International Schools Tech

Profile Questions

2011-06-20T22:50:00.000-07:00

I recently submitted a job application. The fields were limited to 1000 characters, so I had to truncate my answers. Below is the full text.

What is your greatest achievement to date and why do you regard it as such? *

Professionally my greatest achievement has been serving as the technology director for the NESA Virtual Science Fair (NVSF). This is a project that spans international schools around the world for students in Grade 5 and Middle School. The project uses pre-service science educators as mentors for science fair projects, effectively outsourcing the management of the science fair projects to these teachers in training. The pre-service teachers learn how to interact and guide Middle School science learners. As the technology director for this project, I’ve been responsible for training the local site coordinators, adapting the project to the available technologies, and troubleshooting the annual running of the project. This has involved originally setting up the project within the BlackBoard Learning Management System (LMS), adding wikis and blogs from a third party provider, and then transitioning the project this past year to the Moodle LMS. In collaboration with the local site coordinators, the templates used in the project have been continually reviewed and revised so that the technology is making life easier for the classroom teachers, and they are more easily able to manage the interactions between their students and their students’ mentors. I believe in this project because student learning is improved from the regular attention of one pre-service teacher, and it allows teachers to see an accessible and beneficial use of technology. The technology provides an easy entry pathway for teachers that improves student learning. Participating in this project has continually pushed me to learn and explore new things, finding the limits of different LMS’s, finding new ways to instruct teachers (both in person, and on-line video tutorials), and mastering new technologies like the web-based programming languages of php and Zoho’s Deluge. Like my work as a technology integrator it has been about adapting the right technology to improve student learning, rather than adapting technology for its own sake. The technology director of the NVSF is largely a background role, but it has been a key component of the project’s ongoing success.

My greatest personal achievement is my fifteen-year (and counting) marriage, and the two children that we are currently raising. Both are very much works in progress that require daily attention, but they are ultimately that which counts the most in my life.

Describe yourself in the words of an imaginary, fair and impartial critic. *

I believe in the nobility of the teaching profession. I believe in giving students as many opportunities as possible to demonstrate their understanding of the material. I prefer hands on experimentation to direct instruction. I believe in mastery learning so my assessments don’t always fall easily into summative and formative categories. I am passionate about students using technology in novel ways that will allow them to showcase their mastery of content. I am always eager to explore new technologies and their applications to education. I am patient with people who do not possess the same aptitude towards technology that I have. If a teacher is willing to try something new, I will work hard to make sure that they encounter success in adopting a new technological skill to their repertoire.

I listen to teachers’ needs, and try to collaboratively help them craft a solution that will help them simplify their processes. For example I worked extensively this past year with a Spanish teacher to migrate rote assessments of vocabulary and grammar to an online format. This automated her grading and allowed her to spend more time developing in depth assessments of skills that were higher on Bloom’s taxonomy than that of recall. Her successes spread to the rest of the Spanish department as they all started to use these on-line quizzes as formative assessments. This was applicable to second language learning, but is less so to the sciences or even social sciences.

I work hard on providing meaningful professional development for the colleagues with whom I am privileged to work. I survey my colleagues to determine their needs and gaps and work to develop professional development opportunities that will meet their needs and the needs of the institution as mandated by the administration. This past year it took the form of adopting a new LMS in the form of Moodle and ensuring all of our faculty members possessed certain minimum competencies.

I believe that al students need to have opportunities to demonstrate their understandings. In the on-line course that I’ve taught with the Virtual High School this has meant that I have been flexible with students who have been travelling or even missed deadlines. I’ve been flexible and allowed the students enough chances to prove that they can master the material. This has even meant accepting work from students over the summer vacation, and then revising the student’s grade.

Why are you interested in a position with the Higher Colleges of Technology? (If you are an overseas applicant, why are you considering a career move to the Middle East, and to the United Arab Emirates in particular?) *

I am interested in contributing to teacher development in a more formalized role. As a technology integrator I currently work with teachers to help them use technology to implement their curricula. Part of that role is a responsibility for professional development. I would like to help shape pre-service teachers to better equip them to select and use the best technology to meet their learners’ needs. I believe that technology is an amplifier. It makes good teaching exceptional, but it can also make bad teaching horrendous. Having lived in the Middle East for 13 years, I believe that the UAE is poised to transform its educational system beyond rote learning to life-long learning.

Intrinsic Motivation

2009-08-31T12:01:00.001-07:00

Dan Pink's talk about motivation from TED.com is fantastic. I'm trying to work out what it means for teaching. The basic idea is that providing extrinsic rewards works only when there is a clearly defined task. When the task requires some lateral thinking, extrinsic rewards hinder the accomplishment of the task.

Alan Lurie is also writing about motivation in his article. Both Pink and Lurie see intrinsic motivation arising from autonomy, mastery and purpose. All of which are lacking in the current educational model. Students have little autonomy. Lot's of mastery and little purpose. What would a model of autonomy look like in a school? Certainly not like the corporate environments described in this Slate article. Autonomy would look a lot like the concept of education by appointment. It would look a lot like gifted education, where students discover their passions and run with them.

Mastery is something that we may or may not do a good job with in education. Open source software and blogging communities are both examples of communities where mastery, individual thought, and contributions to moving the project forward are valued. How can we bring these sorts of communities into our classrooms where students are competing to show off their mastery of skills, concepts and attitudes?

The assistant principal in our high school is looking at this video. It will be interesting to see if he brings this video or these ideas into the staff meetings.

Teaching Naked

2009-08-24T11:34:00.000-07:00

Wow! I've been mulling over the idea of teaching naked, the last couple of days since I first saw this posting on Dean Sharski's blog. My initial thoughts were wait a second. Content is supposed to be what we're all about in schools. Then Jose Bowen turned up again on the NPR all tech considered podcast, and I started to more fully understand his ideas about turning learning around. He contends taht students come to class without any understanding of the subject, listen to a lecture, study like crazy and try to show that they understand. Instead, he proposes a model where students listen to the lecture ahead of class, take a quiz or some other assessment to show that they listened to the material, and then discuss and explore the content in class. As he states in the video above, most lectures last for 48 minutes and then have 2 minutes of questions, this way he can offer the same content and fifty minutes of questions. To me these are powerful ideas. I've already shared them with our high school faculty. Several of the teachers are interested in giving it a try.

Then I drilled into Jose Bowen's site a little and found a set of podcasts that serve as the listening ahead of class for hs hstory of jazz course. I listened to the bop and hard bop podcasts. I was struck by the fact that at the beginning of this podcast, he launches in right away noting that any categories are provisional, and this is just one way to organize and categorize the whole movement of Hard Bop. Reminded me right away of David Weinberger and Everything is Miscellaneous. Very interesting ideas. Even Bowen's old courses at Georgetown look like they built on diverse ideas. Anyone who can incorporate Wagner into a course on politics and culture has a lot of interesting thoughts.

Start of School - More

2009-08-10T10:52:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow is the big day. Summer vacation is over. Yesterday a colleague sent out a list of software items to cover during the extra time teachers will have during Ramadan. (UAE Ministry of Education guidelines have our school opening later and ending earlier for those students who are fasting [refraining from eating or drinking during the day, but often staying up late at night]). The list reproduced below, bothered me. At first I could not figure out why. Then I realized it was just a list of software. It was not addressing the "so what?" question. If we are to be serious about integrating technology in meaningful ways, the technology needs to solve a problem for teachers in some way.

Please note that these topics are not all-inclusive. Attendants will bring questions.

First Class

Answer any questions about FC attendees may have
Web publishing
Mailbox Rules. Blocking Spam
Organizing your mailbox
Creating and managing Conferences and the users
Other minor items such as: Changing icons, Creating email templates, Recording your voice

PowerTeacher

Answer any questions about PowerTeacher attendees may have
Logging in, changing passwords
Gradebook setup. Straight points, Weighting and Standards
Printing reports
Creating class groups
Exporting gradebooks as spreadsheets
Comments for Assignments and Students (Comment Banks)

Directory Server

Logging in
Moving files around (Drop Box)
Using the Public web publishing folder

ACS Services/Software/Hardware

Subscription Services that ACS offers including: Library Subscription Services, Unitedstreaming, Brainpop, Nettrekker, Turnitin, Wordpress MU, MyAccess, etc. (exact dates/locations TBA)
OpenOffice (exact dates/locations TBA)
Promethean Interactive Whiteboards (exact dates/locations TBA)
Tinkerplots (exact dates/locations TBA)
Google Docs (exact dates/locations TBA)
Video and Still Camera usage (exact dates/locations TBA)

My suggestion was to reorganize the list according to problems that teachers might be having:

How do I share stuff with other teachers and students?

- Directory server

- FC web publishing

- FC folders

How can I communicate more effectively with parents, students, colleagues and admin?

-FC

How do I do my grades and reporting?

-PowerTeacher

How do I create my class help page?

- FC web publishing

How can my students collaborate on documents?

-Google docs

- Word Press MU

How do I do ordering?

-Filemaker

How can my students keep a reflective journal?

-Word press MU

How can I handle documents in different fomats?

-Open Office

-iWork tools

How can I take, organize, and share pictures of class activities?

-digital cameras

-iPhoto

- directory server

How can I take, edit and share video?

-digital video cameras

-iMovie

-youTube...

How can my students improve their writing?

-MyAccess

How can I pre-record and record my visuals for class

-Promethean white board

How can I share text, and artifacts, visual activities with my class?

-document camera

How do I prevent plagiarism in my classes?

-Turnitin.com

What video libraries are available for my class?

-United Streaming

How do I create quick interactive surveys of what my students have learned?

-Brainpop

This seemed like a better way to focus on teacher and student needs. I also thought it would improve buy-in from the teachers. My colleagues agreed with me, but it missed going out to the new hires, who got he original version. The good news is that the conversation has already started to shift. I'm confident next time around we'll all be thinking about how to solve teachers' problems, instead of just giving them some tools that may be useful.

Going back to school

2009-08-09T12:00:00.001-07:00

Summer vacation is almost over. It's back to school the day after tomorrow. Four days of in-service and then the kids start. I've been thinking about what I'd like to focus on this year. More and more its' coming back to the idea of presentations.

The question is how to work with teachers to improve the presentations that their students are doing. Step one in this journey is going to be to approach the administration and ask for their support in improving student presentations and what that those might look like.

We're going to be working within a Ramadan schedule which means late starts and early dismissals. It also creates a lot of space for working with teachers on ther tech skills. One of my colleagues sent out a proposed list of topics. My biggest concern is that this list was all focused on different technology tools. I don't think that there will be much uptake in the presentations offered. I think in a school, we have to be focused on what problems the students and teachers are having and what technological solutions can make their lives easier. In this case, the curricular problem is powerpointlessness. Too many presentations in school are just bullets and talking points. I think the introducations to wikis and blogs also needs to framed similarly, otherwise, no one will use them.

The tie in for the admins is that this all fits very much into our school's mission of 21st century skills ( Communication and Collaboration), and within the ISTE NETS standard 2b of "communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences using a variety of media and formats." It is cross curricular, and can be used in any subject. It also fits with 6b "select and use applications effectively and productively." and 6d "transfer current knowledge to learning of new technologies."

Garr Reynolds also writes about Pecha-kucha, the Japanese movement of 20 slides each for 20 seconds (6 minutes 40 seconds in total). I might try running this as a club and see if I can get seven or eight students to prepare presentations and then have a competition of sorts one evening with the admins, and maybe some external people as judges.

These two prongs will hopefully help improve our students' ability to produce effective presentations. This is a skill that will stand them in good stead long after they graduate

High Noon

2009-08-04T12:36:00.001-07:00

I just finished reading Jean Francois Rischard's book, High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to solve them. I was very pleased to see global poverty as one of his main underlying themes. Knowing that such passionate and intelligent people are running our world institutions is very heartening.

Rischard's main thesis is that two forces are shaping our future. One is the demographic explosion, with the world's population forecast to reach 8 billion by 2025. Rischard sees no good in any of the implications of population growth. However, the other force, that of the New World Economy, which basically finds new ways to do everything, abounds with opportunities.

Others have blogged about his list of twenty global problems, so I won't reiterate the list here. As an expat living abroad in what is basically a tax free haven, I am not fond of the idea of the Canadian government instituting worldwide taxation. I am not the American model of wordwide taxation is particularly effective. Currently the foreign earned income exclusion is currently set at $87, 600.00, and $18.4 billion dollars claimed as exclusions, which is about half of what US citizens earn abroad.

Rischard proposes two possible solutions. One is for people to come together in global issues networks (GIN) around each of these twenty issues. (he does acknowledge that there may be additional issues). Each GIN would enlist members from governments, business, and NGO's. Essentially, each GIN would draft benchmarks and then score each country with respect to the progress they were making towards meeting that benchmark. His alternative solution is to use the G7 structure and add additional countries to create "G20's" made of responible ministers around each of the 20 issues. He sees this solution as less desirable as it's track record so far has not demonstrated that it has the agility and flexibility needed to address these issues in a timely manner.

This book was written seven years ago. Rischard was right on the money when he wrote that global financial architecture was an issue that needed a global regulatory approach. However, we are now a third of the way through Rischard's twenty year timetable. While reading the book, I was thinking how depressing for him, none of the solutions he proposes have been taken up. Neither the Global Issues Networks, nor the G20 models. The urgency around these issues, even global issues has not gained traction.

Rischard also displays a great openness to new ideas. At the conclusion of he book, he asks for reader input at his website http://www.rischard.net. Unfortunately, this domain has expired and is now parked, so there is no way to evaluate the quality of responses he received.

Summer Camp (School)

2009-07-29T11:54:00.001-07:00

This summer, for the first time in a long time, I took a summer job. The job manifested itself at the end of teh school year in the form of teaching an English summer camp at a local university working with high school students. Like everything in the UAE, the summer camp was divided along gender lines. I was one of two males working at the girls' camp. I further lucked out by being assigned as the activities teacher. The way the camp functioned was that there were two teachers, one for activities and one for English assigned to two groups of students. Halfway through the day, the groups would alternate which teacher they were working with. I got a great teaching partner, and can't say enough good things about her.

This was my first intensive interaction with Emiratis. Other than seeing Emiratis in the store or on the roads, it is rare that living in my diplomatic bubble, have occasion to interact very much with the local population. I have to admit, going into this these covered girls were a complete mystery to me. Had I bee assigned to the boys camp, I know that football (soccer) and cars would have gone a long way. These covered girls though I had no idea what interested and motivated them. It turns out that mystery cut both ways. they didn't know quite what to make of me either, white Western male and all. I don't think many of them had ever had a male teacher before. I was surprised by how unwordly these girls were. Few had any idea of who Benazair Bhutto was, or even Roger Federer. I was struck by how little these girls had travelled. Mistakenly, I thought that all Emiratis were extremely well off and well travelled. Most of the girls had been to Saudi Arabi for a non-Eid pilgramage to Mecca called an Umrah. The thing that was most shocking was that about a third of the girls were already engaged. One of teh girls when discussing future career plans didn't even attempt to envisage a career. She just pinted to her ring finger and said "married."

As the activities teacher, I had no job description. It became quite clear early on that these students need help developing oral fluency. I started each class with a song. Fortunately I found a great web site that helped refresh my memory for camp songs from my time at Opemikon as a camper, lifeguard and leader. The curriculum documents provided by the University were not very useful. From the beginning I found that I had to dig a lot deeper. This site was a great resource, as was this one. The problem was that my classes jumped around a fair bit. I was up the night before struggling to find activities to fill my five hours the next day. It all was a little disjointed. If I do this again next year, I'll try and lay these out thematically better, but such is life when you're hired the week before to fill a slot.

The "camp" (really an ESL summer school) did not make good use of the feedback from and assessments of the students. Right away in the first day of camp, they gave the students a placement test. These results were never shared with the teachers. We had no way of knowing what strengths and weaknesses these students possessed. Day 4 had the students writing another assessment. the was to be a pre and post test to show value added by the camp. Again these results were not shared with the instructors. At the ends of weeks 2 and 3, student surveys were given out about how well the instructors were addressing the students' needs. Again these results were not shared with the instructors. At the beginning of the third week , I was observed. I have still not yet seen the write-up of that observation. All of these feedback loops had the potential to help make my teaching and the way I related to the students better, yet none were used. I find that to be a great pity. On the whole though, working at the summer camp was a great experience, that I hope to repeat again next year.

Improving presentations

2009-07-22T12:05:00.001-07:00

I just finished Garr Reynold's book: Presentation Zen. It's a short read, but it was a good reinforcement of what I believe presentations need to be about. Having read the book, it is obvious that Dean Shareski drew heavily on material from this book for his video:

http://flickr.com/photos/mingofaust/2568192888/sizes/s/

PowerPoint Extreme Makeover

What were the takeaways from reading the book? I liked the emphasis on the fact that a presentation should be about storytelling. Facts and figures are readily available on the Internet. Where a presentation can make a great deal of difference is when it answers the question of "So what?" In order to answer this question, the presenter needs to be able to understand what it is exactly they are trying to say and why it is important. This requires planning. Garr recommends that this planning take place offline, with paper and pencil. When you move into slideware like Keynote or PowerPoint, you set up three anchors and then use the slideware to build blank slides to follow these anchors.

Some other concepts that Garr explores in the book include signal to noise ratios. By this he means simplifying slides to their essential elements, and doing away with distracting borders, and clutter. Although he does not state this explicitly, many of his graphs and charts, in the improved slide have a summary headline. Instead of "Number of bikes sold 2002-2007", the caption reads "Over 5,000 bikes sold in 2007." This relates to Dean Shareski's point that if everything has the same emphasis, it is hard to tell what is important.

Having worked this past year to improve student presentations, one of the questions that came up was what would a scope and sequence for teaching students to do better presentations look like? For one thing we need to start with presentations taht teh students find meaningful. For most students especially those at an international school, a presentation on 19th century American reformers has little meaning, and they are not going to be very passionate about it. It will be interesting to see if I can work with teachers this year on improving presentations. I like Garr' 4 step process of brainstorming away from a computer, grouping ideas together and identifying the core, and storyboarding (off the computer initially and then in the slide sorter).

Another takeaway was the idea investigating Merlin Mann as a speaker for one of our NESA conferences.

The Future of RSS

2009-06-07T22:11:00.001-07:00

JamesLedbetter has a great article in the Big Money about the future of RSS feeds. Basically he's arguing RSS is a hard thing to make money of of, in that publishers like only to publish headlines to drive traffic to their sites, but bloggers like the full articles to appear in their RSS readers, so they can blog about it, which in turn drives traffic to the original site. The Big Money's experience suggests that the latter is the case. He also points out that Really Simple Syndication is not really that simple and enjoys only about a 10% uptake. I like my netvibes page and the availability of seeing the headlines from about 50 different sites all at once. RSS was also invaluable in setting up the NESA Virtual Science Fair in that each course had a help button. The RSS reader allowed me to monitor all 500 teams for signs of trouble.

Summer Learning PD

2009-06-06T23:11:00.001-07:00

In the part of the blogosphere that I read, there is currently circulating a Summer Professional Development/Learning Meme 2009 originally started by Cliff Mims. in the spirit of this challenge, I'd like to declare the following goals for this summer:
Learn GarageBand
Read: Dan Pink's a Whole New Mind, Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future, Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen, and J.F. Rischard's High Noon: 20 Global Problems and 20 Years to Solve Them.
Start blogging regularly, at least twice a week.

Rules
Summer can be a great time for professional development. It is an opportunity to learn more about a topic, read a particular work or the works of a particular author, beef up an existing unit of instruction, advance one’s technical skills, work on that advanced degree or certification, pick up a new hobby, and finish many of the other items on our ever-growing To Do Lists. Let’s make Summer 2009 a time when we actually get to accomplish a few of those things and enjoy the thrill of marking them off our lists.

The Rules

NOTE: You do NOT have to wait to be tagged to participate in this meme.

Pick 1-3 professional development goals and commit to achieving them this summer.
For the purposes of this activity the end of summer will be Labor Day (09/07/09).
Post the above directions along with your 1-3 goals on your blog.
Title your post Summer Professional Development Meme 2009 and link back/trackback to http://clifmims.com/blog/archives/2447.
Use the following tag/ keyword/ category on your post: pdmeme09.
Tag 5-8 others to participate in the meme.
Achieve your goals and "develop professionally."
Commit to sharing your results on your blog during early or mid-September.

Technorati Tags: pdmeme09

Videogames

2008-11-19T02:26:00.001-08:00

I found this TED talk on the history of videogames and where they are heading to be very disturbing. "Part of me is just waiting to let go"

1 to 1 as a Distraction

2008-06-11T02:15:00.001-07:00

On Thursday, Slate published this article, which criticized 1 to 1 laptop initiatives based on research from the Euro 2000 program in Romania. This is not an apples to apples comparison. The results of the study noted that student achievement dropped for students that received a subsidy to purchase a computer. When 1 to 1 laptops are deployed, all of the students receive laptops, not just a portion of them. As Alan Kay points out, the dominant technology defines the dominant task. In a case of a 1 to 1 deployment, this means that the paper and pencil exercises can be opened up to problem based learning.

Also, as Lawrence Lessig points out, technology has the effect of democratizing the means of production.

This again is a very good thing. It will hopefully enable students to take back their voices.

The other big argument in favour of 1 to 1 laptop programs is the fact that students often say that school is where they have to disconnect from the grid. (John Medina would argue that we need some time to disconnect:)

However, disconnecting for seven or eight hours every day creates a disconnect for students between school and the world that they inhabit the rest of the day and rest of the week.

Web programming and information architechture

2008-06-11T01:51:00.001-07:00

Andrew Hinton's slide share on the nature of information architechture

| View | Upload your own

As an occasional web programmer, this notion of embedding good information architecture in the form of documents. The example of Flickr on slide 73 is especially illustrating of this principle.

Brain Rules

2008-06-08T01:08:00.001-07:00

Jeff Utecht recently posted about John Medina's book the Brain Rules.

Jeff also provided a link to Garr Reynolds' presentation on his take on the book.

| View | Upload your own

Both of these have me believing that John Medina's Brain Rules is very much worth a read.

Technology starting to have an effect

2008-03-15T12:18:00.001-07:00

I found an article in today's Salon in a lot of ways to be very encouraging. Kids are using technology to get at higher order thinking skills. 8/10 students surveyed understood what To Kill a Mockingbird was about. Lots more work to do. 25% of teh students surveyed could not identify Adolf Hitler's role in World History. The important thing is that Web 2.0 tools are gaining traction and students are starting to use their brains to think, rather than just cram information into.

A philosphy of Anti-teaching

2008-02-17T04:24:00.001-08:00

I just came across Michael Wesch's Savage Minds page. He defines anti-teaching as getting students to ask good questions. To me, that is the essence of good teaching.

21st Century Skills

2008-01-26T21:02:00.001-08:00

In an article entitled "Programming: The New Literacy" Marc Prensky writes:

Thirty years from now, will the United States
be more competitive with a population that can
read English at a tenth-grade level or with a
population excellent at making the complex
machines of that era do their bidding? The two
options may be mutually exclusive, and the
right choice may determine our children's place
in the world's intellectual hierarchy.

This is the need to teach our students how to program, whether that be Excel spreadsheets, html pages, php and MySQL or C++. He who controls the machines is going to have enormous power in the 21st century.

Virtual offices

2008-01-26T20:49:00.001-08:00

Mother Jones published an article yesterday about professionals who have the option to work out of their homes, but choose instead to rent space in an office. They find that there is a great sense of synergy. This lack of uptake on virtual offices, and cyber commuting is very much tied to the lack of uptake of virtual schooling. As a representative of member of the NESA Virtual School consortium, it's always been incredibly productive to sit and meet as a group. Some of this is freeing ourselves up from the daily grind, and some of it is the side conversations that occur about what technologies we are adopting and how we are implementing them. We always have a common set of questions and queries, and benefit greatly from the wisdom and experience of the group. I've always felt that it was somewhat ironic that a group of cyber-savvy educators discussing a virtual schooling project need to meet in face to face mode. This article helps explain a little bit about why.

Teens Are not Internet Couch Potatoes

2008-01-13T20:22:00.001-08:00

From David Weisenberg:

From Pew Internet:

One Quarter of Teens Are Super Communicators

The Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that 93% of teens
use the internet, and more of them than ever are treating it as a venue
for social interaction — a place where they can share creations, tell
stories, and interact with others. 64% of online teens ages 12-17 have
participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating
activities on the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar
survey at the end of 2004.

Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation:

* 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys

* 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys.

* 19% of Online boys post video content online, compared to 10% of
online girls who have posted a video online where others could see it.

47% of online teens have posted photos where others can see them,
and 89% of those teens who post photos say that people comment on the
images at least “some of the time.” Many teens, however, limit access
to content that they share.

La plus ca change

2007-11-05T02:35:00.000-08:00

The more things change, the more it stays the same.

I recently saw this video from the 1940's on progressive education, and it seems very much that 60 years later we're still fighting the same battles. As David Warlick points out, Michael Wesch has another amazing video out about how the students in his first year Ethnography class.

More evidence that students have changed dramatically, but schooling has yet to keep up.

Tropical Cyclone Gonu

2007-06-10T13:59:00.000-07:00

Wednesday Tropical Cyclone Gonu hit here. Not so much as hit here as gave the country a long sideways pummel. The rains started at around 4am and continued until about midnight. The weather probably was at its most extreme from noon to 4pm.

Like Katrina, the hurricane was about category 5, however by the time it here it had dissipated down to a category 1 or 2. Like Katrina, the devastation was not caused so much by the storm itself, but by the flooding that accompanied it. With Katrina it was the failures of levees. With Gonu it was the overflowing of the wadis (normally dried up riverbeds with their sources in the mountains). Some friends of ours reported that they saw a dump truck being swept away by the force of the water and it was just being rolled like a Tonka truck. . In other parts of the city whole sections of the expressway were washed out.

At school, the on campus housing got about an inch of mud when the wadi their housing backs on overflowed. Fortunately there was a solid retaining wall in place, and all the teachers and their families were in the school at the time so no one was hurt. The church across the street from the school was buried in mud. It came within 2 feet of the top of the door. The Toyota workshop next to the church was basically swept downstream. Cars and trucks are strewn all over for about a kilometer. Some buried up to their roofs in sand and muck

We thought we were weathering the storm very well. Until about 6pm, everything was working very well. We had power, electricity, water, telephone and an ADSL connection. The worst of the storm seemed to be over. Then the power went out. It seems that the generator that powers this area used natural gas which was piped in through a pipeline that ran through a wadi. When the wadi flooded, the pipeline broke, and cut off the supply of fuel for the power station. That took 48 hours to repair. We had just checked into a hotel when we came back to get clothes, and saw that the power was back on. A couple of nights make you appreciate air conditioning all the more.

More serious than the electrical outage is the water outage. Water has still not yet been restored. Fortunately we have a stockpile in that we have a water tank on our roof. As soon as we learned that the tank was not being refilled, we took water conservation measures, and still have about 2/3 of a tank. There are rumours that trucks belonging to have been mobbed and others are receiving police escorts. Since initially writing tis, the water has come on for a while and then been turned off so another district can get water.

The infrastructure of the city on all levels took a massive hit. This included the communications infrastructure. In the aftermath of the storm, the phone network went down. At our house it was out for two days. The GSM (cell phone) network was iffy at best. This meant that the school had a hard job communicating with the staff. Not to mention the problem with cell phone batteries dying. With electricity still out at school, and our mail server on campus, communications between the school and wider community are not where need to be. One of my jobs over the next few days is to start looking at some ways to address this issue.

Lessons learned: Two post hurricane stressors were lack of cash as phones and therefore ATM’s were down. Next hurricane, I’m going to make sure I stock up on some cash before hand. Also the half tank of gas in the car was a stressor. I’ll make sure it is full. We had only one cell phone as my Treo suffered an unfortunate accident the week before, and we were constantly switching SIM cards. It might be good to have at least the same number of cell phones as the number of SIM cards in the future. Also good to have is a car charger for the cell phone. Other than that the stocking up with water and flashlights worked out well. Once power is back on at school, I’ll need to start unpacking the lessons learned on the school side. One thing I need to learn about is the difference between a hurricane, cyclone and typhoon. My current theory is that it has to do with which ocean spans them; hurricanes in the Atlantic, typhoons in the Pacific and Cyclones in the Indian. That is just a working theory for now.

Wikis

2007-06-03T23:54:00.000-07:00

Lee LeFever of Common Craft has come up with another great video, explaining wikis.

Planning continues on the technology strand at the NESA Leadership Conference in Bangkok using a TikiWiki. Others have started to use the edit button and move away from the comments. The other tech coordinators and directors are starting to create what will be a really good strand.
I also realized today that blogs were he answer to a problem that were plaguing us in Blackboard. The problem was that teachers wanted to use the results of a discussion board from one year to the next. In Blackboard, once users are deleted, their postings disappear. This was a problem in that the course where the students were posting was a Grade 12 course, and the student accounts (and therefore the student postings) were deleted at the end of the year. Moving that knowledge to a wiki will result an ability for students to stand on the shoulders of their predecessors.

Taxonomy of Knowledge

2007-06-03T22:48:00.002-07:00

David Weinberger's video (based on his new book Everything is Miscellaneous) represents a whole series of new powerful ideas. Equaly interesting are his series of interviews with physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga(founder of he Daily Kos), Arriana Huffington (founder of the Huffington Post), Jimmy Wales (co-founder of Wikipedia).
The main threads running through all of these is how everything has changed. "Web 2.0 changes everything" is a common rallying cry among Educational bloggers, but the how is often missing. I believe that David Weinberger is starting to put his finger on it. According to him, there are three orders of data. There is the data itself, say the pictures in an archive. There is metadata, the card catalogue. But when data and metadata are digital, they become interchangeable. For example, if you know that Charles Dickens wrote a Tale of Two Cities, you can Google and the four or fifth hit gives you the text of the A Tale of Two Cities. Conversely if you knew the line, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times", but were unsure of its source, you can Google the phrase and see that it was written by Charles Dickens. Weinberger's important observation is that metadata is what you know. Data is what you don't.
In terms of Web 2.0, Weinberger mak. es two observations. Firstly that all taxonomies are arbitrary. There is no perfect order, waiting to be revealed. If everyone can organize their own knowledge in any way they see fit, that is incredibly liberating. The Web 2.0 tool that allows users to do this is tagging. As I was writing this I realized that tagging is a constructivist tool. It allows people to attach their own meaning.
Secondly, he notes that traditionally editors have exercised power by controlling what goes on the front page of a newspaper. Thanks to Web 2.0 tools, everyone is their own editor and can use tools like NetVibes to pick what stories they want to see, and in what order. To me that is a revolution on par with Martin Luther's "Every man is his own priest," and sums up very well how Web 2.0 changes everything.

iPods in school debate

2007-05-19T12:18:00.000-07:00

We had an interesting discussion in a High School faculty meeting today. The debate was what to about "personal listening devices" at school. Some faculty were in favour of banning them altogether. The reasons being:

The historical reasons were:
1. There is a very real possibility that students can damage their hearing.
  - Teenagers being the creatures they are need to see immediate consequences. Deafness /impaired hearing five ten years down the line is not on teenagers' timescale.
  - Volume and length of exposure are the key factors. Should we do what we can to reduce exposure?
2. There is a concern that students were not socializing with each other. when they were jacked into their iPods they weren't connecting with each other. Not the environment we want to promote at school.
3. There was a concern about the students listening to explicit lyrics that were inappropriate for school, and listening to such lyrics would not be conducive to engaging in constructive dialogue with their peers

Additional concerns
1. The need for students to spend sometime unplugged, in that they ar eplugged in so much of the rest of their day. The converse of this argument is that allowing iPods in school helps make school like the rest of their world.
2. The possibility of students using iPods to cheat on tests and exams as witnessed by this article
3. Some students are not using the personal listening devices responsibly, ie. walking past people without exchanging basic civil greetings like "good morning"

On the flip side, certain faculty members were arguing:

The current policy of no personal listening devices at school from 8:30 to 3:30 (school hours) except under the direct supervision of a teacher was basically unenforceable.

There are perfectly valid reasons to listen to an iPod at school, especially when teachers assign podcasts to listen to such as in Easy French

The students are social about their listening devices socially, often sharing a pair of buds between two people

If not at school, where else can we teach students to use these devices responsibily

Good analogies abounded.

When one is reading, one is immersed in a world of one's own

Students may be reading objectionable material, but we don't censor that

All in all it was a very good discussion. In the end, the decision was to reframe the school rule so that students are allowed to use personal listening devices at school during their free time, and in classes only with permission of the teacher. I can clearly see the arguments on both sides of this debate. The only one that I have trouble with is the cheating argument. Why are we testing students on rote memorization? Why are we not looking at what value the students can add to the content with which they are working? The health argument especially caused me to rethink allowing students to use their iPods in my computer literacy class while they do their typing. I had always thought of it in terms of the music being an incentive for them to engage in what would otherwise be a dull repetitive task. I need to think some more about the effects it has on their hearing, or at the very least monitor more closely decibel levels.

What I've Been Working On

2007-05-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

The last week has been very busy. Bad Internet access at home. We were not able to connect until after 9:30pm, so I got very little web work done at home. The NESA Virtual Science Fair has been running in virtual mode for the past week. Stuart and I developed an on-line judging system where the judges log in, access their teams' Blackboard sites and post their scores on-line. Some minor hiccups. Learned about php and timeouts, but other than that the coding I did worked as it should have, and Stuart has been able to have real-time data on the 47 teams that made it to the final round. This is a significant improvement over managing three judges per team, with three rounds, and one spreadsheet per team per round. (It would have been almost 150 spreadsheets).

Just to keep things interesting I volunteered to move the timeline for the 5th Grade Virtual Science fair up a year, and quickly cludged a simplified version of the NVSF judging software. This goes live May 15th.

The other neat project on the NESA end that is off the ground, is planning for the NESA Fall Leadership Conference. We're working on developing a technology strand for tech directors and coordinators from the region. Lynne Schrum is going to be the facilitator for two 3 hour sessions. One with the admins and one with the tech directors. We're doing the planning for this as a Wiki. The interesting thing for me is how far we are behind as a region on the Web 2.0 front. Most of the tech directors are using the wiki like a threaded discussion board. No one has hit the edit button yet. This has me a little discouraged, but ultimately I know this is the professional development that we need.

I've also been working on reworking our library web page. This is not yet finished. I had a frustrating time last week trying to upload from school different changes. The idea is that the web page is going to be database driven. I've got the drop-down menus working, but not the database query. Instead of seeing error codes that can inform me about what is going wrong, all I am getting is a network error. I suspect that it is the error checking and recursion I was trying to code, but it is not yet ready fro prime time. All in all a very eventful week.