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.
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.
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.
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.
What’s an ebook anyway?
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Jeremy Brueck, an Akron, OH-based pioneer in children’s digital reading research, spends his days grappling with the cacophony of questions raised by children’s ebooks. With help from grants from the U.S. Department of Education, he’s examining how electronic materials should be used in early childhood programs, including Head Start.
He’s urging librarians, teachers, and parents to pause to get a handle on exactly what they mean when they say “ebook” in the first place. “We have to get out of saying ‘ebooks,’” argues Brueck, who codirects Akron Ready Steps, an early literacy program, and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Akron. “It’s just too broad.” Read the rest of this entry…
iPad2, Xoom, Playbook, iPod Touch, netbook, iPhone, Chromebook, the list never stops. Everyday a new device is hyped, overhyped and pushed into our consciousness by a barrage of media and market glam. In the past 6 months I’ve fielded countless question from school leaders and teachers about the new world order of computing devices.
“Which is better?”
“Which runs faster?”
“Which has the best apps?”
“Which is cheapest?”
“How do we go 1:1?”
Aside from the constant questions, I also hear some horrifying statements.
“We’ve got $30,000 to spend and we’re going to buy every teacher in the district an iPad.”
“The teachers want iPads for teaching so we’re going to get them some.”
It’s got to stop. Enough already because I’m about to go EDTECHHULK on somebody.
Last summer at ISTE 2010, I had a blast at the IEAR Birds of a Feather session. Not only did I get a chance to share some of my favorite apps with the attendees, hang out with my IEAR colleagues @smeech and @jepcke, but I also got an opportunity to create some musical soundscapes with @kevinhoneycutt during an impromptu jam session. Ever since that event, I’ve been wanting to build my own portable music production system that lets me create, record, produce, and perform music with my iOS devices.
This week, I took a major step toward making that happen. I finally broke down and purchased a variety of hardware that I can use both at home and when I’m on the road giving presentations. With the current configuration, I can plug up to 5 iOS devices into a small mixing board and either run the sound out to a small amp for a live performance or into a laptop, desktop or iPad with Garageband or Audacity for recording purposes. I’m looking forward to embarking on my expert knob twiddling adventures and I’ll be sure to keep Raised Digital readers in the loop. For now, here’s a quick run down of the equipment I’ve started to assemble.
So is Quality Rating Tool 2 any better? We will now hone in on our data to see if we have achieved better reliability with Tool 2. The following 4 charts show the inter-rater reliability on three subscales of version 2 of the e-Book Quality Rating Tool. Ten independent raters evaluated 5 books by assigning each book a score between 1 (strongly disagree) and 5 (strongly agree) on ease of use, multimedia and interaction features. Ratings were considered reliable if they fell within +1 point of the rating assigned by the Expert Rater, the project technology expert.
This is a personal blog. The resources, information and views presented on Raised Digital are solely the opinion of Jeremy S. Brueck, and are not meant to reflect the views of my employer.
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