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.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Here are some previous posts that you may be interested in:

1. 400 friends? Confirm or ignore?

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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.

Here are some previous posts that you may be interested in:

1. It’s finally happened…to me
2. The year’s best presentations: What can we learn?
3. Assessment in online courses

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.