The iPod Touch

I picked up an iPod Touch on Saturday, and am I impressed. I have been testing out the Nokia N800, but when it comes to Internet usability, the Touch wins hands down. Surfing is very, very usable.
I’m still getting used to the onscreen keyboard, but it is already a lot better than the N800. The [...]

eTech Ohio Technology Conference

After reading John’s blog post yesterday, I realized that not only haven’t I posted anything, I haven’t even begun to look at what sessions I want to go to at the eTech conference. Since I present at 8:00am Monday morning, I’ve been more focused on that.
Through the Online Conference Planner I’ve begun to setup the [...]

What level is your school district

One nice aspect of working with technology in education is being exposed to a wide variety of skills and operations outside of the educational realm. Today I stumbled upon a process model of software development called CMM, the Capability Maturity Model.. The acronyms mentioned in the article can get quite thick, but we’re more interested [...]

Banning Wikipedia

Apparently, instead of using the situation as a teaching tool, some districts and librarians are just banning Wikipedia outright:
Earlier this month, Pennsylvania’s Express-Times reported on a local school librarian who put up her own "Just Say No to Wikipedia" signs in the computer lab. The entire Warren Hills Regional School District in New Jersey has [...]

Doom and gloom for the OLPC laptop?

One Laptop per Child is blaming politics for holding back the XO laptop, while the article goes into a little background how Microsoft and Intel are doing what they can to stop it. I believe the blame can be firmly placed on OLPC. Instead of just focusing on governments, they should also allow school districts [...]

This blog’s readability level

Making the rounds today I read about a site that will display your blogs readability level. Here’s mine:

While there is nothing on the site that lists how they come to this conclusion (I already knew my writing was pretty juvenile), what it looks like is a clever way of boosting a page rank for a [...]

Technology is not only for the young

Never Friend Anyone Over 29 – Blog Maverick:
Technology. Digital Communications. They are not new. They are not news. They are old news. But thats not what is interesting about these articles. What is interesting to me is not that articles are written showing surprise that the geriatric generation and their kids are going online [...]

One to one computing just got a lot more interesting

With the announcement of the Nokia N810 and the shipping of the Asus Eee PC, one to one computing projects in education just got a lot more interesting. Imagine being able to provide students with a portable device capable of doing a majority of the work done with computers.
The Nokia N810 is a palmtop Linux [...]

One solution for cell phones in schools

While school district struggle with coming up with a balance of cell phone use in schools, here is one solution that may work. Require all cell phones to be on a lanyard at all times when on a student. This removes the secrecy of the cell phone while making it a lot easier for teachers [...]

Education planning

Creating Passionate Users: How to host a product/feature design party:
Forget focus groups. Forget endless meetings and brainstorming sessions. Throw an ultra-rapid-design party, and do it in a single day. This approach exploits the wisdom-of-crowds through a process of enforced idea diversity and voting, so no consensus, committe, or even agreement is needed. And it’s way [...]