Impact of Economic Crisis on Future of Education, Your Move

Higher student:teacher ratios and no part-time staff support were this week’s headlines. Our Superintendent made it clear: 86% of the county budget is in personnel so this will be the area hardest hit by budget cuts, or will it? At present we have a 21:1 student teacher ratio in 3rd grade. This number promises to increase 30% to 1:27 by next fall. When teachers are already struggling to cover the curriculum efficiently enabling students to pass required state tests, how much harder will this be to accomplish when one teacher is serving 27 students? Who is hardest hit? I think it will be the students. Hearken back to 50′s when some teachers were responsible for 40+ students. How did those teachers make it work? Did they have to individualize, differentiate, accommodate students at the same time appeasing parents? Hardly. They didn’t have nearly the accountability teachers face today.

How many of you have viewed the classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail? If you have then the image of the Black Knight should easily come into focus.

Crisis Crippling Education

There may even be a smiling forming on your lips at this very moment. What does he have to do with me/us and the current state of affairs in education? It’s simple. Every time we, as teachers are asked to perform the task of teaching under increasingly difficult circumstances, we are confronted by impossible odds for success. The increasing layers of orders for compliance, demands for data, burgeoning class size and the lack of viable means to accomplish these goals, leaves us as helpless as the black knight. He/we are valiantly shaking our heads and defending our students rights to learn but we haven’t a leg to stand on.

So what does all this mean for the future of education? Something’s gotta give and when it does change will have to follow.

Crisis v Ingenuity

The change will be painful but necessary. All the lip service about 21st century teaching and learning will never amount to anything unless we as educators and community members are forced to make major changes in instructional delivery. A paradigm shift will have to occur in order to save money and delivery quality education. I see the necessity for blended learning programs taking off. Alternatives to the traditional 5 day school week will collapse under the pressure to save fuel, electricity and to address individual student needs. Clusters of learning coops will spring up in homes to receive instruction in a facilitated study-group setting with access to a classroom entered synchronously online complete with two-way video streams. Students may only attend the physical plant location 2-3 times a week.

The reality is, we have been heading in this directions for years by creating a demand for outside forms of educational support. Look at any strip mall and you will find small businesses poised to deliver educational support and enrichment. You will also find families paying up to $60 an hour for elementary school tutors to ensure students pass the gateway tests and are promoted to the next grade. Homeschooling too has been on the rise. What is wrong with this picture? Clearly schools are not able to meet the needs of all students and parents find themselves spending above and beyond the school tax allotment to address their child’s educational needs. Something has to change, and it won’t be easy.

With less disposable income and more at stake in the classroom than ever before, parents are going to reach a breaking point. When they look around and see more money going into Special Education programs and less and less going into the regular ed sector there is bound to be some kind of backlash and an outcry for equity. Change is painful but in if we can hang on through the storm we should actually come out better and stronger on the other end. Ingenuity will triumph over crisis.

new small voices vodcast on podomatic

I just completed editing and posting episode 31 of small voices.  This is my third annual play based on a piece of childrens’ literature.  A friend and coworker of mine, Heidi Holcomb, soon to be EdS in EdTech loaned me a containing examples of literature illustrating the butterfly effect.  I wondered how readily my students would make the connection between the cats in our story and the safety of the island. They listened intently to the tale.  I told the initially to listen carefully to see if they could solve the problem on the island. They each wanted to be the one to find the answer! Stories can be excellent teachers when students assume a role/purpose within the context of the a book.

My role was to ask questions and to help the students take ownership of the play. I call it a play but in reality it would take months to be able to produce this kind of thing sequentially and before an audience. Videotaping is the answer.  It enables the teacher to reduce each the play to scenes or even parts when filming. With 18 enthusiastic kindergarteners, the rule is divide and conquer!  Parental help is key as is a mind reading assistant.  I had both!  See for yourself. The editing is so so but I think you’ll agree, the movie is a living lesson for these children.

I found this lesson plan today based on the book I used.  Some of you may find this helpful in creating your own plans.

Teacher can hinder learning, agreed?

 
http://www.cea-ace.ca/media/en/AntiTeaching_Spring08.pdf

Read this recently published article from Education Canada by Michael Wesch and challenge yourself to consider the possibility that teaching hinders learning.

Jen Wagner Steels (not a typo) the Show!

Today I facilitated a session introducing some faculty members to Web 2.0. This was a new PD topic for our school and the participants had no prior knowledge of Web 2.0. In fact they hadn’t a clue what it might mean. It reminded me of my own reaction a little more than a year ago when I first heard the term Web 2.0. I couldn’t pin down a definition. After much blog-reading, conference-attending and experimentation I finally have a handle on the term. So I ask, how do we typically describe something that is new and improved? I might hear, “This new generation of flat screen TV lets you view in TV in high definition.” New generation, an improvement, that’s what Web 2.0 is. It is a new generation of online internet tools. (see jeff Utecht’s video explanation) Most of these tools have two things in common that enhance internet user experience. Firstly, they are free. Secondly, they embody some collaborative features. In short, Web 2.0 is to the internet of yesterday what Vista is to Windows XP. It is new and improved. (theoretically)

The mystery of Web 2.0 quickly disappeared. It was now time to demonstrate some of the features and benefits. I opened Delicious to the CreekViewElementary page and displayed the contents on the Promethean board. I explained the benefits to using this kind of system for bookmarking over the traditional ‘favorites’ . Delicious links are available any time and anywhere you have internet access. Next I made four simple requests.

1. Each participant had to download and install the Firefox browser.
2. They had to sign up for a Gmail account.
3. They had to set up a Delicious account.
4. Next they imported the Delicious add-on to Firefox.

This took about 15 minutes and they were able to help one another in the process. Next I asked them to enter voicethread.com and then click the handy little delicious TAG button now found in their browser tool bar. I just love this feature. I explained how tags are used to file things by topic. The best part about tagging is being able to file one site under many topic headers. For instance, I put Voicethread under interactive, multimedia, projectbasedlearning, and web2tool. Now when I click on interactive, it appears as one of the options.

I pulled up an example of a 4th grade language arts project in Voicethread. The teachers could easily see how VT could be used within the classroom and even as a collaborative grade level project. Once teachers realize they has the necessary computer skills they get very excited about the prospects of using new tools. The necessary computer skills are very minimal and are virtually the same as the skills required to send an email. This is really another wonderful feature of Web 2.0. It is easy to use. Ahhh, finally and it keeps getting even easier. It really does. At this stage is you can read, type, attach pictures or documents and are willing to follow instructions, then you can enjoy all the web has to offer.

At this point, the participants felt fairly comfortable and were beginning to grasp the intrinsic collaboration component found in Web 2.0 tools. Suddenly they noticed a dialog box open on the Promethean screen from my laptop. It said, ‘ready?’ Oh, that’s my good friend Jen Wagner from California Skyping in to join our session. I will let her know we are ready. I typed back, ‘OK’.  I clicked the green call button and we connected. Jennifer Wagner is so warm and friendly she instantly gained the groups’ attention and started us on a journey exploring Google applications. She started with Google Reader and had everyone subscribing to her blog, jenuinetech.com/blog! She is one smart cookie. She spent 45 minutes with us, covering Google-Calendar and Docs. Jennifer has an amazing way of bringing concepts to life with spot on analogies and concrete examples that teachers can relate to. She was the highlight of the session. Why? Because she is an amazing teacher and because she was speaking to us from California and it felt like she was in the room. Not only did the participants learn about Google apps they also saw the wonder of Skype in action. I was able to walk around and check on progress and offer assistance. It was a wonderful experience for me and I think now, it is the only way to really get teachers interested in the power of edtech.

Jen, I owe you one! You did ‘steel’ the show by strengthening the case for integrating technology. Now if we can just get one or two of them to listen to Women of Web 2 on Tuesday nights from 9-10PM EST … If you are a teacher who thrives on new forms of communication and enjoys participating in lively chats about the latest greatest teaching tools then you really must tune in to Jen’s Show on Tuesday nights. She and 3 other stellar women host a variety of edtech gurus. You listen and chat while they have a conversation. If you do decide to test the water by joining the chat on Tuesday nights please say hello to me (sendkathy) and Jen (jenuinetech).

What if Lincoln had used Power Point…

Last night on Women of Web 2, Joyce Valenza, Media Specialist extraordinare shared why she poses this question to her students,”What if Lincoln had used Power Point to deliver the Gettysburg Address.” This hypothetical question may be applied to any historic speech and what a great way to get students using their higher order thinking skills. Joyce calls the Media Center a Libratory, a place for practice, presenting, creating and sharing a center for communication/information sharing. She has over 30 years of experience in education and a Phd. but there is nothing stale about her approach. Here is her Virtual Library providing you with access to some excellent resources.

The Problem with Overexposure

The problem with exposure is overexposure. How can teachers create safe spaces for children? For that matter how can parents? The internet is a Pandora’s Box, alluring, mysterious and enlightening. Is the incidence of occasionally unfiltered audio of video a threat to internet use in elementary schools? Do the benefits of internet use outweigh the pitfalls? Several posts ago I commented on the surprising use of youtube by young students. I didn’t teach them about it nor have I even even mentioned it because I don’t feel it is a safe place for unaccompanied minors. Our county has excellent filters and they certainly seems to be 99% effective in eliminating unwanted material but the filters can fail and students can run the risk of overexposure. Take Google images, regardless of the setting an search on any term may result in image overexposure! It happened to me one time when I was searching for computers. Mixed among the computers was a random photo labeled computer but without any computer in view.

Media Specialists have grappled with questionable content since the dawn of libraries. Parents dissaporve of some books for religious, political or content about the human anatomy. Some illustrations or photographs may depict strong sequences of violence. I have been on the critical end of this debate when my own children were in elementary school. In fact a middle school teacher showed the class an R-rated movie without parent consent. It was Schindler’s List. My daughter loved her teacher. I felt the woman had exercised poor judgment. I emailed the principal and let her know that perhaps the teacher was not aware of the rules concerning movies. She thanked me and handled it discreetly. No one lost their job. In fact it was a teachable moment for me and my daughter.

I recently encountered some unanticipated pitfalls using audio on the web. Think about still images, screening them is relatively simple procedure. You can see with your own eyes in short order and assess the content. With video alone, you could fast forward and scan the scenes. A different kind of problem arises when using audio. How can you and I be sure the audio content is safe without listening to every word, every second? What kind of warning do you have before it’s too late to stop the sound? What if the unexpected happens? How do you recover? What do you tell the students? I have been asking these questions of my peers and the most frequent answer is to fudge the offending word or phrase and change the meaning, if possible to placate any innocent listeners, but what if that isn’t possible? How can we trust the content even when it comes from a reputable source? Is what we hear online as damaging as what we hear in person? These are the questions creating cob webs in my head. Teachers have to protect their students. I think we have to consider these questions seriously. The advent of phone comments on blogs and VoiceThreads and even audio comments on websites or podcasts raise the chances that some unfiltered audio will reach the ears of innocents. Are there any guarantees save removing internet access? Let me know if you have any answers. I’m all ears!

First time at the FETC

This week Heidi and I will drive down to Orlando to attend the Florida Educational Technology Conference.  My friend Jen Wagner has given me a list of wonderful people to meet and I am looking forward to a dose of inspiration.  Since I am obsessed with the wiiMotes I will undoubtedly make it my goal to find someone who has experimented with the $50 whiteboards. I plan to get the vendor reaction to the wiiMote. I will also see if I can find an XO laptops demo as ours have yet to arrive, and I will look into some eLearning options such as Moodle. Who knows what else I might learn.  Our seven hour drive will be packed with podcasts.  I do my best listening on long drives. We return on Saturday and then Sunday I plan to connect with Jen who will be in Philly for EduCon! Can you say technology integration? My who week will be full of eating, sleeping and breathing technology. My only regret?  Missing Women of Web 2 on Tuesday evening.  Alas we will still be in the car.

Kindle, Kindling and Book Burning

This week I am taking the easy way out! Here is my response to another notable post on the TechLearning Blog by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach. Can you imagine a world without paperbacks, big books or magazines? How is technology enhancing the desirability that digital print? Isn’t a paperback created using digital print? Discover what generated my response by seeking her post The Future of Reading.

I used to be far too impatient to read. I too wanted to “unlock the secrets” more quickly. Actually I really wanted to live the book, not read about it! Now I can see the beauty of listening to a story unfold inside my head. It is an extraordinary experience and like you Sheryl, I wanted my kids to absorb the wonders of reading so I amassed a varied collection of children’s books and read aloud to them until they reached middle school.

My first impressions of Kindle, from what I can tell by its’ size, shape and concept are appealing. The preview, however, reveals a black and white screen and I recoil slightly wondering how I would manage to live without seeing the book cover in color. It occurs to me that the new book smell would also be absent and while this could be remedied with a spray my reluctance festered. The texture of cold plastic, versus the feel of soft, smooth paper sheets made me wonder how comfy I would be propped up on my pillow viewing a screen like the one I stare at most of the day. The words organic and sensual came to mind. Not that I read lurid, torrid tales, I prefer engaging tales of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The kind with human struggles, drama and hard won happiness.

No, Kindle holds little interest for me. I like variety in my modes of reading from cereal boxes to traffic signs to computer screens to good old fashioned paperback books. I hope I don’t offend anyone if I admit that I prefer the real thing in bed. (books that is) Recently I wrote about an electronic magazine medium which I do think has promise. It is every bit as satisfying as a high quality glossy magazine. See what you think. http://preview.tinyurl.com/3834c7

The surveys quoted perplex me. I wonder how they account for the text messaging explosion. If all of the messages could be converted to book quantities then would we find a decrease in reading and writing or just a change in the way we read and write? If literary readers are more likely to engage in politics or volunteering then how do we account for the recent Pakistani protests coordinated by massive texting networks? Things are changing, shifting and the quality is changing. If people decide they love the Kindle then it will continue to be on Christmas lists for years to come. If not then it may just become kindling for a bigger fire.

Posted by: kathy shields | November 27, 2007 2:06 AM

Jeff Giddens Super e-Sleuth, Uncovers Over 350 Visualization Resources

Remember when you were small and your brother/sister used to tickle you until it hurt? Well I was so tickled by what Jeff had to say in his GaETC workshop that I begged him to continue filling my brain with new concepts even though it grew nearly painful to find places to store all of his wonderful ideas.

Jeff shares the authorship of the SEGA Tech blog. He and his cohorts provide educational technology support for Southeast Georgia schools from elementary to higher education. I attended Jeff’s GaETC workshop entitled, Seeing is Believing: The Power of Information Visualization. I consider myself to be a fairly savvy user of educational technology tools and frankly the GaETC held little mystique for me. Having met Jeff at a previous conference I suspected he would be able to deliver rich content and offer concrete examples of how technology can enhance student engagement, learning and skills. He didn’t let me down.

Jeff has an affinity for science and technology. His expertise is particularly poignant on the subject of science technology integration in middle and High school. I could not even begin to enumerate the best practices he bequeathed at this workshop so I give will pass on one suggestion. Subscribe to his blog SEGA Tech and spend some time reaching into the recent past by reviewing his archival posts. Oh, and one more thing … Make sure you have delicious in your tool bar so you can expand your personal set of technology resources exponentially!

Why Tuesday Night is My Favorite

You may be saying to yourself, I know why, Lincoln Heights, Biggest Loser or Beauty and the Geek! As far as I’m concerned, those shows have nothing on Cathy Evanoff’s Making Connections or WOW2.0′s Women of the Web. I get such a rush from the fast-paced drama, excitement, back channeling and scintillating technological tidbits that I just can’t wait for Tuesday night. I know at first it is hard to conceive of a live interactive webcast involving some 60 people in the chat and 5-sometimes 8 in the live streamed conference but it beats asynchronous TV any day.

Last night was particularly exhilarating. First Cathy E. an award winning edtech educator hosted an innovative experimental show featuring uStreamTV. Jeff Lebow, Webcast Academy founder, his bio which I snagged from the TESOL conference site:

Jeff Lebow

Jeff Lebow’s educational career has included teaching 3rd grade in New Mexico, ESL in Thailand & Korea, and Computer Assisted Language Learning in New Hampshire. He founded Worldbridges in 1998 and has been experimenting with live, interactive webcasting and collaborative community building ever since. Worldbridges met the Webheads during EdTechTalk#1 in 2005, and the EVO2007 Webcast Academy session was only the latest in a series of webcasting adventures that have resulted.

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During our meeting Jeff was able to host at least 5 streams simultaneously and feed them into the edtechtalk page in a single embedded window. He is quite simply a magician. Cathy E is very technologically adventurous and infuses her audience with confidence. In new age jargon I felt like my being was vibrating on a higher plane after the show.

An hour later and somewhat subdued and philosophical I joined the Women of Web 2.0 group who include: Sharon Peters, Jen Wagner, Cheryl Oakes and Vicki Davis. The special guest was Melinda Miller – The Podcasting Principal. Upwards of 50 people, fingers flying in the chat room while the talk begins. Melinda is redefining what it means to be a principal by modeling a feet first approach to experimenting with new forms of communication to enhance community. She is full of surprises. For example, she made a very personal announcement via her Meez character which is embedded in her blog page for her staff. By changing the background of her avatar she provided a clue to baby news. Can you imagine a leader so dynamic and spirited? Well actually, my own principal could give her competition when it comes to the element of surprise. I think random acts of kindness started with him because they come so naturally. But back to Melinda and the WOW ladies. The banter over their Skype conference call is witty and personal. I’d liken it to the view only without the political barbs. It’s kinder and gentler but manages to pack the hour with more content than you imagined a brain could hold. Fact is, you can’t hold it all so you have your tabbed browser set up and your delicious tool bar to capture any of the amazing links they mention.

So when people ask me how I know so much about technology. I tell them it’s all how you spend your Tuesday nights! Catch me in the next Tuesday chat with Cathy Evanoff or WOW2.0, I’m sendkathy.