Hiatus

Apparently I’ve been on hiatus from blogging for a while. Don’t take
it personally – it’s not you, it’s me. I haven’t had much to say or
maybe just haven’t had the time to put together any thoughts that need
more than 140 characters.

I’m playing around with auto posting via posterous. Maybe that will
help get more stuff on the blog. Maybe not. But it’s always fun to
play with new toys/geek tools while I’m supposed to be working on
other things. Alas, I must now yield to the siren call of the dishes.
Let’s see how this experiment works out.

Anecdotal records using iPad

One of my professional goals this year is keeping some anecdotal records of what my students are doing in class so I have a better record of what they do during class in addition to having some artifacts of their work, such as exams, audio or video projects. My tool tool of choice is my iPad, not (just) because it’s so darn cool, but because it’s something I have with me all the time. I was also inspired by Chris Lehmann’s plan to use his iPad as a tool for facilitating his walk-throughs (and I’m hoping that Chris will share his experience with the world).

After a few days of research and pondering I’ve put together a set of tools and a workflow that I think will work. The two primary criteria I’m looking for are portability and simplicity. I want to be able to access the information not only on my iPad, but also on my MacBook or from any of the school computers. I’d considered using Google forms, but I’d also like to have the data actually residing on my devices simultaneously, not just accessible through the cloud. I already use Dropbox for syncing/storing many other files on different computers so I’ll be making use of it for this project. I also want my data to be portable in the sense that I can use/edit it between different applications – no proprietary data formats allowed!

By simplicity, I mean that the tools needed to work with the data should be simple tools that I can have on my MacBook, iPad or whatever device I have at hand. Straight ASCII text is the simplest data format for which tools are readily available on multiple platforms so I’ll put all the data into straight text files.

There are a number of iPad apps that edit text, but only a couple that I know of that sync with dropbox – Plain Text (currently free but soon to adopt a freemium model) and Elements ($4.99). (I did a quick google search while writing this post and found that another app called iA Writer ($4.99) also looks promising. There is a Dropbox app directory for various platforms that connect into the Dropbox APIs). Since Plain Text is currently free, I’m using that but if a better alternative comes along, I can easily use transfer over since all the data is in plain text files. I’m storing the records in a separate file for each student.

Usually adding components to a workflow or other system increases the complexity of the system. In this case, however, there is one additional element that makes the system simpler. I already use TextExpander on my MacBook and it is one of my indispensable tools. There is also a version of TextExpander for iOs devices that allows me to create text snippets then assign a text trigger for it. When I type in the text trigger, if I’m in a TextExpander aware app, it is instantly and magically transmogrified into the text snippet. For example, i have a text snippet for the current date in the format YYYY-MM-DD which is triggered using “dymd”. I type in those four characters and today’s date in the desired format appears. I’m creating some text snippets for templates that I will use for creating the records.

So the whole thing basically consists of text files stored/synced with Dropbox. I can create/edit the files with any text editor that can get access to Dropbox. TextExpander helps to save on the typing, which is especially handy when typing on the iPad. The only part that I need to figure out is some way of tweaking data out of the text files in a manageable way, but I think I’ll be able to put together some simple Python scripts to do all the data extraction.

Stay tuned for details as to how this works out.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

A better status quo

cc licensed flickr photo shared by motionblur

I’ve been thinking/pondering about how much new tools/technology really change learning since Edubloggercon at ISTE earlier this year in Denver. There were a lot of smart people with interesting ideas there, but the one that created the strongest impression was during a breakout discussion on the use of iPads in schools. There were a lot of iPads at ISTE and they were in especially high concentration at Edubloggercon so this was a discussion that was of interest to many of the folks there. Most of the iPad nation (I was amongst them) were abuzz about how the iPad was going to be a transformative tool that would really change teaching and learning.

But Scott McLeod (or David Jakes – they were both pursuing the same line of thought in the ensuing discussion) asked a question that stuck with me for … well, right up until now actually. He asked if the iPad was truly transformative – that is, would it change the way we approach teaching and learning in the schools – or was it just a better status quo. Was it really going to allow us to get students learning in a different, and hopefully better, way or was it just the same old same old with some bright shiny objects thrown in to get students’ attention. Scott and David made a convincing assertion that it was the latter. I thank them both for provoking some lengthy reflection on my part. The iPad is great at presenting content in fascinating ways, but how does it let students engage in the creation of knowledge differently than the methods that have been used for the past 50 years? Is it just a shiner, better and more expensive textbook?

The question arose again this morning when I followed a tweeted link to a list of alternatives to book reports. It’s an interesting list and some of the techniques/tools mentioned sound like a lot of fun. I’m sure the students would find them to be a welcome change from the written style of book report. (Dare I even call it a noel approach?) But I’m not sure the students would learn anything more about the book or any different cognitive skills from the analysis of a book than a written book report. The change has been the type of assessment but how much of an alternative is that?

I don’t want to come across as condemning the iPad’s usefulness as a tool in education or the value of have alternate methods of assessing student learning. Access to information that is up to date and well presented will, I think, keep students more interested in the information. Alternate methods of assessing learning will provide some students with a better way to communicate their learning instead of assessing how well they take written tests. My concern is that if we see these as being transformative, we’ll give up looking for ways that really get students involved in deep learning.

A cell is like a …

I love teaching biology but there are some parts of it that weigh heavily on my soul. I usually explain to my students at the start of each semester that bio has a lot of things that need to be remembered (at least in the curriculum I am working from), unlike physics and chem which have fewer main ideas but a lot of time is spent examining applications of the basic principles. There are, however, some key theories in biology that help to tie all the facts together. Two that I always focus on early in the year are cell theory and natural selection. And in order to understand cells, it is necessary to understand basic cell anatomy (in my opinion – the comments are open so that you can try to enlighten me to the contrary). I am embarrassed to say that early in my teaching career I would do this by setting up the overhead projector and putting up the overhead slides – with bulletpoints, I am embarrassed to admit – which were basically a textbook delivered via overhead projector. More recently, I’ve been using the Cells Alive website as a resource so that I could have students goto the web and copy down the description of the parts of the cell, essentially a snazzier and more engaging textbook with a veneer of innovation because I the students were using computers. But still basically a textbook approach to teaching – here is what you need to read to answer these questions that let me know that you glanced over the assigned readings.

But in an attempt to avoid being one of “those teachers” that make Alec and Will cringe, and inspired by the discussion on Scott McLeod’s blog post, I have been racking my brain trying to think of a different way to do this so that students are more engaged in the creation of their knowledge. And I thinking have an idea that doesn’t suck. And if it does, I want you to let me know.

One of the ways that I can understand something abstract and complex like a cell, is by analogy. Instead of supplying the analogy, I’m going to ask students to work in pairs or trios develop their own analogies. They’ll start with a couple of days of research about the structure of prokaryotic, plant and animal cells. Then each group will develop an analogy for each of them (I’ll give them some examples to start with – a plant cell is like a city, an animal cell is like a factory, etc.). For a deliverable, I’m going to have them create a representation/explanation of their analogy to share with or present to the class, with bonus marks given for creative analogy and/or presentation.

I’m hoping it doesn’t suck and I’m hoping it helps the students understand the cell and how cell theory is such an important foundation of biology. I hope I’ll have the opportunity to report back on the success of this approach to teaching what could otherwise be another list of stuff to read and regurgitate at test time. And if Alec and Will like the idea, that wouldn’t be too bad either.

- Posted using BlogPress, which so far I’m liking, from my iPad

WordPress blogging from the iPad, part 1

I’ve had the iPad for a couple of months but haven’t really been able to use it as a blogging tool. The wordpress app was one of the first that I downloaded but I hadn’t used it much (at all, really) because I couldn’t find a way to make links. But – tada – I have just figured it out. Just in case I’m not the last person to figure it out, I’ll share my findings with you as well as a general review of the ease of blogging with it.

I hadn’t realized that the wordpress app accepts HTML input. Once I did, I thought i could create a link by typing in the good old HREF code. I’ve done a fair bit of coding in raw HTML, but really hoped there was a better solution. There is, but I didn’t find it until I started typing in the HREF tag. A helpful little dialog box opened up asking if I wanted help making a link. Yes, by gosh, that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I tapped on “make a link” and yet another little dialog box popped up with fields for me to enter the link text and the URL. After doing that, there appeared a nice little snippet of perfectly formatted HTML for my link.

What I am find lacking is the user interface, which surprises me given the ease of use of the web interface for wordpress. There are a number of features that I needed to look up on the wordpress iPad app website. Adding images also seems less than intuitive. Images can be automagically replaced, but appear only at the end of the post, not anywhere else.

If you are only blogging to a wordpress blog and you generally don’t include images in your blog posts, this is a good app to use. If you do want to add images, this might not meet your needs as your sole blogging tool since you will probably need to touch up your posts in your web browse after the initial writing.

I’ll write up my review of blogpress after I’ve used it for a few days.

PS – WTF? There doesn’t seem to be a post or publish button here. The publishing feature should be obvious, not part of a scavenger hunt.

PPS – The status of the post needs to be changed in the write window. I would never have checked that on my own but found out how by looking at the WP website. Given these problems in the user interface of the app, I would be tempted to use Simplenote or Evernote to write my blog posts then just copy and paste into the web interface. #usabilityfail

Catalyzing change in schools

I’ve had many good conversations with brilliant people during the past two pre-ISTE conference days and any one of them would be worth writing about. The one that keeps whirling around my head tonight is a serendipitous conversation with Don (last name unknown). It started as I was getting ready to say good night to The Kids™ via Google Talk using the iPad.

On a side note, I’ve made an interesting iPad observation. I’ve seen more people using iPads than laptops over the past two days. I would agree wholeheartedly with anyone who says that it is not a laptop replacement, but on the other hand a laptop is not an iPad replacement. There are affordances using the iPad – the weight and size, the simplicity of the interface, the unitasking (which can sometimes be a feature instead of a shortcoming) – that laptops don’t have. but until less than three months ago, we didn’t have iPads (or any other kind of touch interface tablets that may be forthcoming) so laptops were the best approximation we had. My analogy that I tweeted was “Does iPAd replace laptop” is like asking “does Twitter replace blogs” – they resemble each other but they do different things. At one time we used our blogs as a way of twitter like conversation, but once twitter came along we didn’t need to use blogs to do that since twitter did a better job. Similarly laptops don’t need to be our iPad proxies now that we have the actual technology in our hands.

But I digress …

Don asked if I was enjoying my iPad and what sorts of things I used it for. This led us into a discussion of the difficulty of getting teachers to change the way the taught and their concepts of what their job is. I pointed out that just 50 years ago, teachers – indeed the entire education system – embraced and actively pursued change (this is my understanding of it, but correct me if I’m mistaken). Don asked what the catalyst for the change; I said it was a reaction to Sputnik and the shock of suddenly losing hegemony in the area of science research and technology. Then Don asked the question that has been niggling away at me since then – what kind of event would it require to be the Sputnik event for education and teachers today? What needs to happen to catalyze a massive re-evaluation of the role of schools and teachers? Sorry Don, no answers yet but maybe some smart folks might share some ideas with us here. (Yes, that is a massive plea for comments so start sharing some ideas!)

Netbook use case in high schools

A netbook program was discussed at today’s staff meeting. Year 1 of the program would involve providing each teacher in the school (grades 9 – 12) with a netbook so they could have a year to experiment. It was emphasized that a netbook doesn’t have the same capabilities as a full laptop, so teachers should get familiar with the limitations and possibilities afforded by the netbooks. Several colleagues raised an excellent question – what would I or my students use it for? I try not to be too much of a fan of implementing technology just because it’s new and shiny and cool, although I have on occasion fallen victim to BSOS. I know of some of the uses for my classes, but when teachers in other subject areas are asking this I don’t have any answers to give them.

To that end, I’ve set up a google form for a netbook use in high school survey. If you have an idea or two you can contribute, your participation is appreciated and I will personally think good things about you and pass along good karma to you. If you are interested in the results, here is the netbook use survey results data.

“It’s a strange kind of job …”

I’ll explain the title for this post in a moment. First, I want to point out that if anyone would contend (as I sometimes do) that twitter and microblogging have wiped out the engaged discourse that was once the hallmark of good blogging, I direct you to read through Jim Groom’s writing, and the ensuing comments, on Networked Study. If you follow that link and get so engaged in the conversation that you don’t come back here, I won’t be offended.

Now back to the explanation of the title. About 18 years ago, I was finishing up my first teaching contract. The principal made sure he had some time to sit down with me at the end of the year to see how my first year had gone. Something he said stuck with me all this time. “Rob, teaching is a funny kind of career. It’s a strange kind of job because we teach other people’s children – instead of parents teaching their own kids, they send them to us.” I think what stuck with me about this was that it is kind of strange, isn’t it, that I earn my living by teaching other people’s children, usually the children of people I don’t even know. I don’t think there are any other species of parenting animal (that is, those who care for their young through a period of infancy) that will let an unknown and unrelated member of the population raise their young. Even amongst humans, for most of our history as a species we taught our own. Children learned by being with their parents and learning what their parents did.

I was reminded of this as I was reading Will Richardson’s Opportunity, Not Threat (which Will wrote partly in response to the conversation resulting from Jim’s post I mention above). He is drawn to this thought from Michael Feldstein:

It’s hard to change the culture of education without getting the kids before their thinking processes begin to ossify, but in order to do that, you have to contend with their parents who, however well-intended, didn’t have the benefit of the kind education you’re trying to provide their kids and often see it as more of a threat than an opportunity.

Maybe part of the threat seen by parents is that some of the current ideas about K-12 education reform imply that teachers stop having sole or prime responsibility for the childrens’ learning (resulting, no doubt, in a garrison mentality amongst teachers who see their sphere of influence being eroded) . This implies that some of that responsibility maybe goes back to the parents. I don’t think parents know how to teach their kids the way we used to – showing and teaching the skills and knowledge that we used to carry out our activities of daily living. I have a pretty shallow set of skills outside of what I do at work. I can cook a few decent meals, I can take care of some necessary household tasks, but for anything bigger than that – like building an addition to the house or planting and keeping a garden, I’m totally clueless. (Notable exception – I can configure and secure a home data network pretty damn well. It might not be too impressive, but it’s the best skill that I have). I don’t know if I have many life survival skills to show my kids, and I suspect many parents feel the same way. Giving me more responsibility for teaching my children life skills is much more frightening than giving me the strange job of teaching a narrow, specialized set of knowledge domains to other people’s (or mine – The Girl™’s teacher is sometimes surprised at how much she already knows about science).

So, what are your thoughts? Is part of the resistance on the part of parents a reluctance on their part to take back some of the responsibility for their children’s learning?

Enough writing. Time to get some lunch ready for the kids. That’s a responsibility that I can deal with.

A guide for the overwhelmed, part 4 – Keeping the pedagogical horse in front

I’m early into my Easter Break from school right now so I’ve been getting back in touch with some of my online world – a bit of twitter and taking time to read some of the info in my Google Reader account. The last month has been crazy busy with family stuff so between that and work I’ve had almost no time to have some virtual me time. I think the time away has been good for letting me think about some things from a different perspective.

Whenever I head back to the twitter-stream, I am amazed and overwhelmed by the number of amazing tools there are for teachers to use. More than I can possibly keep track of, partially because of the rapid pace of development and widespread familiarity with them and partially because my attention span is becoming more ferret-like as I get older. I remember (yeah, whenever you start a sentence with “I remember …” you are definitely becoming old) when there were two web-based tools that I could make use of for or with students – blogs and wikis. Then came RSS readers (like Bloglines – remember good old bloglines?) and podcasts. That pretty much summed up the contents of the educational technology utility belt in 1995. I was pretty adept at using all of these and occasionally gave conference presentations or worked with staff at my school to encourage them to start using some of these tools. I led a PD session with Donna DesRoches entitled How to Drink Water from a Fire Hose (slowly being migrated over to a wikispaces version), which I considered to be a pretty good overview of the state of the art tools available in ed-tech at that time.

There are now a cornucopia of tools available for teachers to use. Most often when I hear about them (or I’m talking about them) the conversation starts with “Here’s a tool you can use to …”. Use cases have their value when describing a new tool, but I think I need to look at the tools in a larger context. The use case describes problems/situations that are addressed by the tool, but it’s easy, for me at least, to let the use case shape my perceptions of the situations I need addressed. I think it’s far more effective for my students if I have a clear idea of the learning objectives I have for them then find the tools that do the best job of meeting them. Basically, this is just good instructional design like Rick Schwier taught me back in my M.Ed. days. In current educational lingo, it’s called Understanding by Design. Whatever label you want to attach to it, the goal is the same. Develop clearly expressed objectives first, then develop the methods that will achieve those objectives. The pedagogical horse needs to be in front of the cart full of resources, leading down the learning road to the whatever the destination might be. (Crappy metaphor, I know, but cut me some slack since it is getting close to 1 a.m. as I write this).

If I want to clearly keep that horse in front, I need to be very clear about where I want it to go. Another way to put it is that I need to have distinct objectives for travelling that path. So what is the final destination I’m heading to, the destination that our schools are heading to? The horse is going to wander all over the place if I let it. I think that schools can only give a good answer to that question if there is some deep introspection about what our institutional goals are. I’m hoping to have the chance for some introspection of reasonable depth for my own benefit. As time allows, I want to get some of those thoughts down here just to help fix my ideas in place so they don’t wander all over the place. If you have any answers to my questions, or some other questions I might need to consider, I encourage (plead?) you to put some of them in the comments as I muse aloud.

EdTech Posse Podcast 6.1 – the tiny stateroom

(cross posted at the EdTech Posse blog)

EdTech Posse 6.2 – The tiny stateroom

The show felt a little like the crowded cabin sketch from A Night at the Opera.

The conversation started small with just Heather Ross and I talking mostly about the glorious gold medal victory of the Canadian women’s hockey team at the 2010 Olympics. Dean Shareski came onboard and described the Powerful Learning Practice professional development opportunity. Rick Schwier joined us as we were winding up that topic and starting to promote the TLt and IT Summit educational technology conferences that will be happening in Saskatoon in May. Alec Couros joined us and we wrapped up our conversation by talking about implementing a one to one laptop program (as is currently being considered by the Living Sky School Division).

Some other links:

• Isabel Allende’s TED talk
• Powerful Learning Practice
• IT summit
• TLt 2010
• Educon: Field Guide for Change Agents (blog post from Rodd Lucier)

Enjoy the show!