Disrupting Class

With the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, many school districts throughout the nation are updating their technology infrastructure. My district also has an advantage that our voters passed a rather large bond referendum. On the drawing board are plans for new schools: three elementary, one middle, and one high. There is also money for technology upgrades to include mobile student devices at each of our current 27 schools over the next three years. All of our elementary schools will have 5:1 student:computer ratios. The middle schools will have 3:1 student:computer ratios. Finally, the high schools will have 1:1 student:computer ratios! We as a district are busily planning for the integration of all this new technology into our schools. There is much work to be done. I guess that is my fear. Not in the large amount of work, but that all the work will be spent in integration of technology rather than transformation of our schools.

This probably seems strange since my job title is Technology Integration Specialist, but I have been studying. I recently finished reading a book entitled “Disrupting Class.” The authors describe how industries are forced out of business by disruptive innovations – technologies that give choices to people that never really had a choice before and ultimately grow to replace the dominate industries in the field. For example, RCA and Zenith made televisions using vacuum tubes for many years. My dad was a television repairman and made a living going to people’s homes to replace the burned out tubes. With the development of the transistor, Zenith and others invested millions of dollars trying to force these new devices into the power requirements of big floor model televisions with no success. However, companies like Sony first used transistors to make devices such as hearing aids and small radios for teens. The big television manufacturers did not even notice. Eventually transistors got better and better until they ultimately put vacuum tube television makers like RCA and Zenith out of business (my dad retired in the 1980’s as vacuum tube manufacturers ceased production).

In this book the authors are now looking at public education and they say that we are in the early stages of disruptive innovation. Areas where students and parents have had no choices before are now seeing choices through things like Florida Virtual School and APEX Learning for course recovery. I have seen the results first hand in the areas of unit and credit recovery at my high school. In some cases this has given kids hope of success where they had none before. The authors say this type of technology will get better and better and eventually lead to disruption in public education. Because schools are essentially public monopolies, it is believed that we will not go out of business like others. However, we will have major internal changes. The authors used the analogy of trying to fly an airplane while you are building it, something no corporation has ever been able to do.

My real fear is that what we seem to be doing with our district plan is what is described as “cramming.” We are pushing technology into many areas of teaching and at students in arbitrary 1:5, 1:3, and 1:1 ratios depending on the grade level. We are doing things faster and with more flare, but only doing a marginally better job. For instance, much of the English teachers’ time in computer labs at my school are having students do online research and write papers in Microsoft Word. These assignments are essentially unchanged from 30 years ago when students used books to do research and either turned in hand written papers or typed them on a typewriter. To be truly effective, I believe these assignments and grading must change.

If the authors are correct, we need to prepare in earnest for the transition to a truly student centered learning environment. We need to put a HUGE emphasis on training for PBL and assessment. Teachers will have a very hard time creating problem or project based learning units because of our current focus on teaching individual standards and preparing daily lessons tends to be teacher centered. Assessment for mastery will be tough as well because of our current grade levels (developed during the industrial revolution) and their “fixed time, variable learning” that results. The best we can probably do is place greater emphasis on formative assessment until better technologies allow teachers the option of “variable time, fixed learning” because we know students learn at different rates. So what is really going to happen to learning in my school district? Ask me again in about five years and I hope to give you an educated answer.

Teach Tomorrow Today! 2009 Upstate Technology Conference

This was my second UTC conference and it was a good one just like last year. I was still recovering from poison ivy after doing too much geocaching the week before, but I tried not to let it get me down. These are a summary of the sessions that I attended:

Keynote Address by Chris Craft
Superpowers for Everyday Heroes
I have been tweeting with Chris the last few months so I made a point to go up and introduce myself prior to his presentation. Chris is a Spanish teacher in Lexington/Richland 5 at Crossroads Middle School and is a genuinely nice guy. Because he is still a classroom teacher, he brought a down-to-earth feel to how he approaches education and gave some great examples of inspiring uses of technology in the classroom. Because my descriptions would not do it justice, you really need to see his presentation found on his blog Crucial Thought.
Chris got the geocaching bug at UTC 2009 so I may have to call him up when I am forced to go to the mall and show him how to find benchmarks.

Cool Free Tech Tools For Teacher Use
This was my own session to show some PC apps for classroom use. I had over 50 participants in this session. I also did a repeat on the last session of the conference and had 30 participants. Because I used Mediator to create several of these PC tools, many thanks to Dave Hamilton of Matchmare for giving two copies of Mediator 9 to give away as door prizes. Other than the three commercial programs, the other programs I created using Visual Basic. A description and download instructions for each program may be found at: www.lexington1.net/phs/medwards/cool.htm

Don’t Read to Me: A Presentation on Presentations
Chris Craft
After seeing his wonderful keynote address, I thought I would see what Chris had to say again and I was not disappointed. After giving some background information on Cognitive Load Theory, he gave several specific examples about presentations. Here is the basic summary about using PowerPoint:

PowerPoint backgrounds are generally bad
Transitions are generally bad
No bullets
Comic Sans is not your friend
10/20/30 No more 10 slides/No more than 20 minutes/No less than 30 point font
Graphics need to be focused (A carefully selected image can go a long way)
Graphic Sources:
Creative Commons
Flickr
stock.xchng http://www.sxc.hu/

This session may be found on his blog Crucial Thought.

Are Intel Thinking Tools For You?
This was my own session to show these great free tools for classroom use. This last session of the day was not well attended, but I think it went well. The three thinking tools Visual Ranking (used for prioritizing lists), Seeing Reason (used for determining cause-effect relationships), and Showing Evidence (used for developing good arguments) were shown. Also the Assessment Application was demonstrated so that teachers could organize and find various rubrics and checklists. Each tool has a tutorial section, instructional strategies, and sample projects to get the user started. Items from my presentation may be found at www.lexington1.net/phs/medwards/tools.htm

Hot Potatoes Interactive Web-base Program
Michelle O’Malley
This session showed how to use the free set of Hot Potatoes programs. Each application allows the user to create activities and then export these as javascript enabled HTML pages that may be uploaded for student practice and review. The programs are:
JCloze – creates gap filled exercises
JMatch – creates matching or ordering exercises
JQuiz – creates question based quizzes including multiple choice and short answer
JCross – creates crossword puzzles
JMix – creates jumbled sentence answers

The program may be downloaded for free from http://hotpot.uvic.ca/ but must be registered to fully function. Sample activities and the presentation may be downloaded from the presenter’s webpage at: http://teachers.greenville.k12.sc.us/sites/momalley/default.aspx

An Augmented Reality Check
This was my own session to show the work that we had done this year in our pilot of augmented reality. This session was not well attended, but it may have been too ‘bleeding edge’ for this conference. Frieda Foxworth was there to offer support and answer some questions about the World War II – Pacific Theater activity that she helped to create. The Augmented Reality we piloted used an iPAQ Travel Companion with integrated GPS to track student movement. When the students reached a designated point, they were automatically provided with appropriate documents, images, sounds, or videos. Information from my session may be found at: www.lexington1.net/phs/medwards/ar/ar.htm

Place Based Stories
This was my own session to show the work that Priscilla Kelley and I had done this year in preserving some of the local history near our school. This session was better attended. Kristin Magee was nice enough to attend to offer support. I also got to meet a Twitter friend Heather Loy. This session was designed to show how Google Earth and an iPod in ‘museum mode’ could be used to store and present local history projects. Google Earth allows the user to see the location of a place and find out the facts and see and hear the local stories from a computer. The iPod includes the latitude and longitude measurements and allows the users to truly visit the locations and experience the stories for themselves. The presentation, product files, and the help file links to learn how to do all this may be found at: www.lexington1.net/phs/medwards/place.htm

Creating Online Pools and Self-Grading Quizzes
Kim Pauls
This presentation showed how to use Google Forms (a part of Google Docs) to create quizzes and polls. This seems to be a powerful way to get feedback in the classroom using the free tool. For the data analysis, knowledge of Excel was necessary so I am not sure how much the teachers at my school would use it. While I watched, it occurred to me that if the forms were downloaded to the user computer, then maybe I can write a little visual basic app that would read the Excel spreadsheet and automate the process for the creation of the data analysis formulas.
Sample forms and the presentation may be downloaded from the presenter’s webpage at: http://teachers.greenville.k12.sc.us/sites/kpauls/default.aspx

Copyright Conundrum

Over the past year and a half, I and several district Technology Integration Specialists (TIS) along with our web developer have been working to create an online searchable teacher resource center. The idea is to gather together great district teacher resources including documents, spreadsheets, SMART Notebook lessons, presentations, unit plans, etc and place them where our teachers can access them over the internet. While the idea is good in concept, over the past year we have figuratively hit a brick wall when we looked closely at copyright.

The “Fair Use” clause allows individual teachers working in their own classroom to use many resources available from the internet for up to two years. Unfortunately, shared resources do not have the same copyright protection under Fair Use Guidelines as do materials created by an individual teacher for use in his or her classroom. Last summer, I created a set of multimedia guidelines for our district technology classes that would serve as a guide for resources that our district currently licenses and could use without invoking fair use. This document was approved by the district; however, this still does not seem to be enough. Guideline two allows for the use of “Media sources that utilize alternative copyright standards (royalty free) …” so I have been trying to compile a list of potential royalty free and public domain websites for our district teachers to use. Here is my current list that has yet to be approved. Coincidently, an Intel Teach colleague of mine recently posted a listing of websites that appear to have free use of images and sounds. Dyane Smokorowski’s Best Sites to Find Public Domain Images and Sounds for Student Projects is a good attempt to give educators a place to go to find great resources, yet not have to worry about fair use guidelines. (Although, in my opinion the copyright statement of the Library of Congress disqualifies it.)

But our efforts are simply piecemeal at best. Until our legislators or the courts clarify this chaos, perhaps we need one place that all teachers can go to get information like this. While Creative Commons is the right way to go for letting us know what we can and cannot do with some creation, teachers still need a place to find great resources that they know are truly free to use for educational purposes.

Who Am I?

This title to a recent contemporary Christian song has had new meaning for me this last week or so? Sunday, May 3, was my 48th birthday and I had much to think about. Three days before my birthday, my district boss and Director of Instructional Technology tells me that the district test coordinator position will be vacant because of retirement and he has told the Director of Assessment that I might be a suitable candidate. This was so out of the blue that I did not know what to say. I would certainly like to make more money, but all I have worked for over more than two decades has been to become a better teacher. Nowhere in anything that I had imagined had led me to this outcome. So being perplexed, I have prayed and pondered during the last week. I remember during my original job interview in 1986 for the chemistry teacher job at BLHS that I was asked if I considered myself a scientist or a teacher. As I was in the process of finishing my MS in chemistry in the area of organometallics, I answered truthfully that I considered myself a scientist. Well, they offered me the job anyway and I have never looked back. Over the past 23 years, the refining fires of public education have removed the dross and left the purified teacher within. For over a dozen years I have tried to implement technology in my teaching whenever possible. In 2000, I started teaching a preservice technology classes as an adjunct professor for Newberry College. In 2001, I became a Master Teacher for the Intel Teach program and taught seven classes while in Lexington District Three. In 2004, I was accepted as a Senior Trainer for the Intel Teach program and was able to offer training anywhere in the USA. At the end of the 2003-2004 school year, Lexington District One expanded the number of technology integration specialists (TIS) so I applied and was offered a job. It was very hard to leave the school and the people that I had worked with for 18 years. Still this was an opportunity for which I had been preparing for many years and so I took the job. Even though I am a shy person, I feel like it has been a good fit over these past five years and I have been able to work with some great colleagues. In addition to my normal duties, I have been able to be innovative by learning how to more effectively create software tools for teachers using Mediator and Visual Basic. Over the last year and a half, I have worked with a group of TIS and our district webmaster to create a teacher resource center, a database for storing all kinds of digital artifacts that teachers can use. Since last summer, I have become very interested in place based learning. This year, I have been working with a retiring ELA teacher to capture the local history of the community where I work using iPods and Google Earth. I and two other TIS, Frieda Foxworth and John Geanangel have been working on creating augmented reality activities using mobile computers with embedded GPS. With the exception of impending budget cuts due to the Great Recession and our governor’s limited vision of public education, it has been an incredibly good year professionally. Then why do I ask, “Who am I?” At the end of all this, I realize that whether it is an art or a science or a calling, I am a teacher.

What to do with an iPod Touch

On April 29, I watched a live Ustream video of Tony Vincent describing educational applications that he has found useful for the iPod Touch/iPhone. Here is his list of suggested applications:
Lemonade Stand – adapted from Apple IIe app running a business of the same name
Oregon Trail – adapted from Apple IIe app describing frontier travel
Whiteboard – allows users to share over the network as an interactive whiteboard
Dictionary – free dictionary and thesaurus
Word Warp – find all the words from the given letters
Mad Libs – add different words and it makes stories
Star Walk – astronomy program $4.99
Comic Touch – allows users to create comics with messages
Airport Mania – help at an airport $0.99
Flight Control – users control takeoff and landings at an airport
Iclean – dogs or cats are used to lick the screen

There were also some helpful items offered during the broadcast. In the new 2.0 fireware update for the Touch/iPhone, a screen shot may be taken by holding the select button then clicking the power button. This sends the screen shot to the photos.

Viewers writing in also gave out some helpful information. One was a link that described an iPhone app Trails http://gpsobsessed.com/200-garmin-edge-305-more-acccurate-than-199-trails-iphone-app/ This makes your iPhone into a great GPS unit. Someone else mentioned that an account may be set up at http://www.polleverywhere.com/. This lets you use the iPod touch and iPhone as a student response system for up to 32 students. There is an organization for sharing iphone/itouch apps with teachers K-12 teachers:
The Ning Community iEAR http://ieducationappsreview.ning.com/

I am still interested in how these devices may be used in augmented reality such as ARIS, but overall the review was very interesting. The entire one hour video may be viewed below:

Laboratory Safety Augmented Reality

Yesterday was the unofficial “Senior cut day” at Pelion High. Yes, it was the day before the prom so things were running at a slower pace than normal for me in the tech area. I thought that I would go out and test the laboratory safety augmented reality simulation that I had created earlier. Because this used a drawn map, I used the Google Earth measuring tool to determine three corners of a rectangle located in our open field area that was the approximate aspect ratio of my drawn map. I think my map looks pretty good if I say so myself.
After entering the coordinates, I walked out into the 90^o F (wasn’t it just 70^o last week?) and tried it out. The QuizGame Flash file from the mscape forum worked well, but I kept finding little things that were wrong or that I wanted to change. Some of the items on the webpage documents that had seemed fine on the computer now were misplaced on the iPAQ screen or hard to read in the bright sunlight. After several trips inside to make changes then testing outside, I think I now have it the way I want it. This behaves more like a video game where the user wanders around the field for clues and questions. The theme is based on Harry Potter and lab safety at Hogwarts. The QuizGame Flash file keeps score of the questions, but I still do not really know how to end the simulation. I guess when I test it with students I will just tell them to come back when they have answered all nine questions. Otherwise I guess I am going to have to learn how to do Flash Actionscripts and modify the program myself.

Augmented Reality at PHS

After a pretty successful augmented reality trial with Frieda and John at WKES, I wanted to try it out at my school. I developed an activity that would lead students through a decision making process about Energy Choices and I was anxious to try it with students. Students would be placed in groups of four and their decision at each step would lead them to a unique set of choices and different results. The scenario starts out ...

"The year is 2020. Last year world petroleum production peaked for the first time in history and production is down this year. Prices are now over $200 dollars per barrel and gasoline is almost $9 per gallon. With petroleum prices so high, many energy options that were once impossible are now available."

The student teams were advising the President as Cabinet Secretaries of Commerce, Defense, Energy, and Transportation. Each student had his or her own unique advisor briefing manual to help in the decision making process. After initially choosing an energy focus from the areas of biomass, fuel cells, nuclear, or solar/wind, this determined the other types of questions that the team must consider. The students used an iPAQ Travel Companion running an mscape simulation that I had created. After very little help, the students were able to follow the GPS and navigate through to each new position.

When we got back to class, the science teacher Deanna Watson was pleased with the overall effort of the students. Many of the students seemed to pick up important ideas and the overall understanding that trying to figure out the U.S. energy policy is very complex. For the most part, the students were very engaged with the activity. The iPAQs and software worked without a hitch. The highest praise came when one student describing the activity said "I thought this was going to be lame, but it was really good."