In my role as a curriculum director of a statewide virtual school, I am often invited to meetings to discuss evolving programs to better meet student needs.  These meetings usually involve different forms of educational professionals (teachers, administrators, etc.) as well as prominent community leaders.  I am often stunned by the ease in which formal education (K-12 and higher education) is often dismissed as an important path for successful students with some vague notion of “informal education.”

There is no denying there are a lot of great informal options if you want to make yourself smarter.  However, there is a broad claim that formal school doesn’t matter in today’s world that I think lacks proof and data.

My favorite is when someone points out a company says… “Look… the people that run ____ didn’t go to college… now they are billionaires!”  The last four times I have heard this claim, they were specifically calling out Google as run by rogue, education less do-it-yourselfers.  That would be a great argument, except…  1.)  Google was founded by Ph.D. students, both of which help run the company today.  2.)  They are known for preferring not only college degrees, but those from elite universities.  3.)  Even if it was true that X or Y leader didn’t go to college, my guess is that the engineers that make up the working part of Google are college degrees.  Most importantly?  We shouldn’t make policy or create schooling based solely on outliers.

This point can be frustrating to make to someone that honestly believes that every technology company was started by high school dropouts, but, it is important that teachers (from pre-school teachers to college professors) make it clear that schooling matters.

Last week’s Freakonomic radio podcast tackles just that… the value of the college degree.  Give it a listen.  It is worth it.

Freakonomics Goes to College, Part 1

I am presenting “Moving to Moodle 2.x” at the Mountain Moot at Carroll College.  This presentation focuses on my experience migrating our Helena School District Moodle server from 1.9 to 2.1.  I also demonstrate some ways you can use some of the Activities modules easily in your classroom.  Let me know if you have questions….

I am presenting on Thursday, May 31, 2012 at the Mountain Moot at Carroll College in Helena, Montana.  I am presenting on the prospects of using Moodle in a largely mobile environment, based on my experiences at working in the statewide virtual school space.

Here are my slides… I look forward to meeting the Moodle-savvy of the Rocky Mountain West!

From last night’s feeds, here is a great, four minute video featuring “iPad Tips & Tricks.”  Some of these are obvious, but, for the new or reluctant iPad user, it is an excellent introduction.  Enjoy.

I wanted to follow up on my post yesterday with another great conversation starter around nutrition.  If you didn’t get a chance to watch the 60 minutes segment on Sugar, I would highly recommend it.  I have embeded it here for easy access.  In addition, I have added a follow-up video from 60 minutes overtime that focuses on specific foods that are high in sugar and makes the point that you need to think about what and how much you are putting into your body.

Students understand nothing about nutrition.   This may or may not be a surprise to you, but I was completely shocked.  I see 135 students everyday and maybe 3 have a working understanding of nutrition.  I am troubled by this because it is obvious to me now that students are filling themselves with whatever is available and not spending any time thinking about: Should I be putting this into my body? 

In my preparation for this particular unit I polled my students to see where they are eating.  About 75% answered that they get at least 2-3 meals every week from fast food establishments.  McDonalds classifies people that frequent their restaurant once a week as “Heavy Users”.  Under that classification 3 out of 4 of my students are fast food Heavy Users.  Now combine that with the fact that almost none of them put any thought into what they are eating and the foundation is set for some serious nutritional issues.

A tech savvy solution:

I stumbled upon a great site that can help your students start to think critically about the fast food choices they are making.  The website is called Drive Thru Diet and it is maintained by Wake Forest Baptist Health.  The site gives you the choice of 21 popular fast food restaurants.  Once you select a restaurant you are given a list of choices of what you would pick for a meal (The screenshot below shows the high school version of myself picking at McDonalds…yes I have grown in my nutritional understanding)

After you click on the button “See Our Healthier Choices” you are shown a breakdown of the total Calories, Fat, Sodium, Carbs, Sugar, Fiber, and Protein in the meal.  The site also suggests Healthier Choices you could substitute in your order.  The site goes on to tell you the Healthiest options the restaurant offers.

This site is serving two purposes:  The first is it gives students the opportunity to think critically about what they are eating.  The second is it gives us a jumping off point to talk about Calories, Fat, Sugar, Etc.  I hope you find this site as useful as I have.

Educreations Interactive Whiteboard is a dead-simple app for turning your iPad 1, iPad 2 or third generation iPad into an interactive whiteboard. The title is a bit misleading, however, as this is really best described as a screencasting app for the iPad, in the same vein of a Kahn Academy video.

The application itself featured an extremely simple interface that allows users to pull in media from a number of locations (the iPad image library, a new picture taken with the iPad camera or any image file sitting in your Dropbox) and create slide decks that you can explain and annotate.

Once you have completed your deck, you can simply press the record button and narrate the action. While talking, you are able to annotate the screens, switch back and forth between slides and even drag specific objects around the screen to simulate a rough brand of animation.

Once complete, you can save or disgard your handiwork, and, if you wish, publish the video to the Educreations website. You have access control, and can rig up access limitations so only students in your class or school can see the videos.

Once hosted, you can link to or embed the media, as I have done in this brief sample screencast:

Hi there… we are updating to a new version of our website theme and evolving the site organization in response to some useful feedback from readers.  Excuse the mess!

Coming off of our latest adventure presenting at NCCE in Seattle, I thought I would share our strategies to maximizing time, having some fun, and getting our ethnic food eat on.  

GPS App:

Gone are the days when you have to pay the $20 – $50 surcharge for a gps system when you are renting a car.  There are many GPS apps to choose from for the iPhone (remember we are mac fan boys), but the one that we are currently using is Telenav:

TeleNav is initially free to download, but like all GPS apps the good features (voice turn by turn, live traffic, etc) cost some money. Be prepared to pay somewhere between $5 to $50 a year for GPS apps.  That is a steal compared renting or buy a dedicated unit. You can use these apps by yourself in the car but I would recommend an iPhone mount for your car.  Having two people is the ideal situation as one can navigate and the other can drive. (Or in Jason’s case road rage  This takes care of moving around the town and now time for some fun…

TeleNav at the iTunes Store

Fun times and the app we use:

(Full Disclosure: Remember we live in Montana. Which is usually great, unless you like going to tech stores)

The two stops we always make when we travel to the big city are Fry’s and Radioshack Apple Store.  We enjoy tweeting about the glories that are big cities and how great it would be to someday get our tech fix from somewhere else besides WalMart and Staples.  So the Twitter app of choice lately is Hoot Suite:

HootSuite is fast, really fast at updating your twitter stream.  It also supports multiple logins from a variety of services beyond Twitter like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare.  The other nice feature is that you can have multiple streams open and swipe between them making you feel like a true Twitter ninja.  

HootSuite at the iTunes Store

Getting our Ethnic Food Eat On:

Jason and I love to eat ethnic food when we travel (Mushrooms on a steak is about as ethnic as it gets in Montana) so it should be no surprise that our app of choice is Yelp:

Yelp has been a go to app for years but I can’t overstate how big of a time saver this app is for us.  Our strategy is to go about whatever else we have going on, say like a trip to Fry’s, and then breaking out Yelp to search for some food in the area.  Yelp’s social feature let’s us know what is close in the area and how well people like it.  Some things we have discovered because of Yelp is that some restaurants have great lunches, but less then stellar dinners.  We only go to places the are 4 or 5 star rated and in the 3 years of doing this we have never had a bad meal.  If you haven’t Yelpped yet….do it.

Yelp at the iTunes Store

Make your Travel simpler:

Nothing is worse then getting to the rental car kiosk after a long plane flight only for them to tell you that your reservation is not listed.  Those of you that have the ability to keep paper organized could simply pull out the printed reservation and be on your way.  For those of you, who are like me, and can’t seem to hold onto a piece of paper to save your life try the Dropbox app:

While Dropbox is definitely main stream, I am surprised by how many people have not incorporated it into thier daily lives. Dropbox allows you to install an app on your iPhone, iPad, Mac Computer, Windows Computer, and even Linux computer and then will keep files synced between all devices.  This is a great app for travel because I can be on my Mac desktop at home making a plane flight reservation and then print the confirmation to pdf and save it in my Travel folder within Dropbox.  This instantly sends the PDF to every other device I own that has Dropbox.  So now when the rental car company tries to ruin my day I break out my iPhone, open the travel folder in Dropbox and show them the confirmation number on the PDF.

Dropbox at the iTunes Store

So those are our Big 4 apps we use when traveling…try them and let us know if they have made your travel a little less sucktastic.  If you have an app that you use in your travel that we didn’t metion write us in the comments and let us know….

Apple has a small, but impressive podcast channel dedicated to “iPad in Business.”  The archive is 30 videos strong and it appears they post new content twice a month.  While the archive definitely has a business slant, I like the idea of “here is a common need in the business environment and here is a solution with a specific app.”  I have watched about a dozen or so of the vignettes and noted a couple of interesting apps with educational application.