Catch A Wave

and you're sittin' on top of the world. I just received an invite to the new Google Wave. It looks promising as a means for mashing several popular communication media together. I'd like to test drive it with my Multimedia class but somehow I doubt they really want to talk to me outside of school.
As with any new social media, building your contact base takes time. Even more so when it's by invite only. I can easily see business applications but it's the entertainment and social networking that will ultimately drive our "need" for it.
I'll try to find one of my smaller classes with tech savvy students that would be willing to test drive the new Wave and report back in a couple of weeks.

That's What You Get Folks, For Making Wikis

This weekend I started revising an old wiki for school. A couple years ago I signed up for the free, educational version account at wikispaces but never really developed it. I finally figured it out.
It seems there are always a few zippy kids who get done with the assignment long before everyone else. They are the ones who ask, "What do I do now?" And now I have an answer: WikiPatriot
OK, the graphics aren't that exciting and there are too few links, but soon it will be DYNAMIC! (cue the music) Really, the idea is more of a directory to various edutainment type sites. The curious can explore, perhaps even learn a thing or two. Then hopefully as a side benefit, the slower dawdlers will pick up the pace to get to all the "cool games".
I've found a couple other similar sort of sites, but none have impressed me. So I was left to build my own. Maybe I could enlist other teachers and parents to help build it? It is a wiki after all :)

Property Value

Computer Programming class learned a minor (but important) point today. The goal was to create a group of radio buttons that would change the value of a few labels. They all started by setting the label value in the property box but then had to re-enter the data in the code for the appropriate button.
As one student said, "It scares me, if it's not there." So I had him erase the property value and run the program with an empty label. Of course it worked. So what started as practice with radio buttons turned out to be a lesson on the difference between property values and values attributed in the code.

Parents—Don’t Leave Teaching to the Church - Answers in Genesis

Parents—Don’t Leave Teaching to the Church - Answers in Genesis

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Word Processors

The Comp Apps girls seemed to enjoy my offbeat antics today. In order to introduce formatting documents in our section on Word Processing, I started out with a headset microphone and infomercial style hard sell. I tried my best to impersonate the late Billy Mays. I then led into a quick Will It Blend video illustrating how powerful my word processor was.
By that time I had either confirmed their suspicions or won them over. We continued with some animated practice with the textbook's data files and wrapped up the class with saving a word doc in HTML. Overall a good class. It will be interesting to see how the guys respond tomorrow.

Innovative Web Design

Have you been to Zoomii??? Talk about a creative approach to web based book sales. It's also an interesting way to illustrate the concept of "drilling down". But mostly I like the way it feels like your browsing through a bookstore. That's something that's often lost in web design - take a familiar experience and reproduce it in 2D on the web.

Lovin' the Cloud

I gave a web based quiz today that sends the results to my Inbox. So now I'm putting those grades into our web based grade book system while monitoring a fantasy football draft. And I didn't need to bring any papers home. How cool is that?