I have a lot of boxes of books in storage.  It is definitely past time to get rid of them as I have not opened the boxes or looked at the books in years.  At one time I had a couple of thousand books.  Readings is still a very important part of my life, but most of it is done digitally.  Over the past 2 years I have gradually moved away from buying any physical books unless required by a graduate course and have moved to reading only digital versions.  Though I have tried many different devices and platforms, I am currently most settled on Amazon’s Kindle app and iBooks.  Kindle has a definite edge with me because there is a greater selection in the Amazon store and it works across all my devices, including in a browser on my computers.

I have owned a Kindle reader and liked it, but find that in the past year the majority of my reading has been on my Apple iPad and iPad 2.  I also find myself reading a lot on my iPhone 4, though the screen is much smaller.  Reading on the iPhone is strangely comfortable to me as I swipe through pages quickly and can read anytime and anywhere.

Additionally, I find myself reading on my laptops quite often.  Whereas Kindle has offered the Kindle for Mac application for a while, it wasn’t until their newest Kindle Cloud Reader was released that I used my computers for reading.  Having access to all of my Kindle library in any browser is very convenient and I am growing more and more accustom to reading textbooks this way.

In the past several weeks I now have another, new favorite way to read.  Since Google TV (I use the frustrating Logitech Revue)  includes a Google Chrome browser, the books you purchase from Amazon.com can easily be accessed through the Kindle Cloud Reader.  This means that you can display books on a large television in your living room, adjusting the text so that you can see it from your recliner or sofa.  With a keyboard in hand, when you reach the end of the displayed text, simply tap the next (right arrow) key and you move to the next part of text for reading.

In the evenings, I used to find myself with my iPad 2 in hand reading for a while, instead now I find myself just laying on the sofa or sitting in the recliner reading on my television.  I have included some photos below so that you can see a couple of different text sizes and the distance from my recliner and sofas to the television.

Do you remember the first time you heard the words “Life-long learner”?  I remember hearing it as a child, but cannot recall the first time.  People in my life have encouraged me to be a life-longer learner as long as I can remember.  Typically people are referring to the “love of learning” or they are trying to encourage others to be avid readers and try new experiences.

The concept of life-long learning can be used to refer to informal learning experiences or more formal experiences such as adult education.  In either case, it has changed drastically over recent years as more educational institutions have moved content to open, online spaces.  Many universities are moving their courses to an open format and this makes life-long learning much more accessible!  We can now learn from any location and at any time.

Do you use any open courseware content for secondary school teaching?

Here are are some great places to go for free online, open courses:

1. Apple iTunesU (Stanford, Harvard, many others) (University list)
2. MIT Open Courseware
3. Yale Open Courses
4. Tufts Open Courseware
5. Berkeley Webcast

The next step… contacting Marsha Gladhart and finding out how she came about creating these ETaP stages.

In the mean time, I found it very helpful and interesting to compare the other models listed in Cheri Toledo’s work.  A graphic:

I have been watching the Youtube Teacher’s Channel since it launched recently and am thrilled at the content and resources available to teachers.  Whether or not you are in support of students viewing content on Youtube, every teacher can use this new channel as a resource for their own discovery process.

Edudemic has a nice post about it here.

On October 31st I will be presenting on 21st Century Learning Environments with Mr. Darren Price.  This is the second year the symposium has been held and is sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology in conjunction with Hanyang University.  It is always interesting to walk into a presentation situation not knowing how many participants will be there and the background of the target audience.  In any case, I am looking forward to it.  More details are in the brochure, here.

Yesterday I gave a presentation to about 40 educational leaders in Korea representing all the various provinces and other organizations.  The topic focused on English education and mobile devices.  One thing that I pointed out was that responsive artificial intelligence has finally arrived in a form that can be used by anyone and that the impact could be helpful for English language learners.  Dragon Dictation has been well-received and very helpful on Apple’s iOS platform (and others), but it doesn’t respond to you intelligently.  It only dictates what you speak.  Now, with Siri… there’s a response.

I can imagine that in the future that artificial intelligence will be applied in many different ways.  Imagine reading a digital book where you can have a conversation with the main characters and even give input to what actions they take.

Dragon Dictation:

A friend of mine recently posted this video of a classroom of 29 students that use 15 Apple iPads.  This is a very interesting examples what can be done when you mix devices and a very talented teacher.  The video is featured on a ning for ipad educators, http://ipadeducators.ning.com/

Wandering Academic has put together some interesting school ranking information for a group of international schools.  These types of comparisons seem to be more and more unavailable as the word “ranking” has gotten a bad name.  In any case, it is fun to peruse.

1:1   One laptop for each student

1:1t   One tablet for each student

1:1d   One device for each student (usually referring to something like an iPod touch)

1:1+   One laptop for each student plus other devices

http://knowyourmeme.com/