WikiPedia is a good source for images because all the sharing/use terms are explicitly listed for images. We have other image sources listed on our Image Resources page of our COV project Google Site.
The wiki site “Copyright-Friendly and Copyleft Images and Sound (Mostly!) for Use in Media Projects and Web Pages, Blogs, Wikis, etc.” also has an extensive list worth checking out.
David Warlick has an extensive but perhaps overwhelming list of websites which can be used as image sources on his Landmarks for Schools site.
I used to teach a workshop titled “Multimedia Madness: Obtaining Images, Movies, and Audio Files from the Internet and CD-ROMs,” and although the list is a a bit dated there are some image sources there that could be helpful.
Cathy Nelson’s October 2008 post on Classroom 2.0 “Copyright Friendly Pictures” has a bunch of additional suggestions.
I received “Twitter spam” today from four different educators whose Twitter accounts were compromised in some way, either by a phishing scheme, a website with malicious operators which solicits Twitter credentials, or hackers. What are the lessons learned here?
Use a secure password on your twitter account and change it periodically.
Be VERY wary of EVER putting your twitter password into a website that isn’t the official Twitter site, or into a program you run on your computer or handheld that you can’t verify to trust. Just like bank and credit card phishing schemes, people are now phishing with fake twitter sites, so beware of links to Twitter you receive in email.
If your twitter account has been hacked, try to login and change your password to something secure immediately. Then follow the above suggestions to KEEP it secure and private. If you have lost control of your twitter account, then contact the Twitter support team directly for assistance.
I blocked the user accounts from which my Twitter spam originated today, and appear to have been compromised. I am hoping that will mean I won’t receive further twitter direct message spam messages from their accounts. So far, so good. I also tried to contact the individuals whose accounts were sending spam either via email or leaving comments on their blogs or social networking pages. 3 of the 4 people included website links in their public Twitter profile, so I was able to attempt electronic contact to give them a heads up. One person said she’d been inundated with emails from friends about it, because evidently they had also received the spam direct messages via Twitter. She hadn’t used her Twitter account in four months, since August, so I’m not really sure how someone managed to take control of her account.
Alan Levine touted praises for “Andy M’s Yahoo Pipe for putting your twitter followers locations on a map” this evening, but with all these examples of Twitter phishing I’m reluctant to put my Twitter credentials into ANY website other than Twitter.
Anyone have suggestions on how to decide which new websites to trust with your Twitter credentials, and which ones are better to avoid? I’m thinking the conservative path of not trusting ANY of them with Twitter credentials (including a password) is the best policy. I still am going to keep using Twitter Karma, however, unless I hear or read of a problem with it– I LOVE its functionality and haven’t found another site to match it yet.
Most people probably need some reminders and proddings to follow good password security procedures. The Joomla Installation Guide (PDF) by Andy Wallace includes a list of guidelines as good as I’ve seen anywhere regarding password security. On page 13 under “Secure Password Thinking” he writes:
Any password you create for Joomla!, MySQL, Apache, or in fact any passwords you ever create should be
made as secure as possible.
Typically this would mean:
using a minimum of 6 characters -the more the better but 8-10 should be an ideal
a mixture of upper and lower case alphabet characters, numbers, and permitted special characters
for example -, _, *, $, !, %, although the use of these may be governed by the host settings on
shared or virtual hosted, remote servers
do not use easily identifiable passwords for example, birthdays, children’s or family names or words that could be easily associated with you
in fact try not to use real words at all, replace letters with their numeric equal so the word ocean could become 0c34n (yes – I know it is a real word and there are only 5 characters but it is just an
example) try 0c34n!c – and no do not now use that either
another way is to think entirely off-the-wall. Think of a favourite novel for example, The Hitch-hikers
Guide to the Galaxy, and then take say the first and last letter from each word giving a sequence of
letters (as indicated by the underscores):
Example 1. t e h s g e t o t e g y
this clearly means absolutely nothing but it could still be traced – eventually – by a determined
cracker so let us mix it up a bit more:
Example 2. T 3 h $ 9 3 t 0 T 3 g Y
but you can now see that it would be a pretty illogical logic that would need to be applied to even
come close to cracking that and when the additional security features of the various platforms is then
laid over the top of this – we would not want to say it is impossible to crack, but they would take a
very long time, and of course you should regularly change your passwords anyway.
if you keep a written record of your passwords always ensure they too are kept secure and safely out
of the way of prying eyes
despite the temptation, try to avoid using the same password for all your various access
requirements, both at home and at work
When I went to work for AT&T in 2006 I was amazed and a bit shocked how many different passwords I had to create for different accounts, and how often I was forced to change them. In many cases, employees were/are FORCED to use secure passwords and change them often. This is not popular, but it is smart, both for organizations and for individuals.
It’s time for us all to “act smart” when it comes to password security, for Twitter and for other sets of login credentials. The next time someone takes you on a fishin’ trip, make sure it’s the kind that starts with “f” and not “ph!”
Like a large number of North American households with Internet access and elementary age children this holiday season, our home was the scene of many hours logged on both Club Penguin and Webkinz the past couple weeks.
After Christmas, we made a momentous purchase for our five year old: A new Webkinz Penguin she’s named “Sparkle,” which has provided her with the virtual keys to experience the online world of Webkinz along with her older brother and sister. It is amazing to watch our kids teach each other different things about these virtual worlds. They are acquiring more than motor skills: There is a LOT of reading and problem solving going on, not to mention personal finance management as they decide how to use or save the virtual fortunes they are amassing in these online worlds.
My son explained to me yesterday why he would never consider running Webkinz as a separate webapp with a program like Prism– he always has other webpages open (as tabs) when he’s playing Webkinz, where he gets tips and tricks for what to buy in the store, what to play, etc. When I asked him how he found those websites to use, the tone of his answer when he said “Google” communicated something like, “Geez Dad, what planet do you live on?”
This evening we had an important teachable moment involving Webkinz, which highlights multiple things– including the importance of parents having regular discussions with children about what they are doing online. While my 11 year old son was away from his laptop, but still logged into Webkinz, my 8 year old daughter used his account and sent herself a 50% discount coupon for the Webkinz store from his account. She hadn’t obtained permission to do this, and she knew it was wrong. This led to several discussions tonight, apologies, and a consequence that she can’t use the computer at home for the next two days.
Things that happen in the virtual, online world DO matter just as things we do in the real, face-to-face world matter. Perceptions shape reality. I explained to my daughter that her act of going into her brother’s Webkinz account and sending herself that coupon without permission was just like him going into her room and eating a box of chocolates that she received for Christmas, without permission. It was stealing, taking something that did not belong to her without permission, and it was wrong.
Sarah was testing the boundaries of what she could do online and get away with, and testing boundaries is a very natural thing for kids to do. Overall I think our discussions about this were very constructive. She actually wrote my son a note and tried to give him a large part of her Christmas money that she’d received as compensation for this “Webkinz wrong,” so this situation provided a good opportunity to also discuss forgiveness and grace. Lots of good discussions about ethics.
During 2006-2008 when I worked for AT&T as a state education advocate and presented frequently on the topics of Internet safety and safe digital social networking, I was often amazed how conversations with students about Webkinz could tie directly into important lessons about password security and digital citizenship. In a large group of elementary students, typically there would be at least one student who had lost control of his/her Webkinz password and had all their Webkinz possessions sold as a result by a malicious Webkinz account thief. When I invited students to share their stories about Webkinz thefts, it was amazing to see how RIVETED other students were in listening to these tales. These were not “pretend” or “just virtual” experiences that had happened to the child’s Webkinz account: These were REAL experiences that were VERY traumatic and led to some important lessons learned.
When I was growing up, I didn’t have opportunities to interact with others and amass virtual possessions in online worlds like Club Penguin or Webkinz. While kids as well as adults can certainly waste a lot of time online playing games as well as consuming media in various forms, I think there is much more comparative value to my children participating in interactive, online environments like these rather than simply watching television passively. The advent of more streaming video shared on websites means passive TV watching CAN and does happen frequently when kids are online, but I’d say they spend at least 90% of their time online interactively DOING things rather than just “watching.”
I saw tonight that Nick Jr has launched a new commercial enterprise, MyNoggin, which is subscription-based and encourages kids to remain active/engaged on the website by earning virtual marbles and exchanging them for furniture and toys to put in their own virtual rooms. Sounds a lot like Webkinz and Club Penguin. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the pattern and recipe here.
It’s amazing to compare the level of self-directed learning and engaging online learning opportunities available to my children here in our home, to the traditional, textbook and worksheet-based classroom learning experiences to which they’ll return tomorrow at school. Strange ironies of our 21st century existence.
Home:
- Everyone has a laptop they can use
- Everyone has access to filtered but very open high speed WiFi Internet access
- Everyone has access to an iPod, iPod Touch or my iPhone to watch movies, play games, or access other web applications
School:
- No one has a laptop (even the teachers don’t)
- No WiFi Internet is available for anyone to use
- iPods and iPhones are banned
My son was shaking his head tonight as he said several times, “I can’t believe tomorrow is school.” Yep. Back to school. Get out that paper and pencil. It’s going to be time for another spelling test.
A few weeks before Christmas, I watched and blogged Dr. Z’s (Leigh Zeitz) webinar for ISTE on web 2.0 tools. Dr. Z mentioned Skype as a videoconferencing tool in the classroom, which can be used to bring in virtual guest speakers. I asked him during the webinar if he knew of any online directories for K-12 teachers to use wanting guest speakers, similar to the MERLOT Virtual Speaker’s Bureau for higher education. He said at the time he didn’t know of any, but would check. I blogged about using MERLOT to find virtual guest speakers back in September, and Rod Lucier started soliciting entries for a K-12 speaker’s directory on December 1st.
The wiki has a directory, a want-ads page, and an experiences page for educators to share brief stories about their virtual guest speaker experiences with Skype in the classroom to date.
Many thanks to Dr. Z and Angela for sharing this link, and Dan Froelich for creating it!
ePals continues to be one of the best resources I know of for finding other classroom teachers with whom to collaborate on different projects, and does have an advanced search option to restrict a search only to classrooms with audio/voice software access.
The Skype in Schools wiki is the first resource I’ve seen to date which is explicitly focused on serving as a virtual guest speaker networking site for K-12 educators. Do you know of other sites which have this focus?
A search with the keyword “skype” yields just six collaborations as of 1/3/2009, however. One is Tammy Parks’ “Journalism 2.0″ project, involving students in Howe, Oklahoma. The focus of the project is interviewing speakers virtually over H.323 video, Skype, or iChat:
Small, rural school Broadcast Journalism program in SE Oklahoma seeking interviews via distance. Mode of connectivity ranging from iChat, Skype, H.323, etc. Has a student(s) in your classroom received recognition for a class project? Do you know an interesting character? Does your town have a unique story? Tear down those four walls in your classroom and join my students for an interview session for our student-created newscast. We can only interview our Principal so many times, give Mr. C a break from the cameras and tell us YOUR stories! Still not convinced? Let’s discuss what Nat’l/State Standards this collaboration 2.0 project will meet for your lesson plans!
If you’re interested in having your students participate in a videoconference during the Jan-May 2009 school term, get in touch with Tammy!
I hope we’ll see more organizations step up and provide directories for virtual guest speakers, as more folks in the business world outside of education obtain webcams and microphones on their computers. What a great “service learning” opportunity for business men and women, and others in various career fields: Spending a few minutes connecting virtually to a classroom and sharing perceptions and ideas with students as a virtual guest speaker! If a large company or organization would setup, maintain and promote a virtual guest speaker directory like this, I think it would be WONDERFUL resource for classroom teachers seeking virtual connections for students!
Hopefully, in the next 5 - 10 years, international videoconference connections like this will be common rather than rare occurrences in our classrooms.
This past holiday I’ve undertaken the formidable but necessary tasks of backing up all my laptop hard drive documents, archiving old computer files I’ve continued to keep on my laptop (even though there is a 0.00001% chance I’ll ever actually need those files) as well as cleaning up closets and storage cabinets around our house which have housed a lot of technology “stuff” and conference handouts I never read and now, months later, I’m finally ready to admit I never will. (This latter act has won me considerable “good husband points” with my wife.)
The best part of cleaning out closets, drawers, and hard drives is that sometimes, you discover a long-lost item of real value! One of my finds this holiday was a website directory of old conference and edtech site visit trip notes I took from 2002 - 2004, which were previously hosted on my Texas Tech University student website. That account was deactivated, so these EXTREMELY valuable notes (yeah right, whatever) were almost lost to the cause of aggregating human knowledge. Back from the dead, I present to you my archived conference notes from 2002-2004.
I remember Steve Dembo stumbled across these awhile back when they were still online at Texas Tech and posted about them, but I can’t find his post today to reference it. At any rate, it IS interesting to look back and review some of these past notes. I am particularly glad to find my notes from Dr. Vladimir Uskov’s presentation at eLearn2003. I wracked my brain recently to try and remember his name for a literature review, and couldn’t come up with it. I remembered he’s done some extensive research on the effects of coursecasting/lecturecasting on student grades and attendance.
There is TREMENDOUS value to digitizing and sharing our learning with others when we attend conferences and participate in professional development. If I was a school superintendent, I’d require all the teachers in my district to write blog summaries and reflections as a regular part of professional development sessions, whether they involved conference travel or not. The process of summarizing and reflecting on a professional development workshop has inherent value for the writer, and posting those notes online assures (as long as the hosting account is not deleted) that the notes and links can be referenced later if needed. In our world of Google indexing, you never know when notes you’ve taken and shared with others could be useful for an unintended purpose or unexpected context. This value of public idea sharing is communicated well in the opening quotation Miguel Guhlin uses on his “Share More” wiki:
A candle loses none of its light when it lights another.
My old conference notes highlight the BIG differences between “web 1.0 publishing” and “web 2.0 publishing.” These archived notes are static and non-interactive. If you want to leave a comment, you can’t– at least not directly on one of the webpages. You could annotate one of them with Diigo, but only other Diigo users with the toolbar installed and annotations turned on would be able to “see” your comments and annotations. Not very accessible. In contrast, all recent posts to my Wordpress blog accept comments as well as trackbacks. It is AMAZING to see how far web publishing has come in just four years!
Our digital footprints can and should provide authentic windows into our journeys of learning which we and others can helpfully reference tomorrow as well as in the years to come.
This podcast features a recording of the January 2, 2009, live morning radio show interview in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on CJOB|68 with Darren Kuropatwa, minus the news and advertisement breaks. The conversation focused on Darren’s utilization of scribe posts by his Calculus and Pre-Calculus students at Daniel McIntyre Academy in Winnipeg, the imporance of numeracy as well as literacy, and the power of online learning communities to support as well as motivate students inside and outside the classroom. Darren was joined in this series of interviews by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Dean Shareski, and Wesley Fryer, who along with Darren are co-conveners of the free and global K-12 Online Conference. K12Online is an online conference for teachers, by teachers, amplifying the possibilities for using digital technologies as well as online learning communities to support engaged learning. Mark Rabena, one of Darren’s former students also joined in our discussions. Many thanks to radio program host Richard Cloutier for sharing these stories with radio listeners around Manitoba as well as the world! We had about 35 educators in a backchannel chat room (via Chatterous) discussing these conversations, listening to the radio program live as it was streamed over the Internet. Kudos to Darren not only for his outstanding leadership for educators in his school and nation, but also for his work in bringing about this mainstream media radio interview in Canada. I hope this is the first of MANY more mainstream media interviews we’ll see in the months and years ahead about the K-12 Online Conference and the innovative ways digital technologies are being used by educators like Darren to engage students in the learning process.
Podcast298: An Interview on Manitoba Morning Radio with Darren Kuropatwa about Numeracy, Literacy, Student Summary Blogging, Digital Learning and the K-12 Online Conference [01:49:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (261)
This morning Darren Kuropatwa was on the radio for three hours with Richard Cloutier in Winnipeg, Manitoba on CJOB|68. I am about to publish the audio recording of this interview as a podcast, but before I do I want to share a few of the paraphrased quotations I jotted down today during the radio show. Sheryl-Nussbaum Beach, Dean Shareski, and I were able to join Darren for part of the interview, along with one of Darren’s former students.
Darren: “I expect my students to write the textbook.”
Darren: “Engage students face-to-face by talking to them during classtime”
Darren “Online, every voice is amplified equally”
Sheryl: “We need classrooms with more windows than walls”
Sheryl “Helping kids create their own positive digital footprint”
Dean: “Basic difference today and shift: Information isn’t scarce anymore. The basics include digital technologies.”
Sheryl “What we are looking at here is not just institutional learning. We are talking about the re-culturalization of schools. Focus on learning communities.”
Darren: “Learning is a conversation. The reflective classroom: It is apprenticeship and mentorship, co-learning.”
Dean: “The question of what happens when is important. The idea of disruptive technologies does not have to necessarily be a negative thing.”
Darren: “What I want to get out of it is not just the answer to this particular puzzle, but something that we can use all year long… The thinking that is done to get here.”
Darren: “Mathematics is the science of patterns. It’s not the particular facts that are so interesting, it’s the patterns.”
Darren: “It’s really about being numerate. We have facts and figures thrown at us in the media all the time. Our government talks about spending millions and billions all the time. Do you understand the differences between these numbers? If I give you a dollar every second, how long will it be until you have a million dollars. It’s hard for me to get a handle on numbers greater than 100. Answer is: Just under 12 days. Follow up question: Do the exact same experiment but go to a billion. How long will it take, getting $1 per second to get to a billion? It is 32 years!”
Darren: “Do you understand how to think algorithmically? Numeracy and literacy skills are both important. Research says people with better numeracy skills have better economic outcomes.”
Darren: “Learning is an intensely social activity, and children learn from the company they keep.”
Darren: “If you value education, if you value being numerate then your kids will.”
Sheryl: “Teachers are going to need to reinvent themselves in the 21st century.”
Darren: “Students post their muddiest points on their blogs just prior to their end of chapter examinations, which leads to lots of conversations and insights into struggles students are having with content and ideas.”
Darren: “When others care about what you are doing, your motivation to do better work goes way up. The value of mentorship when others are paying attention.”
Darren: “Kids are all about social connections and getting props from each other. Helping students do cool stuff, create valuable content and up the ante for each other [creates powerful dynamics].”
… if you click “Yep, go ahead!,” without notifying you, the service LOGS INTO YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT and makes a post ON YOUR ACCOUNT saying “Just started using http://twply.com/ to get my @replies via email. Neat stuff!”
Not only are you providing your Twitter userid to the owners of Twply, you are also giving them your password and potentially permission to post AS YOU on Twitter. Users beware.
I know it is painful and not fun, but it is also a VERY good idea to change your Twitter password frequently AND use secure passwords. Not a message I’m sure you wanted to hear today, but none-the-less it is an important one. These are all important aspects of media literacy and digital citizenship!
Certainly it can be both interesting and fun to track emerging technologies as they apply to learning and education, but it can also be overwhelming. It’s also easy to fall into the “tooly” camp of focusing more on tools than on learning and student engagement. This danger is not new, of course, Jamie McKenzie wrote “Toolishness is Foolishness” back in 2001. Yet we cannot ignore the tools either, and we need to recognize the natural progression we all go through as human beings when we are new to tools and their use has NOT yet become transparent.
I anticipate continuing to refine my presentation “Powerful Ingredients for Digitally Interactive Learning” in 2009, in which I attempt to distill which of these tools are essential for learning (basic ingredients in the 21st century classroom chuckwagon.)
It’s also important to consider how many of the communication tools and platforms categorized here are BLOCKED in many of our schools. The realities of content filtering in our schools should provide greater motivation and incentives for all of us to demonstrate the constructive potentials of these tools. This reflects the theme of the 2008 K-12 Online Conference, “Amplifying Possibilities.” I continue to believe digital storytelling projects like “Celebrate Oklahoma Voices” offer one of the most powerful and realistic ways to make constructive headway in the struggle to win hearts and minds for digital learning engagement amidst rampant fear mongering and reactionary statements by many leaders.
What is the ideal mobile application for college students armed with iPhones, wanting information related to THEIR college life, courses and interests? According to a telecommunications company like AT&T, the answer may be something similar to iStanford, an application whose development received $10,000 from AT&T as the winner of the “Big Mobile on Campus” contest last year:
Stanford iApps are being developed by current Stanford students Joseph Bernstein and Kayvon Beykpour, the co-founders of the startup Terriblyclever. Josh Quittner’s recent article for Time Magazine, “Can iStanford Take on Facebook Mobile?” reveals the new functionality of the Stanford iApps is due at least in part to unprecedented access granted to the student developers by the university’s IT administrators:
…the newest version, slated to arrive shortly, also allows students to add and drop courses, see the real-time whereabouts of the on-campus shuttle bus, review their own grades and course history and perform a variety of other administrative tasks that are normally accessible only over secure campus networks. That’s because, in an unusual move, Stanford’s IT folks allowed the developers to connect to core computer systems at Stanford.
“The key is they’re integrating [the iPhone app] with our central system,” said Tom Black, Stanford’s registrar, who noted that the team was held to the same level of scrutiny as an outside vendor. “Usually student apps aren’t allowed to go anywhere near that. We’re breaking some ground here.”
While real-time mobile access to course schedules and grades may be cool on an iPhone, such access does not represent a transformative difference or “great leap forward” beyond the access already provided to students at most universities via a WiFi equipped laptop. The “where am I” features of the iPhone with Google Maps tied to real-time campus shuttle bus locations are also cool sounding, but really– how big of a deal is this in terms of making college life much different than it is today? It’s handy to find out when a shuttle bus is coming by looking at your iPhone, but such knowledge hardly transforms the college learning experience.
More than mobile devices with greater access to existing administrative academic data, our K-12 schools, colleges and universities need educators with the pedagogic vision of Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams described in their article “Remixing Chemistry Class” in the Dec-Jan issue of ISTE’s Learning and Leading with Technology. (The article is password protected for members-only.) As high school chemistry teachers, they have “flipped” the normal sequence of lectures and homework for students, recording lectures for viewing via podcast/vodcast and spending time with students working on labs and problem sets face-to-face. They are implementing the precise advice I shared at the March 2006 SITE conference in my session “Powerful Blending: Using Web 2.0 to Interact, Create, and Assess.” When an instructor wants to provide a non-interactive lecture or learning experience, s/he is best advised to make that learning available asynchronously for downloadable, time and place shifted consumption by students. This avoids forced learning experiences in the upper left quadrant of this 2 x 2 grid or framework:
In their article, Bergmann and Sams explain their thinking this way:
We realized that our students most need us to be physically present when they are doing labs, working out problems, and wrestling with an assignment. Our physical presence is not necessary for the presentation of content, so we decided to flip the way we teach. Material that had traditionally been presented in an in-class lecture could be prerecorded and the students could watch the vodcast at home before class. Material that had traditionally been assigned as homework could be completed in class with the benefit of teacher assistance if needed.
WE do not believe that this model will eliminate the need for classroom instruction. Instead, we hope that by eliminating lectures, we can use class time for more student-centered and inquiry-based activities.
These types of pedagogic changes which involve blended learning are MUCH more exciting to me than simply improved mobile access to administrative data at a university like Stanford. Certainly Stanford IS setting a high bar for other educational organizations with Stanford on iTunes. Amidst discussion and excitement over the new iStanford iPhone application, however, I encourage everyone to avoid the tendency to be awed by something entirely NON-pedagogical. This is analogous to parents in our local school district getting excited because this year, for the first time ever, parents can log into “real-time” student grade data online:
My response to this is: BIG DEAL. Yes, of course the Stanford iPhone application is MUCH sexier and more fully featured than basic online grade access like our local K-12 school district provides, but my point is that news articles like Josh Quittner’s for Time make it sound like this application is the harbinger of a learning revolution. A learning revolution IS underway, and mobile devices are playing a key role in this revolution, but the revolution itself is not simply about digitizing our 19th century ways of “doing school.” To use the parlance of ACOT, these examples of digitized access to administrative information are simply “adoption” or “adaptation” levels of technology integration.
ACOT found that given a supportive environment, educators can and will progress through these stages to move into the more advanced “appropriation” and “invention” stages of technology integration, IF administrative leadership supports pedagogic change. The initial stages are natural and perhaps even required, but the key is educational constituents should NOT BE SATISFIED to simply see traditional learning tasks and teaching styles be digitized.
I’m sure lots of the 4000 current Stanford students with iPhones and iPods (“2,500 of the school’s 8,000 students have an iPhone; another 1,500 have the iPod Touch”) are interested in iStanford and the new access options it will provide. I’m guessing lots of those same students would be even more excited, however, if more of their professors and instructors utilized technologies in transformative ways to differentiate learning opportunities as well as assessment options, as the students in the “Digital Students @ Analog Schools” video explain.
I left the following as a response to the first commenter on this video:
Did you watch this entire video? The students are not making a justification for not working or learning. They are asking to be provided with CHOICES in the ways they learn, and the ways they demonstrate what they know. Have you spent time making a video as a class assignment, and been restricted on the length of the film you could create? This can be a very challenging process. Digital storytelling as the social studies teacher of these students, Marco Torres, taught them involves writing, storyboarding, rewriting, planning, as well as producing and editing. One of the main points of the video is that many instructors don’t give students any choices about learning modes or assessment options. Sometimes in life, certainly we don’t get choices. But more often, as educators we DO need to provide choices to students about how they show what they know, particularly when they could provide more transparent windows into their own understanding and knowledge/skill sets by using more authentic means of assessment than just a paper and pencil test.
Stanford’s new iApps are undoubtedly “cool.” We need much more than “cool” when it comes to the digital learning revolution, however. We need broad-based, pedagogic change! Thankfully, educators like Bergmann and Sams are demonstrating how blended learning CAN transform education constructively, in fundamentally different ways than our 19th century models. Now we need to encourage mainstream media authors like Josh Quittner to write about and amplify them so “the rest” of the country can learn about these blended learning strategies who are NOT reading blogs or L&L!
Since Google announced its new web browser Chrome last fall, designed from the ground up to be faster with today’s modern web applications (webapps) I admit I’ve been a little envious of Windows users. You see, to date Chrome has only been available for Windows users. I am a cross-platform computer user, and do have access to WinXP (I remain a conscientious objector to Vista) but I prefer Macs whenever I can make a choice. I’ve used Chrome a fair bit in the past month on the Windows side, mainly working with Google Docs, and I have really liked it. The fact that Chrome runs each website tab in its own protected memory space, so one malfunctioning/misbehaving website in a single tab won’t crash the entire web browser, is the best feature of Chrome IMHO besides its snappy speed.
This evening, thanks to a blog comment from CanyonR, I learned about Prism as well as Fluid. Prism is available for Windows, Mac and Linux users, Fluid is Mac-only. Neither of these programs are the Chrome web browser running on a Mac, but the functionality they offer is similar to Chrome. Both are free applications which let users run webapps as desktop apps. Each has different “engines” (code under the hood) but both allow custom icons to be used. I now have a custom desktop webapp for GMail running via Prism (Mozilla FireFox based) and a custom desktop webapp for FaceBook running via Fluid (Safari Webkit based). I configured both using custom icons developed by Chris Ivarson.
These are really nothing more than just separate shortcuts to different webpages, but since these web applications truly are APPLICATIONS unto themselves, it can be nice to have them run as separate programs in system memory instead of different browser tabs or windows. It’s also nice to dispense with all the browser buttons at the top of the window, which are not really needed once you’re inside a webapp like Facebook or GMail. I am guessing these programs permit each website’s application to have separated, protected memory and therefore not crash, affect, or be affected by other webpages running in actual browser windows. Prism and Fluid definitely DO permit users to application switch using Command-Tab (Macintosh) or Alt-Tab (Windows) and treat each webapp as a separate program. This is VERY cool and useful.
Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop…Prism isn’t a new platform, it’s simply the web platform integrated into the desktop experience. Web developers don’t have to target it separately, because any application that can run in a modern standards-compliant web browser can run in Prism. Prism is built on Firefox, so it supports rich internet technologies like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and canvas and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
On my Mac, I prefer using both GMail and Google Docs in FireFox, because I think the browser support is better than it is for these sites with Safari. I find Safari to be a faster browser with most sites, however, and I love the RSS monitoring features of Safari. For this reason, I was delighted to also discover Fluid this evening after learning about, downloading and using Prism. The Fluid homepage offers the following introduction to its functionality:
Are you a Gmail, Facebook, Campfire or Pandora fanatic? Do you have 20 or more browser tabs open at all times? Are you tired of some random site or Flash ad crashing your browser and causing you to lose your (say) Google Docs data in another tab?
If so, Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) provide a great solution for your WebApp woes. Using Fluid, you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite WebApps as a separate Cocoa desktop application. Fluid gives any WebApp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, logical separation from your other web browsing activity, and many, many other goodies.
I used Fluid to create my Facebook SSB. I do like the fact that Fluid supports tabbed browsing, while Prism (currently) does not. I also like how Fluid-created instances actually take on the application name you assign. In contrast, Prism applications run within the application name “Prism.” Minor differences, really. The main thing is both programs offer SSB functionality, depending on the web engine you want to use.
By default, SSB applications like these use the VERY small default website icons from the Internet. As an admitted Mac addict since 1995, I’ve been pretty “into” my desktop icons from time to time, and I really do like custom icons for different folders. (IconFactory is my favorite source for free custom icons.) Because of my preference for large, beautiful desktop icons, the default web icons for SSBs created with Prism and Fluid are definitely NOT good enough!
Riding to the rescue for my Fluid and Prism icon needs (and yours) is the Flickr Group Fluid Icons. It contains hundreds of custom icons for just about any webapp you can imagine.
I’m not a licensed futurist, but the crystal ball to which I do have access at present tells me webapps, SSBs, netbooks, and offline, synchronizable web-apps powered with technologies like Google Gears are all going to be MAJOR parts of our collective communications landscape in the years to come. These technologies are a big part of our landscape NOW, but users are primarily limited to early-adopters.
Whatever computer platform you’re using at present, give Prism a try. If you’re fortunate to be using a Mac, give Fluid a try too. Both are free, so the price is right. The age of web apps has dawned, and tools like these make powerful SSBs remarkably easy to create as well as customize. If you actually take this advice based on my blog post, I’m betting you fall in the left-hand third of Everett Rodger’s “diffusion of innovations” adoption curve!
For several months now, my five year old has been telling everyone who asks about her future career path that she wants to be a paleontologist and study dinosaurs. (Certainly not unusual for a child her age!) As we considered ways to ring in the new year as a family, given her interest in dinosaurs it seemed natural to spend New Year’s Eve at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in Norman, Oklahoma, about a half hour drive south from where we live. This photo shows Rachel and other children energetically “digging” in the museum’s “discovery room.”
The museum has small iPod signs around the “Ancient Life” exhibit to indicate which part corresponds to different segments of the iPod audio tour.
Unfortunately, however, some jokester (I assume) moved all of them to different locations, so none are in the correct spot. (As of our tour on 12/31/2008.) It wasn’t too difficult, however, to ignore the signs and read the podcast segment titles on our iPods and find the correct segment for each museum area.
One of the highlights for me personally was seeing the largest dinosaur skull ever discovered on the planet, to date, which is over ten feet tall! It was exciting to meet Pentaceratops!
This photo of Pentaceratops with my kids provides a sense of scale for this HUGE skull and full skeleton! Not all of the bones in this model are real, but many are including the skull. It was fun to look at him and figure out which bones were real fossils, and which were recreations.
From a learning perspective, there is NO DOUBT the availability of short “chunks” of information about the museum exhibits via the iPod audio tour meaningfully added to everyone’s learning in the “Ancient Life” area of the museum. Visits to traditional museums usually involve a LOT of reading for visitors who want to learn in-depth during their visit. Like a school textbook in many ways, exhibits are filled with text that must be read to be understood. The Sam Noble museum DOES offer both Spanish and English versions of many exhibit descriptions, but the primary communication modality for the bulk of museum information is still TEXT.
My 11 and 8 year old children could and did read some of the exhibit descriptions, but not my 5 year old. The 11 and 8 year olds, even though they read well, were still very limited in the amount of reading they did. By listening to 2-3 minute audio descriptions of various exhibit elements, however, they picked up on many specific details about the history, science, and creatures described in the exhibits which they would NOT have learned (IMHO) without the audio tour. The fact that we discussed what we had just heard following each of these iPod audio tour elements also helped reinforce different things we were told.
We synchronized four iPods of various ages to include this RSS media feed from the museum at our house before we left for our day’s adventures. Had we not had iPods or needed extra ones, we could have rented iPods from the museum for $2 each. As it was, my youngest two children used an iPod “y cable” and shared an iPod. At each museum station with an iPod audio tour recording, one of the kids gave an audible “countdown” and we all started our iPods on that recording at the same time. This way were were hearing the virtual museum guide at almost the same time, and we could react together to the things she said.
Karen Montgomery teaches workshops for educators on creating “podguides” similar to the one from the Sam Noble museum which we used. A Google keyword search for “podtours” reveals a variety of websites including iPod audio tours of different locations. I think facilitating student creation and sharing of iPod tours of different historical sites as well as local points of interest would be a great element to add to the StoryChasers project for 2009. Often when students assume the role of CONTENT CREATOR they can engage in more higher order thinking than when they are simply passive consumers of information. This can lead to greater transfer and retention of ideas than might otherwise take place as a result of a museum experience. For more on this, see Andrew Churches’ wiki page on the New Bloom’s Taxonomy and ICT.
Overall, our experiences at the Sam Noble museum yesterday were wonderful! They would have been great even without the iPod audio tour, but it certainly did add positively to visit and helped further insure our experiences there were educational as well as fun!
As the new year approaches fast, it’s time to start (if you haven’t already) considering those new year’s resolutions. One of mine, which has been a new year’s resolution in the past more than once, is to “get better organized.” I’m sure I’m not alone with this feeling: I am so deluged with information from multiple sources every day: email, phone messages, tweets, blog posts, social networking comments, etc, it is easy to feel overwhelmed. I can’t get any more time in my day, so I need to use the time I have more efficiently. I need to process greater amounts of information, deal with them appropriately and quickly, and also keep track of all the different “to do’s” (tasks) which are on my plate for various projects.
I ALMOST finished David Allen’s excellent book on personal organization last year, “Getting Things Done,” and have tried a few different “GTD” applications to try and implement his system of processing and tracking all the project to do’s I have. I’ve written about this quest for better personal organization and personal organizers several times in the past:
The GTD application I’ve used most extensively (but eventually abandoned) was 43actions.com. The site is a web application for the iPhone, and does work OK, but I found it required too many connections and clicks to the web to function quickly and transparently. Unlike many other GTD solutions, the developers of 43actions have NOT created an actual iPhone application which syncs to the web. (A beta iPhone app is under development by a 3rd party, but so far nothing has been released.) The site remains a true “web app” as all iPhone applications were before the release of the iPhone SDK. A GTD tool cannot work unless it is used ALL the time to manage tasks. Once you start writing things down in other places or trying to keep them memorized but not recorded, you’re sunk. I’ve been down that road, unfortunately. So, one of my holiday goals was to find and begin utilizing a new GTD application which would integrate wonderfull
