The genius of Apple

http://www.flickr.com/photos/syl2m/ / CC BY 2.0

Why come out with an iPod nano with video? Sounds like such a trivial addition to the product but with that single move Apple could be re-positioning itself in the world of education in a monumental way. I didn’t think of it at first, I thought was “what a waste of an announcement, that it was just a ploy to get Steve Jobs out there in front of people again.” But then I started talking to teachers, librarians, and instructional technology integrators in my school district and I began to see a totally different picture of the iPod nano. First, teachers have long seen the benefits of video in the classroom and on field trips. Traditionally that meant lugging the district or school video camera and let’s face it, even the little school video cameras are big. If your district is more forward thinking you may have one of the new smaller video cameras such as a Flip Video, the RCA Small Wonder or similar small video cameras. However, my district will not allow such video devices because of the proprietary software they require. The videos will not download properly without the software embedded in the camera, which our district blocks teachers from downloading and renders the device useless. Now enter the librarians (and music teachers) who already have convinced the tech gods to allow them to have iTunes. The precedent has been set, iTunes is allowed on district computers for music teachers to download songs and for librarians to borrow and download public library audio books. The interface used by the iPod nano is iTunes. Problem solved. And, will librarians have a use for video? As Sarah Palin has said more than once, “you bettcha”! The library catalogs in our district allow for students to create their own video and audio reviews of books and embed them right into the record of the book so others can see and hear it when they search the catalog. What a great way for students to leave their mark on their school by recommending books to their friends. What a great way to get other kids to read, with recommendations from their peers. Can you tell I am excited? Lastly, instructional technology integrators in our districts are very down in the mouth these days since there is little money in the technology budget. Think of the cost savings this little iPod nano with video will give school districts. They will need to buy only one device instead of the two they traditionally buy. One device that is similar in price to either of the other two devices they now buy… a two for one deal sounds good in my mind. One device that now does the work of two, brilliant. Apple had their thinking caps on for this one folks, it just may be a way for them to break back into the education market which at least in the case of my district has gone to the PC side exclusively. What about your district? PC or Apple? Can you see uses for this new iPod nano? Please comment below. I am looking forward to your thoughts and the dialogue.

Educational Origami

Want to start a new technology integration project in your classroom? Want to use a cool new web application tool to do the project but don’t know how? Well, does Andrew Churches have the answer for you! Andrew is from Auckland, New Zealand. He is a computer curriculum manager and the organizer of a wiki called educational origami. Educational Origami is one of the best wikis I have seen for incorporating Blooms Taxonomy into lessons using technology. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License, Educational Origami allows teachers to use all the information in the wiki and remix it to fit their curriculums simply by giving Andrew credit.

But not only that, Andrew wants to make it easy for teachers to learn how to use Technology so he has created PDF files that he calls “Starter Sheets” that are just that, sheets that will help you get started with any product you choose. He also has a blog on which he posts videos similar to the “Starter Sheets” that instruct on the use of the most common Web2.0 Applications. This blog post is an instructional video on how to use Voicethread. The blog post even allows you to download the video so that you can share it during staff development time. It downloads as a QuickTime Movie and already has Andrew's name on the opening screen, so it already gives him credit. You also hear his incredible accent.

All in all I am very happy to have come across Andrew Churches wiki. It will be quite helpful to me when I freeze up and decide not to use something with my students because I am afraid I don’t know how. It will give me that little boost of confidence I need to use technology tools when I know it will be a boost to my curriculum. I am also following Andrew on twitter, his twiter name is achurches.

Teacher Appreciation Week

If you are reading this, thank a teacher. This week, May 3-9, 2009, is Teacher Appreciation Week. What kind of teacher are you? Here is a great video embedded from youtube that personifies my hope that I never stop learning.

Here's to all the students you touch in your classroom or library every day, may you be the difference in their lives.

:-)

Are Formative Assessments "testing"?

Do you see "formative assessments" as testing? While I do believe that testing (standardized testing as we know it) is not necessarily beneficial for students I don’t see all assessments that way. When I do formative assessments, I tell my classes upfront that they will have a test but that it is not a test that they can pass or fail. I don’t like to use the word test either. I tell them we are doing a survey, we play games where correct information location gets a prize, and we do evaluations of websites (the students do the evaluations themselves, if they can do this they are a step ahead). Every once in a while I switch up the evaluation tools and have the students assess the tools themselves. Sometimes I tell them they are my guinea pigs and that I will be asking them to evaluate themselves and what they learned. During the research process I have them do a daily journal along with a checklist of where they are in the process. The journal part asks 3 things: What went right that day, what they are having problems with, and where do they go from here, their next step. I don’t see these assessments as the same thing as “testing.” Yet, it informs me of their progress. As a librarian I want to create lifelong learners and no standardized test is going to create a lifelong learner. But, a strategically placed “formative assessment” can be the spur that some students need to progress on the road toward lifelong learning.
Just my thoughts.

Sandra Day O'Connor makes Video Games?

When I was an undergrad at Syracuse University, my mentor, Bill Coplin taught me that it was not enough to get a good job, get married, and go on vacation. He instilled in me that I had to do more; give something back, I had to “do good.” He even wrote a book on the subject called, "How You Can Help," but I digress. Today, I read about someone much more important than I, who has already made a mark in history and has done a lot of good, doing even more. Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is continually thinking how to improve our democracy but I never thought I would hear her say the way to do that would be to play video games! Yep, according to a New York Times article in the Arts section, “Former Justice Promotes Web-Based Civics Lessons,” O’Connor is working with Syracuse’s number one nemesis Georgetown University and Arizona State University on a SecondLife type interface game called: Our Courts. The website is already up and is expected to go live this fall. I wonder if students get to choose or better yet, make their own avatar? Of course as a librarian, this game fits right into my goal of promoting lifelong learning and creating a well informed electorate. In the article O’Connor says, “The better educated our citizens are, the better equipped they will be to preserve the system of government we have. And we have to start with the education of our nation’s young people. Knowledge about our government is not handed down through the gene pool. Every generation has to learn it, and we have some work to do.” O’Connor went on to complain that a side effect of No Child Left Behind has been to squeeze out civics education leaving a big gap in our educated electorate. “…we can’t forget that the primary purpose of public schools in America has always been to help produce citizens who have the knowledge and the skills and the values to sustain our republic as a nation, our democratic form of government.” What better way to reach our young people than through the video games they love so well? I am already thinking of ways to introduce this website into my Constitution Day Celebration in September! I love technology and using it in my library as a tool has made a difference in the way students think of libraries. O’Connor agrees that technology and interactive media is the way to preserve our democracy, “interactive education can in some ways be more effective than traditional methods.” All I have to say is that I hope I have her energy to do good when I am her age. Maybe I will have to wait for my mentor to retire and get Syracuse University in the act and start making an interactive video game on The Constitution! How about it Bill?

What would you do with technology in school?

Infusing technology into the curriculum really paid off for two girls from Salford, England. The girls had a school project and it resulted in an actual product being created. Thanks to a twitter friend...Digimom... who saw it on CrunchGear and posted the article link to twitter this morning. The original article in the Daily Mail shows the red nail-polished hand of one girl and the happy face of another. The real twist on the polish comes when the polish is worn indoors; it changes to an almost clear state. The two girls came up with the idea fduring a school joint enterprise venture with a local university. It made good business sense because the girls already had a market, the girls in their school. The school bans makeup and they wanted to wear nail polish (or varnish as the British call it). Girl Power- just goes to show you what happens when we give students real world applications in schools!

Twitter in Education?

I may not be able to twitter with my elementary students but David Parry, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas makes a good argument for using it with college students. Check out his video here: http://chronicle.com/media/video/v54/i25/twitter/. Plus... he uses his iPhone for tweets just like I do... and I have to admit that is the best part of twitter... keeping up with my techy teacher twitter tweets on the road! (Can you tell we are learning alliteration in the library?) Speaking of iPhone... have you seen the SDK release video? Can't wait for June!

Is it Web 2.0 or are we turning into Educaterers?

I first heard the word Educaterers while watching the 1951 movie, “Goodbye, My Fancy”, staring Joan Crowford and Robert Young. Crowford is journalist Agatha Reed returning to her alma mater for homecoming, but if the truth be told, she never really graduated. Apparently she and Young, who is now the college president, were caught in a compromising position and Reed left before graduation rather than expose Young. Reed wants to rekindle the romance but finds out the college president has made a few too many compromises and has turned into an Educaterer, one who thinks students need puff and fluff rather than the true knowledge needed to make them think for themselves.

I have not seen this movie in years but its themes are constantly on my mind as I examine my own pedagogy. Recently I have been considering the term Educaterer because it seems that students are no longer taught to think for themselves. Do I prohibit them from doing so? Am I turning into an Educaterer? Am I giving them the tools they need to succeed? Am I demanding excellence? How do I tell if they are equipped for the future? Am I properly molding the next generation, the next electorate? What will be important for them to know when they graduate and go out into the market place for a job? I had a college dean tell me at a technology conference that I was not preparing students very well at all. He actually was speaking to everyone in the room but it made me start thinking.

He told of several students in an astronomy class not knowing the difference between a planet and a star and not knowing the names of the planets. Forget about Pluto being demoted, students are leaving our K-12 schools and don’t know the names of the planets in our solar system? Does that mean I am an Educaterer? I am not so sure. What I am thinking is that children are being bombarded with information. There is too much information out there that it is impossible for them to remember it all. Even Einstein didn’t remember everything. But he knew where to look to find the information he needed when he needed it. As a librarian, I can teach students where and how to find the information they need to know. I can get them so comfortable with searching that they can find information easily. I can make a difference in their lives by equipping them with technology tools and teaching them how to use them. Educaterers spoon-feed information. I am not an Educaterer. I am a librarian. The difference is that I show students where and how to find useful information and then teach them how to extract the good parts, so they have the information they need when they need it. I can also show them Web 2.0 tools that will enhance their education, not spoon-feeding but technology enhanced education. Finding and using information is not Educatering!

Digital Batteries getting more charged...

Special thanks to Kristin Hokanson of "The Connected Classroom," who asked Steve Dembo of Discovery Education, for his permission to stream his Tuesday keynote for those of us who only attended one day of the conference. A two hour delay morning allows lots of time for recharging batteries. Please check out Steve's keynote on UStream.TV.



I can't wait to check out Curricki.

Catching the Library Wave

More and more librarians are breaking out of the “shhhhhh” mold. As the medium changes librarians have to change. If we don’t we will loose out to the very things our students are embracing. Technology and all it’s trimmings is like an unopened present, waiting for librarians not to just unwrap it but to act like the child in the commercial who gets just the gift he or she wants! Get excited, technology is not the end of libraries; it is the beginning of a new world of librarianship. I am not a traditional librarian, I was a journalist first and research is in my veins. I enjoyed raising my children, only my stay-at-home playground was in Europe, lots of things to see, read, and learn about. I was still researching, just doing it through personal, primary sources. I was starting to think I was the only librarian who had to wait for the technology to catch up before I became one, but now in Ohio I see a kindred spirit. No, I was not a California surfer like Allan Pollchik, unless you count bus tours to Paris, and surfing the Internet. Pollchick like myself entered the library profession as a second or third career. He and I were always librarians; we just had to wait for the field of librarianship to catch up to us, to catch our wave!

Digital Divide or Wing Fitting?

Also on my blog reading roll today was “from now on: the education technology journal”. I have been struggling with the terms digital natives and digital newcomers or immigrants. I first heard this term back in 2005 during my library certification classes. I thought it was great at the time buy I have been feeling like the metaphor has been a little overextended of late. I could not put a finger on my uneasiness and then I read Jamie McKenzie’s article: “Digital Nativism
 Digital Delusions 
and Digital Deprivation.” Jamie is the editor of “from now on,” he’s been around education and technology for a while and he hits my frustration, the proverbial nail, right on the head. And I am not even talking about McKenzie’s tirade about video game learning. I think there is something to be said for such learning and we in education are differentiating instruction so much that there may be that group of students that will respond to video game learning, so why not try it? The part that I am especially concerned about is the isolation of children, which McKenzie uses to caption his picture.

“Childhood is shifting inside. Some fear the consequences of sensory deprivation over the long haul with excessive exposure to things digital. A Digital Waste Land is a poor substitute for the rich flavors, smells and touches of the real world. Leading psychologists have signaled their concern in reports like Fool's Gold. FaceBook, MySpace and Second Life are poor substitutes for face to face communities and the playground.”

I for one am the biggest proponent of using the technology we have in the classroom but I do not want it to isolate children. While I still promote technology, I do not want students sitting in front of a computer 24/7 with no human contact. And, if that human contact only comes at school with a teacher, then that is where children should be, in school with a physical, real person guiding them in their use of technology.

Mix this with David Warlick’s new pondering on his 2cents worth blog and we may have a real gem. Warlick likens teaching with Web 2.0 to giving students wings. There is a physical teacher or librarian there guiding them on their journey yet, they are then no longer navigating in a 2D world, adding wings gives a 3D quality to learning. He says we need to prepare our charges for an unpredictable future. He gives a sort of formula for this new learning, “I found this information in this way. This is how I decided that it was valuable. I mixed it with this other information to add this value.” I say “sort of formula” because I do not want to pretend that learning can be boiled down to any one formula. Our learners are diverse and it is my responsibility as a teacher/librarian to help students find the right size and balance for their wings so they can soar with eagles!

Livescribe Smartpen

Just catching up on my blog readings. Wow… was I surprised to read about this new pen on Bernie Dodge’s blog, the One Trick Pony. But then I realized that this was the same pen that was talked about at D5 and was supposed to be out by now. I do want one because if and when this new smartpen from livescribe comes out, it will be great. I am the old fashion type who likes to take notes by hand rather than type through a lecture. (As a former radio journalist, I also like to have my tape recorder going to catch those important quotes!) Last week in my graduate class I tried yet again to type my notes into Google notes during the lecture. I felt like I was disturbing the professor more than I was helping myself but using a pen and paper… I can do that... having that pen be a tape recorder... even better! Still, I was using Google notes in an attempt to cut down on the amount of paper I use. If this smartpen also could use both paper and some type of paperless tablet it may be more appealing to those of us trying to end the paper clutter and save a tree! To extend my pondering on “are bloggers reporters”, if this smartpen lives up to half its hype, bloggers and reporters alike will have no reason to misquote anyone!

A helpful tool or a way to cheat?

There has been some discussion on LM_Net recently about this website: http://www.ozline.com/electraguide/thesis.html. It calls itself a Thesis Builder and Online Outliner and promises it will help students draft a clear thesis statement for your persuasive essay. It then give students a set of directions to use the site.

I currently have 4th and 5th grade students who need to write persuasive essays. So, I took a look at Thesis Builder Online Outliner to see if it would be a useful organization tool to help them with their essays. First, I am not sure it is a good thing for elementary students that cannot type. But, when I worked at the high school I did have students who could have benefited from using this website to organize their essays. Keep in mind that I am not 100% convinced that it is a useful tool yet. I have used it two or three times using various arguments and it seems to give me nonsense back. I tried to put in an argument regarding episode 82 of Cranky Geeks. The geeks argued about bloggers being considered journalists and therefore entitled to protection under shield laws. The guest was Josh Wolf, a blogger who according to the blurb on the website “received the Longest Content-Related Jail Term of any Journalist in U.S. History--For Not Turning Over a Video” to police. I would love to use this podcast to spur a first amendment discussion in a high school government class. But I digress; when I put in the information into Thesis Builder, I got some nonsense back. They took the information I put into the blanks, and jumbled it around. There were double periods in some sentences and in one spot there was a comma at the beginning of a sentence. If students are looking for correct punctuation, and a way to cheat this site will not give it to them. But, if students are stuck for a thesis statement and want to organize and re-organize their thoughts, I think this is a great site. It is no different than giving students graphic organizers to help them plan out their papers. I think it is neat that it is online, it may appeal to those reluctant to use paper graphic organizers. It could be another tool for teachers to introduce to students. I don’t agree with those who think it is cheating because the students have to plug their own ideas into the blanks on the website. At most it helps them organize their thoughts. Oh, now that I am thinking of it, I wonder if the website wants students to put to leave out punctuation in the blank boxes and then it will put the punctuation in itself. I will have to try that next.
Anyway, if you have not listened to the John Dvorak Cranky Geek episode above, listen and then let me know if you think bloggers should be considered journalists… and if Sebastian is correct that journalism schools are a waste of time. It was a very lively discussion and I found myself talking back to my computer!

Tutorials For Free? Check out Teacher Tube!

There are a lot of free sites and free tutorials online that will help you learn technology. My idea is that if you give teachers the sites, they will take the time to learn the technology as long as someone is giving them some kind of credit for it. You know how us teachers are, we need to get credit for things we do on our own time. Most teachers would jump at the chance to learn technology if it was easy and they didn’t have to go anywhere or stay after school and they got professional development hours for it.

Maybe this is not the best example of a PowerPoint tutorial because there is no sound but it is free and posted online. If you are illiterate you could watch this video and get the general idea of how to play with the technology. Just click the link: http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=8a1b48987a18d831f633.

I also wanted to add this video by having you go to the site to introduce a fairly new tool for teachers. It is called Teacher Tube. I have been a stalker at this site since there were only 2 videos posted to it. It is a great place to look for teaching videos. I love the math raps. It would also be a great place to post videos that you use in your teaching. The best part is that at my school Teacher Tube is not blocked but You Tube is blocked. Check it out and see if this is true for your school.

Lets get out there and promote these free online tutorials to our teacher staffs. Librarians get techie and start posting some tutorials for your teachers to use and learn from. Want teachers to use the technology in your building? How about videotaping your students using the technology? Or have your students make “how to” videos for teachers to view at their leisure, and give teachers professional development hours for viewing them. What about the students? Give them extra credit, community service hours, or make it a graduation project. Remember in the world of technology, our students are the natives and we are the immigrants! Our students have a lot to teach us and as we are teaching them to be lifelong learners, we can set a good example and learn from them!

Are You Teaching With Technology?

I love teaching with technology. I look for interesting ways to bring technology into my library. But, I must admit I have not used all of the technologies talked about in this video... let alone taught with them. Watch and think how you will introduce a new technology into your classroom before June... the year is almost over don't wait! Scared? Don't know how to use the technology your school district provides? Maybe one of your students is already using this technology and can help!
:-)