29 August 2010, 11:12 am
MS Word to edit your digital pictures? Are kidding me?
I’ve been on a wonderful journey the last few months learning about photography and taking a lot of pictures to hone my skills. I think I’ve reached an intermediate skill level as an amateur, but don’t take my word for it, please judge for yourself and let me know what you think.
The other day my wife showed me a catalog of classes being offered through a local community education organization which will remain nameless in this post. I got excited, “Oh! check to see if there are classes on photography”, I say. Sure enough, there are a couple of classes on digital photography. I feel pretty confident that I don’t need an intro level class so I look toward the second, more advanced class, see description pictured.
My head almost exploded… Continue reading ‘My head almost exploded’ »
22 August 2010, 12:02 pm
Boring Sea Urchin at the Field Museum in Chicago
Curation is an important skill in our information rich society. The skill is useful for organizing and digesting information that ultimately makes your Personal Learning Network or PLN. More on that later. Curation in the digital age is about what tools you use to get information and who you choose to listen to. Just like a museum curator chooses what to exhibit and the best way to display the artifacts of that exhibit. For example, one of the tools I use in my PLN is Twitter. Choosing who to follow is the way to curate the stream of information in Twitter.
For my professional life, I follow people like Howard Rheingold, an author and professor of social media. There are also other people I follow that speak directly to education in general and educational technology specifically. Twitter is great because of the near constant stream of information. Sometimes there is a link that I can choose to click to read more, or not. My Twitter feed also gets focused through curation when I follow new people that are mentioned or re-tweeted. This steers my focus along specific subjects, ed tech, iPhone/Apple news, and photography. Continue reading ‘Digital Literacy: Curation’ »
21 August 2010, 12:13 pm
Steve Vai search results on Image-Swirl
Check this out! I know some of you have seen the wonder wheel in Google Image Search. Well, it looks like this project from Google Labs is going to take the wheel to a new level, Google Image Swirl. This is kinda of neat because it groups the results and it uses pleasing animations.
14 August 2010, 10:49 am
Me when I graduated from Central Michigan University
Well, it’s not official just yet, but my professor tells me that I have completed the work for the capstone class and that finishes the requirements for the degree. The grade update and graduation thing should be happening by the end of the month.
For those of you that don’t know, this last class was a bear for me because I had messed up the first project. Last summer I worked my butt off coding data for a research project and I did a few things wrong. The research project didn’t fulfill the requirements of the class. It was about thus time last year when I found out that all my work was for naught. It was a little upsetting and definantly a blow to my self esteem. In discussions with my professor, we settled on a different project that isn’t research. I kinda wish I had known that I didn’t have to do a research project, since I know that research writing isn’t my strong suite. I guess that I assumed that I needed to do research because the class before was a graduate level research class.
Continue reading ‘Masters degree done, what now?’ »
13 March 2010, 6:00 pm
MACUL 2010 Session Information:
Do you ever feel overwhelmed with all the work educators have to do each day? You can use Evernote to keep track of lesson ideas, clip web content, and take notes in meetings. You can even synchronize your notes between the web, desktop, and smart phones like iPhone and Blackberry! ! Download the software at www.evernote.com.
Alright! Thanks to everyone to who came to the session, I hope it was valuable and gets you started do the road to increased productivity. (You know, so you have more time to integrate technology into your classrooms.)
Here is a link to the prezi that I used for the session: http://prezi.com/no6gedbi7twy/
More Evernote Resources:
EvernotePhil on YouTube. Phil’s YouTube channel would be a good place to start if you are just getting started with Evernote. Evernote Blog (w/podcast) & Ron’s Evernote Tips, are good places to keep up on news and tips.
Then there is always @evernote on Twitter.
For advancing users, here is a link to a blog post from Lynda. She taught me a few tricks that I didn’t know about Evernote!
Feel free to keep the conversation going here with tips and questions!
4 October 2009, 12:45 pm
I have this nice little computer lab next off of my main lab/shop space. There is room for 13 or so workstations. In the beginning, this was a mixed space with half Mac and half Windows PCs. In talking with my counterpart at our other middle school, he preferred PCs and I the Macs, so we traded. I like the Macs mostly because I have control over them, if they where PCs I would have to rely on the undermanned tech department for support.
When I had PCs, it seemed that they would brake, our tech would come fix a day later… Then when it came time for the same activity next quarter, they wouldn’t be working right again. With the Macs I have control, I build the master image and copy it out to the rest of the lab. I can tweak things as needed, I can fix issues right away.
This new lab I have done something new, I am joining the Macs to the districts Active Directory (AD) Domain. For those of you that don’t know AD is a major component of Microsoft Windows networking. The advantage here is that my students can now use their AD user names and passwords in my lab, they couldn’t do that before. We are still limited to just authentication, I have hacked the Mac OS X “User Template” to control certain aspects of the environment. However, the next big challenge is to get the student’s network drive to mount automatically. The difficulty is the fact that Im not using a Mac OS X Server to act as a intermediary between the Mac OS X clients and AD.
Here are a few pictures of the new lab, and stay tuned for details of setting up a Mac lab the way I have.
23 March 2009, 6:19 pm
Here is the presentation from
This is example code, Sorry I had to do a screen cap, will work on making it selectable soon
21 February 2009, 10:21 pm
I mean really! Don’t you think Google knows what language I’m using in their email system?
