Category: Teacher Resources

Evernote

This isn’t a new tool, but I seem to continue to find ways to use it.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I’ll be presenting at NCCE in March. I’ve begun my literature review phase in trying to dig up a whole bunch of resources to read or reread. I found my way to gamification.org and wanted to save it. So I made a new notebook for my gaming presentation and used the Safari webclipper (best thing ever) to automatically put it in the “Gaming presentation” notebook with the tag “research” and a couple notes about he site. I love that it goes in with one click!

I think I’ll make a note that outlines my research process and timeline.

I also have the Evernote app on my phone and iPad (yes, there are many devices in this household!) so if I’m reading on either of those, I can also put things into the notebook and it will all sync. Perfectly. Hopefully.

I still keep a pad of paper for doodling and brainstorming – I haven’t, and probably won’t ever, gone completely paperless.

Parents: Facebook may fade… are you ready for Tumblr and Twitter?

I was scrolling through my Google Reader on this lovely summer morning and came upon Ian Jukes’ reposting of this article from eclassroomnews.com: “Some Teens Aren’t Liking Facebook As Much As Older Users.”  WHAT??? Now that we adults finally figured out where they are,  signed up for accounts, talked about friending your kids, how to set privacy and account settings, made policies about whether teachers should or shouldn’t friend students……  they are going elsewhere? Of course. That’s what kids do.

“Facebook is just not the big fad anymore,” said Kim Franklin, a 15-year-old from Gaithersburg, Md., who does not have a Facebook account and prefers social media site Tumblr. “It was like everybody was constantly on there, but now not so much.”

Franklin said her 13-year-old sister Nicole hasn’t signed up for a Facebook account, either.

Meanwhile, Laura Franklin, the girls’ 37-year-old mother, always has Facebook open on her computer while working on her parenting blog, Better in Bulk. That, she said, has led her teen daughters to dub Facebook a “mom thing.”

Everybody was there… so they will leave.

This reinforces for me what I’ve been trying to cultivate as a habit of mind: it’s not about the tool. Tools come and go. It’s about the skills, the processes, the connections.

Computer Science

http://xkcd.com/353/

I’ve been investigating computer science and computer programming this spring in a bunch of different ways, trying to make sense of it myself and figuring out where and how it makes sense for middle school students to get exposed to it. I do believe that it is an essential skill that we need to be exposing students to, especially if OES wants to remain a math and science powerhouse. I think computational thinking will be akin to the literacy movement of the 90s, during which schools pushed for reading and writing in ALL classes.

What I’m doing:

  1. Taking a course online
    • Udacity.com offers free, self-paced or fixed timeline classes beginning with CS101: Intro to Computer Science and going up to CS387: Applied Cryptography. (How cool!)  They have also begun offering statistics and physics. (Unfortunately I only made it through week 3 before succumbing to spring overload, but this summer I’m going to pick it back up and finish the course.)
    • I LOVE LOVE LOVE the format of Udacity. They give short 1-2 minutes videos about a concept, then do a 1-question quiz that checks your understanding. After several teaching videos, they have a couple problems to solve that build up to a final goal. The overall goal of CS101 is to build a web crawling search engine, which is awesome, so it gives you an engaging long-term goal.
  2. Reading
  3. Looking at different languages and project options
    • Python– This is what I’m learning in the Udacity class.
    • Scratch – I’m taking a 1/2 day class at ISTE and hoping to get a better sense of this. This is what students learn in Lower School so it might be the most logical thing to continue in Middle School.
    • NetLogo – I met John Jamison at school one day and he told me about NetLogo and the simluations he’s designed and are being used at the Bush School in Seattle in 6th grade humanities. I did a little researching on it and it looks super promising. I’m hoping next fall I can go up and visit Bush to see the project in action.
    • Google Blockly – Just released – appears to be a visual programming interface like Scratch but web-based. This would be amazing if we could share projects through our Google Apps suite.

***It still amazes me that all of this is FREE!***

Questions I still have:

  • What is really the difference between Computer Science and Computer Programming?
  • Where does this content belong? Integrated into other classes or as it’s own CS class? While there is a natural fit between math and programming because of the logic and ability to manipulate numbers, there is also some talk that doing math problems is a turn off for girls, who engage better with projects that deal with social issues.
  • Could this be a place for an after school club? Can I develop enough expertise to guide this?
  • How will girls react to this content? Right now, I only hear boys talk about programming.

Reading Notes: Everything Bad is Good for You, By Steven Johnson

This book was published in 2005 and is a fascinating look at how pop culture is actually making us smarter. Yep, I said smarter. I love books that turn common belief on their nose, like The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman, which made me feel like the future was actually a great place to go toward as long as I knew how to look at it.

Here are some notes I took:

p. 41 Games force you to make decisions, during which you have to weigh evidence, analyze situations, and consult goals.

p. 45 When gamers interact with gaming environments, they are learning the basic procedure of the scientific method. This comes from James Paul Gee’s research:

  1. Probe
  2. Hypothesize
  3. Reprobe
  4. Rethink

Video games develop different skills than reading textbooks or watching videos, like logic and problem solving. Video games as you to THINK, whereas textbooks and novels as you to FOLLOW. Hmmm… what would we rather our children be able to do?

What skills do they develop? I’m glad you asked:

1. Telescoping: This is the ability to focus on both immediate and long-distance views. There is a hierarchy of tasks in a game, and you have to manage your time. For example, in some games, you have to walk around and collect things or solve little puzzles in order to get enough coins to buy the right potion to transform yourself in order to get access to a boss villain.

Turns out, this is what we all do in REAL LIFE. You have to run errands and do dishes and pay taxes, all while seeking a larger purpose in life.

2. Probing: Games learn by playing. They don’t read the manual first. They probe the logic (or physics) of the games and find the limits.

Turns out, this is what we all do in REAL LIFE. In your first day at a new job, you seek out the norms, the customs, the relationships, the limits.

p. 48 Ask gamers what is happening to them mentally – not what is happening in the game. That is where the valuable skills are being developed.

p. 55 Games have a narrative when you look back at them, but the stories are not built of events – they are built of tasks.

p. 181 We know from neuroscience that the brain wants new challenges. We problem-solve, untangle puzzles,  and lock in on change to try to decipher the cause.

What I find so ironic about the seeming universal attitude towards video games (that they are a worthless waste of time) is that we so universally glorify athletic games for all the values that they teach us: perseverance, cooperation, concentration, strategy, etc. In my opinion, these are skills that can be learned in ALL GAMES, not just athletic ones. Why does it take everyone so long to see these values in video games?

How do you share?

After you teach that amazing class – where the discussion was lively, the students engaged, and the transformation of understanding palpable – what do you do? Do you celebrate with your colleague at the desk next to you? Do you put it as your Facebook status? Do you share with your division head?

When you teach that class that didn’t quite go as planned – where the questions fell flat, the activity was too simple, the students’ eyes glazed over – what do you do? Do you ask a colleague for help? Do you debrief with a mentor? Do you ask a couple kids what went wrong?

“We remain open as learners when we remember to listen to ‘What do you think?” – Chris Lehmann

We need to share, and more than just at the lunch table. Why? Because sharing gives us new perspectives to explore and stimulates conversation.

While there are many ways you can share these days (blogging, twitter, nings, full-on conferences), EdCamp is a great way to share your ideas with teachers from other schools in the area. There is no sign up fee or deadline. We are lucky enough to be hosting the next one on Saturday, May 12th, at OES, 9am-4pm. I’ll be there – how about you?

Acceptable Use

For the Middle School, we follow this Acceptable Use Policy. It is explained to the students at the beginning of the year, I do a short review with the 6th grade tech class, and this year we also reviewed it in January with the 7th grade.

 Acceptable Use Policy, 2011-2012

The school’s information technology resources, including email and Internet access, are provided for educational purposes. The laptop issued to students should be considered an extension of the classroom for the purpose of providing access to educational resources.  Adherence to the following policy is necessary for continued access to the school’s technological resources:


Students must
1. Respect and protect the privacy of others.
  • Use only assigned accounts.
  • Not view, use, or copy passwords, data, or networks to which they are not authorized.
  • Not distribute private information about others or themselves.
  • Not publish pictures of others without their consent.

2. Respect and protect the integrity, availability, and security of all electronic resources.

  • Not download or install any application, extension, or software on the school’s laptops.
  • Not store any personal files on the school’s laptop.  Only files associated with school are allowed.
  • Not stream video or audio through the school’s network during work hours without explicit permission from a teacher for a specific educational purpose.
  • Observe all network security practices, as posted.
  • Report security risks or violations to a teacher or network administrator.
  • Not destroy or damage data, laptops, networks, or other resources that do not belong to them.
  • Conserve, protect, and share these resources with other students, faculty, and staff.

3. Respect and protect the intellectual property of others.

  • Not infringe copyrights (no making illegal copies of music, images, games, or movies!).
  • Not plagiarize.

4. Respect and practice the principles of community.

  • Communicate only in ways that are kind and respectful.
  • Report threatening or discomforting materials to a teacher.
  • Not intentionally access, transmit, copy, or create material that violates the school’s code of conduct (such as messages that are threatening, rude, discriminatory, pornographic, or meant to harass).
  • Not send spam, chain letters, or other mass unsolicited mailings.
  • Not use direct communications such as IRC, online chat, or instant messaging during school without a teacher’s explicit permission.
  • Not intentionally access, transmit, copy, or create material that is illegal (such as obscenity, stolen materials, or illegal copies of copyrighted works).
  • Not buy, sell, advertise, or otherwise conduct business, unless approved as a school project.


Students may, if in accord with the policy above

  1. Use the laptop, its software, and the school’s IT resources to communicate, collaborate, and create original works as enrichment or extensions of the school’s curriculum.
  2. Use direct communications such as IRC, online chat, or instant messaging with a teacher’s permission.
  3. Use the resources for any educational purpose.


Consequences for Violation. Violations of these rules may result in disciplinary action, including the loss of a student’s privileges to use the school’s information technology resources.

Supervision and Monitoring. School and network administrators and their authorized employees monitor the use of information technology resources to help ensure that uses are secure and in conformity with this policy. Administrators reserve the right to examine, use, and disclose any data found on the school’s information networks in order to further the health, safety, discipline, or security of any student or other person, or to protect property. They may also use this information in disciplinary actions, and will furnish evidence of crime to law enforcement.

I follow this with my most important messages:

  • Anything you do online is public, repeatable, and permanent: You should be comfortable with seeing it on the screen in gathering
  • Don’t tell anyone else your password (except your parents)
  • Don’t use anyone else’s computer
  • Log out: be wary of autofill passwords
  • Chat is not necessarily with who you think it is (anyone could be looking at the screen, regardless of who is logged in) and nothing is private
  • At higher institutions, the consequences for violation can be expulsion
  • Harassment is never about what you meant

Resources for Speed Geeking

During our Professional Growth and Development day, I’ll be leading a speed geeking session on using RSS feeds in Google Reader. (The tech department got the idea for speed geeking from Kim Cofino.)

We will start with a brief tour of Google Reader:

Finding good blogs:

I think the hardest thing with trying to find blogs that will be interesting is finding the FIRST one. So I’ve created a bundle of my favorite blogs that you can check out: Click this link and then click the “Subscribe button.”

Reading:

I tend to scroll through my reader a couple times per week. I often get a couple really interesting articles that I like, but I long ago gave up trying to read everything.

Mobile reading:

One reason that I like having everything online is that I read a lot on my iPhone, which can access my google reader through safari or through an app. (I’ve just started playing around with “Feedly,” but there are dozens of apps for reading.)

Great question from a 1:1 Parent

At the end of my workday, I thought I’d glance at my reader and an article stood out to me immediately: Advice for Parents of 1:1 Programs by Jeff Utecht. It began with this question by a parent:

My son attends a school where MacBooks are required from grades 8-12, and students use many different assistive technology tools. I believe that 1:1 is great as a learning TOOL, but because students have their laptops with them all the time, there is no “down” time when they have to use their own initiative to think, dream, plan, create w/o a screen. He gets up and will open the laptop before breakfast to play, he will play or noodle around with his iTunes in the car on the way to school, on the way home from school, and every other time that kids used to be unplugged. He is not creating, he is consuming. It is a huge fight in our household.

What advice do you have for parents in dealing with this dark side-effect of a mandatory BYOL environment?

I like think that in the OES middle school, we are intentional about building a culture of use that aligns with our values, and Jeff’s answers resonated and validated so many of the ideas that I just blogged about. For example,

  1. Create Family Rules –> We say, “Create a Common Culture”
  2. Conversation, Conversation, Conversation –> We say, “Start the Conversation”
  3. We still know what’s best –> We say, no laptop use at lunch: run around and be social.

A couple things Jeff mentioned that I really like are,

  1. Remember that you are the parent. I think this is hard, especially when you do not understand the attraction of the game or the logistics of how to use the device. I GO THROUGH THIS, EVEN AS THE TECH COORDINATOR. Sometimes I force myself to explore games or sites (like Tumblr or FormSpring) just to stay somewhat in the loop.
  2. “Doing homework” is really just disguised mess-around time. Again, his advice is great: let there be natural consequences for not using time wisely. At OES, we have a school culture where parent-teacher communication and personalized attention is the norm, so you can set up a plan like this with the teacher. How much better that students learn the value of time management in middle school, where the stakes are fairly low, rather than waste 4 years of college because they couldn’t keep themselves off facebook and Call of Duty.
  3. What looks like consuming, isn’t always. It seems like they are just messing around on iTunes or games, but sometimes this is deeply creative. This is one reason that I’m a huge fan of Gaming to Learn with games like SimCity or Minecraft. To go further, one of the great things about a 1:1 program, in my opinion is that it develops the fluency of use to allow students to move past just consumption. In my experience, life-long learners are not satisfied with mere consumption and cannot help but give back. Hours of watching video on YouTube becomes fodder for iMovie projects or a couple months (or years) of following twitter feeds eventually turns into tweeting because of a familiarity with the medium and understanding of the social rules. Sometimes “just” consuming can also be pattern and culture recognition, such as what content or behavior allowed and rejected. And, what began today as a surf through my reader, resulted in this blog post and my very first comment on someone else’s blog.

Great question, great responses, and great affirmation of the partnership we do our best to nurture with kids and parents here at OES.

Comments?

Staying Informed: Facebook

From our counselor: Adolescents are impulsive in their actions, focused on connecting to peers and taking risks. Thank goodness! Otherwise they would never have the courage to face the very scary world we live in and eventually leave home. The challenge is that technology feeds all three of these, and the results are not always conducive to a healthy, happy childhood.

Today, when kids turn 13, it’s not just about being a teenager: it’s about Facebook. The Facebook policy requires users to be 13, and signing up for an account, with all the connectedness it offers, might be equivalent to the Quinciñera or getting to vote.

This is where you (the adults) come in. Just as we don’t give them the keys to the car and wish them luck on the highway, we wouldn’t give them access to the internet without so much as a couple hours behind the wheel.

So as a parent (or teacher), how do you talk to your kid (student) about using facebook?

  • Know it yourself – have a facebook page. The best way to understand the experience is to be a part of it. If you kid loved lacrosse, you would probably pick up a stick or watch a couple games just to get a sense of it. Friend your kid. DON’T POST ON THEIR WALL.
  • Go through the account settings. I think of these as what others see about me. There are a lot of settings – you don’t have to do it all at once.
  • Go through the privacy settings. I think of these as who sees what I post. There are a lot of settings – you don’t have to do it all at once.
  • Show your child how to use the “View As” feature to see how their profile appears to the public or to their friends.

My mantra is that everything you share is PERMANENT & PUBLIC. Even on my personal account, I pretend my boss is looking over my shoulder. You never know who might see it.

Facebook is an amazing tool for connecting with friends and family across time and space. I play Scrabble against my mother who lives very far away, and it helps me feel more connected to her. On the other, if it becomes a world absent of adult guidance, like teenage drivers without navigation, it can become a tragic pile up of hurt feelings, broken friendships, and life-haunting videos from that one party in 8th grade.

Learning to manage social networks is a skill that kids need to be taught.

The first time I sat in the driver’s seat of my mom’s Pontiac Grand Am. It was the exhilarating taste of freedom. My mom worried that I would drive with the music too loud with my friends or not look all directions in the intersection. I was impulsive, peer-driven, and ignorant of the risks, but she sat next to me.

Maybe that’s what signing in to Facebook feels like. Same teenagers, different technology.

Build a Common Culture, Stay Informed, and Start the Conversation

These three tenets are the mantra of the middle school parent-tech partnership. Adolescents will always come up with new, wonderfully inventive ways of looking at rules and situations. Thank goodness! Because if they just did the same as we did, the world would never change. As a result of this, it’s impossible to come up with a rule for every situation. I like to come back to these tenets to guide my reactions:

1. Stay Informed

2. Start the Conversation

  • Even a protest is a conversation starter

3. Build a Common Culture

  • Setting boundaries on connectivity for all devices
  • Set family rules, like all technology used in common spaces
  • Model good technology behaviors, like not texting at the dinner table if you don’t want others texting then.
  • It’s about trust and respect, not technology
What does this look like in practice?
  • Your son wants to use his iPod touch to listen to music to fall asleep at night. You agree, but then begin to notice he’s having trouble getting up in the morning and seems more tired than usual.
  • Before you take it away or assume your child is using it all night,
    • Stay Informed: What things are possible on an iPod touch other than music? The most important thing is that it is possible to connect to the internet, so might he be messaging with friends or facebooking late? What do other parents do?
    • Start the Conversation: Ask him why he might be more tired. Ask him what else he uses his iPod touch for (during any time of day – leave it open). Ask what kind of music is he listening to and maybe listen along.
    • Build a Common Culture: What do you do with your technology at night? Do you listen to music to fall asleep? How can we work together to get more restful sleep?
These tenets help me get to the issue before jumping to conclusions. I realize that these may not be straightforward or easy issues, but they are important conversations and life habits to instill in adolescents.  We are invested in growing healthy, tech-balanced kids who can eventually manage their devices independently as adults. As your tech coordinator, I am here for you as a resource.