The other day I got an email from a teacher who was upset about all the talk regarding classrooms of the future and that simulations are replacing real world experiences.
A case for simulations.
I am all for simulations over real world experience under these circumstances:
Student safety: take for example a chemistry experiment, allowing student to play with a virtual chemistry set before letting them loose on real chemicals makes sense to me. I’m not saying that students should never touch real chemicals, but at first they can learn in a much safer environment inside of their virtual lab.
Animal safety: I once saw a great demo on a Gizmo simulation involving genetics and mice. In the simulations you could have as many mice as you wanted reproduce — nice. Or how about the virtual frog dissection. Frogs all over the world cheered when this simulation was announced.
Long distance field trips: don’t get me wrong, I love field trips as much as the next teacher, but my class does not have the time or the money to go on long distance field trips. Which why I love virtual field trips to places like the rain forest, space station, Gettysburg, etc. Hey, if you can’t them there in the real world them a simulation is a close second.
I never look at school technology as replacing something great, instead I want it to make it better.
What do you think?
Today I want to take a few moments to talk about synchronous and asynchronous learning, two concepts that when properly mixed could be the future of modern education.
Synchronous learning is when you learn something right now from your teacher. A typical classroom with a teacher standing at the front of the room is a perfect example of synchronous learning. Great for some people, but having to always meet face to face can be really inconvenient in our modern world.
Asynchronous learning is when you are out of “sync” with your teacher and fellow classmates. Take for example an online class; you might watch a pre-recorded lecture from your teacher that was given last year, write a paper on it and submit your paper to an online wiki for a few classmates to do a peer-review. However, your classmates are spread across the globe, so they might be asleep while you are awake. The lag-time with this type of learning can become monotonous.
As you can see from my examples there are some pros and cons with both methods — which is why I have really gotten into studying about “Blended Learning” where you mix both synchronous and asynchronous learning together to get the best of both worlds. A little face time with a teacher combined with online instruction that you can do anytime or anywhere that you want.
Now… how can I bring this into my school?
Is this the future of teaching school technology?
I remember the weeks leading up to my summer break — oh, the plans that I had. Now that summer is half over for me it is time to start working on all of those edtech plans that I had. So here is my top 5 edtech priorities for the remainder of this summer, things to improve the teaching of technology in my school.
Number 1: Review all of my current lessons. I swear, math teachers have it so easy — nothing ever changes in math. The same principles that were taught to me in my childhood are the same today. But with teaching technology your lessons should always be fresh and current. So this year I will be adding programming with Scratch, deleting a couple of lessons using MS Publisher (I admit, I danced on the grave of MS Publisher), etc. So it is a sort of “out with the old and in with the new,” approach to my edtech lessons.
Number 2: Read a few good edtech or teaching books. This summers reading list: 21st Century Skills by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel, Teaching Content Outrageously by Stanley Pogrow, Reinventing Project-Based Learning by Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss and finally; Disrupting Class by Clayton M. Christensen.
Number 3: Listen to or watch some good podcasts. If you haven’t started watching TEDtalks online, then start. You will be amazed how much these talks will inspire you to be a better tech teacher. I listen to five or six podcasts a week and I love them. Just go to iTunes and search the podcast section for the topic or subject of your liking.
Number 4: Attend a few conferences. As many of you know from my blog posts, I attended the recent ISTE conference in Denver and walked away with a ton of new educational technology ideas for my school. I still have a few more conferences to go to so we’ll see how the rest of my summer goes.
Number 5: Set some new goals. When I finished this past school year I set a personal goal to work out a couple of classroom management issues that I was having in my computer lab. One day when I was surfing YouTube for some ideas I came across a series of videos on Power Teaching (which has now been changed to Whole-Brain Teaching) and something clicked inside of me — I liked these classroom management techniques — so I have spent a bit of time this summer practicing and working on these new ideas. Watch out students, there’s a new sheriff in town!
I hope my list has been helpful, please share your ideas in the comment section below.
The recent Vision K-12 survey given by Software and Information Industry Association shows only a margin of growth by our schools in our students acquiring 21st Century Skills (overall less than a 1% improvement). This got me thinking about my own elementary school and how we would fair in this survey.
The survey tracks five different areas of school technology progress by using 20 questions to get a national average of what is happening in our schools with regards to technology and 21st Century Skills. I now want to take a lot at each area to see how my school might fit it.
21st Century Learning Tools: We have worked hard this past year to embed and integrate 21st Century Skills into our lessons. This next year we plan to use Atomic Learning to help fill in any gaps that our teachers might have in their general tech skills. (My score: B+)
Anytime/Anywhere Access to Technology: We are really fortunate in my school that all of our students have access to computers at home. And since we have moved over to using Google Docs, our students can now get to their work from any computer in the world with Internet access. (My score: A)
Differentiated Learning: The teachers in my school have a strong focus on differentiated instruction, it is part of our teaching culture — so we have no problem with this one. (My score: A)
Assessment Tools: In the past we have done nothing but now that we have subscribed to Atomic Learning we have access to both their teacher and student 21st Century Skills assessment so we hope that this one will be improving this next year. (My score: F)
Enterprise Support: I am going to interpret this area as the support systems for both teachers and students learning these edtech skills. We are working hard in my school to make sure that teachers have access to online professional development that they can access anytime or anywhere that they need, as well as good one on one training to ensure that they use their current classroom technology correctly — like SmartBoards and document cameras.
Admittedly, I do not have access to the real 20 questions, but the survey did cause me to pause and reflect upon my own school and plan for some improvements.
What do you think of this survey and how would you score your own school?
When I was doing a little research on creating timelines for an upcoming lesson I came across this great website about Jazz music.
This website is based on the 10-part documentary by Ken Burns entitled Jazz. Although it was originally broadcast back in 2001 the content is timeless.
Students and teachers will find it easy to use, the content is divided into 13 different sections, with one called Jazz Kids which has interactive activities for younger students. One of the greatest part for me was the timeline, something I am going to use with my students to show how a timeline should be made. When I teach school technology I always look for the best possible examples of what I am wanting my students to produce — set the bar high and students will blow you away!
So get out your favorite headphones and check out some of the great songs that are included on the website.
Sit back, relax, and enjoy this great website.
Today I would like to focus my blog post on what I believe is the best what to teach 21st Century Skills and school technology to our students — projects.
The school I taught at before coming to my current school was a PBL or Project-Based Learning school. This meant that most of the concepts and skills that were being taught to students were part of a larger projects — students love to learn this way. Although most schools really do work this way, this school had made it part of it’s formal identity. Just to be clear, my current school teaches a lot through projects as well.
Here is a rough idea at how project-based learning works…
Step One: Define — give your students a real-world problem or process and ask them to make things better, easier, faster, cheaper, more effective or more enjoyable. This is usually done through a question. For example, in fifth grade this coming year my question might be: “If you lived during the Renaissance, what would you have done to get your work noticed? So that people would be talking about your work hundreds of years later.”
Step Two: Plan — students need to take time to understand information about the subject, through study and research students can use school technology to be better equipped to answer the above question.
Step Three: Do — using different techniques students then do the project, in the case of the Renaissance question, I will ask my students to produce a podcast.
Step Four: Review — student finish the project by reviewing each others work and by posting their projects online for the world to see.
If has been my experience that project-based learning can be one of the best ways to teach 21st Century Skills and technology to our students. Rather than just teaching them a random skill like how to edit audio — just make learning the skill part of a much larger project.
I love to explore the exhibit floor at ISTE. In fact, I think I get some of my best ideas from talking to the different companies about their new ideas in school technologies. Here is my list of the top 10 exhibitors that really impressed me.
Atomic Learning: I love how this company keeps on top of new educational technology — they just added new training for iPad and iPod Touches as well as the new lessons for the most recent Office products.
Vernier: They have now combined their data probes with LEGO NXT robotics — how cool is that! I have been dreaming of getting this for my school ever since they demoed it to me.
Zarbeco: This company just released a cool USB microscope called the MiScope. With 40 to 140x magnification and with the live preview on a computer screen, it is going to be perfect for my elementary students.
Visions Technology in Education: I met one of the authors for this company, Arnie Abrams, at the exhibit booth who showed me his book on digital storytelling projects — a definite “must buy” for me and the projects that I am going to do next year with my students.
Learning.com: Way to go! They launched “In Sky” which allows teachers and students to access different digital content from different providers with just one log-in — THANK YOU!
Rhymes ‘n’ Times: These exhibitors finally showed me a way to teach my students their times tables in an easy and painless way.
Student Publishing: I have been looking for an easy and affordable solution to allow my students to produce their own books — now I have finally found one.
Dreambox: I got sucked into a demo at this booth and boy was I impressed. I loved the idea of game-play for learning math concepts. This is a fairly new company that looks very promising.
Brainology: Here is another fun exhibitor that I came across that really impressed me with the quality of their product line, they offer online lessons to help student be better at school.
Arcademics: I totally believe in using video games to teach students and this company does a really good job at it.
So here is my top 10 list of exhibitors that impressed me with regard to school technology at ISTE 2010 in Denver last week, now I all need is the money to get these products in my school. Next stop — BEGGING FOR BUCKS!
How to decide which netbooks to buy.
When it comes to netbooks it seems that every computer manufacturer is getting in on the action. All the big players such as Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Intel are now making netbooks, which explains why netbooks are one of the top selling computers. The specifications on these netbooks from these different companies and the differences between models can make it very confusing for the average teacher or school to pick the netbook that is right for their students. The following items are some things to consider to help you choose the best netbook for your school or classroom.
Netbooks vs Notebook
There are some people who argue that with the cost of some netbooks being around $350 that schools should just buy a full-size notebook computer for about $100 more. However, price isn’t the only criteria to consider when buying a netbook. Size of the netbook is a critical component of success in the classroom. Smaller sized elementary students seem to fit the netbooks a lot better than a full-sized laptop. An additional plus for the smaller sized netbooks is that the netbook fits on student desks with greater ease. With a netbook on a desk there is still plenty of room for a textbook, but if you have a full-size notebook computer, there is really only room for the computer and nothing else.
Windows vs Linux
Netbooks that we tested usually came in two flavors: Windows or Linux operating systems. We chose the Windows system for two major reasons: compatibility with existing software and the current Wi-Fi system. One aspect to consider is how many educational software titles exist within each operating system.
Keyboards
All netbooks have smaller keyboards than regular sized laptop computers however, this doesn’t mean that all netbook keyboards are the same. For example, the Asus models have very small keys with some of the keys in different locations and different sizes than a traditional keyboard. On one Asus model, the right shift key was about half the size compared to what it traditionally would be, plus the keys were so small that a regular-sized adult hand could not effectively type on this size of keyboard. These netbooks were designed for young students, who by the way, get used to the small keyboard quite quickly. Within a week or two, elementary students didn’t even notice the size of the keys and this smaller size did not affect their typing speed. If you are considering netbooks for an elementary school, small keyboard size might not be an issue. However, if you are looking at netbooks for a middle school, this would definitely be an area of concern since there are several students in the eighth grade that are just as big as an adult and have adult-sized hands. In our opinion, the best keyboards for larger middle-school sized hands were the Dell, Intel, Acer, and HP models with a slight preference for HP. I even found myself easily adjusting to the slightly smaller keyboards of these models and students were not even phased when coming from a full-size keyboard to a netbook keyboard on these models.
Size
The size of netbooks vary a little from manufacturer to manufacturer and from model to model. Basically there are 7 inch netbooks, 9 inch netbooks, and 10 inch netbooks. The sizes refer to the diagonal measurement of the screen of the netbook. The best size netbooks for schools are the 10 inch models. Keep in mind, the actual total size of one 10 inch screen netbook may be different from another 10 inch screen netbook. For example, the 10 inch Acer Netbook is about an inch wider than the Asus. So even though both models might be 10 inches diagonally at the screen, the Acer netbook is bigger. A larger sized netbook means that you have a larger keyboard which in turn makes all the difference in the world when you compare these two models.
Screen Resolution
When choosing netbook software, one important aspect to remember is that almost every netbook has the screen resolution of 1024 by 600. There are some software programs that simply will not work on these smaller sized screens. Double check before buying any software.
Processors, Hard Drives and Memory
Processors are the speed at which your Netbook performs. I would not recommend that you buy a netbook that has a processor speed less than a 1.6 GHz. When we have tested models with processors speeds at less than 1.6 GHz’s, they were simply not worth the savings in money. However, netbooks that operated at 1.6 GHz seemed to be acceptable. We tested the 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor and the netbook literally operated at the same speed as most laptops. Most adult testers didn’t notice a speed difference between their regular laptops and the test netbooks.
Since netbooks were supposed to be “network notebooks,” many early manufacturers only put small solid state drives (SSD) in their netbooks instead of a real hard drive (HD). This was done to save money and because it was thought that netbooks would only be used to perform online tasks. While SSDs are fast and great for holding an operating system, they do not provide much room for anything else. In many instances, you may want to put more things on your netbook, including Google Earth and some photos for a project. Because of this need, I recommend selecting an HD that is at least 100 GB. By having this much space, students can temporarily store photos, music and videos on the netbook HD and transfer them to Adrive or a server when they are done.
Batteries
The question to answer when asking which batteries to buy is how will the netbooks be used on a daily basis within the classroom? There are two basic types of batteries; the three cell battery and the six cell battery. The three cell battery will give you about 2 and a half hours of operating time and the six cell battery will give you nearly 6 hours. Since most schools are open for six hours a day people tend to think that they need the six cell battery. However, students will rarely need to use their netbooks continually for six hours during the day. With just a little planning, most schools can operate using the three cell battery with no impact on instruction. To clarify this rationale, refer back to the typical netbook day to see how many times the netbooks were returned to their chargers during the day. By purchasing the three cell model instead of the six cell model, schools will save money on the overall price per netbook resulting in substantial saving. This means that school could purchase more netbooks with the savings.
Applications
Typically, most districts will not allow teachers or principals to buy netbooks personally and bring them directly into the classrooms to be used. Instead, netbooks will probably have to be taken to your IT department where they will make an “image” of the perfect netbook computer. This image is then copied to all the rest of the netbooks for your school. Teachers will want to think carefully about what they want included on that image. The image includes everything from installed software to the settings in Windows. Each school and district is a little different so teachers will have to spend some time considering this. Preplanning will be critical at this stage since if your school has already paid for a license to a particular math program, you will want that program installed on the original image. Remember, netbooks do not have a CD drive.
Installing Applications
Installing applications on a netbook can be rather tricky since it does not have a CD drive. The easiest solution is to just buy an external USB CD drive to use for installations. Another option is to just buy the digital downloadable version of an application instead of the CD version. This way you just download the install file to the netbook and continue with the install process. Some IT techs install directly from a district server and others install from USB flash drives that they have copied the application install file to. Installing applications is usually something that needs to be pre-approved through most IT departments so check before continuing with this activity.
Subscriptions
Having the right subscription with your netbooks increases their value exponentially. I know that is a bold statement but there is incredible curriculum subscriptions for netbooks that has changed our way of viewing netbooks as student’s tools for learning. Here is an example of one subscription services that was critical to the success of our netbooks within classrooms.
Atomic Learning provides video step-by-step tutorials for just in time training. Imagine being a teacher who has now been thrown into the world of netbooks computers and is having to be a part-time tech teacher to all their netbook students. Many questions can arise such as “How do you make a graph in Excel?”, “How do you make a bullet point list in Word?” and “How do I save this document in a different format?”
With Atomic Learning, all we had to do is log in and then find the short video tutorial (usually under 3 minutes) to show exactly what to do. We could even display the video up on the LCD projector for our students to follow along. Atomic Learning has literally thousands upon thousands of video tutorials. The video tutorials can be “assigned” to students, so that they can learn at their own time and pace.
Atomic Learning also provides something called Lesson Accelerators which are pre-made lessons about using technology in the classroom. Teachers that were wanting to accelerated their students’ 21st Century Skills assigned these lessons to students to increase their capacity. Atomic Learning has also recently added an entire section dedicated to teaching and embedding 21st Century Skills in the classroom.
Online Applications
The concept of a netbook is that you use it online — all the time. Which means that many applications that used to be installed on our computers now live online in the “cloud.” This is why Google Docs is used so much in a netbook classroom, but what about other applications? Let’s says, for example that you need to edit a photo. Just go to a free photo editing website like www.Picnik.com and upload your photo, edit it, and then download it back to your netbook, done. That is cloud computing, see my website link at the end of this book for more examples of this.
Optimizing a Netbook
There are a few tricks to optimize your netbook to meet the needs of students. Regarding the track pad on the netbooks, we disabled the tap feature that allows students to tap their track pad rather than clicking the button. We found that tapping the track pad was very confusing to elementary school students so we disabled it. We also slowed down the speed of the pointer and the double-click speed. We made changes to the Internet Explorer so that it had minimal menus as screen real estate is such a premium on a netbook you do not need to waste it on things like a Google bar or tabs. As a bonus, the new Internet Explorer does have a full screen option (F11) which allows students to see a lot more of a website by going to full screen mode. It also includes a zoom feature, so if students need to they can zoom out to see the entire web page. Mind you, on a netbook screen, the text will now appear very tiny. Another way to increase screen capacity on the small netbooks is to set the task-bar at the bottom to auto hide.
Near Paperless Teaching with Netbooks
By using Google Docs and emails, a teacher can almost teach without printing documents. Teaching students about having an environmentally responsible classroom is just one aspect of being a 21st Century student. As educators, it is very easy to print reams and reams of paper. Instead of printing projects to turn in, a netbook classroom teacher can check student work on a screen.
Let’s see how a nearly paperless assignment might continue. Let’s say that the student’s assignment was to gather information about the red-eyed tree frog. The teacher starts off by sending an email to all the students (a distribution list set up in his or her email program) which sends all the students to a Google Doc worksheet. This worksheet asks the students questions about the frog that they need to research on the Internet. This document also contains the list of tasks that the student is to complete such as obtaining three photos and a map showing where the frog’s habitat is and a short video about the frog which is found on SchoolTube.com. Since the teacher is set up on each student’s worksheet as a collaborator, there is nothing to turn in and revisions can be done as many times as needed. When the student is done, they add the word “final” to their file name and the teacher will know that the grading can begin. To conclude the project, the teacher uses a Google Docs “form” to test for retention (i.e. a quiz without paper).
At the recent ISTE Conference in Denver I sat down with Kathy Schroeder of Atomic Learning and we had a great talk about different ideas regarding the future of education. At first we bantered back and fourth about the regular stuff like iPads and digital books, but they Kathy brought up blended learning, a concept I strongly believe in but I have never really given it much thought.
Blended learning is when the student gains an education from both a traditional teacher-taught lesson and an online lesson. Take my son for example, this year he is entering high school but will take 2 of his courses online — the school he attends does not offer some of what he needs. What also works for my son, and other students just like him, is that he can do is online classes when and where he wants to — the power of asynchronous learning.
I strongly believe that students need to learn how to take online courses and classes, this will prove to be invaluable for them in the future as they enter the work force.
The illiterate of the 21st Century are not those that cannot read or write, but those that cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. – Alvin Toffler
What do you think about blended learning?
In case you didn’t know it, NASA has a lot of different websites, each one covering something different. Which can be a pain when you are looking for something for your classroom to with NASA. The good news is that NASA Education Enterprise is a sort of umbrella that covers all of the individual websites, which is why it is such a good website for teachers and students.
A great place to start is the search box, this will search across all the NASA websites for your subject of interest.
On the left side navigation is the link for educators which is then broken down into grade levels — fantastic when you are looking for lesson ideas.
Also on the left is the link for students which is also broken down by grade levels. I have used this during free time and the students love it.
One of the important part of teaching students to use school technology is of course research, this website from NASA is great for it. I remember the day when I started the students on this website and sent them after as much information on the two robots on Mars; Spirit and Opportunity. I was amazed at what they found.
