Tech Analysis

At Santa Barbara Junior High, students have access to computers in the library and the computer lab. However, the computer lab is only accessible through teacher sign-ups, and the library operates on a similar policy. The librarians generally let students walk in with a pass if there are extra computers to use, but mostly the on campus computer access is strangely limited. Considering the Common Core's requirement to implement technology into any curriculum, how are students going to keep up with requirements if teachers are limited in how much time they can lead students with any particular lesson?

Many students are tech savvy, but even the higher-level tech users have trouble following through with assignments. EDU, for example, is incredibly useful for quick assessment quizzes and mini essays during a class unit, but it's only useful so long as the students actually go home and use it. To check for accessibility outside of school, or even at a public library, I queried my content class with a simple Google quiz. The irony of creating a Google Form quiz was I had to print it out and administer it as a hard copy, then input the collected data myself.

I knew if I gave the students the link to take the quiz at home I would have had answers from maybe 10 kids, or about 30 percent of the class. This would have been misleading, however, since the hardcopy results told me that all 29 students have Internet access at home. So why the disparity?

I initially got 25 students to respond to my quiz, even though it was a hardcopy
and due during the same class period. A few stragglers handed the form in during
the next day, but they hadn't answered all the questions.

Several of the kids are on the verge of failing. Many of them go to afterschool homework clubs, thus when they get home they don’t want to sit down at the computer and do more homework. Even the kids who were working above average and had all the classwork done and were mentoring their fellow students had still failed to share a Google Doc with me after a week of prodding them during and after every class. Most of the lack of shared docs was to save face.

A few girls over the last day or two admitted they didn’t know how to share a document. This is strangely disheartening, since I had shown them on the big screen two days in a row how to share a doc. Yet even after multiple examples, they still didn’t know how. This is probably due to not having a screen in front of them to actually do the process while I showed them, so that once they got home they forgot the steps. Finally a handful of boys and girls came up and begged me to show them again, and I used the two iMacs in the class to walk them through the process near the end of class.

Even though most students still hadn't done something as

simple as share a Google Doc with me, they answered that 

they would prefer to answer on EDU.

This made me quite proud, because after only two weeks of my takeover, they felt comfortable enough to admit that they really didn’t know how to share the doc, even though they had said yes. Yes means no. This was even more telling because a majority of the students would prefer to do an assignment digitally if given the option. The problem with this scenario refers back to my intro, in that there are computers, but there is no computer class. Students have access to tech at home, but for a good portion of them, no one is showing them how to actually function on the computer.

Several teachers informed me that the previous superintendent of schools wasn’t into technology, and  therefore not only was there an insufficient amount of computers, there wasn’t anybody teaching the kids how to use the things. Now we have the push to assess our students with technology through technology, and many of the students know what they want to accomplish, but don’t have the technological dexterity to accomplish those goals.

This is a matter of students playing semantics. The form was answered via a hardcopy, 

so how else would they have gained access to it? I filled that in, but the other answers 

the students had filled in, either indicating a sense of humor or a sense of confusion.

It’s really frustrating to see a lab full of beautiful iMacs, but have to book it three months in advance to get it for one day, then get in there and have a 50/50 chance of the Internet going down and wasting 45 minutes of the student’s time. In addition to the nearly clichéd faultiness is the aforementioned lack of dexterity on a computer. Nearly every student in school is tech savvy, whether their ability be on a smart phone, a game console or a computer at home. Their lack of sharing something as simple as a Google Doc is not an attempt to rebel against the teacher, the school, or their grades; it’s a lack of training.

I hope with the Common Core moving into the curriculum, with its emphasis on technology, that districts, the state and local administration will find ways to reinvigorate student knowledge of computers and their many uses. Growing up we had computer and typing class: now, at SBJH anyway, they have neither. It’s not fair to the kids and it’s not fair to the teachers, both of whom are hamstringed by lofty rhetoric with no way to implement the ideas.

Reflection

I’ve always been a part of the tech #nerdfarm, and it’s only been a matter of finances that has kept me from keeping up with the proverbial Jones’s. So while I consider myself fairly informed of the new and cool, I am now also much more aware of the strange grey legality of educational data systems such as EDU.

When I discovered that EDU was less than a year old, and already the district is adopting Illuminate, all while still merged with Aeries, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of charlatan was playing the well-intentioned administrators against each other and selling program after program to an unsuspecting audience.

Recently, a few members of my PLC at Santa Barbara Junior High complained about an email the admin had sent out, which detailed students on their rosters who had missing assignments and therefore were on the verge of failing. This information had come from the admin sitting and pouring over the EDU data. Since my master’s question involved analyzing some EDU data, and after asking several of the tech specialists in the district how this can be facilitated, I know that analyzing that data is done manually. There is no magic button to sort female from male students, analytics of all seventh grade students with grades below a C-, or a simplified chart of missing assignments and what students haven’t turned in that work.

One discovery I made without even looking for the answer was that poor grades are directly correlated to missing work. If students get in all work, even if the general content is merely satisfactory, students will get at least a C (give or take). My point is that EDU has that information embedded, but it requires hours of manually sorting through this data to get answers. What concerns me is the admin desperately want this data, and this is why there are currently three data systems being bandied about in the system.

As we read about in class, the concern over privacy is a legitimate issue, as administrators, principals in particular, almost have carte blanche to allocate funds toward whatever functionality they feel will best serve their school. While systems like EDU are system wide and are therefore vetted by a much bigger braintrust than any one principal, just seeing the end results with individual schools it’s apparent that those in charge of buying data systems have no idea what it really does prior to signing the check.

That same article stated “school districts across the country are increasingly adopting digital technologies that collect details about students’ achievements, activities, absences, disabilities and learning styles in an effort to tailor instruction to the individual child. The hope is that personalized, data-driven education will ultimately improve students’ graduation rates and career prospects.” Personalized data, if gathered correctly, couldn’t possibly do anything but help teachers and admin—and parents—help kids become better learners and citizens. Data collecting is what good teachers have been doing for decades, centuries even, all without the aid of a good data system.

They have collected attendance, watched their behavior, analyzed their work, and interpreted that data to communicate better with any given child. Now it’s become easier to sort out the little details, and teachers can merge toward the role of uncertified psychologists to better serve the kids in their classroom. Yet the people providing these data systems and mandating their use are also unlicensed lawyers, signing contracts for giant data systems without reading the small print.

“New research on how school districts handle the transfer of student data to companies, for instance, has found that administrators have signed contracts without clauses to protect personal details like children’s contact information, age ranges or where they wait for school buses every morning. [italics are mine].”

Does this mean the admin are ignorant? No, they’re desperate, and constantly seeking quick fixes, all while the greasy charlatans make money coming and going. Clint Eastwood showed how it was done in A Fistful of Dollars. Maybe during the next district-wide meeting that movie should be mandatory viewing so the admin can learn from their mistakes.

My viewpoint on all of this technology was most subverted by the number of students who are incredibly efficient at typing their papers into Google Docs—some are quicker at thumbing their rough drafts onto tiny little screens than they are typing them onto a real computer. This is both the new generation adapting to what is most readily available to them, and a sad statement that the school system is well behind proper training of the next generation of youth.

Typing on a standard Qwerty keyboard is a dying art form, and yet it is one of the foundational skills stated in the school curriculum starting in fourth grade. By sixth grade students should have at a minimum a rudimentary ability to type 20 to 30 words a minute, using proper hand technique. Sadly, close to 100 percent of the current crop of students have no idea how to type on a traditional keyboard, and that percentage goes all the way to seniors in high school.

I’ve talked to parents who scoff at the ability to type—they don’t see it as a useful tool. Students adopt this mentality and prove their scorn through their deft use of smartphones to type in their documents. Given, with the rapid (rabid?) rise of tablets into the classroom, the keyboard is a relic, and most people are quicker at pecking or thumbing than they are at typing. If this is a trend, however disheartening, is it something educators should just resolve themselves to?

This simple argument for typing is a symptom of a bigger problem: a disconnect between the new and the old. If the current argument holds, there will be an entire generation of college students unable to type in the traditional sense, and they will be in the computer lab typing their term papers on their smart phones while checking their Facebook status on the screen next to them.

Thank you for the class. This was typed on a standard keyboard.

Muffin Party

Yet another prime example of my stunning ability to co-opt other people's art and pictures and pretend I'm a really good artist. The cupcakes (minus the warren grass) were traced from a simple picture of 'muffins with no frosting,' while Haystack was taken and modified from deviantart.com. 

From iTunes App store: Hello Cupcake!. Become a leader of All the Pretty Cupcakes. Collaboration, and an edible assessment which brings the elements of story to the class with the result being a room full of students eating characters, masticating conflict, chewing on plot twists, and the creators of the cupcakes blending all of these elements together into one big plate of culinary timelines and handheld chocolate covered similes.

A big batch of mixed metaphors for all. It's a stretch on the "game" category, but anything can be made fun, challenging, and border on bribery.

No. Seriously. The cupcake app has all sorts of templates and such to use, but if students could decorate cupcakes as artifacts to their books, or even create themes, settings, characters; the possibilities are endless. Plus, if you limit the per-student cupcake count to say, 10 or 12, in a class of 27 students, you'd get 270 cupcakes—enough for a complete and utter sugar coma!

The picture above depicts cupcakes as the rabbit warren, and while I only included Haystack to represent the rabbits, you could include as many as you like, or just the protagonists, or the lesser rabbits, etc. The challenge, especially if you limited the cupcake count, would be how close to the novel's theme, setting, characters or whatever a student could get through cupcake depiction. 

Shelton's Period 6 English 8 CP

May The Tech Be With You

EDU 2.0 is used throughout the Santa Barbara district, and the more I use it the more effective it seems. Oddly, many teachers are barely skimming the potential of the program, while others have blended their classrooms and regularly have students take quizzes, communicate with the blog option, and keep parents up to date with news and other items from the class and the school.

Useful and colorful at the same time.

At its simplest level it's used as a grade book, but with the ability to incorporate Skype, Google Forms, and provide full analytics on student lessons, including both teacher-created and default Rubric forms from all disciplines and from college level courses, it's somewhat astonishing that more teachers aren't merging their entire curriculum into the program. It also has a plug and play option to map lessons and units into the Common Core ... and if you get confused it even has a searchable Help Center.

One aspect of this tech integration is the number of students who still don't have ready access to devices.

Totally cool: a built in CSU writing rubric.

I've talked to several students who are either failing or are about to because their teacher assigns multiple assignments digitally, many of them on EDU, and the student gets zeros because he doesn't have access. I asked if the teacher had assessed the class for digital accessibility, and the student just laughed, saying he couldn't take the quiz because it was online—and he doesn't have a computer at home.

While that student was partially being lazy, considering that schools have computer labs, computers in the library, and public libraries also have digital access, the problem is real. Most students won't go out of their way to be one of a very few who have to use the computer lab as their primary source of internet access. Further, the internet, as superb as the whole concept is, still falters on a regular basis. A teacher in my PLC had a 20 minute online intro for her lesson to ready the students for the play of Anne Frank's diary, but three minutes into The Secret Annex online, the internet decided to take the day off.

Back to the hardcopy.

The amount of data that EDU 2.0 provides, if used correctly, could allow teachers to manipulate their lesson plans for slower and faster learners. Plus, with incorporation of Google Forms and other frequent assessments that students might even consider fun because they're quick and online, the teacher could get regularly feedback as to the student's comprehension and enjoyment of any particular lesson.

The App Map

It's absolutely crazy how many apps there are, and quite sad how many of them are rather funky in their usability. After scrolling through hundreds of them, these three appealed on several levels. Read on.

Total Recall—Mind Map is a brainstorming app that allows for unlimited canvas size, to truly explore your thoughts. 

Not a map created in Total Recall, but instead a clever visionary paraphrase. A paravision?

Maps like this are used many times during an exploration of a text, and some students really don't like the process. For the more spatial learners this would be a fun way to explore the theme of a play or short story, rather than the standard pen and paper method.

Room Arranger gives students the ability to create a floor plan of their apartment or a whole house. This would allow spatial learners to get a better idea of where the characters are in a story. For instance, in Of Mice and Men, the bunkhouse is a key setting, and students could build the bunkhouse based on the descriptions in the text. 

We'll be reading The Diary of Anne Frank (the play) soon, and with eight people hiding out in a setting no bigger than 800 square feet, students could get a very real sense of the limitations on space that Miss Frank and her people were subjected to. Of course, you have to be sensitive to the reality that many students live in similar conditions with their families. This would actually allow them to relate to the story more, and once they've created the physical space in this app, the connection will be complete.

iTunes U I cannot over emphasize how huge this resource is. There are hundreds of lectures, lesson ideas and collaborative and differentiated courses. As an example, a course that I subscribe to, Comm 2221: Writing and Editing for News, posted an assignment called a Police Reporting Exercise.

The assignment gives you some facts, a deadline, and a source you're supposed to 'call' to fill in the gaps in the details. The finished piece is posted to a class blog.

If nothing else, iTunes U is a source for lesson ideas. If you take it further and students have access to a device, they can follow some prompts as to what "class" they need to find. This could be multi layered, as they might do the assignment from iTunes U, but post the answer on EDU, then discuss their answers and the concept in class the next day.

Endless opportunities.

Digital Citizens

A truly 1:1 digital classroom is still a ways off, but it will definitely become a reality. With iPads slowly integrating toward all classrooms, and the more economically accessible Google Chromebooks, all students from all socioeconomic backgrounds will have access to state-of-the-art technology in the next 5 to 10 years. That might seem like a long time if you focus only on the 2014-15 school year, and think that there will still be hundreds of students in a district that won't have full access to technology all of the time, but considering just a few short years ago only the teacher had access to technology, it is a monumental leap of progress.

However, monitoring the use of this technology introduces multiple levels of classroom management that will be new and overwhelming for a lot of teachers. First, students must become digital citizens, meaning they know they are accountable for all of their activity when they have devices in front of them. The Social Media article mentioned that all the students had to delete their Instagram accounts as a punishment for posting while in class. This seems a bit severe. What were the pictures? Is there a way to have students use these media sites to promote the lesson?

Second, the Wired Classrooms post seemed to have a keen grasp on holding students accountable for the worth of electronics, and how they need to use it wisely and stay on task. Unless students are trained, laptops and iPads won't hold any more value than a textbook or their binder: they have to know how to handle the devices so they last for years instead of months. I really liked having designated students responsible for distributing either laptops or iPads within the classroom.

As an adult user and teacher who has been using electronics for years, I still get excited to use my laptop, or search something on my iPad, or do something as simple as text on my phone. The younger generation, even though electronics are synonymous with their daily lives, must also get that same rush to feel 'connected' to somebody or something through their digital device. Unfortunately this excitement can lead to broken screens, damaged keyboards, and snapping and sending Instagram posts at inappropriate times.

Digital devices are at the simplest level just another textbook in the classroom—just another tool to facilitate the learning. Just as the current batch of hardcopy textbooks must last for years (sometimes for far too many years) the digital devices must be handled with respect and care and with the knowledge that future students must have access to them as well. A huge part of the distractions in class are from students who don't have access to the same technology at home. For them an iPad or laptop is astonishing.

For all students, the best way to create digital citizens in a class would encompass a full class discussion on rights and wrongs, assigning numbered devices to students so everyone is held accountable for the sustained quality of any one device, and perhaps creating a list of rules to abide by, such that every student could hold themselves and their peers accountable for acceptable use.

Once that is established, let the fun begin.

From Facetime to Facecrime

Salon.com is an independent web-based news source along the same vein as the Huffington Post, Slate, and a slough of other muck-raking sites that have extremely detailed and well-researched articles that publish information that mainstream journalism either can’t or won’t do because of corporate control, shareholder paranoia, and advertising influence.

The author (Anthony M. Townsend) of the following information, which I have cleverly paraphrased for you, excerpted the information from his own book, entitled Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. This is his first published piece on the site, but it is indicative of the kinds of stories to be found. Salon was among the first sites (in 2006) to publish the torture pictures that came out of human rights scandal of Abu Ghraib that started in 2003. 

So what do torture and omnipresent digital surveillance have to do with teaching middle and secondary school children? The topics are timely, worldly, and if lessons, modules and units were to be crafted from information like this it would be a cross-collaborative effort involving math, history, English, physics, language, psychology … should I go on? While the Big Question for this week’s blog was to analyze the site and the author, the story that follows, which, as I mentioned, is paraphrased and lightly attributed, was extremely interesting in terms of the global reach and the not-so-subtle methods of giant corporations like Cisco merging with governments to gain a huge, unprecedented amount of control over civilians. Let it be known that any and all information that follows is derived from the article, save for the final few paragraphs—which are from little ol’ me.

"They" know where you are, what you're doing, and how much coffee you've had.

In 2002 the Pentagon launched a datamining program called Total Information Awareness (TIA), which was headed by Vice Admiral John Poindexter—the same man who had been convicted (it was later reversed) of lying to Congress in 1990 about the Iran-Contra affair. The program was a Defense Department baby designed to gather a centralized database of every government, commercial and private interaction on a geopolitical scale, under the pretense of seeking patterns of terrorist activity. Congress shut it down when it was determined that the same people it was hoping to find could use the information to profit from their crimes—“a virtual market for trading predictions.”

Pattern-matching algorithms have supplanted this relatively secret government program in the form of a fiber-optic feedstock that traces our every move in real time.

It’s called a cell phone.

One such system, called Footpath, recorded via network triangulation shopper demographics in California and Virginia malls in 2011. The data is used to determine retail store rental prices, and stores can place merchandise according to the pathways that shoppers tend to take once inside the store. Shoppers are given the option to turn off their phone and thus not contribute to the demographic, but otherwise the system collects your every move, pause, and transaction.

Most everyone heard of law enforcement requesting subscriber information from Verizon and AT&T, requests which Congress objected to, but off of American soil in 2010 American company Cisco began a collaboration with China to install 500,000 video cameras to watch the 6 million people living in Chongqing. By current digital costs, collecting a year’s worth of footage will cost $300 million. This “invasion of privacy” will play out differently depending on what government is in control: autocratic like the Middle East, authoritarian like China, or the legalistic mumbo jumbo of the American system.

Not surprisingly, the article conjures the dystopia of George Orwell’s “1984,” specifically to reference Cisco’s place in China’s Songdo, a civilization with two-way video screens meshed with biometrics. “It’s a future where police, bureaucrats, employers, and hackers may look out from every screen we look into.” Keep in mind also, that as Congress slaps the hand of the translucent data mining of TIA, clandestine black budget programs like the National Security Agency take its place—using the same technology.

As whistleblowers expose the conspiracies, it’s just a matter of moving to the next building to continue the process. In the continuing effort to track terrorism, which by association is a clever paraphrase of tracking every living person on the planet, our personal data is no longer personal, but a direct extension of what Amazon started years ago: a personal shopping experience with products and destinations geared precisely for you, at any given moment.

We all have cell phones, and a growing portion of the socioeconomically disadvantaged have hand-me-down phones. Everyone can be tracked and catalogued. Privacy advocates and watchdog organizations will continue to fight for what remains of our perceived privacy, but the indifferent complacency of the standard populace—meaning normal civilians who have no history of wrongdoing and would blanche at the prospect of jaywalking—will continue to be catalogued.

People who don’t have terrorist friends are being placed on the demographic wheel along with the supposed enemies, all to create one massive database of the human civilization. Once the information dissemination gurus determine that the information is no longer confidential, it’ll be the greatest census ever undertaken by man. Future generations will be privy to an unbelievable amount of information when it comes to looking at history books.

And if you aren’t doing anything wrong, is it really all that terrible to be catalogued and datamined? Shopping is easier, travel plans are determined in advance, our beverages of choice will pop up on our phones with a 10 percent off coupon as we walk by a coffee shop. If we’re law abiding citizens, who cares how much information they have on us?