There'a a great summer conference opportunity in Salisbury, Maryland. Here's the info for the 2007 Mid-Atalantic Handheld & Emerging Technology Conference!

The Mid-Atlantic Handheld Conference (MAHC) is pleased to announce that we have expanded and grown into the Mid-Atlantic Handheld & Emerging Technology Conference (MAHETC)! This growth and expansion is a result of input from past conference attendees and the conference committee’s desire to meet the needs of local, regional, and national educators. Visit the conference website at: www.seaford.k12.de.us/mahc

This year’s conference will take place on the campus of Salisbury University (Maryland) on July 25-26, 2007. The main focus of the conference will continue to be handheld computers but there will also be sessions showcasing emerging technologies. Please note: this is a full 2-day conference with both days offering attendees keynote addresses, half-day hands-on workshops, concurrent sessions, and door prizes!

Some of the highlights of MAHETC 2007 include:

• Sessions, workshops, and keynote by Tony Vincent
• Sessions, workshops, and keynote by Karen Fasimpaur (K12 Handhelds)
• Sessions & workshops by Mike Curtis
• Conference wiki – http://mahc.wikispaces.com
• Cool Door Prizes
• Lunch provided with registration!
• Network with innovative educators

Session and Workshop Topics

• Handheld Computer Sessions
• Vodcasting (video podcasting)
• Podcasting
• Educational Gaming
• Wikis and blogging
• Response Pads
• Mobile Technologies
• Network Technologies

We also invite you to submit a proposal to present at this year’s conference. This is a great way to share your wealth of knowledge to other educators who are integrating technology to increase student achievement! Presenters also receive a gift card from BestBuy and their registration fee is waived.

For more information on submitting a proposal and general information about MAHETC 2007, visit the website at: www.seaford.k12.de.us/mahc

We look forward to seeing you in July,
MAHETC Planning Committee

Labels: events

Leading Step's Grammar Games: Constructor is a new Palm application and you can download a free 15-day trial.

In game mode, students answer questions to earn puzzle pieces. The questions are completely customizable. Constructor is programmed with hundreds of sentences and students tap specified parts of speech in those sentences. Constructor allows you to specify a "Game Plan" that includes the types of questions and what kinds of sentences that will be used. Game Plans can be as simple as finding nouns in simple sentences to as complicated as identifying the kind of infinitive in sentences with predicate nominatives. The teacher can set a Game Plan on her handheld and beam it to student handhelds. Because it's so flexible, Constructor can be used in elementary, middle, and high school classrooms. In addition, Constructor is set up to support up to eight users on one handheld. The users' answers are tracked and can be reviewed. Games can take some time to finish, as students may answer up to 80 questions to win up to 50 puzzle pieces. It's nice that there's always a help icon for students to tap for helpful grammar information.

Constructor retails for $14.95, but if you plan to purchase more than 10 licenses, you can contact the company to receive a bulk discount.

Labels: palm

Making videos can be wonderful learning experiences. Although the process is most times more important than the final product, there are many tips and tricks that can really help videos shine.

If you're producing digital videos, you're probably using Apple's iMovie. The audio podcast, iLifeZone Episode 18, explains a lot of ins and outs of digital video you should know. Much of the episode is spent talking about shooting the video and many of the tips apply to Windows Movie Maker as well. If you don't have time to listen to the 40 minute program, check out iLifeZone's detailed show notes.

Earlier this month I presented the workshop Make Marvelous Movies at the Minnesota TIES conference. There are a lot of good reasons to make movies and so many great ideas for student-made videos. I showed plenty of example movies during the workshop to demonstrate the video concepts I was teaching. Several of the examples came from videos I have made in the past few years with students, including Explorer Interviews and Character Counts Clips. You can read about some of the information from the workshop in this handout.

Once a video is complete, there are certainly a number of options for sharing it. It can be played for an audience, put on school web site, posted to services like Google Video, or exported to a format for handheld computers and iPods. I like to export my videos as MPEG-4 (.mp4) because this is a standard format that can be played by many software applications and devices. And like audio productions, video productions can be put into an RSS feed and become a video podcast.

Labels: video

Last month Dan Schmit, podcaster, author of KidCast: Podcasting in the Classroom, and fellow Nebraskan, posted his keynote presentation from the iPod and Podcasting Users Conference in Carrollton-Farmers Branch, Texas. Here are my notes from viewing Dan's video podcast:

• According to some market research, there are about 65,000 podcasts and 4.5 million active listeners. By 2010, this number of active listeners is expected to be 56 million.
• Dan sees three ways to use podcasts in education: curricular supplement, professional development, and academic expression.
• Dan teaches preservice teachers. Besides writing a paper, these students must also turn the paper into a podcast discussion of what they learned.
• Dan recommends making students specialists when it comes to classroom podcasts. Some are sound engineers, some are email checkers, and others are publishers.
• Teachers need to design podcasts so that they can be maintained over time. Many classrooms start a podcast but then are unable to keep them going.
• 80% of podcasting is working with content and 20% is spent on production.
• Use rubrics that measure what you value in a podcast. Again, content should be more important than production value in the evaluation.
• Odeo is a podcast directory. It also lets you record and post podcasts right from inside of your web browser.
• Gcast allows you to podcast from your mobile phone.
• Although you can use iMovie and Movie Maker to make videos for video podcasts (sometimes called video blog or vlogs), Dan likes Vlog It! (Windows, $29) and Videocue (Macintosh, $40). These programs include teleprompter and greenscreen features.

Dan shares over 20 innovative strategies and models for educational podcasts:

• Sound Seeing Tour: Take portable recorders on fields trips. The podcasters describes what they are seeing, thinking, and feeling as they move through museums, habitats, historical sites, etc.
• Daily Reporter: Each student takes a turn telling about the school day or special school event.
• Student Almanac: Students pick a day in a given month and create a listing of facts about that date. They could include famous birthdays, historical events, weather observations, etc. Episodes can be recorded ahead of time and then posted on the proper date.
• Process Streams: Record a movie of what's been written on an interactive whiteboard. Examples include diagrams of processes and steps to math problems.
• Study Guides: Students make unit review for tests and quizzes.
• Sound Stories: Acting out student-written stories and dramas. Dan suggests making these serial episodes so listeners have to tune in again to see how the story unfolds.
• Poetry Slam: Create original poems and record them expressively. Publish them separately or as collections of poems.
• Our View: Students participant in a round table discussion about a classroom topic or news story. Opinions are shared constructively.
• Today in History: Students are assigned a day each month to tell about the historical events that took place on that date. Students research context, events, and implications.
• Lost in Time:Quiz show where students describe a date or event in history without giving it away. Listeners email their guesses for the date.
• Add It Up: Students design mathematical puzzles with hints. Listeners can email their answers to the podcasters.
• Where in the World: A global podcasting quiz show where students post hints about where they live. Listeners email their guesses. Check it out in iTunes.
• Word of a Day: Students select a new word to teach others. Students could go to people to see if they know what the word means and how to spell it.
• Book Talk: Review books in a podcast.
• Spelling Bee: Publish your weekly spelling list as a podcast.
• Pod Pals: Create a podcast for students in a partner school. Send episodes back and forth to get to know each other.
• Pet Talk: Everyone loves to talk about their pets. Students can talk about topics like pet selection, habitats, care, and training.
• Career Talk: Record job shadowing experiences. This could be organized through a school's guidance counseling office.
• Liar's Club: Student listeners are the fact checkers for this podcast because the episode contains factual information and some inaccuracies. The following episode addresses the inaccuracies of the previous show.
• Sport Stats: Connect sports statistics to what they mean to coaches, athletes, and fans.
• Sign Casting: Video podcasting for the hearing impaired.

To download the two-part video podcast, subscribe to the KidCast podcast. Or, view the videos online: Episode 33 and Episode 34.

Labels: podcasting

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Labels: mobile internet, palm, pocket pc, soft reset

Users of Apple's GarageBand 3 (part of iLife '06) are familiar with its built-in "podcast studio." The studio is complete with pre-made jingles that you just drag-and-drop into a GarageBand track. With so many podcasts made with GarageBand out there, you might start to notice that those same default jingles are used in many podcast episodes.

Subscribers to Apple's .Mac suite of services ($99 per year) can download dozens of additional jingles for free. Just log in to your .Mac account, click Member Central in the list along the left side of the page, and then click Free jingles + voiceovers. Listed are jingles in nine different categories, including Alternative Rock, Blues, Cinematic, Country, Electronic, Jazz, Rock & Pop, Urban, and World. There's over 800MB in free music for podcasts! Downloads from .Mac's Member Central are usually available for a few months. If you are a .Mac member, download them soon before they disappear.

Unfortunately, you have to install each of the .Mac Podcast Packs separately, but once they are installed, you have access to great podcasting music. Just choose Show Loop Browser from GarageBand's Control menu. Many of the jingles have different lengths, depending on your needs.

Also included are 17 professional voiceover tracks by Joe Cipriano. You're sure to recognize his voice as he's done voiceover work for broadcast networks like ABC and FOX. His recordings are short segments like, "Now, welcome back to the show," and "Coming up next in our show..."

With the 136 new sound files included in the .Mac Podcast Packs, your podcast can have jingles different from the defaults everyone else is using.

Labels: podcasting