Taste of Tech

I received our Asus eeePCs yesterday. After playing with a couple at the tech conference last week, I thought it would be worth the investment to try a few out in the district. I bought one for each building, plus one for my techs to share and one for me to play with. That’s a total of eight.

I purposefully didn’t pre-configure anything. I simply put two lists of questions in the box, and delivered them to the tech team members in each building. The first list was a list of questions that already have answers:

What is this?
This is an Asus eeePC 4G Surf. It’s a small, low end laptop with a 7” screen. There’s no hard drive – just 4GB of flash memory that holds the operating system and applications. It has 512 MB of RAM. You can save data to an SD card or to a USB flash drive. It has a productivity suite (word processor, spreadsheet, etc.). It also has a web browser and can access the network wirelessly or wired. It has an external VGA port, so it could be connected to a larger monitor or to a projector.

Can I keep it?
For now. One was purchased for each of the schools, the technology coordinator, and the tech department. By the end of the school year, we hope to have determined what role (if any) these devices can play in our schools. At that point, we may decide to collect them all and put them in the same place so students can use them.

In the meantime, use it. Share it with teachers and administrators and students. Figure out if it’s a useful tool or just a gadget. Try to think about the questions that need answers. We’ll be discussing them at the April (and maybe May) tech team meetings.

Will it run Successmaker / Kid Pix / Accelerated Reader / Keyboarding software?
No.

Then what good is it?
This device will do most of the things we need computers to do. You can word process, create presentations, use the web, and access network resources (file servers, printers, etc). When you think about what most people use computers for most of the time, this little laptop can do most of it.

How much does it cost?
It costs $367.37. Price-wise, it’s about half the cost of a desktop computer and a third of the cost of a traditional laptop. Compared to the Alphasmart Neo, it’s about 50% more expensive. So for the same cost as 30 Neos, you could have 20 of these. At the secondary level, it’s about 3 times the cost of a graphing calculator, and only slightly more than an ebook reader.

It seems like this little machine has a lot of value given the things it can do and the relatively low price point.

The second list was a list of questions that need answers. I fully expect this list to grow, but right now, this is it:

Does this device work well enough to have a place in our schools?

How could this be used effectively with students?

What limitations are there that would affect its usefulness?

Are there solutions to overcome those limitations?

What technical hurdles would have to be overcome to make the use of these devices successful?

If we were to start using these computers, what could they replace? What could we buy fewer of to make this cost effective?

Are these computers durable enough for student use?

Is Linux too complicated / different / cumbersome / annoying to be used in this environment?

I’ll let you know how it goes.

This morning, Mrs. Hricik’s first graders presented their gingerbread stories. After their presentation for local senior citizens got snowed out earlier this week, they hastily adjusted schedules and invited parents in today. With the help of Jeff Lebow, EdTechTalk, and Ustream, we were able to stream audio and video of the presentations to family members who couldn’t come in to school. We had a maximum of 23 viewers at one point, with people from Colorado, Kansas, California, and Florida.

Special thanks to the students and to Mrs. Hricik for letting us share their stories.

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.

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that I needed to write about this. When you want to copy things from one place to another on the computer, copy/paste is a common way to get that done. I can copy some text out of an email and paste it into a Word document. Or I can copy some text from a web page and paste it into an email.

But what if I don’t want an exact copy? Maybe the email message is using Verdana as the font, and my Word document is in boring old Times New Roman. Or maybe that web page has blue text. I don’t want that in my email message.

This is where Paste Special comes in handy.  Depending on the program and the type of data, paste special will give you some different options. In Microsoft Word, for example, I frequently use “unformatted text”. This pastes the text without the formatting.  If you’ve ever pasted something from a web page, and then struggled to get the formatting to match the rest of your document, this is what you needed.

In Excel, I use paste special when I want to separate the data from the formulas that generated it. I copy the cells I want, and then use paste special, selecting “values.” This replaces the formula in each cell with the data generated by the formula. It’s especially useful when working with data from multiple sources to generate a single spreadsheet. By doing this, we don’t have to worry about keeping the connections between those files intact.

When I taught middle school, I caught a lot of kids plagiarizing text from the Internet because the fonts and text sizes didn’t match the rest of the document. If they had known about paste special, I would have had to actually do a web search to catch them.