Damon Hargraves

As a grant administrator and school administrator I’m building budgets all of the time. No, really, it happens quite often.  Zero based budgeting and incremental budgeting are two methods that I use.  With the zero based method I start off with a total budget amount in mind and build my budget up to that amount, aiming to have zero money left over.  An incremental budget means that I take the last budgeting cycle amounts and base my new budget on what was actually spent last time, attempting to take into account future needs.  I find that using these methods together is very effective. Obviously, my school district has professional accounting software that tracks the real money, so there is no need for me to adopt another system that tracks actual purchases.  Most of the time the budgets that I create are quick, one-off, planning budgets that help inform purchasing, grant reporting, and grant writing.  That said, the normal Word, Excel, Pages, Numbers tools don’t really allow you to d...

This used to be on my wall when I was in Bering Strait School District as the Distance Learning Facilitator.  This was the Student Broadcasting Team event streaming model that we developed back in 2007 and was the one that I used the entire time that I was in BSSD. I still refer back to it today as one of the best models for live broadcasting in rural Alaska.  Two things that are missing from the diagram are the DataVideo mixer and the Skype Chat.  When we used the DataVideo hardware it went between the “Video Mixer” computer and the Tandberg and was used to connect additional cameras.  We also almost always had a Public Skype Chat going for every event.  Students moderated the chat.   Skype discontinued Public Chats  a few years ago, unfortunately. Live event streaming with this setup allowed for a lot of flexibility, lots of camera angles (especially when we added the DataVideo mixer for an additional four video cameras), commentator/interview mics, simultaneous VTC and internet str...

Competency Based Instruction and Asynchronous Learning go hand in hand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7VrfzxLxuk Here's a video from the famous Salmon Kahn.  The whole thing is great, but if you don't have time to watch the whole thing I'd suggest watching 16:00 - 22:20.  Mr. Kahn provides a great case for asynchronous education AND competency based instruction.

Facebook and Twitter have dominated social networking for a few years now.  (Yes, there is LinkedIn and others, but who really uses them?  How many people do you know who've logged in this week?)  In contrast to everything else, Facebook and Twitter are used far more.  As a testament to Facebook, just think about who you have as a friends.  My friends range from former students, to high school buddies, to family, and business associates.  Both my dad and my niece are my friends on Facebook and I watch them use Facebook like crazy.  They run in totally different circles, communicate with totally different types of users, use Facebook in different ways, but we all are able to maintain a unified connection with each other. To me Facebook has become the online catalogue for my relationships.  Regardless of who you are there are enough people on Facebook to make it useful to almost everyone.  It's a giant catalogue of pictures, postings, musings, comments, and the latest news from ...

http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2013/04/18/the-new-skitch-for-mac-and-ios-the-fastest-friendliest-way-to-give-feedback-on-pdfs/ http://evernote.com/skitch/whats_new/apple/ There are a lot of Evernote users out there.  Skitch is an application that works in tandem with Evernote by actually saving all of its data to Evernote. (Evernote owns Skitch) Skitch has historically been a great screen capture app.  It allows you to quickly grab a screenshot, add arrows, circles, or text, and then easily share. Skitch now has the ability to add "stamps" and annotate PDF's.  I could see Skitch being used by teachers who need to provide feedback on a variety of student submitted PDF assignments. Check it out!

Wordpress.com is different from a regular Wordpress site housed on a private server.  Wordpress.com is actually a custom multiuser Wordpress implementation that shares server resources and databases across the thousands of Wordpress.com sites.  Part of the benefits of this is near 100% uptime for your site no matter what kind of crazy traffic you suddenly start getting.  Also, you can rest assured that you site will always be up to date with the latest Wordpress software and security. Part of this security requires limiting what can be done in the database that houses all of the content for your site.  What this means for you as a user is that you can't use javascript, flash, embeds, or iframes.  At least you can't directly use them.  The good news is that Wordpress.com has made accommodations for the most popular ways of using these elements. For example, YouTube provides users with an "Embed" option for every video.  This allows you to put the video on your own si...

I've been a Bento fan since its 1.0 release a few years ago.  Back then I was using Bento to help sort through massive mailing lists and record user contact data.  I was one of the lead facilitators of the Iditaproject run by the Bering Strait School District.  Bento really helped me stay organized in a sea of data.  One of the other things that I used Bento for was as a backend to iCal.  About three years ago Apple gutted a lot of the power user functionality out of iCal.  Myself and several others were left wondering how we were going to keep functioning.  It was almost a disaster until we found that Bento had iCal integration.  Large notes in iCal events are easily editable in Bento. However, with this latest update of iCal Apple has returned some of the power user functionality, and in the last year or so I really haven't had much use for Bento.... until now [play dramatic music].  There's nothing really dramatic or revolutionary about it, I guess I just am really happ...