The Heir Apparent...

Since the announcement of the dissolution of Google.Reader, there has been a ton of social chat about what to replace it with. Most posts and sites I have seen have identified Feedly as the most seamless heir; transferring your Reader subscriptions into Feedly is literally a one-button process, and although I don't understand the back end technology very well, apparently the two programs are highly compatible.

That being said, I did notice immediately that Feedly was missing a couple of features of Reader that I find absolutely essential for my use, so I took the bold step of sending a tweet to the CEO of Feedly, Edwin Khodabakchian:

Much to my pleasant surprise, the next day I noticed that he started following me on Twitter, then a day after that I got a tweet back from him:

So to shorten this lead-in....I contacted him and Edwin got me in touch with the co-founder and lead designer of Feedly, Arthur Bodolec, and wants me to give details of how we use Reader here at HKIS. With the sudden surge of users (3 million new users in the past few weeks), Feedly is rapidly modifying their site. But in reality, aggregators are aggregators, and a fancy skin or new coat of paint is not going to distinguish one from another; to really stand out, Feedly has to offer some functionality that no one else does. 

So this post today is for Arthur, but others who use it similarly (or who want to add to my post) are welcome to chime in.

So Hello, Arthur :-)

While the market is saturated with lots of aggregators, what Reader offers (and what no one else does) is two things; the ability to bundle blogs for organizing and sharing, and the ability to subscribe to a website, RSS feed, or whatnot, with one click.

Here is how I have our system set up:

Our school has about 800 students (200 per grade) and we are requiring all our freshmen to start a blog about their school experience, and maintain it over their 4 years here. Regardless of what program they choose to create their blog, they have to be organized in a manner that allows different populations to find and read them.  And this system has to be robust enough to support 200 additional blogs each year, organized by homeroom and accessible to users with all sorts of ability levels (ranging from highly skilled to terrified, and who are universally too busy to go far out of their way to troubleshoot). 

I have come up with a beautiful way to manage this, however, although it sounds pretty straightforward, the back end design work to set it up has taken a lot of troubleshooting and is completely reliant on some features of Reader.

What I have done is to create a space in each student's user profile in our Learning Management System (LMS) where they can put in their blog URL. Then, when the teachers go to their class list in their Homeroom page (or any class page, for that matter), they see the link that takes them to each student's blog, like this:

Clicking 'link' on the right opens the student's blog in its home URL. 

If the teacher isn't already subscribed to the student blog (maybe the student joined the school late), google has this great little goodie feature called the 'subscribe button'; it puts a button on your taskbar that you click when you are at a website, and the computer automatically opens your Reader account, and asks if you want to subscribe to that URL. 

The beauty of this button is twofold:

1. It changes the experience of following feeds from one where you have to deliberately navigate to your aggregator, mentally changing gears from whatever you were doing before, into one where you just add feeds 'on the fly' as you do what you were doing.
2. Since Reader is already activated in our Google Apps Suite, it takes people there who may not have known that they had a Reader page. That introduces them to RSS aggregators in an authentic manner.

Now, here is the most important feature of reader that no one else offers and I dearly hope Feedly replicates: Bundles.

To make it as easy as possible for teachers to subscribe to and follow their student's blogs, I have created bundles using Reader and posted them on our LMS, like this: 

A teacher could then subscribe to all of their homeroom blogs with one click: when they hit 'subscribe' at the bottom of their own bundle, it automatically imported the entire folder into google.reader, with the proper URLs, student names and sorted into a folder.

Without this 'bundling' feature, I cannot figure out a manageable way to get 64 homeroom teachers to create folders that allow them to follow their student blogs. The 'long way' is cumbersome; open the Class page, navigate to the class list where the kids' blogs are linked to their profiles, click on each blog one at a time, open it in a different window, copy the URL and and paste it into their own aggregator, then go back afterwards and put all the blogs into a single folder, renaming each one after the student who created it.

The beauty of google's 'subscribe' and 'bundle' function is that *I* can do all the heavy lifting: I open each kid's blog site and put them into a folder in my own Reader, rename the blog after the student, then I merely make a bundle and paste it into the LMS site. The teachers can subscribe to the kids' blogs with one click.

So, to summarize:

What I truly hope Feedly creates is a system where a user can do the following:

1) Subscribe to any type of URL without having to cut and paste into Feedly, but do it while navigating the web,

2) Put the subscriptions into a folder where the user has easy control over the name of the folder and renaming the subscription,

3) Create a single link to that folder that can be pasted elsewhere, which allows a DIFFERENT user to download the subscriptions with the same names and folder name into their OWN Feedly account.

There are, of course, some other features that would be nice, but these three (especially the last two) are so essential to how I manage these 800 blogs that without them, I don't have any idea how to do it.  Of course, I could just create a regular folder with all the links in it, but that loses the functionality of showing when there are new posts...since the kids post updates at their own pace, it's not reasonable for the teacher or other users to regularly navigate through all 15-20 blogs hoping to see a new post, hence all this has to be embedded in an aggregator site. 

Feedly; this is your opportunity to offer something that no one else does. And generate a huge audience of thankful teachers and tech facilitators  :-)

The problem with Ed Tech

The news that google is discontinuing Google.Reader has got me thinking. My reaction was not unlike that of many other users: anger, frustration, shock, dismay, etc. Some folks made viral videos that do an excellent job of capturing the emotion, others have even started a petition to get google to reconsider their decision... something that I signed, but with no misconceptions that it's going to do anything.

If you have been reading my previous posts, you see that I rely on google.reader to manage my student blogs; the 'bundle' function is essential for passing around folders of blogs, and the 'subscribe' button makes it manageable for teachers to use. Losing these functions will make me have to figure out how to restructure our entire blogging initiative.

But what really gets me frustrated is how this exposes a serious flaw with Educational Technology, and something that we must address clearly in order to truly leverage technology tools in education.

Teachers don't like too much change. I commented on this in a previous post, and my thesis was not because they are lazy or resistant....quite the opposite. Teachers have to manage such an overwhelming amount of things that they NEED consistency and they need to adopt change at THEIR pace. In my experience, most would prefer to stay with an outdated tool that works, and embellish the lessons around it, rather than update to the most modern version and have to rebuild their activities and support documents. This is entirely reasonable.

However, this is the exact opposite of the technology landscape. In their efforts to capture market shares, and to continually enhance their offerings, developers and providers like Google are constantly revamping their products: tools such as Instagram are changing their usage protocols or merging with social media that have prohibitions on underage use, useful things like google.reader go away, google.sites gets wonky, google changes their platform to 'google plus' with a whole host of new skills to learn (see the pattern evolving here, google?), youtube decides to restrict access to videos from outside the US, or change their codec so download programs like keepvid no longer work, links in blogs become broken, java stops working on Mac, Ning stops being free, Cisco kills FlipCam, etc.

Teachers do not live to learn new tech, and even those who don't mind troubleshooting find that, over time, the constraints of having to continually rebuild lesson plans because of obsolete technology tools are too burdensome. The result is that Rule #1 gets broken: The Tech Has To Work. Having to continually revisit old ground, patch problems, redevelop lesson plans for new tools, and reinvent the wheel does nothing to facilitate using technology in teaching....unless the lesson is in how to use technology (which it rarely ever is).

So what's the future for this? Will Educational Technology become a flash-in-the-pan event...like the surge of use of Video Laser Disks in the 70s, only to fade into history as tried and true methods continue to reign? Or will these program and software developers stop chasing new markets and refuse leveraged buyouts from big companies so they continue to provide stable services for users?

Since educational use is such a small part of the tech market, my expectation is not that they will provide stable services. What that means for the future of Ed Tech remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure....nothing is for certain except change itself. And that is not always a good thing.

Weird post settings

OK, this post is both a request for help, and a test of my twitter network as a resource mine. Please post responses as a comment.

I have all my 9th graders set up with Blogger blogs, and last week we changed the 'Post and Comments' settings so that anyone with a google account can make a (moderated) comment. However, one teacher mentioned that she was unable to comment on 6 different kids' posts, so we went into their blogs and saw that they had the right UNIVERSAL settings (Settings/Posts and Comments),

but the INDIVIDUAL POST comments for some posts were set wrong. These are found when you edit an individual post, and select Options on the right side:

Here's the funny parts that I don't understand

1) The individual post settings were only wrong for posts that had been labeled (tagged)

2) The kids are not friends, so they had not collaborated

3) One kid, in particular, does not show the "Reader comments" selection under 'options'. 

My best guess is that, since they were in the same spot to adjust their options when they were tagging, that the six of them made the same mistake. But I'm wondering if there is any way to universally override individual post settings, and I'm especially wondering whats up with that third issue.

Ideas?

The Value of Anonymity

I'm sitting in a workshop run by Alan November, and he is bringing up a fascinating point. He shared the story of his daughter's participation in Fanfiction, a site where kids have posted their personally-authored stories based on characters of popular books. The driving force is the desire of the audience of fans to have continued interactions with their favorite characters, but what is fascinating is that the kids all post under pseudonyms. When asked why they do this, one particularly eloquent girl pointed out that when her work gets reviewed (especially negatively), she knows that that criticism is directed at the work, and not at her personally. As a result, she takes the criticism seriously (she is truly motivated to improve her writing for her audience), and works hard at it.

His excellent point: if we let kids submit work anonymously, and graded it accordingly, the kids would feel that the feedback was more accurate. But more importantly....they would be greater risk-takers with their work. They would know that feedback is honest and unbiased.

How could this be exported to the classroom? Why not have kids create pseudonyms for their digital writing, and the grade does not get 'averaged in' until the end of the semester? What are people's thoughts about this?

Additionally, he shared the story of a girl who was writing extremely popular fanfiction stories of 20,000 or more words, but was failing her English class. The girl was making a choice between 'write for the teacher' or 'write for the world'. But that's material for a different post.

Math Reform (or: An Essay in Mathpoetry)

In the spirit of Harry Hess' revolutionary 1962 paper (An Essay in Geopoetry) that set the basis for Plate Tectonic theory and shook the foundations of Geology to its roots but provided no firm evidence or research to support its points, I am titling this blog post "An Essay in Mathpoetry." I doubt it will shake the foundations of teaching mathematics to its roots, but having been a HS math teacher for 15 years prior to becoming a tech facilitator, I have observed lots of changes in math curriculum, and witnessed (and participated) in lots of facets of the 'math wars' over curriculum, technology, calculators and pedagogy, and I have an idea...but I have no research or firm evidence other than my own experience to back my opinion. But then again, that's the perk of having your own blog. :-)

Despite striving to be a modern educator, using collaborative tools and exploring ways for the kids to lead the learning, my math classrooms were very traditional. I often was the 'sage on the stage', guiding instruction with examples and lectures, my teaching notes were meticulous and I carefully scaffolded problems until the kids could see the patterns and could use the underlying mathematical principles in more and more complex situations. The kids were often in rows, isolated with their thoughts and deeply immersed in solving problems, collaborating when necessary, but responsible for their own work. Although I tried, when appropriate, to provide 'real world' examples for the math we were learning, it was always challenging,  limited in scope and a little forced. I always felt a little guilty about this, as the literature and lunch table conversation was about 'using real-world examples' and 'making it authentic', however the mental world my students and I occupied was already rich with ideas and concepts, and I almost never had students who claimed they felt that they missed something by not being given examples of how completing the square would be useful in their lives, or what the role of imaginary numbers would be once they graduated college. I found that, just as a chess player can get immersed in a challenging game with a fair opponent into a state of 'flow' as described by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, my students did not need concrete examples and real life applications to become immersed in the process: increments of success with ever-increasing complexity was enough to draw them in. The beauty was in being able to crack the shell of a complex math problem, use the correct mathematical tools to break it down, and express the solution in the most efficient and standardized form. It didn't matter that the problem was a purely theoretical construct, with numbers and structure rather than apples and pears, and the answer was not expressed in terms of 'how much land should Farmer Brown plant'. The process was as meaningful, and as meaningless, as trying to checkmate your opponents King. And just as challenging and open-ended. And satisfying.

This disconnect between teaching ideology and my pedagogy grew with the release of ever more powerful calculators. As calculators evolved beyond 'number crunching machines' into having more advanced features like a Solver, graphing ability, symbolic notation and CAS operations, more and more, kids could get the 'right' answer by inputting the problem and hitting a button, entirely circumventing the underlying processes. And just as having a cheat code to a game diametrically changes the game experience, having these technical tools drove a change in pedagogy. Math teachers starting using  sensor devices to generate acceleration data, temperature probes to gather data from which to derive logistic curves (using a plotter and solver), and the growing challenge became less about how to scaffold problems of growing complexity, but how to run classroom experiments that had dependable results so students could extract the mathematical concepts, but were authentic enough that they were meaningful. In short, 'good' math classrooms began to look a lot like good science classrooms.

I'm not opposed to this: authenticity is a wonderful thing, and many (even most) students require this to internalize their learning. Many students comment on how they never really understood Calculus until they took Physics and had to use it. Or never understood Geometry until they took a surveying class and had to apply it. Applied concepts are essential, for many. However, science teachers are already quite good at running good science classrooms, and a lot of Theoretical math is being lost in the process, and we may have thrown out a bit of the baby with the bathwater.

Some students actually thrive more on Theoretical Math, rather than Applied math, and many teachers are quite adept at teaching Theoretical Concepts. There is a legitimate debate about what is 'mathematical thought'...I attended a presentation from a renowned math teacher from Philips Exeter Academy who showed us some problems using 'clock arithmetic'. He concluded that the kids were learning to think in a different base and modulo, and that this was a great example of extracting 'mathematical thought' in a physical activity. I challenged him, asking why learning to crack a 5th degree polynomial by hand to find all the precise roots, real and imaginary, by using Descartes' Rule of Signs and the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, was not 'mathematical thought'. His response was that it was no longer necessary or useful to do that, as the calculator could find all roots and express them, even irrational ones. My point was that the kernel of the activity was not the solutions, but in the process involved in figuring out how to find them using purely mental tools.

Our world still needs theoretical mathematicians; people who like to solve incredibly complex abstract mathematical problems and who do not require any basis in the physical world. This is the underpinning of Encryption, Cosmology and a host of other disciplines. As many have said: mathematics is not necessarily applied mathematics. And HS science teachers already have a conceptually rich environment to use applied mathematics; why should math teachers try to compete with or replicate this?

My proposal is that HS math and science curriculums should differ in ideology. Science classes should teach the amount of applied math needed to understand the physical scientific concepts in their courses, and all kids should be required to take an abundance of these classes. This will develop a group of citizens who not only understand basic scientific principles, but also have enough mathematical skill to participate in intelligent debate, and who see math as a useful and important skillset for existing in the modern world. Science/math courses should use calculators, computers and all sorts of technologies to assist with helping kids find actual, practical and usable solutions and to be able to represent and interpret situations and results.

Math departments, on the other hand, would be smaller and focus on Theoretical or Pure math. Those students who enjoy finding solutions to abstract problems, with an early emphasis on solving problems by hand, could take these courses as electives, taught by teachers who prefer to teach this content. The non-calculator based coursework would establish a firm understanding of the concepts underpinning the procedures, and students could be encouraged to delve into deeper theoretical questions about patterns and theories. And being released from having to offer these courses to ALL students would free up the curriculum for those who truly thrive on teaching and learning this material.

Anyway, I'd love to set up a program that did this; put the 'real world' math and the abundant math tech tools (calculators, etc) in the hands of the science teachers, and let those who liked to play with numbers and patterns immerse themselves in Pure math. They could still use technologies, of course; sharing findings online, recording their efforts and sharing ideas and suggestions via blogs, voice thread, youtube, and online programs etc. Calculators and other devices would be available once the students felt that they had a good understanding of the concepts and principles, but the consistent technologies would primarily be about sharing and communicating, rather than generating solutions or data and trying to extract the (sometimes quite sublime) underlying mathematics.

ADE application

So my application is in the eMail for the Apple Distinguished Educator class of 2013. I applied two years ago and was rejected: a major component of the applications process is to submit a 2-minute video about a topic that changes yearly. The topic in 2011 was 'How do I use Apple technologies in my profession" and in truth, it was a crap video. I was seized up with writer's block until the last second, then I threw something together and it showed. It was pretty much just a talking head rambling on about using technology remotely....not impressive at all.

This year, I put much more thought into it, and the question was much more manageable: "How do I use creativity to transform the learning environment?" I mean, that's practically my job description!

I decided to focus on three things: the SDLT, my Experimental Classroom, and StuCon2012. All are innovative, self-created and were effective in supporting the technology mission of the school. I wanted to include some other stuff, like the cool jury-rigged document camera I made once, and to talk about the websites and protocols I have developed here at HKIS for different purposes, but the video can only be two minutes long. As it was, I had to 'layer' the message with images and voiceover, plus a popup window and a scrollbar.

Lots going on; check it out and tell me what you think.

Catching up

It's been awhile since I've blogged and a few things are running through my head. So there are going to be several blog posts in a row; I want to unload some of my thoughts before they fade.

First: An update on the Gr 9 Blogs
OK, so I have been able to troubleshoot the issue of getting every Gr 9 student to create a blog (using blogger), to link their blog to their myDragonNet profile, to set their security settings so that they would not accept comments (for now) and to make their blogs visible to the world to see, but only if they had the URL.

The challenge has recently been to be able to verify that these settings are correct. I had a big meeting with all the HR teachers and gave THEM the task of checking this with their kids, but unfortunately (and not unexpectedly), the HR teacher's skills are all over the map, so they are not really reliable editors. My newest idea is to have the members of my SDLT go to each homeroom and check settings, etc, then bundle the blogs and send the link to me.

For those who do not know what a 'bundle' is, it's a great feature of Google.reader that they finally got fixed a few months ago. After you subscribe to a bunch of blogs and drag them into a shared folder, you can right-click on that folder, select 'create a bundle' and it gives you a link you can send around. The recipient gets the link, clicks on it, and it installs the complete folder into their Google.reader account. It's a tremendous way to share the blogs. Unfortunately, google.reader does not allow you to make subfolders, so you cannot bundle all these HR bundles into one, but at least you don't have to subscribe to 180 Freshmen blogs at once. In the future, I'll see about putting all these bundles on a webpage and uploading that, so people don't even have to get them in an email.

This thing about the teachers' skills being all over the map is huge. Learning to use technology is a huge process; I do it full time, and I feel like I've just scratched the surface. For my colleagues who teach content area full time, the additional (and uninvited) burden of having to infuse tech tools is really a challenge. A tech colleague put it very well: it's the difference between a 'trip' and a 'journey'. People on a trip just want to get to the end destination, and success is measured by merely completing the task. People on a journey are more interested in what happens along the way; success is measured by the different things encountered and the experiences. Using tech in teaching can be either: to those for whom it is a trip...they just want to get the task done the quickest way possible and get back to their other responsibilities. To those for whom it is a journey...each tech-related task is a learning ground for new experiences and tools, and they don't mind the time spent exploring settings, troubleshooting, etc. They actively link new tools with old, modify tasks to accommodate new skills, and are always learning. I think a major component of the job of a Tech Facilitator is to help teachers become more interested in the journey, and less on completing the trip.

Next post: musings on Math curriculum.