While in Washington State last week I didn’t have good Internet access.  Laura’s mom still uses AOL dial-up.  Neighbor Duff offered access to his WiFi, but we were just out of range.  So this was the perfect chance to try tethering my laptop to my HTC Android phone.  It worked brilliantly!

I had explored several options for phone tethering.   The current crop of broadband modems just seemed like an additional expense for something with limited capabilities.  I had almost bought the Palm Pre, which can set itself as a WiFi hub, before settling on my HTC Incredible.

I knew I didn’t want to do anything crazy that involved root access to the phone.  I needed something fairly simple, so I first tried PDANet.  I’d had some success using the free version  connecting to my netbook.  However, it was very buggy and kept wanting to crash when I tried connecting it to my larger laptop.

I finally settled on EasyTether, and it worked like a charm.  The phone connected to the laptop with no problem, and I was even able to access the drive space on the phone over the USB cable – something that I couldn’t do with PDANet.  I wound up purchasing the full version of the program for under $10, which gave me access to https and secure sites.  With that I was able to check GMail and remotely log into my district’s network to do some simple maintenance.

I’ve read that 3G speeds are nowhere near as fast as cable or DSL speeds.  However, the speeds I got over my phone were pretty darn fast.  I didn’t try watching lots of video, but I did see a couple of clips, and they played just fine.  I also uploaded lots of high resolution images to Flickr, and those went without a hitch fairly quickly.  As far as I could see, there was nothing I couldn’t access that I would normally access from my home Internet connection. (more…)

I had an eye-opening discovery this week.  One of our principals contacted me about an e-mail she was expecting that hadn’t arrived.  I went into our district spam filter to see if it had been caught there.  While looking for the e-mail, I noticed a lot of traffic from Facebook that had gotten caught in the filter.

At first I thought the Facebook traffic was just generic spam, but decided to click on one to make sure.  Imagine my surprise as I found myself looking at a personal message between two of our teachers about a date they had gone on.  There was absolutely nothing wrong with the message itself, but I’m sure these folks would be appalled to know that I had been privy to such personal correspondence.

The problem was that one of the teachers had used her district e-mail account to sign up for Facebook.  The default setting for Facebook is to send e-mail notification for any wall posts, comments, or private messages.  All of this traffic was coming into our system and subsequently being caught in our spam filter.   I’m sure this teacher didn’t think anything like this would happen, and if she were not getting the e-mails, she would have been unaware of the problem.

Even though the message supposedly was sent within the confines of Facebook, it still wound up on our system.  At that point it becomes property of the district, and could be discoverable by subpoena or FOIA request.  We currently don’t use an e-mail archiving system, but that’s probably going to happen before too long.  When that happens we (my IT staff and administrators) will have even more access to personal messages, whether we want it or not.

I’ve heard some instructional technology gurus call for greater interaction between students, teachers, and parents on social networking sites such as Facebook.  I don’t think that’s such a great idea.  I think there needs to some clear boundaries between the personal and the professional, and that’s just not easy to do on Facebook.  I guess one could create a “teacher” account separate from their personal account, but that can get to be a bother.  My friend John Woodring suggests using a Fan Page.  I still think it’s best just to keep the two separate.

Facebook isn’t the only problem, though.  A teacher that signs up for any other service with a district account will have e-mails coming back from that service.  This could include banking, or any other service that might include personal information.

Starting this fall we’re going to begin insisting that teachers use a personal account for all social networking systems and non-school related services, and to reserve their district account for professional use only.  We have tried to make this standard practice, anyway, and have used the phrase “incidental personal use” for what is allowable.  We’re doing this to protect the teacher, as much as anything.  That way my tech staff doesn’t have to read any personal Facebook soap operas as they find their way into our e-mail system.

Related Posts:

• Facebook and Online Responsibility
• Teachers and Facebook

The problems surrounding teachers using Facebook seem to be getting more and more complex. I’ve written before about how teacher’s private use of Facebook can impact their jobs, whether justly or unjustly.  The issue that was brought up recently involves teachers’ use of Facebook on private mobile devices during school hours.

This is a tricky issue.  We want teachers to be doing what they are paid to do – teach their classes and monitor their students.  But how do you keep this in check?

We have Facebook blocked in our district because of some of the discipline issues is creates with students.  It was suggested that we consider adding restrictions on Facebook usage on private mobile devices to our Acceptable Use Policy.  I flatly disagreed with that.  Our AUP regulates acceptable use of district-owned equipment and services, not private equipment.  I don’t think should or legally could use a policy written for district equipment to be applied to private equipment. (more…)

Here’s an interesting activity you can do with students using Google Earth.  It helps if you use the actual program (or the satellite view in Google Maps) instead of a static image so that students can zoom in and out…

View Larger Map

The above Google Earth image is of the Cherrydale Shopping Center in Greenville.  Using only clues from the image, can you tell me the following:

1. About what time of day was the image captured?
2. What month was the image captured?

Good luck! (more…)

It’s funny how things work out sometimes.  I was putting together that last post and stumbled upon a whole world of new possibilities for embedding content into Google Earth.  I noticed that several of the embed codes used the <iframe> code and just referenced a URL for the embeddable media.  I began to wonder if it would work with any URL, and sure enough, it does!

One of the biggest drawbacks of Google Earth is that it doesn’t have a WYSYWIG HTML editor for placemarks.  If you want to include HTML content, then you have to know how to code.  That can be a pain for teachers, who are, in general, afraid of coding.  Using embeddable content was one way around this.  Using <iframe> takes this one step further and makes just about ANY website embeddable.

Here’s how it works.  Just put the following line in any description box in Google Earth, be it placemark, overlay, folder, etc…

<iframe src=”http://www.someURL.com” />

Make sure to replace “www.someURL.com” with your website.  The website will appear in the placemark’s balloon when you click on it.  Depending on your Internet connection speed, it may take a moment or two for it to load.

You’ll probably notice that the balloon is rather small for the website, and that you have to scroll right and left to see anything.  That’s not good, so I suggest increasing the size of the page as follows:

<iframe src=”http://www.someURL.com” width=500 height=500 />

This gives you a bit more screen real estate.  You don’t want to get too large with the bubble because it will cover too much of your Google Earth map. Unfortunately, scrolling will have to be a part of this, but at least you can make it large enough so that it can be read without too much trouble.  Below is an example using a 500X500 and embedding a link to one of the posts from this website…

There are other properties you can use with <iframe> in Google Earth.  This table lists them, along with the proper syntax.   Keep in mind that their examples assume that you are embedding the frame in another website, rather than in Google Earth.

I’ve found that Flash components tend to crash when embedded into an <iframe> in Google Earth.  If the website you want to use has video or audio, it’s probably not going to work.  In fact, the simpler the website and the less formatting, the better.  If you’re design savvy, you could structure some CSS to detect a smaller screen and format the content appropriately.

So, how might you use this?  Here are a couple of ideas…

1.  Location-Related News

Create a Google Earth file that embeds news articles for specific locations for a “What’s Happening Around the World” activity.

2.  Travel Blogging

Set up a travel blog on Blogger.com or similar service.  Have the <iframe> reference the URL for specific blog posts rather than the entire blog.

I would have love to have know about this when we did our trek across country in 2004, or had taken our London trip in 2006.  I may try it for our next excursion.