Macinstruct TechEd

Dictionary: The Ultimate Educational Application

mcone — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 23:36:50 -0700

Charles Thacker
Friday, February 8, 2007

As part of Farmington Municipal Schools' Learning Initiative, we are focusing on providing quick and easy ways to take advantage of some great tools built into Apple's operating sytem. One of these tools can help you with language (definitions, pronunciations, synonyms, and antonyms) and is an indispensable tool in any classroom. I'm referring to the built-in Dictionary application, of course. But it's not just the application you launch and use directly that is so powerful in OS X. It's the convenience of this tool that makes it so useful.

A dictionary is a standard resource in almost all classrooms. It is used by teachers and students alike to confirm spelling, pronunciation and proper usage. There are several online dictionary services that are easy to use and quite convenient, but what if you don't want to take the time to access an online dictionary, or you don't have that option due to no network connection while you're working?

The real power of an integrated dictionary is being able to look up a word in almost any Apple application with a quick command or mouse click.

Using the Dictionary Application

Let's look at the Dictionary application first. By default the Dictionary program is installed in the Applications directory of your hard drive.

The Dictionary uses the Oxford American Dictionary by default. It presents you with a simple and efficient interface where you can enter a word in the search box. The Dictionary will start searching as you type. This behavior helps learners discover spelling mistakes as they type. As you enter letters in the search box, the Dictionary finds all matching words dynamically and presents the list as you type. Stop typing before you completely spell the word and you are shown the current list of matching words.

Double clicking on a word in the list will present that word in the window. If you continue to type your word and only one match is found, it is displayed in the window.

The window provides the dictionary and thesaurus entries for your word. Each section can be collapsed using the small grey arrow to the left of that section's title. The entries will look familiar to you if you've used any standard paper dictionary. In this window you are provided with:

The syllable breaks.
The pronunciation key with accent marks.
The part of speech (with available inflected forms).
The definition with short examples of use.
The derivatives.
The usage or phrases of the word if applicable.
The etymology or origin of the word.
The thesaurus entries with synonyms and antonyms.

All of the text can be copied and pasted elsewhere if needed, which is to be expected, but if you double click on any word in the window you are immediately taken to that entry in the Dictionary. This makes the intellectual game of looking up words and looking up associated words or referenced words much faster than leafing through the massive tome your local public library provides.

Were you so inclined, you could spend quite a bit of time just double clicking words as you read each entry and thus increase your vocabulary and impress your friends (or alienate them a bit).

Using Dictionary in other Mac OS X Applications

You'd think that this alone would be enough to satisfy your linguistic curiousity, but wait, there's more!

What if you're browsing the web with Safari or working on a document in Pages (or almost any Apple application) and you'd like to look up a word or find a synonym for that too frequently used word you keep typing? Enter the contextual menu and the inline dictionary.

Fortunately, there are several ways to look up a word you see in an Apple application such as Safari, Pages, Keynote, TextEdit, Mail or many other programs.

One method will open the Dictionary application with the selected word presented. If you right click (or Control-click) on a word, you will get a contextual menu with an option to Look Up in Dictionary. This launches the Dictionary application and locates the word for you. This method does not provide the thesaurus entry, just the dictionary entry (this is based on a preference in the Dictionary application. See below).
Another method will create a small pop-up window directly in your application with the definition of the word currently under your cursor. To open this window, press the Control (ctrl) and Command (historically known as the Apple key), and then press the letter D key. Whatever word is under your cursor will be highlighted and defined in the Dictionary panel. You can let go of the keys at this point and use the scroll bar in the window, change from the dictionary entry to the thesaurus entry with the small menu in the lower left, or open the word in the full Dictionary application by clicking the More... text. Unfortunately, you can't copy any text from the Dictionary panel.

Now you're thinking there can't possibly be more you need or want, but wait, there is more!

If you don't let go of the control and command keys you can move your mouse around on the screen and each word your mouse hovers over will show the same pop-up window with the dictionary entry for that word. You need to try it to see a good example. Put your cursor over this word, hold down the Control, Command and D keys and then move your mouse around. Go ahead, I'll wait...

This works in almost all Apple applications, such as Safari, Keynote, Pages, TextEdit, and Mail. Try it in your favorite Apple programs.

Configuring Dictionary's Preferences

Before we close, let's go back to the Dictionary application and talk about the preferences. The Dictionary program lets you set a few options. From the Dictionary menu, select Preferences.

You can turn specific dictionaries on or off, and you can drag and drop them in the order you'd prefer the Dictionary application present them. This changes which entry you'll see with the contextual or keyboard shortcut steps above. Changes here will also change the Dictionary panel view.

You can also set the pronunciation preference with the radio buttons in that section as well as the default behavior of the Look Up in Dictionary contextual menu option. This can make your right click or Control-click open the small Dictionary panel so you don't have to use the Control, Command, D keyboard shortcut. Finally, you can set the default font size for the Dictionary application.

Conclusion

I hope this gives you some new tools for improving your writing and vocabulary as you use your computer. With Apple's Dictionary tools the correct spelling, pronunciation and definition of almost any word on your screen is literally at your fingertips.

I always welcome your comments, questions and criticisms regarding the articles in TechEd on Macinstruct. Please e-mail me directly at cthacker@macinstruct.com.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Charles Thacker has been working in public education since 1994 as an art
educator, network administrator and most recently as the Chief Technology
Officer for Farmington Municipal Schools. His areas of focus are OS X client and server management in an enterprise environment, automated imaging techniques, unified
communications and VoIP in a cross-platform network, with some digital imaging and desktop publishing work when time allows.

How to Use Comic Life in the Classroom

mcone — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 22:31:04 -0700

Charles Thacker
Thursday, March 8, 2007

There's a long history of comics in the classroom, and the list of references at the end of this article is a great starting point for learning about this concept. While there's still resistance to this medium being used in education - whether by staff or students - there is also a growing movement to use every valuable tool available. Comics have some great uses in the classroom and in a variety of curricula. From pre-readers to high school students, from English to ESL to Science and Math, comics can help students analyze, synthesize and absorb content that may be more difficult when presented in only one way.

Why Comics in the Classroom?

For the pre-reader, a comic can be purely graphical in nature and help provide practice with sequencing as well as concrete to abstract transitions using illustrations instead of written words. The written component of a comic can be introduced when the early readers are ready to connect words with images. Comics can help early readers or readers with language acquisition problems by providing visual clues to the context of the narrative.

For more advanced readers, comics can contain all the complexity of 'normal' written material which the student must decode and comprehend, such as puns, alliteration, metaphors, symbolism, point of view, context, inference, and narrative structures. A comic can also be a stepping-stone to more complex and traditional written work. A single pane in a comic can represent paragraphs worth of written material in a manner that is enjoyable and effective for the early or challenged reader.

Comics also have the ability to meet the needs of students in a variety of learning styles. Tom Hart illustrates how comics address many of Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences in this short article. I strongly recommend that you read through the articles in the reference section below as many others have covered the concept of comics in education in far more detail than I do here.

Using Comic Life to Facilitate Student Participation

With the time educators have for research and professional reading becoming increasingly scarce, I know that a quick 'What can I do with this tomorrow in class?' concept must be presented. For this, I will select an example (the book report) that is simple and quick to implement, although there are far more effective uses of comics in the classroom.

We have staff using Comic Life to facilitate student participation in assignments that traditionally would have been written assignments with little to no imagery included. The book report is a classic example of how Comic Life can breath new life into an old assignment. Often dreaded by students (including myself), the book report is a staple of the classroom for several reasons. First, it provides a way to evaluate whether or not a student has read the assigned material. It also allows a student to show how they synthesize and analyze information contained in written material. Depending on the course requiring the report, this may include character and plot analysis, thematic content, purpose, story development, historical reference, and personal evaluation or judgment.

The book reports we often see in classes are, well, boring. Comic Life can help students create reports that are interesting to themselves and the class - reports that are fun to create and share. The paneled interface of a comic lends itself to breaking larger concepts into smaller, easily digested ideas that can be strung together in a coherent and entertaining way. Creating the imagery used in the comic can draw a student into the story or character in a way that a written report simply can’t.

Use Comic Life to help break down complex ideas and to create entertaining content for material that can sometimes be dull. Here are some assignment ideas that lend themselves to the use of Comic Life:

Timelines (history, events, sequences)
Historical figures (history of, life of)
Instructions (step by step, details, illustrations, easy to follow)
Dialogue punctuation
Character analysis
Plot analysis
Storytelling
Pre-Writing Tool
Post-Reading Tool
Teaching Onomatopoeias
…and on and on

What is Comic Life?

Comic Life is an award winning application for creating not just comics (obviously), but also annotated images, dynamic photo albums, greeting cards, scrap books, story books, and instruction guides and brochures. In the classroom, it is an excellent tool for creating reports of almost any kind. Comic Life allows you to create page layouts with boxes for images and text. Styles can be applied to create just about any type of ‘feel’ for your document. Captions can be created with tails in order to have thought balloons, speech boxes or just additional annotations. Filters are available to turn your digital images into a variety of hand drawn looking graphics to enhance the comic appearance of your work.

With the ability to export your comic into a variety of formats (HTML, images, iPhoto Album, QuickTime or use your .Mac account to create a blog complete with RSS) you can share your work with others no matter where they are. Use Apple’s iPhoto Kodak print services to print out a hardback, linen covered, professionally printed book to really impress visitors with your creativity.

The Comic Life Interface

Comic Life gives you a clean and simple interface to use when creating your comic masterpiece. The main window is divided into four major panes.

The left pane shows your pages and allows you to manage them by adding, removing or re-arranging them. The right side of the window has libraries and settings for page layouts and templates, and also an interface to browse your iPhoto library, albums, and any folder on your hard drive or mounted disks. Use the built-in image capture system in conjunction with a connected/built-in camera.

The bottom section of the window has a collection of text containers to create annotations, speech and thought bubbles in a variety of styles.

The filters you apply to the text elements allow you to create eye-popping effects.

The center pane is where you will complete all of your layout and text entry. It is the pasteboard (or work space) for your pages. With a slick interface, drag and drop convenience, and a huge selection of pre-defined templates and styles, Comic Life allows you to start your comic publishing career in a matter of minutes! More importantly, students will be able to quickly create dynamic content without spending excessive time learning how to use the tool. They will enjoy experimenting with the software and learn how to use it while having fun creating comics.

How to Create a Comic in Comic Life

Creating a comic with Comic Life is a simple 5-step process.

Select a template for your new page. There are over 200 templates in categories such as comics from the 40’s, 60’s and 80’s, manga, graphic novels, and euro comics. Or, you can create your own layout by dragging panels anywhere you want them.
Add digital images from iPhoto, other disks or a connected digital camera. You can drag and drop images from the interface of Comic Life (from your iPhoto library or any connected disk), or you can drag items directly from the Finder into Comic Life. If you’d like to capture images directly from a camcorder or camera, such as an iSight, you can use the capture feature of Comic Life and create your comic with images you grab on the fly.
Dragging an image onto a panel will put the image into the panel and crop it so the shortest dimension of the image matches the shortest dimension of the panel. You can adjust the panel size/shape separately from the image’s size.
Select a style/filter for digital images. You can leave your images in their unfiltered state, but Comic Life's built-in filters and styles give you some very cool control over how 'comicy' your comic looks. If you don’t like the pre-defined styles, you can enter your own filter settings to get that perfect look.
Don’t overlook the fact that you can draw your own images (on the computer, or on paper and scan them in) and then include them in your comic once they are in a digital format.
Add text containers and text. Just like almost everything else in Comic Life, adding text is a simple drag and drop process. The text containers at the bottom of the window provide you with different text presentations.

Drag a container into your page and enter your text. If you have a balloon selected, you can drag the tail to associate the speech or thought with a particular character in an image. Additional tails can be added for more than one speaker at a time. Other text containers have options for styles and effects to enhance the text. The controls allow you to stretch, scale, skew, colorize, outline, shade and too many other options to list. The pre-defined options are numerous and individual controls let you take them further.

Nothing says WOW like...
Save (frequently) and export to your format of choice. Your export decisions will be based on what you intend to do with the comic when you’re done. Comic Life has several export options that allow you to share your work in digital or paper/printed form. The HTML export creates an interface that allows users to ‘flip’ through your comic page-by-page. Exporting to an album in iPhoto lets you build a quality book and then have it printed by Kodak. (If you’re not using iPhoto for that by now, you better look into it!)

Other Uses for Comic Life

Your imagination is the only thing that limits what you can do with Comic Life. As some of you may have discovered by reading this article, you can create graphics for use on web pages (or other publications) that would be time consuming to create with other tools. Want to show off something that is new or improved? No problem!

Spice up your images, documents, brochures and web pages. Just try not to use New and Improved together. If it’s new, there was nothing to improve upon and if it’s improved then it’s not new; it’s something old that was improved!

Tell Your Story with a Comic

When my family was in China to adopt our youngest daughter, we had some problems with the Citizenship and Immigration Services department (which was no surprise to us). To express our frustration and enduring sense of humor, I created a comic to share with family and friends regarding our most recent difficulty. I’ve included it here as an example of a quick and simple comic used to tell a short story.

Click here for a larger version of this strip.

I always welcome your comments, questions and criticisms regarding the TechEd articles on Macinstruct. Please e-mail me directly at cthacker@macinstruct.com

District Spotlight: Jordan School District

mcone — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 21:36:08 -0700

Kelly Dumont
Thursday, February 22, 2007

Jordan School District (JSD) is the largest school district in the state of Utah. JSD currently serves over 80,000 students in 10 cities and other unincorporated areas. If you were to look at a map of the Salt Lake Valley and divide it into thirds going north to south, JSD would cover the southern third of the valley from the Wasatch Mountains on the east to the Oquirrh Mountains on the west. You can find further general information about JSD at our website, http://www.jordandistrict.org/general/aboutjsd.htm

My K-12 education was spent in JSD and, between that and 18 years working for the district, I have spent about two-thirds of my life in JSD. Three generations of my family have attended school in JSD.

JSD currently faces many challenges, the primary one being astounding growth. We are currently growing at the rate of about 1,500 students per year. We have opened, on average, at least one new school every year for the past eight years. This growth is expected to continue at the same or even an increased rate for the next 10-12 years. This puts incredible stress on the resources of the district. Couple this with the fact that Utah spends, on average, less per pupil than nearly every other state and the problem is compounded. That said, JSD and the other districts in the state do a very good job of educating our students.

I am currently working as a Curriculum Technology Specialist for the district. I work with teachers to help them integrate technology into their classroom. I also teach professional development at the school and district level. Currently, I am assigned to work with 20 elementary schools. In previous years I have also worked with secondary schools. I work on a team with four other specialists. Besides our work with teachers at schools, we also advise schools on technology purchases.

We also maintain a website, http://t4.jordandistrict.org, to provide information and tools for teachers to use in their classrooms. Due to the diligent efforts of our newest team member, we have recently migrated the production of our site from Dreamweaver-based HTML to Joomla, a content management system. This provides us with a way to update our site much more quickly and easily.

Our newest endeavor as a team involves the production of a weekly podcast, T4 Tech Tips, found at http://t4.jordan.k12.ut.us/t4/content/category/6/68/58/. The podcast can also be subscribed to via iTunes. We cover topics both Mac and Windows-based, and we also talk about online tools.

JSD officially embraces an attitude of choice when it comes to selecting technology for schools. We feel that teachers should have the tools they feel most comfortable with. Our platform mixture is pretty evenly split between Windows PCs and Macs.

We do strongly recommend Macs for our elementary schools. Our current program for elementary schools includes a replacement of the computer lab every five years. This lab consists of 33 Macs, an Xserve, a projector, a color printer, software, professional development (not enough) and networking infrastructure. In addition, teachers are generally on a rotation cycle to receive new computers every 3-5 years. In the past five years, our elementaries have moved from one hundred percent desktops for teachers and classrooms to a laptop-based program. We are nearing about seventy-five percent penetration of laptops for our elementary teachers.

One area that I feel is lacking at our elementary schools is computers in the classrooms for students. We piloted a mobile lab program seven years ago. As a result of that program, many - but not all of our elementary schools - now have at least one mobile lab to supplement the central desktop lab. The idea continues to spread, but we are still far away from where we need to be.

Our secondary schools lean more towards the Windows operating system. In our middle schools, the split may be close to 50-50, but in our high schools it is probably closer to seventy percent Windows. Most of our middle schools have at least two labs and our high schools have a multitude of labs. These labs are used for a variety of purposes.

Mobile labs are beginning to take hold in our secondary schools as well, though the deployment has not been as rapid as we have seen in our elementary schools. We have also not seen the adoption of laptops for teachers in the secondary schools as we have in the elementary schools. There seems to be a lot of resistance at the secondary level.

I am by no means a networking expert, but I believe our networking infrastructure is pretty sound. In Utah, an organization called the Utah Education Network (UEN) was formed about 15 years ago. One of the first and still primary charges of UEN was to provide high speed access to the schools of the state. This has provided our schools with tremendous network access. Each of our schools has at least a dedicated T1 line. The secondary schools now have GeoMax (fiber optic transport). I will share more about UEN in a future article.

Using this infrastructure, our high schools all participate in district and statewide distance learning courses. This helps save on personnel costs as schools can now offer courses of interest to students without having to hire a teacher for each individual school. This system is used heavily throughout the day in all of our high schools. We also have a strong concurrent enrollment program in the district. The district actually has two buildings on a new satellite campus for Salt Lake Community College. Here, students are taking part in programs such as Biotechnology, Engineering Technology, Veterinary/Medical/Dental assistant and several other programs.

Being a part of a large district is a challenge. I sometimes feel like a minnow in a large lake. We work hard as a team to help teachers learn to use technology in a way that will be beneficial to the students and themselves. It does feel like we are swimming upstream at times. Still, I enjoy the job and hope to continue in it for many years. The challenges faced are exciting, especially as new tools become available for students and teachers to become creative individuals. I am also grateful that I have the opportunity to use Apple computers and the tools they provide. Apple sparked a revolution in my teaching several years ago, and I enjoy sharing that. There's nothing like igniting that spark in other teachers.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Kelly Dumont is a Curriculum Technology Specialist for Jordan School District, based in Sandy, Utah. Kelly is an 18-year veteran of the district. He is also an Apple enthusiast who for the past two years has produced The Educational Mac podcast. (http://theeducationalmac.com) He is also the Past-President of the Utah Coalition for Educational Technology (UCET) an ISTE affiliate. He has served on the board of directors and executive committee of UCET for 7 years.

Unified Communications in Education

mcone — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 23:59:33 -0700

Charles Thacker
Thursday, February 15, 2007

One Box to rule them all,
One Box to find them,
One Box to bring them all
and in the network bind them.

Unified Communications (UC) is most definitely becoming, if it hasn’t already become, the buzzword of networking companies talking about an organization’s next step in communication systems. There are few, if any, major networking companies—or even small and medium ones—that are not creating, marketing, selling, re-selling, or implementing unified communications systems. The differences between all of them are in the details, but the overall concept is the same across all vendors and technologies: Combining your multiple communication systems into a single, cohesive and interoperable communications system.

Another term for this is Unified Messaging, which implies the unification of messaging systems specifically. I think Unified Communications is a little broader and prefer it for this discussion, although they can generally be used interchangeably.

What is Unified Communications?

The concept seems simple—all your tools for communicating brought together into a single system. This may be a simple unification of your voice and data systems, often done through an implementation of Voice over IP (VoIP) or IP Telephony—where your data network carries your voice traffic (VoIP has been happening in the big telephone companies for years to reduce operating costs, improve quality of service and increase capacity)—or as complex as combining voice, video and data over your single network with a single ‘box’ for all your voice, video and data communications (voicemail, faxes, e-mail, calendar, contacts, etc…) providing you with access to all of your communications from any other communicating device (computer, phone, PDA, smart phone, etc…).

Adding voice, or video, to your data network creates what is referred to as a converged network. This is often the introductory tool that gets the UC ball rolling. There are several vendors and technologies that provide this solution with Cisco Systems, 3COM and Avaya among the popular proprietary implementations of IP Telephony.

Baby Steps

Let’s talk about a simple unification as a starting point, specifically the use of your data network for voice traffic. Here I’m talking about an end-to-end solution called IP Telephony, which is an end goal of VoIP. The difference between VoIP and IP Telephony is best illustrated by viewing VoIP as the underlying technology of IP Telephony. VoIP allows voice traffic to traverse data networks but generally does not change the end systems. A traditional phone and PBX or key system is still on each end of the phone call. IP Telephony aims to replace existing analog systems with a fully digital, computer based phone/voice implementation.

The basic concept behind this technology is the transformation of analog voice signals, what humans can understand with our ears and brain, into digital signals of ones and zeroes. These packets of data, which now represent your voice, are sent over your data network just like any other data packet. The receiving side takes the digital packets and turns them back into an analog sound signal that a human on the other side of your phone call can understand. An important piece of IP Telephony is the use of Quality of Service (QoS) controls so that the voice packets have priority when traveling along your network where they are sharing bandwidth with your regular data. If the packets representing voice are delayed, so that there is too much time between packet A and packet B being received, or if they arrive at the other end out of order, so that packet B arrives before packet A, then the voice call will be very poor with stuttering, gaps and skipping. It will sound like a very bad cell phone call. To combat this, a network must have some mechanisms in place to make sure that all voice traffic has priority and does not arrive late or out of order.

This packetization of voice has been going on for years for phone calls that were traveling long distances and is now done for calls just across your home town. Now you can get this same technology on your own private network. There are some direct cost benefits to converging your network. If you have a voice network, perhaps represented by a PBX system with dedicated phone lines running to phone handsets, and you have a data network for your computers to communicate, then you must maintain both independently. To improve your data network, you might spend a dollar on it. To improve your phone network you must spend a different dollar on it. With a converged network, every dollar you invest in ‘the network’ benefits both the data and the voice network simultaneously.

You may also, with some solutions, be able to use the same network cable for both your phone and your computer. In our district we use Cisco’s IP Telephony solution and this means that every phone on our network is actually a small switch that allows a computer to be connected to the phone while the phone is connected to the network. The phone helps provide some QoS immediately, and our network switches and routers provide additional QoS. We can now have a single network drop in a room provide both phone and data access simultaneously. No additional cables need to be run for the phone. When a user needs to relocate, the phone and the computer both move to a new room, connect to the network, and they are both ready to be used with no reconfiguration necessary. When a new phone is purchased for a user, they don’t need to have an additional telephone cable run to their room, they can use the existing network connection for their computer.

Management is also easier with this solution. All adds, moves and changes are handled through a web interface. The processing center for all phone calls is a server based software installation. Gone are the days of paying $100/hour for an outside phone vendor to come in and reprogram a PBX or re-punch on a 110 block to move phones or extensions. A few minutes in a web browser and I can completely change any setting on any phone on our network. Changes that used to require a phone call to the vendor, a delay of days (sometimes a week), and a nice little bill to the school district now take minutes for me to complete from my desk, or wherever I happen to be as long as I have network connectivity. I’ve made changes to the system from my home 20 miles away and from the People’s Republic of China 7,500 miles away.

Cisco’s IP Telephony introduces applications at the handset as well, so you can use the phone to perform computer-like tasks. The phone becomes less a phone and more a computing device. The network simply sees the phone as another IP enabled piece of equipment, not specifically a phone. Cisco has also introduced wireless phone handsets that can be used on regular 802.11 wireless networks. Again, the phone is just an IP enabled device on an IP network. With applications built for an IP Telephony solution, you can use the phone, with its built-in screen, to look up phone numbers, news headlines, take attendance from the classroom, and access other outside systems. You are limited only by the creativeness of the software creator, and you might be that software creator!

The Grand Unification Fact

Now let’s introduce some other communications systems and integrate them. The obvious system to discuss next is voicemail. The problems I’ve always had with voicemail are the linear nature of most systems that store it, the difficulty of saving and reviewing messages, and the necessity of using a different interface to access voicemail than what I’m almost always using—my computer. By implementing a fully unified communications system called FirstClass Unified Communications our district has brought all of our communications into one location. Voicemail is now recorded by a server and immediately placed into the same mailbox as a user’s e-mail. Faxes can also be digitized and placed in that same mailbox, or a shared location for multiple users to access and manage. We now have one single location where we can access all of our communications. Additionally, we don’t need to use a computer to access this mailbox. Users can use a phone to have their voicemail played for them, their e-mail read to them and to reply to both.

Managing the historically linear voicemail is now the same as managing e-mail. Each voicemail message is an e-mail with a sound file attached. Anything a user can do with an e-mail, they can do with a voicemail message; forward to another user, file into a folder, or save outside of the system. It may seem like a small thing to be able to play the voicemail in a graphical interface, similar to any other audio file where you have a play-head and start/stop buttons, but it truly changes the entire experience when you can replay a specific part of a message as many times as you wish without listening to the entire message. Missed the phone number at the end of the message? No problem, start playing the message again right at that point.

Example of a voicemail envelope and attached voice message file.

There are several solutions that offer to put your voicemail into your electronic mailbox, but FirstClass offers a distinct advantage with single mailbox management. When I get a new message in my mailbox there is a sound alert on my computer, a red flag on my mailbox, and a light on my phone. More importantly when I read my messages the flag on my mailbox goes away and the light on my phone goes out, nearly instantaneously. It is not necessary to manage a voicemail and an e-mail inbox, because there is only one box to manage for all communications.

One mailbox to store all my electronic communications, one mailbox to find them, one mailbox to manage and manipulate them—that’s Unified Communications.

The Big Picture

What Unified Communications can do for you is dependant upon your willingness to look around your organization and see the areas where seemingly disparate tasks and data could possibly be integrated into existing or new processes. Unified Communications can improve your workflow if you think outside of your current limitations.

One example that we are investigating is the integration of our SchoolMessenger automated dialer system that calls home to report student absences with our Cisco IP Telephony system. Initially the benefits of this integration appear to be the leveraging of our high capacity PRI lines for outgoing calls. This is helpful, but not as much as giving end users, not just system administrators, the ability to create call lists of their own based on their class rosters and recording their own outgoing messages for parents to receive. Why stop with outgoing voice messages? How about outgoing e-mail as well? What about connecting a student management system with the messaging system to create a dynamic phone and mail list for notifications?

We want to provide a way for our staff to communicate out to the community, but we also want to make sure that the community can communicate with our staff. Our district does not provide a phone in every classroom, but we do provide a computer and a Unified Communications account for all staff. Although not every teacher has a phone on their desk, they all have an extension and any parent can call any teacher and leave a message that they can retrieve from their classroom computer, any school phone, their home computer, any phone in the world, or any Internet connected device.

We have only begun to scratch the surface of what we can do with our Unified Communications, and I personally look forward to pushing the envelope and getting everything out of these tools that we can.

Advantages of Unified Communications in Education

A Unified Communications system can provide many advantages to a school district, and financial savings across several departments can be realized when properly implemented. School districts are constantly walking a fine line between providing the services necessary to educate students and doing so on a limited and often shrinking budget. Opportunities to reduce operating costs should not be overlooked or dismissed lightly.

Reduction in total cost of ownership for communications systems (phone, e-mail, video, etc...)
Centralized management of core systems
Increased responsiveness to user needs (adds, moves, changes)
More dynamic access to vital information in multiple formats
Leverage existing infrastructure for new implementations
Anytime, anywhere access to all your communications

You may not be ready for a full-blown unification of your systems now, but you are almost assuredly using such systems in your personal or professional life, even if you aren’t aware of it as an end user. This technology will be growing in the workplace and the household in coming years. Be prepared for unlimited access.

I always welcome your comments, questions and criticisms regarding the articles in TechEd on Macinstruct. Please e-mail me directly at cthacker@macinstruct.com

Related Links:

OpenText, FirstClass Division
http://www.firstclass.com

Cisco Systems, Inc.
http://www.cisco.com

Meet Your Macinstructor

Podcasts In Education

mcone — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:26:01 -0700

Charles Thacker
Thursday, February 8, 2007

Although the concept of streaming media has been around almost as long as the Internet itself, and Podcasts specifically since 2000, the use of Podcasts in education has recently experienced a growth spurt around the world. Education is not generally known for its quick adoption of new technologies. There are still districts that don’t have a presence on the Internet, although I would be surprised to find some that don’t communicate electronically. However, Podcasts are quickly gaining popularity in the educational environment. This article will discuss what Podcasts are, why and how they are used in education, and the basics of creating Podcasts.

What is a Podcast?

I won’t take much space here to try and give a full history and description of a Podcast. You would be better served by reading the Wikipedia entry for Podcasts.

A Podcast can be defined as a media file that is freely available for download from the Internet automatically with software that can handle RSS feeds. This file is then played on a personal computer or mobile device at the listener’s convenience.

This media file may be just audio, audio enhanced with graphics (quite often slides from a presentation), or full video. In fact, a Podcast can be any type of file, but the most common are audio and video files. Podcast files are created by individuals and companies on computer systems with the appropriate hardware and software—which can be as minimal as a way to record sound—and then uploaded to a server that allows visitors to download the file. These servers often provide a list of available Podcasts, called episodes, to special software that can read the server’s feed. A very popular reader of these feeds is iTunes, which can automate the download of Podcasts and help to synchronize the downloaded files between a computer and a removable device, such as an iPod.

Owning a mobile audio player, or MP3 player like an iPod, is not necessary to download and listen to Podcasts. Some statistics show that nearly 80% of downloaded Podcasts are viewed on a personal computer.

In the classroom, a Podcast can be a lecture, presentation, announcement, audio book, or any kind of supplemental material facilitating the educational goals of the teacher and students. It can be created by an outside entity, the teacher, the students or any combination thereof.

Education as a Consumer

Any educator interested in using Podcasts in the classroom should begin by watching a few of them. There are Podcasts for every subject area and for a variety of grade levels. At the post-secondary level it is not uncommon to find entire lectures available for download. A quick search through the iTunes Music Store will return results on almost any topic you are interested in. If you are new to Podcasts, you can familiarize yourself with the general concept by subscribing to a few that are of interest to you, regardless of their applicability in the classroom. This allows you to experience the asynchronous nature of the medium.

Podcasts are similar to e-mail messages in regards to their creation and consumption. They are built around the idea of ‘convenient for me, convenient for you’. This means that I can create a Podcast when I want and on a topic I want. You can then listen to that Podcast if you wish, and you can choose the time to do so. You are not required to be online at a given time. You can choose to listen a week, month, or even year after I’ve created the Podcast. In the classroom this is valuable for repeated use of material, from day to day or semester to semester, and it allows you to match the timing of the presentation to the content of your curriculum. You are also not forced to listen to the entire episode. You may want to be selective regarding what you present to your classes. Once downloaded to your computer or MP3 player, the Podcast can be started anywhere, as well as paused, restarted and stopped at your discretion. The Podcast can also be made available to each student individually if they have Internet access, either from school or from home.

Consider how you can use some of the material being published to supplement your lessons or your child’s schoolwork. Two advantages of Podcasts as supplemental material in schools are the opportunity to provide information in a variety of ways to better meet the diverse learning styles of your students and the inclusion of current technology that is already being used by your students personally for educational purposes. Many educators have found that the use of technology in the classroom has changed the interest level of many students simply due to the fact that they are using technology themselves for personal reasons and are more interested in material presented through this familiar medium.

Podcasts should have a planned presence in your classroom. They should not be included with little or no planning. Consider the pedagogical approach you’ll be taking and match the use of Podcasts to that approach, not the other way around. Careful preparation and planning are necessary to succeed with new tools, and Podcasts are no exception. If you’re expecting to download and play some Podcasts and gain student interest and increase performance, you’ll be disappointed. Planning a Podcast as a resource to enhance your classroom is a better, and more professional, approach. For example, it’s very likely that you’ll want to use just snippets of some Podcasts to highlight concepts and support the curriculum, so you won’t be playing the entire file. You can skip ahead to specific parts and play only those pieces that are pertinent to your class objectives. Compared to the Fast Forward and Rewind of the filmstrip, film projector and VHS days, Podcasts make selective presentation of material exceedingly simple and powerful. However, this requires that you listen to the entire Podcast and select those portions you wish to use. The time invested in this process now will pay off when your lessons are focused and appropriate.

I’ll close this section with a few examples. These aren't fantasies, but potential realities in your own classrooms.

In a classroom where students have access to computers (a computer lab or in a 1-1 environment), students complete work in class and participate in instructor lead activities followed by independent work with a Podcast as resource material. Students can go through the Podcast at their own pace -working through the assignment at their own pace, backing up and reviewing material from the Podcast as needed without slowing down the class as a whole.
Podcasts that support the curriculum are identified and linked to by the instructor. As students require extra assistance on specific topics or concepts, they are directed to the Podcast resources by the instructor for additional help outside of class or during independent work in class. This is in conjunction with one-on-one assistance by the instructor with the student, but also allows the student to work on difficult concepts with extra help from other resources when the instructor is unavailable.
Students participating in English as a Second Language courses are provided with iPods containing spoken material of existing written content to allow them to listen to the material while reading. This can be done in the classroom, on the way to and from school, and at home. Improvements in reading, comprehension and verbal skills are gained through a tool that is cool to have. It’s not a dream, it’s a reality.
Students in one school create content for their own class, but also provide that content to the world so that any other school can participate in their learning process, as an observer or a learner. Comprehension of a topic grows exponentially when you are required to teach it to others. The process of creating a lesson becomes the lesson. The learners are the educators, and the educators learn from their students. This is why TIME Magazine made YOU the person of the year. You are the creator, the publisher, the subscriber, and the consumer. You control the demand and the supply. This is also a reality at Radio Willow Web, one of the leaders in educational Podcasting by students.

Education as a Creator

The next step in the use of Podcasts in the classroom is to start creating your own. Teachers may want to start by creating a few episodes of their own, on their own (with technical help where needed), and then move on to having students create their own Podcasts.

A paradigm shift is happening in education, one that is flattening the pedagogical approach in classrooms. What this means is that the traditional top-down approach - teachers lecturing and students taking notes - is being replaced with a collaborative approach where students are creating their own content and learning in the process. Technology has been accelerating this shift by equalizing access to information. Students now have quick and simple access to the same information that any educator or parent has. Since they’ve grown up with these tools, they may have more access due to their familiarity with the Internet and technology in general. In many ways, adults are playing catch up with the kids around them when it comes to technology. Instead of educators being afraid of their students’ access to all this information, they should be encouraging further exploration and helping to guide the process of analysis and synthesis in the classroom. Ignoring or denying the benefits, power and advantages of the ubiquitous access to information their students have will only decrease the effectiveness of their classroom. This is not to say that every class needs to use technology on a daily basis, or that technology should replace all educational resources currently in place, but it should be included where appropriate and effective.

Creating a Podcast requires hardware and software for recording sound—and saving it in the appropriate format—as well as a server to host the Podcast file. The server does not have to be accessible to the public as long as your intended audience can access it. In our district, we have a few options for staff depending on their system and level of comfort with technology. Our FirstClass Unified Communications system provides a very simple way to both create audio Podcasts and publish any type of Podcast. A built-in microphone is available on all of our staff computers, or a variety of external microphones can be used. Staff with more powerful machines, such as those participating in our Technology Leadership Program, can take advantage of what may be the perfect Podcast-creation suite for educators—iLife. GarageBand has all the tools you need to create professional Podcasts in an extremely simple interface. Combine GarageBand with iTunes, iMovie, and (if you want to move into presentations) iWork’s Keynote and you have an unbeatable combination of tools for Podcasting.

Students can participate in this creative process as well. After the instructor is comfortable with creating and using Podcasts, it is a natural evolution to allow students to be involved in the instructional environment using available technology, in this case Podcasts. This gives the students ownership of their education, which can happen with or without technology and should be occurring in the classroom anyway. This flattening of the instructional environment is paramount to the success of students in an ever-changing world where higher level thinking and creative problem solving skills will be the differentiating factor in whether you have an enjoyable and productive career or become the disgruntled worker watching their job get outsourced to a competitive market. This flattening will be the topic of a future TechEd article as we take a look at how education has been, and is being, impacted by the world Thomas L. Friedman describes in his book The World Is Flat. (Recommended reading for everyone, everywhere.)

There are numerous resources on the Internet addressing the how-tos of Podcasting, and you need to find those resources that match your skill level, interest and computing system. The links at the end of this article are just a starting point, and I had to trim the list quite a bit so that it was not overwhelming. Whether you introduce Podcasting to your students or children will most likely be irrelevant as to whether they use and create Podcasts. Take advantage of their curiosity, ingenuity and creativity. Include them in the process of educating themselves. You’ll be encouraging the creation of lifelong learners.

Advantages of Podcasting in Education

Podcasts provide several advantages to teachers, students and parents. The points made above all support the list of advantages below, which is certainly not all inclusive and is growing as Podcasts become more prevalent in our educational systems.

Meet the needs of more students with varying learning styles and aptitudes.
Provide ‘make up lectures’ to students who were absent.
Supplement existing material and resources with a portable and remotely accessible source of information.
Audio benefits vision impaired students and non-native speakers.
Ability to replay and review information helps to embed lessons in memory.
Asynchronous consumption allows for convenient access and multi-tasking (riding the bus, walking, working out, etc…).
Flexible curriculum pathways to encourage student participation and facilitate success.
Most appropriate presentation of spoken/audio material—e.g. native language, foreign language, speech therapy, music, reading assistance.

Future articles in TechEd will discuss some specific Podcasting in Education tips and tricks, but this introduction should give you a sense of how Podcasts are making the classroom a truly collaborative and dynamic learning environment.

I always welcome your comments, questions and criticisms regarding the articles in TechEd on Macinstruct. Please e-mail me directly at cthacker@macinstruct.com

Related Links:

You will be surprised by the number of educational Podcasts available on the Internet, created by educators and students, through the links below. Please visit these sites and navigate a few pages on each to see what is happening with Podcasts in education.

Wikipedia: Podcasts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast

Apple, Inc: Podcasts in Education
http://www.apple.com/education/products/ipod/podcasting.html
http://www.apple.com/education/resources/podcastingvideos/

Education Podcast Network
http://www.epnweb.org/index.php

Podcast Directory for Educators, Schools and Colleges
http://recap.ltd.uk/podcasting/index.php

Berwick Secondary College
http://www.bsclotecoe.vic.edu.au/ICTPodcasts.htm

Podcasts for Teachers
http://www.podcastforteachers.com/

My personal favorite Podcast list (for now)

These are not all intended for use in a classroom, but they are in my subscriptions and I’m a regular listener to them all.

The Naked Scientists (it’s better than it sounds, and definitely good for the science classroom)
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/

Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing (I need this one for more gooder English)
http://www.qdnow.com/ (more than one Quick and Dirty here, and all are worth a listen)

Point of Inquiry
http://www.pointofinquiry.org/

PopSci Podcasts from Popular Science
http://popsci.typepad.com/popsci/popsci_podcast/index.html

Science Friday from NPR
http://www.sciencefriday.com/

Skepticality
http://www.skepticality.com/index.php

Spitzer Space Telescope Podcast
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/features/podcasts/index.shtml

The RedShift Report
http://www.redshiftnow.ca/report/default.aspx

Universe Today
http://www.universetoday.com/

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Internet Safety for Families

mcone — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 20:46:01 -0700

Charles Thacker
Thursday, February 1, 2007

School districts across the United States provide Internet access for students and staff through their district networks. The purpose of this access is to provide an additional resource for the educational environment and meet the needs of an increasingly dynamic instructional model.

Technology in general, and the Internet specifically, is just a tool. It is inherently neither good nor bad - it just is, until it’s used. Like many new advances in our society, the Internet has brought out the best and the worst in humanity. While the Internet provides students excellent learning opportunities and encourages personal growth, many of us are concerned about the risks our kids are exposed to online. The challenge we face is to educate - not isolate - ourselves and our families about safe Internet use.

The Bad News

According to recent surveys, and bearing in mind that each report is created using different research, somewhere between 1 in 5 and 1 in 7 school aged children received an unwanted online sexual solicitation in 2006. In this regard, equality between the sexes exists online. Taking all exploitation and victimization - not just online activity - girls are twice as likely to experience exploitation.

The Internet is one avenue of contact that predators can use to approach people. Due to the anonymous nature of communication that the Internet provides, a predator can hide behind a well-designed persona that can be anything they wish to the outside world. A 40 year-old man can become a 15 year-old girl, and as long as he maintains the right ‘appearance’ online, it is nearly impossible to break through the façade.

It is an odd behavior, but even adults show a prevalence to trust communications from unknown sources when in an electronic format. As an example, imagine you were to receive a letter in the mail indicating that the National Lock and Bolt Company was concerned about the security of your house and if you would just make a copy of your house key and send it back to them in the self-addressed, stamped envelope provided they would confirm that your house is secure and you are safe. Would you do this? It’s unlikely that any of you would. Now let’s replace the letter with an e-mail message from Bank of America, with whom you may or may not have an account. They say they are concerned about your account password and PIN information. Many more Internet users will respond to such an e-mail, which is called phishing, and they put their personal information at risk by doing so. Children are even more susceptible to this and parents must be vigilant of, and involved in, their children’s Internet activity.

The Good News

While we are all targets when we use the Internet, we do not have to be victims. The difference between a target and a victim may seem subtle, but it is important in establishing your own Internet behavior. In this sense, a target is someone who is the object of an attack, but a victim is someone harmed by another’s actions. We are all possible targets when we use the Internet but we have tools at our disposal to avoid becoming victims.

There is hope. You and your family can take a proactive stance to insure your children’s safety online, and there are things your schools are doing to help keep your students safe as they use the Internet in the classroom.

At Home

Education is the key to safe Internet use and as a parent you should begin by educating yourself and your family. Learn about the Internet, the good and the bad, as well as ways to safeguard your family. There are several tools available for educating yourself.

The Internet: This is one of my favorite tools. There are few tools in the world that will help you learn how to use them. Show me a hammer that teaches you how to use a hammer. Searching for the words ‘internet’, ‘safety’, ‘kids’, and ‘children’ will result in some excellent sites at the top of the list. There is a short list of excellent resources at the end of this article.
Parents and Kids Magazines: Nearly every periodical intended for parents, kids or educators has an article or entry related to technology and children in each issue. Pick up a few magazines from your local library and see what they have to offer in the way of safe Internet use.
Experienced Friends, Relatives and Colleagues: None of us are experts in everything. (Most of the time I feel as though I’m not an expert in anything.) When you are unsure of how to proceed, talk to someone who does know. Find those people who can help you learn how to keep your family safe while using the Internet. Your local library and school are great starting places.

Guidelines for using technology need to be established and followed by your entire family. This can be done with the creation of an Internet Safety Contract that is signed by all family members. There are several examples of contracts like this on the Internet, and you can download and modify an existing one for use in your own family. Everyone must sign it and abide by it. These rules that you establish should not be negotiable. Some rules in the family are pushed and tested by your kids as they learn to find their place in the family and as they try to establish themselves and individuals. Many families understand and support this, allowing the children to learn to guide their own actions. My own upbringing was done through what my mother liked to call ‘judicious neglect’. If our safety was not at risk, then very few doors were closed to us. However, the rules you create for Internet use in your family will often fall into the category of safety and are thus non-negotiable. As an example, the rule for your young kids to stop and look both directions prior to crossing the street is one that you will not back down from. It is for their physical safety and you won’t discuss relaxing it. The same applies to the majority of your Internet contract rules.

There are some general tips and guidelines you can use as a starting point for your family’s Internet use.

Be involved in your child’s Internet use. You should know who they interact with online, just as you know who they play with in the neighborhood and at school. The recent public service ads concerning drug and alcohol use are right on target with their message. Be involved in your kids’ lives. Know where they are going, whom they are with and when they’ll be back. The same applies to online use: Be aware of their activities and be involved. They should be communicating with people you know and approve of. Hopefully you’re creating an open dialogue with your children at a young age, and you’re working to keep that dialogue active as they grow up. It’s much easier to start that way than to try and make up for years of isolating when you finally decide to be involved in what they are doing.
Get the computer into a public area of the house. Just moving the computer into an area where those who pass through the room can see the monitor will make a huge difference in your family’s Internet use. It may seem as though you are helping your child with their homework requirements by providing computer access in their bedroom, but in addition to the risk of dangerous Internet behavior, recent research has shown that the sleep habits of kids are greatly improved when electronic devices (phone, TV, computer, video games, etc…) are removed from the bedroom. Sleep cycles of teenage kids are already in a state of disarray and when you encourage behavior other than sleeping in the bedroom this deteriorates more. Getting enough sleep and being well rested are key factors in student success. You get two benefits by removing computers from bedrooms. Take advantage of this opportunity.
Do not ever give out personal information about your child or allow them to do so. Personal information includes their name, address, phone number, and photograph. Information given out on the Internet, via web pages, chats or e-mail, is like a bullet from a gun. Once you’ve pulled that trigger, there is no way to get the bullet back. After you’ve given information to someone online you have no control over where that information ends up. You don’t own it anymore - it’s free for the giving by whomever you’ve provided it to.
Help create your children’s screen names and avoid anything that will reveal their age, gender, location, etc. Avoid all suggestive terms or sexual connotations; they are magnets for online predators. You want your child to ‘own’ their screen name or login ID, so let them be creative with it, but be involved to make sure it does not draw the wrong kind of attention.
Create separate accounts for each family member. This provides you with several useful outcomes. One is that your user accounts won’t be administrative accounts and thus cannot inadvertently, or maliciously, damage the operating system or important files. Apple’s OS X encourages this very setup by providing a multi-user environment where there is an administrator account and the remaining accounts are ‘regular’ user accounts. You also have the ability to control computer use by your family. I’ll take a small tangent here and relate a story about a staff member who had some concerns about her daughter’s computer use.
I was asked about what filtering software to use for a family and when I went through the basic introductory queries to establish their needs it was quickly apparent that the real problem was one of general access and use. They were concerned because their daughter was using the computer so much and was not completing other duties, such as her chores and homework. They can control her access while they are home, but when gone their teenage daughter would have access for as long as they were not around. I recommended that filtering wasn’t really the answer since it wasn’t the content they were most concerned with. My recommendation was to create individual accounts for all family members. They would then have the ability to control the password for their daughter’s account. If they had to enter the password, or could change it as needed, then their daughter could not log in without their permission. It does require some extra oversight in a situation such as this, but even when not used in such an extreme case, individual accounts allow for more accountability and security.
Take advantage of technological tools to safeguard your family. There are three main types of tools you should investigate. Monitoring and filtering software, both readily available for all modern operating systems, and child safe search engines. Monitoring tools allow you to view and review all activity on your computer, from screen shots taken at regular intervals to transcripts of all chat and e-mail messages. Filtering software prevents access to content, applications and material that you wish to block for individual users of the computer. If you are using OS X at home, you have an immediate advantage, especially for your younger users, with the Parental Controls that OS X offers. I’ve put monitoring and filtering software as the last tip because the first four are more important and more effective. You have the chance to educate your family with the first four steps, but the use of technology to monitor and filter is a way to isolate your family. There are times when this is useful, but being involved is the more important approach. Encouraging the use of child safe search engines, those that are already filtering their results for family oriented content, is more beneficial to the younger users of your family, but should not be overlooked as a way to provide a safe searching environment.

OS X Parental Controls

There are two security methodologies you can use with access control or content filtering. You can deny access to everything except what you explicitly allow, or you can allow access to everything except what you explicitly deny. At first glance these sound like the same thing with reverse wording, but they are in fact two different ways of dealing with security. For younger users I recommend the first approach (deny all, allow specific) but for older users you will find that approach to be too time-consuming and restrictive. Having a young user in the family now, I can say with confidence that the OS X Parental Controls are a perfect choice for filtering young children’s access.

After creating your child’s account in OS X, you can turn on Parental Controls to customize their computing experience. You can restrict access to specific applications, allow e-mail and chat with only authorized users, and set up approved bookmarks on the fly for approved web sites. This gives you the perfect Internet workstation for young children without having to worry about sitting in the chair with them. As you have read, I encourage you to be involved in your children’s Internet use but you should be able to have a presence in the room and still feel confident that they will not stumble into trouble with a few misplaced clicks. Visit Apple’s web site to learn more. This is just one more reason to switch.

At School

Your schools are also working to provide safe computing environments for your students. I can only speak for our own district regarding what is being done, but there are many common tools and policies in place among school districts in the United States. Content filtering is very common in school districts and is required if the district wishes to take advantage of certain e-rate funding.

The first step we take is much the same as I recommend for your own family. We are involved. We encourage and emphasize the use of technology in structured environments with educational goals and tasks. Computer time is not free time.

We do have content filtering in place for all users, staff and students, as required by CIPA for our e-rate funding of certain services and equipment. This is a subscription service that we can modify as needed for granular control over what is available and what is not. Our goal is to restrict access to adult content and to provide a positive and safe educational environment.

While our sixth through twelfth grade students have e-mail accounts on our internal FirstClass system, they do not have external Internet e-mail access without parental and staff consent. This keeps junk and obnoxious mail from getting into the vast majority of student e-mail accounts. Similarly, the chat environment that is available internally for students does not extend to the Internet.

Every student has an individual login and password that allows them to store their own material in a secure location for their access and helps to keep their activity isolated from other users. This login information also provides the district with a tracking mechanism if necessary for reviewing activity on the network.

Watching for Signs

There are many signs you should be watching for in your children, but you cannot take most of them as a direct indicator of a problem individually. You need to consider several factors and be aware of other issues that may be impacting your children’s behavior.

Some low risk signs to keep an eye on include:

Spending large amounts of time on-line, especially at night.
Becoming withdrawn from the family. This sounds like just about every teenager I’ve ever met, including myself. Look at many behaviors taken together, not just a single one like this.
Turning the computer monitor off or quickly changing the screen on the monitor when you come into the room. Once or twice this might be innocent, but if it’s frequent then something is going on. Start a discussion and let them know that when you see this, you get concerned and wonder about what is being hidden.
Using an on-line account belonging to someone else.

Higher risk signs, some of which are dangerous all by themselves, include:

Finding pornography on your child's computer. Unfortunately you can’t always consider this something your child has done. I know that the first claim when confronted with this information is generally “It’s not mine.” and if you have other users of the computer you must consider that this might be true. Don’t be accusative. Start a conversation instead.
Receiving phone calls from men (unfortunately it’s not always men, but it’s such a high percentage as to almost count as always) you don't know, or making calls, sometimes long distance, to numbers you don't recognize. Don’t hesitate on this one. Get involved. If this is happening, someone has gained enough of your child’s trust to get their hooks into their life and they are at serious risk. You need to contact the authorities.
Receiving mail, gifts, or packages from someone you don't know. The same goes for this as for the item above. You need to contact the authorities to avoid any possible physical risk to your family.

If you are concerned about your child’s behavior or actions, you should take the appropriate steps depending on what you are seeing and what you’re concerned about. If they come to you, do not overreact. It takes quite a bit of courage to come forward and let your parents know that something has happened that you don’t feel comfortable with. Be supportive and encouraging in their decision to tell you. Start a dialogue and keep it open. Educate your family - don’t isolate them. When educated, your children will be prepared to use the new technological tools that will become available to them on a regular basis. They will have the experience and intelligence to stay safe while using these new tools. If you are concerned about your child’s physical safety, and feel that a predator is making contact with your child, either electronically or personally, then you must contact the appropriate authorities immediately. If you don’t know whom to call, start with 911 or your local police department. They all want to be as proactive as they can. It is preferable to stop any possible physical threat before it happens than to try and pick up the pieces afterwards.

Remember Yourself

Remember that you are also a target on the Internet. I know that I’d like to be sought after for my sexual appeal, but unfortunately that’s just not the case. As adults we aren’t sexual targets but financial targets. We are susceptible to the same deception techniques and we have to be aware of them and fight back against them. The most common is phishing and spoof e-mails designed to trick us into revealing confidential financial or personal information. Keep yourself educated about the Internet and how it’s changing, for the better and for the worse.

If it sounds too good to be true, you can be pretty sure it is. AppleBee’s is not giving away gift certificates, Bill Gates is not going to pay you for forwarding e-mails, you won’t have bad luck if you don’t tell 10 friends about that e-mail, and missing children notices are not being sent to everyone with an e-mail address in the hopes that you’ve seen them.

If something makes you feel uncomfortable, don’t do it. Your own morality can keep you safe. You know when something isn’t right, and you need to pay attention to that inner voice telling you to be careful. There is no morality higher than your own, so listen to it.

I hope that this article gives you a starting point for keeping your family safe while still taking advantage of all that the Internet has to offer.

You can download the presentation that Farmington Municipal Schools provides regarding Internet Safety for Families. It is an enhanced Podcast (.m4a) with small versions of the Keynote screens available. You can also view the presentation screens in PDF or Flash format on our web site.

I always welcome your comments, questions and criticisms regarding the articles in TechEd on Macinstruct. Please e-mail me directly at cthacker@macinstruct.com

Related Links:

Farmington Municipal Schools’ Internet Safety for Families Links
http://www.fms.k12.nm.us/safekids/

American Library Association Internet Toolkit
http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/iftoolkits/litoolkit/Default2338.htm

Center for the Safe and Responsible Internet Use
http://csriu.org/

NetSmartz Workshop
http://www.netsmartz.org/

iKeepSafe
http://www.ikeepsafe.org

SafeKids
http://www.safekids.com

The Safe Side (general safety for kids, highly recommended)
https://www.thesafeside.com/

Family Contract for Online Safety
http://www.safekids.com/contract_kid.htm

Family Contract for Online Safety (Internet Content Rating Association)
http://www.icra.org/kids/familycontract/

Internet Safety at KidsHealth
http://kidshealth.org/parent/positive/family/net_safety.html

Parents' Guide at Yahooligans!
http://yahooligans.yahoo.com/parents/
 Parents' Guide at Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
http://www.fbi.gov/publications/pguide/pguidee.htm

General Family Internet Guide at About.com
http://familyinternet.about.com/

Online Safety at American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/foryoungpeople/childrenparents/especiallychil...
 Online Safety Guide
http://kids.getnetwise.org/safetyguide

Family Guide Book
http://familyguidebook.com

National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
http://www.missingkids.com

Don't Believe the Type
http://tcs.cybertipline.com

ProtectKids
http://www.protectkids.com
 WiredSafety
http://www.wiredsafety.org

WiredSafety's TeenAngels
http://www.teenangels.org

GetWise
http://www.getnetwise.org

OnGuard Online
http://onguardonline.gov/index.html

Safe Families
http://www.safefamilies.org/

SafeTeens
http://www.safeteens.com/

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District Spotlight: Farmington Municipal Schools

mcone — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 20:35:15 -0700

Charles Thacker
Thursday, January 25, 2007

We'll occasionally reference school districts in our articles to illustrate concepts or identify how technology can be implemented, and it will be helpful if some general information about the districts is available. We’ll call these articles ‘Spotlights’.

Public school districts in the United States vary greatly in many aspects. The size (in students and geographical distances), available funding, socioeconomic factors of the community, internal leadership, and age of a school district are all important ingredients in how technology is implemented. Here, we’ll learn about some of the districts in the country that are making the most of their technology.

Spotlight on Farmington Municipal Schools

Welcome to Farmington Municipal Schools, located in Farmington, New Mexico. It would be difficult to identify an 'average' school district in our country based on the statistics provided to the government, and our own district doesn't even show up on the radar of the largest 500 districts. At around 10,200 students, our district is the 7th largest out of approximately 90 districts in New Mexico. This is well above the 'average' enrollment from the 2002 US Department of Education census, which indicates that there are a large number of ‘small’ districts out there. We are located in a city of about 43,000 residents where 38% of the households have children under the age of 18. We have 17 regular education schools across the city and employ about 1,400 staff.

Our administration has always been supportive and as we've developed our own technology leadership positions the planning, implementation and support for technology decisions has improved. Over the past 12 years our district has grown from standalone computers and small lab based networks to an interconnected system of over 4,000 computers, more than 50 servers and over 700 IP phones. I'll save the discussion and explanation of the technical concepts for another article in this column and give you a brief overview of the technology in place in our district.

Implementation

When a district implements technology across their systems (e.g. business, instruction, administrative tasks, communication), there are several factors that must be taken into consideration during the planning, implementation and maintenance stages.

Financial impacts, both of the initial costs and the total cost of ownership (TCO), are always among the top issues discussed and evaluated. The lower TCO we could attain by using Apple's hardware and software products was one factor in the decision to standardize on that platform.

The appropriateness of the technology for the business and curriculum of the district should also be closely monitored. All purchases should help the district reach its goals by supporting and being aligned with the objectives of the schools. This alignment should exist across all systems, but it is especially important in technology due to the large amount of money that many districts invest in technology hardware, software and infrastructure.

When staff and students begin to rely upon and use technology, a district is required to invest some time and energy in the implementation of practices and polices for security and safety. There is data that must be secured, but also remain available to appropriate users. There are federal requirements for some security and filtering if federal funds are to be provided (this is true for e-rate funds, for example). Users - both staff and students - need to be protected from external and internal attempts to gain access to sensitive information or files. Some of security and safety measures are based on effective training of staff, and some measures are based on technology tools that help protect the network, district assets and users.

Infrastructure

Farmington Municipal Schools has a wide area network (WAN) consisting mainly of point-to-point T1 connections that handle data, voice and video traffic. Each building in the district has a local area network (LAN) that is a 10/100MB fully switched network. We also have a wireless LAN in place at each school and some of the administrative buildings. This wireless network is an 802.11b/g network that can provide up to 54Mbps bandwidth to wireless clients. Our operating system of choice is Apple's OS X, for both client and server systems, and comprises approximately 98% of our installed OS base. We utilize a centralized authentication system, Apple's Open Directory, with a distributed file storage structure for user data. Each site has at least one authenticating server which is tied to the central server, as well as one file server for staff and one for students. We centralize those services that are best suited to such an installation and distribute those that are best placed at the remote sites.

Our connection to the outside world is a 9Mbps, adjustable rate DS3 that allows us to increase our bandwidth without the need for additional physical connections. Bandwidth is like time and money: No matter how much you have you always want or need more. Our humble introduction to internet access was a 56Kbps lease line, followed by a nice full T1, which was upgraded to two T1 lines working in tandem until we had to make the commitment to a scalable system that provided us with the bulk of the bandwidth we needed for immediate usage.

Systems and Solutions

There are many systems that make our district work, both on the business side and the instruction side. The backbone of our communication system is a Unified Communications system from FirstClass. It provides our e-mail, voicemail, incoming fax, calendaring, collaboration, staff web publishing, e-learning, and application development for staff and students. Part of this communication architecture is our Cisco Voice over IP (VoIP) system. Our VoIP phone system is comprised of over 500 phones and uses the data network for voice. Combining data, voice and video on a single network is called a converged network. FirstClass and our VoIP installation, taken together, is one of the most the most mission critical systems we have, but running a close second is our student information system, PowerSchool. PowerSchool provides us with administrative tools to manage student information, schedule courses, record and track attendance and grades, and give students and parents access to real-time data. It also reinforces the data driven decision making processes of our administrative staff.

We are currently working on the development of a long-term plan to implement a one-to-one laptop initiative, with or without state and federal financial support, and the infrastructure we're building now is designed to support this initiative. One-to-one initiatives are a hot button topic in education, and I'm sure you'll see an article here about that in the future. We have started with small pilot programs for teachers who have made a commitment to integrating technology into their curricula. These teachers are provided with an iBook, projection unit, digital still and video cameras and a cart of iBooks for use by their students. By implementing these smaller programs we are building a foundation, in both staff and students, for the eventual creation of a one-to-one environment in our district.

Support

Our information technology staff is a critical component of our technology implementation. The staff members we have vary greatly in skills, experience and responsibilities. With our centralization of core services, user and workstation security, and remote management tools we are able to allow technical support staff at schools to focus on delivering curriculum and training and to provide a first line of defense for technical support. The more involved tasks of network management, client configuration and maintenance are handled by district level support staff who are responsible for multiple sites. Considering just those staff members providing support as their primary duty, we have an average ratio of one tech for every 300 computers. Restricting this ratio to just those technical staff responsible for higher level support, the numbers get closer to one tech for every 575 computers. As we have increased the number of systems we implement, we've found that an increase in IT staff has been necessary to guarantee effective service for our staff and students. Without our support staff, the complicated network, systems and technology tools in use by our district would be under-utilized and in disrepair.

I feel honored and lucky to be involved in our district's technology administration during this time of technological growth and commitment. Our district has come a long way, and has worked hard to implement the technology we have and to insure that it improves the education we provide to our students. There are many challenges to be faced and I think we're ready to meet them.

I always welcome your comments, questions and criticisms regarding the articles in TechEd on Macinstruct. Please e-mail me directly at cthacker@macinstruct.com

Related Links:

Farmington Municipal Schools
http://www.fms.k12.nm.us

FirstClass Division, OpenText Corporation
http://www.firstclass.com

Apple Inc
http://www.apple.com

Cisco Systems, Inc
http://www.cisco.com

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