Browsing all posts in Wes Fryer.
A new world of digital choices
NECC 2009 (the last NECC, since next year it will be ISTE 2010) was a fantastic conference for many reasons. For me, as in the past, the opportunities to have conversations with other educators striving to find new ways to engage students, connect professionally with peers, and utilize cutting edge digital tools to expand the [...]
Great iTouch Apps for Primary Students
Yesterday here at NECC I learned about three fantastic applications for younger / primary age students from Jenny Ashby from Vic, Australia, who has 8 iPod Touches in her classroom currently. Here are the applications. These are ideal for students to use in center activities in a primary classroom.
iCanWrite (99 cents)
Give your kids a boost [...]
EduBloggerCon09: Great Opportunity for Co-Learning
One of the semantic changes I’ve made in the past few years is learning to refer to those engaged in the learning process less by the titles of “teacher” and “student” and more by the title “co-learner.” We can all be learners, and depending on the context, we can change roles from being expert learners [...]
Tips for advanced Audacity editing
This week in a Celebrate Oklahoma Voices digital storytelling workshop in Oklahoma City, I learned several new “advanced” tips for improving the quality of audio recordings with Audacity from one of our participants. The handouts for Audacity which we use in our 2.5 day workshop cover the basics of recording audio, playback, selecting and deleting [...]
Evening reading with the iPod Touch
Here’s a new sight around our house this summer: My 11 year old son reading in bed using his iPod Touch. He just finished reading “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson over the weekend thanks to Project Gutenberg, and is now starting “Animal Farm” by George Orwell. These are two of the required summer reading [...]
Security awareness for Twitter account access
When it comes to granting other people, applications or websites “access” to any online account you maintain, whether the account is on Facebook, Twitter, GMail, or any other site, my advice is to be cautious and proceed slowly. This evening Dean Shareski brought the website HelpIranElection.com to my attention via a tweet. The website exhorts [...]
Blogging the Conference: We’ve come a long way in 3 years!
The response to Joe Corbett’s June 12th post here on ISTEconnects, “Planning To Create Lots Of Great NECC Content? Share It With Us Here!” has been amazing! To date, about one hundred people have indicated they are going to share content from NECC 2009 via blogs, Flickr, CoverItLive, Ustream, and other websites. What an exciting [...]
How does your state measure tech literacy?
Tis the season for educational technology grant writing, now that ARRA funds have been released and many states have announced competitive grant programs for disbursing these funds to schools. In Texas, the “Target Tech in Texas (T3) Collaborative Grant” program was announced in May to provide $28 million in educational technology funds to schools striving [...]
Convert PDF files into eBooks
While it is possible to read a PDF file on a smartphone in its original format, I’ve found to be MUCH easier and flexible to convert PDF files into eBook-formatted documents and read them on the smaller screen of a smartphone. This post explains how to do this using free, cross-platform software tools.
On my own [...]
Schools filtered like totalitarian police states
I recently shared a workshop in a public school, which like many others around the United States, blocks almost all websites which permit interaction and collaboration.
As you can see on the above images, the websites which were blocked included delicious social bookmarks, Flickr photo sharing, the Storycorps oral history project, Friendfeed, Google Mail, and Feedburner. [...]
