Open Source Kid's Painting Application

As reported in a email newsletter from TechLearning , a new free Open Source program for kids ages 3 and up (similar to KidPix) is available for download. Don't forget to clear off space on your refrigerator for masterpieces that will be printed.

TuxPaint

I know I should be working, but it IS summer, you know.

View my Scrapblog!

The Story of Victor Cleansing Co. from 1892 to the early 1970s. (My first scrapblog!)

This link no longer works so I am removing it.

Midge: The Early Years

Martha Broadfoot
Originally uploaded by midgefrazel.

Many of you may have inherited precious family photos and have not taken the time to scan them. I'd like to encourage you to do so so that these items will never be lost.

It is fun to share them with people who didn't know you "before".

Scrapblog

A month or so ago, Kathy Schrock sent me a link to this "scrapbooking blog" Web tool. I have been saving it to investigate for a rainy day and well, today it rained (a lot). I think I am going to like Scrapblog and I've alread a started a scrapbook of some old photos and ads.

It works with Flickr so I can send my scanned photos to be hosted there and then send the photos to any one of my blogs. (I plan to have a lot of them...this is fun!)

I am intrigued by the social bookmarking and have started working with two of them recommended by Will Richardson in his book.

I'll be posting the URL for my scrapblog as soon as I can!

What's Cookin'?

Some time ago, I made a Web page for Women's History Month called What's Cookin' honoring women who cook. My grandmother and mother used to take me to lunch to what was called a "tea room" in downtown Providence (RI). The woman who owned and ran the business was a friend to my grandmother. She was very personable, a great cook and literally had the businessmen of Providence eating out of her hand. I was impressed with the way she "worked the room" chatting with the men and making suggestions of what was good for lunch. It was the first time I'd seen a woman in business for herself.

Naomi Armstrong visited my Web page and sent me an email telling me her grandmother also was a friend of Miss Dutton. She has more recipes and is going to gather them up.

This reminds us all how much the Web brings up together in ways not possible before. By the way, Naomi's is not the first email I have had about this page as a man who worked for Flora Dutton also emailed me.

This inspires me to make a Web page about the business my family owned and operated for three generations.

So many ideas...so little time!

It's Official! I'm a co-Keynote...

Tappedin is having a festival on July 19 and everyone is invited. Will Richardson and I will be co-keynotes for this online event which starts at 11AM EDT. Will will take the lead for the first half hour and then I will follow. I'm really excited about this and this is what Tappedin has to say about our keynote,

"Will Richardson will lead off the Festival Keynote. Will's topic under Sustaining Professional Development will be "The collaborative nature of Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis etc and how teachers can utilize them for ongoing professional development."

Midge Frazel will follow with "Moving from Face-to-Face to Online Professional Development for Tired Teachers." In this half-hour keynote presentation, Midge Frazel will share her ideas about online professional development from both sides of the monitor. After twenty years providing face-to-face workshops for teachers, she enrolled in a completely online Master's program and will share tips on how to be a successful online student. Online learning requires a change of attitude for many teachers who lead busy personal lives, are tired after a long day at school and can't stand to sit through long boring lectures in a classroom. Dress is casual; bathrobes preferred for this not too tiring look at today's online learning experience."

Hope to see you there!

Throwing it Out!

It is time for me to start throwing out the years of materials I have amassed in the time I have been using computers. It's hard for me to do but I am starting to conquer it. I don't think the trash guys are too crazy about it either. Wow...is this stuff heavy.

Rachel (the prof) enjoyed my wacky view of the emerging technologies for the first week of class and so inspired...I forged ahead all did all of the individual work for the next two weeks and started the shopping for technology presentation. With that started, I stopped and began the process of setting up a blog for my gravestone research. This blog will be hosted on Blogger and so the process for setting it up, burning the feed, etc. was a bit different but a good review.

Phew! A Week of New Learning...Done

It's been a week since I started working with several of the new Web tools (without stopping my regular work) and I can honestly say that I would have to agree with the prediction that things are "moving to the Web". This morning, Google announced a spreadsheet online tool. Certainly, that qualifies as an emerging technology.

Blogger was very slow yesterday and I was reminded of years past where you had to plan to check your email at odd hours when the demand was not so great. I suspect that with summer coming, students will be blogging more and more which make it hard to aceess some of these online tools. Fortunately for me, students may sleep until noon or only work in the late night!

Yesterday, I worked with FotoTagger and decided this is a great tool for tagging my gravestone photos and so, as intended, I started a new blog to separate the gravestone project from this blog. I couldn't even get the first posting written.

Metacognition by Miguel Guhlin

End of the first week of my course...a very interesting week considering a few students haven't even showed up for class as yet!

My Google Notebook for this course

My First Podcast

Last month, I was honored to have Tony Vincent and Mike Curtis of Soft Reset interview me about my work and interest the area of electronic reading. Although ereading itself is may no longer be an emerging technology, being part of a podcast is considered to be an emerging technology for sure. I hope that you will be able to find time to listen to this show. I'd love to hear what you think.

Many teachers don't know that you don't need a dedicated device to listen to podcasts. Tony has put a link to the MP3 audio file that you can listen to in your browser. Of course, you can subscribe to the feed in iTunes, if you are a "pod-person" like I am.

Yes, I know...I talk too much and my New England accent may be amusing to some of you. This was a big step forward into new technologies for me. We used Skype to talk to each other, in case you were wondering.

Today, in addition to basking in the glow of podcasting, I did research for the next two assignments for my graduate class, downloaded a photo tagging (free) application called Fototagger.

I am in the early stages of learning about portfolio use. I am downloading Microsoft's PhotoStory 3 which works with Microsoft's Movie Maker 2 to produce digital stories. So many new things to learn everyday!

Weekend (Blog) Warrior

As a writer and a consultant, my weekends are often an extension of my regular weekday life. I do tend to use technology more for my obsession with genealogy and for working with digital images and for getting caught up with the happenings of family and friends.

This weekend, I spoke briefly at my monthly genealogy meeting with a young journalist who came to interview and take photos of our "Show and Tell" event where people in our group, show us family artifacts and photographs of genealogy or family history significance. He took a photo of me with my 2nd great grandmother's writing desk (circa 1861) and the scans of her photograph and of her mother who gave her the desk. Ladies then, managed the correspondence of the family and of the local society in which they lived. Today, we write emails and blog to keep in touch and contribute to society. Is there a difference?

After that I attended a graduation party and talked to two college professors about my experiences in distance learning. They teach face-to-face and still can't imagine teaching a distance class and I can't imagine not doing this! I felt very "emerging-technologist"

Today, I am going to work with FotoTagger, which is a personal free tool for management of digital photos which (like Flickr) uses tags to annotate posted photos. Alex Masycheff, product manager of FotoTagger for Cogitum, LC contacted me about this product. The company Web site says that "The employees in the firm are highly qualified specialists and managers, who have considerable experience in the field of information technologies, including software development." Our assignment for the next week of class is to consider new ways educators need to prepare students for the future, so my investigation of this emerging technology fits nicely within those guidelines.

I'd like to have a robot-maid to do the laundry, clean the house and cook the meals? If the Jetsons could have this, why can't I? Well, I don't, so its off to do some of those tasks.

Remembrance

lilly_valley_sm
Originally uploaded by midgefrazel.

Another May has gone by and I enjoyed the lily of the valley plants that my father dug up from the "deep, dark woods" (not really) behind my parent's house and transplanted for me in my yard. As today is the anniversary of my mother's passing, I took this photo last month of them in their prime and like my parents they are gone but not forgotten.

Lillies are for remembrance...

Fabulous Friday

Today, I use Skype to video-conference with my (famous) friend, Kathy Schrock. Kathy bought a new phone for using Skype and her voice came through clear as a bell. Skype-ing is a fun emerging technology for many teachers and you can make long distance (what does that mean anymore, anyway?) for free until the end of 2006.

Previously, Kathy and create a virtual office atmosphere for a day. It was just like being there with her but without the school lunch. Thanks to Mimi Gilman for alerting me to this great tool and now I can use my ancient Webcam to chat with my Lesley buddies (and see them too). I think only the Windows version does this so that leaves my Mac friends without video but not without a voice.

I must buy a webcam and microphone for my new laptop. Oh, I see we have a shopping trip assignment later in the semester.

In her spare time (right...) Kathy is helping me get up to speed on the emerging technology Web 2.0 tools. She and I are going to FETC in January. Today, we discussed the social bookmarking sites, Furl and del.icio.us (on my plan for next week's emerging technology work) and an application called PhotoStory 3. I told her about Google Notebook, which I am working with and like very much.

Checking in to my course page, I see we have a new face, Kathy from Las Vegas. Where are all my other new friends?

Today, I also focus on organizing my amazing amount of information on handhelds, and work on my cemetery transcriptions. I received an email from a nice gentleman who visits the grave of my second-great grandfather and we instantly become email pals. He's going to locate the grave (in the same cemetery) for another Civil War veteran, another 2nd great grandfather, Joseph Schofield. Where would we be without the Web?

First Day of Class

As has become my custom for the last few weeks, each morning I check my email and then, take a look at the feeds which have been aggregated by Bloglines. (When you get good tips from others who blog... it pays to listen...everyone said this is the easiest way to do this.)

Two weeks ago, I signed up for my free account at Bloglines. What this site does is organize all the daily (or hourly!) postings from the blogs that you subscribe to. I started with just a few and now I am up to 25. Kathy Schrock has a nice list of educational blogs for you to start with. I followed the directions to put a link in my bookmarks toolbar (I am using Firefox) that says "Sub with Bloglines" so when I visit a blog I would like to subscribe to, I just go to my bookmarks toolbar and click those words. By doing that, this tool check the page to see if there is a feed associated with it and if finding one, it moves you to your Bloglines page where you just click "subscribe to this feed and bingo, it appears in your list. I didn't think this would be that easy. This is the FAQs page is you want to start trying this out.

Will Richardson (bless his soul) has a free Guide to RSS for Education. Just get it and read it; don't wait another minute.

I have spent the morning organizing the saved clips I have been making in Google's Notebook. After looking at some of our later assignments, I find that I can find some ideas for those now and clip and organize them by Week. Taking vacation time during this class is a given, so I don't want to get behind.

I have been working on a new handheld lesson on eReading. It's not finished as yet, but I see we have an assignment to develop a lesson so this is a great incentive to use what I have started so far.

For my day's reading, I finish Chapter 6 The Social Network focusing on the section on social bookmarking. I would say, right off the mark, that these new emerging technology tools will make sharing excellent Web resources with other teachers a much easier task than writing Web pages or using sites like Trackstar. Will this replace my Web site?

Checking on my grad class, I see that Rachel (the professor) has checked into the introductory discussion and my friend from one of my last grad classes, Golda, posted her "hello". I think everyone else will wait until after school to look at our class work.