Taste of Tech

Last week, Bob Sprankle posted two new Bit by Bit podcast episodes. These were the last two recordings of presentations made at the Christa McAuliffe conference in New Hampshire back in November. It looks like he saved the best for last.

Dr. Tim Tyson was a middle school principal in Georgia before retiring last year. He spoke on the transformational change that tool place over the course of a few years at Mabry Middle School. Both of his presentations focus on using technology in innovative and transformative ways in an environment where technology was not previously valued or used effectively.

The first presentation, Leadership Applied: Building Powerful Learning Communities, is aimed at technology leaders, in which he includes both administrators and teachers. He urges us to be risk takers — to empower teachers to try new things. Both teachers and principals tend to be control freaks, but letting go of some of that control allows teachers to be creative and innovative without fearing the repercussions of failure.

In the second presentation, The Blogging School, he describes how his school moved from a single, rarely updated, hard to use web page to a multimedia site in which every teacher had a blog and posted to it at least once per week. The change didn’t happen overnight, but he facilitated it by modeling the behavior he expected, by showing teachers how easy blogging is, and by replacing some of their “busywork” tasks with blogging activities.

Here are some more ideas from Dr. Tyson:

• We have to get teachers to the point where they’re willing to suspend the disbelief that they don’t want to learn or can’t learn technology.
• Educating to minimum standards doesn’t work. EVERY kid has to do his or her best, and go as far as he or she can go.
• People do their best with their current vision of what can be done and with the resources they believe they have available to them. By helping to develop the vision and the resources, most people will want to do more.
• When requiring teachers to post weekly to their blogs, he did not intend to create more work for the teachers. He made more work for the parents. By giving parents useful, timely information about what was happening in their children’s classes, they could ask meaningful questions about their children’s schoolwork and reinforce concepts at home.
• “I have a significantly greater chance of my child being killed in the car on Interstate 275 around Atlanta than I ever do that my child is going to be picked up by some pedophile. But what do I do? I put the kid in the car all the time without giving it a second thought.” We have to measure our reaction to fear with reasonableness.
• By distributing the ability to put content on the school’s web site, he also distributed the responsibility. The people with the information should be the people posting the information. When it’s as easy as sending an email, there’s no excuse for not doing it.
• Teaching parents to use RSS allows them to subscribe to all of their children’s teacher’s blogs.
• When requiring teachers to post weekly to their blogs, he also took some work away. By using categories on the blog, teachers could tie their classwork to the curriculum objectives. It was then no longer necessary to do curriculum mapping, which used to take hours. They could simply look at the blog posts for a particular concept to see what was done, and when.
• When teachers are posting content online, establish boundaries for both teachers and parents. One week worked well for his school. Every teacher had to post at least once per week. Some of the parents wanted more; Some of the teachers wanted less. But this was the communicated expectation, and everyone had to live with it. Teachers were free to post more often, but they weren’t expected to.
• When approaching something new, start small. Learn what the issues are. Then, replicate your successes.
• Blogging formed the basis of all of the other technology projects undertaken in the school. Podcasts, videos, and everything else grew from the framework provided by the blogs.
• When working with teachers, start where they are. Empower them to move forward. If you’re doing something and find that it doesn’t meet a real, genuine need that you have, then stop doing it.

Take an hour and listen to one of these presentations. Then, if you liked it, go back and listen to the other one.

Debbie loves this one. Alvin posted last week about Jott, a service that lets you use your cell phone to send yourself reminders. That’s cooler than it sounds. Here’s how it works: you call the service with your phone. It identifies you by your callerid. It asks you who you want to send a message to. You can select yourself, or anyone whose address you have uploaded. You then record the message and hang up. The message can be up to 30 seconds long.

The service takes your audio, converts it to text, and emails it to the person you’ve specified. If you enter a phone number, it also sends a text message to that person’s phone with the text of your message.

Amazingly, the speech recognition software is very good. I’ve used the site a few times and have only had a few minor mistakes.

So what? Here are the applications that have come up in the three days since we started using it:

• I’ve received several emailed reminders from my wife this weekend about various things. When I’m at home, I rarely have my cell phone one, and we don’t have a land line. But email isn’t ususally very far away. I know, I’m a geek.
• John Rundag commented on Alvin’s blog that he listens to podcasts in the car, and Jotts himself with an address or resource to look up later. I’ve taken a lot of heat from the EdTech community over the last year after admitting to taking notes in the car while driving and listening to podcasts. This may help get me to and from work safely.
• My Dad is very excited about this. He needs to email people all the time, sending short messages, reminders, followups, etc. The problem is that he’s not the best typist in the world. He can use Jott to send these messages and improve his productivity immensely. Did I mention that it supports groups? You can send a message to a whole group of people if you want.
• We’re going to be sans Internet access for a week or so starting Wednesday. Debbie suggested tying Jott into Twitter. We can record a message on our phones and tweet it out. That’s pretty cool, since we don’t have a data plan on our cell phones, so we can’t send directly to Twitter from them.
• I’m trying to figure out a way to integrate it with our emergency notification system. We use a system that notifies staff, students, and parents in the event of a schoolwide emergency or weather related cancellation. If we were to add the Jott number to one of those lists, it might be theoretically possible to have that message go to a special email address, which then gets monitored by a server process. The text is then extracted and posted to the web site. So audio emergency announcements are automatically posted to the web site in text format. That’s pretty cool. I’m not sure we’ll actually do it, but it does illustrate the possibilities.

When you save a file, the program you’re using saves it in a particular format. The format describes the way the various elements of the file are stored. For example, let’s say you write something in a word processor. Maybe you boldface some text, or change the margins, or add a picture. Different word processors will store that information in different ways when the file is saved.

Unfortunately, different programs use different formats for the same types of files. Wordperfect uses a different file format from Microsoft Word. So a file saved in one of these programs won’t necessarily be readable by the other one. More confusingly, Microsoft Works also uses a different format from Microsoft Word, and different versions of Microsoft Word use different formats.

This used to be a huge problem. Our school computers had MS Word on them, but people had documents they had created in MS Works, or ClarisWorks, or a different version of MS Word. It was a pain to try to open these files or convert them from one format to another. We used to recommend that people use the “rich text format” (rtf) when saving word processing files. Rtf files can be opened by just about any word processor, and they retain the basic formatting for the document. That’s still a pretty good idea if you need to access your files on multiple computers running different software, or if you’re sending a document to someone and you don’t know which word processor they use.

Things got better in the early part of this decade. Microsoft used the same file formats for its Office products from 1997 - 2006. So even if you had Office 2003 at home, a file saved on that computer would open just fine on a computer running Office 2000, or even Office 97. We didn’t have to worry about it anymore.

That changed with Office 2007. If you create a document in Word (or Excel, PowerPoint, etc) 2007, you can’t open that file in an older version of the program. The two use different formats, and the older program doesn’t know how to handle the newer one’s files. Fortunately, there are two ways to work around this.

On the computer with the newer software, you can save the document in an older format. When you go to the Save As dialog, you can select a file type. In my version of Word, it’s right below the filename. Simply pick the format you need for the computer you’re going to use, and save the file. For example, in my district, if you save it as a Word 2000 file, you’ll be able to open it on any computer in the district.

The other thing you can do is to install a compatibility pack on the computer with the older version of Office. Available from Microsoft, the compatibility pack allows older versions of Office to read the new document formats.After downloading the software, double click on the installer and accept the license agreement. When it’s done installing, you’ll receive a message saying that the installation is complete. Simply click on “OK,” and you’re done.

Now, you can start one of your Office programs and try to open a file. In the file types drop-down, you’ll now see the Office 2007 file formats listed. You can then open these files and use them in the older version of Office.

“I have a puzzle for you.” It was the tenth day of winter break. Mom and Dad weren’t the only ones who could hardly wait for school to start again. The third grader and first grader both came right over. I handed them an envelope that had arrived in the mail. “I need to know who this is from and what it says.”

The disappointment was visible. The third grader can’t remember when she couldn’t read. The first grader is very proud of her literacy. This wasn’t a puzzle at all. Before they tore into the envelope, I asked them to take a closer look. The address, though obviously ours, wasn’t written in a format that was familiar to them. The street name was listed before the street number. The last line read “USA - STOW - OH - 44224.” That’s not how we write addresses. And why did it have three stamps? I smiled. There were more surprises inside.

“Dad!! This isn’t in English.”

“I know.” Now they were interested.

“Where did it come from? What does it say?”

“That’s the puzzle.” They pored over the letter.

“I think it’s from Luxembourg,” the third grader finally reported. “But it also says ‘Letzebuerg’ over here. Is that a place?”

“Who wrote the letter?”

“I think it’s Josée and Fernand.” It was a pretty good guess, because their names were at the top of the paper. I helped by explaining that their last name is on the next line. But they had no idea what the letter said.

“Do you want a hint?” They readily agreed. “The same letter is repeated three times in three different languages.” Josée and Fernand had gone out of their way to ensure they were understood. None of the three were English, though, so the girls were lost. “Are there any words that look like words you know?” Maybe they could get the gist of the letter from context.

The first grader chimed in. “an! in! die! hat! man!” Okay, that wasn’t what I meant. Sure, those are words she recognized, but they mean different things in German.

The third grader helped out. “There’s ‘courage.’ And ‘adresse’ is kind of like ‘address.’ ‘Animaux’ looks like ‘animal.’ There’s also ‘mentionnée,’ which includes the word ‘mention.’”

Now we were getting somewhere. “Can you figure out what it says?” Admittedly, it’s hard to construct a meaningful paragraph with so few clues. So we went online for help.

There are probably better translation tools out there, but I usually use Babelfish, mostly out of habit. I explained that computers can try to translate sentences from one language to another. They usually don’t do a very good job, but they help enough so you can figure out what the text is saying. We started with the quote at the beginning. I did the typing to save time.

«On ne peut atteindre de nouveaux rivages, que si l’on a le courage de quitter les anciens !»

“What language do you think that is?” They guessed French, especially after I read it aloud. So we translated from French to English:

One cannot reach new shores, only if there is courage to leave the old ones

Close enough. The kids figured out that it says something about leaving old shores in order to reach new ones. You can’t finish the journey unless you’re not afraid to start it. Are they on a boat? This has something to do with going somewhere.

We repeated the exercise with more of the letter, and eventually reached the realization that Josée and Fernand have moved to a new home in Rollingergrund. We checked Google maps, and found that this is northwest of the city of Luxembourg. It’s about 10 miles from where we used to live. We used the satellite imagery to look at their street. We then tried to get driving directions to their house, but Google Maps discourages driving across oceans.

How far away is that? We zoomed out until we could see North America. The first grader quickly found northern Ohio.
Wow! That’s really far away!”

It’s unlikely that the children will ever meet the Spielmanns. I do think they would like each other. Josée and Emily are both very kindhearted artists. But even if they never interact, our children have a connection to real people living on the other side of the planet. My kids don’t know anyone who doesn’t speak English as their primary language. Not only do Josée and Fernand not speak English every day, it’s not even in their top three choices of languages to use.

So how does this apply to 21st Century Skills? It’s certainly increasing their global awareness, and expanding their horizons beyond the English-speaking, America-centric world they live in. They were collaborating to solve a problem, and using technology both as a tool to answer questions and as a resource to find information. Not bad for a vacation day.

Josée and Fernand: Félicitations sur votre nouvelle maison, et meilleurs voeux à l’avenir.