Jigsaw Puzzles that Teach or Reinforce

Click and solve a jigsaw puzzle.  This is a way to prepare students for an assignment or for work.  For example, before letting student library workers start shelving books, be sure they know the difference between FICTION and NON-FICTION, alphabetizing by author last name, and of course the Dewey Decimal System.  So many students and teachers have not been introduced to basic library skills.  Give them a few games to play (and successfully solve) before letting them loose on a project.  One jigsaw puzzle tool if available for free from ProProfs Brain Games.

What are you reading? jigsaw puzzle game 

2012 NMC Horizon Report - Tech Trends

The annual NMC Horizon Report will be released in February 13-15 at the EduCause Conference in Austin, Tx and online. A shortlist of applications, trends and issues is posted on its wiki.  This is a good time to review and think about what higher education thinkers are thinking, and to share with K-12 educators so they can better prepare students and themselves.  NOTE:  The issue of digital literacy is identified as a "key skill in every discipline and profession", yet training is rare in teacher education and faculty preparation. 

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less

 Cloud Computing

 Mobile Apps

 Social Reading

 Tablet Computing

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years

 Adaptive Learning Environments

 Augmented Reality

 Game-Based Learning

 Learning Analytics

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years

 Digital Identity

 Gesture-Based Computing

 Haptic Interfaces

 Internet of Things

Top trends and issues:

• The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators.
• Computers as we know them are in the process of a massive reinvention because we increasingly expect media to be touchable and interactive. 
• Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning and collaborative models. [about time!]
• Increasingly, students want to use their own technology for learning. 
• Institutions are increasingly exploring technologies that allow teachers and students to better collaborate. 

• Lecture capture, podcasting, and cheap personal video recorders increasingly make it much easier to prepare lecture-style content for students to see/hear before coming to class. 
• People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to. 
• The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized. 
• There is a new emphasis in the classroom on more challenge-based and active learning.
• The world of work is increasingly collaborative, driving changes in the way student projects are structured.

   

• Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching. 
• The demand for personalized learning is not adequately supported by current technology or practices. 
• Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession. This challenge, driven by a related trend, appears here because despite the widespread agreement on the importance of digital media literacy, training in the supporting skills and techniques is rare in teacher education and non-existent in the preparation of faculty. As lecturers and professors begin to realize that they are limiting their students by not helping them to develop and use digital media literacy skills across the curriculum, the lack of formal training is being offset through professional development or informal learning, but we are far from seeing digital media literacy as a norm. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that digital literacy is less about tools and more about thinking, and thus skills and standards based on tools and platforms have proven to be somewhat ephemeral.
• Dividing learning into fixed units such as credit hours limits innovation across the board. 
• Economic pressures and new models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to the traditional models of tertiary education.

• Institutional barriers present formidable challenges to moving forward in a constructive way with emerging technologies. 
• The global drive to increase the number of students participating in undergraduate education is placing pressure across the system. 
• Most academics are not using new and compelling technologies for learning and teaching, nor for organizing their own research. 
• New modes of scholarship are presenting significant challenges for libraries and university collections, how scholarship is documented, and the business models to support these activities.
• Simply staying organized and current presents a challenge in a world where information, software tools, and devices proliferate at the rate they do today. 

All My Faves: Visual Way to Find Favorite Sites

Do you have a list of favorite websites that you visit regularly or keep track of in your "favorites", "bookmarks", or "delicious"? Well, here is a cool site that is a very visual way to display best sites for everything under the sun. All My Faves (subtitled: Why Search?) is a list of lists, displayed by logos.

Along the left side is a list of topics such as:
Topics of the Day (Mother's Day)
e-mail
video
maps
search
news
weather
(plus about 50 more categories)

Across the page next to each topic are no words, just the logo or icon for top sites. For example, after "e-mail" is the logo for Yahoo! mail -- Gmail -- MSN Hotmail -- AOL -- and many more

MacWorld 2010 Exhibits

Visited the MacWorld 2010 Exhibits in San Francisco last weekend. This was the first year without Apple. Many products were for businesses or consumers, but I looked for potential education applications. Here are a few things of interest:

• MacSpeech Scribe - Personal speech transcription for the Macintosh. Good for those who are well-organized speakers, long commuters, and not-so-good typists. Those who are used to dictating letters to an assistant would find this tool handy. It looks like DragonSpeak Natually Speaking software, but for Mac.
• Eye-Fi - Memory cards make your camera wireless. Features include online sharing, automatically geotagging photos, hotspot access across the USA, Ad Hoc Transfers, and endless memory. [Note: not for Flip video, which uses a thumb drive, not a memory card.]
• 4iThumbs - Tactile keyboard for the iPhone.
• GetUncommon.com - Your iPhone is the canvas. GetUncommon.com or you provide the art for your iPhone. Limitless inspiration for decorating your iPhone. Interesting. Guess if you can afford an iPhone you can afford making it "special".
• ImageQuest Pic-to-nym - a visual puzzle that compines graphic recognition, contextual relationships, and vocabulary skills to guess the word that links a set of images. Entertaining for all ages. English Language Learners (ELL) should find pictonyms fun and instructive.
• zBoost - extends cell zones. Products for car and for home/office.
• Microvision Showwx - laser pico projector. Made for ipod. "Amplify your images from a device that fits in your pocket.
  

Assistive Gaming - Mac OS X games & Accessibility

Mac World Post #4 - I was disappointed that the person who had been demonstrating AssistiveGaming.com had left before I stopped by the demonstration site on late Friday afternoon.

The website looks good as does the statement on the site: "Assistive Gaming provides information on how people with disabilities can enjoy the latest and greatest games on Mac OS X. In other words, how can you play and make accessible games that were not made with accessibility in mind. The editors and authors use assistive technology to access their computer, so they know what they are talking about.... "

I've forwarded url to Jane at TransAccess Technology Center who provided the content for the teacher tutorial on Discovering Assistive Technology.

Two business cards were left on the demonstration platform -- one for AssistiveGaming and one for AssistiveWear T-shirts. The two URLS use the same "head-designed" graphic element -- a blue salamander logo. A cool black cat is also available. Check out the shirts and short video.

Internet Librarian - Libraries in a 2.0 World (Part 1)

Weekend are for catching up with the previous week. Here is the first in a series of posts about cool tools and strategies for marketing libraries that I picked up from just one day at the Internet Librarian and http://www.infotoday.com/il2008/ Librarian conference October 20-22, 2008, Monterey, CA. The 2008 conference theme was "Beyond 2.0: User-Focused Tools & Practices". My notes are in bullets following each presentation.

Lots to learn, so I stayed with Track #2: Outreach & Marketing Public Libraries in a 2.0 World.

Nancy Dowd, Director of Marketing, New Jersey State Library, presented on "Giving Your Marketing and Advocacy a Second Life" She referred to a blog called "The M Word" -- Marketing Libraries. Here is the description of her presentation:
You’re using Flickr and blogs. You’ve created social networks on MySpace and Facebook. You’re IMing, texting, and twittering all day long. You’ve even gained some notoriety on YouTube. Before your avatar drops from exhaustion, isn’t it time you asked what all this 2.0 technology is really doing for your library? Learn the tricks to turn your mad Web 2.0 skills into effective marketing and advocacy results to increase exposure and support for your library. Dowd takes you to the next level by illustrating how to incorporate Web 2.0 technologies with traditional marketing and advocacy tools to produce effective results.

I captured many of Nancy's trends and suggestions:

1. Online databases. 2+1=success. Public libraries should use Google Ads for their local community. Makes sense! Bring in money for the library, while promoting local business. Buy eDatabases from the perspective of a library patron and DEMAND A MARKETING CAMPAIGN for the database from the vendor.
2. Interactive Mobile. Think also of Guitar Hero and other video games.
3. Green.
4. I write. You contribute. Write and tell library stories. Send to iCNN and other online mainstream publications (my note: be visible!) Easy to do. Get (library) teens to do it. Library interns are great for story/video interviews.
5. Stories - Drive customers to the library website with stories. Stories on HOW libraries are TRANSFORMING lives and communities. (Referred to Library Roadtrip across America DVD by Erik Boekesteijn and Jaap van de Geer. See ShanachieTour: A Library Road Trip Across America )
6. Market to VOTERS. See OCLC "Fighting to awareness" report. See list of key voting issues. NJ Library will take each issue and create stories on the issues -- (my note: this is a most excellent and strategic suggestion. It is a mix of issues management and outreach.)

Great to see a Marketing Position at a State Library. Taxpayers fund their state and local public libraries, so it makes sense to have someone devoted to promoting the these public resources.

Build Your Own Horizon Report - Rachel Smith

"Mashup the Library" was the theme of the annual CARL North IT Summer Workshop, which was held on June 25, 2008 in the new library on the Santa Clara University campus.

This post includes my notes from Keynote Speaker Rachel Smith, Vice President of New Media Consortium. Photo is of CARL North IT co-President Sheila Cunningham and Rachel Smith. Rachel set the stage for her presentation on new technology trends when she used a scrolling presentation by Vuvox collage rather than a traditional PowerPoint Presentation to walk the audience through her overview of the 5th annual Horizon Report. This is the time of year when NMC puts out a “call to scholarship” around topics in the Horizon Report. The technology forecast is written for higher education in general, not a specific group within academia. NOTE: August is an excellent time for academic librarians to contribute to the effort. In fact, in addition to regularly contributing to it, academic libraries should make it a point to acquire a copy of the report each year. It would be a good report for the library to promote to its faculty and add a cover commentary on how the library is using or would use new technology.

The Horizon report has three (3) horizons: 1-2 years, 3-4 years, and 5+ years. Each section focuses on two technologies. The Report represents an effort to capitalize on research done by a few people and to distribute the information to many. It is not predictive. It is a forecast.

This year, there is also a section on metatrends – trends that appeared in multiple years of the Horizon Report. An example of this is Gaming. Three years ago, Gaming was featured in the 5th year. Then, Second Life and World of Warcraft became big so Gaming became a topic called Virtual Worlds. Gaming became big but in an unanticipated way.

Here's how the technologies are selected. The Horizon Report has a 40-member International Advisory Board representing about eight countries. There are no face-to-face meetings, just a wiki. Each year, members start with all possible technologies (about 100) and then each member votes for their top 10 technologies and assigns each a horizon (1, 2, or 3). This reduces the list to 12 topics, and then each is written up. The write-up includes how the technology is or would be used in higher education. There are four topics per horizon. Next, members of EduCause and NMC are invited to give examples. One example Rachel cited was from a South Carolina private university, Abilene Christian University, which gave each student a choice of an iPhone or iPod Touch at the beginning of the Fall semester. All class content and other content were on these mobile devices. At ACU, faculty wrote a horizon report version for their own university.

What was forecast in the 2008 Horizon Report?
YR 1-2:
· Grassroots video (video clips like YouTube, which are easy to capture, edit, and share.)
· Collaboration web (i.e., NING or pageflakes)

YR 3-4:
· Mobile Broadband (like iPhone and iPod Touch). Big shift in downloading via wireless LANS. Broadband and mobile are almost everywhere. See ACU vision film. Other examples are PhoneGuide in museums and video direct to the web.
· Data Mashups – see TED video with Hans Rosling, where he debunks 3rd world myths about poverty by “mashing” statistics – combining two or more data bases to make visual representations of the information. See also annual video mashup contest at the University of Pennsylvania. It is very inventive and creative. Songs or broadcasts are mashed up with videos. See “Info Commons @ U of Penn” music video, “Weigle Info Commons”.

YR 5+:
· Collective intelligence: implicit and explicit. Amazon book recommendations is an example of an implicit collective intelligence. Wikipedia, reCaptcha, and Flickr the Commons (public photo collection) are examples of explicit collective intelligence. So is museum tagging – see http://www.steve.museums/.
· Social Operating Systems: the next generation of social networking. An example cited is xobni which is useful for MS Outlook.

Build your own Horizon! There are a number of regional Horizon Reports planned, such as one from Australia. One group wants to do one specifically for K-12. NOTE: Librarians should contribute to it up front each year, add examples, and also promote and discuss it on campus. The next Horizon Report will be released in January 2009 at the ELI Conference (EDUCAUSE) in Philadelphia, PA.

Open Gaming at ALA Conference 2008

Several years ago, Sacramento Public Library began enticing teens to the library with pizza and eGaming. Librarian-in-Black Sarah Houghton-Jans mentioned at LITA's annual "Top Tech Trends" panel that the San Jose Public Library sees 40+ eGamers at a time. That is a lot!

Games and eGaming in public libraries has caught on. ALA offered a Friday evening "Open Gaming" event at its annual conference and devoted an Exhibits section to Gaming. At the Friday party, I munched popcorn, watched teams of virtual bowlers (bowling with a white Nintendo wii wand that looks like a TV channel changer), and I jumped in to race three others. I'm not much of a Mario racer, but it was a fun evening.

eGames are growing way beyond young guys because programs like Dance, Dance, Revolution (DDR), WiiFit, Wii golf and bowling, and such have been discovered by fitness clubs like my local YMCA, retirement and convalescent homes, after school programs, and others.

ALA featured non-electronic games too, including a variety of board games from Out of the Box Publishing. At "Open Gaming" night, teams of librarians were at board games like "10 Days in the USA" or "10 Days in Europe" -- I'm sure there was lots of conversation about places and past trips.

See also: Gaming @ Your Library activities during National Library Week in April 2008.