ESU 13 Technology

Time for change

chicks — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:09:29 +0000

The embedded video below has information that should give the world of education some things to consider. Are we using available technology to teach 21st century skills? Are we using available technology to engage students? Are we using available technology to make global connections?

Picture formatting

chicks — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 01:59:23 +0000

One of the things that I have had a difficult time with is layout of a post that contains a picture. I would like to wrap text around a picture to eliminate large areas of white space that normally shows up when adding a picture to a post. When adding a picture you do have the option of some minor formatting. These options do allow you to set a picture to the right or left, and with this setting, the text will wrap around the picture. This makes for a much better visual display of a post that contains an image. I do like this very much.

There is a very good YouTube video that describes, in detail, how to do this. It also contains instructions for some advanced formatting by using html code input. It is not extremely difficult, but it does require code entry.

Randy Pausch Virtual Worlds

chicks — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:52:55 +0000

There has been a great deal of buzz created by the “Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch. In one section of this very powerful lecture he shares information about starting a new class about building virtual worlds.

Randy Pausch Virtual Worlds

Learning 2.0

chicks — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 01:02:56 +0000

I have had the opportunity to visit a number of our member schools and share an overview of many of the training sessions that have been my focus during the past two school years. Much of what I want to share with teachers are the possible benefits of a variety of web 2.0 tools that are being made available by ESU #13. In a previous post I spoke about the concepts of communication, collaboration, produce, publish and audience. These five concepts form a circular learning environment that could be seen as learning 2.0. Students would have the opportunity to use a variety of web 2.0 tools to communicate and collaborate with others that have common interests or are participating in similar learning activities. Once the communication and collaboration progresses, the opportunity to actually produce some type of output could arise. The use of web 2.0 tools makes the next steps really exciting. The product that has been created can be published, and the audience for the work is world wide. If an active community can be developed, the published work should lead directly back to starting new communication and collaboration.

Teacher Web Presence

chicks — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 02:47:33 +0000

Teachers in the ESU 13 region have used Manila in the past to easily create web pages to support classroom instruction, and share information with parents. We have been searching for a Manila replacement for about a year, and selected the multi-user version of WordPress. During the last month numerous teachers have received training and begun creating content for their WordPress sites.

Here are the sites created by Gering and Kimball teachers;
Scott Plummer
Clint Schleicher
Julie Van Dyke
Mary Robinson
Randy Johnson
Kristy Keller
Russ Hamer

Mark Burson
Nancy Olsen
Ed Montgomery
Carolyn Montgomery
Laurie Janicek
Leta Liesch
Mark Wilson
Emily Brooks
Troy Unzicker
Kimball Library

Many of these sites are in the early stages of creation, and may not have much content at this time.