Ever wonder what your superintendent thinks about teaching and learning in the 21st century? What about the opinion of your tech director about filtering and using the tools you think will work?

I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing both Dr. Pam Moran of Albemarle County Public Schools (VA) and also Kathy Schrock of Nauset Public Schools (MA) on behalf of the Virginia Society for Technology in Education.

Take a listen to hear what they had to say!

The October edition of THE Journal listed a number of websites for introducing the global perspective into your classroom. Goochland’s G21 project considers global/multicultural awareness a 21st-century skill.

• CARE Virtual Field Trips
• ePals
• Global Stock Market Simulation Challenge
• iEARN
• TakingITGlobal

While I will be attending next week’s conference in Richmond to learn about a new DOE initiative, a recent article in THE Journal talks about cyberbullying.

Some 40+% of students report being affected by bullying through the Internet. And only 10% of teens ever bring up the topic with their parents.

I would encourage students at GMS or GHS to use our Eagle and Bulldog websites to report any incidents that take place at school. This is an issue that needs to be discussed in every classroom when issues of Internet safety take place.

This morning I have recorded a new & short video on how to find, download, and install resource packs for ActivInspire from Promethean Planet.

In the course I’m teaching, this week I asked students to tell me why they thought Apple chose the MPEG-4 based “AAC” format for iTunes rather than the earlier MP3 format. In every case, students chose the purported “better” quality of AAC as the reason. Many equated Apple with high-quality products, and similarly, high-quality standards for music.

While many folks online will talk about the advantages in the format (including Apple, whom many students cited as their sole source), I liked what I read here on the matter.

They hint at the one, defining reason:

In order for Apple to be able to sell music online, they had to do so in a protective wrapper so that purchased songs couldn’t be bootlegged by customers for their friends. Apple could add the wrapper to AAC, just as Microsoft did (more than one way) to Windows Media files.

Today, I purchase music from both Amazon (MP3) and iTunes (AAC) and am not sure there’s a perceivable difference on my part between the files. Frankly, I’m waiting for these two to both start selling lossless formats that equal what I can get on CDs (or better yet, what’s available on SuperAudioCD)!