iSean

the International Society for Technology in Education released new National Educational Technology Standards for students last summer as seen here:

new standards for teachers will emerge early this summer. the previous NETS-S and NETS-T were very similar. i participated in dialog sessions and in providing feedback on the new teacher standards and there will be some overlap with the student model above, but the whole model is going to be much more individualized to teachers this time around. that being said, i want to address an observation that i made when i was sitting in the MACUL session on NETS with the deputy CEO of ISTE 2 months ago. we began by going around the room introducing ourselves and came to a woman sitting off to the side. she explained that she was filling in at the last minute for another teacher who had wanted to attend MACUL and couldn’t make it. this woman is a school teacher. she had never heard of the NETS and had no idea they were being refreshed. she described how overwhelmed she feels with standards — she reeled off the names of a few she knows that they follow, etc.

this woman ended up joining my group and helping to provide feedback. our group consisted of two education professors and technology director for a k-12 school along with this high school teacher. she didn’t contribute much, but i was struck by how new these educational technology standards were to this teacher. this is a teacher who ended up going to a technology conference for educators and she didn’t even realize there were technology standards. it’s easy to forget that these teachers exist or even that this teacher represents the vast majority of teachers out there. i teach graduate students who are getting a master’s in educational technology so of course they are aware of the standards and these tend to be the teachers i interact with the most . . . but what about the other master’s programs? they don’t have a required technology course.

i coordinate the undergraduate program and i integrate the NETS-T into the core of the curriculum as these standards drive the curricular decisions i make. i make sure i explain this to my students and to make them aware of the NETS-S and their responsibility for meeting these standards in their future classrooms. unfortunately, most of my students are at least a year or 2 away from student teaching and then they won’t have a teaching job until the year after that. fat chance they’ll remember the ISTE NETS.

i wonder what ISTE is doing to better position the NETS so that K-12 schools are meeting the standards that are posted and linked in detail above. it would be great if NCLB suddenly found an interest in technology standards and even if they incorporated components (e.g., information literacy skills) into the annual testing, etc., but it is not happening any time soon. so i wonder out loud whether ISTE even has an initiative to promote the NETS in place — outside of NCLB, how do we promote the importance of the NETS-S? what’s our plan of action?

i am always on the lookout for tools that I can use in my teaching. i recently had a colleague make a very neat YouTube style video using Sony Vegas. . . but it’s only for PC users. technically I have a PC on my Mac, but I’d have to start up and select the XP partition. that’s fine and my Mac literally becomes a PC. unfortunately, i have all of the files and websites on my Mac side that I’d want to use. so, I’d have to transfer everything over and then restart into the PC just to make a screencast. yuck.

well i just came across a neat new app for Mac user called ScreenFlow. wow! this is a terrific application for screen and podcasting. i can run a Keynote or PowerPoint presentation and have it recorded while recording myself talking about the presentation content. Later I can show the presentation and the video of me at the same time or switch back and forth or only use the audio, etc. — there’s much more it can do and many neat editing features. It only works in the latest version of the Mac OS because it takes advantage of the features built into the OS including Core Animation, QuickLook, Spotlight, QTKit, Quartz Composer, OpenGL, Core Data, etc. Using the OS allows the app to be very lightweight and still very powerful. i am going to try and make something for this semester and perhaps i can post a sample here just for kicks. stay tuned.

so a few years ago i decided to spend a little of my professional development funds on SurveyMonkey. Surveymonkey.com is a site that provides a tool for making surveys. pretty simple stuff really, but they do the job they claim and they do it well. i first subscribed because i was tired of the end of semester evaluations that students complete getting turned in and then not getting the results until a month after the next semester started. if there were any changes recommended to improve my teaching and my classes then I would not get that feedback until well into the next semester. so i wanted to take matters into my own hands. i used my professional development money and subscribed to surveymonkey.com and have been using it ever since.

now that i am realizing the benefits of more instant feedback, particularly as compared to the typical end of semester evaluation, i am going overboard with surveys. i now use surveymonkey to conduct key formative assessments each week and my students complete for participation points. so every week i send out a survey of about 20 questions that range from the time my students spent on various components of the class to questions about the content that was taught that week to questions about how people are accessing my online sessions (e.g. dial-up, cable) to the kinds of equipment people are using and whether they are traveling, etc. — I try and get a nice profile of students, but I also ask about satisfaction levels with parts of the class. and i have open-ended questions about how they’d improve the session/class, etc. they are going to be future teachers so i like putting them in my shoes from time to time. a great thing about surveying my students at the end of the week and through the weekend is that i am now able to change my course and teaching nearly instantly instead of waiting for January. and next semester when i go to teach a particular lesson i can look back at the feedback my students made this past semester.

a nice thing about surveymonkey is that you can use it for free, right now. anyone can create an account and use the service for as long as you need for free as long as you are not getting more than 100 responses per survey (most of us don’t teach more than 30 or so in any given class). unfortunately, the free version only allows up to 10 questions per survey. but free is free. the professional and unlimited version is $200/year. i now have years of data collected in surveymonkey to compare and some of it is quite fascinating — e.g., i used to have nearly everyone on dial-up and now very few people have stuck with dial-up. i can’t reveal the specifics of my data because that would be considered publishing it and i haven’t gone through our institutional review board for human subjects review. i am actually on the IRB committee at my university so i need to be particularly careful.

so i attended the Michigan Association of Computer Users in Learning (MACUL) conference this week. i had 2 presentations and they went just swell. but the fun for me was attending a session by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Deputy CEO Leslie Conery. she held a session for an hour and a half to discuss the new draft of the NETS for teachers. These standards are set to be released this June, but they are seeking feedback right now. much of the session was devoted to small group work to look through the proposed standards and provide constructive feedback. our little group made some suggestions for organizing the standards better and for improving some of the wording of the indicators for various standards. the ISTE bigwigs will be gathering together next week for a few days to go over all of the feedback they’ve received to develop the final version of the standards. i would love to have been in involved in that process just to have a few days to devote to these new standards, but it’s sort of late in the game to think about it a week before it happens {sigh}. i regret not forcing myself to spend more time in evaluating the draft. in any regard, i am excited about the changes to the NETS. in July of 2006 i posted about hoping to see the NETS get “refreshed” so now that it’s happening i really appreciate being able to be a part of the process even if i will miss the nitty gritty next week. i gave feedback to the developers last month when i found the draft of the NETS for teachers and then again at the session yesterday, but now that i have spent more time with the draft i am seeing other changes and recommendations i’d like to make . . . and i am running out of time. doh. if you’re interested in seeing the current draft of the NETS for teachers, you can find it on this website and you can provide feedback before the group meets next week at this website.

back on October of 2006 I wrote about the Blackboard and Desire2Learn patent dispute — Blackboard had gone after Desire2Learn in court over a copyright infringement. Blackboard is the largest provider of online learning management systems (LMSs) or online course management services (CMSs) and Desire2Learn is a similar company on a much smaller scale. a jury in Texas this past Friday gave the first step of the battle to Blackboard. this is more of an FYI since the article linked explains what happened beyond my headline. this is crummy, but D2L still has their patent pending, so there’s that.

one of the biggest barriers to technology integration into the classroom by k-12 teachers is the lack of time. i am experiencing it right now myself. i decided to take an overload section of a course and I also took 8 thesis students on top of that. egads!! what was i thinking (or not)? classes are going well, but my free time is dwindling. i used to love adding to my blog because i was spending time reading other blogs and keeping abreast of the happenings in the field, etc. Now my blog seems like a burden. and this is what happens with regard to using technology in the classroom for some teachers. i wish i had answers for this, but i don’t.

i have my students each post stuff to their own blog. i also have them find other ed tech professionals who keep a blog and my students are to read and respond (and maybe even participate in a dialog with these other professionals). this activity goes well, but the physical act of managing 70 students commenting on 70 blogs is extremely time consuming. i have my students use a code name (e.g., tom205) if they want and then they post the URL to their comment and the name they used. so, to manage this i am using now free NetNewWire — one of the most popular RSS readers on any platform even though it only works on a Mac. i had to enter all 70 student blog addresses into my reader. i then have to check each entry to find the link to the blog where they commented. inevitably, some of the students will post their URL wrong where they commented (e.g., http://blogger.com/add_comment) and i’ll have to contact them to find out the actual URL. i try to and respond to every single student, particularly if the other ed tech professional does not respond to the comment my student left. while i think this is a valuable assignment and gives my students to hear other voices in the field beside my voice, i also recognize that this is eating up my time. i have 7 discussion groups for my students using phpBB forums. here we are just 6 weeks in and look at the number of posts I’ve had to read thus far and a preview of just a screenshot from one discussion to see how my forum looks:

i am approaching 2000 posts and I have very thoughtful students who put much effort into our class discussions. just for the heck of it, i pretended to print just one group discussion on 1 of our two topics this week — it was about open source software. the print preview was 23 pages. keep in mind that i have 7 groups and there were 2 discussion questions. my point is that teaching can get overwhelming and this is true at every level of teaching particularly for teachers who are new to the field and just starting out. so, technology can quickly take a back seat and then these new teachers start forming habits that do not include using technologies and eventually it gets harder and harder to shift these practices to teaching with technology. i wish i had answers for this, but right now i am wearing a life jacket myself. doh.

one key, i think, is to help students realize that technology can save time in the long run even if it takes more time in the short run. sure, we might be struggling to keep our head above water this year, but every little bit we can do to save time in the future is time gained in the future. ooh, i see a new version of WordPress is now available and i am encouraged to update right now. that update might be just what i need to help keep my site that much more secure in te future. off to do it now. ;~)

43folders has an interesting post today by a math teacher who is desperately trying to integrate technology into her teaching yet she is encountering barrier after barrier. for example:

I have found it increasingly annoying to hear from on high that we need to integrate more technology in our classroom, yet most new teachers and old teachers are still using old standbys because we don’t have the time to use and troubleshoot our way through technology. Making worksheets by copying and pasting by hand. Building test questions from book programs that only work on PCs or OS 9 on macs. Wanting to use videos from the internet only to find they are blocked. Wanting to post information to a website or build my own website to find that FTP is blocked or that online-services are clunky, restrictive, and cumbersome. Granted that I am lucky enough to have a computer, a projector, and an ELMO (video camera hookup to a projector.) But for the love of turtles! It seems that the industry ignores us!

this certainly reflects what i’ve experienced from teachers who take my graduate courses. i know going into these courses that the teachers who are enrolled are already the teachers who are using and trying to use technology in their teaching. the teachers in our master’s program are in it to learn how to overcome some of these barriers. the bottom line is that it’s not easy to do and one of the main reasons we use technology is to improve upon what we do without using technology. if technology adds complications and, more importantly, time to a task then it’s very hard to justify. the teachers i work with can justify it because they want to succeed and be a role model. sometimes the legwork in the beginning can save much time over the long haul and that’s okay as well. but when districts hamper the progress technology-using teachers are trying to achieve then that’s problematic. and districts do hamper progress as this teacher writes:

A lot of my issues stem from the limitations (or invisible limitations) of my districts computer policies. I can’t control my district IT, I can whine at them, write them letters, request things and so forth but if that is going to take time away from me making sure next day’s lesson is done and useful-forget it!

i realize schools have to deal with viruses (at least if they are using PCs), security, and safety and all of that jazz, but far too often the model for technology is one that starts from the perspective that blocking and locking content, access, and features out is best until someone can justify why something is useful or necessary. teachers just don’t have the time to have these battles. i use my own website for many of my online classes. often, teachers have to work with their district to allow my website content to be viewable on school computers. this isn’t because i have anything that is questionable; rather, this is because of the mindset that it’s all bad until proven otherwise.

but back to the math teacher who wrote the article . . . she is finding ways to integrate technology into her teaching and she is having to do much of the work at home. why is that? it’s because most schools don’t value technology and even when they do they don’t have a comprehensive plan with regard to technology. technology isn’t tested on NCLB tests and that makes it hard to go above and beyond what districts are already spending on technology in their annual budgets. it’s a shame, really. the math teacher points out that many solutions are offered in the comments section of the article she wrote and that some suggestions are really worthwhile. but the fact remains that the onus for integrating technology and overcoming the district barriers is on the teacher. that’s a recipe for ensuring that only a select few teachers will use technology beyond a token lesson here or there.

Technorati Tags: ed tech, technology integration, barriers, students, teachers, technology in education

i was just checking out arstechnica and came across an article discussing a new report out about the “Google generation.” the report looks at kids born in 1993, so they’d be about 14 - 15 now. these are kids who have grown up only knowing a word on the Internet and Google searches, etc. this report can be downloaded as a PDF here and is sponsored by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee. and while the report finds these kids are more competent at using technology, they still have poor information literacy skills just like the generation before them. one of the neat findings is that kids today are no more impatient and no more in need of instant gratification than previous students. if nothing else, it’s nice to have a little snapshot about current teens and technology.

holy gee whiz, you wouldn’t believe the hosting/server issues i’ve had over the past week+. i am using 4 different hosting services for various domain names i manage. 2 of the 4 hosting services have really failed me this week. first, the domain i have for my courses went down the day before classes started. this included all of my phpBB forum installations. doh. these were on a site using iPowerweb (no link as I don’t want to promote them). to make matters worse, here we are almost a week later and they still haven’t resolved the issue. i talked with various people and tried online chats, email, etc. to no avail. they are working on it. apparently, they moved me to a new server and missed about 60% of my content so everything was broken. i tried to copy stuff over for them, but the mySQL database stuff was all broken. i quickly registered the .net version of my .com site for my classes and set up everything with a new host. really crummy that i had to do this at the last second — the setup time alone took me probably 10 hours that i had already spent on the old and broken site.

but that wasn’t my only issue. this site has been down for nearly a week as well. this site is hosted with bluehost (again, no link). they’ve been pretty good until now, but this outage is far too long. this site hosts my blog, but also some class stuff (e.g., drupal installations for class content). i don’t really have this stuff backed up and i have another week’s worth of material due to my students on Monday. I have been doing it from scratch and i hope to have it ready by Monday but i’ll be working late tonight, tomorrow and Sunday night unless Bluehost can get my site working again (and, if this is posted on Friday night then they got it working and i was able to post this draft — EDIT 2:15 Saturday and it’s working). okay, they have things mostly working again, but my blog has a mySQL table missing and that’s causing an error. apparently, they upgraded PHP and Apache recently and my site has been down since then. so both issues with hosting companies is because of an upgrade. i never upgrade any tools i use during a semester, but i couldn’t stop the hosting companies from upgrading their equipment, etc. crummy that this all hit at once.

the worst thing about iPowerweb is the length of time it takes to get someone on the phone. i had old phones, but i was on the phone for over 1/2 hour without getting a person and my phone died. i ended up ordering new phone set on Amazon with overnight delivery and now i have 17 hours of talk time. watch out tech support, you’re now going to hear from me . . . and i can sit on hold for a long time. doh. i should point out that Bluehost had me talking with tech support in about 5 minutes of holding. that’s world’s and world’s better than iPowerweb. i think i’ll drop iPowerweb ASAP. i just have to figure out how to move a phpBB database from one phpBB installation on one host to another phpBB installation on a different host. if i can do that then iPowerweb will soon be dead to me.

Technorati Tags: blogs, hosting, mySQL

i just came across an article titled, “The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2007” and i looked the list over and checked out some of the apps. i like to think i am fairly on top of technologies that can be beneficial in the classroom yet i hadn’t heard of any of these tools. and that has me thinking . . . is it worth it for a teacher/educator to invest time using one of these tools in teaching and learning? i have no doubt that some of these tools can be beneficial for a teacher and a learner; however, that’s not my concern. i would be worried that i’d put a lot of time into a tool OR that my students would start a project and the tool would evaporate — go away. it’s one thing to use Google tools or some other more mainstream developer’s tools because they have a lot of funding behind them and there is little chance that the tool would be gone in an instant. but many of these other tools may not last. is it worth the risk to invest time and energies into them???