Rather than jump in with both feet, I signed up for one course to check the program out.  The online learning environment was easy to navigate, course expectations were clearly communicated from the start, and I was given weekly feedback on my work.  I interacted with my teaching assistant frequently in the first course, requesting more thorough feedback than “Great Work! 25/25.”  I found the mix of reading, writing, and doing assignments to be reasonable and thorough.  I was sold.

Since completing that first course, my impression of the rigor, quality, and legitimacy of the online Educational Leadership program at Arkansas State University has only improved.  Although slight changes in content delivery, feedback formats, and internship details have come and gone, the quality of instruction has remained uncompromised.  In spite of the “first line of defense” being teaching assistants, I have always felt connected to my professors.  One even invited me to come to Jonesboro and join her for coffee to continue a discussion we were having via email.

The advertisement that drew me into this program claimed to enhance my leadership skills, dispositions, and practices.  Although I possessed leadership aspirations as a classroom teacher, I was sorely lacking in leadership skills and practices.  This program has developed each of those in me and more.  I have grown from teacher to educator.  My perspective has shifted from the students, resources, and activities in my classroom to the students, resources, and activities in my school and community.

Exactly how and when this transition occurred is difficult to pinpoint.  Looking at my early internship activities and class assignments presented in my final portfolio, it is clear that my solutions were designed for the individual classroom and teacher.  My most recent internship activities and assignments reflect a broader perspective inclusive of the school’s shared vision.  This is a deep shift in my thinking and approach to solving problems.

The reflection component stressed by the program has also had a profound impact on my growth as an educational leader.  By requiring key assignments and activities to be inventoried and presented with reflections, the value of early assignments can truly be experienced through the lens of a more mature student.  I have taken time to review work completed in and out of class independently and with my mentor.  Only by looking back is the true value of the work realized.  Reflection is an activity that I plan to continue as a part of my professional growth plan.

In summary, the online degree program that attracted me for its flexibility and low price has proven to be worth its price tenfold.  The skills and abilities that I have acquired when paired with the intangible shift in my perspective and dispositions will allow me to be a true educational leader capable of improving the lives of students for years to come.

This year, Arkansas 9th through 12th grade students have the opportunity to work directly with UALR faculty and students on a variety of ground-breaking research projects in the following areas:

• Computer and Information Science
  • Scientific Programming on High Performance Computing Systems
  • Sensitivity-Aware Secure Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks
  • Data Structures and Algorithms
  • Model of Facial Parameter Extraction and Animation
  • Step by Step introducing Scratch Programming
  • Creating a Twitter “Mood Ring”
• Engineering
  • Fabrication of MEMS-Based Piezoelectric Sensors
  • Photovoltaic Solar Power Systems
• Applied Science
  • Dynamic object following by a mobile robot
  • Mobile robot position estimation using a laser rangefinder
  • 3D imaging sensor for mobile robot navigation
• Biology and Chemistry
  • Exploring the effect of pH homeostasis on life span extension
  • Carbon-based Nanomaterials for Nanophotonics and Optical Biosensing
  • Synthesis and characterization of amide based iron or manganese complexes for activation
    of hydrogen peroxide and oxygen

Vernard Henley, Program Director, shared the following details about the program:

The objective of the HSRP is to engage academic high achievers in a focused research environment by proactively mentoring them and helping them make informed choices on appropriate course work during their high school years for pursuing future careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. In addition, the program provides informal peer mentoring by engaging students in faculty research projects, allowing high school students to establish early contact with college students and professors in specific areas of their interest. A list of available projects is attached.

The supervised residential camp is provided at no charge to students who are accepted to this competitive program.  The HSRP runs July 10 – 29, 2011.  Applications must be postmarked by April 22.

For complete details, please review the full projects list, the application, or contact Vernard Henley. at (501)569-8203.

Applications are now being accepted for the 2011 K-12 Computing Teachers Workshop.  The workshop will be held at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference (GHC) in Portland, Oregon on November 11-12, 2011.  The K-12 workshop is hosted in Partnership with the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) and the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) and will be the third K-12 teachers workshop held at the GHC.  We hope that this year’s theme “Extending Our Reach: New Tools for Engaging all Students” will provide for a fun and engaging workshop.

For details, reference the workshop agenda. Space is limited for the workshop. Teachers who wish to participate in the workshop and apply for a scholarship to support their travel costs must submit an application.  The deadline to apply is May 1, 2011. All applicants will be notified on June 15, 2011.

Registration for the workshop is $40 and includes Grace Hopper Conference activities.  Registration costs will be waived for teachers who are awarded a scholarship to help support their travel costs.  Scholarship awards (to be reimbursed after the conference) include shared hotel for 2 nights, airfare, ground transportation, mileage or gas up to the amount of the travel award. Participants who live less than 1 hour from the conference hotel will not receive hotel accommodations as part of their scholarship and are not eligible to be reimbursed for hotel expenses.

One of the recommendations is that professional educators

Leverage social networking technologies and platforms to create communities of
practice that provide career-long personal learning opportunities for educators within and across schools, preservice preparation and in-service educational institutions, and professional organizations.

The report goes on…

Social networks can be used to provide educators with career-long personal learning tools and resources that make professional learning timely and relevant as well as an ongoing activity that continually improves practice and evolves their skills over time. Online communities should enable educators to take online courses, tap into experts and best practices for just-in-time problem solving, and provide platforms and tools for educators to design and develop resources with and for their colleagues.

Unfortunately, my current institution is blind to the value that comes from access to such resources. Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and many other sites are blocked for employees on some network segments. Where we can reach these resources, we have been warned very sternly not to. Consider this message from my institution’s president about sites such as Facebook:

Beginning tomorrow, we are asking our IT Department to give us lists of all [college] employees who are on these and other social networks. In turn, we will contact those employees and require that they submit to their supervisors and then to their up line vice president a written justification for this use and a detailed business purpose for it. Then, by reference to this memo, we are requesting that our IT department conduct random checks each week of employees logged into social network sites and these employees will be contacted and required to submit to their supervisors and then to their up line vice president a written justification for this use and a detailed business purpose for it. Most use of social networks by employees cannot be justified by a business purpose and is classified as personal use which is prohibited.

How do your schools treat social media? What approaches have you used to soften the stance of an otherwise progressive administration on this issue? Is this a battle worth fighting?

I’d better sign off before the Gestapo find out that I’ve been blogging… If you wish to reach me at work, I’d recommend sending a fax.

PS:  This blog post came out after I wrote this entry.  It’s a perfect example of how professional educators are using social media.  Give it a read.

The title for the Prezi portion of the workshop is “Forget everything you know about PowerPoint.”

Join Discovery Education’s Arkansas Leadership Council for a fabulous event on Saturday, November 6, 2010, as we explore Hot Springs, the perfect site to learn about Arkansas History. Hot Springs has a colorful heritage and the honor of having one of the first national parks. This event, which focuses on Arkansas History, emphasizes how Discovery Education Streaming and Streaming Plus can be used to supplement the Arkansas History curriculum.

During this event we will be teaching participants how to use Discovery media in Prezi, a presentation editor used to create live and online presentations. Participants will be encouraged to take photographs of the historic Fordyce Bathhouse, the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts, and numerous other historic buildings, artifacts, and primary sources that surround the downtown area. Participants will then be able to include these photographs in their Arkansas history Prezi. The event will also include a presentation from the Director of the Garland County Historical Society as well as a National Park tour of the Fordyce Bathhouse. The event will finish with lunch at the historic Brickhouse Grill.

The entire event is sponsored by Discovery Education and is completely free to the first 25 participants who register at https://lrougeux.wufoo.com/forms/discover-arkansas/

As with any good lesson, let’s begin by defining terms…

Google Voice
A free service that allows users to use a web interface to control how calls are placed and received on their existing telephones.  Voice gives users a single, public telephone number, but does not allow calls to originate or terminate at a computer.

Skype
A free service that allows users to place and receive computer-to-computer calls.  To work, it must be installed and running in the background on both computers.

SkypeOut
A paid service, usually about $3.00/month, that allows Skype users to place calls from a computer to a telephone number in the US.

sipgate
Sipgate is a company that offers virtual telephone service.  Users sign up, download the sipgate software, and then select a telephone number.  When someone dials the telephone number, the software rings like a telephone, and the call can be answered on the computer.  Users are allowed free incoming calls, but outgoing calls are billed by the minute.  The sipgate software is very buggy

Kluge: /klooj/ (from The Jargon File)

1. n. A Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in hardware or software.
2. n. A clever programming trick intended to solve a particular nasty case in an expedient, if not clear, manner. Often used to repair bugs. Often involves ad-hockery and verges on being a crock.
3. n. Something that works for the wrong reason.

Right.  Whether my iPhone’s battery is critically low or I need to record a call for use in a podcast or other multimedia work, I often place and receive telephone calls using my computer.  Until this week, I’ve had a setup much like the one shown here.

When someone calls my Google Voice number, all of my telephones ring.  Additionally, the call is forwarded to sipgate.  When the sipgate virtual telephone application is running on my computer, it, too, rings like a telephone.  By answering the sipgate virtual phone, I have achieved my goal.  The drawback is that the caller is being routed through two different companies before reaching my computer, and if anything goes wrong anywhere along the way, the call drops.

Since sipgate charges by the minute for outbound calls, I decided to go with SkypeOut, which is only $3.00 per month.  When I call someone, I want my Google Voice number to appear on their Caller ID.  Until a few months ago, this meant using SkypeOut to dial my Google Voice account, and then using the Skype keypad to direct Google Voice to relay the call to my destination.  It was a lot like using a calling card.  Now, Skype allows SkypeOut users to set their SkypeOut Caller ID, making the process much easier.  Still, SkypeOut costs me $3.00 each month.

Until last week, placing and receiving calls from my computer was a mess!  Now, any time I’m logged into GMail (which is always), I can use browser-based software to do all of this without buggy programs bogging down my system or monthly fees!

To place a call, I simply click “Call Phone” from my GMail contacts list.  I enter the number (or select the person from the integrated Google Contacts list), and I’m quickly connected.  My outgoing Caller ID is my Google Voice number.

To receive a call requires a few simple steps, described here in the Google Chat Help documentation.  Simply place an outbound call using “Call Phone” in GMail, then  navigate to your Google Voice settings.  In your list of phones, you will see a new entry for your GMail account at the bottom.  Simply check the box!

Now, calls can be placed and received using a simple web-based tool offered free from Google that integrates perfectly with the other Google tools I already use.  What a great week!  Just another reason why Every Educator Needs Google Voice.

EMBHSSC
The ExxonMobil Bernard Harris Summer Science Camp is a two-week, academic, residential camp that emphasizes increasing students’ mathematics and science skills while introducing them to college life and stimulating their interest in science and engineering as a potential career path. Each day, campers attended classes that included problem solving, research and communication skills incorporated with biology, chemistry, physics, environmental sciences, earth sciences, technology, engineering and design concepts, and field excursions.

An interdisciplinary experience that we created this year that I am particularly proud of called on students to combine skills from Mathematics, Science, and Technology classes to analyze water quality data from various sources on campus.  Trimble, a leading provider of advanced positioning solutions, lent over $40,000.00 worth of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) hardware and software to the camp identical to those used in the gulf oil spill clean-up efforts.

Students worked in groups in the field to analyze water samples from fountains, streams, and sprinklers.  Using their understanding of chemistry fundamentals such as pH, they paired water quality information with location information collected using the GPS receivers.  Back in the classroom, students visualized the data with Google Earth, allowing them to speculate about possible pollution sources.

HSRP
I have been involved with the University of Arkansas at little Rock’s High School Research Program (HSRP) since its beginning in 2006.  The objective of the HSRP is to engage academic high achievers in a focused research environment by proactively mentoring them and helping them make informed choices on appropriate course work during their high school years for pursuing future careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. In addition, the three week residential summer program provides informal peer mentoring by engaging students in faculty research projects, allowing high school students to establish early contact with college students and professors in specific areas of their interest.

Students worked on a variety of research projects this summer including Micro-Electromechanical Systems (MEMS)-based piezoelectric materials in health monitoring applications, Computer Modeling of Human Respiratory Physiology, SCRATCH Programming, Robotics, Distributed Computing, and Social Network Mood Analysis.  For a full list including project descriptions, consult the 2010 project list.

As you can see in the above Animoto, the high school students have considerably more “play time” than the middle schoolers, but they all achieved great things this summer!

For more information about UALR, EIT, EMBHSSC, HSRP, or any other unpronounceable acronym, contact Vernard Henley, vwhenley@ualr.edu.

When they first start using Google Maps, most people want to make a “places I’ve been” map.  The Google Maps interface is clunky to say the least, and the requirement to place the pin in just the right place causes some to abandon this project early.  Even when you have a cheat sheet, it’s easy to get lost in the process.

Enter foursquare.  This is a social tool that lets you “check in” with your location-aware mobile phone when you visit a place.  Recently, Starbucks offered discounts to people who were the most frequent checker-inners at their nearby locations.  While I was explaining to a group of middle school students how to use $5,000 Trimble GPS systems to collect and plot geolocation data points in Google Earth this week it occurred to me that it should be possible to do the same thing with foursquare data on a Google Map.

I’m not the first person to make this discovery, but it was my own idea, I swear!

To access your foursquare location feed in Google-friendly KML format, click on History and then pick the orange RSS icon.  From there, copy the second link, labeled KML.  Pay attention to the bottom note about adding ?count=25 to the address you just copied to specify the maximum number of most recent points to pull.  This defaults to 25.  The easiest part of this whole process is on Google’s end.  Just go to http://maps.google.com and paste your KML URL right into the search box!  Finally, click the “Save to My Maps” link (which only appears if you’re signed into your Google account).

If I survive this middle school camp I promise to blog again soon!

I give my Google Voice number to everyone.  I put it on my syllabi, I list it on my resume, I hand it out on business cards, I share it in workshops, and I even post it online.  My Google Voice number is (501) 303 MOIX.

I have my Voice account set up to announce callers.  This feature is optional.  What happens when someone calls my Voice number depends entirely on their Caller ID information.

If it’s a new number…
the caller is greeted by “the Google Voice lady,” is asked to speak their name, and then hears ringing.  If the call is not answered, it is sent to voice mail.

If it’s a caller who has already given their name before of if their number appears in my Google Contacts list…
the caller simply hears ringing.  If the call is not answered, it is sent to voice mail.

Depending on who is calling and the time of day, some, none, or all of my phones ring.  When I answer, I hear the name of the caller and a list of options.  The primary options are to take the call or to send the caller to voice mail.  If I select voice mail, I still have the option to listen while the message is being recorded and break in if necessary.

Why is this a service that all educators should seriously consider?

Documentation
By default, all Google Voice activity is logged.  Dates, times, recorded names, and call durations are all easily accessible.  If someone sends a text message to your Voice number that you reply to, both the incoming and outgoing messages are preserved.  Voice messages will remain in your account until they are deleted, and thanks to the text transcriptions they are searchable by keyword.

Control
Giving your home or mobile number to parents provides them with a means to contact you outside of work hours, but sometimes people call at the strangest hours.  By defining the times that you will not take calls you control when calls go directly to voice mail.

Consistency
This falls into two categories.  First, if all of your contacts know to use your Google Voice number, you will avoid a situation where your private home or mobile number “gets out.”  People will soon find that the best way to reach you is through the new number.  Second, you can consolidate your GMail and Telephone contacts using Google’s comprehensive contacts system.  Create and manage only a single copy of everyone’s information.  If you use a smartphone, you can even sync Google Contacts back onto your mobile device.

In the end, Google Voice has many handy features that you can only appreciate once you’ve started using it.  Voice lets you initiate phone calls and text messages right from your browser.  If you are on a call that you picked up on your home phone you can quickly and quietly transfer that call to your mobile phone by pressing *.  If you are “in the zone” and need to hold all calls, you can enable Do Not Disturb which can be configured to turn itself off after a duration you choose.

Using voice is not without its challenges, though.  If you are out and about and want to place a call using your Voice number, you have to dial into that account and then key in the number to call.  Alternatively, you can use your phone’s mobile browser to initiate the call, but it still takes some effort.

Head over to http://voice.google.com and set up your account.  It’s free, and they let you pick your own number.