Greetings Educators,

When I first started in the field of educational technology some 17 years ago, I was amazed at the rate of change that occurred in the field in such a short amount of time. My first experience on a computer was writing a short tutorial and quiz program on a Radio Shack TRS 80 and I quickly moved on to a portable Compaq computer that was about the size of a sewing machine with dual floppy drives. Now looking back I see that, compared to the current pace of change, we were moving rather slowly. Back in “my day” we used Web 1.0 which was quite static. Users did not interact with the content; they only were able to read it. Now with the advent of Web 2.0, users have the ability to interact with the content with blogs, wikis, and podcasts. And this allows the average computer user to create and post content with minimal computer skills.

In keeping with the changing times we have decided to move our EduTech Today newsletter to a Wordpress blog so that our readers can take advantage of RSS feeds and include our articles in their RSS readers. If you have already subscribed to our program you will continue to receive our quarterly newsletter via email and have the added benefit of the RSS feeds. If you have not subscribed, you may do so by going to the Subscribe page.

We will still be sending excerpts of our articles out via email to accommodate our readers that currently do not have an RSS aggregator set up. To learn more about RSS aggregators you can view this short video at http://commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english. In our first course in the Certificate program we have students set up a Netvibes page that allows them to have a collection of RSS feeds all on one page. We provided a tutorial in one of our previous issues. You can access it by going to http://edutech.msu.edu/newsletter/netvibes/netvibes.html to learn how to take advantage of our new format.

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Certificate/Masters Student Makes the Local News

We were very happy to hear that one of our current students in the Masters of Educational Technology program recently made the local news for a project she did in her CEP 812 course. Katie Gutteridge, a Science teacher at West Middle School in Grand Blanc, wrote and received a grant as a part of her TechQuest project in the third course of the Certificate program. The grant was to connect her students with NASA via a video conference. 

On the day of the video conference her students were able to connect with NASA officials and ask them questions in regards to reading satellite photos of the earth. The students loved the opportunity to talk with a scientist directly from Johnson Space Center in Houston,Texas. You can read more about the experience by visiting http://blog.mlive.com/flintjournal/newsnow/2007/12/
nasa_teaches_grand_blanc_7thgr.html.

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Pinckney High School Connects with Algerian High School in E3Link Project

Students at Pinckney High School have been participating in the E3Link Project since the start of the program in September 2006. Recently their connection went beyond the PowerPoint presentations they shared with their partner school. They had the opportunity to connect with their Algerian partner school via a video conference. As part of the video conference U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Brighton, made a visit to Pinckney and Ambassador Robert Ford visited the Algerian partner school. Students were able to ask questions of each other to learn more about the other country’s culture. You can read more about the video conference and what students had to say about their experience by visiting http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008803050375 and http://www.dailypressandargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/
20080305/NEWS01/803050330.

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Edit Images on the Fly using Photo Gadget freeware

As part of our Certificate courses, students share their favorite tips and tricks using technology in their classroom. Often when students select websites that they find useful we will highlight them in our Web Sightings section of our newsletter.Starting in May our students will be selecting their favorite tip and trick from those submitted in their class and post it to our MACUL Space EduTech Group so that anyone can benefit from these great suggestions.

One of our students, Kelly Royer, recently submitted a tip regarding a free software program that you can download to your computer that adds image editing options to your right click menu. She found this program to be very useful for her students by allowing them to edit and save images from the Internet on the fly rather than having to open up a photo editing program.

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We are excited to announce that we now have two social communities available to our readers. For those of you who are Facebook junkies, we have now started a group in Facebook at http://msu.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7822384107. If you already have an account you will need to login, become a member of the Michigan State University Network, and then you can join the MAET group. If you haven’t joined Facebook yet you will need to create an account and join the Michigan State University Network, before you can access the group.

MACUL has also created a wonderful and very active social community on Ning. As part of the MACUL Space we have created our own group so past, current and future students of our program can keep in touch and share great ideas on the latest uses of technology in education. To access the group you can go to http://maculspace.ning.com/group/msuedutech.You can see all the information without having to login or sign up. If you would like to become a member and participate in the group you do need to create an account.

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Web Sites Worth Visiting

Website	Description and Educational Applications
http://www.viddler.com/	Viddler is a fresh, creative web application that lets you upload, enhance, and share digital video quickly and easilyinside your web browser.(Submitted by Leigh Graves Wolf, Program Coordinator for the Master’s in Educational Technology Program at MSU)
http://jumpcut.com/	If creating a video and publishing it to the web seems like a challenge, we think you’ll find that Jumpcut makes it easy and fun. If you’ve been wondering what to do with the video you shoot with your snazzy new camera (or your phone), Jumpcut is the perfect place for you to be creative. If video isn’t your thing just yet and you just want to make cool slideshows with your pictures, Jumpcut is still the best place.Finally, it is also a free online location where you can use all your media, create great looking movies and publish to anyone you choose.(Submitted by Leigh Graves Wolf, Program Coordinator for the Master’s in Educational Technology Program at MSU)
http://nettrekker.com/	This award-winning educational search engine brings the best of the web to K-12 students, teachers, librarians, and parents. netTrekker d.i. connects you and your students to more than 180,000 hand-selected, educator-approved sites – organized by readability level and aligned with your state standards, providing resources ideal for every student’s learning needs with safe, reliable results.(Submitted by several Educational Technology Certificate Students)
http://www.commoncraft.com	Common Craft has created several videos that help explain some of the new Web 2.0 technologies in a humorous and less technical format. They make complex ideas easier to understand. They focus on simplicity, creativity and clear explanations to create videos that stick. Learn more about RSS feeds, blogging, wikis, and social bookmarking through these short 3-5 minute videos.
http://cnx.org/	Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Our Content Commons contains educational materials for everyone — from children to college students to professionals — organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger collections or courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons “attribution” license.

Our courses are taught by an outstanding team of MSU adjunct faculty, many of whom are:

• K-12 classroom teachers themselves who have experience using educational technology in the classroom
• Graduates from our certificate program
• Exceptionally skilled in educational technology
• Winners of awards such as technology Teacher of the Year from the Michigan Association of Computer-Related Technology Users in Learning (MACUL) and the national award of the International Society for Technology in Education

This quarter’s instructor spotlight is . . .

Carrie Albin, Outreach Coordinator for the MSU Educational Technology Certificate Program.

Carrie Albin is the Outreach Coordinator for the Educational Technology Certificate Program at Michigan State University. She is responsible for setting up new locations for the Certificate program in Michigan, recruiting teachers, updating the curriculum, managing the EduTech Today newsletter, and presenting information about our program at conferences. In this role she was a key participant on some international projects in the College of Education. She also worked on the team that developed the online versions of the Certificate courses. Carrie will be traveling to Plymouth, England this summer to teach the Certificate courses.

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Question: I print a lot of information from the web so I can read it easier on paper rather than on the screen. Unfortunately I often get a last page that prints out with only the web address information which is wasting paper. In addition there are usually images that I could do without helping me to save both paper and ink. Do you know of a way that I can eliminate this problem and print only the information I need?

Answer: There are several options available. First you could use the Print Preview feature on your browser and determine if there is an unnecessary page at the end. If so you can select only the range of pages that you would like to print.

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