• Tech In Education, Where Do You Start?

    25Apr
    Categories: future, resources, teaching Comments: 0

    Supervising a laptop program, I get to meet with interesting people from all over the world who come to see what we do. We talk about hardware/software, professional development, computer science and more. But if you were starting an educational technology program, where would you start?

    I would start with decision-makers. If your school is top-down, then your admins need to believe. If you school is more faculty-centered, I would start with the faculty leaders. No matter what, if those who direct the school are not involved, progress is even more difficult than it need be. A bottom-up approach can be tough (although not impossible – viva la revolución de la tecnología!).

    That being said, the training for these folks is pedagogical, not technical. Sure you can train people on software, but if they don’t know why, then what’s the point? Educators’ strength is their ability to see possibilities for their students. It is also their weakness, because their vision tends to be within their comfort zone. The vision push I am most interested in is project based learning. Computers, the Internet, and all the other tech tools work best when students have time to push the limits over an extended period of time. 30 minutes at the end of class surfing a website does not a laptop program make. Two weeks grappling over the question “who writes history,” now we’re talking…Technical tools allow students to spend time analyzing, struggling, interpreting, communicating all in the name of understanding. There is no test on which to recall random facts, but rather a project to demonstrate deeper understanding.

    Some of my favorite project based learning (PBL) resources include: this video of Seymour Papert talking about PBL, George Lucas Educational Foundation’s Edutopia magazine’s PBL site, 4teachers.org’s PBL checklists, the PBL Design and Invention Center, and for some thought-provoking reading, try David Warlick on breaking the standard mold of education or the Department of Education report, Technology and Education Reform (ch. 8).

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  • Do You Like The Internet? You Better Fight To Keep It

    20Apr
    Categories: future, law Comments: 0

    People/companies can develop so much great stuff on the Internet because of one major feature of the ‘Net, called the end to end principle. All this means is that the Internet connects two ends together. It is nothing more than a pipe that sends information back and forth. It is the machines on the end that have all the brains (computers, routers, etc). The network itself is brainless. This is great, it means innovators can send whatever they want through the pipes, and a long as your computer can accept it, it works.

    If you have Skype on your computer, you and I can have a free voice conversation or even video conference. If you have a web browser like Firefox, you can connect to a website like the one you are looking at now. There is nothing between you and me that can block our our communication – again, the network knows nothing more than passing information.

    Some savvy legislators are trying to pass laws that protect this end to end principle. However, there is one major group who is objecting. Can you guess who that might be? Well, the Internet Service Providers of course. They are arguing that they should be able to control your bandwith. They want to decide what data going through the pipes is important and what is not. So, when a company like Vonage lets you make unlimited phone calls on the cheap using the Internet, Verizon might decide to make Vonage’s traffic slow way down, to a point where it is unusable. Why? Because it competes with their phone lines and their voice over IP offerings.

    We as educators, as technologists or just as Internet users cannot allow this to happen. Please consider joining MoveOn.org’s campaign to protect Internet Neutrality (as it has been dubbed). Spread the word, and let people know that the power of the Internet is worth protecting. We cannot allow corporations to decide for us how the Internet will be used. If you don’t want to join MoveOn, please contact your representative directly.

    If you want to learn more about what could happen to the world if this is not protected, read the amazing Lawrence Lessig The Future of Ideas : The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World.

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  • How Can Teachers Help Students "Fail?"

    16Apr
    Categories: teaching Comments: 0

    Creating successful students requires that we understand the entire system that affects our students. The Fifth Discipline (Peter M. Senge), is a book which discusses how systems thinking is the only real way to create change, build growth and develop sustainability for an organization, individual or other group. The book does a brilliant job of explaining how one goes about viewing and changing systems.

    self-fullfilling_prophecy One of the simplest examples sheds light on how we as teachers often contribute to a student’s decline by missing the system. A shy new, student does poorly in class (in fact, distracted by difficult home life). The teacher believes the student is unmotivated. The teacher begins to pay less attention to the student, and student pulls further away from schoolwork. The home life becomes more difficult as a result. This student is caught in a reinforcing feedback loop, and is in fact a victim of a self-fulfilling prophecy by the teacher (see diagram).

    Thus, students are unintentionally “tracked” into a high self-image of their abilities, where they get personal attention, or a low self-image, where their poor class work is reinforced in an ever worsening spiral. (p. 80-81)

    I regularly hear teachers and administrators (at various schools) talk about how a student won’t make it next year, yet the student will be attending the same school next year. How does our predefined judgement affect that student? Are we setting up the self-fulfilling prophecy? The end of the year often has conversations like, “see, I told you he wouldn’t make it.” Are we in fact to blame? Short answer, sometimes. We must try to shift systems by exerting small changes that cause situations to snowball in a positive direction rather than a negative one.

    Educators probably also want to grab Senge’s Schools That Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents, and Everyone Who Cares About Education.
    Professor Meier class at Teachers College

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  • Want A Laptop Program In Your School? Careful What You Wish For

    09Apr
    Categories: hardware Comments: 0

    As a technology director in a laptop school people contact me from all over the world to ask questions about our program. Our school was a very early program (1997), and remains one of only a few girls schools with a laptop program.

    While you are thinking about all the glamorous things that can come out of a laptop program, let me give you some of the least glamorous tech support cases I have seen:

    • Keyboard not working. Remove the keyboard and find some fake fingernails underneath. Reattached and keyboard worked normally.
    • Cat tears apart student laptop by ripping all the keys out and scratching up the entire inner case. Obviously needs a new keyboard, but the cat’s hair is inside everything.
    • Student eating sushi, working with laptop – you can imagine, but soy sauce on a motherboard just doesn’t work.
    • Repeat example above with : water, coke, diet coke and iced tea. (students and teachers)
    • Student takes out emotional frustration on laptop with expired warranty – family had to buy a new one, that hurts.
    • Just last week: sheepish student comes to tell me that someone threw up on her laptop! Everything corroded on the inside. Thank goodness for Dell Complete Care warranty.

    These are all true, so if you are thinking about a laptop program at your school, buyer beware. As someone in my office noted, what kind of laptop party was that kid at anyway?

    Technology in schools creates amazing opportunities for learning, but the practical is, well, just that…practical.

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  • How Did I Get Into Blogging?

    06Apr
    Categories: news, resources, teaching Comments: 0

    Two words: Will Richardson

    RSS: The New Killer App for Educators at the 2004 NYSAIS Conference for IT Managers, and he just killed. I saw all the potential he was talking about and more. He got me totally hooked to Bloglines, a free web-based RSS reader. Right away I started a blog, and right away it crashed and burned. I learned how hard it was to write for public consumption, and how essential a purpose was. Jeff Utrecht talked about this today in his post, myspace and xanga not so cool. He argues that kids are leaving myspace and xanga because they couldn’t keep up with the blogs. The pressure to write, without a purpose, left them unmotivated. The returned to the land of instant messenger. I understand this, because I have been there.

    The Washington Post wrote an article about blogging in Will’s school (now former school) in New Jersey. The piece was slightly light on substance, so if you can, go and hear Will speak in person, or read his book. His calendar is on the right side of his website, and he is all over the place. Will has been so successful blogging and his so into it (he is a self-proclaimed “blogevangelist”), that he quit his job to blog full time.

    Alex Ragone over at Learning Blog tipped me on to both of the articles listed above, so while you’re at it, grab Alex’s RSS feed.

    Will’s original lecture was about RSS. I am an RSS believer, and at my school, we are trying to do all sorts of things with RSS from community calendars, to teacher blogs, to online student newspapers, to podcasts, to homework assignments and more. I will be writing the how-to’s here soon, so stay posted. And I don’t just mean the technical how-to’s, I mean the pedagogical ones…the good stuff.

    update: Washington Post did another article about teachers with blogs called Blackboard Blogging

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