Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

You may have noticed my blog sidebar filling up with all kinds of “stuff”. Today I’ll talk about some of those tools and let you know how they work. Some might be useful for you!

Show notes:

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George Siemens says it about as well as anyone. This post is more of a bookmark for me as anything. But well worth the read for anyone.

I’m bias but I believe we have the best group of 300 teachers around. I had the privilege of visiting all the schools to talk, but mostly listen to their attitudes and concerns around professional development. Our school district has embarked on the journey into assessment and evaluation and are using learning teams (aka: professional learning communities) as the vehicle for this change.

As with any change, it never comes easy, especially if it’s at all meaningful. What I was most impressed with was the degree to which teachers balanced skepticism and concern with a true desire to do what’s best for kids. As educators we have been witnesses to many a bandwagon and that may never change. This time it seems different. With teachers taking ownership of their own learning, they are willing to make sacrifices and put themselves on the line by working together with their peers. The days of isolation are over my friend and the “new shape of knowledge” needs to be addressed.

With this group of teachers, I like our chances of success.

I have a lot of teachers in primary grades looking for fonts that best replicate written work. They often use comic sans as it best reflects student writing, espescially the “a”.

Here’s a site that claims it will help students with dyslexia.

There has been growing innovation to combat dyslexia, especially
for children, in the form of computer software. However, relatively
little design research has been done in the area of typography
and type design that might support dyslexics. Read Regular is
a typeface designed specifically to help people with dyslexia read
and write more effectively.

The basic premise is to create suddle differences in “b” and “d” for example to create distinction.

It’s not available yet but there is contact information for those interested.

I’ve had a go around or two with Todd Oppenheimer. Here we go again. His latest article calls for the advent of the one computer classroom. Not two or more but one.

Schools will get the most out of digital technology with students in junior high school and above. In the younger grades, computers usually mean lots of mechanical hassle and wasted time, often spent teaching students to do things on a screen they can more easily accomplish with paper, pencil, and crayons.

The “mechanical hassle and wasted time” is not as much linked to age as it is to the experience of the teacher and the level of school/district support. Having one computer or five in a classroom will not be the determining factor for good decision making on the part of the teacher. It simplies provides more choice.

Letting young children be captivated by the allure of the screen can distract them from the tactile, imaginative activities.

That’s the reality of the world we live in. I’m not sure why it has to be all or none. Having students experience both the “tactile, imaginative activities” and the digital activities go hand in hand.
Side note: My 6 year old daughter spent most of yesterday creating a book with crayons and markers based on a website she visited earlier in the day.

The issue here goes well beyond test scores. Consider Tom Snyder’s big fear: In time, he believes, employers will increasingly ask whether applicants have been computer trained or teacher trained. The machine-trained ones, he suspects, will be left out, because “they won’t be able to make sense of the world.”

I’m not sure if Mr. Oppenheimer is taking Tom Synder’s comments out of context but again, the point Oppenheimer seems to be making is an all or none arguement. This certainly goes against many of the initiatives to see one to one computing. I don’t think this will be the last time Mr. Oppenheimer and I disagree. I wonder what he’d think of David Warlick’s vision of the ideal classroom.

I’ve had a few conversations recently about handling email. Many seem to be trying to figure out how to respond and manage the vast numbers of messages that fill their inbox.

Here’s an article that touches on some great tips. My favourite include:

Write a great Subject line

You can make it even easier for your recipient to immediately understand why you’ve sent them an email and to quickly determine what kind of response or action it requires. Compose a great a “Subject: line that hits the high points or summarizes the thrust of the message. Avoid “Hi,”” ““One more thing…,”” or ““FYI,” in favor of typing a short summary of the most important points in the message:

This can save a great deal of time when deciding what emails need attention and can be handled quickly.

Make it easy to quote - Power email users will quote and respond to specific sections or sentences of your message. You can facilitate this by keeping your paragraphs short, making them easy to slice and dice.

I don’t do this enough. Some of the problems occur when responding to plain text emails in Outlook. I haven’t quite figured out the settings for that but most of the time, it works well and avoids confusion. Gmail does this very well.

No thanks - I’m not married to this one, but I know a lot of people who swear by it. In more informal settings and in high-volume mail environments, it’s not necessary to respond with a “Thanks”” email whenever someone does what you asked. Save your gratitude for the next time you pass in the hall; a one-word “Thanks”” email can be crufty and unnecessary. On the other hand, don’t hesitate to thank someone for their time if they’ve truly done you a proper.

This one is a bit tough. I talked to someone who said that one particular leader in our division seemed to be quite curt in their emails. This curtness, is a simple attempt to avoid the unnecessary banter. When you receive over 100 emails a day, you don’t need 25 of them being thank yous.

This was our back to school podcast. Each of us cited 2 of our favourite tools for educators/students.

Here are Rob’s excellent show notes:

Dean’s picks

• Furl - a social bookmarking tool, also providing RSS feeds and caching of content. Spurl, Jots and Raw Sugar were also mentioned (and I think that Digg is also pretty cool). All of these are free, web based services.
• Google Earth is a seriously fun program capable of eating up much of your time. Only for Windows at this time, but Google maps is similiar. The basic edition is free, but more bells and whistles are available for cash.

Rick’s picks

• Delicious Library creates a virtual copy of your bookshelf and keeps track when you lend out copies. Sounds cool! This is commercial software, but well worth it according to Rick.
• Notebook from circusponies.com is a virtual notebook. You can add any sort of content, organize it however you’d like, and search it with the greatest of ease. This is Mac-only paid software; again Rick says it is worth the cost.

Alec’s picks

• Not an actual product, but Alec emphasized the convenience of having a good web hosting service (he uses and recommends Advanced Network Hosts, especially with the convenience of cPanel for administering the hosting service, and the Fantastico installer which easily installs many different kinds of open source software.

At this point the sound dies off unexpectedly - argggghhhh! Sorry Alec!

Rob’s picks

• My first pick is GMail. Whadda great service! If you want to demonstrate to someone what Web 2.0 is all about, you could use this as an example. I’m especially happy about the labelling, filters (including great spam filters), and the ability to search my e-mails using all the power of Google. Its free, although you still need an invite to join outside of the U.S. Contact me if you are interested in getting a free GMail account.
• I didn’t mention it on the podcast, but I must pay tribute to Audacity, a professional quality sound editing package. I use it for the post-production of the podcast, and it works so well that I can do this even though I have no idea what I’m doing! It is free, open source software available for Mac, Windows and Linux. If you are podcasting, or thinking of producing your own podcast, I rate Audacity as a must have tool!

Thomas Friedman’s latest op-ed article brings home a couple of key issues for education.Still Eating Our Lunch - New York Times

First, the shift from content to creation:

Numerical skills are very important,” she told me, but “I am now also encouraging my students to be creative - and empowering my teachers. … We have been loosening up and allowing people to grow their own ideas.”

She added, “We have shifted the emphasis from content alone to making use of the content” on the principle that “knowledge can be created in the classroom and doesn’t just have to come from the teacher.

The fact that this country has been at the top of math achievement hasn’t stopped them from looking to improve.

Second point is that static textbooks cannot even come close to demonstrated complex mathematic or scientific concepts:

Our lessons contain animated visuals that remove the abstraction underlying the concept, provide interactivity for students to understand concepts in a ‘hands on’ manner and make connections to real-life contexts so that learning becomes relevant.

Connections? Real-life contexts? Wouldn’t it be neat of our education systems moved in this direction? While some individuals are, we all know “the system” isn’t quite there yet.