This podcast is a short (3 min, 16 sec) screencast explaining how you can use free Juice Receiver software to quickly identify and clean up podcast channels that have more episodes than you want to keep, or episodes you've already watched / listened to. Juice Receiver can work in conjunction with iTunes, and when you "clean up" episodes in Juice Receiver those episodes can be automatically deleted from your iTunes library. I find Juice Receiver (in combination with PodNova) to be a wonderful way to manage my podcast channel subscriptions. This "clean up" feature is one of my favorites in Juice Receiver, and a primary reason I use this open source software. A larger version of this screencast is also available for download in the podcast shownotes.

Posted: January 24th, 2008 under Education.
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This podcast is a recording of my keynote address at the STARtech: Technology for the Next Generation conferece at Salina South High School in Salina, Kansas, on January 21, 2008. An amazing array of digital tools are now available for anyone connected to the Internet to use and share his/her voice with the world using text, audio, and video. The emergence of this read/write web (called "web 2.0 by some" is both exciting and scary to many. In this session we'll explore many of these tools which can be used to communicate and collaborate on the global stage. We'll discuss the ethical responsibility which comes with using powerful tools like these, and explore ways learners of all ages can safely and legally use these tools to create and share digital stories, music, and socially network online with others. The age of the read/write web has dawned. Let's use these tools safely, legally, and responsibly to CREATE, COLLABORATE, and develop the literacy skills required to thrive in the 21st century!

Posted: January 22nd, 2008 under Education.
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Posted: January 21st, 2008 under Education.
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Welcome to episode four of the Technology Shopping Cart podcast where educational innovation thrives on the food of creative ideas! This week Karen Montgomery and Wesley Fryer host an interview with Steve Muth and Ben Papell, the co-Founders of the VoiceThread website and web 2.0 tool. Steve and Ben discuss the background for how VoiceThread started, design principles of simplicity and "the amazon.com model" of task completion in a few clicks, their implementation of layered complexity within their site's functionality, and the benefits of creating living multimedia documents via VoiceThread which can live forever. They also discuss the brand new website "VoiceThread for Education," which is customized with several changes that make it a thoroughly accountable environment safe for student publishing and interactive feedback. Their hope is that more school districts, students and teachers will now be able to benefit from as well as enjoy using VoiceThread as a learning tool inside and outside their classrooms on a regular basis.

Posted: January 19th, 2008 under Education.
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This podcast is a recording of a thirty minute skype connection I made to GT teachers in Ector County Schools, Odessa, Texas, on January 18, 2008. The focus of my presentation was making the case for using and supporting blended learning tools and learning methodologies in the 21st century classroom. There are an enormous array of web 2.0 tools and resources available, but we do not need to jump right to the "point and click" conversation if educators (and educational leaders) are not on board understanding REASONS traditional teaching methods need to change as well as the pedaogogic assumptions which should undergird those methods and tools. These speaking points are included on the wiki curriculum for the presentation, Creating, Collaborating, and Blending Learning in the 21st Century Infoverse. I am including a link to that page in the podcast shownotes. These five reasons I discussed include ENGAGEMENT, RESEARCHED-BASED METHODS FOR IMPROVING STUDENT LEARNING / ACHIEVEMENT, DIFFERENTIATED LEARNING, AUDIENCE, and REAL WORLD SKILLS (21st century skills.) This podcast includes a musical shoutout to Eric Langhorst, the 2008 Missouri State Teacher of the Year. Give a listen and learn why I'm compelled to include the song "There's No Where Like Nebraska" as my musical transition in this episode. :-)

Posted: January 18th, 2008 under Education.
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This podcast features excerpts of the conversation during an unconference session facilitated by Will Richardson at the Learning 2.0 Conference in Shanghai, China, in September 2007. Although there were many more participants, the only ones whose permission I was able to obtain to share their comments were Clay Burell and Ken Carroll. For that reason, I have edited out comments by the other participants. Despite these omissions, I think you'll find the commentary and dialog by Clay and Ken both thought provoking and challenging. How can we avoid using blogs as electronic means for turning in homework? (I've heard of learning management systems at some colleges becoming basically more sophisticated mechanisms for exchanging file attachments, which is a similar problem.) How can we avoid, to use Clay's term, "schooliness" in our use of web 2.0 tools? Is a more inquiry-based pedagogy of learning feasible in our climate of high stakes accountability, and in many contexts a focus on AP test preparation? Is there an agenda for educational change, and if so, how do we understand it and the ways web 2.0 tools can facilitate its advance?

Posted: January 18th, 2008 under Education.
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Educational innovation thrives on the food of creative ideas. Welcome to the “Technology Shopping Cart,” and our third episode when we focus on “Strategies for Helping Teachers Integrate Technology” as well as our “geeks of the week.” Access our show notes below and on our wiki for links to the websites and resources we discussed in this episode.

Posted: January 8th, 2008 under Education.
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This podcast is a recording of a presentation shared by a docent aboard the USS Missouri battleship, now docked at Ford Island, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 5, 2007. It was on September 2, 1945, in Tokyo Harbor aboard the USS Missouri that generals representing the Empire of Japan surrendered to General of the Army Douglas MacArthur and other officials representing the United States of America. The USS Missouri is now docked right next to the location where the USS Oklahoma was docked on December 7, 1941, when it was attacked by the Japanese Navy and sunk after sustaining nine torpedo hits. Two days after this presentation was recorded, a memorial to the men who died aboard the USS Oklahoma was dedicated in Pearl Harbor, only five hundred feet away from where the Missouri is now docked. This presentation and retelling of the surrender of the Japanese to the Americans aboard the USS Missouri was shared especially for junior ROTC students from Claremore, Oklahoma, who had spent the previous night aboard the USS Missouri and were concluding their tour of the battleship. These junior ROTC students served as part of the color guard participating the dedication ceremony of the USS Oklahoma Memorial two days later. It was a moving and powerful experience to stand on the deck of the USS Missouri, in the exact location where the Japanese surrender to the United States had been signed sixty-two years before in Tokoyo Harbor, and look out onto the placid waters of Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona memorial. Let us pray the nations and people of our planet never again experience a world war as terrible and costly as World War II. The courage, fortitude, and sacrifices of the men and women who fought and struggled to bring that conflict to an end should never be forgotten.

Posted: January 5th, 2008 under Education.
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This podcast is a conversation with my brother in law, Max Divine, who recently upgraded computers in his home to Windows Vista and has been exploring the options available within the new parental control settings. We discuss his experiences with the AT&T Smart Limits parental controls system, options available in Vista's parental controls, and how those compare with the options available in the parental controls available with Macintosh OS 10.5 Leopard. We also discuss briefly the network-level content filtering available with OpenDNS, a free web-based service. As we mention several times, technology solutions like parental controls do NOT offer a substitute for ongoing, regular communication between parents and children. If parents want to use some sort of parental controls to limit Internet access and computer use, there are a variety of choices available depending on the age of the children and other factors. While there is not a "one size fits" all solution, it is good to see both Microsoft and Apple providing more tools for parents when it comes to digital boundaries. Whatever operating system(s) you use on home computers, I recommend that everyone look into and utilize the free OpenDNS service for content filtering.

Posted: January 1st, 2008 under Education.
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