Drawing on Scratch

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.

New Skills- Linda Darling Hammond's List

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

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

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.

Snow Day Technology Leadership

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

I have been learning to use Google Wave and want to know how I can share that with others. Here, I am testing Embeddy, the embedding robot. So, I wrote a wave, added the robot and have copied the embed code directly from the bot tools. When I preview the post, I see blank area in page but not any text. Will be interested to see what happens when I publish.

I had hoped to see the embedded wave in the space below this text but it is not there in any form that is useful for readers or even for debugging the failure to render as I intended. If it didn't display, I was hoping that I'd see some kind of diagnostic (login screen, gadget icon, or other indication of what is going on behind the scenes).

And this one right before your </body> tag:

But if you teach me to organize, ...

Reuven Carlyle, is a member of the Washington State Legislature. He also blogs about his work and perspectives on governing with special reference to support of education. In a recent post in a series on education, on Community organizing for change, he posted an image of a poster about organizing. He did not cite the work or identify the artist. I tracked that information down and tried to add the embed code to a comment so that others can easily find Ricardo Levins Morales and his larger body of work. The Wordpress comment tool did not allow me to add the embed code as the artist's site requests. I add it below to complete the process.

Click on the image to see more work of this artist.

Thanks to Nils Peterson, Gary Brown, and the Diigo Group CTLT and Friends for the reference.

All for Good support

I added the All for Good widget to this blog and to my iGoogle page to support the Obama initiative for a summer-of-service. I wonder whether we can develop the capacity to serve MSAD 75 volunteer opportunities and have them rendered here and on the District's web site.

Google Wave for learning 2

In an earlier post, I described developments in Google Wave that might apply to our situation: Google Wave for learning. Avital Oliver, a mathematician, has extended Wilson's work (and other) and has produced a Wave Emulator that shows how several gadgets can be implemented and used by people who don't have developer access to Google's Wave servers. Oliver describes some of the challenges he discovered in trying to implement the emulator for his task list.

As I started the implementation, I realized that there are certain difficulties with gadget state management with regard to Wave’s real-time concurrency. Here is an attempt to recreate the learning process I went through, with the difficulties I encountered and solutions I put in place to make this gadget work.

It reminds me of our (CTLT and Friends & Morning Reading Group) discussions of working in public. 

Students inspire my professional development

We chose the late start time for iTeam meetings in part because members are engaged in activities that parallel teacher's professional development and collaboration. Brandon has reliably come at 7:30 am nearly every Wednesday since November. Today, we learned quite a bit from each other. 

Initially, he was browsing the workshops page at the "Closing the Gap" conference site. He enjoyed participating in two conferences and wanted to see whether he could find new opportunities to learn and participate. We learned that we missed the deadline for presentation proposals and the conference is held in Minneapolis. So, we used the links tool at the Closing the Gap site to find local connections.

The search produced a link to Maine CITE , the Coordinating Center for Assistive Technologies. The Maine CITE site provided a link to the Maine Accessible Instructional Materials site. And the Maine AIM site provides a link to the AIM Community of Practice. The list of members includes Cynthia Curry, the MLTI specialist interested in AIM and Universal Design. I wonder whether they might be open to having an iTeam member join the community of practice?

Then, he showed me Free Rider 2. It is a game and game creation site that simulates trick riding (dirt bikes, skateboards, wheel chair, ...). He found a particularly challenging course and showed me how to use it. He observed that people must spend tremendous amounts of time to create the tracks they share. I asked him whether he had tried to create any tracks; he had but could not find it. I think he showed it to me because he knows I want to learn how he and friends use technologies. I asked him whether he saw any connections between the game and school. He couldn't think of any. I surprised him by pointing out the games connection to physics and math. I suspect we will see a new round of interest in his work there. I can hardly wait to see where it takes us.

Maine: Historical sense-of-place

Maine has a long history of sharing its sense of place. The Passenger Department of the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad Company published this introduction to In the Maine Woods in 1900.


In the Maine Woods By Bangor and Aroostook Railroad Company

Google books tries to make it easy for one to add this image to this blog. Select the portion of the page and then post to Blogger. Unfortunately, for this selection, the title and author link may push the link over the limit to transfer to Blogger with no intervention. I had to copy the link and create the page by hand. In pasting the url in the "Edit Html" tab, I discovered that the alt tag can also be improved by users to indicate the content of the image.

When I published the post, I discovered that some of the Blogger tools cover part of the image. I didn't find a parameters in the code to adjust the size of the image to prevent this but when I viewed the post in the "Compose" tab, it provided image resizing controls. It makes the text harder to read but that is not much of a problem because the original text is just a click away!

<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=tHE3AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA1&
ci=49,108,886,936&source=bookclip"><img src="http://books.google.com/books?id=tHE3AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA1&img=1&
zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U3arR5TWas4um9dD5GOsqyUvg6r6g&
ci=49%2C108%2C886%2C936&edge=1" border="0" alt="Text not available"/></a>
<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=tHE3AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA1&ci=49,108,886,936&
source=bookclip">In the Maine Woods By Bangor and Aroostook Railroad Company</a>

I tried to add this clip to our iTeam wiki but Wetpaint doesn't yet support this form of insert.

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Wilson's Cove Trail Head

Kate participates in the MSAD 75 Wellness program. She discovered that we would benefit from walking more because the steps we take at work don't contribute much to the aerobic steps that we want. So, she has looked for longer and more interesting walks. She heard about the Wilson's Cove Trail that the Harpswell Heritage Land Trust recently improved. 

We have taken that walk several times and wanted to be able to recommend it to others. I tried to find the trail head from the Google Map by using the drawing tool in Maps to find the point 0.9 miles South of Mountain Road. Unfortunately, the designated point did not match what I could see in the satellite view of Maps. But I couldn't see the trail or trail-head in the satellite image. Derrick tells me that the map images are several years old. Then, I thought to use the street view in Maps and it solved my challenge.


View Larger Map

The street view images clearly are much more up-to-date because you can see the HHLT sign even though you can't read it. To see the more conventional Map view, close the street view using the "X" in the corner. Enjoy the walk! 

Seth Godin describes ways drive change at TED

The TED Conference invited Seth Godin to present "The Tribes We Lead" at TED in February. They posted the video of his presentation in May. At 8:45 (minutes:seconds) he presents a diagram that ITeam members recognized as similar to our work on infecting people with good ideas.

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During the talk, Godin refers to Kevin Kelly's concept of 1,000 True Fans:

The Technium: 1,000 True Fans

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Note that TED talks now include a linked-transcript that helps navigate between text and videographic respresentations. I tried to capture the time-code anchor url but the system did not provide it and I could not find the hand-coded equivalent. You need to open his presentation on the TED site to open the transcript window.

Google Wave for learning

Magnetic Poetry of Google Wave ala Wookie.

Scott Wilson of CETIS, reported on Monday June 1st, that he had successfully implemented a Google Wave gadget on Wookie server as a W3C Widget. He commented:

By itself this is not a very exciting example, as most of the cooler examples need a participants model, and so lend themselves better to running in something like Elgg or Moodle than a plain blog site like mine. However the basic principle is that Widgets with this level of interaction could easily replace LMS-specific tools in the near future.

He goes on to say that he has only tested in Firefox and Safari4Beta. I tested on the iTouch and can see the tiles move on the Touch when I use computer browser to interact with the gadget but the Touch's interface does not allow me to move the tiles.

While I agree that this particular gadget is not the most compelling demonstration, it convinced me that we should attend closely to developments at Google Wave and CETIS. Wilson has demonstrated the principle that Lars Rassmussen articulated in his video introduction to Google Wave that they intend for Wave to be free and open to developers at several levels including running local servers. This may be the venue for open source effort that Sally Loughlin and I discussed recently.

Testing rss bookmarks with Safari

Put feed in the toolbar and then watch to see if it updates the marker with the index of number of items to read.

Embedding and crediting CC audio

Kate and I are exploring the possibility of creating a short video to demonstrate a dance activity that she and I discovered. She thinks it will amuse her students and I think it may augment our wellness routines. We need some music to drive the simulation and want to use files that are shared with a Creative Commons license for remix. I searched for "Creative Commons" and audio and found the legalmusicforvideos page at the Creative Commons site. That page points to the ccMixter site with its editorial/picks page. We played several clips and found one that matched our requirements. This post tests of embedding cc link to audio. I pulled the embed code from the share/19174 page and pasted it into the html editor in my blog. The embed code adds the player button and two links to the source.

Deflated & Alone (GE ... by George_Ellinas

The share page also encourages correct citation by providing this credit code, too:

George_Ellinas / CC BY 3.0 and Kaer Trouz / CC BY 3.0

The Ellinas performer's name link seems to be redundant but the CC BY 3.0 link probably marks the page for CC searches. I added the Trouz link because Ellinas remixed her work. ccMixter also invites remixers to provide information about uses of resources from their site. I'll add those after I finish this page. I added this post as a webpage that uses the licensed material but it has not yet been approved.

ITeam support for STEM learning

In Wolfram|Alpha data for analysis, I wrote:

Ruben Puentedura describes some of the Promise and Perils of Wolfram|Alpha. If we want to create cultures that use data to improve our practice, then we should invest some effort in navigating between the promise and the perils.

Image by SCSpaeth aka k6 via Flickr

I have been thinking about Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) because the MLTI Student Conference next week chose it as a theme. I hope we can address the theme in our presentation in ways that will engage both students and teachers. An ITeam member told me that he thought the abstract I had written about our work for the conference was accurate but not engaging for students. He predicted that teachers may attend but students may choose to go to sessions that capture their interest.*

If Wolfram were interested in hoarding their data, then why do they offer access to it in various forms? The Live Mathematica link obviously promotes the purchase of their flagship product. But they encourage use and make Mathematica available to K-12 educators for a reasonable investment of time and money (30 Minutes to Mathematica: Watch three video tutorials for 30 minutes and pay only $50 for two copies of a program worth hundreds).

I don't expect mobs of K-12 teachers breaking down the gates to take Wolfram up on the offer. But if we find ways for ITeam members to do for Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica what Brandon is doing with iTouch, then teachers may welcome the contributions as some are doing with the Air Mouse, screenshots, and other tools he and other ITeam members are exploring.

The ITeams Lobsterman's Research Project (Center Island Weather Station) seems to have potential as a driver for this approach. This project grows out of members' interests and may provide them with a motivation to apply math in a meaningful context that I did not experience until I was a graduate student. Wolfram|Alpha's Examples - Weather and Meteorology may provide us with starting points.

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*Reflection: We are clearly making wonderful progress developing ITeam as a collaborative community of practice if they feel free to assess my work with such candor.

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Wolfram|Alpha data for analysis

Wolfram|Alpha makes it possible to use data in several ways. This request via an iPhone to Integrate x sin dx displays information about the integration. The output frames provide access to the underlying data in several ways.

• gif images of functions, plots and data tables
• plain text versions of data tables with pipe delimiters
  
• Mathematica notebooks to download for further analysis

Ruben Puentedura describes some of the Promise and Perils of Wolfram|Alpha. If we want to create cultures that use data to improve our practice, then we should invest some effort in navigating between the promise and the perils.

Note that I used a technique to share this the image from W|A that Brandon, a middle school ITeam member taught me. He demonstrates it at the end of this brief screencast.

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Posting via iTouch

Testing iTouch with various sites. This HTML editor takes input but the visual interface does not.

Leno: 3-D Printing for Everyone

This video clip from Jay Leno's Garage shows why iTeams should devote some effort to understanding 3-D printing and manufacturing. Note that the embed tool made it incredibly easy to post this video to a variety of places including this blog. I will need to show this to iTeam because the blocking software needs some adjustment.