EastBaySchools.Net

If you are a student and trying to log into moodle,
click ---->>>Here <<<----

I found this site while doing some work for a client. This seems
to be a great alternative to requiring students to buy calculators:

Here's a scientific calculator:

My daughter recently sent me a link to Randy Pausch's last lecture,
a well known and inspiring talk that is circulating the internet.

For those who may not have seen it yet, and don't know about Randy,
he is a wonderful educator that has been involved with Virtual Reality since the early 90s, inspiring a generation of innovation.

While I've linked to the talk below, I think a very interesting project that has been created under his guidance, and should be underscored, is the Alice project, that uses a 3D environment to teach students programming.

See www.alice.org for details.

Recently one of the teachers that I am supporting with moodle wrote me to inform me that moodle had failed miserably during a class quiz.

She enjoys it so much that she has made it central to her classroom management. However, my initial assumptions for supporting Moodle were to use it in a asynchronous mode - mostly for posting class notes, and providing a space for students to work from home.

For those of you that want to skip this article, the general consensus is that for realtime class activity of 30-40 students,
you should consider finding a computer with at least 4 gig of memory. Moodle can be a memory hog. For the rest of you, read on.

I am writing this from a school 2.0 web conference, where I just gave a simple lightening talk. Literally ran in off the bus (BART), 5 minutes before the talk... ran down the street the wrong way to realize that the front door was right at the BART station.

Not sure how the talk went, but it was fun meeting so many teachers that understand the importance of collaborative learning.

One interesting new tool is a new product for realtime online collaboration that has an interesting use in the classroom... "view", spelled "vyew".... http://vyew.com/content/

This is a very insightful interview with Tim O'Reilly
on Web 2.0 and Open Source. His insight is remarkable.

http://audio.edtechlive.com/OReilly.mp3

Solution for todays school?

... smaller class size where students can interact
more fully with adults, and not technology.

In terms of the value shift of commodity software,
his insight is that the shift is towards more valuable
databases. In essence, companies are learning to harness
our collective intelligence.

Final thoughts for teachers... have fun, and do what you have passion for. For students... find those teachers who are passionate about what they teach. Doesn't matter what it is, but you will learn more and enjoy learning, when the instructor brings a passion into the classroom.

According to CoSN K12:

Open source software, open standards and open hardware are poised to make a profound impact on K-12 education. The convergence of web technologies and a new spirit of collaboration in the education community makes this an exciting time to get involved.

They have set up a web site to help with open source and open content. Information can be found here.

http://k12opentech.org/cosn-k-12-open-technologies

According to a press release distribted through the ACM,

http://web.mit.edu/invent/n-pressreleases/n-press-08index.html

"The Lemelson-MIT Invention Index found that more than half of American teens (59 percent) do not believe their high school is preparing them adequately for a career in technology and engineering. The disparity is more pronounced among some groups historically under-represented in these fields. Nearly two-thirds of African-American teens (64 percent) and teen girls (67 percent) believe they are not prepared in school for these careers.