Category Archives: Technology Resources

The Massachusetts New Literacies Institute

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Should I or shouldn’t I? That’s my question right now as I have been asked to be a teacher-leader in an upcoming New Literacies Institute being hosted by our state Department of Education. It certainly seems intriguing and it’s exciting that our state is dipping its toes into New Literacies.

The description of the week-long event, with scattered other activities throughout the year, includes:

To compete in a global information age, students must develop the ability to effectively read and comprehend information on the Internet and to use other information and communication technologies well. Reading comprehension skills such as understanding search results or critically evaluating information laden with social, commercial, and political motives are essential for any student wishing to skillfully comprehend information online for content area learning. So, too, are effective communication skills including e-mail, video, and other digital tools, as well as inquiry models for learning. This Institute will help participants enhance their own skills in these areas and develop effective instructional strategies, using online tools, to promote skill development and academic knowledge acquisition in their students.

Also, on the flier:

Teachers will:

• Develop expertise with teaching the new literacies of online reading comprehension and learning in your grade level or subject area.
• Design and produce video and new media learning products for student learning.
• Adapt innovative social networking environments for use in 21st century classrooms.
• Explore dynamic instructional models for teaching 21st century skills.
• Learn how your class can collaborate with other classrooms around the world.
• Become an instructional leader for change.
• Engage a pioneering community of teacher leaders who continue to collaborate after the Institute.
• Gain access to the latest technology and facilities of the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center in Cambridge, MA
• Have fun!

The institute will be headed by Professor Don Leu, of UCONN, who has extensive work in the field.  There are guest keynote speakers (including Sara Kajder Bridget Dalton,  and Yong Zhao) and the work of the 10 state-wide teacher leaders, like possibly me, will be to partner up with institute leaders and work with small groups of teachers. Sort of like a helper.

Sounds cool, eh?

BUT, my trepidation is that the Institute takes place during the very last week of our school year, meaning I would miss the last few days of school with the kids I have had all year. I would also miss our Recognition Night ceremony — our formal “good bye” to the kids. I am strugging with this because I want to be part of those events.

So, I am not sure. I am leaning towards the Institute — it’s hard to pass up — but I want to ask some colleagues what they think and get some more feedback from my principal.

Stay tuned …

Peace (in the decisions),
Kevin

In Praise of Teachers …

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Yesterday, I wrote about a workshop I was to give during the afternoon in a school in the large city down the road (I have another one this afternoon). My idea is to show free/no-cost tools to teachers in hopes of giving them time to play in the workshop and envision use in the classroom.

I sing in praise of the 20 teachers in the session because, despite emails back two weeks and urges from me to the administration and tech person to check out the sites and unblock the filter, there were hurdles galore.

First, the filter was full-on, blocking most of the sites that we intended to use. I had to run through the halls and offices to find the administrator, who had to call the tech support person (in other building) and then finally, most of what I needed was unblocked.

Then, the browsers on the computers in the lab where we were located were not updated and had no Adobe Flash software. You realize when Flash is not there how important it is to so many sites (maybe Steve Jobs has a point!). And of course, I did not have any administrative access so I could not load Flash myself. Yikes! I asked for patience from the group of teachers and began tinkering around and came up with a solution that worked, but was confusing: we needed to use one browser (Firefox) for one site, and then another browser (Internet Explorer) for the other sites.

For many of us, this does not seem like a big deal.

But I know from experience that the last thing you want is for teachers who little technology background to have too many hurdles. It just reinforces in their heads how difficult it is to do this “tech stuff” and they quit before they start.

That didn’t happen.

This group of teachers was game for whatever I threw out there and were ready to play and explore. I bounced around a lot, helping navigate browsers and websites, but it worked. No one stormed out of the room. No one threw up their hands in frustration. They stuck with it, and soon, they were putting up notes on a Wallwisher, making a webcomic and creating a Glog.

We’ll see how it goes today …

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

Workshop: Free Tech Tools

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I’m heading into a nearby school district this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon to work with two groups of teachers on a technology workshop with the theme of “no cost technology for teachers.” I’ve been trying to figure out the best game plan (one day will be mostly middle school teachers and one day, mostly lower elementary).

Here is what I decided. First of all, it’s not going to be me, talking. It’s going to them, playing. I just hope and cross my fingers that the tech people at this school have not gone overboard with their filter, although I have been assured that the filter will be turned off for my workshops. We’ll see.

I am going to:

  • start with Wallwisher and get them brainstorming and sharing out ways they already use some technology in the classroom. These folks are from different subject areas.
  • move to using Make Beliefs Comix for some webcomic creation, which is always a hit in workshops because the site is just so darn easy to use and requires no registration. This and Wallwisher are tools they could use tomorrow, if they wanted.
  • shift to Glogster for the middle school teachers (this is where I worry about filter issues) and have them create a glog about a favorite book or author. I have set up accounts for them under my classroom.
  • for the lower elementary teachers, instead of Glogster, I am going to have them use Storybird for picture book story creations. This seems like it would be more useful for them than Glogster.
  • I have also created a list of “extension activities” that includes PicLits, Search Story Creator, and Voicethread.

We’ll see how it goes. The workshop will end with another visit to Wallwisher for some virtual exit slips on what technology they can envision using with their students.

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

Winning Projects of the Digital Media and Learning Competition

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These 10 projects who came out on top of the Digital Media and Learning Competition (sponsored through HASTAC and the MacArthur Foundation) are interesting and really do seem to push the possibilities of learning in the digital environment.

• Conservation Connection: Using webcasting, video blogging and social networking sites, this project connects kids from Chicago’s West Side with kids in Fiji to work together to protect Fijian coral reefs.

• Mobile Action Lab: Combining the expertise of social entrepreneurs and technologists and the knowledge and ideas of Oakland, Calif.-based teens, this project helps develop mobile phone applications that serve Oakland communities.

• Click! The Online Spy School: Designed to encourage girls’ engagement in the sciences, Click!Online is a web-based, augmented reality game for teen girls to solve mysteries in biomedical science, environmental protection and expressive technology.

• Ecobugs: An augmented reality game that creates, collects and monitors the health of virtual bugs and their habitats.

• Fab@School: Introduces students to digital fabrication, mathematical modeling and engineering using a low-cost open-source system. Kids invent and design their own creations from mind’s eye to physical form.

• Metrovoice: Youth write and produce videos on an issue on their block or neighborhood. The videos are geocoded and play on city buses as the bus passes through the featured neighborhood.

• Nox No More: Enables kids to upload GPS-gathered data that trace their movements for a week—did they take the bus to their friend’s house or have mom drive? The data is converted to points, and kids compete to be most environmentally conscious.

• Hole-in-the-Wall: Installed in small kiosks on sidewalks, these computer stations offer games in a variety of subjects and skills to kids in Bhutan, Cambodia, India and elsewhere, bringing technology to underserved areas.

• Scratch: This simple programming tool allows kids up to age 8 to create their own games, stories, animations and simulations. The online network allows kids to collaborate on designs, offer suggestions to others, and learn from others as they develop as creative thinkers.

• Youth AppLab: This program supplements D.C. teens’ computer science classes with an after-school opportunity to create phone apps for the Droid. Winners of the best apps are offered internships with technology startups in the D.C. area.

Peace (in the learning),
Kevin

3D Picture Book Experiment w/Zooburst

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I saw this new site — Zooburst — somewhere or another, and given that my student teacher is right now doing pop-up poetry books, I was intrigued. The site is still in beta and they are only allowing new memberships on a vetted basis, I think, but you can make 3D pop-up books. Sounds strange, right?
There are are few levels going on here, including using your webcam and a special printout that allows you to view your picture book on your hand (!), but check out what I have embedded as an example of a picture book from the site — this is my first book called The Writer Within.

(Hmm – the embed code was too big and when I shrunk it down, I seem to have lost the controls to move to the next pages. There’s just a bit of the arrows on the left and right side. See them? Click on them. If not, go HERE to read the book).

But here is where the site is fascinating — if you print out the special image they provide (branded with their logo, of course), and hold it up to your webcam, you get to “see” your 3D book come alive in the webcam window. I’m not sure how to explain it. I was hooked, though. And ZooBurst wisely has a button that will take a screenshot of you and your book, together, and email it to you as a jpeg. How cool is that? Wicked cool, man.

Peace (in 3D),
Kevin

PS — If you are wondering how a teacher finds time during the day to do this, I am home with a sick kid. I tried to get him to try it, but he wasn’t all that interested right now. Too busy being a sick pre-teen, I guess. But he did come over when the webcam kicked in and stared at it with me.

No Media, No Tech — What Happens?

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This is an intriguing study of 200 college students at the University of Maryland who spent a media/technology-free 24 Hours and then took part in a study of their reactions and impressions of the experiment.

Among the findings (which are expanded at the website):

  • Students use literal terms of addiction to characterize their dependence on media.
  • Students hate going without media.  In their world, going without media, means going without their friends and family.
  • Students show no significant loyalty to a news program, news personality or even news platform.  Students have only a casual relationship to the originators of news, and in fact don’t make fine distinctions between news and more personal information. They get news in a disaggregated way, often via friends.
  • 18-21 year old college students are constantly texting and on Facebook—with calling and email distant seconds as ways of staying in touch, especially with friends.
  • Students could live without their TVs and the newspaper, but they can’t survive without their iPods.

Among the conclusions of the report:

The major conclusion of this study is that the portability of all that media stuff has changed students’ relationship not just to news and information, but to family and friends — it has, in other words, caused them to make different and distinctive social, and arguably moral, decisions.

The absence of information – the feeling of not being connected to the world – was among the things that caused the most anxiety in students as they sought to learn about the role of media in their lives – ironically by completing an assignment that asked them to spend a day without using media.

Check out this grid of notes from their class discussions about how they use different technology and media. The column around print, while a small response, is indicative of the slow demise of newspapers and magazines in the world.

Peace (in the world),
Kevin

Hackers, revisited

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In the recent Wired Magazine article, writer Steven Levy has an interesting revisit to a book that I once just loved, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which sought to document and profile those folks who sought to revolutionize the personal computer, mostly with the ideals that technology could eventually be put into the hands of many. In Wired, Levy tries to reconnect with some of the people he profiled in his book, including Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates.

It should be noted that Levy’s use of the word Hackers does not donate someone seeking to crack into a computer or software for malicious intent; Instead, a Hacker defined by Levy is someone who understands the underlying structure of a computer or network, and seeks to improve it or re-imagine it through skills and imagination.

What is striking is how Levy also shows how many of the ideals of that earlier generation have splintered into a couple of directions. Gates urged early on that his work be compensated (which caused an uproar in the technology community at the time) so that he could use the money to hire more engineers and make better products. Others, such as Lee Felsenstein, still held the line that technology should be adapted and used by as many people, and with as few hurdles as possible, which comes into conflict with the for-profit model.

For me, I was never nor will I ever be a Hacker, per se. I don’t have those skills. But when I was creating my webcomic, Boolean Squared, I used some of the ideas behind Levy’s profiles to inform the motivation and personalities of my two central characters — Boolean and Urth. These kids love to dive into the computer and make it work for them, not the other way around, and they are not afraid to yank the cover off anything. I wanted that adventuresome spirit from the beginning days of computer programming to come through with my characters.

Today, Levy notes, we have the continued development of the Open Source Movement — as shown by such companies as Mozilla and the various Linux offshoots — along with ad-driven companies such as Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Levy suggest that Zuckerman and his kin are the indirect offspring of those early days of hacking, although Zuckerman notes that he is less interested in the underlying “code” than the overall use of technology to connect people together as a social fabric. And my guess it that more than a few of the original hackers would be mortified by that association.

Check out the article on Wired.

Peace (in the wired world),
Kevin