iPhone article

Interesting article on the iPhone in education on the Gadgetlab page of Wired.

Flipping Over This Camera

This past fall my son, then a college student in NH, was contacted by a TV news program with a nice deal: go to see presidential candidates and film them and the news program would supply a free video camera that he could keep. What college student wouldn't take that deal? So for the price of admission to one event, he got a cool little Flip video camera.

I dusted around the camera once in a while but never really looked at it until I needed to film something. I borrowed his camera and, voila, a whole new world of video filming, editing, and publishing came alive in my hands, all contained in a device not much larger than a deck of cards.

The model of FlipCam I used stores up to an hour of video. When you get done recording, you take it to your computer and pull a little lever on it that "flips" out a USB connector, which you plug into your computer. Upon doing so, my computer prompted me to install the software that transfers the video from camera to computer, which installed easily and quickly. Then, literally, with a single click I downloaded all the video from the camera and began picking and choosing scenes.

A cool feature of the software is that you can pick any frame in your video and make it a still image (jpg). When graduation day came along, we took the video camera, even though we only wanted stills. That way, if your subject blinks or moves, you have the previous and next frames to choose from, which, with my amateur photography skills, significantly raises the success rate.

In just a few minutes, I learned to love this little camera. This summer when we hosted the 25th Annual Anja S. Greer Conference on Secondary School Mathematics, Science and Technology, one of our presenters forgot his video camera, so I just loaned him the FlipCam for the week. No training, no handholding. It just worked. He paid me back in new batteries.

This summer I've been thinking a little about how one could use this type of camera in the classroom. Certainly, it would be great for recording skits or for students to prepare video for a project. I bet there are a million other uses. It's not a lot different than using your cell phone camera, but, for my carrier at least, it is much easier to access and work with the recorded video.

The only problem with this sweet little portable device is that it is so easy to take anywhere that my son has taken it with him to grad school, so now I think I'm going to have to go buy one myself. The company even lets you buy a branded one that supports a good cause. Now I just have to figure out how to choose among them.

Tweet Deal

The microblogging tool, Twitter, is becoming increasingly visible. Twitter allows you to publish short posts, or "tweets" to a list of "followers," those who subscribe to your Twitter identity. I found out recently that our astronomy teacher, John Blackwell, director of Grainger Observatory, is now using Twitter to keep his students apprised of the weather so they'll know whether to come out to the observatory. How convenient! John has integrated his tweets into the observatory website (see image at right) but chose Twitter because students could subscribe to it on various media (phone, web, email). Stellar use of a new web 2.0 tool (pun intended).

Mobility and Convergence

Today I played with my friend's new Dell Mini 9, a netbook (little, light, and, well, incredibly inexpensive laptop) that is about 2 pounds and runs a Linux Ubuntu Operating System. It is small and light and the battery lasts over 5 hours and it is reasonably easy to type on and the screen is great. I am thinking of getting one of these netbooks just for the convenience of having a laptop with me wherever I go. It is really most useful for using the Internet, although it has OpenOffice on it, so I could certainly do some of my "productivity" work, like writing documents and using spreadsheets, but I still couldn't run my calendar, except by using the web client. Experience may prove that for 99% of what I do, I will only need the Internet, but I'm not sure. In the meantime, it is fun to try these new devices.

I'm still waiting for the "perfect" device, though. Initially I thought that it was going to be an iPhone-like device that would run the Office productivity suite I need to use for my work but still let me have all the creature comforts I would like (such as the ability to plug in to a projector or external monitor, and to use a keyboard and/or mouse for those big document edits or for when I'm grading papers). Now, I'm not so sure. I would like a tablet version of the mini, something that I could write on with a pen for the times I want to grade papers or use to take less conspicuous electronic notes in a meeting. Somehow the noiseless pen doesn't bother people in meetings, but the clicking of the keyboard does, and now that I work out of three different buildings, I've made a real commitment to taking all of my notes electronically so I'll have them wherever I am. I also love having my music with me, but since there are now many Internet radio services (like Pandora and Last.FM), that is less of an issue now, although I try not to use it at work so I'm not hogging the bandwidth for my personal enjoyment.

I had hoped I'd be able to carry one device in my pocket that was phone, camera, document editor, music player, and presenter. The mini is getting very close to that, although I still can't carry it in my pocket (but I could put it in a purse or backpack very easily). As for the camera, I could pay a few more dollars for an integrated webcam (I would probably do that) or connect a little camera/webcam, and as for the phone, Skype is now providing an application that I could use to place Internet calls as long as I was in a WiFi hotspot.

Things are converging. We are moving into a new era where devices are getting much more portable and access to services is almost entirely web-based, so we're no longer tethered to offices and classrooms and desks and the equipment sitting on them (see The Netbook article below). That is good, since I'm finding myself a mobile worker right now. It is also an interesting time to find out what software and hardware we can't live without and how those amagingly creative engineers out there can figure out how to integrate those still-must-have tools and services into our mobile devices.

Cool Conference Opportunity

I attended this conference last year and found it valuable, first to learn a little more about what's out there for Web 2.0 tools, but mostly to meet other instructional technology afficionados.

http://www.iste-community.org/events/teaching-with-new-and-emerging

Citrix

Here at Exeter we use a number of applications to expand what students learn in the classroom. into their homework time. Examples include Fathom and Graphical Analysis and Mathematica. So that students (and teachers) can access this software from anywhere, we host many applications that are used in the classroom on our Citrix applications server. This way, students can use them whenever they need them, from the dorm, from home, or anywhere they can get an Internet connection. No excuses that they couldn't get to the computer lab! And teachers who live on campus and off, or who need to travel, can also access these programs remotely. Pretty neat.

The Netbook

Interesting article. I might just have to shell out a couple of bucks to get one of these cute little netbooks. :)

The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time

Posted using ShareThis

Document Camera Showcase

On February 24, ITS hosted a Document Camera Showcase to give faculty a chance to play around with four different camera models. A new device about to make it into the classroom standard at Exeter, a document camera is like an overhead projector, but it project much more than transparencies. One can display, for example, text, art, homework, peer edited writing, maps or a 3-D object on a projection device. We, in ITS, wanted to know what features and functionality our teachers thought were most important. We also wanted to know where teachers might like the camera to be located in their classrooms.

With the enticement of homemade chocolate chip cookies, we had a dozen and a half teachers walk through the showcase and try their hand at projecting student math work, Japanese exercises, maps, 3-D objects, and, sometimes, well, just their hand.

We also demonstrated how each camera recorded still images and video (and in some cases audio), and we gave teachers the opportunity to see how the camera might interact with the TabletPC.

Since the focus of a Harkness classroom is the table, the document camera can help keep everyone seated and still allow everyone in the room access to the same material when that material is not digital (yet). We see great potential for use of document cameras in programs in mathematics, the visual arts, modern languages, history, and other areas.

TabletPCs Outside the Classroom

In a school with a "triple threat" (teaching, coaching, and dorm residence), it's not surprising that our teachers have found innovative uses for the TabletPC outside the classroom. In our TabletPC Users Group meeting this past week, Math instructor Karen Geary showed us how she uses the TabletPC to coach field hockey. She has found it indispensible for preparing for practices and maintaining "institutional" coaching knowledge, such as the routes for practice runs. See an image at left that Karen created just using OneNote. Keeping track of what her team did in practice last season has been very helpful this season!

Karen also used GoogleEarth to create practice run routes and posted them for new kids (and new coaches) so they'd know where to go when she called for a particular run. See below for an example.

As a dorm affiliate, I can also think of ways I might use the tablet to do check in, to run dorm meetings, room selection, proctor selection and so much more. I think that flexibility to environment is one of the strengths of mobile computing in general and the tablet platform in particular. I also know I've started to find a million ways to use my tablet for all the areas of my life. It seems silly not to take advantage of the ease of use for doing research (URL is pasted in along with the text you copy in OneNote), compiling notes for a piece of writing, and searchability and convenience of having everything in one place. Now how exactly did I get along without this little device before? My only wish: somehow make it run all day on battery, let it be light enough to hold in one hand comfortably, and configure it so that it is small enough to fit in my pocket, but so my old eyes can still read it. A design challenge?

Siftables

Check out this cool demo on TED.

Mathematica

A few of our math teachers attended a conference recently to refine their use of Mathematica, a Wolfram product, that offers a wealth of opportunities for classroom use, both in the Math and Science departments. Here are a few comments from one of the attendees, Math instructor Masami Stahr:

I was a novice user to Mathematica, and I am not quite efficient using it yet,
but I started using the software to integrate problem-solving skill with
visualization, especially 3-D graphs. Students generally understand better
when they can see the problems. The Mathematica website has a lot of
demo projects that I can download and then modify them to suit my
usage. This can be done without extensive knowledge of Mathematica.
To get more proficient, I will try to spend more time on Mathematica next
summer in hopes of further incorporating this software into the Exeter
Math curriculum. I am quite excited to use this flexible software in my
classroom and look forward to finding more creative ways to enhance student
learning.

Update on Tablet Program

Well, Winter term has officially begun, despite, or perhaps because of sleet, snow, ice, power outages, and all sorts of other gifts from Mother Nature in the past few weeks. As of this term, we have deployed about 70 tablets to our teachers (about 50% of the faculty) with generally satisfactory--and sometime extremely satisfactory--reception.

I have continued using my tablet, this time to teach web design. There are a few wrinkles: to figure out the most efficient way to access some things across the wireless network, how to show students what they need to do from an environment that is different, for starters. But it is already clear to me that the advantages thoroughly outweigh the disadvantages.

Here's today's epiphany: I am in a new classroom now that is equipped with a wireless projector, and today, as I began to stand to write something on the board, it occurred to me that I could just project it from the tablet without moving, and "voilà" there it was. At first, I asked myself, "Why does it matter if I use the tablet instead of the board?" But then I realized that if a student misses a class, I will have a record of what we covered in OneNote and can pretty easily replicate the missed class with the student. Very cool.