Computers, the Internet and Creativity - Net Gain or Net Loss?

One topic for discussion in our gifted curriculum class last week was creativity. 

Our instructor began the discussion with a fact: since the 1980s, researchers have seen a decline in creativity.

::Alarm bells::

Hang on, what?

We've got kindergartners posting to their own YouTube channels, entire websites essentially dedicated to people trying to cultivate or share their creativity (Pinterest, anyone?), memes and "it" ideas of Internet culture last only a matter of days or weeks, and everyday, regular people, every day going out to work, trying to figure out how to stay ahead of the computer that ultimately wants to take their job, and people are LESS creative?

I'm less creative than the 1970s version of myself that came home from work, patted his kids on their sweet heads, ate whatever random Campbell's soup-based casserole was for dinner that night, and then watched a couple of hours of the generic, broadly appealing TV that the 3 broadcast networks were pumping to the rabbit ears on top of my television?

Come on... I realize that this research from Kyung Hee Kim of the College of William and Mary analyzing 30 years worth of results from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking supports it, but I don't buy that this is a closed question.

Perhaps we're asking the wrong questions now. The internet has changed the speed of innovation and shortened the shelf-life relevance of many ideas, so why wouldn't smartphones and the internet affect the way we think about and measure creativity? 

A quick digression in case you're unfamiliar with the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking
The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TCTT) was developed in the mid-20th century by educational psychologist Paul Torrance, and is built upon previous work from Joy Paul Guilford defining creativity and fleshing out creative traits of divergent thinking: fluency, originality, flexibility, and elaboration.

Okay, back to my argument (with a little bit of stats talk)
To summarize the article linked above from Dr. Kim about the decline in creativity, she observed changes in the median score on the figural (non-verbal) portion of the TTCT over a 30 year period. For most of the creativity traits, the normed scores were level-ish (yep, of course that's a scientific term. LOL), but particularly in this century, most all of the parameters median scores feel by a statistically significant level from the 2000 norming of the test to the 2008. She acknowledges that the scores might even be inflated because of the long timeframe between national norming of the test. As an example, drawing a smartphone during one phase of the figural test constitutes an "original" idea according to the scoring, because that would not have been an "average" object in 2008. In other words, test takers are getting points for originality that they probably should not be.

I read that entire article, and poured over every chart, hoping to find a chink in the numbers that explained what I was anecdotally seeing in my world - that the internet was, in fact, enhancing humans' creativity in 2018.

An interesting parallel trend to the decline in creativity is that average IQs scores have increased over the same period. So...are we getting better at thinking like computers? (And all the while programming our computers to learn and to think more creatively)?

What's the score?
Here's my general take - overall, computers and the internet have been a positive change for creativity and creative thinking, but that they have had a negative effect on some aspects. I'll use the TTCT Figural Test categories for reference.

Fluency: GAIN
Its nearly impossible to NOT be aware of more ideas and news in a broad range of topics in this day and age, and the more connected you are to social media and internet culture, the more accustomed you are to a breakneak speed of creative output and publishing. Ideas get old quickly on the web.

Originality: LOSS
This one was most important to one of my classmates. He sees his coding kids attempt to steal code from other projects they find on the web nearly every day, so its his professional responsibility to stress the importance of shutting out the echo chamber, sitting with your own thoughts, and having your own ideas.

Elaboration: GAIN
I think elaboration can be the inverse idea of both fluency or originality. Whichever it is, we get lots of practice in our connected culture taking other creatives' ideas and adapting it or viewing it with a critical eye for how we would do better.

Resistance to Premature Closure: EVEN
I've got to admit that I still don't totally understand this one. It has something to do with being okay with an idea not totally being "finished". This sounds to me like apps releasing in Beta and nearly finished products getting funding on Kickstarter. On the other hand...a lot of days long arguments on Facebook stem from individuals seeking closure of an argument that by its very nature probably will not.

Titles (Abstractness of Titles): GAIN
We title things on the internet all the time. Our reviews on Amazon. This blog post. The meme we created for the latest politician's blunder. That perfect caption under your Instagram post.

BUT...the research clearly says that creativity is in decline. So, what's your point?
We've got to keep looking into this! For everyone brave enough to attempt what becomes the next Pinterest Fail, for the DIYer that is going to transform their guest bath, and for every small-business and start-up that risks epic failure to address a problem that currently is underserved, we cannot stop and assume that our creative muscles are atrophying with our thumbs swiping screens, but that rather, we're only getting stronger.

Just because we haven't proved it yet doesn't mean we aren't.

JOIN THE OPTIMISTS!

Algebra on a Chromebook: Coding with Bootstrap

Have you ever wanted to code in the classroom to integrate more STEM projects, but felt tied into making sure you hit all your required curriculum?

Bootstrap (www.bootstrapworld.org) is a complete curricular resource for math teachers who want to integrate coding into their algebra instruction and computer science teachers who want to integrate and support their students' math learning.  Students learn the logic and spatial reasoning necessary to translate into "real" coding languages while working with operations, functions, and the coordinate plane. It's a real two-for-one!

What Will I Find?

The Bootstrap website has everything you will need to implement the Bootstrap curriculum in your Algebra 1 class (except for the technology hardware, of course)

1. Student workbook (and teacher edition)
2. Unit pages for students to follow through and fill in their workbook
3. WeScheme online coding environment (this is called an IDE, for "integrated development environment," which just means, "this is where you write the code for your website or webapp.")
4. Alignment to common core standards
5. Teacher notes (displayed on the same page students use to read instructional content)
6. Professional development videos to help you understand coding-specific words or processes before you have to share with your class.

How Will My Students Do This on Their Chromebooks?

Some of the work in the Bootstrap units will take place in the online modules, some will be handwritten on paper or whiteboards, and some will be in an IDE like WeScheme (when kids are building their projects)

In other words, students will use their Chromebooks for viewing lesson content, collaborating, and writing their code. 

Why Should I Do This Instead of Focusing on Raising Tests Scores? Accreditation is Very Important for Us.

I believe this question can be answered with three more. How's your more traditional curriculum working for all of your student? Is everyone mastering the Algebra content? Are your students learning content for a test, or are you giving them a vision for something more?

In my personal experience, the number of students that come into my Algebra 1 class that are being successful in "normal" classes continues to fall. We still have students that can excel in those environments and can play the school game, but I see a growing divide between those and the others. Going through the laundry list of things our district is trying to target, the bootstrap curriculum gives me opportunity to still do plenty in reading technical content, writing for assessment and understanding, and providing engaging, relevant work.

How Else Could I Sell This to My Administrator and My Colleagues?

Here are some talking points that should cover most of your bases-

• "The units are aligned to the common core."
• "Students will have an end product to demonstrate their learning at the end of the semester."
• "They provide a pre and post test to gather data on the curriculum's effectiveness."
• "Coding is a highly relevant and marketable skill for getting our students college and career-ready."
• "Feel free to come visit and ask my kids about their work at any time. :)"

Is the Bootstrap curriculum for everyone? Maybe not - if you have no interest in coding yourself, then I think you would have a hard time getting your students passionate about learning themselves. Some students are just as averse to "new" or "different" in education as your teaching colleagues, so you'll need to be sold on the idea yourself to get them on board. That's not to say you already need to know everything about coding. The teacher notes are very helpful, and I went from totally confused to amazed at the idea of "circles of evaluation" and how they can help increase my students' UNDERSTANDING of the process and necessity of order of operations.

"Good" Use of Education Technology

What makes for "good use" of a computer lab, laptop, or tablet cart?

The prevailing pedagogy for "21st century" or "rigorous and relevant" learning would say the ideal involves students engaged in some relevant, collaborative inquiry-based project, or simulating/investigating a model not otherwise possible or enriched by software/the web.

But what about other times?

Is standardized testing good use?
Is practice-testing for computer based standardized testing good use?
Is content-related gaming good use?
Is word processing good use?
Is watching tutorial/flipped classroom videos good use?
Are drill and kill practice websites good use?

The answers to all of these questions depends on the current situation in your building and the current needs of your students. Clearly, if all of your students have access to computers and a lot of bandwidth at home, using  the lab for students to finish projects or watch videos may not be a good  use. However, if you're choosing between students turning in 1970s-era projects or giving kids access to create polished, media-rich projects at school, the best use of resources is to have kids create in the lab.

Bottom line, the best use of school technology resources is to USE THEM. Once we're fighting everyday for access to the lab or carts then we'll be more selective and demanding of the way they are used. 

Email Ninja Trick: Add A Like Button

Some emails don't necessarily need a reply, but you want to let the sender know you read the email and will act accordingly or approve of the course of action. Most email platforms have send receipts, but they require the sender to set them up prior to sending, and still at best prove that you opened the email.

To solve this conundrum and clear my inbox, I took a page out of my social media habits and saved my own facebook-style "like button."

In the example above, I responded to one of my assistant principal's emails about make-up fire and tornado drills we'll be having next week.

How can I get my own? 
(PC/Mac)

1. Do a Google search for "facebook like button"
2. Save your favorite image by clicking on one and dragging it to the desktop
3. Rename it to something more descriptive (mine default-saved as "imgres")
4. Open any email reply
5. Drag your image from the desktop to your email text field.
6. Send.

(iPad/iPhone for GMail)

1. Do a Google search for "facebook like button"
2. Save your favorite image by touching it until the box pops up to "save image"
3. Rename it to something more descriptive (mine default-saved as "imgres")
4. Open any email reply
5. Click on the paperclip icon and "attach a photo"
6. Select the "like button" from your camera roll
7. Send.

It's a pretty quick process on a desktop/laptop, but you're probably better off just using an emoji on a phone or tablet. 

Should Your Students Be Practicing Typing for CCSS Assessments?

The Problem Ahead
There is a lot of concern among a lot of elementary teachers I know about the younger kiddos' proficiency with computer skills necessary for completing Missouri's version of the Smarter Balanced Assessment field test later this spring.

I understand the concern. When we're trying to eek out every accreditation point we can, it would be a SHAME to miss the mark because our kiddos knew what they needed to know, but where unable to communicate their knowledge because they were uncomfortable with the interface, typing skills, or mouse skills that will be required of them on this web-based assessment.

So, to address the concerns, many of them have been discussing using the labs in their buildings to have kids practice typing on software or web-based typing games. There's irony here, right? Not only are we teaching to the test now, we're teaching to the skills for regurgitating the skills on the test. Forgive me if I'm out of place here - I have only a small amount of experience with elementary from my year subbing in 2007 and 2008 - but this doesn't seem rational. Elementary teachers are pulled a myriad of directions every day trying to fit in writer's workshops, reader's workshops, social studies, science, math, and specials, and already don't have enough time for their content, but we're going to advise they take time from content and relationship for kids to play typing games?

We don't need them to become home-row drones that crank out 80 wpm. We need kids that are comfortable typing real documents. We need kids that can take something they may have written down on a piece of paper and transfer it to a text-box in the testing environment. We need kids that know how to type out some math as simple even as 8+7=15 without searching for each symbol.

Are There Relevant Activities Can You Do To Practice Typing? (when all you have is lab)
Here's a quick list (this is one of things that are great for searching on Pinterest)

1. Keep writer's workshop drafts or journals in a notebook, have students choose their best to type on lab day and publish to share online
2. Pair students on a collaborative doc tool and take turns writing passages of a story
3. Practice spelling words
4. Choose an article or nonfiction passage in one of your content areas and write summary statements per paragraph.
5. After a science experiment in the classroom, students write up a "report" detailing their hypothesis, method, results, and conclusion.
6. Have students choose a recent leveled book they've read and write a review on Amazon or this site from Scholastic.
7. Create a multiplication or factors table for personal use during math time.

Conclusion

Are "computer skills" important for our students? Absolutely. However, if we think about preparing them for CCSS assessments as another extra task, we miss the point. Skills practice and refinement can and should be integrated with content-specific activities - your students will be better equipped to transfer their skills when they've gained them within a "real" context.

Choose Your Ed Tech Like a 500 Year Old Saint

Having a plan for the education technology you use in your classroom, school, or district must be the first thing you do when considering technology implementation.

You could do worse than designing your technology plan around the educational principles of a 500 year-old saint.

St. Ignatius and the Jesuit Educational Mission
Quick background for the Igna-ignorant like I was several months ago (with apologies to my Catholic friends who know more about this than I do).

"Ignatius of Loyola was a Spanish knight from a local Basque noble family, hermit, priest since 1537, and theologian, who founded the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) and, on 19 April 1541, became its first Superior General.[2] Ignatius emerged as a religious leader during the Counter-Reformation. Loyola's devotion to the Catholic Church was characterized by absolute obedience to the Pope.[3]" - from Wikipedia, "Ignatius of Loyola"

"The Ignatian pedagogical paradigm is a way of learning and a method of teaching taken from the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola.[1][2] It is based in St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, and takes a holistic view of the world.[3]

The three main elements are Experience, Reflection, and Action. A pre-learning element, Context, and a post-learning element, Evaluation, are also necessary for the method's success, bringing the total to five elements. Ignatian pedagogy uses this dynamic five-step method along with an Ignatian vision of the human and the world to "accompany the learner in their growth and development."[4] 

The Ignatian pedagogical paradigm is also used in spiritual retreats and learning experiences as an active means of developing and questioning one's own conscience, as well as in making sound and conscientious decisions." from Wikipedia, "Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm"

These 5 elements of the Ignatian pedagogical paradigm and the Jesuit motto, ad majorem dei gloriam ("to the greater glory of God"), serve as a educational framework for the numerous Jesuit sponsored high schools and universities in North America and around the world. (including St. Louis University, St. Louis University High, and De Smet Jesuit High locally)

To the greater glory of God and the salvation of man

Wrapping Your Faith and Your Professional Life Together
Its been my experience teaching in public schools as a Christian that the further I want to make all of my choices in accordance with my mission to Jesus, the more fulfilled I feel, the more I can stand in the conviction of my choices, but also, the less some of my colleagues, students, and parents may understand where I'm coming from.

Being a teacher that's a Christian is about more than "being Jesus to my students" as the most honest, or most compassionate, or most just teacher in the school - its a challenge to make every pedagogical decision in light of you and your students as spiritual beings with imbued worth as beings created in the image of God. As just one example, being a standards-based grader is a great opportunity to silently craft a narrative of mercy, repentance, and redemption to your students. (The analogy falls apart when I think about grace - if our sins are really analogous to grades, we don't try and try again until we get it right, Jesus takes the failing grade for us and we're granted "mastery" through his sacrifice, but you get the point.)

A lot of money gets thrown at technology because it looks good, or because its the next lastest, greatest savior of education, but following Ignatian principles and reflecting on "to the greater Glory of God," we can be more sure of the stewardship and utility of our technology choices.

For more reading on the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm, this paper from the Jesuits, "Ignatian Pedagogy: A Practical Approach" was very helpful for me.

Using Technology to Enrich Your Students' Experience and Call to Action
How can education technology affect or serve each of Ignatian elements of education?

1. Context
Thinking about your students contextually should always be a consideration when evaluating a technology tool. Can my students use this? Would my students be willing to try this? When I was anti-flipping the classroom on the basis of home access for some of my students, I was sitting here in context.

2. Experience
When a lesson affects your students on more than a superficial level with little active engagment, the material is less likely to "stick" or to spur students to action to apply the knowledge. Integrating multimedia resources to affect senses, reaching out to professionals in the field of study with social media, creating discussion boards via Padlet, or creating a digital artifact to link to the lesson in the students' experience are just a few examples

3. Reflection
Ignatius and the Jesuits went against a "monastic" life of seclusion, which made reflection and solitude in the midst of mission of vital importance. We see times in Jesus' ministry where he left the crowds to be alone with the Apostles, and separated even further to be along in prayer.

Reflection in the Ignatian paradigm is the opportunity to look back on the experience and action of the day to find their worth and to seek what the Holy Spirit is doing next. Even if you're not a Christian, reflection is VITALLY important to teaching because it is the time when we see how we've done and what we have to do next. Reflection is when we sort out our perceptions from reality. Blogging is the only edtech application I see here, but really, why try to do more with it than that? :)

4. Action
The Jesuits were all about being on mission (some compare them to "Catholic Marines"), so the purpose of any learning experience is to compel the student to want to do something with what they've learned. Action is where you put into practice what convictions you found in reflection. This is an excellent opportunity to use technology to reach out to community leaders, upload a video to launch a viral campaign for a cause, or even use a 3D printer to make a product to meet someone's need.

5. Evaluation
How'd you do? What your action effective? Evaluation is the last element in the Ignatian cycle because it then affects the next lesson's context. As far as technology goes, here's another chance for students to blog as self-assessment, use adaptive software tools like Study Island, Manga High or Renaissance Learning for testing, send students a Google Form to fill out, or depending on the product they created in action, using site analytics or view counts as a real-life metric to their success.

YouTube Video Analytics of my most popular upload

"What's in it for me?"
As I mentioned earlier, once I started researching St. Ignatius' educational philosophies and how they fit in with the Jesuit mission for education, I found a lot of clarity in what the Holy Spirit had begun in me several months ago as far as what it means to be a teacher that's a Christian. I have always believed that whatever technology we use in schools should be in service to the learning, but it was harder to go further with that - "and what, exactly, beyond "math," do I want the kids to be learning?"

I felt a little embarrassed at "discovering" educational principles that teachers have been using in my own cities for nearly 200 years, but its been a refreshing response for me to the subjective, everyone's-truth-is-good-for-them attitudes that often prevail in education.

Daum Equation Editor - Polishing Students' Documents and Presentations

The biggest hurdle I've experienced to moving all of my students' math work online and to our iPads was related - I want them to create polished, professional reports and work, but kids were limited in their abilities to express the equations they had worked with.

For instance, showing the work for solving an inequality they had written for a short story ended up looking something like this:

It's serviceable, and if you know what they work is supposed to look like, you can translate it to know its meaning, but it definitely doesn't resemble what kids are used to seeing in any math text, much less the way they themselves would be writing it.

One solution I started accepting to work around this problem was for kids (and sometimes myself) to type out their narrative and leave space to write in their calculations. Writing in their calculations and formulas after printing is certainly easier to implement, but arguably looks much worse than the awkward result of typing them.

Making Equations

So, I'm excited to have found Daum Equation Editor in the Chrome Store this afternoon. According to the app details, here are all of the features:

• Create formulas with the click of a button. 
• Create formulas with TeX input editor. ( latex )
• Changing the size and layout of the formula.
• Images created with a formula to save to your PC. 
• Text files created with a formula to save to your PC.

The tools are based on LaTex, and are identical to those available in the equation editor in Google Docs (my other favorite), but are nice and large (and obvious).

Why Do I Need Daum Equation Editor?

I wouldn't use it if I were creating everything inside of a Google document, but in any other Google product or interactive tools like Socrative, an editor is not present, so you must import equations as images. Here's why Daum wins:

Instead of using Alt + Shift + 4 for screenshots on a Mac, or the snipping tool in Windows Vista/6/7/8, Daum has 3 saving options right in the editor. 

I got SUPER excited at the thought of accessing my photos via Drive, but for some reason Daum saves the images as .PNG files and the embedded Drive option in Google Presentations will only recognize .JPG files.

The Bottom Line

Common Core standards and the demands of 21st century work demand that our students be able to create and publish digital work, so we need tools that are easy to use and share with our students. Yes, there are other equation editors, and one embedded in the programming of Word and Google Docs, but exporting those equations to multimedia presentations or other apps still requires taking a screenshot, so you may as well give your students a straight-forward tool that saves the image on the same screen they use to create it.

Data Doesn't Have to Be Scary - How You Get it Matters

Do you ever feel like you're left with a pile like this after you've collected data for a survey or given a common assessment that needs to be graded and entered into a spreadsheet?

Yeah, I Know Someone Like That...
Gathering data to use for your building goals, data teams, or class statistics projects doesn't have to end with you and/or your colleagues spending hours in front of a spreadsheet entering values (and inevitably making errors). This TED Talk from global health consultant and pediatrician Joel Selanikio (@jselanikio) chronicles his experience with paper surveys in the developing world. What Dr. Selanikio realized from his field observations was that no matter how many nurses tramped through jungles door-to-door surveying families on child births, immunizations, deaths, and the like, dealing with the data was a cumbersome, daunting task that usually was abandoned. The result was "data-driven" decision making on vaccine supply that was formed from very small, very incomplete datasets.




What's This Mean for Me as a Teacher?
Dr. Selanikio's story is about the success of cloud-based, user-friendly, digital data collection methods, and I think we can experience the same in our schools. Beyond the results your state sends weeks (months?) after your spring standardized testing, how much of the data you gather about the student learning at your school is ever compiled electronically?

I think a lot of the one-more-thing mentally that many teachers associate with data teams in their schools is the result of their experiences grading everything by hand, tallying the scores on paper or in their grading software, and THEN taking the scores and (hopefully) copying and pasting them into some common spreadsheet. So how can you experience a similar explosion of efficiency like observed in the TED Talk?

If it cannot be gathered electronically, don't collect the data.

The Shift

Only collecting data electronically MAY mean that you and your team have to rewrite some assessments, but that might be for the best, anyway. Which is more valuable, asking a student to graph the equation of a line in slope-intercept form, (which would be hard to enter on a spreadsheet) or having the student graph the equation of a line and then tell something about its slope, intercept, or coordinates? Once students are taking what they do graphically and making textual conclusions or inferences, those responses can easily be matched and manipulated in Excel.

What Ways Can I Gather Data Electronically in My Classroom?

The secret is in taking advantage of mobile devices that you and your students already have.

Try an of these on for size:

• Google Forms (Here's how I did it)
• Socrative (Here's how I did it)
• MagPi

(Effective) Teacher Technology Use Is Growing (INFOGRAPHIC)

A friend of mine, +Dave Hallmon , forwarded this infographic from onlineuniversities.com today and it had some points that really grabbed my interest.

1. 68% of students reported in 2012 that their teachers used technology effectively.

It doesn't go into what technology proficiencies made for "effective," or at what level, but that seems like an encouraging number.

2. Of teachers surveyed, 90% have a laptop or PC in the classroom.

This astounds me that is NOT at least 99%, but good for perspective, I guess. Even on days you're upset that your favorite tech tool isn't behaving, it could be WORSE.

3. 3 in 4 teachers say that tech allows them to reinforce and expand on content, motivate students, and accommodate multiple learning styles.

Is it statistically appropriate, then to link my first point, and this one and assume that of the ~75% of teachers that report these benefits, only 7% aren't doing it well? (Probably not, but it would be an interesting test of significance to run)

4. In a study of AP Calc students, the half in a #flipclass model scored an average of more than half a point higher on the 5 point AP exam scale

I feel like my most effective days teaching in AP Stats are the days we clarify misconceptions and reinforce what is understood. Giving lectures, which is something my kids DID ask for more of, seems like a bit of a time waste for kids that I know can and will mostly read/watch when I tell them to.

I have a hunch that at least a segment of these higher AP scores are because the brighter kids benefited more from the self-paced learning afforded by the video model, but it's significant enough for me to give it a shot next week when we return from Spring Break.

Link Shortening - It's Not Just For Tweets

Imagine you've engineered a beautifully scripted web-quest for your students...

...and no one finishes because they're all making the same URL typo.

You've got a document shared in your Dropbox or Google Drive that you want to send your students to, but forgot to...

...hyperlink on your class page, put it in the shared folder, or grant permissions to student viewers.

Few things frustrate me more when my students are targeted to specific URLs than the inevitable typos that lead them to erroneous or dead pages. Maybe its the students at our school, but they almost always just assume that MY link was wrong, or that I gave them the wrong link.

To mitigate this frustration, I stole a social media trick you probably use without even thinking:

I shortened my links.

In social media, the purpose of link shortening is to save characters in order to maximize your content. For the classroom, link shortening comes down to this: implementing your lessons, making your job facilitating easier, and kid (teen)-friendliness.

If you have all of your links already hyperlinked on a file or webpage, your best bet will probably just be to get one, simple link.

No frills link shorteners: (More info here)

• tinyurl.com
• bit.ly
• Is.gd
• Goo.gl

If you haven't yet archived or curated your links in one place, bundling them together may save you a step with these tools.

Bundling link shorteners: (More info here)

• bit.ly
• fur.ly
• bridgeURL.com
• minmu.net
• miniurl.com

As an example of how this might work, I bundled all of these link shortener links with bit.ly here.

This is what the page of bundled links will look like for your students (or you)

Testimonial

I helped my department chair through this process one day last week. There was a Google Doc she had created for a career exploration activity that had several hyperlinks embedded in the doc. When I came into the lab, her students were pecking away furiously, copying the URLs from the paper handout she had photocopied for them.

The process was simple:

1. Set the document's share settings to "public" or "anyone with the link"
• If the file is not currently on Google Drive, use the upload button next to "create," then do step 1.
2. Copy share link
3. Paste share link into the text field at tinyurl.com
4. Write new shortened link on the chalkboard

I asked her about the experience later that day:

What's been your experience with having kids type in URLs to go to websites for your lessons?

Kids usually do ok, but some kids take forever.

How did using a link shortener to share your document help students complete your lesson? 

Liked it.

Would you try this out again? 

Yes.

Which do you think you would rather do - send students files through InSight, or share documents from your Google Drive in this manner? Why? (Note: InSight and SynchronEyes are our current and former computer lab management software installs) 

I liked it when I had a document to share, but unsure about if I just wanted to send them to a link. I kind of hate insight anyway... I liked synchroneyes better :) 

Not a rousing success for her, I guess, but I helped another teacher use it to share a file (our kids don't all have Google Apps accounts) the next day, and she was very grateful for the process.

---

UPDATE: The same teacher interviewed above used a link shortener today to send her kids a SMART Notebook Jeopardy file reviewing exponent rules for the students to play against each other in the lab. Here's a picture of her implementation.

If you want to test the student experience for yourself, just use her link! tinyurl.com/KingEX

Why Students Are Failing Online Courses and What We Can Do About It

A recent study of students in online courses by the Columbia University's Community College Research Center (featured in TechCrunch) found evidence that "all students who take more online courses, no matter the demographic, are less likely to attain a degree," but that particularly, male, African-American, and younger students struggle. I'd just had a conversation with an English teacher, @amathews17, about online courses at METC last week, so the study particularly piqued my interest.

The Problem

Class averages with "normal" sample sizes are lower than traditional courses

Our district currently offers a ton of recovery credits to juniors and seniors during the school day and after school two days a week. The success of the program is debatable in my opinion. The math scores, which shown above, are low, but the history and lit courses, (which I thought were always better) aren't drastically better. A lot of kids get credits, but...

Here's the problem (from my experience as an online student AND teacher) with online courses that disadvantage males, minorities, and youth.

1. Online courses require more intrinsic motivation to begin and sustain work, and self-assessment of progress toward learning goals. Without social pressures or direct teacher pacing, many students cannot monitor their pacing and fall behind, or struggle to even begin coursework.
2. Online courses, even those facilitated by instructors featuring both synchronous and asynchronous interactivity in the form of chats or discussion forums, are an independent venture. Students are expected to work alone, and to seek out assistance when necessary. We work hard to socialize our students and foster collaboration (and rightfully so), but we've lost the value of independent, quiet thought in the process.
3. Online courses require students to read for learning and often to write for assessment. This is a particular challenge in OUR program because a lot of our students wind up needing to recover credits because they reading below grade level. They get by in traditional courses where teachers can modify texts and give verbal cues, but once those supports are gone, these struggling readers don't even know where to begin.

What Can We Do?

If online courses are the future of ed, (which all recent trends suggest) there are elements of online courses we can integrate into traditional classrooms to develop a blended-learning environment that can prepare our students for future online courses.

1. Make students read. You have to. Use more than just your text book
1. Check your bookroom for old texts
2. Create/adapt your own texts with a CK12.org Flexbook
3. Make use of free materials on other publishers' websites and MOOC offerings on iTunesU 
2. Hold your students responsible for monitoring and reflecting on their progress, and have tools available for self-assessment and directed intervention
1. Video repository (Your own or any from YouTube/tutorial sites)
2. Extra practice links that are self-grading or worksheets with solutions available
3. Guided chapter or lesson summaries with some blanks missing
3. Before (or after) your social, constructivist activity, introduce an independent activity of pre (or post) cognition. It will enhance later discussion and acclimate students to forming their own questions and ideas
1. Pre-reading
2. KWL charts
3. Frayer models for key concepts
4. "I learned, I liked, I wish..."

The Takeaway

It gets reiterated every year and every time standards are reorganized, but every teacher really must be a reading teacher. Whether its for future Smarter Balanced CCSS assessments, strategies for online courses, or improvement in your own subject, there's no way to get around the necessity that our students are able to read in our content area.

Tech Skills Your Students (Probably) Don't Have and You (Probably) Do - Part 2: Work

"Digital Native" doesn't mean your students have technology skills in their DNA - just that they pick them up more quickly. They still need you to guide them! With this page from the Washington Superintendent of Public Instruction that our district is using as a model for our integration plan, part 1 in the series had 4 research tips for your students that you are (probably) familiar with.

In part two, we'll look at 3 work-specific skills you can model for your students.

1. Entering datasets and creating a graph with spreadsheet software.

I found this deficiency the first time I tried to do this project with scatter plots. Although the scatter plot is much faster and accurate via spreadsheet, the majority of my students felt like learning excel was going to be too daunting a task and drew theirs by hand.

2. Typing "properly" with speed.

In the interest of getting our students more exposure to Office and to align with career-track courses for Perkins grants, my school has eliminated "keyboarding" and mostly teach it in a word processing course. They know more about PowerPoint animations and setting margins, but at the expense of home row and speed drills. Virtual keyboards on smartphones are only making the skill gap wider. As computers evolve, it might not matter, but its still a relevant skill in 2012.

Make typing skills a social game with these websites or Facebook apps.

• Typing Monster - Intermediate to Advanced
• Typing Maniac - Intermediate to Advanced
• Alpha Attack - Basic (Letter Recognition)

Typing Manic on Facebook becomes social

3. Work on a group project without emailing back and forth

Amongst my co-teachers and students, this one is perhaps most known about and least utilized. Maybe I just love it more than others, but I completed an entire 30 page instructional design plan in Google Docs with two partners in grad school. It was fantastic discussing edits as we made them. When everyone in a group has a Google account, especially in 1:1 environments, a group can collaboratively work on a presentation, word document, or spreadsheet at the same time, and communicate on changes via the integrated chat. With Google Hangouts, the collaboration becomes even easier.

Tech Adaptations for YOU:

Are any of these things you can already do? Depending on the age of your students, you have so many professional and/or creative skills that they need, but don't yet have! Come back Wednesday for part 3, or reflect on some things of your own you might be able to share!

Using Old Stuff: Neglected Towers and Laptops

It's technology, so you're familiar with the inevitable march towards obsolescence, but you're nostalgic, too, so you don't want to just chuck the old machines out with the garbage (or try to recycle them). Why not get some use out of them?!



Here's just a few ideas that I've utilized, and the glorious machines that made it all possible.

1998 PowerMac G3  

• Offline Notes Sharer
• Document Creating
• (small) Reference Library
• Crowd(classroom)sourced Knowledge Creation Station (silent conversations, classwide KWL charts, etc.)

I recovered this old machine in 2008 from the back of the library in the A/V graveyard. After inquiring to A/V and the tech department about what I would need to do to "legally" take it home, I was met mostly with confusion about my motives for taking that super old tower. Translation - it was so old no one cared.

I had to buy a DVD drive for it so I could install my personal copy of OS X over the OS 9 living on the 7 gb (?!!) harddrive, and upgraded the RAM an embarrassingly small 256 MB, but alas, she was mine. My first goal for this Mac was as a media center to stream Hulu to my TV, but... this computer was from 1998. Surprisingly, it WAS able to stream Pandora.

This Mac returned to school after my wife (and I?) eventually decided we didn't need a bondi blue  Pandora machine sitting on the floor in our living room. And at school, it solved a problem for me! I felt like kids coming back from illness, field trip, or suspension and needing previous day's notes was becoming a daily occurrence, so the Mac eventually became my yesterday's-notes, type papers, and use the dictionary widget machine in the back of my class. 

Because the harddrive was so small, I had to be judicious, but I was also able to some helpful software on there, as well. 

• To most efficiently conduct my notes-sharing, I installed a slightly older, smaller-than-current version of SMART Notebook. If I were doing this now, I would probably just use Notebook Express.
• Open Office for document creation
• The newest iTunes version I could get on the old (pre-Intel) PowerPC architecture

This tower is officially retired now that I have a class set of iPads since the kids could use those for every role the Mac had filled.

---

2004 Generic Dell Laptop 

• Mobile offline notes station 
• Small group work log (at the desk, which made it less obtrusive to the usual classroom environment than 4 people moving chairs to the back table)
• Document Creation
• (small) Reference Library
• Crowd(classroom)sourced Knowledge Creation Station (silent conversations, class-wide KWL charts, etc.)
• Classroom sign out spreadsheet

I don't even remember the specs on this laptop except that it has no internal wireless card and the install of Windows XP that was on there when I inherited it from my parents was trashed. To put it more positively, I finally had a machine I could (potentially) destroy by going all-in with a small Ubuntu Linux install. This was made EXPONENTIALLY more difficult without the internal wireless card (although, chances are it would not have played well with linux anyway), so every time I wanted to update software or retrieve a new package, I had to dig a network patch cable out of the basement and sit on the floor next to my TV (where the modem and router are). 

This harddrive was a little more manageable, but the processor is incredibly sluggish, so I soon realized the prospects for this machine were actually pretty similar to the Mac previously mentioned. I could run Notebook software (this time, Express). Video streaming was still pretty much a no go, but if I was patient enough, I could buffer some YouTube.

Again, because of the iPads, this laptop had no more of its current roles to fulfill. On a whim the first week of school, I made it my sign-out/sign-in sheet. I can leave it by the door with only one thing to plug in (instead of monitor and CPU), and its still out and present for other uses. I was a little concerned about theft, but since I got it free and don't really use it, I wouldn't really be missing it. I like having that record available right by the door for easy reference.

Anything interesting you're doing with your old machines? Budget-crunched schools are dying to know!

8 YEAR REPLACEMENT CYCLE?!

I heard today from someone "in the know" at my school that given the EXTREME budget shortfall we are experiencing, the 4 yr PC replacement cycle plan we had been on (and my school would have reached next year) has been extended to an EIGHT YEAR cycle.

Really?  That has to be a joke, right?  I mean the computer I bought in 2002 for college still gets a little use in the basement, but I've upgraded the RAM since then and paid some more then so I could get some extended use out of it.  Our school machines, most surely, went to the lowest bidder, and are beginning to die a painful death.  (Although I'm not sure if the death is more painful for the machines, or for the teachers' whose lesson plans are thwarted whenever one goes down.)

My only assumption is that admin across the parking lot is really just holding out for some sweet grant that magically wishes us new machines.  I'm quite understanding that attempting to extend the lives of our current machines is probably a good idea fiscally (and I would even probably end up trying to snag a few of our current machines for in-class use if they WERE to be replace "on time.").  It's just hard to shrug off my envy frustrations when I read about lesson plans using iPod touches and the bubbling excitement over the possibilities of integrating iPads when I'm looking toward a future relationship with an 8-year-old PC.

Finally, while I'm at it, anyone with money to share want to upgrade the computers in the McCluer North math department?  Doesn't hurt to send out a call, right?

Just When I Thought I Wasn't (Comparatively) OLD.

There's much to write (and has been written) about how the exponential growth and expansion of technologies (and the internet) is creating micro-generations and expanding generation gaps between those.  As someone who my peers acknowledge as tech "being my thing," I've largely ignored and dismissed the idea as being applicable to myself.  Yes, being 27, my age group is on the edge of "growing up on the internet," but I've always been an early adopter.  Since I've grown right along with the internet, I did not fully remember the stark contrast of computing without it.


"Were there even computers before the internet?"


"Of course!  Don't you know they were invented in the 40s?  All kinds of computing was being done on computers before the internet.  People published papers and wrote books..."


"That's what typewriters are for..."


"Yeah, but what if you need more than one copy?  You'd have to type it all over again!"


"No, people would go get it Xeroxed."

Of course, I knew that business and then personal computers had revolutionized the way that people conducted business, designed, and published, but this student had already gotten me thinking.  When we went to the computer lab in elementary school, there was not much offered us beyond word processing, Oregon Trail, and (for gifted program kids) LOGO programming (which we didn't really understand).  How much less useful was the personal computer in the 80s?  The 90s?  How much money did individuals and corporations spend on software and utilities that had to be installed on individual machines that is now hosted online?  Just the fact that I even knew a life before being wired(less) was so natural gives me a completely different perspective on the internet and smart devices.

Think about it - do you even touch your computer when your internet connection is down?  Do we use unwired computers less because there is drastically less potential, or because we have been become dependent on web-based apps and file storage that we cannot access when unconnected?  How many lesson-planning resources do you use NOT online?