Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Join the Mischief

This web application comes to us compliments of Monique Dugal, a colleague of ours.Three compelling reasons to use Mouse Mischief in your classroom

#1. Actively engages students and supports collaborative learning


With Mouse Mischief you can spark student curiosity by incorporating interactive technology into the curriculum. Students have fun learning while seeing visual representations of their answers on a shared screen while using colorful mouse pointers (like a robot, snowflake, guitar, and many more shapes). You can enable collaborative learning when using Mouse Mischief in Team mode; in Team mode, all members of a team need to work together to agree on an answer before it can be selected.

#2. Improves classroom management and overall student participation

With Mouse Mischief you no longer need to wait for raised hands; you can immediately see your students' answers on the screen. Mouse Mischief helps make it easy for all students even those who are often quiet in class to participate regularly without the fear of saying the wrong answer. This can allow you to have better visibility into the progress and comprehension of your entire class so you can adjust your lessons on the spot.

#3. Is familiar to use and easy on the classroom budget

Because Mouse Mischief integrates into familiar PowerPoint technology, you do not have to spend time learning new skills to use it. Additionally, you can set up your classrooms to play Mouse Mischief lessons without purchasing expensive hardware; many schools already have mice, and both mice and USB hubs are available at many stores where computer accessories are sold.

A couple of examples...

Join the mischief now at:
http://www.microsoft.com/multipoint/mouse-mischief/en-us/default.aspx

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

The Future of Ebooks

For the most part, right now, Ebooks are nothing more than glorified pdfs. Sure you get fancy interfaces that make it look like you are turning pages and you can do things like highlight text. But things like that you can do with regular books. However, some Ebooks are really trying to embrace the medium. Take for example the book Our Choice by Al Gore. Sure you might be a little tired of hearing that southern drawl tell us how we are wrecking the planet but this book on a tablet is much more than that. It's visual, interactive, includes multimedia and exploits the interface of the device its being read on. In fact, its not really called an Ebook but called an App. Check out the promo:

And the walk through of the features:

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Can you Survive a Jump from a Building?

Ok, so the title is a bit of a misnomer. It actually is the title of an article on wired.com where the writer analyzes a viral video to show that it must have been fake. But the software they used was a free package called Tracker. Tracker allows you to analyze motion in video with mathematical tools. Tracker comes in online, Windows, Mac or Linux versions and is quite powerful. Here's how easy it is to track data while in the program:
Unable to display content. Adobe Flash is required.
Once you have the data in, then you can do a bit of analysis on it: Tracker pt2 analyzing


That is just a little bit of what you can do with the software. Good luck and have fun "Tracking"

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