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Posts tagged ‘education’

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What can you do with a cell phone in the classroom?

Matt Monjan let me know that the Simpsons spoofed cell phones in the classroom this past weekend. Yes, it’s funny, but it’s also frustrating because there’s so many hints of truth in there. Give the segment a watch before continuing. For visitors outside the US, visit FOX to watch the full episode. Clip I’m referring to is from about 1 minute in until the 3:30 mark.

Yes, it’s a comedy, but comedies are only funny if there’s kernels of truth in there. The kids are distracted by the phones. When asked what they’re using them for, they know the stock answers and can rattle them off without thinking. But there’s a big difference between a student rattling off an answer that they think will satisfy an inquiry, and a teacher actually using a mobile device for educational purposes. And all too often, the solution is pretty similar to what you see in the clip… lock it away and pretend it doesn’t exist.

Fact is, they aren’t going away. If anything, they’re only becoming more and more prevalent. School budgets are tight, and here we are with millions of dollars in technology that’s being paid for by the parents VOLUNTARILY… and most schools refuse to leverage it because of outdated policies and teachers that don’t want to modify their own classroom management strategies.

I’ve heard it thousands of times it seems, “cell phones are a distraction in class.” That’s great. So is the class pet, a window, a paper clip and pencil/paper. Isn’t teaching students to overcome these distractions part of what we do in the classroom? Heck, I used to focus on that in kindergarten! “Maybe you should put that toy behind you right now because it’s circle time. You can play with it again during choice time.” Saying that cell phones should be banned in schools because they’re ‘too distracting’ is a cop out. If your current classroom management model can’t incorporate mobile devices…. well, then it’s time to do some unlearning and relearning.

When I saw Jeremy Davis recently, he told me of an educator who uses cell phones in the classroom. In fact, this teacher requires that the cell phone be out and ON the desk. In plain site. Not hidden in a pocket or backpack. So if the student is using it, the teacher KNOWS. And if the student is using it when they shouldn’t… Well, that’s when there are consequences. Phone is confiscated until the end of the week, or the parent can pay a $25 fine to get it back for their student. Sure, there were plenty of students who lost their phones, and plenty of fines paid. They used the money to pay for a field trip before the end of the year. But the point is, the students learned when it was ok to be using the phone as a learning device, and when it was inappropriate. Believe me, no student wants to go to his parents and let them know that they need $25 to get their phone back… and explain why.

Sure, we can keep fighting to keep cell phones hidden or banned in schools. But it’s a battle that schools can’t win. Life progresses, things change. Like it or not, these devices are here to stay, and adoption rates are racing towards 100+%. I suggest teachers be proactive. Because there’s a tidal wave coming and you can either ride with it, or have it crash into you.

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10/6/2009 55 Comments
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The Push

While doing a Discovery webinar with Scott McLeod today, I noticed that he’s engaged in an aggregation project that is well worth contributing to. He’s calling it “The PUSH” and attempting to gather together a current, comprehensive list of high quality content specific for people who are new to blogs to use to fill out their aggregators.

Every single day for at least the next two weeks, we will work together to identify excellent subject-specific blogs that are useful to P-12 teachers. Why? Several reasons…

* To identify blogs that P-12 teachers can use to initially seed (or expand) their RSS readers
* To create a single location where P-12 educators can go to see excellent subject-oriented educational blogging
* To highlight excellent disciplinary blogging that deserves larger audiences
* To learn from disciplines other than our own and get ideas about our own teaching and/or blogging

You can view what has been gathered together here, but I encourage you to contribute as well. Consider it an opportunity to pay it forward, a direct deposit to the next generation of bloggers and members of the EdTech community.

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8/10/2009 6 Comments
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Top 10 FREE Web 2.0 Sites for Educators: NECC Edition

I’ve had several requests via email for my Top 10 presentation from NECC, and realized that I should probably post it here. Of course, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing!

So here’s a link to the presentation slides, such as they are. Most of the presentation is live demonstrations, so they’re only of limited value by themselves.

Here’s a link to the ISTE broadcast of the session. Video looks and sounds great, but they didn’t record what I was doing on the screen until 20 minutes in.

Then there’s my own personal broadcast of it using Procaster and Livestream. It has what’s happening on my screen throughout the entire presentation. However, the camera angle isn’t exactly the most flattering one I could have chosen :)

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7/20/2009 162 Comments
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Education will never be a trending topic

The crowds at NECCAnybody who spends any significant time on Twitter is familiar with the concept of trending topics. They’re essentially a taste of what’s on people’s minds and typically revolve around recent news, television events, buzz generating blog posts and of course, memes.

At large conferences like NECC, with hundreds of people using the #NECC09 hashtag in their tweets, some people speculated whether it would become a trending topic or not. The answer was a resounding No.

It has always been a mystery to me as to just how many posts were required to make it into the trending topics list, and recently Buzzgain published their own research of the subject. The results?

Between 12 (midnight) to 6 am PDT: approximately 1200 tweets and about 500 users to be trending

Between 6 am to 12 Noon PDT: 1700 tweets and about 733 users

Between 12 noon to 6 pm: 1500 tweets and about 812 users (this may be because there are more people during this time but they tweet a lot less)

Between 6 pm to 12 midnight: 1900 tweets and about 922 users

So at best, during the overnight hours when traffic is lowest, it would take about 1200 tweets using a given hashtag to become at trending topic. Not only that, considering that according to their research, a trending topic has an average shelf life of about 11 minutes, there would need to be more than 100 tweets per minute for it to attain the ‘weight’ needed.

While there may be 139,665 people in the education directory of Twellow, you have to go several hundred deep just to wade past all the social media junkies obsessed with gaining the most followers.

I don’t know how many ‘real’ educators there are on Twitter, but I do know that there just aren’t enough to make a dent in the Twitterverse on a mass scale. In fact, it’s futile to even put any efforts in trying to effect real change there. It’s wonderful for making connections and sharing ideas, but it’s just not the right place to effect any significant change. No matter how loud the choir sings, it’s just not going to be heard above the clamor about Harry Potter and Michael Jackson (no connection between the two implied).

As popular as Twitter is, as popular as Facebook is, they are both still used by only a fraction of educators, and within that fraction, they only reach the niche audience you have. I’m grateful to have a fairly large audience on Twitter, but even so that’s still less than 5,000 people, and of those I know a large number likely registered and never logged in again.

It isn’t that there isn’t value information being communicated via Twitter. It’s just a shame that it’s only causing small ripples and then disappearing into the ether.

The reality is, ‘old school’ communications are still the most effective for dealing with the masses. Email and newsletters still carry quite a bit of weight, and from my own experience tend to reach much farther than a tweet or blog post.

With that in mind I’m curious to hear your ideas for getting the ‘big ideas’ and key conversations out to the masses. Should we be aggregating them together and creating a “Tales from the Eduverse” mailing list? Sending out a newsletter in print or via email?

The critical question being, if the ‘right’ ideas are being shared in the blogosphere/TwitterPlurkoverse, how do we communicate them out to the rest of the education community?

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7/17/2009 29 Comments
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Destination irrelevant

Found via EDITing in the Dark

I’ve been a Mythbusters fan, long before I started working for Discovery. What blew me away when I had the opportunity to meet them, was that I discovered there was absolutely no acting on the show. They really are as passionate about learning as they seem to be. So when I found out that Adam had a TED talk, it was no surprise to me that he focused all of his energy talking about how he focuses all his energy on his own personal learning journeys.

So as you watch this video, just think about one thing… what are our students this passionate about, when do they have the opportunity to express it, and what do we do to foster it?

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7/7/2009 3 Comments
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Common sense revolts.

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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5/20/2009 15 Comments
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Thinking about assessment

Students taking a test at the University of Vi...
Image via Wikipedia

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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4/9/2009 13 Comments
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Wednesday morning video break

No specific educational tie in to this one. Unless you think there’s more to life than test scores and that art appreciation is an important part of educating well rounded students.

Enjoy.

3/4/2009 2 Comments
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A few highlights from ICE09

Illinois Computing Educators 2009 has come and gone! I’m too tired to write a coherant wrap up post right now, but I will say this: There was a closeness, family type of feeling there this year beyond what I’ve seen in years past. Not that it hasn’t always been a tight knit group, and a wonderful conference to attend, but this year it seemed to be a little more so than in years past.

I can only attribute it to 3 things. 1) The addition of the PLN Plaza. An open lounge type area for people to network/hangout/plurk in. Scott Meech did a fantastic job putting it together and keeping it active. 2) The bar area being smoke free. In previous years, only the smokers would hang out there, and everyone else would do their best to hold their breath and race past it. This year, it was a place for anyone and everyone to congregate. And congregate they did. 3) The attendance of Kevin Honeycutt. Not to take anything away from anybody else who was a speaker or traveled many many miles to come, but I must say hanging out with Kevin was like a breath of fresh air. Truly a kind and genuine human being and it was a pleasure to watch him ‘in action’.

So, with that, I’ll just share two highlights. So long as we’re on the subject of good feelings, Thursday night Kevin broke out his guitar and we were treated to a fantastic jam session. Here’s just a little taste of it.

The second is my ‘geekbumps’ highlight of the conference floor. The latest and greatest from SMART. Their response to the Microsoft Surface. But this thing is produced for the consumer market and ready for sale. I played around with it for about 10 minutes and was way impressed. It ain’t cheap, but it truly is a magnificent piece of technology. The vendor showing it was Bradfield’s, so if you’re interested in it feel free to drop them a line.

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2/27/2009 1 Comment
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Your Digital Dossier

Andy Carvin shared this video via tweet that does in incredible job of summing up what the New Permanent Record is, in a much more succinct way than I’ve ever managed to.

As you watch this video, consider what these students will look like when they enter your classroom. Honestly, will they care one whit whether you put their first and last name on the same page as their photo? Will their parents insist that you keep their identity private… or will they insist that you exhibit their learning publicly?

Is your school prepared for students that will have a larger digital portfolio before they enter kindergarten, than most of us educators have as adults?

Enjoy:

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2/19/2009 65 Comments
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