Instructify

BY DAN FROELICH

About six months ago, I posted a note to my network asking people if the iPad was only a consumption device or if would ever been seen as a truly productive device for creation. I received a mixed response and just sat on the thought for a while. On my way home, I was listening to This Week in Tech, Episode 286 where Leo Laporte, John C. Dvorak, Larry Magid, and MG Siegler were discussing the merits of the iPad as a creation device. Feel free to listen or watch the podcast and make your own decision regarding this debate.

After reviewing the five iPad advertisements, I noticed an interesting trend. The earlier commercials have a 2:1 ratio of content consumption compared to content creation. As you move through the newer advertisements, the focus leans toward a 1:1 focus of consumption and creation. The final tally ended in a count of 22 applications targeting consumption and 13 aimed at creation. It sounds to me that Apple is attempting to capture the spirit of this device as a device primarily used for consumption. I scoured the internet for articles and research. One of the simplest graphics I found outlines the features of Apple’s three mobile platforms. Take a look and comment on it below.

Strengths

The iPad is a very stable device. Thanks to the closed operated system, the average consumer doesn’t notice any instability or crashes in iOS. As a reader and video player, the iPad provides an adequate amount of viewing space and backlight for low-light situations. Through the iTunes Store and App Store, users can access a plethora of games, publications, media, and organizational tools. With applications like Blackboard Mobile, FlipBoard, iBooks, and Amazon Kindle for iPad, teachers have an amazing array of  research content, multimedia, and instructional text available on a single device.

Limitations

The iPad has no means of exporting content to a USB drive, although applications like Dropbox attempt to offer a file system to transfer content. The closed operating system does create limitations to file-system structure for managing photos, media, and documents. The Safari browser for iPad notoriously denounces any support for Flash content which makes millions of websites impossible to render and use.

The App Store is also known as a limiting factor for advanced users. Without cracking the operating system, users can only access approved applications. The biggest barrier to content creation on the iPad focuses around the unexplained decisions that have limited users’ access to a variety of creation tools. Google Docs was one such feature. When it was originally released, the iPad’s browser didn’t support editing in Google Docs, but in recent months things have changed and users can now edit their documents (with limitations). Users will experience mixed results in support for certain content-management systems and even some online learning platforms due to features disabled in the mobile Safari browser.

Another major limitation to many K-12 users is a lack Adobe of Flash support. While Apple contends that this isn’t a major issue, I challenge you to go through many of the common instructional support websites designed for interactive learning and discover just how many sites are programed with Flash. One very popular K-2 website that is rendered useless is Starfall. If you have an iPad and attempt to visit www.starfall.com, you will get a message asking you to update your browser to support flash. This cannot be done, at all, period. Many textbook companies offer companion websites to extend learning online. Many of these are designed with Flash as the foundation for interactivity.

What now?

With more than 300,000 applications and 10 billion application downloads, Apple certainly has the numbers to keep going, but will their restrictive environment stifle creativity and lean more towards consumerism?  I hope not. Fortunately, Android OS 3.0, AKA Honeycomb, was officially announced last week.  Does this mean the iPad is doomed? Not hardly. But just as in the mobile phone market, competition will drive innovation. With two major platforms, users will have greater choice and see the possibilities of tablet devices. Ultimately, we will need to watch as the current generation of tablets evolve into iPad 2 and devices like the new Motorola Xoom. Either way, I can’t wait to see users pushing designers and developers to support our creativity as technology advances.

In the classroom

Educators across North Carolina are exploring the best fit scenarios for the iPad in the classroom. One of LEARN NC’s online instructors, Lucas Gillespie, offers some support for iPads and iPods in the classroom. If you conduct a Google search for “iPad in the classroom,” you’ll get a really rich listing of sites set up to support the iPad in education. One familiar name in handheld technology in education is Tony Vincent. Over the years, Tony has evolved his Learning in Hand site to meet the demands of today’s forward thinking educators and their use of technology in the classroom. Stop by and check out his Do’s and Don’ts.

Additional reading

Content Creation v.s. Content Consumption: The iPad Revolution

Entelligence: the iPad as a productivity tool

Reading as a Participation Sport

BY BILL FERRIS

Wanted: The Asian longhorned beetle and the emerald ash borer beetle. These insidious insects are wreaking havoc on trees across America. Beetle Detectives, a site from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has put out an APB for some science-minded sleuths to snoop around local flora to see if they can spot these bugs. If they do, your students can report the beetles’ whereabouts via the Beetle Detectives website. The site ranks classrooms according to how many reports they submit, allowing kids to win bragging rights over less-observant gumshoes.

The site includes vital information about both the Asian longhorn and emerald ash borer. It also shows several photos depicting the telltale signs of infestation — visible exit holes in the tree bark, a receding canopy starting at the top of the tree, and vertical fissures in the bark are just a few indications that a tree has been infiltrated. Grab your magnifying glass and head into the woods to help put a stop to these voracious vermin.

Beetle Detectives

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BY DAN FROELICH

As many of our readers know, the 2011 NCTIES conference will take place in Raleigh, North Carolina March 2-4 at the Raleigh Convention Center. For those of you who don’t know, NCTIES (North Carolina Technology in Education Society) is the North Carolina affiliate of the International Society for Technology in Education, and is the state’s leading educational technology organization.

The annual conference is more than just a series of workshops and concurrent sessions. It’s a phenomenal opportunity to network with educational technology leaders across the state, a showcase of success stories, and an opportunity to celebrate our peers through awards, grants, and scholarships.

This year’s conference will feature seven featured speakers, including Ruston Hurley, Patrick Crispen, Leslie Fisher, Kevin Honeycutt, Kathy Schrock, David Warlick, and Tammy Worcester. In addition to these keynotes, NCTIES will have eight concurrent session time slots, seven technology fairs, an exciting exhibit hall, workshops, and a celebration to top off the 40th anniversary of NCTIES.

For those not able to attend this year’s conference, make sure you follow NCTIES on Twitter, as well as conference updates via the #NCTIES11 hashtag. The conversation has already begun. Want to see what sessions are being presented? Check out the conference wiki. It’s a complete guide to all of the sessions (too many to count). Dig deep enough and you’ll find sessions presented by many LEARN NC staff members. I myself will be there presenting the hot topic of mobile course processes using current technologies with Mike Shumake of NCVPS.

Barbara Moose, NCTIES President, is eagerly anticipating this year’s conference. When asked more about it, she said, “My conference thoughts revolve around three Rs this year — relationships, reconnecting, and remembering. For me, this conference has always been about relationships.Reconnecting with colleagues (educators and exhibitors) from across North Carolina is one of my favorite things about the NCTIES Conference. I only see some of them face to face during this time and it is exciting to be able to catch up with them and learn from them. This year we have invited leaders who have served NCTIES (formerly NCAECT) over the past 40 years to be our honored guests as we remember their contributions to NC educators and this organization.”

2011 NCTIES conference

BY DAN FROELICH

March 2 is Read Across America day, as well as Dr. Seuss’ birthday. While that doesn’t necessarily evoke a day filled with technology-enriched activities, it has become so thanks to the availability of web conferencing, social media, and even blogs.

Readacrossamerica.org is the central location for all events and activities related to Read Across America day. Those of you willing to make a pledge to read with your students can do so online using this year’s pledge form. Using a Google Maps interface, you can see how many pledges have been made in each state across the nation.

Schools fortunate enough to embrace social media can “Like” Read Across America on their Facebook page. There’s a Twitter conversation already in the works, a Flickr stream ready to accept photos, and a SchoolTube channel chock full of videos. It’s exciting to see an event like this evolve into so many interesting projects.

In the last couple of years, schools have even taken to Skype calls to have authors call in to a class and read to students. This is something that only a few fortunate schools in the country could afford to do in a traditional face-to-face scenario. Teachers have even buddied up with other classes to read to each other from around the country and across the globe. The Skype In Schools community recently decided to post a Read Across America page. This was something decided upon by the members of the group, and not a direction taken by the administrators of the site.

Random House has created an online gallery of resources to help direct ideas for Read Across America with the support of the National Education Association.

So what are you doing this year? Do your plans include a more technology enriched collaborative effort? If so, please share your ideas in the comments below. Happy reading!

Read Across America

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BY BILL FERRIS

If you want to learn about rockets, who better to turn to than NASA? NASA’s Rocketry website covers everything elementary and middle school students want to know about rockets. The site has some serious geek bait, featuring multimedia, virtual rocket-building activities, the history of rocketry, and lesson plans for grades K-8. The site explains the various phases of rocket building and engineering, NASA-sponsored rocketry competitions, and even tells you how to talk like a rocket engineer.

NASA’s Rocketry site is a great starting point for any unit on rockets, engines or space travel, as well as for anyone who just wants to geek out on space ships for a while. Download the educator guide and blast off!

NASA – Rocketry

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BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

Who was the real inspiration for Count Dracula? What happened during the famous mutiny on the Bounty? Few things fascinate like a great story. Not only can it hook students, but a story also provides a solid framework for building understanding of other material. All you have to do is push play — the storytelling is already done thanks to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a podcast series from How Stuff Works.

Over the last few years the series has built a vast library of irresistible tales. Each one is 10-20 minutes long and presented as a conversation between two hosts. They usually begin by discussing common misconceptions resulting from media portrayals, then go on to tell the story, taking care to separate fact from fiction. With so many historical anecdotes available, it’s worth checking the archive for a podcast related to what you’re currently teaching. They’re displayed on one long webpage, so use your browser’s search tool (Ctrl-F) to find text on the page that’s relevant to what you’re looking for.

If you play a podcast in class, I’d recommend supplementing it with a few pictures to help students visualize the story. Since the podcasts are free to download in MP3 format, another option is having students listen on their computers, music players, or phones. Listening and writing comments makes a great alternative to reading for homework.

Stuff You Missed in History Class

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

A new term has been popping up in discussions of how to view media not only in web browsers, but also on mobile devices. A “flipboard” format is designed to be easier to navigate (particularly with your fingers on touchscreen devices such as an iPad) and easier on the eyes in terms of design elements. Surfboard is a new site that allows you to convert any standard website into a flipboard format, and the results are pretty interesting.

Surfboard is pretty easy to use. Just submit a website URL and let Surfboard convert it. I quickly converted Instructify with Surfboard, and our humble blog suddenly took on the characteristics of a magazine, with pages to flip through and a multi-article visual layout.

Surfboard runs best on the newest versions of web browsers, and my Firefox browser did not cooperate all that well. But when I moved over to Chrome, it was fine. And Surfboard suggests using Safari for the best results of all.

Surfboard

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Here’s what’s going on at the NASA Earth Observatory, brought to you by Fred Beyer at EarthSciTeach.

Heavy Snow on the Korean Peninsula

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

At the end of our school year, one of my colleagues teaching sixth grade has all of her students write a letter to themselves in the future. She dutifully puts the letters away until the students’ senior year of high school, when she puts a stamp on each of them and mails them to her all-grown-up former students. I always loved that idea of a student writing to themselves in the future. FutureMe gives that idea a 21st century twist by setting up a system for sending an email to yourself at a specified time in the future. You provide the email address, add a subject line, write a note to your future self, and then choose when it should get delivered. You may designate your emails private or public, and there is a gallery of interesting public emails (I did not find anything inappropriate, but you would be wise to check the gallery out before bringing students to the site).

A great time to use FutureMe would be at the start of the school year, as students begin to lay out their plans for the coming year. What if they sent themselves an email about their goals and then received that email at the end of the year? It might spark some interesting reflections.

As a classroom tool, FutureMe works through verified email addresses, so a teacher might need to set up a classroom email account for the site, and then let students use that account to send an email either to a home email address or back to the classroom account.

What would you say to your future self?

Futureme

BY BILL FERRIS

Here in North Carolina, we’re coping with a budget shortfall. Valuable programs are facing cuts, and a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. I don’t envy Governor Bev Perdue or anyone else making these decisions, as pretty much any decision they make will make life worse for a lot of people. You can help convey the stakes of the situation to your students with the Balance the Budget Challenge, a game from the North Carolina governor’s office that lets us common folk try to balance a budget with a $2.4 billion deficit.

The Balance the Budget Challenge presents you with dozens of options that can cut the state budget. Should you raise tuition to universities or community colleges? Release a few thousand prisoners from jail? Or perhaps you’d care to eliminate all school-nurse jobs in the state? You can also take measures that will promote long-term growth but raise the deficit in the short term — for example, you could increase financial incentives for business to move to North Carolina. When you’ve finished the challenge, simply press a button to submit your budget proposal to the Governor.

What struck me the most about the BTBC was the sheer number of cuts you need to make — after I cut what seemed like a massive amount of programs, I found I still had a few hundred million left to go. Lest you start on a slash-and-burn campaign in the hopes of “winning” the budget, the game also presents you with the consequences of your decisions — that is, you get to see an exact tally of how many people you just sent to the unemployment line.

My only complaint about BTBC was that it asks you to make cuts to education before any other category. Obviously some category had to be listed first, but I nearly gutted the public education budget altogether before I realized I had six more pages of possible cuts to consider. I have no idea if anyone in power actually reads these proposals, but front-loading the game with cuts to school spending potentially sends a message that North Carolina citizens see educational spending as expendable.

That complaint aside, I recommend the Balance the Budget Challenge as a fun, if sobering look at how a state budget operates. It does a good job of teaching about both fiscal responsibility and the human consequences of financial decisions.

Balance the Budget Challenge

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BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

No social studies classroom is complete without a healthy dose of primary sources. Primary sources develop essential skills for understanding both past and present, like putting information in context and understanding conflicting points of view. Just imagine an entire curriculum designed around these skills. If you teach U.S. history, you have to check out Reading Like a Historian.

The breadth of this project is impressive. Seventy-five lessons span the whole of history of the United States, and though these lessons were designed as a single program, each can easily stand alone. The activities focus on analyzing sources and drawing conclusions about a central historical issue. In some lessons, students explore documents designed to “challenge or expand the textbook’s account.” In others, they use sources to take sides on an issue and then later must reconcile their differences. The quality of the curriculum reflects the talent of the Stanford PhD’s and graduate students that developed it.

The journey is just as important as the destination here. Reading Like a Historian will help your class investigate a topic in more depth while developing essential critical thinking skills. I don’t know anyone who has implemented the entire curriculum, but the abundance of lessons means you’re never far from an opportunity to try one. And since the planning is already done for you, there’s little reason not to use this excellent resource.

Reading Like a Historian

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BY BILL FERRIS

The Mini Page is all grown up. After delighting young readers for more than 40 years in newspapers across the country, this beloved insert has found a new home online. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library has published digital archives of The Mini Page‘s more than 2,000 issues dating from 1969 through 2007.

The collection, donated by The Mini Page founder and first editor, Betty Debnam, contains decades’ worth of lessons, activities, puzzles, pictures, and recipes based on a different topic each week. Biff Hollingsworth, a library staffer who works in the Southern Historical Collection, worked closely with Debnam to achieve her vision for how the archive should appear. “She’s considering this as a way to make sure all the issues she’s worked so hard on are given a new life,” Hollingsworth said.

Educators can put the archive to use in a variety of ways, according to Hollingsworth. If a class wanted to look at how African American history was celebrated over the last 40 years, for example, they can compare early Mini Page issues with today’s. In addition, since The Mini Page is written for early readers, the plain language might be helpful for ESL students learning to read a new language.

Visitors can currently search the collection based on date, title, people, places, and topics. Library staff are working hard to make The Mini Page archive more searchable, adding keywords and other metadata. Hollingsworth went on to say that if educators would like to be able to search via additional criteria, they can submit a request through the library contact page.

The Mini Page Archive 1969-2007

Here’s a look back at some of the best articles from February 2010:

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

A rule of thumb for learning idioms is that you can’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. Just when you think a student has mastered the strange elements of idiomatic language, along comes a phrase that has your student barking up the wrong tree. Is it time to have them think outside the box? The IdiomDictionary is an online source for learning about idioms. With a simple interface, the site gives you not only the definitions, but also some historical background on the phrases and examples in a sentence.

The site claims to have more than 5,000 idiom phrases on hand for search. Certainly for second language learners, the understanding of idioms can be a struggle. But with the IdiomDictionary and a little help from the teacher, students should be able to hit the nail on the head and get a better sense of our language and its all of its quirks.

Idiom Dictionary

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

While online videos offer a wealth of information, sometimes teachers only want to share a small section of a video to a classroom of students. Or they want to annotate a section of a video as a highlight. Or maybe, they want to zoom into something particular. A new site called EmbedPlus gives you these options, as well as an embed code so you can post the video on your own site.

EmbedPlus walks you through a variety of steps, which begin with submitting the URL of the video you want to work with. From there, the options include: scene skipping, cropping, slow motion, zooming, and even a live-discussion feature. In my own tests, the controls worked well and seemed fairly simple to use. The developers of the site have clearly been listening for educators, too, as they have developed a page of possibilities for using EmbedPlus in the classroom.

EmbedPlus

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