Mr. Carter's Blog

Scentsy for Teachers

2010-04-16T03:10:00.003-04:00

Scentsy has created a mid-size warmer specifically for teachers, called the ABCs warmer. It features the alphabet in white on black (like a blackboard), is apple-shaped, and has an inset apple that reads "The Best teachers teach from the Heart". The alphabet lights up when the warmer is turned on.

Also of interest to teachers will be the Sunshine Kids full-size warmer, which is a fundraiser for the Sunshine Kids Foundation. All net profits from the sale of this warmer will be donated to the Sunshine Kids Foundation.

Scentsy wickless candles are a safe alternative to traditional scented candles. The beautiful ceramic warmer houses a low-watt light bulb that slowly melts the fragrant Scentsy bar and fills your space with one of more than 80 great, long-lasting scents. Because there is no flame, Scentsy is safer than a candle. It won't burn you, your children or pets, or start fires the way candles can. And there's no smoke or soot to breathe.

Another essential accessory for occasional teachers

2010-04-12T22:42:00.001-04:00

An MP3 player with a collection of appropriate music and podcasts can be a great tool in the classroom, whether it's curriculum-related podcasts used to enrich a lesson, or The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter soundtrack adding a calming ambience to the classroom.

The trick, though, is having a speaker system that allows the class to hear the MP3 player. Unfortunately, speakers aren't very common equipment in classrooms yet (in fact, most classroom computers are equipped with headphones), so a prepared occasional teacher needs to bring their own speakers.

I've been looking for a suitably loud, yet portable speaker for a couple years now. Most speakers aren't portable enough, or are too small and produce a tinny sound that can't be heard in a classroom. I finally found one that works, though, in the Headrush Crimson Red Pocket Speaker. I even picked it up on sale for $9.99. It's slim, loud enough to fill a room, plugs into the headphone jack of my iPod, and it's even got a fold-out stand so it can be stood up.

The Internet Bogeyman is dead. Common sense finally prevails.

2009-11-02T23:38:00.001-05:00

The Internet Bogeyman appears to finally be dying, and at (very, very) long last, common sense appears to finally be prevailing.

A recent CNET News article describes a move towards "digital citizenship" education. Rather than fear-mongering and the perpetuation of ignorance when it comes to Internet safety issues such as online predators, online dating, online bullying, social networks, viruses/spyware/malware, spam, and scams, people are finally beginning to understand that the Internet isn't going away, and that we'd better start teaching people how to actually deal with and (easily) avoid those threats.

Of course, switching to a common-sense plan of teaching people about online responsibility and very basic technical safeguards is probably less lucrative than advocating paranoia, but it's another sign that the net has become mature when there are enough stakeholders interested in Internet safety that the fear-mongers have become outnumbered by those advocating a more moderate message.

A paper mentioned in the article, Online Safety 3.0, calls for "moving away from fear-based messages toward an emphasis on media literacy and digital citizenship, including recognizing young people not as 'victims' but as stakeholders in positive Internet use. Instead of schools filtering out access to social-networking sites, we believe they should be incorporating social media not only to enhance learning but to promote responsibility."

Galileoscopes

2009-06-28T15:06:00.010-04:00

To celebrate the International Year of Astronomy in 2009, a simple, inexpensive, and well-designed telescope, called the "Galileoscope" is being produced. It costs $15 US plus shipping. I'd recommend going in on an order of 5+ with other people, as the shipping cost per unit drops dramatically at 5+. To ship a single unit to an exotic foreign destination like Canada costs $18.40 US, but for orders of 5+, the shipping per unit drops to $7.28, and drops further with 10+ orders.

https://www.galileoscope.org

They also have a "Give a Galileoscope" program; when you order, you have the option of paying $12.50 more (the 100+ price) to donate a Galileoscope.

The site also has a section for teachers which offers downloadable PDF activity guides to teaching optics and observing with a telescope. The IYA2009 site also has a variety of educational resources. To get the most out of a telescope, though, you should also download some free astronomy software. I recommend Stellarium and Celestia.

Another good site for teachers and Galileoscope enthusiasts is teachingwithtelescopes.org.

Teach Copyright Right!

2009-05-30T01:33:00.006-04:00

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just released curriculum for teachers to teach students about their rights and responsibilities when it comes to copyright.

http://www.teachingcopyright.org/

The materials are free, Creative Commons licensed, and include handouts, goals and objectives, lesson plans, background material, and links to further information and related materials (such as Cory Doctorow's young adult science fiction novel, Little Brother, which won the Ontario Library Association's 2008 White Pine award).

All in all, it's very well designed, exactly what you'd expect from any good teaching resource. Given the emphasis on media literacy across the curriculum, copyright is definitely something we should be teaching students.

Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents

Legal Rights of Bloggers

The Story of Stuff

2009-03-17T02:03:00.013-04:00

I just watched a great video called The Story of Stuff. It takes you through the life cycle of consumer goods and discusses the implications of it all. It's fast paced, engaging, and interesting. And it's only 20 minutes long, which makes it perfect for the classroom. There's even discussion and activity guides.

You can play the video on any computer, but since most schools don't have the fastest net connections, I've saved a copy (just 50 MB) to my flash drive. I've also got a copy of VLC Media Player Portable on my flash drive, too, in case the school's computer has some ancient video player installed. For grades 6-8, this video is a great way to fill a 20 minute gap in the day with highly engaging and educational material.

For teachers, there's a growing amount of educational video on the web in places like YouTube and TeacherTube. While full-time classroom teachers will be downloading clips around which they'll base lessons and units, occasional teachers will want to carefully choose a variety of videos to carry with them which address various grade levels and curriculum strands. Being prepared with a short video relevant to curriculum allows an occasional teacher to enrich a lesson, ensure that all instructional time is used efficiently, and demonstrates to students that you're an effective teacher. Once you've got your students' confidence, classroom management becomes a breeze.

The Case for Investing in Occasional Teachers

2009-02-21T18:25:00.005-05:00

I recently read an interesting article that delineated the number of jobs created with a $1 Billion investment in various areas. Here's the quote:

"If you put a billion dollars into tax cuts, it will result in 5,600 jobs. If you put the money into physical infrastracture, you will create 15,800 jobs for every one billion invested. If you put the money into public services like health care, you create 18,100 jobs for every one billion invested," said Rout.

I'd like to propose a much, much, less expensive way to create jobs and bolster the economy. It involves an investment in public education; not in full-time teachers who already make a great deal of money, but by investing in occasional (substitute) teachers, most of whom earn less than the poverty line each year.

Here's how it works... occasional teachers are currently paid less than the lowest-paid teacher on the salary grid on a daily basis. Their credentials and experience are not recognized. Nor do they receive benefits. It would cost about $35 million to give public school boards enough funding to provide benefits to all occasional teachers in the province. For a cost of approximately $65 million, you could give public school boards enough funding to pay all occasional teachers a daily rate that recognized their credentials and experience (the $65 million is based on an estimate of an average A3 rating with 3 years experience).

What would this $100 million investment yield you? Well, ETFO alone has approximately 19,000 occasional teacher members (about 26% of all teachers). Making this investment would lift those occasional teachers out of poverty. So, right off the bat, you'll have transformed 19,000 precarious jobs into good jobs, with the ensuing economic benefits.

But the benefits go beyond that, because most of those 19,000 occasional teachers currently work second jobs to make ends meet. So your $100 million investment will also make thousands more jobs become available to be filled by other people, as occasional teachers will no longer be in such dire straits that they require a second job. Occasional teachers will then also have the opportunity to focus on being teachers, which ultimately benefits the children in their care.

Clearly, investing in occasional teachers is a simple and cost-effective way to make an enormous impact on both the education offered to children, and to the overall economy of Ontario. But an investment like this isn't going to happen unless awareness of this solution is brought to the attention of decision-makers.

What will it take to make such an investment in occasional teachers happen? First, the message needs to be sent to the ETFO Provincial Executive. The teachers' union, which pretty much ignores the needs of occasional teachers, needs to be made aware of the impact redirecting some of its focus could have on Ontario's economy. The Ontario government and its Premier also need to be lobbied and made aware of the golden opportunity they're missing.

Micro-Blogging for Teachers using Tumblr.com

2009-02-11T00:16:00.009-05:00

Micro-blogging refers to "blog" services which are intended for very short entries. The best-known service is Twitter, which limits entries to 140 characters of text and has tightly integrated cell phone SMS message capabilities. Tumblr.com is a similar service, without the limitations on message length or content type.

If a web site is a reference book, and a blog is a journal, then a Tumblr tumblelog is a notebook for jotting down quick notes that either don’t fit in other mediums, or which you haven’t gotten to expanding upon just yet.

Tumblr.com is similar to Twitter or your Facebook Status, but it offers a lot more than just text. You can also post photos, video, audio, chat logs, and more, using an extremely easy to use interface. A tumblelog can also automatically import your blog feeds; if you have multiple blogs, your tumblelog can serve as a simple aggregator of your posts.

If you’ve got a Tumblr account, you can "follow" other tumblelogs. You can also subscribe to a tumblelog via the RSS link at the bottom of the page (which, of course, you can replace with a FeedBurner feed).

So what are some of the ways you can use Tumblr? On my personal tumblelog, I post updates similar to what I previously would have put in my Facebook Status (I've integrated Tumblr with Facebook), I post short comments and links to sites or articles (essentially it's my mental scratch pad for things I haven't had time to expand into full-length blog entries), and I've set it up to import my blog feeds. Tumblr is easily integrated with Facebook, Twitter, and a number of other services, and there are a variety of third-party add-ons available.

On the tumblelog I've set up for the ETFO Niagara OT Local, I've set it up as a team tumblelog, allowing all the other Executive members to post to the tumblelog as well as myself. We use it for posting short comments and reminders that don't merit an official announcement or entry on our web site, and also as a way to keep members in the loop about some of what we do as an Executive.

Essentially, micro-blogs are a means of communication to complement your existing blog or web site. Your classroom blog, for instance, may have blog entries detailing upcoming trips, what you'll be teaching in the current term, and so on, whereas the tumblelog would have reminders of when permission slips are due, photos of anything interesting that may have happened during the day, and similar less formal items. The visual format of a tumblelog is also aesthetically oriented towards shorter posts. Using Blogger to post day to day homework assignments would probably look like overkill, whereas it would be a better aesthetic fit on a tumblelog.

Tumblelogs and other micro-blogs are another component of a comprehensive communications strategy. Whether it be a blog, a website, a wiki, a Yahoo Group, or a micro-blog, each tool may reach a different segment of our intended audience. Ideally, our audience will utilize all the communications tools we make available to them and become very well-informed. The real strength of using a variety of tools, though, is that each of these tools fills a niche that allows us to reach people with different communication styles.

Front Page article in The Standard!

2008-12-27T17:34:00.003-05:00

Today's St. Catharines Standard featured a front page article about occasional teachers, highlighting Niagara OT's own Britiny Gentry!

Generic FeedFlares for FeedBurner

2008-12-22T03:43:00.004-05:00

When customizing the interactivity built into your blog feed using FeedBurner's FeedFlare feature, the easy way to do it is to use the GenericFeedFlare, which takes parameters:

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/variableflareunits/GenericFeedFlare.jspx?text=Some+text&link=http://www.somelink.com

Since the Creative Commons license functionality built into FeedBurner uses the CC 3.0 Unported version of the license, a good use of the generic FeedFlare is to add a CC license to my feed that uses the CC 2.5 Canada version of the license (the legalese is customized to the Canadian jurisdiction; wherever possible, use your country-specific CC license). To do this, I'd enter the following into the Add New Flare box:

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/variableflareunits/GenericFeedFlare.jspx?text=View+CC+License&link=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/

I've bolded the custom parameters above. You can change them to suit your application. In the example above, for instance, you would want to change the link to go to whichever CC license is appropriate for you (specific to your country and licensing preferences... above, I use the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives Canada license).

Promote your blog with social networking

2008-12-21T17:26:00.007-05:00

In true Web 2.0 style, you can make it easy for your blog readers to promote your blog for you. Of course, with the abundance of social networking sites out there, how do you make sharing/bookmarking links for all of them available to your users?

The problem is solved by services like addthis.com (used on this blog) and addtoany.com, which provide a single button that can be displayed on your blog. When clicked or hovered over, the button displays a wide variety of social networking services, easily allowing your readers to choose the service of their choice on which they'd like to share a link to your blog.

Power up your blog with FeedBurner

2008-12-20T16:45:00.006-05:00

Blogs are useful in all kinds of ways for educators, and as educators we want to teach our audiences how to access blogs in the most efficient manner, by using a feed reader such as Google Reader.

However, encouraging our audiences to subscribe to our blog feeds gives us, as content producers, the responsibility to provide a proper feed. That's where FeedBurner comes in.

FeedBurner's feeds offer the following features:
- an awesome subscribe page that works with all browsers and readers
- the option to enable e-mail subscriptions
- automatic "ping" service to notify search engines when your content has been updated
- statistics on your feed's activity
- integrated sharing of your feed with social networking sites
- integration with Google Adsense to monetize your blog

Go ahead and give FeedBurner a try. It'll make your blog more useful.

Web 2.0 for Bibliophiles and Teachers

2008-08-01T07:08:00.002-04:00

Of all the various "Web 2.0" tools that have emerged, the one that excites me the most is Librarything.com. Granted, I'm a book geek whose home greatly resembles a library, but the potential uses of Librarything in schools seem endless to me.

What is Librarything? Basically you catalog your books, and you become part of a huge statistical mesh of bookowners. The site will look at your collection, compare it to others, and make book recommendations. You can browse other people's collections, join groups of people with similar interests, rate and review books, and so forth.

Using Librarything (LT) within a school, a teacher-librarian could import the school library's catalog to LT and instantly make it searchable from any computer connected to the Internet.

Outside of the school's formal library, a school-wide catalogue of books present in classrooms, tagged according to whose classroom they're in and who's borrowed them, would allow schools to get a better handle on what books are available (and possibly save some money by allowing the library to avoid duplicate purchases). If there were buy-in from all the teachers in the school, you could really get the kids hyped up on books as they tried to catalog every book in the school. Thinking about books, categorizing and organizing them, physically handling every book in their classroom... how could the kids not get excited about books?

Students could enter their personal libraries into LT, compare with their friends, and have LT recommend books to them based on similarities to the libraries of their friends. Book reviews could be done online (and/or existing book reviews on LT could be used as templates for doing a book review), and individual classes could start LT discussion groups to talk about books. Essentially, the "book club" could be moved online.

Librarything, by connecting books to technology, also offers a great opportunity to teach students about e-books, and to talk about issues like copyright, copyleft, and digital freedoms.

Doing it Right by Doing it All Wrong

2008-07-27T01:08:00.004-04:00

In the past couple of posts regarding use of presentation software (PowerPoint, Impress, and so on) in the classroom, I've talked about the proper way to do presentations so that audiences aren't bored, and that the value of the presentation lies in the speaker, rather than the slide-show.

Today, I'll talk about breaking all those conventions to create presentations which can be used differently in the classroom.

In a conventional presentation, a speaker who knows what they're doing puts little depth of information into their slides, keeping himself as the font of knowledge on the topic. In this way, questions are directed to them, rather than by referencing the slides, and the speaker establishes himself as the expert who can be called back for more speaking engagements. If you put too much information on the slides, you essentially give away the goose with the golden eggs.

However, another approach is to create presentations formatted as tutorials. In the tutorial scheme, the author doesn't expect to be "presenting" the slide-show in front of an audience. Rather, the tutorial will be made available online for students to go through individually. This turns the design objectives upside down, because in the tutorial one wants to convey lots of information in lieu of a live speaker.

Teachers may choose to create tutorials rather than presentations as an alternative means of interacting with students. Since live speaking engagements outside one's own classroom aren't typical, for a teacher who wants to share their knowledge with a wide base of other teachers and students, the tutorial offers a means of sharing a more comprehensive set of knowledge.

Other teachers will benefit greatly from this, because a tutorial style presentation offers a turn-key solution to knowledge transmission, which doesn't require the other teachers to be able to speak confidently on a topic they might not know much about. For students, a tutorial can offer a multimedia learning experience which they can go through at their own pace. With students working independently, the teacher can focus on helping students who are having trouble understanding the material. The tutorial is student-paced and student-focused learning, whereas the presentation is teacher-paced and teacher-focused.

Teachers, of course, benefit from sharing their work even when they give it away for free (such as when using a Creative Commons license). To begin with, other teachers share their work in return. Further, if one's work is of exceptional quality, one can begin to build a positive reputation which can translate into different career growth opportunities presenting themselves, whether it be speaking engagements, being used as a consultant, being paid to have some work published, or even getting more work as an occasional teacher because you're respected within your profession.

Presentations created in a tutorial style allow presentations to be used in a different fashion in the classroom than presentations where it's expected that there will be a speaker presenting. To make a good tutorial, though, you'll have to break all the rules and make something that would be just terrible if it was intended to be presented by a live person lecturing a group.

Using Presentation Software to Pace Lessons in the Classroom

2008-07-27T01:03:00.002-04:00

This post will focus not on the how-to of creating presentations, but the how-to of using presentations in the classroom.

Thinking about this a bit, what jumps into my mind is that by combining sound, video, and text into one document, we can control the pace of presenting it all, and eliminate time-consuming transitions between media which cause students to stop paying attention.

Of course, achieving this smoothness of presentation requires a lot of preparation of the presentation ahead of time (which can be very time consuming). The silver lining to that is that because we're using a digital medium, we can easily save our presentations to be reused with other classes of students.

Similarly, teachers can share their lesson presentations with each other and fine tune them, working collaboratively to dramatically reduce preparation time. This kind of peer-review process could lead to an overall increase in teaching professionalism.

Particularly for complex projects requiring a lot of materials, having a step by step presentation, perhaps with embedded video, would be a great way for students to be able to review instructions, and for the teacher to save time, use fewer materials, and make less of a mess.

The benefits when the teacher is using presentation software are pretty clear. But the benefits also extend to the students. As previously mentioned, students can review instructions by looking at the presentation again. They also benefit from a more professional presentation; a fine-tuned presentation which has been peer-reviewed is going to result in a better learning experience than if the teacher is essentially winging it, presenting a lesson plan for the first time.

Students benefit from learning how to use the software (the particular package doesn't really matter, they're learning how to conceptually use presentation software, knowledge which should be transferable to any package) and building transferable computer skills.

Transferable computer skills and comfort with computers are of course far more valuable than learning any particular piece of software in depth. By the time our students are our ages, they'll be talking about the old computers they had in school, that had piddly quad-core processors, a measly 4 GB of RAM, and actually used monitors and keyboards instead of neural interfaces...

Since they're working with presentation software, a presentation is potentially something that can be done as a group, which teaches all the various skills involved in cooperation. When the student(s) present their presentation, they also can practice the various components of public speaking, which can range from simply becoming comfortable speaking in front of a group, to developing their own signature style of engaging an audience.

Sometimes the Medium itself conveys a Message

2008-07-20T05:04:00.013-04:00

When choosing the software we use in schools, we need to be aware of the message that we're sending students. For instance, when we use Microsoft PowerPoint and refer to presentations as "Powerpoints" we're essentially endorsing and promoting a corporate brand. It's really no different than if our students only saw us drinking Coca-Cola, and we referred to all beverages as "Coke".

So, our choice of software says something in and of itself. That being said, do we want to be promoting software which is produced with improving a corporate bottom line as its main purpose? Which many of our students' families won't be able to afford to install on their home computers?

Luckily, we have many alternatives when it comes to software. Since 1984, something called the Free Software movement has existed. Introduced by Richard Stallman, free software provides users with four key freedoms:

* The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
* The freedom to redistribute copies of the software.
* The freedom to study the source code of the program to understand how it works.
* The freedom to adapt or change the program, and to release those improvements to the public so that others may benefit from them.

What do these freedoms mean for schools? The most practical benefit is that schools can save a lot of money by using free software.

Pedagogically, teachers and students benefit because the same software used at school can be freely used at home. Access to the source code means that older students have endless reference material to learn from when they begin programming.

Best of all, free software stands as a shining example of the power of sharing. The community-based values promoted by free software are much more in line with what we teach students in school than the corporate values which are represented by proprietary software.

Click on the banner above to learn more about the philosophy of the free software movement, or go straight to Richard Stallman's essay on why schools should use free software.

Legal Rights of Bloggers

2008-07-20T03:17:00.014-04:00

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of my favourite organizations (along with the Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons), is dedicated to protecting our freedoms on the Internet. Since blogging is something we all do these days, you'll probably be interested in their page of information (just click on one of the banners in this post) specifically addressing the legal rights of bloggers.

It's a good companion piece to the Reporters Without Borders' blogging guide I posted about earlier. The EFF also sponsors development of Tor, which is the best option you've got for protecting your anonymity on the net. More recently, they've also put together the Surveillance Self-Defense project.

Best Practices for Creating Presentations

2008-07-20T02:43:00.004-04:00

In my experience sitting through presentations, the ones which have me bored in no time at all are the ones where the slide comes up, I read it, and then have to sit and wait for the presenter to read the slide out loud, without adding anything of value.

The opposite end of the spectrum is presenters who have complex slides densely filled with good information, and who talk knowledgeably about their subject while barely touching on the slide content. In other words, they overload their audience with information... if you read the slides, you miss the speaking; if you pay attention to the speaking, you miss the slides. Having a printout of the slides doesn't really help either, because who has time to go over all the reams of paper we acquire each school year? Printouts just get thrown in a pile of papers for "future reference".

So, in terms of best practices in developing a presentation, slides should be simple, and the presenter must know their material well enough to talk extemporaneously on the topic. This way, the slides essentially serve as a table of contents for the points the speaker will be touching on, and the focus will be on the speaker (I suppose speaking style is another topic entirely... but since teachers practice public speaking every day, we tend to be pretty good at it. Anyone with serious stage fright should consider joining Toastmasters).

Depending on the purpose and audience of the presentation, making the presentation rely on the speaker for the bulk of the information is also a good practice shouldst one hope to build a reputation as a speaker and earn part of one's living (or simply build one's professional reputation) by public speaking. Presentation printouts should not include detailed information, but rather contact information so that the presenter's expertise can be further tapped (another presentation, consulting work, and so on).

In terms of the technical aspects of the presentation, I personally would tend to stay away from too much multimedia. A presentation should be pretty, but in a dignified way. Instead, the presenter needs to develop a presenting style which is engaging and keeps the audience enthralled. Anecdotes relating to the subject are always more engrossing and memorable than facts and figures. If you can deliver a real-life example of how or why something works, it will always resonate with an audience more than a dry recounting of the theory behind something.

Remember, when a workshop/lecture/speech is over, the audience never remembers the slide show. They walk away with an impression of the speaker.

Presentation resources... tutorials, templates, etc.

2008-07-18T16:18:00.005-04:00

Some of the better resources I've found:

LearnOpenOffice.org
OOExtras - Templates, artwork, tutorials... all for OpenOffice
OpenOffice Extensions - template packs and more
A very nice Impress Chalkboard template
PowerPoint in the Classroom
PowerPoint templates
The PowerPoint FAQ

Media literacy, audio, video... what about low-tech learning?

2008-07-10T04:06:00.002-04:00

In this post I'm going to take a devil's advocate stance, and suggest that while new media literacy and using multimedia as a teaching tool are valuable, that we shouldn't forget the value of low-tech learning. Simple writing utensils and imagination have gotten the human race through thousands of years so far.

What prompted me to think along these lines was the fact that despite being a smart computer geek, a lot of the multimedia creation tools available don't do me a whole lot of good, simply because I lack artistic ability. I can learn how to do very basic things with the various software packages, but without any underlying artistic ability I won't be able to produce anything I'd ever feel was worthy of presenting to an audience.

Yet, if I were a student today, I'd be expected to create multimedia presentations, modify video and photos, and so forth, just to convey basic information. To go back to when I actually was a student, it would be somewhat akin to asking me to illustrate my essays with oil paints. I could do it, but it wouldn't be pretty.

So, that raises a couple of questions. Should being an artist be a prerequisite for being considered capable of communicating effectively? Should some of what we're trying to push on all students be acknowledged as art and taught in appropriate classes? Does the art component of new media put undue expectations on students who are still beginners in the realm of written language in the first place?

Really, at what point did we forget that the richest tapestry is in the mind's eye?

There are so many distractions for students these days that I wonder if a lot of the song and dance we do for our students doesn't just serve as further distraction and limit the students' learning. We seem to seldom get past scratching the surface of what we're teaching. Are we simply enabling and supporting the society-wide attention deficit that's been caused by telephones, televisions, radio, Internet, and so forth?

Perhaps we simply need to try to ensure that the technology we're using doesn't become the focus of a lesson, but is merely a means to learning about the subject at hand. Too many lessons end up with students enamoured by the technology, but learning nothing about the subject matter. I seldom see this happen when working with pencils and paper.

Not to be a Luddite, but I think there's a case to be made for good old-fashioned pencils, paper, and imagination.

Podcast Directories, Aggregators, and iTunes alternatives

2008-07-06T00:43:00.008-04:00

In exploring the whole iTunes and podcast topic this week in more detail than I've ever bothered to do before (just about every waking moment the past few days!), I'm amazed at how much material is out there. I imagine that podcasts will become another source of information overload for me...

Regarding the information overload, I've been looking at various ways to manage podcasts. iTunes is great with it's iTunes Store podcast directory, but it doesn't sync with my Creative Labs Zen Touch MP3 player (or any non-Apple player as far as I know). I can subscribe to podcasts using Google Reader, which gives me the convenience of listening to them easily from any computer connected to the net, but it doesn't sync with MP3 players.

The solution I've found which I think is going to work best is by using PodNova.com, which is an online podcast aggregator. PodNova offers the best of both worlds. I can subscribe to podcasts, which I can find by searching their podcast directory. I can listen to podcasts online from any computer connected to the net. Best of all, I can also download their desktop client software which will automatically download the latest episodes of podcasts and sync with my MP3 player.

For finding podcasts, I've discovered a number of podcast directories online:

gpodder.org
www.podnova.com
zencast.com
www.podcastdirectory.com
www.podcastalley.com
www.podfeed.net
www.podcastshuffle.com
www.digitalpodcast.com
odeo.com

I've also been playing around with a variety of media players, since iTunes doesn't play well with non-iPods. Windows Media Player isn't bad just as a music player, but it lacks most of the bells and whistles other players offer. I of course have Creative MediaSource installed, as it offers the best sync options for my MP3 player, but for a desktop music player, the one I like best is called Songbird.

Songbird uses the Firefox web browser's underlying architecture as a programming platform, and is thus very web integrated, with a variety of add-ons available. It's easily configurable to access my music library (all my songs are stored in c:\mp3, podcasts go to c:\mp3\podcasts), and has all the features I can hope for. Of course, for watching movies, I use VLC Media Player.

Here's a few media players I was playing with:

Songbird
aTunes
foobar2000

Internet Safety for Teachers

2008-07-04T15:04:00.005-04:00

When considering the topic of Internet safety, as teachers we generally think of our students and protecting them from things like online bullying and online predators (who, in a non-hysterical risk assessment, are pretty much equivalent to the bogeyman).

What teachers seldom consider are the risks the online world pose to themselves. These risks are quite real, and it's frightening just how quickly a career can end based on a flimsy, dubious, or outright fraudulent allegation. Do you really want to be listed in the blue pages of Professionally Speaking?

When you communicate with parents and students online, you open yourself to a whole new medium for bullying, harassment, and allegations of misconduct. Something as simple as giving a child your e-mail or website address can be interpreted as "grooming" the child for exploitation, and can directly lead to a variety of serious ramifications.

Be aware that even the most innocuous things can form the basis for misconduct allegations, and that a member of the public can go to the Ontario College of Teachers website and easily find instructions on how to file a complaint against a teacher.

Such complaints, regardless of their validity, set in motion a series of events which will make your life very unpleasant and possibly end your career. This will involve a College of Teachers investigation, possibly Children's Aid and/or the Police, and likely an investigation by your school board. Do not assume these investigations will be fair, rational, and unbiased. In many cases you are considered guilty until proven innocent (and often treated as guilty even if proven innocent), and in most cases there are no consequences for the complainant if their allegations are proven false.

In absolutely no circumstances should you make any statements or comments without first contacting ETFO Protective Services at 1-888-838-3836.

So, what is a teacher to do? In the modern world we can't avoid being on the net. But we do need to take appropriate precautions. Enable all privacy controls available for any online presence you may have on the net (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), use strong passwords, and always strive to keep unprofessional images and postings off the net. Despite privacy precautions, assume everything is public to some degree.

Never engage in personal conversations with students or their parents online. Keep everything on a professional level. Always keep your administrator and students' parents informed and involved in any online activities you're conducting with your students.

We serve in a very public role in our profession, and we interact with a fairly random sample of the members of the public. We are under constant scrutiny, and since our charges are children, we can expect that any kind of question that might arise regarding our professional conduct probably won't be evaluated in the most rational manner. In these circumstances, a little bit of paranoia is actually warranted, as people really are out to get us... but always being cognizant of taking appropriate precautions should avoid any potential problems.

ETFO has released PRS Matters bulletins relating to these issues, which are valuable reading:

Electronic Communications

Understanding Professional Boundaries

Allegations of Sexual Misconduct

Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents

2008-06-29T09:42:00.005-04:00

Reporters without Borders publishes the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents. It's a collection of essays covering things like how to set up a blog, how to blog anonymously, journalistic ethics, how to avoid censorship, and blogs as a modern source of news (particularly in countries where the traditional press doesn't have any freedom).

Particularly since it's written as a series of articles, I can see this being a great tool in the classroom. It raises provocative questions, it's edgy, and it can really engage the imagination of students. It casts the whole topic of net safety in a different light. While learning net safety tactics used by people whose lives depend on it, students will be able to draw parallels to their own net usage.

Classroom blogging limited by lack of technological ubiquity...

2008-06-28T14:41:00.005-04:00

The most limiting factor that I currently see to using blogs (or most computer-based technologies) in the classroom is simply the lack of computers. Most classrooms only have one or two computers, and it's difficult to really run with the technology when you can only count on having each of your kids on a computer for maybe one period per day in a lab. Sure, students can use computers to do their homework, but that's not really integrating them into the classroom, is it?

Few schools yet have wireless networks, either. Installing wireless networks and equipping students with relatively inexpensive handheld devices such as HP iPaqs or Asus EeePCs (possibly with Bluetooth keyboards, or voice recognition) would probably be the best option for providing actual in-classroom (as opposed to computer lab) access to a computer, which is really essential to fully leveraging the technology.

Currently, with students trekking to a computer lab to work on computers, the educational experience centres around the computer or the technology, rather than the subject matter. Once every child has a device capable of net access, then the technology will have become ubiquitous enough that the focus will not be on the technology, but rather on the subject matter.

When the technology itself is thought of as akin to pencils and paper, then students and teachers will be able to truly focus on what they can do with the technology. Even better, teachers will be able to integrate the technology into all aspects of their teaching practice.

I'm looking forward to the day when I'll be able to use technology throughout the day, rather than sending my students home to do the fun stuff.

Netiquette

2008-06-24T10:28:00.004-04:00

Following my previous posting... while there's no exemption from thoughtful composition on the Internet, some of the communications methods available online do entail different writing conventions than straight exposition in order to be effective.

These conventions generally fall into the category of formatting, such as quoting of text from messages one is responding to, trimming excess quotes, how to properly intersperse comments amongst quotes, various ways of indicating emphasis, conveying emotions and body language through emoticons and abbreviations, and so on.

These conventions have come to be known at netiquette. Below you will find several guides to netiquette:

http://www.dtcc.edu/cs/rfc1855.html
http://www.albion.com/netiquette/
http://www.learnthenet.com/english/html/09netiqt.htm
http://www.netmanners.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netiquette

Don't dismiss the importance of proper netiquette! Just as people may dismiss your writings due to poor grammar and spelling, failure to follow proper netiquette will lead to your online writings being dismissed if you present yourself like a complete newbie.