Lightning in a Bottle

A research report written up in the Times Online (of the UK) showed up in today’s ASCD Smartbrief. The research indicates that, contrary to what most people have assumed, kids that have grown up using text messaging are better writers than previous generations.

It’s just one study, so it isn’t the end of the argument, but it does at least sort of slap the widely held belief that text messaging is corrupting our kids’ writing skills. Instead, it found that “…today?s teenagers are using far more complex sentence structures, a wider vocabulary and a more accurate use of capital letters, punctuation and spelling.”

We ran a technology and writing project for three years centered on the use of Alphasmarts. By removing the access issue (one Alphasmart for every kid meant that anytime a child wanted to write, they could grab one), we also increased the amount of time writing. The basic underlying assumption was that the more kids write, the better they’ll get. That turned out to be true. Beyond Alphasmarts, any tool that encourages increased time spent writing is our friend. That includes instant messaging, texting, and blogs. And with a few more research reports like this, maybe we can stop being accused of contributing to the fall of western civilization for using new writing-based technologies.

For any of you reading this from somewhere in our area, the ESD is moving. Friday the 28th was our last day in Burien. Between furniture installation and moving our our hundreds of bright yellow plastic tubs o’ stuff, we operate without offices for the next two weeks. We open for business in our new Renton office on November 14th.

Of course, this being the 21st century, it doesn’t matter much. Our email server has been moved and is running, and our new voicemail system is set up and functional. (I can call in and have it read email back to me over the phone, and it sends the voicemails right into my email - how cool is that! Yeah, yeah, you Blackberry and Treo people can just stop feeling smug. This is still new for a lot of us, ok?). With broadband at home and free wireless at the local library, most of the people with whom I interact will never know I’m working from somewhere other than an office.

I really don’t like moving, though. I hate the packing and unpacking, and it takes forever to get everything sorted out properly at the other end. Of course, I also lived just five minutes from the Burien office, and now I’ll have to drive another six miles to get to work. (Oh, the pain!)

But there are certainly some advantages, too. The new building is completely remodeled, our training facility will be state-of-the-art (well, except for the three-year-old laptops we use), and I’ll have a real office with a door and a window. It may be small, but when I start doing podcasting and video blogs, that door will come in handy!

Besides, as I carried out the last boxes of office stuff to bring home, I turned back to the old building and here’s what I saw:

Seemed like a good sign to me. I think everything will turn out just fine.

Even though I think that higher ed lagged behind K-12 in ed tech for quite awhile, some of those college folks are really starting to show us a thing or two. The Oct. 17 issue of U.S. News has a another interesting article on tech-rich college classrooms. In addition to classroom response systems, they look at podcasting and in-class online discussions during lectures. One lecture features fourteen screens, with the speaker’s presentation on one screen, live student chats on some screens, and web pages relating to the lecture and chats (pulled up by the designated “Google Jockey”) on other screens.

On the one hand, this sounds really cool. On the other hand, it makes me think I should be investing in whatever pharmaceutical companies make the most popular treatments for Adult Attention Deficit Disorder.

Raising parents’ awareness of what students are doing on the web outside of school is a very important thing. There is a whole world of blogging and instant messaging that can lead to online bullying and other nasty situations if students aren’t being careful and appropriate in what they say and do online.

Still, I have qualms about wholesale banning students from blogging. A private school such as Pope John High School certainly works under a different set of expectations than a public school, which I understand and respect. It just seems a bit of overkill to suspend students for using a communication system that they will use for the rest of their llives, or at least until the next technology comes along. Not letting kids use MySpace because some people post innappropriate stuff is sort of like not letting them answer the phone because some people make obscene phone calls.

I feel like there has to be a rational balance here somewhere. I’d rather spend more time teaching kids how to be appropriate with their online experience, rather than cut it off entirely. Sooner or later they will be out from under our control, and I want them leaving with the skills to protect themselves already in place, not dropped unprepared into the virtual world.

You would have to work pretty hard to have avoided seeing all the press last week about the new Apple iPod with video. While most of the chatter was over being able to download television shows, what has me most intrigued is how easy it is to convert virtually any video for playback on the device. I’ve been looking at PowerMediaPlus from Clearvue, which is an educational video company that has made the crossover to digital media. When you license their video and image files (thousands and thousands), you can use them any way you want, including letting students use the materials and edit them into new media projects.

And, as it turns out, the file format is compatible with iPods, so you could also download educational videos for viewing anywhere in the classroom.

What makes it really look appealing to me is the accompanying iTunes 6 software. It will now handle videos, and it’s a great video organizer. You can not only organize imported videos into separate playlists, you can also add comments or key terms to each video, and then (once you modify the view of the playlist in the preferences) search by word or phrase to find the videos you want. You can also set the preferences so that any video you play automatically plays back fullscreen, with no annoying windows or controls. I’ll be using the software as my video viewer on both my Mac and Windows laptops.

Combine these techologies with some of the great software out there for creating studio-like video reports (see Visual Communicator and Vlog It from Serious Magic Software for Windows, or Videocue from Vara Software for the Mac), and you have a pretty amazing video environment that was unimaginable just a couple of years ago. Pretty soon some our students will be bringing professional-looking video reports from home. It would be really great if we could give them that option at school, too.

CNET has a good article today on blogging in schools. (I know, it seems kind of circular to post a blog about blogging. Then again, many bloggers just talk about other bloggers…) Imagine having a setting where every kid writes every day, and peers can view and comment on each other’s writing in a safe setting. Sounds pretty cool to me. Now, if we can just get enough computers into schools to make it possible.

I was also really fascinated by the diagram that sits to the right of the article. I thought it was an ad at first, but it’s actually a story web that links the article on blogging to other technology articles that CNET has published recently. You can see the whole-screen view here.

I think this is really pretty cool. I would love to see more of this on educational websites. What a great way to lay out information from a textbook or unit of study for kids!

What a difference a couple of years can make. Two years ago I would have been all over the latest announcement of new Palm handhelds, reading as many reviews as I could and wondering how the new devices might work in an educational setting. And now? Palm introduced two new models on Wednesday, and I only today got around to reading the overview at the Brighthand website.

They really are impressive, actually. The Z22 is a color entry-level device for only $100. The TX now has Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and a big, clear 320×480 resolution screen, big enough for looking at web pages pretty easily.

But…Handhelds just haven’t made the impact that we expected 24 months ago. Why? I think largely because they were so different from the computers already being supported in districts that it was just too difficult (read: expensive) to add them to the technology infrastructure. Neither Pocket PC or Palms manage easily in a classroom situation without lots of effort, third-party software and add-ons. In the meantime, the lower-end cost of laptops is down to the $900-$1,000 range. In other words, for the cost of 2 1/2 Palm TX handhelds, you can get one full-featured laptop that integrates into whatever existing technology system your school uses now. Financially, they’re probably pretty close to even once you throw in total cost of ownership.

If Palm (or Microsoft) could have made the management of the devices simple and easy to integrate into existing technology implementations, we would be looking at a different situation now. But I think that ship has passed, and we’ll soon be using devices that are the same size as handhelds, but actually just be tiny computers running on the same software and tech standards as full laptops. That will keep things more manageable for everyone.

Palm had a distruptive technology, but they just didn’t know how to follow through.

So, just to keep on a theme, yet another potentially disruptive technology will be coming our way next year. A group of 27 technology companies have agreed to a new standard for the “Wi-Fi” networking standard. The versions of Wi-Fi that we use at home, classrooms, and Starbucks ranges in speed from roughly five to fifty megabits per second. This newest version (802.11n, if you’re keeping score) will be somewhere between one hundred and five hundred megabits. That’s fast enough to stream high quality video, or just send a lot of data.

In a school environment, this speed of data transmission would open up a lot of options. Many of the network-based applications and services that schools use don’t work well over the current wireless standards because of speed issues. This level of bandwidth will (hopefully) get around this, allowing for network-based instructional materials to be available at any place in the school. Combined with broadband over power lines, we’re going to be living the Star Trek lifestyle in no time. Hopefully, it won’t end up being everywhere except school.

MIT is hosting a free streaming video of a presentation by Thomas Friedman. He is the author of the best-selling book The World is Flat, and in this video he covers the main ideas of this provocative book. He looks at how the convergence of a variety of technologies has “flattened” the world economy, allowing companies and individuals in other countries to compete with countries like the United States in ways that were never before possible.

It’s a great presentaion, and should be required viewing for just about anyone involved in education. I particularly like his emphasis on innovation as a key skill. Where is that in our curriculum right now? For that matter, how can teacher teach innovation if they aren’t allowed to innovate themselves? I think educational standards provide a foundation for kids to learn to innovate, but if we just stop at the standards, our kids will be ill prepared for the economy of our very near future.

And next in our lineup of potentially disruptive technologies, we have broadband network access over power lines. This technology would allow power companies to provide high-speed network access through your power service, so you would theoretically be able to connect through any power outlet in your home.

This idea has been kicked around for awhile, but there have been technical limitations that have prevented it from moving to a practical stage. Now, however, the Matsushita company in Japan has developed a specialized chip that allows speeds of up to 170 megabits per second.

The big holdup in the widespread use of high-speed Internet is the cost of getting the signal down to the household level. Running lines to every individual home is costly, and results in only one or two options (cable or DSL) for most people looking for such access. Since the powerline technology uses the existing wiring, that cost is gone. If the speeds Matsushita claims are real (always a big “if”), then this would provide a very interesting new twist.