Going back to the problem at hand, the question that kept me up last night is one with a very direct simplicity, but one that very quickly begs many more questions. This last year my graduate project partner and I have successfully designed, implemented, and reflected on a project that we hoped would lead K-12 students to not just a greater understanding of global issues, but more importantly, to a sense of greater duty or obligation to rectifying the inequities in our world; fighting poverty, preserving the environment, promoting gender equality, etc. The U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals were our template for what an active global citizen should be striving for; the goals that not only they should be informing themselves and others about, but also working towards with both offline and online action.

Over the next three weeks we’ve been asked to “dream big”. To determine, based on our findings, how we could take our pilot projects and transform them into full-blown proposals for serious funding. The question at hand then, is not just “what the world cares about” but also “why”, and “how” should that empathy be manifested.

I’m getting a bit long winded here, but the question that is forming is how do we effectively leap from a successful model of service-learning, and peer education (which my partner and I feel we have achieved through our project), and make the jump to youth leadership development, and full blown civic activism? Questions are a great place to start, and an excellent way to collect data, provided that you ask the right questions in the right way. But we’re “dreaming big” about the steps after those questions. We’re trying to connect those questions to youth development programs, to large U.N. databases for information acquisition, and ultimately, trying to push people towards a reality in which they don’t just ask questions about how to care about humanity, but what they can do to ensure humanity is bettered by their actions.

Technology is not the answer…it’s merely a tool. It can be a wonderfully effective tool, but like so much else in teaching, it is limited by the questions we ask, and how we ask them. It is limited by the examples we set, and the behaviors we model as educators. We have to find a way to connect individuals to individuals, without the technology clouding, masking, or watering down the feelings, emotions, and experiences that connection brings between two human beings.

We need to connect facts to daily realities, personal experiences, and elicit emotion before we can seriously ask the world to care.

If you have another application for creating digital storybooks on the iPod Touch platform let me know, as I’d love to have some alternatives. Otherwise, please feel free to critique my video work, as I’d like to start doing some more video previews and reviews, but really don’t want them to stink

Even though absolutely free networks will be going away (which will actually be great in getting rid of a lot of spammer networks), the new pricing models are awesome! For only $20 a month, they will be offering “Ning Plus”, which includes several services that would normally cost over $50 using the old model of paid services. Additionally, non-profits and other school-centric sites have an option of the “Ning Mini” service, which would allow them to keep their networks up and running for a paltry $20 a YEAR! Granted, those networks will only be able to support 150 members, but any network of sufficient size should easily be able to generate sponsorships and or donations or grant monies to pay for the $20 a month Plus plan (I manage to keep a 300 member wiki site going thanks to our local education foundation’s grant program).

Suffice it to say, this is great news for many people who less than a month ago were busy clogging Twitter feeds and Google Docs with huge lists of alternative tools for creating your own social network, discussing the best way to export user data from Ning, and generally spreading doom across the Internet. Not perfect news, but it’s far from the disaster it could have been.

Get the full details over at Ning’s official announcment of the New Plans, Features, and Service coming in July!

NASA oil slick imagery in Google Earth

The imagery available in Google Earth once again manages to trump other still imagery found on the web, but more importantly adds an element of scale in comparison to video found on television and web news sites. Watching video of the oil leaking up from the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico and the ongoing clean-up efforts is great visual media, but I’ve always found it’s hard to give students a good sense of scale from video. Having the huge oil slick viewable in Google Earth where you could then using the measuring tool to estimate it’s area, and then compare it to surrounding land features gives students a much better idea of just how devastating the problem is. You could even compare the size of the oil slick to the size of your own community, county, or region, again using tools provided in Google Earth, and could generate some great questions.

Yazoo Tornado & Haiti in Google Earth

Also of interest is the use of the Historical Imagery Tool to get a time-lapsed perspective of the Haitian earthquake damage and Yazoo tornado in Mississippi. While you have to download an extra KML file for the tornado images, it’s quite startlingly to see the amount of destruction when viewed in context of time. I’ve seen certain construction sites and large structures be “built” in Google Earth as an imagery update will replace what was once a construction site with a finished building, but it’s another thing entirely to see the opposite happen.

The images from Haiti make for a great discussion about the human impact, as a city park is slowly overtaken by squatters and a miniature tent-city pops up by those that have lost their homes. Anyone teaching a course on world events or global studies should definitely make use of this resource.

Images: Google Earth Blog

This does seem like a dramatic turn of events, but something really powerful has happened in the education world, for which Ning has been a great springboard.  Educational networking, however, is now more powerful than one company’s services alone.  The road may not be completely smooth, but we will figure this out together.

-Steve Hargadorn

Indeed, something powerful has been happening in the education world. Increasing numbers of less than tech-savvy educators have been joining social networks, creating personal learning networks, and have begun to collaborate with their much more tech-savvy peers online thanks to simple free services like Ning. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to launch into a rant decrying the swelling ranks of technology refugees that join twitter only to make a few dozen half-hearted tweets before giving it up, or accidentally sign up for the sme website twice because they forgot their username from the first time. Many of these people educators are my colleagues, and my friends. Many of them are highly successful veteran teachers that make my efforts to instruct seem like a college intern’s attempts at his first solo week. The point is that we, as a community of educators using technology, have drifted far from the more “techie roots” of self-taught programming, web-domain management, and open-source manipulating “geeks”. The majority of our community is now “users” and “consumers” rather than “architects” and “dreamers.”

Which of course, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We need consumers, an audience if you will, to validate the work we do. And to abide by an old adage, “too many cooks spoils the broth.” The growing ranks of educators using free social networking sites, social bookmarking tools, and signing up for automagically created, hosted, and managed blogs has sky-rocketed in the past few years, and that’s a good thing. However, along the way, we’ve lost a lot of what made it so magical to begin with; individuals trying to teacher themselves simple HTML, reverse engineer PHP-scripts, and take ownership of the entire process of creation, not just the product they create.

My brother is a mechanic, and since I got a little geeky there, I’ll use a simple analogy. I own a car; I drive it everyday, get the oil changed religiously, wash it…..occasionally. But I’d be stuck if I had to replace the brake lines (thanks Jon!), or rebuild the transmission. I have a basic understanding of how it all works, but I would be lost trying to build my own car (or even do simple repairs) myself. And that’s where we are with this Ning situation; people reacting almost immediately with cries of “give me a new service to sign up for, and make it FREE!” They don’t understand how “the car” even works, let alone understand how it was built. A shame really, when there are many freely available tools (Elgg, WordPress, etc.) with which to build your own social networks. It’s as if too many people either don’t have the time, or feel they have the knowledge to do something as daunting as setting up their own social network.

Which is silly considering how easy it is to setup your own database-driven, plugin ready website today. This blog is powered by WordPress, which I self-installed on my own domain. I didn’t have to know a single line of code to do it; 5 years ago, I signed up for a webhost (dreamhost.com), got an account, paid to register my domain name, and they installed it for me with a click of the button. Yes, I pay for the webhosting (about $120 a year), but I have complete control over my blog; I can upload and change themes, I can install ANY plugin I want (try doing that at Edublogs), I can directly edit the code on my site (if I was daring enough) and I have much more control over this website than I will ever have with even the premium Ning network that I help manage. I know “how this car works.” Sure, I still can’t build one from scratch myself, but I’ve learned a lot trying to keep this “vehicle” from swerving off the road, and because of that I feel fully confident that should my Ning network go up in smoke, I could recreate something simliar, possibly better, on my own using freely available tools. I wouldn’t need to go find a new service to signup for, and I’m glad that there were a few tweets offering up many open source solutions for creating your own network rather than rely on another service.

We have a HUGE network of educators that we interact with everyday, with varying levels of technological know-how, but we’ve moved further away from a lot of the “home-brewed” sites and adventures that made the Internet so much fun in the mid-90s. We’ve come to rely on others to provide us services that might vaguely fit our needs, without wanting to “get our hands” dirty with the technical side of creating, managing, and maintaining online networks. Perhaps I’m a bit jaded though. My Master’s Program is built around educators developing a working knowledge of Ruby on Rails, one of the most popular open-source set of programming tools to create web applications (social networks, media sharing, etc.). I’ve spent the last 12 months learning how to build “the car” that helps us navigate the streets of the Internet. I’m not advocating that every educator take on a Computer Science degree in their spare time (when we have spare time that is), and I realize that I could very well be coming off as a bit of a curmudgeon here.

The truth of the matter is, we are living in a time when the amount of resources, materials, and other educators that we can tap into is like no other time before it. It’s incredible to be able to connect with other teachers from around the world on a daily basis just by typing 140 characters. The number of great ideas that are shared via blogs, twitter, and other networks is staggering; I encounter daily the sparks of great ideas that could easily consume a person’s lifetime if followed through to full fruition.

In fact, I saw one last night. Some enterprising educator decided to create an ad hoc collaborative group to quickly compile a list of alternatives to Ning. It was brilliant, the document contained several examples of free services, open-source, DIY alternatives, with fantastically insightful comments describing the quick comparison between Ning and the alternatives. There were micro-reviews, links, and several pages worth of great information. It was  21st century educator’s dream! People, responding to a problem had spontaneously joined together (via online tools), and in less than one day’s time had assembled a pretty impressive document for creating free social networks for education…..and that’s when everything went horribly wrong.

Someone decided that this was such a brilliant idea (because I think it was), that they would add even more “cooks” to the pot. The more voices, the better the process, right?

WRONG! This is where education gets a lot of things right when it comes to ideas, but lately we’ve been using technology as though we really don’t understand how it works (which a great deal many of us don’t as I surmised earlier). Within a few minutes, the link to the Google Doc where these bright, eager educators had been collaborating was tweeted and retweeted ad-infinitum, inviting who knows how many hundreds or thousand of people to come collaborate with them. By the time I clicked on the link to jump in and offer up some ideas, there were well over 400+ simultaneous users on one Google Doc, and you can guess what happened then; my web-browser choked, my computer became unresponsive, and within just a few clicks of the keys I received an error from Google Docs. Being a person who isn’t easily thwarted by a simple error message, I clicked the little “x” on the error message and pushed onward. Only to be greeted by another error, and another.

Now, I had a feeling I knew this was going to happen when I clicked on the link. I mean, come on, an open invitation to collaborate on a “hot button” educational issue? That’s a recipe for disaster, and it was. I know this, because I saw it first hand at the MACUL 2010 closing keynote, when Hall Davidson invited every attendee in the session to collaborate in a single Google Doc Spreadsheet, and 500 users later we brought Google Docs to it’s knees, complete with error messages and a never before seen “high traffic” mode that stripped away a lot of the formatting features for users of the document.

The point I’m trying to make is that one educator took a fantastic 21st century learning idea, didn’t consider the technological consequences, and went for it. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have….it was actually a bit humorous watching that number of users tick upwards in a never-ending ascension of collaborative-glee. But with all of the great ideas we’re having about 21st century learning, and the opportunities we have to share and communciate like never before, FAR too many educators are getting the educational side of things, and not the technological side; computers, servers, smartphones, workstations, broadband connections, access points; these are physical devices, with physical limitations, and they cost time and money to engineer, build, and deploy.

The document that was produced turned out to be a really great collective piece of information, but the process in which it was done made it so that 1) I couldn’t physically contribute during the moments of greatest sharing, and 2) I’m pretty sure there are a few hundred other people who either couldn’t contribute OR hampered those already working by clogging that document, and causing all of the crashes. I had a very brief disagreement with David Warlick about this a few years ago, and I feel that it still stands. Teachers today need a blended preparation, one that not only shows them how to use online collaborative tools, but also shows them how these tools work, so they have a better understanding of “how the car gets down the road”. Is it completely necessary? No, but I can bet that if you required that sort of competency you’d be able to take the thousands of great ideas shared everyday be able to fly down the highway with them, rather than causing a 50-car pile up on the freeway in the name of collaboration.

Oh, and the actual Google Document that contains all of this great information about Ning alternatives? I can’t even get to it as of this posting, so I’ll leave it to you to track it down for fear of clogging the collaborative effort even more. If you find it in a more usable form, please post in the comments.

Image – http://www.flickr.com/photos/60648084@N00/2462966749

This month I’m sharing a short movie clip with my 5th graders about just one way that the world, and more specifically the U.S., disposes of their electronic waste; old computers, cell phones, digital cameras, etc. The problem I’m presenting to them is simple. Many thousands of pieces of technology are tossed out into the garbage each and every day. Some communities have recycling centers and programs for dealing with the toxic materials, plastics, and metal found in our electronics, but many communities simple don’t know what happens to e-waste that’s just tossed in the trash. A lot of that e-waste ends up overseas, dumped in rivers (yes, computers just dumped in a body of water as a disposal method), buried in landfills, or just left in piles. While the environment suffers in these areas, it’s really the inhabitants of that area, the poorest residents that is, that actually live in a lot of that trash, or make a living by digging through that trash, and subjecting themselves to a lot of toxins and pollutants as they strip old computer parts for valuable materials.

What I love about technology is that it gives us a very visual way to explain problems. Sure, I could tell kids about Guiyu, a city that has grown to be the largest importer of e-waste in China. I could read to them a newspaper article about how discarded computers choke off rivers, and the poorest workers in the city spend all day melting down plastic and computer chips, breathing in toxic fumes, OR I share the short YouTube video above so they can see first hand the bulldozers shoving computer boards into lakes, and watch poisonous gas escaping computer parts that are being “reclaimed”. The visual nature of it makes the problem that much more compelling, especially knowing that a lot of the e-waste came from the U.S.

Does it make it a bit more shocking? Yes, but sometimes problems of this nature need to be, and video lends itself well to that. The real focus though will be next week when I introduce my students to local recycling programs and centers that specialize in re-purposing old electronics, or find ways to recycle and dispose of old computer in an environmentally-friendly way. I’ll also show them a few more articles and videos that offer other solutions, and then see what sort of solutions the come up with for educating others in our community with the purpose of enacting simple realistic solutions that don’t cripple the entire computer industry or electronics economy (which of course we’re far from in danger of doing being a small rural town in Michigan).

A little dose of shock, thanks to technology, followed by a LARGE dose of practical reasoning is a nice way to do things to keep the students engaged in the post-Spring Break months.

Which got me thinking about how we use TV in the classroom, or rather don’t use. Every room in my building is wired for cable, an expense the district pays for, yet the TVs are almost never on, get used primarily during records’ day when teachers are alone in their rooms, or they’re used for viewing a DVD or VHS tape with the class.

So why is it then that we continue to pay for the service? Is it one of those “just in case” expenses? More importantly, why aren’t television broadcasts being used more in the classroom? Arguments against exposing students to the commercials is really moot, considering all of the advertisements we expose them to on webpages. The one-way, non-interactive, consumable nature of television can be a big issue as far as effective teaching and learning is concerned, but media, especially visual media, can be an effective tool at times. The last big issue preventing more use of TV in the classroom would be the big scheduling problem; the show you want the students to see isn’t on until 8:00 at night, and besides, you can probably find it on YouTube later so there’s no point in recording it.

And that’s where my thoughts led me to Hulu. We’re already subjecting students to massive amounts of advertisements on all of the free websites we use (guilty as charged). We’re already using video that we’re finding for free from other sites, but having to go through the hassle of downloading it (YouTube, Vimeo, etc), converting it and/or putting it somewhere on the network where it can only be accessed at school. Many teachers have highly trafficked websites for their classrooms, which students and parents are using regularly. Perhaps the website-ready, embeddable-friendly, search-able database of the on demand Hulu video library might be something worth exploring then.

You could easily embed a video panel with short clips from the “Big Ideas Small Planet” series to help illustrate examples of sustainability in a science lesson.

Or you could even embed a full NOVA documentary about deciphering ancient Mayan language to provide students studying world cultures or history with instant access to high quality media, or supplemental materials for when they get home.

I realize that Hulu is probably blocked in many schools (it’s blocked in mine), so an idea like this might be for a more progressive community. At the very least, using Hulu embedded videos, a teacher could pass rich visual media to their students at home via a classroom website, especially if the district doesn’t have the means to purchase a subscription to Discovery Streaming, or wants to avoid the somewhat less than desirable corners of YouTube.

I’m currently teaching, have just come off of helping plan one of the largest teacher conferences in the Midwest earlier this month, trying to be a good dad to my 4 year old and 4 month old, trying to be a good husband, taking master’s classes…..you get the idea. To top it off, the set of students response units (clickers) that I’ve come to depend on during this time of year for student feedback on presentations is being used by another teacher in the building (who coincidentally totally deserves to use them, so don’t think I’m whining).

So to take a little bit of stress off my shoulders, I found a way for my students to still submit comments on their presentations while my clickers are down the hall in the hands of other eager young learners. Using my Google account, I set up a simple form from Google Docs. Nothing fancy, just went to my Google Docs home page, created a new form with just one question. I set it up as an open paragraph response, in case the students wanted to write a lengthy response to another students’ presentation, made sure to include some simple directions (comments need to be positive, focusing on one aspect of the presentation they enjoyed, and more importantly why). I embedded the open-ended question on my website and magically, the comments kids were sending in went form just a few words “u R a great presenter, nice pics” on the clickers to “I really like your hotel, it looks like a nice place to stay. Glad you includd [sic] info on how much kids cost to stay” by using the Google Form.

I’ve been asking the students about this all week, especially since we’ve been using the clickers for two years now, and they’re all very well versed with texting. Their answers? “It’s easier Mr. Rimes, and it’s hard to text lots of large stuff on the clickers” pretty much sums up their responses. I was floored! In just a few days, one simple little empty box and a keyboard was able to provide the clearest example, and best as of today, of what I’ve been telling my students for three years now; typing, real typing, using the homerow matters. WHen done right, it’s quick, allows you to get your thoughts on the screen as soon as you think them, and you don’t have to deal with the frustration of those small buttons.

Yes, believe it or not, my students actually SAW the benefit of using the “stupid, old-man like typing lessons I’ve been having them practice”, and were actually quite happy to send in their comments using the Google Form. I don’t know if it was just the mindset of them using the clickers (hey, it’s like a cool phone thingee, let’s go ahead and just send in superficial, text-speak comments), but moving over to the keyboards was wonderful breath of fresh air for both me and the students. When asked if they would like to use the Google Forms again, it was a resounding yes

I don’t have the control over the comments as I did with the clickers. If a student were to send in an inappropriate comment or phrase I couldn’t track down which one of them said it like I can with the clickers, but thankfully a lot of the work I’ve been doing with online collaboration and digital citizenship in 3rd and 4th grades has paid off by the time the students get to 5th grade. I only had to take away a half dozen clickers this year during presenter feedback as opposed to the dozens I had to take away with last year’s 5th graders.

But I digress, as the real purpose of this post was to show my growing love for Google Forms. If you aren’t using them in your teaching yet, give it a try, see what happens

But what is Kerpoof you ask? Simply put, it’s an online social network for kids, built around art. Accounts are free, although there is a paid membership that gives you access to premium features.  All users can create drawings, stories, movies, and then share their artwork with the greater Kerpoof community. Once shared, artwork can be awarded stars (much the same way YouTube videos have ratings) by other users, which earns coins for both the artist and the person awarding the stars. The coins then allow users to purchase items for their avatar, better paintbrushes, extra characters for movies, or new props and stickers for their drawings. It’s all very extrinsically motivated, but the kids love that “gold star effect” when they see their artistic creations earning stars and coins.

So what’s the big deal you may be asking, you can do the same sort of artistic sharing on other sites. Yes, you can, but the teacher controls, group message boards, kid-friendly backgrounds and themes (far-away land, fairy tales, hangin’ at school), and the most recent update make Kerpoof the perfect tool for the classroom. But I digress. Enough talking about what Kerpoof is, and more about the new tool; Spell a Picture!

To write about the tool would do it an injustice, so I’ve done a short screencast and used VoiceThread to share. Why VoiceThread? I’m far from being the gateway to good ideas, so I thought it might be fun for others to add their ideas and thoughts on how Kerpoof’s Spell a Picture feature could be useful in the classroom. That’s right, if you watch the video below, you have an assignment; leave a short comment using VoiceThread to tell us how you might use Spell a Picture in a classroom.

My wife and I then proceeded to stay up way past our bedtime discussing Sir Robinson’s thoughts, the implications of focusing on children instead of standards, how both the previous and current administration in the U.S. is out to completely destroy any sense of individuality and creativity in the schools, and recommitting ourselves to raising our children in a way that encourages them to make mistakes, take risks, but ultimately pursue something that utilizes their gifts.

So do yourself a favor this Sunday afternoon, give the video a watch and pull the nearest person closest to you over so you can discuss it afterward. Check out Sir Robinson’s site here.