bob sprankle

Seedlings @ Bit by Bit Podcast: Show 80
February 4, 2010

We’re Discuss the 2010 Horizon Report!

Links from the show:

• NMC: Horizon Project

“Geek of the Week” Links for 2010-02-04

Chat Transcript from EdTech coming soon!

Music:

• “And So We Strive” by Stuart Lawson

Technorati Tags: bitbybit, seedlings, education, cheryloakes, alicebarr, bobsprankle

 

 Seedlings @ Bit By Bit Podcast: Show 80 [54:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

(cross-posted at TechLearning)

In this post I’d like to share some great finds that I’ve had the fortune to discover this week.

First and foremost, this week gave us the 2010 edition of the “Horizon Report” put out by the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. I look forward to this publication each year like a child looks forward to Christmas. I read it over and over, both in paper form and on the web, and click on the great links included in the report for weeks on end. It brings me both a lens to peek into our possible education futures as well as a chance to reflect on how far we’ve come. As in years past, the Horizon Report looks at “key trends” in technology related to education. The report identifies three different “horizons” or time frames for when the tools will likely be adopted into the “mainstream” of educational use. The horizons are defined as: “Near-Term Adoption” (within the next 12 months), “Second Adoption Horizon” (two to three years out), and “Far-Term Horizon” (four to five years away). The report doesn’t claim to be a “predictive tool” but serves to “highlight emerging technologies with considerable potential for our focus areas of teaching, learning, and creative inquiry.” Top dog tool in the report: mobile computing.

The report also identifies “Critical Challenges” that will affect education, and it is this passage that I’ve been meditating on all week:

“Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession… As faculty and instructors begin to realize that they are limiting their students by not helping them to develop and use digital media literacy skills across the curriculum, the lack of formal training is being offset through professional development or informal learning, but we are far from seeing digital media literacy as a norm. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that digital literacy is less about tools and more about thinking [my emphasis], and thus skills and standards based on tools and platforms have proven to be somewhat ephemeral.”

Great stuff there. And I can’t help but connect it to another great article that’s hijacked my brain all week: “Debunking the Case for National Standards: One-Size-Fits-All Mandates and Their Dangers” by Alfie Kohn. In this amazing article, Kohn challenges the notion that “uniformity” benefits students:

“I know of no evidence that students in countries as diverse as ours with national standards or curricula engage in unusually deep thinking or are particularly excited about learning.“

There’s that thinking word again.

Two more great finds that I’ll leave you with are a recording hosted at Slate.com put out by Slate and New America Foundation called, “Authority, Meet Technology,” a discussion about China, Google, and Internet freedom. This of course goes well with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech the following day on “Internet Freedom.”

Hope you enjoy the finds!

Seedlings @ Bit by Bit Podcast: Show 79
January 21, 2010

It’s a “Call-In” Show to Discuss Student/Parent/Teacher Conferences!

Links from the show:

• Here’s the NING Discussion that started the topic
• Delicious Links for “Conference Resources”—Please add to Delicious with the tag: “2010-01-21SeedlingsConferenceResources”

“Geek of the Week” Links for 2010-01-21

Chat Transcript from EdTech

Music:

• “And So We Strive” by Stuart Lawson

Technorati Tags: bitbybit, seedlings, education, cheryloakes, alicebarr, bobsprankle, call-in, conferences

 

 Seedlings @ Bit By Bit Podcast: Show 79 [63:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Seedlings @ Bit by Bit Podcast: Show 78
January 14, 2010

We’re joined by Richard Byrne!

Links from the show:

• Free Technology for Teachers

“Geek of the Week” Links for 2010-01-14

Chat Transcript from EdTech

Music:

• “And So We Strive” by Stuart Lawson

Technorati Tags: bitbybit, seedlings, education, cheryloakes, alicebarr, bobsprankle, richardbyrne

 

 Seedlings @ Bit By Bit Podcast: Show 78 [61:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

(cross-posted at TechLearning)

This week’s article is an experiment and review for the Dragon Dictation iPhone application which is currently free [and] available for the iPhone. I will write this complete article by talking into my phone using this application and if the application makes any mistakes, then I will put the correct words in brackets and we’ll see how well this application does.

One drawback is that I can only put so much text into the document at a time and when it’s filled up then the application will stop and I need to e-mail it to myself and then start a new section. So that give [can] me [be] a bit time consuming and also interrupt[s] my flow of thoughts. But for short text and especially for someone who is challenge[d] to NIST and in the texting arena, this app works great and some of the recognition is incredibly surprising. For instance he it has no problem with the word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

The way Dragon works works is you just click the app to start it up and click have the “[Tap] to record indicates [button]“, say some words, and then it pushes your speech up to the server where Dragon’s powerful computers can turn it into text.

Dragon software has been around free [for a] long time and it’s definitely come down in price and is available for your Mac or PC. East Beach [Speech] to text technology has definitely improved significantly since the last time that I’ve looked into it and for instance, with the iPhone app, there is no training involved at all. I just speak and then the processor[s] is at the Dragon site take care of it. One thing that I have noticed with the Dragon app is that it seems to recognize words spoken by an adult much better than children. Now this test has been done in [an] with a small sampling of students in an informal setting and desolate [definitely] not in a scientific way.

So what does that [this] is making me wonder about is this: is speech recognition becoming more I am ready for schools? And, especially as an elementary teacher with students that take a long time to type in their thoughts, reason or even to write— it is just is this the tool of the near future?

The other thing that it makes me wonder about is: how much time schools or teachers are actually giving to curse of [cursive] these days as well as to time to learn typing in the elementary grades.

So I’m going to set up a survey below and I would love to hear your feedback on how much time you give to cursive instruction and how much time you get give to typing instruction in the grades K to five [5]?

Thanks so much for joining in on the survey!

In conclusion, I like the Dragon have [app] for my texting purposes when I’m writing something very short. It’s definitely faster than me using my big thumbs on such a small iPhone. As far as doing a long piece, I’m not sure that that’s it’s the best way for me to write and I’m pretty sure I prefer typing.

Afterword (done with a keyboard and NOT the Dragon App):

As you can see with the text above, Dragon did pretty well. Most words are recognized and few words were dropped. Dragon makes it quite easy to fix the errors right within the app, but I chose to fix them here in the blog so you could see the amount of errors and what they looked like.

Bottom line for me: as mentioned above, it’s great when I need to write on the iPhone for short “texting-like” pieces, but it is terrible for any serious writing. The above writing is pretty sloppy because I’m not able to pause and do any real editing, as I can do when typing. It may be faster to get the words (or letters) out, but they’re definitely weakened by not having the benefit of my fingers tapping them out.

However… are we needing to take a closer look at speech recognition software once again in education? Are the children that we’re still teaching typing to going to be “talking” to their machines when they leave us? Is typing an essential skill? What about cursive instruction?

Seedlings @ Bit by Bit Podcast: Show 77
January 7, 2010

We’re joined by Deb White —2009 ACTEM Educator of the Year— Talking about Twitter in the Classroom!

Links from the show:

• New this week:  Student Blogs
• Last Year’s Student Blogs
• School page
• Old blog on Open Source

• ACTEM
• Netsmartz
• Cybersmart

“Geek of the Week” Links for 2010-01-07

Chat Transcript from EdTech

Music:

• “And So We Strive” by Stuart Lawson

Technorati Tags: bitbybit, seedlings, education, cheryloakes, alicebarr, bobsprankle, debwhite, ACTEM

 

  Seedlings @ Bit By Bit Podcast: Show 77 [40:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

(cross-posted at TechLearning)

I’m barely awake, watching the ending scene of my favorite movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, but this time it’s different. When the camera zooms in on Jimmy Stewart holding Zuzu, and the bell rings, a line has been changed:

“Daddy, teacher says that every time a bell rings, a new Web 2.0 app has been created.”

Jimmy Stewart tells Zuzu that she’s right. He’s got tears in his eyes. I’m wide awake now. Did I just hear that correctly?

Ok. Clearly I need a break. Time to shut down the pipelines. Turn off Twitter, disconnect the iPhone, unplug gMail and pull the plug from all that is streaming and fed by RSS syndication.

It’s hard to stop, but I’ve made a promise that I will take an entire day during this upcoming Winter Holiday vacation (here in North America) to completely unplug. It’s something that no longer comes easily —turning off all the “stuff.” I’m not saying that I’m at the level of crisis like some, but sometimes it’s hard to remember what life was like without all the connectivity and new Web 2.0 tools to try out every time I turn around. Vacations are always a good time to refuel and refocus. This year, my inspiration for letting go of the digital for a day comes from a book by A. J. Jacobs, called The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment, in particular, Chapter 8: The Unitasker. In this experiment, Jacobs strives to stop the curse of multi-tasking and return to a simpler, more focused mode of life. He sites the article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicolas Carr as part of his own inspiration and tries to suss out all multitasking in his life and commit to one act at a time as part of a self-imposed experiment.

Hey, I should be able to do at least a day of this, right?

Having made this promise to myself and my amazed family, along comes another book of inspiration: a free ebook put together by Seth Godin, comprised of over 70 “big thinkers’” micro-essays of ideas to chew on as we head into the New Year. It’s called What Matters Now and, according to Godin, will set you on the path to “a different way of thinking, a useful way to focus and the energy to turn the game around.” While not all the essays have been earth-shattering to me, I’ve bookmarked quite a collection that have spoken directly to my “rebooting and refocusing” quest as well as given me things to think about once I plug back in:

• Right out of the gate, Elizabeth Gilbert hit me with the essay, “Ease,” which tells me to “take a step back” and turn off all my electronics.
• Howard Mann cautions us that “more megaphones don’t equal a better dialogue” and to be aware of how large and loud the “echo chamber” is becoming.
• Guy Kawasaki tells us of 10 important things to remember when evangelizing.
• Mitch Joel reminds us of the importance of Compassion.
• Karen Armstrong reminds us of the “Golden Rule.”
• David Weinberger reminds us how the hyperlink makes us smarter by bringing differences and disagreements “only a click away” and gives us the opportunity “to live together peacefully in a world or unresolved differences.”
• Mark Rovner asks us, “What would Buddha Tweet?”

This book is a wonderful gift (holiday or otherwise) that Godin has placed at our feet, perfect for reflection in these hyper-changing times. I invite you to check out What Matters Now and pass on the link to friends. Which essays speak to you? What would you add?

Are you like me? Have you been planning on a “reboot” or a “powering down?”

Happy Holidays!

(cross-posted at TechLearning)

I love it when this happens: when learning goes home, never having been assigned by the teacher, but taken up by the student.

It happened a bunch this week, so I’m smiling hard and telling the tale in 3 acts:

Act 1:
The scene is 2nd graders who are learning how to change the font in their “Peace Cards to the World” that they’re making in the tried and true application, KidPix. One girl comes across the font called, “Alex” and pretty soon students are asking, “Who’s Alex?” I explain that this is the name of the font and that it was probably named after the person who made it (Alex). The girl who discovered the font lights up and says, “Cool! That would be cool to make your own font.” Moments later, we are downloading the template to make your own font from FontCapture.com and I’m showing her how she can in fact create her very own font. She asks me if she can take the template home, and I say sure. The next day, she has created three beautiful fonts on the templates, has named them (“Peace,” “Cactus,” and “The Squirrel”) and brings them to me. I scan them in, upload them to the site, and voila! she has her own fonts.

Now most of her class is taking home the font template and are bringing back font after font after font. My scanner is busy and happy, and this class has become font designers all on their own: it was never a part of my curriculum.

Act 2:
It’s a lesson working with photo images with 4th graders at the site Pixlr.com, which is a free web-based graphics program that does many things that the very expensive Photoshop can do. Students are working with the photos that they recently took in Art and are literally jumping out of their seats when they discover something new that completely transforms their photos into amazing works of art. At the end of the lesson, student after student actually thanks me for the lesson.

Then half the class goes home and fires up Pixlr.com on their own and continues creating art. They can’t wait to tell me about it when I see them next.

Act 3:
I’m watching 3rd and 4th graders “knock it out of the park” with their Poetry Blog they’re working on: their poems are amazing, but so are the in-depth comments that they leave for each others’ work. They don’t just say that they like a poem. They are following through with our lesson of “What Makes a Good Comment” and telling why they like the poem, asking the poets questions about their inspiration, and starting threaded conversations with each other.

One student goes home and shows her mother the blog, teaches her how to log in and how to leave a meaningful comment. The mother joins in and leaves her daughter and another student comments on their work. The girl is overjoyed when she reads this the next day.

Now other students want their parents to join in. Neither their teachers nor I have even sent a letter home to orchestrate this.

It’s happening all by itself.

The show continues… without the teacher as director.