The Handhelds Are Coming! presented by Cathie Norris and Elliot Soloway from the Center for Highly-Interactive Computing In Education at the U. of North Texas and U. of Michigan

The final session features two professors who study handhelds and their use in education. Their thesis is that technology has not had a very big effect on technology largely because the technology has not been accessible to all. Handhelds help solve that problem because their relatively low cost makes them affordable for all. The student to computer ratio is still at about 6:1 and 9:1 in urban districts. A 1:1 ratio is key to transforming education with technology. They are talking about a Handheld Learning Environment (HLE).

What can you do in a handheld-centric classroom that you couldn’t do in a room with one or two PCs?

1. Multi-week and multimedia projects
2. Collaboration: peer editing, synchronous problem solving, and participatory simulations
3. Learning in context: science experiments (probes) and field trips (cameras)

Cathie is demonstrating a student project developed using PicoMap, PocketWord, PocketExcel, and a couple other apps. The student did a project about Leonardo da Vinci and incorporated some text, drawing, spreadsheet, and a digital photo.

Palm Archive and Application Manager (PAAM) helps manage students’ documents by downloading and storing all their docs on a server. Parents can log in to PAAM and see their child’s work.

What’s next?

• Generation 1: Repurposed business devices
• Generation 2: Designed for education (AlphaSmart’s DANA)
• Generation 3: ??? (convergence of camera, PDA, cell phone)

How To Make a Movie presented by James McLellan from Winnepeg, CA

James works with students making feature films. He teaches kids film making techniques and has found that many teachers who are using digital video don’t know some of the key techniques that comprise good film making. He’s going to talk about some key “rules.”

1. Rule of thirds: characters should be framed with their eyes resting on the top third line and the subject matter should be off-centered. James uses cardboard cutouts that illustrate wide-screen and 4:3 formats and has his students place their “cameras” over some pictures to practice framing scenes.
2. Camera angles: master shot, medium shot, over the shoulder, close-up, extreme close-up, point of view, and insert. It turns out that this is the order that shots are filmed in the industry. This happens for efficiency purposes.

Now we’re actually filming a bunch of different angles for a scene. Our “actors” are repeating their lines over and over again. The rule of thumb is that 1:00 of finished film takes about 10:00 of footage. Kids don’t like to do closeups at first and they almost never think to include inserts (tight shots of inanimate objects). James is editing the film using iMovie and we’ll have a complete scene when he’s done.

Differentiating Instruction With Technology presented by Ann Nicholson from CRCSD in Cedar Rapids, IA

I came in a couple minutes late to this one. Bad traffic. I did, however, get a seat near a power outlet and a strong wi-fi signal.

Ann is talking about differentiation and universal design principles. Universal design for learning means finding multiple means of presentation, expression (student work), and engagement. The Center for Applied Special Technology Web site looks like it has tons of resources for universal design. There are examples of lessons that employ universal design principles. In particular, Ann recommends some of the online tools at the CAST site such as the UDL Goal Setter.

Now Ann is talking about learning style inventories and recommends www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html as a starting point. The person sitting next to me also recommends VARK. Also recommended is the LoTTIE Kit For Literacy, a set of low-tech tools that can help students with organizing and note-taking.

An interesting idea that was presented was using MS Word’s commenting and change tracking capabilities with writing activities to facilitate peer editing. Ann is talking now about using Word’s readability statistics to make sure that instructions for students are written at an appropriate level. Some students also have an easier time reading on-screen when you change the color of the Word background. It may be helpful to create forms in Word to help students complete projects.

Several multmedia learning sites were recommended including marcopolo, Inspiration, and WriteDesign Online. A cool app for writing is WordQ.

Jake’s Brave New World: Using Technology to Increase Learning presented by Glenn Wiebe from Essdack Ind. School District 622 in Hutchinson, KS

This session could be interesting. Students today definitely view technology differently than they did a few years ago, but I’m not convinced that they’re all that tech savvy. Kids tend to be pretty good at a few different applications like IM, Web, email, but that doesn’t mean that they know how to use those tools creatively to solve problems.

A bunch of the information from Glenn’s talk is found at www.socialstudiescentral.com. He has included a PowerPoint presentation there at the Workshop links page. A lot of Glenn’s thoughts have been inspired by Alan November.
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