Every photo tells a story

In session 4, tools for creating vidoes have been covered.  I have created a video clip using some photos taken in the Apple Race, an yearly event of my school, using Photo Story 3.

Photo Story is a piece of very easy to use freeware.  It can help use to create slideshows using our digital photos. Adding stunning special effects, soundtracks, and our own voice narration to ur photo stories are made easy.  Details of Photo Story 3 is available here.

Teaching with Resources on the Web

The Tower of Hanoi Puzzle is one of the problems I used every year to illustrate and teach the concepts and techniques of recursion in programming.

To provide hand-on practice to students, I have purchased 3 sets of Tower of Hanoi game boards many years ago.  Students are given these game boards to try and play in groups.

In recently years, these game boards are no longer needed.  Google “Tower of Hanoi”, plenty of online resources are available.  Some provide beautiful animations letting students to play and try solving the problem online, and animated solution is available.  One of them can be accessed by clicking HERE.
 

M-Learning Case study

I would like to share a journal article about M-learning. The article talks about a report of an  mobile game-based learning research project in Finland. A historical game is developed and students are required to form groups and play the game. Members of group are randomly assigned the role(for example, beggar, merchant, etc).With the help of GPS technology,Smart phone (with Internet access), students need to walk through the Amsterdam to find the the track point in order to win the game.

The result showed playing of mobile game have a better learning effect than having lesson in the classroom. I am not surprise with the result because the "digital natives" are surrounded by the technology products when they grown up. The old,traditional teaching methods are no longer suitable for them.

However, I don't think this kind of project is suitable for Hong Kong. First of all, Local schools is lack of money for IT infrastructure. In my school, there are very limited funding for school to purchase new IT devices. It is hardly possible to launch project like this. Moreover, number of students of my school come from grass-root families.They are poor and unable to buy  these expensive devices(eg. GPS device, smart phone).

However, This project gave a a new vision. the project pointed out that more and more students drop out the school without graduation around the world(not only Finland, also USA and other European countries). It thus appears that the traditional education is not meeting the needs of certain pupils sufficiently. As an educator, we can no longer use the old pedagogy to teach!

The website of the research project:
http://freq1550.waag.org/

M-Learning in my work place

The department that is responsible for technology development and technology application used in teaching and learning in our University is called Publishing Technology Center (PTC); its mission is to integrate design, media and publishing technologies to support teaching and learning, research and publicity of the University.
There are several services it provides that are quite useful and enables mobile learning in our University. One of them is called “RVC” - Remote Video Capture which is used by a lot of faculties and being highly appraised by students. Almost every lecture classroom and lecture theater is equipped with RVC system.

Faculties will need to make the booking of the service first (by providing information on class venue and class time), and then the video recording of the whole lecture will be started automatically without any set up. You may see it as a simple video recording, what’s the big deal? Actually it does more than video recording, you can see from the following picture how it different from traditional video recording. Basically, it separates the screen into two parts, on the left hand side, you will see professor is lecturing; and on the right hand side, it shows the presentation slides during the class or what is being written on the white board. It synchronizes the lecturing from professor and PowerPoint slides Presentation. So you don’t need to refer to print outs of the ppt when you’re listening. One amazing thing is that the camera could sense the movement of Professors and adjust the angles for best video recording.

Another good thing is that it also allows concurrent video recording, which means classes happen at the same time can be recorded simultaneously.

When students want to review the class for whatever reason (maybe they skipped the class for a job interview or they attended a party last night), they could always get to the website and input their University account and password to see the lecture video from their dorm or their home.