Update
 
Hello everyone. Our meeting last week in Madison was both informative and fun. I enjoyed meeting with you and learning about your commitment to this project. If this first meeting is any indication, we should have a great year.
 
We have a few items that we need to attend to fairly soon:
 
  1. • We need to each select the problems that we will be working on. Each of us should identify four or more to work on. The PRAXIS project web site contains the sets of Math problems and the sets of Science problems that we want to concentrate on. Send me an email letting me know your choices. I will put together a page for each of us that lists the problems you have identified. You can send interested students to this page.
 
  1. • We need to select students. The UW-L group will be hosting a “coffee” that will bring together interested students so that we can go over the project expectations. We will then select our students from the set of students that remain interested. Other campuses do not need to follow this same model, but if you come up with another method of selecting students, please let me know so that I can share your idea with the group.
 
  1. • I would like to post a short bio for each person involved in the project (this includes the Co-Lab people and will include the students). Please email me the information that you would like me to post. As an example, I have posted my bio under the People tab at our project web site.
 
  1. • Let me know if you need to order any hardware for the ChalkTalk portion of the project. At UW-L, the Director of Educational Technologies (also our LTDC rep) has indicated that we have a sound booth equipped with a nice microphone that is available to us. He is looking to see if they have a pad and stylus that we can use. You may find similar hardware available at your campus. Please check into this and let me know if we need to order anything.
 
  1. • It is never too early to start learning new software, and the links that Patrick provided will help you learn Flash (they are reproduced below). Each team should contain a Flash programmer, so the faculty leader may not need to be extremely proficient in Flash, but a basic idea of what it can do (and how) will make the project flow more smoothly.
 
  1. -http://www.actionscript.org/tutorials.shtml
  2. -http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=169
  3. -http://www.gotoandlearn.com
  4. -http://www.w3schools.com/flash/default.asp
  5. -http://www.adobe.com/resources/education/hed/faculty_dev_guide.html
  6. -http://www.kirupa.com/developer/index.htm
  7. http://www.communitymx.com/category.cfm?catID=2&typeid=2
 
We will also want to look over the Module Evaluation Survey that the Co-Lab has created, but I will save that for a later update.
 
I hope the last few days of summer are both relaxing and productive. Let me know if I can help with anything.
 
--Bob
 
P.S. The photo’s at this web site were taken by me and my family on our summer vacation. I do not like the pic-art of the scientist on the front page of our web site, so if you have an image that could replace our odd-looking scientist, please send it to me.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006