Executive summary on practitioner based article.

For my practitioner based article I am reading an article about cell phone use in the classroom. Gabcast is one of the technologies that cellphones can use to publish to the net. Here is my first experiment with Gabcast (click on the small play button on the Gabcast logo to hear the embedded audio if you click the link you will go to my Gabcast channel):
Gabcast! beduc566 #1

Weekly blog from November 19th

I saw some pretty cool probes for the ti calculators. The motion detector was the coolest. I wish I had had it earlier in the semester in physics. I would have tried to capture the essence of the slope of a distance vs. time graph in my motion. The ti technology seemed pertinent in a way other technologies have not. Since these calculators will be in the classroom any help in using them to help bring alive the math or science they are used for is welcome.
Is is a conspiracy that ti calculators are so clunky? It is a little like using dos. I later thought of the possibility of getting the calculator to calculate your velocity and graph that against time. I might be wrong but I suspect the calculator could not do that. I think ti will have a day of reckoning when pda's and laptops get close to the $100.00 mark. Running those probes through a computer with fathom would be sweet. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth I learned I will need to become familiar with all the ti probes and have ways of using them creatively.
I want to take the time to look into all the probes and perhaps those usb hook ups can be used with a pc.
To beat a dead horse I think the motion detector added a new dimension to the often dimensionless Cartesian coordinate graph. The motion detector and Robin's demo were a power full use of technology.

Weekly blog from November 12th

I have talked about this before but I think that we need to agree on what we are trying to accomplish in education. Video games are great ways to learn I don't deny that, but are they in line to allow learning what we consider knowledge that schools should be teaching. The argument I hear is that currently schools don't even teach what an adult needs to know in the world. The world seems to be functioning just fine with people who supposedly haven't been taught what they need to know. Do we really need to teach it then? Is it possible that one just learns it and that if schools take care of the critical thinking most people can learn the specifics of our brave new world.
If education should prepare people for what they are going to be doing day to day we should throw out history and start teaching driving, I do a solid hour of that every day. We don't because we assume that people will learn to drive as part of growing up, if they need it they will learn it. A lot of technology is that way too. If it is so ubiquitous in society and we should be teaching it, how did all the people who are currently using (and improving it) learn it, apparently not in the technology phobic schools.
What I learned is that there do not seem to be games that can teach academic subjects that match the level that games designed for entertainment. I worry that the video game apologists think that just saying that what the engaging video games teach is good does not address any common values on what should be taught in schools and that is where we really need to start.
I found out that Supercharged!, the software that taught unintuitive theories of physics is not available, it was developed on a non PC system at MIT. None of the other games developed by the same lab seem to be available. So what is it going to take to develop games that can address academic subject and achieve some sort of interest, be truly endogenous. It seems a huge hurdle to overcome.
The promise of Supercharged! intrigued me. If such games can be developed and can clarify and maintain interest in subject that loose learners in traditional teaching settings I say bring them on. I am no programmer so it is going to take some inspiration on someones part to create these games

Given the view of schooling in the readings for this week, which technologies do you think are most likely to be taken up in schools? Why? Which techn

Technologies most likely to be taken up by schools will be technologies that schools can afford and are reliable.
The technologies that push my thinking of teaching and learning are technologies that can teach subjects that when presented in traditional ways are not effectively taught to some students. An obvious model is the ability to model in 3-d concepts that are difficult to visualize in 2-d. There is software that can manipulate on a level that concrete models cannot and this can really illustrate concepts that otherwise might never make sense for certain students.
An example that immediately comes to mind is Sketchpad and the dynamaps that show dynamically the relationship between independent and dependent variables in a function. The ability of software to illustrate in such a unique way intrigues me. While math and science seem great subjects in which to apply such such technology I would like to think that social sciences could benefit from software applications that can illustrate as well.
I think inexpensive reliable technology that can help illustrate difficult concepts are here and cost will continue to go down while choices of software will increase and grow more sophisticated.

Weekly blog from November 5th

I learned two words I still have trouble pronouncing: Exogenous and Endogenous. These describe two different game types. I and my group who played a video game on a laptop were the only ones in the room who got to experience both types of games. We played Math Blaster and it is exogenous. Repetition of discrete facts (arithmetic) will get you through this game with a little keyboard tapping. I think a session of flash cards with a comedian would be more interesting. How would you make arithmetic into an Endogenous game? I heard a story once of third world children who would help out at their parents' stall at the market, as a byproduct of their having to occasionally run the stall themselves they were really sharp at arithmetic. It would seem that if arithmetic was woven into a game as a real organic tool, not the main attraction, like the third world sales-children you might see a mastery of arithmetic.
My group grew very bored with Math Blaster, we needed an Endogenous game, we watched another group play Spore. Very Endogenous. Tools were offered and could be used creatively. This clearly was the venue for some learning.
As a teacher though I can see why Math Blaster was developed, it is basically flash cards and if it can create interest then it could help in learning arithmetic skills. So how do you create an Endogenous game that can help teach arithmetic. It seemed the answer was Supercharged!, a game developed at MIT to help physics students understand the unintuitive concepts of electromagnetism through a game. It was reviewed as a great prototype of an Endogenous game and as a current physics student I was very interested. Supercharged! does not seem to exist, searches find articles that cross reference each other but never a way to get the game, no download no sales. Clearly there is more to this story. Why is this game that supposedly was developed five years ago nowhere? Is there more to making a endogenous game that teaches a specific academic subject? This will be my search. I want to find such a game and see if it is possible. Stay tuned.

weekly blog from October 29

Darn, overwhelmed again. The technology class continues to offer an avalanche of technology suitable for the classroom and it can be overwhelming. What I need is to begin to develop some filters.
Filter number one: Robin and Carrie. they are both editors for the technology magazine I read every Thursday night. I try not to think how much time it takes for them to find and evaluate the sites and software they offer us because there must be a good number of duds. I have to remember that this is not the subscribe to a magazine paradigm. No editor is in their ivory tower picking content for you in web 2.0, you simply look behind Robin and Carrie and what do you find is the free technology for teachers web site http://www.freetech4teachers.com/. This is now my Filter number two. I need to get a collection of filters together to keep me in touch with all the technology offerings I might be interested in. It was this macro-view of technology that really hit me this week in class. My question is how do I find technology that I can apply to Robin's standard of helping me to teach. I will have to get a collection of editors. I will also need to have groups that I can ask and reflect off and of course our cohort is a great group for that since we are all basically on the same part of the education technology curve. This will be my Filter number three.
The application of my filtering network of sites and groups will have to become part of my lesson preparation.

Weekly blog from October 22nd

Robin showed us some stats from the history of the census and from the selective service. The point was that what appeared as one set of data actually told a different story than one might assume at first glance. Technology, in the case Fathom, illustrated "the story". This was all within the framework of "telling a story" with numbers to make a subject interesting. There was also a comment (this week's I think though I may be wrong) about how if a picture can tell a thousand words, what is the power of technology to illustrate a lesson. I really liked the idea of "telling a story", I think it can bring attention to a subject. I also thought about the different ways to relate a story: words, pictures, technology. I was also thinking about the history of relating abstract ideas. If you go back really far the most abstract ideas were not science or math but history. The teachings were mostly oral. So how do you utilize "story telling" to teach a non narrative subject like math or science? If you can figure this out you are doing well because the best oral tradition is hard to beat. I think of the best story tellers: you really remember what they said, you remember the story. Imagine the 10,000 hours rule back in preliterate times 3,4,5 thousand years ago. The stories and the tellers must have been really good. They probably had all the literary devices including plot twist. Wait, plot twist, isn't that the literary technique Robin was using in her "stories", and Malcolm Gladwell too? So to be a great teacher you have to learn to use technology to tell good stories, how do you learn to tell good stories to adolescents?
I want to learn to tell stories that adolescents think are interesting stories, I want to learn how to use words pictures and technology to make them irresistible. I want a set of stories for algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, statistics and number theory.
Here is a story that has not been well told and yet probably could. Kepler figures his second law: A line joining a planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time. An orbit is an elipse, so how do you figure the areas of sweep? Calculus, which was developed 50 years later?!? So Kepler wasn't integrating his areas right? No. There is the story: try to figure Mars's orbit, based on Tycho Brahe's numbers without calculus. Now doesn't it turn into a page turner if Mr. Newton or Mr Liebnetz add their two cents worth, doesn't it illustrate both concepts better?