During our last Town Meeting it was great to see people sharing the different things that they have found, and how they might use them. As always it is interesting to see what people are discovering. Over the past two days I have heard about another tool that I have thought was pretty interesting.

About a year or so ago I ran into a friend at a book store with his daughter, we started to talk about our jobs and some of our shared interests. I shared with him my goal to actually be able to create a 3D animation of a song that I had been listening to a lot. My goal was to use Blender to create a simple minute and a half music video. My friend smirked a little and said how long do you expect that to take? I thought at minimum a year, but wasn't too rushed to do this. He didn't stop smiling, but rather shared a different program that I should look at, Alice which is a basic animation and programing tool. He was using it to work with his daughter to introduce her to some basic computer skills. So here we are a year later and I am writing about it why? 

Well Doreen sent an email today talking about a program that she read about in the book The Last Lecture. Yes that's right it was Alice that had been mentioned since the professor was from Carniege Melon, which is where the program was developed. Ironically the day prior we had a meeting at Nazareth College where Alice had also come up in reference to something that might be taught at the Summer Teaching, Learning, and Technology Conference.  So now I think it is time to mention this and a few other software programs that I have heard about and how they might be used in the classroom.

Blender - Is an advanced 3-D animation software, that has been used to create short films and even parts of a game. This type of software allows students that are interested in working in these industries as an artist to begin somewhere.

Bob Schlegel shared Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope at one of out Town Meetings this year. Two other programs that are also availalbe are Stellarium and Celestia. Each allow students to explore the Universe that is out there. Stellarium allows you to view the night sky as if you were out in the afternoon. Where as Celestia allows you to fly through the Universe and explore.

Scratch - If Alice is the entry level 3-D programing environment, then Scratch is an entry level 2-D programing environment. Developed at the MIT Media Lab, which is known as being a technology play ground for learning. Scratch alllows students to create animations by using simple programing blocks. Think of Logo, with a different kind of turtle.

These are just a few of the different software programs that I think have a lot of possibilities beyond typical desktop software that is out there. The reason I like these pieces is that they offer the ability to have students use the computer as a tool for investigation, not simply producing.

Over the past few years I have noticed that one of the things that there is a lot of is using the computer to show case learning in a very textual manner, and I wonder how this is using the technology for learning. I think of when I was trying to create my own book publication how I had to use math skills to solve the problems of binding and centering a page, as well as printing the final publication. Are these experiences that our students are having when they are publishing with the computer? 

One of my personal learning experiences that I feel help me learn in many different ways was few years ago I was interested in creating my own web page, ended up doing some research, and have learned a ton about how the computer works because of this. During this time I also had to learn about a lot of other things that coincided with this project. The research skills that I developed as well as the mentors that I found all led me to successsfully completing my goal. For me it has been something that I was intrinsically motivated to do, since it was solving a problem that I had.

I think of my recent visit to the Strong Museum of Play and how instrinsic motivators as anticipation, suprise, and pleasure can cause a self motivated discovery of concepts and learning. One of the keys to a lot of the software that is available out there for students to learn with is that it can be exploratory and teach concepts that are not isolated instances. I have had a lot of opportunities to learn about a large variety of things from my experiences related to technology and a problem that I had. Everything from the concepts of division, think about splitting up a page to showcase your idea, to learning about a different language, certainly HTML is a language.

So how do we go about giving students the opportunities to expierence creating projects and show casing what they know and have learned during a project? Also is the areas where they might have learned something that we didn't expect them to whether it is within our curricular domain or not, how do we assess this?