Tag: Innovation

Posted on

How To Use Twitter to Virtually Network at the ASCD Conference 2009

I couldn't attend this year's ASCD conference currently going on in Orlando. That's a shame, since conferences are such a great place to meet new people and share ideas. So I thought I use Twitter to see if I can virtually meet folks and share thinking.  

First here's my elevator speech introduction – conference attendees pretend we just met over coffee…

Great to meet you… My name's Peter Pappas, from Rochester NY. I taught high school social studies for over 25 year, became a K-12 coordinator and then finished the last 5 years of my career as a assistant superintendent for instruction. Since then, I've been able to devote myself, full time, to expanding my role as a staff developer and consultant.

I've had the chance to work with districts across the country with a focus on literacy, technology, document-based instruction and student engagement. Staff development should model what we want to see in the classroom, so I bring an audience response system and we actually use the techniques I'm promoting!

Follow me on Twitter – hope you have a great conference!

Oh .. and … have you heard of any good sushi restaurants nearby? …..

Note: As of 4/26/09 the TwitterCloudExplorer seems to have disappeared.  Here's a screen shot of what it looked like during the ASCD conference. Notice my Twitter name edteck was the 4th most Twittered word when I took the screen shot.

Twitter-cloud


Technical Specs

1. Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.  I sought out the relevant hashtags people are using for the ASCD conference. Note: It seems this year both #ASCD and #ASCD09 are being used. For more on hashtags 
2. I used a Twitter Search to look for people using the #ASCD OR #ASCD09 hashtags. Search results here.

3. Then I sent out Tweets to people using either hashtag with a link back to this post. Hopefully their replies will follow.
4. I'm a big fan of quantitative display of information, so I used one the many new Twitter visualization tools – Twitter Cloud Explorer to generate this embedded query. Note: As of 4/26/09 the TwitterCloudExplorer seems to have disappeared.  There are many new Twitter visualizations coming along every day.

Posted on

Wiimote Interactive IR Pen Whiteboard Solution

It's only been just over a year since Johnny Chung Lee's first posted his creative solution for turning a Wii remote into an cheap interactive whiteboard system. Watch Johnny Lee's original IWB video.   

Last week, Stan Merrell and Adam Wilcox - two of my Rochester NY tech buddies, met fellow Rochestarian – Tino Agnitti. Tino has developed a great Wii mounting bracket and IR pen that makes assembling Lee's Wii creation a snap. Tino calls his IR pen "The Groove" it's a sleekly designed, 2nd-generation IR pen that features – Hybrid Activation Tip Switch and Button, Treated LED for better tracking, Vishay TSAL6400. It runs on AAA batteries and it works great. I was especially impressed with its very intuitive interaction with writing applications. Tino also created "The Spot," a mount to connect your Wii remote to a standard tripod with a 1/4" – 20 thread.

Tino sells his Groove/Spot combo for only $39. Spend another $39 for a Wii remote (no need to use the rest of the Wii system) and you have an interactive whiteboard on any flat surface you choose to aim your  LCD. Tino showed me how to  aim the Wii at my monitor and we turned my MacBook into a tablet! 

Software? For PC, Tino recommends Smoothboard produced by Boon Jin Goh, a friend who lives in Singapore.   Tino set me up with the Mac version – Wiimote Whiteboard that I'm running. It comes out of Germany from Uwe Schmidt, a master's student at Darmstadt Technical University.  It was a quick install and it's especially easy to calibrate. For more on the growing wiimote community check out The Wiimote Project Forum  

I'm working on integrating the wiimote system into a portable whiteboard that I can use in my presentations. I'm very excited about pairing it with Prezi – its zooming capabilities will allow me to do exciting nonlinear presentations. 

My buddy Stan Merrell shot our meeting Tino

Posted on

Physics Department Innovates with Student-Centered Approach

There's an interesting piece in the New York Times "At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard" (1/13/09) that details an effort by the MIT physics department to move to a more student-centered, interactive approach to instruction. Physics is not simply a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking, asking questions and discovering answers.

At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required — classical mechanics and electromagnetism — but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers.

Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants, the professor makes brief presentations of general principles and engages the students as they work out related concepts in small groups.

Teachers and students conduct experiments together. The room buzzes. Conferring with tablemates, calling out questions and jumping up to write formulas on the white boards are all encouraged.

“There was a long tradition that what it meant to teach was to give a really well-prepared lecture,” said Peter Dourmashkin, a senior lecturer in physics at M.I.T. and a strong proponent of the new method. “It was the students’ job to figure it out.”

The problem, say Dr. Dourmashkin and others in the department, is that a lot of students had trouble doing that. The failure rate for those lecture courses, even those taught by the most mesmerizing teachers, was typically 10 percent to 12 percent. Now, it has dropped to 4 percent.

… The traditional 50-minute lecture was geared more toward physics majors, said Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard who is a pioneer of the new approach, and whose work has influenced the change at M.I.T.

“The people who wanted to understand,” Professor Mazur said, “had the discipline, the urge, to sit down afterwards and say, ‘Let me figure this out.’ ” But for the majority, he said, a different approach is needed.

“Just as you can’t become a marathon runner by watching marathons on TV,” Professor Mazur said, “likewise for science, you have to go through the thought processes of doing science and not just watch your instructor do it.”

Posted on

Teaching Innovation

04edlife.fruit.190 Innovation – an idea put to work – stands at the pinnacle of higher-order thinking. It begins with a firm grasp of the basics. Then the innovator must continue up through Bloom's taxonomy of thinking skills to analyze patterns and needs, evaluate alternatives and finally create something to resolve to the problem. Creating is nothing more than a new combination of existing components.

The New York Times has devoted much of this week's "Education Life" (1/3/09) to showcase 23 innovative ideas generated by students. The same issues details a number of college course on entrepreneurship – "Dreamers and Doers." 

<<< The Elizabowl’s shape shifts to hold more or fewer fruits. The idea is to separate fruits into individual compartments to retard spoilage. Photo by by Sarah O'Brien (it's inventor)

Let's hope this focus on innovation and sustainability can extend down to K-12 education. Kids are getting plenty of time with the basics – when do they get to create something original with them?  Seems more valuable and engaging than test prep.