Tuesday, December 17, 2013

The "Anti" Bullies

At first I thought, "this isn't my story to share." Then I realized that it is my responsibility to be a voice for my daughter. She is 10. She doesn't have a public voice yet, though I hope she will soon. I encourage her to speak her mind, but also to be considerate of others. To be polite. Sometimes though, being polite makes it hard to stand up for yourself. That is probably why she came to me tonight. Speaking haltingly, later crying, and finally sobbing.

"There are mean people in the world," I had to tell her. Not for the first time. What really made me angry, and why I am writing now, is the reason she felt the way she did.

A few boys at her school are mean. Not physically, but verbally. They make vulgar jokes, and call others names. Put them down. Make fun. Ratchet. Stinky. Uncool. No swag. Your momma... Your daddy... You'll never... You... By the time I was in high school, I couldn't care less, but I remember being 10. I remember how much words could hurt. I remember how much they hurt me, and how much I hurt them. We teach our children to be polite. We try to set an example that they can follow. Sometimes we forget. Sometimes they forget.

My daughter though is what some might call a gentle soul. The words hurt her. And that hurts me. I try to tell her how she can stand up for herself and for those around her. I want her to be strong, fearless, self-confident, but she is ten. Still uncertain of who she is, or what place she holds in the world. She dreams one day of being a teacher, the next a veterinarian or a botanist. She loves music, and camping, and bugs, books, and people. Sometimes she is shy around strangers, sometimes she is completely forward, asking questions that aren't polite, but asking them innocently. I love her, and it hurts to see her so upset.

She was upset about being bullied, but she was more upset that she might be a "bystander." This is the word we use for those who don't stand up for the victims. The word that describes the child who watches another get bullied without stepping in and saying, "stop, you're being a bully." The anti-bullying crowd is telling our children that bystanders are just as bad as bullies. They are telling young children that they should stand up for the victims, and if they don't, then they are just as bad as the bullies.

My daughter was sobbing. "I'm a bystander, daddy," she told me. Distraught that all she could do was stand beside another little girl. She told me she wanted to say something, but couldn't. I tried to explain to her that just being there for the other girl was enough. She had done something, and that was good. She knows how much it hurts to be picked on. She is a wonderful and loving child. Who has a deep-down strength that will one day give her courage. Right now though, at 10, she is not particularly courageous. As much as she wants to be, she needs to learn who she is. Kids can be mean, but they don't need adults telling them that they are bullies when they don't have the courage to stand up for those around them.

Theylook a lot like bullies themselves. Manipulating our children through guilt and fear. Instead of adults leading by being positive examples, they are acting foolishly then telling our children to be brave. Politicians, athletes, actors, musicians, and other adults are publicly shaming one another then asking children to be kind.

Draw your own conclusions...

Sunday, September 8, 2013

Things are calming down a bit. As most teachers know the first week of school is intense. As a technology coach, I expand that backward to work week, because that is when teachers come to me with all the ideas and questions that have been brewing over the summer. They start trying things out and preparing and find that they have questions they hadn't considered. It is also when I am trying to make last minute preparations to get ready for the school year. That, of course, carries into the first week when students arrive and have forgotten how to log on, or are confused by changes that happened over the summer. All that adds up to not much of the fun stuff getting done during those first few weeks. All that being said, I got to spend some time this weekend exploring and here is what I found:

This is a great TED Talks video which not only demonstrates the power of harnessing programming and the internet, but also highlights the interconnectedness of humanity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAvNlh2Z0GI

This is the "We Feel Fine" interface. Be careful about randomly clicking on links with your class as they can occasionally be a bit risqué. http://www.wefeelfine.org/

Too often I hear people talk about how impersonal electronic communication is. Those who regularly communicate online or through other electronic means know that they can share their most personal thoughts and feelings online. The "We Feel Fine" project really captures that.

As a side note, this can be yet another example of how widely the very personal thoughts and feelings of individuals can be shared and viewed online. Never hurts to remind our students that anything you publish online may be viewed by people with whom you may not intend to share your most intimate moments...

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Thoughts on Piracy and Patents

Recently I came across this link shared on a social bookmarking site: https://reporting.bsa.org/r/report/add.aspx?src=us&ln=en-us&cmpid=nopiracy. This got me thinking about piracy in general, which in my mind is inextricably linked to patent violations and patent trolls. All together these ideas are referred to as intellectual property rights and intellectual property theft.

Several years ago I heard a speaker at a conference talk about catching his son illegally downloading a Star Wars movie. His son, the speaker said, defended himself by saying that he had already paid for the movie at the movie theater twice (probably at around $10 a ticket) and he had purchased the DVD, and when the blu Ray version was released he planned to purchase that too. At that moment, however, he wanted to watch the movie on his computer. He figured that he had already paid to see it three times and planned to pay for it a fourth time. This anecdote got me thinking. When you buy intellectual property or protected content sometimes you buy a term license, other time, as with the purchase of most music and video, you purchase a perpetual license. There are some different perspectives on whether or not a person, library, school or other entity who purchases a CD or DVD owns only that copy or has the right to convert it to another format for single use. These laws get complicated and can be vague. Furthermore, perceived value vs. cost seems to be directly related to piracy. When consumers believe that the price of an item outweighs the value that it holds for them, then they are more likely to pirate.

Software piracy research suggests that increasing software prices increases piracy [3, 6, 8]. Also, consumers with a high value for a product typically tend to purchase rather than pirate [3, 4, 7]. Additionally, in the face of increasing preventive controls (encryption and other technologies), individuals who do not legitimately own the digital good simply do without it [6]. This represents an opportunity loss on producer profits. http://utopia.csis.pace.edu/dps/2007/jkile/DCS891A/2004-10-08%20Assignment/Digital%20Music%20and%20Online%20Sharing%20-%20Software%20Piracy%202.0.pdf

Then we get to academic, non-profit, and other secondary uses. I'm sure you've heard the 10% rule and that copyright doesn't really apply when something is used for academic purposes, but that really isn't accurate. If you want to read the law, here is a link: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/, good luck. What I am really concerned with here, though, is fair use. The copyright office has been kind enough to publish a fact sheet on fair use: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html, which explains the basics of how copyrighted materials may be used without express permission from the copyright holder. I've also heard fair use summarized as something that adds value without directly competing with or removing value from the original work. There aren't any hard and fast rules here, and not a lot of legal precedent. The purpose of copyright and patent law is to encourage innovation by protecting the innovator's intellectual property from those who would steal the innovation and therefore that individuals ability to profit from the innovation.

This brings me to the more recent patent troll discussion. Are those patenting innovations actually 1. Creating the innovations themselves, 2. Contributing an innovative product or idea to the marketplace, and 3. Inspiring, or at least not inhibiting the ability of, others to innovate? For most so called patent trolls the answer to all three of these is a resounding no. Furthermore, the innovators themselves are often not benefitting the most from patents and copyrights as may have once been true, and copyright and patent laws are growing ever more complex to the point where only larger bureaucratic entities such as music and movie production companies and large corporations are able to benefit. Even in the case of large corporations it can impede progress and innovation, such as with the recent case between Samsung and Apple. Apple is by no means a patent troll. On the contrary this is a successful, highly innovative company, as is their competitor Samsung. This case was a waste of resources of both companies, not to mention taxpayer resources consumed by seemingly endless hearings. Maybe these accusations came from the fear that Apple was losing market share, or maybe they legitimately felt that Samsung was trying to make their devices look and feel like iOS devices. At one time Apple would have put its resources into further innovation in order to outpace its competitors rather than trying to win the battle by stopping its competitors. In an age of patent trolling, however, the powers that be at Apple made the decision to fight the battle with lawyers rather than innovators.

In the end none of this is good for any of us,except maybe the lawyers and the politicians. We all lose out when individuals and corporations fight rather than innovate. It is in my best interest and yours to have fair but reasonable laws which protect intellectual property, but none are served when the laws are used to restrict the very innovation which they are intended to protect.

Friday, June 28, 2013

BYOD: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I stumbled upon this article a few days ago. It is something of a counter example to the benefit of technology in the classroom: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html

You may have seen this or a similar article before. There are quite of few of them out there, but it is about a group of private schools which advocates the absence of technology for children until the reach eighth grade. Then it is only to be used sparingly at home.

I don't agree with the logic, especially since most of the students attending these schools are from privileged families, and will have ample opportunities to learn to use technology properly as they grow. Whereas, many of the public school students with whom I interact daily learn at an early age to use technology for entertainment and consumption. More and more this is where personal electronic devices are marketed. Tablets and smartphones have great potential to be used for production and creative expression, but generally they are built to help us efficiently consume.

One of the biggest mistakes that we are making with technology and young children is that we are teaching them to be consumers rather than producers. BYOD give us the opportunity to teach children that their laptops, tablets, and smartphones can be used for more than just playing games, watching movies, and listening to music. Concepts that children who attend Walden schools will likely have little difficulty embracing later in life.

Where educators may fail, unfortunately I already see many who do, is that we will market BYOD as a way to "have fun" with learning. Learning can be engaging, entertaining, fun, interesting, and exciting with or without technology. Sometimes the topic won't interest a student and it probably won't be fun... Using interesting tools, apps, and software with a goal in mind, or challenging students to find a way to produce a final product can be fun, but assigning a list of questions to be answered with Web sites may seem like more fun than a paper and pencil worksheet, but it accomplishes no more than a work sheet would have and has the added benefit of allowing students to disconnect even more because instead of reading and taking notes, now they just watch the video, pause, rewind, playback when they get distracted. On top of that there is very limited peer engagement.

Building scavenger (QR) hunts, making recap pod and vodcasts, creating instructional presentations, and other teacher produced materials are a great way to engage students and convey information, but that is just technology in the classroom 1.0. It has been around for years, and still just teaches students to consume. Classroom Tech 2.0 is engaging students through production. They create the vodcasts and scavenger hunts based on research. Students should be able to put together a legitimate portfolio of their work by the end of a good course. I'm going to go one step further here as well and talk about Classroom Tech 3.0 (maybe it should just be 2.1), where students collaborate to produce some of their final products. This is not a new concept I know, but it seems to me that it is overlooked in many classrooms. Maybe that is because it gets noisy, and often looks somewhat disorganized. There are two ways that you can know for certain though that it is working.1. Are the final products better than anything that an individual would have produced on his or her own? This may not happen the first time around, but should start as student grow accustomed to collaboration. 2. Does the conversation alway circle back to making the final product better? We all get off topic when working with others. Most of us get distracted when working alone, but sometimes those tangents produce out-of-the-box ideas or help us consider alternative approaches. Either way, the process leads back to improving the final product.

Properly implement BYOD can be a boon to learning both in and out of the classroom. We can teach our children to use technology to further their love of learning, and to be more productive, but be careful to take time to disconnect. Do it the "old fashioned" way once in awhile, and be mindful of the potential for falling into the "electronic babysitter" trap that has been associated with television for years. Whether or not we use technology in the classroom is not the point. Hands on, interactive, student-centered learning has always been effective. Disengaged students won't learn by watching a movie, filling out a worksheet, completing a Web quest. Many activities have a place in an effective classroom. Sometimes we need to memorized facts and figures, sometimes we need activities which simply reinforce a basic process, but we also need to be challenged and to have the opportunity to try, fail, overcome, and create.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Getting Our Feet Wet

So we're in the final stages of planning for Bring Your Own Device/Technology (BYOD/T) for the school. Things are well underway, and we are preparing professional development for teachers. They won't be required to participate in BYOD or the PD, but I hope they will. We have some super teachers here and I think that proper application of technology can make their classrooms more exciting and will help students learn skills which will benefit them as they continue into careers and higher education.

We began a little over a year ago discussing how BYOD might impact our school division. At the time we were revising the Code of Conduct, which had prohibited all cell phone use or possession during school hours. This was a policy written several years prior in reaction to complaints that cell phone use during school hours was becoming prolific and teachers felt that little was being done to restrict it. Many felt that cell phones were a disruption to the instructional environment. Discipline for cell phone use skyrocketed after this policy went into place, but actual use became much less prevalent. Since that time, technology has evolved greatly. Android and iOS were in their infancy. RIM and Palm were the only options for so-called smart devices or PDA, and they had not ventured anywhere near education. I was on the no cell phones side of the debate, and honestly there wasn't much resistance. Most staff and parents were tired of their children's attachment, both physical and psychological, their mobile phones.

Last year, we re-evaluated that policy, and modified it to allow the use of mobile devices sans their network connections, wired or wireless. We considered that we are not longer referring to only phones. We also considered that there is a time and place for every tool and as educators we should be part of teaching our children what is and what is not an appropriate time and place for mobile devices. Now we press forward into BYOD.

We will open our wireless, but not wired, network to student and staff mobile devices beginning this fall. We have upgraded our infrastructure, met with teachers, administrators, students, and parents, put together training, and carefully considered the consequences both intended and unintended. We believe we are ready, but we won't really know for sure until well into the 2013 - 2014 school year.

Monday, April 22, 2013

Thoughts on MOOC, 21st Century Skills and the Future of Education

I think it is great to teach our children to think creatively, collaborate, lead, take initiative and to use the other tools in the 21st century box. It is still, however, just that, a box. If those are the only things we teach them, or the only way we encourage them to think about things, they will still not explore beyond that realm. To most adults, using rote memory seems painfully simple. That is how most of us were taught to think. Maybe a few people had the good fortune of having a variety of teachers who taught them a variety of skills, and ways to approach topics, but I don't think that is the case for most people.

You see when we polarize our thinking we end up in a place where X=bad and Y=good or vice versa. Either way, we are reluctant (or even refuse altogether) to try anything that does not fit neatly inside the box that we have constructed. You may say, "but when we teach children to think creatively they will explore all their options." In response, I would say, "No, they will explore the options we taught them to explore, and then maybe, if we are lucky, they will take another tiny step and extrapolate a variation of one of the ways they were taught to approach a problem." Teachers are just that, teachers. The children they teach often have very little in the way of experience. While some are naturally creative, and most are naturally curious those are skills that need to be practiced and honed, even when they come naturally.



It's great when teachers use PowerPoint to stay organized or excel to help with calculations. It's really cool to shoot a video of a lesson, or even create a guided Web quest where students go out and find answers to a worksheet using the internet, but it isn't really technology integration. These things are just remakes of old teaching tools. A PPT is easier than rewriting your notes on the chalkboard, over and over, and it can be better if you are using videos, and other multimedia elements, but unless the students in your classroom are interacting with your slideshow, then it isn't tech integration. Students should be engaged with technology, experimenting, failing, succeeding, and learning using technology.

That doesn't mean you should stop using PowerPoint, or that you should make quick videos of yourself reteaching a pivotal concept to post online. It just means that you can do more. Web quests and online quizzes are great tools. They are easy to grade, allow you to give your students quick feedback, and can be good learning experiences, but this sort of activity isn't the kind of 21st century tech integration that makes a difference in learning. It is just a new way to create the same ol' stuff.

Need some ideas? Try these sites:
http://www.21stcenturyschools.com/What_is_21st_Century_Education.htm
http://shoutlearning.org/
http://www.web20labs.com/
http://www.classroom20.com/