From DSC:
Below are some questions and thoughts that are going through my mind:
Will “class be in session” soon on tools like Prysm & Bluescape?
Will this type of setup be the next platform that we’ll use to meet our need to be lifelong learners? That is, will what we know of today as Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Content Management Systems (CMS) morph into this type of setup?
Via platforms/operating systems like tvOS, will our connected TVs turn into much more collaborative devices, allowing us to contribute content with learners from all over the globe?
Prysm is already available on mobile devices and what we consider a television continues to morph
Will second and third screens be used in such setups? What functionality will be assigned to the main/larger screens? To the mobile devices?
Will colleges and universities innovate into such setups? Or will organizations like LinkedIn.com/Lynda.com lead in this space? Or will it be a bit of both?
How will training, learning and development groups leverage these tools/technologies?
Are there some opportunities for homeschoolers here?
Along these lines, are are some videos/images/links for you:
To enhance the Prysm Visual Workplace, Prysm today announced an integration with Microsoft OneDrive for Business and Office 365. Using the OneDrive for Business API from Microsoft, Prysm has made it easy for customers to connect Prysm to their existing OneDrive for Business environments to make it a seamless experience for end users to access, search for, and sync with content from OneDrive for Business. Within a Prysm Visual Workplace project, users may now access, work within and download content from Office 365 using Prysm’s built-in web capabilities.
We first launched support for 360-degree videos back in March 2015. From musicians to athletes to brands, creators have done some incredible things with this technology. Now, they’ll be able to do even more to bring fans directly into their world, with 360-degree live streaming. And after years of live streaming Coachella for fans around the world who can’t attend the festival, this year we’re bringing you the festival like never before by live streaming select artist performances in 360 degrees this weekend. Starting today, we’re also launching spatial audio for on-demand YouTube videos. Just as watching a concert in 360 degrees can give you an unmatched immersive experience, spatial audio allows you to listen along as you do in real life, where depth, distance and intensity all play a role. Try out this playlist on your Android device.
CWRU was among the first in higher education to begin working with HoloLens, back in 2014. They’ve since discovered new ways the tech could help transform education. One of their current focuses is changing how students experience medical-science courses.
“This is a curriculum that hasn’t drastically changed in more than 100 years, because there simply hasn’t been another way,” says Mark Griswold, the faculty director for HoloLens at CWRU. “The mixed-reality of the HoloLens has the potential to revolutionize this education by bringing 3D content into the real world.”
“Imagine a physics class where you’re able to show how friction works. Imagine being able to experience gravity on Mars — by moving around virtually,” he says. “VR can make science, technology and art come alive.”
VR will soon become an open canvas for educators to create learning experiences. Eventually, fitting VR into the curriculum will be limited only by an instructor’s imagination and budget, says Christopher Sessums, the program director of research and evaluation at Johns Hopkins School of Education.
Burleson and and co-author Armanda Lewis imagine such technology in a year 2041 Holodeck, which Burleson’s NYU-X Lab is currently developing in prototype form, in collaboration with colleagues at NYU Courant, Tandon, Steinhardt, and Tisch.
“The “Holodeck” will support a broad range of transdisciplinary collaborations, integrated education, research, and innovation by providing a networked software/hardware infrastructure that can synthesize visual, audio, physical, social, and societal components,” said Burleson.
It’s intended as a model for the future of cyberlearning experience, integrating visual, audio, and physical (haptics, objects, real-time fabrication) components, with shared computation, integrated distributed data, immersive visualization, and social interaction to make possible large-scale synthesis of learning, research, and innovation.
…British television presenter Diane-Louise Jordan will guide students on a tour through Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, including his childhood home and school; and the bard’s view of London, including the famous Globe Theatre where his plays were performed. (Shakespeare actually died April 23, which this year falls on a Saturday.)
Also see:
You can register to see the recording on that page as well.
Film Students To Compete in Virtual Reality Production Contest — from campustechnology.com by Michael Hart One of the first ever competitions involving virtual reality production will challenge college film students to create their own 360-degree films.
HBO and Discovery Communications announced today that they are partnering with 3D-graphics startup OTOY — both companies taking equity stakes. The partnership marks an effort by the two networks to evolve entertainment experiences beyond two dimensional television. Virtual reality, augmented reality, and even holograms were all highlighted as areas OTOY would help its traditional media partners explore.
TV knows it must push toward virtual and augmented reality
Apple was granted a patent today for a type of live interactive augmented reality (AR) video to be used in future iOS devices, indicating the company may soon enter the AR/VR game. The patent does not appear to be directly related to an AR/VR headset, but is certainly a step in that direction.
The patent describes Apple’s planned augmented reality technology as layered, live AR video that users can interact with via touchscreen. In the live video, objects can be identified and an information layer can be generated for them.
“In some implementations,” the patent text notes, “the information layer can include annotations made by a user through the touch sensitive surface.”
Virtual & Augmented Reality: Blooloop’s Guide to VR and AR — from blooloop.com Visitor attractions are racing to embrace Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies. But what are the potential opportunities and possible pitfalls of VR and AR?
We have now been Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) for three years, and boy, do the students bring it. They bring it all! We have iPads, Surface, iPhones, Droids, Chromebooks, Macs, and PC laptops. Here’s my current thinking.
Music is for everyone. So this year for Music In Our Schools month, we wanted to make learning music a bit more accessible to everyone by using technology that’s open to everyone: the web. Chrome Music Lab is a collection of experiments that let anyone, at any age, explore how music works. They’re collaborations between musicians and coders, all built with the freely available Web Audio API. These experiments are just a start. Check out each experiment to find open-source code you can use to build your own.
I love the School Report scheme that the BBC run via Newsround. We all remember the Newsrounds of our youth. For me it was John Craven who made me watch it whenever it was on. It was this report I saw recently on eight things teachers should learn, which got me thinking about eight things I thought teachers should learn about edtech.
My work sees me regularly helping teachers learn different things related to the use of technology and so in this post, I’m going to talk about the eight things I think teachers should learn with #edtech to help support their use of technology to enhance learning in the classroom.
As we move toward interacting more with students who have an individualized education program (IEP) indicating that they need additional time on tests and quizzes or just need to deal with life issues, it is imperative that the learning management system (LMS) depended upon by an instructor and student alike be properly configured for such accommodations. Canvas and Moodle are currently two of the most popular learning management systems, and both offer the ability to make adjustments to quiz functions within the course without compromising the overall structure of the course. In this article, we will examine how to do so and offer some tips on situations where they are relevant.
[The] Chrome web store is packed full of all kinds of educational apps and extensions some of which are also integrated with Google Drive. For those of you looking for a handy resource of Chrome apps to use with students in class, check out this comprehensive chart. In today’s post we are sharing with you a collection of some practical Chrome extensions to unleash learners creativity. Using these resources, students will be able to engage in a number of creative literacy activities that will allow them to multimodally communicate their thoughts, share their ideas and develop new learning skills.
How do you work technology into the pedagogy, instead of just using something cool? That task can be especially daunting in language arts literacy classrooms where reading and writing skill development is the crux of daily lessons. However, as 1:1 technology initiatives roll out, integrating technology into the classroom is our reality.
With hundreds of sites, apps, Chrome extensions, and platforms available, choosing the right ones can seem overwhelming. As an eighth-grade language arts teacher, I’ve experienced this myself. Following are four tools that can help provide immediate formative assessment data as well as top-of-the-rotation feedback to help students develop personal learning goals.
If, like my school, you’re in a “Chromebook District,” these suggested tools will work well because all integrate perfectly when you sign in with your Google ID, limiting the need for multiple passwords. This saves a lot of student confusion, too.
This giggly play session actually was a serious math lesson about big and small and non-standard measurements. Dreamed up by Richardson and kindergarten teacher Carol Hunt, it aims to get the children to think of animal steps as units of measurement, using them to mark how many it takes each animal to get from a starting line to the target.
Teachers call such melding of art and traditional subjects “art integration,” and it’s a new and increasingly popular way of bringing the arts into the classroom. Instead of art as a stand-alone subject, teachers are using dance, drama and the visual arts to teach a variety of academic subjects in a more engaging way.
Paul Pattison and Luke Minaker knew they were onto something when they got an email from the mother of a nine-year-old who read the first instalment of their interactive story, Weirdwood Manor.
“She wrote that she couldn’t get her son to pick up a book,” said Pattison, technical director of All Play No Work, producer of the iPad app. “She got the app for her son and he went through it in two nights. He finished both books.
“And then because we don’t have book 3 out yet, unprompted by her he went over to the bookshelf and pulled off a paperback and started reading chapter books again.”
Every year, Microsoft holds a developer event called “Build.” And recently, those events have gone from snoozers to exciting showcases. Microsoft has a winner with Windows 10 (as long as you ignore the phones), a robust personal assistant in Cortana (that works just fine on a laptop), and a wild holographic future to plan with HoloLens. It’s a lot to take in, and at this year’s Build Microsoft we got updates on all of it. And a few surprises.
Going in, we weren’t totally sure what would be coming next for Windows 10, but it turns out there’s a lot that Microsoft has planned. It’s not just that there are new apps, there are also new bots, which will help people handle all sorts of small tasks. In fact, those bots and Microsoft’s vision of how they should work stole the entire show. Windows, Xbox: you’re cool, but the future is bots.
To that end, Microsoft has published a new Bot Framework, which makes it easier to build chatbots using either C# or Node.js. Working with the tools isn’t so easy that anyone could do it, but they can help reduce some of the difficulties of conversing with a computer.
It was one of the main announcements from Nadella’s keynote address at Microsoft’s Build developer conference Wednesday.
Also see:
Microsoft’s Build 2016 message: ‘we love Cortana’ (but should users?) — from thenextweb.com by Nate Swanner Excerpt:
Build 2016 has one clear takeaway: Cortana is what matters, at least for now. At almost every product or service announcement at this morning’s keynote, Microsoft made a point to mention that it would also work with Cortana. At a deep dive event for press later in the day, Microsoft further highlighted its commitment to the digital assistant. .
From DSC: Questions/relevance for those working higher ed:
Are Computer Science programs able to keep up with the pace of these Human Computer Interaction (HCI)-related changes? The changes in AI/cognitive computing? Are courses being created to address these new skills? These developments also impact those teaching about user experience design, application/product design, and more. .
How will such personal assistants be used by the students? By faculty members?
Million-dollar babies — from economist.com by As Silicon Valley fights for talent, universities struggle to hold on to their stars
Excerpt:
THAT a computer program can repeatedly beat the world champion at Go, a complex board game, is a coup for the fast-moving field of artificial intelligence (AI). Another high-stakes game, however, is taking place behind the scenes, as firms compete to hire the smartest AI experts. Technology giants, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Baidu, are racing to expand their AI activities. Last year they spent some $8.5 billion on deals, says Quid, a data firm. That was four times more than in 2010.
In the past universities employed the world’s best AI experts. Now tech firms are plundering departments of robotics and machine learning (where computers learn from data themselves) for the highest-flying faculty and students, luring them with big salaries similar to those fetched by professional athletes.
Experts in machine learning are most in demand. Big tech firms use it in many activities, from basic tasks such as spam-filtering and better targeting of online advertisements, to futuristic endeavours such as self-driving cars or scanning images to identify disease.
AI is already starting to generate big financial gains for companies, which helps explain firms’ growing investment in developing AI capabilities. Machine-learning, in which computers become smarter by processing large data-sets, currently has many profitable consumer-facing applications, including image recognition in photographs, spam filtering and those that help to better target advertisements to web surfers. Many of tech firms’ most ambitious projects, including building self-driving cars and designing virtual personal assistants that can understand and execute complex tasks, also rely on artificial intelligence, especially machine-learning and robotics. This has prompted tech firms to try to hire up as much of the top talent as they can from universities, where the best AI experts research and teach. Some worry about the potential of a brain drain from academia into the private sector.
The biggest concern, however, is that one firm corners the majority of the talent in artificial intelligence, creating an intellectual monopoly of sorts.
Surface Hub is… “a new category of device that will transform the way companies work by delivering a new kind of productivity experience made for group collaboration. It was designed from the ground up for ink and touch, and harnesses the best collaboration and security features of Windows 10, Skype for Business, Office, OneNote and Universal Windows apps.”
Microsoft Surface Hub finally starts shipping — from informationweek.com by Nathan Eddy Microsoft’s Surface Hub promises to revolutionize the way companies collaborate and communicate, but are businesses ready to pay a hefty price to do so? The giant, Windows 10-based device starts at $9,000.
Also see:
You can choose between 55” HD and 84” 4K options.
Start meetings on time with a tap of the screen.
End your session with an option to save & send meeting content to the group for later use.
From DSC: Though this hardware is targeted towards the corporate space, I can’t help but think of the applications to higher education as well. This is yet another tool that could facilitate active learning & stronger collaboration — whether that be in classrooms or in conference rooms. Note how these solutions are often able to bring in remote learners/employees into the discussions. In several of these kinds of solutions, the remote learners/employees can see and interact with the same content…such as in Bluescape.
San Francisco – March 30, 2016 – 8ninths was named today by Microsoft Corporation as one of seven companies chosen for the Microsoft HoloLens Agency Readiness Program, and will showcase their “Holographic Workstation”™ prototype, designed and engineered for Citi, this week at Microsoft Build 2016. The Holographic Workstation™ increases efficiency by using the Microsoft HoloLens platform to create 3D holograms of real-time financial data. A three-tiered system of dynamically updated and interactive information enables traders to view, process, and interact with large amounts of abstract data in a combined 3D and 2D environment. The physical workstation integrates tablet screen space, 3D holographic docking space, keyboard, mouse, gaze, gesture, voice input, and existing Citi devices and workflows.
8Ninths Cofounder and CEO Adam Sheppard told me they looked at the pain points of existing workstations and then drew inspiration from how, for example, they’d seen Microsoft and NASA solve 3D problems by embedding information in 2D and real environments.
The result is 8ninths’ Holographic Workstation, which was announced Wednesday at Microsoft’s Build 2016 developers conference. It’s a true blend of the real world (a physical day trader desk with a pair of real screens and a Surface Pro 4 in the middle) and a host of live, financial visualizations spread above the physical desk, including a cloud-like work area floating above the top shelf.
The developer version of the HoloLens augmented reality headset starts shipping today, Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) announced at its developers’ conference in San Francisco.
The company also unveiled a Windows 10 update that includes new powers for virtual assistant Cortana, expanded security features, and new support for styluses.
11 incredible headsets that are making the virtual a reality— from digitaltrends.com by Simon Hill The latest VR headsets offer more than a mere doorway into wire-frame worlds. We are finally about to lay our hands on the decent VR headset we’ve all be waiting for. Here are the top contenders, from Oculus to PlayStation VR, vying for the title.
The aim of these films is to make us care about these crises on a deep, personal level. We know instinctively that it’s easier to emote with a single person than a faceless crowd of thousands, and this tactic takes that idea to its extreme: VR places you next to the person you could help with your donations, and allows you to directly engage by “walking” around the film yourself. The near-banality of Sidra’s film is its strength: the balance of dark and light in her life is easier to understand than a montage of outright misery, because it more closely mirrors our own.
An operation on a British cancer patient is to be live-streamed around the world using virtual reality technology designed to make viewers feel as if they are in the operating theatre.
It will be performed by Shafi Ahmed, a London surgeon who has been at the forefront of pioneering virtual reality technology in surgery, and who described next month’s operation as a gamechanger for healthcare innovation and education.
Holoportation is a new type of 3D capture technology that allows high-quality 3D models of people to be reconstructed, compressed and transmitted anywhere in the world in real time. When combined with mixed reality displays such as HoloLens, this technology allows users to see, hear, and interact with remote participants in 3D as if they are actually present in the same physical space. Communicating and interacting with remote users becomes as natural as face-to-face communication.
holoportation is a new type of 3D capture technology that allows high quality 3D models of people to be reconstructed, compressed, and transmitted anywhere in the world in real-time. When combined with mixed reality displays such as HoloLens, this technology allows users to see and interact with remote participants in 3D as if they are actually present in their physical space. Communicating and interacting with remote users becomes as natural as face to face communication.
I am super excited about today’s announcement that the Microsoft HoloLens Development Edition is available for pre-order. We set out on a mission to deliver the world’s first untethered holographic computer and it is amazing to finally be at this point in time where developers will be receiving the very first versions so they can start building their own holographic experiences.
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With HoloLens, we are committed to providing the development community with the best experience possible. In order to help get developers started creating experiences for HoloLens, we’ve provided a number of great resources. First of all, there is a complete set of documentation provided to developers both by the people who have created the platform and by the people who have been building holographic experiences. We want to share all of our holographic knowledge with developers so they can start bringing their holographic dreams to reality as easily as possible. We have also provided a host of tutorial videos to help people along. All of the documentation and videos can be found at dev.windows.com/holographic.
Stepping in front of a classroom of skeptical students can be nerve-wracking for first-time teachers, but a new teaching platform at the University of Central Florida gives educators-in-training the option of conquering their classroom jitters in a virtual environment.
Educators must navigate social, pedagogical and professional hurdles all at once. And TeachLive is the first of its kind — a classroom simulator that can emulate these challenges and scale its difficulty to the specific needs of the teacher.
TeachLive places a teacher-in-training in a virtual classroom populated by computer-generated students. A Skype conference call and a Microsoft Kinect motion sensor power the high-tech pantomiming behind the platform. It’s currently being used at more than 80 campuses across the U.S. to train some of the next generation of educators, and it appears to be working.
TLE TeachLivE™ is a mixed-reality classroom with simulated students that provides teachers the opportunity to develop their pedagogical practice in a safe environment that doesn’t place real students at risk. This lab is currently the only one in the country using a mixed reality environment to prepare or retrain pre-service and in-service teachers. The use of TLE TeachLivE™ Lab has also been instrumental in developing transition skills for students with significant disabilities, providing immediate feedback through bug-in-ear technology to pre-service teachers, developing discrete trial skills in pre-service and in-service teachers, and preparing teachers in the use of STEM-related instructional strategies.
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.
Out of the thousands of ideas entered, Airquarium, Grab the Idol and Galaxy Explorer were the three that made it through. Out of those the eventual winner was Galaxy Explorer with a total of 58 per cent of the votes. The app aims to give users the ability to wander the Milky Way and learn about our galaxy. Navigating through the stars and landing on the myriad of planets that are out there.
Except: Augmented reality(AR) has continued to gain momentum in the educational landscape over the past couple of years. These educators featured below have dove in head first using AR in their classrooms and schools. They continue to share excellent resources to help educators see how augmented reality can engage students and deepen understanding.
Unlike devices such as HoloLens or Google Glass, which have been marketed as consumer devices, the Daqri Smart Helmet is designed with industrial use in mind. It will allow the wearer to effectively peer into the workings of objects using real-time overlay of information, such as wiring diagrams, schematics and problem areas that need fixing.
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.
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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