Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Category: Tech

  • Interactive Whiteboard

    A few months ago I found this interesting video about a home-made interactive whiteboard (a la smartboard) made by Johnny Chung Lee, from Carnegie Mellon University.

    Outside of the niftyness factor of making your own cool tool using a wii remote, this project can also create huge savings for schools. A smartboard can set you back from 1000 (without projector) to 5000 dollars (with all the bells and whistles, including integrated projector) , while this project, on top of a projector, will cost you about 45$ for the wii controller and a few extra dollars for hardware.

    This morning I found detailed instructions, including free software downloads for LED pen calibration to help ease the process, for building the project on Johnny Chung Lee’s website. Very cool stuff.

    Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wiimote

  • Constructivism mind map

    The content of this mind map is taken directly from Marcy Driscoll’s map, found on p. 384 of Psychology of learning for Instruction (2005).

    The point of this post is that I wanted to play around with mindmeister‘s map embed function. It’s pretty cool, at first I though that it had chopped off part of my map, but then I realized that I could drag the map around in order to see what I was missing and I could zoom in or out…neat :)

    Originally I had tried to play around with glinkr.net…unfortunately they still have some bugs with Linux (Ubuntu, to be precise). I tried it with firefox, swiftweasel, and epiphany…but no go or, to be more precise, partial go. I could use it, the problem was it would only save part of it – no matter how many times I tried to re-type the content. Too bad because I prefer the interface and the flexibility of glinkr to mindmeister. Hopefully they’ll figure out the problem soon!

  • Questions about learning with tech…a start

    …technology integration in schools is not easy to achieve, no matter how much evidence we have that it can help learning. It’s also important to integrate technology appropriately, as critics are quick to point out that computers, besides being expensive, can harm young children who sit for hours in front of them instead of being engaged in the “real world” (Alliance for Childhood, 2000). So what is known about how people learn and the role technology may play in their learning? How might that knowledge provide guidelines for appropriate uses of technology that can help students and teachers?

    Questions to ponder from the ERIC Digest: How People Learn (and What Technology Might Have To Do with It).

    ***added April 1, 2008***

    Elona pointed me toward this great article by Mark Prensky called Turning On the Lights The last section does offer some answers to the questions posed above. Give it a read….

    Prensky, M. (2008) Turning on the lights. Educational Leadership, 65 (6), 40-45.

  • Desperately Seeking Text Readers

    …but good ones. And free. Not asking for much, eh? ;)

    So far I have found a number of free text-to-speech readers, but they all sound VERY computer-y and as such are not really helpful for my students. They find them difficult to understand.

    I’m looking for free because, well, we’re in a public school and expensive programs to use with only a few students are not so easy to ask for!

    Though…if anyone can recommend a REALLY GOOD text-to-speech reader with multiple functionalities and an easy user interface with a reasonable fee, I’d like to know about that, too.

    Here is a collection of what I have found so far (actually, this is a great review site):

    Free text-to-speech software downloads 

    And here is one I just found and will have to try:

    Speak It – Firefox  Addon


  • New Theme

    I am trying out tried out this great new theme by Michael Oeser.

    It’s called WyntonMagazine – here’s a screen shot of the original template:

    screenshot.png

    I liked the magazine layout, however It turned out that I wasn’t happy with the fact that there was no sidebar on the main page, so I searched around some more and found this theme:

    The Unstandard by Derek Punsalan

    Derek promises a 2.0, which will be widget-ready, soon. I’m looking forward to the increased functionality that should come along with it.