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?

Tech Versus Old-School

It is my contention that technology should be used as often as possible. In class today I had created a vocabulary example sheet for students to model from: I could have printed out a copy and used the overhead projector, but instead I mirrored the document from my iPad onto the screen using AppleTV. This way I could single out the word, the definition, and zoom in on a particular section. Afterwards, the students were to think | pair | share using the defined word, the context it was used in the novel, and a possible darker variation of the word 'derisive.'

I suppose it would have been fine to have the students create a document on the computer and share it with a partner and make comments on each other's papers, but that time is quite a ways off when every student will have an iPad of a laptop. In the meantime, the old-school method of pen and paper will have to suffice for in class assessment.

Also aligned with an in class novel like Of Mice and Men is a film tie-in, such that students can watch the visual representation of the novel they're reading. While this can be an excellent combination, especially for a few of the students who might not have knowledge of visualizing a novel, it's also important to give students a chance to create their own idea of what a character might look like based on the physical and psychological characteristics painted by the novel. This can be done through good old fashioned character maps drawn in class, where students pull information from the novel to create a colorful and complex character.

Technology Integration in Class	No Technology
American/British/Australian vocabulary skype, TodaysMeet, Google Drive	Discussion/assessment of in-class novel journals, group discussion, class publishing
Movie tie-in to in-class novel	Draw concept of character based on traits outlined in novel
Multimedia quiz Google Drive, EDU	Vocabulary concept map
Research author, history and setting of a novel	Write a background of one character from a novel whose history is unknown

Technology is awesome, and it's only going to get cheaper, more accessible, and more integrated, but in the short term there are many students who still have limited access, and technology will fail. For instance, the Internet was down all day due to some obscure electrical part, and this was after the problem was momentarily fixed due to a firmware update. This outage made it impossible to do any online research or to do any activity using the Internet.

A Plan B is always a good idea, no matter how integrated your classroom might be.

The Form of Amazingness for You.

To the Backchannel, Teacherperson!

"The backchannel is everything going on in the room that isn't coming from the presenter," according to the TodaysMeet website.

This sounds like an awesome concept, and considering the example comes from an 8th grade class, amazing. This would take a lot of scaffolding to get the kids to participate in any meaningful way. The ease of posting something inappropriate or off-topic would be too enticing for some students (… and I may have knowledge of that process …)

But that's as far as I got. I couldn't post a third comment (which said something like: I can't post a third comment). Also, once I'd named my "voice," I couldn't go in and create another voice to have a conversation. Maybe the login to the TodaysMeet page is specific to my computer? Such that everyone needs their own device to get a voice? It's very clean and simple. 

According to the unbelievably cool rubric that Jubilee, George and I created, if we were to use TodaysMeet in the classroom to discuss Of Mice and Men, we would be at a midlevel integration into technology, where students are posting on a forum established by the teacher, and responding to other student posts.

This particular tool seems rather acceptable in the strength department. It keeps kids concise because the  posts are Twitter size, or 140 characters. If, like the article says, you establish at the beginning that this is an academic discussion online, the students should respect that and leave the LOLs and the IDKs in another chat. Plus, if the above chat example were streamed to the board students could watch their thoughts float to the screen and be loudly published. In addition, as other students posted, the comment would disappear up the chain of texts, thus prompting students to both respond and come up with new ideas to keep their thought box on the page.

In seeking to improve this idea, I have to ask the question: what's the point? If it's used in the classroom,  and students get to watch their digital discussion live, that's great—it'll inevitably encourage even the quietest students to post a comment in order to "own" the board for a second or two. But what do you do with it once you're done?

I suppose once the discussion simmers down you'd have the students write a paragraph based on the discussion. The whole concept is a nice midway point to get students talking, but I wonder how long it would take to train students how to text academically, rather than colloquially. I can think of a few class clowns who would love to post just a smidgeon of a wrong statement and have it immortalized on the board for 30 seconds.