Thanks for the kind words those of you who attended my CUE 2010 presentation on Open Source Animation.  Attached, you will find a .ZIP file containing my first nine assignments in PDF format.  These assignments use Pencil and Pivot (Stykz) about half the time and Adobe Flash CS4 the other half.  Fell free to repurpose these and make these your own.

No warranty expressed or implied.  Use at your own risk.  Driver does not carry cash

deliot_animation_assignments

I’ve always been disappointed by how much software companies charge education.  Sometimes, you find great software at a reasonable price, but other times you don’t.  One area that comes to mind here is in the area of Interactive Whiteboards.  Leading companies like SmartBoard and Promethean charge thousands of dollars for a single installation.  So it was with great joy that I found MIT doctoral student Johnny Chung Lee’s Wiimote Whiteboard.  Basically, Johnny shows how any LCD projector with a screen can be turned into an Interactive Whiteboard with an IR LED light pen and a Nintendo Wii Remote Control.  So $100 or less can create a complete interactive system instead of $3,000.  Lee started his Wiimote “mini-revolution” with this famous YouTube video.  A great use of off the shelf technology to solve a larger problem.  More on this topic soon after I finish a Wiimote Whiteboard setup for my MacBook!

Ubuntu Linux is a wonderful operating system. Over time, each new release has gotten closer and closer to being usable by real people. Real people like teachers, students and (gasp) site administrators. People who just turn on and USE computers to do things, and nothing more.

In October, the Ubuntu folks released Ubuntu 7.10 (code name Gutsy Gibbon). The question is, will this be the one. Will Linux finally gain traction in this world of Windows Vista and Mac OS? Probably not this time, but soon, I predict a Linux Operating System (probably Ubuntu) will dent the mainstream.  Time will tell…

I will be presenting at the CUE “Digital Natives / Digital Immigrants” Conference in Monterey on Saturday, December 1st, 2007. You can find a copy of my PowerPoint presentation here converted to PDF format:

Using WordPress In Education PDF

We have all run into CAPTCHAs (those little squiggly words we must type to access web services). You might also know there are multiple projects under way with the goal of scanning books and documents into digital form. Now imagine combining these two concepts!

Enter reCAPTCHA, whose goal it is to provide login security AND help digitize thousands of books. Every time a user uses reCAPTCHA to log into a website, they are also asked to decrypt a “hard to read” word from one of the book digitizing projects. So as you log in to a website, you are helping digitize a book. Check out THIS ARTICLE discussing reCAPTCHA in more detail.

Have you ever wished that your hard drive would just tell you why it’s so full, and what files are filling it up?  Well, now there is a free program called WinDirStat that does just that.  WinDirStat, gives you a graphical view of your hard drive with blocks representing files.  The beauty of this is, you can quickly see which giant files are taking up your hard drive, and where they are located.  This program would be great for educators to monitor their hard drives and keep free space available.

Even giants like Microsoft have failed in this area with their Microsoft Passport system (now Microsoft Live ID). The newest contender in this race toward “one password to rule them all” OpenID. Where others have failed, OpenID may actually succeed. One reason OpenID has a fighting chance is it’s Open Source origins. Because of this, OpenID is not owned by anybody in particular. This allows anybody, including industry giants like AOL to use OpenID. Here’s hoping that OpenID (or something like it) finally takes hold.