Taste of Tech

A pdf version of this document is also available.

What is Del.icio.us and Why Do I Care?
One of the first things we learned about using the web is how to save bookmarks. You are visiting some web site, and you want to save that link so you can come back to it later. So you save it as a bookmark (or favorite), and it gets added to your list of saved sites.

This works fine. All of your bookmarked sites show up in a list in your browser, and you can return to them any time. You can even organize your bookmarks into folders, just like you would with your files. Use different folders for different topics, and you have a nicely organized collection of web sites that you can return to with ease at the click of a mouse.

There are two problems with this. Many teachers use multiple computers. At the very least, you probably have one at school and one at home. In some cases, teachers share rooms and end up using several different computers at school throughout the course of the day. But the bookmarks are stored on the computer you were using when you created them. That means you can’t get to bookmarks you created on another computer.

There’s also another problem. If your bookmarks are stored on your computer, what happens when the computer’s hard drive dies? Your bookmarks die along with it.

What we really need is bookmark portability.

Delicious (http://del.icio.us) is one service that helps you manage your bookmarks. Start by signing up for a free account. You will also need to install a toolbar, so you have access to the Delicious tools. Then, when you’re surfing the web and encounter a site you want to bookmark, use Delicious instead. You can add notes about the site and choose one or more “tags” for it. Tags are one-word descriptors for categorizing your sites. For example, I use the tag “profdev” for sites related to professional development. I use “2blog” for sites that I want to blog about. You can use any tags you like.

Delicious then allows you to access your links from any computer. Simply log in to your account, and you can manage your links. If you want, you can choose to share your links with others, too.

You can also search Delicious to see which sites other people have tagged in a certain way. Maybe you’re doing a lesson on photosynthesis. You can search delicious for items that other people have tagged with “photosynthesis.” The result is a list of hundreds of web sites about photosynthesis that others have found valuable enough to bookmark.

By sharing your links, you contribute to the global collection of annotated resources related to whatever topics your tags cover.

So How Do I Do This?
First, go to the Del.icio.us site. It’s at http://del.icio.us. There aren’t any www’s in there. There’s no dot com. They were being cute when they set up the site. Most people just find it annoying because they can’t remember where to put the dots.

Once you’re on the Delicious site, click the Register button in the upper-right corner. Fill out the information they ask for. The password has to be at least six characters, and it has to have either a number or a symbol in it.

Once you register, you’ll be taken to a page that allows you to install software in your browser to integrate with your Delicious account. This page should automatically detect your browser and operating system, and take you to the right tool.

Go ahead and install the buttons (or extension). In Internet Explorer, this will add a Delicious toolbar to your browser. In Firefox, it’ll add new buttons to your navigation toolbar.

If you want to install these buttons on other computers, you can find them in the “Bookmarking” section of the Help page on the Delicious web site.

It’s Installed. Now what?
When you’re on a web site that you want to bookmark, click on the new TAG button. When you do this, a pop-up window will appear, allowing you to add notes about this site.

You can also enter tags. Think of tags as being categories for your links. You can display lists of sites that are tagged a certain way. Because links can have as many tags as you want, you can organize your links in lots of different ways.

Your Delicious links are available by clicking on the Delicious icon, or by going to http://del.icio.us/username, where “username” is your username. This is great, because it gives you access to your links from any Internet-connected computer.

What Else Do I Need to Know?
Privacy
By default, your bookmarks are public. That means anyone can see the list of things you’re bookmarking. There may be sites you want to bookmark that you don’t want everyone to know about. When tagging these sites, just click “Do Not Share” and they won’t be visible unless you’re logged in to your Delicious account.

For this to work, you may need to enable private saving. From the Delicious page, select Settings, and then Private Saving under Bookmarks. Then, check the box to allow private saving, and save the change.

Importing
You can import your bookmarks from your browser. From the Settings page, select Import/Export under Bookmarks, and follow the instructions provided.

Sharing Links
If you want to share a link with another Delicious user, add an additional tag of “for:username” when you tag the link. Replace “username” with the person’s Delicious username. Then, the link will go onto their “Links for You” page.

Time is running out for you to sign up for your free Yugma Premium account. In December, Yugma announced that they were giving away free one-year subscriptions to their premium service to any blogger who requests one. The offer expires January 31, though, so you’d better hurry up if you want one.

Yugma is desktop-sharing software. It allows you to share your computer screen with others over the Internet. After signing up, you can create a session. You then start sharing your screen in that session, so anyone connecting to it can see what’s on your screen. You can invite others to participate by sending them the session id.

This is extraordinarily useful software for distance conferencing. I can use it to do a webinar, and show my presentation while I’m talking. Or, I can demonstrate software, with the participants able to see what I’m doing. Generally, you’d want to pair it with an audio conference, either through Skype or a phone system. There’s also a built-in text chat.

If you miss the premium account promotion, you can still sign up for the free version. It works just as well as the premium one, but it does require all of the participants to register before they can join your session. It also has fewer options in the areas of file sharing and recording, but it does meet most needs pretty well. After using it, you can upgrade later if you need the advanced features.

I showed Ustream to my tech team earlier this week. Here’s how it works: you go to the Ustream site and sign up for a free account. Once you have your account and you’re logged in, you can select “Broadcast Now” at the top of the screen. A Flash applet loads, and asks you if it can use your webcam and microphone. After approving this, you’re ready to go. Click “Start Broadcasting” and the audio and video from your microphone and camera are broadcast online.

That’s amazingly easy. You give out the address of your show to people, and they can watch you live. The site also offers the ability to record your video, and it gets archived on their server. People can then access it later, you can embed it in your blog, or you can download it.

When watching the stream, your viewers can participate in a text chat on the same screen, or they can leave comments. You have the option of leaving these features available, restricting them to registered users, or disabling them entirely. You can also password-protect your broadcasts, if you’re concerned about privacy or security.

I first heard about the service a few months ago, when EdTechTalk started using it for some of their shows. At one point, we did a mashup of four video streams on the same screen as we did an EdTechWeekly show. We soon realized that the show was much better without the video (a face for radio?), but Jeff Lebow still uses ustream for the audio. It’s much easier to use than Shoutcast, and it doesn’t have the audio delay traditional streaming packages use.

This is also the service we used to broadcast the Gingerbread Stories last month. With a lot of help from Jeff, we were able to turn a video Skype call into streaming video with a little smoke and mirrors.

From a tech perspective, there aren’t many “gotchas”. To do audio, you have to have a microphone, and to do video, you need a webcam. You could probably pick up both for $40. On the network side, you have to have access to ports 1935 and 6667. That’s all in the FAQ on the site, and you don’t need to worry about it unless you have a problem.

The one problem we had in our district is that it also requires access to ports 80 and 443. None of the documentation says this anywere. Since a lot of schools (including ours) block port 80 because they require web filtering, this presented a problem. Eventually, I resolved it by allowing port 80 access through the firewall, but only to the ustream site. A kludge, perhaps, but it’ll work until ustream responds to my support request.

The tech team was thinking about possibilities and liabilities. They liked how easy it is to use, and they appreciated the powerful nature of this software. At the same time, they’re concerned about keeping kids safe, and protecting privacy, and the liability of giving a student a camera, microphone, and global audience without a delay. So we’ve started having some of those conversations about how we can use this. In the meantime, we have one more item in the bag of tricks.

Last week, Bob Sprankle posted two new Bit by Bit podcast episodes. These were the last two recordings of presentations made at the Christa McAuliffe conference in New Hampshire back in November. It looks like he saved the best for last.

Dr. Tim Tyson was a middle school principal in Georgia before retiring last year. He spoke on the transformational change that tool place over the course of a few years at Mabry Middle School. Both of his presentations focus on using technology in innovative and transformative ways in an environment where technology was not previously valued or used effectively.

The first presentation, Leadership Applied: Building Powerful Learning Communities, is aimed at technology leaders, in which he includes both administrators and teachers. He urges us to be risk takers — to empower teachers to try new things. Both teachers and principals tend to be control freaks, but letting go of some of that control allows teachers to be creative and innovative without fearing the repercussions of failure.

In the second presentation, The Blogging School, he describes how his school moved from a single, rarely updated, hard to use web page to a multimedia site in which every teacher had a blog and posted to it at least once per week. The change didn’t happen overnight, but he facilitated it by modeling the behavior he expected, by showing teachers how easy blogging is, and by replacing some of their “busywork” tasks with blogging activities.

Here are some more ideas from Dr. Tyson:

• We have to get teachers to the point where they’re willing to suspend the disbelief that they don’t want to learn or can’t learn technology.
• Educating to minimum standards doesn’t work. EVERY kid has to do his or her best, and go as far as he or she can go.
• People do their best with their current vision of what can be done and with the resources they believe they have available to them. By helping to develop the vision and the resources, most people will want to do more.
• When requiring teachers to post weekly to their blogs, he did not intend to create more work for the teachers. He made more work for the parents. By giving parents useful, timely information about what was happening in their children’s classes, they could ask meaningful questions about their children’s schoolwork and reinforce concepts at home.
• “I have a significantly greater chance of my child being killed in the car on Interstate 275 around Atlanta than I ever do that my child is going to be picked up by some pedophile. But what do I do? I put the kid in the car all the time without giving it a second thought.” We have to measure our reaction to fear with reasonableness.
• By distributing the ability to put content on the school’s web site, he also distributed the responsibility. The people with the information should be the people posting the information. When it’s as easy as sending an email, there’s no excuse for not doing it.
• Teaching parents to use RSS allows them to subscribe to all of their children’s teacher’s blogs.
• When requiring teachers to post weekly to their blogs, he also took some work away. By using categories on the blog, teachers could tie their classwork to the curriculum objectives. It was then no longer necessary to do curriculum mapping, which used to take hours. They could simply look at the blog posts for a particular concept to see what was done, and when.
• When teachers are posting content online, establish boundaries for both teachers and parents. One week worked well for his school. Every teacher had to post at least once per week. Some of the parents wanted more; Some of the teachers wanted less. But this was the communicated expectation, and everyone had to live with it. Teachers were free to post more often, but they weren’t expected to.
• When approaching something new, start small. Learn what the issues are. Then, replicate your successes.
• Blogging formed the basis of all of the other technology projects undertaken in the school. Podcasts, videos, and everything else grew from the framework provided by the blogs.
• When working with teachers, start where they are. Empower them to move forward. If you’re doing something and find that it doesn’t meet a real, genuine need that you have, then stop doing it.

Take an hour and listen to one of these presentations. Then, if you liked it, go back and listen to the other one.

Debbie loves this one. Alvin posted last week about Jott, a service that lets you use your cell phone to send yourself reminders. That’s cooler than it sounds. Here’s how it works: you call the service with your phone. It identifies you by your callerid. It asks you who you want to send a message to. You can select yourself, or anyone whose address you have uploaded. You then record the message and hang up. The message can be up to 30 seconds long.

The service takes your audio, converts it to text, and emails it to the person you’ve specified. If you enter a phone number, it also sends a text message to that person’s phone with the text of your message.

Amazingly, the speech recognition software is very good. I’ve used the site a few times and have only had a few minor mistakes.

So what? Here are the applications that have come up in the three days since we started using it:

• I’ve received several emailed reminders from my wife this weekend about various things. When I’m at home, I rarely have my cell phone one, and we don’t have a land line. But email isn’t ususally very far away. I know, I’m a geek.
• John Rundag commented on Alvin’s blog that he listens to podcasts in the car, and Jotts himself with an address or resource to look up later. I’ve taken a lot of heat from the EdTech community over the last year after admitting to taking notes in the car while driving and listening to podcasts. This may help get me to and from work safely.
• My Dad is very excited about this. He needs to email people all the time, sending short messages, reminders, followups, etc. The problem is that he’s not the best typist in the world. He can use Jott to send these messages and improve his productivity immensely. Did I mention that it supports groups? You can send a message to a whole group of people if you want.
• We’re going to be sans Internet access for a week or so starting Wednesday. Debbie suggested tying Jott into Twitter. We can record a message on our phones and tweet it out. That’s pretty cool, since we don’t have a data plan on our cell phones, so we can’t send directly to Twitter from them.
• I’m trying to figure out a way to integrate it with our emergency notification system. We use a system that notifies staff, students, and parents in the event of a schoolwide emergency or weather related cancellation. If we were to add the Jott number to one of those lists, it might be theoretically possible to have that message go to a special email address, which then gets monitored by a server process. The text is then extracted and posted to the web site. So audio emergency announcements are automatically posted to the web site in text format. That’s pretty cool. I’m not sure we’ll actually do it, but it does illustrate the possibilities.