Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

If you read my blog this weekend, you would have found a post I wrote in response to Bernie Dodge’s rather candid, and in my mind, somewhat unprofessional post regarding a presenter at a conference he was presenting at in Texas.

I posted a comment on his blog expressing my concern and posted here in regards to my fears that we as educators were not modelling the kind of conversation and dialouge we want our students and other teachers to engage in.

I checked back tonight to see that Mr. Dodge has retracted his post to now exclude the name of the presenter to which he was referring. He is still upset with the presenter but now his post addresses a greater problem that is worth writing about. I’m sure it wasn’t my post that changed his mind but rather, as he stated, a wiser wife.

Bravo Bernie Dodge.

On the 1 year anniversary of my blog, I thought I should try and write something so deep and profound that it would shake all my readers.

Okay so that’s not likely to happen so I’ll just throw out some thoughts around relevancy and communication.

When I think about our provincial language arts curriculum it seems to cover the 6 basic strands of communication: reading/writing speaking/listening viewing/representing
Most would acknowledge that we’ve over emphasized the reading/writing aspect and definitely are working towards incorporating more of the viewing/representing strand. The thought that occurred to me yesterday was about relevancy. If you asked the 10 adults if they did any writing in the past few days, I wonder how many actually did any writing other than making a list or a quick email or text message. While there are definitely a number of vocations where writing is part of the daily routine, my instinct tells me this is the minority. Most people do not engage in much writing. In fact, of these 6 strands, it is definitely the consumption strands (reading, listening and viewing) that we engage in. Speaking is obviously right up there as well but writing and representing do not really have a regular place in the life of your average adult.

So if this is true, why do we continue to spend the time we do helping students to write? I suspect the initial response to that is to help them communicate and also be better readers. I agree. David Warlick often talks about the future and how our students will be asked to create movies and other multimedia projects. Many of our enlightened educators are helping students to be contributors of this new read/write web. Creators not just contributors. It seems that we believe because of the new tools and openness of the web, all can be creators of content.

All can be but my feeling is few will be.

I say this because of two observations. One as I’ve alluded to earlier was that few adults communicate with writing or representing (ie. video/imagery). Even if they were given an audience, most people aren’t interested in sharing with a larger audience. This number is obviously growing as evidenced by the number of teenage blogs. But it still is a small percentage of the total population.

The second observation is that just because the tools are there, doesn’t make the creation of content and less stringent. I do a lot of video editing. I love it and appreciate the advancement of hardware and software to make the process almost as easy as it can get. But creating a quality video is hard work. My son spent 5 hours last night working on a short video for school. That doesn’t include the pre-planning and actual filming. Anyone who has created video understands this. I think teaching kids this is important more because it helps them better view the media they see everyday. I don’t think the majority of citizens will be creating video. It’s just way too hard. Same with writing. Although it’s easier than video, crafting a well written, readable document takes time; more time than most people are willing to give.

So after all that here is the hard question…

Should we be teaching the creation aspects of communication in equal proportion to the consumption, if indeed very few will be regular contributors?

How many feeds is too many? 50? 100? 200? I’ve got 250. To be fair, probably half of them aren’t very active and so they really don’t create much work or time to read. But I do have a number of feeds that rarely offer anything of value. My most useless feeds are:

1. Boing Boing.…very popular but total fluff. They usually have 20 or so posts per day and maybe I’ve found 5 posts mildly interesting. Not necessary but amusing. Can 39,392 subscribers be wrong? Change that to 39,391.
2. Tech Bargains…. nice if you spend alot online or are an American but for me I think I’ve only taken advantage of one offer.
3. NY Times Op-Ed…since they’ve moved to a pay model for most of the columns it’s a waste. I originally subscribed because of Thomas Friedman but he’s not free anymore
4. CBBC Newsround….I started a folder called Kids Feeds which was intended to find RSS feeds for kids. This is one I thought might be suitable but I’m not sure anymore. Still looking for a good kids news source. I’m still waiting for yahooligans to offer a feed.
5. “Classroom Blogging” news feed. I have this coming in from Google and Yahoo. In general I’m not happy with most news feeds. They tend to repeat too many stories from various sources and also the same story seems to reappear about 58 times before it dies.

Okay those are my top 5 worst feeds. I’m going to go and remove the subscriptions. I’m still frustrated by the number or times the same post gets republished. I know I’ve done it a few times after correcting or updating a feed but it seems that it happens more than it should from my other feeds. Maybe there’s a technical issue I’m missing here.

Anyway, maybe I should weed more often. Now I’m down to 245.

I think Google Maps and Google Earth should be incorporated into virtually every classroom on a daily basis. Rarely does a day go by in my routine where I don’t do a quick look up of a location or directions.

But here’s what I’d love a classroom to do:
Take this link filled with Google Earth/Map hacks and tools and sort them and categorize them. There are so many incredible applications. As a fan of 24, here’s a neat little application that plots the various locations of each episode. Not only that but most of the applications provide photos and links to additional information.

As Clarence wrote,

One thing I have seen this year is the kids grow and respond to certain tools. Some kids have turned in to great prolific bloggers. Other prefer our wiki. Some kids have made great use of their Bloglines accounts while others have hardly touched them. Now we are moving on to Skype. I have been discussing it with the kids in my class and now at least half a dozen of them have set up Skype accounts. I have learned this year valuable lessons about exposing kids to tools, teaching them how to sue them safely and ethically, and then allowing them to use those which suit their purposes best. While I expect them to be able to use any of the tools, I need to allow them choices and responsibility in their communication channels.

So there’s the challenge. Get your kids to dig into these tools and their value and post the findings.

This is a bit of a guilt post.

Darren just Skyped me about talking to some teachers on Monday as he’s doing another one of his great sessions on the tools of Web 2.0 (at least I think that’s what he’s doing). He asked me to talk about folks that I’ve been helping and the impact it’s had on their students.

I have a little folder in my aggregrator called PS 210 bloggers. These are all the teachers that I’ve worked with in starting a weblog. There area about 50 or so bloggers in there. Of those, perhaps 15 have maintained there blog. Most use it as a classroom announcement/information site which I’ve always encouraged but also tried to promote the more reflective/connective aspect. That’s been tougher. I’d say I only have 2 really reflective bloggers. Here’s where I really feel guilty, none of them at this point have introduced blogging to their students. I have worked with a few classes and got them started but not very successfully.

So when Darren calls me on Monday (I’m sure Darren, you’ll read this before then) and asks about the impact with students, I’ll have to confess it’s been minimal. The teachers who use them as classroom portals/sites are happy but it’s been slow in moving beyond that.

So in light of that, I dug around my clippings in Bloglines and found 3 posts from the past that may encourage teachers to start student weblogs.

• Grade 8 student reflection
• Grade 8 teacher perspective
• Kid’s quotes on blogging

Now if any Prairie South teachers are interested, I’d love to work with you and your students in discovering the power of blogging.

Confession is over.

I don’t want to be these guys…

Curriculum Actualization is a term used in our province to indicate the completion of implementation of a curriculum.

Miguel has been having some great discussion about curriculum and its worth a read.

I spend a lot of time reading and writing about the way things ought to be in terms of creating an authentic, relevant classroom. Bob Sprankle, if you aren’t aware is a grade 3-4 teacher in Maine. He’s been podcasting for some time now and if you visit his classroom site, you’ll get a sense of what he and his students are doing.

I listened to his podcast last week where he talks about his students investigation of a false accusation on wikipedia. That in itself is powerful stuff. David Warlick did a session last week and used their podcast as an example of K-12 podcasting. During the session, he had participants comment on what they heard. One person questioned the validity of the students work and wondered if Bob Sprankle had done the writing for them.

In the most recent podcast by Bob Sprankle, he records a classroom discussion where students respond to the accusation that perhaps they aren’t doing the writing. Listen to their response.
I like this exchange, when Bob plays devil’s advocate and says:

“How would you even know a word like ‘false accuation’.”
“I read books”

I love how Bob let’s the kids hammer out their ideas and simply offers leading questions. This is great teaching and even greater learning.

Miguel said,

So, although we may perceive that students are developing skills more efficiently as they “wikify” knowledge, we could still achieve the same results with other approaches.

Really? What other approaches could match this learning?

If you can find a better or comparable example of authentic learning that doesn’t incorporate technology, I’d like to know.