Monday, September 24, 2007

To Catch a Virtual World Thief

To Catch a Virtual World Thief

...... link to an article in Business Week might interest some of our Second Lifers.
;-)

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Thursday, September 20, 2007

"Presentations" now in pvlearners

Google just released the ability to conduct presentations (with their docs and sheets), and it's available in our pvlearners accounts. Sweet....enjoy......

Friday, September 14, 2007

See Our 'Ocean Stories'

This is the link to my ESL General Science classes' podcasts of their stories about the ocean. I had the students watch a Bill Nye video on ocean life, make a bubble map for the story, write the story on a Dana handheld, and then read it into Garageband for the podcast. It was a lot of fun.

http://eslstudentsspeakout.info OR the same link 'in-District':

http://cmweb.pvschools.net/pvhsweb/pvhspodcasters/pvhspodcastergerdin/ESSO


Enjoy.

Sunday, September 9, 2007

Distribution List from pDAT My Roster

Karl from PHS asked the question,

"Is it possible to import student emails from pDAT into pvlearners.net?"

Answer: Not directly.  But, here's what I would do.

In pDAT under My Roster, select all the information, copy it and paste it into a spreadsheet.  Then, select the email addresses from the column in the spreadsheet, go into pvlearners, add a new distribution list from the Contacts area of the eMail application, and paste all the email addresses into a new list.  Presto, you have one distribution list for all the students in all of your classes.

Now, for MS and HS application, where you probably want a distribution list by class period, it's a little bit trickier (we really need to get a class list roster by period in pDAT - I'll work on that).  For this type of application, well, I would have each of your first period students email a GenYes student (nice little project), their email address.  The GenYes student compiles a spreadsheet for you of each period with the student's email accounts.  Once completed, the GenYes student emails the teacher the spreadsheet, and you can compile the distribution lists.  You might want to make a shared doc with the email addresses, for your students to also use the distribution lists - just make the shared doc only viewable to students of pvlearners.net, not the entire world.  Make sense?  Not perfect, but a nice GenYes project to help the integration of technology into the learning environment.

In the meantime, I'll work on getting the class period as one of the fields in pDAT, so that when you copy and paste from My Roster, things are already broken up by period.

Friday, September 7, 2007

Google Notebooks

I followed the thread in the blog for Google for educators and began playing with Google notebooks. You have to download the app. using a gmail account. It looks like a REALLY cool way to have kids collaborate on line.

I ran into a couple of issues. If anyone knows the answers please post here or email me at kjohnson@pvlearners.net.

#1 To get the app for Google Notebook I had to use a gmail account. My pvlearners.net didn't seem to work. Was I using the wrong password?
#2 Using my personal gmail account I can access the Google Notebook app just fine, but I certainly don't want to be using that account to communicate with students, so that puts me back at issue #1. Is my pvlearners.net usuable in the same way as my gmail account?

Anyone else out there playing with Google Notebook?

Do kids using pvlearners.net have to have a separate gmail account to use the Google Apps and Docs or can they do it through pvlearners?

Google for Educators

Might want to join their forum discussions, or investigate some of the lesson plans.

Google for Educators (http://www.google.com/educators).