Archive for November 4, 2009

Richard | November 19, 2009
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Kids, do you know what an IP address does?

When it comes to student behavior on the Web, adolescents behave in a manner that suggests a lack of awareness that anyone could find out what they are doing online. I try to combat this with a simple lesson about IP addressing.

Kids, you are not anonymous on the Internet, because there’s this identifier called an IP address. On some networks, it positively identifies you (we assign IP reservations on our wireless network). On others, it provides a temporary identifier that can be used to track one’s network activity, the pattern of which may identify you. Our wireless network, web sites, and email system automatically track user activity in this way. I’m not even getting into browser cookies and corporate tracking of user click patterns.

When unsupervised, children may behave poorly, unaware that they could be held accountable for their actions. This is akin to the parents going away for the weekend and leaving the child at home, perhaps with the car keys! An awareness of system logs and IP addresses may encourage children to behave better. Alternately, it could encourage them to become more skilled at hiding their identity on the Internet. I like to think that behavior would improve for most students.

Can anyone point me toward an empirical study that would help me more deeply understand this psychological dynamic in children?

Category: Social studies | Tags: , , , ,
Richard | November 19, 2009
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Teen Sex Culture and Technology

Our middle school counselor researched this topic and wrote the following article for parents. I’m interested in learning what other schools are doing in this area.

http://www.catlin.edu/news/middle-school/teen-sex-culture-and-technology

Category: Social studies | Tags: , , , ,
Richard | November 16, 2009
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Annihilating Space?

Friday, a number of us attended a talk by Dr. Ellen Handler Spitz titled “Reflections On Space and Childhood.” Dr. Spitz presented a thorough investigation of how children use and explore space through play. She emphasized the importance of understanding and preserving child-centered spaces, even if they appear messy and disorganized to adults!

Dr. Spitz made only a passing, less than complimentary, reference to technology, but it resonated with me. She said that technology was “annihilating space.” This powerful turn of phrase suggests to me that individuals equipped with technology may overcome obstacles of distance and the limitations of some physical media. It also suggests that sitting at a computer workstation disconnects an individual from one’s immediate surroundings or at least renders them unimportant.

This characterization of technology contributes to a myth that is particularly difficult to dislodge in educational circles. Virtual technology spaces are not the opposite of the material world. This oversimplification is both inaccurate and does a disservice to serious consideration of the useful roles of technology in all disciplines, including art.

Painting and drawing are rarely considered virtual in nature, but the images produced with paint, graphite, and canvas are hardly concrete. They create a representation of an image that transcends the raw materials and taps into people’s imaginations. Though easier to manipulate, the activation of light-producing LCD pixels through computer commands is not the opposite of drawing but rather just another form of the creative process.

Music stands as another powerful example. Musicians have successfully blurred the boundaries between analog and digital instruments. Sounds waves of music create a mental representation much in the way that light waves create an image in the mind.

Dr. Spitz’s most compelling examples concerned the distribution of physical, play materials in a house or the painting of images on a wall. If children act as artists through play, they can certainly find rich playgrounds using technology.

Rather than destroying space, technology creates cyberspaces that children and adults alike may explore. Adopting a multifaceted view of technology is essential to furthering our understanding of the role of technology in the arts.

Category: Curricular integration | Tags: , , , , ,
Richard | November 16, 2009
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The Rummage effect

Last week, our famous rummage event took place. Check out the effect on our website. I don’t know how Google really knows who is a new visitor to the website, but that’s great if it’s true.

rummage graphs

Category: Communication | Tags: , , ,
Richard | November 12, 2009
2 comments

Does anyone read our emails?

Our school switched from paper to electronic newsletters some years ago in order to reduce paper consumption. Since that time, the question has lingered. “Does anyone read the newsletters?” As teachers struggle to keep up with a rapidly growing inbox during free periods, and parents sometimes appear unaware of information distributed to them, it’s easy to reach this conclusion.

Thankfully, we have found a way to collect some data to allay this concern. We installed the Drupal module Simplenews Statistics on our site, and now our main newsletters include an invisible image that sends a request back to the website each time the email is opened. Our kindergarten email newsletter, sent to 40 families, was opened 108 times within 24 hours! Although opening an email does not guarantee that a person reads it or digests its contents, it at least it suggests that email is effective at putting the news in front of our readers.

If you store email addresses for newsletter subscriptions in your website, this module will even tell you which individuals opened the newsletter, which didn’t, and whether they clicked on embedded links. We don’t seek that level of resolution of data, since just the total is a relief to see, and we subscribe a Mailman listserv address to each newsletter instead of individual addresses.

We learned another lesson from this investigation. Data can really help soothe anxiety over changes that involve technology. Looking at our website statistics helps in a similar way. Data won’t answer all of one’s questions, but it helps challenge some deeply held assumptions about the perceived ineffectiveness of some forms of electronic communication.

Your website or listserv platform may include a tracking feature like this.

Category: Communication | Tags: , , , ,
Richard | November 11, 2009
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Sharing Is Good

In my previous blog post, I shared a video produced by second grade teachers and students about the brain study project they just completed. I also posted a link to the article to Twitter. Two days later, I received a comment from the All Kinds Of Minds CEO congratulating us on the video! She shared it with her organization’s leadership staff and board, bringing our school a lot of attention and rekindling our relationship with All Kinds Of Minds. We circulated the notes around our school, giving the teachers who worked so hard to assemble the project deserved recognition and building more excitement for brain-based curriculum development.

Publicly sharing student work can lead to unexpected, positive consequences!

Category: Communication | Tags: , ,
Richard | November 8, 2009
One comment

All Kinds Of Minds in action

You may know the whole-brain teaching philosophy called All Kinds of Minds. A majority of our teachers attend professional development days to learn this brain-based approach to teaching students, one part of our approach to progressive education. Teachers learn to construct learning activities that work for different types of learners. Students learn to identify their own learning strengths and weaknesses and appreciate the unique set of qualities that each person possesses. Such an approach gives students responsibility for their own learning. In the following video, second grade students share what they have learned about their own skills and brains.

The video also serves as a fine example of teacher use of technology to share student learning with the school community. This second grade teacher collected media, produced this video, and presented it to parents without requesting any assistance from our IT department. Well done!

Category: Curricular integration | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Richard | November 4, 2009
4 comments

Amateur Video On Your School Website

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth a million. Motion picture and audio better simulate “being there” than a long article or photo gallery. Video may capture the subtle cues of emotional expression and the energy of the moment that help a viewer understand the intangible values of your organization. Now, it is possible to capture video with a small, portable device and transfer it to the web with just a few clicks.

Why isn’t online video more popular on independent school websites? One reason may be the apprehension of some about posting “home videos” on your school website or social network site. Given all the care that we put into our print publications, we may wish to hold videos to the same standard. That would be nice, but It takes many hours (and/or dollars) to create professional-quality video. Perhaps we should hold video to a different standard than written articles. Could a new standard for school website video include amateur content?

Authenticity

In the new web, content has trumped style. YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Twitter have demonstrated the greater value to users of authentic content over quality of presentation. YouTube is the fourth most popular site on the web. The President of the United States addresses the nation via YouTube. Cellphone reports of political unrest and natural disasters run on major network news broadcasts. At times like these, the value of amateur video is the authenticity of the content, not its production quality.

We may apply the same test to school events, even though they may not convey the same impact as mass demonstrations and natural disasters. Take the following video. I shot this at our annual homecoming event, a varsity soccer game attended by alumni and long-time faculty. It may well capture essential aspects of our school better than highly polished writing in a glossy magazine, especially if you studied with these teachers 20 years ago.

Choose to film school events that naturally capture the special qualities of your institution.

Edit as much as time allows

While you may not have the time or expertise to create professional-quality video, you can still produce video of reasonable quality. Depending on how you learn best, you may benefit from attending a beginner’s training for iMovie or Adobe Elements Premiere. Consider using a tripod to stabilize the picture and an external microphone to capture good audio. Develop a basic sense of composition, and timing. Learn to add just enough transition effects that your clips smoothly link together. Cut at least 90% of your original footage, keeping just the very best scenes.

Track your success

Following the progress of your new videos is essential to inform your own publishing choices and convince others that the experiment is working. Social media websites track the number of views of each of your content items. This allows you to track the number of video playbacks, one potential measure of success.

blip stats

If you use Google Analytics on your school website, check out the “time on page” measure. Larger values suggest that more viewers actually watched the video all the way through.

time on page

Determining perceived quality is more difficult. Comments may provide some clue. If hundreds of people view a video and only one person complains about video quality, then you’re probably on the right track.

comments

Start on your social media sites

You may not want to post your first video experiments to your public-facing websites. Facebook and YouTube are chock full of amateur video, so people will expect to see work of lower production quality there. The community pages on your school website may be another good place to start. Yet don’t stop there. Collect data on these first experiments in order to make an informed decision about whether to extend the experiment to the public-facing pages on your main school website.

On perfection

A founding faculty member at a well-regarded school recently retired. In his farewell remarks, he cautioned the community to resist perfectionism.

We are all under the illusion that we can and should be perfect all the time. If we don’t do “excellent” work everyday, then we don’t “measure up” to [our] standards. An awful lot of us impose these unrealistic expectations on our selves, and it’s not healthy. [...] Our school culture unduly puts pressures on us to look perfect in the eyes of everyone else. Stop!

Category: Communication | Tags: , , , ,