#edtech #edchat #podstock2012
I put together a little video about the keynote that I will be giving at Podstock 2012 this year…
Brad Flickinger, Tech Teacher from Bethke Elementary in Timnath, Colorado will be keynoting at this year’s Podstock.
http://www.BradFlickinger.com
http://www.podstock2012.com
http://youtu.be/DcexJQM-8W0 (iBand)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/56155476@N08/sets/72157628777364255/ (photos of kids and iPads)
Email me at bradf@me.com if you want to join the Podstock iBand.
#edtech #FETC
Here is a copy of the presentation I gave yesterday at FETC. “Unbelievable Elementary Tech Projects.”
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3473176/Unbelievable_Tech.pdf
#edtech #edchat #mlearning
The kids of today are fine to not have a physical keyboard.
Has the physical keyboard gone the way of the Dodo bird?
This week I went to the FETC in Orlando, so I got to see thousands of techie teachers in one place over a few days. With such wide view of so many people I started to wonder about the future of some of the technology that we use, or don’t use.
As I looked around I noticed that most of the teachers were either using Smartphones or tablets to take their notes of the sessions they attended. Only a small percentage had laptop computers and an even smaller percentage had actual paper notebooks with real pens! Now granted, this was a tech convention, so I know that this group does not actually represent the real population, but I do think that they are a bit of a crystal ball of what is to come.
The kids of today are getting so used to either onscreen or micro keyboards that they almost wouldn’t know what to do with a real one if the had one in front of them. It is us adults that are having a hard time with the transition.
I still see many adults with a mouse connected to the laptop — like they are still trying to hold on to a little bit of the past. They balance the mouse on their knee or on the corner of their laptop. Their refusal of using their trackpad makes them look silly to the younger generation, “Check out the guy with his mouse,” they chuckle at each other as they point. “It’s called a trackpad, use it.”
My wife gave me a wireless keyboard recently. Don’t tell my wife but it is still in the wrapper. I don’t want it. I hate when I see people trying to turn their tablets into laptops by adding keyboards. This looks as silly as the mouse balancers.
The biggest problem with this is that the people who are in charge of technology for schools are sometimes stuck in these old paradigms. “We can’t get tablets for the students, they don’t have keyboards, how could they do a report?” I have news for you, the kids don’t want them. Like me they have adjusted to the onscreen keyboard.
If we are truly living in the “post PC era,” as recent reports suggest, then while are we still trying to put our schools and students back into it?
- Brad Flickinger, Tech Teacher, Bethke Elementary School
#edtech #FETC #edchat
Michael Wesh gave an interesting keynote this morning at FETC about getting our students to “wonder.”
#fetc #edtech
I was amazed by Tierny Cahill’s opening keynote…
#edtech #fetc #mlearning
It all started at 4:30 this morning in Denver and involved one really long shuttle bus ride from the Orlando airport, but I have finally arrived at this year’s FETC. I will be posting video updates during the conference to my YouTube account — so stayed tuned.
My first report will be about the opening keynote by Tierney Cahill, a teacher from Nevada and former confessional candidate, which starts in 30 minutes.
- Brad Flickinger, tech teacher, Bethke Elementary School
#edchat #ipaded #mlearning #appleed
The amazing iBook Author.
Like many of you I watched last week’s Apple announcement about the changing of textbooks with somewhat cautious optimism. I think it is about time that the textbook publishers got on board — so I was happy to see what Apple had put together. But when they showed iBook Author I about fell out of my chair. I have literally been wanting something like this for years.
As soon as the presentation was over I downloaded the free app to my MacBook Pro. Now all I needed was a book to write!
That was when I decided to publish the screenplay to my recent iPhone movie I did during the iPad Boot Camp, The Attack of Robokid. So I opened iBook Author, picked a template, drug my screenplay from Pages into it and Shazam! Instant iBook!
That took care of chapter one, so I then added a chapter with behind the scenes photos done as a slide show — I had to write a caption for each of the 15 photos, so this took the bulk of the 20 minutes.
I then added a final chapter that had the video of the movie the screenplay is for so the reader could see how we chose to shoot it.
I have to admit it looks great. As it turns out, the next thing I needed was an iTunes Connect account so I can sell it in the iBook Store, so I applied for that, plus ordered an ISBN number and now I am just waiting for everything to go through.
Below is the PDF of the iBook (all the interactive parts are missing, but you will get an idea as to my layout).
- Brad Flickinger, Tech Teacher, Bethke Elementary.
#edtech
Next week I’ll be traveling to Orlando, Florida for the annual FETC conference to give my presentation on unbelievable elementary tech projects. I have been panicking trying to get the new projects from my recent iPad Boot Camp included my presentation.
My biggest frustration is that this presentation as it was, would take normally two and a half hours to show and now with the new stuff that I just got from the iPad Boot Camp, I don’t know how I’m going to fit all of the projects into the one hour time limit that I have at FETC. So I guess the best thing I can do is to show little samples of each project to give a little taste of what is possible for young students to do with technology. Because if these conference attendees are anything like I am when I go to conferences, I go there for two reasons; I go there to be inspired and I go to there to steal ideas and that’s really what I want to do, I want to give them lots of different ideas that will inspire them and also things that they can just take back to their own schools and take credit for themselves.
If you are planning on attending, my friends at Atomic Learning have a free Expo Pass: https://www.xpressreg.net/register/fetc012/start.asp?sc=FREE016 then enter this code: FREE016.
See you there!
-Brad Flickinger, tech teacher, Bethke Elementary
#edtech #mlearning #ipaded
CES 2012 Report: great new products for your school’s music departments from Castiv. http://www.castiv.com/ (This video was recorded on a iPhone 4 and edited in iMovie on the iPhone and uploaded directly to YouTube)
#edtech #ipaded #mlearning
CES 2012 Report: new video editor for student filmmakers to use on their iPods from Cinefy.http://www.cinefyapp.com/ (This video was recorded on a iPhone 4 and edited in iMovie on the iPhone and uploaded directly to YouTube)
