Seamless Services?

Precursors of the Open Hardware movement

2011-10-28T09:01:00.002-04:00

The Open Hardware Movement has precedents that might help us to understand how to make the best use of Knowledge Commons:

Note the motivation for improvement and the public sharing of a well defined metric of improvement.

Sugar on an iBook

2011-09-05T07:07:00.003-04:00

Xubuntu on an ancient iBook supports a vnc remote client that allows me to run Sugar, capture an image, & share to Seamless Services blog. If here, where else, & for whom?

Posting via Trisquel4.5 Sugar

2011-08-09T07:31:00.007-04:00

I tried to take a photo and post it here. Captured the photo but lost it in the process of adding it here. Now, I'll try an intermediate save to see whether that helps.

Yes, that worked but getting text input back challenged me briefly. I needed to "Save Now" before I could enter text again. The problem seems to lie in hitting the "Done" button on the image upload tab. The browser seems to interpret that as a message to close the browser session rather than just close the tab and return to the original tab. Submit a bug report?

The photo question comes from the annual world-wide day of service originating in New Haven.

Posting from the Sugar Browser

2011-07-18T10:59:00.006-04:00

TurtleArt Flower: nested repeats of a square.

Tony Forster regularly blogs about work he has done using Sugar. He shares that work at http://tonyforster.blogspot.com. His work includes screen shots from Sugar. I wonder whether I am able to do similar work with my current install of Sugar (a Trisquel Virtual Machine running in VirtualBox). So, I am using this entry to test. I am able to add text and Blogger keeps my work.

Then, I tried to upload an image from the Sugar Journal. The browser let me select an image and previewed it. But, when I tried to submit the image to my Blogger picture-base, it threw me out of the Browser Activity and back into the Journal. I needed to sign in again and found that Blogger kept my text but did not add the image.

Now, I see that I have multiple tabs in the Sugar Browser and that I can return to editing my post before indicating that I am "Done." Blogger was able to successfully upload the image and integrate it into my post. Will have to learn what combination steps is required to reliably reproduce this process.

MTA Capstone Video: 11 Pilot Project Abstracts

2011-07-08T16:22:00.005-04:00

I finished editing and adding the jazz audio track to the eleven students' presentations for the Capstone Assembly in May. These brief presentations were intended to help students understand the scope of Capstone projects and help them to choose which two of the sessions they wanted to see for the full presentations the following week.

I uploaded it to a personal account at Vimeo. Once things work well, I'll establish an institutional account so that school personnel can manage in the future.

MTA Capstone 2011 Pilot Projects from Stephen Spaeth on Vimeo.

Charter Schools in Maine

2011-06-30T10:37:00.002-04:00

After many years resisting the development of charter schools, the Maine Legislature has passed Charter School Legislation and Governor LePage has signed LD 1553 into law. Two features of the legislation are particularly interesting:

7. Teachers – All full-time teachers in charter schools must either hold an appropriate teaching certificate or become certified within three years of the date they are hired, excepting those with an advanced degree, professional certification, or unique expertise and/or experience in the curricular area they teach. ...
...
9. Virtual Chartered Schools – LD 1553 adopts the language of the national model bill that defines and allows virtual chartered schools.

I'm interested to see how these develop.

Stowe's Brunswick and Bowdoin

2011-06-27T10:39:00.003-04:00

The Stowe Society's "Stowe at 200" Conference included a walking tour of sites in Brunswick associated with Stowe. Polly Kaufman lead the tour starting at the Pjepscot Historical Society building. Fifty or more people participated with a small number from the Stowe Society, a few more from the conference and most from the general public in the area.

Dr. Kaufman carried photocopies of some notes and images of interest. I found the following image from collections at the New York Public Library via Wikimedia Commons that shows sites more as Stowe experienced them.

By Lane & Scott, FitzHugh Lane [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The most easily identified buildings in the lithograph from the left are: First Parrish Church, Massachusetts Hall, Winthrop Hall, Maine Hall, Bowdoin Chapel, and Appleton Hall. Dr. Kaufman related the story of Harriet Beecher Stowe using her husband's office in Massachusetts Hall to write parts of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Note a confusion in local informal history. The Bowdoin publication "Academic Spotlight" in an article "Tracing Lasting, Local Footprints of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'" relates the story of a student tour guide who incorrectly identifies the site of Calvin Stowe's office as Appleton Hall.

As a student tour guide for Bowdoin's Office of Admissions, Tom Brickler '10 had led dozens of prospective students past Appleton Hall.

Stopping, he would say: "It was here, where Harriet Beecher Stowe sometimes worked on the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin." For full dramatic effect, he might add the words: "writing late into the stormy winter night."

The author of the Spotlight article suggests:

Though it is campus legend, no one knows for sure if Stowe—the wife of a Bowdoin professor—actually worked there during the years that she wrote the novel in Brunswick. But it hardly matters: The compulsion to imagine and re-imagine the daily existence of luminaries connected to Bowdoin—including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Joshua Chamberlain, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—is part of the ambience of being at such a historically significant college.

While it may "hardly matter" to casual visitors and some reporters, it clearly matters to Stowe enthusiasts and scholars. If these kinds of historical resources were more easily accessible, then perhaps we can increase the number of people who care about the historical details.

Tracing Lasting, Local Footprints of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'

2011-06-23T14:32:00.001-04:00

Tracing Lasting, Local Footprints of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', Academic Spotlight (Bowdoin)

Bowdoin's Academic Spotlight on Tess Chakkalakal's course on using place-based resources to connect with 21st Century reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Includes a brief video clip of a class held in the First Parrish Church:

Can we build digital resources to support asynchronous access to experiences similar to this.

hReview of MAMS ITeam site

2011-04-30T09:12:00.003-04:00

Mentor led documentation

Apr 30, 2004 by SC Spaeth

Mt. Ararat MS ITeam Site

Provides a useful overview and activities of the MAMS ITeam. Shows some student work on projects. Needs to provide more complete coverage of activities. Would be helpful to have students more engaged in the creation and management of the site.
------
Meta: I write this review to test the microformat tools for hReview.

This hReview brought to you by the hReview Creator.

Harriet Beecher Stowe on Child Labor

2011-04-17T13:49:00.003-04:00

Harriet Beecher Stowe is most famous for her writing of Uncle Tom's Cabin. But her indignation against slavery seems to be matched by a similar feeling about child labor. A correspondent from England complained about a reference in Uncle Tom's Cabin to labor conditions for children in England. She responded as follows:

Beecher Stowe moved from Brunswick several years before the beginning of the Civil War. So, it seems unlikely that she would have seen this ironic outcome of her advocacy for the abolishment of slavery:

WANTED! 120 Girls and Boys to work in Maine cotton mills for 9 hours per day. L-A Museum and Maine State Archives.

Modk.it testing via Crocodoc

2011-04-09T13:02:00.007-04:00

I have been testing the Modk.it editor for Arduino. It works reasonably well in its current form but I need access to some features before I invest a lot more time into it. I have documented some of my work as part of a learning process record and had a screen-shot lying on my desktop that I use here to test Crocodoc:

The Annotation tool did not display when I examined the sample doc that I embedded in yesterday's post. The Annotation tools came as soon as I uploaded a document of my own. This seems like a useful tool for remote collaboration on a broader range of document types than Google supports.

The comments that I make on the screen shot describe my reactions to both current status of the Modk.it development and features of Crocodoc.

Highlighting and Annotating Collaborative Work

2011-04-08T16:13:00.003-04:00

Theron bookmarked (Diigo/Theron_d) a page from Crocodoc, a html5 based document rendering engine, that supports high-lighting and annotation of pdf and other challenging document types. While Google is improving its capacity to support this kind of collaboration on documents, they can use the competition.

The chunk of text below came from a copy and paste of a selection on page 22:

 The longest path is the
shortest and the shortest
path is the longest
The shortest route to learning the craft
of a ﬁeld is the one that, at ﬁrst glance,
appears the longest.To really learn
something, you must understand the
basic concepts of your ﬁeld.If you
try to skip,

I copied and pasted because the tool did not seem to work when I tried it.

Inevitable. But how to get there from here?

2011-04-08T08:26:00.003-04:00

Maine ASCD invited Bea McGarvey back for their Spring 2011 conference. She will promote the Mass Customization of Learning. MAMS ITeam and Capstone participants explore this frontier. I try to identify and develop opportunities for students to find a compelling interest and develop it as individuals or small groups. But the approach is so different from most of students' other experiences in school, that many find the transition very challenging. When I see evidence of students getting the idea, I try to have them show-case their accomplishments.

At yesterday's ITeam meeting, I tried to help the whole group look at the Minecraft explorations as an example of what it means to find an engaging creative medium and then spend time outside of school to explore and develop that interest. The Minecraft explorers seemed to appreciate the recognition of their efforts but the robotics crew dismissed the idea because they are not interested in it at all. And, when conferred later, they wanted to know what they should do next because robotics were interesting but didn't sustain their engagement. When I turned the question of what to do next back to them, some waxed nostalgic for last year's student-teacher ratio. I reminded them that we have to find an approach that doesn't rely on favorable ratios.

Erik Kramer share the link to the following video:

Meg and Alex are developing lessons through CREA that they plan to share with elementary school students at Bowdoin Central and Woodside Elementary Schools. Can older students learn Squishy Circuits and similarly share them with young children?

Learning Analogies

2011-04-05T15:11:00.008-04:00

SAT Question of the Day:

Redstone Circuits : Minecraft :: ________ : Arduino Robotics

LEDs
AppInventor
Modk.it Editor
Cellbots and Servers
All of the above and more!

We use a project-based learning approach for ITeam. I want students to engage with the work so that they choose to spend time outside of school to work on their projects. So, I give them latitude in selection and encourage them to shoulder part of the project management responsibilities so that we can customize their learning. Since many have never learned this way in school, we have challenges making the transition to this way of learning. One of the biggest challenges is getting them to document the work they have done in ways that we can share with stakeholders and other interested parties.

Our recent foray into Minecraft originated in student engagement that they used to convince me that I had misinterpreted the genre. I saw the chopping as destructive and did not yet understand the real intent of the activity as gathering raw materials for creating new materials and artifacts.

Now, I am learning that some middle school ITeam members are setting up multi-user Minecraft servers at home and are developing the ability to tune-them to meet specifications that support our learning needs. Coby told me today, that he has shifted his focus from creating objects and structures in Minecraft to understanding and creating tools for others to use. He clearly has established a Pre-Capstone Project that shows potential for transferring what we are learning in the MTA Capstone Project to middle school and beyond. Clearly, we are shifting roles and moving toward authentic co-learning.

How can we help all students at all levels to take more responsibility for helping to manage their own learning?

----------------

The answer is clearly 5. All of the above and more!

Now, if I can just keep up with them. But, Coby described getting help from the Minecraft admin community in setting up port-forwarding in his network settings. So, I hope we have reinforcements ready in the wings in the form of mentors in new cultures of learning that David Thomas and John Seeley Brown describe in their book the New Culture of Learning:

In this connected world, mentorship takes on new importance and meaning
Where traditionally mentoring was a means of enculturating members into a community, mentoring in the collective relies more on the sense of learning and developing temporary, peer-to-peer relationships that are fluid and impermanent. Expertise is shared openly and willingly, without regard to an institutional mission. Instead, expertise is shared conditionally and situationally, as a way to enable the agency of other members of the collective.

Learning from students and others

2011-04-05T09:26:00.005-04:00

Members of the MAMS ITeam shared their interest, engagement and creativity using Minecraft. But when I ask them to connect their work in Minecraft, with learning in school, they don't provide compelling examples or analysis. I tried to illustrate last week with the high school students' example of creating a model of a cell in Minecraft as a high school biology assignment. I don't know how effective that was.

Paul Soares, Jr. posted this link to a video (that showed up in Joel Levin's blog) of Minecraft project that illustrates more compelling connections to desired learning outcomes:

Does this exemplar help students to understand what we are trying to develop? Last year ITeam members tried to use Alice to meet Mr. Hale's social studies assignment to create a town. They used the libraries of available objects to create responses but the medium seemed to lead them away from his assignment and toward something that it could support. Does Minecraft provide more generic materials that can be used to meet assignments to represent various time-periods and cultures?

MinecraftTeachr talks about elementary learners

2011-04-03T10:52:00.011-04:00

Minecraft FM interviews Joel Levin, Mindcraft Teachr, about his use of Minecraft with elementary school students. Points to Minecraft In School, a PBWorks wiki, as another resource. Using multi-player server otherwise just playing. Wants the collaborative activities. Using Craftbukkit with plug-ins for managing what they can and can't do.

The press continues with an interview at KQED

Levin’s words, “exactly what is so appealing to me about Minecraft as a teaching tool. It’s so open ended and extensible. I really think of it more as a canvas than a game. I’m able to construct these elaborate experiences, settings, and stories for the kids to move through. Rather than having to shoehorn a lesson around a game, I’m able to think about what I’m trying to teach and then design an entire world around that.”

and another at ArsTechnica.

"l chose Minecraft specifically because it's so open-ended," Levin told Ars. "The game presents you with a huge open world and you can do any of a dozen different preset activities. Or you can go off and create your own content. That alone gives me a ton of freedom to invent content for the kids to engage in. I don't let them just play the game however they want. They must follow a path I lay out for them, which allows me to carry out lesson plans."

One of the elements that Levin requires is that students all work in a Multi-user setting and that the challenges he poses strongly encourage collaboration. Would a multi-user environment help to foster communication and collaboration among ITeam members?

Transferring communication from channels to platforms

2011-03-25T14:29:00.003-04:00

When services provide web-based support forms, I often wish I had a copy of what I wrote to them because it has value to me and perhaps beyond. So, I copy it here to preserve the text and share in the future.

I read through the FAQs and couldn't find a description of how to transfer a user's account to membership in a class. Students in our class have spread the word to some of their classmates about using GSM. They have signed up at home using free accounts. We'd like to transfer some of those accounts to our classroom/institutional account. For example, one of them has created a Featured Game.

Can I transfer his existing ID to our classroom, do you have to make that change, or do kids who want to join the class have to start again from scratch to build their GSM cred?

Thanks for your assistance.

SC Spaeth, MSAD75 Mentor

I checked one more FAQ in the Institutional sign up area it it seems as if kids can use the link to associate existing accounts with the class:

Q: How do students (and other teachers) join my class/instituion and start using Gamestar?

A: Once your class or institution is set up, you'll receive an email and confirmation page message. This message will contain a friendly link for your students to follow to join your institution/class. When they follow the link, they'll have the opportunity to create a Gamestar Mechanic account. This account will automatically be joined to your class/institution. (If they already have a Gamestar account, they'll be able to use that account to join your class/institution, too). Once they complete this step, they'll enjoy all the features of your subscription.

Let's hope that this community can develop into passionate affinity spaces that James Paul Gee advocates for learning in the 21st Century.

Fifth-grade student at WES creates a featured game in Gamestar Mechanic

2011-03-25T12:51:00.007-04:00

A fifth-grader at Woodside Elementary School created a game that Gamestar Mechanic has featured on its Game Alley:

Use this link to Josh's Dark Realm to see the full-size version.
Gamestar Mechanic provides embed codes to make it possible to share student' s work on websites outside of Gamestar's. But the embed code contains Javascript so I suspect that this attempt to share his work will fall short of the intended. He is well on his way to creating his digital portfolio of evidence of 21st Century learning outcomes. I fully expected this embed to fail because of restrictions on Javascript. But it worked! Unfortunately, the dimensions of the game are greater than the layout for this blog will allow. Clicking on the "Play" button opens the game in half a window. Need some work on this to recognize his achievement. Use this link to his Dark Realm in order to see the full size.

CellBots Remix

2011-03-24T13:09:00.004-04:00

In anticipation of the upcoming US Open Robotic Soccer Tournament to be held at Bowdoin College, I shared the work with members of the MAMS ITeam. Tim H. helped to explore this set of tools. Here, I show that other hand-held devices can also access the page. Avery showed that he could also see it on his iPad. We need to find ways to secure and detect these kinds of services in order to ensure safety and decorum.

Uncle Tom's Cabin at ARIS

2011-03-17T08:11:00.005-04:00

From Drop Box

Illustration by Hammatt Billings [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The original image is in the public domain and shared at Wikimedia Commons. I added a medium resolution (500px jpeg) photo as display media for an ARIS item. The Harriet Beecher Stowe NPC (non-player character) gives the player a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin after engaging in a dialog.

ARIS initially displays the full height of the image but supports touch-screen zoom and panning of the image. Here, I zoomed into Billings' illustration but kept Stowe's name and print run (150,000 copies) in view. Then I took the screen capture of the image which includes the ARIS Controls. The 'Detail' button brings up a brief caption and attribution information.

The iPhone's system (iOS 4.2) supports zooming into the image far enough to see pixellation easily for individual words. I suspect that this does not detract much from the quality of the exhibit as iPhone users experience it but may be more of an issue if players are using iPads. If people want to study the image in more detail, then the attribution information will allow them to easily locate and inspect the image at the highest resolution available (1024 px width).

Child slavery, too?

2011-03-16T07:49:00.004-04:00

By Bain News Service photograph, c. 1909 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The banners these New York City children wore read, "Abolish Child Slavery."

Were children in Maine also an important part of the labor force in textile mills along the Androscoggin River?

If Waiting for Superman is an accurate representation of the current situation for some students, then we still need to liberate children from intolerable conditions.

Uncle Tom's Cabin (Title page)

2011-03-15T14:58:00.003-04:00

This reproduction of the title page for an early edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin is in the public domain and could be used as a resource for ARIS activities.

Note, that Wikimedia Commons assigns credit in this case to Hammatt Billings, the illustrator:
By Hammatt Billings [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
rather than to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the book.

Stowe House, Brunswick in ARIS

2011-03-15T12:39:00.006-04:00

As I spoke with ITeam members yesterday and with Dennis Edmonson this morning, I wanted to have examples to share rather than just speak about them. So, I took the historic image (from the post-card of the Leighton Company, circa 1905) cropped it to meet the size guidelines for ARIS media and put it into ARIS as a plaque (320X320 px). I added the appropriate citation information to the caption text.

Then, I navigated to the page in ARIS and took this screen shot from the phone. It is difficult to read the text and it did not help to enlarge the photo. After seeing the photo in context, I revised the text to read:

Harriet Beecher Stowe lived in this house. Here, between 1850 and 1852, she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Photo credit: Hugh C. Leighton Company, c. 1905 (en wiki) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

For this image in the public domain, it is less critical to include the live links: By Hugh C. Leighton Company (en wiki) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. I wonder how we should handle attribution in other cases.

The Quick Travel option in ARIS helps to support this kind of exploration because users can inspect resources irrespective of their proximity to the location:

ARIS and Local History

2011-03-15T09:08:00.006-04:00

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Brunswick, Maine

By Hugh C. Leighton Company (en wiki) [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

ARIS is promoting a Global Jam on April 18-20th to create 50 'games' in 50 hours. I took this occasion as an opportunity to share the idea in more detail with Dennis Edmonson. I wanted to learn whether he knows of students who might be interested in helping to create ARIS exhibits for Topsham and Brunswick as Capstone Projects.

Dennis made the connection with the Museum in the Streets^TM initiatives in several communities in Maine (and beyond). They have a well established and protected concept that they have developed and refined over the last twenty years. Communities pay a fee for the assistance to develop walking tours and then provide free tours (brochures and physical plaques with pictures and short texts) to visitors to their communities.

The ARIS Dow Day and BikeBox approaches reduce the need for physical signage and increase the types of media that can be shared (e. g. video clips of re-enactors). But they increase the need for technology infrastructure (devices and support). Next, I need to visit with Chris Nulle to get his perspective on the degree to which the re-enactors (local and beyond) would be willing to share clips.

Exploring inverted pendulum control

2011-03-12T07:48:00.010-05:00

In December, I wrote about finding a Mathemetica notebook that helped me start to understand the classic Inverted Pendulum problem as it relates to the Woodside-One-Wheelers learning to turn themselves into stable inverted pendulums.

With the release of Mathematic 8, Andrew Moylan, a Mathematica employee, has created blog presentations highlighting its new features. He has written Stabilized Inverted Pendulum and Stabilized n-link Pendulum. In the first article, he describes Mathematica's capacity in terms that make sense to me and perhaps to some of our ITeam members:

Using the new control systems features (one of several new application areas integrated into Mathematica 8), I’ve been experimenting with models of stabilized inverted pendulums. I’m no expert in control theory, but you’ll see that one doesn’t need to be.

I'm no expert in unicycling, physics, control theory, or any other arcane elements of this story but I don't need to be to appreciate and explore the connections. And, I suspect that our ITeam students don't need to be experts either to find some age-appropriate insight into something that catches their interest.

The Bowdoin Robotics Team came to Mt. Ararat Middle School last week and inspired several middle school students to think more about balancing on one foot (inverted pendulum with fixed base) to kick a soccer ball. Matt worked in ITeam meetings, CET, at home in the evening to install and start to learn Python because the Bowdoin Team uses it to control their robots!

Moylan include several video clips (generated with Mathematica) in order to illustrate the ideas he discusses. He also includes a link to the notebook that he created. Inside the notebook, he hints at even greater support for explorations by experts-in-training.

In the next article in this series, we'll derive pendulum-and-cart equations programmatically to make it easy to explore more general cases.

Samuel Chen commented on Moylan's post with this observation:

Simply amazing! One single post from Moylan covers the entire mechanics course from college!

Compare that with Sophia.org's concept of learning packets.

The material on Sophia is organized by "learning packets," which are small, bite-sized tutorials focused around a specific learning objective, including thousands of standards-aligned objectives. Each packet includes a question and answer conversation, giving learners the benefit of learning from both the content itself as well as the supplementary discussion.

I'm finishing this post now so that I can go and explore Moylan's notebooks with the new Mathematica CDF player.

Sophia.org and Creative Commons Licenses

2011-03-08T15:08:00.004-05:00

A group of former Capella.edu leaders has created Sophia.org. They have a community-based learning and teaching model with checks built in for academic quality. Compare it with P2PU.org with its roots in the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation.

Sophia.org encourages authors to use Creative Commons Licenses to encourage reuse and remixing. I don't understand their business model and can't find much about it on their site or in reviews. Here, I test the OpenAttribute tool to see how their licenses are represented:

Work found at http://www.sophia.org/packets/creating-a-learning-packet-publishing / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

It captures institutional information but not authors. Will that provide the necessary incentive to participate?

Harriet Beecher Stowe House- Photo

2011-03-07T15:02:00.004-05:00

Wikipedia requests the help of local Wikipedians to help improve the quality of the article about the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Brunswick by providing a photo. Pablo Sanchez, a visitor to Brunswick, took this photo and shared it with the appropriate license but obscured part of the image with an inset of the cover of Uncle Tom's Cabin. I suspect that in this form it is not appropriate for Wikimedia Commons.

While Wikipedia rates this article's importance as low, I suspect that the interest in the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War will increase interest in it. Where can we get or develop the person power to create work like this? ITeam, Capstone Projects, ... ?

Allie: Ambassador Actors and Bullying

2011-03-07T08:25:00.006-05:00

Allie is using her work on the Ambassador Actors Project as the basis for her Capstone Project. For several years, the Ambassador Actors have used playback theater support anti-bullying and restorative justice work in our schools and communities. Seems like the Ambassador Actors have established some important precedents. MSNBC responded to President Obama's recent initiative to control bullying by producing a Dateline NBC show about Bullying:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Seems to me as if we have a reciprocal learning opportunity!

OpenAttribute - Not at PicassaWeb

2011-03-02T13:28:00.009-05:00

From SCSpaeth PicasaWeb

ITeam has been exploring ways to help ourselves, peers, teachers and others to understand issues of digital citizenship associated with Creative Commons and related licences and attribution. We have looked at site-specific tools at Wikimedia Commons and found them to work inconsistently. Flickr has a similar tool. Unfortunately, site-specific tools, add a burden for learning how to use multiple tools.

So, I was excited to learn recently that Mozillians have taken on the challenge of attribution and begun a Drumbeat project, OpenAttribute to improve attribution. The OpenAttribute Project is creating Firefox and Chrome extensions that intend to simplify and unify attribution. This approach might make it easier for ITeam members to encourage and support best practices for this aspect of digital citizenship.

Molly Kleinman writes about the development of the idea in her post Announcing Open Attribute:

Workshops and how-to guides and step by step flowcharts haven’t reduced the confusion, so we thought, “What if we can just create attributions automatically? Like the citation generators in academic databases? Click a button and you can have a properly formatted citation in MLA style, APA style, Chicago style. Technically, there is no reason why we couldn’t do a similar thing for attribution.”

So, I installed both the Firefox and Chrome OpenAttribute extensions and tested in a couple likely sites. I got mixed results from this software that is still under development. As I worked, I thought about Ari's post on the Sketchpad.cc blog about using screencasts to help developers improve their software. He cites Dennis Daniel's substantial effort to give YouTube feedback to the Sketchpad.cc project. Dave Humphrey at Seneca College in Toronto encourages his students to make real contributions to real projects. Could this be our contribution to Open Educational Resources?

It works for this Seamless Services? blog but the generated html can't be put in comments.

Seamless Services?
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
/ CC BY-SA 3.0

The comments tool rejects too much of the html.

Sensors and graphing to support STEM learning

2011-02-28T12:36:00.003-05:00

Jan Mokros at the Maine Math and Science Alliance advocates use of charting real-time sensor data to help students develop understanding of charts as symbolic representations of physical phenomena. Unfortunately, at Mt. Ararat Middle School, our sets of probes and sensors are aging and replacements are expensive. So, I have been exploring alternatives that ITeam members could help to implement and in so doing learn and share their learning.

From bottom clockwise: Physical data board, the flex sensor, board application, laptop application and visual display.

Demonstration of visualizing physical computing. A bending sensitive sensor (Piezo) connects to an Arduino Uno input pin. The Arduino Sketch outputs the measured values of bending. The Processing Sketch reads the stream of inputs and changes the location of the dots. The visualization is one that came with the sample code. Its meaning is in demonstrating capacity of these tools for interesting work. I wonder whether the Scratch or html5 crews are up to creating more meaningful charts of displacement v. time.

Credits (Shared via Creative Commons or Public Domain Licences):
http://webzone.k3.mah.se/projects/ard...
http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Knock
http://www.processing.org/

Arduino Merit Badges

2011-02-27T18:34:00.004-05:00

Todbot gave a class in using piezo elements to create drumset midi interfaces. He awarded students a merit badge:

Each student in my Spooky Arduino class was awarded one of these badges by Mark from Machine Project.

I wonder whether Emily or other ITeam members might be interested in work along these lines. Element 14 produced this similar project on the Make Project Site. It includes processing sketches to augment the interface.

Modk.it/editor/preview challenges- Chrome developer tools

2011-02-27T10:09:00.005-05:00

I looked a little further into the problem of getting Modkit to program the Arduino. I used Google Chrome's Developer tools to look at the kinds of errors that might be causing the "error programming/compiling" messages. It seems as if several are XMLHttpRequests that cannot load. The Modkit/editor seems to be trying to get information from a local host server (127.0.0.1:3000). A localhost server is one that runs on the device on which the browser is running.

XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://127.0.0.1:3000/send. Origin http://www.modk.it is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.

sendFailed to load resource

receive:-1Resource interpreted as script but transferred with MIME type application/json.

XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://127.0.0.1:3000/send. Origin http://www.modk.it is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.

sendFailed to load resource

receive:-1Resource interpreted as script but transferred with MIME type application/json.

getStateNamesFailed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found)

XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://127.0.0.1:3000/registerEvent. Origin http://www.modk.it is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.

registerEventFailed to load resource

For security and control, Apple and MLTI limit the use of MLTI machines as servers. I don't find anything in Modkit's rudimentary documentation (they say it is still under development) about requiring that the Modkit/editor has an active web-server. So, I guess we have to wait for updates and or more documentation at Modkit.

Neither Safari Webkit nor Firefox were any more successful in resolving the issue.

Update 2011-3-15: The latest releases seem to have resolved several of these challenges. I am able to read an analog input (potentiometer) and make the LEDs change in response to the changing input. I'm looking forward to being able to save and load code. These changes come from both improvements in the tools and improvements in my understanding of how to use them. Look for my contributions to the community of learners on the Modkit blog.

Arduino-I/O-Remix

2011-02-25T22:08:00.009-05:00

The Html5-based Modkit editor for Arduino, excited me because it seems like another gradual step for middle and high school students to learn important science, technology, math, arts and engineering. So far, we have elementary students starting Gamestar Mechanic and continuing with Scratch, or Alice; Modkit or AppInventor; and iOS SDK. They should be ready to start work on Java in high school with much better preparation.

I got an Arduino Uno (~$30 fully assembled and tested) to help evaluate the system over vacation. The Modkit team recently released a public beta associated with the publication of the latest version of Make Magazine. A comment from the Modkit team about the release of the public beta indicates that it should be possible to program other pins, too. But when I try to program it, I only get a "Programming device" followed by "error compiling" messages. Arduino literature says I should choose /dev/tty.usbmodemXXX but I see /dev/cu.usbmodem621. Could that be the problem?

So, I decided to wade into using Arduino programming tools directly. That seemed to me to be a less than optimal solution for students but it would allow me to troubleshoot the failure transfer and run simple programs. I hesitated because I don't have time to learn another language. But I discovered that Arduino developers have created an environment that reminds me of the early days of learning how to code html pages: examine and copy source, modify to get the desired result, and share. When I open the Arduino monitor, it says that it is using /dev/tty.usbmodem621. Could that be the reason it works for Arduino and not for Modkit?

In any event, I suspect that the MAMS ITeam html5 group can easily work at this level. Then when we figure out how to use the Modkit, then the more experienced users can help the new users to get started.

/*
  Analog Input
 Demonstrates analog input by reading an analog sensor on analog pin 0 and
 turning on and off a light emitting diode(LED)  connected to digital pin 13. 
 The amount of time the LED will be on and off depends on
 the value obtained by analogRead(). 
 
 The circuit:
 * Potentiometer attached to analog input 0
 * center pin of the potentiometer to the analog pin
 * one side pin (either one) to ground
 * the other side pin to +5V
 * LED anode (long leg) attached to digital output 11
 * LED cathode (short leg) attached to 110 ohm resistor to ground
 
 * Note: I use the Uno Arduino's built-in LED attached 
 to pin 13 on the board, as the second LED.
 
 
 Created by David Cuartielles
 Modified 4 Sep 2010
 By Tom Igoe
 Modified 28 Feb 2011
 By SC Spaeth
 
 This example code is in the public domain.
 
 Original: http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/AnalogInput
 Remixed: http://scspaeth.blogspot.com/2011/02/arduino-io-remix.html
 
 */

int sensorPin = A0;    // select the input pin for the potentiometer
int ledPin13 = 13;      // select the pin for the LED
int ledPin11 = 11;
int sensorValue = 0;  // variable to store the value coming from the sensor

void setup() {
// declare the ledPin as an OUTPUT:
pinMode(ledPin13, OUTPUT);
pinMode(ledPin11, OUTPUT);
// open the serial port at 9600 bps:
Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop() {
// read the value from the sensor:
sensorValue = analogRead(sensorPin);
// print the value from the sensor:
Serial.println(sensorValue);
// turn the ledPin on
digitalWrite(ledPin13, HIGH);
digitalWrite(ledPin11, LOW);
// stop the program for <sensorValue> milliseconds:
delay(sensorValue);     
// turn the ledPin off:        
digitalWrite(ledPin13, LOW);
digitalWrite(ledPin11, HIGH);
// stop the program for for <analogInMax - sensorValue> milliseconds:
delay(1023 - sensorValue);             
}

Now I see a small flaw in this system where the html transfer converts the 'less than' and 'greater than' brackets of the html into ampersands and code in the last few lines. It does however show up in the rendered blog page as written in on the Arduino resource page. That can be fixed with an adjustment to documentation style. Not bad for a few hours of tinkering!

Robotics at MTA and MAMS

2011-02-24T14:43:00.001-05:00

Dr. King announced new course offerings in a post on his blog that included an elective on Robotics. This slightly more detailed description from the Program of Studies document provides details about the tools they plan to use. I'd also like to know who is developing the course and planning to teach it.

ROBOTICS
Prerequisite: Science I
½ Credit;
Recommended level: 10-12
Robotics is the science and technology of the design, manufacture and application of robots in various applications, including space exploration, surgery and everyday living. In this course, students take on the roles of mechanical engineers, computer scientists and electrical engineers. Students research dynamics, kinematics and sensors. Subjects such as motion planning and obstacle avoidance, and velocity and acceleration are covered. Students put the knowledge into practice through lab settings where robots are created with teams. Students will have the opportunity to use VEXX robotics and/or Lego Mindstorm. COURSE #1490

I hope this will get students started in projects that will turn into exciting Capstone Projects. I know some middle school students who are ready to start pre-capstone work.

James Smallwood, a Mt. Ararat alum who owns a small IT business hints at the opportunities for our students:

I grew up in Topsham, Maine and attended Mt.Ararat for a few years and if I had a learning tool such as a robot while I was being taught computers basics in 7th grade, there's no doubt in my mind that learning would've been a lot less complicated and much more interesting.

Another ITeam logo?

2011-02-24T11:45:00.005-05:00

Coby spontaneously created a logo for ITeam and then updated it with a revised version. I have been exploring the possibility of helping students to create a participatory logo. AdaFruit's MiniPOV kits seem like an exciting possibility.

Zach Rattner, an undergraduate student at Virginia Tech got aMiniPOV device. He had some time on his hands and some expertise in Javascript, CSS and Html so he created a web-based program that helps people write the code to display messages and images on the MiniPOV devices.

I used his tool to create a draft of another logo for MAMS ITeam. I didn't have enough room for MAMS-ITeam so I used the next best option (ITeam [MSAD]75) that fit within Ratter's scheme. I suspect that ITeam members could find ways to improve the logo. In doing so, they would learn more about digital representation and images, e. g., in the grey area below the controls, you can see the binary codes that his program generated. He opens the code to inspection so it might be possible for ITeam students to modify the Javascript code and get something that works even better for us. The wonders of an open-culture!

Share the road

2011-02-23T14:34:00.006-05:00

During winter break, I have been exploring resources to support customization of learning. I found excellent tutorial resources at AdaFruit for a variety of low-cost projects. On one of their tutorial pages for their SpokePOV devices, they included links to documentary photos that people had shared. This one intersects with one of my other interests:

Photo license: Sparr0 - Attribution, Share Alike

This project depends on interesting biological and mathematical concepts. Does work on projects like this transfer to better understanding of important learning outcomes? Could we use bikes as mobile billboards to generate support for the Topsham-Brunswick Trails Project and other regional trail projects: Merrymeeting Trail?

Making stuff smarter- Invisibility cloaks

2011-02-18T13:48:00.004-05:00

When this show aired on our local station, I wanted students to see parts of it to compare with our work on MAMS ITeam. I hope that it will show the connection between our activities in ITeam and activities in places outside of school.

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

Here, I am testing to see whether it is possible to deep link into the content of strongest connection so that it will draw them in to watch more. Yes, the embed code contains an easily identifiable parameter 'chapter=n' that can be changed (in two places) in order to start the video at the beginning of a section. This strategy is not as precise as deep linking to time-code values but it embeds easily and provides context for what the viewer will see. This illustrates another service that the ITeam Html crew can learn and share.

Developing a culture for Capstone

2011-02-18T12:54:00.005-05:00

In our meeting this morning, the Capstone crew reflected on the Capstone Celebration meeting. They appreciated Mr. Ottow's presentation the most because he spoke directly to them. I asked them if they were willing to have me post the clips of their presentations on the Capstone Facebook site. They accepted. I also told them about the response from the School Board that I described in this post and sharing with MAMS ITeam members.

They generally reacted negatively to the idea that principles of Capstone should be extended earlier in high school and to the middle school and beyond. Zach said that while it is great to have more choice in the selection of projects, it still is yet another thing to do and a source of stress for students. Others nodded in agreement. We discussed the issue of whether Capstone will substitute for other graduation requirements. They seem to be waiting for an authoritative answer to this issue rather than seeing the opportunity they have to help influence design.

I told them explicitly that I am writing about our process as part of my contribution to the development of Capstone. I think they were surprised to hear me reflect on their contributions to the discussion. Dan backed off a little on his position regarding time logs. He explained how he had used them extensively in learning to play piano but now doesn't need logging. Allie reiterated her position on design for each student. Since this is consistent with mass customization of learning, it seems like we should try to find a solution to this challenge.

Simulations and Games for STEM

2011-02-18T10:03:00.007-05:00

The National Academy Press recently released this review of and plan for research on the use of simulations and games for enhancing the learning of science, technology, engineering and math.

I tried to use the NetLogo simulation of Ants (http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/Ants ) to help MAMS ITeam members understand our need for more structure and feedback on their work. We had some challenges in getting the right version of NetLogo (the MLTI image contains regular, hubnet, and 3-D versions that students found). The tool did not engage them in the way that I had hoped despite my effort to connect it with an authentic challenge we face together. But maybe it is my challenge rather than one they perceive to be their challenge, too.

Discussing the Plan & Prospects for Capstone

2011-02-16T15:20:00.012-05:00

The Capstone Committee met all Fall with the goal of presenting first to the MTA faculty and then to the M.S.A.D. No. 75 School board. Members of the Committee, including student and parent representatives, presented the plan for Board consideration. Members of the Board took the opportunity to give preliminary feedback about the plan. One board member wanted to make sure that students who might not be ready to speak to large audiences would find some accommodation.

Claudette Brassil pointed out that students' access to individual laptops has made it possible for student to find alternatives to rhetorical skill. She says that students can prepare presentations, or videos or other ways to give evidence of their learning.

Board member Kim Totten cautioned against too much reliance on technology as a crutch. She cited the parallels between Capstone Projects and Eagle Scout Projects. She noted that the scouting program helps students to prepare for the presentations of Eagle Projects over an extended period of time, "they are earning all their merit badges to build toward doing their final projects." Several of the merit badges a scout completes (including communication) prepare scout candidates for the presentation. She favors a good measure of face-to-face presentation skills.

Scott McKernan observed,

"That it is really encouraging to see how all the various components and philosophies behind the Capstone Project really mirror all of the 21st Century Learning Skills ... that we, from day-one, were trying to incorporate as part of the Comprehensive Strategic Planning Committee. It is really encouraging to see that and I am really eager to see how these Capstone Projects turn out especially as they roll out to an entire class. ... It will be really encouraging in five to ten years down the pike to see some applications of those concepts rolling down into the middle school and possibly further. With the proving ground being this program."

Craig King elaborated by saying how difficult it is to lift such a project the first year but that eventually it can become a part of the culture of the school. Kids anticipate homecoming and proms, they anticipate AP exams. He hopes they will learn to anticipate Capstone Projects.

Dr. King elaborated further on the theme by pointing out that the design includes having students see presentations of older students so that a culture of anticipation develops. I have advocated an even stronger form of building awareness and anticipation. Scouts developing their Eagle projects actively recruit younger scouts to help with the implementation. Younger scouts develop insights into what it takes to create a successful capstone for their scouting experiences than they would just by listening to presentations. We can learn more from the scout model.

I hope we don't have to wait five to ten years to develop that kind of culture of anticipation. Part of my design for the work of ITeam at the middle school is to establish that culture of anticipation now. We have students who have already started work on their precapstone projects!

-------------

I recorded parts of this discussion and used the recording to reconstruct the record here. I tried to upload it as part of the evidence for this post but the Blogger software only gave a spinning wheel of perpetual processing. It may not accept the .amr file type that audio recording app in my phone produces.

Feedback on Draft Capstone Proposal Template

2011-02-15T11:30:00.003-05:00

I created a document, MTA Capstone Proposal, to copy and share with individual students for them to have a framework for proposal preparation. Shared the request for feedback via email message to the Capstone Pilot Facebook Group and directly to other students who choose not to use Facebook accounts. Dan said that it looked okay to him but asked when they are 'due' and turned to the group for their opinions. Others nodded and no one objected to the goal of producing a draft immediately after returning from winter break.

We used the remaining time to meet with students individually for updates on their progress. Several students (Nick, Michelle, Haley) are a little frustrated by the lack of responses to their email queries and form submissions to potential mentors or volunteer coordinators. Michelle wants to help resolve this challenge by studying local volunteer opportunities. I told her about starting that process with the Topsham Library last week and that an expansion of that effort would be a great service to peers and the community.

When I copied the Proposal 'template,' I seem to have lost Sinjin's Capstone Logo. It seems as if it should copy over to the individual copies but I'll need to confirm that in subsequent distributions.

Reactions to Time Logs

2011-02-14T23:01:00.002-05:00

The Capstone Committee has requested that students keep both a time log and a reflective journal of Capstone process. When I told students about it today, some were outraged. One thought that it made more sense to do rather than keep tedious records of time. Alex said that he understood the motivation to have some kind of record of activity but that differences among projects mean that no one solution would work for everyone. Allie reminded us that the whole point of this is for students to take responsibility.

Can we use a default plan, keep either a time log or a reflective journal or some combination of the two? If participants think that does not work for them, then they are responsible for describing and developing a solution that meets their needs and advisors.

Inspect Sidewiki

2011-02-14T08:07:00.001-05:00

Nils started to develop this course course for P2PU in the School of Web Development. He opened the challenge of creating an assessment extension to a nascent community of practice. He describes collaborating by difference.
He refers to a mockup of the assessment tool using Google's Sidewiki. I learned that the code for Google's extentions to Chrome are open for inpection so that it might be easier to morph Sidewiki into an assessment engine than it would be to create one in Firefox.

in reference to:

"We've expanded the idea to "Peer Review the Web" a means for learners to solicit feedback on any webpage. We made a couple mockups for a competition (one uses Google Sidewiki), and are offering this course to co-learn about creating extensions and in particular our application."
- Creating a Firefox Extension | p2pu (view on Google Sidewiki)

Jameson Presents His Perspective on Capstone to MTA Faculty

2011-02-12T17:00:00.000-05:00

Jameson Bryant and Brooke Smith, juniors at Mt. Ararat High School, have served on the MTA Capstone Committee and provided students' perspective on the design and development of the Capstone Project. Jameson helped present the plan to the MTA faculty during part of a Professional Development day at the end of January. Brooke helped present the plan to the School Board at one of its regular, televised meetings.

In this clip, Jameson describes and reflects on his service on the committee. I hope this is a sign of the culture we develop!

Capstone Pilot: getting the idea of design with students

2011-02-09T14:09:00.004-05:00

If we really want students to take ownership of some portion of their learning, then it is essential that we encourage them to take part in the design of that experience. I'm hoping that the Pilot can include a significant amount of design-with rather than just design-for the participants.

Some of the students in our meeting this morning recognized that this is a real opportunity for them. For example, Dan recognized that if the Capstone Committee's documents are still a draft, then the members of the Pilot Project still have an opportunity to influence the design. He wanted to make sure that decisions of the Committee don't get formalized in ways that limit the kinds of project students can choose.

Student also reiterated their desire to be able to use the AST portion of the block schedule for its intended purpose. They have worked out systems to get the assistance that they want and need and don't have good alternatives other than the scheduled Advisory time. I met with Craig, Josh, and Claudette and we agreed to reassign students for both AST and Advisory. So, the Capstone Pilot will not face-off against academic support. Phew!

Capstone Pilot Documentation Dev.

2011-02-09T13:11:00.004-05:00

The Capstone Pilot seeks to help develop and share Mt. Ararat High School's approach to capstone projects. Future students will be able to create better capstones if they can see some examples of strong capstone projects. The more we can document both the process and the final presentations, the better will will understand what we need to support all students to be able to learn from their capstone projects.

For example, you gave mini presentations for the video clips. Some describe closely what you plan to do while others indicate that you are still developing your ideas. We appreciate your willingness share developing ideas because that is part of the process. Your work is an important part of developing our understanding of MTA's Capstone!

The Capstone Committee has developed some resources to support Capstone projects and shared those at: http://mtacapstone11.pbworks.com/ . The document is a draft that will improve with your testing and suggestions for improvement. We also need places to develop and share our perspectives. Where would work best for you?

The link to the MTA Capstone 11 site listed above gives this summary of our next steps.

II. Guidelines

A. Each participant will draft a written proposal that addresses the following:

Area of interest
Extent and description of work
Potential community partner(s)
Specific timeline
Goals ( connected to the four standards of the mission statement)

What progress are you making on this part of the Pilot?

The linked document also specifies that we use a shared spreadsheet in order to explore how to manage record keeping:

Time Log of Work:

I. Entered via a Google Spreadsheet which is shared to the school facilitator. This would help school facilitators to easily organize and manage the large amount of information.

This link to a Google form is one approach to collecting these logs. Alternatively each student can get a copy and manage an individual list.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dHAza1lhM1RpaTkycm80cDFveWtvb3c6MA#gid=0

------------
Public version for students who choose not to use social media and others who may be interested in our development process.

ITeam Project Support

2011-02-08T09:19:00.005-05:00

Last spring, ITeam built a green screen to support projects. From that modest start, students and teachers across our district have started to use green screen technologies.

Ari Bader-Natal blogged about Education 2.0 being on the Radar. From there, I found Dale Dougherty's blog and links to Make Magazine. We often borrow tripods and make do. Could ITeam members make projects like this, too?

Mobile Document Camera Stand

Jacob and Ian created windblades that were a similar level of complexity for the Maine Windblade Challenge. So, I suspect we need to find the right matches of projects and access to resources. We have a similar challenge in finding ways to support the matching for Capstone Projects. In fact, Make Magazine, or other venues like it, could be both sources of projects and places to authentically share innovate Capstone Projects.

Progress building capacity - Capstone

2011-02-07T14:34:00.004-05:00

Met with both Capstone Pilot students and with MAMS ITeam today and got encouraging signs of students developing their understanding and capacity to undertake more challenging work:

Capstone:

Sara inspired us with her descriptions of Capstone work she already has underway.
Several students have already sent out inquiry email messages and have been waiting patiently for responses that have not yet come. They are ready to pick up the phone to see whether they can get better responses that way.
Dan said that his jazz ensemble had just produced a performance CD. They are now looking for more gigs. Noted the challenge of getting members out of school for Capstone performances. We briefly discussed video and other ways to share the performance part.
Haley described what she wants to do and Sara was able to help her with knowledge and experience that she has developed from her parallel work at Maine Region Ten. Sara offered to introduce Haley to her teacher at Maine Region Ten. We paused to reflect how this is a very important example of how we can scale this operation: share knowledge and share process so that others can appreciate it and extend.
Nick described his plan to find and execute off-season conditioning but then went on to say that he planned to integrate his work in the WebTeam class with his Capstone Project. He (and others?) will build a web site to share appropriate parts of his conditioning portfolio.
Luke tried to contact the Marine Resources Officer in order to get expert assistance with learning about and working on the invasive species challenges.
...

We are using a Facebook group MTA Capstone Pilot to support some of our work on the Pilot. We chose Facebook because students already use it and check it more frequently than other ways of communicating. Since Facebook limits access, we will need to make a special effort to share with broader communities.

TinEye- Image search for exploring attribution?

2011-02-01T11:59:00.006-05:00

I wrote about using Google Goggles to find the source of the image that we used for Capstone visuals. ITeam members were impressed when I showed them how my phone could find the image. But they typically don't have smartphones that are capable of running Goggles.

In reviewing Nevit's contributions to WikiMedia Commons, I learned about TinEye.com, a browser-based reverse search engine. I want ITeam members to get some experience with powerful applications of technologies that will help with a problem they face in school. So, I tested TinEye on the same photos that Goggles found. When TinEye could not find the modified image (arrow added to point to the keystone), I cropped back to the largest part of the unmodified image.

An Awesome screenshot annotated to show the contrast with Goggles results.

Contrast it with the original:

By Shizhao (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons

If TinEye can survive the competition with Google Goggles, then I suspect it will be able to locate photos like this. While we wait for the dust to settle, TinEye provides some Cool Searches that illustrate the power of artificial intelligence for current and future challenges.

Professional Development from Scratch

2011-01-31T16:32:00.003-05:00

Maggie Wachtl, a chemistry teacher at MTA, wanted to learn whether she could use Scratch to create manipulatives to enhance learning about Dimensional Analysis. Her students needs to understand for stoichiometry calculations. She has laminated cards to create a manipulative that she'd like to implement in Scratch. In two hours, we moved from an introduction to Scratch to code snippets that get sprites to show a proof-of-concept: inversion of fractions to make reciprocals, sensitivity to the color on which the sprite is drops. She seemed pleased with the start and progress.

I introduced and reinforced the concept that we could get students to share our desire to have them experience differentiated learning. At several points, I said honestly that middle school students could answer some of her questions better than I could. I hope we can quickly move to get both teachers and students to recognize the opportunities in developing projects that the probability spinner that Matt Lunt requested and that Coby, Cole and Charlie are developing.

Working Outside the Bubble

2011-01-31T16:01:00.003-05:00

We don't have enough time during CET and after school to share as much as some students can. I needed to meet with the volunteer coordinator at the Topsham Library about preparing for Capstone opportunities. I took that opportunity to meet with Coby. We reviewed:

Attribution challenges and the underlying cause.
iMacro as an approach for us to implement for ourselves.
AppInventor with the emulator to see whether we can generate interest.
David Shenk's approach to developing expertise.

Coby gets the concept of ITeam and is ready to develop more cases.

Full After School ITeam

2011-01-28T15:31:00.003-05:00

A nearly full complement of 7th and 8th grade students participated in ITeam yesterday. For the most part, they attended well to experienced ITeam members sharing their projects. We spent most of our time sharing the projects that exemplify the directions in which we are encouraging ITeam to move this year: Green Screen, Creating the Scratch Spinner App, Alice, presentations to MLTI conference, ... .

New students spoke up when they had questions or when we asked for opinions. They were quiet when we sought suggestions for feedback and improvement. I gave brief meta feedback to students who shared. Cole, Coby and Charlie talked about their project, then worked on it while Drew, and Ariel shared Alice. By the end of our time, they shared progress on the spinner project. Clearly, we have got to find ways to build on students' interests in order to capture and sustain engagement.

Today Jen, Ariel, Laurel, Drew, Coby, and Evan thought that we should continue to encourage feedback as the best way for us to improve. Evan came a little later than others because he had difficulty locating his device. When he arrived, we met individually and he told me about his experiences programming robots. He might be part of a core-group on robotics.

Nova: Making things Smaller

2011-01-27T08:21:00.005-05:00

The PBS show Nova has created a new series of four hour-long introductions to exciting new developments in material sciences. David Pogue hosts the show in his quirky and engaging way. On January 26, they aired the Making Things Smaller segment. They introduce nano robots that will help doctors to treat patients. The segments support the work that we have started with ITeam on using smart phones and AppInventor to control Lego NXT robots. Initially, they provide video to the 'trailer.' But eventually they will provide the entire segment.

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

They also provide activity resources that we should explore. While we are waiting for the full video, we can use a selection they provide as resources for education.

Japanese Knotweed (Bamboo) on Harpswell Neck Road

2011-01-25T09:35:00.006-05:00

Luke is interested in human impact on local environments. We needed a context shot for the Capstone Pilot video clips. The invasion of Japanese Knotweed (Bamboo) on school grounds and here, along Harpswell Neck Road illustrates an important human impact on our local environments.

View Vital Signs Japanese Knotweed in a larger map

Can Capstone Projects help to educate people and manage invasive species?

Capstone Images and Visual Search

2011-01-18T10:44:00.007-05:00

As I worked on developing resources to support the Capstone Project Pilot, I saw periodic updates that Doug Ware and Dawn Prindall were also contributing. This morning, I learned that Dawn also searched for an image of capstones that she could use in a presentation for the Capstone Feedback Project (a set of four study circles). She found an image she liked and included it in a Keynote presentation that she shared on the PBWorks site.

I couldn't find any attribution on the image so I used Google Goggles to see if it could find the source. Goggles found the original image on the first try and I was gratified to see that she used a CC Licensed image from Wikimedia.

By Shizhao (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons

I like her image more than the ones I found which are associated with burial mounds. Perhaps I focused too much on the search term "capstone" rather than "arched stone bridges". But it also may be that she has identified a "keystone" rather than a "capstone".

When I added the Shizhao's image here, I learned that Wikimedia has also improved its support for appropriate citation of licensed materials (place the cursor over the image to reveal complete citation information in the title that displays over the image). These are tools that ITeam members can master and share with teachers as part of our efforts to support digital citizenship.

Capstone Planning and Video Clips

2011-01-17T16:43:00.002-05:00

We are working to establish better means of communication and collaboration to support students in their work on their Capstone Pilot Projects. But the deadline for presentations to the faculty and School Board are pressing. So, I resorted to any means available: email, Facebook message, and face-to-face explanations of this challenge.

Thank you for your willingness to help develop the concept of Capstone Projects at Mt. Ararat. The MTA Capstone Committee has made progress specifying characteristics of the Capstone Project and Pilot ( http://MTACapstone11.pbworks.com ). We hope the Capstone Study Circles that some of you have also chosen to join will help to explain and help to refine those ideas. Clearly we still have more work. I suspect that you have many questions. Please come to MTA 107 during AST if you want to discuss the process and your plans.

The Committee is preparing to present a summary of their work to the MTA Faculty during the professional development day at the end of January. The Committee wants to convince the faculty that Capstone Projects will be valuable learning experiences. Then they will present to the School Board. They very much want to have brief video clips (literally 10 seconds) from each of the participants in the Pilot about their project plans. Since several of you are going out into the community to do your projects, we'd like to include an image from your work (if you have or can take one) as part of the clip. We will film in MTA 107 during AST blocks for those who are able and by special arrangement for those who have other commitments.

Please consider what you might say in 10 seconds about yourself and your plan for a Capstone Project. Sara has already started hers so I can guess what she might say:

"Hi, I'm Sara. I am in the health careers program at the Region Ten Tech Center. For my Capstone Project, I'm job shadowing a radiologist at Parkview Hospital to learn whether I'd like to specialize in that field." [Cut to an onsite picture of controls for a CAT scanner at Parkview.]

Credit to Liz West with a Creative Commons License.

If you don't know what to say, then come to 107 and we can figure it out together. I work both at the high school AND the middle school so send a reply so that I'll be sure to be there to meet with you.

Stephen Spaeth
Student Projects Coordinator

Clearly, we need to improve this facet of the operation if we are going to develop a sustainable program.

Capstone Images

2011-01-17T12:23:00.003-05:00

The new Google Science Fair illustrates the use of site templates for students projects. The MTA Capstone Pilot could use a similar approach. So I searched for some Creative Commons licensed images to include in a template. I like this one because it shows many capstones mutually supporting one another.

Credit to Paul Walker at Flickr
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

Karen Cator: Professional Development Needs

2011-01-13T10:31:00.007-05:00

Karen Cator spoke at Education Week's Leadership Forum "Unleashing Technology to Personalize Learning," held October 5, 2010, in Washington, for district-level personnel charged with maximizing the effectiveness of technology in education.

As part of her presentation she described new strategies for professional development. She said (starting at 1:22),

Every profession today needs to be a learning profession.
...
We need to get more thoughtful about the kinds of professional development that we provide. One kind ... that we need to provide is professional development in how to create a new generation of assignments. What are the most compelling, interesting and engaging assignments, where the students can leverage the technology to do those assignments and get that work done? And, it doesn't mean the teacher has to be an expert on what to point and click on within the context of the technology but that they are really expert on how to create engaging and compelling assignments for students.

View the entire video at this link.

How do we leverage the work of teachers innovating and ITeam members who are ready and willing to help prototype assignments?

Green Screen Collaboration and Elaboration

2011-01-10T13:34:00.003-05:00

Frau Adams teaches German at both Mt. Ararat Middle School and High School. Several weeks ago, she encouraged middle school students to create a variety of multimedia submissions. ITeam members who had worked with the green screen chose to use it for their assignment. Ms. Myers, Chair of the Foreign Languages Department at the High School, learned from Frau Adams about the green screen project her students had done. She thought that it would be a useful approach for one of her upcoming assignments: Picnics in January.

Ms. Myers started sending students down to check out the video production studio. On Friday, Emma and Molly asked two interesting questions:

First, if we wear green, can we make parts of us disappear?

Yes, during our work on the middle school "Das Wetter Projekt," Alyssa wore a green shirt. We learned that we "saw" through her torso. The shirt didn't match the screen color exactly but was apparently close enough to cause parts of her to disappear. It may be tricky to get the lighting right for a convincing special effect but matching color may help. Here is the link to the product description at the fabric store that supplied the green screen fabric.

http://www.joann.com/joann/search/searchall.jsp?keyword=6658660
The color is "lime green."

Second, can we superimpose video on top of video or only on still images?

I didn't know the answer to that question so, we quickly prototyped the idea with a video clip of Molly and Emma and superimposed it on a clip of middle school ITeam members building their green screen. While the lighting (script, set design, ...) need work, it is clear that concept works. With repeated additions of green screen tracks, the program may have some challenges with audio tracks.

Emma and Molly discussed how they would work that into their project as they returned to class. I'm eager to see what they create!

Capturing NXT-AppInventor Work

2011-01-09T16:01:00.005-05:00

I've been programming my phone to collect data from sensor and control motors connected to the Lego NXT brick using AppInventor. I am motivated to invest this effort because my students find the Lego robotics connection motivating and engaging. The picture shows how I am able to capture browsing of the blog post about Ariel using the program to control a simple robot she created. I see them doing science, technology, engineering and math because they want to explore robot control.

This is a very powerful combination of prototyping and research tools. So far, I have focused on the development of tools rather than capturing high quality images of the interface. So, despite the low quality, I have simply used the iSight camera, a small digital camera or even an iPhone to snap photos of the display on my Android phone. The images show finger prints on the screen, and reflections and strange colors, ... But this weekend I generated some results that deserve better representation. So I re-searched for ways to capture screens of Android phones. Gary LaTraille at AbsolutelyAndroid surveyed several methods for capturing Android screens and recommended the Dalvik Debug Monitor (DDMS). It is included in the Android SDK but I had not taken the time to learn how to use it.

I put the Android SDK in the MyApps folder of my MLTI laptop and clicked on the DDMS application in the "Tools" folder. The DDMS does much, much more than screen capture but I can block out most of those distractions. I wonder whether the complexities might overwhelm some middle school students.

Segway NXTway-Gyro self-balancing NXT robot with remote PSP joystick con...

2010-12-28T15:02:00.002-05:00

This clip shows the possibilities of NXT WOW. I spent several hours trying to improve my understanding of PID Control. After quitting last night, however, I refocused on the human intelligence. What can we learn from kids who have developed these kinesthetic skills that will help us to help all students to achieve at high levels?

Mathematica Solution to the GyroBot Control

2010-12-25T07:50:00.003-05:00

A Google search (forces inverted pedulum angular rate) produced this online view into a Mathematica Notebook addressing the challenge of robot control.

Note the much greater complexity than the solution that Barello describes in his version of the GyroBot. Perhaps we can derive insight from this demonstration to see how to implement an easier solution. Also note that Mathematica even provides a free viewer tool that allows an intermediate level of access to the model.

----------------
Mathematica model contributed by: Stephen Wilkerson (Towson University) and Nathan Slegers (University of Alabama, Huntsville) with contributions by Franz Brandhuber

Ariel, Laurel and Alyssa share in Frau Adams' class

2010-12-22T09:39:00.005-05:00

Frau Adams invited students in her 8th grade German class to submit weather projects in multimedia formats of students' personal preferences. Ariel and Laurel chose to extend their work with the green screen in ITeam for this assignment. Here, they set up to share their production with their class. I wanted to submit a brief video clip of their presentation to the class but Blogger would not accept the video file submitted this way as described here and here.

This image comes from the camera album in the gallery.
This method does not require the end termination. I also needed to add tags manually.

ReTest post to blogger with attached image

2010-12-22T09:17:00.003-05:00

This post ideally should contain a title. This text with appropriate formatting.

The AndroidLegoRemote video. It did not take the video.

Now trying a jpg image. And a tag escape.

And none of the signature stuff after an end command. The end command worked as described in help but my attempt to probe the system for undocumented functionality did not produce the desired result:
#tag test
I needed to add the labels to the post manually.

Sharing video of learning process

2010-12-21T11:13:00.005-05:00

Blogspot gives me a tool for adding video to this post. Will it work any better than the Video Upgrade at Wordpress.com?

I have been trying to locate one of my videos of this subject on my MLTI laptop and it is anything but straightforward. I can easily find and view the video I want but so far, I cannot get the file url into the upload tool.

By using the "Save for Web" item under the file menu of QuickTime, I was able to create and find the file for upload. While that convoluted process might have sufficed in the past, it doesn't encourage routine use. What can we do to facilitate easier use?

Capstone retreat and student participation

2010-12-13T12:02:00.005-05:00

The Mt. Ararat H.S. Capstone Committee has planned an all-day retreat off-campus in order to focus on the development of resources necessary for the implementation. Unfortunately, the two student members of the committee expressed reservations about taking that much time away from school because of the challenge of keeping up with demanding course-work. The situation illustrates the challenge that students face in having to choose between two conflicting demands: during junior-year, when students are trying their hardest to establish exemplary records, conventional school work almost always wins. It is extremely difficult to introduce a new culture when the existing one is so firmly established and reinforced.

I wonder if some of the seniors that are doing pre-pilot projects might be available. They face some similar challenges but might be willing to come for part of the day and recruit a collaborator who would bring valuable perspectives, too.

NXT, AppInventor and ?! [1st DRAFT]

2010-12-13T10:43:00.005-05:00

Interrobang invites students to participate in missions and share their work as deeds that are reviewed before publication on their website http://playinterrobang.com. Ariel and I are evaluating the environment by submitting a collaborative mission. Interrobang held our work in limbo for more than three days.

Sunday evening they returned access to our work with a request to revise before they will accept it. The reviewer suggested that we add some video to our contribution.
Deed Needs Revisions
The deed you submitted for the mission "Knowledge Swap" needs some more work before it can be approved. You can keep working on it and submit it again at any time.

Here's what you need to work on:
This is very cool and we want to accept the deed -- but I think it can be much more illuminating to the community if you also upload a little video of what you're doing. Is that possible? We'll give you more points if you do so. Thanks!

So, I am saving it here as part of our development process and evaluation.

-----------------------------
"Ariel M. and I worked together combining her knowledge of NXT and mine of AppInventor"

I am developing experience with AppInventor and track the new features as they are released. When I saw that Liz Looney was developing AppInventor support for NXT robotics, I anticipated that this would be highly engaging for ITeam members.

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/learn/reference/components/legomindstorms.html

Ariel uses NXT robotics outside of school. She showed me how to use the NXT module and test a variety of sensors. For example, she used the ultrasonic distance sensor to determine its range (~1 to 90 inches). We connected it to math by measuring the maximum distance and comparing it with the distance we measured (as 7.5 x 12" tiles on the floor outside he library).

We could make an even more engaged connection with STEM by conducting a more complete comparison of observed (sensor) with measured (tape measure) distances and plotting those for analysis and interpretation. Once ITeam members are sufficiently familiar with the tools, we may be able to help MAMS sixth-grade teachers and Ms. Hogan, the technology integrator, incorporate ideas into the force and motion unit that they are developing.

We were able to connect the phone to the NXT Bluetooth and control both the tone generation and a test motor! Ariel was sufficiently excited that she started building the robot described in the NXT instructions booklet.

12/10/10- Today we worked on adding another motor to the robot. We also took some pictures of what we were doing. Hopefully by next week we will have the motors put together and many more pictures.

InterroBang ?! - A network for student-centered learning?

2010-12-10T08:05:00.008-05:00

We need infrastructure to support project- and challenge-based learning that we are doing in both MAMS ITeam and MTA Capstone. We have been exploring and doing action research using AppInventor to control NXT robotics as they roll out new features. We want to share our work with others who might be interested in it.

I learned about ?! (InterroBang: http://playinterrobang.com/) through a message that Jim Matthews posted on the ARISgames group (http://groups.google.com/group/arisgames). I investigated, created an account, selected a mission, created an entry based on current work, invited Ariel, one of our experienced ITeam members, to contribute and help evaluate the system. After we submitted our entry to the system, I wrote the following reflection on the wall of of my user page at InterroBang.

Stephen Spaeth [Note that this link will not take most users to the right page because you need to have an account to get access to this page.] Ariel joined our team and contributed to documenting the deed. She took the picture, wrote the caption, and added text to describe the continuing work we did today. She decided that we were ready to submit the mission and hit the button. Apparently, it takes the deed out of our hands and we no longer have access to the deed. I can understand the need to freeze it during the approval process but I'd still like to be able to see the preview. It is unnerving to loose control over our own creation.
about 18 hours ago

As more time elapses, it becomes clearer that providers of this service need to:

Make the time-frame for approval process clearer
Make it clear to users that they will loose access to their own creations
Add the option to cross-post entries to other venues (e. g. to this blog for me) or at least the option to make the entry publicly accessible

Ariel thought that we should encourage ITeam members to use this service. I'm pretty sure that we don't want to do that until we resolve some of the outstanding issues.

Update: AppInventor developers and beta users are cranking out useful resources almost every day. For example, Liz Looney shared ShinyLegoNxt, a new source file to demonstrate the new NXT resources.

Re-Building Capstone

2010-12-09T13:01:00.004-05:00

We are establishing a formal Capstone program at Mt. Ararat High School to give student alternative ways to show that they meet the mission of our school. As part of the process, we are running a Capstone Pilot with a subset of students. At yesterdays' committee meeting, Dr. King described Chandler M.'s plan to rebuild a motorcycle. After the meeting, I wrote to Dr. King:

Thank you for making time in your schedule to participate (even briefly) in the capstone meeting today. I thought that your part added much to the deliberations. Your story about rebuilding a motorcycle resonated with me because my brother's student initiated learning project consisted of 3 or 4 years dedicated to rebuilding two Model A Fords.

Students have wanted more engaging learning experiences for a long time. But only the most persistent and/or well-supported have been able to do substantial interest-based project and connect them with their school experiences. How can we make it possible for all students to get the benefit of doing the "hard fun" of something they want to learn?

Alex's Blog

2010-11-19T22:41:00.002-05:00

Alex came to visit and updated us on his work at Hoboken and the new opportunity to do work on transportation security in London. I told him about discussing Capstone Projects with Brad Smith. He gave us the address for his blog:

http://alexkbernier.blogspot.com/

Organizations selected for Google Code-in 2010

2010-11-06T17:37:00.005-04:00

Organizations selected for Google Code-in 2010

For several years, Google has supported the development of open source projects by sponsoring Summer of Code Programs and related competitions. They typically have recruited undergraduates to participate and compete for prizes. They programs are sufficiently successful that Google has developed infrastructure to support projects. They are now extending the program to include secondary school students (13 to 18 year-old). Since this is the age range of our students, I have studied the program in more detail.

Previously, I thought they were primarily interested narrowly in "code." The Code-In Program makes it clear that all aspects of open source development are supported including outreach and training. These elements are closer to the mission of MSAD 75 ITeams so I want to understand the opportunity even more.

One of the projects selected to participate in the Code-in Program is LimeSurvey. Since we use surveys extensively to support learning and management, I wonder whether we can find ITeam members or others who would be motivated to participate. Since they build mentoring into the process, these opportunities would make great Capstone Projects for students who are motivated: Announcing Accepted Organizations for Google Code-in.

2011 Windstorm Challenge

2010-10-22T13:25:00.004-04:00

Mt. Ararat students Jacob K. and Ian H. designed, built and submitted their entry to the 2010 Maine Wind Blade Challenge. Organizers recently announced the deadline for the 2011 Challenge and announced the opportunity to participate in a second challenge: The Windstorm Challenge (http://www.deepcwind.org/windstorm/index.php and http://www.facebook.com/pages/Orono-ME/Windstorm-Challenge/151153578227990)

Mt. Ararat students have expressed interest in creating an entry for the Windstorm Challenge:

These entries could provide outstanding examples of Capstone Projects. Can we find video teams who could create the a documentary of such a project as their Capstone Project?

Google charts and more

2010-10-10T12:28:00.007-04:00

I have started programming app inventor apps. Some members of the Google app inventor group provide new insights. Here is one: The Google Charts API provides the tools to produce a growing variety of charts and maps to visualize data and share the results in web-based images. The tools are sufficiently flexible to support the creation of QR Codes.

and to the tools:

Use a QR Code scanner to test these codes.

I hadn't fully appreciated until I worked with this tool that the 'data' can be many forms (urls, app store links, phone numbers, poetry, mathematical equations, ...) and now under control of anyone who has a Google account. This capacity solves on of the outstanding questions that I had about the development of some ARIS Quests.

Interested in Developing Apps?

2010-10-06T14:00:00.004-04:00

Are you interested in learning more about developing apps for mobile phones? I need some original images to incorporate in a demonstration app for App Inventor development. This image in Russian is not particularly helpful to most of us despite its Creative Commons License: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pitch_Roll_Yaw%28rus%29.png. Once the images are created (probably with SketchUp), I'd like to explore the possibility of using SketchUp to animate motion sensors. If people are interested in learning more about programming smartphone apps, then this will be an opportunity to do that, too.

Beginning a Learning Partnership

2010-09-21T14:14:00.004-04:00

We will have a meeting for middle school parents on Wednesday this week and I want to have a student help me explain some of the new directions we are taking. Jon is an eighth-grade student who enjoys science and wants to learn more. Ms. Theberge thought that he would be able to learn quickly and be confident enough to share on such short notice.

We met last Friday during Community Enrichment Time (CET) to make a plan. I had hoped that he would be able to bring his laptop home over the weekend so that he could learn to use the data logging and analysis software that MLTI installed on all computers. At that meeting, he told me that he could not do that because students cannot bring home computers until after the parent meeting. Foiled.

When I told Ms. Koch the story on Monday morning, she said, "We have a computer that we could loan to him for this purpose!" So, I quickly installed the required software and she delivered it to his math class. He returned this afternoon for another session to prepare for Wednesday evening. He seemed pleased to have had the opportunity to work on the project at home. He could not find the video tutorial so he figured it out on his own. He looked at the help menu but did not realize that further down the page they provided links to additional information. Despite these challenges, he was able to create the trace of a foosball bouncing on a hard floor.

We compared his experiment to the simple simulation that I created 7 months ago (click on the image to go to the Scratch site where you can interact with the project and download it to revise and improve it):

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/scspaeth/890658

Now that we have more insight from our research, I can see ways to correct some over-simplification in my simulation!

We reflected that he had been able to make considerable progress on the challenge. That he had exercise ingenuity to solve some problems. That he enjoyed the 'hard fun.' That there are opportunities to improve his initial attempt. That he should keep a copy of his first try so that we can look back on the experience to see the progress that he/we are making. He has a soccer game this afternoon so he won't have as much time to repeat the experiment but will try.

I wonder if he will think about bouncing soccer balls in new ways as a result of this work?

Progress as a Mechanic

2010-09-08T21:21:00.004-04:00

Gamestar support responded to my query. Seems as if they are still refining their level controls:

MESSAGES
Gamestar Mechanic Your bug report Sep 7th, 2010
Hi, SCSpaeth-

It seems you have found a bug! The system has been incorrectly unlocking some quest games for users. You are required to beat all missions in an episode before the next episode is unlocked. You can currently check to see if a mission is completed by a red check mark that appears on the mission tab. If there is no red check mark, then the mission is not complete.

As it currently stands, if you do not finish a mission, the next one will still unlock. You can go back to a mission by clicking its tab in the mission screen. You may experience unexpected behavior in how your episodes unlock until we address this issue within the next week.

Thank you for your bug report!
-MKG

I returned and reworked through all the levels in Episode 2 and finally got to move on to Episode 3. While I worked, Kate asked me what I was doing. She is used to a regular pattern of sounds coming from my computing. This certainly differed from my typical computing. I told her personally, that I'd prefer solving puzzles (e. g. mind bending) to action but the Factory is training well-rounded game mechanics.

Gamestar Mechanic Challenges

2010-09-07T14:23:00.003-04:00

I signed up for the Gamestar Mechanic Beta because of the power that I saw in ITeam members use of Scratch 1.4 to create games. Some students had a little difficulty with Scratch programming so I hope that Gamestar Mechanic will provide an easier on ramp to this kind of learning opportunity.

My invitation arrived and I have been exploring and asking older students to explore. They are generally enthusiastic and I am enjoying the opportunity to learn new skills and ideas. But I got stuck so I sent the following message to the Gamestar Mechanic support system:

In the instructions for participating in the Challenge you say

"If you haven't already, complete Episodes 1-5 of the Quest to earn the right to publish games in your Workshop. If you already have, you might want to replay Episode 4 for a quick reminder about top-down games vs. platformers." So, I know that there are at least three more Episodes to complete.

I have completed the four levels of Episode 1 and two levels of Episode 2. But now, the only choices I can make are to replay levels within Episodes 1 and 2. The colored indices display on the silos on the left of Factory 7 and level tabs (4 for E1 and 2 for E2 )but I don't know how to activate more levels within E2 or the next Episode. If that is part of the puzzle to be solved, then I'll keep searching for the key. If it is an unintended challenge, I'd appreciate some help in continuing.

Maybe I need a kid to help me through this barrier.

How to make a fake UFO video

2010-09-04T14:27:00.002-04:00

Avery has been looking forward to joining ITeam. He found one of my YouTube accounts and subscribed to my channel. When I looked one of his videos, it bore a striking similarity to one I posted recently:

Avery's:

Mine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv7xG9KA4Ss

Until he pointed it out, I had no idea that I had been making "ufo videos." I'll have to ask him how he is getting his viewers!

App Inventor for Android

2010-07-30T12:57:00.005-04:00

Googlelabs have developed a new tool for learning and programming: App Inventor for Android. The programming interface is similar to that of Scratch 1.4 and has common roots.

They are inviting requests from users and educators to participate in Beta testing. I wrote this in my request:

Our student tech team members have been using Scratch 1.4 extensively and have produced increasingly interesting and elaborate games. They are so engaged with the experience, that they spend weekends and vacation time working on Projects.

They used the Scratch viewer for iPhone briefly until Apple pulled it from their App Store. I'm confident that they will transition to this new level of development without breaking stride!

Stephen Spaeth
Scratch Gallery: http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/75680

I'm eager to see what they will do with this!

Tools for Place-based Learning Projects

2010-06-29T12:54:00.004-04:00

We are trying to develop our capacity for Challenge- and Place-Based Learning. Tim H. helped me test the Trails App on his iPhone. When it worked reasonably well, we used it at the Summer Technology Institute as one of the sub-projects of our Vital Signs Project. This is an extension of that effort:

Picture geotag? at EveryTrail

Plan your trips with EveryTrail iPhone Travel Guides

Cameron Herold: Let's raise kids to be entrepreneurs | Video on TED.com

2010-06-18T12:01:00.001-04:00

While trying to setup a network service, I waited for the required several minutes for data to load from one interface to another. I took the opportunity to catch up on a little RSS Feed Reading. I found this talk by Cameron Herold to be interesting and applicable to our work.
Cameron Herold: Let's raise kids to be entrepreneurs | Video on TED.com
Tim, Kate and others are exhibiting entrepreneurial leadership. What can we do to help foster stronger and broader support for it?

Respect Awards - New York 2010 - Danielle Smith

2010-06-01T09:02:00.003-04:00

"GLSENvideo — May 28, 2010 — Danielle Smith is honored as this year's Student Advocate of the Year, presented by AT&T, at GLSEN's seventh annual Respect Awards - New York."

In this speech accepting this national award, Dani describes the process by which she became a student leader. Peers, teachers, administrators, parents and community members can benefit from seeing this autobiography of leadership development and asking themselves, "What can I do to help develop leadership skills for myself and others?"

Where do we see other students and colleagues take the responsibility for informal leadership that would otherwise not be noticed? What can we do to share these so that they become the norm rather than the exception?

The Making A Difference Club Video!

2010-06-01T07:15:00.002-04:00

I saw Jennifer and Ted at the Memorial Day Parade on Main Street. We shared progress on establishing community connections. She and Ted told me about this video that The Making a Difference Club created in order to have something to share with their community partners at Spectrum Generations. They made the video and then worked with six Spectrum partners to setup YouTube accounts and find videos of interest to them.

Both Ted and Jennifer said that both groups enjoyed the experience and want to do more. She reported similar challenges sustaining collaborations when other activities compete (e. g. school sports participation) for collaboration time. Jennifer liked the idea of collaborating on the Power Meter Project and expressed enthusiasm for connections with other groups and more systematic approaches. She especially liked the idea of improving assessments to be more consistent with 21st Century skills.

Vital Signs involves collecting, mapping, photographing, analyzing, and communicating about local invasive species to determine where they are and how they are spreading through Maine. Power Meter uses real-time energy monitors (provided by the project) at school and home to collect real-time data about electrical energy use and determine ways of reducing consumption and saving money.

In looking for the link to Spectrum Generations, I noticed that its partners include some of ours as well:

Spectrum Generations celebrated a “soft” opening recently with a luncheon at the new Southern Midcoast Community Center at 12 Main Street in Topsham.
Guests included representatives from Westrum House in Topsham, CHANS Home Health Care, TRIAD, the Topsham municipal office, Respite Care, and Hospice. Two new Center volunteers took advantage of the opportunity to start the new “Friday Fun” morning social time.

MYAN Peer Leadership Award 2010 - Tim

2010-05-26T11:49:00.005-04:00

Mt. Ararat High School holds award ceremonies to recognize the contributions and achievements of students. MTA High School recognized juniors during Advisory this morning. Organizers asked me to present Tim's MYAN Peer Leadership Award to him.

Find my remarks below:

----------------------
MYAN is the Maine Youth Action Network, a state-wide organization dedicated to encouraging youth leadership development. They do this through a Peer-Leadership Conference and Workshops. At MTA, we know them best as one of the organizations that supported the development of Wellness Wednesdays.

The MYAN Youth Leadership Awards recognize young people who exemplify leadership in their groups, schools & communities. These youth are selected for their dedication and passion for making positive change.

Tim seeks out opportunities to help with technology in schools. He takes responsibility for his own learning in and out of school. He transfers knowledge and skills from work in the community to activities in school.

Beyond that, Tim is helping us to understand the mission and vision of our school:

MTA Vision and Mission Statement
At Mt. Ararat High School our vision is for every student to explore and work toward fulfilling his or her unique potential.

Tim is taking responsibility for shaping his high school experience to meet his and our needs:

He led the identification of the Network Challenge.
He contributes to technology use at the high school as an ITeam tech support person.
He works with District Technology Department to contribute a student perspective to network use at the high school.
He will participate in the competitive NextGen Operators program for the 2010 MLTI Student Conference. Tomorrow he will work along side Networkmaine, Apple and Cisco engineers to support the wireless network for 1000 MLTI laptops that students use in Orono.
His volunteer work at the middle and high school has convinced the District Technology Department to hire him during the summer to work on tech support.
Finally, he has also worked with Guidance, Staff and Mentors to create internship for next school year that will extend his work from the summer.

His leadership helps us understand how students can take a greater role in identifying learning opportunities important to them and make them happen.

Thank you, Tim, for your leadership!

High School Students Reach Across Globe Through Technology

2010-05-10T12:41:00.003-04:00

High School Students Reach Across Globe Through Technology - Annotated

DJ submitted this request to alert people about our collaboration with Maris Stella High School. He received some authentic feedback from the Editor of this About.com section. This use of network tools illustrates students' developing understanding of networking to achieve goals.

tags: ChBL, ITeam, mlti, assessment, tech
- High School Students Reach Across Globe Through Technology
  
  From Douglas Smith,
  - - post by sspaeth
- Our mission has been to communicate and collaborate with students from Singapore about real world issues of information, communication and technology skills faced in schools today.
- How I Got Involved With My Cause:
  
  I've always had a passion for technology and when a few friends and I got involved in the school's 1-1 laptop program, we were able to come up with solutions to problems that the school faced.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Note that the annotations that I added to highlights from DJ's entry are not included in this blog posting. You can see my comments in the annotated version linked above.

Middle school students support Scratch 2.0

2010-05-05T08:30:00.003-04:00

Seventh-grade members of our ITeam have been creating Scratch Projects for several months. The projects started simply and have progressively increased in complexity. I also see them apply concepts that they are learning in math (e. g. x- y-coordinate systems) to a context for which they have great affinity, game development. They are spending considerable amounts of time exploring and creating projects outside of school.

Look at this gallery of projects to see more examples: http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/75680

We discussed the plans to develop Scratch 2.0 and one student proposed development of capacity similar to Build Your Own Blocks (BYOB) that several advanced users of Scratch have been developing and evaluating: http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/79892 When I showed him BYOB, he downloaded the image and created test blocks with interesting properties. He created an arrow control with a rate parameter and discovered that a negative value for the parameter inverted the senses of up/down and left/right arrows as well as controlling the rate.

When I showed the Scratch programmers the Scratch entry in the DML Competition site and explained the rationale for comments from users, they considered adding a comment. But, ultimately they chose to create new Scratch projects instead. They are preparing to work with middle school technology teachers at the District Summer Technology Institute to incorporate Scratch into their classes. We all look forward to using Scratch 2.0.

Google Building Maker- evaluation

2010-04-04T12:06:00.005-04:00

I read the Google Blog and learned about Building Maker, a browser-based 3D modeling program. I wanted to learn more and give some feedback so I explored and then took their survey. Here is my more extended response:

I am a technology integration specialist in a Maine School District (MSAD 75, Topsham, Maine) where we have one-to-one laptop implementation (Maine Learning Technology Initiative, MLTI) from grades 7 through 12. We are trying to identify ways for students to apply math concepts in service to their communities. We explored SketchUp modeling and found it to be more complex than we could manage with available resources. I decided to explore Building Maker as a potentially shallower learning curve.

I saw that one of your featured users, do nuko, was mapping extensively in Sapporo, Japan. I lived there many years ago but still recall the time fondly so I decided to explore the Building tools there. I suspect it will be some time before you provide Building Maker images for Topsham, Maine.

Drawing on Scratch

2010-03-13T17:28:00.006-05:00

I told ITeam members about the enthusiasm that Ms. Loughlin, the Assistant Superintendent of MSAD 75, showed for the generative work that they have been creating with Scratch, SAM, Alice and video. They expressed appreciation for the recognition and seem to be inspired to create more.

Coby created a drawing program that uses the arrow keys to control the "Pen" and a palette to control the colors. If you need instructions to understand how to use it, click on the "Learn more about this project" link.

Learn more about this project.

I tried to adjust the scale of the applet to get the controls to fit within the column width of the Blogger page but it does not scale project as it does images. The layout of the programs that Coby and Scratch designers have used causes some controls to be out-of-sight. I am excited to see that the Scratch programmers are using x-, y-coordinate systems to create and discuss their development strategies. This kind of application of math concepts should serve them well in more formal math and science learning.

Supreme Decision- a learning game

2010-03-13T08:58:00.000-05:00

The Learning Games Network will host a session on the new series of games designed to support learning about civics. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor encourages students and teachers to use games to engage in important work through new media. This may interest our students even more because of their opinions about student rights and technology: Supreme Decision.

ITeam Scratch Programming

2010-03-07T09:51:00.005-05:00

Some ITeam members have embraced Scratch as a creative medium. All ITeam members have shown their enthusiasm for the projects. I have encouraged the programmers to share their work at the Scratch site. Coby has shared one of his simple games. Charlie has programmed several but not yet shared any on the Scratch site. Here I test to see whether I can share their work and extend their audiences.

The simple embed reference is above and the applet embed is below:

applet id="ProjectApplet" style="display: block;" code="ScratchApplet" codebase="http://scratch.mit.edu/static/misc" archive="ScratchApplet.jar" height="387" width="550">/applet> Learn more about this project

It looks as if Blogger won't accept the Applet embed.
Correction: The Blogger Preview did not load the Applet embed when I used the Chrome browser. Now that I have switched to Firefox, it loads the program and starts. Unfortunately, the window is too narrow so the start flag and stop button are hidden out-of-sight. The only way I could stop the program was to leave the page. We'll need some more work on this to find the best ways to share our projects.

Google's Blogger API connects to Seamless Services?

2010-02-17T09:49:00.001-05:00

Blog This - simple editor using the Blogger JavaScript API
I am trying to understand how to use the JSON feed from Diigo to support our assessment needs. Google provides several examples using such feeds and I am testing this one to understand how it works.

New Skills- Linda Darling Hammond's List - Part 2

2010-02-03T17:17:00.001-05:00

I wrote recently about New Skills- Linda Darling Hammond's List that will be needed in this new economy. Sally and I discussed how we can help our students and stakeholders to value and develop these skills. We will want to use some of these ideas to support the collaboration with students at Maris Stella HS in Singapore.

Then, over the weekend, I worked with Nils to explore the proposal that he and others at CTLT are developing for the New Media Competition. We struggled with an online submission interface that interfered with our work. I used the comment system that the competition organizers provided so that they would easily be able to see our public work without going elsewhere. But, I kept some of my own notes about the process in Diigo. I shared some of those with Nils in the form of a Diigo List.

Nils returned to work on Monday and consulted with Theron and produced a new way to organize feedback on proposals using a DML-Competition group with color-coded highlights in Diigo and then he tried Google Sidewiki. This morning, Theron commented that he wanted to be able to sort and filter for tags. I liked Theron's idea but I couldn't find any way to run the queries that Theron requested.

I looked at the tools in Diigo to learn which could potentially support the filtering and found that Diigo Groups have some of the right properties. Initially, I met some internal resistance because this seemed as if it were an unusual application of groups. But as I worked with the concept, it started to grow on me. So, I needed some relatively short names for one or more Diigo groups to prototype my interpretation. So, I searched for Darling Hammond's list and revised it for compact representation:

Design, evaluate & manage one's work
Frame, investigate & solve problems
Find, analyze & use information
Collaborate strategically
Communicate in many forms
Develop new products & ideas

(Darling Hammond, 2010)

As I worked on the list and the problem, I realized that it forms a reasonable representation of our (Sally, Nils, Theron, Steve, Lisa, ...) work, too. In this post alone, I describe how we "frame, investigate, & solve problems," "collaborate strategically," "communicate in many forms," and "develop new ideas." Perhaps one of the best ways for us to understand how to help our students and colleagues is to walk a mile in these shoes.

Linda Darling Hammond. 2010. The Flat World and Education, TC Press. 408 pgs.

Flocking simulation and school change

2010-02-02T13:08:00.005-05:00

The Committed Sardines are trying to support transformation of schools. The name "Committed Sardines" requires some explanation that they provide on a page with their blog. They use analogies to contrast the turning radius of a whale with that of sardines swimming in schools to describe their strategy to promote change in schools.

But finally, when a critical mass of truly committed sardines is reached - not a huge number like 50 percent or 80 percent of the school, but 15 to 20 percent who are truly committed to a new direction - the rest of the school suddenly turns and goes with them - almost instantaneously!

I recalled Netlogo and Starlogo both provide samples of flocking simulations that they say are similar to schooling. In searching for and embeddable version of a flocking simulations, I discovered this one at OpenProcessing provides this simulation of flocking/schooling with a different goal. Move the mouse around the simulation window to see changes in the system behavior.

OpenProcessing represents interesting concepts that some of our ITeam members may grow to appreciate.

Testing LooseStitch Collaborative Outliner

2010-01-21T12:39:00.003-05:00

This post tests the online outliner LooseStitch that claims to make it possible to collaborate on outlines.

And this continues the blog text. The embed script does not render in the blogspot preview. When it does render, the outliner seems to be a little confused about where it is in the outline.

New Skills- Linda Darling Hammond's List

2010-01-13T10:38:00.006-05:00

Linda Darling Hammond has published a new book, Flat World and Education: How America's commitment to equity will determine our future, that applies the principles of Tom Friedman's Flat World concept to Education. In chapter one, she lists skills that will be needed in the 21st Century. She attributes the list to Peter Drucker and Tony Wagner. But she writes her list in ways that are succinct, compelling and easier for students, parents and others to understand.

Skills that will be needed in this new economy include the capacity to:

Design, evaluate, and manage one's own work so that it continually improves.
Frame, investigate, and solve problems using a wide range of tools and resources.
Find, analyse and use information for many purposes.
Collaborate strategically with others.
Communicate effectively in many forms.
Develop new products and ideas.

Sally Loughlin and I are trying to find ways for students and teachers to use this or a similar list in assessment for learning including self- and peer-assessment.

She reported using this list in recent discussions with members of the local Rotary Club and observed that the list resonated with them. Their discussions led to a focus on students communicating with members of our communities similar to those that the Study Circle Pilot groups' recommended as actions to develop.

New Program at UMaine for wind development

2010-01-06T10:06:00.003-05:00

New Courses to be offered at UMaine for wind development

We should try to find ways to articulate our efforts in STEM with these initiatives.

“We’re putting together new educational programs at the university. Undergraduate and graduate students will work in the laboratory and get paid. It covers all aspects of the deep-sea wind development, whether it’s the oceanographic environmental monitoring piece or the development of composite turbines, said Dagher.

Posted using ShareThis

Choosing Tools for Collaboration: Co-presence Indicators in gDocs

2010-01-02T08:09:00.012-05:00

MTA student leaders, Josh Ottow, Lisa Hogan and I are planning a challenge-based learning project called the Network Challenge. It developed as a result of the expansion of the MLTI project from 7th and 8th-grades to the high school. Adding more than 900 devices to the MSAD 75 network introduces both opportunities and challenges.

We need to decide what tools will best support the effort. Since one of the major assessments of the project is a performance-based presentation to MTA Faculty, one of the constraints is that project members will need to develop and give presentations. When students at the MYAN Conference, presented one of their action plans to a review panel, they worked under an extremely tight time-frame. They chose Keynote because they were familiar with the program and didn't need to deal with remote collaborators.

A week later, when visitors came from Maris Stella High School in Singapore to learn how we use technology to enhance learning, Lisa and I asked ITeam members to develop and give a digital presentation about ITeam's contributions to deployment and supporting enhanced uses of technology for learning. We called a brief meeting on Monday afternoon, divided the topics among the ITeam members most involved with each project and asked each presenter to create a 2- to 4-slide presentation. Since students were not able to stay to develop their presentations, we discussed whether to use Google Presentation or Keynote. Since we did not have time for face-to-face development, I leaned toward the Google solution. I thought that it might help presenters to see and articulate through lines of ITeam work. Lisa expressed a strong preference for Keynote and dissatisfaction with some aspects of Google's presentation tool. She proposed that students use Keynote, and email their parts of the presentation to her. Then she would assemble the components into the composite presentation by the deadline of 10:00 am the next day. Presenters accepted her proposal after agreeing to use a common theme and style for their parts so that the composite presentation would be consistent.

When we gathered the next morning, only a few had submitted their parts of the presentation to Lisa via email. So the others transferred their parts via thumb-drive. During the presentation, students spoke in turn as the topic slide signaled their entrances. Since students spoke about common experiences, they built on their previous knowledge of each others' topics rather than previewing their presentations. Students gave impressive demonstrations of their contributions and leadership to the school and district.

The Google Docs development team recently announced the addition of Co-Presence Indicators in the Google Presentations tool. Now, you can see where a collaborator is working on some element of a presentation (e. g. slide, title, text, image, ...). This new feature makes it easier and more reliable to collaborate on the development of a presentation even if contributors can not meet face-to-face.

Schedules challenge our work on the Network Challenge. Students, staff and resource people are all busy with other responsibilities that make it difficult to schedule face-to-face time for the team to work on the challenge. The plan for an initial presentation to the faculty on the January 19th professional development day gives us more time than either of the previous cases. We all have more experience with online collaborative documents. We may even have the time necessary to develop the presentation using Google tools in ways that will make it possible to export into a Keynote for the final presentation to take advantage of some of the features that come with a desktop application.

Google Voice Transcription for Universal Design

2009-12-22T17:36:00.006-05:00

While I wonder whether Google is collecting too much information about me and others, I still marvel at the capacity for supporting the kinds of work we do. Eric and Alex recommended Google Voice so I requested an invitation. It arrived and I am setting it up and testing to see how it works and how I might incorporate it into our work.

Google Voice seems to have potential for supporting universal design for learning. Here is my first test of that function. The snippet below is the transcript. The word "voice" displays in a grey font color so I suspect that the transcriber is less confident in that part of the transcript. But high accuracy including punctuation is a pretty impressive result even if it is not 100% confident.

12/22/09 5:24 PM 10 minutes ago
Hi. This is testing out whether the google voice system can accurately transcribe my voice and take a message and send it to the proper place. Thanks very much. See you later. Bye.

Snow Day Technology Leadership

2009-12-09T08:45:00.004-05:00

Last March, a heavy snow caused school closures across Maine. But we discovered that the work of ITeams could continue despite the snow using network communication and collaboration. Sylvia Martinez, President of GenYES, commented on that post suggesting that we expand the practice.

When the phone rang at 6:00 this morning with Superintendent Wilhelm's announcement of school closure, I knew we had a new opportunity to follow Sylvia's suggestion. With the full expansion of the MLTI program to the high school and access to new tools, we have even greater opportunities to lead with technology. Let's see what we can accomplish and document with this opportunity.

This year we also have new tools to support this collaboration; I am writing this message in a Google wave shared with several ITeam members. And now I am extending the text in the Blogger editor. When I tried to transfer that message here to the blog, Blogspot stripped the links and formatting in both a copy and paste and a drag and drop. So, we need some more work on making tools operate more seamlessly.

Embedding a Wave 2nd try

2009-12-05T10:18:00.002-05:00

Since it did not work as I intended in the earlier post, I am using the sample that Google developers posted on the Google Code site:

http://code.google.com/apis/wave/articles/embeddy.html

That way, I can narrow down where the problem lies. I hope to see something in the space between the horizontal lines:
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Paste this snippet wherever you want the wave to show up:

And this one right before your tag:

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