Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

Here’s a product of research in “motion of text” and how that motion can add an emotional element to the text even when no sound is present. I spend a lot of time talking with my students talking about motion mainly in PowerPoint. If the default actions in PowerPoint are used, the result is usually distracting. If some of these kinetic effects can be added to a PowerPoint presentation, the end result could increase the audience’s emotional response making the event more memorable.

The author of the movie has a free program that can be used to create presentations. You can find it on the Carnegie Mellon website.

Alan November has a good post on one-to-one laptop program lashback.  Here is a quote:

First of all we should never call any program a “Laptop Program”. We certainly do not have pencil and paper programs. As soon as a school or district places the focus on the technology I believe it is doomed to fail.

The research is all over the place on this topic.  Most say there is no difference in student learning with laptops or without laptops.  The larger problem is number of variables in the equation.  Giving each student a laptop will not make a difference if the teacher uses the same instructional techniques as in a laptop-less class.  The assignments must be different.   Students must be involved in determining how the learning process materializes.  The role of the teacher is dramatically different.  November defines the teacher as someone who builds learning communities.

The article gives a list of institutional changes that should take place before a laptop program is initiated. Training teachers to use technology is one small step toward revamping the educational processes involved when instituting a project as complex as a laptop program. In fact, the technical training is probably the easiest step to complete.

If you are a Blackboard user, here is a del.icio.us/Scuttle social bookmarking service that plugs right into the learning management system.  It’s called Scholar.  You must have Blackboard to add bookmarks to the system.  Without a Blackboard server you can search through the links made public by Blackboard users.  Browsing isn’t too bad because all the links are connected to courses with academic content.  There aren’t as many links in the database, but a search will have a higher probability of a valuable hit.

Having social bookmarking built into the LMS solves a lot of the problems inherent in larger sites like del.icio.us.  All the bookmarks in Scholar can be grouped by course.  A student or an instructor can have generic bookmarks or bookmarks associated with specific courses.

Now we need someone to integrate Scuttle into Moodle.