Taste of Tech

My favorite first grade teacher finally has a blog. I was talking with her about it a couple weeks ago, and it was interesting to hear why she wanted to blog. Her school district provides a web site creation tool. They can easily put announcements, homework, classroom rules, and schedule information online. They can choose the neat animated graphics that elementary schools seem to love. But that site didn’t meet her needs.

She likes Wordpress for two reasons. First, it’s easy to get information online. Click write. Type what you have to say. Click publish. That’s all you have to do. She also likes the theme choices. Just because it’s a site for an elementary class, doesn’t mean it has to have a distracting or juvenile theme. She ended up picking something that’s definitely not first grade. But it fits her personality.

The blog came with added benefits, too. When she’s ready, she can have her students writing and commenting on her blog. She wouldn’t be the only first grade class doing this. She can also easily offer RSS feeds and email notification for parents. They can sign up and get the content emailed to them automatically whenever she posts it. She can’t do any of those things with the tool her district provides.

Do you want to be a teacher-blogger too? If you’re a BBH teacher, start here. If you’re not, head over to Edublogs or Wordpress to get started.

Back in August, the National School Boards Association concluded that social networking isn’t so bad after all. The study that they commissioned found a significant disparity between the things students are doing online, the things schools are allowing, and the risks associated with participation in online social networks. The materials from an August 14 news briefing are also available online, and were used for the graph displayed below.

The study consisted of three surveys: a survey of 1,277 nine- to 17-year old students, a survey of 1,039 parents, and a survey of 250 school district leaders who make decisions on Internet policy. Here’s some of what they found:

How Much

• Students responding to the survey reported that they spend an average of nine hours per week on social networking, compared to 10 hours per week spent watching TV.
• 96% of students with online access (hereafter referred to as “students”) have used social networking tools. 71% use these tools at least weekly.
• 60% of students using social networking tools talk about education topics, including the 50% who specifically discuss schoolwork.

Creating and Connecting

• 41% of students post messages or comments at least once per week. In 2002, it was 17%.
• 12% upload music or podcasts that they have created themselves at least once per week.
• 10% upload videos of their own creation at least once per week. 22% have uploaded a video of their own creation at some point.
• 22% share photos or artwork that they have created themselves at least once per week.
• 25% update their personal web sites or online profiles at least weekly. In 2002, less than 12% had their own web sites.
• 30% have their own blogs. In 2002, it was less than 1%.

Nonconformists

Nonconformists are students who break the “rules” of online safety and appropriate behavior. Sometimes, this amounts to using inappropriate language or posting of inappropriate pictures. It may also include pretending to be someone they’re not or sharing personal information online. Twenty-two percent of students are classified as nonconformists. Here’s what we know about them:

• They’re MUCH heavier users of social networking tools. They use ALL of them more frequently than their rule-following counterparts.
• They tend to break school rules to use social networking tools at school.
• They prefer new media (online, video games, handhelds) to old (TV, DVD, radio).
• They learn about new technologies online rather than from parents or teachers.
• They communicate MORE with their parents than nonconformists, in every way except in person.
• Their 21st century skills of communication, creativity, collaboration, leadership, and technical proficiency are extraordinary.
• Their grades are lower than their peers, typically in the B-C range.

School Rules

While students are regularly engaging in social networking activities outside school, they have to unplug when they come to school. Here are some details:

• 98% of schools use software to block access to inappropriate sites. This isn’t a big surprise, since it’s required to be eligible for e-rate funding. BBHCSD is definitely one of them.
• 84% of schools prohibit online chatting, and 81% ban instant messaging. While we don’t specifically ban these, many are blocked by the Internet filter.
• 62% of schools do not allow students to participate in bulletin boards or blogs. Again, we don’t have specific rules against the technology, but in practice many of the sites are blocked.
• 60% of schools deny access to email for students. We’re one of them, mostly because we’re liable for the contents of students’ inboxes, and we have no control over the email they receive.
• 52% of schools specifically prohibit access to social networking sites at school. We’re not one of them.

Problems

Schools typically deny access to electronic resources to alleviate the threat of liability. We don’t want our students accessing inappropriate materials. We don’t want them participating in unsafe behavior online. We don’t want the school district’s technology resources used for nonacademic purposes. Here’s what the students and their parents reported about these issues:

• 20% of students have seen inappropriate pictures on social networking sites within the last three months.
• 18% of students have seen inappropriate language on social networking sites.
• 7% of students reported that someone has asked them for personal information on a social networking site. 3% of students reported that they’ve given out email addresses or other personal information to students. 52% of schools reported that this is a significant problem.
• 7% of students also reported that they have experienced cyberbullying.
• 4% of students have had conversations on social networking sites that have made them uncomfortable.
• 3% of students report that unwelcome strangers have tried repeatedly to communicate with them online.
• 2% say a stranger they met online tried to meet them in person.
• 0.08% of students report that they’ve actually met someone in person from an online encounter without their parents’ permission. In a district our size, with 1,442 students aged nine or older, that would be one student.

NSBA Recommendations

The report recognizes that communities trust the schools to protect students during the school day, and this protection should include online activity. Schools should proceed cautiously, creating policies that protect this trust while still meeting the needs of our students. At the same time, communities expect the schools to take advantage of new technology to the extent that it can reasonably be used to improve education. To find the balance, the report recommends that schools do the following:

• Use social networking tools themselves, and form their own opinions about them. Too frequently, we focus on negative examples and media-hyped anecdotes intended to scare.
• Use social networking tools for staff professional development and collaboration. Teachers and administrators are less intimidated by technologies they use, and they can better see the educational possibilities.
• Experiment with structured social networking. Set up systems for homework help or collaborative projects. These tools appeal to students who are not ordinarily engaged in the classroom.
• Ensure equitable access. Students don’t ALL have broadband Internet at home. While most can get online outside of school if they really have to, it’s much more difficult for some than for others. With the immediacy of social networking, the have-nots are going to lose out.
• Embrace the nonconformists. These students are technology leaders, even if they’re disillusioned with the traditional school structure. By reaching out to them, schools can learn more about new trends that are coming, and gain a little credibility with the student community at the same time.
• Re-evaluate the policies. While it’s important to protect students, most Internet Safety Policies were written at a time when the web wasn’t so interactive. Are we doing too much filtering?

Where Do We Start?

Well, I’m starting with a blog post. This is going to be followed by a district tech team discussion later this week. From there, we’ll probably start taking a look at our policies, and making sure that they’re continuing to meet our needs. I’m not saying we’ll be recommending changes. But we should be sure we’re still happy with our rules, and change them if needed.

The other thing we’re continuing to do is use the “walled garden” approach. Our students can use Moodle, for example, to participate in an online community. Because only our students are allowed in, it’s safer environment, and it’s allowed at school. As an extension of the classroom, we can enforce school rules in ways that we couldn’t if kids had off-site blogs.

The use of these tools with teachers is also important. We need to get more teachers blogging, and more of them blogging about teaching and learning. We need to have more of them participating in online professional development. We have to get more of them plugged in to the online communities. This is a slow process, but we do have a start.

The other thing we can do is start a conversation here. Feel free to throw in your thoughts.

This is the third installment of my notes on using Linux as a desktop OS. You can catch up in the Desktop Linux category if you’re interested in the background.

Real work kind of got in the way on Friday, and I found myself trying to do some things with OpenOffice on this new Linux box. Basically, the problem was this: I wanted to compare my school district’s per-pupil expenditures for 2006 with those of the other schools in the county. I also wanted to compare our district’s performance index with those same schools.

As a quick aside, Ohio schools have something called a performance index. It’s a number which quantifies how “good” a school is based on the students’ performance on achievement tests. Schools with a high performance index (like ours) can brag about how great they are. Schools with lower performance indexes can point out that it’s not necessarily the only, or even the most effective, way to measure a public school. But I digress….

All of the data I needed is on the Ohio Department of Education web site. They have some reasonably useful tools for extracting all kinds of data about Ohio’s schools. It only took a few minutes to generate a report that has the per pupil expenditures and performance indexes for all of the school districts.

The problem is that this file didn’t have any county information. So I couldn’t just select the ones I needed. I managed to find a separate report that listed all of the school districts with their counties, but this one also had the private schools in it. Without a one-to-one correspondance between the two data sets, the easiest way to combine this data is with a lookup.

No problem. I’ve been down this road before. In Excel, I would use “=vlookup(A1,’[somefile]!somesheet’!$A$1:$C:850,3,0).” Basically, take a look at the value in cell A1. Compare it to the values in the first column of this range on another spreadsheet. If you find it, return the value on the same line from the third column.

I know, I’m getting a little complicated, here. But these are the kinds of things our kids should be able to do.

The first problem I had was that the formula syntax was different. I sort of expected this. While there are functions to do the same things in Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, they’re going to work a little differently. I was really annoyed that OpenOffice uses a semicolon as a parameter delimiter instead of a comma.

I know. I’m whining. But I’ve been using parameter lists since 1988. Everybody uses commas. I’m pretty sure I’ve never done any programming in any language that didn’t use commas, with the exception of shell scripts and DOS batch files, which use spaces. And if I try to open an Excel file, it replaces all the commas with semicolons and just works. So nothing is broken in old files. But it’s still annoying.

The second problem was that the IRNs were in different formats. The IRN is a six-digit numeric code used to uniquely identify each educational institution in Ohio. This was the primary key I was using for the vlookup. I was using two CSV files generated using the same tool on ODE’s web site. In one, OpenOffice treated the IRN as a number. In the other, it was text. Since you can’t compare numbers and text, I wasn’t getting any matches. I worked around this by creating a new column and adding zero to the IRN. This forced it to be a numeric, and I could compare them again.

The next problem was that I couldn’t do lookups across multiple files. There weren’t any errors, I just didn’t get any results when I tried to do it this way. Copying the data from the two spreadsheets into two different sheets in the same file fixed the problem. So now, I was just doing a vlookup from one sheet to another in the same document. That worked well.

So, I got all of the data in one place. Next, I just needed to filter the data, so I only see my county. That was easy enough to do, and it worked pretty much just like Excel. My standard procedure at this point is to copy the filtered data and paste the values into a new sheet. Ultimately, this is the data I want. I don’t care about the formulas and data sources used to get it. I don’t want to worry about links to other sheets or what happens when I re-sort the data, or how things break if I change filter settings. I just want the data itself. In Excel, I do this by copying the data I want and then pasting the values into a new sheet. Paste special is a wonderful thing, and I have to remember to blog about it sometime.

In OpenOffice, there’s no way to do this. Sure, the paste special does have a lot of other neat features that aren’t in Excel, but this isn’t one of them. I worked around it by copying the data, pasting it into a text file, and then copying it back out and pasting it into a new spreadsheet.

After a few simple calculations, I had the data I needed. The whole process took about an hour. Using Excel, it would have taken about 20 minutes. If I do this type of thing once a week (a conservative estimate), that’s a TSPY of -34.67. Granted, I’ll get more efficient at this. Different isn’t necessarily better or worse, it’s just different. But it is a big price to pay for not using Microsoft Office.

By the way, our district spent $9862 per student last year. The district ranked 27th among the 31 school districts in Cuyahoga County, spending 16% less than the county average of $11738. At the same time, the district’s performance index is 106.9. This is the third highest in the county, and 12% above the average of 95.8.

Are you going to the conference this year? If you have the time, immerse yourself in the content. Interact with the other participants and the presenters. Reflect on the things they’re talking about, and post about it on the conference site, or on your blog, or on my blog. The second annual K-12 Online Conference begins Monday, October 8, at midnight GMT.

I know. i can’t ever figure out the times, either. I always end up running out of fingers. Here in the North American Eastern time zone, we’re four hours behind GMT this time of year, so the conference starts at 8:00 PM on Sunday night. But it’s okay if you can’t make it then. Most of the events don’t take place in real time, so participate on a schedule that makes sense to you. The EdTech blogosphere will be abuzz with the ideas from the conference, and you can tap into the conversation just about any place, any time.

What’s the conference about? The first week has two strands: Classroom 2.0 and New Tools:

Strand A: Classroom 2.0
Leveraging the power of free online tools in an open, collaborative and transparent atmosphere characterizes teaching and learning in the 21st century. Teachers and students are contributing to the growing global knowledge commons by publishing their work online. By sharing all stages of their learning students are beginning to appreciate the value of life long learning that inheres in work that is in “perpetual beta.” This strand will explore how teachers and students are playing with the boundaries between instructors, learners and classrooms. Presentations will also explore the practical pedagogical uses of online social tools (Web 2.0) giving concrete examples of how teachers are using the tools in their classes.

Strand B: New Tools
Focusing on free tools, what are the “nuts and bolts” of using specific new social media and collaborative tools for learning? This strand includes two parts. Basic training is “how to” information on tool use in an educational setting, especially for newcomers. Advanced training is for teachers interested in new tools for learning, looking for advanced technology training, seeking ideas for mashing tools together, and interested in web 2.0 assessment tools. As educators and students of all ages push the boundaries of learning, what are the specific steps for using new tools most effectively? Where “Classroom 2.0″ presentations will focus on instructional uses and examples of web 2.0 tool use, “New Tools” presentations should focus on “nuts and bolts” instructions for using tools. Five “basic” and five “advanced” presentations will be included in this strand

In the second week of the conference (October 22), the focus shifts to Professional Learning Networks and Obstacles to Opportunities.

Strand A: Professional Learning Networks
Research says that professional development is most effective when it aims to create professional learning communities — places where teachers learn and work together. Using Web 2.0 tools educators can network with others around the globe extending traditional boundaries of ongoing, learner centered professional development and support. Presentations in this strand will include tips, ideas and resources on how to orchestrate your own professional development online; concrete examples of how the tools that support Professional Learning Environments (PLEs) are being used; how to create a supportive, reflective virtual learning community around school-based goals, and trends toward teacher directed personal learning environments.

Strand B: Obstacles to Opportunities
Boundaries formalized by education in the “industrial age” shouldn’t hinder educators as they seek to reform and transform their classroom practice. Playing with boundaries in the areas of copyright, digital discipline and ethics (e.g. cyberbullying), collaborating globally (e.g. cultural differences, synchronous communication), resistance to change (e.g. administration, teachers, students), school culture (e.g. high stakes testing), time (e.g. in curriculum, teacher day), lack of access to tools/computers, filtering, parental/district concerns for online safety, control (e.g. teacher control of student behavior/learning), solutions for IT collaboration and more — unearthing opportunities from the obstacles rooted in those boundaries — is the focus of presentations in this strand.

Last year, I missed most of the conference. I wasn’t in to webcasting yet, and I did listen to most of the sessions as podcasts after the fact, but I didn’t really interact with the community at all. I hope to be more involved this year, though.

I can only get to NECC about once every four or five years. The last time I went, there were 12,000 people there. It’s easy to get lost. It’s certainly not possible to engage in dialogue with the presenters. In the K-12 Online Conference, you get the best of educational technology in a personal, collaborative environment with a global perspective. You can’t find that at any face-to-face conference. Don’t miss it.

I’m serious. I can’t believe you haven’t already requested professional leave.

This is part 2 of my Linux journey. See what you’ve missed. 

Ubuntu installed without any problems. Upon restarting, I logged in with the account I configured during the installation. The first order of business was fixing the video settings. I was stuck in 800×600 mode, because the installer didn’t correctly identify my video card. It took a little Googling to get it resolved, but essentially I just needed to tell it to enable the higher resolutions. While it was frustrating, it wasn’t any more of a pain than installing a fresh copy of Windows to find I’m in 640×480x16 mode because it doesn’t have a graphics driver.

Once that was resolved, I moved on to setting up email. I toyed with the idea of using Evolution, but since I’m happy with Thunderbird on Windows, I thought I’d start there. I was pleasantly surprised that the web site auto-detected the OS I was using, and it gave me the right installer.

I was a little confused about where to install it. Normally, on Linux systems, I would put applications in a folder like /var/local. But since I’m not running as root, I don’t have access to that location. There doesn’t seem to be a Linux equivalent to “Program Files,” where regular users can install software. In the end, I created a folder called “apps” in my home directory, and put everything there. I know this may cause problems down the road, but for now, it’ll work.

So I launched Thunderbird, and got the familiar “gee, it looks like you’re new here, would you like to configure an account?” dialog. I didn’t really want to set up all my various email accounts and RSS feeds, so I cheated. On my Windows computer, I found the Thunderbird profile in c:\Documents and Settings\myusername\Application Data\Thunderbird. I copied this folder to the Ubuntu machine, and put it in my home directory. Then, I renamed it “.thunderbird,” launched the program, and it loaded with all of my settings and messages intact. Cool! That just saved about an hour’s worth of work. I did notice that it’s not working with my Gmail accounts, but I haven’t had a chance to troubleshoot that yet.

Next up: the browser. Firefox was already installed, but, like Thunderbird, I had customized it to a considerable degree on the Windows computer. So I copied the profile for that over, too. Upon launching Firefox, I found that I had all my settings, including the add-ons I had installed. The toolbars were properly arranged, and it even restored the session from the Windows computer.

My next-most-used application is probably Putty. I manage most of my servers from the command line, and Putty does the trick. This isn’t a problem in Ubuntu. I can just open up a terminal window and secure shell to the servers. No special software is needed. I added a terminal icon to the Gnome panel to make this faster, and was all set.

Now, it’s time for some more challenging tasks. I have a Palm LifeDrive. On a good day, if the stars are aligned and the gods are smiling, I can eventually make a Palm talk to a Windows computer without my kids learning too many new words. I’ll be amazed if I can get it to work with Linux any easier. After that, it’s time to start playing with audio. Stay tuned…