pacific tech

Tyler and video games for history.

I talked about the game peacemaker.org

PeaceMaker challenges you to succeed as a leader where others have failed. Experience the joy of bringing peace to the Middle East or the agony of plunging the region into disaster. PeaceMaker will test your skills, assumptions and prior knowledge. Play it and you will never read the news the same way again.

Frontline has created a nice set of videos that are interviews with educational leaders about our digital nation and schools.

Meghan talked about using math apprentice in a middle school classroom.

Jeanie talked about froguts and virtual dissection.

Erica talked about planet science.

Amanda’s math webquest.

Cari talked about the visual thesaurus.

Anna talked about an online timeline.

Cassie talked about flip cameras.

Cassie talked about puzzles

1.  Create a folder…Add…Folder…name the folder  A folder will appear in your places window. The folder will become the kml file that you will email to me.

2.  Drag your placemarks into the folder.

3.  Right click on the folder, and select Save Place As.. at this point a save window will appear and give you the option to name your file and save it to a location. You should save the file in a place where you can then find it to upload to your blog, or email to me.

Hi Folks: I had some thoughts and discoveries today I wanted to share with you. I enjoyed working with everyone in the lab on Wednesday. The conversations and work were fun to participate in. I appreciated watching you develop your Web Sites. I witnessed a lot of evolution in your thinking and work. It reinforced (positively) my developing view of trying to give you projects and work that require you to apply your knowledge and understanding of technology, curriculum, and pedagogy to an authentic task. As we integrate technology into our understanding of curriculum and pedagogy, it helps to take a look at some folks who are trying to understand how to do this effectively. You can take a look at some of their work here. It seemed like the more we worked with the content, the deeper we understood it. Which made me think of different ways you can consider graphically representing knowledge.

In your minor state of disequilibrium, you might be asking yourself: What is that graphic and how did he make that? Well let me try to help you equilibrate a bit. I used Wordle, a free word cloud generating tool. In their words:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

For this word cloud, I simply copied and pasted the definition of metacognition from Wikipedia and played with the formatting tools a bit. After you make your cloud, you can take a screenshot of it (go to takeascreenshot for directions specific to your operating system..it’s simple). Once you take a screenshot, you now have an image file you can do anything with.

Another example: I found this great graphic organizer that helps you understand the Federal Budget; it’s called Death and Taxes. The information and the graphic interface is excellent.  One reason this graphic is effective is because it follows the principles of design (refer to the principles of design slide show link in the blogroll) and in their words:

Death and Taxes” is more than just numbers. It is a uniquely revealing look at our national priorities, that fluctuate yearly, according to the wishes of the President, the power of Congress, and the will of the people. Thousands of pages of raw data have been boiled down to one poster that provides the most open and accessible record of our nations’ spending than ever before. If you pay taxes, then you have paid for a small part of everything in the poster. “Death and Taxes” is an essential poster for any responsible citizen or information junkie.

See if you can look at the graphic and consider how they have use proximity, alignment, repetition, and contrast, (PARC) effectively to reduce the load on working memory and text processing.

How we organize information, the names we give things, and the symbols we select to represent things is crucial as you have seen. These decisions from a cognitive science view give power to the retrieval cues we create for our students and thus the ease in which they can recall information from long-term memory.

I’m looking forward to seeing your Web Quests. When you are finished, you should share the site with me. Go to More Actions….Share…and invite me to view the site. I’ll get an email with the url of the site. I will post all the links to your sites in my class blog so we can see all the sites. Also be sure to tell me in your email who is in your group.

Here’s a two minute video worth watching that illustrates the point that how we represent information interferes with our ability to see that different representations are possible.

Because so much of what we do with technology involves design, I thought this video would give you some guidance in the process.

Rethink Scholarship at Langara 2010 Call for Entries from Rory O’Sullivan and Simon Bruyn on Vimeo.

As I mentioned repeatedly in class, powerful pictures used in pedagogically powerful ways can help you and your students learn. As we wrap up the slide show part of class I wanted to be sure you knew how to upload your slides to the slide show program in Google Docs. When you go to Google Docs, you will have the opportunity to upload your slide show to be viewable by specific people or the entire world. You get to decide. Once you upload your slide show you will find that you have control over how your slide show can be viewed. There is a size limit with Google Docs. If your slide show is more than 10MB you will not be able to upload it. But, there is a work around to get it to work. It may take a few minutes depending on how many slides you have. But, if you really want to do it, it’s worth the effort. Here it is:
Open your slide show In PPT…click on File…Save as Pictures. Then you will be able to save your slides as pictures in a folder. At this point you will have to insert each picture into a new slide show presentation. Then save the file and you are ready to upload it. When you save the slides as pictures, it compresses the pictures and makes them much smaller.

A few questions I answered this week follow:

How do I view an Inspiration file if I don’t have Inspiration? If  you want to view an Inspiration in all of it’s glorious Inspirational Power (it acts like an Inspiration file) and don’t have Inspiration, you can download a free program called Inspiration Viewer that will allow you to view the files.

How do I send a file that is is too big for email? You can use a free service you send it. It acts like P.O. Box. You upload a file to their site and give the email address of the person you want to send it to. That person then gets an email with a link that allows them to download the file.

How do I download a video from the web so I can embed it into my slide show? If you use Firefox for your browser (I recommend that you do) you can download a plug-in (a little computer program you add to an application, in this case Firefox.) called download helper I showed you in class.

On to the web today.

mark s.

Welcome to Technology Across the Curriculum

This the class where you will learn to acquire the magical powers necessary to become an effective user of technology for the 21st century. This is my class blog where I will keep you updated on all things about the class.

Project Support

I have built in a wide range of support for each project. Depending on your personal preferences, you can use the kind of support that meets your needs. My goal in this class is to help you develop a set of skills that will allow you to become an independent and self-regulated learner. I want you to feel supported, but I also want you to learn to support yourself which means developing a skill set for the tools and a set of professional dispositions for learning. When I introduce a project I will give an overview, identify the important elements, show you some models, and model the foundational skills needed to use the software.

When you begin to work on a project it’s important to have a plan and budget the time necessary to complete a project that reflects your skills and commitment to excellence. The reading assignments for the class are brief; as a result,  because I want you to use your time to complete your projects.

When you begin to work on your project, you will be able to rely on a wide range of resources depending on your needs.  Some folks like to play around and figure things out as they go. If you do this try to add right clicking to your skill set. If you get stuck, there is a wonderful button at the top of the screen that spells what you are probably thinking HELP. It’s a step up from the magic eight ball. You can type in your question and a list of possible answers will appear. You can also perform a Google search to find answers to your questions. In addition, you will find that most of the software we will use in class is supported by video tutorials on the web site.

In addition to these resources we have our rendition of human resources, Jesse and I are available to work with you in the lab on a drop in basis. Jesse is in the lab from 8:30-5 Monday-Friday. He does take lunch and has other meetings to attend at different times, but he is in the lab available to help the majority of the day. I am happy to work with you in the lab during my office hours as well. If you can’t make those, email me and we can schedule a time to meet that works for both of us. I  will be in the lab at 4 P.M. on Wednesdays. If you can manage to arrange your schedule to come at 4 P.M. It would be a good use of your time..Jesse and I are both there to support you. I also have office hours on Thursday mornings from 9-11 A.M.

Project Process

Here is a to do list in order for the first project.

1. Read the project description closely and use the online resources that are built into the project description. Pay close attention to the scoring guide. It is the organizing framework for assessment.

2. Budget the time to work on the project using all your resources. Get started early if you can. I expect you to have your project atleast 67.5% complete when you come to next week’s class. We will use the first hour of our next class as workshop time. That way you can make good use of my time and I can be the most useful to you. If you can come at 4 and use that time as well, you should be able to wrap up that project tightly and call it good.

3. Select a benchmark from the Oregon State Standards Newspaper that you will use to guide your project. You can download a pdf file of the newspaper or search it online at the ODE Standards web site. The link to download a copy of the newspaper is in the lower left hand corner of the page.

4. When you are close to completing the project use the scoring guide to assess the project yourself. Assessment is one skill you will develop as a teacher. So, it’s good practice . During our class workshop time we will look at each others’ work to give any helpful feedback for improvements.  All of this is in the spirit of improving your project before you submit it to me for assessment.

5. Post your reflection on the blog. As stated in the syllabus, your blog post should include the following three elements:
-A description of how you might use the project and the benchmark the project is designed to meet.
-Describe the cognitive assimilation and / or accommodation you experienced as a result of completing the project.

6. Name your file using your firstname and first initial of your last name plus the number of the project. For example I would name my inspiration file “marks1″

Let me know if you have any questions.

Have fun and challenge yourself to do your best work.

mark s.