SOPA And EdTEch From Jeff Thomas - CTRL-ALT DELiver Podcast

SOPA and How it affects education and a Treasure Chest of EdTech.

Just a quick update from Episode 13. One week later and still no New Twitter UI has been pushed out.

For this week’s tech article I turn to an article from Good.IS on SOPA and it’s potential impact on the Open Education Resource movement. One of the things that I really love about the Internet, in general, and Social Networking, specifically, is the sharing of content and experiences that takes place among educators. When you get into such fine line areas as “fair use” for education, it is entirely feasible that content on a shared website could include some material that is not correctly being used from a copyright standpoint. Although that would certainly not be an educator’s goal, it happens. And when it does, you notify the person that submitted the material and ask them to fix it or it will be removed. This is not the way that it would be handled under the Stop Open Piracy Act, though. No, the entire site could be shut down and their domain blocked by the government. I understand the concerns of the copyright holders and, although I feel that the industry (particularly the entertainment industry), needs to be looking at revamping their distribution models to meet the changes that have taken place, this is NOT the way to go about it.

I have introduced you to Jerry Blumengarten, @cybraryman1 on Twitter. Now meet Jeff Thomas. Jeff has been an educator for over 30 years, as well, and is now Director of Technology at a private middle school. Jeff runs a site called JeffThomasTech.com. Jeff’s approach is very different than Jerry’s, but you put these two into your toolkit and there’s not going to be much that you will miss for your tech needs. Jerry says this about Jeff:

Jeff Thomas @jdthomas7 has been extremely helpful to me as he highlights each week sites that his followers might have missed.Since it is impossible to keep up with all of the great sites that are suggested his weekly tweet I have found to be invaluable.

Energetically yours,

Jerry Blumengarten @cybraryman1

His WebApps Page provides a great list of aggragator sites, such as CybraryMan’s and CoolToolsForSchools. But by far, my favorite part of Jeff’s site is his weekly Treasure Chest of EdTech Resources that you might have missed. The post has three sections: Featured Articles, Tools, and How To’s. The featured articles for this past week, for example, cover everything from SOPA to Flipping Your Classroom (a concept that I want to look into more). The Tools include things like a link to another great Blogger and EdTech inspiration for me, Ozge Karaoglu from Istanbul, Turkey.(I’m sorry if I butchered your name Ozge) She’s been running a series of A-Z Web 2.0 tools that offers an EXTENSIVE list of sites for each letter. I will have to do a feature on her after the New Year. And finally, the How To section includes things like this week’s What are Browser Cache and Cookies, and Does Clearing Them Help? . ALong with Jerry and Ozge, Jeff gives you a rich resource and starting point for becoming an EdTech master.
Follow him on Twitter at @jdthomas7

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