11.03.2009

Module 5: Data Overload

Bridging digital divides


Preface:

The Shape of Assessments to Come



— Adrian Veidt, "Watchmen"
In particular [young teachers] say two things about their training in ed school. First, most of them say they did not get the hands-on practical teacher training about managing the classroom that they needed, especially for high-needs students. And second, they say there were not taught how to use data to differentiate and improve instruction and boost student learning. On Tuesday night, at a national town hall meeting with teachers, I asked the studio audience of about 100 teachers how they felt about their schools of ed. An uneasy laughter filled the room—not the kind of response that engenders confidence.

Teacher Preparation:
Reforming the Uncertain Profession
— Remarks of Secretary Arne Duncan at Teachers College, Columbia University. October 22, 2009

By the end of the fourth class of this Practicum, a generalized numbness wafts over the quiet air vent.  Although it could be a lack of oxygen, it's more likely that frenetic musings like, "so much information, so little time to process," are resonating throughout the classroom.  As student teachers morph into full time teachers, their cocoons are continually prodded with jargon like "best practices," "differentiated instruction," "classroom management," "alternative assessments," "item analysis" – phrases that do little more than add to the swampy morass within which the pupae mutate.  How can we stay on top of all of the data we're expected to assess and evaluate, let alone grade student exams and papers? How can we stay on top of it all?

Let's look at one piece of the data deluge: professional development. By the end of the first few months of teaching, you may find yourself talking exclusively to children. You may even find yourself talking as loudly as they do in the hallways, and not even realize it.  Keeping current with novel practices is an effective way to maintain connections with adults outside of the classroom.  We've talked a little about edublogs, but even the simple list we looked at three weeks ago quickly became too massive for any one teacher to stay on top of, so each of us skimmed one blog, and shared what we read over Twitter.  That's one way to stay connected.  But there is another type of technology that is very efficient at culling pertinent pedagogical pieces out of the terraflops of information posted daily on the Internet.  The technology is called RSS, for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary.  Or even, "I'm Ready for Some Stories." Let's look at what RSS has to offer.

RSS Feeds

If you can click it, you can clip it!

Back in the day, "newspaper clipping" services would hire people to skim through hundreds of publications, looking for specific research topics, and compile lists of summaries of these articles for other researchers to access when they were looking for materials to use in an upcoming publication. Today, the Internet offers so much information that it is impossible for anyone to stay on top of all of the postings uploaded every day. So electronic versions of clipping services have come online in the past few years to help Internet users sift through all of the webpages.

Most newspapers offer a summary of the day's articles on the first or second page of the printed publication. RSS feeds do the same thing online.  How can you find these feeds?  If you are on a webpage that has a bunch of articles posted on it, like an online newspaper or blog, look for the orange icon to the right of the previous paragraph.  If you see that icon on the web page you are reading, click on it, and you will be wisked away to the RSS feed for that list of articles.  You will know you are on a RSS feed page by the layout of the page: very simple, no graphics, only a "Subscribe to this feed" box at the top, and a list of title and short summaries of all the articles.  If you click on any of the titles, you will be taken to the page where the full article is posted.  For example, the Department of Education has an RSS feed that summarizes current agency events and announcements. Click on the link and see what a RSS feed page looks like.

Many newspapers offer RSS feeds, some even narrow their RSS feeds for education articles only. oday, most Web browsers have aggregators as an add-on application, so you can read them the same way you would a web page.  If the web page can be aggregated as a RSS feed, the orange icon will be visible on the right side of the URL address window (where "http://www... is typed in).  If you can see it, click on it to get to the RSS feed page.  You should see the icon to the right of this blog's URL address at the top right of this browser window.  It's so easy to do, that many Websites have their own RSS feeds.  Here's a list of education articles published in United States newspapers.

RSS feeds for Newspapers
Clicking through each link one at a time hardly makes sense. So when RSS feeds first started coming out, people needed a software program called an "aggregator" to group the feeds together into easily readable and sortable articles. Even today, these "stand alone" RSS aggregators are useful, because we usually scan various education articles only when we have some free time to separate ourselves from our daily routines, looking for information that will help us make a small change, a little improvement on the ways we wander through our day.  It makes sense to have a separate icon on the desktop to click on when we are in a contemplative mood.  Here are some of the more popular aggregators. If you don't like these, try this list.

Stand alone software

Into the Mash Pit

So many RSS feeds exist now, that it can take the whole day just to read through the summaries.  Hardly a time saver.  So now we have software to clip the aggregated RSS feeds. Sifting through a bunch of RSS feeds, looking for a key phrase is called a "mash up," and was considered one of the best educational technology innovations in 2008. Instead of sifting through RSS feeds individually, you can mash them together, and look at all of them at one time.

An easy way to see how this works is to look at Pageflakes. Like Adrian Veidt, we now can gaze upon one webpage, and scan news feeds, podcasts and videos, in search of everything we want to know about education. But you still have to let your eye rove, looking in many different places, seeing many different things.  Suppose you just wanted educational articles that had something to do with YouTube.  To funnel our search to those parameters, we need weld a Yahoo pipe, which is another example of a mashup. What's wonderful about Yahoo pipes is that they are open source, so anybody can see what RSS feeds are being used to make up the mashup by clicking on the 'Edit Source' link.  In this case, I used the list of newspapers above to create the mashup, and searched for any news article with the search term, "YouTube."  Only two came back, both from CNN.  Of course, you could type in whatever search term you want in the search box.  Or create a new pipe, this time using the edublog RSS feeds listed above. This time seven postings with the term, "YouTube" come up.


And a Little Video for My Friends


In past classes, RSS is about as far as I could go.  But this cycle I finally have some time to add some new techniques to this course.  If there's one additional computer skill I use all of the time in the classroom, it's playing videos onto a white wall of my science classroom.  Those of you who took my science class know this all too well.  So I'm going to add one more piece of technology you can add to the classroom: a simple way to play videos you download from the Internet in your classroom.

A Cautionary Note before we start.  Videos, like any creative expression, are generally protected by copyright law, which means you can't just copy something off the Internet and publish it (that includes showing it in your classroom) without the author's consent.  Two classes ago, we talked about plagiarism, today, from a legal standpoint, we're talking about copyright infringement.  That means if you don't get the author's permission, either through direct contact, or through the terms of the author's license, e.g., creative commons licenses, you could be liable for monetary damages.

Sometimes an author will allow you to use his or her expressions so long as you don't make any money using them.  As an educator, this "fair use" is often the case when you download something off the Internet for your class – you aren't planning to make any money off of what you downloaded, if teachers did, their profession wouldn't be one of the most underpaid in the country.  But suppose you then include those downloaded expressions in a unit plan you develop, and then publish them as part of a professional development workshop you took part in, and you hope the publication of that unit plan will help enhance your reputation in the field.  At this point, we may have moved away from a "fair use," into a derivative work.

What makes a publication you created, but is in part based upon other people's expressions, a "derivative work," isn't easy to define, just look at Teacher's Domain's Open Educational Resources license.  You may think, I'm not going to make any money or fame on this cobbled together lesson plan, so why worry?  Most teachers, even though they probably won't get any material compensation for their lessons, tend to hold on to them like truant children, never letting them out of their sight.  But if your work is actually a derivative work, you have little to no say over how that lesson gets distributed throughout the halls of learning, because you used someone else's expressions to make your lesson plan.  So be careful when you're using other people's works in your lessons, if you aren't careful, your lesson may end up being someone else's. If you want to see how convoluted these derivative webs can be, just look at what happens when someone uses someone else's test prep book in their class.

Think about the graphic at the top of this posting.  I scanned it from my "Watchmen" graphic novel, Photoshopped it, and then uploaded it.  Is that a violation of its copyright?  Probably not, it's just an excerpt from the novel, I'm using it in a way not intended by the authors, and I'm not making any money on it, and it's unlikely anyone else can.  But if I did published this blog in a book format, with the intent of making money from first-year teachers buying the book to help them implement technology in their classrooms, I should contact DC Comics to get permission to reproduce the graphic. 

All that being said, I'd like to end this class with sharing a few techniques on how to spice up your classes with online videos. The simplest way to do this is if you have an Internet connection and a video screen or projector in your classroom.. If you can play Internet streaming video in your classroom, all you need are the links to educational shows online.  Here are some of the best:
Of course, almost all network broadcasts are available online. Even commercial series, like House, Bones, CSI, can have some hook that can be used as a motivation for a science class.  Besides simply going to the network website, the following aggregators can help you find a TV series that might have something to do with your class. You'll need a lot of bandwidth for these sites.  The first links have an international flavor, with many sites from foreign countries. If you want to find more of these websites, here's another list.
As a general rule, it's unwise to rely on school network servers to be there for you when you need them for a class.  An entire book could be written about the relationships between educators and the IT folks who are contracted to service their needs at schools.  Suffice it to say that most experienced teachers have a laundry list of concerns they have about interacting (or even trying to find) the tech guys responsible for keeping the computers working in school.  So it's generally best to download a video to your computer, that way you'll always have it available. There are two ways to download a video off  the Internet.  You can cut and paste the URL of an online video into another web page that will save it to your computer.  Here are some of the most popular websites for both options.

OnlineThe other way is to download some software you can run on your computer, and cut and paste the URL into that software.  Some of the software will run in the background, and when a video appears in a browser window that it can download, a popup message will notify you of the video's availability.  Or, the software will add a button to the browser's toolbar, and it will flash and jiggle when you start playing a video in your browser window. Just like RSS, many web browsers now have addons that will do the same thing as the standalone softwares.  Here are some of the more popular standalone softwares.


Standalone
Most online videos are in a Flash (.flv) format.  Once you have downloaded a file with a .flv extension, you will need a player in order to watch the video.  There are many decent freeware brands to choose from, which means yet another list...

YouTube – Bootleg Bruhaha or Educational Extravaganza?


Had enough yet?  I'm almost there, I promise.  There is one more key piece you need to know when downloading Flash videos.  Most of the TV websites listed at the top of this posting won't let you download them.  Some will, like the Discovery and National Geographic channels, and you should always try until you're certain the website completely bars downloading.  There are three websites that will always work: YouTube, Google Videos, and DailyMotion.

Given the ubiquitous nature of YouTube on the Internet, several website have been created that organize YouTube content in ways helpful to educators.


Rapprochement



What I have attempted to offer you in this last part of this last module is the awareness that Web 2.0 is too variegated to issue blanket statements like "block YouTube" or "downloading is copyright violation."  All of us, as teachers need to explore the many sources of good and bad information across the Internet, and make our own, independent decisions about what and how we will deliver online information in the classroom.  As soon as we delegate pedagogical decisions concerning Web 2.0 to people who are outside the classroom, the quality of delivery will start to decay, until both teacher and student are reduced to passive button clickers who receive, but do not comprehend what they're watching.

What I have attempted to offer all of you in this Practicum is the awareness of various online technologies you have at your disposal, and some techniques that are helpful in delivering these contents in the classroom.  Relying on other people to do these technological things for you will only stunt your development as master teachers. Through current news stories I have highlighted the fact that teacher certification classes in the near future will require education students to master skill that will help first year teachers manage their classrooms more effectively, rather than sitting a Masters of Ed "Mickey Mouse" class, listening to someone summarize a chapter from a book that will not help them once the bell rings, and the adult is alone with all of the children.

When we looked at test prep techniques for the Regents, it was obvious to me that skills like "standards alignment" and "item analysis" are not techniques that are not commonly addressed in educations classes.  And given the obsession with "teaching to the test," resistance to these skills is understandable.  But the result as been the development of a $1 billion dollar industry that exists entirely outside of public education.  The Kaplans and Princeton Review feed off the fear parents have about their tweensters failing a test which will make it impossible for them to get into a good college.  Because teachers haven't mastered these test prep skills, schools have to designate part of their meager annual budgets to buying these test prep books, which teachers resent as encroaching on their freedoms in the classroom, and students hate because instead of learning what they want, they're told what to study and how.

Outsourcing educational instruction from teachers and students sharing a space in a school every day to private businesses that deliver slick shiny packages, but no guarantee that the products will be effective unless teachers do what they tell them to do gets us no closer to enhancing the quality of instruction for students.  The only way I see to achieve actual improvements is for teachers, not consultants, to master new medias, like Web 2.0, for themselves and bring the digital world into the classroom.  Hitting the play button on a DVD player offers only limited experiences for classroom instruction, either you're listening or you're not, and it's hard to take notes with the lights off...

We've gone many places during this Practicum, and I know some of you feel like you've gotten lost along the way.  But I'm will to bet if you feel that way, it's because I've shown you a lot of different educational opportunities that are available on the Web today.  Of course you're not going to use them all in your first year teaching.  But hopefully, as you travel down your own educational pathways, you'll remember sometime mentioned in this class, this blog, this wiki, that you can use as a reference point to developing your own technologies in the classroom.  And that's the bottom line, we have a choice as educators, we can depend on others to deliver educational technologiesto us, or we can make them ourselves.


Evaluation

Homework #5


Deliverable #1: Each student will use either the newspaper or edublog mashup to find three postings about a professional development topic. Each student will post the URLs for each of the posting to the group wikipage.

Assessment

To Date


 I have checked through all blog and wiki postings and compiled a list of completed assignments to date on the class wiki page.  I strongly urge each group to dedicate some time over Thanksgiving to complete these assignments.  Classroom presentations will be delivered on December 4th.  I will be online over the holiday to answer any questions you post to your wikipages or over Twitter.

Based on your Twitter responses, I have compiled the following list of completed in-class assignments.  A "-1" means you completed the assignment.  The assignments for each week are:
  1. "Digital divide" definition
  2. Edublog choice
  3. Three Educause technologies you would like to integrate into your classroom
  4. "Poof paper" definition
If you haven't completed these assignments, please Twitter me with your missing responses.
quy_grades
first_name
 last_name
 #4
 #3
 #2
 #1
Alexis
 Cabrera
 -1
 -1
 -1
 0
Shabana
 Choudhari
 -1
 0
 -1
 -1
Dina
 Di Salvo
 0
 0
 0
 -1
Janny
 Diaz
 -1
 -1
 -1
 -1
Kim
 Epps
 0
 0
 0
 0
Margarita
 Estevez
 -1
 -1
 -1
 -1
Aldona
 Gierlarowiec
 -1
 0
 -1
 0
Doreen
 May
 0
 -1
 -1
 0
Corrine
 Mojica
 0
 -1
 -1
 -1
Yadira
 Obando
 -1
 0
 -1
 0
Maria
 Quezada
 0
 0
 0
 0
Tabatha
 Quinones
 -1
 0
 0
 -1
Diana
 Rivera
 0
 0
 0
 0
Naika
 Rodriguez
 -1
 -1
 -1
 -1
Vickyana
 Rodriguez
 0
 0
 0
 0
Jessica
 Sanabria
 0
 0
 0
 0
Jamarie
 Santiago
 0
 0
 0
 0
Ana
 Soto
 0
 0
 0
 0
Nicole
 Spinelli
 -1
 0
 0
 0
Yinorah
 Varela
 0
 0
 -1
 0
Dorthea
 Walsh
 0
 0
 -1
 0
 .

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