Enhancing

Yesterday was a bit frustrating, when I got home I thought about the whole tech world and teaching... I reflected about the conversations I had this week where tech had enhanced student learning.

 Some rights reserved by kev_hickey_uk

One of my biggest finds this week was using OCR-image to text. Some of my students have reading struggles and this app has helped them have access to any book.  Often teachers are constrained to digital books, or audio books, but students can use this to capture the text, and then using the accessibility features of the iPad have it read to them.   Is it perfect, nope, is it pretty amazing, yeah for sure.  It has put huge smiles on the faces of these students.

Nature and exploring the outdoors is a passion of mine, and earlier this week I found this site on twitter.  14 Apps That Will Revolutionize Your Walk in the Woods. Again, I felt that at times our tech could enhance, not just what we do at school, but what we do everyday.

These apps can help us develop our passions.

This week has been three way conferences, and traditionally the parents have not often talked to the tech teachers.  This year has been different, and the conversations I've had with parents about apps, programs, and hardware that enhance learning has just been incredible.

Permanence and student data

  by  jonny goldstein 

We've been digging deep into the idea of digital footprint and permanence this week while blogging.

Some of our discussions have revolved around what photos are always going to be there, what comments will stay, how can we delete things we don't want?  There is a wonder about what will happen if someone impersonates another person, how can we delete that data.  I've been stressing this idea that some things are very, very hard to delete.

And then...

One of my students left, he had been collaborating with other students on a slide show, and his googleapps account was deleted by us.  All of his information and work was gone... wild, no longer any access for those people who had been collaborating with him.

I've done the google admin test, and I thought ownership was transferred over to someone else, obviously I was wrong.

Licensed for reuse - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bots

We've learned a lot as a tech group this week about google docs about permanence.  We've "lost" some files that were really placed somewhere else by an author.  We've had some hiccups with organization of our drives, but we had never really lost anything before.


Now our plan is to make a accounts which aren't linked to humans.  For me this is hilarious because I've been talking to students about their blogs and how most of the traffic that comes to them is from non-humans.  They wonder about why people would do this, and now I have a very relevant reason for doing this, keeping our googledocs around.  For group projects we are now going to transfer ownership to nonhumans if someone is going to leave.  That way all of their joint accounts will go with them., making it easy to keep our projects safe.

I love the idea of Google Take Out which can keep our data ours, but I'm glad we now have a strategy for keeping shared data safe.

Unselfishness - How Michael Richards inspired me.

www.comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com

Over the break, I got a little into Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.  I think I saw someone post it on twitter or something, but started with Louis C.K. and just worked my way backwards.

Lots and lots of funny moments with funny people, some good observations on life, with Jerry Seinfeld who knew right? Most of it was just something to enjoy, right up till the Michael Richards episode.

Anyway, he was talking about that one night he verbally abused some guy and walked out.  He was reflecting, openly and honestly about a mistake he made. The word he used was selfish, he was being selfish about his act.

This made me think about teaching.  How often am I selfish of my lesson, or what I want the take away to be?  I don't think it is that often, but it made me set my resolution this year to be totally focused on student learning, and from their perspective.  What is it that they want to take from the lesson.  How can I empower them to start directing their own learning, and allowing them to think whatever they want about my teaching.  I see this as an opportunity to be a better learning, and technology coach.

When working with the students this week, I've been working on developing their voice in their blogs. I adapted some of George Courus' work on blogging to present to the teachers about why we should be blogging with students. With our migration unit, the grade four and five students are thinking deeply about why and how people migrate. I've also been really happy with the sharing of the writing. Blogs have made sharing so much easier for my students, and the immediacy of feedback has really inspired some to write more. 

When working with teachers this week I've been much more patient.  For the last month or so, I've been focused on achieving the school goals, while this is really important, I wanted to focus on each teacher's perspective and ability this week.  It's been great so far, I have the goals we set at the beginning of the year, and while we have been progressing, I took this week to review our goals and make some changes.  It's great to see where they are in applying the SAMR lingo to their lexicon, and even more inspiring to see how redefinition of integration is constantly being modified.

Anyway, a fantastic episode and an inspiring start to the New Year.