Last month I blogged about a new product (then in beta) from Microsoft called Mouse Mischief.  This product allows multiple students to interact with a PowerPoint slide projected on the big screen in a classroom.  Each student needs his or her own wireless mouse to do so.  Each student has a unique cursor on the big screen, allowing them to respond to clicker-style multiple-choice questions embedded in PowerPoint slides.  Check out the video below.

As I noted in my earlier post, this system has a very significant flaw as a replacement for a “traditional” clicker system.  Since students can see how their peers are responding to questions, it’s impossible for students to respond independently.  That means that many students will likely wait to see how their peers respond before jumping on the bandwagon and selecting the most popular answer.

Mouse Mischief is now out of beta, and a colleague sent me a link to the above video.  Now that I’ve seen the promotional video, I’m starting to see more potential in Mouse Mischief.  Not as a replacement for clickers–my earlier concern about independent voting still stands–but as a way to allow students to interact with text and images shared with the class.  Imagine sharing a portion of reading with students and having them take turns highlighting quotes that support a particular argument, with each student discussing his or her quote with the class.  Or showing students a complex medical diagnostic image and having them take turns circling abnormalities and sharing possible causes for or effects of those abnormalities.

Given how the system works, having students respond simultaneously to questions doesn’t make much sense.  However, having students interact with text or images in sequence has some real potential.  There are other ways to implement these kinds of activities–having students take turns coming up to the instructor’s computer or interactive white board or having students use laptops to log in to the same Google Doc–but in some teaching contexts, Mouse Mischief might be a very practical option.

What do you think?  Do you see applications for this kind of tool in your classrooms?

Image: “Wireless Mouse” by Flickr user kengo / Creative Commons licensed

I was looking over my notes from the 2010 Health Professions Educational Research Symposium (HPERS) hosted back in January by Nova Southeastern University, and I was reminded of a couple of interesting points Jim Vanides of Hewlett-Packard made in his closing keynote.  Jim had shared several fascinating ways that educators receiving HP grants have been making use of tablet PCs in the classroom.  I had been familiar with ways in which laptops are often used in the classroom, but I hadn’t heard as much about uses for tablet PCs.

Jim described several examples in which the “digital ink” that tablets provide through their stylus interfaces played key educational roles.  For example, students in an engineering class can draw or design various diagrams on their tablet PCs, then send those to the instructor to be shared and discussed with the whole class.  Sure, students could prepare their diagrams before class for sharing, but sometimes having students work on “deliverables” during class–when the instructor and fellow students are around to provide feedback during the design process–is advantageous.

During the Q&A after Jim’s keynote, I asked him a question I’ve posed here on the blog several times: If students are submitting responses to free-response questions during class, how can an instructor process and use 20 or 30 or more student responses in a timely fashion during class?  With multiple-choice clicker questions, the bar chart is the perfect way to display the results.  How to handle free-response questions?

Jim made two very good points in response to my question:

1. Since humans process visual information very quickly, having students submit diagrams, drawings, photographs, and other visual responses means instructors can often make sense of dozens of student responses very quickly during class–more quickly than with textual responses.  As a big fan of using visual thinking tools in my work, I really liked this answer!  It also argues for using devices with touch interfaces, like tablets and smart phones, as part of classroom response systems used with open-ended questions.  (Jim also noted that in science, engineering, and mathematics, where people often think with pencils in hand, digital ink can be very useful.)
2. Instructors practicing the “usual” version of peer instruction, in which students respond to a clicker question on their own, then discuss it with peers, then vote again, can start processing student responses to open-ended questions during the peer discussion phase–while students are engaged in talking with each other.  This gives the instructor a little more time to make sense of student responses and decide how to discuss them with the class.  This is not unlike taking a “backchannel break” during class in which students brainstorm questions in small groups and submit them to the instructor via backchannel.  (I used this approach in a recent workshop on lecturing.)

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m very excited by the educational possibilities of having a class full of students with Web-enabled, app-enabled, touch-screen devices.  I was glad to hear a few new and very useful ideas on this topic from Jim at the HPERS Conference.  I think it’s often helpful to hear from people somewhat out of the usual academic circles I run in for great new ideas!

Image: “40+86 Tablet” by Flickr user bark

I was quoted this morning in “At Universities, Is Better Learning a Click Away?“, an Associated Press story on the future of classroom response systems by AP reporter Eric Gorski.  The story features Michael Dubson, who teaches physics with clickers at the University of Colorado-Boulder.  CU-Boulder, and its physics education research group in particular, has been very active in the world of clickers (including contributing to these great videos), and I was glad to hear Michael Dubson’s perspectives on the technology in the AP piece.

CU-Boulder is an i>clicker campus, and Dubson makes the case in the AP story that a simple, dedicated clicker device is preferable in most instances to more flexible systems based on smart phone apps.  Indeed, i>clicker devices have only six buttons–an on/off button and buttons labeled A, B, C, D, and E.  This is a very simple system, but, as inventor Tim Stelzer argued at the Louisville clicker conference back in 2008, multiple-choice questions with five answer choices work very well for the kinds of formative assessment and peer instruction many instructors use clickers to implement.

Gorski places me on the other side of a somewhat-artificial divide:

Derek Bruff, assistant director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching, said simple clickers are great at multiple choice questions. But he’s more excited about using smart phones, which allow students to ask questions of instructors, hold back-channel discussions with each other and respond in their own words.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m definitely excited by the possibilities of using smart phones as “super-clickers” or to facilitate backchannel discussion in the classroom.  It’s true that I’m more excited by smart-phone systems than I am by simple clickers like i>clicker, but that’s largely because I’ve been involved in teaching with clicker with several years and I’m eager to leverage that experience to consider new kinds of technology-facilitated classroom dynamics.  (For one thoughtful perspective on those potential dynamics, consider Sean Seepersad’s recent post on moving away from clickers.  I hope to blog about Sean’s post soon!)

I’ve spent plenty of time thinking about the pedagogy of multiple-choice questions (while writing my book, blogging about clickers here, and giving talks on the subject around the country), and I think the multiple-choice format is often underrated.  I even have an article coming out (soon, I hope!) titled, “Multiple-Choice Questions You Wouldn’t Put on a Test: Promoting Deep Learning with Clickers.”  So I definitely get where Michael Dubson is coming from: Five-answer multiple-choice clicker questions are incredibly useful in all kinds of courses.

All this to say that one of the principles I attempted to uphold when writing my book was that everyone’s teaching context is different–different students, different disciplines, different institutions, different teaching styles and experiences.  I’m interested in helping instructors think more intentionally about their teaching choices, exploring the pros and cons of choices both traditional and innovative.  So while I may be more excited myself about smart phone systems, I always encourage instructors to select technologies and teaching practices that make the most sense in their particular teaching contexts.

I’m glad for clickers to receive the attention of the Associated Press.  The story has been all over Twitter today, and I hope it makes its way into print and online newspapers across the country.  And I’m glad that I could help Eric Gorski out as he was researching this story.  Eric also contributed to a short video piece to accompany his article, and he blogged about the story on the AP’s Facebook page.

Thoughts on the AP story?

Image: “The Nabla System (Forgotten Seed)” by Flickr user Syntopia

Have you seen the new product (in beta) from Microsoft called Mouse Mischief?  I heard about it on Twitter a few weeks ago.  It’s an add-on to PowerPoint aimed squarely at the K12 market, but it’s of potential interest to those in higher education looking for alternatives to clickers.

To use Mouse Mischief as a classroom response system, a teacher embeds a special multiple-choice question slide in her PowerPoint presentation.  Each student in the classroom needs a mouse connected (wirelessly, no doubt) to the teacher’s computer.  When the question slide is shared with the class, each student sees a unique mouse cursor on the big screen.  They manipulate these cursors with their mice, using them to click on their answers to the question at hand.  The program then provides a bar chart showing the distribution of student responses.

I hear a lot about clicker alternatives that involve student cell phones or smart phones or laptops, but this is the first tool I’ve seen that uses mice as student input devices.  That’s a clever idea, but it has a very significant flaw.  Since the students can see their peers’ mouse cursors on the screen as they answer, students can’t answer independently!  This means that you’ll see the same lemming effect you see with hand-raising.  Once students start to figure out which cursors belong to the “smart kids,” they’ll just wait for those kids to answer and copy them.

Given this very significant flaw, I can’t really see how this tool would be useful.  It’s better than a show of hands, I guess, since it records student responses, allowing teachers to hold students accountable for their class participation.  That’s a good thing.  But the lack of independent responses is a real deal-breaker in my view.  What are your thoughts on Microsoft Mouse Mischief?

Here’s a nice follow-up to my previous post about backchannel use during live performances.  Over at Abilene Christian University, where all the students (more or less) have iPhones, a group of students were given extra credit for watching the recent State of the Union address by US President Barack Obama.  However, they didn’t just watch it; they responded to clicker questions asked by their instructor on-the-fly during the speech.  The students used their iPhones to respond to these questions, but any kind of classroom response system would do the trick for something like this.  This seems like a great way to use some student perspective questions to help students engage more meaningfully with a live broadcast of this nature. (You may recall that I mentioned some universities that did something similar during the 2008 presidential debates.)

ACU also thought ahead to video the evening!

I wanted to share some additional thoughts on Cliff Atkinson’s new book, The Backchannel, and its implications for higher education.  As I mentioned in my earlier post, the first chapter of the book is available online and provides a very clear introduction to the logistics and possibilities of the backchannel.  What might the backchannel look like in educational settings?  Here are a couple of examples.

“The Twitter Experiment,” a five-minute YouTube video, shows how UT-Dallas history professor Monica Rankin used Twitter to facilitate a backchannel discussion.  In her case, she had a somewhat large class that she broke into smaller discussion groups.  The students were encouraged to post their thoughts on Twitter during the small-group discussion time.  The Twitterstream was displayed on the big screen for the whole class to see.  This led to some “cross-fertilization” of small-group discussions as ideas generated by one group were read and discussed by other groups.  Dr. Rankin also had a TA monitor the backchannel, responding to student questions and surfacing important points for Dr. Rankin to discuss with the entire class from time to time during the class session.  For more details on Dr. Rankin’s use of Twitter, see my earlier post on this topic.

Purdue University has developed a system called Hotseat that facilitates backchannel discussion.  This system allows students to contribute to the backchannel in a variety of ways, including Twitter and Facebook.  The student contributes are typically displayed on a big screen for the entire class to see, and the instructor typically takes a “Hotseat break” of sorts every now and then to respond to the questions raised in the backchannel.  Students can comment on other students’ posts and they can “vote up” comments or questions their peers post so that instructors have an easier time identifying the most pressing topics.  The Purdue team shared their work on Hotseat at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative earlier today, and, according to Twitter user @eyb, who “live-tweeted” the presentation, students really liked the system.  They didn’t necessarily think it helped them learn better, but they liked it and they wanted their instructors to spend more time responding to the questions raised in the backchannel.

(I’ve been meaning to talk about Hotseat here on the blog for a while now.  Thanks to @eyb for some great reporting at ELI!  I feel I have a much better sense of the system now, technologically and pedagogically.)

What are some other ways that backchannel might function in educational settings?  Cliff Atkinson describes some common and uncommon uses of the backchannel in Chapter 3 of his book.  Here are my thoughts on how Atkinson’s uses might map over to educational settings:

• Notetaking: Students can take their notes during a class in the backchannel.  This provides an electronic (and thus searchable) set of notes for the student.  Moreover, students can read and use each other’s notes more easily.  You might even select two or three students each day to be official class note-takers, freeing other students up for more engagement in class.
• Sharing Resources: Students can also look online (or, call me crazy, in their textbooks) for information that supplements the lecture or class discussion.  It’s easy to share links in the backchannel thanks to all the URL shortening services, and students can be very good at finding useful and relevant information online.  And if a resource shared by a student isn’t useful or relevant, it creates an opportunity to discuss with students how to find and evaluate online information resources.
• Commenting: Students can also comment on the ideas being share or discussed in class.  Just providing a visible venue for student comments is likely to encourage more students to reflect actively during class.  Plus, students can read and respond to each others’ reflections.  Sure, students can contribute to online discussions after class, but there’s something exciting about having more students engage in discussions during class–more than just those who are bold enough and quick enough to contribute verbally.
• Amplifying: The Hotseat feature mentioned above that allows students to “vote up” peer comments they find important is an example of what Atkinson calls “amplifying what others are saying.”  On Twitter, this happens via retweeting: If a comment is retweeted frequently, then many people find it interesting enough to share.  Google Moderator is a free service that works similarly–students can post questions and others can vote them up or down.  This kind of feature is a great way to handle the problem I’ve identified here on the blog several times: It’s really hard for an instructor to follow and make sense of the backchannel during class given the open-ended nature of the comments.  Giving the students the ability to identify more or less relevant comments is one way to help with this.  (Monica Rankin’s use of a moderator–her TA–is another.)
• Asking Questions: I’ve put this a few spots down the list since I think it’s a more obvious use of the backchannel than some of the ones listed above.  Backchannel provides students an additional way to ask questions.  Students are frequently hesitant to ask questions in class for a variety of mostly social reasons–they don’t want to look “dumb” in front of their instructor or their peers.  Anonymous backchannel discussions make it extremely easy for these students to surface their questions.  Even when students are identified on the backchannel, having a venue where questions are encouraged is likely to make it easier for students to share questions.  And if the backchannel includes an amplification tool, then students can support each others’ question-asking very directly.
• Helping One Another: Keep in mind that there are several kinds of backchannel conversations, including student-to-student conversations.  When one student poses a question on the backchannel, another student might very well answer that question before the instructor can get to it.  This kind of peer instruction is a common use of clickers, and it can work well in the backchannel, too.
• Offering Suggestions: The backchannel can give students a voice in where a class discussion goes.  Students can suggest discussion topics or questions.  They can also suggest useful readings, activities, or topics for subsequent classes.  They can provide instructors with feedback on what’s working and what’s not from their perspective.  Many instructors have students complete a “minute paper” at the end of each class in which students identify the most important point of the day or ask a question.  The backchannel allows instructors to gather this kind of feedback whenever students are ready to share it during class.
• Building Community: Particularly in large classes, it can be hard for students to get to know more than just the few students they sit near.  Backchannel discussions can help students get to know each other in a variety of ways.  I would argue that it’s important for students to have avatars or icons attached to their backchannel posts, preferably photos of themselves.  Seeing someone’s face along with their comments and their name helps build actual, not just virtual community.
• Opening the Classroom: Some backchannels are private; that is, only the instructor and students can see or participate in the backchannel conversation.  Others, like Twitter, are public, allowing those outside the classroom to participate in the discussion.  This provides an opportunity to open the class discussion to those not currently enrolled in the course–students taking other courses, students who took the course in the past, academic experts at other institutions, and more.  These external people have the potential to learn from and contribute to the backchannel discussion.

That was fun thinking through these options!  You can have fun, too: What did I miss?  Comments or suggestions for the uses I’ve listed above?

Cliff Atkinson, author of Beyond Bullet Points, has a new book out, The Backchannel, from New Riders Press (publishers of Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen).  I’ve discussed the use of backchannel in the past, and I consider backchannel technology to be part of the more general category of classroom response systems.  I just finished reading The Backchannel, which focuses primarily on backchannel use in business and conference settings, and I wanted to share some thoughts on the book and what those of us in educational contexts might learn from it.

First, a little definitional work.  The term backchannel refers to three kinds of conversations that usually don’t occur in traditional one-to-many lectures or presentations.  I call backchannel type 1 the conversation that occurs among students or audience members.  This kind of backchannel has been around forever, but until the advent of laptops, netbooks, and smart phones, it was usually limited to whispering to your neighbor and passing notes.

I use backchannel type 2 to refer to the feedback that students or audience members provide to an instructor or presenter.  This, too, has been around forever, in the form of brief Q&A interchanges between the person at the podium and those in the seats, but now with services like Twitter and Hotseat, students and audience members can share their thoughts with instructors and presenters in very different ways.

There is a third kind of backchannel that’s distinctly different from types 1 and 2.  Traditionally, the only participants in a lecture or presentation were the people in the room at the time.  However, Twitter, blogs, and other social media tools allow conversations to extend beyond the physical room.  Presenters and audience members alike can share ideas, questions, and resources with people outside the room following the conversation virtually through social media.  And those virtual participants can interact with those in the room by sharing ideas and resources and asking questions of those in the room.

In his book, Atkinson describes very clearly the roles these three different kinds of backchannel can play in a lecture or presentation, illustrating his points with many examples of backchannel uses both successful and unsuccessful at recent national conferences.  The first chapter, available online, is a particularly easy-to-follow introduction to backchannel technology (Twitter, in particular) as well as questions, concerns, and opportunities that backchannel presents for those at the front of the room.  If you’re not sure what all the buzz about Twitter and backchannel is all about (and you’re still reading this post!), then I recommend you read through Atkinson’s first chapter.  It’s a great starting point for understanding the logistics and dynamics of backchannel.

Subsequent chapters provide a step-by-step guide to getting started with Twitter, explorations of the risks and rewards of backchannel, and Atkinson’s recommendations for making the most of backchannel before, during, and after a presentation, including advice for handling an “unruly” backchannel.  This last advice is accompanied by an examination of how social media expert Chris Brogan “tamed” a rough backchannel conversation at a conference last September.

As noted, Atkinson does a great job of explaining backchannel and its potential for good and for bad.  He also presents several useful “what would you do?” scenarios throughout the book, asking the readers to put themselves in the shoes of a particular presenter, moderator, or audience member.  The book is written in an informal, engaging style, with helpful images, screenshots, and diagrams throughout.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking and blogging about the backchannel, and I still took away several interesting, useful, practical tips from Atkinson’s book about managing backchannel conversations.

My primary criticism of Atkinson’s book is that he is a little too prescriptive with his advice.  I know that every instructor’s teaching context is different–different institution, different students, different topics, different teaching strength, and so on–so I tried in my book on teaching with clickers to describe a variety of options for teaching with clickers, along with pros and cons for those options, so that readers might decide for themselves what teaching choices to make.  Atkinson does a little of that in his book, but for the most part he tells the reader what they should do when leveraging the backchannel.  I respect his expertise on this subject, but there were several times while reading the book that I could easily imagine presenting or teaching contexts in which his recommendations would not work well.

I took about 15 pages of handwritten notes as I was reading The Backchannel, and I plan to write more about the book, particularly its implications for those of us educational settings.  In the meantime, I’ll end with two quotes from the book.  The first one is found on page 31 and addresses the educational context:

Some educators have been experimenting with using Twitter and other social media technologies to introduce a backchannel to the classroom, a practice that has generated intense criticism from those who see it as a threat to traditional lecture formats and established pedagogy.

The second one makes clear what Atkinson thinks about this debate and is one of several times Atkinson argues that the rise of the backchannel will fundamentally change the world of presentations:

The traditional lecture format, bullet point slides, and post-presentation Q&A session are becoming dinosaurs in this fast-moving world.  Each of these social tools has offered some efficiency or benefit that was appropriate for the time, but times are radically changing, and it is time for these methods to evolve into new ones that are a better fit for our needs.

What do you think?  With mobile computing identified in the 2010 Horizon Report as an emerging technology likely to have a significant impact on campuses in the next one or two years, what role do you see for backchannel in college and university teaching in the near future?

University of British Columbia professor of earth and ocean sciences Roland Stull recently gave his popular course on the science of storms a clicker makeover.  Persuaded by research from Carl Wieman’s Science Education Initiative at UBC, he now structures his class sessions around conceptual understanding clicker questions, using a version of the standard peer instruction technique.  Stull has his students read their textbook and respond to online quiz questions the night before class.  He has a TA analyze their answers for common areas of confusion, then adjusts his plans for class to address those areas.  Stull notes a variety of benefits to this teaching approach:

“It’s a lot more fun for me to teach the class,” Stull said in an interview in his UBC office. “Not only are the students interacting with themselves, but they are much more willing to ask me questions during class.”

The Georgia Straight article about Stull’s use of clickers quotes Alan Webb, a University of Waterloo accounting professor who published a study ostensibly showing that teaching with clickers actually decreases student participation in class.  However, as I noted in my review of this study, what Webb actually showed was that indicating the correct answer to a clicker questions prior to class discussion of the question decreases student participation.

At the University of Buffalo School of Dentistry, instructors John Maggio and Chester Gary have students respond to questions during class using their laptops as response devices.  The school requires students to have laptops so they can access electronic textbooks, so using “virtual clicker” software on student laptops makes sense.  Maggio finds that his students have rather short attention spans, so he uses clicker questions to keep them engaged during his 90-minute classes, asking as many as twelve questions per class.  The frequent questions and the fact that some are graded on accuracy (not just effort) keep his students from using their laptops to distract themselves.

Just like Roland Stull at UBC, John Maggio says that his clicker questions have increased participation in his class:

“They raise their hands much more often, they’re discussing things much more, they’re participating more than they ever have,” [Maggio] says, noting that his classes featured very little discussion or debate before the introduction of the audience-response technology.

One of the criticisms I often hear about teaching with clickers is that doing so gives shy students an excuse not to summon the courage to speak out in class.  These two news articles would indicate that’s not the case, after all.

As Abilene Christian University rolls through year two of its iPhone experiment, ProfHacker (my new favorite blog) features a post by Jason B. Jones asking, “What would it take to demonstrate the academic value of handheld computing?“  My answer: Research on the impact of smart phones on student engagement and student learning.  However, assessing the impact of smart phones on student learning is a bit like assessing the impact of chalkboards on student learning–it all depends on how the technology is used.  I would be interested in seeing research on the use of smart phones in the following ways:

1. “Super-clickers” allowing for multiple-choice as well as free-response questions during class
2. Tools for student-to-student communication and collaboration during class (e.g. backchannel discussion)
3. Portals to the world outside of the class (e.g. Google jockeys)
4. Mobile platforms for delivering content (lecture notes, videos, texts, etc.) anywhere students happen to be
5. Tools for collecting and analyzing data (interviews, photos, scientific data, etc.) while out in the field

Using mobile devices in any of these ways would certainly require a variety of teaching choices to be made, but these seem to be the most common proposed uses of mobile devices that I hear about.  Have I missed any big ones?

I’ll admit here that I still haven’t read Liz Kolb’s book Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education.  I’m betting she has some ideas that don’t fit into these five categories.

Update #1: I’ve been thinking about where “simple augmented reality” would fit in on this list.  While it involves the use of mobile devices in specific places outside the classroom, which sounds like #5, I think it’s more likely a more interactive example of #4, providing geo-aware content to students.

Update #2: Thanks to some comments in the #lrnchat Twitter stream on January 7, 2010, I’ve learned that some interpret the “mobile” in the term “mobile learning” to refer to the mobility of the students, not the computing devices.  By that definition, items #1, 2, and 3 wouldn’t count as mobile learning–unless the students were roaming around the classroom while participating in those activities.  I prefer the Abilene Christian University definition of mobile learning, which interprets the “mobile” as referring to the computing devices.  Their definition includes situations in which the students are mobile, too, leaving all of #1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 as aspects of mobile learning.

Note: I’ve had a couple of problems with this blog recently–the RSS feed stopped working and I haven’t had any time to post.  I’ve now fixed both problems.

I’m a huge fan of the World’s Technology Podcast from the BBC and PRI.  Clark Boyd puts together a great collection of technology stories from around the world every week–not the usual stories about the latest gadgets, but stories about how technology is impacting society and culture around the world.  Great stuff.

A couple of months back Clark ran a story on Chinese students using cell phones to cheat.  I tweeted Clark and suggested that he take a look at some of the positive ways teachers are using cell phones in the class room.  I recommended he take a look at what Greg Kulowiec has been doing in his 9th grade history classes in Massachusetts.  I’ve blogged about Greg’s use of Poll Everywhere, and Greg’s posted a great video showing how he uses this text-messaging-based response system to ask his students ethical questions about the Holocaust.

Well, Clark Boyd took me up on my recommendation and interviewed Greg about his use of technology in his classes.  The interview ran near the beginning of episode 256 of Clark’s podcast.  Greg talks about how he had his students use their cell phones during class to call people they knew and quiz them about the US Constitution and how he uses his students’ cell phones as part of a classroom response system to engage them during class.

Greg also describes a couple of ways to leverage his students’ cell phones’ camera functions.  He had his students take photos during a class trip to the New England Aquarium and send them to Greg’s Evernote account for later use in an Animoto video, for instance.  He also plans to have his students create their own Evernote accounts so they can take photos of references as they do research, send those photos to their Evernote accounts, and use Evernote’s tagging ability to organize their research notes.  Very cool stuff.  I think it’s time I signed up for an Evernote account.

Props to Clark Boyd for being open to listener suggestions and to Greg Kulowiec for being willing to share his innovative uses of technology.  You can follow Greg’s continuing experiments on his blog, The History 2.0 Classroom.