallery.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

I’ve always been a fan of Elluminate, and I plan to use it more next year with our grant schools.

Ed tech developer Elluminate Monday announced new collaborative learning bundles–the Elluminate Learning Suite and the Elluminate Next bundle–and launched a new tool for planning online learning sessions called Elluminate Plan! The company also told us it’s revamping its education licensing structure, moving away from a concurrent user model to a structure based on the full-time enrollment of educational institutions.

The Elluminate Next bundle incorporates Elluminate Publish! and the all-new Elluminate Plan!, a tool designed to help instructors and instructional designers organize and package content for online sessions prior to the session being conducted live.

Gary Dietz, product marketing manager for Elluminate, provided us with a preview of Plan! last week. He explained that the software allows users to plan a template, structure, and framework in a non-real-time environment. It allows the structure used for interaction to be, essentially, packaged in advanced. “You can take the actions and content from a rich environment and provide this plan, which is a single file [and] runs on any system,” he said. (It will be compatible with Elluminate Live! version 8.5, which is slated to be released at the end of June.) “It’s like moving back to old planning book.”

Link to article

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is involved in this new Web site for 7th, 8th, and 9th graders.

Visit the Our Courts Site