Have you noticed that I'm not posting on here much these days? After we launched FinalSite for our community web pages, I started putting most of my energy there. But my tech blog on that site is restricted to just members of our school community. It's tricky trying to maintain a public blog and a private blog (and a personal blog and a travel blog) so trying to merge all of that will be a personal project for me over the next couple of months. In the meantime, when I want to share something with the world, this OSX blog server isn't a bad option.

In my last post, I mentioned that I was going to try and use the Rover app to open a Smart Notebook file. I was able to do it! (Does that mean that I'm the very first person to ever open a Smart Notebook file on an iPad? Given how hard it was to do it, perhaps I was.)

Here's what I learned. You can do it, but it's not easy. Surely it will get easier over time, but at least as far as a proof of concept, I'm happy that it was a success.

First, I used the Rover App for iPad. It's free. And it's good to have for a variety of other reasons - you can access all the standard educational Flash-based content (FunBrain, Matheletes, Discover Education, etc.) and it all works pretty well. One issue that I'm having from home as well as from school is that now and then I will get an alert that says "Disconnect with Error." On the Rover community support website it appears that other people have that same problem. Since it's not consistent and it happens both at home and school, I suspect it's a problem with their cloud service and not a block on my firewall or a restricted port. Anyway, it's not every time so I was at least able to make this work.

So I enter "express.smarttech.com" in the URL window and it is able to load the page. It looks just like the version on the browser. When using Skyfire or Photon, I just get an error that says the page contains flash content that won't load. So far, Rover is the only app that I've found that can load this website.

Now comes the bigger challenge - getting it to open a Smart notebook file. I had uploaded two files to my blog in order to give them a public URL. To make it easier to type, I shortened the links with bit.ly. However, the Smart express "open URL" feature won't take a bitly link. Not sure why, but it's probably some internal safety check.

Just click File, Open URL, then enter the address. Here's the hard and frustrating part. Since you can't just enter the bit.ly short link, you have to type the whole address. And the address is darn long. You can try it yourself if you want:

Even more frustrating? You can't copy/paste. I tried to email the link to myself, copy it in Mail, the paste it in the box. But Rover doesn't act exactly like an iPad app - there's no click-and-hold for paste. And without a Control key on the iPad keyboard you can't force a paste. So I typed it in carefully.

Even more frustrating than that? The box you're typing into is hidden by the keyboard. So I typed a little, minimized the keyboard, checked my work, brought up the keyboard again, typed some more, repeat, repeat.

Eventually, success!

I was able to interact with the notebook file just as if I was on a SmartBoard. There was a little bit of lag as I dragged objects around on the screen, but it basically functioned the same as Smart Express. Then, hold your breath and flip to the next page. . . .

Yes! Page 2 on my Smart notebook file has a Flash-based hundreds chart on it. And it opens! And it works! Proof to me that I can have students interact with flash objects that a teacher puts together in Notebook software. A little bit tricky, but technically possible.

If I was to do this more often, and if bit.ly wasn't the solution, then I think I would figure out a slick brief publish-to-web option that could give me a shorter URL. I could probably get a folder on the isa.nl/ webserver that teachers could drop files into. If we did this a lot, it would be worth working on.

Have you found another way (or an easier way) to open Smart Notebook files on your iPad? Leave a comment and let us know how you did it.

One of the biggest criticisms or worries I've heard from teachers about using iPads in the classroom is that iPads don't support all the file formats teachers want to use. They support almost all. And the support has improved since they were first released, as new apps keep adding new features. But the one thing I couldn't figure out how to do was to open a Smart Notebook file on an iPad. I tried a bunch of things. First, I searched for an official Smart app, which isn't there (but you have to assume that Smart is working on this.)

Then I looked at all the apps I have which open multiple file formats. GoodReader handles a ton of them, but not *.notebook files.

I know that if you can get a notebook file onto the web, you can open it with Smart Notebook Express, which was my next strategy. I uploaded a few Smart Notebook files to my blog page, where I would be able to open them from any computer (without using a password. If I uploaded them to our password-protected Learning Management System, I'd be introducing a new source of problem, so I wanted to find a nice publicly available URL for them.)

Then the task was to find a Flash-enabled browser that could open Smart Express. I've tried Photon and Skyfire, and while they are great at working with Flash video, they don't handle interactive animations. Smart Express just gives an error. Last week I read about Rover, which turns out to be the perfect solution, at least as far as I've tested.

Here are some Notebook files for testing out. The hundreds chart was something I made just to compare Flash objects and regular Smart objects. The Balanced Forces file is a large interactive lesson developed by Danny Nicholson and Think Bank Ltd. The teacher who is most interested in using Smart files with their students is a middle school physics teacher, so I thought he'd like to see this as an example.

I'm part of the beta test for ShowMe, a whiteboard-sharing type app for the iPad. It's a pretty simple idea, but I kind of like it. It records the screen and your voice as you draw on your iPad. Then you can upload your video to their screensharing community. I could imagine teachers using this for demonstrating math solutions and such.

The part I like best is that after you upload it, you get a slick embed code, so you could put it in your teacher portal or your blog. It would be a really easy way to capture and share student work. Here's an example: a 6-year old who is teaching you how to draw a cat.

For now, at least, there are no ads, no YouTube-ish popup stuff. Just a nice, simple, clean interface. I could see this catching on as a great way to showcase student work and as a very easy way for students to demonstrate their understanding in video form.

Very cool. OK, it's a bit of a dry, boring video. But look past that for a second. If you have ever tried to get students to re-arrange their Excel files so that they can be graphed, you know what a pain that is. I'm going to play with Data Wrangler to see if it might save the day. A bit of up-front work teaching kids to wrangle data, but in the end, much easier data manipulation for all.

Wrangler Demo Video from Stanford Visualization Group on Vimeo.

I'm excited about this!

Jay shared a video with us this morning - an excellent demonstration of how the iPad can be a device for creation of media, and not just for consumption of it.

In a lot of recent discussions about iPads here at ISA, we've brought up Scott McLeod's talks at the ELMLE conference, as well as some of Jeff Utecht's blog posts. It seems that so many people are focused on the use of an iPad as a consumption device that we are overlooking it's power as a creative tool. I love it when I find an example of someone using their iPad creatively.

But what I love more is when they make it look easy. I know people can create music with ProTools and a MIDI keyboard. It just looks so hard when they do it. And I've seen people make amazing animations with Macromedia products. It just looks so hard that teachers aren't going to spend class time in lower school having their students make animations. But wow, the iPad really makes this sort of thing so easy! Makes me happy.

The Humanities department had an excellent day-long in-service this week! Richard Allaway from Geneva came out to spend the day with our Humanities teachers. They did sessions on social bookmarking, Google Docs, blogs and wikis, and digital images and video. By the end of the day, everyone was buzzing with new ideas! I'm excited to see how much progress the teachers have made towards their technology goals for the year.

Our librarians just returned from the ECIS library conference in Istanbul and have been sharing some of the tech resources they learned about there. Donna posted her conference notes on her blog, and Anthony shared a great list in our bi-weekly tech-and-library meeting yesterday. Check out the library's Diigo page for links to tools like Squrl, PhotoPeach, and Twurdy.

So I got an error from Outlook today.

I'm not sure what I was doing when it happened, or what operation Outlook was trying to perform. There wasn't much information provided, and my only option was to Click the OK button.

Was the information helpful? Not really. But I thought it was nice of Outlook to ask for feedback.

Happy Earth Day! The Green Team and the Paperless Committee have been working hard lately at improving our environmental footprint. One of the new things we're implementing is e-voting. By using a web-based online voting system designed especially for schools, we're going to be able to replace all the printed paper ballots for any election we want to greenify. Personally, I am happiest about simplifying and streamlining the process. It just makes me cringe to think of the amount of human time spent on printing, counting, tallying, and sorting all that paper. But the green paperless benefits are good as well.

We already used e-voting for our recent Battle of the Bands. The Middle School student council used Google Docs to allow bands to sign up for a slot at the talent show, then used Ecoballot to create the voting ballot. Each student was able to sign in and vote securely. It was a good test case to make sure that Ecoballot works with our network and email and student usernames and everything. Quite effective, too! Here's a graph from Google Analytics that shows how many people opened the ballot.

You can see a little bump on Monday, when the student council first created the election and tested it, then a big peak right after the Friday performance. A few students waited and voted on Saturday or Sunday. The rest voted on Monday morning at school, then the council met again. Vote counting took literally just a few seconds. Awesome!

Now that it's working out, I hope that we'll use Ecoballot for PTA elections, school board elections, and any other elections we do at ISA.

We had a great presentation this morning for faculty from visiting author Sue Palmer. She only had 40 minutes to work with us, but she did a great job summarizing a lot of her work on raising children in this high-tech always-on world. I like her focus on encouraging children to play outdoors, and on trying to help parents overcome the media-fed fears of letting their kids play while unsupervised.

After my presentation in Frankfurt last month, I got a lot of email from teachers and tech people interested in using iPads in school. I'm replying to each one, but I'm also planning to blog my responses so that everyone else can participate in the discussion. Today I got an email from a Tech Director who asks:

Dr. Greene shared an article with me recently from Education Week. It did a great job of reinforcing what I was thinking a lot about lately: that the streamlined form factor and intuitive interface of the iPad make it the perfect tool for supporting students with special learning needs. Here are some interesting quotes I pulled out of the article:

(snip)

Which makes total sense. Having students with fine motor control issues using a device like a laptop which requires fine motor control - I can see how frustrating that might be. But the iPad is a perfect solution.

Have you found any good apps for use with Student Services? Add your favorite differentiation applications in the comments.

Wouter shared a great article from Gizmodo, about how the iPad is revolutionizing computers by putting them back in the hands of non-technical users. It's worth a read. My favorite part:

We really like the ABC apps from Peapod labs. It's a great early-reading interface. Each app has a theme (animals, transportation, music, etc). It's essentially a curated collection of appropriate YouTube links, with all the ads and related content stripped out. It's a safe way to let a young child view video. Very cool.

We ran into a snag on campus. YouTube isn't blocked, so we didn't think it was the web content filter. But Peapod labs uses an Amazon cloud service called Amazon Cloudfront, which was being blocked by the Barracuda web filter. We weren't getting any errors, but as soon as you start the app, it just crashes. We knew it was something to do with the school network because it worked just fine at home, but crashed consistently at school. Also, sometimes it gave the error "The server is not correctly configured." Anyway, whitelisting cloudfront solved it!

Thank you so much to everyone who attended my session last week on internet safety!

I had promised to follow up on a few items that didn't quite get answered.

First, that 3-dimensional bar code I used is called a QR Code. If you have an iPhone (or another type of smartphone) you can find plenty of free apps that will read them. Just search for "QR Code" and you'll find one. I bet you'll start seeing them more frequently on posters, billboards, and magazine articles. It's pretty cool technology. You can practice with this - it should link to my blog post with the handouts:

On Monday the 21st, I have my next regular meeting with the library and IT staff in lower school, and we already have Poptropica on the agenda. I played it myself for about an hour on Saturday, and found it to be engaging and interesting. I can see why kids would like it. There are some fun sub-games in it, as well as some action and some problem-solving. There's a social aspect in that you can interact with other people who are playing it, but safety features as well - you can only choose from pre-approved phrases, so there's no danger of inappropriate chatter. That said, the frequent advertisements and upsells were bothersome. It does seem to be trying to sell you something at every corner. Personally, I'd rather pay 40 euro up front than have a free game keep pestering me for 50 cents and show me ads for breakfast cereal. I'll make sure that whatever our decision is that you stay informed.

I've already spoken with Monica and Sue about the current and the future internet safety content in the lower school student ICT curriculum. We'll collaborate together on and answer to that - we'll let you know what is currently being taught, and what we plan to teach in the future.

Thanks again for attending the talk, and I hope to have more of them in the future!

By the way, you may have already seen the plug in the newsletter about website redesign testing volunteers. But as long as I'm writing to a group of interested, active, parents who care about technology and already know who I am; I might as well take advantage of that. If you'd like to be part of a focus group to help us determine what information you want to find on our website, or if you'd like to user-test our draft designs as we work on them, or if you just have ideas for improvement, please send me an email! Also, if you have suggestions for parent talks you'd like to see me give, please do let me know. I consider working with parents to be one of the most important and rewarding parts of my job!

Thanks again,

Warren

An interesting article appeared in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune this weekend. It's an issue many of us in Educational Technology have grappled with - the Terms of Service for most web 2.0 apps (including facebook) state that users have to be 13 years old or older. It's due to the US Child Online Privacy Act, but the side effect is that even children outside the US are lying about their age. Essentially, all children using the internet these days are pushed into situations where they have to lie about their age.

How should we, as a culture, respond to this? Deny them access to Facebook? Force a change of the rules? Ignore the fact that they're lying? It's a tough ethical decision.

Waren

Come learn about internet safety for lower school children. Have you wondered:

• What should I be worried about when my kids are online?

• How do I know which video games are OK for kids to play?

• How do I block or stop frightening content on my home computer?

• Should I install a web filter at home?

You'll leave with four easy new tools you can start using right away, as well as links to some of my favorite written resources on the challenge of raising kids in the digital era.

Here are links to some of the tools, handouts, and sites I'll talk about on March 17th with parents. The talk will be at 9:00 AM in the Theater Foyer. If there's demand, I'm happy to give more parents talks in the future, on this or any topic!

This guide comes from insafe, and is a well-written, informative overview of current topics in internet safety.

7 Things You Should Know About Web Filters,

by Caroline Knorr. This is from 2009, so it's a bit dated, but still valuable. A nice one-page summary about the dangers of trying to filter the internet at home.

Developing Ethical Direction

(The new moral compass) by Mike Ribble and Gerald Bailey. This was originally published in Learning and Leading with Technology in 2005. Mike Ribble is also the author of a book called Raising a Digital Child.

Videogame Ratings and Parental Controls.

Published by the ESRB, which is an industry group, and these types of settings change quickly, but it's still a good overview.

10 New Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know

WiredKids has a good overview of CyberBullying - what it is and how to stop it.

Hector's Safety Button - it's a swimming dolphin icon that kids can click on if they need to cover the screen when they find something that makes them uncomfortable.

The PACT is a one-page agreement

that you can complete with your children and sign. It helps you collaboratively set boundaries and agree on what they are allowed to do.

And my favorite tip is Google Chrome. It has a malware filter, an automatic translator, safe-search settings, and an all-purpose address bar.

See you Thursday!

Warren

We're really lucky to have so many technology visionaries as parents at ISA! Recently, Dr. Marc Teerlink, Global Strategist at IBM, came to school to talk about the recent Watson jeopardy challenge. Dr. Teerlink spoke with a class of our ITGS students, who are studying Integrated Technology in a Global Society. He's coming back this afternoon to speak with faculty. He's got a fascinating insight to the challenges of creating "Brainware."