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Student Profile: Wanna Know How to Fix Schools? Ask a Student!

Diana Fingal — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Ask Michael DeMattia what he thinks of school, and he’ll tell you. He will also thank you. That’s because the 17-year-old from New Canaan, Connecticut, USA, thinks the student voice is too often missing from conversations about school reform and where education should be headed. And he’s grateful every time he gets a chance to give his opinion.

So what would he say if you asked him? Well, for starters, he’d say that blocking the internet "communicates a lack of trust" to students. He thinks schools should provide access without bans and filters. "Students aren’t that different from adults," he says. "They don’t want someone looking over their shoulders. They want to be trusted."

While many educators might scoff at the idea that students should be trusted with an unfiltered internet, Michael has managed to make some teachers rethink their positions. He’s spoken at a number of local, state, and regional conferences. In January, he presented to a group of teachers at EduCon in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. EduCon is a conference geared toward progressive-minded teachers that focuses on discussing the future of education.

"Even at EduCon, there were people who were not sold on technology," Michael says. "Even from the most open-minded teachers, there’s the fear that something will go wrong."

In his opinion, that’s a bad attitude. "You have to fill the pool up and patch the holes as you go," he says. "If you don’t fill the pool up, you won’t get to see what works and what doesn’t."

His provocative message stirs even skeptical educators, he says. "I definitely provide a different way of thinking," he admits. "In Philly, a lot of teachers said they were surprised that I, as a student, could provide that point of view. If anything, they came away from the presentation willing to take the point of view of the students."

How he came to be a spokesman for students at education and tech conferences is an interesting story in itself. At New Canaan High School, Michael is the director of mobile devices—not the kind of title usually bestowed upon a student. In this role, he is responsible for the acquisition, formatting, and maintenance of the school’s mobile technologies, such as iPads and iPods. He is also the student representative for new technology and approaches on school panels.

"Believe it or not, I don’t quite know how I got myself into this role," he says modestly.

But Michelle Luhtala, the school’s library department chair, does. She was the one who promoted Michael. Basically, Michael began sitting in the library circulation area to study and got to know Luhtala. It wasn’t long before she realized what a resource he was.

"I provided input on things and was making more and more decisions," Michael recalls.

Once he took over the mobile devices program, Luhtala realized she shouldn’t be keeping him all to herself. So she urged him to speak up to as many groups as possible.

"Michael really gets what this program means to his peers, " Luhtala says.

If Michael has one piece of advice for education leaders, it’s this: "You just have to be willing to listen to kids. Simply go up to kids and ask what they think. I promise that if you demonstrate that, students will take the ride with you!"

Diana Fingal is senior editor of L&L.

Video Games: Harmful or Helpful?

Gary Butcher and Kyle Dunbar — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Harmful

It may seem odd that I, an IT instructor, would argue against students’ use of video games. Many of my peers in the ed tech community believe that video games promote improvements in following instructions, problem solving, logical thinking, hand-eye coordination, fine-motor skills, and spatial thinking. But during the last decade, I have witnessed several changes in students that I think may be cause for concern, and I have heard the same worries from parents.

Educational technology and video games are often grouped together, but they have distinct differences. The evidence supporting technology’s positive influence on learning continues to grow. But the argument for including video games in that category starts to lose momentum when you realize that students are seldom willing to research topics on a computer simply because they want to learn something new. Whenever my students are on a computer for more than a few minutes, they are quick to try to save the queen, avoid crashing a car, or slay the dragon, but they resist any technologically enhanced learning activity that does not resemble a game. Video games give them a rush of excitement, and before long, plain old learning can’t compete. My conclusion is that the use of video games gives students unrealistic expectations that detract from their motivation to apply technology to other tasks.

When I watch students engaged in video games, they appear tense, as if they’re perched to literally slay a dragon. One could argue that, while using technology to explore new topics will keep students in the positive portion of the stress curve, action video games are actually causing distress. Perhaps these games are able to grab and hold students’ attention because they create spikes in adrenaline. Physiologically, how can this compete with simply exploring topics? That’s likely why, if I am not vigilant about keeping students on task, they throw all of their energy into seeking out action video games. After observing this again and again, day after day, I have come to the conclusion that this compulsion offsets any potential benefits attributed to video games.

What’s more, when I hear students talking about "gaming," they’re usually referring to video games with varying degrees of violence. In his 2003 article "Violent Video Games: Myths, Facts, and Unanswered Questions," Craig Anderson says that meta-analysis and "considerable progress in basic theoretical models of human aggression" demonstrate that the "facts become more understandable and convincing" that violent video games contribute to violent actions, and we have seen this borne out in the tragic cases of some school shootings. At the same time, it seems that empathy, camaraderie, and civil interpersonal relationships have all but become extinct.

It is a hard lesson for many kids that life doesn’t have a reset button. Our actions and words have real consequences, unlike what they learn in the gaming world. And, while educational technology offers many effective solutions and options for learning, when it comes to video games, the Oregon Trail is paved over and Carmen has left the building. Their brains are developing now, and there are no redos.

Helpful

Do you know what is really compelling about a great video game? It’s not the great graphics or the amazing sound effects or even the ability to do things you can’t do in real life. The really compelling feature of video games is their ability to give you a task to complete that is hard enough that you feel challenged but easy enough that you know you can do it. In addition, as you work toward that challenge, you get constant feedback about how you are doing. And I don’t mean the computer is shouting back at you "Alllriiight!!!" or "Way to go, dude!" but rather that at any moment, you can see your score, your time, your distance, and how you compare to others in the game.

What’s more, the challenge you are completing is epic. It is part of a larger story, often the ubiquitous hero’s journey. In this journey, the choices are yours to make. Your decisions will make a difference and contribute to events more important than your individual life.

Think about all that for a minute. What if going to school felt the same way? What if when students arrived at school, they knew they were about to be presented with a challenge that was difficult but achievable, a challenge that was significant to the world outside of the classroom walls, a challenge during which they would consistently learn if they were on the right track, a challenge where they were empowered to make their own decisions and choices? I think this would lead to students who would love coming to school, have high engagement in their learning, and be prepared for a future world of work and learning where they will need to solve difficult problems.

I have been lucky enough to work in classrooms where teachers are trying to make the connections between video games and content learning. Several classrooms in my school are using online multiplayer content-area games. When you walk into the classrooms playing these games, you can feel the excitement in the air. It is loud as students shout encouragement back and forth. It is busy as students ask for help with problems they are unsure of. It is focused as students work on content-area skills to conquer an online problem.

But that’s not all. As they play these video games, the students are building their knowledge and confidence in multiple content areas. Whether they are simulating the challenges of being president in iCivics (www.icivics.org), determining why the fish have left a national park in Quest Atlantis (www.atlantisremixed.org), working as a team to solve math problems to conquer a node in Dimension M (www.dimensionu.com), or trying to contribute to the American Revolution in Mission US (www.mission-us.org), the students are engaged, persistent, and better problem solvers as a result of their experience playing games in schools, according to their teachers.

We can do better than dismissing video games as violence-producing time-wasters. We need to stop thinking about video games as things that are sucking our students away from learning and instead find out what they are learning from playing them. And then we need to find more ways to make school more like video games—self-directed, relevant, challenging, engaging, and epic.

Gary Butcher is an information technology instructor at Falcon High School in Colorado, USA. He recently finished his doctoral dissertation on the use of software programs with autistic students.

Kyle Dunbar is a technology integration specialist in Alexandria, Virginia, USA. You can find her on Twitter @edtechdunny or read her blog, Learning with Meaning, at http://edtechdunny.blogspot.com.

Kindling a Passion for Literature

Gigi Whiteside — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

I have always loved the feel of a new book in my hand, the crackle of the spine when I open it for the first time, the smell of the freshly printed pages. When digital books and electronic readers first made an appearance, I scoffed. I felt it blasphemous to think that an impersonal electronic device could ever compete with a true artifact, a book. But today, as a veteran English teacher, I am going on record to say I have changed my mind.

I teach high school English in a team-taught setting as well as in a small-group resource class. Both scenarios are specifically designed to address the individual needs of exceptional learners. As a special education teacher, each year brings new students with new challenges. And last year brought my biggest challenge yet.

Engaging Nonreaders

I had the opportunity to teach a 15-year-old who was labeled a "nonreader." I’ll call this student Bella, after a literary character from her now favorite vampire trilogy. She arrived with a school-issued laptop and software that enabled her to listen as printed text was read aloud. Bella used her technology to read all three vampire novels during the school year. As I witnessed her download and listen to books on her laptop as she read along, I thought, if I could provide the same technology for all of my struggling readers, maybe they would show the same thirst for reading as Bella.

However, Bella was an exception. She was not self-conscious about using the laptop in all of her classes. Two of my other students qualified for computers and reading software but felt conspicuous when encouraged to use them. As I watched these two students refuse their technology, I felt compelled to find a better, less conspicuous, and even "cool" device that could enable them to access printed text.

I began researching various electronic readers, and I settled on the Kindle, a device that had text-to-speech capability. My next step was to find funding. I assembled my proposal, "Kindles for Kids," and submitted it to our PTA. I was thrilled to learn it was approved for a generous grant. I ordered the Kindles, downloaded a few e-books, and watched as the astonishing transformation of my students began.

Introducing the Kindles

On Monday, I presented the Kindles to the students. A casual observer would have thought it was a birthday celebration. The students were ecstatic about trying out the new reading devices. They couldn’t wait to download their first books. I was touched to be part of this excitement. Most of these students were reading below grade level. These were the same students who had little interest in selecting from the difficult books at the high school library, who wouldn’t consider walking across the street to find easier books from the middle school library, and who had no desire to get public library cards of their own. These were students who complained when informed we were beginning a new novel in class. Rather than the usual, "Do we have to read today?" my students began to ask, "Do we get to read today?"

Exploring the E-Readers

The days that followed impressed upon me the importance of evolving toward digital literacy. The first day we had the Kindles, I allowed the students to simply explore their e-readers. My students were quickly able to use the school’s wireless internet to download the books they wanted to read. Their exploration turned to mastery within a class period. I wanted their first e-book experience to be positive, so the first semester we practiced reading for enjoyment without the added pressure of a summative assessment. We went online and perused e-books of personal interest. Once they selected their books and obtained parental approval, we downloaded the books onto their Kindles.

In the beginning, I allowed students to read their new e-books only as a reward for completing their classwork. After the first week, they began to request class periods allocated for the sole purpose of reading on the Kindle. My exceptional learners had never "requested" a class period to read quietly before. I was overwhelmed with the high interest these devices brought to my students.

Initially, I did not allow my students to remove the Kindles from the classroom. When I had a student request one from in-school suspension, I caved. He finished his entire book while in detention. As we approached the semester break, another student begged me to take a Kindle home so he could finish his book. I caved again. This was likely the first time this student had ever wanted to finish a book. He returned the Kindle on Monday unscathed.

Enjoying the Results

One of the most memorable e-reader moments involved a student who frequently missed class due to discipline infractions and often threatened to drop out of school. One morning I was headed down the hallway, and I heard him yell out, "Hey, Ms. Whiteside, are we reading our Kindles today?" I assured him we were, and he continued, "I was lying awake in bed last night and thinking about what might happen next in my book. Then I thought of something that I was sort of confused about, and I called Bella to ask her, since she had already finished reading it. We talked about the book for a long time." His next comment went right to my core. He said, "You know, I have never looked forward to coming to school, especially staying through to the end of the day. But now, I get kind of excited about reading my book, and I want to be here!"

Even more impressive were the students’ passing rates on summative assessments designed to test students’ mastery of the state standards. The prior year, my small-group resource class had a collective passing rate of 20%, which was typical for students reading two years below grade level. This year, after seven months with the Kindles, my resource students earned a collective passing rate of 70% on their tests. In my 19 years of teaching exceptional learners, I have never encountered such dramatic results. I am confident the opportunity to use Kindles and the text-to-speech feature positively affected my students’ test performance.

Perhaps the best indicator of all is that I have received emails from parents informing me that their children are asking for Kindles as holiday gifts.

E-Readers Continue to Engage

One fear I had was that the novelty of the Kindles would eventually wear off. I began this year teaching the same group of students. I decided to use the Kindles as the delivery device for my course novels, in addition to the self-selected novels the students would read. Our first e-book was Lord of the Flies, and the students maintained their enthusiasm for using the electronic readers. They have already submitted book requests for me to download, including textbooks in electronic format. The students reported they preferred using Kindles because they were often intimidated by the number of pages or thickness of printed books.

The recent release of the Kindle Fire, which functions as an e-reader and tablet, offers even greater opportunity to engage students with the tools that inspire them. It costs a bit more—twice the price of a Kindle Touch—but offers color illustrations, apps, and the ability to search the web. With e-books, reading becomes fun and engaging. Despite cognitive limits in decoding words and comprehending print, they are able to "listen" to an electronic reader and develop literacy.

Gigi Whiteside, EdS, is an assistive technology specialist for Fulton County, Georgia, USA. She has also taught at Milton High School in Alpharetta, Georgia. She is a member of the Striving Reader Grant Committee, supporting targeted schools through digital literacy.

Bloggers Beat: Sure, You're Resilient, but Should You Have to Be?

Diana Fingal — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Resilience, persistence, patience, and sacrifice. These are the qualities of the great educators who are blazing a trail to the digital age. I think you know the type: the teacher who plans a great digital lesson only to find out the network is too slow to carry out the task. Or the librarian who wants to show students a useful website but realizes the site is blocked. Or the tech coordinator who reserves the computer lab for professional development and discovers six of 12 desktops have out-of-order signs on them. And yet, using workarounds and ingenuity, these educators pull off their lessons with aplomb. Perhaps you are one of them?

Bill Ferriter is one. And, quite frankly, he’s tired of it. In a post on the Education Week Teacher website, Ferriter suggests that it’s time educators demand access to working devices and strong internet connections. The post "Our Never-Ending Reliance on Digital Resilience" appeared on the Teaching Ahead: A Roundtable blog. In the post, he writes about his tireless efforts to persevere in the face of inadequate or clunky tech:

Roll into a computer lab with 12 broken machines? No sweat. I’d pair kids up and move on without missing a beat. Struggling with a slow internet connection? Fine. I’d stay all night to upload student content if I had to. Need a hand-held video camera to make digital storytelling possible? I’d buy six, and hide the receipts from my wife.

But despite his willingness to make it work, he wonders if all this enabling is making things worse in the long run.

If change is going to be systematic and sustainable—replicable without relying on superhuman patience and ridiculous acts of professional altruism—it’s high time that we start making investments in the kinds of tools and networks that our teachers and students have access to. To do otherwise is nothing short of hypocritical.

His post prompted this comment from mrmalley: As another digitally resilient teacher, I wholeheartedly agree. It’s time for the national and state leaders, above my level and pay grade, to acknowledge that this is important and to put their money where their mouths are.

Ferriter, who also authors the Tempered Radical blog, wasn’t the only blogger reeling recently over the state of the digital infrastructure in our schools. On the Learning Nation blog, Cale Birk, a principal in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, writes about similar frustrations:

As a tech evangelist who champions all of the advantages that technology can bring to our schools, there is still one thing about technology that drives me crazy. When technology does not work.

Birk goes on to describe the chaos that ensued at his school when the student information system froze as the ninth grade students were entering their course selections for the next term. But Birk takes a different tack than Ferriter. He urges the tech-savvy among us to consider how tech glitches and breakdowns affect those wary of technology in the first place:

I know that in the end, it will all work. We will call and find out the reason for the crashes, and we will get all of the information from the kids. But I only know this because I have had technology crash on me too many times to remember, and I have had people there to support me when I wanted to give up. Bearing that in mind, I think it is paramount that those of us who are more comfortable with technology in tech leadership positions recognize the potential fragility of new tech users and consistently provide support for them when tech goes bad.

Ferriter, Birk, and many of you resilient, persistent, patient ed tech enthusiasts in the trenches know this by now: Change doesn’t happen by sitting back and waiting for improvement. It happens when people speak up!

Diana Fingal is the senior editor for L&L. She has been writing for and editing periodicals for more than 20 years.

Bring Back the Boys

Alison Carr-Chellman — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Boy culture is out of sync with school culture. There are several reasons for this, including zero tolerance policies that are too often taken to extremes, the lack of male teachers, and the compression of the curriculum. What’s more, boy culture is not socially accepted, and boys quickly come to feel that they aren’t good at school.

The results are startling: In the most recent set of tests administered by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) across 65 countries, boys scored lower than girls in basic literacy skills in every country tested. In fact, while girls caught up to boys in math, they soared ahead of boys by 39 points in reading.

Do not misunderstand the point. I am not interested in blaming educators. Teachers really are doing all they can within the social expectations and the culture of schools. Nor am I interested in suggesting that all boys are one way, all girls are another, and they all must behave within rigid gender stereotypes. Rather, I’m suggesting that the vast majority of boys and girls do function in certain ways and are engulfed in cultures that, in the case of boys and many active kids, put them out of sync with school mores and expectations.

Boys are tuning out of learning at record rates, far outpacing girls. This is particularly true for literacy in the early grades, and this is where we should focus our attention. Great work has been done to re-engage girls in learning about math, science, and engineering. Educators and parents need to learn from that effective movement and help boys’ literacy grow and flourish throughout the early elementary years.

We can begin to look for ways to engage boys in their own learning to empower them rather than channeling their energy into the behaviors that schools might prefer.

There are many possible ways to do this. Nick Ferroni, a high school social studies teacher in New York City, uses pop culture references, such as The Simpsons and The Family Guy, in his teaching as a way to generate critical thinking among all of his learners. And the democratic schools movement allows boys and girls complete freedom to create their own curriculum.

Gaming, which appeals to many boys and girls alike, may be one of the best ways to teach boys. More than one school is using World of Warcraft as curricular material.

There are three ways that we can approach gaming in an effort to bring boys back to the learning experience with joy and excitement. First, we can create better educational games. Second, we can use existing high-motivation games in the classroom and focus on the sorts of things they can teach us. Finally, we can also allow kids to create their own games. It is easiest to consider these three interwoven possible approaches together as we look at the variety of games available to us.

Beyond E-Flashcards

I find most online educational games to be disappointing. Far too many are nothing more than glorified flashcards. Some kids do seem to do well with and enjoy IXL math, Starfall, or Ooka Island for early letter recognition and reading. So maybe the drudgery of rote learning is best relegated to a computer that never tires. However, if your students don’t find it much fun to do flashcards with their teachers and parents, how likely is it that they are going to enjoy them when there’s no caring person attached to the task?

When considering digital resources for the classroom, think about whether those resources merely mimic analog resources or offer something unique.

Here are some types of digital games—several that are designed for entertainment—that have educational applications.

Virtual worlds. Games such as Club Penguin may not seem to have high educational value but underneath can teach lessons on consumerism, hard work, and economics. Other virtual worlds, such as National Geographic’s Animal Jam and Jumpstart, use this compelling environment and a reward system to entice kids to play learning games and watch educational videos.

Don’t assume children will automatically be drawn to any virtual world, however. Many games on the market are just not that interesting for kids. The point is not to create an exhaustive list of educational games and virtual worlds. We need to consider how to build curriculum around them and to point teachers and parents toward a process of meeting kids where they are.

Civilization. This game, in which players design and create civilizations with all sorts of variables—such as religion, and race—help teach a great deal about history and systems thinking in an immersive way. But it does take a great deal of time to learn, which can be an obstacle to classroom adoption. With standards and accountability heavy on the minds of most teachers, the focus has to remain on narrow success to meet or beat the tests. It is unlikely that most teachers are willing to devote the time necessary for their learners to figure out the intricacies of how to play the really good immersive games.

Journey to the Wild Divine. In this interesting biofeedback game, sensors are placed on players’ fingers to monitor their breathing and heart rate as they move through a series of exercises to help focus, energize, and calm them. This one has a strong interface with good graphics. A guide helps you through the first few activities, and this scaffolding works very well.

Once players reach the end of the guided section, however, figuring out how to move forward with the game becomes more challenging. This can be frustrating for younger children in particular and can detract from whatever focus or calm they may have achieved. However, for boys who are struggling with focus, I think this one has some promise.

It costs around $400 for the complete set and less for individual segments of the game. A cheaper way to try the same thing would be the Lotus Focus on Wii Fit, where the user has to sit very still for about a minute and a half to keep the candle from blowing out. There are distractions while you’re trying to sit still, such as squeaky floors, footsteps, and the like. It has less sensitive biofeedback than Journey, but it’s a way to help a child focus for a few moments between activities or just prior to school. If Lotus Focus is useful, then Journey to the Wild Divine might also benefit that child. Studies are under way to determine if these games improve focus.

Generation Cures. This is another interesting "game" that is primarily aimed at social and civic responsibility. In this case, players come into a rich narrative story about a plague that is spreading across a mythical land. Players, who are early medical students, are sent to work in a lab when the medical school closes.

This game is linked to fund-raising efforts for a children’s hospital, and it is fun to play. This type of game could encourage teachers to persevere when it aligns well with content standards.

Froguts. This is a wonderfully animated and simple quest-driven science education program. While the kids I asked to use Froguts tended to feel that the content checks were too simple, they all enjoyed it and were able to tell me things that they learned about mass and physical characteristics. Froguts has several more modules than I was able to preview, with more on the way, and I was impressed by the guided learning nature of the game.

This game would be a great addition to any science classroom. One drawback is that the material is for slightly older learners than I think the cartoon interface suggests, and it may be difficult to hold students’ interest in the upper elementary grades.

Collapse of Rome (COR). This game was developed by a history teacher/computer programmer. It is a souped-up version of the board game Risk or a slightly more targeted and academically friendly version of Civilization. COR comes with instructions explaining how the game can teach history, an online study guide, and a quiz, along with two tools that are particularly useful for teachers: a map-making function and debriefing questions. I am very impressed with COR and think it could be used directly off the shelf at the high school level.

Fantasy Hip Hop. I also enjoyed a new fantasy hip-hop game developed by Jason Townes-French and Brent Vale. Players learn a great deal about business, team building, hip-hop music, and its industry via this role-playing fantasy game. I think this is a great idea, and it may have a serious future as an educational game.

Build Your Own

There are several good tools to help children build their own games at the elementary level. As an advocate for user design, I am excited about children learning design principles at an early age and putting those principles into action by building games that please themelves and their friends. Among the best tools out there are GameMaker, Scratch, and Alice. My colleagues at Pennsylvania State University recently published an article in Educational Technology Research and Development explaining how they used Scratch in a fifth grade classroom to construct an educational environmental game. Overall, the study found that learners were able to create games that were meaningful to them as designers and users in less than three weeks.

Game design programs are not as easy to use or as friendly to kids as already designed games, and they teach very different skills. So don’t assume that kids who like to play games will also necessarily like to design and create games. They may prefer game creation to memorizing their multiplication tables, but it may not hold a candle to playing Quest Atlantis.

Matt Paquin, an instructor of several game design/creation courses with middle and high schoolers, wrote to me after seeing a TED talk I gave and expressed his surprise and frustration about his attempts to work with kids to learn game design. "Playing a video game like Halo is an adrenaline rush," he said. "The colors and textures race across the screen, and the player feels a certain sense of empowerment. It’s an immersive experience. The actual process of making that game is far from it."

Game design won’t necessarily take the place of gaming for re-engaging boys, particularly young boys, in their education. But for some, it may represent another way to communicate early design basics.

Avoid Turning Off Boys

In the end, games are just one of many ways to interest boys in their education. Integrating games into a K–12 environment, particularly at the elementary levels, appears to be one way to send a strong message that is counter to the dominant culture in schools today—a welcoming message to most boys and active kids.

School boards should examine their policies to ensure that the culture of school is not chilly for young boys’ ways of being in the world. Likewise, school boards,
administrators, teachers, parents, and community leaders need to know that curriculum compression is not a panacea for academic success. Students will achieve high academic standards more effectively when boys as well as girls learn to love, not loathe, learning. We must work together to find ways that communicate our acceptance of boys in the curriculum and classroom if we hope to avoid the loss of entire generations of boys.

Resources

Alice: www.alice.org

Alison Carr-Chellman’s TED Talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=23Uuehgmd14

Civilization: www.civilization.com

Fall of Rome: www.atomicgamer.com/games/1302/fall-of-rome

Fantasy Hip Hop: www.fantasyhiphop.com

Froguts: http://dissect.froguts.com

GameMaker: www.yoyogames.com/make

Generation Cures: www.generationcures.org

IXL math: www.ixl.com

Journey to the Wild Divine: www.wilddivine.com

Jumpstart: www.jumpstart.com

National Geographic Animal Jam: www.animaljam.com

Ooka Island: http://ookaisland.com

Scratch: http://scratch.mit.edu

Starfall: www.starfall.com

World of Warcraft: http://us.battle.net/wow/en

Alison Carr-Chellman is the head of the Learning and Performance Systems Department at Pennsylvania State University’s College of Education. She has taught elementary school, worked in tutoring centers, designed instruction for fighter pilots, and taught design and qualitative research.

Multitasking: Boon or Bane?

Boon by Chris Stefanski and Bane by Dennis McElroy — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Boon
Though cliché, the old adage about the chicken and the egg is all too fitting for this discussion. Did our reliance on modern technology grow from a human desire to multitask? Or did our propensity to multitask develop and expand because we have so many tools to jump to and from?
On any given day, I could be writing a report for work, answering an email, getting a text, assisting a coworker via instant messaging, and cleaning up some web code, all while listening to music. As I type this, I have open two internet browsers with a multitude of tabs (work homepage, work email, Google Apps administration, personal email, a teacher webpage template I am creating, Google music, and my graduate studies Blackboard page), in addition to Microsoft Word and three Excel files. I cannot sit and work on a task uninterrupted until completion—not because I don’t want to, but because my environment and culture won’t allow it. While I would love to be able sit and work on one thing from start to finish, I can’t just ignore all my phone calls, emails, and other requests. We are all expected to be constantly accessible and connected, so we have no choice but to multitask. Because of the sheer amount of tools and content available to our students, they face a similar overload, now and in the future, and knowing how to multitask is a vitally important part of being able to handle it all.

To efficiently multitask, we need to be able to critically identify the most important task for that instant, taking into account both work and personal factors, and work on that task until something more important arises, even if that important something is switching to another task while your current task develops in your head. Crucial to multitasking is developing the analytic and critical thinking needed to be able to, in a split second, identify if you should continue working on that current task or switch to something new. The only way to gain these skills is through practice—something that teenagers are getting in spades. By developing the ability to quickly jump between tasks, students are honing the very skills they need to successfully navigate an inundation of information. It is easy for even a seasoned professional to get buried under work and data, so it’s important to build the skills to be able to filter it effectively.
Granted, a big problem is that many teens’ priorities are not the same as many adults. They are still learning how to easily switch between tasks to something that is more important, but sometimes talking to a friend is the most important task to them. As technological leaders and role models, it is up to us to help students identify and hone their critical-thinking skills so that they can effectively use their time and be successful later in life.

—A former K–8 technology instructor, Chris Stefanski is currently the associate director of technology for the Paterson Diocesan Schools in New Jersey, USA. He assists both principals and teachers in helping the schools meet their educational technology needs.

Bane
By Dennis McElroy

It may seem that multitasking is a natural part of daily human function. It’s true that, for instance, your eyes may be viewing this narrative while your ears hear what is happening around you. Your hands and fingers might be navigating this page as you read through the text. Your brain is able to discriminate what is important from the extraneous inputs your senses are receiving. It can instantly shift focus, delegating tasks to the background and back again. Even the process of writing this essay was an example of multitasking: my fingers typing, my brain thinking about what is to come, my ears filtering noises from other offices and students in the hallways. But is this really what most people mean when they refer to multitasking?
I believe that when most people think of multitasking today, they are thinking more about what technology is capable of doing. Since the late 1980s, computer operating systems have had the capability to run simultaneous processes. Since then, we’ve transferred this idea to our own brains, and now we have the same expectations for ourselves. Rather than prioritizing and focusing on a particular task while other minor tasks operate in the background, we now believe we should be able to keep multiple processes running equally and at the same time.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist Earl Miller was quoted in a 2008 National Public Radio article (www.npr.org/tablet/#story/?storyId=95256794) stating, “For the most part, humans can’t focus on more than one thing at a time,” unlike computers, which can run multiple processes with all of the needed “focus” on each one. He says that, instead, we “shift our focus from one thing to another with astonishing speed.”
The crux of Miller’s explanation is its emphasis on focus. While a computer can blindly process multiple tasks, it is incapable of being distracted. It isn’t listening to its environment. It can’t smell something cooking in the kitchen. It doesn’t see pictures on a television. Human beings, on the other hand, are constantly taking in and processing information. We are the consummate input device. We can’t shut off our senses. We are able to make determinations about what is important and what is extraneous noise, but that takes mental energy too. That’s why we get distracted and why we sometimes lack focus.
Educational psychology courses teach us that classical music, vanilla, and a view of the outdoors are all beneficical to learning. Yet if the music is too loud, the smell is too strong, or the sun is too bright, these inputs can quickly become distracters. If this is true, it’s no stretch to imagine the impact that incoming text messages, a yammering television, and an iPod blaring music may have on focus.
To do something well, we must be able to focus on that task and delegate other inputs to appropriate, lesser levels of awareness. The more complex the task, the more focus required. Driving a car is a great example. Extensive research shows the influence of drinking (which impairs focus), texting, and other distractions on one’s ability to drive. Just transfer that analogy to learning. There’s no way students can do it to their highest potential if their attention is elsewhere.

—Dennis McElroy is an associate professor of education and director of technology for the Graceland University Gleazer School of Education in Lamoni, Iowa, USA. He formerly worked as a high school science teacher, administrator, and technology consultant for the Iowa Department of Education.

Literacy iPad Apps for Teachers

Jennifer Shettel — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

APPS FOR ELEMENTARY GRADES

Build a Story $3.99

This app is easy for young children to use. It comes with a variety of default settings and ready-to-use characters and props. Students create the illustrations and type their stories, making this app ideal for reinforcing fictional story elements, such as character, setting, and plot. A main drawback is that editing the story is not easy, so I would suggest that students prewrite their stories using a storyboard and use this app as a publishing mechanism.

LAZ leveled reading libraries   Free +
(Paid libraries at each level cost $3–$6.) Teachers familiar with the Reading A–Z website (www.readinga-z.com) will appreciate this app, where they can find leveled books in e-reader format. I especially like this app because parents could also use it to find books that their beginning and early readers can read on their electronic devices.

Mad Libs   Free
My own two children (ages 9 and 13) have actually been known to play together without fighting when I allow them to use my iPad to play Mad Libs. They said, “This is way better than the regular [paper] kind because you don’t know what the story will be until the end!” I like it because it is fantastic for broadening their vocabulary. Can’t think of an adjective? No problem! Click on “hint” and an ongoing scroll of words they probably wouldn’t have thought of rolls across the screen with gems such as zany, ecstatic, and starving.

Sadun’s Whiteboard   $2.99
Since this app’s original development, its creators have added some cool features, such as different colors of markers, a typewriter tool, and a hidden message option. And what could be better than a whiteboard with markers that never run out of ink? Kids can write with their fingers or use the typing tool.

iBooks   Free +
(Full-color picture books run $3.99–$12.99; chapter books cost $3.99 to $12.99, depending on how recently the book was published.) This is Apple’s answer to e-books, and it rocks! The app comes with a complimentary copy of A. A. Milne’s classic, Winnie the Pooh and a library with lots of empty shelves that just beg to have more books added to them! Many other classic titles are free as well, such as Alice in Wonderland, The Ugly Duckling, and The Velveteen Rabbit. What makes this app stand out from other e-readers are the full-color pictures and page-turning features.

Frosty Welcome   Free
Letters that look like they are on a whiteboard move easily with your finger. Students can use them like magnetic letters to spell words, practice the alphabet, or sort letters into categories. This free app contains only lowercase letters, so that could be a drawback. This app contains an email feature so students can send home their “fridge messages.”

Puppet Pals HD   Free +
(Contains one free sample pack; other packs available for 99 cents each, or buy the director’s pack for $2.99.) The theater lover in me adores this app! Imagine your students’ theater presentations coming to life! Students select characters from different theme packs, choose a backdrop, and go to town recording and watching their shows. This app comes with the Wild West pack for you to play with, but I recommend purchasing the Director’s Pass for only $2.99, so you can have access to all the theme sets including Fairy Tales, Politicians, and Zombies, to name just a few.

USA Today   Free
Can’t afford to subscribe to the newspaper for your class-room? No problem! USA Today is a free app that looks just like the paper copy—full color, with plenty of news, maps, charts, and graphics. All the features teachers love about this newspaper are the same on the app. Students can read it like a traditional newspaper or jump to different sections by touching the screen.

Shake-n-Spell   Free
I love word games for building fluency and flexibility in spelling, phonics, and vocabulary. This is a fun game that reminds me of the board game Boggle. You even shake the mobile device to start the game! I also like how you can select a time of one, two, or three minutes—built-in differentiation for various levels of learners! This one is a big hit with my own children. Technically, this is an iPhone app, but it works just fine on the iPad.

Wild about Books!   $4.99
More and more interactive e-picture books are coming to the app market. I love this story because it’s about reading. There are many interactive places for kids to “play” in the story. The words light up when the reading is happening, and the voice sounds natural—not robotic at all. Turn off the sound so students can practice fluency by saying the words as they light up!

APPS FOR MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOL GRADES

Constitution and Declaration for iPad Free

Actually, these are two separate apps. Each is a no-frills app that allows students to read one of these historical documents on the iPad. In the Declaration app, students can view and read an image of the original parchment Declaration of Independence and find out more information about each of the signers. In the Constitution app, readers can search by article or amendment number, read the full text, and read notes relevant to each section. Keep in mind that both of these seminal texts are included in the new Common Core State Standards for English language arts. And you can have these primary-source documents literally at your fingertips!

Marvel Comics   Free +
(Paid issues are $2.) I am a big fan of using comics and graphic novels in the classroom. These texts appeal to striving readers and are popular choices for boys, although many girls like comics too. The full-color pages with high-quality graphics and easy-to-read text really make this app pop! While you can download a few comic books for free, you will need to sign up for a username and password to download other titles.

SAT Vocab Cards   Free
Paid SAT apps abound, but this one is free. It’s not as flashy as some of the others, but it offers a quick and easy way to build vocabulary without slogging through hundreds of workbook pages. There are two components: flash cards and quizzes. The app has nearly 1,000 flash cards, and it is possible to master the entire load. You can control the quiz feature to include all the cards or narrow it down by selecting options, such as “never quizzed” or “answered poorly.”

Poem Flow   Free
You get 20 poems for free and can pay to add more. A library of 100 poems costs 99 cents. This app features both contemporary and classic poets as well as the “poem of the day.” I love how the poems literally flow across the screen for a unique reading experience with this oft-neglected genre. Hook your iPad up to a projector or lay it on a document camera to have a poem flowing across the screen or interactive whiteboard as students enter the classroom.

Newspapers for iPad   $2.99
If you want a free newspaper for your classroom, I highly recommend USA Today. It is a high-quality, full-color app that looks just like the paper version (see Elementary Grades for details). If you want something more, I suggest Newspapers for iPad. For only $2.99, you can catch up on the news from all over the world! This awesome resource provides you with a quick and easy way to select a location and then click for the link to the newspaper’s website. You will need to be online for this app to work, but you can email articles or save them to the Instapaper feature to read later offline.

iTranslate   Free +
(The basic version of this great translation software is free; upgrade to a more deluxe version for about $4.) This is a very sophisticated app. You can translate written English into more than 50 other languages, or you can flip it and translate into English. Some languages (not all) come with a text-to-speech button as well, so you can hear how to say it and see how it’s written. This is a great app for English language learners and foreign language classes.

Free Books   Free
You get 23,469 free books and/or documents from the public domain. Many of these same titles are available through other e-readers (iBooks, Nook, Kindle), but I love how this app’s library comes already pre-organized into categories such as Banned Books, Classic Psychology, Epic Epics, and more. You need an internet connection to download the titles you want, but once you’ve done that, you can read the books even when offline.

Shakespeare   Free +
(Upgrade to Shakespeare Pro for $9.99.) This is a fantastic resource for any English teacher. The free version features the complete works of Shakespeare plus a searchable concordance. Want to find all references to poison ? No problem! Type it into the concordance, and every line in any play, poem, or sonnet with the word poison immediately appears. The “pro” version contains some added features, such as a glossary and a portrait gallery, but the free version is probably enough if your goal is to have multiple copies of each play.

Goodreads   Free
This is a social networking site for readers. Have your students rate books, get suggestions, and even form book groups online. It is a great way to use social networking, but with a literacy angle. Get the teachers in your school to start using Goodreads and form your own student/teacher groups. Students must be 13 to set up an account.

iFound Poetry   $1.99
This is one of my favorite “magnetic” poetry apps. The manipulative words and word parts look just like the real game, but this app comes with lots of options. You can change the words by choosing a different theme, and you can create your own words to use in the poem. You can change the background image and the fonts of the magnets. Best of all, students can share their poems through email, Facebook, and Twitter, or they can save them to a photo library. This app brings the idea of “found poetry” to life and would be a great addition to a unit on the genre of poetry.

—Jennifer Shettel is an assistant professor at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, USA, where she teaches courses in literacy education. She presents on how to use apps in literacy classrooms.

Unique Partnership Prepares Educational Leaders to Achieve NETS-A

Donna Schnupp — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

W hat do teacher evaluations, a high school orientation program, and digital portfolios highlighting NETS for Administrators have in common? These and dozens of other resources and initiatives were all developed in partnership with ISTE by graduate students in the online Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Graduate Certificate Program in School Administration and Supervision.
The ISTE and JHU partnership offers a 15-month online graduate program that challenges students to think like school leaders as they prepare for the School Leaders Licensure Assessment, an examination for an Administrator II credential. The program not only prepares aspiring educators for school leadership and administrative positions, but also helps current school leaders and administrators learn how to effectively use and achieve NETS•A.
Now in its sixth year, the program provides graduate students opportunities to immerse themselves in learning about, understanding, and mastering NETS•A and the Educational Leadership Constituency Council (ELCC) standards. This is the only resource and partnership to achieve ISTE’s mastery-level Seal of Alignment for NETS•A.
Throughout the year, students work on leadership activities and assignments in six courses, gaining practical, hands-on experience with NETS•A and ELCC standards. As a final requirement of the program, students create a digital portfolio that summarizes their accomplishments and includes artifacts they develop to illustrate how they demonstrate competency in each of the NETS•A. Several students from last year’s cohort developed short videos that show NETS•A in action (see Resources for two that Karen Bryer and Mike DiSalvo developed).
At ISTE’s annual conference and exposition, students present a poster session highlighting a NETS•A resource or initiative they developed. Often, these resources come out of a student’s work in the internship course or one of the other five core courses in the program.
For instance, in the Supervision and Professional Development course, students learn about the full clinical cycle of supervision. Students use a variety of observation formats for a series of teacher observations. Seeing an opportunity to move beyond paper observations, former student John Binnert explored how to use iPads and other handheld devices for observations. In his iEvaluation poster session, Binnert showcased how he set up Google and PDF forms to collect observation data. Coming out of the ISTE/JHU program, Binnert armed himself with several practical tools he and other school administrators could use for teacher evaluations.
Jenn Perino and Susie Ciccarelli from Peoria Notre Dame High School took a different approach to developing a practical resource for their school. Recognizing the lack of resources to assist new and current students about to enter high school, they created a time-managed, socially networked orientation resource to help students transition to their new learning environment.
The ISTE/JHU online program connects educators from across the globe to share, learn, inspire, and lead. Applications for the 2012–13 cohort are due April 1.

Resources
iEvaluation: http://ipadteacherevaluation.blogspot.com
JHU program: iste.org/jhu
Karen Bryer’s digital story: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OQplIZsTKA
Mike DiSalvo’s digital story: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnTILjmsYVc
Onboarding Transition Program: https://sites.google.com/a/pndhs.org/pnd-ijourney

Bringing the NETS to the Middle East and Beyond

Diana Fingal — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Mahmud Shihab was like a kid in a candy store in 2003 when he attended his first ISTE conference. He had just been named head of educational technology at International College in Beirut, Lebanon, and was sent to the Seattle conference to explore technology tools, software applications, professional development opportunities, and integration techniques to share with teachers at his school.
“It was an amazing experience,” he recalls. Not only did he bring great ideas back to the teachers at International College, he says, but over the years he has shared resources, ideas, professional development, and other information gleaned from ISTE with educators around the world.
Shihab is in his second year as an ISTE Ambassador, a program designed to connect international members to each other and to the resources in their country or region.
Shihab, who represents the Middle East, has been a perfect fit for the program, says Jessica Medaille, ISTE’s senior director for membership development. “He’s a highly respected ICT thought leader, conference presenter, and champion of the NETS, and he’s been longtime volunteer contributor for ISTE,” she says.
Shihab is grateful for the opportunity. “The ISTE Ambassador Program has helped me reach more educators in my local and international communities,” he says.
In addition to his home country of Lebanon, Shihab has attended—often as a presenter—education conferences in Greece, Thailand, Egypt, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Oman, France, Austria, and the United States. When it comes to his success at integrating technology—or advising others about it—Shihab says he has many tools, but only one is indispensible: the NETS.
“In my capacity as educational technology program administrator, educational technology lecturer, and teacher trainer, I have used ISTE’s NETS at the core of my workshops and presentations,” he says. “ISTE has always been at the heart of discussions relating to ed tech integration, planning, and professional development.”
When Shihab realized the NETS weren’t accessible to everyone he presented to because they were published only in English, he saw an opportunity. “I realized that we needed to translate the NETS•S into French and Arabic, and I was happy when ISTE encouraged me to do so,” he says.
The task of translating the NETS•S actually gave him a keener understanding of the standards. “It pushed me to go deeply into the meanings of every word in the standards and look up equivalents in professional references in the three languages,” he says.
Now all the teachers at International College use the translated NETS•S (iste.org/standards/global-reach.aspx), and Shihab hopes other French and Arabic speakers will find them useful as well.
Shihab has always been a technology buff. Even before his brother brought home the family’s first computer in 1991, he collected computer magazines and pictures of computers.
He began working as a computer teacher while finishing up his teaching diploma at American University of Beirut. Ever since his first day on the job, he’s been integrating technology, and he wouldn’t teach any other way, he says.
“Educators fail when students fail,” he says. “In the 21st century, technology is at the heart of education, and technology is dear in the hearts of today’s students. Therefore, we succeed as educators when we bridge the gap by using technology in ways that are meaningful to our students.”

—Diana Fingal is senior editor of L&L.

Rural Districts Bolster Choices with Online Learning

Don W. Brown — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Find out how four small rural school districts use online learning to offer enrichment courses to advanced students and give struggling students a way to retake courses to graduate.

All schools can benefit from giving students the option of online learning, but for many rural schools, online learning is a lifeline. In the past two years, Lane Education Service District in Oregon, USA, has developed online resources for 14 Lane County school districts, which vary in size from 170 students to as many as 17,000.
Many of the smaller districts, which offer fewer courses due to the size of their staffs and limited space on the schedule, turn to online learning to give students a richer selection of offerings. Some have found online credit recovery courses to be an excellent tool for helping students graduate on time. And most of our districts use online curricula to customize instruction for students.
Our goal is to remove barriers, develop free and low-cost shared services, and innovate using online tools.
The first phase of our collaboration with the districts was to purchase turnkey courses that provided everything—the learning management system, teachers, and courses. Now in our second phase, we are building courses ourselves and trying them out with local teachers. We also have online enrichment programs
for fifth and eighth grade gifted students.
During this project, we have found that each school district has a unique story based on its students, teachers, and community. What follows are examples of ways that four of our rural districts have not just implemented online learning, but tailored it to fit their needs.

Creswell School District: 1,300 Students

By the time we began working with Creswell, the district already had years of experience using online courses from a variety of vendors. The district developed a sound procedure for identifying students for online courses, and the staff had considerable expertise in mentoring them. They established a tiered approach to enrolling students in online courses, with gifted students getting top priority, followed by juniors and seniors who had at least a 3.5 grade point average (GPA) and wanted a course that was not available at their school.
Creswell was so ahead of the curve that we turned to Sue Bowers, the district’s instructional assistant in charge of monitoring online students, to help guide our initial vendor picks and early best practices in mentoring. She began using online courses in 2005 and last year attained a 100% completion rate. She attributes the success to the following district procedures:

•   Students may take only courses that are not offered by the school already.
•   Students pay 10% of the course cost.
•   Students work on their online course (usually just one at a time) during a dedicated period at school with a mentor.

If money is available, students with GPAs as low as 3.0 can take an online course, and in rare cases, sophomores may take them as well.
This year, the district began offering credit recovery. The credit recovery model is a bit different, in that students do not have to pay up front for the courses, and the courses must be required for graduation.
When students work on courses every day, at a set period, they get the support they need for success, said sophomore Rebecca Bowers:

Taking online classes is a really good way to explore who you want to be and what you want to know without having to worry about whether or not your school will have the resources.

Technical, scheduling, and progress-monitoring issues exist, but the most challenging part is helping students
stay on track. Sue Bowers said:

The scheduling piece is most difficult for the students. If the course does not generate a pacing chart, be sure to have them build one with due dates for assignments and tests. I review the pacing charts with every student individually each Friday. More students tend to fall behind than work ahead. Without consistent support, students may fall so far behind, they give up.
Lowell School District: 280 Students

Before we began working with the district, Lowell High School had used a less expensive online course product for credit recovery, with mixed results. That’s why, during the first year of the countywide effort, many students felt like the courses were more difficult. But the monitoring we provided, along with better interactivity in the courses, allowed students to be successful.
Using credit recovery, regular courses, and electives, Lowell has integrated online courses for all students.
Student Jaren Nichols sums up the advantage of online learning for him:

My school does not offer a Spanish II class, and I need another year of Spanish to get into a four-year university. Without these online courses, I wouldn’t be able
to get into college as easily.

Now in the second year of development, Lowell educators are establishing criteria for students who want to participate in the program. Students must have a teacher’s recommendation, and juniors and seniors get first priority for credit recovery courses, but younger students can also take them as space allows.
District Superintendent Aaron Brown looks forward to the day when staff teach online content themselves.
Several years ago, Lowell educators experimented with sharing Spanish courses via a statewide interactive videoconference (IVC) service. That program “didn’t take off,” Brown said, “probably due to the supervision issues associated with different schedules at different sites.” Unlike IVC, online courses offer more opportunities for students to work and interact with each other asynchronously. Brown said:

Getting more of our teachers using online resources will help us serve students at both ends of the spectrum—enrichment courses that allow capable students to move ahead and other components of online learning that help students who are in the alternative-education model.

In addition to full courses online, Lowell teachers use an online supplementary math program in the computer lab to differentiate curriculum. The math teacher, Liam Pilong, designs the courses, and students complete them at their own pace. Testing is proctored at school. Pilong has found this to be a good way to serve students who need a wider scope of resources than grade-level materials, and it’s less expensive than buying a full suite of supplementary materials.
Next, the staff at Lowell High School is thinking about using a commercial online mathematics curriculum that can be tailored for each student. Some of the teachers on the Lowell staff have embraced online learning and are developing course assets on their own. But building a full course is a long-term process, so teachers are beginning by hosting a collection of websites and reading resources. As they gain more expertise developing a blended model using the Moodle course management system, they discover they have many options for instruction that were not available before.

Pleasant Hill School District: 840 Students

Pleasant Hill School District was already using an online math curriculum before we began working with them. This year, the district is using online courses for students who have been exposed to content already but need to make up the credit and demonstrate more mastery. Online credit recovery courses have had mixed results at Pleasant Hill, and school officials cite “less motivation” as one reason why some students are not as successful.
Pleasant Hill’s credit recovery model involves students attending the online course every day for 50 minutes in a computer lab with a trained mentor.
In addition to credit recovery, some students take courses online for enrichment or because they want to take courses not offered by staff, such as German, Japanese, Mandarin, physics, or computer programming.
Mentor Inga Perham says, “Online courses allow us to provide courses we can’t offer due to a smaller staff, and it allows us to compete with nearby in-town schools.”
The biggest barriers in implementing online courses are communicating offerings and enrollment qualifications to students and finding room in the schedule. District administrators are working on contract language that allows students the flexibility they need but keeps them from laying off staff because of small class sizes. Staff can supervise students taking online courses and take on the role of the mentor, and the online class has its own highly qualified teacher doing the grading and answering content-specific questions.
Pleasant Hill still needs to develop clear procedures for students who are not completing work or who are earning low grades in an online course.

Crow-Applegate-Lorane District: 310 Students

Crow High has been using online courses since the school became part of our Online Options program in fall 2010 [see “Right on Course,” L&L, August 2011, pages 26–29]. In addition to providing courses that would not normally be available, such as world languages, Crow-Applegate-Lorane uses scaffolded courses with a variety of students, including those on individualized education plans (IEPs).
Sean Bradshaw, the primary online mentor for high school students at Crow, acknowledged that it’s easier the second time around. “Students understand how to navigate courses and work with mentors to pay special attention to pacing,” he explained.
Bradshaw has set a baseline expectation of completing 6% of the course each week, and he keeps a close eye on how students are progressing.
Online courses not only provide content knowledge, they also teach kids technology skills and prepare them for the future, Bradshaw said, adding, “We need to train these kids for their world.”
Establishing a collaborative structure to remove barriers was essential to getting the program started. We assumed the financial risks by setting up a dedicated fund to pay for course seats in AP, regular, and credit recovery courses. The number of seats was proportional to the total number of students each district had compared to all students in the county. This allowed districts to try different courses with various student populations without spending their own money.
After the first year, the ESD continues to pay for credit recovery courses, and the districts each have unique models for using the other courses. The ESD kept the credit recovery courses so we could continue to monitor progress, develop best practices, and obtain a bulk purchase discount.
Removing the financial barrier allowed students and staff to try things out and gave them time to develop policies and procedures. Now, at the beginning of the second year, principal Ron Osibov and staff have worked together to update the old “distance learning” language in the student and teacher handbooks. These are the criteria they consider before enrolling a student in an online class:

•   Is online the best setting for this student?
•   Will it affect the jobs of teachers in the district?
•   What is the cost for this student to take the course?

Online courses are broadening choices for students,
providing an effective alternative for students on IEPs,
and helping students graduate who certainly would not without the opportunity to make up a course online.

The Path Ahead

We are now developing local course resources, training teachers in Moodle, and offering our own courses. Using Collaborative Statistics, a college-level statistics textbook by Barbara Illowsky and Susan Dean, as a guide, we are developing our first full-year course. We chose Collaborative Statistics because Oregon students will soon be required to have three years of mathematics at the Algebra I level or higher, and most high schools have a difficult time providing options for students who don’t want to take calculus. We have branched the course from the textbook to use some of the project-based instructional strategies that have proven successful in alternative high school settings. Students can complete the traditional path or go the project-infused route. After piloting this year, we will share the course via Creative Commons.
One way for teachers to create content if they don’t have time to build an entire course is to create miniblocks of web resources. Using bookmarks saved over the past two years in Diigo, we will begin offering minicourse blocks in high-interest topics to encourage others to give blended learning a chance.

Don W. Brown, EdD, is an instructional technologist for Lane Education Service District in Eugene,
Oregon, USA. He consults with the University of Oregon’s Center for Advanced Technology in Education and the Oregon Department of Education. His research focuses on the implementation of virtual courses.

Learning Connections: iPad: The PE Teacher's Digital Age Clipboard

Ken Felker — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

I wrote an article last year about 10 iPad apps that I find useful in health and physical education classes (see "PE: Bring Your Sneakers, Rackets, and iPad," L&L, May 2011, pages 32–33). The options ranged from a BMI calculator to a pocket yoga app.

I’d like to add to that list a number of apps that make a PE teacher’s day easier, even if they aren’t directly re-lated to physical education activities or curricula. In fact, many of these apps would be useful to teachers of all subject areas.

Gradebook Pro. This virtual gradebook supports weighted and standard grading and student attendance. It also provides data backup and restore on Dropbox, and you can track multiple classes and terms. This app has all the basics as well as the bells and whistles any teacher could wish for.

My LessonPlan. This app offers instant access to all of your lesson plans. You can create, customize, save, email, and print lesson plans. You can even save them as a backup in iTunes.

Splashtop Whiteboard. This app turns your iPad into a mobile interactive whiteboard. Connect to a computer over Wi-Fi; control audio, video, and desktop applications; and annotate content directly from the iPad. Splashtop Whiteboard works with all major interactive whiteboards.

Grader. Since 1894, teachers across the United States have been using the Kurtz Brothers E-Z Grader to calculate percentages. Using that same concept, educators enter the number of questions on a test or assignment, and Grader generates a chart that displays grade percentages.

Weather Channel Max. This app provides forecasts and up-to-date radar screens, bringing joy to any physical education teacher who has had to plan both indoor and outdoor lesson plans for the same activity when there is a threat of rain.

Chronology Timer. This app provides up to 12 timers (countdown/count-up), making it perfect for conducting various fitness tests with large groups of students.

Calculator. This app helps the mathematically challenged, and the calendar reminds users of upcoming meetings and appointments.

iBooks. A more specialized function of the iPad is the ability to download e-books to the bookshelf app iBooks. Several other sources of EPUB (iPad format) books provide access to free books for download, such as Google Books, ePubBooks, FeedBooks, and Project Gutenberg. One other website to consider is http://calibre-ebook.com. This website provides a free open source tool for creating EPUB books from a variety of files, including HTML, LIT, PDF, and TXT, among others. Additionally, iBooks allows users to upload PDFs through iTunes and view them within iBooks.

LogMeIn. This app allows a user to access the desktop of a computer through an iPad. Although I don’t see the current iPad replacing a desktop computer for most teachers, its size, weight, internet access, battery life, and apps make it an extremely useful tool in today’s classroom and gymnasium.

Prezi Viewer. Go to http://prezi.com and create a presentation by placing images, videos, and other media on a virtual canvas and grouping content in frames. Then download the finished prezi to the iPad. You can drag to pan and pinch to zoom for an on-the-fly presentation.

Personally, I have used the iPad to take roll, track and calculate grades, show YouTube videos and movie clips, and play audiobook segments. In addition, it has enabled me to create presentations, time student activities, calculate BMI, conduct nutritional analysis, and support other health and physical education curricular areas. The most exciting part is that we’ve just begun to scratch the surface.

I’m excited to share and hear how other educators are integrating the iPad into their lessons. The phrase "limited only by your imagination" seems to apply to the potential for iPad use in health and physical education.

Resources

ePubBooks: www.epubbooks.com

FeedBooks: www.feedbooks.com

Google Books: http://books.google.com

Project Gutenberg: www.gutenberg.org

—Ken Felker is a professor of health and physical education at Edinboro University in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, USA. His research interests include mobile fitness data collection and
exergaming. He is the author of Integrating Technology into Physical Education & Health.

Feature: Teach Your Students to Fail Better

Christian Long — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Design thinking combines collaboration, systems thinking, and a balance of creative and analytical habits. And it might just help your students make the world a better place.

If you were able to create your own classroom for the future, with your choice of resources, furniture, tools, and technology, how would you design it so that your students would be most capable of adapting in an increasingly complex world as a learner, professional, and citizen? And how would you design it so that your students were likely to have the greatest impact on the world around them? I believe this is the driving educational question for all of us in the digital age, and it has been tugging at me with increasing intensity over the past few years as technology has begun to dominate the larger conversation about learning and teaching.

Fail Better

Last spring, I was invited to speak at TEDxOverlake, a learning-focused event held at the Overlake School outside of Seattle, Washington, USA. When the event’s curators asked me what part of education I wanted to speak about, I answered decidedly, "failure."

In fact, I didn’t want to speak about just the general concept of failure, but I wanted to celebrate the words of Samuel Beckett: "Fail, fail more. Fail better." And I wanted to do so with an eye toward empowering students to thrive.

At first glance, Beckett’s provocation appears to be counterintuitive. After all, our current system remains predicated on the belief that we should eradicate failure and guarantee that every student "succeed" at all costs. And yet, when we really look at what learning in the digital age is about—fostering multidisciplinary collaboration to solve increasingly complex problems with no clear answers—it seems impossible to imagine that an educational culture built on confirming "right answers" within predictable training scenarios offers our students a viable way forward.

Perhaps in the past when learning outcomes were more static, we needed students to be predictable. Tomorrow, however, we’ll need agility, divergent thinking patterns, and an ability to test ideas in messier ways.

In other words, we need digital age learners to be comfortable with failure. And we need learners who know how to fail better.

From Designing Curriculum to Design Thinking

As a former high school English teacher and longtime experiential education leader, I spent years searching for innovative ways to combine the best of traditional academics with the hands-on projects my students accomplished outside the classroom.

My students successfully ran international blogging projects mentored by professional jury members around the world, undertook an 8,000-mile creative writing/research road trip to discover the "real America," debated literary ideas via Skype with students around the world, created a pop-up black-box theater in the woods behind our school to bring Shakespeare to life, and spoke at national educational technology conferences.

Sometimes these projects were fueled by emerging technologies. Sometimes they were analog in nature. They all, however, had one thing in common: I was ultimately in charge of identifying the problem to be solved. And to be honest, I always struggled with that.

I didn’t struggle because teaching in such circumstances was hard. Quite the contrary. I was amazed by my kids’ passions and abilities, and I loved conjuring up new problems for them to solve. What I struggled with was the contradiction of being the "designer" of my students’ experiences on the one hand while wanting them to truly "own" their learning on the other.

While I spent years trying to perfect engaging project-based/problem-based learning experiences, I never quite made peace with the fact that:

I was always in charge of the problems they would solve.
The problems were not always anchored in the real world (even if they were useful in terms of
academic skill development and general engagement).
Deploying cutting-edge technology was often becoming the primary driver of the project itself.
All too often, I felt pressured to prevent students from truly risking failure (and thus learning) in
a meaningful way.

Most project-based/problem-based learning examples I ran into (or created myself) still treated school and the real world as distant allies, not as rigorous partners that had to work hand in hand.

It wasn’t until I discovered the concept of design thinking (DT) that I could finally see a new way to challenge our students to become agile thinkers and collaborators in an effort to solve meaningful problems anchored in authentic experience. Even better, DT demonstrated how my students could create their own learning from beginning to end.

Defining a Design-Thinking Mind

DT is about using design to improve the human experience. It combines the ideals of what we want for our students: collaboration, systems thinking, and the development of a balance of creative and analytical habits. It also fuels what our students want for themselves: making an impact on the real world in real time and having adults take their passions seriously.

The process essentially comes down to a continuously evolving feedback loop with four elements: empathy, ideation, prototyping, and testing.

Empathy. DT is a creative process grounded in practical experience. By learning to observe human behaviors and needs in the context of real life, DT participants discover human-
centered questions and problems worth trying to solve. Better yet, it does so within a remarkably empathetic process that puts the experience of human beings at the center of the equation. It is no longer about answer keys with static facts that seem separate from the day-to-day lives of learners.

Ideation. Once a DT participant is able to identify a real-world problem worth solving, the next step is to explore ways to respond. The goal is not to find a perfect solution at this point. Instead, DT participants seek novel perspectives with a bias toward innovation. DT values the creativity and insights of all participants, regardless of specific expertise or a need to be "right" at first blush. It encourages outside-the-box thinking, which leads to unexpected creative solutions. DT relies on a creative process based on "building up" ideas (rather than the typical analytical process that looks to "break down" ideas). Key to this is the belief that there is no place for value judgments early on. The DT process rewards "and, and" responses from participants, as opposed to the "yeah, but" reactions that are typical of traditional academic experiences.

Prototyping. Once participants identify a wide range of possible solutions, the next step is to rapidly mock up examples. To DT advocates, the idea is to help make an idea real, tangible, and accessible. Ultimately, DT has a natural bias toward action. The best way to approach this—as many designers will tell you—is to use a rapid prototyping process fueled by an attitude of "fail and fail fast," something ideally suited for learning in a complex and often messy 21st century world.

Testing. Creativity and open minds aside, DT deeply values testing all assumptions. Solutions need to work. And better yet, solutions need to work in the real world and have an observable positive impact on the human experience. Because problems are found in the real world, answers need to be agile enough to adapt over time. Such a pedagogical framework naturally provides learners with the thinking tools to respond to an unpredictable future while remaining focused on the human experience.

Prototype Design Camp

Given this understanding of DT, let’s go back to the original question: Imagine you were invited to create your own version of the classroom of the future. Where would you start?

This was precisely the question that members of the eTech Ohio conference planning team presented to Be Playful, a design firm I founded, a year ago in advance of their annual statewide conference.

For the eTech Ohio team, this was not a theoretical question. In essence, they wanted to design a classroom space placed physically in the middle of the conference that would creatively suggest the possibilities for learning and teaching at the front end of the 21st century.

Furthermore, this "classroom of the future" needed to integrate dynamic and cutting-edge technology. It needed to inspire large numbers of the estimated 6,000 conference attendees to come explore and collaborate. It also needed to compete for attention in an exhibit hall surrounded by student-built robots, Wii dance contests, and a range of innovative educational programs. More important, the solution needed to be unlike anything they had tried in the past.

As a passionate advocate for em-erging technology inspiring real-
time innovation in the classroom
and a designer working in the international school architecture field, this project offered precisely the type of challenge that brought together all
of my passions.

However, my first answer was a conditional "yes" that I wasn’t sure the eTech Ohio team would accept. While many previous ideas celebrated emerging technology (and the impact of architecture), our energy focused more on what students (and teachers) would be challenged to do in a digital age learning environment.

Our proposal essentially stated:

The classroom can’t just be a showcase for technology.
Students must be the center of the program.
Adults must serve as mentors, sherpas, and allies.
Students must solve real problems that they come up with.

To our pleasure, the eTech Ohio team said "yes." They were willing to support our idea of "seeing" students actively working, collaborating, solving problems, communicating, creating, and presenting.

To that end, DT made for the perfect partner as 45 high school students from 14 diverse schools in Ohio (as well as a school in Indiana and another in Georgia) trekked their way through the snow and ice to participate in the first-ever Prototype
Design Camp.

Their process took the following form:

Find a problem worth solving. Students spent three intense days (from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.) working in teams of six to seven that set out to find, explore, and solve a remarkable problem focused on the future of learning. Students—as researchers and ethnographers—interviewed conference attendees, global partners, and virtual participants (via several digital platforms) on Day 1, leading to a range of design problems they wanted to consider.

Explore a range of remarkable possibilities. Once students returned to the classroom, they filled the space with colorful Post-It Notes and sketches rich with multilayered questions and descriptive idea sparks until each team identified their preferred problem. Problems ranged from how to empower young people to become global journalists while still in school to how to stretch the boundaries of a physical classroom and how to redesign the underlying relationship between learners and teachers. Working face to face with a cadre of professional designers, educators, and technology experts from around Ohio and the United States, design teams spent a day and a half exploring ways to come up with solutions worth prototyping.

Ask big questions of innovative thought leaders. In addition to having access to mentors within the physical prototype classroom, students also worked virtually with a range of national and global experts via Skype and various social media channels. This included ed tech visionaries Stephen Heppel in England and Ewan McIntosh in Scotland, Ming-Li Chai from Microsoft’s corporate futures team, "Project Runway" finalist Althea Harper, TEDx curators, and others. Simultaneously, Prototype Design Camp students and mentors collaborated with educators around the world via Twitter, Facebook, live streaming of key conversations, and live blogging.

Rapidly prototype a physical concept. Student teams spent a full day trying to make their most inspired ideas come to life. In addition to an assortment of cutting-edge technologies, including 3D projectors, iPads, and an immersive menu of web 2.0 tools and social networks, the students had a range of art supplies, building materials, and props. We gave them permission to redesign the classroom as needed, from deploying an array of furniture to crafting just-in-time spaces. The attitude was "by any means necessary." Perfection was not expected. Prototypes only needed to be good enough to suggest possibilities and engage audiences.

Present to a live jury of professionals and the globe. At the end of the three days, Prototype Design Camp teams presented their solutions to more than a dozen jury members from different professional perspectives. They included the founder of a nationally recognized theater group, an architect who had designed libraries around the world, an architect rebuilding schools in Africa, a professional writer based at a modern art museum, a range of artists across various media, an engineer working in both mechanical and software realms, an internationally known librarian, a graphic designer, marketing specialists, and others. We asked judges to avoid "yeah, but" reactions. Instead, they were expected to invest in the students’ ideas and offer real-world applications of those ideas. The final presentation was broadcast to the entire 6,000-person eTech Ohio conference and to the world via various social media channels.

Realize that even three intense days is only scratching the surface. Despite a remarkably immersive experience where our Prototype students successfully used a DT mindset to develop exceptional solutions to authentic learning problems, the real success lay more in students and mentors committing to the process itself than in the answers they presented.

--Christian Long is an educator, designer, school planner, educational futurist, and advocate for innovative learning communities. He is vice president of Cannon Design and founded Be Playful, a collaborative global design agency, and Prototype Design Camp.

Student Profile: This High School Student Is Keeping It Real

Diana Fingal — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

It’s a familiar story. At 13, Philip Chrzanowski disliked school. It’s not that he struggled with his studies or that he clashed with his teachers. He was just plain bored.

"I was always a good student, but school just didn’t interest me," he says. "I would answer the questions, but not in depth, because I just didn’t care."

So when one of his teachers suggested that he attend high school at Nex+ Gen Academy (https://sites.google.com/a/aps.edu/nex-gen), a magnet school within his Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, district, he jumped at the chance. The academy is different than most public schools. Its focus is project-based learning with a strong technology component. All students get laptops and access to software that they use to make movies; learn programming; and study math, languages, and more. They work in teams, and the students decide how to handle their assignments.

So how does Philip like school now? "I’ve learned so much from this school in such a short period of time," he says. "Our school offers a way for you to come and challenge yourself. The creativity comes from us, and we make our own education."

Take the award-winning film that Philip, now 15, created last year with three teammates, Adelle Blauser, Deven Mettling, and Hannah Couse. The assignment was to make a film that would be a sequel to a popular children’s book that they could show students at a nearby elementary school. Philip’s team chose The Rainbow Fish, a story about a conceited fish with beautiful scales who loses all his friends, until he chooses to share his glimmering scales with others.

Philip’s team wanted to do something different. Instead of making a sequel to the book, they created a prequel. "We decided to take the story in an alternate route and make him an ugly fish and explain how he got his scales," he says.

Under Philip’s leadership, they wrote the script, created the artwork and animation, and narrated the video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSyVGG24SMg). Philip, who has experience in graphic design, worked on the colorful underwater backgrounds.

"We all worked together," Philip says of his team. "Without one person, it would have been difficult to pull off."

Julie Lopes, the teacher who assigned the video project, says Philip thrives on authentic, hands-on projects. "He loves how ‘real’ our projects are," she says. "He is quickly disengaged if he perceives work is simulated."

Lopes entered the video into the Digital Desert Youth Film Festival in Albuquerque, where it took third place last spring. After the film was complete, Lopes asked Philip if he and his team would discuss the project-based learning process with dignitaries from the New Mexico Department of Education, and he immediately agreed.

"Although this required a great deal of preparation and work above and beyond all his other responsibilities, he willingly gathered his group and developed a presentation," Lopes says. "He took a leadership role in scheduling meetings and work sessions with his team to get the job done. And he did this as a freshman!"

Philip’s passion is design and programming. He’s learning C++ mostly on his own, with some guidance from teachers. He wants to design video games one day.

"I was never good at art or writing, so this is my art. I know a lot about video games and programming," Philip says.

And he’s lucky to attend a school, he adds, that takes his passion seriously.

—Diana Fingal is senior editor of L&L.

ISTE Members: A Driving Passion for Innovation

Jessica Medaille — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

We set aside each February to celebrate you, our wonderful members, during Member Appreciation Month—four weeks packed with special free resources and opportunities to win valuable prizes (iste.org/memberappreciation). We applaud the commitment you make
to pursue your own professional development. It is your driving passion for innovation—despite the roadblocks and detours along the way—that is transforming learning and teaching and preparing students for their rapidly changing world.

The road to innovation can be lonely, with no maps or street signs to guide you. Educators are often isolated in their classrooms, unable to see around the next bend what others may be trying. Think of ISTE as your personal GPS that will show you the way just when you need inspiration and new ideas the most! We take this journey seriously, knowing you depend on us to connect you with the latest trends and thought leaders. Staff and volunteers are committed to developing the very best print and online resources and professional development opportunities.

But make no mistake. You are our best resource. The enthusiastic members who make up ISTE’s communities generously offer a wealth of knowledge and resources. The ongoing connections they foster support not only ISTE members like you, but also your students and colleagues who benefit from your new ideas and experiences. Some of our most active communities are the special interest groups (SIGs), which offer year-round book clubs and webinars; databases of resources; newsletters; and workshops, sessions, forums, and networking activities at ISTE’s annual conference. With 21 groups, you’re sure to find one or several that match your interests—and they are free to join!

Our members also work on ISTE-led projects to advance the field and advocate for change. Members support the development of ISTE’s NETS, digital age standards for students, teachers, and administrators. Others write for ISTE’s membership magazine, blog, and journals; review papers; judge awards; present at conferences; and serve on ISTE’s committees or board of directors. Thousands of ISTE members are contributing their time, expertise, and leadership year-round to a whole much greater than themselves. We encourage you to explore these communities, access great peer-generated resources, and see what
everyone’s talking about. It’s easy to
get started! Visit iste.org/volunteer
to find out how.

In January, ISTE launched a new volunteer program. This call for participation lists a wide range of volunteer engagement opportunities. If you have an area of expertise you’d like to share, wish to grow your leadership skills, or want to meet others with similar interests, please do jump in. Progress requires individuals step-ping forward to lead and contribute. We can’t do it without you!

Perhaps you’re only beginning to daydream about your trip to the annual conference this June in San Diego, but at ISTE we have been on the road since October. An amazing crew of 450 volunteer reviewers has culled through more than 2,200 conference proposals looking for great new ideas, best practices, success stories, and inspiration that will make up this year’s program. We hope to see you in San Diego, but for now, please come with us on a virtual road trip to explore your member benefits—accessible to you at work, home, and on the go!

Point/Counterpoint: Should Students Use Their Own Devices in the Classroom?

Jen LaMaster and Gary S. Stager — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Jen LaMaster: Yes

On a recent Friday, I was trying to activate 27 seniors into our AMDG.brebeuf.org Google Apps for Education domain. The laptop cart was short by five computers, and the access point had crashed, so the only wireless signal came from down the hall. In the past, this would have ended the activity right then and there. But this time, it wasn’t a problem. Many students simply pulled out their own smartphones and went to work. Those without phones teamed up with their neighbors. By the end of the period, all 27 students were working on their assignments collaboratively on personal devices. And they had done exactly what we educators always dream of: They assessed their learning needs and found the right tools to satisfy those needs without adult intervention.

Marc Prensky wrote about nouns and verbs in technology integration. He said it’s not what we use to complete the task (the noun) that matters, but how we construct the learning objective and present the mastery (the verbs). The devices (nouns) the students carry are often more powerful, personalized, and efficient at accomplishing what the teachers want them to demonstrate (verbs) than the computers that their schools own. Ideally, the students create their own verbs, constructing education in ways that are meaningful to them. And the limited resources of every school can be used instead to acquire the latest technologies for students who lack the means to provide their own. Isn’t this a much better use of resources than buying dozens of low-bid-winning, underpowered devices that students, teachers, and techs all agree are shaky, slow, and unable to meet anyone’s needs?

Allowing students to use their personal devices in the classroom is imperative in a world full of ever-changing technology. Our students are remarkably adept at discerning the right devices for their needs. Because of my school’s open bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, I see students using tablets, smartphones, laptops, and e-readers of all brands and models. Students sit in the cafeteria critically assessing each device for its use in school and personal life. Some students create flashcards on their phones for vocabulary review. Some use Poll Everywhere to gather data for math assignments. One group custom built the hardware and coded the open source software for a multitouch kiosk for our alumni directory.

Will students test the limits of acceptable use? Of course—they’re teenagers. But quite frankly, I would rather they test boundaries in the safety of school than out on the wild, unfiltered web. Are there times when students don’t know how to use a particular device? Not often, but it’s a wonderful opportunity when it does happen: Techs, students, and teachers all get to discover together how a new tool works to meet educational goals.

I can hear network administrators groaning at the prospect of supporting these devices on a school network (bandwidth, acceptable use policies, and multiplatform hardware support, oh my!). But if students have no problem using their devices at McDonald’s, why shouldn’t they use them in school? If we mean what we say—that children are our future—let’s start focusing on those verbs and release our noun control.

—Jen LaMaster is the director of faculty dev-elopment for Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. Follow her on Twitter @40ishoracle.

Gary S. Stager: No

In 1990, I began helping schools across the globe realize the transformational learning
potential of a laptop for every child. From the start, there was a recognition of the inevitability that every student would own a personal mobile computer in the near future, whether school provided it or not.

However, BYOD is bad policy that constrains student creativity, limits learning opportunities, and
leads to less support for public education in the future. It’s a reckless idea for the following reasons:BYOD enshrines inequity. The only way to guarantee equitable educational experiences is for each student to have access to the same materials and learning opportunities. BYOD leaves this to chance, allowing more affluent students to continue having an unfair advantage over their classmates. This is particularly problematic in a society with growing economic disparity.

BYOD creates false equivalencies between any objects that happen to use electricity. Repeat after me! Cell phones are not computers! They may both contain microprocessors and batteries, but as of today, their functionality is quite different.

We should not make important educational decisions based on price. A mentor told me that basing important educational decisions on price is immoral, ineffective, and imprudent. Doing the right thing is a matter of priorities and leadership, not price point.

BYOD narrows the learning process to information access and chat. Information access, note taking, and communication represent the tiniest fraction of what it means to learn. Looking up the answers to someone else’s questions online to type an essay or make a PowerPoint reinforces the status quo while failing to unlock the opportunities that computational thinking provides.

BYOD increases teacher anxiety. Schools have largely failed to inspire teachers to use computers in even pedestrian ways after three decades of trying. A cornucopia of devices in the classroom will only amplify their anxiety and reduce use.

BYOD diminishes the otherwise enormous potential of educational computing to the weakest device in the room. The computer is an intellectual laboratory and vehicle for self-expression that makes it possible for children to learn and do things in ways unthinkable just a few years ago. We impair such empowerment when we limit educational practice to the functionality of the least powerful device.

BYOD contributes to the growing narrative that education is not worthy of investment. We reap what we sow. If we placate those who slash budgets by making unreasonable compromises at the expense of children, we will find ever fewer resources down the road. We must not view education as some "every man for himself" enterprise that relies on children to find loose change behind the sofa cushions. Democracy and a high-quality educational system require adequate funding.

Check out the new Macbook Pro, iPhone, iPad, and high-def video camera carried by the tech coordinator who decided that students should be happy with whatever hand-me-down devices he can scrounge up. The message here is: "Let them eat cell phones!"

It takes chutzpah to ask a school to buy something for every student. You better make sure you ask for the right device. Kids need a computer capable of doing anything you imagine they should be able to do, with plenty of room for growth and childlike ingenuity.

—Gary S. Stager, PhD, is the director of the Constructing Modern Knowledge Institute
(http://constructingmodernknowledge.com).

Learning Connections: Sharing Made Easier with Creative Commons

Karen Fasimpaur — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Good citizenship is not just about things that participants in a society shouldn’t do, but also about what they should do. As members of a well-functioning community—whether physical or virtual—we are called upon to participate in governance, be courteous toward one another, and thoughtfully share certain community resources. In the physical world, our shared resources include land, air, and water. The digital parallels include bandwidth and data.
Beyond those things that we must share are commodities that we may opt to share, whether out of generosity or other motivations. One key difference in the digital world, though, is that we can still retain personal ownership of what we share by virtue of perfect digital copies. Sharing comes very naturally in the online world (some might argue that we share too much) through social networks, email, messaging, and photo and video sharing sites.
While many of us liberally post content to these sites, current copyright laws limit the extent of that sharing. Others cannot legally fully share, download, or use such materials in a presentation, for example, without permission from the creator.
There are some exceptions to this in terms of fair use, but the law is gray, especially if you plan to publish the work. Suffice it to say that fair use is not as broad as many think. Also, fair use applies almost exclusively in the United States, which poses challenges in the globally connected online world. Copyright restrictions stand in stark contrast to the technical ease with which these materials can be reused. Just think about the simplicity of copying and pasting and how often it is done without regard to copyright or digital citizenship.
For those who want to share their digital content more fully without requiring others to request permission, Creative Commons (CC) licenses preserve the ownership and copyright of the creator while saying to others, “It’s OK to use my stuff without asking my permission as long as you attribute it to me as the creator.” A variety of CC licenses extend different degrees of sharing rights (see “CC License Types” on the next page and www.creativecommons.org for a complete explanation).
Educators have a long history of sharing. We have always shared lesson plans, exchanged assignments, and traded teaching and learning strategies to enrich learning for all of our students. Now in the digital realm, we can extend this by applying a CC license to the educational materials we create that we are willing and able to share.
As educators, we are compelled not only to exhibit good digital citizenship ourselves, but also to help our students learn about digital citizenship, including the meaning of copyright, the associated legalities, and other licensing options, such as Creative Commons. Students tend to be engaged and inquisitive about topics such as these, in part because they view themselves as content creators and copyright owners.
We should help students under-stand the common good that can come from sharing. In the era of uber-collaboration, they will need these skills in the workplace. Andwe should all be mindful of the benefits of sharing under licenses such as CC and how much value we can give others without decreasing our own digital net worth. Sharing like this could not only revolutionize education but also could change the world.

Who Owns the Copyright?

When considering whether to open-license your work, the first step is to verify that you actually hold the copyright to that work.

Normally, when someone creates a work, the copyright resides with that creator. However, for some employees, contracts include “work for hire” clauses stipulating that the employer owns the work. For teachers, this is not always straightforward. Your contract with your school may stipulate that works,
such as lesson plans, produced on school time are “works for hire” and
belong to the school. Also unclear may be what constitutes “school time.”

Contracts often don’t specify whether the teacher or the school holds the copyright. In that case, it’s crucial to get clarification before assuming you
are the owner. If you don’t do this, legal entanglements may result.

In many cases, applying a Creative Commons or other open license can bring benefits for both the teacher and the school. Teachers retain the copyright to the work while granting rights for others, including those in the teacher’s home district
and around the world, to benefit from using and remixing the materials.

Bottom line, it’s vital to resolve these issues in writing before moving forward with any licensing.

Open Educational Resources

Here are just a few of the many open-licensed educational resources that are available:

CK–12 FlexBooks | www.ck12.org/flexbook. Open textbooks that can be flexibly configured
(high school)

Curriki | www.curriki.org. A repository of educational resources covering all subjects (K–12)

FreeReading | www.freereading.net. A research-based reading intervention program (elementary)

Khan Academy | www.khanacademy.org. More than 2,100 videos and 100 exercises in math and
other topics (also available in Curriki)

Kids Open Dictionary Builder | http://dictionary.k12opened.com. Accessible definitions and glossaries that teachers can import into lessons or online courses (K–12)

Open High School of Utah | www.ocw.openhighschool.org. Downloadable Moodle courses in a variety of subjects (high school)

PhET | http://phet.colorado.edu. Interactive math and science simulations (middle and high school)

P2PU | www.p2pu.org. Open, online, peer learning materials about almost anything, including professional development for teachers

Find the complete list of resources at www.livebinders.com/play/play/117659.

—Karen Fasimpaur works with schools to integrate mobile technology into the curriculum to enhance learning. She is also an evangelist for open education, an award-winning author, a blogger, and an aspiring carpenter.

Dr. Eval: Venting at the Virtual Water Cooler

ISTE R&E — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Greetings! I’m Dr. Eval, and this is the first installment of my new research evaluation advice column for L&L. As part of ISTE’s in-house Research and Evaluation (R&E) Department, I work on federal- and corporate-funded projects all the time, so I know what they’re looking for and how to design programs and evaluations that meet their requirements. And I’m here to answer your questions about the process.
Because readers haven’t had the chance to submit any questions yet, I went looking for some online. I found “An Open Letter to All Organizations in Need of a Program Evaluator” by Watson Scott Swail on the Washington, D.C., Education Policy Institute’s news site (http://tinyurl.com/3enaxzn). The American Evaluation Association’s discussion list (evaltalk@bama.ua.edu) picked up the letter, which elicited a flurry of contributions under the strand “Things Evaluators Hate to Hear.” Although I would classify these comments mostly as venting at the virtual water cooler, they provide a short list of important questions for educators and evaluators to consider together.

How much is an evaluation going to cost?
In general, it will cost what the funder says it should cost. Some agencies expect you to commit a certain percentage of funds to evaluation. If you are the funder (e.g., your district wants to commission a needs assessment directly) and you do not know what the work should cost, tell prospective evaluators that you need help with the scope of work and can negotiate the final assignment. Some evaluators will be reluctant to invest time in a project that they ultimately may not want to bid. However, those who do respond may end up being long-term research partners.

When do you bring in an evaluator?
Ideally, you work with an evaluator when you design a project. Scroll through grant announcements to see if the funders require evaluation. If so, try to bring someone in while planning your proposal. The evaluator can help ensure that the project is set up to collect the information it needs to tell its story. The planning process itself often results in a more focused and compelling proposal. Most evaluators don’t charge for their contributions to a proposal, because they expect to recover their investment with an evaluation contract if the proposal wins. Evaluators can join a project that’s already under way, but they may identify important studies that will be difficult to carry out if personnel are already committed to other activities.

What do you do with an unwelcome finding?
Consider it an opportunity for growth. No finding should be a total surprise. Evaluators should update a program whenever they feel that something—technology, professional development, assessments, whatever—is not working out. You can question the data and methods behind any evaluation report; evaluators should expect to back up their work. However, a negative evaluation may be entirely valid. Trying to get the evaluator to spin the findings is a nonstarter. The “lemonade-from-lemons” approach is to identify why you did not get the results you wanted. Strong evidence that an approach does not work could save educators millions of dollars. If you are at a point where you can modify your program, funding agencies usually appreciate responsive grantees. And if you are
at the final-report stage, you are now the expert in what not to do. You should be well positioned to propose an alternative for your next project.

Member Profile: Got a Student Who Hates School? Give Him an iPad!

Diana Fingal — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:00:00 GMT

W hen the going gets tough, the tough get technology. Or that’s what Ashley Talley does, anyway.
As a teacher of talented and gifted students and kids with special needs—including those with behavioral challenges—Talley realized early on that she had to engage her students if she wanted them to stay interested in school.
She grew up with technology, so it wasn’t much of a surprise that she began incorporating ed tech into her lessons as a young teacher. She knew her students would love it. She didn’t immediately realize, however, that technology would be the key to turning one particularly difficult kid into a lifelong learner.
The student in question had never been successful in a regular classroom, so he was placed in a class for students with behavioral issues.
“He hated school, hated work, hated adults, could be violent, and had an all-around negative attitude toward school,” she recalled. “But he had never been in a classroom quite like mine before.”
Talley’s classroom had iPads, desktops, laptops, webcams, microphones, Flip video cameras, a Wii game system, an interactive whiteboard, a student response system, and gobs of interactive websites and purchased software.
She started him out using an interactive whiteboard and let him try the student response system.
“The immediate results, continuous feedback, and his ability to participate in the lesson started to improve his engagement,” she said.
His attitude, along with his academic success, also began to improve. “Through the use of these tools, he became hooked on learning, developed a desire to come to school, and increased his academic achievement and his positive attitude toward adults,” she said. “He was doing so well that we moved him into a less restrictive setting. It was a huge accomplishment for this student, who had never experienced success quite like that before.”
Talley taught for four years at Eaton Elementary School in Lenoir City, Tennessee, USA, before she became an assistant principal at the same school in August.
As a teacher, Talley used tech tools with all her students. Her fourth graders used Skype to talk to peers from another school across the state. Her talented-and-gifted classes made podcasts of their debates and posted them online. And her behaviorally challenged students recorded themselves reading words, defining them, and creating sentences.
“The level of technology I used changed with each situation and each group of kids, but the goal of technology use remained the same: to enrich the classroom experience and enable students to reach and exceed grade-level expectations,” she said.
Her enthusiasm for and success with educational technology led her to be named a 2011 ISTE Emerging Leader, a distinction granted to young educators who are leaders in tech integration.
Although she is now an administrator, Talley remains an advocate for ed tech.
“Even though I am not in the classroom, my love and desire for using technology hasn’t changed,” she said. “I have the opportunity to share what I am learning with a large group of teachers, and I can share with numerous classrooms the ideas and approaches that I have seen work.”
In fact, she loves to talk about her favorite tools. Just don’t ask her to pick favorites.
“Wow, it’s really hard to decide,” she said. “I have so many tools in my toolbox. But if I have to pick a favorite, I would choose the iPad. The iPad is changing the way educators can differentiate and track student learning, track academics and behavior, reinforce skills, present information, teach new ideas, extend learning, and create and save documents for on-the-go use.”

—Diana Fingal is the senior editor of L&L.

Point/Counterpoint: Should We Let Students Opt Out of Face-to-Face Education?

Don W. Brown and Ralph Maltese — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Back in the 1800s, people had to get along with each other due to geographic isolation. If you were in the United States at that time, you were likely to live in a small town or community and be hours or days of travel away from the next city or town. Travel was expensive and time consuming. Social skills to “get along” with everyone were important then, but I would argue that they are far less important now, especially in schooling.
I believe that face time with teachers and students is unnecessary. Students do and always will have face-to-face (F2F) interactions with family, friends, and the general public. I know of rural schools today where students know everyone in town but have never traveled 50 miles from their homes. Having access to an online network can be even more important to their education and personal development than F2F interaction with those physically in front of them. Here are a few things to consider:
One person cannot know everything. Online resources give you access to the combined thinking of teachers and professionals in the field. You also have access to other viewpoints, which is important particularly for understanding social studies content. Consider a student growing up on the West Coast discussing the Civil War with another student in his or her school, versus discussing it with a student from South Carolina. That’s probably going to be a richer conversation.

Students often have personal interests that those around them don’t share. As a rocketry and space enthusiast, I can tell you that I have often had difficulty relating my excitement and learning to many of those around me, but thanks to my online social networks, this has become a big part of my personal and even my professional life. Personal interests tap into students’ passions. Let them explore them with other people who are passionate about the same subjects they are.

Socialization happens online as well. Because of the many choices available, if you are unkind, rude, or inappropriate, you will be isolated by people online just as you would in a F2F setting. In fact, some online venues (such as Second Life) have cultures that expect far more courtesy and kindness than any school I have been in. Students can benefit from immersion in online environments that encourage reflection about their own cultures. They may learn to suspend judgment until they gain more understanding about why or how others might have different opinions. This way of building empathy is very powerful, because it is directly based on personal experience.

If you consider the factual knowledge available online, the ability to customize online interactions based on interest and experience, and the fact that socialization happens online, a 100% online education should not raise any concerns about social skills. In fact, it broadens a student’s ability to understand different points of view, be empathetic, and become an expert at the digital age skills of communicating in speech, text, video, and images.

—Don W. Brown, EdD, is part of a team that develops virtual course services for 14 school districts in the Lane Education Service District in Eugene, Oregon, USA. He teaches online courses and volunteers as Oregon’s Solar System Educator for NASA/JPL.

I do not doubt that online learning has a value in the educational community. The availability of content to students who cannot attend school or who don’t have access to some courses in their conventional classrooms is a sound reason for online learning. But allowing them to opt out of F2F learning simply because they want to begs far more forensic questions, including: What do we mean by an “education”? If it is simply the dispensing of information from one centralized location, then computers can easily replace teachers. If we consider education to be the development of knowledge (not to be confused with information), however, then we have to consider what skills and knowledge we want our students to develop.
The future might include people who never work in F2F situations, in which case the skills of reading other people’s body language and facial expressions could well become evolutionary relics. If this is our future, then online learning for everyone is certainly a good option. But at this point in time, we humans learn to gather information and form opinions in conversations based not just on what others are saying, but on their nonverbal communication as well. Studies on adolescent thinking reveal that students have not yet developed the facility to read irony or sarcasm. Other studies conclude that most people can subconsciously detect when another person is lying by reading nonverbal clues. Even a virtual conference does not allow the development of the communication skills that students must develop if we expect them to collaborate with other people in work, marriage and family, and their communities.
Even in my own personal and professional life, I have learned that emails can sometimes get me in hot water. I have realized that if I want to express my opposition to someone’s opinion, I need to discuss it in person, as seeing a comment in print can be interpreted as condemnatory, while inflection and tone of voice can convey a totally different meaning.
Students have to learn how to work cooperatively, for both their personal and future professional lives. I discovered long ago that honors students are no more likely to have those collaborative skills at the ready than less academically successful students. In fact, in my experience, some of the best students often have the most difficulty with collaborating on project-based learning assignments. These students would struggle not only to listen but to articulate. Do we let them opt out of this because it is a challenge for them to work with others, or do we consider the development of those skills a necessary part of their education?
Of course, students who have a difficult time in traditional school, especially socially, will often argue for an online-only education. Given the realities of bullying, we may be tempted to make life easier for them. But if adolescents are still developing intellectually, emotionally, and socially, do we really want to burden them with such a big choice as opting out of school? It’s a time in their lives they will not get back.

—Ralph Maltese taught language arts for 38 years at Abington High School in Pennsylvania, USA. He was selected as Pennsylvania’s 2002 Teacher of the Year and has also been both a Classrooms for the Future coach and a coach mentor.

Feature: Teachers Beware! The Dark Side of Social Networking

Harry Ess Belch — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Think teachers can post what they want on their own time? Think again. Many have lost their jobs over social networking gaffes in recent years. Follow this ed tech specialist’s advice to stay both socially active and happily employed.

T wo years ago, I received my first email from a staff member alerting me to a teacher’s Facebook page. She was concerned that the teacher had posted photos of herself and other teachers with drinks at a local bar. At the time, I didn’t share her concern. I felt that teachers had every right to enjoy their own social lives after school, and it was nobody’s business what they did when they weren’t on school grounds. And I had no desire to become the Facebook police at my school. I told the reporting staff member that if she thought any students were in danger because of the postings, she should contact the administrators, with the implication that she should otherwise let it go.
I have since learned a lot about how school districts cope with teachers and online social network-ing sites. Here’s what I found out and what I recommend to teachers who want to have an online social life and hold on to their jobs.

The Perils of Posting

I knew that teacher discipline over social networking practices was becoming more common, but I had no idea just how common. Here are just a few of the cases that a quick internet search unearthed:

An unidentified elementary school teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, listed her hobbies as “drinking” and “teaching chitlins in the ghetto of Charlotte” on her Facebook page in 2009. She also posted photos of herself and others in sexually suggestive positions. She was suspended with pay because the school district determined that the comments affected her ability to interact with students and parents, stating, “Clearly, when there is poor professional judgment, it impacts the teacher’s ability to do their job.”
In 2009, Beaver Dam Middle School (Wisconsin, USA) teacher Betsy Ramsdale posted a photo on her Facebook page of herself pointing a gun at the camera. She was placed on administrative leave for what “appears to be poor judgment.” The community was split. One parent commented, “I don’t think it’s appropriate. I’m not sure why this would be on the computer at all,” while another parent offered, “I don’t see anything wrong with it. She’s on her time to do what she wants.”
In 2009, Sonya McNally was suspended from Humberston Comprehensive School in Grimsby, England, for posting a private message on her Facebook page that one class of students was just as “bad” as another class. This offended another teacher, who complained. McNally was suspended for “bringing the school into disrepute.”
Gloria Gadsden, a sociology professor at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania, USA, had a few bad days in January 2010 and decided to vent on her Facebook page. As a result, she received an indefinite suspension from the university. Gadsden wrote, “Does anyone know where to find a very discreet hitman? Yes, it’s been that kind of day....” On a different day, she offered that she “had a good day today, DIDN’T want to kill even one student :-). Now Friday was a different story.” This ordeal led Gadsden to comment, “I honestly have to say that people have too much faith in the internet. I think the internet can be as dangerous as it is wonderful.” Gadsden was eventually reinstated.
Last year in Pennsylvania, Brownsville High School Spanish teacher Ginger D’Amico hosted a bachelorette party with other teachers that included a male stripper. One of the attendees posted a picture of the event on her own Facebook page. Unfortunately for D’Amico, she was the only teacher identifiable in the photo. It was brought to the attention of her administrator, and she was suspended for 30 days, which was eventually reduced to 19 days. Other teachers in attendance received letters of reprimand. After the American Civil Liberties Union became involved, D’Amico was able to reach an out-of-court settlement with the school district.

What the Law Says

I decided it was time to find out what protections—if any—the law offered teachers for their freedom of online expression. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, neither students nor teachers “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” That means that, for the most part, teachers and students maintain their constitutional protections at school. They also have some protection outside of school when speaking as private citizens on matters of public concern. But I soon discovered that the privilege of teaching also comes with unique speech and privacy restrictions.
In the United States, every state has rules that govern teacher behavior outside the “schoolhouse gate,” but the legal protection offered to teachers often fails when the teacher decides to make his or her private life public through online social networking sites. The four key factors that determine how much trouble, if any, a teacher may face
for this type of transgression focus on whether or not:

The teacher is on a continuing
contract
A nexus can be established between the teacher’s behavior and his or her effectiveness
The behavior causes or could cause a disruption to the educational process
The behavior is considered damaging to the school’s reputation

If a teacher is on a continuing contract, one of the final three other factors typically needs to be present to discipline a teacher. But if you don’t have a continuing contract, you don’t get much margin for error.
The courts have weighed in on this relatively new phenomenon as well. In 2008, teacher Jeffrey Spanierman was dismissed for postings on his MySpace page and filed suit against the school system (Spanierman v. Hughes, 576 F. Supp. 2d 292, Dist. Court, D. Connecticut 2008). Spanierman was a nontenured English teacher who decided to create a MySpace page to keep in touch with several of his students at Emmet O’Brien High School in Ansonia, Connecticut, USA. Many young teachers have a difficult time striking the balance between teacher and friend, and sometimes they blur the lines. The school board determined that Spanierman crossed the line when he engaged in “peer-like” exchanges with students. After viewing the evidence, the court concluded that “such conduct could very well disrupt the learning atmosphere of a school, which sufficiently outweighs the value of Plaintiff’s MySpace speech.” Spanierman’s dismissal was upheld.
Another case that intrigued me quite a bit is currently unresolved. In 2009, Ashley Payne was a nontenured second-year English teacher at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, USA. Like many young professionals, she decided to spend her summer vacation traveling in Europe. Upon returning to the United States, she posted 700 photos; none of them were salacious in any way, but 10 showed her in various drinking establishments. She also mentioned in a post that she was going to a local bar to play a popular game called “Crazy B**ch Bingo.” One morning early in the school year, Payne’s principal received an email from a presumed parent claiming that her child saw the photos and the slang term, which prompted the child to use the word. The email contained some of the photos and the post with the slang term. When Payne arrived at school that day, her principal confronted her,
and she subsequently decided to resign rather than face a suspension.
Further investigation revealed that Payne’s Facebook page was never accessible to her students or parents, and the email address that was used to report Payne was bogus. The speculation is that this young teacher was sabotaged by a disgruntled friend. Nonetheless, she lost her job and is currently fighting in court, claiming she was denied due process.

Time for Training
It became obvious to me that many teachers are under the impression that their private behavior on social networking sites has no bearing on their jobs. The incidents described in this article prove that assumption false. I wanted to make sure that the teachers in my school district knew the facts.
I decided to explore what other school systems are doing regarding teachers and online social networking sites. I discovered that school districts are often slow to respond to this predicament, but some have taken charge:

The Granite School District in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, offers guidelines that do not prohibit teachers from using social networking sites, but students are not allowed to access teachers’ personal sites. The guidelines also make it clear that there is no expectation of privacy when teachers are using district-owned equipment, on or off contract time, and forbid the use of personally identifiable student information on personal sites.
In its Guidelines for Employees Who Participate on Social Media Web Sites, Lee County Public Schools in Florida, USA, calls it inappropriate for teachers to communicate with students or friend them via personal social networking sites and warns teachers to be thoughtful when posting items and photographs, because they may be offensive to others.
In response to cases involving teacher sexual misconduct, the Commonwealth of Virginia, USA, drafted state guidelines that would prohibit teachers from texting students, interacting one on one with them through personal social networking sites, or accepting invitations from them to interact privately through texting or personal social networking sites. These guidelines created a significant uproar, and the final guidelines were much less restrictive.

When my colleague sent that email to me two years ago expressing concern about our co-worker’s postings on Facebook, I was naïve. After educating myself, I’ve become convinced that schools must offer some form of training to teachers before we lose too many. The last thing I’d want is for any of my staff members to get suspended or lose a job because they weren’t aware of the pitfalls of social networking sites.
With that goal in mind, I set out to make my staff aware of the issues that teachers around the globe face as a result of information and images they post, or have posted about them, on social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace.
A critical aspect of my training was to make my staff aware that once you put something on the internet, regardless of your privacy settings, you have just made your private life public. That said, the point was not to condemn social networking sites or scare anyone. In fact, although some participants expressed frustration with what they felt was a “Big Brother” presence, I made it clear to my staff that the cases I presented were all initiated by private citizens or journalists, not by the government or school administrators.
In addition to referring to the incidents and cases mentioned previously, the training included these main points:

Teachers who are not on a continuing contract are especially vulnerable.
Behavior outside of school, online or not, can be cause for suspension or dismissal if the behavior diminishes instructional effectiveness or creates a disruption at school.
Keeping your online social networking site private does not guarantee privacy.
Friending students can appear to create an inappropriate teacher student relationship.
The language you use in your social networking postings can be misinterpreted.
Photographs, even if they are innocent in intent, can also be misinterpreted.

After the awareness session, I had my staff complete an “I Used to Think/Now I Think” activity by writing what they used to think about using social networking sites on one side of an index card and, on the other side, what they now think as a result of the awareness training. Since questions still remained after my awareness training, I created a frequently-asked-questions document based on the index cards and made it available to my staff.
These quotes are just a few of the many that participants wrote on their index cards that demonstrate their new level of awareness:

“I used to think my social activities, as long as they were legal, were my own business and did not affect my job or reputation. Now I think I have to be more careful and aware of how others can misuse or take things out of context.”
“I used to think you had to be careful about what you put on social networking sites. I now believe you have to be extremely cautious of what you put because even the most private settings might not make you safe.”
“I used to think our private lives were our lives as long as it wasn’t publicized. Now I think that is not the case; even in private we have to be careful.”
"I used to think my social and professional lives were totally separate (as long as they don’t negatively impact each other). Now I think that they’re not. It seems I have to be extra cautious because things can be easily taken out of context. Sadly.”

Based on the feedback I received, I believe my staff has a heightened level of awareness that will help keep them socially active and happily employed. And I hope this article will stimulate other concerned educators around the globe to initiate awareness training in their parts of the world.

Resources
“Barrow Teacher Done In by Anonymous ‘Parent’ E-Mail about Her Facebook Page” by Maureen Downey, November 13, 2009, Atlanta Journal Constitution: http://tinyurl.com/42xmfdf
“Employee Uses Racial Slur in Facebook Profile: Can You Fire Her?” by Ann Doss Helms (November 12, 2008), Charlotte Observer: http://tinyurl.com/3hf4htz
“Faculty on Facebook: Privacy Concerns Raised by Suspension” by Jack Stripling (March 2, 2010), USA Today: http://tinyurl.com/ya6mteb
Granite School District Networking Policy: http://tinyurl.com/3zh5ox4
“Pennsylvania School District Settles Suit by Teacher Suspended over Facebook Photo of Her with Male Stripper” by Joe Mandak (August, 17, 2010), Legal Clips: http://
legalclips.nsba.org/?p=1650
Press release, Lee County Public Schools: http://tinyurl.com/3fc99l2
“Teacher Is Suspended for Jibe on Facebook about Her Class” (August 1, 2009), Mail Online: http://tinyurl.com/4xafcak
“Teacher Placed on Leave for Questionable Facebook Posting,” WKOW: www.wkow.com/global/story.asp?s=9781795
“Teacher Ready to Move beyond Suit” by
Merritt Melancon (August 29, 2010),
Online Athens: www.onlineathens.com/
stories/082910/new_701567572.shtml
Virginia Board of Education Agenda, January 1, 2011: http://tinyurl.com/3gd8raq
Westlaw: https://web2.westlaw.com

Harry Ess Belch is a school-based technology specialist at Union Mill Elementary School in Clifton, Virginia, USA. He is currently working toward his master’s degree in educational leadership at Virginia Tech.

Connected Classroom: Introducing Mechatronics in Schools

Glen Bull, Willy Kjellstrom & Joe Garofalo — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In 1971, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon proposed that school computers should not be limited to the confines of a computer monitor, but should also interact with and control objects in the physical world. Papert and his colleagues worked with advanced capabilities years before they became widely available. This provided a time machine that offered an advanced look
into the future. That future has now arrived.

Intro to Mechatronics

The word mechatronics combines mechanical engineering and electronics. The emergent field of mechatronics encompasses mechanical, electronic, and computer engineering. Digital fabrication is an efficient way to design and create rapid prototypes of mechanical systems. Electronics engineering provides a means of designing actuators to control movement of these systems, and computer engineering provides the logic for communication and control.

Use of microcontrollers as logic modules to control movement is bringing about sweeping changes in the field of mechanical engineering. In the past, mechanical engineers worked with cams, gears, levers, and mechanical actuators to produce desired motions and actions. Microcontrollers have largely replaced this step.

Microcontrollers are a common component in washing machines, cars, and any other device with embedded intelligence. They are essentially a computer on a chip that is small, programmable, and inexpensive. Today, they cost just a few dollars, and the price is likely to drop.

Activities for Young Students

Papert’s work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) led to adaptations of these systems for educational use that continue today. Mitch Resnick, the Papert Professor of Learning Research, directs the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT. This group conducted the research that led to development of the LEGO Mindstorms robotics systems. More recently, it developed a LEGO robotics kit for elementary students. The LEGO WeDo robotics kit contains working motors and sensors that children as young as 7 can assemble and control.

Scratch, a kid-friendly programming language that Resnick’s group at MIT developed, now includes control motors and sensors. Students can drag program blocks that control motors and sensors onto the Scratch programming workspace, fulfilling Papert’s vision. For example, students can use the motion sensor to construct an alligator that snaps its mouth shut when an object comes near it.

Scratch’s accessibility, combined with the LEGO WeDo’s functionality, creates opportunities to connect mechatronics with traditional curricular content. For example, students in Paula White’s fifth grade class at Crozet Elementary School in Crozet,Virginia, USA, constructed hand-cranked mechanisms using card stock. To learn about open and closed circuits, they customized their creations with LED lights that lit up when parts of the mechanism reached an apex. As an extension, students connected these automata to the LEGO WeDo motor and controlled it with Scratch. The additional computer-controlled elements allowed the students to redesign their card-stock models and solve problems that required precise measurement.

Microcontrollers

In the early 1970s, Papert and Solomon assumed that computers would be able to spin motors, switch lights, and read the state of light-sensitive cells, but they may not have guessed that this would be possible with tiny microcontrollers that cost just a few dollars. A microcontroller allows projects to stand on their own without a connection to a laptop computer.

The PicoCricket is a microcontroller developed at MIT that uses lights, motors, and sensors to make things spin, light up, and play music. The Playful Invention and Exploration website (www.pienetwork.org) is a useful source of PicoCricket project ideas for a variety of content areas. Examples include analyzing graphs of data gathered from light sensors attached to a wearable belt as well as kinetic sculptures that incorporate the principles of simple machines. The PicoBoard is a new product that combines a Pico-Cricket controller with built-in buttons and sensors on a pre-assembled circuit board.

Activities for Advanced Students

For more advanced students, the Arduino is an open-source microcontroller designed to allow non-technical users to explore the field of mechatronics. Artists and museums are adopting it to create interactive objects and environments. It is also useful for many educational projects.

Leah Buechley, director of the High-Low Tech group in the MIT Media Lab, uses a version of the Arduino called the Lilypad that students can sew into clothing to create interactive fashions.

Roger Wagner has developed a version of his widely used program HyperStudio that offers control of the Arduino with simple button-based actions. This provides a useful entry point for students before they begin using text-based programming languages with the Arduino.

Products and Features for Exploration of Mechatronics
Product	Controller	Integration	Sensors & Actuators	Grade
LEGO WeDo http://info.scratch. mit.edu/WeDo	Computer controls motors and sensors	No microcontroller	Prepackaged kit	Early elementary and above
PicoCricket www.picocricket.com	Stand-alone micro-controller controls motors and sensors	Microcontroller, preassembled on circuit board	Prepackaged kit	Upper elementary and above
Arduino www.arduino.cc	Stand-alone micro-controller controls motors and sensors	A breadboard for prototyping circuits	Components sold separately (prepackaged educational kits available)	Middle school and above

Download the PDF

Student Profile: Holly Baiotto

Diana Fingal — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

It was a scene that would turn many people off technology forever. Holly Baiotto was a freshman at Van Meter High School in Iowa, USA, and had recently been invited to join her school’s chapter of the Virtual Reality Education Pathfinders (VREP, www.vrep.org), a virtual reality club. Her principal at the time, John Carver, had acquired from the University of Maine a massive piece of technology called an Immersadesk R2, a semi-immersive virtual reality workstation. It arrived in a gigantic box inside a horse trailer on the last day of school in 2009, and Holly remembers it well:

When we opened it, everything was a complete mess. Things were everywhere, and there were no instructions. It is basically a big huge projector that has three colors, a mirror, and a screen. It is old 1990s technology that was actually high tech for its time. It has a built-in tracking system in the canopy, but it was missing the wand that allows it to track.

Holly and her dad, Ron Baiotto, spent their summer that year trying to track down someone who could help the club fix the monstrous, nearly obsolete machine. She contacted officials at Rockwell Collins, an aerospace company, and Mechdyne, which makes audio-visual and immersive 3D products, to get help repairing the Immersadesk.

“It took two weeks and many phone calls to a man in Canada before we were able to fix the Immersadesk,” she said.

For Holly and her virtual reality cohorts, the workload didn’t diminish when school started up again in August. “We spent half of the next school year figuring out how to operate our MacBooks with the software,” she said.

Not everyone was as motivated as Holly. “A lot of the students didn’t want to put the time into doing the projects and learning the software,” she said. “That left me as the student leader of the group.”

Her VREP chapter began to wither until, in her junior year, a new shop teacher took over and the club became an independent study class. He taught 3D software programs, such as AutoCAD, Google Sketchup, and Blender, to his junior high school students. Then 10 younger students joined 10 high school students to begin working on virtual reality projects of each student’s choosing.

While some students replicated 3D designs of existing buildings, Holly created a wind tunnel. Using Twitter, Holly connected with some students in Minnesota who wanted to build a device to see how wind flows around airplane wings.

“They drew up some rough sketches on a whiteboard and sent them to me,” she said. “I then basically designed their wind tunnel in Blender. I finished it in, like, three days and sent it back to them.”

After the students built the wind tunnel, Holly was invited to sit in on a Skype videoconference where she talked to district school board members about her role with the project. She recently started working on a bigger wind tunnel for the same group.

Holly, now 17 and a senior, has become an advocate for the program and even spoke to the National Federation of Women Legislators in Des Moines, Iowa, about VREP. But she credits her success to the adults in VREP who have steered her along the way.

“This is a program where all teachers and administrators step out of the way and let students go wherever they want to take it,” she said.

—Diana Fingal is senior editor of L&L.

Point/Counterpoint: Is the Digital Native a Myth?

Sylvia Martinez & Marc Prensky — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Yes

Digital native and digital immigrant are catchy phrases, no doubt. The slogans capture the ease with which young people accept technology that baffles many adults. But the observation that children appear more comfortable with digital devices offers little insight into how computing can actually transform the learning process. Catchy phrases should never be confused with guiding principles for education.

If the intent behind the cliché was to inspire adults to develop new fluencies and respect the competence of young people, the result has been the opposite. These terms imply a generational divide that has resulted in educators throwing in the towel.

Calling students digital natives is an excuse for not teaching them about technology. Kids may be less afraid of technology, but this doesn’t translate to intellectual curiosity or comprehending boundaries.

Young people still need teachers and parents to guide them to use these tools wisely and purposefully. Teachers can challenge students by creating experiences with substance and meaning. Parents can model values through words and actions. If adults walk away from our responsibility to teach young people about appropriate, thoughtful uses of technology, it’s our fault when silly or inappropriate uses fill that vacuum.

And we should go further than just helping young people use technology. They need to know why adults think it’s important, and they need to be partners in the process. By giving students a role in decision making about using technology in education, we empower them to think beyond their own enjoyment of the moment. By sharing the “whys” of educational technology with them, we gain powerful allies and advocates in the effort to improve education.

Being a digital immigrant is also a convenient excuse for teachers who don’t want to learn something new. It implies that adults will never “get” technology the way kids do because their brains are wired differently, something that has never been scientifically proven. There is no doubt that the hidden message of being labeled a digital immigrant is that, no matter how good you are with technology, you will always “speak with an accent” and your brain is out of whack with the modern world—so why even try? I have all the sympathy in the world for teachers who are overburdened and who have learned to ignore all the hype that never pans out. But it’s 2011—c’mon people, no more excuses!

Educating today’s students means teaching them how to use computers. No one is saying that the fundamentals aren’t still important—that critical thinking and reading and math aren’t required to succeed in today’s world. But technology makes those things accessible to students who might have been left behind before. Blogs give shy students a voice in a class discussion or allow a student who is not even physically in the classroom to participate. Wikis represent the technology of democracy and everything we try to teach students about collaboration and teamwork. Getting these tools up and running is important; challenging students to use them wisely even more so.

Labels only solidify boundaries and imply that teachers and students are adversaries. It’s simply the wrong model for a collaborative learning environment, where both teachers and students are fellow lifelong learners.

—Sylvia Martinez is president of Generation YES (http://genyes.org), a nonprofit that evangelizes for student involvement in education reform through technology integration and service learning.

It makes little sense to debate whether the digital native is a myth, because it exists only as a metaphor and a definition (meaning someone who was born in the digital age). To dismiss the term as merely a catchy phrase, however, is to deny the enormous power it has had to help huge numbers of people understand an important part of 21st century reality. For me, the metaphor has never been—as some have tried to make it—about capabilities or knowledge about all things digital. No matter who you are, you have to learn those things. The distinction is much more about culture. It is about younger people’s comfort with digital technology; their belief that it is easy, useful, and benign; and their view of it as a fun “partner” they can master without much effort, if they choose to (they don’t always).

Because they have grown up with digital technology, digital natives are more comfortable with it than the generations that did not. But this doesn’t mean they know everything about it or want to. A nonintuitive file system that dates back to the earliest days of computing may be of little interest to them.

In World War II, one of the ways the U.S. military tried to ferret out possible spies was to ask them cultural questions that anyone who grew up in the United States should know, but that foreigners, no matter how much they studied, probably would not. Digital natives have that same kind of “growing up with it” knowledge. It is not so much knowing facts about hardware or software as it is having had so many experiences at a formative age with digital devices and interfaces that their use seems to come naturally and intuitively. While many adults have a high level of digital comfort, there are almost always things most young people know and can do easily that older people can’t. For example, I know far more about technology than my 6-year-old son (I hope), but he often shows me tricks or shortcuts he has figured out that I have not.

Obviously, not every child has grown up in the same digital culture. But more and more of the developed world’s kids have game consoles (more than 90% of U.S. households with kids have them), cell phones, and other devices, or have friends who do. And these devices are spreading quickly to the rest of the world too. If we are smart, we will use this to our, and our students’, educational advantage.

One criticism leveled at the digital native/digital immigrant metaphor, however, has some validity. Some people use the categorization to justify continued division and their own inaction rather than the coming together and mutual learning I hoped it would support. Whenever an adult asserts, “I’m an immigrant, and I’ll never speak your language or understand you, so why should I even try?” or a young person says, “I’m a native, so you’ll never understand me,” that is a dangerous misuse of the metaphor that I firmly oppose. When the
description becomes a proscription, we are on the wrong path.

Of course, the very concept of digital natives and digital immigrants has a limited shelf life. The time will soon come, even in less-developed countries, when all will have been born in the digital age, and we will take digital technology as much for granted as we do electricity (although even that, sadly, is not yet completely universal). That is why it is important not to dwell too much on the digital native/digital immigrant distinction, but to instead think ahead to new ideas, such as “digital wisdom.” You can read my thoughts on this at http://tinyurl.com/yjodyfu.

—Marc Prensky is a speaker, writer, consultant, game designer, and author credited with coining the term digital native. This response is adapted from Chapter 2 of Deconstructing Digital Natives, which was published earlier this year. Read more at www.marcprensky.com.

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Learning Connections: No Robotics in School? 4-H Can Help

Bradley Barker & Richard Mahacek — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

There’s no shortage of opportunities for young people to engage with robotics. They can participate in competitions, after-school clubs, summer camps, and even a few classes or mini-classes. But robotics activities can be expensive, often requiring pricey kits as well as computers to program the robots. That’s why 4-H offers a way for students to learn about robotics and the connected science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) skills without a robot. We developed a program that allows students to learn about robotics in one of three ways:

•Participating in a virtual robotics environment

•Taking part in Junk Drawer Robotics activities using items found in
a typical classroom

•Using off-the-shelf robotic kits

Our program, 4-H Robotics: Engineering for Today and Tomorrow, allows students to explore technology and engineering concepts using robotics and associated systems as an integrated theme. And they can do it with or without buying a robot.

Our goal in creating the 4-H robotics program was to give students and teachers flexibility in costs, materials, and subject areas by developing three diverse learning tracks. The program was developed by teachers, extension educators, engineers, and university researchers. It uses various technologies and delivery strategies to increase student understanding of basic physical-science concepts related to robotic systems, introduce the use of technology tools for learning and communications, and provide career exploration opportunities for students.

The Virtual Robotics track.
We created this track using the Unity 3D game development tool, which allows students to build and test robots in a virtual robotics laboratory. The track contains 12 modules focused on physics, electricity and circuits, motors and gears, computer programming, sensors, and robot behavior. The learning experience includes videos, simulations, and animations. Students explore a virtual world representing an industrial environment and must employ robots to stop gas leaks and other disasters too dangerous, dirty, or dull for humans. While sensors on the virtual robots collect data about the environment, students maneuver their robots using keyboard controls and computer programming to deal with the industrial challenge.

The Junk Drawer Robotics track.
This track guides students through the design, construction, and testing of robots using everyday objects. Students build working robots that lift, move, or float to explore topics such as robotics design and subsystems; mobile robotics, including constructing remotely operated underwater vehicles; and robot control and behavior, including basic programming and sensors. This track comes with a leader’s guide, a student robotics notebook, and an optional supply kit of the basic components or everyday materials used to construct robots.

It focuses on three activity outcomes: learning (science), doing
(engineering), and making (technology). These focus areas are not independent of one another. The structure of the track allows each focus area to be addressed separately yet highlights and reinforces the interconnections.

The lesson modules start with an exploration science learning activity. These activities allow students to build conceptual understanding by exploring scientific processes and information. Engineering design activities promote concept development of what students discovered in their exploration.

The design activities build on the knowledge students gained in the exploration by allowing them to solve a problem and overcome constraints.

The design phase promotes problem identification, framing, and solving as students work within the given constraints to engineer a solution to the challenge.

In the third phase, students apply these concepts using tools to construct a physical model. They strengthen their reasoning skills as they make and test their designs, observe solutions, find sources of failure, and consider redesigns. This iterative process of engineering and technology allows for deeper exploration into the concepts.

The three types of modules spotlight science, engineering, and technology while encouraging a scaffolding of learning as students work to understand the elements of robotics systems.

For example, an important consideration in mobile robotics is the concept of friction. A properly designed robot will minimize friction to reduce energy consumption and extend the longevity of the robot’s mechanical parts.

To teach this concept to students, we begin by sliding a box of paper clips down an angled cardboard ramp containing a number of surfaces with varying degrees of resistance. In the final challenge, student teams design and build a “clipmobile,” a vehicle that can overcome friction and travel down the ramp and continue for a specified distance.

The challenge becomes even more interesting when students have a base kit of parts and $45 of pretend money that they use to purchase additional parts for their clipmobile. Student teams are evaluated based on outcomes related to their efforts, including: weight capacity of the vehicle, performance, complexity of parts used, efficiency in the number of parts used, and the cost effectiveness of their budget.

Teams are required to present their vehicle, an inventory sheet of parts, and budget sheets. Even with the best performance record, a team will not necessarily win the challenge if they buy and use a large number of parts. In the end, students learn that the engineering design process often includes real-life constraints that determine the engineering design process.

The Robotics Platforms track.
This track uses LEGO NXT or the VEX robot kits. However, our goal in the Robotics Platforms track was to focus on learning important technology and engineering concepts and to help students develop important workforce skills. As students move through each module, they record their progress and keep records in a robotics notebook.

Results from the Classroom

Engineers piloted and field-tested all three tracks of the curriculum to ensure the lessons worked as intended and met the science, technology, and mathematics national standards.

The first phase of the piloting process was a formative review of the lessons by faculty curriculum specialists at the University of Nebraska. We revised the lessons and piloted them with 640 students and 62 facilitators (teachers, extension educators, and adult volunteers) at various locations across the country. Finally, the program was field-tested with 35 students and 13 teachers during the summer of 2010 in a meeting involving seven school districts in Nebraska.

Results of the field tests showed positive attitudes toward technology and engineering as well as increased conceptual learning related to big ideas, such as variables, engineering design, and robotics. In particular, students made good progress in their understanding of robotics and engineering design.

For example, when asked what a robot is prior to the program, one student in the Junk Drawer Robotics track answered “not sure.” After the program, the same student answered, “A robot is a machine that can operate without a person.”

When asked to define the engineering design process, one student in the Virtual Robotics track answered, “I have no clue.” After the program, the same student answered, “The engineering design process is the process of designing something, revising the design, and testing it.”

Robotics, in many ways, is an ideal field to engage youth in STEM education. Science, engineering, and technology are all connected and undergirded by mathematics. Each domain informs the other: Scientists inquire about the natural world, developing new theories. Engineers use scientific knowledge to design technological devices to meet the needs of human society. The field of robotics is multidisciplinary, involving concepts in physics (friction, electricity, and magnetism), computer engineering (programming and binary numbering), mechanical engineering (gears and sensors), and unifying science concepts (form and function as well as science inquiry) and engineering concepts (engineering design and flowcharts).

Discussion and Recommendations

It may well be that some of the benefits of engaging youth in educational robotics do not need to involve expensive robotics kits and computers. Our experience is that well-structured, creative, and engaging alternative activities using common materials found in a classroom may be able to achieve at least some of the STEM benefits sought in the context of using the more expensive technologies.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Steven Worker, the 4-H science, engineering, and technology education coordinator for the University of California 4-H Youth Development Program, in Merced, California, USA, and Neal Grandgenett, the Haddix community chair of STEM education at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, USA, for their help with this article.

Resources

National 4-H Council: www.4-h.org

Unity 3D: http://unity3d.com

—Bradley Barker is the Nebraska, USA, 4-H extension science and technology specialist. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.

—Richard Mahacek is county director and 4-H youth development adviser with the University of California Cooperative Extension, Merced, California, USA.

About 4-H

Head, heart, hands, and health comprise the four H’s in 4-H, and they are the core values participants focus on while in the program. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National 4-H Council, and the 109 land-grant universities in the Cooperative Extension system provide leadership to the 4-H youth development network. 4-H engages kids ages 5–19 in a wide range of nonformal educational programming, including projects in the field of robotics. 4-H reaches more than 6 million youth annually in urban, suburban, and rural communities in every part of the country with out-of-school time science, engineering, technology, healthy living, and citizenship projects. Moreover, the 4-H learning environment emphasizes positive development and helps youth develop essential skills they will use throughout their lives, such as identifying interests, setting goals, communicating, leading, and giving back to their communities.

Engineering and technology play a vital role in the world economy, yet no U.S. engineering education standards exist to help guide program development, and scant research is available on existing levels of youth engineering proficiency. In 2008, the USDA 4-H National Headquarters responded to the lack of STEM literacy by establishing the 4-H Science, Engineering, and Technology Initiative. This initiative tasked a multistate collaborative with developing a 4-H robotics curriculum to engage the next generation of leaders in science, engineering, and technology.

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Feature: Reading Redefined for a Transmedia Universe

Annette Lamb — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Once upon a time, reading was as simple and straightforward as decoding words on a page. No more. Digital age technologies have made such an impact on the way we interact with content that the old definitions of reading and books no longer apply.

Times, as they say, are changing. The digital age is transforming nearly every aspect of our culture, from business to education to social life. Reading and books are no exception. Mobile devices, multimedia publishing, and social technologies are having a major impact on the reading experience both inside and outside the classroom. Instead of carrying backpacks full of 40-pound textbooks from class to class and trading paperbacks with their friends, today’s young people are downloading and exchanging digital novels and textbooks on their smartphones, e-book readers, and tablets. Besides taking a load off our students’ backs, this development has turned on its head the very idea of what it means to read a book.

Don’t believe it? Read The Pedlar Lady of Gushing Cross from Moving Tales on a tablet, or watch the book trailer on YouTube. This story contains text and images, like a traditional book, but it also has digital animation and audio. So is it a book?

Given these new realities, it’s time to expand the meaning of the phrase reading a book.

First, let’s tackle the definition of reading. What’s involved with the activity? Must it involve only text, or can it include graphics, sounds, motion, and other kinds of symbols in addition to or instead of the text? Does a book need to have a traditional start and finish? Or could the content emerge or even be created as the reader moves through the experience?

Here’s a revised definition that encompasses all these elements: Reading is the process of constructing meaning from symbols.

Now let’s redefine the term book. Does a book need to be made of paper, or can it be digital? Can it contain artifacts or other elements? Does it need to have pages? Must it be linear, or can it be branched or chaotic?

A new definition that allows for all of these options is: A book is a published collection of related pages or screens.

This expanded meaning not only reflects the changing landscape of reading, it also opens up new worlds of possibilities for students to engage with content inside and outside the classroom.

Digital Reading Environments

It’s taken 20 years for PK–12 interactive books to make a comeback (see “History of Digital Reading,” page 16). But this resurgence has brought with it an explosion of reading choices.

Let’s explore five electronic reading environments: e-books, interactive storybooks, reference databases, hypertext and interactive fiction, and transmedia storytelling.

E-books. From current favorites
such as The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins to traditional series such as the Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner, many publishers are selling e-book versions of their titles for the Kindle, Nook, and other e-book readers. Some companies also give users access to their e-books on other devices, including smartphones and laptop computers.

In a 2010 study of young readers published in Reading Teacher, Lotta Larson found that digital reading devices promote new literacy practices, such as digital note-taking, and provide readers control over how they engage with the text. While e-books feature linear content, just like a print book, many also contain additional tools, such as highlighters, dictionaries, virtual bookmarks, and note-taking tools. Search tools allow readers to easily locate words and passages. Some e-book readers give users control over screen resolution, text and background color, font size, and display orientation. In some cases, users can even insert or remove text, mark up pages, add comments, insert notes, attach files, and record audio to e-books.

Enhanced e-books for the iPad, iPhone, and other multimedia devices contain multimodal features—images, web links, and embedded media—within the linear text. These media elements have been particularly popular in nonfiction books such as The Kennedy Detail by Gerald Blaine. Increasingly, audio and video are integrated into books with a movie tie-in, such as I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore.

Books in James Patterson’s popular Maximum Ride series are available as Kindle e-books that students can read not only on Kindle e-readers, but on iPhone, Windows PC, Mac, Blackberry, iPad, Android, and Windows Phone 7. Supplemental materials are also available in various formats through Patterson’s website (see “Digital Reading Resources” on page 16 for this and other resources). One of the books, Fang, even has its own mobile app.

And not all apps are designed for use only on smartphones. For instance, readers of the Vampire Academy series can connect to a Facebook app from any computer or while reading the e-book on a tablet.

Interactive storybooks. These were introduced on CD-ROM back in the 1990s. Today, many are available as mobile apps for smartphones and tablets. New companies, such as mytales digital, are producing these multidimensional stories.

Interactive storybooks feature a narrator reading a linear story aloud. To help beginning readers, the text is often highlighted as the words are read, and the book may provide options for defining words or exploring elements on the screen. Many of these storybooks, such as One Snowy Day by Tammi Salzano, give children different ways to access the content of the story, including “read to me,” “read by myself,” and “play with me.”

In recent years, the introduction of mobile apps for iPhones and iPads, such as the app for Donald Crew’s Freight Train, has renewed students’ interest in interactive storybooks. And today, these types of extended reading experiences are reaching beyond the elementary grades to prekindgergarten. For instance, the TouchyBooks apps contain a number of child-friendly demo stories.

Many researchers, including Larson and Cathy Pearman, have noted that struggling readers benefit from the support that interactive books with high-quality navigation provide. However, in a 2001 study in the British Journal of Educational Technology, John Trushell, Clare Burrell, and Amanda Maitland found that, even though these books have arrows encouraging readers to move forward through the story, many children choose to go backward or in a nonlinear way, which adversely affects their recall of the story.

Engaging interactive experiences are also available for young adults. Classical Comics provides graphic novel adaptations of classic literature that incorporate interactive animation and audio features.

The options to hear words pronounced aloud, read definitions, explore glossaries, see labels on illustrations, and experience reading support are useful for all ages, but particularly in guided learning situations for children with special needs and English language learners.

Reference databases. Students no longer need to lug around heavy reference books to have information at their fingertips. Increasingly, they are using mobile apps, such as the iBirds Pro iPad app for bird watching or the Star Walk iPad app for exploring the night sky, to explore the natural world.

Reference databases provide nonlinear, organized access to records of information through search tools, indexes, or subjects. They also often incorporate tools for bookmarking and note-taking, as well as photos, maps, audio, and video elements. For instance, The Elements by Theodore Gray iPad app provides a visual exploration of the periodic table. Dorling Kindersley produces an Eyewitness Travel series exploring popular world destinations using clickable maps, scrolling photo galleries, and zooming images.

In her 2009 article “Digital Literacies” in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Larson points out that today’s readers expect to be immersed in multimodal resources that combine a variety of modes and media. Rather than simply reading about history, geography, or science, students want information they can see and hear.

Hypertexts and interactive fiction. Students can access these nonlinear narratives through various hotspots or links online. Over the past decade, many authors have chosen to publish their interactive fiction on the internet because of how easy it is to create nonlinear texts. For instance, 253 by Geoff Ryman is a novel published exclusively for the web about an accident in the London Underground. And remember the Choose Your Own Adventure series that was popular in the 1980s? It has been re-created as an iPhone/iPad app.

In the article “Hypertext Narrative and the Reader: A View from Cognitive Theory,” published in 2005 in the European Journal of English Studies, Ralf Schneider notes that hypertext readers are empowered by the options this type of environment provides. However, he also points out that some users may become lost in interactive texts. This problem of coherence may be related to the uncertainty of nonlinear texts, as these reading experiences’ lack of a beginning, middle, and end may make it difficult for readers to sense how much of the content they have explored or to locate subplots and alternative storylines.

Transmedia storytelling. Transmedia storytelling involves a multimodal, multimedia story with nonlinear, participatory elements. Resources connected to the story might include print materials; documents; maps; web-based clues; mobile apps; cell phone calls; social media connections; activities and games; and media such as audio, video, or animation.

The main storyline may or may not reside in one location, such as a traditional book or website. The narrative may be told through a series of media. For example, the series 39 Clues includes a traditional book and game cards along with access to an engaging website containing clues, missions, background information, and games. The Skeleton Creek intermediate-level books connect novels written in a journal format with web-based videos.

Social technology has become a core element of transmedia storytelling for young adults. The Cathy young adult series begins with a book and accompanying evidence packet, but social features—including cell phone numbers, websites, Flickr pages, and Facebook connections—are woven throughout the book. And the Amanda Project series website is a place for readers to engage in discussions, contribute content, and expand the reading experience.

The publishing industry is continuing to look for ways to extend the reading experience. For instance, The Search for WondLa by Tony DiTerlizzi provides book trailers introducing the reading experience, an iPad app to extend participation, and an augmented reality option called WondLa-Vision that immerses readers in a map connected with the story.

Transmedia Reading in the Classroom

In his article “Transmedia Education: The 7 Principles Revisited,” Henry Jenkins challenges teachers to actively involve students and put what they see, hear, and read to use. Transmedia environments ask readers to seek out content, explore information in different contexts, evaluate ideas across formats, and interact with other readers.

Educators don’t need to toss their current curriculum to make use of these new reading environments. Instead, select those technology elements that enhance the learning experience. For instance, in the October 2008 issue of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Larson suggests transforming the traditional reading workshop into an electronic reading workshop by exploring e-books, writing in electronic journals, holding online discussions, and using technology tools for publishing.

You can also use e-book readers to differentiate instruction. Some students may benefit from hearing words defined or pronounced, and others will find the bookmarking and note-taking features valuable.

Increasingly, learning games are being woven into reading experiences. While playing Lure of the Labyrinth, middle school students read digital comics as they work their way through a series of math games. Students can work at their own pace while the teacher tracks their progress.

Social studies and science teachers will find a growing number of immersive interactives that involve students in text, audio, video, and animation content. At the Changing the Balance website, participants seek a cause-and-effect relationship between climate change and the impact of deadly parasites. The online role-playing simulation Mission US allows participants to explore different aspects of the American Revolutionary War. Both of these digital reading environments provide depth to the learning experience, along with multiple ways to access and use information.

New Opportunities, New Challenges

Today, young people may choose from many different devices that serve a variety of functions. But does technology-based reading enhance or distract from the learning experience?

The answer may depend on whether the media elements and technology tools are integral or incidental to the reading experience. Elements that support struggling readers, cue readers to important events, contribute to the mood of the story, clarify difficult concepts, or reinforce key ideas activate thinking and promote comprehension. Yet over-reliance on audio, bells-and-whistles features that distract readers, and “eye candy” unrelated to the story can divert attention, cause readers to lose focus, and adversely affect learning. When evaluating reading resources, consider the role of the audio, graphics, motion, and interactive elements and determine whether the navigation and support tools are easy to use and contribute to the reading experience.

And remember that, despite all the new formats and ways to interact with them, the content is still the part of the reading experience that provides value for the learner. Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for readers of all ages to differentiate between fact, fiction, and fake information.

Traditional fiction is a representation that is invented or imaginary and not factual. Nonfiction, in contrast, is information that is real, truthful, and factual. But what happens when you’re in a fictional augmented or alternative reality world but working with nonfictional materials? Or when you’re in the real world working with fictional materials? Or when authors develop websites that are intended to be misleading or deceptive?

The intermediate-level novel Spaceheadz by Jon Scieszka is advertised as a work of fiction about a boy and his experiences at home and school. However, the book also contains pages with factual information about topics such as sound waves and electromagnetic fields. To make it even more complicated, links within the story take readers to websites with fake content, such as the Mrs. Halley’s Comets, the Anti-alien Agency, and SPHDZ. These websites are intended to look real and could easily deceive readers.

As reading continues to expand beyond the printed word, it’s going to be more important than ever for young people to be able to evaluate information and distinguish fact from fiction. Scholastic’s BookFlix subscription service matches fiction and nonfiction reading to provide this foundation for young readers.

Redefining reading may be the key to nurturing the next generation of readers and promoting lifelong reading practices. According to the 2010 Kids & Family Reading Report by Scholastic, children enjoy digital reading. One third of young people in the study stated that they would read more books for fun if they had access to e-books. As digital content quality catches up with the explosion of easy-to-use technology, educators will discover new ways to motivate digital age reading across the curriculum.

Annette Lamb has been a school library media specialist, computer teacher, and professor of education and library science. She is currently teaching online graduate courses for librarians and educators as a professor at Indiana University-Purdue University (IUPUI), Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.

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Research Windows: What Does the Research Say?

Clare Strawn — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

What does research say about the impact of technology on learning outcomes? It’s a question that ISTE’s Research and Evaluation Department fields often, but it’s difficult to answer. Unfortunately, you can’t separate technology as a component of learning and teaching from the many other contexts that influence learning outcomes, such as how it is used pedagogically in the classroom.

Think about how we usually measure learning outcomes: with standardized test scores. Then think about everything that influences how well each student performs on the test, from the home environment to individual psychosocial factors (including learning abilities), teacher preparation and skill, and classroom environment. In the big picture, how much difference do we expect the use of technology to make?

Fortunately, thousands of authors of basic research studies and program evaluations have investigated the impact of many implementations of technology on learning in many contexts. To answer the question of how any one influence affects learning outcomes, researchers enter measures of what they expect will be important, including an intervention such as technology use, into a statistical model. By interpreting the results, the researcher can estimate to what degree any item influences the outcome relative to the other items in the model. The influence of technology use would have to be big to outweigh all of the other contextual and individual factors.

Studies can also report results as an effect size (the difference between the mean for the treatment group and the mean for the control group, divided by the pooled standard deviation) that compares and standardizes the average scores of the two comparison groups. A meta-analysis can derive a composite effect size across many studies to estimate the overall impact of technology on learning outcomes in the big picture.

Tech Makes a Big Difference in K–12

According to R. M. Tamin’s article “What 40 Years of Research Says about the Impact of Technology on Learning: A Second-Order Meta-Analysis and Validation Study,” published earlier this year in the Review of Educational Research, the use of technology in instruction shows small to moderate gains in student learning over instruction that does not use technology. Technology used to support instruction had slightly stronger effects than applications that deliver direct instruction.

The study—which includes K–12 and postsecondary levels, different subject matters, and many kinds of technological interventions but excludes 100% online learning—supports findings from one of the contributing meta-analyses that “computer technology used as ‘support for cognition’ were significantly greater than those related to computer use for ‘presentation of content.’ ” For example, students learn more from teachers who use technology as tools for learning than when they learn directly from an educational website, CD, or educational software program.

The other important distinction is that technology integration in K–12 schools had a larger effect than it did in postsecondary contexts. Research does not explain most of the difference in student scores, but on average, a student exposed to technology in K–12 instruction will perform 12 percentile points higher than a student without technology-enhanced instruction.

Now that the big question of effect of technology on learning has been answered, this report concludes that research can now focus on the best ways to integrate the many technology tools into learning and teaching practices.

Online Learning Works Best with a Teacher’s Guidance

Barbara Means, Yukie Toyama, Robert Murphy, Marianne Bakia, and Karla Jones tackle the impact question from an online learning angle in “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies,” which the U.S. Department of Education’s Center for Technology in Learning published in 2010. Interactive, collaborative, and multimedia features are relatively new to online learning environments, so the authors could find only nine studies that apply to K–12 education (between 2006 and 2008), and only five of these were sufficient to report effect sizes, despite that “over a million K–12 students took online courses in 2007–08” (Means et al. referring to Picciano & Seaman, 2009). In addition to the five K–12 studies, the meta-analysis included 43 studies of postsecondary learners.

The article addresses the relative effectiveness of online learning compared with face-to-face instruction and with blended instruction and found that:

• Online learners performed slightly better than face-to-face learners. However, instruction delivered only online is neither better nor worse than face-to-face instruction. Authors attribute the small advantage to the greater flexibility, and therefore more time, students apply to learning.

• Blended instruction, which combines face-to-face with web delivery, shows a larger effect size than web-only delivery when compared to face-to-face-only instruction. This larger gain may justify the greater expense of blended instruction compared with self-directed online learning.

• Collaborative or instructor-directed instruction showed a larger effect size than independent online learning.

The authors stress the limitations of this meta-analysis, including the fact that the sample of students in these studies is too small to demonstrate confidence in how the findings apply to younger learners. In fact, effect sizes for the subsample of K–12 learners did not show any advantage for web delivery, and we can’t assume that what is effective for adult students necessarily applies to children as well.

Another important consideration for interpreting these findings is that “treatment conditions,” such as time on task and pedagogic approaches, cannot be separated from the method of instructional delivery (face to face, online, or hybrid). The authors assert that it is the combination of web delivery with curriculum, time, and pedagogy that explains the differences in outcomes.

In their review of studies (which was not included in the meta-analysis for technical reasons), the authors conclude that videos and quizzes do not improve learning delivered online. However, giving individual online learners the opportunity to control online activity and to reflect and self-monitor their learning increases gains.

Implications for Practice

These two studies are important to teachers, administrators, and program planners because they make the case for integrating technology into instruction. Both studies show that technology improves student outcomes the most when teachers integrate technology tools into the learning and teaching experience. They also support the idea that substituting technology for quality teaching is not as effective. Recent and continuing changes in technology, such as social media and interactivity, probably increase the web’s effectiveness for learning, but there is not enough research yet on these developments.

If you are implementing a technology program, including well-designed evaluation research will enable you to make specific claims about the outcomes of your investment for your stakeholders and contribute to the growing knowledge of the field. When you’re thinking about how these findings might apply to your environment, one place to start is the NETS Essential Conditions, which provides guidelines to set the stage for success.

Resources

NETS Essential Conditions: iste.org/NETS/EssentialConditions

“Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies” by Barbara Means, Yukie Toyama, Robert Murphy, Marianne Bakia, and Karla Jones (2010), U.S. Department of Education, Center for Technology in Learning: http://tinyurl.com/yz2pk56

“What 40 Years of Research Says about the Impact of Technology on Learning: A Second-Order Meta-Analysis and Validation Study” by R. M. Tamin (2011), Review of Educational Research, Vol. 81, pages 4–28.

Research Windows Is Changing!

Starting with this issue, ISTE’s Research & Evaluation (R&E) Department will author the Research Windows column. In the September/October and March/April issues of L&L, R&E staff will summarize some of the most important and up-to-date ed tech studies and explain how the results apply to your education practice. In the December/January and June/July issues, R&E’s alter ego, Dr. Eval, will answer questions about how to meet the evaluation requirements of federal- and corporate-funded grant projects in the new advice column “Ask Dr. Eval.”

Clare Strawn, PhD, is a senior research associate with ISTE's Research and Evaluation Department (iste.org/research). You can contact her at cstrawn@iste.org.

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Member Profiles: Spreading Ed Tech to Spanish-Speaking Educators

Diana Fingal — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Spreading Ed Tech to Spanish-Speaking Educators

Claudia Uribe de Piedrahita didn’t initially pursue a career in educational technology, or even education for that matter. She studied physical and occupational therapy in college and then worked in real estate. Later she managed nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in health services and for underprivileged children in her native Colombia.

It was the death of her son, Gabriel, in 1995 that set her on a trajectory of improving information and communication technology (ICT) for K–12 schools serving underprivileged students.

Gabriel was killed in an airplane crash at the age of 22. He was just six months away from graduating with honors from Harvard University in applied math. His immediate dream was to teach at a school in a disadvantaged community.

“Gabriel saw education as the key to creating a more equitable world, and he considered communication, the spread of knowledge, and the shared experiences and realities of human beings to be pillars on the path toward tolerance and peace,” Uribe de Piedrahita said.

To honor the memory of their son, she and her husband, Francisco Piedrahita, established the Gabriel Piedrahita Foundation. The NGO is dedicated to improving the quality of primary and secondary education in Latin America through the effective use of ICT, focusing on less-privileged schools and communities. Uribe de Piedrahita is director of the foundation, which started out working in a handful of schools in Cali, Colombia, and then expanded to larger programs. The foundation designs, implements, and tests curricula, lesson plans, and other tools aimed at increasing the competency of students and teachers in ICT and improving technology integration into all subjects.

“We have seen changes, sometimes dramatic changes, in the attitudes of teachers and students toward teaching and learning, in the level of aspirations of the kids, in their attainments,” Uribe de Piedrahita said. “Many students are attending college, something they would not even have considered before.”

In 2001, recognizing the lack of Spanish-language resources for teachers, the foundation launched Eduteka (www.eduteka.org), a site packed with information about and resources for integrating technology into the classroom. Eduteka offers free original and third-party content—including updated national and international articles, interviews, and research studies—as well as resources and interactive spaces.

When it began, Eduteka served mostly Colombian teachers. But as word spread, it began attracting registered users from Spanish-speaking countries in North and South America and Europe. These days the site’s visitors are not just teachers but school administrators, teacher trainers, and preservice teachers. Eduteka averages 517,056 visitors a month and more than a million page views.

The foundation was a natural fit for ISTE, and Uribe de Piedrahita became a member in 2000.

“ISTE has been a compass for the foundation and for Eduteka throughout these years,” Uribe de Piedrahita said. “We cannot think of what our foundation and its ability to fulfill its mission would have been without all we have learned from ISTE.”

Uribe de Piedrahita serves as an ISTE Ambassador (iste.org/ambassador), which means she helps educators in her region connect to one another and find resources. She also volunteered to translate the NETS into Spanish.

Uribe de Piedrahita works tirelessly to connect Spanish-speaking educators to modern tools, but she knows there are many more pieces to the puzzle than merely offering support and education.

“We need much more hardware, and we need much better connectivity,” she said. “But, above all, we have to transform our school administrators and our teachers. We have to give them the training opportunities and allow them enough time to appropriate and feel comfortable with the new demands of 21st century teaching and learning.”

—Diana Fingal is senior editor of L&L.

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Point/Counterpoint: Is Cursive Writing Worth Teaching?

Sharon Eilts — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Is Cursive Writing Worth Teaching?

Yes

Each year, more than 1 million visitors come to the Rotunda of the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. They come primarily to see three hand-written documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Most visitors know generally what the centuries-old parchment pages say, because they have studied their contents in school. But, on a recent morning, we overheard a girl of about 6 years old telling her parents as they stood in front of the case displaying the Constitution, "It is so pretty. I can't wait to learn cursive. I really want to know what it says." In those three sentences, she articulated many of the reasons why cursive writing is still worth teaching.

First of all, she recognized the beauty of script. Obviously we all appreciate it, or software companies would never have come up with the hundreds of fonts to make our typing appear more attractive. Her observation that it's so pretty reflected her awareness that learning cursive is an artistic skill. As with most visitors, she likely paid particular attention to the signatures that appear on the charter documents. Not only is each pretty in its own way, but each also reflects attributes of the signer's personality.

Second, the 6-year-old sage acknowledged that learning cursive is a milestone on the path to becoming a grown-up. Her expression that she can't wait revealed her recognition that learning cursive is an attainable skill. Her optimism left no room for complaints that deciphering is too difficult or that using fine-motor skills is too challenging.

Third, she knew that when you learn to write cursive, you learn to read it too. Her desire to know what it says signaled her understanding that learning cursive is a practical communication skill that will enable her to both convey her ideas (without an electrical device or satellite) and make sense of those penned by others in the past, present, and future.

Although the young girl did not mention it, the mere fact that her parents brought her to see the Charters of Freedom suggests a fourth reason why cursive writing is worth teaching. This reason does not have to do with the acquisition of a skill but involves instead an important ability. Learning cursive contributes to our capacity to imagine. A handwritten document is evidence of a specific moment in time when a fellow human being put pen to paper. Although the document cannot actually transport us back in time, it can connect us to that moment in a very tangible way. This is true not only for the big and famous documents, but for the small and seemingly insignificant ones as well.

Finally, if we do not teach students cursive writing, large portions of our collective past will literally be inaccessible to them. Untyped words will be unintelligible and cease to have meaning. Lessons that might have been learned and inspiration that might have been found will be lost. We are all stewards of information, and, as educators, we play a vital role in preparing our students for the stewardship roles that they too will play. Teaching cursive is an important component of this preparation.

—Lee Ann Potter is the director of education and volunteer programs at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C. She and her team (Stephanie, Michael, Megan, Becky, Dave, Judy, Denise, and Missy) discussed and wrote this response together.

Teaching cursive is obsolete. If the goal of writing is communication, then the tool that is used to communicate should not be the focus. The act of communication is the focus. Whether you use print, cursive, or type is not paramount. As educators are mandated to teach more and more information, knowledge, and skills in a 21st century format, some older skills need to be laid to rest. Cursive is one of these skills.

Indiana has already abolished the instruction of cursive, and California mandates it only in grades 4 and 5. And with good reason. Electronic signature software is improving. Most students have access to computers and handheld technologies, such as smartphones. We can teach fine-motor skills in a myriad of other ways, including finger games (such as coin flipping) for dexterity, cutting and pasting, stringing beads, or using manipulatives. If a student demonstrates issues with print, referral to the district occupational therapist for assessment might be warranted.

As a special education teacher, it pains me to see students who are able to multiparagraph compositions but are unable to put pen or pencil to paper to write more than a sentence. Are we not supposed to give weight to content? What about those students who, because of some physical, learning, or cognitive challenge, are literally unable to write? Speech-to-text software allows these students to access the curriculum. Should they be penalized on some arbitrary standard because they are unable to write in cursive? I do not think so.

Many who remember the hours they spent practicing cursive skills wax poetic on this subject. I remember it too. The significant portion of my school year that I spent learning flourishes and circles, trying to link in my mind what I learned as print on paper and page to what I needed to learn for cursive, making sure there were no reversals, and practicing loops and lifts, were hours I could have been working on other skills. I could print quite well. Why did I need to learn how to write all over again? What other skills, abilities, or knowledge could I have learned or expressed in that amount of time?

If we as educators are to maximize student learning, support Universal Design for Learning and access to curriculum for all, and prioritize instruction, then we need to accept that some skills should be moved to the realm of nostalgia and that the tools for those skills should be relegated to collections and museums. Inkwells are now gone from student desks. Fountain pens are novelty items. Cursive instruction, although lovely and a reminder of earlier times, has no place in modern education. We need to look forward, not backward.

—Sharon Eilts teaches special education to middle school students with autism and provides assistive technology assessments and trainings to local school districts. She is an Adobe Education Leader, Apple Distinguished Educator, Google Certified Teacher, HP Teacher Mentor, and Intel Teach to the Future Master Teacher.

To contribute to this and future discussions, go to L&L’s group page on the ISTE Community Ning at www.iste-community.org/groups/LandL.

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Learning Connections: Students Dig Up Dirt to Learn about Internet Safety

Jesse Morehouse — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Students Dig Up Dirt to Learn about Internet Safety

Students are dangerously unaware of the privacy implications of social networks.

Many of my students, for example, are stunned when I give them the facts: 87% of Americans can be positively identified from their ZIP codes, dates of birth, and genders. Add residence type and marital status, and you easily surpass a 90% likelihood of identifying someone.

Yet students routinely post this information and much more to the web via a variety of social media applications.

When I voice concerns about internet safety to students, their teenage sense of invincibility keeps them from truly comprehending the impact of an inappropriate entry on a personal blog, social network, or Twitter account. The idea that such actions could adversely affect them when applying for jobs, running for elected office, or even trying to get a date in college seems difficult for them to imagine. To make the learning stick, I knew I needed to connect this lesson to a real-life situation. The question in my mind was: “How?”

Privacy vs. Security

I developed a module for my Intro to Computer Technology class that seems to do the job well. The point of the lesson is to teach students how to appropriately share information when using social media. First, we review lesson vocabulary and watch a 40-minute documentary called No Place To Hide narrated by the late news broadcaster Peter Jennings. The video details privacy issues balanced against collective security. I use the film to introduce the concepts of privacy and anonymity and discuss students’ views on them.

Then the real fun starts. We discuss the idea that online data can be pieced together to create a fairly complete picture of an individual. This is legal and practiced routinely by companies marketing their products and services.

Data Mining the Teacher

Next we data mine. I begin by introducing my students to a list of useful search tools for personal information that I have bookmarked on Delicious. We talk about how a data miner can use each tool to find different things and why those are important. I give students 10 minutes to data mine me. They call out possible facts as they find them, and I write them down on the interactive whiteboard, which allows me to perform conceptual grouping later in the exercise. While writing, I do not give any indication of whether the information is true or false.

Then, we examine the information on the board and discuss it. Can they draw conclusions about me? How could they conduct more accurate searches? I give students another 10 minutes to find out more about me. Afterward, I select two pieces of data, one true and one false, and we go through the process of figuring out how the students could determine the validity of each.

This part of the lesson is also very amusing. One class thought I had three wives, and many of my students are convinced I went to high school in a state I have never visited. One other thing I like about this assignment is that I get to learn exactly what data is available about me. This year, a speeding ticket from 2001 popped up!

Vetting the Facts

I understand that this lesson freaks out some adults. But every piece of information the students find is legally in the public sector. It is actually quite safe and very engaging. After all, what student doesn’t want to dig up the dirt on his or her teacher? After you show them how to vet the facts, they begin to look at every piece of data skeptically.

For this lesson to work, you need to give students the name of a willing adult who has some degree of web presence. I have had a few other teachers volunteer to be data mined, but searches turned up little more than the names of relatives, addresses, and phone numbers due to their limited digital footprints.

Data Mining a Stranger

The next part of the lesson is to allow students to test drive what they’ve learned about privacy and personal data-search tools. This task allows students to apply their own analysis and evaluation skills and learn firsthand the limits of internet privacy. Their assignment, executed in teams of two over two class periods, looks like this:

Browse social networking sites or personal blogs and find a “subject” who meets the following requirements:

• Provides first and last name

• Provides current city and state of residence

• Has a discernible gender

• Provides at least “ballpark” age (adults between the ages of 28 and 40 are best)

• Is not from our town

• Is a complete stranger

• Is an ordinary person

Create an electronic presentation with the following slides:

• Cover (with person’s photo and first name only)

• Basic information from their social network site or blog (what you started with and why you thought it was important)

• What you found from your search results—with sources!

• Conclusion (four deductions/inferences about your person and two issues/concerns with online privacy)

When they finish their data mining, the student teams present their projects to the class. It is amazing to see what students can find out in just a few hours. Relatives, addresses, pictures of houses, housing prices, estimated income (using a few different estimation methods), dates of birth (usually given away by blog entries of their friends), and much more allow students to create fairly robust profiles of their subjects. Of course, some subjects turn out to be difficult to data mine, but there are lessons from them as well, and students must explain them in their work.

Student reactions to this assignment are commonly a mix of fascination, worries about their own online choices, and at times a feeling of “creepiness” when they discover they are much easier to learn about online than they ever imagined.

The final step in this lesson is for us all to walk through the privacy settings on students’ Facebook accounts to evaluate their importance and choose appropriate settings. At this point, they all make changes.

I get more parent compliments on this assignment than on any other. Parents are understandably interested in ensuring their children learn safe online behavior but have little training and experience in exactly how to do that. Many of them even ask for a copy of the recommended privacy settings for their own use.

This assignment makes the topic very real for students, and many of them go on to use these skills in many creative ways, such as helping their parents track down hard-to-find clients!

This lesson is an excellent way to teach higher-order cognitive skills using technology as a medium. And it illustrates that if you are a good digital citizen and make good choices about what you share online, you have nothing to fear. Your online “image” will reflect positively on you.

Resources:

Datamining list: www.delicious.com/jessethecsguy/datamining

No Place to Hide documentary: www.snagfilms.com/films/title/peter_jennings_reporting_no_place_to_hide

—Jesse Morehouse teaches computer science at Pagosa Springs High School in Colorado, USA. He loves seeing students apply what they learn. Data mine him using his professional user ID, techkilljoy.

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Feature: Excellent Educators

Diana Fingal — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

ISTE’s award winners exemplify what it means to be innovative, engaging, and connected.

It isn’t difficult to find excellent educators among ISTE’s membership. After all, people who join ISTE tend to be some of the most innovative teachers in the world. What is difficult is selecting the best from the vast pool of teachers, technology coordinators, administrators, library media specialists, and teachers in training. Each year dozens of judges are charged with that task—poring through scads of award applications and selecting those who rise above the rest.

We’d like to introduce you to the best of ISTE and share what makes them great, because learning from each other is the ISTE way!

Bijal Damani, Outstanding Teacher

Higher secondary teacher specializing in business education,
S.N. Kansagra School, Rajkot, Gujarat, India

It’s hard to encapsulate the single project, idea, or characteristic that sets Damani apart. Colleagues boast about her focus on the whole child and teaching through project-based learning. Perhaps the best example of this is the Galaxy Bazaar, a project she started with her high school commerce students in 2005. That first year, 29 students organized and put on a huge bazaar at the school and made about 8,000 rupees (about $177 in today’s U.S. dollars) of profit, which they donated to charity. The project has grown substantially since then. Last year, the project earned 400,000 rupees ($8,888).

Students sell gifts and food and run a game zone where bazaar-goers can play laser tag and other games. Students work all year planning and organizing the event and even sign on sponsors. They create promotional materials, work with wholesalers, contact the media, and manage dozens of other behind-the-scenes tasks that not only make the event a success, but also teach students volumes about commerce. They donate the money to a charity that educates underprivileged children in the city.

Damani uses technology in every aspect of teaching. Her school website is packed with resources for both students and their parents. Her students create e-portfolios, use digital cameras to illustrate their perspectives of the world, and use Google Docs and Spreadsheets to share their mock investment portfolios.

What her nominator says:“The characteristic of an outstanding teacher is the ability to make the moment of learning exciting and creative, a moment never forgotten. This happens through the infusion of one’s own excitement and acquired knowledge into the process of learning. Ms. Damani is extremely creative and converts social networking media like Facebook into an educational and collaborative tool, helping and guiding the students on the correct usage.” —David Morris, India Council for Integral Education

What her colleagues say: “Gifted with an innovative mind, Bijal always looks for solutions and ways to draw out the best from her learners. Over the years, I’ve been a witness to many such practices. Her pioneering work in integrating ICT in the classroom began with the e-classroom. She has also successfully encouraged all her students to develop e-portfolios of their own, thus gifting them with the most crucial ICT skills needed by 21st century learners.” —Sujata Kini, English teacher, S. N. Kansagra School

What the judges say: “Her integration of project-based learning, her concern for each individual child, and her bringing together of social activism with entrepreneurship is very powerful.”

What she says: “Each child is a unique individual having various talents and skills. Teachers have to identify and tap the latent potential within each child. I believe in development of the ‘whole child’—the physical, intellectual, and spiritual.”

Learn more: https://sites.google.com/site/bijaldamaniseclassroom

The Outstanding Teacher Award honors a teacher who has improved education through the effective use of technology.

Monica Beglau, Outstanding Leader

Executive director of eMINTS (Missouri Instructional Networked Teaching Strategies) National Center, University of Missouri, USA

Monica Beglau is all about bringing educational technology to the masses. She is executive director of Missouri’s eMINTS Program, an intensive two-year technology professional development program designed to help teachers learn how to integrate a specific suite of technology into their classrooms using instructional strategies that promote inquiry-based learning and encourage collaboration and community building among students and teachers.

Colleagues laud her for her ability to forge partnerships with businesses and other organizations to stretch dollars and extend programs to reach more students.

In addition to her role with eMINTS, she oversees eLearning for Educators, a self-sustaining online professional development program in Missouri that has trained more than 1,200 teachers.

As if that weren’t enough, Beglau is the project director for a $12.2 million Investing in Innovations (i3) grant, awarded to the University of Missouri to implement eMINTS at 60 middle schools in the state.

What her nominator says:“Dr. Beglau’s entire career has been focused on the effort to improve the quality of education for students. She views the eMINTS Program as a way of leveling the playing field for students who may be at a disadvantage.” —Cathie Loesing, program coordinator of eMINTS National Center

What her colleague says: “Monica’s work at the state,
national, and international levels has made a significant difference in the educational opportunities students are
offered through technology in their schools. Monica was an early advocate for the ISTE NETS. She promoted changes in state and national standards for the instructional use of technology to mirror the ISTE standards. Her strong beliefs about the role technology can play in supporting student achievement have translated into changed educational practices.” —Barbara Treacy, director, EdTech Leaders Online

What the judges say: “Impressive record of facilitating the use of technology for teacher preparation programs. This nominee has also forged international partnerships.”

What she says:“Schools with strong eMINTS programs are exciting, lively, and interesting places to be. Students and teachers alike are fully engaged in learning and use technology as a way to explore the world, learn new ideas, and solve real-world problems. Students in eMINTS classrooms use technology to become independent thinkers who are also active team members and creators of knowledge.”

Learn more: http://emints.org

The Outstanding Leader Award goes to an administrator—at the school, district, state, or national level—who improves education through the effective use of technology.

Adam Bellow, Outstanding Young Educator

Director of educational technology for College Board Schools,
New York, New York, USA

Adam Bellow is a tireless advocate for sharing. He has invested countless hours—and dollars—putting together a comprehensive website chock full of resources for K–12 teachers. His site, eduTecher.net, groups thousands of websites according to grade level and subject matter. But it’s not just a list of links. The site allows teachers to keep a backpack of resources that they can categorize, annotate, and share with friends. He also posts video tutorials.

But that’s technically just his hobby. His real job is director of technology for the 17 low-income schools on the East Coast of the United States that are designated as College Board Schools. Although some district-level technology directors seldom walk into a classroom, Bellow loves to meet with teachers, listen to their ideas, and suggest ways that technology can improve their lessons. His favorite thing, he says, is to find an educational use for a technology that was not originally designed for education.

What his supervisor says: “Adam is a key addition to our team in so many ways. He is a true collaborator and solution seeker and has a highly developed sense of humor that serves to better the dynamics and health of our team and the College Board as well. Early on in his employment at the College Board, Adam co-led a technology project with our Advanced Placement division that has proven to be highly successful and may lead to a new and interesting project in support of AP students.” —Helen C. Santiago, vice president of College Board Schools

What his colleague says: “Adam is like no other administrator I have met. He is a responsive, caring, dedicated
person and a most patient teacher. Adam is what I think
of when I hear the term lifelong learner. He puts students and teachers first and helps thousands of people every day.
It is because of Adam, his website, and his hard work as
director of educational technology that I am able to do a lot of the great projects I am doing with my students. He has made a tremendous impact on my colleagues, myself, and the culture of our school.” —Marie Cooper, teacher

What the judges say: “Adam is the ideal young educator for ISTE to showcase—knowledgeable, helpful, eager to share what he knows both through the hundreds of teachers he supports each day in his job and with the thousands of educators who access his eduTecher site.”

What he says: “Learning how to use all the wonderful technology available today opens up worlds to our students and new avenues in which to reach and teach them. Learning how to use the tools responsibly and safely is the key to making it all work. I am never satisfied walking away from the educational buffet of tools, resources, and content out there because there is always something to learn and share with others in order to help teachers reach their students using successful integration of instructional technology.”

Learn more: www.edutecher.net

The Outstanding Young Educator Award honors an educator under age 35 who has demonstrated vision, innovation, action, and transformation while using technology to improve learning and teaching.

And the 2011 ISTE Award Winners Are…

Outstanding Teacher: Bijal Damani, S.N. Kansagra School, Rajkot, Gujarat, India

Outstanding Leader:Monica Beglau, executive director of eMINTS National Center, Columbia, Missouri, USA

The Outstanding Leader and Outstanding Teacher awards honor individuals who have demonstrably improved education through the effective use of technology.

Outstanding Young Educator: Adam Bellow, director of educational technology, College Board Schools, New York, New York, USA

The Outstanding Young Educator Award honors an educator under 35 who has demonstrated vision, innovation, action, and transformation while using technology to improve learning and teaching.

Emerging Leaders: Caroline Haebig, social studies educator, Bradford High School, Kenosha, Wisconsin, USA; Josh Stumpenhorst, sixth grade social science and language arts teacher, Lincoln Jr. High School, Naperville, Illinois, USA; Crystal Beach, English teacher, Lakeview Academy, Gainesville, Georgia, USA; Merry Willis, teacher, Carmel Elementary School, Woodstock, Georgia, USA; and Ashley Talley, special education teacher, Eaton Elementary School, Lenoir City, Tennessee, USA

Emerging Leaders are young educators who are leaders in technology integration.

Public Policy Advocate: Becky Fisher, representing Virginia Society for Technology in Education, Greenwood, Virginia, USA

Public Policy Advocacy Trendsetter: Michael Walker, representing Technology Information Education Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

The Public Policy Advocate awards recognize outstanding leaders and mentors who advocate for educational technology policy at the local, state, regional, national, and/or international levels.

Kay L. Bitter Award for Excellence in Technology-Based PK–2 Education: Amanda Marrinan, Year 2 teacher, St. John Vianney’s School, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

The Kay L. Bitter Award honors a PK–2 educator for vision and creativity in a project or program that effectively integrates technology.

Sylvia Charp Award for District Innovation in Technology: Vail Unified School District, Vail, Arizona, USA; Kevin Carney, director of the Beyond Textbooks program, and Andy Chlup, director of technology

The Sylvia Charp Award, presented by ISTE and THE Journal, recognizes district innovation in technology.

SIGMS Innovation Technology Award, primary school winner: Mary Carole Strother, library media specialist, and Bryce Kennaugh, second grade teacher, Finch Elementary School, McKinney, Texas, USA, for “Maybelle the Cockroach”

SIGMS Innovation Technology Award, secondary school winner: Cynthia Cassidy, media specialist, and Michelle Cook, language arts teacher, Mount Olive Middle School, Budd Lake, New Jersey, USA, for “Who Owns History?”

SIGMS Honorable Mention, primary category: Karen Kliegman, library media specialist, and Noel Forte, technology integration facilitator, Herricks School District, Searingtown School, Albertson, New York, USA for “Survivor MD”

SIGMS Honorable Mention, secondary category: Jennifer Kelly, library media specialist, and Debbie Hague, social studies teacher, Virginia Beach City Public Schools, First Colonial High School, Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA, for “Conflict Everywhere”

The SIGMS Awards, sponsored by Linworth Publishing Inc, and Follett Software Company, honor a school librarian and collaborating teacher who have conducted an exemplary technology program extending beyond the media center.

SIGOL Learning Award, first place: Diane Heitzenrater, Stacy Rotchford, and Andrew Osborne from Hatboro-Horsham School District, Horsham, Pennsylvania, USA for “Internet Safety 101”

SIGOL Learning Award, second place: Lisette Casey and Toni Oliver-Barton from Springs School District, Manitou Springs, Colorado, USA for “We’ve Got Sole Manitou”

SIGOL Learning Award, third place: Janine Lim, Berrien Springs, Maryland; Sue Porter, Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Elaine Shuck, Sturgis, South Dakota, USA for “Read Around the Planet”

SIGOL honorable mentions: Saskatoon Catholic Cyber School, Saskatoon, Canada; Herricks School District, New Hyde Park, New York, USA; Blue Springs School District, Vesper Blue Springs, Missouri, USA; Henrico County Public Schools, Henrico, Virginia, USA; and Deakin University, Victoria, Australia

The SIGOL Awards, sponsored by the ISTE Special Interest Group for Online Learning, recognize creative educators for their pioneering use of online networks for students in grades K–16.

SIGTE Research Paper Award: Susan Sutton, St. Cloud State University, for “The Preservice Technology Training Experiences of Novice Teachers”

Congratulations ISTE 2011 Making IT Happen Winners

Jeanne Biddle, ISTE Board member and director of technology
for Scott County Schools, Georgetown, Kentucky, USA

Scott Merrick, SIGVE chair and virtual learning curriculum specialist for Metro Nashville Public Schools, Nashville, Tennessee, USA

Dan Meyer, ISTE Board member and CEO of Atomic Learning Inc.
Little Falls, Minnesota, USA

Ben Smith, ISTE Board member and physics teacher at Red Lion Area High School, Red Lion, Pennsylvania, USA

Amanda Marrinan, winner of ISTE’s 2011 Kay Bitter Award for Excellence in Technology-Based PK–12 Education

Amanda Marrinan, Kay L. Bitter Award for Excellence in Technology-Based PK–12 Education Teacher

St. John Vianney’s Primary School, Manly, Brisbane, Australia

Even some of the most devout educational technology advocates haven’t tried what Amanda Marrinan does in her classroom as a matter of course: She encourages her 5-year-old students to blog. She opens her classroom three days a week for a bloggers café, providing students a space where they can blog, network, learn new skills, mentor one another, and even help staff and parents.

In 2007, she connected her class with teachers and students across the world using Skype, and she has participated in global collaborative projects. One of those projects, Voices of the World (http://onevoice.ning.com), connects educators who share recordings that their students make to introduce children to languages, accents, and dialects from around the world.

Marrinan is able to engage her students in international projects due to the connections she’s maintained with educators in the United States, Canada, and Australia. She also shares her tech knowledge by facilitating workshops for teachers and parents during lunch breaks and after hours.

What her nominator says: “Amanda’s students participate in online, collaborative projects that support their learning across literacy and numeracy as well as develop an awareness of the whereabouts and culture of others within our global community. The children connect, learn, share, and collaborate via wikis, VoiceThreads, and video as well as through tools like Skype and Twitter. Amanda truly embodies the qualities of a lifelong learner. She is passionate about embracing technology as a way of differentiating learning for her students.” —Sheila Adams, teacher, Rye
Junior High School, New Hampshire, USA

What her principal says: “Amanda remains ahead of her time as an early adopter of innovative, creative technological advances. She has amazed me with her energy, passion, and diligence as she follows the trail of new web 2.0 tools that will enhance learning for her young students. The staff and students of St. John Vianneys have benefitted immensely from Amanda’s work in promoting the use of technology in the classroom.” —Karren Strahan, prinicpal of St. John Vianney’s Primary School

What the judges say:“Amanda is truly an educator who embraces the use of technology not only to encourage her students’ learning but the global community as well. She exemplifies the Kay Bitter Award.”

What she says: “Learning is lifelong, and it’s important to me that I model being a reflective, lifelong learner with my students. I don’t consider myself the master teacher, the holder of all knowledge, and I’m comfortable telling my students, ‘I don’t know. How could we find out?’ I strive to create a learning environment where everyone is valued as a teacher and learner, where students are given a voice, learning is negotiated, and they have a say in what and how they learn. We’re on the journey together.”

Diana Fingal is senior editor of L&L. She has been writing for and editing periodicals for more than 20 years. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, USA. She also taught English in a K–11 school in Yalta, Ukraine, as a Peace Corps volunteer.

The Kay L. Bitter Award for excellence in Technology-Based PK–12 Education recognizes educators for vision and creativity in a project or prgram that effectively integrates technology.

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Feature: Right On Course

Don Brown — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Lane County, Oregon, has 16 school districts, and up until last year, every one of them had its own online learning program. Some were more like correspondence courses, while others were closer to online curriculum delivery. No one had ever explored the options available, the cost savings that district collaboration might provide, or the benefits that a central “go-to” for support could offer.

During the 2009–10 school year, district superintendents decided to work together to create better online options countywide. That January, they directed the local education service agency, Lane Education Service District (Lane ESD), to try something new. In addition to providing special education services and delivering teacher professional development, Lane ESD would create a diverse
collection of online options for all
students in the county.

Many results were dramatic. Interest was high, so enrollments began earlier than we had initially planned. In fact, fall semester enrollments exceeded the anticipated numbers for the entire year. The service added a “proof of concept” class for gifted elementary students and offered ongoing teacher professional development to support the move from face-to-face teaching to online courses.

The phases that followed included hiring part-time teachers and building Lane ESD’s first fully owned courses, but getting to this stage required some serious planning and lots of support for individual school districts for technology infrastructure and communication.

Getting Started

When the mandate went into effect, the first step Lane ESD took was to work with superintendents to define common goals that corresponded with local district goals:

• Expanding course offerings

• Improving student retention

• Increasing options for non-traditional students

• Establishing regional oversight

The next step was to map out a timeline of critical events. The ESD staff created this timeline and quickly handed responsibility over to a cadre of teachers, instructional assistants, principals, and even two superintendents. They defined the research needed, decision points, and funding estimates necessary to get the project under way.

We then began visiting schools and talking to principals, counselors, and students about course services. After visiting high schools in 14 of the 16 county school districts, we saw some specific trends. First, many students needed credit recovery classes, and second, some teachers were concerned that a student could be outsourced to an online teacher for the wrong reasons. Many districts agreed to allow only online courses that were not available in the existing curriculum at the local high school. These were mostly world language and AP courses. Finally, a few students were homebound or suspended from campus. Those students would require full-time courses, but with regular adult contact from a district teacher or counselor.

Partners and Resources

Our local community college became a partner early on, and we found an important mutual resource: Moodle. The college already used the open source learning management system as a platform for all its courses, but there was one challenge. In the College Now program, high school teachers collaborate to teach college credit–bearing courses at their high schools and often use Moodle for content. The problem was that the college tied its Moodle server to its calendar and registration system. That meant that high schools, which often use a semester system, had to work around the college’s quarter system. It was a tricky problem. The solution was to have the college provide ongoing teacher training in Moodle and have Lane ESD provide a Moodle server that was not tied to a calendar of any type. This allowed College Now teachers to migrate their courses to our Moodle server. The partnership works well, and we continue to find partnerships that bridge K–12 and the community college through online learning.

Course Offerings

With Moodle support planned and a timeline for development of services in hand, we gathered data to find out just what the school districts needed. We had a goal of visiting at least one high school in every district in the county. We talked with principals, students, and counselors to assess the needs. As we completed visits, three distinct types of needs for online courses emerged. First, and the most obvious, was the need for courses that smaller districts could not offer, including AP courses, electives, and some advanced mathematics courses. Next was the need for credit-recovery courses, and finally a mixture of unique cases.

We built three profiles and used them to design the web portal:

A fresh challenge.
These students need challenging courses or courses not offered at their school. Occasionally, at rural schools, students may have scheduling conflicts that are serious enough to warrant an online course substitute.

A different pace.
Often students needed the flexibility to work on a class at any time and from any place. Students who cannot come to the campus need full-time enrollment in online courses. This is problematic because of the project’s commitment to blended learning, but so far, this hasn’t been done.

Credits in a hurry.
Some students want to retake a course they have failed. Online credit-recovery courses make use of assessments that allow them to skip the sections of the course they remember and help them learn the parts they didn’t understand. In addition, they can take the courses during a class period or after school.

Selecting Vendors

The second big task was to select vendors for the new service. We evaluated 13 potential vendors using the iNACOL National Standards for Quality Online Teaching rubric and the Quality Matters Inter-Institutional Quality Assurance in Online Learning rubric. The education district contracted with Aventa Learning and Florida Virtual School to prepare for fall enrollments. We had planned to use a provider from within our state, but scheduling issues kept it from being used much.

We felt ready to begin in the fall. We had the web portal ready with pre-assessments, talking points for counselors, and links to course catalogs. We had narrowed the providers to those that we felt had the highest student engagement and best content for the cost, and we had an initial budget to purchase courses so that districts could focus on infrastructure, professional development, and equitable methods for using online courses.

To our surprise, two districts requested to begin immediately, in hopes of enrolling students in June 2010 for summer school. We said yes, thinking all of the enrollments would be for credit recovery, but remained flexible when they were not. As a result, a gifted incoming ninth grader was able to earn high school credit before her first day in high school. The two districts had an overall passing/completion rate of 80% for summer programs—much higher than the previous year in both cases.

When fall came, additional schools and districts were prepared to start online learning based on their own logistical models. One immediate lesson emerged: Students must have an email account they will actually look at to enroll in a course. Most districts did not offer student email and relied on parent permission to use the students’ personal email accounts. This was a good thing in the end, because students checked the accounts regularly. For the few students who did not have an account, the parents (or school personnel acting on behalf of the parents) opened a free personal account.

Improving Communication

Supporting the IT infrastructure for 16 organizations was a challenge—not in servers, switches, and software, but in communication. We quickly realized that, although we had a cadre of teachers, instructional assistants, and administrators (at least one person representing each district), this was inadequate to facilitate the learning curve that the IT staff in each district faced. We had few issues when downloading new plug-ins or software. When technical difficulties did arise, the most frequent result was a breakdown in student access and great concern that teachers would need a lot more services from district-level tech support staff. What was actually happening was that those working directly with students were not getting information we had shared with either administrators or technology staff as quickly as we would have liked. We worked hard to facilitate this communication by instituting three changes:

1. We began copying administrators, mentors, teachers, and tech staff on any email that dealt with technical issues that had arisen in other schools and districts.

2. We set up a subgroup of the cadre called the Logistics Special Interest Group (SIG-Logistics) that would facilitate communication between technology staff in different districts.

3. We ensured that tech staff received updates, not just by emails and a dedicated wiki, but also in person through existing face-to-face meetings that did not include information about online courses prior to the project start-up.

By mid-November, we had turned a corner on communication. Most of the staff members with concerns about implementing online courses were helping to meet the needs of students, and some even became enthusiastic supporters.

Price of Service

Of course, to meet our goal of removing barriers during the “proof of concept” year, we needed to offer some funding to get things going. We put a dedicated fund together for the first year and devised a plan for “costing” the service: seats, slots, and courses. This proved to be far more complicated than anticipated.

Our first attempt to distribute funding was to take an average cost of the anticipated seats, then let the first districts to take advantage of the seats be the recipients of the dedicated fund. That quickly gave way to a plan that allocated each district a portion of seats based on their total district enrollment. This was because the administrators guiding the group knew that each district was in a different state of readiness to implement online courses. Some were already offering limited online courses and had years of experience, and others had just started considering how to best use the resource.

During the school year, we began to discuss sustainability once the initial funding was over. We started by providing a free online professional development opportunity called Moodle Monday. Every Monday at 4 p.m., teachers could drop in for webinar sessions that alternated between direct training in elements of the Moodle LMS and chat sessions where everyone could suggest a topic and learn from each other. We enrolled all who attended Moodle Monday in a “sandbox course,” so they had a common place to experiment within our actual Moodle LMS. We also explored uploading free content to the Moodle server from a variety of sources but soon found that the quality of many free resources was not up to par. Using the iNACOL Standards for Online Learning, ISTE’s NETS, and research on best practices, we are now in the middle of developing our own course standards for blended learning. Our cadre will continue to discuss and guide this framework using their firsthand experience with students.

We also want to progress from the “turnkey” purchase of courses (where we purchase the course, LMS, and a teacher from a vendor) to a place that will allow more local teachers to take advantage of teaching online. We have the Moodle training in place for this reason and will move to leasing content as a bridge while we develop courses with our own course standards, which may include project-based options within the course architecture. We also want to use community engagement as a mandatory element of all secondary courses.

Lessons Learned

We have learned a lot in our first year of operation with more than 525 individual course enrollments:

• We now know that every online course varies and every online teacher varies, just like in brick-and-mortar schools.

• Our most critical role in developing a consortium for implementing online learning has more to do with facilitating communication within districts than actual computer specifications and course selections.

• For online learning, the role of the teacher breaks into three distinct roles: the mentor who is with the student, the teacher providing online instruction, and the course designer (or instructional designer) who makes the course engaging and aligned to standards. As we look ahead to hiring our own staff, we must consider the unique training and experience requirements for each of these roles.

• Finally, we have learned that online learning can be very engaging for any student, especially using the blended models that are present in our consortium. We have an overall success rate of 75% of students passing online courses for both summer school and courses completed so far this school year. We would like it to be higher, but that rate of success for a proof-of-concept year points to a higher success rate once more mentors, teachers, and instructional designers are trained and gain experience and after we collect even more data about what works with the students in our schools.

Don W. Brown, EdD, is an instructional technologist for Lane Education Service District in Eugene, Oregon. He consults with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the Center for Advanced Technology in Education. His research focuses on the implementation of virtual courses.

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Connected Classroom: A Personal Micro Database in the Cloud

Glen Bull — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Tim Berners-Lee’s original goal in creating the World Wide Web was to provide an easy means of sharing physics notes. He envisioned that creating a webpage would be as easy as creating a word processing document. However, the technology for reading webpages advanced faster than the technology for creating them. Web browsers were easy to use, but web editors required mastery of technical skills.

Ward Cunningham wanted to fulfill Berners-Lee’s original vision for the web by providing a way for an average user to create a webpage. He developed a tool that allows users to quickly create webpages without special training: the wiki. Wikis serve a useful function alongside other web services, such as blogs and Facebook. They are particularly helpful when collaborating with a smaller group, such as a class of students. They can also link to newer cloud technologies as needed to create a powerful, flexible platform
for addressing a wide range of tasks.

Personal Information Manager

TiddlyWiki is an example of an easy-to-use, open source personal wiki. You can download it for free and use it as a private database on a single computer or served to the web. By examining this simple wiki, users can come to understand the operation of more full-featured, complex
wikis, such as Wikipedia.

Organized as a personal notebook, TiddlyWiki consists of a series of note cards that users can link to one another. You can download TiddlyWiki as a single file (no installation necessary), and it doesn’t need an internet connection to run on a computer. When an internet connection is available, it is possible to embed links to any webpage.

In addition to displaying content, the program allows you to tag each note card and find all of the cards with similar tags using its search function. The TiddlyWiki application manages the note cards. It can display the contents of any note card, locate and open all of the cards with a given tag,
or create a menu of the main topics in an outline.

Students and teachers could use a personal wiki to take notes, manage tasks, or work on any project that would benefit from a series of linked notes. A TiddlyWiki journal template can generate a note card with a date that is useful for maintaining a diary.

Because the micro database consists of a single file, you can carry it on a USB drive, email it from one user to another, or post a copy on a webpage. This provides a way of using it on a variety of computers throughout the day.

The advent of cloud computing services, such as Dropbox, offers flexible access to a personal wiki. These services enable a user to store files in the cloud and access them across a variety of devices. You can use Dropbox, for example, to synchronize files across Macs, PCs, iPhones, iPads, or Android devices.

Classroom Applications

An electronic file box of note cards can be
useful for any project involving research or categorization. Teachers have traditionally encouraged using note cards for writing and language arts projects. Typically, teachers or students place the subtopic heading at the top of each note card followed by one key point. An electronic note card can be particularly useful for documenting references associated with web sources because it can include embedded links that go directly to the online source.

A teacher could provide a template for an assignment that each student can use for completion of their research. For example, a miniature database can be useful for a science notebook, especially for projects involving a taxonomy or classification system. This can involve phyla in the life sciences, chemical structures in the physical sciences, and so on. Historical events and timelines also lend themselves to a note-card structure, with one event or historical character per note card and links to related cards and/or tags to organize large groups of cards.

When students work in teams, they can import their individual note-card files into a single master file. This provides a way for students to work independently with the goal of contributing to a larger collaborative effort. If students tag the cards they create with their name, teachers can track the contributions of each student.

TiddlyWiki is best suited for small projects involving a few hundred note cards. As a way around this limitation, users can create several linked TiddlyWiki files for a single project.

An Extensible Architecture

TiddlyWiki is fully functional in its standard download, but you can also customize it in many ways. Developers wrote the application using a combination of HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript. Users who are familiar with HTML and CSS can customize the application’s layout, format, and colors.

TiddlyWiki can import plug-ins that extend its capabilities. A large and active user community has developed plug-ins for this purpose. This allows students and educators who may not be familiar with HTML or CSS to customize TiddlyWiki's functionality. There are plug-ins for “to do” lists, a customization to support creative writing, a version of TiddlyWiki with resizable windows, a code sharing tool, extensions that support the development of slideshow presentations, and many others.

Because TiddlyWiki does not require a web server, it also offers a good environment for introducing and teaching web technologies, such as HTML and CSS. This allows students to directly edit HTML and CSS and see the results immediately across multiple pages.

Sharing Projects

The combination of TiddlyWiki plus Dropbox is a particularly powerful way to collaborate. Because Dropbox creates a synchronized local copy of the file on each device, users can access the local copy even without an internet connection. This can be a significant advantage when the connection is intermittent or unreliable. It also results in increased speed of access when the internet is available. Once users re-connect their devices, Dropbox synchronizes the local files.

Because developers designed Tiddly-Wiki as a personal tool, collaborative projects will require some adaptations. A plug-in called TiddlyLock offers multi-user functionality by locking a file so that a second user doesn’t inadvertently overwrite another person’s work.

TiddlySpace is a hosted space that allows many people to edit the same wiki at the same time. There is no charge for creating a TiddlyWiki file on TiddlySpace. This could make it well suited for class projects where students work on the same file.

Resources

Dropbox: www.dropbox.com

TiddlyHub plug-ins: http://plugins.tiddlywiki.org/plugins

TiddlyTools plug-ins: www.tiddlytools.com

TiddlyVault plug-ins: http://tiddlyvault.tiddlyspot.com

TiddlyWiki: www.tiddlywiki.com

TiddlyWiki hosting: http://tiddlyspace.com

TiddlyWiki multi-user plug-in: www.minormania.com/tiddlylock/tiddlylock.html

Glen Bull is co-director of the Center for Technology and Teacher Education in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.

TiddlyWiki is a nonlinear personal web notebook that uses tags to search and display note cards.

Dropbox can synchronize a TiddlyWiki database among multiple devices, including desktop computers, laptops, and mobile phones.

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Point/Counterpoint: Can Assessment Technologies Make Standardized Testing Obsolete?

John Tanner & Elayne Evans — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Yes

Our educational system claims to be about high expectations for all, regardless of ability. It says that, with the right teaching and some effort from the student, a low-achieving student can learn and improve. And yet our standardized testing system is designed to focus only on a student's ability. If it's time and effort that you standardize, then you guarantee that on any given date the amount each student learns will differ according to his or her ability. Consider that if you want to standardize an outcome—what it is you want them to learn—then time and effort must become variables in the system, so that ability ceases to be as important.

We have the capacity to do this easily right now by using technology to allow us to refocus where, what, and how we standardize. In fact, we don't even need the technology. In 1993, following my first year of teaching university freshman English, I realized that I wasn't doing my students much good. After grading my first paper, I could tell the good writers from the bad, and their first grades were a good indication of their final grades. Most students left my class with the same capacity to write as when they arrived.

During my second year, I tried something new. My syllabus indicated that the only way to pass was to write at least one extremely good paper. It might take a poor writer the entire semester or a good writer a week, but that was not within my control. My job was to support them based on their needs. I would determine grades by how often they wrote well, with a single success resulting in a C and additional successful work eventually earning an A.

I had good writers who earned their A's by the halfway point, while other good (but lazy) students wrote well once and took a C. I had poor writers who struggled all semester to earn the C, and a few who, through effort and extra time with me, actually achieved A's and B's. Regardless, no one walked out the door without having met a certain standard. On the last day of class, I could have easily ranked my students in terms of writing ability, but at that point, it no longer mattered.

I had found a way to standardize an outcome and de-standardize everything else. All my students were given a true opportunity to achieve at a very high level, and almost all of them did. My students differed dramatically in terms of the date on which they accomplished the task, the effort required, and certainly their ability to write, but by removing time and effort as constants, ability no longer mattered.

A standardized test given once each year only answers the ability question—what each student is able to do at that moment in time—but, as my example shows, the bridge between ability and success has a lot to do with time and effort as well.

This is where technology comes in. It can enable and scale what I discovered years ago. Establishing expectations for students, tracking student progress, and steering resources are no longer technologically challenging. A system that makes time and effort the variables and student success the constant is easily within our grasp.

Standardize the right things, and standardized testing will cease to matter.

— John Tanner is executive director of Test Sense, an organization with an innovative approach to turning data into information, appropriately and with a focus on the student.

New technologies are rapidly transforming the way we evaluate student learning. Emerging digital tools and improved assessment strategies are having an impressive impact in the classroom. This is not because testing is the most important aspect of education. Rather, assessment is meant to guide instruction. Testing should not consume valuable time that could be spent instead on what is infinitely more important: learning and teaching.

Modern advances in related tools allow teachers and test proctors to more efficiently (and sometimes more effectively) evaluate students. Ideally, this means teachers will waste less time creating tests, and students will waste less time taking them. However, this will not render standardized testing obsolete. If anything, standardized testing practices will improve just enough that our dependence on them will grow.

Maybe we will make standardized testing, regardless of its form, more valuable or conduct tests more swiftly due to these new ideas and technological advances. But the medium does not change the nature of standardized testing, which suggests that every student should learn the same things at the same time (often in the same way) as their peers.

While performance-based assessment may have more merit than a multiple-choice exam, for example, the standardization of requirements and expectations will not change because of new strategies or software. Many lawmakers in the United States embrace standardized testing as an accurate appraisal of the success of our education system. Teachers are held responsible for their students’ performance, regardless of classroom demographics, personal lives, or individual challenges. This will not change until we are bold enough to challenge the convention that students must be grouped by age to learn a regulated list of concepts.

What are the goals of an education system? If we mean to create a standardized experience for our youth so that every child grows up to have known, seen, and done similar things, we do them a great disservice. A unique perspective is invaluable to any situation. Just as biodiversity is important to the survival of a species because it endows the ability to resist disease or withstand environmental challenges, a heterogeneity of exposure and understanding is vital to our students’ intellectual future and success.

Standardized testing may shift and change in the future, but it can only become obsolete when the system begins to recognize the value of diverse education and experience. New assessment technology will only change our methods, not our madness.

— Elayne Evans is an instructional designer and an adjunct faculty member at Western Oregon University. She is currently teaching technology integration courses for preservice teachers and researching the flipped class model.

To contribute to this and future discussions, go to
L&L’s group page on the ISTE Community Ning at
www.iste-community.org/groups/LandL.

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Student Profile: Florida Boy Finds His Mission with Quest Atlantis

Diana Fingal — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

To say Karthik Sreeram of Lake Mary, Florida, is a busy kid would be like calling Apple just another computer company. This 11-year-old takes part in more activities in the fifth grade than many young adults do during their entire college careers.

For starters, he’s a first-degree black belt in taekwondo and a junior champion in tennis. He studies a type of
Indian classical music called Carnatic and takes violin
and vocal lessons. He participates in events for the local Indian cultural association and volunteers at his temple.

At school, he participates in Odyssey of the Mind, starred in the school play, sings in the chorus, and won
a prestigious Presidential Award for earning straight A’s each term during fourth and fifth grade.

None of that, however, describes what Karthik is most famous for. Karthik is a computer whiz who represents his county on the Student Council of Quest Atlantis (QA), an
international learning and teaching project that uses a 3D multi-user environment to immerse kids in educational tasks.

The student council is made up of teams from all over the world who develop 3D virtual spaces within QA that focus on seven social commitments, says Karthik’s adviser, Janine McGrath, an educational technology educator at Seminole County Public Schools in Orlando, Florida.

Karthik’s team developed a mission about the melting of the polar ice caps. The students came up with a story line, wrote the script, and built the virtual world with only a little guidance from McGrath and a QA adviser. As team leader, Karthik’s role was to make sure everyone was on task and to communicate the team’s needs to the advisers.

“I feel that this is a very big honor, because to represent a county is just way out!” he says. “It can be fun a lot of times, as I would be one of the first students to explore new places in the QA world. But sometimes it is hard,
like when you have to type up dialogue for the nonplaying characters.”

If it’s hard for Karthik, it’s safe to say it would be hard for most adults. McGrath says teachers have a hard time keeping up with this kid. “His mind works at about a million miles an hour, and he is always very reflective on his work,” McGrath says. “He is patient; however, some of us struggle to keep up with him at times, as he easily makes connections and can see the big picture.”

That might explain why Karthik is the go-to guy when technology goes awry at Heathrow Elementary School.

“Once a teacher was not able to access a program, and so I was called out of class to help,” he recalls. “I experimented and found out that a program was missing. So I installed it and solved the problem. The teacher was very happy.”

As a pint-sized fourth grader, he taught a class of high school students to make iMovies, and he’s even trained district teachers how to use Quest Atlantis, which, he says, was an honor.

“I have learned a lot from them, and I feel proud to share my QA knowledge with them,” he says.

He’s a big advocate of ed tech. “I am always trying to see different ways I could use technology for learning, and I like to challenge myself to learn new skills. I think technology, when used properly, is a great tool for all students.”

—Diana Fingal is senior editor of L&L.

Student Profiles highlight kids who use technology in creative and authentic ways.

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Learning Connections: Find the truth about the Pacific tree octopus

Keith Ferrell — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Find the Truth about the Pacific Tree Octopus

One of my fourth grade classes was about to embark on a research project, so in a recent lesson, I decided to teach and hone their research skills. Not wanting to go the standard route of teaching them how to Google more efficiently, I selected two topics, asked students to search for information on one of those topics, then share what they had learned. The two topics students could choose from were “The Tree Octopus” and “All About Explorers.” (I did skew the activity purposefully by telling them that they had to search for those exact phrases).

Most students went directly to Google and, without much thought, clicked on the first link and began writing down “factual” information about their chosen topic.
Some facts they discovered included:

• Christopher Columbus was born in 1951 in Sydney,
Australia.

• Marco Polo, Bill Gates, and Sam Walton helped finance Magellan’s expedition to the Spice Islands.

• Lewis and Clark were inspired to become world-famous explorers after being mesmerized by the stunning color photographs in National Geographic magazine.

• The Pacific Northwest tree octopus (Octopus paxarbolis) can be found in the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula on the west coast of North America.

• Unlike most other cephalopods, tree octopuses are
amphibious, spending only their early life and the
period of their mating season in their ancestral
aquatic environment.

• Tree octopuses have eyesight comparable to humans.

And so on…

The students shared their findings with the class, and as the discussion moved on, several of the students began to see some flaws in our research. We then began to inspect the websites more carefully and found many erroneous claims and facts throughout. The students were stupefied and could not believe that there were websites that look so real but lie. One student said, “They even have pictures!” They were more amazed that these were the first two hits that Google presented them in their searches. We continued the discussion with what to look for in websites that are reputable, using the “5 Ws”— who, what, when, where, and why—looking for URL suffixes (.edu, .gov, etc.), and reviewing how to double-check sources.

One of the sites where students found erroneous information, All about Explorers, was actually developed by teachers to educate students about the pitfalls of blindly Googling without using critical-thinking skills.

I’ve done many internet research lessons in the past, but none have the lasting impact that this one did. The kids jumped right into the task and rolled along smoothly, impressed with how easy the task was and what good researchers they were. The harsh dose of reality truly sticks with students and really makes them think about facts and information they find on the web.

—Keith Ferrell is the technology integration specialist at Singapore American School. He has been a classroom teacher since 1996 and has taught everything from 2nd to 12th grade. Read his blog, Ed Tech Ideas, at http://edtechideas.com.

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Voices Carry: Help the White House Focus Its Vision for Ed Tech

Hilary Goldmann — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Since President Obama took office, ISTE has supported many elements of the administration’s vision for education. While we continue to agree with much of the White House’s objectives for education today, we cannot support its implementation as reflected in current budget and policy proposals for classroom technology. We do offer an alternative proposal, and we have a committed community of educators who are willing to work tirelessly to improve learning and teaching.

Arne Duncan’s article on page 10 makes it clear that the secretary of education and the Obama administration recognize the potential of effective classroom technology. The White House published a National Education Technology Plan that has a strong vision for digital age learning and a National Broadband Plan that included a significant focus on school internet connectivity. In the early days of this administration, ed tech was one of only a handful of education programs included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Back then, it was exciting to see funding for the Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program become a priority along with Title I and special-education funding.

Current budget and policy proposals, however, are heading in the opposite direction. Instead of leveraging the power and the purse of the federal government to promote classroom technology, White House policy recommendations view technology as an optional component. The administration’s proposal to eliminate funding for EETT sets back the progress our schools are making. Its ESEA reauthorization proposal to consolidate ed tech into a larger funding stream is vague and provides no assurances of funding to support student learning with technology.

The administration has invested heavily in connecting schools to the internet, but a broadband connection won’t serve its purpose if there are no appropriate tools at the other end of the pipe or teachers who are prepared to use them. While research and development for innovative learning technologies as outlined in the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Education (ARPA-ED) proposal are laudable, it should not come at the expense of funding for professional development to train teachers and administrators to use the technologies we have today.

As Secretary Duncan points out in his article, “Research shows that students who benefit from both technology and effective teachers learn more than students who have one but not the other.” With that in mind, we feel that it is more important than ever to provide dedicated funding for the development and support of great teachers who know how to integrate technology effectively.

ISTE’s Ed Tech Trio for 2011 (http://tinyurl.com/6658bws) outlines our priorities for edu-cation. This proposal recognizes the tough dec-isions in front of us, as well as the values and vision we share with President Obama and
policy makers around the world. Would you like to participate in this important discussion? You can find plenty of tips, resources, and ideas for year-round activities on our advocacy webpage (www.iste.org/advocacy).

Hilary Goldmann, ISTE’s senior government affairs officer, has 20 years of experience in public policy and advocacy. Her column appears in every other issue of L&L.

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Member Profiles: ISTE's Young Educator of the Year Is a Resourceful Guy

Diana Fingal — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

If you’re one of those educators who’s gone searching for pay dirt on the internet, only to find more great ideas than you know what to do with, you understand that free digital resources can be both a blessing and a curse. No matter how well you tag and bookmark, it can often be a challenge to find that great interactive science lesson you remember discovering last summer.

Fortunately, there’s another free web resource that can save you from the burden of having, well, too many free web resources. EduTecher (www.eduTecher.net) is a labor of love that Adam Bellow created to rein in resource overload.

“I started eduTecher in 2007 to keep track of all the great sites I was finding,” he says. Before long, he shared it with the college students he was teaching, and they loved it. “I decided then to devote more time and energy to making it one of the best places to learn about new web tools and how to use them.”

Today, the site, which was redesigned in April, is a gold mine of easy-to-find sites. EduTecher allows users to keep a “backpack” of resources that they can categorize, annotate, and share with friends. There are no ads, and although it takes a tremendous amount of time and his own resources to maintain, it will always be free, Bellow says.

“With a loving wife and two young boys, it is not always easy to make time,” he admits. “But when I hear from users about how helpful the site is to them, it is all worth it.”

Bellow is the winner of ISTE’s 2011 Young Educator of the Year Award. Last year he was named an ISTE Emerging Leader.

He started out teaching high school students with learning disabilities and then became a districtwide technology training specialist. Now he is the director of educational technology for the College Board Schools in New York, which are public schools that serve students in low-income and traditionally underserved areas. They focus on preparing students for college. Bellow works with educational leaders and teachers to help them infuse technology into the classroom.

His passion for technology began years ago when he was a young boy. He loved the educational computer game “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” and he started programming his own games in BASIC as a third grader, he says.

“I think what I really fell in love with was what the tools let me do,” Bellow says. “While I loved the game aspect of computers, I really enjoyed creating art, animations, and music.”

And he enjoys finding educational uses for tools that were not designed for classroom use. As a teacher in 2004, he wanted to help a student with dyslexia who could not read very well. There weren’t very many audio books available at that time. So Bellow decided to use GarageBand to record the student’s assigned book. He recorded it on CD, put it on iTunes, and then uploaded the MP3 file to an iPod.

“The student was so appreciative,” he says. “It felt so good to be able to help him.”

It was experiences like that one that made Bellow an evangelist for ed tech. He goes to great lengths to win over naysayers. Bellow recalls a tech training session he taught several years ago. One of the teachers in his group made it clear from the get-go that she was not taking the class willingly.

“She told me point blank: ‘I am retiring. I don’t care. I’m not going to use this.’ ”

Bellow remembers how she kept her head down “just like a teenager.” But ultimately she was expected to adapt one of her lessons for the electronic whiteboard. When she did, something clicked, and she got it. “She thanked me for breathing life into her lesson and helping her go out on top,” he says.

And that’s what it’s all about, he says. “Educational technology can inspire, encourage, challenge, and enable teachers of all content areas and learners of all abilities.”

—Diana Fingal is senior editor of L&L.

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Learning Connections: Abracadabra - It's Augmented Reality!

Raphael Raphael — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —Arthur C. Clarke

Books suddenly appear in your hands. Flames shoot from your fingertips. Snow falls indoors. To anyone seeing augmented reality for the first time, it certainly looks like magic. In truth, augmented reality—adding layers of information on the real world, usually in real time—is not entirely new. If you’ve seen the yellow first-down line appear during televised American football games or have seen footage from a soldier’s helmet with real-time on-screen information about a target or locale, you’ve experienced augmented reality (AR). The ghost suddenly next to you in the mirror at the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland is also AR.

Though it’s not completely new, a recent explosion of interest has been fueled by developments that allow greater direct participation with the “magic” of AR.

The proliferation of mobile computing, dramatic spikes in processor speed, and greater access to more generous bandwidth are driving this innovation. Ironically, economic uncertainty has also boosted the surge. Economic crisis and technological innovation are old friends, from the invention of sound film during the Depression to the graphical user interface (GUI) in the early 1980s. Today, businesses, eager for exciting, new ways to get folks to spend a buck, have invested heavily in AR, which many see as the coolest new way to make their products and company look good.

This recent move toward greater availability and more widespread use of AR, along with the rise of touch and gestural interfaces, is already radically changing the way we interact with computers. That’s why it is essential that we as educators find strategies to introduce AR to our students—not because it’s the magic of powerful corporate gods, but because of the exciting new ways students can use it to create.

While AR will certainly be a compelling learning tool, it’s just beginning to formally cross paths with education and educational technology. At the time of this writing, just a handful of children’s books had been released with AR content, and a small number of software companies had announced plans to release “AR curriculums.” What form these will take is not yet clear. Examples already available, though, offer valuable immediate points of discussion with students. Demonstrations of GE’s Plug into the Smart Grid and the Getty Museum’s 17th Century Cabinet of Curiosities AR display (see Resources on page 26) offer great starting points to get students writing and visualizing what they imagine the future of this technology holds.

Now, viewed through your screen, the virtual object appears to be magically mapped onto the real world. Wherever the marker is placed—whether in your hand or on your forehead—the object now appears. You move, it moves.

Many AR objects also provide additional information when you move them in front of your webcam. For example, 17th century “Cabinet of Wonders” on the Getty site allows you to open its drawers and view it from different angles.

While AR web content like the Getty’s can be stunning, the best tool for bringing AR into the classroom in a way that empowers kids is the versatile AR authoring tool Zooburst (see L&L, May 2011, “Create Your Own Pop-Up,” page 35). It’s a simple and intuitive digital-storytelling tool for creating AR-viewable pop-up books. Students drag and drop elements into stories. Primary students can create narratives from scratch or bring in digital creations from other applications, such as Kid Pix. Characters can link to additional text or sound in the premium version.

In addition to storytelling, older students can use Zooburst to create digital portfolios of creative work using Photoshop, Comic Life, and other programs and embed them on a website. Each book also includes a discussion forum.

Those without a webcam can see a Zooburst creation as a digital pop-up storybook. Those with a webcam, though, get the application’s full magic: Place a printed Zooburst marker anywhere in your physical environment, point the webcam at it, and the AR pop-up book magically appears. One mode also allows basic gestural interface for turning pages. The site even lets students take and send snapshots interacting with the books. The premium Zooburst adds teacher management tools, such as the ability to create student accounts and a private environment for students’ responses to each others’ work. Zooburst has no peers. Other AR authoring tools exist, but none that are intended for nonprogrammers. Zooburst is a powerful way for students to experience augmented reality with their own creations and to begin to feel at home in what may well be the augmented age.

Here are a few innovations that are already available or will be soon:

Mobile apps. A growing number of AR mobile computer apps that are both practical and playful are already available. Wikitude provides additional information about the immediate environment. Pointing your phone at a restaurant might provide a peek at its menu; pointing at a monument may yield additional historical images (field trips, anyone?). Several apps act as virtual telescopes. Pocket Universe and Star Walk allow you to point your device up to the sky and see layers of information, such as star names and constellations. A growing list of AR games includes TagDis and the Hidden Park.

Social networks. It gets even better in the future. Some day soon you’ll be able to point your mobile device
at people and have their physical location mapped to available “web-able” information, such as their Facebook status, recent tweets, and Google data. Currently available applications include TagWhat and Tweet 360, both of which allow you to map tags (or tweets) to specific locations.

Virtual desktops. Other projections include the ability to map your desktop environment onto physical spaces. That is, you could conceivably walk on desktop folders and click on documents on your walls.

Virtual training. One prediction that has recently gone live involves devices for mechanical work that can, for example, display floating arrows directing an airplane mechanic where to place crucial screws.

We are just beginning to see the “magic” these new tools will offer. As we enter this exciting period of
dramatic changes—both cultural and technological—AR tools such as Zooburst encourage our students to feel at home as creators in the augmented age.

Resources

GE’s Plug into the Smart Grid: www.ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid

Getty Museum’s 17th Century Cabinet of
Curiosities AR display: www. getty.edu/art/exhibitions/north_pavilion/ar/index.html

Layar: www.layar.com

ManyCam (free webcam software with simple AR features): www.manycam.com

Pocket Universe: www.craicdesign.com

Star Walk: www.vitotechnology.com/star-
walk.html

TagDis: www.tagdis.com

The Hidden Park: www.hiddenpark.com

Wikitude: www.wikitude.org/en

Zooburst: www.zooburst.com

—Raphael Raphael is a media specialist for International School Services in Atyrau, Kazakhstan. He also lectures on film and media at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He tweets @raphaelspeak.

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Feature: Harness the power of technology

Arne Duncan — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Today, U.S. educators are teaching in the midst of a technological revolution. Technology promises to provide innovative solutions in the nation’s classrooms, just as it has transformed the way we communicate, socialize, and conduct business. Now it is time for us to harness technology to revolutionize the way students learn and the way teachers teach.

Innovative teachers like you are leading this technological transformation in our classrooms today. You use powerful resources to engage students, deepen their understanding, expand their creativity, and help them solve problems. Because you have the passion, knowledge, and experience, you can prepare your colleagues to follow your lead and play a pivotal role in our national effort to transform our schools into innovative learning environments.

I understand that you face considerable challenges as you create digital learning environments. Some schools are rich with technology but are still stuck in the 20th century model of teaching and learning. Some teachers still see technology as an add-on to their lesson plans rather than integral to the process of teaching and learning. Computer labs too often are testing factories that don’t harness technology’s potential to accelerate student achievement. Far too many schools—particularly those in rural areas—do not have access to broadband internet, which limits teachers’ and students’ abilities to leverage the productive value of technology to assist the learning process. Finally, for all the progress our schools have made, educators still don’t have an organized and coherent understanding of the most effective and engaging uses of technology.

Technology Engages Students

It’s essential that you work with your peers to overcome these obstacles. For starters, we know that technology has the power to engage. Students who are hesitant to read books may become interested when assignments from that reading send them to the internet for a scavenger hunt or to research ways to solve a character’s problem. Much like the printing press allowed people to learn from books as well as teachers, digital technology offers learners powerful new environments that include simulations, animations, scaffolded and guided practice sets, and experts who may be far away. With your firsthand experiences, you are uniquely qualified to articulate, showcase, and explore the power of technologies for learning.

An exciting aspect of technology that I often hear about from teachers is its power to personalize learning experiences. Technology can pace instruction based on each student’s needs, so that a student having trouble with a mathematical concept can get remediation at the same time that an advanced student moves on to higher concepts. Many emerging programs support learning, including videos, online tutoring networks, and adaptive programs. With the facilitation of an effective teacher, these innovations address students’ specific learning needs and accelerate achievement. As leaders in your field, your role is to adapt and leverage technology to focus on solving learning problems.

ARPA-ED to Pursue Breakthroughs

To encourage the education sector to invest the necessary funds and speed up the pace of innovation of learning technologies, the U.S. Department of Education has proposed the establishment of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Education, or ARPA-ED. Modeled on a similar agency in the U.S. Department of Defense that spurred the creation of technologies such as the internet and GPS, ARPA-ED will aggressively pursue technological breakthroughs that have similar potential to transform teaching and learning. ARPA-ED offers the opportunity to create an environment where teachers integrate technology into everything that happens in our nation’s classrooms. It will move us away from our current structure, where technology is an isolated program that isn’t part of students’ daily learning experiences.

ISTE NETS Guide Tech Integration

No matter what funding or supports exist for technology, the truth of the matter is that teachers are still the most essential part of the learning process. Now more than ever, schools need you. Research shows that students who benefit from both technology and effective teachers learn more than students who have one but not the other. Great teachers employ smart uses of technology to personalize the learning experience and engage students in the pursuit of the learning they need.

ISTE already has done important work creating the NETS, which define how teachers should integrate technology into the process of learning and teaching (iste.org/standards). By using the NETS for students, administrators, and teachers, you become the leaders in your schools and districts, working with colleagues to help them master new methods of teaching with technologies that they may be afraid of using. Your role is critical as you identify ways that you and your peers can take advantage of existing technologies in your classrooms today and identify emerging technologies that will enhance learning opportunities in the future. We need to continue to hear your voice so that local, state, and federal policy makers are making decisions based on the best information from experts in the classroom.

Five Goals to Advance Ed Tech

The U.S. Department of Education has a distinct role to play. We want to support your work with resources and leadership. We have a comprehensive and coordinated series of initiatives designed to improve access to technology and support its use in the classroom. Through the National Education Technology Plan, we have identified five goals for the federal government to advance the digital classroom.

Learning: Engage and Empower

All learners will have engaging and empowering learning experiences both in and out of school that prepare them to be active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants in our globally networked society.

Assessment: Measure What Matters

At all levels, our education system will leverage the power of technology to measure what matters and use assessment data for continuous improvement.

Teaching: Prepare and Connect

Technology will support professional educators individually and in teams by connecting them to data, content, resources, expertise, and learning experiences that enable and inspire more effective teaching for all learners.

Infrastructure: Access and Enable

All students and educators will have access to a comprehensive infrastructure for learning when and where they need it.

Productivity: Redesign and Transform

Our education system will redesign processes and structures at all levels to take advantage of the power of technology to improve learning outcomes while making more efficient use of time, money, and staff.

Our policies address three specific needs that are critical to advancing technology in the classroom.

We are supporting states as they raise their standards to reflect the knowledge and skills that will be necessary to succeed in the 21st century. These standards will give technology educators a clear road map for designing the creative, engaging, and powerful technology-based learning tools that will prepare students for success in college and careers. To build assessments aligned with these new standards, the Education Department has awarded $350 million to states to create assessments that will measure students’ progress on the full range of standards aligned with college and career expectations. These assessments will go beyond the end-of-course standardized bubble tests that are common across the country today. They will use computer adaptive technologies and challenge students to analyze and solve complex problems, communicate clearly, synthesize information, apply knowledge, and generalize learning to other settings. I am convinced that these assessments will be game changers in education.

To connect teachers with learning experiences of their own, the department is leveraging the power of social media and other technology to create Connected Online Communities of Practice. The goal is to build large and sustainable online communities that will allow teachers to share practices, access experts, and solve problems.

For technology to be truly transformative, it needs to be accessible to everyone. Unfortunately, that’s not the case today, especially in rural areas, in low-income urban neighborhoods, and for students who have disabilities. The Obama administration has made a significant investment in expanding broadband to areas without access to high-speed internet. President Obama has set the goal of ensuring that 98% of the country has available broadband in the next five years. With $7.2 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, and the Federal Communications Commission are financing the construction of broadband networks into unserved areas. These dollars will provide high-speed internet in thousands of schools. In addition, the FCC has changed the E-Rate program to support innovative approaches that expand the reach of schools’ networks. Schools are now allowed to use E-Rate funds to provide access during after-school hours, and a pilot program will test the use of wireless networks that students can access in their homes. These are essential investments for closing the digital divide, which would otherwise make the transformation to a digital classroom impossible in many of our communities.

All of these investments will help the transition from a predominantly print-based classroom to a digital learning environment. But using technology is not an end in itself. The ultimate goal is to vastly improve the opportunity to learn, accelerate achievement, and prepare students for success in the 21st century workforce. The ability to work, innovate, and be productive using technology is essential for professionals in almost every sector. Doctors and auto mechanics, architects and artists, engineers and teachers—these and just about every other profession will need workers who can harness the power of technology. For children to excel, we have to prepare them today.

We do so by unleashing the untapped potential of learning technology—with your commitment, passion,
and expertise.

Arne Duncan is the U.S. secretary of education. Prior to his appointment, Duncan served
as the chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools from June 2001 through December 2008.

Post your comments about this piece on the ISTE Community Ning (www.iste-community.org/group/landl).

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Point/Counterpoint: Should Students Use Their Real Names on the Web?

David Wees & Dan Maas — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Yes

Educators have been insisting that students not use their real names online for several years now due to the mistaken notion that if we hide their identities, we are protecting them. In fact, quite the opposite is true for a couple of reasons.

The first is that we are giving the kids a false sense of security. They think that because no one knows who they are, they can post whatever they want. As a result, they are posting all sorts of things without thinking about the consequences of their actions, including cruel comments about others. The real issue with this is that if any questionable content they publish online should go viral, it is likely that someone who knows them will see it and share it with their local peer group, which could have a devastating effect on self-esteem and personal relationships.

Pseudonyms don't actually protect the kids either. With web 2.0 technology, online predators don't actually have to be from the local neighbourhood to have a negative impact on children. They can just prowl the internet from any location and look for kids to prey on. Just because the kids have a pseudonym doesn't mean they run a smaller risk of being contacted by these predators. We could have a whole different discussion about whether the actual risk of kids being exposed to online predators is very high, but that aside, once the kids connect to a predator through social media, having a pseudonym doesn't protect them from the social engineering tricks these people use to get kids to give up their personal information and locations.

Second, the rewards of a student sharing his or her work outweighs the risks involved. Kids who have built up a repertoire of their exemplary work online are going to find it far easier to find a job once they leave school. We have a very talented artist at my school who produced a masterful five-minute anime cartoon for her personal project in school. This work could very likely lead her to a whole career in graphic and animation design before she even finishes school!

We also teach kids that it is OK to hide online, when really one of our objectives for education should be to teach them how to be good communicators. Communication between people is much more effective when the whole person is involved in the discussion. Ever notice that the anonymous comments on YouTube and blogs are always worse than the ones that are connected to a real name? Similarly, anonymous letters to the editor in newspapers are always far more negative than letters people
have signed their names to.

Instead of hiding kids behind pseudonyms online, we should
encourage them to post their work openly and publicly so the world can see. This way, students will learn how to appropriately navigate the web with our assistance and will be much less likely to post inappropriate material.

—David Wees has taught mathematics in the United States, England, Thailand, and Canada. He co-authored a textbook, has a master's of educational technology from the University of British Columbia, and is an

The fatal error people make when discussing educational practices is to think of children as mini adults. I doubt many adults in the world would want their digital footprints or portfolios to include their writings and drawings from fifth grade. Kids grow up at different rates, and the question of whether or not to publish under your true identity is a very adult decision. That’s why anonymity should be the default setting until a student is ready and decides to claim his or her digital work for a footprint.

Cybersafety experts, such as the investigators at the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office (www.co.jefferson.co.us/da/da_T99_R78.htm) in my area, do presentations at our schools all the time. Their experiences are valid and many. They realize that students are vulnerable in many situations and caution that children must learn basic sensibilities to keep them as safe as possible. They advise us that we should avoid connecting a name, a picture, and a location.

Critics will cry out that this will hardly assure student safety. True enough. Telling kids not to talk to strangers will also fall short of making certain a child is safe from abduction or other harm. But we tell them anyway, not because that one behavior is the silver bullet for child safety, but because it can help improve the situation and lower the odds. The same is true for online anonymity. It is certainly possible for a person intent on harm to use masked online information to find a child, but let’s make their work as difficult as possible.

It is important to teach kids to stay anonymous and tell them why we want them to do so. After discussions on cybersafety that included the reasons why we try to keep students fairly anonymous online, I have overheard students remarking that they needed to change their Facebook or Twitter accounts at home.

An important caveat is that students’ identities should be hidden only from outside individuals. Teachers and peers should know exactly who has written a post so they are accountable for their interactions. This is where naming procedures—ways students and teachers can know each other without divulging their identities to outsiders—become useful. Identity protection is a critical 21st century skill.

Once a child reaches adolescence and is ready to assume a digital footprint, I’m all for full disclosure. But it should be their choice. I use my full name on my LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. When students ask me about that, I have a chance to explain what a digital footprint is and why I want one.

The bottom line for me is that school is a place where kids can grow up making mistakes without having to pay penalties for them for the rest of their lives. Plunging them into the deep end of full identity disclosure for the purpose of creating a digital footprint ignores the developmental needs of children. So keep kids reasonably anonymous until they are ready to behave like adults, because a digital footprint is a very adult concept.

—Dan Maas, EdD, is the chief information officer for Littleton Public Schools in Littleton, Colorado, USA. He led the implementation of more than 5,000 Linux-based netbooks and districtwide Google services in a literacy initative titled “Inspired Writing.” You can visit his blog at http://lps2.it/blogs.

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