Author: ianhoke

The NETS and Teaching

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As a part of my COETAIL course at ZIS, I am required to answer the question “Whose job is it to teach the NETS (and other) standards to students?” NETS stands for the National Educational Technology Standards and is a set of standards for various groups in schools, like students, teachers, administrators, coaches, and so on. Like most standards, these statements aren’t analytic, but big, broad statements such as “Students understand human, cultural, and societal issues related to technology and practice legal and ethical behavior.” Then, each statement is parsed into 4-5 areas of application, also broad. So, who teaches creativity, collaboration, communication, information literacy, technological fluency, critical thinking, citizenship, innovation, research skills, and media literacy? You. Wait – didn’t you get the memo?

The problem with such standards – probably all standards – is that they at once seek to define all that must be known and done by everyone, everywhere. Standards have value and I find the NETS sensible and useful, but of course I understand the NETS through the lens of my subject area and age group. Most other teachers will do the same. As such, the NETS become a sort of planning and reflection checklist for the teacher – how am I hitting or ignoring certain parts of these, and how can I do better? That’s useful.

But, as long as we teach from pages 134 to 141 tomorrow, and as long as we shoot for standards like the Common Core, for example, there is little hope of generating the sort of student-centered, exploratory environment that would furnish the most powerful, transformational answer to this question: Together we learn the NETS through exploration in a supportive environment. I recently read something marginally snarky on Twitter that the tech-savvy person hits a problem and asks “How can I solve this problem?” and the tech-o-phobe asks “Who can solve this problem for me?” If that’s true, then the failure for the tech-o-phobe is in the environment in which they are working; perhaps a better question in a more supportive environment would be “Who can help me learn to solve this problem?” That is the sort of question I want students and teachers asking together.

If a school environment supported messy, time-intensive “project based-learning” or exploratory approaches, they need to cultivate the risk-taking (maybe low-risk taking is a good term), “play” mindset. Teaching media literacy, for example, gets sticky fast. As soon as we start drilling down past the surface, individual interests lead kids off in fascinating directions. Once they start producing media that “talks back” to mainstream media messages and values, it’s hard to have everything due on Tuesday. Instead, some time frames expand while others contract. Some students make a chunky poster, others geek out in Photoshop, and others still build elaborate sandbox sets for the destruction of a Matchbox car in explosion and flames. Each student may not even hit the same standards at the same time, but allowing open-ended exploration and choice helps students learn the NETS themselves in cooperation with each other and with the teacher or teachers. And that is the right answer.

Digital Storytelling in 90 Seconds

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I have been working on a variety of digital storytelling rubrics focused on specific types of journalistic reports lately, cooperating with students to reflect what they see as valuable or important in feature writing versus opinion writing versus news reporting, and so forth. My next project is video, breaking down what works in video in these various types of reports and adding investigative reports to the mix. It’s a work in progress.

But, I have also created a very, very brief digital story of my own this week: a “Virtual Classroom Tour” that may be found below. This project is part of the presentation on podcasting in my Digital Journalism course that I will make at the Microsoft “Partners in Learning” Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, in a few weeks. The time limit of 90 seconds was set by the good folks at Microsoft, and, as I so often say to students, I learned from having my communication forced inside an imposed structure. I wouldn’t only want to tell a story this way, but it’s a good opportunity to boil the podcasting project down to its essentials. Therein lies the strength of an imposed structure, similar to the AP exam’s time limit or a prescribed “elevator pitch” layout like a Pecha Kucha.


So, please check out this very brief digital story produced in Camtasia Studio and offer any and all feedback. I took the video of students with the iPad 2, which lacks a good microphone. I tried to compensate for that, but it only worked to mediocre effect. I also had to convert the video from the iPad to use it in Camtasia, which created very small final products. Part of my thinks the little “window into the student” effect of the almost embedded interview video is interesting, while another part recognizes it’s kind of crap. Still, it helped me conceptualize the curriculum a bit to push it out in 90 seconds. I can see the value of asking for super-brief videos asking for illustrations of key concepts as a method of formative assessment a as result of this experience.

The iPad 2 for Learning: A Student Experiments

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Recently, a student in my Digital Journalism class decided to do a feature article on the experience of closing his school-supplied Lenovo tablet laptop for the week and only using an iPad. His article is spectacular student writing in our nascent culture of journalism at ZIS, and I found the scope of his successes and challenges enlightening in one particular respect: We are not asking students to use their computers in new ways. Students like this are creative with their computers like I was creative with a darkroom and a typewriter in 1989, and the creativity is still great. Students also use their computers as textbooks, as notebooks, as Trapper Keepers, as easels, as paper, as media studios (this bit gets me excited), as telephones, as shopping malls, as billboards, as video game consoles, as televisions and movie theaters, as the conference social (think networking), and as printing presses. But, none of this is new, really. Almost everything our students do digitally has an analog in the real world. If this young journalist had to program, had to build new opportunities for other computer users, he would have had many more problems with only an iPad for the week.

Only. I realize, as one who taught in a very resource deprived American public school, how ridiculous that sounds. I know every teacher and student on Earth would take an iPad if offered, but they’d use it to keep doing the same things they are already doing. While he concludes forcefully that it would be a “huge mistake” to replace the laptop with an iPad, which I agree with, if the infrastructure at school supported Mac, much of what happens on a daily basis would still be possible for students. I don’t know exactly how to change that – maybe offer programming, as a start, and give lots of time and freedom for students to choose such courses – but I recognize that it is a problem. At any rate, if you’ve read this far, be sure to read the piece linked above.

Images for Irony

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In classes like AP Literature or IB Language & Literature, I’m always seeking to expose instances of widely misunderstood concepts like, for example, irony. Take situational irony, please. (Get it?) Now, that’s just bad humor, not situational irony. Situational irony is based on an occasion resulting in an outcome radically different than that which we might expect. Satirists often build on situational irony by using hackneyed conventions that we all recognize in order to undermine some assumption that we all share or something we take for granted. Stephen Colbert creates situational irony in his super pac ads, like the one below that mocks super pacs and super pac ads through a super pac ad about super pacs.

http://blip.tv/play/AYLn3AoC.html?p=1http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYLn3AoC

But, of course, this blog post is about images and their use in the classroom. I use images often for media literacy,to get a class’s attention as we begin to explore a book, or for explicit visual literacy instruction and practice. As an avid photographer, I believe in the power of an image and that I have a hard time capturing that power!

Here is an image that I could use to teach situational irony, covering the final panel and asking students to predict the outcome. It works – as does the awesome “Book World” comic linked above – because it’s punchy, quick, and darkly funny. Once the expectations are exposed, the last panel’s situational irony is unavoidable; if the expectations of students aren’t exposed beforehand, they will sometimes play the “saw it coming” card for cool points. Thank heavens for The Perry Bible Fellowship and Married to the Sea (my favorite), though be forewarned, they are sometimes inappropriate in their humor.

Anyhow, that’s me and images.

Twitter Provides a Teachable Moment

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My Digital Journalism students have been using Twitter to follow journalists, aggregate content that fits their interests, and promote their blog posts, but today they saw the cooperative power of Twitter first hand. And it was awesome.

We have just begun a nine-week long exploration of “The Feature” as a genre of journalism. The idea is a little artificial, but a convention of journalism, I think, and worth exploring. Students read a bit about what features are and how they are organized differently from straight news and opinion writing. The next step was to read the awesome piece about real life superheros published in GQ by Jon Ronson. Students had a few tasks to perform while they read, tying the initial instructional information about features to the example. Uniformly, they loved the piece, just as my IB students loved The Psychopath Test, also by Ronson, who uses a narrative style that is simply unique and engaging.

We discussed the piece and just had a great conversation. At the end of the lesson, a student wondered aloud if Ronson is writing notes the whole time, while crackheads and dudes in rubber masks engage in brinkmanship over a 3am Seattle street corner, or if he uses a recorder.  I started to speculate, then realized that I follow Ronson on Twitter and that we may be able to use a bit o’ social networking gold to find out. Twenty years ago, when I was in tenth grade, we could have chucked paper letters into the void after an author, never to hear of them again. Today, a boy fired off a Twitter direct message to Ronson and heard back 20 seconds later.

iPhone voice memos. Amazement. Engagement. And every kid in class has an iPad to pull off the same trick.

“Do I thank him, or is that just clutter?”

“Hmm. I don’t know. Do whatever you’d like,” I replied. And so he did, owning all of the experience.

My guesses about the impact are as follows:

  • Jon Ronson got 16 new Twitter followers
  • Students saw new possibilities in Twitter that they never did before
  • Authentic learning happened – students now know how a professional records interviews and thoughts and can already do this themselves
  • Young journalists got a little more stoked on writing

A big win, easily done on a whim, happened this morning. Oh, how these technologies may transform not just what we do and how we do it, but how we think about what we do.

Instructional Videos in an English Classroom

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It’s all the rage, and I’m a sucker for fashion, so I’ve been making some instructional videos. I’ve made a few “flipped classroom” style videos that are basically short lectures, introducing a new concept, for example. However, that seems like a waste for my classroom, best for absent students or for those who wish to brush up on a concept down the line. However, what makes the most sense to me is to record myself writing a model essay or planning a response to a prompt in such a way that basic skills, covered repeatedly throughout the year, can be reinforced. Additionally, I’m a big believer in modeling and in exposing my thinking as I do, making explicit the internal conversation and experience as I write or do something.  Often, I find myself believing that experts at something must just act or react in perfect confidence, without doubt, exuding the awesome. But, in reality, I think we all question ourselves or maybe even just revise as we go, refining for a better product. By making that conversation explicit, kids learn.

Youtube is great for learning little things, likely those things that we already know something about. I’m a fly-fisherman, but when I’m doubting myself, I go check out a video on roll casting, for instance, and refresh my memory. I’ve learned knots, the disc golf jump putt, and how to behave during a Chinese tea ceremony which used to throw me off whenever I tried to buy tea in Chengdu. In all of these cases, I watched somebody do and narrate their actions in order to learn. I’m considering videos on using and citing source material, doing research, writing a poem, reading and annotating a text, and revising a piece of writing. These are actions, skills, active behaviors that may translate to video. So far, the feedback is positive, but I doubt how much students are really using these videos because the play counts are low. In fact, the only video that has taken off is my tutorial on making a podcast, which other teachers have used. Maybe if I include a cat falling off a TV or a clip from “Friday” my numbers will jump. Maybe if I do a better job of conceptualizing and producing the videos, they’ll be more popular with the kids. Yeah, I’m going with the latter.

OTM & dana boyd on Internet Age Restrictions, Privacy, & Implications for Schools

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Ohhhh, so that’s where the 13-year old concept comes from! When teachers talk about Facebook – and we do, oh yes, we do – the age restriction is always in the background and often the subject of conversation. Cyberbullying in middle school? Solution! The age restriction on Facebook. Does it have the force of law? I always scoffed at the idea, but it actually does in the United States. On The Media‘s current podcast addresses the issue of the age restriction resulting from the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and parental perceptions and decisions around it. I found parental perceptions of the age restriction informative and the implications of privacy violations by the very free web services like Facebook or Gmail that kids are clamoring to use fascinating, particularly in terms of the implications for educators.

When educators speak about privacy concerns, they worry primarily about cyberstalking or cyberbullying – interactions between people, facilitated by technology, that go horribly wrong. However, COPPA isn’t built to protect children from other people, per se, so much as it is built to protect children and their personal information from institutions or corporations. That’s fascinating. This concept is a game changer – privacy is more about protecting children from becoming the products of free online services, sold to advertisers for targeted marketing and come-what-may, than about protecting children in public interactions online.

dana boyd points out, however, that parents have mixed views of the age requirements of Facebook: only 53% of parents reported knowing that Facebook had a minimum age, and 35% of those believed it to be a recommendation rather than a requirement. Only two parents from this group “referenced privacy. Amidst the open–ended responses, the notion of maturity or age appropriateness came up frequently. Some parents highlighted maturity with respect to content; others referenced maturity with respect to safety issues like bullying and strangers” (¶50). In short, most parents who know there is an age restriction view it more like a movie rating than a restriction. Privacy is a slippery concept that is obviously hard to define.

At my school, we are having discussions about the “Responsible Use Policy” and our school publishing policy as we move to more and more student publishing online – e-portfolios in the form of blogs, an online student newspaper, and multimedia publication via Youtube, Soundcloud, and so on. Our policies state that they are “informed by” COPPA, and our focus for protecting children’s privacy should focus on those under 13, generally students in the middle school. Of course, this is not to say that we should be careless with how we handle demographic or personal contact information for anyone, student or otherwise, in our institution. But, as dana boyd points out, a regular approach of law enforcement and others teaching kids about online safety is to suggest lying for safety. She states in this podcast that a large number of kids on Facebook identify their location as Afghanistan or Zimbabwe, because these come first and last in the alphabetical order of countries, respectively. The flip side of this message is that lying gets kids access, as boyd points out. Ironically, it is lying that subjects Facebook and free email providers to the vagaries of COPPA, because they are then automatically holding, mining, and marketing the personal information of children under 13. Students are opting into violations of their privacy through lying in ways that they believe will keep them safe from a threat that may not exist or is, in my opinion, quite overblown.

The implications for teachers are many. First, we should work with kids under 13 to identify the sources of actual threats to their privacy, that they are the products and not the customers of web services like social networks and free email. Second, we should craft an environment and a curriculum for students over 13 that focuses on personal responsibility, honest and ethical participatory citizenship in public communities, and conscious use of the Internet with its myriad tools and sporadic pitfalls. To that end, I have proffered an edited version of our online publishing policy that states the following:

Publishing via the Internet is encouraged at (our school). It is viewed as an effective way for students and faculty to publish their work and ideas to the broader world because it:

  • includes broad representation from all students/groups within (our) school community
  • reflects the academic and social values of the (school) Mission & Philosophy
  • encourages students to produce their best work for publishing through a process of revision and to accurately reflect their developing levels of skills
  • creates an opportunity for students to discover how to be positive, respectful, contributing members of an open community
  • serves as a springboard for peer review, reflection, and collaboration with a global community of learners
  • encourages the conscious development of a positive online presence or “digital footprint” for every child

The US Children‘s Online Privacy Protection Act, while not binding on the school, has informed (our school) guidelines with respect to Internet publishing and privacy. The US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act defines a child this way: “The term “child” means an individual under the age of 13.” As such, we recognize that (our school), in which all students are 13 or older, needs to provide a safe, guided approach to managing online presences or “digital footprints.” The following expectations apply for all members of (our school) community when preparing material for Internet publishing on (our school) Web Site or on external websites for school-related purposes, like blogging, posting media, or collaborating with others.

  • Students are solely responsible for what they choose to publish online.
  • Students publish material online with the understanding that their published content should adhere to academic and/or professional norms and appropriately reflect (our school’s) Mission & Philosophy.
  • No current, specific demographic or contact information will be published which will identify a student, faculty, or staff member (i.e. home address, telephone no., etc.).
  • Personal information regarding faculty or staff members will not be published without prior permission.
  • Online publishing is a public activity, and every effort is made at (our school) by teachers and administrators to teach and model appropriate public behavior in an academic context.
  • Students involved in specific academic activities which use Internet publishing as an integral part of their academic experience (i.e. student newspaper or literary magazine) should understand that their names and/or pictures may be published in relation to work undertaken as part of these activities.
Student Publishing Statement
Content published by students is not intended to be official (school) communication and does not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the school. (Our school) is responsible only for official content published through official channels.
Can a change of policy result in any actual changes of procedure, values, or perception? I’m hopeful that a statement of values may be a first step in the right direction. I’d love any and all feedback on these policy ideas, as well.

Observations on the SAT

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I understand that higher education is an industry that must manage huge numbers of applicants. I understand that processes and sorting operations are therefore necessary. I understand that much more than admissions hinge on tests like the SAT and ACT, scholarship decisions and so forth. However, I had a moment while serving as a proctor for the SAT this past weekend that illuminated part of what is crazy about this whole system.

As I wandered slowly through an aisle of earnest test takers, I realized that a student from our school who has written a software program for education that seeks to rival Moodle and, which I can testify to personally, that absolutely would win in a fair fight, was filling in bubbles before me. This young man has created software, started a company, capitalized his business, and is poised to launch. What university doesn’t want this kid? Still, there’s the hoop. Better jump.

I don’t have the solution, but I think I can see the problem.

The iPad 2 for Learning: Students’ Choose Laptops

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These days, now that the shine has worn off, students involved in the action research project involving iPads more regularly come to school without them. This may sound minor, but considering the initial buzz around the iPad in the classroom and the school, it marks a shift. Indeed, when students are accessing information, consuming media, or producing media, their overwhelming choice is to use their tablet laptops, not the iPad. In fact, the savviest students use the iPad as a kind of sidecar, like an extra monitor for holding text that they can use while they make things on their laptop. This is anecdotal and it remains early days, but the sense I’m getting is that the iPad is not as good as a full-powered computer for what students do most.

The iPad 2 For Learning: Not So Great for Video

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My students have just completed a unit of discovery based on creating video news reports. The idea in the course is that students are trying to use the iPad, but not past the point of frustration; in short, they are problem solving when the iPad gets in their way. Students found that it was difficult to get decent video with the iPad and that the audio was very poor. iMovie on the iPad was deemed by students to be useful for sprucing up a single video clip for quick upload to Facebook or YouTube, but not for anything else. Additionally, video was difficult to get off of the iPad. Email attachments have size limits and, for some reason that I am sure is related to copyright protections, they couldn’t put any video file longer than one minute into their Dropbox accounts.

When students had video off of their iPads, they opted not to use our Lenovo tablets’ native Windows Movie Maker, which really is awful in Windows 7, but opted instead to edit the video at home on Macs with the full version of iMovie. I found this really interesting, and wonder if Microsoft hasn’t punted a bit on their formerly useful Movie Maker software as a concession to the primacy of Macintosh in this arena. The Windows Live adaption is just weird and I can’t understand how this is better for users. Final video products, which I will share once I ask students for permission, show decent fluency with the medium, but also show clearly the limitations of the iPad for academic or amateur quality video products.

The verdict is clear. No students said they would edit video on the iPad. Only three said they would shoot video with their iPad again, and several said they would rather use their smartphones. The limitations of the iPad for quality media production appear obvious.