“The Danish minister of education is quoted: “I am happy that we as the first country in the world had the vision to let students use the internet during their exams. The internet is an integrated part of students’ everyday lives and education so this development is natural. The experiment shows there is a range of positive effects.”

Connected Test-Taking: Is It Cheating?

(via teachersworldwide)

Monday, May 14th, 2012

Google Drive, Dropbox, and iOS

Bill Campbell on Google+ asked if Google will work within Apple’s App Store policy to get Google Drive in the iOS app store:

With regard to the iPads and Google Drive, the following bothers me. You may already know there is currently no Google Drive app for iOS. While Google is reported to be working on it, one reason it might not become available on iOS might be Apple’s policy, which resulted in them removing apps that supported Dropbox from the App store. The ability to buy more Google Drive space directly from Google without Apple getting their 30% service fee could be considered a violation of Apple’s app store rules.

The issue with Dropbox was the link to sign-up for a paying account from within the app itself. As soon as Dropbox removed it, all of the affected apps were approved and subsequently put in the app store. Dropbox is still free to offer paid subscriptions and Google Drive will be as well—they just won’t be able to advertise it in the app without also giving Apple the standard 30% cut.

I don’t imagine this would be a huge show-stopper for Google—who has tons of alternate avenues to promote their product. They are, of course, and advertising company after all. I think that Google understands that a lion’s share of the interaction with their products (I’m looking at you Google Docs) happens in the browser, not on the mobile platforms. Coincidently, Google Docs seems to be where Drive is most tightly integrated.

It’s easy to paint Apple as a ruthless dictator of the App Store ecosystem, but when you look at it from a pragmatic approach. If they didn’t charge for in-app purchases, then a significant segment of developers would dodge paying Apple at all by releasing free apps with links to paid upgrades outside the store. I’m talking less about Dropbox, Google Drive, and Amazon Kindle and more about the short-sighted, opportunistic apps that show up from time to time. Publishers with weekly or monthly subscriptions would also be getting a free ride and bandwidth for a one gigabyte Retina-quality magazine certainly isn’t free. After credit card processing, storage and bandwidth (free apps cost Apple money), and other infrastructure, the App Store contributes to less than 1% of Apple’s overall profits.

Apple, unfortunately is not in a position to pick and choose when to enforce this policy (it doesn’t explain why the Amazon app hasn’t been yanked, but it does explain why Amazon hasn’t updated that app in ages). They have to enforce it and they have to enforce it across the board—even if that occasionally leaves a bad taste in our collective mouthes.

Again, I don’t think it’s a significant obstacle for Google at this juncture. They don’t need to link to the paid subscription from the app. The kind of users willing to pay are the same ones who will find out how through Google’s other channels.

Google Drive for iOS has significant technical challenges in terms of iOS’s sandboxing and whatnot. For example, if you fire up Google Drive and open up a Word document in Pages—how do you get it back into Google Drive? With the way that iOS is setup, it would require Apple to build support for Google Drive into Pages, which is about as likely as Google Docs supporting iCloud anytime soon.

Tuesday, May 8th, 2012

In which yours truly talks about using Reflection to send your iPad’s display to a Mac you know and love. This is incredibly useful if you want to project your screen onto a SMART Board and one of the only games in town if you want to record your iPad’s screen.

(Source: vimeo.com)

Monday, May 7th, 2012

A Liberal Decalogue: Bertrand Russell's 10 Commandments of Teaching →

I like the fifth one especially.

  1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
  2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
  3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed. 4.When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
  4. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
  5. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
  6. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
  7. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
  8. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
  9. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

Sunday, May 6th, 2012

Getting Involved in Education in New York City

New York City is home of the largest school district in the country. On one hand, this means that it is one of the biggest bureaucracies in the United States. On another hand, it makes the city a target for opportunists and bullshit artists. On a magical third hand, it also means that, statistically1 speaking, there are a lot of smart people lurking in the shadows. Lately, it seems that the the constituency of smart people is growing to a critical mass.

EdCampNYC

Inspired by FooCamp and BarCamp, EdCampNYC is a loosely organized “unconference” with sessions led by practioners—or as I like to call them, people who are not representing the sales and marketing department. It’s happening tomorrow, Saturday, May 5, 2012 at Francis Lewis High School in Queens, NY.

By attending EdCamp, you are guaranteed to learn something new, make a new friend and receive information that you can immediately apply in your classroom and professional life!

I dig conferences, but there are few things I hate more than vendors hawking their wares at conferences. EdCampNYC is all of the good without any of the bad.

New York Education Tech Entrepreneurs

Every month, Douglas, Lee, and Saad bring two unlikely groups together: entreprenuers and educators. I’d argue that the two have more in common than they you’d think, but that’s another topic all together. New York City is becomming the second largest incubator of technology startups in the country (see also: Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Meetup, Bit.ly). Collaboration with the education community is a natural fit.

Their last meeting featured James Shelton III, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement for the U.S. Department of Education and the top brass of local startups. Other previous meetings have welcomed professors from local universities and technology directors from nearby school districts.

The meeting is on June 5th. There is a $5 fee to join, but it’s completely refundable if you can’t make it.

A Note to Non-New Yorkers

Teaching is a very insular occupation. I believe that the education community in New York City is in something of a renaissance, but that I live here. THere may be something awesome brewing where you live, but your going to have to drag your weary self out of the house to seek it out. In many waysm smaller communities are at a significant advantage because the bureacracy isn’t as big and the pockets aren’t as deep (I’m looking at ypu textbook publishers).

A Note to New Yorkers

I plan at being at both of the events listed above. Feel free to reach out on Twitter if you also plan on attending.

  1. Made up statistics, that is. ↩

Friday, May 4th, 2012

Life After the Test →

Jose Vilson:

The nerve of this kid, who is super-bright by the way, to think I’m going to stop teaching just because there’s no standardized test at the end of June. I teach a generation of kids who don’t remember a time when the grade at the end of the marking period mattered as much as the state standardized test, if not more. Nowadays, when the test is “done,” the school year is done for them. Yet, they always get a rude awakening when, after the test, I have my chalk / marker ready to go for the next subject.

One—extremely effective—way to let our students know that high-stakes testing is not the be-all-and-end-all is to avoid the temptation to lower our standards once the test has come and gone. You can’t hide behind test prep anymore. Let this be the time that you try out an audacious project with your students.

Some ideas that we’re piloting at my school:

  • Sixth grades are pulling apart the mathematics curriculum and creating online video tutorials for each and every topic—something along the lines of a homegrown version of the Khan Academy. Next year’s sixth grade will have a collection of student-made resources explaining how they learned to tackle a given problem.
  • Seventh grade students are creating digital textbooks, historical fiction, and other curriculum-based writing pieces using iBooks Author. These books will be available on every iPad in the school, an online repository, and possibly even the iBookstore.1
  • A high-school A.P. U.S. Government teacher is going to experiment with flipping classroom with college lectures from iTunes U and using class time to focus on deeper discussions and debate.
  • The librarian is creating an online book club where students video their discussions about popular book for posterity and for other students who may read the book in the future.
  • I am working on bringing in software engineers from local New York City start-ups (e.g. Tumblr) to come in and get my students interested in programming.

There are other small ideas that percolating, but the teachers involved in the projects above have committed to getting these projects off the ground. A major focus is leveraging student creativity in order to build up a library of resources that will ultimately benefit the entire school community.

  1. I am not entirely sure what’s involved in that just yet. ↩

Thursday, May 3rd, 2012

Teaching Design and Creativity

Over the course of my career, I have done two kinds of teaching—both of which have been challenging. On one hand, I have taught The Curriculum. You’re familiar with The Curriculum. It’s based on standards, outlined in textbooks, and typically requires you to answer to some kind of higher authority.1

Teaching The Curriculum is hard in its own special way. It’s tough to get kids excited about the next chapter in the textbook. It’s your job to take the otherwise drab content and make it engaging. Put on a good show, even if the script sucks. Make them care, even if they’ll never need to use whatever it is you’re teaching.

Regardless of how bad my education was (and it was pretty bad), it—at the very least—serves as a boilerplate template for how to go about teaching The Curriculum. I have decades of experience with unenthusiastic teaching from the other side of the desk.

On the other hand, this year I’ve begun teaching more complex topics, such as programming and design. So far, I’ve found that teaching these skills is much harder than teaching the curriculum.

I’ve read enough programming books to know that it is non-optional to begin with a basic discussion of how to print “Hello World” to command line. Beyond that, however, spending weeks discussing the finer points of associative arrays and closures is no way to win over an audience of 13-year-olds. They want to make stuff. Badly. It’s my job to get them to that point as quickly as humanly possible.

Although I learned how to program relatively recently, I’m not entirely sure how I acquired the modest skills I currently possess. I find myself having to explain abstract concepts I’m not sure how I learned in the first place.

The paradox of teaching design is that designers know things, but they can’t tell others about them in a way that novices will understand. In other words, this stuff can’t simply be written down and told to people and voila! they become experts.

In a chapter entitled, “What Is Design Knowledge and How Do We Teach It?”, in Educating Learning Technology Designers, Christopher Hoadley and Charlie Cox discuss the difficulties of teaching design—another abstract and complex subject where students are in a hurry to be able to produce something cool and quick.

We need, then to get a better grip on what experienced designers know-in whatever sense of the word-and come up with effective, reproducible ways of getting novices to a similar stage, such that they understand the general ideas that all expert designers share, and develop their own unique way of understanding and applying those ideas.

How do we know what we know? How would you explain color to someone who had no concept of it. Our brains take a lot for granted in order to avoid being overwhelmed by the complexity of the world around us.

That said, dealing with this abstraction cannot necessarily be avoided. Modern problems are complex, ill-structured, and open-ended. It’s our responsibility as educators to prepare our students to tackle these problems.

Teachers should be experts at explaining and externalizing the automatized ways of knowing and doing such that novices can understand.

That’s my job now and I dig it.

  1. The wiener pun was intentional and unapologetic. ↩

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

Pineapples in Cut-Off T-Shirts and Ignoring Everybody

The only thing more boring than having to take state assessments for six out of ten days is having to watch kids take state exams for six out of ten days. I’ve been trapped in a poorly-ventilated room with torn garbage bags covering bulletin boards for two hours and fifteen minutes in a clip. In situations like this, I do what any self-respecting teacher would do: I whine.

“Well, it’s never going to change in our life time,” a colleague replied. She had a point. It’s not like bureaucracy ever decreases. But, as I thought about it some more, I’m not so sure that I agree.

We’re living in some really exciting times right now and we shouldn’t count anything out at this point

Bureaucracies are not particularly good at being nimble and the landscape is changing so fast that it just might leave the pencil-pushers in the dust.

It will happen in higher education first. College tuition continues to rise and student loan debt is getting out of hand. At the same time, it’s getting increasingly easier to learn pretty much everything. I can take full courses at Stanford University on my iPad through iTunes U, Coursera, and Udacity.

The equipment costs of getting into a certain field are dropping rapidly. You can produce world-class work with a decent laptop and a few peripherals. You can get your hands on the same tools top photographers, recording studios, and videographers use for under $10,000. It’s even cheaper if writing, programming, or design is your passion. You can rent Amazon or Google’s massive infrastructure for a few dollars an month if you need to scale your idea. I can get in touch with some of the top figures in a given field with a well-thought out email or a witty toot.

At the same time, the status quo is looking increasing ridiculous. The state tests are filled with absurd stories about sleeveless pineapples butchered to make even less sense and coupled with cryptic questions. New standards and initiatives read like vague versions of the old standards and initiatives. They are struggling to keep up and it’s starting to show.

My students know it. For days after the New York State ELA exam, my inbox was filled with articles from my students covering the controversy over the “The Pineapple and the Hare.”

Ignore everybody. Dig into deeper problems. Do something awesome.

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

Google Education On Air →

This Wednesday—May 2, for those of you keeping track at home—Google is holding an online conference via Google+ hangouts. Hangouts On Air is a special feature in and of itself, but I digress.

The conference takes place from noon on the east coast and goes into the evening. You can pick and choose which sessions you’d like to attend. My understanding is that there is limited space if you want to participate, but each session will also be streamed live.

Monday, April 30th, 2012

Bill Gates: Making Teacher Evaluations Public 'Not Conducive To Openness' →

The goal is to help teachers be better,” Gates said. “And when we run personnel systems where we want to be frank with employees about where they need to improve, having [evaluations] publicly available is not conducive to openness and a free exchange of views.

(Source: gjmueller)

Sunday, April 22nd, 2012

We Know How to End Bullying in Schools—So Why Don’t We Do It?  →

Liz Dwyer for GOOD Magazine:

Shore says research shows that schools that create comprehensive programs see a 50 percent drop in bullying. So if we know what steps help foster a culture of caring—and we know it works—why don’t more school communities take action? Part of the answer is that parents and teachers still accept bullying as a normal part of life, a rite of passage that helps kids learn to deal with the real world.

And it’s true, bullying is an ingrained part of our society—principals bully teachers, teachers control their classrooms by humiliating students, bullying bosses run rampant in our workplaces, and Rush Limbaugh can call a law student a slut without any real consequences. That’s why nothing will change if educators continue to focus simply on identifying individual students as possible school shooters. We have a responsibility to all students.

My wife made the very same point to me this morning.

Sunday, April 22nd, 2012

Confirmed: He Who Sits the Most Dies the Soonest →

Neil Wagner for the Atlantic:

A study of more than 200,000 Australians adds to the growing body of evidence that people who sit the most die the soonest. It also found that you can’t exercise this effect away, though exercise does help reduce it greatly.

I set up a standing desk in my classroom, but lately I’ve been grabbing laptop and sitting at a student table. Looks like it’s time to return to the standing desk.

Sunday, April 22nd, 2012

Simon Hauger on Solving Real-World Problems →

Sarah Brooks:

Simon Hauger, an urban educator and founder of the The Sustainability Workshop in Philadelphia, believes that school should be about students solving real world problems to have life changing educational experiences. If you ask kids, they’ll tell you school is boring. He explains, “Traditional school is just focused on content. And if that’s not in the service of something larger, kids get bored. Urban education is an interesting place to look. So many things have broken down, you can’t hide the failure.”

Thursday, April 19th, 2012

Fire and Water is an awesome project on Kickstarter about a surf legend turned New York City firefighter directed by a local Rockaway Beach surfer. Totally up my alley. I backed it but the project is just shy of it’s funding goal and there are only a few days left. I can’t support it unless it hits its goal and I really want to support this documentary.

Don “Gums” Eichin, from Long Island NY was 1 of a handfull of pioneering surfers in the late 1950’s and 60’s that set out to make a life in Hawaii. Testing their wits in the big waves of Oahu’s Bonzai Pipeline, Wiamea & other imfamous waves with some of the greatest named legends of the time. He later became an FDNY Firefighter. His story is no less then that of legend. His passion for surfing, the ocean & amazing stories have passed through the generations of his own family and their friends as they were so influenced by him that they too became surfers and FDNY Firemen.

(Source: vimeo.com)

Friday, April 13th, 2012

webkitbits: Ole Michelsen has created a View Source bookmarklet for the iPad and iPhone with syntax highlighting, formatted/selectable text, and clickable links. Alright, who has been reading my mind and granting my wishes? Also: why are my wishes so banal?

webkitbits:

Ole Michelsen has created a View Source bookmarklet for the iPad and iPhone with syntax highlighting, formatted/selectable text, and clickable links.

Alright, who has been reading my mind and granting my wishes? Also: why are my wishes so banal?

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012