Chris Lehman at Ignite Philly. Take 5 minutes and watch this great summary of what needs to change in schools and why:
Shift and Change in School: The “7 Things” Theory
I am toying with an idea that came up at a recent department meeting I had with my tech teachers here at Dubai American Academy. I asked them each to talk about technology integration and what that meant to them and also how they percieved the success of that model at DAA. Each talked about different things and I was struck that I agreed with each of them. How then to reconcile all those ideas?
In relating the discussion to others afterwards I found myself repeatedly saying “There are 7 things that need to change in order to make a successful change in Tech use in schools.” I am not sure where I got the number, but “7 Things” seemed to make my point that, even if you change one or two things about the school or about teaching, you will not effect lasting change or successfully shift the school into a 21st Century Technology Learning model.
Most importantly, these all need to be done at the same time. They are not successful when only some of them are done and they are not successful when done sequentially.
So what are the 7 Things?
- Curriculum: The curriculum needs to change to reflect integrated technology opportunities within subject area units (even if they need to be changed every year or two)
- PD: Classroom and subject area teachers need good PD both in technology tools appropriate to their area and in planning units and lessons with technology tools from the outset (not planning their lessons and units and then asking the tech team for some help afterward).
- Schedule: The use of computer lessons as planning time for teachers (in the elementary school) and having mandatory (or elective) classes in “technology” needs to be thrown out to allow the tech “teachers” time to plan and teach collaboratively, to go to classrooms or work with other teachers in the labs. The labs (if there are to be labs at all) need to be open for teachers to use.
- Hardware and computer labs: Students need their own computer. Period. Along with this, the network must be created/improved to handle the load of 1:1. Accept this and start planning now because it takes years to get there.
- Perceptions of Technology: Technology can no longer be seen as a separate subject. It is not. Technology tools are tools that help students learn Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies, Music, Drama, Art, etc. They are the things that enable students to make connections in their learning.
- Collaborative teaching: Until all teachers are proficient enough in their own requisite tech tools, teachers must work together with their colleagues and the school’s technology integration specialists. The team approach is essential.
- Choosing the right tools: We need to take a good close look at what technology tools are really necessary for each grade level and subject and work with teachers to get them and their students proficient in using those. We do not need to teach students 10 different software packages each year. Choose a couple of tools and use them over and over. For learning. Not for their own sake. If a certain tool, like PowerPoint, is not serving the classroom curriculum, we need to stop using it and teaching it. We don’t need to teach PowerPoint in Grade 3 because they will need it in Middle School.
7 Things. All at the same time.
Some caveats of course. What do you think? Let’s hear some challenges and Yeah-Buts in the comments.
Let the students drive?
Good post over at Clay Burrel’s blog, reflecting on his school’s 1:1 program and how students see it.
An Old Prophecy Confirmed? On the Uses and Abuses of Laptop Learning
My comment:
I think that this is a trap many 1:1 schools encounter, forcing the tech and “making good use” of the expensive new toys. If students are not seen to be making iMovies constantly, the board will question the program and revoke the funding.
What if we did this instead? What if we gave the kids the laptops, because there is no doubt in my mind that kids need anytime anywhere access to these tools, and we relied on them to decide when and how they wanted to use them?
What if, instead of teachers continually telling students how to learn or how to communicate their learning, we instead formed a partnership with the students and allowed choice in student products? What if we stopped worrying about the cost of the laptops and allowed some students to leave them in their backpack for days on end if they simply did not need them?
So, in this scenario, the kids have the technology. The teachers have the curriculum and the learning outcomes, benchmarks, standards, whatever, and the students can use or not use the technology tools based on their learning styles, interests and aptitudes. Students and teachers need to learn about the technology tools and what their options are, but teachers only need to assign a task like this: Show me that you have learned X. Use whatever medium you like, imovie, pencil and paper, blog, podcast, etc. Communicate to me and your peers (or dare I say even an authentic audience somwehere) what you have learned. You have a laptop and all the tools you need. Bonus points for using the tech tools in a way that we have not seen before. Let the students teach us about how they use technology.
What if we stopped trying to force the technology and instead allowed different students to use different tools based on them, not us?
Imagine all the students, learning things this way….
Change is slow in education and change in technology in education has been particularly slow, compared to the rate of technology change and penetration in the “real” world. I think that comes in many ways from schools and teachers trying to be experts at it and not giving students enough ownership over their learning. Teachers have to assign the projects and set the tasks and if they are not comfortable with the technology or they only know the one thing they learned in the PD they got in August (used to be PowerPoint and now its iMovie), they use that over and over, even when it is not appropriate to the task.
The power and potential of technology, as we can see by the evolution of the web to a democratizing platform of user-driven content and services, is that individuals can use the things that work for them. We must engage students in a partnership for learning. Give them the tech tools and let them run with them. Let them teach us and teach each other how they can best use the tools for learning. Let them innovate. Let them experiment. Let them fail. Let them learn.
What is Web 2.0?
Web 2.0 is approaching being passe but it is still interesting to me that the term has varying meanings depending on who you ask. I found this today on the new Microsoft World Wide Telescope website:
“Web 2.0 is the next generation of the World Wide Web wherein technologies and social practices use metadata or tags to enable communication and resource sharing in a variety of forms (text, audio, video, links, etc.) through the Web without a centralized authority’s intervention or approval. Rich visualization software provides a graphical visualization of large structured data sets. The software’s interactive graphical user interface provides users with a more data-rich presentation of the data and enables them to explore, filter, analyze, and interact with the data, resulting in a better understanding of that data.”
From this page: http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/whatIs/whatIsWWT.aspx
Thank you Microsoft.
Others of course claim that Web 2.0 does not really exist and still others claim that it has to do with the social web rather than the commercial web that pre-dated the dot-com bust.
For me Web 2.0 is all about data driven websites. Interactive sites that allow you, as the user, to log in and customize your interaction with the site in some way, or give and receive data with the site. Social networks, blogs and wikis are all examples of this kind of interactive web. I distinguish Web 2.0 sites from the old HTML sites that gave info and left it at that. Looking back in time, using the Wayback Machine for example, it is interesting to see web sites from the 90’s that have static front pages providing info on a company or brand and that offer no way to join or get more info beyond what the webmaster chose to put there. Hard to imagine now.
Web 3.0, if there ever is such a thing, will likely be an extension of the web 2.0 data model where data from diverse sites will begin to come together using tags across sites or by linking user profiles across sites. Somehow the various stores of data will be connected and manipulated by users in ways that the data can not right now because it is tied to one domain or one company.
We’ll see.
Google Spreadsheets now as a Wiki!
Google Spreadsheets, the online spreadsheet program that is part of Google Docs, has just added a new feature by which you can make a spreadsheet open for editing to anyone and everyone. Before, you could invite collaborators but you had to provide them with a link that included a secret code so only invited people could participate. Now you can have it open for anyone to click a link from a web page or blog and edit in real-time with many others. See a full explanation at http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-spreadsheets-become-wikis.html
Cool.
Asus EEE PC 900 review
Wired’s Gadget Lab has a preliminary look at the Asus EEE 900. It looks awesome but the price is getting a little high to be an ultra-affordable ultra-portable. I would say $400 is a max for a machine like this as you can get a full-fledged Dell laptop for around $600. The new EEE 900 is priced at $550 according to Wired.
I suppose you could get three of these instead of one MacBook. I really like the EEE, but the iLife suite is a great set of tools for students and I am not sure if the EEE, without a CD drive, would be as suitable for young kids, software-wise.
Carry Documents Around in Your iPhone
Here’s a simple way to add documents to your iPhone. This applies to OSX Leopard but I am sure you can do the same thing somehow in Tiger or even on a PC 😉
1) Open your document in its native app. I wanted to put some Word documents on my phone so I open them in Word.
2) Go to File…Print and choose the PDF button at the bottom. Save the doc as a PDF.
3) Open the PDF in Preview. Save as… and save it as a PNG or other image format.
4) Import it into iPhoto. I created an event called iPhone Documents and then a smart album to hold anything that has the word iPhone (thus the entire event). You could also just create an album and add documents to it whenever you add them to iPhoto.
5) In iTunes set your iPhone to sync that smart album to your iPhone. (I already only sync selected albums as I have too many photos to fit on my phone. One other thing I find useful is syncing the “Last Import” album. When I connect my iPhone it opens iPhoto and I import any photos I have taken. I add them to an existing event if applicable or create a new event. Then I delete the originals from the iPhone. Then iTunes syncs that last import back to the phone using the event name I chose, and if I added them to an existing event, it syncs that entire event back to the phone. Seems like a waste, but I find it very handy. I then have three albums on my phone, the photos I am taking on the phone, the last import and my documents. Nicely organized.)
Done. Now you can view your docs in the photo gallery on the iPhone. The quality is not superb, and text size of 10 will be unreadable, but I think it is cool that you can take docs along if you want. No editing, mind you, at least not ’till this summer when Documents to Go or something like that comes out through the app store, but handy for now.
Google Shows Mac Users Some Love
Thanks to LifeHacker for this heads-up:
Google Adds Mac-Specific Search
“If you run into a problem on a Windows computer, all you have to do is type a little description of the problem and Google takes care of the rest; Mac users, on the other hand, often need to include a little context in their search—instead of typing a query like text editor, you type text editor mac. Google’s Mac-specific portal, found at http://google.com/mac/, now includes a Mac-specific search box. It’s not groundbreaking, but the guaranteed Mac-specific results could come in handy next time you’re looking for a specific application or you’re troubleshooting your Mac.”
Ultra Mobile PC’s Abound
In one of my first blog posts, following the release of the MacBook Air, I lamented the fact that no company had created what I thought was an appropriate portable learning device for students. The device I envisioned was small, cheap, portable and had the necessary tools built-in (word processing, digital imaging and video, editing, network connectivity, etc.).
Apparently I need to eat my hat, because a flood of inexpensive Ultra-Mobile PC’s have cropped up lately. Now this could be a case of the everyone-drives-the-same-car-as-me syndrome, in which, when you get a new car you begin noticing how many of those same cars are one the road. More than you ever noticed before. So once I started keeping a lookout for the perfect student computer, I started noticing them. It could be that.
But I do think there are other things at play which allowed Apple to create the MacBook Air. One is that hardware is coming of age in this area. Flash memory is dropping in price so it is now cost-effective to put a 20 GB solid-state drive in a laptop. Small screens are cheap, and clearly processors are too. I also think companies are jumping on a bit of a bandwagon. With the OLPC rpoject getting so much press and at least one manufacturer (ASUS) having success with its own UMPC (the EEE PC), this is the market to get into right now. Consumers, I think, are also realising that they don’t need a $2000 computer just to check their email and surf the web (sales of the Air are not stellar as far as I know).
I came across two good sites recently, one highlights the new HP ultra-portable (a bit of a high-end device) and the other covers the range of UMPC’s available.
HP launches The Linux Powered Mini Note Micro Notebook Liliputing: A comprehensive List of Low-Cost Ultra PortablesThis is a very exciting development. I will say, I don’t think any of the big players here have made the perfect one for very young children. I would add touch-screen, tablet-like behavior to make it truly friendly to younger children. Some of those listed at Liliputing have tablet abilities, but I would still like to see HP, Asus or Apple try their hand at this. Apple, interestingly, has a patent on a dual-screen laptop that might be very interesting. Instead of a keybaord on the lower half of the laptop, it has another screen, with the ability to do all teh things the iPhone does in terms of virtual keyboard, multi-touch interface and even, potentially, more screen real-estate. That would be cool!
As for me, I am pining after the new Asus EEE 900.
And thinking of moving my next school to linux-based portables for students. Any thoughts? Leave a comment.
Some Predictions
I have not posted anything in a while as I have been busy working with a group of students on an iMovie project. Now that it is over we are looking at the end of term and some final tech projects. One teacher has asked her students to create a memory using some kind of digital format, movie, podcast, or whatever. Hmmm, just thinking, VoiceThread might be a good idea.
Anyway, while discussing this with students today we started a discussion of memories and keeping things to share with their children. Someone suggested a blog would be a good memory. I quipped that the blog server (we host the students’ blogs locally) will not be around in 20 years and they were shocked. What did that mean?
So I had to break the news to them that the Internet is not permanent. Indeed, I told them, the Internet will likely not exist as we know it in 20 years. I stand by that prediction.
Even now the Net Neutrality issue threatens to change the nature of the democratic web. If companies and countries can control access to sites and give more bandwidth or more access to certain sites and kill others if they disagree with them or if they can’t pay enough, the web as we know it will change irrevocably.
And I think, soon is my guess, that the need to upload things, to use WordPress or a hosting company, will go away. A computer, on the network, has an IP address and a unique hardware address. That can and will likely be accessible from the Internet or the wider network. Why should I have to post my photos on a photo sharing site? I have my photos in iPhoto and I can chose to share them on the network. Anyone should be able to find me and see them.
And I will not really need my computer much anymore. Perhaps if I am doing some work of a particularly complex nature, or that visually requires a big screen, I might need a computer, but otherwise, my iPhone is pretty good right now at most things I like to do. I can browse the Net, send and receive messages, cal people, watch videos, etc. Soon devices like that will also take video, allow simple editing and uploading or sharing and then, I won;t really need my computer to create content and share it. I can type alright on the iPhone, update my blog, connect to FaceBook, etc. right now and these kind of small portable devices wil only get better and more powerful. The Network they exist on will become more and more ubiquitous and soon I will be on-line all the time. Connected all the time. So then I can be sharing content and viewing content anytime anywhere. So why would I need a hosting company? Why would I need a computer?
I don’t know if something like the iPhone will be able to do all the things I do with a computer, but my prediction is that we will change what we want to do with the computer based on the devices we have and the services and software that wil be created to harness their abilities and size.
So, no Internet (as we know it) in 20 years (likely sooner) and no bulky computers (for personal use). Mark my words, becasue this blog won’t be here in 20 years to come back and check.