Can Middle School Kids Create iOS Apps?

The Problem

No question about it, Apple does not make it easy to write apps for iOS. I take the fact that the Apple Developer program license is only free to university programs to be just one sign that Apple does not expect many students in K-12 to be making apps, no matter how much teachers may want them to (and they do!). I'm not talking about rare whiz kid 12 year-olds who follow enough tutorials and have enough guidance and a fairly good idea to make an app and get it in the store. I work with teachers who want to integrate app-making for iOS into their science curriculum, with 50 students developing

Two New Google Apps Worth Checking Out

I told the science and English/history teachers I work with about these two new apps from GoogleLabs. Now I imagine they are spending their vacations browsing the human body and published word usage history, respectively. The first is the Google Body Browser. Think Google Earth for the human body. Truly amazing! For it to work you have to download the beta version of Google Chrome. The other is Google Ngram Viewer. This lets you enter a word or collection of words and search the entirety of what Google Books has scanned and made public to give you a graph showing their occurrences over time. If you enter more than one word the graphs are shown together so you can compare. It's an amazing tool for English, history, and even math. Really any discipline if you want to see how certain domain-specific terms have changed in importance over time.

Vocaroo, a nice little audio service

Vocaroo looks like a great little service. It seems to do just what you would want with your voice recording-link to it, embed it, or download it. And there's no sign-up and account hassle. You just use it. And it looks simple.

Wav2Rso: Making it Work Properly

Wav2Rso (scroll down) is a great program for doing one thing--converting WAV audio files to RSO format so they will play on a Lego NXT robot. You can take any WAV file--one you record or one you download from a website like findsounds.com--and put it on your robot. How fun! The only catch is that for some reason Wav2Rso is set to a sample rate of 8000 Hz. The typical WAV file is more like 11,025 Hz, so when you convert it, the sample lowers in pitch considerably and you have a quiet, baritone robot. The fix is to open the WAV file in Audacity or another audio editing program, edit the preferences to set the sample rate to 8000 Hz, then export it to WAV again. This file will convert properly and at the right frequency.

Get Dropbox

Go to dropbox.com now and get it if you regularly work on more than one computer. Dropbox does one thing really well, which is share and update versions of files among different computers. You get a folder at your user account level on your Mac or Windows computer and you drag an file you want to have access to at your other computer/s. Sure, you could easily do this by emailing it to yourself or uploading it to a web site of some kind, but this just takes all file types, up to 2 GB free, and makes the task so darn easy. Just log in to your other computer and after a little spinning of arrows the contents of your dropbox on that computer are updated. And if you are at a public computer, just go to dropbox.com, log in, and download what you need. Seriously, get it.

The Greening of the Web is Dark

A student of mine recently introduced me to Earthle, powered by Google so you have the same results, same options, but it's black. That's so you'll use less energy while you're searching. It's a great idea. I think more of the web should get darker to promote energy conservation. #000000 instead of #FFFFFF.

Photosynth

Microsoft has come up with something really amazing in its research labs called Photosynth. I learned about it from this TED talk with Blaise Aguera y Arcas. He demos the software, showing how it syncs photos of the same geographic location so you can manipulate the object of the photos in 3D passing through the lens of each picture. The pictures come from all over the web, from devices as varied as camera phones to high resolution cameras so as you pull each one into focus you can explore its specific resolution and visual character. The great quote from Aguera y Arcas comes when he compares the experience of changing one's point of view from a distant perspective to an extreme closeup to manipulating paper. He calls paper "an inherently multi-scale medium," which puts the finger on why e-paper could never take the place of physical paper. No matter what happens inside the screen, the metal and liquid crystal provide an impermeable barrier between you and the object you'd like to manipulate. Photosynth does bring you a little closer to that experience, though.

How to install Storytelling Alice

It's almost as easy as 1, 2, 3, in that you have to install 3 things. Kelleher only made a version for PC and has no plans to make one for any other platform. First download the Storytelling Alice zip file and unzip it anywhere you want it, like your desktop. The program runs on Java and needs the Java 3D API and Media Platform to work. You can find the 3D API here (look for "j3d-1_5_2-windows-i586.exe") and run it from your desktop. Finally, download the Java Media Platform here (after clicking download you choose your platform).

UPDATE (7-2-09): In reinstalling SA on an image for a new model of Dells I realized that the Java software is only necessary for rendering the 3D content in an HTML page. You only need that if you're publishing a story as HTML, which you do from the file menu. If you don't plan on using this (and you may not as it doesn't support the speech bubbles or any audio) then all you need is SA itself!

Open Source Communities

This is an excellent example of the process of open source software development and distribution. I came across this discussion on a forum at Moodle.org as I was refreshing my memory about how to upload our school courses in bulk. It's something we do once a year and I didn't take notes when I figured it out last summer. Fortunately, not only did my memory get refreshed, but during the year the Moodle community was hard at work improving the utility for it and had something that should prove to work even better than last year. In the process I saw that there are some great examples of how the open source process works in this forum. If you click the link to it and log in as guest you can read through it. It's long but really worth it.

• There's a positive and helpful tone throughout. Lots of respect given.
  
• People are negotiating responsibilities for projects, not in a pushy way ("Has Jeff agreed to maintain this? Jeff?"). When Jeff gives his reasons for not wanting to permanently support it they are very clear and the forum listens.
• People are getting all sorts of help for big and small problems.
• There's a big range of experience among the participants and newbies aren't afraid to identify themselves.
• Towards the end there's a really interesting negotiation about how to distribute the utility and what status to give it so people will have appropriate access. One person recognizes the valuable work being done by contributors and says he'll create an entry in the Modules and Plugins database because he sees "some wonderful stuff get buried in layers and layers of forum discussion." Another person goes one further and prematurely creates a wiki documentation page and heartily apologizes when he is respectfully corrected because some issues have to be worked out before that should happen.
  

Del.icio.us makeover

Wow. That's a shocking re-design.

No EI 7 for networked computers

I made this decision a year ago when EI 7 was still a new and curious application, and I've made the same decision a year later. IE 7 just won't work in a networked environment with multiple users. I get that Microsoft wants you to be safe and protected from the elements of evil on the internet. But aside from the fact that most people at home don't really know the consequences of choosing to activate the phishing filter or not among several other set-up decisions they are forced to make the first time they run the program, in a multi-user environment every student will have to click through all of those windows making all of those decisions every time they run IE 7 for the first time, which will be almost everytime they use a computer in the beginning of the year as they aren't assigned computers in a laptop cart situation, tapering off to almost never towards the middle of the year. I could teach them all how to configure IE 7 so they'll know what the choices mean, but even if they remember the steps it takes an extra few minutes to get the program ready to do what you wanted to in the first place, which for middle schoolers kills the whole experience, and forget about the primary grades. It seems to me that Microsoft hasn't considered the implications of such involved user-specific settings to a multi-user environment. It would be nice if there were a way for an administrator to make settings for all users of a networked computer but I haven't come across any (and forget about pushing out settings from the server, not worth our trouble to figure out and maintain). �

Animate with Pencil

Pencil is really amazing! Get it here. My only complaint is it seems you can't set your own size for the canvas. I guess I could get around that by figuring out how to make vector drawings instead of bitmap. So below I've exported an animation to SWF, uploaded that to a server, then pasted Flash-generated object tag HTML into this post referring to the uploaded file so it'll show here:

The Best Photoshop Teacher

The internet is the best Photoshop teacher. My 8th graders are finishing up their issue-related advertisements in Photoshop and while some straggle, others need something to work on. They were clamoring for me to teach them how to "Photoshop" themselves, or change their own features the way we've been looking at how it's done in media. At first I felt alarmed, like they wanted to look like the models we were supposedly deconstructing, but then realized it was a way for them to feel empowered in the face of the manipulating images and messages around them; they can finally begin to control something for which they are just considered an audience. Anyway, rather than try to teach them techniques I barely know myself I found some tutorials on everything from changing hair color to making an object pop out of a frame. The students have been incredibly focused as they follow these tutorials step-by-step on images of their choosing. In fact the by-product of the activity has been much-needed practice of following difficult directions. Here is the list of tutorials:
Beginner
Make a reflection of an image
Swap faces
Put cracks in a face
Separate a subject from its background
Create smooth skin
Make a grin look evil
Put a ghost in a picture
Stretch a mouth for cartoon effect
Make a photo look old
Replace a color with another color
Change hair color

Intermediate
Make a face wooden
Make something jump out of a frame
Make something jump out of a frame (another version)
Make line art from a photo
Make Warhol art from a photo

Essential Free- and Shareware for Kids

Yesterday I brought home a free, old, but working laptop from work to give to my 7-year-old daughter to use. Right away I started installing her favorite programs she's been using on my laptops and she's so excited to have her own system to use them on. Putting together this little package for her all at once got me to thinking that there's some really amazing free and cheap software out there that gets kids' creative juices flowing and lets them experience the unique power of computers at their level. Here's a list of what I put on for her:

• Pivot Stickfigure Animator; freeware
  
• ArtRage 2; freeware light version with a full version for about $20
  
• Samorost 2; used to be shareware for $10, now a cd that includes game and music for $15, really great music. Play Samorost 1 online here
  
• Owen Piettes' Falling Sand Game; freeware

I know there's a ton more stuff out there, but this is where I've started.

Fun, Useful or Both: Spell With Flickr

I came across this nice little application by Erik Kastner yesterday (weird, not many Eriks with a 'k') and immediately used it to create a Christmas card I needed to make, printed right out on photo paper with a nice result. I'm a novice coder but I can tell it's a combination of php and javascript that enables you to type a word or even a phrase (supports spaces) and pulls random thumbnails from Flickr for each letter. If you don't like a particular letter after it prints them you can click on one and it will pull another. This could be developed in some directions I can think of, like creating a printable version so you don't have to copy your pictures over to another program.

And what could a kindergarten or 1st grade teacher do with this? Wouldn't kids love to see their own words depicted with environmental signage right on the screen? I say both fun and useful.
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