Final Projects--due by midnight--5/10/13

This has been a unique pilot project, so thank you for your willingness to experiment in this 21st century endeavor.


On the 15th expect to present your completed work (aka 'Final Project') to me, your course peers, Mr. Ruscito, the Superintendent, and any other interested parties.

I have made lots of personalized changes this semester to suit the needs of this cohort, so don't focus upon the Final Project requirements on the syllabus. Instead use the information below for this semester.

Your Final Projects will be due by Midnight on Friday, May 10th.

You will create a new screencast and place its link (please triple-check to make sure it works) under the Final Projects posting on this blog.  Additionally, you will prepare a 6-8 minute presentation that will be given live on 5/15/13 in the WHS Library from 4-6.

The live presentation will be very similar to the Final Project screencast, but will provide more opportunity for discussion, demonstration, and Q & A from the audience (Principal, Superintendent, URI representatives...).

Both the screencast and the live presentation should include the following:

• A demonstration of your finished project (at least finished for the time-being b/c most of these projects will continue to develop over the next year)
• The practical uses you foresee for your students and yourself.
• How you envision this project will evolve over the next school year and over the next 5 years.
• The potential benefit to teaching and learning, as well as the financial benefit to the district or state, as a whole.
• Include directions for anyone watching about how to find your project on their own.  (what is the url, site it was uploaded to, saved location...), so that the world can benefit from your work.
• Lastly, please add any other important details that you feel should be mentioned or shared.

Additionally, for anyone that may be interested, there may be several opportunities to continue to share your experiences, after the semester closes.  


Holly Walsh, the Instructional Technology and eLearning staff member at RIDE, has expressed some interest in seeing your finished projects and possibly having some of you present them with me at the next "Innovations through Technology" conference that RIDE sponsors on October 5th, 2013.

Also, Senator O'Neill, the Chairman of the Joint Legislative Commission to Study the Use of eTextbooks in RI, has expressed interest in hearing about the Final Projects that you have developed.

I would like to thank all who participated for allowing me to lead you through this process and I look forward to continuing our collaboration in the future.

Once again, I our last face-to-face class is scheduled at WHS, in the Library, on May 15th from 4-6pm.  



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 questions as they come in.

Good Luck!

922-Sessions 11---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, 
• 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 Final Projects are due by midnight EST Friday, 5/10 which gives you two weeks to pull everything together.)    Let's tentatively plan on meeting for our last f2f meeting on the following Wednesday, 5/15 (3-6).  

This has been a unique pilot project, so thank you for your willingness to experiment in this 21st century endeavor.

On the 15th expect to present your completed work to me, your course peers, Mr. Ruscito, the Superintendent, and any other interested parties.

I have made lots of personalized changes this semester to suit the needs of this cohort, so don't focus upon the Final Project requirements on the syllabus. Instead use the information below for this semester.

Your Final Projects will be due by Midnight on Friday, May 10th.

You will create an additional screencast and place its link under the Final Project posting on this blog. (available by Wed. 5/8).  Additionally, you will prepare a 6-8 minute presentation that will be given live on 5/15.

The live presentation will be very similar to the Final Project screencast, but will provide more opportunity for discussion, and Q & A.

Both the screencast and the live presentation should include the following:

• A demonstration of your finished project (at least finished for the time-being b/c most of these projects will continue to develop over the next year)
• The practical uses you foresee for your students and yourself.
• How you envision this project will evolve over the next school year and over the next 5 years.
• The potential benefit to teaching and learning, as well as the financial benefit to the district or state, as a whole.
• Include directions for anyone watching about how to find your project on their own.  (what is the url, site it was uploaded to, save location...)
• Lastly, please add any other important details that you feel should be mentioned or shared.

Additionally, there may be several opportunities, after the semester closes, for anyone that may be interested.  


Holly Walsh,the Instructional Technology and eLearning staff member at RIDE, has expressed some interest in seeing your finished projects and possibly having some of you present them with me at the next "Innovations through Technology" conference that RIDE sponsors.

Also, Senator O'Neill, the Chairman of the Joint Legislative Commission to Study the Use of eTextbooks in RI, has expressed interest in hearing about the Final Projects that you have developed.

Once again,I would like to have our last face-to-face class at WHS on May 15th from 3-6pm.


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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 11.

As I stated above, your Final Projects will be due by midnight of May 10th.  


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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.

922-Session 10--Creating an OER from scratch

We'll start this week with a brief video on Carnegie Mellon's "Open Learning Initiative", then transition to a Curriki unit on "Creating an OER from Scratch".

I  hope that video gave you a brief snapshot of what the future will look like soon.  As the ability of technology to aid teachers increases exponentially, very quickly we will all begin to see practical models like this integrated into  K-12 schools.  The potential is mind-boggling, so I thought that this video would help inspire you and give you a little extra fuel for the next few weeks.

The focus of this session will be on a unit from the OERI project in Curriki.  It's called, "Creating an OER from Scratch".  Most of the links can be found in the syllabus.  This session will include:

• Exposure to an array of OER resource environments;
• Recognizing the value of creating and publishing curriculum within an OER environment;
• Constructing relevant curriculum using a well-defined model;
• Appropriately integrating technology into your curriculum;
• Studying the techniques of publishing to an OER environment; and
• Publishing a curriculum module to Curriki.

I know that many of you may have plans for the April vacation next week, so I'll move our deadline to post your responses to S10 until Wed., April 24th. That should give you some time to enjoy the vacation and still have a few extra days when you get back to create your next screencast. This screencast's link will be posted under S10's entry below and will include an update on what you have done since the last screencast (several weeks ago) and also describe what goals you would like to reach regarding your digital chapter(s) by the end of the semester. (Midnight, Friday, May 10th)

922-Session 9-iPads and iBooks

Welcome to Session 9

You can't talk about eBooks and Digital Content  and not address Apple's dominance in the tablet arena.  There's no doubt that their current market share (51% in 2012) is a force to be reckoned with.  I've taught this course a few times before, but its content and focus has shifted a tremendous amount.  What was important and trendy in the 2010 Spring semester is very different today.  The first iPads didn't hit the shelves until April of 2010.  No one could have predicted the explosive growth, so given this information I've decided to spend the bulk of this week on Apple's iPad and the new iBooks product.  

In March of 2012 Apple came out with their newest version of the iPad.  Some call it the iPad 3, but that's not official.

Learn about it here, but I warn you, you'll probably want to buy one after this:

Then see some of the engineers demo the product:

And lastly, here are some of the additional features:

Now let's transition to their most recent publicity hype for the new iBooks project called the Apple Education Event read about it here.  Let's remember though that as interesting as this sounds it's all just a big commercial. Apple's in the business of making money, so you won't find many mentions of Open Content.  The first 10 minutes are just talking, but the demonstration starts around minute 10.   

Now a few of you may be interested in learning how to create books using Apple's iBooks Author tool.  It may be too advanced for most of you, but if you ever want to learn how you can always come back to our class web blog here and refresh your memories. We hear about that here.

Now if you wanted to find textbooks for your iPad then you can see an overview here:

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Now the flipside

We've now seen the promos, infomercials, and Apple employee demos, so let's balance things out with some outside reviews, analysis, and feedback.


First let's start with a webcast recording from Edukwest entitled: "What do iBooks mean for the eBook/eTextbook industry?"

Summary: The eTextbook industry got a big publicity and market education boost with Apple’s announcements in 2012. What it didn’t get was the market revolution it could have.





You can take a break now!  Go for a walk and clear your head.  I'm sure that's been a lot of video.  When you come back I'd like you to read, "The new iPad (2012) review"  from iMore.  They have a nice breakdown of the pros, cons, and overall assessment.
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Next you can use the following three sections as a go-to guide to help you answer most of the faq's.

2012 iPad buyer's guide

How to sell your old iPad before upgrading to the new iPad Buy vs upgrade vs skip: Should you get the new iPad? iPad 2 vs the new iPad: Which should you get? New iPad vs BlackBerry PlayBook vs Amazon Kindle Fire: Should you go big or go budget?

AT&T vs Verizon: Which 4G LTE new iPad should you get? Rogers vs Bell vs Telus: Which 4G LTE new iPad should Canadians get? 16GB vs 32GB vs 64GB: Which new iPad storage capacity should you get? Black vs white: Which new iPad should you choose?

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2012 iPad user's guide

How to set up your new iPad with iCloud or iTunes How to use: Email, iMessage, Contacts,Dictation, Wi-Fi Hotspot (Tethering),Playlists, Twitter, Facebook, Skype,AirPrint, AirPlay, Dictation, Find my iPad

• iOS 5 walkthrough, iOS 5.1 update
• How to get: Music, Movies, & TV Shows,Apps & Game, iBooks & Kindle books,Magazines & Newspapers

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I hope I didn't drown you too much in everything 'iPad'.  And if you didn't finish practicing embedding some Google Forms into your digital textbook (assigned under Session 8), then please try to complete it asap.

We have two more weeks until RI school's  April Break, so let's try to add as much material as we can to our eTextbook project before then and maybe we can take a week off from this work for vacation.