On iPods and iPads

Today we examined apps available on iPods and iPads and how they would be useful in the classroom. I had difficulty finding anything that seemed particularly useful or interesting for some time, but I eventually came across an app designed for students with autism spectrum disorder or other cognitive difficulties. As I have experience working with said students and an interest in autism, I decided to follow this thread and find some other autism-based apps. I found an app that was simply a database of other apps that might be useful for autistic students, and that led me in some interesting directions.

As our project was to find apps to incorporate into a lesson, I had to decide what direction to take the lesson, what topic the apps should deal with. I looked at communication, basic cause-and-effect teaching, a "visual cue" app designed to help students understand what they needed to do next (a picture of washing hands instead of/in addition to the words), and several other items including an "observation" app to help teachers track their students' progress. For each, I saw usefulness in the classroom, but not one that seemed to integrate easily with a lesson, until I came across the "Social Express" app. One of the biggest problem autistic students have, even the high-functioning ones, is recognizing and interpreting emotions. Social Express shows animated characters interacting and clearly showing various emotions, with the app guiding the student into recognizing them--"this character is sad. She is frowning, her shoulders are slumped, and she's looking down." I thought it was an innovative app--basically the same concept as videos on the same subject, but more interactive. I found another similar app, that asked students to touch the picture of "the crying boy" or "the happy men," and thought that these would work together well, so worked up a quick lesson based on recognizing the basic emotions.

We also created very small and simple iPod apps using the Xcode program, which I didn't realize was even a thing, much less a free and (relatively) easy-to-use programmer. I have no coding experience outside a few lines of HTML and Textile formatting I use on a gaming wiki I maintain, but I found the simple task we had to accomplish easy to do and kind of fun. I doubt I'll actually learn how to code iPod apps, but it's worth noting that simple apps are simple to create.

I've had a fairly easy time in this class, being a tech-savvy individual, but I'm a bit nervous about the final project--lesson planning is pretty new to me, as while I've worked as a TA, that's all about following another person's plan. I'm also used to working in environments with little to no technology available, so the idea of incorporating technology into a teaching environment is a bit daunting. I'm having trouble coming up with an idea for the lesson right now... maybe I'll just go for an old standard (for me) like introducing fairy tales, asking the students to follow the plot and identify the lesson, and maybe ask them to create their own fairy tales using some kind of "picture book creator" app like I encountered during the Web 2.0 session.

Maybe. It's a place to start.

On Podcasts

Today we looked at the medium of podcasts. These are audio or audio-visual "broadcasts" on almost any topic. Filling a niche between YouTube and RSS feeds, podcasts can be any length (unlike YouTube) and get delivered right to your "podcatcher" program, as RSS feeds are, allowing subscribers to get their content sent to them instead of having to repeatedly check the podcaster's website.

We looked at using iTunes to find podcasts, which I found difficult to browse for relevant 'casts, and it seemed like I needed to either know exactly what I was looking for or be satisfied with the stuff that happened to be "most popular" or "suggested" by iTunes. I imagine this is mostly me being unfamiliar with iTunes podcast-searching methodology, but I was disappointed that such a "user-friendly" company as Apple created such an obscure search method.

When it came time to create my own podcast, I was inspired by my Linguistics class, as we've been examining all the various sounds possible in English. I decided to make a simple, grade-school-version of looking at the different sounds each of our vowels can make. I cheated in a couple ways for time--I didn't look at dipthongs, or address why vowels make what sounds when, or why more than one vowel can make the same sound, but for a very quick overview, I'm pretty happy with it. I was actually irritated by the requirement of adding sound effects--if I had infinite time and infinite resources, I would have been happy to find a sound representing each of the words I used as examples, but trying to find useful sounds from the tragically incomplete iTunes stock library was frustrating.

However, the technology was easy to use and simple to create something useful--and I've used Jing before to create screencasts for another class, and think that will be useful in the future as well. My father creates podcast versions of his music lectures so that he can teach online (although I don't think he's familiar with the term "podcast" or the idea of subscribing, he just puts the videos on his website), and it's served him well.

All in all, a useful session.

On Search Engines and Hoaxes

Today we looked at comparing search engines and figuring out the validity of websites and their information. The search engine comparison was an interesting project--I haven't used anything but Google since HotBot was a big thing. I found that Altavista/Yahoo, Bing, and Ask all have the first few results the same (in different order), but start varying widely after that. Also notable is the question of news and image searches, which are possible on Bing and Ask, but not Altavista (though news results did appear at the bottom of the first Altavista page). I also noted that Ask focused differently: the first result for "presidential election" was the 2008 election, not 2012, and it was the only search engine to list information on other countries' presidential elections on the front page. I also noted that Ask seems to still be a "safe" site, as looking up "Santorum" on Google, Altavista, and Bing all had the... rather adult slang term named after the politician as their first result, while Ask focused entirely on the politician himself. In short, while I use Google for most things, I may now try other sites if I'm unable to find what I'm looking for on Google.

Looking at hoax sites, I think the most important piece to discern the truth is verification by outside sources. Find what sources a website cites. Check out what other sites say about this site, about its facts, about its author. Perform some critical thinking, or you may end up trapped by a purely fake site like Malepregnancy.com or, even more dangerously, a place written genuinely but with dangerously slanted information like martinlutherking.org. It was an interesting project, even though the site I was assigned was absurdly easy to discern as a "fake"--especially given that its purported subject, Ruritania, is a very famous fictional country, and that it labels the site as a "simulation" right at the top of the homepage.

Our work with the CPS(?) "clicker" system was interesting--it's nothing I've ever worked with, but it seems like it would be a useful system. I am most interested in using it to check understanding, asking children "did everyone understand?" and allowing a student to show they do not understand without calling attention to themselves.

On Google Earth

A slightly irritating day. Google Earth is a very neat tool, but I had great difficulty making it do what I wanted it to do. The first problem was that it kept deleting my pushpins--it took me some time to figure out that each time I had to select the "folder" before adding a pushpin. I certainly couldn't use it properly as a search tool--I had to retire to Wikipedia to find a list of museums in Oregon, because Google Earth only gave me Portland results and had no good way to filter it. Then all my "pushpins" disappeared, making it very difficult to identify where I had actually placed things (and even Denvy couldn't figure it out), only to reappear without explanation later on.

Also, the automated tour function seems choppy and awkward in transitioning between locations, but I'm not comfortable enough with the program to think I can improve upon it, and the in-program help is less than useless.

In short, more of a chore than a fun experience, but perhaps the program just has a steep learning curve...

On iMovie

I spent a year in film school, learning the ins and outs of screenwriting. During this project, I was given the opportunity to bring my knowledge of film to a new arena. Starting with the premise "a movie discouraging academic dishonesty" and the basic style idea of "in the vein of a cheesy '70s after-school special," I pulled up Plotbot, a free online screenwriting program and dashed out a one-page script. Since I was familiar with how to "imply" shots in prose, we didn't need to work up a storyboard (though I'm sure it would have helped, had we more time), and we shot things quickly.

As has always been the case for me, I overwrote, and we had to cut a lot of stuff out in order to bring it down to 40 seconds (bargained up from 30). This was the part of the process I was unfamiliar with, having done very little video editing in my time, generally leaving that to people more skilled. However, since our goals were simple and easily achieved, it was fairly easy and fun (though it required a lot of fiddling to get the shots and transitions to fit EXACTLY 40 seconds).

A fun and worthwhile project, and it was fun to get a chance to utilize my film experience in a new context.