May 2009 Archives

A colleague of mine forwarded me a good resource for ed-tech folks looking for some online videos to check out. This blog post, off of the open thinking blog, has a list of 80+ videos for educators, administrators, parents, and students about the way that technology is affecting the way we teach and learn. And it's probably worth poking around the rest of the blog, too. Lots of good information and resources.

And to give you a taste, here's a video one teacher made about his journey to becoming a "21st Century Teacher":

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Sean Cavanagh, my colleague over at Curriculum Matters, has this post about an online summit from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Check it out.

While you're at it, you might also be interested in Sean's entry about two Chicago boys who've created a cell phone application for math calculations. And on the same blog, Mary Ann Zehr has this report on language-acquisition software.

Posted by Kathleen Kennedy Manzo at 12:08 PM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Blackboard Inc.'s purchase of ANGEL Learning last month has drawn the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice, according to this story in Campus Technology.

As I reported here a couple weeks ago, the $95 million deal will expand Blackboard’s client base to nearly 6,000 schools, colleges, government agencies, and corporations, according to a company statement.

But the Campus Technology story mentions concerns among ANGEL Learning clients, without specifying the nature of the complaints.

Blackboard officials say they are cooperating with the inquiry, but confident that it will be resolved without complications for the merger.

"The industry is as vibrant as it has ever been and we are confident that the acquisition of ANGEL Learning was compliant with all applicable antitrust requirements. We are providing information to the Department of Justice on a voluntary basis in response to an inquiry received on May 22," Blackboard's Chief Business Officer Matthew Small said in a statement.

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This article about texting from The New York Times points to some of the frustrations of allowing cell phones in the classroom. According to the article, teenagers are spending more and more time texting each other, including during class, with their cell phones hidden underneath their desks or jackets. It's to the point where teachers find it more productive to ignore the behavior than stop class to reprimand those who engage in covert in-class texting.

And it's not just in the classroom that texting is causing problems. Many teens are now sending hundreds of text messages a day, which works out to one text message every couple of minutes, sometimes even during the night. That amount of texting can cut into a good night's sleep and can even cause pain in the texter's thumbs, say doctors.

It's hard for me to imagine students getting any homework done if they're constantly being interrupted by a buzzing, chirping phone every few minutes, and some parents are now setting limits on the amount of time kids spend texting as well as the hours when they're allowed to text with their friends. According to the article, texting isn't as closely monitored by parents as video-game playing or time spent surfing the Internet, but that may start to change if texting begins to impact students' performance in school.

If you are a teacher, how does this article compare with your experience? How do you deal with the texters in your classroom? And if you are a parent, do you set limits on your child's text messaging, or is it something that they're able to control themselves?

Posted by Katie Ash at 1:44 PM | Permalink | 6 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

With the National Educational Computing Conference, or NECC, about a month and a half away, my inbox is currently being flooded with invitations from various ed. tech. public relations firms, hoping to garner some time to meet with their clients. And perhaps it is because of this sudden influx of requests that at least one PR group has decided to do something to stand out from the crowd. Instead of PR pitches, they're writing rhyming couplets, inspired by NECC. I should say up front that this is in no way an endorsement, just something I'd like to share.

With Obama in the White House and a new administration on the Hill,
Education is in an uproar with the passing of the new stimulus bill.

The power packed line up launching in Washington, DC.
Will have everyone talking-- even Arne!

To see the latest innovations in the world of Ed Tech,
Save room in your schedule to visit the KEH suite at NECC.

I have to say, the meter leaves something to be desired, but it definitely caught our attention, if only for its creativity.

But let's hear from the poetry critics out there. What do you think? Should this poem be slammed or applauded?

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I've heard many educators and school reform advocates talk about the importance of increased communication between teachers and parents. The more information teachers share with parents about their child's progress, the better, right?

Well, teachers in Louisiana will have to adhere to some pretty stringent guidelines for reaching out to parents and students using their own personal computers, cellphones, and other communication devices. Lawmakers in the state legislature in Baton Rouge could be close to finalizing a bill that would restrict teachers from using personal devices to communicate with their constituents.

For many educators around the country, communication with students' families often occurs before and after school. Like the conversation I exchanged with my son's 3rd grade teacher at 9:30 p.m. one night this month. It just so happened that the teacher and I were both online checking e-mail, and luckily were able to resolve whatever issue came up within a few minutes. I'm sure that my son's teacher was at her home at the time, probably tapping away at her own computer, just as I often do when I'm catching up on work e-mail in the evenings.

House bill 570, which is scheduled for a floor debate today, is intended to head off any potentially inappropriate interactions between staff and students. The bill would require teachers to use only school-issued computers, phones, and other tools to e-mail or phone parents or students. When teachers must use their own personal phones or computers, the law would require them to report the contact to the district.

I don't know if districts in Louisiana routinely provide laptops and cellphones to teachers, but it seems likely that this kind of a law would limit, if not discourage, many teachers' conversations with parents.

Does the security concern here trump the need for more teacher-parent communication? Is restricted contact necessarily a bad thing?

Aliza Libman, a Massachusetts middle school teacher, balked at first when she learned her e-mail usage would be limited to school time. But in this op-ed she describes her change of heart when she realized that limited e-mail correspondence would help her improve her overall communication with parents and give her more control over how and when she would have those big and small conversations with parents and students.

Here's a snippet:

Without e-mail at home, I’ve had to be quick and efficient at school, or risk staying hours after the work day ends. I have taught myself how to prioritize and weed out the e-mails that don’t require immediate attention, or that don’t need responses at all.

Restricted e-mail access, I’ve found, also makes me think seriously about whether there are better ways to communicate with a family or solve a problem. I don’t automatically dash off quick e-mails anymore. When I do write them, I write carefully, giving attention to every word.

Perhaps, I have concluded, e-mail is like ice cream—too much makes me sick, but life without it would be inconceivable.

Your thoughts?

Posted by Kathleen Kennedy Manzo at 3:08 PM | Permalink | 4 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

While catching up with my blog roll this morning after the weekend, I discovered a lot of buzz about WolframAlpha, a new Web tool that you can use to type in equations and get the answers. If you're at all interested in data, statistics, or little bits of information, it's worth spending a few minutes checking out. I highly recommend the screencast of WolframAlpha to get an idea of how it works and what kinds of information is available from it.

Although you can type in mathematical equations and get the results, you can also type in questions about things like the weather, cities, dates, or even Web sites and get information about them. It will also show comparisons of data if you type in two similar items, such as "the population of the U.S." and "the population of Mexico."

I'm curious to see whether K-12 educators will be quick to pick up this tool and use it in their classrooms. It seems like there are obvious educational implications—being able to find data quickly and easily and manipulate it to find the specific piece of info that you need is educational in and of itself—although I wonder if, like Wikipedia, it will need to be viewed with a skeptical eye. I did notice, though, that at the end of every query, there's a link to source information, which could help track down whether the information generated is viable or not.

Has anyone else played around with this at all yet? What implications do you think it might have for your classrooms or schools?

Here's what Stephen Wildstrom, from Business Week's The Tech Beat blog, has to say about it, emphasis mine.

In time, Alpha could become a very useful tool for researching facts, especially odd facts about the relationships among two or more things. Unlike many Web sites, it gives clear sources for its information and these sources are generally authoritative. But I think that other than students and researchers, most people are going to find it too quirky and limited in its score to be of much practical use.

Posted by Katie Ash at 2:18 PM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Online safety and teaching students how to behave responsibly in a digital age is something many educators, as well as parents, are grappling with. And within the past year or so, a new trend has cropped up called "sexting"—where teens send naked pictures of themselves through text messages.

It's become enough of a problem at this point that an organization, the N.J.-based Institute for Responsible Online and Cell-Phone Communication, has been created to help teachers and parents teach teens about appropriate use of technology. Their flagship curriculum is concisely titled "Sexting is Stupid."

A survey conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy found that about 20 percent of teens admitted to posting or sending nude, or semi-nude, pictures of themselves, compared to 33 percent of young adults, aged 20-26. Most teens, 71 percent of girls and 67 percent of boys, say that they shared those images with their boyfriends or girlfriends. The survey, which gathered responses from about 1,280 people, found that most—75 percent—believed that sharing sexually suggestive content with others can have negative consequences.

Digital Directions Senior Writer Michelle Davis recently caught up with Ting-Yi Oei, an assistant principal at Freedom High School in Loudoun County, Va., who was wrongfully charged with possession of child pornography after investigating a "sexting" incident at his school. The incident raises some serious questions about technology in school and what administrators need to know about it. Listen to her audio interview here.

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Blackboard Inc., a dominant company in the U.S. for e-learning tools, announced this week that it had acquired education software developer ANGEL Learning Inc.

The Indianapolis-based ANGEL’s products include learning management software and an electronic portfolio system that tracks student progress.

The $95-million deal will expand Blackboard’s client base to nearly 6,000 schools, colleges, government agencies, and corporations, according to a company statement.

The Washington-based company, which reported significant losses in revenue last year but has since seen revenues improve, said it anticipates seeing savings by combining some of the two companies’ infrastructure, sales, and administrative operations. Blackboard also hopes that ANGEL’s support services will help the combined company maintain and expand its client base, the statement said.

Is this the start of a trend toward consolidation of ed tech companies? When the textbook publishing industry began consolidating in the 1990s it snowballed to the point where just three or four major companies eventually dominated the K-12 market. Ever since, many smaller and/or newer companies have had a hard time competing.

Seems like there's a lot of opportunity for innovation and competition in the ed-tech sector, but the poor economy might make it difficult for some companies to get started or get solid footing.

Any market watchers out there want to look into the crystal ball for us?

Posted by Kathleen Kennedy Manzo at 1:00 PM | Permalink | 1 Comment | TrackBacks (0)

This blog item I found via @berkshirecat, a New England teacher who I follow on Twitter, is a letter to teachers who are loathe to use technology.

The writer, Patrick Higgins, makes a snide case for the way technology helps teachers break out of what he implies to be unproductive or counterproductive traditions. He includes reasons for his shared loathing of technology, mimicking the subconscious complaints he imagines his change-fearing colleagues make for avoiding tech-integration in their classrooms.

"The fact that there will be conversations about topics in my class that occur UNABATED and not in my presence is inconceivable and incorrigible," he writes. He then goes on to describe some teachers' complaints about being asked to develop a broader range of student literacies that incorporate the increasingly complex media environment. "So I am with you, I think, in resisting this move, and I'll do just what's mandated of me by my building principal. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go close my classroom door..."

Take a look and tell me if Higgins' somewhat cynical perceptions of tech-refusers is a fair assessment. Do you have any strategies for convincing colleagues of the value of technology in the classroom?

Posted by Kathleen Kennedy Manzo at 10:20 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Digital textbooks are back in the news, with the release of a new, larger-screened Kindle by Amazon.com, which could be suitable for digital textbooks, according to this Associated Press article. But there are still obstacles that stand in the way of e-textbooks taking off—such as a lack of awareness about them—which this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education does a good job of laying out.

Most college students—more than 80 percent, according to a survey by Educause—already own portable machines that can display electronic textbooks: They're called laptops. And more than half of all major textbooks are already offered in electronic form for download to those laptops.

Yet so far sales of electronic textbooks are tiny, despite efforts by college bookstores to make the option to buy digital versions clearer by advertising e-books next to printed ones on their shelves.

Despite the concerns mentioned above, K-12 schools in Texas may soon at least have the option of assigning digital textbooks to their students, according to this AP article. And in California, in an effort to pinch pennies in the cash-strapped state, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has asked Secretary of Education Glen Thomas to make free, open-source, digital textbooks available to students in high school math and science courses by the beginning of the next school year, in fall 2009.

Top-level education officials in the state will apparently spend their summers coming up with a list of those open-source, high school math and science texts that are aligned to state standards. If it works out, it will be a big first step towards including open-source schoolbooks in the classroom. Read more about open-source textbooks in K-12 classrooms in this Ed Week article. And click here to read my colleague Sean Cavanagh's take on this proposal on the Curriculum Matters blog.

Photo credit: Mark Lennihan/AP

Posted by Katie Ash at 11:55 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | TrackBacks (0)

Ed-tech proponents were dismayed to learn of the cuts to the Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program proposed in President Obama's budget.

Four organizations promoting the use of effective technologies in schools released a statement yesterday urging more money, not less, for the flagship federal ed-tech program.

Obama's budget proposal would slash funding from $269 million to just $100 million. In the stimulus package, the program received $650 million in additional funding. The program had been slated for elimination by the Bush administration, and its funding was progressively cut over the last eight years.

The stimulus money brought the program’s funding close to what it was when President George W. Bush came into office in 2001, as we reported here.

“With the historic level of funding provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it appeared that the administration was prepared to invest significantly in educational technology, viewing it as an engine of change to modernize our education system," the statement by CoSN, ISTE, SIIA, and SETDA said. "Instead, this cut stalls momentum, ignores demonstrated results and undermines the progress being made in our nation’s classrooms through effective uses of technology to engage students, improve teacher quality, and individualize instruction for all kids."

Posted by Kathleen Kennedy Manzo at 3:33 PM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)

It turns out I'm not the only Katie blogging about technology in education on edweek.org. We've just launched a new blog, Teaching Generation Tech, written by Katie Hanifin, a teacher at Canastota High School in upstate New York. She's blogging about her experiences as a teacher, trying to bridge the gap between modern technology and the classroom.

It's refreshing to hear about the ways that technology can help, and hinder, instruction through the eyes of a teacher, rather than just from researchers or academics. Like this post, which talks about cell phones that repeatedly go off during class despite the school's no phone policy. Or this one about technology and student engagement.

We're really excited to have Katie join the edweek.org blog roster. We recommend that you head over to her Teaching Generation Tech and help us welcome her to the blogosphere.

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I got pretty excited this week when I surpassed 100 followers for my @kmanzo account on Twitter, and then again when the numbers started to ratchet up. But then my enthusiasm turned to wariness when a Twitter user named Stalker started following me. I chided myself for the skepticism when I realized Craig Stalker is a legitimate member with seemingly valid intentions. Even though he's not an educator, I found many of his posts informative, so I followed him back.

It was only when I started getting a swift stream of female followers with cute user IDs—each including their first names and a year—that I realized not all of the millions of Twitter users are tweeting for good. Sure enough, the girls were pitching some dating service and their profiles included links to provocative photos of themselves.

Why hadn't I even considered that this medium would be rife with potentially inappropriate contacts? Probably because I'm not in the classroom surrounded by children all day, tuned in to all the warnings about Internet safety. I began to wonder how educators are dealing with this problem in reading and posting to Twitter from their school accounts. Are teachers' computers screened for questionable Web content, and how do you get around the filtering tools when you have your students use Twitter and other social networking sites?

When I realized what was happening I just started automatically blocking followers with similar code names. Does this simple solution work in a school setting?

Posted by Kathleen Kennedy Manzo at 3:08 PM | Permalink | 3 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Although concerns about the swine flu are subsiding, I've been very impressed by the role technology has played in keeping students, teachers, parents, and administrators connected during this unexpected break for some students and teachers.

My colleague Michelle Davis and I talked to several school districts and disaster preparedness experts about the ways that technology can help ensure a continuity of education for this story that appeared on edweek.org. Since then, I've come across several stories about districts tapping their already existing or makeshift technological infrastructures to keep kids engaged in their studies.

Take Michael Sanderson, for example, who is a science teacher at M.L. Kirkpatrick Middle School in the Fort Worth Independent School District in Texas, which has been closed since last Thursday. He's been answering students questions about science via text messages, he says. The students in his class created a "study chain" where they forward questions and answers that they have while studying for their state tests—TAKS—through text messages. The impromptu communication system was set up by the students, and he just jumped in to guide them when they hit a roadblock, he says.

And if, like me, you're wondering how in the world he answers questions in 140 characters or less, he says that sometimes it requires two or three text messages to get the answer across. And in those cases, he encourages the students to call him, says Sanderson.

Thanks to Margie, who commented on Kathleen's story on Web 2.0 tools, for the tip about this particular example of the way that technology is making it possible to keep in touch in times of crisis. And if you have any examples of the way that students, teachers, and administrators are communicating through technology during school closures, please let us know in the comments, or feel free to email me!

See edweek.org's complete coverage of schools and the swine flu here.

Posted by Katie Ash at 12:16 PM | Permalink | No Comments | TrackBacks (0)

This article by the Asia Society, which aims to strengthen relationships between Asian countries and the U.S. and promote greater understanding of Asian culture and history, gives a number of tips to educators on how to use technology to increase global awareness in the classroom.

The many resources available on the Web make it easier than ever before to connect with individuals around the globe, examine current events from multiple cultural perspectives, and tap into a global network of information, says the article. The Internet has also made it possible for students' work to be accessed by a global audience.

This list talks about a number of school-related projects that students and teachers could get involved with and stresses the importance of taking advantage of these learning opportunities. This is a great resource for those who are looking to incorporate more global perspectives into lessons. And check out the society's education page, which has lots more resources for teachers and students, too.

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