Here is one of those ideas I want someone to use in a classroom and report back to me how it worked: Wikibooks are free, open content textbooks. The site contains over 50 textbooks in various stages of development, as well as links to other wiki references. Users, that is anyone with a desire, can read, edit and write the texts. What’s a wiki? A website that is editable by anyone. There is real appeal
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In an article from the Journal Albion, Camille Paglia looks at the impact of modern media on our ability to read, to process, and to interpret images with depth and insight. She describes the activities she uses in her university classes to help students learn to take the time to really examine images in meaningful way, rather than leap from image to image as we typically do with modern media. I don’t agree with everything she has to say (she sees sexual messages in a lot of unusual places, such as statues of saints), but it does provide some food for thought. The article is at www.bu.edu/arion/Paglia_11.3/Paglia_Magic%20of%20Images.htm.
You can find K-12 activities similar to this at the National Archives. To compliment their online collection of hundreds of thousands of historic photographs, documents, and artifacts, they have developed a series of analysis worksheets for students use to guide their observation and investigation of original source materials. The worksheet for photographs starts out with “Study the photograph for 2 minutes.” That all by itself is a hard task for many of our kids! The NARA Digital Classroom site is at www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/index.html, while just the analysis worksheets (for images, documents, artifacts, maps, sound recordings and more) are at www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/lessons/analysis_worksheets/worksheets.html.
Here are some more links for your researching enjoyment:
Technology and Achievement: The Essential Work of School Leaders, A Shared Vision for Student Learning. This is a series of downloadable articles from the Fall 2003 issue of Threshold, an online educational technology magazine. The articles are relatively brief and readable, ideal for handouts. www.ciconline.org/AboutCIC/Publications/Archives/threshold_fall03.htm .
Key Building Blocks for Student Achievement in the 21st Century. This is the fourth ed tech report from the CEO Forum on Education, which looks not only at the link between ed tech and student achievement but also looks at the “21st Century Skills” that our students should have. www.ceoforum.org/downloads/report4.pdf .
One-to-One Computing in Maine: A State Profile. The Metiri Group published this initial report on the massive computer initiative in Maine. There is little direct data on student achievement because the report is from early in the program, but the opinions and attitudes of students and staff are quite striking. http://www.metiri.com/NSF-Study/ME-Profile.pdf .
A Decade of Reform: A Summary of Research Findings on Classroom, School, and District Effectiveness in Washington State. Ok, this isn’t directly related to educational technology, but this study by the Washington Schools Research Center provides some really interesting information contrasting schools that are either successful or unsuccessful in moving students to success on the WASL. The conditions for success on the WASL are (unsurprisingly!) the same conditions we should be looking for if we want the successful application of technology. www.spu.edu/orgs/research/ADecadeofReformOctober192003v5.pdf .
I spent a fair amount of time doing a research report on the impact of educational technology on student achievement, and was honestly surprised by the amount of information I could find. I’ll put a link to the PowerPoint presentation after I fix a few errors, but for the meantime I’m here are links to some of the best reports and overviews that I found. (I wouldn’t read then all at once unless you want to risk an attack of narcolepsy.) What was interesting to me was how some themes came up over and over. However, is it surprising to find out that one common finding was “it isn’t what you have, it’s how you use it”?
What was informative was how important it is to have strong leadership, a school or district-wide shared vision of the use of technology, and tying the use of technology directly to desired learning goals. As an overall finding, the use of technology has the greatest impact on student achievement (yes, even on standardized tests and the WASL) when it is used in constructivist/student-centered/project-based learning. Then again, students learn better in that kind of environment without technology, so again this shouldn’t be a big shock.
Ed Tech Clearinghouse. Put together by Rita Hale from ESD 112, this site gives an overview of the research on educational technology, with links to resources. A great starting point, and there will be some overlap with the resources I list. www.edtech.wednet.edu/Resources/research.
Research on computers and education: Past, present, and future. A research report for the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation by the Washington Schools Research Center and Jeff Fouts. www.gatesfoundation.org/nr/downloads/ed/evaluation/Computer_Research_Summary.pdf.
The Learning Return on Our Educational Investment. This report looks at the question of educational technology on a cost-for-return basis. One of a number of good papers from WestEd. www.wested.org/online_pubs/learning_return.pdf.
More tomorrow -
I must admit, I have a big soft spot in my heart for encylopedias. (Of course, I was the kind of nerdy kid that bought a dictionary for fun reading in 6th grade.) It’s probably not surprising that sales of printed encyclopedias has dropped off enormously over the last fifteen years. CNN has an article about the changing world for encyclopedia publishers at www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/03/11/disappearing.encyclopedia.ap/index.html. Many now offer their information over the web for a fee, and the electronic versions have many advantages, including staying current and having more multimedia options. (However, I’m beginning to wonder if they have any multimedia other than the video of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It seems like every single article and demonstration of electronic encyclopedias I have ever seen refers to or uses this same clip.)
Thing is, even when electronic encylopedias are often available in the school library, most kids head out to the web anyway. It’s just what they’re used to. We need to do a better job of steering students to other kinds of online resources (databases of periodicals, reference libraries, etc.) to make sure they have a range of resources for their work.
I also think we lose something with online resources. I’ve always enjoyed looking through old encyclopedias for a chance to see what was the most current knowledge of that day and time. Only printed material captures that moment - electronic resources change daily, and the ephemeral nature of the information will leave no snapshot for the future.
And will we need to update Encyclopedia Brown to Internet Brown? It just doesn’t have the same ring…
One of my favorite events here at the ESD is the annual High School Art competition. Dozens of exciting and interesting artworks line our halls, including drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures. There are so many that every time I walk around the building, I see something that I hadn’t noticed before.
Now, thanks to digital photography and the web, the art can be viewed online. Point your browser at www.psesd.org/artshow/, and you can see what some of our region’s most creative students have done.
It’s actually fairly easy to create these kinds of web galleries. Adobe’s Photoshop Elements is probably the best software you can get for working with digital images, and has a very reasonable $42 education price. Creating web galleries is just one of the many things you can do with it. There are three steps to creating a gallery:
The program does the rest for you, generating a set of html files that your web administrator can upload onto your school or district web page.
For the more ambitious of you, take a look at www.artsitenet.com/. This company sells two products, one of which is a custom server-based system for creating school art sites, with student galleries and portfolios. If you have an active arts program, it looks like it would be a great way to connect your student work with the outside community.
I’ve referred to this site before, but it bears repeating. When you receive an email with some heart-warming story, or amazing photograph, or outrageous story of corporate/government/celebrity behavior, don’t hit that forward button. Take a minute and surf on over to www.snopes.com and see if your recently received email is in their vast databases of Internet urban legends.
The Snopes site is an effort to catalog and verify thousands of various tales of the Internet. The folks that run the site do an amazing job of tracking down the details behind these emails, and can usually document whether they are true, false, or somewhere inbetween. Even if you don’t have a specific story to check out, it’s incredibly interesting just to cruise through and see what kinds of rumors, stretched truths, and outright fairy tales are circulating out there.
And consider it part of your email civic duty to not pass on emails that are fraudulent, especially when it’s so easy to take a minute and check them out!
Microsoft has posted a 64-page guide on the use of tablet PCs in education at www.microsoft.com/education/?id=edguidetabletpc. Sales of tablets have so far been very low, in part because they are priced higher than comparable laptops. (This is due both to the extra cost of things like touch screens and Microsoft charging more for the Tablet PC operating system than for standard Windows XP.) However, once you use one, the appeal of the tablet form factor becomes very obvious. Forget handwriting recognition, though - the nice thing about taking notes on the tablet is that it is in your own handwriting, complete with your diagrams and doodles. Plain text can’t compete!
Last week’s OSPI conference offered many good presentations with valuable information, but that isn’t much help if you weren’t able to attend (or able to get into the very crowded rooms). The good news is that most of the Powerpoint presentations and many of the handouts are available to download from OSPI’s website at www.k12.wa.us/conferences/JanConf2004/Materials.aspx.
I think it’s an interesting statement of how widespread some uses of technology are - almost every presenter has a PowerPoint presentation. I only saw one overhead in the two days, and that was used side-by-side with the LCD projector and PowerPoint.
If you’re tired of using the same old templates in your PowerPoint presentations (or seeing your students using them), you can download several dozen new education-themed templates at www.websiteestates.com/education/templatesindex.html. You need to download them one at a time, so it will take a little bit of time. (Of course, if you are willing to pay for them, you can download them all at once.) Much of the site is ads, but there is good free stuff tucked between the paid displays.
By the way, if you’re using a Mac, when the directions say to “Right click on the link,” you should click and hold on the link. The option to download will pop up after a short moment.