Lightning in a Bottle

While I was at the ACPE conference last week I had a chance to work for a few minutes with a CTL 2Go PC (the same device I mentioned a few weeks ago).  It feels much more rugged than the EeePC, and to underscore the point, the company representative repeatedly demonstrated dropping the device from about five feet in the air.  The trade-off is that it is a little larger and heavier than the EeePC, but that also gives you a larger screen and longer battery life.  As the previously-linked review noted, the keyboard is still pretty cramped, and the screen resolution is still only 800×480, despite the larger display.  My major frustration with the keyboard is that the right Shift key is very small, and the Enter key is where I expect the quote/apostrophe key to be,  which causes me to regularly break sentences (or IM messages) when  I try to type I’m or similar words. They’re still pretty amazing, though!

Someone sent me a link to a YouTube video called Wikis in Plain English. I loved the simple, effective way the video explained what wikis are and how they work, so I followed the URL at the end of the video to find the site from which the production originated. It’s called The Common Craft Show, and they have produced a series of these neat little explanatory videos using paper cutouts, a whiteboard, and hands.

I love these little videos. (I wish I’d come up with the idea!) I also think the format lends itself very well to student-created videos. These producers have shown you can create compelling presentations using very simple materials and techniques. Good communication technique works with any medium!

Professor Michael Wesch from from Kansas State University has a great blog post that went up today.  It contains a link that shows a synchronized video/PowerPoint presentation he did at Educause on the “The Crisis of Significance.”  It incorporates some of the material from his videos, but puts it into a context that brings a clarity to those presentations.  It’s about an hour long, and incorporates 379 slides (!), but it effectively underscores a lot of what I’ve been thinking about lately.  We don’t have simply a technology gap with students coming into schools now, we have a cultural gap.  While the “generation gap” has been around for a long time, the impact of technology seems to be creating greater and faster levels of separation in ways that directly impact what and how we teach.

Note - I did have to install a plugin to make the video presentation work, and there are several comments to the effect that others were having difficulty viewing the presentation.  I used Firefox for Windows, and after installing the required plugin it played just fine.

We held a statewide videoconference last week, and really pushed the limits of the technology at hand. We had a great guest speaker named John Kuglin, who is currently the Director of Technology for the Eagle County school district in Colorado. We had 11 sites in Washington hooked up, and then John came in from Colorado. Things started off OK, but then a glitch kicked in that prevented us from seeing John. We could hear him, and he could hear and see us, but no video came through from his site (except for frustratingly brief two-second moments when his smiling face would appear).

So what did we do? Well thankfully, we were also running a screen-sharing session using a program called GotoMeeting from Citrix. Each of the eleven sites had, in addition to the videoconferencing system, a computer and projector hooked up. The computers were logged into a GotoMeeting session with John’s computer, so his Powerpoint presentation on 21st Century Students was being shared on each screen, projected in each of sites. Since we could hear his voice and see his screen, the presentation was able to continue with only minor problems. (John uses a lot of videos in his presentation, and the screen-sharing system couldn’t handle those. They had to be skipped.) There is also a chat window embedded into the product, so I could send messages back and forth to John and to the facilitators at other sites without interrupting the videoconference.

The added advantage of the GotoMeeting software was that, in addition to preventing a disaster, it actually works far better than sharing a PowerPoint in the videoconferencing system. The video quality of the average video conference is murky at best, and it can render presentation slides almost completely unreadable. Through the screen sharing, it comes through as sharp and clear as if you are watching in on the presenter’s own computer.

Just to be clear, there are other similar products besides GotoMeeting - WebEx has a new similar product, and there are others such as Elluminate and Adobe’s Acrobat Connect. Regardless of the product, however, it was just fun to try out new ways to present and collaborate.

John Kelly from ESD 123 alerted me to Pop!Tech, another cool online conference that’s starting Wednesday, October 17. The theme is The Impact of Technology, and while the actual conference itself is in Camden, Maine, all of the sessions are being broadcast live on the Internet. Many of the previous sessions are available to be viewed online or downloaded. The topics are varied, wide-ranging, and very interesting.

And don’t forget that the K-12 Online Conference is under way!

The panel discussion I mentioned in the previous post was recorded, and can now be listened to online at Clarity Innovations podcast Ed Tech Coast-to-Coast. While you can’t see the slides that David, Tim and I are using, I think you can still get a clear understanding of what we are sharing.

Discovery Education has launched a new online homework help service for home use called Cosmeo.

Because it is a service of the same company that provides unitedstreaming online media, it has a lot of video files available as part of the service. It seems to be a fairly rich resource for students to use at home. That’s the good news.

The bad news comes in two parts. First, the organization of the videos is kind of kludgy. You can browse by content area, or you can actually go into an area that helps you match videos to standards. I tried the latter, and it is decidedly un-helpful. For instance, I went in to look at videos mapped to the grade 10 Language Arts standards. I was presented with a ginormous list of every langauge arts standard, dozens and dozens. From this list, I selected

GR10 - 2.2.4.a. Recognize and use previously taught organizational structures (description, comparison and contrast, sequential order, chronological order, cause and effect, order of importance, process/procedural, concept/definition, problem/solution, episodic, and generalization/principle) to aid comprehension.

I was then taken to a page listing, among other things, videos on using big books with first graders, a health film on the birth of a baby, and a history film on the aftermath of World War I. None of the films list how or why they are matched with that standard, which would be nice to know before downloading and watching a film between 15 and 45 minutes in length. Under some of the standards, despite there being an active link, there are no films of any kind listed. When you hit the Back button, you are greeted with an annoying browser message that the previous page used a form, and asking if you want to send it again.

Still, I assume that some of these issues will be fixed sometime, and this will develop into a very handy resource. That’s where the next problem arises - this costs money. An annual subscription is $99. That’s all well and good for a middle-class family, but what about families with lower income? Just when the cost of computers is finally falling to the point where the digital divide may begin to fade, we find ways to provide a new kind of resource that may not be available to all of our community.

The King County library system does a wonderful job of purchasing services like this for use of its patrons, which is great resource for lower-income families. However, I worry about other communities that don’t have a forward-thinking library like this (or a library at all!)

I was reading an article by David Jakes at the TechLearning blogs site, and followed a link to an intriguing site called Digital Stories. If you’re interested in digital storytelling, check out this site. Students and teachers can submit stories to be hosted there, and it already has a small but good collection of student projects. It’s a great place to go to find examples to share with others to help them understand what digital storyelling is all about. (I had some problems with the streaming video from the site, but that may just be a problem with my older computer.)

And if you’re in the mood for looking at student work, check out the enhanced podcasts at Long Elementary School. The third-grade students are re-telling and illustrating a favorite book through a series of podcasts. It’s a great project!

Every once in awhile, I see a new piece of technology that makes me wonder “How did they ever think of that?” I looked at a video demonstration of a new digital storytelling software package called MemoryMiner. It isn’t a software product for everyone (it could be a bit overwhelming), but appears to be a remarkably powerful tool for sorting and classifying images for creating digital stories. It’s easier to tell you to watch the video than to try and describe it. It just made my jaw drop!

I have always been fascinated by animation. When I was a kid, my dad brought back an Elmo 8-millimeter movie camera from Japan, and I was thrilled when I figured out that it had a single-frame advance on it! I made several animations about five seconds long, and on a trip to the ocean set it up on a tripod and spent forty-five minutes capturing a sunset in time-lapse. I thought it was very, very cool, but it was also expensive (that film and developing cost a lot of money), very difficult to view (you had to haul out the projector, set up a screen, thread the film, and so on), and it was, of course, silent. Yes, children, no sound!

Fast forward more years than I care to think about, and it’s a whole new world. I’ve been working with a cool little software package for Macs called iStopmotion from Boinx Software. Using any standard digital video camera, you can create animations or timelapse videos. The animation window has onion skinning, which allows you to see the previous frame as you set up the subsequent image, which is really helpful when you forget just where the arm on your character was before you moved it. It also has a voice control option, so you don’t even need to touch the computer as you move your clay blob, or drawing, or whatever you are animating.

The time-lapse function is also incredibly easy. Just set the time between frames, and click record. Here’s the view from my office at the start of the day. It represents about ten minutes of compressed time. (Watch for my coworkers showing up in the window reflection.) The occasional blurring of the screen isn’t a problem with the software; it was raining really hard that morning, and there were moments when the window was covered in sheets of water.

Of course, there are Windows programs that have much of the same functionality. I haven’t worked with any of them, but there is an extensive list of available products (along with a ton of other info) at the StopMotionWorks animation enthusiast website. These guys are from the school of “if a little info is good, a lot of info is better.”

If anyone is using animation software in schools (or just for fun!), let me know. I’d love to post it here.