Check out this nifty little feature. Magic Autofill lets you be lazy in Google Spreadsheet by doing the thinking for you. Sweet!

Editors Note: This is the first of a video series which may evolve into something more. Depending on the amount of encouragement ;)

The following is an announcement from The Foundation @ FCOE:

Announcement
The Foundation @ FCOE
2011 Innovation Grants

Beginning with the 2011-2012 school year, The Foundation @ FCOE will annually award grants of up to $1000 to Fresno County public school districts, to fund innovative projects or programs that promote student development and achievement. The Innovation Grant Application is available on the Foundation website at www.fcoefoundation.org/innovation/grant through September 9, 2011. Innovation Grant award recipients will be announced on September 15th and recognized at a reception on September 29th at 4:00 pm held at the Fresno County Office of Education. The Innovation Grants are sponsored exclusively by generous contributions from the employees of the Fresno County Office of Education.

Example Articles:
Play Music from Online Storage
Stream Video Files From Google Docs
Google Docs Stream to Android
Google Music Beta

From my understanding and experience when another google account shares a file with you it does not count against your storage space, yet you still have access to it. So if you want extra storage space for your Google Docs you could create additional emails, load your files and share them all with your main account. You could even get creative with your email addresses to stay more organized. Like newzealandpics@gmail.com. This would give you an “unlimited” amount of storage.

Of course this may be against Google Terms of Service or something like that and I don’t really like the idea of Google hating me so I haven’t tried this as I have described. I have however used my work email, a google account, to expand my storage space. So if you have Google powered email accounts you only use for email you may want to reconsider your cloud storage options.

Anyone have experience with something like this?

Chris Durham presenting on free and open source tools at CUE 2011 in Palm Springs

Recently myself and Dave Childers went down to Palm Springs to present at the CUE annual conference. CUE stands for computer using educators. The presentation was on a mix of free and open source tools to reduce computing costs in a 1:1 school. We discussed a few tools we use daily at ACEL Fresno Charter High School. I’ll briefly discuss them here.

Schoology: “Schoology is a free web-based learning management system (LMS) built on a social network. Schoology leverages the familiarity of popular social media tools to improve communication and collaboration.” If Facebook and Moodle had a child you would end up with Schoology. Schoology has a lot of very cool features for teachers and students, far more than I will go into in this short post so I highly recommend you at least click on the link and check them out. Here’s a snippet.

• Create School, Course & Group Pages
• Create Assignments, Tests & Quizzes
• Manage Grades & Attendance
• Course Analytics

We use Schoology to deliver content, files, links, and grades to students. This is a fantastic and feature rich tool for managing your 1:1 classroom.

Symbaloo: Symbaloo is a dashboard you can set as your homepage and spring to any site you have setup a tile for. We use it as a simple and cool looking launchpad for the students to access their commonly used pages but it has so much more potential. You can create webmixes and package lessons with all the online resources your students would need right on one page. You can also embed youtube videos and Google Documents right into your webmix, allowing the students to complete an entire lesson without ever having to leave  Symbaloo. It is also a great way to share resources for staff development. It also has a lot of potential for personal use.

I have met the CEO of Symbaloo and he is a very cool guy. He is definitely open to new uses for their product. So tell him Chris Durham from CUE sent you.

Google Apps: If you haven’t heard about Google Apps by now then you should start to question your worth. Seriously though, if you can, you need to be using Google Apps in your classroom. There are countless sites out there which explain ways to incorporate Google Apps into your classroom, just Google it.

We use Google Apps for just about anything and everything. Every student and teacher has an account so we are able to easily communicate and collaborate. The live collaboration on documents and presentations is by far the most used feature. Students working on the same presentation at the same time is mighty powerful stuff.

iTalc: iTalc is a free tool which allows you to monitor and control student computers. Similar to Apple Remote Desktop.

“iTALC has been designed for usage in school. Therefore it offers a lot of possibilities to teachers, such as

• see what’s going on in computer-labs by using overview mode and make snapshots
• remote-control computers to support and help other people
• show a demo (either in fullscreen or in a window) – the teacher’s screen is shown on all student’s computers in realtime
• lock workstations for moving undivided attention to teacher
• send text-messages to students
• powering on/off and rebooting computers per remote
• remote logon and logoff and remote execution of arbitrary commands/scripts
• home-schooling – iTALC’s network-technology is not restricted to a subnet and therefore students at home can join lessons via VPN-connections just by installing iTALC client”

We run Linux on our student netbooks and iTalc works for both Linux and Windows.

Diigo: Cloud based bookmarking and so much more.

Diigo V5: Collect and Highlight, Then Remember! from diigobuzz on Vimeo.

We use Diigo for staff professional development and each Teacher uses it individually in various capacities.

GIMP: This is a fantastic tool. It’s basically a free version of Adobe Photoshop which works on Linux, Windows and OSX. It is very powerful (although photoshop is better) and has a large user base which means there are lots of tutorials and videos on the internet to help you get going. The learning curve is not as bad as you would think. I use this program with 9th graders and in no time they are compositing images and placing themselves into historical photos. Check out GIMPKnowHow’s Youtube channel for some fun project ideas and tutorials.

Do you use any free or open source tools on a daily basis in your classroom?

At least it will after it indexes this post.

Goal: Have at least 10 images of me indexed within the first 2 pages (I now realize this depends on your screen resolution) of Google Images when you Google Image search “Chris Durham”. (At the start of this challenge I already have 1)

Why: A good friend of mine, Peter Lang , shared an article with me about a girl who got revenge on her ex by posting pictures of him to a website where funny and crude comments were put on the image. When you searched for him the entire first 2 pages of results where the same picture of him with insulting text. This gave me an idea, how cool would it be to have a majority of the images returned from Google actually be of me and not of the million other Chris Durham’s out there. When you type in a celebrity name you only see results of that person. It’s time to become a Google images celebrity.

Research and Analysis: When this idea occurred to me I searched for myself and found that I did in fact pop up in the results, it was just at the bottom of page 2. So I tried to figure out why the pictures above mine where above and why mine was below, here is what I figured out. The first 2 results are located on on pages with a higher ranking than mine. The other images had an equal ranking but where titled as ChrisDurham.jpg or the text Chris Durham was located very close to the image. So, since I have access to the site where my image was located, my work website, I logged in and got to modifying. The first change I made was renaming the file from 1235.jpg to Chris_Durham.jpg. This change alone, once Google reindexed, moved my image to page 1! After this result I changed “Chris” which was near my image, to “Chris Durham”. (At the time of this writing I am still waiting for Google to notice the change.)

Now these changes may not have as big of an impact for you depending on what kind of results pop up when you search your name. If your name is Justin Bieber good luck getting your images to appear on page 1.

Game Plan: Originally I was thinking about how to get my images on to higher ranked sites but it looks like only the first 2 images for “Chris Durham” have higher Page Ranks than this page right here so… I plan to put a few images of myself into this post, each titled Chris_Durham_”descriptive text”.jpg and make sure that in the descriptive text right under the image I include my full name. I will also add an additional picture to my Chris Durham work page bio and any other page on a site I have access to. I will then submit those page’s url to be indexed by Google, something that would happen on it’s own eventually but I’d like to speed up the process. Then, I wait and see.

Have you tried to impact your name searches? Share your efforts in the comments below.

Chris Durham Studying Abroad in France in 2007

Chris Durham on a rainy street in front of the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, France 2007

Chris Durham: In 2007 I studied abroad in Paris, France with my friend Peter Lang. We attended the Leonardo da Vinci University, located near the ‘La Grande Arche’ station, in the La Defense District.

Chris Durham with friends from Egypt and Ecuador 2009

Chris Durham with Fulbright Scholars from Egypt and Ecuador

Chris Durham: Friends visiting Fresno from Pepperdine University.

I want to write a book, but I can’t. It is too large a task and my mind moves to new ideas to quickly. This is a weakness, I struggle to finish things I start, but I am not trying to improve my weaknesses. They are weaknesses for a reason, because of a personality trait or something else hard to change, and to improve them would require lots of work and only yield incremental results. Instead, I plan to apply the 80/20 Principle to just about everything I do and focus on my strengths. Improving my strengths will yield bigger results and if I utilize them properly, can compensate for my weaknesses, voiding the need to improve them.

Example, these blog posts. Blog posts are short and quick when compared to a book. I can write blog posts, I can’t write a book. Yet, If I combine enough blog posts, I have a book. Strengths compensating for a weakness.

Because I move on to other things quickly any challenge or task I give myself must be able to be completed quickly. I am not focusing on the quality of this post as much as I am just getting it done. I know that if I try too hard to write something profound I will have a great half completed blog post, which is the same as no blog post at all. So, here is the plan.

Each post will be a challenge. That challenge will need to be completed within 24 hours. The challenge must be measurable and ideally still worth something even if failed or only partially completed. Each post will outline a hackers guide to completing the task. Research and data will be gathered and the 80/20 principle applied to it. Actionable goals which focus on effectiveness rather than efficiency will be set which will contribute to completing the challenge. A completed challenge must yield one or more of these things, money, benefit others or provide me with a sense of satisfaction or pride. These things must be measured at the end of the challenge and reflected upon.

Now, what kind of book is this going to be. Well, it may change, but I expect to have something that inspires and provides an outline for people like me to improve their lives and start getting things done. Plus, who cares, I just want to be able to say I wrote a book

Chris Durham for Mutual of Omaha's Aha Moment Ad Campaign Filmed in Fresno CA

I had seen the tv commercials and never really thought about how they found these people. For me at least, it was through the internet. In May of 2009 I received an email which said the Mutual of Omaha tour bus was coming to Fresno. They had heard about me through my site and my bio on my school’s website, www.acelfresno.org. They wanted to hear more about the transition from business to education and after a few emails back and forth, I was in a mobile studio, sharing my story. Check out the video below.
 

So first things first, no, I have never designed a game before. I have had this idea for some time now and I think I finally have the gameplan and tools to make it a reality. The game will be based on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which for those of you who don’t remember your history class, pretty much started World War 1. The game will play as a top down RPG and put you in the role of key figures in a group known as the Black Hand. With the story based on actual events, it should be a fun and interactive way for people to learn about a historical event that had dramatic and long lasting effects. I’m hoping to start programming over Thanksgiving break and have a working game by the end of Christmas vacation. If your interested in learning more about the assassination right now, check out the video at this site http://www.awesomestories.com/assets/assassination-of-archduke-franz-ferdinand-2