4 articles Tag WK1

Are Standards Needed If Technology Is Used As A Tool?

by on April 18, 2012, 0 comments

In 1998 the ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) released National Education Technology (NET) standards “for the purpose of leveraging the use of technology in K-12 education to enable students to learn effectively and live productively in an increasingly digital society.” Today the standards are widely accepted as the benchmark for educational technology. There are standards for students, teachers, administrators, coaches and computer science educators, which makes them very broad and encompassing. These standards are excellent for when you have a stand alone model of technology education, much the same as at my current school. I see every class from kindergarten to grade seven for their own technology lesson once a week. In this session, I can spend time creating learning experiences for my students that help them meet the NET standards. However, what happens if your school has an integration approach to technology education? Maybe your school has a coach and that person works with teachers to integrate technology into the class. So who is responsibility for the NET standards in a circumstance like that? Is it all the teachers of a specific grade? Is it the coaches role to make sure each class is meeting the standards?

A Swiss Army Knife, like a computer is a versatile tool for many applications. So should it have it's own learning standards? Or should we use this tool to helps us meet other goals?

To answer these questions, I think you have to think about the school and it’s philosophy regarding technology. If technology is seen as a set of skills that each student must learn before they progress onto the more complex skills, with each skill requiring the previous to succeed and progress, then I guess you will need to rely on a detailed map of where, how and when each skills is taught. This could be compared to a senior Mathematics class, you can’t learn algebra if you don’t know basic operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. This style of addressing technology education is much more suited to stand alone technology lessons as there is one teacher that is responsible for the teaching of the skills and standards. The problem I find with this model is that modern computer skills are rarely the type of ‘build upon’ skills that they used to be. Sometimes you need to know how to use a mouse and keyboard, but sometimes you don’t. You may have a trackpad or a touch screen device which makes the mouse lessons taught earlier on irrelevant. The same thing applies to software. One example is keyboard shortcuts, what you learn in one piece of software may not work in another. And these two examples, hardware and software, are constantly changing. Skills we learn are usually stand alone, or need to be modified significantly to be transferred over into other applications. Or these skills change with a new software update or the integration of a new tool. So I believe teaching specific ‘skills’ and not seeing technology as a tool make the use of technology irrelevant to the 21st century learner.

If, like many schools, technology is expect to be integrated and used as something to supplement lessons and the curriculum, then chances are you have a tech coach that helps teachers develop learning experiences that incorporate technology into their classrooms. Some would say this person should be responsible for students meeting the NET standards. However, I think if your philosophy is that technology is used as a tool, then possibly the idea of technology standards needs to be rethought. We don’t have curricular for other tools we use at school such as pencils, base ten blocks, books, etc. We use those tools to help us help the students meet other standards. Isn’t technology supposed to be a tool that we use to help students learn content in other areas of the education? Just because it is an expensive, sometimes daunting tool, highly sophisticated tool, doesn’t mean it should have it’s own curriculum does it? Or am I way off?

What are your thoughts, I’d love to hear them in the comments below.

Mac OSX Keyboard Shortcuts Poster

by on February 3, 2012, 0 comments

My students have transitioned from using a desktop PC to using Mac laptops so I thought I would make them a poster displaying most of the common keyboard shortcuts. Hopefully this is going to save them some time and make them more efficient when using computer. Feel free to use it in your classroom, office, staffroom, etc. Images of the poster can be found here on Flickr.

 

 
I designed the poster with simplicity in mind. I wanted it to be aesthetically pleasing but easy to read from a long distance as not all computers could be proximal to the posters. I figured that the font size was the smallest I could use to meet the intended purpose of the posters. This also meant that I had to withhold some shortcuts as all of the shortcuts I wanted to add would not fit.

Letting Go – Putting My Real Name Out There

by on November 10, 2011, 0 comments

I had a totally different angle I was going to address this post from. I was going to outline how I’m empowering my students to develop their own positive online presence, while remaining safe by posting anonymously. I was then going to go into the details of how I created my own online persona to cultivate a positive online presences, all while maintain my privacy. But after reading a lot of articles about digital footprints and digital shadows and especially after the discussion I was a part of at a recent COETAIL meeting and reading, I finally decided to put my real name out there for everyone to find. From now on, I am not going to hide the fact that my full name is Mitchell Norris and I’m an ICT specialist teacher that works in Tokyo. And it feels good to get that off my chest!

Footprint in concrete on sidewalk. By Tobias Titz.

To promote that the Mister Norris persona was really Mitchell Norris, I went onto the about me section of my blog which can be found above, and added my full name in there. I changed the name of the image of me to my real name too. I understand that the image is only a drawing (a great one done by one of the kindergarten students) and not an actual photo, but it’s my first steps at putting my real name out there and I still have to think through the ramifications of putting a real photos of myself out there. Baby steps.

Next I went to my Twitter account and modified the description so that it included my full name in it. I have also been avoiding a LinkedIn account as it’s just another social network to manage that I feel I would not get much in return for, plus I would have to use my full name, which I was avoiding in the past. But maybe that’s my next step, is to develop a LinkedIn account with my real name. There are a few other steps I am thinking about pursuing as well, but for now, these three small changes should promote my real name and allow others to track me back to my current online persona much easier.

So why am I doing this you ask? Well I fully understood the idea of a digital footprint. And I also have a strong grasp of why I should develop a positive online presence, as you can see by simply searching ‘Mister Norris‘. If you do that search, you will see my website comes up as the first entry. Also on the first page you will find my Twitter account, Slideshare account, Vimeo account and my Google+ account along with a host of different post from this blog. Even my Diigo account comes up on the second page. But if you don’t search the exact term ‘Mister Norris’, if you put in ‘Mr Norris’ or ‘Mitchell Norris’ or ‘Mitch Norris’, there is no way to track it back to me. If I meet someone and I tell them to check my website, then it could be difficult for them to find me. If I tell a student to go to my website, despite my constant attempts to make them write in the full URL in the address bar, they usually default to a Google search. Currently if they put in ‘Mr Norris’ like they are used to seeing written everywhere, they can not find what they are looking for. If they Google my name to get some leads, they still can not find what they are looking for.

Connections. By Google.

The other problem is, if on the off chance there was something negative posted about me online, under my full name, I would not have any positive online presence to counteract it. This is a big concern as it’s not very hard for a careless person to post something misleading or derogatory without thinking about the ramification. If I have a positive presence to counteract this, hopefully it can eclipse anything negative that may surface.

So there you have it, my training wheels are off and I am going at it full steam to develop not only a digital persona, but a positive self image of myself, Mitchell Norris.

Experts At Your Fingertips

by on September 4, 2011, 0 comments

The last two weeks have been enormous for me. After a world tour, visiting three continents and seven countries on summer vacation, I was dropped back into the world of education with a thud. Not only did I now have to move house, I had to move my office. I also had to adjust to a new and enthusiastic Head Of Department (HOD) that has a lot of great ideas for the future of our school. On top of all of this, I started my Certificate Of Educational Technology And Information Literacy (COETAIL) at Yokohama International School. After having many motivating conversations about the state of technology in education and long terms plans and directions with my new HOD, we were made to read the article “World Without Walls: Learning Well with Others” by Will Richardson which was published in Edutopia.org in our first COETAIL class. I found the article extremely motivating and reassuring because it outlined the exact feeling that I was trying to convey to my new HOD. So many great point of views and ideas come up in this article, but the main thought line I liked the most was that of collaboration and searching out the ‘teachers’ that are most relevant to your interests.

This idea resonated with me because that was what I have been doing for myself recently. For over a year now, I have been really finding an interest in nutrition and have been educating myself on the topic. I read some books, but time and time again, when I would Google questions I that had arose from reading the books, I found more current and relevant information online in blog posts, Twitter feeds and message boards. In the World Without Walls article, Richardson wrote:

 

“For educators and the schools in which they teach, the challenges of this moment are significant. Our ability to learn whatever we want, whenever we want, from whomever we want is rendering the linear, age-grouped, teacher-guided curriculum less and less relevant.

Experts are at our fingertips, through our keyboards or cell phones, if we know how to find and connect to them. Content and information are everywhere, not just in textbooks.”


And this was exactly what I was doing myself, finding my own content that I had an interest in. 20 years ago, to learn the very specific area of nutrition I had an interest in I would of had to have read text after text along with scientific studies by the bucket load. Now, highly educated experts sift through this information, collate it, curate it and present the findings for the world to see, readily available and free. A great example of this type of curator is Kurt Harris, a M.D. who produces the blog www.archevore.com by finding relevant, scientific studies to his nutritional and lifestyle area of interests and posts about them with his own reflection and adaption to the real world. As Will Richardson said:

 

“We must find our own teachers, and they must find us.”


This is exactly what has happened for me through the use of blogs and Twitter, where these experts have found their voice and know people are listening to them. Another great example of this is iTunes U. The best explanation of iTunes U is on this short video:


This system makes experts available to anyone in the world with internet access, no matter what their socioeconomic background or geographical location.

I think this should be how students should be learning in our classes. Not necissarily through Kahn Academy style videos of a chalk and talk lesson, but through seeking out the experts and sources we see as most relevant to us. As teachers, we must model to them how we go about making our own connection, how we find the content that interests us and empower them to do the same. Students would quickly realize how little the teacher sitting before them really knows and how much expert information is available to them, right at their fingertips. But to accomplish this we need a dramatic change in the culture of education and the current schooling model. I believe that schools and teachers are not ready for this, not now, but hopefully teachers and institutions can see the impact it can have on their students and learning in general. A world where student at school learn about what interests them, what they want to learn, from a range of experts is one so exciting and empowering it has me dreaming of possibilities everyday. Once again, to quote Will Richardson:

 

“We as educators need to reconsider our roles in students’ lives, to think of ourselves as connectors first and content experts second.”