This dictionary of commonly used terms at the WVDE is open for anyone to edit. Please feel free to add, delete and re-write any entry as you see fit.
The WVDE is beginning to use Web Meetings to conduct regular business meetings instead of traveling across the state. This saves a great deal of time and money. There are many companies that provide this service. Currently the WVDE is using a company called “Arkadin” http://www.arkadin.com/
Arkadin provides three services. Teleconference, Anywhere Conference and DataNow Conference.
Process: Sit through training provided by Mark Moore. Once you have been trained your name will be given to Phil Uy who will request a card with your name. This card will have the instructions and the numbers you need to use the services.
If you need to show a PowerPoint slide show, or discuss a document or spreadsheet you could use the Anywhere Conference service. This provides a visual component to your online meeting. Everyone would sit at their home computers and watch your slideshow while listening to you talk on the phone. Our cost is 15 cents per minute for the Anywhere conference plus an additional 4 centers per minute for the teleconference.
If you need to do a more complex type of online meeting such as training a group to use a a website or showing new software to a group of people who are scattered across the state you could use the DATA NOW conference. This allows you to share your software with everyone in the meeting. You could take control of everyone’s computers and lead them through the training. Whatever you do on your computer they would see on their monitors. You would still need to do a teleconference as well. Our cost for this service is 25 cents per minute per connection for the DataNow and 4 cents per minute per connection for the teleconference.
Commonly called a conference call, this allows anyone with a telephone to participate in a group phone call. A teleconference or conference call is audio only. Currently, our rate for the is 4 cents per minute per connection.
Blog is a contraction of the words WEB and LOG. Think of a blog as a diary that is kept online. Many people keep a text journal which gives us the opportunity to look back and see what we were thinking at an earlier time.
A Web Log or Blog allows us to record our thoughts from any computer that is connected to the Internet. We can also share these thoughts with a small group or we can make it public for everyone to see. (Wouldn’t it be helpful if you could read your supervisor’s thoughts?!)
The WVDE has created a blog service located at http://blog.k12.wv.us. Anyone who has an ACCESS email account can create their own blog. A blog consists of multiple ‘posts’. You can thing of your blog as your diary and your post as what you wrote today.
A person could use a blog to ensure that their thoughts are not filtered. Someone who is frequently misquoted in the press could use their blog as a form of recourse.
A teacher could keep a journal of what material was covered and students could refer back to the blog when preparing for an assessment.
A projection device frequently hooked to a laptop computer via a cable. Data Projectors are also frequently called LCD Projectors. This is NOT the same as an Overhead Projector.
Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills - This is a software program used by teachers on PDAs (Palms) to monitor student reading progress.
An Ipod is a very popular MP3 player created by Apple. Microsoft has created a competitor product called a “Zune”.
IMAP and POP3 are basically two ways to work with email. In the past we only had POP3, now we have both. IMAP may be helpful if you want to access your email onto a handheld device or PDA.
The Intel Corporation has created two new courses dealing with educational technology; “Intel Teaching Thinking with Technology” and “Intel Essentials”. These courses are taught through a train-the-trainer model. In the spring of 2007 the WVDE trained 3 Senior Trainers and over 50 Master Trainers in the “Teaching Thinking with Technology” course. Several other people were trained as trainers in the “Essentials” course. The courses deal with current and emerging technologies but more importantly they deal with new methods of instruction and assessment that fit perfectly within the idea of 21st Century Education. The “Teaching Thinking with Technology” course requires 24-40 hours of classroom time. The “Essentials” course takes several weeks of classroom work as well as online study. More information can be found here: http://www.intel.com/education
Pronounced “Ell-Dap” stands for Lighweight Directory Access Protocol. In simple terms it means that you could login once and be automatically logged into everything else that you use.
The WVDE is considering getting an LDAP Server which means you could use one screen to login to your email and you would automatically be logged into your Wiki, your Blog, your personal Webspace, your virtual classes and any other service that the department may provide in the future.
See Thinkfinity
MP3 describes the file extension on a sound file that has been compressed. Most computers and PDAs can play MP3 files however many people also use an MP3 player to listen while “on the go”.
Originally created for bands to communicate with each other, Myspace www.myspace.com now has over 100 million user accounts that include parents, children, businesses, schools and just about everyone else.
Process: You go to www.myspace.com and create a free account. This will give you a ‘page’ to edit to suit your tastes. You can add music, games, graphics, a blog, jokes, and just about anything else that you might want. Now that you’ve created a page you tell you friend about it and find out that they also have a myspace page. You can put a link on your page that takes you to your friend’s page. Very quickly you will end up with many friends listed on your page which also has links to their friends. You may remember the old television commercial “And they tell two friends, and THEY tell two friends..etc.” Myspace is a social networking tool.
The Myspace tools allow you to see when your friend is online and you can communicate with them.
In short, a myspace page allows anyone to have their own personal web presence.
Palm Pilots do not exist anymore but the name has hung around. The original Palm Pilot was a handheld computing device. It was replaced by the “PALM”. Other companies joined this market with devices such as the Jornada, the Treo, and the iPaq.
The most correct term to use is a PDA which stands for Personal Digital Assistant. PDAs can be used to hold your calendar, task list, contacts, digital books, blood pressure and diabetes information, medical information, weight loss software, travel reimbursement records, and many other tools. Some PDAs have wireless internet connection and can be used to receive email and visit websites. With extra hardware you can even connect your PDA to a data projector to show your PowerPoint slide shows.
No, you don’t need an iPod to listen to a Podcast. All you need is an MP3 player. Your computer is an MP3 player, so is your PDA and most likely your mobile phone is too.
Digital sound is nothing new. But some techie people figured out how to make the digital sound fit into a smaller space. Now you could get hours of sound into a space that previously could only hold minutes worth. This new compressed format was called MP3.
Translation: If someone says they have an MP3 it means they have something for you to listen to. Music is the most popular, but it could be lectures or speeches or even jokes.
Some organizations create new MP3s every day. National Public Radio, CNN, The American Association for the Advancement of Science (from MarcoPolo) and the Bob and Tom radio show are a few examples. You computer can use software to go out an hunt down the shows that you like. You simply subscribe (usually free) to the show and your computer collects it for you on a daily or weekly basis. Now you can listen to your show on your computer, on your PDA, on your mobile phone or ON YOUR IPOD. Because iPods are so popular we now call this process a PODCAST.
Example: Every morning you like to listen to NPR but your hectic morning routine means that you miss half of the show. You simply install software (like iTunes) on your computer and tell it to download NPR every day. Now when you get to your office you can listen to the entire show while you work.
Example: You’ve decided to take up jogging. If you have a portable device that plays MP3 files (phone, pda, iPod) you can now listen to your NPR show while jogging.
Example: A teacher sets up a microphone in the classroom and goes about their normal day. Students could then subscribe and listen to the teacher’s lectures again while preparing for an assessment.
What do you need? You need software on your computer to go out an collect the podcasts you like. iTunes is the most popular. This software is free to download. http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/
What if you want to create your own MP3s? A very popular choice is Audacity. This software is also free and can be downloaded here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
SAS inSchool's Curriculum Pathways is a web based educational took that has over 900 lessons that deal with critical thinking and higher-ordered thinking. Curriculum Pathways is suitable for grades 8 and above. There are lessons is math, english, science, social studies and Spanish.
Second Life www.secondlife.com comes from the gaming world. Some computer games span the globe allowing anyone with an Internet connection to challenge anyone else on the planet that is playing the same game. Games such as HALO allow for teams or ‘clans’ to challenge other ‘clans’. Once the gaming world figured out the technology, the business world stepped in to use it in a different way.
1) You go to www.secondlife.com and create a free account. 2) You can create a virtual ‘you’. An avatar. You can choose what clothes to wear, the style of your hair and what race you are. 3) Explore! There are over 6 million people using secondlife right now. 4) Conduct business! Over 1 million US dollars are spent in secondlife every 24 hours. The official currency of the Secondlife world is the “LINDER”. People who live in Secondlife are called “LINDERS”. 5) Anyone could use the tools within secondlife to build a virtual building. All it takes is time. You could design your dream house or dream office and then sell it to someone who needs a meeting place but doesn’t have the time to create their own.
The WVDE could create its own meeting place and any teacher, student or administrator could then meet online. Imagine a teacher holding office hours online rather that ‘in their office’. Parents would no longer have to deal with transportation issues.
A WVDE meeting place could also provide an alternative to “face-to-face” meetings. This is another option to reduce our travel expenses.
Smartboard is a brand name of an interactive white board. Teamboard, Mimio and Numonics are other brand names of interactive boards. In simplest terms, an interactive white board looks like a huge touch screen monitor. It allows a presenter or teacher to take notes directly on the screen and use a pen or even their finger instead of a mouse. Used properly, an interactive whiteboard can bring a lesson to life.
Originally called “MarcoPolo”, Thinkfinity is a parternship between National Geographic, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and others. This partnership has created over 50,000 educational resources in all grade levels and all subjects. These resources are given away free of charge with no subscriptions or passwords. Thinkfiity also has a search engine that is specifically designed for teachers. http://marcopolo.k12.wv.us and http://www.thinkfinity.org
A Webinar is the contraction of the words WEB and Seminar. A more correct term would be Web Meeting. See Arkadin
The WVDE's online learning platform. http://wvlearns.k12.wv.us
A wiki is any kind of thing that can be edited by many people. WikiPedia www.wikipedia.com is the most popular wiki. This is an encyclopedia that anyone can add to. You may be the first person to search for “Education in West Virginia” and find that there is no entry so you create one. When someone else searches and finds your entry they may disagree with you and add a new paragraph onto the bottom.
The WVDE has created a wiki available here: http://wiki.k12.wv.us . You can request a wiki from our webmaster by sending a request here: web@access.k12.wv.us .
The Teacher Leadership Institute uses a wiki to communicate with a large group of people who are spread out throughout the state. They place contact information, agendas, comments online for anyone to see. Many people (but not all) have been given the permission to edit this information as needed. A person in the northern panhandle may be in charge of keeping email address up to date and a person in Charleston may be in charge of scheduling meeting locations.
This document could be placed on a Wiki so that anyone who wishes to contribute to this dictionary could do so. They could also edit something that has already been written.