Eric Hoefler

On the Phone with Zee

Sunday, April 1, 2007

Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with Ziad “Zee” Muhmood, one of the minds behind the still-in-development TTeach site. He called from his London base and we spoke for nearly an hour about both the technology and the vision behind TTeach (which he pronounced as just “teach”). For anyone curious, I thought I’d share [...]

TTeach and Others Like It

Thursday, March 1, 2007

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A comment on an earlier post asking if anyone had information about tteach led me to Peter Rock’s blog entry. There, he says of tteach: Paying teachers through advertising revenue is unwise pedagogy. The site says that “tteach is essentially School 2.0″. Apparently, School 2.0 is really about placing profit over students. gnuosphere: School 2.0 [...]

The Killer EdApp

Saturday, February 24, 2007

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This Wednesday (Feb. 28th, 2007), I’ll be talking with Paul Allison and others on TeachersTeachingTeachers.org about various CMS (Community Management System) solutions for schools. Specifically, I’ll be talking about Joomla. I’ve written some notes on Joomla before, and have been talking to a few teachers in other districts about its potential for the classroom. For [...]

Watching LibraryFriends

Saturday, February 24, 2007

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I recently figured out how LibraryThing handles “friends,” and it makes the site even cooler. LibraryThing doesn’t call friends “friends” (because maybe they’re not really your “friends”) and doesn’t make the list two-way (so you can follow someone’s library without letting everyone else know whose library you’re following). Instead, LibraryThing uses a “watch list.” When [...]

Mobile Decisions

Monday, February 19, 2007

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About a month ago, I wrote about introducing the idea of mobile alerts into my classroom. Today, Connee left a comment on that post, along with some good ideas for using the two services I mentioned, which reminded me to post an update. After that post, I set up a survey on the class website [...]

Huh – Anyone Know?

Monday, February 19, 2007

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Have you seen tteach yet? I stumbled-upon it. Here’s what they say about themselves: tteach is essentially …School 2.0. Where the world educates each other and where you learn what you want to learn. We’re here every step of the way…to make it fun, simple, interactive and as much yours as it is ours. tteach! [...]

Levels of Safety

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

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As a few of my former posts reveal, I’m trying to find a balance between helping my students take advantage of online technologies on the one hand, and ensuring their safety and our compliance with district guidelines on the other. (And apparently I’m not the only one, though Wesley Freyer takes things a step further [...]

Never Anti-Safety, Always Pro-Empowerment

Monday, January 29, 2007

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Never Anti-Safety, Always Pro-Empowerment

I’ve been invited to sit in on my county’s “Internet Safety Committee,” whose purpose is to revise the Acceptable Use Policy. I hope the revisions will improve safety without severly restricting access, but I’m worried. I’ve written before about some of the problems I have with denying access to (and thus preventing instruction about) the [...]

Slowly Moving Mobile

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

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Yesterday I found myself needing to get a message to my AP 12 students. I had the email addresses of most of them and the cell numbers of a few, but I found myself wishing for their cell numbers more than their email addresses. The reason? I know that email is soo last century … [...]

Using Joomla in the Classroom

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

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Update/Note: This post has been re-written to reflect that I no longer teach using this site. In addition, the site detailed in this post used Joomla version 1.3. Therefore, some of the capabilities and limitations of Joomla described below may no longer apply. Also, the example websites described below are no longer active. I keep [...]

Freedom and Safety for All

Saturday, January 20, 2007

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Last week, my creative writing students pulled out their laptops and headed over to the eStudio that I setup on ELGGSpaces (which is designed specifically with education in mind, and for which I had just spend $99 out-of-pocket to make the space ad-free.) They were going to upload some new drafts, write some blog posts [...]

Sharing Resources

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

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I’ve been working with Teacher Consultants of the Northern Virginia Writing Project over the last few weeks, and we’ve created a few Google Docs that served as the outline for our sessions. The goal was to give a solid introduction to forums, blogs, and wikis, and to situate those tools in the concepts that underpin [...]

The Problem is Gaining National Recognition

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

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I first heard about The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce on Will Richardson’s blog. He tells us that the full 200+ page study from the National Center on Education and the Economy will be released on Amazon this Friday. You can read the summary by downloading the PDF. Two choice quotes [...]

When Will We Listen?

Monday, December 11, 2006

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Lots of people seem to be blogging about the latest education article in Time magazine, titled “How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century.” (You can’t get to the full article without a subscription, but your public library has access to tons of online databases … it’s worth the few minutes of searching.) [...]

Permission to Play

Friday, December 8, 2006

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For about five years, I’ve been running an online community with a few teachers and their students at my school. This year, as “Web 2.0″ continues to expand our educational options, I’ve started finding ways to wrap some of these features into the site, and I’m very excited about the tools we can offer students [...]