Category Archives: Education

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Skype Web Site Blocked – But Not Skype – I Can’t Wait To Find Out Why!

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Last week part of each my 3 presentations at The Nevada Education Technology Leadership Conference was about Skype audio and video-conferencing. So this week I got emails from a teacher in my district wondering how I bypassed school district filters to use it. To make a long story short what I eventually realized was that the Skype web site is blocked by the school district (it wasn’t as late as January the last time I downloaded Skype to a computer at school) but using Skype is not blocked. If you already have the software installed you can get out – no problem. So I just found the teacher an alternate site to download the software – but I haven’t heard back yet to see if she has been successful.

We tried to figure out why access to the Skype web site would be blocked. The only idea we had was that IT is afraid of the impact of having “too many” teachers Skypeing (whatever that threshold is).

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A Bit Of A Breakthrough

I know this may not seem like that big a deal to many, but for me this was a bit of a breakthrough. Last Monday morning I took my wife to the doctor for a check-up on her broken knee, so naturally I had a substitute teacher. The breakthrough was that almost the entire morning was done on their laptops with a substitute that knew nothing about using them. My plans involved them using our class wiki to access online math activities and later to do schema building pre-reading activities and writing activities and the students were able to handle that on their own.

When I came at lunchtime the sub was just awestruck that the students got so much done and were so on task (with a few minor issues from some usual suspects). “It was easy,” she said. The students noticed too. They thought it was great that even with a sub I could let them use their laptops because they have some basic skill now in using them and our wiki and more. Now understand we still have a ways to go – but they are really on their way to just using their laptops like any other learning tool.

We are pretty sure now that I will be able to roll this class to fifth grade next year and I look forward to seeing where we can go with these powerful learning tools.

Learning Is Messy!

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Don’t Weigh The Elephant …

Milton Chen at Edutopia has an interesting article: “Don’t Weigh The Elephant — Feed The Elephant.”

Up front Chen recounts the following experience of a friend that visits India and has a discussion that includes:

“In America, you test your students a lot, don’t you?” She replied, “Well, indeed, the United States has a national policy that requires testing of all students in certain grades.” The Indian educator said, “Here, when we want the elephant to grow, we feed the elephant. We don’t weigh the elephant.”

Next Chen talks about the research findings of Carol Dweck, Stanford University’s William B. Ransford Professor of Psychology, and her colleagues, Columbia University’s Lisa Blackwell and Stanford’s Kali Trzesniewski, published in the journal Child Development and highlighted in a recent National Public Radio report.

Math grades typically decline during the early teen years, but students who were taught to think about their brains, and about how their intelligence could expand, reversed the expected decline; students in the control group continued to worsen academically. In the NPR interview, Dweck described how seriously students took this neurological learning: “When they studied, they thought about those neurons forming new connections. When they worked hard in school, they actually visualized how their brain was growing.”

Read the whole article – it’s an easy, short read and is good food for thought.

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Nevada Education Technology Leadership Conference

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Update 2-28 / 10:30pm
Link to my conference Wiki.

This weekend is our state technology conference. Ian Jukes is the keynote speaker Saturday. From the conference website:

The theme of this year’s conference, Technology: The Great Connector , suggests the wide range of influence technology has on learning. Sessions and workshops will reflect this. Topics will include –
Connecting to Curriculum: student use of technology in design: robotics, art, buildings; integration of technology resources into classroom activity
Connecting to Leadership: preventing student plagiarism (defining it and preventing it through use of online websites such as turnitin.com), implementation of technology plans; becoming “highly qualified”
Connecting to Creativity: student productions (yearbook, newspaper, etc), innovative uses of PowerPoint, ActivBoards, and other tools.
Connecting to Each Other: blogging, using online resources such as think.com

I’m doing 2 presentations – a 60 minute presentation Saturday called “Tales From A Model Technology Classroom” (the classroom is a model – we might get there later). And Sunday I’m doing 2 hours on “Blogging and Other Web 2.0 Goodies.” I’m hoping to have a wiki for both presentations done in the next few days.

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The Inclusion Story Continues

Even though she doesn’t want any of the credit Wendy Damonte co-anchor from KTVN Channel 2 who reports this story made the contact with Renown Health that got Celest an iMac computer. The Children in Transition Program of Washoe County, Nevada, used grant money to pay the monthly fee for the high speed internet connection at Celest’s house – and AT&T installed an extra phone line in her house and installed the DSL for free. Click the photo below to see the newscast streamed. Click here to see a higher quality download. With permission From KTVN Channel 2 Reno, Nevada.

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Inclusion Update 2-19-07

This week was the best yet for Skypeing Celest into class. Last week she Skyped-in a total of maybe an hour and a half (there are other issues besides leukemia I can’t share – think poverty and ALL that goes with that). But this week she spent all day Monday with us and almost all day Tuesday and Wednesday. Wednesday was Valentine’s Day, Celest had sent hers in with her little sister, so as we passed them out students made a pile in front of her on the computer and we turned the camera around so she could see the goings on. A student from her table group read a few of them to her, then we sent the rest home unopened with sis at the end of the day.

Three days a week is going to be our schedule I think – she gets chemo on Thursdays and that wipes her out for Friday, so that’s going to probably be the norm. She hangs in pretty well with us unless she needs extra attention – that is sometimes difficult because of sound issues. I might have to get her headphones with a built in microphone – background noises at her house often lock-up the sound intermittently – that and the inconsistency at times of our connection. Sometimes we lose her about every 20 minutes or so – the students in her table group just seamlessly reconnect (takes about 10 – 30 seconds) and we just keep going. I do sometimes help her with things while the rest are at recess.

I mentioned in an earlier post that local TV news came and did a story about what we are doing – the one day that the connection was horrible of course – I did give them a copy of our vidcast on digital tape, so it will be interesting to see if they use any of the scenes from our video. They are broadcasting the story Tuesday night. They have given me permission to record and stream from our web site so I’ll let you know when that is available.

This week we will only see her Tuesday and Wednesday because of the holiday and next week we have CRT testing all week – but then most of our testing is done.

I shared with the class many of your comments from our video post – I really had to work hard to impress on them just how important and groundbreaking and just generally cool what they are involved in is. They get it to a point, but this is becoming just one of the things we do, kind of a regular part of the day after three weeks – so they’ve “been there done that.” When my class four years ago made such an impact with our “Don’t Laugh At Me” video, that class got tired of the attention they received. Someone would come to give them “another award” and I would have to talk to them for 20 minutes or more before the presentation about being gracious recipients. I guess it’s a fourth grade thing?

Many have asked me to post updates like this one from time to time and I will.

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Student Blogging Limbo

I’m not sure I would say we are going about this the wrong way, but we are trying to do many new things this school year. I have used technology with students since the early 80’s – but usually that has been limited – one or two classroom computers. I have had access to 30 wireless laptops for 7 years, but I was sharing them with the entire staff. Now this year comes along and I’m swimming in technology. Those 30 laptops, though old, live in my classroom, I have access to 3 digital video cameras, multiple digital cameras, scanners, and also a new Promethean Activboard. More importantly I have “PERMISSION” to use them with my students.

We are doing many tech/web 2.0 goodies, but we are introducing many of them at once. Again I’m not sure that is “wrong” – just that we are in early adoption mode in many things instead of learning things one at a time – becoming somewhat proficient and then moving on to the next.

Because of that approach we are aware of many things but still require lots of teacher support in almost everything we do.

Blogging is one of those areas. We have done some (along with, a 1:1 laptop pilot, digital video, word processing, internet research and applications (Wiki, Flickr, Skype, downloading video and images) but if you visit our blog you will note that 1) the posts we have done are not polished, we haven’t even agreed on a name (so Name To Be Decided graces it now) and therefore we have zero comments outside of our own to each other.

On the other hand as we learn we are seeing how these different pieces integrate – and as we do things and see the importance of analyzing what and why we are doing that work, we have come back to earlier work and come to terms with the shortcomings. Also contributing to that is how fourth graders mature – some students “grow-up” from one week to the next. An “its good enough” attitude one week becomes an “I didn’t see those mistakes? – I’d better fix that,” attitude the next.

So earlier work will become fodder for future learning and that can’t be bad. Look for us to come out of our “Blogging Limbo” in the next few weeks.

Also we have been working very hard on long pieces of writing that may become future blog pieces – although many of these stories are 2 to 6 typed pages … is that too long for a blog post for a 4th grader? These are pieces we started before we had laptops. They are stories about “Being Your Shoes” for a day and tell about a day in your life from the perspective of your shoes (this lesson is my best contribution on the Nevada Writing Project’s fantastic “Writing Fix” web site – Corbett Harrison has designed maybe the best web site to support writing instruction out there – with a little help from his friends).

It will continue to be an adventure to see how we progress – especially since I still hope to roll this class to fifth grade to continue our pilot and build on this year’s learning.

Learning is messy!

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Be Prepared???

Usually when I’m going to present I spend lots of time preparing and still feel like I could have spent more time and then it would have been even better. So it is ironic that Friday, when I was asked to present to my staff about more things they could do with their digital cameras and introduce wikis and some math and language activities, I had just come off 2 days that did not lend themselves well to being prepared … and so I wasn’t comfortably prepared. I had a handout with links for the things I would show them, but during recess and lunch I used up the little last minute time I had to prep, switching computers that I would present from (my overused Mac is being fixed) – meaning I would use my classroom HP – I’m not as “at home” with Windows machines so that also put me at a bit of a disadvantage. And yet the presentation was very well received and mostly came off without a hitch.

Most of the staff at my school hadn’t seen our “Inclusion” video yet, so we started off with that. They loved Fd’s Flickr Toys – and the writing ideas I had to go along with them. I made several examples before their eyes and then showed them the examples I was working on when I took my header. And then I quickly introduced them to Wiki’s – only a few had heard of them before, so I explained basically what they are and then used a new Wiki I’ve just started to put together to have them try out Wiki’s and the online math and language software they were asking about. We passed out laptops and had them try things out … and my 45 minutes were up. I had many share with me how they saw using the resources I’d shared in their classrooms right away.

HMMM, maybe I should under-prepare more often.

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“Magazine Cover” from software available at: http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/

This provided the brief comedic break during my presentation. Actually my daughters from a trip to Yellowstone National Park 2 years ago.

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Update and Thanks!

Well, to say the least we’ve had quite the response to our Skype and video projects! Thanks to all that have commented and showed such great support of what we are trying to do. I was especially intrigued for another reason by this comment:

AprilMJ Says:

You’ve made a convert. Being a district admin, I am initially cautious of new technologies that may tax an already overextended system… but you’ve proven that the cost is far outweighed by the benefits.

Congrats. You’ve touched more than one life.

It has only been 2 weeks, and we have only managed to Skype less than half that time – partly because we are in a heavy assessment period (11 days of testing in a less than a 30 day period) and for other reasons too – some technical, some medical. There is definitely a learning curve for all involved.

Videoconferencing works really well for certain types of lessons – brainstorming for writing (which was our first activity on the first day) works well for example – and Celest seems to be able to follow along pretty well in math – I use several web sites to have students practice multiplication facts and she is able to be just one of the students in class when we do that also. Other types of lessons we will have to work out how best to include her. I really want to try involving her in group discussions for example – and I think we can get her in music class too – the music room might be close enough to one of our wireless hubs that I can carry the laptop and web cam in so she can sing along – the music teacher is game, so we will give it a try.

The iMac computer she is using has a built-in iSight camera which I’m finding out might be a disadvantage. I can move the USB connected web cam we have in class around to show her things – even the screen on the laptop we use if necessary,  – it would be nice if she could show me what she is doing sometimes to either troubleshoot an application issue she is having or so I could see her writing as she is doing it – but that built-in camera doesn’t lend itself well to that.

My school district’s bandwidth is barely adequate so we have periods where she comes in loud and clear and times when the sound drops out a lot. Of course Friday a local TV news reporter came to do a report (she helped get the computer) and the HP we usually use would not connect at all – so I used my Mac laptop and an iSight camera – there was a constant buzz, the sound dropped out and we had to reconnect every few minutes – other than that things went well, things went well, things went well …

My other students are still “overly intrigued” by it all, so I have to shoo them away (occasionally) from waving into the camera during transitions – but I know that in the not-to-distant future this will just be what we do and become fairly transparent.

I’ll keep you posted on our progress.

Learning is messy!