Technology Counts 2007

After March 29, 2007, the Technology Counts 2007: Looking Back, Looking Ahead report will be available on the Education Week site. In November 2006, educators Larry Cuban, Sara Hall, Don  Knezek, and Keith Krueger discussed how technology has changed since the first report ten years ago. If you are interested in browsing past reports, the Technology Counts Archive contains them all.

Video Games in Your Classroom: Coming Soon

Video games are used for training and education by business, medical schools, and the military, and teachers have long known that games can motivate learning. Games such as Jeopardy are popular in education, but so far there are few video-type games being used in classrooms. That's probably because teachers see little educational value in most of them. -But a new crop of games is on the horizon, games that will work for K-12 education. Muzzy Lane has a game called Making History that focuses on World War II, and Cisco Systems has three games for ages 8-14 that help students better understand how the Internet works. The Cisco games also target engineering and IT careers, while encouraging girls to head toward careers in math, science, or technology. Interested in putting video-game motivation to work in your classroom? Check out Marc Prenski's Games2train.

Free Complete Access to EdWeek

Until April 15, 2006, the folks at Education Week offer complete and free access to the site. There you'll find 25 years of archives, your own state reports, and the magazine's Web-only content.

Goodbye to Privacy

Teacher to students: Guess what kids? Thanks to the ubiquitous cell phone camera, the age of any kind of privacy is over. These days if you do anything even slightly outrageous, illegal or unconventional in public, or even what you thought was "private," chances are that someone, someone that you don't even know, has captured it on their cell phone and within a short amount of time it will be up online for the whole world to see. (BTW - whole world means friends, parents, school officials, prospective employers, college admissions officers and even voters in a possible future election.) Just ask some of the semifinalist American Idol contestants in the current round whose pictures - and look alike pictures - are cropping up to embarrass them. Does this mean the age of being "a little wild in my youth" is over? Probably not because some kids that may foolishly think this kind of exposure is their "15 seconds of fame." This isn't Big Brother watching - this is Little Brother and he doesn't care who sees. Until kids begin to realize they are all in this no-holds-barred world together, things are only going to get wilder.

Sometimes It's All in the Delivery - iPods and Reading

Sometimes with reluctant readers it is all about the delivery method. So why not try an iPod that can deliver a book in two ways - both by hearing it and seeing it? Now those clever "Choose Your Own Adventure" books are being delivered that way as well as other graphic novels from a vendor called iPREPpress. Check out what else they have available including dictionaries, study guides, encyclopedias, and biographies.

More About iPods and Education

It seems like there's something about iPods and their impact on education almost every day in the popular press. MS/NBC has weighed in with The iPod widens its audience in school with some interesting first person interviews about learning a foreign language. For more information about adding podcasts as a tool in your classroom see the archives of Teaching with Technology.

Life Long Computer Skills

What are life long computer skills? According to usability guru Jakob Nielsen, "There is some value in teaching kids skills they can apply immediately, while they're still in school, but there's more value in teaching them deeper concepts that will benefit them forever, regardless of changes in specific applications". Included in Nielsen's suggested curriculum:

• Search strategies, like forming good queries and judging relevance of results
• Weighing the credibility of online information
• Techniques for dealing with information overload
• Writing hyperlinked online text
• Computer presentation skills (nip bad PowerPoint habits in the bud!)
• Workplace ergonomics
• Debugging -- not the heavy-duty stuff, but the logical process of tracking down errors
• Usability basics, for making informed decisions on a product's ease of use

Says Nielsen: "Teaching life-long computer skills in our schools offers further benefit in that it gives students insights that they're unlikely to pick up on their own. In contrast, as software gets steadily easier to use, anyone will be able to figure out how to draw a pie chart. People will learn how to use features on their own, when they need them -- and thus have the motivation to hunt for them. It's the conceptual things that get endlessly deferred without the impetus of formal education." For more information on theses kinds of skills see the archives of Teaching with Technology

A Photobucket of Free Image Editing Tools

Photobucket, a free video and photo sharing site, is offering free access to Adobe video editing tools online. The video remix and editing technology can be used to combine images and video with captions, bubbles, frames, transitions, music and other effects simply by dragging and dropping desired content. Clips and other content can be reordered, trimmed and split as well. Users can also access more than 2.5 billion publicly-shared images and videos to include in their work. Once done with the enhanced video, users can embed it into any Web page, blog or social network profile by copying and pasting a bit of HTML code. The software offered by Adobe is the "lite" version of the company's editing tools -- a move likely intended to entice users to buy enhanced versions. For more on free photo editing software see Why Not Try Free Photo-Editing Software?

The Effects of Multitasking on Teens

Do your students multitask? What effect does it seem to have on their schoolwork? (We'd love your feedback) Many teachers and parents express astonishment at the range of gadgets and modes of communication that come into play on a school night and say they couldn't do it. Others try to impose a ban. Experts worry about the long-term effects but the genie may well be out of the bottle. Is there a way to teach kids when multitasking is appropriate and useful and/or how to cope?

Note: This blog entry is linked to the Washington Post online. To view the article you will have to register for free.

Save a Laptop from Liquid Damage

We've pointed out helpful info before from the wikiHow site, but if you haven't subscribed to it you might want to at least Bookmark or Favorites How to Save a Laptop from Liquid Damage for future reference. Take a look around the site while you are there. There are lots of help how-tos here  -- some obviously more helpful than others - but think about asking your students to write something for the site. Learning how to write a set of directions is a skill and an art.