Blog Juice for Educational Technology

We had an interesting conversation at dinner last night revolving around the changes that are occurring in classrooms these days. Since we’re in the middle of our Tablet PC pilot at our school right now, I know this is especially acute as I’ve seen some pretty remarkable things this first week with teachers and students. But last night we were talking about the access to information that many (but not all) students and teachers have via the Web. And we were talking about how few educators had made the Internet a significant part of their practice. If we’re entering a world where much of what we do in business, communication, politics, etc. will be done online, we have to prepare our students for that reality. And the most effective way to teach these skills is to master them ourselves.

Case in point: I was talking with a math teacher who is a part of our pilot, and he told me that in the course of his lesson on Monday he used a term that was unfamiliar to his students. Rather than simply give them a definition, he modeled his own practice by having his students watch as he went from the OneNote page he was projecting via his tablet, opened up a browser, surfed over to Wikipedia, looked up the definition, and started a discussion about not only the math but about the workings of the site. Now I would bet that only a handful of teachers would model that same process.

And why is that? I’m back to that again, I know. The Web and these technologies have transformed the way I learn, provided me with many teachers who push my thinking, given me the potential to direct my own education as it is. Why don’t more educators make it a part of their own practice?

What I realized more clearly last night is that for many teachers, the idea of teaching kids to be able to access information and find mentors and communities of practice basically means teaching themselves out of their jobs, at least as they know it. I mean, at some point, we’re going to have to let go of the idea that we are the most knowledgable content experts available to our students. We used to be, when really all our students had access to was the textbook and the teacher’s brain. But today, we’re not. Not by a long stretch. And we don’t need to be. What we need to be is connectors who can teach our kids how to connect to information and to sources, how to use that information effectively, and how to manage and build upon the learning that comes with it. That’s a much different role than “science teacher” or “math teacher.” Now I’m not saying that subject matter expertise is irrelevant and that there aren’t core concepts that discipline specific teachers shouldn’t teach. But they should be taught it a much wider context, not in the fishbowl this is our traditional classroom.

This is a scary idea, I think. But it takes me back to something I wrote a couple of days ago that was almost a throw away line at the time but one that got me thinking much more deeply about all of this stuff:

The best teachers are the ones we find, not the ones we’re given.

There’s much more to write about that…

So how’s this for karma: we’re flying to Houston to get a connection to Austin for our Dell visit which starts today and after making a 360 around a big, black cloud, the pilot comes on and says “Ladies and gentleman, the bad news is that Houston is under a weather alert and we’re being asked to circle around up here for about an hour. The worst news is we don’t have enough fuel to do that, so we’re diverting to…Austin!”

Bumps all around.

What a week. And it was only a three day week, to boot. I don’t think I can ever remember a more exhausting, exhilirating opening to school, due in large part to the Tablet PC pilot that I’ve been bringing up here from time to time. I must have made at least 50 visits to classrooms, checking in, troubleshooting problems, giving therapy, watching kids, trying to make sure the teachers in the pilot knew we were going to be there to support their efforts. I knew going in that some would flourish and others would struggle, and that’s been the case. But all along we’ve asked them to be brutally honest in their reflections and assessments since capturing the good, bad and ugly was the only way we would be able to trust our decision making at the end of the process.

But having said that, I’m feeling almost giddy. By and large, the teachers are finding their classrooms and their practice changing in good ways. Some excerpts from our Moodle site:

I just want to say…I am having a great time with this thing. I have used it since yesterday to show old student work, art from the internet, and websites….It dawned on me today that I could grab my tablet and show a student exactly what I was talking about on my screen right at thier desk! Well, this was exciting to me….Then today I had a few new add on kids come into class…. The tablet is a wonderful tool when a new student comes in because I could go through my entire presentation right at his desk. He didn’t miss a thing. (This was not expected)

How cool is that? And another:

I got a huge amount of class participation doing a vocabulary worksheet with my freshman by allowing them to write the answers using the tablet. Far more than i’ve ever gotten without it. Everyone in the room seemed engaged.

Again, the unexpected, and that’s what will continue to be the most interesting. And finally, this from an e-mail:

Am loving every second of teaching with the tablet!!!! In 302, the digital projector room, I am teaching low level Spanish to a class of only 10 kids, each with learning disabilities… and they have been writing sentences and labeling pictures on the tablet as the rest of the class watches. They love putting their own personal touch, and learning from each other… It is incredible to watch!

Now of course, not all is good. Despite my best efforts to help them Zen about their own approaches and results, some are feeling behind, not as successful. I keep repeating my mantra that success will not be measured by what happens in the classroom as much as by being honest about the experience. There are no grades, no bars, no exams, only the experience whatever it is. For a group of motivated, high achieveing teachers, this is hard for some to get to. I’ll keep trying.

Finally, I just wanted to point to Gardner Campbell’s deconstruction of my Tablet screencast from a couple of days ago. It’s one of those very powerful examples of how the transparency of these technologies allow us to learn from each other. And, it’s an example of what continues to amaze me about the Read/Write Web, the connections that we make to teachers that we learn from because we are willing to share our own knowledge and questions and experiences. That seems almost standard procedure in my life these days, but I’m amazed when I think of how different it is from just a few years ago. Our best teachers are those we find, not the ones we are given.

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When ESPN says that my alma mater’s football program is one of the worst in collegiate history, rest assured it’s not hyperbole. In fact, I found it hysterically funny that in the story about Ohio U.’s mega-upset over Pitt last night, they told a truth I’d known since I went to school there way back in the…well…a few years ago:

There was reason for pessimism. The Bobcats hadn’t been on national television since 1969. In the last 35 years, they’ve had 29 losing seasons, spawning a local tradition. Students go to games, watch the band at halftime, then leave en masse.

But as I just happened upon the game last night after an evening of 8-year-old kareoke (don’t ask), and as I found the ‘Cats winning 10-7, and as Pitt drove down to tie it with eight seconds left in the game, and as then, in overtime, OU picked off a pass and ran it back 85 yards for the winning score, and as tens of thousands of fans poured onto the field wanting to make the most of their first nationally televised game since 1969, even with all of that, I still found myself bummed that I’d missed the band…

So in the craziness of the first two days of school, I’ve been running around trying to visit/support our 33 teachers who are piloting Tablet PCs in their classrooms. The good news is that they’re already doing very cool things, and we’ve only had two units that crashed. (Some weird thing where all of a sudden the stylus stops working.)

Anyway, I’m trying to keep them motivated, so I did a quick hopefully motivational screencast/congratulations for them on my own tablet using Windows Media Encoder. I’ve already been asked to add it to the next training…

I love it when technology is fun…and works. Whew!

Seems it might take James a couple of weeks to dig out from his todo list, and I know how he feels. Finding the time to steal a few minutes to blog this week is going to be a challenge…teachers back today, 3,000 kids back tomorrow, new construction everywhere, Tablet PC pilot to support, new teacher in my department to supervise, in-service day coming up next week (along with a trip to Austin, TX to tour the Dell plant), board presentation the week after, final book edits the week after that, Girl Scouts tonight, horseback lessons tomorrow night, another podcast Thursday night, soccer (coaching) Friday night, camping Saturday night, grass up to my knees, oil changes, peeling paint…oy.

And yet there is so much I want to blog about: more about the Web and New Orleans, Alan asking about “Citizen Teaching”, David’s riff on Connectivism, Paul Allison’s wiki worship…let’s see…what’s gonna give?

One of the things I’ve been really struggling with in writing this book is the dearth of statistical research surrounding the use of blogs in educational settings. I’ve seen references to a couple of studies but haven’t been able to dig up the results. I found this description of a 2004 study by Kimberly Rynearson of Tarleton State University, but never found the results:

The primary research question guiding the study is: Are weblogs a viable technology for improving studentsÂ’ reading/writing achievement? The study addresses this question directly by measuring studentsÂ’ performance on end-of-year measures of reading/writing achievement.

Read the entire .pdf for more detail…and please let me know if anyone has seen the outcome.

Today, Stephen Downes points to a News in Science article titled “Blogs help students think for themselves.”

Blogging is helping students to think and write more critically, says an Australian researcher, and can help draw out people who would otherwise not engage in debate.

These are the preliminary findings of PhD research by Anne Bartlett-Bragg, a lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, who has been using weblogs or blogs in her own teaching since 2001.

“[The students] are thinking more critically,” she says. “They are learning to be responsible and they’re communicating outside the boundaries of the classroom and the institution, and they like that.”

A couple of caveats: no methodology is cited, and I couldn’t find any at her blog either (though I didn’t spend a whole lot of time digging.) Also, her research seems to point more to higher ed. That’s why I wish I could find the results to the previous study.

But, hey…it’s a start…

If you really want to get your brain around the sheer enormity of what’s happening in New Orleans, here’s something that spurred me to donate a few more dollars to the relief fund. These are lists being kept by MSNBC where people are posting requests for information about loved ones that are missing. The sheer number listed already is mind-numbing, but the messages are just gut-wrenching. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be without any way of communicating with loved ones, to be separated from my newborn without any way of tracking where she’s going, to just being totally and literally in the dark.

Amazing.

Steve Burt is vacationing in Peru, but the other three of us got together Thursday night via Skype for a discussion centered around barriers to implementation of some of these technologies in our schools. I’ve been writing quite a bit about this lately, and I worry that I’m starting to paint a picture of teachers that they are more resistant than they really are. Listening to this discussion again, I think the time issue is really such a big part of it. Tim Lauer has been able to carve out different ways for teachers to start working with these tools in a pretty seamless way, and I really admire the way Tim Wilson approaches the sales part of this with his staff. It’s true that a part of this is going to be helping people to understand the need to make these changes. Lots of work to do.

At any rate, here is the link to Ed Tech Coast to Coast Podcast #2. All feedback is surely welcomed.

ETC2C-20050901 ((18.7 MB, 40:43)

There’s obviously no sense in trying to capture in words what’s happening in New Orleans right now. As someone said yesterday, “this is our tsunami.” The death toll may not rise as high, but the devastation and the scars that will be left make the comparison understandable. Not to minimize what happened four years ago, but this even seems more poignant somehow. The faces of the “refugees,” the children, the hopelessness. The Trade Center bombing happened in an instant, and it’s scope was defined. This tragedy had a two day build up, and it just keeps developing. And it keeps getting worse.

And once again, the efforts of bloggers have taken center stage. There will be plenty of time to deconstruct all of this later, but it’s hard to look at this past week on the Web without some amazement. I won’t go so far as to call it seismic, but I would not be surprised to look back on this event as another in a series of defining moments on the road to some new understandings about how communities and trust relationships are built. Old structures are falling, and new ones are being built, in more ways than one.

My worst fear is that we don’t heed the obvious lessons that New Orleans is trying to teach us. Are we prepared for the most obvious scenarios in our own neighborhoods? Can we really trust what we’re being told? On many levels, I really fear for what the future might hold.

Just in case anyone is looking for a way to help, the national Unitarian Universalist Church has a donation page. For what it’s worth, they have my complete trust in terms of where the money goes. I’m sure any amount will be welcomed.

So, if you had an hour in front of your full faculty to do a show and tell of some cool sites/tools out there, what would you show? We have a staff in-service on September 23, and I’ve got that hour. I’m thinking:

So, ironically, Userland is building in even more flexibility for teachers and students in it’s 9.6 version due out soon. CEO Scott Young says:

This is an important issue for many educators using blog technology in the classroom and revolves around the ability to protect and insulate the student’s work from criticism - especially the destructive kind - before its released to the class or the school in general. As such the teacher needs the ability to review a students work and comment / advise before its published. This iterative process may require several cycles before the work is ready for prime time. While an editorial oversight process is pretty different from the way most blog software behaves, its crucially important for academic blogging applications.

So for Manila 9.6 we will provide the ability for a Managing Editor to moderate and approve material before its published to a wider audience. On a site with this feature enabled, all items the students create will be “pending” items. Pending items can only be seen and edited by the creator and the Managing Editor. To simplify the process of collecting and reviewing “pending” items, they will be collected for review on a single page by the site’s Managing Editor (the teacher). The “pending items” page will list the author, department/category, date created, date last edited and by whom, a checkbox to delete the item, and a button to “publish” the item to the home page.

Ok, I think I get that. When students are contributing to a teacher-owned site, the teacher can now review what students write before it gets published. But on a student owned site, if the student is a managing editor, there is still no way to do prior review unless the teacher takes the managing editor role on the student’s site and the student is given a lesser editorial role. Get it? I think I’d rather do that a bit differently.

I’m rewriting the Manila documents for my teachers today (if anyone wants a copy of what I come up with, just let me know.) But there is still one thing I won’t be able to add that for a split second when reading Scott’s post today I thought I would:

“And, Manila also allows site owners to moderate comments that are left on the site by approving their publication before they can be seen publically.”

Scott, if you’re listening…

So it’s taken me until now to really start digging into Manila 9.5. I’m starting to set up sites for teachers and students for the news school year, and I’m just realizing how much more Manila can do in terms of determining who sees what and how. It’s going to take some time to play, and I’m already trying to enlist some teacher volunteers to push the envelope a bit for me here, but here are some pretty cool aspects right out of the box: