The Green Cup

I’ve heard it a few times from people in educational leadership: we’re building a plane while we’re flying it. Usually, I get the urge to get off when I hear that. It doesn’t strike me as inspirational – unless the goal is to inspire fear…

Brian Eno recently talked about the nature of the coming change:

We’re either at the start of a renaissance, or at the end of civilisation. Increasingly, from facts and figures and arithmetic, we’re building the intellectual tools to decide which it will be. While some shrill conservatives cling to the past, the rest of us are moving forward to something still in the process of being defined. That’s why, compared to them, we look a bit untogether. They know precisely what they don’t want, but we can’t yet clearly articulate what we do want. That’s the nature of the future—it’s a collective act of informed imagination. And the quality of information is improving. (Emphasis added.)

My friend John Connell commented on Eno’s idea of how data impacts our decision making. Here’s Eno’s quote:

In the absence of data, you theorise. In an abundance, you just need to do the maths. And, because of all those super-efficient search engines, we share more and more data. Data dissolves ideology.

Connell disagrees; and so do I. Connell points out that not only do we still have to make assumptions, but the energy in the current debate about the future comes about because we’re not able to agree on those assumptions – assumptions that Eno thinks are so obvious (in light of all the data available), they’re inescapable (just a matter of doing the math).

I like the metaphor of a coming Renaissance when we talk about change and about new direction. Airplanes are, well, mechanical; and if they don’t work, we crash and burn. The Renaissance was a more productive form of chaos.

Eno has muddied an important distinction. There’s a difference between facts and truth. Truth is more real, but less tangible. And while it might seem like an abundance of facts would lead to obvious conclusions, the truth is that facts are manipulable. Individual facts may not be malleable, but a collection of fact usually is manipulable. And people manipulate them to draw conclusions they’d already suspected (or hoped) to be true…

I’ve been too busy with professional development (among other things) to blog about professional development much these last couple of weeks. So let’s summarize briefly…

I attended the Special Education Teacher Leadership Academy (SETLA) in Charleston, WV from July 26 to the 30th. I got a new laptop out of the experience. I sat through a brief intro to Vista and learned (among other things) that it has its own screen capture tool (the Snipping Tool) built in. I attended a workshop on INTEL’s online classroom tools. And I spent a little while in a podcasting workshop.

There was lots of other stuff.

The podcasting is something I’ve put to immediate use. My page at the SETLA website has links to two podcasts on it, on one why life long learning is important in our society and one on something called cognitive dissonance. The podcasts are produced using a program called Audicity.

Learning to use a new technology often results in the need to learn more about other technologies. MY podcasts are part of a book student. I need to do at least six or eight more. And that presents some online storage problems. So I’m exploring ways to solve that through some kind of a webhosting service. Podcasts usually open in Window’s Media Player or in RealPlayer. Both can show pictures connected to an audio file. With commercial mp3 files, that’s usually an album cover. I can’t help but think there’s a way I can brand my podcasts with a logo or icon of some kind in that same way, but I haven’t figured it out yet…

Last week (July 26-30), I attended SETLA - the Special Education Teacher Leadership Academy - in Charleston, WV. Three other professionals from my school district attended. Over 300 professionals (special education teachers, technology integration specialists, central office staff, and special education directors) were there to participate from across the state.


One of the things we did was live tweet the event. What does that mean? And why would we do that?


To "live tweet" an event means that you have your Twitter account open and you post comments (or "tweets," in the vernacular of Twitter users) as the event progresses. Probably you also employ a #hashtag in your tweets, a #word preceded with a number sign that informs Twitter that your post should be cataloged in its search engine under a particular topic.


Why? There are a couple of answers. First, it creates a background conversation where participates at an event can discuss a speaker's ideas or a workshop's content while things are actually happening (instead of later, when it's over). Second, it allows the outside world a glimpse of what's going on at the event. Third, it creates a permanent record of your thoughts that you (and others) can refer to later - like putting your notes on an event online. And final, I suppose it gives you something to do if you're a little hyperactive or you have a case of hypergraphia.


Hashtags only show up in a Twitter search for one week, so the #SETLA tag will disappear from the search engine over ther next few days. But the posts themselves can still be found by visiting the individual pages of event tweeters.


I counted about 400 posts using the #SETLA hashtag. In no particular, here's a list of the 17 event participates who used the tag:



• Valerie Wilson - the event's organizer.
• Marla George
• me
• Ellen Shepherd
• Devan Simmons
• Sonja Phillips
• Pam Butcher
• Becky Moore
• Denise Shipley
• Melissa Given
• Shelby Haines
• Diana Nash
• Courtney Curran
• Ali Stevenson
• Stephanie Simmons
• Amanda Shelton
• Kim Nicholas

Perhaps the biggest lesson was that it helps to have the support of the event and to announce a hashtag for the event. Without that, most of our 17 participants wouldn't have known about each other... (Thanks, Val).

I participated in a webinar yesterday on the use of cellphones as instructional tools. Edweek organized the event (sponsored by Sprint). It was enlightening.

A little self-disclosure… While I’d like to think of myself as at least a bit of a geek, I don’t own a cellphone. I can explain why. I lived in the wrinkled up terrain of rural Appalachia. In my corner of far western Virginia, I get one bar at my house (two if I stand on the back deck and hold my mouth right) and no bars at work. What good is a cell phpne. My wife has a cell phone; but she works within sight of a tower and has a marvelous signal at work. If I lived a mile closer to town and worked at a different school, life would be different. Anyway…

That said, the webinar changed the way I think about cellphones. The webinar’s presenters left you with the impression that laptops and PCs are, well, almost obsolete. They stated pretty clearly that hand held devices are the real personal computers. And they made a strong case for the idea that cellphones engage students more completely than PCs.

They also suggested that cellphones extend learning to outside class time (and they are far more portable than a laptop or PC) and that cellphones bridged the digital divide because they are as common in inner city environments as in the more well off suburbs. While that comparison may work well for cities and suburbs, it doesn’t do much in my rural environment. Still, the argument that hand held devices like cellphones, smartphones, iPhones, Palms and Backberries are the real personal computer and the wave of the future seemed compelling.

I won’t repeat the numerous ideas for actual instructional applications here, since the webnar is archived.

The webinar’s presents said pretty clearly that teachers should start by working within existing policy on cellphone use. But I already had reservations about policies that completely ban student possession of a cellphone. Now I feel even more strongly that cellphones have to quickly be embraced as part of normal life in the 21st Century and recognized as a valuable technology tool within the curriculum.

Note: Back on June 11 I blogged about a goal of developing a new technology skill on an average of once each week. And I’ve been trying to blog about keeping up with that goal. So…

On June 15th I attended a workshop in Charleston on WebTop (which I’ve talked about in some detail here and here).

The workshop was actually a five-in-one set of hour-long mini-workshops. We were introduced to a tool for creating electronic portfolios (ePearl) and a virtual classroom (Manhattan). We got a look at developments in the evolution of our state’s student records system, WVEIS (and we were cautioned, on pain of death, that we could no longer call it “Wee-vus,” but had to say the letters – “dubya-vee-ee-eye-es”). We were given an introduction to Google Sites (which is embedded as a tool on the new virtual desktop). And we got to see how the desktop and its accompanying social network, WebTop Communities, works.

I tweeted.

Now, I know there will be some of you thinking, “What does that mean?” It means I used Twitter to record my thoughts and experiences as the workshops progressed. Twitter is a microblogging tool that allows users to publish statements of up to 140 characters in length. And I live tweeted the workshop – publishing about 30 Twitter posts (or “tweets”) as the day progressed.

Twitter uses something they call a hashtag to track topics. So I put the hashtag #WVDE in my posts, but that only works for a week. You can find things I’ve posted to Twitter at my Twitter page: http://twitter.com/gregcruey.

Live tweeting is quickly replacing live blogging of conferences and events.

Below is a list of tweets I posted during the workshops. I’ve arranged them in chronological order, even though almost any Twitter client tool would present them with the most recent post first.

• Tweeting from a workshop in Charleston WV 2day ay Capital HS. Workshop on WebTop, the new virtual desktop. #WVDE #WebTop
  7:46am Jul 15th

• Starting with a tool called ePearl. We’re in small groups in computer labs and we are on the same keyboard all day. Nice… #WVDE #WebTop
  8:27am Jul 15th

• Presenter for ePearl: Donna Landen http://wvde.state.wv.us/dir… eLearnign Coordinator #WVDE #ePearl #WebTop
  8:32am Jul 15th

• Toying with customizing the appearance of ePearl. Students can pick images and color themes they like. #WVDE #ePearl #WebTop
  8:53am Jul 15th

• ePearl is open source. Nice. #WVDE #ePearl #WebTop
  8:54am Jul 15th

• Naming/color coding folders. Students can color code folders to show level of completeness – so teacher can assess it. #WVDE #ePearl #WebTop
  9:10am Jul 15th

• Discussing how ePearl could be interfaced with other software – like techSteps and Writing Roadmap. #WVDE #ePearl #WebTop
  9:12am Jul 15th

• Looking at example of student portfolio. Teacher has included a rubric. Includes a box where teacher types comments. #WVDE #ePearl #WebTop
  9:16am Jul 15th

• ePortfolios provide a way to fix Pontius Pilate Syndrome: “What I have written, I have written.” Get kids to edit. #WVDE #ePearl #WebTop
  9:22am Jul 15th

• Resource section for ePearl includes both text and video based tutorials. #WVDE #ePearl #WebTop
  9:23am Jul 15th

• Next up, Fernando Ibanez on Manhattan Virtual Classroom http://wvde.state.wv.us/dir… #WVDE #PBL #WebTop
  9:58am Jul 15th

• Manhattan is intended to facilitate project based learning for Teach 21 wvde.state.wv.us/tea… #WVDE #PBL #WebTop
  9:59am Jul 15th

• Creating a class on Manhattan. WVDE has given 500 mg of space to students for their ePearl portfolios #ePearl #WVDE #PBL #WebTop
  10:10am Jul 15th

• Looking at modules available within Manhattan course. 17 different module formats that can be used in combination. #WVDE #PBL #WebTop
  10:20am Jul 15th

• Discussing the possibility of interfacing Manhattan & Writing Road Map. #WVDE #PBL #WebTop #WRM2
  10:34am Jul 15th
  
  
• I received this tweet from… ladyvolhoops@gregcruey 17 modules for what
  10:43am JUL 15th

• I received this tweet from… ladyvolhoops@gregcruey i am sitting in a conference with people doing pbl globally. listening to how it is done in italy
  10:43am JUL 15th

• I received this tweet from… ladyvolhoops@gregcruey r they looking at eports for how many years. 5oo mgs would not be enough if done correctly for 9-1210:44am Jul 15th
  
  
• @ladyvolhoops Modules that can be used in structuring a class for Manhattan Virtual Classroom -open source, in WebTop #PBL
  10:45am Jul 15th

• Adding students to Manhattan classroom. Searchable list of candidates based on people in the WVDE WebTop System #WVDE #PBL #WebTop
  10:46am Jul 15th

• @ladyvolhoops epearl in WebTop for ePorts. Can be uped to 1 gig on request. ePearl can be passed on 2 next grade #ePearl
  10:49am Jul 15th
  

• I received this tweet from… ladyvolhoops@gregcruey y would you want a virtual classroom? what r they saying is the purpose?
  10:50am Jul 15th
  
  
• @ladyvolhoops Fernando says it helps manage the interaction between face-to-face teaching and online tools. #PBL #WebTop #WVDE
  10:53am Jul 15th

• Discussing how teach21 can be used inside Manhattan Virtual Classroom. #WVDE #Teach21 #PBL #WebTop
  10:54am Jul 15th
  
  
• I received this tweet from… ladyvolhoops@gregcruey don’t mean to be a pain, but what is fernando basing this on? we already do this in our school without a virtual class
  10:55am Jul 15th
  
  
• @ladyvolhoops No pain…I suppose it’s just an alternative format. It’s a free open source tool. But, bout to break for lunch…
  10:59am Jul 15th

• Session 3 is on WVEIS. Presenter Richard Pullin http://wvde.state.wv.us/dir… #WVDE #WVEIS
  11:39am Jul 15th
  
  
• I received this tweet from…jonbecker@gregcruey I worked with lots of OIS folks a while ago when WVEIS was a system way ahead of its time. Made for great research databases
  11:42am Jul15th
  
  
• @jonbecker We’re basically getting a run down of what WVEIS can do. FERPA prevents much hands on work in a workshop. #WVDE #WVEIS
  11:55am Jul 15th

• WVEIS (our student records) has gone from a tedious DOS-sorta application to being web based. Much nicer, more user friendly. #WVDE #WVEIS
  11:59am Jul 15th

• Presenter: Jeff Takarsh on Google Sites #WVDE #GoogleSites #WebTop http://wvde.state.wv.us/dir…
  12:57pm Jul 15th

• The WebTop virtual desktop uses Google Sites as a tool and links from that virtual desktop. #WVDE #GoogleSites #WebTop
  12:58pm Jul 15th

• Creating a new Google Site – practice, basically. #WVDE #GoogleSites #WebTop
  1:05pm Jul 15th

• All normal Google Sites stuff. But the account comes thru the Department of Ed. Keeps personal things separate. #WVDE #GoogleSites #WebTop
  1:39pm Jul 15th

• Presenter: Chris Casto http://wvde.state.wv.us/dir… on WebTop Communities #WVDE #WebTop
  1:55pm Jul 15th

• WebTop Communities is a closed social network (much like Facebook) for WV educators and (eventually) students #WVDE #WebTop
  1:56pm Jul 15th

• WV’s WebTop Communities page is available in 28 (twenty-eight) langauges, from Arabic to Vietnamese… #WVDE #WebTop
  2:11pm Jul 15th

• Hadn’t noticed the bookmarking feature in WebTop Communities before. I can share bookmarks with WebTop friends. #WVDE #WebTop
  2:20pm Jul 15th

• WebTop Communities gives me a gig of storage space separate from the gig I have at the WebTop desktop. #WVDE #WebTop
  2:21pm Jul 15th

• Looking at creating communities in WebTop Communities. Any WebTop user can create communities. #WVDE #WebTop
  2:30pm Jul 15th

• “Any WebTop user can create communities.” Check that: students will NOT be able to create communities. #WVDE #WebTop
  2:34pm Jul 15th

• Well, headed home…
  2:45pm Jul 15th
  

I talked last week about WebTop – the West Virginia Department of Education’s virtual desktop and accompanying tools. One of those tools is WebTop Communities.

WebTop Communities is a closed social network for state education. At the moment it’s inhabited by the employees of the state’s schools systems. But eventually the plan is to include students.

WebTop Communities home page I get when I’m logged in.

WebTop Communities gets compared to MySpace by WVDE staff. I’m a member of MySpace and Facebook. I like Facebook more. MySpace seems a little more cumbersome to me than Facebook.

There are some ways that I think WebTop Communities is like MySpace, some ways it is like Facebook, and some ways it is different from both of them.

WebTop Communities is like both MySpace and Facebook in a number of ways. It includes its own messaging system where you can send other members emails, and it will notify you that you have email waiting. But MySpace sends you an email telling you that someone has sent you an “email” on MySpace, and you then have to login at MySpace to read that message (which I find inconvenient); Facebook and WebTop Communities both send you the text of your message in an email, and you only have to login to the service if you want to reply.

My friends at WebTop Communities.

WebTop Communities, MySpace, and Facebook all three allow you to formalize relationships by “friending” people within the network. But Facebook and MySpace require those relationships to be reciprocal: I friend you, you friend me back (or approve my “friend request”) and then we’re friends. WebTop Communities allows you to display people as “friends” on your page without them listing you as friends on their page (and vice versa). And in that sense it is more like Twitter (which allows you to “follow” people who don’t follow you).

My WebTop Communities profile page.

Unlike MySpace and Facebook (or Twitter for that matter), WebTop does not have a place for personal, status, or “mood” updates. On Facebook there’s a window when you login that asks “What’s on Your Mind?” On MySpace the Status and Mood page asks “What are your doing right now?” And Twitter asks simply “What are you doing?” There is nothing like a “status update” on WebTop Communities. That makes it a little more like LinkedIn – a professional network. Social, but professional…

WebTop Communities is more like Facebook than MySpace in the ease with his smaller groups within the larger social network can be formed. So for example, I have a closed community within WebTop specifically of staff at my school. I moderate the community, decide how visible it is to users who are not members of my community. And I determine who can be a member of the community. MySpace may be able to do this (I’m not absolutely sure), but such pages are legion on Facebook. WebTop Communities makes them very easy to create and use.
Like both Facebook and MySpace, there is a blog tool in WebTop Communities. And recent blogposts show up on the WebTop Communities home page.

My blog page at WebTop Communities.

So I guess my main point is that the community is unique. While its appearance hasn’t changed much in the year since I joined (my first blog post at WebTop was July 23, 2008), I suspect it’s capacity has increased greatly and the ideas for its future have multiplied.

I think WebTop Communities feels more like Facebook. MySpace has always had a problem with spam that is, well, in poor taste. I’ve rarely experienced that on Facebook (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen). I hope that WebTop Communities will become more like Facebook in that Facebook has seen a proliferation of applications for users – games, quizzes, etc. I know that the WebTop apps would be educational. But if we’re building a social network to include students in an educational setting, I think such applications would have potential.

Finally, Facebook is growing. MySpace isn’t. I hope that WebTop grows…

This week my new tech tool was screen capture. I used a program I’d come across a while back (but had never actually installed) from a company called Etrusoft.

!Quick Screen Capture (the name of their program) was easy to install and quite easy to use. I used it to caputre a series of screens that have to do with the West Virginia Department of Education’s WebTop program.

WebTop is an cloud-based personal desktop that West Virginia educators and (eventually) students can sign up for. It allows them to maintain their own access to a particular set of tools and documents despite having to move from classroom to classroom (or even school to school, depending on their job).

Let me show you some of the screens I captured (you can click on them to get a larger image)…

To log onto WebTop you go to http://wvde.k12.wv.us. The page looks like this:

In the blue box on the left of the page, the second option down is “WEBTOP LOGIN.” Click on that and you get this page:

I fed in my user ID and password:

And I got this (my own virtual desktop):

I haven’t done much with mine yet. So you might call this the standard look. Let’s take a look at the four folders on the WebTop. Going from left to right, the first folder is the WVDE forlder. Inside you find this:

The folder contains:

• a shortcut to the State Department of Education website (the little A+ thinggy)
• a link to a page that will let you check your state issued email account (and you have to have an “access” email account to get a WebTop account)
• a link to WebTop Communities (kind of like Facebook for state teachers; I’ll look at WebTop Communities in some detail on another day).
• Several Google tools that you can maintain separately from any personal Google account you might have.
• A couple of other tools that at this point I haven’t used.
• And a link to page where you can look up other teachers you know of in the state and find their email address (a handy tool).

I used this box most often to click on through to the WebTop Communities page.

When you open the “Teacher Tools” folder you get this:

The folder gives me access to the Manhattan Virtual Classroom. I also get a link to upcoming professional development opportunities, some online textbooks, and a place where teachers can check their own certifications.

The third folder is on project based learning. Inside:

There’s the Manhattan Virtual Classroom, an eportfolio tool called “epearl,” and some Google tools.

The last folder is for student tools and it currently contains just a link to Acuity, the state’s benchmark assessment program.

You get the idea. You get the idea about WebTop. And you get the idea about screen capture. The only problem with screen capture is that the Etrusoft tool isn’t free. I may pay for it (eventually) but I’ll look for a good free screen capture tool first.

On Wednesday I have a workshop on WebTop in Charleston. For now, I think I’ll play the chess game featured in WebTop’s software folder…

Note: Scott McLeod put out a call recently for people to participate in Leadership Day 2009 and blog about technology leadership. (You can find the results of his call from last year here). This post is my response…

I’m spoiled. At least I suspect I’m spoiled. I work in a state that was recently ranked top of the pile in the Technology Counts 2009 report. Only West Virginia and Georgia received an “A” in both technology use and technology capacity in the report. I’d like to think that my particular county is more aggressive in pursuing technology goals than many in our state. So I suppose you can take what I say with a grain of salt. Or you can look at it as something that could be helpful for predicting future problems as your school system catches up with us…

Even in our district’s smallest elementary school, we see new technology walking in the door regularly. Every classroom has a handful of PCs that can be used for learning station activities for small groups. Many/most of our classrooms have replaced overhead projectors with document cameras, chalk boards and dry erase markers with SMARTBoards and those little electronic slates that the kids can write on. Several teachers (right down to kindergarten) have electronic student responders. There are cameras and flip cams, laptops and mobile presentation stations – I could go on. All of this in a building that dates back to at least the Depression era, for a student population of less than 90.

The hardware is only half the story. We have a number of cloud-based curriculum tools that allow students to start an assignment in class and continue working on it at home (if they have Internet access at home). Those software packages allow the teachers to view and access student work at school or at home. I graded papers last year for a writing assignment while I was at a conference in Charleston, 100 or so miles away, by accessing the work on my laptop via a wireless connection in my hotel room. We have consistent broadband access, state-provided email accounts, and regular professional development opportunities that generally occur outside normal school hours and include a stipend. What more could a body want?

If we have a technology problem at the moment it’s that the maintenance of our computer systems is not a local issue for us. That is to say, we rely on outside sources for trouble shooting and repair of our systems. That outside source is primarily our RESA office. We send work order from repairs, upgrades, etc. to them. They cover several counties with minimal, and they get to us when they can. Sometimes that means that a particular machine is dysfunctional for a weeks.

If two or three of the machines in a lab become dysfunctional and stay that way for three or four weeks, the usefulness of the lab can be reduced. Instead of taking a class into the lab and sitting everyone down at a machine and giving them an assignment, you end up with a handful of students who don’t have access. There are ways to cope; it would be better to just have the machines working.

From a layman’s perspective, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a hardware or a software problem. And even a geek wannabe like me can’t usually tell which it is just from looking. We have someone in the building who’s been assignment duties as a sysop for the school. Maybe reloading Windows would fix the problem. The sysop doesn’t have the time or authority to do that – and doesn’t know if it would solve the problem. So we wait…

When the PC is one of 16 in a lab, it’s annoying. When it’s one of four or five in a classroom, it becomes a problem that can change the course of instruction because a teacher no longer has enough PC’s to have a functional learning station.

Technology integration is the simple idea that a teacher and a group of students have come to rely on some technology as part of their instruction to such an extent that they take it for granted. Nobody expects it to work perfectly all the time. But success in technology integration is a factor of reliability.

It’s not a particularly flashy issue. We’ve committed a lot of personnel resources and money to just having technology already. But to succeed in technology integration we will eventually just have to make upkeep and maintenance more of a local, in-school function. In my state, I suspect we’ve taken steps to better equip district personnel to cope with computer problems through our technology integration specialist (TIS) program. That seems likely to keep us ahead of the national curve. Eventually that level of training will need to filter down to the school level.

A friend of mine on a closed social network for WV teachers asked me a couple of weeks ago what educational uses I thought Twitter had. I thought I’d recycle my answer to her. Here it is…

I wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago on an instructor at a community college in Texas who’s used Twitter to facilitate discussions in his history class. I’m guessing that similar applications would work in high school classrooms. Of course, Twitter in the classroom provides some liabilities regarding privacy and publishing student work. Maybe a parent’s signature on an acceptable use policy gets around that; I’m not sure…

Angie Dowling (teaches in Morganton, I think), pointed me to a microblogging platform with greater security, designed for educators: Edmodo (article at TechCrunch). I don’t know it the law is keeping up with technology, or whether having a closed (passworded) platform gets past the liabilities involved or not. Having a closed system with limited participants certainly serves to manage traffic. But there are other ways to do that – Twitter groups or communities.

I use Twitter as part of a personal learning network. I follow 130 160 people on Twitter at the moment. It’s one way I know, for example, that Scott McLeod (Dangerously Irrelevant) is having a summer book study and that Wesley Fryer (Moving at the Speed of Creativity) had a new post yesterday on copyright and the idea of creating a culture of information sharing (“sharing by default”). Of course, Twitter overlaps with my RSS reader for this. But I have a few dozen people in Twitter who

• don’t write a blog
• work as educators, often with some job focus on technology and
• will often answer questions I ask on Twitter, especially if I direct the question specifically at them.

Twitter is a marvelous professional development tool, IMHO.

Instructional use? If you can do it with chat, you can probably do it with Twitter. Slightly different limitations. You have to be a little more succinct. But you can create clickable links. And there’s a more-or-less permanent record automatically created. AcademHack has some interesting ideas for Twitter assignments. An example of middle school use is at Digital Directions (Education Week).

Backing away to a slightly broader perspective, Twitter (or one of the other microblogging platforms) is fast becoming basic literacy behavior for the 21st Century. If I can find ANYTHING that encourages kids to write words down and send them to each other in a socially productive framework, THAT’s a win. Literacy behavior as a form of social interaction is what social networking is about. It should be part of the educational environment for a 21st Century school. If I had my way, every child in the intermediate grades at my school would have a microblogging platform and a social network presence (like WebTop) where social networking skills could be practiced and modeled, and they’d have access to a keyboard as often as possible so they could READ other people’s replies to them.

I neglected to mention that microblogging is becoming a communication tool that businesses use to to allow employees to communicate with each other in the workplace – kind of a replacement for email. A microblog post could be used instead of an intercom system for announcements (”Teachers: please keep students out of the down stairs boys bathroom until further notice while the custodian deals with a plumbing issue…“). Of course, that relies on the idea that teacher will actually use the microblog.

I’ve clarified a goal for myself recently in the area of professional development. The goal: develop a new technology skill on an average of once each week.

While that may sound ambitious, the truth is that it will probably be easy. There are lots of little possibilities that qualify. Last week’s tech skill was sending text messages to a cell phone using a computer. I discovered that there are a number of websites that will send text messages from your computer to a cell phone for free:

• Online Text Messaging
• Txt2Day
• SMS Everywhere
• txtDrop

Be forewarned that the process of converting an email into a text message takes place at the cell phone holder’s service provider – and it can take about an hour. That’s how long it took for my wife’s cell phone to get my message.

Next up? Tomorrow I’m going to learn to use the new voter registrar software that has replaced the paper poll books in Virginia. I’m a precinct chief in Virginia and I have to be at the polling place with a couple of laptops (instead of the old paper list of voters) and some voting machines at 5am.

Future plans include learning to use some screen capture software (which is essential for presentations on some topics) and attending a workshop on the new virtual desktop (WebTop) that the West Virginia Department of Education is providing for teachers. I’m sure I’ll come up with other ideas…