Tuesday, July 5, 2011

QR Codes

QR Codes - ISTE 2011
Presented by Stephent@nipissingu.ca


"QR Code — abbreviated from Quick Response Code — is the trademark for a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) first designed for the automotive industry. More recently, the system has become popular outside of the industry due to its fast readability and large storage capacity compared to standard UPC barcodes. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be made up of four standardized kinds ('modes') of data (numeric, alphanumeric, byte/binary, Kanji), or by supported extensions virtually any kind of data." --Wikipedia.org

Here's the quick 411 on using QR code in the classroom based on what I learned at ISTE11 this summer in Philadelphia...

Using QR codes in the classroom requires 3 ingredients:
  1. The QR code
  2. A smart phone/device
  3. A smart phone/device app
    • Optiscan, quickmark (iPhone)
    • Code scanner pro, scan life (blackberry)
    • Barcode scanner, quick mark (android)

What can a QR code encode?
  • Text
  • Website URL
  • Telephone number
  • SMS message
  • Email address
  • Email message
  • Contact details (vcard), Event (vcalendar)
  • Wifi login
  • Paypal buy now link
  • Social media
  • Google maps
  • iTunes link
  • YouTube video
  • Etc.
How do I get started using QR code?
  • Go to Qrstuff.com .
  • Download the program Quickmark onto your laptop - it will read and create QR code.
How are QR codes being used?
  • Business cards
  • Name tags
  • Advertisements
  • Flight boarding passes
What are some example of classroom activities using QR code?
  • Distribute a famous piece of art with a QR code on the side that takes students to information or websites about the piece of art. The code could also take students to a website with a zoomed-in portion of the painting so the students could view the details of the painting.
  • Create a class newsletter full of QR codes. The paper could only include headlines and photos. Readers would have to scan to code to be taken to an online version of the paper containing the stories.
  • Library buzz - Put QR codes into books that link to the electronic version of the book or information about the author.
  • Scavenger hunt - Post a series of QR codes around the classroom or the school that link to clues for finding the next code.
  • Answers to questions - Include QR codes on student worksheets so students can scan them once they have solved a problem in order to check their work or to access help videos recorded on the classroom document camera.
  • Interactive timelines - Build a timeline with QR codes that link to more detailed information about each event.
  • Communicate with parents - Include QR codes that link to interesting parent information on class, school, or PTA newsletters, or even on your classroom door.
  • Differentiated assignments - Create alternate assignments for students to access without everyone else in the class knowing they have a different list or assignment.
  • Geocaching
  • Step by step instructions  - QR codes lead students to one step at a time
  • Link to audio file that ties into the lesson.
  • Link to student personal information like a bus or phone number for students who need help remembering.
  • Link to a podcast you would like your students to listen to.
  • Create an audio or other media tour of a park, museum, or field trip destination by displaying QR codes next to artifacts or creating a pamphlet of QR codes that are linked to recordings or websites.
  • Create QR code flash cards.
  • Technology/art fusion project - Make an artistic representation of your QR code. Then, link it to an explanation of your creative work.
QR code activities are great for 1-to-1 pilots. When students have their own mobile device they can use QR code to participate in class activities, receive and turn in assignments, and to access help and individualized instruction.
Where is QR headed?
  • Beyond QR code lies augmented reality where 3D images pop up when you hold a code in front of a scanner.
  • SMART sells a document camera that reads and projects "mixed reality" content.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Podgineers - Microphone Specs

Podgineers
Notes from a presentation by Michael Harper at PodCampSLC 2011

Microphones:
  • Zoon handicorder H4N - "Best $300 you'll ever spend"
  • XLR cables - feed to professional mics
  • Sure SM58
  • You can use your headphones as a mic if you have to
  • Electrovoice RE20
  • Audiotechnica AT450
  • 2.6 Khtz
  • 1/4 ratio

Being Professional with Your Passion

Being Professional with Your Passion
Derrick Clements – @ThePixarPodcast
Notes from PodCampSLC 2011

What I don't mean by "professional"
  • Attract huge numbers
  • Make big $$
What I do mean
  • Attracting great guests
  • Making a great podcast even if you're not an important person
Use journalistic principles with you podcast:
  • Print journalism exists in space
  • Broadcast journalism exists in time
  • Where does podcasting exist?
    • "Back to the Future" time
  • Make your own "Press Pass"
  • Interviews
    • If you want to learn how to interview, listen to people who are great interviewers
    • Know your interviewee, be prepared and in control of your interview
  • Ethics
  • Research
  • Good audio, visual, editing
  • Be willing to deal with the tough stuff
Social Media
  • Use tools like Twitter to contact people to include in your podcast
Skype
  • Can use Skype to record phone call interviews for podcasts
Software:
  • Soundflower - to channel sound from other applications to be recorded
  • Blueberry - to track listeners/download

What it takes to publish to iTunes / Internet TV

What it takes to publish to iTunes / Internet TV
Emily Hendrick - Works for the LDS church developing their iTunes and and Internet TV
Notes from PodCampSLC 2011

Who is my audience?
Strategy
  • Complicated Strategy
    • What format is my podcast in?
    • Do I want to be on multiple platforms?
3 Key Elements
  • Consistent and Clean metadata
    • Consistent labeling
    • Consistent titles
    • Consistent length
    • What not to do:
      • Don't have 20 variations on your keywords - choose the most important ones
      • Keep your titles relatively short
    • Look at the store first to see what you should be doing. Very important:
      • Your graphic is most important
      • Album artist
      • Author - Could put a variety of things in this field, ie. your Twitter name
      • Lyrics tab - can put the text of your podcast
      • Utilize every tag if you can - use your keywords wisely - 13 is the limit, but don't use 13 b/c that's too many
  • Legible and well-designed cover art
    • Consistent, clean titles, organization, and graphics
    • Multitple podcasts under the same umbrella could have a similar look
  • Quality video/audio production
    • Make it look nice
      • Green screen
      • Watermark
    • Great content
    • Personality
Publishing to iTunes
  • You want to be on iTunes - it's where the podcast traffic is and it's easy to upload
  • Upper Echelons of iTunes
    • Site Manager Page (minimum of 10 podcasts required)
Internet TV Channel
  • Roku
  • Blip.tv
  • Netflix
  • flickr
  • facebook
  • AppleTV
  • etc.
  • The drawback is that we don't yet know who the "big racehorse" will be. - Who will be the biggest provider for this?
Podcasting Software:
  • Publishing
    • Podcast Maker
    • Feedburner
Links
Making a podcast
Submitting a podcast

How to Get Your Blog Noticed in a Crowded Niche

How to Get Your Blog Noticed in a Crowded Niche
Tristan Higbee – @tristanhigbee
Notes from PodCampSLC 2011

1. Be everywhere
  • Start with commenting
  • Guest posting
  • Mentions
  • Interviews
  • Benefits: Increase in reputation, traffic, backlinks, relationships, comments, shares, likes, retweets
2. Have the best customer experience
  • Reply to every comment
  • Leave a comment on their blogs
  • Respond to emails quickly and awesomely
  • Be liberal with your shares (retweets, likes, etc.)
  • Thank people
  • Add a top commenter widget to your blog - you can then thank them for commenting
  • Return favors
3. Provide great content
  • Your personal experiences
    • Interesting
    • Proof
    • How personal?
  • Interviews
    • On your blog - typed interviews rather than audio or video
  • Case Studies
4. Personality
5. Different Media
  • Video
  • Audio
  • Graphics
    • iStockPhotos
    • Make (take) your own
    • Infographics
  • eBooks

PodCampSLC Keynote

How to Create Compelling Content: Lessons from a Lifetime of Journalism
--Bryan Schott
Notes from PodCampSLC 2011

How do you get your content noticed?
  • Have good information.
  • Be interesting.
  • If you don't have good information, be extremely interesting.
  • Find your voice.
  • Be authentic - be yourself, don't just copy someone else
  • Have a point of view
The Interview
  • Do your homework
  • Listen
The Bored at Work Network
  • The BWN decides what becomes popular now
Editing
  • Get a second set of eyes - have someone look over your content before putting it out there, but still keep it in your voice
Push your content out
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Blogs
Preparation! - Work hard to make your podcast great.
Be creative.
Trust your instincts.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

UCET 2011 - GIS Workshop

GIS Workshop
Notes from UCET 2011

The objective of GIS is not to create the perfect map, it is to recognize spatial patterns - explaining patterns and trends and predicting future trends.

GIS
  • Web
  • Desktop
    • allows you to overlay data from various maps
  • Utah has Arc GIS through USOE (Rick Gaisford - Rick.Gaisford@schools.utah.gov)
Week-long course on the desktop software -- 1st week of August with UEN

Data
  • Raster - grid format
  • Vector - points and lines
Census Data

World Mapper
  • cartograms - Maps that show data by shrinking areas that have low numbers and expanding areas that have larger numbers
NationalAtlas.gov

ArcGIS
  • Create your own online account.
  • Can upload maps you create on the desktop version to the online version for others to download
  • Utah account: ge0graphy   ag0lw0ndrous

Saturday, January 29, 2011

"It's not a digital footprint, it's a digital tattoo."

EduBloggerCon - Networking/Web 3.0

What is digital citizenship?
I have noticed a shift from simply teaching online safety to teaching digital citizenship. What is the difference? I think digital citizenship is more all-encompassing. It includes online safety (what I think of as the "stranger danger" aspect of digital citizenship), but is a more well-rounded and complete view of what it means to "be online". It addresses safe searching, filters, security, and protecting personal information as well as appropriate content, cyber-bullying, copyright, ethics, social skills, collaboration, affiliation, authorship, and accountability. It is not just acceptable use, but responsible use. Yes, parents and educators need to keep children safe on the Internet, but we need to teach them etiquette and behavior expectations as well, just like we do in the "real world". The virtual world should not be that different from the real world. It's the same people conducting the same business and social interactions, just in a new way.

What is Web 3.0?
At the Networking/Web3.0 session I attended at EduBloggerCon in June, we discussed the idea of "Web 3.0". This discussion focused on the following progression: from The World Wide Web, to Web 2.0, and on to Web 3.0. The World Wide Web was an amazing connection of hypertext and linked documents. Web 2.0 shifted to being of the people, by the people -- interactive and open-source. Web 3.0 has shifted to more than just talk -- we share information and help each other manage and find meaning in the information that is out there.

What does Web 3.0 mean for students, parents, and educators?
Parents and educators have a responsibility to help students understand that there are real people with real feelings behind all the tweets, posts, and avatars.  Every person is a citizen online, just like in the real world. We are all expected to follow rules, laws, and appropriate social behavior in life, so we must do the same online.
What does this mean for school work?
On school networks, no person should ever be anonymous. We should be asking our students to put their name on everything. Being anonymous is like wearing a mask. People behave differently. They feel that because nobody knows who they are, they can do things they would never do normally. They disconnect from their actions and therefore take no responsibility for them. Students should be taught to be responsible for everything they put out there -- every post, tweet, and comment they make. Teaching them to put their name on their work encourages them to take ownership and responsibility for it.

In addition, keeping things anonymous does not allow authorship. It does not allow students to take credit for the great work they are doing. Instead of encouraging anonymity, we should encourage authorship by finding people to comment and share with our students so they can experience the benefits of taking ownership of their work. How? We can use hashtags like #comments4kids on Twitter to get other educators to comment on student blog posts. We can let students know who has viewed their blogs. We can try to get student work published outside of the school -- linked to a local paper or on a public site. (For example, talk to an historian and create a site for the local museum, newspaper, historical society, or library.) We can get outside businesses and associations interested in what our students are doing. (This is mutually beneficial. The students gain an understanding of their potential influence, and businesses gain interest from the "under-30 crowd".) We should be helping students see how far-reaching their online influence can be.
    The Eisenhower school safety project expands on this concept. Check out their blog titled "Generation YES Blog -- Thoughts About Empowering Students with Technology".

    How should educators handle social network sites like Facebook?
    I think that although we do need to be responsible online citizens, we do not want to create fear of social networking and sharing online. We want students to be able to reap the benefits of world wide access to incredible educational resources and social networks. Facebook is the "pizza parlor" or "shopping mall" of today, as the video below says. That means Facebook is also a great way to get announcements, news, educational content, and information out to students and the community. How? Teachers can create Facebook groups or fanpages for their classes instead of friending students. While we do need to be wise and thoughtful about the use of and access to social networks, we should not completely shy away from using them as resources.

    How do we bring the family along for the learning?
    Parents need to be involved in the online lives of their children. They need to help their children learn appropriate online behavior, just as they help them learn appropriate real-world behavior. We as educators can help parents. How? We can start by helping them become educated about digital citizenship. We can help parents understand the Acceptable Use Policy and Information Release Forms they are asked to sign. We can make them aware of available digital citizenship and network literacy resources. For example, UEN has created NetSafeUtah - a collection of movies about Internet safety and citizenship. I watched one NetSafe movie recently that focuses on parent involvement in the online activity of their children:


    Educators should help parents understand what schools are doing with technology, particularly with Internet resources, so they can support our efforts. How? Schools can hold parent openhouse nights to encourage family involvement. They can hold family tech nights at the start of each school year and then again throughout the year on specific technology tools and topics. They can hold classes at various times and in various places for short periods of time to make it easier for busy parents to attend. Some schools even allow parents who do not have computers or Internet at home to have some access to computers and Internet at the school.

    Educators can hold classes for parents where they actually participate in the same types of assignments, projects, and experiences that their children are participating in so they understand what is happening and what the value is. Experiencing what their kids experience can also help parents understand how to help their children with technology issues that arise at home (ie. what to do when you have trouble uploading a file). Have parents comment on each other's posts and projects so they can understand how it feels to interact and receive that kind of feedback. Try sharing class blogs from previous years so parents to see examples of what blogs are for and what can be accomplished with them.

    What about kids who do not have access to technology at home?
    Many educators are finding that it is difficult to press forward with technology use in education when so many of our students do not have the same technology tools and resources at home that they have at school. In public education we cannot require students to use tools unless we provide them. Even if districts can purchase equipment for students, it doesn't help much if they don't have Internet access at home. Here are some ideas our EduBloggerCon discussion group brainstormed to help families access technology and Internet resources at home:

    • Set up a rent-to-own program through the district, just like many districts have set up for purchasing band instruments.
    • Use the free/reduced lunch format to achieve one-to-one access.
    • Buy technology instead of textbooks.
    • Purchase mobile devices that do not require a home Internet provider.

    What are we afraid of?
    There are a lot of questions to be answered and ideas to ponder when it comes to managing and using technology in education, particularly Internet resources. There are many things we need to be wise and thoughtful about. But, it is clear to me that we cannot be afraid of the opportunities presented by the digital world. We should be excited about them! We should be providing our students the training and access they need to succeed and make a difference as digital citizens. The world of technology is their world. We are tasked with the responsibility to prepare them for it. I think I'm about the break into song... "I believe the children are our future. Teach them well, and let them lead the way..." You said it, Whitney.