Transitioning: Finding Time and Space

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

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?

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.

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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’."

3. 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

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

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 ?

 

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?

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....