instructional technology network
tri-county educational service center

Gapminder is data visualization tool.

Yes, it sounds a little dull when you put it that way, but when coupled with a mountain of socio-economic and demographic data, it is an unbelievable picture of our world. It is an excellent resource for charting and comparing data on countries around the world and looking at the relationship between those data.

Compare life expectancy, number of doctors, internet use, infant mortality rates, phone use, boy:girl ratios in schools, and a big handful of other indicators.

This is a great tool for helping your student visualize the discrepancies (i.e., gaps) between their lifestyles and that of others worldwide and could spark some incredible discussions.

Find it online at http://tools.google.com/gapminder.

By way of eTech Ohio:

“eTech Ohio is seeking applications for competitive professional development grants in the amount of $20,000 each to teachers in grades 9-12. These grants will support the creation and use of electronic portfolios (ePortfolios) in Open Source Portfolio (OSP).

As part of this two-year grant, school building(s) within a district may apply for up to $20,000 with a plan for utilizing ePortfolios to integrate technology and support state academic content standards. At most, one building per district may be awarded a grant.

Grant information, including the Request for Proposals, is available online at http://www.etech.ohio.gov/go/CompPD. For questions or more information, please contact Sandra Paxton.

There are a handful of qualification requirements and applicants must have the support of several individuals in the district (specific roles).

I encourage interested teachers to consider applying. Keep in mind, that $20K is bound to attract several applicants. You’ll need to think creatively and follow the RFP guidelines to the letter in order to stand out to the grant readers.

If you’re interested, contact your tech coordinator and/or district’s curriculum specialist to begin setting the wheels in motion - this is also helpful to avoid competing applications from the same building. As always, I’m glad to assist in this process as well, so contact me too!

RSS is a term probably unfamiliar to most, both in and out the education field. You may have noticed a “subscribe by RSS” option in the lefthand column of the blog’s main page. Same idea.

The folks at Common Craft have a series of “In Plain English” videos where they describe some recent web tools and trends in, as the series title suggests, plain English. They do a pretty good job which is why I am going to let the video clip (3:43) explain the fundamentals of RSS.

RSS In Plain EnglishVideo clip missing above? View the full post at tech.tricountyesc.org to see the clip or go directly to TeacherTube. TeacherTube loading too slow (it has been lately)? See the clip on YouTube .

This is a great means to have the information from several worthwhile sites brought together for you in a friendly format on a regular basis.

Start with one or two feeds that you know or just look interesting (may I recommend this tech blog as a great starter?). Over time, particularly in the case of blogs, you may begin to note other authors that your author references who also seem worthwhile. This is a great way to connect with information about your teaching specialization or even hobbies written by others with similar interests.

This certainly isn’t a complete explanation of the topic. I’ll stick to the vocab lesson and cover some of the other nuances in future posts.

Sidenote: The video clip embedded in this post is hosted at TeacherTube.com which is kind of like YouTube , but for educators, and - at least for the moment - is filter friendly.

Tri-County ESC is offering a technology integration class series targeted toward middle and high school grades teachers.

During the 4 face-to-face sessions participants will explore topics such as:

• information literacy
• presentation skills
• online publication media
• online learning environments and best practice (e.g. Moodle)

Complementing the face-to-face sessions, is an online component to the course designed to foster continued learning opportunities and participant dialogue between sessions. This blending of instructional delivery allows time to not only learn about featured topics, but also to develop and try new skills in a supported environment to encourage real integration experiences.

No prior experience with online coursework is necessary.

The course is available at any of four locations in the area, and each site is open to teachers from neighboring Tri-County districts.

Course locations and dates include:
Black River Education Center (BREC) Media Center, Black River Schools
Thursdays, 9/20, 10/4, 10/18, 11/1
Time: 3:30-5:00p; Last session 3:30-6:00p

Loudonville High School, Lab 101A, Loudonville-Perrysville Schools
Wednesdays, 10/10, 10/24, 11/7, 11/14
Time: 3:30-5:15p; Last session 3:30-6:00

Rittman High School Computer Lab, Rm 117, Rittman Schools
Tuesdays, 9/25, 10/9, 10/23, 11/6
Time: 3:00-4:45p; Last session 3:00-5:30

Waynedale High School Computer Lab, Southeast Schools
Tuesdays, 10/16, 10/30, 11/13, 11/27
Time: 3:00-4:45p; Last session 3:00-5:30

A similar course experience for elementary grades is planned for sometime after the holidays.

Register online at event.youresc.k12.oh.us or call the ESC office at 330.345.6771. One hour of graduate credit is available through Ashland University.

David Warlick at 2¢ Worth lays out some simple points on writing to communicate. These tips apply particularly well to writing for an online audience where page width can range from around 8 inches to at least twice that, making for extremely long lines, and where typical visual landmarks/cues, like left and right pages, page edges, and page numbering, are absent.

The four key ideas he mentions are:

• Write in short paragraphs, separate by lots of white space
• Any list of items that accedes two, should be bulleted
• Headings and subheadings should hang out over the paragraphs that follow
• If an idea can be effectively conveyed with an image, then it should be conveyed with an image

These are relatively straight-forward ideas, but they don’t follow the traditional form of essays and many other print mediums. Writing for online publication is a different medium and brings with it different nuances.

For more detailed descriptions of Warlick’s four points, see his complete posting, Writing to Communicate, at 2¢ Worth

The Ohio Treasure Chest, a website created by the tech staff at North Canton City Schools, contains a wealth of standards-organized resources as well as curriculum connections, lesson plans, and assessments.

Thousands of resources have been identified by other educators as being useful tools for teaching many of the indicators in each grade level. I’ve also identified connections between technology indicators and those in language arts, science, social studies, and math to help determine where these concepts may already be addressed across the curriculum.

Those of you who’ve visited the collection before, will be glad to see the site has a new web address: www.ohiotreasurechest.org.

I encourage you to visit the Treasure Chest and take a look around.

Staff handout: http://www.ohiotreasurechest.org/otc4staff.pdf

Parent Flyer: http://www.ohiotreasurechest.org/otc4parents.pdf

If you could customize the search results for your class searches would you do it? How would you tweak the results? Would you select a list of sites to search? Specify sites that should get preferred listing? A list of sites to leave out of the search?

Google’s Custom Search allows such customization. With Custom Search you can make a number of modifications to the search process you direct your students to use. Educational users may also opt out of displaying Google Ads on their results page.

This is a great opportunity to pare down search results for specific projects or younger researchers just learning their way around mainstream search tools. I am not suggesting the use of Google Custom Search in lieu of teaching students to use the real-world web, but rather as a chance to make searches better for specific situations.

The example here will search all of the ESC’s pages, even though we have content hosted on at least three servers at two different locations.

(As of publication time, Google still isn’t indexing new content on the ESC website very well, so the results aren’t likely to be complete or current. This is not problem with the Custom Search tool itself.)

The URL for your custom site is less than pretty, so I would recommend linking to it from your classroom website (or Progress Book).

For a more detailed explanations see the Google Custom Search site or see Read/Write Web’s writeup, Google Custom Search: Setting the Bar for Vertical Search Engines. Thanks to Jim Vincent at SPARCC for passing along a heads-up on the education application of this tool.

Sitting in a chair earlier today with my son and daughter looking over my shoulder watching a video on YouTube of the late greats, James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti, in a concert setting with full orchestra and a packed house….

And my daughter asks, “Can they hear us?”

“No,” I reply, not for once having imagined otherwise.

“Why not?,” she inquires.

This is my children’s world. A world where people - grandma, grandpa, and even great-grandma - appear on the screen and she talks back. And, yes, they can hear her. This is the world for which she must be prepared. This is not the world of her father’s education.

Scott McLeod (one of my favorite education/technology/leadership bloggers) has pointed out the availability of [free] tutorials on data analysis at School Data Tutorials.

“The tutorials on the web site highlight many of the Excel skills that are helpful when working with building- and district-level data. The tutorials are targeted at data managers, principals, guidance counselors, teachers, and other school personnel who have the responsibility for collecting, analyzing, and reporting K-12 performance data (which is just about everyone these days!).”

Specifically highlighted are four categories of skills that McLeod and his team think every education-related professional should understand: freeze panes, sort, filter, and conditional formatting.

While you can jump straight over to the site at schooldatatutorials.org, I recommend you start with the original article, cross-posted at LeaderTalk.org and DangerouslyIrrelevant.org , and follow the links provided there.