links for 2008-07-06

Best in Show

In a conference like NECC 2008 with so much and so varied experiences, it’s very difficult to determine a “Best in Show”. It’s a personal experience and certainly doesn’t demean any of the other things, but this leaps to the forefront for me.

I’m not running around the conference with a rubric rating various things. My litmus test is that the best of the best demands more than a passing interest, a return look, and an obsession to try it out at home on my equipment so that I can share it with others.

My tendencies are mathematical and I make no bones about it. Math makes the world go around and mathematical literacy is important to everyone. Whether your job involves making change for a sale, estimating the amount of paint required to cover a wall, or as an air traffic controller keeping airplanes safe and under control, mathematics is at the heart of it all.

The poster sessions at conferences are always the highlight for me. It was at a poster session that I ran into this application. NASA has developed a simulator that allows you to go through what it means to be an air traffic controller. This project is supported by the FAA and the gentleman that I talked to indicated that a real Air Traffic Controller can come into your classroom and talk about this as a career.

Details are here: http://www.smartskies.nasa.gov/lineup/index.html where you can find all sorts of details and instructions with the actual simulator located at: http://www.atcsim.nasa.gov.

The premise is actually quite simple. You’re an air traffic controller with one runway to land your incoming plans. You have a number of flight paths that your clients potentially approach your landing strip on and there is the potential for bad weather to get into the road. Your job is to get all of the planes safely on the ground in as optimal a time and as safely as you can. The application comes with its own problem sets of 2-5 incoming airplanes or you can create your own. As an Air Traffic Controller, you’re not driving the plane. You are limited to instructing the actual pilot to adjust speed or approach route.

To be successful, you need to develop an ongoing and real life sense of time, distance, and speed. Once the simulator starts, there’s no time for calculators! You’re on your own to apply proportional reasoning.

When the simulator ends, there are no fireworks going off to celebrate success. If you are not successful, there are no gruesome examples of carnage either. But, you may re-analyze what you did and look for an even more optimal solution. This is guaranteed to have more than a passing interest.

I recall a university professor talking to us in math class once. “If you are an athlete, how to you get better? Practice, Practice, Practice.” If you have a tendency towards mathematics, what do you do? “Do the odd numbered questions on page 37 for tomorrow.” Applications like this are great for mathematics and maybe those with mathematical potention will be encouraged to “Practice, Practice, Practice”. I know I did.

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links for 2008-07-05

NECC’s Ongoing Influence

Last year, I didn’t have a Twitter account.

The NECC Conference was in Atlanta and when it was over, I went home. Once I got there, I worked my way through my notes and observations and made an impact on myself and planned for how I was going to use the ideas in the upcoming year.

This year, I have a Twitter account. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/dougpete/ First thing this morning, I took the lawn mower through the grass. Then, I fired up my computer and Twhirl grabbed 20 tweets and I saw that the chatter from this year’s NECC continued. I summized “NECC” and holy cow. People were blogging and commenting about their experiences and learnings from the conference. On a normal day, my online learning network has about 200 people. Now, literally, there are thousands of people posting observations, pictures, and resources to share the experience.

I haven’t even begun to dig into the archived ustream resources or archived presentations from the ISTE website.

The learning is ongoing as people continue to share.

It’s never the same as being there, but the resource list and ideas will continue to grow. I still have Alan November’s book to dig into and I also bought that book about Ghosts in Texas. (Despite the rumours, I’m not all nerd…)

This year, the learning continues. The cool thing is that it won’t continue alone.

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links for 2008-07-04

Ghosts in San Antonio

These are the things that make tourism and entrepreneurs so active. The concept of a ghost wherever you are headed. New Orleans is famous for it and it is a substantial business there. The setting is perfect for it with the graves above ground. But, San Antonio?

I stumbled upon this before we left for the NECC Conference. My favourite all time movie is John Wayne’s “The Alamo”. It’s in DVD format in the library. So, it was natural that I would do some internet research before heading south. There was the expected; the information about Travis, Bowie, Crockett, etc. and on one of the pages, there was a link to the Ghost Tours of San Antonio. Prominent on the tour is the Gunter Hotel. Hey, I’m booked at the Gunter Hotel! It’s away from the convention centre and had lower rates which was important. So, I read all about the ghosts of the Alamo and of the Gunter Hotel.

The Alamo part made sense with the famous battle and its ending. However, the grisly events at the Gunter were bizarre. See the links below.

So, it was room 636 which I had engraved in my mind.

We met a nice couple from Atlanta on the ride in from the airport on the shuttle. They were staying at the Gunter so I shared the story with them. At registration, there were two clerks and I stepped up and we registered for our room. 601. As we gathered our luggage, the gentleman came back to me and asked “The ghost room was 638, right? They put us in 636.” Gulp. As we got to the room, it turns out that 601 is adjacent to 636.

On the hotel elevator later on, I got on with a group of young men and pressed the 6 button. One of the guys said, “Oh you’re on the ghost floor”. Floor?

The evening was uneventful and off to bed I went. At about 2am, the smoke detector started to beep. It’s the beep that you get with a low battery. It wasn’t stopping so I called the hotel desk and they sent up a maintenance person. The smoke detector was high on the wall and required a ladder so it was necessary. Just like when you take your car to a mechanic, the beeping stopped while he was in the room. However, after 20 minutes of trying, he was unable to remove the cover but the beeping had stopped so we figured that it was just a bizarre battery thing, he left, and I went back to bed.

Half an hour later, the beeping starts again! I call the desk and he’s back and, of course, the beeping has stopped. I assure him that I’m not a whacko and that the beeping was indeed there. He called down to the desk to see if we could get a different room. Ah, nothing like moving rooms at 3:30 in the morning. But, the odds are that in a hotel of this size, we’ll be on a different floor. Right?

Wrong.

The new room was 634. But, our adventure stopped here. The beeping didn’t follow us. The new room was great; the hotel was very good hosts; and I’d go back there in a heartbeat. Judging by the lack of USA Today in front of 601 as I went for the free wireless in the lobby at 5am, the room was not occupied for the rest of our stay.

But, what a story. And, there are books about San Antonio’s ghosts in the gift store. That will be my treat to myself.
http://www.sanantonioghosts.com/pictures.html
http://www.angelfire.com/weird/DemonicsandHauntings/ghostsofgunter.html
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/TX-GunterHotel.html
http://www.unexplainable.net/artman/publish/article_3123.shtml

In addition to the Alamo,

http://www.legendsofamerica.com/TX-AlamoGhosts.html

another supposedly haunted place that we visited was the Spanish Governor’s Palace.

http://www.alamocityghosttours.com/TheHauntedPalaceTour.html

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Day 3 at NECC

Day 3 started on a cooler note. Although it’s still quite warm, there was rain in the air last night and temperatures dropped with cloud cover remaining. It made for a pleasant stroll to the shuttle pickup point. On the drive, I had the chance to share some stories about computer PD with some technology coordinators. Lots of the same demands are placed on them as me so it’s nice to meet kindred souls.

It’s sad, but it took until the third day that I actually got my map out and found my first conference room so I got to do directly there. I’ve wanted to hear Mitchell Resnick from MIT for quite some time. The session was entitled “Grassroots Creativity: Helping Everyone Become a Creative Thinker”. We spent some time talking about the history of innovation that has come from the MIT labs from the very first Logo to software logo, etc. It brought back some interesting memories and it also put the development of this genre into perspective. The philosophy of imagine-create-play-share-reflect-imagine was evident in the delivery. In his mind, the only two things that are working in education are kindergarten and grad school. Everything else needs fixing.

Mitchell demonstrated some of the results from Lego workshops and talked about the inspiration and creativity shown by students when given access to the hardware and software.

Then, we saw the latest revision of Scratch. http://scratch.mit.edu As with the previous endeavours, the focus is on creativity and problem solving. MIT has extended the concept with the development of a sharing, networking site for Scratch projects. Students are encouraged to upload their projects, download others and help out with development, comment on other works, improve and share back. This is a wonderfully new concept in the area of programming. There is support with Scratch Education for Teachers and on the horizon, hooks into Second Life. That should prove to be exciting.

Over the break, I met up with Robert Martellaci from Mind Share Learning and he took me into the Press Lounge with a couple of his classmates from Pepperdine University. We had a really nice chat about the state of the world and they were very interested in our implementation of SMART Boards as part of our portable initiative when so many others are bolting them to the wall. I gave our philosophy of trying to make resources available when necessary and the ability of teachers to rearrange their classrooms as they need. Some of the things that go away when you’re working with a fixed solution. I also found out where the best coffee and free food is. The Press is treated nicely indeed.

By the time I left, my first choice for next session was full as was the second. Thinking I would head to the posters, I happened to drop into a session just for a look but stayed for the duration. “GIS, Google Maps, and More for Literacy Projects”. The emphasis was the engagement that students get when they visualize where stories take place through Google Earth instead of just on paper. Interesting. Google has scanned some of the books that have been digitized and plotted every location that it recognizes in the text. This is placed in a mashup that you can view in conjunction with the book to understand the location of the settings. Very cool. Some of the books that were mentioned where “Around the world in 80 Days”, “9/11 Commission Report”, “War and Peace”, “Travels of Marco Polo”, and “Make Way for Ducklings”. I can’t wait to have some time to follow up on this. It was very engaging. Jerome Burg who was the genius behind Google Lit Trips was in the audience to talk shortly about this project. Really, really interesting presentation which concluded with an impromptu Powerpoint lesson. You had to be there!

The Poster sessions again beckoned where I definitely saw the Best in Show for me. I’ll blog about it separately after I play with it a bit.

I decided to go to another Hall Davidson presentation. I was intrigued by the descriptor about how to edit things on an iPod. Hall was in rare form. We learned how to turn off the menus on an iPod, do Chroma Key with Windows Movie Maker, put a floating image into Google Earth, and how to embed live audio into WordPress and Typepad blogs. The highlight was Hall trying something new and that was to place a live Qik feed into an instance of Google Earth. He gave a call to his friend Steve Dembo who started broadcasting and sure enough it worked! Software to check out is MogoPop and Panda Maker.

Back to the poster session to see if I got it right. I did and am even more excited now!

My final session of the conference was with Steve Dembo talking about internet safety. We talked about the need for filtering although nobody was really happy. In the US, if you get money for internet, it must be filtered. Steve, while pointing out that he wasn’t a lawyer, showed us what was required to be blocked. Child Pornography, Obscenity, and anything that is harmful to minors. Nobody would argue over this list but often it goes so much further. We looked at some Acceptable Use Policies and talked about what it is that education needs to do. How can we teach students about all of the internet when it’s filtered? If we’re not doing it, they are learning at home with no master plan. That’s not necessarily effective. We talked about the value of http://berecruited.com and the importance of an appropriate online image for students. Steve even gave an example of a school district that makes a review of one’s Facebook, MySpace, etc., part of the curriculum so that students get into a good college or hired for a new job. They are also encouraged to “Google themselves” to see what they have left on the internet or what others have said about them. There are lots of implications that students don’t necessarily realize. How will they learn?

Finally, the keynote to close the event. Idit Harel Caperton talked about “The Transformational Power of Social Media Technology in Learning”. During her presentation, she injected her viewpoints of constructivism in a Web 2.0 world with Web 3.0 on the horizon. She took us through 3 decades of thinking, covered in 3 days at the conference and concluded with 3 wishes for the future. Twitter served as a back channel for the presentation and it was alive throughout. If you Summize “NECC”, you’ll see what was going on. The session was also broadcast live from ISTE Island on Second Life.

The three wishes for the future?

  • Become a signal now for the future
  • Cultivate the constructivist “Wisdom of One”
  • Honour the “Eternal Beta”

And then it was over. On the way out, I finally got a chance to talk with Tim. In a place so big and with so many people and actually in both a convention centre and a hotel, you just never meet up sometimes.

I have a lot of work ahead of me with all kinds of notes of things to check out and try. A very rich three days.

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links for 2008-07-03

Day 2 at NECC

NECC, Day 2 is Canada Day. Before I left for the convention centre, I sent out two tweets.

Paul has a quiz on his blog and Microsoft had a quiz on their site. What a nice day to Canada’s birthday. It was a nice lead-in to the opening keynote. Canadian educators Mali Bickley and Jim Carleton were interviewed by NBC’s Lester Holt. He interviewed the duo about the global collaboration projects their classes were participating in. Of particular interest is the support that their administrator gives them and the return is an increased return on EQAO scores. It doesn’t get much better than that. Using connections from iearn.org and myhero.com, they are able to bring character building and global awareness into their primary classes. Students polish their work knowing that they have a global audience. One particulary emotion moment came when one of their students adopted a truck driver as “My Hero” because he gave his life in order that others would live. The widow showed up at the school to meet the student who had made her husband his hero. It was tough to choke back the emotion. On the horizon, these teachers will bring a carbon calculator to their students to help them identify their footprint on the environment. The session certainly set the tone for the day and there were references to Canadian global awareness and compassion at later sessions. The whole interview was very professional and I suspect will be on an edition of The Today Show this weekend.

Had a nice chat with Ron, Harry, Beth, and David Warlick. I complimented David on his presentation yesterday. It really was good. We had a nice chat about Personal Learning Networks and immigrants to Canada.

There was a longish break before the next set of concurrent sessions and so I headed back to the vendors. This time, I was intrigued by some of the sub-compact laptops that were on the floor. OLPC has been good for breaking the mold of what a laptop computer could be. I think this is going to grow and set a standard for us in the upcoming years. One unit claimed a battery life of 6 hours. You can’t ask for more in a regular school.

Hidden well in the maze of sessions was my next one. “What Effective Computer-Using Educators Know about Teaching: An International Perspective”. Geoff Powell from Australia, Peter Skillen from Canada, and Gary Stager from the US formed a panel where they gave us some thoughts about best practices. I can always count on Gary Stager for a good line or two and he made an interesting observation. When interviewing for teaching jobs, if someone has summer camp experience, they go to the top of the list because they’ve lived with kids and hopefully understand them better. I’d never thought of that. While I had never done summer camp, my summers involved teaching swimming lessons and lifeguarding. I wonder if that would count. Some other observations “Good teachers scare kids (sometimes)”, “If you’re going to make your school wireless, don’t forget the courtyard outside”, “Always ask deep questions”, and then there’s a comment that makes one of my employer’s belief statements. “All teachers should be able to explain what it is that they do and why they do it”. Makes so much sense, but does it happen all the time? I also learned a new use for Google Earth. It’s called “Dipping”. Use Google Earth to find a nice big swimming pool in someone’s backyard and get the gang and go for a midnight dip. Hmmmm.

Alan November had the big theatre for his presentation about “Designing Rigourous and Globally Connected Assignments”. Alan gave the audience the challenge to make some significant changes this year. Remember that whatever you “say” on the web could conceivably be heard around the world. Some things to learn.

  • Learn the grammar and the syntax of the internet
  • Screencast your homework
  • Assign jobs to kids so that everyone’s work has value
  • Have a Scribe team and develop class notes as a community
  • Add some value to the world - make a contribution to Wikipedia…

A great presentation. Unfortunately, it ran over and I had a commitment so I had to sneak out at about the 65 minute mark. The big thing thought was that we all got a copy of Alan’s Book “Web Literacy for Educators”. It will be a good read on the flight home.

Next, Will Richardson and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach talked about the creation of Online Learning Communities. Sheryl shared a great line “Change is always premature”. Got to remember that one. Stories were shared of some work that they had done with schools using Personal Learning Communities and some of the face to face and electronic means that they used to promote the essence of the communities. Another great quote “None of us are as good as all of us”. You can check out the results of their work illustrating what they consider to be best practices at http://abpc.wikispaces.com. And, Sheryl uses Flock as a browser. What a great sign of someone who understands community. They also shared a rubric for acquisition of the skills.

  • Know Nothing
  • Newbie
  • Explorer
  • Path Finder
  • Power User
  • Know Everything

with descriptors for each level, of course.

Finally, Hall Davidson finished the day with a talk about cell phones in the classrooms. We, of course, all poked fun at schools that ban cell phones. At least in North America. This is a phenomenon that’s not going to go away so we need to figure out what we’re going to do about it. Some interesting cell phone trivia - on the planet, there are 3billion cell phones and 6.6billion people. In perspective, there are 850million persona computers. I thought this was cool…there are 30 countries that have more cell phones that people!

Hall then took us through a thoroughly enjoyable look at some things that you can use a cell phone for.

Jott - instant transcription
GCast - create your own podcasts by telephone
We also did a poll like you would with your hand held classroom response units only by cell phone through PollEverywhere
Get food information by texting to 34381
Search Google by texting to 466453
Access Google Calendar by texting to 48368
The folks from Kurzweil have a cell phone with a reader…
And, there’s a cell phone that is also a projector to display contents on a wall.

And, of course, your phone can play mp3, videos, do slideshows, take pictures, and even make telephone calls.

Apple Canada had a reception for Canadian attendees and it was good to renew acquaintances. Then, the compulsory walk along the Riverwalk. Interesting to note that Discovery Education had reserved an entire floor for a reception.

One more day… I can’t wait. This has been a great two days so far.

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links for 2008-07-02