10 Interactive Whiteboard Tools

Over the last two years I have been using and perfecting the Wii Interactive Whiteboard in my classroom. I am preparing for a presentation on the setup and use of the WIWB at the 2010 MACUL conference on March 13 and put together a list of my top 10 favorite uses for aninteractive whiteboard. All ten of these products are free and easy to use.

1. Review Games

2. Google SketchUp

3. Google Earth/Maps

4. Assessments and Review

5. Virtual Cell

6. Biggest Brain

7. Virtual Knee Surgery

8. Timelines

9. Concept Maps

10. Magnetic Words

Fellow Wii IWB user Dave Tarwater has also compiled a list of interactive activities for IWB.

IR Pen Product Review: Updated

The infrared (IR) light pen is one of the essential pieces of hardware for the Wiiboard. The evolution of the IR Pen has progressed rapidly as the Wiiboard technology has taken off. About a year ago I posted my original review of several IR Pens. Since my original post the pens that I reviewed have been updated and improved and several other manufacturers have begun selling IR Pens.

Four companies were kind enough to send me samples of their IR pens for my review. These pens were tested for several months in my high school science classroom. Here are the results.

Click to enlarge image

Penteractive.us

4/15/2010 Update: Penteractive has recently updated their classic IR pen. John Mitchel was kind enough to send me a sample of version 2.0. After some testing I'll post my review.

John Mitchel's $8 $10 (price recently changed) pens are simple and effective. They run on three hearing aid style batteries and feature the brightest LED available. I purchased this IR pen over a year ago and it has yet to need the batteries replaced. The Penteractive pens are switch operated. I like the fact that when you press the switch you will hear and feel a "click" that indicates the switch is working. These pens are the size of a small highlighter which makes them ideal for small hands. The durability of these pens is awesome. They have been dropped countless times with any adverse affects.

In addition to providing a quality product, Penteractive offers great customer service. Emails are answered promptly and orders or fulfilled quickly. I made several purchases from Penteractive and highly recommend all of their products.

The Groove 1.5 by irpensonline

The Groove is an IR pen with a pressure sensitive tip. The Groove can also be activated through the red button found on top of the pen. The second generation of the groove (ver. 1.5) is remarkably better than the original version which I previously reviewed. Owner Tino Aginitti listens and responds to his users suggestions. The most notable improvement is a reduction in the amount of pressure required to activate the LED. This is especially important in instances where images are projected on a soft surface such as a free-hanging overhead screen. The pen casing has also been improved and is much more aesthetically pleasing and more durable.

The LED intensity of The Groove is excellent. One of the most convenient features of The Groove is the fact that it runs on one AAA battery that can easily be replaced by removing the cover on the bottom of the pen.

I would highly recommend The Groove for use in the classroom, especially with younger ages. The pressure sensitive tip makes using this pen very intuitive.

Whalebone "Gum Box"

A new entry into the IR pen market is Whalebone owned by James McLain. The pens built by James have the distinction of being the most creative and fun of all the pens. The version which I reviewed is the "Gum Box" pen made out of a small tin in the shape of a Wiimote. James also sells a pen shaped like Frankenstein as well as an extra long IR pen he calls "The Laser Sword."

Although it looks cool the gum box pen did not perform as well as its counterparts. The LED used in this pen is noticeably dimmer than those of other pens. In this pen the IR LED faces up and back. This makes precise navigation difficult. Ergonomically the gum box pen is awkward to hold. Its width makes it difficult to hold naturally in your hand and the activation button is poorly placed. At $9.95 each (including shipping!), these pens are affordably priced. They are powered by one 3v watch style battery which is not easy to replace.

InfraWow: WIB Scrib

If you are looking for an extremely durable IR pen, turn no further than to Riley Sowle and his pen the WIB Scrib. This pen is made from heavy duty steel and features an unique metal to metal activation switch. The LED brightness is comparable to both the Groove and Penteractive pens. I like the size of the WIB Scrib however the weight is noticeably heavier than any of the other pens due to the solid steel case. Battery replacement is easy with the twist off end which reveals two AAA batteries.

Although the activation switch on the WIB Scrib is effective, it does not have the helpful sound and feel of a click upon activation. From my observation of students using IR pens I have found that this feature helps students feel like something is happening, especially since IR light is invisible to the human eye. This would be my recommendation for future improvements of the WIB Scrib.

My thanks to each of these companies for allowing their pens to be rigorously tested and critiqued. I hope that this post will generate business for each of them. All four companies are small business operations run by good guys. None of them are large corporations. I would encourage you to support their innovation and creativity and to provide feedback to them to help improve their products.

If you have had experience with any of these products I welcome your feedback and critique. Help make sure that each of these companies have a fair review! If you're a manufacturer of IR pens or other products related to the Wii interactive whiteboard and are looking for a rigorous tester, send me an email: jsowash [at] southfieldchristian [dot] org.

Don't Read your Textbook

Note: I decided to take a little break from my normal ed. tech posts. Here's an article that I wrote for a local school newsletter.

Reading is a critical skill for academic success. This includes the sciences. Sadly, when it comes to reading, most students only think about their textbook. How boring! Reading textbooks provides great instruction and information but doesn’t do much to excite students about science. When given the option of reading a science textbook or a favorite novel, it’s no surprise that the textbook gets put up on the shelf.

You don’t have to read a textbook to learn about science. There is a wealth of literature that illustrates scientific principles, heralds scientific discoveries, and encourages exploration. It is only when students are excited about the possibilities of science that they will be willing to engage in the difficult work of mastering scientific concepts.

Reading science literature for pleasure benefits students in two ways. First, engaging with complex information develops the brain and requires higher order thinking. This type of cognition is critical for success in the sciences. Secondly, when student see examples of scientific discoveries, breakthroughs, and triumphs, they will be eager to learn more. Compelling stories provide a context for scientific facts. Yes, this stuff actually can be useful! There is no greater example of this than the space race of the Kennedy era. The triumph of putting a man on the moon is still amazing even today. Reading an in-depth account of this adventure encourages scientific exploration.

My teaching partner at Southfield Christian School, Dr. Jan Guthrie, and I have compiled a list of books which we use to encourage high school student to read scientific literature for fun. It’s a mix of fiction and non-fiction. I have selected 10 of my favorites from the list to share with you. If you would like to full list (70+ books), please send me an e-mail: jsowash at southfieldchristian dot org.

Ten Great Science Books:
All links to Google Books
The great influenza: The epic story of the deadliest plague by John M. Barry. (Genetics, Epidemiology, Biology)

Into thin air: A personal account of the Mount Everest* by John Krakauer (Ecology, Biology, Anatomy & Physiology)

Jurassic Park* by Michael Crichton (Genetics, Biology, Paleontology)

Rascal by Sterling North (Bology, Veterinary Sciences)

The Case for the Creatorby Lee Strobel (Biology, Chemistry, Physics)

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made by Philip Yancy and Paul Brand (Anatomy & Physiology)

Between a Rock and a Hard Place* by Aron Ralston (Anatomy & Physiology)

E: the story of a numberby Eli Maor (Mathematics)

The five biggest ideas in science by Arthur W. Wiggins, Charles M. Wynn (Biology, Physics, Chemistry)

My stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor (Anatomy & Physiology)

* = parental review recommended due to language and or graphic content

Why can't schools be miniature Magic Kingdoms?

I'm spending my winter break this week in Orlando, Florida with my wife, daughter, and in-laws. We visited the Magic Kingdom yesterday and Downtown Disney tonight. Throughout our visit I vacillated between disgust and amazement at the Disney empire. The expense, extravagance and commercialism can be overwhelming. Upon further reflection, however, you have to be impressed and amazed at the vision created by Walt Disney which infuses every aspect of Disney World.

Recognition of the Disney brand is one of the top in the world. The Fortune 1000 market report ranks it as the 11th most recognizable brand. Not only is the Disney logo instantly recognizable, it carries with it an ideal greater than the sum of its individual parts. Disney is associated with imagination, creativity, adventure, excitement and magic. Several other companies have achieved similar success in their branding, namely Google, Apple, and FedEx.

When touring the Magic Kingdom I was impressed by the immaculate landscaping, tightly designed themes, and unbelievable staffing and infrastructural organization. 17 Million visitors walked through the gates of the Magic Kingdom in 2008 making it the worlds most visited theme park. Every aspect of the park exudes the creative imagination of Walt Disney. Even areas under construction are decorated with quotes from Disney. Museums, theme parks, and other entertainment venues strive to achieve similar success, but Walt Disney is unquestionably the master.

If you've read this far, you're probably wondering how this fits in with education, technology, teaching, or anything at all. Simply put, why can't schools be miniature Magic Kingdoms?

First of all, very few companies, let alone schools, have a guiding vision that is understood, owned, and lived by their employees. Some do (Zappos is a good example), but this is the exception, not the rule. Are you in a school in which students, teachers, parents, and administrators are all striving for a common goal? I'm not talking about some vague goal of "academic excellence," but something deeper and more significant that requires the collective efforts of an entire community to make possible, something that impacts the culture of the school.

Does your school have a brand? Does it have uniqueness about it that sets it apart from other schools? When people think of your school what words, feelings, or ideas come to mind? Are they positive? Reputation is a powerful force. It takes years and years to build and seconds to destroy (just ask Tiger Woods). Schools need to do a better job of branding themselves. Schools create a product just like a business. Our product and methods are different, but we are still expected to produce. Charter and online schools are doing a decent job at branding themselves. Some private schools are as well. In my area (metro Detroit), Brother Rice has done a remarkable job at creating an educational brand that excites families.

Everyone wants to be a part of something that is bigger than themselves. This is vision. Where there is no vision, people perish. Strong leaders emphasize and illuminate the vision. They don't always have to come up with the vision, just creatively and inspirationally communicate it to others. This is what Walt Disney was able to do. His vision was so well defined and communicated to his employees that even after his death it continues.

If schools can become miniature Magic Kingdoms, they will be transformed into exciting, dynamic, and challenging learning environments. Castle optional.

Dynamic Bookmarking on your Blog or Wiki

I frequently come across websites that I think would be helpful for my students to know about. My old method of sharing them was to announce them in class, send an e-mail out, or post them individually on my class page. This worked, but was time consuming as I had to repeat the process for each new resource that I found.

I recently stumbled up a neat feature within Wikispaces that allows you to share Delicious bookmarks. Upon further exploration I found out that you can filter the resources you share to a specific topic.

For my Anatomy and Physiology class I have created a separate wiki page for each of the 11 body systems. On these pages I share my lectures, class notes, and other resources. I am in the process of adding a widget that links to my Delicious account and shares all of the resources that I have tagged as "skeletal" "muscular" or "nervous". Each page now has an ever expanding section of links which students can use as study aids.

Interested? Here's how to add dynamic bookmarking to your blog or wiki.

Dear Google: Please let us use YouTube at School!

Google's products are wonderful classroom resources. Sadly, one of my favorites, YouTube, can not be accessed by students in educational settings. My school completely blocks student access to YouTube; both the site and embedded videos. I agree with this policy: there is simply too much garbage on YouTube to allow student access. In order to reverse this policy, and gain access to the millions of students and teachers who would benefit from YouTube access, Google will need to structure YouTube in a filter friendly manner so that required school web filters can distinguish between trash and treasure.

Apple took a step toward becoming "school friendly" when it added a K-12 section to iTunes (check out my previous post on the topic). This move was made after an overwhelming response to the addition of iTunesU and the wealth of content uploaded by colleges and universities from around the country. The service hasn't taken off. In my opinion, this is because of the added layer of complexity that the iTunes software adds to the process of finding and downloading videos.

Google has a prime opportunity to own educational video content on the web by optimizing YouTube for use by educational institutions. Here are four reasons why they are the best company to accomplish this:

1. The corporate philosophy at Google is to allow open access to information, no special software, subscription fees, or restrictions.
2. Google has the brain power, coffers, and infrastructure to satisfy demand.
3. YouTube's technical infrastructure is unmatched in terms of speed, reliability, and ease of use.
4. YouTube is familiar to virtually all internet users (ranked as the third most popular internet site by Alexa).

There are essentially two reasons to use YouTube or other related video upload sites. The first is to upload and share your videos. I do this fairly regularly, perhaps as much as once a week. In my classroom, I assign 1-2 video creation projects per year. YouTube certainly satisfies need, but so do several other video upload sites such as Vimeo, SchoolTube, and Google Video. The second reason to use a video site is to find a video on a specific topic. For this purpose, YouTube's breadth and depth is unmatched. No other video site can match the content offered by YouTube. Phillip White reports that the number of videos available on YouTube in July of 2009 was somewhere around 100 million. TechCrunch reports that YouTube streams as many as 1.2 billion videos per day. With a pool that deep, it's hard not to find something useful.

The entire reason that Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion was to be the facilitator of the largest collection of user generated video on the web. Google Video has a fraction YouTube's content. The fact that most students are unable to access this resource is unfortunate. Schools can choose to use any number of sites for uploading and sharing videos, but no other site (currently) can offer the range of videos offered by YouTube. For this reason alone, Google should optimize YouTube so that schools can offer this content to students. Here are some suggestions:

1. Standardize video URL's: each video hosted on YouTube has a unique URL. Because of this, unblocking videos is a tedious task. Each video must be unblocked separately. Standardizing URL's so that each video showed up as "youtube.com/jrsowash/watch?v=wH-6vM61LaI" would allow the unblocking of all video content from a "clean" user.
2. Add Channel Certifications/Ratings: Allow YouTube users to apply for channel certifications that would stamp their content with a seal of approval. Educational institutions, non-profits, businesses, and certified teachers could apply for this certification which would elevate the credibility of their content. These certifications would require independent confirmation by some authoritative group. I would recommend something similar to the Wikipedia model of editing and approval for this. Use the wisdom of the crowd!
3. Give individual videos a rating: We rate our movies and TV shows, why not online videos? Allow users to tag videos with G, PG, PG-13, and R ratings (or some equivalent) . Again using the wisdom of the crowd, videos with some number of the same rating (say 10) would be confirmed into that category. This would make filtering videos for viewing at school easy.
   Note: Just this week Google announced a new feature called "safe mode" on YouTube. This is a step in the right direction!
4. Solve video search: One of the biggest unsolved challenges related to digital media is how to search the content of a video. Currently, all video searching is accomplished through text tags which users add to their video. No one (not even Google, the king of search) has figured out how to dynamically search video content. When they do (yes, they will eventually!), filtering content will be much easier and automated. Inappropriate videos tagged as "educational" will be immediately identified and the tag can be changed.

Google, your tools have added tremendous value to my classroom. I hope that you are able to open up YouTube to K-12 students in the US and around the world.

Forms in Google Docs Spreadsheets

I'm a big fan of the forms feature that is integrated within Google Docs Spreadsheets. If you're a regular reader of my blog, you've seen me use this feature a few times.

Here is a tutorial on creating forms as well as a brief illustration of how I have used forms to collect survey data and registration information.

How have you used forms? I'd love to view your application. Please leave a link as a comment!

Using Google Calendar for Lesson Planning

Google calendar is a great tool. My wife and I have been using it for over a year to keep track of our family activities. A new feature currently in calendar labs adds the ability to attach a Google Doc to a calendar event. This makes using Google Calendar for lesson planning a powerful tool. After create a lesson or unit, you can share your calendar and relevant documents with other teachers in your building or district, fostering collaboration.

Here's a quick tutorial on lesson planning with Google Calendar.

Note: one thing that I forgot to mention is that if you share a calendar that has attached documents, you must give those people permission to view/edit your shared documents. Sharing the calendar does NOT automatically give them permission to view/edit the attached documents.