Wired Educator (not Wired/Educator, though, judging from the terrible logo) on the AppleTV instead of a projector (or worse, interactive whiteboard):
Using my iPad and AirPlay, I can wirelessly mirror any content on my iPad to the screen at the front of the room. The real advantage is evident during collaborative activities. Students can use their own iOS devices to connect to the AppleTV to share their work with the rest of the class. I can be anywhere in the room and still run my lesson. I can pull up sound and video clips on my iPad and instantly share them with my class without being attached to any particular location in the room.
There’s so much potential here, especially with AirPlay support for Macs in Mountain Lion. TVs are cheaper and higher-resolution than most projectors, too.
(Aside: the AppleTV has become one of my favourite Apple devices in recent memory. So great.)
Matt Langer on the ridiculous “Curator’s Code“:
First, let’s just get clear on the terminology here: “Curation” is an act performed by people with PhDs in art history; the business in which we’re all engaged when we’re tossing links around on the internet is simple “sharing.” And some of us are very good at that! (At least if we accept “very good” to mean “has a large audience.”)
But we should not delude ourselves for a moment into bestowing any special significance on this, because when we do this thing that so many of us like to call “curation” we’re not providing any sort of ontology or semantic continuity beyond that of our own whimsy or taste or desire.
Agreed.
Aside: I wondered how I’d feel if the untrained masses who produce instructional YouTube videos called themselves ‘teachers’–they don’t seem to, at least not yet. I think I’d be fine with it, because the act of putting together something instructional requires so much more effort than posting links on the Internet, and who can claim that Khan is any less effective a teacher than most of our “trained” colleagues?
Umm:
Many times, Mr Tan said the unreasonable requests stem from a misconception on the kind of consular assistance [the Ministry of Foreign Affairs] provides. He cited an instance where a Singaporean complained about racial discrimination just because he had received a smaller piece of KFC chicken compared to what the locals had.
Mr Tan said: “He wanted MFA to investigate this incident and seek justice in that foreign country for the unfair treatment he claimed to have received. To assist such request will require conduct of delicate chicken diplomacy with another foreign country. And it would have been very difficult because the evidence – the subject of the complaint – had been consumed and we can’t follow up.”
Achievement unlocked by “Mr Tan” for finding an opportunity to use the phrase “chicken diplomacy” literally.
(via Adrianna on Twitter.)
An interesting argument: that calculating devices are now ubiquitous, and math should focus on computational problem-solving instead of drilling and memorisation. An example the author cites:
Computer languages allow students to transform ideas into action. Here is a simple rule that a math teacher might describe to her students:
If the number is greater than 9, carry the 10′s place; otherwise add the number to the bottom row.
The solution for this can be expressed as a simple if/else statement:
if (number > 9)
carry += number / 10;
else
bottom += number;
There are, as expected, plenty of opposing views in the comments, but it’s good food for thought. Also noteworthy: the comments aren’t completely stupid. Not-completely-stupid comments! On the Internet! WHAT IS THIS WORLD WE’RE LIVING IN
Interesting piece on protecting teachers from destructive management through data-driven evaluation, with corollaries to how programmers are evaluated:
Bill Gates is making the same crusade he made for developers — protection from the type of overly simplified management incentives that destroy your ability to focus on the tasks at hand when working in a complex, creative profession.
Related: Confessions of a ‘Bad’ Teacher, in today’s New York Times. This teacher, who received an “unsatisfactory” rating wasn’t even evaluated on any automated effectiveness metrics, though, which speaks of how tough a problem this is.
From the blog behind the “Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python” book:
“[For] the casually interested or schoolchildren with several activities competing for their attention, programming concepts like variables and loops and data types aren’t interesting in themselves. They don’t want to learn how to program just for the sake of programming. They don’t want to learn about algorithm complexity or implicit casting. They want to make Super Mario or Twitter or Angry Birds.”
We’ve actually found that our students are usually quite happy to spend lots of time making silly console-output programs, like printing a pyramid of asterisks. However, the intro programming courses we’ve conducted have been for a fairly self-selected bunch.
The book is available online for free, and it certainly looks like a great instructional resource.
From the New York Times, via The Loop from a while ago:
“This is not about the technology,” Mark Edwards, superintendent of Mooresville Graded School District, would tell the visitors later over lunch. “It’s not about the box. It’s about changing the culture of instruction — preparing students for their future, not our past.”
As debate continues over whether schools invest wisely in technology — and whether it measurably improves student achievement — Mooresville, a modest community about 20 miles north of Charlotte best known as home to several Nascar teams and drivers, has quietly emerged as the de facto national model of the digital school.
Fascinating look at how they did it: job cuts, larger class sizes, leased MacBook Airs, self-paced learning. Noteworthy, too, that it’s for an entire school district (5000 students… the size of one of our “integrated programme” schools here).
Found via Brandon’s recommendation:
Everpix is an online repository of every digital photo you’ve ever taken, supported by a background Mac utility that keeps it in sync with your iPhoto/Aperture/Lightroom, and an iPhone app that syncs your Camera Roll, and allows you to view your library in the cloud. Crucially, it also syncs with your online photos on Flickr, Instagram, Google+/Picasa, and Facebook.
I don’t obsess over taking pictures, and care even less about organising or sharing them. As such, Everpix’s ability to collect and see all my photos in one place fits my needs perfectly. Having those more advanced sharing options around are great, too, for the (admittedly unlikely) scenarios when I “get around to posting them on Facebook”. (Sorry, anyone waiting for wedding pictures.)
I strongly recommend giving Everpix a try; it’s free (for now) anyway.
Gawker found the man behind @horse_ebooks:
A human being behind Horse_ebooks could either intensify or diminish its myth. Horse_ebooks itself would be elevated from a dumb spam bot that had chanced into greatness to a brilliant viral marketing tool. But Horse_ebooks fans would be debased, transformed from connoisseurs of sophisticated anti-humor to the unwitting cash cows of some Russian mastermind.
Pretty gripping, even for non-fans (WHY ARE YOU NOT A FAN OF THE GREATEST TWITTER ACCOUNT EVER ARE YOU INSANE).
Fraser Speirs provides a great overview of iTunes U, and why he’s excited about it. As previously noted, it’s not quite a complete learning management system –
There are two sides to digital workflow in school. There’s the information distribution and communication side and there’s the submission, grading and feedback side.
It’s important to understand that iTunes U only attacks the first part: information distribution and communication. It is not a test-taking, file submission and grading system. Neither does it track student progress through a course.
(Emphasis mine)
– but it does go a long way in solving teachers’ problems in digitally communicating with students and distributing course materials, neither of which are adequately served by many LMSes. That’s in a uniformly-iOS school environment, of course.