Session Date:    02/15/2012
Session Room:    C213 – 214
Session Start Time:    0800
Presenter: Jeremy Brueck
Co Presenter(s): Kelly Kendrick; Kimberly Brueck; Tammy DeDominicis

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…

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.

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.

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.

Read the rest of this entry…

Drawing on this professional knowledge base, we developed a matrix to guide the design of a prototype tool for evaluating the e dimension of the early childhood e-book. This matrix provided a framework for organizing the tool (categories & elements) and specified criteria for judging the electronic environment. We used the Quality Rating Tool 1 with a set of internal raters, consisting of 4 teachers, and also external raters, who were members of our research team.

Read the rest of this entry…

From the Blueprint Key, we moved to the development of 2 unique analytic tools. Analytic Tool I was adapted from the coding categories of de Jong and Bus (2003) and focused primarily on multimedia/ interactivity design features. This tool uses the entire e-book as the unit of analysis. It is organized into four categories—Book Assistants; Multimedia Illustrations; Multimedia Print; Interactivity—that reflect the major early literacy learning domains of Book Handling, Comprehension, Word Recognition and Cognitive Processing. The four categories include 14 elements that describe ebook design (e.g., presence of static and/or animated illustrations).

Read the rest of this entry…

In Phase 1, our research goal was to design an effective and usable tool for early childhood teachers to us in order to rate the quality of the e-Book for use in early literacy instruction. Our interest in developing an e-Book rating tool began in 2008 with our first attempt, the Blueprint Key, and has evolved over time by blending several different analytic tools to create the most recent version, the Quality Rating Tool. Let’s take a closer look at the evolution of each component of the Quality Rating Tool.

Read the rest of this entry…