Caution with implementation

I have a lot of concerns about certain technology being a good investment, especially trendy (read: pricey) devices like iPads. I get just as excited as everyone else about having a fully equipped modern classroom with a SmartBoard and enough computers, but I think this stems from the greedy nature that comes along with growing up in an entitled consumerist society.

Most of us want to ensure that we have all the ‘tech necessities’ in our lives – a smartphone, high speed wireless internet at home, a big enough hi-def enough tv, the devices that make our HDTV prove that it’s HD, etcetera, etcetera. I think that we as teachers have that same mentality about our classroom – that we, and of COURSE our students, need and deserve the very best. Otherwise, how are we to educate in the very best manner? (Sarcasm intended)

When we put more thought into it, it becomes obvious that we do not need to set our classrooms up with one top of the line fully loaded 17” MacBook Pro and iPad 3 for each student. Nor can we really afford to go to the opposite extreme and have our students trying to do 21^st century work on computers running Windows ’95, or even worse, fail to have our students learn to be tech savvy in the first place. So the real question is, “how do we find the best balance when it comes to equipping our schools with modern enough technology on a sensible budget?” To answer this, we’ll need to have proper research and evaluations behind how well different technologies support learning. 

As Larry Cuban points out, the research approach needs a lot of improvement and schools have to be willing to trust the data:

          New Technology in Schools : Does it Work?

The article is a quick read, but be sure to hit both parts of it. I’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions – if better research showed that a lot of classroom technologies have little to no impact on learning, how would that hit you?

Some thoughts on video gaming

A few years ago I was a manager for several different GameStop stores. When I decided to make a big career shift and move into teaching, one regret I had was that the vast majority of the experience and skills that I had built up to be a successful and marketable retail store manager wouldn’t really carry over. But upon reflecting on my experiences in different stores, it hit me that I have a fairly good insight into areas that almost all American students have an enormous interest in – not just video games, but music and movies as well.

For video games, it’s important to acknowledge that they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. There is a very large gender gap when gauging students’ interest in electronic gaming, although more and more girls have found gaming approachable and accessible in the past five or ten years. Systems like the Wii and Nintendo DS and the growing popularity of simple mobile games have brought in tons of demographics that would never have been interested in gaming in the 16-bit days.

What I’ve found most fascinating about the gaps in interest in video gaming is that there’s virtually no difference in interest across different socioeconomic groups. Attainability of the most modern gaming machines and the newest software may be different, but you’ll find no shortage of students in Newark who love playing their Playstation 2 systems as much as more affluent suburban students who own every up-to-date console available. A shared interest like this seems very rare to me, it doesn’t seem very likely that children with such starkly different backgrounds and cultures would universally love video games. So if a vast majority of our students are so into gaming, why is it so hard to come up with ways to use this interest to engage our students’ learning?

It could be that educational software is simply unwelcome on these platforms. Consoles like Leapster are a rare case of a perfectly effective educational video game experience, but only because all the hardware and software is exclusively focused on that purpose. Furthermore, the target audience is for a fairly young age, and as it carries no other entertainment purposes, other home and handheld consoles become more desirable as the child grows older.

When the DS first came out, Nintendo began exploring ways to incorporate educational software and came out with some great titles like Brain Age, Personal Trainer: Math, and Learn Science. Brain Age in particular was a huge commercial success and got a lot of parents to reconsider the value of allowing their children to spend time playing video games. To a certain extent, though, the presence and success of the games may have been based around naive purchases. In my experience, the vast majority of the copies of educational software we sold were purchased as gifts by the parents or relatives but rarely or never put to good use. Lots of children immediately traded the software in to buy more engaging games, and the general impression I got was that the only benefit of having educational software was that Nintendo made their products more marketable by claiming they had better intentions for the kids using their systems.

Despite the inherent difficulty in merging the worlds of electronic entertainment and education, I feel that there’s something important to our students’ ever-growing interest in video gaming. I’m not sure how I would go about tying in this interest my students may have into my classroom – I’m certain that engaging the students as a class with games would be ineffective, but in certain one-on-one scenarios perhaps I can use a particular student’s interest in games to motivate learning. In my case, this may be finding out what kind of game they’re into and having them analyze how certain physics properties were programmed into the game’s engines or perhaps having them find moments in the game where the physics don’t actually make sense.

In the end, regardless of how any of us may feel about gaming, we have to face facts - we're all going to have students who love them. How would you go about engaging a student who has no interest in your class but loves playing Halo? 

Setting the bar for accountability

          Social Media in the Physics Classroom

Above is a link to Stephanie Chasteen's 'Social Media in the Physics Classroom'. The vast majority of her insights and observations apply to all content areas, so it's definitely worth a look even if you're not teaching science!
In several of my prior posts I've pointed out my concerns about the distractions and disruptions many technologies bring into the classroom. Chasteen quickly addresses many of the same concerns I've had, but points out that a teacher who constantly discourages the usage of technology ("lids down time) does the student a disservice. She does a great job pointing out effective ways to use various social media tools to shape your students' learning, but the biggest thing I took home from this was the advice to have accountability - having a wiki-based contract and encouraging buy-in from the students. If I can find a way to make this more effective, I'll not only be free to use a huge amount of online resources with the fill trust of the kids, but I'll also be shaping them into responsible technology users at a very early age.

Double Slit Experiment simplified

The concept of the double slit interference pattern was something that baffled me at several points in both my high school and collegiate physics courses. I remember doing labs on this and having the feeling that the concept WOULD be something important to understand but I just never connected the dots and was able to visualize the phenomena and what went into it.
Truth be told, I think this is an example of a whole slew of concepts that a lot of physics professors 'get' themselves but have a hard time passing on the visualization and importance on to their students. In high school, something like this may be glossed over - which makes the introduction almost pointless. The very premise of the wave-particle duality is one of the most fascinating aspects you can address when describing electromagnetic waves, and yet it's all too easy to either go over your students' heads or underestimate their ability to grasp the concept. In all honesty, how many of you scratched your heads and/or yawned whenever the terms 'double slit', 'interference pattern' and 'wave-particle duality' came up? That's what I thought.
Well, thanks to our friend Dr. Quantum, even those of you who hated physics and struggled with it can get a powerful visual for not only how the experiment works, but WHY it's so dang crucial to both the study of electromagnetic waves and quantum physics:

          Dr. Quantum - Double Slit Experiment

Although I won't need to go into the quantum aspect of this video too much in my class, it's going to be immensely helpful when I talk about the light wave version. The animation alone with the highlighted interference on the waves simplified and clarified a concept that I used to be rather puzzled about. This gets added to the list of go-to videos along with Bill Nye!

Science jam, key of Curium

Early on in my observations, I noticed some of the 7^th and 8^th grade science teachers using a very strange method in their classes. Every once in awhile a big announcement would come up – that in a few days, lyric sheets would be passed out, and the students would all get to sing a song about the science topic they were covering.

Yep... songs… 

...singalong songs… 

...about science...

...to the melody of ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’... 

...couldn't make it up if I tried.

And you know what? The kids absolutely ate it right up. The very announcement sent them into a frenzy, and the students eagerly anticipated the upcoming lesson that contained this delightful treat. They would bristle with energy and excitement, and sing out songs about the rock cycle and elements at the top of their lungs. Self-conscious as tweenagers are, not a single one of them wanted to miss the chance to join in on these songs.

So in the oddest implementation of technology yet, I plan on tinkering around in GarageBand next semester during my student teaching with my 8^th graders. Writing up some MIDI-based tracks should be a piece of cake, and if my students are into rap, I’m sure I can drop some beats for them. I highly doubt I’ll get a chance to do this with high school students later on, but there is NO way I’m going to pass up a chance to utilize music in my science class, especially seeing how insanely enthusiastic all the middle school students at this school were about the idea. 

P.S. The symbol for the element Curium is Cm ... C minor... terrible science gag of the day, complete!

Never enough restrictions?

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/53910819-79/ipad-apple-ipads-students.html.csp

For all the effort and great intentions that go into new technologies to be used in the classroom, it’s a shame that there’s no way to overcome students’ natural abilities to uncover EVERY distraction they can find. Apparently even the mighty Apple can’t quite counter these tendencies, as the article above reveals. As simple as they make it to disable and restrict all dangerous or unproductive apps and websites, students quickly found out that using iMessage can’t be blocked in any way!

Such a small loophole now means that usage of already purchased iPads will have to be severely restricted and monitored, and in many cases would prevent districts from purchasing iPads. The risk for cheating or even just unnecessary chit-chat outweighs the possible benefits of implementing all the educational tools an iPad can bring to the table. Apple clearly wants to be marketable and have the iPad be the tablet of choice for the classroom, so it probably won’t be long before a proper set of tools are released to ensure that this won’t be a problem any longer.

The real shame in all of this is that lower and lower attention spans are the source of both the need of new technology and the risk of implementation. The reason that devices like laptops and iPads hold so much potential is because students overuse them recreationally and are, quite frankly, bored when engaging technology isn’t present. Then, given the tiniest opportunity to exploit distracting and entertaining non-educational aspects of the technology, students unravel the devices and ruin what could have been the engaging classroom experience they needed.

I personally think there should be more emphasis on encouraging maturity in the utilization of technology at an early age. In the market, devices seem to generate the most appeal (even for adults) in the potential they hold for keeping us far, far away from boredom , and it’s no surprise that all of us are now programmed to be distracted and entertained at every moment of the day. When we have a class full of children or teenagers who are wired this way, it's not fair for us to try to master the balance of giving them enough tech to stay engaged and restricting the access they have to avoid distraction.

What can we do as educators to overcome this and hold our students to higher standards of behavior and maturity?

Interactivity #5

I interviewed a 6^th to 8^th grade ESL teacher working in the North Arlington public schools in Bergen County, New Jersey.  Early on, it was very clear that NETS hadn’t been unpacked in detail to her.  The term ‘NETS’ actually didn’t initially ring any bells, but she did recognize it once shown the actual standards lists.  Since the interview was conducted over her school’s spring break, she was limited to the paperwork she had at home with her, and could not find anything in her files that referenced NETS specifically, nor could she recall any specific training on these standards.  However, upon reading the list she was able to give me a lot of insight into what her district has been doing to meet the standards.

Their superintendent is very pro-technology, and their classrooms are very generously equipped.  Given her small class size, her room is one of the few which doesn’t have a SmartBoard. She has received several laptops and an iPad along with workshop training and constant software upgrades to fully utilize all her technological resources.  Their grading and lesson planning systems are all online and completely paperless. Workshop days with free choices of topics always include abundant opportunities to master technology utilization – recent mandatory workshops covered topics like cyber safety and cyber bullying, supporting the Digital Citizenship standards.

She found the North Arlington 3 year technology plan (2010-2013), which does not specifically reference NETS. It does have ICT (Information and Communication Technology) Literacy standards, which are expected to be incorporated and explained in the lesson plans. The layout for this is similar to how we are assembling our lesson plan spreadsheet for Interactivities 4 and 5 – in addition to the strategies aligned with the standards, usage of technology must be noted and explained.

Again, it’s difficult to tell whether or not the school’s current policies are adopting and implementing the NETS specifically or if they’re just under a larger umbrella of technology integration. My interviewee was confident that even though she wasn’t aware of these specific standards, she was certain that her superintendent would get all required standards met well before deadlines.

Judging from my classmates’ posts about their own interviews, I’m not too surprised that it was so difficult to figure out why NETS seemed to be missing from the school’s technology plan. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to see how readily she was able to explain the other implementations that have become their day to day standard.

In my future as a teacher, I’ll have to make sure I keep myself up to date with the state expectations independently of my district. While keeping on top of the school’s plans to meet standards is an administrative responsibility, knowing the standards and being ahead of the game myself will save me a lot of work down the road. It may even potentially give me an opportunity to shine when I can show my colleagues how I’ve gone about integrating the new standards. 

Link to updated lesson plan analysis with NETS-S and NETS-T standards.

Damaging Distractions

My cooperating teacher runs two faster-paced enriched courses for his 8th graders, and for their class we're giving them a group project where each team of 4-5 students has to teach their classmates about a topic they haven't gone into detail on yet. Students picked topics like electrical circuits, sound, light, and electromagnetism, and have to teach their peers the key points, show them a demonstration, and give them a quick assessment on what they should have learned.
Many of the students wanted to see their phenomena in action before just reading the chapters cold, and rather than wasting tons of time retrieving equipment and setting up labs that might not work well, I decided to encourage them to use some online lab simulations. The teacher thought this was a great idea as well, and we showed them a site that had some great programs that would quickly take the place of the more time consuming and labor intensive labs, and really give them great insight into many of the fundamental ideas behind their topics that they could start with.
This was going great, until the students devolved from learners into browsers. Within moments of showing them the sites they could get the labs from, most students had opened up multiple tabs in their browsers and were pulling up songs on YouTube and a multitude of other focus-draining sites on the side. It seems that the firewall on the network does block out obviously noneducational sites like Facebook and Twitter, but there is just no shortage of procrastination enablers on the web, and our 8th graders wasted no time in figuring out which ones they could get away with pulling up.
It's hard to assign blame to them, as we as adults are (generally) not much better. By now, most of us have made the connection that when it's crunch time, we can only truly get work done by being disciplined about limiting what windows we keep open, but it's undeniable that using internet resources to be productive comes coupled with the inherent temptation to fool yourself into opening up the forty things you 'need' to keep checking on.
For our students who haven't gotten to this point, how do we illustrate the danger of letting distractions seep in? In some cases we can try to catch them and reprimand them, but if they're really expected to be able to take advantage of these awesome tools, we need to be developing their mindsets so that they become aware of their tendencies. At what point would they be mature enough to take ownership of something like that? Is specific education on how to wisely approach browsing something that needs to be implemented?