Random Tools
Today’s post is a collection of tools and resources that have come my way over the past few days.
My Friend Flickr
This excellent article from Edutopia outlines a variety of student-safe uses of Flickr, the online photo sharing site. Amy Standen (author) does an excellent job of pointing out the potential pitfalls of turning students loose in a social networking site and demonstrates that such a resource may be used safely and productively in a school setting. Be sure to check out the links at the end of the article.
Free Flash Cards
Sometimes the old fashioned tools are the best. This is a nice repository of free flash cards on a wide variety of topics including math and science, business, arts, languages, etc. You can create your own flashcards and embed flashcards in your own blog or web page.
SchoolTube
SchoolTube is “a network of students, educators, and industry working together to foster video production and internet publishing in a safe online learning environment.” Modeled after YouTube (and many similar sites), this site publishes teacher-moderated and approved videos submitted by schools. These are not “educational” videos in the typical sense–rather, they are student or teacher produced videos from a variety of genres, including comedies, music videos, school events, careers, ceremonies, and even student council meetings. Great fun and a good option for uploading student productions.
Blogs in Education
A narrated PowerPoint presentation on basic blogging, from how to find a place to blog to why you should consider blogging. It includes a good discussion of the potential “dark side” of placing students in a social networking environment. Highly recommended as an introduction to blogging for those who are new to the concept.
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Education in Rural Alaska
Three weeks ago, I spent a very exciting and enlightening week with a dozen pre-service teachers from rural Alaska. This was an “intensive” class–a week of face-to-face teaching and learning followed by a semester of distance-delivered coursework. This was an incredibly energetic and enthusiastic group which gave me much hope for the quality of instruction in our rural sites. I learned as much from this group as I hope they did from me.
I was reminded of an article in the Christian Science Monitor about the many problems faced by rural Alaska educators (“In Alaska, School Equity Elusive”). This article outlined a number of challenges faced by rural school systems, made even more problematic by the No Child Left Behind litany of exit exams, highly-qualified teachers, and adequate yearly progress. Finding a “highly qualified teacher” is impossible when one of the main challenges is finding a teacher at all:
“Educators have cited several reasons for rural schools’ woes: poor language skills among students, a dearth of early education opportunities, alcohol abuse and other social problems in the communities, and a difficulty in attracting and retaining teachers. The last is probably the biggest challenge, said Eric Fry, spokesman for the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development. “If you don’t retain teachers, you get, by definition, inexperienced people,” he says.”
Add to that inadequate teacher housing, lack of services (including such basics as grocery stores and running water), and cultural gaps and you have an educational system that typically underserves rural students. This notion was underscored by a recent Alaska Superior Court decision that found that rural education quality was so poor that rural students should not be required to pass the same exam that their urban counterparts take.
” “It is fundamentally unfair for the State to hold students accountable for failing this exam when some students in this state have not been accorded a meaningful opportunity to learn the material on the exam – an opportunity that the State is constitutionally obligated to provide them,” Judge Gleason said in her ruling. The state must do more to improve education in troubled districts, located in generally impoverished areas of rural Alaska, before reinstating the exit-exam requirement, Gleason said.”
It seems a bit like a Catch-22–some rural students aren’t qualified to take the state-required exit exam because of poor educational preparation, but the state is required to provide adequate preparation for all of its students so that they can pass the exit exam that all Alaska students are required to pass, but some rural students aren’t qualified…
That’s why I was so encouraged by the dedication and enthusiasm of the students in my intensive class. They have a real chance to make a positive difference in their schools and districts once they become teachers. I think it’s already beginning. I require the students to keep blogs about their experiences living and teaching in their towns and villages. Their reflections about life in rural Alaska provide some powerful stories that we all need to hear. An example–this post in Betty’s Uqqaluvut blog profiles life in Kivalina [aerial photo], a small whaling village north of the Arctic Circle. It should be required reading.
I’m convinced that Web 2.0 technologies can play a meaningful part in changing the nature of education in rural Alaska. We need to tell the stories of education in rural Alaska, and the best people to tell those stories are the folks that live and teach there. In future blog entries, I’ll be linking to some of the place-based projects that my students will be undertaking this semester. Stay tuned…
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96% of Teens Use Social Networking Tools
According to a recent poll by the National Schools Boards Association, ninety-six percent of all US students aged 9 to 17 who have Internet access have used social networking tools (blogs, chats, text messages, online communities, etc.) to communicate and to create content on the web. Some specifics:
- 49% have uploaded original photos or pictures
- 25% have personal profiles posted on a web site
- 22% have uploaded original videos
- 17% have blogs
- 16% have visited virtual worlds such as Second Life
Perhaps most interestingly, 50 percent report that they use social networking tools specifically for schoolwork. Anne L. Bryant, NSBA’s executive director, sums up the findings this way:
“There is no doubt that these online teen hangouts are having a huge influence on how kids today are creatively thinking and behaving. The challenge for school boards and educators is that they have to keep pace with how students are using these tools in positive ways and consider how they might incorporate this technology into the school setting.” [NBSA online article | Complete article as PD file]
From my perspective, truer words were never spoken. If it wasn’t clear before, it should be obvious now that many of our K-12 students are developing their learning styles and preferences in environments that look far different than the classrooms in the schools they attend. They are not simply consumers of online content–they also create it.
The questions that schools need to address involve what to do when students come to school and expect to use their technologies to communicate, research, create, and collaborate. Do we ban these technologies, or do we use them as teaching and learning tools?
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Newsfeeds You Need
News feeds–content that is automatically delivered to your news reader via RSS–are time-savers in many senses of the term. Instead of searching for current topics, you can have news delivered right to you.
Here are a few web sites that provide news feeds that are useful for K-12 and post-secondary teachers:
- eSchool News: excellent coverage of K-12 and post-secondary ed tech issues, current research
- This Week in Education: news feed from Education Week magazine; good coverage of education issues in general
- Top 100 Education Blogs: from the Online Education Database; lots of targeted resources for teachers
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Digital Storytelling
Here’s a quick profile on two tools that should interest K-12 and post-secondary educators who are interested in the idea of digital storytelling. One of them (Panraven) is brand new. The other–the simply amazing Comic Life–has been a mainstay on Macs for some years but has recently been released in beta version for Windows. Both are simple to use and powerful as media creation tools.
Panraven is an online storybook creator. Originally developed for travel agents to create books for their clients, Panraven is now open to the public. In use, it resembles Apple’s excellent book feature of iPhoto. You upload digital photos (there are free plugins for iPhoto and Picasa, so you can batch upload directly from Macs or Windows), choose a page layout option, drag your uploaded photos to the pages, create captions and titles, and share your creation. You can make your book private, open to the public, or open only to selected invitees. And, as with iPhoto, you can have your online book printed, hardbound, and delivered to you. The basic service is free, and there are subscription options if you need more storage, etc.
Here’s a link to my first attempt at using Panraven without (as usual) reading the directions first and using some photos uploaded from iPhoto that I had on my laptop. I should have varied the layouts more–an easy task with Panraven. Think about it–online storybooks, travelogs, primers, step-by-step lessons, sense of place projects. The possibilities are endless.
The Comic Life
Comic Life, from Plasq, has come installed on most Macs for some time now. Using pre-installed page layouts, lettering, and dialog and caption boxes, it’s easy (and addictive) to create “comic books” from your digital photos by simply dragging them and dropping them from iPhoto and annotating them. The ease with which this can be accomplished is astonishing. MacWorld has a nice review that will give you a sense of what I’m talking about.
The good news for Windows users is that Comic Life is now available (in beta) from Plasq. You can download a trial version for free. Other licenses cost $25 and up, and there are household licenses available for families with multiple computers.
While you may think that creating comics is a rather limited undertaking, you should be aware that Comic Life is essentially a page layout program with a huge range of customizable features. You can create your own layouts, vary the page size, and save and print in a wide variety of formats. It’s great for storyboarding, large format posters, advertising, childrens’ books, and anything else you can think of to publish. After a recent trip to Europe, I created a series of travel posters from some of our digital photos. An example from Italy is shown here. The originals were printed to a PDF file in tabloid (11″ x 17″) format, taken to my local copy center, and printed on card stock for about two dollars each. I have dozens…
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E-mail is SOOOO 20th century…
One of the things we are taught when we are studying to become teachers is to “meet students where they are” in terms of their learning styles and preferences. It does no good to teach at a pace that is too fast or too slow for the learner, nor is it a good idea to use materials or methods that do not directly address the way a person learns. This idea is at the heart of constructivist teaching–find out what motivates a student and start from there to build a teaching and learning system that optimizes a student’s opportunity to learn.
It’s interesting to consider this in light of existing and emerging technologies. As teachers of teachers, those of us in schools of education (if we practice what we preach) should be meeting our students where they are in terms of their learning styles and preferences. These styles and preferences were typically developed in a world of ubiquitous technology in their homes, in a world in which e-mail, the world wide web, and computers have always been there.
That’s why a recent article on CNET caught my attention. In “Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead,” Stephanie Olson writes:
The future of e-mail might be found on the pages of MySpace.com and Facebook.
Just ask a group of teen Internet entrepreneurs, who readily admit that traditional e-mail is better suited for keeping up professional relationships or communicating with adults.
“I only use e-mail for my business and to get sponsors,” Martina Butler, the host of the teen podcast Emo Girl Talk, said during a panel discussion here at the Mashup 2007 conference, which is focused on the technology generation. With friends, Bulter said she only sends notes via a social network.
“Sometimes I say I e-mailed you, but I mean I Myspace’d or Facebook’ed you,” she said.
There is a lot to digest in those words. How many terms did you encounter that refer to something about which you know little or nothing? Facebook? MySpace? Podcast? Mashup? Social networks? Does this suggest that your students–the ones in your university classes, studying to become teachers–know about something very important that you don’t? Read on:
“If I’m talking to any friends it’s through a social network,” said Asheem Badshah, a teenaged president of Scriptovia.com, an essay-sharing site that launched this summer. “For me even IM died, and was replaced by text messaging. Facebook will replace e-mail for communicating with certain people.”
Not only are some of the methods of communicating changing, but the devices used to communicate are also evolving. Facebook runs on cell phones. There are more than 15 billion cell phone in the world today and only a third as many computers, most of which are sitting on desktops [citation]. Most cell phones can capture video, send and receive text messages, and even work with e-mail.
Butler replied that she uses Facebook on her cell phone. “I need (Facebook) everywhere I go, but I log into e-mail only once a week,” she said.
More and more, social networks are playing a bigger role on the cell phone. In the last six to nine months, teens in the United States have taken to text messaging in numbers that rival usage in Europe and Asia. According to market research firm JupiterResearch, 80 percent of teens with cell phones regularly use text messaging.
Social networks may or may not be the future of communications–things change quickly these days. But that’s not the point of this post. The point is that we–post-secondary educators–need to be conversant with the tools that our students use and the learning styles that are fostered by them. We may tell ourselves that we’re using technology for teaching because we use Blackboard and send e-mail to our students. We may ask them to look up topics on a web page instead of a textbook or use a discussion board to post threaded comments. But to our students, this is probably neither engaging nor is it technology. It was all invented before they were born.
It’s soooo 20th century…
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Of Books, Blogs, and Teaching 2.0
Two seemingly disparate articles came my way this week and got me thinking (again) about the nature of Teaching 2.0. (I have been defining Teaching 2.0 as the shift in pedagogy brought about by participatory Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, social networks, etc.)
The first is a story from the Daily Herald in Provo, Utah. Ron Hammond, a professor at Utah Valley State College, is leading a protest against the exorbitant and rising price of textbooks for college students by not requiring any for his classes. Instead, he assigns journal articles and original research available from online sources or libraries. In addition to saving significant amounts of money for his students, Hammond has found that engaging students with original research teaches students powerful research skills that will help them in their careers. [Read the article here.]
I have not required textbooks for my university classes for the past four years. The impetus was not necessarily to protest against the cost of textbooks–although my students were very happy about not having to purchase any. Rather, it was an effort to provide current information to students in a format that was easily accessible and extensible. My reading lists vary from semester to semester as I constantly locate new and more current sources of information relevant to my topics. They are also responsible for finding some of their own sources. In a field in which information becomes obsolete almost weekly, it’s an advantage to students to be exposed to current information and also to learn the skills for locating it on their own. I’d urge all educators to critically examine the texts that they use to determine if they are really necessary for their classes. It’s very liberating to be free of the tyranny of the textbook.
The second article deals with what has become–for me, at least–a major alternative to the textbook. By most calculations, I came late to blogging. As of this writing, blogging is officially 10 years old–an eternity in computer years. I have been actively involved for about three years as an author, and for a few more as a consumer. It’s as an author, though, that the power of the medium has come into such sharp focus and why I have come to believe that blogging is such a critical tool for our students, both K-12 and post-secondary.
21Classes (as of this writing still in beta but available for use) is offering a unique take on blogging with students. 21Classes is both a blogging portal and hosting service aimed at getting students to blog. Because it offers a variety of blog management tools (e.g., reviewing entries, control over student content, making some content private, etc.) it seems targeted at K-12 students whose posts may need review prior to publishing. However, it would also be appropriate for post-secondary students, particularly as an introduction to students who may not be familiar with blogging or to those who have some privacy concerns.
21Classes is a free service at it’s basic level, which includes advertising. For about $9.00 per month, you get no ads, more storage space, and the ability to create 100 separate student accounts rather than just 50.
So–not only do we have some sound pedagogical (and economic) reasons for looking beyond textbooks, we have some easy tools to let us get started with some powerful supplements.
I want my university students to blog for a number of reasons:
- To reflect on their studies
- To develop and enhance writing skills
- To share articles and their own insights with others
- To create placed-based projects documenting Alaska’s far-flung communities
- To keep up with what their peers (and former teachers) are writing and thinking about
- To provide us at the university insight into current K-12 classrooms and issues
There’s just no reason not to anymore.
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