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February 1, 2012
Day 757: Heading to Punxy tomorrow? 6:50 PM

Tomorrow is Groundhog Day...a holiday celebrated more in Western Pennsylvania than any other region, I'd bet.

Sure, the movie Groundhog Day helped bring added attention to the folks in Punxsutawney celebrating this great day every February 2, but they've been rocking every Groundhog Day since 1886!

As many years as I've lived in Western PA, I've never gotten the opportunity to travel there to celebrate the holiday. And the past few years, I've been disappointed in the lack of live coverage by the local and national TV stations.

Well thank you, Mr. Internet! You can learn all about the festivities at Groundhog.org and of course, view the morning's events LIVE from 5:45 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. EST at VisitPA's website dedicated to the event!

One of these years I'll get to go...it's on my list with a few other cities (ahem). Until then, I'll keep watching the movie and streaming the event...it's almost as good, I'm sure :)
Posted By: Chris Stengel Leave a Comment
January 31, 2012
Day 756: Happy Digital Learning Day! 8:48 PM

Tomorrow is the Alliance for Excellent Education's annual "Digital Learning Day."

Designed to be "a nationwide celebration of innovative teaching and learning through digital media and technology that engages students and provides them with a rich, personalized educational experience," this day is being celebrated by states, district, schools, and classrooms across the country in a variety of ways tomorrow.

Online, there is a town hall webinar you can sign up for as well as a number of videos on the right side of the web page for this day.

As I researched this day for my post tonight, I learned that this day has been recognized as such for a number of years now and I'm thinking that if we are able to continue our "Distinguished Elementary Technology Integrator*" award program beyond this first year, it might be a good idea to announce the winner on February 1st of every year!

If you are a teacher, take a minute of your day tomorrow and see if there is a topic or a tool that you'd love to integrate more into your classes if only you had some additional training....and then let me know about it. Deal?

* The Mt. Lebanon Distinguished Elementary Technology Integrator award is given to the teacher who best demonstrates excellence in the integration of technology with their classes. Each building nominates a building-level winner and the district-level winner will be chosen from these seven nominees this April.

 
Posted By: Chris Stengel Leave a Comment
January 30, 2012
Day 755: UGGly rule? 7:44 PM

Today was the first day of a ban on Ugg (and Ugg-ish) boots at Pottstown Middle School outside of Philadelphia, PA.

Apparently, some students were "smuggling" cell phones into class by dropping them into the "open-topped" boots and the school's decision to curb this behavior was to ban the boots.

Personally, I'd think that such an act might challenge the kids to just come up with the next way to smuggle a cell phone in.

I'm going to make a crazy assumption that there is no BYOT initiative at Pottstown Middle School also. If there were, each classroom could have its own daily rules on whether cell phones could be used or not for specific purposes.

And I wonder whether it's the right call to just ban devices outright as if there is no room for judgement and responsible use of devices to be taught to the students? They're just inherently bad things?

I'll be interested to see if there's any follow-up to this ban to pronounce it effective or not...is cell-phone smuggling just a problem in the cold-weather months? What did middle schoolers do last May when such cold-weather boots were decidedly off-season? And were boys really wearing Uggs so they could smuggle their cell phones into class or is is it just the girls who break the rules?

I also enjoyed finding and thinking of titles for tonight's post on this topic:
  • Stomping mad
  • Curb Your smUGGling
  • Let the fur fly!
  • Pottstown gives Uggs the boot
  • Fashion profiling
  • Crimes against fashion
  • These boots are made for talkin
  • Ugg! Another cell phone ban story
  • Foot fault!
  • A fuzzy cell connection
  • Fur-thering the digital divide
How about you? Do you think this is a realistic course of action for a school to take?
Posted By: Chris Stengel Leave a Comment
January 29, 2012
Day 754: One hundred thousand thanks! 7:48 PM

Fun fact: this was an actual denomination of US currency (SOURCE)

This afternoon, FarFromBloggin recorded its one hundred thousandth click!

100,000...that is a lot of clicks. Hopefully, some appreciable percentage of these clicks led to some thoughts or discussions that helped out your classroom, your place of business, or your personal lives.

At the very least, I hope they were clicks you were happy to have made...for either serious or humorous reasons.

Thanks to each of you for your readership...what started as a way for me to learn and model blogging has evolved into an audience for which I now write and I'm thankful that you're a part of that audience.

Below are some ways to help you visualize 100,000 (click each for details):
Posted By: Chris Stengel Last Comment at: 1/30/2012 9:53:47 AM 1 Comments
January 28, 2012
Day 753: Taking out a flier on an app 9:08 PM

So I have to admit that when the iPhone 4S was released, I was moderately jealous of the people who got Siri on their iPhones (I have an iPhone 4...not the 4S).

It did kind of neat things, and it was something I didn't have. It even has a set of funny responses that it will give you if you ask the right question.

So I was intrigued when I saw this Mashable article today highlighting a half-dozen apps to try and one of them was Evi...purported to be even better than Siri. It's even free for Android! ($0.99 for us Apple people)

So I went for it...and I got directions to the High School! And then...predictably (if I had read the reviews), it started telling me that its servers were down and try back some other time. Their website even addresses the issue! But I ignored it on high hopes and downloaded it.

Ugh...and I had such high hopes...oh well.

But stay tuned...the $0.99 is a sunk cost so I might as well keep it on my phone...and I'll keep trying and let you know if it pans out as a cool app before you spend your dollar!
Posted By: Chris Stengel Leave a Comment
January 27, 2012
Day 752: Wicked awesome sweet 3:37 PM

Yesterday I had the great fortune to sit in on a chemistry class at the High School where 6 iPads recently purchased by The Mt. Lebanon Foundation for Education were being introduced to students in that class for the first time.

It was great to see that devices could increase engagement at this grade level! I think I naively assumed that they would only engage students from the younger grades. In fact, the title of today's post, "Wicked awesome sweet" is a direct quote from one student whom I overheard talking to another student about the iPads.

The exercise involved 6 groups using the iPads with an app while the other groups used laptops which were running a similar program. I observed that the groups with the iPads actually demonstrated increased collaboration! At first I wondered if maybe these "collaborators" were inclined to be the ones who pushed to the front to get first crack at the iPads, but this was even true after they traded their iPads with groups that had laptops.

I also got the chance to witness BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology) in action: When the teacher gave out the name of the app that the iPad teams were going to use, I saw 3 students take out their iPhones and look to download the app...instantly increasing the classes capacity to run this app by 50%!

Thanks for letting me observe, Mr. Tilger!
Posted By: Chris Stengel Last Comment at: 1/30/2012 10:11:43 AM 1 Comments
January 26, 2012
Day 751: The ground is broken 6:34 PM

Click to Enlarge

The image above was created with an app called 360 Panorama (iPhone and Android available). It lets you "stitch" together a series of photos to create a panoramic image like this one from the High School renovation project ground-breaking ceremony today. It really gives you a feeling of what it was like to stand there at today's ceremony.

I'm excited for us to get started on this project! We had a big meeting with one of our partners today where we discussed some of the larger scale items that will need to take place as we move along the project timeline. Many details to keep organized, but the outcome will be so great that I'm excited to give it our best go!
Posted By: Chris Stengel Leave a Comment
January 25, 2012
Day 750: State of the Wordle 8:52 PM

2012

2011

I've blogged about wordles before...they're visualization tools that (artistically) present a collection of words (a speech, a book, etc.) and show higher-frequency words as larger.

One of the great uses of a wordle is simply as a conversation-starter! And even more so when you take something like the State of the Union and compare one year against the next.

The wordles above were created from the transcripts of President Obama's State of the Union Address this year (top) and last year (bottom). You can click each one to see a larger version of the image.

A couple of differences I can see right off the bat from last year to this year is the increase in frequency of the words "energy" and "tax." What could those increases in word frequency signify? Let the classroom conversations commence! And go make your own wordles at wordle.net!!
Posted By: Chris Stengel Leave a Comment
January 24, 2012
Day 749: Does the Megabus go to Orlando? 7:41 PM

Today was the first regular day of the Florida Educational Technology Conference (FETC), one of the country's largest educational technology conferences.

It's Florida's version of our PETE&C Conference that we go to in February.

It would be great one year if we could somehow all get free transportation down to Florida and attend FETC instead...I mean check out this year's program!

In the meantime, I can follow the takeaways and backchanneling by reading the tweets of this year's attendees on Twitter when they use the #FETC hashtag! Not quite as good (or as warm!) but definitely better than nothing :)
Posted By: Chris Stengel Last Comment at: 1/24/2012 8:08:58 PM 3 Comments
January 23, 2012
Day 748: Southern Hospitality 7:30 PM

I have to admit....I was tempted.

I had the great fortune to get a private tour of the soon-to-be-occupied Bethel Park High School today. Special thanks to Ron Reyer, the BP Technology Director, for walking me around and showing me all of the great things that their students are about to experience!

It was a great afternoon...though it overfilled my head with thoughts, considerations, ideas, details, good-to-knows, what-if's, conclusions, opinions, and partial-understandings!

In fact, it made me wonder once we get underway with our high school project how I'm going to have time to do much of anything else!

I took so many photos that I think the best way to share is to give you all a PictoBrowser from the set I put on Flickr:
Posted By: Chris Stengel Last Comment at: 1/25/2012 2:02:16 PM 9 Comments
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Blog Description:
This is a public blog for my posts and thoughts surrounding technology used in the Mt. Lebanon School District.

Thoughts are my own and not the district's.

A year ago, I completed a 365 Day Challenge where I have made one post every day for a year...but for some unknown reason, I'm still going :)

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