Using the i-Pad in Education

Please feel free to share your ideas. Some helpful links to start off include:

• (Education) Why the iPad Absolutely Matters - on the iPad forum (extends i-Pad usage to educational management as well)
• iPad for Teaching & Learning (by Cloudworks) - specially set up for the topic
• 5 Ways the iPad will Improve Teaching - not all of which are 'substantial' ways (see #5) but it's still a good discussion to kick-off
• Teaching with the iPad - some personal sharing by a teacher (another similar one here)
• An iPad in Every Classroom - quite a comprehensive list of suggestions from yet another educator, includes slogans like, "The iPad is NOT a laptop!"

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiments have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they're motivated by curiosity and peer interest.

Digital Tools for Learning

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

View more presentations from Jane Hart.

--by Jane Hart from the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies. Accessed at http://blog.curriki.org/category/ed-tech/

Teachers, how many of these tools do you use in or out of the classroom?

Can you locate MS PowerPoint in the list? (Hint: it's not in the top 10.)

Prezi for Lectures and Presentations

Have you heard the buzz or seen the new zooming alternative to boring old PowerPoint? Check out this presentation to MassComm students at KDU. Just click the arrowhead at bottom to start, then at bottom right ("More"), click "fullscreen" and "autoplay" for easier navigation.

With a little practice, you can create similar presentations yourself, for your own classes with your own material. You can learn and browse the showcase of presentations at Prezi.com. Students and teachers are loving it! At the site, you can create a free account, design, and download your presentation for use offline. Educators and students qualify for the middle level of usage for free.

TLC will offer training in the near future. Stay tuned!

Warning: after I introduced Alwyn to Prezi, he says the learning, playing, and designing can be a bit addictive.

101 Free Learning Tools

View more presentations from zaid. (tags: thinking tools)

Tips for Technophobic Teachers

Edutopia tells the story of Jim Wilson, a senior teacher in a Pittsburg high-school who has gone from grumbling about his school's technology-integration initiative to embracing it. Here is Wilson's advice for teachers struggling to keep up to speed with the new technologies being infused into schools: 

Ask for Help

Wilson has the benefit of an on-site tech-integration coach, provided jointly by the school district and a state grant. However, even teachers without this resource can walk down the hall and find help from a more tech-savvy colleague. Or they can simply look around their own classroom, as explained in Wilson's next tip.

Learn from Students

Some of Wilson's most dependable tech tutors have been his students. Students can also coach one another -- every class has a computer whiz or two. "I have a tough time answering the simplest of questions, but I've learned a whole lot from them," Wilson says. "Learning from the students is a neat thing. They're proud of themselves because they know something that the teacher didn't know."

Take Baby Steps

Wilson started by learning to use email, then moved up to Yahoo searches, Microsoft PowerPoint, and ultimately streaming media. He says, "If I could learn as much as I learned this year every year, I think in a few years I'll be of some use to the students instead of the students being of some use to me."

Be Precise About Your Expectations

When asking students to use tech tools and the wide world of Internet resources, you need to be specific. Says Wilson, "There are so many places you can go and really stray and still be in the same ballpark." After a couple of projects gone awry, he learned to make his assignments exceedingly clear.

Expect Snags

"Pitfalls are going to happen every day," Wilson notes. Then he adds with a laugh, "This is public education." Yet, from those pitfalls come lessons about how to do things better the next time. Already, Wilson has learned some computer-troubleshooting techniques, and he has tweaked lesson plans to obtain better results. In the meantime, he says, "you hope the pit is not too deep."

Allow Students to Take the Reins

Back in the 1970s, Wilson recalls, the mentality that a teacher on his feet is worth two in his seat kept him looking over students' shoulders and walking them through many tasks. Now, with the resources and tools computers and the Internet provide, he feels more comfortable standing back and letting students explore a project on their own -- acting more like a coach than a drill sergeant. That's not to say computer-using kids don't require supervision. Wilson says, "You still have those day when you have to be the bad guy."

Beware of Plagiarism

Wilson may be an old dog, but he quickly learned that with the wealth of material available online, students, he says, will "paste and copy any paper they can." It's something to watch for, he adds. But on the flip side, Wilson notes, the exposure to different ideas and information can expand their perspectives and help students formulate their own opinions.

Keep an Open Mind

"If you have an open mind, you'll see that using technology is just like anything else," he says. "There's good and there's bad, and you just have to wade through and figure out how you can best fit into the situation."

7 Mistakes Teachers Make With Technology

Doug Johnson rants:

1. Not backing up data. "You mean having two copies of my files on the hard drive doesn't count as a backup?" The first time a teacher loses his/her precious data my heart breaks. The second time, well, stupidity ought cause some suffering.

2. Treating a school computer like a home computer. Teachers who use a school computer to run a business, edit their kid's wedding videos, or send tasteless jokes to half of North America (including that fundamentalist English teacher down the hall) are being stupid. Teachers who take their computers home and let their kids hack on them are being stupid. Teachers who don't own a personal computer for personal business deserve to get into well-deserved trouble.

3. Not supervising computer-using students. It is really stupid to believe Internet filters will keep kids out of trouble on the Internet. For so many reasons. Even the slow kids who can't get around the school's filter, can still exploit that 10% of porn sites the filter won't catch if they choose to do so. They can still send cyberbullying e-mail - maybe even using your email address. Or they can just plain waste time.

4. Thinking online communication is ever private. Eventually everyone sends an embarrassing personal message to a listserv. I've heard of some tech directors who get their jollies reading salacious inter-staff e-mails. You school e-mails can be requested and must be produced if germane to any federal lawsuits. Even e-mails deleted from your computer still sit on servers somewhere - often for a very loooong time. Think you wiped out your browsing history? Don't bet that that is the only set of tracks you've left that show where you've been surfing. Your Facebook page will be looked at by the school board chair and your superintendent and principal know who the author of that "anonymous" blog is. Not assuming everyone can see what you send and do online is stupid.

5. Believing that one's teaching style need not change to take full advantage of technology. Using technology to simply add sounds and pictures to lectures is stupid. Smart technology use is about changing the roles of teacher and student. The computer-using student can now be the content expert; the teacher becomes the process expert asking questions like - where did you get that information, how do you know it's accurate; why is it important, how can you let others know what you discovered, and how can you tell if you did a good job? The world has changed and it is rank stupidity not to recognize it and change as well.

6. Ignoring the intrinsic interest of tech use in today's kids. Kids like technology. Not using it as a hook to motivate and interest them in their education is stupid.

7. Thinking technology will go away in schools. The expectation tha "This too shall pass" has worked for a lot of educational practices and theories. Madeline Hunter, Outcomes-Based Education, whole language, and yes, some day, NCLB all had their day in the sun before being pushed aside by the next silver bullet. (I think that metaphor was a bit confused. Sorry.) But it is stupid to think technology will go away in education. It isn't going away in banking, medicine, business, science, agriculture - anywhere else in society. Thinking "this too shall pass" about technology is pretty stupid.

What would make YOUR list of the top stupid mistakes you've seen teachers make with technology?

The Future of Education - Gaming?

How You Can Save the World asks:

"Why should anyone sit through hours of instruction about biology or anthropology or geology when, today, virtual reality video gaming technology can project students directly into the subject.

"Having fun, they can fight off invading bacteria, live in an ancient city or watch the formation of the Ice Age. They can learn more in 10 minutes of game playing than we learned in hours of classes and reading boring textbooks. Who says education has to be painful?"

Tips for Powerpoint

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Good Power-Point

From Seth Godin's Really Bad Powerpoint:

Here are the five rules you need to remember to create amazing PowerPoint presentations:

1. No more than six words on a slide. EVER. (check out some ideas on presenting with text)

2. No cheesy images. Use professional images from corbis.com instead. They cost $3 each, or a little more if they’re for ‘professional use’. (alternatively, Google Images and Flickr might suffice)

3. No dissolves, spins or other transitions. None.

4. Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never (ever) use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have.

5. Don’t give hand-outs of your slides. They’re emotional, and they won’t work without you there. If someone wants your slides to show “the boss,” tell them that the slides go if you go.

You put up a slide. It triggers an emotional reaction in the audience. They sit up and want to know what you’re going to say that fits in with that image. Then, if you do it right, every time they think of what you said, they’ll see the image (and vice versa).

Steve Jobs and the iPhone

Steve Jobs launches the iPhone 3G at the WorldWide Developers Conference 2008.

Shift Happens

Will Machines Outsmart Their Makers?

Two links on artificial intelligence:

1. Minds of Their Own, from the Economist

"Throughout history, engineers have spent their lives inventing machines that were faster, stronger, more reliable or capable of greater precision than human beings. Whether they were Jacquard looms, combine harvesters or CAD-CAM gear, they were tools for amplifying some human skill or compensating for a weakness.

But always they needed human intelligence to function. That’s now changed.

Neuroengineers build tools that think for themselves, making decisions the way humans do."

2. Super-Intelligent Computers, from the Enterprise Resilience Management Blog

"Advances in artificial intelligence are creating machines with near human-like mental agility. Intelligence will be embedded everywhere -- even in our clothing, thanks to smaller, more powerful computers....The program will either scare you or assure about the future."

Winner of TechCrunch 50

Yammer is the new winner of the TechCrunch 50. It's Twitter with a business model.

"Created by an existing company, Geni, to scratch its own itch, Yammer takes the familiar Twitter messaging system and applies it to internal corporate communications. There is such a huge demand for this type of service that 10,000 people and 2,000 organizations signed up for the service the first day it launched on Monday.

"Anyone with a corporate email can sign up and follow other people in their company. But if a company ants to claim its users, and gain administrative control over them, they will have to pay.

"It’s a brilliant business model."

Read more about the competition, Yammer and the runners-up.

Want to Remember Everything You've Ever Learnt? Surrender to this Algorithm

This is a long article, but it may be worth your time. It's about a new program called Supermemo and how, "(Human) forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off."

Read more.

E-Books Like "Vegetarian Meat"?

In a digital age, there is natural tendency to chuck away our physical books for e-reading gadgets. I get a feeling that many KDU students would rather log on to Wikipedia than go into the library.

Jordan Jacks from Yale University bemoans this trend and reemphasizes the very nature of books over against the superficiality(?) of e-reading devices like the Sony Reader.

Some excerpts of his very well-written article:

"The problem with the Sony Reader is not its ease of use, its price, or the books it can display; the real problem with the Reader lies in its very existence. Boiled down to its essentials, the Sony Reader faces the same damning comparison as vegetarian lunch meat—why read the Sony Reader’s imitation ink, look at its “paper-like” display, or handle its book-aping flip covers, when the real thing is cheaper, easier to use, and comes in more than three colors?

"The Reader fundamentally changes what it means to read, transforming what was an escapist, often solitary act—a way to leave behind the considerations of schedules or electronic
timetables, the ineffable present of daily life—into an integrated communion with the modern world. How can you escape into a book when that book is linked to the rest of the daily, electronic grind?

"Readers must, in the act of reading, be allowed to be alone with a book."

What do you think? Wanna stay with 'real' books? Or will 'virtual' reading rule the world?

Did You Know?

One of most popular short-clips on the Web regarding education.