Category: Projects

Color Hints

So.

My dad wrote an app. It’s called Color Hints, and it’s a pretty nifty thing. It allows you to analyze the colors in a picture, and using that information find what colors will coordinate. You can take pictures or pull them in from your photo roll, but it also has a built ColorHintsin browser, so you can sample colors off web pages. That way, when you see a paint you really like, you can sample the color and save it. Not only will Color Hints help you find coordinating colors, but it will tell you all the values of the color you’ve sampled- and that means you can have matching paint mixed to order.

He wrote it for my mom, who’s been doing a lot of quilting recently. She uses it to log fabric swatches and know which go with which, but it’s just as useful in the hands of a designer (interior, industrial, fashion, take your pick…), and it’s a pretty decent tool for teaching color theory as well.

It’s in the app store now here, and I’d recommend it highly. I’ve been running the beta for a few months now, and when it comes to helping me pick what art to hang in the dining room to go with the carpet and table, there’s nothing else quite like it.

This. Is. Big.

Here it is: My new project.

There is sometimes the assumption in the educational world (heck, in the world in general…) that free is good. That things should be free. There has become an expectation on the web that things should cost nothing. But that’s not true- because everything costs something. Google is lovely, but it isn’t free. Your data and the onslaught of ads pay for that service. Facebook is free, except that it sells every ounce of data it can take from you. Be it ads or data, we pay for everything we use. Sometimes it’s not clear how we’re paying- at that, I think, can be the most scary option.

I’m not going that route. I’m going to be transparent. I am charging an up-front fee, payed by the month. For this, I will provide a weekly(ish) newsletter full of the very best links and thoughts related to education. There will be no ads. There will be no solicitations. There will only be awesome.

Each newsletter will keep a theme- and I’ll pack as much into that as I can. But realize this: I’ve called this “Experimental Education” for a reason. Much of what I’m writing about isn’t triggered by education articles- I don’t think it’s the fertile ground for new ideas. So don’t be surprised to see things start off with an article about graffiti in the UK. Or the genetics of narcasistic personality disorder. Or something stranger.

I can only promise this: I will do my best to provide the most fertile ground of ideas I can.

Let’s do this thing.

 

Premium?

I’m thinking about a new project for myself.

There’s a lot of content that I create- I try to keep re-blogging here to a minimum, and leave it for specific cases that I believe warrant it: Required Viewing and Research posts. Even still, there’s a lot of good content that I create and find that doesn’t make it’s way onto this page- maybe it’s spread across the other platforms I use, maybe it goes into one of my notebooks, maybe it’s left in the back of my brain. I’ve been looking for a better outlet for that data.

I made the deliberate choice a few years ago (around the time I started tweeting) to not spend much of my time aggregating information publicly. I viewed my role primarily as a creator of entirely new content. What’s been a little tough is that I’m prone to personal aggregation, and it can be frustrating to not share some of my best finds.

To that end, I’m looking into some options for producing a subscription-based “premium” feed from me. It’d include the content here (as a matter of convenience for readers, primarily), though I’d be expanding somewhat from my normally short-form writing in some cases. In addition, I’d be cherry-picking the very best of my finds and including them- a sort of ongoing annotated bibliography of what I’ve found. While the blog posts would share some of their content with my blog, what you will be able to read here will serve as a jumping off point for the content of this new project. It’s the stuff I couldn’t/wouldn’t post here. It’s the reasoning behind (and the thinking about) the Research List, instead of just the list of the links. It’s a closer look inside and. It’s less filtered and more experimental, and if you’re itching for more new ideas and sources of inspiration, it’s where you’ll find them.

What I’m not sure about is where to host it, and what to charge for such access. This represents a significant investment of time and resources for me, and I can’t offer this publicly. I have limited time, and where I spend time impacts other aspects of my life. There isn’t much in the way of “free time” for me, and as much as I’d like to offer this all free to everyone, those hours cost me.

I’m looking at the possibility of an iTunes-based magazine model, but I’m never sure about the intricacies of that. I’d rather stay device agnostic for something like this, though I’d like some ability to format and include some small amount of media in these releases. HappyLetter is a neat possibility, but I’m unsure about the formatting options it offers. I’m looking at weekly releases right now, and I think it’s unlikely that I’d go any more often than that- but I want each issue to be full and not have any fluff- and that may mean that every two weeks becomes more reasonable.

I dunno. I worry there’s not enough of an audience to justify the time and money. This blog doesn’t exactly generate massive view numbers (to say the least…), and I can’t write a magazine once a week for three people. I suppose it’s possible I won’t due this at all- though I’d like to, as I genuinely think it’d be a useful resource for progressive educators.

 

Remote Teaching

From time to time I get asked about remote teaching- that is, teaching when I’m not in the room. I talk about how I’ve Google Video Chatted into my classroom to teach when I’m not physically there, and people are often… skeptical.

Just yesterday, however, an former student of mine sent me a video they’d shot from the first time I’d ever taught remotely- my kids had kept me home sick, and I felt some obligation to help my students with Midyear reviewing. It’s a short video, but it’ll give you an idea what it looks like.

Anywho.

iCon 2013

It’s that time of year again.

The organizing team that brought you the New England 1:1 Summit, the nation’s first large scale 1:1 conference, is excited to announce iCon 2013. iCon 2013 is a conference that focuses on conversations around how new and current technologies are affecting learning opportunities for our students, not just one device. This is not an iPad conference or a Chromebook conference, but a collection of educators coming together to share their ideas and thoughts on designing and creating innovative learning spaces.

The conference is free for all attendees and we welcome anyone involved in the education world as well as students. The BHS student help desk team will be on hand to answer any technical questions and present their experiences working and learning in Burlington Public Schools.

This year we changed our format to accommodate for school visits at Burlington High School and Marshall Simonds Middle School. Both schools boast 1:1 iPad environments and will open their doors for attendees to observe the iPad in action. This will take place on Friday, March 22 from 9am – 1pm. Saturday, March 23 will be a full day conference at the newly renovated Marshall Simonds Middle School in Burlington, MA followed by a networking social.

Registration for iCon will launch later this week, but we are opening the call for session proposals. You can fill out the form below.

Please stay tuned to this website for more information on the event. Or follow us on twitter@i_Con2013

Updates on my studio.

I got asked the other day what I meant by my studio. My studio’s kind of a hybrid workspace: I use it for music work, for idea development, and for varois hobbies I have. I put some pictures of it here, but they’re already posted over on my Flickr account. It’s a space that is moved with me through several iterations. I had one of my previous residence, and I’ve had two different ones at this house.

I think it’s important to have a working space in your house. I think it needs to be separate from your day to day life space, and needs to be designed specifically to foster creativity. I written before about the idea of the Vegas cube. In as many ways as is practical, I like to use some of those ideas in my studio spaces. That means I don’t keep a clock there. I don’t allow in natural lighting. It is, in as many ways as I can, isolated from the outside world. While that I solution isn’t always practical, it does help with the creative process. Nowadays with my kids, I have to be careful with how isolated I let myself get.

I’m in the midst of contemplating some larger changes to the studio. As those get made, I’ll try to keep this site updated in my Setup section. I’m spending less time on my music, and more time working on idea creation for education. This change of priorities has to be recognizing the physical layout of my studio.

Strangely, one of things that I’m walking in my studio is wall space. I’m looking at some options that allow me to have movable wall space. I’m still unsure about the budget I want to commit, and materials that I want to use for such an application.

A potential Hack

I’m using “Hack” in the oldest sense of the word- as a positive descriptive noun for something clever and elegant.

So two companies I enjoy products from, Evernote and Moleskine, have teamed up to produce a physical notebook. That sounds odd, I realize, but it has a number of features that allow Evernote to digitize it’s contents more easily. One of these is a particular style of dotten lines on the pages that help the scan with error correction. That’s neat, but not what really caught my eye.

The notebook comes with a few sheets of stickers with tags on them- and the optical scanning in Evernote is keyed to see those stickers and automatically apply the tags you wish to those scans. That means I can sketch/write/draw ideas related to a project, slap a sticker on the page, and when I take a picture of that note into Evernote, it’ll automatically apply my tags to that note. That’s awesome.

The notebooks are a small premium in price above the already-premium-priced Moleskines. That’s understandable; they’re a more complicated book, and made in smaller numbers. That said, I have plenty of existing notebooks, almost all of which are Moleskine anyway. So I don’t really need another.

What I really want are the stickers- and I’m interested in either

a. Buying them, or

b. Having them made.

Any ideas about either of those two options?

What have I done?

I’ve mentioned here before that my school self-publishes our senior year ELA textbook as well as our junior year ELA textbook. Not to go into too much depth, but for the last six years we’ve written and curated and had printed our own physical books. We use Adobe InDesign for the layout, and use the excellent Lulu for printing. It’s wildly cheaper than comercial textbooks. It’s so cheap that we can print and GIVE to students new books every year, and it still costs less than buying one set of hardbacks that we’d keep for TEN years.

I was heavily involved in getting this off the ground- I did the layout work for a few years, and early on was so keen on the idea that I paid for parts of it out of my own pocket. I still feel passionately about it, though I don’t have a ton to do with the project these days.

Or “didn’t,” I should say. Because I’ve gone and done something rash.

I’m taking all the existing files for the senior year book and I’m going to turn them into a decent digital version.

It exists already, as a matter of need (to upload to Lulu) as a PDF, but PDF’s are not an acceptable format for the distribution of a file like this. I’m going to be doing either (and maybe both?) an ePub and an iBooks Author file. Either will allow much of the hands-on work with the text that those teachers have come to expect from students- and either will be a. Cheaper, b. Not confined to the limits of a printed page and c. physically weigh nothing. All of which, as far as I’m concerned, are good things.

It’ll be some work. But maybe me doing this will be what it takes to get my department completely onboard.