In our national quest for demanding minimum standards be attained by children, I want us to change our focus: NCLB should stand for No Computer Left Behind. You see, I am a bit worried that the technology industry is beginning to participate in the soft bigotry of lower expectations--for my computer.

I sense a growing trend toward a "device" (not a computer as we have traditionally grown to understand them) that contains less hard drive space (if any), fewer programs (if any), and a significantly simplified operating system. The brains of the machine, the storage capacity of the "device," the operating system per se is all dependent on the internet. The development of this operational model is well underway with cool online "applications" like ThinkFree, Google Documents, et.al.

Using these tools you can create documents in your web browser with tools that closely approximate the Microsoft Office suite. You can save the documents online in your free 1 gigabyte of storage space. Advantages abound: access your documents from any computer with access to the internet. Share your documents with anyone with a simple click or two. Allow others around the world to participate in the editing process--even live in a collaborative work session. Print your documents from any computer to the printer at hand.

Aside from the office-style products, there are online podcasting, screencasting, photosharing, photoediting, videosharing, videoediting, file conversion services (to name a few) as well. Shared "television viewing" services are even beginning to appear. Free and very inexpensive server space, like Amazon S3 and Box.net, for data storage is proliferating. But, gradually these free services seem to be moving to a more sustainable business model, which I alluded to in my last post. Could a business model develop that further excludes those who cannot pay "by the document" or "by the gigabyte" thereby deepening the digital divide between the haves and have nots?

If the rumor mill can be trusted, and one never knows!, at MacWorld this week Apple may introduce an internet-dependent "device." The rumor mill is calling it MacbookAir. Whether the rumor is true or not, my expectations for my computer's performance remain the same. I need the greatest possible storage (for digital media), the greatest possible processor speed (for digital media creation and distribution), and massive amounts of fast RAM. When I leave the house, I typically keep working on the road and still want as much computing power as I can get.

I don't want to give up any processing or computing power, any program functionality, or any system functionality to the creeping, crawling, unsecured world wide web. I don't want to dumb down my machine or open it to data-mining. I don't want to have to pay extra so as not to be bombarded with advertisements every time I brighten the screen or save a file to some great server in the sky. I want to minimize any dependancies to something located in the ether of "over the rainbow."

This week Apple announced their new Mac Pro with Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Harpertown” 3.2GHz processors, 1600MHz dual independent frontside buses, 12MB of L2 cache per processor, up to 4 terrabytes of disk space and 32 gigabytes of 256-bit-wide, fully buffered RAM with Error Correction Code (ECC). Now ladies and gentlemen, that's a machine! I'd love to own one so I can run the world! OK, I'll settle for using it to make digital video more efficiently.

Perhaps a market exists for a small internet-dependent "device," especially if it can easily "plug in" to it's own "mother ship" at home as well. I must confess that indeed Apple struck gold with the iPod in a time when all of the nay-sayers were asking, "Who on earth would want to watch a movie on a 1.5 inch screen?!" Well, as it turns out, the answer is: millions of people the world over. And I'm among them.

An internet-dependent device would induce an interesting business model into the technology industry, potentially doing to itself what iTunes has done to the music industry: creating a metamorphosis in the current technology content and distribution models. But a significant difference would exist: the music you buy today, for the time being at least, lives on your machine, in your procession. With the new model, you might not own the music or the video or the computer program. You might pay for access to these collections of digital bits that live on the big servers in the sky. Your access is granted or denied. The long term implications are substantive, and the scope of possibilities are interesting to consider... Yes, interesting indeed. No one knows the impact a crawling baby will have in 30 years.

I just don't want us to sink to the lowest common denominator of "cheap" and "good enough" (not that Apple ever has, in my opinion) or lose affordable access to the real horsepower the digital era affords the common guy/gal on the street, like me! Leave no computing power behind!

What are your thoughts on these issues as this post only skims the surface?

I have long thought of education as a media rich content delivery system with a high degree of human interaction. In that light, how can the iTunes media content distribution system afford our students and teachers a deeper, richer teaching and learning experience?

We have certainly seen the impact of iTunes in the music industry. How can educators leverage this same content distribution model to positively impact teaching and learning in school? The possibilities are enormous and fantastic.

Student-created Media Content for Teaching and Learning
With the powerful digital media creation tools afforded students today, rich content development by students for students is certainly happening in many schools. (Check out MabryOnline.org if you are not aware of the broadcast quality, exemplary work those middle school students and their teachers have done.) But student- and teacher-created digital media learning objects is just a small part of a larger perspective.

iTunes University Courses
For those who may not be aware, iTunes U has taken off with a flourish and features courses from many of America's best universities: Duke, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, MIT to name a few. I have it on good authority that this list will grow explosively in 2008. Middle and high school students need to be exploring these courses, listening to these professors, getting to know more about their future educational encounters. Educators, can we say rich and outrageous "differentiated instruction?!"

K-12 iTunes Learning Resources
But iTunes U has now started going much further. Look at the lower right hand side of the main iTunes U window! Apple appears to be adding media rich learning content from some very noteworthy sources: American Public Media, American Theater Wing, The Research Channel, Smithsonian Global Sound, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to only name a few. I suspect (have on good authority?) that this effort is only going to expand significantly in the coming months.

I'll speak to one recently added resource. PBS has just added to iTunes U resources from 4 affiliates: K-12 teachers' classroom resources organized by content like Earth and Space Science, and Engineering; global history in regions including Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East; series that include Ken Burns' The War and The Jewish Americans; and QUEST: Science and Nature. Professional development resources from PBS are also here.

In my mind, forward thinking K-12 educators will want to leverage the iPod (especially the iPod Touch and even the iPhone) for learning. As more and more professional content creators add their resources to iTunes U, doing so will only become easier. Teachers can easily add a link on a classroom blog or website, a link that takes students directly to a specific podcast for download to their iPods.

How to Add a Link to an iTunes U Resource to Your Blog
As you can see in this post, I have included several links to iTunes U. Clicking on the link launches iTunes (Mac and Windows must have iTunes installed.) and takes the user to the linked resource. This is easy to do! Let me give you the simplest way to add a link to your blog post.

• Go to iTunes U.
• Find the link to the content you want your students to download or watch on the computer.
• Place your cursor directly over the link. (The cursor becomes a little hand when positioned over a link.)
• Right click on the link.
• Select "Copy iTunes Store URL" from the contextual popup menu.
• Immediately go to your blog post and paste. (If you copy anything else to your clipboard before pasting the iTunes link to your blog, you will lose the link and need to go back to iTunes U to copy the link again.)

If you want to write the html code yourself, the actual html code will look something like this:

<a href="itms://deimos3.apple.com/indigo/main/main.xml" target="_blank">iTunes U</a>

where everything in the first set of quotation marks is the link you copied from the copy step above. And in the space in the html code above that reads "iTunes U" you simply add the text you want to appear in your blog for the link, perhaps: "Click here to go to Tonight's Homework Podcast" without the quotation marks.

More that Just iTunes U
I suspect that in the near future teachers will be able to design interactive content for the iPod Touch and iPhone. The only people that will be more excited about this learning tool than I am are the students! The iPod becomes an anytime, any place, interactive learning kiosk for kids. Imagine homework assignments that are literally interactive online and on-iPod learning experiences. I've actually been talking about this for years.

Students are required to take ownership of their own learning in their own space outside of the school building. The teacher is everywhere, in living color, with them. Class time is reserved for more individualized student learning and project-based instruction.

More that Just Content Delivery
And don't think of the iPod as only delivering content. The iPod Touch and the iPhone sport the slick touch interactive interface. You can use these as assessment devices--a feature I suggest Apple is going to leverage in significant ways in the relatively near future, making portable, quality, interactive, learning assessment ubiquitous.

From my perspective, IT and system level curriculum specialists need to begin designing formative assessment tools that teachers can use with students. Imagine: an online tool in which the teacher types in the questions and assessment distractors (multiple choice options, True/False, fill in the blank, even pictures and movie files could be used).

I'm thinking class sets of the iPod Touch where the students go to the online assessment site, touch their screens for each question and provide immediate feedback for the teacher through the classroom WiFi network. Such a process ultimately takes the teacher out of the tedious and time consuming clerical business of grading papers and puts them in the data assessment business--making instantaneous, meaningful judgements about student learning and designing time-sensitive interventions to maximize achievement. We frequently speak of teachers needing to work differently, not more? This is a classic example!

Nay Sayers
Don't be quick to say this will never happen. That's what the record industry said, and they certainly have far more political and financial clout than educators in this country!

Don't be quick to say "If we buy every student a $250 iPod Touch they will sell it for crack cocaine!" [I actually heard, with my own ears, a parent say that about student laptops! I think I unintentionally gasped aloud in complete shock.] This is the very same mindset that didn't want pencils and paper in classes because students might pass notes in class. Bad things happen in this world. If we let that keep us from doing good things we wouldn't drive our cars either. This is also the same mindset that causes those who try to refuse to grow to become bitter and more irrelevant to their students.

The positive possibilities here are endless. Our students' interest in the iPod is high. We can leverage this unprecedented interest, this participatory experience, this emotional connection... for learning. What an exciting time to be an educator!

Years ago I purchased NetNewsWire, an RSS feed aggregator designed for the Mac by NewsGator Technologies. (Their Windows RSS feed reader, FeedDemon, also seems to get high reviews, but, being a Mac head, I have never used it.) I actually tried several feed readers at the time I began feeding at the RSS trough, but of all the readers I tried, I fell in love with NetNewsWire.

In an extraordinary move, a few weeks ago NewsGator Technologies made all of their RSS feed readers, including NetNewsWire, free downloads for everyone--not your standard business model! (They do sell other software and services.) I highly recommend this cool tool. No, I highly recommend this essential tool.

Many people still don't know or have a really fuzzy understanding of what RSS feed aggregation is. And for those who do know, RSS is often used much too little. RSS is far too powerful to be so little used. If you do not subscribe to RSS feeds, you are really missing out.

What Is It?!
The easiest way to explain RSS feeds and their aggregation (fancy word for "collection in one place") is by example: If you had a child at Mabry Middle School, where every teacher blogs (even the counselors, media specialist, nurse, the PTSA, etc.), you could easily have to check 10 or more web sites (blogs) to keep up with what is going on in your child's school. On some days the teachers have posted, and sometimes they have not. The daily process of checking each blog quickly becomes a little tedious--even with the generous use of numerous bookmarks.

So, let's make this easy!

On the first day of school, use an RSS feed aggregator, like NetNewsWire, to subscribe one time to each teacher's blog. (You never need to go to those blogs again if you don't want to.) From that day on, every time you launch NetNewsWire, or any RSS feed aggregator you choose to use, NetNewsWire tells you how many new posts have been published by which teachers. All of the posts come to you in one place--in my case, NetNewsWire. When I launch the program, it looks at every blog or website to which I have subscribed and brings me the new posts.

In NetNewsWire I can read a summary of each new post. If I find it of interest, I can click on the summary and see the entire post. I can even click on the title of the post and open the blog from which it came.

If I have two children at Mabry, I can have two folders: one for the teachers of one child, and one for the other child. I can have a folder for news sites like CNN and the BBC, a folder for technology sites like Wired and Boing Boing. I can even have NetNewsWire search the internet for posts about specific topics and keywords with which I want to keep informed with the latest information. In this post I am only scratching the surface of the many powerful possibilities, but lest I overwhelm those who are first learning about RSS aggregation, I'll stop here.

As far as I am concerned, every student in middle school and up (at the least!) should use an RSS aggregator daily. This can be a powerful learning and research tool when used well.

Why Not Use Your Browser's RSS Capabilities?
For one thing, only the latest version of Internet Explorer has any RSS functionality built into it. Since a significant number of internet users use older versions of IE, this may explain why RSS subscription has not become standard practice. The old version of IE can't work with it at all.

And while both Safari (for Windows and Mac) and the new version of Internet Explorer have RSS functionality built into them, they lack some of the amazing additional functionality provided in the free RSS feed aggregators you can download from NewsGator Technologies.

How Do I Use It?
All you need to know is that blogs and even many websites create RSS feeds. One of the ways you can tell a site has an RSS feed available (not all do): they are typically identified with an icon that looks much like the one pictured next to this paragraph--small orange, "radaresque" icons. (I picked one that's a little fancier than usual.) You click on the feed icon which launches NetNewsWire or whatever aggregator you have installed on your machine. (The fancy feed icon pictured in this paragraph is linked to this blog's RSS feed!) You select the folder you want the posts from the feed to appear in within NetNewsWire. You have now subscribed. Now all of the new posts from that feed, that web site, that blog will automatically appear in NetNewsWire everytime you launch it.

Go ahead and try it. Download a free aggregator from NewsGator Technologies. Click on my feed icon near the bottom left sidebar or in the paragraph above, and watch what happens. This is a better, more efficient way to work!

Teach the parents of your students how to subscribe to your blog. Teach your students how to subscribe to your blog. (Don't even tell me you don't have one! I'll leap right through this screen and point my finger in front of your nose for your not using best practices!!)

If You Are A Geek (Like Me)
You will want to check out this post about tweaking NetNewsWire to provide you with abundant functionality. Also read this post. You can: have NetNewsWire feed you your blog stats, your mail, posts about you, comments made to your blog, podcasts, create smart folders, post an article to your del.icio.us account, post an article or a highlighted section from an article to your blog, show you blogs that aren't actively posting, show you blogs that are using the most bandwidth, send podcasts to iTunes to sync to your iPod, send your feeds to Safari on your iPhone (or other mobile devices, or any computer browser in the world), have your feed summaries appear in the sidebar of your blog, and on and on and ...

Educators, this should rock your world!

Articles on Wikipedia
RSS
Web feed
Aggregator
NewsGator Technologies

Articles about Blogs and RSS for Teachers and Parents at MabryOnline.org
Under the Hood of Our Website
How to Subscribe
Overview Information (which contains numerous resources about RSS)

Let's go a little deeper into NetNewsWire--which, I remind you, is now free. If you haven't read this earlier post, start there unless you fancy yourself a bit tech savvy (meaning you understand the concept of RSS).

You collect all of your RSS feeds in NetNewsWire. You read all of the posts that arrive in NetNewsWire from all of the sites to which you subscribed (this is almost always free). As you come across a post you find of interest, you can open it in a tab in NetNewsWire to see the actual webpage or open it in your default web browser. These are the standard options you would expect to find in any RSS aggregator.

This is what I call munching through the feeds. It's a quick process of skimming and scanning, even using the search features if you're looking for something in particular, to find important or interesting information from your collection of RSS feeds.

Post to Your Blog
But you have more options. You can select a portion (or the whole thing for that matter) of an important post and click on "Post to Weblog." NetNewsWire launches your blogging GUI software* and creates a new post containing the highlighted material. At the end of the quotation NetNewsWire adds a citation to the source of the quoted material. What an efficient way for educators to work professionally! (You can customize the look and feel of this feature if you're feeling uber geeky.)

Do You Have a Del.icio.us Account?
You can also select "Post to del.icio.us" and NetNewsWire, using your del.icio.us account settings, opens a standard del.icio.us window for you to fill out thus saving the URL to your del.icio.us account.

Clipping Folders Rock My World
But here is one of my favorite features: you can create Clipping Folders. Let me explain by example. As a teacher I could create a clipping folder for each of the subjects or units I teach. I come across important resources from my RSS feeds that I want to share with my students. As I read the resource in NetNewsWire and decide I want to share a post with a class, I click on "Add to Clippings."

I then drag the clipping from the general clippings folder to one of the specific clippings folders I created. For this example, we will say I created a "Civil War" clippings folder where I'm collecting all of the posts on the Civil War that I want to share with my Social Studies students. In one location, my "Civil War" clippings folder, I can build a webquest for my students.

Now this is where the program rocks! I tell NetNewsWire to create an RSS feed for my "Civil War" clippings folder. It gives me a link (URL) to the RSS feed for my "Civil War" clippings folder. (Don't worry about how it does this. It's just very clever!) I post the RSS feed link to my blog and require my students subscribe to it.

Wow! Now every time I add a site to the "Civil War" clippings folder, it shows up in each of my student's RSS aggregator, where ever they are, for them to read and study.

Not Just for Teachers
System and state level curriculum specialists, this has important implications for your work as well. You can have the educators you supervise subscribe to specific clippings folders you create.

Public Relations can set up a clippings folder in which you add posts from schools and teachers who have done noteworthy work you wish to highlight. Then place that RSS feed in a column on the system's main website. Set it to show the 5 most recent posts from your clipping folder. Now you have a simple way to distribute fresh highlights to your system website from individual websites in your school district--yet another important reason to have blogs as school websites instead of regular html pages! Don't forget to have the local paper(s) subscribe to this feed as well.

Mobile Access
NetNewsWire also offers you access to your RSS feeds on your mobile phone as well. You can skim the post summaries on your iPhone. As you read the summary, that post is marked read. Send the ones you want to read in detail to your general clippings folder. When you have time and are seated at a computer with a larger screen, you will notice the summaries you read on your phone are marked read on the computer. You can go back to the general clippings folder to read the posts you wanted to revisit in more detail.

Windows Users
I am assuming that NewsGator Technology's Windows RSS feed aggregator, FeedDemon, would have to have very similar functionality to NetNewsWire as the company owns both.

More...
I've only scratched the surface. NetNewsWire has more powerful functionality than I've discussed so far. Here are a few things to whet your interest: smart folders that search your subscriptions intelligently; special subscriptions from search engines, tags, bloglines, even local files; most and least viewed statistics; bandwidth usage per feed, etc.

Now That You're All Excited
In order to use clipping folders and use the mobile features I believe you have to have a paid annual subscription with NewsGator. The annual subscription isn't expensive, and I do not know if they offer site licenses. I would suggest taking things one step at a time. Download the aggregator. Use it. If it's a comfortable fit, explore it in more detail. When you fall in love, purchase a subscription.

* Blogging GUI Software: This will be the subject of some future post I'm sure. But for now: You can purchase really inexpensive programs that run on your computer and link you to your blog. Rather than using your web browser to publish to your blog, you launch the program and fill in the window. Click publish. Done. These programs often add additional functionality to publishing (making adding pictures from your computer or from flickr easier, for example) and are especially helpful when you publish to multiple blogs. I really like ecto (Mac and Windows). I have played a little bit with MarsEdit (Mac only), and Adobe's Contribute (Mac and Windows). I'm sure others exist as well.

In my recent work in Oregon, I had the opportunity to meet more incredible educators doing great things for the children in their care. One of them had such exciting new ideas about using technology to help her hearing impaired students with cochlear implants increase their hearing and language skill development. This teacher's dedication is an inspiration.

As we talked, I was thinking that Videocue, by Varasoft, might be just the solution for what she wanted to accomplish. While her objectives can be met with a lot of time invested in recording and then editing digital video, she, like all teachers, has tremendous demands placed on her time and therefore needs a really quick and easy, practical solution. After playing with Videocue this morning I have concluded that this software will do just what she needs.

The Objective...
She wants her students to be able to see the printed text they are reading, hear it read aloud in a natural human voice, and also see it signed for them--all in real time.

The Workflow...
Videocue is very powerful teleprompter software. But, as I have done in the example below, you can use it just as effectively on your computer screen without purchasing a teleprompter. I got a little wild and crazy in my example, just to show you some of what the program can do. However, the workflow can be just this straightforward:

1. Type (or copy & paste) your text (script)
2. Click record
3. Read your text
4. Save the file
5. Upload the movie to your blog

Some Details...
The program window is divided into three parts (left to right): assets, text, tracks. To accomplish this teacher's objective, you would type (or copy and paste) the text you need to read and sign into the main text area (middle) shown in the picture (click to enlarge it). Your camera video input (and any movies, stills, or audio you have imported into this project) appears on the left of the text window. (Mac laptops, and even the iMac, purchased in the last few years all have a built in video camera.) Drag the camera icon on the left to the right of the first line of text.

Before recording, go to the Export Settings... under the File menu (pictured on the left; click to enlarge) and check "Include Captions," which will overlay, at the bottom of your finished movie file, the text you are reading so your students can read as they listen and watch. Click the red record button. Sign the text as you read it.

The text scrolls through a highlighted bar. Use the space bar to pause the text or use the up and down arrow keys to speed up or slow down the scrolling text. If you have selected "Include Captions" in the export settings, the words in the highlighted area will appear on screen in the finished movie while as the viewer hears you read them. Therefore, to appear natural, you want to make sure what you are saying is in the highlighted area as you say it. This simple step synchronizes what the viewer sees with what is being heard.

You can rehearse if you wish, as the software has a rehearse feature. I found that after just a couple of tries, I had adjusted the speed of the scrolling text to a comfortable reading pace.

When the window reaches the bottom of your text, the scrolling stops, and you are prompted to name your file and decide where to save it. If you have ftp access to your file server, Videocue can even be configured to upload the file for you!

An Example...
To the right is a quick example I created using Videocue Pro. It's not a fancy example. I just threw it together literally in a matter of minutes to demonstrate to busy teachers that this can be a very easy, quick, and practical video podcast solution. The program is easy to use! Click the apple to see the video podcast example.

I Covered Just the Basics...
This post has covered just the basics! Videocue Pro has plenty of bells and whistles--some were demonstrated in my example movie. You can download a trial version and take it for a spin on your Mac. (Sorry Windows friends, this only works on the Mac. If you know a similar package for Windows, click comments and share.) Brian Novak, at Varasoft, provides a special discount for educators. You can find their education pricing at this link.

Another solution, called ScreenFlow, was just announced by Varasoft this past week. It goes well beyond the function of a simple screen capture utility. I'll save it for another post.