Race To The Bottom: Tablet Wars

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

via

Text Messaging: The Lost Tool In The Educators Tool Kit

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

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

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?

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

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.