Will be presenting in about 10 minutes at the NICE mini conference here in Illinois. Doing a revamped version of my Top 10 Web 2.0 for Educators. Most radical change is that I don’t have an aggregator in there. Still kinda torn about that. Part of it is that time is limited, but another piece is that I’m not positive that it’s as relevant as it used to be. Considering people are aggregating via their inbox, via iGoogle, via My Yahoo, within the browser and more. There’s so many ways to subscribe, that I’m not positive it’s worth including an aggregator in this type of fast paced presentation.

Regardless, the current version is embedded below, and the examples I show for each site can be found here.

Let me know what you think! What did I get right, and what did I miss? Above all, please be sure to include WHY. Oh yeah, you can also add your thoughts to this Wall.

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With all the news about the disaster in Haiti, one of the more interesting things I’ve seen technologically recently came from there. I’ve seen 360 videos before, going all the way back to Quicktime VR and such. But this absolutely fascinates me.

This video was shot on January 18th, and while watching it, you are able to use your mouse to look in any direction, up or down as well. Pretty stunning to say the least. And what an incredible way to provide students a window into the area.

Can’t speak for you, but I’d love to see them run this through the Grand Canyon… or around Washington DC… or through an excavation site.

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Augmented reality is one of the few technologies that have come out within the last few years that really have the ability to simply drop jaws. Primarily, it’s hung out in the marketing field, and been used in car ads and recently on the cover of Esquire magazine. Home versions include a DIY lightsasber and Addidas has announced plans to include an AR code into several of their upcoming shoes, allowing people to actually use the shoe as a controller for a video game. Seriously. I really couldn’t make that one up.

The big question of course is, does Augmented Reality have a place in education, and if so… what is it? At FETC, the folks over at SMART had a small corner of their booth devoted to Augmented Reality. The person there said flat out that they have nothing in production right now, they really have no idea where it’s going to go, they just think it’s neat, has potential and wanted to hear what educators thought.

Well, I got an email about a month ago from a company with a product called Imaginality, and they’re much farther along the path of figuring this stuff out than anybody else that I’ve seen yet. They’ve taken the ordinary webcam, combined it with images that you print out and created some pretty dynamic modules. Basically you download their software, choose which modules you want to purchase, and setup your webcam. Then, when you hold the ‘paddles’ in front of the camera, it displays various 3D objects. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What’s really interesting is the way the paddles can interact with each other. For example, check out this video of the Solar Explorer module.

As you can see, each paddle representes a different planet. The planets spin at the correct proportional speed, and have some bars in the corners representing various stats about them. But what’s interesting is when you move the planets within a few inches of each other. They resize themselves proportionally. The most dramatic example of that is when you move any planet next to the sun. Pretty powerful effect, much more so than holding up the pumpkin and a marble.

A few other examples. The video below is about the human heart. One paddle shows a beating heart, and by rotating it around you can see it from any angle. But the next four paddles display each of the four chambers. By holding up the ‘info’ paddle, you can make it translucent and see how blood flows through it. But when you start moving the paddles next to each other in the right combinations, the chambers actually connect to each other to create a complete heart.

Is this all you need to teach a student about the heart? Absolutely not. But you do have to admit that it’s a pretty amazing demonstration of the direction technology is moving. I mean, this isn’t something that you find in a museum, it’s being done with ordinary webcams and bar codes you print out. Pretty amazing.

The big question is, where does this belong in education? What kinds of AR should people be building? Science seems to be the most obvious application, and everything from biology to chemistry could make use of this. Think about the building blocks of matter, and how atoms interact with each other. But Imaginality also has a math module, using blocks to demonstrate how multiplication works. It’s more of a proof of concept right now, but it really does show some great potential.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this one. Where does Augmented Reality fit in? If you could ask them to build a module, what would you want them to create? How would you use it in the classroom?

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In case you haven’t been keeping up with ISTE’s dive into the crowdsourcing arena, the final voting is now open for the ultimate keynote presentation at this year’s conference. Your choices are:
* Chris Lehmann
* Alan November
* Jeff Piontek
* Peter H. Reynolds
* Gary Stager

I know most of the people on the list, and they’re all worthy choices. You should definitely stop by and cast a vote for your favorite.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what this has boiled down to. The process began with people proposing and voting on topics.

Then the topics were narrowed down to five, and people were able to suggest and vote for speakers on each of those topics.

Now the topics seem to have gone away completely, and we’re left with five names and we’re just supposed to pick one, on the topic of “Excellence in Education.” I guess the topic of “Good Things to Talk About” would have been too broad.

While I applaud ISTE in their efforts to engage the community and bring them into the process, I think it was handled poorly. Clearly, things have not been thought out quite enough.

It seems as thought phase 1 should have been skipped entirely. In round 2, there were 5 topics listed, and people nominated speakers for each topic. However, based on the sheer numbers in the voting, clearly not everybody realized that you could vote for people for each of the different topics. The speakers that were nominated in the first topic got the vast majority of the votes. Some very qualified people I think were victims of that confusion.

And the net result? When all is said and done, we have a popularity contest that’s being run on Polldaddy of all things. Really? No registration required to vote, just using a free polling widget that has already been well documented to be ‘hackable‘? I’m shocked that the largest EdTech conference in the country would step it up and not use a free, insecure polling widget to determine who will be their keynote presenter.

Moral of the story? Love the idea, hate the implementation. Hope they learn from this process.

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Like many other bloggers that I consider to be colleagues, my blogging has tapered off quite a bit over the years, and while some of the fault lies in myself, I put most of the blame squarely on Twitter. Why take half an hour to write several paragraphs, hyperlink it up and find an appropriate image, when I can just spout off 140 characters and move on? It just makes sense, right? That’s why I’m rather looking forward to Flutter’s official launch.

I jest, but it does bring out an obvious reason why blogging is becoming less and less of a ‘hot topic’ and Twitter keeps getting the buzz. It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s accessible, and most of all it doesn’t require a significant commitment. While it’s very arguable whether that’s a good thing or not, it’s a reality.

It used to be the standard, just an assumption that everybody would have a blog. Join a PLN, create a blog, set up your aggregator, be a part of the club. But now…. Well, I’m spending less and less time even using my aggregator. If it’s important enough to read, more than likely someone will tweet about it. And if they don’t… well, there’s a lot of good things to read that I miss. I can live with that. The library is full of them.

So the question then becomes, with dozens of microblog options out there (and even nanoblogs!), would you recommend a newbie start a blog? If somebody who is just getting started with community building and personal learning networks wanted an avenue to share, would you even suggest that they start a blog or set up an aggregator? Or do you shuffle them straight to Twitter/Plurk and roll from there? Or a different option altogether?

And don’t worry, I’m not missing the irony of posting this on a blog. I’ll be tweeting it out as well!

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While the results of this survey by the National Literacy Trust are hardly conclusive, students who engaged in higher levels of social networking tending to consider themselves better writers.

A survey of 3,001 children aged nine to 16 found that 24% had their own blog and 82% sent text messages at least once a month.

In addition 73% used instant messaging services to chat online with friends.

Of the children who neither blogged nor used social network sites, 47% rated their writing as “good” or “very good”, while 61% of the bloggers and 56% of the social networkers said the same.

The results seem to be positive, but there’s a difference between believing that you’re good at something and it actually being true (see American Idol). However, you can’t downplay the role of self-confidence and peer recognition in education. If the student believes in themself, they’ll try harder which certainly can lead to improvement.

One note. David Worthington makes a great point about this article.

I would like to see any cross tabs that detail their income levels, and whether their parents (or caregivers) were college educated. We’ve all heard about the digital divide, where lower income students lack Internet access. This could be just another example of it manifesting itself.

Very valid point. That being said, we’ve all heard wonderful anecdotal stories of the benefits of blogging and social media when used with students. It’s nice to hear the beginnings of some people attempting to quantify it. Something to keep an eye on.

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Via @TerryFreedman:

Looks like Notre Dame high school in the UK is taking the bull by the horns and moving forward with an initiative to allow the use of mobile phones for educational purposes during class time.

Assistant headteacher Paul Haigh said mobiles, MP3 players and gaming devices were “untapped resources” for teaching and learning.

“We realise as a comprehensive state school we could never afford to buy every student all the IT and mobile devices we would like them to have.

He added: “But most students own many of these devices anyway – they’re just hidden in their schoolbags. What’s more they’re experts in using them, knowing all the short cuts and characteristics of their own equipment as they use it every day.”

Mr Haigh said there was little logic in allowing pupils to use a netbook in school while banning mobile phones, many of which could access the internet, record sound and take digital photographs.

This new school policy is running contrary to a nationwide ban of cell phones in schools. What’s interesting though is the source of the opposition. That the teacher’s union is against it isn’t all that surprising, but the other group that is currently opposing the change is…. the parents. While there isn’t much in the way of details on this front, it does say that parents are worried phones will be a distraction.

Whether you’re in agreement with the new policy, or with the opposition, it will certainly be an interesting story to follow. Hopefully they plan to publish the impact of this change throughout the year.

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I think that many people (myself included) that share sites like Twitter at conferences inadvertently do our attendees a disservice. In the effort of attempting to demonstrate how wonderful, simple, powerful and dynamic it is, we make it seem much more effortless than it really is.

For example… How many times per day do you see somebody say, “Give a shout out to the people in Nepal who are attending my presentation about social networks about using the Luge to teach physics!” And then 30-40 people reply with a hearty “Hello”. So attendees believe all it takes it to toss a tweet out there, and dozens of responses will pour in.

What isn’t necessarily shown, or may just be glossed over, is the fact that it takes TIME and EFFORT to gain a few hundred followers. And without having a critical mass of people to message out to, your odds of getting a response from a general tweet are VERY small. If you have 40 followers, more than likely none of them are actually online at the same time as you. And even if they are, who knows if they’re checking Twitter? And even if they are, who knows if they’ll see your tweet? And if they do, how many people will see it and ignore it, versus will see it and respond?

For example, if I send out a “Please give these folks a shout out” tweet, I expect maybe about 30-40 responses on a typical school day during normal hours. If it’s a weekend, or in the evening, you can cut that number in half. I currently have about 5000 followers. So at best, that’s less than 1%. At that rate, if you have 100 followers, could you realistically expect an instant response from even a single person? I’m not sure… It depends on who is following you.

That’s not to say that everyone should run out and get more followers. My point is simply, things aren’t necessarily as rosy and simple as we may make them seem during presentations.

I can’t tell you how many times I see a Twitter newbie who has under 50 followers throw out a request like, “I’m trying to find schools that have updated their AUP this year. If you know someone, please tell me.” Then when they don’t get any responses, they get frustrated and may wind up quitting. While I can’t address what may be an issue with persistence, I do think that person has set themselves up for failure.

I really do think you need to follow/be followed by about 100 people at the least for Twitter to begin to be valuable. If you have a dedicated, highly focused group, that number may be smaller, but in general I think that’s a fair ballpark. If you have less than that, you need to be much more aggressive to get responses.

A few suggestions for people who are new to Twitter or have relatively small audiences right now.

1) Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with putting a message out there multiple times. If you’re worried about looking like a spammer, reword it. Mention that your STILL looking for information. But it’s entirely possible that people didn’t see your message. So give them another chance. And yet another.

2) Ask some people directly to respond. If you send a tweet that includes @TheirUsername, more than likely they will see it. It may take a day or two before they look for personal replies, but most people WILL see it. Unless they have fairly strict privacy settings, it should work. So if there’s someone you think might be able to help you out, send it directly to them by using this feature.

3) Reach out to the hubs in your network. Let’s face it, some people have more followers than others. Maybe they do a lot of conferences, maybe they just have too much time on their hands. Regardless, they may have a longer reach than you do. So contact them directly and ask them to retweet it for you! I’m extremely grateful to have the audience that I do, and I’m happy to share them whenever someone asks. By doing this, you maybe be able to ensure that your request has been seen by a few thousand people instead of a few dozen. Doesn’t guarantee a response, but it does give you better odds.

Of course, the best solution in the long term is to build up your own community. The only real way to do that is to maintain your own presence, to reach out to others, and to follow people and give them the chance to follow you.

For those of you that do present sessions including Twitter, do you see the same thing happening? Is it just me or is this something you’ve experienced yourself? And if so, how do you address it?

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Looks like TEDxSMU has organized the first ever Ted Talks for kids. TedxKids was the first of its kind and invited local students to share their thoughts in the TED format, as well as attend presentations. The organize of the conference had this to say:

“It’s important to get kids interested at an early age and one of the hopes is that TEDxKids will be a meaningful experience for both us and other kids.”

The event was a couple of days ago and as of now, there haven’t been any videos released from it, but I did find this blog post mentioning it.

On Friday, the TEDxSMU team also hosted the first-anywhere TEDxKids event, bringing many of the speakers we saw Saturday to a group of middle school students. While I didn’t attend that event, reports were that the kids had as exciting a day as we did — we got to see a fun video from their day, including a segment where some of them filled in the blank on the statement: “My parents don’t know that _________.” (Our equivalent was “How I got this scar.”)

I love the idea and think it would be a magnificent addition to any conference. Allow students to share TED style presentations, stories to share, that they think would be important for teachers, educators, and decision makers to hear.

Any conference organizers interested in stepping up and adding this on to the agenda somewhere?

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Not sure if this is going to work, but going to try to embed in a Google Wave for following the ITEC conference.

Unfortunately, yes you do need to already have a Wave account to see it, but them’s the breaks.

Looks like it works!

If you can’t see it, I apologize. But these are the eggs we’re cracking to learn how to make an omlette!

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