2012 Horizon Report

• January
• 7

The yearly update to the Horizon Report isn’t due until February. Until then, I highly recommend taking a look at the project’s Emerging Technologies wiki page. Really interesting stuff!

The 2011 report is also well worth reading.

About the 2011 Horizon Report:

Each year, the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education and creative expression over the next one to five years. The areas of emerging technology cited for 2011 are:

Time to adoption: One Year or Less
Electronic Books
Mobiles

Time to adoption: Two to Three Years
Augmented Reality
Game-based Learning

Time to adoption: Four to Five Years
Gesture-based Computing
Learning Analytics

Kindle Myths and Partial Truths

• December
• 28

While reading through lots of online material about Kindles, I came across an excellent wiki page covering some great information about Kindle Myths and Partial Truths. Here are the topics that are covered:

• 1 Locked into buying from Amazon only
• 2 Amazon charges to convert a document.
• 3 A thief can use your Kindle to make purchases from Amazon
• 4 The Kindle can only read Amazon’s format
• 5 Without Whispernet you can’t buy books
• 6 Airport Security X-Ray Machines can/will fry your Kindle
• 7 Only One Dictionary is available for the Kindle
• 8 You Must own a Kindle to buy Kindle books
• 9 Only 6 Kindles can be registered to your Amazon account

Capstone & Video

• December
• 19

This semester finished  with a heavy emphasis on video production and editing within my capstone class.  Four students in my visual art capstone used video this year, while last year only one student had video as part of his presentation.  I have some general observations about students and video:

Their everyday involvement with YouTube has made them very familiar with video as a medium of expression, and many want to try to use it themselves within their academic and artistic practices;

The ubiquitous connection to video leads them to think that they have a pretty good handle on how to produce a strong video;

The video-editing program of choice for most students is iMovie;

They tend to have no conception of the need to “export” their project to make it into a finished product that can be easily opened and viewed;

They have no concepton of the large-sized, and duplicated, files that can easily be produced in the movie-making process;

They have no conception of the idea of various camera settings and codecs being appropriate for various applications;

They have no idea of the TIME it takes to edit a movie – and that there are other choices in movie-editing software than iMovie that might work better for them;

and THEY DON’T BACK UP THEIR FILES!

So, I see students with a great desire to make movies, but when they go to do it, they end up with poor quality recordings, computer crashes from over-sized files, video projects mistaken for finished movies (and un-backed-up – original video files) resulting in hours of lost footage and lost editing work, and a general sense of working in the dark instead of being in control of their movie-making process.

The help exists for them here at the Academy.  They can go to Jason Scherer, Taylor Ford, or come to me for assistance with the basics of movie making.  If we don’t know the answers to their questions, we know how to help them to find them.  The problem, to me, seems to be that they THINK they know more than they do about this area of technology.

Maybe involving students in our inservice will help to build a bridge of trust between students and faculty regarding technology.

50% off NYTimes Subscriptions for Educators

• December
• 16

The New York Times is offering a 50% discount for educators. If you already pay the full price, you can change your account over to one with an educator discount.

30 Cutting-Edge Tech Projects From Around the World

• December
• 7

Mashable just posted a fantastic article on some of the most impressive tech projects currently in motion all over the planet:

30 Cutting-Edge Tech Projects From Around the World by Lauren Hockenson

Excerpt:

From bike-sharing in Toronto to geothermal technologies in Reykjavik to accessible laptops in India, civic projects and startups alike are using tech to make a difference in the way everyone lives. These efforts are making traffic easier to navigate, energy consumption a little greener, and people happier. They show that smart uses of technology will be key in solving some of the world’s most pressing problems.

 

The New Digital Divide

• December
• 6

The NYTimes just ran an opinion piece that is well worth reading:

The New Digital Divide by Susan P. Crawford

Excerpt:

But the rest of America will most likely be left out of all this. Millions are still offline completely, while others can afford only connections over their phone lines or via wireless smartphones. They can thus expect even lower-quality health services, career opportunities, education and entertainment options than they already receive. True, Americans of all stripes are adopting smartphones at breakneck speeds; in just over four years the number has jumped from about 10 percent to about 35 percent; among Hispanics and African-Americans, it’s roughly 44 percent. Most of the time, smartphone owners also have wired access at home: the Pew Internet and American Life Project recently reported that 59 percent of American adults with incomes above $75,000 had a smartphone, and a 2010 study by the Federal Communications Commission found that more than 90 percent of people at that income level had wired high-speed Internet access at home.

 

New Mission: iPad

• November
• 29

As part of my portfolio action plan, I’ve been asked to work on implementing the iPad in my classroom. At this point, I’m still poking around and checking out apps. I’ve found a few that are to help teachers stay organized – attendance, for example, and a few more that might be useful for grading essays, as you can edit your comment bank (“you need more analysis here”… “could you clarify?” … “is this the strongest piece of evidence to support your argument?”).

Otherwise, I’m pretty excited to switch the Europe trip site back to WordPress. I got lured in by some fancy stuff in iWeb, but since I’ll probably bring the iPad with me instead of a computer, I’m excited to be able to update using the WordPress app.

When I find cool apps, I’ll post screen shots of them in action! Pretty psyched.

STJLabs Help Info

• November
• 16

As you work through the potential deluge of STJLabs questions, here’s some info that might be helpful.

Email me with lists of accounts you need reset. I can’t reset student accounts when the requests come from student email addresses.

Usernames are all fullfirstname.fulllastname@stjlabs.com. All spaces are removed. Dashes are included. Notice the period between the full first name and the full last name.

Passwords are whatever a kid has set. The first time they log in to the system they are forced to change their password.

Portal and STJLabs accounts are completely separate. If someone changes their password on one system it does not change their password on the other. (Sidenote: Yes, I do think it would be amazing to have a universal login and password for all the systems we need to log into.)

The login info letter I give out to all new students is right here. It may be helpful to give out to students who are confused about their accounts.

Lots more support info is online on the STJLabs Support page: http://stjlabs.com/support/

10 minute lesson plans

• November
• 15

Bill Vinton suggested that we use this 10 minute lesson plan in the science department, to organize our lessons through this guided step-by-step lesson plan builder and get students to engage, focus and improve in the classrooms. I found this very useful and would like to share it with you.

http://www.10minutelessonplans.com/

Technology as a Tool to Help Struggling Students

• November
• 15

As a teacher of 47 standard level Social Studies students I find one of my hardest jobs is keeping track of my student’s progress and helping them make up class when absent, and/or providing support beyond the classroom.   My new (to me) tablet PC has been providing a way for me to capture dynamic in-class discussion and make them available to students via the Portal or by simply handing it to them when they return.  Students who struggle to take notes while pay attention and engaging in discussion can forgo standard note taking procedures and therefor concentrate on staying present with the material being discussed.  They can access the notes at a later date to review necessary content.  I find for many of my students this increases their confidence level and thus their willingness to contribute in the moment.

I have had some successes and failures while using the hardware and software.  The normal frustrations that technology presents many of us, some of it caused by user error, some by the quirkiness that comes with machines that seem to have personalities of their own, has caused some moments of utter desperation but alas it’s been a journey of problem solving that my students have been a part of, and for many that is the best lesson they can learn.

Here are the details; by creating a framework for each class with topics, sub topics and guiding questions in Power Point and then importing into One Note I have essentially my lesson plan as a guide to our discussions.  I take all notes of our discussion generated by the framework on the tablet PC (at this point I take all the notes but would love to transfer that over in time to my students). The end product is a pdf version of a summary of the discussion.  It works well for some discussion but with others I would love to have an audio recording as it’s sometimes hard to capture the entirety of a high order thinking discussion (as I hope all of them are, to varying degrees of success) in written words and phrases. That is the next step.  My goal for next semester (with Josh’s help) is to get the hardware and software necessary to audio capture our discussions.

I strongly believe that no audio recording or pdf will ever replace the experience my students have with each other in the classroom but for students with occasional or chronic absences (of which I have far too many) it does provide a vehicle to begin the make-up process.  Technology has the opportunity to not only work in a reactive way but also in a proactive way for my student who needs additional support.  Knowing that have access to the material at a later date allows them to be more present and engaged.  I should note that I do require that students take some sort of notes but my goal this is for their insights and ideas, something to enrich rather than to remediate.