Time travel, motivation, creative problem solving, and testing

It's amazing what cleaning up one's email does. But let me back up a minute …..

Two weeks ago my tough Toshiba -- faithful companion through all Wilkes courses -- wouldn't boot up. I took it to my tech guys who were able to back up all the data and get it running again, but only sort of. There just wasn't any sound. Try as we might with fixes we found on the internet, the problem could not be fixed. The computer had been beeping strangely when booting up for some time, and I was on the last week of my 3 year, on site warrantee with Toshiba, so I contacted them thinking a nice miracle worker would come to my door to set everything right. Instead, they insisted on a compete reset back to factory settings in order to diagnose what was software and what was hardware related.

Now, I use my email as a sort of diary of daily connections, so there are over 10,000 sitting there -- some categorised nicely in folders, others just relegated to the junk file or left in the in-box. And all of this dates back to when I abandoned my desktop machine in 2009. I decided that before wiping out the heart of my machine, at the very least I ought to sort the individual folders and the junk file to preserve relevant content and purge the rest.

I started at the top, quickly got tired, and moved to the bottom of the list. There was more to delete from there, so it gave me the illusion of going faster. To my surprise, the process turned out to be quite interesting. I had set up the system so that most subscriptions would go to 'junk' simply so they wouldn't clutter up my in-box every day. Scanning these turned into a compressed journey through technological time. For example, I watched Google Wave go from inception to demise. I revisited the early smartphone and pre-tablet eras when making technology easily accessible in classrooms seemed an insurmountable hurdle. It made me very aware of the problems that 'technological disparity' is going to create in North American classrooms where a public school education is supposed to be one of society's great equalizers.

It also made me resolve to delete 200 old emails per day as well as read or properly classify all new ones rigorously which leads me to today's mashup. I offer you two items this week's emails : an article entitled "Panel Finds Few Learning Gains from Testing Movement" and a video (below) called "Gamifying Education."

What occurs to me is that perhaps U.S. educational policy makers should be looking at how to get from where they are (tests don't boost learning) to where they want to be (ensuring greater learning success for more children) as a game of connections (as in the last segment of the video). My worry is that they won't use this as a reason to apply creative problem solving and critical thinking skills to the problem but will just respond by adding another level of tests or by rejigging the existing tests to make it harder to 'game the system'.

I'd be interested in reading your thoughts on one, either, or both. What do you find are life and school's greatest motivators?

Free one year trial of 'Imagine Mars'

(click for full-sized image)

Learning.com is a subscription-based company which will deliver online lessons -- selected from their collection or developed by you -- to your students. Their materials, for the K-8 market, are designed to help teachers meet the STEM standards as well as give students instruction in 21st century technology skills. Their game-based packages create a multi-sensory environment where students can "model … new skills and create stronger connections to their learning." They take advantage of kids' natural desire to master internet applications and at the same time support their learning efforts. Learning.com is partnering with a number of other educational service providers, including Discovery, so teachers can create and distribute online learning experiences which integrate materials from these sources through the SKY digital learning environment.

With Imagine Mars, Learning.com has created a project-based learning package for grades 3-8. It's a little reminiscent of the old survival on the moon group survival simulation activity we used to have students do in the old days. Learning.com has worked with Nasa to replicate virtually the kind of face-to-face experience illustrated in the video below.

CK2 NASA Imagine Mars youth program from danboarder on Vimeo.

The one year, free trial is good for one teacher and a class of 30 kids. All you have to do is answer 2 questions to start the process of signing up. Once you have your trial, you'll be prompted to create an account and set up your licences. Enjoy.

Mac Alert

Update from May 31: Apple has released a security update to tackle this problem. See this article -- http://www.pcworld.com/article/229100/apple_releases_mac_defender_security_updateeverybody_relax.html#tk.nl_dnx_h_crawl)

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OK -- I'm struggling to learn how to use my new MacBook Pro effectively, so today I paid attention to an article on a Mac Virus and am wondering if I should be purchasing anti-virus software for my new machine. I thought these machines had immunity!!!!

In the meantime, I'm sure many of you are using Mac's so these links are worth a read: Mac Malware is Back (in PCWorld) and How to avoid or remove Mac Defender malware (from Apple Support).

Also be sure, you go into the preference and UNCHECK the "Open 'safe' files after downloading" option.

• Right click on Safari.
• Select Preferences >> General (light switch icon).
• Uncheck the box at the very bottom of the page. This may help prevent the process from starting automatically.

Also, if a normal attempt to close Safari doesn't work, use 'Force Quit' (on the Apple menu, far left.)

What looks like a super writing tool -- Scrivener

This is a big hello to all you new Wilkes students. I've found a tool I think would have made my life a lot easier when I was churning out papers, responses, and blog entries for my courses. Keeping track of ideas and sources was a complicated affair especially when writing a long paper or doing one of those courses that required multiple written pieces. Scrivener (in Mac and Windows versions) is designed to "help you get to the end of that awkward first draft. … Outline and structure your ideas, take notes, view research alongside your writing and compose the constituent pieces of your text in isolation or in context" -- it all seems to be there.

[Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DthBJhBrYs]

What I love about this tool is that the 30 day free trial means 30 days of actual usage. If you only use it once a month, you get 30 months free. After that the price is very reasonable. There is a good collection of tutorials, a wiki with the FAQ's, a support form, and you can register copies of the software on more than one machine. You can also publish your work so that it can be read on an iPad or other e-book readers and sync it with apps such as Simple Note that use DropBox. I'm wondering what it will look like on an IWB.

I'll be writing next week to see if you can move files back and forth between Mac to Windows as sometimes I work on one, and sometimes on the other. I've just bought a fancy new Mac, but have found that with the high-res screen, I can' change the sizes of the fonts in the toolbars unless I sacrifice resolution and I'm struggling to see the tiny print. Fortunately I have a second monitor (the best hardware investment I ever made) which works best at a different resolution which is better for my aging eyes. I've also installed something called DejaMenu which allows me to open a menu that pertains to the second screen on the second screen. This is a natural act on a PC -- Mac doesn't seem to lead the way in everything.

Onwards towards the end of the school year ...

Software finds: fill out PDF forms and make a screen recording

You have a pdf form that needs to be filled out, but you've been keyboarding so long that you're handwriting skills have all but vanished. You don't want to fork out for the full Adobe package. Where do you turn? To PFDescape!!!




This is a little clunky (e.g. can't cut and paste to rearrange ideas in a paragraph or copy from a word document into the online file & I couldn't figure out how to do a circle or rectangle that wasn't filled in red), but compared to the alternative (my handscratch), it's a great way to fill in one of those read-only pdf's that can be such a pain. Just open an account (so you can save and get back to the document), upload, enter your information, then download and save as a pdf again. I tried it this morning and it worked perfectly.

I can see using this with students when they have job application forms to do. They can scan their forms, save them as pdf's (instead of jpegs), add their information in beautiful typed format and download to add their signatures and return them to the employers. They could also do fill in the blanks kinds of quizes or tests or annotate images like maps or mindmaps that have been saved in pdf format.

For those of you who can't easily get online, there's a very inexpensive ($20) downloadable alternative called PDFill. They also offer some free tools that are worth looking at if you're using an old version of Word and can't save to a PDF or want to merge/split files, reorder pages and so forth.

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For those of you who don't have a good screen recording tool, today's Giveaway of the Day -- Bandicam -- seems to be receiving good reviews from the gamers. I'm going to try making machinima with it in Second Life. Remember, when you download from GOTD, you must open the ReadMe file right away and follow the registration instructions exactly. If you don't do that inside their 24 hour period, you'll lose the lifetime registration and the program will revert to a trial version.

5 addtional ways to view Blogger content

If you're tired of the standard view of the wonderful Wilkes blog and want to enjoy a more dynamic viewing experience, use this URL (http://wilkesinstructionalmedia.blogspot.com/view/sidebar#!/) and then use the drop down menu in the upper right corner to try all 5 options. Those posts which had no images show up as titles or summaries.

I think this could be a cool way to display class blogger content to to parents. If you were doing Scribeposts for math, one of the tasks could be to ensure there was a visual which represented the main idea uploaded directly to Blogger to help users recall the main idea behind. Younger students could scan artwork and use that to identify their posts. Before I stop, I'd better add an image to this post.



It's interesting to see the trend in use of visuals over the time that I've been writing this blog. I think I depend a lot more on videos now than I did when I first began.

Here are the links to the instructions to be sure your classes can access these 'dynamic views': All About and how-to.

BTW: I know that as EDIM students you're all writing and responding like mad. I'd love this to morph into a space to share ideas across class sections and across courses! If you or someone in one of your courses has written a blog post you'd be willing to share here, please let me know how to access the content, and I'll put it up. Just post a response here or in the Facebook feed. Thanks for the help.

Gmail Motion & Google docs Motion

Those people at Google have done it again --

Link to video: Introducing Gmail Motion


AND

(to add action to real time collaboration and excitement to your presentations)