Flickr Slideshow

Refined Lesson Plan

Subject, grade level, and lesson topic.

a. Subject: Computer Human Interaction / Artificial Intelligence.

b. Grade level: Computer Science Graduate Students

c. Lesson Topic: Develop a mobile application. Students can choose the OS, android, or iOS. Topic is also optional.

Learning goals:

At the end of the lesson plan, student will be able to develop a mobile application. They will learn from the basic operations to advance features, depending on the application to develop. They also will be able to construct a Software Requirements Specification official document. This will be a group assignment composed of 4 team members broken down into the following:

1) Lead Programmer – Focuses on the coding section of the project.

2) V & V Supervisor - Main job is to document the project.

3) System Architect - Establishes the basic structure of the system

4) Designer – Explains the foundations of the software development process.

5) System Analyst – Liaison with the customer. Oversees in overall the success of the project. Makes sure the requirements specifications are met. Designs the workflow of the project.

Understanding or estimation of student interest, prior knowledge, or common misconceptions related to the topic; discuss how your lesson can tap into their interest or address misconceptions

This project will motivate students to develop something that is going to be helpful for them, because at the end of the project they will have the option to upload it to the actual market for the public to use. As a software engineer, it’s a great feeling that people use something that you have developed to make their lives easy or happier (if it’s a game app). This project will also help students to enrich their resumes when applying for a new job on the Technology field. Today mobile technology is a very demanding career, since the growth in this area; several companies are looking for mobile developers. With this project, students will have the basic knowledge on how to build a mobile app. If they get highly motivated they can build a very complex application.

Technology and resources that you are going to use

Teacher :

- Use of Edmodo to submit assignments, project deadlines and announcements.

- Videos on my web site related to mobile development on main site for student to reference.

- Course podcast, each class will be recorded as well as any PPT used, this is to help students to reference to the class given at any time and from anywhere.

- RSS. They can subscribe to the Course web site to keep up with announcements and news about the class.

- An online voting poll will be provided at the end of the project to vote for the best project. The winner will earn 5 bonus points.

- I will create an ePortfolio using Adobe acrobat Pro to store each team project.

Students:

- Website. Using Google sites each team will make use of a website to centralize their project.

- Blogs. Using Blogger each team will have a blog to upload each idea that they brainstorm their project.

- Bonus point if teams actually podcast their projects about what programming languages they used, what OS they chose and why.

- iPeer reviews. Using iPeer students have to provide teammates peer reviews each week on the project contribution.

- Bonus point if they use web conference software (video & audio) to communicate with the client.

- Wiki. Student will have to post their feasible report and the SRS on a private wiki. Only members of the team can view and edit the wiki content. They will grant me access to view only their work.

- Bonus point if they share links related to mobile development to their classmates using delicious or diigo.

- MS Lync. This is a tool provided by Microsoft, is another communication and collaboration tool that serves as IM, desktop sharing, video calls, and/or just audio calls with the use of speakers and a mic.

Concrete list of activities in your lesson in chronological order

1. Day 1. Introduction to the project, explain about project. I will explain about the different OS, advantages and disadvantages. I will form teams this day. I will make use of an online survey to give them the option to sort the most desired position to the least desired position.

2. Week 1. Will tell them the formed groups and their roles. Assignment will be given to research and brainstorm about an application to develop. Results will be posted on their blog.

3. Week 2. I will explain what a feasibility report is and leave them with the assignment to one to make sure the proposed project is feasible within the project time frame given. 6 weeks.

4. Week 3. Start implementing the application. Constant communication with the customer to go over the application and provide feedback.

5. Week 4. Testing application

6. Week 5. Submitting application to customer.

7. Week 6. Final presentation of finished product.

Student learning will be assessed on the following criteria:

- Proposed project runs successfully (no bugs) - 50%

- Project complexity. 30 %

- Code optimization. 10 %

- Documentation. 10%

12th Teacher Networking Technology and Content (TNTc) Conference

This was my first time attending a TNT conference and this one was the 12th!!! From now on I am not going to miss any future TNT conference. They are very informative and not matter how technology savvy you are, even if you now a lot or if you have plenty of experience in this field, at the end of the day you leave whit a very good taste and as I said, even if you have a lot of experience on technology you learned a lot. As you know technology is continuously growing at a very fast pace. I could not say that it grows every year, because companies keep releasing amazing technology through the year. I was not familiar with this conference I thought that we were going to be all in one room discussing about new technology and innovations, but that was not the case, you can attend to all of these available sessions from different presenters. It is hard to pick your sessions since they all very attractive. I guess it all depends on the technology you would like to start implementing in your classroom; those are the sessions you would attend.

My first session was the apple company. Apple as you can see is a company that quality is one of their primary requirements. I have not found an apple product were quality was poor. Another reason why I chose the Apple guys was because apple also focuses on the end user, and they always try to make their interfaces as user friendly as possible. On the apple session they showed us different products one of them was Apple TV which one of its many features that I liked the most is that you can wirelessly stream your videos, photos, movies and you can actually mirror your ipad into a TV. They gave us a website where you can schedule to free workshops about their different products. The URL is apple.com/cielovista. You can also register to a 1 to 1 membership where they basically give personal workshops on any apple product you have bought. The membership costs $99 dlls. They also have free field trips and camps, which they are also for free. You have to keep an eye on their website to check when the next available field trip or camp would be. They also handed several iPad for us to play with.

After the apple session I went to the keynote presentation. He talked about many things but one of the things that caught my attentions is that this guy went to china recently and he bought an iPhone where you can actually have 2 SIM cards, which allows you to make calls from two different carriers. This technology is not currently available here at the US. He also used his iPad to show us how easy is to learn how to play guitar or any instrument. He actually played song for us during his presentation with his iPad.

My third session was about edmodo, an amazing web resource for teachers. If I get to be a professor sometime I would defentely use edmodo, it is a very user-friendly web tool that is similar to Facebook. I liked a lot of features on this web tool, one of them is that you can sign in as a Teacher, as student or as a Parent. All of these modes have their own interface, where as a Teacher you have more control. You can have as many classes or “groups” as is called in Edmodo as you want. You can register your students for your different groups; you can also lock your group so no one can register for your class any more. If your students are misbehaving in the comment sections you can actually set their permission to read-only. You can setup quizzes, polls, assignment, notes and you can also have a calendar. You can send notes or comments to an entire class, to their parents only, to a single parent and/or to another professors. I am amazed with this web resource, I highly recommended.

My fourth session was about games in Flash for android and iPhones. I have a high interest in mobile programming. I think a developer or also called programmer must to expand his knowledge base to mobile programming, because now it is not sufficient to only develop an application that would run only on a single computer, you would need to develop that can be globally used and I mean globally as other sources. In other words, your application has to be web based, it would also need to run on mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, android phones, tablets, etc, etc, etc. After attending this session I was able to see that you can develop mobile apps using Adobe Flash. Obviously as more complex you want your application to be you would need to know a lot of coding, but for simple and basic apps you can use this tool with basically no programming knowledge at all. Adobe representatives gave this presentation.

My fifth session was with the same guys from Adobe, and was about how to create an ePortfolio. It’s a very easy task to do, you can create folders and subfolders, you can run slideshows to showcase your pictures. You backup a website and import it into a PDF. You can easily create forms from Word and have it in PDF. One of the features I liked about Adobe is the security and the compression on the PDF files.


My sixth and last session was another web resource, which I was not very pleased with it. It was basically a tool to simulate post-its online, but the web site was not password protected at all, so all of the information is open to the public, the user graphical interface was not user friendly at all, all of the information was spread out trough on single page and was not organized.

One suggestion that I have about this TNT conference is that they should build a committee to approve the proposals, they should not let anyone to just present whatever they wanted, but overall it was a great experience, I would highly recommend that you attend to the next TNT conference. I bet you that you are going to learn something great at the end.

How you can use podcast in your teaching?

I can tell you how you can use podcast technology in teaching because a couple of years ago a setup podcast and vodcast technology for the College of Health Science and School of nursing. For the podcast there are several ways to do it. One way is with a USB voice recorder, there are several brands and with different functionalities, but there are some key features that you might want to consider.

I recommend that your voice recorder have the following features.

· USB connectivity. This is very important as would make easier to transfer the audio files to your computer. If the voice recorder is USB 3.0 even better, because it will transfer the files faster.

· MP3 format. Make sure the voice recorder saves the audio files in MP3 format. MP3 is an audio compress format that will not take too much space in your computer, especially if your class last more than 50 mins.

After class you can easily upload your class podcast to your website, or to your blob using podomatic or archive.org.

For the vodcast I used an application called echo360, is not free but it offers a wide variety of features. Echo360 is a web based application that helps your organize your podcasts. It records your voice and what ever is in your screen. For instance, if you were doing a presentation in MS Power Point, it would save whatever is shown in the screen, plus your voice. I would recommend buying a wireless microphone, that way you can walk across the classroom and it would still record your voice. One of the great features that echo360 offers is that you can just schedule your class online. Let say that you teach MWF from 1:00pm to 2:00 pm. You can program to automatically create the podcast on a semester basis based on those parameters. For instance, you would tell it, save from 1:00 – 2:00 pm MWF from January 8, 2011 to May 10, 2011. It will automatically start recording during that time frame and it will post it for you into a website for your students, it also has the feature that at the end of the class to send an email to all of your students a link to the podcast, and they will be able to listen or download the podcast.

I could tell you so many stories about how podcast technology helps students. For instance, if one of your students missed a class, he or she can always get the podcast from the day missed, he or she will be able to listen to it and catch up with the class. Podcast technology also plays a huge important role on online courses. No matter what grade level, topic you teach podcast is great resource for your students.

Check out their website and watch the video on the home page, so you can get an idea how this works.

http://echo360.com/

Use of Audio Podcast in K-12 and Higher Education

The use of podcast in K-12 and higher education provides another technology resource for the students to support students’ learning. Podcast technology is an additional technology to provide educational content. One of the many advantages of podcast is that it makes use of XML technology, which makes it a file-based downloads instead of streaming from the web. For the end user is way better to download the file to their computer and the listen to it as many times as they want, because once it is downloaded to your system, you will be playing an MP3 in your computer, rather than streaming it from the web which if you have a slow connections will make it difficult to listen to or you would have to wait several minutes to listen to it.

Another great advantage is that Podcasts can be syndicated with RSS . in my own opinion that is one of the most powerful features of podcasts, because it would allow automatic downloads to your system every time there is a new podcast, you would not have to worry about keep checking if there is a new podcast. As soon as you subscribe it’s all problem-free. The other great advantage is that is portable in the sense that you can listen to it whenever in a MP3 enable device.