NECC Update - From Tuesday

This was a busy day and I really was lamenting having left the power supply for my laptop in Michigan. I went to several sessions yesterday and enjoyed all of them.

The first session of the day for me was one hosted by Apple, Free Learning Content from A-Z. This was mainly a session on finding good educational podcasts. The new thing for me was the Apple Learning Interchange, a social network like interface for browsing a set of lessons created by teachers for Apple. It's worth a look.

Next I went to the SIGILT (Innovative Learning Technologies Special Interest Group) business meeting. This was actually cool. This SIG is only two years old and is still trying to find its way. The main goal is to find and bring together research on the effectiveness emerging technologies have on education. More on this later.

After the SIGILT meeting I ran to the Social Networking Pannel. This was pretty cool there was a great group for this and the first thing they did was start the back channel chat. There were a lot of really good points made, but I frankly can't remember them all. So I'll just put in what it made me think about.

1. Most people, including educators, fixate on the dangers of social networking and how kids use it very inappropriately. We need to constantly remind people that just as we have policies in our classrooms to enforce order and appropriate behavior we need to have policies for online behavior as well.
2. I should figure out all the privacy issues in Facebook, how to open open up my profile and how to it down.
3. I may want to also create a physics group in Facebook to parallel what we do on Ning. The kids are on Facebook, so I may want to have a presence there as well.

After this I ran down to the big theater for Hall Davidson's Cell Phone talk. It was great, but very similar to the keynote talk from MACUL in March, so I didn't walk away with much new stuff. But I did think a bit more about how I use my cell phone and how I should stat using it. I need to be more comfortable with what I can do with my phone so that I can teach my students about the powerful tool most of them cary around in their pockets.

Then I had to un to the othe side of the conference hall to catch the Classroom 2.0 Birds of a Feather meet up. I would summarize it here, but you'll get a better idea by going to the forum post on this session. The highlight for me was getting to share the stage with David Warlick, er I mean Clovis.

Very Cool Tricks for Using and Making Videos

NECC 2008 BYOL Presentation

Rushton Huley, next Vista For Learning (n08s573)

If students walk out of the classroom saying that was "cool" does not necessarily mean that quality leaning happened, but it does mean it could have. Hurley is an entertaining speaker and has some good tips, but so far (50 minutes in) I have no idea why this is a BYOL session. So far he hasn't had us do anything on our laptops yet.

This was also billed as a session for people who knew stuff already, but has been presented for very novice users. Overall it was a fine talk, but not exactly what it was billed to be.

Good Links Shared:

• morguefile.com - Public Image Reference Archive. Good quality Creative Commons images.
• search.creativecommons.org- Search engine for Creative Commons content.
• piclens.com- Great way to view media searches on websites.
• partnersinrhyme.com - Royalty free music and sound effects.

Why do we need a $100 laptop?

At the NECC this year I saw a talk, given by Greg Dekoenigsberg, on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, the so called $100 laptop. Overall it was a very informative presentation and showed off the capabilities of the OLPC. Among the topics Dekoenigsberg covered were the major criticisms of the program. The biggest in my mind is, "Send them food not computers!"

Dekoenigsberg talked about this and said something to the effect of, countries with educated populations do not suffer the ravages of famine we see in many third world countries. I wasn't sure I bought this, until I read about William Kamkwamba, a young man from Malawi in south eastern Africa. William's family couldn't afford to keep him in school, so he took on the task of educating himself. He used his education to take scavenged materials and build a windmill to power his home. He now has visions of building a bigger version that could be used for irrigation. With some knowledge and a lot of ambition, William brought enough electricity to his home to light four lights and two radios.

You can read more about his story by searching the net or by going to his blog (he started it after he was discovered by the press). It's a great story that goes a long way towards showing the power of education.

My Stuff from the NECC

Well, as of this morning my handouts still haven't appeared on the ISTE-NECC site for my session, so I've converted my pdf files to jpg and uploaded them to Picasa Web Albums (owned by Google).

Here are all the handouts I had posted to the backboard behind my table. I created them using Comic Life on my MacBook.

• Build your own probeware
• Sound Science
• Motion with a picket fence

I also have them as pdf files. If you'd like a copy of the pdfs just shoot me an email and I'll send them along (falconphysics@gmail.com)

You may also want to see my step by step instructions over on instructables.com

Now I can Relax

Well, I survived my marathon presentation today. I was at the Math/Science Playground at the NECC from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. It was a long day, but I met lots of great people and made some good contacts, which is what this is all about.

Here are the links I promised people would appear on my blog:

• My stuff on instructables.com
• My stuff on the ISTE - NECC site
• Visual Analyser - Free Oscilloscope
• Audacity - Free, audio recording program that I used as a recording oscilloscope

I'll try to put up a more comprehensive posting tomorrow. I'm wiped out today.

Live from the NECC - Free Software

Well, after being bumped from my flight I was able to catch the next one and arrive in Atlanta only a couple hours late. The first session I caught was this morning.

When the Best is Free: Open Source Software in Education
David Thornburg, Thornburg Center
http://www.tcpdpodcast.org/

I'll be seeking Dr. Thornburg out at future conferences I attend. He was a very dynamic and entertaining speaker. One of his opening quotes illustrates this quite well.

"No operating system in history has done more to advance Linux than Vista."

Thornburg's presentation went through lots of great free and/or open source software. Here's the list of what he covered. I've included links to my own blog for those things I've covered previously.

Celestia - Solar System Exploration. I usually explain it as Google Earth for the Solar System and nearby galaxies.

Scratch - Programming language from the MIT Media Lab. Thornburg's site is the only place to get the Linux version from. Scratch uses blocks that can be clicked and draged to write programs very easily. I had my eight year old son programing last summer with this. One of the cool things is there are lots of different spoken languages you can have menus and commands displayed in.

PhET - Lots of really great science simulations on the web. They can be installed locally if your network is not reliable.

MVT - Mathematical Visualization Toolkit. Function plotter, derivatives , numerical integration. 2D and 3D plotting.

MathTrax - This is an equation plotter. The cool thing is it returns a text description of the function in words based on your function. This was originally created for vision impaired kids, the text description can be read to the kids.

JAlbum - Build website picture photo albums. Thornburg showed an elementary assignment, students take pictures objects that look like a letters to create the whole alphabet.

Cmap - Concept mapping tool, while not as pretty as Inspiration, it is free. Users can get suggestions from the internet, looking for related words. Collaboration - multiple students can work on the same map at the same time.

Molecular Workbench - 3D models of molecules and such. It comes with lots of ready made models. This was shown near the end of the presentation, so he didn't get much time to talk about it. I will definitely have to spend some time with this later.

Me at the NECC

I've been hurriedly getting my stuff together for the upcoming NECC. I'd be doing great as far as time goes if it weren't for the fact that I'm also working with a team of students who are trying to finish their invention project. They won a Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams grant and will be presenting their project in Boston from June 19th thru the 23rd. I'll be going with them, which will be cool, but I'm running out of time!!!

Any way, on with my stuff. I've been uploading directions to Instructables.com. This site is pretty cool and they have a competition running right now where the best project wins a laser cutter. While I don't think I'll win the laser maybe they will send me a free T-Shirt. Although if I do somehow with the laser cutter the science club next year will have the best fund raisers ever.

Below you will find links to the projects I've submitted so far. I will have at least one or two more to put up yet before I'm ready for Atlanta.

• Make Your Own Light Probe/Photogate
• Determine the acceleration due to gravity
• Find the Speed of Sound
• Capture a sound and rebuild it with Audacity.

I've been contemplating ways I can use Instructables in class. I've used some of the projects either for demos or student projects, but I haven't had students upload their own yet. Their had been a problem with the Instructables web site and our network firewall, but this seems to have been resolved. Next year I'll have to use this. I just have to figure out a good way that won't swamp the site with 90 projects for the same thing.

NECC 2007

I'm going to the National Education Computing Conference (NECC) this year. It's the premier ed tech conference. This year it's in Atlanta and I get to present.

I'll be a part of the math/science playground. Stop by and say Hi, I'll be there all day on Tuesday. I won't be showing anything new (at least not new for me), just my improvised probeware stuff. What I'm really excited about is the chance to learn from other educators. What works for them, what can I steal... er I mean use and cite appropriately.

I'm still looking for good ways to incorporate web 2.0 into my physics classes appropriately and effectively. I want to meet people, to pick their brains, to learn how they do what they do. I'm also hoping to meet up with some of the other members of The TechSavvy Educator forums who said they'd be attending.