Typing with Thumbs and the “Wrong Fingers”

As often as teens message, you’d think they’d have really fast typing skills, even with their thumbs. Some type extremely fast this way, but many, when it comes to typing reports, papers, and projects, struggle. Usually the thumb-touch method is confined to smart phones and smaller digital devices, but many teens have developed their own unorthodox typing styles, often using just a few fingers when typing on full keyboards.

Parents agonize over slow typing speeds and urge schools to put traditional typing back into the curriculum. Common Core standards call for keyboarding, but to be sure, it is difficult to break teens of typing methods they’ve become accustomed to. Janqui Murray (Askateacher.wordpress.com) says that she teaches using correct fingers but that it’s a constant battle with her students who excel at their own techniques. Most students, however, according to Murray, need help and benefit from learning to type properly.

Don’t Forget Grammar Girl

When Grammar Girl’s podcast first came out, we looked to her to help us and our students with grammar. Maybe, we even have her book in our classrooms and offices. The good news is that Grammar Girl, Mignon Fogarty is still around reminding us about such grammar goodies as there’s a difference between i.e. and e.g., how to know when to use affect and effect, and that “different from” is preferred over “different than”. You’ll find her on iTunes, on Facebook, you can subscribe to her newsletter, you can order her audio books, and you can access her Quick and Dirty Tips online. Did you know that Grammar Girls says it’s okay to use sentence fragments on Twitter—if the meaning is clear.

Texting Parents

Lisa Neilsen, in SmartBlog on Education, gives us four ideas for connecting with parents through texting. These include use of services such as Remind101, Mobile Commons, ClassPager, Twitter, and Poll Everywhere. Remind101 and Mobile Commons are for mass messaging and are perfect for alerting parents about school closures and scheduled events. Messaging through ClassPager can be used for messaging to students and parents for homework, links to resources, and notices. Even if parents have not joined Twitter, they can receive tweets by following their children’s school and/or teacher messages. Poll everywhere is one of the “voting systems” you can use to survey parents’ opinions/ideas about school events, curricular offerings, summer reading, and/or other input you may want from parents. Neilsen’s blog entry gives links to the services and to selected schools that have put the services to work.

Social Media and Your Employment Status

What do you do when students ask to “Friend” you on social media sites? Are you careful about what you post through social networking and/or what you text and email? Even if you make a “Page” private, are racial, violent, or sexist comments all right? What type of photos have you posted online? Have you answered a digital communication in anger?

Concerned about teachers as negative role models, the National Education Association (NEA) created “Social Networking Nightmares”, which includes teacher comments like this questionable message to a student: “You’re a retard, but I love you.” The courts have ruled that teachers do not have absolute First Amendment rights and, just because posts may be made when not in school, teachers are still accountable. The New Jersey board of education has posted a Code of Conduct for teachers and staff, which includes items that relate to use of social networking in school, harassment, defamatory statements, confidential information, violence, sexually graphic posts, etc.

Texting Awareness

Danielle Veo wanted to find a unique way to raise funds for the hospital that is helping her 11-year-old sister, who is suffering from a rare immune disorder. She came up with the idea to call for a NO TEXTING DAY. Although Danielle created the day as a fundraiser, she realized that such a day would help everyone put down their phones and spend time talking face-to-face.  She’s hoping people will be inspired to get going with more direct communication.  After reading about Danielle’s project, I checked online to see what others were doing to bring awareness to problems related to texting like lack of direct conversation, texting during class, texting while driving, and obsessive texting. There are pledges to be signed, videos showing the dangers of texting, studies on excessive texting, and texting guidelines. Not much seems to be working, since today, teens are texting more than ever. The average is reported to be about 60 texts per day, with girls sending more messages than boys.

Multitasking Lowers IQ

According to researchers at Kings College of London “constant exposure to e-mail and other multitasking-friendly technology temporarily lowers IQ by 10 points–or about as much as skipping a night’s sleep and more than twice as much as smoking marijuana.” Hallowell’s book, CrazyBusy, suggests that multitasking with texting, emailing, tweeting, networking, and such is like “playing tennis with two balls.” Researchers at the University of California studied a group of professional people. It seemed that they could only remain on a task for about eleven minutes before they were “called” by some sort of digital messaging. After that, it took them twenty-five minutes to get back on task. Market research indicates that company workers waste 2.1 hours of work a day because of multitasking.  Dr. Hallowell says that with so much to do, so much information, so much “blabber” and multitasking all of us look like we have ADD. Consider how all this relates to our students, who are multitasking even more than most of us. The answer is not to unplug our students and ourselves, since multitasking is part of our world today, but instead to learn to use our tech tools wisely.

Is It Good for Our Students and Us to Be “Wired”?

According to Joan O’C. Hamilton’s article, Separation Anxiety in the Stanford magazine, we might be getting “way too much of a good thing” with our access to digital technologies and digital worlds.  Is “accelerated interaction” good for us? Some say that adding the excitement of video games to education and business stimulates learning and productivity, but others fear that being constantly wired to others and digital activities may result in serious consequences. How do we keep the real and the virtual separated? How do our students distinguish between actual friends and their hundreds of online “friends”?  While multitaskers may seem to be extremely proficient, are they? Probably not, according to a National Academy of Sciences study. Instead of accomplishing more, “heavy multitaskers are actually prone to distractions and irrelevant information and perform worse on tests designed to measure their ability to focus and successfully switch among tasks.” As we attempt to do more and more faster and faster, David Levy, professor at the Information School of the University of Washington explains, “We lose the life-giving dimension of being in the moment.” What does all this mean in our classrooms? With students used to a fast-paced digital world and with mobile technologies and social networks providing learning opportunities, how do we make sure that our students have the down time they need to absorb, think about and appreciate, what they are learning?

PBS Presents “Digital Media: New Learners of the 21st Century”

Digital Media: New Learners of the 21^st Century will be presented as a one-hour documentary featuring cutting-edge education and cognitive research related to use of digital media and interactive practices in schools and how these practices and “ignite...students’ curiosity and ingenuity” while helping them learn to work collaboratively with other students all over the world. The premiere will air on February 13,^, 2011, but the  documentary will be available on-demand at http://video.pbs.org/video/1767314964/ for a limited time after the premiere. For addition information about on demand, go to National Productions and Mobile Digital Arts, the organization that produced the video for PBS.

Digital Generation Brains: Do They Work in School?

Since the evolution of Sesame Street and its engaging, fast-paced television learning, educators have wondered how classroom teachers can possibly compete with what’s enveloping student minds beyond school. Today the problem is not only beyond school, but in school as well. Keeping students from using digital devices for texting and networking isn’t easy; nor is keeping their minds on school studies. New York Times writer Matt Richtel, in his piece Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction, discusses time he spent with students and staff at Woodside High School, California, where principal David Reilly says he’s “trying to take back [student] attention from the Blackberries and video games” and “to a degree, I’m using technology to do it.” In the school there are now Chinese language classes taught via iPad and audio production classes. Reilly hopes to capture the attention of students who can’t seem to focus on schoolwork because they are too involved with digital activities that offer “instant gratification.” A 14-year-old admitted sending and receiving 27,000 text messages a month, while others are up late into the morning hours on school nights playing video games, social networking, and working on digital movies. Not all educators and researchers agree that adding more tech is the way to challenge today’s students to learn, and research studies cited in the article suggest that video games hamper sleep and seem to “override” what students have studied.  Multitasking doesn’t work, and the brain appears to need downtime, not constant activity, to digest what it learns. Although there are excellent points tackled in this article that all educators must think about, the answers are still waiting. The questions remain: (1) Is the answer good teaching, whether tech is used or not, or (2) are some students so intensely involved in their digital lives that they are not able to focus no matter how effective the teacher?

Surviving Text-Free

Can students go two days without texting and online chatting?  Can college students? Probably. But it’s not easy. Riverdale Country School in the Bronx tried it for two days.  Students found that even if they wanted to keep with the program, they’d forget. When asked about how they felt, they said they really wanted to text and said they learn to appreciate the convenience of this method of communication. They also found that a text-free Sunday, for example, was relaxing because they didn’t feel they had to video chat, check their Facebook page, or respond to all those messages that come in every day. One said, “I had to look for things to do.” While the Riverdale students seemed to survive no-texting or chatting without problems, in a similar experiment at the University of Maryland, researchers found students displaying “withdrawal” symptoms “similar to those of drug addicts going cold turkey.