Room With A View

I remember a few years ago someone told me there was no point in teaching keyboarding because voice recognition software would make the skill obsolete. Perhaps this will be the case in the future but right now my students need to be able to keyboard. They need to get to the point where they can get a first draft on the computer without their lack of keyboarding skills getting in the way of their ideas.

I mentioned this at my school’s back to school night earlier this week and the parents asked for software recommendations. The networked program we use at school is not available in Beijing. Does anyone have any suggestions for a good keyboarding program? Is Mavis Beacon still widely used?

The folks on the Seedlings Podcast were talking about Google Notebook so I installed it yesterday and have been playing around with it. It’s an extension for Firefox and Internet Explore that let’s a person copy and paste text from a webpage into their Google Notebook without leaving the page. (No extension for Safari at this point.) It has huge potential for kids doing research. They can be working at home, at school, or a friend’s house and still have access to their notes.

Of course plagiarism and making sure that kids write things in their own words are issues but they have been for a while. (People have been pasting text into word-processors for years.) It looks pretty good.

I see that Tim Lauer is moving his school to Drupal as a web platform. He says:

Besides using Drupal for internal and external web communication, I am really excited about using Drupal as a basis for web based student and teacher interaction.

I’ve looked at Drupal, Moodle, Elgg, Wordpress and several other CMS, LMS, and blogs over the last year or so. Unfortunately, my school is not ready to support any of these tools at this time. The tech support people are stretched as it is and can’t support one more thing. This may change in time but for now I’ve got a few teachers that are going out on their own and using Wikispaces. A few use PBWiki. It would be nice to have a school-wide system and in time we will but for now teachers are happy to have something they can use easily to communicate with students and parents.

My school is moving towards using Microsoft’s Learning Gateway but it looks like it will be a while before teachers can post their course material on-line. I was really encouraged when a couple of teachers asked me to help them set up a webpage for their joint classes. When I asked about Learning Gateway the IT folks told me it would be a year or two before teachers will be using Learning Gateway. We can’t wait that long and nor do we have to.

Wikispaces will foot the bill nicely. It is easy to use and has rss built in.

I understand that Firefox 2.0 will support spell checking. That’s great news for those of us that use it to post to blogs and wikis. Last year I had students working on a wiki and spell checking would have made life much easier.

I’ve lost my room with a view. We’re two days into a new school year and I’ve changed rooms and jobs. I’ve given up my third floor room with a view of the mountains surrounding Beijing for a windowless computer lab. I’ve gone from being an elementary school classroom teacher to a middle school computer integration teacher. I’m glad I made the move but I have a few mixed feelings about it.

The advantage of being a classroom teacher is that one can create one’s vision for education with some interaction with others. As a technology integrator I have to work closely with my collegues in order to build a cooperative vision of technology education. It’s a challenge I look forward to. I just wish I had a window.