Lightning in a Bottle

Technology and Learning hosted their first Seattle-area Tech Forum in Bellevue last week. It was well attended, with around 200 participants. It was a nice size for a technology conference. I had the pleasure of participating in a panel with super tech principal Tim Lauer from Lewis Elementary School in Portland, and the peripatetic David Warlick, educational technology consultant superstar. Actually, it’s kind of hard to compete with two people such as these, but it was fun nonetheless. The topic was Technologies that are changing education, and I let Tim and David take the really exciting stuff, like blogs, wikis, Google Maps and all. I love these technologies and what they are doing in the classrooms where they are being used, but I decided to take a different tack. The fact is, if you do a survey of classrooms throughout our region, you’ll find that very, very few are using any of the technologies described by David and Tim. Far more are using technologies that aren’t as exciting, but are having still having a huge impact, such as document cameras and projectors.

Why is that? This is the slide I used to illustrate the point.

Technologies such as document cameras take off quickly because teachers can see an relatively immediate impact for relatively little investment of their time and effort. That’s the green line. Technologies such as blogging (or video making, or hypermedia, or Lego Robotics, or many other really exciting technologies) tend to follow the red line. There is a lot of effort involved in learning and managing the new technology, and many teachers will give up before they see the return on that effort, or may not even perceive what the return it. (Note that the labels are Perceived Effort and Perceived Return. For tech-loving teachers, hours spent after school learning a new technology aren’t really perceived as an effort - they love doing it.)

That doesn’t mean “red line” technologies will never be adopted, but it does mean that districts need to recognize the realities of getting them into classrooms. We have surveyed the teachers of a dozen districts in the last few years, and the single consistent issue that comes up is time. Teachers already have too little time to get their jobs done, and learning new technologies (and the teaching strategies that make them worthwhile) takes even more time that they don’t have. There has to be systemic support for teachers to undertake the level of change that can produce something like blogging throughout a district. Unless we recognize the amount of effort necessary to make this kind of change, schools will continue to be a hodgepodge of participating and non-participating classrooms.

This has to be driven by a clear vision at the building and district level. The vision gives the teachers the understanding of the value of the effort, and the security in knowing they will get the support they need to implement it. The vision and support carry them through slow beginning at the start of the red line. Tim’s school demonstrates that with a supportive leader providing that clear vision, it is indeed possible for an entire building to make amazing things happen. With more leaders like him, perhaps we can get to the point where document cameras really aren’t the most widely-used new technology in classrooms.

Boy, that’s a lot of empty space!

Summer is not a quiet time when your job is focused on teacher training. This summer I taught or co-taught three Photoshop classes, one class on weblogs and podcasts, a week-long multimedia projects class, a four-day digital storytelling class, and three Digital Photography Bootcamps. And somewhere in there I actually took some vacation, too.

Despite the hectic pace of it all, it was a great summer. It was really exciting to me to see what teachers can do when they are given the opportunity to really, deeply explore the use of digital tools such as PowerPoint, iMovie, Photostory 3. Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, weblogs, podcasting and digital cameras. It recharges my batteries to see teachers get excited about what they can do and create, and start thinking about how they can take these tools back into their schools.

My only worry is the question Can they? Can they take what they learn here back to the classroom? I’m not questioning the capabilities of the workshop participants; I’m worried about the flexibility in their schools to make room in the curriculum for the time and effort to use these tools and resources or to provide the technological support to use them. I’ve seen the deeply meaningful learning that many of my participants have experienced reflected in the multimedia projects they have created in our workshops. I really want to see students have that same opportunity.

Not many entries this summer! Of course, I could say that it’s because nobody is around to read them, but actually it’s because it’s our crazy season. Since June 25, I’ve either taught or helped teach one three-day camp, two one-day workshops, and a five-day workshop. Throw in a week of vacation and there isn’t much time for blogging. Over the next few weeks I have two more camps, four more one-day workshops and a four-day workshop. (You know, teachers may think it’s great to get the summer off, but it’s hard on the teacher trainers!)

The sad part is that it’s also a great learning time for me, and I should be carving out time to share what I’m discovering. For instance, in the week-long multimedia workshop I taught earlier this month, one of the participants was an education professor from a four-year college. He shared with us that when he attends national conferences representing faculty from colleges of education, the cultural norm is to keep Powerpoint slides fairly plain, emphasizing almost entirely text. He said that his colleagues will get after him for putting in “non-content” items such as images.

Wait. Images aren’t content? Sure, we’ve all seen lots of PowerPoint presentations filled with inane pictures that have nothing to do with the content being shared, but that doesn’t mean images should be completely dispensed with. It just means that those who create presentations need to be purposeful with the images they choose to use. The phrase a picture is worth a thousand words has been around long enough to underscore that yes, images are content, and can be remarkably efficient at that.

This would be funny except that the community of people in question are the people who are instructing our new teachers. Arrgh.

So, I’ll try to share more as the summer goes by. I’m learning a lot. Besides, I’m also teaching class on Weblogs, Wikis, and Podcasts on Wednesday, and I certainly need something posted for that!

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.

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.

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last few months thinking about the purpose of blogging for educators. I guess I should say purposes, since there are clearly many good reasons. For a while, though, I was beginning to feel like it was becoming just kind of an echo chamber. I post something, and Jeff Allen responds in his blog, or Glen Malone posts something and I refer to it in my blog. Weren’t we all just reinforcing each other in something we already believe?

The more time I’ve spent doing this, however, the more I’m starting to get the big picture. To some extent, the answer is yes, this is the choir preaching to itself (to mash the metaphor). That’s not a bad thing, however! I recently compared the blogging circles that I visit every day to one of those great conversations you have over dinner after a really interesting conference, the ones where you and your colleagues get ripping on great ideas and get really excited about education all over again. The blogosphere is becoming like that - just every day, not once or twice a year.

To take this to a school level, I read a great article today from the March 2006 issue of Educational Leadershiop called Improving Relationships Within the Schoolhouse. Two things made an impression on me from the article. First, the quality of relationships among the adults in a school is key to how effective the school is in teaching kids. Second, the steps listed as necessary to helping a school develop a Culture of Collegiality can almost all be supported more effectively through blogging, Moodles, or other forms of electronic community building. These steps are:

• Talking About Practice
• Sharing Craft Knowledge
• Rooting for One Another
• Observing One Another

The first three clearly lend themselves to online community. The fourth one really should be in person, but you can always record your observations and share them online!

This article appeals to me, because it emphasizes teachers as professionals and seeks to build on that basis. I also like it because it reinforces the importance of relationships. In the end, teaching and learning is based on relationships, not curriculum or standards or teaching models. The more technology can be used help us build and strengthen relationships, the more it will improve what educators and students can achieve.

We taught a workshop today called Weblogs, Wikis, and Podcasts, Oh My!, and it seemed to go really well. We had twenty people, and we spent the day visiting educational weblogs like Glen Malone’s, learning how to use Bloglines, creating Blogger accounts, making podcasts with Odeo, and messing around with a wiki in Wikispaces. Along the way we had a lot of interesting discussion about the differences betweens blogs, wikis, forums, what the heck all of this means in the lives of our students and how (or whether) we should be applying this in our classrooms.

It occurred to me after the class that most of what we talked about today was stuff I was completely unaware of twelve months ago. And I am, in the words of my son, a professional nerd. How on earth should we be expecting teachers to be coming to grips with the stuff yet? The main challenge in teaching the workshop was deciding on what information to share, and what not to share to keep from overwhelming everyone.

My observation from the workshop is that there was a lot of excitement and interest by the participants, but there still needs to be some streamlining of the technology. For instance, Blogger is cool, but you still need to mess around in html code if you want to customize your page to any degree. No normal person should ever have to mess with html code.

And, of course, virutally none of the example systems we used are school-friendly. I know, however, that there are more education-oriented products on the way (or in place, like David Warlick’s ClassBlogMeister, and once they are widely available, I think things may reallllly take off.

This is getting pretty circular, but this morning we had a nice meeting about educational blogging. I’d write more about it, but Jeff Allen from Olympic ESD participated in the meeting via videoconferencing and he already blogged about it before the meeting was over.

We looked at educator blogs, classroom blogs, and aggregators like Bloglines. We also spent a lot of time talking about the applications and implications of blogs in the school system. It’s a very wide open topic, but there seems to be some significant interest in identifying blogging systems for students (such as David Warlick’s Blogmeister) that has moderating and other protections. There is also an interesting tension between staff blogs and a district’s legitimate need to monitor communication with parents and the community.

What’s really clear is we can’t ignore blogs. They’re going to continue to be created, used, and read. We might as well use this great technology as best we can.

I just received another heart-warming story forwarded to me through email. I’m always kind of skeptical about anything like this, so I go to a website called Snopes (I have no idea where the name comes from) to see if they’re real. They have a huge, well-researched and constantly-updated database of emailed stories, the vast majority of which are either hoaxes, misunderstandings, or just confused. I strongly recommend visiting the site before forwarding any message, picture, or alert that you receive in email. (By the way, if an email starts off with “This is not a hoax!!”, you can be 99.99% sure that it is.)

This story was in the database, and interestingly enough, it’s true. Sort of. The version I was sent had been edited from the original. In the actual story, the setting of the story is a Jewish school, and the boy profiled is named Shaya. In the version I received, all references to the nature of the school have been removed, and the boy’s name has been changed to Shay. There are a variety of other subtle changes as well. Apparently, somebody in the email chain somewhere decided to edit out all the “Jewishness” from the story. Oh, and they had the boy die in the end, which didn’t happen in real life, either.

Why was the story altered? Was it an innocent attempt to broaden the appeal of the story, or was it an anti-semitic alteration to avoid anything that smacked of Jews? Nobody knows, but it’s kind of disturbing, nonetheless.