Category Archives: technology

How to Fund Your Cause or Idea with Crowd Funding?

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Are you looking for a way to fund your dream project or support your cause?  The act of making a new product, an innovation program or creating a new service can be very exciting.    When planning any venture, leadership has to answer the question:  How do we fund this idea?

It breaks my heart to hear stories of teachers and faculty struggling to serve their students because funding is tight.   A huge barrier to adopting new educational technology is cost.   As we try to prepare our students to become the next generation of leaders, innovators, and teachers, it becomes imperative to provide technology resources to our students.   Access to educational technology and resources is especially challenging in our poorest neighbourhoods.   We do not want to increase divide between the rich and poor because of a lack of tools and resources.   How can we empower the community to help?

To share a personal story, my wife has been researching ways that she can offer an undergraduate research program at her school.   We have been exploring DIY Biology and related web sites, to find ways to establish a research lab at lower cost.    As grant funding becomes more competitive, we have started exploring other research alternatives.

What is Crowd Funding? 

“Crowd funding” is a movement enabling leaders and makers to ask their community to financially support a cause or project.   Don’t non-profit communities already do this?   Why is this new?   I believe the movement of “crowd funding” works well due to the network effects of the Internet.   If an idea is worth sharing, it will be shared!   If a cause addresses a deep need in the community, the community will respond, share and help.

As we have researched this topic, I wanted to share a few insights, links and resources that can help you fund your cause or idea using “crowd funding.”

How to Fund Your Idea with Crowd Funding?

1)  Find ways to add value to your community today:  Are there ways that you can share insight and knowledge with your community today using social media or a blog?   How can you serve your community today with information or practical tips?   There is research showing that having 1000 FaceBook connections that are your “raving fans” increases the probability that you can fund your idea using a crowd funding site.   Building a community around your idea is your first step.  (Refer to “The Art of Community” by Jono Bacon)

2)  Cast your vision and tell your story:  As you design your crowd funding campaign, it’s very important to communicate your story with clarity.   The story should include a brief elevator pitch summarizing your idea.      Whether you are presenting a project or cause, it’s also important to connect your community with the mission and vision driving it.    You may consider reviewing the excellent TED talk by Simon Sinek that provides insights into how great leaders inspire action.

3)  Learn from others:  As we have started the process of researching crowd funding options for Sarah, we have found value in review project ideas that won and lost.    For the Kickstarter community, you can use tools like http://www.kicktraq.com to gain insight into the velocity of various project ideas.   How did the better projects present their story?  If a project did not succeed in funding, what were the lessons learned?

4)  Don’t forget about incentive planning:  Some crowd funding websites require projects to include an incentive program.    When planning the amount that you need to raise for your project, make sure you account for costs related to your incentives.   You need to make sure to forecast the funding of all your incentives in addition to the costs related to funding your project.

5)  Additional reading and inspiration

  1. http://hopemob.org/
  2. Nice executive summary of various crowd funding sites: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/crowdfunding-sites/
  3. Free Book on running a Kickstarter Project: http://kickstarterguide.com/files/2012/07/A-Kickstarters-Guide.pdf
  4. The untold story behind Kickstarter stats [infographic]
  5. “The Dynamics of Crowdfunding: Determinants of Success and Failure” by Ethan R. Mollick – University of Pennsylvania – Wharton School
We are very thankful to our student collaborators from Mercer University who have helped us study the proposal process.   Collectively, we have done a great deal of research on this topic.   If we can help you in anyway, please let us know.    Please leave a comment below.    We would love to support other innovators in the community.

 

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How to Avoid The Technology Trap

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Technology is supposed to make out lives easier right? In many ways it has, but we must remember that technology is only a tool and it can be used for good or for bad. You can probably think of several ways, right off the top of your head, that technology has improved your life. Smart phones help us to be more organized. Facebook connects us with long lost friends. Online banking makes balancing a checkbook easy. But there are also ways that technology has negatively impacted our lives as well.

The first thing I think of is automated phone systems. Hours of my life have been lost in the virtual mazes of the customer service systems of my banks and insurance companies. Another example is what I like to call the “GPS effect”. This is when people rely so heavily on their technology that their forget how to think for themselves. I once gave a family member simple directions to the store near our house (less than 2 miles- two right turns and then you’re there). Instead of following my directions he got into the car and put the name of the store into his GPS. Unfortunately, it did not direct him to the correct store and we got a call an hour later saying he was completely lost. SMH. Finally, technology can make us feel connected virtually, without truly connecting with anyone. We can exist in a virtual world without experiencing the amazing things going on in front of our eyes. As a parent I must be particularly conscious of my tendency to plug in when I’m around my kids. They are only young once and I need to unplug my eyes from my phone and plug in my heart to my kids.

As a teacher I can see many ways in which technology can improve my classroom, but as in everyday life there are pitfalls that we must avoid. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here are mistakes we can make as teachers and some ways that I think we can avoid them.

1) Disconnecting from assessment. I’ve been thinking about this one a lot lately. There are lots of tools that we can use to make grading and assessment easier. Some are old and some are new. Scantrons have been around as long as I can remember. When I started teaching I immediately starting using scantron testes because I was overwhelmed by the shear number of exams I had to grade. I just have to feed the tests into the machine and it calculates the grade and the class average and gives me a report on which questions the class struggled with. The problem with this approach is that I don’t see how each student answers the questions. I don’t know if they simply got mixed up between two similar concepts or if they just wildly guessed. I can spend time analyzing each exam, but it is easy to just spit back grades at my students without paying attention to what the grades mean. This can happen with all types of technology- classroom response systems, online homework programs, multiple choice tests, etc. We must be intentional about looking at our student assessment and using it as a guide in the classroom, making adjustments to our classes as necessary, not just as benchmarks as we proceed through the semester.

2) Disconnecting from the students. In this age of email and electronic communication it is easy to walk in to the classroom, lecture and never actually talk to my students. This world is already so impersonal. Let’s not make it worse. Students who feel cared about will be more engaged in the material and more likely to succeed. Learn your students names. I average about 100 students a semester. It takes me most of the term to learn their names, but I know that they appreciate it when I do. Talk to them about things outside the class. Get to class a little early. Spend five minutes talking to students about their other classes, their families, politics, whatever they are interested in that moment. Get to know them a little and let them get to know you. We can use technology to do this as well. Set up discussion boards in Blackboard/WebCT/Desire2Learn etc that allow students to introduce themselves and create a sense of community.

3) Letting technology be a distraction.  I know that I have done this. I’ve been excited to try a new tool, but haven’t completely learned in before introducing it into the classroom. I’ve been known to spend 5 minutes at the front of the room tinkering with the computer. I went to a seminar last week where the presenter said that he has a 90 second rule. If he can’t get technology to work after 90 seconds, he proceeds without it. I think that is a good rule of thumb. I think it is also important for us to learn the best ways to use a particular tool before trying it out. Take the time (I know, who has the time these days) to really train yourself on a new tool. It will pay off. The better prepared you are, the more you will get out of using a particular technology. Again, it’s not what you use, but how you use it.

What are some pitfalls that you see with using technology in the classroom and how do you avoid them?

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7 Lessons from Teaching a Kickstarter Class

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Kickstarter.com helps creative people and makers bring their projects to market.   If you are going to create something new like a music album, a new video game, or a movie, you need funds to pay for labor and resources.   Kickstarter.com provides a platform to enable creative individuals to share the story about their project and ask the community to help fund it.

In my professional work, we have looked for ways that our software development team can support deeper learning in higher education.   Through collaboration with Mercer University School of Engineering and the Technical communications department, our research center was given the opportunity to help mentor students.   We are very thankful for the professors and leadership of the Technical communications department enabling us to mentor students from the proposal writing classes.   While the students learned various aspects of technical writing, the professors designed their classes in a project based manner.   This was a perfect environment for the challenge we would offer to students.

Our software team had the opportunity to mentor two semesters of students.    We challenged the students to design an educational video game that would delight college students.   The games were designed to maximize fun while helping student gamers to “learn by accident.”   By co-developing the project ideas with students, we hoped to conduct research with them while also funding future internship opportunities for the students.

So… Why should we teach with games?

– We learn by doing. Student learning increases when they can immediately apply their knowledge.
– Games can be a platform for teaching systems thinking (i.e. the Sims, FoldIt! )
– Games can inspire large scale collaboration (i.e. Wold of Warcraft)

Lessons Learned from teaching KickStarter and Game based learning:

–   Learning creativity:  The students who selected the Kickstarter game design challenge utilized thoughtful creativity to draft their educational experiences.    Students explored almost every genre of gaming including social games, casual games, first person shooters, MMO’s, and other virtual environments.   Their subjects ranged from math, personal finance to history.   The imagination from the students was very inspiring.

– Learning the art of persuasion and marketing:   When I learned technical writing in college, I have to confess that it was very dry.  I really enjoyed seeing how the teachers shared the craft of writing with the students through proposal writing.    The students had to learn to share their visions and scope with written and visual clarity.   The project proposals considered needed to address planning concerns of cost, schedule and scope.   By developing a Kickstarter proposal format, the students also learned the craft of engaging the community by sharing a clear vision of why their proposal can benefit education.

– Leadership and working as a team:  Drafting a proposal that inspires leaders and the community to care about a cause is very challenging.   The teachers of the class organized the students into project teams.   Through this process, the teams selected leadership and organized the various phases of the project:  letter of intent, requirements drafting, story board drafting, drafting budgets, and video recording.

– Building high level requirements for programmers:  To help keep the students organized in communicating with our software engineering teams, we mentored them in creating user stories for their ideas.    User stories are a light format for documenting software requirements.   Through this process, the students learned to prioritize their requirements and focus their product designs so they have a minimal viable product that is more likely to be funded.

– Estimating budget:  Students worked with a software engineering team to scope and estimate a budget for their project.   Using the user stories/requirements the students created, the software team treated the students as customers.    The programming team offered potential implementation ideas, offered coaching on having a clear elevator pitch, and making sure the students considered all the design elements required for a game.

  • What’s the objective of the game?
  • What are the rules of the game?
  • Why would I play?
  • How does the player receive feedback about progress? (scores, badges, visual space)

– Introduction to game based learning:  I really enjoyed seeing the students share their final presentations.    Game based learning is a relatively new concept in educational technology.    It was exciting to see these undergraduate students propose new ways of teaching using gaming.

– Story telling using video: To conclude the proposal process, some students created draft videos in the “Kickstarter” style.  During this phase, the students drafted their video messages using an outline or story board.

My team and I really enjoyed our opportunity to serve as mentors in this technical communications proposal class.    During the closing presentations, I realized that we had transformed these student teams into teachers.    The students were passionately advocating for their idea that can help enhance student learning and make it more fun.    To be honest, some students were more engaged than others.      I, however, enjoyed the process of mentoring these students in creativity, planning, and communication using our mash-up of Kickstarter and project based learning.

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Game based learning

Game based learning

Want to build team collaboration, communication, and productivity? Make work visible!

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A powerful technique for building team collaboration, communication and productivity is to make the work very visible.    You could create a Google document with a big list of tasks and share it with your team.   Simple list applications are not always designed for team speed.   In the ideal case, I want to be able to glance over a project board and see our progress.    We are naturally visual creatures and can find patterns very quickly with our eyes.    In a world without computers, agile coaches promote the idea of using white boards with post it notes.  (i.e. Kanban boards)   They are simple and effective for radiating project tasks.   The tasks boards can be organized in a manner that’s logical to the team.   I tend to favor simplicity.

Here’s a sample KanBan Board.

Sample Kanban Board

photo credit: talios via photopin cc

While these kinds of boards are popular with software teams, the idea of radiating task items from a board is broadly applicable.    A busy family can organize their major goals for a week on a KanBan board.   Teachers using project based learning can encourage their students to keep their project status visible and encourage students to communicate regularly on progress.   A blogger might use this to track ideas and progress for posts.

In the past week, I came across a delightful tool that I had to share with my readers called LeanKit.   As a promoter of Scrum, I found it very easy to create a board that would work for my team.   The tool has other board configurations for personal productivity, sales, project management, and more.   Check out the video below.

I believe this tool does a great job keeping work items organized while enabling the team to quickly assess status at a glance.    It’s really awesome that you can use this tool for 25 team members for free.

I hope it helps you in leading your project based learning efforts, agile projects, or businesses.

 

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5 Resources To Help You Teach Kids Programming

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(http://www.flickr.com/photos/botguy/8090983379/sizes/m/in/photostream/)

As I have been listening and talking to advocates of STEAM education, I have come to believe that we need to engage young people in science, technology, engineering, art, and math as early as 3rd or 4th grade.   I had the opportunity to start hacking at programming using GW-BASIC when I was six or seven years old.   I am forever thankful for my Dad for many things.   I, however, am especially thankful that he taught me to start hacking on computers so early.    It was a great bonding experience for both of us to work on projects and helped launch my career that helps me support my family.

I have been thinking about the idea of creating a learning resource that would support teaching kids and teens how to code.   So…. what can kids learn about computer programming?   What is age appropriate?    What kinds of programs can a student in middle school create?   What kinds of software can high school students make?

I wanted to share a few resources and perspectives that I collected.

1. Teach U.S. kids to write computer code :  Douglas Rushkoff, digital literacy advocate for Codecademy.com and contributor for CNN, shares 10 reasons to teach young people how to program.  As we learn human language, we learn to speak, read, and write.    As our future generation uses technology more, it becomes more important for them to know how to make software… They can’t just be consumers.

2. TEDxManhattanBeach – Thomas Suarez – iPhone Application Developer

3. Teaching Kids to Program:  This post provides a nice collection of tools that help teach programming to kids.   I am very interested in how to teach programming in an age appropriate way.   I appreciated the author’s recommendations about waiting to teach kids until age 7.

4. So – you want to Teach your Kids Computer Programming?  In this post, I appreciated that the author ordered technology recommendations.    Early recommendations are great for young kids.   Technology mentioned later in the post are great for older students.

5. 36 Resources To Help You Teach Kids Programming – Nice index of tools and resources

 

How might we improve the way citizens and governments interact?

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If you read the news paper, it’s impossible to avoid headlines related to big issues facing our culture.   How do we value people and human life?  How do we address poverty?  How do we improve our education system to foster a culture of great teachers?   For our exceptional teachers, how do we celebrate those teachers with a great salary?   How do we stimulate the local economy to create jobs?

As common citizens, it’s easy for us to feel powerless in the face of these big problems.   We often think about government as this “big entity” that we influence by voting, writing letters, and getting involved in local councils.     Like many others from the “code for America” movement, I believe that social media and the internet give citizens a new opportunity to connect with each other and local leaders to create positive change in our neighborhoods.    Social media, however, is only a tool.   It takes great leaders, engaged communities, and a common vision to address some of the big issues facing our culture.  How do we get more of this?

Jennifer Pahlka, one of the founding leaders from Code for America, has an awesome quote about a new vision of government:  “Government is about doing together what we can’t do alone.”   Government isn’t just the people we elect to public office.   Citizens have the potential to connect to each other, self-organize, and form communities of reform.   SeeClickFix.com is an example of an app that can be used by citizens to identify issues in their area and encouraging citizens/government to resolve them.

I wanted to shine a light on an open innovation event sponsored by the Knight Foundation.    I believe the Knight Foundation has a very cool and important mission:  “Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. We believe that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged.”

How might we improve the way citizens and governments interact?

They seem to have a passion for engaging citizens and solving “big problems” in novel ways.  In their current innovation challenge, they are asking citizens to address the following question: “How might we improve the way citizens and governments interact?”   You can learn more about their challenge to government and local citizens by visiting http://www.NewsChallenge.org.

I believe their approach to this challenge is cool since they are executing this challenge using OpenIdeo’s social innovation platform.   This platform has many of my favorite ideas:  online collaboration, gamification, and designing engagement experiences with focused missions.

At the time of the writing, the challenge event has collected 109 innovation ideas.    In the spirit of previous Knight Foundation challenges, they hope to financially support some of the top ideas.

  • What one idea would you want to share?  What’s important to you?
  • From a project based learning perspective, can we use these open innovation challenges to create “mini-challenges” that can be shared with students?
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Benefits of Teaching Kids To Code That No One Is Talking About

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Scratch - Teaching kids to code

In previous blog posts, we have discussed the necessity to encourage science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) especially in the United States. As our culture has become increasingly digital, we have coined this term of “digital natives” to describe the current generation of kids who grow up playing with IPads, cell phones and computers.

In conversations I have had with advocates of STEM education, some believe it’s important to get kids interested in learning about STEM topics before the 4th of 5th grade. Why? Around middle school, children start to form opinions about what is “cool” or “not cool.” Most kids put things like math, science and computer science into the “un-cool” category.

Mitch Resnick of the MIT media lab and his team of researchers have taken up the challenge of teaching kids to become fluent with technology. While we commonly call kids “digital natives,” Mitch challenges us to take students to the next level. Students should not be passive consumers of knowledge and entertainment. In Mr. Resnick’s view, digital natives should have the ability to make and create technology. In an increasingly digital world, he suggests that students should develop a basic fluency in computer programming and gain a sense of how software works.

I really admire the work he and his team have done on Scratch, a computer programming environment created for kids. It’s designed to be very fun and interactive. Using Scratch, students can create very dynamic interactive experiences and games by simply connecting puzzle pieces together. Many of these student experiences are not trivial to code using traditional programming tools. In the following TED talk, Mr. Resnick describes his passion for teaching kids to appreciate computer programming and how Scratch works.

I really appreciate that Scratch helps kids to have fun with math. Without a doubt, tools like Scratch are encouraging students to become creative. Creativity is such a precious skill that we need to promote to our students. With tools like Scratch, students are getting a fun introduction to design thinking and systems thinking.
Things don’t always work out well when you’re programming in Scratch or any other programming environment. You have to learn how to work through bugs and imperfections. Mr. Resnick suggests that students who use Scratch learn a sense of persistence. Since students engaged in getting their game or their creative project working, they naturally start asking questions, find answers, and learn to work through problems.

I love Mr. Resnick’s closing idea. Teaching kids to code is not about programming itself. It’s about promoting creativity, curiosity, teaching persistence, and giving young people a sense of how they can create technology. All of these fluencies are needed in our rapidly changing world.

Related Links:

Please visit the following links to learn more about Mitch Resnick and his research.   I have also included other links related to teaching computer programming to kids and teens.

“Inventors Workshop” series at the Museum of Aviation

In 2017, Check out the “Inventors Workshop” series at the Museum of Aviation.  We’ve designed these workshops to introduce young makers to engineering and tinkering with code, digital fabrication, and robotics.   Through making and tinkering, participants will learn S.T.E.A.M. (science, technology, engineering, art and math) skills using their hands, grow their creativity and become more curious about their world and test the limits of what is possible.

Learn more here.

 

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Using Game Segments to Engage Students in Computer Science Education

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The Matrix

Teachers of computer science, like many STEM teachers, desire to find ways to engage students in the craft.   How do we make learning computer programming fun?   How do we empower students to be creative?

As a computer science graduate myself, I have to confess that we cover some pretty dry material at times.   I can always say that I found internal motivation to fight through difficult classes by seeing how those concepts related to creating video games and 3D simulations.   This was a small mental trick that worked for me.   Can it work for others?

Over the weekend, I discovered a pretty cool paper entitled “Using XNA-GSE game segments to Engage Students in Advanced Computer Science Education.”   The author, G. Michael Youngblood a professor at University of North Carolina, shares his experiences of engaging students in the study of artificial intelligence using a technique he calls “game segments.”    This work was shared by Microsoft Research at “Microsoft Academic Days on Gaming 2007.”   “Game segments” is a project based learning technique where students practice the implementation of various algorithms in AI in the context of a realistic video game scenario.    You might think of a game segment as a “fill in the blank” computer science programming activity.   The segment has most of the game mechanics implemented.   The student can focus on implementing the “brains” of the software and applying a specific model of artificial intelligence.     In other words, most of the game context is coded and completed.    The student is tasked with understanding, designing, and coding the “computer intelligence” components.

The full paper from Microsoft Research can be found here:  ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/carlat/N14_Using%20XNA-GSE%20game%20segments%20to%20Engage%20Students.pdf

The author felt that students became engaged in the activity because they had creative freedom to customize their game creations.   They were empowered to change the artwork of the game and experiment with various aspects and behaviors in the games.    Since all the game segments were designed with Microsoft XNA game studio, students could also enjoy playing their game creations on their Xbox if they desired.   I thought it was cool that students would often hold informal competitions among themselves.

Some of the scenarios covered in his class include the following:

  • Chat bot: Students practice techniques for creating their own “Siri” like agent that can have a conversation with a player.  In this context, the player needs to discover a secret known by a agent in the game.    The students got to play with AIML and related algorithms.
  • Motion planning: In this scenario, a student needs to implement algorithms so that a character can navigate through an environment, cross a bridge, and capture a prize.
  • Adversarial search:  This game segment enables students to learn how to implement the search and attack algorithms that you might find in a game like Minecraft.   In Minecraft, zombies and spiders come out at night and try to attack players.   Students need to learn to use sensors, search and planning algorithms, and get the agent to move intelligently avoiding road blocks.

In the context of his class, the students worked with five game segments.   Mr. Youngblood shared some guiding principles he used in constructing the activity.

  • “Design Principle 1: The areas where students are to modify, incorporate their code, or examine for debugging should be very clear in the game segment. “
  • “Design Principle 2: Allow the student to easily change the cosmetics and/or behavior of the game so they can customize it and take ownership”
  • “Design Principle 3: Always leave an element of the base code that the students would like to change but is not required to be changed.”
  • “Design Principle 4: Document all of the game segment source code well. It serves as an example student will refer to for additional learning.”
  • “Design Principle 5: Keep the game segment simple by testing only one major application of a learned technique at a time with the addition of at most one minor applied technique.”
  • “Design Principle 6: The game segment should encourage the desired proper coding style and paradigm (e.g., object-oriented).”
  • “Design Principle 7: Design for competitions or diversity to help show off the student’s work in class incorporating it back into the lessons.”

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How can a technology MAKER support great teaching and learning?

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Space Shuttle Launch

As a maker and technologist, I believe that my creations should have a strong purpose.   Since Sarah(my wife) is a college professor, we started this blog with the purpose of exploring practices, leadership methods, and tools that support great teaching.    Through blogging, I have enjoyed learning, listening, and discovering incredible teachers.   This experience has also caused me to reflect upon how important my teachers have been for me.   Many of them have transformed my life for the better.   For this… I am forever thankful.    So… As a citizen of the world, I say THANK YOU teachers for helping to transform the culture of the world for the better.    You rock!

As a writer for this blog, I have a desire to support great teaching and leadership.   I have been reflecting upon how I can use my own strengths and gifts to support this mission.   I currently work as a project leader for a local research center.   I LOVE the craft of software engineering and technology.   Technology, when implemented well, can greatly serve our students in life.   I also believe the craft of “making” offers many life lessons to our students on planning, creativity, working well in teams, and systems thinking.

With some of these thoughts in mind, I plan to focus on a smaller set of topics through my writing and reading.    Ultimately, I would like to start producing apps, tools, and resources that serve great learning and great teaching.    I hope these topics will help support our mission as teachers:

1)  Project based learning.

2) Tools to support the productivity of teachers.

4) Game based learning.

5) Tools that support teaching programming.

What is your top problem in teaching and engaging your students?     Is there a way that technology can help solve that problem?   How can we help you to be successful as a teacher?  We love to hear from our readers.

 

 

 

12 Popular Posts On Teaching, Productivity, and #EdTech Tools

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studentsWithIpads

I am very thankful to my personal learning network on Twitter.    As I research ways that I can serve my community of teachers and students using technology,  my Twitter personal learning network has become an indispensable  learning and development tool.   In an effort to focus my personal learning on the needs and interests of my community of teachers,  I did a quick analysis of some of the post popular links I have shared on Twitter based on data from Buffer in the past three months.   I thought our readers would be interested in the results.

Tools

Teaching

Free & Productivity

Trends

 

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