I’ve said this to so many people here but I am "mentally saturated". I have too many new ideas that I’m worried I won’t be able to take any one of them and start using it. To alleviate this fear, I have documented as much as I can in several pages of scribbled notes. Over time, I will try to dump many of them here. Let me continue with an overview of what I’ve learned and what’s up and coming.
Continued from last post: (still from yesterday)
7. I received a wealth ideas for student projects related to biological and life sciences in a Computer Minicourse on Biocalculus. With my upcoming Math Models courses in the fall, I am always looking for new projects to try out. I learned how to implement sliders in Excel and saw a confirmation of an idea I have been pondering for Excel. I was wanting to develop an Excel spreadsheet to explore predator-prey models in Differential Equations. The idea was to create an underlying calculation worksheet and then on the main spreadsheet have a series of graphs, sliders and parameter settings that allow the model to be "toyed" with. The presenter pointed me to a project called ESTEEM where several such workbooks have been produced toward this end. (more on this later)
8. The evening was capped off with a wonderful outing with some fellow bloggers (and pre-bloggers). We had lengthy discussions about what most disappointed us and most excited us about this conference. We conspired a few blog storms to take down misdirected technologies. I’ll rip off some pictures from their blogs as soon as they are posted so you can see just what a lively bunch we turned out to be. (Thanks to Maria and Robert for helping to put the evening together)
On to Saturday:
1. I took my time getting around this morning. I was up all hours of the night trying to catch up and answer email. I failed miserable at the "catching up" part. I arrived to the conference center around 9:30 and wandered around the exhibitor’s booths. The exhibits I spent the most time with included TechSmith and MapleSoft. TechSmith produces SnagIt, Camtasia and Jing. I used a freeware screen capture software for our online College Algebra course called CamStudio and I wanted to know what the "Gotta Have It" feature in Camtasia. I needed more motivation to fork over the $180 for a license. Nothing grabbed me, but there are few features that I need to look over more closely. Flash quizzing, fully-featured editing suite, 8 different export formats, call out features - they all have potential but nothing I can’t accomplish with freeware. Maybe the fact that it is all in one place is enough to sell me. We’ll see.
2. I attended a panel discussion on Evaluation and Online Teaching. Not much new for me here. It might simply be a function of my innovation tank reaching capacity. Although not directly related to the talks, I did learn about WizIQ for potential use in live office hours and pen technologies that record audio and can replay by clicking on a particular point in the hand written notes. I’ve got over a dozen new software packages to test out and consider how they might fulfill a niche in my content delivery.
Who wants to place bets on how much of the material I’ve collected this weekend will fade into oblivion as I return to the daily obligations of teaching and research?
Here’s the rest of today:
1. Blogging with Concept Maps
2. Tweaking online Calculus
3. 20th Celebration of ICTCM (Gala)
4. Bed and go home tomorrow !!! woohoooo!
March 10th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
[…] dropped off on Saturday’s post and there were a few remaining talks I attended, shoving a few fresh concepts into my already […]