As Back-to-School Night looms, this perceptive article would be a good share for your more technologically embedded teachers. The author makes a good case for parent fears about classroom technology use (I'm somewhat abashed to admit that hadn't occurred to me. Tech nerd that I am, I thought parents would leap on board with loud huzzahs of gratitude!)
I've completely rethought my approach as a result of the article, and will put my presentation together this weekend. I'll post it when finished.
On another note, a few days ago I posted my presentation for the faculty library orientation, and said I would let readers know how it went. I won't say it was a smashing success, BUT:
The two new admin members made a point of saying they were happy to hear I believed in an active, participatory library.
One of the faculty, while demurring about the "thrill" of listening to it, did say it was reassuring to hear I had a vision for the library.
Best of all, three faculty members who ignored the library in the past, have come to ask for help with student projects.
I found two new and interesting tools to use both in the library and in my English classroom. The first was passed on by Buffy Hamilton, and the other I found while looking for articles to populate my Scoop.it page on Digital Storytelling.
Socrative takes clickers to the next step. It's free, works via a web browser (though they have an Android app, and are working on apps for the iPhone and Blackberry), and allows teachers to receive quick feedback, give quizzes, and monitor formative assessments with a mere click. There an introductory video below.
I like the multiple formats for responses, the display for quick survey of responses, which makes it easy to monitor and adjust. Unfortunately, we're not a 1:1 school, and this being Mongolia, I don't know how many students have smart-phones, but I'll check with them when we have class on Thursday.
History in Pictures
Historypin takes the social nature of Google Earth and makes it super easy (without all the bandwidth-eating downloading, I might add). In fact, it partners with Google. Select a place--say, your hometown--and populate it with photos past and present. There are already multiple collections availabe, providing a fascinating look at how places change over the century (the timeline feature goes from 1840 to the present).
You can also choose a picture and lay it against a streetview map, directly comparing the past and present views (see screen capture below). In addition, each photo has an "story" feature that lets users tell the story behind the photo.
This tool has multiple uses, from digital documentaries, to oral histories and more. Student groups create histories of their school or community, of community-service activities or other events.
I'm just commenting on a random thought that crossed my mind as I clicked on my Instapaper backlog, while looking through the 1000+ entries in my reader, after just telling someone yesterday how woefully behind I am on my YA reading, having now taken on the K-5 group, which means I have some serious catching up to do on my children's lit, on top of keeping up with the news. And I haven't read my Twitter feed in weeks!
Yet there I was yesterday, blithely assuring a group of overwhelmed 10th graders embarking on the extensive researched needed for their MYP personal projects, that I would show them the tools that would allow them to manage it all.
Who am I kidding??!
And if I'm overwhelmed, it's no wonder that the students, once we convince them there is more to the information world than Google and Wikipedia, stand stunned by the sheer volume of what's available to them. I used to try to show it "all" to them. Once I'd explained databases and the OPAC, we would spend a few days on "the web." We'd talk portals and search engines and advanced tools and browser add-ons and RSS feeds.
I don't know if any of it sank in. I thought I was preparing them for the vast online world, but I now think less is more. I need to tame myself, not the web. I will now teach a core set of manageable tools and skills, saving broader/deeper instruction for a one-on-one as needed basis. To wit:
1) Basic search skills, obviously. Keywords, Boolean (at least the concept), quotation marks, narrowing domains. A few of the Google options, such as the wonder wheel.
2) Specific portals, two or three depending on research focus.
3) Two or three specific search engines, such as Google Books, Intute, and Infomine. I'm actually not all that fussed about Google Scholar, and tend to mention it in passing, then talk about why it's not very useful, unless you're at a big univesity. Specifically, much of the content is behind a pay wall.
4) Evernote, NoodleTools and Bibme.org. I'm a recent NoodleTools convert. I never used to like it because I thought their citation tool was FAR too lengthy and cumbersome. With wonderful tools like BibMe available, why should students go through that process, if even I wouldn't? They now have a shortened MLA version, however. So I'm trying it this year (mostly for the note cards options), and will survey students for their response to it.
I also used to show them iCyte (which I will use instead of EverNote for middle-schoolers) and Diigo, in the belief that it's good to have options. Now I think it just confuses them. I really love Diigo, I might add, but it relies too heavily on good tagging for its organizational structure. Students still need folders.
I'm still teaching the same content, I'm just increasingly convinced a large part of our technology job is to assess, winnow, and present the most useful options--much like developing a collection.
Caveat Emptor: This is not the most coherent post I've ever written. It's me (trying) to think through stuff I've been reading, my current plans for the library program, and how it all comes together.
I worry a lot that educationally, pedagogically, after 25 years of teaching, I'm in a rut. We have all these wonderful new technologies with the promise to alter profoundly the way we teach and to empower student learning. I certainly work to harness that power, but am I using it to keep doing the same old thing? Worse, am I actually standing in the way of student progress?
There's a quotation on my computer desktop from a now-forgotten speaker: "Teachers have the right to hide in a cave, but they don't have the right to drag students with them." Reading over my earlier post today and thinking about my plans for the DP students, I started wondering, "Is this really giving students the tools to become independent, self-motivated learners? Am I putting myself too much front and center, rather than guiding students towards engaging with the material in meaningful ways?"
I look at those plans, and they don't seem that innovative to me. True, they're new for the school, and certainly for the students. But are they just variations on a theme, and are there better, more student-centered, ways I could be using these tools?
Undoubtedly, yes. Will's comment that "reforms are hampered by the lack of teachers who can teach in progressive ways," should strike a note in all of us. It is all too easy to stay in the rut, because the rut (usually) takes you safely to a known destination. It is a (seemingly) guaranteed outcome. Except, like the story I told Doug, staying in the rut can sometimes leave you upside down in the ditch. If teachers keep doing what we've always done, our educational system is going to end up in the ditch, and we'll find ourselves replaced by computers.
Fortunately, and this is a rut I'm proud to stay in, I've always been one to listen to students, seek their feedback, and implement their suggestions. So an integral part of this new(ish) approach I'm taking will be to question students about what worked, what they think could be done better, and ideas they have for improvement. Whether we ourselves are all that innovative, if we see ourselves as co-learners with the students, as sojourners on the same path, we open ourselves to new possibilities.
One thing I'm hoping, since this is so new for the students, is that their comparative ignorance of how we "should" be using technology will spark new ideas on how we can be using these tools as they do their research and write their papers. I'm so embedded in education and pedagogy, it's hard to see over the rut; students don't come with the same preconceptions; so an integral part of this whole process will be student feedback before, during and after the process.
UPDATE: On thinking about the implications of Mitra's talk, it's pretty powerful for libraries and media specialists. We are all about providing access, then getting out of the way. I can see where this would be threatening for some content-driven teachers; if learning is self-organized, they are out of a job. Librarians, however, would be at the very center of this. I need to think more about this and my angst-driven, somewhat self-centered musings above. (By self-centered, I mean obviously those worries are still picturing me at the core, instead of putting faith in the students' ability to take an idea and run with it.)
What can Old Spice commercials teach us about reforming education? A lot.
Like most people, I love the new Old Spice commercials with the really good looking, incredibly ripped, bare-chested guy. They are hilariously witty, both verbally and visually.
If you pay much attention to YouTube, you know the Old Spice creative team has been on a real spree the last few days, crowd-sourcing user questions on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, then creating short, 30 second video responses to the best questions. They are, as you would expect, both funny and an excellent marketing ploy. Hey, if I were a man, I'd run out and buy some Old Spice!
Now, to back up a bit, lately I've been reading Tony Wagner's Global Achievement Gap, where he posits that the education system is in big trouble, largely because the world has moved on, but the system hasn't. We're teaching an industrial age mindset with an industrial age pedagogy, with lots of isolated little learners, and many teachers who still think collaboration is cheating.
Which brings me back to Old Spice. Yesterday, the ReadWriteWeb posted a fascinating article on how the team went about making and posting (so far) 161 of those videos. They worked as a team, delegating tasks to experts rather than everyone working on everything (what Wagner calls "team-based leadership"); they leveraged social networking to gather data and real-time feedback from a vast audience, then integrated that information into their final product; they published that product, generating more feedback. (Serendipitously, on the same day, David Pogue posted his crowd-sourced article on iPhone Apps We Wish We Had.)
Read the article? Can you see this happening in your school? Well, if your school blocks Facebook, Twitter, and other networking technologies, it won't be happening any time soon. And that's one reason why education is in such big trouble in this country. If the above scenario is what's happening in businesses these days, and Wagner says it is, we are not only not preparing students to be effective contributors to that society, we are working actively to prevent it. That scares me no end.
This wildly popular series was not based on pre-conceived assumptions about their audience, or a discrete set of "knowledge." With their ultimate goal in mind, they set about finding/generating information, then constructing their response to it. I found the following remark especially telling:
Tait says that Old Spice's parent company Proctor & Gamble exhibited incredible bravery in allowing his team to write marketing content in real time, with little to no supervision.
"There is such great trust [between the companies]," he said. "But we are being very responsible. They have given us a set of guidelines and if we get close to the edges we contact them."
This is the crux of what education reformers have been preaching for years: Teachers need to cede control to the students, to get out of the way and LET THEM LEARN. We provide guidelines, we teach them the skills, provide the tools, then sit back and let them do it, only 'interfering' when they need help.
It's scary to give up that much control; even when you're willing, the system doesn't always support it, though Grant Wiggins (who spoke at our school a few years back) convinced me that we use NCLB testing as an excuse. He states that good teaching will result in improved test scores, as long as it promotes understanding, not just rote content. We need to stop seeing ourselves as experts and more as facilitators; more importantly, and this is the really hard part, we need to get students to take on the responsibility for their learning, to stop sitting there passively, hoping osmosis will do its work.
Though I think if we're doing the kind of engaged, participatory education the Old Spice team demonstrated, that enthusiasm will follow. As Ian Tait, the leader of the project states, "Those people [the creative team] are having more fun than I've ever seen anyone have in a shoot like this. That's part of why it's doing so well. It's genuinely infectious."
The job for me now, is to figure out how this translates to libraries. I have mostly taught the research process as an independent sort of endeavor, and I need to make it far more collaborative.
But a) this post is already long enough and b) my discussion with Michelle Luhtala yesterday directly ties in to this, because of some of the ways she is leveraging collaborative tools when she works with students. So I will work on getting that interview up early next week, then elaborate on how I hope to implement these ideas in my own program.
In the meantime, this weekend is the big move; I have to finish getting ready for that, so won't be posting much. As a closing "gift," however, here's one of my favorite Old Spice commercials, followed by one of the video "blurbs" on libraries. Enjoy!
I just signed up for a year-long workshop on EdWeb, taught by Michelle Luhtala, Connecticut's 2010 Outstanding Librarian of the Year (and winner of the National School Library Program of the Year).
So whatever she has to say, I'll listen!
Entitled Using Emerging Technologies To Advance School Library Programs, the free workshop looks at a multitude of online tools and shows how they can be used to your library program's advantage.
As I reconsider my library program and online presence for the new school, I'm definitely looking forward to this for some ideas.
It starts on an as-yet-undetermined date in July. You can sign up here.
Busy, busy spring, so my posting has definitely tapered off. However, a post by Chris Harris on the AASL Blog raises again that old spectre: Are books obsolete?
Here we go again.
Apparently, the Dean of Purdue/Indiana University library nonchalantly stated that there will be no books left in his library within three years, thanks to databases and the University's digitization program. So Chris posits the end of books for research purposes (we'll still use them for pleasure reading, Kindle to the contrary), and that we better start training our high school students to cope.
Do you sense me rolling my eyes here?
I admire Chris greatly, read his SLJ blog regularly, but he's jumping the gun here. While Purdue's library may well divest itself of physical books (see my title) within three years, I doubt most universities--and almost no secondary schools--are even near that point. The high cost of digitizing books is prohibitive, in and of itself.
Nor is Google Books the cure-all, unless there are major changes in copyright laws. Try accessing any book to which your school hasn't purchased rights, and you'll get only part of the book, and usually not the part you need. Many books aren't even searchable.
This also fails to take into account user preferences. Students are supposed to be digital natives, but the first thing my students want to do when they find something online is print it out. Ever try doing that with a Google Book? I'd be interested to hear the uproar from campus faculty this might have caused. The Dean of the library may be ready to go virtual, but are his faculty and students?
We ran a trial of Questia --a wonderful digital library--last year as a way to augment our book collection; the kids hated it. They found it difficult to search the books, couldn't print out more than a single page and generally told me "don't waste your money; we won't use it."
While I'm fairly sure we're all going to be reading everything in the cloud some day,we could quote Twain here: "The rumos of my [imminent] death have been greatly exaggerated."
Thus, until such time as the resource world is far more digitally friendly than it is, I will continue to teach students to use a wide variety of material, whatever may happen at Purdue!
So we're all sitting at the opening session, which was supposed to be linked to a video-conference with students from a school somewhere. At the same time we were listening to the un-keynote speaker, he had us log into the conference chat, where we were told to discuss different topics. Multi-tasking overload! And of course the conference link wasn't working, so we couldn't hear what anyone was saying; half the people couldn't log in to the chat. The rest of us were so focused on the chatting, we ignored the speaker.
A perfect lesson in "just because you can (or, in this case, can't!) doesn't mean you should." The chat was really a gratuitous use of technology--we were sitting right next to the people...why would we chat?? Face-to-face would have worked better and been more meaningful.
It also had me wondering about students who "multi-task" during class. While they're so-called "digital natives," all the studies show that multi-tasking actually decreases performance level, so at what point do we insist they slow down and mono-task? Or is that concept all but defunct in the world to come?
The video-conference debacle was a problem with the resort--it was built 150 years ago or so, is wired for Web.05, and we were trying to run Web 2.0 technology. So I definitely felt for the poor speaker, who was having the technology nightmare we all dread. But we also need to be careful. If this had happened with non-tech savvy teachers, they would have walked out in 15 minutes, or used it to reinforce their technophobia.
I'm now sitting in a Drupal session. Everyone else is more au fait than, I, however. I'm interesting in using it to develop the new library site--Joomla was a disaster this summer!--I need something more basic than this, though. Not off to a booming start; some interesting sessions coming up, so my hopes are high!
And you can't complain about the setting at all. These photos were taken off the balcony of the session room.
Ewan McIntosh posted about Animoto this morning, so I decided to play around (I'm in major packing avoidance..). This is about as cool as it gets. I can't stop watching this thing! Upload photos from your desktop, Flickr, MySpace page, etc. Add music (I found mine on PodSafe Audio, a Creative Commons site), then Animoto generates a music-video quality slideshow. Wouldn't this be fantastic for students? Photographers and musicians could get together to create their own music videos. Other Uses:
Back-to-school night events--have the show on a loop, featuring pictures of kids-in-action, with student-composed music.
Advertise student musical productions before the event, especially in districts with morning video announcements!
Students choose photos to illustrate poems they've written (or better yet, take their own!), use Audacity or GarageBand to narrate the poems and add music. Upload it all to Animoto: semi-instant poetry reading!
New library books (I need to check copyright issues on this), collect pictures of the covers from new books, put it together with some music, or your own narration (see above), and show it on morning announcements. Great project for your library volunteers!
Shows up to 30 seconds are free, or you can buy unlimited video length for $3/video or $30 per year.
Ann Davis posted this link to an interesting article on the Future of Libraries. While it spent an inordinate amount of time arguing about the term Library 2.0, it does quote several prominent librarians regarding their view of the future and technology's impact on library service.
A good cheat sheet showing how to use some non-advertised advanced search features in Google. (e.g. using "link:URL" to show all the pages that link to a site or "info:URL" to find out info about a website.)
Forget iPhones with $600 price tags. If you want to have some fun with technology (and you use Firefox) download a great little browser extension called Wikialong. (It's free) This app is the coolest thing I've ever seen! I got so excited, I forced my fiance move from his comfortable position lying on the sofa to come take a look.
Basically, Wikialong turns the browser's sidebar into a wikipage. As you move from website to website, you can leave notes and comments. If someone else with Wikialong happens upon that page, they can read/edit/add to your comments. I kid you not! It's like Post-It notes for web pages!
The uses of this for the classroom astound me. Students working on a wiki could post a list of links for other group members to examine. At each of the links, they could leave questions, comments, suggestions for use, to which other group members respond.
Teachers could build a web-quest/ Treasure Hunt a la The DaVinci Code, with clues at each web page, which students then piece together. (Good netiquette would require you to go back and delete the comments afterwards, of course!)
Those are just two I can think of off the top of my head. If you can think of others, please post in the comments! (And, once again, thanks to Will Richardson's book for mentioning the extension.) Too cool!
You know, I've been thinking about education's (in general) and the library's (in specific) anti-google and anti-wikipedia rallying cry. I bought into it at first, and during my practicum would bore students with my "wikipedia and google are bad" rants. But I also realized I was being a complete hypocrite. I'm a student at Pitt, so have access to some pretty incredible databases. Yet the first place I often look is Google--in fact, I often find it easier to find what I need on Google than trying to scour the mess that is Ebsco.
Now, I completely understand the reservations about these two services, and the read/write web. The majority of students use them in a fairly brain-dead sort of way. But they use their texts in the same manner, and we work to re-educate them about active reading. Shouldn't we be doing the same with Web 2.0 tools? I spent hours teaching students the difference between a journal and a diary. Why shouldn't I spend equal time teaching the difference between a journal and a blog? (Will Richardson's book suggests some excellent scaffolding for this.)
Fighting Google, Wiki and My Space is a losing battle. They're quick; they're easy. Rather than telling students not to use them, shouldn't we be training them to use them WISELY? Go ahead and look up your topic on Wiki, but only as a way to find further information. Find information on Google, but you better check the databases, too. The easiest way to do this, of course, would be to require certains types of references. A two books, two database articles, one web page kind of thing. With millions of webpages generated each day, students must learn to assess the infoglut for relevance and authority. Banning them from it completely will never achieve this.
This presentation was recorded at the Online Conectivism Conference 2007. The topic, which Will Richardson presents, is "How the Read/Write Web Challenges Traditional Practice".
This is a great bit on ed tech and pedagogical change. Also see blog below!
I've been burying myself in Web 2.0 the past few weeks, and trying to figure out best practice for integrating it into the classroom, especially since my new job requires me to teach it to other educators! With that in mind, I purchased two books, one published last year and one published last month.
Will Richardson's Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms is a god-send. A fire up Amazon and BUY THIS NOW!!! kind of book. If you are AT ALL interested in educational technology, this book will not only answer your questions (or questions you never thought of), it also gives you practical, start-to-use-it-on Monday advice and ideas for classroom use. It explains not just the what, but also the why and the how. I've never had a clue how to really use RSS feeds, but Richardson not only explained the technology in easy to understand language, he gave great examples of how to get set up and ideas for using RSS feeds in the classroom (and why every teacher should). I'm convinced! He gives plenty of examples K-12. As an ex-English teacher, he makes a strong case for building the read/write web into the English classroom, with fewer compelling cross-the-curriculum examples, though he does try. My strongest praise would be that my school offered to let me teach an English class along with the library duties, if I wanted. Originally, I planned to turn that down so I could concentrate on the library (English teacher burn out!). Having read Richardson, I'm now so excited to try these techniques in the classroom, I not only WANT to teach a class again, I'm excited about the possibilities.
Less compelling (as a practicing teacher/librarian) is Gary Bitter and Jane Legacy's Using Technology in the Classroom (7th Edition), just published a few weeks ago. Written as a textbook rather than a practical "how to,' the book serves more as an introduction to educational technology for the neophyte ed student. While I knew what the technologies were after reading this (well, I knew before, but I'm speaking as a tech-tyro here), I really didn't have a clue how to get started using them, or what to do with them if I managed to get up and running. Some chapters offer a few teaching ideas, but I found them limited in scope. The book comes with a DVD and an companion website; frankly, what working teacher has time? What were incredibly useful (and almost worth the $90 price!) were the plethora of links and and resources at the end of each chapter. This alone will save you HOURS culling the web for content.
