TechIntersect

Some of the blogging tips I have been reading lately have increased my hesitation to make a post for fear of not measuring up with those who have done this longer. Here is a sample:

1. Are you a wannabe?
2. Blogging is Essential
3. Say Nothing in 500 Words

These all contain great advice for making the best blog posts, however if I am less inclined to post, I have defeated my purpose in starting this project in the first place. You see, I have long known about blogging, I just never started doing it because I felt like I had little that was worthy of adding to the conversation. This past spring, I made a decision that even if no one ever reads what I write, it is still valuable to me because I provide myself a written record of my own thinking over time.

I’m finishing up my 4th month as a blogger. Hardly enough time to consider myself anything more than a newbie. And since I’m an educator on summer break, the bulk of this experience has been in the off-season.

What do you think fellow bloggers? Do you ever hit a dry spell? Do you get discouraged and feel as though you have nothing worthwhile to say? Do you just get really busy and not take time to write anything? Do you concern yourself with how many readers you get? Are you doing it for a personal written record? Are there certain times of year you find yourself more active in this pursuit?

I’m curious how others out there stay motivated to keep writing. Not that I plan to quit anytime soon, I’m just looking for a little feedback that might help shape how to proceed from here.

Summertime is a great time for kids to get outside and experience the world around them. As a youngster, I was very interested in science and experimentation. Around middle school and junior high when the science and related mathematics became more challenging, I sadly gave up on trying to learn in these areas. I can’t point to any specific reasons, but I don’t think my experience is uncommon.

Many people dislike math and science, and it is really starting to show. Fifty years ago when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, cold war fears fueled a boom in math and science education. Government spending poured into efforts promoting this kind of learning, and many young people became scientists and engineers as a result. Twelve years later, the United States landed a man on the moon and we have been benefiting from the resulting space-age technological marvels ever since.

However, the popularity of technology careers has faded, and many people in them are approaching retirement age or have already retired. It is no longer fashionable to become a scientist or engineer. Compare these two lists I found online this week. The first is a list of college majors most in-demand by potential employers and the second is a list of the nation’s most popular majors as chosen by college students. What’s wrong with this picture? In many cases college students are not choosing majors that align with the career paths that will provide them with the best opportunities!

Employer Highest Demand Majors: (National Association of Colleges and Employers)
1. Accounting
2. Electrical engineering
3. Mechanical engineering
4. Business administration/management
5. Economics/finance
6. Computer science
7. Computer engineering
8. Marketing/marketing management
9. Chemical engineering
10. Information sciences and systems

Most Popular Major Choices: (Princeton Review)
1. Business Administration
2. Psychology
3. Nursing
4. Biology/Biological Sciences
5. Education
6. English Language and Literature
7. Economics
8. Communications Studies/Speech Communication and Rhetoric
9. Political Science and Government
10. Computer and Information Sciences

Right now the United States graduates only a fraction of the engineers that India and China do each year, and there is no sign of a change in that trend. But there is no cold war to fuel the interest in these areas like there was fifty years ago.

Technology guru and Internet founding father Vinton Cerf has called for renewing national interest in the sciences as in the days of Sputnik to respond to the current threat of global climate change. However, this threat has not struck the fear into the hearts of average Americans that Sputnik did, simply because it is a slow and creeping change rather than the instant change that Sputnik represented. Likewise, the threat of terrorism has spurred great interest in national defense and technological advancement as the cold war threat did. The terrorist foes we face are not perceived to threaten our way of life, and even our very existence as the Soviets of the cold war did.  It seems that we need a crisis, rather than a dull but persistent need to encourage change.

I mentioned earlier that I lost interest in Math and Science when those subjects became difficult, yet those two subjects are precisely the areas needed for careers in all of the engineering fields that are so much in demand. I think this pattern is pretty common, with initial interest in the early grades only to lose interest as the subjects become more challenging. What can be done to keep the interest alive in our children? Just watch some young kids for a while and you can easily see that problem-solving, experimentation and wonder is innate in human beings. So where is the disconnect? What happens that so few people wind up in technical careers that directly depend upon human curiosity? Something happens between early childhood and adulthood.

I think that part of the problem might be a general fear of Math and Science among primary grade educators. Of course, this is a generalization and not true for everyone, but if teachers in the lower grades are not enthusiastic about these subjects, it’s unlikely their pupils will be. I also think that upper level Math teachers can compound the problem. Students often move from teachers who dislike or fear Math in the lower grades to upper level teachers having such a love of Mathematics it is difficult for them to relate to people for whom Math does not come easily. Moving from Math fear to Math zeal is not an easy transition.

Personally, I didn’t find a Math teacher I could relate to until I attended community college. I’m sure much of it had to do with a more mature attitude, but some of it was definitely the teacher’s style of teaching. I believe it would be helpful if we had more Math teachers who struggled and still chose to teach the subject!

Parental support is critical. Teachers cannot do it all alone. There simply is not enough time in a school day to meet the needs of each child at the level of his or her needs. I believe parents can help, even if they are not strong in these areas. This summer, my daughter and I made a video about the summer solstice. My daughter made observations, collected data, and thought about why she saw what she saw; she did the basics of scientific inquiry. Not bad for a kid just out of kindergarten. It was nothing that was terribly difficult. All it took was some time and effort.

On August 9th, we are planning a Science Day camp for kids in grades K-4 in our city park. We are planning to do some physics experiments with the playground equipment, as well as the famous Diet Coke & Mentos geysers and other related science fun. We hope to get the kids thinking about experimentation and the scientific method of discovery. I will plan to share some photos and information about how the day went with you when it becomes available.

This summer my writing and blogging has greatly decreased. This is mostly because I have been fully engaged in learning and acquiring new information. You could say that I have been in student mode for much of the summer break, either in a formal class or self-exploration on various technologies.

Last month I took a K-State online course “EDCI 786 Digital Video in the Classroom” about video production and editing. Taught by Kay Murphy and Vaudene Field, this course is an excellent introduction to getting started with video as a teaching tool. (I have seen this course listed the past few summers, if you are interested in taking it check K-State’s Distance Education site to see when it will be taught next.)

Although I have been an amateur video enthusiast for many years, I still learned a number of things in the class. I will try to share a little bit of that new knowledge with you here.

Zimmertwins

The first week of the video class I was introduced to the Zimmertwins website. It provides a very basic introduction to timeline based editing. It’s very cute, and my 6 year old loves it. I think it would be a very good starting place for working with primary school children on concepts of digital storytelling needed for video making.

Video in the Classroom

Matthew Needleman’s excellent Video in the Classroom website is a tremendous resource for learning about digital storytelling in the classroom. For those interested in digital media projects as learning tools for any subject area, you don’t want to miss his reasons for integrating video technology. One of the most important reasons listed here is:

Higher level thinking.The revised Bloom’s Taxonomy puts creating at the highest level. Most traditional teaching asks students to memorize and recall information whereas filmmaking asks students to analyze and synthesize information from multiple sources, decide how to illustrate that information, and make decisions about presentation. (Needleman, 2008)

SchoolTube

I had already heard about and tried TeacherTube before, but this class introduced me to SchoolTube. Both are education friendly video hosting sites similar to YouTube. I have not used either very much and cannot be considered an authority on which is better to use. However the SchoolTube interface seems overly complicated and it’s search engine couldn’t find my video. As a college level educator, YouTube is appropriate for what I do, so I’ll probably continue using the original.

Video Tutorials

There were a couple of video making tutorials shared in the class. I bookmarked them for future reference to share with my students and I’ll share them here. They are:

1. Video with Professor Monkey
2. How to Shoot Like a Pro tips on filming a field trip
3. Flick School
4. Beautiful Transitions: Having the guts to cut

Video Terminology

Baffled by the jargon of video? Here are a few glossaries of terms:

1. Desktop Video
2. Shooting Terms

Equipment Purchasing Assignment

One assignment dealt with purchasing equipment for videomaking. As it turns out, my summer job had me spending a great deal of time researching video equipment. So my equipment list was a bit more sophisticated than that of the average classroom. Two pieces of gear to check out if you already have a video program in place and want to expand:

1. NewTek Tricaster Studio – A slick video studio in a box supports editing, mixing, virtual sets. Check it out!
2. Panasonic AG-HVX200A A high definition video camera supporting solid state & mini DV tape recording

That’s all for now. I’ll try to be better about posting more often, but right now it seems I’m too busy learning new stuff to spend a lot of time writing!

I have only been blogging for a few months but I have noticed that I have been less inclined to post since I am working a non-teaching job this summer. Perhaps I have less to say, but I think it is mostly that my thinking has not been as much in the educational realm as I want this blog to be.

My thinking has been very much in the technology realm, however. You could say that much of what I’ve been doing is working as a software engineer/analyst and technical consultant. Officially, I am a faculty intern at the local telecommunications company. I’ve never been that hung up on titles as long as the work I am doing is interesting.

You would think I would have plenty to write about, and I have learned a great deal this summer. Mostly I’ve been re-learning things I’ve gotten very rusty on. I’ve been so busy learning, I haven’t been keeping up with writing about it. I thought I’d take a moment and update you on some of the things I’ve been working on, and how they might be of benefit to a teacher interested in technology.

One of the first things I did was take an old eMachine pc and turn it into a Linux box I could experiment with. I had used primarily Red Hat Linux in the past, but also some Mandrake Linux. It has been over eight years since I have worked with these OS’es. I wanted to try something new, and I’ve heard a great deal about Ubuntu Linux so I downloaded that and gave it a try. The install was easy and friendly, but it had more of a feel of an end-user machine than a server, which is what I was after. Ubuntu looks like it would be an excellent place to start if you’ve been curious about Linux but afraid to take the plunge.

Debian Linux

After a little research, I learned that Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian Linux. The thing that impressed me right away about Debian is it’s lack of corporate affiliation. Back in 1999, my wife’s mother gave us $500 to invest in the red hot tech stock market, something I knew little about. I put it all in Red Hat stock (much like putting it all on Red-7 at a roulette wheel.) I quickly turned that $500 into about $10 when tech stocks tanked. (I learned a good lesson about investing, and no longer buy single stocks of any kind.)

Anyway, I found fully Debian very refreshing in that it is run by volunteer effort in the true sprit of the open source software movement. So I downloaded the installer and went to work building my system. I was after an automatic method of backing up router configuration files, and I had discovered RANCID, the Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ. (Anything with “Awesome” in the name has to be good, right?)

After getting my Debian system set up, I went to work getting RANCID working on it. It was a process of trial and error, reading everything I could find on the web about running RANCID on Debian. I’ll admit it wasn’t a simple process, but I was able to finally get things working properly.

Web Server

So, if you aren’t into backing up multiple Cisco router configs, what else with Linux might be of interest to an education technology person? One great thing you can do is set up a web server, which I did on my machine. I installed Apache web server with PHP and MySQL. PHP allows me to write server side scripts (computer programming) and MySQL is a relational database (MS Access is also a relational database, but it’s not free!)

With these tools, I began working on a project that involves looking up addresses in a database and allows potential customers to sign up for the different services offered by the company available to that address. I’m still working on this, but it works pretty slick.

If you want your students to learn about the technology driving Web 2.0, a great place to start is with a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) installation. All of the software you need for free is hard to beat!

Java

I taught Java a couple of times about eight years ago, and then also in the fall of 2007. I had a project this summer that allowed me to write a Java program to automate a task. I wrote a program that read through all of the e-mail accounts on the mail server, finding the ones that have not been accessed for a specified period of time and deletes them, saving a lot of manual administration time.

Newtek Video Gear

I spent a significant amount of time reading up on video gear, since the company provides IPTV video to it’s customers and wants to begin producing local content. Probably the most exciting thing I found was the Newtek Tricaster video studio in a box. If you want your students to have access to some amazing video technology, you might look into a Tricaster. This thing is a video mixer, compositer, editor all rolled into one. I think the live virtual sets is what amazed me the most. If you have ever tried to render a green-screen matte using Adobe Premiere or similar editing software, you will appreciate the live compositing available with the Tricaster. The software in this thing can make it look like you are standing on a million dollar set, when you are really in a small room. That’s the power of a virtual set. I’m hoping my school will purchase one of these things, it’s that amazing!

Teaching

One of the most fun things I did this summer is give one of my networking lectures to the telecom technicians. Most of them have no background or training in computer networks, but they are installing cutting edge FTTH (Fiber to the Home) in all of the communities they serve. It’s amazing technology, and I had a great time explaining an overview of the seven layer OSI model that shows how what they do fits into the larger picture of computer networking.

If you’ve ever had a lecture on the OSI model, you know how painfully dull that can be. I go to great lengths to make my talk funny, interesting and relevant. It was great practice for me as a teacher to make a presentation to this audience. There is another group of techs in another city and I may get the chance to practice with them as well.

It has been a fruitful summer for me, and I’m eager to get back in the classroom next month with stronger technology muscles.

I’m a new fan of science guy Steve Spangler. I had not ever heard of him until someone posted a tweet on Twitter recently about his appearance on the Ellen show. In the Ellen video, Steve fills a bathtub full of cornstarch & water, which creates a sloppy, soupy mixture similar to cake batter. Ellen has an audience member run across the top of the mixture.

The demonstration caught my attention because our chemistry professor at K-State at Salina did a miniature version of the same idea at our school open house last April. She explained that with non-newtonian fluids if you move slowly, the mixture will let you pass, but if you hit it quickly, it will resist you. That is why the young lady was able to run across the top without sinking in.

So of course I had to read more about Steve Spangler. He has a website where one can purchase supplies needed for numerous science experiments, including the famous Diet Coke and Mentos geyser experiment. His patent pending Geyser Tube takes the guesswork out of creating a soda pop geyser. I’m planning to get a bulk pack of those things!

Perhaps one of the more interesting things I learned about Steve Spangler is his Science in the Rockies “boot camp for K-5 teachers who need creative science integration strategies.” It looks like a fun and engaging way for teachers to learn about science, and it looks like it starts today. I will have to book mark that site and try to encourage some of our local elementary school teachers to attend.

Well, I’m off to do some science experiments with my kids!

Tags: science