Information Technology Education

This week's video on America's Greatest Makers available  her e showcased three makers who are revolutionizing basketball, music and art. 1)   ShotTracker  allows basketball players to track their own shot/score stats from anywhere in the court.  Players use the bluetooth and sensor enabled app-integrated innovation to collect valuable real-time data. Before I even played the first part of this week's video to my students, we started with a class talk about how they track their basketball data.  They all said that their coaches or parents do it by tracking their shots and successful shots with paper and pencil on a clipboard. I then asked them to brainstorm answers to the following questions: What could you invent to track your basketball shots?  How could you integrate technology to come up with a way to track your basketball shooting data? It was amazing to hear their responses! As a class, they came up with the same idea as the ShotTracker.  One stu...

Virtual reality (VR) is on the verge of gaining a foothold in schools thanks to affordable viewers like Google Cardboard . And with more VR apps appearing every day, it’s likely that immersive VR expeditions will eventually become an engaging way for students to explore everything from historical landmarks, distant planets, oceanic locations to the human body. But VR can go beyond passive viewing. One way to take VR to the next level is to give students the opportunity to curate, produce and create their own expeditions. By doing so, students create primary source artifacts in the form of 360-degree views they can share with the world. After an amazing day of traveling all over the universe with Google Expeditions , I wanted my students to be able to do more than have these experiences. I wanted them to create these types of expeditions for themselves and others. Now, using the Google Street View app, they can create their own 360-degree panoramas of any location. 5 steps to creating a...