Life Round Here - Round One ends October 31

I’ve been thinking a lot about story telling. Since creating the Life Round Here project I’ve been wondering how the end results would turn out. As it turns out, as kids were going through the process of writing and then storyboarding, they ran into some serious roadblocks. Walking down Story Road turned out to be a more arduous journey than they expected…

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Free Wikis for Educators

Adam Frey and the gang at Wikispaces want to give away 100,000 free wikis to educators and I think we should help them meet their goal, don’t you? You can create a public space that is open to anyone, a protected space where anyone can see the work but only members can edit, or a totally private space where only wiki members can work. in other words, there’s a flavor for every taste.

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Open Source Blogging Session and Other Early NECC Reflections

Pretty amazing that the 40 computers in my open source session at 8:30 were claimed by 7:45 and that a good 150 people (if not more) crammed into the room by the start time. (The photo was taken at about 8:15.) And even more amazing that the Internet connection basically went dead but I think the presentation went pretty well anyway. I’d guess about 40% of the people raised hands when I asked how many were bloggers or used blogs. And some really good questions saved me from tap dancing too much.

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China’s Higher Ed Explosion

Needless to say (which is why I will), it's an exciting time to be in education. The promise of change is in the air, driven by technology, social change, and (perhaps most significantly) economic and political power shifts to countries like China, India, and Brazil...and regions like Africa and the Middle East. A small sample of the enormity of the change - China’s Higher Ed Explosion: "In pure bulk, the numbers behind China’s expansion are startling. Between 1999, shortly after the country’s leaders decided to focus on expanding access to and improving the quality of higher education as tools to propel the former Third World economy into the leading ranks of the world’s powers, and 2005, the number of undergraduate and graduate students earning degrees from China’s colleges and universities quadrupled, rising to 3.1 million from 830,000. Enrollments grew even faster over that period, with the number of new entering students growing to nearly 5 million in 2005."
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Blogs - a “must-have”

eSchool news points us to a great article entitled, “CoSN profiles ‘must-have’ technolgies. One of those must-haves is blogs!

The article states:

“Most schools embracing technology today have primarily focused on its deployment for administrative purposes or for the back office,” said Keith Krueger, CoSN’s chief executive officer, in a statement. “Our hope is that this guide will provide technology leaders with a strategic understanding of technologies that can truly transform their schools over the next three to five years.”