EdTech from the Valley

The Digital Promise: Technology in Our Schools.

2011-11-08T21:56:00.001-08:00

Race To The Bottom: Tablet Wars

2011-10-26T21:32:00.000-07:00

One of the Educational Technology issues that I have always felt very strongly about has been equity and access of technology for all students. I was shocked to hear about the Aakash tablet that was being introduced in India. The Indian Government is subsidizing the tablet for schools to purchase at $35 per unit. The reports also have the tablet selling retail for $60.

Aakash Tablet from Venturebeat on Vimeo.

As the associated article states, this is a "leap frog" technology, which introduces a technology into a culture that has never seen a previous iteration of the technology in their lives. Think of the poorest people in the world who have never had a telephone in their lives, suddenly getting access to a cell phone, this is a "Leap Frog" technology. The article is straight forward stating that the unit is slow in the way it processes some basic tasks, but they were very surprised when they watched a YouTube Video with no delay or buffering... WOW!

This is just the beginning of the Tablet Wars that will be played out in the market place over the next few months. Yesterday; ViewSonic, a company best known for producing quality computer monitors, introduced the ViewPad 7e, which is a 7" tablet running Android version 2.3 and lots of extra features, including: SD Memory Card slots, HDMI output, front and back cameras and 4 GB of internal storage. Retail Price.... $200.

About two months ago, Lenovo (the spin off of the IBM desktop and laptop computer line) introduced the IdeaPad, a 7" Android tablet which boasts some of the same features as the ViewPad, like dual cameras and SD card slots. The IdeaPad also has onboard GPS.

Not to be out done, Amazon has re-imagined the Kindle reader and introduced a new version called the "Kindle Fire." It also retails for $199 and has some nifty features as well. Amazon already has 95,000 pre-orders for the device, and with the Christmas rush, there will be plenty more sales to come.

What does all of this mean? It means that there is a "race to the bottom" on the price of tablet devices. Who benefits from this race to the bottom? Our students do. As teachers, we do. Society does. All of these Android devices have access to multimedia creation applications that are free and access to the Internet. With a variety of free and low cost standards based text books already available, school districts can purchase these devices with text book funds and still come out ahead. This also means that the only limitation on our teaching and our students learning is our own minds.

So, the only question left is.... What are you and your students going to do with the world at your fingertips and a tool that will let you create anything you and your students can think of?

Smart Phone Usage

2011-10-25T20:39:00.001-07:00

via

Text Messaging: The Lost Tool In The Educators Tool Kit

2011-10-15T09:31:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest tools that teachers never take advantage of is text messaging services, or Short Message Service, (SMS) There are several tools available now to take even more advantage of this service that almost every student in your class has access to and if they have a cell phone this is the one thing they probably have unlimited access to,

The first is one that was popular a few years ago, but most people don't even know it exists or completely forgot that it is still there. Searching Google using a text message. If you or your students have some basic knowledge of Google Search Strategies, they can get an answer anywhere, even with their "Dumb Phone." Check out Google's SMS Search Page.

Google also has ways to interact with some of their more popular applications using SMS on their SMS Applications Page. I think one of the best is the ability to post to a Blogger Blog from their phone using SMS. That is something almost any kid can do and gets into the idea of authentic assessment that will definitely be part of the Common Core Standards. Check out the demo of Blogger SMS below.

Google Voice is another great ways to leverage SMS technologies in your classroom. You can message your class by putting in their cell phone numbers in your Google Voice account and text them directly by sending a message through Google Voice. The nice thing... All the students see is your Google Voice number, not your personal cell number or your personal e-mail address.

Another cool way to interact with students via their cell phone, via SMS is a new free service called, Remind101. Remind 101 allows teachers to create a class, the system issues a code to the teacher and then the teacher distributes the code to their class. The best part of this is that the students never see the teacher's phone number and the teacher never sees the students cell phone number. This gives us that level of privacy we need in education, while leveraging the tools available to teachers and students. Check out a demo of Remind 101 below.

Remind101 from remind101 on Vimeo.

The last tool is in private beta, but could be one that is a game changer and could put the "responder/clicker" producers out of business. The service is called "Socrative." What this service does is turn any connection a student has to mobile services, a laptop, smart phone, SMS, etc. and allows them to answer questions to a quiz, a true/false question in class, etc. The other benefit is that you can see the student results come into the system in real time. There are also some templates that you can automatically use, like "exit ticket" and more. This is definitely worth checking out, if you are someone who has used responder systems or clickers in the past. Check out the video below.

I have also added an infographic below that shows some of the ways that SMS or texting has changed the lives of people around the world in ways that many of us could never imagine. Is there a way that you can change or improve your instructional practice by adding a text message every so often?

http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/planet-text.jpg?w=640&h=5125

Skills: Mad and Necessary

2011-09-18T10:58:00.000-07:00

Things are changing, yet they are staying the same. The introduction of a variety of technologies, which have changed the way educational services can be delivered to students and the vast variety of ways that students can interact with that information and develop their own "reality" or "context" is probably the most important theme in education as we move forward.

It has long been understood that all students learn in different ways, whether that is in a typical classification system or something much more personal for each and every student. It was close to 15 years ago now that I told my Advanced Placement American Government students that the most valuable commodity in the economic system they were entering was "information." In the old educational paradigm, the one that most of us were educated in, the ability to "possess" information was the reason most teachers have their jobs. I was initially hired as a teacher because I possessed a certain level of knowledge in the Social Sciences. In today's economy, possessing knowledge or information is not the most important skill for today's students. The more important skill is the ability to quickly access and evaluate information and employ it in a way that allows students to answer questions that their experiences pose to them.

This means that students need to construct their own contexts and connections between information systems. The writings of Howard Gardner and Sir Ken Robinson illustrate the need for students to construct their own personal contexts. Standardized tests, assess an artificial context that politicians have determined is the most important for students to have, while that may be one measurement that can be used, it is one that is artificial and cannot accurately assess the skill level of any student. The use of rubrics in educational settings, has done quite a bit to make what was once a very 'subjective' process in assessing students personal contexts into one that is much more 'objective' and can be used to compare students' academic achievement with one another.

Employing a hierarchical structure like Bloom's Taxonomy (Cognitive and Affective Domains) can make sense of this from an academic perspective, but it is not a structure that can be easily applied in the context of traditional school.

So, moving forward, what is a structure that can allow educators to assess and knowledge, synthesis and application of the connections and contexts that teachers have? Storytelling and Folksonomies. Storytelling and folksonomies, make it easier for the work of a variety of individuals to be compared and evaluated. Storytelling, allows students to follow an idea or theme from beginning to end and support their context with the connections they make and how they communicate that with the audience. The level to which they are able to connect with their audience creates a bond to their personal knowledge. Folksonomies allow individuals to place their own filing or categorization framework on the knowledge they possess in their own minds, along with the information they can access, synthesize and create a new framework.

If you want to know what a student really knows and can employ in their personal lives, have them tell a story about it. From simple to complex. From comical to dramatic. From instructional to playful. Their stories will allow them to connect their knowledge in new and different ways. Digital technologies allow us to do this in so many new and powerful ways that we are only limited by our own minds. My challenge to groups I do professional development sessions with is this: Can anyone identify a project that they would like to do with their classes that cannot be completed using free technology tools? As of yet, no one has been able to identify a project.

Why haven't we adopted this framework to move education forward? Because it isn't easily assessed using a scantron form.

How Students Use Technology

2011-08-15T11:05:00.000-07:00

Here is a nice infographic from onlineeducation.net. If there was any question about the fact that the students we teach do not heavily rely on their own personal technology, this will close the argument.

Via: OnlineEducation.net

Is Facebook Looking in the Rear View Mirror?

2011-07-25T11:24:00.000-07:00

Google+ is growing by leaps and bounds. Current growth estimates have it at over 20 million users. It took Facebook close to 18 months to get to the same number of users. Facebook has definitely paved the way for services like Google+, but because of the tight integration with all of the other Google services and the ability to video chat in a split second, Google+ will continue to grow rapidly. Google+ may never overtake Facebook, but it will definitely be "THE TOOL" for those of us who use technology as an integral part of our business and social lives.

The Lost Generation

2011-06-12T15:38:00.000-07:00

Ten Years Ago, we were introduced to the idea of Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives. We were told that people who were born before 1990 were Digital Immigrants, because most of their education will have taken place before the ubiquitous use of technology in our lives. Marc Prensky, the author of the paper, stated that teachers, who were Digital Immigrants, needed to change their instructional strategies to reach the student they were now teaching who are Digital Natives. While on the surface, this looks like a logical explanation to a problem, but in reality it has had the opposite effect on our educational system over the past ten years. Marc Prensky's premise has given an entire generation of educators an excuse to not keep up with the current trends in their profession and allow the way we to educate children to remain unchanged since the early 1900's assembly line brought to popularity by Henry Ford's automobile factories. While I know it was not Marc Prensky's intent to create a system where we perpetuate the past, it has in effect created a Lost Generation of Educators, where they have used the label of "Digital Immigrants" as an excuse for not being able to learn the necessary Educational Technology skills requisite to teach the students of the 21st Century.

I have been involved in Educational Technology for the past 20 years of my professional life as an educator. I have seen hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on educational technology during this time, some of it very well spent, but unfortunately much of it spent in ways that do not improve teacher's professional practice or student achievement. There are a variety of reasons we can analyze in an attempt to answer why we haven't been more successful with Educational Technology initiatives, but in reality it comes down to a few very simple premises.

First, there have been a lack of professional standards put in place for teachers to meet. The first ISTE NETS standards were published in 2000, but had little or no traction in schools or districts. We can look at why teachers did not adopt the ISTE NETS standards, but in reality it comes down to the simple fact that teachers, like employees in all other businesses, will only do what they are evaluated on. Since these standards were not included in a teacher's evaluation, they did not feel the need to abide by them. In most cases, we need only to look at NCLB and the conditions the Federal Government placed on schools with high-stakes testing to understand why districts put the ISTE NETS standards lower on the list of instructional priorities. ISTE revised their NETS-T standards in 2008, updating and making the standards more specific. We are seeing some adoption of these standards in isolated schools in districts, but that is more dependent on school or district leadership. This leads to the second premise...

At the present time, we do not have enough administrators who can adequately assess whether teachers are successfully integrating technology into the educational process. This was one of my primary motivations for becoming an administrator. In California, there is a very specific piece of the "California Standards for the Teaching Profession" (CSTP) that states: "Using materials, resources, and technologies to make subject matter accessible to students." I watched year after year administrators mark "has met" on teacher evaluations for this Key Element when all they had done relative to technology was to post their syllabus on line. Administrators didn't have any requirements for their own professional practice until there were some standards established by ISTE in 2009. Even with the establishment of standards for Administrators, there has been no rush by most to work towards attaining these standards. There are some administrators who will say quite confidently that, "the younger teachers coming in have grown up with technology and don't need professional development or to be evaluated on its use." I will tell you very simply that the teachers coming into the system know how to use technology for their own personal use, but have no idea how to integrate technology into instructional practice.

The last issue that needs to be addressed is the "squeeze factor." The squeeze factor is that the students are integrating new technologies into their academic lives, but that the teachers are unfamiliar with these tools and either completely ban or severely regulate their use. There are a variety of reasons that can be identified as to why teachers and schools are doing this, but you can boil all of them down to "the fear of the unknown." There are many teachers who don't know what these tools can do and how their use will effect the curriculum, so they will "squeeze" them out of practice. Students will continue to "squeeze" them back in with some accepting teachers, but there has been no wide scale adoption of personal technologies in schools. Think of the fact that, given the current rate of "smart phone" penetration, close to 90% of high school students have a device that they can use to access the libraries of the world and access rich educationally appropriate content with them everyday. Students are more likely to have their "smart phone"with them, than they are to have remembered to bring their text book that day. (Pew Internet and Life Project)

These technologies allow students to complete the assignments that teachers have used over the last 100 years in a fraction of the time. A quick example would be asking students to look up 30 vocabulary words in the dictionary, this would be a task that would take students a decent amount of time using a hard bound dictionary. Using a smart phone, most students would complete writing out the definitions of 30 vocabulary words in 1/3 the time or less. So, really what does this mean? Teachers, you could recover tons of instructional time and teach more... yes, MORE!

The last point to make here is to ask the question of why? Why won't teachers embrace the use of these technologies? Why won't teachers allow students meet the course requirements in new and different ways using technology? Why have students had the tools they use to access all types of media and information outside of school taken away from them as soon as they walk on campus? Fear of the unknown. Plain and simple... Anything that takes away from the teacher being the person who possesses the information in that particular academic discipline is going to be met with resistance.

The answer is that we can't re-form education, we need to create a new educational model. Schools don't need an incremental upgrade, what they need is a Forklift Upgrade. We need administrators who are willing to move forward and trust some educators, who are actually doing what needs to be done. The key to all of this is trust. Those schools and districts who have trust and work collaboratively with administrators, teachers, students and the community will reap the greatest benefits in the years to come.

As always, your comments are welcome.

Transferring the Model Downward

2011-06-11T07:56:00.000-07:00

While many college students have had the opportunity to take online classes, those opportunities have been very limited for high school students. Most school districts have looked for ways to make sure the education students receive in these courses meets their standards. This is something that is going to happen, the only questions we need to answer is when and how? Take a look at this infographic to see where online education can make additional inroads into the high school arena.

Via: OnlineEducation.net

The Tool Box of the Internet has Gone to the Birds

2011-04-03T20:05:00.000-07:00

We have finally arrived.... We are free and most of us don't even know it.

Software and compatibility issues have been a thorn in the side of educational technology for years. I can remember when I was a Technology Coordinator and a student would get a new computer for Christmas and sometime in January or February of the next year they would bring in a disk with a paper that they had typed on their new computer and try to print that paper at school. The paper wouldn't print.... why? Because most PC's came with Microsoft Works, instead of Microsoft Office, which was the word processor that was installed on the machines at school. There were several ways to work around this, but it was difficult and frustrating for both the student and their teacher. It reinforced the idea in the minds of students and teachers that using technology in class was hard and difficult. This was also an issue that occurred on Macintosh computers as well, since there were many schools where the only Apple based computers were in a lab dedicated for some type of creative content creation. (Video, Graphics, Multimedia, etc. ) This is no longer the case..... The issues with Microsoft and Apple will still exist, but one simple way around it is to use Google Docs and other Google Tools. If you have Google Apps for Education, you have some pretty cool free instant add-on's that will provide even more tools and services for FREE.

So, looking at all of the things that schools and students spend their money on, software is no longer something they should spend their money on for students or teachers. Google tools are also better because they are available 24/7/365, absolutely anywhere there is a computer and an Internet connection. (See my last post about "Where are Your Black Holes")

Here are the applications that most schools currently use and what are their free Google equivalents.

- Microsoft Word - Google Documents: Can upload and download .doc and .docx files.

- Microsoft Excel - Google Spreadsheets: Can upload and download .xls and .xlsx files. There are fewer functions available in the Google Docs version of the spreadsheet, but it is enough for most users. There are also some very cool Google Formulas you can use.

- Microsoft PowerPoint - Google Presentations: Can upload and download .ppt and .pptx files. One of the benefits of Google Presentations, is that it is much easier to add images and video into your presentation.

- Besides the typical applications, Google also has G-Mail, Calendar and Sites, which all integrate with the other Google Apps. For example, you can attach a document to a Google Calendar entry or you can integrate a Google Form, a YouTube Video or a Google Calendar into a Google Site.

-Speaking of YouTube, there is a new online YouTube Video Editor that allows anyone to upload their video from any source and edit it online. There are some music you can add and some basic transitions you can use between clips, but to teach the basics to video editing for students this is a great introduction.

The newest set of Google Tools comes from another company that has intentionally built their set of tools to quickly and nicely integrate into the Google Apps platform. The Aviary Suite of content creation tools. If you have a Google Apps EDU domain, you can even have the Aviary Suite integrate into the Google Docs menu and you can save all of these files in your Google Docs account.

- Photoshop (picture editing) - Google does basic image / picture editing with Picasa and Picnik, but in Google Apps EDU you can add on Aviary and use the Phoenix and Raven applications within Aviary to create layer based vector graphics like Photoshop creates.

- Screen shots: Microsoft and Apple both have basic screen capture tools within the operating system and there are some good free tools like "Skitch" to do screen shots and then edit and annotate them, but you can also use Falcon and Talon from Aviary, which are add-on's for the Firefox and Chrome browsers that will produce screenshots and the tools to annotate them.

Garage Band / Audacity - Aviary also has tools to edit Audio and create Music. Roc for music creation an Myna to edit audio files for podcasts.

So, with all of these free tools, there is no limit as to what you, and your students, can do with a computer and an Internet connection. Everything I have mentioned in this post is free. What could you do? What will you do? How will this change the way you teach? I would like to hear from you. Post a comment with your ideas and suggestions.

Where are Your Black Holes?

2011-03-26T18:04:00.000-07:00

Over the past twelve years, I have been fighting the same fight. I have long been an advocate of teachers integrating the use of technology into their professional practice, but the excuse that most teachers I spoken to about this have used the same excuse for not wanting to jump into the EdTech waters. "I'm sorry, not all of the kids have access to the technology or they don't have access to the Internet in their homes and it isn't fair to them." This was an excuse in 1999, when I first became the Technology Coordinator at Capuchino High School and it is an even bigger excuse today. Equity and access issues have been at the forefront of the battle I have waged to make sure that every student has access to technology. Why? Because I believe that giving students access to the libraries of the world and any information 24/7/365, is the great equalizer of our time. I also did everything I could to provide the technology and access to the Internet to the students I worked with through the Digital Bridge program.

The video above, from the TEDxNYED (Technology Entertainment Design x New York EDucation) Will Richardson talks about the importance of the Internet on the lives of our children. Will talks about how our children use the Internet to learn on their own, without the use of teachers. They search the Internet to solve real problems, as they occur in their lives. It could be as easy as who was the 16th President of the United States, or as complex as how to solve a quadratic equation with multiple coefficients. In this video, Will talks about how his daughter learned how to play Journey's "Lights" on the piano. As teachers, we need to realize that this is the way our students learn and in turn, how can we best teach our students given their desire to be constantly connected to a variety of electronic resources.

So, to bring this back to the issue of equity and access, how can we level the playing field and make sure that all students have access to the wealth of resources that are available to them on the Internet? We have between 85 and 90% of the students we teach carrying cell phones and most of these devices can access the Internet. The cost of computers, especially netbooks and tablets are low and are continually dropping closer and closer to the $200.00 mark. Free access to the Internet is becoming more and more available, yet there are several areas where this access is lacking. The map below, taken from Ji-Wire (www.jiwire.com) a site that shows free and paid wireless access for any area around the world, shows a large area in the Woodside High School attendance area that does not have any access to free wi-fi access. Why? The area that is outlined is an area that has plenty of retail businesses and homes, but it is a lower socio-economic area.

This to me is a "black hole." A black hole where the light of the information available on the Internet does not enter. The people who live in this area are more than likely, people of color and mostly Latin American. One of the more pressing issues facing education is how to bring light into the Black Holes that exist in our communities. Can we talk to the public libraries, Boy's and Girl's Clubs, YMCA's and other public agencies to provide free wireless access in their buildings for students? Can we talk to the independent coffee shop, ice cream store, fast food restaurant to add free wi-fi or to open up their existing wi-fi for their customers, mostly the students we teach.

So, where are your "Black Holes" and what can you do to bring light to them?

3/30/11 - One of the things I left out in the post was that one of our district's "Black Holes" was the city of East Palo Alto, but there is some light there now with the Wifi101 project, that has blanketed the community with free wi-fi with towers on public buildings and apartments where the owners have granted them space. The group also takes in computers and refurbishes them and donates them back to the community.

There is another group doing this in the city of Richmond, across the bay from us. Building Blocks is a non-profit that provides computers and Internet access to families who could not afford their own access. Here is a video about their project in Richmond.

2011 - The Year Education becomes Flat

2011-02-09T19:03:00.000-08:00

It's been almost 6 years since the initial publication of Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat." This is one of the books that transformed me as an educator. There are others that I read before it (Negroponte's "Being Digital") and others that I read after it (Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody"), that had a profound affect on me, but it was the one book that was truly transformative. The World is Flat is a book that talks about the forces of change and clearly delineates how these forces will change the world.

As most professional educators know, it takes 5-7 years for things that are common place in business to even get a basic or cursory usage within education. Well, that is where we are now....

The 10 Flattners that Friedman spoke about in "The World is Flat" were directly related to society as a whole and the first three directly related to historical events that occurred to create the openness necessary to allow the final 7 "flattners" to take place. The first flattner, "The fall of the Berlin Wall," is an extremely important event, because it eliminates the competition of socialist societies. In education, we are wholly controlled by the government from management to funding, therefore any advances that run contrary to the current government structure are banned. The one flattner, that has had the greatest affect on education is the rise of Open Source and Free Software. Friedman talks about software like the development of the Netscape web browser and the development of other open source projects like the Apache web server software and Linux operating systems. Now, we are seeing a convergence of many of these tools into one, which has brought the price of Internet connected devices down and made them more common place than they had been before. The most interesting of these new devices is the Chrome Notebook. It is a netbook computer, which has retailed for as low as $250 with Windows pre-installed.

A Chrome netbook, is running the Google Chrome operating system, no Windows, and runs much faster than typical devices because all of the data is stored on Google's Internet servers. The anticipated cost of a Chrome Netbook is expected to be in the $250 range. If Google could deliver this to school at a cost less than $200, it would be a game changer.

Here is an explanation of the Chrome OS.

I am also going to take a look at the equity and access issues in society and how things are quickly becoming more and more accessible for all and they are all FREE.

New Year - New Tech Strategy - Week 1

2011-01-02T20:57:00.000-08:00

With the beginning of the New Year, we all make some resolutions that we want to make this year a bit better than the last. I am no different in this regard, I tweeted this afternoon that my New Year's Resolutions were to Tweet once a day, Blog once a week and to work on being healthier by joining Steve Dembo's Fit42 Fitness Challenge. I am hopeful that I will be able to achieve all of these goals. In the Blogging arena, I am going to resurrect this blog. I had posted regularly between 2005 and 2008, but when I took the position as the Administrative Vice Principal at W oodside High School, it left me little time to blog.

I have continued to present at a variety of Education Conferences in California and I have done some presentations for CUE, in their CUE to You program. I was also elected to the CUE Board of Directors in April 2010, so I have continued to be very active in the EdTech community, but I have been less on the cutting-edge than I had been in the past and I realized that I very much miss the implementation of new and emerging technologies in the educational process and having conversations with my colleagues, local and around the world. I am hopeful that this blog will allow me to jump back into the conversation and re-engage with all of you.

With that said..... here we go!

One of my rallying cries over the past several years has been to increase the amount of technology that is used as part of the educational process. I have been a huge proponent of this since the mid-1990's. I have always had to deal with some teachers that refused to integrate technology into their classes for a myriad of reasons. One of which was always access and the other was that because they were "seasoned" teachers they couldn't learn how to use technology like their younger counterparts. Teachers in this group typically held up copies of Marc Prensky's "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants," as a justification of their position. While I think that Marc Prensky is an intelligent man, I want to let him know that while he may have just identified behavior that he observed in educational settings, he set the integration of technology into education back at least 5 years. I know that there are other factors that come into play, including: unions, finances, professional development, standards, NCLB, etc., but the "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" gave teachers the easy out.

Next week.... Access, Access - 2011 is going to be the year when we get so close to "ubiquitous access" and there won't be any more excuses.

The First Penguin

2010-08-29T12:09:00.000-07:00

I have spent the past couple of weeks getting through Randy Pausch's "The Last Lecture." I have found it to be real, poignant and inspiring. If you aren't familiar with the book or the theme; Randy, a computer science professor working in the virtual reality field at Carnegie Mellon University, has found out that he has pancreatic cancer and will soon succumb to the disease. The book is a collection of his hopes for his wife, family and students. He delivers these in a "Last Lecture" at Carnegie Mellon for his students.

In most computer science fields, those who are really at the cutting edge of the field have to take risks. Many times expending time and energy in projects that won't work. To recognize his students who were attempting to create something new and exciting, but failed to get the desired result, he created the "First Penguin Award." (p.148-149) When in the Antarctic, Penguins travel in groups, but there always must be a "First Penguin" that dives into the water without knowing what is there. There could be predators that could quickly feast on that first penguin, but the first penguin also gets an opportunity to make a mark in the field and learn so much in the process. Randy would award the group in his class with the most spectacular failure a stuffed penguin as a recognition of their efforts.

In the Educational Technology field, there are plenty of "First Penguins" out there, who can assist those coming into the field in how to navigate through the issues that arise anytime you try something new as an educator. Randy starts the section with the quote, "Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted." Some have had some huge successes after some initial failures, and some continue to be that "First Penguin" working to make a difference in a field where the institutional predators are often times the most dangerous. When I eventually become a principal at a high school, I will be looking for some "First Penguins" to come to my school. Fortunately, I will be able to give them some assurances that I have cleared the water of some of the typical predators.

Sifting Through Infowhelm

2010-07-09T12:59:00.000-07:00

Over the past several months I have definitely been experiencing "Infowhelm." In my position as the Administrative Vice Principal at Woodside High School, I don't have as much time as I used to to explore everything that was happening in the "EdTech Blogosphere." And there were a lot of things going on besides school, I was on the road a little bit presenting at the annual CUE conference in Palm Springs in March, a few one day professional development sessions, a three day session with Administrators in Georgetown, KY and getting elected to the CUE Board of Directors.

So, my personal professional development took a back seat as evidenced by the lack of posts on this blog and the number of items in my Google Reader account growing to over 1,000 several times during the past 6 months. As you can see from the graphic on the left, my Google Reader account now has no unread items in it. No, I didn't hit the "reset" switch by clicking on "Mark all items read." You can see that there are certain things I found interesting during the past 6 months, but taking a peek at my "Shared Items" list in Google Reader.

One of the items in this list is a short video that was shared by Lucy Gray, a great educator from Chicago, whom I have never met, but we have definitely traveled in the same circles in EdTech. The video illustrates the exponential growth of information in our society today and points out that we are still largely teaching "content" in schools instead of "Information Fluency" skills.

Will Richardson posted this morning on the same topic. What are we teaching? Are we teaching kids how to be better test takers? Are we teaching them how to get into the college of their choice? What should we be teaching them? In my mind, we need to change that paradigm and start teaching skills that will allow them to possess the skills that will be necessary in the economy they will be competing in. Thinking, evaluating, collaborating, applying skill, problem solving, etc. Or as Seth Godin sets forth in his book that is my current reading material, Linchpin, that "schools should teach students how to solve interesting problems."

One way I have seen recently to teach students how to solve interesting problems has been the work of Dan Meyer and his presentation at TEDxNYED. His 4 step process is clearly laid out in the presentation below.

I hope that some of you will see this an comment about where we should be going and how do we get there. I welcome your comments.

We Have No Excuse!

2009-12-26T17:46:00.000-08:00

Over the past few days, while I have been on break, I have been mulling around the blogosphere looking at all of the things that have been going on. I got completely caught up on reading everything in my Google Reader and even engaged with David Jakes, Gary Stager and others over the validity and the content of a GTA designed for Administrators. I know it has been awhile since I have posted anything here, but I want to post more as my time permits.

This post may not be something that my colleagues in education will necessarily agree with, but in the words of Kathy Sierra, its time to "get out of default mode." I am seriously thinking of using the slogan when I present on the last day of the CLHS Statewide Conference in Monterey, CA on January 17, 2010.

So, here we go! We have no excuse any more. Teachers need to get out of default mode. I am tired of teacher's complaining that they cannot assign any Internet based assignments because students do not have access at home. At the present time, any student that does not have access to the Internet does not have it because they have chosen not to have access. This is despite the economic situation of their families.

Currently, Walmart is advertizing an e-Machine's Netbook for $228 and have an Acer Netbook for $298. The prices are so low that the major cell phone services will give you a free or low cost netbook in exchange for a two year service agreement. (AT&T and Verizon)

The locations offering free Wifi is increasing by the day. McDonald's (12,804 locations in the US) just announced that they will have free Internet access starting during January 2010. Starbucks (11,068 locations in the US) has offered 2 hours free per day, in exchange for registering your card and using the card once a month. Barnes and Noble has 777 locations and Borders Books has 517 locations offering free Wifi. Panera Bread has 1,272 locations in the US offering free Wifi. Add to this number locations at Public Libraries, Apple Stores, Schlotsky's Deli, Daily Grind and the variety of independent businesses offering free Wifi, there is simply no excuse any more. In my local community, there are two cities that have municipal Wifi networks. (Mountain View and East Palo Alto)

If there are still barriers, the one technology that people in the lower socio-economic groups have adopted in large numbers has been the cell phone. Over the last two years, 2007-2009, the number of smart phones (iPhones, Droids and BlackBerry's) has increased by 20% per year and will account for close to 150 million cell phones in the US by 2013. Will Richardson's post earlier this month about allowing students to use their own connection, is borne out by these numbers.

So, if there are those teachers in the profession who still want to hang on to the argument that they will not assign students work that necessitates students using Internet resources, please send them my way. I have a few resources I would like to share with them.

Global, Mobile, Ubiquitous and Cheap

2009-07-31T09:35:00.000-07:00

Those four words have been the rallying cry for most of Clay Shirky's recent talks at TED@State and other venues recently, speaking about how the media landscape is changing at a rapid rate. In one of my previous posts I mentioned the video you can watch on the subject along with the keynote presentation I did at the Harker Teacher Institute in June. In that keynote, "Jumping the Educational Shark," a reference to the social phenomena that Skirky identifies as the "cognitive surplus" of time that people in industrialized countries had after World War II that was taken up by the "sitcom." And my own reference to the phrase "Jumping the Shark," which is common in television, when a show has peaked and is definitely beginning to slide into the abyss and is making one last effort to bring viewers back before the show is eventually cancelled.

My point in the keynote was to express the idea that the educational community has many people trying desperately to hold on to the old industrial model of education that resembles an assembly line, but not recognizing that it is no longer useful to prepare students for the world they will live in during their adult lives. One of the arguments of this group was that we couldn't assign students work to do using computers or the Internet because not all students had access to those tools. Access has been improving steadily over the past few years and now, I truly believe this argument is no longer valid. If students want a computer, they cost about as much as a cell phone and if they want to use that device to access the Internet, there is free access at at variety of locations. This came into focus for me over the past three days. First, I read that Barnes and Noble is another national business, along with Panera Bread and Starbucks that is providing free Internet access to their patrons. Secondly, all of the public libraries in San Mateo County, where I teach, provide free wifi access as well. Third, the City of East Palo Alto, where some of our neediest kids live, has a free municipal wifi program that covers most of the city, called "wifi101." (Here is a link to their coverage map.)

Along with these developments, the Pew Internet and Life Project published a new report about how people are accessing the Internet and more than half (56%) have done so using a wireless connection through a phone or wifi. Some may say that the number is low, but there are some issues that are brought to light when you dig a little deeper. The first is that the use of wifi or accessing the Internet through a 'smart phone' has been completely demystified. It is common place in our society and people can assist those who are trying to make the leap into the wireless world. Secondly, the group showing the greatest percentage of gain is African Americans.

"African Americans are the most active users of the mobile internet – and their use of it is also growing the fastest. This means the digital divide between African Americans and white Americans diminishes when mobile use is taken into account."

So, to me the divide has been bridged. If a student wants access, it is available. They might need to jump through a hoop or two, but there is access and in most instances it is free. What does this mean to education, especially in my school. The on-going rhetoric from teacher's that they cannot assign work to students that would require them to access the Internet or use some type of technology is no longer valid. To me, as an administrator, the message is clear: Teachers you need to move forward and use these tools to engage students in the educational process. A blog post that crossed past me this week says it about as good as I could ever home to. It is from the "TeachPaperless" blog and it is titled, "Top Eleven Things Teachers Need to Know About Technology."

Image: www.thumbjockey.com

How Society Has Changed...

2009-07-24T08:57:00.000-07:00

Well... this is a different type of post than I usually post here. Since almost all of them deal with Educational Technology in some way. This post is more of an observation of society and how times have changed in the last 20+ years.

I went and saw the film, "I Love You, Beth Cooper," yesterday. It is the normal teen fare, where there is some overt sexuality, the local bully gets put in his place and the nerdy guy finds out what life is like as part of the "popular clique." The main character, Denis professes his unrequited love to the head cheerleader. The rest of the film is a bunch of teen antics, but the underlying story shows that Denis is on his way to Stanford in the fall and on to a very successful adult life. The object of his affection, Beth, may have reached the apex of her life in High School and may never reach a higher status than the one she had.

The other film that it brought to mind was one that was somewhat similar was "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," which is a classic for most of the people in my generation. I can remember seeing the film in my early 20's and thinking this guy has the whole world "wired." Ferris is a cool and hip schemer, who is about to graduate from High School and go off to college, is trying to have one last great day with his girlfriend and somewhat nerdy best friend and before he graduates.

But here is what I wanted to compare between the two films. Denis' father in "Beth Cooper," is played by Alan Ruck. There is a scene, where Denis' father gives him a bottle of champagne to celebrate his High School graduation and tells him where there are condom's for him to use should the need arise. He does this because he recognizes that his son has worked hard to get accepted in to Stanford and says that, "there won't be much time for Toga Parties with your pre-Med curriculum." In "Ferris Bueller," the smart and somewhat nerdy best friend, Cameron Frye, is played by ... Alan Ruck. Same guy, 23 years later. Cameron has real issues with his father, there is little or no communication between the two, which frustrates Cameron. At the movie's climax, Cameron intentionally bashes in his father's prized vintage Ferrari to force the two of them to talk.

I will make the point here, that Alan Ruck in "Beth Cooper," plays the type of father he wanted to have when he was in "Ferris Bueller." Is this the evolution of our contemporary society, or have we recognized that we have to work with our kids to assist them in dealing with the social issues that they have to confront as teens.

As teachers, we deal with these issues on a daily basis, with a variety of students at completely different places along the social continuum, how we support them as they move forward in their journey towards adulthood is definitely part of what we do to create a whole person.

Leadership Day 2009

2009-07-12T20:52:00.000-07:00

I wanted to post today to Scott McLeod's Leadership Day request, because I see myself in a situation that is different than most administrators and therefore, most educational leaders in the US today. As most of you know who have read this blog in the past, I have worked in EdTech circles for quite some time. I am one of the first 50 Google Certified Teacher's and I have moved forward into the administrative ranks for the express purpose to move the use of technology in the educational process forward.

There are two video's that really point the direction of the use of technology in education. There aren't many who believe that using technology in education is going to be detrimental, but many are not advocates, since they do not have any personal knowledge or experience in integrating technology into the classroom. There are two video's that have come out in the past two weeks that will really move the use of technology in education forward. The biggest reason is that the cost of most of the techology has become $0.00. That is right, NOTHING! And if school districts plan and make the right deals with textbook publishers, there will be a cost saving. If the country were to bring into practice, what California is talking about with online open source textbooks, the cost savings would be remarkable.

The first video is the quick speech that Clay Shirky, the author of last year's "Here Comes Everybody." Shirky makes the point that the explosion of Internet technologies have made the media of today, "Global, Mobile, Ubiquitous and Cheap." Cheap $200-$250 netbooks can provide a huge amount of processing power in a small package, which schools could provide to students at an even lower cost given the savings of bulk purchases.

The second video is the preview of Chris Anderson's new book, "Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price." This is a followup to his best seller, "The Long Tail" from 2004. Anderson makes the point that bandwidth, processing power and storage capacity has increased so much and has become so cheap that the cost of producing these items is virtually $0.00. This has a huge impact on education, since we are always facing budget cut backs and technology never seems to be a priority. If Anderson's premise is true, the future of education is going to involve more and more technology.

The last issue is the fact that California is undertaking with open source text books in Math and Science. Governor Schwarzenegger would like to have this all in place by the beginning of the next school year. This would push the textbook publishers to make additional material and even e-book versions of their texts available to schools.

We'll have to see how all of this plays out.... but the prospects are interesting.

"Yes We Can" Because?

2009-06-19T22:23:00.000-07:00

NOTE: I am cleaning up some of the partial posts I have been working on over the past few weeks.

Since the school year has ended and I have had a little more time to get to the thousands of feeds and other material that I have let build up over the past few months, I have unintentionally found myself at the flash point of how media is changing and how it will effect the educational process. I did the morning keynote presentation at the Harker Teacher Institute this past Wednesday, June 17. It was a great experience for me, since it was my first 'formal' keynote experience. I don't think they had any idea what they were getting with me, but overall I think the talk was pretty good. I had some friends in the audience 'tweeting' about it as it was happening and that brought what I was talking about into even more focus. The picture is one of the slides I had in my talk when I brought up Clay Shirky and his book, "Here Comes Everybody," which I think is a must read for anyone interested in learning about how the media landscape is changing. To get quick idea of what Shirky is advocating take a look at the video from TED linked here.

There were a few things about the talk that really struck me....

In the 20th Century most of the media was created by professionals and in the 21st Century most of the media is created by amateurs. The huge rise in User Generated Content (UCG) is linked to the fact that the media landscape of today is characterized by four things. Media is Global, Mobile, Ubiquitous and Cheap. The implications of this blow the doors open in education to have deeper, richer and more personal connection to others next door or on the next continent.

I am also going to suggest two books I am going to attempt to get through myself this summer. "Free: The Future of a Radical Price." This is Chris Anderson's follow up to his 2004 book, "The Long Tail. I am also going to post a short video below of what the book will attempt to illustrate.

The second book is: "The World is Open," by Curtis J. Bonk. From reading the initial reviews, it looks like an educational corollary to the Thomas Friedman's, "The World is Flat."

It will be interesting to see how each of these books lays out a new educational paradigm and how early adopters will leverage these tools to create new, dynamic learning environments.

LifeBlob

2009-04-12T21:30:00.000-07:00

It has been quite some time since I have posted on this blog for a variety of reasons... select the best reason for my length of time without posting.

1) Too busy being the Vice Principal at Woodside High School

2) Too busy working on curriculum for a variety of projects.

3) Too much e-mail and blog entries to get through to have something to write on. (Finishing Spring Break today and I had over 1,000 entries in my Google Reader account and at least 30 response necessary e-mails in my 'In Box.')

4) Too busy playing on Facebook and/or Twitter.

Well, given the fact that I have had a week off and have been able to catch up on everything, I have found a few cool things that I will share with you. One of these things is 'LifeBlob,' which is an online time line for any events you want to place in the time line. The LifeBlob that is shown below is the time line for all of the posts on this blog. You can upload content from 'YouTube,' 'Flickr,' 'Picasa,' or 'Twitter.'

I can think of many different projects in Social Science, English and Science where an online annotated timeline would assist students in constucting their own linear progression of events and/or actions. The strength of a LifeBlob is the practice of constructing the timeline and applying knowledge in a real and visual way. It is different from recreating or memorizing a timeline created by the teacher or text book publisher.

What I saw at CLHS.....

2009-01-19T17:26:00.000-08:00

I just returned home from speaking at the California League of High Schools Statewide conference this past weekend and it was a different experience for me for many reasons. First, I usually attend and speak at Educational Technology Conferences and gatherings, so I usually know that my attendees have come to the conference to... "Get their Geek on!" They are a willing and receptive audience and usually have some interest or have done some work in educational technology. They are there to learn the latest and greatest things and what others are doing in the field. The groups I spoke to this past weekend were different, in that there were some who fit the EdTech profile, but there were others, some "who hadn't drank the kool-aid" yet, but knew it was time they did so. For this group, I got the feeling that my sessions were "like bringing water to the desert."

Secondly, there was an overriding feeling that the current state of affairs in education is about to undergo a significant and trans formative change. Whether it was the impending inauguration of President Obama and the bringing to Washington his basketball playing friend, Arne Duncan, as Secretary of Education or the general feeling that the system does not meet the needs of the current students any longer and the rank and file teachers know it.

I asked the people attending my sessions a few general questions, the first question that I usually ask to gauge the receptiveness of the teacher and school district is whether 'YouTube' is blocked. I usually get 'yes' responses in the 70% - 75% range when I ask this question at EdTech Conferences, this past weekend the responses were solidly over 90%, approaching 100%. As I went through each of my sessions, which were on varied EdTech topics (Blogger, VoiceThread and One Hour Website), I had at least one person stop me and ask, if I would come to their district and speak to their administrators about Educational Technology.

When I was a Technology Coordinator, I had a great deal of autonomy. (Thanks, Tess!) For a variety of reasons, the first being that I just did what I felt needed to be done. If there was an educational justification for it, I did it! I didn't ask all the time, I just did it, and there were some occasions where I had an administrator wag their finger at me, but that was about it. The Assistant Principal that was supposed to oversee me, quickly became overburdened with my constant requests and pestering for change that he moved aside and let me go. But I did meet some resistance once I got to the District level and this is why I eventually recognized why I had to move into Administration. I could go on and on about some of these issues and how I eventually got my way or was still fighting the good fight when I left for Woodside, but that doesn't serve the ends we need to get to, which is having ubiquitous access to Internet resources at every school in every country around the world.

So, the question I am asking is this... What do you want me to tell your Administrators? What do you need to make ubiquitous access happen in your school? What resources do you need?

I am going to take your responses and develop a series of talks specifically aimed at administrators, to get them on board and move the entire process forward.

I am looking forward to hearing your responses, so we can 'bring water to the desert' and create oases of how education should look like in the 21st Century. More to come...

EdTech Camp

2008-12-30T22:23:00.000-08:00

So, call me crazy! One of the ideas that I have been rolling around in my head over the past few weeks is to hold a EdTech Conference at Woodside High School, where I became the Vice Principal this past July. Now, this conference wouldn't be massive like CUE, or intimate like a Monterey CLHS/CUE conference, but would be more like a collaborative experience for those people who are already innovators in the Educational Technology field. I understand that many of the headliners, make their living this way, but I wanted to have something that would bring all of the innovators together in one place for three days and allow the group have some synergistic energy to tackle some of the issues surrounding EdTech and its implementation, or lack thereof in the schools of this country and around the world.

If you want to visualize it, think of a TED like conference or a FOO camp for just for those people working as innovators in the Educational Technology field. The location is great as well, since Woodside High School is one mile from Sand Hill Road the cradle of Silicon Valley Venture Capital Firms and the weather during the Summer months is great. San Jose and San Francisco are 25 miles away in opposite directions.

The idea came from a connection I had over the past year after having been a participant in the Google Teacher Academy (November '06) as an attendee and as a Lead Learner (June '08) and seeing the large whiteboard in the lobby at Google with all of the ideas on it and how employees were using their 20% time to create new and innovative projects that interest them, which have become new Google products. The image stuck with me again last summer when I saw the movie 'Accepted,' where two High School seniors create a ficticious college to accept them and then create the college to keep the charade going. What the students found out in the process was that they were more motivated to learn when the constraints placed on them by traditional educational institutions were removed. Although it doesn't exactly fit, one of Clay Shirky's quotes comes to mind. "Social Tools don't create collective action, they merely remove the obstacles to it."

Attendance would be limited to 600, with 500 receiving invites and the other 100 being selected through an application process. Participants would be responsible for their own travel and lodging. The cost for attendees is $0.

Call me crazy? Maybe crazy enough to make it work?

Top 50 Skills the Tech Savvy Educator Needs to Have

2008-12-29T09:17:00.000-08:00

(Image:Martin Kingsley via Flickr)

I have been mulling this post in my head over the past few months for a few reasons. First of all, as I speak at different educational technology conferences, I see teachers at many different places along the skill continuum with regards to tech skills and there wasn't consensus as to which skills were really the most valuable for teachers. Secondly, as a new administrator, I wanted to have a list of EdTech skills I could use during the interview process to be able to objectively evaluate potential candidates for teaching positions at my school.

So, I started the process of developing a list, I didn't initially start out to list 50, but to list the skills I felt were necessary for teachers to have, which would allow them and their students to take advantage of the tools and services available. I just started typing in a 'Word' document and quickly the list grew to over 40 skills, so I decided I would get to 50 and stop there. I put the skills into 6 different categories to make it easier for me to assess strengths and areas for improvement quickly.

So, here's my list, I am not saying that the list is definitive, but I do think it is solid. As you look at the list, which skills would you delete or add? I am interested to hear what others think, since I tend to have higher expectations for teachers.

- Google: (10)

- turn on ‘safe search’

- use Google as a dictionary

- use Google as a calculator or conversion tool.

- search web pages from a particular domain

- search web pages from a particular country

- search for particular file types.

- determine the sites linked to a particular site.

- search for non-copyrighted material.

- set up a Google Alert.

- translate text into another language

- Google Apps / Tools: (5)

- set up an RSS reader. (Google Reader, Bloglines)

- set up a Google Group

- create a Google Spreadsheets form.

- put a place marker in Google Earth.

- save a Google Earth file. (.kmz)

- Internet: (8)

- decode an Internet URL

- find the owner of an Internet domain.

- download a document or image from an Internet site.

- view a historical version of a web page.

- compare the traffic of two different web sites.

- create a blog.

- create a wiki.

- set up an online calendar.

- Image / Videos: (4)

- download/upload images to an photo sharing site. (Flickr / Picasa)

- download a ‘YouTube’ or other video service video

- embed media into a webpage, blog or wiki.

- create an online slide show.(VoiceThread, Photostory, Animoto, Picasa Web Album)

- Communication: (6)

- send, receive and respond to e-mail.

- attach a file to an e-mail

- send e-mail to multiple recipients and how to use copy and blind copy

- use an Instant Messaging Client. (AIM, Google Chat, Yahoo Messenger)

- set up a microblog (Twitter, etc.)

- set up an Internet ‘phone call.’ (Skype)

- set up a video chat.

- Cell Phone: (3)

- use your cell phone to send a text message.

- use your cell phone to search Google. (SMS)

- upload images from your cell phone to the Internet.

- Personal Computer Management: (13)

- cut and paste from/into any Office Productivity Application (Microsoft Office, Open Office) document.

- crop an image

- create charts and graphs in any spreadsheet application

- copy text data and paste it into a spreadsheet so it can be manipulated or sorted.

- convert any office productivity document into a file type usable by another application.

- create a .pdf file.

- create a mail merged document.

- add media to any presentation application. (PowerPoint)

- save any document to a flash drive.

- burn data onto a CD.

- convert audio files into MP3’s.

- do basic computer troubleshooting .(Physical, Hardware, Operating System)

- test an Internet connection. (ping)

I am interested to hear your responses... please leave a comment or e-mail me here.

Are You Willing to Take the Opportunities?

2008-12-22T10:21:00.000-08:00

“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities - brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.” - John Gardner, Founder - Common Cause and former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.

This is one of the quotes that Thomas Friedman uses to start the second half of his new book, "Hot, Flat and Crowded." Just as we face many issues in dealing with Global Warming and the depletion of fossil fuels on the planet, we also face many issues in education that necessitate the change from the standard 5 rows of desks inside a classroom, with students reading from a standardized text book, following along with a teacher who is probably following the same lesson plan they developed ten years ago.

As the most technologically savvy country on the planet (allowing us to have an ego!), we need to play to this strength to solve the problems of global warming and in education. Unlike the world of "Green" industries that are in their infancy, many of the technologies that can transform education are in their teens, metaphorically speaking. Which means, we have seen these devices develop and we have a good idea what they will look like when they have fully matured and reach adulthood, but there is still some opportunities for change.

The tools that will power the change in education are known to a certain extent, in the fact that we are quickly seeing a convergence of technology tools at a price point which will make them affordable and accessible for most teens to own. We have all seen the XO Laptop ($100 Laptop), ASUS Eee PC and the new Acer Aspire One, all of which have a price of less than $350.00 and have the full functionality of a standard laptop. There are also mobile devices like the iPhone, LG Dare, G1 and the BlackBerry Storm that have many of the functions of a laptop with access to the Internet via a 3G mobile network. Want proof of this convergence? Animoto, the music video slide show site, has recently launched a version for the iPhone.

We need to think of these mobile technologies as 'leap frog' technologies, just as most of the developed world 'leap frogged' the wired telephone in their homes and went directly to cell phones which don't need a cable. In the personal computing market, many teens may or may not have their own computers, but a vast majority of them will have cell phones (current data states 80% of all 13 to 18 year olds) and it is the primary mode of communication for most of them, if you look at voice and text services. (Video Here illustrating this point.) The current survey states that 15% of all teens already have 'smartphones' and with the current two year replacement cycle of cell phones in the US, the numbers of teens owing 'smartphones' will rise dramatically by 2010.

So, what does this mean for education? We have a good idea as to what kind of devices students in our classes will have and some of the basic functions they will have, which will continue to expand as each of the mobile carriers develop 'App Stores' for their phones, allowing third-parties to develop and market applications for their devices. Educators need to develop ways for students to use these devices in ways to authentically assess their proficiency. Liz Kolb's blog, "From Toy to Tool: Cellphones in Learning" is a great resource with many different ways to use cellphones in the educational process. Here are just a few...
Camera, video camera, voice recorder, search engine, polling responder, speech to text messaging, mobile blogging, to do lists, etc. The number of applications available will continue to expand, so for the tech savvy educator it is imperative that you learn how to best integrate these devices into your curriculum. You can even deliver or share content with your students via video or podcasts they can access from their phones. For the tech savvy administrator, you need to find those teachers who are moving in this direction and give them the encouragement and support to keep developing ways to integrate these devices into the curriculum. I know as we start looking forward, we will be looking for teachers who have the skill and desire to move in this direction.

Your comments and suggestions are welcome... If you have ideas of how to integrate cellphones or smartphones into the curriculum, please drop me a note!

Processing Ideas

2008-12-20T09:19:00.000-08:00

It has been awhile since I have been able to post on this blog, and the ideas have been piling up. Being a high school adminsitrator just doesn't give me the time to blog like I have had in the past. I have been able to keep up on most of the blogs I have followed in the past and read some books, but I haven't been as active in the Google Certified Teacher's Group as I had been prevously and I haven't 'tweeted' on Twitter as much either. That was one of the interesting side notes of my visit to Monterey earlier in the month, when I presented at the CLHS/CUE conference there. I had several people come up to me specifically to mention that they had noticed my absence from the blogosphere and the 'tweetsphere.' I was also impressed with the turn out I had in my one 3 hour session in Monterey, I had a triple sized room and eventhough I was the first thing on the agenda and not many people had arrived at the conference yet, I had a nice group that stuck with me the whole way through. If you were one of those who was in my first session in Monterey, thank you!

One of the goals of the Winter Break from school is for me to get some things done for school, but also to get some of the ideas that have been running through my mind out and posted here. I have things like "Filtering is Fallacy," "The 50 Skills Tech Savvy Teachers Must Have" and "Using a Crane to Lift Teachers from the Stone Age" as potential blog post titles. I have written a little on the filtering issue in the past and hit it hard during my last two presentations at the Monterey conference and in a private session with teachers in Piedmont. The 50 list came to me one afternoon when I was sitting at home spacing and I was actually able to pull over 40 skills off the top of my head in about 10 minutes. Thinking about a film showing the 50 skills in small screen casts mashed up together.

I am also prepping for a few one hour sessions at the CLHS statewide conference in Monterey in January on Website in an Hour and VoiceThread for Educators.

Nothing like being on vacation to get some work done....

Transitioning: Finding Time and Space

2008-10-25T10:38:00.000-07:00

It has been over a month since I have posted on this blog for a variety of reasons, but the biggest reason is that I have been climbing a sharp learning curve in my role as the Administrative Vice Principal at Woodside High School. I have likened the experience to running on a treadmill and having people throw me things to carry as I run and deciding what to catch and what to let fly by. In this vein, I am in a mode where I am working hard to become a good administrator, while at the same time remaining connected to my previous roles as an EdTech coordinator and teacher. One of my primary motivations to get into administration was to advance the idea that school and education is changing and technology will have a major role in that transition.

Will Richardson's blog, Weblogg-ed, has been one of my favorites since I have entered the blogosphere myself and he seems to have a finger on the pulse of the directions in the EdTech. His posts on some of the Lessig materials have been spot on and I have read several of the books he has recommended on his site, including Henry Jenkins, James Surowiecki, Daniel Pink, Don Tapscott and Clay Shirky. His latest post has a quote from Clay Shirky which rings true for me.

"Social tools don't create collective action - they merely remove the obstacles to do it." - Shirky

The tools are available to make education a truly interactive endeavor, yet we create artificial obstacles through legislation and school district policies and regulations to keep this from happening. The problem is that school districts can't stop it. The statistics from a variety of sources show that the proliferation of smart phones like the iPhone, the LG Dare and the new Blackberry Thunder which have the ability to present full web pages make any Internet content available to students on our campuses EVERY SCHOOL DAY! 92% of all 17 year-olds have cell phones and given the marketing nature of the nations cell phone companies, where you can up grade your phone every two years, by the time 2010 rolls around, a majority of the students on our high school campuses will have a smart phone where they can access any internet content.

To keep up... I am changing some of the blogs I subscribe to... First, I have added Liz Kolb's 'From Toy to Tool' blog where she consistently presents some of the best uses for cell phones in education. Secondly, I have added Dan Meyer's dy/dan blog. I have been a fan of Dan's starting this summer and some of his video relating the educational process back to inquiry and student engagement are truly powerful. I found out that he was a presenter at the ILC in San Jose, as I was last week, but I didn't get the chance to see his presentation, I am hoping we cross paths in Monterey at the CLHS/CUE conference in December, where we are both presenters.

One Foot in Each World... Literally and Figuratively

2008-09-20T09:28:00.000-07:00

It has been some time since I have posted on this blog for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, I have been trying to hit my stride at my new job as the Administrative Vice Principal at Woodside High School. It has been a long month, since school started on August 21, but I tell people I see around campus that, "I am still vertical." I am also teaching a few nights a week back in my old stomping ground at Capuchino High School in San Bruno for ROP(Regional Occupational Center) in the Cisco Networking Class. It has been helpful to keep my hand in the teaching arena, since I felt at different points in my career that some administrators didn't have enough of the classroom perspective to genuinely appreciate the art and craft of teaching. I do believe that teaching has an artistic / craft facet to it, not to say that non-artists can't be great teachers, but those who have the knack tend to hit their stride much more quickly than those who don't. This is something I need to remember as I begin the process of evaluating teachers over the next few months.

I am also starting to see part of my role as a bridge builder between my old role as a teacher and a technology coordinator to school site administration and district level administrators. We are currently at the crossroads in the role of technology in the educational process. We have many teachers who have done remarkable jobs in using technology to make the content and curriculum accessible to their students and allow them to exponentially increase their personal growth. There are others who have not moved in this direction, and while they are not bad teachers, they do limit the amount of growth their students could experience if they introduced some of the resources available today. The issue is that the door is already wide open, (see previous blog post) the longer we wait to bring all teachers into the conversation, the longer it will take to hit our collective stride as educators.

I have for years been a PC person. In my early years in dealing with technology, I was an Apple user. In fact one of the last things I did in High School in 1980, was to unpack the first Apple IIe's and set them up at Menlo-Atherton High School. In the mid-1990's as I began to become more involved in educational technology and tech integration, I found myself using the Windows platform more and more. By the time I started teaching a Computer Repair class in 1999, I was completely over on the Windows side of the continuum. My colleagues in the Google Certified Teacher's group referred to me at the 'Token Windows Guy." Over the past few years, I have found myself wanting to drift back more and more to the Apple platform for a variety of reasons, the biggest being the ability to create web content much easier and having a suite of integrated apps to do that was very valuable to me. Not that I couldn't do all of this on the Windows side of the house, but it was just pre-packaged on the Apple side. About 2 years ago, I was able to get a Intel iMac in my office at Capuchino. I was able to do things in iMovie and other things I really liked, but disliked shuffling media back and forth from a Windows machine.

So, in my new position at Woodside, I was able to make a clean start as far as technology goes, and what did I do? I planted myself firmly in the middle. This is my first blog post from my new MacBookPro running Parallels in Coherence Mode. So, what does that mean? I have both operating systems running at the same time sharing the same desktop. I have the Apple Dock on the left vertical edge and the Windows task bar on the right vertical edge of the screen. I have been able to have applications in both operating systems at the same time and switch between the two and share files between the two operating systems, as long as they have that same host application.

The goal today is to get the Google Reader account down to zero... It has been hovering around 1,000 the past two weeks, so let's see if I can get there. I bet there will be some cool stuff I will want to share along the way!

FYI: I am presenting at ILC2008, with two of my former Capuchino colleagues on October 15. Hope to see everyone there!

Are We Ready For 3.0?

2008-08-02T12:06:00.000-07:00

There has been some talk around the Internet about Web 3.0 and what does that exactly mean? There are several definitions of Web 3.0, but it is easier to see it as the next step along the computing continuum, instead of something new and different. And more importantly, what are the implications of Web 3.0 schools?

There is a good article on TechCrunchIT, written by Marc Benioff, outlining the differences between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Below is a video, which is a small section of an interview with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google and his definition of Web 3.0.

A more practical delineation of the differences between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 are as follows:

Web 1.0 - When you can access and consume (read/watch/listen) the content available on the Internet.
Web 2.0 - When you can access and consume (read/watch/listen) the content and react to it by 'publishing' your own content in some way. (blog/video/podcast) This can also facilitate the conversation between other consumers of the media. We access, consume, respond and republish in this stage. One piece of media can spring forth hundreds, if not thousands of responses. The responses reuse older media and ideas and bring them together in new and different ways (mashup), creating a new work.
Web 3.0 - When you can access, consume and interact with the media and applications by employing it to meet your needs and the needs of others. Google Apps is a good example of a Web 3.0 tool. Software is no longer something that is loaded on a local computer, it resides on a server located on the Internet. Terms like Cloud Computing and "Software as a Service" (SaaS) will become commonplace as more and more computing occurs on a server someplace other than the users home computer.

What are the implications of all of this and the effect on the educational process? There are a few which are significant.

Buying software is so Web 1.0: The necessity to have all the applications to use, produce and publish content on the Internet do not need to be on the user's local machine. There have been blogging tools and podcasting tools for quite some time, but in the past few months we have started to see online video editing tools. This makes it possible for users to create rich, multimedia content any place at any time. (See previous blog post!) Students don't need to own the application, it is on the Internet for them to access for free or in the case of some of the heavy hitters like Microsoft, for a subscription fee. Personally, I don't think the subscription model is going to work after we have been given access to many very powerful applications for free.

- Imagine students going on a field trip, taking video clips from the trip with their mobile phone, editing those clips and adding other content from online sources while on the bus on the way back to school and posting the video content on YouTube or Vimeo and embedding the video on the class wiki. Students would be ready to present the learning to their peers when they get back to school.
The Filtering Fallacy: Filtering Internet traffic on High School campuses is a fallacy! Do we really think that we are going to keep students away from undesirable content at school? How many new 3G iPhones or LG Dare's do you think you are going to see in the hands of students when school starts again in a few weeks? Can we really think we can stop it? Lawrence Lessig's quote about students and the way they interact with technology really hits the point home.

"We have to recognize something about our kids – that they are different from us. We made mixed tapes they remix videos. We watched TV, they make TV. It is technology that has made them different. We can’t kill the instinct technology produces, we can only criminalize it. We can’t stop our kids from using it, we can only drive it underground. We can’t make our kids passive again, we can only make them ‘pirates’."
And the walls come tumbling down: The statistics I quoted in a post last week do come into play here as well... More than 1/2 of the people on the planet have a cell phone, this includes the students we teach. The current statistics show that 91% of 17 year old girls and 78% of 17 year old boys own a cell phone. The mobile phone manufacturers estimate that 20% of a teen agers own a 'smartphone' like the 'iPhone' which will allow them to access Internet based media content. The point of entry for students to have and use web enabled mobile phones is lowering very quickly. Verizon is currently offering the LG Dare to continuing customers on their two year upgrade cycle at $149. The new 3G iPhone is priced at $199. This will only add to the popularity of the platform, which is expected to grow three to four fold in the next few years.

- To illustrate this point a little further just take a look at the biggest dance craze by US teens over the past year. The "Soulja Boy - Crank It" video has been viewed over 33 million times in the past year. It is in the Top 15 of all music videos and Top 20 of all videos all time on YouTube. The video has become so popular that you cannot embed the authorized version from YouTube any longer. I have embedded an alternate version of the video below, which has been viewed almost 10 million times. The video shows how this dance and music craze spread... It spread through computers and smartphones and teenagers posting embedded copies of the video on their MySpace sites.

Where is this going to go? I think we all have an idea and we need to get ready for it, because if we don't it just might trample us!

Omnisio: SuperCool Educational Tool

2008-07-31T08:51:00.000-07:00

Google has purchased Omnisio, a site that allows you to take YouTube videos and edit the clips and create new videos to be posted on YouTube. You can also add PowerPoint slides from services like SlideShare, etc. to the videos. For those districts who have unblocked YouTube access this could be an awesome creative tool for teachers and students. I like the ability to create a video lecture with only the specific clips I want and adding slides to the mix where the teacher or student can do the voice over on those slides. You can then embed the video into a website or wiki. Awesome!

- TechCrunch Announcement of Google's Purchase

- Review of Omnisio from KillerStartups

- Omnisio Website

Now, I know some of you are saying.... I can't use this tool, my district blocks YouTube. Well, Here is what I would advise... Create the video you want using Omnisio, post to YouTube and then download to your hard drive and use at school or send out as an attachment or post to another video hosting service that is not blocked by your district. I have seen many of these services, but the one I like that allows embedding and has good picture quality is Vimeo.

Below is a video from Dan Meyer, a teacher in San Lorenzo Valley, CA, which is just down the road from me. I got connected to Dan from reading Will Richardson's blog last week and really liked the video below on classroom management and I am a HUGE fan of "The Wire." I also want to show you the quality from the Vimeo site.

dy/av : 006 : carver's classroom management from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

Does this have the potential to change your teaching... your students learning? I think so?

The Divide: Real and Imagined

2008-07-27T15:56:00.000-07:00

The Digital Divide has been an issue that I have personally worked hard to break down and I know that my efforts alone are not going to solve the problem, but I want to do my part to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. Yesterday, there was an article that appeared in the San Jose Mercury News where they published the statistics for Computer Use, Internet Use and Broadband access for people of different ethnic groups. The results are some what surprising, but not completely unexpected.

This data is promising and troubling all at the same time. I was happy to see that Internet use among Asians and Blacks is on a par with White Americans.This means that Asians and Blacks are learning how to use the medium, even if it is only to e-mail or access social networks, and integrating it into their daily lives. Many of these skills are transferable to other applications and technology tools and will eventually enter students academic lives. The troubling statistic is that Latinos lag behind all other groups by 20 percentage points in Internet usage and Broadband access. One can only hypothesize for the reasons, personally I believe that culture, language and the lack of Internet access in Central and South American countries are all contributing factors. The article also mentioned that in households earning less than $40,000 annually the level of Computer and Internet access is less than 50%.

Programs, like Digital Bridge, at Capuchino High School and Computer Check Out at Woodside can help bring computers and Internet access to many families who currently do not have access. With more than half of all of the people on the planet owning cell phones, those running on 3G wireless networks will help bring many more Latinos into the digital age.

While most schools send most school-wide communication home in both English and Spanish, I also think teachers need to work with families who speak languages other than English, by using translation tools like BabelFish and Google Translate to bridge the communications gap.

Is the "Digital Divide" real? Yes... Is it permanent? No! Will it disappear tomorrow? No, but we can see it from here!

Better Than the $100 / EeePC/Classmate PC ?

2008-07-21T22:30:00.000-07:00

Today, on the TechCrunch blog, the editor, Michael Arrington, based on a blog post on the Macrumors blog, proposed the creation of the device like the one above. It would have a browser (Firefox) and Skype and a USB port. There would be no keyboard, but there were several suggestions in the comments section, like an on screen keyboard like the iPhone, a small USB keyboard or handwriting recognition with a stylus. The unit would also have speakers and a web camera built in. Arrington wants the retail price to be around $200 and the screen size would be approximately twice the size of the iPhone.

Something like this would be a educator's dream. You could reduce the cost of entry for all students and with the price of access to 3G networks dropping (future blog post) we could have ubuquitous for all students by 2010.

The unit would have access to all of the things the students want and all of the things teachers want them to have access to.

What do you think? Is it plausible? Is it desirable? Only time will tell.

Future Trends: How Fast Will We Get to Ubuquitous Access?

2008-07-13T21:55:00.000-07:00

There has been quite a bit of discussion about how computing and social networks will create a completely connected world. Just in the past few days there have been more than a few things that have crossed by me that tell me that we are right around the corner from having a completely connected world and as educators, we need to be at the forefront when it comes to using the connectivity our students will have.

Here are some statistics and other items that I have seen lately that make me believe that we will have completely connected students by 2010.

A little more than a year ago, more than half the world had never made a phone call, now more than half the population of the world owns a cell phone. (Quoted in Clay Shirky's interview with Will Richardson last week!)

Because of the nature of the technology (the ease of being able to interconnect cell towers wirelessly, which decreases infrastructure costs), cell phone penetration has been able to 'leapfrog' other technologies. In the years between 1998 and 2003 growth rate of cell phones in Africa was over 5,000% mostly because it was cheaper to install cell service than it was to install actual copper or fiber optic cable. The growth rate of cell phones in the United States between 1995-2004 was over 300%, from 34 million to 159 subscribers. The rates for these services have also dropped considerably from approximately .25 a minute in 1995 to .06 a minute currently.
Most 3G networks offer Internet access with their service.
The newest cell phones run on 3G or 3rd Generation Wireless service, which allows the transfer not just calls, but other forms of data including broadband wireless data and multimedia Internet traffic. 3G networks are growing at a rapid rate, with 200 million subscribers in 2007, which is only 6.7% of the total number of wireless subscribers, but in countries where 3G networks were first introduced (Japan and South Korea), over 50% of the wireless subscribers are now connected to 3G networks. Most of the 'industrialized world' will have a majority of their subscribers connected to 3G networks by 2010.

The newest 3G iPhone has a full feature set, including Internet access by connecting to an available wi-fi hot spot or using the phone's own network from the cell phone provider. Apple is also offering a whole new set of applications to be used with the iPhone, all of which are available at the Apple Store.

Google has been busy in the cell phone market as well. First, offering over 10 million dollars to developers to build applications for the 'Open Handset Alliance' platform. Google may also come out with a GPhone as well, as revealed this week.

Yesterday, the editors of the 'TechCrunch Blog' held a round table discussion yesterday in Menlo Park, CA to hypothesize the future of the mobile phone computing platform. The discussion was streamed over UStream and once I can find it archived someplace, I will embed a copy of the discussion here.

Now, why am I writing all of this now? Because I got slapped in the face with it last week. During Summer School, I had a teacher bring me a confisgated cell phone and I called the student in to discuss the matter. The student quite calmly announced he was typing his paper on his cell phone, so he could access it later from home and perform edits. He did this instead of writing out the paper long hand and have to type it in later.

More to come soon in this rapidly changing computing landscape....

Snap the Web

2008-07-07T09:37:00.000-07:00

A new service, Sazell.com, has launched today that allows you to take a snap shot of any web page, highlight it and share it with others via RSS. Below is a sample snapshot I did of the Edupunk page on Wikipedia.

The service also has a 'Digg' function, where pages that are 'snapped' more frequently are posted on the main page for others to see as they access the service.

From an educational standpoint, this type of application could be invaluable as a way to collect resources and bookmarks prior to a research paper or project. Students could paste their 'snaps' on a single page and use that as the beginnings of their bibliography. The ability to add visual content to bookmarks that are shared is a big plus and also gives students an additional frame of reference for their information.

The Tech Crunch Blog did a big write on Sazell here.

The site is in 'private beta' now, but I just typed in 'TechCrunch' as the invite code and it allowed me to create an account.

Change Agent at Work: Leadership Day

2008-07-02T09:23:00.000-07:00

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit."
-- Aristotle

How can we expect the students of the 21st Century to be information literate and become digital citizens if we do not provide the training for them to learn and model these skills in schools? This question has been posed to educators for the past decade with a variety of responses; some acknowledging the issue, some in denial that the issue exists and others finding a variety of reasons to keep from taking any positive action.

The new ISTE NETS*T standards for teachers was released this week at NECC in San Antonio. They reflect a change in the role of the teacher as someone who 'possesses' the knowledge that students need to learn to someone who teaches students how to interact with the media they come into contact with in an academic and ethical way.

1. Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity
2. Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments
3. Model Digital-Age Work and Learning
4. Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility
5. Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership

Over the past ten years, I have been working with teachers to integrate technology and media into their teaching repertoire. I have worked with a great number of teachers who are eager and wanting to move forward in their classrooms. For the most part, I have encountered these teachers at conferences or professional development sessions I have spoken at and found the energy and professionalism of these teachers truly remarkable. These teachers are the few, from among the many who could be doing more to bring 21st Century Skills to the students who are in our classes everyday.

When I was the Technology Coordinator of a school and a little later on of a School District, I would always be reminded by those who didn't want to join the party, "Why should I do this, I am not being evaluated on it?" My reply was always: "You do this because you are supposed to be a professional and work to improve your personal skill set and provide the best education for the students in your classroom." Well, I pushed some forward, not as many as I would have liked to, but some. Capuchino High School has the reputation and can state that they are the most technologically integrated school in the San Mateo Union High School District, but I still think Capuchino has a lot of room for growth.

I looked at the situation and realized that many of the teachers I had spoken with were right. The teachers were not being evaluated on the level of technology integration. Why? Because the administrators responsible had no idea what effective educational technology integration looked like. We haven't trained many of the adminstrators in tech integration, nor did we provide them with any models that they could use for comparison purposes. To some of the admininstrators I spoke with, posting a syllabus online and being able to create a PowerPoint would be considered high level technology integration.

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
-- Mahatma Gandhi

Over the past three years, I have worked outside of my local school and district to build educational technology integration. The Google Teachers Academy, The Digital Bridge Project, and a variety of presentations (CUE / CLHS / CTAP) I have done over the past three years have been my efforts to increase the level of tech integration. I also have mentioned on this blog several times, this has been my motivation for moving into the administrative ranks.

So, I may not solve the issue all on my own, but I will definitely be part of the solution and move the agenda forward in my small way!

How Long is Your Lever?

2008-06-28T08:33:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled across Vicki Davis' UStream this morning from Edubloggercon, which I was extremely jealous that I couldn't attend, at NECC. The presenter was Kevin Jarrett, a Cyber-colleague from the Google Certified Teacher's group. Kevin was presenting on Google tools and it was neat that I was then able to share the two sets of slides (Google Apps - Education Edition and Google Sites) I used during my presentation at the most recent Google Teachers Academy (GTA) this past Wednesday (June 25).

"Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough, and I will move the world."
- Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody p. 6

How much leverage did this interaction have? Think about it... I was in Fremont, CA in my kitchen, Vicki and Kevin were in San Antonio, TX and they were broadcasting to the world and there were at least 30 people in the back channel. I had heard reports from some of the people at GTA that there were going to be upwards of 500 people involved at Edubloggercon.

The leverage that teachers now have to share best practices, learn from each other, and connect and collaborate is truly amazing. Getting these tools into the hands of more students and teachers and getting them to engage in this new and rapidly growing space is one of my goals as a professional educator. When I arrived at GTA on Wednesday, my name tag had under the role section, "CUE Lead Learner." I took a great deal of pride in this title, since I still see myself as a learner and fully expected to learn from the participants at GTA, which I did. (Pulling the locations of participants from a spreadsheet and then plotting them on a Google Map is VERY COOL!)

So, the question is.... where are you going to stand? Because the tools available to you today definitely give you a long enough lever to move the world!

Google Teacher's Academy - The Fourth Generation

2008-06-27T16:15:00.000-07:00

I have been very fortunate in the fact that I have been able to work with some truly wonderful people in the area of Educational Technology. In November 2006, I was one of the first 50 Google Certified Teachers, and it has opened several doors to me over the past 20 months. First of all, I have had the opportunity to work with a great group of people in the area of Educational Technology. The ability to collaborate with many experts in the EdTech field has allowed me to grow and take new chances. Kathleen Ferenz, Cheryl Davis and Jerome Burg (The EdTech Rockstars!) have allowed me to hang around and present in many different venues with them. This has given me the opportunity to meet many new people and get feedback from the writing I have done on this blog from people who have attended presentations I have given.

In the past two days, I have had another one of those experiences that come once in a very long time! On Wednesday, June 25, I had the opportunity to be one of the presenters at the newest Google Teacher's Academy. I had the opportunity to meet another 50 truly gifted people and watch them go through the same experience that changed my life almost two years ago. When I was giving my presentations, the questions and the amount that the participants already knew about the products was very impressive. There were times I felt more like a cheerleader than a presenter. I have to admit, I got a little star struck when Vicki Davis was in my presentation on Google Apps - Education Edition and Google Sites after I had gushed all over her in the line waiting for and on the bus over to the main campus for lunch. Vicki had a great Keynote to start the afternoon session. One of the anaolgies she made about the British Fleet and the Spanish Armada in 1588 and schools today was spot on! Chris Walsh and Esther Wojcicki were as wonderful as they were when I went through the academy.

Then... if that weren't enough, I was able to attend the GTA - Reload for the GCT's in the group I went through the academy with in November 2006. There were about 25 of the original 50 who were able to make it back to the Mountain View campus to reconnect and work with some of the Google engineers on the products. The opportunity to provide feedback to the Google engineers in Google Apps - Education Edition, Google Groups, Google Apps, Google Book Search, Google Sites and Google Earth / Sky was very cool. It really made me feel like I was in on the ground floor on some of the Google development.

The connections I have made over the past 20 months within my Google Certified Teacher's group and the online connections I have made with the Santa Monica and New York City cohorts have made me step it up a few notches in my own professional development. I can only imagine how much more the bar is going to be raised with the newest Mountain View cohort! I guess I better get my high jumping shoes on!

A big thank you to everyone who I have had the opportunity to connect with over the past 20 months and to all of those newly minted GCT's who were so kind to me during my presentations on Wednesday!

Congrats Esther!

2008-06-21T09:09:00.001-07:00

Congratulations to Esther Wojcicki, a phenominal English and Journalism teacher from Palo Alto High School to being named to the Creative Commons Board. Esther's work with students at Palo Alto and the work the students have done in their online Journalism program is a model that I think will soon be replicated by schools all over the country. I know Capuchino High School is moving this way as I write! (One of my last acts as I moved to Woodside High School, was to get an online journalism class piloted.)

I first met Esther when I attended the Google Teacher's Academy in November 2006, when she presented Google Docs to our group, before it was really out to the public.

I am personally looking forward to Esther's contributions to the Creative Commons board and the direction I see coming in relation to Copyright, Share-Alike and other types of creative licensing of original works and the role they play in the educational process.

Again, congratulations to Esther! We are all looking forward to great things!

Guerrillas vs. Evangelists

2008-06-08T21:17:00.000-07:00

I have been away from this spot for way too long. With the end of the school year and a myriad of other duties, I have been unable to get back here to get this out. I actually started this post several times and then hit 'delete' thinking that it was a little 'out there.' But as I kept thinking about it, it made more and more sense. So, what is it?

Over the past three years, when my EdTech epiphany occurred, I have gone back and forth looking for the right paradigm to explain my vigilance in the EdTech arena. I started with evangelism, thinking that I needed to convert the masses and bring Educational Technology to them and convert others. Did I need a list of theses, like Martin Luther had in 1515 in Wittenberg? I know that Wesley Fryer contemplated his own list of theses in one of his blog posts. I saw the need to bring the information and the skills to the teachers I worked with on a daily basis, but if I went over board I would run the risk of alienating some and end up with the opposite effect. I also looked into some of the strategies of Guy Kawasaki, one of the original 'Apple Evangelists' to gain some insight into non-religious evangelism. What it really came down to was the dedication to an ideal or set of ideas that any individual wanted to garner more attention for. I was much more comfortable with that definition in theory and practice.

I have also used the idea of being an EdTech Guerrilla. I even have registered the domain, Guerrilla Learning, which sits fallow right now and my current professional development wiki is titled, "Guerrilla Learning." I took the wikipedia definition of Guerrilla Warfare and broke it down to illustrate how students (the guerrillas) and the teachers (the established government) interact with educational technology. The students, being more willing to take chances with the technology and media they had access to would begin to create rich content and use it to demonstrate their mastery of educational objectives, whereas the school, not being able to control the information and media would attempt to lock it out. I have rattled around the ideas of guerrillas, but the ideals of Che Guevara didn't exactly get me where I wanted to be. When I first thought of Guerrilla Warfare, I had images of the Movie, "Red Dawn" from the mid 80's with Patrick Swayze and teenagers from Colorado taking on the Soviet backed, Cuban paratroopers. Although, I dislike the overtly military references, I did tend to identify with the definition on many different levels. First, those taking part did so of their own choice. Secondly, they used what every was available to them to advance their cause or ideals. Third, there was an emphasis on being mobile, and attacking from ambush or other advantageous positions, which is a definite trend in EdTech. (mobility and quickness)

So, what is my goal? My goal is to equip teachers and students with the tools necessary to create rich media and use it to demonstrate their mastery of educational objectives. To teach teachers and students that they are the masters of their own knowledge and they do not need to rely on someone lecturing on it to obtain it, it is available on any Internet accessible computer. But to truly make teachers and students accountable for their own learning, we must teach them the skills to evaluate and make informed decisions about the content they are consuming.

The paradigm is important in the sense that it gives someone a point of reference or a way to scaffold the skills and information to make meaning of it for the teachers and students. What paradigms do you you use? How do you use paradigms personally? How do you teach students to use paradigms to take control of their own learning? Regardless of the specific paradigm that you or your students use, having a well thought out systematic process to teach one's self is well worth it and it is something that brings focus to the teaching and learning process.

Going Public: A Transformation of Consciousness

2008-05-25T13:09:00.001-07:00

Over the past few years, I haven't made it much of a secret that I was attempting to move into the Administrative ranks after spending over 20 years in the classroom. I looked and looked for models that I would like to teach in and couldn't find one that would suit my needs, so I decided I needed to move forward and work with a team towards creating it. I have always liked the Gandhi quote, "We must be the change we wish to see in the world." So this is what I am doing. In early May, I was offered and accepted the position of Administrative Vice Principal at Woodside High School in Woodside, CA. I will start at Woodside on July 1, 2008. This will be a homecoming of sorts, since I graduated from a school in the same district.

I will continue to be active in EdTech issues, being involved with the Google Educators Group and doing Professional Development sessions in Northern California. I am already scheduled to speak at the Innovative Learning Conference in San Jose in October and at the CLHS/CUE Technology Conference in December in Monterey. I will also continue to write on this blog, eventhough if you go to it now through Blogger, it has changed. First, the actual color scheme is now the Woodside orange, replacing the Capuchino green and the title has changed slightly from "EdTech from just a little north of the Valley" to "EdTech from the Valley" paying due respect that Woodside High School is about 2 miles from Sand Hill Road, the financial heart of Silicon Valley.

I wrote a response to a Will Richardson post in December, which I have quoted previously, where I outlined there were two ways to create change. Either work within the current system or outside of it. I have made a conscious decision that the only way to evoke long-lasting, institutional change is to work within the guidelines of the current model. The nature of education is going to change, it is inevitable and I want to be on the front lines leading the charge.

So, as my last day as a full time teacher comes to a close this Thursday, May 29, 2008, I am looking forward to the new challenges that will present themselves in the coming months!

Hey... maybe I can get some of the high-tech big shots to stop by? Doubtful... but you never know! (smile)

Professional Development Bliss: Lead Learner as Student

2008-05-01T10:48:00.000-07:00

About a week ago, I lead a wiki professional development session for a few people involved in a grant our school and region is currently working with. The BRIDGE (Bay Region Initiative for Digital Gap Elimination) grant is a group of Northern California Community Colleges, High Schools and Regional Occupation Programs working together to develop career paths in the digital arts. Part of our mission is to build the capacity of the faculties of these institutions in the teaching of courses in the digital arts, the dissemination of best practices and facilitate articulation agreements between K-12, Community Colleges and ultimately to UC/CSU campuses.

Our wiki workshop was designed to use wiki's as a collaborative tool that can be used as a class website or as an individual student portfolio to house their work. I also wanted each participant to create a wiki that they could implement immediately. One of the participants was a Audries Blake, who is the new chair of the grant committee from Cabrillo College in Aptos. As I began to teach the section on embedding video into wiki pages, she called me over for assistance. She showed me her current work, which was a wiki dedicated to the work of her father, J. Herman Blake, an educator going back to the early 1960's. She had found a video on the University of California, Berkeley web site that was an interview from October of 1963 with a UC Berkeley Professor; her father, who was a graduate student at UC Berkeley at the time and Malcolm X. Yes! "THE" Malcolm X! We had a little difficulty embedding the video directly from the UC Berkeley site since the video was in Real Player, but a quick 'YouTube' search found the video in several 3 to 4 minute pieces.

In working on this with Audries, I found myself drawn to her father's story. After the workshop ended that day, I took some time to research her father's career. J. Herman Blake was a graduate student at UC Berkeley at the time of the video above. He eventually earned a doctorate in sociology from UC Berkeley. In 1966, he became the first African-American professor at UC Santa Cruz, Dr. Blake also served as the President at Tougaloo College and in leadership positions at Indiana University, Swarthmore College and Iowa State University.

Dr. Blake is the utmost authority on Gullah culture, a group of African-Americans living along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia and in the Sea Islands. Dr. Blake also wrote the Introduction for Huey Newton's autobiograhy, 'Revolutionary Suicide.' I also found out that the Black Panther Party's famous march on the California State Capitol was 41 years ago, yesterday. May 2, 1967 which was also my 5th birthday. Reading between the lines, Newton and Blake's paths coincided in the late 1970's when Newton was a student at UCSC and Blake was on the faculty.

So... what is the point? The teacher became the student, a Lead Learner! Through my own personal initiative, I learned about something I didn't know before. I enriched my life because I took the time to learn about someone else. I was able to do this quickly and easily because I knew how to learn. I had the skills to teach myself. If we stop and think, isn't what we should be doing with the students in our classrooms? Teaching students how to learn and teach themselves?

Why I Am Moving Into Administration

2008-04-29T13:37:00.000-07:00

As most of you, who have read this blog in the past, I have made no secret about moving into the Administrative ranks. I always get a 'why?' from people I meet at workshops I present at and other teachers in my district. The biggest reason is the graphic above. I have worked over the past 15 years toward integrating more technology resources into the educational process, because it was apparent to me early on that information was the most important resource in our society. The difference becomes in the way "information" or presently "media" is seen as part of the process. The 20th Century Model says that students and teachers need to 'possess' or 'know' the information they are presenting or learning in class. All teachers in high school classrooms today are there because they have shown a level of competence or possess a 'body of knowledge' in a particular subject area. In the 21st Century Model, teachers and students do not need to possess the information available they need to be able to manipulate the information in ways useful to them in their academic and personal lives.

There are many in the 'Edublogosphere' who propose that the newest generation of teachers need to 'lifelong learners.' But these teachers need to fill a different need in today in their classrooms. Teachers need to frame the learning in their classrooms, but they also have to be flexible enough to allow students to find their own way to internalize the material that is essential to the course.

How do you think schools would change if we had Administrators who were tech savvy and had the skills to identify, evaluate and integrate technology into the educational process? How long would it take for this to happen?

Testing Isn't HOTS

2008-04-05T08:28:00.000-07:00

Its been a few weeks since I posted here, for a variety of reasons, but I am in the throws of 'blogger's Guilt' and need to get this post out. I get in to these periods, where I want things to change immediately and get frustrated when they don't change at the rate I want them to. Over the last few weeks I have seen some really cool things happening in Educational Technology and say why can't we do this all... TODAY!

Create, Evaluate, Analyze and Apply are the four upper levels of the Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) identified in Bloom's Taxonomy and I want to see it used more in the form of assessment but I find that in education we constantly get lost in the quagmire of easy to assess multiple choice tests.

We just finished our annual round of STAR tests at Capuchino and it is huge institutional stressor. First, we adapt the daily schedule to administer the test, while trying to maintain some modest level that some instruction is really going on. Second, we pull most of the instructional aides from their assignment to shuffle test documents and booklets from box to box in preparation for the next days test. Lastly, we maintain a J. Edgar Hoover like security with the tests, with a special room that no one is allowed to enter. Teachers walk in and they wait at a counter for one of two or three instructional aides to get them their testing material. We ask teachers to sign an affidavit swearing the utmost security for all of the testing material. (I would think this would be within someone's professional standards, but there are those who would do anything to make themselves look like better teachers than they are.)

I know the question has been asked and answered several times and in several ways in the past, but why can't we create a state wide form of assessing students that does not involve bubbling in a scannable answer document. We have done a lot with rubrics to allow for objective assessment of writing and projects, but I think one of the thrusts of teacher training in the future needs to be in assessment. One of the benefits I have seen in moving from teaching Social Science to teaching in the Technology Arts has been the authentic form of assessment that is available to me. I can assign a project for students to complete using a computer or building a network, my assessment of their efforts can be boiled down to three words... does it work? Some of the literature dealing with Professional Learning Communities advocates for students to receive grades of 'A', 'B', 'C' or 'Not Yet.' Students would work on mastery of a set objectives before moving onto a new set of objectives.

I am adding a video from Dean Shareski about assessment and goal setting, I think there are some great analogies and metaphors from the point of view of a Canadian Football player and his coach.

How should schools deal with assessment and mastery of objectives in an educational system that is rapidly changing to meet the needs of a student body that will need to have a skill set that is yet to be defined? How should we assess student learning in the future? Let me know!

Coming to a School Near You

2008-03-28T08:12:00.000-07:00

Chris Pirillo, who has made his name through his work on Tech TV and on his web site Lockergnome.com, has announced that he wants to support the development of an open source Content Management System. (CMS) Chris wants to 'de-geekify' the process of managing a CMS and make it easier for individuals and groups to set up their own CMS the way they want it with individual modules that will allow: chat rooms, forums, video, podcasts, blogs, wikis, pages, etc. This way, a school or other organization could download the CMS and the modules they want to install and have their own 'walled garden' of tools for their school site. Chris is supporting the further development of the 'Drupal' CMS, there are others out there including, 'Joomla.' If you want to see some examples of CMS sites. The Sequoia Union High School District uses Joomla and the Alameda County Office of Education uses Drupal. (The video below is Chris' explanation, but it is about 45 minutes in total length, so beware - but the first few minutes will give you the best information)

This could be a huge benefit to school districts, lowering the 'technical point of entry' to have their own CMS. To do something like this in the past required a number of technical support staff to install and maintain the system for the school. One of the issues I see when I work with schools and technology is that the educators and the technical support staff don't interface well. I live in both worlds, having been a classroom teacher for many years and having some technical training, I often become the interpreter between the geeks and teachers. Time to get these guys on the same page... this might be it!

So, what is the cost of entry? One computer that can be used as a server. The rest of the material is free, unless you need to register a new domain name, which can be done for a few dollars a year. You will also need the support of your network administrator to get a static IP address so that people can find you!

I'm simplifying the process somewhat, but I think it is definitely something many schools could implement quickly and easily to create a dynamic web presence.

Change School: Climbing Pyramids - Real and Fabricated

2008-03-27T11:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I had the unique opportunity to go indoor rock climbing with my daughter in a facility like the one in the picture. I have to admit that I was a bit hesitant to participate myself, since for those of you who do not know me personally, I was at one time close to 300 pounds in weight and never had much confidence in activities like this. I was an athlete in high school and college and since I have lost a significant amount of weight, so I decided to give it a go. I think this is what some of our students must feel like when we ask them to do things that are completely outside of their character. The fear of failure and what the perception will be of the others around completely controls their behavior because they do not feel safe enough to take risks.

When I first strapped on the climbing gear I started getting a little nervous and I was in a facility with a lot of kids (Spring Break Week here!) and a few parents there watching their kids try to assault these walls of fabricated rock formations which are screwed into the wall. The wall or pyramid we are attempting to get students to climb is the revised version of Bloom's Taxonomy, pictured below. As teachers, when students start we try to provide more places where students can place their hands and feet to assist them getting up the wall. As their technique and skill level improves, we remove some of the supports that we initially provided. As for me on the rock wall... I missed on my first attempt up the wall, but I was successful in 7 subsequent attempts, including the course I missed on my first attempt. After I was successful the first time, it became easier and easier to transfer those skills and confidence to other climbing courses in the facility. Many of our students act the same way, a single success can be parlayed into a series of successes.

Too much of the time, our goals are tied to high stakes testing, which has limited value, since once the test is over, students usually do not maintain mastery of the material because it is typically learned out of context. The material has no meaning, because it was not applied to a particular idea. HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills) help move students up the Bloom's pyramid. Project based learning, blogging, podcasting, video, etc. allow students to apply, analyze, synthesize and create their own mental maps and internalize the learning that has taken place.

Another aspect of high stakes testing is the fact that the tests are designed to measure a body of knowledge to be learned in a particular year and some students will be able to learn in that time frame, while others will not. Some of the work of Saphier and the Research for Better Teaching program, discussing teaching loops and support for learners can assist teachers in enhancing their own repertoire and in turn helping students achieve. What we are really after is creating a system where students can demonstrate mastery in a particular subject.

Will Richardson on his blog mentions some use of Web 2.0 tools and their value in allowing teachers to share, refine and connect to other teachers.

I know it would require some front end loading, but if districts were using wikis to house curriculum and encouraging teachers to work off of them as they move through the year, noting, tweaking, fine tuning, reflecting, etc., it would be one way that they could begin to make good use of a Web 2.0 tool and make it easier to connect to what other folks are doing. Not to mention the growing of some very important local network connections (which then, of course, could be expanded out.) And the other piece, of course, is that it’s a “safe” way to get started at least in terms of not having to deal with student participation issues.

Go back to the first "Change School" post. "Personally honest, but institutionally corrupt." What structures are in place that will help teachers move forward and improve their teaching? But that is for another post.

Are you ready to adjust the path along the pyramid with supports to help students initially move up the pyramid, but then remove the supports to provide students with an authentic learning experience?

Change School

2008-03-23T21:30:00.000-07:00

I guess it is fitting that the leader of the Change Congress movement is also the founder of Creative Commons. I sure hope that Lawrence Lessig, licensed the material on the site as a share-alike attribution license, because I about to violate his copyright if he didn't. I spent some time watching the videos on the Internet with Lawrence Lessig and Barack Obama this weekend and came away thinking that the same way they look at the presidency and congress, I look at education and school. This was part of the debate I engaged in on Will Richardson's blog in December last year and he offered support if I were to ever run for political office. I feel strongly about this and I know there are plenty of others in the EduBlogosphere who feel the same way. Will quoted Clay Burrell and his thoughts about leaving schools if he really wanted to make a difference in the lives of his students. Well, I am quoting Barack Obama, when I say that teachers must have a "belief that change is possible."

We are preparing students for a world we cannot accurately define. (attributing this to David Warlick - since that is where I think I heard this first.) Karl Fisch, in his excellent "Did You Know..." video, states that students in our classes now will have 14 jobs... by the time they are 38 years old. We have 19th Century classrooms for 21st Century students and current laws encourage teachers to engage in the status quo because there is no motivation to improve or be innovative. There are a few teachers, who have taken it upon themselves to move forward, but their only reward is longer hours and the personal knowledge that they are truly "educational professionals." When speaking about congress, Lawrence Lessig states, "Members of Congress are personally honest, but institutionally corrupt." I could easily make this same point about the teaching profession. I know many teachers who are some of the most personally honest people I know, yet they are institutionally corrupt because they fall into the trap of "teaching one year thirty times."

Smaller Learning Communities and Professional Learning Communities show some promise, since they actively engage both teachers and students to take responsibility for learning and refining their activities as both students and teachers. The current state of education makes their wide spread implementation improbable since many of the core strategies of both require schools and school districts to lower class size and hold advisories in order to allow a group of teachers to have extended contact with the same group of students. Lowering class size and advisory periods costs significantly more than the traditional 35 students, seated in five rows across, seven seats deep. We have become extremely effective in moving the human herd from information grazing spot to the next spot, but is this the best way to educate them?

I think most agree this is not the best for our students or best for our society, but where does the tipping point come to change the system to something better? I have some ideas myself... more to follow.

Google Undercover:

2008-03-23T12:53:00.001-07:00

Google has been the dominate search engine on the Internet for several years now, but there are many, many things you can do with Google that most people don't know about. Many of these hidden gems inside of Google add some tools that help you become a search engine pro. Many of you know about and use the 'link' and 'site' searches that you can use in Google, I cover these in depth in many of the presentations I do, specifically in the 'World Wide Literacy' presentation I have done at the CLMS Statewide Conference and at CUE in Palm Springs, when I pinch hit for Chris Dede. The two videos below cover many of these Google functions, that the advanced user uses regularly.

These are some lesser known tools that are deeply undercover, but can re
ally help you if you need to validate or track information that has mysteriously disappeared.

FileType Search: The filetype search is the one piece of this post that many people know about, but I included it because I think it is one that most teachers don't know about and probably should. Why? In many schools, the school subscribes to a service to check student work for plagiarism using turnitin.com or some other like service. These services do a great job comparing text passages with the written work of other authors, but typically will not index PowerPoint presentations. If you are having students use PowerPoint to present their work, you should know about how to use the filetype search to find PowerPoint presentations posted on the Internet.

Page History: Ever want to find a page that has mysteriously disappeared from the Internet? There are many ways to do this, but it all depends on whether you anticipate the page disappearing in the first place. If that is the case, most bookmarking services, like del.icio.us and Furl.com will actually index or cache the page when you save it, so you can go back at anytime and see the page as it existed when you bookmarked it. Many of you know and use the 'Wayback Machine' at Archive.org which will show you the entire history of many pages on the Internet. I frequently use this tool with students because of it's ease and simplicity. But there is a little known function within Google that will do the same thing, it is the 'cached' link that is part of every Google search. In the graphic below, I circled the 'cached' link to the copy of the page that Google has in its own cache.

Similar Pages: Some people don't see this as a thing of value, but I like to use it to validate the information on any page. If I can document that the same information is coming from two or more domains with different 'owners' (easywhois search) it goes a long way toward validating the information on the page.

Page Translation: You can use Google Translation to read pages from other languages, but there are three different ways to do this. First, use Google Language Tools, which will search the Google database for pages in the language you specify and translate them to the language you want to read them in. Second, you can use the search string to look for sites in one language and have them automatically translated into another language. Third, you can use the link provided in the Google Search Results to translate the page. (see graphic below)

Focusing the Beams of Light

2008-03-15T10:02:00.000-07:00

I can remember back to 1989, when George Bush gave his 'thousand points of light' Inauguration Speech and dismissing it as just another piece of rhetoric from the Republican propaganda machine. Dana Carvey had fun with the same phrase on SNL over the next few years, but it eventually drifted off into the distance like most other political slogans. But in the last few days I have been bringing together many of my own perspectives, or points of light, relating to teaching, learning, access to resources, leadership and the like.

Yesterday, I was the SMCOE, listening to Bernie Trilling from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills and discussing some of the issues during the break with people I know from around San Mateo County and in my own district. My motivation to get into administration after 20 years in the classroom has been very simple, I want to change the system of how teachers teach and how students learn. I want to see teachers become lead learners and students learn how to teach themselves. I want to see students have access to the greatest amount of learning tools and information that has ever been available in the history of mankind. Will Richardson, who tongue-in-cheek offered his support a few months back for any potential potential political office I was looking at running for, blogged yesterday about the urgency of getting 21st Century skills to teachers and administrators first. Will's post generated 130 comments in 24 hours. For this to happen, we need to reform the current teacher and administrator training programs. In California, there has been AB75, which provided funding for Administrators to be trained in using technology to give them greater access to 'testing and other quantitative measurements.' While this is important, it does not address the real issues relating to the use of technology in educational practice.

So, what does need to happen? Teachers need to take on a different role. It is simplistic to say that teachers need to be 'lead learners.' Mark Wagner's blog post from last year is a great start on the 'lead learner' approach when it comes to presentations, but how do we get this practice into the hands of the classroom teacher on the front lines with our kids on a daily basis? DuFour's writings on PLC's and SLC's comes very close to what does need to happen in schools when it speaks about bringing teachers together in common practice and teacher professional development and collaboration. Hillsdale High School in our district is following this model and has seen some success using the SLC/SRN Model.

How can we make it happen? Get Administrators trained, knowledgeable and willing to move forward. Knock on their doors and push another article about 21st Century learning under their nose. Keep the stream of information steady and constant. Ask them about the information you are giving them. Find teachers in your school that want to move forward and support them. If you write grants to get money for technology assets, make sure they get new gear and help them use it. Show them off to the Administration and other faculty members. In many instances, when you are implementing a tech integration program, you and your teachers are in an unfamiliar jungle. You need to be the machete to clear the trail and allow them to follow you.

Will this be an overnight transformation? No, but it will be steady and consistent and you will reach critical mass, where the faculty will follow and begin to do many things on their own... They just need the support of others....

... Gently stepping down off of the soap box...

21st Century Learning

2008-03-14T09:39:00.000-07:00

As part of SMCOE's Council for Instructional Improvement meeting today, I am doing a follow up presentation to Bernie Trilling's presentation on 21st Century Skills. I am going to highlight some of the work done in our Global Communications Cohort, specifically around blogging and RSS feeds.

The Google Presentation slides are below!

Palm Springs: CUE 08

2008-03-07T18:47:00.001-08:00

The first full day of the 2008 CUE conference is over, I felt like I was running around most of the day, since I was. The opening keynote from Vint Cerf was very well received by a crowd who for the most part weren't as 'star struck' as I was from being able to hear Vint speak. This is even after I have introduced myself to him at a Google event. For those of you who don't know what I am talking about, Vint Cerf is probably considered one of the 'Fathers of the Internet.' It is his work on the TCP/IP model that has allowed the Internet, as we know it, to work as well as it does.

During the keynote, Mike Lawrence announced that one of the spotlight speakers, Dr. Chris Dede was having to cancel due to transportation issues. I had offered to Mike several weeks ago that I would be happy to step in if he had any cancellations, since I had two presentations that I had prepared earlier ready to go. So, in the spur of the moment, I was speaking twice today after my short session at the Google Booth yesterday.

The two sessions, World Wide Literacy and Guerrilla Learning are available on my Guerrilla Learning wiki and I would like to get any feed back that people would want to share. I am also embedding the Google presentation for the "Guerrilla Learning" session below.

Doing the Google Thing

2008-03-06T17:33:00.000-08:00

Well, it is the first full day at CUE and I was able to do a short 30 minute session for Google on Blogger and Google Reader in their booth in the exhibit hall. It was a great experience and I will repeat my session on Saturday morning at 10:30AM. I put together the presentation using Google Presentations and I am going to embed it here. I also mentioned several other resources to learn more about RSS and blogging.

The presentation slides are embedded above and definitely give you something new to do with web sites and blogs. I can see that I would use this tool in many different ways and convert many of the older PowerPoints I have into Google Presentations and then embed them into wiki's and blog posts.

CLMS State Conference: World Wide Literacy and Guerrilla Learning

2008-03-01T08:45:00.000-08:00

I am in Sacramento today, presenting at the CLMS Annual Conference in the Gateway Lab. I have been putting the finishing touches on the sessions I am doing this afternoon. World Wide Literacy and Guerrilla Learning. I have all of the materials from these sessions on the Guerrilla Learning Wiki.

I have presented on both of these topics before, but these presentations are adaptations of the previous sessions. Please feel free to check out and use any of the material on the wiki to use with your classes.

I am also doing a couple of quick (30 minute sessions) at CUE next week in Palm Springs. Blogger and Google Reader will be the presentations.

If you are around at either of these conferences, please come up and say hello!

Lessig and the Change Congress Movement

2008-02-23T16:11:00.000-08:00

Well... I have to come clean.

I am a dyed in the wool democrat.

When I cast my vote for Bill Clinton in 1992, it was the first time in my adult life where I voted for someone that actually won the Presidency. So, in the 7 Presidential elections in my adulthood, I have only voted for the winner twice.

I have spent most of my life within 30 miles of Redwood City, CA, that means I was born, grew up, went to school, went to college, settled after college and have worked my entire adult life in this area of the country. It is a great place to be and if I could afford to buy a bigger and better house in the area, I would.

I have been a teacher for many years and spent a considerable amount of time teaching American Government. Capuchino High School, where I have worked for the past 20 years, is directly in the middle of the 12th Congressional District in California. This happens to be the same high school where the late Rep. Leo Ryan taught.

When I taught American Government, I took a keen interest in local politics. I had candidates for city council debate in front of the students and I even had Rep. Tom Lantos, speak to my classes on several occasions. Tom Lantos has represented this district for the past twenty-five plus years, since there was a Republican in the seat in the two year period after Rep. Leo Ryan's death in Guyana during the Jonestown Massacre. Tom Lantos passed away two weeks ago from cancer of the esophagus. The area will have a special election in April to select a replacement for the remainder of the current term. It is a little ironic that the leading candidate for the seat is Jackie Speier, a former aide to Rep. Ryan and who was also shot at Jonestown. Jackie Speier has represented the area well in the state senate and assembly for the past 20+ years and was eventually forced out due to the new term limits law.

Now, a new candidate is emerging... Lawrence Lessig. Lessig is a Stanford University law professor, the founder of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, the founder of Creative Commons and the leading advocate of reduced legal restrictions on copyright and trademark restrictions. I have read some of Lessig's work... I can't say that I am an expert on his writings, but I do agree with the things I have read, especially surrounding copyright and privacy. Will Richardson refers to Lessig as "one of his heros." In January of this year, Lessig announced that he would be changing his focus and concentrating on changing the political system in this country. He launched a new web site to spread his new message, change congress. Lessig's philosophy is that money has tainted the political process and that members of congress should not take money from special interests, earmark money for specific expenditures and support the public funding of elections. When I hear some of these things, I just remember Robin Williams performance in the Presidential Debate in Man of the Year.

So, Lessig hasn't decided to run ... yet. His collegaues created a 'Draft Lessig' wiki page and he has created his own exploratory web site. The video below reviews his past and current thinking on copyright, privacy and the political process. He is also very complimentary toward his potential opponent, Jackie Speier.

So, will Lawrence Lessig run? The question will be answered in the next week, but regardless, I think the conversation is going to change...

How Do You Do That? Tools for the Future

2008-02-17T12:55:00.000-08:00

I feel like there is a tipping point that is on the horizon. The conversation that has been swirling around the EdTech Blogosphere for the past few months has been much more abstract than concrete and in some cases difficult to follow. Will Richardson, David Warlick, Miguel Guhlin, Scott McLeod, et al have all tossed their spices into this strange mix of new and emerging learning styles and technologies. The discussion has been lively to say the least.

For me, the conversation is necessary, since it provides me a perspective that is different than my own and it begins to frame the question in new and somewhat different ways. Most of this really relates back to a post Will Richardson made just before New Year's Day. There was quite a conversation that ensued about how to best make substantive change occur and which changes were necessary. I posted a comment and blogged a reaction to Will's post and mixed in a diagram that David Warlick had been working on as a way to get me to start thinking about things in a different context. As I mentioned in my comment to Will's post, I have been looking to move into the administrative ranks, but I now see other possibilities, especially in smaller schools where I think substantive change is easier to achieve.

Over the past 6 weeks or so, I see things starting to bubble from new and different directions. First, both of the top Democratic contenders for the Presidency (Obama and Clinton), in favor of willing either to fund NCLB or dismantle it. Regardless, NCLB will more than likely be in a different form than it is today. Secondly, there is much more awareness of the need to move forward. I don't know if it is because of the attention being paid to things because of the presidential election, or that there is finally a critical mass of technologies, both hardware and software that create such a low cost of entry that they cannot be ignored or dismissed because of cost. Change is definitely upon the horizon, but like the sunset, looking at it too long can cause you to go blind. Miguel created a wiki page to compile all of the ideas from Will's most recent post on the subject. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. The conversation is extremely valuable, because it allows a synergy of ideas to come together from a variety of perspectives and gives us the greatest amount of information to make better choices in the future.

The Digital Ethnography project at Kansas State University is still churning out mash-up video's that illustrate the changing mediascape. The video below is created by mashing up 10 other videos that had previously been posted on 'YouTube.' This was all done by a biomedical engineer in his spare time. The quote below appears at the end of the video and to me crystallizes how teens interact with media today. Things are going to change in many ways and there will definitely be some surprises along the way.

"You can't kill the instinct that technology produces. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using it. We can only drive it underground. We can't make our kids passive again. We can only make them pirates. In a democracy, we ought to be able to do better." - Lawrence Lessig.

Comiqs: An Online Comic Book Creator

2008-02-17T09:33:00.000-08:00

Being a PC user, I have been somewhat jealous of some of the tools that Apple users have at their disposal, one of them was ComicLife, a tool to create comic book pages. I had been looking for a PC version and found one in Comic Book Creator and I purchased several copies for the lab computers at Capuchino High School. Now, there is an online alternative. Comiqs, is a tool that allows you to upload pictures or other images and add 'thought bubble' and other types of text to the images. I have always liked having students use comic book or cartoons to show cause and effect relationships and to illustrate complex ideas into a step by step process. I also like the fact that it allows students who may not be 'wordsmiths' an opportunity to shine using another medium to demonstrate that they have synthesized the material covered in class.

While I think the original intent of the application was purely recreational, I do think there are some definite educational applications. I will be adding this into the presentations I am doing with Picasa and Guerrilla Learning. Check out the demo below from YouTube.

Social Mathematics: CQ + PQ > IQ

2008-02-03T09:35:00.000-08:00

I have been missing being able to blog the past few weeks, since over the holiday season and into the new year since I was working on the revisions to the SMUHSD Tech Plan, and it's subsequent submission to the State Department of Education, and on developing the 'Guerrilla Learning' wiki for my presentation yesterday at the Silicon Valley CUE conference. I just learned I will presenting the Guerrilla Learning at the CLMS Statewide Conference in Sacramento at the end of February. I was very pleased with the reaction the presentation received yesterday and will do a little refining before I present it again at CLMS.

This morning I have been catching up on reading blogs and looking at what some of the new conversations are in the EdTech Blogosphere. There are a few posts that really caught my eye... the first was a 'YouTube' video that Miguel Guhlin posted on his blog that was a mashup of a Barack Obama speech intermixed with actors and other notable people repeating the words along with him. It was very powerful, but I began to think about what has contributed to this resurgence of populism and the inclusion of more young people in the political process. The video, produced by Will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas and Bob Dylan's son, Jesse.

I am very interested in Barack Obama's campaign, since he is the only presidential candidate who has made a positive statement regarding net neutrality. Danah Boyd makes an appeal for Obama on her blog post this morning stating that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are very close except for the net neutrality issue. Net Neutrality, I believe is necessary for our government and educational system to be transparent and grow in a postive direction.

The other post I read this morning that caught my eye was Scott McLeod's post on Dangerously Irrelevant, where he links to an American Association of School Administrators article of Daniel Pink (A Whole New Mind) interviewing Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat) about education and the future. The interview went back and forth connecting each other's work into an educational setting. The piece that struck me right between the eyes was when Friedman made the point that in China and India, college graduates are great in math and science, but have trouble innovating because they have aren't well rounded. Friedman mentions that both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were college dropouts. Friedman, then related his equation that he uses to explain the dominance of the United States in world economics. CQ + PQ > IQ or Curiosity Quotient plus Passion Quotient is greater than Intelligence Quotient. Pink then added that humans are naturally curious and that, the educational system takes that out of them. It is a great article and will definitely be the basis of future discussions out on the blogosphere. I can't wait for the 2 Million Minutes Documentary to come out and for me to look at it using this filter!

Global Perspectives: Reference Points for a New Generation

2008-01-17T09:06:00.000-08:00

During the past two days, students in the Global Communications class have been blogging on the first of the "10 Flatteners" from Thomas Friedman's,"The World Is Flat." In reading their blog posts, I was really struck by the different perspective the students have regarding world wide events.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was definitely an event of huge cultural and political significance to people in my age range (45) because it ended the "Cold War." During my school age years, we were taught to fear the Soviet Union and it permeated the society. Being a history major in college, I learned the genesis of the fear of the Soviet Union, the Kennan 'Long Telegram' and how the United States reacted to it during the 1950's with Dulles' 'Containment Policy.' The Containment Policy became the basis for the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

The students in our schools today do not have a frame of reference for events like this. The fall of the Berlin Wall occurred a few years before their birth and the first event they have a collective consciousness about is September 11. I'm sure that people older than I had the same dichotomy when it came to world events and the younger generation, but it seems that the separation has become a chasm. I guess that is part of the reason I feel classes like Global Communications are so important.

What are the goals? Perspective. One of the advantages of a hyper-texted life is that the creator or the reader can add the third dimension, depth to the page. Read a book, watch a movie or television show, look at a painting, what do you get? Height and width... Hyper-texting adds the depth to any medium and this is the bridge across the chasm.

What Defines a School?

2008-01-05T15:39:00.000-08:00

Over the past week, there has been quite a spirited discussion about what the future of education should look like and and how best to achieve that vision. David Warlick has posted a diagram about the linkages between School 1.0 and School 2.0 and how to best identify the differences between the two. I commented on the first iteration of the diagram, regarding the perspective and some of the ideas contained within, which I was surprised to see Dave immediately implement. There has been a third iteration of Dave's diagram and I actually added a few extra items, which you can see below. I personally really like what Dave has done with this and the connections he has made, but I felt delineating the connective tissue between School 1.0 and School 2.0 would make it a little easier for most classroom teachers to follow. It also defines which three School 1.0 skills are necessary to move into School 2.o. I referred to these as the 'Three Literacies.'

Communications Literacy: The ability to read, write and speak with others. The ability to communicate with others.
Computational Literacy: The ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide.
Social Literacy: The ability to behave in a way that is socially acceptable and function as a member of a group.

So, what does this mean for schools? How do schools transition from School 1.0 to School 2.0? What does the final School 2.0 look like? Is it the same four walled classroom that we have now with students moving from class to class like an assembly line during the industrial revolution?

I doubt that the current educational system will be able to transition fast enough for us to know what the final School 2.0 will look like anytime soon. I also know that the very nature of education and information continues to grow and expand, bringing new skills with it. Skills that will, like almost anything else, have to broken down and delineated in a way that can be categorized.

I also read and responded to Will Richardson's post 'Some New Years Dreaming' about how schools need to change and where the change agents are coming from. Will is personally looking at removing himself from the current structure that the educational community has. He and his wife are in the process of home schooling their children and giving them rich educational experiences using the informational tools available to them in their home. One post a few weeks back had Will 'Skyping' Steve Hargdon into his dining room to connect with his children. It's the 'Network not Tools' was another recent post from Will's blog.

I agree with Will's thinking. Schools, right now, are fundamentally flawed. They suffer from a social malaise that hasn't created enough pain for the people in the United States to want to take action on a national scale. Even Will's response back to me talked about the lack of national leadership to make change possible.

Seriously, I do hope you change your system. But “The System” needs some real leadership on a national level to begin to find relevance again. I know that both you and Clay (and I) would love to see the tipping point of teachers doing good work make systemic change happen. But I have no doubt it won’t happen while my own kids are in school and little faith that I’ll see it in my lifetime. Which is why an alternative is sounding better and better.

My response to Will's initial post really spoke about how to best make change possible. Is it from within the current structures or from outside?

So, the question becomes: Are you going to work within the current political reality (Adam Clayton Powell) or are you going to work outside the current structures (Black Panther Party) to change the system?

Personally, I have decided to take the path or working within the current system. I have taken it upon myself to get an administrative credential and I am currently seeking administrative positions to change the current structure of education. I am not saying that one is better than the other, I have just decided to take one path. This does not mean that I have been mute on the other side, I was sending my blog posts out to all 400 teachers until I received a ‘cease and desist’ e-mail from the district administration.

The reality of the situation is that we need both. We need people working within and outside of the current system to make real change happen. Let’s hope that 2008 is the year that the forces inside and outside meet in the middle to make real change happen!

So, how would you move from School 1.0 to School 2.0? From inside or outside? What are the connective tissues between the two? Who needs to take the lead? Teachers, Administrators, State Department of Education or the Federal Department of Education.

I welcome your comments, because I am of the mind that the 'conversation' is the way this issue is going to gain enough critical mass to cause a 'tipping point' in the basic functioning of schools in the United States... I hope that slap in your face realities like '2 Million Minutes' expedite the process.

The Missing Nokia Video: Web 2.0

2007-12-28T11:37:00.000-08:00

The Nokia video that showed up about a month ago and then was mysterously removed from YouTube has shown back up. I have the words posted on the initial post on the video and I have embedded it below. It is hosted by a French site, let's hope this time it stays up.

La chanson du web 2.0 par NOKIA
Uploaded by buzzynote

2008: Five Trends in EdTech

2007-12-27T11:47:00.000-08:00

When I started thinking about what 2008 could mean to Educational Technology, I began writing down trends and ideas that are expanding at a rate that they will cast a net over the entire educational community. A net so big that education won't be able to ignore, regardless of the distance that some decision makers have from the classroom.

1. Low Tech Presentation - High Tech Delivery:
- 2007 saw the explosion of video on the web, with YouTube and other sites providing a platform for anyone and everyone to post video to the Internet. Some of the best videos I saw that related to education and educational technology were the simplest in production, but used the power of the Internet to gain a broad audience. I'd like to give big kudos to Lee LeFever and the CommonCraft Show for their series of videos dealing with Web 2.0 topics. A white board, hand drawn pictures on paper, a few printed screen shots and a dry erase marker equals one pretty powerful series of videos. I'd also like to mention educational specific sites like Next Vista for Learning, UStream and TeacherTube for providing educational specific space in this area.

2. Applications Are Personal and Connected:
- The war between Microsoft and Google has started and it starts in a different space than "Googlezon" predicted, but it is very real and the outcome is the same. Bill Gates, you lose! Who wants to buy Microsoft Office for $500 or even the Students and Teachers Edition for $145, when I can use Google Docs and Spreadsheets for free, have my documents available to me where ever there is a computer with a connection to the Internet and I can share my documents and collaborate with anyone around the world with a few clicks. This is a no-brainer. Besides Google Docs and Spreadsheets, there are other free online applications that will make it easier for students and teachers to tap into the power of the Internet and Web 2.0. There are too many applications to list here, but the boundaries have been completely blurred and are non-existent.

3. Broadening Perspectives:
- Net Neutrality is a big issue, so big that it can't be ignored and will make it difficult for the big telecoms from trying to impose a 'packet shaping' pricing scheme on the consumer. Having said this, free services like Skype and others will increase the amount of real-time collaboration that occurs between companies around the world and this will quickly flow down to education. Take a look at Vicki Davis' 'Flat Classroom Project' as a great prototype in this regard.

In a more global political perspective, closed networks in countries like China and Iran, will need to open themselves up to information from beyond their borders in order to survive. Having the 2008 Olympics in Beijing will mandate the poking of a large hole in the 'Great Firewall of China.' Let's hope that the hole is large enough that it cannot be easily patched once it has been opened. We already receive reports and blog posts from inside of China, including Jeff Utecht's "The Thinking Stick" blog.

4. Better Plumbing:
- Broadband connections are increasing their bandwidth and getting cheaper, this encourages more families to bring broadband access into their homes. As part of our Digital Bridge program, we provided 25- 9th graders with free Internet access from San Bruno Cable Television. The service normally costs $30 a month and students are selected based on need, which is determined by 'Free and Reduced Lunch Eligibility.'

The amount of 'free' wi-fi access is also expanding, as businesses, cities and other civic entities are providing no-cost access. In our area, all of the libraries in San Mateo County provide no-cost wi-fi access. All of the Panera Bread stores nationwide provide free Internet access. There are also websites that will give you the locations of free wi-fi connections in the local area, through "WiFi Free Spots."

5. Opening the Door for All:
- The traditional barriers to entering the digital world are beginning to fall. The price of small PC's are lower than the newest iPod. The low cost PC's I blogged on last week have definitely reduced the cost of entering the digital world for everyone. Even if you don't have a PC, cell phones are beginning to offer many of the same functions of standard PC's . iPhones and the upcoming 'Android' open source cell phone platform from Google will provide most of the functions found on a standard PC. There are also low cost desktop units in the $200 range running a version of Linux, (gOS or Ubuntu) which has a graphical user interface similar to that of Windows or Mac OS X. The other cool thing with most open source operating systems is that they will typically run on fewer system resources than the top of the line Windows or Macintosh.

What is the net effect of these trends? Easier, cheaper and more equitable access to all the people and information in the world. How does this change education? The world becomes our classroom. Collaborating with someone in China becomes as easy as collaborating with someone in the next town. Our schools and our homes have access to the information in every library on the planet. Individuals can be heard and seen and have their ideas rolled into the collective knowledge of the society. The real question becomes is: Will schools and education in general take advantage to the greatest reservoir of information on the planet? Or, will fear and shortsightedness win out and deprive our students of this vast amount information and the ability to become 'global citizens?' I hope we can create a system where students have access, yet have the skills to discern fact from fiction.

What are you willing to do to make this happen??? Comment and let me know!

Transitions: How Soon?

2007-12-26T08:59:00.001-08:00

Over the past few months, I have written here and read in many, many other places about some of the transitions that are inevitably going to take place in education and the role that technology will play in these transitions. While many of these discussions have been hazy and lacked clarity as to the precise direction these transitions will take, there are some very definite clues as to what the final result will look like. The four micro-laptops on the market now; The XO Laptop, the Asus Eee PC (Which I blogged on last week), the Zonbu, and the Classmate PC. Dean Takahashi of the San Jose Mercury did a review of these devices on Christmas Eve. 2007 has also seen the proliferation of cell phone technologies where the iPhone and the upcoming 'Android' platform from Google will allow cell phones to act more like computers than ever before. Amazon introduced the 'Kindle Reader' which provides a platform to read books.

The flip side to all of this is that I hear complaints annually from teachers, students and their parents about the size and weight of text books. There are some English Literature Anthologies I have seen over the past few years that are well over 10 pounds in weight. The cost of these text books are also rising significantly, with many of these books are now approaching the $100 a piece range. So, a student that is taking five 'academic classes' (English, Science, Social Science, Math and World Language) the school is investing close to $500 in text books and the students are looking at back packs that are approaching the 50 pound range. We can deliver the same content in a richer, more interactive way through one to one laptop initiatives, which several states are in the process of doing. (Another Mecrury News article on Prediticions for 2008 and 1 to 1 initiatives.)

So, when will we reach the 'Tipping Point?' The point in which schools nationally and internationally will provide mobile computing devices for students and allow them to connect wirelessly to the Internet at school. When will we allow students to take these devices home and connect to students around the corner and around the world? Increasing their personal voice and creating a truly interactive educational system.

Costs for schools and textbook publishers will drop significantly as economies of scale come into play for production. People bring the damage argument into play, where they talk about the cost of repairs and damage that students will place on the devices. I see students lose books every year and pay several hundred dollars in book bills, what's the difference whether it is a book or a small computer?

I don't think there is a question whether this transition is going to take place, the question is when? Is 2008, the year when this transition begins to take place? Stay Tuned.... I'll be doing my part from the electric pulpit!

Asus Eee PC: A Little Wonder

2007-12-15T11:23:00.000-08:00

I had read some of the accounts of Asus' new Eee P C, but until you actually hold one in your hand and play with it for a few minutes, do you realize what an amazing little computer, and I do mean computer, it is.

I had one of my adult students bring one of these into my classroom yesterday and I was BLOWN AWAY! This unit has the potential to make 1 to 1 computing in education a reality.

First, the unit uses a form of Linux as it's operating system and it's folder organization makes the user interface very friendly. There is no initial training necessary.

Secondly, it has preloaded many different applications to allow the user to many different things from the first boot. Open Office and Skype are pre loaded. There are links to the Google Applications, instant messaging, e-mail and Internet radio applications.

Third, the hardware necessary to be a cool global student is all there. There are stereo speakers, a web cam and a microphone built into the screen. There are two USB ports on the side to bring in additonal media or attach a mouse so you don't have to use the touch pad.. The image quality and color is very good, which makes the screen very readable. The other thing I liked was that it had external VGA , headphone and mic ports to allow for the connection of those devices. All of this is packed in a 7" unit weighing about 2 pounds. The smallness of the keyboard and touch pad are a little tough, but I was able to type on it with my large hands.

Check out this video (about 12 minutes!) that puts the EeePC through its paces...

I could see having an online or flash drive presentation ready to go and walking in with one of these units and connect to an LCD projector and speakers and be on the roll. The small size and portable nature of the device, will make it a favorite for students.

I like this unit so much, that I want to go and buy one now... and I just might depending on how Christmas goes. If there was someone I was considering a starter computer for... this would definintely be the unit I would recommend.

Students 2.0 - A New Voice for the Silent Majority

2007-12-09T16:36:00.001-08:00

A new site launched the other day that has the potential to create quite a buzz around the edublogosphere. Students 2.0 is a site that is going to give several student bloggers from around the world the ability to reach out to a students around the world and "start the conversation," which is really Web 2.0 is all about.

Here is a video of the new Students 2.o site.

Students 2.0 Launch Teaser from Sean on Vimeo

New Google Tools for 2008?

2007-12-01T21:47:00.000-08:00

The Google Tool Box has just gotten a little fuller with the anticipation of the inclusion of JotSpot, wiki tool that Google acquired last year. It looks like the new JotSpot will replace or enhance the current 'Google Page Creator' and allow individual users or companies to build out their own sites with custom domain features. This is starting to sound a little more like an online version of 'Joomla' than a wiki tool, but it does look like it is going to be the container that the rest of the Google Apps can 'live in.' In the two different articles, there was a fair amount of supposition as to how and when Google rolls out all of these tools, but both expected there to be a big move towards integrating 'Google Gears' (offline use of web applications) in the new and improved Google/JotSpot wiki too.

Google has also recently acquired 'Grand Central,' a company that is working on a new cell phone tool that will allow users to greatly reduce the number of 'separate connections' users would have to have at any time. What does this mean? You will soon be able to manage all of your technology devices through your cell phone. Want to see all of the things Grand Central can do? Click here! This connected to Google's new Android mobile phone platform will make cell phones the way most people will access their 'digital assets.'

What does this mean for education? It really means that the tool that is ubiquitous to all high school and middle school students, the cell phone, will be the connecting device for all of a person's digital assets. This will allow all students to be connected to every piece of media instantaneously and will dramatically lower the point of entry to the information age for all students. Talk about leveling the playing field? Absolutely!

I was fortunate enough to be in Monterey last weekend at the CLHS/CUE conference and listen to Will Richardson speak. He did much of his usual presentation regarding blogs and wikis, but added in a section about Cell Phones and 'Open Phone Tests,' which he had blogged about last week. Then I remembered, especially since I had recently seen it on HBO, the prominent role cell phones and text messaging played in "The Departed." There were at least two scenes where either Matt Damon or Leonardo DiCaprio used their cell phones to text message their superiors during tense situations. The video below is one of those situations. This is only the first part of the scene.... just after this scene, Matt Damon text messages, without looking at the key pad at all, Jack Nicholson's character to let him know there is a police informant in his group.

So, where do you think cell phones are going? Should we start the process of integrating them into our schools as tools that allow students to create and have access to a rich supply of media that can enhance the teaching and learning process? I'd like to hear your comments!

Web 2.0: It's About Connecting People

2007-11-18T19:08:00.001-08:00

Well, I am usually the last one to cheer a large corporate behemoth for something they have done, but I'll do it here. Nokia, has put out a short video explaining Web 2.0. I think the visuals are neat, the lyrics are pretty good and the tune is definitely catchy.

What does Web 2.0 mean to you? How can we connect with other people? How valuable is this to me? To You? To all of us? How small has the world become? We ordered a MicroSD card from a guy who was selling them on eBay at a pretty good price. Looked at the price, including the shipping and the shipping time and decided to give it a try... We looked to see where the seller is from... Try Hong Kong! Going back to Negroponte's premise in 'Being Digital' that it was far easier to transport bits than atoms, and it still is, but it looks like that transporting atoms is getting easier all the time.

The Lyrics: (This is the best I could by listening myself.)

Why is it so complicated?
Shouldn’t it be simply stated?
If some one mentions multi-channel
Smack them with a plywood paddle.

Web 2.0, it’s a great idea
You can blog while shopping in Ikea.
I can Twango from Djbleezi
And bid on eBay when on the Zambezi.

Web two point zero, lets keep it simple
It’s all about connecting people

My cat does lots of stupid things
I love that cat to bits
I posted her on YouTube
And she’s got a million hits.

Don’t miss the kids when you’re not home
Don’t miss them puke
Don’t miss them groan
With 2.0 you’ll see them live
Beamed straight down your RIM 95

For dating it could not be better
There’s a hundred ways to go and get her.
Two point 0 can be a dating disaster
Because sometimes I get dumped so much faster

Web two point zero, lets keep it simple
It’s all about connecting people

Wondering teenager, do not stress
You can track them down with GPS.

Facebook, YouTube, eBay, Flickr
MySpace, Moove, Google, Twitter

With Web two point zero
You have the means
To carry the world in the back of your jeans

Thanks to you Web two point 0
There’s no such thing as good-bye
But know when you ‘poke’ my Facebook
I can see it you and not reply

Web two point zero
Let’s keep it simple
simple, simple, simple
Web two point zero, lets keep it simple
It’s all about connecting people

For all the words and made up names
For all the hype and buzz
Its been about connecting people
Like it always was
Like it always was

Just Getting a Little Easier...

2007-11-04T17:06:00.000-08:00

In preparation for my talk at the CLHS/CUE Conference in Monterey at the end of November, I was doing a little research on some of the things that Picasa and other tools can really do and how they can best be used in education. I have found several tools that can be used in conjunction with Picasa and give teachers and students greater flexibility in the ways they can create multimedia content for the web.

While the basis of the talk I am doing is centered around Picasa, there are other tools available that will make it easier for anyone and everyone to create dynamic online content. One of the issues that arose as I began the process of planning this talk and the types of activities that I wanted participants to complete was... where were they going to get the content? I can't expect everyone to have a memory stick with a bunch of pictures on it ready to work from, so where are they going to get the content. Two places.... First, we will go through the process of taking pictures from your cell phone and uploading them to the Internet and then back to Picasa to create content. There is a great new blog from Liz Kolb, titled: "From Toy to Tool" that discusses ways to use cell phones in class. The second is from the computer itself. If you wanted to, you can create content using the 'Paint' application. You can take screen shots of web pages or other images and then using the 'Paint' application to add diagrams or highlight certain parts of the image.

Picasa: A Google tool with really two versions. The desktop version organizes all of the pictures and graphics on your computer, allows you to do some basic editing. (Far easier than Photoshop!) You can then upload your pictures to the Picasa Web Albums and share with family and friends and create online slide shows with captions on each picture. Once finished, you can copy and paste the 'embed' tag into any html page and have the slide show play within your page. I have used this process on this blog a few times earlier this year. (I'm doing a separate session on Saturday at CLHS/CUE Conference in Monterey!)

Animoto: I blogged on this last month, but a cooler version of the Picasa slide show that has some trick photo transitions and allows you to add music to your slide show. The site has some music from independent artists you can choose from or upload your own.

VoiceThread: A new tool that allows you to upload pictures to create a slide show and add voice overs (Several per page with multiple users. Voicethread refers to them as 'identities.') This would be great if you were teaching a process or wanted to have students narrate their artwork, etc. Imagine having a picture and recording each student's voice reaction to it... The possibilities are endless.

Photostory: A Microsoft tool that is free from the Microsoft site as a download. You will have to validate your version of Windows to download the application, but it is a very easy install. The way Photostory works is that you upload pictures which become slides. I am working on a test Photostory from one of my PowerPoints that I use for one of the large presentations that I do. Once you load the images, you can change the order and select the way pictures or slides transition from one to the next. You can then record a voice over for each slide. Not quite full motion video, but its free and you can do lots of amazing things with it.

The process of allowing students to create multimedia projects and posting them on the Internet has become easy and accessible for almost any student. A basic computer and cell phone give you access to a wealth of content and editing options. The only limits are your own imagination. If you have other tools that you use that I haven't mentioned here? Drop me a note!

Hope to see many of you in Monterey in a few weeks. If you aren't going to be in Monterey, stay tuned for more 'Google Almanac' presentations in the coming months.

Social Digital Global Shift

2007-10-27T09:19:00.000-07:00

I saw this video at Miguel Guhlin's blog and thought it was a fun look at how digital media is changing our relationships with people and information.

I often wonder in this time, when many educators are trying to incorporate social media into their classrooms, and do so in an ethical manner, that we stifle creativity? It's a difficult balance that teachers have to maintain, within the chasm of anarchy and totaliatarianism.

So, as we teach ethical behavior, here's a little survey that was developed by Ed Bott at ZD Net to look at some behaviors that most people do with digital media.

Media Ethics Survey

Do you think it’s proper to buy a CD, rip it to your hard drive, and then make copies for your own personal use on multiple devices or computers?

Survey by Quibblo

EdTech Imponderables

2007-10-21T21:40:00.000-07:00

David Pogue, the technology columnist of the New York Times, wrote a column this week about his technology 'Imponderables.' These are items that may or may not have answers, but they are all interesting to discuss. To take Pogue's premise and apply it to educational technology, there are more than a few things that jump out at you...

- If the government is going to fund high speed network access to each County Office of Education in California, through the K-12 High Speed Network, why don't they assist districts in funding the 'last mile?'

- If the federal government is going to mandate CIPA, why don't they help with the filtering? They only mandate that schools and libraries must have filters.

- Districts want teachers to use technology to enhance the educational process, yet they don't mandate professional development in the use of technology in schools and in most cases don't make it part of a teacher's professional expectations and use it as part of the teacher's job performance.

- Software companies, thinking they are being benevolent by cutting schools a 10% break on the cost of software, but fail to see the fact that they would make more in the long run to build product loyalty as students learn to use computers using their software. Adobe made it next to impossible to outfit a lab with their software. It looks like they may have finally figured it out when they acquired Macromedia and adopted their educational marketing strategy.

- Teachers wondering why students are so connected with MySpa ce and Facebook and not finding ways to transfer the skills in developing these pages into the educational process by using wikis and social networks.

- Parents providing cell phones to their children and not realizing that the 2" x 4" piece of plastic and transistors they hold in their hand, gives them a window to the world. Some good, some bad, but all at their fingertips 24/7/365.

- Teachers and schools seeing cell phones as the source of bad behavior in schools. Cell phones simply take what is already there and magnify it and make instantly accessible. What would happen if we used cell phones to magnify and make instantly accessible what we were teaching in our classes?

- Does anyone think that the number of devices that allow individuals to wirelessly connect to networks, including the Internet is going to shrink? So, why are there so few schools with a 'wireless policy?'

Do you have any 'EdTech Imponderables?' If so, send them to me and I'll post them in a follow up....

The Google Model

2007-10-14T21:15:00.000-07:00

What if we started to run schools like Google runs their business? Google is well-known for offering plenty of perks to their employees, like free food, (I've been to the GooglePlex and it is pretty good stuff!) refueling (snack) stations close at hand, laundromats, massages, concierge, etc. but I am not talking about those things. One of the things that Google does is allow all of their employees to spend one day a week working on a personal project. On the Google Campus, this is commonly known as "20% time." Many of these projects have made their way to becoming actual products or new features into existing Google products.

So, what I am suggesting is that we allow students in some classes to spend one day a week on projects of their own choice. They would post on their blog weekly on their "20% Project" documenting their progress. This would give students periodic feedback from their teacher and other students on their project, allowing them to keep on track. Their "20% Project" could be anything from a short film, a podcast, a tutorial or a series of articles on their favorite band or sports team. Just about anything that forces the student to become an expert in something and share their knowledge with their peers or the world as a whole is a valid "20% Project."

Here's a video of a Google engineer and his perspective on "20% Time."

I feel so strongly about this, I am going to suggest it to our Global Communications teacher, in fact by posting it here, she probably already knows!

What do you think? Leave a comment and let me know....

Shifting Sands: Changing How Students Use the Internet

2007-10-08T09:49:00.000-07:00

I have spent a considerable amout of my own time since 1998 looking at different uses of technology in education. With the introduction of the Internet and it's boom in 1999 and 2000, the sands in education shifted. Slightly. With the tech bubble bursting in 2001, there was a lull in technology and a justification for education to hold off in the process of integrating technology into the classroom.

I can remember being on hand my last semester in high school unpacking some of the first Apple II's that were in classrooms. At that time they were used to teach BASIC programming, and soon there were other educational uses for the computers. Some followed the 'drill and kill' approach of electronic flash cards, while others allowed for some creative interactivity with the computer.

One of the first EdTech grants I wrote was for Apple III's to use with a program called "Where is Carmen SanDiego." I was going to have four machines in my classroom, and there would be four students to a machine, with different roles to play as they went through the 'game.' This created some interactivity with the students and the application, but in the end, the game was still 'static' and once the students went through the game, it was over. In the case of Carmen SanDiego, there were several different versions of the game dealing with US geography, world geography and history (time) which helped, but there was definitely a finite limit that could be reached and the game didn't allow for individual creativity.

The Internet, in its early days in education was seen as a digital card catalog. I can remember using "Gopher" from the University of Minnesota and using some of the first search engines, like Alta Vista. The means to create and publish on the Internet were still in the hands of a relatively few people, mostly academics and businesses. As far as k-12 schools were concerned, there was little that the Internet could be used for besides research for your own classes. I played around with transitioning some activities I had previously done in other ways, with the information found on the Internet, most notably a stock market simulation that I had used wth Economics classes.

In 1999, when I became the Tech Coordinator at Capuchino, I felt it was my duty to infuse as much technology into education as possible, which included creating Technology courses. For several years, I felt we did a pretty good job. In 2004, it hit me that we fundamentally changed the educational process for the students in our Tech classes, but did very little for those students in the regular education classrooms. We did the standard; making sure that students word processed formal writing assignments, used spreadsheets to analyze data, etc.

The last three years has seen the Internet and what students can do with it explode, but have we done what we can? I think we have moved forward, as well as any school has, with what we have done with Global Communications and the connected courses, but being the pusher I am, I am not satisfied... We need to do more. So, what are the next steps? Here are a few videos from the Kansas State Digital Ethnography program that may lend a little insight. I know they have at least given me a few things to think about.... take a look.

So Close.... Wait, I Think We Have a Connection

2007-10-07T10:29:00.000-07:00

There has been much talk about how the "World Is Flat," I have blogged about it so many times, that many of you may be saying.... 'not again!' I have read stories from others about their experiences connecting to others around the world, but I really thought those were exceptions and not something that normal humans with basic tools could do. Wrong! This past Thursday, October 4, during our Global Communications team meeting, we were able to connect in real time via Skype video conference with our colleague Geoff Hinman. Geoff was our Global Communications teacher in 2006-2007 and at the end of the year decided to take a positon at the American Overseas School of Rome in Italy for the next two years. We were able to have a full chat with Geoff for about 45 minutes from his apartment in Rome to the Video Lab at Capuchino. We started the plans to connect his Creative Writing class in Rome to our Global Communications students in San Bruno. We will have the students in California in class at 8AM connecting via Skype to the students in Rome at 4PM on a few occasions during the spring semester. Other than the Skype connections, we will be working collaboratively on a wiki to pull out social issues of interest to both groups of students.

Just as this happened, I was cruising the blogosphere and came across a few other things that fix nicely into the new paradigm that is now starting to take shape. Karl Fisch on his blog posted about a collaborative project that is asking people from around the world to collaborate on a project "to use the power of film to promote better understanding of our common humanity." The project known as 'Pangea Day,' will collect films from around the world to develop a 4-hour presentation on May 10, 2008 that will be video conferenced to 6 cities around the world.

Another development was the use of live video chat as a television show. Will Richardson, Steve Dembo and David Jakes did a "2.5 Cubs fans in a Bar" hosted the show using a site called 'ustream.tv.' I think the ability to broadcast to a group and allow them to comment on the presentation in real time is very valuable. Think of the travel around the world it would save. I am hoping to be able to ask Will about this when he is in Monterey next month for the CLHS/CUE conference. live stream from Chicago last week. Check out the archived copy below.

And if all of this wasn't enough, UC Berkeley is putting the entire lectures entry and mid-level courses on YouTube. (I'll be writing soon about how to download YouTube video if it is blocked in your school.) Check out the UC Berkeley channel, here!

Do you have ideas on what you would like to do with video to connect with others? Did you know that you can make videos without a video camera. Capture video with your cell phone and use bluetooth to send it to your Mac, or on the PC side, upload to your service provider and download back to your desktop. With most providers you can get 15 seconds of video per clip. Video field trip reports.... video homework.... share with anyone or everyone! There is definitely more to come...

NetNeutrality: Do We Still Believe in the First Amendment?

2007-09-29T20:32:00.000-07:00

Given my training as a Social Science teacher and more specifically the time I spent teaching American Government, the First Amendment has always been something that I feel very strongly about. When I did teach American Government, my students had it drummed into their heads... "WHAT ARE THE FIVE FREEDOMS OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT?" I never quite created a little mnemonic device to help students learn them easier, but I did keep repeating, "R-S-P-A-P, R-S-P-A-P." Which all of you know, stands for Religion, Speech, Press, Assembly and Petition. And that became the way students learned the First Amendment. I also had what I called the "Dirty Thirty List" of Supreme Court cases that students needed to know the facts and holdings of for tests, expecially for the AP Government examination. I outlined the limits of free speech that Justice Holmes put forth in the Schenck case. We covered student symbolic speech, in Tinker v. DesMoines School District.

I'm worried that the explosion of free speech and press that has been possible through the Internet is going to be restricted, not because there are political disagreements, but because the ISP's (Internet Service Providers) want to charge more for specific services. There are several terms used to describe this practice, but the most common is 'Tiered Internet.' The ISP's could allow their Internet traffic, or the traffic of companies that pay an additional fee to get preferential time slots on their networks. Think of it like a highway that has five lanes. In four of the lanes, there is no speed limit, but you have to pay an additional $100 a month. In the other lane, you can pay the normal rate but the speed limit is 5 miles per hour and it will be constantly jammed or slow. ISP's can also do something called, 'Bit Shaping.' When ISP's bit shape, they charge more for bits that are using a particular service. For example, an ISP will charge customers more if the bits they are being used for Peer to Peer File Sharing or for Voice over IP traffic (VoIP).

There are many sites around supporting Net Neutrality and lobbying against any potential legislation at the state and national levels.

Net Neutrality and Civil Liberties: A site put together by the American Libraries Association that has a variety of links to different resources regarding Net Neutrality.
Save the Internet: A site that has several positon papers, a lobbying effort and many citizen created videos in support of Net Neutrality.

The videos below are both good examples of how Net Neutrality is important and why it should be preserved.

Presently: The New Google App

2007-09-22T23:20:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of talk over the past few months about the release of the new Google Apps, PowerPoint-like presentation tool. The tool, which has been code named, "Presently," will allow you to create a slide show like PowerPoint, allow others to collaborate on the slide show with you. There are several omissions right now, like animation and video, but I would assume that these will be coming right around the corner since that has been the typical 'modus operandi' of the Google Apps releases. (The graphing tools were added after the initial release of the spreadsheet tool.)

The one cool thing that is there, is a chat function. So, you can have your slideshow and give a live presentation and allow others to chat with you in real time. I can see two different ways this will be used. One as a way to discuss the presentation as it is being constucted and secondly as a feedback tool during a live presentation.

This is just the latest in the series of tools Google has released in the Docs and Spreadsheets tool kit, but it isn't the last... I would suspect that their wiki tool, JotSpot (or a re engineered version of the old JotSpot) will be out before the end of the year.

What does this mean for education? The bar for entering the digital academic world has just been lowered again. Students, most who can't pay even the $150 for Microsoft Office for Teachers and Students can do all of the basic office tasks for free and store them online. I don't have to worry about lugging disks from place to place, scheduling time at the one parent's home that has all of the correct software. I can even go to the public library, a friends home, school, etc. and have access to all of my documents and e-mail. For teachers, this means they can assign more work that needs to be done using technology because the socio-economic barriers to access are so low that students can easily meet them.

Want to learn more about the new Presentation tool... Lee Lefever, from the Common Craft Show has done another of his great videos to show off the Google Apps Presentation tool. Take a look below!

Animoto: A New Twist on Home Video

2007-09-15T09:26:00.001-07:00

This is a video I produced online in about 15 minutes, using a new service called: Animoto. Animoto allows you to upload your pictures to the site, add music from their library or add your own and then render the video. When finished, you can e-mail the video to your friends or embed it to a blog like this.

Very cool... I can think of a few projects that could use something like this....

Digital Citizenship: The "Killer App" For Education

2007-09-09T07:30:00.000-07:00

I'm too close... It's too big... I don't know if they can see the forest for the tree s, but it is HUGE to me. I keep wondering why everyone can't see it. Can they see it, but choose to ignore it? Is there anyone alive today that believes that the amount of information (media) that we will have access to is going to decrease? Is the educational establishment in a myopic haze that has everyone defending their content to detriment of the students, who spend their waking hours surrounded by four beige walls disconnected from a world that will require them to access more information faster and employ that information in a way that will provide value to themselves or their employer? I often wonder out loud about teachers who were unwilling to grow with the new tools and sources of media available to them and whether they feared being seen as human instead of the oracle of their chosen field of study?

As most of the people reading this blog know, for the past several years, I have felt it is essential to put these tools and skills in the hands of students and teachers. I decided to live by the words of Gandhi and "be the change I wish to see in the world." It is the reason I decided to do the following:

Reading blogs and educated myself as to what others are doing in education and how the landscape is changing.
Write this blog, which is close to 100 posts now, over the past two years.
Go and get my Administrative credential after almost 20 years in the classroom, because I wanted to be part of the change.
Pushed the idea and wrote the grant for the Global Communications Class and pathway.
Create the 'Digital Bridge' program to assist students who could not reach the point of entry of the Digital Age.
Applied for and was accepted into the Google Certified Teacher's program.
Started speaking at conferences with some of the other Google Certified Teachers to promote the use of these tools to other teachers.

The four parts of Digital Citizenship: Literacy, Safety, Learning Strategies and Etiquette are not nice additions to the learning process, but are necessary for the students we teach to be productive adults. (thanks to Vicki Davis for the graphic!)

In preview of their conference session at the Tech Forum 2007, Wes Fryer and Miguel Guhlin posted the following introduction to their co-keynote.

Whether we're with them or not, today's young people are venturing into the virtual world where they face challenges of the sort we could hardly have dreamed of a few decades ago. If we ban new technologies in schools we are not protecting our students from them; we're simply asking them to venture into this new world alone. Just as adults must help young people learn to drive before setting them loose behind the wheel of a car, we have a responsibility to help our students and children learn how to safely navigate the virtual environments of the 21st Century. In this session we will explore how to be proactive rather than merely defensive, how to reassure community members without ignoring real dangers, and how to help students make the connections and participate in the collaborations that are crucial to digital citizenship today.

So, how do we do this? Some of the following should be a little thought provoking.

- Karl Fisch's post on his blog, 'The Fisch Bowl,' titled, "Is It Okay To Be A Technologically Illiterate Teacher?"

- "Knowledge resides in the network. Students need to know how to find that knowledge, whether it’s on a server in Indiana or in a human brain in India."

- “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”- Alvin Toffler

- “In times of rapid change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”- Eric Hoffer

- In Australia, the government spent several million dollars creating a filter to keep pornography away from teens and children. It took a 16 year-old student 30 minutes to bypass the filter. Australia Teen Cracks Filter

Here are a few video's that might provide a little thinking about the issues of Digital Citizenship and Cyber Safety.

Feeling comfortable with the Shifts.....

2007-09-08T09:18:00.000-07:00

My last post talked about some of the 'shifts' that this blog will go through, since I am writing this personally and have created a new blog specifically for SMUHSD EdTech Professional Development. (SMUHSD Tech Bytes) But there are other 'shifts' that are going on that are worth noting.

On Thursday, I was involved in a training session on the use of 'DataDirector,' a new data presentation tool for schools to better use data to guide instruction. I have been a fan of 'DataDirector' for a two years now, I was very pleased when the SMUHSD decided to dump Edusoft and pick up 'Data Director.' In speaking with some of the other teachers in the session, the reviews were very, very positive.

In the afternoon, I was part of a panel of EdTech people speaking to a group at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. The members of the group had been corresponding with each other via e-mail and building out some ideas on the 'Classroom 2.0' social networking site on Ning and on a wiki provided by 'Wikispaces.' This group of people are 'HEAVY HITTERS' in the EdTech arena and I am a High School teacher and Technology Coordinator. Steve Hargadon, the moderator of the group, is one of the Infinite Thinking Machine bloggers, as well as founder of k12 Computers. Steve Dembo, is the author of the Teach42 blog and works for the Discovery Educator Network. Adam Frey, is one of the co-founders of Wikispaces, a wiki tool that is free for educators. Anastasia Goodstein, is the author of the 'Ypulse' blog as well as the book, "Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens are Really Doing Online." Sylvia Martinez, is the President of Generation YES, a firm that assists schools in making transitions into 21st Century learning. Rushton Hurley, is the founder of NextVista for Learning, a site that allows students and teachers to post educational video to share with others. Karen Greenwood-Henke, is the founder of Nimble Press, a San Francisco educational consulting firm, and the author of the 'Grant Wrangler Blog,' aimed at the educational market. Guillaume Cohen, is the founder of Veodia, a live streaming video firm that provides service to conferences and other events. Veodia was on hand and took video of the entire presentation, which you can watch here, look for the 'Classroom 2.0 presentation.

Friday started with another meeting, the County Technology Coordinators as SMCOE. The meeting was a little awkward, since the County Technology Director has recently resigned and there isn't a replacement as of yet. Kathleen Ferenz, from CTAP and the GoogleIT sessions this summer, pinch hit for the county. To her credit, Kathleen set up a wiki for the County Technology Coordinators to begin the process of organizing for the remainder of the school year. There were plenty of new faces in the room, it made me feel a little dated. Most of the brainstorming session looked at different district goals and there was plenty of talk about "Cyber Safety," "Digital Citizenship" and "Information Literacy." Three topics we have done some work on in our Global Communications course.

This school year has started with lots of ambivalence and uncertainty and I know it is going to keep changing on all fronts; school, district, county, state and nationally. As an individual, I will just have to learn to 'feel comfortable with the shifts.' Perhaps all of us should?

Going in a different direction...

2007-09-02T13:22:00.000-07:00

The school year is now three weeks old. Hard to believe, especially since my daughter doesn't start school in Fremont, CA until this coming Wednesday, September 5, 2007. The school year has been particularly busy with a variety of different things going on and I have been doing double duty for some of it.

During the summer, I published to this blog frequently, finishing up on some of my 'works in progress' during this time. I received many positive comments from teachers in the SMUHSD regarding some of the posts that were here. There were also those who disliked the frequency of the posts during the summer and the fact that there was 'opinion' in some of my postings. At the first SMUHSD Tech Coordinators Meeting, the issue of this blog came up for discussion. The issues of frequency of posts and posts that were 'opinionated' that went out to the masses were discussed. As a result, I am going to continue to write on this blog like I have in the past, seeing what I believe are the emerging trends in educational technology and sharing my opinions as to the best ways these emerging technologies can be used in the classroom. In addition, I will create a second blog, SMUHSD Tech Bytes that will publish only once per month and will have just professional development activities and resources on it. This blog will be e-mailed to all SMUHSD teachers.

There will be some duplication on the two blogs, but for the most part, this blog will be my space where I can be a little contraversial and espouse some views that are my opinion and not be worried about offending someone due to the nature and number of posts. The SMUHSD Tech Bytes blog will be limited to professional development items and it may have some links back to this blog and will only be published once a month.

For those of you who read this blog and are not SMUHSD teachers, nothing will change, maybe a little, since I won't be holding things back on this blog. It will be me, 100% of the time. Thanks for reading and please feel free to comment on what you see here anytime.

Google @ School

2007-08-17T18:17:00.000-07:00

I had a great opportunity to attend the 'Google @ School' presentations yesterday at the 'Googleplex' in Mountain View, CA. (I'm pictured here with Cheryl Davis and Kathleen Ferenz, whom I presented the GoogleIT sessions this summer and will repeat them in Monterey this November!) There were presentations from many of the teams working on the 'free Google Tools' that have a variety of educational uses. The tools included, Docs and Spreadsheets, Gmail, YouTube (I found out that one of the YouTube project leads is a Capuchino HS grad), Talk, Calendar and Pages. The best part of the sessions were the testimonials from Northwestern and Arizona State Universities about their implementation of the Google @ School tools and the 'domain page' that allows information technology directors to customize the tools and the level of access students and teachers have to each individual tool.

There is no cost for educational institutions to implement the Google @ School tools and Google can assist you in purchasing a domain name (web site name) where your tools will be hosted for $10 a year. Personally, I piloted this system for the students in Capuchino High School's Global Communications Program to give them access to these tools 24/7/365. Capuchino's Google @ School Page

I this could be a great solution for many educational institutions because Google has assured all educational institutions of the following:
- No cost for Google Apps for Educational users.
- No maintenance for district IT departments.
- Gmail can be filtered and blocked by districts by adding their own filtering, blocking device
- No selling or providing of data to any third parties by Google for the duration of the program.
- Districts have complete control as to which tools students and teachers have access through a dashboard that allows certain functions to be 'turned off.'
- Students can access their data and documents from any Internet accessible computer.

This might not be the right fix now, but it could be something that could be beneficial for all schools. Only time will tell.

If you want to take a look or want more information about Google @ School, check it out here!

World Clock: Running Statistics at Your Fingertips

2007-08-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

Ever wanted to visually represent to students how the worlds population is changing in real time? The world clock provided by a site called 'Poodwaddle,' allows you to embed a version of their world clock into your web page or blog. The clock uses sources like the CIA Factbook, World Health Organization and the US Census Bureau to calculate the data. They do make a disclaimer that the data is based on statistical analysis from the sources above and may not be accurate in real time, it is very interesting to see and to have students see how the population of the world is changing all the time. The buttons across the top allow you to view the statistics on an annual, month, day or current basis. The 'Now' button allows you to clear the counters and watch them rise in real time. Take a look below and see how the population of world changes before your eyes...

Poodwaddle.com

Poodwaddle also offers a variety of different resources that you can use on your web page or blog for free...

Educational Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century

2007-08-01T14:33:00.000-07:00

With the beginning of the 2007-2008 school year quickly approaching, (August 14 for me!) I wanted to look at why some projects succeed and others fail. This is important to those of us who are involved in Educational Technology and how the changes in information will change how teachers teach and students learn. Today, I happened across a few blog posts and a news post from from the business field that might shed some light on the future of education and how educators might deal with it.

Presently, there is a summit at Stanford University, where Start Up CEO's are meeting and discussing which growth opportunities will fuel the expansion of the Internet and technology services. Unsurprisingly, these entrepreneurs identified teens as the group driving innovation within the Technology field. KGO-TV did a short piece on the conference and an interview with the host, Tony Perkins of Always On. Watch the Video here!

There were also three blog posts today that fit the idea of teachers becoming entrepreneurs of their own teaching. The first is from Guy Kawasaki's blog, "How to Change the World" and guest blogger, Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin. His post, "On the Other Hand: The Flip Side of Entrepreneurship" listed several ideas that ring true for educators as we change the nature of how we teach. In reading this article, I could see how the motivations to join a start up tech firm (remember most lose money and die!) are very similar to becoming a teacher and how the process of building a start up and a school run parallel paths. The first item, "True believers go nuts at the slightest provocation," rings true with me, since it talks about Jerry Maguire type memos written late at night, outlining new or updated practices for the firm. Count me in, Guilty as charged!

The second blog post comes from Scott Adams', Dilbert Blog. In his "Career Advice" post, Scott makes the case that one of the best ways to get ahead is to be pretty good (top 25%) in more than one thing instead of being the best in only one thing. In education, we are often called upon to do more than what we were 'trained' to do in our student teaching programs. Working with students in extracurricular programs (coaching athletic teams, clubs, etc.) or serving in leadership roles as department chairpersons, WASC group leaders or serving on district level councils. While there are some great teachers that teach in one subject area during their entire teaching career, there are also many teachers that have had to 're-invent' themselves during their career, or had to show they could perform many different tasks to get the job initially. Being flexible and showing the ability to be good at more than one thing is definitely something that is valued in an educational environment and will become even more important in the future. I can count at least 20 different classes, roles, coaching assignments, etc. that I have performed during my tenure in the SMUHSD.

The last blog post I want to mention is David Warlick's, 2Cents Blog post titled, "History = Future?" In this post he makes the statement that classrooms are becoming places where media, technology and information come together and can create rich and deep learning environments for all students. He also states that all teachers and educational institutions will have to acknowledge three things in the next few years.

We are preparing children for a future we can not describe
We are preparing children, who as a generation, are enjoying a rich information experience outside-the-classroom.
We are preparing children within a new and dynamic information environment with new qualities that seem ready made for teaching and learning.

How are we, as teachers and professional educators, going to deal with these issues effectively and what role do other stakeholders (parents, community groups, business, etc.) have in the process?

Phishing: A Few Basics

2007-07-30T22:41:00.000-07:00

Phishing: is the practice of sending a fradulent e-mail (spam) to someone in the attempt to get them to reveal personal information that will allow the phisher to illegally access the victim's online banking, shopping or other online (e-commerce) site and transfer or use the assets available on the site.

Why am I sending this to a group of teachers? Because you, and your studnets, need to be aware of these types of schemes and it clearly illustrates the need for Information Literacy and Digital Citizenship skills in our schools.

As part of this effort, I would like invite you to take a short quiz that will ask you to determine which e-mail or web page is a phishing scheme and which one is legitmate.

US Government Phishing Quiz

This article and the short video below will go into phishing in a little more detail.

Two Great Online Tutorials

2007-07-27T15:38:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I embedded a video titled, "RSS in Plain English." The video was done by Lee LeFever of the CommonCraft Show. I really liked the way that the video simply explained RSS and how to set up a feed reader. The video also didn't concentrate on one type of reader but gave a few options. (Google Reader and Bloglines)

Recently, I found two additional videos done by Lee and the CommonCraft people, titled: "Social Networking in Plain English" and "Wikis in Plain English" I'm embedding them into this blog post below, so you can just click on them and watch them from this blog. (Remember embedding of media we talked about a few weeks ago with the Simpson's Slide Show!)

Social Networking in Plain English

Wikis in Plain English

I think all three of these videos are a great way to introduce these concepts to teachers and to students in your classes. They are also a great refresher to keep around when you forget the basic concepts in each of these areas.

My Wikipedia Education

2007-07-25T07:51:00.000-07:00

In the process of one of my most recent posts, I coined a term to refer to the bloggers in the Educational Technology community. I added 'EdTech Bloggerati' to Wikipedia as a term to describe these people. (I mostly did this as an experiment to understand the process for myself!) Members of the 'EdTech Bloggerati' are concerned with engaging with many different members of the community for the purpose of scholarly discussion and conversation about the future of education and technology.

I wrote what I felt was an average definition of the term and included several bloggers who could possibly defined by this term.

I returned to the page the next day and found a warning that the article may be removed due to 'obscure neologism.' According to Wikipedia's own sources, neologism is a word, term, or phrase which has been recently created ("coined") — often to apply to new concepts, to synthesize pre-existing concepts, or to make older terminology sound more contemporary. Neologisms are especially useful in identifying inventions, new phenomena, or old ideas which have taken on a new cultural context.

Well... essentially they are correct, but if you look at the definition, you'll see the reasons why I coined the term.

1) This term is applied to new concepts: The integration of technology into educational practice is a new concept and members of the EdTech Bloggerati are those individuals who are at the forefront of synthesizing the previous uses of technology in education and developing new ways to use technology in education.

2) EdTech Bloggerati also defines the older ideas of education and technology which have taken on new cultural context due to the inclusion of Web 2.0 tools and in decrease in the POE (Point of Entry) for students to have an Internet presence.

I'm hoping that the term survives... There have been two of Wikipedia's editors that have dinged it for being too obscure, but regardless of the outcome, it has been an education for me and something that I will definitely pass on to the students I work with on a daily basis.

You could show your support by clicking on the link here and adding to the definition of the term...

	Yes
	No
	Sometimes