Podcasting on iTunesU

I applied and was invited to submit podcasts to the MI-Learning section of iTunesU. My main focus will be demos I use with my physics students. This way if they miss class when I do a demo they don't have to miss it completely.

Additionally I want to make sure my videos can be used by other educators who might not have all the right equipment to do demos or who might not know how to do them. I will be doing some videos intended to teach other teachers how to do various demos in class. Such as the Lasarium shown below.

You can find all of my Democasts at iTunesU, at Blip.tv, or the Archive.org.



Cross posted from FLOSScience

LiveScribe Pulse

OK, I recently got a new toy so I figure I should blog about it. I got one of the LiveScribe Pulse pen. It totally rocks. We'll see how useful it proves to be over the next few weeks or so.

Basically, the LiveScribe is a magic pen that records your notes as you write them. What makes it really cool is the built in audio recorder. So, you record the audio portion of a lecture and then the pen syncs your written notes with the recorded audio. Later you can place your pen at a point in your notes and you hear the audio from that part of the lecture. Totally cool. But it gets better.

You can dump the files to your computer for viewing/archiving but you can also upload them to the internet for your students to view. The embedable files work just like the notebook. You see ghosted writing you can watch the notes being written as a flash movie from the beginning or click around to jump to specific points in the lecture. The pen comes with either 1GB of memory for $129, or 2GB of memory for $169.

So far I've been having a student in each class use my pen to take notes (a different one each leacture). These notes are then uploaded to the net. I may also use it to quickly work some example problems to help students with homework or to prepare for tests. Below is an example of it in action.

Honors Physics 09.01.2009 08:44:05 AM
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Rewards don't work?

I just got done watching a video that was on John Sowash's blog. It's a TED video so you know it has to be good. The basic premise is that rewards don't work. Well, that's not exactly it, but watch the video and then we'll talk.

OK, rewards do work if the only thing you're rewarding is reptative mechanical tasks. Watching this made me think of traditional education. Most students see grades as both a carrot and a stick. Luckily most education seems to boil down to "reptative mechanical tasks" and so it seems to work quite well (yet another time I wish there were a sarcasm font, I know how to YELL, but how do you express sarcasm?).

Unfortunately many educators, me included want more than just the traditional approach. We want students to express themselves creatively in the class. We want them to think critically when solving problems. We want them to be intrinsically motivated. However we are forced to use a carrot/stick reward system. How do we move past this to foster authentic education? I wish I had answers.

Google Workshop at Wayne RESA

Today I'm leading a workshop as a Google Certified Teacher at Wayne RESA. I'm not sure I'm as ready as I should be, but there's not much hope I'll ever feel as ready as I need to be.

I'll be focusing on Google Apps for Education, but I'll also be covering Blogger, YouTube, and Google Maps/Earth. If you're interested you can check out a Google Site I put together for today. It serves as my handouts, agenda, and presentation tool.

Physics Videos for Your Class

By now you've probably seen the Periodic Table of Videos produced by folks at the Univeristy of Nottingham. If youhaven't you really should check it out. But you may not have seen their Sixty Symbols videos.

In thier newest series they take sixty physics symbols/concepts and have created videos explaining what they are and what's cool about them. Below is the highlight reel. Check it out.

Cross posted from FLOSScience.com