LAPCAE Materials

I’d like to thank everyone who came to my session, Emerging Technologies in the Adult Education Classroom. You were a fun group to talk to and I hope that everyone got something to take away from the session.  As promised, I’ve linked my slide set and handout below.  While you’re here, I hope you’ll take the time to look around and some of the articles we’ve shared in the past.  If you have any questions about the topic, or anything about technology in education, really, feel free to ask.  If we don’t know the answer, we probably should, so we’ll find out for you.

• Handout of Useful Links
• Slide Set (This file is pretty hefty.  About seven megabytes.  You don’t want to download this over a modem.)

Technology Applied to Unintended Uses

There was an interesting note in Dear Abby yesterday (4/29/2010).  The writer wanted to share an idea to get her children to read more.  Like many parents, “Proud Parents” would prefer their children to read.  The children preferred to watch more television.  The compromise that was reached was to turn off the audio on most programming, and allow the children to watch it only if they were willing to read the closed-captioning.

Closed Captioning

The result of this policy is that the childrens’ reading scores have greatly improved and the parents get more quiet time when the TV is on in the family room.  Abby rightly points out that closed-captioning, while intended for folks with disabilities, is a wonderful aid to people trying to develop ESOL skills.  I think that this technology would also be useful to adult learners working on conventional literacy issues.

Some teaching ideas/notes:

• While many of you may have noted this before, adult learners may need some actual training on how to turn on closed captioning, and practice at doing so – you can provide this in the classroom.
• Also note that you can have closed captioning on at the same time as the audio – great for those who are hard of hearing – and ESOL learners, and folks who are very beginning readers.
• Even with the sound off, the visuals partnered along with the words on the screen can give struggling readers a boost – aiding in decoding and comprehension (building visual literacy?).
• Another source of captioned materials – many YouTube videos are in another language and subtitled (see Medieval Tech Support!).
• This again is a tool for practice, and should be partnered along with other reading instruction and practice activities in other formats – like online text, book text, e-mail, etc.

Your Turn: The ELMO HV-110U Document Camera

Some of ya’ll might remember a bit of old tech called an “opaque projector.”  This was a monstrous piece of hardware about two feet tall, two feet wide, and three feet long.  It had an complex and expensive set of optics that allowed you to put a book or other printed material on it’s target platform, and it would project an image of it on the screen.  It took a lot of lumens to project that image, so the thing ran hot, consumed a lot of power, and ate expensive bulbs like they were popcorn.  Accurate milling of lenses is an expensive, labor-intensive process, so this was also a very pricey way to heat up your classroom.

While you can still find opaque projectors today, mostly marketed to artists, they have largely been replaced by the document camera.  This is a specialized video camera with a short focal length that is suspended over the book or other material the instructor wants to project onto the screen.   With far smaller optics, it runs cooler, takes up far less space, and in general is handier than the old opaque projector.  The problem is, they cost about the same as opaque projectors used to.  In general, they start at around $1200.00 and go up from there.  Without a lot of effort, you can spend $5000.00 on a document camera.

Well, I’ve found one for under $800.00.   It’s called the ELMO HV-110U.  As you can imagine, I’m skeptical of the quality of the image that’s going to come out of a camera that’s this cheap, and to make things worse, the only two reviews I’ve found are quite negative.  But that’s only a couple of guys’ opinions.  I thought before I make a commitment to this piece of hardware one way or another, I’d ask you guys.  Have any of you worked with this particular document camera?

More Changes – Although This One Came Slow

Just the other day, Sony announced that they would be ending domestic (Japanese) sales of 3.5 inch “floppy” disks.  The latest and most efficient versions of this medium, the High Density disk, would hold 1.44 megabytes of data.  And they’re very, very slow to transfer data.  Now, Sony holds 70% of the market share for 1.44 MB floppies in Japan, so this is pretty much the death knell for this ancient and venerable storage medium.  It will take a little longer for this to roll out into the United States, as we hang on to our computer hardware longer than the Japanese, but the writing has been on the wall for a while.  Apple abandoned this medium several years ago, and as of last fiscal year, Dell no longer provided them as standard options on it’s commercial-grade computers. (Source: CNET – Sony delivers floppy disk’s last rites )

Introduced in 1987, the 3.5″ floppy had a twenty three year lifespan as a standard.  And that’s a pretty darn good run.  The 5.25 floppy, it’s immediate predecessor wwas introduced by Apple around 1978, and only lasted nine years.  The 8″ floppy, used before that, only lasted seven years. 

Today’s preferred portable media is the “memory stick.”  Also called a “thumb drive” or “jump drive,” 512 MB versions can be had for under a dollar, for the careful shopper.  For a dollar, you can buy a media stick that will hold three hundred and fifty five floppy disks.  Or, if you’ve got a little more money to spend, you can get an 8 GIGAbit drive for about $24.00.  It will hold the same amount of data as FIVE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED and FIFTY FIVE floppies.  For $24.00.  I remember being shocked when the price of floppies dropped below a $20.00 for a pack of ten.

SO – teaching learners to use floppy disks or even CDs/DVDs is probably not a good way to spend the tiny amount of time we have for technology training.  I would be very surprised to discover a computer in use with a floppy drive in another five years.