Show Me Is a Favorite

At a recent meeting of K-12 tech coordinators, librarians, teachers, and administrators, the free app, Show Me, was touted in several sessions. The app helps you create and share “whiteboard-style” lessons when using iPads.  With Show Me, you can send lessons to students, and your students can create materials as they work with each other. A gallery of lessons is being developed as teachers share what works for them.  Show Me also provides a Video of the Day that gives examples of excellent ideas for use of the app.

To BYOD or Not?

What direction is your school taking when it comes to hardware? Choosing your way isn’t easy, since there are no ready answers. With so many students having access to smart phones, iPods, iPads, laptop computers, and Android devices, BYOD sounds like a good idea. You could go the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) route, but what do you do about those students who don’t have appropriate devices and how do you prepare your teachers for their students using a variety of devices in classrooms? Maybe you don’t require students to bring devices, but you allow them to use theirs in place of the school’s if they wish.  For both economic and personal choice reasons, some schools are developing their own version of BYOD. Then there’s the question of software. What software would they need and who provides it? Perhaps you’ll just use the devices for work on the Internet, communication, and free apps?  With all these devices activated in your school and all the uploading and downloading, can you afford the bandwidth and file storage you’ll need? There are so many questions to answer but not much data to rely upon.

To iPad or Laptop or Lab

Not every school or district views BYOD as the way to achieve one-to-one when it comes to digital devices. Some are opting for iPads in classrooms, while others prefer laptops. Questions arise about these choices as well. Do you assign students to a personal iPad or laptop, or do your have mobile carts so that several classes can use the equipment? Do you transition to one-to-one with all grade levels or do you get started with one or two grade levels at a time? Do personal devices go home with the students? How do you handle broken or lost device issues? Do you have enough bandwidth and file storage? How do you prepare your teachers?

How Teachers Use Tech in Classrooms—According to Students

To be sure, there is an abundance of resources and tech tools online that teachers can use in the classroom or in computer labs. It’s interesting to ask students how their teachers are putting technologies to use. As you would guess, a variety of answers will most likely be forthcoming. You may hear: “We do all kinds of projects —like videos, animations, podcasts, and radio shows—with our computers and iPads.” “All we do with our laptops is look up sites on the Internet and take notes on paper.” “Some of our teachers let us use our cell phones in their lessons, but most make us keep them in our backpacks or lockers.” “I don’t think that every teacher has to use computers in class.” “Interactive whiteboards are fun in some classes and boring in others.” “I know kids are supposed to know lots about tech, but some teachers expect you to know how to do things you don’t know how to do. They should realize that not everyone uses the same apps or software as they do.” “I like it when we connect to other classes around the world.”  —When you listen to your students, what do you hear and what does it mean?

Technology Megatrends

One hundred “global thought leaders” working with the Horizon Project met in January 2012 to talk about research relating to technology and education. They came up with 28 megatrends of which 10 were considered the most important. These megatrends are bringing about significant changes in our world, our interactions, and the way we learn. Although you can read more about the top ten in the New Media Consortium’s Communique´on the Horizon Project, some of the trends include the following:

• People expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want....
• The Internet is becoming a global mobile network....
• The technologies we use today are increasingly cloud-based....
• Legal notions of ownership and privacy lag behind the practices....
• The Internet is constantly challenging us to rethink learning and education, while redefining our notion of literacy.
• There is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools....

Techedge offers information on the megatrends as they relate to young learners and asks, “After Megatrends...What Next?” Some of the solutions suggested to help teachers with tech expectations of their students are: using LiveMinutes for online discussion, Audicity for interviews, ShowMe for “re-imagining the learning process”, UStream for video capture, and Dropbox for file sharing. For additional information, check out the very useful article by Pat LeMay Burr, “What Young Learners Expect and How Technology Delivers”.

Great Software to Look For

Peggy Healy-Stearns’ popular and affordable Community Construction Kit and Diorama Designer will soon be available in wonderfully updated versions. Be on the lookout for when they are announced at Tom Snyder Productions, because they’ll be a great addition to elementary classrooms for the 2012-2013 school year. These are programs that stimulate student creativity and thinking skills by enhancing traditional subjects in the regular school curriculum. You can download sample cutouts of the current versions of Diorama Designer and Community Construction Kit to get an idea of what these programs offer.

Educators, What’s Your Favorite Ed Tech Product?

eSchool News Readers’ Choice Awards is requesting your input to help select the best products for education. You can nominate your favorite until April 20, 2012. Your nomination will help educational technology developers to better understand what type of products work for you.  All you have to do is to click on the link above, name your product and who makes it, briefly explain how you use it and how it has benefitted your students, your school, your district, and/or teachers.

Think Locally About Ed Tech Needs

Maybe you are thinking about purchasing some of the latest technologies for your school or classroom and decide to look for research on the product or methodology.  Chances are, you won’t find it. With the speed of changes in technology, research can’t possibly keep up. Good research takes time (usually years), and if you wait for it, the ed tech world will move on to new products and ideas before you are able to make a decision about what to purchase.

In order to help school leaders with decisions about educational innovation, Laura Devaney, Managing Editor of eSchool News, in her article How Can Research Inform Ed-Tech Decisions?, offers ideas from Stanford’s Larry Cuban, North Carolina State’s Glenn Kleiman, and Harvard’s Chris Dede. Kleiman suggests that schools follow their own research to find what needs improving and what “approach is the best fit for [their] context.”  According to Dede, if school leaders decide to give all students digital devices, they need to remember, whether there is research or not, that good results probably won’t happen without staff support, staff development, and curricular changes. Cuban suggests that the first question school leaders should ask is: “What is the problem to which an iPad or a laptop is the solution?”

The bottom line seems to be that educators can’t expect to find research to justify purchases of technologies, and that even if they did, they may discover that their local needs don’t fit the research. It’s time to ask the right questions locally before seeking answers and spending money.

Haven’t we been saying that one-size-doesn’t-fit-all in education? That’s what Kleiman says as well.

Serif’s Inexpensive, But Highly Effective Software

Serif’s software works well and gets excellent reviews. Besides that, it’s quite inexpensive and all the products, whether for desktop publishing; video, panorama, or art creation; photo editing, Web design, or craft projects, work with the same interface. If you use Windows, Serif products are well worth looking into. The programs do not work with Mac OS. The latest versions of the software products sell for $99, but there are often specials offering them for lower prices. If you don’t need the latest versions, you can get Serif’s desktop publisher, for example, anywhere from about $20-$45 on Amazon.

A Puzzle with Some of the Pieces Missing

It’s a giant puzzle, isn’t it? A puzzle with some of the pieces missing. That’s what it feels like if you are a teacher or school administrator trying to decide which direction to head with curricular materials, methods, and equipment. Looking at what’s available, you’ll find traditional textbooks, online courses complete with management systems, courses that are basically text-based but make use of specific digital resources, apps such as the iBook Author that let your teachers or staff develop their own courses, online curricular content for a portion of a course, software you can purchase for your school server or individual computers, apps for specific learning areas, online experiments. . .  Pulling together what is best for your students is not easy, especially when the puzzle is complicated by the need for digital devices and robust wireless networks.

The Education Week Webinar, Forging the Technology – Curriculum Link might help you get started fitting the pieces of your curriculum together. It’s scheduled for March 1, 2012, but if you can’t make the session you can sign up (it’s free) and review what took place in the seminar anytime within the next six months.