New Intranet

This week was spent doing a little redesign on the Indian River Intranet page to help make it a little more accessible.

Working with Moodle and Loudbot

Today was spent in Indian River looking over some of the podcasting technologies that are available to many of our districts. We have modules setup for both Moodle and Loudbot and have been testing them to see if they will fit the need of our Model Schools.

Also I had a discussion with some reps about Indian River converting over to School World and some of the pricing associated with that.

Health Fair

Today I spent the morning over in the Middle School participating (from the tech end) of the Health Fair. It was a gathering of various local health officials and associations (hospital groups, rescue squads, and police force representatives). The one thing that caught my eye the most was the gym teacher and how he had video games setup as a demonstration of how children can be active and use that type of technology. He had a version of Dance Dance Revolution! with footpads. He also had a baseball simulator where kids would swing a bat at a pitch coming from the TV screen. Is this a place where we have not been as dedicated in pursuing technology as other disciplines?

Career Day

Today I participated in Career Day at IRCSD. I spent the afternoon with three separate groups of kids and talking about what I do as and FTE in the district and what I do outside of Indian River. Also I addressed different teaching strategies and different technologies that many Universities are started to play with (ie. Second Life). In addition I addressed how employing gaming theory is becoming an influencial factor on how people in the realm of educational technology are developing software and working these theories into their ever changing curriculums.

Meeting with CSE

Today I spent some time over in the CSE office discussing what strategies to employ when creating their new database. We decided to cut down on the development time by doing one simple thing. Traditional databases are setup so all of the criteria you select is an entry in a database, instead of going this route, we will base our criteria not on pre-formulated entries in a database but rather a word search found in the titles of each report. That will completely eliminate the creation of a database to fit search criteria and cut development time in half.

What Kids are Learning from Video Games!

This site designed by Marc Prensky discusses the positive educational impact of video games in education.

 Visit Here!

Federation of American Scientists on Gaming in Education

Read this report published in 2005 by the Federation of American Scientists on how add games in education isn’t an option, it’s a must.

READ ME!

Second Life

Check out this article from the New York Times about Second Life and how it is being used in education.

 Click Here!