Lightning in a Bottle

With the rapid adoption of text messaging, instant messaging, e-mail and weblogs, the opportunities for child-to-child cruelty and harrassment have increased as well. The Washington Post has an online article about electronic bullying, and how difficult it is for school systems to deal with. It’s a disturbing story, and one that all teachers and school professionals should be aware of.

How would your school respond if a student, on his or her own web page, starting listing other students that were stupid, or ugly, or sluts? What if the writings were on a web page that allows anonymous postings, so the authors are unknown? What do you do if a student tells you that they are receiving insulting, demeaning emails from another student?

You can ponder those issues as you read the article at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8020-2003Sep26.html.

The New York Times today has an article on the Biloxi program of putting cameras in virtually every area of their schools, including all 500 classrooms. While some teachers have expressed concern, for the most part they have been used with little or no controversy. The cameras have been in place almost two years, and so far have only been used to resolve fairly mundane discipline issues, such as missing lunch money, or cheating on tests.

Examples from other schools also point out some of the good and bad of cameras. One school wondered why the kids papers were scattered during the night, and found the custodian had used a leaf blower to clean the floor. In a more troubling incident, a storage area was converted to a dressing room for basketball, but the ceiling camera was overlooked in the remodeling. Images of students changing clothes ended up automatically posted on the Internet.

While nobody seems to question that the student behavior has improved, and discipline is less of a problem, are the kids only learning to behave while they’re being watched?

The article is at www.nytimes.com/2003/09/24/education/24VIDE.html?pagewanted=1. (You need to register to view the article, but the registration is free.)

Researchers in the area of creating electronic paper (or is it electronic ink?) are moving toward being able to display moving pictures on paper. If their predictions hold true, the result will be a very inexpensive, low-power and sturdy replacement for LCD screens and computer monitors. The concept of the e-book that works for schools could finally begin to happen.

The scientists even envision being able to sew a display right onto your clothing. Can animated t-shirts, baseball caps and bumper-stickers be far behind?

The article is at story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&e=15&u=/nm/science_paper_dc.

In response to continued reductions in funding, the Texas Education Agency has eliminated it’s entire educational technology department. Some staff are being laid off, and some are being transferred into other departments such as textbooks or curriculum and instruction. While part of the effort is described as an attempt to integrate technology throughout the agency, some significant programs have been slated to shut down. The highest profile is the Texas-State Telecommunications Access Resource (T-STAR) network, a satellite and videoconferencing system similar to Washington State’s K-20 videoconferencing system.

There are more details at eSchool News at www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStorytw.cfm?ArticleID=4641.

CNN has a special report on the use of handhelds in schools. While not dreadfully informative at times (did you know a lot of teenagers have cellphones?), it does profile some of the issues that schools are struggling with. How do you monitor to make sure kids aren’t using them to play games, or chat, or cheat?

One issue they don’t discuss is the definition of cheating. If a child can carry an abbreviated version of the Encyclopedia Britannica in their Palm ($39.95 at the Palm Store), and they will use that kind of resource every day in their personal and professional life, is it cheating to use it in school? When is memorization an important skill, and when is it just a traditional holdover of what expect for school?

I remember very clearly the day my chemistry professor told us that all tests would be open book, because “When you graduate and get a chemistry job, your boss isn’t going to come up to you, give you a work assignment, then grab up all your books and walk away.” If we can resonably expect that current schoolkids will live in a world where they will have the equivalent of an entire reference library in their pocket at all times, should we be re-thinking what skills we need to emphasize, and more importantly, what tools they can use when we test them?

The CNN article is at www.cnn.com/2003/EDUCATION/09/21/sprj.sch.classroom.gadgets.ap/index.html.

Intel has proposed a miniature “Personal Server,” a small computer the size of a matchbook, that you would carry around on your person and would be able to wirelessly connect to whatever computer device or technology you happen to be using. All of your files and important data would travel with you wherever you go. An online article describing the project is at www.vnunet.com/News/1143659.

Their projections for it are even more interesting. At the current rate of development, the device should be able to inexpensively store 3 terabytes of data by the year 2012. (A terabyte is about a trillion bytes. 3 terabytes is about about the amount of memory in 10,000 current desktop computers.) That’s enough storage to record all the conversations you ever have in your life. By 2014, they anticipate pushing that to almost 100 terabytes, enough to record video of your entire life.

The good news here is that fairly quickly the cost of storing electronic portfolios shouldn’t be much of a problem. The bad news is pretty soon we will be surrounding by people recording everything we ever do. How can our stories develop their delightful exaggeration if there will always be someone to produce a video showing exactly what happened?

Besides, if you record a video of your entire life, when will you have time to watch it?

The online collection of materials at the Library of Congress continues to grow at a phenomenal rate. If you visit their online collections at memory.loc.gov, you will find text, images, sound files, and now video files. You can search the hundreds of thousands of files by keyword, or browse the collections by topic, such as the Civil War, the Depression, Early Animators, or many others. It’s an amazing resource, and all of the files can be downloaded for use in classroom presentations.

(A footnote - at this moment on Sept. 18, the site is unavailable, probably due to Hurricane Isabel and the closing of all federal offices in Washingto D.C. If you can’t get in, try again on another day. Assuming they aren’t washed into the Potomac.)

I couldn’t pass this up. I took fifteen credits of Soil Sciences classes in college, and was tickled to find the NASA “Soil Science Education Web Page” (ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/globe/.) It’s a resource page for students with loads of information and activities for studying soils. It even has a “Soil of the Month” picture!

Studying soil is a great integrated science project, because it involves botany, biology, chemistry and geology. (It’s also one of the only educational activities you can do that gives you a legitimate reason to dig big holes in the ground, which, come to think of it, has a language arts tie-in with Holes by Louis Sachar.) If you and your students want to have the necessary appreciation for the ground beneath us, check this page out.

Several universities are using wireless response devices to provide more feedback and interaction between lecturers and their large classes. An article from the online version of the Boston Glove describes the experiences of students and professors at www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/09/13/on_campuses_handhelds_replacing_raised_hands.

Professors put up multiple choice questions during the course of the lecture, and then can monitor the results on their computer in the front. Students are required to buy the $36 devices, and because they each have unique codes, the professors can track the responses of individuals as well as the class as a whole. This allows the instructor to alter the content of the class if the whole group is not doing well, or respond to the needs of only those that are not answering correctly. (It also acts a de facto attendance mechanism, much to some students consternation.)

These devices have been gaining in popularity for K-12 classrooms. The informal , ongoing assessment of how the students are picking up information can provide the teacher with valuable information to use in pacing or adapting their instruction.

Palm announced some new peripherals today, including a new, infra-red keyboard that does away with needing to connect the Palm directly to the device. It is compatible with virtually all Palms, instead of having to have a different model for each different kind of connector port. You can read about it, the new SD card camera and the spiffy Executive Stylus that is a combined stylus, pen, laser pointer and flashlight at
http://www.brighthand.com/article/palmOne_Announces_Keyboard_Camera