My wife’s elementary school is having a “Science Night” tonight and I’m having fun walking around and seeing the cool things that the kids are doing. Chemistry students from Anoka High School are here too helping the elementary students work on experiments like “Blast Off!” (citric acid and sodim bicarbonate rockets), “Rock with rocks” (smash up rocks and look inside), “Mini Mysteries” (fun with microscopes), “DNA Dental Detective” (make impressions of your teeth), and others. Lots of parents are here and the kids seem to be having a great time. I’m tempted to suggest that a Technology Night would be a good idea, but I think it would be even more valuable to embed the technology in curriculum nights like this. We need to show the public that the technology work we’re doing is a key component of the curriculum and not just an add-on.
Daily Archives: 4/5/2005
10 cool things from MacWorld
In our morning session at the NCLB Showcase, Apple employee Janet Hill shared her top 10 list of cool things she saw at MacWorld Expo. Here’s her list with some links:
- iStopMotion and iVeZeen from Boinx Software are used for stop motion animation, time lapse recording, and recording movie clips with an iSight camera.
- 3D Weather Globe & Atlas from MacKiev incorporates NASA maps and real-time satellite data. You can also overlay current weather on the maps.
- iGuitar makes guitars that can be interfaced directly to your computer.
- XtremeMac Airplay is a FM transmitter for an iPod
- The Solio is a solar charger for your iPod, cell phone, or other small electronic device.
- Macally sells iPod accessories.
- Podcasting. I’ve posted on this before.
- If you’ve got some song writing talent, maybe you should give the John Lennon Bus Tour a try. Participants may get a chance to record a song and video in a mobile recording studio.
- Grokker takes a different tack on search with a graphical interface that attempts a non-linear approach to communicating results. You need to register to try it, but there are some screen shots.
- The Griffin iTalk makes it easy to record audio directly to your iPod. I only wish the iPod wasn’t such a crappy voice recording device (e.g., preset, low bitrate encoding)
Looks like some cool stuff here. You can sure see that Apple is pinning their hopes on the iPod.
Online “gizmos” at ExploreLearning
ExploreLearning.com is a subscription service that has about 600 science and math simulations. Here’s the official word from their site:
ExploreLearning offers a catalog of modular, interactive simulations in math and science for teachers and students in grades 6-12. We call these simulations Gizmos. Gizmos are fun, easy to use, and flexible enough to support many different teaching styles and contexts. Our Gizmos are designed as supplemental curriculum materials that support state and national curriculum standards; in addition, Gizmos help teachers bring research-proven instructional strategies to their classrooms.
Once they have an account, teachers can make various simulations available to their students. All of the simulations have supplementary materials and most have some assessment features. One feature that intrigues me is the ability to link directly to the simulations. That would make it easy to add one to one of our Moodle courses. We tried several different “gizmos” during the presentation including the Doppler Effect, roller coast physics, and an infectious disease simulation. They all seemed very well done and I would definitely use them if I was still a physics teacher.
Rich media presentations with mPOWER
Multimedia Design Corporation has a multimedia product called mPOWER. It looks similar in capability to eZedia and MediaBlender, but my first impression is that it’s a bit more intuitive to use. The program has direct hooks into Apple’s iLife applications that allow you to import photos, movies, and audio very easily. The desktop version works on PCs and Macs. There’s also a Web-based subscription version that can be used to access presentations that are on the Web and modify them. The “webinar” feature looks pretty interesting too. Subscriptions to the Web-based version are very cheap and according the sales rep the webinar attendees don’t need their own subscriptions.
The software imports HyperStudio which is interesting to me because we’ve still got some old HyperStudio stacks lying around that are increasingly difficult to play on our newer machines. The content is stored in XML format for maximum buzzword compliance. I’m sitting here cringing at the moment because the sales rep who’s doing this presentation clearly has no idea what he’s talking about with respect to XML, HTML, and streaming over the Web. I hate sales B.S.
The final verdict: the software is definitely worth looking at. Price looks pretty good and there are a bunch of features that could be useful for putting content on the Web.
Hanging out at the NCLB Solutions Showcase
I’m in St. Paul today at an event sponsored by Apple Computer. The NCLB Solutions Showcase is highlighting a number of products from vendors that have products to show that address science, math, and other NCLB tested areas. I’ll take some notes and post the highlights.