I have a Facebook account, I have Twitter, Diigo, Flickr, Blogspot, Edmodo, LinkedIn, and about any other social media site you can think of. The issue questions becomes, how do I make them work together. I know there are lots of neat ways to set one up to post to the other and to use RSS to get lots more done, but that can be a bit of a pain. Yesterday I was introduced to IFTTT (If This Then That). For those of you who remember what BASIC programming was, then an IF THEN statement should be familiar to you. It is also used in the study of logic. This however is a website that allows you to do some pretty cool things all from one site.

I set one up for the school that will (hopefully) feed our Activities calendar to our twitter account, and if we had a Facebook Fan Page, then I could send it there too. For personal use, I have it send a tweet from me when I create a new blog post (this will be the first one, so I hope it works), when the ITEC fan page on Facebook has a post, it goes to my twitter, and when itec_ia tweets, I retweet it.

What is really cool about the site is the recipe book. People are sharing their IF THENs so that you do not have to recreate the wheel. I know that I am not on the bleeding edge, but I like to think that I am a little ahead of the average bear when it comes to new technologies. By the number of recipes that are already on the site, I feel like I am out of the loop on this.

I hope that some of you find this site interesting and useful. If not, then I am sorry I wasted your time. But for me, the sky is the limit as I think of new ways to use ifttt.

Until next time, Happy Days!

I love Facebook. If for no other reason than it allows me to keep in contact with people from my past without really having to have a conversation with them. My daughter has been begging my wife and me for permission to open a Facebook account for two years now. We have been adamant about denying this request based on her age. As a fifth grader we feel it is important to fight for her childhood. As more and more of her friends are getting on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites, it is getting harder and harder to maintain our position. It seems that today's children are more in touch with having online lives. They would just as soon e-mail or post on a friend's wall, then talk to them in school. Given this modern method of communication, it is important that students, parents, and teachers are all on the same page when it comes to understanding what that means and how they should best go about living their online lives.

Using the Common Sense Media curriculum, I am working to develop a plan that combines teacher training, student courses, and parent info packets to create a complete curriculum that best instructs our students about their online lives. Keeping them safe is the number one concern, but teaching them proper etiquette and cyber citizenry are also important in the lessons.

Teacher training can be viewed here.
Student curriculum can be viewed here.
Parent information can be viewed here.

Why Textbook Companies Are Dying

I will start this entry out with a disclaimer that most of what I am going to write is pure conjecture. I have little to no evidence to support what I feel is true. Having said that, I will still be happy to express my opinion.

I do not think that textbook companies live under rocks. They are aware of the changes that are occurring to their industry. This is evident as some of them have attempted to get into the Student Information System (SIS) business or into the e-book realm. But overall, I think they have a slightly inflated opinion of themselves.

This blog entry has been stewing around in my head for a year or so. I see textbooks as an outdated idea. Why should we limit ourselves to one source of information for a class? Why use a textbook when there are almost limitless resources available to us on the web? Why spend ridiculous amounts of money on an textbooks that all too often are so limited in scope?

We recently went with a specific textbook companies literature series. Part of the package included online curriculum that would help to integrate technology into the class. During the presentation I was impressed by the publishing companies attempt to be relevant to a 21st Century school setting. This online component was a major selling point and one of the main reasons we went with this particular series. My thoughts were that we had found a publishing company that understood the fact that textbooks are becoming obsolete and that by providing an online component they could remain current and effective.

Now we are one quarter into the school year and I am hearing that many of the online features do not work with our systems. Upon calling the company for support I was asked why we do not use IE as our default browser. This is where I should have realized that Publishing companies are dinosaurs and we should run while we could. I informed them that we are a mac platform and that IE has not been developed for the Mac since 2003. The support reps response floored me. HE asked "Why would you use Macs?" Really, that is your question? He then did a little research and said it was a specific java update that was causing the problem. I told him that because we are Mac, that update did not apply to us. He then said that an older version of Safari was shown to work with the software. So he expects me to downgrade my current software set so that we can run his web based curriculum.

So this is where I am at. I have no need for a company that

1. Is so full of itself that it feels it can dictate to me which computer platform we should use, not just to run their software, but because they feel it is better.
   
2. Wants me to actually downgrade my browsers to best utilize the curriculum they offer.
3. Blames other software companies for "breaking" their product.
   
4. Refuses to write web based software to HTML or XHTML standards so that it can be used on most browsers.

This is why these companies will eventually die. They live in 1950, when they were able to dictate what the curriculum was and how it was taught, because you needed their textbooks and teacher resources. Well it is 2011, there is this little thing now called the "Internet" perhaps they have heard of it. Rumor has it that you can research almost any topic and find resources for almost every course. There are even people out there that have done a lot of research and are willing to share lesson plans and full curriculum. I would suggest that publishers figure out.