DEN Blog Network

You might think this post is about old Coach Brennan dusting off the playbook and throwing his hat in the ring for Bobby Knight’s former job, but it’s actually about the One Laptop per Child Program (OLPC) or the “$100 laptop” as the press had labeled it. Local district tech director Chris Brown put out a call to his techie buddies to join his faculty on their institute day yesterday for a bit of conversation and play with these clever little laptops. Enough people had taken advantage of the buy one, give one program over the holidays that we had ten of the little green machines available for our local mesh. By putting the two rabbit ears up on either side of the screen, the laptops can find each other for chatting, collaborating and connecting to the Internet. Because of the security on our host school’s network, we couldn’t get on. But we got an idea how easy it would be for kids in a village to hop an Internet connection from the local school to/through laptop to laptop.

We thought we were doing pretty good until a 6 year old dropped in to show us how he does some basic programming using a version of the venerable Turtle language, plays matching and memory games, and creates his own music. He even had his own colorful mouse to plug into one of the 3 USB slots. I won’t go into the specs of the computer - you can read that for yourself. Suffice it to say I was very impressed with the design, the screen, the power and potential for the price. I know these are intended for 6 to 12 year olds in third world countries, but I’m sure they would be welcome in many homes and schools here.

Which brings me to my point. I got to see Nicholas Negroponte’s keynote a couple of NECC’s ago where he introduced and defended his OLPC program and then challenged American education to make the most of the tools that we have at our disposal. In answer to criticism that these computers would not be available to American students, he replied that our students could have access to as much technology as their community deems important and is willing to support. As he put it, “the American equivalent of our laptops (from major computer makers) just cost around $5-600. Which is still cheaper, relatively speaking, than what an OLPC laptop costs a Peruvian village in the Andes.”

So, no earth shaking answers here. Just some observations and food for thought as we prepare our students for their future. And I have to add that I am a big fan of Hall’s strategies for the iPod. For $249 you can get the whole Discovery Education streaming library on one ($149 for less capacity with a Nano). Add free lectures from Harvard or Stanford, etc. via iTunes. Create quizzes and study guides. Add your own students’ pod and screen casts. I guess you know what’s on the presents’ list for my young grandchildren in the upcoming years.

How do we help our students use the resources that those villages in Peru and Mongolia are struggling to get?

I’ve talked about Vyew before and how I think that it’s one of the better ‘Office 2.0′ applications out there.  Well, now it’s gotten even better. 

Vyew 2.0 has just entered into public beta. For those that don’t remember, Vyew is a free webinar solution, similar to Webex which is what we use here in the office.  It supports document sharing, whiteboarding, teleconferencing, desktop sharing, and more.  Pretty darn robust for a free application!  The new version allows you to store multiple Vyewbooks (sort of like an overall presentation including slides, whiteboards and more), layer objects on top of each other like you can do in Powerpoint, and desktop sharing for OSX oriented people.  Plus it looks cooler

If you have any need to do virtual meetings or distance learning, give Vyew a shot and see how you like it. You can’t go wrong with free and it seems to stack up pretty well to some of the big boys.

Of course, they couldn’t have them done in time for IT Directors who are imaging school computers over the summer, but the two most widely used browsers on the market have been been upgraded to new versions recently. 

In one corner, the "Goliath" of browsers, Internet Explorer 7 has finally integrated in features that some of us have been used to using for years.  By far, the two biggest upgrades are the ability to do tabbed browsing and the integration of RSS feeds into the interface.  Interestingly, but default the browser does away with the familiar File, Edit, View , Help menus that people are generally used to.  Of course, it’s easy to get back, but I thought that was surprising change.  They’ve also taken a tip from Firefox and Opera by putting a search box in the upper right hand corner of the window.  You can set what search engine you’d like it to use quickly and easily.  I do love the fact that you can set multiple ‘Home’ pages for yourself, so when you open the browser you can have it open unitedstreaming, discoveryeducatornetwork.com and the National Blog :)   IF you’re used to Firefox, all the usual shortcut keys seem to work and they’ve incorporated some of the more popular plugins. 

Of course, for those of you in the counter-culture movement, the "David" of browsers,  Firefox, has done some upgrades of their own.  I can’t speak from first hand experience because I’m downloading it as I write this blog post, but here’s some of the upgrades listed on the website:  Improved visuals, anti-phishing technology (Explorer has this as well though), integration of session saver type plugins (restore all your tabs even if your browser crashes), and my personal favorite: SPELL CHECK.  Seems like a no brainer, but now you have a spell check built in for any forms that you type in on the internet.  Whoohoo!  If the list sounds kinda lame, I think it’s mostly because Firefox was already that good to begin with.  IE is finally starting to catch up.

Looksl ike a win-win situation, so upgrade your browsers!  Oh yeah, don’t forget that IE7 is the officially endorsed browser for unitedstreaming and Cosmeo, but if you’re into the Firefox thing, it should work just fine as well. 

Happy Browsing!

Brian Bartel Dale Basler shares a great podcasting tip on his blog.

I just found out about a new tool called The Levelator from GigaVox Media.
This free tool levels out the audio automatically. The quiet gets louder, the
loud gets quieter—all in mere seconds with The Levelator.

If you vist the post, he has a dramatic example of the kind of difference it can make.  I know that I have this problem all the time when I try to record meetings.  Invariably, one person is closer to the microphone than others, which totally screws up the levels.  Can’t wait to try this tool out myself.

Got any podcasting tidbits of your own?  A tool or program that has worked well for you?

Update: Want to see a picture of Dale in action?  Check out this article about how "he is using podcasts to take what he teaches in his physics and physical sciences classrooms to a new level." 

After reading a post by Kathy Schrock about trying out Facebok,  I decided to give it a whirl myself.  I had thought that it was only available to high school and college students and teachers, but I was surprised to find that they have over 1,000 work networks registered as well, Discovery being one of them. 

I registered a new account at Facebook and found it much easier to get rolling than Xanga and MySpace.  For lack of a better term, it’s much cleaner.  Doesn’t feel so chaotic.  It took me a few minutes to update my profile, upload a photo and start exploring. 

After spending some time browsing through the Discovery network, I decided to go exploring.  It seems as though you can only browse through your own network (the network you initially registered with), but you can search through any network on the site.  I looked up my high school, but didn’t have any specific names to search for.  I quickly discovered that the minimum you can search for is two characters.  So by typing in "st", I was able to browse through profiles for every person at my high school with "st" in their name (94 people).  This gave me an idea of what kinds of ways students are presenting themselves.

This brings up one nice safety feature that Facebook has.  While I was able to figure out a way to browse through those users in a limited way, all I was able to see was their username, profile photo, and a list of who their friends were.  I couldn’t see the rest of their profile unless I requested that they add me as a friend first.  So as I was browsing through the list of users, I was blocked from getting any other information about them.  Their name, photo and school does give away plenty of information, but at least people were prevented from seeing other photos, IM information, phone numbers and blog entries.

I did spend a little time exploring groups, but haven’t seen any that inspired me yet.  So I created my own group.  There’s now a Discovery Educator Network group available in Facebook.  If you create a profile on the site, you should look it up. 

If you haven’t explored social networking sites like MySpace, Xanga or Facebook yet, I think Facebook would be a great place to start.  Head over there, create a profile, and join the DEN group.  Get some first hand experience and see what all the hype and concerns are about for yourself.

BTW, don’t worry if you aren’t at a college or high school.  It says in their help section:

If you are a college alum, and you have access to a school alumni email
address, then you can easily register for and use Facebook. We accept alumni
forwarding accounts, available at many schools (usually for free) through their
school or alumni association. Check out your school’s website to see if they
offer alumni email addresses. Also, if you now work for a network that we
support, you can register with your work email address. This, however, will
affiliate you with your work network rather than your old school.

Sounds like it isn’t hard to get a college email and get registered.  So give it a shot, and if you do, send me a poke!

CoolCatTeacher shares a post about how and why to comment on blogs that I think is a must read for every fledgling blog reader and author. 

Commenting has truly been the fuel that has fired readership for my
blog and opportunity for me. It is also part of being a responsible
blogger in general.

If one is an expert, I guess they may just want to keep their "wisdom" on their own blog, but the true conversation participants are those who contribute to the discussion wherever the blog posting is.

Whether you consider yourside a newbie or an experienced blogger, I think you’ll definitely find at least one pearl of wisdom.

We’d like to welcome the Implementation team to our expanding network of Discovery Education blogs! 

What can you expect to see on the blog?

You will see posts from your favorite
Implementation representatives, as well as from your peers.  Look for
posts from fellow educators, and district media and technology
specialists detailing their experiences with rollout and training on unitedstreaming.

To kick things off, Matt Monjan shares details about the new unitedstreaming training kits!  The perfect thing to get the school year started right.  Check it out!

While researching some green-screen options for somebody in our training department, I stumbled across a free video editor that I’d never heard of called ZS4 Video Editor.  It runs on Windows, OSX and even Linux!  Astonishingly, it has over 150 built in video effects. 

From their website:

ZS4 Video Editor is worth using when…

• the final output is a combination of more than 2 media sources rendered simultaneously. (like nine talking heads separately filmed, but later arranged in a 3×3 video wall combination)
• every aspect of the compositing process needs to be ‘tweened with an
  adjustable interpolation algorithm, from rotation angles to audio
  volume and chroma key sensitivity etc…
• it becomes necessary to create custom effects and
  imaging processes by combining any number of effects using a highly
  flexible and infinitely variable toolbox of imaging "primitives".
• the user likes to be limited by their own imagination instead of the software-makers ideas of the "desirable".

the ZS4 design therefore favours…

• choice over clarity.
• uniqueness over "standard".
• chaos over order.
• flexibility over simplicity.

Sounds interesting!  I haven’t used it myself, but it sounds like it might fall somewhere between iMovie and Final Cut on the Mac side, or perhaps between MovieMaker and Premiere on the Windows side.  And since it’s free, there’s no reason not to download it and give it a shot!

If you do try it out, or you already have, leave a comment and share a quick review of it!

If you’re school was lucky enough to get any of those shiny new Intel Mac’s, then you may already be aware of the issue they have with Windows Media Videos.  Out of the box, WMV files can’t be played on Intel Macs running OSX.  While you could use bootcamp to load up Windows and play them, that’s a big hassle just to play a video.

There are now two solutions for dealing with those, one professional and one beta. 

Flip4Mac WMV Player Pro will handle playing those files and will also allow you to convert them to other more Mac friendly formats.  It’ll cost you $29 to buy this completely finished and supported product.

UPDATE: As Hall and Joe Brennan pointed out, the latest version of Windows Media Player combined with the recently updated Flip4Mac will allow you to play WMV files natively in OSX.  I haven’t tried it myself yet, but Hall and Joe swear that they work great.  FYI, looks like this is the last version of Windows Media Player for OSX.  "Microsoft will continue to offer Windows Media Player 9 as a free download for
Macintosh users, but has no plans to provide future updates or product support
for Windows Media Player for Mac." 

VLC player has long been recognized as being one of the best ‘universal’ open source video players.  It runs on Windows or Mac, and has recently added the ability to play WMV files on an Intel Mac.  It hasn’t made it’s way into the official release just yet, but the nightly beta builds are freely available.  Just download the most recent one and give it a try.  I haven’t had any problems with it, but if you do run into anything, let them know so they can fix it! 

Got any other quick tips for video players on Windows or Mac (or Linux if you have an affinity for penguins)?  Please share!

Love Discovery content, but dont’ have time to sit around and watch it?  Take it to go!  Discovery has just launched in the US a new service for cell phones and mobile devices, Discovery Mobile.

Just type in "discoverymobile.com" into your phones browser and you’ll have instant access to ringtones, wallpapers, podcasts and information about some of your favorite Discovery shows.  The perfect thing for those long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles!