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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iMovie ’08
It sounds like the best feature of iMovie 8 (the version that comes with the recently released iLife ’08 suite) is the fact that it does not delete an already installed version of iMovie from your hard drive.
David Pogue, NY Times technology columnist, echoes the hue and cry from the blogsphere and the discussion boards regarding the removal of many useful features from versions of iMovie prior to v8:
“I can’t remember any software company pulling a stunt like this before: throwing away a fully developed, mature, popular program and substituting a bare-bones, differently focused program under the same name.”
Among the changed or missing features:
- no timeline with displayed timecode
- no ability to change the audio volume during a scene
- no way to extract audio from a clip
- no more support for multiple audio tracks
- no plug in support for third party effects
- no ability to insert chapter markers for iDVD (this seems inexcusable…)
- no ability to export part of a movie
- no visual effects (that’s right–no slow motion, reverse, black-and white, sepia tone…)
- inability to fully import old iMovie projects (imports clips only–no transitions, credits, music, effects…)
Regular users of iMovie will recognize this list as comprising a significant portion of the feature list of previous versions of iMovie. All gone…
Fortunately, installing iLife ’08 over previous versions of iLife does not result in the deletion of your old version of iMovie. Look for a folder title “iMovie (previous version)” in your Applications folder. If you inadvertently delete it, Apple will allow owners of iLife 08 download a free copy of iMovie 6, the version immediately prior to v8. It’s a 155 MB download, and it will install only if it detects an installed copy of iLife 08.
Educators should also be aware that iMovie 8 requires significant computing power to run at all. Apple’s site states: “iMovie requires a Mac with an Intel processor, a Power Mac G5 (dual 2.0GHz or faster), or an iMac G5 (1.9GHz or faster).” It will no longer run on G4 processors. iBook users are out of luck.
While I can recommend the improvements to other iLife components (iPhoto 8 in particular), it’s going to be important for most schools and educators to stick with iMovie 6 until Apple updates and improves the current release.
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Searching for Tutorials
I’m a committed Google search user. I like Google’s easy interface, it’s intuitive shortcuts, and it’s uncannily accurate search results. Other general search engines just don’t seem to measure up.
However, Google and it’s lesser counterparts search the entire web–or at least as much of the web as can be indexed on a regular basis. That’s a lot of information to sift through. Sometimes it’s more effective to search a subset of the web with a tool that is targeted toward the specific results you want. Google Scholar is a good example–it searches only journals, peer-reviewed papers, theses, abstracts, and related academic topics. Another example, cited elsewhere on this blog, is Everyzing, a search engine that uses advanced algorithms to search for online videos by content and not just titles or text descriptions.
That’s why I was (initially) very excited to find TuToogle, a search engine that claims to index over 100,000 online tutorials on a variety of subjects. The site’s goal is an admirable one–a one-stop portal for finding out how to do things. A quick check of the site’s search capabilities was promising–it quickly found tutorials for PowerPoint, Excel, AutoCad, and a few others that I tried.
Disappointment began to set in when I searched for tutorials for Inspiration, an outlining, brainstorming, and concept-mapping tool that I use in my classes. TuToogle found nothing at all other than a couple of unrelated PhotoShop tutorials. Searching Google with “inspiration tutorial” immediately returned dozens of relevant sites. Further, TuToogle’s on-screen display of returned hits is dismal. TuToogle provides meager descriptions of the site along with the site’s title, and the hits are randomly mixed in with ads from Google. There does not seem to be any kind of prioritization of hits, either–another area in which Google excels. And–unforgivable for a new search tool–some of the hits were dead links.
TuToogle is–at least at present–a very disappointing iteration of a potentially very useful tool. For now, use Google.
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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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