Pushing Pixels

During a workshop on Critical Thinking in the Classroom, all the the teachers came up with a fantastic list of ways to engage students and make them think. These can be applied to any subject. I present them here in no particular order. What other items can be added to the list?

• Carouseling - put up a different question on each wall and groups of students have 5 minutes at each to answer. They may not repeat what others wrote.
• Case Study – A real world article that applies the subject to a problem.
• Debate - Have them take sides and have at it. You might want to do a brief intro on acceptable debate tactics.
• Fish Bowling - A select few students have a guided discussion while the rest of the class listens.
• Jigsaw - Each group is assigned a topic. New groups are formed from one member of each group. They then discuss with each other what they learned in the first group.
• Journaling - Students write down their thoughts on the subject.
• Small Group Problem Solving - Each group has a different problem to tackle.
• Practice Question – New use for old tests
• Role Playing – make them pretend to be characters, cogs in a machine, or parts of a process
• Source Analysis – Look at he source of something we know and examine how credible it is
• Evidence-Based Practice – They must show the evidence that something works/happens/doesn’t work.
• Chalk-Talk – Another word for brainstorming
• Design Challenges – Everyone design a symbol for Fire without color. Make them competitive and vote on the best.
• Design The Exam – They come up with the questions and the answers
• Minute Papers – Write down everything they can in :60
• Board Games – I’m going to use RoboRally to teach programming. I’ve suggested Wealth of Nations could be used for economy.
• Jeopardy/Trivia – Always fun, try finding a PowerPoint Template.
• Student Presentations – Give them the book and 20 minutes. Then they tell the class what they learned.
• Critiques - Art, Designs, Professional Examples, be sure to put in poor examples as well as good ones.
• Reverse Engineer - Give them a working example and tell them to take it apart, label the parts and put it back together working.
• Open Ended Essay - No right answer, you’re looking at their thought process for answering subjective questions.
• MindMapping - Give them all the vocabulary/concepts and they have to map it into the correct hierarchy.

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So what if it’s been like 4 months since I’ve posted. Let’s get back at it! We’re starting off with a vid:

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I’m moving at the end of the month and I’ve put a bunch of stuff up on Western Maryland CraigsList (with pictures).  In case you’re looking for some cheap furniture:

Recliner $20
Steel Kitchen Floor Cabinet $25
Folding Futon $75
Four Dining Room Chairs $100
Dining Room Buffet for Sale $100
3 Drawer Cabinet %50
Collapsable Large Dog Kennel $75
Ceramic Tile $150
Single Chair $20
Auto Pet Divider $35

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I went and found a list of my favorite sci-fi actors from some great shows and movies on Twitter. These are the profiles of the real actors and not their characters (some have several) or generated news feeds. If anyone has one I missed, I’ll check it out.  My favorite* just came online today!

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Brent Spiner

Levar Burton

Wil Wheton

Marina Sirtis

FireFly

Nathan Fillion

Jewel Staite

Sean Maher *

Star Trek

William Shatner

Star Wars

Carrie Fisher

Anthony Daniels

*Not me, the real Sean Maher

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A 1977 hoax article printed in the Guardian. All the graphic designers will love this.

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/San_Serriffe/

I wonder what life on this idyllic island is like?

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I wanted to add file icons to links on a site. If there was a link to a .PDF file, there would be a little PDF icon to the right of the link. You can just add them as images via HTML, but I needed a CSS solution. And here it is:

   a[href $= '.pdf] {
      padding-right: 18px;
      background: transparent url(images/LinkIcons/pdf.png) no-repeat center right;}

This CSS code may need some explination. The first line selects every link on a page to a .pdf file. More specifically it finds all <a> tags (which are links) and looks at their href= attributes. If the values of the attribute end in .pdf, they the rest of the style code will be applied to it (the $= means ‘ends with’).

The link is then given a bit of extra padding on the right to push away other text that comes after it and places the PDF.PNG graphic as the background in the extra padding area.  It will look like this:

It’s a good trick, but I needed a lot of files. Like a lot of files. I started with the file icons from SplitBrain. They have 86 icons for different file types, but I mostly needed Adobe icons. So I opened up my Adobe folder and pulled a copy of all the different file types I needed and put a copy in a folder. I took a screenshot of the whole thing and sliced that up into a bunch of 16×16 PNG files. I reworked a few existing icons for a total of 126 file types. I’ll admit, I have no idea what an .SXD file is, but it’s got an icon.

So here’s what they look like:

We’re not done. I also wanted to put icons for links based on their protocol. A link looks like this: <a href=”http://www.site.com”>link</a>. This next selector grabs the link by the “http:” part.

   a[href ^= "http:"] {
      padding-right: 18px;
      background: transparent url(images/LinkIcons/http.png) no-repeat center right;}

The ^= means ‘begins with’ so any link to an external site should begin with http://www…  So I found some of the more popular protocals and collected icons for them too.

Here are the protocol icons:

The last one I added was for a pop-up. If you create a link like this: <a href=”http://www.site.com” target=”_blank”>link</a> it will open in a new tab in Firefox or a new window in Internet Explorer. The CSS for this one is:

   a[target="_blank"] {
      padding-right: 18px;
      background: transparent url(images/LinkIcons/popup.png) no-repeat center right;}

So any links with target=”_blank” will look like this:

All of this is contained in the .zip file along with a minified version of the CSS which saves about 4 kilobytes.

DOWNLOAD CSS ICONS ZIP FILE

I’d love any feed back; let me know how you’re using this or if you have ideas or need for new icons.

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I’m old and just discovering Friend Feed.  I found that my article on 10 Productivity Web Sites I Can’t Live Without generated a number hits from FriendFeed.com. I think I’ve heard of it before, but I figured I should check it out and see what’s going on.

I’ve been using DandyID which has a huge list of social sites and you plug in your profile address and it generates a list of what you’re subscribed to.

Friend Feed takes that one step further and generates an RSS Feed of all the things you do at those sites.  Here’s the link to my feed: http://friendfeed.com/stmaher.

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This will blow your mind!

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…but this is over the top. Adult Fans of Lego is 30 minutes and some of these people who live in their parent’s basement at 40 scare me.  But if you want to be more scared, check out my Brickshelf Gallery.

AFOL A Blocumentary from AFOL on Vimeo.

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Here are 10 Productivity apps I’ve been using for a while that I can’t live without.

1. Checkvist

I just switched from Google Tasks to Checkvist. What a great app. I liked Google Tasks because input was amazingly quick but it was meant to be a small app. Checkvist lets me create a much larger list and gives a lot more detail for each list. Read the rest of this entry »

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