Free in-home wireless broadband service by Google

Google TiSP (BETA),FREE in-home wireless broadband service by Google.

http://www.google.com/tisp

When we are mentioning about M-Learning will this Google New service helps for a more complete WiFi coverage in free??

Individual Response Devices

How could they be used in education?

Introduce educational software

When we are talk about Web 2.0, I very important element "cloud process", like Google Docs , had become more and more common. Rather than using a same software, why we do not think about using the same working platform?

glide is a online Operating System, which user can login to their Operating System anywhere, anytime with different devices, of cause the one we are introducing is not perfect at this moment but this will be a good way to go ahead.

Web site: http://www.glidedigital.com/

The advantage of this are as follow:

1. All student us the same Free working platform. Students do not need to buy and install any software.
2. Machine independent. Students can log in by any computer which bring their own computer is Not a MUST, they can continue their work on any computer.
3. It allow students the share documents like Google docs. and contain NetMeeting function, student can collaborate through the platform.
4. They do not have any excuse for forget to bring their homework.

Presentation Word

Building Web sites Spreadsheet

Photo EditDrawing

Net MeetingAudio and Video Player

2010-3-22(session 7)-Group Activities

Consider uses of mobile technology in your school or workplace. Upload to Group blog and present in class.

1. What is mobile technology?

Mobile technology is exactly what the name implies - technology that is portable. Examples of mobile IT devices include:

• laptop and netbook computers
• palmtop computers or personal digital assistants
• mobile phones and 'smart phones'
• global positioning system (GPS) devices
• wireless debit/credit card payment terminals

2. What‘s the educational implementations of the mobile technology?

Possible educational uses include:

• To engage students in learning basic skills such as spelling, phonics, maths facts, etc.
• To allow students to report back from a location to the classroom, eg. geography, envirnmental topics...
• To enable students to upload, download and share ideas through internet EASILY in any time.
• To conduct data handling activities.
• To conduct assessment.
• To compensate weaker writing skills by using the voice recording.
• To allow students to learning and continue to collaborate anytime, anywhere.

3. What about the benefits?

This leads to great flexibility in working - for example, enabling home working, or working while travelling. Increasingly, networking 'hot spots' are being provided in public areas that allow connection back to the class network or the internet. The growth of cloud computing has also impacted positively on the use of mobile devices, supporting more flexible working practices by providing services over the internet.

4. Let’s check organizational level of using mobile technology

HKU provides PC in library, Computer Center, classrooms and the wifi covers most of the area within the university.

SMS service is provided by HKU library to assist students to record call numbers and titles of books that they are interested. So in HKU, if you want to look for a book, you don't need to use pen and paper. The information will come to you by some easy clicking online.

Portal account is used for students to jump into the HKU system anytime to enjoy services provided by university, such as email, course or examination information service, etc.

Mobile technology enlarges the space of school actually by creating and enhancing a virtual environment which is not limited by time, geography, or language problem. With Google searching engine, everyone could be an intelligence center; with Google translate, everyone will not feel hard to read any type of language. In this way, mobile technology empowers one person to be a learning center.

5. Let’s check individual level of using mobile technology

Usually I bring my PDA and notebook everyday starting from my Uni study. Usually I will use for following tasks:

1. Download and read lecture material (Notebook)
2. Searching for supplementary material (notebook)
3. Record and Replay lecture voice record (PDA)
4. Do online tasks (Notebook)
5. Searching book and record books detail at library (PDA)

In my work now:

1. Watching newspaper (PDA)
2. Chatting with others through MSN (PDA)
3. Google Maps (PDA)

6. Promising? But wait a minute.

See what he says:

In my workplace, we have not really explored the use of mobile devices yet. I think it is an interesting area to explore and will definitely motivate many of the students. I think before we undertake this as an initiative we should explore the possibilities and be clear about what benefits we hope to gain from their use. If we do not have a clear plan and assess this we could end up wasting time and effort with little reward and that is when parents will criticize us.

7. So what are the drawbacks of mobile technology?

We believe that the drawbacks could be:

• Students easily get distracted
• Students may not have the time to digest information
• Students will have more pressure as they receive other's reply in a easy and quick way.
• Students need training in order to use mobile technology completely.

Here are some other considerations:

• A Fragmented Learning Experience
• Lack of Well-Developed Metacognitive Skills
• Small Screens and Difficulty Accessing Information from the Web
• High Costs
• Challenges to the Security of the Device and Its Data

8. Conclusion

It's exciting to adopt and implement mobile technology into education. Absolutely it has a lot of promising benefits. However, drawbacks could not be ignored meanwhile. Before taking actions, it is better to consider more about our purposes and expectations from using mobile technology. In other words, detailed and specific plan is definitely required for a better practice.

9. Useful Links

Here are some links about mobile tech in education:

http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2009/01/09/04mobile.h02.html
http://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/videos/mobiles-0
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/853703.stm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/6320811/High-school-to-allow-mobiles-in-classrooms-to-help-learning.html
http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/columnists/guhlin/guhlin011.shtml

2010-3-15 (session 6)- Group Activities 3: Research ITE(extension)

Present a potential research topic that would be useful in providing a solution to an educational issue (should be relevant to IT).

Upload to Group Blogs and present in class.

2010-3-15 (session 6)- Group Activities 2: Research ITE(review)

What do you think are the main areas of research on and with ITE? Upload your comments to the Group blog.

All Ready for Surfing Lesson Plan? Let Tips Go First!(Sharon)

If you have trouble in figuring out how to integrate proper technology into your teaching to construct a perfet lesson plan, go to library and borrow this book:

Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching, by M.D.Roblyer.

Different versions are available. I've read the 5th version from PolyU library and now the 3rd version from HKU library. Prefer the latter version, much lighter than the former version.

Here I'd like to share with dear you some useful tips quoted from the book. Hope it helps you think further about your technology integration when design your lesson plan. Here we go.

Preface
Good teaching comes first.
Technology is us.
We control how technology is used in education.
Integration methods should be based in both learning theory and teaching practice.
Integration should match specific teaching and learning needs.
Old integration strategies are not necessary bad; new strategies are not necessarily good.

Brief contents

Part one: introduction and backfround on integrating technology in education
C1: educational technology in context: the big picture
C2: planning and implementation for effective technology integration
C3: learning theories and integration models

Part two: integrating software and media tutors and tools
C4: integrating instructional software into teaching and learning
C5: integrating word processing, spreadsheets, and database software tools into teaching and learning
C6: integrating other software tools into teaching and learning
C7: integrating multimedia and hypermedia into teaching and learning

Part three: linking to learn: principles and strategies
C8: integrating the internet and other distance resources into the curriculum
C9: a link to the future-emerging developments in technology integration

Part four: integrating technology across the curriculum
C10: technology in language arts and foreign language instruction
C11: technology in mathematics and science instruction
C12: technology in social studies instruction
C13: technology in art and music instruction
C14: technology in physical education and health education
C15: technology in special education

Tips
1. There are two instructional methods: directed and constructivist. (p52)

Philosophical differences can be summarized in the following way (p53):
Objectivists. Knowledge has a sepatate, real existence of its own outside the human mind. Learning happens when this knowledge in transmitted to people and they store it in their minds.
Constructivists. Humans constuct all knowlege in their minds by participating in certain experiences; learning happens when one constructs both mechanisms for learning and his or her own unique version of the knowledge, colored by background, experiences, and aptitudes.

Learning theories associated with directed instruction (p56)Behavioral theoties
Information-processing theories

Learning theories associated with constructivism (p62~70)
Dewey's social constructivism
Vygotsky's scaffolding
Piaget's stages of development
Vrunner's relevance principle
Papert's microworlds
John Seely Brown and cognitive apprenticeships
Vanderbilt's cognition and technology group and anchored instruction
Cognitive flexibility theory and radical constructivism
Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences

2. Developing constructivist lesson integration strategies (p212)
(1) watching: observation in environment to develop a purpose for their project
(2) wondering: explore topics and focus on specific issues or concerns by brainstorming or discussing, reflecting, etc.
(3) webbing: locate information and connect ideas
(4) wiggling: evaluate information found by them
(5) weaving: find ways to organize and express information
(6) wrapping: show their information art out in different forms
(7) waving: practice and find out solutions
(8) wishing: reflection, evaluation and summarization.

eLearning and Web 2.0

Look at this website for a basic knowledge of elearning and four major functions related to web 2.0:

RSS feeds

Wikis

Social bookmarking

Social networking

These videos embeded in the website have been provided by common craft, a very brilliant organization aiming at explain complex definitions and phenomenons by very simple pictures and text. (Sharon)

Resource For Lesson Planning

(Azalea)It ia a good introduction of lesson planning, with some guidelines and methods for introducing how to make a lesson plan:

Lesson Plan

View more presentations from tarakbr.

What do you think about room 321?

Tell us what you think about the benefits of this room and any possible issues/problems with it?
How could it be used to enhance teaching and learning?

2010-3-15 (session 6): Group Activities 1: What is educational research?

What does educational research mean to you?

Educational research is research conducted to investigate behavioral patterns in pupils, students, teachers and other participants in schools and other educational institutions. Such research is often conducted by examining work products such as documents and standardized test results. (Wikipedia)

Contribution from Joe:

Purdue OWL

fno.org: the educational technology journal

The Journal: transforming education through technology



Contribution from Sharon:

Educational Research Journal

Educational Research Journal (issue and volume, details)

Taylor&Francis Group Website

JITE (Journal Name)

Delicious on VoiceThread (Sharon)

How can social bookmarking tool (such as delicious,) support T&L？

Bump into this webpage when searching on how delicious could benefit teaching and learning. And I find it is very detailed to tell people how useful it is to use delicious to assist learning in education. Please refer to here for details. Here is some contents quoted from the web:

Grosseck described several ways in which Delicious could support teaching and learning, including (Grosseck, 2006):

* Use on multiple computers
* Support for lectures
* Mechanism for building learning communities
* Research resource
* Bibliographical aid (in fact, all references for this article can be accessed here)
* Insights into student interests and needs
* Feeds into RSS aggregators

Grosseck, Gabriela (2006). Using DEL.ICIO.US in Education,
http://www.scribd.com/doc/212002/ Using-Delicious-In-Education

You could also see a PDF document within the webpage named after 7 Things you should know about social bookmarking. Hope it helps if you are not a fan of using online bookmarking for web surfing yet.

Social Bookmarking–Repository–Networking: Possibilities for Support of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (Daniel Churchill, Wing Wong, Nancy Law, Diane Salter, Benny Tai,2009)

I'm now a frequent user of Delicious.

I've tagged every favorite web into Delicious.


You could come and check what's in Sharon's life on Delicious.

how can wiki support teaching and learning

Here, I am going to point out that, besides wikipedia, there are also many useful online wiki pages can be used to facilitate our teaching and learning:
Like PBworks,


it is a “secure online workspace” for users to create, share, contribute to their own or others contents. It is easy to sign in and easy to build a group. So for collaborative projects, it’s a good platform for both teachers and students to contribute on. And, with each student has a unique login and password, you can easily know who made what change. When you need to assess the contribution from students, it could be a good criterion of judgement.

Comparing its editing function with moodle or other discussion forum and blogs, the obvious difference is these wiki pages can be re-edited or modified by any person. And, “generally, wikis have a history function, which allows previous versions to be examined, and a rollback function, which restores previous versions.” So in this aspect, I think wiki is more open access and collaboration-welcome.
(Azalea)

Web 2.0 Presentations on Voicethread

Upload your voicethread presentations about different Web2.0 applications and how they can be used for educational purposes.

From Sharon: Delicious on VoiceThread

News from Youtube this month!

YouTube plans to caption most videos automatically

By Mike Swift

mswift@mercurynews.com

Posted: 03/04/2010 02:55:24 PM PST

Updated: 03/05/2010 02:17:09 PM PST

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_14514072?source=most_emailed&nclick_check=1

You could check video shown below for the improvement applied. Click the "for detailed information" link under the uploader's picture, you will get the whole text content reflected from the video. Quite amazing, huh?

2010-3-8 (session 5): Preview before Class

Part 1: web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0

The Evolution of Web 3.0

View more presentations from Marta Strickland.

This slide neatly sums up the main differences between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.

Web 1.0 – That Geocities & Hotmail era was all about read-only content and static HTML websites. People preferred navigating the web through link directories of Yahoo! and dmoz.

Web 2.0 – This is about user-generated content and the read-write web. People are consuming as well as contributing information through blogs or sites like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc. The line dividing a consumer and content publisher is increasingly getting blurred in the Web 2.0 era.

Web 3.0 – This will be about semantic web (or the meaning of data), personalization (e.g. iGoogle), intelligent search and behavioral advertising among other things.

If that sounds confusing, check out some of these excellent presentations that help you understand Web 3.0 in simple English. Each takes a different approach to explain Web 3.0 and the last presentation uses an example of a "postage stamp" to explain the "semantic web".

(source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/web-3-concepts-explained/8908/)

Part 2: materials reference contained in Bob's PPT
(1) Websites that you should try
Delicious
www.delicious.com
Twitter
www.twitter.com
Flickr
www.flickr.com
Wikipedia
www.wikipedia.com
Youtube
www.youtube.com
Facebook
www.facebook.com
Needleworkspictures
http://www.needleworkspictures.com
Openculture
www.oculture.com
wordle
www.wordle.net
Secondlife
www.secondlife.com
Voicethread
www.viocethread.com
Netvibes (experience web 3.0)
http://www.netvibes.com
Zoho (experience web 3.0)
www.zoho.com

(2) Newsy Video: High School Sued Over Webcam Spying

Digital Storytelling

Today we used Microsoft Movie Maker to try making digital stories or educational movies. There are many other pieces of software that allow you to do the same, some are more complicated than others.

Some possible educational uses of digital storytelling are:

• Producing a fictional story written by the students
• Producing a factual text, eg. All about cats
• Producing a timeline of the student's life
• Producing an instructional text, eg. how to make a paper aeroplane

What other uses can you think of? Post some examples if possible.

Make your own IWB

Go to this link to see how you can create your own Interactive Whiteboard. (Joe)

http://www.ted.com/talks/johnny_lee_demos_wii_remote_hacks.html

Technology and Learning

While 'constructivism' and 'inquiry-based' learning are hot topics in education today, they are not new concepts. These approaches to learning have been present in classrooms for many years now however the available technology has not necessarily supported it. Now, with Web2.0 and the rise of social software, etc. there are more opportunities for technology to support this approach to education. (Joe)

Learning Objects--WISC-ONLINE

(Azalea)There are sufficient learning materials embraced in this website, referring to different fields like business, health, technical, general education and so on. This website is a good learning platform for sharing and acquiring resources, although most of these resources are presentation and information objects and simply designed with the performance which is mostly like Power Point. But, many of these learning objects have their own ways to stimulate users’ thinking, like giving multiple-choice questions or examples associated with the content. I think it is one way for motivating learners; however, it is still lack of interactive function established between users and knowledge providers. For evaluating its usefulness of teaching and learning, I think it suits those self-learning learners who have foundation knowledge in a certain area, and is a good source of reference resources for teachers. But, as these learning objects cannot be rebuilt or split for reuse, it is hardly to be a component of courseware.

Combining Visualization and Interactivity

Multiple representations, modalities and multimodalities

Dual coding

Gestalt Principles

Limitations of Short-term memory

(Azalea)

This Information Processing Model shows us a clear picture about the procedures of information transformation. See below:

Daniel Churchill's Paper

Here is the link to "Towards a useful classification of learning objects"

http://www.springerlink.com/content/9g4336282u640184/fulltext.pdf

Reminder: Group work for Lesson 3

Homework 1

Search for and explore:
•Limitations of Short-term memory
•Gestalt Principles
•Dual coding
•Multiple representations, modalities and multimodalities
•Combining Visualization and Interactivity

Homework 2

# Identify one useful learning object (LO) from the Internet
# Reference this LO in the RISAL
# Embed RISAL Link in your blog
# Write a blog post with short review of its usefulness for teaching and learning
# Embed your tag clouds from RISAL in your blog

http://interactivenarratives.org

Add some comments about what you think of this online resource...

http://interactivenarratives.org

8th Feb Presentation Slides for Learning theories

http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dg2vcf68_456dcpqpdfh&invite=570290545

About TED.com

http://www.ted.com
TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year's TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize.

On TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 500 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks feature closed captions in English, and many feature subtitles in various languages. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

RISAL

Here we can discuss what we are doing with RISAL.

http://risal.cite.hku.hk/login.php

Sharon's RISAL tag cloud:

Details for mindmap

http://www.mindmeister.com/?first=true

Username: tametiger2010

password: tametiger

Cognitive Tools

Add your posts about some of the examples of cognitive tools from session 2 notes...


•Here are some examples developed mostly by students:Typhoon➔Drying Rate ➔ Multiplication of Fractions ➔ Learning Theories ➔ Perspectives ➔ Magnetic Fields ➔ Air Pollution ➔ Photosynthesis ➔ Waist Recycling ➔ Marketing Plan ➔ Animated Gifs ➔ Geography Decision Making Exercise ➔

•Review some of these examples and then select one for your review. Provide brief review in your Blogs (you might be asked to present).

Expert & Novice (Sharon)

chapter 2 How Experts Differ from Novices

I quoted this from page 19. It is talking about the differences between expert and novice:

We consider several key principles of experts' knowledge and their potential implications for learning and instruction:

1.	Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices.
2.	Experts have acquired a great deal of content knowledge that is organized in ways that reflect a deep understanding of their subject matter.
3.	Experts' knowledge cannot be reduced to sets of isolated facts or propositions but, instead, reflects contexts of applicability: that is, the knowledge is ''conditionalized" on a set of circumstances.
4.	Experts are able to flexibly retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little attentional effort.
5.	Though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are able to teach others.
6.	Experts have varying levels of flexibility in their approach to new situations.

Our Experiences

Our experiences have been recorded in the 6024 forum.