Stephen's Untold Stories

Good things happen!

http://blip.tv/file/2614336

I hate to report this, but the answer for many teachers is “not at all.”

Photo from the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

Look at all those Macs! I see the same thing where I work….way more Macs than PC laptops.

Caption added by Will Richardson.

Original photo here.

They started this a year ago, and here are the results.

We knew the “what” already: ACU handed out 957 devices to incoming freshmen, as well as 169 to faculty and another 182 to staff. It wasn’t a blind move, or a gimmick; it was the result of much research, planning, and even a faculty contest to submit ideas for implementing technology — namely, the iPhone — into the curriculum in ways which would be beneficial, non-distracting and begin to chip away at the age-old paradigms of the lecture hall.

The incoming freshmen were given a choice between an iPhone, an iPod touch, or neither. Unsurprisingly, every incoming student accepted one or the other, with about 36% choosing a iPod touch over an iPhone. This is in large part due to the fact that the school, for several reasons, was unable to provide any contract with the iPhone, and many students had existing cell phone contracts which would result in a significant enough penalty to discourage starting an AT&T plan. Even among those, though, there were some iPhone switchers willing to pay the price.

The ACU iPhone initiative would be a gimmick if research wasn’t done in post to determine its results. Several surveys were taken (with an unusually large percentage of respondents), and information was compiled. One of the questions asked was about the distraction level the iPhones and iPod touches generated in the classroom. George tells me that, in a post-semester survey, 90% of the faculty and staff stated that the devices “were not a distraction in class.” Students reported that they were bringing their devices to class, and that their performance, grades and class work all benefited. The studies also revealed that 82% of the students had used the web portal at least once per week during the Fall semester, 49% said they were given at least one assignment that required device usage outside of class, and 60% of students said they had regular opportunities to use the device for at least one class.

On the faculty side, about 65% of the 167 iPhone/touch-using faculty and staff members responded to survey questions on topics such as demographic and experience factors, personal and classroom usage, and perceived impact on student engagement and performance. An overwhelming majority of the respondents deemed the program a success, said that there was adequate communication and that the device was easy to use and implement. 70% responded positively about the course calender, 83% were in favor of online course documents, 63% for podcasts, 74% were happy about in-class internet searches, 76% responded favorably to the devices’ role in taking attendance, and a whopping 87% stated that they felt comfortable about using the devices for required course activities. The research also revealed that faculty were using the devices to students’ benefit, even when the students in their class didn’t have them. All in all, a positive response from the faculty and staff, and a desire for further training and continued app development.

Read the rest here.

I am thoroughly satisfied with my G1.

Click the image for the full-sized version.

If you know of anyone with an autistic child, please forward this to them. It may save them thousands!

Leslie Clark and her husband have been trying to communicate with their autistic 7-year-old son, JW, for years, but until last month, the closest they got was rudimentary sign language.

He’s “a little bit of a mini-genius,” Clark says, but like many autistic children, JW doesn’t speak at all.

Desperate to communicate with him, she considered buying a specialized device like the ones at his elementary school in Lincoln, Neb. But the text-to-speech machines are huge, heavy and expensive; a few go for $8,000 to $10,000.

Then a teacher told her about a new application that a researcher had developed for, of all things, the iPhone and iPod Touch. Clark drove to the local Best Buy and picked up a Touch, then downloaded the “app” from iTunes.

Total cost: about $500.

A month later, JW goes everywhere with the slick touch-screen mp3 player strapped to his arm. It lets him touch icons that voice basic comments or questions, such as, “I want Grandma’s cookies” or “I’m angry — here’s why.” He uses his “talker” to communicate with everyone — including his service dog, Roscoe, who listens to voice commands through the tiny speakers.

It’s a largely untold story of Apple’s popular audio devices.

It is not known how many specialized apps are out there, but Apple touts a handful on iTunes, among them ones that help users do American Sign Language and others like Proloquo2Go, which helps JW speak.

The app also aids children and adults with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy and Lou Gehrig’s Disease, or ALS — even stroke patients who have lost the ability to speak, says its co-developer, Penn State doctoral student Samuel Sennott.

Using the iPhone and Touch allows developers to democratize a system that has relied on devices that were too expensive or difficult to customize, Sennott says. “I love people being able to get it at Best Buy,” he says. “That’s just a dream.”

He also says that for an autistic child, the ability to whip out an iPhone and talk to friends brings “this very hard-to-quantify cool factor.”

Link to article

I’d love to see some students who are doing things like this with iPhones or iPod touches. Be sure to check out the video down below.

Jorge Colombo drew this week’s cover using Brushes, an application for the iPhone, while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.

“I got a phone in the beginning of February, and I immediately got the program so I could entertain myself,” says Colombo, who first published his drawings in The New Yorker in 1994. Colombo has been drawing since he was seven, but he discovered an advantage of digital drawing on a nighttime drive to Vermont. “Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner’s hat, I could not draw in the dark.” (When the sun is up, it’s a bit harder, “because of the glare on the phone,” he says.) It also allows him to draw without being noticed; most pedestrians assume he’s checking his e-mail.

There’s a companion application, Brushes Viewer, that makes a video recapitulating each step of how Colombo composed the picture.  Colombo leans heavily on the Undo feature: “It looks like I draw everything with supernatural assurance and very fast—it gets rid of all the hesitations.”

Colombo’s phone drawing is very much in the tradition of a certain kind of New Yorker cover, and he doesn’t see the fact that it’s a virtual finger painting as such a big deal. “Imagine twenty years ago, writing about these people who are sending these letters on their computer.” But watching the video playback has made him aware that how he draws a picture can tell a story, and he’s hoping to build suspense as he builds up layers of color and shape.

Link to article

This is from the University of Virginia, but I also see a lot more Macs nowadays at the university where I work.

Link to article.

Thanks to my dad for alerting me to this one!

Are you a PC? Then you’d better not go to the University of Missouri’s journalism school, where 99.5 percent of the students have Macs and incoming freshmen have just been told they’ll need an iPhone or iPod Touch as well.

Why? So they can play back lectures in their free time, according to Associate Dean Brian S. Brooks.

“Lectures are the worst possible learning format,” he told the Columbia Missourian, the campus newspaper. “There’s been some research done that shows if a student can hear that lecture a second time, they retain three times as much of that lecture.”

In a conversation with FOXNews.com, Brooks said that any MP3 player could actually be used.

“You could use a Zune, for example,” he said.

But he said the Apple devices, which start at $200 apiece, were made official requirements for the benefit of students on financial aid.

“If it’s required, it can be included in your financial-need estimate,” he told the Missourian. “If we had not required it, they wouldn’t be able to do that.”

Brooks said the journalism school was stressing Apple devices to standardize software — lectures are downloaded for free from a special section of the iTunes Store — and because so many students either already had or wanted an iPhone or iPod Touch.

“There are about 50 other schools across the country that are doing this,” he said.

Link to article

A few months ago, my first iPod looked like it was dead. I bought it in 2004, and it served me well until recently. One day I tried to turn it on, but all I got was the sad iPod screen.

Now this indicates a hardware problem, and it often means the end of the line for your iPod. I Googled up a lot of suggestions for fixing it, but none of them worked. I put the iPod in one of my desk drawers and forgot about it.

Flash forward to yesterday. I was looking for something in my desk and saw the iPod there. I decided to take a chance and hook it up to the computer. I plugged it into the USB cable and nothing happened. I then decided to drop it on the floor.

On purpose.

So I did.

I dropped it from a height of about six feet. I then plugged it back into the USB cable and saw this screen.

After a few minutes, the iPod started synching with iTunes. Pretty cool, huh?

I realize it may not last, but at least it’s working for now.

I’ve been saying this for years. I love my Macbook Pro, but I don’t see it as completely safe. It’s my job to make sure it is safe.

When news like the rampaging Conficker virus hits, Mac users often feel a certain sense of comfort–if not smug superiority–knowing it doesn’t affect them.

But just how relaxed (or smug) should Mac users be? It’s true that very few viruses have been written for Macs–and none are spreading actively right now. Similarly, hacker programs distributed by malicious Web sites typically run only on PCs.

Yet Macs’ relative safety is primarily due to their still-slim market share. They’re simply a waste of time for today’s attackers, who are trying to accomplish crime on a large scale by infiltrating millions of computers. And there’s nothing inherently more secure about a Mac. Researchers found 26 vulnerabilities in OSX in 2008, about the same as in Windows Vista (27), according to security software maker Symantec. If its market share rises enough, the Mac will become a target and attacks will succeed.

Read the rest here.

Interesting development. One of the key people in this project came to work in Georgia a few years ago. Things didn’t go so well for her down here, but it looks like Maine is doing okay without her.

Despite the nation’s economic turmoil, Maine is expanding its program to provide laptop computers to 0students.

The goal is to provide a laptop to every public school student in grades seven through 12 by the fall, adding 53,000 high schoolers to the program, said Education Commissioner Susan Gendron.

Gov. John Baldacci hinted at an expansion of the laptop computer program in his State of the State address Tuesday night, and Education Department officials announced Wednesday that they’re negotiating a four-year lease with Apple Inc. for 100,000 Apple MacBook laptops.

In his speech, Baldacci referred to revamping the laptop computer program and turning it “into a powerful tool for the entire family.”

“Every night when students in seventh through 12th grade bring those computers home, they’ll connect the whole family to new opportunities and new resources,” Baldacci said. The computers would come with software to connect to the state’s CareerCenters, he added.

Maine started its first-in-the-nation program by distributing more than 30,000 computers to each seventh- and eighth-grader in all of the state’s state public schools in 2002 and 2003.

About 30 high schools also have laptops that they obtained outside the scope of the original program. Now, all 120 of Maine’s high schools, along with 241 middle schools, will have new laptops under the same program at a cost of about $242 per computer per year, Gendron said.

The state hasn’t yet completed its negotiations with Apple, but it’s expected that the new lease will cost the state about $25 million per year, said David Connerty-Marin, an Education Department spokesman.

An Apple spokesman in Cupertino, Calif., referred questions to the governor’s office.

The state now pays about $13 million per year to provide Apple laptops to 37,000 middle-schoolers and about 10,000 middle school and high school teachers and administrators.

Read the rest here.

More and more colleges are starting to do this. It’s nice to see some research that shows it is worthwhile.

The ability to pause and rewind podcast lectures gave the upper hand to college students in a recent study that compared the performance of students who attended a lecture in person and those who viewed it from iTunes University.

The study, “iTunes University and the Classroom: Can Podcasts Replace Professors?,” was conducted at the State University of New York Fredonia. It called for some introductory psychology students to watch a recorded lecture available online and others to attend a traditional classroom lecture.

Students who watched the lecture podcast–available from the iTunes U online video library–scored an average of 71 percent. Students who sat through the 30-minute classroom lecture scored an average of 62 percent, according to the study.

Dani McKinney, the study’s lead researcher, said test scores were most dramatically affected by note taking. Students who watched the video lecture and took notes, McKinney said, scored an average of 15 points higher than their peers in the lecture hall.

“They listened to [the podcast] over and over,” said McKinney, a Fredonia psychology professor since 2006 who completed the iTunes study with researchers Jennifer Dyck and Elise Luber. “Listening passively doesn’t get anything accomplished. It’s not enough to just do rote memory and repetition.”

Examining the notes taken by students who participated in the study, McKinney said it was clear many students took advantage of the pause and rewind buttons.

Read the rest here.

Now THIS is really sweet. I already installed it on my iPod touch, and it works great!

This could mean a lot for schools that have already purchased iPod touches for their students. Now they don’t have to buy a separate device.

You may not have the latest $359 Kindle electronic book reader from Amazon.com, but if you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, a new application will let you access much of the same content on your Apple device.

In a bid to increase its slice of the e-book market, the Seattle-based online retailer rolled out a free program Wednesday that brings several of the Kindle’s functions to the iPod and iPhone’s smaller screen.

The program, which can be downloaded from Apple’s online application store, lets iPhone and iPod Touch users read the same electronic books that Kindle owners can buy on Amazon.com. As with the Kindle, the iPhone app lets users change the text size on the screen, and add bookmarks, notes and highlights.

The application does not connect to the Kindle store, however, so users must access the Web browser on their iPhone, iPod or computer to buy the content. Users cannot read magazines and newspapers on the Kindle application, either.

If you happen to have a Kindle and an iPhone, Amazon‘s program will handily sync the two so you can keep your place in the same book on both devices.

Read the rest here.

That’s what these students are doing in Houston.

Studying on your laptop is so 2007. A group of biology students at Houston Community College’s southeast campus just turns on iPhones.

“Instead of bringing your book to class, you bring your phone,” said Lisa Jackson, one of 15 students enrolled in Anatomy and Physiology II as part of a pilot project to deliver course work on Apple’s trendy smart phones.

Lifang Tien, a biology professor, and Roger Boston, who teaches computer science and business technology, received $100,196 from a fund created by HCC Chancellor Mary Spangler to encourage innovation, then used the money to buy phones and pay the monthly bills. Students have to give the phones back at the end of the semester.

In return, Tien and Boston are studying whether delivering instruction on a phone that can connect to the Internet anytime and anywhere makes a difference in how students learn.

Tien’s students like the convenience. Tiffany DeBurr Brewer has studied in her car while her three kids raced noisily around the house.

“I can study in my spare time,” she said. “I don’t have to lug a laptop around. It makes my life easier.”

Read the rest here!

I wonder what kind of music the soldiers listen to while they’re lining up the target.

A new application has been launched for the iPod touch to help gun users line up a clean shot at their target.

The BulletFlight app, which costs £6.99 to download from the iTunes store, has been developed by Runaway App to turn the iPod touch into a ballistics computer which the company says can provide “quick solutions in the field”.

Users can mount their iPod touch to their rifle, and then use the iPod’s touch-screen to tap in details about the wind conditions, ammunition type, distance to the intended target and even the wind speed.

he application features built-in profiles for three weapons – the M110 semi-automatic precision rifle, the KAC PDW, and the 14.5in SR16 rifle – although users can add more weapons into the app.

Link to article

Finally!

http://picasa.google.com/mac/

I would encourage all of your tech superstars out there to apply!

The Apple Distinguished Educator (ADE) program is a relationship program focused on educational excellence and leadership. ADEs are members of a select group of K-12 and Higher Education professionals possessing an identified expertise in educational technology leadership. This group of over 1200 educators spans the globe with membership in the USA, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Latin America, and Asia.

Apple Distinguished Educators fulfill 4 primary roles:

Advocate: ADEs are passionate advocates for the potential of Apple technologies and they provide expert assistance and best practices to peers and policy-makers. ADEs are frequent presenters at local, state and national educational conferences.

Advisor: ADEs provide valuable input to Apple on the realities of integrating instructional technology into learning environments.

Author: ADEs publish authentic work on the Apple Learning Interchange (ALI), such as teaching and leadership best practices, exemplary lesson ideas, and a range of content items that showcase Apple solutions and technologies for the advancement of education.

Ambassadors: ADEs are innovators in building community and capacity for teaching and learning in a global context. Through online projects and collaboration tools, they empower each other to expand the walls of the classroom and bring global experiences to classrooms everywhere.

Check it out here!

Just testing for now. This could be dangerous.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Not only students, but TEACHERS get one.

A Chapel Hill middle school could become the first in the country to give an iPod to every teacher and student, an experiment that would challenge teachers and administrators to ensure the hand-held devices are used as learning tools, not toys.

It’s still not clear how the iPod Touches would be used at Culbreth Middle School. And school officials know that students may use the iPod Touches more to download the new Jonas Brothers single than to tap the riches of human knowledge. But Principal Susan Wells says that to dismiss the technology as a distraction or a gimmick ignores today’s tech-driven world.

“It’s a world we better figure out, because we can’t ask our students to come into a classroom, put those things aside and sit in a row and think we’re interesting,” she said.

“We’re just not that interesting.”

If the project wins funding, Culbreth’s teachers, administrators and students during the next year will develop courses for which iPod Touches are central to the curriculum. Other schools could follow Culbreth’s model.

Early ideas include letting students get arts credit by taking online guitar lessons in which they can watch a video of a guitar instructor on their iPod and practice at home. Physical education teachers might give take-home fitness assignments for students to track their stats — calorie intake, number of sit-ups they can do in a minute, etc. — and create a podcast demonstrating certain exercises.

Link to article

Another one you must bookmark.

If you’re thinking that all your iPod can do is play music, think again. With a little ingenuity and guidance, you can turn your iPod into just about anything, whether it’s a remote control or a notepad. Read on to find more than 75 tutorials that will walk you through projects that will transform your iPod.

Link to site