digital learning

Don’t rule out tvOS for some powerful learning experiences / new affordances [Christian]

On 02/26/2016, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, A/V -- audio/visual, adult learning, Apple, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, career development, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, communities of practice, computer science, content development, aggregation, repositories, convergence, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, digital video, distance education, education technology, educational games / serious games, elearning, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, flipping -- inverted learning, global / globalization, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, interactivity, internet, IT in HE, K-12 related, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, lifelong learning, multimedia, online learning, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, programming, second screen apps, training / L&D, universities, usability, user experience (UX), using teams, virtual field trips, virtual K-12 schools, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, vision/possibilities, web-based collaboration, webinars, workplace, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
Don’t rule out tvOS for some powerful learning experiences / new affordances. The convergence of the television, the telephone, and the computer continues…and is now coming into your home. Trainers, faculty members, teachers, developers, and others will want to keep an eye on this space. The opportunities are enormous, especially as second screen-based apps and new forms of human computer interfaces (HCI) unfold.

The following items come to my mind:

Online-based communities of practice. Virtual reality, virtual tutoring. Intelligent systems. Artificial intelligence. Global learning. 24×7, lifelong learning. Career development. Flipping the classroom. Homeschooling. Learning hubs. Online learning. Virtual schools. Webinars on steroids.

With the reach of these powerful technologies (that continue to develop), I would recommend trying to stay informed on what’s happening in the world of tvOS-based apps in the future. Towards that end, below are some items that might help.

Apple releases Apple TV Tech Talks video series for building better tvOS apps — by AppleInsider Staff

Excerpt:

Apple on Wednesday released to developers a series of videos focusing on Apple TV and its tvOS operating system, offering a detailed look at the underlying SDK, resources and best practices associated with coding for the platform.

Also see:

Apple publishes Apple TV Tech Talk videos for developers — from todaysiphone.com

Addendum on 2/26/16:

Apple Adds Multiple New App Categories to tvOS App Store — from macrumors.com by Juli Clover
Excerpt:
[On 2/25/16] Apple updated the tvOS App Store to add several new app categories to make it easier for Apple TV 4 owners to find content on their devices. As outlined by AfterPad, a site that showcases Apple TV apps, the new categories are rolling out to Apple TV users and may not be available to everyone just yet. Some users may only see the new categories under Purchased Apps until the rollout is complete.

Harvard’s new official tour app leverages augmented reality — from betaboston.com

New York Times showcases virtual reality technology — from browndailyherald.com by Harry August
Virtual reality, used to craft more immersive storytelling, risks providing less narrative context

Oculus preview event to highlight multiplayer games — from uploadvr.com

Woofbert are using VR to bring great art to everyone — from roadtovr.com by Kent Bye
Voices of VR Podcast – Episode #303

Woofbert VR

Microsoft developing video calling that projects people in front of yYou — from gadgets.ndtv.com by Robin Sinha

Facebook has created a new ‘Social VR’ team to explore how we’ll communicate in virtual reality — from businessinsider.com by Jillian D’Onfro

I planned out my last vacation in virtual reality — here’s what it was like — from Business Insider By Brandt Ranj

Augmented reality looks to future where screens vanish — from interaksyon.com by Glenn Chapman

VR And AR will be mobile’s demand driver, not its replacement — from techcrunch.com by Mike Hoefflinger

Excerpt:

Projections for the big players
If things go in this direction, here’s how it may play out for The Big Six:

Apple…
Google…
Facebook…
Samsung…
Sony…
Microsoft…

Addendum:

HTC Vive is launching, here’s what we know — from futurism.com
Leap Motion: Orion (video)
Reach into the future with Orion, Leap Motion’s new hand tracking software that’s built from the ground up for virtual reality.

5-minute film festival: Resources for filmmaking in the classroom [Borovoy]

On 02/22/2016, in A/V -- audio/visual, attention, collaboration, communications, creativity, design, digital audio, digital learning, digital photography, digital storytelling, digital video, education technology, engagement / engaging students, K-12 related, using teams, by Daniel Christian

5-minute film festival: Resources for filmmaking in the classroom — from edutopia.org by Amy Erin Borovoy

Excerpt:

I’ll admit I’m a bit biased here since I’m a filmmaker by trade, but I truly believe the process of planning and making videos can offer tremendous learning opportunities for students of almost any age. Not only is the idea of telling stories with video really engaging for many kids, filmmaking is ripe with opportunities to connect to almost every academic subject area. As the technology to shoot and edit films becomes more ubiquitous, where is a teacher with no experience in video production to begin? I’ve shared some resources below to help you and your students get started on making blockbusters of your own.

Finding our voice: Instructional Designers in higher education — from er.educause.edu by Sandra Miller and Gayle Stein

Key Takeaways

A New Jersey workshop on instructional design gave attendees the opportunity to learn about instructional designers’ roles at different institutions and brainstorm good ideas, tips and tricks, important contributions to the field, and how to overcome shared challenges.
Instructional technologists and video production coordinators also are involved in the instructional design process, helping faculty learn how to use instructional tools.
A major challenge for instructional designers is faculty resistance to new pedagogies and deliveries — not just to hybrid and online courses.
Institutional acknowledgement of skill acquisition in their professional development can lead faculty to place a higher value on technology integration in teaching and learning.

…

What Instructional Designers Do
Instructional designers take on a variety of roles. They can be course development focused or technology focused. They can be facilitators, mentors, trainers, collaborators, reviewers, and mediators, and more likely some combination of those. They often have different roles to fill in addition to instructional design: they may supervise computer labs, have responsibility for classroom technology, and/or oversee video production facilities.

The instructional designers who attended the NJEDge.Net Instructional Design Symposium are involved in:

Providing both pedagogical and technology training, sometimes simultaneously and sometimes separately
Moving courses between learning management systems
Creating new online courses or transitioning face-to-face courses to online formats
Producing video and other multimedia
Supporting a variety of software that faculty want to use to create their courses or
Training faculty to teach more effectively using technology
Supporting students using LMSs
Ensuring that courses meet federal requirements for accessibility
Lobbying for funding for faculty who are taking time to create online courses
Creating challenging assessments to minimize cheating

…

Instructional technologists and video production coordinators also are involved in the instructional design process. They help faculty learn how to use instructional tools such as lecture capture, synchronous meetings, asynchronous discussions, collaborative document writing, group work, clickers, learning management systems, video production, and video editing.

The instructional designers found that it made a difference in terms of trust and respect accorded them when they sat on the academic side of the house. (Nonetheless, the majority of instructional designers at the symposium report to the IT side and ultimately (usually) to the financial/administrative side, despite their preference for the academic side.)

A prediction from DSC:
Those institutions who develop and use internal teams of specialists will be the winners in the future.

Below are some of the forces that will reward those institutions who pursue such a strategy in order to design, create, and provide their offerings/services include:

The rise of personalized/adaptive learning (data mining, learning analytics are also included in this bullet point)
The increased use of artificial intelligence and the development of intelligent systems/assistants/tutoring
Higher ed’s need to scale and reduce the going rates/prices of obtaining degrees — yet maintaining quality
Rapid technological changes and an ever increasing amount to know as instructional technologists (this is also true with videographers, multimedia developers, copyright experts, and other members of the team)
New discoveries and advances w/in the various disciplines — which require faculty members’ focus to stay on top of their disciplines
The changing expectations of students, and how they prefer to learn
The rise of alternatives to institutions of traditional higher education who, from their very start, develop and use internal teams of specialists (all the more relevant if these alternative organizations obtain the financial backing of the Federal Government)

The trick is how such teams should actually operate so as not to become bottlenecks in keeping the curricula relevant and up-to-date. After all, it takes time and resources to effectively design, create, and deliver blended and/or online courses.

Example slides from their
SlideShare presentation:

and from the PDF:

accenture: Technology Vision 2016 | People First: The Remedy to Digital Culture Shock — from accenture.com

Excerpt:

Winners in the digital age do much more than complete a technology checklist. They know their success hinges on people. Understanding changing customer needs and behaviors is, of course, hugely important. But the real deciding factor in the digital era will be the ability to evolve corporate culture. That means not simply taking advantage of emerging technologies but, critically, embracing the new business strategies that those technologies drive.

You can’t solve this challenge just by consuming more and more technology. Nor, as some fear, by replacing humans with machines. Instead, enterprises must focus on enabling people – consumers, employees and ecosystem partners – to do more with technology. That demands a digital corporate culture enabling people to continuously adapt, learn, create new solutions, drive relentless change, and disrupt the status quo. In an age where tech is grabbing the limelight, true leaders will, in fact, put people first.

But the real deciding factor in the era of intelligence will be a company’s ability to evolve its corporate culture to not only take advantage of emerging technologies, but also, critically, embrace the new business strategies that those technologies drive.

From DSC:
Are we preparing our students to be ready for — and successful in — this changing workplace? Are adults ready for this changing workplace? It appears that some are, and some are left reeling by the pace of change.

What is our role as educators in K-12? In higher ed?

What are the roles of trainers and/or mentors in the marketplace?

How does one help another person to learn quickly?

——–

Addendum:

The Most Digital Companies Are Leaving All the Rest Behind — from Harvard Business Review by James Manyika, Gary Pinkus, and Sree Ramaswamy
Excerpt:
The answer is that a new digital divide has opened up in America. Just about every individual, company and sector of the economy now has access to digital technologies — there are hardly any “have nots” anymore. But a widening gap exists between the “haves” and a group we call the “have-mores”: companies and sectors that are using their digital capabilities far more than the rest to innovate and transform how they operate.

How Google is reimagining books — from fastcodesign.com by Meg Miller
“Editions at Play” sees designers and authors working simultaneously to build a new type of e-book from the ground up.

Excerpt:

The first sign that Reif Larsen’s Entrances & Exits is not a typical e-book comes at the table of contents, which is just a list of chapters titled “Location Unknown.” Click on one of them, and you’ll be transported to a location (unknown) inside Google Street View, facing a door. Choose to enter the house and that’s where the narrative, a sort of choose-your-own-adventure string of vignettes, begins. As the book’s description reads, it’s a “Borgeian love story” that “seamlessly spans the globe” and it represents a fresh approach to the book publishing industry.

Larsen’s book is one of the inaugural titles from Editions at Play, a joint e-books publishing venture between Google Creative Lab Sydney and the design-driven publishing house Visual Editions, which launched this week. With the mission of reimagining what an e-book can be, Editions at Play brings together the author, developers, and designers to work simultaneously on building a story from the ground up. They are the opposite of the usual physical-turned-digital-books; rather, they’re books that “cannot be printed.”

From DSC:
Interesting to note the use of teams of specialists here…

Without blended and/or online learning, obtaining data & using analytics in education only gets you so far. [Christian]

On 02/09/2016, in analytics, blended learning, Daniel S. Christian, data related items, digital learning, education technology, elearning, face-to-face, higher education, hybrid learning, ideas, instructional design, IT in HE, learning spaces, MBA, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, online learning, smart classrooms, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
Big data is a big theme these days — in a variety of industries. Higher ed is no exception, where several vendors continue to develop products that hope to harness the power of big data (and to hopefully apply the lessons learned in a variety of areas, including retention).

However as an Instructional Designer, when I think of capturing and using data in the context of higher education, I’m not thinking about institutional type of data mining and the corresponding dashboards that might be involved therein. I’m thinking of something far more granular — something that resembles a tool for an individual professor to use.

I’m thinking more about individual students and their learning. I’m thinking about this topic in terms of providing additional information for a faculty member to use to gauge the learning within his or her particular classes — and to be able to highlight issues for them to address.

So, for example, when I’m thinking about how a mathematics professor might obtain and use data, I’m thinking of things like:

How did each individual do on this particular math problem?
Who got it right? Who got it wrong?
What percentage of the class got it right? What percentage of the class got it wrong?
For those who got the problem wrong, where in the multi-step process did they go wrong?

So perhaps even if we’re only obtaining students’ final answers — whether that be via clickers, smartphones, laptops, and/or tablets — data is still being created. Data that can then be analyzed and used to steer the learning. This type of information can then help the mathematics professor follow up accordingly — either with some individuals or with the entire class if he/she saw many students struggling with a new concept.

Such data gathering can get even more granular if one is using elearning types of materials. Here, the developers can measure and track things like mouse clicks, paths taken, and more. So like the approaching Internet of Things, data can get produced on a massive scale.

But very few mathematics professors have the time to:

manually track X/Y/or Z per student
manually capture how an entire class just did on a math problem
manually document where each student who got a problem incorrect went wrong

So in the way that I’m thinking about this topic, this entire push/idea of using data and analytics in education requires things to happen digitally — where results can automatically be stored without requiring any manual efforts on the part of the professor.

The ramifications of this are enormous.

That is, the push to use analytics in education — at least at the personalized learning level that I’m thinking of — really represents and actually requires a push towards using blended and/or online-based learning. Using strictly 100% face-to-face based classrooms and environments — without any digital components involved — won’t cut it if we want to harness the power of analytics/data mining to improve student learning.

Though this may seem somewhat obvious, again, the ramifications are huge for how faculty members structure their courses and what tools/methods that they choose to utilize. But this goes way beyond the professor. It also has enormous implications for those departments and teams who are working on creating/revising learning spaces — especially in terms of the infrastructures such spaces offer and what tools might be available within them. It affects decision makers all the way up to the board-level as well (who may not be used to something other than a face-to-face setting…something they recall from their own college days).

What do you think? Are you and/or your institution using big data and analytics? If so, how?

Also see:

Big data and higher education: These apps change everything — from bigdatalandscape.com

Excerpt:

Big Data is going to college. The companies on this list have been developing innovative higher education analytics apps. Universities are realizing the importance of harnessing Big Data for the purposes of helping students to succeed, helping instructors to know what students still need to learn, analyzing efficiency in all areas, boosting enrollment, and more.

For example, CourseSmart embeds analytics directly into digital textbooks. These analytics provide an “engagement index score,” which measures how much students are interacting with their eTextbooks (viewing pages, highlighting, writing notes, etc.). Researchers have found that that the engagement index score helps instructors to accurately predict student outcomes more than traditional measurement methods, such as class participation.

In addition, there are dashboards that enable Big Data analytics and visualization for the purpose of monitoring higher education KPIs such as enrollment, accreditation, effectiveness, research, financial information, and metrics by class and by department. Read on to find out about the companies that are shaping Big Data analytics in higher education.

How five edtech start-ups are using big data to boost business education — from businessbecause.com by Seb Murray
MOOC platforms explore analytics with b-school partners

Excerpts:

“Data is an amazing resource for teachers, who glean detailed feedback on how learners are processing information,” says Julia Stiglitz, director of business development at Coursera, the online learning site with 17 million users.

Coursera, which works with the b-schools IE, Yale and Duke Fuqua, offers a dashboard that gives teachers insight into when students are most likely to stop watching a video, and the percentage who answer assessment questions correctly the first time around.
…
“By carefully assessing course data, from mouse clicks to time spent on tasks to evaluating how students respond to various assessments, researchers hope to shed light on how learners access information and master materials,” says Nancy Moss, edX’s director of communications.

Interactive app brings 4th-century thinker to life — from campustechnology.com by Toni Fuhrman
At Villanova University, a student-developed app version of Augustine’s Confessions brings contemporary vitality and relevance to a classic 4th-century work.

Excerpt:

Augustine of Hippo, who lived from A.D. 354 to 430, might be surprised to find his Confessions in circulation today, including a number of e-book versions. Still widely read, popular in great books programs and studied in university classes, The Confessions of St. Augustine is autobiography and confession, spiritual quest and emotional journey.

One of the most recent electronic versions of the Confessions is an interactive app developed at Villanova University (PA), the nation’s only Augustinian Catholic University. Released three months ago on Augustine’s birthday (Nov. 13), the Confessions app is required for all freshmen as part of a “foundation” course. Available for both Apple and Android devices, the app includes the 13 books of the Confessions, authoritative commentaries, photo gallery, timeline, map and text-highlighted audio, as well as search, note-taking, annotation and bookmark options.

“What better way to reflect on and update this struggle than for today’s students to use technology to bring the text to life through visual, audio and analytical components?”

Confessions-Feb2016

From DSC:
Love the idea. Love the use of teams — including students — to produce this app!

New Media Consortium (NMC) & Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) release the NMC Horizon Report > 2016 Higher Ed Edition — from nmc.org

Excerpt:

The New Media Consortium (NMC) and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) are jointly releasing the NMC Horizon Report > 2016 Higher Education Edition at the 2016 ELI Annual Meeting. This 13^th edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, an ongoing research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in higher education.

The report identifies six key trends, six significant challenges, and six important developments in educational technology across three adoption horizons spanning over the next one to five years, giving campus leaders, educational technologists, and faculty a valuable guide for strategic technology planning. The report provides higher education leaders with in-depth insight into how trends and challenges are accelerating and impeding the adoption of educational technology, along with their implications for policy, leadership, and practice.

Example slides from one of the presentations at the Flipped Classroom Conference 2016
[Held at Harvey Mudd College in January; with special thanks to Mr. Jeremy VanAntwerp,
Professor of Engineering at Calvin College for this resource]

Three reasons for switching to flipped learning — from rtalbert.org by Robert Talbert, Mathematics Professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan [USA]

Excerpt:

The argument from pedagogy: We use flipped learning because it puts the best-known/best-available practices for teaching and learning in the spotlight, including active learning of all kinds, student-centered instruction, constructivist techniques, differentiated instruction, spaced repetition, Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development idea, self-regulated learning, and the like. Whereas these things can be featured in a traditional classroom but it feels unnatural, like the wrong tool for the job.
The argument from logistics…
The argument from relationships…

Peer instruction for active learning — by Harvard University Prof. Eric Mazur on difficulties of beginners, teaching each other, and making sense of information

Also see Eric’s presentation out at Auburn University from back in September 2014:

Why are we so slow to change the way we teach? — from facultyfocus.com by Maryellen Weimer, PhD

Excerpt:

However, lecture isn’t the only example of where we’re slow to change. Many aspects of teaching—course design, approaches to testing, assignments, and grading—have also changed little. Granted, some faculty do change, a lot and regularly, but not the majority. The question is, “Why?” Here are some possibilities I’ve been considering.

Crafting questions that drive projects — from learninginhand.com by Tony Vincent

Excerpt:

Not only does project based learning motivate students because it is an authentic use of technology, it facilitates active learning, critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity. Projects begin with a driving question—an open-ended question that sets the stage for the project by creating interest and curiosity. Writing an effective driving question is surprisingly challenging. You want the question to be intriguing and irresistible to students, which makes it very different from the typical questions they encounter on tests.

A Driving Force
Like many educators, I call the “mission statement” of a project a driving question. It captures the heart of the project by providing purpose using clear and compelling language. With so many different flavors of project based learning (including problem based learning, challenge based learning, student centered learning, exploration, student driven inquiry, and authentic learning), it’s not surprising that we have a variety of other terms for a question or statement that is the project’s driving force. These terms include essential question, challenge, prime question, WILD HOG question, focus question, and smart question. I’ll stick with driving question, but do know that sometimes the driving question is not interrogative. It might be a statement, but I’ll still refer to is as a question.

Literacy help: Alan Peat story bags – How to develop story writing and literacy skills in younger children. — from hubpages.com

Excerpt:

There is no getting away from the fact that the more a child has been read to and the more they try to read themselves then the better their literacy skills are going to be. Parents have a massive influence on this. As a parent myself I considered reading to and teaching my daughter to read the one most important thing I could do to aid her life at school.

Sadly this is not always the case and too many students we teach read rarely at home or in rare cases don’t even own a book. Sad I know and to be honest I can’t imagine a house without books in it. I jokingly refer to my daughters collection ‘her library’ because she has so many which are updated as she reads through them.

But lets be fair, it is not only the students who struggle with reading that need help with story writing. A lot of students will benefit from this approach including your high flyers. I have taught this in year 3, although i would consider it to be more a KS1 activity, but in year 3 they do need certain aspects of a KS1 curriculum to help there development as it is a hard transitional year. Saying that I have seen other teachers use it in higher years than that and why not if it will benefit their writing.

…
On the front of each bag, so every child can read it easily should be the questions:

Who?
Where?
Where next?
Why?
What goes wrong?
Who helps?
Where last?
Feelings?

Simple tips to create a blended learning classroom — from blog.edmentum.com by Jasmine Auger

Excerpt:

We’ve compiled this list of five easy ways to start incorporating technology into your classroom and building a blended environment!

Blogging
Social Media
Virtual Presentations
Infographics
Video

Other somewhat related items:

Full STEAM ahead: Why arts are essential in a STEM education — from edutopia.org by Mary Beth Hertz

Excerpt:

The connection is also obvious for anyone who has ever worked in any traditional STEM career. Everyone from software engineers and aerospace technicians to biotechnical engineers, professional mathematicians, and laboratory scientists knows that building great things and solving real problems requires a measure of creativity. More and more, professional artists themselves are incorporating technological tools and scientific processes to their art.

Also see:
STEM to STEAM: Resources Toolkit — from edutopia.org | Originally Published: 5/21/14 | Updated: 1/20/16
Whether you are looking for resources on integrating science, technology, engineering, and math or on infusing the arts to transform STEM into STEAM, these curated compilations will help you plan different approaches to integrated studies.

…and a related item re: curriculum, but at the collegiate level:

What is the value of an education in the humanities? — from npr.org by Adam Frank

Excerpt:

In spite of being a scientist, I strongly believe an education that fails to place a heavy emphasis on the humanities is a missed opportunity. Without a base in humanities, both the students — and the democratic society these students must enter as informed citizens — are denied a full view of the heritage and critical habits of mind that make civilization worth the effort.
…

So, these are my traditional answers to the traditional questions about the value of humanities and arts education vs. science and engineering. From my standpoint as a scholar, I’ll stand by them and defend what they represent to the last breath.

But the world has changed and, I believe, these answers are no longer enough.

It’s not just the high cost of college that alters the equation. It’s also vast changes that have swept through society with the advent of a world run on information (i.e., on data). So, with that mind, here is my updated — beyond the traditional — response to the value of the humanities in education: The key is balance.

It is no longer enough for students to focus on either science/engineering or the humanities/arts.

50 of the best teaching & learning apps for 2016 — from teachthought.com

Excerpt:

What are the best teaching and learning apps for 2016? That’s a good question this post looks to answer.

Every year, we put together a collection of what we believe are the best teaching and learning apps for that year. (Here, for example, is our 2015 version of the list below, where you will notice about half the apps are the same, and half have changed. That’s not bad for progress, is it?

This year, we were asked by the good folks at Easelly (the infographic and visual data platform) to create a collection of resources that while including their apps, would curate a lot of good stuff teachers would benefit from in 2016. Since we were preparing to release our TeachThought Editor’s Choice: 2016 Best Teaching and Learning Apps–and have used Easelly for years ourselves–we combined the two projects to give you something you can use to guide your #edtech integration this year.

6 ed tech tools to try in 2016 — from cultofpedagogy.com by Jennifer Gonzalez

Excerpt:

About a year ago, I published an e-book called the Teacher’s Guide to Tech. Over the last month, I have been updating it for 2016, adding over 30 new tools and refreshing the information I had about the original ones. I have to say, the 2015 version was excellent, but now it’s SO MUCH BETTER. (To take a peek at the guide, scroll to the bottom of this post.)

In the process, I discovered some tools that I absolutely fell in love with, and I wanted to share them with you here. Each of these tools can make your teaching more efficient and effective, and your students’ learning deeper and more engaging.

Let’s take a look.

Visit Shakespeare’s London at FIU’s new virtual reality facility — from cec.fiu.edu

Excerpt:

It’s 1598, and you’re on your way to the Globe Theater to watch one of Shakespeare’s plays. You walk along the dirt roads and the green fields of London and you realize you can see the London Bridge in the distance. A vagabond asks you for a coin, and you find the village houses and the town market bustling with customers. Once you arrive at the theater, you watch the first few minutes of the opening monologue of “Henry V.”

This is a virtual world created by a multidisciplinary team of FIU students – and you can immerse yourself in this time-travel journey starting Jan. 29 when the I-CAVE opens at Modesto A. Maidique Campus.

.

Google brings commenting to sheets and slides on mobile— from techcrunch.com by Frederic Lardinois

Excerpt:

Google announced [on 1/28/16] a couple of updates to the commenting features in its Google Apps productivity suite.

These include the launch of mobile commenting in the iOS and Android apps for Slides and Sheets. Thanks to this, the commenting experience in Google’s apps is now (almost) the same across all of its apps — whether on the web or on mobile. I’m not sure why Google didn’t already offer this before, but better late than never, right?

10 very good tools for student researchers — from educatorstechnology.com

Excerpt:

One of the onerous parts in essay and academic writing is the bibliography section. Managing, organizing and citing references can sometimes be a real challenge especially if you don’t keep track of what and who you cite. The last thing you want after a strenuous writing task is a messy bibliography with one reference missing a page number, the other needs publication date or, worse of all, having to go back to your sources to check for the source of that quotation you included in your conclusion. If you find yourself constantly grappling with problems such as these, the web tools below are absolutely something you might need to consider. These are some of the best applications for organizing, managing, and publishing bibliographies, citations and references. Some of these softwares are integrated with Google Scholar.

Fresco News app brings crowdsourced journalism to Apple TV — from imore.com by Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Excerpt:

Fresco News, an app that crowdsources news footage by allowing citizen journalists to upload and share their photos videos of current events around the globe, has officially launched an Apple TV app. With the app, users can check out first-hand accounts of events around the world on the big screen through their Apple TV.

5 Apple TV fitness apps to get in shape on a budget — from macworld.com by Caitlin McGarry
There are tons of streaming TV apps, but I’m on the hunt for a streaming workout app that won’t cost a fortune.

Excerpt:

The fourth-generation Apple TV now has more than 3,600 tvOS apps, Apple revealed in its first-quarter earnings call Tuesday. Most of those are games or streaming video apps, and there are tons of great options in both categories. When it comes to fitness, which seems to me a natural fit for the TV, the selection is sparse. But still, I was sure at least one Apple TV app would have what I was looking for: a cheap way to stay in shape. But it wasn’t that easy.

Codespark.org

Codemonkey

Best iPhone 6 and 6s tripods for stablizing and mounting — from imore.com by Brent Zaniewski
A dependable tripod can enhance your iPhone photography skills and help you get an otherwise impossible shot.

Livestream unveils new device for affordable multi-camera productions — from bizbash.com by Mitra Sorrells
The tiny Movi camera links with an iOS app for real-time recording, editing, and streaming from events.

Excerpt:

Planners interested in creating multi-camera video productions at their events will soon have a new, inexpensive option. Livestream, the company behind live online events for brands such as Tesla, Salesforce.com, the N.B.A., and more, has created a 2.5-inch device that lets users record and edit in real time between nine virtual high-definition cameras. Movi is available for preorder for delivery in April, currently at a price of $299.

This lens can widen your view into a classroom for only $10 — from blog.edthena.com

How Five EdTech Start-Ups Are Using Big Data To Boost Business Education — from by Seb Murray
MOOC platforms explore analytics with b-school partners

Excerpt:

Education tech companies including Coursera, edX, Udacity and their b-school and university partners are delving deeper into big data analytics to improve teaching and student learning.

Simon Nelson, CEO of online learning company FutureLearn, says: “The potential is incredible — and we are just scratching the surface.”

A report to be published in January by the UK’s Higher Education Commission (HEC) envisages that big data will help identify risk of failure; give students instant feedback; and benchmark their performance against peers.

Addendum on 2/1/16:

Free Audio Sound Effects for E-Learning — from blogs.articulate.com

Addendum on 2/2/16:

The 25 Best Free iPhone Apps For Business — from fastcompany.com by Doug Aamoth
Make meetings actually useful. Brainstorm like a champ. Take the boredom out of busywork. And much more.
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Apps that will revolutionize how you work from home — from chicagotribune.com by Sheila Marikar

Blogging in the classroom: How to get started [Banner]

On 01/20/2016, in blogs / blogging / vlogging, collaboration, communications, digital learning, education technology, ideas, K-12 related, pedagogy, student-related, teachers, by Daniel Christian

Blogging in the classroom: How to get started — from onblastblog.com by Matt Banner

Excerpt:

Here’s what we’ll discuss today:

Ways to bring blogging into your classroom and daily lesson plans
The litany of benefits blogging brings to education
Deciding the purpose and goals of your blog
Setting up your classroom’s blog
Easy ways to promote and grow your classroom blog

…
Blogging about a subject turns novices into experts.
There’s no other choice. When you write thousands upon thousands of words about something, doing research all the while, you become an expert in that subject. It’s unavoidable, and possibly the best way to learn in my opinion. Instead of having the information fed to them, students are taking it and putting it down on paper in their own words.

They live the information instead of simply seeing it. This is huge in terms of learning something for the long-term. Hands-on experience will always leave more of a lasting impression than something that is simply boiled down to a few questions on a test.

Michelle Lampinen, a high school English teacher in New Jersey wrote a great article on this here.

Also see:
How blogging is being used in the classroom today: Research results — from emergingtech.com by Mike Wallagher

Excerpt:

The 2015 survey has yet to be reported on, but 2014 research findings have something to say about the state of blogging in the classroom today.

Benefits of Blogging in the Classroom
Blogging in the classroom can have numerous benefits depending on how you use your blog. Just some include that:

Instructors can create a blog about class happenings so parents can stay up-to-date and students can access announcements from anywhere
Teachers can use their blogs to store lessons online or provide supplemental learning materials to students
Instructors can use blogs to organize assignments, such as posting them online for absent students or listing due dates so all students have access to the course materials from anywhere
Teachers can post previous students’ work as examples or publish current students’ work so they can show parents and family who live far away
Educators can open the comment sections on blog posts to get feedback from parents and the community as well as to create discussion between students
Student blogs teach children about writing techniques, online publishing, and proper Internet etiquette, which most students will use in future careers

How Blogs Are Being Used
“Blogging in the classroom” may bring up this idea that there’s one way to present blogging to your students, but there are a myriad of ways educators can use blogs. Just some options include:

Personal blogs for teachers
Student blogs
ePortfolios
Platforms for assignments, homework, and announcements
Classroom blogs for collaboration and discussion

From DSC:
Whether your school, university, or college has a web hosting service or whether you need to go out and find a web hosting service yourself — or use a free service/solution — blogging is a great way to create streams of content and to “think out loud.” It offers benefits for students, teachers, professors, staff, and administrators.

From DSC:
Currently, you can add interactivity to your digital videos. For example, several tools allow you to do this, such as:

Wideo
Rapt Media
Wirewax
Educanon
TouchCast
Engajer
etc.

So I wonder…what might interactivity look like in the near future when we’re talking about viewing things in immersive virtual reality (VR)-based situations? When we’re talking about videos made using cameras that can provide 360 degrees worth of coverage, how are we going to interact with/drive/maneuver around such videos? What types of gestures and/or input devices, hardware, and software are we going to be using to do so?

What new forms of elearning/training/education will we have at our disposal? How will such developments impact instructional design/designers? Interaction designers? User experience designers? User interface designers? Digital storytellers?

Hmmm…

The forecast? High engagement, interesting times ahead.

Also see:

Interactive video is about to get disruptive — from kineo.com by James Cory-Wright
Excerpt:
Seamless and immersive because it all happens within the video
We can now have embedded hotspots (motion tags) that move within the video; we can use branching within the video to change the storyline depending on the decisions you make; we can show consequences of making that decision; we can add video within video to share expert views, link directly to other rich media or gather real-time data via social media tools – all without leaving the actual video. A seamless experience.
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Endless learning: Virtual reality in the classroom — from pixelkin.org by David Jagneaux
Excerpt:
What if you could be part of the audience for Martin Luther King Jr.’s riveting “I Have a Dream” speech? What if you could stand in a chemistry lab and experiment without any risk of harm or danger? What if you could walk the earth millions of years ago and watch dinosaurs? With virtual reality technology, these situations could become real. Virtual reality (VR) is a hot topic in today’s game industry, but games are only one aspect of the technology. I’ve had fun putting on a headset and shooting down ships in outer space. But VR also has the potential to enhance education in classrooms.
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Matter VR

PBS’ School Sleuth: The Case of the Wired Classroom <-- A well done, creative, objective, solid discussion of technology in the classroom

On 01/16/2016, in 21st century, active learning, Apple, blended learning, Bring your own device (BYOD), change, collaboration, creativity, digital audio, digital learning, digital storytelling, digital textbooks, digital video, education, education reform, education technology, elearning, game-changing environment, generational differences, Google, hybrid learning, internet, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning theories, media/film, Microsoft, multimedia, online learning, organizational change, parents/guardians, pedagogy, personalized/customized learning, research, student teaching/teacher education, student-related, tablets, teachers, teaching & learning, teaching online, technology (general), the downsides of how people use tech, tools, trends, United States, web-based collaboration, youth, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
If you can clear up just short of an hour of your time, this piece from PBS entitled, “School Sleuth: The Case of the Wired Classroom” is very well done and worth your time. It’s creative and objective; it offers us some solid research, some stories, and some examples of the positives and negatives of technology in the classroom. It weaves different modes of learning into the discussion — including blended learning, online learning, personalized learning and more. Though it aired back in October of 2015, I just found out about it.

Check it out if you can!

Also see:

Schools push personalized learning to new heights — from edweek.org
Excerpt:
For most schools, reaching the next level of digitally driven, personalized learning is far from reality. Still, some schools are extending their digital reach in significant and sometimes groundbreaking ways, as the stories in this special report illustrate. They are making moves to integrate a variety of technologies to track how students learn and to use the resulting data to expand the use of hands-on, project-based learning. The goal is to build never-ending feedback loops that ultimately inform the development of curriculum and assessment. Plus, big data and analytics are gradually making their marks in K-12 education. This special report outlines the progress schools are making to use digital tools to personalize learning, but also raises the question: Are they reaching far enough?
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A Pedagogical Model for the use of iPads for Learning — from higheru.org

“Microlearning: The e-Learning method taking off around the world” [Knowles]; also, podcasting for professors

On 01/16/2016, in A/V -- audio/visual, adjunct faculty, Adobe, Apple, Asia, Australia, blogs / blogging / vlogging, Canada, colleges, communications, community colleges, corporate universities / corporate training, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, educational games / serious games, elearning, Europe, faculty, flipping -- inverted learning, global / globalization, higher education, ideas, India, learning ecosystem, microlearning, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, multi-touch, online learning, podcasting, social media, streams of content, teachers, tools, training / L&D, UK, United States, universities, vendors, web-based collaboration, by Daniel Christian

Microlearning: The e-Learning method taking off around the world — from educators.co.nz by Catherine Knowles

Excerpt:

Technology is disrupting traditional learning bringing new methods and tools into educational institutions and businesses.

Microlearning, for instance, has displayed great potential for growth, according to Association Learning + Technology 2016 – a report published by Tagoras and sponsored by YM Learning.

The report looks at the use of technology to enable and enhance learning in the continuing education and professional development market and provides insight into how the role technology plays in learning has and will evolve.

In fact, among five emerging types of learning (microlearning, massive open online courses (MOOCs), flipped classes, gamified learning, and microcredentials), microlearning shows the highest rate of adoption – and arguably the greatest potential for growth.

Podcasting is perfect for people with big ideas. Here’s how to do it — from by Todd Landman
Surprisingly few academics have learned how to podcast – but it’s a great way to reach a wider audience

Excerpt:

In the face of conflict in the Middle East, the flow of refugees to Europe and the violence associated with Islamic State and other militants, there has never been a more important time to talk about human rights. And talk about them is what I do – not in a lecture hall or at conferences with academics, but in a podcast series. Let me explain why.

I have worked as a political scientist for 25 years, focusing on human rights problems such as the struggle for citizenship rights in Latin America and the relationship between inequality and human rights violations.

I am part of a wide network of people dedicated to producing sound evidence on human rights, and my work has been communicated through articles, books and reports. But I am limited in my ability to reach the people I would most like to engage and influence – those who do not have an academic understanding of human rights but might benefit from finding out about it.

There is a new breed of academic who understands this and is committed to bridging the gap between academia and the real world. Many blog, actively seek media coverage of their research and appear on radio and television to shed light on the issues of the day.

From DSC:
Some of the tools that Landman mentioned were:

Skype and ecamm Skype Call Recorder:

A MacBook Pro and its free audio editing software GarageBand (for Mac OS X and for iOS)
A lapel mic used with his iPhone

Some other tools to consider:

From DSC:
The above articles point to the idea — and the need — of creating “streams of content” — something that I wish more professors, teachers, staff, administrators, trainers, and instructional designers would create. Blogs, podcasts, and the use of Twitter come to my mind. Such channels could really help build others’ learning ecosystems.

Many professors and academics — folks who have so much information to share with the world — often produce works just for other academics in their discipline to review/check out. Such bubbles don’t have the impact that would occur if professors created streams of content for members of society to check out and learn from. Such mechanisms would also hopefully strip away some of the more academic sounding language and would get to the point.

Also see:

Learning Ecosystems

10 new items re: AR and VR

I wonder how “interactive video” will morph as it hits the virtual reality world [Christian]

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