My dad, my son, and my grandson!

It has been way too long since my last post!  There are many reasons, but the biggest is really something quite wonderful.  I have new lenses in both eyes, and this has restored the fabulous long distance vision of my youth.  I’ve been tempted to say “…it was just cataract surgery”, but that would not be accurate.  It was an example of the many miracles of modern medical science.

There was, however, a price to be paid.  For more than three months–from the time of the surgery in my first eye, until I finally received a new set of prescription progressive glasses–there was constant strain in looking from computer screen, to paper pages, to people and back again.  The weariness never seemed to go away, and it was almost more than I could do to keep pace with the essential responsibilities of my day job.  So, I haven’t been blogging.

For what feels like my first post ever, I’ve decided to reflect just a little about fathers, and especially about my own dad.  This is an ‘edublog’, but I believe it’s imperative never to lose sight of the reality that education is supposed to be about far more than school!  When it comes to learning, families matter on many levels.

We’ll celebrate Father’s Day tomorrow in Canada.  I’m the proud father of two adult children.  Our daughter Anjali made me proud in a fresh way this week, as she flew from Vancouver to London, en route to a three month stint as a volunteer nurse on the ‘Africa Mercy‘, a hospital ship currently docked in Freetown, Sierra Leone.  This coming Tuesday, my son Aaron will be going out of his way to visit my dad, who lives 3000 km away from Aaron’s home here on Vancover Island.  That makes me proud, too.

We don’t choose our parents, but I am blessed to have a truly wonderful father.  My dad was a minister who went to his first church two weeks before my birth.  He has always modeled authenticity and integrity, living through the week what he preached on Sunday.  I have learned much of incalculable value from my dad’s example.

As  a boy, I learned much about our world from his answers to my questions.  On the verge of my own 60th birthday, there are still so many things I know because “that’s what my dad said when I was a boy.”  He was a veritable fountain of knowledge–about history, about how things like electric motors work, about how crops grow, about the reasons for seasons, and about countless other stuff.

Dad was always there for me, and I knew that, whether I wanted him to be there or not.  He never imposed himself on me, but I could always count on him to be there.  He was even there when I attended boarding school a thousand miles from him and our home in Calcutta, as I did for 10 years from the age of 7.  Without fail, dad wrote me a letter every single week that we were apart.  He wrote individual letters to each of his four children!

I could go on for a long time and never say it all.  Suffice it to say that my dad deserves to be honored, and I’m glad Father’s Day has brought this into focus again.  Here’s a video that I put together on the occasion of Dad’s 80th birthday in  2008.  I made the video with exerts from Dad’s own 8mm cinematography between 1952 and 1972–in Southern Ontario, in rural West Bengal, and in the Himalayan foothills.  The focus is sometimes pretty soft, but the film helps to keep the memories bright and warm.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.  And thanks for being who you are.  I could never have asked for anything more!

“The 21st Century Fluencies are not about technical prowess, they are critical thinking skills, and they are essential to living in this multimedia world.” (Ian Jukes)  The “fluencies”  of the “digital citizen” referenced here are:

• solution fluency
• information fluency
• collaboration fluency
• creativity fluency
• media fluency

An underlying goal of the 21st Century Fluency Project is to “…assist in transforming learning to be relevant to life in the 21st century.“  For the majority of learners there has long been an unbridged chasm between what has been taught in the classroom and life outside of school.

Prior to the digital era, the problem of irrelevance was compounded by the reality that success in school required a strong aptitude for reading, writing and test taking.  With the advent of digital text, along with accessible multimedia tools, there is realistic hope for meaningful change in the learning enterprise.  This is especially critical for learners who have hitherto underperformed or failed at school.

Learners who will never succeed in predominantly text-oriented schools, now have numerous options for receiving information.  Likewise, varied media and combinations of media are available for using that information to problem solve and for creative expression.  Learners can show what they know without having to express it in essay format.  Within a meaningful and often engaging process, all learners now have the opportunity to develop skills that have the power to inform and enrich their personal and working lives.

Aviary is a free online suite of extremely powerful multimedia tools that can be used by learners to help gain 21st century fluencies.  The suite includes a sophisticated image editor that can be used to create from scratch or for modifying exiting images,  a vector editor, an effects editor, a color editor, an image markup tool for screen captures, a Firefox extension for doing quick screencapture, a versatile audio editor, and even an amazing music creator.

Aviary has to be experienced to be fully appreciated, and they make it easy to take a quick look.  There is an introductory page with accompanying video for each tool.  Aviary also provides numerous video tutorials for its tools.  Tutorials are rated beginner, intermediate or expert.  It is still in beta, but Aviary now offers Aviary Education for the classroom.  They claim it is “100% school safe”, and it contains features to facilitate classroom use.  You have to request an account for your classroom.

Finally, Aviary offers a forum for sharing work that has been created with Aviary.  This means there are plenty of sample products to examine.  In the gallery, you can see the sources for a created work, along with alternative versions and derivitatives that have been created by others.  I’ve included below a sample of work created in the image editor, and ‘symphony’ that was put together in the audio editor. Please take time to click the play button and listen to some of the amazing music.

EdibleArchitecture.egg by meowza on Aviary

CTG10 – Collection of Free Digital Resources to Support UDL

I’ve just linked my blog to a wiki that I created last fall, so I thought I’d describe the wiki here.  I’ve put a great deal of effort into it, so the more widely the wiki is used, the happier I’ll be!  I first shared this resource in a pre-conference session at  Closing the Gap in Minneapolis last October.

The wiki has been organized around the 3 fundamental principles of Univeral Design for Learning–Multiple Means of Representation;  Multiple Means of Action and Expression; Multiple Means of Engagement.

The rapidly growing number of quality digital resources available online is huge!!!  I’ve organized and presented some of these in as user friendly a manner as I could manage.  Straight lists of links don’t work well for me, so I’ve included logo images and point-form descriptions.

CLiCk,Speak works well to provide text-to-speech in the tables on the wiki, as long as you are using Firefox 3.6 or earlier.  I believe that means FireVox should work for those who need a screen reader.

The resources linked on the wiki include both online applications and programs that can be downloaded and installed for offline use.  At the bottom of the FrontPage of the wiki is a ‘Table of Contents’ with links to each of the other wiki pages.

This is how the resource collections are organized.

]]> http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2011/01/09/ctg10-udl-resource-collection/feed/ 0 http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2011/01/01/fresh-starts-new-beginnings-and-a-udl-presentation/ http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2011/01/01/fresh-starts-new-beginnings-and-a-udl-presentation/#comments Sat, 01 Jan 2011 19:27:14 +0000 Paul Hamilton http://paulhami.edublogs.org/?p=2322 Continue reading →]]> I love sunrises! For as long as I can remember,  I’ve appreciated the way sunrises organize time.  With each sunrise, we’re presented with a brand new day.  For me, this has always offered the promise of a new beginning with the chance to start over.

In a similar vein, New Years Day seems an apt time to make a fresh start with my blog.  I’ve been away from the blog for much of 2010.  Now I believe it’s time to start sharing here again. Dean Shareski was spot-on when he described sharing as a “moral imperative” for educators in his pre-conference keynote for the 2010 K12 Online Conference.

There are, of course, countless ways for an educator to share.  I’m convinced, however, that with its potential for embedding a wide range of media, and thereby offering multiple means of representation, the blog remains one of the most powerful vehicles for sharing.  I will continue to highlight free digital resources that support learning, but I’m not exactly how I will refine my focus.

Today, I begin by sharing a presentation on Universal Design for Learning.  I had the privilege of sharing this in person in Minneapolis in October and again in Hong Kong in November.  For anyone keen on educational reform and looking for a sound pedagogical approach to using technology in the learning adventure, I believe UDL is worth more than  just a look.

[I shot the sunrise scene above from Landour, in the Indian foothills of the Himalayas.  This is where I lived as a boy, and where I taught from 1981 to 1990.]

In Teaching Every Student, David Rose and Anne Meyer  observe that “…a person who appears learning disabled in a print-bound, text-based environment may look extraordinarily skilled in a graphics or video-based environment.” There are indeed learners for whom video is especially helpful, but I believe that all learners benefit tremendously from access to video. That’s why, in a universally designed learning environment video is made freely available to everyone.

With all the online video that is readily available on almost any subject imaginable, it is a truly wonderful time to be a learner!  TechCrunch reported recently that there are now nearly 17 billion video clips online.  The challenge, therefore, lies in finding the most useful and highest quality video. WatchKnow does a great deal to help meet this challenge; and it is a resource that should be familiar to anyone who wants to foster a UDL learning environment.

WatchKnow has indexed and organized 18,485 online educational videos as of today. Site organizers aim to increase that total to 50,000 by the end of 2010.  All videos have been organized by category and sub-category.  For example, the 2,490 videos listed under mathematics have been sub-divided into 15 categories that range from “Number Sense” to “Calculus” and “Math in the Real World”.

WatchKnow has been organized as a Web 2.0 community where input is welcome from all.  Users are encouraged to add videos.  Since WatchKnow is funded by a foundation, however, teachers and librarians have been hired to edit the directory.  Each video is accompanied by a description, age level information and rating.  Access to videos does not require registration, but you must register if you wish to add videos to the collection.

Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is the executive director of WatchKnow.  He offers an overview of WatchKnow in the video below.

[eType is another option for free word prediction that you may wish to check out. I wrote about it HERE.]

Last month I wrote about MyStudyBar, a suite of literacy tools for the PC. This loads as a floating toolbar so the tools can be available to the user from within any program.  The toolbar can be downloaded and run from a USB flash drive on any computer.  This week, Craig Mill of RSC, has announced the release of Version 2 of MyStudyBar.

In this post, I want to draw attention to the powerful free word prediction application, ‘LetMeType’, that is part of MyStudyBar.  I’ve long been eager to know of effective free word prediction; and this seems to fill the bill.  Word prediction is a tool that I believe ought to be introduced to all learners.  Typically, only individuals with identified learning difficulties are given the opportunity to use it, but there are many others who would find word prediction helpful!

I’ve embedded Craig Mill’s tutorial screencast about ‘LetMeType’ here because I couldn’t possibly do a better job of describing it. I recommend that you view the video in full screen mode.

Every learner is uniquely gifted, and has his or her own unique set of learning needs. I’ve concluded that a one-size-fits-all approach to learning has done more harm than good in the lives of countless children who have been subjected to it.  I never have to look far to find  heart wrenching evidence of this reality–individuals who have  “learned”  in school that they are incompetent failures.

There are no magic bullets, and our model for schooling is inherently flawed; but the situation is far from hopeless.  Universal Design for Learning (UDL) offers  both a research-based theoretical framework and a practical approach that can go a long way toward meeting the unique needs of the individual learners in our classrooms.

The video below offers an excellent introductory overview of UDL.  Following the link above will take you deeper.  If you are not familiar with UDL, please take a serious look.

[CAUTION:  This post is a rant! There is eventually helpful advice here, but I have some frustration to get off my chest first.]

Firefox is my preferred browser because I believe it to be the browser that offers more to make the Internet accessible to all users than any other browser.  This is the result of numerous built-in features and addons–especially addons.  I’ve written about some of these addons in numerous posts, as you’ll see if you type Firefox into the search bar at the top of this page.  There’s no disputing that I’m really a very big Firefox fan.

At the moment, I’m a frustrated Firefox fan!  That’s because Firefox has updated to a new version–AGAIN!  This means that some of the addons that I most appreciate won’t work with the latest version.  That, in turn, is because the good people who develop the addons, often out of the kindness of their hearts, have to spend time updating their addons to make them compatible with the updated Firefox.  This is a process that has been repeated too many times for me to keep track of.

At the moment, three of my favorite addons won’t work with the latest version–CLiCk,Speak, HyperWords, and the IE Tab.  This is particularly annoying to me because one of “my” school districts is finally willing to begin making Firefox available to learners.

The good news is that the incompatibility situation is only temporary.  In time, the addons will almost certainly be updated and made compatible.  There’s also a temporary solution to tide us over.  We do not need to install the latest version of Firefox.

If we’ve installed the latest version of Firefox and our addons won’t work, we can uninstall it.  (We won’t lose our bookmarks or other personalized data.)  Then we can go to Oldapps.com to download a previous version of Firefox and install that.

There!  Now that I’ve got all that off my chest, I feel much better.

]]> http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2010/02/12/firefox-firefox-why-do-you-update-so-often/feed/ 5 http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2010/02/10/mystudy-bar-study-tools-in-your-pocket/ http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2010/02/10/mystudy-bar-study-tools-in-your-pocket/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:17:20 +0000 Paul Hamilton http://paulhami.edublogs.org/?p=1903 Continue reading →]]> I’ve raved here repeatedly about AccessApps from RSC–the suite of free digital tools that can be downloaded and run from a flash drive.  It’s  difficult to  overstate the power of having the tools you need available to you wherever you are, regardless of what computer you use.    Now Craig Mill, of RSC, has done it again with another  portable suite of study tools.

MyStudyBar is a floating toolbar of free open source applications that can be downloaded and then easily installed on a flash drive for use on any Windows computer. In his introductory video overview, developer Craig  Mill makes the important point that although these applications are intended primarily for learners with “literacy difficulties”, the tools have the potential to support ALL learners.  To this proponent of UDL, Craig’s statement really resonates.

The MyStudyBar toolbar offers applications for mind mapping, screen masking, word prediction, a talking dictionary, text to speech, and voice recognition.  (The voice recognition requires the built-in speech recognition that comes with Windows Vista or Windows 7.)  I’ve embedded Craig Mill’s overview video here.  In follow up posts, I’ll discuss each of the tools on MyStudyBar.

It is worth mentioning, that MyStudyBar does not have to be run from a flash drive.  It can also be installed on any PC and run from the desktop.

PDFMYURL can be an invaluable tool for anyone doing research online.  As its name suggests, this application turns web pages into pdf files.  This can be especially  helpful  in situations where web content is required when a person cannot be online.  Or, when someone wants to embed a web page on a wiki or blog.

Web pages can be turned into pdf files with virtual printers such as PDFCreator, but I think it’s slicker and quicker to use PDFMYURL, especially with the available bookmarklet that can be added to the browser’s Bookmarks Toolbar.

With the help of embedit.in, I’ve embedded an eSchool News article that I first turned into a pdf file with PDFMYURL.