I heard by way of many tiny tweets that the Thinkquest ‘09 winners had been announced, so I decided to give them a peak. To put it simply, I was floored. From the top “19 and under” winner, to the honorable mention for 12 and under, I was amazed at the level of web design and craftsmanship that denote current Thinkquest winners. For those that aren’t aware of the Thinkquest Project, it’s an annual web design competition sponsored by the Oracle Foundation. There are 3 main categories, which focus on creating websites that either (1) present an innovative way of addressing educational material, (2) creating a site of rich content for use in the educational world, or (3) building a website that focuses on local communities.

The Thinkquest project is nothing new to me, but I must have spent too much time away from perusing the entries and winners, because the current crop of 2009 winners display a remarkable feat of both excellent web design and compelling content. The older Thinkquest sites that I have my students use for research and/or exploration of topics look as though they were created with Netscape Composer compared to the new sites. Flash objects, javascript, and CSS are just a few of the web design techniques used in almost all of the winning sites, creating professional looking sites that many professionals could take note from.

WARNING:
For those curious, the rest of this post is written as a formal critique of a website for my graduate course; you may or may not find the following dull, boorish, long-winded, and downright dry. Enjoy!

By far, the most impressive was the winner of the 19 and under category, not just because of it’s design (which was very well executed), but the content as well. The LEAD Portal is a a full on social network designed to help foster leadership skills among young adults. Having gone through the Boy Scout’s junior leading training program (Brownsea Training),  I thought discussing traits of effective leadership while having to assemble your own campsite and latrine from a pile of canvas and raw materials was an achievement, but the LEAD Portal puts that training to shame.

The navigation on the page is flawless, giving the user simple and clear navigational headings running across the top of the page. Any questions or head scratching you might stumble across on amateur websites when it comes to navigation is non-existent. By using simple headings like Theories, Qualities, and Application of Leadership, it was quite apparent how to find the information needed for learning not just about good leadership theories, but also how to implement best leadership practices. Nice big shiny “clicky buttons” pulled my attention to the most important information about the site; how to get started, activities I could immediately “sink my teeth into”, and what the site was all about. In less than 5 minutes, I had a profile, was playing with some fun flash games (all coded by the student creator of the site), and was already working on memorizing simple leadership mantras and strategies.

The only information required of me was when I first visited the portal. A small pop up asked for a username, no password, no e-mail. After putting in some gibberish, it disappeared, and popped up in the upper right hand corner of the page. A quick click of my username revealed that I could change settings or view my profile. But here’s the kicker! The profile is kept completely by cookies in the browser! There’s no login, no need to enter an e-mail address, and no password to remember. Clicking on my profile showed me the games and activities I had tried, as well as suggestions for assessments or learning pieces I should look at. It was a unique experience to have the website recognize me without having to click a “remember me” button, or “keep me logged in” on the first visit. I assume the design is meant to make teens feel as comfortable as possible using the site, without having to worry about going through the lengthy process of creating yet another online account. Of course, the drawback is, you can’t have multiple people use the site, unless you clear your cookies and cache, or visit the site from multiple user accounts on the computer. Something that makes the site MUCH less practical in a school setting. That, and it tells the user that what you’re doing may be very important to developing your leadership skills, it’s not important enough to warrant being able to access the website and track your development from different computers.

The site is by no means perfect, and excels tremendously at trying to keep the content and layout simple, but at times there’s just too much. While the index page uses just enough white space to comfortably “cushion” the content, and chop the page up into manageble “bite size” pieces, the shear amount of pieces is staggering, and often not well placed. The “quick links” bar is placed at the bottom of the page, instead of the top where it might have been more useful. The 7 step flow chart of understanding and mastering leadership skills is also at the bottom, so while there’s a nice step by step suggestion of how to navigate the site, it’s hidden below the flashy video and tidbits about famous leaders like Bill Gates and past Presidents of the United States. Other small issues, like the inability to use the back button to return to a previous page are annoying (you have to use the HOME button at the top of the site).

The designers of the site have implemented some pretty impressive features though, to help make consuming the content of the site easier. The conventional search box and small navigation panel are present in the right hand sidebar of every page on the site, making it easy to find what you’re looking for. It functions much the same way the navigational frame on older frame driven sites worked, only a little smoother; clicking on one of the categories in the navigation panel opens up the small sub-menu in a very “jump menu” like way. However, the toolbox which tops this navigational tower is the most impressive. With four simple icons which were immediately recognizable, I was able to print the content of the page, open up a small flash-based notebook which could save any notations I wanted to make about the site, or even “star” my favorite pages, to make finding them again easier by automatically adding them to my bookmarks (an old convention, but a nice one). A silver sprocket even allowed me to turning highlighting of particularly important phrases and terms on or off, making it easier to scan through and pick out important pieces of information.

With a very nice blend of visual, textual, and interactive media, the LEAD Portal is an amazing site, that catches your attention, and does an effective job of steering you down the path of building leadership; that is once you’ve decided on which of the multiple starting points you want to take. The site is a little “ADHD” as far as providing no fewer than 5 text links, shiny buttons, or menu items that all take you to the same place from the homepage, but once you settle in to the site, it’s easy to appreciate how the activities all pop up as unobtrusive flash-objects, and quickly slide away when needed. The bottom line is, this website is a HUGE design coupe for a group of web designers not yet out of high school. Sure, there’s plenty of things to improve upon, but I never really felt lost while using the site; just a bit scatter-brained.

So I guess it goes without saying that I’ll be definitely looking into more of the winning ThinkQuest sites, as the LEAD Portal has shown me just how amazingly far student designed websites have come since I first started using Dreamweaver a decade ago. The fact that is was created by 6 students who are physcially scattered across Asia and Australia goes to show that this “world is flat” thing can really produce some pretty impressive results.

Wolfram|Alpha is currently going through an open beta test this weekend in preparation for next week’s launch. And they just happen to be sharing a live video feed of the data center. Curiously enough, it’s a lot more lively than I would have thought; people manning computers with large screen data monitors on the wall. I would have thought it more akin to the WOPR with just a few technicians

For those note aware, Wolfram|Alpha is a new “automagic” computational engine attempting to make all systemic knowledge on the Earth searchable and accessible. In other words, searching for a map of the U.S. gives you a map of the U.S., not lists of sites with maps, and typing in a complex math equation gives you the answer. Doesn’t sound impressive enough. Check out the examples page. Wolfram|Alpha will automatically graph descriptive statistics, up to the minute GDP per capita comparisons of any country on Earth, and will automagically compute the time elapsed since your birthdate, famous people who share your birthday, and give you the current phase of the moon on that date when you enter in the date of your birth!

Oh, and just for fun, the nutritional information for 10 peanut M&Ms

Education is about to get a heck of a lot more interesting!

Watch live video from Wolfram|Alpha on Justin.tv

On many Fridays I like to take a topic that I’ve found from elsewhere on the Internet and share my thoughts on it here. It’s a nice way to hear what others are thinking, learning, and how they’re growing in their educational lives. That, and it makes for some good personal reflection.

I spent this week reading through a couple of articles for my graduate level seminar course. The one that caught my attention the most was a paper that came out of the MIT Media Lab, written by Mitchell Resnick. The paper, (which you can download and read with this link) “Computer as Paintbrush: Technology, Play, and the Creative Society“, paints a picture of playtime as learning time. Not just the average run of the mill playtime with blocks, crayons, and toys; but rather play time as serious problem-solving engagement time. Something almost akin to the Montessori method; allow children to have the tools and the time to learn, experiment, fail, and ultimately achieve on their own.

Which got me thinking. In my unique situation as a computer lab teacher, my lessons, teaching goals, and methods can often conflict with the student’s expectations. The students come into my room and they want to play on the computer. Games, drawing, internet; they don’t care what it is, they just want to play. I have clear standards and goals for them to master, or at least be introduced to, and can’t justify letting them play all the time. Which is the problem. I personally believe that allowing a learner time to play with a new program, website, or piece of software, will help them pick up new skills faster, make deeper connections with how programs work in general, and give them the chance to discover those all important “this is totally SWEET ” moments.

As I write this, a 4th grade class is exploring Art Rage, a fabulous art simulation program that all schools should have installed on their computers. This is the 3rd year I’ve worked with this program, and by giving them time to play, they make important discoveries about what’s important to them in the program. Some students become experts in erasing, undoing, and eliminating mistakes with the many tools they have. Others get excited when they discover that they can zoom in on their painting, or move the canvas around with a right-click drag. And the truly artistic start playing with all of the drawing tools, and manipulating the settings until they can draw the most perfect bunch of purple grapes. Their excitement with the painting program is ten fold the amount it would be if I had simply told them to open up this new painting program, and then had them start painting and authoritatively instructing them on how to use the tools. When I assign them their self-portrait project next week, they will feel much more prepared, and feel more confident because they’ll be basing their work on their own personal trails and errors, not on what “Mr. Rimes told them to do”.

However, there needs to be a balance. If I let them play for too long, or too often, students will enter my room with the notion that “computer lab = play time”. Many students will enter asking “Do we have free time today?!” week after week in hopes that they will get to play. In every class there are also a few students who will purposely neglect work in order to continue playing. They already understand the concepts I’m teaching them, and how to manipulate the program, I just haven’t provided them with a compelling enough reason to stop playing.

Then again, there are some programs that I can’t expect the students to just “play with” and figure out. Google Earth is a great example of a very unintuitive experience for elementary students. Flying to places is simple enough, but creating placemarks, adding folders, and then organizing those placemarks by folders is something I have yet to see a student just “pick up” on their own. It requires careful planning on my part to disguise the tutorials for Google Earth as “games.” I imagine the challenge is akin to what video game designers must go through in planning tutorials for their proprietary game or control systems.

Where to strike the balance between play and instruction can be difficult, especially with a classroom full of a wide range of learning styles, disabilities, and students that bring with them a diverse background knowledge. How do we as educators, find the perfect balance of play?

With a headline like that, I don’t expect many to read the post, but my brain is a bit mushy this morning, so bear with me, please.

The CIA Factbook is one of those “old internet” websites that is a treasure trove to educators helping students gather facts and information about foreign countries. You want the birth rate of Bulgaria? It’s got it. The age of suffrage in Somalia? It’s got it! The median age of people in Madagascar? Yeah, it’s all on the CIA Factbook. Everything from the Geography to an overview of the Transportation and Economy of a nation is registered on the Factbook; which is great for older students, or those with proficient reading skills.

For younger students, or learners that don’t have very well established vocabularies, the CIA Factbook is difficult to pull information out of. That and it makes comparing data quickly a bit cumbersome. Which is why the KML Factbook is so impressive. Frank Taylor of the Google Earth blog wrote about it, and I couldn’t resist playing around with the visual data. Comparing population growth, or the percent of people below the poverty line is as easy as seeing the difference in height and color of the nations outlines. Each country produces a 3D outline that is raised or lowered depending on the data being compared. Highly useful for secondary Social Studies or Economics classes, these visual tools can be downloaded as a KML file and then opened up locally in Google Earth on your computer, or just viewed on the web. Clicking on the individual countries flags pulls up all of the information that the CIA Factbook contains about that country, so you still have access to the written data.

The data loaded a bit slowly when I was playing around with it, so you might want to consider preloading the data you want to use with your class, or download it for future use. However, I was able to capture an image of one interesting set of data; the amount of debt each nation owes. Yup, that’s the U.S., with it’s massive red tower of debt, which might help explain why so many more free programs and open sources resources are being used in schools these days

KML Factbook

Thanks to Frank Taylor – KMLFactBook – A Data Visualization Tool with Google Earth

On most Fridays I like to pull a resource or interesting topic of discussion from either the nearly defunct forum here on the site, or from elsewhere on the Internet. Since most people have better ideas or resources than I usually do, it’s nice to get a different perspective on a resource or teaching tip. This week Several months ago I found an interesting resource on the Google Earth Blog by Frank Taylor about Somali Pirates. I’ve also been listening to special NPR stories on pirates that use the lawless country of Somalia as a base of operations.

My biggest “beef” being an elementary teacher, is that my students are usually almost always too young and naive about the world to talk about global issues with any real substance. To them pirates talk with British accents, and fight zombies, ninjas, and other pirates (though not necessarily in that order). Global warming is something “bad”, and copyright infringement means  don’t cut and paste information from Wikipedia into your report. Very rarely do I have the opportunity to engage students with any deeper conversation beyond the superficiality of placing events into good and bad categories. I know that part of this is a product of the time I have to interact with students (only 45 minutes a week in the computer lab), and structuring lessons to meet their developmental needs (5th graders really don’t need to be engaged in a conversation about whether merchant vessels should be carrying armed escorts).

However, I do come across resources that I think would be fabulous in a middle school or high school setting that accomplish two tasks; first of all, add a visual or aural element to help aid in global awareness, and secondly, help dispel stereotypical archetypes of popular culture that cloud perception of reality. So without much further ado, I submit a few resources to help better understand how modern day piracy is both similar, but also very different, from Disney’s version of old world piracy:

Somalia Piracy Map in Google Earth (from November 2008)

NPR News Stories on Piracy (over 1,100 articles, some of them dealing with I.P. piracy)

LIVE Piracy Map (an excellent Google Maps Mash-Up)

ICC Commercial Crimes Services (A corporation dedication to “helping business stay in business”). A great look at the other side of piracy; how people make money from the problem.