Living the second time…

Hi all,

Like I’m sure many of you, I’d heard about Second Life but really never gave it much consideration. I understood the basics of how it worked, but never really understood why.

For those of you that haven’t yet looked into this world, Second life is a virtual world. Participants interact with the world and each other through a personalized avatar. “Residents” can move about the “world” as it exists, or they can purchase and develop their own land.

This is where my understanding ended until just a few weeks ago. As part of a masters project, I decided to immerse myself in this environment. It didn’t take long for me to discover that this was far more than a simple game.

One of the first tools that I discovered (after making my avatar look the way I wanted and building a small meeting space) was the events search window. On a regular basis, throughout second life, residents host events like trade shows, live music, and training opportunities. This is where it’s power for Distributed Learning became clear to me. I was able to attend a “workshop” on the Second Life scripting language. The presenter’s avatar stood in front of us with two display screens behind her. As she walked us through the process, participants copied her actions and used text chat to ask questions of her and each other.

Participants from all over the world can “teleport” into a common space, then using either text chat or live voice chat can interact with each other as they would in the real world. A presenter can give a multimedia live presentation as they would in the real world. The voice chat is based on proximity so you are louder to someone sitting next to you than you would be to someone on the other side of the room. As the presenter talks, you can use text chat to ask each other questions and share ideas. The use of gestures like laughing, shrugging, and yawning can add to the effective communication. You very quickly get to the point that you don’t notice that you’re interacting through a computer!

The most amazing experience I’ve had so far was entering into a live performance. While the avatar for the musician appeared to strum their guitar music was piped through an internet radio feed. Indeed I thought I was listening to an internet radio station until the performer acknowledged that I had entered the room! Audience members were able to interact with each other and the performer through text chat while they were performing. The ultimate effect was a more intimate performance than you would ever get in real life.

Just of word of warning though, I would caution against using this as a distributed learning environment for K-12 students. As there are no restrictions on what residents can build and sell there are many places that you can go with VERY inappropriate content. Second Life itself recommends that this environment be used by adult participants only.

 

Constructing an understanding of Pythagorean Theorem – Geogebra

Hi all,

Yes, I know I’ve been absent from this blog for quite a while! To make up for it, here’s a great online trick for helping your students come to an understanding of Pythagorean theorem. The strategy uses the freely accessible “Geogebra” (http://geogebra.org) to construct Pythagorean theorem from first principles. This is a great SmartBoard strategy too!

Click Here for the Tutorial

 

Create instant screencasts … For free!

Hi all,

Without a doubt, the tool I use most when supporting staff and students with technology is the screencast. While there are lots of tools available for this purpose, including Adobe Captivate and Camtasia Studio, Jing (http://www.jingproject.com) is an excellent free alternative.

The free version of Jing will capture up to 5 minutes of video (including sound) and then post that video with one click to screencast.com (http://www.screencast.com). With the two tools together you can deploy a screen cast in almost the same amount of time it takes to create it!

Click the image below for a screencast of Geogebra (http://geogebra.org) that I created for our teachers.

Anyone else used this or other free screen casting tools? Comment away… J

 

Tools to support research and collaborative writing

With some of the social networking tools available literature research no longer needs to be an isolated venture. Students can share and learn from each other as they discover resources from a variety of sources. Here are just a handful of tools to help you do this.

Zotero:
http://www.zotero.org

Zotero is a cross between a bibliographic management tool and a social network. At its simplest level, Zotero is a Firefox plugin that manages your references as you write. At a deeper level it is a social networking tool that enables the tagging and sharing sharing of references within a personal learning network. It includes:

• The ability to download reference information directly from a variety of libraries and online bookstores (including Amazon) via a single click.
• The ability to generate a bibliography in APA, MLA, and a variety of other formats.
• Zotero can The ability to automatically cite references and generate a formatted bibliography of those citations in almost any format using the Word and OpenOffice.Org plugins.
• The ability to synchronize between your personal bibliography and your Zotero network.
• The ability to import data from a variety of bibliographic formats (including Bibtex and RDF).
• The ability to tag, comment on, and organize references for your network.

Delicious: http://delicious.com

Delicious is a social bookmarking site. It enables users to tag and share bookmarks. Students can build their personal learning networks by discovering who else links to the same sites that they do!

Diigo:
http://diigo.com

Similar in function to Delicious, Diigo adds the powerful feature of being able to highlight and comment on bookmarked websites. Users within your network are able to see your highlighting and notes, plus they are able to add comments of their own. By making your highlighting or comments public, any Diigo user visiting sites you’ve bookmarked will be able to see your markup. This helps to grow your network.

I’d love to hear what other social reference tools you are using, or how you are using these in the classroom.

Comment away,

Doug

 

Explore physics without learning physics

Hi all,

One of the biggest challenges to teaching online is the provision of authentic ways for kids to experiment with scientific principles. There are many visualization and simulation tools out there, but most of them are either restricted to a pre-designed experiment or require an understanding of computer programming.

Enter Phun (http://www.phunland.com). This intuitive program (free for non commercial use) enables students to play with physical principles simply by drawing shapes. Objects created in this environment can fall, collide, interact, float, move on their own, sink, and even turn into liquids. Objects interact as though they would in the “real world” providing students opportunities to create their own simulations for gravity, pendulums, resonant systems, robotics, etc. All without a single calculation.

Here are some examples of what you can create:

I’m curious if anyone has used this with kids. I’ve had a colleague of mine try this with grade 4 kids, but really anyone who can use a mouse should be able to get ths to work.

Cheers,
Doug

 

Wordling Away

Hi all, here’s another cool tool to help your students visualize the content of large quantities of text. http://www.wordle.net will take any large quantity of text and sort based on the frequency of use of each word. For example wordling this blog (prior to this post) gives:

To really get a sense of the power of this tool, try wordling two different speeches on the same issue, or two web sites that offer different opinions. Here are 2 examples of different speeches on similar events:

Roosevelt Declares war on Japan

Churchill Blood Sweat and Tears Speech

 

Two must have tools for collaborative concept mapping

One of my favorite tools for students to explore ideas and build a shared understanding, especially students separated by large distances, is to build a collaborative concept map. Although far from a comprehensive list, I’d like to highlight 2 tools that have served me well in the past, albeit in very different ways.

Gliffy:
http://www.gliffy.com

For lack of a better definition, Gliffy is what you get when you cross a concept mapper with a wiki. Multiple students are able to access one map and do so when it suits them. Every change is recorded, just like a wiki, so there’s no danger of one student destroying another’s work. Gliffy supports images, sending your maps to a blog, flowcharting, network mapping, connecting words, and more. Best of all it’s free for a personal account.

IMHC CMap tools:
http://cmap.ihmc.us

This is without a doubt one of the most powerful visualization tools that I’ve ever used. On the surface, CMap Tools is a concept mapping tool that encourages the use of linking words to join ideas together. It has the ability to extract phrases from these joined ideas that can be exported to a word processor. Maps can be used to generate presentations where the nodes of the map appear in a prearranged pattern. This can be useful for both teacher and student presentations.

The real power of CMap Tools becomes evident when you join it to a CMap Server. You can do this one of two ways,

1. Connect your CMapTools to one of the public servers preloaded into it’s directory.
2. Download and host your own server available to educational institutions for free download.

Once connected to a CMap Server students can build a map collaboratively in real time! As a student adds or links a node they see other nodes appear to create, move, and join on their own as classmates add content. A chat window lets the students discuss additions as though they were working face to face.

My students have used these tools to brainstorm ideas for a project, summarize readings, and synthesize a unit. I’d love to hear what strategies/tools you’ve used to help students collaborate and build shared understanding.

 

Royalty free digital media for student work.

One of the biggest challenges in the creation of student blogs, podcasts, digital stories, etc. is that in order to generate these forms of electronic media students feel that they need to breach ethics. After all, where will they get the imagery, background music, video clips, etc unless they can violate copyright?

Enter Creative Commons.

Creative commons isn’t a developer of media. Instead CC is a license that artists can apply to their media so they can share it with the world. Licenses range from free for non commercial use to the sharealike license enabling users to not only use the media for free, but also modify and adapt it into a new piece of work.

There are a number of social networking sites designed to share Creative Commons Media:

• CreativeCommons.org – Includes information about the creative commons licenses plus a meta search of creative commons sharing sites.
• ccMixter.org – A unique social network where members can upload audio recordings and original music. Other members can then download these pieces, remix them, and then upload as a new performance. The result is an original work that is free to use in podcasts, movies, etc.
• flickr.com – A photo sharing site where members can upload their best photos under the creative commons license. Each photo is tagable and includes a place for comments. Photos tagged creative commons can be downloaded and used for websites, blogs, digital stories, etc.
• blip.tv Similar to flickr.com except Blip.tv archives cc licenced movies.
• Project Gutenberg – Historical documents and works of fiction that have been released under creative commons, including works from Arthur Conan Doyle to Shakespeare, are available for download in a variety of text formats.

I’ve used these sources in student podcasts and digital storys. Because they’re not familiar sources, students really have to be thoughtful why they might choose a piece; they need to choose based on relevance instead of the popularity of the artist.

I’d love to hear how you are using creative commons in your classrooms. Are your students contributing meda as well as downloading? What are they creating?

 

Math for all – 5 open and free tools to help students learn at home

If you read this blog, you’ll soon learn that I am a strong believer in open source for education. There are a huge variety of applications available to help students learn math, and since they’re open students can install this software for free on their own computers.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of open source, I encourage you to view “Freedom Fry’s” description on the GNU website.

So without further ado, here are 5 of my favorite open or otherwise free tools for teaching math online.

OpenOffice.org

http://www.openoffice.org

OpenOffice.org is a complete office suite with a powerful spreadsheet, database, word processor, etc. It is comparable in power to other office suites, but as it has been developed by the open source community it is completely free for download.

It includes a spreadsheet tool capable of scatter plot, bar plot, nets, etc. They can help students visualize numbers and look for trends.

OpenOffice.org saves in a variety of popular formats making it compatible with commercial applications.

 

Maxima

http://maxima.sf.net

Maxima is a computer algebra and visualization tool. It is made to work like the commercially available Macsyma. It will solve complicated algebraic expressions, calculus, matrices, and complex numbers. It will plot graphs in 2 or 3 dimensions from a variety of data sets.

This is a tool for older students of course as it requires a good understanding of symbolic math, but it does give students an opportunity to find solutions to very complex problems by taking care of repetitive tasks.

 

Geogebra

http://geogebra.org

Geogebra is an excellent tool for visualizing and verifying geometric properties. Shapes can be fully articulated with shapes connected to each other. You can construct perpendicular lines, points, circles, angles, segments, polygons, graphs, etc.

The software runs using the Java application launcher, and is therefore launched straight from the website without download!

 

Gimp

http://www.gimp.org

Gimp is a powerful graphic editor comparable in power to Adobe Photoshop. For math however it doubles as a powerful fractal explorer. If you have a copy of Gimp, click Render from the Filters menu and choose fractal explorer. Kids from a wide range of ages can explore these repeating shapes, then use Gimp’s powerful graphic design tools to produce a unique piece of art work.

 

Scratch

http://scratch.mit.edu

Saving the best for last, Scratch is nothing less than a programming environment designed for young children. Instructions take the shape of lego pieces that are dragged and snapped into place to produce a completely interactive program. I’ve used this tool to help students understand what a variable is, the cartisian grid, and even to construct the concept of a 360^o circle simply by trial and error.

Scratch comes with a variety of graphics and sounds to make engaging games, and is intuitive enough that many students will be able to sit down with the tool and just play.

 

Anyway, those are a few of my favorites, I’d love to hear what the rest of you are using.

Cheers,

Doug

 

Distributed Learning on a Dime

Hi all,

I thought I’d start a discussion about some of the open source tools available for distributed learning. We’ve been using Moodle as our LMS for about 3 years now. Our staff have found Moodle easy to use. It is a powerful system due to its intuitive free form layout, and standard features such as multiple discussions, synchronous chat, wikis, and digital drop boxes. The system also supports both the IMS and SCORM content formats.

The real power of the software comes from its modularity (the ‘M’ in the acronym). The software is open source (and therefore free), and this open architecture has lead to the creation of dozens of downloadable plugins that add additional features. Moodle also has the ability to connect to your email and LDAP servers to make communication and authentication seamless with your existing infrastructure.

For experienced Linux users I would recommend building a L.A.M.P. server for speed and stability. You can however download ready to run versions of Moodle for both Windows and Mac. All you need is a computer with a static IP address to build it on.

In future posts I’ll elaborate on how we use this and other open software in our district. I’d really be interested to hear of your experiences. What open software are you using? How are you using it?

Comment away:

Doug