iBooks Presentations from #MACUL13

I think I may have finally recovered from the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning annual conference. As usual I was pretty busy. I ended up being involved in two different presentations, which always take a lot out of me.

Both of the presentations I was involved in were focused on the use of iBooks Author to create textbook replacements. Yes, I understand this limits me to the iPad only, but really, I don't care. I thought I'd post a quick summary including links from both talks.

Innovating with iBooks Author and Pages

This was a talk I gave with my very good friend Serge Danielson-Francois (Library Ninja). Serge and I complement each other perfectly. I tend to be frenetic and get going on an idea with a focus that can sometimes get me way off agenda. Serge on the other hand always has the long view and can help keep things moving in the right direction.

Anyway, I typically don't use PowerPoint or an alternative. I tend to present from an outline and jump between webpages and applications. You can find our complete outline and all of our links on the Google Site I set up for the presentation. When we both started the year we had a vision of how we'd use iBooks Author and what our "textbooks" would look like. This really became an exercise in reflection on our teaching. We shared our original vision and then how this has changed over the course of the year. If you'd like to see the original vision you can check out an article we wrote for the MACUL Journal, look on page 26.

Serge's vision changed the most. He originally envisioned having his journalism 2 and 3 students create a textbook for his first year students. Awesome idea! However, he's learned that journalism today is a moving target and those things that don't change rapidly are things his students would have difficulty teaching. Things like avoiding the easy headline and digging deeper to the real story. In short how to think like a journalist. He now sees his students creating a portfolio of how stories were covered this year. It will be more of a resource for the future editors of the school's online paper.

Join the iBooks Author Collaborative

I was a co-presenter with Tony DiLaura, a great guy from Zeeland Public Schools. This was the kickoff session for the upcoming iBooks Hackathon! In June we will be inviting teachers to come and learn iBooks Author and hopefully partner up with other educators to create high quality resources for use by students around the state (and beyond). We will be running basically the same session on both sides of the state. On the west side of the state we will be hosted by Kent ISD and on the east side by Wayne State University.

What we really want to do is get teachers working together collaboratively to create pieces of iBooks. This could be good text, graphics, interactive widgets, videos or other cool stuff I haven't thought of. All of these pieces could be then archived in a way that other people could take them and create custom books for their own students. However, we're running this as more of an edcamp like idea, so if our participants have a different vison then we'll go in a different direction. The big ideas are:

• Create resource to support the way individual teachers teach
• Collaboration: "Many hands make light work"
• Collaboration: Lets learn from each other. I would love to find someone who could teach me new skills or offer me better ways to reach my students.
• Share what we've made: If what I do will help other educators that would be great. I know I have skills that others don't. If I make my stuff available then they don't have to have those skills.

Interested? Wondering how you can get involved?

1. Goto our Hackathon Website for more information and to register. We are charging $30 because the number of people we can accomodate is limited and we want to help ensure those that register actually show up. (plus we're providing lunch)
2. Join our Google+ Community. We currently have people from around the state and as well as other people who've found us.

iBooks Hackathon

I've already written a bit about iBooks Author and how awesome it is for creating resources to share with your students. I know some of you are probably rolling your eyes about now and thinking something along the lines of, "More iPads in education... When will this fad die?" Whether or not iPads in the classroom are a fad or not is really immaterial at this point. Like it or not, many schools are already or will be going one to one with them. So we should probably find the best way to use this technology to support our students.

Last year Dan Spencer put me in contact with Tony DiLaura. Tony is an educator from Zeeland Michigan. He is also excited about the potential impact of teacher created textbooks using iBooks Author. His goal is to bring educators together to collaboratively create resources that can be used to make the creation of these books easier. After some discussion the idea of the iBooks Hackathon was born.

We will officially kickoff the Hackathon at this year's MACUL conference. Then in June we will have two workshops, one on the east side of Michigan and the other on the west side. At these workshops we hope to bring educators together into groups and begin working on cool resources. Throughout the summer these groups will continue to work and in August we will take what has been created to that point and have the official launch of what will hopefully be a large collection of resources for other educators to use.

if you are interested in participating you can check out our Google+ Community as well as our page in the MI-Learning section of MACUL's website.

MACUL 2012 Video Abstract - Simple Game Programming for Android

Below is a video abstract for my Hands on Workshop for MACUL 2012. I will be covering how to create simple games using Processing for Android devices. As a bonus, I'll also cover how use the same content as interactive elements in Apple's new iBooks 2.0. You'll be able to find everything I'll be talking about on a site I'm creating for the workshop. It's a bit spare right now, but that will be changing over the next week or two as we get closer to MACUL. processing.flosscience.com

Preparation for MACUL

As you know, the annual meeting is just a few days away. I was starting to get ready yesterday and I thought I would share my geeky preparation with you. The first thing I did was dust off my Twitter client. I don’t really use Twitter as much as I should. I mainly use it when I’m at conferences to see what’s going on in the back channel.

I use Tweetdeck to check Twitter. The first thing I had to do was clear out the search columns I’d created for the last conference I attended. Then I set up my MACUL search column. #MACUL10 is the tag of choice. Now as geekery goes that’s pretty pedantic. The real geekery came when I found a way to get the MACUL search feed to show up on my desktop.

I saw this over at Mac OS X Tips. They used this technique to have the feed fromFaceBook show up on their desktop. I only had to modify the process a little to get the #MACUL10 Twitter search to show up. It relies on the instillation of a new preference pane called GeekTools.

I just followed their full instructions and then used TextEdit to modify the files they already created to replace their FaceBook feed and files with my MACUL ones. The whole process really shows some of the power in OS X. It relies on Automator actions and Shell access. Luckily someone else has already did all the heavy lifting for me. If you have any questions about the process I might be able to answer them. No promises though, I barely understood what I was doing.

Anyway, that’s my first step in getting ready for he conference. Now I need to go over to the online planner and figure out what I’m going to see.

Crossposted from macul.edublogs.org

The World Beyond Essays - Digital Storytelling with Jason Ohler

So, I read the description for this session and thought to myself that this will either be really good, or I'll leave in the first five minutes. I stayed through to the end because it was outstanding. Jason talked about media literacy replacing our outdated definition of literacy that only involves text.

When we use our old definition of literacy we say you are literate if you can read and write. Today we have many more ways of expressing ourselves. Ohler talked about the "Media Collage" that we see on most web sites today and that not only do your students need to know how to extract meaning from these sites, the must also be able to produce this media or they're not really literate in modern society.

Jason stressed that you don't have to have lots of expensive equipment or software to create a compelling digital story. In fact all you need is a computer. He shared an engaging story created by a student using still images in WindowsMovieMaker (free if you have Windows). It's the story that matters, not the toys or effects.

He also spent sometime discussing what a story is and what it isn't. It is often tempting to have students create multimedia reports, but when we can have them create stories than they are more engaged with the process and the material. For a story we some sort of problem and a resolution of that problem. That can often simply be the misconceptions or misunderstandings the student had along the way and how they resolved those misconceptions. i.e. What was the learning process.

All in all, I'm glad I decided to walk into this session. I may even buy his book. You can find more information at:

http://www.jasonohler.com

or for information on the session go to:
Web 2.1 and the World Beyond Essays - http://www.jasonohler.com/storytelling/beyondwords.cfm

Making Connections - Guerrilla Sessions

I went to Ben's MaculSpace Meetup this morning that was held in the Guerrilla Session room (Pullman room at Amway). I got to do one of the things I always look forward to when I go to conferences and that is networking with other like minded educators. We wished we'd recorded the whole thing, it was a great conversation.


The sessions are great, but it's those "hallway" conversations that often have more power to change the way I teach. It's the connections and conversations that make this really worth while. I guess that's why I really like social networking sites like the one Ben has set up over at maculspace.ning.com If you haven't already, you should come over and check it out.

Guerrilla Sessions are a great place for this sort of interaction. These sessions will be much less formal and should actually look more like the model of education we keep talking about rather then the Sage on the Stage model we have in the regular sessions.

To that end, I've also put up a picture of the Sign-Up sheet for tomorrow. So far it looks like we have:

• Show Me The Money - Grant Writing at 8:25
• Steal Back Fair Use: Copy small segments or whole DVD's for your own or educational use. at 10:00
• 11:30 Still Looks Open
• XO Laptops: Check it out - 1:15
  

MACUL - Guerrilla Sessions

MACUL is just a couple weeks away and I can't wait. Last year one of the things I was looking forward to most were the Guerrilla Sessions. It looked like they wouldn't happen and then there was some internet buzz and the MACUL Borad found a room for the first Guerrilla Sessions. I was excited.

Unfortunately there ended up only being one impromptu session and I missed it. The folks from the Geek!ED! podcast did one where they recorded live at MACUL. I would have been there, but I was presenting a hands-on session at the same time.

I still really like the idea of Guerrilla Sessions. Basically, these sessions could be on the cutting edge of new technologies, so new they didn't really exist before the session submission deadline. Or maybe they're a bit geeky/technical, or maybe a little too short for a full one hour session, or maybe the presenter has good ideas but was a bit intimidated by the quality of MACUL presentations and consequently didn't write a session proposal.

This year I have ideas and I plan on doing at least one Guerrilla Session, maybe two. One I'm planning on for sure is:

How do I, as an educator, exercise my fair use rights with DVDs? There are times when I need a small section of a DVD that I legally own for use in my classroom. I can, of course, cue up the DVD to the proper section, but this is cumbersome and wastes valuable teaching time. It is much more effective to extract just the small section I need.

I'll be shooting for a good time on Friday for this one, keep your eye out if you're interested. Does anyone else have any plans?

Detroit Metropolitan Educational Technology Users?

I love using the internet to meet and interact with other like minded educators. However, many educators do not participate in online resources or may simply be lurkers. Many of these educators may be interested in using technology in their classrooms, but they are simply intimidated. Personally, I have no problem with online interactions, but I still find face to face to be much more powerful. Additionally, face to face offers educators who are intimidated by technology a way into the conversation. So, where is an educator to turn if they want to attend educational technology conferences and meet like minded individuals? In Michigan we have the MACUL annual meeting and a few other regional conferences. In many cases educators would incur some expenses for travel as well as need to pay for the conference (not to mention the fees for their professional affiliation).

Currently, in Michigan, we are loosing funding for schools. There is a fear that schools simply can't afford to send teachers to meetings and if they can it is only one or two educators at most. So what do we do? Even if we have the money to get us to conferences there are really only a few opportunities every year. Before we get to the main point of this post I need to describe another group of dedicated educators I belong to.

I'm a member of the Detroit Metropolitan Area Physics Teachers (DMAPT). As near as we can figure, this 2007 marks the 50th year the DMAPT has been meeting. Some of our current members go back nearly to the beginning of the organization. They have long since retired, of course, but continue to attend meetings because they have a passion for teaching and they've made many life long friends through the organization. We try to meet every month during the school year, although we never quite make it that often. Meetings are held in the evening during the week. Experience has shown this to be the most popular time. Typically we are hosted by one of our members and meet at their school. Often we will be invited to meet at one of the local colleges. Last year we had one meeting at Wayne State and another at the University of Michigan.

Typical meeting agenda:

• Eat pizza (every one tosses in $5 or so and the host picks it up)
• Chit chat with like minded educators while eating dinner
  
• Do a quick round of introductions
• Cover any New/Old Business
• Then we have Presentations - Members volunteer to get up and share lessons/demos/labs they find useful. Occasionally a member will share an idea they had and seek additional input on how to execute it effectively. The presentations are often, but not always, grouped around a particular theme.

All in all, our meetings are very informal and a lot of fun. I always come away having learned a lot. Our dues are a very affordable $5/year and the only meeting fees we have are used to cover our dinner (if you come in after dinner or choose not to eat, the meeting is free). The dues are used to cover any dinner expenses that go beyond the typical $5/head and very occasionally pay a speaker. All in all it has proved to be a very successful model for a grass roots educator association.

So, what's the point of all this? I've been wondering if there might be any interest in forming this sort of organization around technology integration. Originally I'd thought of proposing it as a MACUL SIG, but then I changed my mind. We could look at being MACUL and/or ISTE affiliates, but by being independent, the only cost to join would be our own membership dues.

Anyway, I've rambled long enough. I think you should be able to get the idea of what I'm talking about. If anyone is interested in forming such a group (or a similar one following a different model) please email me, comment on this blog, or start a forum discussion. Or I suppose you could do all the work of forming a group and send me an invite to your first meeting ;)

Cross posted to maculspace.ning.com

Web 2.0 at MACUL

OK, Steve Demob is going to be another one of those speakers I look for at these meetings. Steve went through about 20 or 30 different websites while highlighting his Top 10 Free Web 2.0 Sites. All his links are available at 10freesites.pbwiki.com, so I won’t list them all here.

Here are some of the cool new things I learned:

• Jumpcut - A free online video creation/editing site now allows you to do the Ken Burns Effect with your photos
• Picnik - This is a free online image editor. I’ve heard of it before, but I’ve never used it. I will now. It does all the basic editing you need. You can upload photos or you can pull them directly from the web (including your Flickr). When you’re done editing you can save them, email them, dump them to Flickr, or send them to a number of places that will print them out for you.
• Vyew - Webinars free on the web. You can use your browser to host a webinar. The participants, who only need a browser, can watch your presentations or you can share a real time screen cast. There is a chat window available and you can share audio by having participants call into a phone number. Up to 100 people can call into the free version!

Steve talked about a lot of stuff more than I will mention here. His list of 10 Free Sites is great and you should give it a look.

Me at MACUL

This year I presented. I ran a hands-on workshop entitled probeware with almost no budget. My handouts are on my wetpaint site, as usual.

Abstract: Learn how to make your own probeware for under $10/station that will allow you to do multiple labs in physics/physical science and how to use the free software to make it work. You will use homemade probeware to analyze sound, investigate gravity/acceleration, and periodic motion.

Even given a minor snag or two, it went better than I could have hoped. We managed to cover all the topics I'd planned plus one or two extra. All the participants got to make and take their own solar-cell based probe and nobody burned themselves with the soldering-iron.

More MACUL-Video Tutorials

Dale Rogers presented how he uses video tutorials to help teach complex software. He focused on two programs HyperCam and Camtasia Studio.

Both programs allow you to very easily capture everything you do on the computer while doing a voice over narration. Camtasia has a lot more bells and whistles but it has a much higher price tag ($299). HyperCam can be downloaded and used for free, but you get a “Unregistered HyperCam” in the upper left corner of your finished video. If you want to buy it it is only $39.95.

Both programs looked pretty easy to use. Dale also talked about how having dual monitors set up is incredibly helpful when using video tutorials. Students can work on one monitor while running the tutorial on the other. And to be honest how many of us have extra CRTs gathering dust? All you need is a second cheap video card and you’re ready to go.

My Notes:

I've played around a bit with this myself. I've used Camtasia, which I was lucky enough to be given a free copy of (a colleague won it at the NECC) and iShowU, which is a Mac only program. I've also played with another free program called Wink. The learning curve is a little steep, but if you're interested in putting together a lot ov computer tutorials on the cheap it is definitely woth a look.

Will Richardson at MACUL

I went to Will Richardson’s first talk this morning. I almost didn’t because I’ve seen him talk many times before, but I’m glad I did. He is one of those speakers you should go out of your way to see. He helps me to remember why it is important to keep pushing the bounds of technology. I really needed that this morning after spending way to many hours trying to do something that should have been “easy” with my relatively new MacBook. I was able to get it done after much gnashing of teeth and two different work-a-rounds.

Richardson spent quite a bit of time talking about how he has learned more from the internet and the interactions it makes possible than he ever learned when he was a student. He highlighted this by showing the ClustrMap of the people who visit his blog. They come from all over the world as they do for all blogs. We end up in an environment where every one is as passionate about the same things we are. They come to our blogs because they are interested in what we have to say and so they will often interact with us and we end up learning more.

This extends into teaching in two major ways. The internet and the read write web makes interaction so easy. We don’t have to be the only content experts in our classrooms anymore. We can “invite” others in by simply highlighting great web resources or by facilitating conversations with real experts out there in the real world. The tools we have today make this much easier than ever before.

Additionally, many students get involved in online communities where they can share their passion with others. In one example he showed a fanfiction site that has hundreds of thousands of user generated stories. Many of these stories were undoubtedly written by our students who were writing for fun and learning at the same time. They do this not for a grade but because they enjoy it. They will learn a lot from this, maybe more than they will in their English classrooms.

One of Richardson’s recurring themes was that there is a wealth of information and tools for building information available on the web today. We need to be teaching our students how to use these tools effectively, not simply blocking them because the tools have the potential to be used inappropriately.

I could write volumes on everything Will talked about, but there’s more great stu. You can see his outline and talking points on his wiki handout. Now I’m off the the Apple booth to see if they can help me with my iMovie beach ball of death issues (the reason for the teeth gnashing I mentioned above).

Two Years Down!!!

I'm nearing the end of my second year of blogging. I started after the annual MACUL meeting two years ago. I've been a bit distracted lately, so I haven't posted as much as I would like, but I have lots of good stuff just waiting for a chance to hit the blog.

This year I was asked to be an official MACUL blogger. So, I'll be posting several things from the conference over the next week or so.I'll cross post everything here as well as on the MACUL Blog.

This year marks my first foray into presenting at MACUL. I signed up to run a hands on workshop. Unfortunately I didn't realize that it costs $60 to attend hands on workshops when I signed up. Otherwise I would probably have signed up for a regular presentation so I might have a chance to share my stuff with more people. Oh well, you live an learn. If you're interested in learning about Probweare for teaching sound or motion on the Cheap check out my session from 3:30 to 5:30 on Thursday.

MACUL 2006 - Part 2

I went to a presentation given by, Ben Rimes, the creator and moderator of a web site titled The Tech Savvy Educator. His site consists primarily of his technology in education blog and forums for educators to discuss technology ideas. His blog ideas are nicely tagged and categorized to make finding ideas on a specific subject or topic easy. All in all his presentation was good and his site deserves a look.

Ben is quick to answer any questions of fix problems. I registered and found I was unable to log in because I typed my username in wrong when I registered. Ben fixed it the same day.

MACUL 2006

I just got back from MACUL. This is my second MACUL, after my first I started this blog. There weren't any really big wow new technologies for me this year, but I did learn about some new stuff. Here's my first installment of what I found interesting this year.

David Pogue gave the opening keynote and it was great, he talked about newish technologies and how they might change the way we do things in the future. His list included:

1. Voice Over IP - David highlighted the potential of using WiFi enabled devices with Skype to potentially skip regular phones altogether.
2. RFID Tags
3. Untethered TV/Movies - With iTunes and Google Video we can now watch TV anywhere.
4. Digital Cameras - These are everywhere.
5. HDTV

I also attended part of his Tiger Secrets talk. I'm not a mac person these days, but this rekindled my Mac Envy.

Will Richardson gave a marathon four sessions in a row. I managed to only make one of them though and managed to learn a lot. The presentation I made was about podcasting, vodcasting and screen casting. He had a number of links in his presentation. I haven't been through them all, but here they are anyway:

• Education Podcast Network
• Ourmedia.org - free media hosting
• Worldbridges - Webcasts of EdTech
• Savvy Technologist - A podcast and blog
• Feedburner - creates RSS feeds for blogs, news or podcasts
  

More MACUL - Furl

I've been playing around with Furl today, it's pretty cool. It will let you archive web pages for later viewing in case they vanish off the net. Even cooler it will serve as a repository of bookmarks. You can log into Furl from any computer and recover all your links.

When you furl a page you categorize it and give it some key words to make searching for that cool site you looked at two months ago and can't remember the exact url really easy. Additionally, furl will recommend sites you might like to visit based on what you and other users store.

It is also possible to look at what a specific person is storing. In fact, within 2-3 hours of setting up my Furl I had one subscriber.

For lots more info check out Jim Wenzloff's primer on furl.

If you care what I'm reading you can subscribe to my furl:
http://www.furl.net/subscribe?id=122286&search=true

or the RSS feed of my Furl:
http://www.furl.net/members/mrdickie/rss.xml

MACUL Miscellany

Blogging - One site cited for blogging in education at MACUL was Blog Meister. This site seems to allow for teacher review of all blog posts and comments before students get to see them. This offers more security and helps to ensure appropriatness. In order to register you need a school code. Acording to the Documentation on the page you can recieve a school pass code by emailing David Warlick.

MovieMaker Tips - I didn't go to the session on MovieMaker tips, but from talking to a collegue I wish I had. He gave me a link that is almost as good as having been there. PapaJohn's Movie Maker 2 page.

Seeing Reason - A concept mapping tool developed by Intel Education. Seeing Reason prompts students to investigate casue and effect relationships and develop thinking skills. Intel Teach to the Future offers a 40 professional development program centering on effective use of this tool. There should be some Michigan specific information about Intel Teach appearing at the MACUL web site soon.

Technology Cartoons for Educators - TechToon

MACUL 2005

Last week I attended the annual meeting of MACUL hosted in Detroit. I consider myself fairly advanced when it comes to technology and learned a lot of really good stuff at this meeting. Over the next couple of days I'll hit what I felt were the highlights of the meeting.

I went to a lot of sessions and actually stayed in till the end through most of them. At a lot of meetings I find myself learning nothing new at sessions, that was not true at this conference.

Sessions I went to and found valuable:

Blogging Before Breakfast by Meg Ormiston - I didn't really learn much new in this session, but for many who did not know what Blogging is it seemed valuable. She maintains a website at www.techteachers.com. She has digital handouts for all of her MACUL sessions on her site as well.

Active Galaxies by Dr. Mary Garrett (NASA) - This was a great presentation about the Looking at Active Galaxies educational unit developed by NASA. Marry was a great presenter and the activities she presented could be used at many levels. A copy of Mary's lesson(s) can be found on her webpage. NASA's activity book is available from NASA's GLAST Page.

Teach Beginning programming Surreptitiously by Barry Webster - This session focused on using JavaScript to teach the underlying concepts of programming while having students create web pages. His explanations were clear and concise, but bogged down while he was trying to teach code to the audience. The session would have been better if he'd kept his focus on what was possible and how to teach it to kids. He recommended the book JavaScript For the World Wide Web as a great resource for this approach.

RSS: The New Killer App for Educators by Will Richardson (did the google bots find me?) - This was a great session for the novice to advanced user. I knew what RSS was before this session and read several feeds daily but Richardson taught me a bunch more. On his website he has assembled an RSS quick start guide which includes instructions to (among other things):

• Understand what RSS is
• Find RSS feeds
• Bring them together to make them easy to read
• Set up Google and Google News Alerts as RSS feeds letting you do research 24/7
• Embed an RSS feed into a webpage

This session and the quick start guide answered all the questions I had about RSS and gave me new ideas on how to use it for myself and in education.

I went to a few other sessions and learned some more stuff, but I haven't had a chance to delve to deeply into it all yet. As I do I'll publish my findings here.