Creative Commons Flickr Search

@AngelaMaiers in my Twitter PLN, posted a link to this set of Flickr search tools. One of the tools mentioned in that article is Flikr Storm, a site which gives the user a very simple interface to search for Creative Commons licensed materials. I used this site for my last blog post to find an image that I could freely use that would give "fork in the road" article some visual imagery.

I've been encouraging students and teachers to use Creative Commons and to give attribution to the creators of the media. In creating the blog post and using that image I forgot to give credit!

I'd like to correct that...

Here is the source of that image. Thanks, SkyWhisperer for making this image available for free use.

A teacher uses the computer as a tool

I had no sooner read David Warlick's blog post titled Are computer's a tool? when I discovered a series of sites developed by a math teacher doing just that.

Darren Kuropatwa is a senior math teacher at a high school in Winnipeg Manitoba. He has been using Web2.0 tools to support his instruction.

His main blogsite is: A Difference. This appears to be his primary reflection site where he talks about the use of software and hardware tools (such as the SmartBoard) during and following his class.

He has a podcast site set up at: MathCast Central. This site is created using iWeb and the files are stored on his school district server. The servers we have at our highschools and at our tech office could host a site like this. What you discover by going to this page is his experimental work with one of his classes that he records on a daily basis as a podcast for later review by his students or other interested parties. He has had some challenges with this work, and it is interesting to hear how he is working through this.

His class blog is: Pre-Cal 40S (Winter '07). I find this really cool. He has the students in his classroom as partners in this blog, each having the permissions to make postings. I've seen this done before, but what I find most interesting with Darren's implementation is that he has students assigned the task of scribing the class, taking images from the SmartBoard, and posting a daily summary of each class.

Very cool. I'd like to review these pages with some of our teachers to see if there is interest in a similar project that I could support from the corner of my office.

Zoho Notebook

The following video has been referenced from a number of blogs I read regularly and I thought I would post it here for some possible discussion. In my home province, British Columbia, the consortium of school districts our district belongs to is considering an offer from Microsoft to license MS-Office for any district who wishes to participate. We don't know the cost yet, we will within the next 6 weeks or so, and I anticipate it take a fair amount of our budget to do this. At the present time, we license Office for many computers in the district and if it appears that our annual costs to do so under this new plan is reasonable, we may move to the provincial agreement. The Zoho Notebook video does give a glimpse as to what can be accomplished by an online tool. No pricing for this software is available at this time... it is in its early development stages. Take a look and see what you think.