I’m sure most of us when reading that quote see it as the great, timely idea that it is. Unfortunately there are two roadblocks.
How exactly do we do that?
How many teachers, when told how to integrate the curriculum into “real world” experiences, acknowledge that it’s nice and then continue with business as usual?
Obviously #1 is the first snag that must be addressed, especially for those of us with mandatory state, county, or local curriculums. I would propose that we look at our planning backwards – like teaching to the test, but in this case the “test” is surviving after graduation.
What skills will students need when job descriptions are constantly changing? (I won’t list those here, if you’re reading this you probably already have a good idea.) Those are the parts of the curriculum that need to be reinforced the most. Even if you have a rigid curriculum you should still have some wriggle room to get the ball rolling.
The 2nd roadblock is much more difficult. Inertia is a horrible thing to overcome, and teachers who were innovative ten, twenty, and thirty years ago have eroded away a nice rut. They’re comfortable, the students are learning (albeit not what they need to learn…), and they’re tenured, so why change?
We need to show those teachers how much better the change can be.
I’ll be the first to admit it: I’m a technophile. I simply love technology (cutting edge or otherwise) and what it can do in the right hands. If you’re reading this, you’re probably in the same category.
Back when I was a kid I learned about video conferencing, which to some was a very big deal. I remember going on a field trip to a museum so we could sit and watch a little unmanned sub named Jason explore the Titanic. Our time there was limited and while we were told it was a video conference there were so many kids participating that no one in our museum got to ask the scientists any questions – at least, not while my class was there.
At the time, I wasn’t that impressed. Now as I look back I’m impressed with the technical ability to do live video communication via satellite during the 1980s, but the implementation was on just too wide a scale to give any of my classmates a sense of ownership in the experience.
Years passed, and a lot of cool things happened.
A sunday school teacher of mine came in one day and said he had talked to someone in Alaska by typing on a computer. Having read a lot of science fiction and fantasy even at that point I believed him, but again I had no ownership in it. After all, even if he got the chance to do that I probably never would. Computers like that were for scientists and rich people.
More years passed. I decided I either wanted to be a forest ranger, teach literature, or teach art. (Art won.)
My first semester in college a friend (who would later be my roommate and even later the best man at my wedding) introduced me to this wonderful thing called the “internet.” Our university gave out free dial-up accounts, so the price was right. At the time our system was already antiquated so those speedy 24K modems (top of the line at the time) were vastly overpowered for the university network.
We had three numbers we could call. Two were the low speed connection of 2.4k (that decimal is not a typo), and they also had a high speed line that was a blazing 9.2k (again, not a typo). This of course limited our surfing ability, but having never been on the internet before we were still blown away. Paul and I spent a lot of time in various telnet chatrooms, MUDs, etc. where we could talk to people all over the world. At the same time I started to spend time on usenet, mostly lurking in the short fiction groups to feed my sci-fi/fantasy addiction or actively participating in a couple of the philosophy groups.
This time I had a tremendous sense of ownership, but never thought once about how I could relate this technology to a classroom environment. It’s embarrassing to admit that, but it was true.
Later on I started hearing about webcams, and how they would allow for not just text communication but instant visual communication as well. It was Jason and the Titanic all over again, but this time anyone with a webcam and a connection faster than 9.6k (thank you, free AOL disk!) could do it. I heard more than one person start talking about video conferencing in the classroom, but it pretty much ended there.
I heard a story about a small school in Texas that had a limited budget, so they used video conferencing to outsource several of their classes to other schools. The special played one day, then I never saw anything about it again.
One of my former buildings even had a video conference room, complete with a wall of TV monitors and unidirectional microphones embedded in the desks, but in my two years as a teacher there I only ever saw it used for department chair meetings or standardized tests. I never saw anything in there even turned on, and the microphones in several desks had been vandalized.
Move time forward again. Yesterday Mr. Sprankle posted some photos of his kids interviewing (and being interviewed by) a radio station as well as Janet Hill from Apple Computer. The radio thing is cool just by itself, but the entire conversation with Janet Hill took place on the computer. It was a small scale video conference, and I’m sure that it was everything my Titanic experience was not.
Heh, every time I think Room 208 is so cool it can’t get any better, they go and one up themselves.
My 46th podcast is NOT a conference or presentation (gasp!)
Show Notes:
I’ll admit it, I’m a total cheapskate. As such, I’ve found a variety or resources to use frequently that cost me nothing, or at least next to nothing. Hey, even today’s background music (Loyalty and Honor The Journey Home) was free.
Criticism, that is. A lot of people out there in the blogosphere ask for comments and criticism, but Lawrence Lessig (the man behind Creative Commons) has gone one step further.
Mr. Lessig has created a wiki where anyone can go in and offer criticisms and counterpoints to the arguments he offers in one of his books. It’s an idea I had never thought of myself, and I’m very interested in seeing how it turns out.
This is one of the nice things about the way the web is evolving. It’s a way for us to share our opinions, true, but it’s also a way for others to share differing opinions with us.
Turns out that it wasn’t MoviesForMyPod that wasn’t working, it was me. As you can see in the illustration (click for a better view if you can’t see it) there’s an option to select Windows Media or Quicktime as a playback option.
I had switched this to Quicktime, but never refreshed the page so it was still full of .asf files. That didn’t even matter, since I spent most of my time trying various freeware programs on an .asf file I had downloaded last week.
While revisiting unitedstreaming yesterday I noticed that suddenly all the files were using quicktime suffixes because by now Firefox had refreshed.
So unitedstreaming works better than I ever thought it did. I feel silly for not noticing this before, but at least now I can put a lot more video on my iPod to show my students.
Discovery Education offers a great service called unitedstreaming. It’s a commercial product, but lucky for me my county purchased licenses for all of it’s schools. This gives me access to all kinds of videos (and clips), pictures, lesson ideas, and more, but I do have a problem.
The movies are saved as .asf files, which means I can’t put them on my new iPod with video. A workaround has been found using Quicktime Pro, but after paying for an iPod I don’t really feel like shelling out another $30 or so to make it work. (Especially when a Quicktime Pro license only lasts until the next update.)
So I embarked on a search for a free solution. I’ve had Digigami’s MoviesForMyPod on my hard drive for a while, so I knew when that was suggested as a solution it wouldn’t work – it didn’t have the right codec to decode .asf files.
Then suddenly Flip4Mac came on the scene, due to Microsoft’s decision to discontinue updates for the OS X version of their Media Player. I actually saw references to this nifty app on a cartoonist’s website first, although Mr. Dembo is already hyping it.
So I downloaded it last night and did a restart.
Turns out on my Mac running 10.3.9 it’s only half successful – I can listen to the audio just fine but the pictures are just a wash of pixelated colors. I’m open to the idea that I did something wrong or skipped a step somewhere, but after uninstalling and reinstalling I still can’t figure it out.
Does anyone have a free solution for me to translate .asf files into .mp4 so I can use them in my classrooms?
My 45th podcast is another presentation – this time it’s an introduction to blogging. I can’t say it was my best example of public speaking, but I said I’d record it and put it on the site so that’s exactly what I’m doing.
Last time I included all of my presentation slides embedded in the mp3 file and I decided to do the same thing this time as well. Be careful, though – at 9.8 MB and over 28 minutes this podcast is much longer than my usual ramblings.
I was doing some very late (or very early) spring cleaning, and came across some papers from seminars and conferences I attended years ago.
Most of the stuff wasn’t worth keeping, but I did find a list that I think I acquired at a MICCA conference. I wish I knew who wrote this (a Google search came up empty), but I think it’s worth a reprint here.
UPDATE: I just got an email from Rachel. It turns out that Sarah Stiles (A freind of Rachel’s from Anne Arundel County Public Schools) was the author of this wonderful list. My guess is that it was her presentation I saw at MICCA.
8 Ways to Test for Effective Technology Integration
1. An outsider would view the use of technology as a seamless part of daily instruction.
2. Students are genuinely interested & excited about learning.
3. You’d have trouble accomplishing your learning goals if the technology were removed. (In other words the technology is truly the “best media,” or the “right tool for the right job.”)
4. You can explain how the technology is enhancing instruction in 2-3 sentences.
5. Students work towards one or more content-related outcomes.
6. The technology activity is a logical extension of the lesson.
7. A real problem is being solved through the use of technology.
8. All students are able to participate & you can describe how a particular student is benefiting from the technology.
The idea behind this list is not to do all 8 at once, but to hit two or three of them every time you strive for technology integration. Thoughts? Comments? Does anyone know who wrote this?
We might be using computers and web sites, but this is still good old fashioned networking – the sharing of ideas and concepts. It gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling when I get to participate in a global phenomenon like this.
… but I digress. The conversation’s on what people think the classroom will be like in 2015. To summarize, one comment Mr. Warlick made was that it’s disturbing to him that so many educators think classrooms will be totally replaced with long distance learning by then. Mr. Dembo’s post continued along those lines, mentioning that to do such a thing would actually pull people apart rather than bring them together.
I totally agree with both Warlick and Dembo, but I’m not worried about the classroom disappearing. Why? Well, the answer’s quite simple.
I’ve read a lot of old science fiction.
I mean REALLY OLD science fiction. In high school I would often walk to the local used book store and buy all kinds of anthologies and other sci-fi books, many of them published before I was born. I loved entering those hundreds of fanciful universes where the writers’ futures were our present. They had some really cool ideas about what would be going on right now, but you know what?
They all got it wrong.
In some cases we’re more advanced than they ever thought we would be. (The first Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov had the characters calculating equations for faster than light travel without a computer to help them.) In other cases, we’ve advanced much slower than the writer thought we should. (I’m still waiting for my fusion powered flying car.) In all those stories, the writers were way off on what life is like today.
Sure, some of them predicted certain ideas, but looking at the big picture they couldn’t get it right.
So I don’t really think we’ll get rid of the classroom any time soon, or even in the next ten years. Kids need social, face to face interaction. They also need to use computers and understand how flat the world is becoming, but you can’t play kickball with someone on the other side of the country (unless you’ve got a VERY strong kick…) or have a chemistry lab partner on another continent.
There are some who would look at Warlick, Dembo, and myself and say that we just don’t get it, that we’re holding onto the past like so many of the industrial age teachers we criticize. My response to them is that I’ve never advocated the total abandonment of old styles. For example, there are a lot of art projects for which a sheet of paper is far superior to a laptop screen, and there always will be.
What we need to do to prepare our students for the future is to give them a healthy dose of both old and new styles. I think I could go on, but I’ll stop here and let someone else add to the chain of thought.
Thanks to a great plug by Steve Dembo there are now others besides me editing the Blogging 101 wiki. I myself have been slacking on that, but only because I’m busy designing and rehearsing my blogging presentation in OpenOffice. … oh yeah, and visiting the family in Pennsylvania for the holidays sorta limits me to infrequent dial-up access. (Do you remember when a 28k modem was fast? I do, but now a 56k modem feels like molasses.)
In any case, my presentation on January 10th is going to be fun. If anyone’s near Anne Arundel County, Maryland and wants to register, drop me a line.
David Warlick had a great quote on his blog today:
iPod fanatics unite!