Star Wars in my Feeds

This week was unique in a number of ways, but one common thread that connected diverse dots, was Star Wars. Although the series began over 30 years ago, it remains a pop culture staple. As evidence, here is where I encountered Star Wars this week:

1] The cutie-patootie 3 year old summarizing Episode 4: A New Hope (actually the first film) went viral on YouTube:



2] Every week, I see, but rarely take a close look at, Clay Burell's blog icon.

3] My son is hooked on both the new and the old episodes, this week, I did my computer work with Episode 2: Attack of the Clones (actually the 5th movie) in the background.

4] In talking with teachers about e-learning, one of the participants share the site 'Wookie-pedia'. The site is a wiki encyclopedia where fans of the Star Wars universe can share everything and I mean everything about the saga.

5] I couldn't resist revisiting Chad Vader, a serial version of Darth's younger brother working as a day shift manager at a grocery store:



I couldn't resist doing a podcast with selected audio from these experiences.

A Pink Fischbowl

Thanks to Will Richardson's tweet, I was able to attend the latter half of Daniel Pink's video-conference with Grade 9 students at Arapahoe High School in Colorado. While I thought I'd be missing out due to a previously scheduled meeting, it was my great fortune upon arrival home for lunch, to discover via Twitter, that the 8:30 a.m. (PST) meeting was still taking place upon my return... at 11:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time!

The full story of the event including a number of related links and the live-blog of the event, are available on Karl Fisch's blog: The Fischbowl

The technology allowed an international audience to eavesdrop, but very quickly the event went from being about the technology, to being about the interactions between Pink and his highly engaged teen audience. It's amazing what can happen when right-brained educators are supported in their risk-taking!

Coupled with Clay Burell's story just twelve hours earlier, the idea of live video conferences, and the broadcast of these events, has me thinking this might soon become a normal experience for teacher and students. If you're interested in my immediate audio response to the event, I scrambled together a 5 minute Teacher 2.0 podcast over the lunch break.

Transparent Technology

If you have a few minutes to see a supply teacher coached via Skype; followed by a tech-savvy teacher giving directions from 'home' to his students, check out Clay Burell's latest blog post.

Clay currently teaches at a 1:1 laptop school in Seoul, and the short video he's embedded in his post is compelling on a few levels. While the technology is captivating initially, allowing teacher to interact with supply teacher and students, in short order the technology becomes transparent and Clay's relationship with his students takes centre stage (even as he prepares for a wedding!).

Excessive Computer Use Harms Learning!?

My breakfast is rarely accompanied by members of my immediate family, but almost always allows me to catch up on hometown news. The routine is pretty simple, open my web browser, click the folder that says 'daily' on my menu bar, and wait for the 12 tabs to open up.

Among a number of feeds, my daily reading includes my hometown paper, the Windsor Star, which today, had my full attention with a front page headline:"E-Learning Debate Rages". Later, I found the Montreal Gazette also ran with a catchy headline: "Cmputrs in skools make u stoopidr".

Themes in both stories can be highlighted with a few select quotes from Michael Zwaagstra the author of the 'research report':

"Excessive computer use can harm learning..." and "...students shouldn't use computers in a classroom more than once every two weeks."

Fearful that the report would be supported by select parents or worse yet, teachers looking for another excuse to abandon tools of the present in order to "get back to basics", I was pleasantly surprised at the thoughtful responses of selected school board representatives, and was happy to read in Doug Peterson's blog:

"With computers, we enable students to have access to more information, think deeper and more analytically, and view problems in ways never imagined in a traditional classroom. The challenge for us is to prove that it’s money well invested."

Following a link to the Frontier Centre for Public Policy report (thanks Doug!), I discovered that the real story of the report was missed! The study actually refers to the need for technological literacy on the part of educators:

"Computer technology is simply a tool and is only useful if teachers know how to use it effectively. Not all teachers are equally computer literate...

...School divisions need to spend more time ensuring that staff members are fully computer literate before purchasing expensive computer systems for their students."

Unfortunately both the Windsor Star and The Montreal Gazette ran with inflammatory storylines, with the Windsor Star actually gathering and publishing school board hardware budgets. Maybe next time, these newspapers might craft headlines that are in the best interests of teachers and students alike, something like:

"Teachers need to make more effective use of present day learning technologies!"

Heir or Err? It's Air vs. Air!

I'm not sure whether or not these two new 'Air' products are representative of competing views, but each is staking a claim on how hardware and software will interact in coming years.

The most recent 'Air' product to the party, is Adobe Air, a software technology that promises:

"... an exciting new way to engage customers with innovative, branded desktop applications, without requiring changes to existing technology, people, or processes."

While the World Wide Web seems more and more to be a place where applications reside, Adobe Air is swimming against the tide in bringing apps back to the desktop. The technology allows a wide range of companies, to develop their own applications that can interact with remote data, without being embedded in a web browser. Will folks want to download Air to keep their 'favourite' apps offline? I'm not sure... I guess we'll have to see what compelling apps get developed.

The highest profile 'Air' product in recent weeks, has to be the MacBook Air. Although other manufacturers have since begun advertising computers in mailing envelopes, Apple is the first to forego what many believe to be essential computer guts in creating their lean machine.

While many scoffed at the iMacs lack of a floppy disk drive... the machine was ahead of it's time in recognizing that the media was changing to CDs and DVDs. Will the absence of a disk drive herald a broader change in the rest of the computing world? No doubt it will; but "How many years it will take before monster-memory thumb drives and wireless file access replace the need for CDs and DVDs?"

Who will be the heir? Will the strategy of remote computing trump local applications? Will developers using Adobe's new tool deliver 'must have' applications? Maybe both will err? Regardless, I'm glad to see creative thinking is alive and well... There is definitely change in the air!

It's Time to Differentiate Support for Educators

Why don't we embrace the philosophy of differentiation in providing Internet and communications technology support to educators?

At the turn of the century (9 years ago!), I spent a lot of time learning about differentiation, specifically in attempts to develop suitable programming for the gifted students in my board. The past few years, the language of differentiation has made its way into all schools in our district. Even the ministry of education is on this tack both in professional development initiatives and in recently released policy and program documents. Maybe it's time we consider differentiating the support we provide to teachers...

Many teachers in North America are turned off of using the Internet, precisely because they find the web filters engaged by their boards to be too stringent. I know that in my board, this blog continues to be unavailable to the very educators I'd love to engage in dialogue. A differentiated approach to the filtering of the World Wide Web, where authentication of a user would grant varying permissions, is I think a logical step. Wesley Fryer sees injustice in the fact that teachers and kindergartners often have to play with the same filter rules:

"If school districts insist on blocking access to sites like YouTube, PBwiki, Wikispaces and Blogger, in my view they should NOT block that access for teachers."

With increasing numbers of forward thinking educators attempting to leverage read/write tools of the Web, school administrators face challenging times. As Will Richardson writes:

"We’re in the “Networking as a Second Language” point in teaching, this messy transition phase that is slowly gaining traction where we are beginning to understand what this means but not quite sure yet what to do about it."

A differentiated approach to teacher professional development may be part of the solution. According to a March 2007 article on Canada.com, the Lester B. Pearson School Board in Montreal allocated significant funding to train teachers in making effective use of modern teaching tools:

"Ped-tech leaders were identified at each school - teachers who were willing to work with technology - and they are being used as the basis for the project. These 180 teachers have each been given laptop computers, a projector and a smart board to really crank up their efficiency. In turn, they will be expected to bring other teachers into the fold and help them become more familiar with and more comfortable with using technology in the classroom."

Teachers have diverse needs when it comes supporting the use of technology in the classroom. My fingers are crossed that some day soon, district school boards will realize that "Differentiation is an effective way to meet the needs of all types of learners... including teachers."

Teacher 2.0 Podcast: "Differentiation: for Teachers" now online.