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EdCamp Still Rules

  Looking Back at 10 years of EdCamps Oh how the time flies, EdCamp Madison is turning 10 this year!  It will be held Saturday, February 3rd at Sun Prairie West High School. Which can be found at 2850 Ironwood Drive in Sun Prairie Wisconsin from 8:30 am - 3:00 pm.  Get more information and register here: https://sites.google.com/sunprairieschools.org/edcampmadwi/home   I will always remember sitting in my first EdCamp opening session at the very first EdCamp Madison and having no clue what I was in for. So, I’d like to take this space to go over some of the basic rules of EdCamp. No One Will Pitch It for You EdCamps are unconferences. By this I mean that they have a blank slate of sessions for the day. There may be a few predetermined sessions, but ultimately the session topics are determined by attendees during the pitch & plan session that opens the day. If an idea gets pitched there will be a session on it. If a topic doesn’t get pitched, there won’t be a session on it. So, it i

Student Presentations in 360°



As we are wrapping up our personal learning projects, we were able to include a new option for presentation.  That is Thinglink VR.  This is the first time I've ever had my students work with Thinklink in the classroom and the VR aspect made it even better.

A handful of students choose this option and a couple completed products are linked below. Note, they are designed to be viewed with VR Googles such as Google Cardboard. So, if you try to view it in non-stereoscopic mode, the hotspots can't be viewed in their entirety. 

To view the images in all of their glory, you'll need a smartphone and a set of googles. Even if you don't have the googles you can follow these steps to view in stereoscopic display.  You just won't get the desired experience.














It was fairly simple to create. Students used Google Drawings to create the background image for the scene.  They then used Google Slides to create each of the individual slides to be each hotspot. As this was our first go around, we didn't worry about adding videos. I'll save that for the next time.  

The only tricky part was scaling the Drawing and Slides so they worked in the stereoscopic image. The background was scaled to 5376 x 2688 pixels in Google Drawings to give the maximum panoramic effect. The Hotspot Slides were scaled to 720 x 720 pixels. In stereoscopic mode, they need to be square to show all the info. The only downside is they won't be entirely displayed in non-stereoscopic mode.

Once students had a plan and all the pieces, the assembly is very straightforward. The background image was uploaded. Then, each slide was downloaded as an image and uploaded as a hotspot image.

Thinglink has a vast support center that can be found here.

I look forward to having students use this virtual space to design creative presentation spaces. I think Prezi was a great step towards rethinking presentations as an experiences.  I think Thinglink VR will be the next step in this evolution.  We just need to let students loose to design in these spaces.




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