Lightning in a Bottle

One of the things that I really emphasize, particularly in my digital photography classes, is the absolute, critical importance of backing up your files. Hard drive failure is a matter of when, not if. I recently purchased external hard drives for both my work and home computers for this explicit purpose. As a matter of fact, my new 400 gigabyte drive was still sitting in its shrink-wrapped box (where it had been for three weeks) when my computer suffered a major crash on Monday.

YEAARRRRGH!!!

In my own defense, I had been regularly backing up the photographs on the computer onto DVDs, so I would have been able to recover those particularly precious files. Still, things did not look good. This led me to call Apple Technical Support.

Recommendation number one: If you are a Mac owner and an educator, purchase the Applecare program. The educator discount is really good, and the online support is great.

The helpful people on the phone helped me diagnose that my iMac was suffering from what is colorfully known as a “kernel panic.” Unfortunately, even when I followed their instructions and booted from the appropriate CD, the hard drive was not repairable. (It identified somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.8 million problems. I am not making this up.) At this point, they told me that I needed to purchase a third-party program called DiskWarrior. According to the folks I spoke with on the phone, the software is so good that virtually the entire tech support team owns copies.

A quick trip to CompUSA and $99 later, I was booting from the DiskWarrior CD. Thirty minutes after that, my computer was alive and kicking and all of the rather serious damage to my directories was repaired. And yes, I immediately backed up the whole darn hard drive!

Recommendation #2: If you own a Mac, buy this software.

And I really don’t need to say the final recommendation, but - backup, backup, backup. This is not the first time I have had a hard drive problem. Luckily, I was able to rescue my data this time, but I have had hard drives mechanically break down, with no ability to recover files. Luckily, in those cases I did have up-to-date backups. I know people who have lost terribly important materials because they hadn’t made copies, and it’s a dreadful feeling knowing that a few minutes of effort could have protected against the loss. To paraphrase Harriet Beecher Stowe,

The bitterest tears shed over any computer are over drives left uncopied and files left unrecovered.

For those of you reading this in the Pacific Northwest, we are partnering again this summer with NCCE to offer Digital Photography Bootcamps. It’s held at the Pack Forest Conference Center near Mt. Rainier, which provides a marvelous setting for learning about digital photography. Each session is three days and two nights, providing instruction on a variety of topics and lots of time for practice and application. Anne Allen and I had a great time last summer, and are really looking forward to the sessions this summer!

For more information and registration, visit NCCE’s website, or email me at cmcquinn at psesd.org.

In the wake of the cyberbullying posting I put up on April 11 comes the news that five teenagers planned a Columbine-style shooting spree yesterday. (I’m not going to address the fact that it was messages posted on one of the student’s MySpace page that led to the plot being uncovered, other than to say I think it’s an indication that at least one of these kids wanted to be stopped.)

What would motivate a bunch of kids to make a hit list of classmates and teachers? According to preliminary reports, the kids were socially on the outside and harassed. This isn’t shocking; it was the motivation for the Columbine tragedy and many other instances of school violence. (It’s also the plotline for a whole genre of movies, starting with Carrie, where a downtrodden outcast wreaks gory revenge on the popular kids that put them down.)

This just underscores why we need to remain vigilant about the climate between students in our schools. It doesn’t matter if the harassment is online or face-to-face, on campus or off, it still poisons what happens in the classroom. Of course, the first and primary reason to fight this is that school should be an emotionally safe place for everyone, and no student deserves to suffer through emotional abuse at the hands of their classmates. However, a secondary reason is that there can be serious repurcussions from bullying that can lead to all kinds of potential tragedies. This event came very, very close to happening. Even though the rampage was stopped before it began, the lives of the students involved will never be the same.

Looking back to my post yesterday about asking the right questions, how can we use technology to help all students feel connected and supported at school? Is the ability of shy kids to share through blogging, in a moderated and supportive environment? Is it allowing the dyslexic student to discover their previously unknown mechanical skills working with Lego robotics?

Sometimes technology opens doors for students, and sometimes it opens doors for teachers trying to help the students. Reading Jeff Allen’s blog today on Erin Gruwell’s Freedom Writers project got me thinking along these lines. Erin is clearly an outstanding teacher who invested a great deal into her students. However, if another teacher were inspired to replicate her student-published book project, until recently the complexity of such an effort would have stopped all but the most dedicated individuals. However, this kind of effort has been made much easier through services such as Lulu. How can we use these opportunities to help teachers reach kids in ways they’ve never been able to before?

Grant Wiggins (co-author of Understanding by Design) has posted a good article in Edutopia on assessment. He focuses on healthy assessment, which is to say formative assessment that gives feedback for growth for students and teachers. It should seem obvious, but I certainly don’t see it implemented as widely as it should be. Wiggins writes that

…British researchers Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam showed that improving the quality of classroom feedback offers the greatest performance gains of any single instructional approach.

So, why am I writing about this in a weblog supposedly about educational technology?

I’m mentioning it because I’m getting tired of people asking questions like “How can technology be used to support Essential Academic Learning Requirement X?” There often isn’t a good, clear answer to that question. When there is, it’s usually a fairly narrow, focused application, such as using Inspiration to illustrate the water cycle to help understand systems. Now I love Inspiration, and I think that using it for the purpose I just described would be really effective. But it’s a reductionist view that leads to thinking of educational technology as a bunch of separate, vaguely-related techniques and tools that don’t necessarily require any kind of major change in instructional strategy to implement.

Instead, we should be asking questions like “How can technology be used to improve the quality of classroom feedback?” We know (referring the research cited by Wiggins in his article) that if we can improve the quality of feedback, kids will improve in all content areas. If teachers are already focused on better feedback, then we can start producing some effective recommendations on using technology. Blogging, document cameras, online learning systems, and classroom response systems all take on a different focus if viewed in the context of formative feedback. And those applications are completely independent of any particular EALR, GLE, or whatever acronym you are saddled with. If effective formative assessment is an essential condition to improved student achievement, we can easily demonstrate how technology improves our ability to achieve that goal.

Ewan McIntosh mentioned suggested this in Wesley Fryer’s podcast on March 16, stating that he thought that if we focused on nothing else in educational technology, we should focus on formative assessment. It took me awhile, but it filtered through my brain. I heard a person use the term “elegant leverage” once, where you get the greatest return for the least effort. I think formative assessment can be our point of elegant leverage.

Edweek has published an excellent article on cyberbullying. It gives a comprehensive look at the different forms of online harassment, impacts on students, and strategies (and challenges) that schools face in dealing with the situation.

The most important step is awareness. Schools need to understand that this is happening, so they can be vigilant in uncovering it. I think most harassers operate with the assumption that the adults in the system are clueless to what they’re doing, and sadly they are often right.

We had a great discussion at our regional Tech Forum yesterday on the topic of one-to-one computing. We had a panel representing three nearby districts that are in various stages of implementation. Jim Golubich and David Watson came from Shoreline, which has introduced a middle-school program this year with all students receiving iBooks; Dennis McClellan shared a program from Kent with a 100 student school-within-a-school using HP Tablets, also just starting this year; and John Newsom from the Lakeside school, a private 5-12 school with all students using PC laptops, which has been ongoing for two years.

I didn’t moblog the discussion (I was facilitating, and I’m not that capable), but out of an hour and a quarter, here were the things that I was most intrigued with:

• Contrary to what I’ve read in other sources, they have a lot of problems with damage to the computers. There have been few (if any) instances of theft, but the computers are constantly in need of repair. Some kids broke their loaners before they could get their original computer back from repair.
• Because of the issue above, they all recommend that you pay for whatever service contract the vendor offers that covers accidental damage. It will quickly pay for itself.
• Teachers are catching on fairly quickly on how to take advantage of the equipment.
• Battery life is reduced (and hard drive lifespan as well) if students use their computers as MP3 players. That keeps the hard drives going constantly.
• Dennis felt that the Tablet PC interface and the use of OneNote were very compelling in a classroom setting. Some students are using the recording function to do things like submit recordings of musical instrument practice or foreign language exercises.
• John found that screen breakage was much less of an issue after switching to 12-inch screens. The torque on larger screens is just too high for the kind of use that teenagers put them through.
• The theoretical possibility of replacing textbooks with digital media has not yet taken place. The price of digital equivalents (if available) is still quite high, and curriculum departments are not quite ready to make that transition.

There was consensus that the one-to-one programs were appearing to have a significant positive impact on the learning environments at each school. There was also consensus that the programs are very expensive, and that none of the laptops being used at any of the schools were truly ready for the kind of use and abuse that students will put them through. In the long term, the value of these programs will be in helping to prepare for more widespread implementation when we have access to portable technologies that are robust enough to withstand the school environment and inexpensive enough to be widely adopted.

Thanks Jim, David, Dennis and John for a great discussion!

On a related note, ASCD Smartbrief today pointed to an article on the move to digital replacements for books, papers and pencils in Australia. Despite the experiences of our local folks discussed above, down under there seems to be a bit more activity in this area. I particularly liked this quote:

Jenny Fergusson, the director of the Macquarie ICT Innovations Centre, puts it like this: “Textbooks are the one-way transmission of a uniform version of knowledge. Digital learning is the construction of knowledge from multiple sources.

“Culturally, this is a very confronting idea. With textbooks you had a manageable version of reality and a sense that you could understand the world. Now the overwhelming volume of information is a problem.”

Overwhelming for everyone - and if it’s overwhelming for the adults in the system, how do we help the kids?

Today was the day that, at three seconds past 1:02, the time and date was 1:02:03 04/05/06. I took a screen capture of the event on my network-synchronized computer clock.

And on a completely different note, this is my 300th post. Whew! I’ve been doing this for three years, which is hard to believe. Thanks to Karl for getting me started on this and encouraging me to keep at it. It’s been a blast, and I’m looking forward to doing for quite some time to come!

Discovery Education has launched a new online homework help service for home use called Cosmeo.

Because it is a service of the same company that provides unitedstreaming online media, it has a lot of video files available as part of the service. It seems to be a fairly rich resource for students to use at home. That’s the good news.

The bad news comes in two parts. First, the organization of the videos is kind of kludgy. You can browse by content area, or you can actually go into an area that helps you match videos to standards. I tried the latter, and it is decidedly un-helpful. For instance, I went in to look at videos mapped to the grade 10 Language Arts standards. I was presented with a ginormous list of every langauge arts standard, dozens and dozens. From this list, I selected

GR10 - 2.2.4.a. Recognize and use previously taught organizational structures (description, comparison and contrast, sequential order, chronological order, cause and effect, order of importance, process/procedural, concept/definition, problem/solution, episodic, and generalization/principle) to aid comprehension.

I was then taken to a page listing, among other things, videos on using big books with first graders, a health film on the birth of a baby, and a history film on the aftermath of World War I. None of the films list how or why they are matched with that standard, which would be nice to know before downloading and watching a film between 15 and 45 minutes in length. Under some of the standards, despite there being an active link, there are no films of any kind listed. When you hit the Back button, you are greeted with an annoying browser message that the previous page used a form, and asking if you want to send it again.

Still, I assume that some of these issues will be fixed sometime, and this will develop into a very handy resource. That’s where the next problem arises - this costs money. An annual subscription is $99. That’s all well and good for a middle-class family, but what about families with lower income? Just when the cost of computers is finally falling to the point where the digital divide may begin to fade, we find ways to provide a new kind of resource that may not be available to all of our community.

The King County library system does a wonderful job of purchasing services like this for use of its patrons, which is great resource for lower-income families. However, I worry about other communities that don’t have a forward-thinking library like this (or a library at all!)

I was sorting through some boxes and came across some old newspapers used for packing material. I couldn’t resist taking a look to see how old they were and what interesting information they may contain. (No, I’m not the most efficient box-sorter. Yes, I’m easily distracted.)

It turned out I had the business section of the Seattle Times from February 22, 1981. What caught my eye was this advertisement for computer systems. Look at these beefy machines! The top of the line computer has an 80 million character hard disk, for only $14,800!

Adjusting for inflation, this system cost the equivalent of $32,990 in today’s dollars. Coincidentally, that is almost the exact amount on a quote I received a couple of days ago for 16 laptop computers. This is way more than simply getting sixteen computers today for the price of one 25 years ago. The hard drive on each single laptop stores 750 times the memory of this old machine, and each one holds over 19,000 times more RAM.

That means that for roughly the same level of spending, I can buy 12,000 times more hard drive capacity and 304,000 times more RAM. On top of it, the newer computers use technologies unheard of back then - wireless networking, DVD burners, and a huge amount of software built in.

That’s one human generation for all that change. It has happened in the lifetime of the newest teachers just starting in their classrooms. This level of technological change will undoubtedly continue into the future. This means the power of computers will grow at such a pace that we literally can’t understand yet what we will be able to do with them, and that the cost of entry-level computers will drop even further. For instance, there is far more computing capacity in the average cell phone than in that old computer system - and they give those away for free!

So, how do you plan for a future that is, truly speaking, unimaginable? The biggest factor in the successful use of technology is changed educational practice. We may not know exactly what the future holds, but we can start creating now the active, student-centered learning environments that will be fully prepared to use technology when - not if - it gets to be cheaper than purchasing textbooks. The best part is that this is the best way to teach anyway, technology or not.