Taste of Tech

I found this by mistake, but it’s pretty neat. In Firefox, you can do tabbed browsing. Each tab can have a separate page in it, but they all show up in the same window. This makes it easy to visit multiple sites at once and switch between them without having dozens of different windows open.

If you have two or more tabs open, though, you can set them ALL to be your home pages. Click on Tools, and then Options. On the general tab, where you can set your Home Page, the button that usually says "Use Current Page" has changed to "Use Current PageS." Click this, and then Ok.

When you start Firefox, now it’ll open multiple tabs with the pages that you specified. So you could, for example, open the school’s portal page in one tab and your personal Protopage in another.

This is a test to see if I can post a podcast. As it turns out, I can. Here are the limitations, though:

• If I just post the podcast (like the high school people do for the morning announcements), I get the file just fine in my podcast receiver. I don’t see it on the blog though, so I can’t download it directly without subscribing.
• I tried to attach a file to the post, and to just use the URL of the audio file. That doesn’t work. It results in a 0K file that can’t be opened.
• If I attach a file to the post, and actually select the MP3 directly, it works. That’s what this post is. The down side is that the file is actually on the server twice — once to download via the feed, and once embedded in the post. This approach generates the "attached files" stuff below.
• Theoretically, I could also just link to the feed version. That would look like this:

Download the podcast here.

In any event, it’s a little more complicated than I initially thought, but not much.

I finally figured out the problem with email notifications. I’ve been told many times by my most faithful reader that email notifications aren’t working, and that problem is showing up on other people’s blogs, too. I, on the other hand, haven’t been having a problem with it.

As it turns out, the problem occurs when someone with a non-bbhcsd.org email address tries to sign up. The email gets sent to their address from our web server, but since there’s no reverse-DNS entry for the web server, the remote mail server rejects the message. In simpler terms, our web server tries to make a connection with, say, Roadrunnner’s mail server. It says, "I have this message from bbhcsd.org." Roadrunner looks up the address that our web server is using, and sees that it’s not bbhcsd.org. In fact, it’s Lnoca.org. So it says, "I’m not going to talk to you, because you’re not bbhcsd.org."

There are two fixes to this. One is to set up pointer records in the DNS system for our IP address, so that reverse lookups resolve correctly. This is pretty complicated because it involves changes on our system, Lnoca’s system, our external DNS providers, and DAS in Columbus (Lnoca’s Internet service provider). The odds that this will happen are pretty low.

The other alternative is to not send email from our web server. Instead, have the web server send the email through (*gasp*) our mail server. Since the pointers and reverse DNS records are already configured for the mail server, this should fix the problem.

Unfortunately, telling the web server to send mail through the mail server is much easier said than done. But we’re working on it….

I’ve heard or read these lately. According to the January 2006 issue of Technology & Learning, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that:

• Amost one-fifth of teens blog.
• Teens from urban homes are more likely to share their work on the Internet than suburban or rural teens.
• Girls create more content than boys.
• Boys download and share files more than girls.

Last week, Stephen Abram spoke at the eTech Ohio State Technology Conference. His talk included the following statistics:

• 75% of high school and college students have MySpace accounts.
• eBay sells more cars before 9:00 AM than any dealer in America sells in a week.
• 85% of 15-25 year olds have instant messaging accounts
• 5% of people over 30 have instant messaging accounts
• 50% of the people in the world have never seen a telephone.
• 87% of the content on the Internet is not publicly accessible for free, and is not indexed by Google.

Thinking more about the possibilities for Wikis in the schools, lots of ideas come to mind. The collaborative nature of a Wiki can have many degrees. It could be a collaboration among a few people, or a larger group of teachers, or an entire school, or the whole world. It doesn’t have to be restricted to allowing everyone to edit everything.

One possibility is to use a wiki to build an internal knowledge base. We’d probably start with technology, because that’s what we know best. We’re woefully negligent about documenting the techy-stuff, which keeps people from solving their own problems. How do you set up a printer? It’s an easy process, but it’s a little non-intuitive. How do we configure email in our district? If it’s spelled out in the documentation, more people would be able to do it, and it would save everyone some time.

If we built this kind of thing in a wiki, then our teachers could indentify and translate our geek-speak into something that more people can understand. They could also begin to document their own tips, and add to the content. There’s one wiki application.

Another problem that’s come up lately is the lack of a system to share teaching resources. At the K-3 level, the buildings are on their own. At 4-8, the teams often work independently of one another. At 9-12, we have many teachers teaching the same courses, but not necessarily sharing best practices. If a structure were created, tied to academic content standards and grade level, where teachers could share projects, worksheets, lesson plans, online resources, and other useful stuff, then others could use it. As time goes on and more people begin to use this resource, they can modify the projects, and improve the quality and effectiveness of the lessons. This type of application would both help teachers to share resources and find ways to improve their teaching. At the same time, it helps address the academic content standards.

The WorldBridges project is looking at extending this to electronic textbooks. If the textbook for a social studies class is a wiki, teachers can customize it to meet the needs of their students. They can correct mistakes, clarify misleading or confusing passages, or augment the resource with primary sources or other information.It becomes a living document that’s constantly being revised.

Students can get involved with wikis by using them at the end of instruction. They can produce a wiki about the topics they’re studying. This resource could then be used by future students in the same class. For example, the students in a science class may do a research project on a certain topic. The end result, the deliverable, is a wiki about that topic. The students create it, revise it, refine it, and finally deliver a very good product. The next year, this becomes the primary resource (textbook) for the students in the class. Those students do a wiki unit on another topic. Over time, a resource is created that covers the whole course, and many teachers can use it (and refine it) with their classes.

All of this is getting a little ahead of us at the moment. I think if we start with the knowledge base stuff and work from there, we’ll find even more applications. Stay tuned….