Monthly Archives: August 2011

Aug 12 2011

OTR Links for 08/12/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Aug 11 2011

Interactive Stories and Writing

I’ve been reading a great deal lately about the future of electronic books.  What will they look like?

There are some interesting examples from PDF files to books with hypertext links to embedded video to augmented reality.  Just do a search and you’ll find all kinds of early examples of what electronic books might be.  There really isn’t a pure definition of what it might look like or what it might be.

Even if we agreed tomorrow what an electronic book should look like, will we be able to replace libraries and classroom collections quickly?  Hardly!

I was playing around with yet another online QR Code generator last night.  It’s called SmallQR and you just type the URL that you want to shorten and it does its magic.  Visit the SmallQR website here.

I was pondering what might happen with the existing literature collections should we come up with some sort of new electronic book.  Surely, they will lose their interest in favour of the flashier alternative.

Then, it dawned on me.  Maybe they don’t have to.  Maybe we could update them ourselves.

It would actually be kind of an interesting research project for students.  As they read the book, why not have them also do a little research to go along with their reading.  The research might be a dive into Wikipedia or a YouTube Video or a Flickr image.  Could they not bring the book alive for others to read by taking their research URL and creating a QR Code?  That code could then be printed and taped or pasted in the margin of the book for the next reader to enjoy the full experience.

I see two immediate benefits – the second reader would get the complete electronic experience; the first reader would dig deeper into the book that they would have otherwise.  Win – Win?  If nothing else, we could extend the life of an existing book by adding that new dimension.  Could this be extended to their own writing?  We know from blogging that success comes from hyperlinking.  Could successful paper writing add a new dimension by having a QR Code to take it beyond the paper?

How about in the music classroom?  Imagine sheet music with an attached QR Code that would play a video or a music clip to immediately help the learner.

It’s a great deal of work but I think it’s an interesting concept that might turn out to be helpful to breathe some life into older materials that will end up competing for attention alongside a contemporary, glitzier version.

Aug 11 2011

OTR Links for 08/11/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Aug 10 2011

Access :: Future

I’m on a roll.

In addition to the previous post with all kinds of Open Source software, I was doing my daily read of Stephen Downes’ OLDaily.  There was one entry that particularly caught my eye.  It was a book that he ha written titled “Access :: Future – Practical Advice on How to Learn and What to Learn“.

It’s a PDF file suitable for immediate download which I’ve done.  It comes as no surprise that Stephen has licensed it under a Creative Commons license – nice.

Check out the Table of Contents.

Learning Today 

  • Introduction  
  • The Purpose of Learning 
  • Things You Really Need To Learn 
  • The Mark of Wisdom 
  • Critical Thinking in the Classroom
  • Necessary and Sufficient Conditions 
  • Not All… 
  • Educational Blogging 
  • Your Career 
  • Managing Your Blog Entry: 11 Better Tips 
  • Blogs in Education 
  • How To Write Articles Quickly and Expertly  
  • Principles for Evaluating Websites 
  • Applying Critical Reasoning 
  • How Do You Know? 
  • Having Reasons 
  • How Memory Works 
  • How The Net Works 
  • An Operating System For The Mind 
  • Personal Knowledge: Transmission or Induction? 
  • Virtues Education 
  • Free Learning and Control Learning  
  • The Science of Learning  
  • E-Learning 2.0 
  • To The School or Classroom 2.0 Advocates 
  • The Issues in Front of Us  
  • The Form of Informal 
  • Uniqueness and Conformity 
  • New Technology Supporting Informal Learning 
  • How I Would Organize A Conference 
  • What I Learned in High School 
  • My Personal Passion Trajectory 
  • My Academic Upbringing 
  • Social Media and Me 
  • Seven Habits of Highly Connected People 
  • The Reality of Virtual Learning 
  • Nine Rules for Good Technology  
  • What Not To Build 
  • Ten Futures  

The book is a collection of Mr. Downes’ thinking and original writing over a period of time.  It’s not a book that you should or will read from beginning to end.  I’d suggest that you install it on your computer or reading device and read a chapter at a time and take time to see the relevance to you.  It’s not necessary to even read it in order.

You need to download this book and read it.  You need to share it with your colleagues.  You need a book talk about this.  From the entries, great conversations and learning should ensue.

Aug 10 2011

An Open Source Goldmine

I’m excited.

Like many people, I want to have it all.  While I’m working on moving most of what I do to the web, there are still times when nothing beats having the right software on your computer.  Like many people of my ilk, I work interchangeably in Windows, Macintosh, and Ubuntu environments.  If I had to purchase a piece of software for every task that I perform, I would be even poorer than I am now.

So, the web is a perfect solution for me.  More often than not, when that fails, I’ll turn to Open Source software.  You’ll find some incredibly talented programmers turning out some of the best software there and it’s ready for you to use.  More often that not, they’ll have compiled their wares into an executable ready to run.  At times, you may have to download the source and compile it yourself.  Often what you get when you’re done is great software.

I had run into author Cynthia Harvey a while back and quite frankly, had forgotten until I stumbled onto the article 55 Open Source Apps Transforming Education.  I read it from top to bottom, creating a to-download list as I was doing so.  I was rubbing my hands in anticipation of this goldmine when I returned to the first page and saw that the article was over a year old.  That’s not too bad in this day and age but I started to wonder if she’d updated it for this year.

It was actually pretty easy – there was a link to “More Articles” where I got a list of articles by Ms. Harvey.  Jackpot!

Not only had she updated the education list, but she’s got a number of other articles.

What the heck.  Why am I copying these individual pages — here’s a summary of articles she’s written.

If you’re searching for that elusive application, why not start with these articles and see what she has to offer?

Of particular interest to me was the list of Open Source Apps that Replace Popular Education Software.  Educators in Ontario are generally pretty well off with software licensed by the Ministry of Education through the OESS process.  The complete list can be searched on the OSAPAC website.  But, there are times where there may be a gap in your suite of software or you might be looking for titles to recommend for student home use.  This is the perfect place to start.

 

Aug 10 2011

OTR Links for 08/10/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Aug 9 2011

You know…

…there are times when I don’t even know where to try to begin to understand…

 

It’s so great when my “secrets” become “magnificent concepts”, I guess.  <sigh>

Aug 9 2011

My Thoughts on “Maybe 1 to 1 isn’t such a great idea”

Dean Shareski is a pretty sharp guy and I like to read his messages and his blog.  He makes sense in his efforts and I often use his thoughts as a litmus test for my own thinking.  Recently, he wrote a blog post “Maybe 1 to 1 isn’t such a great idea“.

There are parts of the post that make a great deal of sense, and yet, there are some assertations and assumptions in the post that I’m having trouble with.    

Probably the most salient part of the post was the thought that one of the valuable things that traditional school offer is the opportunity for students to work face to face.  To that, he’s absolutely dead on.  If we think of providing attitudes and skills for the workplace, the ability to work productively with others is absolutely crucial.  And yet, how many companies are global in nature and rely on technology to allow people to collaborate using technology?  The well rounded citizen needs to do both.

This is the quote that really hit me though.

“As online education grows so does the potential for students to opt out of face to face attendance.“

Yes, the potential is there but is this a reality that is going to overnight empty schools of students? I don’t see that happening anytime soon. As the DeLC (District eLearning Coordinator) for a school board, I managed the offerings that we offered students as online options though eLearning Ontario. There were many reasons why students opted to take a course online.

  • extended absence from school (illness or other reasons);
  • not enough students interested in a course at school to offer a section onsite;
  • course not offered at a school as there is no teacher ready to teach it;
  • summer school;
  • upgrading courses;
  • and sometimes just the desire to take a course online.

Guidance counsellors do their very best to help students make the best choices for success.  At the end of the day, there wasn’t a mass exodus of students.  In many cases, students would take their courses using school computers and certainly we were nowhere near a 1:1 ratio!  

If we go back to the original title and think about 1:1, I still think that it’s an admirable goal.  Through traditional means, I do think that that goal is unreachable in a publically funded school board situation.  Not only do you have to acquire the equipment, but you need to sustain it through funding and that’s just plain difficult.  But, that doesn’t close the door.  In fact, a better ratio may be achievable if only we recognize and honour the fact that students have the potential to bring their own computing devices with them and let them use them.

That brings the state of collaboration to a new and empowering level.  I’ve seen groups of two or three working on a project where one student may be working on a school computer (with the school/board/Ministry licensed software) and partners doing over the shoulder proofreading and using their own devices to help with on the fly research.  It’s a noisy scenario but a good noisy.  It was an environment that a teacher had cultivated with the students and it was just the way that things were done.

But, let’s not lose sight of the fact that education is about the curriculum.  The technology, at whatever ratio you may be at, is a tool to be used when appropriate.  If 1:1 is a scenario that it can replace a classroom satisfactorily, then the class really wasn’t satisfactory.  Just today, I read a post by Peter Skillen about “Mindfulness“.  There are words of wisdom in this post that every technology enthusiast (including myself) need to read a ponder.  ”Because we CAN do it, we do it.”  Does the logical ground lie in the middle?  ”Because it’s the best tool available, we do it”.

There are powerful online learning environments.  In fact, if you’re reading this post, you’re enjoying it.  We talk about the power of collaboration and building the perfect PLN as professionals.  Why wouldn’t we be wanting the same thing for our students?  I’m also a real fan of a blended solution where some elements are face to face and others are online.  I really see this as offering a balance and exposing students to the best of both worlds.  But, it’s not going to happen unless we have enough technology in place to make it happen.

Sorry, Dean, but I’m not with you on this one.

Aug 9 2011

OTR Links for 08/09/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Aug 8 2011

Dynamic Geometry Becomes More Dynamic

One of the real "game changing" licenses that we managed to acquire for publically funded schools in Ontario during my stint on the OSAPAC Committee (Ontario Software Acquisition Program Advisory Committee) was licensing for The Geometer’s Sketchpad.  It has the ability to change the way that teachers and students think about geometry (and application to other subjects as well) simply by letting you draw and manipulate mathematical objects on your computer with your mouse.  Or, the next step would be an Interactive Whiteboard.

Think back to the good days of pencils and straight edges and you can really get an appreciation for the understanding that this software package encourages.  You can just try things and immediately see the results.  It really inspires students to explore and just try on geometry for size.

What could make it better?  How about an iPad version?

It’s here and available for download for free from here

The application seems to work best in landscape mode and the book icon in the bottom right corner takes you immediately to resources prepared and ready to go with the application.  The documentation indicates that it’s ready to take any .gsp files already created with Sketchpad for the Desktop 5 and many Desktop 4 application.

From their descriptor:

"Sketchpad Explorer includes iPad®-specific activities and workbooks for:
• elementary mathematics (Grades 1-6)
• early algebra (Grades 7-9)
• geometry (Grades 9-10) 
as well as full access to many mathematical documents hosted on the Sketch Exchange community site and across the web. Users of The Geometer’s Sketchpad can also create and share documents with and for their iPad using iTunes® File Sharing."

Details about how to manipulate the screen objects is available at the Dynamic Geometry website here.

What impressed me was the ease with which objects on the screen can be manipulated with your finger or a stylus. There was no real additional learning and it was just so easily used.

If you’re using The Geometer’s Sketchpad in your classroom and have an iPad, you’re going to want to download and enjoy this application right away.

Powered by Qumana