Supreme Court Video Game

"Sandra Day O’Connor’s Plan for Joystick Justice"
78 year old Justice O'Connor wants to lead the way in learning civics, ethics, and character development using video games. She is helping to develop a game which has an issue brought to the court and argued by different players.

Art Class 2.0

Should designing a computer font be a skill we teach students in art class?
"Down with Helvetica:Design Your Own Font"
The article talks about the need to create new fonts to personalize in the digital age. The article includes websites with software ranging from free to $1,000 in price to create your own fonts.

Are Viral Videos a Marketing Skill?

It seems every month a video goes viral getting millions of views. Is this a skill that can or should be taught? Is it lightning in a bottle like a great song? Does this skill have a place in a marketing class or business school? Does it show a superior form of digital literacy if you can create a viral video?

Web 2.0 Social Studies Classroom

Want to create an online timeline for your social studies classroom, use XTimeline, while there are many timeline creator programs out there XTimeline has web 2.0 traits, it is web based, easy to use, and embedable.

http://www.dipity.com/ is a similar application.

Sticking with the Social Studies theme the Best of History Websites pulls together some of the best resources for history teachers.

Using Comics as a Classroom Assessment

Comics could be a different product for student representation of ideas. The software Comic Life is an affordable solution. The Read Write Think website offers a free comic creator applet.

Connecting Universities to the Classroom

Ohio University students are creating virtual worlds to teach middle school students math, science, and technology. In the Interactive Science Lab students enter a virtual lab to perform experiments. Could this be a solution for New York City schools who do not have the proper equipment to perform these experiments?
Ohio University Immersive Technologies and Arts for Learning

Technology/Government/Civics

Congress is arguing over how much freedom to give its members when it comes to Twitter, You Tube, and other applications.

"In House, Tweets Fly over Web Plan"

This dovetails with the disparities between Obama and McCain's technology platforms. Look at the difference in their platforms over at Mother Jones Magazine. Obama has some interesting proposals like a Chief Technology Officer and using technology to make government more transparent.

We shouldn't underestimate a President's ability to be forward thinking with technology. President Lincoln was a techie, he pushed hard for telegraph lines across the country and slept in the telegraph office when he was monitoring battlefield positions.

Julius Genachowski's Blog can be read here. He is running technology for Obama's campaign, his name has been kicked around as the first Chief Technology Officer. The blog is a window into the campaign's thinking on technology. Names of a lot of technology heavyweights have also been mentioned for the position of CTO.

"The Facebooker who Befriended Obama" Chris Hughes, one of the four founders of Facebook is running Obama's MyObama social networking component of his campaign.

iLighter

iLighter lets teachers highlight websites up at the SMARTboard. Markings will be saved and can be organized into folders for different research topics. Highlights can then be e mailed or posted to blogs or websites.

Voki

Get a Voki now!

Mountains and Mountains of Data

Nate Silver is known in baseball circles as the stat guru. He takes seemingly unrelated data and predicts hits and season records. He is taking his data analysis talent to political polling. His predictions of state results in the Democratic Primary were often very close to the outcomes. He often beat established polling companys offering a critique of them on his website fivethirtyeight.com. How does this relate to Educational Technology? I would argue that a skill needed for the 21st Century is the ability to analyze data. Nate wrote algorithms to make predictions from available data. This ability made him successful in the baseball and political worlds.

Read about Nate in Newsweek.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/140469

In a related story Bill James a life long Celtics fan is being credited with the Celtics playoff birth last year for his analysis of seeming unrelated statistics. Bill does statistical analysis of common stats but is also able to tag game footage to easily enable players to bring up all instances a player is at the top of the key to see if they go left or right. Bill's expertise in math and computers has made him a go to guy for the front office, players, and coaches.

Tina Fey Phenomenon?

When I first started teaching math I would often come across articles talking about the gender gap of achievement. Boys were suppose to be out performing girls in the classroom. I taught in a middle school and I found the opposite to be true. A similar technology gender gap has been researched. Newsweek took a look at the issue in their Revenge of the Nerdette article. The article takes a look at girls that are smart, good looking, and popular. They are succeeding in areas of math, science, and technology.

Not all woman are being well received in the tech world. It seems some woman bloggers are hitting a glass ceiling.

Make a Long Story Short

Attention English teachers Spark Notes is the Cliff Notes of the 21st Century. Students can get abbreviated versions of books online. Could this be incorporated into the classroom?

In a related article "The Dumbest Generation? Don't Be Dumb." Newsweek wonders if Generation Y's ignorance of facts like history and geography reflects a dumbness or just an attitude that if it can be looked up I don't have to remember it. IQs have been rising since the 1930s, technology is changing how information is processed. It is still yet to be determined if it is changing for the better or worse. Are multitasking and video games helping or harming our kids? Could these be increasing our thinking ability?

"When Computers Hurt instead of Help" is the NYTimes take on how helping poorer students buy laptops may not be improving their achievement but becoming a distraction.

Is Teaching Ed Tech a National Security Issue?

In an under reported story stores as prominent as Target and Best Buy sold digital frames produced in China that when connected to a user's computer loaded a Trojan virus which could take control of the customer's computer and steal personal information. It was suggested that this virus could be from the Chinese government.

"Virus from China the gift that keeps on giving"

The NY Times Bits Technology blog had a post "Tracking Hate 2.0 on the Web", it mentions a Congressional briefing looking at hate in the information age. How can we follow the proliferation of this speech if we don't understand the technology they are using?

Another related article
"Al Qaeda Warrior Uses Internet to Rally Woman"

Before Russia invaded Georgia it attacked its online infrastructure.

Photoshop and Ethics

Show students this video before teaching them Photoshop, start a conversation about the power of the tool. This can develop a student's digital literacy of what the are being shown.

Even foreign governments photoshop official government photos as seen in this Iran missile launch. A digitally literate citizenship will be able to pick out the phony photo.

Online College Courses

Stanford's Education Program for Gifted Youth lets students of all levels take enriched multimedia classes through a distance learning model. Course offerings range from Math to Music.

Yale's Open Course Program is just one of the many programs offered by colleges that let anyone in the world audit a class. Yale has offerings in Astronomy and Philosophy.

MIT's Open Courseware is a resource for teachers to integrate MIT material into their classroom.

The abundance of free material from these colleges almost makes you forget how much they have grown to cost.

If you have a ipod check out iTunes University for educational downloads (no degrees currently offered).

Adobe Flash

Tired of stale PowerPoint presentations, give your students access to Adobe Flash Animation. Students can create video presentations for Science showing how different objects fall or an audio dubbed cartoon animation demonstrating the use of the Spanish past tense.

I am Running for President

Studying the Election in Social Studies, have your students create video commercials for their candidacy where they represent their platform.

On the reverse side have your students create an attack commercial, showing them the music, tone, and lighting usually used in these ads. They are so easy to make even the Swift Kids for Truth put some out.


Read this NY Times story about Facebook users who are putting their middle names as Hussein to stop smears against Obama. I think this is a great way to use a web tool to protest.

This video from CNN talks about students learning political advertising 101.
"Students Explore World of Politics"

Spore

Spore is the highly anticipated release from video game maker EA. In the game you can nurture a creature through the 5 stages of evolution. From an educational perspective I am more interested in the Creature Creator. You can design your own creature from scratch. You can have students accurately create an animal they learn about in Science class. I teach proportions by looking at the long necks or short arms of dinosaurs, why not have my students create creatures with a arm to body proportion of 10:3.

Are your 8th Graders Programming?

Bill Gates started programming in the 8th grade. Being introduced to computers at this age helped him become one of these founding Microsoft members.

Google Earth/Sky/SketchUp

Studying Architecture in Art class, bring up famous buildings in Google Earth. Why not have your students create their campus with Google SketchUp and place it on Google Earth.
Don't keep your feet on the ground, use Google Sky to study the stars in Science or Astronomy class.

Record Calls in Skype

With Skype students can call anywhere in the world free to another Skype user. Bring an expert into your classroom where students can ask questions. With the Call Recorder download you can have a record of the conversation. Create a podcast news report of the interview using clips from the recorded discussion.