Comments for Multi-faceted Refractions

Comment on K12 Online Announces Conference Theme by Jose Rodriguez

Jose Rodriguez — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:39:19 +0000

Hey Vinny, haven’t heard you on 21st Century Webcast lately….. any chance of a live report from Necc like you did back in 2007?

Comment on Headin’ Towards the Clouds by Lisa

Lisa — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:33:53 +0000

Best of luck with the Google Apps roll out. Ours is going well and we have trainings in place for our teachers. Looking forward to comparing notes.

Safe travels to NECC.

Comment on Live Blog - Sir Ken Robinson @ FW Parker - Chicago by Sarah

Sarah — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 03:00:46 +0000

I enjoyed reading your notes. Love the observation that life never was linear. I think we’ve been pretending it was for too long! Nice Kurzweil reference too.
Thanks for live blogging and sharing!

Comment on Teaching the Old Music Teacher New Tricks by Ken Pendergrass

Ken Pendergrass — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 04:02:19 +0000

Vinnie-
Yes! Your wife is right! This changes everything when it comes to teaching music. I am a middle school music teacher in Seattle and I have to “apologize” every time we start a new semester of piano class. The monologue goes something like this: “The songs in this piano method book are not the songs you listen to on your iPod…does anybody have ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ on your iPod?’…” Thankfully I have a small Mac lab and Garageband to get kids interesting in learning the piano and use this technology to create-”…individual, passion based projects…” as you so wonderfully put it in your post. Three cheers for your wife’s teaching methods.

Comment on Now My Wife Gets It by Carol Broos

Carol Broos — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 02:41:58 +0000

I would LOVE to share this with my classes at Northwestern! We are talking about middle school curriculum and what you have written is exactly what should happen for the middle school music teacher. Thanks for the wonderful post! Glad to have Carol “get it.” (Your words not mine)

Comment on Changes in GabCast’s Business Model Leaves Educators in the Lurch by vvrotny

vvrotny — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:46:16 +0000

Richard,

We actually have found a work around that works very well, so we are up and running at this point in time.

In the mean time, we are researching GCast as well as a platform being developed by Michigan State University for our future work.

I agree with you that schools with resources should host their own services when possible. This is what we try to do whenever we can. However, we often use these “free” web 2.0 tools to seed until we have a critical mass. We have been showing Gabcast and GCast to our language department since the Fall 2007. It wasn’t until this fall that they began to integrate it and with the success, it has embedded itself into the curriculum in such a way that it is becoming an indispensable for the learning environment.

Hence, our looking at hosted options now.

Comment on Changes in GabCast’s Business Model Leaves Educators in the Lurch by Richard Kassissieh

Richard Kassissieh — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 05:21:53 +0000

Switch to GCast! Seriously, this is one reason why schools with resources should host their own services whenever possible. Another reason is control over the rights to your data (see Bill Fitzgerald).

I learned that our Avaya voice mail system stores messages as individual WAV files in a simple folder structure. How easy would it be to share one account’s voicemail folder to the network, pick up new files, convert them to MP3, and include them in a podcast feed? Alternatively, configure email forwarding for that mailbox and use POP to fetch messages and convert the attachments. I haven’t had the opportunity to try this yet, but it’s on my to-do wish list.

Richard

Comment on Digital Story Telling at North Shore by Nancy Jones

Nancy Jones — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 20:59:55 +0000

Thanks for sharing these. I am sorry I missed your presentation @ICE. I am curious about the third grade project. Did you provide the pictures or did the students search? I would have the same question for the MS projects you are working on. Sometimes it seems so much time ican be wasted in the search process by certain individuals. , at least in school . Do you have them search @home and then send to themselves? I am trying to figure out an efficient way to make this work when access to cpmuters is not always easy.

Comment on Changes in GabCast’s Business Model Leaves Educators in the Lurch by Carolyn Foote

Carolyn Foote — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 18:12:04 +0000

That’s timely as I was just planning to introduce various “call in” podcast sites to our teachers tomorrow.

I noticed Gabcast had a five minute recording limit posted, so I think we’ll use Gcast instead. Any experience with that?

Comment on Always Have a Plan B by Leigh Zeitz

Leigh Zeitz — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:10:13 +0000

Vinnie,

Just wanted to thank you for inviting me to join in your event. It was quite an honor. I hope that the examples of using Web 2.0 tools were useful.

Although I didn’t see the educators that you had at your conference. I had the opportunity to attend an ICE meeting one afternoon and was quite impressed with what I saw. Keep up the good work.

Leigh Zeitz
http://drzreflects.com