Taste of Tech

I was accused of being too nice to Microsoft yesterday. Before I get too MS-friendly, I should point out that they also have a suite of tools available to help students become more productive. Microsoft Student is a suite of tools that includes a graphing calculator, photo organizer, search tools, a dictionary, and an encyclopedia. Their book summaries include "over one thousand in-depth guides [to] help students gain a better understanding of popular literary works" — apparently without actually reading them. The suite also includes "complete sets of questions and answers taken directly from popular math textbooks," because the best math help they could possibly provide is to give students the right answers to their math homework.

The student software (unlike the free teacher software) retails for $50-70 depending on where you buy it. Oddly enough, there’s also an academic version for $30, as if there’s someone out there who would be a non-academic user of a product called "student."

To sweeten the deal, Student includes Learning Essentials for free. What a bargain.

I don’t often speak highly of Microsoft, but they do occasionally manage to do some neat things. A long time ago, they produced the Microsoft Office Classroom Tools. This pathetically publicized collection of templates and resources helped students and teachers use the Office 97 and 2000 tools for student and teacher centered activities.

They’ve updated the products for Office XP and 2003 with Learning Essentials. According to the marketing-speak, "Learning Essentials includes curriculum-based templates and toolbars for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, plus academic tutorials from leading education publishers. Learning Essentials helps students get started, stay organized, and successfully complete high-quality assignments. And for educators, Learning Essentials can help them easily create effective instructional resources, complete administrative tasks, and implement new teaching strategies."

Add this one to your list of primary source resources. The Collaborative Digitization Program is a project begun by the Colorado State Library that stives to achieve high quality digital access to cultural heritage collections. Their focus is on the American west. Partnering with museums and libraries throughout the west, the project highlights best practices for digitzing, archiving, indexing, and storing historical content. The collections include historic newspapers from Colorado, primary source material from Heritage Colorado and Western Trails, and an architectural collection documenting architectural styles dating back to the 1850s.

The Teacher Toolbox includes dozens of lesson plans for all grade levels, as well as self-paced professional development to help teachers with searching for and utilizing photographs, maps, audio and other media.

I’ve been writing so much about podcasting that I decided that it should have its own category. I added it yesterday, and went back and updated all of the posts so they show up in the right places. Previously, I had lumped Podcasting into the Web 2.0 category. But it’s not really Web 2.0.

Will Richardson was talking on Ed Tech Talk last week about his reluctance to embrace podcasting. While it is a neat new tool, it doesn’t really fit into either of the Web 2.0 definitions. It’s a broacast technology. One person or group records an audio program, and sends it out to other people, who can listen to it. Sure, they can provide feedback to the originator, but there’s no real sense of interactivity. There’s no online community. This isn’t the read/write web. The fact that it uses RSS, and that people can have it automatically downloaded to their computers, doesn’t change that.

It’s also not web-as-platform. That’s the other way web 2.0 is described. You can do word processesing, calendar management, spreadsheets, graphs, even presentations online. The operating system on your computer doesn’t matter, and you don’t need any productivity applications. But podcasting doesn’t fit into that at all.

So it’s really more of a one-way communications tool. It’s broadcast. Old school. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I’ll try to categorize it correctly from now on.

We’re going to try to claim this site on Technorati one more time. Does anyone else have this many problems with it? Technorati Profile