Anybody shocked? In a report from Common Sense Media, 35% of students admitted to cheating via cell phone, and over half the students surveyed admitted to using the internet to cheat in some way. There are plenty of people who would say that this is a fantastic reason to ban cell phones in schools. I only hope that those same people ban the internet too.

Seriously though, I’m not sure anybody is all that surprised. And before any suggests we start banning technology because it can be used to cheat, I suggest they do a few Google searches. Cheating has evolved into quite the art form. Taking away their phones won’t stop anyone, any more than taking away the graphic calculators would. If someone wants to cheat, they will.

A few other key findings from the study:

* 41% of teens say that storing notes on a cell phone to access during a test is a serious cheating offense, while 23% don’t think it’s cheating at all.
* 45% of teens say that texting friends about answers during tests is a serious cheating offense, while 20% say it’s not cheating at all.
* 76% of parents say that cell phone cheating happens at their teens’ schools, but only 3% believe their own teen has ever used a cell phone to cheat.
* Nearly two-thirds of students with cell phones use them during school, regardless of school policies against it.
* Teens with cell phones send 440 text messages a week and 110 a week while in the classroom.

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Nice move for both of them. Key paragraph from the press release:

The partnership allows the students and teachers using Glogster EDU �” now more than 450,000 around the world �” to share their Glogs using the popular SchoolTube sharing site, and also allows them to easily import multimedia elements found on the SchoolTube site into their Glogs. All student-created materials on SchoolTube must be approved by registered teachers, follow local school guidelines, and adhere to the company’s high standards.

So it provides them a moderated means of publication, and also a way for Teachers to browse for edu-safe glogs. Kudos all around. Hope more sites go this route. There’s so many great Web 2.0 tools that educators COULD be using, but because of red tape and policy issues, they’re unable to leverage them.

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When people refer to the ‘big five’ in Africa, we’ve learned that they’re making a gigantic mistake. Because if the Great White Shark doesn’t deserve to be on that list, then somebody hasn’t done their due diligence.

In Chicago, we have a fantastic aquarium, and one of the tanks has quite a few sharks swimming the reef. The powerful yet graceful swimmers never fail to generate a visible, emotional stir amongst viewers. And while everybody always spends a few extra minutes in front of that tank in hopes of seeing the deadly beast in action, it seems most of us have always ‘just missed’ a feeding.

Our cage dive with the sharks couldn’t have been a more different experience.

While the marine biologist who shared her unique perspective on the great white called them ‘elegant’ and ‘largely misunderstood’, I’d say that outside the Hollywood sensationalism, they’ve earned every ounce of reputation that they have. And after yesterday’s adventure, I’ve seen their viciousness firsthand.

After taking the boat out to Shark Alley, they dropped the cage into the water and 7 brave souls suited up and took the dive into the frigid waters of the Indian ocean. The crew chummed the water, and then threw out a decoy that cast a sea lion shaped shadow as well as a line with a fish head the length of my arm. They would toss them both into the water, leave them be for a while, and then when a shark was sighted, they would reel them back in towards the cage, entice the shark to swim closer.

How close? Close enough for us to stare it in the eye. And believe me, I blinked first.

To read the rest, along with student accounts of the day, visit the Discovery Student Adventures: South Africa blog!

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After three continents and three flights in two days, I’m not exactly sure which way is up. But a small price to pay for the adventure of a lifetime. For the next two weeks, I’m traveling with 3 teachers and 12 students on the Discovery Student Adventures program to South Africa! Right now I’m in Cape Town, and getting ready for our first day of activities. I most likely won’t be blogging much over here, but wanted to point you over to the DSA South Africa blog, where you can read blog posts by me, the teachers and students, as well as see our videos, photos and tweets.

I strongly encourage you to join us there, and if time allows, leave a few comments for the students. We all know that there is nothing more motivating to a new blogger than knowing that somebody is reading.

Thanks, and I look forward to sharing our adventures with you!

DSA South Africa Blog
My DSA South Africa Twitter Account

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Several months ago, I received a Facebook message asking me to to join a group. Surprisingly, it was a group organized to pay tribute to a Junior High teacher from Glencoe, IL named Marvin Martin.

I joined the group and then leaned back in my chair. People were posting stories and memories that they had of his class and I wanted to do the same… but I couldn’t. The reason I was unable to, was that it wouldn’t do him justice for me to just whip off a paragraph in ten minutes and toss it into cyberspace. More than likely he has no idea just how much of an influence he had on me, but he just may have been the most valuable teacher I ever had.

Mr. Martin taught me to read.

I don’t mean that he taught me phonics, that happened many grades earlier. I don’t mean that he taught me to draw meaning from the written word, that too happened a a much younger age.

He taught me to read with passion. With hunger. With love. With hate. He taught me to read a song and the songwriter as well. He taught me that reading was both a gift and a curse. A new friend that becomes an old friend just a few chapters later. He planted the sapling that has grown within me all these years, and now provides shade as I read with my son.

Before I journey too far along the highway of metaphors, let me explain a few things. If I remember correctly, I had Mr. Martin as a literature teacher in sixth grade at Central School, in Glencoe, Illinois. Prior to that class, I can say definitively that I did not read. Of course, I read for class, and I could read a menu and such, but I rarely if ever, picked up a book for pleasure.

Mr. Martin established a very simple system for dealing with students like me. He created a structure where you could get extra credit in his class by choosing a book off of his list, reading it, and passing a comprehension test. Every test you passed earned you a few percentage points. My first time out, I skimmed through a book and took the test. I failed miserably. You see, he ensured that he asked questions that you couldn’t answer by reading the cliff notes. He made you think about what you had read and prove that not only did you read it, that you understood it. I don’t take failure well, so I went back, re-read it for the first time, and this time I passed the test. Sensing a way to get an easy “A”, I grabbed another book. And then another.

I believe I completed that class with 192%.

The books on his list were a mix of classics as well as contemporary literature. They weren’t just geared to middle school students either. You see, he made a promise to his students. If there was a book that wasn’t on his that they wanted to read, they just had to submit the title of it to him and he would read it and add it. At any given time, he had a queue of about 15-20 books. Which might seem daunting, if he didn’t read a few books every day. It seemed to me that he simply devoured books, and every day new choices were available. And I took advantage.

I began to read every night. I would get so into the books that I kept reading late into the night. When my parents finally put their foot down, I began keeping a small flashlight next to my bed that I could use to continue reading with as soon as they’d gone to sleep. I began carrying a book with me, so whenever I had a minute of down time, I could break it out and burn through a few more pages. It got to the point that I was unable to go to sleep if I didn’t read at least for ten or fifteen minutes.

That habit is still with me today. I am never without a book to read, and I read every single night before turning in. If I don’t have a new book, I grab an old favorite. Another habit I can attribute to Mr. Martin. No matter how many times you’ve read a book before, there are still new things to be discovered within those well worn pages. I can honestly say that I have read some of my favorite books more than a dozen times.

The funny thing is that everything I have discussed so far… was simply the icing to his classroom. This was a layer on top of the actual teaching and learning, an optional component that most students participated in. The class time itself was a different type of journey.

I won’t pretend to say that I remember every class period, or that I looked forward to going every day. But here’s a few things that have stuck with me.

I remember that he was never satisfied with half an effort. When you read aloud, you read with expression. He made sure that you thought about what you were reading, considered the point of view of the characters as well as the author, and read it so that everyone else in the room could feel it.

I remember studying the words of Simon and Garfunkel. In particular, the 59th Street Bridge Song and the Sounds of Silence. I remember him leading us to discover what they meant by phrases like “the words of the prophets are written on subway walls and tenement halls.” And I also remember him challenging us to bring in lyrics to our own favorite music at the time and to see what we could learn from them. If my memory serves me, we wound up studying a song off of U2’s Joshua Tree album and a couple John Lennon songs, all by request.

I remember that while he was always a passionate teacher, there was only one time that he was genuinely angry. Somebody requested that he read Flowers in the Attic and add it to the list of books that could be read for extra credit. He was furious over the incestuous themes throughout the story, and refused to add it to the list. I had never seen someone get so upset and emotional over a book before. Looking back on it now, I think one of the reasons he was so upset was that in some sense, the book defeated him. He couldn’t in good conscience ‘encourage’ students to read that book by adding it to his list. And yet students were interested in it, all the more so because he was so upset by it. I think more students eventually read that book because of his refusal than would ever have read it had he accepted it. And while seeing him discuss the lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel showed us how high he could get discussing the written word, his reaction to Flowers in the Attic showed us just how deep those passions ran.

I would be remiss if I didn’t share one other aspect of Marvin Martin. Teaching was his life. And while I feel that I have met thousands of educators who are passionate teachers, few of them kept a sleeper sofa and refrigerator in a small office next to their classroom. Rumors run wild amongst six graders, so take this paragraph with a grain of salt, but so far as we knew he spent most of his evenings reading and sleeping in his office. There was a house in Glencoe that I’d been told belonged to him. It seemed like it could have fit in the garage of most of the houses neighboring it. While most other teachers shared stories of what they did over the weekend or while on vacation, Mr. Martin shared what books he had read. Teaching was his sunrise and his sunset. He dedicated every moment of his time to his students.

According to the Facebook group, after teaching in Glencoe for forty years, he retired in 1996. I’d always thought about going back and visiting him to let him know how profound an influence he had on me, but I never did. I’m hoping that through the magic of Facebook I’ll be able to reconnect with him and pass along a link to this blog post. Even better, perhaps have the chance to tell him in person.

So let this stand as a tribute to a wonderful teacher… from a student who didn’t know enough to thank him at time and doesn’t have enough words to do a proper job of it now.

Thank you, Marvin Martin.

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Found this on Dan Pink’s blog:

I mentioned before how much I love the idea of turning assignments into creative briefs.

So what happens if you take a fairy tale that’s near and dear to all our hearts, and give it a new spin? While this wasn’t done by a student, just imagine if you allowed students to take the same story, and remix it with other genres. As film noir. As claymation. As series of commercials. As GoAnimate cartoon. As an episode of 24. As a Cloverfield/Blair Witch style movie. And so on…

Watch the video and see. By the way, I highly recommend you view this one in full screen mode.

Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

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Ben Grey wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago that I’ve been sitting on, knowing that I needed to respond, but loath to start because I knew what it would require to do it justice. He asks people to respond to a very simple question: “Why Technology?”

Often, nobody is given the opportunity to defend the cutting of budgets or programs. But what if they were? What if you were? If tomorrow you had to stand in front of your Board of Education and respond to the question, “why should we continue to use and pursue technology in our district,” what would you say?

My initial smartass answer is, “why not?” But obviously that doesn’t do it justice. So I sat down and thought about it. And then I came back to it. Again and again I mulled it over and couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I know how important it is, but I was having trouble pinning down exactly why I felt as strongly as I do.

It all gelled together when I saw what I thought was an unrelated video. Someone on Twitter linked to the Larry Lessig Ted Talks video as an example of how to use 200 slides in a 20 minute presentation in a GOOD way. However, when I only got about four minutes in before I had to stop watching.

At the 2:54 mark, he begins to tell a story about property laws. Trespassing laws used to extend property borders straight up, all the way to the sky. When airplanes began flying overhead, the question was raised before the Supreme Court, whether planes flying over property were trespassing. It seems some farmers were worried about the planes distressing their chickens. So the Supreme Court studied the law, discussed the issue, and as you might imagine they ruled that the farmers were wrong, and that “the doctrine protecting land all the way to the sky has no place in the modern world.” Just think about how complicated it would be if those LA to DC flights had to zig zag around different properties. And then came the phrase that made me hit the stop button. “Common sense revolts at the idea.”

And there you go. Failing to teach our students technology? “Common sense revolts at the idea.” That sums it all up for me. It’s an integral part of our world at this point. It’s not a matter of preparing them for life, it’s a matter of setting them up to be successful. It’s a matter of giving them every advantage. It’s a matter of teaching them ethics, citizenship and… well… common sense. And to be honest, it’s a question that we shouldn’t even be asking anymore.

At some point, we accepted that every student needs to know how to read and write in order to be successful. Well, technology falls under the same category. The problem is, people assume that just because a student is classified as Digital Native, people think the student knows everything they need to be successful. That simply isn’t the case. Is uploading video to YouTube a skill? Something that can be done ‘well’ or ‘poorly’. Take a look at this video and compare that with all the videos on YouTube of kids smoking Salvia and you tell me whether there’s a difference, or a teachable moment waiting to happen.

So why technology?

Because every career in the world is being impacted by it.

Because every student has an equal opportunity to ruin their chances of being successful through it.

Because it’s the right thing to do.

It’s just common sense.

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Hi. My name is Steve Dembo. If you do a Google search for “Dembo” I have four hits on the front page. Considering all the famous Dembo’s, that’s quite a mediocre feat! And that’s how I identified myself to most people for the first few decades of my life.

About five years ago, I registered the domain name Teach42.com. Since then, there are thousands of people who know me primarily by that name. It has become my brand, my online identity, my signature. People know that if they see Teach42 on a website, that’s me.

This is nothing unusual though. Anybody who registers for just about any website has some sort of alter-ego now. An alias that they use to refer to themselves. Use the same one often enough, and you become quite attached to it.

How disappointed would you be if you had visited Twitter, intending to register, only to find that YOUR username had already been taken? Somebody else was online and communicating under the name that you had dibs on. Deliberate or not is irrelevant. First come, first served.

This has led to hundreds of thousands of URL’s being snatched up and squatted on. The cost is so low that it’s easy to grab them, either to hang on to or to put up for sale/auction. Heck, for only 8 bucks, I can register any open domain I want. 8 bucks is nothing, right?

Well, mull this one over. Twitter accounts are free. And considering that Twitter is now one of the largest social networking sites on the internet, are names on Twitter as valuable as domain names? Some sites seem to think so. People are snagging up Twitter names and putting them up for sale. After all, there’s only a finite amount of ‘good’ ones, right?

Of course, why stop at Twitter? While it may be the flavor of the month, who knows what will be replacing it. With new sites being launched daily, perhaps the next big thing went public this morning. How can you ensure that you will be able to get in there and get that perfect username, the same one that you used everywhere else?

Sites like UsernameCheck.com provide lists of Web 2.0 and social sites, and will check your username against all of them, to let you see where it has been registered and where it as available still. You could easily use that to see where you haven’t registered yet and start chasing windmills, registering your username on every site out there. But more will be coming out tomorrow, and the day after that. Can anyone really keep up?

Which leads me to KnowEm.com. It’s similar to UserNameCheck, but with one small twist. They’ll check where you’ve registered … and for a small fee they’ll register you on the rest. Then, for $20 a month, they’ll keep registering you on any new sites that they add, an estimated 15-20 per week.

I puked a little when I read that at first. Really?? I’m going to pay more than I currently pay for Tivo to have somebody register my name at every site that gets released? But then I started thinking about how bummed I’d be if I didn’t have Teach42 registered on Twitter. Or on Flickr. Or anywhere else for that matter. It’s my own personal brand. It has led to my current job, speaking gigs around the country, and an audience that I’m eternally grateful for. Is that worth a few bucks per month? Well, I haven’t plugged in my PayPal account yet, but I no longer think it’s such a crazy idea.

And that’s for me on a personal level. From a business standpoint, I think it’s almost a no-brainer. Why wouldn’t you want to maintain a tight leash on your brand and online identity?

So the question is, just how valuable is your online name? Can you put a price on it? And how upset would you be if it wasn’t available? What, if anything, would you spend to ensure that you maintain control of it and to be 100% positive that you have it reserved for you when the next big thing hits?

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NCLB is bad. I know I won’t get many people arguing with that statement. However, it was created because people wanted to know that our education system was doing what we want it to. Of course, we could easily argue over what we actually want it to do, but ignore that for just a moment. Accountability is not a bad thing in itself. And if we’re spending time teaching people, we DO want to know whether we’re actually being successful, constructive, and making a difference. I mean, even if NCLB ceased to exist, that doesn’t mean we’d stop assessing our students, right?

SO. With that in mind… If you could wiggle your nose and make NCLB go away, how would you suggest we assess our students? Crazy ideas are perfectly acceptable here. BUT, you do need to consider that at some point there does need to be a way to compare information about the students. For example, when push comes to shove, colleges do need to know how students did. And parents are going to want to know how their students are doing versus other students, dogs and pet rocks in their district/state/country/continent/planet.

Whatcha think?

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The other night I was scanning through tweets about Phish’s recent concert, and came across the tweet of a certain MusicLoverChick. The tweet was interesting, but what was even more interesting to me was the fact that the gramaphone in her profile pic MOVED. It was subtle, but every second or two, it just thumped a little. And yet, that little bit of motion BLEW ME AWAY. I have been so used to looking at Twitter images as static and motionless, that just the little bit of animation was enough to knock me off my rocker.

Of course, I simply HAD to know how it was done.

After a few searches, I found a couple of sites with decent directions. And it didn’t look that hard at all! Just take an animated GIF and upload it, right? Well, in reality it wasn’t QUITE so simple.

Here’s how I did it.
1) Get your footage. I decided to use a video and started off with a video of Aiden that I had recorded in Qik. Unfortunately, Qik’s download feature is broken right now, but there’s a hidden way to get access to those files still through the RSS feed. If you go to http://qik.com/USERNAME/latest-videos, you’ll get their RSS feed of videos WITH the download links available. Footage obtained.
2) Trim it down. I used QuickTime Pro. Popped open the video and trimmed it down to JUST the part I wanted. Or at least the part I THOUGHT I wanted at the time, but more on that later.
3) Export it as images. Using Quicktime Pro, one of your Export options is Movie to Image Sequence. Choose that and it’ll save your video clip frame by frame as jpg images. My 8 second clip resulted in a couple hundred images.
4) Crop and resize it. This part may be a bit tricky, and might be worth doing prior to step three if you have a video editor that’ll do it. Instead, I grabbed photoshop and created an action that cropped the image down to a square (centered) and then resized it down to 150×150. Then I used the Batch fucntion in Photoshop to resize the entire folder of images at once.
5) Create an Animated GIF from it. While there are dozens of programs that will create animated GIF’s, I took advantage of a free one for the mac: GifFun. All you do is drag in your folder of images, make a few tweaks and then click on Create GIF. One thing to keep in mind though is that you probably want it to have something like 3-5 microseconds between frames, and by default it is set at 20ms. Change that in the program options first, so when you bring in your images, they’ll all be at a nice 5 ms between frames. Then click on Loop Forever and Make GIF and away you go. I haven’t tried any of these yet, but here are 5 online tools for creating animated GIF’s.
6) Trim it down…. AGAIN. The resulting image will be opened in your browser. Just save the iamge to your computer for now. Once you do, check on the file size. Twitter won’t take anything over 700KB, but I found that I had better success in the final step with smaller file sizes. So try to keep it down to around 500kb or smaller. How do you do that? Two ways. In the options for the program, you can reduce the color palette or in GIFFun, click on Minimize Output. Not sure what that does, but it does shrink down the file. you can also remove unnecessary frames from the GIF. So in the eye example, I went from over 200 frames down to a paltry 89 frames. It’s a shorter animation, but the file size requires it. C’est la vie.
7) Upload it. Rinse, repeat. You’re now ready to upload it to Twitter, which unfortunately is the most complicated step in the whole process. First of all, Twitter is not supposed to support animated GIF’s. While that may be their official stance, the site DOES support it…. kinda. You’re able to upload GIF’s as an avatar pic. But animated GIF’s routinely fail. Seems like there’s some faulty code there, and the first 10 times or so that I tried to upload my animation, it failed. I tried in Firefox on the Mac and got the Fail Whale. I tried in Safari and got the same. I tried in Firefox for Windows and no dice. I tried in IE7 for Windows and nada. Then I tried in Opera for Windows……. and SUCCESS! My boy was on the screen bonking his head for all to see.

So what’s the moral of the story here? If you want to upload an animated GIF, you’re going to need to be patient, persistent and may need to try uploading it 30-40 times before it works. If it consistently fails, try tweaking it just a touch. Maybe shrinking it down a little, removing a few frames. And then keep trying to upload it. There’s no magic formula for this part. Just be persistent. When I tried to change it from Aiden bonking his head to my eye blinking, I failed about 40 times before I resized it, failed 10 more times before it finally went through.

One thing to note. Seems that Twitter isn’t happy with their inability to handle animated GIFs well. Supposedly, they won’t be accepting new ones anymore.

There is no plan to remove existing GIF images. You’ll still be able to use JPEG (image/jpeg and image/jpg) and PNG (image/png) images, but new GIF images will no longer be accepted. This code should be ready within the next week.

That was posted on the dev boards on January 29th. Seems they’re running a little bit behind schedule. Point is though, if you’re interested in having an animated avatar, I wouldn’t waste any time. Could be locked out any day now and then the only people who will have them are those that are grandfathered in.

I can’t help but think that as more and more people do this, Twitter is going to look more like the Daily Prophet from Harry Potter. I know some find it distracting, but I love seeing how people express themselves. Look forward to seeing what you come up with!

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