Session Description
We are in a new age, a new time and we need to create new places and spaces that nurture mobile content in the richly literate classroom. From a pedagogical perspective, we are adrift as mobile devices make their way into the hands of our children and spread ever more widely into everyday life. Although a growing body of research points to the potential of mobile computing for influencing children’s emerging literacy skills, empirical studies on mobile learning in early elementary are rare. Even less is known about developing learning spaces that can support our youngest mobile students.

As technology becomes ubiquitous, questions of appropriateness, physical attributes of devices, placement, and usage patterns need to be answered. Young children need age and developmentally appropriate physical environments that are safe, nurturing, and supportive of child-directed play and learning. Active, creative play and exploration is central to healthy child development. The physical environment, including its ambiance, layout, acoustics, lighting, equipment and furnishings has a profound impact on children’s learning and behavior.

Without a doubt, designing a high quality, developmentally and culturally appropriate environment for children, whether for learning or for play, is a highly complex process. Join in a conversation around building spaces that support the elementary child as a unique individual; are child controlled; encourage exploration, experimentation, and risk taking; encourage critical thinking, decision making, and problem solving. Discuss the implications of these type of spaces as young learners transition to secondary schools.

Conversational Practice
User-centered design is a process that focuses on the needs, wants, and limitations of end users of a product. Rather than forcing users to modify their behavior to accommodate the product, user-centered design attempts to optimize the product around how users can, want, or need to use the product. As we envision and design new spaces for our youngest learners, this user-center approach is critical. In the context of our conversation, user-centered design will become a multi-stage problem solving process that requires participants to analyze our current schools and classrooms, envision new spaces for learning and create rich media objects that will transform our conversation into eBook that can be shared widely with educators so that we may test the validity of our assumptions in real world cases.

I’m going to rush to get this post out ahead of the big Apple Education event on Thursday. All the hype is pointing to some sort of announcement of an easy way to create custom books for the iBook app. While this is certainly exciting news, I’m sure it is going to come with a bunch of “How to Use [Apple's Newest Thing] in Education” tweets,  blog posts, lists and presentations. So ahead of all the hipster, fanboy, and hater posts that will inevitably follow Apple’s big announcement tomorrow, I’m bringing you this post. Option 1 from my Creating Custom Digital Content for iPad: Educators Have Options series!

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the Creative Book Builder app for iPhone and iPad. Created by Tiger Ng, this app is currently selling for $3.99 in the iTunes Store.

Creative Book Builder enables everyone to create, edit and publish ebooks in minutes. Creative Book Builder can import document from Google Docs and parse HTML output into chapter. Create unlimited number of chapters add title, description, images, videos, audio recording, music, links, and lists. CBB lets you sort your content’s ordering within a chapter and customize your cover image.

What I did with CBB:

My plan is to base this project on a second grade Rocks & Fossils unit that my wife and a colleague originally developed in 2005. That unit contains a collection of resources ranging from a section of a science textbook, videos, digital photos and a couple PPT presentations. I have all the various source files stored on my Dropbox account and in my iTunes/iPhoto albums so I can access them as needed across devices. Read the rest of this entry…

One of the things I’ve been looking into lately has been mobile content creation. With the rise of the tablet, I’m finding k12 and adult students are eager for opportunities to learn just-in-time with their device of choice. From an instructional design perspective, this means that to deliver to any & all devices, you’ve got to be looking towards HTML5.

My developer colleagues at the University of Akron’s Center for Literacy cringe every time we talk about HTML5 and designing apps for iOS and Android. To them, HTML5 is a giant step backwards in terms of the complexity and richness of web apps that could be developed with other tools (RIP Flash).

They feel that in the HTML5 arena, animations are stripped down and much less interactivity is available. They are mostly right here. HTML5 has limited the types of instructional interactions we can offer all ages of students in the online environment. As we begin to design web-based user experiences in HTML5, we are essentially creating a duel interface that can be run through a desktop or laptop browser AND a mobile browser. Until mobile devices have processors equal to their desktop/laptop brothers, we’ll never be able to offer as rich of a learning environment on any type of mobile device, yet we are still going to develop custom digital content for mobile…

So what can the average educator do? Read the rest of this entry…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/liewcf/5492108806/

People love the iPad. Everybody wants an iPad. I know a little bit about iPads, so it seems like I get asked some version of the same question over and over again regarding those lovely little iPads. Usually this occurs during casual conversation or small talk type events that happen daily. Occasionally I get a phone call from someone who knows me and is in the store at that very moment. Sometimes I get an email. In any event, I am going to post my most recent response and begin referring people to this post so I don’t have to keep writing the same thing over and over again:)

This time the question came in from my father-in-law, Big Jack, a respected journalism professor at CMU and a diehard traditional literacies type of fellow. It is fairly typical of the question I’m talking about.

We are thinking of acquiring an iPad. Give us your best advice re acquisition costs, program costs, and operation techniques and costs at your convenience.

Read the rest of this entry…

For the past few days, I’ve been in beautiful Sedona, Arizona to attend and present to a group of early childhood educators from Arizona and New Mexico as part of the Southwest Institute Summer Literacy Institute.

Southwest Institute for Families and Children (SWI) is a non-profit research and development organization focusing on children’s health and education.

Below you will find the slidedeck from my presentation to this dedicated group of early childhood educators, many of whom serve high-poverty children and families from the Navajo nation.

While #ISTE11 in Philadelphia, PA is almost a month past us, I have some unfinished business to take care of here on Raised Digital stemming from my trip to the City of Brotherly Love for the annual conference. Maybe it’s because I’m lazy; perhaps it’s because I’m busy; and it’s certainly so this post didn’t get washed in with the hundreds of other ISTE Reflection posts, I am now recording my thoughts and take-aways from the 2011 ISTE conference experience.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed my ISTE trip this year. From EdubloggerCon, to my model lesson presentation, visiting, sharing and learning from all my colleagues and an enjoyable round of golf with a rag-tag crew of edubloggers, there were lots of great moments. The best part of it all was the fact that I was able to have my family with me. My wife attended the conference and came away with a lot of great ideas she can share professionally in her district. She and I got to spend time together, which is not par for the course when I attend conferences.

Perhaps the the greatest experience was having our 4 year old son with us. While it was challenging at times to haul a preschooler around the Philadelphia Convention Center, I was proud of the way he handled himself over the 4 days we were in attendance. To watch him communicate, create and explore among some of the top educational minds and thought leaders that were in attendance was truly a proud moment for me as a father. I know we had fun and learned a lot together, as a family. I have evidence.

For further review, I submit to you, my thoughts/notes from #ISTE11.

Read the rest of this entry…

Remember listservs? I guess people still use them, but they really seem so 1990′s to me. Regardless, I’m still on a couple different listservs, and from time to time, there IS good information that comes through the barrage of emails that fill my inbox. Very often, the people who are emailing the listserv are looking for help, assistance and/or answers to their questions. I can appreciate this. Occasionally, I take time to write a decent email and respond back to those questions. I hate doing it though. I wish these listserv people would move their “conversations” to a more open forum, like Twitter, a Facebook group, or possibly even Google+, but many of them are not ready for that, or just not interested. I hope that changes.

Until then, I have very little choice in how I add my voice to the conversation other than writing an email back to the listserv. I took that rather antiquated approach to professional learning and sharing this morning when I wrote a decent email to the people in the NAEYC Technology & Young Children Interest Forum about how I am using iOS devices with young children to take photos and videos. Upon completion, I thought that the information the email contained might be valuable to people outside the listserv, so I’m sharing it here.

Read the rest of this entry…

Most educators are familiar with Twitter, but how do you put it into classroom practice? Join us and find out how to #teach w/ #tweet.

21st Century educators should exemplify how an individual uses digital tools and resources to become a skilled communicator, collaborator, and devoted lifelong learner. As a follow up to the immensely popular ISTE 2010 BYOL session, #tweet. #learn. #lead., Becker, Brueck and Craft return with a Model Lesson that will provide educators with sound pedagogical approaches to integrating Twitter into the classroom learning space. Participants in this session will learn how educators can use Twitter to support student learning goals while effectively modeling the path of the 21st Century skills.

Jon Becker, Jeremy Brueck and Christopher Craft will demonstrate ways classroom teachers can provide differentiated learning opportunities through the social microblogging platform Twitter. Participants will learn interactively during a focused and intense hands-on lesson that will leave them with an understanding of: How to use Twitter in the classroom for networked learning; How to use Twitter search, hashtags, groups and other 3rd party services to facilitate a classroom activity; Sound pedagogical approaches for integrating Twitter into the learning environment. After the session, participants will be prepared to create a personalized learning network in a virtual classroom space and lead students into a new era of networked learning.

Back in October of 2010, I was interviewed by Lisa Guernsey for an article on eBooks that was to appear in School Library Journal. That article has finally been published in the June 2011 edition. You can read it in its entirety here. Thanks to Lisa for including information about Akron Ready Steps and our eBook research in the article. A small snippet from the piece follows below.

Aiden and I traveled to Green Primary School today so he could be “Principal for a Day.” A couple of my favorite pictures from our trip.