Friday post: The future and other ramblings

Uploaded by Thomas Hawk http://tiny.cc/jsBqm

It is the end of the week and I have begun a number of posts that are still drafts. The topics include my thoughts on Twitter and also Cloud computing and what they offer, if anything, to the world of education and libraries.

I have been considering the use I make of the different digital and social media in general. I followed a tweet about Twitter and Facebook to a blog post containing a great photo with captions. I liked the humour although one commentator did not.

I also had a 2  meetings today. Both discussed the issues around the idea of where our school is heading, trying to articulate the plans for learning and teaching and looking at where technology fits into the greater scheme. We will be working on this for the next few months, both as part of the PLP program and our internal audit. The idea that technology will simply make it cheaper and easier (eg. we don’t need to buy books anymore because everything is on the internet and everyone can just use that) is slowly changing. People are beginning to realise whilst there are wonderful learning opportunities, there are also many issues that need to be considered if our transition is going to be successful for our students and our teachers.

- And (2 random thoughts)  thinking about the future, there are two quotes I like on this topic:

 John Sladek “The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.” 

and William Gibson “”The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.“ 

Uploaded by World Bank Photo Collection http://tiny.cc/8KCcD

Uploaded by Nic’s events http://tiny.cc/k8pMS

 I also wonder what the current the economic state will mean to the parents who send there students to our school. Our fees are more than other schools near to us because we have our notebook/laptop program. I believe our program can offer great opportunities to our students as well as our schools other advantages of the fantastic grounds and the pastoral care set-up.

Uploaded by Geoff Ruddock http://www.flickr.com/photos/14444445@N06/3247868734/

Anyway it is now the weekend.

What to do this weekend. I don’t sleep in, sleeping isn’t everything! I have set myself some jobs to do this weekend, they will be the first two days I will have had without at least a whole day committed to others.  It is going to involve some exercise (a long walk along some tracks I haven’t used for a while) and then I will be getting my house in order. Tasks include:

• Complete a cleanup of my email accounts, both my school and my home accounts. Preferably doing it reasonably quickly.
• Clean up my RSS feeds - both the outlook and Google reader accounts
• Listen to or delete the podcasts I have loaded onto iTunes.
• Either watch ar delete any television programs I have taped more than 2 weeks ago but have not watched. 

If I can complete these tasks, I will be very pleased with myself.

Digital identity – what are we teaching?

We have been back at school for a few weeks now and all the students have their re-imaged notebook computers back. The year 7 students have had their first “technology immersion days”, where they learnt the basics about their new tool and one of the software tools (photostory) that is available to them. Maybe it is now time to ask about the availability of some of the Web2.0 tools I used last year. This year a number of sites seem to be blocked.I don’t think there has been a reversal in the thinking on these tools. They probably just slipped through the net when the servers were up-graded (or some such- I prefer to belive this)! It is however, really irritating that I cannot get to and use these simple tools. I feel a bit like the students. Many students have been living in the high social, digital world over summer. They have been messaging, sending each other photos, using podcasts and vodcasts, sending each other information about all sorts of things and now they are back at school. At the moment they cannot use their phones, ipods, etc. and so. at the start of the year especially, feel isolated and shut away from a lot of what is important. Many had an interest in the information about the bushfires. As a teacher I had news feeds and twitter to get ready and up-to-date access to information, they did not. After a meeting and some long discussion, some teachers were allowed to experiment with facebook for the year 12 English students. Many of the more strident questions came for those who abviously have not taken the time to look at/experience this tool. Some concerns were valid and worth discussing but there was the impression of fear as well. As teachers, we need to understand atleast the basics of these common digital tools. In our schools, we must acknowledge their existence and help our students understand them. If we are to help them become responsible digital citizens, the ones who have power over the tools, not those that become it’s victims, we need to teach our students how to be safe and how to be responsible. I copied this quote from a longer post  by Chris Lehman about some legislation in the US but the argument holds anywhere.

…the more we ban, prohibit, regulate and legislate, the less we teach. If we want students to learn how to manage their lives, we have to let them live them. Chris Lehman calling for action and using facebook

What do students really understand about the difgital media they immerse themselves in? From classes I have been going into, and some individual conversations, some know quite alot others know a bit and some understand almost nothing. We need to help them make decisions that may have an effect on their lives now and in the future.

Below is an interesting little video on how we all have a digital identity, whether we like it or not. Certainly makes you think.

What are you teaching students about their digital identity?

Parents as Partners in learning

I wrote in an earlier post about involving parents. I believe we need to do more to help parents understand why we are using technology in our schools, that technology is not the end in itself but a means to an end. The skills that we want the students to learn are the important focus in our teaching and the fact that we can use technology to create a range of interesting, real-world and authentic learning experiences, that engage our students, is a great bonus.

I am thinking about having a section on our intranet that allows parents to obtain information they require and/or an understanding of the technological skills that their sons are developing. After completing a version of the “23 Things” program, my idea would be to create something similar for our parents. We currently have 3 technology evenings for parents of our year 7 students and these could continue and exist alongside the on-line information. I would not have to “reinvent the wheel”, there are many existing models available,  just modify the information to meet the needs of our parents. The information does not have to be in the form of a tutorial but designed to answer questions, as they may occur to parents. Graham Wegner had some interesting ideas on his blog, now called Open Education, about helping parents understand about technology use in schools. We are also working on some cyber safety information for teachers, students and parents. This is a real concern for many parents, and it seems the media outlets think it that it more commercially beneficial to emphasise only the bad, rather than a more balanced and holistic view.

There are many sites that I will try to bring together and utilise. One of the first might be the following: “How to understand your kid’s text messages” on Mahalo ( they have a parenting how-to category where they are putting up all sorts of information.) This is a  good guide to texting language. It gets into reasons for abbreviations and is much more than just a list of “net words”. Good for both parents and teachers alike.

We now have a two week break from classes and I will think more about how this might work.

To finish this, from CoolCatTeacher (2007):

 ”American Education continues to be afraid of technology and ignore its importance to our future as a nation and the future of our children. We must move ahead and use technology to teach and to keep our kids safe. Wisely used technology can be a friend of education. Ignorance is the enemy.”

Wikipedia’s reliability validated

WikiPedia Logo Archives,
originally uploaded by

 Ben Jacob is moving to flickr/benjacob.

Following on from the article about Veropedia compared to Wikipedia, I was investigating more about each. I stumbled on to an article about Wikipedia in 48 Hours on Wikipedia posted by Kent Anderson. He discussed the finding af a study in First Monday. This quick but effective small study analyzed how quickly errors in Wikipedia are picked up and corrected. The author of the study, P. D. Magnus, introduced incorrect information (called “fibs”) into some Wikipedia articles about famous philosophers. He then waited to see how long it took for the errors to be corrected.

The study showed that Wikipedia’s methods for checking for small inaccuracies are validated. The answer to the question “how quickly are errors picked up?”, is that they are found and dealt with expediently. Some errors were corrected within/around 2 hours. Within 48 hours, those that had not been corrected, had been flagged as needing adjustment.

When Wikipedia first began many teachers, teacher librarians and librarians spoke out about the validity of something like Wikipedia. There were many who were very sceptical about how reliable such a resource could be. I did not have a problem with students using Wikipedia, although I believe that for many younger students many articles become too much for them. I believe, as always, all material should be checked from several sources anyway. The results from this study provide more than just anecdotes about the reliability of Wikipedia articles.

Learning and technology (and the internet)

How can we, in our teacher/librarian roles, help the teachers incorporate the new technologies in their classrooms? This was a question that I have been asking myself over the past few weeks. Many teachers seem to be fearful of the technology and then “what happens if it doesn’t work?!!” We need to reassure teachers that, if you understand the reason behind using the technology, if the technology is a means to an end, not the end in itself, it doesn’t matter when gliches occur. Students can even be of help, if you are happy to work with them to overcome problems.

I was giving some research skills lessons in some year 7 classes recently. One of the objectives was to investigate how to use the 2 visual search engines, Viewzi and SearchMe, as well as some databases our library subscribes to. Upon finding the information they needed, the students were to use various note taking techniques to record the information they found. Unfortunately for the classes, and the teacher and me, the school’s internet connection was down due to circumstances beyond our control. In another case the class hadn’t been booked in for on-line searching. I had to alter my approach but we still managed to work on the skills I was wanting the students to learn. We worked on some documents I hade prepared and then carefully prepared questions, and worked out keywords, for the internet searches that we carried out in following classes. We also made use of a little tool called Zulupad, to work on a timeline for the events in their class novel. Zulu Pad is open source software that allows the user to create links that open up onto new pages.  It is a bit like a portable wiki.  This is a simple little piece of software and I like the use of it in a number of circumstances, such as building vocabularies and note taking. We have used it in some language classes, as well as research classes

This week I had a problem with not being able to use my computer with the data projector. So I asked a student to volunteer and we continued on with the class. I had numerous offers from the students to be the one whose work was shown on the big screen. The others were all focused on the task at hand and we carried on as usual, in fact it was great to have a student at the front so that I could stand at the back of the room whilst directing the class.

In each of these cases it was not the end of the world when the technology did not work as planned. I knew what skill I wanted the students to learn and had other alternatives ready. This is the “trick” to success. I have worked for a long time in the area of student research skill and I am comfortable with technology. A few hiccups does not mean that using the wonderful array of technological tools are too difficult to handle. So, going back to my first question, what can we do as teacher librarians to help the classroom teachers? Work with them in the planning stages, helping them to develop the required learning outscomes for the topic, team teach and share the experiences with them.  And show them the possibilities that are open to them when they use the many and varied tools out there in Web2.0 land, and that most problems are not major, and can be useful, in the learning environment.