<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="0.92">
<channel>
	<title>Remote Access</title>
	<link>http://www.evenfromhere.org</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:55:49 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<docs>http://backend.userland.com/rss092</docs>
	<language>en</language>
	<!-- generator="WordPress/3.0.1" -->

	<item>
		<title>Online Orphans</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Over the years that I&#8217;ve been using social media and 2.0 technologies in my classroom, I&#8217;ve tried plenty of different services. When accounts are free, it is easy to try things out. Of course, what ends up happening is that plenty of these get abandoned. A service didn&#8217;t do what you thought it would, the service dies, or the you simply end up not using the tool in your classroom. Whatever the reason, we&#8217;ve all created plenty of online orphans. What happens to all of the wikis we&#8217;ve created and never used? Or the email addresses we&#8217;ve changed from? The services we&#8217;ve signed up for and left behind. What happens to all of these things? Nothing. And that is part of the issue. Every place you&#8217;ve created an account or a profile can be tracked back to you. Every single piece is a part of your digital footprint. With a memory the size of Google&#8217;s, these orphans, that we give little or no thought to, are an important part of who we are online. In a recent op &#8211; ed piece published in the New York Times, Eric Schmidt, one of the founder&#8217;s of Google has suggested: &#8220;that young people [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.evenfromhere.org/?p=1491</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Do New Tools = New Learning?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The tools I&#8217;ve been using in my classroom have been mostly static for several years now. While this might seem like an eternity in internet time, we&#8217;ve been successful with our model. Blogs, wikis, google docs and open internet service as cornerstones. Many others on the periphery such as audacity, igoogle, flickr, youtube and delicious. While my teaching has changed in this time (and I hope improved) using these tools, the tools themselves haven&#8217;t. I&#8217;ve learned to use them in new ways, digging deeper with my students, watching for patterns of use and learning how to help them to use these tools to see new issues. While not resistant to using new things, I&#8217;ve been careful to not chase after every new online service or website that has emerged. I&#8217;ve thought of this as the &#8220;shiny object syndrome.&#8221; This year however I am hoping to add a few tools to my cornerstones. I plan on working with both diigo and the online community I&#8217;ve set up using buddypress at Hive Thinking. I think that these tools will add capabilities that we currently don&#8217;t have in the classroom. And this has got me thinking. Does using new tools allow for new [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.evenfromhere.org/?p=1501</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Hive Thinking</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I put the cart before the horse today. While I&#8217;ve constantly preached and believed in the fact that learning need and pedagogy come before selecting tools &#8211; I set up a new website today for my classroom and I&#8217;m not sure how it will be used. As ning went through its changes this spring and re-emerged as something different, I still saw the need for a social network that could be used in the classroom. While I had only used ning for one project in my classroom, it had been a powerful experience and I felt I needed another space like this. Going with the Idea Hive theme that I have branded all of my sites with, I registered Hive Thinking for a mere $10. I have in the past chosen Bluehost for my data and so with only several several mouse clicks, I installed WordPress. Once this was up and running, I installed the Buddypress plugin and searched for a theme. A bit of image editing for the header image and I was up and running. If you haven&#8217;t heard of it, Buddypress is a free open source plugin for WordPress that allows you to run a full social [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.evenfromhere.org/?p=1514</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Classroom as Intellectual Hothouse</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Quote of the day from Clay Shirky&#8217;s Cognitive Surplus: &#8220;The hothouse environment of a collaborative circle can make the ideas and achievements of the participants develop faster than if the participants were were all pursuing individual goals without sharing.&#8221; I love the idea of classroom as &#8220;intellectual hothouse.&#8221;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.evenfromhere.org/?p=1503</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Building a Summer</title>
		<description><![CDATA[- My father and father &#8211; in &#8211; law are both the type of men that could build a passable ark with a bunch of toothpicks and twine. While I have no trouble doing things around my house (one of the things you simply need to be able to do when you live in small town and there are few people around that you could possibly hire for anything) it has never been my &#8220;thing.&#8221; Which is why I&#8217;m surprised at myself this summer. For a few weeks at the end of June and for most of the last two weeks that I&#8217;ve been home I&#8217;ve been very busy working outside of my house. I&#8217;ve needed to build an extension on my garage and a new fence between my yard my neighbour&#8217;s. Add to this a dozen other smaller jobs and you see how day after day I&#8217;ve found myself outside each morning with a cup of coffee, my carpenter&#8217;s belt, and a whole lot of tools. But the amazing fact is that I&#8217;ve actually enjoyed it. The smell of the wood. The puzzle of figuring out how to do something new and the knowledge that I&#8217;m learning to do [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.evenfromhere.org/?p=1499</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Neatly Packaged Information</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve long had difficulty teaching out of any kind of basal reading system. Right from the beginning of my career I had trouble seeing how these sets of readers were supposed to inspire, motivate or interest students in reading or the world. Luckily, along the way, I&#8217;ve had administrators who supported me as I worked with the students in my classroom in a variety of ways, pulling out the textbooks when I wanted a common text for us to look at, but otherwise, leaving them on the shelf. This same philosophy applies when it comes to information and and research. Publishing companies want to sell solutions. They want to sell pre packaged units and collections of books. They want to sell search access, collections of pre approved websites and libraries of online videos that have been watched by &#8220;experts.&#8221; They want to give teachers scripts, assessments, worksheets and tables of outcomes. Information that is neatly and cleanly packaged usually promotes only one point of view. Sets of books and websites and videos don&#8217;t often help us to wonder, &#8220;who&#8217;s voice am I not hearing in this?&#8221; Purchasing unit after unit of stuff doesn&#8217;t give our students the ability to locate [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.evenfromhere.org/?p=1468</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Magic Words</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve been reminded several times lately of some of the greatest words that you can hear coming out of a teacher&#8217;s mouth who is still fairly new to all of this 2.0 stuff: &#8220;I&#8217;m not really sure how to do that; but I&#8217;m willing to giving it a try.&#8221; Pure gold. Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/turbojoe/417829347/sizes/m/]]></description>
		<link>http://www.evenfromhere.org/?p=1492</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Just Wondering</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Anyone have a school supply list this year that looks something like this: - 10 pencils - 5 red pens - 5 blue pens - erasers - internet connection (laptop, smartphone or netbook are all acceptable) - notebooks - binders]]></description>
		<link>http://www.evenfromhere.org/?p=1486</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Data Control</title>
		<description><![CDATA[- Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian company that makes Blackberry phones, is in trouble with a few countries in the Middle East. Beginning with the United Arab Emirates, but also with Saudi Arabia and India, RIM is facing tight deadlines. These nations have all threatened to block Blackberry Messenger as well as email service to these phones. If I&#8217;m understanding the issue correctly, the problem has to do with data control. Most smartphones handle email and other data through the telecom system of whatever nation they are currently in. Blackberry on the other hand, runs there own encrypted system, having control of their own data centres around the globe. This makes Blackberry&#8217;s very safe to use from a privacy point of view, but almost impossible to snoop into from a governmental or security point. The news stories on this issue over the last couple of days have got me thinking about education. 1.) Do schools want / need to see all of the data that their students produce? Are there schools that monitor everything? Are there schools that monitor nothing? What are the consequences of both of these scenarios? 2.) Do our students have an expectation of privacy in [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.evenfromhere.org/?p=1478</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>It&#8217;s Complicated</title>
		<description><![CDATA[- &#60;/rant&#62; It&#8217;s August, which means my brain is slowly turning itself towards thoughts of school and the still-a-month-off year ahead. As I&#8217;ve been doing a bit of reading and surfing, paying more attention to education news, one marketing word has caught my eye repeatedly already: &#8220;easy.&#8221; As in products advertising how easy they make it to: integrate technology, evaluate students, increase test scores, work with students who are having a hard time, communicate with parents, keep your grade book up to date, take better pictures with students, make better videos, plan better lessons, make the school day more interesting &#8211; and on and on. &#8220;Easy&#8221; seems to be the theme of educational advertising these days. But I&#8217;ve got news for advertisers (which is absolutely not news for anyone involved in education) teaching isn&#8217;t easy at all. It&#8217;s actually a tremendously complex human endeavour involving all sorts of variables and permutations which often change and recombine on an hourly basis. Don&#8217;t insult people by telling us that your product will make our lives easy. Help us. Work along side of us. Offer us forums where we can discuss our lives in the classroom. Offer us spaces to connect with other [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.evenfromhere.org/?p=1474</link>
			</item>
</channel>
</rss>
