Lightning in a Bottle

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!

As a science teacher and ed tech person, I’ve always been enthused about the use of technology in teaching science. More to the point, I’ve been excited about kids using technology to do science. After all, real scientists do!

Still, I haven’t seen as much activity in this area as I would like. Part of it is that science-oriented peripherals (Digital microscopes, probeware, etc.) are specialized and somewhat expensive. Part of it is also that integrating these tools is more complicated than, say, adding word processing to writing instruction or web-based research tools to a social studies class. Science data-collecting equipment and software is more complex, and managing a lab-based instructional environment is even more complex. (And I suppose a big part of it has been that science isn’t on the accountability chart. Yet. But it’s coming!)

That’s why I was pleased to read about the Sand Diego School District’s grant project. The press release hasn’t got a lot of detail, but what I see I like. In particular, there is a real emphasis on teacher training and the development of professional learning communities. That’s going to help regardless of whether or not technology is put to use. (It also sounds a lot like our No Limit math and technology grant. Great minds think alike!) I hope to track down more information as to the kind of technology and activities they have been using so far, and what they see using in the future. I’ll post what I find here. (via TechLearning.

I’m trying to decide if I should be worried or excited about the impact of this year’s 10th-grade WASL on technology use in schools. On the one hand, finding out that almost half of our students don’t make the standard for math would seem like a great opportunity to direct people to research-proven technology tools that can help kids learn more effectively. (The best are listed at the Metiri “Technology Solutions that Work” webpage. This is a for-fee site with login required, but has been licensed for Washington state educators. Contact your district technology director for access. If he or she doesn’t know how, send them to your local ETSC director.) Particularly with the significant financial resources that are being directed to students that didn’t pass, it would be possible to invest in some of these systems, equipment, and methods without needing to dip into already-stretched budgets.

Unfortunately, I don’t expect to see that happening. Part of it is that the people who will be making the decisions on how to address this challenge are probably largely unaware of the technology options available. (This is natural, as we still seem to have a significant divide between the Curriculum and Ed Tech cultures in many of the schools. That in itself is a long discussion.) Another part is that many people under pressure will stick with what seems like the safest choice, which is also natural. In many places, will probably mean more extensive, intensive application of the current curriculum and teaching techniques.

Dave Thornburg had an interesting response to this approach. He said “If the medicine you are giving the patient makes them sick, why would you think that giving them more would make them better?” I know that’s a glib metaphor and can be easily argued against (the problem might be that the patient is sick not because of the medicine, but not enough medicine, etc.), but the bottom line is that we have to be willing to look at new options. For many of our students, the current classroom model isn’t working. I hope in at least a few places we can take this challenge and use it to encourage more innovative approaches to helping our kids, rather than pulling back.

There is an article in the online version of The Oregonian about the success of and controversy surrounding a new online charter school. Demand is outstripping the school’s capacity, despite heavy reliance on parents being the student’s “learning coach.” What probably ups the controversy is the fact that the school is run by a for-profit company from Baltimore named Connections Academy. They are now running 11 schools nationwide.

60% of the families currently signed up for the Oregon Connections Academy were already homeschoolers . (The school has a really cool acronym -ORCA. We’d be stuck with WACA. Better than Colorado, though - I’m not sure how many parents would sign up their kids for COCA. But I digress.) I have been saying for a number of years that technology is going to provide parents with many more options for homeschooling, and I’m sure programs like this will only add to the trend.

Whether online schooling is good or bad isn’t really important. If parents and students perceive that it’s good, they will take that opportunity. We can provide it through public education and maintain that connection with our community, or leave it to private schoools or for-profit companies and become increasingly irrelevant to larger numbers of constituents. I don’t see a postive outcome to the latter choice.

Just to reinforce my last post, within two days of each other last week my daughter’s iBook and my work PowerBook had serious breakdowns. (For those of you with PCs snickering at me, you should also know that my PC laptop needed to have its entire logic board replaced four months ago, too.) In other words, every one of the four computers that I either regularly use or have paid for has had some form of major breakdown this year. Every breakdown risked all the data on the hard drive. Even as I write this, the miraculous software I used to rescue my home computer’s data is valiantly fighting to rescue the data on my PowerBook’s dying hard drive. The struggle has been going on for over 24 hours. The good news is that everything important was backed up just a few weeks ago, but it will still be sad to lose that last batch of pictures from the park.

We must really like these things to put up with all this trouble!

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.