Inventive students
Today several of us attended a business fair at the University of Texas, put on by Linda Cleveland’s business class.
Students had to research an invention, be sure it wasn’t patented, create a template and business plan, and create a marketing booth to sell the product at the business fair. Some of our students from Vicky Abney’s business class were the judges along with other judges.
Some of the inventions presented by the U.T. students included smart clothing, a smart grocery cart that could tell you what prices were and total what was in your basket, and a gps system that notified your car of available parking spaces nearby. Two other groups had Ipod devices, including I Tooth which sent bluetooth signals to another Ipod, and IBike which had speakers embedded in the bicycle handles. Several of the students were trying to work with engineers to actually create these products.
This assignment is a great example of project based learning which we talked about in our meeting on Wednesday, so I wanted to share it! (It’s also a great example of how we can connect with university students, by having our students attend events like this).
March 2, 2007 @ 4:37 pm
Today my students are creating their own personal learning space at http://www.PageFlake.com (which was one of the Project Technology 15-minute inservices). The kids are personalizing a one-stop place on the internet where each person sets up a page with multiple flakes of interests or topics. [You must first sign in with email and password, so you can return to the PageFlake as desired, in other words you won't lose your flakes.] Students have included google earth (their homesites), blogs, wiki search windows, rss feeds for articles of interest and current news, photos from flickr, world time, even WHS activity photos. They began work on their PageFlakes in their “down” minutes when I was away. It held their interest.
March 11, 2007 @ 3:46 pm
Hi – I teach in higher ed and am thinking about incorporating page flake into my library literacy class. I was going to play around with it today but cannot seem to get it up. I’m just wondering if you have had good experiences with page flake – or, if you pardon my pun, is it flakey? I am hesitant to use it if it goes down too frequently.
Thanks for any insight.
Another Vicki
March 11, 2007 @ 5:25 pm
Hi Vicky–
We’ve had fairly good success here with Pageflakes. (I know Vicky A. used it with her classes as she mentioned, as did another of our business teachers.)
I also created a Pageflakes page for the vision committee that this blog is a part of and although it’s gone down maybe once, I haven’t had problems with it.
(One of our teachers did tell me that she was having difficulty with it from home. I believe she may have had to adjust her security settings in Internet Explorer to medium in order to allow the RSS feed or the cookies to work.)
But my experience has been that it’s usually available when I call up the pageflake we have created for our committee. It’s been so useful for our committee, because we have a common site with news feeds, blogs, podcasts, etc.
I learned about it at a workshop with Will Richardson and he was suggesting using in a situation where you have each student create a blog, because you could then “subscribe” to all their blogs and it would be an easy way to read through all the blogs students were creating.
I think using it for a library literacy class would be an excellent idea. I’m also a librarian and was thinking of teaching students to use it for some more advanced research projects they are doing. It’s very user friendly, once you understand how to pull the feeds in.
Let us know how it goes! Carolyn