Online Safety Link

This is a link to a web site from the PBS series Frontline. In light of the focus on internet safety, I thought I'd post a link to this. It's from an episode that aired in 2008 and is titled "Growing Up Online".

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/

TRintuition

Just discovered this site through an online newsletter. They offer a service called "workbench" and is best described as a web-based multimedia authoring tool. As it states in their FAQ page...

Web authoring software has traditionally fallen into one of two categories. It has either been powerful but difficult to learn to use (and consequently used primarily by professionals), OR web authoring software has been easy to use but very restrictive and based on the use of confining screen templates.

The workBench overcomes this either/or quandary in important new ways. Its intuitive, drag-and-drop environment contains templates, but they are a convenience, not a requirement, and you can open and totally alter any one of them in any way you choose. You can create web screens entirely from scratch and, if you like, save your own screens as templates at any point in their development. You can later copy and paste these screens into any project, new or old. Better yet, you can create working groups, teams of users, to collaborate on the creation of websites and other web-based materials, with each group having access to its own planning Calendar, sharing resources, and combing web pages into final cumulative products.

I've only been playing with it for about a day now, but I have found it easy to use and very powerful. The help screens and video tutorials are excellent.

I encourage anyone who is interested in this service to give it a try! You can set up your own single account for free and subscription plans are available for classroom and school wide services. I'd love to hear from anyone else who gives this a try! Let me know how you see yourself using it.

New York State Model Schools Meeting

Last Thursday and Friday (April 29-30), BOCES I.S.S. staff members Rod Sutton, Ron Pike and Todd Rutan participated in a teleconference with other members of the New York State Model Schools consortium. A major part of the teleconference involved breaking the committee up into working sub-groups who then worked on portions of a new online course being offered via the new Model Schools moodle. The new course being created is intended for teachers in NYS to learn about safety on the internet.
More information about this course will be distributed when the course is finalized.