Ed's Tech Tips

 

The MHC Education Summit wiki web site is an interactive web site for the Mount Holyoke College Summit on Education for faculty, alumnae and students. Hopefully the site will be the vehicle for starting and continuing conversations about education before, during and after the Summit. So often, a conference generates a lot of excitement and enthusiasm that unfortunately fades shortly after the event ends. The wiki can function as a collaborative conduit for sustaining a dialog between alumnae who are educators, college faculty, and students who are aspiring to be teachers. Teaching methods, projects and internships may evolve from the summit and be shared via the wiki. Additionally, this wiki offers examples of various open source or free web 2.0 technologies that teachers may find useful in their classrooms.

The summit wiki is  built with the open source community edition of Mindtouch Deki. It is a powerful wiki platform that allows for integration or mash-ups of other web services, such as, Google maps, YouTube videos, RSS feeds, Flickr videos, embedded PDF's and much more. At the same time, the wiki is very easy to use with true WYSIWYG editing, extensive search capabilities, revision tracking, page printing, built-in scripting, page level security settings, file attachments and easy to following menu navigation. Mindtouch Deki significantly lowers the barrier of entry for sharing and collaborating on content on a web site.The school district of Dearborn, Michigan (which is very aggressive in their use of web technology) is seriously considering switching to it to allow all schools to have their own wiki web sites thus allowing all teachers, students and parents the ability to contribute to the web sites, instead of the current 1-3 persons per school that update their respective web sites via Adobe Contribute.

In addition, the wiki will allow alumnae that could not attend in person to particpate remotely in online discussions. The keynote presentation and panel discussions are going to be web cast live via video streams using Stickam that will be embedded into the wiki. The  Stickam web casts also feature live text chat sessions. The live video feeds will be recorded and embedded into the wiki to allow for viewing after the event.

Roz Savage, the first woman to row across the Atlantic ocean two years ago, has recently finished her first leg across the Pacific after 99 days, 8 hours and 55 minutes. Back in May she left San Francisco and rowed beneath the Golden Gate bridge toward Hawaii. While she did this by herself she brought along thousands of podcast listeners and blog readers for the ride. 

Her ocean going row boat is outfitted with solar panels which powered a MacBook, a few iPods stock full of audio books, a CD player, a Meridian satellite phone and a Tomtom GPS.  Three times a week she called Leo Laporte of TWiT fame for a audio podcast via her satellite phone. And everyday she posted to her blog after rowing, on average, 11 hours per day. Roz also took advantage of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, SmugMug, LinkedIn, iTunes and Amazon where she has a wish list. 

She is a tough English woman and a real inspiration. Not matter what happened, including a broken water filter, she was always upbeat and optimistic. Her goal was not to set a record but to spread a environmental message about how humankind is polluting the Earth's oceans, especially with plastic. She will spend the time until the start of her second leg of her voyage speaking and fundraising. 

Subscribe to her blog and the podcast. Listen to the previous episodes and get ready for the rest of the voyage.