100 tools for learning.

Jane Hart is a UK educator who has polled "learning professionals"  (by which I think she means teachers and trainers of all sorts) each year for the past 6 years to learn what their top 100 tools for learning are.

Game Design & Coding

I'm going to use this as a holding spot for software that might be useful for teachers interested in game design or coding.

Game Design:
Gamestar Mechanic (for Teachers)
ARIS Editor (ARIS Community on Google)  (ARIS Manual) (ARIS Game Jam Oct 23 / 24)
Game Salad (Game Salad Tutorial)
GameMaker Studio

 Sample Game Design Rubric
Game Design Tack at Elementary Tech Fair

Game Based Learning
What Game Based Learning Can Do For Student Achievement
The Minecraft Cell:  Biology Meets Game Based Learning


Coding
Code Academy
Code.org
Scratch
Tynker 

Hour of Code
Teaching Code without a computer
Unplugged Hour of Code
Unplugged Code: Computational Thinking Without a Computer  

Reports
From the Computer Science Teacher's Association

The New Elite School

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, has built a new school. Ad Astra for his (and some of his employees') children.  Ad Astra has done away with traditional barriers of classes and students are taught at their abilities.  It sounds like it's based pretty strongly in constructionism... but there is little more news about the school, yet.

http://nextshark.com/elon-musk-created-his-own-secret-experimental-school-for-his-kids/

Getting Ready For TEP 519A Fall 2015

In thinking about class this Fall, this video is a nice place to begin.  :)

Course Apps -- Placeholder

It appears the the next evolution of the MOOC (and one that may be more easily monetized) is the course app.

UT Austin may have developed the first course app, out of the Energy 101 MOOC it offered via EdX in 2014.

The NYT reported on the course app in October 2014 here.  The Energy 101 Course App is running on Adobe, and the Adobe Blog reports on the course app here.

There are MAJOR learning analytics that are built into the app -- which looks GORGEOUS on an iPad.

This post is a placeholder for me to come back to this at another time.

(Most) Technology Is Not Neutral

I just saw this post on Risk, Reward, and Digital Writing, today, from the good folks at Hybrid Pedagogy. Among other things, it reminded me of the lack of neutrality in technology.

Technology.  It's hard for me to walk through the world without using it.  Relying on it.  And accepting it almost unquestioningly, most of the time.  Sure, there are design errors, and processes that the technology sometimes insists upon that are clearly not based on a user with my particular experience.  Technology is best when it's invisible.  Or maybe when it wows.  And tech is at its worst when it fails.  (Or we fail to understand the logic of the machine.)

Sometimes software technology or web technologies are agnostic.  Meaning:  They work regardless of the type of hardware being used.

But technology is not neutral.  It's all been developed with assumptions.  Sometimes these assumptions are so in line with norms, that they are not visible.  (That this communication will take place in text, that I will be writing in English.)  When we get to Google Docs from our Antioch account, the assumption is that our first line of sharing will be with others in the Antioch Community.  And Google Docs was built on the assumption that documents are for sharing.  And for co-editing.  And that drastic mistakes as well as tiny edits should be reversible.

One of my concerns about many educational apps is the tacit assumption that Apps Are For Consumption.  Children are natural creators.  Tablets have the ability to allow them to create, connect (with each other and broader audiences, if appropriate), and (appropriately)  share their creations.  But finding apps that are not consumption-centric is difficult.  In TEP-519, we will begin to explore some tools that are designed for creativity.  One great outcome of  TEP 519 would be that teacher candidates begin to  look at the assumptions of technologies they wish to adapt in their classrooms.

iPhoto pics are too big.

Maybe this  is common knowlege, but iPhoto pics are apparently HUGE.

E-N-O-R-M-O-U-S.

Make your PPT un-uploadable big.

So.

Of course.

I will want to experience this for myself.

Darn it.  I was not able to replicate the problem.

I wonder if she is taking all HD pics?  Or if there is something about the export/import settings between her phone and iPhoto???

Oy... I'm not finding similar problems online.  Which makes me think I'm not asking the right question.  (Because it's rare that there is a rare problem?)

Here's something that works... but it's clunky... it's more like a work-around.  Exporting a picture (to a file, somewhere.  This blog post talks about how to export a pic as a smaller file for email, but the principle is the same.

Anyway... this doesn't solve Ashley's prob.  There is no reason (IMO) that a pic cannot simply be uploaded to Blogger (or Tumblr) or PPT

Could it really be this clunky method is the one that needs to be used?