Archive for May 5, 2008

Richard | May 29, 2008
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Thinking about curricular integration

synths

The PNAIS TechShare planning committee would like each member school to articulate its technology philosophy and future plans. They hope that answering these questions will inform the technology planning efforts of other member schools. The committee asked us to think about where we are now and where we are headed. I responded to their questions as follows:

1. Describe your school’s technology philosophy.

Catlin Gabel technology resources support the educational mission of the school. We aspire to a high standard of excellence, delivering systems that work reliably and with high quality. We anticipate and plan for new opportunities and empower users to investigate new applications of technology, solve computer problems, and collaborate with IT staff. We carry out our work with a support orientation and high integrity. We make decisions in order to minimize the environmental impact of computer use.

2. What is your vison for classroom technology five years from now?

To continue to deepen its application to teaching and learning in a variety of forms. All teachers will list their curricular and pedagogical goals for their classes, consider how technology could help meet these goals, and regularly attempt new, technology-enriched activities. The forms will cover the range of available technologies, such as touch surfaces, the social web, data-collection devices, audio and video publishing, and so on. Teachers will feel fully supported by IT and empowered to design and attempt new, technology-rich activities in their classes. Teachers will participate in an active community of practice with their colleagues both within the school and beyond.

3. Do you have teachers willing to adapt curriculum to utilize technology innovations,or asking for technology so that they can?

Yes, though I would use language such as “employ technology to support curricular goals in their courses.” I would say that a large minority of teachers change curricula as they employ technology in their classes. We will know better after the completion of an upper school laptop program survey next week.

4. Explain how you support teacher innovators.

We consider all teachers to be potential innovators and therefore approach them about the same. We respond quickly and definitively to teacher requests for advice and support, including appearing in their classes to assist a teacher with technology-rich lessons if desired. We encourage all teachers to thoughtfully consider how technology could support teaching and learning in their classes. Often, innovation comes from surprising sources — not necessarily the most technically advanced individuals. We encourage all teachers to share their work with technology with their colleagues in both formal and informal settings. We encourage all teachers to actively seek professional development opportunities here and outside the school.

5. Describe your technology professional development plan for all employees.

The school offers three sources of funding for professional development: individual, department/division, and schoolwide. Individuals have an allotment of funds to spend where they prefer. Divisions and departments have funds to undertake professional development efforts for some or all of their members. Schoolwide initiatives such as All Kinds of Minds are also available. The school does not have a separate plan for technology professional development nor specific requirements for how much technology PD individuals should undertake.

6. Define the infrastructure (wiring, traffic capacities, switches, severs, wirless) changes you will need to make to support the five-year vision you described above.

We feel that we already have in place the baseline infrastructure to support this vision. We will continue to make incremental changes, such as introducing a wireless controller to enable better management of our wireless network, piloting small form-factor laptops such as the eeePC and 2Go to assess their potential for the classroom, and investigating social web site tools for our intranet and public-facing web sites.

7. What changes in human resources will you need to make to support that vision?

We are meeting our needs for the immediate future. We will continue to assess the workloads of our employees and request increases as appropriate.

Category: Curricular integration | Tags: , ,
Richard | May 22, 2008
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Harvard Law votes for “open access”


samirluther

Isn’t this more consistent with the pursuit of learning? Thanks, Stephen. danah will be pleased.

In a move that will disseminate faculty research and scholarship as broadly as possible, the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously voted last week to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS the first law school to commit to a mandatory open access policy.

Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit.

source: Harvard Law School

If more schools of higher education do this, then we may have some hope of bridging the research-practice divide. Practitioners do not have the funds or the time to subscribe to expensive academic journals and the proprietary databases required to search them. Most researchers spend precious little time alongside schoolteachers, and when they do, it’s primarily to collect information, not share wisdom. What if teachers could Google for research studies that inform their practice? What if teachers set a standard for themselves to ground their pedagogical strategies in research? Yum.

Category: Curricular integration | Tags: , ,
Richard | May 21, 2008
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Zoomerang Unhelpful

This year, we have made two survey systems available to our users, Zoomerang and an internally-developed tool. Yesterday, I got a call from a user who was experiencing page load wait times of up to two minutes. We weren’t experiencing similar issues with other web sites.

waiting

She called Zoomerang, who promptly blamed us for the issue. Not helpful! Unable to produce the survey using Zoomerang, the user turned to our internal tool and had the entire survey up within minutes.

survey

Although I have abused Zoomerang before, I will acknowledge that it is a perfectly fine survey tool. I am just surprised that a successful company would not provide better customer service. Whether or not the problem resided at their end was not really the issue. A “valued customer” with the “pro” membership was experiencing a problem isolated to their tool.

Today, Zoomerang is running normally. Go figure.

Category: Software/web | Tags: ,
Richard | May 19, 2008
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Build online community — graduation tickets?

Here’s a way to get more parents talking through the web site — create an online space to exchange graduation tickets, à la Craigslist! We linked parents to a single thread in a Drupal forum to create this space. There’s only one problem. Only one person so far has tickets available. Everyone else needs tickets!

graduation tickets

Category: Community | Tags: ,
Richard | May 19, 2008
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3D Cell Explorer gets a nod

Many thanks to SEGATech for their review of 3D Cell Explorer. They write:

If you’re teaching anything about cellular functions or know of students who are trying to gain a better understanding of the subject, speed on over to Richard’s site. The 3D Cell Explorer has instructional videos that explore topics such as:

* the cell membrane,
* mitochondrion,
* mitosis,
* meiosis and more.

This site provides a great means of demystifying the workings of living systems by helping students visualize what’s going on at the cellular level.

(source)

Also note that you can embed the movies on your own site, putting the power for teachers and students to make use of the videos in their own work.

SEGATech is a gem, recommending a steady stream of useful technology resources for education. One of the first blogs to land in my aggregator, they have stuck.

Category: Curricular integration | Tags: ,
Richard | May 19, 2008
4 comments

Community of practice

Borrowing ideas from Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Chris Lehmann, I would like to strengthen the connection between progressive education and instructional technology next year.

Lehmann deconstructs the Learning to Change video to propose several practical, potentially unpopular ideas: 1) fully adopting social web technologies in education implies committment to progressive educational principles; 2) doing this right requires a lot of effort.

Nussbaum-Beach proposes that educators may, through virtual professional communities, better understand how to teach students 21st century technology literacies.

In our school, teachers normally meet in face-to-face faculty meetings, departmental discussions, and informal conversations around campus. These provide limited opportunities to engage practitioners in thoughtful conversations about using technology to support teaching and learning. I have before experimented with a blog-like format for communicating new resources and ideas to my colleagues, but this became far too one-sided. Teachers rarely replied.

Teachers at our school are innovating uses of educational technologies in remarkable ways but mostly in isolation from each other and based on very different learning objectives. What if we were able to increase the extent to which innovators worked from shared principles and practices?

Could we attempt to create a virtual community of practice within our single school? We have several factors working in our favor. Most of our teachers already know each other. A virtual community could provide more frequent opportunities for discussion than faculty and department meetings. It would overcome obstacles of time and space keeping apart teachers from different divisions (e.g., lower and middle schools).

Challenges are also numerous: the competition for teachers’ free time is just as fierce as it is for face-to-face meetings. Email has so dominated in our school for the last decade that it is difficult to get teachers to hold meaningful discussion in another format. So many initiatives have a history of strong starts and then fizzle out.

One idea (from Nussbaum-Beach): to increase the potential success of this initiative, gain the agreement of a big enough core to actively participate in the online community from the start and take responsibility for its success. Others who show up will find an active discussion taking place, and the burden won’t fall on a tiny group of people (or perhaps just one) to keep the discussion going. Another idea: use occasional face-to-face opportunities to build synergy with the online discussions. A third: create one online space in which to conduct all discussions schoolwide, so that users will have multiple discussions in which to consider participating.

We had success this year building momentum around discussion of social network sites within our “technology advisory group,” a committee that meets monthly face-to-face. We produced two carefully thought-out emails that we sent out to the community, but these on their own did not generate actual discussion, though they did accomplish other objectives.

I field tested the idea of a virtual discussion group for instructional technologies with one teacher the other day and received an overwhelmingly positive response. This encourages me to keep trying with others.

To what extent will we discuss pedagogical theory? I don’t know. For one, many of our teachers already practice progressive education. Yet, it is so difficult to disengage many from the traditional emphasis on the technology itself.

Have you tried to generate online discussions among your teachers? Tell us about it.

Category: Social studies | Tags: ,
Richard | May 15, 2008
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Explaining Social Network Sites

Our committee on technology use wrote the following article to help explain social network sites to the teachers and staff in our community. What explanations have you found particular helpful/unhelpful at your school?

Understanding Social Network Sites
Catlin Gabel Technology Advisory Group

Last fall, the Technology Advisory Group (TAG) distributed a survey to solicit your advice about a vision for technology at Catlin Gabel. A number of you asked about social network sites: what are they, why are they popular, and what can we do about them? TAG devoted some time this year to study these questions. While we did not find simple answers, we did find a great variety of “expert” perspectives that helped us better frame the issue. We found several passages in these articles particularly helpful.

Social network sites (SNS) put people in contact with each other. You can maintain a personal profile, create links to “friends,” and share information with them. Online communities have existed since at least 1985, with the founding of The Well. Some of today’s leading social network sites include Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Ning. To better understand one, register a new account for yourself, and then search for “Catlin Gabel!”

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com
Global Education Collaborative: http://globaleducation.ning.com/
Independent School Educators Network: http://isenet.ning.com/

What value do social network sites have for our students? Are they simply time-wasters?

When it comes to socializing with friends, youth prefer in-person (unregulated) encounters. They turn to SNSs when they can’t get together with their friends en masse or when they can’t get together without surveilling adults. They are desperately craving an opportunity to connect with their friends; not surprisingly, their use of anything that enables socialization while at school is deeply desired. [1]

Bridging social capital reflects the benefits we receive from our “weak ties” — people we don’t know very well but who provide us with useful information and ideas. Undergraduates who used Facebook intensively had higher bridging social capital scores than those who didn’t, and our longitudinal data show that Facebook use preceded these social capital gains. [2]

How does classroom management change? The above quotes help explain students’ motivation for using Facebook during class, but they do not help guide us toward particular classroom management strategies.

What effects do social network technologies have on our students’ social interactions with others?

Weak ties (e.g., casual acquaintances, colleagues) may not be reliable for long-term support; their strength instead is in providing a wide range of perspectives, information, and opportunities. As society becomes increasingly dynamic, with access to information playing a growing role, having many diverse connections will be key. [3]

While all humans need to feel connected to each other or to some cause, there are also times when we simply want to disconnect, and disconnecting is becoming increasingly hard thanks to social networking technology. [4]

How concerned should we be about online cruelty and privacy?

For teens, who can be viciously competitive, networking sites that feature a list of one’s best friends and space for everyone to comment about you can be an unpleasant venue for social humiliation and bullying. These sites can make the emotional landmines of adolescence concrete and explicit. [5]

It’s a lot harder to accept that social media is mirroring and magnifying all of the good, bad, and ugly about today’s society, shoving it right back in our faces in the hopes that we might face the underlying problems. Technology does not create bullying; it simply makes it more visible and much harder for adults to ignore. [6]

Our students are growing up in an increasingly interconnected world, mediated by social web technologies. The better we understand this landscape, the better we will be able to adopt the pieces that best support teaching and learning, relate to our students’ social needs, and manage a changing classroom environment.

Resources Cited

1. boyd, danah. “The Economist Debate on Social ‘Networking’”. Zephoria January 15, 2008 http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2008/01/15/the_economist_d.html
2. Ellison, Nichole as quoted in Dubner, Stephen J. “Is MySpace Good for Society? A Freakonomics Quorum” New York Times February 15, 2008 http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/is-myspace-good-for-society-a-freakonomics-quorum/?hp
3. Donath, Judith, as quoted in ibid.
4. Chazin, Steve, as quoted in ibid.
5. Donath, Judith, as quoted in ibid
6. boyd, danah, as quoted in ibid.

Further Reading

boyd, danah, and Ellison, Nichole. Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship <http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html>

Lenhart, Amanda. Madden, Mary. Macgill, Alexandra Rankin. Smith, Aaron. Pew Internet Life Report: Teens and Social Media <http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/230/report_display.asp>

VanPetten, Vanessa. For Parents: Why do Teens Use Social Networking Sites? (video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6YT6sEDZiE

The Economist: Debate: Social Networking. http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?action=summary&debate_id=3

Category: Social studies | Tags: ,
Richard | May 14, 2008
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Theory/practice divide grows


Marc Shandro

Things are heating up in anticipation of the summer. Simultaneously, we are wrapping up the current year and starting work summer work. I have the following going on now.

Evaluations: It’s time to write annual staff reflections for the IT department. Each individual completes a self-evaluation, I write a performance review, and then we meet to discuss.

Laptop Survey: We should perform an annual review of our 1:1 student laptop program so that we adapt and improve it over time. Unfortunately, we have not taken a close look at the program since its inception in 2003. This year, we will resurrect three comprehensive surveys from 2003, for parents, teachers, and students. This should provide us with useful information to reflect back to the community in the fall.

Arrivals and departures: Unbelieveable. We have about 30 personnel changes to make, what with the annual arrivals, departures, leaves of absence, long-term substitutes, and internal transitions.

Communicate fall plans: Present at closing faculty meetings to share new plans for the fall.

System replacement: Collaborate with laptop and desktop replacement for users.

Summer training workshops: Finalize schedule, teaching assignments, and open signups.

Web application programming: I am updating the bookstore, admission inquiry, curriculum map, and signup/volunteer applications. I am also going to migrate and adapt my community service script to this school.

insideCatlin redesign: Our intranet has grown like crazy this year, now comprising dozens of courses, tools, links, media galleries, and hundreds of pages of content. It is proving impossible for newbies to find what they are seeking on the site. We plan to transform the home page to provide clear guides to the content that users seek.

Public-facing web site platform migration: We hope to move our public-facing web site to Drupal with the help of a development/consulting firm.

AppleScripts: Finish developing AppleScripts to speed up laptop cleanup and deployment.

Core switch refresh: Follow the progress of this major project and participate when needed.

(I’m sure I’ve left off something important!)

While I am impressed with the manner in which the “blogerati” continue to raise the conceptual level of the ed tech discussion, I fear that this also makes it increasingly irrelevant to the daily work of practitioners like us. Last night, I caught up with my aggregator. Today, I have put together this list of urgent projects and routine tasks. The contrast struck me. I am all for questioning assumptions and redesigning education, but let us not forget the incremental changes that practitioners can make today to improve their work.

Theorists continue to raise the bar for the changes that we should make. They are right, but we also need to answer how to facilitate such discussions within the busy structure of daily school life. Our school is stable, successful, and thoughtful. We are not a technology school. We would like to improve broad aspects of our school — student workload, weekly schedule, global education, experiential learning, service learning, and affordability, among others. It’s hard to find time to focus just on technology, so we squeeze it in where we can, like so many other initiatives. As such, we must make changes over the long term, making technologies available to innovators and helping them share their work with colleagues. We measure progress over a span of years.

I question the focus and timing of the K12 Online Conference this year. It takes place for ten consecutive weekdays. Who can leave school for ten days of professional development in October? Who can follow hours of video presentations while continuing to work at school? This conference is no longer designed for practitioners. Sure, it’s possible that I might view these videos later on, but then the online community has moved on to other pastures. The strands seem more abstract than last year — will practitioners find enough meat to inform their practice?

(rant complete)

Category: Strategic Planning | Tags:
Richard | May 6, 2008
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Senior Project Blogs

blog feed
Senior project blog entries

This week, 25 students begin their “senior projects,” volunteer internships around town in environmental, bike, journalism, and many other types of organizations. The senior projects coordinator asked me some weeks ago whether students should blog about their work. I replied, “of course!” First, I asked what the students used to do in past years and attempted to determine how well that would translate to blogging. Students had before completed weekly reflections and sent them to their advisors for comment. The coordinator wanted these reflections to be more visible within the school, so that other students could gain ideas for their work. Blogging seemed like an excellent fit.

I had been waiting for an opportunity like this. We run both Moodle and Drupal on our intranet, both within a “walled garden” — restricted to our students, employees, and parents through authentication. Moodle is for discrete groups within campus (classes, clubs, committees), whereas Drupal is for community-wide content. This clearly fit the description of “community-wide,” and Drupal automatically provides a blog to each user. It seemed ready to go.

I provided a how-to article to explain blogging to new users. I was pleased to include blog writing tips gleaned from a variety of sources.

  • Write a distinctive subject line.

  • Use a conversational tone.
  • Keep paragraphs short.
  • Vividly describe your experiences. Which of your experiences are most compelling?
  • Link to organizations or articles you reference.
  • Post images when you can. They really do say a thousands words.
  • Invite your readers to comment.
  • Determine a writing schedule and stick to it.

I found it a little tricky to explain to teachers how to directly find the blog of a specific student. Drupal’s default search looks for content, not users (does anyone know how to modify this default behavior to include user names?). Thinking that most people would miss the Users tab in the search results, I created a new menu item that links directly to user search. I didn’t want to use the node profile module, which would take on a lot of overhead and unwanted features just to make users searchable. At our school, students don’t need to modify their profiles much — they don’t rely on the intranet to describe themselves around school!

Nearly all teachers prefer to find out about new student blog posts by email notification. We use the subscriptions module to add “subscribe blog” and “subscribe post” links to each post. This also permits the author of each post to automatically receive email notifications of comments to their content. This is essential in this environment, in which blogging is new and people are unlikely to check the web site frequently to notice new blog posts and comments.

If blogging takes off here, RSS subscription may increase in popularity. Given that our entire site is login protected, we require the HTTP auth module to use HTTP instead of web authentication for specific URL paths. This allows RSS readers and “podcatchers” such as iTunes to subscribe to login-protected Drupal feeds.

I didn’t require students to tag their posts with particular keywords to separate them from other types of blog posts, mostly because no one else is really blogging at this time. I don’t really see an easy way to do this, as requiring people to select from a list of tags would seem too strict. Does Drupal have a group blogging feature other than Organic Groups? It would be great if blog posts off a specific link automatically gained a particular tag.

A half-dozen students have posted in the first day. One challenge is completion — the system does not have a strong disincentive for those who do not post regularly. After all, the students have volunteered to undertake a senior project in the first place. The writing itself has been pretty lively and interesting so far — one student even included an image! I will watch closely for the development of each student’s blogging voice and look for signs of impact from writing to the community in this fashion.

Reflective blogging occupies the middle space in the senior project, between proposal and final project. We may extend the online support for senior projects by collecting proposals and final projects online as well and linking all three content types together for others to review in the future.

Do let me know your lessons learned from similar student blogging or Drupal configuration experiences.

Category: Curricular integration | Tags: , , ,
Richard | May 5, 2008
6 comments

Document cameras not for everyone

ELMO

Should document cameras be ubiquitous in the classroom? A colleague pointed me to the following article, to which I penned this response.

I take away three significant uses of document cameras:

  • Magnification: in classes that work frequently with very small objects, a document camera may show more detail/be more convenient than simply passing the object around the class.

  • Sharing student work: in classes that frequently share student handwritten/drawn work, a document camera may increase the convenience of making the work of an individual student visible to the entire group.
  • Manual manipulation: you can project a piece of work as you draw on it.

Playing devil’s advocate, a document camera would provide little advantage in the following situations:

  • The class shares objects of larger size (can be easily seen or too large to fit under the camera).

  • Holding the object, not just seeing it, has high pedagogical value.
  • Students complete work to share with small groups, the teacher, parents, or themselves, not the entire class at once.
  • The teacher doesn’t spend much time teaching from the front of the class.
  • The teacher prioritizes aural or text-based instruction over visual.
  • The class is primarily organized around student-led projects.
  • The depth of the object is important (3D vs. 2D).
  • The classroom is physically organized around “activity centers.”

I guess I find document cameras a good fit for the teacher-directed or whole-group classroom, not for the project-based, small-group, or student-directed classroom. Your thoughts?

Category: Curricular integration | Tags: , ,
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