Jeff Utecht – Educator, Consultant, Author
Do you support People or Platforms?
Mar 20th
As I sit here in my hotel room an hour away from starting my official Apple Distinguished Educators (ADE) training this question keeps popping into my head.
Do you support People or Platforms?Flickr ID: Wader
It’s an interesting question…that I continue to reflect on. We all have strengths and weaknesses in the computer programs/platforms that we know. But do we some time support the platform rather than the people?
Is there a difference?
Can you support people without supporting a platform?
Just some questions that are running through my head as I start my 5 day training on everything Apple.
More >
Conference Week
Mar 17th
So let me cut through the smoke and mirrors and really tell you why this coming week is important to me.
Simple….on Tripit.com I’m trailing David Warlick in the number of countries I’ve traveled to this year. As an International Educator….that’s just wrong!
I won’t pass David this coming week but I’ll tie him going into the opening of Baseball Season and we all know from there it’s a whole new ball game.
This coming week I’ll start my travels in Singapore where I’ll be brainwashed attending the Apple Distinguished Educators Asia Institute. I was suppose to attend here in Bangkok last year, but thanks to More >
Blogging Process – Find Your Flow
Mar 14th
Brian Grenier wrote a blog post back in 2007 that I think I missed where he asks the question how do you write a blog post?
Miguel Guhlin just wrote a great post in response to Brian’s thoughts. In my COETAIL course yesterday we had a great discussion around how blogging was going for those in the class. All of them just 5 weeks into blogging. It was interesting to hear that many of them say blogging as publishing. That they had a lot of drafts waiting to be published but they wanted them to be “perfect” or “publishable”.
“The thought that other can read More >
The Next Phase of Technology at ISB
Mar 4th
ISB 1:1 Timeline
Last week our IT Director, Chad Bates, gave a presentation to the ISB School Board outlining the next phase of technology use at ISB. The phase includes a plan to go 1:1 starting next year with grade 6 students.
It’s an exciting time to be at ISB and I for one am looking forward to rolling out the 1:1 program over the next couple years.
As part of his presentation Chad went over the history of technology implementation at ISB over the past 10 years. As I sat there reflecting on how far we’ve come with technology in just the past More >
My Google Chrome Extensions
Feb 18th
Last week Google Chrome updated itself on my MacBook and now allows Chrome extensions. I’ve almost completely moved over to Chrome as the speed of the browser just blows both Firefox and Safari away in my experience…and the way it handles gmail, gdocs, gwave, and the rest of G is just smooth. What’s been holding me back from making the full switch were the Firefox extensions that I have come to rely on. But now that I have most of them, I use Chrome 90% of the time.
Extensions slow a browser down as it’s extra code that needs to be loaded, More >
Bring Buzz to Edu Apps
Feb 17th
Google Buzz has been out for a while now and has been slowly making its mark on the social-networking scene.
As I’ve been investigating Buzz (a.k.a. playing with it…but investigating sounds so much more important!) and how it changes social-networking, it hit me the other day how this might just be the communication tool I’ve been looking for in schools ever sense Twitter came out.
I’m hoping that Google brings Buzz to the Education Apps soon. There are a lot of schools (including mine) that are embracing Google Apps and taking a serious look at using the set of tools as the default More >
Proper typing out, thumb typing in
Feb 12th
Flickr ID: ArabCrunch
Just as I’m having conversations again around why we should or shouldn’t teach typing in our schools technology has once again moved us into another typing realm. The thumb typing.
I’ve watched more videos than I care to count about the iPad (my thoughts here) and in a recent survey to our students here at ISB revealed that almost 70% of middle school and high school students have either a Blackberry or iPhone. Second hand iPhones are being sold on the cheap at the moment at our school, as high school students trade them in for Blackberries and the More >
