1. What program did I use for the presentation? Apple Keynote ‘09.
2. Does anyone use Blogs for meeting minutes/notes/documentation? – We use wikis for this purpose as it follows more of a document model.
3. How do you pay attention AND send/read messages at the same time? – It’s a skill some have developed. I can’t say it’s for everyone.
4. Musicians+technology=rulers of the world! – Yes we are Howard.
5. I’m from northern Ohio. Where did you go to school? Avon Lake High School, west of Cleveland.
6. My literature class student’s work blog:http://mrsberkley.blogspot.com/ – thanks for sharing your work with students.
7. I’m going to use this tool at a presentation in October (speaking of Today’s Meet).
8. I want to encourage my principals to blog about school happenings to get them involved as well as the teachers. – great idea!
9. Is there a quick guide/read to getup and going? – You will find several blogging videos at our Goochland blog server for teachers.
10. Can I post homework assignments on my blog? Yes – either as text, or you can upload attached files (PDF, etc.). Also look into Scribd.com that hosts your PDFs as embeddable Flash paper documents.
11. Hmmm, little confused, how does this qualify as a BYOL session? – You are encouraged to follow the example blogs as they were presented.
12. When my IT person says, “Why do you want a blog when we use Moodle?” What will my argument be? – One is private (Moodle), although there are ways around that. I would say the choice of tool is really dependent upon what your goals are. Blogs are real, authentic tools. But they may not be right for your needs.
13. Doesn’t moodle have a blog feature built in? – Yes, but it isn’t very feature rich.
14. Ning is also a great blogging site. Our school district uses it. We use it too, but more as a fun, social space for teachers. It does have blogs.
15. blogger is free – why pay? You can do more when you host the blog yourself, in terms of customization of the look, etc. If it’s on your own server, you aren’t competing with thousands of other blogs on that site (speed), but it depends how good of a host you’ve contracted with in terms of their bandwidth. Another reason may be school filtering – at many districts, sites like blogger or wordpress are banned.
16. The biggest concern is, “Is anyone actually reading this?” – I am, Mike C.
17. Yes. I have posted it as a PDF in the NECC presentations/handouts area. Search for my surname.
18. is todaysmeet.com free? Yes.
19. do you have anyone to unblock sites for you on your filter? Yes, all of our teachers can override the filter.
20. what is your process when creating a blog for a new teacher? Do/can tey do it, manually by you, integrated with network account? Wordpress has self-signup. I limit it to only accept new sign-ups from our email domain.

Thanks for those who participated today!

Welcome to NECC 2009 and my session on blogging best practices for teachers. This blog entry enhances the “bring your own laptop experience” by linking to all of the resources used in my session. While some in the blogosphere may already considering blogging dead or on its way out, I think it is still a viable, dynamic medium that has yet to be fully explored in the world of education. While I believe there are virtues towards having students blog, my session today focuses on teacher blogging. I firmly believe that teachers need to understand blogging by becoming active participants before blogging can become a successful medium for students as part of school. So, for today, that’s where we start.

• Goochland County Public Schools
• Goochland’s Blogging Server
• John Hendron (John’s Official Blog)
• Today’s Meet Backchannel Discussion
• Phillip Greenspun’s Weblog
• Darren Rouse – Probloger
• Tony Hung – Problogger
• Edublogs
• WordPress.com
• Movable Type
• Tumblr.com
• Blogger.com
• SquareSpace
• Teach Paperless
• Jennifer Bocrie
• History Tech
• Ms. K’s Place for Important Stuff
• Jonathan Becker, PhD
• Dy/Dan
• ITRT Bea Cantor
• Kimberly Berry
• Generation Yes – S. Martinez
• Assistant Superintendent, Pete Gretz
• Lucacept
• Technology in the Middle
• Eagle’s Eyrie – Goochland Middle
• the Fischbowl
• Caroline Long

• NECC Ning Page for comments and questions

No good clue why, but I was considering earlier this week my favorite “reveals” by Apple’s Steve Jobs. I think two are rather spectacular, in terms of representing his “essence” at representing the company and his infamous reality distortion field.

The introduction of the G4 Cube (listen for the gasps when he turns it upside down):

And the Intel Switch Revealed (yes, Virginia, we’ve been writing OS X for Intel since 2001.)

On Tuesday-Thursday this week I’m leading a Scratch Workshop at the GHS library media center.

Available to participants is this PDF handout of the Promethean flip chart pages used in our training from Day 1.

Sometimes I get asked why copyright is such a big deal. This past week, a court case was won by the RIAA and the defendant in the case had only downloaded 24 songs.

The fine? 1.92 million dollars.

She hasn’t got it, but I can’t be so sure they won’t go after colleges and universities, not to mention private or public K-12 schools. The amount awarded seems nearly insane, but it’s within the letter of the law and if it doesn’t scare you, well, think of the reasons to acquire your media legally.

The quantity of what we can obtain today online is staggering. Between blogs, wikis, and sites like YouTube, just about anything goes. Funny nonsense, short talks by talented smart people (TED Talks), and breaking, fresh news.

It would be interesting for us to rate what we actually use or value based on the item’s quality.

Finding an abundance of quality content online is in jeopardy with pirating. But I think it needs to be done fairly. A standard business model, this isn’t.

Take for instance the idea that I could sell 500,000 CD recordings. “Put your stuff online, and you could sell maybe 2 million.” So can I expect to sell 4 times the content online and consequently make 4 times the money? I’m saying you shouldn’t be thinking like that.

I’ve been buying a lot of online music. I wish it was better quality (in a lossless format). But the price difference for me is in a sweet spot. It’s still fair to the musicians (let’s say at $10 an album) but it’s cheaper for me. Distribution costs still exist, but they’ve got to be cheaper.

The article I cited says she may just end up paying a settlement in a few thousand dollars instead of over $1 million. I only wonder if she got to keep those 24 tracks?