Bill MacKenty

Technology strengthens, deepens, and broadens our learning...

I’ve heard plenty of talk and unfilled promises of technological revolution and the role technology can play in education.

And I think most of it is utter nonsense.

The effective use of technology in education depends on three things:

1) The relationship of the teacher to the technology
2) Effective and real in-class support for technology use
3) Relevant and real connections between content and the technology. 

The ever-helpful Javelin has started a podcast centered around text-based games.  Javelin is a smart guy; his thinking around play, games, and text-based games is invaluable.

This is a worthy podcast, I heartily recommend it. 

Using_Shared_Calendaring_in_Google.pdf

Thanks to the indomitable Valerie Becker (her school) for pointing me to this fantastic educational technology wiki.  I have always thought “Gee, one day I should....” and here it is!

This is a great resource.

This is a small PDF which helps very new users use Google documents.  Google documents is an excellent tool for educators and students - you can edit and save documents online (and access them from anywhere).  You can also invite collaborators to help you edit your work (or have students do some good collaborative writing).

Here are some scans of the system…

Entering a ticket:

After a user enters a ticket:

Admin’s section:

Here’s the second part of the admin section (it’s a big page) :

Here’s an admin view of editing a ticket

As mentioned in the first post, the trouble ticket system was rolled out in about 4 hours - it’s an incredible value when you look at our work:output ratio.  Using custom queries, and solspace’s form helper (for editing our forms) we created an incredibly valuable system in our organization.  Although there are many other help-ticket systems, having an integrated system worked very well for us.