olco5's posterous

October 31, 2008

For those of you who missed it in the announcements

This is what I wrote in the homeroom announcements based on some new information we got from our Blackboard Folks:

Those of you who are using Firefox 3 to turn in assignments in Blackboard, you may need this info from our Blackboard contacts:

This is just FYI. I know that many of your teachers/ students were running into this issue with View/Complete assignments, so I figured that I would pass along this information. Let me know if you have any questions.

FireFox 3: Assignments Issue

It has recently been discovered that students using Firefox 3.0 as their web browser receive an error message preventing them from uploading their assignments via the "View/Complete Assignment..." link. The error message is "Please enter a valid file" and appears even though a valid file name has been selected for upload.

This is a bug with Firefox 3.0 that does NOT affect Firefox 2.0 or other Bb certified web browsers. We strongly recommend that all students and faculty use one of the web browsers certified by Bb, such as IE6, IE7, or Mozilla Firefox 2.x to avoid this and other possible problems.

If you would like to download Firefox 2.0, you can go here.

I just thought you should know in case other students are asking that also have not looked at the announcements.

-Ben Wilkoff

Online Learning and Technology Resource Specialist

Douglas County School District

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October 27, 2008

Two Great Things

I hope all of you had a great break. Even though I didn't take any time off, I had a great time anyway. One of the reasons for this was that the K12 Online Conference was in full swing last week. This full-online conference is in its third year of existence and it is by far the best time I spend in PD every year. I don't want to hog it all so, here is their blurb about the conference:

The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2008 conference theme is “Amplifying Possibilities”. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 13, 2008. The following two weeks, October 20-24 and October 27-31, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations. More information about podcast channels and conference web feeds is available!

Beyond this rather large overview, I thought I would put together a series of highlights from week 1 of the conference. I think that everyone will be able to find at least one session that applies to your discipline and level of experience with technology. Anyway, here is my highlight page: http://www.google.com/notebook/public/08091645236303007352/BDQVSDQoQhJWQ99Mj

I also think that it is important to note that you can view these at any time in the future (as well as looking at the last two years of presentations), so if you do nothing else, simply bookmark http://k12onlineconference.org for later viewing.

The second great thing that happened over the weekend is that IQity now provides a really great view for us to see which items students have looked at in our classes and which they haven't. This is so awesome. I think that this will help quite a bit with deciphering which pieces kids are not attempting and which they are. I'm sure you can think of other uses, but I am so glad that they are finally adding features from the list of things that we requested. What do you think?

-Ben Wilkoff

Online Learning and Technology Resource Specialist

Douglas County School District

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October 21, 2008

CDE Annual Report for Online Programs Template

ALL online programs are required by statute to submit a report annually to the Colorado Department of Education. The report is due to the Unit of Online Learning, on or before December 1, 2008.

_______________________________________

Rick Tanski

Online Program Teacher & Administrator

Academy District 20

1110 Chapel Hills Drive

Colorado Springs, CO 80920

rick.tanski@asd20.org

Online Program Website

_______________________________________

You must have flash to see this embedded document.

(download)

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October 21, 2008

School Reform in 5 Minutes

This video, which is accompanied by slides you can follow along with, is a 5 minute video about what Chris Lehmann, Principal of the Science Leadership Academy believes about school reform. I’ve heard him at other conferences and what he says often leads to some interesting discussions. http://practicaltheory.org/serendipity/index.php?/archives/1042-IgnitePhilly-Five-Minutes-To-Communicate.html

Rick

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October 15, 2008

Knowing who is online, when you are online. (My last message for today)

It became clear to me yesterday at our informal training that you all would really like to have a way of knowing when kids are online; you would also like to have a chat interface within IQity. Well, I think I have figured out a way to do just that. As I said in my previous e-mail, wikis and other collaborative spaces are coming. As a part of that push, I have created a Google-sponsored playground of sorts for us. All of our students (with their same user names and passwords) have been entered into a Google Applications installation on edcsd.org. This means that they will (at an appointed time in the future) have access to wikis, collaborative documents and other things all within our walled garden.

One of the bonus features of setting this service up is that we can run our own chat service. This service can either be run through the web browser (meaning, within IQity) or though a chat program (like iChat or Google Talk, or Pidgin). This means that you can know which students are on the system and you will be able to use text chatting (which can be a lot easier than sending students lots of e-mails as you may know).

Now, before we roll out this system for the entire school, I would like to start with just teachers and counselors. I have added a new button to the homepage of IQity for just those groups. It is called eDCSD Google Talk (we can change this to anything we want, and we will eventually have this embedded directly in the sidebar, rather than as a button link). When you click on this button it will ask you to log in. You will use the same username as you do in IQity and then you will use "elearning" as the password (without the quotes). It will then ask you to change your password and make sure you are a real person (by typing in the weird letters that it displays). You will then be able to chat with any other teacher that is on IQity at any given moment.

After about a week of the trial run, I will open it up to students as well. In that time, please send me any questions that you may have about this new capacity to keep track to students. Also, if you would like to know how to check in with students using an easy chat program (instead of having to log in to IQity), let me know.

Also, For those of you who are listed below, please let me know what your Infinite Campus login is, so I can put you into the system (I can also change your user names in IQity if you like):

Blaine Haskell , Rhead Kinder , Jacqueline Cahill , Kaylynn Johnson , Drew Beedy , Theresa Kane

Thank you so much for all that you are doing. I hope that this will get us one step closer to talking with our students as effectively as we can. Talk to you soon.

-Ben Wilkoff

Online Learning and Technology Resource Specialist

Douglas County School District

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October 15, 2008

Opening up multiple IQity tabs at the same time in Firefox

Thanks for this list of wishes for IQity. I will be pressing them on it quite a bit while they are here.

One thing you can do as a better workflow is to have multiple firefox tabs open with each of the tabs that you usually use in IQity.

This will allow you to go back and forth easily between tasks in IQity. If you want to open up a new tab you can press control and T (or Apple and T if you are on your mac). You can also set those tabs up to open on your command by bookmarking all tabs into a folder in Firefox and then simply going to that folder and clicking open all in tabs: