Technology in education

What can we reasonably expect technology to do in education?  In the last 30 years, computers have promised a great deal and delivered a great deal, but what was promised and what was delivered were not always the same thing.  As we move out of the era during which desktop computers are the ONLY way to do computing, the new thing is tablet computers, led by the gold standard, the iPad.  What will this new technology be able to do for us?

Audrey Watters, at the oft-cited but never duplicated Hack Education, wrote an interesting article about educational technology as a MacGuffin.  It's good for hooking us in to the plot, but it's only meant to hold us in place until the real plotline gets moving.  For explanation, she quotes a speaker she heard at a conference:"something that provokes learning, but isn't."  Technology is a good trick for getting students to pay attention, or a force for making teachers re-analyze the efficacy of their teaching strategies, or a way to show the school board that a staff is taking the problem of the day seriously: "See?  We were trained on a software product that helps us keep track of bullying instruments."  It's a good place to begin these conversations, but it was never meant to carry the whole party by itself.

In my own practice, I look to technology to do three things: to scale up good practices more easily, to make individualizing instruction and practice a little bit easier, and to take my students to places in the world I can't afford to send them for real.  Having said that, almost everything in that last sentence is wrong.  When I say, "In my own practice," I don't mean I actually practice this very well.  It's what I move towards.  When I write lesson plans, I look for places to do this.  It isn't very deeply ingrained in my day-to-day life yet, but I hope I'm moving in that direction.

Scaling up means to take something which works on the small scale, and to make it work reasonably well in a setting a hundred, a thousand, a million times bigger than when it was designed.  Starbuck's has succeeded because its business model was scaleable.  Hundreds of small, local coffee roasters and cafes, which clearly have a superior product, cannot say the same.  (Water Street is a happy exception, and may it long remain so.)  Scaling up is an issue I don't think that the education world has dealt with especially well yet.  Ironically, a lot of the education reform movement has its roots in scaleability of good practice (I'll write that doctoral thesis another day) and it's something that no ed reform movement really takes very seriously.  This is where technology comes in--we can put computers in a lot of places we can't put teachers.  Students can interact with computers much more frequently than with teachers.  (If I divide the number of minutes in class by the number of students I have in that class, each of my students is entitled to approximately 90 seconds of my time.)  So if I can translate a good practice on to a computer--a communicative activity where a student has to comprehend target vocabulary to complete a task, or a video chat with the ambassador from Spain--I can presumably reach a much larger number of students.

Individualizing instruction is terribly important, and in a lot of ways, feels like the opposite of scaling up.  That is sort of not true, though.  Good practice looks a lot of different ways, and individualizing instruction is all about finding the kind of good practice that works best for a given student.  An individual teacher can take care of HUGE swaths of this simply by increasing the variety of teaching methods s/he uses.  (A constant struggle for me, and I imagine for lots of other people, too.)  If a lesson plan calls for an aural-intensive lesson, providing a visual or a kinesthetic experience as well is helpful to ALL students, but especially those who learn best in that way.  Technology makes that easier to organize.  However, when I said it was "easier," it's not: it's just easier at time of instruction.  Planning it is as hard as planning anything else, and I think that's the reason I don't do it more often.  (That's probably true of educators more broadly, but I haven't read the study that shows it, so I can only speak for myself.)

The only clear victory for me in the world of ed tech is in taking my students around the world.  My Spanish II class had to find an apartment in Barcelona a week or two ago; it was awesome.  (Thanks to the MiWLA presentation of Amber Kasic-Sullivan for the idea and the unit plan.)  I've had my Spanish 1 students explore Chichén Itzá; there are some new laser-rendered drawings which are just extraordinary.  (I'll dig them up and put a link in the comments later.)  Using Google Earth and its acompanying street view, students have had to follow directions through downtown Oaxaca, Mexico; I've shown them big chunks of St. James's Trail, through northern Spain; we've visited my dad's ocean-side restaurant in Puerto Rico.  It's remarkable how little vocabulary students need to know in order to conduct 80% of these lessons in Spanish, so win-win there.

More thoughts about this later.  This is really only the summary of the piece I want to write about ed tech, so I might need to wait for a longer break to work on it.

My next research project

...will be entitled, "A comparison of remediation strategies to behavioristic barriers in the linguistic transfer from L2 input to L2 intake."

The subtitle will be, "Why won't Spanish students just LISTEN?!?"

In slightly less silly news, Apple had their big "education" reveal on Thursday.  They revealed a new, upgraded iBooks, which will allow multi-touch digital textbooks.  This brings us one step closer to a world in which our textbooks talk back to us.  They also revealed a program called iBooks Authors, which allows anyone to turn anything into a multi-touch digital textbook.  This brings us one step closer to a world in which textbook companies are merely the biggest of the publishers, and not the only sources of organized material.  Hopefully, this will cause them to a) critically re-examine their business model and reorganize into smaller, more flexible publishing companies with increased focus on high-quality, variable-use peripherals, and less focus on giving students pre-chewed information and "higher-order thinking" questions that don't actually relate to anything in the textbooks, or b.) collapse underneath their own weight.

I look forward to playing with Authors, but I need the next generation of the Mac OS before I can download and play with it.  It's on the to-do list, though, possibly for the afternoon.

Tech tools update

I looked at my calendar this morning, and found that it was the 23rd of July.  The start of school is right around the corner.  I haven't read a teacher tech blog in weeks, and those are normally among the highlights of the internet for me.  So I looked at some of my RSS feeds, and a lot of really intelligent people are doing a lot of really cool things.

Via iLearnTechnology, we have Automatoon, an online animator that uses HTML5, not Flash, as its basis.  This is important because Flash works badly on Macintosh computers, and not at all on iDevices.  (There are also some philosophical reasons for HTML5 over Flash, but I only barely understand them, and wouldn't deign to try to explain them.)  It's easy to use, and unlike other online animation features I've demonstrated here before (notably Go! Animate), with Automatoon it's relatively easy to start an animation from scratch, right down to the component pieces.  It requires a little more freehand computer drawing skill than I have, but I imagine most of my students are better at it than me.  This is a welcome addition to the world of visual learning tools and student-production-other-than-5-paragraph-papers tools.

Free Tech 4 Teachers points us in the direction of a QR code reader treasure hunt generator.  QR codes are those square bar code things that you see everywhere from magazine ads about perfume to, er, other magazine ads about perfume.  The idea behind a QR code, I guess, is that it's supposed to allow people with mobile camera devices to take a picture of the box and get a lot more information about whatever the code is attached to.  I saw them the other day on the tags in house plants in Lowe's.  Taking a picture of the code would take you to a website or something that gave you information on care and feeding of the plant, something that used to be printed on the tag.  I guess they had to get rid of that information to make room for the  QR code.  I don't really get QR codes; I don't know what they're really good for.  I feel like they're an answer looking for a question. 

That makes them a perfect fit for the QR code treasure hunt generator: students have to go looking for the questions.   *rimshot*  The idea is that students take their device, equipped with an appropriate QR code reader app (and the site provides some suggestions on where to find them), and go searching the school for QR codes.  They take a pic of the code with their device, the reader app reads it, and gives them a quiz-type question.  Students punch in the answer, and they're off to find the next question.  Setup seems easy enough: the teacher types the questions and answers (or copies and pastes them off of a text document) into the program provided, the program gives QR codes for each question, the teacher prints them off and hides them around the school.  S/he gives the students X minutes; the ones who come back with the most correct answers wins.

Again, this feels like an "almost there" technology.  I haven't fiddled with it yet, so maybe I'm missing something.  What I'd like to be able to do with this is an Amazing Race-type event: The answer to the question is the location of the next question.  Maybe it will work for that; I don't know.  I intend to give it a try, but I'm not certain I get the advantage over doing exactly the same thing, but having students take pictures of themselves at the appropriate locations.  If it's an excuse to turn short-answer quizzes into kinesthetic learning activities, I guess that's fine.  It feels like it could be more so, though.

This looks like fun...

Larry Ferlazzo (and, let's face it, he has more good ideas on a Sunday in a long weekend than I've had in my whole year, which is why I keep stealing his stuff) talks about Protagonize.  It's a social networking writing website which Ferlazzo says has "choose-your-own-adventure" style elements to it.  I'll play with it over the summer, and see how it goes....

Stealing other peoples' links

The great part about the internet is that almost everything is on it.  (At least temporarily.)  The bad part you have to be able to find it when you want it.  These are tech sites I hope to use someday, but have to keep track of in the meantime.

Tiki toki (stolen from iLearn Technology).  A tool for creating timelines.  I'm going to try it for a presentation, although the presentation was not intended to be exceptionally multimedia. 

Snipsnip.it (also stolen from iLearn Technology).  An apparently decent video editor.  I don't know that there's anything here I can't already do in iMovie, but for those times iMovie isn't available or sufficient, this might be useful.


Goodreads.com (stolen from Free Technology for Teachers).  A social networking site for readers.  It looks like it will make independent reading assignments much more thorough, effective, and maybe fun.

Animation test

I don't remember if I've already tested this, and I can't be bothered to search the archives to find out.  I should actually be working right now. 

Go!Animate is an online tool for creating flash animations with relative ease.  I say relative because it's still a fairly time-consuming process, and it isn't quite as intuitive as it likes to think it is.

I created this animation because in Spanish I, our most recent unit was about basic socializing.  The exam for the unit is a one-on-one conversation.  I have one student whom I know knows all the stuff, but I don't think I've ever heard her speak individually in class.  My thought was that, instead of having a straight-up conversation with her, she could help me do the voice-over work with this cartoon.  It turns out that you can't directly record voice-overs into the video--you have to use a different piece of software to record them, and then import them into the animation.  If your objective is creating videos, that's not a problem, but if your objective is getting reluctant students to speak, you add a whole layer of abstraction and hassle that you don't want.  So that idea isn't really going to work.

Anyway, without further ado, two methods of sharing the video:  the link,

http://goanimate.com/movie/0y_W4EyibzgY?utm_source=linkshare

and the video embedding:

GoAnimate.com: Las presentaciones by jcos

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Update:  You can sort of record your own voice.  You call a telephone number, and it will record you, and by some mechanism, it ends up attached to your video.  It's still not as good as just pressing a record button and talking to the computer, but it might be able to work.

Technology and how teachers are using it

Earlier this summer, I bought a Mac laptop computer.  I did this because I know how to use a lot of the tools it comes pre-packaged with.  iPhoto, while not the world's best photo editor, makes moving photos to other applications very simple.  (I like '09 less than I like '06--they did something to the organization options that I find simultaneously more invasive and less intuitive.)  Garage Band is an AMAZING piece of software, and I have endless fun with it.  It also lets me (or a student) record a podcast and export it to iTunes.  From iTunes I can convert it into an MP3 file and distribute it in one of myriad ways.  Mac's Work suite is pretty well designed, too, although, again, I like the '09 version less than the '06 version.  The software designers seem to have de-prioritized simplicity for the sake of lots of cool mouse-clickable buttons.  The big advantage is the ease with which bits of some applications move into other applications.

But for as much as I love my Mac, and am excited to use it in my classroom, it turns out that my tech fu is no longer at the black belt-level I thought it was.  (Well, maybe it is, but like a 1st-degree black belt, not a 3rd-degree, like I thought.)  So, here are some of the apps and sources I'm finding online that can make my job better and easier:

Free Technology for Teachers.  This is a blog about, well, I'll let you guess.  I'm going to start following it a lot more closely.  In the meantime, it led me to the some of the following websites.

Screencasts.  Just the other day, I wanted to create a video out of Google Earth.  I could do it in Google Earth, for the entirely reasonable price of $400.  I decided against it.  Today, I found out about a whole host of screencast tools, which will permit me to do just that.  They will also let me make how-to videos for the whole lot of new technologies I hope to introduce.  I'm just going to link to this post, which describes a variety of tools for doing this:  Four free tools for creating screencasts.  I'm going to download Jing and play around with it, and maybe I'll try some other things.

Online whiteboards.  Colleen Young highly encourages the use of these for teaching math.  She recommends Sketchcast with some reservation.  We'll play around with those, too.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child:

Social networking and teacher/student relationships

The Century of Web 2.0 has made children of us all.  Like children, we all want to play with the shiny new toys that an inexpensive worldwide network of communication (and music videos!  And clips from Bollywood-style films starring Natalie Portman!  And the latest gossip about the latest subject of gossip!  [Not to mention metagossip!]  And recipes--my god, the recipes! etc.) provide for us.

And, like children, some have no mechanism for deciding what's appropriate behavior in this completely unprecedented situation.  The stories of otherwise intelligent, professional, well-educated and well-intentioned adults getting themselves into trouble by posting pictures on Facebook or MySpace are rampant.  This behavior isn't just limited to teachers, either--I seem to remember something about a meteorologist or something getting fired from the TV station she worked for after posting semi-nude pics of herself somewhere. 

There seems to be an added element of terrifying when teachers get involved, though.  After all, we're supposed to be professional role models.  What does it do to classroom management if a student finds out that his teacher likes a good fart joke?  For that matter, what does it do to fart jokes?



And so, some school districts are left in the bizarre position of deciding for their teachers what is okay for them to put on the Internet on their own behalf.  The last thing a superintendent needs to discover is that the award-winning second-grade teacher had a great time at last week's Hash Bash, or whatever the polemic issue of the community is.  So, the superintendent may quietly draw up a draft that says something like, "Technology can be a powerful tool for education, and social networking can be a great way of building relationships.  We encourage the use of technology, both amongst our students and our staff.  But so help me, if I find your cleavage online, it's ring-a-ding-ding for you, bozo." Then she runs it past the school board, which harrumphs for a while until Mrs. Flanders cries, "The children!  Won't someone think of the children?!" and the motion passes unanimously.

That isn't what anybody signed up for--superintendents never intended to be censors of teachers' personal lives; teachers didn't agree to surrender out-of-school rights that everybody apparently has.  (Behaving like a jackass in front of the whole world evidently isn't illegal, even for teachers.)  Monitoring teachers' behavior is a particularly thorny issue because technology CAN be powerful juju.

So where does this leave us?  Are we stuck with the choice between not acting like idiots and the threats of termination from High Command?  Or to put it another way, the choice between self-censorship and external censorship?  I don't know.  I just try to remember not to write anything down that I wouldn't want someone else reading, and to compartmentalize my personal, professional, and political lives.  And while we I wait for Web 3.0 and the inevitable rise of the machines, I'll let Louie Armstrong speak for me.