Digital Textbooks

I still can't figure out why Apple hasn't jumped on the textbook yet. The iPad seems to me to be the ideal platform for education. You can put all your stuff on it, it's got color, it's got video and audio capability. One device, a dozen textbooks and a boatload of reading books. More and more, colleges and schools are putting materials online. Five colleges calculus, MIT courseware, California Learning Resource Network, all of the Regents Materials you could ever want. When was the last time you actually told a kid to take notes in the book? Now you can. Okay, typing still sucks on tablets and note-takers aren't going to stop using paper anytime soon. Still ...

It's gonna happen.  For me, the only question is "When?"

From Slashdot:
South Korea plans to spend $2.4 billion buying tablets for students and digitizing materials in an effort to go completely digital in the classroom by 2015. From the article: "This move also re-ignites the age-old debate about whether or not students learn better from screens or printed material. Equally important, there's the issue of whether or not devices with smaller form factors are as effective as current textbooks, which tend to have significantly more area on each page."

Apart from the lunatic fringe who want to ban the Kindle from classrooms because blind kids can't use one, this seems like a win. All the stuff, handouts, videos, textbooks, all transferred to each students' machine and portable.

From Jacob Nielson on readability and reading speed:

Results: Books Faster Than Tablets

The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle measured at 10.7% slower than print. However, the difference between the two devices was not statistically significant because of the data's fairly high variability.

Thus, the only fair conclusion is that we can't say for sure which device offers the fastest reading speed. In any case, the difference would be so small that it wouldn't be a reason to buy one over the other. But we can say that tablets still haven't beaten the printed book: the difference between Kindle and the book was significant at the p<.01 level, and the difference between iPad and the book was marginally significant at p=.06.

User Satisfaction: iPad Loved, PCs Hated

After using each device, we asked users to rate their satisfaction on a 1–7 scale, with 7 being the best score. iPad, Kindle, and the printed book all scored fairly high at 5.8, 5.7, and 5.6, respectively. The PC, however, scored an abysmal 3.6.

I'm sold.  Yoo-hoo! Principal PJs!
About that "Have you looked at electronic readers for your classes? What do you think of them?" comment that you uttered the last time we talked?

We need to talk.

Student videos at Dangerously Irrelevant

These kids are complaining about school (a new phenomenon, I'm sure) and, true to form, people are watching them. Some viewers take everything at face value and believe every word the kids say because the teachers are always at fault. Others, I assume, are in thrall to the idea that "If it's put on the Internet by a kid, then that's 21st Century Skills right there!" and completely miss the fact that the kid is in desperate need of some psychological counseling. Most of the ones shown at the link above are of the"whiny student" who hates his teacher "because he made me work" variety. Danzigar (left) points out the problem with that reasoning.

Scott MacLeod gathered some videos together, asking "American students generally have the legal right to express their opinions at home on their free time using non-school computer equipment. So here are a few students expressing their opinions about their teachers. Do you know what your students are saying at home about your school? Is this something that educators should care about or just ignore?"

Some of the ones he gathered are full of psychological cues for depression, others are classic student complaints -- a self-centered world-view and a total misunderstanding of what they will need in life and why the town spends the kind of money it does. The self-centeredness is nothing new, of course, but I must admit to an overwhelming desire to point out how incredibly short-sighted most of those complaints are.

A few are to the point. I always hated when anyone said "Nucular" instead of "Nuclear" but he was our President and we had to live with it. I think he was an idiot but not because of his pronunciation problems.

I worry, though, about the ramifications of these. The teachers who see them are not going to be happy and the kids seem completely unaware that people talk. They also seem unaware that most people, when attacked directly will retaliate, overtly or subtly. Stories will be told. Deadlines will become more definitive; retakes and makeup will disappear. People will be warned. Reports of threats and unsafe working environment will surface - hey, teachers are mandatory reporters and that first kid keeps picking up sharp implements. Threats will be reported to the police and the evidence is crystal clear. Admissions officers will notice. Principals will react. People will think twice about your judgment. It'll all be confidential, of course. (Sure, it will -- you put it on YouTube, you moron!.)

What's the point of it in the long haul? Why didn't some adult say, "Not a good idea."?

If I'm in one of these videos, I might change something about the way I teach but it's more likely that I would write it off as another selfish, whiny student. I can't change my accent. I teach the way I do because I believe it's a good way - backed by my 30 years of teaching experience as opposed to the kid's 2 years ignoring high school. If you hate me, I don't actually care.

But these videos persist.

• "A recommendation? Sorry." 
• "You want to join my class? Sorry, it's full." 
• "Mr. V, watch it with that one. Bad student." 
• "That just wasn't a very good essay.  I'm sorry. You made a whole lotta grammatical errors and it brawt the grade down. You're a junior. This isn't assseptable." I'd be sure to use any words she mentioned in her little tantrum and really draw out the accent.
• "This dyke isn't amused." 

A teacher could make the next parent phone call or conference REALLY uncomfortable for the parents, especially if the teacher has been there for a while and knows all the people the parent knows. Just start playing the video in everyone's presence. Watch the parent slink into the crack of the chair.

To answer MacLeod's question:

1. Ignore all of the ones that complain. They have the right to babble, off-campus. Mention the video to the teacher and suggest he/she watch and decide if there is any merit to the complaint and to ignore it or change, as he/she feels appropriate.
2. Take seriously all the ones that threaten, slander or libel. Sorry, kid. You took it public. There are always ramifications for public speech that threatens, slanders, or libels. Under current interpretations of law, statements such as "Ugh, class ... with the dyke ... 'That's the point, you suffer.' 'Fucking dyke.'" constitute harassment.
3. Take seriously all those "hidden camera, gotcha" videos. Something is wrong but remember that students can drive a teacher to it. Don't just react and fire a good teacher for a bad day with evil children. Notify and warn, but do nothing because you don't have context. (Unless you have context.)
4. If school equipment was used, then someone needs to have a serious talk with the teacher responsible for it. That classroom in #2, for example. 
1. Were they allowed into someone else's room? 
2. Did they film that for an assignment? 
3. Did the teacher know that the school resources were being used to attack another teacher? 
4. Why did he approve the script? 
5. Why did he think it was okay to let students do this?
5. If you've got violence about to happen ...
   Well, you'd better do something quick, don't you think?

Speech is not completely free in Schools, even though the Tinker decision said, "The rights of students and teachers do not end at the schoolhouse door." The later Hazelwood decision allows editing (censorship) in those school fora which were not expressly set up for a free flow of student views ... "the rights of public school students are not necessarily the same as those of adults in other settings." Essentially, the school does not have to provide full, free-speech forum and may instead provide a limited speech forum for academic purposes. This limited speech forum cannot be forced to allow full free speech, "schools aren't required to lend their resources to the dissemination of students' opinions, particularly opinions that 'associate the school with any position other than neutrality on matters of political controversy.' "  The court also specifically allowed officials to censor material that's "biased or prejudiced, vulgar or profane, or unsuitable for immature audiences."

The current interpretation of this rule is that schools may "edit" (or censor) material or views that are produced using school equipment, or school resources. [The main reason I write this blog from home and never check it at school]. School resources include school-assigned emails from the school domain, internet access, class or study hall time or computer equipment use, school software or even school laptops when taken home. (Bet you didn't think of that!)

Remember that case of the school that turned on the laptop webcams? They got into $600,000 worth of trouble because an administrator went off on her own to start taking pictures of students, half-naked or in their bedrooms. Had it been properly warned and notified, had protocol been set and followed, things would have been different. They did not get into trouble for monitoring their own machines. They would not have been ni trouble if they had required all students to submit to an audit of the harddrive.

If the threats were created done at school, it's even easier.  Simply explore the kid's network account for the powerpoint or animation file and follow your current procedures when you find it.  Any kid stupid enough to attack a teacher by making a file in computer class deserves to be punished, if only for being so stupid.

Computer Science is on the wane

eSchoolNews reports that

U.S. needs more computer science teachers

Fewer than 65 percent of K-12 schools in the United States offer an introductory-level computer science course, much less rigorous training, according to a recent study conducted by the Association for Computing Machinery and the Computer Science Teachers Association—and an Oct. 6 Computing in the Core summit aimed to draw attention to the need for more computer science teachers.

I see a couple of reasons for it. QBasic used to be installed on all windows machines as part of 3.1, 95, 98, NT and some XP, but no longer.  If you want to play with a simple language, you have to find and install it yourself. Not a problem, you say?  Ahhhh, but when I learned Basic on the pdp-8 and then the TRS-80, that's all I could really do with it, so I learned it.  I used it occasionally in math classes whenever the problem would fall to a brute force solution.  When I moved up to the Commodor64 and then to various windows machines, it was always there.  Not anymore.  I can't even get my copy of TruBasic to install on my Win7 box, though I didn't try all that hard.

HTML might be the computer language that breaks the ice and draws in the novice programmer, but few kids care about the static web.  JavaScript, java, php, asp, ruby, python, perl, AJAX, etc. all take a significant investment in time with little to show for it until a great deal of sophistication is achieved. Oh and a website that supports it or an emulator on your machine -- again, probably more work than it's worth in the beginning..

Pascal? I'd rather do .php -- at least I can make use of that. C or C++? How incredibly tedious.

A second culprit is the rise of web 2.0.  Why?  Because web 2.0 is designed to be used by the masses and hides all of its code behind the scenes.  You don't need to code ... you just need to type.   If you consider LOL and POS as typing. This rise of Facebook and the rest of social media drains off the fence-sitters who might have enjoyed coding but who find "better things to do."

Mostly, I think there are too many incredible video games. That means that the nerds and geeks who might have turned to coding as an outlet for their geekiness are instead playing shoot-em-ups with mind-blowing graphics and intense game-play.  Zelda v1 or Space Invaders were simple enough that you could think of doing it yourself.  Zork and the other text games were fun to rework.  Warcraft? Might as well just play it. 

Randall got it right, but I can't see kids taking this route anymore:

More's the pity.

New is the Old New ... whatever.

Some years ago, Dan said

"The suspicion just creeps over me every coupla months or so that the constant introduction of new tools has left your average, well-meant educator a permanent amateur, able to save some time for herself using these tools, unable to do anything better. And since we're all in that same state, there exists very little peer pressure towards excellence, excepting occasional posts from certain School 2.0 curmudgeons."

 Add to that the constant introduction of "New and Improved" (read: different interface entirely) versions of the software we all depend on. In my career, I've gotten used to 13 different versions of Word which were mostly compatible with each other but only in one direction. Add to that, a couple of WordPerfects which were far superior to Word but the schools always used Word, so I had to change or suffer the incompatibility.

It's the same with a host of other software. I frankly don't see how most people keep up with it AND with the constant drumbeat of "better" ways to teach math. Throw in operating systems, schools behind the tech curve and the cost of software - and "Don't you dare install FOSS on your school computer.  That stuff is loaded with viruses."

Web 2.0 is little different. I've gone through three different blogging platforms so far -- fortunately they are roughly similar but they are constantly being bought, sold and changed.  The paradigm is changing monthly ... do you use blogs, forums, moodles, chat, text, email, IM, Skype?  Do you have any idea what your passwords are if you don't have them stored in your browser?  How do you circumvent the school filter to show YouTube video? (Me? I download the video and play it with VideoLAN.  Don't tell IT.)

Apparently, the only way to be a teacher nowadays is to be a tech expert.

Technology and the Digital Natives

We hear all the time about our digital natives, their need for 21st century skills and their total immersion in 21st century technology. This morning, the following thought occurred to me:

Our kids don't need any training / help / instruction / encouragement with social networks and tech. They've got that in spades already. What they need is to control their social life and learn the unsocial 21st century skills.

My son was sitting on the coach with his wireless laptop, playing World of Warcraft with Facebook open in another window, his band's Myspace open in another and an IM session running ... then his phone rang. The TV was showing iCarly or Spongebob.

If anything, kids need to be pulled back and calmed down when it comes to social media and web 2.0. They've stayed at the banquet table too long and gorged themselves on every privacy exposure they could find. There are ways to reduce your public exposure, but many settings were deliberately left obfuscated so kids wouldn't understand what they were throwing away. Marketing, of course.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt in Wall Street Journal: "In the future, the passage from teenage life to adulthood will include an automatic name change 'in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites.' "

I don't think it needs to be that way and it's not too late. Everyone should simply change their names now on all social media accounts. As I said last month, put up a fake persona. We all need to do that: our social life gets a fake persona ("Harold the Magnificent"), work and serious life gets the true stuff, and never the twain shall meet.

Back in the classroom, what our kids really need for the "real world" and for "work in the 21st century" is to learn and make better use of the non-social tools. You know: spreadsheets, word documents, email, writing, publishing, graphic arts, WolframAlpha and calculators, online references and other tools ... whether Excel, Google Docs, blogs, OpenOffice, forums, wikis, etc.  They need to consider their words, slow down their minds and stop blaring out any random fluttering thought.

We need a catchier word for it. though. What's the opposite of "social media?"

Anti-social ... no.
Non-social ... that doesn't seem right either. It's serious but needs to be shared.
Web 2.x ... not descriptive enough.
unsocial ... oh sure, make a geek joke, why don't you?

Weight of the Argument

from Scott Macleod (Dangerously Irrelevant) comes this angst-filled twitter post:

and he asks: "Hmmm… What’s in there that’s not available in at least a dozen places on the Web for free?"

Well, organization, for one thing -- it's one book instead of "a dozen places on the Web" for each topic. Location, for another. Accuracy, for a third. Fourth, cost. Lastly, bias.

I'm all for free textbooks for the school, but those who write them occasionally want to get paid for their work. If the school buys a textbook, they have similar editions for all the students in the class and assurance that someone has vetted them for accuracy, minimal bias, and clarity for the level of student. It's also free to the student. The cost to the school is spread over several years. Online resources are currently too expensive or scattered and useless.

Bias is similarly easier with a book - Howard Zinn was a socialist. Knowing that meant you could easily work around it or extol it but you'd always be dealing with a known quantity. Websites change too often for you to trust them without verifying.

Hoo boy, trust. What if that website you linked to in August is kaput and serving ads in December when the parent tries to follow it -- or worse, gets squatted on by Stormfront -- and that parent hits martinlutherking.org (NSFW) instead of the main page for the King Center (the real one). A textbook gets vetted once.

Accurate? Accuracy matters: Read here:
Technology might be the Answer but not ... for the story of the definition of Radian.

I think the iPad (or similar) will be the textbook of the future, as soon as Apple drops the ridiculous iTunes Store file limitations and opens up the platform to flash. It would be wonderful. It's the right size, has color, can run video, touch screen and type, has everything except openness. We're close but until Steve Jobs realizes the goldmine he could be sitting on, we'll still have books. He'll charge for the convenience, but it would beat paper.

Free online doesn't necessarily mean free to the student. I've noticed that free materials invariably are better and easier to use when printed - that's a cost for the student, especially if we're talking about inkjets. It always amuses me when conference people make a big noise about "saving money, paper and the environment by not printing out notes and handouts" and then you look around at all the attendees who printed everything out themselves at their expense on less efficient inkjets. 

Then, there's readability. Those textbooks that are free on the web -- I'm thinking the California initiative -- are not easily read. I'm reminded of the study comparing ease of reading of Kindle, iPad, paper and computer screen (including laptop). "iPad, Kindle, and the printed book all scored fairly high at 5.8, 5.7, and 5.6, respectively. The PC, however, scored an abysmal 3.6." Imagine if they had been working with a math book? Again, I have hopes for the iPad or a similar, but it's not quite worth it yet.

Let's pretend that we're not printing out material, just accessing it.  How trustworthy is it?  Is it "Wikipedia good?" Has it been edited recently by someone who knows the truth or is the urban legend version of history taking hold here?  Just because everyone knows that "tea partiers" are the only true patriots doesn't mean that it's a true fact. I have confidence in that printed book.

Why is the online textbook free? Is it free because it's the pdf version of the second edition, copyright 1990?

Organization is another big issue for me. The material for a typical history or even math course would be so widespread over the internet, it would be a tremendous pain to find and collate. Why should I spend that time and effort finding and verifying what the book publisher is willing to do for me? Nothing will be free but I think that iPad (click above to enlarge) holds the most promise.

Then there's linkrot. I took an online thing this summer and 1 of the links had expired and was serving ads - less than a month after the link was created. You would have to recheck everything every year to be sure that the page hadn't changed nor had any others on the same site.

Finally, there's cost. You can't carry a desktop computer. Laptops and netbooks have a serious distraction issue, they're delicate and they're tough to read because of that vertical screen. iPad shows the most promise but, starting at $499, isn't affordable by every student. With an initiative, we could supply them to every student -- cheaper than a laptop -- and escape the problems with laptops in the classroom, damage, viruses, etc.

In sum, we're close. I can taste it already. We just need a little push.

Forcing Teachers to Read: Useful or just a Time-Suck?

Scott Macleod, over at Dangerously Irrelevant, wonders if we should require teachers to read the RSS newspaper: Should we require school employees to have RSS readers? He and his reader community created lists of rss feeds:grade-level and subject-specific blogs.

I'm great up to this point. Most of these blogs (I haven't read them all so can't say about all) are good people with good experience writing well and intelligently. But then Dr. Macleod goes a little off the end when he thinks about the next step ...

1. Should we require school employees to have loaded RSS readers (with a concurrent expectation that they spend time checking them and reading in them)?
2. How would the lives of the educators in your school organization be different if they regularly spent time with their loaded RSS readers?
3. How would the lives of preservice educators (i.e., student teachers) be different if they regularly spent time with their loaded RSS readers?
4. Can we figure out how to give educators professional development / licensure renewal credit for time spent with RSS readers, interacting with other educators in social media channels, etc.? We seem to be able to do so for face-to-face training, discussion groups, school book clubs, and so on ...

Thoughts on any of this? Got your own questions you’d like to add to my list?

No,
Not by much,
To brainwash them some more - haven't they already read these blogs as part of their classes?
and YAY! Another meaningless credit for meaningless professional development!
 Then there's time and viewpoint.

Time? I get to school at about 7:15. I start the computer, which takes maybe 15 minutes to complete, and then load a firefox folder of bookmarks - the things I do everyday like check my and the school's calendar for games or meetings, read email (I only do it once at the beginning and once at the end of the day) update the SAT problem of the day, open the gradebook. I am checking that all my first classes are ready - emergency copying, bookmarking the text. I check my school mail box on another floor. I get my caffeine. Classes start. During my prep period, I prep. During my classes I teach. After school I help students, go to a game or go home. When do you suppose I should spend an hour on my school computer reading an RSS feed? How pissed off would the taxpayers of my community be if they knew that I spent that time surfing the internet every day?

Viewpoint? All the blogs listed are definitely opinionated. The viewpoints are not ones that I agree with all the time. I don't care to have my principal, who knows little about teaching and basically nothing about math and less about educational technology, decide what things I must read daily. I would hate to see what he would require I read -  he already photocopies pointless articles (FYI) and forwards joke emails. The upshot is that so much of his correspondence is junk that it lessens the importance of the rest of it.
 Suppose I read Right on the Left Coast, which is not on the list, but not Dy/dan, which is?  What if my blog were required reading instead of this Macleod's?  Or Theo, or Moonbattery, or Breitbart or Malkin?

Overload.  The list for math has 31 blogs on it.  If you overload people with this much new educational thought and trivia during a time when they can't process it, you will lose much more than you possibly gain. "Even though it could yield great results" - but it won't.

I see it far more likely that any time allocated will be spent with BostonHerald's Red Sox feed than on head-in-the-sky education dreamers who can save the world instantly if you only do .... this.  Does anyone really think that updating a facebook profile is a good use of a teacher's time?

Macleod seems to have plenty of time during the day to read, relax and tend to his presence on the web (he lists a Blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Twine, Delicious, Digg, Gmail, Skype, coComment, Technorati, Wikipedia), but I have other interests, i.e., teaching. I have precious little time to browse during the day and I don't care to waste it reading Macleod's recount of some conference he went to.

In the evening, which is when I do my reading, I can read and consider, answer and comment -- but certainly not under my principal's eye. Of course, that's also when I tend to my own life, virtual and otherwise. I volunteer my programming time and server space for a bunch of websites, maintain this blog and my own, keep track of my own facebook account (which the students do NOT have access to) -- have a life, such as it is.

I might even grade papers or (GASP!) watch a game.

Don’t expect schools to be cyber-parents

My response is: anything but "F"
But then, I'm a teacher and I don't believe that anything happening outside of the school or non-school related activity or trip is any of the school's business.

Via the Schenectady (NY) Daily Gazette
July 6, 2010, page A5

A boy has apparently sent filthy text messages to your daughter over the weekend. Both are sixth-graders at the same school. You, the girl’s father, coach sports with the boy’s father. What would you do?

a. Disconnect your daughter from all texting services.
b. Talk to the boy’s father, whom you know.
c. If the father refuses to do something about it, stop socializing with him.
d. Call the police.
e. Do some combination of a, b, c and d.
f. Complain to the school principal.

This is a real-life example, and the parents chose only f. The two students attended Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, N.J. The principal, Tony Orsini, asked the girl’s parents whether they had contacted the boy’s family. No. That would upset the coaching arrangement. He asked whether they had called the police. They again said no, making several excuses.

In olden days, the parents probably would have intervened personally. They could have cut off their daughter’s texting capabilities and diplomatically called the other parents. Or they might have gone directly to the door of the offending schoolmate’s house to make their displeasure very clear.

The more aggressive approach is best done with calm. The parents may have had no idea of their child’s activities and would be grateful for the information. Or, the odious messages may have come from someone else who had found the cell phone. That had happened in the above case.

But outsourcing this parenting role to teachers and principals seems to have become the common practice.

Most schools understandably don’t have the time or desire to monitor their charges’ electronic communications. And what’s a school to do when one student sends obscene texts to another from home on a weekend? Obtain a search warrant?

Suppose the principal confiscates a cell phone and finds provocative photos of the owner on it, not uncommon for those who do “sexting.” The educator risks having an unhinged parent retaliate by charging him (or her) of trafficking in child pornography.

Schools have come up with varied responses to the cyber-bully problem. A Seattle middle school suspended 28 students who ganged up on a classmate on Facebook. By contrast, a mother asked a school in Fairfax, Va., to punish students involved in a Facebook pile-up on her son and was told there was nothing it could do.

My favorite response was Principal Orsini’s. He sent an e-mail to all parents that described their responsibilities.

“There is absolutely NO reason for any middle school student to be part of a social networking site,” Orsini wrote. He noted that cruel 12-year-olds pose more a threat to their middle-schoolers’s well-being than the adult predators of parental nightmares. And he told parents whose children were attacked through networking sites or messages: “IMMEDIATELY GO TO THE POLICE!”

Typing these words, I feel like reaching for the hand sanitizer. You who have hung in this far may feel similar revulsion. You wonder why any sixth-grader has texting privileges at all. Why parents let their tender-age teens do social networking. Why Facebook opens its service to people as young as 13.

There are ways to pressure Facebook. Parents, meanwhile, must do their job. They must confront the parents of their children’s assailants, contain their kids’ computer use and, if necessary, call the police.

Technolgy (Those Wonderful Toys.)

The problems with technology in schools start with its cost and a lack of intelligent implementation backed by science. It gets worse in that the purchase, support and decision-making are so fragmented.

The faculty end-users are usually not familiar enough with the products to be able to determine absolutely what they need or to determine the difference between a name brand (like Smart) and the generics which are often 1/3 the price. Most haven't used them much before getting them - at least not in any meaningful way. SO someone will scrape enough department budget money together to get one and then the teacher will leave it in the corner of his room propped against a filing cabinet because "he doesn't have time to learn how to use it" or "I'd need hours to set it up."

The tech brats might know what's best but don't ever ask the teachers for a list of needs. They couldn't be bothered to figure out for themselves which board is optimal. They're mostly interested in making their own job as easy as possible, meaning that standardization is a higher priority than cost or ease of of use. Laziness and a willingness to cry "I'm so busy" are the primary reasons. They also don't mind a 6 foot SmartBoard being unusable for an entire year because of a faulty cable. Fixing the obvious problem is not their concern - they acquired it, that's enough.

The financial people who authorize have no clue either. To them, it's a board that you "tap" to go to the next slide.

The administration who demands "more tech because I think it sounds cool" are no help. They like IWBs because the district tech person can stand by the board and tap it to get to the next slide. "We're high-tech here." So they fiddle with discretionary spending and equip a conference room off the main office with one that no one else may use. Maybe they'll put a couple into select brown-noser rooms to show how forward-thinking they are. At which point, the teachers use it as a projection screen.

The salesmen con the community into thinking it's for the good of the children and will "build learning opportunities for the digital natives, don't ya know" and the irony of the marching band equipment salesman takes another bump.

Meanwhile, those who might make something out of it continue with whatever old technology they could scrounge from what was lying around and are doing just fine, thank you.

But. What I could do with one ...

Trebuchets. Technology for the Last Millenium.

The Great Northern Medieval Faire is coming up soon. (well, June 3rd). There will be trebuchets throwing cabbages. Yours truly will be there. We're looking for targets. Just kidding! But if you're willing ... Still kidding! "Students seeking volunteer hours for a credit are welcome." Normally, I don't like required volunteerism, but this is a pretty cool way to work off that indentured servitude, if you ask me. More below the jump. and pictures.

Medieval News also announced the event. If you can make it, we'd love to see you. Naturally, I'll be there but not as the Curmudgeon. Even if you ask, I'll still deny it!

For those unclear on the exact meaning of "trebuchet", it is not a catapult. A catapult has a straight boom with a bucket on the end, as seen to the left. The arm throws the payload. The throwing forces are generated by a twisted skein of rope at the axle. 

A trebuchet is a later invention (French) that augments the straight arm with a sling, and replaces the rope skein with a hanging basket of stone.

The trebuchet's sling cannot carry the huge loads that the catapult could handle but it increases the range by a factor of three or four and made repeatability, aim and accuracy easily achievable. With a small change to the slide, the "landing point" can be adjusted by fractions of a degree. With changes to the hook, the range can be adjusted, too. All in all, a shot from 400 yards can be repeated at will, pounding the same section of wall again and again. Tolerance is +- 2 feet at 300 yards with a 100 pound stone.

Below is a scale model of "Warwolf", King Edward's coup de grace at Sterling Castle. One shot took out the gatehouse (or a section of the wall, depending on who you ask). The castle defenders decided that was a good enough demonstration of its capabilities and surrendered.

Warwolf, ca 1304

Writing across the curriculum, my foot. Give me FIREPOWER!

Death of a Calculator.

Time to play "The Last Post" and "Flowers of the Forest" for the venerable TI.

Schools have been buying TI-84s for their students for years now. TI-83s before that, or 85s or 82s. I believe that the game has fundamentally changed.

The iPhone app store has a graphing calculator app for $0.99. It's not perfect ... yet.

The comments from buyers ask for intercepts, regressions and a few other things but the days of 92 x 68 dull gray pixels is close to over.

I say "Good Riddance."

For far too long, TI has coasted on its laurels, allowing a once-perfect idea to gradually fade into a crappy has-been of technology. The TI is slow, expensive, big, cumbersome and limited to the buttons at hand, though the Non-Inspiring Inspire does allow you to change the faceplate. The screen resolution is the same as was available in 1990 with the TI-82, for crissake. Twenty years and practically nothing new!

I was wondering when someone would produce an app for the handheld device many of them carry already. It has color, better interface, finer resolution, quicker graphics, you name it.

No school should bother purchasing more TIs. Let your current ones be augmented by those kids who have a smartphone and the ITs will break or kludge down at about the same rate as your students proportionally get smartphones.

Look at these screenshots from the AppStore. So far, and I stress that this is only temporary, the TI competes with this thing. The TI has too many nifty things built in for this guy to compete with. But! How long will it take for him or someone like him to mimic every useful TI function? Not too long.

The kids need to develop an understanding of cellphone etiquette, fair use, proper use -- something that schools are just going to have to deal with. We can't put this off. This issue will be front-burner next year (2010-2011, for anyone reading this in the archives) if not for exams this year.

That'll be another post.

Idiocy in Denver

SO the State of Colorado wants to tax Amazon.com and the anti-taxers are screaming.
"... a recent study on "Amazon laws" concluded online companies would have to deal with more than 8,000 different tax computations should every state join Colorado's effort. Amazon would be nuts not to fight."

Oh, please.

What really needs to happen is a federal law that states that online merchants need to collect tax based on the destination of the package rather than on the location of the sender's warehouse.

Argue about paying taxes. I get that. Argue that taxing the local warehouse will induce Amazon to move the warehouse to a tax-free state. I get that, too. But if you argue that Amazon couldn't figure out how to do it, you're talking out the wrong end of your body. It's just silly.

Amazon is entirely run by computers. Orders are taken over the web without a single human intervening. The warehouse is run by computers that tell every worker exactly what to put in what size box and then slap a label on it. They figure out the shipping details for millions of people, millions of destinations, and millions of shipments a year. They send out email tracking details, feedback emails, follow-up emails, and a host of other automated stuff.

There are at least a dozen shipping options and at least six payment options. Each person has one (or many) different address options. Amazon must deal automatically with customs to every one of the 200-odd countries they ship to, monetary conversions for all those, multiple websites (one for each major country). You purchase details are kept meticulously and all of those records are used to build recommendations and to track your online movement.

They must deal with thousands of publishers and suppliers, each with different options, deals, and profit percentages. They have thousands of "Used and New" resellers, with all of their charges and costs, all getting 60% to 85% of their money (the rest is Amazon's cut) - and those deals change all the time.

And you're trying to claim that they can't figure out how to charge me 6% tax and send it to Vermont?

I'm actually required to pay taxes on all purchases that I bring into Vermont from tax-free locations - the snowblower I buy in NH, etc. There's a place for it on my tax form. (Or car registration - they charge the 6% to register it.) If I go to a gunshow or any convention and buy something, it doesn't matter where I live or where the vendor lives, I have to pay local sales tax. Is that destroying civilization? No. Somehow the guy manages to get a local vendor's license and tax number.

I don't like taxes and I love tax-free Amazon. I would love to do without taxes.

Just don't claim that Amazon is somehow incapable of a simple** programming task.

** Simple compared to what they do for everything else.

Article below, if it gets deleted or archived.
http://www.denverpost.com/harsanyi/ci_14658950

Harsanyi: Beware the Amazon

By David Harsanyi
Posted: 03/12/2010 01:00:00 AM MST

Tyranny is afoot. And this evil arrives in the guise of second- hand books and cheap Chinese trinkets. So beware.
Actually, if anyone ever needed an obvious illustration of how government overreach can damage an economy, they need look no further than the Colorado legislature's foolish attempt to wheedle a few extra bucks out of consumers via an Internet sales tax.
After legislation forcing online companies to collect sales tax passed, Amazon.com moved to protect its consumers and long-term interests by severing its ties with Colorado. Unfortunately, this meant closing its associates program, which involved an estimated 5,000 jobs.
Amazon's actions were not surprising, as it did the same in North Carolina and Rhode Island (a state, incidentally, which reportedly saw no additional revenue generated after passing a similar law taxing Internet sales).
"They've done nothing here but spit in our face," bristled Colorado Senate Majority Leader John Morse in a ludicrous rant on YouTube, wherein he went on to describe Amazon's actions as "such tyranny!"
Tyranny? Imagine that.
Since we're throwing incendiary words around, it should be noted that Morse's actions are a far better fit for the definition. The dictionary, after all, defines tyranny as "oppressive power exerted by government" or a "government in which absolute power is vested in a single ruler."
Besides, Amazon does not possess the power to compel its will on any Colorado citizens. All Amazon can do is pick up and leave. The state, on the other hand, does have the ability to coerce both taxpayers and corporations.
Once you get past the hyperbole of embarrassed legislators, the argument— and it has appeal — is that there is a lack of "fairness." Why should out-of-state online stores have an advantage over the traditional stores in the state?
Well, Amazon came up with better technology, it offers better services and, thus far, it has had a far superior business model. That's why. Let's leave the slippery concept of "fairness" to toddlers and legislators.
Amazon and other similar online stores offer a near-infinite array of choices at affordable prices. Their success hurts many on-the-ground businesses, no doubt, but it also benefits millions of consumers who save money. The tax savings that consumers cull from Internet purchases will be spent elsewhere, and more than likely in brick-and-mortar establishments.
But let's not forget that legislators also packed the bill with punitive measure and mandates that resemble, gulp, "tyranny."
Not only must online businesses notify consumers to pay taxes, but they would be mandated to hand over consumer sales records, and if not, pay fines for every violation — many beyond their control.
And as a recent Tax Foundation study on "Amazon laws" concluded, online companies would have to deal with more than 8,000 different tax computations should every state join Colorado's effort. Amazon would be nuts not to fight.
Still, you can understand why some folks are mad. ProgressNow, a liberal advocacy group, has launched a boycott of Amazon, which is a fine way to make a point, though I suspect its impact will be as small as the national Whole Foods boycott (which started after CEO John Mackey had the gall to offer some constructive ideas on health care reform).
One only wishes that citizens could boycott irascible and intrusive state legislators — with their knee-jerk, ill-informed, anti-capitalist sentiment — who are willing to risk the jobs of thousands of citizens for a couple million bucks in the state's coffers.
Alas, no such luck.
E-mail David Harsanyi at dharsanyi@denverpost.com and follow him on Twitter at @davidharsanyi.

Google expands its reach

Sometimes Google needs to just chill. Other times, they are on the right track. This is one of the good times, I think.

Streetview now goes underwater.
Satellite mapping now includes aerial pictures from World War II and forward.
(sorry, jd. I should have mentioned: Google Earth.)

This is seriously cool. They got permission to include War Department images and they've put them in the correct places on the current-day maps - overlay form. Seriously. Visit Dresden, Germany and look in the corner of the screen for a "History" slider. If there's available images in your current view, you can set the date back to any time for which they have a picture.

Update, Screenshot:
I've gone to Dresden and clicked the little clock icon to show the historical slider. The little blue lines in the slider indicate what's available and I've chosen Dec 1943. The vague green area outside the city is off the image.You can then slide back to the present and compare the rebuilt city with the old image.

Isn't that awesome?

GOOGLE Earth mapping service is letting people use the Internet to dive into the world's oceans or see the ruin that World War II bombings rained on European cities. The Internet powerhouse on Thursday added an Ocean Showcase and WW II era aerial photographs to its free, interactive on-line atlas.
"The historical imagery feature gives people a unique perspective on the events of the past using today's latest mapping technology," Laura Scott of Google Europe said in a blog post. "We hope that this World War II imagery will enable all of us to understand our shared history in a new way and to learn more about the impact of the war on the development of our cities."
The feature includes images taken in 1943 of 35 European cities pictures and of war-battered Warsaw in 1935 and 1945. Google Earth users are able to do side-by-side comparisons of the cities then and now.

New and Improved! Technology initiatives in education.

Time for a big-ass rant.

The Tempered Radical knows why teachers give up on Interactive White Boards. With some major snipping, and hoping I don't eliminate context:

What bothers me ... is an attitude towards teachers that I see often in conversations about school change. "Teachers all resistant to change and lazy!" the argument goes. "If they'd just be persistent and determined, our schools would be saved." ... The general belief is that teachers lack determination and commitment in almost every circumstance.
... that's a flawed assumption. ... the amount of effort that most changes take doesn't align with the corresponding benefits that change is designed to produce. ... The software wasn't designed to naturally facilitate the kinds of teaching that I believe in and limited access to the hardware required that I restructure learning time in my classroom almost every day.

I'm all over this. I think that the programmers who do this stuff should spend some time teaching to find out how the "real-world" will use it and what those teachers actually need. This is, for me, the crux of the problem. Those who write don't know what problem they are trying to solve and often do not have a clue as to how I will use it. (Sort of an educational consultant, no?)

Then, the pressures of making a sale get in the way of making my life easier. All too often, the person making the purchase isn't the one who gets to use it. Even if they asked the teachers, they're still asking someone who hasn't used it and can't really tell.

There are four major problems with technology and tech initiatives: Variety, the learning curve, Usability and Availability.

The rant is below this break.


Variety:
MS Word, OpenOffice, Google Docs; MAC vs PC; wikis, blogs, GoogleDocs, twitter, facebook, a million Web2.0 sites; GradeQuick, Powerschool, BlackBoard. This list is a tiny fraction of the options available to me. If I put everything together for PC and the Office suite, should I suddenly redo it all when the school upgrades - or when my wife's school upgrades and the home computers do or don't?

Does Scott Macleod's obsession with transformation mean that I have to transform according to his specifications? I hope not.

I am using what works for me. Your flavor might work too, but as Bill argues and I agree, the cost of conversion is often higher than I care to spend right now. And I'm one of the geeks. What actual benefit can be found in converting? Tell me that and I'll go for it.

My colleagues have a higher "benefit" threshold, though. Online gradebooks started this year (I volunteered to do the training), and I stressed the ease of printing a progress report and the chance to put things online for ill students. Had I told everyone that they had to be fully invested from the word "go", they'd have tuned me out. It would have been nice to repurpose some inservice time for it, but we managed.

Like the Highly Ineffectual Principal he is though, our HIPster didn't get it. He is now ratcheting up the "standards" before anyone is comfortable. He wants everyone to put lots of time into it but can't free us from mindnumbing inservices to do it. Pushback. Push back.

Technology isn't the magic cure-all, either. I LOVE blackboards. There really isn't much reason to eliminate the 18 feet of beautiful slate in favor of a 4 foot piece of gee-whiz. If the IWB is an addition, then "woot!" but new isn't necessarily better, it's just different.

You don't need Excel to average 20 numbers. Or even a calculator.
You don't need a spreadsheet or database to deal with your grades (but it does make things a little easier).
You don't need Blogger to tell your kids the homework. or texting, or podcasts, or wikis, or a lot of this junk. If you can, great. But you don't NEED it.

The learning curve:
This is the flip side of the "benefit" threshold - the cost of converting. You need to start small and give the faculty (and the students) the time and training to pick up the new software and make the changes to their daily lives to fit the software. If you don't give them either, they will nod and move to more pressing matters like, oh I don't know, maybe teaching?

The other thing is that you have confidentiality and sensitivity issues. Jumping right in and forcing everyone to play ball before training only makes the inevitable mistakes harder to handle.

I was called in to help another teacher fix her grades 70% of the way through the course. She hadn't weighted her terms or her categories properly and had wrong dates for terms, start dates, etc. -- and this was the computer teacher. I told the principal that unless he wanted to redo all of the transcripts for all of her students, then we shouldn't touch it because they were all going to get changed grades (a month after report cards had been sent).

We had gone too far, too fast and most faculty were barely getting it right and some, like this one, were messing up big time.

Added to this mess was that the guidance department was convinced it knew what it was doing, but was missing very important details, like making sure that global settings were done. This year, apparently, started in Aug 2008 and so all of the teachers' gradebooks thought the first day was fourth marking period. Then, the first day of 2010 was showing up as 1910 and the "out of chronological order" popups were flying everywhere -- because guidance hadn't applied the update that had come out six months earlier. BTW, the tech guy refuses to be responsible for the gradebook system because they purchased it without consulting him (or some such BS), so the guidance counselor is trying to do the administration for it, too. Not surprisingly, she doesn't get things right.

Usability:
Then, of course, you have usability, the redheaded step-child of the computer development teams. It's obvious they didn't think everything through.

• Tell me why you need a "wizard" to add a mark to your spreadsheet.
• Why can't I type in the date? Why do I have to use the drop down calendar?
• Tell me why there isn't enough room in the category field for the word "classwork" or "participation" - haven't we heard of a lookup field and a normalized database?
• Tell me why clicking on the spreadsheet adds a new student.
• Why isn't there an UNDO feature?
• Why does the guidance secretary need to click through 13 different menus and popups to import grades from a single course from one teacher and then print it out for verification?
• Tell me why important settings are in four different preferences screens, accessible from different menus without rhyme or reason. The faculty ask "How do you know this stuff?" and I reply "Because I do it over and over with each of you and the repetition helps me remember. You only do this step once per year and it's something guidance should have set globally anyway -- why would you bother remembering it?"
• Tell me why Blogger jumps me all the way to the top of my editing window if I bold-face something at the bottom?
• Tell me why I'm ranting?

SmartBoard software is a dim cousin of, and less useful version of, PowerPoint, which is a problem all its own. The included graphics are lame, the lessons are silly and many are flawed, and the "tools" are pale versions of things found elsewhere. Any notebook gets edited by the student running it - there's no way to block those changes so the next kid can run it from the beginning. (What? Why?)

The lessons I find at TeqSmart are amazing in a "can't turn away from a trainwreck" sort of way. The learning curve on this piece of software is pretty steep and not worth the time and effort, in my mind, even though I did it.

But LOOKIE, I can TOUCH it! and wrilewrite with my finger. And it has SOUNDS! and I can ROLL a DIE! (pretty much how the 3-credit training course went) Yes, I got three credits for something learned in about 30 minutes RTFM. Sue me.

Availability
Why do I give a damn about a SmartBoard if I can't get one? I was told I could "Borrow" the one from across the hall. Anyone who has one knows how that would go. If I make every kid use Google Docs, they all have to have Google accounts. If I want everyone on Excel, I have to have a computer for at least half of them. This gets expensive. If you want to throw money away on a one-laptop-per thing, okay, I'll go along and make use of it. Otherwise, shut up and let me use my blackboard. I'll sign out the computer room when I can, but there ARE other teachers in the building.

In summation:
I am in favor of technology and would actively use an IWB were it to appear in my room, but I get annoyed when people like Scott Macleod go all "Techno uber alles" on me.

Kids minds haven't changed much in the "mumble-mumble" years I've been doing this. They can put their toys away and learn.

Learning is hard and technology is no shortcut. "There is no Royal Road" and all that. GeeWhiz is like CheeseWhiz - kids love it, it's sorta nutritious and it holds their attention, but it isn't all that great most times.

P⁶: Proper Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
Forget that at your peril.

Is it too much to expect?

I was floating around the Teacher College website, specifically "Curriculum and Teaching", when I came across a true gem of an article in a group of articles about the program (I guess).
For starters, I reproduce the list of articles:

Program News
* Does Science Proves Some Things Taught Were False? (2006)
* T.C. Takes Second in U.S. News Rankings (2006)
* Quiet Students Can Speak Volumes Through Actions (2005)
* Cathy Benedict (Obit from 2005)
* Enrichment Program Plagued By Flaws (2004)
(Parenthetical additions mine)

Yeah, it jumped out at me, too. Aren't you impressed by this Teachers College Program? How about that first article?

"Does Science Proves Some Things Taught Were False?
Published: 10/21/2006

"When I try to help my son with his homework I see a lot of things that are different from when I was in school," said Marietta parent Matt Reed, 39. "Math is so different I can't even help him most of the time." Whether it's facts that have been disproved or courses that have simply gone out of style, there are a plethora of things that used to be part of any student's curriculum and are no longer taught in schools.

Some boards of education, including the Texas State Board of Education have recommended replacing textbooks with laptop computers and say a nationwide move in that direction is only a few keystrokes away.

"I think conventional textbooks -'" they're pretty much dead," Peter Cookson, director of educational outreach at Columbia University's Teachers College told the Associated Press. "Not this year, but in the next decade."

This article appeared in the October 21, 2006 edition of the Marietta Times.
http://www.mariettatimes.com/news/story/new55_1021200615356.asp.

To be fair, this article told me a great deal about the Curriculum and Teaching Program at Teachers' College.

• It told me that nothing good has been written about them in over 3 years.
  
• It told me that the College can't be bothered to check the grammar on its website.
• It told me that an article that it considered important and relevant was disjointed and bizarre -- is it discussing science proving things false as the title would indicate, curricula changes confusing parents as the first paragraph has it, or the "fact" that textbooks are dead because Texas thinks they should replace them with Laptops?
• It told me that its Director is an idiot and it made it clear why TC should be regarded as the last refuge of the Incompetents.

By the way, that Texas thing about laptops? That fad was sooooo three years ago. We're doing 21st Century Skills now. You know, technology and communication skills.

Cellphones and Teenagers.

Over at Joanne Jacobs, Sexting is Popular among teenagers:

More than a quarter: involved in sexting
One third sent or received explicit photos.
14 percent said they suspect the pictures were shared without permission
Seventeen percent of those who received naked pictures said they passed them along to someone else, often to more than just one person.

I'm not surprised. Cellphones (with their current abilities and prices) are so new that everyone has difficulty. Society hasn't set the rules yet. We're close, but it's gonna take time. It always takes time for society to figure itself out.

I recall going to an Everclear concert at a local club. They were playing loud and furious and an audience member held a camera high above his head to record the whole song. Everyone else was doing the same thing but this guy was close to the stage and the camera was right in front of Alex's face and the guy kept it aimed right at him. He stopped the song in the middle. "Dude, you're weirding me out."

We have the same situation in schools with texting during class and the constant NEED to have the phone on vibrate or "too high for teachers", the same situation with over-controlling boyfriends and their new way of keeping track, the same situation with impulsiveness and what the older group deems irresponsibility.

Give a kid unlimited candy and he will eat too much of it.
Give a kid unlimited hours in front of a tv, he will sit there and veg.
Give a kid a computer in his room and he'll spend all his time on it.
Give a kid unlimited use of a cellphone, he will misuse it.
The same with videogames.
The same with sports.
The same with books.
The same with sex.

The parents who give their kids unlimited and uncontrolled use of a toy unleash the limitless ability of the teenager to waste all his time with it and do something stupid or intelligent, wasteful or pretty cool, annoying, funny or thoughtless.

Adolescence is the time when controls are needed to establish boundaries and learn the appropriate use of everything. Limit choices.

Finally, a note to the parents of high-school students:

Please don't try to claim that the current cellphone with all of its bells and whistles is necessary - only the "call parents" option is necessary. Everything else on that phone will be misused.

Technology and the 21st Century

There was a nice comment on my rant the other day. I was discussing the merits of Dangerously Irrelevant's call for firing teachers who demanded training or who wouldn't learn new technology.

Sandra said "I'm wondering if DI is thinking of the same teachers I am who are perfectly happy to keep photocopying the same originals (or multiply-copied copies) they've used for 20 years, and who balk at the request to re-type them and make them available to other teachers digitally."

Before I ask for a teacher to be fired over this, I wonder if someone could explain exactly how much of this makes a difference in that teacher's classroom? Does re-typing something improve it? If that old map is still useful and correct, use it. If that hand-written worksheet still works, what is the need for change? (I am assuming it is legible. In fact, I note that many items deliberately use a handwriting font for student interest and understanding - maybe we should hand-write them sometimes?) If someone else wants to use it, why is a teacher required to put it in a convenient form? Why can't the recipient do that work?

We are too often changing without knowing that the result will be an improvement. I am very uncomfortable with forcing people to upgrade or perish.

I am in favor of technology and all the teachers I know are as well. What I disagree with is the notion that new is necessarily better and that teachers who don't jump into the bleeding edge are somehow deficient.

Change for the sake of change: Here's my take on the Frameworks, Standards, GLEs, Curriculum Mapping and Other Reasons to Re-type the Syllabus.

Sandra also asks "In addition to only using their word-processing programs for the most basic purposes, these teachers also refuse to learn how to use basic email and student grade software themselves, and either find someone more tech-savvy to give them their own personal tutorial session or insist that the school give them one."

This is a better point. I cannot imagine someone refusing to learn email. I can see the reluctance to learning gradebook software on their own. Many of those grading programs are garbage. The flaws are legendary and the implementations are often a joke. The interfaces are counterintuitive and cumbersome.

One school locally has a grading program that takes forever to use because of all the "wizards" it pops up, and then there is a different, on-line, system that the teachers HAVE TO MANUALLY RE-TYPE data into. Oh, and they're required to keep a paper gradebook and lesson plan book as well because the Principal wants to be able to review them. Any wonder why these folks don't bother doing more than one grade per marking period on-line? The retreat into "I want training" is pretty reasonable - it's a way of putting off the pain.

Then we have a philosophical question. If something is new, why should people be denied training in how to use it? Like Sandra, I am the teacher people ask for help because the tech guys are non-existent and useless. Why me? I spend hours on this stuff - I like it. I run websites with thousands of pages and I've been doing programming for years. I know how programmers think and I can teach.

Most people take a bit of time - I try for a two-hour window during the August inservice so I can get everyone done at once. It's a lecture with each teacher at a workstation. You can leave them to explore the software (taking 10 to 20 times as long to find 10 to 20 percent of the stuff they need) and do collaborative learning or 21st century on-line learning, ...

But teaching is quicker, better and more efficient.

Dangerously Irrelevant Is

Dangerously Irrelevant shows why he's irrelevant.

In many job sectors, employees are expected to keep up with relevant technologies or risk job loss. When do we require that of K-12 and postsecondary educators? At what point do we say to them “No, we’re not training you how to use this. It’s easy enough for you to learn on your own. And if you don’t, we’ll find someone else who can.”
When will we, as educational systems, redefine the job descriptions and expectations of educators to include their regular and effective incorporation of relevant digital technologies?

Like many bloggers and opinionators, DI has it wrong. There are precious few teachers who aren't technologically capable. We all use technology every day. We call on cell phones, use computers, drive cars, download things from the Internet, use graphing calculators, SmartBoards and other technology. The level of use is different, but we're ALL living in this world now.

Who defines your acceptable level? Who decides that it isn't enough? Who has actually made sure that more technology is actually USEFUL in the classroom setting? Will it be Techno-geek boy or an actual teacher in a school like Packemin High School? To accept a definition like this from someone who has such an obvious axe to grind is like calling on the Oil Companies to write an energy bill for Congress. (Oh, wait ...)

A commenter says "The obvious next question is: If we are successful in changing job descriptions to include integrating 21st tools and resources, how do we fairly assess teacher performance?"

to which I respond:

The students need to know what they are doing - that's called knowledge of subject. Those 21st century skills are mostly Glitzenbullshit, a tool that kids can pick up at any time. People like this commenter are changing the subject out of ignorance.

As Peter Berger (Poor Elijah's Almanac) says,

The high-powered Partnership for 21st Century Skills still preaches this same doctrine, euphemistically arguing that we need to "emphasize deep understanding rather than shallow knowledge."

Unfortunately, without deep knowledge, the best you can have is a shallow understanding. Without any knowledge, meaning facts, any understanding you think you have is illusory, baseless, and void.

...

You can't attain understanding without knowledge, and you can't acquire knowledge without mastering facts. You can't skip the grunt work, even if it's often dull and painstaking. That's true in any discipline. Our children need to realize and accept this. So do the experts who mastermind our schools. So do we all. That's the new angle on teaching and learning that we desperately need. More gimmicks won’t help.

True, grappling with facts and turning them into knowledge can be hard work.

But reckoning with ignorance is even harder.

Naturally Speaking

I was at another conference the other day and the presenter rambled on about this and that (don't they always?).

He caught my attention when he spoke about 21st Century Skills: "students won't have to use the keyboards and won't have to learn to type. It's a new form of communication skill - they'll be using Dragon Naturally Speaking instead" and then he spoke of the dramatic improvements to DNS and how it's tuned to the user's voice and that we have to transform our schools and our teaching to take advantage of this different manner of communication.

I nearly snorted in my teacup. I remember when DNS (or it's corporate predecessor) was relatively new - 12 years ago - I got it free with Corel Wordperfect. It didn't work very well then and it doesn't work very well now and it has nothing to do with the program and its capabilities.

First, voice control is always touted as a boon for the student who can't learn to type, for SpecEd, for the less-capable student. The problem is that voice control is a lousy interface model and totally inappropriate for those who don't write well to begin with, uh, like, it thinks, no , back up, delete, tries to uh, get rite the students words but it dozen quite do it, uh, like, yeah. .

Additionally, a student is rarely in a room or environment appropriate for voice control. There are other students around who are problems not because their voices add words to what the program hears but because they are a distraction and the DNS user is a distraction right back. How often would he be trying to think of what to say when he overhears the kid next to him saying something that catches his ear? He'd be constantly trying to get back on task -- multi-tasking is not a human feature.

Can you imagine 25 students in a computer lab using DNS simultaneously, trying to format a paper, correct an error, compose a sentence ... out loud?

Now add in the fact that most students who use DNS are special ed, 504, IEP students. The only time or place they should use DNS is in a solo situation with no distraction -- how often is THAT happening in your school? Then go to college - you can't use voice control in the library, in class, in any populated environment and probably not even in your dorm room. Who wants to be "writing a paper, email, letter out loud in the coffee shop? Force the world to listen to your next great idea? Plop on your headphones or earbuds and then speak WAY TOO LOUDLY and everyone has to shush you so they can hear the TV or the music or their conversation? Your roommate will kill you if he has to listen to you try and compose a paper. The click of the keyboard is white, background noise. Speech recognition is unbearably irritating if you're an innocent bystander.

Try to use voice control at work? Not happening and not worth it. The writing that most people do is not long enough or is too complicated (filling in forms, tabbing through text boxes, etc) to find any improvements with DNS.

In a manipulative sense, it is much less accurate and fine-grained than fingers or pointing device. As Jakob Nielson put it, "it's even less suitable for most everyday interactions because it's a less data-rich channel and it's harder to specify something in words than to choose it on a graphical display."

Is it faster? Yes, in limited circumstances. Is it more efficient? Not unless you can write very well, compose on the fly, organize in your head, and speak in complete sentences that follow the rules of proper grammar.

Lastly, my biggest concern is that, for many of the above reasons, keyboarding DOESN'T go away and the student will not have learned the skill. Now what? Where's your 21st Century Communication Skill now?

Data and Improving teaching

Over on Right on the Left Coast, Darren spoke about his school's new program to track student scores and data.

Today we were introduced to the new software that's going to track every student's performance, on any number of tests (not just state standardized tests), for the 13 years they're in school. I can see how my last year's students did, or how my current students did on last spring's tests.

A response asked

"If there is some way to figure out how the students who are one grade above what you currently teach did on some of the math SUBtests (such as multiplying fractions, or dividing decimals or whatever), you may find a potential weak spot in your teaching of *this* year's students and head that off at the pass. Is the information that detailed?"

Information is rarely that detailed. They'll say "number operations" but you really don't know exactly what the question was. You're always left wondering how accurate the data is:

- was the kid tired, lazy, trying? did he care? (Scores don't count for the student up here - they don't have to pass or even take the test. They can just bubble in or fiddle.)

- was the question worded strangely or differently from what we do?

- What was the general trend/difficulty of the test/assessment? Up here in the frozen north, they don't release the whole test like the NY regents do and we often don't see the results until 5-6 months later. (Test in Nov, scores by April) It makes it difficult to tailor your next years teaching when you can't get a sense of the target.

If RoTLC can get more data from his program, it'd be neat. Ultimately, though, you can lose yourself in the data aggregation and disaggregation and forget that kids change and the data collection was suspect. The summer transitions often make those new 10th graders unrecognizable. Getting a job often turns 11th grade slackers into 12th grade students. Girlfriend issues make far more changes occur than Education Commisioners.

Data is wonderful, but students aren't data. All the data in the world might help you make some remedial work available, but four weeks later he 'gets it', now you don't need any of it.

RoTLC is going to hear a LOT about "Tracking" and "Don't let his past performance dictate his future." I suspect that he will also be up to his MilSpec eyeballs in outside concerns that skin color is affecting scores and placement, not ability. (With all the yellers forgetting that class is a much better indicator than skin color, but I digress)

Finally, I'd say to everyone: There's good teachers and bad teachers, teachers who connected with Johnny and those who didn't. Don't assume anything from his old scores until you know Johnny, and really not even then. The only really useful assessments are the ones you give out yourself.

It's kind of funny that we are assuming that past teaching was not good enough and we need to improve our teaching by poring over those same past results. We tend to dwell on those past scores as if they were generated by the best teachers in the world using the best teaching methods known to man. Seems like a disconnect to me.

I'm going to stick to teaching algebra, helping the weaker ones remediate, pushing the group to do their best. I'll test them for my purposes and when I'm done, I'll send them to the next teach with a good background. Any difficulties the kids had last year - well, that's what these inservice days are for, in my opinion - talking about students and what they need.

I know that my course is listed as "Algebra I," not "Topics as they occurred to me." My kids need to move on. They will need certain knowledge and skills. If they don't have either, then I can't let them move into "Algebra II."