Andante

Putting devices in kids hands

metcarolann — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 20:38:38 +0000

I struggle daily with trying to figure out how to put internet capable devices in the hands of my students even a camera would be a great start.

We have a total of 34 reliable laptops for a school of 530 kids…it is a sad situation.

I had a bit of an aha moment when I asked my grade 4/5 class how many of them had either an iPod touch, an iPad, a 3DS or other hand held gaming system that accesses the internet. (they actually didn’t know they could access the internet on them which was another interesting tidbit) Most of them raised their hands to answer yes.

The problem I face is the “no devices at school policy.” How to get around it is the question. I am thinking that I simply ask parents for permission to bring the device to school for use on a project and we go from there. Has anyone out there done this? What did you do?

Techie friends are Important

metcarolann — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:14:17 +0000

I have a new one on staff which is great. Justine and I spent a morning this week preparing a “Technology Implementation Plan” for our school, which is a fancy way of saying we wrote down what we consider to be best practice on a piece of paper so that we could use it to fund some technology at our school.

This was a new experience for Justine, and it was great to have her bubbly excitement every time there was and idea between us. I am a little more jaded I guess, it felt like it was homework for my Masters degree coming back to haunt me in some ways. Fortunately after doing that MET degree, this was pretty easy for me, just don’t look at how I did my citations…

In the spirit of cooperation, I am posting the plan here, in case one of you fellow techies need to write one. It will give you a template to use or ideas to borrow or add to. If you do write one using this as a template I respectfully request that you post it here as a comment so that we can all share.
TechnologyImplementationPlan

Ross Road Technology Implementation Plan by Carolann Fraenkel, Justine Frazee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Busy People just get Busier

metcarolann — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 16:08:07 +0000

School starts, new grade level (4-5), huge renovation starting, running a conference in April, so what do I do? Join a choir! Of course, (and knowing me) not one that I can just show up to and sing, I had to choose one with regular homework. I’m loving it so far though.

Also on the agenda is to lobby the school district for more tech for our school (yeah that will go well.) We are in a completely woeful state at the moment, with one functional laptop cart of 16 and one computer in each room. How can I share… there are 540 kids at this school. Something has to happen and fast!

This isn’t “our” Union

metcarolann — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 17:30:27 +0000

The BCTF required my private email address for use only on “urgent” Union business, relating to contract negotiations. Union reps told us that the School Board could shut down our email to make contract negotiations difficult, etc.

I knew I didn’t like the idea then, and I know it was a bad idea now.

Today I received an email (very carefully worded) from Susan Lambert, BCTF President, explaining the union position on the HST referendum and telling me when to vote etc.

How is this “urgent” union business? (or union business at all?)
How is this not illegal? Are there not laws in this country about telling people how to vote without saying as much?

I have to say I was angry and outraged that “our” union would spam the membership for political posturing. This has absolutely nothing to do with improving teaching and learning, and everything to do with political games that I want no part of.

Awesome Education Resource

metcarolann — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 02:19:28 +0000

The US Academies Press has released their catalogue on pdf…(free!) I can’t begin to tell you how brilliant this is.

http://www.nap.edu/topics.php?topic=282

Pot O Gold?

metcarolann — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 16:56:48 +0000

Photo Credit: jaqian

Not really a pot of gold at either end of the rainbow as far as I’m concerned, its more like fairy dust. In “A Personal CyberInfrastructure” (essay,) Gardner Campbell advocates for giving all matriculating college and university students their own web server so that they can build their own “personal cyberinfrastructure.” He lost me when he used the word affordances in relation to web based analytics and database management. It is possible that Mr. Cambell doesn’t really understand what an affordance is. (pet peeve, click the link to a great article by Donald Norman himself about how the word is mis-used) It could be that what he is really trying to say is that University IT departments hand out crippled webspaces to students that don’t let them learn the whole picture.

Having been a system administrator, I understand both sides here. The sys admin in me says “heck no, I’m not giving a bunch of kids admin privileges!” Who gets to talk to the police when some student uses their server to host some illegal activity? or more likely sets up an easily hackable password and someone else does it without their knowledge? How long does it take anyone to figure it out? Who is responsible? Who is responsible for cleaning up, re-imaging and dealing with security issues on all these virtual servers? Server administration is a full time job. If that is what you are teaching, fine, but where is the time for the rest of the curriculum?

The teacher in me says, yes, I understand how frustrating it is when systems are so locked down that you can’t even change your own desktop picture. (yes that is true where I work ) How are we all supposed to learn when we are treated like idiots and made to feel like anything we do might “break” something. I work around a completely crippled computer system every day, and the sys admin in me screams about that too.

A virtual server like Campbell advocates is really just a new playground, but this one is scary and it has land mines and pits and big giant structures that need to be climbed. It could work if there is enough guidance to learn how not to fall in the pits, and figure out where the land mines are and there is enough endurance and skill to climb the giant play structure, but I have my doubts that it would work as a learning tool for “everyone” and I have my doubts that the average University professor has the skills and knowledge to manage a class or classes of students servers either.

A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words?

metcarolann — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 00:55:24 +0000

I call this one, “Dutch still life with Kitchen Counter Clutter”

The flowers were purchased by my mother in law who left here last week. I just don’t have the heart to throw them out, and my husband said “hey its ok, its kinda like a dutch still life without the maggots.” Now they have to stay. (for now anyway)

An idea so simple

metcarolann — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 03:03:39 +0000

I have about 4 kids who if I get 2 sentences of writing from them for any reason, it is a miracle. So the other day, I decided to do something unusual. I took a Flickr photo set about a dog named Dominoe (thanks to Alan Levine http://cogdogblog.com/) showed them the pictures, did some pre-planning and had them write a story about the dog. It was the usual, “I don’t know what to write.” “I’m done (after 2 sentences)” until I told them we were going to the lab to write our stories and they had to write a minimum of 100 words. For a 9 year old this might seem like a lot, but word count is now their favorite tool, they are having contests to see who has the most words! Ahh small victories.

Let the Blogging Begin

metcarolann — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:06:48 +0000

I have set up all the kids blogs, and hopefully they will be inspired to get their theme picked and play around with wordpress a bit over the holidays. (that is the hope anyway, I really don’t want to dedicate class time to choosing themes…) Then we are going to move pretty fast into posting on our blogs our writing, and journals. I really hope that it will cause kids to take more care with what they are writing. I am doing some workshops with my staff about blogging and literacy. I guess I’ll have to dig up some research too.

Blogging with 9 year olds

metcarolann — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 05:25:49 +0000

Well, I am biting the bullet. I have started creating blogs for my grade 4 students. We have practiced using glogster to get the idea of how to log in, create, save, comment get messages. There is a big learning curve. Now its full wordpress, wish us luck. My timing is intentional, don’t give them anything to do but change their theme and play around a lot over the Christmas holidays. Hopefully they will get some of the basics figured out on their own. I am finding that most of them are pretty adept at figuring things out and they are happy to help each other, and show each other (and me) tricks they learn.

I do miss teaching music, but I love doing things like this too. These are skills that these kids will take with them for years to come. Once we get blogging down, maybe we will try some digital storytelling. I might have to register for ds106 and actually do it. I have a tendency to sign up for open courses and then never do the work.