After my presentation on Tuesday, ISTE asked to interview me about a few things for the home audience who were watching via Ustream. That video is below. After watching it, I have adopted a couple of new rules for myself.Don't give an interview directly after presenting to 1500 people. The adrenalin is still flowing and I seem a tad frenetic!Don't give an interview in a referee's uniform (or any costume for that matter!)Learn to control my hand movements, thought this will probably be unlikely.I know I slow down my speech when I present, but, boy, I was whipping through this interview!Go get lunch first, then do the interview...However, I don't think I did too bad with the content, so I am happy with that, anyhow!   Visit Kathy's Web pages: Kathy Schrock's Home Page Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators

I have been noticing something more and more lately. When I chaperoned the recent 8th grade trip to New York City, I observed that students in every pair of seats were sharing a single set of earbuds attached to one music or DVD player; one student was using the left one and one was using the right. I wondered how it sounded, since one student was listening to the right channel and one to the left. Was one hearing just the melody and one hearing just the bass line?I also noticed this was not happening because every other student did not have some type of a device. Every student on the bus seemed to have a music player of some sort.I would never think of sharing music this way. I guess this has become a common practice because, first, many of the popular audio players do not have a speaker, so the use of a headphone is the only way to listen to the music, and, second, the dramatic rise in the use of the earbud style of headphone lends itself well to this practice.Interestingly enough, I noticed a few laptops at the local computer store that now have two audio-out jacks built-in. Well, at least if students are sharing a movie on this brand of computer, they will each have access to the full stereo experience via their own set of earbuds!Have you noticed any other "interesting" cultural practices lately due to technology advances?Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rogpool/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0  Visit Kathy's Web pages: Kathy Schrock's Home Page Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators

Okay...this is pretty cool. Using Splash Data's File Magic desktop and iPhone app, I am typing this blog post in the email component of the File Magic desktop app. Once I am done, since I have no data connection from my laptop, I simply hit "send" and the email moves over to the open File Magic app on the iPhone, and then I can simply use the iPhone's cellular data connection to send this post! (Now, I know I could have typed this message directly on the iPhone, but it is quite long, and it is easier to use the full-size keyboard for this purpose!)However, that email component is secondary to the main strengths of File Magic. This app allows you to easily move files, with both the iPhone/Touch app and the desktop app (Mac/Windows) open, from your desktop to your iPhone, or just via the iPhone app from iPhone to iPhone. These both work as long as both devices are on the same wireless network or accessing a WAP on the same network. You could just use the File Magic app on the iPhone/Touch as a data transfer-and-storage app if you wanted to.But, the File Magic app on the iPhone/Touch also allows you view several different file types, some of which are not native to the iPhone or iPod Touch. If you move a Word doc, a MS Powerpoint presentation, an Excel spreadsheet, or an Adobe PDF file to the iPhone/Touch, you can view it through the File Magic app on the device. Pretty sweet!You can find out more about the $4.99 app here if you are interested:http://www.splashdata.com/filemagic/ or in the App Store in iTunes.  Visit Kathy's Web pages: Kathy Schrock's Home Page Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators

Blog URL: http://kathyschrock.net/blog/ I decided to run a Wordle query on this blog to get a sense for what I am really writing about. If you have never tried Wordle, the site defines Wordle as "a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text."I feel it is much more than a toy. Imagine students running Wordle queries on blogs they follow to see the author's most written about topics? Or creating a Wordle from the text in their own essay to see what topics they cover in depth?Tom Barrett has a great slide show with many suggestions for using Wordle in the classroom.The Wordle from this blog is below. It provides me with useful information and reminds me that I should probably branch out a bit in my areas of discussion!Give Wordle a try for yourself!  Visit Kathy's Web pages: Kathy Schrock's Home Page Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators

I am preparing an introductory Twitter presentation and am using information from a blog post by Charlene Kingston dealing with setting goals for your own use of Twitter.I asked my Twitter PLN to answer a short survey on this topic. I sent the tweet out to my 4625 followers, and some of my followers re-tweeted the request to 4019 of their followers (who may or may not overlap with my followers.) I received 196 responses, many in the first few hours of posting the request on Twitter.The yes/no questions were as follows:I am a K-16 educator or pre-service educator.I use Twitter to talk to friends and family I use Twitter to find business customers. I use Twitter to form a professional networkI use Twitter to send out and share information. I use Twitter to receive information. I have more than one Twitter account so I can keep my personal and professional tweets separate.Results:7% of the respondents were not K-16 educators93% of the respondents were K-16 educators8% of the non-K16 educators had separate Twitter accounts for personal and professional use.24% of the K16 educators had separate Twitter accounts for personal and professional useThe goals for the use of Twitter by the non-K16 educators are illustrated in the graph below.The goals for the use of Twitter by the K-16 educators are illustrated in the graph below.The graphs were created using the NCES Create-A- Graph site.A big thank-you to all who responded!  Visit Kathy's Web pages: Kathy Schrock's Home Page Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators

Based on a post last Thursday by a user who was able to find the new Wacom Bamboo Touch Tablet (Model: CTT-460) at his local Best Buy, I took a chance and visited my local store. There was no sign of it with the other Wacom tablets, but I asked a friendly salesperson who looked it up on the computer, and said they seemed to have one in stock. He went to the storeroom, but came out and said it was on the "new items" end-cap, which, in my store, was kind of out of the way. In any case, the one was there, and I scored! (I guess I might have given him the only hug he will get all day!) It is not yet on the Wacom site or the Best Buy site, but it is really out!The Wacom Bamboo Touch Tablet is a USB tablet that can act as a mouse, a multitouch trackpad, and a small drawing tablet. I installed it on both a Macintosh (Snow Leopard on an iMac) and a Windows machine (Toshiba laptop with Vista Home Basic).The Bamboo touch is 8" x 5.5" in size and the input area is 5.5" x 3.25", with the four "ExpressKey" buttons located outside of the input area. These ExpressKeys are configurable for various functions as most input device buttons are.You simply start the software install, pick right- or left-hand orientation, and then plug in the Bamboo Touch to complete the installation. It shows up, after the install, in the System Preferences and Control Panel panes as "Bamboo" and you can set the pointer speed, double-tap speed, etc.There is a nice tutorial on the CD which illustrates and explains all the multi-touch features. The full user guide is also downloaded to your computer in PDF format.Here are a few screenshots from the manual, illustrating the capabilities of the Bamboo. (Click on the thumbnail to enlarge it.How well does it work?Let me start out by saying I am not a mouse user-- I use a trackball on my desktops and the built-in trackpad on the laptops. I also do not take advantage of all the whiz-bang features of the MacbookPro multitouch trackpad on a regular basis.However, I did put the Wacom Bamboo Touch Tablet through its paces on both the Apple and the Windows machines, and all of the multitouch features worked great! I also opened Adobe Photoshop and used the Bamboo touch both as a mouse and as a drawing tool. I could navigate and "fingerpaint" with no problem, but I would still choose to use my Wacom Graphire for serious drawing. My finger is not half as steady as my hand with a drawing pen is.I am going to replace my trackball on my iMac at work with the Wacom Bamboo Touch Tablet, locate it in front of the keyboard, and use it as my mouse. As well as adhering to the sound ergonomic principle of having the input device as close as possible to the middle of your body, so there is no stretching going on, I now also will have the multitouch features available on the Mac and Windows side of my desktop! I plan to take advantage of those swiping, panning, rotating, and the other whiz-bang features!  Visit Kathy's Web pages: Kathy Schrock's Home Page Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators

I am still trying to figure out how best to send information to support my Personal Learning Network. There are a few hundred people subscribed via RSS to this blog (although that is no real indication of how many others are reading it). On the other hand, I have almost 5000 people following me on Twitter. Even if only 10% of my followers use Twitter on a regular basis, it means that my Twitter posts are getting out to many more educators than the blog posts.Can Twitter, the micro-blogging tool, replace blogging? I don't think so. Since it is hard to say much in the 140 characters Twitter allows, some people's tweets wind up just being links to their longer blog posts. And Twitter will not replace email, either. If someone asks me a 140 character question in Twitter, I don't even try to fit my response into 140 characters. I just send them a note and tell them to email me so I can share some good information with them.However, is Twitter convenient for both posting items of interest and asking questions to tap my own Personal Learning Network? Absolutely! It is all about choosing the right tool for the job. For me, I think about it this way...-- Blogging: I have not used blogging much to express my opinions. I use it as a place to publish information that I feel other educators might benefit from. I often ask users to contribute their thoughts, ideas, and to add to the conversation, which enriches the blog posts. However, when a reader has a follow-up question, I wind up commenting along with the readers in the comments area of my own blog. I am not sure how useful that is when someone is trying to re-construct the information in the blog post.-- Email: I receive lots of questions from teachers who would like my help, opinion, and/or pearls of wisdom. These lengthy discussions do, and should, take place via email. The conversation is often personalized to the sender. At times, if I get the same question from lots of educators, I wind up creating a blog post about it so I can easily point others to the information.-- Twitter: I use Twitter every day, all day. I follow about 125 very smart and tech-savvy educators, and the power of this group to find super resources to support teaching and learning is unmatched. I am a big believer in "pay it forward", so I try to do my part and post items that I feel my followers would find interesting. In the past few days, I have posted about my first foray with Google Wave, Aviary's new audio-editing tool, a well-done Time article about Google Wave, the fact my son won a programming contest, the new version of Tweetie for iPhone, Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, and the Hotmail phishing scam. I follow a lot of blogs, and, in the US, I am in the time zone that gets up first and I get up early, so I am often able to "announce" things before most educators are out of bed.-- Web pages: I continue to update Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators daily. I add new sites, send out a site of the week to tens of thousands of educators, and add content that supports my presentations and workshops. I check all 3000+ links by hand each month to make sure they are still working and valid. Is this "old skool"? In this time of collaborative tools, it seems like it might be. However, I truly believe there will continue to be a place for experts to offer information that is useful without the comments, critiques, and collaboration of others. That place would be the Web page. The great thing about some of the new online tools is the creation and housing of Web pages has become a non-issue for teachers. With Google Docs and Sites, all educators can easily create an online resource to share with their students and colleagues.-- Facebook: I would be remiss if I did not include this social networking tool. I have lots of friends in Facebook, and it is really where I get to learn more about them. Educators are careful to include enough information to interest you, but not too much information, so it is fun to both share in personal events (like weddings and such) and also share their successes in the classroom. I don't really like getting reference questions via Facebook, since I then have to log-in and answer the question there. My email address is prominently on my profile, and I hope that most people just email me vs. me having to go to yet another place to answer questions. However, the use of a social networking tool is a powerful thing for schools, and I see the use of similar platforms, such as Ning.com, becoming more and more used in schools by teachers and their students.This blog post started out to explain why I tweet more than I blog, but has turned into more of an explanation as to how I use the Web-based information-sharing tools. I am sure many of you have quite different opinions, so feel free to share!Credit: Phone image courtesy of Dan Brady.  Visit Kathy's Web pages: Kathy Schrock's Home Page Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators

I just downloaded the 30-day trial of Camtasia for Mac and am quite excited! Of course, most people think of Camtasia as a screen-capture tool for creating tutorials and such, which it does very well in this version, too. (It only captures full-screen, but it is very easy to crop to the selection you want later.) Here is a chart of the comparisons between this first version of Camtasia for Mac 1.0 and the Camtasia Studio for Windows 6.x product.Only having spent a little time with it, my first impression is that, as well as an easy tool to create tutorials and screen captures (including video and sounds), Camtasia for Mac is a fairly full-featured video editing program that is also quite intuitive! You can import images and layer videos on top of them, layer videos on top of videos, easily separate audio and video lines, apply effects such as one similar to the Ken Burn's effect to videos after the fact, and much more!The share menu item allows you to share to Screencast, YouTube, or iTunes, and the advanced export function allows exporting to AVI, QT, MPEG-4, and more, with the ability to pick your codec and quality options.The TechSmith Web site has a great set of tutorials located here if you want to get a feel for the options it offers.I might have found an easy-to-use tool that allows me to both create tutorials and access to a simple, but effective, video editing program! If you try it out, leave me a comment and let me know what you think!  Visit Kathy's Web pages: Kathy Schrock's Home Page Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators

I wanted to gather some information from our grade 6-12 students to help me better support them in their use of technology both at school and at home. I sent the 1500 middle and high school students the survey as a Google Form in their Google Apps email account. The survey was open for two weeks and I received 98 responses. I did not do anything additional to convince students to complete the survey, so I was happy with the number of responses I received. I appreciate the students taking the time to respond!Here are the results from the first 8 questions: (Link to full-size online version.)The last question gave the students the chance to comment when I asked "Anything you would like to tell me about your personal use of technology?" Here are some of the responses."I think it would be great to have WiFi all over the school for students to use. I often find myself at school and needing WiFi, especially being part of the theatre program and having long rehearsals when the library is closed. It would make doing online research and such during these times much easier.""In school I do school related stuff on the school computers. Also at home I use my computer to IM (AIM) friends, update my MySpace, or check homework and grades daily.""I use technology for mostly browsing, typing papers and research. Other than that, I use it only for Facebook and playing music. :)""I am a frequent Facebook user and if the high school were to go wireless with an assumption of the student body having access to it, Facebook wouldn't be as important to us since Nauset students are at school with you and non-Nauset students don't have access to the Web during the day."Your comments or thoughts on the collected information?  Visit Kathy's Web pages: Kathy Schrock's Home Page Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators

I just received my Chumby One yesterday and all that you hear is true-- you cannot help but love the little information device! After setting up Chumby on your wireless (or wired) network, you simply visit the Chumby site to both activate your device and to choose from the list of applications to install.The adding of applications to the Chumby takes place via your Chumby's personal page on the Web site. Here you add and customize (if necessary) the widgets. It could not be any simpler! The applications cycle through, each staying on the screen for the time you have determined in the set-up. There is also a large button to push that both allows you to pick a certain widget to show, but also allows it to stay on-screen if you wish. Some of the widgets are interactive, like the Twitter widget which allows you to tweet using an on-screen keyboard and the sticky-note app which allows you to leave notes to yourself. You select items from the screen using the tip of your finger or your fingernail (or a stylus), and it works easily.In addition to the 1500+ widgets you can install, the Chumby also allows you to choose from a list of streaming radio stations and podcasts that can even play in the background as your widgets cycle by. Of course, there are lots of clocks to select from, and there is a nighttime setting that dims the screen or even shuts it completely off if you want.If you want to see how to set it up and how it all works, simply visit their FAQ page.Here are the specs from the Chumby One page:3.5 inch LCD color touchscreenAccess to free chumby contentUses rechargeable lithium ion battery (not included)USB 2.0 high-speed portStereo headphone output2W mono speakerVolume knobFM radio tunerAccelerometer (motion sensor)Wi-Fi connectivity (802.11 b/g)USB Ethernet compatibleOver-the-air software updatesDimmable backlight454 MHz ARM processor64 MB DDR SDRAM2 GB internal microSD cardAC adapter included3.5" wide x 4" tall x 3.5" deep$119.95 with free US shipping  Visit Kathy's Web pages: Kathy Schrock's Home Page Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators