STJLabs

You don't know what you don't know

Lots of updates…

February
7

Here’s how thing stand in the world of Tech Integration at St. Johnsbury Academy:

Academics Manager: A couple teachers and students have been playing around with the interface. They’ve found it to be quite easy to use and that it’ll satisfy a good number of their basic web needs. Students have been playing around with a demo account that is tied to a demo teacher and demo student. They like it so far although one complaint has come up that there seems to be no rss feed for each class. A few teacher are ready to try the system out with a live class. That will happen once Finalsite corrects a small bug in their system which shows a students email address even if it’s set to private. Hopefully the bug will be corrected soon.

Blogging: I’ve set a few teachers up with WordPress blogs to help them coordinate work with their classes. One teacher’s page is online right here and another’s is right here. Right now both sites are in their infancy, but they have already proven to be quite useful. Sidenote: WordPress is a wonderful, wonderful piece of software.

Wikis: Guided Studies was interested in playing around with a wiki, so I set them up with two different Wiki installations, TikiWiki and MediaWiki. The idea is to have them tryout both systems and see which one they like best. The TikiWiki installation is located right here and the MediaWiki installation is located right here.

Google Documents: I’ve continued to use Google Documents in my AP Calculus classes. Last week both of my classes took a 4 question quiz. When they got the quizzes back I broke each class up into four groups and assigned each group one of the questions to correct. They were required to work together on one Google document. Not only did I end up getting some wonderful group work submissions, per a student’s suggestion, I shared all of their corrections with both of my classes via GDocs. The corrections ended up being a great study resource for the chapter 4 test they took today.

Google Apps: The very nice people at Google upgraded the applications install to the education edition after verifying that I was indeed tied to a school. This means we get some cool features and the ability to create (essentially) as many users as we want. The big reason I set it up is so that SJA teachers can create Google accounts at will. So far two teachers are setup with admin accounts and one has created accounts for all of her students. If any SJA teachers out there would like an admin account, email me.

x61 TabletPCs: Last Tuesday was a magical day. That was the day both of the TabletPCs arrived. It’s been less than 48 hours and I can say, without a doubt, that how I teach has been forever changed. One of the tablets is an HP tx2000 and the other is a Lenovo x61. Both tablets are similar — They both have 12 inch screens, extended batteries, active wacom digitizers as well as touch screens, and built in wifi and bluetooth. The differences are that the HP is bigger and has a DVD burner, while the Lenovo is smaller, a tougher build, and has no CD drive.

I’m using the x61 as my teacher tablet. I attached to an lcd projector and viola, I can write on the wall without having to deal with chalk or markers. All of my board work is now saved and can be as colorful and as animated as I want it to be. I have been using OneNote for my board work and WinPlot for graphing. At the end of class I save my notes as a pdf and email them to the class list. For the past two days I have been connecting the tablet to the lcd projector with the VGA cable, but that is now a thing of the past… The Wireless Projector Adapter (Viewsonic WPG-150) arrived today which allows me to connect to the lcd projector wirelessly through my wifi connection. So now I can walk around during class and be tied into the lcd projector. Nice.

The tx2000 is being used by a student every day in each of classes. Their job is to take notes, and record the class from their own perspective. That night they are then responsible for posting a writeup of class on the class blog which is located at jseamon.stjlabs.com. The tablet will rotate through the entire class during the semester so each student will have at least 3 tries with it. In their post they are also supposed to talk about ther experience using the tablet.

I’ve also used the tablet to make a screen capture (w/audio) of a problem I thought I could have explained better in class. You can view the problem right here: Part1, Part2. Making the screencasts was easy — All I had to do was use Jing, a free screencasting program that ties into an online storage account. I loaded the program, selected the part of the screen I wanted to record, hit record, did my thing, hit stop, and then shared the file to free hosting space. This is all done through the Jing interface and couldn’t be easier.

I also wanted to see if I could get an online study session going. I managed to succeed by combining freeconference.com, ustream.tv, and WebCamMax. After getting everything setup I emailed both of my classes with the connection information and within 20 minutes I had 3 students in on the conference call asking questions and watching my board responses on the live ustream.tv feed. It was VERY cool. We ended up studying for an hour and the kids loved it. You can view a recording of the session right here.

It’s only been two days, andI am sure there is alot more I need to learn about the tablets before I can come to any hard conclusions, but I must say… DAMN they are slick.

Everyone out there is more than welcome to come by Severance any time to try them out. You can see them in action in SV20 (A block) and in SV16 (C block), or take one for your own use during B and/or D blocks.