Grand Theft Auto 4 and other thoughts about video games in education

Certify like that which Hoop HINT insecure, I wrote a blog advertise in re how the dense trading in demand of this goods would render insignificant by any liberal of ormative record affair profit-making. I didn’t yet paraphernalia whether tape games happening schools are a useful belief on the other hand firmness facilitate students memorize legal subjects. Nevertheless that doesn’t trouble. Maladroit thumbs down d event what you estimate, it’s an doctrine whose age choice never come.

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Charged up about innovation

Charged up about innovation Contest tying green tech, business lures teams from MSOE, MIADBy STANLEY A. MILLER II
smiller@journalsentinel.comPosted: April 8, 2008

A challenge that features college students competing in reality TV-type events might not immediately come off as educational, but that's exactly the case in the Milwaukee Innovation Chase.

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Lessons learned about mass user uploading

I have been working tirelessly to upload all my students’ info in preparation for a new semester after the upcoming holiday break.

Since we do so much work on our Moodle, and since I receive over one hundred new students each nine weeks, I need a mass upload solution to input user data. Here is how I have achieved it thus far…

(side note, I have yet to upgrade to the latest version of Ooo, which is version 2.1)

1. I have found that OpenOffice Calc works better than MS Excel for this purpose. It seems to be less fussy about beginning zeros. Some of the randomly generated numbers have one or two zeros at the beginning and Excel cuts them off before I can reformat the cell. So using MS Excel, I would have to add the requisite number of zeros to over two hundred records. OpenOffice doesn’t seem to care. Nice.

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The News About Weblogs

Greensboro 101 seems to be the on everyone’s blog radar these days as it’s turning into an effective model for community journalism a la Weblogs. They have about 50 or so bloggers, but even more importantly, they’ve got t-shirts. I say this not in jest as the t-shirts, snappy as they are, tell me at least that someone has decided to actively market the meme. (This may be something to think about for edubloggers as well…)

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About us and this blog

About Generation YES

We believe that technology in schools is critical to bringing 21st century educational opportunities to everyone. However, we see that traditional approaches to integrating real technology into classrooms have largely failed. Even though visionary educators have seen the potential for decades, and there are a few bright and shining examples of students having amazing experiences, more often than not there is a failure of implementation between the vision and the action.

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Thinking about NECC

I have been thinking a lot about NECC since I arrived at home on Tuesday night. This a post written in an airport departure lounge so forgive the lack of links.

I too, had an incredible time at the Edubloggercon and hanging out in the Blogger’s Cafe.

Seeing at this was my first NECC, and I’ve never been to a full-fledged state conference, either.

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The Best Ten Websites For Students To Learn About Computers

I’ve gotten into one of my “list-making” moods this week. I was inspired by a request from Karisa Tashjian (a staffperson at the Rhode Island Family Literacy Initiative) for sites to help English Language Learners with computers, so came up with this one.

This list is categorized a little differently from the majority of my other “The Best…” lists. Instead of ranking them from the best to the very best, I’ve picked a couple of sites that each fit into specific sub-categories of knowledge that students would need to have about computers.

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Podcast Episode 13 - An Interview with Bill Fitzgerald about OpenAcademic

Bill Fitzgerald sure is a nice guy! I had a great time chatting with him this morning in what turned out to be the first recorded Open Source Classroom dot com Interview! We talked about OpenAcademic which I have posted about recently. There aren’t a whole lot of details available on the inner workings of the project so I went to the source. The project centers around OpenID which particularly interests me since I have had to prune Drupal out for my kids to prevent having to enter that many user names and passwords. OpenID would solve all that, although there are still a few practical questions lingering in my head. That’s a later conversation, though. Towards the end of the interview, he even gives a potential release date!
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Thinking about the teaching of writing

A while back I posted about comment starters…….

This made me think about…….

I wonder why…….

Your writing made me form an opinion about…….

This post is relevant because…….

Your writing made me think that we should…….

I wish I understood why…….

This is important because…….

Another thing to consider is…….

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The “Conversation” About “Conversations”

Lots of interesting and angst-ridden writing flowing around of late about the “conversations” happening in the edublogosphere, set off in some measure by a recent post by Doug Belshaw.

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