How Teachers Are Using Technology at Home and in Their Classrooms | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

How Teachers Are Using Technology at Home and in Their Classrooms | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project: Teachers of low income students, however, are much less likely than teachers of the highest income students to use tablet computers (37% v. 56%) or e-readers (41% v. 55%) in their classrooms and assignments

When disciplines collide, and new forms of learning are created

This class that combines history and hacking Arduino--what a great idea. “To write their group papers, the students used a platform hosted by the Swedish Pirate Party, called piratepad,” said Famiglietti. “It’s the same site used by Anonymous and other hacker organizations to write some of their collaborative documents. I thought that was a nice touch.”

The devil finds work for IDLE...oh never mind.

I'm currently looking for an alternative to IDLE. It crashes when I go to change the font sizes. Fixing the problem involves switching to an older version of ActivestateTCL and bit of mucking about that I don't want to hassle with. http://bugs.python.org/issue15853 The author of the book I'm using also hates IDLE: http://inventwithpython.com/blog/2011/11/29/the-things-i-hate-about-idle-that-i-wish-someone-would-fix/ I googled "best free python ide os x" and came across this helpful thread, which recommends Eclipse with the Pydev plugin: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=127552

Learning Python

I'm supposed to have been learning Python since December, but just started yesterday. I thought I'd put my notes here since I'm not writing much else. It took two hours for me to figure that I have to type "Python3" to invoke the latest version of Python that I installed under OS X. Although I asked for help online, the solution was in the docs. My goal is to see how much Python I can learn in two months. Why? a number of reasons. 1. I'm trying to make myself learn to code. 2. I'd like to do something with gamification and my writing courses. Not sure exactly what. Initially I'd like to make something that let's my students rank and respond to snippets of writing. 3. I'd also like to have a tool that aggregates snippets of writing in some manner. I'm using "Inventing Games with Python" because it has gotten good reviews, is free, is project based and looks fun. The writing is clear and enjoyable.

Remixing movies

I want to live in a world where anyone can remix and recombine any art they want, if they're not making money from it. I want to start a Kickstarter for a version of VLC that lets you insert control scripts that let you move through a movie in a predetermined fashion, so you could create a phantom menace edit, for example that left out Jar Jar Binks, or a version of the The Dark Knight Rises that would allow one to decrease or increase the scenes with a particular character. Imagine good movies that were damaged by the inclusion of brief scenes that didn't work. Just download the remix script for that show. They could be stored on a website and the most popular scripts would appear in the "greatest hits" section. The second Lord of the Rings movie, with about 20 minutes less of Sam staring with concern at Frodo. Mormons taking two F-bombs out of a PG-13 movie so they could show it to their kid would just be a byproduct. Incidentally, the Cleanflix version of The Wedding Crashers is a very different movie than the original, almost absurdist. Also, Back to the Future would not have been damaged had the swears been removed. I'd like there to be some sort of universal tag that torrenters use to designate TV edits. I'd buy originals if they contained tv edits.

Jayne Anne Phillips - Violence in American Myth

Jayne Anne Phillips - Violence in American Myth: We might start by asking ourselves what Americans love, what myths and stories feed our perceptions of ourselves as a changing people and much divided community. The source of myth, world-wide, is often violent or cataclysmic, but its reduction as an idea that permeates and shapes a culture often becomes romanticized, simplified, removed from its context and reality. Myth then loses dimension. Myth can become dangerous justification, a costume or disguise up for grabs. The inverse of the myth is always worth our attention, and in America, the inverse of the myth can become a kind of politically correct myth, a myth equally reduced. When

Writing for the web with Markdown: Alternatives to HTML

I'm just writing about this on the odd chance that someone here can use it, although I recognize that this post will probably resemble one of those unpopped kernels of corn that gets discarded, and that's ok.

Markdown is this simple little language that can be auto-converted to HTML, but is much easier to write than HTML and uses a lot of email conventions. Italics are like *this* for example.

So there's a free Markdown editor for the Mac called "Mou." http://mouapp.com/

It shows your text on the left, how it is rendered on the right side, and it can auto-export in HTML when you're done. In addition, a lot of wikis support markdown. Here's a screen cap of Mou:

Anyway, it's terribly convenient if you have to create a lot of text for the web, it's free, and you don't have to mess around with the wackiness that is Dreamweaver.

There are a number of tools out there that will automatically convert Markdown to html, I just use Mou because it is so painless.

Oh, I just discovered that Textwrangler (also free) will convert Markdown. Neat.

Markdown in Textwrangler From Wikipedia:

Markdown is a lightweight markup language, originally created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz allowing people "to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)".[1] The language takes many cues from existing conventions for marking up plain text in email.

Markdown is also a Perl script written by Gruber, Markdown.pl, which converts marked-up text input to valid, well-formed XHTML or HTML and replaces left-pointing angle brackets ('<') and ampersands with their corresponding character entity references. It can be used as a standalone script, as a plugin for Blosxom or Movable Type, or as a text filter for BBEdit.[1]

The Eagleman Stag

This was definitely worth eight minutes of my life.

aggregating student blogs

I'm using student blogs in a hybrid American lit course, and am trying to figure out the best way to read their work. While writing this query I came up with a solution so I thought I'd send it to the list. Some of my initial attempts at reading student blogs in one place included:

1. Making a wiki page with links to each blog

2. Placing the blogs in a folder in Google reader (this is proving to be surprisingly difficult and counter-intuitive). In addition to folders Google Reader has something called "bundles."

 What I eventually ended up doing was combining their RSS feeds into a single feed and place them in a widget on the course home page. This is proved more difficult than I thought, and took about 2.5 hours of messing around. Chimpfeedr appears to create a useable aggregated feed, but it was difficult to find an rss-->widget creator that actually works, hasn't gone offline, etc.

 Eventually (while drafting this note) I ended up googling around and using this service to create the embedded html widget that shows all of the blogs at once:

http://www.rssdog.com

 So to recap, this is how I cobbled everything together:

1. Asked students to create blogs

2. Copied their blog RSS feeds and used http://mix.chimpfeedr.com to turn them into a single RSS feed.

3. Took that feed over to http://www.rssdog.com/ and created html that I then pasted in a wiki page within Canvas-Instructure. 

Here is the sample feed I created: http://mix.chimpfeedr.com/d503a-amlit-2520 (note: I have since added a late student and created a newer feed)

 I wonder if there is a more elegant solution for aggregating student blogs that I've overlooked. I also don't like depending on free services that could disappear tomorrow.

Friday plans.

Friday: The Friends of the Provo Library is having a top secret pre-sale tonight for members who attend the business meeting. That means I will be able to enter the book sale room and skim the cream, while leaving the dregs behind for the unwashed rabble who will show up at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow. This is the closest I will get to experiencing what it is like to be very wealthy. That, and going to bed each night in a warm, safe home, slightly nauseous from eating too much.

Saturday: My weekend is rich with possibilities this weekend, thanks to the recent acquisition of small objects, including the best garlic press ever:

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When you pick it up, it is so solid it feels like you are holding a Sig Sauer. I will probably bathe in crushed garlic just to test it out.

My son has more merit badge mill at BYU, so I will be attending and also scouring their excellent graphic novel collection, since I acquired a BYU library card last week.

Also, I just put a computer on the bike, so I can track my rides and try to join the 1,000 mile club. Finally, I rented this board game:

and played it last night, and will play it some more. It's like Ticket to Ride, but you buy shares in the railroads and get dividends and it will make your head explode. There is no luck involved and it only takes an hour once you know what you're doing.

Thoughts on the Canon S95

G1x is a pretty *** machine too for a point and shoot person. Canon G series p&s started to get really cool at about the G10 and after. I would use the *** out of anything that came after G9. (to be fair, G9s are not bad at all)

I just bought a Canon s95 with only 50 shutter actuations for $270 from some guy on KSL who used it to take short clips of video robotics at his work. It has similar specs to the G12 but no flash shoe and not as much zoom. It will fit in your pocket, however, and is a nice backup to a DSLR (I sold mine to buy this). It'll shoot in RAW and has full manual controls. It's not as powerful as a 50D, but I always have it with me so I can capture the amazing things I run across every day, like the ventilation pipes at UVU, or hazy shots of Utah Lake.

There's quite a difference in size between the s95 and the Sony A230 that I had for a year. The sensor on the s95 is smaller than the A230, but bigger than some point-and-shoots.



It'll shoot time lapse with tilt shift, which is kind of fun. The s100 has better video resolution: 1920 x 1080p



Sample pics:

Flickr slideshow

I'm not really a photographer, and most of these were just shot on "auto."









Some low light video, 720p HD I think.




Here's a pic from DPreview shot with an s100 at ISO 6400. The colors are nice but there are artifacts: