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May 10, 2008

Saga of the Wiimote Whiteboard

Been having a good time this week really being a geek again!

My project has been to make my own Wii Whiteboard as developed originally by Johnny Lee of Carnegie Mellon and featured at the 2008 TED conference. This let's you use your $40 Wiimote, a homemade <$10 IR Lightpen, and any surface in place of a commercial $1000+ whiteboard system. You bring the computer and the projector and here's the rest of the story.

The basic idea here is to use the Wiimote's infrared camera to point at an infrared light source and relay that information back to the computer via Bluetooth. As with so many other projects, the Wiimote projects have had most of their development on the Windows side and there are many variants of the software around the web. Although there are fewer choices, the ones I found did the job just fine.

So, what's needed.

First, you need to connect your Wiimote to your computer via Bluetooth. On the Mac, that deed is done quite simply through the System Preferences. Fire up the Blootooth control panel and add the Wiimote by pressing both the 1 and 2 buttons simultaneously when it's time to have the device discovered.

Second, let's just try to use the Wiimote as a remote mouse. For this task, the best software I found was Darwiin Remote. Again, a few little tricks. Although the directions tell you to press the software's "Find Remote" button and then the Wiimote's 1 and 2 buttons simultaneously, I found it worked more reliably if you do it the other way around. So, press 1 and 2 and your 4 LEDs will be flashing. Press the "Find Remote" button and you get confirmation that the Wiimote is all hooked up.

One more thing to take care of here. You'll need to open the Darwiin Remote buttons and define the left click and right click. I used the A and B buttons since that felt most natural.

You could stop right here and have a remote mouse and amaze your friends! But let's get to the really interesting stuff!

Third, you'll need an Infrared Lightpen to turn the whole setup into an interactive whiteboard. The complete directions can be found on Johnny Lee's site but there are variations all over the place. The best directions I found were on Youtube. This will give you a good grounding in the electronics, even if you are as much of a novice as me! This other Youtube video gives a simpler version, but you need to find the right pen. I found it useful for the closeup of the diode.

Coolcatteacher, Vicki Davis, blogged about this and found a nice Flickr image. Here's my first attempt. (I know...but it works!)

Fourth, you need the software to turn that funky IR pen into a true Interactive Whiteboard tool. That's the Wiimote Whiteboard software. In this case, the Mac version. The simplest way to get this running is to press the 1 and 2 buttons on your Wiimote and then launch the software. You'll now be able to calibrate the pen and from there it can be used as a your Whiteboard mouse complete with left and right mouse buttons.

The biggest hurdles from here are tuning your setup of the projector, screen and Wiimote considering all our options.

For an educator's journey through all of this, you can read this post from Tom Sextro, the Technology Director for Holton USD 336, who is using these in the classroom. He does a great job of chronicling their journey.

Okay, it's not exactly simple, but it's $50 and a few hours or $1500. And, it's fun!

Posted by Pat on 8:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 18, 2007

Hats Off to Delaware Students Who "Rocked Our World"

Today I got a chance to really explore the contribution that the kids from Cape Henlopen school district made to this project. You can start your exploration at the home page. Then check out the Family Night video where the kids participated in an international chat.

Their entry into this world was a video that is now posted on Teachertube.com. Although there are several hits on a search for "horseshoe crab at YouTube, this is the only one at TeacherTube.

Bravo to all involved!!

Posted by Pat on 2:50 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 16, 2007

Magic Pictures

I've been preparing for a session on organizing digital media for use in classes.  One of the things I've been struggling with is how to convince teachers that it's worthwhile to tag any of their content.  It's really taken me almost a year to figure out the best way for me to use my del.icio.us account.  The power of that service is all in tagging. I've also used Flickr extensively for a by searching on various tags and organizing slideshows or collections with that tool.

This week I came across PhotoSynth by Microsoft, which aggregates photos to create a seamless whole picture.  This is still in beta, but it gives a good picture of how this is going to get continue to become more useful. Right now the demos are using photos taken by one individual or a small team (gotta make the demo look good). But the longer vision of this is to enable users to stitch together their photos based on tags. Or better yet, use the Flickr tags of numerous people to build these 3D views.

From where I sit, this looks like more of the world getting flat.  Last summer, when AOL released data on all their searches, it was disturbing to see how quickly the little one or two word phrases that we typed in can be aggregated to give a snapshot of our whole identity.  That's the dark side.  Finding a way to aggregate those little bits of data and create a larger common consciousness is much more powerful and exciting. We do that intentionally at Wikipedia and now we might begin to see it happen more automatically.

Posted by Pat on 12:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 10, 2007

Where was Pat?

At the beginning of June, I took a trip to Europe for the first time. Now, I'm finally getting my photos organized because I'm doing a session on digital images and education. Here are my slides as organized in Picassa, uploaded to my Picassa Web Album, and turned into a slide show with code from Picassa Web albums.

Posted by Pat on 5:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 3, 2007

IPod or No IPod?

The month of June brought two stories that are hard to hold in your head at the same time.

Schools banning iPods to beat cheaters

From eSchool News staff and wire service reports

June 1, 2007—

Banning baseball caps during tests was obvious--students were writing the answers under the brim. Then, schools started banning cell phones, realizing students could text-message the answers to each other. Now, schools across the country are targeting digital media players as a potential cheating device.

Devices such as iPods and Zunes can be hidden under clothing, with just an earbud and a wire snaking behind an ear and into a shirt collar to give them away, school officials say. ...

Prepare for the SAT Test, or Play With Your iPod? Have It Both Ways

By MARIA ASPAN

Published: June 25, 2007

High school students cramming for the SAT test have traditionally relied on thick books full of practice exams, sharpened No. 2 pencils and intensive tutoring sessions. But now a traditional test preparation company is offering some options for the iPod generation. ...

To me, all of this underlines the fact that we, as educators, really need to be doing things differently within our schools, while the rest of the world changes so much around us.

Posted by Pat on 11:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 9, 2007

Rediscovered: Poor Man's Multimedia

While working on a presentation about "multimedia assignments" for the UD Winter Faculty Institute, I revisited some tools I had played with before. Both of them have added features and just generally got better.

First is BubbleShare. This is an online version of PhotoStory 3 or the narrated slide show features of iMovie. You can upload images and then add narration right in the web site. This saves you the trouble of getting the software and of learning how to publish.

Second is EyeSpot. This is the online version of iMovie. You can upload video clips and then edit them together in real time. The interface on this has made great strides allowing you to reorder clips and edit them, add transitions and titles, and then mix your video for publication right on the site. You can even pull from the clip libraries that are available on the site.

For people who want to get into digital storytelling and publishing to the web, these sites are certainly a no muss - no full way to get started.

Posted by Pat on 1:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack