It’s Friday, July 29th 2011 and welcome to episode 122 of TechTalk4Teachers, I’m Tom Grissom. This month we have a couple of special segments to share with you, first I have a debriefing with Brian Poulter, we had Brian on the show a couple of episodes ago back on Episode 120 when he was about to leave on a motorcycle trip to follow the Oregon Trail. Brian is now back from his trip and has some interesting stories to share with us.
Right Click Here to Download MP3
(33 minutes 43 seconds)
Following the Oregon Trail segment I will have an interview with Dr. Cindy Rich from the Teaching with Primary Sources grant here at EIU who I have invited back again to share more about digital resources available from the Library of Congress. In talking with Dr. Rich after last months show we thought we would try to make a new recurring segment called Teaching with Primary Sources to incorporate into the TechTalk4Teachers podcast to share the many things made available to teachers from the TPS grant.
So once again we have a lot to cover so let’s get started.
Looking for the Oregon Trail
In the End
http://brianpoulter.com/?p=438
Tragedy Strikes
http://brianpoulter.com/?p=403
Picture of Graves with Mt Hood in Background
http://brianpoulter.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/hood.jpg
Teaching with Primary Sources
EIU Teaching with Primary Sources Website
http://eiu.edu/~eiutps/
Library of Congress
http://www.loc.gov/index.html
Library of Congress Site Update Sheet
http://eiu.edu/~eiutps/2011_LC_Updates.pdf
Kitten on the Keys Music
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/papr:@filreq(@field(NUMBER+@band(edrs+50898l))+@field(COLLID+edison))
Technology Pick of the Week
My Technology Pick of the Week this week is a TED video by Matt Cutts. Matt gives an excellent talk about trying something new for 30 days. When Brian Poulter and I talked about Oregon Trail trip we threw out a challenge to you for trying something new over the summertime and sharing that experience. Brian also mentioned that he would be doing another photo a day experience this fall. I believe as educators we must constantly sharpen our saws and hone our skills to make us better educators. Becoming stagnant and stuck in a rut is a death knell for an educator.
TED Talks Homepage
http://www.ted.com/
Having a time of purposeful practice is absolutely necessary in order to improve any skill. The only way to achieve that is with commitment and focus. You can read and dream all you want but the effects of actually doing something is the only way to improve, there is a price to pay for getting better at something. Since education is all about constant improvement, by learning new things we need to consciously make decisions about what area of life we would like to improve.
I have provided a link in the show notes to the TED talk by Matt Cutts about such taking a 30 day challenge.
http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_cutts_try_something_new_for_30_days.html
Learning takes time and repetition and it turns out that focusing on something for 30 days provides just enough time to create new habits (or break bad ones).
If you are not familiar with the TED talks you should really check them out. There are nearly 1000 videos of some of the worlds best and brightest thinkers at the TED website where videos of short 20 minute or less presentations are available about what the speakers are passionate about.
Here is what the TED website says, “TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design”
So, if you have a little extra time this summer and have not yet experienced TED Talks, or even if you have, I encourage you to visit the TED website and do a search on whatever topic of interest and sit back, watch, and be inspired.
That wraps it up for episode 122 of TechTalk4Teachers. I want to thank Brian Poulter and Cindy Rich for being guests on todays show. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at eiu.edu/itc To leave a comment or suggestion, please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk for Teachers blog. Until next time, this is Tom Grissom. Keep on learning…
Friday, July 29, 2011
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Episode 121 – Teaching with Primary Sources Podcast
It’s Thursday, June 30th 2011 and welcome to episode 121 of TechTalk4Teachers, I’m Tom Grissom. We have another great interview lined up for you and this month we will be talking about using primary sources with your students and where you can find millions of resources to use with your classes. This episode mentions a few links throughout the interview so be sure to check out the show notes to learn more about all the resources that are shared.
Right Click Here to Download MP3
(32 minutes 13 seconds)
For those of you wondering about the adventures of Brian Poulter and his motorcycle trip following the Oregon Trail be sure to checkout his blog at brianpoulter.com Seems Brian has run into a bit of a snag and the best laid plans have hit a glitch. I hope to talk with Brian again soon so until then you can follow his blog to find out the latest.
http://brianpoulter.com/
End of the Trail
http://brianpoulter.com/?p=438
We have a lot of resources to share with you today so let’s get right to it.
TechTalk4Teachers Links for Episode 121
Teaching with Primary Sources
Teaching with Primary Sources Eastern Illinois University
www.eiu.edu/eiutps
Library of Congress
www.loc.gov
American Memory
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html
Presidential Inauguration
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/pihtml/pihome.html
After the Day of Infamy Man on the Street Interviews http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afcphhtml/afcphhome.html
Ansel Adams’ Photographs of Japanese American Internment http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/anseladams/
Veteran’s History Project
http://www.loc.gov/vets/
Childhood Lost: Child Labor during the Industrial Revolution
http://www.eiu.edu/eiutps/childhood.php
Follow the Evidence: The Trial of the Lincoln Conspirators (Lincoln CSI) http://www.eiu.edu/eiutps/april_65.php
Central Illinois Teaching with Primary Sources Newsletter
http://www.eiu.edu/eiutps/newsletter.php
Teacher’s Page
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/
Santa Fe, New Mexico, Gas station price analysis
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa2000002818/PP/
Civil War Maps
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/civil_war_maps/
Patriotic Melodies
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/patriotic/patriotic-home.html
Stars and Stripes Forever
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.100010445/default.html
Technology Pick of the Week
My Technology Pick of the Week this week is a very affordable MP3 player that is working very well for my renewed interest in My Media Mall and the free audio books that can be checked out from this site. Back on episode 119 of TechTalk4Teachers we explored the topic of ebooks and also talked about a service called My Media Mall and the Overdrive software that is available at many local libraries across the nation. Using this free service from my local library I can checkout up to 5 audio books for a period of up to two weeks. After that time the digital rights management scrambles the files so the titles become unusable.
I recently needed another MP3 Player and came across the Sansa Fuze 4GB model that is currently available at amazon.com for approximately 60 dollars. This MP3 player also has expandable storage that I use with microSD cards to add capacity when I need it. Being able to add storage on-demand is a very nice feature and it helps me manage audio and video content by keeping different categories of audio or video on different microSD cards. The Sansa Fuze also has a nice display that is easy to use and you can easily navigate through your content using the scroll wheel. The Sansa Fuze can also play videos but I find the 1.9 inch screen too small for video viewing so I will stick with my netbook or other computer connected to my HDTV for video viewing. A link is in the show notes to the model I purchased. I also purchased an arm band so I can strap it on my arm when exercising or moving about. It is advertised to have a 24 hour battery life but I have not come close to running out of battery before I recharge it so I will just have to take their word on that.
Sansa Fuze 4GB Model – works with My Media Mall with Windows 7
http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Sansa-Fuze-Video-Player/dp/B0015LOWD4/
Technical Details
• Listen, watch, and play all day with 24 hours of battery life and room for up to 1,000 songs
• Watch your favorite video clips or share your photos on the 1.9-inch color screen
• Digital FM radio with 40 preset stations
• Voice recording with built-in microphone
• Expand your existing 4 GB memory with the microSD/microSDHC slot
Since I already had the Overdrive software program loaded on my PC all I had to do was go to My Media Mall and checkout the audio books that I wanted then downloaded them to my computer. Once they were downloaded on my computer I simple connected the USB cable that came with the Sansa MP3 player then opened Overdrive and right-clicked on the title of the audio book that I wanted to transfer to the device and clicked on transfer. I have already listened to several titles and would recommend Blink and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell to either put on your summer reading list or listening list, whatever medium you prefer. I often prefer the audio content as I can be doing other things while listening.
Here is bonus tech pick for you. I am also an outdoors type of person and have a small farm where I am often out on a tractor doing various chores. I often use a special headset that has earmuffs to help with the engine noise but the headset also has a MP3 Jack that I can plug in a MP3 Player like the Sansa Fuze and listen to audio books or podcasts like this one while I am out plowing the fields or mowing the lawn. A link is in the show notes to the headset I use.
WorkTunes Headset with MP3 Jack
http://www.amazon.com/AO-Safety-90541-WorkTunes-Protector/dp/B0013092CS/
That wraps it up for episode 121 of TechTalk4Teachers. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at eiu.edu/itc To leave a comment or suggestion, please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk for Teachers blog. I would like to thank Dr. Cindy Rich for taking the time to talk with us about Teaching with Primary Sources and encourage everyone to go to the websites she mentioned and check them out further. Until next time, this is Tom Grissom, keep on learning…
Right Click Here to Download MP3
(32 minutes 13 seconds)
For those of you wondering about the adventures of Brian Poulter and his motorcycle trip following the Oregon Trail be sure to checkout his blog at brianpoulter.com Seems Brian has run into a bit of a snag and the best laid plans have hit a glitch. I hope to talk with Brian again soon so until then you can follow his blog to find out the latest.
http://brianpoulter.com/
End of the Trail
http://brianpoulter.com/?p=438
We have a lot of resources to share with you today so let’s get right to it.
TechTalk4Teachers Links for Episode 121
Teaching with Primary Sources
Teaching with Primary Sources Eastern Illinois University
www.eiu.edu/eiutps
Library of Congress
www.loc.gov
American Memory
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html
Presidential Inauguration
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/pihtml/pihome.html
After the Day of Infamy Man on the Street Interviews http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afcphhtml/afcphhome.html
Ansel Adams’ Photographs of Japanese American Internment http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/anseladams/
Veteran’s History Project
http://www.loc.gov/vets/
Childhood Lost: Child Labor during the Industrial Revolution
http://www.eiu.edu/eiutps/childhood.php
Follow the Evidence: The Trial of the Lincoln Conspirators (Lincoln CSI) http://www.eiu.edu/eiutps/april_65.php
Central Illinois Teaching with Primary Sources Newsletter
http://www.eiu.edu/eiutps/newsletter.php
Teacher’s Page
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/
Santa Fe, New Mexico, Gas station price analysis
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa2000002818/PP/
Civil War Maps
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/civil_war_maps/
Patriotic Melodies
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/patriotic/patriotic-home.html
Stars and Stripes Forever
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.100010445/default.html
Technology Pick of the Week
My Technology Pick of the Week this week is a very affordable MP3 player that is working very well for my renewed interest in My Media Mall and the free audio books that can be checked out from this site. Back on episode 119 of TechTalk4Teachers we explored the topic of ebooks and also talked about a service called My Media Mall and the Overdrive software that is available at many local libraries across the nation. Using this free service from my local library I can checkout up to 5 audio books for a period of up to two weeks. After that time the digital rights management scrambles the files so the titles become unusable.
I recently needed another MP3 Player and came across the Sansa Fuze 4GB model that is currently available at amazon.com for approximately 60 dollars. This MP3 player also has expandable storage that I use with microSD cards to add capacity when I need it. Being able to add storage on-demand is a very nice feature and it helps me manage audio and video content by keeping different categories of audio or video on different microSD cards. The Sansa Fuze also has a nice display that is easy to use and you can easily navigate through your content using the scroll wheel. The Sansa Fuze can also play videos but I find the 1.9 inch screen too small for video viewing so I will stick with my netbook or other computer connected to my HDTV for video viewing. A link is in the show notes to the model I purchased. I also purchased an arm band so I can strap it on my arm when exercising or moving about. It is advertised to have a 24 hour battery life but I have not come close to running out of battery before I recharge it so I will just have to take their word on that.
Sansa Fuze 4GB Model – works with My Media Mall with Windows 7
http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Sansa-Fuze-Video-Player/dp/B0015LOWD4/
Technical Details
• Listen, watch, and play all day with 24 hours of battery life and room for up to 1,000 songs
• Watch your favorite video clips or share your photos on the 1.9-inch color screen
• Digital FM radio with 40 preset stations
• Voice recording with built-in microphone
• Expand your existing 4 GB memory with the microSD/microSDHC slot
Since I already had the Overdrive software program loaded on my PC all I had to do was go to My Media Mall and checkout the audio books that I wanted then downloaded them to my computer. Once they were downloaded on my computer I simple connected the USB cable that came with the Sansa MP3 player then opened Overdrive and right-clicked on the title of the audio book that I wanted to transfer to the device and clicked on transfer. I have already listened to several titles and would recommend Blink and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell to either put on your summer reading list or listening list, whatever medium you prefer. I often prefer the audio content as I can be doing other things while listening.
Here is bonus tech pick for you. I am also an outdoors type of person and have a small farm where I am often out on a tractor doing various chores. I often use a special headset that has earmuffs to help with the engine noise but the headset also has a MP3 Jack that I can plug in a MP3 Player like the Sansa Fuze and listen to audio books or podcasts like this one while I am out plowing the fields or mowing the lawn. A link is in the show notes to the headset I use.
WorkTunes Headset with MP3 Jack
http://www.amazon.com/AO-Safety-90541-WorkTunes-Protector/dp/B0013092CS/
That wraps it up for episode 121 of TechTalk4Teachers. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at eiu.edu/itc To leave a comment or suggestion, please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk for Teachers blog. I would like to thank Dr. Cindy Rich for taking the time to talk with us about Teaching with Primary Sources and encourage everyone to go to the websites she mentioned and check them out further. Until next time, this is Tom Grissom, keep on learning…
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Episode 120 - The Oregon Trail, a motorcycle, a camera, a blog, and a summer teacher challenge
It's Tuesday, May 31st 2011 and welcome to Episode 120 of TechTalk4Teachers, I'm Tom Grissom. Summertime is now upon us and thousands of teachers will soon be on summer break but the learning never stops. On todays show I have an interview with Brian Poulter from the EIU Journalism department and we will have a discussion about sharing our passions and how teachers can challenge themselves to take on a summer project that will take their learning to the next level.
Right Click Here to Download MP3
(33 minutes 25 seconds)
Brian will be going on a summer adventure in June where he will be taking his motorcycle across the country following the route of the Oregon Trail and shooting photos and videos along the way. The ultimate goal of his trip will be to create a video production on the Oregon Trail using affordable technologies that fit into a backpack on his motorcycle. This episode has a lot of tips for those interested in sharing their experiences by using blogs, photos, and videos made possible by modern technologies along with a challenge for you to select a summer project of your own to take your learning to the next level.
Looking for the Oregon Trail
http://brianpoulter.com/?p=53
Here is our interview from earlier.
Interview:
TOM: With me today we have Brian Poulter who is a photojournalism professor here at Eastern Illinois University. I invited Brian in today to talk about some of things that he’s been doing over the summertime. With summertime fast approaching, many teachers are going to be going out and going on vacation and Brian’s done some really interesting work with sharing, photography in particular and incorporating that with blogs and he’s done some cross the country trips with a motorcycle and he’s blogged his experiences. Last summer, he went to Alaska, and, he blogged that particular trip day-by-day, taking photographs as he went along, and this year, I believe he’s going to be going on the Oregon Trail.
Two Wheels North
http://herald-review.com/special-section/news/two_wheels_north/
So, let me just turn it over to Brian and let him introduce himself and we’re just going to talk a little bit about sharing some of this information and how teachers can use it and blog their experiences and increase their skills. I think Brian and I both agree that the best way to do this is just to get out there and do it and practice. You know, you can read, and talk about it, and think about it all you want but you’re really not going to understand and gain the skills until you really do it. So, Brian…
BRIAN: Hello, I’m Brian Poulter, and nice to talk to you all today. I think he’s brought up a couple of really nice points here. This summer you’re going to be doing something, and one of the best ways, because I teach Photojournalism and New Media and I have to try to keep up on all the new technology, and like yourself, it’s impossible to do--I’m sure you’ll find that is a truism. So what I often do is I find something I’m going to do and force myself to do a project about it. And by doing so… and then telling everybody I’m going to do it, I have no excuses not to do it—
TOM: (laugh) Right.
BRIAN: --because they’re, looking for it. And the beauty of that is you get to figure out what the thesis is of what you’re going to do. You’re not locked into anything, and yet you’re forcing yourself to work with the new technologies. And what that does is allows you to make a lot of mistakes but you don’t have to show it to anybody, but you’ve made the mistakes and, better yet, when you try these new technologies, whether is Blogger or Flickr or an actual piece of hardware, what you’ve done is you’ve made mistakes so if you work with your students later on, they’re going to make similar mistakes, and you’ve figured out how to solve them. And you’re a better teacher, and everybody thinks you’re brilliant because you’ve figured out how to make their mistakes, and it makes your content better. I don’t’ care if you’re a talented pianist or a talented, racecar driver, the first time you work with a new piano or new racecar, you just don’t quite know how it’s set up and how it’s working. And so you’ve got to get comfortable with it. And with that comfort comes confidence and that’s going to work in your teaching.
TOM: Right, and that’s true of most things in life. It’s that “practice, practice, practice.” And, you know, oftentimes, in education we’re so focused on, “Well, we’ve got to get to Chapter 3 by such-and-such time and just going down and covering material. We really need to pause, one of the things that I see in teaching pre-service teachers is giving the students those opportunities in authentic environments. So the project that you’re doing, like you did last year with, with the Alaska trip, is a perfect , you know, a perfect project for that because you’re incorporating multiple technologies and they’re getting to see an end product, an end result there. And that involves several different skills, whether the technology—Really, to me, the technology, is the easiest part to master. It’s all those other pieces and putting it together and coming up, for example, in your Alaska trip, telling those stories and things day-by-day coming through to make that whole, to make it, a good experience out there.
BRIAN: Well the other great thing, too, is on the trip, I had a lot of photographs, raw photographs, that hadn’t been touched, and even though I processed them and I’d send them to, in this case, newspapers for republication and I had the rights and I had the edits and I gave myself about an hour and a half a day to do it because I was also riding a motorcycle—in the rain, most of the time, it seemed.
TOM: Yeah, let’s back up a minute and just set up that and preface for what you did last year in Alaska. So, it was what? Thirty days?
BRIAN: Yeah, I left here in Charleston, Illinois, which is what, two hours south of Chicago or a little bit west of Indianapolis? And I rode from here to the Artic Circle and the Yukon and then you have to come back, actually south and then west to get into Alaska and then I came back through. And so what I did is I blogged everyday with photos and text and sent it to the Decatur, Illinois Herald & Review and they republished it.And the nice thing about that is that once I get back, I still have these raw photographs and I can give them to students and I can say, “I’m going to give you 35 minutes to turn this into a publishable photograph,” and say, “Here’s what I got, yours doesn’t have to look exactly like mine does, because that’s part of the art, is how you work with it, the decisions you make, but it’s a real-life scenario. It’s not like it’s out of a workbook where they think, “Oh, we’re just doing this for busy work.” This is a photograph that someone’s published before. Are they up to the challenge and the task of doing this? I teach journalism and photojournalism , so I’m about storytelling. So, if I can give them some photographs, give them a little more time, they’re new at it. It’s a great opportunity for them to see if they are up to the task. It doesn’t matter if it’s in Photoshop or if they’re using some other photo manipulation program, again, or one of the other free ones that’s available like GIMP. It’s all about the end result, the skill I’m teaching, and it’s more real to life. And, I found that students get more excited about stuff that seems real to them rather than like, pulled out of a workbook.
TOM: Right, right. And, I’ll provide a link in the show notes to this Alaska trip. It’s really worth going out there and taking a look. You were using Wordpress, Flickr…?
BRIAN: Well, in this case, I was just sending this stuff directly to the Decatur Herald Review, but for previous stuff I’ve done and stuff I do in my own personal work, I work with Wordpress a lot which, if you’re not familiar with it, you can go to wordpress.com and you can it really help sets up a bunch of, I don’t want to call them templates because that isn’t a strong enough word for what’s they are. But, it really builds a nice, beautiful website that you can manipulate, put plug-ins in, or you can also get that software for free and load it onto your own server so you have more control. That’s nice. Another great tool to work with that is Flickr, flickr.com. Just take the “e” out of flicker.
TOM: Yep. F-L-I-C-K-R.
BRIAN: It’s the Facebook of photography. It’s a social network.
TOM: Been around for a long time.
BRIAN: It’s free. If you want to pay 24, 25 dollars a year to have a professional account, I do only because you get to load up more and bigger stuff, but once you have it set up, it’s a depository for your photographs. You can then say to Facebook, “Take this photograph. Put it on my Facebook page.” And, you can also say, “Take this photograph, and put it on my Blogger site or my Wordpress site.” So, it’s like a cloud that holds all your photographs, but you can from there parse it out. And, it’s archived. If your computer crashes, you now know where your photographs still are; they didn’t disappear off your hard drive.
TOM: Right, now talk about some of the challenges there because you are going across country and are you uploading those photos as you go?
BRIAN: Right, and no…when I say that I blog daily, it was nice in a way because the Decatur Herald & Review didn’t want to pay anybody to sit and receive my work on the weekends, so I had the weekends off. Even though I was writing and shooting stuff, I didn’t get to put up stuff, and it often coincided to when I didn’t have internet availability it would be one of those weekends. But… thank goodness for wireless, free wireless at gas stations and libraries and hotels and wherever I could find it, and there were times where I literally turned my computer on, said send the photographs, put the laptop in a bush, and walked two blocks away and ate and came back, not thinking that anyone was going to find my laptop in that bush because that was where the best internet connection was. You know, when you’re in the middle of nowhere, there’s fewer people to find your stuff and steal it.
TOM: Yeah, and then I noticed on the blog you were having people comment and things as it went along. Was that all done on the fly as you were going, or did they publish that after the fact?
BRIAN: No, they published it daily. A lot of times what I did was I actually emailed the text
to my wife because we were having some FTP issues and she could check periodically. I can’t do that on a motorcycle. And, the fun thing I learned about when you blog for a newspaper is that it doesn’t go through an editing process. They just publish it, so there are a couple sentences I now go back and read, and I go, “What the heck does that say.” So, when you’re reading be tolerate.
TOM: Keep that in mind that you were eight hours on a motorcycle, and…
BRIAN: Yeah, and by the way, I didn’t mention that it rained nineteen of the first twenty days I was on the motorcycle. Every single day I got wet, but that’s a great thing to tell students. You say, “You have no excuses for not getting your homework done. I had homework to do, and I had to do it in the rain from a motorcycle. It’s doable.”
TOM: Welcome to the real world.
BRIAN: Going back to the thing, I think you were trying to establish this, it’s summer. If you’re passionate to go visit it some place, something…
BRIAN: I think will be stunned that if you just do a minor about of research, and let’s say…well, I’m going on the Oregon Trail, so I’m contacting this woman who is an editor of a tribal newspaper on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation. I don’t know her, and I send her an email and say, “Hey, here’s what I’m doing. Would you be willing to participate?” And, she’s like yeah, and she’s an award winning journalist. Anytime you approach somebody with a little bit of passion and a little bit of understanding and have done just a minor amount of research so people understand that you’re just not trying to get some freebie from them you’ll be stunned at how much time they’re be willing to spend with you. And, that introduces some unique photographs or writing or whatever it is you’re passionate about in teaching, and it gets you excited.
TOM: Right, yes.
BRIAN: You know, I’ve taught the main Photo class two or three times a semester for nineteen years. I really, really enjoy that class. In fact, it’s my favorite class, but I change it every semester. I don’t teach it exactly the same way. I have the same results I have to achieve. If I don’t get excited about it, I can’t get them excited.
TOM: Well, let’s just pause and stop. How much has changed in the last nineteen years? I mean, every year there’s something, you know, that you’re adapting and integrating into it. But, it’s just staggering just to pause just a moment to think how much the world’s changed.
BRIAN: I used to teach taking film out of a canister and rolling it on the reel.
TOM: and a darkroom.
BRIAN: And, then printing it in the darkroom. Then, we went to…we still use film, but then we scanned it. Then, we go to digital. Well, digital wasn’t going to be good as film ever.
TOM: Exactly, it will never…
BRIAN: Now, we’ve given up film, and I have a M.F.A. in Photography. And, I love my experience with printing photographs in the darkroom and putting my hands in chemicals that will probably kill me like via cancer one day, but I don’t miss it. And, it’s cheaper. And, the best thing is, like your students, if you’re not making mistakes with technology, you’re probably not learning. And, that’s what this summer project is about, if you take on our challenge, I guess that’s what we’re saying here, is about…is making mistakes and learning. I tell my students all the time, who are really good at something, “You’re not working very hard. You’re not doing good work.” “Well, I’m getting an A.” Yes, but you’re not teaching yourself anything.
TOM: I have several teachers in my personal learning network, and the photo 365 is one of those things. And, it’s exactly that. Just doing one photo a day for 365 days, and I really do think that teachers would benefit from that blogging experience out there. Especially if you’re wanting to incorporate a specific subject out there, and you know, as teachers, like I said when we go on vacation we always mix those things that interest us. And, just imagine a social studies teacher going to Washington, D.C. for example and being able to share that experience and things. And, just having that catalogue of photographs, if nothing else, to be able to share with their class. And then, since I’m an audio podcaster, if you would want to take a recorder, digital recorder, tape recorder, and being able to do that. And I know you’re also involved with video. …and you might mention that because you said that you’re changing it up from what you did last year with the Oregon Trail.
BRIAN: Right, this year I am, I’m still taking my digital camera which by the way can shoot video, but I’m taking a specific Panasonic video camera, and I’m working on a documentary film that will incorporate some still but will primarily be video-based because I need to learn something new. And, in journalism, we no longer teach people, really, to work for TV stations, newspapers. We teach them to work for media companies because, if you’re working for NBC, I don’t know if you know this but, they have a website, and they put video on it, and they put text on it, and they do everything on it. And, a requirement of our core curriculum in our journalism program is they have to take a New Media course. It’s one of many things. And, they have to learn to edit video. They have to learn to edit audio. They’ve already been doing stills. And, combine these. They have to blog, and not just in the New Media class, in the writing classes, they have to blog. In our ethics classes, they blog. In our Sports Writing class, they have to make their own photographs and blog even though it’s primarily a writing course. So, there’s a cross-connection of stuff going on here, and teachers can really benefit and help themselves be a more effective and more excited about what they do day to day if they just participated. And, that sort of thing.
Brian: …something I did with my students for 30 days and you’ll have a link off here I’m sure to ittybittyphoto.com..…all shot with point shoot cameras, not the expensive stuff, I challenge myself to make a photograph and publish it every single day for thirty days, and then, I challenge my students to do it. They go that’s too hard and I go I can do it I have a job, things I got to do.
Itty bitty photo
http://ittybittyphoto.com/
Tom: I think that’s often excuse……for…students. I remember whenever I was starting out with podcasting things, I literally was using a little netbook and a ten dollar microphone. And yeah, those didn’t sound as great, but I was learning the process and things. And then, over time, I’ve upgraded the equipment, and now, I’m using a mixer. And we have two microphones going in whereas before it was just you know one microphone that we shared back and forth, but again, the important thing is to get started on that and as you said find something that you’re passionate about and the rest will follow out there.
Brian: On one of the first trips I did, I followed the Mississippi with a teacher, a local teacher, I know who is an alum of Eastern here named Jim Standerfer, a very talented writer, because I didn’t want to do the writing and the photography. This last time I realized how hard it was. I purposely used a Canon Powershot G10 camera; the same point and shoot camera we teach our students with, the same one you..can’t buy now because the G11 is the new version, but it’s a point and shoot camera. And, my point then doing some work which got in a gallery show and got published in newspapers was that I’m trying to teach technique and understanding not how to use a specific piece of technology. One of the main reasons I did it that way is that I said, “Look here is the same camera that I hand you in class. What’s your excuse.” I also make sure though, when I talk about this, I show them all the bad photographs that I make that don’t quite work or have a technical problem. We were discussing before we went on air, I guess you call it, the best thing you can do to be able to teach something effectively is to play with it and screw it up. You’ll never be able to teach something as well or do anything as well as after you’ve had to teach it, break it down and not approach it from how you learned it but figure out how somebody else learns it and approaches it that way. And, I think it all snowballs from there.
Tom: Right…Students have to internalize that learning and the only way that you internalize it is through those experiences out there and that you have to provide those opportunities for the students to learn and to fail. I use a term…I tell my student whenever I start on some project-based learning activity is I want you to fail fast. I want you to go through and take all the steps of this project and go through very, very small at first. So say a podcast, you know, it would be probably crazy to give my students to say I would like for you all to do a thirty minute podcast, so let’s do a one minute or even a thirty second one. You would be surprised how much time you could spend on just a thirty second project. You know because you’ve done it out there, but students think. “Oh, no problem. Let’s do a public service announcement. Thirty seconds, here’s what you want to do.” That literally can take hours to get that thirty seconds.
Brian: One of the other things related to that, I think, is that, what we’re talking about here too, when you set up these situations where you allow people to fail, you don’t have to ride your motorcycle through the Arctic to make content; you don’t have to go on the Oregon Trail. I’m just interested in those things, so I decided to document. However, going back to what I was talking about before, I had set up this photograph every single day. Publish it online; people were checking it. I did this in Charleston, Illinois. We’re a county that’s what, 30,000 at most and it’s shrinking in population.
Tom: Rural Illinois, corn and bean fields everywhere.
Brian: So, I had to find something. And a lot of it did not come on the campus which takes about half the population of the county away. I had little towns like, if you’ve ever looked at a map, Reardon, Illinois. Something I don’t know if you can even find on a map. Well, I would just go drive because I had this hour and a half window available that day, and I knew people would give me a really hard time if I didn’t put something up. And so, what you find yourself doing is falling back on “Ok, I teach this class. What makes a good photograph? What compositional things can I do turn this situation into a good photograph? What’s at the heart of a good photograph? It’s emotion, it’s faces.” Sort of, you’re like, oh yeah, there’s a reason why this stuff that I teach works. It actually does great. …and it sounds like work but actually it was probably the best part of my day. It was like my hour and my half where I got to be creative and do something for myself....
Tom: But, you set that goal to begin with and that’s kind of that drive…same thing here with this podcast. I used to publish weekly and then I made it once a month and kind of turned this into more of an interview type format. But, you do feel yourself, I don’t know if pressures the right word, but you have that goal in the back of your mind. Like, oh, it’s coming up on the end of the month, we need to get the whatever it is done, whatever goal you have accomplished.
Brian: The best thing about teaching photo students having been a photo journalist is you can’t make photographs over the phone. You can’t sit in an office and call someone up and say, “Can you send me a photograph that I can use and put my name on.” You overcome what I call the Velcro of the Couch Effect which is the hardest part of any project is getting your butt off the couch, being stuck there and there is this inertia of a body at rest. You’d be amazed once you go out there and just…the beautiful thing of the assignment of making a photograph a day is you know you have to do something. There are no excuses for well that’s not going to be good enough so I’m not going to push the button. And you’d be surprised that, when you force yourself to do something, you can do better stuff than you thought you could do.
Tom: Right, and that’s that growing process and learning process out there. And, once again, it comes back to practice, the more you do, you know, I think, subconsciously, it works on your mind over time. As long as you have the goal, and you mentioned this, of constantly improving because it is possible to get in a rut and, well, I know how to do this, I’m going to do the same thing, as you said, thirty times this way. But, as long as you push it to that next level, and grow. And that’s where that patience comes in, so if you have that patience in there, you’re constantly striving for that.
Brian: I do some workshops for high schools, and we put a bunch here. And there’s a little town called Mount Carmel in the Southern part of the state, Wabash County. And, they bring me in, and I teach their students photography and a little bit of web design and this sort of stuff. I look at what they do now, and they’re running…they’re building commercial websites for the businesses in their community. And, one faculty said, “I know how to do web servers or you know do subservers”. So, they do that. And, one person, “Well, I sort of know web design, and I teach business communication.” And, what I love about their approach down there is, these faculty have found a way to keep themselves excited rather than just like, “Well, design a website for yourself,” and really, how do you critique that. But, now you have a customer to keep happy, and you don’t get to pick pink for your webpage just because you like pink. You better hope that there’s a reason for it to be pink, and one of the largest producers of oil drilling bits in the country is in Mount Carmel, Illinois. They do the website for them. They don’t want pink; I don’t think. They want red and oil black, and so it’s real life experience. And those kids get to point to that, put that on their resume, their college application and say, “I’ve done commercial websites.” That’s better than I built a website for myself, and the faculty get the pride and satisfaction of knowing they’re really teaching real stuff.
Tom: Ok, we probably need to wrap-up here a little bit, but let’s talk a little bit about some of the technologies and things that you and I both use out there for…obviously the Tech Talk for Teachers blog, if you visited that site, we’re using Blogger. And then, for their photo site of that, they’ve got another Google property that’s called Picassa, so some people may have heard that name. So, since those two belong to both companies, those are kind of a natural pair out there, Blogger and Picassa for some of your photographs. A long time ago, like I said, Flickr’s been out there. It was one of the first web 2.0 companies. They were and still are, aren’t they, a Yahoo! property…
Brian: Uh…yeah…Yahoo!...yeah. And so, if you have a Yahoo! email account, you already have a Flikr account.
Tom: Whether you know it or not…it’s part of your Yahoo! account.
Brian: Yes, you just log in there. And so, I made up a Yahoo! email account just for that purpose.
Tom: And, for teachers out there, you know, keeping the personal separate from some of the class projects out there, you know. You might set up a separate account for something like that whether it be a Blogger or a Flickr or Picassa whatever…whatever it might be. Same thing, you know the Yahoo! account, same thing with Gmail, if you have Gmail, you have Blogger and Picassa out there available to you.
Brian: And, click on Google, and click on tabs: the extra stuff that they normally don’t show you. I mean there’s…
Tom: More items…I can’t remember what it is. I click on it all the time.
Brian: You have a website. You want to know if people are using it.
Tom: Google sites?
Brian: Google analytic will tell you an amazing amount of stuff that you probably don’t want to know about your traffic or lack of it sometimes (laughs).
Tom: (laughs) Yeah. And then, when we were talking earlier, you mentioned something about Vimeo. Can you talk a little about Vimeo and Youtube?
Brian: Right. Vimeo and Youtube, I’m sure you all know what Youtube is. …Vimeo, I like to call it the adult version of Youtube. …It doesn’t take commercial content. It’s much higher quality. …and if you want to inspire yourself and challenge yourself and your students, you can go there and just find a bunch of stuff. Now, it’s overwhelming because there’s so many stuff there, and before I go on, they have some really nice forums that are really helpful for a specific camera, what you are trying to do. …everyday they have staff favorites which just for your own entertainment purposes and to inspire yourself are worth looking at. You can have a paid account, but it’s also free. Just, when you pay, you can upload more, and you can get more options. I’m using the free one right now. When I come back from my trip on Oregon, I’m going to offer my stuff to both PBS and probably put an edited version up on Vimeo just because the quality is so high. I mean it’s high definition streaming if you want it streamed at a higher quality. It’s much higher quality than what Youtube offers. It’s worth checking out, if for no other reason, because, as a teacher, I steal ideas all the time. I see somebody do something really awesome. Hey, that’s pretty cool. I’m going to teach my students to do that, and I’m going to steal that idea. And, it’s everything from big massive epic productions where people have hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment to stuff that was shot with Flickr cameras or, I’m sorry, flash-based camera. It’s a better resource, I think, for getting better content. Looking at stuff that you can steal ideas from and try to emulate to make yourself better.
Tom: Ok, to wrap-up here, let’s just kind of go through a project, and you’ve inspired me. I probably need to start doing some more photography and things. That’s something I’ve always been interested in, and I was one of those, when I was teaching high school we had the dark room, so it’s been a few years. I’ve gone through that evolution. But, I, number one is establish a goal. Don’t let the summer go by, you know. If you’re going to be out there on vacation and you’re interested and passionate in something out there, just make it a goal out there to provide some type of way that you can share your passion and knowledge out there on the subject with others. And then, from there, you know, pick whatever media…medium you would like to do whether it be still photographs or a combination of photographs and blogging and things. I’ll put in the links in the show to some of Brian’s prior work because I think that blog for teachers out there, that’s a familiar format, you know. We’re very familiar with blogs at this point, but it’s having that goal out there on that specific thing. Any other words of wisdom here as we…
Brian: I just think what you want to do, primarily, is say imagine someone sitting there, and they say tell me a story. So, what is it you’re interested about? What do you know something about? Where are you going? And, tell them a story about it, and you’re all teachers so figure out what’s the teachable moment out of it and chase that. And then, figure out how…but before you go figure out how you might share it that will sort of dictate what your approach will be. And, the beautiful thing here is that you don’t tie yourself to thirty seconds or thirty minutes or something. This is not broadcast. This is internet casting. It’s how long does this need to be but edited down, so there’s not extra in there. You know, you don’t a twenty page paper when a ten page paper will do, and go out there and make some mistakes, and if it totally blows up in your face, nobody will know about it. Unless you’re stupid enough to tell people you’re going on the Oregon Trail.
Tom: Which can be a motivating factor as you said, along there to push you.
Brian: You’re teachers. You know what a little research can do. You know knowing something before you get there, what it’s about, and that allows you to focus in, literally, on what the story’s about. But, I just spent two days figuring out how to get two pieces of software to work together, so I know I’m going to have to do this. But, you know what, that’s kind of fun once you figure out how to do it, and the thing that teachers have available that nobody had available fifteen to twenty years ago are forums. Go there. Ask questions. Just say, I’m a newb or a novice. And, as soon as you admit that you don’t know anything, everybody’s willing to help you. It’s a beautiful thing. So, figure out what you want to do, try it, ask for some help. If you fail, so what no one will know the difference.
Tom: Yep, get better next time. Reach that next level. Ok, I’d like to thank Brian Poulter for coming in today. It’s been a great conversation, and also, as you all head into summer, I’d love to hear from you. Some of the audience members out there, if you have an idea, if you have little question, shoot an email to our techtalk@eiu.edu email address, and I’d love to see some of the projects or things. Whenever you come back to school this fall, be sure to drop me a note. Let us know if this has been beneficial for you, and we will continue to broadcast. I’ll have another episode in June. So, we will continue over the summer, but for those of you that are going on break, you can stay subscribed. And, I’d like to wish everybody a very productive summer.
Technology Pick of the Week
My Technology Pick of the Week this week is the Asus Eee Pad Transformer tablet. I recently was in the market for purchasing a new netbook for my own personal use but I was also was considering a tablet like the iPad. I came really close to buying the iPad version 1 product when they were reduced in price to $399 when the iPad 2 came out but I really did not want to be stuck with a tablet that was over a year old when I bought one. I am glad I waited as the Eee Pad Transformer became available at the end of April and I purchased the Eee Pad along with the optional keyboard dock that “transforms” the tablet into a netbook like device.
Eee Pad Transformer
http://www.asus.com/Eee/Eee_Pad/Eee_Pad_Transformer_TF101/
The Eee Pad runs the Android Honeycomb operating system and I get the best of both worlds. I get a touch screen device with about 9 hours of battery life and a keyboard dock that provides an additional 7 hours of battery life along with a physical keyboard to use when I want to get some real work done. Thats 16 hours of battery life when used in combination with the keyboard dock, talk about all day computing! It provides instant on and the keyboard is well designed with special shortcut keys that make using the Eee Pad with the docked keyboard a joy to use. There is a small switch that slides back and forth to lock and unlock the keyboard dock to the tablet.
I can use a touchscreen keyboard for small amounts of text input but I find myself wanting to use a physical keyboard for anything longer than a paragraph of typing. The docking station is very easy to use and I can move from a tablet to a netbook style device at will. I bought the Eee Pad 16GB version that retails for $399, a one-hundred dollars savings over the iPad. Two other features sealed the deal for me in making this purchase. First, and it includes a microSD card that provides flexible storage that I can use to load content onto a microSD card. This essentially allows for unlimited storage as I can load up a microSD card with content and when it gets full I can buy another microSD card for additional content if I so choose. Because the Eee Pad allows additional storage it also has a file manager that allows you to easily copy and paste files from your computer to the Eee Pad using the special USB cable that is provided. Secondly, the Eee Pad has a mini HDMI out connector that allows you to connect to a HDTV using an affordable mini HDMI to HDMI cable. This allows you to watch on the big screen any content that is displayed on the Eee Pad.
As I mentioned I also bought the optional keyboard dock that costs an additional $150. This is optional and not needed at all unless you want the added battery life or are like me and prefer to use a physical keyboard for anything other than casual typing. Since I wanted a netbook like device I elected to purchase the keyboard dock. I have had the Eee Pad for about a month now and it has handled everything I expected it to do. It supports Adobe Flash so you will enjoy a full Internet experience. Being a Google operating system it works well with gmail and Youtube and you have full access to the Android Marketplace if you would like additional apps. For those that are considering 1 to 1 tablet programs in schools the Eee Pad may be worth considering as a hybrid solution that offers the best of the touchscreen tablet world along with the practicality of the netbook world.
That wraps it up for episode 120 of TechTalk4Teachers. I want to thank Brian Poulterr for being our guest on todays show and wish him the best on his upcoming Oregon Trail trip. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at www.eiu.edu/itc To leave a comment or suggestion, please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk for Teachers blog. Until next time, this is Tom Grissom. Keep on learning…
Right Click Here to Download MP3
(33 minutes 25 seconds)
Brian will be going on a summer adventure in June where he will be taking his motorcycle across the country following the route of the Oregon Trail and shooting photos and videos along the way. The ultimate goal of his trip will be to create a video production on the Oregon Trail using affordable technologies that fit into a backpack on his motorcycle. This episode has a lot of tips for those interested in sharing their experiences by using blogs, photos, and videos made possible by modern technologies along with a challenge for you to select a summer project of your own to take your learning to the next level.
Looking for the Oregon Trail
http://brianpoulter.com/?p=53
Here is our interview from earlier.
Interview:
TOM: With me today we have Brian Poulter who is a photojournalism professor here at Eastern Illinois University. I invited Brian in today to talk about some of things that he’s been doing over the summertime. With summertime fast approaching, many teachers are going to be going out and going on vacation and Brian’s done some really interesting work with sharing, photography in particular and incorporating that with blogs and he’s done some cross the country trips with a motorcycle and he’s blogged his experiences. Last summer, he went to Alaska, and, he blogged that particular trip day-by-day, taking photographs as he went along, and this year, I believe he’s going to be going on the Oregon Trail.
Two Wheels North
http://herald-review.com/special-section/news/two_wheels_north/
So, let me just turn it over to Brian and let him introduce himself and we’re just going to talk a little bit about sharing some of this information and how teachers can use it and blog their experiences and increase their skills. I think Brian and I both agree that the best way to do this is just to get out there and do it and practice. You know, you can read, and talk about it, and think about it all you want but you’re really not going to understand and gain the skills until you really do it. So, Brian…
BRIAN: Hello, I’m Brian Poulter, and nice to talk to you all today. I think he’s brought up a couple of really nice points here. This summer you’re going to be doing something, and one of the best ways, because I teach Photojournalism and New Media and I have to try to keep up on all the new technology, and like yourself, it’s impossible to do--I’m sure you’ll find that is a truism. So what I often do is I find something I’m going to do and force myself to do a project about it. And by doing so… and then telling everybody I’m going to do it, I have no excuses not to do it—
TOM: (laugh) Right.
BRIAN: --because they’re, looking for it. And the beauty of that is you get to figure out what the thesis is of what you’re going to do. You’re not locked into anything, and yet you’re forcing yourself to work with the new technologies. And what that does is allows you to make a lot of mistakes but you don’t have to show it to anybody, but you’ve made the mistakes and, better yet, when you try these new technologies, whether is Blogger or Flickr or an actual piece of hardware, what you’ve done is you’ve made mistakes so if you work with your students later on, they’re going to make similar mistakes, and you’ve figured out how to solve them. And you’re a better teacher, and everybody thinks you’re brilliant because you’ve figured out how to make their mistakes, and it makes your content better. I don’t’ care if you’re a talented pianist or a talented, racecar driver, the first time you work with a new piano or new racecar, you just don’t quite know how it’s set up and how it’s working. And so you’ve got to get comfortable with it. And with that comfort comes confidence and that’s going to work in your teaching.
TOM: Right, and that’s true of most things in life. It’s that “practice, practice, practice.” And, you know, oftentimes, in education we’re so focused on, “Well, we’ve got to get to Chapter 3 by such-and-such time and just going down and covering material. We really need to pause, one of the things that I see in teaching pre-service teachers is giving the students those opportunities in authentic environments. So the project that you’re doing, like you did last year with, with the Alaska trip, is a perfect , you know, a perfect project for that because you’re incorporating multiple technologies and they’re getting to see an end product, an end result there. And that involves several different skills, whether the technology—Really, to me, the technology, is the easiest part to master. It’s all those other pieces and putting it together and coming up, for example, in your Alaska trip, telling those stories and things day-by-day coming through to make that whole, to make it, a good experience out there.
BRIAN: Well the other great thing, too, is on the trip, I had a lot of photographs, raw photographs, that hadn’t been touched, and even though I processed them and I’d send them to, in this case, newspapers for republication and I had the rights and I had the edits and I gave myself about an hour and a half a day to do it because I was also riding a motorcycle—in the rain, most of the time, it seemed.
TOM: Yeah, let’s back up a minute and just set up that and preface for what you did last year in Alaska. So, it was what? Thirty days?
BRIAN: Yeah, I left here in Charleston, Illinois, which is what, two hours south of Chicago or a little bit west of Indianapolis? And I rode from here to the Artic Circle and the Yukon and then you have to come back, actually south and then west to get into Alaska and then I came back through. And so what I did is I blogged everyday with photos and text and sent it to the Decatur, Illinois Herald & Review and they republished it.And the nice thing about that is that once I get back, I still have these raw photographs and I can give them to students and I can say, “I’m going to give you 35 minutes to turn this into a publishable photograph,” and say, “Here’s what I got, yours doesn’t have to look exactly like mine does, because that’s part of the art, is how you work with it, the decisions you make, but it’s a real-life scenario. It’s not like it’s out of a workbook where they think, “Oh, we’re just doing this for busy work.” This is a photograph that someone’s published before. Are they up to the challenge and the task of doing this? I teach journalism and photojournalism , so I’m about storytelling. So, if I can give them some photographs, give them a little more time, they’re new at it. It’s a great opportunity for them to see if they are up to the task. It doesn’t matter if it’s in Photoshop or if they’re using some other photo manipulation program, again, or one of the other free ones that’s available like GIMP. It’s all about the end result, the skill I’m teaching, and it’s more real to life. And, I found that students get more excited about stuff that seems real to them rather than like, pulled out of a workbook.
TOM: Right, right. And, I’ll provide a link in the show notes to this Alaska trip. It’s really worth going out there and taking a look. You were using Wordpress, Flickr…?
BRIAN: Well, in this case, I was just sending this stuff directly to the Decatur Herald Review, but for previous stuff I’ve done and stuff I do in my own personal work, I work with Wordpress a lot which, if you’re not familiar with it, you can go to wordpress.com and you can it really help sets up a bunch of, I don’t want to call them templates because that isn’t a strong enough word for what’s they are. But, it really builds a nice, beautiful website that you can manipulate, put plug-ins in, or you can also get that software for free and load it onto your own server so you have more control. That’s nice. Another great tool to work with that is Flickr, flickr.com. Just take the “e” out of flicker.
TOM: Yep. F-L-I-C-K-R.
BRIAN: It’s the Facebook of photography. It’s a social network.
TOM: Been around for a long time.
BRIAN: It’s free. If you want to pay 24, 25 dollars a year to have a professional account, I do only because you get to load up more and bigger stuff, but once you have it set up, it’s a depository for your photographs. You can then say to Facebook, “Take this photograph. Put it on my Facebook page.” And, you can also say, “Take this photograph, and put it on my Blogger site or my Wordpress site.” So, it’s like a cloud that holds all your photographs, but you can from there parse it out. And, it’s archived. If your computer crashes, you now know where your photographs still are; they didn’t disappear off your hard drive.
TOM: Right, now talk about some of the challenges there because you are going across country and are you uploading those photos as you go?
BRIAN: Right, and no…when I say that I blog daily, it was nice in a way because the Decatur Herald & Review didn’t want to pay anybody to sit and receive my work on the weekends, so I had the weekends off. Even though I was writing and shooting stuff, I didn’t get to put up stuff, and it often coincided to when I didn’t have internet availability it would be one of those weekends. But… thank goodness for wireless, free wireless at gas stations and libraries and hotels and wherever I could find it, and there were times where I literally turned my computer on, said send the photographs, put the laptop in a bush, and walked two blocks away and ate and came back, not thinking that anyone was going to find my laptop in that bush because that was where the best internet connection was. You know, when you’re in the middle of nowhere, there’s fewer people to find your stuff and steal it.
TOM: Yeah, and then I noticed on the blog you were having people comment and things as it went along. Was that all done on the fly as you were going, or did they publish that after the fact?
BRIAN: No, they published it daily. A lot of times what I did was I actually emailed the text
to my wife because we were having some FTP issues and she could check periodically. I can’t do that on a motorcycle. And, the fun thing I learned about when you blog for a newspaper is that it doesn’t go through an editing process. They just publish it, so there are a couple sentences I now go back and read, and I go, “What the heck does that say.” So, when you’re reading be tolerate.
TOM: Keep that in mind that you were eight hours on a motorcycle, and…
BRIAN: Yeah, and by the way, I didn’t mention that it rained nineteen of the first twenty days I was on the motorcycle. Every single day I got wet, but that’s a great thing to tell students. You say, “You have no excuses for not getting your homework done. I had homework to do, and I had to do it in the rain from a motorcycle. It’s doable.”
TOM: Welcome to the real world.
BRIAN: Going back to the thing, I think you were trying to establish this, it’s summer. If you’re passionate to go visit it some place, something…
BRIAN: I think will be stunned that if you just do a minor about of research, and let’s say…well, I’m going on the Oregon Trail, so I’m contacting this woman who is an editor of a tribal newspaper on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation. I don’t know her, and I send her an email and say, “Hey, here’s what I’m doing. Would you be willing to participate?” And, she’s like yeah, and she’s an award winning journalist. Anytime you approach somebody with a little bit of passion and a little bit of understanding and have done just a minor amount of research so people understand that you’re just not trying to get some freebie from them you’ll be stunned at how much time they’re be willing to spend with you. And, that introduces some unique photographs or writing or whatever it is you’re passionate about in teaching, and it gets you excited.
TOM: Right, yes.
BRIAN: You know, I’ve taught the main Photo class two or three times a semester for nineteen years. I really, really enjoy that class. In fact, it’s my favorite class, but I change it every semester. I don’t teach it exactly the same way. I have the same results I have to achieve. If I don’t get excited about it, I can’t get them excited.
TOM: Well, let’s just pause and stop. How much has changed in the last nineteen years? I mean, every year there’s something, you know, that you’re adapting and integrating into it. But, it’s just staggering just to pause just a moment to think how much the world’s changed.
BRIAN: I used to teach taking film out of a canister and rolling it on the reel.
TOM: and a darkroom.
BRIAN: And, then printing it in the darkroom. Then, we went to…we still use film, but then we scanned it. Then, we go to digital. Well, digital wasn’t going to be good as film ever.
TOM: Exactly, it will never…
BRIAN: Now, we’ve given up film, and I have a M.F.A. in Photography. And, I love my experience with printing photographs in the darkroom and putting my hands in chemicals that will probably kill me like via cancer one day, but I don’t miss it. And, it’s cheaper. And, the best thing is, like your students, if you’re not making mistakes with technology, you’re probably not learning. And, that’s what this summer project is about, if you take on our challenge, I guess that’s what we’re saying here, is about…is making mistakes and learning. I tell my students all the time, who are really good at something, “You’re not working very hard. You’re not doing good work.” “Well, I’m getting an A.” Yes, but you’re not teaching yourself anything.
TOM: I have several teachers in my personal learning network, and the photo 365 is one of those things. And, it’s exactly that. Just doing one photo a day for 365 days, and I really do think that teachers would benefit from that blogging experience out there. Especially if you’re wanting to incorporate a specific subject out there, and you know, as teachers, like I said when we go on vacation we always mix those things that interest us. And, just imagine a social studies teacher going to Washington, D.C. for example and being able to share that experience and things. And, just having that catalogue of photographs, if nothing else, to be able to share with their class. And then, since I’m an audio podcaster, if you would want to take a recorder, digital recorder, tape recorder, and being able to do that. And I know you’re also involved with video. …and you might mention that because you said that you’re changing it up from what you did last year with the Oregon Trail.
BRIAN: Right, this year I am, I’m still taking my digital camera which by the way can shoot video, but I’m taking a specific Panasonic video camera, and I’m working on a documentary film that will incorporate some still but will primarily be video-based because I need to learn something new. And, in journalism, we no longer teach people, really, to work for TV stations, newspapers. We teach them to work for media companies because, if you’re working for NBC, I don’t know if you know this but, they have a website, and they put video on it, and they put text on it, and they do everything on it. And, a requirement of our core curriculum in our journalism program is they have to take a New Media course. It’s one of many things. And, they have to learn to edit video. They have to learn to edit audio. They’ve already been doing stills. And, combine these. They have to blog, and not just in the New Media class, in the writing classes, they have to blog. In our ethics classes, they blog. In our Sports Writing class, they have to make their own photographs and blog even though it’s primarily a writing course. So, there’s a cross-connection of stuff going on here, and teachers can really benefit and help themselves be a more effective and more excited about what they do day to day if they just participated. And, that sort of thing.
Brian: …something I did with my students for 30 days and you’ll have a link off here I’m sure to ittybittyphoto.com..…all shot with point shoot cameras, not the expensive stuff, I challenge myself to make a photograph and publish it every single day for thirty days, and then, I challenge my students to do it. They go that’s too hard and I go I can do it I have a job, things I got to do.
Itty bitty photo
http://ittybittyphoto.com/
Tom: I think that’s often excuse……for…students. I remember whenever I was starting out with podcasting things, I literally was using a little netbook and a ten dollar microphone. And yeah, those didn’t sound as great, but I was learning the process and things. And then, over time, I’ve upgraded the equipment, and now, I’m using a mixer. And we have two microphones going in whereas before it was just you know one microphone that we shared back and forth, but again, the important thing is to get started on that and as you said find something that you’re passionate about and the rest will follow out there.
Brian: On one of the first trips I did, I followed the Mississippi with a teacher, a local teacher, I know who is an alum of Eastern here named Jim Standerfer, a very talented writer, because I didn’t want to do the writing and the photography. This last time I realized how hard it was. I purposely used a Canon Powershot G10 camera; the same point and shoot camera we teach our students with, the same one you..can’t buy now because the G11 is the new version, but it’s a point and shoot camera. And, my point then doing some work which got in a gallery show and got published in newspapers was that I’m trying to teach technique and understanding not how to use a specific piece of technology. One of the main reasons I did it that way is that I said, “Look here is the same camera that I hand you in class. What’s your excuse.” I also make sure though, when I talk about this, I show them all the bad photographs that I make that don’t quite work or have a technical problem. We were discussing before we went on air, I guess you call it, the best thing you can do to be able to teach something effectively is to play with it and screw it up. You’ll never be able to teach something as well or do anything as well as after you’ve had to teach it, break it down and not approach it from how you learned it but figure out how somebody else learns it and approaches it that way. And, I think it all snowballs from there.
Tom: Right…Students have to internalize that learning and the only way that you internalize it is through those experiences out there and that you have to provide those opportunities for the students to learn and to fail. I use a term…I tell my student whenever I start on some project-based learning activity is I want you to fail fast. I want you to go through and take all the steps of this project and go through very, very small at first. So say a podcast, you know, it would be probably crazy to give my students to say I would like for you all to do a thirty minute podcast, so let’s do a one minute or even a thirty second one. You would be surprised how much time you could spend on just a thirty second project. You know because you’ve done it out there, but students think. “Oh, no problem. Let’s do a public service announcement. Thirty seconds, here’s what you want to do.” That literally can take hours to get that thirty seconds.
Brian: One of the other things related to that, I think, is that, what we’re talking about here too, when you set up these situations where you allow people to fail, you don’t have to ride your motorcycle through the Arctic to make content; you don’t have to go on the Oregon Trail. I’m just interested in those things, so I decided to document. However, going back to what I was talking about before, I had set up this photograph every single day. Publish it online; people were checking it. I did this in Charleston, Illinois. We’re a county that’s what, 30,000 at most and it’s shrinking in population.
Tom: Rural Illinois, corn and bean fields everywhere.
Brian: So, I had to find something. And a lot of it did not come on the campus which takes about half the population of the county away. I had little towns like, if you’ve ever looked at a map, Reardon, Illinois. Something I don’t know if you can even find on a map. Well, I would just go drive because I had this hour and a half window available that day, and I knew people would give me a really hard time if I didn’t put something up. And so, what you find yourself doing is falling back on “Ok, I teach this class. What makes a good photograph? What compositional things can I do turn this situation into a good photograph? What’s at the heart of a good photograph? It’s emotion, it’s faces.” Sort of, you’re like, oh yeah, there’s a reason why this stuff that I teach works. It actually does great. …and it sounds like work but actually it was probably the best part of my day. It was like my hour and my half where I got to be creative and do something for myself....
Tom: But, you set that goal to begin with and that’s kind of that drive…same thing here with this podcast. I used to publish weekly and then I made it once a month and kind of turned this into more of an interview type format. But, you do feel yourself, I don’t know if pressures the right word, but you have that goal in the back of your mind. Like, oh, it’s coming up on the end of the month, we need to get the whatever it is done, whatever goal you have accomplished.
Brian: The best thing about teaching photo students having been a photo journalist is you can’t make photographs over the phone. You can’t sit in an office and call someone up and say, “Can you send me a photograph that I can use and put my name on.” You overcome what I call the Velcro of the Couch Effect which is the hardest part of any project is getting your butt off the couch, being stuck there and there is this inertia of a body at rest. You’d be amazed once you go out there and just…the beautiful thing of the assignment of making a photograph a day is you know you have to do something. There are no excuses for well that’s not going to be good enough so I’m not going to push the button. And you’d be surprised that, when you force yourself to do something, you can do better stuff than you thought you could do.
Tom: Right, and that’s that growing process and learning process out there. And, once again, it comes back to practice, the more you do, you know, I think, subconsciously, it works on your mind over time. As long as you have the goal, and you mentioned this, of constantly improving because it is possible to get in a rut and, well, I know how to do this, I’m going to do the same thing, as you said, thirty times this way. But, as long as you push it to that next level, and grow. And that’s where that patience comes in, so if you have that patience in there, you’re constantly striving for that.
Brian: I do some workshops for high schools, and we put a bunch here. And there’s a little town called Mount Carmel in the Southern part of the state, Wabash County. And, they bring me in, and I teach their students photography and a little bit of web design and this sort of stuff. I look at what they do now, and they’re running…they’re building commercial websites for the businesses in their community. And, one faculty said, “I know how to do web servers or you know do subservers”. So, they do that. And, one person, “Well, I sort of know web design, and I teach business communication.” And, what I love about their approach down there is, these faculty have found a way to keep themselves excited rather than just like, “Well, design a website for yourself,” and really, how do you critique that. But, now you have a customer to keep happy, and you don’t get to pick pink for your webpage just because you like pink. You better hope that there’s a reason for it to be pink, and one of the largest producers of oil drilling bits in the country is in Mount Carmel, Illinois. They do the website for them. They don’t want pink; I don’t think. They want red and oil black, and so it’s real life experience. And those kids get to point to that, put that on their resume, their college application and say, “I’ve done commercial websites.” That’s better than I built a website for myself, and the faculty get the pride and satisfaction of knowing they’re really teaching real stuff.
Tom: Ok, we probably need to wrap-up here a little bit, but let’s talk a little bit about some of the technologies and things that you and I both use out there for…obviously the Tech Talk for Teachers blog, if you visited that site, we’re using Blogger. And then, for their photo site of that, they’ve got another Google property that’s called Picassa, so some people may have heard that name. So, since those two belong to both companies, those are kind of a natural pair out there, Blogger and Picassa for some of your photographs. A long time ago, like I said, Flickr’s been out there. It was one of the first web 2.0 companies. They were and still are, aren’t they, a Yahoo! property…
Brian: Uh…yeah…Yahoo!...yeah. And so, if you have a Yahoo! email account, you already have a Flikr account.
Tom: Whether you know it or not…it’s part of your Yahoo! account.
Brian: Yes, you just log in there. And so, I made up a Yahoo! email account just for that purpose.
Tom: And, for teachers out there, you know, keeping the personal separate from some of the class projects out there, you know. You might set up a separate account for something like that whether it be a Blogger or a Flickr or Picassa whatever…whatever it might be. Same thing, you know the Yahoo! account, same thing with Gmail, if you have Gmail, you have Blogger and Picassa out there available to you.
Brian: And, click on Google, and click on tabs: the extra stuff that they normally don’t show you. I mean there’s…
Tom: More items…I can’t remember what it is. I click on it all the time.
Brian: You have a website. You want to know if people are using it.
Tom: Google sites?
Brian: Google analytic will tell you an amazing amount of stuff that you probably don’t want to know about your traffic or lack of it sometimes (laughs).
Tom: (laughs) Yeah. And then, when we were talking earlier, you mentioned something about Vimeo. Can you talk a little about Vimeo and Youtube?
Brian: Right. Vimeo and Youtube, I’m sure you all know what Youtube is. …Vimeo, I like to call it the adult version of Youtube. …It doesn’t take commercial content. It’s much higher quality. …and if you want to inspire yourself and challenge yourself and your students, you can go there and just find a bunch of stuff. Now, it’s overwhelming because there’s so many stuff there, and before I go on, they have some really nice forums that are really helpful for a specific camera, what you are trying to do. …everyday they have staff favorites which just for your own entertainment purposes and to inspire yourself are worth looking at. You can have a paid account, but it’s also free. Just, when you pay, you can upload more, and you can get more options. I’m using the free one right now. When I come back from my trip on Oregon, I’m going to offer my stuff to both PBS and probably put an edited version up on Vimeo just because the quality is so high. I mean it’s high definition streaming if you want it streamed at a higher quality. It’s much higher quality than what Youtube offers. It’s worth checking out, if for no other reason, because, as a teacher, I steal ideas all the time. I see somebody do something really awesome. Hey, that’s pretty cool. I’m going to teach my students to do that, and I’m going to steal that idea. And, it’s everything from big massive epic productions where people have hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment to stuff that was shot with Flickr cameras or, I’m sorry, flash-based camera. It’s a better resource, I think, for getting better content. Looking at stuff that you can steal ideas from and try to emulate to make yourself better.
Tom: Ok, to wrap-up here, let’s just kind of go through a project, and you’ve inspired me. I probably need to start doing some more photography and things. That’s something I’ve always been interested in, and I was one of those, when I was teaching high school we had the dark room, so it’s been a few years. I’ve gone through that evolution. But, I, number one is establish a goal. Don’t let the summer go by, you know. If you’re going to be out there on vacation and you’re interested and passionate in something out there, just make it a goal out there to provide some type of way that you can share your passion and knowledge out there on the subject with others. And then, from there, you know, pick whatever media…medium you would like to do whether it be still photographs or a combination of photographs and blogging and things. I’ll put in the links in the show to some of Brian’s prior work because I think that blog for teachers out there, that’s a familiar format, you know. We’re very familiar with blogs at this point, but it’s having that goal out there on that specific thing. Any other words of wisdom here as we…
Brian: I just think what you want to do, primarily, is say imagine someone sitting there, and they say tell me a story. So, what is it you’re interested about? What do you know something about? Where are you going? And, tell them a story about it, and you’re all teachers so figure out what’s the teachable moment out of it and chase that. And then, figure out how…but before you go figure out how you might share it that will sort of dictate what your approach will be. And, the beautiful thing here is that you don’t tie yourself to thirty seconds or thirty minutes or something. This is not broadcast. This is internet casting. It’s how long does this need to be but edited down, so there’s not extra in there. You know, you don’t a twenty page paper when a ten page paper will do, and go out there and make some mistakes, and if it totally blows up in your face, nobody will know about it. Unless you’re stupid enough to tell people you’re going on the Oregon Trail.
Tom: Which can be a motivating factor as you said, along there to push you.
Brian: You’re teachers. You know what a little research can do. You know knowing something before you get there, what it’s about, and that allows you to focus in, literally, on what the story’s about. But, I just spent two days figuring out how to get two pieces of software to work together, so I know I’m going to have to do this. But, you know what, that’s kind of fun once you figure out how to do it, and the thing that teachers have available that nobody had available fifteen to twenty years ago are forums. Go there. Ask questions. Just say, I’m a newb or a novice. And, as soon as you admit that you don’t know anything, everybody’s willing to help you. It’s a beautiful thing. So, figure out what you want to do, try it, ask for some help. If you fail, so what no one will know the difference.
Tom: Yep, get better next time. Reach that next level. Ok, I’d like to thank Brian Poulter for coming in today. It’s been a great conversation, and also, as you all head into summer, I’d love to hear from you. Some of the audience members out there, if you have an idea, if you have little question, shoot an email to our techtalk@eiu.edu email address, and I’d love to see some of the projects or things. Whenever you come back to school this fall, be sure to drop me a note. Let us know if this has been beneficial for you, and we will continue to broadcast. I’ll have another episode in June. So, we will continue over the summer, but for those of you that are going on break, you can stay subscribed. And, I’d like to wish everybody a very productive summer.
Technology Pick of the Week
My Technology Pick of the Week this week is the Asus Eee Pad Transformer tablet. I recently was in the market for purchasing a new netbook for my own personal use but I was also was considering a tablet like the iPad. I came really close to buying the iPad version 1 product when they were reduced in price to $399 when the iPad 2 came out but I really did not want to be stuck with a tablet that was over a year old when I bought one. I am glad I waited as the Eee Pad Transformer became available at the end of April and I purchased the Eee Pad along with the optional keyboard dock that “transforms” the tablet into a netbook like device.
Eee Pad Transformer
http://www.asus.com/Eee/Eee_Pad/Eee_Pad_Transformer_TF101/
The Eee Pad runs the Android Honeycomb operating system and I get the best of both worlds. I get a touch screen device with about 9 hours of battery life and a keyboard dock that provides an additional 7 hours of battery life along with a physical keyboard to use when I want to get some real work done. Thats 16 hours of battery life when used in combination with the keyboard dock, talk about all day computing! It provides instant on and the keyboard is well designed with special shortcut keys that make using the Eee Pad with the docked keyboard a joy to use. There is a small switch that slides back and forth to lock and unlock the keyboard dock to the tablet.
I can use a touchscreen keyboard for small amounts of text input but I find myself wanting to use a physical keyboard for anything longer than a paragraph of typing. The docking station is very easy to use and I can move from a tablet to a netbook style device at will. I bought the Eee Pad 16GB version that retails for $399, a one-hundred dollars savings over the iPad. Two other features sealed the deal for me in making this purchase. First, and it includes a microSD card that provides flexible storage that I can use to load content onto a microSD card. This essentially allows for unlimited storage as I can load up a microSD card with content and when it gets full I can buy another microSD card for additional content if I so choose. Because the Eee Pad allows additional storage it also has a file manager that allows you to easily copy and paste files from your computer to the Eee Pad using the special USB cable that is provided. Secondly, the Eee Pad has a mini HDMI out connector that allows you to connect to a HDTV using an affordable mini HDMI to HDMI cable. This allows you to watch on the big screen any content that is displayed on the Eee Pad.
As I mentioned I also bought the optional keyboard dock that costs an additional $150. This is optional and not needed at all unless you want the added battery life or are like me and prefer to use a physical keyboard for anything other than casual typing. Since I wanted a netbook like device I elected to purchase the keyboard dock. I have had the Eee Pad for about a month now and it has handled everything I expected it to do. It supports Adobe Flash so you will enjoy a full Internet experience. Being a Google operating system it works well with gmail and Youtube and you have full access to the Android Marketplace if you would like additional apps. For those that are considering 1 to 1 tablet programs in schools the Eee Pad may be worth considering as a hybrid solution that offers the best of the touchscreen tablet world along with the practicality of the netbook world.
That wraps it up for episode 120 of TechTalk4Teachers. I want to thank Brian Poulterr for being our guest on todays show and wish him the best on his upcoming Oregon Trail trip. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at www.eiu.edu/itc To leave a comment or suggestion, please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk for Teachers blog. Until next time, this is Tom Grissom. Keep on learning…
Friday, April 29, 2011
Episode 119 - A conversation about ebooks for educators
It’s Friday April 29th, 2011 and welcome to episode 119 of TechTalk4Teachers, I’m Tom Grissom. We’ve got a real treat for you on todays show as we will be talking about ebooks. Ebooks have been in the news a lot lately and many schools and universities are considering their use on a wider scale in the classroom. While ebooks have been around for a number of years now many schools and universities are considering school-wide implementations. There are however a number of issues that need to be worked out before a successful ebook program can be implemented on a larger scale.
Right Click Here to Download MP3
(40 minutes 58 seconds)
For todays show we talk with Karen Whisler who is the Head of Collection Development at Booth Library here on the campus of Eastern Illinois University. On the surface ebooks look so easy to use and we educators often see articles extolling the virtues of ebooks, but there are also a number of challenges with implementing a successful ebook program. Gadgets are constantly changing, ebook formats are evolving, Digital Rights Management and licensing fees need to be addressed on the front end before an ebook program can be successfully implemented.
So, without further delay here is my interview with Karen Whisler about ebooks for educators from earlier this week.
Kindle and Library Lending
http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/20/kindle-library-lending/
Eastern Illinois University Booth Library
http://www.library.eiu.edu/welcome.html
Booth Library - Books, Videos, and More
http://www.library.eiu.edu/resources/books.html
Technology Pick of the Week
For my Technology Pick of the Week this week I would like to encourage everyone to take a look at MyMediaMall and Overdrive. I have provided links in the shownotes to MyMediaMall as well as the Overdrive software that you will need. This is a wonderful resource that is available at many libraries across the country.
http://www.mymediamall.net/3A79CF6F-75E4-4CAF-B211-1D584C42E1CF/10/342/en/Default.htm
http://www.overdrive.com/software/omc/
If you are a faculty, staff, or student here at EIU you already have access to MyMediaMall here on campus and also off-campus if you use your EIU Library Card number to logon.
For others in Illinois many local libraries, such as mine, also offer the MyMediaMall service to their patrons. If you are in a different state or country be sure to checkout your options as MyMediaMall advertises itself as a global company. If you are outside the United States please drop us an email if you can access MyMediaMall or if you are using some other service to access ebooks.
Since we are coming up on the summer months I encourage you all to give MyMediaMall a try. I use MyMediaMall for both ebooks and audio books and it is one way that I keep up-to-date on current topics of interest to me. It is also great for recreational reading or listening.
I would also like to ask, what’s on your reading list for the summer? If you are interested you can leave a comment on our TechTalk4Teachers blog with your reading recommendations for other educators. I mentioned the ebook Blink by Malcolm Galdwell and I downloaded the audio version of this book to my Zune and am listening to it now. It is 7 hours of audio content which is a lot but because I can listen to it when I am doing other things I can multi-task.
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
http://www.mymediamall.net/3A79CF6F-75E4-4CAF-B211-1D584C42E1CF/10/342/en/ContentDetails.htm?ID=0FC87C78-8E45-4829-BD99-3210CBE9FEFE
If you have a long commute audio books are a great way to access content you might not otherwise get to and maybe make your drive a little more enjoyable. Many cars have AUX ports in the Radio to plug in a MP3 player so you can use the car radio speakers to listen. Audio books are also great to listen to while exercising or doing household chores.
That wraps it up for episode 119 of Tech Talk for Teachers. I want to thank Karen Whisler for being our guest on todays show and sharing her wealth of knowledge on the topic of ebooks. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at www.eiu.edu/itc To leave a comment or suggestion, please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk for Teachers blog. Until next time, this is Tom Grissom. Keep on learning…
Tom Grissom, Ph.D.
Right Click Here to Download MP3
(40 minutes 58 seconds)
For todays show we talk with Karen Whisler who is the Head of Collection Development at Booth Library here on the campus of Eastern Illinois University. On the surface ebooks look so easy to use and we educators often see articles extolling the virtues of ebooks, but there are also a number of challenges with implementing a successful ebook program. Gadgets are constantly changing, ebook formats are evolving, Digital Rights Management and licensing fees need to be addressed on the front end before an ebook program can be successfully implemented.
So, without further delay here is my interview with Karen Whisler about ebooks for educators from earlier this week.
Kindle and Library Lending
http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/20/kindle-library-lending/
Eastern Illinois University Booth Library
http://www.library.eiu.edu/welcome.html
Booth Library - Books, Videos, and More
http://www.library.eiu.edu/resources/books.html
Technology Pick of the Week
For my Technology Pick of the Week this week I would like to encourage everyone to take a look at MyMediaMall and Overdrive. I have provided links in the shownotes to MyMediaMall as well as the Overdrive software that you will need. This is a wonderful resource that is available at many libraries across the country.
http://www.mymediamall.net/3A79CF6F-75E4-4CAF-B211-1D584C42E1CF/10/342/en/Default.htm
http://www.overdrive.com/software/omc/
If you are a faculty, staff, or student here at EIU you already have access to MyMediaMall here on campus and also off-campus if you use your EIU Library Card number to logon.
For others in Illinois many local libraries, such as mine, also offer the MyMediaMall service to their patrons. If you are in a different state or country be sure to checkout your options as MyMediaMall advertises itself as a global company. If you are outside the United States please drop us an email if you can access MyMediaMall or if you are using some other service to access ebooks.
Since we are coming up on the summer months I encourage you all to give MyMediaMall a try. I use MyMediaMall for both ebooks and audio books and it is one way that I keep up-to-date on current topics of interest to me. It is also great for recreational reading or listening.
I would also like to ask, what’s on your reading list for the summer? If you are interested you can leave a comment on our TechTalk4Teachers blog with your reading recommendations for other educators. I mentioned the ebook Blink by Malcolm Galdwell and I downloaded the audio version of this book to my Zune and am listening to it now. It is 7 hours of audio content which is a lot but because I can listen to it when I am doing other things I can multi-task.
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
http://www.mymediamall.net/3A79CF6F-75E4-4CAF-B211-1D584C42E1CF/10/342/en/ContentDetails.htm?ID=0FC87C78-8E45-4829-BD99-3210CBE9FEFE
If you have a long commute audio books are a great way to access content you might not otherwise get to and maybe make your drive a little more enjoyable. Many cars have AUX ports in the Radio to plug in a MP3 player so you can use the car radio speakers to listen. Audio books are also great to listen to while exercising or doing household chores.
That wraps it up for episode 119 of Tech Talk for Teachers. I want to thank Karen Whisler for being our guest on todays show and sharing her wealth of knowledge on the topic of ebooks. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at www.eiu.edu/itc To leave a comment or suggestion, please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk for Teachers blog. Until next time, this is Tom Grissom. Keep on learning…
Tom Grissom, Ph.D.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Episode 118 – Flipping a Classroom, Khan Academy, and New Learning Analytics
It's Thursday, March 31st 2011 and welcome to Episode 118 of TechTalk4Teachers, I'm Tom Grissom. We are a little past mid-way point through the spring semester here at EIU and faculty and students are busily working their way through their courses. Many educators are constantly on the lookout for new methods to be a more effective teacher and thanks to the advances in technology you do not have to look far these days.
Right Click Here to Download MP3 (9 minutes 51 seconds)
There has recently been a crescendo of interest growing in education circles regarding a former TechTalk4Teachers Pick of the Week. This former pick has received new funding and is helping students from all around the world learn new things by simply watching YouTube videos and all for free.
I'm going to “flip” the format of todays show and you will see why in just a moment. Since I began TechTalk4Teachers I have made the Horizon Report a yearly technology pick and I have not yet had the opportunity to talk about the report this year.
Technology Pick of the Week
So before this semester gets away from me my technology pick of the week, this week, is the 2011 version of the Horizon Report published by the New Media Consortium. I use this report in both my undergraduate and graduate level technology classes as a reading assignment to help my students get up to speed with the latest educational technologies. Students are often amazed at the pace of adoption of new technologies and this report provides plenty of real world examples for students to explore.
When I tell them this report is about 40 pages long I usually hear some moans and groans but they are short-lived as I setup a discussion group where we discuss this report online over a two week period. This gives students the flexibility to chunk the material into more manageable pieces and provides a social component for them to share their impressions as they digest what they read and provides a way to share their reactions with the entire class. If you have not read this years Horizon Report I strongly encourage you to do so and a link is provided in the show notes.
2011 Horizon Report
http://www.nmc.org/publications/2011-horizon-report
As the name implies this report takes a look out over the horizon to observe new technology trends and how they are impacting teaching and learning. The report is broken down into three time-frames for technologies that are 1 year or less away from adoption, 2 to 3 years from adoption, and those that are 4 to 5 years away from being adopted on a larger scale. Of course predicting the future is always a risky business and unforseen technologies often enter the picture and take the education world by storm without much notice. Most recently the iPad and Android tablets serve as examples that have entered the mainstream consciousness of educators in the past year and many are experimenting with this new form factor.
Most of you can probably guess what the near term technology influence is, mobile phones and ebooks. As smart phones become more affordable and as wireless broadband access becomes more available the mobile phone is poised to enter the learning mainstream. I mentioned on last months show that smart phones are now outselling PC's for the first time and I believe that this trend will continue in the future. Mobile phones will not replace PC's in the immediate future but new combinations and form factors are competing with the traditional Personal Computer for use in schools.
The same is also true of ebooks, with the success of the Kindle and now new tablet and slate form factors, ebooks are beginning to be taken seriously as legitimate replacements for physical books. Several schools are piloting ebooks as possible replacements for their physical counterparts.
http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2011/03/25/mct_caebooks.html
Learning Analytics
The one thing in the Horizon Report that was placed four to five years out is something called Learning Analytics. Learning Analytics are technologies that can be used to measure learning by collecting and interpreting information using data-mining techniques to assess student academic progress. Many in the teaching field become a bit uneasy when there is talk of data-mining models for use in teaching and learning because it seems like such a sterile environment to teach and learn in. When some teachers hear this many envision students becoming just numbers to be analyzed and this is antithetical to the viewpoint of most teachers. However, teaching is both an art and a science and I believe we need both sides of the equation to be effective teachers. Learning analytics are in the infant stage but new developments with the Khan Academy have thrust learning analytics into the spotlight over the past two months.
I have talked about the Khan Academy before and it has been receiving a lot of press lately. Now, with new additions to the Khan Academy learning analytics has suddenly jumped ahead five years and is now front and center and on the minds of many educators. The Khan Academy has recently received some funding that has suddenly catapulted this online academy into the national spotlight.
Khan Academy
http://www.khanacademy.org/
Sal Khan has developed over 2000 short videos on a variety of subjects and placed them on YouTube for students to access across the world for free. I have provided a few links in the show notes for you to explore further and I highly recommend you watch his presentation.
Here is a short video clip from his recent TED talk, I will play about a minute of it to give you an idea what the Khan Academy is about if you have not heard of it before.
Khan Academy TED Talk - 2011
http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html
Alright, that was Sal Khan giving an introduction to his Khan Academy at a recent TED talk. The full presentation is about 20 minutes long and I encourage you to give it a watch if you want to see what the next level is and where the Khan Academy is heading in the future.
If you are familiar with Google Analytics imagine taking that technology and using it to display and track student progress from the videos students watch on YouTube and also being able to analyze the exercises students complete. The data generated is very detailed and provides a look at student academic progress across time.
Now, imagine being a teacher where you can have your students sign-up your class where you could use Khan Academy videos to supplement your students learning. If you so choose and have administrative approval you can setup a class and where you can monitor your students progress using learning analytics that the Khan Academy has designed. The service keeps track of each students individual progress. Data that is collected for every student include what Khan Academy videos they watch, how long they watch, and there are also exercises embedded within the videos that can be tracked to monitor progress. Students can see their progress and even earn badges along the way as rewards for completing lessons.
A color coding system is used so that teachers and students can easily see where there needs to be more work, green is good, and red needs more work. Teachers can see individual as well as the entire class statistics on how students are doing if they setup their classes to use the Khan Academy. Because learning analytics are so new educators should check with their schools polices before using such services and obtain administrative approval. It really is remarkable the data that can be collected and at the same time a bit concerning because teachers have not had access to so much detail before.
Flipping your Classroom
The Khan videos have been around for a while and many teachers are using the videos to “flip” the traditional classroom model of instruction. Some teachers are assigning the videos as homework to be watched at home and then use students scheduled class time to work on problems where the teacher can float around the room and assist any student with any questions they may have.
This flipped model gets the teacher out of the transmission mode of instruction and allows the teacher to give more individual attention to students. It is lecture by night and homework by day, flipping the traditional model. I have provided a link in the show notes to how some teachers are using the flipped classroom so be sure to check them out.
Reverse Instruction: Dan Pink and Karl’s “Fisch Flip”
http://www.connectedprincipals.com/archives/1534
To Flip or Not to Flip
http://marynabadenhorst.global2.vic.edu.au/2011/03/19/to-flip-or-not-to-flip/
What do you think, have you used the flipped classroom approach?
That wraps it up for episode 118 of TechTalk4Teachers. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at eiu.edu/itc To leave a comment or suggestion, please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk for Teachers blog. Until next time, this is Tom Grissom, keep on learning…
Right Click Here to Download MP3 (9 minutes 51 seconds)
There has recently been a crescendo of interest growing in education circles regarding a former TechTalk4Teachers Pick of the Week. This former pick has received new funding and is helping students from all around the world learn new things by simply watching YouTube videos and all for free.
I'm going to “flip” the format of todays show and you will see why in just a moment. Since I began TechTalk4Teachers I have made the Horizon Report a yearly technology pick and I have not yet had the opportunity to talk about the report this year.
Technology Pick of the Week
So before this semester gets away from me my technology pick of the week, this week, is the 2011 version of the Horizon Report published by the New Media Consortium. I use this report in both my undergraduate and graduate level technology classes as a reading assignment to help my students get up to speed with the latest educational technologies. Students are often amazed at the pace of adoption of new technologies and this report provides plenty of real world examples for students to explore.
When I tell them this report is about 40 pages long I usually hear some moans and groans but they are short-lived as I setup a discussion group where we discuss this report online over a two week period. This gives students the flexibility to chunk the material into more manageable pieces and provides a social component for them to share their impressions as they digest what they read and provides a way to share their reactions with the entire class. If you have not read this years Horizon Report I strongly encourage you to do so and a link is provided in the show notes.
2011 Horizon Report
http://www.nmc.org/publications/2011-horizon-report
As the name implies this report takes a look out over the horizon to observe new technology trends and how they are impacting teaching and learning. The report is broken down into three time-frames for technologies that are 1 year or less away from adoption, 2 to 3 years from adoption, and those that are 4 to 5 years away from being adopted on a larger scale. Of course predicting the future is always a risky business and unforseen technologies often enter the picture and take the education world by storm without much notice. Most recently the iPad and Android tablets serve as examples that have entered the mainstream consciousness of educators in the past year and many are experimenting with this new form factor.
Most of you can probably guess what the near term technology influence is, mobile phones and ebooks. As smart phones become more affordable and as wireless broadband access becomes more available the mobile phone is poised to enter the learning mainstream. I mentioned on last months show that smart phones are now outselling PC's for the first time and I believe that this trend will continue in the future. Mobile phones will not replace PC's in the immediate future but new combinations and form factors are competing with the traditional Personal Computer for use in schools.
The same is also true of ebooks, with the success of the Kindle and now new tablet and slate form factors, ebooks are beginning to be taken seriously as legitimate replacements for physical books. Several schools are piloting ebooks as possible replacements for their physical counterparts.
http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2011/03/25/mct_caebooks.html
Learning Analytics
The one thing in the Horizon Report that was placed four to five years out is something called Learning Analytics. Learning Analytics are technologies that can be used to measure learning by collecting and interpreting information using data-mining techniques to assess student academic progress. Many in the teaching field become a bit uneasy when there is talk of data-mining models for use in teaching and learning because it seems like such a sterile environment to teach and learn in. When some teachers hear this many envision students becoming just numbers to be analyzed and this is antithetical to the viewpoint of most teachers. However, teaching is both an art and a science and I believe we need both sides of the equation to be effective teachers. Learning analytics are in the infant stage but new developments with the Khan Academy have thrust learning analytics into the spotlight over the past two months.
I have talked about the Khan Academy before and it has been receiving a lot of press lately. Now, with new additions to the Khan Academy learning analytics has suddenly jumped ahead five years and is now front and center and on the minds of many educators. The Khan Academy has recently received some funding that has suddenly catapulted this online academy into the national spotlight.
Khan Academy
http://www.khanacademy.org/
Sal Khan has developed over 2000 short videos on a variety of subjects and placed them on YouTube for students to access across the world for free. I have provided a few links in the show notes for you to explore further and I highly recommend you watch his presentation.
Here is a short video clip from his recent TED talk, I will play about a minute of it to give you an idea what the Khan Academy is about if you have not heard of it before.
Khan Academy TED Talk - 2011
http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html
Alright, that was Sal Khan giving an introduction to his Khan Academy at a recent TED talk. The full presentation is about 20 minutes long and I encourage you to give it a watch if you want to see what the next level is and where the Khan Academy is heading in the future.
If you are familiar with Google Analytics imagine taking that technology and using it to display and track student progress from the videos students watch on YouTube and also being able to analyze the exercises students complete. The data generated is very detailed and provides a look at student academic progress across time.
Now, imagine being a teacher where you can have your students sign-up your class where you could use Khan Academy videos to supplement your students learning. If you so choose and have administrative approval you can setup a class and where you can monitor your students progress using learning analytics that the Khan Academy has designed. The service keeps track of each students individual progress. Data that is collected for every student include what Khan Academy videos they watch, how long they watch, and there are also exercises embedded within the videos that can be tracked to monitor progress. Students can see their progress and even earn badges along the way as rewards for completing lessons.
A color coding system is used so that teachers and students can easily see where there needs to be more work, green is good, and red needs more work. Teachers can see individual as well as the entire class statistics on how students are doing if they setup their classes to use the Khan Academy. Because learning analytics are so new educators should check with their schools polices before using such services and obtain administrative approval. It really is remarkable the data that can be collected and at the same time a bit concerning because teachers have not had access to so much detail before.
Flipping your Classroom
The Khan videos have been around for a while and many teachers are using the videos to “flip” the traditional classroom model of instruction. Some teachers are assigning the videos as homework to be watched at home and then use students scheduled class time to work on problems where the teacher can float around the room and assist any student with any questions they may have.
This flipped model gets the teacher out of the transmission mode of instruction and allows the teacher to give more individual attention to students. It is lecture by night and homework by day, flipping the traditional model. I have provided a link in the show notes to how some teachers are using the flipped classroom so be sure to check them out.
Reverse Instruction: Dan Pink and Karl’s “Fisch Flip”
http://www.connectedprincipals.com/archives/1534
To Flip or Not to Flip
http://marynabadenhorst.global2.vic.edu.au/2011/03/19/to-flip-or-not-to-flip/
What do you think, have you used the flipped classroom approach?
That wraps it up for episode 118 of TechTalk4Teachers. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at eiu.edu/itc To leave a comment or suggestion, please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk for Teachers blog. Until next time, this is Tom Grissom, keep on learning…
Monday, February 28, 2011
Episode 117 - We Live in Amazing Times – Watson Wins!
It’s Monday, February 28th, 2011 and welcome to episode 117 of TechTalk4Teachers, I’m Tom Grissom. A short month this month but an eventful one for the human race none the less, more on that later in the show.
Right Click Here to Download MP3 (28 minutes 45 seconds)
This month I had the honor of speaking at the opening session of the Students Involved with Technology Conference held here at Eastern Illinois University. This conference is held yearly in Illinois and also has concurrent conferences in other areas of the State for K12 students. In the past this conference was held in the Bloomington/Normal area and this was the first time to my knowledge that the event was held at EIU. The conference is setup by students for students and gives K12 students the opportunity to share their knowledge and skills with one another. We had several volunteer student presenters present on various technology topics as well as some adult experts presenting on topics such as making music on your computer and a session called computer guts, where students could learn more about what makes a computer work. Our School of Continuing Education organized this years event and did a great job.
We had an excellent turn out of over one-hundred and twenty K12 students participating in this years event. With a wide range of student ages ranging from 3rd graders to high school students I presented a talk called “We Live in Amazing Times” to share some of the history of computing that has occurred in my lifetime and how those trends will continue for the student participants as they grow older and experience their own amazing times ahead as technology evolves and improves in the future. Here is the recorded audio from the opening session.
http://www.sitconference.org/ SIT
Session Transcript coming soon….
We Live in AMAZING Times PowerPoint Presentation (PDF)
http://eiu.edu/techtalk/We Live in AMAZING Times_02122011PDF.pdf
We Live in Amazing Times PowerPoint (PDF) Alright, that was the talk I gave at the SIT Conference held on Saturday February 12, 2011 here on the campus of Eastern Illinois University. It was interesting talking to some of the students throughout the day about their understanding of technology and where they think it is going in the future. First I had to come to grips with the fact that we now have elementary students in school that were born in the 21st Century and will never have any first-hand experience at all with 20th Century technology and culture.
As we teach we must reach into the future world our students will live in but also provide a solid background of fundamental concepts and enduring truths. The students did get a kick out of the 30 pound laptop that I demonstrated but could not believe that such a device ever existed or that people would actually use one. I had a conversation with one of the students who observed that the Kindle ebook reader I demonstrated used less energy to turn to the page due to the e-ink technology that the Kindle uses. We need to encourage such thinking and curiosity as we need a lot more green energy development in the future to make devices as power efficient as possible.
Several students were very interested in how to make computer music and the conference had a session just for that. Many of the students were interested in the Microsoft Kinect and expressed interest in finding ways to use it including computer gaming and new uses not yet invented. There were sessions on Robotics, Facebook Privacy, Technology and TV News, Social Networking Safety, Flash Animation and many more. I remember the days of elementary and middle school where I would take things apart just to see how they worked. The challenge was always putting it back together so it would work again. This de-construction and re-construction is necessary to learn more about the way things work. Our students today need the opportunities like this to learn in a safe and constructive environment where the hands-on / minds-on experience of making things is encouraged.
Whether it be computer projects like creating computer generated music, drawing cartoons using Flash animation, or producing their own TV shows project-based learning activities are fun and the learning lasts over time. These types of projects and opportunities are where children make quantum leaps in their knowledge and understanding. It was a fun day and everyone learned something new.
IBM Watson
As a follow-up to the amazing times talk I gave at the conference I want to mention IBM Watson this month. The Watson Jeopardy show aired the week after I gave my presentation to the students but I hope that teachers across the nation took some time this month to discuss this amazing mile-marker in the evolution of technology. The IBM computer called Watson, named after IBM’s first President Thomas Watson, matched the abilities of two of the smartest humans in the world in a game of Jeopardy. The computer was up against the two best Jeopardy players in the world. Ken Jennings the 74 time undefeated champion of Jeopardy and Brad Rutter. Watson won the game with a total of $77,147 to Ken Jennings $24,000 and Brad Rutters $21,600 over a two day period.
It really was quite an impressive feat. I have provided a link in the show notes to a PBS NewsHour article complete with a series of videos about the behind the scenes story of IBM Watson and how scientist are working on the next generation of artificial intelligence.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/02/watson-wins-ibms-machine-rages-against-jeopardy-champs.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(artificial_intelligence_software)
Smart Phones Outpace Sales of Computers
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/smartphones-tablets-sell-personal-computers-2011-deloitte-trends-20110118-054249-075.html
Alright, that was the talk I gave at the SIT Conference held on Saturday February 12, 2011 here on the campus of Eastern Illinois University. It was interesting talking to some of the students throughout the day about their understanding of technology and where they think it is going in the future.
First I had to come to grips with the fact that we now have elementary students in school that were born in the 21st Century and will never have any first-hand experience at all with 20th Century technology and culture.
As we teach we must reach into the future world our students will live in but also provide a solid background of fundamental concepts and enduring truths. The students did get a kick out of the 30 pound laptop that I demonstrated but could not believe that such a device ever existed or that people would actually use one.
I had a conversation with one of the students who observed that the Kindle ebook reader I demonstrated used less energy to turn to the page due to the e-ink technology that the Kindle uses. We need to encourage such thinking and curiosity as we need a lot more green energy development in the future to make devices as power efficient as possible.
Several students were very interested in how to make computer music and the conference had a session just for that. Many of the students were interested in the Microsoft Kinect and expressed interest in finding ways to use it including computer gaming and new uses not yet invented.
There were sessions on Robotics, Facebook Privacy, Technology and TV News, Social Networking Safety, Flash Animation and many more. I remember the days of elementary and middle school where I would take things apart just to see how they worked. The challenge was always putting it back together so it would work again. This de-construction and re-construction is necessary to learn more about the way things work.
Our students today need the opportunities like this to learn in a safe and constructive environment where the hands-on / minds-on experience of making things is encouraged. Whether it be computer projects like creating computer generated music, drawing cartoons using Flash animation, or producing their own TV shows project-based learning activities are fun and the learning lasts over time. These types of projects and opportunities are where children make quantum leaps in their knowledge and understanding. It was a fun day and everyone learned something new.
IBM Watson
As a follow-up to the amazing times talk I gave at the conference I want to mention IBM Watson this month. The Watson Jeopardy show aired the week after I gave my presentation to the students but I hope that teachers across the nation took some time this month to discuss this amazing mile-marker in the evolution of technology. The IBM computer called Watson, named after IBM’s first President Thomas Watson, matched the abilities of two of the smartest humans in the world in a game of Jeopardy. The computer was up against the two best Jeopardy players in the world. Ken Jennings the 74 time undefeated champion of Jeopardy and Brad Rutter. Watson won the game with a total of $77,147 to Ken Jennings $24,000 and Brad Rutters $21,600 over a two day period. It really was quite an impressive feat.
I have provided a link in the show notes to a PBS NewsHour article complete with a series of videos about the behind the scenes story of IBM Watson and how scientist are working on the next generation of artificial intelligence.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/02/watson-wins-ibms-machine-rages-against-jeopardy-champs.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(artificial_intelligence_software)
Here is a question for you, after reviewing the videos do you call Watson a he or an it?
Technology Pick of the Week
My Technology Pick of the Week this week is a new smart phone app that I mentioned in the SIT keynote presentation called Google Translate. I really do believe that the Smart Phones that are coming on to the market today mark a similar point in history as the Altair and first Personal Computers in the 1970’s did for my generation. Smart phones are evolving very rapidly and are now being paired with cloud computing services that make the mobile devices as powerful as the mainframe computers not so long ago. In fact, they are increasingly being connected to mainframe type computers by high-speed wireless connections to take advantage of massive amounts of computing power that was previously impossible for the average person to access. All of this computing power is now in a cell phone sized device that many of our students carry with them all the time.
I have provided links in the show notes to the Google Blog that discusses Google Translate program as well as a YouTube video of a Google Translate demonstration. In the YouTube Video you will see an example of where a person that speaks English wants to buy a pair of shoes in Germany. The English speaker says that they want to buy a pair of shoes and then the Google Translate app that is now available on Android translates the English sentence into German. That’s pretty cool but in the next part of the video the German store keeper speaks into the Android phone in German and it is translated from German into English so that the English speaker can understand his answer.
Conversation Mode for Google Translate on Android (Blog)
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-look-for-google-translate-for.html
You Tube Video of Conversation Mode in Google Translate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtMfdNeGXgM&feature=player_embedded#t=26m24s
Translate supports 53 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish, and voice input is currently available for 15 languages with more sure to come in the future.
Yes, translate does make mistakes from time to time but this really is absolutely amazing technology. We are getting closer to the Universal Translater that was used on so many episodes of Star Trek I watched while growing up, science-fiction is becoming a reality.
That wraps it up for episode 117 of TechTalk4Teachers. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at eiu.edu/itc To leave a comment or suggestion, please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk for Teachers blog. Until next time, this is Tom Grissom, keep on learning…
Right Click Here to Download MP3 (28 minutes 45 seconds)
This month I had the honor of speaking at the opening session of the Students Involved with Technology Conference held here at Eastern Illinois University. This conference is held yearly in Illinois and also has concurrent conferences in other areas of the State for K12 students. In the past this conference was held in the Bloomington/Normal area and this was the first time to my knowledge that the event was held at EIU. The conference is setup by students for students and gives K12 students the opportunity to share their knowledge and skills with one another. We had several volunteer student presenters present on various technology topics as well as some adult experts presenting on topics such as making music on your computer and a session called computer guts, where students could learn more about what makes a computer work. Our School of Continuing Education organized this years event and did a great job.
We had an excellent turn out of over one-hundred and twenty K12 students participating in this years event. With a wide range of student ages ranging from 3rd graders to high school students I presented a talk called “We Live in Amazing Times” to share some of the history of computing that has occurred in my lifetime and how those trends will continue for the student participants as they grow older and experience their own amazing times ahead as technology evolves and improves in the future. Here is the recorded audio from the opening session.
http://www.sitconference.org/ SIT
Session Transcript coming soon….
We Live in AMAZING Times PowerPoint Presentation (PDF)
http://eiu.edu/techtalk/We Live in AMAZING Times_02122011PDF.pdf
We Live in Amazing Times PowerPoint (PDF) Alright, that was the talk I gave at the SIT Conference held on Saturday February 12, 2011 here on the campus of Eastern Illinois University. It was interesting talking to some of the students throughout the day about their understanding of technology and where they think it is going in the future. First I had to come to grips with the fact that we now have elementary students in school that were born in the 21st Century and will never have any first-hand experience at all with 20th Century technology and culture.
As we teach we must reach into the future world our students will live in but also provide a solid background of fundamental concepts and enduring truths. The students did get a kick out of the 30 pound laptop that I demonstrated but could not believe that such a device ever existed or that people would actually use one. I had a conversation with one of the students who observed that the Kindle ebook reader I demonstrated used less energy to turn to the page due to the e-ink technology that the Kindle uses. We need to encourage such thinking and curiosity as we need a lot more green energy development in the future to make devices as power efficient as possible.
Several students were very interested in how to make computer music and the conference had a session just for that. Many of the students were interested in the Microsoft Kinect and expressed interest in finding ways to use it including computer gaming and new uses not yet invented. There were sessions on Robotics, Facebook Privacy, Technology and TV News, Social Networking Safety, Flash Animation and many more. I remember the days of elementary and middle school where I would take things apart just to see how they worked. The challenge was always putting it back together so it would work again. This de-construction and re-construction is necessary to learn more about the way things work. Our students today need the opportunities like this to learn in a safe and constructive environment where the hands-on / minds-on experience of making things is encouraged.
Whether it be computer projects like creating computer generated music, drawing cartoons using Flash animation, or producing their own TV shows project-based learning activities are fun and the learning lasts over time. These types of projects and opportunities are where children make quantum leaps in their knowledge and understanding. It was a fun day and everyone learned something new.
IBM Watson
As a follow-up to the amazing times talk I gave at the conference I want to mention IBM Watson this month. The Watson Jeopardy show aired the week after I gave my presentation to the students but I hope that teachers across the nation took some time this month to discuss this amazing mile-marker in the evolution of technology. The IBM computer called Watson, named after IBM’s first President Thomas Watson, matched the abilities of two of the smartest humans in the world in a game of Jeopardy. The computer was up against the two best Jeopardy players in the world. Ken Jennings the 74 time undefeated champion of Jeopardy and Brad Rutter. Watson won the game with a total of $77,147 to Ken Jennings $24,000 and Brad Rutters $21,600 over a two day period.
It really was quite an impressive feat. I have provided a link in the show notes to a PBS NewsHour article complete with a series of videos about the behind the scenes story of IBM Watson and how scientist are working on the next generation of artificial intelligence.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/02/watson-wins-ibms-machine-rages-against-jeopardy-champs.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(artificial_intelligence_software)
Smart Phones Outpace Sales of Computers
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/smartphones-tablets-sell-personal-computers-2011-deloitte-trends-20110118-054249-075.html
Alright, that was the talk I gave at the SIT Conference held on Saturday February 12, 2011 here on the campus of Eastern Illinois University. It was interesting talking to some of the students throughout the day about their understanding of technology and where they think it is going in the future.
First I had to come to grips with the fact that we now have elementary students in school that were born in the 21st Century and will never have any first-hand experience at all with 20th Century technology and culture.
As we teach we must reach into the future world our students will live in but also provide a solid background of fundamental concepts and enduring truths. The students did get a kick out of the 30 pound laptop that I demonstrated but could not believe that such a device ever existed or that people would actually use one.
I had a conversation with one of the students who observed that the Kindle ebook reader I demonstrated used less energy to turn to the page due to the e-ink technology that the Kindle uses. We need to encourage such thinking and curiosity as we need a lot more green energy development in the future to make devices as power efficient as possible.
Several students were very interested in how to make computer music and the conference had a session just for that. Many of the students were interested in the Microsoft Kinect and expressed interest in finding ways to use it including computer gaming and new uses not yet invented.
There were sessions on Robotics, Facebook Privacy, Technology and TV News, Social Networking Safety, Flash Animation and many more. I remember the days of elementary and middle school where I would take things apart just to see how they worked. The challenge was always putting it back together so it would work again. This de-construction and re-construction is necessary to learn more about the way things work.
Our students today need the opportunities like this to learn in a safe and constructive environment where the hands-on / minds-on experience of making things is encouraged. Whether it be computer projects like creating computer generated music, drawing cartoons using Flash animation, or producing their own TV shows project-based learning activities are fun and the learning lasts over time. These types of projects and opportunities are where children make quantum leaps in their knowledge and understanding. It was a fun day and everyone learned something new.
IBM Watson
As a follow-up to the amazing times talk I gave at the conference I want to mention IBM Watson this month. The Watson Jeopardy show aired the week after I gave my presentation to the students but I hope that teachers across the nation took some time this month to discuss this amazing mile-marker in the evolution of technology. The IBM computer called Watson, named after IBM’s first President Thomas Watson, matched the abilities of two of the smartest humans in the world in a game of Jeopardy. The computer was up against the two best Jeopardy players in the world. Ken Jennings the 74 time undefeated champion of Jeopardy and Brad Rutter. Watson won the game with a total of $77,147 to Ken Jennings $24,000 and Brad Rutters $21,600 over a two day period. It really was quite an impressive feat.
I have provided a link in the show notes to a PBS NewsHour article complete with a series of videos about the behind the scenes story of IBM Watson and how scientist are working on the next generation of artificial intelligence.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/02/watson-wins-ibms-machine-rages-against-jeopardy-champs.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(artificial_intelligence_software)
Here is a question for you, after reviewing the videos do you call Watson a he or an it?
Technology Pick of the Week
My Technology Pick of the Week this week is a new smart phone app that I mentioned in the SIT keynote presentation called Google Translate. I really do believe that the Smart Phones that are coming on to the market today mark a similar point in history as the Altair and first Personal Computers in the 1970’s did for my generation. Smart phones are evolving very rapidly and are now being paired with cloud computing services that make the mobile devices as powerful as the mainframe computers not so long ago. In fact, they are increasingly being connected to mainframe type computers by high-speed wireless connections to take advantage of massive amounts of computing power that was previously impossible for the average person to access. All of this computing power is now in a cell phone sized device that many of our students carry with them all the time.
I have provided links in the show notes to the Google Blog that discusses Google Translate program as well as a YouTube video of a Google Translate demonstration. In the YouTube Video you will see an example of where a person that speaks English wants to buy a pair of shoes in Germany. The English speaker says that they want to buy a pair of shoes and then the Google Translate app that is now available on Android translates the English sentence into German. That’s pretty cool but in the next part of the video the German store keeper speaks into the Android phone in German and it is translated from German into English so that the English speaker can understand his answer.
Conversation Mode for Google Translate on Android (Blog)
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-look-for-google-translate-for.html
You Tube Video of Conversation Mode in Google Translate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtMfdNeGXgM&feature=player_embedded#t=26m24s
Translate supports 53 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish, and voice input is currently available for 15 languages with more sure to come in the future.
Yes, translate does make mistakes from time to time but this really is absolutely amazing technology. We are getting closer to the Universal Translater that was used on so many episodes of Star Trek I watched while growing up, science-fiction is becoming a reality.
That wraps it up for episode 117 of TechTalk4Teachers. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at eiu.edu/itc To leave a comment or suggestion, please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk for Teachers blog. Until next time, this is Tom Grissom, keep on learning…
Monday, January 31, 2011
Episode 116 – Do not shutoff my Internet and the Four Horsemen
It’s Monday January 31st, 2011 and welcome to episode 116 of TechTalk4Teachers, I’m Tom Grissom. Another month has gone by since the last podcast and the world has changed once again.
Right Click Here to Download MP3
(10 minutes 10 seconds)
This past month has witnessed protests in Tunisia and Egypt in attempts to oust the current dictatorial governments. Social media has played a huge role in these protests, so much so that the government of Egypt has cut-off cell phone and Internet service in the country in an attempt to disrupt protestors. Organizers of the protests were using Facebook and Twitter prior to the Internet cutoff to coordinate protests, so, the government made the decision to turn off the Internet switch. As of the time of this podcast some cell phone coverage has been restored but there is still no Internet access in Egypt. This is a very fluid situation and it is unclear whether President Mubarak will remain as the leader of Egypt as of the time of this posting. Tunisia was successful in their attempts to depose the Tunisian dictator but it did not come without the loss if life. Current events are always unpredictable but offer educators the opportunity to talk about democracy and what life is like in other countries.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/01/14/tunisia.protests/index.html
Modern communications technologies have allowed for instant communication on a world-wide scale. It is a bit disconcerting, but not surprising, that any country can just turn off a switch to disrupt communications in the face of a crisis. One reason the Internet has been so successful on a global scale is that it was designed to be very robust with the capability of re-routing information if needed.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/how_egypts_internet_kill_switch_works
The Internet was born in 1969 as part of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as a way to build a communications network that could communicate with other networks through internetwork packet-switching.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
The idea was that if one part of the communications network went down for some reason the rest of the network would remain operational and find an alternative path if possible. That works well as long as the network node you want to communicate with is alive but if you cannot access devices on a portion of the network you are out of luck. In essence this is what has happened in Egypt as their Internet has gone dark while the rest of the worlds Internet access remains functional. That is a good thing unless you happen to live in Egypt where you are directly impacted by the blackout.
Network engineers have worked very hard on building a reliable networking infrastructure that is capable of routing around problem areas where congestion occurs or access is unavailable. If the pathway to a specific device is unavailable then there is no communication possible unless a redundant pathway is established.
Egypt finds itself in the midst of protests with no Internet communications possible because the portion that serves Egypt has been shutdown. It is a tragic situation and one that we can only hope will be resolved peacefully.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/01/30/egypt.what.next/index.html
The Internet has become so successful that we are experiencing growing pains as there is now a coming crisis of not having enough Internet IP addresses to add more computers and devices to the Internet. With the explosion of smart phones that are capable of connecting to the Internet we are nearing the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses. Do not worry as there is a plan to move from IP Version 4 to IP Version 6 that will solve this problem but it does mean that the Internet infrastructure will need some revamping to accommodate the new format. I have provided a link from a PCMag article if you would like to know more about this upcoming change due to growing pains on the Internet:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2376887,00.asp
The Four Horsemen
In other news this month the world of technology witnessed changes for two of the four leaders from what has become known as the four horsemen of the technology industry. Leaders at Apple and Google have had a change in status at their respective companies this month. The so called four horsemen of the tech industry change from time to time but it is not hard to argue that Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Intel have been on this list in recent years.
Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, has taken a leave of absence due to health concerns and Eric Schmidt of Google has stepped down as the CEO of Google as part of a corporate restructuring. Schmidt will remain as part of the management team along with Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Google. It remains to be seen what changes the announcements may have on the future business of these tech titans but both announcements caught the tech world by surprise this month.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/157088/steve_jobs_to_step_down_temporarily_as_apples_ceo_for_health_reasons.html
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_ceo_eric_schmidt_steps_down_larry_page_take.php
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft is also making some executive changes at the top with the replacement of Bob Muglia, head of the Server Business Unit at Microsoft. At Intel, CEO Paul Otellini , is also facing changes with Microsoft possibly porting its next version of Windows to the ARM architecture. The Intel architecture that Microsoft has supported exclusively for years will likely face some competition with the ARM architecture.
With so much of a shakeup at the worlds largest tech companies the world is changing once again.
January also marks the time when these companies announce their quarterly earnings reports and all four of these horsemen recently reported record years and are riding high on the horse. A link is provided in the show notes if you are interested in reading the Press Releases regarding the recent quarterly earnings from these companies. You can really learn a lot about these companies from these press release statements:
Microsoft Reports Record $0.77 Earnings Per Share in Second Quarter
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2011/jan11/01-27fy11q2earningspr.mspx
Apple Reports First Quarter Results
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/01/18results.html
Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2010 Results and Management Changes
http://investor.google.com/earnings/2010/Q4_google_earnings.html
Intel Reports Record Year and Record Fourth Quarter
http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011/01/13/intel-reports-record-year-and-record-fourth-quarter
I scanned the reports for information and if I did my math correctly these four companies had just short of 67 billion in revenue with over 18 billion dollars of that being net income. And this is just for the QUARTERLY results! For the average person that is an almost inconceivable amount of income.
What is net income?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_income
The four horsemen of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Intel have a tremendous impact upon the lives of millions of people every single day.
Technology Pick of the Week
My Technology Pick of the Week this week is a free ebook reading program that is cross-platform. Calibre will run on Windows, Macs, and Linux and is an open source ebook reader / management program. I am pronouncing it (Caliber)Calibre as that is the way that Kovid Goyal, the creator of the program, pronounces it. I have heard several people call it “Calibre” but I will honor the creator of the program and call it Calibre here. I have provided links in the shownotes to the Download site as well as an introductory video of its capabilities that is worth a watch if you want to know more about this free ebook reader.
Calibre open source ebook reader
http://calibre-ebook.com/
What I like about Calibre is its cross-platform support as well as the support for the majority of ebook formats. The two most popular formats being EPUB that the Barnes and Noble nook uses and the MOBI format the Amazon Kindle uses. The only catch is that Calibre will not work with all ebooks due to Digital Rights Management issues, also known as DRM. DRM is currently used on the Nook, Kindle, and other ebook readers in efforts to keep electronic books from being pirated.
It feels like we have seen this song and dance before as publishers are using proprietary DRM formats to protect content to the detriment of consumers. If you lived through the transition of digital music from CD’s to downloadable MP3’s you can unfortunately expect a similar experience with ebooks. When Apple came out with iTunes the music Apple sold was protected by DRM. DRM uses proprietary software that may lock you into a particular device, in the case of Apple it is the iPod/iPhone. If you want to use another MP3 player you could not if the music was DRMd to a particular device.
The music industry has gradually limited DRM and much music today can now be purchased without DRM. A negative of buying digital copies is that if the service decides to change the format the consumer may be forced to buy the content again in the “new and improved format”. This happened with Apple at one point where consumers were faced with re-buying songs they already purchased if they wanted to buy a higher quality version of songs.
Coming off this history I do not want to repeat the mistakes of the past but I find myself in a similar spot with the current state of ebooks. Having lived through the messy world of DRM music I now find myself in the DRM ebook world. It will be a while, maybe never, but I dream of a day that I could read a book I purchased on Amazon in the Kindle format and read it on a Barnes and Noble Nook, or read it using some open source program such as Calibre or in my Google ebooks folder. Right now the solution is to lock into a particular format or buy the old fashioned paper-based version of the book, currently I am using the Kindle format for purchased ebooks but Google offers the advantage of access from an inclusive gmail account. Then there is the iPad and the slew of Android tablets that support ebooks. Hmmm, choices.
How about you, are you using ebooks? Are you finding any barriers with using ebooks in schools? I would love to hear from you so please send me an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or better yet record your question or comment in a sound file, keep it brief and to the point and send it to me as an email attachment. Selected comments will be shared on the next episode and played on air if you send in an audio comment. One thing I think we educators need to do more of is to comment on each others blogs, wikis, and podcasts to share more with one another by participating in the content we use. When was the last time you posted a comment or participated on a podcast?
That wraps it up for episode 116 of TechTalk4Teachers. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at eiu.edu/itc To leave a comment or suggestion, please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk for Teachers blog. Until next time, this is Tom Grissom, keep on learning…
Right Click Here to Download MP3
(10 minutes 10 seconds)
This past month has witnessed protests in Tunisia and Egypt in attempts to oust the current dictatorial governments. Social media has played a huge role in these protests, so much so that the government of Egypt has cut-off cell phone and Internet service in the country in an attempt to disrupt protestors. Organizers of the protests were using Facebook and Twitter prior to the Internet cutoff to coordinate protests, so, the government made the decision to turn off the Internet switch. As of the time of this podcast some cell phone coverage has been restored but there is still no Internet access in Egypt. This is a very fluid situation and it is unclear whether President Mubarak will remain as the leader of Egypt as of the time of this posting. Tunisia was successful in their attempts to depose the Tunisian dictator but it did not come without the loss if life. Current events are always unpredictable but offer educators the opportunity to talk about democracy and what life is like in other countries.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/01/14/tunisia.protests/index.html
Modern communications technologies have allowed for instant communication on a world-wide scale. It is a bit disconcerting, but not surprising, that any country can just turn off a switch to disrupt communications in the face of a crisis. One reason the Internet has been so successful on a global scale is that it was designed to be very robust with the capability of re-routing information if needed.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/how_egypts_internet_kill_switch_works
The Internet was born in 1969 as part of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as a way to build a communications network that could communicate with other networks through internetwork packet-switching.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
The idea was that if one part of the communications network went down for some reason the rest of the network would remain operational and find an alternative path if possible. That works well as long as the network node you want to communicate with is alive but if you cannot access devices on a portion of the network you are out of luck. In essence this is what has happened in Egypt as their Internet has gone dark while the rest of the worlds Internet access remains functional. That is a good thing unless you happen to live in Egypt where you are directly impacted by the blackout.
Network engineers have worked very hard on building a reliable networking infrastructure that is capable of routing around problem areas where congestion occurs or access is unavailable. If the pathway to a specific device is unavailable then there is no communication possible unless a redundant pathway is established.
Egypt finds itself in the midst of protests with no Internet communications possible because the portion that serves Egypt has been shutdown. It is a tragic situation and one that we can only hope will be resolved peacefully.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/01/30/egypt.what.next/index.html
The Internet has become so successful that we are experiencing growing pains as there is now a coming crisis of not having enough Internet IP addresses to add more computers and devices to the Internet. With the explosion of smart phones that are capable of connecting to the Internet we are nearing the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses. Do not worry as there is a plan to move from IP Version 4 to IP Version 6 that will solve this problem but it does mean that the Internet infrastructure will need some revamping to accommodate the new format. I have provided a link from a PCMag article if you would like to know more about this upcoming change due to growing pains on the Internet:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2376887,00.asp
The Four Horsemen
In other news this month the world of technology witnessed changes for two of the four leaders from what has become known as the four horsemen of the technology industry. Leaders at Apple and Google have had a change in status at their respective companies this month. The so called four horsemen of the tech industry change from time to time but it is not hard to argue that Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Intel have been on this list in recent years.
Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, has taken a leave of absence due to health concerns and Eric Schmidt of Google has stepped down as the CEO of Google as part of a corporate restructuring. Schmidt will remain as part of the management team along with Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Google. It remains to be seen what changes the announcements may have on the future business of these tech titans but both announcements caught the tech world by surprise this month.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/157088/steve_jobs_to_step_down_temporarily_as_apples_ceo_for_health_reasons.html
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_ceo_eric_schmidt_steps_down_larry_page_take.php
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft is also making some executive changes at the top with the replacement of Bob Muglia, head of the Server Business Unit at Microsoft. At Intel, CEO Paul Otellini , is also facing changes with Microsoft possibly porting its next version of Windows to the ARM architecture. The Intel architecture that Microsoft has supported exclusively for years will likely face some competition with the ARM architecture.
With so much of a shakeup at the worlds largest tech companies the world is changing once again.
January also marks the time when these companies announce their quarterly earnings reports and all four of these horsemen recently reported record years and are riding high on the horse. A link is provided in the show notes if you are interested in reading the Press Releases regarding the recent quarterly earnings from these companies. You can really learn a lot about these companies from these press release statements:
Microsoft Reports Record $0.77 Earnings Per Share in Second Quarter
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2011/jan11/01-27fy11q2earningspr.mspx
Apple Reports First Quarter Results
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/01/18results.html
Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2010 Results and Management Changes
http://investor.google.com/earnings/2010/Q4_google_earnings.html
Intel Reports Record Year and Record Fourth Quarter
http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011/01/13/intel-reports-record-year-and-record-fourth-quarter
I scanned the reports for information and if I did my math correctly these four companies had just short of 67 billion in revenue with over 18 billion dollars of that being net income. And this is just for the QUARTERLY results! For the average person that is an almost inconceivable amount of income.
What is net income?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_income
The four horsemen of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Intel have a tremendous impact upon the lives of millions of people every single day.
Technology Pick of the Week
My Technology Pick of the Week this week is a free ebook reading program that is cross-platform. Calibre will run on Windows, Macs, and Linux and is an open source ebook reader / management program. I am pronouncing it (Caliber)
Calibre open source ebook reader
http://calibre-ebook.com/
What I like about Calibre is its cross-platform support as well as the support for the majority of ebook formats. The two most popular formats being EPUB that the Barnes and Noble nook uses and the MOBI format the Amazon Kindle uses. The only catch is that Calibre will not work with all ebooks due to Digital Rights Management issues, also known as DRM. DRM is currently used on the Nook, Kindle, and other ebook readers in efforts to keep electronic books from being pirated.
It feels like we have seen this song and dance before as publishers are using proprietary DRM formats to protect content to the detriment of consumers. If you lived through the transition of digital music from CD’s to downloadable MP3’s you can unfortunately expect a similar experience with ebooks. When Apple came out with iTunes the music Apple sold was protected by DRM. DRM uses proprietary software that may lock you into a particular device, in the case of Apple it is the iPod/iPhone. If you want to use another MP3 player you could not if the music was DRMd to a particular device.
The music industry has gradually limited DRM and much music today can now be purchased without DRM. A negative of buying digital copies is that if the service decides to change the format the consumer may be forced to buy the content again in the “new and improved format”. This happened with Apple at one point where consumers were faced with re-buying songs they already purchased if they wanted to buy a higher quality version of songs.
Coming off this history I do not want to repeat the mistakes of the past but I find myself in a similar spot with the current state of ebooks. Having lived through the messy world of DRM music I now find myself in the DRM ebook world. It will be a while, maybe never, but I dream of a day that I could read a book I purchased on Amazon in the Kindle format and read it on a Barnes and Noble Nook, or read it using some open source program such as Calibre or in my Google ebooks folder. Right now the solution is to lock into a particular format or buy the old fashioned paper-based version of the book, currently I am using the Kindle format for purchased ebooks but Google offers the advantage of access from an inclusive gmail account. Then there is the iPad and the slew of Android tablets that support ebooks. Hmmm, choices.
How about you, are you using ebooks? Are you finding any barriers with using ebooks in schools? I would love to hear from you so please send me an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or better yet record your question or comment in a sound file, keep it brief and to the point and send it to me as an email attachment. Selected comments will be shared on the next episode and played on air if you send in an audio comment. One thing I think we educators need to do more of is to comment on each others blogs, wikis, and podcasts to share more with one another by participating in the content we use. When was the last time you posted a comment or participated on a podcast?
That wraps it up for episode 116 of TechTalk4Teachers. Show notes for this episode and archived episodes are available on the web at the EIU Instructional Technology Center website at eiu.edu/itc To leave a comment or suggestion, please send an email to techtalk@eiu.edu or leave a comment on the Tech Talk for Teachers blog. Until next time, this is Tom Grissom, keep on learning…
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