Chris selected as K12OnlineConference keynote speaker Each year the K12OnlineConference provides tremendous professional development for free, and entirely online. This year, they have selected me as one of their keynote speakers. I am thrilled to have been chosen and look forward to participating in the conversation. Read the full post announcing all the keynote speakers here.
Two quick links on Cognitive Load Theory I've been fielding lots of questions lately about Cognitive Load Theory. Here are two quick links that may be useful. First is an article talking about the practical implications of CLT on the design of learning. The second are some "recent" (as of 2003) developments regarding CLT. Happy reading! Update: I clarified the second...
Practical advice on kids and Android app development After hearing about my students' success developing an Android app, I've gotten several emails asking for more details as to how I practically worked with my kids. Here are some pointers that I offered to the first person that emailed me, perhaps they are of some use to you. Please note that your mileage may vary. It's ok to not be...
Publishing an App Inventor app to the Android Market As I mentioned earlier, my students and I published an Android app to the Android Market. See those links for more information on the background. This post is decidedly technical. First, once we finished the coding process, we packaged the app for to download to the computer. This is an option in App Inventor. This downloaded an .apk file....
Designing and publishing an Android app with kids This post is designed to provide some context around how/why we decided to build this app. The more technical details of the code and how we published it will come in a future post. My students and I recently completed and published an Android app, and here's how we did it. First, the genesis for this goes back to a question I asked...
Oct
27
Category : Educational Technology, Featured, General
Each year the K12OnlineConference provides tremendous professional development for free, and entirely online. This year, they have selected me as one of their keynote speakers. I am thrilled to have been chosen and look forward to participating in the conversation.
Read the full post announcing all the keynote speakers here.
May
23
I’ve been fielding lots of questions lately about Cognitive Load Theory.
Here are two quick links that may be useful. First is an article talking about the practical implications of CLT on the design of learning.
The second are some “recent” (as of 2003) developments regarding CLT.
Happy reading!
Update: I clarified the second article, it’s not all that recent.
May
17
After hearing about my students’ success developing an Android app, I’ve gotten several emails asking for more details as to how I practically worked with my kids.
Here are some pointers that I offered to the first person that emailed me, perhaps they are of some use to you. Please note that your mileage may vary.
Is this useful? What other questions do you have?
May
15
As I mentioned earlier, my students and I published an Android app to the Android Market. See those links for more information on the background. This post is decidedly technical.
First, once we finished the coding process, we packaged the app for to download to the computer. This is an option in App Inventor. This downloaded an .apk file. It is possible to install that .apk file directly to the phone, but it is not possible to publish that file directly to the market. Here’s how to put the finishing touches on your app and get it ready for publishing.
First, save yourself LOADS of time and go download the amazing conversion program located here. Then follow these steps.
Publish it! Just go to http://market.android.com/publish and create a developer account (costs $25) and publish away!
Here is the app2market process in pictures.
May
13
This post is designed to provide some context around how/why we decided to build this app. The more technical details of the code and how we published it will come in a future post.
My students and I recently completed and published an Android app, and here’s how we did it.
First, the genesis for this goes back to a question I asked some time ago, regarding what I should teach kids. I then asked for help designing the course.
I developed some thoughts in response and wondered how the course would go. Since I’m such a Google fanatic, I was aware of the App Inventor software Google provides for free. I set it up on three computers and left it prepared if the chance arose to try it out.
When the first class of “media tech” came to me we began chatting about what they wanted to learn. A few kids said the magic words, “we want to learn about developing apps for phones”. Music to my ears. I set them down on the three computers, showed them how to find the tutorials and they went to work.
The first app kids developed was called Meatball Destruction. The goal was for a meatball to destroy different objects, with the difficulty increasing. Truth be told, the game didn’t get too far. It was barely playable by the end of our nine weeks (block schedule, so I see these kids roughly 22 times) course.
So when the new block of kids came in, I decided that the kids needed to have a useful purpose behind the app in order to help sustain interest when the difficulties arose. So the kids decided to make an app about our school for parents and students.
Most of the time, they worked on their own, and sometimes they came to ask questions. Truth be told, they knew more than I did, and it was ok. We spent time Googling answers together and sometimes I had to ask questions in a forum. Thankfully the community was supportive and helpful.
If you have an Android phone, we’d love it if you would download it and rate it!
May
05
My friends at join.me are offering educators one free month of a pro account. You can read my thoughts on join.me but suffice it to say I like it very much.
If you want the free month of a pro account, fill in this form. Enjoy!
Apr
23
I have been a faithful DimDim user since David Jakes told me about it at NYSCATE in November of last year. I ended up purchasing a year’s subscription right before they got bought by Salesforce. While I still have a few months left on my subscription, I decided to go hunting for a new solution, so as not to be hurried. Here are my needs/wants/etc…
Aside from those two options, everything else is icing on the cake. The vast majority of webinars, technical support calls, and conference calls I do need only those two options. However, that proved quite difficult to find.
I explored several of the major conferencing providers, and discovered that most, if not all, charge lots of money for phone conferencing. For example:
And so on and so forth.
Note that I do not mind paying for a service that works. I pay for DimDim. But I could not see paying by the minute for phone conferencing.
Enter join.me.
I initially discovered join.me as I needed a quick and easy solution to helping my parents with their ailing computer. join.me allowed me to control their computers with ease.
Did you know every join.me session comes with a free phone conferencing session? I didn’t. I learned it did. And I was hooked.
In fact, every join.me session allows up to 250 people to participate on the phone conference. For free. Outstanding.
So now I am using join.me as my conferencing provider. I fire up my presentation in Keynote or Google Presentations and present that way. I get a chat room, phone conference, and can even let others participate.
And, there are Android and iOS apps for viewing presentations.
So I’m a join.me convert. Try it and let me know what you think.
Full disclosure: Since I heart join.me so much and have been using it so much over the last few months, we decided to work together. So I am helping them perfect an already outstanding product a few hours each month. My opinion of the product is not shaped by our agreement, I work with them because I believe they’ve got a good thing going.
Mar
30
I recently polled my Twitter colleagues for help with software for a kid to make animations. Here are their thoughts.
Mar
09
I have been encountering a particular issue using Android App Inventor recently. The error message says:
error your build failed due to a server error in the AAPT stage
It turns out this was caused by having too many extra images. Once we removed the additional unused images the problem went away.
Perhaps this will help someone.
Feb
04
I am working with a brand new class called Media Tech. Kids have naturally divided into groups based on interest, and for most all of their interests I had tools available that they could work with. For example, one group wanted to make videos, and I handed them cameras and a laptop and sent them to find a place to work. One group, however, wanted to make their own video games. I didn’t have an easy answer for them, so I asked my colleagues through Twitter.
Here are the responses, perhaps the resources will be useful for someone else wanting to help kids build video games.
