Teaching Digital Citizenship

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It belongs in our curriculum...

@joe_edtech

October is "Connected Educator Month," and we just came out of "Digital Citizenship Week." It is a good time to remind ourselves about our responsibility to teach digital citizenship, especially when we are in a 1:1 environment.

Once in a great while, and usually quite by accident, the Illinois General Assembly passes a really useful and meaningful piece of legislation.  In 2007, they passed Public Act 095-0869. That catchy title means that every public school in the state of Illinois must teach some component of Digital Citizenship to its students every year from 3rd grade all the way through their senior year of high school.  

If you've never looked at the law, the most salient part says, "[B]eginning with the 2009-2010 school year, a school district must incorporate into the school curriculum a component on Internet safety to be taught at least once each school year to students in grade 3 or above. The school board shall determine the scope and duration of this unit of instruction. The age appropriate unit of instruction may be incorporated into the current courses of study regularly taught in the district's schools, as determined by the school board."

In order to meet the letter of the law, school districts can include any individual unit of study - which would likely include a disconnected assembly or lecture from a media specialist. However, we are entering a 1:1 world where nearly every classroom is a computer lab and most of our students have access to the Internet 24/7, and the statistical data from disconnected programs like that (DARE for instance) are not good.

Word Cloud of Nancy Willard's CyberSavvy Approach

In order to meet the spirit of the law, and in the spirit of good teaching, shouldn't we weave elements of Internet Safety and Digital Citizenship instruction into every classroom as a part of our standard operating procedure?  

So, what is the first step in teaching Digital Citizenship? Actually, good teachers have been teaching about good classroom citizenship for years. Our students know how to behave towards each other and their instructors in the classroom, they know the kind of language that is acceptable and the kind of language that is not, and they know the expectations for studying, completing, and turning in assignments. Perhaps the first step in teaching Digital Citizenship is establishing the same expectations for students' online lives.  In other words, if our students email us, do they know the format and language that is acceptable to use in their school email accounts?  When our students post to our Wikis or Edmodo pages, do they know the kind of behaviors that are expected of them?  Do they know how to evaluate websites and scrutinize authors online to determine their appropriateness for class?  If not, isn't that the first place we should start?

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Incidentally, I always recommend that teachers start by looking at Nancy Willard's Embrace Civility in a Digital Age and Common Sense Media's site for Educators for positive, research based approaches to teaching Internet Safety and Digital Citizenship.  There are several more great resources out there, but these two are my favorites.

If you have others that you use and love, please leave them in the comment box below.

FTT - Google Experiences

Reaching Visual Learners Through Google's Educational Projects:

Cultural Institute & Google Beyond Earth

@joe_edtech

Have you ever wanted to take your students to explore the Battlefield at Gettysburg, or have them walk through the Louvre? Here's a solution that won't cost a dime or require you to arrange for transportation.

A couple of years ago I stumbled on a pretty cool Google project called the "Google Art Project." It was a plan from Google to make extremely high resolution artwork from around the world available for students and aficionados whether they actually had the resources to travel to museums and see the original pieces or not. Google boasts, "More than 45,000 [works of art] are featured in high resolution. Some have been photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution or 'gigapixel' photo capturing technology, enabling the view to study details of the brushwork and patina beyond that possible with the naked eye" (Art Project). 

Well, that was cool enough for me, but the Art Project has exploded, and has become the Google Cultural Institute, featuring not just an Art Gallery, but also History and World Wonder projects as well. Each one features the same high resolution photography, and, where applicable, Google Street View of museum or historical sites. Here's a short video overview of the Cultural Institute site:

But just in case that doesn't cover visual content for you, Google Earth and Google Maps have literally gone out of this world, incorporating images from the SETI Institute in their Google Maps Gallery as Google Earth files. You do not have to have Google Earth installed to view the images, but they do work as fully functioning Google Earth files.

"Google Moon" - from the SETI Institute Collection

In both cases, the visual products in Google can help you extend or situate your lesson, or you can incorporate some elements of student inquiry and invite your students to follow their curiosity.

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Have you used these tools with your classes already? If not, can you think of a creative way to teach using Google's Cultural Institute or Google Earth? Please share in the comment section below.

Research / Reality Disconnect

photo credit: Nic's events via photopin cc

Altered Reality: Does Our Educational Research Match Our Reality?

@joe_edtech

The other day I was reading a really compelling article called, "The Impact of Technology and Theory on Instructional Design Since 2000," which is actually a chapter out of a larger work entitled Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology (full citation below). In the article, the authors suggest that we have already gone through "Four Ages of Educational Technology," and they are, "the Age of Instructional Design, the Age of Message Design, the Age of Simulation, and the Age of Learning environments" (p. 89).

In a recent post, I talked about the author's "Age of Instructional Design," so I won't belabor that point here. But let's take a quick look at the other "Ages." Of the "Age of Message Design," the authors claim that "Lesson content and heuristics for performance are seen as best embedded or situated within an authentic task" (p. 90). In the "Age of Simulation," the authors assert, "emerged in response to the wide availability of technologies that allowed for the development of digital models that students could directly experience, which encouraged interaction that is learner centered" (p. 91). Finally, the "Age of Learning Environments" reflects "the shift from the design of instruction to the design of learning environments with learning being more dependent on the learner. Such environments cognitively and/or physically situate content and skills within complex, adaptive educational scaffolding spaces both face to face and online" (p. 91).

The descriptions for the 3 later Ed Tech Ages are fabulous if in fact we are describing future hopes and expectations for classes that are transformed through the use of instructional technology. They are delusional if they are supposed to be descriptive of current common practices. There is no doubt in my mind that there are individual programs or teachers who have developed authentic student centered learning environments, but we are kidding ourselves if we think that is currently the norm in K-12 education. Frankly, it can't be the norm as long as our national leaders (right and left) cling to the high stakes, standardized testing, industrial age model of education.

For a peek into what education could be in a post industrial world, watch the amazing RSA lecture given by Sir Ken Robinson, linked here.

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What do you think? Am I the delusional one thinking that there could be something after high stakes testing?

Warren, S. J., Lee, J., & Najmi, A. (2014). The impact of technology and theory on 
     instructional design since 2000. In J.M. Spector, M.D. Merril, J. Elen, M.J. 
     Bishop (Eds.) Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and
     Technology. (pp. 89-99). doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-3185-5

FTT - Storify

Sorting Through the Social Media Noise

@joe_edtech

On the heels of our Twitter Challenge, I thought I'd offer you a tool designed to help you sift through your social media outlets and take a closer look at the things that are important to you.

Over the summer I read a book called The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele (somebody please ponder this paradox - the link I just included will take you to Amazon.com). I found the author to be extremely nostalgic about the good old days of high minded professional journalism, and even more so about the historic ability of the two big parties to produce quality, principled candidates for public office. However, he wrote a gripping history of the growth of Big Tech in the United States, and he suggested some great online tools. One of them is storify.com.

In the chapter on the end of big journalism, Mr. Mele suggested consumers should find some way to sort through the noise of social media and create order and meaning out of chaos by using online tools like storify.com . While I don't join the author's nostalgia about principled big journalism (“…You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the War…” —Citizen Kane) I do agree that it is important for us to find ways to make sense of, and search for meaning in the Social Media outlets available to us.

Enter "Storify." If you create an account on storify.com, you can create your own news story out of the social media posts available to you. If you want to find all of the meaningful blogs, news stories posted on Facebook, or search for first hand Twitter accounts of world events, all you have to do is create a new story and search for the topic the way you would in Google.

Then you play editor. You decide which stories, posts, and tweets are important, and you create your own Social Media story. I've embedded a "Storify" story on "Storify" below. I know, not very creative.

What would be creative, though, is using tools like Storify and other social media tools to teach digital citizenship and Internet safety to your students. But I'll save that for the next post. 

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How would you use storify.com with students?

STORIFY ON STORIFY:

A New Age in Education?

photo credit: Psychology Pictures via photopin cc

Have We Really Moved Beyond the Age of Behaviorism in K-12?

@joe_edtech

Every once in a while in my doctoral program I run across an article that I can't help but share with people, especially my teacher friends. Last night I read "The Impact of Technology and Theory on Instructional Design Since 2000," which is actually a chapter out of a larger work entitled Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology (full citation below).

Hold your yawns. I know it doesn't sound very exciting to anyone other than disciples of Instructional Technology like myself, but there are some really interesting claims in this article. I think this is a discussion worth having with educators across the curriculum, and maybe with some of our national "leaders" in educational policy as well.

In the article, the authors suggest that we have already gone through "Four Ages of Educational Technology," and they are, "the Age of Instructional Design, the Age of Message Design, the Age of Simulation, and the Age of Learning environments" (p. 89). In the "Age of Instructional Design," the first and supposedly defunct age, 

focused mainly on content creation, was based on behaviorist and cognitivist theories of learning. Learning was perceived as simply a change in behavior or cognitive structure or both with instruction designed to effectively transfer knowledge to the learner...This included the mechanisms of scientific management emphasis and focused on both standardization and increasing learning efficiency through content and task analysis. (p. 90)

I take no issue with the fact that most educators recognize the description above as largely outdated thinking. However, I don't believe the American Education system has moved on from this kind of "industrial age" model of teaching and learning. For instance, doesn't the above describe perfectly American workplace training modules? And more importantly, despite the claim that we are teaching skills instead of content, doesn't the standardized testing required under NCLB mean that it is impossible for school systems to move too far away from this Mid-Twentieth Century model? I'd love to say that Common Core tests will move beyond this out dated thinking, but in the most optimistic statement I've made in 2014, that is yet to be seen.

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What do you think? Is the author right? Have we entered a new Age of Ed Tech?

Warren, S. J., Lee, J., & Najmi, A. (2014). The impact of technology and theory on instructional design since 2000. In J.M. Spector, M.D. Merril, J. Elen, M.J. Bishop (Eds.) Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology. (pp. 89-99). doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-3185-5

FTT - Kahoot!

https://getkahoot.com/

Gamify Your Classroom with Kahoot!

@joe_edtech

Quite independent of one another, I found two very interesting pieces of research that have changed some of my perspectives on using games in the classroom. One is Dr. Ali Carr-Chellman's work on using games to engage boys in the classroom (I linked to her TED Talk - worth it! I saw her give a version at a conference I attended last Fall). The other is a research study I read on the effectiveness of using student response systems for formative assessment in the classroom (Beatty & Gerace, 2008). I'm still not sure Kahoot! would have caught my eye except that I worked with a Transition to High School Language Arts class last summer in which the teacher used Kahoot! every day to teach grammar to his very challenging students. At the end of the semester, each of the students identified "Playing Grammar Games" as the thing they loved most about summer school. GRAMMAR GAMES!

So what is Kahoot! anyway? If you teach a Freshman Advisory, you've probably seen our Librarians use it to introduce topics for discussion. It is an online student response system with a gaming component. Ever been to a bar and seen different tables playing the interactive trivia game on all the TVs? (Of course I would never enter one of those dens of iniquity, but I've heard about them.) Kahoot! is a lot like that for your classroom. Here's the short demo Kahoot! offers on their website:

Kahoot! is completely device agnostic. You can play it on your phone, on your Chromebook, on a tablet - anything that has Internet access. And, one of the things I like best about Kahoot! is that your students don't need to sign up for an account. They just need to go to kahoot.it and access your game. In order to create games (aka - formative assessments), you simply need to go to getkahoot.com and make a free account for yourself. Once you've done that, Kahoot! offers you step by step instructions for creating and sharing your first Kahoot!, or you can search through public Kahoots! and play one of those with your kids.

Wanna see what happens when Kahoot! is played in the classroom? Click Here.
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Do you help your kids learn with games? Or have you seen better online student response systems? If so, please tell us more in the comment section below.

Personal Professional Development - Twitter Chats

photo credit: mkhmarketing via photopin cc

Getting Started With Twitter Chats

@joe_edtech

Why use Twitter? If you don't necessarily see value in Twitter as a social communication tool, surely every educational professional can see the value of  Twitter for Professional Development purposes - especially when it comes to Ed Tech and technology integration.

In an earlier post, I suggested that even if you never send a single Tweet, there is a lot to learn by following innovative thinkers on Twitter. Today's post is going to focus on getting involved in the conversation by following Twitter chats. For instance, #iledchat is a Twitter chat run by a few Illinois educators every Monday night from 9-10 PM. One recent discussion focused on "assessment." 

To follow a chat, you simply need to go to Twitter and search for the chat #hashtag (in this case, #iledchat):

Then you'll see a list of Tweets sent with that HashTag. For the #iledchat, at 9PM on Monday, a moderator will send a tweet introducing him or herself and the topic. Then they'll pose questions to the participating community. 

Questions will be labeled "Q1" and "Q2" and so on. Anyone following the chat can respond. This is what it looked like when people were responding to "Q2" during the assessment discussion - notice their Tweets start with "A2" and end with "#iledchat."

Don't worry about reading every Tweet, almost every Twitter Chat will post an archive of questions and answers at the end:

Here's the archive from last night's chat on Homework: http://sfy.co/gwIH

If you'd like to try it, here are a list of some of the most popular education related chats: bit.ly/officialchatlist  (compiled by @thomascmurray , @cevans5095 and @cybraryman1).

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How do you stay current and provide yourself with personal professional development?

FTT - Word Clouds

Word Clouds in Class

@joe_edtech

One of my colleagues loves word clouds because they are pretty.  Well, of course they are, but they can also be great tools for analyzing articles and speeches, or beginning class discussions about assigned readings, or even for quickly encapsulating group responses to questions.

Created with Wordle from the "Jobs" Speech

I once worked with an AP Econ teacher who frequently used Word Clouds with his students to analyze text.  Do you remember President Obama's "Jobs" Speech?  Before his class started discussing the economic implications of the speech, they took the text of the speech, created a Wordle Word Cloud.  The words that were used most frequently in the speech appear as the largest words in the cloud.  With a quick glance, you can probably hone in on the President's analysis of the problem and some of the solutions he suggests. This is a great way to get kids thinking and talking about the speech, or really any text you want them to discuss.

Another teacher used Word Clouds in one other really interesting way.  After the first test he asked all of his students what they could have done to improve their scores.  He collected the responses in a Google Form and pasted all of the text into Wordle.  This helped kids assess their own study habits and plan for their own success for the rest of the year.

History and English teachers have been using Word Clouds for a couple of years to compare and contrast speeches from different times and different sources.  For instance, if you take the text of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address and make a Word Cloud, and put it side by side with FDR's First Inaugural Address, what would that tell us about both the issues confronting these two men and the values and concerns of the American People at the time these two Presidents took the oath of office?

Lincoln's 2nd Inaugural on Word It Out

There are several free Word Cloud generators out there and they all work about the same.  Wordle is the one that gets the most publicity, and is probably the most popular.

Tagxedo allows you to customize the shape of your Word Cloud (I once used Tagxedo to make my resume into a giant "J" word cloud).

While most of the Word Cloud generators aren't iOS friendly, Word It Out works pretty well and has most of the same features as Wordle.  The last image on the right was made by pasting the text of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address into Word It Out.

If you are working on a Chromebook, you can use the Free Chrome Web App "iLanguageCloud" to create word clouds very similar to the ones made in Wordle.

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Do you have other Word Cloud or Text Analysis tools that you use with your students? If you do, please tell us about them below.

What is the purpose of Ed Tech?

Courtesy Liz508 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/liz508/7795990614/

Hey, Technology Is Supposed To Make Our Lives Easier, Right?

@joe_edtech

Last night I was reading the Januszewski & Molenda piece Educational Technology: A Definition with Commentary  (Wait - you weren't????) and I was reminded of the epithet that is usually lobbed at me as profanely as possible when someone can't make their computer work the way they want it to. "Hey, isn't technology supposed to make our lives easier?" Well, um...no.

From the book:

Educational technology can improve the performance not only of learners but also of those who design and deliver instruction. It can reduce learning time and increase learning effectiveness, both of which enhance the productivity of instructors and designers. Equally importantly, educational technology can help create instruction that is more appealing and respectful of human values, thus aligning instructors and designers with their highest professional commitments. (2008, Chapter 3).

I think the default thought process is that we can use technology in education to do the same things we've always done, but it will be easier because it will be automated. I have two things to say to that. First, computers are dumb. They do what we tell them to do. If a process is to be automated, we have to automate it and that can be a long, tedious process. They are computers, not magic boxes.

Courtesy Manfrys 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/manfrys/2226178289/

Secondly, technology in education can help us "improve performance" which "enhances productivity." The idea isn't that we can do the same things more efficiently, it is that we can do different, better, more productive, more engaging, more profound things than we could do before. 

For instance, Google Docs revolutionized my classroom in my last two years of teaching. In the days before Google Docs, collaborative writing meant one kid wrote the essay and maybe he showed it to the other kid. In Google Docs, kids compose collaboratively in class, at home, synchronously and asynchronously, and I can see all of the changes they make, individually. Google Docs didn't make classroom writing easier, in fact the grading became a little harder and more involved. It did, however, help make the writing better and the learning deeper.

Adding educational technology to your classroom isn't easy - but it can be powerful.

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How has integrating technology improved your teaching? Please leave a comment in the box below.