MIT OpenCourseWare – now for high school

Posted on November 29, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

I talked about MIT’s OpenCourseWare project last year in my eTech presentation.  This is a great resource if you are interesting in the content of a college course.  MIT has placed many (I have heard people say “all”) courses online and has made them available to the general public for free.

Last year, I needed a quick thermodynamics refresher, so I downloaded the class notes from a Physical Chemistry course.  The PDF’ed lecture notes were clear with pictures, equations and definitions.  There were also assignments and a complete syllabus in case I wanted to work a few problems or take the whole course. 

In fact, everything was there except the faculty person.  MIT makes these courses available because they know students out there want the information in the courses, but may not have the chance to take a course at MIT. 

Today the MIT president announced that a new high school portal called Highlights for High School is being developed.  This initiative will give high school students and teachers resources for advanced courses.  It turns out that about 15,000 high school students are currently downloading MIT course materials each month.  It was speculated that many secondary students do not have advanced course offering because of the reduction in funding of gifted and talented programs.  The Highlights for High School program is designed for these students.

I like the motto of the program:  Unlocking knowledge, empowering minds.

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Free – SnagIt and Camtasia Studio

Posted on November 28, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

TechSmith is offering two popular titles as free downloads.  Both SnagIt (screen capture) and Camtasia Studio (screencast capture) are utilities I have used for years.  Now the company is making last year’s versions available for free.

These free versions do not expire.  The hope of the company is that you will like them enough to pay for an upgrade to the latest versions.  If you upgrade these free versions, TechSmith is offering the new versions at half price.

If you capture web pages, one feature of SnagIt may save you a lot of time.  As the picture on the right shows, SnagIt can capture an entire scrolling web page in one shot.  This is much easier than trying to capture one screen at a time and pasting them together.

Camtasia Studio is used to create screencasts like those used in Atomic Learning.  Basically, anything you do on your screen can be captured in real time while you provide audio in the form of a voice over.  All you need is a microphone and you can create custom tutorials for anything on your computer.

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Wii Big Brain Academy

Posted on November 27, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

I have been a fan of the Brain Age and Big Brain Academy games on the Nintendo DS.  So I wasn’t surprised when someone in my family gave us the Wii version of Big Brain as a Christmas gift.

If you are looking for a more mentally stimulating game than the average first-person shooter, you will probably like Big Brain.

The whole idea behind these games is to exercise your brain by showing you simple puzzles and measuring how long it takes you to solve them.  The answers are things even an elementary student knows, so the challenge is the go through them as quickly as possible. 

Here’s an example.  You are given four numbers: 4, 1, 2, 3

Eliminate one or more of the numbers so the sum equals six.  There are a couple of ways to do it, but the quickest response gets the most points.

In between family matches of tennis, we are now adding some brain exercises.  Anyone for an online challenge?

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Vista – What is it good for?

Posted on November 26, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

I am still have problems with Vista.  If I weren’t in the middle of a semester, I would dump it tomorrow, but it will have to wait until Christmas.

I started making a list of things in Vista that I like, but aren’t available in XP.  The list is short.

1 – Search-able Start Button – I use this at least fifty times a day.

2 – The user directory structure – I like the fact that all the “My This”, “My That” folders are gone.  Now it’s all in a directory called “Users” instead of the ridiculously named “Documents and Settings”.

Beyond this, I can’t think of anything else that benefits me.  Am I missing something?

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Wish I could have seen this one live

Posted on November 25, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

That UStream.TV is a bit slow.  At least on a weekend.  I have been struggling through a conference wrap-up with Will Richardson and Gary Stager.

This is the first conference that has permitted two well known people with differing opinions about educational technology sit down and have a civil discussion about technology’s roll in education.

Read more about it on Will and Gary‘s blogs.

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