Category — TechLearning Posts

(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!

(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?

(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.

(cross-posted at TechLearning)

This post is Part II of a post started by Cheryl Oakes on Tuesday, November 23, 2009 at TechLearning about the incredible work that Colleen King is doing with her site MathPlayground. When Cheryl asked me if I was interested in following up and continuing the theme of her post, I immediately said yes. Colleen’s tools are too numerous and amazing too fit in one blog post. In fact, we’re not even talking about just one site. Colleen currently runs 3 Math sites:

• Math Playground
• Thinking Blocks
• Math Apprentice

Each site offers a cornucopia of invaluable math tools.

(Speaking of cornucopia… I like to take this brief pause to wish all of the United States readers a Happy Thanksgiving today. Okay… back to the post).

Each of Colleen’s sites can be accessed directly from the Math Playground site, but let’s examine them separately to understand their offerings.

Math Playground:
As Cheryl pointed out in her article, this site serves up engaging math games and puzzles that will keep students coming back again and again. Math Playground is also a “1-stop-shop” for teachers to gather or create their own worksheets, have students practice facts with flashcards, find word problems, use video tutorials for instruction, or work with interactive manipulatives that are ever-ready at the click of a mouse button (my favorite is the Function Machine!).

Thinking Blocks:
Thinking Blocks is an incredible resource to develop Algebraic Reasoning. Students can learn at their own pace as they are guided step-by-step through word problems. Using manipulatives, students are able to work out the problems in the “Build Your Model” section and get feedback and guidance on how to solve the problem from the “tutor.” In the “Practice” section, students get a video tutorial showing how to solve the type of problem they’re working on. There’s even a “Modeling Tool” where teachers can create their own problems to work on with students during direct instruction or to print out for independent work.

Math Apprentice:
“When are we going to use this in the REAL WORLD?” Ever hear that from your students about the math they’re learning? Well, Math Apprentice is the answer to that question. Students enter a video game where they get to take on the role of an intern at one of 8 different companies, offering interesting jobs: Restaurant Owner, Bicycle Designer, Video Game Programmer, Robot Scientist, Computer Animator, Artist, Building Contractor, and Roller Coaster Engineer. Each job incorporates real-world use of math concepts, with activities to complete. This site really hits home the importance of math for students, and opens up opportunities for discussion of how math will connect to their futures.

Colleen King has created more than enough resources and engaging activities with these gems to fill out an entire math curriculum. The tools are completely free (supported by unobtrusive advertising) and are geared towards Elementary and Middle school students with scaffolded activities for learners at all levels. Colleen’s work is truly an Internet treasure that will benefit students and improve your instruction.

I’ll see you at the Math Playground!

(cross-posted at TechLearning)

We are constantly telling our students to be careful what they post online because “nothing ever goes away on the Internet.” That photo of them at that Keg Party posted on Facebook could come back to haunt them later when they try to get into a college or apply for a job. Theoretically, this is definitely true. We have created a “collective” memory on the Internet. A photo can be copied — an endless number of times — and might never go away. To all intents and purposes, it’s permanent.

I remember this idea of permanence hit home for many people when DejaNews made it easy to search archives of Usenet posts. Google later acquired DejaNews and other archives, allowing searches to reach all the way back to posts created in 1981. Quite simply, many early users had not thought about their posts having such longevity and there was an outcry of loss of privacy and control upon the realization that the content could now be “owned” and available through a search engine. Online discussions changed as Usenet users shifted from the perception that their posts had a shelf-life of one or two weeks to now having immortality.

This idea of “Internet-permanence” is now more expected than it was in the early days of the Internet, perhaps so much so that it is startling to see how easily a large part of it can be obliterated literally overnight. This Time article reports on how Yahoo! is wiping out 7 million websites created in the early days of the Internet as it kills off its GeoCities. Why should we care? These sites have much to tell us about those early Internet days and are an essential piece in the story of its evolution. Culturally, these sites are part of our collective narrative, and whether you care about them or not, many of them have just disappeared forever. Think planet Alderaan being blown up in Star Wars IV: A New Hope. There’s no getting this back.

The Archive Team at archiveteam.org has attempted to save as many of these pages as possible before their obliteration. They state their purpose and justification on their website:

While the natural urge by some would be to let Geocities sink into obscurity and death, leaving nothing in its wake but bad memories and shudders of recognition at endless “under construction” GIFs, the fact remains that Geocities was for millions of people the first experience dealing with the low-cost, full-color, world-accessible website and all the possibilities this contained. To not at least have the option of browsing these old sites would be a loss of the very history of the web from the side of the people who came to know it, not the designers who descended upon it. For that reason, Archive Team thinks Geocities is worth saving.

Geocities is a cautionary tale for all of us. Now that we’ve come to expect permanence from the Internet and move deeper into cloud computing, it’s tempting to think that everything is safe and backed up. But, as the Archive Team reminds us, all that data, writing, photos, movies, etc. are at the mercy of corporations. The lesson to our students can’t just be “be careful what you post on the Internet because it will be there forever,” but must also include, “BACKUP what you’ve posted on the Internet, because it may not be there forever!”

This lesson doesn’t just apply to an individual’s personal Internet offerings, but must be appreciated on the “bigger picture” of collective-cultural, preservation. In a world where much of our story is being told digitally, it is important to realize that those digits must be protected,  archived, and backed up.

For more reading and investigation of preserving our Internet history, I direct you to the work being done at the Internet Archive, whose mission is to offer “permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format” as well as one of my favorite books: Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity by Lawrence Lessig.

—————

Works Cited

“Deja News – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2009. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejanews>.

“Google Acquires Deja.com.” Information Today, inc. – NewsBreaks. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2009. <http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Google-Acquires-Dejacom-17652.asp>.

“Usenet – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2009. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Archives_and_Web_interfaces>.

“Yahoo! Pulls Plug on GeoCities, Erases Internet History – TIME.” Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews – TIME.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2009. <http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1936645,00.html?xid=rss-topstories-polar>.

(cross-posted at TechLearning)

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Blanche DuBois
“A Streetcar Named Desire”

It’s been over fours years in the making, but I am publishing my 100th podcast this week at Bit by Bit. In honor of this numerical celebration, I went back and listened to Show #1: June 29, 2005. The topic of that show? Explaining what a Podcast is.

Back in 2005, I had already spent half a year podcasting with my 3rd/4th grade students for their show “Room 208″ (we have Wikpedia status!), but decided it was time to start my own podcast show. I picked June 29, 2005 to start the show because it was the day after Apple updated their iTunes software to include the Podcast channel. I state in the podcast that I believed this to be a “tipping point” date and that Podcasting was about to become a household word, known and understood by all. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:

Version 4.9 of iTunes, released on June 28, 2005, added built-in support for podcasting. It allows users to subscribe to podcasts for free in the iTunes Music Store or by entering the RSS feed URL… The addition of podcasting functionality to such a widespread audio application like iTunes greatly helped podcasting enter the mainstream. Within days after iTunes 4.9 was released, podcasters were reporting that the number of downloads of their audio files had tripled, sometimes even quadrupled.

As I celebrate my 100th show, I think I would be hard pressed to find someone who has never heard of podcasting. A large majority of folk at least know how to subscribe to podcasts, and I believe that iTunes (Apple) is largely responsible for this. Podcasting has evolved to share the stage with Vodcasts and has become more “mainstream” as “traditional” media has taken advantage of the podcast forum (such as NPR, CNN, The New York Times). These podcasts take up a large part of the real estate on the iTunes podcast page, and are even marketed as “Featured Providers.” Even now, when giving workshops, I use these podcasts as “hooks” to get folks interested in subscribing, but hope that they continue to dig down deeper and find some of the great podcasts that are being produced by individuals without a major production budget.

The reason I started my “Bit by Bit” Podcast back in 2005 was to answer many of the emails that I was getting from other educators on the topic of podcasting. It was much more expedient than answering individual emails and helped me document and reflect on technical tricks and tips as well as purpose and pedagogy. In the early days, most of my shows explained the successes and hurdles I had experienced in podcasting with students with the goal of assisting other educators wanting to bring podcasting into the classroom. I hoped to simplify the process for educators and once the “how” of podcasting was accomplished, I centered on the “why.”

My podcasting and my career has certainly evolved over the years. I’ve shifted from the “regular” classroom to teaching in the computer lab, and though I still have students record their learning with audio, it isn’t true podcasting (since it has no RSS feed and can’t be syndicated). My own show, “Bit by Bit” has taken a back seat to the “Seedlings” podcast, which is an almost weekly live show at edtechtalk.com (through the school year) with my great friends and collaborators, Cheryl Oakes and Alice Barr. Each week, we have a new guest on to interview, and I have learned so much from them and Cheryl and Alice over the past year and a half of the show’s running. I quickly learned that podcasting with other people is much more fun than doing it by myself, and so my “Bit by Bit” podcasts are much more infrequent than the “Seedlings” show.

I still use my own podcast to reflect on my practice, though mostly, I use it now to bring subscribers recordings of great workshops and presentations that I attend. It is amazing how many people have allowed me to record their presentations and post them on the Internet. I can’t thank them enough for sharing their work freely with the world. Out of all the conferences I’ve attended over the years, I can count on one hand how many people did not grant recording permission. My own podcast show has become a conduit to share the great work that I’ve been able to attend with a much larger audience. Clearly, according to my hosting site statistics, many people have taken advantage of these offerings. Just in the past year, 469.28 GB of my site’s bandwith have been used for audio files alone (that’s 92 % of my total bandwith).

I can’t tell you how much I myself appreciate when someone has podcasted a presentation that I was unable to attend. I’ve never been to the NECC conference, but have traveled there vicariously through the great recordings that others have shared. I try to pay back the kindness of others by making sure I have my recording studio whenever I go to a conference: my iPod Nano and microphone. The entire thing fits in my pocket. As mentioned above, most presenters have granted podcasting permission. Most of my 100 podcasts are recordings of presentations from other people. They’ve been downloaded across the globe thousands of times. Honestly, they took little effort on my part. I’m just the guy holding the microphone.

So when I celebrate the 100th Podcast, I really am celebrating all of those wonderful people who have filled up my shows with amazing learning opportunities for us all. I raise my glass to them.

“Thank you!”

I was sitting with my one of my most favorite podcasters the other night: Wes Fryer. Wes has brought me some of the best professional development I’ve ever received from his own reflections and presentations, as well as the presentations of others. Wes and I had just completed a 2 day workshop at ACTEM in Maine. Over Maine Lobster and Fish and Chips, Wes and I talked about the lack of podcasting at the workshops we’ve been attending lately. To my knowledge, for instance, he and I were the only ones recording at the ACTEM workshop. We wondered why this was and lamented the lost opportunities of being able to hear presentations that we aren’t able to attend. We both agreed that we would write about this and put out a “call to arms” for folks to audio-capture conferences and workshops. I realize that not everyone has a podcast feed to attach their audio to, but there are plenty of alternatives to share the audio with the rest of the world. Back in August, I wrote an entry called “Share the Infinite” which gives some tips and ideas on how to join in on the fun.

Today I’m going to take a more direct approach with you. With the technology these days, it is incredibly simple to record and post audio of presentations. With the incredible willingness of presenters to be podcasted, there are entire libraries of material that are being lost to the ether because no one has hit the record button. I ask you —no, I beg you — to consider helping to capture all that great content in order to share it with the world. Administrators: consider providing teachers with recorders to bring to conferences and have them ask presenters for permission to record. When presenters are invited to your own districts, ask them to give permission for recording privileges. If nothing else, the audio could be shared within the district. The audio could be stored in libraries, ready for new teachers to listen to or existing teachers to re-listen to.

So, climb aboard and join the “conduit” campaign. It’s a great feeling sharing your opportunities with others and knowing that you’ve helped presenters reach more ears. I thank you and “raise my glass to you” in advance!

(cross-posted at TechLearning)

I’m currently finishing up my survey collection of Internet and media usage from 3rd and 4th graders. I’ve been doing this in the first few months of a new term for the past couple of years in order to see how student behavior has evolved online. The survey is invaluable as it helps me know how to adapt my lessons to the changing times and what resources I can offer parents. I’m learning that things have definitely changed since last year. The results show that there are more students using chat rooms, email, and instant messaging than previously reported. This year, I’ve been using some of my own questions, and others from the Common Sense Media resources.

One question that I used from Common Sense Media for the first time this year was:

On a typical SCHOOL DAY (Monday-Friday), how many hours do you spend using the Internet for homework or school?

I was pleasantly surprised by the results to this question:

As you can see from the results above, more than half of the students surveyed (109 out of 199 students) report that they use the Internet for homework or schoolwork for an hour or more on a typical day. True, this may be “perception” more than reality, but they are clearly identifying the Internet as a tool that assists them academically.

The irony here is that the number of teachers who actually assign Internet-related homework at my school is a minority. I know this because I asked the surveyed students if they currently have or previously have had a teacher who assigns homework that must be completed by way of the Internet. I must admit that when I was in the classroom I too was reticent to explicitly connect homework expectations to the use of the Internet because I knew that not all my students had easy access. I think this lack of Internet-homework is perhaps more prevalent in the elementary setting (which is where I teach). I know that when I assigned homework in my class, I worried about the family that would have to go find public Internet access to help the student accomplish the assignment. Perhaps teachers in the upper grades are more likely to assign Internet related homework because older students have more independent access to the Internet resources.

The interesting thing I found in talking with the students, is that even though teachers aren’t mandating Internet use for homework, our elementary students are using it anyway. They understand that it is a natural fit for schoolwork and offers more than just games and online virtual worlds. Examples they gave for how they independently incorporate the Internet into their homework included:

• looking up the correct spelling of a word
• looking up the meaning of a word
• research
• further studying something they learned about at school (independent of homework expectations)
• finding graphics or photos to compliment their research

When I saw David Weinberger speak at the Building Learning Communities Conference (BLC09) this summer, he showed us a picture of an assignment his son received from school for a research paper (to be completed at home). The teacher included in the directions that “no more than 3 Internet resources could be used” in the paper. We all laughed at the absurdity of this, because, as David pointed out, it is ludicrous to limit the use of this expansive resource. Imagine if we told students that you can only use 3 books in the research. Most of us teachers still see the Internet as something external to what we traditionally believe research to be.

As you see above, I too have been susceptible to this illusion, careful not to “overtax” families by expecting them to scrounge up the bandwith to accomplish continued learning at home. Truthfully, we could apply this same concern toward the acquisition of books or any other “traditional” media. Last Friday, The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy released a report that compared the necessity for nationwide broadband access to that of Eisenhower’s building of an interstate highway system. According to my students’ survey results, they already understand that this access and use of Internet tools is a necessity even when not directed to use it by their teachers. According to the Knight Commission, only 60% of Americans have the access to “digital tools and skills [that] have distinct political, social and economic advantage over those without them.”

According to the survey conducted with my 3rd and 4th graders, there are 10 (out of 199) that do not have the Internet at home. I want to be in a world where I don’t even hesitate to assign my students to use the Internet for homework because we’ve reached 100% of connectivity. As the Knight Commission states, access to this free-flow of information and resources “is as vital to the healthy functioning of communities as clean air, safe streets, good schools and public health.”

What percentage of students are without in your school?