Your Own Child Left Behind?
It’s difficult to find arguments for the success of NCLB, but here’s a unique twist on the topic. Parents (at least those in Kansas) don’t appear to support strengthening math, science, and technology programs to enhance 21st century skills. This report from eSchool News suggests that parents are on the whole satisfied with “basic” skills in math and science and do not see the need for advanced skills for their own children.
“The dilemma is really twofold,” says Jean Johnson, executive vice president of Public Agenda. “One is that parents, students, and local communities may be complacent about or even resist efforts to strengthen math and science education. Right now, most just don’t share leaders’ sense of urgency. The second is that many young people and their families may not recognize the vast and interesting opportunities available to students with strong math and science backgrounds. They just may not have absorbed how much the economy and future jobs are changing.”
I guess it doesn’t take a government program to leave children behind when parents are willing to do it themselves.
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Getting Your Message Out
Many universities use Elluminate Live! for distance classes. ELive is a fine tool lets users share application screens and whiteboards, participate in audio chat sessions, and move into breakout rooms for small group discussions. Sessions can be saved and viewed later. I use it in my own classes for many tasks.
But what if you don’t have access to ELive, or need to use only certain features? What if you don’t need synchronous communication with your audience?
There are some free alternatives to ELive that are worth your consideration.
Google Presently
The latest addition to Google Docs is Presently, a presentation program that resembles and works with PowerPoint. Existing PowerPoint presentations can be uploaded and viewed at any time, or the author (or designated collaborators) can take control of the presentation and walk viewers through it. There is a text chat window so that viewers can communicate with each other or with presenters but no audio chat feature. Uploaded PowerPoint presentations will not show any animation at all (bullet points, slide transitions, etc.) and action buttons will not work. While it sounds limited, when employed for simple instruction it can be a very useful tool. This presentation was uploaded from an existing PowerPoint presentation and shows the utility of having web access to an instructional document.
To use Presently, all you need is a Google account. If you have a GMail account, use Google Reader, or keep a Blogger bog, you already have one.
SketchCast
First there was podcasting. Then came vcasting and screencasting. As of a few weeks ago, we now have sketchcasting.
Imagine that you are a high school math teacher standing at a whiteboard walking your class through a geometric proof. You draw a few figures on the board, make a few comments as you go, and arrive at the final proof. That is the concept behind SketchCast. SketchCast gives you a whiteboard with different colored markers onto which you sketch your ideas while you (optionally) narrate your sketch. This process is recorded and produces a video that can be embedded into a web page or blog or can be saved online for viewing by anyone. It really helps to have a graphics tablet with a pen to make your sketch, but it will work with a mouse or trackpad. If your mousing skills aren’t great, you can enter text from the keyboard by selecting the text tool, but you only get one font in one size. You can’t paste images from another source–you’re limited to what you draw or type on the whiteboard.
Still, there are some instances when a SketchCast could come in very handy. Math comes to mind immediately–solving an equation, working through a proof, simplifying a fraction, etc. Many art activities are possible–cartooning, specific pencil or color techniques, for example. How about sounding out words using the audio feature?
WizIQ
WizIQ shares many features of Elluminate: two-way audio, text chat, shared whiteboard, and PowerPoint and PDF Document sharing capabilities. It’s designed as a way to deliver tutorial information either in real time or as a saved archive. Members (membership is free) can schedule real time sessions and invite participants, participate in others’ sessions, browse from a wide variety of saved sessions, and search for other members with similar interests. Real time sessions include audio, chat, and shared documents. Saved archives function much like PowerPoint presentations, including some animation and embedded sounds. Some PowerPoint features–action buttons, for example–do not work, but there are on-screen controls for stepping through the slides. Saved sessions may also be embedded into web pages or blogs. Like Presently, you can upload existing PowerPoint documents.
WizIQ makes sense as a way to deliver online tutorial content to an audience. It’s not better than Elluminate in this regard, but it’s free.
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What Can Kids Do?
This morning I was made aware of a very powerful web site called What Kids Can Do. WKCD’s purpose is to promote adolescents as valuable resources (rather than as problems) and to showcase the power of what young people can accomplish when given proper opportunity and support. The Feature Stories and Special Collections sections of WKCD contain wonderful case studies of young people in action reforming schools, creating new knowledge, and even learning how to subsist in rural Alaska.
It was the latter that provided my introduction to WKCD. A student of mine from Russian Mission, AK wrote a compelling blog post about how the school there handles the subsistence issue in rural Alaska. Many rural Alaskans depend on fishing, hunting, and gathering to provide food for the winter, and this sometimes conflicts with school schedules. (You know–the schedule that lets us out in the summer months to work on the farm…) Following the author’s suggestion to google “Russian Mission school subsistence” led me to WKCD and a wonderful article (“Outside Is Our School”) about Russian Mission’s school-based subsistence program. I won’t spoil the beauty of the words and images contained in the article, other than to tell you that I learned something very important today. You can too.
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Preparing Students for College?
This article from eSchool News–Report: Schools Aren’t Preparing Kids for College–is required reading. In it, eSchool News Assistant Editor Meris Stansbury reports on a panel discussion convened by the Alliance for Excellent Education that examined AEE’s brief on how US high schools do–or don’t–prepare students for success in college.
Some of the findings:
- Thirty-four percent of US high school students graduate ready for college;
- Eighteen percent of high school freshmen graduate in four years, go on to college, and earn an associate’s or bachelor’s degree;
- One-third of those who make it to college must take remedial courses;
- Sixty-five percent of college professors do not believe that high school standards prepare students for college
The issue is not just one of preparing students for college. According to ACT’s Cyndie Schmeiser, “recent studies have shown that the skills needed to succeed in college are similar to the skills needed for good-paying jobs.”
Don’t finish reading this post. Go read the article, and download the AEE’s brief, “AEE’s Issue Brief: “High School Teaching for the Twenty-First Century: Preparing Students for College.”
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Research on Social Networking
Wired for FaceBook?
As my university students and I delve more into the phenomenon of social networking, I find myself looking for research that addresses the reasons that so many folks find social networking so compelling. Many of my students have an almost palpable fear of being un-connected to their network of friends, be that realized through cell phone, text messaging, instant messaging, Facebook/MySpace/LiveJournal, and even e-mail. Some of my students maintain contacts in more than one of the aforementioned media simultaneously. The rapid rise of Twitter (“what are you doing right now?”) as a communication platform is further evidence of the need for constant affirmation through social contact. But how does this compare to “real,” face-to-face contact?
Evolutionary psychology may give us some clues. Michael Rogers, a columnist for MSNBC, recently reviewed a book by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar called “Gossip, Grooming, and the Evolution of Language” [Amazon link]. In this book, Dunbar examined the behavior of humans long before civilization or language developed. His basic premise is that understanding one’s place in the social hierarchy of early hominid groups was critical for survival and that this was largely accomplished by the same kind of grooming behavior that we currently see in apes, chimps, and monkeys. As these early hominid groups became larger, mutual grooming of every “tribe” member became impossible. The vehicle that replaced grooming as a social contact was language. Language facilitated quicker communication and the ability to communicate with multiple individuals at the same time. As Rogers puts it, “we haven’t stopped gossiping since.”
Intriguingly, Dunbar points out that there is a practical limit to the number of individuals with whom a single individual can maintain this kind of contact. That number is about 150. Large scale groups have developed a series of ways to compensate for this limitation by forming bureaucracies, social stratification, or other mechanisms to keep the numbers down to a manageable size, but the limitation still exists.
So–is social networking the next evolutionary step in increasing the number of contacts that an individual may have while still being able to understand one’s place in the hierarchy? Are we “wired” to have a Facebook page? It’s clearly too early to tell, but these are interesting times…
Who Are Your Friends?
“Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace do not help you make more genuine close friends, according to a survey by researchers who studied how the websites are changing the nature of friendship networks.”
That quote is from an article by Guardian science correspondent James Randerson titled “Social Networking Sites Don’t Deepen Friendships.” Citing results from a survey about the nature of friendships and how they may be influenced by social networks, Randerson concludes that, while an individual may have thousands of friends collected on MySpace or Facebook, these friends are not the same as friends developed in traditional face to face situations. Researchers found a distinction between friends made through a social network and “close” friends made by traditional means.
This is probably not a surprise to anyone. Trust engendered through traditional friendships is difficult to build and maintain through a medium in which it is so easy to misrepresent yourself. However, it appears to be the case that the generally accepted limit of 150 acquaintances (or 5 close friends) may be expanded through social networks by making it easier to keep in touch over distance and making it less expensive–both financially and in terms of effort expended–to maintain a large number of social contacts.
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Teachers’ Domain: High Quality Video Content
As I mentioned in some of my earlier posts (see Free Online Videos and Free Online Videos, Part Two), research tells us that having “just-in-time” video resources available for students has a positive effect on achievement, time on task, and overall engagement. Commercial services such as United Streaming Media provide these media, but licenses can be expensive and are usually handled at a district level.
That’s why I am on a constant search for free, high quality video resources for teachers. One of the best such resources came to my attention recently. Teachers’ Domain offers an exceptional collection of very high quality Open Educational Resources video content across a variety of topics as well as excellent professional development opportunities in the form of online classes using resources from NOVA and other PBS programming.
The online content offered by Teachers’ Domain is compelling. You’ll find a variety of QuickTime movies, interactive Flash applications, images, PDF files, web links, and lesson plans categorized by topic and grade level. Most of these resources can be viewed online, which is good in itself, but an exciting feature is the ability to (legally!) download and even remix resources for your own purposes.
Social networking capabilities have not been overlooked. You can create online folders to store links to content that you will reuse at a later date, and you can create groups of other Teachers’ Domain users to share resources, lesson plans, and ideas.
Teachers’ Domain should be on every teacher’s favorites list.
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