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.

A Possible Research Topic

As the mobile learning is become more and more popular in modern education, students are able to grab a piece of information so quickly through their iPhone/iPad or any other Internet-connected digital devises, do they still bother to make efforts to remember something?
At “ancient times”, we used pens and paper notebooks to record what teachers were taught in classes, when writing took place, to some extent, it helped students to take the first step in remembering the contents; when they reviews the class, things written on notebook could remind the learning contents again and they may think more deeper, then they might add more notes on. It’s better to understand the whole thing and remember what you have learned now, otherwise, it would be a huge task before the exam when you basically need to start from zero.
According to cognitive theory, two things are very important:
(1) The memory system is an active organized processor of information and
(2) Prior knowledge plays an important role in learning.
If students are so easy to get the information from Internet through their mobile devices, they may feel there is not a necessity to remember everything, since their mobiles made it possible for information-on-demand (or knowledge-on-demand). However, one’s knowledge is expended based on what they have now (what they remember), if you don’t have the previous knowledge base, you cannot absorb new knowledge. It can be explained that why we have prerequisites for different courses.
So what I feel will be an interesting research topic is that “Will the use of Internet – connected mobile devices weaken the memory ability for students?”
To conduct a research, a comparative experiment can be conducted. For one group of students, they are allowed to use iPhone/iPad during the class, and for the other group, they can only use pens and paper during the class. We can ask them to have a quiz right after class to see what happen to their short-term memory, and of course, we can also wait until the end of semester to see which group did better job in the exam.
Still, I think the result might be different when conduct experiment in primary school, secondary school and in the university. But I may have the hypothesis that it matters more in primary level.

Opinions on Experimental Classroom

Opinions on Experimental Classroom

It is a great experience to have classes in such a high tech classroom.

The best thing about this classroom is that we students are being the center of the learning process, while instructors are act as kind of facilitators during whole process. The student – centered learning is enabled of course by the ICT equipped in the experimental classroom.

1.    Students are arranged to be seated into different groups, it eases the communication and discussion among group members.

2.    With the provided PC, we can quickly key in opinions from different group members for documentation and later on we could use what we came up during the discussion for assignment and group works.

3.    Group works are not only shared among group members, but also with the rest of the whole class. Thanks to the ICT system, each groups’ input can be displayed through the big screen so that everyone in the classroom can see the contents of group discussion and freely give quick comments on that. It is definitely a good way to learn from each other.

4.    With smart control system, the lightening can be adjusted easily. When instructor would like to dry attention from students, he/she can turn off the lights and left only the big screens to be seen.

5.    Though the tables are set freeze in classroom, but the chairs are moveable, students can always move around. Maybe you would have a cross discussion with your neighbors, that would be possible.

6.    Except PC input, each table is also equipped with a microphone which help individual’s opinions to be passed throughout the whole class.

7.    I realized there is also a visualizer on each table too, though we have not used it until now, but I am sure it is a very good ICT that is used in education when people need to present something in real, for example, students may show some of the iPhone/iPad application on his/her iPhone through the visualizer.

Things I am not sure whether good or bad

1.    I personally do not see the leveling of the whole classroom help that much. It is a little bit uncomfortable when you hear somebody is talking but you cannot see his/her face. It is just different from talking through phones, you know the person is there, but without seeing him/her, you are not that convinced. It’s the same thing when instructor is lecturing, without the eye contact; it’s just missing something there. On the other hand, I believe to some extent leveling is good, but it is better to make sure the structure won’t block students’ vision.

2.    If the table can be movable, that would be great; but I can see how messy it could be if the cables cannot be hidden under the table.

3.    About the microphone on each table, though it is alright for us to pass around the microphone to the one and another, it is still not very convenient.

4.    If the system could display the multiple video inputs at the same time, (which means we can see different screen inputs from different groups on one single screen) that would be easy for us to make comparison.

Overall, I enjoyed the classroom a lot.

Web 2.0 in Education - Building a Virtual Classroom in SecondLife

Have you ever experienced a second life in the virtual environment provided by SecondLife? 

SecondLife has created a virtual world, each participant can create an avatar to represent himself/herself in this virtual world.  Every avatar we

meet in the virtual world corresponds to a real person in the real world.  We can chat or talk with others in the virtual world.  We can build our own buildings, rooms, and create our own settings.   We can share files, images, etc. in the virtual world.  You may click here to visit the website of SecondLife to get more information or to join it.

Thus, a teacher can use SecondLife to support distance learning.  The teacher can ask all students to create avatars for themselves.  He then creates a virtual classroom in SecondLife, and asking all students to log in and come to this place to attend the lesson.  The teacher can talk to the whole class as in the real world.  He can share the lecture notes and other resources.  Students can discuss with each others and with the teacher.