Stephen’s Untold Stories

Because of this amazing post by Wes Fryer, I decided to check out the Read the Words site. Registration was free, and it did a fast and great job of creating an mp3 recording of a Word document I uploaded. It even allows you to embed the recording in a web page of blog.

The file I uploaded is some training material I use for Dreamweaver, and the playback time is around 45 minutes. Read the Words converted the uploaded Word document in less than 2 minutes!

Just think how easy it would be for teachers to upload their handouts here so that students could use listen to them on the bus, at home, or wherever. ESOL kids would especially benefit from this.

There is a limit of 800k for each file, so if you have larger files you’ll need to break them up.

I’ve tried a few other services like this, but none have been this good.

I wonder how many other schools have one of these.

• iPhone Portal at Vanderbilt University

Great stuff from Apple.

iPod in the Classroom Resources

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My contract with Spring is up in May, and I have pretty much decided that I’m going to get an iPhone. I am very excited about the possibility of the 3G version with GPS capability. I’ve been playing around with an iPod Touch, and it is an amazing device. The new iPhone should be even better.

A June introduction of the 3G iPhone could tie in with Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference to be held in San Francisco from June 9 to 13, especially if that event also sees the arrival of the finished version of the iPhone SDK, which is currently in beta.

What’s going to be packed into the new iPhone? GPS seems likely, as well as a dual-camera arrangement to allow 3G video calls as well as taking photos with the screen as a viewfinder. The industrial design of the handset is likely to change, as Apple and handset buyers are both particularly style-conscious.

Link to article

Great story about a guy who just won’t stop learning. Nice to see his being able to take advantage of these opportunities.

Baxter Wood is going back to college. But the 62-year-old truck driver won’t be quitting his day job or going to discussion groups with kids 40 years his junior.

Instead, he will have his pick of professors from elite universities like Columbia, Yale, MIT and Stanford — and his tuition will be $0. How’s that for financial aid?

Wood is one of the thousands of students attending iTunes U, downloading lectures available free of charge on the iTunes Web site to his MP3 player.

“It’s amazingly realistic,” Wood said. “The sound of the pages rustling, chalk on the board … I’m convinced that the best way to learn something is to get a professor who knows more than you do to explain it to you.”

More than 50,000 lectures are downloaded every week from almost 30 universities whose professors offer their teachings to anyone with a computer.

Professor Hubert Dreyfus of the University of California at Berkeley, Wood’s current teacher, is one of the most popular picks among iTunes U students.

“I’m podcasting my course on Heidegger, ‘On Time and Being,’ which is the hardest philosophy book of the 20th century, I think, and the most important,” Dreyfus said. “That surprises me that Heidegger has such an audience.”

Link to article

I’ve posted many times about iPods in the classroom. Here is another great article about them in higher education.

Students staring at their iPod screens may be taking a break with a music video — or they may be reviewing a tough chemistry lecture.

These days, students who miss an important point the first time have a second chance. After class, they can pipe the lecture to their laptops or MP3 players and hear it again while looking at the slides that illustrate the talk.

Professors who know less than their students do about MP3 players won’t be at a disadvantage, because the systems require little technical skill to operate. “The best lecture-capture solutions simply require the speaker to turn on a mike and push a button to start the recording,” she said. “They are simple to use.”

Long before audio files, of course, students were doing “lecture capture” by taking notes, but even rapid writers may fall behind in fast-spoken, highly detailed deliveries. The new technology may help some of these students, especially those in large lecture classes. “But it doesn’t necessarily make sense for all groups,” Ms. Engelbert said, “for instance, in a more collaborative environment like an advanced composition class with a lot of discussion.”

Link to article

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The iPod skeptics are upset to see this kind of article. I’d love to work with a school on an implementation of these.

A ban on iPods is so strictly enforced at José Martí Middle School that as many as three a week are confiscated from students — and returned only to their parents.

But even as students have been told to leave their iPods at home, the school here in Hudson County has been handing out the portable digital players to help bilingual students with limited English ability sharpen their vocabulary and grammar by singing along to popular songs.

Next month, the Union City district will give out 300 iPods at its schools as part of a $130,000 experiment in one of New Jersey’s poorest urban school systems. The effort has spurred a handful of other districts in the state, including the ones in Perth Amboy and South Brunswick, to start their own iPod programs in the last year, and the project has drawn the attention of educators from Westchester County to Monrovia, Calif.

The spread of iPods into classrooms comes at a time when many school districts across the country have outlawed the portable players from their buildings — along with cellphones and DVD players — because they pose a distraction, or worse, to students. In some cases, students have been caught cheating on tests by loading answers, mathematical formulas and notes onto their iPods.

But some schools are rethinking the iPod bans as they try to co-opt the devices for educational purposes. Last month, the Perth Amboy district bought 40 iPods for students to use in bilingual classes that are modeled after those in Union City. In South Brunswick, 20 iPods were used last spring in French and Spanish classes. And in North Plainfield, N.J., the district has supplied iPods to science teachers to illustrate chemistry concepts, and it is considering allowing students in those classes to use iPods that they have brought from home.

Link to article

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I hope Steve Jobs doesn’t want to kill us all!

A Douglasville, Ga., man said he had flames coming up to his chest when his iPod Nano suddenly burst into flames while he was working.

Danny Williams, who works at a kiosk at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, told WSBTV.com that he had the iPod and a glossy piece of paper in his pocket at the time. He said it was the piece of paper that saved him from being badly burned.

The iPod Nano uses a lithium-ion battery, the same kind that has been recalled for spontaneously setting laptops on fire.

Link to article

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Man, I wish we had iPods when I was prepping for the SAT!

High school students cramming for the SAT test have traditionally relied on thick books full of practice exams, sharpened No. 2 pencils and intensive tutoring sessions. But now a traditional test preparation company is offering some options for the iPod generation.

Three interactive programs from Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions are for sale at iTunes for downloading to iPods with video screens. The programs were released last week, giving vacationing students plenty of time for practice quizzes before the next test date in October.

The three programs, in critical reading, mathematics and writing, correspond to the three graded sections of the exam. The programs cost $4.99 each and are available in the iPod games section of the iTunes store alongside slightly more entertaining, if less educational, options like Tetris, Pac-Man and Lost: The Game.

“Learning styles have changed a lot since Stanley Kaplan founded Kaplan in 1938,” said Kristen Campbell, the national director of SAT and ACT programs for Kaplan. “Students take their iPods with them all the time, whether they’re in a car driving to baseball practice, or at home, or sitting at school waiting for their parents to come and pick them up.”

The programs include about 1,000 practice questions and hints and strategy sessions on subjects like “Top 10 Test-Taking Tips” and “SAT Math Basics.” They can be used only after being downloaded to an iPod, not in iTunes.

Link to article

Here are some pretty good recent finds. I usually put these in my shared blog, so you might want to take a look there. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for my shared items. If you have your own shared blog, let me know and I’ll check it out!

• Firetune - Tweak your Firefox settings to try to speed things up.
• Differences Between Google and Yahoo - Just in case you couldn’t tell the difference.
• 6 Online Photo Editors Compared - I haven’t used online image editing very often, but it’s nice to know it’s there if I need it.
• Some good 3-column themes for WordPress - 3 columns is all the rage these days.
• Two solutions for copying songs off of your iPod to a Mac - not that any of you would really consider doing anything like that.
• Blog workflow tools wiki - For those of you who want to get things done and get them done quickly.
• Windows Desktop Search - Maybe the best way to search your own computer for files.
• Download Your Favorite YouTube Videos - This one’s straight from the folks at Google, so it must be okay, right?
• 6 Firefox Extensions for Web Workers - Because you want to be more productive, don’t you?
• Make eBooks, webpages, quizzes and other content iPod-mobile! - Trust me. You don’t have enough stuff to put on your iPod.
• 100 open source tools templates and resources - There might be one or two of you out there who actually use open source software. Enjoy!
• How to Do Email and RSS Just Once a Day … and Boost Productivity in the Process - This one made me laugh.
• Top 10 Unofficial Gmail Apps and Add-ons - Your Gmail is just waiting to be hacked. Why make it wait any longer?
• Download Published Documents and Spreadsheets - For times when you are really bored.
• The Best Free Blogging Tools for Power Bloggers - Just in case any of you consider yourselves to be “power bloggers.”
• How to Get Started with Google Reader - If you aren’t using it, you can’t sit with the cool kids at lunch.
• Useful Google Bookmarklets - Because “bookmarklets” is such a neat word.

There. That helped to clean out some of my starred items. Hopefully some of those will help you in your quest to conquer the world.

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Tony Vincent has a great post that will tell you everything you need to know about the cost of podcasting.

• Read all about it here!

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I’ve been reading Andy’s blog for a while, and he is one of my favortie reads. In his latest posting, he gives a good overview of where things are in this debate.

First it was cell phones, and now it’s iPods. K-12 schools around the country are beginning to ban students from carrying MP3 players, fearing they may use them for cheating. Yet at least one university is embracing the exact opposite approach - giving every incoming student an iPod to enhance educational practices and promote academic responsibility.

Why the sudden interest? It’s due to an Associated Press< story that’s been making the rounds on lots of news websites. The article, Schools Say iPods Becoming Tool for Cheaters, paints a picture of clever kids running amok with their MP3 players, sticking it to The Man by using the devices to cut corners on tests, all under the not-so-watchful eyes of teachers too technologically illiterate to do anything about it.

Well, don’t tell that to officials at Duke University, because they’ve headed full-throttle in the exact opposite direction. Duke entered uncharted waters in August 2004 when they distributed iPods to every incoming freshman. The goal, you can imagine, wasn’t to bridge the digital divide between those students who could download music illegally and those who couldn’t. Instead, Duke had a bigger goal: to explore the potential of digital music players as an integral part of the education process.

The program, part of the Duke Digital Initiative, has been running for three years now. This semester, more than 1,300 students and 85 professors are using iPods in 71 courses, with a heavy emphasis on language and the humanities. Professors can use the iPods to deliver copies of lectures, books on tape and other course-related electronic materials, including video. And everyone who gets an iPod is encouraged to participate in iPod training seminars so they learn the ins and outs of the device.

Read the rest here.

Thanks, Andy!

There has been a lot of news lately about students using iPods and other electronic devices for cheating. Wes has addressed the issue better than I could ever hope to.

Rather than adopting policies about technologies that are banned, school districts would be better advised to have their teachers craft new assessments. Our goal should not be, “How can we maintain our instructional and assessment paradigms from the 19th century today in our 21st century digital culture?” but rather “How can we craft authentic assessments our students cannot fake and they can take with open notes?” Open notes should include “open devices” like cell phones and iPods.

The problem with this proposal is that it is very challenging to write and use authentic assessments. It is much easier to test at the knowledge and comprehension level, and that is why we see so many teachers doing it. When you want to have statistical reliability and validity with an assessment, it becomes much more difficult to assess higher order thinking skills with “messy assessments” that include rubrics and subjective analysis. NCLB also encourages this simplified look at assessment, encouraging school districts, administrators and teachers around the United States to focus almost exclusively on multiple-choice, black and white forms of assessment that can be graded via a scantron.

Read the rest here!

Thanks to Tony Vincent for posting this.

Go to iQuizMaker.com to download free software for making your very own true/false and multiple choice quizzes. You can include explanations with your true/false questions. You can set several options, including how many questions a user can answer incorrectly and the graphics theme of the quiz. iQuiz Maker includes an iPod simulator so you can take the quiz on your desktop before syncing to an iPod. Currently the software is Mac only with the Windows version due in May.

iQuizMaker.com has additional quizzes you can download for iQuiz, including Human Anatomy and Cats & Dogs. You can download the Quiz Installer for making the process of getting these on your iPod easier. [To manually install a quiz pack, put the quiz pack folder in the iQuiz folder, which is in the iPod Games folder in your iTunes folder.] Apple has more detailed information for installing and creating quizzes.

Here is the rest!

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I never would have imagined this benefit from an iPod. I hope more and more helpful uses are discovered as well.

Doctors can greatly improve their stethoscope skills and therefore their ability to diagnose heart problems by listening repeatedly to heartbeats on their iPods.

Previous research has shown that the average rate of correct heart sound identification by physicians is 40 percent.

In a new study, 149 general internists listened 400 times to five common heart murmurs during a 90-minute session with iPods. After the session, the average score improved to 80 percent.

Proficiency with a stethoscope—and the ability to recognize abnormal heart sounds—is a critical skill for identifying dangerous heart conditions and minimizing dependence on expensive medical tests, said lead researcher Dr. Michael Barrett, clinical associate professor of medicine and cardiologist at Temple University School of Medicine and Hospital. “It’s important to know when to order a costly echocardiogram or stress test,” Barrett said.

Barrett believes the skill of learning heart problems is best learned through intensive drilling and repetition, not by traditional methods, usually a classroom lecture or demonstration in medical school and then on the job.

Link to article

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If you haven’t added Open Culture to your RSS list, you really need to do so. It might be the best site for compiling great podcasts out there. Here are some of the full-length audio books you can download.

• A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (iTunes)
• Animal Farm, George Orwell (iTunes)
• Collected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (iTunes)
• Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving (iTunes)
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets, William Shakespeare (mp3 download)

Here is the complete listing.

YouTube converts the videos that people upload in flv files, which are viewed in your web browser using the Flash plugin. While YouTube does not support downloading the files directly, there are a couple of ways to get the files if you want to view them offline.

First of all, this site will allow you to download YouTube videos in the flv format. You will need a special player to view them offline, so this might not be the best way to get the files if that’s all you want to do. If you want to put the files on your own site, then this would be a good option since you are going to put them there in flv format anyway.

My favorite way to get them is to use this site. It allows you to select the file type you want, and it will convert it to one of several formats for you. I recommend the MP4 option, as that can be viewed on an iPod, PSP, or on any computer that has QuickTime.

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Very interesting stuff here.

 In the beginning, the iPod let you listen to every CD you owned, even when you were stuck on the Red Line. Then Steve Jobs said, “Let there be video,” and lo and behold, you could watch “Lost” die a slow, overwritten death on a two-inch screen. But while people seem content to load their little devices with as many songs and TV shows as possible, podcasts (think of them as radio programs that you download) tend to be neglected.

Which is really too bad, because some of the more educational ones can help give you a truly brainy rep — if you listen to them regularly. The free podcasts below can teach you how to say, “Where’d my job get exported to?” in Mandarin and why, psychologically speaking, listening to that Regina Spektor single makes you burst into tears.

Link to article

Here are a couple of interesting articles about how people are using iPods to steal data from their workplace and school.

Pod Slurping (I really dislike that name!)

Schoolboy steals sensitive data

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Wes always has some great stuff, and this one is too good not to share with you. Wes lead a workshop with teachers in Oklahoma City and they did this great KWL chart. Click on the image for the full-sized view.

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