Pulling the Strings

For the last 20 years, I’ve had this love-hate relationship with computer programming. I took a high school programming course at the suggestion of a math teacher, and found that I enjoyed it and was relatively good at it. I liked the idea of controlling the machine — deciding what I want it to do, [...]

Posted on June 27th, 2008 by John Schinker
Filed under: 21:Collaboration, 21:Innovation, Front Page, Online Resources, Opinions, Students, Teachers | No Comments »

One Walkie-Talkie

My brother and I had walkie-talkies when we were kids. I think we got them for Christmas one year. They were red, ran on 9-volt batteries, and had ridiculously long antennas. We used them constantly until the batteries died. Then, they fell into disuse (we never seemed to have a battery surplus). In the half-dozen [...]

Posted on June 18th, 2008 by John Schinker
Filed under: 21:Collaboration, Front Page, Online Resources, Opinions, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Introduction to Moodle

This week, we’re offering two professional development classes on using technology in the classroom. In the first class, we’re covering a series of interactive web tools including Protopage, Blogging, Podcasting, Wikis, and Moodle. Because he introduces this better than anyone else in our district, we convinced middle school teacher Joe Zenir to introduce this for [...]

Posted on June 12th, 2008 by John Schinker
Filed under: Front Page, Teachers, Web 2.0 | 5 Comments »

Game Show

On Tuesday, June 4, the EdTech Posse will be joining the Women of Web 2.0 in their weekly webcast at 9:00 PM EDT. The show will include a game show component, where the two teams will compete against each other to will fabulous prizes, which mostly consist of just bragging rights. You can help by [...]

Posted on June 9th, 2008 by John Schinker
Filed under: Front Page | No Comments »

Protecting Kids Online 4: Filtering

Hopefully by this point, you’ve put the cybersafety issue into perspective, implemented some basic measures to protect your kids online, and used resources to help teach kids how to protect themselves. Now it’s time to talk about filtering Internet access. Conceptually, web filters are very simple. When using a filtered computer, requests for web pages, [...]

Posted on June 4th, 2008 by John Schinker
Filed under: Cybersafety, Front Page, Parents | No Comments »