This Holiday Season

Every year around this time children start making their wish lists for their parents to buy them and parents spend lots of money out at the stores buying toys and games that after a month or so get put away and never seen again.  This year let’s do something different.

In the past few years school districts budgets have been slashed due to the economy and programs have been cut.  Teachers are expected to teach more students with less supplies and equipment and if something breaks it probably is not going to be fixed.  So this year let’s make education our priority in our children’s lives and donate something to your child’s school.  Here are some great suggestions

Books – Do you have old books around the house that you or your children have read consider donating them to your schools library.  If you do not have any maybe while you are out holiday shopping pick u one of the new best sellers for young adults.

Technology – Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals are all around this year with great electronic gifts including tablets and netbooks.  Consider buying one of the cheaper ones and donating it to your child’s classroom this piece of technology could help out 30 or more students and last a few years in the classroom

Your Time – This is probably the biggest and most influential gift you could give your child this holiday season.  Donate a day to the school and come in and help out in the classroom, offer to chaperone a school field trip, or help out by fixing something that is broken in the school.

These are just a few examples of things you could do this holiday season to make a huge impact on your child’s future and education along with helping out one of the people that is very influential in your child’s life.

Uses of Twitter for a Teacher

The more I use Twitter the more I come to realize the potential it has more everyone.  Now I know what you are thinking Twitter is for people to say what they are having for lunch or to share this cool picture of their cat doing something stupid, well yes some people use it that way but that is not the best use of Twitter and you do not have to follow them so you will not see it.  Twitter can become a great source of information about anything you are interested in and it also can be used to crowd source ideas and questions.

Here are a few ways that I am using Twitter:

1. I follow about 70 teachers and educators around the world that have interesting things to discuss and share.  This allows me to keep on the pulse of technology in the classroom and gives me great ideas for these tech tips.  You can find teachers to follow at http://twitter4teachers.pbworks.com/w/page/22554534/FrontPage
2. I regularly look at three hash tag feeds.  They are #EdChat, #EdTech, and #MathChat.  These are hash tags that anyone can use to share information about these topics.  This gives me access to the world that I am not following but are still talking about things I am interested in.  You can find hash tags you want to follow at http://www.cybraryman.com/edhashtags.html
3. I also participate weekly in twitter discussions.  #EdChat has their discussions on Tuesdays at noon EST and 7pm EST every week.  Each week has different topics that are discussed and it gives you access to what other people are thinking and also gives you the ability to share your views with the rest of the world.
4. Last week I introduced one of the twitter papers (http://paper.li) and this is a great way to catch up on things you might have missed because Twitter never stops flowing.
5. I use a program called TweetDeck (http://www.TweetDeck.com) to make looking at Twitter manageable since it gives me columns of information.

I hope that you take the plunge and look at twitter as a professional resource tool.  Honestly I find it more useful than any PD that I have gone to because it is teachers helping teachers.

Facebook Messaging and its Impact on Education

E-Mail it has been around since before the World Wide Web and until recently has been underused in the educational world.  School just started embracing email in the last 10 years since their students started getting email addresses.  Today teachers want their students to communicate with them through email instead of phone calls and this has started forcing schools to open up Yahoo mail, Hotmail, and Gmail on their networks so students can use email to communicate.   Today Facebook announced their own email program, how will this change the way schools use email?

Highlights of Facebook Email

Seamless Messaging – SMS, IM, Email

Send a message to a person instead of thinking about what you are going to use to do it

Facebook.com email address if you want

Real time communication messages sent to all mediums

Conversation History – One Thread per contact, stored forever and searchable?

Stored history of all conversations in one place

Social Inbox – Filtering based on social contacts

Secure email ability to prevent email from getting to you if you are not a friend of the message sender

Impacts on Education

One of the great things I did like was the ability for teachers now to email our students and that email would go directly to their Facebook page is they have it set up allowing easier communication because they check their Facebook page more often than their email.

The move from the written paper or letter to email was hard for education and English teachers because in was looked at as not as formal of writing.  Now with Facebook’s popularity and this new change to quick short messages will it further change our student’s ability to write formal pieces?  I think our students will be able to separate this type of communication from formal communication however it is important for teachers to make sure students still know how to write formal letters or emails because that is still the standard in the work place.

I do not see this changing schools opinions on Facebook however it does integrate it into our students lives even more and that is something that all schools are going to have to deal with sooner than later.

Teachers and Technology - Are We Doing it Right?

This past week there has been a lot of talk about technology in the classroom with the release of the National Education Technology Plan (http://www.ed.gov/technology/netp-2010) but does it really make a difference and is the focus on the hardware and software the right place to look.  Two articles and a conversation on Twitter in #EdChat made me really start re-evaluation by opinion on this subject.  Before this week I would have said yes focus on getting more hardware and software into the classroom and make sure the teachers are integrating it into their classroom, however now I am not quite sure if that is the best use of our time and money.

First there was an article that was released in The Telegraph a paper from the United Kingdom newspaper that stated textbooks and becoming obsolete due to the rise of computers (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8127270/Textbooks-becoming-obsolete-due-to-rise-of-computers-in-the-classroom-claim-teachers.html).  In this article they state that 68% of teachers polled believed gadgets such as computers and interactive whiteboards are more useful than textbooks.  The question I asked my self was why do they believe this?  Then I thought to the reason we use textbooks in the classroom to start with they are resources to help a student get information and practice the skills we are teaching.  Ok by that statement the internet will satisfy that need and in a more dynamic way then the textbooks we have today.  Students have access to all the information in the world on the internet including hundreds of ways to do any topic we can teach in school and as teachers we can use the internet to make authentic ways to have the students practice the skills instead of the static and unrealistic practices in textbooks.  So the move from textbooks to the internet is just a change in where we get our information.

Second there was an article I read asking “Do Podcasts Help Students Learn?” (http://www.convergemag.com/classtech/Podcasts-George-Washington-University.html).  This article looked at the impact of podcasts at George Washington University when they were debating renewing their iTunesU contract.  The results were they found no statistically significant difference in students learning while using Podcasts or not using them.  So based on this what do we do?  Today we are run by test scores and student data.  Everything we want to do or are told to do is held to the standard of how will it raise students test scores and learning.  If we then see that this technology does not help improve student learning or raise test scores why should we adopt it?  My answer is because it doesn’t hurt either. 

Well now looking at those two articles you might think well we need to look into getting more technology into the classroom but here is where we have to start and think.  Why are teachers saying textbooks are on the way out?  Because they have other tools they can use.  Why should we offer podcasts to our students?  Because they are another option for our students to learn.  Each of these examples does not rely on the technology it is the teachers’ use of the technology that makes the difference.  Yes we need to make sure everyone has access to the technology in the classroom through computers and the internet however our money needs to be spent training teachers how to use these new tools to impact student learning and giving teachers the ability to decide what tools they want to use in their classrooms even if it is a textbook.