Happy Holidays!

I just want to wish everyone well, have a great holiday and a Happy New Year!

Peace

Gesture Based Learning through the Kinect

     Gesture based computing in the classroom refers to using devices that can track movements for the purpose of teaching a concept or skill. Devices that use gestures include the iphone/ipad/ipod or any other tablet/touch device, and motion sensor platforms like the Wii or Kinect. According to the horizon report, in 4-5 years gesture based learning should be a part of the classroom of the future. Development of applications is still in progress, however, some schools are starting to use devices like the kinect to engage and teach their learners.

      As I started to do research about the kinect for one of my classes, I couldn't help but be excited about the potential of the applications for learning. Students can maniuplate objects in a virtual world. In the science classroom, student could do physics type activities where they can "throw" objects or "push and pull" them and take measurements based on their own physical movements. They could "zoom in" on objects or living things to "see" the complexity of the molecules that make them up such as zoom in on a human and seeing the different layers of an organ from the tissue to the cells. There are many applications that could be develop for other content areas such as math, social studies, english, and the arts.

      I made a short video below that discusses the ways motion sensor computing could be used. It includes more examples of how the kinect can be used. I also created a "glog" website about using the kinect in the classroom and includes applications for special needs and literacy.

Now we need people out there to develop learning applications with these devices. 

I really want a kinect now! :)

Resources-

The Kinect Effect Video- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_QLguHvACs

The Horizon Report- http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2011/sections/gesture-based-computing/

The Flipped Classroom Case Study

Here's a blog/vlog about the flipped classroom. The flipped classroom is newer concept in education that involves taking the lecture part of class and making it homework by having students watch it via vodcasting at home. Then they have more time in class to do activities and projects and more time for one on one teacher time. I had heard about it through some teachers on my twitter feed and would like to try it out next school year. I made a presentation discussing what it is and the advantages and disadvantages of the flipped classroom. I consider it to be an innovation in teaching. Would you use the flipped classroom?

Check it out-

My Personal Learning Environment and Networks Exposed!

     
        Having a personal learning network has allowed me to learn from others from around the world and share ideas. My personal learning network that I started to develop at the end of summer has grown significantly. When trying to diagram these connections, I knew I wanted to separate the networks and environments into general categories. When I checked out the EdTechPost’s wiki that shows others PLN diagrams, I was a little overwhelmed by some of them. There are so many connections people have made and it was hard to follow some of them. I liked the ones that were simplified, yet still represented their connections without going into arrow overkill. 

      Martin Weller’s diagram is nice because it categorizes the networks. I also liked the use of the logos/pictures, it makes it visually friendly and the fact that he is part of the center of it all demonstrates that all of these tools make up what how he learns and stays connected. I also liked Chris Dukes PLN with the circles crossing each other. Many of the tools that are out there are not just used for one purpose, but can cross categories and his diagram represent’s this. So after checking out the EdTechPost’s wiki, it seems my PLN diagram would fit under user/action oriented because those seem like they are based more on categorization of the networks and how the tools are used.

      So far I find my personal learning network sufficient for me. However, I would like more people join these networks that relate to my field, especially people who teach science to my demographic of students. It would be nice to get different perspectives and relate to others who share what I go through each day trying to teach science to students who are not at reading level and are from low-income families. It would be great if the teachers I worked with would embrace networking so we have more “eyes” searching the world for ideas. For now, I have been getting better at finding sources for information and for entertainment as well.

          When I first started to develop my diagram, I was thinking of just having myself in the center and my networks shooting of it. However, as I started to think about how I use these tools, I realized that for me, it’s not that simple. That many of them are related to not just how I learn, but how I share. I considered this collaboration, learning from others and others learning from me to reach our goals of improving our practices of teaching. So I changed how I set up my diagram and included a Venn diagram (I actually did this before I noticed Dukes circles) to represent how these tools relate to each other. I also felt it would be nice to include a snapshot of how I use some of these tools. It helps with preventing the “arrow” overkill I mentioned earlier. I think some people just list every single thing they use and how they use it, I thought about providing examples. However, now I am going beyond just showing connections on a diagram, so I thought I would make this into a video that represented the ways I network. I used prezi to set up the diagram and just showed snapshots of networking in action. So check out the video above and I also have the diagram in prezi to view, but it doesn’t have the “snapshots” of my networking in action. But if you click on it and zoom out you can see the whole diagram as one. It was fun to make this!

My PLN on Prezi

Curation Exploration 2.0

     
My paper.li sites:
"Physics stuff"
"Strauss' Ed and Tech News"  
"Strauss Science and Health News" 
     
        Curation is a great way to find "stuff" online that has been recommended by others. One of the resources I enjoy pulls content from my twitter feed and curates it on the paper.li curation site. The most popular links are posted in a newspaper format that allows one to not only see those links, but get a visual representation of them from the pictures within the article of website or a short summary of the article giving the reader an idea of what the page is about. Another great thing about curation is being able to organize all of this information by topic. I have a topic about science news (and I added health to the title since it also had a bunch of health articles) and I have a topic about educational technology to keep up with the latest trends in 21st century teaching resources. I share my newspaper on twitter for others that may be interested in the topics I post.

         I chose to try a different curation tool called scoop.it. I have heard raves reviews of this site from some of my classmates, but never took the time to use it. However, this week I have finally started to use it and I must say I am enjoying my experience. Scoop.it is different from paper.li in that it let's you use tags and searches many different sites for content. Then it let's you chose the content you want to post onto your topic page. The process is not automatic like paper.li. This allows the person to personally choose each topic that is posted. Paper.li just added a feature that let's you choose articles to post, but they still post other articles from your twitter or Facebook feed. Paper.li is also limited to twitter, facebook, or rss feed. Scoop.it searches many other sites along with twitter like google sites, digg, and youtube. It expands the amount of information you get. 

        When I started to use paper.li I thought that it could be used with students to allow them to find resources to blog about or do research on. However, it is hard to control what information is posted. I have found that some of the information would be at too high of a level for my students or it some could be considered inappropriate for their age (for example since I have biology on there, there were some articles about sex, not pornography or anything, but dealt with science of sex type of things). With scoop.it you could control everything that shows up and so you can filter out inappropriate topics. So this site would be better to use with students. Plus I think it's more visually friendly for the students with the pictures and previews of the videos posted. 

       Overall, I think I will use it to save the resources that I find on scoop.it and "rescoop" them to my page and maybe share some to twitter of Facebook if I think they are really useful or just plain cool. I can also use it to find topics relevant to what I am teaching in class and to give my students resources for research or interest. I do not think I would have them curate for class just because they may pick inappropriate content to post, but I can certainly suggest they use it for themselves. I will most likely just use it to save information I find through scoop.it and occasionally content I find on my own. 

       I think paper.li and scoop.it both have great advantages. Paper.li is nice for summarizing topics from twitter since it's hard to keep up with like 500+ tweets a day. And scoop.it is great for a more personalized curation experience. I have also discovered the "lists" feature in twitter which allows me to group the people I follow by topic, so I can still catch tweets from those who have not posted an article or other resource. For example, I have a list of just science teachers, one for ed tech, another for entertainment, one for news, and another for friends. I have about 9 lists total and it let's me check out what I want to check out without feeling overwhelmed by the 126 people I follow. Curation overall is a great way to keep all of this information organized and allow you to see what you want to see instead of sifting through a bunch of random articles. 

So speaking of curation, I thought I would post a video I found through scoop.it via Karen (my professor, check her page out- Innovations in e-Learning ) and it's about...you guessed it...curation! ;-)

Prezi instead of powerpoint....

I made a prezi on symbiotic relationships in ecology. I thought I would make one to make the notes more engaging in class. Instead of just going through powerpoint slides, the animation of the prezi makes the topic seem more interesting with it's zooming features. I did get the opportunity to use it in class. The students were intrigued by something different. A couple of students said it was "raw" (that means cool from what I have gathered). When I presented this, I would ask them questions about the pictures and discuss how the examples related to the pictures. Then ask them if they could think of other examples. My favorite part is the video with the ants and fungi. They are usually grossed out at first by it, but then they can't stop watching the fungi attack the ants (you have to check it out!). That video then brings up more questions from them about the fungi, they usually ask if people can be infected the same way (as far as I know, it does not affect humans, the fungi is species specific). Here's the prezi-

Symbiotic relationships on Prezi

After the notes I showed a short video showing more examples of these relationships, I tell them to see if they can identify the relationships we just discussed in the notes. It's a trick question, the whole video deals with mutualism. Here's the video for that.

The next day I had them make a collaborative powerpoint finding describing each relationship and finding more examples of the relationships. They did the powerpoint through google docs. 

Here's are a few samples (note this was their 2nd powerpoint they did for me, and there may be several spelling errors (we're still working on citations, one thing at a time), but I thought I would leave it "authentic")

Group 1

Group 2

I like prezi for making presentations more engaging. You have to get used to the process and how to use the tools within prezi, but it's easy once you get it down. The only thing I wished I could do was make the video full screen, the video is small on the board, and also get the ad off of the video. You also have to be careful and not go zoom crazy, otherwise you may cause some seizures :-)

Resources-

www.prezi.com

www.youtube.com

google.docs.com

Education in the Future

It’s sometimes hard to imagine what the year 2025 will be like when 5 years ago if you told me I’d have a phone that has internet, touch screen, and Facebook on it, I would have thought you were radical. Of course, now you can’t go anywhere it seems without seeing these mobile devices. I think it would be interesting to re-read these predictions in the future to see how accurate they are.

In a post by Blake-Ploch, he suggests that in the future typical school items like desks, homework, standardized tests, paper books, and even paper itself will be obsolete in the schools of the future (2011). I think some aspects of education will be better off without these things, but depending on the school, I don’t know if all of this would happen in 15 years. If schools do not have the resources or organization to implement technology in the schools, then the current ways of teaching will still be around. Even at my school, we had a 1:1 laptop grant, but it fell through partly because teachers weren’t using them or did not use them the “right way”. So with the laptops that we did receive we were going to just divide them up into class sets and share them in our departments. They had all summer to do this, and yet I still do not have these laptops. It’s like the right idea is there, but if people do not know how to efficiently run things, then it stays an idea and doesn’t become action. To me this is a small scale example, it seems like my school cannot be the only school with this issue.

                So if I were to make my own assumptions on how the learning environment should look in the future, first I would predict that there would be no more textbooks. That content will either be in the format of an “e-book” or students will find content by searching for it. They will be able to find videos showing them the concept they are learning within the reading or by searching for it. I have read a little about “semantic” searching which gives search results not just based on text, but based on meaning, I see this being the norm in the future which will enable students to find “better” information.

 The setup of a classroom should be designed to allow students to collaborate with each other more effectively, no more rows of desks. I read an article that even suggests classrooms should have couches and coffee tables instead of desks, making the learning environment more comfortable. While that may seem farfetched, it would be nice to see. I currently have my classroom arranged in tables where students sit in groups of 4 and they face each other in their groups. Unless I get couches in the future, I think this is something that I would keep, having students sit in groups versus rows of desks.

Future classroom setting?
From learningspacedesign.wikispaces.com

In the future, students will work together to solve problems about world issues, there will be less independent work focused on memorizing facts. Games will be used to help students learn the basics of the different subjects. Many games will be “social” so students will compete against each other or work together to reach a goal. There will be more “virtual reality” and simulation activities to teach students basic concepts. The teacher standing in front of the classroom giving notes will no longer be effective. The teacher will give directions and let the students explore the world using the technology they have.

However, with all of this technology and students being glued to computers, I believe that there will be some techniques that will stay. Lab activities will still be part of the science classroom. You can run simulations of labs on the computer, but I believe it is not as fun as doing the real thing. The types of labs may change, such as the growth in biotechnology, and labs may be incorporated with technological tools. But to extract one’s DNA, you simply have to do it in real life to see how your genes match up with everyone else’s in the class. Demonstrations and doing live chemical reactions will also still be part of my classroom. You can watch a video of a cool reaction, but doing it with the students is better. Even now if I show a reaction on youtube, students will ask if I or they can do it in class. The fun of hands-on science will still be around in the future in my opinion.

I wonder how the institution of schools will look like not just as a teacher, but as a future parent. Ken Robinson has a great talk about how we need to change the whole educational paradigm. That schools should not be “factory” based, but places where their creative minds can learn about the world and come up with new ideas (video below). I do not see schools themselves being radically different in 15 years, mainly because of money and lack of training to teachers about these technologies. Some schools that are in communities with strong economic backgrounds may take the lead in pushing this new way of teaching and learning. And teachers who go out of their way to get the training will be taking the lead as well. But if schools cannot afford to implement technology or the students do not get technology at home because they cannot afford it, then these changes will be slow. Hopefully technology will be cheaper for schools to handle.

Changing the paradigm-

Schools will always be around, the role of a teacher may change, but in the end there will always be a place for young people to learn. We as teachers need to recognize the need for creativity in learning not just for our students, but for ourselves. We have to be the leaders and show other teachers that 21^st century skills are different than the 19^th century skills we still teach. I work with some teachers that say “well if a student comes to school, takes notes, and studies them, then they will do well in school”. Sure they will do well in the current setting we have, but I think we need to redefine what “do well” means. Spitting out facts is not as important as learning how to find the answers and figure out solutions to the problems we all face in the world, I hope to see this in 2025.

References

Blake-Plock, S. (March 2, 2011). 21 Things that will be Obsolete by 2020. Retrieved from http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/03/21-things-that-will-be-obsolete-by-2020/

 RSA (poster). (2010, Oct) RSA-Animate- Changing Education Paradigms by Ken Robinson. [Video] Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html