My iPad goes to VBS

This week is Vacation Bible School at my church Bartlett Methodist.  The exciting and fun theme for the kids is Galactic Blast!, which has been a blast.  I have been leading the Discovery Time, which is focused on science and particularly earth sciences and physics.  So each night during the week, we have been experimenting with a individual experiments and then we have a whole group time, too.  On Tuesday night, though, the individual experiment didn’t take long and I wanted to show the kids some of the most recent images from space, especially some of those from the Hubble Space Telescope.

I decided to bring my iPad and project some of the images for the kids.  Like others have discussed, you can’t just project on your iPad.  In fact, the individual applications have to release the video out (check out this spreadsheet for the list). One application that I’ve really had a lot of success with video out is GoodReader.  It’s a great application, and it worked really well for me at VBS. I was able to project an image onto the screen, then blow it up by “pinching.”  This was particularly effective when I was discussing the maria and craters on the lunar landscape.  Since my iPad is not a 3G, I relied on transferring all of the images and videos directly onto the iPad with GoodReader, too, while syncing.

In one session with kids, I was running a little ahead.  So, I also unplugged from the projector and used the Planets app to show the kids individual images of the planets.  I was able to walk around with my iPad among the kids and they got a closer view, too.  All in all, the iPad and the space images were both hits. Have you used your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch with less formal learning situations?  Let me know in the comments.

I made Slideshare’s Best Presentation of the Day

Oh, wow! First, I was surprised that I one of my slideshows made it to the homepage of Slideshare briefly. Well, the same slideshow also was selected by Slideshare for its Best Presentation of the Day today!  I really can’t believe it.

Today, I just happen to take a look at some of the presentations I had uploaded to Slideshare as part of my course, where I had decided to publish all my slides for my “Developing Interactive Learning Environments” course last spring. I just happen to notice that this presentation on “Comparing Instructional Design Models” was approaching 3000 views, which is pretty amazing itself.  So, I happen to tweet that out and hash tagged it with #BestPreso as well for Slideshare’s daily contest.  Now, I really didn’t expect there to be anything of this, because this is a pretty esoteric topic.  I just was happy to see that this slide deck was useful to so many people.

This is so cool! After the news today, the views have gone up as well.  Slideshare has really included quite a few more pieces of data about where your presentations are being seen.  Here’s a screen shot of my stats on this presentation. With Slideshare’s press about this deck, the views are well over 3000 now.

Slideshare continues to be an excellent outlet for making content highly visible.  So, my experiment on whether Slideshare is a good way to share open educational resources.  Thanks, Slideshare for the props! And thanks everyone else for stopping by and using the slides.  I hope they are helpful.

PBWorks Camp & cool things to embed in your pages

Some of you may remember that last summer I went to camp — PBWorks Camp that is.  Well, this year, I went back to be a mentor.  This past Tuesday I had the pleasure of presenting to massive number of teachers, library media specialists, university faculty and staff, and others who are part of PBWorks Camp 2010!  It was a super fast and fun webinar.  I tried to focus on some cool and fun stuff you might want to embed into your web pages and blogs. One of the things I wanted to bring home to folks as they begin embedding media and using others’ works more is to be respectful of copyright.  This means to attribute the media where appropriate, following the appropriate linking and referencing such as with Creative Commons.

You can see the whole list of things we discussed here: http://bit.ly/pbworkswebinar

Some of the tools I mentioned were:

• Flick Creative Commons
• Morgue File
• Veezle
• Bubbl.us
• Wordle
• Jing
• iSpring free
• Poll Daddy

I had a blast!  The campers were so gracious in their appreciation, too.  So thank you all for the appreciation!!

Mobile learning about mobile learning

A few days ago, I wrote about how I was experimenting with mobile learning.  In fact, I am testing out mobile learning with a unit on mobile learning.  One of the units I added this summer to my Internet in the classroom course was on virtual schooling and mobile learning.  Through a pilot program with Emantras, I am using their MOBL 21 application to develop and deploy this unit onto iPod Touches, iPhones, and through their desktop Adobe AIR application.

I thought I would share some of the screen shots from the desktop application (that simulates iPhones/iPod Touches).  I’ve enjoyed testing out this system. Not everything is exactly the way I would have preferred the content to be. For example, I would really like to be able to embed images and videos directly from the Web.  The images I had to go into the HTML code and insert.  The video I had to upload, which I wasn’t happy about.  I would really like to be able to take advantage of iPhone/iPod Touches connection with YouTube directly to go full screen.  This wasn’t possible inside of MOBL 21.  I am also still learning the ins and outs of the system.

As you can see from the screen shots, though, you can create study guides, which are content with text, images, audio, and video.  You can also create flash cards.  Since my content isn’t drill and practice, I used the flash cards as a way to present some quotes about virtual schooling.  If I had had more time, I would probably have created these as graphics and uploaded them into the system … probably with Powerpoint.  Finally, you can create a quiz.  I haven’t tested this feature yet.

In another post, I’m going to list some of the features I would like to see added in as an option to make a more robust system.

Other recent articles from around the Web:

• 20 mLearning Tools in 60 Minutes – mLearnCon 2010 (slideshare.net)
• mobl 101 (zef.me)

Experimenting with mobile learning

During this term, I am teaching a course on integrating the Internet in the classroom with teaching and learning.  As a result, I am adding a completely new unit for me on virtual schooling and mobile learning.  I have decided to build this unit as a mobile learning unit.  I am in the process of creating the content for this unit. Most definitely, I will be piloting the use of MOBL 21, which is a content creation platform for mobile devices, specifically iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches.  MOBL 21 also has an Adobe Air desktop application for students who do not have one of these devices.

A few of the questions that I have to figure out answers to with this development project is:

• Can I include video into the MOBL 21 environment?
• Is it necessary for me to chunk the content into pages/screen?
• How much is too much content in this unit?
• What are the best methods to have students interact with this content?
• Will the lack of Flash on the devices be an issue?
• Should I do the entire unit inside the MOBL 21 environment or should I also include content outside of MOBL 21?
• Should I have students experience the iPhone Simulator?
• How do I address other devices?

In addition, the Advanced Learning Center at the University of Memphis is allowing me to offer iPod Touches to my students in this online course, so they can play, test, and use these devices with this unit.

What’s your thinking about my project and my questions?  Can you help me … quickly?

Testing for HootCourse with my Viral-Notebook #hootcourse

Hi, everyone! I am testing a new web application called HootCourse, where I can integrate Twitter posts easily with courses. HootCourse allows both tweets and blog posts for longer content.  The documentation on the services are meager, so I’m running a little test to see if I can post directly to my Viral-Notebook blog and to Twitter at the same time.  Now someone else wrote that HootCourse won’t post to Twitter directly unless the course is public.  Right now, I have my course set to private, but I may test again by changing my course to public to see if that does anything differently.

Amazingly, Rex and Thomas W at HootCourse both responded to my forum question, because I was having a problem logging into my own installation of Wordpress.  But it appears that I’m able to do that now.  I had questioned whether HootCourse was limited to Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com accounts.  Funnily, Rex at HootCourse thought so too.  However, Thomas W piped in and said:

One night I added support for non-WordPress.com WordPress blogs and I must have forgotten to mention that to Rex. HootCourse’s essay feature should be able to integrate with just about any Wordpress installation. That includes everything from the standard WordPress versions all the way to the heavily customized WordPress MU instances in use by some universities.

Doing ID theory better

During a session last week at AERA on theory and practice in instructional design and elearning, I piped in with a comment about folks who I thought were doing theory better than those of us in higher education.  In fact, I thought these folks were making theory not sound like theory at all.  They are providing to a large audience of practitioners through their blog posts a wealth of applicable knowledge and skills in very digestible ways.

My comment must have struck a nerve.  After the session, I had three or four folks come up to me wanting the names of the folks I mentioned.  This morning, I got email asking for the names, too.  So, I thought I would drop these names into a post about folks that I read for instructional design and development.  Folks who I think have a lot to teach my student and myself about instructional design.  In no particular order:

Tom Kuhlmann at Articulate
Tom works for Articulate in their user community division.  He spends a lot of time writing posts about graphic, visual, and message design, particularly using Powerpoint (because Articulate is a plug-in to Powerpoint).  But he also writes some ridiculously practical posts on instructional design.  Some of my favorite posts are:

• Build Branched E-Learning Scenarios in Three Simple Steps
• 7 Tips for Better E-Learning Scenarios
• Are Your E-Learning Courses Pushed or Pulled?

Cammy Bean & Kineo
Cammy Bean works at Kineo, a firm focused on design and development.  Cammy is the VP of Learning Design and writes posts at her own blog. In fact, the last post on Cammy’s blog is an interview with Tom Kuhlmann.  Small world.  Kineo, however, writes short elearning tips.  These gems are gold.  I sometimes disagree with their interpretations of some theories, but the posts are valuable.  Ones from Kineo and Cammy that I particularely like are:

• Tip 33: A Shot of Theory – Keller’s ARCS Model
• Tip 20: Six Steps to Effective Tutorials
• New Skills for Instructional Designers

The Learning Circuits Blog
Every month The Learning Circuits Blog hosted by Tony Karrer, CEO/CTO of TechEmpower, presents a “BIG Question” to the elearning community.  Practitioners, academics, and consultants alike offer up their interpretations and responses to the “BIG Question.  I’ve used the “BIG Question” in my own classes for students to consider their responses in comparison to others in the field. Some of the most interesting and favorite questions of mine:

• Predictions and Plans for 2010
• Presenting the Value of Social Media for Learning
• Working with Subject Matter Experts

<Insert Shameless Plug>Viral-Notebook
I thought I might insert a few of my students and my own posts that really garnered some interest and interesting view points as well.

• SCORM, standards in e-learning, and the groceries truck
• The Perfect SCORM: Is there an impact to elearning or not?
• It’s finally happened…to me

That’s enough for now.  I’ll create another post with a few more later, though.  What other blogs do you read that represent theory and practice in the field of instructional design?

I’ve jumped ship. Goodbye Jumptags. Hello Diigo.

Okay, I finally did it. I jumped ship and have decided to leave Jumptags. Why? Well, I wasn’t happy about it.  The choice was hard, but in the end, there really wasn’t a choice.

Jumptags was great.

I really like My Jumptags.  I particularly like that you can create bookmarks for different types of media, include images/photos, code, and videos.  I also like that you can create sort of hidden tags, too.  But the death-nail for me was that the Jumptags tool bar wasn’t working for me in Firefox on my Mac.  Even the bookmarklet was giving me issues.  For a few weeks, I thought maybe something was up.  Then about a week ago, I took a long hard look at everything, and I determined that the toolbar was not working … and not working consistently.  So, I made the decision to move my bookmarks.  I can’t work this hard to get a bookmark into Jumptags.  It has to be seamless and unobtrusive.  Now, it is neither for me.

Moving to Diigo

I took a look around at the possible options for bookmarking services, including diigo, delicious, among others.  Delicious certainly is robust and functional, but it doesn’t have a lot of integration features with APIs and other services. (It’s still not the prettiest thing to look at either — even after Yahoo! got ‘em.)  Diigo on the other hand is extensive.  It does offer a lot of service, but it’s also a little overkill for many things.  I don’t necessarily need to use the annotations right now, but I was willing to consider diigo and its smorgasbord of services even if I wasn’t going to use them all.

I also decided to give diigo a try because of how easily it was to import my bookmarks from Jumptags.  Unfortunately, diigo does not like two-word tags.  Jumptags did allow spaces inside of tags. (Tags were delimited by commas — not spaces.) Diigo instead opts for hyphenated tags.  So, I definitely have some cleaning up to do.

Join in … again.

I also went ahead and created a group for my Viral-Notebook site.  You can see the group and join the group at http://groups.diigo.com/group/viral-notebook. With diigo you can set your email options to send to you any group bookmark updates.  So, be sure to set this up. If you do join the group, then you will be able to contribute to the Viral Notebook bookmarks as well.  So, I encourage you to do so.

Plus, I have decided to go ahead and allow diigo to publish the bookmarks into my Viral-Notebook blog as well.  I am considering adding a couple of lists (which are a little new to me and a little confusing to me) for specific courses for my students.  So, I’ll let you know when that happens.

IDT 7095/8095 Project Showcase

Tonight is the project showcase for my IDT 7095/8095: Developing Interactive Learning Environments II course.  The overwhelming majority of this course is based in working with a “live” external client.  At the beginning of the semester, student teams select clients from proposals I have received.  Then students work all semester with the client to analyze, design, develop, implement and evaluate a solution to the proposed problem.  As part of the showcase, student teams will present an executive summary of their projects’ problems, solutions and evaluations. This semester there are four strong teams.

CBL Designs repurposed text-based instructional job aids for shortening maintenance currently in use at most Long John Silver’s restaurant locations. This redesign incorporated the use of multimedia to attract and motivate learners from 16-25 years old. Their client is Maredith Adsit, Training Developer for Long John Silver’s Restaurant, based in Louisville, Kentucky.  CBL Designs combines the expertises of Kristy Conger, Amanda Bevis, and Jeremy Larson.

Design Domicile created a Web-based course to teach written and audio medical terms in Spanish used in a clinical setting. Their client is Dr. William Brescia, the Director of Instructional Technology at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center – College of Medicine.  Design Domicile’s primaries are Carmen Weaver, Stacy Clayton, and Joey Weaver.

Innovative Design Taskforce developed Web-based, self-paced, and on-demand training that equips subject matter experts at International Paper to write adequate and well-structured assessment items.  Deborah Adams, Manager for Enterprise Learning Services, is their client.  Innovative Design Taskforce employs Terica Butler, Federico Gomez, and Dot Hale.

Top Stone created a refresher course for Leadership Values for managers to review instructional material and modeling videos through AutoZone’s learning management system.  Their client is Kevin Thorn, the LMS administrator at AutoZone.  Top Stone’s team includes Linda Sadler, Luther Bradfute, and Suha Tamim.

In addition to the primary project, students are also learning project management.  We follow Lynch and Roecker’s (2007) Project Managing e-Learning: A Handbook for Successful Design, Delivery and Management, which is based on the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK).  In addition, we supplement with the Fast Forward MBA in Project Management, which has a wealth of examples and templates built in.

On top of the instructional design models from previous courses, including Morrison, Ross and Kemp and Dick, Carey and Carey, we emphasize rapid prototyping as a development model. So, you can see that students are doing a tremendous amount of work and learning.

I’m doing something unusual, and I need your help.

Here goes.  I’m going to do something unusual for me.
I’m going to tell a private story to the public.

When I was 16-years-old, I became very sick.
I lost 40 pounds without trying.
I experienced pain every night.
I lived with lots of embarrassing personal events.
I graduated high school, went to college, graduated with a BS then a Masters, and I still was sick without any real explanation.

About 10 years ago, I got diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Finally, an answer.  Unfortunately, it was only a beginning.  My health became much worse.  I spent the last decade attempting to manage how bad things were, and I spent a lot of time trying to ignore how sick I was.  It’s just not something I talked about.

About 2.5 years ago, things changed.  My disease became so bad, I had to have surgery.  The surgery lasted about 2.5 times longer than the great surgeon planned.  Recovery was long.  It was hard to be home, be a teacher to my student, be a husband, and be a dad to my daughters.  How do you tell your little ones you can’t pick them up and they can’t sit in your lap?

Remarkably, since that time, I have been 100% disease free.  However, Crohn’s is a chronic disease, so I will never be cured.  I’m over the 20 year mark now for living with Crohn’s.   My current prognosis is truly a new lease on life for me and my family, but the lack of a cure reminds me that things can change quickly.  I’m told that there’s about an 80% chance that my disease will return.  So, I’m waiting.  I have a long scar on my abdomen to remind me physically of what I’ve gone through and that it’s not over for me.

What’s worse though?  What’s worse is knowing that these digestive diseases have a genetic link.  So, now I not only worry about me. Now I worry about my three daughters. That is why I believe it is critical to raise money to find a cure for Crohn’s, colitis, IBD, and all of the digestive diseases to help prevent my daughters from going through what I’ve gone through.

On the evening of May 23rd, the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America will host the “Take Steps. Be Heard.” walk in Overton Park at Levitt Shell. This is the 3rd year for my family to raise money and “do the walk.”  We are passionate about this, and this year our team name is “Scars & Stripes.”  It’s a great experience, and it reminds me of how much bigger my role is in helping others. I need your help.  I would like to invite you to make a donation to help cure the digestive diseases, including Crohn’s disease, colitis and ulcerative colitis, and IBS, that plague children and adults alike. Together, we can make a significant difference. Here’s the link to donate online:

http://online.ccfa.org/goto/michaelgrant

I know that many people feel that they cannot make a substantial donation.  I’m hear to say, “Every donation is substantial in my eyes.”  So, if you can contribute $5.00, that’s substantial.  Please don’t let the amount prevent you from helping.  I would rather see 500 friends and family members contribute $5.00 each than just a couple folks contribute larger amounts.  (Don’t get me wrong.  If you want to blow my mind with a crazy-large amount, I’m all for it.) But I want everyone who has been affected by these diseases to feel the meaning that I do by contributing.

Finally, please don’t think that this is an exclusive club.  Oh, no.  If you have friends, family, or other colleagues that share our passion, I encourage you to forward them the information and invite them to donate as well.  That link again is

http://online.ccfa.org/goto/michaelgrant

Blessings and health to you and your family.