Clif's Notes

Free Inspiration Webcast

(NOTE: I received this announcement via email from Inspiration.)

Webcast: Using Visual Learning Techniques to Improve Academic Performance with Inspiration®
Date: Thursday, January 29th, 2009
Time: 12:00-12:45 p.m. Pacific Time, 3:00-3:45 p.m. Eastern Time
Register for this event today!

Inspiration® helps students develop ideas, analyze concepts and improve organizational skills. Join us on January 29th to explore templates and examples that will help your students improve academic performance in Science, Language Arts and Social Studies. Cathy Cuff, our Education Development Manager for Science, will host a complimentary 45-minute webcast demonstrating how you can use Inspiration 8 to:

• Expand on ideas to create well-supported thinking and conclusions
• Build knowledge by increasing comprehension of new concepts
• Increase organizational skills by connecting ideas into a logical hierarchy

Join us for this professional development webcast!

If you are unable to join us, don’t worry – the webcast will be archived and available to you shortly after the event concludes.

View our archived webcasts!

• Webcast: Writing to a Prompt with Kidspiration
• Free Concept/Semantic Mapping Software
• The Human Clock
• New STEM Resources and Games from PBS KIDS GO!

Webcast: Writing to a Prompt with Kidspiration

(NOTE: I received this announcement via email from Inspiration.)

Graphic organizers are an effective tool to support students as they learn how to write to a prompt. Join us on January 15th to see how your students can learn to write on demand using Kidspiration®. Lucy Belgum, our Education Development Manager for Language Arts, will host a complimentary 45-minute webcast demonstrating how to:

• Use visual techniques to plan writing that is mindful of audience, purpose and form
• Engage students in the process of writing paragraphs that contain supporting details
• Target, plan and write to the components found within the various modes of writing using graphic organizers

Date: Thursday, January 15, 2008
Time: 12:00-12:45 p.m. Pacific Time, 3:00-3:45 p.m. Eastern Time

Register Today!

If you are unable to join us, don’t worry – the webcast will be archived and available to you shortly after the event concludes.

View our archived webcasts!

• Free Inspiration Webcast
• Writing Letters to Santa: A Lesson Plan
• WEbook: Together We Write Better
• EBC and NECC Preparations Underway

Prezi

I discovered Prezi today via a bookmark from Dean Mantz. I spent about 10 minutes looking through the site, the tutorial and the three examples on the homepage.

Here’s what some are saying.

When it comes to presentations, Microsoft Powerpoint is the desktop tool that most of us use. Apple Keynote delivers better visuals and is preferred by creatives. Google & Zoho presentations bring a subset of the functionality to the web and allow collaboration. Slideshare introduces community – following the strategies of Youtube (video) and Scribd (documents). But Prezi flips the paradigm of presentation inside out to bring you simple interactive presentations like you’ve never seen before. (Source)

Prezi allows anyone who can sketch an idea on a napkin to create and perform stunning non-linear presentations with relations, zooming into details, and adjusting to the time left without the need to skip slides. (Source)

With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. (Source)

Josh Lowensohn of CNET stated that Prezi is a presentation creator that ditches the idea of individual slides in place of a giant expanse that can be navigated with a mouse, keyboard, and eventually touch screens. The end result is pretty incredible and feels a lot like Google Maps. (Source).

Educational Uses

I must admit that while browsing through the site I almost gave up and left twice, but I’m very glad that I didn’t! It’s an interesting tool and holds untold educational potential. Here are a few thoughts that came to mind.

• Presentations could become more dynamic, interactive and hopefully engaging. Prezi IS the message.
• The ability to easily incorporate most any digital file or media allows teachers/designers to account for a variety of learning styles (audio, video, visual, etc.).
• Prezi could be used as one of the (if not the) most robust concept mapping/semantic mapping tools that I’ve seen.
• Teachers and students could find it useful for organization, collaboration and project management.
• I like the idea of using Prezi to help during the design and development phases of lesson planning, unit development, team planning, cross-curriculum mapping, etc. In some instances (such as a typical presentation) your design and development work actually becomes part of the final product or learning artifact.

• Podstock: An Education Podcasting Convention
• Collaboration in a Web 2.0 World
• An Introduction to Presentations 2.0
• Professional Development Partnership with MASE

This Afternoon at EBC

Diving Deep into Google Earth and Google Maps

• Lucy Gray’s presenter notes
• Adding images in Google Earth
• Geotagging
• Maps, directions, and more
• Google Book Search Library Project

Web 2.0 in Teacher Education (Program Info)

1. My presenter notes
2. Alternative to the term Web 2.0 is the Read, Write Web
3. Teacher education and professional development that effectively helps teachers better integrate technology with teaching and learning
• Allow the teachers to select their own goals and help them reach them
• Online social networks can more easily provide the in-time assistance, coaching, mentoring, etc. that individuals during development/learning, but teachers often don’t think about using the networks
4. How do we prepare teachers to teach in the 1-to-1 environment?
   • The emphasis should change from "teaching" to designing learning that engages the students.
5. Resources for future teachers
   • Social Network
   • Bookmarks

Designing the 21st Century Global Learning Environments (Program Info)

1. Building on some online discussion that has been ocurring for the past year here and here.
2. If there were no barriers what would education look like? Brainstorming notes

• Suggested Reading for 11/15/2008
• This Morning at EBC
• Planning District-Wide Technology Professional Development
• PD for the Holidays: Web 2.0 Tutorials for Teachers

Free Concept/Semantic Mapping Software

The following free software programs are good alternatives for concept/ semantic mapping technologies like Inspiration and OpenMind. These are helpful in the development of concept/ semantic maps, flow charts, diagrams, timelines, and more.

• Exploratree
• Thinkature
• MindMeisterv
• Gliffy
• Kayuda
• Bubbl.us
• Mindomo
• Flowchart.com
• Comapping
• Mind42
• Inspiration Trial Version
  

• Demo of an AMAZING New Technology
• Free Open Source Software (FOSS)
• Prezi
• Free Inspiration Webcast

Free Open Source Software (FOSS)

I’ve run across several lists of free open source software (FOSS) in the last few days. I’ve added each to my del.icio.us bookmarks (see My Bookmarks in the main menu) but I wanted to a bit more proactive in sharing this information with teachers, thus the reason for this post.

Free/Open Source Software for Kids – This list was generated for those teaching 3-12 year old students. It suggests FOSS for music composition, painting, space exploration, math, and more.

KDE-Education Program – This group is “developing high-quality educational software for the K Desktop Environment. Our primary focus is on schoolchildren aged 3 to 18, and the specialized user interface needs of young users. However, we also have programs to aid teachers in planning lessons, and others that are of interest to university students and anyone else with a desire to learn!” You’ll find about 30 educational software games/ tools related to math, science, languages, art, keyboarding, and more.

23 Most Valuable Free Software – A list of the most outstanding free/open source software.

GIMP – “The GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.”

Exploratree – Exploratree is a free web resource where you can download, use and make your own interactive thinking guides, concept/semantic maps, organizers, charts, tables, and more.

Firefox – A cross-platform browser, providing support for various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. However, the source code has been unofficially ported to other operating systems. This project has a large community of external contributors. If you haven’t already switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox (or at least something else) then I strongly suggest that you consider it.

Blender – “Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite.”

For even more, you can also review my previous notes on other FOSS and TeacherJay’s Free Software Guide.

• Suggested Mac Software
• Free Educational Software
• Free Concept/Semantic Mapping Software
• Free 3D Software for Interactive Whiteboards

Demo of an AMAZING New Technology

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo…Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images. — from TED Talks

The potential implications this kind of technology could have on education are mind blowing. Off the top of my head I can see connections to math, science, geography, art, architecture, photography, mass media and communications, and language arts just to name a few. Then there’s the unbelievable potential for semantic mapping/concept mapping. I’d very much like to hear your thoughts about this. Please leave your response using the Comments link below.

• WOW Your Students
• What Lies Ahead?
• Teaching Economics with an Educational Game
• Bookmarks for 03/09/2010