Discovery Educators Network (DEN)

Many of you know about Discovery Education or United Streaming.  They have some great resources for bringing rich multi media to your lessons.  The best part is that all of the resources are free.  You can find content that is applicable to the lessons you are teaching and seamlessly integrate them into your curriculum. For more information about Discovery Education go to:

http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com

What I want to talk about today is taking the next step by joining the Discovery Educators Network (DEN). This is a social network for educators. While some of us may conjure up inappropriate images and thoughts when we hear the words “social network” I assure you they can be excellent ways to communicate and collaborate with people who have the same interests as you do. At this time there are just as many good and appropriate uses of social networking as there are abuses of the system. It is an area where our youth really paved the way and showed adults how an online community can be beneficial.

The DEN is a place where educators go to talk about education. Specifically the discussion boards are littered with tons of resources and best practices from teachers who are creating multi-media rich lessons for their students. A great way to start with this social network is to join and start reading the discussion boards. You do not even have to be an active participant at first, but I think you will find that once you find some resources that are useful you will find yourself wanting to share ideas as well. For those that want to go even further there are STAR educators. These are the educators who are leading the way in 21st century education in the classroom. There are links on the site to find out what it means to be a STAR educator and the responsibilities and benefits that come with it.

Free iPod touch

In case you were not aware, Apple is running a promotion right now that when you buy a new Mac you qualify for a free 8GB iPod touch.  The following link had information on the offer:

http://www.apple.com/backtoschool/faculty.html?cid=WWW-NAUS-BTS20080530-KQEQ9

The iPod touch’s are a great new iPod.  They now contain all features of the iPhone except for the phone.  One suggestion would be to not buy the Mac until July 11th.  Apple is releasing new software for their iPhone and iPod touch and if you purchase before the 11th you may be forced to pay the $9.95 to upgrade your new iPod to the newest software.  It is worth waiting a few days.

iTunesU

I saw a great announcement today concerning iTunesU.  They are now offering K-12 content.  This was just announced Tuesday July 1st at NECC.  Here is an article with information:

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/?i=54390;_hbguid=f266f42f-b885-4d14-a151-b1b4cf0a11b8

iTunesU has been offering some great content since it began a little over a year ago.  Wikipedia says: iTunes U “features free content such as course lectures, language lessons, lab demonstrations, sports highlights and campus tours provided by top US colleges and universities including Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Duke University, Arizona State University, and MIT.” Since the day it opened we have been asking our Apple reps when they were going to start offering K-12 content.  The answer we always got was … soon.

What is exciting about this announcement is the opportunity for school districts to offer content on-line for on-demand access.  What is even more powerful is that users are not restricted to just their school district.  Any material that is released to the public will be accessible through the iTunes store. The initial Universities that started offering their content this way felt that the charge of their institution was to offer the best education to the world they could.  They no longer have to be confined to the bricks and mortar buildings on their campuses to offer this content. Many professors embraced this opportunity and the amount of content you can find now from post-secondary schools as grown tremendously.  I expect a similar explosion in K-12 content.

Apple to Lancater

It appears that Mac fans in Lancaster County will have a lot to be excited about this fall as an Apple Store is planned to go into Park City Malls this October:

http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/222225

Apple has traditionally only sold their products at their online store or at their own retail stores - named Apple Stores. The closest one to Lancaster is the King of Prussia store.  It is very small in comparison to some of Apple’s more well known Apple Stores.  Among avid Mac users these stores are big attractions.  It is almost a badge of honor to say what Mac stores you have visited.

Each store not only displays and sells Apple products, but they also set out their equipment for people to use so you can experiment with the exact product you will be purchasing.  They also run training sessions where you can learn about some of Apple’s newest software.  But probably the most attractive feature of an Apple Store is the Genius bar.  Every Apple Store has a Genius bar where you can talk to an Apple “genius” and get any questions answered, get hardware and software support or just talk over best practices for using your Mac.

Apple Store openings are also big events.  The first 1,00o or so customers get a free T-shirt with the store name on it.  People will wait in line at some of the more prestigious openings for hours before the store opens to get a T-shirt.  Some come out Lancaster in Oct. and wait in line with me to gett a free T-shirt.

Google Calendar

We all now that Google is putting out some great Web 2.0 products. In this post I want to focus on their calendar. I have a work laptop, a blackberry phone and a home desktop. The challenge is being able to keep my calendar straight on all 3. Google Calendar is the solution I use. Since it is on the web I can access it on any computer and edit/update entries as needed. On the laptop and the home desktop I then use iCal. Google calendar give you either a XML, an HTML, or an iCal feed that allows you to share your calendar with other applications, feeds or websites. It really is simple to do. For iCal I just get the address from Google for my calendar, I go to iCal and chose subscribe to calendar and paste in the address. Then I get a read only view of the calendar I edit on Google. What is great about this is I can set up as many computers as I need - in this case 2 - to see the same calendar. If I am at work and make a change to the calendar within 15 minutes it is updated on my home computer.

Some things that make this even better are Google allows you to create and maintain multiple calendars. So I can keep my work, home, baseball, church, etc. calendars separate. I can color code them so they are easy to pick out. Also, Google has a lot of public calendars that you can subscribe to. For instance I subscribe to the National Holidays calendar, phases of the moon, and the Ohio State football schedule. Those calendars are created and maintained by someone else.

For my blackberry Google makes a great sync application that keeps my calendars up to date on the blackberry as well. It auto syncs so I always have an up to date calendar on my mobile phone also.

The only downside is that you have to have Internet access to update the calendar. This is true for all Web 2.0 apps and for me is really not a problem. For the odd times that I am out of Internet range I simply write down the date and update the calendar when I am back online. It is a great solution for me.