July 1, 2008
apple, resources, school
No Comments
Pretty exciting news came my way via Kelly Dumont.
iTunes U, a wonderful free service full of rich content from universities and community colleges across the nation, is now spreading to K-12!
Kelly has a great post on his blog where he talks a little bit about the program.
“I believe this project will be somewhat of a game changer. Here K12 ed will have a central gathering place for resources, be they audio, video, text-based, etc.” - Kelly Dumont
In order to check out some of the schools and state programs who were part of the the launch you can find the K-12 link within iTunes. Once you have launched iTunes and the iTunes Store all you need to do is click on “iTunes U”
Then click on “K-12″…
After you have navigated your way through you can select one of the schools or organizations from the list. For right now the list is short but I am sure the list and interface will grow with time.
Here is a look at Michigan’s MILearning page…
While you are checking out the K-12 content you should definitely take some time to explore the university content. Neat stuff!
February 12, 2008
books, education, school
No Comments
Came across this story today in my RSS feeds. What does this mean for the traditional publishing companies? For right now I do not think they need to worry.
CK-12: Remix and Share Your Own Text Books as FlexBooks
“CK-12 wants to bring open data to school textbooks under the name of FlexBooks. Through the tools on their site they’ll let schools, teachers, parents and students can pull articles from different sources . The books will be available to others via the site. The demo that they showed this morning at TOC really wowed the publisher-heavy audience. The non-profit, currently in limited beta, will be launching in August.”
“The UI for book creation is simple and attractive (the Engineering Book above was made during the demo). You can search content from CK12, Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and WikiUniversity. The results are articles that can be previewed. Once an article is selected for inclusion in the book it can simply be dragged over to the Table of Contents. At any point in the process the book can be downloaded, viewed as a PDF or saved to CK-12. The internal storage format is DocBook, a format used by book publishers (like us; in fact the tool is very similar in concept to our own Safari U — just different source materials and pricing).”
(Via O’Reilly Radar.)
February 1, 2008
PDF, applications, education, mac, school
No Comments
A trend that I am beginning to see more and more of in the graduate classes that I am taking is the lack of textbook purchases that I am having to make. I think that this is wonderful. There were plenty of textbooks from my undergraduate years that cost a ton, yet were rarely used. In the place of textbooks the professors select journal articles or specific chapters from books that the library scans in using an electronic reserve system. The journal articles are typically accessible through the university library subscription service database (ProQuest, EBSCO, JSTOR, etc.) In the past I would go straight to the campus computer lab and print 20-25 page articles out, one at a time.
Such a waste of paper!
Instead of this I have been doing the best I can to utilize Adobe Reader as a way to read the PDF’s and take notes on paper or with a word processor. The new Adobe Reader 8 has some nice highlighting and note taking features. However, with any free software released by a major corporation, it is expected that the consumer pay for more functionality (Adobe Acrobat).
I found a really nice, open source, PDF/Note taker application called Skim.
For a free application there is plenty of functionality. Below is an image I snapped along with some text pointing out the key components of the user interface.
Even when switching to full screen mode the user still has the ability to use all of the markup tools for commenting and taking notes on the content of the document. There are a few easy to remember keyboard shortcuts which helps the user accomplish the task much smoother. Using it today in full screen mode I had a new discovery when I moved my cursor toward the edge of the screen. The notes window pane and the thumbnail window pane would appear, alternating based upon the side of the screen that I moved the cursor towards. I was pleasantly surprised and I feel that this is great for jumping from page to page, or note to note without ever leaving the fullscreen mode.
Overall I am quite pleased with the application, and it serves my educational reading needs! For the Mac user I would suggest it over using Preview or Adobe.
September 20, 2007
house, podcast, resources, school
1 Comment
I committed the cardinal sin of blogging, lack of posting! Many apologies. The school year started on the 5th for me and I have been going full steam since! Also I bought a house on the 7th. My free time has been limited. When I am not working on the house, planning for my class, or working on my graduate school work, I am with my wife and son… at Lowe’s. They should include in the disclosure information how many trips you will need to take to a home improvement store before you can move in. The first weekend I think we had 7 total visits. Obviously you can tell we are first time home buyers!
Two quick pics of the house project…
Floor Before, tearing out the carpet (It smelled like a 20 year old Cat)
Floor After (Refinished! No more animal mess stains.)
What woke me up, out of my blogging slumber, was a mention on one of my favorite podcasts, The Ohio Treasure Chest Podcast. There I was, sitting in the teacher lounge today grading papers and waiting for Open House night to start, listening to my fancy new mp3 player. I was listening to the latest OTCP show when Eric began to share his favorite blogs. He mentioned el/ed/tech! I could not believe it. Thank you Eric, it is an honor!
The Ohio Treasure Chest is an excellent resource for educators of every level. I have shared it with many of my fellow staff members and frequently use the site to find resources to support my instruction. The podcast is professional, informational, and I always leave with a new resource following Eric’s review.
