Check this out! isn't this great?

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MediaStorm: Blog

• Don’t use dissolves between images
  • Wow, this is great for advice for some our comment by Miguel guhlin
  • Avoid excessive pans and other Ken Burns-style effects. Animation on stills is effective only when done sparingly.
    • In multimedia, we have the power to determine how long viewers spend with each photograph. A good rule of thumb is

Here's that great info you were interested this morning...

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The Internet and the Recession | Pew Internet & American Life Project

• The Internet and the Recession
  by Lee Rainie, Aaron Smith
  • Some 69% of all Americans have used the internet to cope with the recession as they hunt for bargains, jobs, ways to upgrade their skills, better investment strategies, housing options, and government benefits. That amounts to 88% of internet users.
    
    • Most people consult multiple sources of information and support as they are trying to devise personal strategies to meet challenging times. They are "networking" through family, friends, experts, and information sources as they try to make sense of what has happened to the economy and the policy solutions that are proposed.
      

Thought the info in this article would catch your attention...Instructional Technology Services can support these kinds of wikis but we'd need someone to facilitate the conversation, and to mediate the content authority issues!

Feel free to share! BTW, we've just launched The Campus Technology Center (http://itls.saisd.net)...everything you wanted to know about campus tech in ONE place with forums, etc. Invite everyone to join at your campus!

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Education Week: Educators Assess 'Open Content' Movement

• Leaving their textbooks to gather dust, Houston middle school teacher Ardith A. Stewart and her students studied science this spring by assembling much of their curriculum on a class “wiki.” The materials included students’ written postings on class topics, and projects, grading rubrics, and discussion questions that Ms. Stewart prepared or obtained from teachers in other parts of Texas and the United States.
  • exas teacher is part of a small but growing movement of K-12 educators that is latching on to educational resources that are “open,” or free for others to use, change, and republish on Web sites that promote sharing. The open-content movement is fueled partly by digital creation tools that make it easy to create “mash-ups,” or digital medleys of content of various types.
    • groups advocating open content say it saves schools money by spreading the time and expense of developing curricular resources over many contributors.
      • Many adaptions give schools more ways of differentiating instruction, by adding language translations, shifting grade level, and adjusting for reading ability, a special geographic or cultural focus, and other tailorings from the standard curriculum.
        • incorporating short videos on punctuation into a class-created wiki, a Web site that allows users to add, remove, and sometimes edit the content, for student content and peer grading.
          • “Getting students to [assemble their own educational resources] creates a kind of buy-in,” Ms. Stewart said. “It can’t just be teacher-created, because the kids are going to be bored.”
            • The process of content creation and sharing is also a way to build professional relationships between teachers
              • more that teachers get their hands into content creation, the better they can teach that material
                • The OER Commons site, which allows users to search across different repositories of curriculum content, also gives teachers a means of tagging, rating, and reviewing open educational resources. Teachers can modify the resources and post their revisions for others to use.
                  • textbook publishers have a great store of expertise in creating curricular materials that meet state academic standards and that conform to expert pedagogical practices and the findings of research.
                    • [Teachers] can use that work not just in their own classroom, but repurpose them, organize them, customize them, and share them back to the educational community,” Mr. Donovan said of the open content.
                      • Much of the consortium’s online open-content collection consists of case-based teaching materials that encourage students to engage in research of the local environment. Another section hosts “a problem space,” offering data sets and posing shared problems that different learning communities are working on. It also offers teachers and students free tools for analyzing data.
                        • Using those activities and tools re-creates the scientific process in a way not obtainable from a textbook
                          • “The content-authority sorts of issues are never going to go away,” Mr. Donovan said. “We’re always going to need strong editorial leadership from some experts who know how to organize and present in some coherent fashion the background disciplinary knowledge.”
                            • One initiative, called FreeReading, aims to help educators teach reading by making high-quality, instructional materials for early reading widely available and free.
                              • “We’re looking to provide a reliable forum where teachers can openly and freely share their successful and effective methods for teaching reading in grades K-1, and for at-risk students in later grades,” according to the Web site.
                                • “FreeReading is an ongoing, collaborative, teacher-based curriculum-sharing project,” said Karen M. Fasimpauer, an advocate of open content who helps school districts start programs to provide handheld computers to all of their students
                                  • he Kids Open Dictionary Builder, which invites people from around the world to contribute simplified definitions to an online dictionary that will have language levels and readability appropriate for children.
                                    “We’re hoping lots of people will rip it off and do what they want with it­—it’s one of the most basic needed resources,”

FYI

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Bluebonnet books meet web 2.0! | Top Shelf

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Pearson Presents: Learning to Change - Practical Theory

• Pearson Presents: Learning to Change
  • start problematizing all these ideas. I want our community to get more rigorous about our ideas. I want us to start talking about what we gain and what we lose when we make these choices because I think we have to be really honest or we'll lose this battle. We cannot pretend these ideas "save" our schools, they create different schools -- better ones, I believe -- but very, very different ones, and that's the piece I see missing. But the problem is that I'm not sure that's the message this video was meant to bring ou
    • What's so amazing about that video is how un-revolutionary it should be by now. What should worry us is that Pearson -- and many companies like them -- are ready to sell us the product that they swear will move us there. And I, for one, don't believe them.

11% of district employees have criminal charges, among them administrators and teachers.

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MySA.com: Metro | State

• The fingerprinting of 4,457 SAISD employees turned up 470 criminal charges, including enticing a child, selling alcohol to a minor, prostitution, larceny and aggravated assault.
  • SAISD spokeswoman Carmen Vásquez-González said district officials will review each charge on a case-by-case basis. “For example, a charge for possession of marijuana while in college probably doesn't matter today, and a DWI charge, if you're a teacher and were not driving a district vehicle would be OK,” she said.
    • Someone convicted of some offenses — including those that require registration as a sex offender and certain felonies — would automatically be fired or precluded from being hired.
      • “SAISD is creating documents that they're not required to create,” Villarreal said. “We did not do that and we're not planning on doing that.”

New grant opportunity...is SAISD pursuing it? Relevant info below

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TEA Correspondence Item

• 
  The Texas Education Agency (TEA) is requesting applications
  • either open an Early College High School (ECHS) or expand an existing ECHS no later than August 2009 to serve middle school students
    • The ECHS model is complex and requires high levels of collaboration and commitment between all participants.
      • applicants must agree to develop the ECHS in accordance with the following requirements.  An ECHS shall: 1) be a collaborative partnership between a school district or an open-enrollment charter school and an IHE; 2) provide a course of study during grades 9–12 that enables a participating student to receive a high school diploma and either an associate’s degree or 60 semester hours toward a baccalaureate degree; 3) target and enroll a majority of students who are at risk of dropping out of school (at-risk, economically disadvantaged, English-language learners, and first-generation college goers); and 4) be an autonomous high school that is (a) located on a college or university campus, or (b) a stand-alone high school campus near a college or university campus, or (c) a small learning community (where the ECHS is physically separated from the larger high school and ECHS students are a separate cohort with their own teachers, leader, schedule, and curriculum plan) within a larger high school that is near a college or university campus.
        • An eligible applicant shall demonstrate how it will meet all of the requirements of this RFA for opening an ECHS no later than the beginning of the 2009–2010 school year.
          • create collaborative partnerships between school districts and IHEs to open small high schools that provide students at risk of dropping out of school, including traditionally underserved students, an opportunity to earn a high school diploma and 60 credit hours towards an associate’s degree and/or a baccalaureate degree at no cost to the student.
            • Each ECHS must serve grades 9–12 and some portion of the grades 6–8 middle school population. 
              • An ECHS provides for a course of study that enables a participating student to receive both a high school diploma and either an associate’s degree or 60 credit hours toward a baccalaureate degree. 
                • Students graduating from an ECHS will be prepared for post-secondary and work success.
                  • 
                    The ECHS Cycle 3 Expansion Grant will be implemented during the 2008–2011 school year(s).  Applicants should plan for a starting date of no earlier than December 1, 2008, and an ending date of no later than May 31, 2011.  Funding will be provided for approximately 5–10 new ECHSs and approximately 10–15 existing ECHSs, to expand service to include some portion of the grades 6–8 middle school population.  A total of $5,175,000 in project funds is available to be awarded.

A few kid-friendly image search engines...please add to the IMages for Educational Use Collection.

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Start Your Search Engines Part 2 - 5/1/2008 - School Library Journal

• Picsearch is another terrific tool for tracking down images.
• The image-only engine boasts that it has access to more than two billion pictures, which, it claims, are completely kid-friendly.
• If you work in a school, Pics4Learning is another smart choice. Like Picsearch, Pics4Learning’s photos are student-safe, but more importantly, they’re also copyright-friendly, which means you’re free to use any photos you find.
• Another fine site to mine is Wikimedia Commons, a database of images, music, and videos that’s available for educational purposes, as long as you attribute their source.
• If you’re interested in life on Earth—and really, who isn’t?—then you’ll want to beeline to the Encyclopedia of Life.
• Creative Commons is also currently setting up a portal for teachers and an educational search engine (to learn more, visit learn.creativecommons.org). In the meantime, you can search for Creative Commons–licensed materials on Google, Yahoo!, Flickr, blip.tv, OWL Music Search, and SpinXpress. But since these sites often contain images that aren’t appropriate for kids, we recommend that only librarians and teachers search these sites for pictures—rather than just turning your students loose.
• Whenever students use online images, it’s important to remind them to cite their sources—and for you to model the same practice.

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See my bookmarks at http://www.diigo.com/user/mguhlin

See my profile at http://www.diigo.com/profile/mguhlin

How to create templates and load them into OpenOffice.

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OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas: OpenOffice Templates: Making Them, and Making New Documents Based on Them (Writer, Calc and Impress): Updated March 2006

OpenOffice Templates you can use...this web site also has great info on how to use Open Office.

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OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas: A Few OpenOffice Impress Presentation Templates

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Tools for facilitating PBL? » Moving at the Speed of Creativity

• The real world is full of groups working on project teams, and part of the solution to fixing the disconnect between 21st century skills which employers say they want, and the skills emphasized in our schools, is operationalizing a learning culture in our classrooms which regularly involves project-based learning.
  • educators are focused on “doing what is convenient, not what is best for students.”
    • we should be focused on maximizing student achievement, but that focus has virtually nothing to do with the emphasis of NCLB and high-stakes accountability.
      • So, you're encouraging teachers to do what they're told explicitly NOT to do, which is to leave the bounds of the District's scope and sequence? How is this a "real world" piece of advice? You're exhorting them to expressly go against the direction of their supervisors. Revolution makes for great television and epic movies, but this is America...someone has to do the hard work! comment by Miguel guhlin
      • Certainly our students need to take tests and score well on them, but there is SO much more we must do and on which we must focus in our schools than simply minimum standards for student performance established by the state.
        • However, minimum standards ARE NOT what our schools are preparing kids for. Instead, they are working to improve student success according to district-approved resources. It is irresponsible to urge teachers to forget what they've been told to do by their organization simply to achieve 21st Century skills that pundits want them to have. comment by Miguel guhlin

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Teacher Magazine: Empowering Teachers

• if there’s one question on the survey that I look at to gauge a school’s situation, it’s the one that asks whether teachers believe there’s an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect in the school. That is the one question on the survey that really correlates well with both student achievement and teacher retention. Teachers want to work in schools where they can thrive, and they’re not going to thrive and extend themselves if they don’t feel comfortable with their colleagues and the school leadership.
  • leaders creating a clear and compelling vision around learning and really going to bat for teachers. They have to create a safe environment for teachers—an environment where teachers feel they can make decisions that matter in both their classrooms and their schools.
    • ensure that teachers have time to collaborate and plan. I’ve seen principals who have been willing to go in and meet with parents and support teachers in their decisions.
      More broadly, effective leaders create structures in which it’s clear that teachers have a certain authority.
      • have processes where they can really understand their role in learning and can really respond to situations and engage in ways that make sense to them.
        • It is difficult to let go and empower others when you know it is your neck on the line for results.
          • Are there things that teachers themselves can do to improve their career satisfaction?
            • teachers in that situation need to find other outlets to be advocates for themselves, for their profession, and for their students.
              • They create professional learning communities, finding time to collaborate. They seek out their own professional development opportunities and advocate for themselves to be able to go and learn, so they can bring that knowledge back to their colleagues. But again, this takes a lot of care and commitment—and time. It’s hard for teachers to sustain over the long haul if they aren’t given support from leadership.
                • what teachers tell us they really want are opportunities to help them differentiate instruction to meet diverse learning needs.
                  • they need are strategies to help them tailor that knowledge to meet the needs of special education students, English-language learners, and other groups in order to work towards closing the achievement gap.
                    • engage my faculty in a conversation about what they want and need.
                      • leaders still need to develop contextually-based strategies.
                        • getting together and reflecting on what needs to be in place for everyone to be successful and making sure this gets done in a way that everyone is comfortable with.
                          • We need to find new ways to identify these core, accomplished teachers and to give them new avenues to spread their expertise—through technology, for example. We need to create new career-advancement opportunities for them, give them greater decision-making authority and responsibility, and allow them to be successful in their work.
                            • What most teachers tell us is that, while higher salaries are nice, they aren’t going to make them stay in a job they don’t like. So while I think salary—and looking at ways of paying teachers differently for doing different jobs—is important, I think the starting block is really reflecting upon the structure of schools and creating the kind of environments where teachers can thrive, grow professionally, and do their best with their colleagues and the kids.

Thought you might find this curious...I had no idea this article had appeared on School CIO and featured Instructional Technology Services so prominently. SOme of the content came from IT's eNews, so...nice to know someone is reading it.

Relevant quotes below.

Take care,
Miguel

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SchoolCIO: 10 TIPS for Internet

here's an article that features my school district but that I had no clue that we were being featured or that articles I'd written were being quoted.

• Miguel Guhlin, director of instructional technology services for the 55,000-student San Antonio Independent School District in Texas, give their suggestions on how to achieve this.
  • San Antonio is working on a series of lessons and presentations that teachers and staff can deliver to parents. The 10�20 minute video clips will be available to parents in a variety of ways�on the Internet, on CDs, and in face-to-face meetings, Guhlin says.
    • According to Guhlin, Internet safety revolves around "how to be 'digital citizens' and get along in the virtual world we have all created." Districts need to help teachers get over their fear of the unknown. San Antonio, for example, successfully introduced teachers to blogging by holding teacher workshops and setting up a Web site (www.itls.saisd.net/scribe), where students and teachers can share their work.
      • San Antonio has blogs, wikis, podcasting, and image-gallery access for its students and teachers. However, those Internet tools are on school servers. Instead of teachers using a site like blogspot.com, where the next blog is just a click away, San Antonio installed b2evolution, a free blogging platform that they can use.
        • As with blogs, make sure you have some say over the content. For example, instead of Flickr, which provides easy access to inappropriate images, San Antonio uses Gallery, a free open-source image library that allows the district more control.
          • San Antonio has it all in one place. Districts can learn about how to set up their own safe cyberspace communities at http://mguhlin.wikispaces.com/.

FYI

The CTO Challenge:
Building Your Personal Learning Network

By Miguel Guhlin

As a chief technology officer or director of technology, probably one
of the toughest challenges you face isn't keeping up with the
technology, but rather understanding how to leverage it for your
organization. While in the past, we were limited by the occasions that
served as "learning experiences," in the 21st century, learning isn’t
restricted to a special event bound by time and place. We don't learn
just when sitting in a meeting, or at a conference or from 8:00 to 3:30
PM when school is in session. Today, we have the potential to tap into a flow of conversation, a web-based learning ecology, that we can learn from 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The only way for me to respond to that panic attack was to seize
control, to realize that I do have some measure of control over how I
react to rapid, tectonic paradigm-shifts that inflict terror because
they transform the world around me. Not feeling it, huh? Well, that
means you haven't looked over the edge and seen it looking back at you.

The only way for all of us to deal with the current challenge to our
particular approach to learning -- aside from ignoring it completely,
which is about as effective as ignoring an oncoming truck -- is to
seize the wheel and create our own learning network. As technology
directors, people look to us to model learning new technologies. Are
you taking advantage of all the resources you can to streamline the
often messy learning process?

WHY JUMP IN?

Christopher Parsons shares that we need to do four things with the overwhelming amount of
unorganized content -- information, ideas, tips and how-to's, and
personal information -- we receive; the kind of content that might be
useful in the future but today might be thrown away or filed away in a
way -- paper notes, e-mail, bookmarks -- that would not be useful and
would probably be forgotten. Those four things are:

• Read: Read/watch/listen to the entirety of the content that you are presented with.
• Evaluate: Consider what the content means to you, and
  whether or not it is a source of information that intuitively seems
  appropriate/acceptable for a task at hand.
• Critique: Moving beyond evaluate, seriously reflect on the material and then form your own opinion of it.
• Write Share your critique with others, so they can engage with you and the original content to develop a cohesive knowledge-product.
• Annotate curriculum documents and add stickies to show where tech
  integration is happening and could happen. That could be annotated for
  a group of curriculum writers.
• Annotate state education agency memos for your
  administrators. We get memos every day and they are posted online.
  Immediately, among a team, share the implications of the ideas in the
  memo, the most important points, and so on.
• See instructional uses of Diigo as screencasts developed by Clay Burell, an International School teacher.
• What backup software do you use in your district?
• Have you considered switching from MS Exchange to Google Apps? How did you make the transition?
• What special-education tracking software or web-based service are you using at the District level?
• What kinds of audio/visual solutions are you using to broadcast school board meetings?

And many more. Responding to those types of questions in your blog and
sharing resources with other technology directors via Diigo will enable
you instantly to share ideas about important matters relevant to your
work.

Get started by joining the CTOnetwork group for chief technology officers, technology directors/coordinators, and others in district-level technology positions.

Use Google Reader to Manage RSS Subscriptions:
Most new web pages now have what is known as an RSS feed button. A web
site with an RSS (real simple syndication) feed enables you to read the
content without visiting the site beyond the first time. You can
subscribe to a site’s content -- and subscription is free -- and any
updates/changes to the site will be delivered directly to you. (Watch this Video.) The benefit of that method is that creating a personal learning network will not result in more email, but less. Instead of receiving email notifications, you go to
Google Reader to review the latest updates and changes, and participate
when you have a need.
My Example: Miguel's Shared Items in Google Reader
Get Started at http://reader.google.com

REFLECTING ON THE TOOLS

The tools discussed here can save a lot of time and energy as you try
to join the flow of conversation. One of my favorite quotes -- which
came to me via Mark Wagner -- is, "He who learns from one who is
learning, drinks from a flowing river."

I hope you'll continue to learn every moment and share that learning with others. The rewards are infinite.

Miguel Guhlin
Education World®
Copyright © 2008 Education World

FYI