On Saturday I'll be joining an incredible lineup of educators and thought leaders at TEDxNYED (www.tedxnyed.com). Tickets are still available (click on 'Attend).

I'll be sharing some thoughts on Formative Learning and Assessment and do my best to connect them to the day's theme of Inside-Outside.

I'm having fun putting together the visual elements - references to look forward to include: King's Quest, Zelda, Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto, Back to the Future, Toasters, Inkjet Printers, The Terminator, and more!

Hope to see you there!

This week I'll be heading down to the iPad Summit in Atlanta. I'm putting two links that will be used in one of my sessions titled Explaining Everything: Screencasting and Qualitative Formative Assessment.

Option 1 (Suggested for 8-9 People)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/k7vvnet02w4t47q/bradybunch.png

Option 2 (Suggested for 3-4 People)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xyr3iy99z0wew6b/muppetIntroBG.png

The use of these images falls into a grey area of education fair use. Will take down links upon request from copyright holder!

Also, check out the screenshot below. It's from the iPad App Store in Australia and New Zealand. Explain Everything was featured as on the front page as the first app for all categories. Pretty cool!

Here is the slide deck for my session (content will probably be updated as the date nears): http://www.haikudeck.com/p/29wctjexHc/ipad-summit-2013

It's always nice when my daily Google searches come up with something like this.

It's from the Adventures in Parenting blog on the New York Times. Here is the full article: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/parents-of-the-touch-screen-generation-dont-free-your-ipad-yet/

It is a response to another article that recently appeared in The Atlantic.

Yesterday I mentioned that one of my three big projects for 2013 was writing a book. My colleague, Stephen Valentine (@sjvalentine), and I are making a bold attempt to both articulate and model leadership and collaboration in a time where access to information and people are ubiquitous and  The challenge is to produce something that is relevant, interesting, and innovative while not presuming, overstating, or generalizing. Steve has written about this project on his blog: www.refreshingwednesday.com.

Last year I attended a talk by Dr. David Reinking about his work with design experiments (same vein as design-based research). In this presentation to Teachers College doctoral students and faculty, he said that one of the best things about this type of research was that even if a design study appears to be a failure from the outside, there is always something to write about as the reasons for the perceived failure are helpful for other design researchers. So if Steve and I should stumble, or even 'fail,'  we still will learn and acquire new insights to share with others. I don't see how any aspect of this experience can be a failure.

There is a community that gets together on Twitter every Saturday morning for something called #satchat, a conversation for school administrators and educators to discuss different ideas and challenges. We want to add to this type of dialogue by engaging a conversation about leading in an online world. So starting this Thursday 1/3 at 9 PM ET (after the kids have gone to bed) Steve and I are going to moderate a weekly chat with the hashtag #leadingonline to share and explore ideas that up until this week have been brewing in a shared Google Doc only accessible to me and him.

The first topic will be: Asking For Help. This is timely, as Steve and I will be asking for help from the greater education leadership community as we work on this project.

Dissertation, Explain Everything 2.0, and a Book

I'm already in the participant selection phase for the first of three case studies that are part of my doctoral research. I am exploring the relationship between teachers' beliefs on learning and their instructional practices, using mobile screencasting and qualitative formative assessment as lenses for this examination. My methodology is what I am calling 'Design Based Case Study Research.' 

I've been bad about posting stuff on this blog mostly because I have spent less time investigating new tools and more time working on getting an upgrade to Explain Everything ready for public release. The feature that I am most excited about is the ability to insert and annotate over videos - live and imported.  I'm excited to see what people come up with. YOu can learn more about what's going on with EE 2.0 by clicking here.

Last summer a colleague and I led a workshop called 'Leading Online' at a couple of summer educational technology conferences. After putting some time into both the planning and the execution of this workshop, we considered ways to take what we had done and allow it to evolve in some other format. I have enjoyed getting familiar with iBooks author where I have been putting together a manual for Explain Everything. We are considering using the iBooks ecosystem for distribution of the book. Tomorrow, I'll post some more about our ideas and plans. 

This free app is incredibly engaging. You start with four elements (air, water, earth, and fire) and are required to combine elements to make new materials. Right now there are a total of 330 possibilities and that list keeps growing. While it is not a true scientific environment, it does afford the chance to think about the relationship between certain elements. For example, when you mix water and earth you get mud. Or when you combine lava with air you get stone. There are some silly combinations as well. My favorite so far is that a sword and the energy element combine to create a light saber. Add a human and you've got a Jedi!

The logic of this activity reminds me a lot of the crafting aspect in Minecraft. Some Middle School students at my school have been showing me how to create things in Minecraft worlds, and I soon learned about how intricate the crafting interface is.

Infographics are the new thing it seems for telling a story or supporting an argument. Easel.ly is a free web-based tool that lets you work with templates for creating really elegant visual representations of information. There are a bunch of templates and objects that can be added to the infographic, and you can upload your own content.

The interface is very simple and easy to navigate. While I love the updates to the Prezi editor and have generally thought that Glogster is a interesting presentation medium, I find that Easel.ly has better web-based interface design for visual content organization. My only gripe is that it doesn't work well on the iPad!

With this growing use of infographics, I like to remind myself about how easy it is to be persuaded by the arrangement of information rather than the facts. I think it is a skill to create persuavive materials, but I also think that a fine line has to be drawn between persuasion and deception.  What would you think if you saw this infographic at the top of this post?

I might be taking a break from Prezi for a little while and start using HaikuDeck for all of my presentations. This really well-designed app for iPad forces the user to focus on the most important point of any slide by limiting the amount of text and images that are on the screen at any given moment. What is most impressive is the amazing and seemingly endless collection of professional photographs which can be used as the backdrop for slides (you can also import photos from the photo roll or take a new picture). It's a free app and it comes with a bunch of great default themes (you can buy more 'themes' as in-app purchases)

I made a few slides for a presentation yesterday and ended up taking screenshots from my device so that I could import them into Explain Everything. I did find that you can export the file. It downloads as a .pptx file though you have to manually append the extension. The slides above are embedded from HaikuDeck.com.

The best screencast tutorials and presentations usually have a script. Following a recent dialogue with Tim Fahlberg, one of the 'godfathers of screencasting' (at least in my opinion), I have decided to share two ways for adding captions to Explain Everything projects. 

All of the text in the video below was actually inputted by voice on an iPad 3. I could have typed it in and I did have to correct a few incorrect words but it was really easy to do.  In order to use the iPad 3 voice recognition you need to have an internet connection (it's like Siri) and you cannot be in the recording mode of Explain Everything.  When paused or stopped, you can add a text box, speak in the text, save the text element, and then record your animation.  This might be a good alternative to the YouTube transcript service shown below because the text show up in the source file. 

YouTube Caption Transcript allows you to upload a script file and it will use Google's speech recognition technology to align your script with the audio from your uploaded Explain Everything file. I found that using a plain text document (*.txt) works best. In Word or Pages you can save in this file format. The biggest drawback is that YouTube videos on the iPad (from the app or in a browser) don't appear to support closed captioning yet so you have to watch on a computer in order to have the captions show up.  Press the 'CC' button to turn the captions on if they aren't already. 

Here is the Prezi I shared during my Mobile Technologies session at the Teachers College Educational Technology Conference. You might need to make it full screen in order to see some of the text in the tables and images. Enjoy!