I’ve decided that one of the things I’m going to do in this blog is to write about some of the ideas for lessons I have in the computer lab. First, it’ll help me to remember to do them. Maybe it’ll give other people ideas on how they can integrate technology in their classrooms or schools.

Every year, fourth grade students at our school take a field trip to the historical missions in the area. This series of lessons could be done a week or two before they take that field trip. It’s to familiarize with some information before they go, such as when they were built, where they are and who they were built for.

1. Student would work in pairs to read information about the El Paso Missions on selected websites in order to sort the facts to the correct mission on a Wallwisher wall I created. When complete, they could print that information.

2. Students would produce pictures of the three missions in a drawing program such as KidPix and export the drawings.

3. Students would make a presentation of their information and their pictures using Keynote or Powerpoint.

Flipboard is an innovative new app which gives you a much better way to read your Twitter and, to a lesser extent, your Facebook accountss. What it does it take all the updates, the pictures and the links to articles the people you follow have posted and then puts them into a magazine type format.

For example, here is the “front page” of my Facebook feed this morning in Flipboard :

I can now tap on any of the pictures or text which will let me see the full entry, let me see any replies and let me add my own reply. It’s really well done! I’d about given up on both Twitter and Facebook but this might change that around.

There’s also some other preselected feeds you can add, but I haven’t added any of those. I already have enough things to read and unless someone puts together a great news collection, I’ll probably just stick to my Twitter and Facebook accounts.

There are a couple of things that should be improved. First, the Twitter integration is a lot better than Facebook’s because in Facebook it’ll only show your friends’ updates and not the updates from the pages you’re a fan of. I’m a fan of some news organizations, TV shows, podcasts, and musical acts and it would be great to get those updates in Flipboard and make it much more like a magazine.

Another quirk in the program is you’re never sure when it’s going to update. I launched it this morning and all the Twitter updates were the very same ones that were there six hours before. It wasn’t until 15 minutes later when I relaunched the app that I saw new entries. Maybe a refresh button could be added?

One other improvement I would suggest: Less clicks! If someone links to an article, there’ll be a short excerpt shown in Flipboard along with it’s headline and a picture if it finds one. If you click on that, it’ll show a full screen version which has the headline, the pictures and maybe four paragraphs of the article. To see the full article, you have to click again and it’ll take you to the website where you can finally read the full article. I’d like some kind of way to see the full article after that first click.

But if you have an iPad, definitely download this app and give it a try. After all, it’s free! You can see how developers are figuring out how to use that extra space the iPad gives them and making it more than just a big iPhone. Instead of giving you a long list of items to scroll through, they’re figuring out how to present things in more innovative and attractive ways.

As the technology coordinator at my school, it’s often up to me to provide professional development for our teachers in this area. Lots of times they work out, sometimes they turn out to be a total waste of time for one reason or another. For this reason, I always try to analyze the sessions I attend at ISTE as to what made them successful or not and use those lessons when I plan my own sessions.

Fortunately this year it was a high percentage of valuable sessions at this year’s conference. I attended several by people who are required to present formal presentations as a regular part of their job – college professors, professional trainers, principals – and all of their sessions were good. Interestingly it was the classroom teachers who lead sessions that weren’t very good.

Like the session on Google Earth. I was really looking forward to this session because, although I think Google Earth is a great program, I’ve never figured out a way to use it with students. About a year ago, I did set up a lesson in which students needed to find something in the program, but when the students launched it, they all didn’t see the same thing – there were several different variations in what was being shown. There was such a difference that I couldn’t give a direction because it was different for so many of the students. I soon gave up and went to something else.

So I really wanted to find out more about this program and ideas on how to use it with students. Unfortunately I didn’t get that with this session. The presenter was certainly knowledgeable and gave out a lot of information about different tools and resources available within the program but I didn’t really get a picture on how to present that to students or why I would want to. (Much of it seemed geared to secondary students, so that was part of the problem.)

During the session, we were encouraged to “play with” and explore Google Earth, but I’ve already done that on my own time. For me, what would have been more helpful is if I were given some task to do and see what connections I could make on my own – then I’d have a better idea on how to utilize the power of the program for my students.

I did get the idea of trying it out next year before the fourth grade students go to Carlsbad. They could follow the route we’re going to travel, locate Guadalupe Peak along the way so they’ll know which mountain that is and see if there’s any virtual tours available.

I also attended a session on creating a student-produced news program. We’re going to start a media class at our school so this session was especially relevant to me. It wasn’t a total waste by any means – it was interesting to see the different roles they gave students and the different segments they had (one of which – a public service announcement – was a good one that I hadn’t thought of). But they took too long on this and then the hands-on portion was a waste. They had these templates for us to download and adapt them a little bit. Again, it was interesting to see, but it would have been a lot more helpful if we’d learned how to make our own templates. I’ll use some of their ideas, but it’s not going to be exactly the same and I doubt any other school would have their’s exactly the same as our’s. So I think that would have been a lot more helpful.

Creating an engaging technology session is extremely hard, especially at a conference at ISTE where the attendees are so knowledgeable. I know the presenters were prepared and had useful knowledge to impart, but something got lost in the translation. At least, for myself, I didn’t get the necessary experience from the sessions that would push me forward in these two areas. You win some, you lose some.

When I was up in Minnesota earlier this month, I spent a day in Duluth, which has to be one of the world’s most beautiful cities. It’s built on a big hill on the northern tip of Lake Superior. In the main part of the city, you can see Lake Superior just about everywhere you go, like you can see the Franklin Mountains in El Paso. I lived there when I was in college and the city brings back many happy memories.

Steve Dembo is one funny guy. He kinda resembles John Belushi and has the same blustery-with-a-wink personality. He had the participants laughing throughout this hour long session.

It was called Extreme Makeover: Education Edition and the idea was that he was going to teach tech newbies how to use some Web 2.0 tools. I was there to see which websites he chose and how he would introduce each one.

Most of the websites he went through were ones I was familiar with – he went over Blabberize (why didn’t we do anything with that last year?), ipadio (which I wrote about in May) and how to start a blog.

He spent the most amount of time on Wallwisher, a very simple website which lets you create a virtual corkboard on which you or your students can add their own notes, and has lots of possible uses. I’m definitely going to have to find ways to use that next year.

The funniest one was Let Me Google That For You, for those colleagues who email you questions they could very easily find for themselves if they’d only take a minute to Google it themselves.

Steve’s approach to these websites was very similar to the one Tammy Worcester uses in many of her sessions: He would show the basics of each website, explain how to get started and give ideas on how to use it in the classroom. It was very fast paced and enjoyable for the inexperienced tech teacher as well as the experienced ones.

I watched Steve Jobs’ press conference yesterday and I thought he did well. Although he didn’t apologize for any mistakes he or the company have made in the past several weeks besides a general “we’re not perfect,” he made a decent explanation on what was causing the iPhone 4′s receptions problems and made reasonable steps to make the situation right.

I’m still not entirely convinced having that antenna making up the outside band of that phone is such a good idea, Mr. Jobs made a convincing argument that this was totally overblown – most of the people who have bought the new iPhone are not having this problem. A very small percentage of them are reporting this problem to Apple support or returning their phones.

Still, to alleviate the problems some users are having, Apple is giving everyone who has bought an iPhone a free bumper, which seems to solve the problem, or they can bring it back for a full refund. For me, I think these are totally fine solutions. Hopefully the media frenzy will die down and move on to their next victims.

What’s maybe most remarkable about the recent coverage of the iPhone’s antenna issues is the inability of our mass media to get the story right. It makes you wonder: If they can’t explain something as simple as a phone, how can we trust them to explain important, really complicated events like wars and the economy?

First, let me point out that I don’t own the iPhone 4 and don’t plan to. I bought a 3GS late last year and I’m not eligible for any reduced pricing on any upgrade at this time. Even if I was, I’m happy with my phone now and I don’t need every new feature the moment they’re released. But from everything I’ve heard is that the new iPhone is a great device that most buyers are very happy with and it also appears that have a strange antenna problem in weak signal areas if held a certain way.

That’s hardly the message you get from watching the TV coverage. Watching that, you’d get the impression that the iPhone 4 is a total lemon that needs to be recalled and that Apple is trying to rip off the public by refusing to do so. Ridiculous. What would be the point of that? True, Apple is a company that wants to make money, but it wants to keep making money by selling customers the iPhone 5 and 6 and 7 and so on. It’s had a very good run lately and it’s not in the company’s interest to stop that momentum with a faulty product. That said, so far it has responded to these antenna reports very poorly with stupid statements like telling customers they have to learn how to hold their phone differently and at one point deleting every reference to a critical Consumer Reports article on their discussions forums. Hopefully at today’s press event, they’ll apologize for those blunders, have a clear explanation for what’s going on with their antenna and detail a fair and reasonable way to fix it.

Actually, I think Consumer Reports had it exactly right. When they tested the new iPhone, it came out as the highest rated smartphone. They also confirmed the antenna issue and, as a result of that, didn’t recommend it. They didn’t tell people not to buy it, they just couldn’t recommend it.

If I were buying a new phone, I would have no problem buying an iPhone 4. I would, however, be sure check the return policy at the store I was buying it from so I could bring it back without any cost or hassle if I did turn out to have significant problems with it.

But let’s see what Apple says today.