Everytrail

Everytrail is a website that allows you to map your trips by adding geotagged photos from your computer to Google Maps. For example see this walk of San Francisco . If you don’t have GPS data to add to your map, you can just draw right on the Google map. You can search other people’s trip maps using the site directory, doing a keyword search, or through the sites world map.

This would be a great way to document a field trip or history in your area with students.

Online Videos of Ultraportable Devices

The CoSN Emerging Technology Committee Blog has information about ultraportable devices including some online videos of some of the devices.

The Power of Us!

This year’s Milwaukee Digital Media conference theme is The Power of Us: Creating the Future Together.

“What and how we teach needs to change. The Internet is not a thing or a place but rather communication/information which is highly integrated, participative, co-owned, dynamic and across space and time”~ Productions of Space-time Common to Everyday Online Practices.

“Education is not merely about transferring information. It is about contextualizing that information in the real life experiences of the learners, and in relation with the experiences of other learners…It is the relationships among people and sharing contextualized experiences that create emergent knowledge that is the basis of education”~ Mark Federman.

We will be practicing these ideas at this year’s conference. The conference will be held at the Milwaukee County Zoo, July 28^th-31^st. It will be a hands-on collaborative conference in which we will learn about wikis, digital mapping, digital photography, video-editing, and podcasting. More information will be available in the new year on The Stephens Group website.

Waymarking

At a planning meeting this week, Dick Diener showed us a new Web 2.0 technology called waymarking. It is a form of digital mapping. This technology allows you to pinpoint a location using latitude and longitude and add information about it digitally. They can contain text, images, hyperlinks and comments from other visitors about the place and information can be added by others. It also shows your site on a map. You can see your spot on a regular map, a satellite map or a hybrid. It also includes an option for forums and blogs centered around a specific waymark. Waymarks are peer reviewed.

There are various ways to search and explore Waymarks. For example waymarks are sorted into categories and users can search via the waymark directory. I typed in my zipcode to find waymarks in my home city.

Dick is using waymarks in a class project in which his middle school students are researching World War II Memorials in their county.

BBC Coverage of the XO Laptop

The BBC website has some interesting coverage on the emergence of the XO laptop. The site contains a lot of articles looking at different aspects of how the introduction of the XO in developing nations is going. It also includes a lot of interesting media including short video clips.

One of the articles is a review of the XO by a nine year old from England. He uses his laptop to "his laptop to write, paint, make music, explore the internet, and talk to children from other countries".

Another part of the site I liked was the Factfile which shows the technical features of the XO.

In the article Glimpsing Nigeria's Digital Lifeline, the authors talked about some of the challenges such as broken machines, unreliable Internet access and the need for funding for filtering.

I liked the coverage on this site because it showed some of the positive aspects of the $100 laptop as well as some of the challenges as well as some of the political forces surrounding this machine.

Cell Phones Use in Schools

This month's issue of ISTE's L&L had an interesting article with two different perspectives on cell phone use in schools (p. 9). I tend to think that the main issue is knowing what it is you want to do and then picking a device that can support that.

I tend to agree with Liz Kolb that cell phones "can be audio recorders, digital video camcorders, still cameras, note-taking devices, calculation devices, scheduling and management tools, phone conferencing devices, Internet researching tools, faxing and scanning devices, blog and web page editors, or even audio assessment recorders".

While with any new technologies, learning how to manage it in a school environment is always an initial challenge I am intrigued at how some educators are experimenting with how these tools can be used to promote student learning.

One of the blogs I subscribe to is Dave McDivitt’s http://davidmcdivitt.wordpress.com/ . Some of his recent entries have been talking about how he has been texting reminders to his students. I think this is a great way to utilize cell phones and improve relationships and engagement between students and teachers.

I am also intrigued by Project Connect in which Ninth graders in several public schools in North Carolina will receive smartphones to access supplemental math content to assist them with Algebra. One the advantages of this program is it allows students access to online resources that do not have a computer or internet access at home.

The Race is Not Always to the Richest

I found the article The Race is Not Always to the Richest, in the December 6th issue of the Economist very sobering. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), conducted a study that compares the reading, mathematical and scientific progress of 400,000 15-year-olds in the 30 OECD countries and 27 others, covering 87% of the world economy. Its predecessors in 2000 and 2003 focused on reading and maths respectively. This time science took center stage. For more than 40 years, the OECD has been one of the world's largest and most reliable sources of comparable statistics, and economic and social data.

"At the top are some old stars: Finland as usual did best for all-round excellence, followed by South Korea (which did best in reading) and Hong Kong; Canada and Taiwan were strong but slightly patchier, followed by Australia and Japan. At the bottom, Mexico, still the weakest performer in the OECD, showed gains in math; Chile did best in Latin America.

There is bad news for the United States: average performance was poor by world standards. Its schools serve strong students only moderately well, and do downright poorly with the large numbers of weak students. A quarter of 15-year-olds do not even reach basic levels of scientific competence (against an OECD average of a fifth). According to Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's head of education research, Americans are only now realizing the scale of the task they face".

Shaping the Flow of Media

I recently started using a social note-taking tool called Clipmarks. Clipmarks is a tool that allows users to organize and transmit information. It is a modern form of collaboration that allows users to “clip” parts of a web page that they find interesting. You can save your clips to your own online clipmarks space, add your clips to your blog, email your clips to others, add clips to social bookmarking sites such as delicious or print your clips. When you install clipmarks a small icon in embedded in the toolbar of your browser making it easy to multi-task as you clip parts of websites as you browse.

When you clip something you “tag” it. Tagging is an evolving social practice that allows uses to add their own searchable metadata, such as keywords, to their clips. Lankshear and Knobel (2007) call this a “bottom up approach” because the user makes the decisions about how to classify information instead of relying on a pre-established hierarchal system. This makes the exchange and sharing of information more “fluid, continuous, open” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007, p. 15) and less “expert-dominated” (p. 9).

You can also create catalogs for your clips and make them public for others to search, view, or add comments to. The fact that others can add comments to your clips makes this a relational technology. The fact that clipmarks was designed for users to share their clips publicly shows that the developers understand that “learning is an individual phenomenon and a collective phenomenon…understanding that learning and development is a bi-directional phenomena” (Kaptelinin, & Nardi, 2006, p. 91).

The ability of social networking tools such as Clipmarks is shaping the flow of media. The ability to tag is revolutionizing the way we use the web. In a print world there were top-down hierarchical standards such as the Dewey decimal system on how information was classified. In the past the designer or author might give keywords to a web-site. Now, the ability to tag allows a bottom-up organic approach where the individual user has the ability to create keywords, categories, and libraries to categorize information in ways that make sense to them. In other words they control the flow of the media. The ability to share these tags with “my clippers” allows you to add a social network of others who have similar interests. Again this is allowing the users a new way to flow media and information to one another.

References:

Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (Eds.). (2007). A New Literacies Sampler (Vol. 29): Peter Lang.

Kaptelinin, V., & Nardi. (2006). Acting with Technology. Boston, Massachusetts: MIT.

Six Tech Trends for the Next Five Years

EdTech Magazine has an interesting article on predictions of what the big trends will be in the next five years. http://www.edtechmag.com/k12/issues/august-september-2007/6-tech-trends-for-the-next-five.html

Site Visit to Westerly School

Today I had the opportunity to visit Westerly School in Long Beach, California. Westerly is in their first year of implementing a 1:1 Tablet PC program for middle school students. I met with Dr. Victoria Lovejoy, the Director of Differentiated Learning Solutions (love that title!) for the school. She explained that the program was a gradual evolution. Five years ago the school had a cart of laptops and two years ago they added a second cart. Last year the technology committee started visioning a 1:1 program.

We visited a guided studies class where students were doing homework. Many of the students were using their tablets and were eager to share how they use them. When I visit schools to see how students are using technology, one of the most common uses I typically see is students surfing the Internet to do research on a topic. One of the unique things about the tablet is that students can write and draw on it and their handwriting can even be turned into text. When I asked Dr. Lovejoy why they chose tablets over a traditional laptop, she said that they felt that the tablets would give students more options and would be a better tool for meeting diverse learning styles. In this class I saw very little of students using the Internet and far more of students using their tablets to help them do authentic work. I saw them illustrating concepts that they were learning about in ink art, or animating their drawings to show cell mitosis using Flash, or creating graphs in Excel for presentations they were making.

Teachers and students talked about how the tablets were allowing them to become more paperless. For example, in class students will bring up their homework assignments. They will go over the answers and the teachers will ask them to use their stylus to “correct” their work. Students can circle things, highlight key things, and make notes to themselves. The emphasis is less on getting a perfect paper, but to show the process and to show what you’ve learned. Teachers also encourage students to use these techniques when taking notes so that they are more actively engaged in higher order thinking during the note-taking process.

The school also has its own online portal. Students have access to private folders that only they and their teacher have access to. They also have pen pals in another country that they can upload their letter to inside the portal. Teachers can also use the portal to post their homework assignments.

One of the things I was most impressed with was how well the tablet program the supported the mission of the school. The school focuses on the “whole” child. In their mission statement which is posted throughout the school it listed 21^st century skills such as digital literacy and creativity. This fits a lot of the research I’ve been reading about how some teaching learning environments, such as the one at Westerly, are much more conducive to 1:1 programs than more didactic skill based environments.

When I asked a group of eighth graders what would happen if the laptops went away, they replied, “I would have to write everything”… “everything would take twice as long”… “I would die!”.