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On the path to K12 Online

If you’ve not taken part in it before, put the K12 Online Conference in your calendar. Run as a virtual conference, K12 Online is an annual two week long professional development event for educators around the world, where the conference “sessions” are offered in the form of digital presentations – podcasts, vidcasts, digital sories, etc.

This year’s event is based on the theme “Amplifying Possibilities” and will kick off with a pre-conference keynote address in the week starting October 13. Over the next two weeks, October 21 – 31, there will be a regular stream of virtual presentations released in four different strands.  These 20 minute presentations have been selected from a number of submissions that teachers all over the world put forward, and were chosen using a blind peer review process.

This year, I was fortunate enough to have my proposal selected for the conference, something I’m very excited about! The session is called “I Like Delicious Things: an introduction to tagging and folksonomies“. Here’s a peek at a short promo teaser that all presenters were encouraged to create as a way of generating more interest in the conference…

I think I have a fair idea of what the presentation will cover, but I need to put it all together over the next week and a half.  If you have any ideas, suggestion or questions about what you’d like to see it cover – on the basic theme of tagging and building knowledge folksonomies – please leave me a comment.

By the way, this video was shot using my Nokia N95 cellphone.  I’m really happy with the quality of the video it captures and I plan to shoot the whole thing using it if I can.  Of course, the real secret to the video quality is my camera person, the Lovely Linda.  Thanks baby… you da best!

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Placing our first Geocache

A while back, I went geocaching with my daughter Kate.  We spent quite a while hunting for an elusive cache not far from where we live but we thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being outdoors in the sunshine, using GPS technology to have a bit of real world fun. In fact we enjoyed it so much that after we signed the cache’s logbook and returned to the car to drive home, Kate asked if we could place our own cache some time for other people to find.

What a great idea.  I’ve been wanting to place a cache of my own for a while, but Katie was the impetus I needed to actually do it.  So, no time like the present, we took a detour on the way home and went via the local Dollar Store, picked out a suitable plastic container, a handful of inexpensive trinkets to include inside it, and a small notebook to use as the logbook… all this for less that $20 (and it could have been much less if we weren’t being extravagant with the trinkets)

We went home, printed out the official geocaching note to include in the cache, and packed it all into the box.  Now it was just a matter of finding a good place to stash it.

I had an inclination to stash the cache in a nearby park, somewhere I could keep an eye on it, but a few walks through the park didn’t turn up any really good hiding places.  Consequently, the cache sat on my shelf at home for several months while I got distracted by other things.

However, today was such a nice day that we decided to finally go hide the cache. After a last minute spray with some green paint (didn’t want to make it too easy to find!) we went to a lovely little park near our old house, in fact the same park where I used to play as a kid.  Sure enough, with a bit of hunting we found a perfect spot to hide it… not so obvious that it would be found by passers by, but not so impossible that a keen geocacher couldn’t find it.  We called our cache “Childhood Memories”… if you’re ever in the area, see if you can find it!

There is a real sense of fun and adventure when you go geocaching.  Making our own caused us to think hard about the placement of the box, where would be a good spot, how to find the right balance between making it too hard and too easy, not to mention the physical act of actually getting to the place where we hid it.  It was good fun…  here is a short video I shot on my phone just after we placed it.

I’m really pleased that Katie has taken on the role of being my geocaching buddy.  On the way home we had to drive past another cache, so we decided to stop and have a quick look for it.  Although I had my regular GPS with me (a Garmin GPS V) I thought I’d try finding this cache using only my new Nokia 95 phone’s built-in GPS.  I was a little doubtful that the GPS in a phone would be good enough for this sort of thing, but I was running Geocache Navigator and wanted to try it out.  As it turns out, it was spot on, and I mean exactly spot on.  A very impressive mobile app, and super easy to use.

If you haven’t tried geocaching yet, give it a go.  I can see it being a great activity for kids, as evidenced by Kate’s enthusiasm for it.  It manages to combine a bit of technology use, some outdoor adventure, resourcefulness and higher order thinking skills, physical fitness and just generally having some fun.

Having my own daughter as a geocaching buddy makes it even more special.

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I just want to (edu)Blog!

I really like Edublogs.  James is a great guy, and the service he has put together is pretty awesome most of the time.  So awesome in fact that I recommend it highly to any teachers who want to try blogging with their students.  It has all the cool features, plugins and themes, as well as just being a really good blogging service.

When it works.

Just lately, Edublogs seems to have been plagued with problems, with the recent need for multiple password resets, general system slowness and, today, a period of maintenance that saw it become unavailable for over an hour.  Normally, I wouldn’t complain… after all it’s a free service and I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but it went down smack in the middle of a Year 4 class that were finally looking forward to blogging after spending the last few periods trying to recover from those random password resets!  Last lesson we finally got all the kids logged in with new passwords, got them to change their passwords to something they could remember, even wrote their passwords down so they wouldn’t forget them… and then today we find that half of them had their passwords reset again (!)

During the lesson the whole system then became unavailable and was supposed to be back online “very very soon”.  I’m not sure what that translates to in minutes, but it went way beyond the end of our classtime.  Now the kids don’t have another class till next week and we are nearly at the end of term and they have a major blogging project to try and complete.  Very frustrating!

I’m sure we’ll manage, and I’m sure there are people in the world with much bigger problems than having their blog provider be out of action for an hour or so, but still, in a school where I’m trying to win people over to technology – especially web 2.0 technology – it’s pretty frustrating when the same class seems to get hit with access issues over and over.

Please Edublogs!  I love ya, but can I have my reliability back!

BTW, here are some comments from the Year 4 students… they are just as frustrated and can’t understand why they seem to have problems every single time they attempt to blog.

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