April 2014 – Learning Aloud

Free as in Gift or Free as in Expected?

Some years ago I remember a cable channel (Channel One) providing educational content was criticized because the content contained ads. I remember my reaction. If content a student viewed at home contained ads, why would content they viewed at school have to be different? At least the educational content was educational.

Today Google announced (see Google comment, EdWeek description) there would be no more ads in the free GAFE opportunities for students. I guess I understand the issue – parents may have a position on whether they want their children to be exposed to ads and schools using Google services may not be sensitive to the parents position. I do think it is more complicated than this. Google did provide a way to turn off the ads. Most parents probably don’t care because they allow their children to watch television which offers no on/off switch for ads. I often describe the reality of education vs. interesting ideas as the challenge of taking ideas that make sense for individuals and struggling to determine how to apply the ideas to a group. Typically, I am describing an idea someone has about a specific instructional idea (coding, making, etc.) that are ideal for some. It seems to apply to what and how we are willing to pay for education as well.

I wonder if anyone ever thought – we should say thanks to Google for allowing our students/children to use these valuable services without compensating Google. Do we somehow think we deserve such opportunities? Why? (Reminds me of the Chris Anderson book – Free: The future of a radical price).

Digital dentist

I realize that I not a digital native and may be out of touch with this technology stuff, but this morning’s visit to the dentist brought a new learning opportunity. I was scheduled for x-rays and instead of sticking that small piece of “film” in my mouth the technician inserted what I suppose was some type of CCD device connected to her computer. She said it saves having to have a patient stick around to see if the x-rays show what they want to see. I told her it sounded like a digital camera. She seemed surprised I knew about digital cameras.

Evidently one of these teeth requires a crown. Growing up on a farm without flouride in the water has resulted in life-long consequences.

The technician seemed surprised when reclining in the chair I pulled my phone out of my pocket and took this picture. Evidently, no one had ever done that before. I was primed for the opportunity. I had a MRI to determine whether I had a concussion after a bad fall on the ice and I regret not capturing the moment of looking at my brain on screen. A picture of a couple of my teeth will have to do. I probably violated some HIPPA rule, but I was too fast for the technician and she was too surprised to stop me.

ThingLink

Thinglink allows the sharing of tagged and annotated images (see link by positioning cursor over image). Thinglink works across platform and device allowing users to work from a variety of devices. In an educational setting the opportunity to work from handhelds in contrast to a camera would offer some advantages as students could annotate images as the images were collected.

If you identify yourself as a teacher when signing up for a channel, Thinglink allows you create channels (see instructions). Channels (see example) offer a way to organize images into albums. As you see from the image below images or channels can then be embedded in other outlets (this is an example of an embedded image).

Location, location, location

Here is another Google search feature that was new to me (credit to Daniel Russell for the tip). You can determine the latitude and longitude for a location of interest by search for locationname coordinates. I find the ability to geotag images of personal and educational benefit so this feature caught my attention. I have a very nice camera that takes great photos, but does not record coordinates. A cell phone will often collect such data and I commonly combine phone and camera photos for this reason.

Here is a demonstration for the location Sandia Peak (the search would be Sandia Peak coordinates).

The search results:

Here is a photo at the top of the peak captured with my phone (the exif data are provided). The data are difficult to read, but are very similar.

I see this is a post production tool useful in some situations for “mapping” digital camera photos.

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