YouTube – Wolfram|Alpha Homework Day: Teaching 4th Grade Students using Wolfram|Alpha

(Via Wolfram|Alpha Blog.)

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind — fantastic new book about a how a Malawian teenager harnessed the power of the wind – Boing Boing

“Using Energy described how windmills could be used to generate electricity. Only two percent of Malawians have electricity, and the service is notoriously unreliable. William decided an electric windmill was something he wanted to make. Illuminating his house and the other houses in his village would mean that people could read at night after work. A windmill to pump water would mean that they could grow two crops a year rather than one, grow vegetable gardens, and not have to spend two hours a day hauling water. “A windmill meant more than just power,” he wrote, “it was freedom.”

(Via Boing Boing.)

Entire Cities Recreated Using Thousands of Flickr Photos

“A group of researchers with University of Washington’s graphics and imaging laboratory (GRAIL) wanted to see if they could build a piece of software that would search the web for images of a particular place and recreate that place in 3D in under a day.They succeeded, and the team, lead by Sameer Agarwal, created a simulation of Rome using 150,000 images harvested from photo-sharing website Flickr, and build a virtual model within a day.”

(Via The Next Web.)

 I like how they mix in old footage and commentary of classrooms from decades ago and the diverse range of uses for technology and learning that go beyond only replacing printed text with digital text (video, audio, etc.).

 Below is a picture I snapped yesterday at a historical school house building at our local county fair. Some things are very different from today, while some are the same…

We had finished listening to four other talks when I decided we should give the last one a listen.

We listened and we loved it.

The talk was given by Benjamin Zander and the most memorable part of the talk is when he speaks about “shiny eyes”. He relates his experiences as a conductor and his personal realization that he wanted to consistently “awaken possibilities in other people.” In order to assess how he was “awakening” these possibilities all he had to do was look at their eyes to see if they were “shining”.

“Who am I being if my players eyes are not shining?”

For parents, relatives, and teachers…

“Who am I being that my children’s eyes are not shining?”

As a parent and a teacher this caused me to pause and think about what I do daily to awaken possibilities in my son’s life and the lives of my students. Often we can get caught up in the daily grind leading to the simple things and glorious opportunities passing us by.

Take a listen to the talk and enjoy. We loved it and I hope you do too!

1 year and 8 months ago I made a video containing short clips of my son’s first four months. I also added in 5 minutes of Lynryd Skynrd’s song “Simple Man” as a background track. I shared the video with family members and on a whim decided to add it to Youtube along with clips of my son’s first Halloween and first words. This is where I messed up. It is a mistake many make, and probably do not realize they are making.

I foolishly thought my little video would be seen only by my own family and the friends they shared the video with. I knew the risks. I knew online videos are open to everyone unless the user makes their videos private. But I decided to fight the law and see what would happen. (In reality, I was just naive, and did not feel there was a threat to my video).

Even after I started learning more about content online and copyright issues, I did not take the video down because I was curious to see if it would be noticed.

Almost two years later my video has performed as I predicted…

With 300+ views I can tell you that 90% were from my own mother showing the video to her friends. Regardless, this does not excuse my usage of protected works.

Today I received notification from Youtube that this video had been found to contain music belonging to Universal Music Group. Or at least, I assume “UMG” stands for Universal.

Here is a screenshot of the email that was sent to me…

As you can see my punishment is weak. Their claim allows them to include advertisements on my video page. At first I was relieved my little video could still stay up. This seemed very fair, until I visited my page and saw this…

I have since removed the video and hope to hear from others. Has this happened to you?

How can we as educators share an experience such as this with our students as they venture out and create digital projects?

When you visit the TEDTalks website there is a little button on the bottom for downloading the video as a Mp4. I have already popped it into iTunes so I can show some teachers at school today!

TED | Talks | Roy Gould: WorldWide Telescope

“Science educator Roy Gould gives an astonishing sneak preview of Microsoft’s new WorldWide Telescope — a technology that combines feds from satellites and telescopes all over the world and the heavens, and builds a comprehensive view of our universe. (Yes, it’s the technology that made Robert Scoble cry.)”

(Via TED Talks.)

So what do you think?

Here is the promo video from Oct. 2006

I really enjoy viewing, editing, and scrolling through the calendar in flash. I had it running on my laptop, offline, as I was adding events for the first week back. When I got home I logged in via wireless and it automatically sync’d all my work from the day. Simply awesome! I look forward to when we start seeing this functionality in more web services.

Note of frustration. Today I went to download my “beginning of the year” files from Google Docs and the web blocker popped up. I knew I had the files backed up at Yahoo Briefcase, only to find that blocked as well. Last but not least, I found my thumb drive with my last back up. In between the decorating, labeling, and crayon sorting, I was hoping to use Google Docs to put together a collection of creative commons flickr images that I plan on using for a bulletin board near my classroom library. Luckily Zoho Writer worked for creating a web based document containing the photos. Flickr Storm + Zoho Writer + Color Printer = Success. Now I have some nice scenic, global pictures to hang on my connections board!

Related links…(I think I will keep doing this related link sharing!)

Creative Commons Video- Wanna Work Together
Creative Commons Comic Book- Check out the Flash Animation Version!
Yahoo Creative Commons Search
Flickr Postcard Viewer
Zoho

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• Question for everyone–pass the word, please comment!

Does anyone know of a place where I can host SWF files? I have a screencast I made, using Jing Project, for the Yahoo Gobbler. I have it hosted at Screencast.com on one of their free accounts, which has limited bandwidth. I am afraid that once 20 people watch it I will no longer have access to it for the month. I have already used up a quarter of the bandwidth showing it to my colleagues.

Thank you!