Sir Ken Robinson extravaganza

I've been a fan of Sir Ken Robinson for a while. He's just updated his web site and has a number of videos on his site which are all examples of digital stories of our time, and the time of the near future for our students. Here are a couple that have some appeal ...

1. Trailer for Lord Putnam's new film



2. Speech to Hammer Museum at UCLA about his book "The Element" in Jan 2009 (1 hr 20 mins)



3. Q TV Interview about The Element (17 mins)



4. 6 minutes of student interview at the London International Music Show 2008.
(If you last to the end, the girls have their own reflections on what SKR had to say, and about their "education" and music. [There are no wrong ways ...]



Thanks for sharing your ideas, Sir Ken.

New Streaming Video for Schools

Over 90% of the bandwidth used at my school is accounted for by streaming video. There is no doubt that streaming video is a powerful learning tool, but there are also huge diversions available to students in this environment. So, it is with great interest that I followed the link to http://www.watchknow.org/ that I received in a recent ISTE email.

This site looks to deliver what I have been looking for for a long time - an organised way of getting access to some of the rich content on the likes of Youtube and Google Video without all the junk. I'll quote from the press release in the ISTE email ...

WIKIPEDIA CO-FOUNDER DESIGNS WIKI-STYLE DIRECTORY OF EDUCATIONAL VIDEOS FOR CHILDREN

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (Nov. 12, 2009) - Dr. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, has launched a new website designed to gather and organize educational videos for students ages 3 to 18.

The site, www.watchknow.org , launched in October and currently features more than 11,000 videos across 2,000 categories on subjects such as math, science and history. The nonprofit site features new software, specially developed for the site by Dr. Sanger, which allows wiki-style collaboration among users.

"Think of it as YouTube meets Wikipedia, filtering out everything but quality educational videos," says Dr. Sanger. "WatchKnow.org links together content from traditional sites, and also allows users of the site to improve the organization of the video categories, which makes finding the video you need much easier."

The site, which features videos from National Geographic, YouTube and Google Videos among others, took more than 18 months to develop and has been endorsed by educators from schools including Harvard, Stanford, Brigham Young and more. WatchKnow.org is designed to complement and enhance the traditional learning experience for students as they study concepts that are traditionally hard to learn."

So, I've created my account (free of course) and I look forward to both helping students and teachers explore it in the new year, and contributing to the community as well. WatchKnow.org is funded by the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi (CFNM), which has set the goal of offering more than 50,000 videos on the site by the end of 2010. The site offers tips for video searching, separate pages for students, parents and teachers, and a guide for contributors.

What are your best applications for use with students?

I wonder what are the applications that you use with students that make a difference for them? Here are some of the ones I use that students seem to enjoy.

Edmodo - terrific tool for managing a class in a "school sponsored bebo" (as one of my students called it) format. Nice functionality for handling assignments, polls etc. Students love it.

Voicethread - terrific tool for sharing all kinds of data from video to still images, with comments via a wide range of options.

Wikispaces - very easy way to get a web site up and running -the free ones for educators are a real bonus.

Google Apps - while very bandwidth hungry these tools offer great flexibility for collaboration and communication. Google Sites is the best aspect of this suite in my view.

Google Sketchup - what a fantastic 3D visualiser this is. A real favourite.

Delicious and Diigo - great tools - work well together.

iTunes - the best way of organising audio and video

Youtube - there is so much quality and education specific stuff that it is worth putting up all the rest of the rubbish that people want to share.

TED - you can always find really cool stuff here for use with students and staff.

Jing - screencasts and captures

Prezi - very cool presentation tool - makes an audience stay awake!

Aviary - awesome suite of online editing tools - students love Phoenix (photo editing) and Myna (Sony Acid lookalike) most.

Livebrush - very cool graphics program.

Google Earth - you can do so much with this great tool - always a favourite.

Pulse Smartpen from Livescribe - not a software tool per se, but a combo of a pen, microphone, camera and software. If only it had OCR ...

K12 Online Conference - not long now!

Now the dates for this are Nov 30 – Dec 17, but don’t panic – on the 30th one keynote talk gets posted, and you’ve got a week to watch it. Then over the 2 subsequent weeks a series of other videocasts/podcasts/ presentations are posted – and you can pick and choose how you want to watch/listen.


The rough schedule for what is on and which weeks is here http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=389 and you can watch the stuff either on the site here http://k12onlineconference.org/ or on the ning site here http://k12online.ning.com// [If you are not a ning member, sign up. This social networking tool is used by vast numbers of educators and students world wide – it is like facebook or bebo, only seems to have found a niche with educators].

If you want, you can gain a teaser of previous years k12 conferences – another power of the web is that the 2006, 2007 and 2008 conferences are still available here http://k12onlineconference.org// - just use the navigation on the rhs

Note that many/most of these presentations are available as a download – I generally download the iPod version and watch them on either my Ipod or iTunes on my laptop.

You gotta love the web – so many options...

How hard is it to sell a new idea?

Thanks to Ollie Bray for bringing this to my attention.

Awesome 3D Visualisation Tools

I had the pleasure today to spend a few hours with Brenda Fisk at nextspace looking at the new version 6 of Right Hemisphere's 3D visualisation software. In particular we looked in detail at the free DeepView Viewer product and the very impressive Deep Exploration Creator product. In particular, both were their new version 6 offerings. To be fair, I had spent a little time with the previous version, 5.7, but v6 is just awesome. Version 6 offers HDR (high dynamic range imaging) which offers unbelievable photographic realism, especially where lighting is a bit of an issue. I'll cover the Crreator product in more detail once I download the new version and can produce some HDR samples.

But the free DeepView Viewer also offers incredible functionality - on a wide range of image formats. I like the fact that it reads Sketchup files as we use this with many of our students. But what it can do with these files is just amazing. You can measure distances and angles, you can cross section, produce orthographic projections, line drawings and a whole hjost more. You can "pull apart" a 3D image created anywhere and label vaious parts - you can also comment on parts of the diagram and share these comments with others. There is another cool function - it embeds into MS Office products so that you can use the 3D viewer for any model that you have included in a Word, PowerPoint or Excel file - very, very cool.

The following images are from a standard house file grabbed from the Google 3D warehouse and opened within DeepView.

You can "pull apart" the model and look at how it was assembled in the first place.

You've got options to measure parts of the image.

DeepView is certainly a fantastic bit of code, very easy to use and affords some very cool functionality for students and teachers - in fact anyone wanting to visualise in 3D.

Seriously cool. Try it. Soon.

Why Social Networks Are Important

The power of visual story telling and the power of social networking. Why they both matter. In a simple presentation.

A colleague asked me recently for a reason she should sign up for a social networking site. The best response I could mutter was something along the lines "Well, this is why I use ...." and proceed to try and show how I find some social networks better (for me) than others.

Now, I've always liked the CommonCraft videos - they do a great job of explaining web related issues, and thanks to following CommonCraft on Twitter, I found this today - a great explanation of just why I find value in social networks. Wish I'd seen it before I tried to stumble over my explanation!

Smarter Work: Why Social Networks Matter

View more documents from Sacha Chua.

So, thanks Sacha!

TED India Live - See Hans Rosling and Pranav Mistry live!!!

Now - this should be very cool for anyone interested in data visualisation and the power of technology to increase learning opportunities. In my inbox from the great people at TED this morning

Dear TEDsters -
We're thrilled to announce that Day 1 of TEDIndia and the closing session on Day 3 will be webcast live, to the world, for free. The webcast is hosted by the Times of India, TEDIndia's online media partner.
On Thursday, the first day of the webcast, you can watch at ted.indiatimes.com (note that this page is not yet live).
Read more about the TEDIndia speaker program.
Webcast schedule (all times are India Standard Time , GMT+5:30):
Thursday, November 5
Session 1: Fast Forward -- 11am-12:45pm
Session 2: Not Business as Usual -- 2:15pm-4pm
Session 3: Wonder. Wonders. -- 4:45pm-6:30pm
Saturday, November 7
Session 9: Within You, Without You -- 11am-12:45pm
Want to watch the stream on your television screen? Download instructions for connecting your television to a Mac or a PC.

So, why am I excited about this? Two immediate reasons -the first is:
Hans Rosling is presenting in the first session. I have mentioned his awesome GapMinder web site and talks before. The opportunity to see him present his latest live just seems like any mathematicians or social scientists dream come true. His session is set to go at 11am Thursday 5th in Mysore India - so by my calculation this is 6.30pm Thursday evening NZ time.

The second is Pranav Mistry - Pranav is a student at MIT and is the brains behind a project that goes under the name Sixth Sense. If you haven't seen Pattie Mae's TED presentation earlier in the year then make sure you have a look at the video below - it'll give you an insight into the work.



Pranav's session is due for kick off around 12.15am Friday morning - so might be a bit of an ask - but if you're a night owl ...

And there are a host of other peple delivering inspirational talks too - you never know - you just might find something useful.

You can watch these at this site http://ted.indiatimes.com/ - it is not live yet.

Enjoy!