Mobile Photo Blog

This week, after reviewing some of the basic photo techniques (zooming in, rule of thirds-see my example below, not centering things, etc.) one girl asked if she could show me a picture she took with her phone, which she wasn't supposed to have on in class. Needless to say, I said yes because it was a clear furthering of the educational process in this case. And, lo and behold, she showed me a beach picture she had taken that was a perfect example of the rule of 1/3s!

I had already been thinking that I really ought to find some way to leverage the camera phones and iPod Touches the kids already have with the classroom focus on photography skills, but as I thought about this student's great photo, I knew exactly what I wanted to do: Through a micro-blogging service (such as Posterous or Tumblr), create an 8th grade Mobile Photojournalism blog, in which students could text or email in pictures to the site. Both of these sites are excellent ways to have kids put their work online nearly instantly. All they do is email their writing, image, video, or sound to a specific address and it's posted immediately (though you can set it up with pre-approval by the blog administrator required, which I had planned to do).

The only problem was that as I was setting up this blog, I realized that neither of the services I was planning on using allowed texting photos into the blog. This is a critical difference, because many of my students have cell phones, but few have smart phones that can send an email. (In fact, most of the kids don't have email addresses because they don't see the point.) The email address wouldn't be a problem to create; the wrong kind of phone is a problem.

So, now I'm not sure what I want to do. It seemed like such a great idea, but now I'm stuck because I don't know how to make it work. Yes, I could have them text my phone the pictures and I could forward them to an email, but I am NOT one of those teachers who give out their cell phone numbers to students. I could have them each make their own accounts on the blog service, but that would mean they'd have to know how to get their images from the phone to another computer and I don't have time to help kids with 50 different phones figure this out. So, if anyone out there has any good suggestions on how to make something like this work, it would really help me out! Sometime, an unfulfilled idea is extremely frustrating! (Sort of like when you think of the exact food you want to eat, but you're out of a key ingredient.) Let me know your ideas!

Beginning of the Year Observations

A few random observations from the first 2 or 3 weeks of school this year:

With my 8th grade Photojournalism students, I've implemented a photo of the day, in which every class starts by analyzing an interesting picture and identifying interesting, different, notable features. I knew this would be good practice for them, in terms of looking at (and taking) photos critically, but I've been impressed with the amount of participation I've had with it, as well as the interesting observations. For instance in this picture, they all thought it looked like a tornado was coming (mind you, none of them have ever seen a tornado. This is Arizona people!) A few others noted that it was odd that there were only 3 houses (because when you're in the city, 3 unsurrounded houses is unheard of). One day, when I didn't have the image up on the board right away, one girl asked me if we could please look at a picture and talk about it :-)

This was another picture I used with the 8th graders and 7th grade computer students. I used it to discuss symbolism, and how different items in a picture can create unique symbolism. In this case, we talked about what the White House is a symbol of, and what fences represent and how those contrast each other. When asking students for other examples of symbolism, it was really fascinating to see the different levels of brain development. For what the White House symbolizes, the 8th graders came up with things like freedom, power, justice, etc. The 7th graders said things like, the President, laws, Congress, etc. When they had to come up with their own examples, many 7th graders said a stop sign was a symbol. Clearly their developmental understanding of something concrete representing a very abstract idea isn't quite there yet. A good thing for me to remember at the beginning of the year.

As most teachers do, I spent my first session with each class going over the rules. However, since school started on a Wednesday and I like to start new content on Mondays, I had 3 days to kill during the second week, so everyone practiced keyboarding. Especially with 7th grade, I was absolutely shocked at how much they enjoyed the typing practice and games that I had them play. One student asked why we were teaching them this "fancy typing." Of course, this was after we had already discussed that virtually every kind of job these days would be easier if you knew how to type, so I thought of a couple additional examples to convince him :-) I always know a lesson is successful when kids ask for paper to write down the website so they can practice at home, and that definitely happened several times that week :-)

One of the things each class did during the first session was to read and sign a tech class contract. However, before they signed, we had a big discussion about what situations people sign contracts in. Inevitably, someone in every class came up with a cell phone contract (which I hadn't initially thought of). So then we discussed what would happen if they signed a cell phone contract without knowing that the payment was going to go up after several months and how they would be legally bound to pay it since they'd signed the contract. Needless to say, since this is in the near future for many of them, I had their attention. Yet again, it showed me how if you can find a situation that is relevant to kids right NOW, they will pay attention. Too bad those examples aren't always easy to find!

As usual, I forget how much kids keep me on my toes, coming up with things I never would have thought of. That's what keeps it interesting! :-)

Accessibility for the Visually Impaired and Computer Geeks

Whew! After a June full of educational technology with district work, a July full of pregnancy and relaxing, and August full of school starting, I've finally regained enough momentum to blog again!

In addition to the many observations the beginning of every new school year brings for me, I have been forced into new learning. As we all know, given the option, most of us will continue to do things the way we've always done them until something comes along and forces us out of the way. Such is the occurrence in my teaching right now. (I am again teaching 7th grade Computers and 8th grade Photojournalism.) Last year, I had a 7th grader who was blind, and I had a heck of a time trying to accomodate for him, though I did try (with varying degrees of success). A major part of the challenge was that he used a PC and all the rest of the kids used Macs.

However, in 7th grade this year, I have another blind student who is very interested in sticking with the Mac laptops all the rest of his classmates use, and another who is visually impaired, but not completely blind. At the request of this last student's visual-impairment teacher, I finally sat down and did some research into what the accessibility features were on the Mac, including keyboard shortcuts for zooming the screen and enlarging the cursor. Part of me was also quite curious about the use of a PC because his teacher maintained that it had a better accessibility functions than Macs. Being a Mac-believer, I had reason to doubt this, and finally went hunting to find out.

First of all, as it turns out, Mac's Voiceover program appears to be just as capable as comparable Windows programs, and with only a few sets of keys to memorize, you can be up and on your way.  For instance, command+F5 turns on the Voiceover program, which then reads any items currently on the screen. (Side note: Apple has fantastic intro videos in terms of the more extensive vision accessibility features, including Gestures, which is very cool.) I also found the commands to open a list of applications, open an application, open Spotlight, do a Google search, and so on. To test it out, I closed my eyes with a blank screen, and after about 5 keyboard shortcuts, I had opened Safari, searched Hurricane Irene in Google, selected an article and had the screen reader reading an article about it.

But wait, there's more! The best thing I discovered today (other than all of Mac's simple accessibility features) was the Safari Reader function of the Safari internet browser. This feature takes any website on which it finds a text-based article and automatically converts it into a plain-text article, with only relevant images attached. (i.e., no ads, no extraneous page links, etc.)
From this new window that pops up, you can either magnify the text many times, print it or email it, or even better, have the screen reader read it for you. This addresses one of my biggest frustrations with my blind student from last year: it was almost impossible for him to use anything on the internet because it had so many other links that the screen reader would read and never get to the actual content. Safari Reader seems to be a much better system, and will help me greatly in the coming weeks.

I was so excited today as I finally sat down and wrote down all the relevant shortcuts and ideas. As I wrote the shortcuts  down (and sadly acknowledged how long it took me to do all of that,) I decided that I should really save some other people the work. Since the visual-impairment teachers seemed unaware of the accessibility functions on a Mac, I emailed them all of the relevant shortcuts, links, features, videos, etc., that I had looked up. Then I realized that in our culture of sharing, there are probably a good number of other people who may find this information useful. So, I did what any good computer teacher would do: I made a Google Doc. Of course, the people most directly impacted by this kind of information are those that are visually impaired or who work with them. However, the other biggest users of extensive keyboard shortcuts are computer geeks, and I think this could be useful to them as well. It made my geeky side happy anyway :-) Click here to access the basic information in a Google Doc and add to it yourself, or here to get an extensive list of Apple accessibility keyboard shortcuts. Hope it helps someone else too!

[And I realize this comic is PC-based, but I thought it was entertaining nonetheless, assuming you know what they do ;-)]

Why Digital Literacy Matters

For years, I've heard teachers in the district rave about tech camp in Tucson. For years, I've thought, "Hm, that sounds nice. Too bad I wouldn't be able to convince anyone to pay for me to go to a resort for a week." In reality, I never asked, I just assumed that was the case. Yes, I know what that makes me. It also goes against my philosophy of "You never know till you ask." Either way, when my Instructional Technology director happened to mention that he still had slots to fill for both ISTE 2011 and tech camp, I "happened to mention" that I had never been to either. (Subtle of me, right?) So, when he offered me a spot at tech camp, I was all over it. And here I am!

While it's affectionately called tech camp, it's officially called "Camp Plug & Play 6.0" and is sponsored by the AZ K-12 Center. It's not a conference, so much as an extended workshop, in which you learn a specific skill all week. Some of this week's strands focus on iMovie, interactive whiteboards, Google, and digital storytelling (the strand I was signed up for). Though it's not really a standard sit-and-get conference, there was a keynote speaker yesterday, who made some excellent points. Her name is Angela Maiers and she was so passionate, I decided to go back for an optional evening session on the first day when I was already exhausted. The focus of her second presentation was the importance of digital literacy. I have never seen someone speak so passionately on this topic (for good reason)! These are some of her best points, written through my lens.  

Being literate is no longer only about being able to read words. Obviously that is a critical, first step, but if you don't know how to communicate in this new digital world, you will feel like you're in a foreign country. We see evidence of this everyday as more and more people with public identities try to speak in a language in which they are not literate (Representative Weiner, etc., etc., etc.) One of her key elements to being literate in the digital world is learning how to be a "great infosumer." Not only do our children have to know how to read, now they have to know how to find and then select the most relevant, accurate information. Without this, we have students meandering all over the wasteland of the internet looking at images as "research" or using Honda.com as an impartial source of information. 

Then, once they find the information their looking for, they need to know how best to represent that information to others. This includes synthesizing that information into a person's own unique words and understanding, as well as adding new information to what is already available. While many of our students are experts at knowing how to upload a fight video to Youtube or how to post on Facebook, they are absolutely clueless on how to post information that the world finds valuable. In Ms. Maiers' words, "The web doesn't care about you until you contribute valuable information to the community." Our students rarely think beyond the borders of their own community. They don't realize that there is a whole world of people who may be viewing their work, and that if those people find it valuable, it could be shared with hundreds and thousands of people. It absolutely behooves us to help our students differentiate between information for friends and information that is useful to people around the world. 

On a related note, we have to teach kids about how to act respectably and respectfully on the web. Heaven knows adults are not setting good examples for them, and we must point this out to them. We have to help them have a bit of foresight and know that the internet actually "does NOT have an erase button." There is no such thing as deleting. If your screen name in 7th grade was sexychica, it will define you for far longer than you want. Everything a student puts on the web will be searchable by someone, potentially someone you don't want to find it (a future employer?) and will do so long after it ceases to represent who he/she really is. (There are fantastic interviews with students on this point in Along Together.) We have to help our students have the foresight to represent themselves well. 

These were just a few of the points she covered in her 60 minutes, but she was kind of enough to show us her full-blown graduate class information via her wiki for free. Check it out if you want step-by-step lessons for ways to teach these concepts to your students. Needless to say, I will definitely be including portions of this information in my courses this year. 

Mind, Brain & Education

That's the title of an interesting collection of brain-based education articles I borrowed from a friend. While there are definitely some dryer parts to this collection, there is much that can be applied in everyday classrooms. It also expounds on the numerous inaccuracies that many teachers have been led to believe is solid research in terms of the brain and it's impact on education.

• Right-brained vs. Left-brained. While there are clearly different sides of the brain that accomplish different tasks, there is no such thing as a kid who is too left-brained to be able to do something "right brained." (I read the same thing in a NYTimes article today.)
• Mozart Effect. The original study describing the impact of Mozart's music on increasing intelligence in people has never been replicated, and the original study only showed a weak, temporary increase in intelligence. 
• Brain Plasticity is Limited to Certain Ages. The past ten years of research has confirmed that a person's brain is able to change to include new things at any age. While it is true that there are certain periods in which the brain demonstrates extreme plasticity, this process continues in varying degrees throughout life. 

 Here are some of my favorite ideas from the book.

• Only kids who think, learn. Specifically, when kids make predictions, it ensures that they learn something. When they are engaged with the material and have to presuppose what might come next, and they receive confirmation (or not), the neural network in the brain is either rewarded with a dopamine burst for being correct, or has to rewire itself to adapt to the new information. Either way, comprehension is occurring. But it only happens when kids think. (p. 56) 
• Know your brain. When students understand a few key bits of information about their brain, it can motivate them to not only study more, but study more effectively. For example, if a student knows that repetition forces the neural networks to prune out unnecessary information and only latches on to the repeated information, their practice can make that knowledge permanent. (p. 58)
• You can change your brain. Research has shown many times that human brains change from birth to death, due to experiences and learning. This is critical for all students to know, but especially those students who think they aren't as bright as others. When they find out that they can change their own brain by practicing new skills, correcting mistakes, and having new experiences, they are empowered to take responsibility for their own learning. (p. 61)
• Think big picture. Ask the kind of probing questions that help students develop intuition about their own thinking. For instance, if a student is trying to solve a math problem, have them back up and ask themselves if they are using the right strategy for that type of problem. Or, if they're working on a science project of some sort, have them ask themselves, "Am I getting closer to the answer?" This type of metacognition (thinking about one's thinking) encourages the brain to begin to automatically ask these sorts of questions when working through any problem. By evaluating their thinking process, students learn to make their thinking more effective, by focusing on what works, and how to get there as quickly as possible. (p. 80)

It's All About Choice

There are several things I've learned about teenagers in my teaching career, and two of them tend to go together. (More on the others later). My mantra, especially with difficult classes has become, "If you can make something into a choice, it will be a better day for everyone." This can relate to discipline as well as actual assignments.

When kids are being disciplined, having a choice helps facilitate the idea that their back is not up against the wall yet (figuratively). The fight-or-flight instinct hasn't been touched off yet. When I used to teach in an alternative high school, if I wanted a student to do something, I'd give them two options, even if I knew they didn't want to do either of them. Usually, that was enough to move them at least closer to the objective of the lesson, even if it still wasn't perfect. Today, when I have students that are (I'll just make up a quick, implausible example here), on Facebook or Youtube when they should be working, I tell them to close it. If they don't, the next step is "You close it, or I close it." (To most kids, keyboard shortcuts are still a total mystery. I tell them it's magic :-)) Generally, they'll start moving to close. All kids want is to feel like they're not on a one-way street.

In terms of curriculum, whenever I'm designing assignments for regular classes or my technology classes, I do everything in my power to incorporate choice into the project. When I can do this, everybody is happier, me included. For instance, my 8th graders are currently working on a project about the Vietnam War on Glogster. I gave them a list of things to include, and they chose 3-4 in each category. Added bonus: they get a big long list and are overwhelmed, and then I tell them they don't have to do it all :-) My 7th graders are making interview videos in iMovie about technology and how it impacts us. While they didn't have a choice on the general topic, they can choose the specific question they are asking people, and then can choose what the final product looks like.

Choice and motivation are like spring fever and state standardized testing: you don't get one without the other. The 7th grade project has made my life a breeze this week. The students know how to do all of the pieces, from last week's instruction and previous assignments, and I just let them go. I've literally spent all year trying to keep them off of great programs like Photo Booth because they weren't in my assignment. I finally figured out that I just had to design an assignment using photo and video and they're all over it. Just the specific technology is motivation enough. Last year, I had students supremely motivated to learn about tides, not because of the topic, but because (without any previous instruction on tides) I had them find a video describing how tides work. (Added bonus to this assignment: Youtube was blocked, so they had to find a way to work around it.) Again, sometimes just the technology itself is motivating. Imagine if you told students to take 5 pictures with their cell phones and write a story to go along with them. Motivation? Check.

[Note: all the links in this post are how these tools relate to education.]

Twitter 101

[Sorry for the cross-post, those of you that follow both blogs. I thought it was suitable in both places.]

I love Twitter. After a recent conversation with my aunt about what, exactly, Twitter is, (and realizing that I’ve had this conversation multiple times), I decided to put it in writing. As they always say, if one person has a question, there are probably many others who do too. So, for those of you who don’t understand what the big deal is about Twitter, this is why it is NOT what you think.

What Twitter is NOT:

Twitter is NOT about updates about what you had for breakfast, (unless you can say it in an incredibly clever way). It is also NOT a private, direct messaging service, a la Facebook, email, instant messaging, etc. Though many use it from their smartphones, it is NOT only available on phones, but is also a website where you can tweet from (Twitter.com).  

What Twitter IS:

Twitter is a “micro-blogging” service. In other words, it is like a blog, in that all posts are public, and they are listed reverse chronologically, with the newest posts listed first. It isn’t like blogs in that it has a140 character limit.  Because of this limit, tweets are approximately 1-2 sentences and many people and companies use it to post links to longer articles, blog posts, etc. (It IS possible to send direct messages to people, but they still have to be 140 characters or less. Because of this, it is not a common use of Twitter though.)

Due to the public nature of Twitter, it is most useful for keeping track of public organizations and people. You don’t have to know them or ask for permission to follow them. For instance, I follow AirFrance for European travel deals (@AirFranceUS), New York Times for news and commentary (@nytimes), and Jimmy Fallon (@jimmyfallon) and Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome) because they are hilarious : - )

However, the reason Twitter is most useful to me in my daily life is that I can follow other people within the education community, many of whom are technology teachers like myself. We all post about things we’re doing within the classroom, open questions we’re considering in terms of educational technology, and other such things. Some of the teachers I know personally, but many I do not. Twitter gives me access to a much wider circle of like-minded people whom I can bounce ideas off of. I also follow some friends from my personal life.

Overall, Twitter is an excellent means of keeping abreast of news and information of interest to you, professionally and personally. There is much more to say in terms of effective ways to use Twitter, details about common abbreviations, hashtags, or trending topics, but hopefully this basic description helps you understand what it actually is and how it might benefit you. And if you decide to join Twitter, follow me @dierdreshetler ! :-)