Teaching With Technology

Apparently I'm a Total Nerd

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Thu, 5 Nov 2015 08:47:00 -0500

So today I'm geeking out a bit. The school's 3D printers are in another room on the other side of the building from my office. If you've ever used a desktop 3D printer then you know they have a tendency to fail. This can be a problem when you are not near the printer. A while ago I figured out that I could use a cheap webcam and stream the operation of our printers live to YouTube. It's not riveting video, but it lets me keep an eye on things. However, when things go wrong I still have to run down the hall to stop the printer.

Enter Chrome Remote Desktop. This lets you use Chrome to remotely access a computer that you are signed into. It's pretty easy to set up and I can even access it from outside of the school building. If I use the same computer that is running the 3D printer I can cancel the print job remotely. This means I could start a long print job and still monitor it from home. If things go wrong I can stop the printer from making a pile of spaghetti.

Is Keynote the best app to create widgets for your iBooks?

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Fri, 1 May 2015 08:52:00 -0500

The cool thing about eBooks created with iBooks Author is they can be interactive. However, most of the traditional publisher offerings are only slightly better than their print counterparts. By and large, they don't do a good job capitalizing on the features offered in this relatively new medium. Most teacher created textbooks, by contrast, do a much better job using interactivity and are therefore much more compelling.

This interactivity typically comes in the form of widgets. The widgets built into iBooks Author will only take you so far. Before long teachers are looking for ways to create their own widgets. I'm going to contend that Keynote is the best app you can get to create custom widgets for your iBooks. That said, I should also mention that I'm a big fan of Tumult Hype, but I believe Keynote is the best place for most teachers to start. There are lots of great general tutorials out there for learning the basics of Keynote, some created by me and some created by other very talented people. These will get you up and running in Keynote, but are not focused specifically on using Keynote with iBooks.

I've created a number of posts showing how to use Keynote to enhance your iBooks. So, in an effort to win you over to my way of thinking, here are a variety of ways you can use Keynote to enhance your students' learning.

Creating Interaction:

Interactive Maps - Create maps like the ones showed off in E.O. Wilson's Life on Earth books. The same technique could also be used in a variety of widgets where you want to highlight or contrast various parts of an image.
Math Practice Widget - Build something like Tara Maynard's ultra cool math practice widget. This is set up to allow students to get the level of help they need while working on problems.
Interactive Videos - Have a dialog with your students through video, where your students' answers to questions lead to different responses from you. Get your students think, not just watching.

Creating other Cool Stuff:

Downsize your iBook - Create Keynotes with voiceovers to replace some of your screen-cast videos.
Create your own Clipart - Never worry about violating copyright nor about finding just the right clipart or icon for your book.
Create custom animations - You can actually use Keynote as a simple animation tool.
Keynote as Video Editor - Believe it or not, you can create some pretty cool video effects in Keynote.

Keynote is not nearly as powerful nor versatile as Hype, iAd Producer, or straight HTML and JavaScript. It is, however, much more accessible. In most cases if you have a Mac it's most likely already on your hard drive and you've probably already used it.

Downsize Your iBook using Keynote

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 09:55:00 -0500

I like to embed a lot of videos in my iBooks Author projects. These videos can often push the size of my iBooks up to an unacceptable size. One way I get around this is to create YouTube widgets in a program like Hype or using a web service like Bookry. However, this means students must have in internet connection to view the videos. Requiring the internet can sometimes be a problem which is why I like to try to include full videos when possible.

As it turns out, many of my videos are screencast tutorials. These often simply show a static screen with my mouse moving to and clicking a button to bring us to the next static screen. This can easily be reproduced with a series of screenshots put into Keynote. I use an Animate Action or Magic Move Transition to move a cursor from one location on the screen to another, or to highlight a a particular item. Then all I need is a voice over.

Currently audio files will not autoplay on the iPad, but videos will. So in-order to add a voiceover I need to add in a video. Now this seems like it might be a bit counter productive as I was trying to not add a video in the first place. The video I make for this is tiny, consisting of only a solid background and recorded audio. I make these using Quicktime. Simply select "New Screen Recording" from the "File" menu and then drag a rectangle over a plain white portion of your screen when prompted. I discussed using a video for a voiceover in my video on Tara Maynard's Interactive Math Practice Widget.

You can see some examples of my finished video replacements in an iBook on using Google Drive in education I made for my school last summer. The content is slightly outdated now, but you can still see how I used Keynote to replace screencasts. In this iBook I didn't use a single video nor HTML5 widget.

I should note that videos playing in a Keynote widget will not have video controls, so there is no way to pause them nor replay them. With this in mind I'd recommend adding linked buttons to replay a slide as well as buttons to go forward or back as needed. The replay button was not something I added to the Keynotes in my book, but I will in the future.

I wouldn't replace all of my screencast videos but I will be using Keynote more and more in the future to replace videos. One of the things I like about replacing videos with Keynote is you can easily have playback require student input to progress. This is important for two reasons. First is the student is more likely to pay attention if they have to click to continue and secondarily the passes can give time for reflection or note taking.

CK12 to iBooks Author

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Thu, 23 Apr 2015 12:15:00 -0500

Finding the perfect textbook for your class really is an impossible task. Each one you look at is missing some critical component or if one does have everything, it uses an approach that you think won't work with your students. Even if you somehow find the perfect book, it is typically the most expensive book you've looked at. In the end you end up selecting a book that is the best compromise of several competing factors. Not the best but instead, the least bad. The alternative is to not use a textbook or to create your own textbook.

With this in mind I encouraged the teachers of our freshman Integrated Science Class to create their own textbook for the first year of our 1:1 iPad deployment. This was a huge undertaking so I encouraged them to dive into ck-12 to assemble a series of books to use with their students. The books were saved as ePubs and distributed through iTunesU.

The ePubs, while very nice, have some limitations. The ck-12 materials often have videos and interactive elements scattered throughout. In order to use these, the students must leave their book and go onto the web. Not a big deal, but often once students leave their books many never make it back again. For next year we want to make the books more encapsulated, removing the need for students to leave the book to work with the interactive elements. Enter iBooks Author. The last update Apple gave iBooks Author the ability to import ePubs. Now we can take the work that was already done and repurpose it.

Workflow:

Create flexbook on ck-12 and download as ePub (done already)
Import into your iBooks Author template of choice. All of the content will come in as a single chapter.
Create a new chapter for each of the chapters in your original ePub
From your chapter with everything copy all of the content for a chapter and paste it into the chapter you created for it. Keep going until you've done this with all the chapters.
Work on Formatting: All of your images are "inline" you might want to use the Inspector to change them to Floating or Anchored so you can put them where you want them to be.
More Formatting: Edit the text/paragraph styles used by ck-12 to be something you want (totally optional)
Create Widgets for interactive content.
Export as iBook and distribute or publish

Point 7, "Create Widgets" is the hard part. iBooks Author doesn't give you the ability to embed most web content directly. It does, however, give you the ability to add in HTML5 widgets. I typically build my HTML5 widgets in Tumult Hype. Totally awesome program. I haven't looked at the newest update yet but I will probably buy it. They do offer an educational discount, making it much more affordable. A less nerdy, as well as free, way would be to use Bookry to make your widgets. Once we get some of the books converted I'll post them here.

Below is my walkthrough of using Hype to embed a YouTube video in your iBook. You could use the same process for a lot of other web content as well.

Presentations for Mercy TechTalk

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 05:08:00 -0500

I'll be giving to presentations today at Mercy Tech Talk. Here are the links from my presentations:

3D Printing in Education - 11:10 in N-17
Curious about 3D printing? We will walk through the basics of 3D printing and introduce simple programs for creating 3D models suitable for printing. No previous 3D modeling experience is needed. We will also look at some ways 3D printing can be worked into the curriculum and for fundraising.

Flipping with an iPad - 1:00 in Drama Studio
Have you thought about making videos to support your instruction? Maybe even a full flip? With an iPad you can create and distribute videos for your students. We will investigate several apps and accessories you can use to make compelling content for your students without the need for a computer.

Course in iTunes U that I put together for the staff at Divine Child
Best iPad Stylus Ever! Well, at least the best that I've tried
Pretty good iPad Stand
Swivl Robotic Cameraman

Fun with Keynote for iPad

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 06:30:00 -0500

Our school is in the process of moving to 1:1 iPads. Part of my job is to provide professional development for our staff. I've decided to share some of the materials I'm putting together here. The references I make to individuals in this material are to members of our staff.

Sorry for the very heavy focus on Keynote in my blog lately. I'm sure I'll get bored and move on to something else soon.

There is a lot of power in Keynote to style, arrange, and edit items. You can use this power when making your presentations or you can co-opt this power for other creative endeavors. The videos below assume you already know some basics about Keynote for iPad. If not you should watch this video for a quick overview.

We first need to learn about the formatting options that are available. You can access the formatting options by selecting an object and then touching the paint brush.

Watch this video to learn about some of the formatting options:

Do the following after watching the video above:

Create a new presentation
Add a slide with pictures and text
Use the formatting tools to change the styles of your objects.
Add an interesting border to your pictures
Change your font and text styles

Have you ever taken a picture to use in a presentation only to find out you need to bring it into an image editor to crop or resize it before you can use it? You can actually do this right in Keynote.

Watch this video about working with the Image Mask:

Do the following after watching the video above:

Go back to the presentation you were just working on or create a new presentation
Add a slide with a picture on it
Tap the plus to put your own picture in.
Double tap your picture to edit the image mask

The last skill we need is called Instant Alpha. This will work best if your picture has a uniform background. This can be used to create silly pictures, but is can also add a touch of awesomeness to your presentation without much extra effort. Thanks to Andy Losik for showing me this.

Do the following after watching the video above:

Create a new presentation
Add a blank slide
Use your iPad to take a picture of yourself or someone else with a fairly neutral background
You may find you need to edit the image mask to crop your picture first
Now put your subject into someplace awesome

Interactive Maps with Keynote and Gimp

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Thu, 19 Feb 2015 07:19:00 -0500

When people are learning to make iBooks with iBooks Author they often want to have cool widgets for their students to interact with. As I've shown in previous posts, you can create some pretty easily with Keynote. I really like showing teachers how to use Keynote to do this because if they use a Mac they already have it. When you couple this with a free image editor, Gimp, you can do some really cool stuff.

The example here is not one I've used to teach my students, but one I used at last year's iBookHack. From a teaching standpoint it might not be very good, I'm not really sure since I don't teach social studies. It's just an example of how you might create an interactive map to use with your students. The first video below walks you through using Gimp to create your maps. The second shows you how to use Keynote to bring them together as an interactive widget you can drop into an iBook.

Interactive Practice Widget Built in Keynote

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Sun, 15 Feb 2015 08:54:00 -0500

I've been involved in iBooks Author teacher training with Anthony DiLaura for a few years now. You can find out about our hackathon coming up this summer at the ibookhack site.

While working on the iBookHack project I've gotten to meet some amazing educators. One of these is Tara Maynard. Tara saw a cool HTML5 math practice widget in an iBook and she wondered if it would be possible to put something like it in her own books. I showed her how she might reproduce the basic idea of the widget in Keynote and she went on to create this great template. She has shared it so you can use it as a starting point for your own practice widget. If you need a little help you can check out my video below.

The problem is shown, if there are accessibility concerns a button is included that will read the problem aloud to the student. Each problem can provide a hint to help aid students in independent practice and finally the solution is provided so students can get instant feedback to see if they were correct. Since it is made in Keynote the problem, hints, or solution can include pictures or videos as well. Overall it is a great interactive element to include in an iBook and doesn't take a lot of technical skills to implement.

The core idea of this widget centers on creating a "Links Only" presentation in Keynote. If you need a little more information on this you should check out another video I made, which is also included below.

Getting Started with 3D Printing - Find a problem to solve

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Wed, 3 Dec 2014 11:42:00 -0500

This week I went high-tech to go low-tech. When I taught physics I taught with a student centered pedagogy called Modeling Physics. In Modeling we have student collect data and then use that data to construct models to explain physics. Basically students do labs, graph the data, find an equation that fits their graph and then they turn that equation into a generic equation that can be used in other situations. Everything works great if you can get the students to collect really clean data and if you can actually convince them to think.

I don't teach physics anymore, but our new physics teacher, Vance, also uses the Modeling Method. He built some apparatuses last week end to collect really good acceleration data. This is just a wood disk with a golf tee glued to the center of each side. This rolls down a pair of rails and is slow enough to allow students to get some really good data. I'd thought about building these myself in the past, but I knew it would be hard to do and that I'd probably screw it up. So I never constructed any. Vance did a fine job in his construction, but he ended up having all the problems I knew I would have had.

Enter the 3D printer. Looking at Vance's system I knew I could knock something out on the 3D printer that would work. This is one of the coolest things about owning a 3D printer. You will see problems and begin to envision solutions. Once you start doing this the easier it becomes. The only risk is that you will quickly assume the 3D printer is the best tool for all jobs. As awesome as it is, it is not always the best way to solve every problem.

I spent about 10 minutes in Tinkercad on my design and then it took about an hour and a half to print. Vance tells me it worked great for the lab. I'm already envisioning modifications for future investigations. The design could be easily modified to investigate rotational inertia and energy, but maybe I'll leave it to students to create these new designs.

Acceleration Paradigm Lab - Teacher Notes

Materials (for each group):

2 bricks with holes or grooved sides
2 five foot sections of electrical conduit
1 wood disk with a golf tee sticking out of the center of each side, or 1 3D printed disk with cones out of each side
Dry erase marker
A metronome set to 60 peats/minute (or a computer program) - One for the entire class

Basic Procedure:

Set the conduit up as a pair of rails spaced appropriately for your rolling disk
Let the disk roll down the rails
Mark the position of the disk at 1 or 2 second intervals
Create a position vs. time graph and find the equation that fits the data (should be a quadratic)
Create a velocity vs. time data set and graph from the position data using the secant line created by each pair of points on the position graph. This graph should be linear.
Note: If the incline is too steep it will slide rather than roll.

Class discussion:

I always have students use the actual variables in their equations, no x's or y's. In addition all constants need units.
Once students have equations for both their position and velocity graphs I ask them what each constant represents and how they know. This is pretty easy for the velocity graph, but a little harder for the position graph. It leads to some great conversations and ultimately to a pair of generic equations we will use for the rest of the kinematics unit.

My 3D Model:

On Thingiverse
On Tinkercad: the Disk, the Side Cones.

This is a part 6 of my series on 3D Printers in Education. Go back to earlier parts in the 3D printer series: Part 1, Part 5

Interactive Video Widgets in iBooks

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 10:42:00 -0500

For the last couple of summers I had the pleasure to work along Tony DiLaura, Dave Bast and some great educators committed to making their own content with hopes of replacing traditional textbooks at iBooks Hackathons. I'd put together some material for those hackathons and I thought I'd share some of it here.

When I teach I try to always ask questions and never give answers. I want my students to struggle a bit and discover the answers through experimentation and discussion. This is very difficult to do in the videos I make. Due to the nature of video I don’t really give students time to think, nor do I give them a chance to investigate different answers. Derek Muller hit on a solution to this on his Veritasium YouTube Channel. YouTube allows you to put clickable hotspots on videos. Derek uses these to link to other videos he's made. He set up a kind of choose your own adventure allowing viewers to think about different answers to questions and each answer has it's own video.

I thought this was an awesome way to get students thinking and set out to try it myself. But as it turns out, these hotspots don’t work on mobile devices, including iPads. We're in the midst of becoming a 1:1 iPad school, so I don't want to rely on cool internet features that I know won't work on mobile devices.

After some though, I realized I could create the same sort of effect using either Keynote or Tumult Hype. Once created I can drop them into an iBook as an interactive widget and my students will be able to actually grapple with questions in their book rather than simply being presented with the answers. Each solution has its own advantages and disadvantages. Here's the version I made with Hype (I'm not sure this link will work correctly) to use with my students.

One big advantage with Keynote is it is easy to work with and if you have a Mac you probably already have it. Keynote’s biggest disadvantage is there is no way to control the video once it starts in an iBook widget. The video starts and then runs to completion, no pausing or rewinding.

In Hype you do have the video controls. The other big advantage in Hype is you can embed YouTube videos. I don’t know of any way to have YouTube videos auto-play in Hype. As far as I know, there is currently no way to embed a YouTube video in a Keynote. Embedding YouTube videos means you must have internet access to view, but it keeps the iBook size down to manageable levels. Unfortunately Hype is not free. It costs $30, but if you're going to be making iBooks it might be worth it in the long run. Make sure you buy it through the Tumult Education Store to get the discounted price.

Instructions:

Make your Keynote Presentation "Links Only":

Keynote for Interactive Video:

Hype for Interactive Video:

Putting YouTube Videos in Hype:

Getting Started With 3D Printing - PLA vs. ABS

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 08:39:00 -0500

There are two main types of plastic used in most FDM printers, polylactic acid (PLA) and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS). ABS is the same plastic Legos are made from and PLA is a bioplastic typically derived from corn starch. I will not go into a lot of the technical differences, but will instead focus on the practical issues related to each type of plastic.

Each plastic has its own advantages and disadvantages. Most of the newest low cost printers available today will only print with PLA. In order to complete a successful print, the plastic must stick well to the print bed. Sometimes it may be beneficial to heat the print bed to 40-50°C for PLA. However, it is often not necessary and many commercially available printers designed to print with PLA do not have the ability to heat the print bed at all. ABS requires a heated print bed for parts to stick. It is necessary to heat the print bed to 110-130°C when printing with ABS. This is quite hot, remember water boils at 100°C.

There are other practical concerns related to both plastics to consider. ABS shrinks substantially more than PLA while cooling. This can often cause parts to warp. When a part warps the edges or corners lift off the platform. This can lead to a part becoming completely unstuck from the platform or even if it stays in place may be completely unusable. ABS also gives off some fumes while printing. They are not overwhelming, but they are noticeable. One of my colleagues has sever allergies and asthma and reacts to just about any type of smell or fumes in the air. She never had a problem with the ABS fumes in the room.

Since PLA doesn't shrink as much as it cools it is much less prone to warping and the finished parts are much closer to the intended dimensions. This difference often doesn't mean much. However, if you are printing something like a phone case it is much easier to design one that fits just right if you print with PLA rather than ABS.

Given the minimal shrinkage, lack of fumes, and no need for a heated bed you might be wondering why I'm even presenting a choice between ABS and PLA. PLA seems to be far superior in almost all respects. One factor to note, however, is it is far more finicky to print with. With PLA, if things are not perfect the printhead can become clogged. This is not a problem I've ever had with ABS.

I was so fed up with problems related to ABS that I've been printing exclusively with PLA for the last couple of years. For the 9 months, with my first generation Replicator, I have not been able to print something that takes more than an hour and a half before the print head jams. Often it jams much sooner. Newer printers may be more reliable, but I don't have experience to speak to that. Yesterday I switched back to ABS and was able to do a two hour print of a comet and a five hour print of a fossil skull with no problems. For my printer I may switch over to mostly ABS and just print in PLA when I need something that fits precisely.

While I'm talking about Plastic I should mention that both types should be stored in sealed containers. Over time they will both absorb moisture and this could cause problems while printing. I use a container designed for long term storage of food and I toss in some silica gel to absorb moister. The container I use was less than $15 on Amazon and will hold two spools of plastic. The other bonus with using containers for storage is it will keep your plastic relatively dust free. If dust accumulates on the filament it can cause the print head to become clogged.

Go Back to earlier parts in the series: Part 1, Part 4

More Fun With Keynote

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 10:13:00 -0500

After my last post I remembered I made a video last summer for the iBooks Author Hackathon that used Keynote as a video editor. In the video I show how to create a cool map with animated path effect. I thought I'd share it here.

The more I dig into what is possible in Keynote the more impressed I get.

Use Keynote (or PowerPoint) to Make Your Own Clipart

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 19:24:00 -0500

Last year I had the pleasure of seeing Andy Losik give a presentation where he used Apple's Keynote not to make cool presentations but instead as a photo and video editor. I was inspired by this and started to think about other ways to use Keynote and then I saw this article that included a bit on using PowerPoint to make your own royalty free clipart.

I immediately realized I could do the same thing in Keynote, so I decided to give it a try. As it turns out it was really easy. You can create some great clipart by using the simple shapes in Keynote and you'll never have to worry about Copyright or even Creative Commons attribution.

Once your figure is done, just select all the objects and Group them. The copy your figure and paste it where you need it. Your figure will be a PNG image with a transparent background. If you need to save your figure as an image file after you copy just open Preview and create a new image. A new image will be created with your figure in it already. Then just save and use as needed. Pretty cool.

Below are the figures I created one afternoon. Feel free to use them with a CC-BY-NC license, or just use them as inspiration to create your own.

Getting Started with 3D Printing - Jazz Hands

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Thu, 6 Nov 2014 07:42:00 -0500

In my last post I walked you through creating a relatively simple cell phone holder in Tinkercad. In this one I want to show you how easy it is to modify an existing design. You can do this with your own models or you can do this with ones you find online in places like the Thingiverse.

We're going to add a design to our phone case we made in the last post by importing an image in svg format. svg files can be imported, resized and extruded into 3D objects. I'm going to use a public domain image from Pixaby. I like Pixaby because all the images are public domain. They do have svg files available for download, however, I haven't had any luck importing their svg files into Tinkercad. Instead I find an image (png or jpg) I like and convert it using the Online SVG Image Converter. You'll want an image that is only black and white (literally black and white, not greyscale). If your image has any grays they will be treated as black when imported into Tinkercad. The image I chose has some grays, but I think it will look fine as black and white.

Basically you just import your svg file, resize it to fit, and the position it where you want it to go. You can either do this as a raised pattern or turn it into a hole and use it as a recessed pattern. You can find full directions in the Google Presentation below.

Go Back to earlier parts in the series: Part 1, Part 3 or go on to Part 5

Subversive Professional Development

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Sun, 26 Oct 2014 09:09:00 -0500

This year I have a new job. I'm still at Divine Child High School, but now I am overseeing our 1:1 iPad initiative. This year all of our freshmen have iPads. Next year it will be freshmen and sophomores and we will keep adding a class a year till the entire student body is 1:1. I'm not planning on going into any of the technical details nor do I plan on starting a debate about the best device for a 1:1 deployment. I want to talk about the educational side of my new job.

Besides being responsible for the technical aspects I'm also responsible for staff professional development. I want to share one of the projects I've been helping with. Most of our 9th graders take a class we call Integrated Science. The teachers of this class has never been particularly satisfied with the textbook offerings from the big publishers. So I convinced them to look at what ck-12 has to offer.

ck-12 makes free Creative Commons textbooks. More importantly they allow teachers to take the different materials and assemble them in any way they see fit. So, basically you get to create the textbook you want to match the course you're teaching. Not only can you take the ready made materials, you can also go in and edit them. It's a great way to get started making your own textbooks without having to start from zero. I was able to convince the two Integrated Science teachers to use ck-12 rather than buy a new iPad ready textbook for this year.

I used to teach the course years ago, so I offered to help. ck-12 doesn't really seem to have a way to collaborate very easily so we split the content up. We made a different book for each unit, downloaded as ePubs and put them into an iTunes U course for distribution. Included in each unit in iTunes U are all the other documents and assignments students might need.

From the teaching standpoint having a textbook you made yourself is awesome. However, one problem is you don't have all the associated support materials assembled for you already. For this we are using Google Drive. We have a folder called "Integrated Science Teachers Manual" where we put in the unit overviews and skills/standards and such.

I volunteered to create the first unit for a couple of reasons. The first is that I know a lot more about Astronomy than either of the other teachers, but I also wanted to create a model for them to see what was possible. I tried to make the first unit as student centered as possible with assignments designed to make students use their iPads as both learning and content creation tools.

I call it Subversive Professional Development because the teachers involved have had to get much better at using Google Drive, they've had to learn to build a course in iTunes U, and have had to learn more about the possibilities afforded by having a room full of iPads, all without any formal training sessions. They've also gotten a chance to see how open ended student centered assignments can drive education. My next goal is to track their progress and see if they can keep this up through the rest of the school year.

One of the best parts about this whole process is I've heard from some of the other teachers that they may want to do the same thing once their students have iPads. Needless to say, I am very excited by this prospect. Some teachers in my building are beginning to see that they themselves can dictate their curriculum and use a textbook to support that curriculum rather than the other way around.

Getting Started with 3D Printing - Lets make something

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Sat, 25 Oct 2014 10:29:00 -0500

OK, it’s been a couple of weeks since my last post. I’ve decided to do an instructional post to break things up a little. One of the projects I had my physics students work on last year was an engineering/design problem. I simply asked them to create an accessory for their cell phones. This idea was not original to me, but I honestly can’t remember where I got it from.

In order to actually make their own accessories my students needed some sort of program to create a 3D model. Our school doesn’t currently have drafting or CAD classes, so I was left with only a few options. We have no CAD software and even if we did, my students wouldn't know how to use it.

I settled on cloud based solution, Tinkercad, for my students. Tinkercad is very simple, which also means it lacks many functions you’d expect in a traditional CAD program. It is also run in the cloud so it can be slow at times, but on the plus side if your computers have Chrome there is also nothing to install. This can be a huge plus in an educational environment. I use Tinkercad at least in part for almost all my 3D printing projects.

The basic idea behind Tinkercad involves building models by joining together simple shapes. Shapes can either be solids or holes. It seems like this would be a difficult way to create anything, but as it turns out you can create some very useful models with this very simple idea.

I originally found this phone stand on Thingiverse. I like it because it holds the phone up a little higher than most of the ones I've seen. I'll show you how easy Tinkercad is to work with by recreating it. We'll talk about the phone case in a future post.

If you have students create accounts for Tinkercad please steer them away from using their Facebook or Twitter accounts. In the past I've had a few students create accounts at home using their Facebook credentials. We block Facebook, so they were unable to access their accounts at school.

Go Back to earlier parts in the series: Part 1, Part 2, or go on to Part 4

Getting Started with 3D Printing - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Sun, 5 Oct 2014 08:49:00 -0500

This is part two in my ongoing series of articles on 3D printers for the classroom. Click here for part one.

I don't know about you, but I have virtually no training in 3D modeling software. How should a classroom teacher start with their new 3D printer? Personally, when my printer arrived I spent a lot of time looking for cool designs online. The main repository I used and still use is the Thingiverse.¹

The best way to start with your new printer is to find some models that other people have created and printed successfully and print them your self. There are lots of great ones to choose from. Some of which are simply models for demonstration while others may be tools or puzzles. My printer came with two spools of plastic. I burned through them and called it professional development. I really did learn a lot from this. You should probably do the same thing. Print stuff because you think it might be fun, useful, or you just want to see how it prints. I think the nerd word for this is experiential learning.

The bottom line is, it doesn't really matter what you print. Print small stuff, big stuff, stuff with lots of small details, stuff with overhangs. Start with the default settings on your machine, then change them to see how it affects the final print. This will begin to give you a sense for what you can print and what you can't. I also kept a small scale handy so I could determine the mass of my prints and then figure out the material costs. If I buy a 1 kg spool of plastic for $48, then each gram of plastic used is 4.8 cents. So a 20 gram part costs about $1 in materials.

Don't worry if you'll never use these early prints in your classes. One of the first things I ever printed was a replacement cup holder for my Ford Focus. While it had nothing to do with teaching it did begin to show me the power of having access to a 3D printer. I also got my first experience with warping², a problem that plagued a lot of my early 3D printing.

During my learning process I did manage to print a few tools to be used for teaching, including a Macro Extension tube for my camera so I can take extreme closeups without having to buy a $400+ lens, an adapter to hold my iPhone to a telescope, an adapter for my Canon camera that works both with our telescope and our instructor microscope. But mostly I printed random stuff like an iPad sound reflector, games to play with my son, Higgs-Bosons, Pan Tail Duck call, and a bunch of other stuff.

If you feel you must print something useful try these:

Triangle "Missing Square" Puzzle: It's a good critical thinking exercise. Print one and play. You may have to do a little sanding to make it fit perfectly.
Wind Puzzle: Not sure if this one is a Bernoulli effect demonstration or some other fluid dynamics principal. Either way it's fun and my students love it.
Microscope Mount for iPhone 5: I modified an iPhone telescope adapter to work with our student microscopes. If it doesn't fit yours I'll teach you how to modify it in a future post.
One Small Step: Cool desk placard showing the first footstep on the moon on one side and the moon in relief on the reverse.
Lincoln Life Mask: The Smithsonian is starting to publish 3D models of their artifacts online. You can see how the presidency aged one of our greatest leaders.
Air Powered Rocket Car: This one presents good learning opportunities. It's the first one I printed that required "supports"³.

Back to Part 1 or Continue to Part 3.

Footnotes:
1. Now I should say that many people have philosophical objections to the Thingiverse. Thingiverse was started by Makerbot. Makerbot had it's origins in the Open Source Hardware movement. At some point Makerbot moved away from Open Source and was later bought by Stratasys, a large traditional 3D printing company. However you feel about Makerbot's abandonment of Open Source or their later acquisition, the Thingiverse is a great place to find cool models to make.

2. Warping can happen with larger prints. The corners of the print lift off the build platform. Sometimes the part will still be usable, but more often it will not and sometimes can lead to the whole print coming unstuck resulting in a completely failed print job. I'll talk about what to do to deal with warping in a future post.

3. FDM printers build from the bottom up. For some prints you will have parts that can not be printed because there is nothing below them to hold them up. Supports are typically a series of thin "walls" added below these areas, designed to be easily broken off the final print.

Getting Started with 3D Printing - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Thu, 2 Oct 2014 09:38:00 -0500

I’ve had a 3D printer in my classroom for a couple of years now and it is totally awesome. Last year I wrote a blogpost answering a question I received as a tweet. The question was, “What resources or designs do you wish existed for teachers/students when you got your printer?” I’ve decided to do a series of posts from an educator’s point of view to create the resource I wish I'd had when I first got my 3D printer.

There are a lot of emerging technologies that are capturing attention today. Of all of these, I think 3D printing has the most power to inspire students. I managed to get the first generation MakerBot Replicator a couple years ago and every time it’s running in the back of my classroom it acts as a student magnet. Some would just stand and watch a print run from start to finish if I’d let them. I have to say it is pretty awesome to watch an object get made seemingly out of nothingness.

When I got my printer, it cost just under $2,000. Today you can get a pretty respectable machine for under $500 and if you want to go into the $2,000 to $3,000 range you can get a really nice printer. If you’re in the market for one I would highly recommend picking up a copy of Make: Ultimate Guide to 3D Printing. The last two years Make Magazine has done a great rundown on the consumer grade 3D printers that are available. If I was going to buy a new printer, this is where I’d start.

The main thing you need to know, is there are two broad categories of 3D printers you might consider for your classroom, Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) and Stereolithography (SL). My printer does FDM so that’s what I’m familiar with and able to speak to. I really want to try SL, because it’s totally cool. The most common printers in classrooms today use FDM, but this may change in the future.

In a nutshell, Fused Deposition Modeling printers melt plastic and push it out through a nozzle like a hot glue gun. The nozzle in this case is much smaller and hotter than a glue gun, however. The printer builds the object up one layer at a time.

Stereolithography printers use a liquid resin. The resin solidifies when a light is shined on it. These printers also build an object one layer at a time, but the do so a bit differently. The light source in an SL printer will either be a laser that traces a path similar to an FDM printer or a DLP projector that will simply project an image of the whole layer at one time. Once the layer at the top of the liquid solidifies, the printer lifts the growing object and the next layer is illuminated.

If you’re looking for more resources to get you started I’d recommend:

Continue to Part 2 in the series.

Reflections from Blended Learning in the Classroom

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Sat, 26 Apr 2014 05:37:00 -0500

I've been taking an online course through REMC called Blended Learning in the Classroom. As a part of the required work are a number of reflections and such. I've not been blogging much lately, so I figured I'd share some of these reflections.

The Prompt: Share at least one reason why creating a collaborative community within the online portion of your learning environment is important.

I may get in trouble here, but I'm going to say that creating a collaborative community within the online portion of my learning environment is not important. In the past I would have agreed that an online community was important, but in going through the beginnings of this module I found my feelings changing. This is due partly to the readings and partly to reflection on my past experiences.

Building an online community of practice has been one of the things I have been struggling with since reading Brown & Adler (2008) 5-6 years ago. The best experience I ever had with this was years ago when I used Ning to create a social network for my physics classes. This was only a partial success at best. Only a small number of students, three out of 90, really joined the community. Those students truly got a lot out of our Ning. My other students would go in only to make the required posts and responses. The next year I had only one student who tried to engage in a meaningful collaborative community online.

While I don't believe there has to be an online collaborative community in a blended class I do believe every course should include a collaborative community. As pointed out by Misanchuk & Anderson (2014) both Vygotsky and Moore and Kearsley highlight to the importance of collaboration between students. Vygotsky contends, "All higher-order functions originate as the relationships among individuals.” While Moore and Kearsley contend that learner to learner interactions are just as important as learner to content or learner to instructor interactions.

There is no real reason why, in a blended environment, that a collaborative community could not be built in the face to face portion of the course rather than the online portion. It is important to create a strong community that fosters collaboration. If this can already be done within the four walls of the classroom why do we need to force it into the online portion of the class?

I think part of the problem I've had in the past relates to the fact that all of my students see each other every day at school. The online community has always been extra. Virtually all of the community building I would like to see happen online is already happening in the face to face portion of my classes, making the online portion a bit superfluous.

There may still be some benefits to shifting community to an online environment, however. It would allow all discussions to be archived, shy students may feel more free to speak up, and all students would be able to have a voice. However, when techniques like Modeling Discourse Management (Desbien, 2002) are employed many of these concerns can be addressed in the traditional classroom removing the need for an online community.

Brown, John Seely, & Richard P. Adler. (2008). “Minds of Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0.” EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (January/February 2008): 16–32 retrieved from: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0811.pdf

Desbien, Dawin. (2002). Retrieved from article.pdf

Misanchuk, Melanie, and Tiffany Anderson. (2014). "Building community in an online learning environment: communication, cooperation and collaboration." Abstract. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2014. Article.pdf

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Do I even need a Laptop Anymore?

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Fri, 24 Jan 2014 09:53:00 -0500

A bit of a rambling post for a snow day:

I realized the other day that I almost never carry my laptop to school anymore. It's not particularly outdated, but I usually just leave it plugged in at home. I now treat my laptop the way I used to treat my desktop and I use my iPad the way I used to rely on my laptop. This is kind of funny as I'm often told people don't use iPads to get work done in the real world. I do it all the time, but then maybe being a high school teacher doesn't qualify me as working in the real world.

I've been teaching for 14 years now and until recently I carried a laptop to and from school everyday. This has become unnecessary for me with the advent of cloud services like DropBox and iCloud. If I need something more than my iPad at work I sit at a desktop computer in my classroom. But for the most part I get my work done on my iPad.

I think the lack of iPad use for "Real Work" is less about capability than about comfort. Most people in the workforce today grew up with the traditional keyboard-mouse paradigm. I wonder if we'll see a shift in the next decade as tablet use continues to rise. For me I've gotten so used to working with my iPad that when I sit at a computer I have to be really careful when I type lest I fail to use apostrophes or forget to capitalize the first word in a sentence or personal pronouns.

I would say more than 90% of my current computing needs are met by my iPad and it's hard to justify luging around a laptop for that remaining 10%. A couple years ago I decided I'd never buy a new desktop computer. Now I'm not so sure. When my current MacBook dies I will be very tempted to replace it with a desktop computer with more power and a bigger screen than a comparably priced laptop and rely on a tablet (probably an iPad) for my mobile computing needs.

What does this mean for education? I don't really know. But I get really tired of people telling me we need to teach our kids for the world as it looks today. I simply don't care if most of the world currently uses Microsoft Word. Before the June 2007 most people only carried flip phones and the only smartphones business executives carried were made by Balckberry. Less than seven years later it's almost impossible to buy a phone that isn't a smartphone and almost none of them are Blackberries. We need to focus more on teaching students to be adaptable rather than teach them skills and hope the world doesn't change.

Image Credits: ipad.02.png from Mourgefile.com

Walking the Walk - Creating video for students with only an iPad

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Sun, 27 Oct 2013 06:41:00 -0500

Next year my school will begin it's 1:1 iPad program. We're starting slow with only the freshman class, so it will take us four years before we're totally 1:1. I've been tasked with helping get teachers ready for the flood of technology headed our way. One of the ways I've been doing this is through iTunes U courses for professional development. One of these is Flipping with an iPad.

I've been making videos to use with my students for years on my computer with Camtasia Mac using a Bluetooth Wacom tablet and Sankore for annotating on the screen. But these take me a while to make. A lot of this time is spent in the set up. I've been urging some teachers to lecture less in class and to use videos as replacements. I know lecture is not the best way to deliver content, but when starting a revolution we have to begin somewhere. So I decided to make a series of videos using only my iPad so I would have a much better idea of what was involved. I'll be adding all of my lessons learned to my iTunes U course.

I'll call these videos Quickcasts, not because they're short, but because I want to make them quickly. The goal for a 5-10 min video will be no more than 20-30 min from set up to upload. This first one took a bit longer than that, but future ones will go much quicker. I learned a lot getting it together. Here's how I did it.

Equipment:

Apps:

Explain Everything $2.99
Pinnacle Studio $12.99
iMovie $4.99 (or free with new device)
NodeBeat HD $2.99
YouTube Capture Free

I used Explain Everything to capture all the video and screen writing. I used the Notier stylus for annotating and drawing. I've tried many styluses and this one works best for me. Over the years I've become more of an audio snob with my videos, so I have to have a microphone. I used the Rode smartLav. This was the first time I used it, so I still have a bit to learn about proper placement and such. My next video should sound better. On a side note, I've also played with the microphone built into my iPhone ear buds, I'm not sure how much better the Rode microphone is.

I also used Explain Everything to create the intro clip. It was too slow so I wanted to speed it up. Unfortunately iMovie on my iPad 2 could only slow down the video, not speed it up. I'm not sure if newer iPads can speed up video or not. So I took the clip into Pinnacle Studio to double the speed. I could have finished the video here, but I wanted to gain some experience with iMovie on my iPad, so I took the clip back to iMovie. All of our teachers already have iPads with iMovie.

The intro music was created in NodeBeat HD. This is a fun little app that I picked up a couple years ago while it was free. Moving audio around on an iPad can be problematic, but I was able to email the file to myself from NodeBeat and then import it to my project in iMovie. I could have used GarageBand to create the intro as well. Then I rendered the video to my camera roll and used YouTube Capture to upload. It is possible to upload directly from iMovie, but I also wanted the saved video file to drop into my iTunes U course anyway.

Next time I will position my microphone differently so the levels won't be too high. The intro clip with music is done so I'll just reuse it again. I may also spend a little more time prepping slides in Explain Everything so the video itself can be shorter. While nice at times, students don't need to watch me write every word on the screen in real time.

A question about 3D printers in education

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Fri, 2 Aug 2013 07:34:00 -0500

I was recently asked a question about my 3D printer:

This ended up being very thought provoking on multiple levels and as with all thoughts I have like this I thought I’d share them here.

Through serendipity about a year and a half ago I found I had unspent grant money that needed to be spent. As I’d made a few big rounds of purchasing for my classroom lately I felt I pretty well supplied. So I decided to take my largess and spend it on a Makerbot Replicator. I entered into this technology purchase in the worst possible way. Here was a big tech purchase and I really had no specific educational outcomes in mind and yet with a tool with the promise of this one I feel no regrets on that score.

So, back to the question. What resources do I wish I’d had? I wasn’t quite sure what Matt meant and I’ve decided to not ask for clarification on this question, but to answer it a few different ways. A few of these wishes have since been met, I’ll point out the resources where appropriate. I’ll also add in the resources I’m glad I had.

What resources do I wish I had before I purchased my 3D printer?
I wished I had a good breakdown of all the entry level 3D Printers available on the market created by a third party (that is to say, not marketing material for any one printer). Personally I spent a lot of time on the internet searching before finally settling on Makerbot. Now, of course, there is the Make: Ultimate Guide to 3D Printing and they’re now working on an update to this guide. I’d add that I’d like to see one of these done by educators to see what they’d predict they’d see in a school environment with the different machines. This team should include some dedicated industrial ed teachers as well as core content teachers who might use 3D printed objects in their curricula.

Another thing I would like to see is some sort of article or set of articles that could be used to justify the expense of such a machine in the classroom. These could be used to help sway a school’s administration into investing in such a device. Inspired by the question I will try to create such an article in a future post.

Now, once I had my printer what resources do I wish I had?

First on this list would be easy to use software to run my 3D printer. For those not familiar with 3D printers, you need a piece of software that will take the 3D model file to create the tool paths for the machine to follow. This one has been solved for the Makerbot with Makerware. I’m not sure if Makerware will work with other 3D printers or not. Makerware offers very easy default options, but also gives the more advanced user more control. These advanced features are mostly hidden from novice users which really is a good idea. With the advent of Makerware my Makerbot became much easier to use and more versitile.

Next on this list would be an easy to use CAD program. I teach physics and electronics with micro-controllers. Neither of which have much time built in that could be used to teach CAD (even Sketchup). This problem has also been solved for me in a couple of ways. The first of these is a service called TinkerCad. TinkerCad runs in the cloud and requires no software install (always a bonus in schools). It allows you to easily create 3D models and export them as *.stl files ready for printing. Note, there are actually lots of options now. TinkerCad is my favorite though.

Another option that occurred to me last year was OpenSCAD. OpenSCAD allows you to create 3D models programatically. This is not something I plan to teach to my physics students, however. The power here is that like any program you have variables. So you can create or find a good model and then let students explore how changing variables can change the underlying model. My students were able to investigate how changing the parameters of a wind turbine affected the output voltage while possessing no 3D modeling skills. We created and tested 20 different designs. The designs were all created in only two class periods, one each for my two sections.

I would also have liked more nuts and bolts advice and knowledge on operating my printer and the problems I might encounter. To some degree it really is impossible to put together a resource that covers all the potential pitfalls, but I had to fumble around quite a bit. The biggest issue I had to overcome was the warping of parts. This happens for particularly large parts as they cool. The can pull away from the build platform and distort the part or even come loose ruining the print run. The “Helper Discs” that appeared in the example menu in Makerware have helped me immensely with this problem. While there is some overlap, the needs of a Maker are often much different than the needs of a teacher.

The final thing I wished I had when I got my 3D printer was a good idea of how to leverage the power of this device to enhance my teaching. I know it’s a bit ironic, this is exactly what I said I didn’t have and didn’t really care about when I started this post. What I’m still looking for are really cool design projects I can use with my students to tie together what we’re learning with real world applications and critical thinking. To some degree this has been solved a bit with the Makerbot Curriculum page, but I’m still not satisfied here. Now that I've discovered the power of OpenSCAD, a whole range of potential projects has become available as well.

Bottom Line?
Some of the things I wished I had are now available but a few are still lacking and might never really exist:

Breakdown of best 3D printer in an educational environment. Ideally created by educators (and their students)
Articles to be used to support an educator in the purchase of a 3D printer.
Cool design project ideas to be used in conjunction with core content classes.
Nuts and Bolts guide for teachers on how to use and trouble shoot problems.

Re-thinking Professional Development

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Tue, 21 May 2013 04:45:00 -0500

Photo by Sean MacEntee CC-BY

How do you train a teaching staff in the use of iPads in teaching? Or better yet, how do you help a staff see how their teaching can be transformed from a traditional model of instruction to one that leverages the power of technology to place the student at the center of the learning? We've begun investigating the move to a 1:1 iPad program at Divine Child High School. For those in our community who may have found this post we're looking at starting with only the freshmen in 2014. So, we won't be fully 1:1 for a number of years yet. I've been asked to head up the whole program. My immediate goal is to make sure we have everything in place to ensure things go smoothly when the first class of iPads arrive in 2014.

Why wait so long? Why not start this fall? Inertia, it takes time to change practice. I want to get the staff development piece right. Step one, all of our teachers will have an iPad in their hands before they go home for the summer. Familiarity will go a long way I know, but where do I go from there? My assistant principal keeps asking me how many PD days I need next year. I really don't want to try working with a room full of 60 people at a time. That's a recipe for disaster.

My current plan, assuming I can get our administration on board, is to flip our PD and faculty meetings. I saw an awesome talk at MACUL this year by +Fred Sitkins and +Rebecca Wildman. They outlined how they've transformed professional development in their school. I'm planning on stealing all their ideas. You can find out all about what they've done on their site or in their iTunes U Course. I highly recommend checking them both out! You should also follow Fred (@fsitkins) and Rebecca (@rebeccawildman) on twitter.

In a nut shell they've gotten rid of traditional faculty meetings. Staff are expected to replace that time commitment with time spent working with their PLNs. Stuff that would be in a normal faculty meeting is delivered via video and teachers watch when they have time. PLNs find times to meet that are convenient and may be face to face or online in the evening. One member of each PLN reports out each month to the school improvement committee on the progress of the PLN. This is self directed professional development that is fully differentiated to meet the learner (i.e. the teachers) where they are!

The best part of this whole model is it is exactly what we keep saying our classrooms should look like. Not only could this be a more effective way of doing PD, it also models good teaching strategies to use with our students. The other thing I like about this model is it is rooted in professionalism and trust. It will only work if the teachers involved act like professionals and the administration trusts teachers to do their jobs. In the traditional model we try to ensure participation by requiring seat time in meetings. The problem with this is seat time does not equal participation. Compliance is not the same thing as engagement. It often looks professional, but that doesn't mean it is.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be sketching out my plan on how to implement this form of PD. I'll try to share my thoughts here as I move forward.

iBooks Presentations from #MACUL13

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 07:06:00 -0500

I think I may have finally recovered from the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning annual conference. As usual I was pretty busy. I ended up being involved in two different presentations, which always take a lot out of me.

Both of the presentations I was involved in were focused on the use of iBooks Author to create textbook replacements. Yes, I understand this limits me to the iPad only, but really, I don't care. I thought I'd post a quick summary including links from both talks.

Innovating with iBooks Author and Pages

This was a talk I gave with my very good friend Serge Danielson-Francois (Library Ninja). Serge and I complement each other perfectly. I tend to be frenetic and get going on an idea with a focus that can sometimes get me way off agenda. Serge on the other hand always has the long view and can help keep things moving in the right direction.

Anyway, I typically don't use PowerPoint or an alternative. I tend to present from an outline and jump between webpages and applications. You can find our complete outline and all of our links on the Google Site I set up for the presentation. When we both started the year we had a vision of how we'd use iBooks Author and what our "textbooks" would look like. This really became an exercise in reflection on our teaching. We shared our original vision and then how this has changed over the course of the year. If you'd like to see the original vision you can check out an article we wrote for the MACUL Journal, look on page 26.

Serge's vision changed the most. He originally envisioned having his journalism 2 and 3 students create a textbook for his first year students. Awesome idea! However, he's learned that journalism today is a moving target and those things that don't change rapidly are things his students would have difficulty teaching. Things like avoiding the easy headline and digging deeper to the real story. In short how to think like a journalist. He now sees his students creating a portfolio of how stories were covered this year. It will be more of a resource for the future editors of the school's online paper.

Join the iBooks Author Collaborative

I was a co-presenter with Tony DiLaura, a great guy from Zeeland Public Schools. This was the kickoff session for the upcoming iBooks Hackathon! In June we will be inviting teachers to come and learn iBooks Author and hopefully partner up with other educators to create high quality resources for use by students around the state (and beyond). We will be running basically the same session on both sides of the state. On the west side of the state we will be hosted by Kent ISD and on the east side by Wayne State University.

What we really want to do is get teachers working together collaboratively to create pieces of iBooks. This could be good text, graphics, interactive widgets, videos or other cool stuff I haven't thought of. All of these pieces could be then archived in a way that other people could take them and create custom books for their own students. However, we're running this as more of an edcamp like idea, so if our participants have a different vison then we'll go in a different direction. The big ideas are:

Create resource to support the way individual teachers teach
Collaboration: "Many hands make light work"
Collaboration: Lets learn from each other. I would love to find someone who could teach me new skills or offer me better ways to reach my students.
Share what we've made: If what I do will help other educators that would be great. I know I have skills that others don't. If I make my stuff available then they don't have to have those skills.

Interested? Wondering how you can get involved?

Goto our Hackathon Website for more information and to register. We are charging $30 because the number of people we can accomodate is limited and we want to help ensure those that register actually show up. (plus we're providing lunch)
Join our Google+ Community. We currently have people from around the state and as well as other people who've found us.

Papert's Gears

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 06:27:00 -0500

Week two of Learning Creative Learning is all about formal vs. informal learning. We started with a reading of Seymour Papert's essay, "Gears of my Childhood". It focused on his fascination with gears that started very early in his life (when he was two) with gears and how this fascination played out through his formal education. We were tasked with writing about on object from our own childhood that interested us.

I really struggled with this. I don't know that I had a similar object/experience when I was very young. In fact I find it very difficult to remember much from that time. This probably points to the fact that I didn't have any really powerful experiences like Papert's when I was very young.

The closest experience I have with an object from my childhood was the Franklin Ace 1000 computer we got in 1982, when I was 11. The Franklin Ace was a clone of the Apple II+. My brothers and I had been begging for a computer. When ever we went to K-Mart we would immediately go to the computer section of the store. Yes, K-Mart really did sell personal computers. We would play with them and write simple programs to fill the screen with things like, "Steve is COOL" or "My Brother SUCKS!" on infinite loops and then walk away. I later learned that my parents made a decision not to take the family to Florida that summer and instead to buy us a computer. From that point on I've always had a computer in my house and computers (or similar devices) have been at the center of how I work and play.

This was an incredible thing to own. We could run cool games, but more importantly I could use it to write computer programs. Now, I never really ever wrote any really complicated programs on this computer. I think I never had the sort of persistence required to do that. Maybe if I'd had badges ;). Just having it there being able to type in programs from computer magazines and see them run really gave me a sense of accomplishment. I wrote, or copied, a program and I cause something to happen on the screen. It really was kind of awesome.

It was obvious, even in the 80s that computers were going to be very important in the future. In retrospect I'm very glad that my parents chose the computer over the vacation. They were really investing in the futures of their three children. Today my older brother is an engineer, my younger brother is the Director of Technology at a high school, and I'm a physics teacher who relies on computers and the Internet as an integral part of my teaching and learning.