College of Education Laptop Initiative

Welcome to the homepage for the USF College of Education Laptop Initiative. Please check here for news, links, resources, and software updates for students and faculty involved with the Initiative. Click the About link for an overview of this project.

Laptop Lounge Scheduled Workshops

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What's New

Social Studies and Science in 3-D

Looking for ideas to capture the interest and imagination of your students? Consider 3-D images online!

FCIT offers hundreds of red/blue 3-D images on its Exploring Florida website. These are 19th and early 20th century stereoview photographs that have been converted to red/blue 3-D images. They depict many aspects of life in Florida around the turn of the previous century.

You can also find great 3-D content at the University of Delaware's biology department, where you can view pictures taken with an electron microscope of body cells. For views of a different landscape, Hazy Hills offers 3-D images of photographs taken by NASA's Mars rovers.

If you are interested in borrowing a classroom set of 3-D glasses to use for a student project, please inquire at the Laptop Lounge!

Links:
Historic Florida in 3-D
Human cell images
Hazy Hills/NASA Mars images
FAQ's on 3-D
Wikipedia on anaglyphs

Student Profile: Allison Papke - iPods in the Classroom

Allison Papke implemented this project for her Level 3 practicum in special education at John Long Middle School in Pasco County. This project demonstrates how iPods can be used to create an individualized testing experience for students. Allison's work was inspired by the innovative practices of educators at Louisa-Muscatine Elementary in Letts, Iowa. For more information about the Louisa-Muscatine iPod Project, please visit their website.

Before Allison's iPod project, the special education students in her eigth grade social studies class were pulled out of class and had the tests read to them. Using the Notes feature of the iPods, Allison created an interactive experience that allowed the students to listen to the test questions at their own pace. The students could also repeat questions as many times as needed, and since they were listening to the questions on an iPod they did not have to be pulled out of the room and were able to take the test with the rest of their classmates. The iPod version of the test included text to accompany the audio so that students could read the test questions as they listened to them.

The iPods Allison used were provided by the Laptop Initiative, which also helped her record and edit the test questions using a new sound booth available in the Laptop Lounge. If you have a high speed connection, you can also download a larger version of the video (14.3 MB) and watch it in a separate window.

• Read Oracle article about this project.
• Other Profiles ...

Laptop Lounge

The Laptop Lounge is located in EDU 252. Throughout the year, training and special events are held there for students and faculty involved in the laptop initiative.

The Laptop Lounge calendar is online! Click here to view the calendar in your web browser. Click on the appropriate button below to subscribe to the calendar:

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- For RSS readers.

Upcoming training sessions will include iMovie, iPhoto, .mac, podcasting, iTunes, Garageband, iCal, and OS X 10.4.

Contact

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about the Laptop Initiative or the Laptop Lounge, please email James Welsh. You can also email him to schedule a workshop.

For technical support questions, you can use the support email and we will try to get back to you with an answer within 24 hours. If you have any suggestions or comments about this website, please email Luis Perez.