VITA-Learn Central Minutes -- 9/25/08 Meeting

VITA-Learn Central
09/25/08

Location: Crossett Brook Middle School
Present: Kaye Marcelle, Eric Hall, Vitaliy Kulpin, Susan Monmaney, Robin Gouin, Bob Sargent

We talked about peer review for the Educational Technology Specialist endorsement. Both Eric and Vitaliy are looking at undergoing peer review to obtain the endorsement.

Kaye shared the work she is doing with her teachers using blogs. She posed the question to her teachers, if you are going to start blogging, what are you going to give up to make time? She suggests that teachers use blogging sites instead of class websites or newsletters. She uses Edublogs. It was pointed out that you don't need an account to view the blog, as you do on some other blog sites. Below are two urls that are examples of her teachers’ work:

http://www.geob3.edublogs.org/
tyoung.edublogs.org

We played a little bit with a Studio 64 live CD. Thank you Vitaliy for letting us use your laptop to boot the CD. We looked ar Hydrogen demos of percussion tracks. Eric is installing Ubuntu on old machines that he provides to students. He is going to add some music aps to these machines.

This little tidbit alone made the drive to Crossett brook worth the trouble. Infocus media projector remotes do not work with the fluorescent lights. I have had an intermittent problem with this for years. Thanks for the tip Eric.

We talked briefly about cloning machines with open source applications: Clonezilla and FOGG.  If you already have licenses for Ghost, why switch?

We set a tentative meeting day of October 16 @ Montpelier, but we needed to reschedule for November 12th. Stay tuned to learn exactly which school building will host the meeting.

We talked about VTFest. We also talked about participation in VITA-Learn’s board.

We added Ray Ballou telling stories about his summer trip to Russia with his wife to the next meeting’s agenda.

Everyone had to leave at 5:00, so we did not get a tour.