I’ve been using Delicious for a while now for saving web sites that I find useful in solving technology problems. After I fix something most people say “I don’t know how you know all this information.” and I say, “I don’t know it all, I know where to find it and where to save it.” Google is your friend, it helps you find what you need and Delicious helps you save it for when you need it. I would never carry a book or expect myself to remember all the data that I need to fix the things I’m responsible for.
At the same time, teachers shouldn’t have to memorize all their curriculum or items that enhance it either. They should be able to get the information, save it to Delicious, then retrieve it at a later time when they need it for a class. Could you see a teacher being able to log into Delicious, search a tag and come up with a web site in seconds for a class on the spur of a moment. That enhances the learning experience for the students. It gives them something extra and teaches them another way to use the resources at hand to get information relevant to a subject they are studying.
Another way to use Social Media to our advantage teaching students with current technology.
Delicious, Social Media
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I experienced some weird signal loss with a few of our ActivBoards that I could only reproduce on the teachers laptops that used those ActivBoards. I took my known good laptop with me to test the board to verify that it was the teachers laptop, not the ActivBoard. I also took the teachers laptop to another ActivBoard, which would then reproduce the error without fail. This led me to start looking at what was installed on the laptop for conflicts.
In each case, 8 total, the laptop either had the AOL client installed or a Google product that had installed the Google Updater. After removing or actually first disabling these programs, I found these laptops worked without any further trouble with any ActivBoard. I let the laptops run for a week with the updater or AOL disabled before I then re-enabled the offending software for a final proof of theory. Bingo, the systems started losing signal with the ActivBoards within an hour, sometimes within 30 seconds.
Our district does not condone the use of Google products such as Google Desktop or toolbar and does not support them, ditto for AOL. I personally consider the AOL client software a poor piece of programming that takes over your system without any regard to your wishes or what else is installed.
I’ll be warning teachers more often about Google and AOL so that I don’t have to make a service call that could have been avoided.
Technorati tags: Educational Technology, k12 Education, ActivBoard, Promethean, Google, AOL
