Teachers and Tablets

After Fred and my presentation at NECC, I have been thinking off and on about the tension between those on our faculty who embrace digital media’s value in the process of teaching reading, and those who shy away from it, believing instead that reading is a more solitary process best done with a book, a dictionary, and a pen for marginal notes.

This morning, I sat down at my computer and scanned the headlines of today’s New York Times. Being a recovering English teacher, the article “When Poets Were Scientists and Nature Their Mysterious Muse” caught my eye.

The article reviews a book about science and the nature of discovery in the mid to late 18th Century.

At one point, the book goes into a discussion about Herschel’s discovery of Uranus and makes reference to Keats’ Sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” which makes reference to the discovery.

Not being the kind of person who typically cracks open his volume of Keats at 6:30 AM, I would have simply glossed over the reference had I been reading it in the printed newspaper. Since I was already online, however, and the poem was linked to in the Times article, I clicked on it because I was curious about the reference.

As I read, I was able to highlight and right click on words that I didn’t understand or know the meaning of such as demesne and Darien. After reading through a couple of times, I had a general gist, but without any knowledge of who Chapman was, I had to search Google for a little more help. In an analysis of the poem posted online I learned that Chapman had written a translation of Homer that Keats really liked. Oooh! Now I get it!. All of a sudden the metaphoric meaning of “demesne” is made clear, as is the entire point of the sonnet.

So what’s the point?

I guess I find it interesting how digital media tears down numerous inertia barriers to understanding in reading. Because the information is instantly and easily available, things that would otherwise have been glossed over can be uncovered when one’s curiosity happens to be engaged about something.

It is easy for us as teachers to underestimate the critical nature of students’ background knowledge and previous expereiences as they relate to their success as readers. Small gaps in a reader’s background knowledge can lead to huge chasms of understanding when approaching a challenging text. Easy access to information to fill in those gaps can help to mitigate that problem.

Hey, who knows. If Keats had access to The Google back then, he would have known that it was Balboa and not Cortez that discovered the Pacific. Of course that would have thrown off the meter of the line, though.

Made it to Boston last night to present today at the Whipple hill user conference as a case study on how my school uses their API to move data from our Database into Whipple Hill.

While writing software and pushing data around was pretty cool to me, I think the two sessions I watched earlier were probably more generally compelling.

The first was a panel discussion about social media, where Will Richardson and several others advocated for more and more effective use of social media. The discussion seemed to focus on two main areas — PR / Image management and Learning tools.

Regarding PR uses, the theme seemed to be transparency. The more you try to control the online image of your institution, by ignoring or shouting down negative comments, the faster your fans, followers, and visitors will begin to sniff out your agenda and tune you out. The solution seems to lie in the creation and maintenance of an online social media presence that is genuine and does not shy away from sensitive topics, but also does not endeavor to control the conversation.

Will Richardson spoke passionately for more educational uses of these tools. He correctly pointed out that most children have almost no one teaching them how to use these things as educational resources. He made a great point about the difference between using things like blogs as publication tools, and the truly powerful use of social media as a tool to leverage relationships to socially build understanding.

I asked the panel about how we might effectively tap into the passion that students have about social networks without creating awkward and inappropriate relationships between teachers and students. I mean it’s really the social part of these networks that make most kids want to be a part of them. I suspect that a Ning devoted to Irish Poetry would not be nearly as popular among my students as the facebook groups they belong to. So how can I help them understand the way that I use facebook (to post articles from NYTimes.org, NPR.org, youtube, ted talks) in a way that is authentic and that doesn’t require me to read about who hooked up with whom at the party last weekend.

I’m not sure if the panel understood my question or if they just didn’t have a good answer, but I’m still wondering about this one.

I’m guessing, though that the answer has something to do with the transparency issue above (i.e.) not trying to sneak in learning disguised in the wrapper of a cool new technology). Helping kids find their genuine passions and building social communities around them so they can see the power of these learning tools seems to be the trick.

But how to do it…

Fred daly and I did a model lesson at NECC today.

We did a version of the collaborative close reading exercise that I had done last year with a group of teachers.

The video below is a re-post of the one we did last year with teachers at D-E.

The lesson went relatively smoothly with the exception of one minor sever glitch, and most people seemed to like the concept.

Comment press seems like a good tool for now, but I wonder if there isnt a small bit of a learning curve that might prove to be a barrier.

We had a great discussion at the 1:1 SIG forum sharing stories and learning about other programs. We quickly read and discussed Norris’ and Solloway’s article “Pedagogy is King.” Made me think of the quote: “This only becomes pedagogically interesting at the point when it becomes technologically boring.”

We heard a lot about Maine’s program (Mike Muir from Maine was leading the session), and Angus King stopped in to talk for a few minutes and answer questions.

He talked about a new web resource for teachers and technology leaders called Maine Learns (http://mainelearns.org/). Looks like good stuff.

While walking through the poster sessions, I med Bernajean Porter and talked to her about why stories are such powerful learning tools, and therefore, why Digital Storytelling can be such a great activity for students.

It wasn’t until I was in the 1:1 SIG forum working on an activity about Digital Storytelling that I leanred that she is one of the gurus of Digital Storytelling, hosting workshops and retreates and everything. Pretty cool.

In the SIG activity, I was in a group of people who were exploring what digital storytelling is. We found a whole bunch of great resources:
http://www.digitales.us/ (this is bernajean’s site)
http://www.edutopia.org/use-digital-storytelling-classroom
http://delicious.com/techmotivate/digitalstorytelling
www.storycenter.org
www.inms.umn.edu
www.umass.edu/wmwp/digitalstorytelling
www.techsoup.org
http://www.storycorps.org
www.teachingteachers.com

While there are some very specific definitions of DST out there, our group struggled to clarify exactly what those definitions meant and how they could be applied. Below is what we came up with:

Using digital media to communicate a story to an audience in a way that engages that audience. That engagement usually occurs through the characteristics of traditional story elements, and many of these elements have been formalized by other educators into “7 elements of digital story telling” There was significant discussion of what types of stories qualify as “stories” and which ones don’t. Often they have strong personal elements or employ dramatic tension or conflict. The bottom line, however, seems to be that engagement of the audience is a must.
Seven elements:

• Point of view
• Dramatic question holds the attention of audience resolved at end
• Emotional content
• Strong Narrative Voice
• Sound Track
• Economy (of words?)
• Pacing

After the keynote, I made my way down to the Exhibit Hall & walked around for a while. A couple of things jumped out at me:

1. Stoneware - Admittedly, it was the vendor’s cool glass projection display that caught my eye, but that had nothing to do with his product. This is a company that is trying to deliver a unified, cloud computing experience to schools so that all elements of cloud based applications can be unified and accessible to students from any device such as a laptop, ipod, or blackberry. Sounded promising. I need to look into it further. It was funny to run into Rob Mancabelli from Hunterdon Regional. They are moving into a student 1:1 program and mentioned that they were interested in using Stoneware to deliver applications and data management for student laptops. This could potentially be a great improvement over a synchronization solution like iFolder. I wonder if it stores a local copy of data, and if not, what the implications of that might be.

2. Flexbook — This is a company that allows teachers to generate their own text books. I didn’t stick around to learn much about it, but I picked up the literature in the hopes of finding out more later. After reading Disrupting Class, I was pretty intrigued by the idea of content creation that occurs outside the business model of textbook companies.

Great Oxford style debate with some great thinkers involved.

It’s a good question, but the answer, really is: It depends. No one is arguing for the status quo, but people disagree on the point of whether change can be achieved within the current physical structure. Also in contention is whether effective education can be delivered without the physical “space” of schools.

Howard Levin from the Urban School in San Francisco also did a session this afternoon detailing the integration that Urban School teachers have achieved in their one-to-one program.

While I have a great deal of respect for Howard and what he has done with that program, I continue to be concerned with the fact that very few people here are talking about the difficulties associated with one-to-one implementation.

I personally think that we take a great risk when we only highlight the success stories — especially when we do it in front of the people who are most likely to embrace technology in the first place.

Gladwell talked yesterday about the value of “failures” in the learning process, but sometimes at NECC, it seems like we only want to talk about what worked.

Howard did show a series of AMAZING videos, however: http://web.me.com/howlevin11/Digital_Tools_and_Practices_Samples

Ok, usually I use my iPod to fend off unwelcome assaults from vendors on the Exhibit Hall floor (that works great by the way). But when I walked by the Livescribe booth and saw their Pulse Smartpen, I had to stop and ask for a demo. This looks like an elegant, simple, and intuitive piece of technology that could solve the problem of kids who need to take notes in Math & Science class but would prefer to use a Mac than a Tablet PC. I’m going to pick one up at Target and check it out when I get home.

Oh, forgot about the cool factor — I watched the sales guy draw an octave of piano keys on the paper and tap out a song which played on the pen’s speaker.

Graphical Search engines and semantic network based dictionaries:
http://www.searchme.com - displays search results in a really engaging “cover flow” format.
http://www.visuwords.com - builds the definitions of words visually through graphic representations of their relationships to other words and concepts.

Elementary students using Scratch –
I spoke with Christopher Michaud, the project coordinator and asked what I always ask anyone who teaches programming concepts to kids — how do you introduce programming concepts from ground zero, and at what point do they make the intellectual leap from following step by step instructions to being able to apply these tools to solve novel problems. He pointed me to their website where there is a series of introductory lessons. According to him after the fourth or fifth lesson, many kids have begun to independently apply these concepts to their own work. http://nebomusic.net/scratch.html

Online Literature Tool –
I met with Ann Bailey from Howard County Public School System who told me about www.shmoop.com, a free online resource for helping students to gather background information and to do analysis of different pieces of literature. It seemed conceptually, very much like spark notes. For each piece of literature, it offers a summary, analysis, and study questions. It adds numerous technical tools, however such as the ability to post sticky notes on the text with students’ own comments and questions. Summaries and analysis are also written in a very informal tone. I have never had a problem with my students using Spark Notes to better understand a piece of literature, but I am fully aware of the objections of some of my colleagues. If you don’t like Spark Notes, you probably won’t like Shmoop. If you don’t mind SN, however, and you can get over the general tone of the commentary / summary, you will probably see some good value here. It would be even better if teachers could load in their own commentary and literature.