My Head Hurts

Jim Gates PresentationOK, I’m sitting in Jim Gates’ keynote at the Classrooms for the Future Boot Camp — great stuff, lots of cool online tools.  He’s also showing a wiki page that was created by a student as part of an assignment.  The student found a great video on YouTube about the culture of the country he was writing about and included it.  Then, when he went to present his project in class — the video was blocked.

At the same time, I’m scanning through the transcript from the chat that the audience from last night’s keynote  generated, and am blown away.  The transcript has been transported over to a wiki page, that will continue to be available to the audience — and I’m adding in comments and further explanations in the wiki.

OMG! He’s showing Gapminder.org — plotting time-based graphs. 

My head hurts!

8 thoughts on “My Head Hurts”

  1. If you watch the
    documentary _The Future We Will Create: Inside the World of TED_ you get to see Hans Rosling and Jeff Han briefly discussing how his data manipulation could be merged with Hans multi-touch computer screen as an interface. Very cool and a Watch Instantly selection if you have a Netflix account.

  2. The student found a great video on YouTube about the culture of the country he was writing about and included it. Then, when he went to present his project in class — the video was blocked.

    David…the BEST part of this story was what the students did to solve the problem…contact the video provider, download the video, put it on teachertube… and THAT is the power of project based learning. If you look at any of the wiki’s on Jim’s Site that are student projects the most POWERFUL part of the project is not always what is on the page, but the livliness of the discussion board, the debate, planning, problem solving, decision making that goes on there as well as back in the classroom!!! As Jim Gate’s says…”OH that’s good stuff” 🙂

  3. Dave,

    I’m always interested in information graphics.. thanks for that site, I’ll have to check it out.. but it seemed like you were suggesting that there is a tool out there for plotting time based graphs. I wasn’t sure what you really meant by time based graphs actually (although I guess I could guess) But, I am interested in tools that kids can use to illustrate information in different ways so that they can begin to think about novel ways to present information successfully. I’m also thinking that I need to know more about this myself. Can you point me toward something?

  4. While we’re talking wiki’s, what’s the best wiki site to use in the classroom. I’m looking to get students to create classroom resources for certain stories, types of writing, projects, etc.

    What’s the most popular, and what are some alternatives?

    1. What I’m seeing most often used is Wikispaces (http://wikispaces.com/). It’s a good sturdy engine and teachers can use it for free (scroll down to the bottom of the opening page for instructions). Also, a lot of folks are using PBWiki or Peanut Butter Wiki (http://pbwiki.com/). It has added some features lately that make it an interesting alternative. I use PMWiki (http://pmwiki.org/), which is open source software that you install on your own server. It also has a pretty determined community of programmers who are adding extensions. PMWiki is not as user-friendly.

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