Connecticut

Are you a Pandora user? I am an early adopter of this Internet music service and even as they have gone through their growing pains, royalty fights, and now their drop in ads and 40 hours per month free / premium model, I continue to be a big fan. If you are not familiar, Pandora is a an Internet radio service, with a twist. You sign up for and account and enter an artist’s name. Pandora uses it music genome technology to build a radio stream based on that artist or artists that are similar. You can make several radio stations, you can mix radio stations so that if you were in the mood for The Beatles mixed with Metallica and Lady Gaga you would have a radio station that played that mix of those artists and others like them. Pandora has has grown so that you can get the app on a mobile device (think Pandora on a Blackberry streaming to your phone while you run or work out) and the Internet capable Sony Blu-ray player that arrived for Christmas has a connection to Pandora so it streams my radio stations into the home entertainment system.

It looks like YouTube is heading this way as well. The host of the great net@night podcast, Amber MacArthur dropped this link -  YouTube.com/disco into last weeks episode.  If you like to consume your music as music videos, it looks like YouTube now has a service that does for music videos what Pandora did for Internet radio. You put in an artist name and YouTube builds a play list of music videos of that artist and similar artists. If you are signed in to your YouTube account you can save the playlist and there are links to buy the music. Like Pandora you get a short commercial dropped in every couple of songs (much more frequently than Pandora it seems).

And what does this service have to do with this blog site? Well, the “disco” in the link refers to what YouTube is calling it - the  Music Discovery Project. We should feel right at home there.

Would you like a different way for students to demonstrate an understanding of a novel they are reading? Try using Blabberize or GoAnimate. 

With Blabberize, students can draw a picture of a character in the novel, upload it to Blabberize and then use their voice talking as that character.  Once the picture is uploaded, students can use the editing features to make the mouth open and move as the student is talking.

GoAnimate has features that allow students to create their own animated cartoon.  Choosing various characters and scenes, students can make their characters talk using their own voice, move, and have dialogue of speech bubbles with other characters.  Background music can be added as well.  All animations can be embedded into wikis, blogs, or websites.  Students could reenact a scene of the novel they are reading using this site.  A teacher can create one account and have all students under that account or individual student accounts can be made (if the student has an email address to register).

Some of the largest expenses for any school district are the energy costs for electricity, fuel oil or gas for heating, water usage, etc.  A group called The Alliance to Save Energy has a program called Green Schools Program which seeks to reduce energy costs in order to free up more funds for education programs which strengthen academic achievement.  What makes this program interesting to me is that “Green Schools encourages students to apply the lessons of energy-efficiency message in their homes and communities.”  They do this by ” engaging students in creating energy-saving activities in their schools, using hands-on, real-world projects.”  If you would like to explore this further, you can check out their website at The Alliance to Save Energy

PBS’s Frontline premiers “Digtal Nation” tomorrow night on its broadcast stations. The program and some great additional resources are available on the companion website. It promises to be a provocative look at our always on, always wired world. Check it out on air, or online!

Many thanks to the wonderful Nancy Hovorka for forwarding the info!

Over the next three days over 75 formal educational convesations and many many more informal conversations will be happening at this year’s Educon 2.2 Conference. This unique gathering at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia will bring aout 500 educators together for a truely amazing 3 days. One of the best thinjgs about it is that many others will be able to attend virtually.

Steve Hargadon of Classroom 2.0 and Learn Central has arranged to simulcast all sessions in in Elluminate . From Steve’s enail -

“This weekend (January 30 & 31) Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia is hosting Educon 2.2, an education conference that is “both a conversation and a conference.” In its third year, this unique event actively involves the school’s students in organizing the event, and gathers lots of great names from the educational “blogosphere” together to facilitate the “conversations.” As an experiment in collaboration (students are running all of the streams), I’m excited to be helping to provide live Elluminate streams of all 76 sessions on Saturday and Sunday as part of the work I do for Elluminate at LearnCentral.org.

The conference website is at http://www.educon22.org. A listing of of sessions (”conversations”) with the links to their descriptions and the Elluminate rooms is at http://www.educon22.org/conversations. All times listed for the sessions are US Eastern Standard Time. If you need help converting to your time zone, I recommend the converter page at http://timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html.”

I consider myself fortunate to be able to attend the conference and if you follow my Twitter feed (stevesoko) you will see me tweeting. The twitter search term  for the conference is just educon, and if you follow that term you will see a whole lot of tweets from people a lot smarter than me!

How do you catch a glimpse of the fastest creature on earth?  Go online!  ”Raptors in the City” is a real-time, inquiry-based science and technology program that stars the peregrine falcon.” Falcon nesting season starts at the end of February.

I received the above message in my email today and it reminded me that I had been wanting to write about Animal Web Cams. For the last few years, one of my favorite sites to share with primary grade teachers is the National Zoo Web Cams. The Panda Cams are a family favorite. For other grades, these cams are great for introducing topics such as endangered animals and animal habitats, as well as motivating students to research further.

Here are some links to other animal web cams: Videos and Web Cams from the San Diego Zoo, Animal WebCam Locators, and exZOOberance.

Discovery Education Streaming and Science has many videos and other media on animals. DE Science for Middle Schools has The Jeff Corwin Experience in the Featured Video Series under the Teacher Center link.

Discovery Channel has entertaining animal games at Games Central such as Animal Arcade: Swim for Your Life (the player helps the salmon get upstream) and Sharkrunners (goal is for player to collect data on sharks).

Have you made the move to the cloud? Is your email up on Google? Are your pictures up on Flickr? Are your most important thoughts on Blogger or Word Press? Have you ever considered what would happen to that data if the service you were using went under, gets gobbled up by a competitor, has a change in service policies, or even closes your account because of a violation of their service agreement, for real or by misunderstanding? Is your data gone? Can you ever get it back?

The answer may vary by service provider and circumstance but there are services out there that allow a backup of those portions of your life that exist in the cloud. One such service is Backupify,which is offering free sign-ups until January 31.  After January 31, they will move to a “free-mium” model where limited services are offered for free and their whole package will have a fee. Right now as a new service they are encouraging folks to use the free sign ups to “stress test” their system before moving to the paid model. If you sign up before January 31, 2010 your subscription will be free now and forever.

When you sign up, you give Backupify permission to access your accounts on services such as Twitter, Delicious, Flickr, Zoho, and Google Docs. They have services such as Gmail, Facebook, and Blogger in beta and services such as YouTube and Xmarks are listed as coming soon.  You can backup on their Amazon S3 servers or if you have an Amazon S3 account you can use them to back up there.

Now I wish that I could say how well Backupify works and share more information about how they format the data as they back up and how the restore process works, but if they wanted a stress test, they got one. A note on their blog details that their efforts to ramp up by offering the service free until the end of January, did break parts of the system and that about 10% of the user base is not getting service, especially  those with large Gmail and Twitter accounts. I find myself in that 10%.  While I set my accounts up a couple of days ago, my profile and history shows no movement of files to Backupify. Their blog does report that Backupify has identified the
“bottlenecks” in the system causing the problems and that they will be back on track soon. They thank their users for “breaking” the system as part of their stress test. To which I say, you’re welcome, I think.

Being one who does not mind stepping beyond the leading edge, out onto the bleeding edge on occasion,  I remain optimistic that the Backupify folks will stay true to their pledge and the bulk of my online life will be backed up with their service.  If you don’t mind a few nicks and cuts out there on the bleeding edge as Backupify grows into a maor service this may be a service for you and, if you act before January 31, you get those two magic words, “free” and “forever” connected to your account.

There is a good discussion of Backupify and the pros and cons of  backing up your cloud computing on the January 13, 2010 episode of the Net@Night (#135) podcast.  Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur interviewed Robert May the founder of Backupify.

Three  items that crashed like waves on my virtual shore and just made me go, hmmm….

Laredo, Texas Becomes a City of 250,00 With No Bookstore

Vicar Gives Blessing to Electronic Gadgets

and

OMG! Des Moines Teen is US Texting Queen, Heads to World Championship

Reminder: Tonight on the EdTech Connect webinar series Cheryl Lemke will present on Web 2.0 at 7:00. 

Cheryl Lemke Web 2.0: The Ripple Effect

Design tomorrow’s lessons using the latest social, learning, and neuroscience research on critical thinking, multi-tasking, multimodal learning, collaboration, and engagement.

Click here to register.

Last night was the first DEN LC webinar meeting for the new year.  Scott Kinney, Vice President of Professional Development and Outreach at Discovery kicked off the meeting with news of upcoming channels Discovery will launch in the next eighteen months.  Three new networks will exist:  the OWN-Oprah Winfrey Network, a 3D Television Channel, and HUB- Hasbro television for children will replace the Discovery Kids Network.  A new series will also launch in March on Planet earth called Life.  Here is a brief preview of this eleven part series. Teacher resources and guides will be available at the launch of the series.

Lance Rougeux talked about how popular SCIcon 2010 was and thanked all of the LC’s that participated.  He also reminded everyone about the Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge. If a DEN STAR submits and entry, they will be entered into a drawing for a free trip to NSTA.  The state that has the most entries will be awarded with a DEN event by Discovery.  The deadline for the K-5 applications is March 15.

There are several big events that Discovery is hosting this year: the Leadership Council Institute, the STEM Institute and the National Institute.  The dates for these events will be announced in February.