This blog is to provide Educational Technology resources to teachers from around the country. The resources listed here allow teachers to quickly find resources to use with their classes and to improve their own technology integration skills.
I haven't posted on this blog much in the past few months, due to the huge lack of time with my job, but when this popped up, I had to get something out.
This is super cool, when you are writing in Google Docs, a new "search" box pops up on the right hand side, where the conversations and/or chat would be. This becomes a "mini-browser" where you can search and insert items from the Internet, without leaving the tab that your Google Doc is on. The window has a small search box, back and forward navigation buttons and will list information like maps, images and then will give you a list of search results.
Check out the screen shot below.
Thanks Google for providing a new tool that will make my life, and I am sure the lives of many other's much easier.
In my post on October 26, 2011, I look did a round up of all of the tablets that are or will be available soon and what this will mean for education. In January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, ASUS announced that they would be releasing a 7" Ice Cream Sandwich tablet. The ASUS MeMo 370t was a 7" tablet with a quad core processor and a $250 price tag. As a Director of Technology for a medium-sized suburban school district, I saw this as a device that could realistically make 1 to 1 computing in our district a reality. The video below is a review of the MeMo 370 from CNET. The other major features of this device are that there micro-USB, micro-SD and micro-HDMI. This will allow you to connect this device with off the shelf cables. This is a huge departure from the iPad, where any device you want to connect to it, requires a "dongle" that carries an extra cost, typically $30. As a District Director of Technology, managing proprietary dongles, on top of cables, is not something I want to do.
Since that time there have been several rumors about different devices from the Mobile World Congress held earlier this month. One of the things that was missing, was more mention of the ASUS MeMo 370t. Yesterday, the absence of the ASUS MeMo 370t were answered. A variety of different media sources started to report that Google has stepped in to support the 7" tablet project by ASUS and rebranded it the "Nexus Tablet." The best part of all of the reports that have been published yesterday was that the price, instead of $250, has dropped to between $149 - $199. This now brings the price of the tablet down to a price where schools can purchase this device, the digital textbooks for students to use with the device and save money in the process. The best part of this is that this device is not just an "e-reader." First of all, this device will have a camera that will function as a still and video camera. There are photo and video editing applications already on the machine. Because it is on the Android platform, it already has tight integration with Google Apps, which will run "natively," instead of in another wrapper, like the way they do on an iPad. This means that Google Apps will run on this device, like they do on your computer, without any extra integration. Personally, we proved this the other night when we were able to use the full scripting function in Google Spreadsheets on an Android tablet.
OK, we have made the case that this tablet can and will provide all of the functionality necessary for a true 1 to 1 device. We need to make the monetary case for purchasing these devices in a way where it is actually going to save school districts money. Most schools have a seven year text book adoption cycle. This means that they purchase new textbooks for their students every seven years. In a high school, with students taking 6-7 classes, with potentially 5 text books issued to them at an average cost of $100 each. Most of the "digital text books" that have been brought to market are sold at an average cost of $15 each. If you used a simple equation of 5 books, at $100 each, equals a $500 cost for that student. We know that these books need to last for seven years and more than likely we will go through two tablets in that time frame. Therefore, 5 digital text books at $15 per book, equals $75. If we purchase two tablets in that time frame, $150 x 2, equals $300. Adding those two pieces together, $75 for books and $300 for two tablets, gives us a total cost of $375 and a $125 savings.
My only question now is why are we waiting.
If you have comments, questions, issues, etc. PLEASE send them to me.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
