Taste of Tech

I resisted blogging for a long time. Initially, weblogs had the reputation for being online diaries where people rant about inane things, chronicle the minutiae of their lives, and generally ramble on about the grilled cheese sandwich they had for lunch. There was no point in wasting your time reading this stuff, let alone bothering to actually write one.

Some would argue that things haven’t changed much, but I disagree. Blogging has become a way for me to share ideas, observations, opinions, and resources. What I intended to be a resource for teachers in my district has become more of a documentation of my own professional development, along with some pointers to useful and interesting resources online.

I didn’t anticipate the social networking aspects of blogging when I finally took the plunge a couple hundred posts ago. I didn’t really think anyone would read this stuff, much less comment on it and link to it. Indirectly, it has been the catalyst that has connected me with much of the edtech community, and I consider the blog to be one of the best things I’ve done for my own professional development in the past decade.

Using RSS, I can “tune in” to others’ blogs. I get notifications when they post something new. Trackbacks show me when someone posts something on their blog about something I posted on mine. Within minutes, everyone in the community knows when discussions are being updated and people are contributing to the conversation.

Last spring, the South by Southwest conference was abuzz about Twitter. For the uninitiated, Twitter allows you to post short (up to 140 character) messages about what you’re doing right now. People can follow your Twitter account, and they get nearly-instant notifications on their phones, in their browsers, or in email every time you post. You can also follow your friends, so you can be constantly updated with what they’re doing.

Like blogging, I avoided it like the plague. The tech community went crazy about it. The edtech community thought it was wonderful. I was unconvinced. I don’t need to know what everyone is doing right at this moment. I don’t want to spend all my time following what other people are doing at the expense of doing things myself. What am I doing right now? I’m watching what you’re doing. What are you doing? Updating your Twitter.

But I’ve found that I’ve missed some things by not being on the Twitter bandwagon. I would have known about the discussion between Will Richardson and Gary Stager that Alvin missed if I had been using Twitter. I could have participated in some live discussions and had some neat experiences online if I had known they were happening.

Then, there’s this presentation coming up that I’m supposed to do in February. I can’t remember exactly what I proposed, but I think my presentation is about personal learning networks. It’s about education professionals taking control of their own professional development by connecting with other educators who share similar goals, experiences, and challenges. By making these connections, we can all grow professionally. One way this is happening is through Twitter.

So I finally signed up yesterday. I started following a few people, and sent my first “tweet.” “Investigating whether twitter is a good thing or a bad thing for me,” I said. Almost immediately, I started getting responses. “Oh it’s a *very* good thing.” “Welcome to the twitter newbie.” “How is it that you haven’t already been assimilated into the Twitterverse?” I added a widget to my blog’s sidebar, so you can see what I’m doing, too.

Now, the responsibility sets in. People are paying attention. I have this new obligation to keep them updated with what I’m doing. But they don’t care what I’m having for lunch. They probably don’t care that I’m working on a problem with a wireless link, or that the middle school wants to have a meeting about online course requests, or that a principal is waiting for me to call her back about online calendars. How do I strike a balance? How do I make this an effective tool? I’m not sure yet, but I’m playing with it and trying to find out.

Ironically, the school cafeteria is serving grilled cheese for lunch today.

A couple weeks ago, my daughter’s first grade class started blogging. They were doing a unit on the pilgrims, and had written some journal entries. They took turns typing these into blog posts on the classroom blog. They’re taking baby steps at this point. They’re not accepting comments or linking to other blogs or anything of the sort. Right now, they’re just typing their journal entries, and Mom and Dad can read them at home. The rest will come later.

We’ve known for a long time that student work improves when there is an authentic audience. A decade ago, my eighth grade students were doing research projects on world leaders. At the end of the project, they had to make web pages (using a text editor!) about their leaders. I left these pages online for a couple years, and later found that there were university professors and libraries and K-12 teachers linking to their reports as authoritative sources. While none of us were quite as critical of the information we read online then as we are now, these web pages were at least good enough that some serious people took them seriously. That’s a lot better than the written reports that were just handed in for a grade.

The technological barriers to putting things online are gone. I’m writing this in a form on a web page. When I’m done, I can click “publish” and it’s online. I don’t have to know html. I don’t have to ftp files to the server. I don’t really have to have any understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes. I can just write.

What I do have to understand is that anyone can read this. I have occasionally been surprised by people commenting on something I’ve written. Once in a while, someone will make an offhand comment about some blog post I made, and I’ll realize that I have some teachers in my district or administrators or parents or family members reading this. Our students have to understand this too. Grandma might be reading what you have to say. Or maybe your ex-girlfriend is checking your blog. Or a potential employer may Google you five years from now and find something you’ve posted.

That’s all the more reason to take online writing seriously. And given the opportunity, our students will do just that.

All Right. I’m Sold. Now What?

There are no major technical hurdles. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t legal ones. If you’re going to have students blogging in your class, you probably should start by reviewing your school’s policies relating to this activity. In the Brecksville-Broadview Heights Schools, this type of publication would fall under policies 7540.02 - District Web Page, 8330 - Student Records, and 5722 - School-Sponsored Publications. While you can certainly read them for yourself, I’ll save you some time:

• District and building web sites go on www.bbhcsd.org, and staff web sites go on staff.bbhcsd.org. Staff web sites may also be hosted on external sites in some circumstances. Everything on www is “official” and represents the district. Everything on “staff” represents a specific staff member or group of staff members, and may not reflect the district as a whole. Class blogs would go on “staff” if they’re hosted locally. They could also be hosted on another site, like Learnerblogs.
• There are rules about the type of content that can be posted. Use common sense and good judgment. If you think you’re in a gray area, check the policy.
• In a classroom blog, where the teacher is supervising the activity, the teacher has the right to decide what is or isn’t posted. The EFF provides the legal basis for this, and it’s also in the policy on school-sponsored publications.
• Get written parent permission when posting student work online. That’s the last line of the District Web Page policy.
• Protect student privacy. Avoid associating student first and last names with student pictures, for example. At the elementary level, it may be more appropriate to just use first names and last initials. Your best bet here is to include the types of identifying information you plan to post in the letter to parents that you use to get permission. Then, you’re covered.

So How Do I Actually Do This?

• If you don’t already have a blog, get one.
• Set up some users in your blog. In Wordpress, if you go to Users, you can create additional users. You can also allow people to sign up for their own accounts. Different users can have different roles, including:
  • Contributor: Can write new posts, but can’t publish anything. Everything written must be approved before it is published.
  • Author: Can write and publish their own posts, but can’t approve/edit/delete the posts of others.
  • Editor: Can mange other people’s posts, including the approval of contributed posts for publication.

  Using these roles, you might set up the students as contributors. That way, they can write their pieces, and you can still maintain control over what is ultimately published. If you’d like to loosen the reins (and your workload) a bit, you could delegate “Editor” status to a small group of trustworthy students or parent volunteers, who can read and approve the items. If you want to have an easier process, make your students authors. They can post their own work, but they can’t do so anonymously. Because they’re responsible for their own work, they’re probably not going to post inappropriate things. This is especially true if you’ve discussed what’s appropriate ahead of time.

• Another approach is to use the comment system. You can either leave the comments open, or require users to be registered before making comments. With this approach, you would post a writing prompt as a blog post, and the students would respond in the comments.

I Need Help!

Check out Blogging: A Teacher’s Guide, by Scott Walker. The Blogs For Learning site has great resources for instructional blogging, from both a technological and pedagogical perspective. If you want to get other teachers’ perspectives on student blogging, this is a pretty good discussion from Brian Crosby’s Learning is Messy blog. A couple years ago, Bud the Teacher created a wiki for classroom blogging. It includes collaboratively developed blogging rules, writing prompts, and assessment tools for class blogs.

The United Kingdom is considering legislation that would make it a criminal offense to lose a laptop containing unencrypted personal data. We have all heard the horror stories about laptops being lost or stolen that contain thousands of social security numbers, credit card data, or other personal information. Here’s an excerpt from the Computerworld UK article:

[Deputy Information Commissioner David] Smith told the Lords constitution committee that an example might be a doctor leaving a laptop containing personal details of patients in a car. It was “hard to say [this was] anything other than criminal negligence”, he said… [Commissioner Richard Thomas reported] that criminal sanctions should be used where a laptop had “a lot of personal information that hasn’t been taken care of and hasn’t been encrypted”. Doctors and others carrying sensitive information on portable devices “should know the basics of encryption”, he told the committee.

We have a fair number of laptops in our school district. Most administrators have them. Many special ed teachers use them, as do school psychologists, speech pathologists, and others addressing special needs in multiple school buildings. In most cases, these people have a need for data portability. They work in several different buildings, or they need to work on education plans and reports from home. All of them have access to confidential and potentially sensitive information. But almost none of them know anything about the basics of data encryption.

Our approach thus far has been two-fold. On one hand, we try to minimize the number of portable computing devices we have. If we have an elementary school guidance counselor who works in two schools, it’s actually less expensive for us to put a desktop computer in each school for her than it is to get her a laptop. When you factor in the higher acquisition cost, higher maintenance and support costs, and lower anticipated product life, a laptop is more than twice as expensive as a desktop. While data security hasn’t really factored in to these decisions in the past, it does benefit from them.

The other thing we do to protect data is to store it centrally. The software used to manage student Individualized Education Plans, for example, is stored in a centralized database. While laptops are used to connect to this database, the data isn’t stored on the laptop. This isn’t a foolproof solution, but it helps tremendously to reduce the amount of data on these portable devices.

We should be using TrueCrypt as well. This free software does a really good job of encrypting data and storing it securely. Essentially, the data is stored on the computer’s hard drive in an encrypted file. In order to access it, the computer user runs the program and types in the passphrase. If you enter it correctly, the encrypted file shows up as another drive on the computer, just like a flash drive. You can then copy files to and from it normally. This is good software, and it works well. But if you forget your password, you’re out of luck. If a staff member changes jobs, or goes on a leave of absence, there’s no way for the district to recover that data. With a staff that sometimes has a lot of difficulty with pretty basic technology tasks, that’s a pretty high tightrope to walk without a safety net. But maybe it’s time now to tighten things down a bit in the data security department.

Let’s say you’re planning to take the SAT Reasoning Test. If you’re a college-bound student in the United States, chances are good that you’ll either be taking this test or the ACT (or both) in order to get into college. This is a fairly high-stakes test. It’s only offered a few times per year, and due to college application deadlines, most students only have a couple opportunities to take it. Add to this the fact that it costs $43 to take the test, and that it’s given on a Saturday morning, and you’re going to want to do as well as you can the first time you take it.

So how do you prepare? Well, you could buy an SAT Prep book. There are lots of titles to choose from, each offering the “best” advice on preparing for the test. You could take a class online. Kaplan offers one for $399. For a mere $70, you can take an online course from the College Board, which administers the test. If you’re a student in my district, you can take a before-school class for $50 that will help you get ready for the test.

Or, there’s an alternative. ProProfs.Com offers a wealth of SAT test-prep materials for free. The site offers practice tests, study guides, flash cards, quizzes, and test-taking tips for best performance. The site also offers some videos, but they’re mostly embedded YouTube videos, so access to these resources may be limited in schools.

In addition to the resources provided, the site allows teachers and students to contribute by making their own quizzes and editing the wiki. This allows students to share their successful strategies with others.

In addition to the SAT prep resources, the site also has study aides for the CompTIA, Cisco, and Microsoft certification programs. They’re also working on resources for the ACT, GRE, GMAT, and several other high-stakes tests.

I’ve heard Will Richardson speak a number of times, including twice last month. In his keynote addresses, he usually includes this:

We have to figure out who we can trust. We can’t have our kids simply looking at something and accepting it. I know many of you have seen this. Martinlutherking.org. This is the stump site for people talking about information literacy. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it comes up in the top results on the Google search when you search for Dr. King. It looks like a pretty decent site. “Attention students. Try out MKL Pop quiz.” They’re marketing this to kids. “Death of the dream.” “Civil rights library.” It looks pretty good until you read over on the right where it says “That night King retired to his room at the Willard Hotel. There, FBI bugs reportedly picked up 14 hours of party chatter, the clinking of glasses and the sounds of illicit sex — including King’s cries of ‘I’m F-ing for God’ and ‘I’m not a Negro tonight!’.”

Now if our kids are doing research on Dr. King and they come to this site and they read that and a little bell doesn’t go off in their brains that something is not quite right with this page, that’s problem number one. If the bell does go off in their brains and they say “that doesn’t sound like something really accurate” but they don’t know how to figure out who owns this site and what the motives of the people who own this site are, that’s problem number two. And the biggest problem of all is if I gave you the quiz right now, and I said you have a minute to figure out who owns this site and what the motivations of those people are, that’s a huge problem if you cannot pass that quiz. Because, guess what. In this world, if you can’t do that, you are illiterate. Because that means anybody can tell you anything at any time.

This particular quote is from Bob Sprankle’s recording of Will’s talk at ACTEM07. I’ve also excerpted this section so you can listen for yourself.

 

 Will Richardson at ACTEM (excerpt) [1:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In this example, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page, and find the “Hosted by Stormfront” link. I didn’t link to either page, because I don’t want to do anything that would improve their Google results. Clicking on the Stormfront link at the bottom of the page will give you a pretty clear picture of the motives behind the website. But what if it’s not that easy?

I’m going to pick on the Hudson City Schools for a minute. This is a school district in northeast Ohio. In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I used to work there, and I’m friends with their technology coordinator. But there are a couple red flags that come up when you go to their web site. The first of these is that they use “hudson.edu” as their domain name. Normally, “.edu” is reserved for a college or university. Most K-12 schools in Ohio use something like “hudson.k12.oh.us.” So how do I know that this “.edu” site is the real site for the school and not just some prank hosted by a disgruntled former student at a university somewhere?

One thing I can do is look up the organization that controls the domain name. If I go to whois.net, for example, I can search for “hudson.edu,” and it tells me it’s registered to Hudson High School. It gives the name and contact information for the person responsible for the domain name, and it includes the valid street address and phone number of the school.

Let’s try another one. What about “tasteoftech.net?” That’s registered to me, and a whois search confirms that. How about “bbhcsd.org?” That looks like the official site for the Brecksville-Broadview Heights schools, but the “.org” makes me suspicious. It lists valid contact information for me, as well as the school’s name and address. You’ll also note that “www.bbhcsd.k12.oh.us,” a web address that more closely follows the convention used by Ohio schools, also goes to the same place.

Let’s look at one that looks a little less plausible. Genochoice offers prospective parents the ability to genetically engineer their children. Using sophisticated probes and DNA amplifiers, they can identify genes that predispose people to Alzheimer’s, heart disease, cancer, obesity, and dyslexia. By eliminating these genes at the pre-embroyonic stage, they can decrease the risk of these babies developing those types of conditions later in life. The page is very professional-looking, and the site appears to be affiliated with RYT Hospital. Whois lookups on these sites reveal the fact that their owners’ identities are being protected by the domain name registrar. This has become a common practice now. It doesn’t necessarily indicate a problem, but it also doesn’t vindicate the sites.

Looking closely at the site, you see a couple things that give it away. The “credits” page, for example, explains that the site was created by artist Virgil Wong. Then there are the links to the “male pregnancy” site and the Glyven project, which simultaneously cured Alzheimer’s while giving a mouse the intelligence of a human. But you might miss those at first glance.

How do we teach this stuff? Back in high school, my American History teacher taught us to always consider the source of information we read. This is the class where we spent six weeks digging through primary sources about the battle of Lexington and Concord. People write things from their own points of view to justify their own actions, decisions, and opinions. Two eyewitness accounts of the same event will often differ, because the witnesses report things from their own frames of reference. Without knowing anything about the author of something on the web, then, it’s difficult to establish its credibility. The Genochoice site is an artistic work that can be misinterpreted as a real medical site. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that there would be a fake school site online somewhere. Whitehouse.net (and .org and .com, and, to be honest, .gov) are all run by people with political axes to grind.

Ironically, this may be a case where sites like Wikipedia become more credible. A collaboratively written document is vetted by a number of people with different points of view. The likelihood that it represents a single perspective diminishes as more people contribute to it.

How do we solve the third problem? I’m not sure we can. But the first first step is to be skeptical. Challenge the assumptions. Make the sites prove their credibility. Don’t believe everything you read. Use your 21st century information literacy skills.