Two of the classes I currently teach are BYOL (bring your own laptop). The other three classes are totally online. So, I suppose all of my current students rely almost exclusively on their own personal devices. I believe this empowers my students, preservice educators, to become more technologically competent. They need to personally invest in their own professional development and realize the potential of their own devices before they'll effectively incorporate technology into their own teaching.
Thanks to one of my students, Lindsey, who posted the above video to her own blog recently.
It's easy to forget just how much teachers shape the moral character of their students. Today, Larry Cuban posted his Thoughts on Teaching, a look back at his commencement speech from 2001 in which he reflected on the teaching profession, calls for reform, and the requisite need for teachers to provide both intellectual and moral attentiveness.
Moral attentiveness means to concentrate on helping students grow as persons in grace and sensitivity, becoming more rather than less thoughtful about ideas, becoming more rather than less respectful of others’ views, and becoming more rather than less responsible for reducing social injustice. Questions of what is fair, right, and just arise constantly in classrooms; students learn moral sensibilities from how their teachers answer those questions….
I believe teaching and learning are inherently social and that much of what we learn from each other is consequential–the result of what happens peripherally to any core subject area. All teachers bare an enormous responsibility for modeling so many things beyond their subject area–the ethical use of media and technology, digital citizenry, inquiry, critical thinking, collaboration, respect... For good or bad, students learn more from their cumulative experience at school than from any one teacher or class. Likewise, teachers learn a great deal from and are shaped themselves by their cumulative experience with students over the years.
Cuban's full blog post is a terrific reminder of the art of teaching, but Scott McLeod took this one step further in his own post today, Blogging v. Teaching, suggesting that teaching and blogging are natural extensions of one another. What a great way for teachers to think about how and why they should embrace technology and Web 2.0 social media!
Performance pay for teachers based largely on test scores = inequality and strong incentive for drill & (s)kill (teach to the test). We should not be discouraging risk taking by teachers. To the contrary, we should be encouraging innovative teaching and learning methods.
We need to do whatever we can to introduce more risk-taking, experimentation, and use of technology in schools. We should expect some failures, applaud those who fail in pursuit of bold dreams, and help them get up to try again.
Our schools are in trouble, and we need to do a better job of preparing students for their futures. I'm not opposed to performance pay for teachers. I'm opposed to the simplistic idea that we can measure teacher performance based largely on students' standardized test scores. That's how the general public and too many politicians seem to interpret it. Doing so completely ignores the realities of socioeconomic and demographic disparities between schools, not to mention individual motivational factors. What incentivises students (or their families) to perform well on those standardized tests? What incentivises a good teacher to work in an inner-city, impoverished, or otherwise struggling school?
Tying salaries to arbitrary test scores will encourage teachers to focus less on children and more on tests. Let's come up with more sophisticated and accurate ways to measure how well teachers teach and students learn.
A November 2010 report describes the affects of new media and mobile technologies on young children and their families. The report, Learning: Is there an app for that?, touts the educational benefits of well-designed mobile apps for preschoolers. It also cites the reality of preschoolers using mobile devices--often, their parent's device passed to them in the backseat, a phenomenon labeled the "pass-back" effect. I'm familiar with the practice.
This Tech & Learning article summarizes the findings of the report and provides additional information. For example, a 2009 content analysis of the iTunes App Store (education section) revealed that 60% of the top-selling paid applications targeted toddlers and preschoolers.
When I upgraded my smartphone recently, I removed the sim card from my old iPhone and Magda set it up for Lucy to use as an iPod Touch. When I commented about this recently in a backchannel during class, one of our students (future teacher) asked what does a 3-year old need with an iPod? Well, Lucy loves to...
Take pictures--even photo essays of sorts of her dolls and environment.
Swipe thru pictures she has taken and also of our family and friends
Watch movies--home movies from our Flip camera, episodes of her favorite shows, movies downloaded from YouTube (her channel and others)
Record and listen to herself singing songs--sometimes to recall the melody of a song to begin singing it.
Listen to music
Play--some apps support cognitive development while others build fine motor skills (psychomotor) or appeal to her emotionally (affective domain).
Explore. She's just curious to figure out what the device can do. I believe this is particularly important, because she is developing a fluency with new interfaces and input devices (gestures, voice recognition, etc.).
Now, we just need to mount one of these interactive displays on the wall in her preschool classroom!
Update:
Lucy's teacher, Donna, just directed me to this related Sesame Street video. :-)
Thanks to a tweet from Stephen Ransom, I just discovered Google Reader Play. It displays the RSS feeds you've subscribed to via Google Reader in a nice slide show format, and it encourages you to star, like, or share the things that catch your eye. You can trigger it either by clicking the link above or choosing "View in Reader Play" from the folder settings as pictured here.
The annual Iowa Technology & Education Connection conference (Twitter hashtag #itec10) is underway! To keep up with the events and dialogue, I've created this CIL Ticker. Join the conversation! To add comments, click the icons below to sign-in with your Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace account. Or just include #itec10 with your tweets during (and after) the conference.
Well, here's a creative solution. Don't have that paper done yet? Buy yourself some extra time by submitting a corrupted file to your teacher. I just discovered the Document Corrupter web site via the Tech :-) Happy blog where Keith Ferrell points out the humorous misspelling of "corrupted" on the site. There's even a shuffle option to "make it harder for tech-savvy teachers to recover the file"--well done, slackers.
Of course, I had to try it. Sure enough, attempting to open the corrupted file inexplicably crashes my copy of Word, though it opens fine with Text Edit. So, if any of my students get any ideas--forget it. I'm on to you!
See that listen now button above each post? Dr. Z turned me on to a very cool text-to-speech service he recently added to drzreflects.com (take a drink).
Odiogo creates a free audio podcast from RSS feeds. It's super easy to install. Just sign-up by providing your email and blog address then follow a few simple steps customized for Blogger, TypePad, or other blog services. I really expected it to be at least a bit more complicated. It wasn't. Odiogo installs a widget alongside your blog layout so people can subscribe to the content as an audio podcast, and it adds a "listen now" button above each post (old and new). Voila! Done.
The quality of the synthesized voice is impressive. It seems to correctly pronounce Diigo (not quite so good with Magda, however). It speaks the abbreviated letters C S T as Central Standard Time. It even announces the beginning and end of quotes (not just in quotation marks but those formatted with the HTML blockquote tag). Listeners using iTunes or an iPod can speed up or slow down the playback to suit their listening preferences. Also, Odiogo provides download statistics, so you can discover how many people are listening to your blog this way.
Scientists and engineers once believed we'd be having regular conversations with our computers by now. It's proven to be a bit more difficult than they expected. There are, however, some impressive speech recognition and voice-operated features in today's cars and mobile phones. There are even some intriguing voice translation apps for iPhones and Android devices. Though text-to-speech (TTS) has been around for quite a while, the quality of synthesized human voices has gotten noticeably better in recent years. Web 2.0 continues to deliver in this area too. Check out Voki and YakiToMe as examples.
The 1988 article by Jim Watson entitled Database Activities in a One-Computer Classroom began...
Students who leave school with just a set of facts will be ill-prepared for a world in which they will change careers 6-10 times. Students need to know how to get the facts and how to use them well.
Pretty much the same language used 22 years later to get educators to change the way our kids learn at school.
Magda and I are presenting at the IACON Conference on the topic of using backchannels to support learning activities in both traditional and distance learning environments. Many of our resources can be found in my Diigo bookmarks. We hope you'll join the conversation below beginning at 2:50 PM CST.
Check out this stop motion video created by 16-yr old Mukund Martin. It's comprised of more than 1500 images!
And this video by two Mid-Prairie Tech Club students.
Today's technology fair was one of three regional events in Iowa and showcased 31 projects created by K-12 students in Eastern Iowa. Two projects earned purple ribbons, and those students are now invited to share their work with educators and administrators from around the state at the annual ITEC Conference in October.
Sadly, Ning just announced that they've cut over 40% of their staff and are discontinuing their free product. Existing free networks will have to start paying or migrate to another service. It's difficult to imagine migrating content from a Ning site to something else and how that could be anything other than copy and paste. However, parts of a Ning site could be ported to other services. For example, Posterous committed to developing a Ning blog importer.
It's unfortunate that K-12 education customers won't be able to continue using Ning for free. Educators have flocked to Ning in the past couple of years. Many teachers have built social networks to support learning activities, and for most it's a good alternative to using Facebook at school. Ning's troubles are going to impact higher education too, though not to the extent that it could derail innovative efforts in K-12 education.
Web 2.0 is a double-edged sword for schools. Educators flock to free tools for good reason ($$$), but they question how long those services will be around. To what extent should they commit their time and energies to innovative web-based services that could disappear or start charging money tomorrow? Henry Thiele argues that we should always have an exit strategy planned for the tools we use. That's easier said than done--innovation in teaching and learning typically stems from the creativity and ambition of a classroom teacher, not the strategic planning of a technology coordinator or district administrator.
To most of us, Ning seemed well established and their support to K-12 education has been exemplary. Hopefully, even in this very challenging time for the company, they'll find a way to continue supporting schools for free. On the other hand, maybe it's time for school districts who are adopting Ning on a large scale to start supporting the company too.
Iowa Public Television recently interviewed John Carver, superintendent of Van Meter schools (one of the 15 Iowa districts with a 1:1 laptop program) and Judy Jeffrey, director of the Iowa Department of Education. The 16-min video is online at: http://www.iptv.org/video/detail.cfm/7427/tij_20100401_323_clip_2
Topics addressed:
Growing number of 1:1 schools in Iowa (currently 15, projected to be 30-40 next year)
Real time collaboration, better comments, autofill and formula bar in spreadsheets, faster performance, standalone drawings. Awesome improvements announced for Google Docs!
Second Life just became way more useful! Viewer 2 uses WebKit, making it easy for content creators to rely on Flash and other web browser plug-ins to display dynamic and interactive content from the web in world. This is really exciting!
Imagine the possibilities for working with email, EtherPad, Google Docs, Wikis, You Tube and other typical Web 2.0 tools within the immersive environments of Second LIfe!
It began innocently enough--Lucy was trying to play with mommy's laptop, I thought maybe she'd like to see some pretty pictures on the computer, and I'd been meaning to check out the latest SecondLife viewer (I haven't been using SL much at all lately). Together, we arrived in Iowa (virtual Iowa) to see what's new at Dr. Z's place in world. A few minutes later, my 2.5 year old daughter had figured out how to walk, turn and fly in a virtual world. What just happened?
I realized that I had just witnessed something remarkable (I think). I had observed how a digital native makes sense out of a virtual world--a totally new and different environment. In a span of about 15-20 minutes she had discovered how to navigate this virtual world--how to walk, turn and fly. She expressed real emotion (humor, curiosity, frustration, reward, and even a bit of fear that she was up too high or going to get in the water). Through trial and error, she very quickly learned how to manipulate the avatar on the screen and make him not only walk about in open areas but travel in and out of buildings. And she wanted more!
Amazing (I think). Watch... (and listen)...
Afterward (about 30 min), I put Lucy down for her nap and my head filled with questions...
Am I a horrible father?
Is there anything very novel about this? Is it really much different than watching a child learn how to use a remote control car?
Will Lucy think she can fly now? Will she try to jump off a building or something?
If she can do this at 2.5 years old, what will she be capable of (and what will she expect from media and technology) when she is 5, 10, or 15 years old?
How much will she remember tomorrow? She had no trouble remembering that the E key made the avatar fly and the C key made him land. That's pretty abstract. Will she go right back to those keys the next time we play in Second Life?
Did I just violate SL's terms of use?
There's a Second Life Teen Grid. Should there be a Baby Grid? Or do WebKinz and Club Penguin have that covered?
What would my students think of this? (maybe they'll blog about it)
Posts
