Category: Status

Keynote and Learning Experiences

The new beta functionality of playing Keynote presentations anywhere (well, anywhere there’s a browser, iPad, iPhone or iPod) is major for me…

iWork.com – The Great Wall

Most of the lessons or quick points I want to cover with my students are done on Keynote. We’ve always been able to watch them over the projector at school, of course. I’ve also uploaded the slides to the iWork.com beta site.

However, they were never able to play the presentation and get the full experience of the transitions and effects.

Now that has changed. Plus, with more and more of my students getting iOS devices, they can have that same experience in a mobile or tablet context.

That’s awesome.

INFP

Guilty!

Portrait of an INFP: “INFPs are usually talented writers. They may be awkard and uncomfortable with expressing themselves verbally, but have a wonderful ability to define and express what they’re feeling on paper. INFPs also appear frequently in social service professions, such as counselling or teaching. They are at their best in situations where they’re working towards the public good, and in which they don’t need to use hard logic.”

Search is the Card Catalogue of the Web

I wrote this piece on April 25, 2007. I’m fishing through some old posts and had to revisit/repot this as I think we’re on the verge of a major shift in attention literacy and finding information on the web.

Enjoy…

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Search is king.

We have conferences and we have an entire industry built around the idea that “search marketing” is the end all / be all of online marketing.

If you want to reach people and influence their buying habits, you include a large AdWords and keyword budget for search. If you want people to find your website in the vast chaos that are search results, you spend a great deal of time and money on optimizing your site (in some cases at the expense of user interface and aesthetics).

But what about discovery?

Why has “searching” for information outpaced “discovering” information online?

It’s simple… companies and platforms who monetize a user’s ability to find the information they want have found it easier to provide “search engines” rather than “discovery engines.”

This is not just semantics.

Instead, look ahead to the future and how the average web user’s experience has progressed so far. Finding information relevant to your query has forever been a struggle. We’ve made positive steps forward with the search engines, but users still complain about the amount of junk, garbage and irrelevant results they receive in a Google or Yahoo search on a particular topic.

However, as the price of user generated data continues to rise and the price of producing user generated data continues to fall, we see a market shift away from “search” and towards “discovery.”

Soon, we’ll all be paid by Amazon or Google to host our data with them as we do our daily web browsing on our computers, on our cell phones, in our cars and on our digital cameras. Instead of searching for information, you’ll be discovering information based on your user generated output.

Our children will laugh at us for how we sought out information online, just as we raise eyebrows at the thought of using a card catalogue to find a book in a library.

Survival of the Focused

I would add that beyond the ability to “concentrate,” the ability to sift through the mountains of data, information, junk and propaganda will be the most essential skill for 21st century learners (an ability we’re still not doing a very good job at helping current students learn or sharpen)…

Book review: Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? – WSJ.com: “One theme emerges frequently from enthusiasts and skeptics alike: Precisely because there are such vast stores of information on the Internet, the ability to carve out time for uninterrupted, concentrated thought may prove to be the most important skill that one can hone. ‘Attention is the fundamental literacy,’ writes Howard Rheingold, the author of ‘Smart Mobs.'”

Attention is a new literacy, but there are also many other literacies out there we can’t ignore.

Creating Your Own Education

Exactly what I’ve been wanting to try with my 8th graders…

Create Your Own Assignments « Teaching as a dynamic activity: “This semester I am planning to let students create or choose their own assignments. “

I just have to be brave enough to trust what I know they can do and give up the preconceptions of what “assignments” and “assessments” really mean.

I Love Dan Bricklin’s Note Taker HD App


You can use Note Taker HD to take notes, sketch diagrams, quickly and easily jot down names, phone numbers, to-do items, directions, and more. Pages are flexibly organized by date/time last modified, tags, favorites, and more, with thumbnail images of part of each page to help you find them later. Pages may be grouped together as multiple “sheets”. You can also email one or more pages as a single PDF file. VGA output is supported with zoom and pan.

via softwaregarden.com

I’ve been using Bricklin’s Note Taker app on my iPhone since last December, but the Note Taker HD app on my new iPad is simply extraordinary.

I cannot wait to get into the lab with my 8th grade students and jot down notes and observations that we can use to better communicate their findings in our Physical Science class next year.

Thank you again for all you do, Dan.