Virtual Labs(Ti Smartview) presentation in Nova Scotia

On Friday of last week (Oct 27th), Rick Snow and I did a presentation on Virtual Labs to a small group of people in Nova Scotia. It was the very same demo we did last year in Dallas. I take control of the Ti-Smartview remotely and Rick does the
Physical part on his side. It seemed to work better last year in Dallas but this one went ok. We did Newton's Law of cooling and a ball bounce experiment (to determine gravitational constant).

E-Teacher Meetings, October 6th-8th

This week from Monday to Wednesday we had our Fall F2F meeting of all our E-teachers and staff with the Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation (CDLI). We started on Monday at 1 pm. The first session was a smartboard presentation by 3D datacomm and it was OK. The SMARTboard is not an overwhelming piece of technology. Some feel the power comes from the notebook software. I think the power comes from the creativeness of the user. Yes, Notebook helps.

For the second session we did a videoconference with a teacher from the Alberta Distance Learning Centre (ADLC) through SMART's bridge-it software. Not as smooth as I would like to see it but impressive nonetheless. The last hour on Monday was dealing with "2nd Life". I actually saw a lot of application to my classroom for this avatar based "fantasy world" building concept. I have been highly interested in desktop virtual reality since my Master's of Education program in Information Technology. Interesting possibilities here. HMMMMM!

Tuesay, October 7th was a darker day for me personally since tragically one of my students in my math 2205 class was killed in a car accident. I taught his brother last year and he was also hurt. But he made it through and will be fine. Emotionally he will have a great struggle due to the loss of his brother. My thoughts are with the Gale family.