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We're getting set up to share our portions of the ISTE 2014 experience in Atlanta, Georgia with educators around the globe at our ISTESIGVE headquarters in Second Life. Beginning Saturday, June 28, I'll be streaming SIGVE events into Second Life on the rooftop of our beautiful HQ building.

There's a notecard in the sign that details events, dates, and times proposed for streaming and this information will continue to grow as I plan the conference. I'm very excited this year because my only real presentation (that I'm time-committed to) is the SIGOL Ignite session, which should be cooler than grits and lasts only an hour. The rest of the time I'll be your cameraman on the scene, and I'll be in SL and in Atlanta and in the action's thick. Plan to plop down on a rooftop "comfy cushion" and join us! The Playground this year is organized and run by our own Bluebarker Lowtide and should be worth the cost of admission alone (if there were a cost of a…

I am lucky to live on the west side of Nashville, in a neighborhood where all the mostly ranch-style homes are backed by steep ridges that run like beef-steak marbling through the landscape. While the tops of the ridges closest to my home are technically not a part of the Conservancy proper (see the map at the Conservancy's website), they are attached to it by virtue of their undeveloped woodsiness and steep remoteness. My own property line contains a triangle of the woods, and just above it is a high ridge that if I follow it up to its highest point, connects to the "Ecological Corridor" protected not just by its elevation, but by law. If I could backpack in a boat to get me across the Cumberland River, I could hike to my favorite fishing lake, Marrowbone Lake, just northeast of Beaman Park, at the north end of the Corridor.


The other day, the last day of Winter, in order to get out of the house for a bit, I hiked up the back yard an onto "my" ridge. (Coming b…

Very cool: Getty Images just implemented a decision to make its images watermark free and embeddable in exchange for a mandatory link to its site. This is a huge boon to bloggers, students, and teachers who are creating content. I'm just passing it along here, discovered this morning in Facebook shared by Wesley Fryer and Sharon Duffy Elts. they, in turn, got the skimmy on this sea change at The Verge. To find your own images by searching the Getty Images site, simply use the search tool and click on the open/close tags icon beneath your resulting picture. It looks like this:

. Copy the code and make sure you are in your html edit mode. Paste it in, formatting as you wish -- I notice the image below, embedded in that way, has a scroll bar which I could noodle around with (likely the size parameters) to make disappear.  I'm thinking that the mandatory link is a citation in and of itself, voila! Auto-citation! At least in online documents. You may need to do an internet citation …

Roughly 6,000 public school teachers will all be consistently exposed to a rigorous online self-paced course in Blackboard over the remainder of Spring semester and through the summer. In all schools in the district this week and ongoing, All-Star "Lead Learners" are introducing this program to their full-time certificated charges of 50 or fewer teachers along with the District expectation that they complete it by what I like to call "August the Oneth."

For the first time in my own 4 year employment with Metro, every single teacher will be on the same page with important concepts, policies, and resources--including Education 2018 (MNPS's plan "to become the highest performing school district in the nation by 2018"),  Common Core State Standards, PARCC testing, District hardware and software, Response to Instruction and Intervention, Teaching for Understanding, and what the district is calling it's "Lever of Change," Personalized Learnin…