At NECC this year, I saw many attendees carrying new mini-laptops (also called netbooks) and talked to many planning large school purchases. A lot of people asked me which model is the best, and I referred folks to our comparison chart. If you have your own opinion about which model is best for schools, post your comments and experience.

While each has its pros and cons in terms of features, another consideration is which vendors know how to work with schools and will be around for the long haul. I like Dell in this regard. Not only do they work well with schools, but their new mini-laptop is ruggedized for kids and there is a cart available.

Another vendor that is doing well in the U.S. market is Acer. In fact, the New York Times ran an article this Sunday that says that Acer is poised to pass Dell and become the #2 seller of personal computers this year. That kind of market might makes for not only good prices, but longevity, always an important consideration in the mobile technology arena. Acer makes several mini-laptops that are good choices for schools to consider.

The new Flip Ultra camera (120 min. version), as well as the HD models, use an MP4 format. This doesn’t import directly into WIndows Movie Maker like the AVIs do, but the conversion process to WMV files is very easy using the built in Flip software.

To do this, you’ll first need to install the FlipShare software, which you can do directly from the camera. Then:

• Plug in your camera and run FlipShare.
• Select the videos you want to convert.
• Click Online under Share at the bottom of the screen.
• Select Other Web sites. Click Next.
• Click the radio button next to Other. Click Next.
• Click Go and wait until you get a message that the conversion is done. (There’s a status box in the lower left corner. Depending on the number of length of clips you’re converting, it can take a while.)
• The converted clips will be put in a folder on your desktop.

Other notes of interest….

- This process reduces the resolution of HD movies. Depending on your application, this may or may not be important.

- Make sure you do this BEFORE you take movies off your camera. Also, don’t rename the movies on your camera, or FlipShare won’t recognize them. (You can rename them after you do the conversion.)

- For Mac users, the MP4 files will import directly into iMovie.

I am really excited about two hands-on sessions I’m facilitating at NECC in DC this year. They both concern open educational resources (OER), which are free and open digital content resources for educators. I think that OERs can be a critical piece is differentiating instruction.

In these sessions, we’ll be exploring open licensed photos, clip art and music; looking at open wiki-based textbooks; using an an open licensed kids dictionary; and creating and improving other OERs. Here are the times:

Open-Licensed Content: The Missing Piece
[Formal Session: Open Source Lab]
Monday, 6/29/2009, 8:30am–9:30am WWCC 152 B

Open Educational Resources: Share, Remix, Learn
[Formal Session: BYOL]
Tuesday, 6/30/2009, 12:30pm–1:30pm WWCC 151 B

I’ll also be in the 21st Century Media Center Playground on Mon. from 12-2 showing mobile technology tools that can be used to differentiate instruction and in the Open Source Playground (Mon. from 2-4 and Tues. from 2-4) showing open content and talking about how you can use this free resource in your school.

Hope to see you in DC!

There is a flood of stimulus money coming into education this summer, including a substantial amount for ed tech. This is one-time funding that is to be spent quickly, but in a way that yields significant, long-term gains.

I can think of no better way to use such funding than to develop high-quality, open-licensed curriculum resources that would be available for free use worldwide. Teachers and students in one-to-one laptop programs across the country could benefit from this content.

A more detailed concept paper of this idea is available here.

If you are with a school district that would be interested in a collaboration on such a project, please contact me at karen at k12opened dot com.

Dell has finally come out with its much-awaited new mini-laptop (netbook) for education. The Latitude 2100 has a 10″ screen includes many of the features of other mini-laptops, as well as some unique features for education, most notably a ruggedized case. The starting price is $369.

There is also an optional touchscreen that could add some real benefits for education. (This seems to add only $30 to the price. Amazing!) Other add-ons include additional memory, hard drives (up to 250 GB)  a longer-life battery (recommended), an extended warranty, and even Vista. (This is the first netbook I’ve seen that could run Vista.)

Stay tuned for more reviews as these roll out.

I don’t know why I didn’t do this a long time ago, but I have just created annotated tag sets for two of my workshops (I guess I get the “bookmarking” part of social bookmarking, but sometimes forget about the “social” part.):

Web 2.0 — All You Can Eat Buffet
Using Open educational resources - Share, Remix, Learn

I already do wikis for all my workshop, and tag sets are another logical step of going to all-electronic workshop materials. Both of these tools are also a nice way to continue to deliver new info long after the workshops are over and to share with a wider audience.

What a great idea! DeAnza College DeAnza College has a community service learning project that involves developing open educational resources. They suggest several projects that students can contribute to.

What a phenomenal way to teach about open education, while also contributing something to the world at large.

This would be a great idea for service learning for K-12 students. Have them write or edit a Wikipedia article; write a definition or two for the open dictionary; or open license some of their own photos, clipart, or video and upload to a site like Flickr, WP Clip Art, TeacherTube, or NextVista.

I tried out the wiki-embedded formative assessment idea in several workshops last week.

Here is what worked well:

• It was quick and easy when people could get there easily. (See below.)
• The general results were very close to my intuition as the instructor about when people were getting it and when they weren’t, but the comments often revealed things I hadn’t sensed.
• Participants agreed that they (and their students) would be more likely to answer this and to be honest than with other methods (show of hands — I actually did a show of hands once to discuss the difference. We all agreed that 30% or so of folks won’t raise their hands no matter what you ask.)

Here is what didn’t work as well:

• It was sometimes hard to find the “assess your learning” link to do the survey. (After the first day of trying this, I moved the links to a separate sidebar, but it was still sometimes cumbersome for the class to know where to go.) This would be helped by making this a browser plug-in always on the screen. In any case, though, tying the data to a page presumes that people that are on the right page…not always the case.  (On the other hand, clickers tie the data to time, which seems more appropriate. Perhaps there is a way to do this with a plug-in and to know that “at x:xx, we were doing yyy.”)
• I had planned to do this five times during the day (6 hours of instruction), but in practice, this seemed too often. I ended up doing it only two or three times.
• In one instance where participants were really flailing, the assessment seemed demoralizing. However, based on the results, we revamped things, differentiated, and (hopefully) came out better on the other end.

There will be a discussion on open content in ed at the Future of Education tonight. Hope you can join us. If not, the recording will be posted afterward.

So I’ve been thinking a lot and talking to people about the formative assessment idea I wrote about earlier this week. (The working name is now the “comprehension plug-in”…thanks to Chris Campbell for this great name.)

As a part of the Mozilla Open Ed course I’m participating in, we’ve been talking about assessment-related browser plug-ins, and this seems a perfect fit. In a one-to-one situation, in which most students will have a browser open all the time anyway, this is a natural. Imagine a series of LED-type buttons like this:

I like this approach to formative assessment because it moves learners toward metacognition, leading to taking control of one’s own learning.

I think this approach can be just as effective with adult learners in professional development workshops. Next week, I’m going to try this. (In addition to using this formatively, it will model the technique so that participants can think about using it in their own classrooms.)

To do this, I’ve set up a wiki for the workshop. (I use wikis for almost all my workshops now.) After each major instructional block, participants will do a quick online “how is your learning going?” survey. I will (hopefully) use this data in real-time to see how things are going and then to differentiate instruction as needed. It looks something like this:

I’ll let you know how it goes!