TechTimes Blog

Jun 3 2015

Utilizing the Khan Academy as a Teacher with Students

Video tutorials are not everyone’s idea of the ideal learning asset. The idea of reducing education to a bunch of embedded online videos really did not sit well with a lot of educators as the Khan Academy began to be used in America’s schools. Yet, I am a fan of the site and resource. And it’s not because of the videos.

They offer a nice management dashboard and they are trying some truly interactive, interesting ways to engage the learner beyond video watching. What some teachers may not know is:

What’s available? and
Is there a management tool for me?

This guide does a good job of detailing how a teacher can create a coach role and let students become monitored by the teacher. As students progress through activities and develop points within the system, it’s all tracked. This would help facilitate time spent within Khan on a routine basis, if the teacher set the expectation for “10 minutes of Khan a week” or “1000 points a month.”

And for those not sure what’s there beyond math, here’s a catalog of their subjects covered by volunteers and resource partners. For parents, they too can become a coach, and monitor their student’s progress. We recommend students use their Goochland Google account to connect to the service.

By John Hendron • For Parents, Learning for Teachers • • Tags: khan

May 13 2015

Transient and Anonymous Social Networking Tools

A couple years ago, Snapchat just came out and was one of the new, popular tools for sending messages that could include video or photos that disappeared. Billed as a feature, this service offered its users the ability to send things without worry about accountability. For instance, the service might be used to send very private photos, but the unlike regular texting, it would prove difficult for the recipient to save the photo. As it turns out, the service is still popular, but it’s being joined by other services that either emulate its main feature or else has capitalized on new ways to communicate under a cloak of anonymity.

Watch our video explaining some of these tools.

Tools we think parents should be aware of include:

YikYak (anonymous location-based messaging service),
Snapchat (encourages distribution of images and videos),
Periscope (live video streaming via Twitter),
Meercat (live video streaming via Twitter),
Kik (peer messaging system).

There are also alternative apps that mimic Snapchat. What’s difficult is to track what are the new tools and which are the popular ones. As new tools are developed that allow for communication in different ways, it becomes of paramount importance not to necessarily ban the apps from kids—or ban a specific way of communication—but instead to talk in more general terms about what you, as a parent, find acceptable.

As an example, let’s assume you do not want your child using dating apps on their smart phone or tablet. Many of these services are intended for young or older adults, but lying about your age isn’t an impossibility to gain access to these types of apps. This article from April, 2015 looks at some of the more popular dating apps that allow for communication with others. While parents can go online to learn about what’s popular, the conversation and expectation might be more far-reaching: “there will be consequences if you use your phone to use apps aimed for adult users that encourage dating. I am not comfortable at this time you using these services.”

What we find interesting of late is the generational divide and diversity among social apps. Adults (18 years+) prefer to use more mainstream apps, such as:

Facebook,
LinkedIn,
Pinterest,
Instagram, and
Twitter.

In addition to Facebook and Instagram, the most popular tools used by teens also include:

Google+,
Vine, and
Tumblr.

The same report cites that 73% of teens have access to a smart phone, and 87% have access to a laptop or desktop computer.

Some tips for staying on top of the latest apps allowing us to communicate in new ways:

Set up your app account so that you are granting permission to the account and can control the password;
Regularly check the device to see which apps your child is using and in what capacity;
Read the age ratings of apps provided by the app stores;
Have regular conversations with your child about your expectations for communicating online and what the consequences are;
Understand that there is an incredible amount of peer pressure for students to communicate socially with online tools, including texting (also called SMS messaging). Just because the tool can allow something inappropriate, does not mean your child will use the app or service for something inappropriate. That said, all the apps in general allow for private conversations, and unlike a phone call, these conversations written in text can re-surface causing embarrassment;
As a general rule, you should not communicate with text, picture, or video anything that might later embarrass you, another person, or you wouldn’t mind your own mother (or father) seeing.

By John Hendron • For Parents • • Tags: communication, social, tools

May 12 2015

Digital Citizenship: Games

I wanted to re-visit some topics related to digital citizenship for parents and to provide resources. In this first post, we’ll look at video games.

That video was from 2013, and I wanted to update the video with a few take-aways.

Video games are poised to take-over Hollywood soon in terms of value for an industry; we’re expecting video games to become far more immersive and life-like, as evidenced by technologies such as the Oculus Rift and Microsoft Kinect.
Video games are not inherently bad, but with all activities, moderation is likely key. Some video games are designed to be addictive, and mastery of the game may require several hundred hours of screen time. Talk to your child about what values you can agree upon or uphold for reasonable game playing.
Like popular music and popular movies, there is a game industry built around games that include content that may well be inappropriate for your child, with themes of violence, sex, and drugs. Consult the video game ratings guide and investigate what ratings games you are purchasing hold.
Games are becoming increasingly social (it’s more fun to play with a real person than a machine). Some games allow for open chat (audio or typed) or may have associated social platforms that allow for direct communication with other game players. Participation in these social spaces could expose your child to inappropriate language or images. Talk with your child to understand their interest in games and ask them to show you how players can interact online.
Look at parent guides for ideas about what lurks beyond a cool sounding game. And, if we may, invite yourself to play with your child (whether it’s a game designed for a mobile device or a console game, or one designed for playing on a PC).
Games, by design, can be a fantastic medium for learning and for entertainment. Just like with food, some treats (or too much one of one food) may not be a good idea for our overall health. Games by design are made to challenge us, reward us, and to engage our attention.

By John Hendron • For Parents •

May 7 2015

Leading from Values

When Mark Fernandes visited us a couple years ago, and led discussions first with our leadership team, and later the division at convocation, he challenged each of us to look at ourselves as leaders and to consider the proposition that we find direction through our values. There was something overwhelmingly refreshing about his story, specifically about how Luck Stone’s compass is not focused on “making rocks” as our own Pete Gretz likes to say, but had a mission that went beyond the bottom line of their business. “Igniting human potential” is their mission and their battle cry. They could be in the education business, perhaps they could make healing drugs, or even great software. But their business is rock. And yet to grow that business and to distinguish it from others, they put a focus on human potential. Refreshing for sure.

This 2011 article made the case for values-based leadership, and from it, I think one paragraph in particular is worth replaying:

In all of these roles I have stayed committed to values-based leadership. No matter what title I’ve had, whether corporate executive, professor, executive partner or board member–or for that matter soccer coach, volunteer parent or Sunday school teacher–I’ve never lost sight of who I am and what matters most to me. By knowing myself and my values, being committed to balance and having true self-confidence and genuine humility, I can far more easily make decisions, no matter if I’m facing a crisis or an opportunity. The answer is always simply to do the right thing and the very best that I can.

Knowing your values can help you do the right thing and also focus your effort on being the best that you can be. And its worth saying here, for those reading, that values-based leadership works in two ways. First, you have to know yourself and your own values. Your values are what make you, you. Its from these that you will act on a daily basis, and when they’re known and focused on positive traits, there’s the potential for great things.

Second, there are the values that define an organization. The values are what you find, but hopefully those are the same values that you see members of an organization attempting to champion. Excellence, creativity, courage, honor, and optimism are hopefully not just words you see on our walls, but the feeling, evidence, and artifacts left behind from interactions with teachers, students, custodians, and bus drivers. In fact, the entire organization might so focused that it’s easy to see these values all around us.

Getting that focus can be difficult. It takes time and effort. But how do we start?

First, consider what each of our ECCHO values means to you. Which ones really resonate? Are their other values that mean something to you? If you are not sure what other values you might consider, look at the Luck Companies’ app called Igniter.

Next, let’s focus on your own set of values. The personal set. For me, one of the ones that feels strongest to who I am is creativity. It drives how I work and the way I make decisions. If it’s who I am, then I need to make sure I am not compromising these value. I might take a week to reflect on how creativity has played a positive role in my work and relationships. Then I might look back on ways I could have been more purposefully engaged with the traits that reveal this value.

Next, we might sit with a small group of colleagues, or even students, and even parents. Where do we see ECCHO? How do these values align with our mission of maximizing the potential of learners? When we look at the full strategic plan, what goals might we set for ourselves in the next month that would help contribute to others seeing excellence, creativity, courage, honor, and optimism all around them, when they interact with us, when they visit our classrooms, or attend one of our meetings?

I believe values stick to us based on our experiences and that has a lot to do with our outlook on life. Likely one of the most sure-fire ways to inspire another person is to let them experience us living through the values that resonate with us. You might be reading this, and asking “Who has the time? I’ve got a job to do!” At the end of the day, our job is inspiring and preparing the next generation. The details matter. It’s about preparing students (and one another) to make a positive impact.

If you’re hungry for more thinking about leading from values, check out Luck’s Value Based Leader blog. Thanks for reading!

By John Hendron • General News • • Tags: values, vbl

May 5 2015

Phillip’s Instrument Drive

GHS Senior Phillip Goodman wants to help the instrumental music program here in Goochland. He’s established an instrument drive, and is looking for donated musical instruments (in working or not quite working order) to be used in our schools. On May 12, from 3:30-9:00PM, he’ll be manning the band room door at the GHS cafeteria to collect what you might have to donate. They’re looking for oboes, flutes, clarients, bass clarinets, saxophones, french honrs, trumpets, trombones, tubas, percussion, guitars, and more. If you have questions, you can reach Phillip by email (pgoodman93 at yahoo.com).

By giving your old instrument you are giving a great opportunity to someone else who otherwise could never learn. Please join us in this project to bring music education to everyone in Goochland County who is unable to without the help of our community.

By John Hendron • General News •

May 1 2015

Tricorder in Hand

In high school and into college, a friend of mine piqued my interest in a sci-fi television series called Star Trek: the Next Generation, and like the original series, the characters living aboard the Enterprise used small, hand-held computers called tricorders. According to the Wikipedia, this device was focused on sensing, computing, and recording things.

More recently, I visited Mrs. Kass’ classroom at GMS and students were learning about the quilt designs used during the time of the Underground Railroad to communicate. A whole collection of designs were used, and some can be seen here. While originally unplanned, students were using their iPads to “record” these patterns as they came up on the projection via the Promethean board. Designs would be used later in an upcoming project.

Having the tool in hand, students could immediately utilize the camera to record these images. Earlier in the week, Mrs. Kass’ students from her science class were doing something similar, recording images of their environment. Students collected a number of fascinating things from around the school, in areas just beyond the tennis courts. Mrs. Leiderman led the expedition, and later shared with students her own foraging artifacts in the form of bugs and flowers that have gone to form the virtual pages of several ebooks.

This is interesting. A small, hand-held device can be used, almost just like in StarTrek, to sense, compute, and record things. These examples have been light on sensing (and perhaps, fitness trackers or the new Apple Watch might be better examples of how we will use technology to sense things), and the computing part happens too, but more often later in the classroom as students re-mix the recorded photographs in a way that helps them better understand what was captured.

I recently learned that some teachers were exploring research that articulated what can go wrong with an iPad deployment, as published in a research article about a school iPad deployment in another state. For anyone who might point out what could go wrong with behavior, perhaps even amplified bad behavior with a powerful sensor, computer, and recorder, the potential for deeper learning using such a device will likely always outweigh the negatives. I don’t really care so much that the iPads I see in our classrooms remind me of the future foretold in StarTrek, but sometimes you have to marvel at how that vision from just a few years ago has the potential to change the ways in which we get to learn and grow.

By John Hendron • General News • • Tags: ipads

Apr 16 2015

Embracing an Active Learning Modality

@bealeiderman recently shared this article with me. “It’s a good article, it’s easy to understand, and gets at a point I know we’ve tried to make in the past.” Okay, I’ve read it.

What Project-Based Learning Is (and what it isn’t)…

As teachers learned this past semester in our online course on PBL, there is a difference between learning “through the project” and one that’s added at the end, served as “dessert.” What I liked about this article were the examples educator Azul Terronez uses in his classroom.

(As an aside, the comments are worth reading from this article, too, and raise important distinctions about what’s “new” and “old” about a “true” PBL approach. What I couldn’t help but recognized, however, is how engaging Terronez’s activities sound. That’s distinctive. When you want to do some of those things yourself, it goes beyond sugar-coating activities to be fun. Through these types of activities students can find real passion.)

By John Hendron • Learning for Teachers • • Tags: pbl

Apr 14 2015

Understanding Personal-ized Learning

Scott McLeod, who spoke at this past year’s VASCD Conference, made a big point (and a valid one, too) about the differences between individualization in education and personalization. Personalization, more than the former, gets used a lot in education circles, and a lot with educational technology products.

An article by Alfie Kohn recently got re-published by Tech and Learning magazine about Four Reasons to Worry About ‘Personalized Learning’. In it, he quotes Will Richardson, who basically equates “personalized” with “individualized” and personal as what we should mean when we say “personalized” or “personalization.” The easy way to remember? Something individualized is done to you, and something personal is from you. Both authors are endorsing personal learning, but Kohn especially is cautioning us to be leery of the term, especially when it is used by vendors.

I have likely misused the term myself. It’s important to make the correct distinction here. I think there is space in our world for both an individualized approach and a personal approach, although Kohn and Philip McRae tie the whole idea of individualization to behaviorist principles that at their worst, “establish[es] children as measurable commodities to be cataloged and capitalized upon by corporations.” Kohn advocates for social, project-based learning. He says:

In the best student-centered, project-based education, kids spend much of their time learning with and from one another. Thus, while making sense of ideas is surely personal, it is not exclusively individual because it involves collaboration and takes place in a community.

In Goochland today I see a mix of approaches towards learning, and sometimes, we do want to help support students either in groups or individually with study that is tailored to their current needs. We have never needed technology to help differentiate instruction (although it can help, a lot), and as Kohn points out, we have never needed technology to make learning personal. In the end, striving to personalize instruction means for us that we have to be flexible enough with our design for instruction to allow the perspectives, desires, interests, and emotions of our students to play a role in the learning experience. When and where digital tools can support that pursuit, we have some interesting new opportunities. Otherwise, in our pursuit towards individualization, we might take the time to weigh our efforts with individualization versus different opportunities for authentic learning.

By John Hendron • Learning for Teachers, Resource of Interest • • Tags: individualized, kohn, personalized

Mar 30 2015

Learning from… experience

Tonight after school I led the final technology workshop of the year, on podcasting. One of the questions I posed was what it takes for students to remember something well. One response was “a personal experience.”

Many years ago, we convened on a professional development day at the Cub Scout camp in Goochland (thanks to Karren Streagle) and we all worked on a marketing project together for promoting popcorn. The session, entitled “Learning Hacks,” based in part on the book by John Medina entitled Brain Rules, focused on a project-based approach that started with an entry event of smelling and tasting popcorn.

What was cool about re-discovering these photos this evening on my home computer was the “look” of engagement when teachers were poised to learn, working in teams. It brought back some good memories, and reinforced for me the wisdom from today about providing memorable experiences for our students.

By John Hendron • General News • • Tags: pd

Mar 23 2015

Virtual Classroom Feature Comes to Schoology

Recently, I noticed a new app had become available via Schoology, called Big Blue Button. This add-on, once enabled for your course, gives you the ability to setup a virtual classroom space, similar to other products you may have used. Learn more, below.

This tool unfortunately requires Flash and only works on laptops (not iPads). See Zoe or Bea today to get started!

By John Hendron • Learning for Teachers • • Tags: schoology

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