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Create podcasts of students tests and novels to enhance comprehension, increase interest in reading, and improve test results.

The students created enhanced podcasts in Spanish in which they performed a short telephone conversation in the target language utilizing specific vocabulary.

Students will use Comic Life to make comic books featuring poetry superheroes. Once the panels are done, they will be exported as individual pictures and put into iMovie, where students will incorporate their stills, record voiceovers, and use sound effects to create movie versions of their comic books.

After reviewing different types of triangles using the ActivBoard, United Streaming Videos and OAT standards-based instruction, the children searched the building and grounds for different types of triangles. They identified and photographed different types of triangles based on side length and angle measure. With the help of the TRT, the students uploaded pictures into Comic Life where they analyzed and evaluated the pictures and synthesized the information into a Comic Life book page as they became experts of their assigned triangle.

It snowed in Happy Valley Monday. Yes, snow after Finals Week. In the face of such hardships, the staff of ETS soldiered on and continued the work of bringing technology innovation to education.

Cole Camplese, ETS director, and Chris Millet, manager, advanced learning projects, are at Harvard Law School for the Berkman@10, The Future of the Internet event. Cole is posting updates on his blog. They are worth reading as a lot of what is being discussed has a lot of relevance for teaching and learning with technology.

Brett Bixler, lead instructional designer, recently blogged at the Educational Gaming Commons on comic books and education. He even has a few ideas on how to work Web 2.0 into them.

Elizabeth Pyatt, instructional designer, posted a “hot team paper” on social ratings and their educational impact. Hot teams, by the way, are a group within ETS that takes some time to examine an emerging technology to see if it has any potential for use in education.

Elizabeth also announced new ANGEL Town Hall meetings to discuss the upcoming ANGEL upgrade to 7.2.

Some news from around ETS:

Faculty, staff invited to participate in beta test of enhanced version of Turnitin

Turnitin is conducting a beta test of a new, enhanced version of their Web-based plagiarism prevention resource, and faculty and staff are invited to participate. Some of the enhancements being evaluated include a redesigned interface, expanded student paper databases, improved Originality Reports, and expanded content databases.

For more information about participating in the beta test and to see demonstrations of some of the enhancements, please attend one of two informative online sessions offered Thursday, May 15 at 1:00 p.m. or Friday, May 16 at 10:00 a.m. in the Adobe Connect meeting room at https://breeze.psu.edu/turnitin/.

Before joining a Connect meeting, please read through the Getting Started information at http://meeting.psu.edu/quickstart and test your connection with our generic test meeting room at https://breeze.psu.edu/testmeetingroom/. Questions can be directed to turnitin@psu.edu.

ANGEL to be upgraded to version 7.2 weekend of July 19

During the weekend of July 19, Information Technology Services (ITS) plans to upgrade Penn State’s Course Management System, ANGEL, from version 7.1 to 7.2. The new version will feature enhancements to several existing tools, and several new tools will help course editors perform administrative tasks. For the most part, however, the interface and functionality will remain familiar to users.

Enhanced tools include course/group mail, chat, reports, and the HTML editor used in text entry fields.

Using the ANGEL 7.2 mail tool, users will be able to access mail from all their courses and groups at once, either from a component on the My Profile page or from within a course or group.

The chat tool, which has a new look, will open in a new window. As messages are posted, the screen will refresh instantly, with no lag time. A related chat tool, called Live Office Hours, provides a way for instructors to meet with students individually online. As students select the link for the Live Office Hours chat, they are placed in a queue, then allowed into the chat one at a time. Each student can only see his/her own messages and those of the instructor. When the instructor sets up the times/dates for Live Office Hours, these times and dates are automatically added to the course calendar.

On the course Report tab, the same types of reports can be generated as before; however, users will see changes to the names of some fields and the arrangement of the screen. Once a report is generated, a user can click the new Print Preview button to generate a PDF to print or save.

The new inline HTML editor will be integrated with each text area, rather than opening in a new window as before. The tool will feature improved functionality, including a more robust equation editor and the ability to create form fields. The equation editor, which includes the functionality of the WebEQ application, allows a user to build an equation right within an ANGEL text area, eliminating the need to build an equation using an application outside ANGEL, then importing it. The HTML editor, including the improved equation editor, will be available to students in a quiz essay question.

New tools in ANGEL 7.2 include a new Permissions tab within the roster editor and a Date Manager for lesson content items.

Within the roster editor, when an instructor is editing the entry for a course member, the settings will be arranged on two tabs. The first contains the familiar user settings. The second is the new Permissions tab. Here, an instructor can assign read/write or read-only permission for chat, mail, and discussion forums. When assigning permissions to a fellow course editor, the instructor can grant or deny permission to edit various portions of the course.

In ANGEL 7.1, instructors assign start and end dates for lesson content items within the settings for each individual item. In ANGEL 7.2, a new Date Manager located on the Manage tab streamlines this task. It allows an instructor to set dates for all content items in a single location. If the course is then copied into another section, for example, in a subsequent term, the dates can be adjusted more easily.

While the new version of ANGEL is being implemented the weekend of July 19 this year, ITS anticipates returning to its schedule of performing the upgrade between the spring and summer I terms in the future.

For any questions, contact ANGEL support at angelsupport@psu.edu.

That’s all for this week’s BuzzLion. If you have anything of interest you would like us to mention here, please email jco11@psu.edu. Thanks for reading!

Mathematics is a very important life skill. However, students do not always do as well as they could because they do not understand why math is relevant to their everyday lives. In this project we will see how math is used in the real world. We will do a variety of activities that focus on home economics. Students will be given the opportunity to practice computational and problem-solving skills as they learn how incomes and expenses affect the finances and, ultimately, the lifestyles of different sizes of families. This will primarily be an individually graded project; however, there will be an ungraded group component. Students will write a family story, create a family portrait, and design an individual Keynote presentation, all of which will be part their trimester project grade. They will also receive an individual participation grade, as this project relies heavily on student interaction and discussion. The group component will be in the form of group discussion/work during class time.

Creates visual map of relationships between authors based on readers collections

ADE Eh Channel Podcast

Nous produisons des émissions de radio diffusée sur iTunes depuis 5 ans. Le nom de la radio est CXIT et la fréquence fictive est le 81,5 WB. Notre 17e émission est en préparation.

Mes élèves de 6e année enseignent à des personnes âgées de la communauté comment utiliser un MacBook à raison d'une heure par semaine. En novembre 2008, ces aînés produiront une site internet grâce à ce qu'ils auront appris aurpès des jeunes de 11-12 ans.

This article overviews the explosion of technologies which are available for businesses, students, educators or for any person to post information, photos, video, audio etc..

The New Media Consortium (NMC) announced today the call for proposals for the 2008-09 NMC Virtual Learning Prize, a $100,000 competitive program of awards

Most people who have reached the high vistas of the Twitter Life Cycle curve have at least one, if not many small stories where they got information, a contact, a resource from twitter that they would not have gotten anywhere else. Or in such a timely fashion.

So here is one more, how I long shoot tweet in the air got me technical info I needed.

The NMC web site runs in drupal (no snark today). We use the TinyMCE module to give our users, and our office staff who create a lot of the content, a visual text editor. But I have had this nibbling problem which will likely seem nothing to a drupal-ista. I have our CSS styles include classes for hyperlinks, so that adding something like class="pdf" to an href tag will insert a small file type icon:

It is as simple as

(See the <a href="/pdf/virtual-learning-prize-PR.pdf" class="pdf">press release</a>.)

I have a few classes for quicktime links, word docs, rss feeds, they all look something like:

.pdf { background: url('images/pdf.gif') no-repeat; padding-left: 14px; }

But the problem was I would edit these in the drupal plain text editor, since I love seeing the HTML code, but if someone else in our office went to edit the content (like to fix one of my typos), when they went into the TinyMCE text editor and then saved their work, the damn class would be stripped from the source.

So I spend a lot of time re-editing our pages to get the damn icons back. I knew there was some place in the pile of the drupal module files to fix it, but never quite found it. So yesterday, in a total shot in the dark, I heaved a Twitter Hail Mary pass:

which is pretty damned obscure.

And then, in my email box this morning was an email from Michael Harris- who pointed out the part of the drupal.module code to add this, changing:

$init['extended_valid_elements'] = array(’a[href|target|name|title|onclick]‘);

to read:

$init['extended_valid_elements'] = array(’a[href|class|target|name|title|onclick]‘);

and it works! For the NMC staff accounts, I add a list of extra CSS classes to their TinyMCE profile:

and when they edit a hyperlink in the visual editor, they have a nice drop down of CSS classes they can apply:

So now they can link and edit away and not eat my classes!

So thanks twitter, thanks Michael Harris (I’d send you a foamee if I knew your twitter account).

This is by no means a unique story anymore, but it still thrills me to death when It Just Works.

But as a closing lesson, it is not just twitter that makes this possible. If I created a twitter account, and started tossing my questions, needs out into the wind, I’d be the tree falling in the woods with no one around. Twitter is the vehicle- it is that I have been here more than a year growing, following, and cultivating my network, that people hear the messages. So the network is crucial here, and we need to be talking more about the ways newbies can go about building their useful network. And a lot of it is just being in that network, participating, giving back.

Yes, I fall back on the Churchill quote:

Ruckus fails to quell University online music piracy

The introduction of the free, ad-supported music downloading service, Ruckus, in December 2006 has not eliminated the problem of illegal downloading on campus. This academic year alone, at least four undergraduate students received pre-litigation letters from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) as part of a batch of 417 letters sent to students at 16 colleges nationwide.

Speakers: David Goodhart, Professor John Keane, Professor Lord Bhikhu Parekh. Chair: Professor Lord Tony Giddens

A stunning new Second Life art show will be opening this Saturday on NMC Campus. “Kiss the Sky” is the definitive exhibition of Hyperformalism in the world of Second Life®, and is a brand new collection of Second Life art curated by DC Spensley (aka DanCoyote Antonelli).

Virtual worlds are a place for discovering new territories and exploring meaning outside the context of the material world. Even in virtual worlds there is an avant garde, a native artform spawned from unique conditions. “Kiss the Sky” is an exhibition of artists that have been wowing viewers since 2006 with art installations indigenous to the virtual world that artist/curator DC Spensley calls Hyperformalism.

We caught up today with DC and recorded a brief interview where he talked about the new show, what Hyperformalism is, and why he thinks this is a historical moment for these Second Life artists. Be sure to check out his new Hyperformalism Ning social networking site.

Interview with DanCoyote (13.3 Mb MP3, 19:22)

On May 17, 2008, 12PM PST, DC will unveil “Kiss the Sky” the definitive group exhibition of Hyperformalism as expressed by over a dozen artists working the discipline in Second Life.

Artists included are the most notable creators in the virtual world of Second Life, chosen specifically for their Hyperformal direction. On display are Chance Abattoir, Vlad Bjornson, nand Nerd, Selavy Oh, Adam Ramona, Nebulosus Severine, AngryBeth Shortbread, Sasun Steinbeck, Sabine Stonebender, Seifert Surface, elros Tuominen, Juria Yoshikawa, and i7o Zhu.

The reception and exhibit are at the NMC Arts Lab (43, 135, 706)

Hyperformalism is non-figurative abstraction in hyper-medium and has been known to include abstract objects arranged in simulated space, navigable on a network as well as expressions of reactive and interactive artwork behaviors and geometric or algorithmic pattern play in 2, 3, and 4 dimensions. This list is far from comprehensive. Because Hyperformalism is not representational, viewer relationships are less fettered by pre-existing symbolic weight and artworks encourage fascination with form for its own sake. The virtual world provides the ability to liberate the work from scale constraints and provides a perfect context for this post-conceptualist form.

With a figure in the picture, nobody notices the landscape. Hyperformalism proposes that that by removing the comfortable cliché of anthropocentricism a viewer will be more open to a whole other class of experiences that resonate on a more basic level of awareness and reflect back to the viewer their own humanity. The perception of immersion and variable point of view implicates the viewer into unique relationships with the work destroying all of the usual boundaries between the viewer and the work.

While space in virtual worlds is a simulation, place can be real. In fact art experiences are the only thing that can be real in both the virtual and material worlds at the same time. Abstractions that exist as discoverable objects are somewhere between object and concept. It is the state of half existence between object and concept that differentiates formal abstraction in virtual worlds from preceeding expressions of formalism, minimalism and abstract expressionism. Hyperformalism is not Modernism, it is not Post-modernism because it is native to a continuum where only the human mind can visit and where the body and the ideological weight of the figure are not the default fixed point of view.

A stunning new Second Life art show will be opening this Saturday on NMC Campus. “Kiss the Sky” is the definitive exhibition of Hyperformalism in the world of Second Life®, and is a brand new collection of Second Life art curated by DC Spensley (aka DanCoyote Antonelli).

Virtual worlds are a place for discovering new territories and exploring meaning outside the context of the material world. Even in virtual worlds there is an avant garde, a native artform spawned from unique conditions. “Kiss the Sky” is an exhibition of artists that have been wowing viewers since 2006 with art installations indigenous to the virtual world that artist/curator DC Spensley calls Hyperformalism.

We caught up today with DC and recorded a brief interview where he talked about the new show, what Hyperformalism is, and why he thinks this is a historical moment for these Second Life artists. Be sure to check out his new Hyperformalism Ning social networking site.

Interview with DanCoyote (13.3 Mb MP3, 19:22)

On May 17, 2008, 12PM PST, DC will unveil “Kiss the Sky” the definitive group exhibition of Hyperformalism as expressed by over a dozen artists working the discipline in Second Life.

Artists included are the most notable creators in the virtual world of Second Life, chosen specifically for their Hyperformal direction. On display are Chance Abattoir, Vlad Bjornson, nand Nerd, Selavy Oh, Adam Ramona, Nebulosus Severine, AngryBeth Shortbread, Sasun Steinbeck, Sabine Stonebender, Seifert Surface, elros Tuominen, Juria Yoshikawa, and i7o Zhu.

The reception and exhibit are at the NMC Arts Lab (43, 135, 706)

Hyperformalism is non-figurative abstraction in hyper-medium and has been known to include abstract objects arranged in simulated space, navigable on a network as well as expressions of reactive and interactive artwork behaviors and geometric or algorithmic pattern play in 2, 3, and 4 dimensions. This list is far from comprehensive. Because Hyperformalism is not representational, viewer relationships are less fettered by pre-existing symbolic weight and artworks encourage fascination with form for its own sake. The virtual world provides the ability to liberate the work from scale constraints and provides a perfect context for this post-conceptualist form.

With a figure in the picture, nobody notices the landscape. Hyperformalism proposes that that by removing the comfortable cliché of anthropocentricism a viewer will be more open to a whole other class of experiences that resonate on a more basic level of awareness and reflect back to the viewer their own humanity. The perception of immersion and variable point of view implicates the viewer into unique relationships with the work destroying all of the usual boundaries between the viewer and the work.

While space in virtual worlds is a simulation, place can be real. In fact art experiences are the only thing that can be real in both the virtual and material worlds at the same time. Abstractions that exist as discoverable objects are somewhere between object and concept. It is the state of half existence between object and concept that differentiates formal abstraction in virtual worlds from preceeding expressions of formalism, minimalism and abstract expressionism. Hyperformalism is not Modernism, it is not Post-modernism because it is native to a continuum where only the human mind can visit and where the body and the ideological weight of the figure are not the default fixed point of view.

New mobile technologies are emerging that can change--and even save--our lives.

Look for two events coming up tied to the International Day for Sharing Life Stories, which is Friday, May 16, 2008. During the day, you can be in a Second Life story circle! Any group in SL can get self-organized and participate.

In each story circle, each teller will prompt the next teller the American Indian way, by handing him/her a talking stick.

• Organize a group! Make sure at least one member has the talking stick, which anyone can get by visiting the SL Campusfor the Center for Digital Storytelling at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Teaching%202/209/109/23 and opening the pink box in front of the screen by the dome.
• There should be one talking stick per circle. Circles should have 10 people or less. If more folks show up, they initiate a new story circle
• The topic is a ‘miracle story’, no religious meaning implied: a story centered by what, by its impact on your life and/or surprise, felt like a ‘miracle’ to the teller - quoting Joe Lambert - “from ‘life’s little miracles’ as in the way a Buddhist might say if you pay attention every moment is a miracle, to those truly metaphysical and inexplicable events in our lives that suggest transcendent power or possibility”.

Your group should do this activity at noon, Friday May 16 for about 20 minutes.

On Saturday, May 17, the Center for Digital Storytelling is organizing a panel discussion at their home in Second Life. Join the activities at 10:00 AM PDT at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Teaching%202/209/109/23

The Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) and the Museum of the Person are celebrating the International Day for Sharing Life Stories on May 16. The following day – May 17 – the CDS is proposing a reflection on storytelling in virtual environments in the form of a panel in Second Life. The approaches to this theme will be very different as a result of the panelists’ distinct academic backgrounds.

Panelists include:

• Jen Friedberg, Multimedia Producer, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
• Dale Jarvis - Storyteller, folklorist, and performer
• Adriene Jenik - Telecommunications media artist & Assoc. Professor, UCSD
• Joan Llobera - PhD candidate, Starlab, Barcelona, Spain
• Joe Sanchez - PhD student, School of Information, UT Austin
• Vicki Smith - Visual Artist, Aotearoa, New Zealand

Moderators are Joe Lambert (Center for Digital Storytelling) and Ana Boa-Ventura (UT Austin).