Rewired Learning Blog

NCSS 2009 - The state of technology in High School Social Studies Education

This past weekend was the 2009 National Council for the Social Studies convention in Atlanta, Georgia. While I will have other posts on the materials presented, the one thing that was lacking was the presentations concerning new ways to teach or present materials. Many of the sessions were material related, which is needed because there are many minute instances in history that are unique teaching moments that create interest in the student. Still, providing students with the tools they will need in college and beyond is critical in the education of the student. Web quests and PowerPoint’s worked in 1998, but now we have a palate of delectable electronic materials that are used every day by students, but not in an educational setting.

One session, Social Networks in the Social Studies: Promise and Potential, was disappointing from the perspective of who attended. Only 31 people attended. A presenter at the seminar related the story of Club Penguin, a self described social networking site for 6-14 year olds, is a place with over 10 million registered members. With this ease and popularity of social networking among pre-High School students, why is it suddenly dying and then rearing up again in college? It seems that there is just a general lack of interest in this new wave of Web 2.0 interaction. Personally I believe that it is a stagnation of teachers to learn new materials when the old material "works" Additionally, with focus on curriculum and material and responsibility to parents who might only know the dangers of social networking and not its benefits, change is lagging. The attendance is sad, but I guess I cannot blame them.

The one enlightening seminar was by Kelly Jones-Wagy who teaches at Brighton High School in Colorado. Less than half of her students have internet access but over 1/3 of her grades come from online activities and exercises. She podcasted the 2009 Obama inauguration and has her classes do wiki's for grades. Quite possibly she was the most innovative of all the session presenters. Unfortunately she had the smallest room, available and it was packed, with a good 40-50 people. Her conference title, Wiki’s! Podcasts! Blogs! Great: Now How Do I Use Them?, is a much more friendly title and less scary than "social networking". Her materials are available at http://ncss2009.pbworks.com/FrontPage, are user friendly and quite possibly the most comprehensive recap of a presentation of any of the ones at the conference. In five years I hope that all the presentations from the NCSS conference are as accessible as this one.

 

Facebook vs. the Teaching Profession...Facebook wins

Recently there a Georgia teacher was released from her position, or she resigned more to the point, based on her Facebook status. From the many sites I read, it involved a teacher holding an alcoholic beverage and somewhere in the posting was the word “bitch” or a derivative of that.

    This blog entry has no point in going on further in to the implications of what is wrong and what is right concerning the firing of a teacher. What is important is the protection of character in the “semi-private” sphere. Lets face it, what you do at home in front of 2-5 people is private, on the street corner next to a 60 story building is public…in front of 100 “friends” is semi-private. Everyone can be on Facebook but like it or not, others can peek.  Blogging for science and technology in the classroom also entails protecting yourself, student and teacher alike, from those technologies as well.

    Students have, hopefully, heard many times and half-tuned into the notices about putting yourself too much on line, but many adults have not. What adults understand is not to listen to scams and give out their social security and credit card numbers. Public and private have melded into a middle ground that never existed 15 years ago and has become more prevalent in the last 3-4 years with the influx social media programs. New rules have to be written and learned to be seen as a person and not a radical…which in this case is a 24 year old with a beer saying a curse word.

    Many websites are now places to meet and like it or not, the web is a nearly permanent marketing place for a person (can you ever be truly positive that another website took down your pictures?). Here are some simple guide lines on what not to do on a social gathering site as a teacher (if not for others) :

1)   Don’t  Curse

I think cursing is silly, I mean the fact that there are a few unspeakable words out there that I am pretty sure that all of my Facebook friends have said and I don’t think less of them for it. Use  #$%@#$  when needed to, we all get the idea of extreme frustration.

2)   Don’t allude to too much imbibing

As a teacher of Juniors and Seniors in High School for the past 4 years, saying that you had a beer or two while having dinner means you are an adult and they think nothing of it. Anything more than that, some students might think that you are one of them… You should be able to identify with them, but not be one of them. Even if you shared two glasses of Balvenie 30 and some Vintage 1977 port (neither of them students can understand the complexity of) with a friend of 20 years, don’t write about it.

3)   Don’t Lie

Why? Besides the obvious, if they found out they can throw it in your face, and so could the administration that might find the page as well (and if they find out, then everything you say is under suspicion)

 

4)   Don’t get too personal

Don’t say anything you would not tell an adversary of yours. If you ever think that you are putting something down in writing that could affect you, don’t do it. While your best friend might argue with you about it, students might laugh about you behind your back and administrators might call you down and discuss conduct and propriety. I have seen people with over 1500 Facebook friends. That is a lot of people that have an opinion on your personal life and I am sure that all 1500 of those friends are not very close friends. Are  you sure that the day might come that your “friend” is subpoenaed over a Facebook account will never arrive…I am not.

5)   Never,Never Ever have students as friends

 

Way too many instances as to why this can go wrong. Keeping with the spirit of this blog, I do encourage teachers to create a SECOND Facebook account where they create a community of students and where the teacher’s manner is the same as in class. Additionally I would encourage notifying administrators as to this account and supplying them access to be sure that all instances from students and teachers are classroom appropriate and it will protect both in the mean time. But , if you have only one personal account, a student with access could have an undesirable person over their shoulder looking at your content. I am always amazed as to who knows who in the hallways of school and I have to assume that my favorite is best friends with my least favorite.

 

Social media outlets are like Napster in 1999, no one wrote the rules for this type of interaction yet. They are also like credit cards, excellent tools that can easily be abused to the point where they can affect your future. Remember: you control what is placed about you on the internet and you market yourself every time you post something. Would you ever wear to your job a t-shirt that stated all of your Facebook statuses? If you answered no, you might want to rethink your manner of posting.

A first step towards social media in the High School classroom (Part 1)

Today, thanks to slideshare.com, I took a first step towards using a social media outlet in the classroom. My assignment can be found at www.bit.ly/4l48iu but briefly it is having students make Powerpoints that are much better than the average one we see in the classroom. They viewed an example presentation about social media (which served the dual purpose of presenting the material to them as well as looking at a good presentation) and then my presentation, shown in my blog below, about creating good Powerpoints. They are working on only 6 slides using 2-3 vocabulary words from the AP Psychology chapter we are studying but first results are great. They cant just copy information and spit it out on screen, they have to think about the term and convert it into something pictoral as well as written. The examples I have seen today are very good with interesting and proper graphics. Thinking about how to translate text into a different medium presents a different type of cognition which will hopefully sink into their minds.

At the end of this project I will gather all their slides and compile it into one powerpoint/slideshare presentation for each class. Kind of a class collaboration but not quite, hence the "first step" mentioned above. In the future I might have them all post their PPT's and have others comment on them. When I have the collaboration placed into one presentation I'll list the site here. I have good expectations of work coming out of this project.

Implementation of the digital age in the classroom is haphazard

  

  "We're experiencing a revolution in education like the one we went through in the 1800s when we went from an education system based on apprenticeship to one based on universal schooling...We're not saying schools are going away. It's just that the people who are using technology for learning are really doing it outside of school. Just as in the 1800s -- when the industrial revolution was starting in America -- this again is a time of flux because of the digital revolution." -Allan Collins

I ran across this quote the other day and had to include it here because of its pertinence to the gap between technology and current learning systems. We have Web 2.0 (the movement from static web pages to interactive ones where conversations can happen) now we need to start with a comprehensive Learning 2.0. We see it coming, it is not taking us by surprise, but we are reacting to it like a car headed towards us at 2 miles an hour. "Oh no! We are going to get run over very slowly, eventually"

Going to college in the early 1990s, few students had computers, computer labs were good but, especially to today’s standards, not powerful and almost no one had cell phones. Fifteen or so years later PC's are everywhere and cell phones and smart phones are nearly ubiquitous, even at high school levels. While computers have been placed in the classrooms, cell phones have been expelled. The digital revolution that is here is limited in many educational facilities. I feel it is because we don’t know how to use it. PowerPoint is easy and can be learned and used just like over head notes, there is no real advancement (ooh a picture). Collins would possibly describe this level of technological development in the classroom as “willy-nilly”

  We need to find a way to use the new materials and not expel them from classrooms. PowerPoint for notes is not advancement. Twittering students questions to be answered on line, or having the first 10 that twitter the response back get an extra point or two might be valid (interval reinforcement, instead of cramming knowledge into someone over 55 minutes and hope they read the book). It seems that the digital revolution is getting lost in education not because of the access to technology, but the need to teach the teachers (and administrations) methods of implementation for these new technologies (e.g. Facebook, blogging, Twitter).

Climate change with reduction of paper via mobile communication

Today is blog action day, where bloggers go and all try to talk about one subject. This year it is climate change. This reaches in easily with my goals at this site: to use social media and moble communications to enhance education.

Why cant I test remotely? Why cant I twitter quiz? A facebook quiz posted at 6pm and you have until 10pm to respond? I know there are security and proper assessment obstacles to overcome but beyond those it could benefit all. Tesitng in a less stress environment, testing in a certain window not on command and testing with immediate results...and of course, no paper.

I dont have all the answers on these matters, actually, I have most of the questions. Yet when we see students using their most frequent means of communication and their most beloved devices as items of assessment, reams of paper will not be the only thing saved.

Twitter: Between High school and social media lies learning

   Whenever we see a teenager with a cell phone we automatically start thinking they are texting/ calling their boy/girlfriend, looking up a song or having a moment where they need to find "an app for that". How wonderful would it be to see 9 seconds of that phone stare comprised of a small piece of info from one of their classes?

Twittering provides students with the ultimate anti-cramming learining place. Nine seconds of looking at a sentence because you are interested in it clobbers the hour of studying beacuse you "have to" even if you love the subject. In many ways, in many classrooms, each class is really a cram session where homework is given in order to reinforce the "cramming".

Where your 6-iron was the holstered medium of choice in the old west, todays survival method is the clamped on smart phone. Even the basic kid has one of these. Why are educators not taking advantage of the most common and most accessable piece of equipment...ever? Fear, learning curve, old material "works" so why change it..? Possibly but we see it as a medium that should be banned and not controlled. Regardless of the policy, we know HS students have them around somewhere in school.

Hundreds of years of learning words and for many, flash cards are the top choice. Why? Portable, fast direct and to the point for the learning needed. That is exactly what twitter can do. A teacher giving a list of words to students to memorize is fine, but what twitter does is emotionally "highlight" the works. Which word is more important of the list? Hard to say sometimes, but if twittered by the teacher, the teacher is taking time to say, this is an important one...that is why I am twittering it.