This page contains information and links to material related to the work I did on May 15, 2010, at the SCEA conference. These resources will only remain available online for a limited time.

The materials are for your personal learning with some rights reserved under a Creative Commons, attribution, non-commercial, share alike license. You can find specific information about your legal obligations under that license at this link.

Below and throughout this post you will find links to student-created movies and screencast(s) of presentation(s) I made while visiting with you. The screencasts were made with ScreenFlow, a powerful program! The movies were made with iMovie and Final Cut Pro. For these media files to play in your browser, you must have QuickTime, which is free, properly installed on your Windows machine. (None of this should be an issue for Mac users as these come on your Mac at purchase.) Perhaps the best way to do that is to install iTunes on your Windows machine. iTunes, which is also free, opens up a whole world of amazing content to you! Download times for the media files vary depending on your connection speed. You may need to be patient!

My 3D Augmented Reality Business Card

If you haven't had a chance to experience my 3D Augmented Reality business card, be sure to check it out. You can still try it out even if you don't have one of my business cards. Just head on over to this link for a video demonstration of how it works as well as directions and a link to download the card so you can see it for yourself.

Keep in Touch

In addition to my blog and my podcast series, you can keep in touch using the resources listed here. Each image is a link to the resource it features.

My Shared Bookmarks

I maintain an ever growing list of bookmarks about a variety of topics that many educators may find of interest. Included are tools, tricks, how-tos, example sites... just a variety of things that strike me as interesting and/or helpful as I routinely surf the web.

These bookmarks are grouped into over 40 lists. The two largest groups are Examples (by grade level and subject area) and Tools (for a variety of web-based work). Check out the lists, and if you find them helpful, follow me on diigo. It's a free service that can turn your collection of bookmarks into a research tool. Diigo also has a specific free plan for educators, one that would be a valuable tool for classroom student collaborative projects.

Follow Me on Twitter

I use Twitter to notify people who follow me of new blog posts I've just written. I also share videos I find of interest on YouTube, and bookmarks on Diigo, etc. Twitter has become just a convenient way to quickly share things that catch your attention.

Additionally, with tools like TweetDeck, Twitter becomes a very powerful search engine for current information and resources. You can also use Twitter to direct message me if you like. I've found increased value in using Twitter to connect and share with educators around the world.

My Shared RSS Feeds

This is a link to all of the current posts from all of the education blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader. It's a fairly large group from almost 100 education bloggers.

There's even an RSS feed button near the top right of each page, called an "Atom Feed." After setting up your own free Google Reader account, you could subscribe to this one RSS feed of all of these bloggers in one click! This will give you a good start with your RSS feeds—a nice collection of education blogs to follow.

Feedback

I know things can be very hectic at a conference, even for presenters! Sometimes I don't think to mention how to provide me with feedback, which I use to inform my professional practice. So below are two ways you can provide me with feedback about the presentation content, presentation style, resources provided, just anything that's on your mind.

• You can send me a text message. [This is another great way to use PollEverywhere, which I demonstrated in the keynote.] Simply text 24555 followed by a space and then your text message to: 22333.

I appreciate your helping me better help educators!

Movie Links

I only had time to show you one student project. So I thought I include a few more here. All of these projects were made by the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students at Mabry Middle School.

The movie files are all 2 minutes or less, range from 16 to 38 megabytes, but should start playing almost immediately. However, download times will vary depending on your connection speed. You may need to be patient!

Numerous (hundreds) excellent movie projects abound both on MabryOnline.org at this link and on the iTunes Store at this link. As we got further into the online publishing process we typically grouped the movies into categories rather than singling out individual projects. This was generally done because of the time constraints of running school. Putting individual movies up on the web required more time than just converting, for online publication, the same files used the night of the film festival.

PollEverywhere

I mentioned Poll Everywhere, an excellent tool for educators that are comfortable allowing student use of cell phones in school (with parent permission). Below are a couple of polls embedded on this page. You can embed PollEverywhere polls into your classroom and parent presentations for realtime feedback as well as on web pages or blogs.

We may not have actually used these two polls, but I wanted you to see different ways of using this technology. If the polls are still open you can actually vote from here (by clicking on your desired answer below or texting in your answer, or visiting the web address listed, or tweeting in your response) as well as see the results. The results will change over time as I reset them for different groups.

You can also choose to just embed a results graphic which does not permit voting from the site or by SMS.

Here are the final results from the poll we did in the keynote as a demonstration of PollEverywhere. Notice we had a total of 16 successful responses.

Questions & Ideas

I was delighted to see how many people were actively participating in our time together by sending in your questions (through PollEverywhere) so we could extend the conversation beyond our very limited time together. I'm quick to say that I personally have more questions than I have answers. So I'm offering up a lot of ideas here in response to your questions. Remember, these are just ideas from the world according to Tim. :o)

• wonderful look at 21st century reality
  Thank you.


• what if not very child has a cell phone?
  This isn't the only question here: What if parents will not allow their students to send text messages, which often are at an additional cost? You start by asking... everyone, including parents. Then build your strategy based on the data.


• what do you do with teachers who resist technology? The "old dog new tricks" syndrome
  For me, the conversation always begins with an immersion/emphasis on "What we do really value most in this school?" Forget the politically correct mumbo jumbo. Go for honesty. What is it? For Real!! Then the conversation is about "What are we doing with our most precious resource: the dedicated teacher's use of class time?" Where do those two questions align and where are they misaligned? What's getting in the way of our using all of our resources as wisely as possible to reach this goal as quickly as possible? This isn't about technology. This is about best instructional practices. Teachers who are not interested in using best instructional practices to reach our goal need to go find other work that brings them greater joy. Leveraging technology to achieve our goal is just one best practice. --This, of course, is the world according to Tim.


• what's the biggest obstacle to adopting technology : $$$ or fear?
  Tim no likie binary choices. They are too simplified for me. Reality is generally much more complex. If I must choose between the two, I would suggest the answer depends on the situation. But I actually think the more pervasive issue is perspective: not knowing what using technology effectively in the classroom setting actually can look like today.

Ideas for Student/Parent Technology Questionnaire

You may want to survey your students and their parents about the types of technology they have. This information will assist you in deciding how to design content for your web presence or digital learning hub. The document below provides some ideas about where to start.

Tools I Use

Below is a list of tools I may have used during our time together. Since I get a lot of questions about these, I'm including the information here for your use.

• I typically use Keynote to do the presentations themselves. And I often control Keynote with one of several applications on my iPhone. These applications are downloaded through the iTunes Store and will work on the iPod Touch as well as the iPhone. iTunes will run on a Windows machine and comes automatically installed on every Mac. ( iTunes U and iTunes K-12 are rich sources of information and resources for schools and educators.) You can find detailed information about Keynote and the iPhone applications I use to control Keynote in this post on my blog.
• You may also have attended a session in which I mentioned CoolIris as the presentation tool. In fact, one of the links in the presentations section below is to a CoolIris version of the presentation: Leadership Applied: Building Powerful Learning Communities. CoolIris is not for the faint of heart. If you want to design presentations with it, you must be comfortable editing a media.rss file, which is written in XML, a very unforgiving programming language. For more information about using CoolIris as a presentation platform, take a look at this post on my blog.
• The blogging system used for MabryOnline.org and for drTimTyson.com is MovableType. For more information about that implementation, you can consult this blog post on the MabryOnline website that covers answers to many frequently asked questions about the work we were doing at Mabry Middle School.
• The application I use to record presentations is ScreenFlow for the Mac. A number of screen capture utilities are available, but, as of this writing, I believe ScreenFlow to be the most elegant implementation of screen capture you can find on the Mac. Not only can it be used effortlessly and quickly, with just a few more minutes, you can make your screen casts look awesome. Exporting the finished screen cast is also incredibly easy: choose a preset and walk away from your computer while it generates the finished project for uploading. If you're interested in purchasing ScreenFlow, be sure to inquire about the education discount. A similar, slightly more expensive tool is available for Windows and Mac users: Camtasia. Camtasia has additional capability; but, as these are competing products, they will probably compete against one another by advancing their feature sets.
• I also frequently use my iPod and a mic attachment (be sure you purchase one that is specifically designed to work with your exact iPod model) to record an audio only podcast of the presentation. You may also use your iPhone and iPod Touch to record podcasts. For more information on using the iPhone and iPod Touch to record podcasts, watch this podcast I produced on the subject.
• I also probably mentioned using uStream.tv to broadcast and record from the computer. As of this writing the service is free. Other similar services are also available.
• I probably used the xTag USB wireless mic from revolabs to record the screencasts in this post. I have written a review about this little mic after learning about it from Dr. Andy Brovey.

Many other tools could be listed here, but this is probably more than you have time to explore if you're not already familiar with them.

Presentation Resources

Making Learning Irresistible

1. Audio-only Podcast of An Irresistible Vision of Global Contribution
- This is the same presentation as above (in number 1); however, the audio quality is sometimes better as the mic is closer, in my pocket, connected to my iPod. No video or slides are shown, just the audio.

Concluding Thoughts

I have observed over the years that educators tend to be overachievers! You will want to do everything you learned in our time together, and more, before the end of the week. Life just doesn't happen like that! I remind you that the student and staff work I shared with you in our time together was the product of 6 years of focused work. Pace yourself!

That said, don't tolerate low quality work from students or yourself. We all have to live that culture of personal best. Don't let students get their hands on the tools until they have done the required thinking work that earns them that privilege! Too often, once students start working with the tools, they want to focus on the tools. Your job as the educator is to keep them always focused on your learning objectives.

I do hope that our time together was helpful for you! I hope it renewed your joy and passion for making learning irresistible for your students. When your students (and you) begin to accomplish really exciting things, drop me an email with a link so I can include it in my Diigo links.

I wish you only the very, very best!

Tim