Education is Technology

If you have old computers in your school, or have one with a lot of memory that can support virtual machines with a free virtualization platform like VirtualBox, Turnkey Linux @ http://www.turnkeylinux.org has a vast library of “turnkey” appliances: softwares that make installation and configuration a breeze for anyone with admin access to a computer.

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/mahara: digital portfolio platform w/ social networking features. Great for faculty and students alike. Useful for transition services, IEP implementation.

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/statusnet: microblogging for inside a campus. Useful for teaching precision and concision, net citizenship, audience awareness and rhetoric.

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/elgg: social networking for campus - again, training for real world citizenship in the digital ages. Restrict to campus.

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/etherpad: we use for real time collaboration in meetings and composition classes.

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/ for the full catalog of turnkey appliances. There’s a lot of wiki options if you want to encourage authentic writing.

Why Algebra Matters And How Technology Can Help

So I just want to point out here, to close it up and turn it over to you guys, that print is a medium. Same as digital photos. Same as a teacher’s voice. Same as a YouTube video. Same as a podcast. These are all different media. And as we know, the medium is the message. The medium defines and constrains and sometimes distorts the message. The math that can be conveyed in a YouTube video is not the same math that can be conveyed in a digital photo or a podcast or a print textbook.

We’re so enthusiastic here in the Silicon Valley and in this group about technology that disrupts and scales but I think it’s really important to point out here the fundamental misapprehension of this whole process of technology that we have is that there is one monolithic “mathematics” and we are all just innovating around “mathematics.” But those innovations distort what mathematics is. That’s the ball that I urge us all to keep our eye on today. I’m really excited to be here and tease apart those issues with you and take some questions. Thank you.

On Monday, all but one student came into first period with a tablet. For students with or without executive function challenges, effective notetaking seems to be an epic struggle. New tools, tablets and smart phones, can’t immediately become powerful assets in this struggle if students still struggle differentiating main ideas from support, identifying types of support - reasoning vs. concrete details, etc.

—Unless there’s something inherent in the structure of the tool that is novel and exercises these skills.

That’s what I’d like to learn about Evernote, available for Android and iOS devices, as well as Macs and PCs. Evernote users can take notes on their devices in a variety of formats, with or without attachments, and sync them to cloud storage. The notes can then be recalled and reviewed on any system on which the client has been installed and internet access is available.

As I was teaching the students with Android tablets this strategy for using their tools productively, it caught on. The remaining student installed Evernote on a laptop running Ubuntu Linux using Wine. That was a positive sign, and the results by the end of class were encouraging: pithy, economically efficient notes were taken by all.

What surprised me is that word clearly got to other students, because by 4th students had their smart phones out and Evernote already installed. Their thumbs poked and prodded at the material as we discovered and constructed an understanding of it.

I’ll sum up my observations at the end of two weeks. In the meantime I intend to introduce some strategies to use with Evernote: Make PDFs of handouts with cam/scanner and attaching them to Evernote entries; scanning QR codes to make data entry quicker, etc.

A Day in the Life of the iPad Classroom

girlwithalessonplan:

stevekinney:

Jeannetta Mitchell, a veteran teacher of 20 years, is encouraged by what she sees so far. “This is not a magic wand,” she says. “This just makes it more fun for them to learn. Nobody’s just sitting there writing down the answer, saying I don’t know how I got there. They know how they got there.”

Even—if at the very least—all a given tool does is making learning more engaging, is that such a bad thing?

It’s a bad thing if you put them in the hands of half the school without training the teachers or giving them time to begin adapting lessons.

Interesting spin this year. My professional life has been committed to participating in learning communities centered around literature; composition has always been a necessary but not tremendously rewarding part of that. </context>

This year I gutted my syllabus to pivot on the needs of the post-secondary writer - emphasizing agility and performativity/audience awareness no matter what the student’s celebrated post-secondary path is to be.

I feared my enjoyment would be sacrificed, but felt this would better serve the population I’m invested in. I planned for there to be plenty of very short literature excerpts that would model rhetorical modes and models. But the end goal isn’t the introduction of literary/critical theory, which is what my ego ideal has always pushed toward. Instead, we’re approaching literature as rhetoric, and I’m reading, consuming, and creating meaning in wholly different ways as a result.

I couldn’t be happier. A few weeks ago we worked through the first scene of Fight Club to learn how make implications about characters in narrative. We then looked at the screen play to see what strategies a screenwriter can use to develop characters indirectly.

Today was an accidental success. Neuromancer was out after a technology class. The following period we decided to look at page 1. First line explicated: character or setting? Setting. How’s it achieved strategically? Elaboration and comparison. Good, put that on your to do list. And so on through tactical use of elaboration and concretion, incorporation of dialog into prose, comparison, hyperbole, contrast…each strategy was added to do list for their current portfolio work.

My concluding realization is that literary tropes and figurative language are being covered just as they were, but we’re discussing their tactical use and inventorying them as rhetorical devices instead.

Pulling off grade level independent reading for students reading significantly below grade level: I can’t credit Calibre’s feature set enough (free software for linux, Mac, and PC). With this resource, I can refactor digital texts to suit the needs of the individual students - ration of text to white space, kerning, font, line height, etc.

Thank you, period 7. Any thoughts?

OpenTeacher

OpenTeacher is an opensource vocabulary training application that helps you learn a foreign language!

Enter a list of words in both a known and a foreign language, and OpenTeacher tests you.

OpenTeacher 2.2 has the following features:

• Smart question asking and interval training
• Think answer, shuffle answer and repeat answer input modes
• Easy symbol, Greek and Cyrillic input
• Read and write T2K (Teach2000), wrts and read ABBYY Lingvo Tutor files
• Save and open your online WRTS lists
• Print your word lists
• Available in Arabic, Trad. Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

OpenTeacher 2.2.1 is available for Linux, Windows and Mac.