Monthly Archives: June 2005

Savvy Technologist Podcast #5

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I took my new podcasting gear into the vendor hall at NECC to see how two mics would work when interviewing someone with tons of background noise. You can hear for yourself, but I think it turned out pretty well. In this, my first vendor-cast, I talk briefly to Peter Schneider our Atomic Learning sales rep. Hopkins has been an Atomic Learning customer since the company began, but I often wonder how I can encourage our staff to utilize the subscription more effectively. I asked Peter and here’s what he said.

Download: STP-AtomicLearning.mp3 (2.6 MB, 5:43)

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Savvy Technologist Podcast #4

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I had the pleasure of meeting an old long-distance colleague of mine, Jeff Elkner, face to face for the first time today. Jeff and I collaborated a bit several years ago when we were both teaching the Python programming language in our respective high schools. I used the How To Think Like a Computer Science text that Jeff had a hand in creating and he used a few of the assignment ideas that I created for my students. In this podcast I catch up with Jeff and here what he’s been up to and some of the interesting open source projects that his students are working on.

Download: STP-JeffElkner.mp3 (4.3 MB, 9:19)

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Technology in the math classroom

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This session is called “Ideas for Using Technology in the Mathematics Classroom” and is presented by Frank Sobierajski.

He’s talking about Geometer’s Sketchpad, which is a piece of software our Hopkins math teachers have been working on since we adopted the Key Curriculum for next year in our secondary schools. He’s showing a quick demo of Sketchpad and how it can be combined with an locus problem activity utilizing a map of downtown Syracuse, NY. The activity combines circules and bisected angles to locate a hidden treasure.

Spreadsheet Sliders take advantage of a feature of MS Excel that allows you to add a custom slider to a spreadsheet worksheet that allows you to manipulate the value in a cell via the slider. It’s in the Tools menu, but I didn’t have time to note exactly where. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. This looks like a good way to control simulations and graphs as the graph updates in real time to reflect the current value of the sliders. One slider can control multiple values because you can create equations that refer to the slider values.

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Building 21st Century Skills

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21st Century Skills come up a lot in the literature about one-to-one computing. This session is called “School Leader Development: Building 21st Century School” and is presented by a number of folks who work through Microsoft’s Partners in Learning program.

The presentation begins with some information about globalization. They mention Friedman’s recent work, but the point is that individuals in “Globalization 3.0″ are connected in dramatic ways. Friedman says that 24% of new jobs in America are math and science related while we are graduated a mere 5% in those areas. How is Microsoft responding to this potential crisis? They’ve committed with a strategy in multiple countries to work on new programs like one-to-one computing, schools of the future, and other forward-thinking projects. The presentation appears to be a report of Microsoft’s Partners in Learning project in the six states where they’re working. Boy am I hoping that things get around to some more practical steps that individual districts can work on.

Now we’re getting a look at the Building 21st Century Schools program. It’s a multimeida, modular program that has the feel of a simulation. The intent appears to be to get teachers and school leaders talking about the relevant issues. There are links to background articles and opportunities to compose relfections before and after reading the materials. The system allows groups to work together and take some group notes of their thinking.

There’s plenty of glitz and slick multimedia authoring in evidence here, but my sense is that this system suffers from the same limitations as practically every other similar program I’ve seen. It requires the participants to enter a world entirely separate from their world of work and play. Why can’t this be Web-based? Is there an RSS feed or, at the very least, an email gateway for the discussion component? If not, why not? If I were implementing this program, I can imagine how it would go. A small fraction of the teachers would actually use it because it’s a relatively large pain in the backside to take time to explore this system. From what I can tell, the same program could be built as a Moodle course and delivered in a much more friendly way.

Most of the background learning theory work for this program comes from three books: How People Learn, How Students Learn, and (soon to be published) Preparing Teachers For a Changing World. These would be worth looking at.

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Intro to SchoolTool

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I’m hanging out in the open source pavilion watching Tom Hoffman do a demonstration of the new SchoolTool open source school management system. SchoolTool is a product being development by the Shuttleworth Foundation and Tom is the project manager.

We’re looking at the calendaring features which allow students to create and track their own calendars. You can also track resources like rooms and LCD projectors with SchoolTool. I’m especially interested in that feature. It uses Zope 3 as the underlying technology which means that there’s a finely-grained access control structure that allows admins to assign a variety of rights to various users and groups of users. There is an extensive web services API as well which allows anyone to build a tool to query SchoolTool and return XML that can be used in almost any way imaginable.

The vision of SchoolTool goes well beyond calendaring. The developers also plan to build support for the basic student information features like registration, grading, scheduling, etc. They’ve got a long way to go to build a system that has the breadth of features that are found in most of the commercial student information systems, but they have a committed benefactor in the Shuttleworth Foundation and are building a strong community of developers and users.

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Implementing UDL

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This session at NECC is called “From Mole Hills to Majestic Mountains: Implementing UDL.” I’m beginning work on a universal design project at Hopkins, so this session is particularly timely. The presenters are Lauri Susi from Spotlight on Learning and John Laskarzewski.

The presenters’ definition of UDL: Universal Design for Learning is an educational approach to curriculum and instruction using technology to enable students with divers learning needs to be successful. The origin of universal design is in designing physical access to buildings and other devices, but UDL as it is currently envisioned has implications for materials, instruction and assessment.

Principles of universal design: provide multiple and flexible methods of presentation, expression, and engagement. How does UDL differ from differentiated instruction? Good question. The presenters skipped that slide. Doh! How to get started with UDL? The presenters are showing some examples of how the same information can be displayed in multiple modes. The key is that the instructor doesn’t have to create the different presentation modes for each student separately, but creates the content in a way that can be used in multiple modes automatically by taking advantage of the capabilities of operating systems or specific software. (There are some obvious connections with standards-based Web design here.)

Getting started: Enter the K-Trek. That’s the presenters’ terminology for a curriculum design process that starts with “big ideas” and builds essential questions from there. They use a National Park Service metaphor with each K-Trek beginning at the “Visitor’s Center” and proceeding to various “Outlooks” where students gain perspective and begin interacting with the content. Each outlook has multiple ways of interacting with the content at various levels of difficulty.

Now the presenters are talking about some specific techniques. Here’s one I hadn’t considered: use the auto-summary feature of Microsoft Word to create simplified versions of original documents. (Look in the Tools menu.) Then the teacher can add instructions, color-coded cues or whatever else makes sense for the student. They’re emphasizing the usefulness of building eBooks that have the text in audio format via text-to-speech capabilities of various software tools. It would be interesting to see how well it works to use Apple’s VoiceOver technology with Audio Hijack to read the text out loud and simultaneously capture the audio.

I think the take-home message is, “Design once; view and interact in many ways.” There’s a significant staff development component to this, but the work that goes into teaching about UDL will pay dividends in other areas. There’s no Web site that describes the K-Trek method yet, but Googling for “Spotlight on Learning” should turn it up when it becomes available.

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STP Episode #3

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Carlyn and I attended an Apple-sponsored podcasting event last night with my friend Craig Nansen from North Dakota. Perfectly timed with the release of iTunes 4.9, Barnaby Wasson from Arizone State U. presented for about 30 minutes about the educational uses for podcasting and provided a good primer for those in the audience who were still learning the basics. We also got a tour of the new iTunes from an engineer who works on the iTunes development team. We were all quite surprised at the tournout as Apple had to conduct two back to back sessions to accommodate the crowd who showed up at 9:00 p.m. for the session.

After the session ended I got together with Carlyn, Craig, and a bunch of teachers from Grand Forks, ND for a chat about what we’d just seen. (I didn’t just pick them out of a crowd. I met most of these folks a couple weeks ago at the TNT Conference in Grand Forks.) If nothing else, this podcast illustrates another way that podcasts could be used in schools. Teachers could create an initial podcast and students could be encouraged to podcast their reactions to it. Have a listen.

Download: STP-2005-06-28.mp3 (4.8 MB, 10:34)

A mass of vendors

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Carlyn and I took on the vendors yesterday at NECC. Like last year the vendor hall is the size of several football fields. I’d be interested to know exactly how big it is, but let’s just say that you would get a decent workout just by walking briskly around the perimeter. We spent well over 3 hours and made it down every aisle at least once, grabbed plenty of vendor swag, and registered for a few giveaways too. Look for a couple vendor recap posts coming soon where I’ll share some thoughts about the products on display.