Posting from the Sugar Browser

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

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.

Harriet Beecher Stowe on Child Labor

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

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.

Inevitable. But how to get there from here?

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?

Exploring inverted pendulum control

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.

TinEye- Image search for exploring attribution?

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

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.

Capstone Images and Visual Search

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.

Karen Cator: Professional Development Needs

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?

Ariel, Laurel and Alyssa share in Frau Adams' class

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.

Capstone retreat and student participation

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]

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.

Google charts and more

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.