Websites

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#ScienceLooksGood - Space Theme for Your Computer

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Lifehacker has an amazing space desktop theme available for Windows, MaC, and Linux.  Check out their post here. It includes the above wallpaper plus customized skins and icons to make your desktop look like Spaaaaace! The following are included for Windows:

The Goodnight Tale wallpaper from DeviantArt
The Rainmeter system management and configuration utility for Windows
The Encoded skin for Rainmeter to get the date and weather
The Enigma suite for Rainmeter for the system stats on the right side of the screen
The Google bar for Rainmeter for the search bar in the upper right
StarDock's ObjectDock to replace the Windows taskbar
The Token icon set for the dock at the bottom

Check it out at Lifehacker!

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Online Courses for Free and Customized Educational Videos

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Yup, it's me. High school was awesome.


I've been a huge fan of MIT's online OpenCourseWare initiative. For 10 years, MIT has made several of its engineering courses (and a few others in the Sloan business school) available online free of charge. Impressively, it was more than just a few PDFs - there was lecture videos, lab notes, problem sets, and exams.  It was truly an interactive way to learn for those of us proactive enough to seek out information online.

Now, Harvard and MIT are teaming up to offer free online courses. Similarly, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michiganan are also planning to offer free online courses. The two groups are using different companies, which will bring the competition needed to truly flesh out the best way to offer information online.  The best thing about these efforts is that they will be actual courses, which will be graded either by professors, peers or crowdsourcing.  While I doubt that you'd be able to use these for any actual course credit outside of the involves university, it's still a great idea.  Just think about what this can look like a generation from now. 

Hopefully, universities will be as inventive as TED, an educational video site, is when it comes to interactive educational video. They've just unveiled a great way to mix and match segments of videos as well as add annotations, quizzes, and other parts to create a product customized for a specific audience. This is great because sometimes it can be a pain to send someone a video and mention what part they should pay attention to - with this solution, the video itself can be as brief and contain the relevant text itself.  Cool stuff!

Here's to using technology to help improve education! And for free!

 

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Flipping Education On Its Head

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Its common knowledge that the United States education system needs some work.  But too often people throw technology at the problem without a plan.  Dumping a bunch of iPads on a school without a process on how to utilize it is an expensive recipe for disaster.

Thankfully, Arizona is doing the opposite. They are taking advantage of online lectures on sites such as YouTube and Khan Academy to create a "flipped classroom".  Learning a concept in class and applying it at home is flipped into learning the concept at home (using the online tools listed above) and turning class time into a large group workshop to apply that concept.  Fittingly, the idea began in Colorado and has spread via social networking to schools across the country.

This is a new concept that has many challenges. For example:

The biggest criticism of the flipped classroom is that some students don't have access to high-speed Internet.

To overcome this, some schools leave their computer labs open during lunch hours and after school. Others direct students to public libraries within walking distance.

Flipped classrooms are more likely to be in private schools, where more families can easily afford computers and high-speed Internet, some superintendents said.

As this teaching style gets tested, challenged, and improved, I hope that it can reach kids regardless of what school and socioeconomic background they are. Our schools need to get a little crazy and nontraditional to be able to break out of mediocrity.

Speaking of nontraditional, some enterprising students at Vanderbilt are developing a custom tablet that allows blind people to understand algebraic concepts using touch and vibration.  The video is so great that I can't really do it justice - check it out below!