Honest Company

It’s Tuesday, November 30th, 2010 and welcome to episode 114 of TechTalk4Teachers, I’m Tom Grissom. We are back from a week long Thanksgiving break where I was lucky enough to take a technology holiday and managed to have a solid week of no online activities for the first time since I can remember. I hope those of you in the U.S. also had an enjoyable Thanksgiving break and found some time to reflect on all the blessings we have as Americans. One of those blessings for me is a great public education. Right Click Here to Download MP3 (10 minutes 11 seconds) It has been a very busy November here in our college as we are ¾ of the way through the fall semester. We also had our NCATE Accreditation site visit this month that involved all teacher education faculty, staff, and students and we are now awaiting the official report. Accreditation is very important for teacher education programs as it provides mechanisms for measuring and assuring quality programs that benefit our students. As th...

It’s Thursday October 28th, 2010 and welcome to episode 113 of TechTalk4Teachers, I’m Tom Grissom and I’m Adam Dodge. With me today in the studio is Adam Dodge who is here to talk more about Information Technology security. Back in August we invited Adam to talk about the importance of userids and strong passwords. Since October is Cyber Security Awareness month I thought we would invite Adam back for more information about protecting all of the IT resources we all come to rely upon daily. Right Click Here to Download MP3 (25 minutes 11 seconds) Links mentioned in this episode: Antiphishing Working Group - http://www.antiphishing.org OnGuardOnline - www.onguardonline.gov National Cyber Security Alliance - www.staysafeonline.org Facebook Security - www.facebook.com/security Campus Downloading - www.campusdownloading.com Technology Pick of the Week For my Technology Pick of the Week this week I am recommending that you take a look at a new feature in Google Docs, in particular Google sp...

It's Thursday, September 30, 2010 and welcome to episode 112 of TechTalk4Teachers, I'm Tom Grissom and I'm Loren Lindgren. Welcome Loren. We have a guest today in the studio. Right Click Here to Download MP3 (18 minutes 14 seconds) Tom: Loren is a graduate student here at the ITC. So, I wanted to invite Loren in and talk a little bit about podcasting. He had expressed in interest in podcasting so I thought well, let’s just do a live show here. I also have my undergrad class, what we call our Teaching and Learning with Technologies in Classrooms class and we’re doing some podcasting in there as well. So, I thought I would just introduce some of the equipment and just bounce some of the questions, because I believe this is your first experience with podcasting. Tom: Okay. And I’m setup probably a little bit differently. I’m certainly setup differently than whenever I started this, three or four years ago. Back when I started this, I was literally just using a regular compute...

It’s Tuesday August 31st, 2010 and welcome to episode 111 of TechTalk4Teachers, I’m Tom Grissom. We’re Back! It is back-to-school time here at EIU and we have survived the first full week. Schools across America are going through the annual ritual of back-to-school activities as students once again enter classrooms. Faculty are going over their syllabi with students. Whether you are at a K-12 school or at a college or university you are most likely faced with another ritual of obtaining userid(s) and password(s) for the new school year. Right Click Here to Download MP3 (30 minutes 23 seconds) Userids and passwords are literally the keys to the kingdom when it comes to accessing electronic resources. Your userid and password is the only thing that stands between you and the often sensitive and confidential information available electronically. It seems like one of the simplest of things to deal with but because of the importance of userids and passwords I thought it would be valuable t...

It’s Friday July, 30th, 2010 and welcome to episode 110 of Tech Talk 4 Teachers, I’m Tom Grissom. Summertime is rapidly coming to a close. Teachers and school support staff are beginning to think about all that needs to be finished in order to have a successful launch to a new school year. Right Click Here to Download MP3 (7 minutes 56 seconds) For many educators having a computer with Internet access has become the norm. I cannot imagine teaching today without the assistance of technology. There are just too many benefits for teaching and learning with technology. Our students today expect a technology-enriched learning experience as they have grown up in a world saturated with technologies. We have become so reliant upon technology that we often take it for granted. Many do not realize all the hard work that goes into creating and maintaining a reliable and vibrant technology-enhanced environment. It is now crunch time as we are beginning to run out of summer. Summertime is the bes...

It’s Wednesday June, 30th, 2010 and welcome to episode 109 of Tech Talk 4 Teachers, I’m Tom Grissom. Across the country thousands of educators are on summer vacation and recharging their batteries for another school year. What many people forget about is that there are also thousands of educators taking time-out of their vacation plans and returning to school to catch-up on the latest developments in education. Right Click Here to Download MP3 (6 minutes 45 seconds) Many attend workshops, conferences, or go back to school to take graduate classes. With me today is such an educator. We have many teachers from the surrounding area that return to EIU each summer to take graduate level classes here. We have a guest on this podcast today to share what she is learning as well as offer her perspectives about how she is using Twitter as an educational tool to develop her own Personal Learning Network or PLN as it has become known. Without further delay we will get right to it. (Interview) Che...

Tech Talk 4 Teachers It’s Monday May 31st, 2010 and welcome to episode 108 of TechTalk4Teachers, I’m Tom Grissom. Today in the United States it is Memorial Day where Americans pause to recognize and honor those that have made the ultimate sacrifice in serving our country and protecting our freedom. Memorial Day also marks the beginning of summer time activities as schools are wrapping up the school year. Many schools in our local area held graduation ceremonies this past weekend and have dismissed students for the summer. Right Click Here to Download MP3 (9 minutes 20 seconds) Today is also Quit Facebook Day where some users of the Facebook service have pledged to delete their Facebook accounts today to protest privacy concerns and other recent changes of policies at Facebook. We will see how many actually follow-through and delete their Facebook account after today. I have provided a link in the show notes to the Quit Facebook Day website and as of the time of this posting only 31,99...