You can now preorder my book, RSS for Educators through the ISTE website.

The book will be released in March, 2008. $20.95 for ISTE members, $29.95 for the general public.

I realized today that I have done a horrible job at keeping track of when I’ve appeared in the press. At least the national press.

Back in ‘06, an article was written about our blogging initiative in Teacher Magazine.

More recently, I was quoted in District Administration Magazine. This article, oddly enough, was on administrator salaries. I wasn’t aware of this, until at the end of the interview. But it was cool to get our district named/linked in the article.

Last year, too, I was interviewed by EdTech Magazine for an article on podcasting in schools. My favorite quote from this one:

Fresh is best, says John Hendron, Webmaster, Goochland County (Va.) Public Schools.

Sadly, one interview I also did for EdTech, in which they took over 80 posed photographs of me at our high school, never saw the printed page.

Anyhow, I wrote this post for myself, so that I could refer to it in the future, if need be.

Last Friday, we noted the 5-year anniversary of Creative Commons. Today, the 10-year anniversary of the blog.

It was back in 1997 that I was in graduate school. I started my first webpage. Friends were telling me I ought to write a book of stories. (I had the uncanny ability to raise hilarity with my storytelling, not unlike the style in which my father can tell a story.) Instead, wanting instant gratification, I started a website to share my creative interests.

Soon after, and I use the year 1998, I naturally evolved my writing into a post-like format, mimicking other sites on the web. I wasn’t yet aware of the term weblog, but that’s what I had going. Soon enough, I had a Blogger account and it all went downhill (or up) from there.

I’m sad I haven’t had a continual, non-stop blog since 1998. That would have been interesting.

Currently, I (mis)manage to author five blogs. Among them are a music blog, my work blog, and a food blog. So, yes, I’ve been doing a lot of this since the dawn of the blog. It’s not surprising, perhaps, that I think blogging has a place in education.

Tonight I taught a class in blogging to some of our teachers. We call it “PowerBlogging,” as it teaches them how to go beyond mere text entries, and do links, pictures, podcasts, and whatever else we can cram-into a 2-hour session. I long for the more power-ful blogging platforms (like Wordpress, used here), so that the “power” is more evenly distributed, and available to all (without so much training). It seems hard to believe the HTML codes I was putting up on the interactive whiteboard have been a part of my active vocabulary for some 10 years.

Do I expect such rapid change in the future? I am not sure we’ll see it. I think in the next five years to be trends will be:

• anytime, anywhere writing (cell phones, ubiquitous Internet access)
• vlogging and videocasting
• (even more) use of tags
• shorter and shorter posts (i.e., a proliferation of what I call microblogging)

Hopefully, Hendron’s Digest will continue-on for at least another 5, to see if I’m right.

Today I recorded a podcast to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Creative Commons. For this discussion, I partnered with our Goochland ITRT Bea Cantor, who thought a podcast about Creative Commons was a great idea.

This is Episode #110 of our TechnologyTimes Live Podcast from Goochland County Public Schools.

After installing Leopard, I didn’t do any printing for some time. When it came time to print on my Canon Photo Printer, the i9100 large format model, I couldn’t print (well). It would start-out fine, but stop mid-print. The processors in my G5 would rev-up, and all printing would stop.

I downloaded new Canon drivers after removing the old.

1. Go to /Library/Printers/.
2. Remove the Canon folder. I moved it to the ~/Desktop.
3. Install the new drivers from Canon.
4. Restart.
5. Add your printer. Mine is connected from USB to my Airport Extreme.
6. It works!

The step I think was important, and worked for someone on an Apple forum, was the removal of the OS X-installed drivers first.