Considering Google Classroom - part1

So you're considering Google Classroom?  Great!

What it is: The best way to explain this thing is that it's an organizing system for GMail communication in a classroom setting. It has tools that make the process of sending out assignments and collecting assignments, from all of the students, multiple classes, multiple artifacts per student, much easier. 

It is NOT an online classroom where each student gets to work at his/her own pace. That would be Moodle ... if you want a totally differentiated system that does the teaching and each kid is at a different place, then Classroom isn't going to work well for you.

Type of class it's best for:
My colleagues in the English and History departments are the most satisfied with Classroom because their myriad assignments are typically written paragraphs that could easily overwhelm your in-box if you were to try and have the students just send them to you ... to the tune of 1000 emails a week, or more.

(update: "Ducks to Water - Google Classroom" details the experience of a New Zealand English teacher's use of Classroom)

It's tough for math, however.  Symbols are limited. There is Greek Delta for triangle, but you have to use < for angle. Complex notes are impossible - handwritten still works best for taking notes, then scan and send from the school copier.  Algebra is possible for me since I'm writing one equation for a problem but the students can't show their work easily. Pre-Caclulus and Calculus are basically a no-go in GDocs.  There's easy integration of Desmos and Geogebra, but you have to let go of the need to show work or steps.

The exceptions: Probability and Statistics, and portfolio/explanation/extended answer questions. P/S using Sheets works great. You can send out data ("Make a copy for each student") and the kids each create a presentation with graphs from it.  Similarly, "portfolio" problems or the new Common Core explanation-required problems work fairly well because there's more writing and verbiage than math equations.

Bottom line: If your students are using Google Docs to do their work, then Classroom is perfect. I gave the Stats class work that they generated spreadsheets and graphics for: Sheets and Slides came back, sorted, tagged with name, a nice little interface that collects all of the artifacts that are submitted with the assignment (also renames them with assignment name and student name, e.g., "6.2 Histogram - John Smitty 2018").

Bonus: If your students have more than one class using Classroom, then they get a dashboard with assignments and such. They LIKE having everything there.

Advantages:

• Ease of use.
• Every assignment goes to every kid at the same time. Email notification and bright red "Assignment Due" in the interface.
• The assignments that are submitted are definitely submitted.
• Kids appreciate it when multiple teachers use it.
• You can grade right in the list of students' submissions. Open the kid's submitted files, add comments right in the margins, "Return" it if you want improvements, choose a grade.

Problems:

• Typing Algebra. 
• Drawing graphs. (Desmos and Geogebra integrate well, but DRAWING is cumbersome)
• Every assignment goes to every kid at the same time. Email notification and bright red "Assignment Due" in the interface. No differentiation.
• No quizzes (yet. They claim to be working on it)
• You can't have a class prepped too far out, certainly not a full course. 
• Gradebook is limited and does not integrate with your gradebook program.

Here's a sample assignment:

It's got a title and a due date. I included a picture for them to look at (student can view), a spreadsheet will the data that each student will work on and submit later (Make a copy for each student) and an another spreadsheet that all students can edit together. The "Make a copy for each" option allows each student to have their own to work on while the "Students can edit" option lets us all contribute data to the same file. It could be raw data, a GDoc that you're using for class notes, etc.

The paperclip icons at the bottom allow you to attach a file from your computer (uploaded), attach a google doc (doc, sheets, drawing, etc.), a YouTube video link, and a general link.

When you student has completed his work, he goes back to this page and hits the SUBMIT button.  Any file that was "Make a copy for Each" is automatically attached, but the student can attach other files, evidence, artifacts, and then submit.

It all gets neatly organized in your GDrive, in a folder creatively called "Classroom", but you will never need to look in there for them.

Nope, don't care.

What you'll do is look in your assignment "stream":

Note: The blue rectangles are just to obscure the students' names for publishing here. The green one covers a student's name as part of the new automatically created filename. Each student's entry can be expanded as I did here to see and open any submitted files. Everything is in my Drive, but I can get to it all here.

Also, to answer the other question asked on Twitter, I feel it's not that difficult to create the same assignment more than once for different sections and this gives me the flexibility of having classes at different points during the year. Not only that, but announcements can be posted to more than one group and can contain PDFs, links, images, etc.

Note: I don't grade them here because I don't want dual-gradebook confusion. I do write comments (ctrl-alt-M) in the documents themselves.


If this works for you, you owe me a beer someday.

There will be a part 2.

Automation

In an article about the crash of Flight 447, Automation Paradox, pt. 1

In 1997,  American Airlines captain Warren Van Der Burgh said that the industry has turned pilots into “Children of the Magenta” who are too dependent on the guiding magenta-colored lines on their screens.

William Langewiesche agrees: “We appear to be locked into a cycle in which automation begets the erosion of skills or the lack of skills in the first place and this then begets more automation.”

However potentially dangerous it may be to rely too heavily on automation, no one is advocating getting rid of it entirely. It’s agreed upon across the board that automation has made airline travel safer. The accident rate for air travel is very low: about 2.8 accidents for every one million departures. (Airbus planes, by the way, are no more or less safe than their main rival, Boeing.)

As a math teacher, the parallels to the use of calculators, graphing calculator apps, and various other tools, jumped out at me immediately.  These tools make student progress in mathematics easier, make concepts more easily grasped ... and give the students a crutch that has vast implications when that crutch is whisked away or breaks.

Technology cannot replace understanding. It is a tool, nothing more.

Things we need you to stop saying 4

I'm scheduled for a Tech conference.  This is one of the offerings:

Really?

I find this amazing, sad, depressing, and it pisses me off.

I find it amazing that any teacher doesn't know more about technology than students; decent and cheap personal computers that can play video and music and run Office software and play games, have been around for 20 something years now.  More basic machines like the TRS-80 and the PDP8 (with punch tape reader!) since the seventies.  The Internet has been a thing since '95 and smartphones since 2007.

What teacher doesn't know tech at this point? Are there really people that backwards and stupid who don't know Office, and video games and .... a concept of programming whether it's macros in word, Windows script, basic, html, php, javascript, excel .... Anything? Something? Do I know any of these people?

Yes, yes I do. And they're teachers.  That's the sad part. Sad because it seems like MOST of the teachers I deal with are technidiots. (Like that? I just made the word up.)

It's 2015 and this conference is charging $200 a day and this is the title of one hour's workshop and the title isn't considered odd or demeaning or out-of-place. That's depressing but not surprising.

Far too many teachers are STILL tech illiterate, even by comparison with their students.

Yes, I said it. The students are not "digital natives" endowed with magical tech-fu. They are mostly clueless about useful tech of all kinds. They're great at plugging in the computer and playing a video game, or installing Candy crush on their phones and mindlessly playing for hours, but that's not tech literate.  Sure, there are some who know more than I do, but not very many, and I'm not setting a particularly high bar.

So what pisses me off?

This:

Holy shit!  I've been told that I can't teach unless I have certifications and continuing education in all forms of my field. I'm supposed to have lesson plans ready and write curriculum and proficiency based standards and differentiate my teaching.

Programming, apparently, doesn't require any of that.

Programming doesn't need expertise.

Programming is something the smart kid can teach for you.

Students helped with instruction and debugging. They addressed multiple languages and "no one knows the entire curriculum" and "all learn basics together".

What is this, an after school program at the Boys and Girls Club?

Teachers: Stop being idiots. Go learn how to program. Do your budget on Excel. Figure out how to center your words both vertically and horizontally in a Word document.

PD Leaders: Stop encouraging the technidiots.  It's not cute. It's not helpful, and we really need you to stop saying it.

Doing Things the Hard and Expensive Way

So this school had an election. Desperate to justify their purchase of enough TI-Inspire Navigator calculators for the whole school, they used them for voting for StC, because apparently:

• the cellphone that every kid carries around were ... IDK ... banned, 
• the free Socrative.com website was shut down undergoing maintenance at that exact moment, as were all of the similar, related websites, also free. .. like SurveyMonkey.
• Google Forms was suspiciously locked and inaccessible ... 
• the supplies budget didn't allow for 100ct note card pack at $0.39 per ...

but did allow for the Inspires:

For this misuse of funding, we hereby award them the US Armed Forces Monetary Memorial Medal, emblazoned with the image of Our Rich Uncle Pennybags.

How cool is this? HS students used the TI-Nspire Navigator to cast their votes for the Student Council Board: http://t.co/tr8WEjJKI0 #edtech
— TI Calculators (@TICalculators) April 16, 2014

Paranoiacs in Charge

Don't you just love it?

We have Google Apps on our domain and I guess I should be thankful for that but it really sucks when they tell you that "Hey! There are some really cool add-ons" but fail to mention that the ability to add add-ons has been disabled by the domain administrator .... the same one who sent the email.

New Feature in Google Drive.
Things like: Track Changes, EasyBib Bibliography creator and much more.
http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2014/03/add-ons.html

Now I'm excited ... maybe there are trendlines in sheets ...

Hopes are rising ...

Well, damn.

Yo, IT Department.

Just some notes for any IT personnel who may be reading:

1. If the accounts at a school aren't consistent -- the account names are different for network log on, powerschool log on, and email -- teachers are not going to be happy. Having mcurmudgeon as my powerschool account, curmudgeonm as my school computer account and math.curmudgeon@vtsch.net as my email is stupid. Do your job - fix that.
2. Changing the domain three times in one year is stupid. Expecting anyone to be happy when you're changing over all of the Google accounts and all of that stored class information from one domain to another should have happened over the summer, not a month into the year.
3. Training is not something you can throw together in two minutes. 



It's called a computer lab. Surely you've heard of that?

4. When conducting software training, it helps if the teachers can be logged in to a computer and can see what you're talking about. Waving your hands dramatically isn't a good way to convey the use of the four level tab and pull down menu structure.
5. Showing a random video to a roomful of teachers isn't software training.
6. Making a 100+ character link available on the school webpage works much better than attempting to relate it verbally to the group.
7. Your job is to make the technology work for the teachers and staff. Period. You have no other purpose.
8. My job is to teach. It does not include teaching myself how to use all this technology so that I can teach the rest of the faculty because you're an incompetent ass.

Have a nice day.

I'm tired of Twitter and Mindless Slogans.

For me, the basic problem with Twitter is the all-too-common resort to pithy statements that fit the character count but don't make for a coherent conversation.  I don't really care what's been said about the Seattle-San Francisco game; that's not important enough that sound-bites and sloganeering detracts from the conversation.

I'm talking about education reform ... and that is a big problem when discussed on Twitter. Changes to standards-based grading is a big discussion currently, as is standardized testing. These broadsides are fired without really discussing nuance, and for me, nuance is necessary.

You can't standardize learning nor will a standardized test ever be able to report it #abed #edchat #bced #mathchat #onted #ableg
— D Martin (@d_martin05) January 20, 2014

Here's the thing ... that's not an argument. It's a statement unbounded by fact or reason.

There are plenty of situations in which standardized tests are important, mostly in those situations where you have a need to compare against a national standard such as SAT, ACT, AP, IB, A-levels, GRE, Bar Exam, Civil Service, Driver's License, et.al.

DMartin agreed with my sarcastic comment to eliminate all of the above testing with "Yeah all mc parts. I agree!! Great idea!!"

So now we've gone from being anti-testing to being anti-MC, as if MC is somehow flawed.  Again. I have to ask, what leads anyone to think that MC can never be useful?

Why is this such a necessary part of my online life?  (The answer: it isn't.) What part of reasoned and thoughtful commentary includes these random unproven factoids and false dichotomies?

I'll leave with another ...

No cell phones in class b/c they cause distractions well let's remove pencils they cause spelling mistakes 

Instead of Mindless Dichotomy, how about just removing or eliminating the distraction part of the cellphone?

Technology - Interactive with what?

Technology is great.

Technology is the wave of the future.
Technology is a tool, allowing us to do more.
But so far, technology doesn't seem to be helping with the whole "Interaction" thing.

We'll have to figure this thing out before it kills us.

Every kid, staring at a screen.

More staring ... but at least he's not letting his head fall over.

Ah, now the teacher is watching them stare at screens. So META.

Staring in a circle.

Seriously, Rocketship Academy? This is Edutopia? This cubicle-farm with rows of cells?

We have to do better.

Putting everything on wheels and moving them around daily so the "teacher doesn't even know where to stand" isn't going to improve things much.

Yeah. They get enough at home. Mindlessly fiddling with crap isn't education.

See, lecture isn't a bad thing, in moderation, and when done well. But changing to Khan Academy lectures on the computer to replace the teacher's lectures in the classrooms isn't much of a fundamental shift.

Your guidance counselor spent untold time arranging the schedule so you and your unique teacher skill-set could be present at the same time as the students who needed that exact same set of knowledge and ability. Use the time. Be the teacher.

Leave the screen time for when you and the other kids aren't around each other. FLIPping the classroom is fine. Assigning the Khan for outside work is fine. Watching them day after day, huddled in their solitary confinement of a sensory-deprivation cubicle with walls to block sight of other students, headphones to block the sounds of other students, and a computer to overwhelm all thought ... isn't education and isn't an improvement.

No matter what Rocketship might say.

Maybe a quick glimpse of my road will calm us down so we can be objective about this.

Nice.

Tech's Magic Formula

Scott MacLeod:

Lack of vision + inadequate infrastructure + no training + poor implementation + insufficient ongoing support + refusal to change = tech success!
Does this sound like your wishful school or district? Hope not!

With our Highly Ineffective Principal (HIPster), we drew a Royal Flush on this one. It's all we can do to keep the one-to-one going despite the random flailings of the administration ... we being three of the teachers.

1. Lack of vision - If it hadn't been for one particular teacher getting the ball rolling and two other of us pushing, we'd still be without BYOD or any one-to-one program.
2. Inadequate infrastructure - don't get me started.
3. No training - Inservices revolve around the Curriculum Coordinator and his protocols for having discussions about "authentic" learning and teaching, protocols for having meetings, protocols for developing a single lesson plan that we'll test in a few months. That's right ... we're making a single lesson. Technology? Not so much.
4. Poor implementation - 
1. Kids are damaging their devices and no one has a plan for that. 
2. They don't charge the batteries ... "I can't hold class because they didn't bring it."
3. Leave it at home.
4. Some parents don't want their kids to have that much screen time and have asked that the kids NOT be given one.
5. Insufficient ongoing support - Crickets make more noise.
6. Refusal to change - This is the one part we do too much of. Change, change, change ... without ever looking back to see if the previous changes were effective or looking forward to see if we can predict and measure the effects of the present proposed change.

= tech success!

Why I'm going slow with tech in the classroom.

I'm having trouble with tech in the classroom. It's similar to the complaint expressed a few days ago on DogHouse Diaries about the vast array of digital storage options and the call for simplification. Expand the graphic to see what I mean.

I've found that I have an incredibly diverse set of tools that I can use daily, that the "reformocrats" would like me to be "expert" at using.

• For writing and other communications: blogs and forums, Twitter, Facebook, Edmodo, Google+, Reader, TypeWithMe, and other web stuff,  Word, OpenOffice.
• An ability to make websites: Google Sites is a minimum, but really, I'm supposed to be able to build one from scratch using wordpad or notepad. 
• I've had to become proficient at administering Moodle because the school IT's refuses to set one up. Another teacher and I paid for the site from our dept budgets. We set it up, maintain, enroll students, create classes, train teachers in creating and using.
• I need a Google account so I can make good use of maps, images, drive, gmail and all of the sharing capabilities. Google Drive and all of its quirks and annoyances needs to balance with the harddrive and network folder at school and the computer at home, not to mention the USB stick that I carry. Version control, anyone?
• For worksheets and practice: MS Word 2000 and 2007 (different formats). Text files, HTML pages, Latex.
• For quizzes: MS Word 2000 and 2007 (different formats), Moodle quizzes which need either Latex or some equation editor or equations as images, Google docs which doesn't import equations real well from Word, Socrative, the book's test generator.
• For presentations: Powerpoint, Google Docs, Prezi, SlideRocket.
• Other media: Photoshop, Word Drawing tools, TurboCAD, Audacity, Five different movie editing tools as my OS changed, VideoLan and WMedia and Apple QuickTime.
• Tools such as Excel and other spreadsheets, databases ranging from Access to MySQL, Fathom and other specialized statistics software, not to mention familiarity with WolframAlpha and the formatting language behind it and Mathematica or Maple. Don't forget MatLab and the TI-83/4 and Inspire graphing calculators.
• While we're at it, I should be able to code: Javascript, .php, MySQL, .html, etc. All of the other languages I've learned are obsolete: Basic, Fortran, .asp, TruBasic. 
• The grading software. It was FinalGradePro, then GradeQuick, then Gradequick with Edline, and now it will be Powerschool.
• The SmartBoard.
• I need to be able to train the faculty at my school in most of these technologies because IT doesn't do this. Fortunately, I have several fellow teachers who are as good as I am - we work with each other and then spread out to train. 
• Chromebooks will be handed out to students at some point and we'd better make use of them or the Powers That Be will be pissed at the expense. Did I mention that the only group doing training is that same core group of faculty?
• Did I mention that many of these are programs that my school doesn't install on the faculty computer? I can make CAD drawings at home but have to convert them to show at school, or print at school.  Some of these have been eliminated (Google Reader, delicious, etc.) and others have not had their license renewed (OpenOffice replacing Office for fiscal reasons) or made major format changes.
• Books: I have hardcopy, Kindle format, text files, Google Books, pdf.
• Jeez ... forgot about flipped classes, video, audio, YouTube and TeacherTube and computer support.
  
  
• Oh yeah, I also teach math. I'll have five preps next year, including an online Geometry course that I've never seen before - something the state cooperative bought from Florida Online. 

And that is just scratching at the surface. I'm sure that everyone of you reading this said to yourself at least once, "He forgot about ____. That is so useful."
Remind me again what I'm being paid to do?

I know most of this tech already, but the students don't (with the exception of Facebook and their smartphones) and most of the other teachers are pretty new at everything, too.

My co-teacher falls into this trap a lot: he's real excited about every tool. "You can all use powerpoint but it's not the best. Google presentation isn't very good either. You should use SlideRocket." Other teachers are using Powerpoint with them because the kids all learned that in 7th grade and still others are excited about Prezi because it "engages the students more." That's four different presentation methods - so each student has to learn four different environments ... and that's just for making a presentation. And it assumes that the tool you learn this year will still be around next year and that the para-educators know all four and can help the kids with each one (not for $11/hour).

There are so many options, the whole thing grinds to a halt.

There are so many tools that won't play nicely together.

With "new" comes "Training" and mistakes. Unfortunately, mistakes in education tend to involve confidential data and are usually a big problem. There is so much data being put into Powerschool that doesn't belong in a single-access system. The people setting things up are dumping everything into it with little concern for who "needs" to see which piece of information. All it will take is for a single teacher to be careless with a single password and a whole host of information will be out there in the student body. 

Most importantly, if you want people to learn and explore and experiment, you have to be willing for things to not go well and all we've heard about is how bad our schools are and how much reform is needed. Most of the push for reform involves more and more diverse technology tools that no one can use well in the first place. "If only you all used ____, our scores would go up."

I used to hate Microsoft for its dominance and attitude until I realized that the standardization it fostered made education manageable. You could teach kids how to use a tool quickly and then get on with using the tool to learn.

So, before we ask that teachers be good at everything ... is there a chance that we could standardize this list a bit? Put together a list of the must-haves and hold off on the rest?

1:1 Tech - How Do you Kindle?

We're going to Chromebooks for next year.

1. Anyone who has done this already ... how do you Kindle? We'd like to get some fiction, purchased by the library, available to students. There are some students who absolutely cannot afford anything (living in a house with dirt floors ... in Vermont, 2013.  Yeah, I know)  so the Chromebook can't be tied to a credit card or anything like that.

1b. Similarly, we don't want the school's account to be available to the student.

2. We'd also like to have public domain novels, writings, and textbooks readable on a good reader.

How do you manage this?  What have you found useful, easy enough to implement, secure?

Okay, maybe I'm not getting how this works since I don't have a Chromebook yet.  Bill's comment addresses point number 2.  My bigger question is "How do you deal with a school-owned device needing a personal Kindle account?"

Tech Questions for Educators

EdWeek has Questions For Educators

1) Do the most exciting technology-rich learning opportunities in your school go to the most-advantaged students in Honors or AP classes?

APThat's a tough question but fair and it's a good way to start this discussion. Our school is dipping its toe in the water this year and jumping in next year. From eight tablets to full 1:1 but it has been a tremendous work getting the IT, administration, faculty and taxpayers all on that same page. I can see how a school might hesitate in giving its worst students expensive tech that never gets used; better to give it to motivated students who will use it, in my view.  Even better to give it to everyone and avoid this quandry.

2) Is your school using technology to gain efficiencies in old practices, or to do things that are truly different?

I disagree with this question's intent - to pressure people into change - and I don't think that it is necessarily a bad thing to gain efficiencies. This will be the spark that gets technology into schools but once there, the changes to paradigm will happen when they become obvious. Changes shouldn't happen just for the hell of it.

3) Does your school teach students to be afraid of making bad decisions on the Internet? Or do you teach students how to create a digital footprint to be proud of?

I am proud to say that we teach the students to hide their personal information, obfuscate Facebook details, and do those crazy things teenagers do in ways that won't come back to haunt them. Then, we show them how to create the Public Persona and keep it clean and well-scrubbed.

4) Do rubrics for online projects evaluate students' ability to demonstrate their understanding, or do they measure compliance concerning criteria like length, number of posts, number of pages, etc.?

Spoken like someone who has never been a teacher. Those compliance measures are minimums. The wheat cannot get separated from the chaff if neither exists. As any writer can tell you, writing is the best practice for writing.  Do it often and throw away the bad stuff, but do it often.  As any math teacher can tell you, practicing the basics allows critical thinking to happen. Sometimes to have to require certain minimums from all and then marvel at what you get.

Nowhere to be found.

5) To what extent is your school measuring the impact of your technology investments? Could you prove to your stakeholders (parents, school boards, trustees) that the vast sums invested in technology are making a difference in student learning?

Absolutely not at all. This is a common complaint for me. "Change" is the rallying cry. Administrators spout the most recent BestPractice workshop. To which I answer, "To what end? Why? What improvements do you see? How do you know you've achieved those improvements?"  The inevitable answer is, "You're not much of a team player."

6) Does your school have a coherent vision that defines high quality learning? Is your technology plan specifically designed to serve that vision?

Again, nope. Reasoned, directed planning is not something that schools do well.  We're usually far too engrossed in our day-to-day work to venture into the world of "Vision."  I hate going there because I feel that the school's vision should be one sentence long: "Teach the students" and that obviously won't do. Our current vision and mission statement together run three pages and several hundred words.

7) How does your school prepare students for a world where the vast majority of learning takes place outside of school?

Silly question.  The vast majority of learning has always taken place outside of school. School is for the common foundational work that all students need. Little of what we do is geared specifically towards any particular life or job future. We teach poetry, algebra, physical science, literature, computer literacy and programming, languages, writing, history, art and music; most of it has little direct use once they graduate except as a foundation upon which to learn what they really need or want to know.

School is not a job training exercise. It can have some of those aspects to it's mission but that is not the primary mission of school.

Writing a Tech Policy

Or maybe I should say, "What NOT to include."

First, throw out all of your current policies and previous work. They were all written long before the Internet became the Internet -- the rules and culture have changed.

"Parents must sign before you will be allowed on the Internet/ borrow a 1:1 device."

And if they say "No" or if they just don't get the slip of paper? You are providing this kid with an education and a lot of it requires the Internet. Don't make threats you can't keep. If a "No" isn't an acceptable answer, then don't give the choice. (The parent's giving the kid a different device is obviously acceptable).

We are now at the point at which education without connection is well-nigh impossible. Primary purposes of 1:1 tech are to replace the textbooks with a tablet/chromebook and to allow the kids access to information unrestricted by access to a workstation. How is a policy that deprives a student of a textbook or Google apps reasonable?

"Failure to adhere to this policy will result in the revocation of access privileges."

Evil, evil child.

With this clause, you would give petty people the power to persecute. A kid reads his other email account and you ban him from the network? You find a kid is playing games? Reading hacker websites? Shopping websites? Instead, look at why he's wasting his time that way. Punish the behavior in some other way than by banning access to the Internet or simply ignore it - reading Facebook isn't the end of the world. Not paying attention is a problem, regardless of the form it takes. 1:1 device policies that contain a similar revocation clause are equally pernicious - how can you justify removing access to textbooks, Moodle, coursework, Google accounts, etc.?

If the kid is at home, then bug off. The school needs to stay out of personal business as much as practicable. Don't turn on the camera to spy on them. Don't wander through student folders. Don't read student email.

Until you have to. Then have a set policy detailing exactly under what circumstances the administration will examine documents. Lock out by password; two or more adults look through; student and parents are officially informed of positive or negative results. Don't leave any clause in the "contract" that permits anyone in your district to spy, eavesdrop, open student files or any other invasion of privacy without the same due process that adults demand.

Bullying is illegal. So is harassment.  Neither offense depends on the medium and both can by committed by students or by the school. Punish the offense, but realize that a forced disconnect is (A) impossible in light of the many cheap and readily available tools, like cellphones, and (B) isn't addressing the issue. .

"The Board believes that the benefit to students from access to electronic information resources and opportunities for collaboration far exceed the disadvantages."

What disadvantages? This is old-time thinking; "big, scary Internet will rot his brain if he doesn't fall victim to a sexual predator or download a virus that will wipe out the entire school, and allow a hacker to destroy us." We're in the 21st Century and, as much as I decry the ra-ra boosterism, I know that anyone who refers to them as "electronic information resources" doesn't really understand them.

Access to the Internet via our network provides connections to other computer systems located all over the world. Users and their parents must understand that the school district does not control the information available on these other systems. Some of the information is controversial and may be offensive.

Gatekeeper is an anachronism.

Yeah, but the bigger issue is that the majority of it is incorrect or biased. Stop the CYA and get out more. There's not a teenager alive who was harmed by the sight of a boob. Acting the over-protective nanny is obnoxious and rude.

"Do NOT access, store, create, consume, or share unauthorized or inappropriate content on your device."

If the school owns the device, then the school should press the reset button occasionally. All student data should be in their Google accounts anyway, or in a cloud storage site set up by the student; the device is irrelevant. Furthermore, schools need to back off the "must control everything" aspects of technology. Personalization is inevitable. Any student with a brain will set up a cloud storage, second gmail account, anonymous blog, or similar way to store things out of reach of the administration -- since you can't pry through it all, then back off the draconian attempts to micromanage what little you do have "control" over.

"Device use for monetary gains is prohibited."

Why? What bloody difference does it make if the kid gets a little entrepreneurial? In fact, I would welcome it. This may have been an issue once upon a time -- prevent teachers from slacking off and earning money while being paid by the District, but the students should be required to try and make some money, in my opinion.

Here is all the policy you really need:

By signing this document I and my child understand that computers and/or the 1:1 device are provided for “educational purposes” by the taxpayers of this town in the belief that such provision is worth the expense. We agree if my child knowingly breaks school rules, or state or federal laws, appropriate disciplinary action will be taken. 

Plain, simple, workable.

Said no student ever.

Technology is programmed but Teaching isn't. Can't Fix That.

Dan Meyer mentions Pattern Matching In Khan Academy, quoting Stephanie H. Chang, one of Khan Academy's software engineers:

I observed how some students made progress in exercises without necessarily demonstrating understanding of the underlying concepts. The practice of “pattern matching” is something that Ben Eater and Sal had mentioned on several occasions, but seeing some of it happening firsthand made a deeper impression on me.

I find these kinds of errors showing up often on the gray, blurry line between teaching and computing/programming.

Those who teach don’t necessarily understand programming so they tend to not be able to specify what works in a classroom and the processes or habits that the software is meant to address.

Those who program have never taught so they don’t know how to write the code that solves the problem because they fundamentally don’t understand the problem - or more problematically, don't understand the math they are "teaching" well enough to actually teach it. (That wisc-online tutorial about radians is still there 10 years on, still unchanged, still displaying the same problems I talked about in 2008.)

Unfortunately, those who have done both to a sufficient level aren’t writing the programs that most of us need.  Sometimes, the incompetence is on both sides, but ...

You see this in:
-- grading programs that ignore the ways teachers operate and get in the way instead of making life truly easier ... I just need to enter grades and I don't need a "Wizard" to do it. Why do I have to put this number here and why can't I delete it later?  Why does the thing insist on showing the entire gradebook at all times - I'd like to allow a sub or a student aide to enter attendance. Why does the program not allow me to copy and paste the progress report into an email? Why do I have to use a "wizard" to enter a note to student?

-- Moodle courses that purport to teach but contain things like this gem from a graduate-credit bearing course being "taught" by our "curriculum coordinator":

Google Apps Tutorial:
Watch this online tutorial introduction for Google Apps. (Hints: your screen may not be large enough, so scroll down to see the next button. Playback controls are near the bottom of the page in the center--a very small tab above the line.) Some things on this tutorial will look a little different. Don't let that throw you.
http://services.google.com/apps/resources/overviews/welcome/topicWelcome/index.html

That's it.  That's the sum total of her "teaching". "Follow this link and learn from it".  Must be nice to earn that much money doing so little.

Isosceles has a new definition in SKOOL.

--- software that doesn’t work or fails in bizarre ways ... did you know that Greece is an island? or that a 45-45-90 triangle can have sides 252-325-403? SKOOL says it does and anything named SKOOL.com must be correct, right?  It came with the SmartBoard, so it must be Smart.

 --- Tools and software that include limitations and drawbacks unnecessarily. One of the most puzzling is TI-SmartView, which allows the teacher to project on a IWB a very realistic, working version of the TI-84. The simulation has been deliberately slowed down to mimic the time that the actual calculator takes to graph a complicated function ... WTF? ... I have a quad-core machine and it takes seconds to do this graph? As a result, I use the thing only to show the students key locations and methods -  it's too damned slow and cumbersome ... I use things like Graph 4.4 instead -- better graphics, higher resolution, more colors, faster interface, free. Anyway ...

“I observed how some students made progress in exercises without necessarily demonstrating understanding of the underlying concepts.”

Yeah, like the people who made and those who take the at wisc-online tutorial about radians.

We’ve come a long way but not nearly far enough to allow the replacement of teachers; like one other of Dan Meyer's commenters, I see the best use of Khan as taking the rote memorization out of the hands of the teacher-in-class (though Flash Cards is the Number ONE “really cool idea” promoted by the parents I talk to, especially the home-schoolers).

Let them practice outside of class and bring basic skills to automaticity so that we can do some real work together in our limited time together.

Tech Gurus need to Shut Up.

Scott Macleod is saying that he is Struggling with educators’ lack of technology fluency

"All teachers suck at tech."

It’s 2012. Technology suffuses everything around us. The Internet and Internet browsers have been pretty mainstream for at least a decade. And yet, I continually run into significant numbers of educators who still don’t know how to work their Internet browser. They struggle with copying and pasting. They get confused just clicking between 2 or 3 different browser tabs. They don’t conceptually understand the difference between their browser’s Google search box and the box where they can actually type in the URL and get there directly. They have no idea that they can right-click on things like hyperlinks or images. And so on… [And this is just the Internet browser. I'm not even talking about individual software programs or online tools.]

I have a few things.

This is hardly just a teacher issue. Frequent any tech-centric forum and you’ll hear these complaints are endemic to EVERY field, from nuclear physics to graphic arts AND Education. When I am helping the nurse in the emergency room with a computer issue and it's brain-dead simple, I don't run screaming that all nurses should be tech nerds or be fired.

You need to stop lumping the capable with the clueless and stop implying that I am just like that apocryphal moron. Sure, you "continually run into" them but you also continually run into capable people, too.  We don't hit you in the metaphorical gut in such a memorable way, though. I suffer these fools, too, but I don't want to fire everyone who can't run AutoCAD.

You need to stop conflating your pet peeves with actual problems. Not understanding the difference between the URL box and the Google search box is a minor issue. The only difference, when you come right down to it, is that the one gives Google one more sliver of ad-revenue. Maybe. I'm sure that I could find some equally "silly" thing that you don't know about IE or Chrome.


In education, the answer is many-faceted:

1. Free up the tech people to make tech available to the faculty and to provide training for teachers and students. SOMEONE has to be the go-to guy, looking at various options and deciding which might be worth following. Tech is coming out constantly - you can't expect faculty to succeed with two full-time jobs simultaneously: (1) teach high-school math and (2) discover, evaluate, learn, train on the 1200+ software tools on the 10+ major platforms.
2. Introduce tech to the classrooms that works as promoted. Too often, the starry-eyed purchase something that winds up being ignored because every time you go to use it, it fails and you have to have a plan B ready for the 45 minutes you have these kids. The tablets needs to be able to connect to the Internet ... all the time, in every classroom, without a 15 minute delay.  By the time I finish taking roll, the tech should be working. If my smartboard crashes every time I use it, I won't count on it.  If the tech guy comes in with a wide-screen monitor for a 3:4 aspect ratio projector, you're not going to be able to use one of those two. If the students can't access their Google accounts, you won't get much done. If the school tech guy can't get the filter to work seamlessly, then you will be constantly doing things that are not what you planned. 
3. Plan for repair and maintenance. If you ask the average person to repair the tech in his room, be sure that he will make some mistakes - it's not just a teacher thing.
4. Free up the faculty to develop these new resources. Remove the stigma / penalties for those who try something new and fail the first couple times.  If your teachers are afraid for their jobs, they will be ultra-conservative since few want to take a wild-ass chance on a curriculum revamp with merit-pay and test scores and observances and evaluations on the line. When parents and administrators and school boards are all questioning a new way of teaching, few teachers are going to jump at the chance to be the guinea pig. If it has to be perfect the first time, it won't happen at all.
5. Research and Published Results. Tech-gurus and bloggers and educational researchers are consistently contradictory as to the value and efficacy of new (or rehashed) ideas.  It would be really nice if you-all could agree on starting school at age 3 or age 7, whether this tech or that tech is best, whether collaborative learning Integrated Math or Singapore Math is best. Figure this shit out for me so I can apply it.
6. Free up the money to let this all happen. Tech is expensive. Tech mistakes are expensive too.
7. Free up the faculty from union restrictions. Yeah, I said it. In the  push to help guarantee fair treatment for all teachers, the NEA and AFT too often negotiate contract compromises that bind faculty or give faculty the sense that going around that provision is tantamount to surrender in a bloody civil war. Occasionally, the faculty need to tell off the Union Rep in order to get the time to receive training that actually helps them.  Of course, the school has to be sure that the training actually helps them.

We aren’t asking for much.

Brain-Dead Teenager to be Euthanized

Naturally, the Onion was on the case first.

Technology Quote

Robert Talbot:

Technology neither improves or diminishes learning. It’s the instructional design choices made and instructional practices used by individual teachers with individual students that do this.

Those Digital Natives are not Teachers

Just because it's a computer
doesn't mean it's remarkable.

Is it just me or has the phrase "digital natives" started to sound a lot like the "noble savages" idea of some years ago? I get this sense that we have no idea of how limited most students are, tech-wise and otherwise, and so we attribute mythical abilities to all students due to their being just a single step up the tech knowledge ladder from most teachers, present company excluded.

Anyway ...

NEAToday sent me "5 Tips for Tech Terrified Teachers", and I'm thinking to myself, "Holy Crap, Self! How can there be any Tech-Terrified Teachers left?" and then I get depressed because I know it's true.

How is it that any teacher isn't tech savvy by now? All the new teachers are part of that digital native group we've been placing on a pedestal these last ten years, while the more experienced ones are adapting to it. Are there really that many older teachers who are still terrified of tech and refuse to embrace it? Are there really that many people who are afraid to RTFM and learn some new software?

I'll tell you what I think: we still have too many stupid, pig-headed, teachers.

Read this list, if you don't believe me. Consider that some teachers need to read this and change, that some teachers are still resisting tech, and that the union felt it necessary to write this and publish it. Then you can laugh about the odd phrasing, simplistic advice, and especially #5.

1. Remember, it’s not about you! Your discomfort with technology impacts your students’ futures. Teachers need to be preparing students for the world we live in today. So many jobs are dependent on a basic understanding of technology. Always ask yourself, “am I teaching something that is obsolete, or something that will help my students in the future that lies ahead?”
2. Don’t resist your tech guru teacher-friend: It is difficult to ask for help but partnering up with a tech guru teacher-friend can provide a support system that can help ease your transition from tech terrified to tech curious.
3. Realize it’s okay if you are not in control: In reflection, I realize that a major reason that I resisted tech for so long is because I feared what would happen if I was no longer in control…but it is okay if the tech malfunctions. In fact it can lead to some pretty teachable moments.
4. Let your students teach you something: Newsflash – if you think you are the omnipotent force in your classroom, think again! Kids know a lot these days and it can boost their confidence and engagement if you call on students for support.
5. If you find a product you like, ask someone from the company to come visit – Tech startups want you to use their products so most likely if you send an email, they will answer any questions you have or maybe even come visit your school to teach you how to use their product.

About #5: Tech startups will send someone to talk to Dan Meyer, Sal Kahn, or someone who will really make use of their software and make some valid contributions.

No company will send someone out to talk to a tech-terrified teacher with some toys sitting around the classroom gathering dust because loser child can't be bothered to figure out how to turn them on.

Experience

Seth Godin (Marketing Guru) has this little post

Are you doing math or arithmetic?
I have enormous respect for mathematicians. They're doing work on the edge, a cross between art and science and music. Arithmeticians, not so much. They are merely whacking at a calculator, doing repetitive work better done by a computer or someone cheaper.

Many fields have precisely this same division. There's a chasm between the proven, repetitive work that can be farmed out and the cutting edge risky work that might just change everything.

With my students, I tell it this way:

A mechanic is looking for a job.
He tells the manager "I have twenty years experience."
The manager asks "Is that twenty years of experience or two years experience repeated ten times?"

Which is it for you? Are you still teaching the same things with the same worksheets and the same quizzes and the same methods that have worked over and over? There's a lot to be said for consistency, but you do have to stick your head up and make sure that what and how you're teaching is still relevant.

I'm making the change to tablets instead of textbooks, .pdf instead of paper.  It's still a work in progress, especially the video.  I'm still trying to figure out if the inverted classroom is fad or future. I'd love to get the note-taking features of the iPad/Android to mesh with the marginalia of the textbook, but we're not quite there yet. Where is the graphing calculator app that works with a spreadsheet?

Some tech is incredibly useful.  Some tech is incredibly damaging, especially to teenagers. Texting is, without a doubt, the most pernicious distraction ever created by man.  Read Daniel Willingham's work on concentration, learning and the cellphone call in the middle of the information storage process.

It'd be nice if the nation was a little more together on all this.

Education Nation is Full of Narcissistic Fools

SO NBC, that bastion of level-headedness, has this thing called Education Nation. I did not watch the two segments.  After reading the following list, I couldn't do it.  I feel somewhat sick already and didn't want to push it.

The Innovative Educator thought this was all peachy-keen and listed out some of the talking points that resonated in its empty head.

Apparently, no one listens to the students and that's bad.  Of course, most of us do but that's not the Reformer Way of Describing Teachers so we obviously don't do that and obviously The Students Are Always Right When They Complain.

" In their discussion, young people provided insight into their own experiences with education and what they think needs to be done to ensure that every student receives a world-class education."  Because we all know that students are the Font of Wisdom and teachers are morons.  Quick note: Sleeping through class does not make you an expert on education.

But let's let their words speak for them ...

I have to critically think in college, but your tests don't teach me that.

They're not supposed to teach you that. They're supposed to help form and guide your learning and measure it, give that college some idea of what you can do.

We learn in different ways at different rates.

SO? Even though you really aren't all that different from your peers.  It's funny how I easily I can predict what each student will be able to achieve and what time frame it will take to do it.  Amazingly, the whole class is within a short time of each other.

I can't learn from you if you are not willing to connect with me.

Bullshit. Teachers can connect but it's a two-way street and you're not playing. If you can't learn without the touchy-feely crap then you'll never learn from Salman Kahn, a computer, an online program, a disinterested presenter or any teacher who is even slightly less than your ideal of perfection.  That's a damn shame.

Teaching by the book is not teaching. It's just talking.

Minor point. Teaching by the book is accepting that someone smarter than I and with more time and help from his graduate students, has put together a pretty damn good calculus book.  Why would I change it radically?

Caring about each student is more important than teaching the class.

Bullshit. Caring about you is not the reason I get paid nor the reason you're in that class.  Teaching is a profession and one that I enjoy but I am not your parent, your priest or your counselor. I am the teacher.

This is my job.

Every young person has a dream. Your job is to help bring us closer to our dreams.

Nope.  My job is to teach math the best I can. See all that stuff to the right? Your job is to see to your dreams. You're the only one who can force you to put in the effort to reach your dreams.  This is an internal incentive.  External forces don't work here.

We need more than teachers. We need life coaches.

Really? "Life coach"? When did teachers take the place of your parents? Do you really want me to (A) know about all of your off-campus shenanigans and problems and (B) are you willing to let me solve them? Did it ever occur to you that I might not have an answer for why your religion is retarded or why your mother is drug-addicted? I might not be the best person to counsel you on what to do with your life. How can I possibly know what you want? You can't even tell me what you'll be doing next summer, forget what you'll spend your life doing.

Or do you want someone's shoulder to cry on and pat you condescendingly on the head? If you want my advice as a Certified Life Coach: stop being a navel-gazing narcissist and grow up. The world really doesn't give a damn about your "life coaching".

The community should become more involved in schools.

Meh.  If there's anything less appealing, it's having a whole bunch of people around who are convinced that they know everything because they went to school.  You don't second-guess any other professionals in your life, why the eagerness to second-guess teachers?

Even if you don't want to be a teacher, you can offer a student an apprenticeship.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

Us youth love all the new technologies that come out. When you acknowledge this and use technology in your teaching it makes learning much more interesting.

I love them, too. Now get out your iPads and load up the Kindle version of the textbook and get to work. If you can't connect to the school's network, then set up a wi-fi hotspot off your iPhone, go to wolframalpha.com, find the answer to the first part of the question and incorporate it into the Excel spreadsheet to further analyze the problem, dump the results to Powerpoint, send it to your portable printer or convert it to one of the four acceptable electronic formats.  Then, don't send it to my email account but rather submit it to the class Moodle in the proper forum.  You know how to do that, right? By the end of the week, I'll want you to be able to explain all this and apply your knowledge to something completely different, so you need to get cracking.

You should be trained not just in teaching but also in counseling.

Really?  Cool. That'll get me an additional $50k per year, and I get to send the rest of the class away for the period while we talk. Feel better now?  Made much improvement in math while you sorted out your ego?

Tell me something good that I'm doing so that I can keep growing in that.

You're a big boy, now.  If you don't know your strengths, my telling you over and over isn't going to help. I give praise when it's deserved and to encourage students.  I don't give out gold stars because that's demeaning. You need to do something difficult. You need to fail, and then pick yourself back up, fail and finally succeed.  YOU need to tell YOURSELF what's good. You're not supposed to be dancing to my tune on that.

When you can feel like a family member it helps so much.

Not it doesn't.  I'm not your parent. Our relationship is on a friendly, but professional level.

We appreciate when you connect with us in our worlds such as the teacher who provided us with extra help using Xbox and Skype

I'd appreciate it if you paid attention in class and made the most of the limited time we had. Since we only have those 60 minutes and there are quite a few equally needy souls in the room, how about we dispense with the games and focus on the math you signed up to take?  My understanding was this was pre-calculus. I know a whole lot more than you do about what you'll need in the workplace ... XBox, not withstanding.

Our teachers have too many students to enable them to connect with us in they way we need them to.

Grow up.  Seek out the teachers.  The good ones will be there. Just wait until you get to college and have the privilege of sitting with 400 of your closest friends in a lecture hall listening to a TA with a heavy foreign accent. Nobody is connecting until you show up at Office Hours and ask an intelligent question.

Bring the electives that we are actually interested in back to school. Things like drama, art, cooking, music.

Those things should never have left. Don't blame me for the morons in the community who made that decision. HOWEVER, student interest should never drive their education decisions ... they have no idea what they'll need and waste the limited time they have on things that are easy and un-challenging rather than on things they will later wish they'd done.

Education leaders, teachers, funders, and policy makers need to start listening to student voice in all areas including teacher evaluations.

Nope. Until you have some experience, your "opinion" is worthless and people will blow you off.  When you have that experience, you'll find we already do listen.

You need to use tools in the classroom that we use in the real world like Facebook, email, and other tools we use to connect and communicate.

You need to put away your childish toys and realize that gossip and passing notes is something we did when we were young, too, and that Facebook and twitter are simply the new version of that. There's a reason why older folks don't communicate as often - they communicate BETTER.  Quality will someday replace quantity.  In the meantime, continue sending 300+ texts a day .... I'm sure someone is reading and thinking deeply about them.  At some point, though, the two of you sitting on each end of the couch texting each other might consider putting the phone down and "talking".

You need to love a student before you can teach a student.

Awesomely silly.   and false.

We do tests to make teachers look good and the school look good, but we know they don't help us to learn what's important to us.

I don't like those tests either.  If I had my choice, you'd have four tests per semester and an end-of-course exam. Five scores. That's it. No homework grade, no participation grade, no effort grade, no attendance ... nothing but "Do you know what you're doing"?

I'm glad we had this talk.