Stephen's Untold Stories

A very strong effort!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP6CeGLPuOY

Wes Fryer hits the nail on the head.

I had an interaction with a parent today which was simultaneously sad, eye opening, and challenging.

Essentially, the parent said they wanted an interactive white board (IWB) and an audience response / electronic response system in their child’s classroom, so their child and peers would be more engaged in learning and enjoy their time in the classroom more. The parent explained, “Kids are into technology.”

While it certainly is true “kids are into technology” today, it is a fallacy that providing these technologies to teachers in the classroom will automatically result in better learning experiences for students. This is well supported by educational research, and is something I likely say frequently in presentations, but it still seems to be a common perception among parents. I suppose this perception accounts for the high levels of spending we see in our schools today for IWBs and clicker systems.

I would much rather be in a classroom or have my own children in a classroom in which the teacher knows how to facilitate lessons where students are ACTIVE rather than PASSIVE, being challenged to think DEEPLY and CRITICALLY about ideas and issues rather than being simply expected to consume information– even if it is in multimedia formats.

Read the rest here.

For free! – http://discussions.zoho.com/

And Zoho has plenty of other free tools you should check into.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn-7i7l2xOE

Good things happen!

http://blip.tv/file/2614336

Late last night I took a break from studying and I saw on Twitter that a fellow educator who has been working in Hong Kong was asking for someone to Skype in and discuss his or her experience with the K12 Online Conference. I thought I’d take a chance and see if I might participate, and within ten minutes I was speaking with him and his participants live in his classroom in Hong Kong. I was online with them for maybe six or seven minutes, and I must say it was a very rewarding experience.

He was able to get someone from the other side of the world to participate in his class with no notice within minutes using tools that are completely free. It’s a little overwhelming to think how far we’ve come with using technology in education. Of course we still have many miles to go, but I was very glad to take part in a truly global learning experience.

Very interesting list.

• 26% store info on their phone and look at it while taking a test
• 25% send text messages to friends, asking for answers
• 17% take pictures of a test – and then send it to their friends
• 20% use their phones to search for answers on the Internet
• 48% warn friends about a pop quiz with a phone call or text message

There has been some serious discussion in the edtech blogosphere about these. Is letting your friends know that you had a pop quiz really cheating? When I was a teacher I wouldn’t always give pop quizzes to each class on the same day. I might have given one early in the day, and by the afternoon classes all the students were expecting one. They were so miffed when I didn’t give them one. I even had some of them complain about it. “Why didn’t you give us a pop quiz like you gave 1st period?” I would explain to them that since they knew about it that it really wouldn’t be a “pop quiz” for them, and that they would get theirs on a different day and they wouldn’t know when it was coming. I rarely gave pop quizzes anyway, but the possibility was always there.

Anyway, here is a link to the complete article.

Guaranteed to provoke some serious conversation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8

Interesting story about a school near Boston that has done something rather revolutionary.

Many will be surprised by this. I am not one of them.

As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write—and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?

Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

Read the rest here.

No major surprises here, although I didn’t know about Baidu.

1. Google
2. Yahoo!
3. Facebook
4. YouTube
5. Windows Live (live.com)
6. Wikipedia
7. Blogger.com
8. MSN
9. Baidu.com – Chinese search engine
10. Yahoo! Japan
11. Myspace
12. Google India
13. Google Germany
14. Twitter
15. QQ.com – Chinese Instant Messaging Site
16. RapidShare
17. Microsoft.com
18. Google France
19. WordPress.com
20. Google UK

Here is a link to the top 500.

Apparently so!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7y7NafWXeM

Thanks to Scott McLeod for this one!

dear parent

teacher

administrator

board member

don’t teach your kids to read

for the Web

to scan

RSS

aggregate

synthesize

don’t teach your kids to write

online
pen and paper aren’t going anywhere

since when do kids need an audience?
no need to hyperlink

make videos

audio

Flash

no connecting, now
no social networking

or online chat

or comments

or PLNs

blogs and twitter?

how self-absorbed

what a bunch of crap
and definitely, absolutely, resolutely, no cell phones
block it all

lock it down

keep it out
it’s evil, you know

there’s bad stuff out there

gotta keep your children safe

don’t you know collaboration is just another word for cheating?

don’t you know how much junk is out there?

haven’t you ever heard of sexting?

of cyberbullying?
a computer 24-7? no thanks

I don’t want them

creating

sharing

thinking

learning

you know they’re just going to look at porn

and hook up with predators

we can’t trust them

don’t do any of it, please

really

’cause I’m doing all of it with my kids
can’t wait to see who has a leg up in a decade or two

can you?

A very original and entertaining way of explaining how Wikis work.

Very interesting video. Well worth 8 minutes of your time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4

A very timely article for me as I am taking a course of designing and facilitating online learning this semester.

A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education (pdf) has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”

The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.

Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.

“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist at SRI International.

This hardly means that we’ll be saying good-bye to classrooms. But the report does suggest that online education could be set to expand sharply over the next few years, as evidence mounts of its value.

Read the rest here.

A good sign! I hope to be doing these myself in a few years.

Sue N. Averill, associate provost for faculty affairs at Kent State University, has one overwhelming memory of her first few weeks on the job last year: a mountain of white-plastic bins looming over her head.

In early December, containers typically used to transport mail began piling up in the provost’s office. Each was filled with paper-stuffed binders from faculty members building their cases for promotion and tenure. The bins took up two whole walls in a conference room, where they were kept under lock and key.

Not only did the binders use colossal amounts of paper, Ms. Averill realized, but the cumbersome system slowed the evaluation process to a crawl. “I thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way,’” she says.

That “better way” will begin this fall, when Kent State faculty members have the option of submitting their dossiers electronically; digital dossiers will very likely become the only way to go in a year.

The push to go digital, currently under way at institutions such as Kent State, Virginia Tech, and a few others, is being driven in part by a desire to save paper (St. John’s University reported that it had saved 225,000 pieces a year when its process went online, in 2008) and in part to make it easier to include forms of scholarship that aren’t paper-based. The push is not as widespread as one might think. Though individual departments at some institutions have moved to digital dossiers, universitywide efforts have been hampered because breaking away from tradition is tough, and the technology involved doesn’t always meet expectations.

Professors at the university now have a choice. They can scan paper documents and upload them as files to be arranged in a digital system custom-tailored for dossier creation. Or they can punch holes in hundreds of sheets of paper to be sorted and then stuffed in a three-ring binder. Officials hope faculty members pick the former.

A big attraction of digital dossiers, some professors note, is that it’s easier to include elements of scholarship and research that couldn’t be captured as well in a binder. “You can post video and audio of your teaching. You can take pictures of art and include it,” says David W. Dalton, an associate professor of instructional technology at Kent State. “You can hyperlink to things. You can really tell your story in new ways.”

Gordon J. Murray, an assistant professor of electronic media, remembers putting DVD’s and CD’s in plastic sleeves to go in his binder, along with printed screen shots of Web sites he’d worked on. Mr. Murray has just started testing Kent State’s e-portfolio system, and plans to use it to assemble his application for reappointment, due in early September. “I’m grateful that the university is forward-thinking enough to to at least attempt to do this,” he says.

Electronic tenure applications are also touted as more accessible to reviewers. With paper binders, people typically “check out” the documents they need to look over. That means only one person can look at a binder at a time and generally does so only during business officers. Files can also become disorganized from repeated handling, or sections can go missing. Digital dossiers mean “faculty reviewers can look at them and they can all do it simultaneously and from anywhere,” Mr. Dalton says.

Read the rest here.

I must say that I am really enjoying my Google Voice number. This article has even given a non-journalist like me so good ideas.

Every time you answer a call you are presented with three options: answer the call, send it to voicemail, or listen in on the voicemail. Doing the latter lets you break into the message the caller is leaving to speak with them. When someone calls who is in your address book, a computerized voice announces his or her name when you pick up the phone.

This is a huge improvement for reporters like me who don’t have Caller ID on their work phones. Normally when I pick up my work phone, I have no idea if it’s a PR person trying to pitch me a technology product to review, a reader looking to rant about the digital TV transition, or a source I’ve been trying to reach.

When someone leaves a voicemail, it’s automatically transcribed as text, available to listen to online and sent to you as an e-mail. The transcription of words leaves a lot to be desired, but it does a good job getting phone numbers right. Being able to access voicemail messages from the Web saves a lot of time because you no longer have to call into your voicemail and sit through annoying prompts (“To listen to the message details push 1″). You can also e-mail voicemail messages, download them or embed them on your blog or Web site.

Since a record is kept online of every call placed and received, you don’t have to worry about callers hanging up without leaving a number or about losing important phone numbers or voicemail messages.

Read the rest here.

I’ve been trying to do this for a while. Sometimes I get the impression that the audience really wants us the use bullet-points. Looks like I was right.

People are reluctant to change their slide style for a range of reasons. Different people will have different sticking points. To change their minds you need to engage directly with their sticking point. Find out what it is by asking them what they like about bullet-point slides.  Then you’ll be able to offer just the right counter-argument, encouragement or advice which may entice them to make a change.

Here are the common reasons why people are reluctant to ditch bullet-point slides and how you can address them:

1. People are emotionally attached to their bullet-point slides.
2. Some people genuinely like bullet-point slides when they’re in the audience.
3. Some people don’t want to stand out.
4. They are easy to prepare.
5. Bullet-point slides allow other people to deliver the presentation
6. “Visual” people like bullets

Link to article

One of the best blog posts I’ve read in quite some time.

The internet is a series of connected tools. It’s time to start treating it like that.

No more talking about Facebook. No more explaining Twitter. No more asking about connecting on LinkedIn.

Just talk. Collaborate. Learn. Listen.

We have daily, nearly real time access to the greatest trove of information ever known, yet all we seem to do is talk about who’s using which network, and how to do so.

Link to complete post.

Thanks to Hoke for pointing this one out. I’ve already added his RSS feed.

Yet another university starting to use Moodle. I wish mine would follow suit.

The University is in the process of transferring to Moodle, a user-friendly Learning Management System (LMS) which allows students more interaction between each other and the professor.

Four thousand institutions are using Moodle. The Moodle Pilot team has examined how other universities have made the switch to the system.

“UNC Charlotte and Asheville have switched over, and other UNC schools are also considering making the move,” Dulberg said.

The entire system won’t change until summer 2011, when Vista will completely cease to exist. Three semesters will be given for the changeover, encompassing spring 2010, fall 2010 and spring 2011. If a new course is developed during this time frame, it will be done through Moodle.

The plan is to first migrate Vista users onto Moodle for one-and-a-half years while maintaining WolfWare. The initial goal is to have WolfWare powered by Moodle Beta for production-level usage by January 2010. WolfWare users will be migrated when file management tools, and other WolfWare tools not currently in Moodle, are implemented into Moodle.

Read the rest here.