Seedlings @ Bit By Bit Podcast: Show 83
Seedlings @ Bit by Bit Podcast: Show 83
March 11, 2010
We’re joined by Melinda Miller, Podcasting Principal and Google Certified Administrator!
Links from the show:
“Geek of the Week” Links for 2010-03-11
Chat Transcript from EdTech coming soon!
Music:
Technorati Tags: bitbybit, seedlings, education, cheryloakes, alicebarr, bobsprankle, melindamiller
March 12, 2010 No Comments
Overload?
(cross-posted at TechLearning)
Here’s a constant thread that’s been running through many conversations I’ve had with educators over the past month: Information Overload.
Now hang on a moment… it’s not what you think. It’s not about teachers complaining that too many things are on the proverbial “plate,” or that there’s yet another Web 2.0 Marvel that needs to be learned to reach the “Holy Grail” of good teaching, or even that they can’t keep up with their email.
The conversations have focused on the perspective of the parent. The question I’ve been hearing can be summarized as:
“Have we overwhelmed our parents with too much information?”
For instance…
“District Blarney” (not its real name… and in fact, is a representation of numerous districts) decided years ago that every teacher in the district should be blogging. “Blogging = good!” We want transparency, we want a bridge between home and school, we want to give parents an “open window” into the classroom so they can see what’s happening with the majority of their student’s day.
So… teachers jump on board and start blogging up a storm. This goes so well, some folks decide to open up the classroom even more by putting GRADES online so parents can log in at any hour of the night or day and get information on how their student is doing.
This leads to Wikis and Moodles where actual lessons and handouts and resources are posted —not only for students to access, but for parents to examine as well.
Next up: District Blarney creates its very own YouTube channel! Videos of outstanding and exemplary student work are showcased along with monthly “newcast” updates.
A Twitter channel is established for daily announcements.
A Facebook page is created in order to invite the community in for ongoing discussions concerning district committee work.
A SimplyBox account is made for “just in time” resources and links.
An AlertNow phone messaging system is purchased.
Messages from administrators are emailed home weekly.
… okay….
Let me be clear: I think every single one of these tools listed above are valuable and I would LOVE to have each (and even more!) for my own daughter, from her district.
But here’s the rub… District Blarney started looking at the “stats” on web usage of all their sites, and it’s dropping. Less people are accessing all this great content (remember: District Blarney is fictional and is a composite of many districts).
What’s happened? Why aren’t these great resources being used? Why are the numbers going down rather than up, with each new tool introduced?
District Blarney starts to wonder: “Have we over-inundated our parents with too much information?” Or, rather: “Have we asked our parents to go to too many places for information that it’s become too overwhelming?”
The tools available for school-to-home communication and allowing transparency are plentiful and multifarious. They are constantly evolving and it seems the minute you commit to one tool, a better one suddenly emerges. A district’s audience is also diverse and has varied preferences for favorite mediums for information.
Is there a danger of too much of a good thing? Do we weaken the message by providing too many mediums?
What does your district do? Do you provide a variety of methods for the community to access information, or is everything encapsulated in one central “watering hole?”
Thank you for offering up your stories, advice, successes and struggles in the comment section below.
March 11, 2010 No Comments
Seedlings @ Bit By Bit Podcast: Show 82
Seedlings @ Bit by Bit Podcast: Show 82
March 4. 2010
We’re joined by Mike Gorman!
Links from the show:
- 21st Century Educational Technology and Learning
- 21st Centry EdTech Wiki
- Welcome to the Future Video
“Geek of the Week” Links for 2010-03-04
Chat Transcript from EdTech coming soon!
Music:
Technorati Tags: bitbybit, seedlings, education, cheryloakes, alicebarr, bobsprankle, mikegorman
March 4, 2010 No Comments
Copy. Paste. Done.
(cross-posted at TechLearning)
I saw a handout from a middle school teacher recently that had some really great information about searching on the Internet. It was given to the students to support the assignment of having the students research two different cultures and then report on the similarities and differences between the two cultures. Excellent stuff!
My understanding (from what I gleaned from the handout and what was related to me about the lesson) was that the teacher took the time to talk about the pitfalls and hurdles of searching on the Internet. The handout also had plenty of key tips on how to make a successful search: how to go “under the hood” and use Google’s advanced search tools to refine the search; how to conduct a Boolean Search; how to put keywords within quotation marks to have them appear together; etc. Wikipedia was mentioned in a fair and balanced light as a viable “starter” site for information which then needed to be further validated. All great stuff and essential skills for our students.
However, there was one part of the handout that stopped me cold. In a section that explained how to effectively use keywords in the search topic, there was the example of putting both cultures in as keywords (for example, Rome and Greece) and then also including the keyword:
“compare”
or
“contrast”
So, to be clear: students were encouraged to enter “Rome… Greece… compare” or “Rome… Greece… contrast” in order to research the similarities and differences between the two cultures.
Uh oh…
Let’s break it down and see what would happen if a student put in one of the examples I gave above. When I put in “Rome… Greek… compare” into Google, here’s one of the top links I got back:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Compare_and_contrast_ancient_Rome_and_ancient_Greece_religion
Heading to that page, I see the work has already been done for me by the wizards at WikiAnswers (at least concerning the topic of religion):
Greeks worshiped many gods + goddesses. The Romans were polytheistic, and were often part of cults such as the the cult if [sic] Isis. Rome took the Greek gods and changed the names. Many Romans became Christians when Christianity came alive as a small sect of Judaism.
Copy. Paste. Done.
I applaud the teacher for conveying the importance of validating resources and ways to control the results of a search. These are some of the essential skills needed to navigate the amount of information that will come back in a search result. Students need a lot of practice (from Elementary school onward) to be able to identify reliable, relevant, and useful information. But then they need to go beyond that. The next part of the lesson —the one we’ve been teaching even before Search Engines— is for students to synthesize and make meaning out of the information.
I fear the lesson and handout just encouraged the opposite line of thought: that the Search Engine can do all of the thinking for us. By putting in the words “compare” or “contrast” into the Search Engine, students are asking for a page to come back with all the thinking and meaning-making already done for them. This is only a step away from resorting back to what students were doing before learning about keywords and other effective search strategies— directly asking the “Google-god” the question.
Example: Can you tell me what the similarities and differences between the Rome and Egyptian cultures are?
You think I’m exaggerating with that example? Far from it; I recently witnessed a 6th grade student enter almost that exact type of phrasing for a search query just last week. Did she get some hits? You bet. Did she demonstrate that she understands how to use a Search Engine? No, I’m afraid not.
But worse, if students are told they should use words “compare” and “contrast” in their keywords, then we’ve really missed the boat. We’ve just encouraged them to cheat. The “Copy-Paste Society” that we’re trying to stamp out just got a little larger. We need to teach students to find useful and reliable information that can be used to do their own thinking with. The wonderful essence of what the lesson set out to do (have students make meaning –compare and contrast– from information collected) has been handed over to the Search Engine.
As teachers, we need to make sure that we come up with assignments that can’t be quickly answered by asking Google. This lesson definitely started in that direction by asking the students to find similarities between the two cultures. Even without “shooting itself in the foot” (and encouraging students to include “compare” or “contrast” as keywords), students might have found the easy way out on their own, and simply taken the ideas of someone else who’s already made the comparison. Perhaps even one more step could have ensured that the work was entirely original, such as “Compare both cultures to the culture we have at our school” or “In what ways does our school culture resemble the Roman Culture/Greek Culture?” (something that is specific to the here and now, for instance).
In examining the described lesson, I thought about how the teaching of just 2 keywords brought that lesson down from a higher-order thinking exercise, to one that, in my opinion, could be accomplished with a simple copy and paste.
2 simple keywords.
It doesn’t take much, I realize, and all week I’ve combing through my own lessons in my mind and lesson planner to see where I might have done the exact same thing and encouraged students to rely on the tool rather than do the thinking themselves.
February 24, 2010 2 Comments
Seedlings @ Bit By Bit Podcast: Show 81
Seedlings @ Bit by Bit Podcast: Show 81
February 11, 2010
We’re joined by Christian Long, talking about the “Alice Project”
Links from the show:
“Geek of the Week” Links for 2010-02-11
Chat Transcript from EdTech coming soon!
Music:
Technorati Tags: bitbybit, seedlings, education, cheryloakes, alicebarr, bobsprankle, christianlong, aliceproject
February 12, 2010 3 Comments
Tell Your Story
(cross-posted at TechLearning)
Budget. Cuts.
It’s top of the chatter these days. I don’t personally know of any school district who isn’t dealing with severe budget cuts for the next calendar year. In each scenario, this means communities and school boards and administrators making very tough decisions on what can stay and what needs to go to make the numbers work. There are a lot of unknowns and a lot of worry in my own state of Maine. Many districts will be forced to let go of valuable and outstanding teachers as well as lose important and necessary programs.
It’s a very rough time. Some say it’s going to get a lot rougher.
Because we have to make the numbers work, I’m sure that no matter how hard those making the 
decisions try to resist it, there comes a moment (maybe more than once) where a program under chopping-block consideration is represented as a dollar figure rather than the “story” behind the program. Data can only tell so much about a program’s worth; the narrative of its history, successes, goals, and dreams have to be as much a part of the consideration process.
I remember hearing David Warlick talk years ago about the necessity of schools telling “their own stories” —in particular, telling the new stories of what is being done within our buildings and how our stories might be very different than the experiences much of our community had in education when they were in school.
We have the tools today to tell our stories in ways never before possible and make our work in schools visible to the community (global, in fact) at the click of a mouse button. I believe the importance of telling those stories is just as necessary during “calm” economic periods as it is during the tempest of these difficult times. By no means am I saying that having a well articulated and transparent story will guarantee the survival of programs or jobs, but, when your program (or position) is laid out on the table during budget time, wouldn’t you also want that narrative to be readily available for administrators, school board members, parents, residents, elected officials, etc. to be able to examine it? By the time it gets to the table, isn’t it too late to begin telling the narrative? Shouldn’t these stories already have been told day in and day out?
So, I’m curious… How does your school or your program tell its story? What tools are people using to get the tales of success —as well as the ones of struggles— out to their communities? How many have YouTube channels dedicated to that effort? How many schools/programs are “Twittering” their narratives? How often do you get your message out? Is it only on Open House night, or is it daily? What are the successful “delivery packages?” (Personally, my own team at school just started Twittering daily on the front page of our website; 140 characters a day… it couldn’t be easier).
I look forward to hearing your ideas and your methods and thank you for sharing them in the comment section below.
February 11, 2010 No Comments
Seedlings @ Bit By Bit Podcast: Show 80
Seedlings @ Bit by Bit Podcast: Show 80
February 4, 2010
We’re Discuss the 2010 Horizon Report!
Links from the show:
“Geek of the Week” Links for 2010-02-04
Chat Transcript from EdTech coming soon!
Music:
Technorati Tags: bitbybit, seedlings, education, cheryloakes, alicebarr, bobsprankle
February 4, 2010 No Comments
This Week’s Shares
(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!
January 28, 2010 No Comments
