Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • #OhioITSCO Leadership Symposium – Teach Like a Hacker

    Why hack?

    Teach like a hacker is the epitome of “work smarter, not harder”. Figure out clever solutions to tough problems.

    Coding

    Examples in the classroom

    Math

    Students can write programs to solve the type of problems being studied in Math. For example, write a program in your favorite language (spreadsheet, Ruby, Python, etc.) that can add fractions.

    English Language Arts and Social Studies

    Use interactive fiction to put your students into the mindset characters in literature or in history. Inklewriter can be used as a starting point, advanced students can move to Inform. Both can be published on the web for others to play. (Inform can be hosted in Google Drive.)

    Science

    For this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the three scientests used computers to model molecules and reactions.

    As a news release explained it, “Chemists used to create models of molecules using plastic balls and sticks,” but “today the modeling is carried out in computers,” thanks in part to work done in the 1970s by the three new laureates.

    A lot of modeling of processes can now happen in the computer, and the students can modify the model to see what happens.

  • Follow and backchannel the Apple event today

    I’ve set up an IRC bot to feed MacRumorsLive Twitter account into the #eduk8me IRC channel on Freenode. You can use the web client or any IRC client to connect to the #eduk8me channel on Freenode.

    (I’m at the Ohio ITSCO Leadership Symposium, so I don’t know how much time I’ll have to join. 🙁 )

  • Quantum computing and Minecraft

    Google Releases qCraft Mod For Minecraft So Kids Can Explore Quantum Computing

    Google recognizes the potential here well, and wanted to add quantum physics into the mix. Thus, the ‘qCraft’ mod was born, one that adds new blocks that add an entirely new mechanic to the game, such as quantum entanglement, superposition, and observer dependency.

    The company admits that this isn’t a “perfect scientific simulation”, but there’s such thing as “good enough” here. The goal is to get kids and others interested in quantum physics, and judging from a quick demo, it looks to have major potential.

    Very cool!

  • From the, well duh department

    Technology Will Not Replace Teachers

    As much innovation as the iPad may bring to the classroom, it’s not going to replace a teacher anytime soon. In fact, the influx of technology like iPads means there is a greater need for teachers. We need teachers who are part early adopter, part integrator, and part mad scientist. The modern teacher must be willing to take chances and able to figure out how not just how technology works, but how it works for each student, and where its use is most appropriate.

    Mad scientist indeed!

  • Get voice search on your older iOS devices (iPad 1, iPhone 4, iPod Touch, etc.) with Google Search

    Do you have a iOS device that doesn’t have Siri? Are you feeling lonely and would like to talk to your device? Maybe Google Search is what you need.

    Once you install it, you can ask Google questions, like “Is it going to rain tonight?” or “What time do the buckeyes play today?”. It’s not all the automation that Siri does, but it’s pretty nice.

    (Google Chrome also supports dictation in the app)

  • More on libraries and their future

    Surprise! It’s the Golden Age of Libraries

    Zachary Loeb (who writes as the Luddbrarian on the blog librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com) notes that “although college students have a huge amount of information available to them, this does not automatically mean that they have acquired all of the information literacy necessary to really make sense of this mass amount of information. As a result the library staff becomes an increasingly important resource for students wading through the information glut, especially as library staff are often available to students in numerous ways (in person, e-mail, chat, by phone).” This is particularly true for adult learners who return to higher education after many years away from the classroom and who often find virtual research daunting.

    Libraries aren’t going anywhere, but much like the saying “let’s videotape that” now meaning to digitally record video, “let’s go to the library” will mean something different.

  • #tlah Managing your class list in a spreadsheet, part 2

    When we last visited our spread sheet, we used formulas to cut apart a list of names in our class that resulted in the following spreadsheet:

    Our great class

    Today, we will learn some more programming techniques in our quest to create another column in our spreadsheet which would have the students full name in the format Firstname Lastname. To create this full name column, you might try:

    =B2+C2

    Ugh, what’s this #VALUE! result? In this instance, it is because you tried to use the + operand on data which cannot be added. This means we need to talk about data types. We’ll touch on two today, number and string (for those that know, a number data type can be a very complex beast, but we’re trying to keep it simple!). A number data type is basically anything numeric. 19 and 87 are two numbers. We can add those two numbers and get 106. A string is a data type that can encompass letters, numbers, and symbols. Luke is a string as is I am your father. But, 19 and 87 can also be strings, it just depends on what you want to do with them.

    With strings, you don’t add, you concatenate (yes, that’s a real word, go look it up!). When you concatenate Luke and I am your father you get LukeI am your father (no space between Luke and I because the original strings don’t have a space). You can also concatenate 19 and 87 to get 1987. The operand to concatenate is &. So for our example in Column D we will use the & to concatenate the two fields:

    =B2&C2

    Oh, so close! But now we have LukeSkywalker, we want a space between them. To add the space, we just concatenate a " " in between the two cell references:

    =B2&" "&C2

    And violà! We have a new column with the users Firstname Lastname:

    mygreatclass-firstname-lastname-l.png (640×292)

    How would you write the formula to create a username which consists of the last two digits of the grad year, last name, firstname?

    p.s. All posts in the series – Managing your class list in a spreadsheet

  • ❂ Libraries are the future

    Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

    I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure.

    It’s not one to one: you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

    Interesting start, although the prison planning story appears to be an urban myth without any source.

    But later Mr. Gaiman hits pay dirt:

    I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.

    It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

    And not just for the use of the word tosh. This needs to be shouted from the rooftops, posted in every school, said at every parent/teacher conference.

    Via: Neil Gaiman On Why Libraries Are the Gates to the Future – Slashdot

  • The first woman programmer, Ada Lovelace

    Ada Lovelace, an Indirect and Reciprocal Influence

    When I heard that Ada Lovelace Day was coming, I questioned myself, “What do I actually know about Ada Lovelace?” The sum total of my knowledge: Ada was the first woman programmer and the Department of Defense honored her contributions to computation in 1979 by naming its common programming language Ada.

    A few Ada biographies later, I know Augusta Ada Lovelace to be an incredibly complex woman with a painful life story, one in which math, shame, and illness were continuously resurfacing themes. Despite all, Ada tirelessly pursued her passion for mathematics, making her contributions to computing undeniable and her genius all the more clear. Her accomplishments continue to serve as an inspiration to women throughout the world.

    I’m always fascinated by what some people have gone through to succeed, especially when I’m dealing with minor complaints such as “it won’t print”.

    Via: Slashdot

  • Replacing the library

    The End Of The Library | TechCrunch

    I know this sucks. Libraries have been an invaluable part of human history, propagating our culture and knowledge over centuries. But recognizing the changing times and pointing out the obvious shouldn’t be considered blasphemy. It is what it is.

    The internet has replaced the importance of libraries as a repository for knowledge. And digital distribution has replaced the role of a library as a central hub for obtaining the containers of such knowledge: books. And digital bits have replaced the need to cut down trees to make paper and waste ink to create those books. This is evolution, not devolution.

    Interesting points on where we may be going with libraries. But is there a future without libraries? I don’t see them disappearing, but I do see them morphing into something else. Just like the shift over the last 30 with school libraries, I mean, library media centers. 🙂