Copy / Paste by Peter Pappas

Google Chromebook: 1-to-1 Computing for $180 per Student?

This week Google launched the Chromebook - a cloud-based "laptop" priced at $20 per month. That's $180 per student for a nine-month school year. Not a bad price for 1 to 1.

It's built on the already popular Google Chrome and Google apps platform. (I'm using both with increasing regularity).  It will be a tempting offer for schools - instant on, always connected - plus no software installs, anti-virus, or upgrades to worry about. Run it at school on the district WiFi, then take it home and use 3G - Verizon is providing 100mb of data per month for free. 

The Chromebook will raise big questions about collection of personal student data, internet security and acceptable use policies. But Google claims to have features in place which offers granular controls on web access (1st graders can't get to sites that might be acceptable to high schoolers.) 

I wonder if schools will take the bait? If I were the school IT guy - I'd be nervous. If it turns out Chromebook works as advertised, I might be out of work.

On second thought - I should get one for my mother. That's an IT job I'd like to lose!

The Inconvenient Truth About Textbooks

I just went to the iTunes App Store, and in one impulsive click, downloaded Al Gore's companion app to his book "Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis."

It's an immersive learning environment that begs the question - $4.99 iPad app or $49 textbook? 

Watch this promo video and you decide if the eBook has made the traditional textbook a relic. If you need some more numbers to help you make the decision -a quick search on textbook costs turned up this data from a 2005 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. "The average estimated cost of books and supplies for a first-time, full-time student at a four-year public institution was $898, or 26 percent of the cost of tuition and fees. At community colleges, the estimated cost of books and supplies was a whopping 72 percent of the cost of tuition and fees." 

EBook or textbook - still trying to decide?  Don't forget that future updates of the app could add more content or features - how about social networking?

Update: A hat tip to my friend Martin Edic at 24PageBooks who pointed out that Push Top Press (the folks who did the Gore's book) plan to release a publishing platform for authors, publishers and artists to turn their books into interactive iPad or iPhone apps — no programming skills required. Imagine when students can make their own!

 

Student Personal Tech Devices in the Classroom? A Cartoon Parable

"The Cameraman" - From Cartoonist Chris Ware, animator John Kuramoto and Ira Glass of This American Life. First grade teacher, Jeff Potter tells Ira about an art project and the impact of  personal "technology" in the classroom. 

"The camera really changed the way we behaved.... We lost our humanity."

Were the cameras really responsible for the student insensitively to the fight? Was banning the cameras the only alternative the teachers had? I don't know. I wasn't there. 

But it does strike me that the cameras were also a catalyst to creativity, collaboration, and powerful student engagement. Is this a parable about balancing the benefits and liabilities of cell phones and other student personal technology in the classroom?

Hat tip to David Kwasigroh

Historypin - Make DBQs with a Digital Time Machine That Layers Image, Story and Location

While planning for my next document based question (DBQ) workshop, I discovered Historypin. It's a great mashup of digital photos with stories layered over Google maps. Users can search images by geography / time and post historic photos with stories to maps. It's fascinating to view historic photographs set against the backdrop of current Google map street view.

Here's a circa 1894 photo I uploaded to Historypin showing a bridge crossing the Erie Canal in downtown Rochester NY. It's layered over a functioning "street view" in Google maps.

In Historypin's story section, I provide a brief history of the canal's impact on the growth of the city.

Then I pose a question. "I wonder if the people in the old photograph still appreciated the canal's role in creating the city of Rochester, or if they had come to see it as outmoded nuisance which divided the city in half?"

For more ideas for classroom see:  image guide | story guide | teachers' notes. 

What I like most about Historypin is that it adds a new dimension to the DBQ approach to instruction - students don't simply learn from historic documents - they get to document their world for future generations.

More from Historypin:

Historypin was created as part of our current campaign to get people from different generations spending more time together. From a lot testing, we found old photos are a great way of getting people talking about how their street used to look, what their grandparents were like and what's changed (or not) over time. 

We decided to create a website where people everywhere could share their old photos and the stories behind them, pinning them to a map of the world. We also thought it would be neat if you could compare these old photos with how the world looks today, making the site a bit like a digital time machine. So we asked Google if they'd help. They let us use their map and Street View functionality and helped us build the site. 

The great thing about Historypin is that when they're using the site, loads of people are spending time with someone from a different generation. Older people have attics full of old photos, younger people know when to click and when to double click.

Design Your Website from the Bottom Up

For months, I've noticed a steady stream of searches on this blog for "Design Your Website" or "Bottom Up." I realized folks were looking for a PDF that I created back in 2000 as part of my web design class - we're talking "old school" FrontPage webs! I started teaching web design to students and teachers back in 1997. Over 10+ years I helped hundreds of teachers and students get started.

 

 

I thought since people are still looking, I'd repost the PDF on my blog and save them some search time. Download Design Website From the Bottom Up 200KB pdf

Design tools have evolved greatly since then, but I think the "bottom up" approach still offers a useful perspective for thinking about information design. 

Reader smight also find some useful (but dated) resources at my site "Website Design for Teachers"

How To Quantify Culture? Explore 500 Billion Published Words With Google's Books Ngram Viewer

By now you must be aware that Google has been busy digitizing books - over 5 million are now available for free download and search. Recently Google Labs has made public a giant database of of names, words and phrases found in those books (along with the years they appeared). It consists of the 500 billion words contained in scanned books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian. 

Google Labs has just posted the "Books Ngram Viewer" - a free online research tool that allows you to quickly analyze the frequency of names, words and phrases -and when they appeared in the digitized books. You type in words and / or phrases (separated by comma), set the date range, and click "Search lots of books" - instantly you get the results. Note: when "smoothing" is set to "0" the results will show raw data. Using a higher number produces an average - example "4" will give you four year running averages that will more readily display trends. 

In this graph I searched "horse, carriage, canal, train, steamship, bicycle, car, airplane" and set the date range to 1800 - 2000.  Link to this transport graph at Books Ngram Viewer The results offer some insights into when these new transportation terms found their way into print. 

I think Books Ngram Viewer has many interesting applications in the classroom. The first that comes to mind, is as tool to introduce the research method - form hypothesis, gather and analyze data, revise hypothesis (as needed), draw conclusions, assess research methods. Working in teams students can easily pose research questions, run the data, revise and assess their research strategy. Students can quickly make and test predictions. They can then present and defend their conclusions to other classroom groups. 

Using the Ngram viewer, will enable students to discover many insights which will require revisions to their research strategies - a great way to explore word usage, social context and statistics. Words have multiple meanings. In my transport example "car" appears in the graph long before the advent of the automobile. Was it used as railroad car? In contrast to newspapers, events and trends take time to find their way into books. "Pearl Harbor" does not reach a peak until 1945.

The frequency of occurrence scale is important (vertical Y-axis.) If you graph a high frequency word against a low frequency word(s), the low is reduced to a flat line at the base of the scale. (Abraham Lincoln and Marilyn Monroe) Remove the high frequency (Abraham Lincoln) and re-run the graph - the low frequency (Marilyn Monroe) will appear with more detail. For more specifics on how to search, click here.

[nGram even includes a "Rickrolling" Easter Egg.
Search for "never gonna give you up"]

Update: Hat tip to Jean-Baptiste Michel of the nGram team who emailed me "In English, the data is good in 1800-2000, but not really before or after. Past that date, it looks like the composition of the corpus is changing; trends would indicate a shift in the corpus, not a shift in the underlying culture. So really, one shouldn't look at data past 2000 in English."

There are so many new free online tools that allow students to visualize and present information in new ways. For example,  see my post "Build Literacy Skills with Wordle." Let's start to collect classroom ideas for Books Ngram Viewer. If you find some interesting uses in the classroom, please post them as comment (with links). Here's a few more graphs to get you thinking.  Need ideas for nGrams? Click here.

Analyze societal values: "ex wife, ex husband"  
 Changing laws and social values?
Watch the change in the Y-axis scale - add "my ex" to the original graph.

Track trends: "latte, sushi, taco"
Link to graph Are these new food fads?

Filtering - The New Literacy of Maintaining Focus

The New York Times recent story "Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction" and reinforces a point I made in a July blog post "Forget About Remembering, It's Focus That's the New Literacy." I thought I'd revisit my original post and add the NY Times' thought-provoking video. 

The cost of information is rapidly approaching zero. Normally as price of a commodity drops, we consume more of it. But unlike all the other cheap stuff we buy, and then later discard, cheap information demands our attention. Despite all the claims of multi-tasking, we are stuck with a finite attention span. Thus the ability to selectively filter out unwanted information and stay focussed on a task is emerging as a new literacy.

Students are adrift in a sea of text without context.  As the barriers to content creation have dropped, old media (for all its flaws) has been replaced by pointless mashups, self-promoting pundits, and manufactured celebrity. Educators must help students make more effective use of the information that fills their lives - how to better access it, critically evaluate it, store it, analyze, share it, and maintain their focus. For more on how we need to redefine the information flow in school see my post "What Happens in Schools When Life Has become an Open-book Test?"

Recently David Dalrymple, a researcher at the MIT Mind Machine Project, made an insightful contribution to the The Edge Annual Question — 2010 "How is the internet changing the way you think?" He wrote, 

"Filtering, not remembering, is the most important skill for those who use the Internet. ... Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends' doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally."

Classroom Collaboration and Brainstorming with Prezi Meeting

If you're a reader of my blog, you know that I'm a big fan of Prezi, the non-linear presentation tool. Prezi has just announced a new feature - Prezi Meeting which allows multiple users to remotely collaborate on the same Prezi screen. Imagine your students mind-mapping in real time on Prezi's "limitless whiteboard." 

Note: Team members will need an email accounts to be invited to participate. Select “Invite to edit” to generate a link that you can send to anyone. When your invited collaborators open the link, you will see their avatars. Text, images, and videos added to the prezi are visible to everyone, giving remote team members the sensation of being in the same creative space together. (When you are invited to co-edit a prezi you will enter the Prezi Meeting in Show mode upon clicking the link. To start co-editing the prezi, switch to Edit mode).

For more detailed instructions on how to use Prezi meeting click here. 

 

Forget About Remembering, It's Focus That's the New Literacy

The cost of information is rapidly approaching zero. Normally as price of a commodity drops, we consume more of it. But unlike all the other cheap stuff we buy, and then later discard, cheap information demands our attention. Despite all the claims of multi-tasking, we are stuck with a finite attention span. Thus the ability to selectively filter out unwanted information and stay focussed on a task is emerging as a new literacy.

Students are adrift in a sea of text without context.  As the barriers to content creation have dropped, old media (for all its flaws) has been replaced by pointless mashups, self-promoting pundits, and manufactured celebrity. Educators must help students make more effective use of the information that fills their lives - how to better access it, critically evaluate it, store it, analyze, share it, and maintain their focus. For more on how we need to redefine the information flow in school see my post "What Happens in Schools When Life Has become an Open-book Test?"

Recently David Dalrymple, a researcher at the MIT Mind Machine Project, made an insightful contribution to the The Edge Annual Question — 2010 "How is the internet changing the way you think?" He wrote, 

"Filtering, not remembering, is the most important skill for those who use the Internet. ... Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends' doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally."

If you need a visual reminder of the swamp of information that your students are wading through take a look at this video "InfoWhelm and Information Fluency" from the 21st Century Fluency Project

Please Vote for Elementary School Engineers

A colleague and creative friend, Brian C Smith is currently in the running for an H P EdTech Innovators Award with an innovative proposal for "The I.D.E.A Room."  His project is based on his 4th-grade "Playful Inventors" workshop that Brian and his wife Wendy, (a STEM coach)  piloted in 2009. The project had great success integrating the arts, science, engineering, and technology in creative problem solving environment

Please take a moment to read their proposal
 and cast your vote here.
  

More on the project from Brian ...

Our faculty explored inquiry-based models of instruction and wanted to experiment with implementing a fully student-centered learning experience.  After analyzing data from NYS 4th grade test scores, problems under the physical science realm were identified as most troublesome.  Given their action research idea and the identified areas of weakness in science, a team of teachers designed the I.D.E.A Room program to provide students with opportunities to explore physical science concepts through the engineering design process while using technology as an integral component of their work. The Playful Inventors workshop, an after-school program implemented in the fall of 2009,  allowed students freedom of time to play, explore, design, test, and problem-solve.  Highlights of the success of the program include:

    •    Increased problem-solving strategies

    •    Reliance on cooperative learning

    •    Integration of the arts, science, engineering, and technology

    •    Creative uses of materials 

    •    Increased proficiency with technology, including computer programming

    •    Deeper understanding of key concepts of force and motion

 Our most important initiative is to continually shift instructional practices to become constructivist in nature using inquiry-based methods. We have discovered that in the classrooms where this is the norm, students are more self-directed in their learning, willing to take risks, creative in their approaches to problem solving, and demonstrate stronger team approaches to learning.  In the I.D.E.A Room, projects are personal, yet learning is both iterative and social.  The work by the teachers on the I.D.E.A. Room project has built the foundation for this instructional shift.  

Our second initiative is to increase the use of technology to facilitate learning for both students and teachers. Students participating in the pilot program were able to use a wide variety of technology tools for learning, collaboration, and creation of content.  Both the teachers and students in this group will be instrumental in assisting others to learn how technology can be transformative.

At the end-of-the-year I.D.E.A. Room Community Workshop, students will collaborate to create their multi-media presentation and practice their presentation skills. The Jr. Engineers will facilitate the hands-on stations as community members, including invited engineers from local industry experts, business owners, parents, and others try their hand at creating, designing and programming using the I.D.E.A. Room materials.

Top 100 Tech Tools for Teaching and Learning

The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies has assembled a useful survey of top tech tools for learning professionals. Jane Hart of the C4LPT compiled input from nearly 300 ed tech experts from around the globe who were asked to rank their "Top 10 Tools for Learning in 2009." 

The Top 100: Full Survey Results

To get you started, here's the top 10 in order:

Twitter
Delicious
YouTube
Google Reader
Google Docs
Wordpress
Slideshare
Google Search
Audacity + Firefox (tied)

The majority of the top 100 are web-based and free - great news for educators in an era of scant educational funding. New the list in 2009 are two of my favorites  - Prezi (presentation software) and Wordle (word cloud generator). For ideas for on how I use these free web resources follow my links to Prezi | Wordle.

Note: The 2010 survey is being in progress.  All learning professionals are encouraged to share their Top 10 tools to help build it further. Submit here.  Kudos to Jane for conducting the survey.  (And thanks to @russeltarr  for his tweet pointing me to the survey.)

Follow the Twitter Backchannel at Cy-Fair's 2010 Leadership Conference

I'm presenting at Cyprus Fairbanks ISD's "Rigor, Relevance and Relationships Conference" near Houston Texas. (June 9-11). My keynote, "The Reflective Principal / the Reflective School," is based on my Taxonomy of Reflection. For more on my reflective model click here.  Here's a link to the Prezi tour of the Taxonomy of Reflection. I'm also giving  breakout sessions in Strategies for Summarizing and Comparing. For a sample of those strategies click here.

To follow the conference Twitter stream, I created this Wiffiti visualization based on the conference hashtag #RRRCF. Stop by my session and I'll have it running live. Click in the lower right corner of the visualizer to view it full screen 

Your Mission is Life-long Learning: A Video How-To

Most school mission statements include a reference to "fostering life-long learners." Nonetheless if you walk through most schools you'll find an information landscape that seems designed to suppress that goal. Far too many adults telling students what to know - as if that will inspire them to take responsibility for their learning. 

To explore the meaning of life-long learning at your school, I suggest you show this video (and a few of the comments it received) at your next faculty meeting. I've included a few questions for your follow-up discussion. 

Background: "help with a bowdrill set" is a YouTube video posted by a young man looking for help in using his bowdrill to start a fire. After detailing his materials and techniques, he states "I know I'm doing it wrong. Please comment down below so you can teach me how to do it." If you view his YouTube post you'll see that his video has over 8500 views and fifty people took the time to offer concrete advice. I trust he's now successfully starting fires.

Guided questions:
1. How would you define teacher and student in this video? What roles / responsibilities do they have?
2. What information / skills / strategies did the young man lack? What did he have?
3. In what ways is the teaching / learning environment of this video similar to / different from your classroom?
4. What does all this suggest about the paths to life-long learning?

Tip of the hat to Angela Maiers and Ben Grey. I first saw this video at their 2010 ASCD conference workshop   Link to my Prezi coverage of the conference 

Looking for a Pay Phone and a Lecture

Their seems to be a new genre of "Did You Know" video designed to overwhelm us with upbeat music and a relentless bombardment of stats attesting to the whirlwind of technological changes going on in the world.  As if I need a YouTube video to remind me!

The video below was produced by the New Brunswick Department of Education. I really enjoyed the opening question it poses - "When's the last time that you - sent film out for processing, used a pay phone, etc..." It then asks a great contrasting question - "But what about education?"

I was disappointed at the 52 second mark when I watched the film go on to contrast those antiquated activities with the innovations going on in New Brunswick schools.  I was hoping for a different contrast - interviewing students about the obsolete communications landscape of the typical classroom - when's the last time they were asked to listen to a teacher talk, write down what they heard and then give it back on a test. 

Not many pay phones around anymore, but walk in most schools and you'll have little trouble finding a lecture.

Notes to my Canadian neighbors: I was impressed with the great things going on in New Brunswick schools. The lecture problem is global. And one more thing ... can someone find another adjective to replace 21st century?

Social Media Engagement for Schools

Educators who are already using Twitter (and other social media) know the power of interaction with your own personal learning network. It's like a never ending seminar that you can freely visit to learn, share, and reflect. By far, the best professional development going! Likewise, more of our students are using social media to learn and to share their thinking / creativity with an authentic audience of peers.

While many teachers and students have embraced social media, most schools still lag behind, struggling with the question of whether they should formalize social media networks for their students, teachers, and community. 

First step - help school leadership better understand what social media is and how it can be effectively utilized. (Hint: it's more than Twittering about what you had for lunch.)

My hats off to Hans Mundahl, Director of Experiental Learning and Technology Coordinator at the New Hampton School, who has provided a great video that introduces the potential for social media engagement for schools. He even simplifies it to this tidy equation ...

(Engagement + trust) x targeted audience = impact

Which translates into...

(social media + shared authentic conversation) x personal learning network = quick useful resource

 

 

When your done with the video be sure to take a look at the great wiki page resource that his PLN created.