Atavist – Publishing Platform

Posted on December 18, 2015 by jjohnson

Would you like to create a series of web pages that connect to each other as in chapters in a story?  Try Atavist. Here’s an example of a site created with Atavist. I have limited experience with Microsoft’s Sway, but it appears that Atavist is much easier to use and the pages are more interactive.

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Live Presentations with Swipe

Posted on September 28, 2015 by jjohnson

Swipe is a web service that allows you to easily create presentations by importing PDFs or typing in Markdown. You can also embed YouTube or Vimeo videos. Your slides can also have polls. The slides will also play on any device or computer. But I think the best part of Swipe is the fact that the slides are live; in other words, you can control the presentation the students view.

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Create and publish Markdown web pages

Posted on September 13, 2015 by jjohnson

Want to quickly publish some Markdown web pages? Here are some ways of doing it:

Want to create a presentation from a markdown document?

  • Try Swipe. (See the post about Swipe.)
  • Have a Mac? Try Deckset  ($29.99).
  • Another easy possibility is to download the Markdown Presenter zip file, save a copy of the enclosed presentation.md file for future slides, modify the original presentation.md file with a markdown editor, upload all of the files to a web server (or Dropbox) in a folder, and give the URL of the Presenter.html file to others. You can modify the name of the Presenter.html file if you like. Unfortunately, if you are creating more than one presentation with this, you’ll need to put each of the presentations into separate folders on your server (or Dropbox).

Want to create a wiki in Markdown? Here are some possibilities:

Want to create an epub book that can be read in iBooks on iOS devices as well as the Mac? The iPad version of Notebooks App can do that.  Multimarkdown Composer for the Mac can also do that.

Ever need to convert HTML into Markdown? Use the web site, to-markdown.

Need to quickly create a table in markdown? Go to http://www.tablesgenerator.com/markdown_tables

Need to generate a Markdown file from a Word document? Go to Word-to-Markdown Converter (http://word-to-markdown.herokuapp.com/)

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LiquidText – PDF and Document Reader for Annotating, Researching, Highlighting and More – For the iPad

Posted on September 5, 2015 by jjohnson

Check this out the free iPad app LiquidText

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Student collaboration with Fetchnotes

Posted on September 2, 2015 by jjohnson

Maybe your students want to collaborate by creating study notes together. One free tool to consider is Fetchnotes. Notes can be created in a browser and viewed on a mobile device, and vice versa.

  • Fellow students will receive a notification when someone has edited the notes.
  • Hashtags  (#) can be used to put a note in a category.
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The Key to Success – Grit

Posted on July 9, 2015 by jjohnson

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Dr. Carl Weiman: Science Education in the 21st Century

Posted on January 31, 2015 by jjohnson

The video below is a talk that Dr. Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics, gave at Cornell University in 2009. The notes below are a summary of the talk.

 

How Experts Think and Learn

  • Experts have a lot of factual knowledge
  • Experts have a mental organizational framework that is consistent
    across that discipline that allows them to retrieve and apply their
    knowledge.
  • Experts monitor their own thinking and learning. They are able to
    ask themselves if they understand something. This ability doesn’t come
    naturally. This information takes time to develop in order to get it
    into long-term memory.

How well do students learn?

  • Concept Inventories can be used to determine how well students
    understand a principle. Concept inventories are typically given at the
    beginning of a course and then at the end in order to determine how
    much the students have learned.
  • Results of experiments from using concept inventories indicate
    that lecture-based classes aren’t helping students learn the concepts.
  • Novices see principles of physics as isolated facts and learning
    is a matter of finding the appropriate formulas in order to solve
    physics problems.
  • Experts look at broader concepts.
  • How a presentation is perceived by an expert is different than
    how it is perceived by the novice.
  • The limitation of the working memory needs to be considered. The
    working memory capacity limits how much new information the brain can
    handle.

What needs to be done to
help students learn?

  • Learning is built on prior thinking and understanding. You have
    to connect with their prior knowledge.
  • Students have to see what expert thinking is like and they have
    to practice it for extended periods of time. There has to be effective
    feedback (timely and specific) in order to guide their thinking and
    understanding. Thinking alone is not enough; students have to be
    guided. Students need to be motivated in order to accomplish. There
    also needs to be spaced repetition in order for the learning to be
    retained.

  • Motivation

    • Students need to see the relevance in the topic in
      order to be motivated.
    • Students have to believe that they can master the
      subject.
    • They must feel that they have self-control.
  • Practice expert-like thinking
    • Students need to engage in thinking and have it
      monitored.

      • progressively more challenging tasks
      • They have to see relationships and also determine what is relevant and what is not relevant
      • Students need to self-check (metacognition).

How do you do
all of this with a large number of students?

  • You have to depend on technology.
  • Highly interactive lecture using clickers
  • See the Course Transformation Guide and the Clicker Resource Guide from the Carl Weiman Institute in order to understand how to use clickers effectively
  • Important to have challenging questions. They students need to be engaged by attempting to answer higher-order thinking questions, not just rote-memory questions.
  • After asking a clicker question, allow student discussion in order to answer the question. Also, the instructor needs to follow up on the discussion. You can ask the students to work in a group and have the members of the group come to a consensus before they answer the
    question. You can also wander around the room and listen to their discussions.

 

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