Getting Started with Raspberry Pi Zero

Got my Raspberry Pi Zero  a couple of days ago and was pretty excited that I was able to get one since they are pretty much sold out everywhere. I decided to get the Raspberry Pi Zero Budget Kit from Adafruit.com since I figured I would need most of the parts the kit had anyway. I still needed to pick up a powered USB hub to plug in a mouse and keyboard and a HDMI to DVI adapter to work with my monitor. Once those show up, then I'll be ready to download Raspian and start playing with this tiny computer.

I went to a talk at the PLTW conference last month about how to use Raspberry Pi's and Minecraft to teach about coding and it was a very cool idea. The presenter showed that for a few dollars and a little work you could really get a lot of learning out of these small computers and find something useful to do with Minecraft other than kill zombies and skeletons.

So once I get every thing together I'll be able to get started on trying this new toy of my out in the classroom.

Parts Is All I Need

When working on my projects, I try to have a lot parts on hand to choose from. First of all, it cuts down on the cost for things I need for the project, and second it goes along with my philosophy of recycling. And where do I find all of these parts? From old toys, games and other electronic equipment which no longer works. Believe it or not, there are lots of great parts in old kids toys, VCRs, RC cars or even things like old power tools. 

How do I get all of this junk? Well for starters it helps to be known as a fix-it guy, because then people bring me their broken gadgets, which sometimes I can fix but other times I can't but I kindly offer to dispose of for them. Other times I just have "Bring me your junk" drive which can bring in a lot of stuff. Finally, while not really being a Garage Sale person, if I'm at one, I will pick up some broken electronic stuff.

Once I have a pile of stuff, I start working through it, separating out the useful parts from everything else. Mainly what I'm looking for is motors, sensors, wires, screws, gears, LEDs, battery parts and springs. The one thing that I always felt guilty about was all of the plastic that I had throw away, but I think I may have come up with a way of dealing with that.

There are plastic recycling gadgets now that take plastic waste and turns it into 3D printer filament. They are a little pricey but I feel they will probably start coming down in price soon.

Over all, it's pretty awesome that we now are at a point where we have access to all of this great technology, like 3D printers, Arduinos, and other electronic pieces to rearrange and make into other awesome things.

Ball Bot Project #1

After thinking this through, and after wishing for a Ball Bot for years (see my separate page on my history with this concept), I'm starting my project for the Ball Bot. I'm basically following James Bruton's design for his BB-8, which is awesome. Watch his video series on Youtube:

I've started purchasing my own parts and would like to get a working prototype before I give out a list of the parts I have used for this project.

I'm going with a 4 motor solution like James uses because like him I think it will be easier to program. I've seen other Ball Bots and they all use a 3 motor design which may be the way I go in the end but at least I'll have enough parts to start with.

Parts

Unfortunately most of the parts that James uses for his BB-8 droid are no longer available through Sparkfun.com so I've had to improvise. Currently I have some motors which are similar to the ones that James uses, a motor controller for the Arduino, and an Arduino Uno. I'm still waiting on my Accelerometer-Gyro-Magnotometer unit and then I start engineering the basic design for the Ball-bot.

Expenses

The most expensive part of the project so far has been the motors which for 4 of them have cost a little over $70. Everything else has been under $20  we'll see how well these all work together. I still need batteries though and they can be expensive depending on the type.

Another potentially expensive piece to this would be the type of ball I choose for the robot to roll on. I'd like to make it so that it could ride on anything about the size of a basketball/ soccer ball, this would help with that cost because first of all we all have something like that in our houses, and second they don't cost too much and third, you can play with the ball when you're not using it for the robot. But for something that is durable and would only be for the robot, I'm also looking at bowling ball blanks. I've done a little pricing on these and they are pretty expensive, mostly because the blanks are usually for custom designs on the bowling ball.

Next Steps

Now that I already have the motors, the motor controller and the Arduino, I'd like to hook those up and play with some of the code to familiarize myself with how all that works together. This will mean finding some batteries to help power the motors but I may be able to find a temporary solution for this for now.

Keep on rolling!

Mini-Courses

I've always struggled with wanting to teach more computer-related material than I typically have time for during a regular semester. Also, while most of my current curriculum is based on skills required by state standards, my students have different interests in what they would like to do on a computer.

So my idea, which I've had for a while, is to create a Mini-Course that allows the student to work through a computer skill like Photo-Editing in their own time and discover how to learn on their own. It's been working out great so far and I've been able to sit back and be a facilitator for all the students, nudging them in the right direction and providing my "expert" knowledge when necessary. The students were a little apprehensive at first about learning on their own, but after they had a couple of quick successes with the course they had chosen, they were all in. My only problem may be pulling them away from the Mini-Courses and get them back to their businesses!
#tw

Note Taking Apps for iPad

Tablets and tablet PCs and me go way back to 2001-2002 somewhere and before that it was the PDA (Palm) devices so you might say I'm an early adopter for this kind of technology. In fact I often bring out my HP TC1100, one of the best Tablet PCs ever made in my opinion, to show my students of what things were like before the iPad came along (in 2010). My reasons for using these devices was to be paperless as much as possible. I had stacks of notebooks and notepads laying around my office cube and most of them were unorganized and not easy to share with my colleagues. The tablet was the perfect solution to my note-taking problems.

But note-taking on the iPad Mini is sketchy at best (pardon the pun). I've tried various note-taking apps, the free ones anyway, and none of them are that great. I have come to the conclusion that it is mainly because of the user interface for the iPad Mini (and probably all iPads) because I have a great experience with any of the Samsung Note products (Note 10 and Note 3) which probably are engineered from the start to work with a precision stylus that is built into the product.

That being said there are a variety of note-taking apps for students which are free and that work pretty good for the classroom. The one thing I was looking for specifically was a way to use Cornell Notes through one of these apps and none of them can do that specifically but they can all do some form of it.

The other questions I had for any note-taking app were:

• Can you draw with it? I'm all about creativity and doodling as a form of note-taking. I also believe that a lot of our students can write faster than they can type on iPad keyboard.
• Can you take photos? Taking a photo of your project or the Smartboard slide to add notes is a skill that is definitely useful for these devices.
• Does it share well with other forms of social media (email, Twitter, Google Drive, etc.)? Once you have your notes you'll want to use them somewhere.
• Can you dictate? This would be a solution for students who don't type or write fast.
• Can you cut/paste easily? Moving notes around on my page is why I started using tablets and Tablet PCs 10 years ago. Its a great way to keep your notes organized
• Can you organize the notes? Your notes are no good if you don't have them organized in some way.

My main recommendation would depend on how the teacher was using notes in their class. If it is Cornell Notes then I would probably suggest using Microsoft One Note even though the iOS version is a little light on the full functionality compared to the PC version. 

If Cornell Notes is not an issue but price is then I would probably go with either Penultimate or Topnote.

Finally if you have some money then Notability is a good choice.

Reviews

Notability

One app that I have looked into which is not free is Notability which our district has purchased for every student and teacher. This app works very well and does what most note-taking apps do. You can write and draw with it, you can take photos, and you can record sound. The cut and pasting is very easy to use and makes organizing notes very easy. Organization is pretty straightforward, you just add "Dividers" and "Subjects", not exactly what I would have called these but it works. You start by creating a Divider, which is really the subject like Math or Social Studies, then underneath, you can organize your notes by "Subject" which would be something like "Unit 1" or "History of Athens". You can also choose a paper type which I really like in any note-taking app. So you can have a blank page or a ruled page or even graph paper.

Sharing is also very easy and there are as many options as you have saved on your device. So if you have Google Drive, Twitter, Box and One Drive like I do you can send it to any one of those. But you can also send it to Drop Box, iTunes or any other app you have on your device. You are also able to choose a format for saving your document like PDF, RTF or Notability file formats. The emailing option works through iPads own email client so that will need to be set up but you can email through Gmail and Outlook by choosing "Share".

Using this app to take Cornell Notes will require the students to format their notes beforehand which shouldn't be too difficult and will reinforce with them why to use the Cornell Notes structure. I would suggest using the graph paper format so that they can more easily draw the vertical lines. Overall a very good app for students to take notes and stay organized in their classes.

Microsoft One Note

I've been using One Note as long as I've a had a Tablet PC and I consider it one of the best, if not the best, note-taking apps out there, (as long as you are not using it on iOS, more about this below). What I have liked about this app is that it fully integrates with the other MS Office programs so you can insert a spreadsheet from Excel, or share your notes on a PowerPoint or a Word doc. It also organizes your notes into "Notebooks" then into "Sections" and then by "Pages" which is very similar to a paper organizer and thus very familiar to most of us who started with paper notebooks. It is also a great app for converting your handwriting into text. Depending on how legible your handwriting is, it gets about 95% of what you write.

But that being said, the iOS version of this app leaves out a lot of functionality. For example, there is little to no integration with the other MS Office apps even if you have them installed on your device. There is also not much functionality like changing paper types as there is in the PC version. You can work around that by using a default template in the PC version which will then sync with the iOS version. You can still draw/write, add or take photos, but no sound recording with the iOS version. And finally, it doesn't do handwriting recognition. As for sharing, you really can't do much on the iPad except for copy a link if you don't have the iPad email client set up. You need to do all of that through the PC.

Microsoft's point of view is that if you really want to use their software you should be using it on a PC and not really an iPad so that's probably why they have taken out some of the options that make One Note so great. Using this app to its full potential requires that the students use the PC version in conjunction with the iPad version.

For Cornell Notes, you would again need to have students create their own structure for the notes but given that they can create a section head and page titles, they wouldn't need any of the header information in Cornell Notes. For example, if they were in Science, they could create a Science Notebook, and if the Unit was planets they could create a section for that. Then each page of notes could be the Essential Question for that day and it would include the date. They could even create a separate Summary Page at the end. If they go into the PC version, they (or the teacher) could create a template for these kinds of notes and set it as default for each class so that each page would open with the structure already loaded. This is the only app that I have found that can do this.

So overall, still a really good note-taking app, but it really only works good on iOS as long as you work with it on the PC too.

 

Evernote/Penultimate

Penultimate was my favorite iPad note-taking app for a long time. It was really great at drawing and using different paper types like graph paper and lined pages. It had several other paper types which I thought would be great for teachers like different forms, dot paper, etc. But after they were purchased by Evernote, most of these other paper types are now only available as an add-on purchase. Still it is one of the best drawing interfaces on the iPad.

Now the trick with Penultimate is that it is tied to Evernote so that some of the functionality is with Penultimate and some of it is with Evernote. The drawing capabilities are all in Penultimate while the other note-taking functions like inserting photos and recording sound are in Evernote. Also all of the sharing functionality is in Evernote, you can share to email through iOS Mail and any social networking apps that you have installed but there is no direct way to share to Google Drive. Also, Evernote treats your Penultimate note page as an image, so you can't do much with it in Evernote except to share it. You can even share to One Note if you would like to use its functionality.

You can use Penultimate for Cornell Notes by having students create their own Cornell Note paper, which would probably work best by starting with the graph paper. Since all of the organization for the notes goes on in Evernote, this is where you can need to create a notebook for your class, but there is no way to go beyond that level of organization.

The sad news is that Penultimate was better before Evernote bought them.

Topnotes

Finally I looked at Topnote mainly because it offered free PDF annotation. The free version is a little light on functionality but it is not too bad. You can enter text by either writing or through the keyboard. It has the ability to insert pictures and you can cut and past your notes to keep things organized. You can add "Folders" to organize your notes by class but that's about it. It has a nice variety of "Papers" or page types like graph paper and ruled paper, but you can only really share it through the Pro version, which means purchasing it.

What interested my was the PDF annotator since it would be great if students could take notes but also have a place to mark up a PDF with their notes. The free version does a nice job of this and the Pro only adds the ability to type in your notes on the PDF. You can pull the PDFs from most any of the Cloud storage sites that you have set up on your iPad (I did it from Google Drive and Box)

Like all of the apps I've looked out there is no way to add Cornell Notes directly but you can have the students create their own every time they take notes.

Topnote is a nice app but a little light on functionality for the free version.
#t

Passwords

Yesterday as I was sitting though Purchase Card training, there was some discussion about passwords. For our new vendor, they require that we change our passwords every three months and that we don't use the same previous eight passwords. Everyone groaned of course and I just shook my head. This is another case of an organization who feels that rapidly changing passwords is the key to security, when it fact it will only lead to users using very insecure passwords or storing their password in an insecure manner. Studies have shown that a good, strong password that is stored securely is the best defense against hackers and the amount of time a user has their password does not effect how secure or insecure they are.

So what do I do? Use a Password Manager. This way I have a unique password for all of my accounts and for most of them I don't even know what the password is. I have the password manager generate a random password as strong as it can with numbers and special characters and I don't care what it is because my Password Manager will automatically fill it in for me. All of my social media accounts, my financial accounts, Amazon, Paypal, etc. they all have different passwords that I have no idea what they are. And when they need to be updated, I just let the Password Manager generate a new random password and I'm done. It works on all of my devices and with most of my apps. When it doesn't automatically sign me in, I can pull up the app and copy the password and paste it in manually. In fact the only drawback that I have had is that sometimes it logs me in too quick and I want to be the one who clicks the "login" button. I do need to have a nice strong password to get into my Password Manager, but I' rather have just one good, strong password to remember than 20 unsecure ones.

This is also a better solution than having the one password for everything in our school district. I realize that our Tech Support people are trying to make it easier for us and the students but one not-so-good password to get into our computers, email, online learning systems, business services, etc. is probably not a good idea either. It also has to be changed every year (at least its not every 3 months!) and can't be the same as our previous two passwords. Its amusing because my Password Manager warns me all of the time that "you are using the same password for multiple accounts" but that's way the district is structured.

For a long time I was worried about the security of these apps but I've been using mine for almost a year and haven't heard or experienced any issues. In fact when there was some news about a possible flaw, the company quickly pushed out an update to fix it. I use Lastpass because I'm mostly on Android. It doesn't integrate so well with my iPad but there are Password Mangers that work better with Apple.

I think this is an awesome solution to our password woes and recommend it to all of my students and everyone else. #tw

Creative Design

Students in my Business class are working on their Create A Product project. We just finished watching a video about the company IDEO and now they are learning first hand about the creative design process. #tw

Standardized Testing

We're half way through our week of standardized testing and except for some scheduling issues, things have been going smoothly. This year the test has been on computers which is a great step forward. 

The only drawback is that our network can barely handle it. Every day I have at least one class that has a hard time staying connected to the Internet and my second-screen laptop has a real hard time for about half the day. My programming class is working on their apps for tablets using App Inventor and they also struggle to stay connected to test out their code.

The test this year has also shown what a valuable skill keyboarding will be moving forward, so I hope that there is more support for teaching this at the elementary level.