In the past 3 days, I’ve had 3 different people contact me and ask me if I want to participate in a study.  One is a Ph.D. student about to finish her doctorate, another is an IT director for a school district, and the last is a business student who wants some information about a product his group is hoping to build with teachers in mind.  Each of these messages was personally addressed to me and cited either my online activities as a reason for the contact, or my interest in technology.

I suppose that my willingness to blog about what I am doing and share my resources has made me easy to find.  Perhaps anyone who is blogging and a strong online presence is going to be found in this way.  Anyway it has made me think about an online presence and its value.

The past week my wife has been in Mexico with my son, and every day we’ve been video chatting via Skype.  It’s amazing how powerful this experience is, and how happy I am that I am able to connect with both of them and see their faces.  It makes a difference.  Now I know that video conferencing with loved ones abroad is nothing new, but I’m including it as an example of how people are connecting today.

Another example.  A friend of mine is looking for work, he contacted me through Facebook and asked if I had any contacts.  Turns out, I do, and I shared them with him.  My friend is 9 hours away via timezones, this kind of interaction is very difficult to do via telephone but it worked really smoothly via the inbox and wall of Facebook.

I’ve heard it said that our reliance on technology for connecting with people has reduced the amount of face to face interactions we have.  They are probably right.  It has dramatically improved our ability to connect in so many other ways though, I think a bit of a loss in F2F time is worth the ability for me to see my son via Skype in Mexico, or for 3 professionals to connect with another professional and ask for his support in their personal projects.  

Update:

Here’s a TED video that describes a similar issue.

The OpenSimulator is great, but unfortunately it was written for adults in mind.  One of the options available all over the place is "Take Off" which basically means to take off the given item of clothing.  This means if install this program as is on your school’s servers, you just installed something which allows students to view porn on the school’s computers.  Ouch!

Fortunately there is a solution.  The Hippo viewer uses a series of XML files to create it’s menus.  If you go into ‘C:\Program Files\Hippo_OpenSim_Viewer\skins\default\xui’ (or a similar location based on where you installed the program and what operating system you are using) you can find the XML files which define the menus.  Simply go through them (use find "Take Off" in your text editor) you can safely remove all of the options for removing clothing from every menu. Whew, lots of work, and easy to mess up, but at least it works.

Before you make any changes, make a backup of your installation (just make a copy of the whole program with extra files somewhere else on your computer, like in your ‘My Documents’ folder).  Basically to get this to work you have to find the folder ‘default’ in C:\Program Files\Hippo_OpenSim_Viewer\skins and replace it with the contents of this zip file.  You also want to delete the ‘Silver’ folder from the skins directory so the students can’t switch to a theme with the buttons we don’t want.  Note that if you upgrade this program, you’ll have to repeat these steps.

It’s not foolproof, but it seems to be very stable and I have happily tested that the buttons and menu items which let users remove their clothing are now gone.

Here is a brief overview of Google reader.  If you aren’t sure what a reader is, or what it is for, you should really watch this Common Craft on RSS in plain English first.

Screen-shot:

 

Summary:
Google Reader is an application which lets you pull information to you rather than searching for information on the web.  Blogs, newspaper, even Twitter, publish links called feeds which you can use to subscribe to their services and they will push information to you.


Purpose: 
This application is a way of reading information online using syndication.  It’s much like having online newspapers delivered to you, rather than searching for the newspapers in the shop.

How this can be used for professional networking:  
First you search for blogs written by teachers.  One easy source is to go to http://edublogawards.com/ and subscribe to all of the nominees of the blogs.

How this can be used in the classroom:
Students can also search for and find blogs and other feeds to follow.  On a regular basis they will be pushed information.  As well, students can subscribe to each other’s blogs and have a single place to read all of the comments and posts from their peers. A classroom could have subscriptions to a number of sources, and you could share the posts with the class as a current events section or something similar.

Advantages of this application: 
It’s easy to use, it has a number of straight forward features, such as the useful ‘recommendations’ which are other feeds that Google thinks you should subscribe to, based on what you have already found.  It is also nice because it has a single sign on with other Google applications, and finally, there are nice applications for mobile browsers, so you can get your feeds on the go. Finally, Google reader also works when you are offline using Google Gears, which means that you can download your feeds when you have a connection and then read them when you are offline.

Disadvantages of this application:
This application has no serious disadvantages that I can think of, except that finding the subscriptions in the first place can be a tricky.  I find the interface fairly easy to use, but I could imagine it could be a bit daunting for someone who is just getting started.

Similar tools: (if applicable) 

So a while back I posted a link to an survey I conducted.  I didn’t have an enormous amount of respondents, but I’ll share the results with you.

First it should be noted that there is some selection bias.  Actually probably LOTS of selection bias, given that this survey was conducted entirely online and that people who read this blog, or found the link to the survey through Twitter are probably pretty IT savvy.  That being said, you might still end up being surprised with the results.

There were two questions on the survey.  

1.  How many sheets of paper (approximately) do you use in a day?
2.  How many teachers do you have in your school?

The lowest answer to the first question was 1 single sheet of paper a day (good for you!) and the highest was 75.  The lowest answer to question number 2 was 6 teachers and the highest was 170.  The 11 respondents used a total of 326 sheets of paper a day, or just over 26 sheets each.  Probably this is pretty good, I would expect that a typical teacher probably uses more.

According to these results, a typical school in which these respondents work uses about 2000 sheets of paper a day, or about 360,000 sheets in a school year.  Of course there are thousands of schools in Canada and the US (where most of the teachers who responded probably live), 96,000 or so in the US (or 120,000 depending on who you believe) and this means that more than 34 billion sheets of paper are used each year just in the United States.  Assuming that each sheet costs a mere 5 cents (photocopy paper at Office Depot apparently costs 38 cents) a sheet, then to provide paper to every child in the US each year for school costs about 2 billion dollars a year.

For comparison, providing each child in the US with a $100 laptop (recently available on the market) would cost about 8 billion dollars assuming even the little kindergarten children get one.  In other words, we could pay for a laptop per child in the US in 4 years by stopping using paper in schools.  Oh and that laptop can also replace the paper…

Of course if the people surveyed are far from standard, then maybe schools actually use twice as much (or even four times as much) paper, in which case the amount of time it would take for the savings from not using paper to turn into laptops would be reduced to half (or even a quarter) of the time estimated.  In other words, we could potentially turn billions of pieces of paper into every child in the US having a laptop.

Now I’m using US numbers here for this calculation (because the supporting figures are easier to find) but it shouldn’t take you long to realize that this is probably true of any industrialized nation with similar expenditures on paper.  Perhaps we can use some financial arguments to persuade our legislators to put some good tools into the hands of our students?

I’m working on a simple project to explain to students the importance of learning integration (which is an important technique in Calculus).  The basic idea is this, take a model of something from the real world, like a car for example, and find the area represented by the model.  You can talk about the importance in figuring out how much the metal will cost to make the car, or how much paint is required to cover the car, etc…

Here’s how we are going to do it in my class.

First we use our friend Google Image search and find a model.  I found some great models from http://carblueprints.info and settled on a 1931 Ford Window Coupe as an example.  It’s not clear to me what license these images are under, but given that I am using them exclusively for educational purposes and that there is no commercial value in what I am doing, I’m probably okay to use them here.

Once I had an image, I cropped it down somewhat and resized it.  This was to make it more convenient to embed in my favourite graphing program, Geogebra.  You could very easily use any graphing program here, or even print out the image and do the rest of this project on paper.

The next step was to open up Geogebra and insert the image.  Lots of tutorials on how to do this and push the image into the background, and of course the steps will vary depending on which program you use.  Once I had the image in Geogebra, I added points around the edge of the image at the critical parts of the model.  I basically want to split the edges of the model into the different functions.

Once you have the coordinate point, which are the difficult things to find really, you can now use all sorts of techniques to find the functions.  For example, which a less advanced class, they could approximate the shape given using straight lines.  For a more advanced class, they could use lines, circles, polynomials, whatever to find the functions which represent the shape of the curves.  

One nice option here is to either use the regression tool on a graphing calculator, or available in Excel to find the functions as appropriate.

Once you have the many functions which represent the shape, the students will have to find the x bounds of the functions (which should be easy if they have recorded the coordinate points) and then integrate each function over the appropriate bounds.  One thing that could get students stuck at this stage is remembering that if they actually want to find the area ABOVE the curve, they will need to either flip their function over the x-axis, or more easily, find the absolute value of their negative answer for the integration of that function.

This activity allows for all sorts of differentiation (in terms of pedagogy, not calculus!) as well.  Students who might struggle can be encouraged to choose easier models to begin with.  You can also point out that some areas of the shape might be better done using actual area formula instead of integration or potentially this same type of activity could be used at a much lower level of mathematics using just area formula.  These models represent excellent examples of composite areas, and their realism will help students recognize the relevance of what they are learning.

I haven’t actually gone through the entire process of the integration itself.  I’m going to be using this activity with my students today and I don’t want to give it all away yet!  Wait for me to post some examples of their work when they finish.