Apace of Change

by Damian Bariexca, Ed.D.

Archive for August, 2007

Schools: Your Friendly Neighborhood ISP?

In response to my post Promoting Twitteracy in the Classroom, Paul Harrington dropped by to make a salient point that we as teachers/technology enthusiasts must never forget:

…we have to be cautious though with the digital divide that we don’t further disadvantage those without access to the technology outside school – a difficult nut to crack….

This brief comment got me thinking about my own experiences with students and their ability to access the Internet. In responding to Paul in the comments, I got off on a bit of a tangent:

… if lack of access in the community is a widespread enough problem, I wonder what role the school could play in providing that access on an evening/weekend basis? And perhaps not only access, but instruction as well, perhaps in an adult-learning model?

If we are going to commit to instructing not only students, but administrators and parents, too (as folks have suggested elsewhere in the edublogosphere recently), should schools commit to providing community Internet access and education, especially in communities where folks may not even own computers?

I’m not talking about an ISP in the sense of Verizon or Comcast; I mean a full-on commitment to keeping a free or minimal charge drop-in computer lab open with a small staff to assist people as needed, and maybe run adult-ed-style classes on navigation, search skills, online banking, online safety/security (e.g. avoiding phishing/email scams), etc.

So many questions come to mind as I think this through: would the existence of such a service go over well in your community? Would taxpayers find this an acceptable use of school funds? Even if schools don’t have an obligation to do so, should they step up in the name of social action and provide this service to the communities that need it most? Furthermore, could it help to combat this seemingly pervasive attitude of alarmism (and, dare I say, ignorance?) such as appears in this month’s Scholastic Administrator (please also read John Pederson’s response) [both via Christian @ think:lab]?

Do any of you have any experience with such a plan in your district/state/province/country? How successful (or unsuccessful) has it been? Could it work?

Hi-Tech Lo-Fi

 I posted last week about my attempts to mashup a slide show with sound at Slideshare.net. I took an Impress show on the life of Thomas a’ Becket I created about a year and a half ago and recorded some narration, simply to see how the service works. The results were very positive: it was both a Featured Slideshow (without sound) and, once I added the audio, the Slidecast of the Day. To date, it’s had over 400 views, and I’ve had some nice comments and private e-mail sent my way.

While I think bulletpoints have their places, I remember distinctly wanting to move in a more visual direction when I first put this together. Unfortunately, as any of my students can tell you, my lack of ability in the visual arts is legendary. Stick figures are about as detailed as I can get.

Mulling that over in my head, I asked myself, “Why not just go with stick figures, then?” Several hours later, the first of my Stick Figure Theatre presentations was born, and it was a hit with my Honors Brit Lit class. I share it with you folks not to garner e-pats on the back, but rather to give hope to the artistically disinclined that with a little creativity, even an utter lack of talent can’t stop you!

[kml_flashembed movie="http://s3.amazonaws.com/slideshare/ssplayer.swf?id=87612&doc=thomas-a-becket3383" width="425" height="348" wmode="transparent" /]

For the teachers asking themselves, “So what does this mean for me?”, the biggest takeaway lesson I got was, “Less is more.” I could have made a 50-slide presentation with a million bulletpointed facts and gorgeous backgrounds (well, I couldn’t have, but someone else could have), but for some reason, I think the DIY ethic of this show struck a chord with my students. It certainly has none of the elegance of some of Dan’s stuff, and I’d never call it great art, but I think it has a bit of rough-around-the-edges appeal that you can’t get from a PowerPoint template.

It’s a timely lesson, as the New York Times recently ran a piece on the constant re-branding of merchandise in an effort to be more in our faces (and our students, as a major target demographic, bear the brunt of this). There’s something to be said today for simplicity in design – just because we have a million design tools at our disposal doesn’t mean we have to use them all (especially not all at once!). Just something to keep in mind as we prepare those first month of school and Back-to-School Night presentations.

Update, 8/14: If you’re reading this in a feedreader, there’s an embedded video that may not show up in your reader (it didn’t in mine, anyway) – come to the site to check it out.  Also, I realized after I uploaded that in the third from last slide, I mistakenly referred to Beckett as “Henry”.

A Quickie Poll: What’s on Your USB? (Educator Edition)

Lifehacker was the first blog I ever read with any regularity, and I’ve been a huge fan since the day I started. For the uninitiated, Lifehacker offers tips, tricks, tutorials, and how-tos for streamlining (“hacking”) your daily habits. A discussion thread that pops up there (and on similar techie blogs) from time to time is “What’s on Your USB Drive”, in which people compare… well, you know.

So in the interest of a break from my mind-numbing summer job of writing standardized test questions (yes, it’s about as exciting as it sounds), get ’em out.

Here’s what’s currently on my 2Gb Cruzer Micro:

  • John T. Haller’s PortableApps Suite – slightly modified; contains flash-drive-friendly versions of OpenOffice, Firefox, Gaim (instant messaging), Sumatra (PDF reader), VLC (media player), Clam (antivirus), and xPlorer2 (file manager)
  • PC Repair System – a 36-app first-aid kit for your PC. I have no idea how to use most of these, but could probably figure some of them out if I had to (or could at least give to someone who does know). Much like a real first-aid kit, I keep it in hopes I’ll never have to ask someone else how to use it.
  • All the digital documentation for each class I’ll be teaching this coming semester (Multicultural Studies, Shakespeare’s Comedy, and Sophomore English) – handouts, audio/video files, plans/outlines, etc.
  • Four complete music albums (legally obtained and DRM-free, thankyouverymuch) I was supposed to give to a friend the last time I saw him but forgot to (sorry, Dan – get at you next weekend).
  • Photographic evidence that I have the cutest two-year-old in the all-time history of everything ever.
  • A .txt file titled “READ ME IF YOU FOUND THIS”. The contents are my name, work address & email, and cell phone number, as well as the promise of a reward for its safe return.
  • An encrypted folder containing… well, if I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret! Just some boring personal stuff that no one but me would find interesting and I don’t want messed with.
  • 1.2 Gb free space

Before I got my tablet PC, my flash drive was a godsend – I don’t have an assigned room, and have taught all across my school’s 72-acre campus. Thanks to it, I’ve never been without any offline teaching resource. Despite the tablet, I still carry it on my person, if for no other reason than for redundancy’s sake.

What are your “must have” docs and apps for your portable drive? Let us know in the comments.

Promoting Twitteracy in the Classroom

I can’t resist the urge to leap headlong into an awful portmanteau, but Dr. Yvonne Andres could when she posted about TwitterLit.com back in May. From her article:

Realizing that the opening sentences of books are often an intriguing attention getters, twice a day, TwitterLit creator Debra Hamel, posts the first line of a book, without the author’s name or book title. Why? Well, according to Hamel, “Because it’s fun and quick daily literary teaser.” There is a link back to Amazon so you can see what book the line is from and all the posts are available for subscription via RSS, Twitter, and email. A great learning activity might be to have students make a list books with the most interesting opening lines.

I thought this was a neat idea, and an interesting application of what many are writing off as a complete timewaster. Even among our edublogopeers, the general consensus among those who are giving it a chance is, “There’s something there, but I’m not sure what it is.”

Let’s try to put some practice to the theory together. I’ll start here with some English/Social Studies-based ideas; you follow up in the comments.

1. Easy way of posting homework assignments without creating/maintaining a website. Even the most tech-phobic teachers can log in, type 5 Tweets with the week’s homework, and tell their students to go to twitter.com/mrsmcgillicutty. As easily editable as Tiddlywiki, only less involved, if such a thing is possible.

2. Students writing a wiki, or working on some other collaborative project outside of class? When mine do, one of the chief complaints is emails left unchecked or eaten by spam filters. I work in a regional district, so it’s not always easy or possible for students to physically get together to work on projects. Try having them all sign up for Twitter accounts and follow each other. They can conduct real-time multiple-user discussion in which all group members can participate. Those who are offline can catch up later in the History, or have messages sent to their cell phones.

3. Will Richardson recently wrote about RSS feeds as texts for students. What if we turned the information flow in the other direction and had teachers subscribe to a Twitter RSS feed of their students? Tonight’s homework: Tweet in the voice of Abraham Lincoln 5 minutes before delivering the Gettysburg Address. Summarize the relationship between Miss Bennett and Mr. Darcy in exactly 140 characters. Tweet your answer to this central question, and send @messages to at least two other people in the class. Eliminate the excess, get kids thinking critically about the meat of their message, and it’s all there for you in your feed aggregator.

4. Have students maintain a Twitter account for a week/month/unit/marking period. See who can create the most new social connections in that time, and at the end have them reflect on and share/compare their experiences on a class blog or wiki (or in person in small groups, if that’s how your school rolls).

5. “Follow” some major news organization like BBC, Sky, CNN, etc. with your students, and have your students select Tweeted stories to respond to (by your method of choice). Let your class double as Intro to RSS 101.

6. Set up an account and instruct students to “follow” you. When you’re online outside of school hours, Tweet a grammatically incorrect sentence or phrase. First student to Tweet back to you with the corrected phrase wins a small prize.

Standard disclaimer – when having students go online, especially in a social capacity, please also teach them about safe & responsible Internet use (I hope I’m preaching to the choir, but I feel obligated to mention it). Looking back, I’m not sure I like #4 anymore, but I’ll leave it up in hopes that someone can improve upon it.

So can math teachers use this tool? Tech educators, how will/do you use Twitter? Administrators! Is there a place for Twitter in your schools?

A little recognition goes a long way…

My first official slidecast is not only up and running, it was selected as Slideshare.net’s Slidecast of the Day. You can check out my take on the life of Thomas a’ Becket right from the front page of Slideshare.net (I’ll post it here after it leaves the front page).

Word to the wise: if you plan on doing a slidecast, you can upload your Powerpoint, OpenOffice Impress, or Keynote (as PDF) files to Slideshare, but you must find your own separate hosting site for the accompanying mp3. I’ve used MediaFire and MyDatabus for hosting and streaming in the past (and I highly recommend both those services), but for some reason, their servers didn’t play nicely with Slideshare. I had to post the narration mp3 to HotlinkFiles.com – it worked flawlessly from there, and best of all, it’s free (as are Mediafire and parts of MyDatabus)!

If you’d like to download this slideshow, you can do so directly from Slideshare.net. If you’d like a copy of my lecture notes or the “script” (and I do use that term loosely), leave a comment or Twitter me.

Addendum: Dave Sherman recommended in a comment that I check out Voicethread.com. I did, and I was impressed by how much more dynamic it is in function than Slideshare. Every service suits a purpose, but in my mind, I see more possibilities for collaborative student work at Voicethread. Check out Dave’s thoughts on his blog, then go to Voicethread and run the demo.