The 10 Coolest Things from NYSCATE

Without a doubt, the biggest buzz around a new technology at NYSCATE was when David Jakes demonstrated GE's augmented reality. Watch the YouTube Demo or why not print your own marker and see for yourself.



Google just keeps adding things like Image Swirl, which is like Wonder Wheel, but for images. Fast Flip is pretty cool too. If you need a quote then navigate to In Quotes. And if you need to make comparisons, try Google Squared.

Creating animations becomes easier with Animationish, a product that attempts to maintain simplicity and includes 3 levels to progress through. Here is my first attempt:




I could export the animation into iMovie or Movie Maker and add a sound track or narration as well.

Stupeflix.com provides another tool to take images, video, text, and audio and package them into a video. More customizable than Animoto, this video took me about 5 minutes to create from start to finish (pics were already on Flickr).



If you are looking to write your own iPhone or iTouch app, you might want to check out Swebapps or Appincubator. Swebapps allows you to build your app using their template and Appincubator asks for app ideas and then they will write the app and take a cut if it sells on iTunes.

And finally, this student Balloon Project is very cool.

Honorable Mention: Kiss YouTube, Today's Front Pages, BeFunky (create then import into Animationish), and Quiet Tube (strips all those nasty comments from youtube).

YouTube EDU

YouTube recently launched YouTube EDU. You have options to view the most viewed or most subscribed channels. Channels amount to dedicated pages for colleges and universities. I did a search for "psychology" and found an entire Lecture Series from Cal-Berkeley. Now as an AP Psychology teacher, this presents an interesting dilemma. Am I short-changing my students by not incorporating the lecture series from one of the finest universities in America? Should students view these lectures (and often the accompany slideshow) for homework and we discuss, explain, synthesis, analyze, and apply the principles during classtime? Bill Gates recently said in a TED Talk (about 1/2 into the speech) that the top 20% of our (United States) students are getting a good education that compares favorably to the top 20% worldwide (although fading). Gates is concerned with the remaining 80% of our students. Gates thinks the descrepency is in the quality of the teaching. Those students with the top quartile teachers give their students a 10% increase in their percentile ranking on standardized tests. While one could argue that other variables come into play, it would be hard to outright dismiss the quality of teaching. Now lecturing is not teaching, I know...but having access to these videos sure opens things up for the classroom.

Here is a look at a lecture on Sensation & Perception:

Web 2.0? Web 3.0?

For those of you who are just trying to figure out what Web 2.0 might be or how what it's impact might be, then this anthropological look at YouTube might be of interest to you.

And, if you are interested in the next 5000 days (Web 3.0...4.0??) of the web then check out Kevin Kelly, Executive Editor of Wired Magazine among many other roles.



Trying to figure out how our students fit into all of this is hard enough, trying to predict the future is all but impossible. What happens to education? If high school doesn't become more participatory, creative, collaborative, constructive, and user-generated then I think we are in trouble. So that's my prediction --> User-generated Education.

YouTube Channels

Many of us go to YouTube to watch random videos. Some of us may actually search for videos for classroom use. Fewer of us may have our own students create content that is shared on YouTube. Whatever the case, did you know you can create your own channel? Included in your personal channel is to use a user -defined playlist as your video log. In this case, these are videos that connect to concepts in my AP Psychology class. As I find more videos for this playlist, the v-log grows as well.