Final Projects

Your Final Projects are due by midnight on 7/27 EST.  You are asked to upload all of your material to Curriki then post a small description below this entry while including a url to your Curriki product.  Please double check all links to ensure that they are working.  Once I review your Final Projects, I will send you a confirmation and grade.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.  I've been fielding the questions when they come in.  One recent issue was with the formatting being lost in Curriki.  Please see my response below:

"Try typing everything in MS Word and then uploading it.  I believe that way it will retain the formatting. Another alternative is to type it into a Google Doc and then 'share' it with everyone.  This option will give your document its own url which you can then paste into Curriki with an explanation."

922-Session 10--But wait there's more!

Welcome to the 'beginning' of the 'end', but not the 'end' of what has 'begun'!




This semester I've tried to guide you through what some people consider very complicated topics:

• Navigating through Open Source content, 
• Digital books, and 
• Mobile devices. 

Through my "Internet travels and wanderings" while researching content for this course, I've come across countless resources that I knew were useful and valuable, but as the semester progressed, I was never quite sure where some of these items would best connect under a certain week's themes.  Therefore, throughout the semester, I collected many of these resources (from webinars, to videos, to readings) that I thought would be interesting to most of you with the hope of getting the chance to show you before the semester was over.  


Well, this is our last session, so it's now or never.  (After all, your Finals are due by midnight EST Friday, 7/27.)  If anyone is having trouble meeting the deadline, just drop me a line and ask for an extension.  I've got to complete the grading by Monday, 8/6.


In this, our concluding session, I've included this potpourri of remaining resources that I know to be powerful, useful, and practical.  These resources never made it into this semester's weekly sessions either due to the sheer size of the workload per week or b/c I just couldn't find the best fit for them. So, knowing the value of these items I couldn't very well not share them with you.  That's why I've added this compilation in Session 10.


As I stated above, your Final Projects will be due by midnight of July 27th.  I'll add an additional blog entry for you to post a brief summary of your F.P. later this week where you'll also include the url for the Curriki page where it can be found.  


As I was reading through last semester's Final Projects I noticed that some people ran into some techno-trouble uploading material to Curriki, so if you would rather put your material in a Google Shared Doc. and then just place that link into Curriki, then that's fine.  Feel free to let me know if you have any questions.


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Let's start this week with a video explaining Project Gutenberg. (If an ad comes up, make sure you skip it.)







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Readings: 

• "Who needs a bulky textbook?"

• SLJ's 2011 Technology Survey: Things Are Changing. Fast.

• "Textbook-free Schools Share Experiences, Insights"

• " The App Squad: SLJ's advisors weigh in on kids' book apps
• Student Comprehension of Books in Kindle and Traditional Formats
by Michael Milone, a research psychologist and educational writer at Renaissance Learning. He asked students in two fourth-grade classes located in the Upper Midwest to read up to six books from a selected list of a dozen popular fiction titles that included Eleanor Estes's Ginger Pye (Harcourt, 1951), Gary Paulsen's Lawn Boy (Random, 2007), Mary Pope Osborne's Sunset of the Sabertooth The 31 students—who read a total of 135 books, 69 on the Kindle and 66 in print—were asked to alternate between reading half of the books on the Kindle and the other half in a bound, printed format.

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Teachers and eBooks: What's the Story?
View the Recording
Read the Chat TranscriptFeb 8, 2011: e-Book Lending and Borrowing for Beginners

Webinar
Public Chat Transcript

Jan 11, 2011: eReader Device Comparison
WebinarPublic Chat Transcript

Watch and listen to: "eBooks, eReaders and the Role of Mobile Devices" and

March 8, 2011: Ereaders in the Classroom

"Using eBooks to Motivate Students"

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Kansas State Dept of Ed. 
This webpage contains open access resources and digital textbooks that are available within the public domain. They are not copyrighted and may be customized, modified, or combined with other materials.


Enjoy these resources! It was a pleasure working with you this semester. The enthusiasm in some of your posts was contagious. Through the years I've worked with plenty of districts that didn't encourage their employees to strive and reach for new goals. I hope this course has convinced you that over the next few years we're going to see exponential growth in the use of eBooks for all purposes. Education won't be far behind, and you, the participants of this course, will be the leaders of this movement.