From the Saline Schools, right here in Michigan, comes a video about how teachers and students are using cellphone in the classroom to enhance teaching and learning. Check it out h/t Superintendent Scot Graden's Blog
Deconstructing TV news
The video below has been getting a lot of attention on the blogs lately, and despite that it is pretty good. No kittens riding skateboards or mentos and Coke here. Just a beautifully constructed take down of TV News. A must see for all media literacy courses. Check it...
The infinity of primes (proof as poem)
The math-po (and sci-po) stream keeps flowing. Math Mama Writes, who started the whole math-poetry movement has some more on her blog, and here is Erin Nash with some really beautiful biological poetry. And of course, here's her husband Sean Nash having his students...
Absolutely brilliant video
The Rethink Scholarship is an scholarship for aspiring art directors and designers to Langara College's Communication and Ideation Design program. This video is to publicize the program.
Limerick on Math & Beauty
Image credit: eoliene_pe_campii Mathematical Beauty: A limerick Punya Mishra, Jan 27, 2010 Doesn’t it just gladden your heart to see These games we can play with infinity? How can one stay aloof From the elegance of a proof And remain immune to mathematics’ subtle...
Douglas Adams, technologies & anticipatory plagiarism
Image Credit Leeks As readers of the blog know, Matt Koehler and I work together quite a lot. In fact we just rotate author-order in our papers since it is hard to keep track of individual contributions. (I would like to claim that the cool ideas are mine - but again...
The futility of existence
I stumbled across this little machine that shuts itself off once it has been switched on! How cool is that. I don't have an clue whom to credit it to and would appreciate a heads up on that. I was reminded of the myth of Sisyphus which led to a great piece of...
The TPACK game, Littleton version
I received an email from Michael Porter of the Littleton Public Schools in Colorado about a version of the TPACK game Michael and his colleagues recently conducted with their K-12 Leadership team (building principals and district administrators). I know that Matt...
Teaching design, some ideas
I recently received an email from a teacher in Poland, seeking advice for a curriculum outline for their Design Technology Section. They said, and I quote: Unfortunately, I have minimal experience with the subject as a teacher or as a student in my younger years,...
For Sean & his students
Sean had this wonderful post on his blog (Is this a sluggish strategy?) about this whole scientific and mathematical poetry that is going around. He links to some excellent sci-po's written by his students (see Pushing Scientific Thought Into Art) and also provides a...
Stuck with Google (recursively)
The other day, for one reason or another, I did a Google search for the word "recursion." According to Wikipedia, recursion ... in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own...
Palindromic poetry in prison, introducing Sandra Gould Ford
Those who follow this blog know that I love visual wordplay. This is most commonly seen in my ambigram work but another area where I have spent some time is in writing palindromic poetry. I wrote a whole series of poems when I was in graduate school at Illinois and...
MLK
Martin Luther King, Jr. January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968 Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted —in Strength to Love, 1964
Art, design & teaching great quote
Steve Wagenseller, a student in my 817 Learning Technology by Design seminar wrote something so cool in the class forum that I felt that it was worth recording on my blog... ...One of the differences between art versus design is that a user has to approach the art,...
A tangent, a line & a circle, another Math-Poem
A tangent, a line and a circle A math poem Image credit: chrstphre (on Flickr) A point outside a circle, shoots out two lines one heading for the center the other more feline smoothly kisses the curve That delicate swerve of the ball and then, abruptly turns to the...
The mathematical “i”
I guess 'tis the season of Math-Po's! Sue VanHattum, whose challenge started all this, commented on my recent Math-Po (Math-Po (Mathematical Poetry): Goldbach’s Conjecture) by providing an example of her own writing, a poem titled Imaginary Numbers Do the Trick. That...
Math-Po (Mathematical Poetry): Goldbach’s Conjecture
My previous post (Poetry, Science & Math, OR why I love the web) mentioned a challenge by Sue VanHattum of "Math Mama Writes" to "write a little kids’ poem ... and that tells of the beauty of math, or, that mentions math and challenge, both in a positive way."...
Poetry, Science & Math, OR why I love the web
A 5th grade science assignment, transformed. A rant about Mother Goose. A math poetry challenge! How did that come to be? And what does that have to do with loving the Interwebs? Read on... I had written earlier about how my 10 year-old daughter had been writing...
eduPUNKing a course website!!
I had written about the EduPunk movement earlier, in fact had even designed a logo for it. A brief description of Edupunk can be found on Wikipedia (a google search will reveal many more). Wikipedia describes it as follows: Edupunk is an approach to teaching and...
New ambigram logo for ideaplay.org
I had written previously about a blog started by students in our Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Ph.D. program (ideaplay.org) and had designed a couple of ambigrammatic logos for them. You can see the original post here. Here is one of the original...
Nature v.s. nurture, what are we missing
Jordy Whitmer over at the Birmingham School district forwarded me this link to this really cool video by George Kembel on Awakening Creativity. There is a lot in the video to ponder and discuss but I want to focus on something he said about music learning that really...
Happy 2010! Stop motion movie
I have had a lot of fun this year playing with video. Most of these experiments were done with my kids (nothing like combining work with pleasure). One of the things we had done last year was a stop motion new year's card. So we just HAD to create one this year as...
Finding Nemo, the sea-quel
Our family's stop-motion animation festival continues with our latest offering: Finding Nemo, the sea-quel!! This movie was conceptualized by Shreya and filmed by all of us over a couple of days. What was interesting about this movie was just how many technologies...
Stop motion fun
My daughter, Shreya, had some friends over yesterday and they created a short stop-motion animation film with the new setup in our basement. Enjoy [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTkhuEfTAnk[/youtube] More videos made with my kids can be seen by clicking...
On picturing words, tech-mix an old school idea
Students in my CEP 818 (Creativity in Teaching and Learning) have been using digital photography to explore a variety of topics related to trans-disciplinary creativity. I hope to showcase some of their work on this blog once the semester gets over. In the meanwhile,...
Creating Palindrograms, aka palindromic ambigrams
Ambigram.com is a website about ambigrams and the people who make them. Lots of cool stuff for enthusiasts and novices alike. They often conduct competitions and other fun challenges for readers. One recent one was related to palindromes. In brief, they challenged...
All you can cheat, part II (a response)
Patrick Diemer commented on my previous posting, All you can cheat, the web & learning by saying: Do you have any words of wisdom or resources on how to create appropriate questions? This sounds great, but easier said than done in my humble opinion. I started...
Jere Brophy / Motivation Ambigram
A new ambigram created in memory of Jere Brophy, world renowned scholar on psychology of motivation. The ambigram reads, "motivation" one direction and "Jere Brophy" when rotated by 180 degrees. Click on the image to see a larger version, hosted on Flickr....
New ambigrams for a new blog!
What do you think this is? Take a guess...Well, it is the top half of a lake-reflection ambigram. What this means is that if you reflect what you see along a horizontal line at the bottom of the image, the picture you will then get will spell a word. Can you figure...
Mastery=unconscious (contd.)
Robin Revette Fowler sent me a message on Facebook regarding my recent posting(s) about moving from incompetence to mastery (see the two previous posts here and here). She took issue with my idea that mastery requires some kind of meta-level, self-awareness. She said...