There’s two missions students will undergo. The first is to explore the ocean. After an orientation, students put on a deep sea diving suit and go out and walk around on the ocean floor, and participate in a scavenger hunt to locate, identify, and photograph different biological specimens using the viewer’s snapshot tool. The second mission involves the students creating their own posters about marine wildlife which are then added to the virtual world for the benefit of future visitors. Adventurous students may even be given the ability to texturize, script, and build their own undersea animals. This way, the sim will continue to build on itself as more students use it, and later visitors will enjoy the effort students have put into it. Since I hope to use this Underwater Observatory as part of a larger virtual world system in our school district at a later date, I believe it’s important to use a constructionist approach when designing our educational sims, where students are the main content creators rather than the teachers. Our teachers don’t have the time to create elaborate regions, so we need to encourage students to “Leave it better than you found it!”

The amazing thing is most of this has been created with freebies. OpenSim has a constantly growing repertoire of good, free content available on the web, which I was able to use. For example, the undersea building itself was created with Bubble City. Much of the plant life and some furniture is from Linda Kellie’s collection, and some other components are taken from Universal Campus. There are other pieces from OpenSim Creations, too, and a lot of the details I created myself, such as the lights, the diving suit, the fish swimming around, and the squid. There are some other little easter eggs as well, such as a treasure chest and a shipwreck which the students may come across, and the squid will [harmlessly] follow around anyone who comes within 20 meters.

I’ve been trying to get Fred Frederix’s blue whale to work in OpenSim, too, but have been having limited success. Apparently sculpties can’t use the llMoveToTarget() function in OpenSim yet. But normally this would be one of the other reasons OpenSim is such a great choice as an educational virtual world: there are thousands of free LSL scripts for Second Life, and most of them work quite well in OpenSim. Since teachers and students may not have the time to become master scripters, there’s often a script for anything they need that they can just “plug in” to what they create. There’s also plenty of tutorials to help those interested learn how to do it.

There’s still a few things I want to add, and I’d like to fill out more of the rooms because some of them feel a little empty. I still haven’t created a decent submarine to take students to the lab. I was originally going to use Garry’s Beaumont’s fantastic Submarine Nebuchadnezzar, but I’m taking a crack at building my own. Vehicle support is limited in OpenSim due to the physics engine, but I think I can come up with something that works decently enough.

As soon as the sim is finished, I’ll post the OAR files for download here.

Entering the Lobby	The Classroom	Another view of the classroom
These posters are examples of possible student work created as part of the missions	An upstairs lounge lets students grab a snack before going out to explore the ocean depths.	Entering the Observation Room
The Observation Room provides a relaxing view of the local marine life	Outside the Airlock	Viewing the Lab from Outside
Exploring an Undersea Cavern	Encountering a Giant Squid.	Outside the Lab
On the Ocean Floor

At first I tried to recompile mencoder to do this. Mencoder is the Linux program that WeberTube uses now to convert any video that gets uploaded to FLV format. It needed some reconfiguration to allow H.264/AAC videos, namely the x264 and FAAC libraries. However, no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t get the audio to work. So after wrestling with compile errors, I switched to ffmpeg, compiling it with the H.264/AAC support. Everything so far is working great, except for a few audio/video sync problems, but I’m confident I can get those resolved. Even after we deploy the WeberTube updates, it’ll be a process of tweaking and re-tweaking the settings until we feel good about the balance of video quality to filesize.

Now we just need to back-convert all the 5500+ videos on WeberTube.

Every teacher in Weber School District can make a simple learning network through our Moodle system, eCourses. Create a forum and let your students communicate and collaborate. Guide the discussions with topics you’re discussing in class, and allow students to engage each other and reflect on their own learning. Often the shy students are the ones who shine the most, since online communication tends to “level” the playing field for many of them. From what I’ve seen with our teachers who use Moodle forums, the extremely shy and reticent students really open up online, and make friendships with their classmates that then extend directly to the face-to-face environment, making them a more active and social part of the classroom in general. Plus, we’ve found that our secondary students often log in and are talking to each other at 9 or 10 at night (even though the teacher tells them to go to bed), discussing the topics the teacher raised.

A Moodle forum can provide a way for students to share their work with each other, so it’s not just the teacher who sees it, but all the classmates who see it and provide feedback. For a classroom with a lot of technology-oriented projects (e.g. videos, podcasts, VoiceThreads, etc.), establishing a learning network on Moodle can be a huge benefit. Ultimately, it widens the span of cooperative learning.

A forum is ideal for collaborating in a group, and following prompted topics. For example, a history instructor teaching a unit on the U.S. Civil War may post weekly discussion questions like:

• Why do you think it took hundreds of years for slavery to become such a divisive issue?
• How did women contribute to the war efforts?
• How did the abolitionist movement begin?

From these questions, a very lively and thought-provoking discussion may occur among the students. Each shares their own input, responds to others, and contributes by drawing from their existing knowledge and experience. It’s an excellent activity for hybrid learning environments, and directed online classes.

Forums work well for self-directed classes, too, where students work at their own pace. While you can’t guarantee that every student will progress the same through the course, thoughtful forum-based questions can cause the student to continually think about the general topics at hand. It is not unusual for forum topics anywhere on the web to be rekindled one or two years after they go silent, often by an enthusiastic or curious contributor. The advantage of the forum is that it doesn’t have to be limited in time.

In this sense, the forum acts somewhat like a blog. Student A responding to a post that Student B made a year ago probably won’t hear anything back from the Student B, since Student B likely completed the course a long time ago. But Student A still gains valuable reflection from writing. Especially in a K-12 environment where safety policies may prohibit teachers from endorsing student blogging, a closed forum hosted on the LMS can be a welcome, viable alternative.

Dawley (2007) wrote, “The asynchronous nature of discussion forums provides opportunity for in-depth reflection over time. They also create a sense of community through discussion of course concepts, peer interaction and feedback, making instructor feedback visible to all students, and they also exemplify one of the highly touted benefits of online learning — anywhere, anyplace, anytime” (p. ix).

A blog is a reflection tool that doesn’t need strictly directed prompts. When students blog, they are writing to the world, and inviting comments from people all over, not just their classmates. Using blogs gives the students ownership of their content, and lets them engage a worldwide audience, not just their teachers and classmates. Plus, many students who are shy in face-to-face settings and never speak up in the classroom, finally find they have a voice and can assume a vibrant, charismatic persona they would never seem to be able to do in a face-to-face class session (Ferdig & Trammell, 2004).

References

Dawley, L. (2007). The Tools for Successful Online Teaching (1st ed.). IGI Global.

Ferdig, R. E., & Trammell, K. D. (2004, February). Content delivery in the ‘blogosphere.’ T.H.E. Journal, 31(7), 12-20.

Udutu

Udutu is a courseware development tool that allows the teacher to make non-linear Flash-based lessons with multimedia, quizzes, and activities. The lessons are far more visually appealing than simply reading a giant page of textual information, which is how EHS courses are currently set up. Thought-provoking activities such as roleplays are ideal for Udutu lessons. What’s more, you can import Flash (SWF) files into the course you develop, which opens up numerous possibilities to integrate Udutu with other Web 2.0 tools, and existing materials on the web.

For example, typing “photosynthesis filetype:swf” will yield a number of Flash animations that could be imported for a lesson on plants, such as http://dendro.cnre.vt.edu/forestbiology/photosynthesis.swf Searching for “nuclear fission filetype:swf” yields a number of good animations on nuclear fission, such as http://www.british-energy.com/swf/fission.swf. Before importing anything, it is a good idea to make sure you’re not running afoul of copyright and fair use restrictions, and make sure you include a link to the source.

Animoto

If you have a segment of your lesson that’s heavy on photos or short videos, you can use Animoto to create an eye-catching musical video with interspersed text, and add this to a Udutu page. It only takes a few minutes to design a video with Animoto, though you may have to wait awhile for it to fully render it. Make sure you sign up with Animoto for Education to take advantage of the special longer videos they offer to teachers, for free.

ToonDoo

ToonDoo is a comic strip creator. Students may respond to instructional material better when a virtual character is guiding and co-learning the material with them (Spierling, 2005). ToonDoo allows you to place virtual characters in scenes, arrange relevant props around them, then use captions to share instructional content. Due to the limited-text nature of comics, these shouldn’t be used as the primary tool in delivering instructional material, but to emphasize key points of lessons conveyed through other more conventional means, such as text, audio, etc.

References

Spierling, U. (2005). Beyond virtual tutors: Semi-autonomous characters as learning companions. ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Educators program, SIGGRAPH ’05. Los Angeles, California: ACM.

This is a new frontier for Weber School District, and there will be some hurdles to overcome. Few, if any of our teachers have direct experience with teaching in a fully online environment. Watson (2007) identifies five major challenges that schools and districts often encounter when implementing online courses.

Many parents, administrators, educators, and legislators do not fully understand online education

In 2006, Michigan became the first state in the U.S. to mandate virtual K-12 learning, requiring that each student take at least one online course before graduation. Others states followed in the years after. With Utah Senate Bill 65, a statewide online education network was ratified, yet the community is still somewhat divided on the issue.

Generally people see anything that can aid a student’s education as a positive thing, but the problem is that people often don’t understand the ramifications of online learning. Is it really that different from a traditional classroom? How does a student communicate with the teacher? Some people think online learning constitutes a “teacher-less” or “self-directed” learning environment. Recent changes to Utah’s law has K-12 students registering for online courses in “windows” of enrollment each semester, rather than an anytime free-for-all, suggesting that a progressive model of learning in the collaborative social environment similar to a traditional classroom can be used. As Dawley (2007) demonstrated, online group learning gives students a stronger sense of community, instills enthusiasm and motivation with coursework, addresses multiple learning styles, reduces feelings of isolation, and gives opportunities to gain experience in using teamwork in testing real-world practices, a critical trait for functioning in the modern workplace (p. 98).

The problem is that teachers transitioning to online instruction are often at a loss in how they must shift their pedagogy. How do we assess learning? Should we just give quizzes to our students the same way we do in traditional classrooms? Studies suggest that students do perform better with online tests, rather than paper tests (MacCann, 2006). But just because Moodle provides the ability to give online quizzes, shouldn’t lead teachers to believe they are a necessary component of online assessment (Dawley, 2007). “Authentic assessments such as projects and portfolios help students develop real world skills and empower them to take responsibility for their own learning” (Dawley, 2007, p. 174). Online courses have a tendency to thrust students into the position of being more responsible for their own learning anyway.

Current growth trends indicate that 50 percent of all courses in grades 9-12 will be taken online by 2019.

The growth in online education has outpaced education policy and processes

How do we regulate what students are doing online? It has been a long-standing policy of Weber School District that official student-produced work on the Internet must have a teacher backing it. For example, students can’t upload their own videos to WeberTube. A teacher must do it for them. Likewise, can an online teacher request that students produce an online public portfolio as part of their coursework, or must all course materials be kept within the LMS? I’ve written before about student blogging (Why Teachers Should Encourage Students to Blog), but I left out this problematic policy. In Weber School District, teachers are on their own if they want to use Edublogs or a similar system to set up student blogs, but as district policy we discourage anything that in which student work is published without a teacher approving it first. A teacher could set up a fully-moderated blog that meets all these requirements, but this would be using third-party tools, so they’d receive no official support from the district.

And what happens when students outside our district start enrolling in our classes? What jurisdiction do we have over them? How will they integrate with our student system, which was initially designed for in-district students only? How will our online reporting data synchronize with other districts? Questions such as these must be addressed as we move forward.

Funding for online students and programs has not been resolved

It costs money to educate our students. If students start taking one or two extra courses each semester than we originally allotted for them, how will we reconcile this when we carefully analyzed the funding and distribution of assets in our district? How much is the state going to “chip in” to resolve this discrepancy, and will it be enough?

Equal access remains a challenge

Not every family in Weber School District has a computer, let alone high-speed Internet access. While the digital divide is constantly closing, teachers must be aware of some of the challenges. Weber School District does a great job of providing technology and computer lab resources to all its students, but if a student is trying to take an online course from home on a dial-up connection, it hardly makes sense for the teacher to incorporate video lectures and material, as these would take a frustratingly long time to download. Teachers wishing to include multimedia in their courses should survey their students before the course starts to make sure technology gaps don’t exist.

Determining the proper role of technology in education

Technology is only as good as the students and teachers using it. Our students are being trained to be productive, effective members of the community in the 21st century world. Workplace skills require adeptness with technology tools, and our “digital natives” are already intimately familiar with many of the tools. The role of the teacher should be to educate these students in how to use these tools to create stimulating learning experiences, and how they can impact how the students function and perform in real-world situations.

References

Dawley, L. (2007). The tools for successful online teaching. IGI Global.

MacCann, R. (2006). The equivalence of online and traditional testing for different subpopulations
and item types. British Journal of Educational Technology, 37(1), 79-91.

Watson, J. (2007). A national primer on K–12 online learning. Washington, DC: North
American Council on Online Learning.

One of the strengths of online communication is having a variety of ways to converse. People have different comfort levels with different forms of communication. Some are more articulate in text, while others are better with voice. The two can be mixed together in the same session, with the same end result. Providing different options takes a step toward equalizing the playing field, empowering users with a stronger ability for communication.

On the other hand, I’m not terribly impressed with TinyChat’s inability to archive sessions, though this is perhaps something easily overlooked if someone is tech-savvy enough. A simple text copy/paste and Audacity recording can work well enough to overcome this. A screen capture with a tool like Camstudio can be used if video archiving is necessary.

With the continued widespread growth in online course offerings, it’s only a matter of time before nearly every course will have an online counterpart, so instructors must be educated in online instructional practices. In some cases, an organization’s accreditation status can even be put in jeopardy if professional development programs are not sufficiently in line with the mission of the institution.

The emphases on evaluation and lifelong learning are important points to which any organization utilizing or implementing online training should adhere. Institutions should conduct quality assurance reviews to ensure faculty possess the proper skills for online education.

References

McDaniel, H., & Shaw, M. E. (2010). Online adjunct faculty professional development and training in higher education. Journal of eLearning and Online Teaching, 1(5).

Utah Senate Bill 65

There are a good number of teachers in Weber School District using Moodle, but we’re struggling with getting teachers over the learning curve. And the problem is the same as one identified by Lane 2009. For our teachers, Moodle is a counterintuitive interface which “stops Web novices in their tracks” (p. 4). “Educational technologists look at a [course management system] and see its many features, but faculty see an inflexible system that cannot be customized” (p. 6). There are probably very few teachers in our district that have taught in a fully online learning environment, let alone do so effectively by adjusting their pedagogy accordingly.

I realize Moodle is frustrating for some of our teachers, but I also realize now that it’s our fault. We handed them a default course template that does not adopt best practices in online learning. Moodle’s topical format isn’t particularly pretty, and I’ve seen some teachers’ online courses that scroll forever downward with a neverending pile of assignments and resources. It is, quite frankly, confusing. As a result, we are redesigning the Moodle course format and implementing our own. The goal is to make an interface that’s more intuitive for novice online/hybrid teachers, makes it easier to navigate for students, and encourages stronger constructivist methodologies in the instructional practices.

What Utah is doing right now with online courses, I imagine one day will happen with professional development, even if not formally mandated. If we can share educational courses for K-12 students statewide, why not the same for teachers? There are many similarities and best practices we can identify in both K-12 and adult online courses, such as a strong focus on collaboration — the lack of a physical social presence necessitates a stronger cyber-social presence. Teachers should encourage discussion among students, and give numerous opportunities for interaction and collaborative learning. And as noted in a study by Arbaugh (2000), students in web-based courses conversed more than the old brick-and-mortar classrooms (as cited in Ternus, Palmer, & Faulk, 2007).

Collaboration was the primary focus in our Moodle class at the BrainBlast conference last summer. Yet as I discovered in my recent evaluation of Moodle, there has been little to no change in how our teachers use Moodle for collaboration. If it’s true that in the hybrid course, we must meet best practices for both online learning and classroom learning, then we need to place more focus on the online learning space in Moodle, and use it as a constructivist learning environment, rather than just a repository for stashing assignments and quizzes (Ternus, Palmer, & Faulk, 2007). Likewise, any future online professional development class we build must follow the same standards of highly constructivist learning if it is to truly succeed.

References

Arbaugh, J. B. (2000). Virtual classroom characteristics and student satisfaction with Internet-based MBA courses. Journal of Management Education, 24(1), 32-54.
Lane, L. M. (2009). Insidious pedagogy: How course management systems affect teaching. First Monday, 14(10).
Ternus, M. P., Palmer, K. L., & Faulk, D. R. (2007). Benchmarking Quality in Online Teaching and Learning: A Rubric for Course Construction and Evaluation. Journal of Effective Teaching, 7(2), 51-67.

Related articles

• A blend of Moodle and Web 2.0 technologies (cruiselyna.wordpress.com)
• Can I look at your Moodle……please? (edugeek.net)
• Merits of Moodle (weber.k12.ut.us)

My first memories of online courses date back to about 2001, when my undergraduate school was first implementing online learning. It was a prime example of what not to do: no collaboration, faulty assessment tools, and no interaction with the teacher. There were few, if any opportunities to interact with the other students online. The assessments were basically just the same quizzes used in the brick-and-mortar version of the class, but with a time limit slapped on and the ability to “cheat” by reading your textbook. And the teacher was unavailable, and wouldn’t respond to emails for three or four days at a time.

Contrast that with the highly constructivist, collaborative, project-based learning model Boise State’s EDTECH program has adopted in its classes. It is an engaging experience. I’m finding that I’m learning and retaining more knowledge than I have before. The collaboration is invaluable as I develop and refine my projects, not to mention the enjoyment that comes from sharing one’s hard work with peers. Being able to create projects that I can directly use in my own line of work is motivation to finish them and do my best. For me, at least, I consider that an indication of this instructional model’s efficacy.

In our school district’s summer technology conference, all learning follows a similar hands-on learning model. Participants are expected to create content, rather than simply learn about it. There is still an approach where the instructor is more a lecturer than a facilitator, but every participant sits at a computer, learns about the technology tools, and constructively uses them during the instruction.

Related articles

• Project-Based Learning (taraprogram2011.wordpress.com)
• Student Perspectives on eLearning: Not Just an Education but a Way of Life (einsights.typepad.com)

This is why we must adopt a constructionist approach when addressing virtual world instruction. Constructionism is a form of constructivism where artifact creation is the product of learning. The way I see it, students themselves should be the primary creators of the content and build the sims, under the direction of the teacher. Lessons should be designed that teach the intended content while the student is in the process of constructing, and the lessons should be designed to support a situated learning framework. Identifying an appropriate context for the learning, and focusing on collaborative activities is important.

When implementing constructionist activities in Second Life or OpenSim, it’s crucial that the teacher facilitates and provides consistent scaffolding support to the students, especially when there are varying skill levels. This takes constant observance of the activities, and at no time should a teacher stand on the sidelines, but be actively engaged in the process. With this type of activity, it is important that the instructor be continually and intimately aware of everything going on, to facilitate the experience. During the activity, the teacher should consistently provide help or suggestions that ensure a smooth and effective learning experience.

Identifying the types of activities that support the constructionist mode of learning inside the virtual world will enable us to find the right balance that fosters optimal learning opportunities. I certainly realize that there are many other ways to learn in a virtual world besides building content. But this is a necessary model for Weber School District, due to our existing infrastructure.

The learning activities that should be implemented, necessarily should adopt this “situated constructionist” approach. This way, especially with the forthcoming mesh abilities of Second Life and OpenSim, drafting students could import their buildings into Second Life. 3d animation students could import their characters and models. Programming students could learn the Linden Scripting Language and code the simulations. The virtual world implementation will be autonomous, and draw upon effective learning theories to guide its educational development.

Related articles

• Why Open Sim will Dominate Virtual Worlds in Education (coolcatteacher.blogspot.com)
• Reflections on Immersive Virtual Learning (weber.k12.ut.us)
• Teaching and Learning Options in the Virtual World (gridjumper.net)

Gamer on the verge of an epic win

In February 2010, Jane McGonigal gave a TED Talk on how gaming is not only a prominent feature of modern society, but an absolutely essential one. She cites statistics that demonstrate people become engaged in games more than any other activity, and follows up with an argument that has been echoed by educators interested in gaming for awhile: Since deep, immersed engagement is present in game playing, why not use games for learning?

McGonigal identifies four common aspects of gamers that can be called the “habits of heroes,” or traits successful real-life problem-solvers possess:

1. Urgent optimism: Gamers believe in instantaneous action to solve problems. It is not always necessary that a deadline must be looming in the background, or that a time-sensitive result must be attained. Gamers tend to believe in prompt action to solve the game world problems.
2. Social fabric: Gamers trust the community. Strong social bonds are formed particularly through multi-user game playing, raiding, questing, and adventuring. This cohesion forms relationships of dependence and reliability that are essential to group work.
3. Blissful productivity: Gamers are happier to work hard at solving the problems in a game. And in conjunction with the large groups of people available in the game, a diversity of skills can be pooled together to tackle the problems.
4. Epic meaning. Gamers desire to become involved in a common cause. The gamers believe in what they are doing, and are motivated to see an engaging game through to the end.

The elusive question is how do we make the real world like the game? Or more to the point of game design, how can we create games that instill in students an engagement and motivation in a cause that can be transferred to the real world?

First, students must be able to relate to the content. A part of what makes a good game interesting is that the matter is interesting to the player. If a gamer can believe in the cause, albeit a virtual cause, they are more likely to stay engaged and willing to see the game through to the end.

Although the content is relevant to the real world, it must not portray real-world quests in an unsolvable manner. For example, The River City Project is a 19th-century multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) in which students research and attempt to solve the problems of a society. Rather than tackle global-scale problems such as world hunger, the issues are localized and solvable.

Collaboration is key, and students should be encouraged to weave their part of the social fabric. In the aforementioned MUVE, students work together in teams. If games use a problem-based learning approach, problems that can be more easily solved in groups should be designed.

Watch the video below, and see what you think about her ideas.

One of the foremost benefits of virtual worlds is its ability to reach higher levels of immersion more readily than other learning platforms. Csikszentmihalyi (1975) introduced the concept of flow as a state of absolute engagement or absorption in an activity, resulting in an optimal learning experience, which has been shown to have a positive impact on learning. There can be such a thing as too much immersion right away, however, and in some cases scaffolding may need to occur to ensure different types of participants properly assimilate the immersive experience.

One of the chief mistakes many teachers make when starting to use virtual worlds is simply replicating the classroom environment in the online space. There is little sense to creating virtual desks in a virtual room with a virtual whiteboard if it already exists in the real world. The power of the virtual world is that it provides a collaborative space where constructivist learning activities can take place, in ways that are difficult or simply not possible otherwise. For learners to achieve the flow state, they must be actively engaged.

In some techno-cultural milieus it may be inappropriate to expect learners to participate in different types of immersive environments. The digital divide can play a significant role in who has necessary access to the types of technology-based learning employed. Pedagogically, the paradigm shift that comes from teaching in a classroom to teacher in an constructed immersive environment requires both training and experience before effective instruction and learning may occur. This is one of the greatest challenges, ensuring that the virtual environments are used optimally, but it is an important one as virtual environments are continuing to become an important part of children’s social and online lives (Beals & Bers, 2009).

References

Bartle, R. A. (2004). Virtual worldliness: What the imaginary asks of the real. New York Law School Law Review, 49(1), 19-44.

Beals, L., & Bers, M. U. (2009). A developmental lens for designing virtual worlds for children and youth. International Journal of Learning, 1(1), 51-65.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1975). Beyond boredom and anxiety: The experience of play in work and games. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

It can be astonishing to some to learn that accessibility is a very real issue in virtual worlds. The Virtual Ability Island in Second Life illustrates how different people with different disabilities react to the virtual world setting. In some cases, citizens who are wheelchair-bound in real life are not comfortable walking around in the virtual world setting, and may opt to roll around in a modeled wheelchair instead. It’s remarkable how some people identify themselves in certain ways, and these aspects become an integral part of their self-image.

In other cases, virtual worlds are able to break down the barriers some feel in the real world. Those with speech impediments may find it easier to communicate through typing. Different assistive tools available on the computer can ease the transition into a virtual world setting, and provide a level of comfort that facilitates an improved learning experience for the student. Some of these may include speech recognition software, text-to-speech applications, and alternative user interfaces.

Virtual worlds are a fairly new technology for educators. Best practices are constantly being developed, studied, analyzed, evaluated, and revised, and the sophistication of this technology will only increase with time. As with any technology, it is evolving and changing rapidly, and the greatest challenge will likely be trying to keep up with the latest advances. It is ultimately the teacher’s responsibility to be aware of their students’ unique needs and tailor instructional measures to provide the optimal experience for the learners.

These ideas apply directly to how learning-oriented games can be designed, and to a large degree apply to the physical classroom environment as well. Chatfield’s list is as follows:

1. Experience bars measuring progress

Instead of assigning grades, some teachers have turned to an experience point system. This is a familiar aspect of games, and measures a student’s steady progression through tasks (or “quests”). This system can apply to traditional classroom learning as well, and a teacher could accomplish this by putting experience bars up on a board, or manage it with online student profiles. Experience points are great at measuring progress over time in a nuanced, quantified manner, perhaps moreso than a flat list of assignments on a student’s progress report can do.

2. Multiple long and short-term aims

Students should be allowed to participate and choose different types of quests. Different quests can lead to larger goals, but students should be allowed to guide their progress, and take ownership of what they choose to accomplish. With enough “subquests,” students feel as though they are continually progressing, and have a clear end in sight.

3. Reward for effort

This goes back to standard behaviorist principles. If desired behavior is rewarded, the behavior will be reinforced and more likely to be repeated. We shouldn’t punish students when they fail, but instead recognize their achievements as they learn. Games teach us that we should turn “failure” into “success not yet realized.”

4. Rapid, frequent, clear feedback

One of the advantages of games is that they allow players to link consequences to actions. Even in cases where a game’s storyline is progressive and linear, a clear cause-and-effect chain is implied. For open-ended games, the player can alter the state of the world through their own choices. It is essential to learning that students are given prompt feedback following activities, so they know if their attempt was successful, or what could have caused unintended outcomes.

5. An element of uncertainty

People should not always expect everything, and the consequences or outcomes should not always be expected. This adds to excitement and encourages people to keep coming back. When applied to education, it keeps students entertained and willing to keep engaging in the learning process.

6. Windows of enhanced attention

Find moments in a learner’s play where they will be most receptive to learning, and identify areas where learners will gain confidence as they play. This can relate to how Kiili (2005) describes flow theory, or the ideal state at which a participant is absorbed in the learning material, the optimal experience in which full attention is placed on the activity, and nothing else seems to matter. If we can create these types of experiences in our games, students will be more receptive to what is being taught.

7. Other people

Students will invariably possess different competency levels in any game they play, and as they learn, their skills will evolve at varying speeds. Hunicke (2005) discusses this at length as a mechanism for creating an effective gaming environment without disrupting player experience. A balance must be formed between the game’s ease and difficulty. In other words, the game must be “gamed” in such a way that learners are not bored or frustrated with the ease or difficulty.

References

Hunicke, R. (2005). The case for dynamic difficulty adjustment in games. Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, 429-433.

Kiili, K. (2005). Digital game-based learning: Towards an experiential gaming model. The Internet and Higher Education, 8(1), 13-24.

This is an aspect which must drive how we design all educational games. Not necessarily to the point where students are sobbing uncontrollably while they play, but presenting them with the opportunity to totally immerse themselves in the game, and tapping into what makes games such a unique form of learning: their ability to dig deeper into our minds and emotions that traditional learning media cannot reach.

Gaming has shaped our culture, and how we see things. I identify with Michael Highland’s video shown in Perry’s talk, where he says, “When I’m driving down a road at sunset, I think this is almost as beautiful as my games are.” It’s been four years since I last played Oblivion, but every time I see a beautiful scene, such as fog covering the Wasatch Mountains, or the colorful landscape of Bryce Canyon, I instantly think, “This is just as beautiful as Oblivion.” Video games are adept at shaping and reprogramming our minds. The key is to use this for good, and use games to shape the brains of students in such a way that cannot be done with traditional media.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Geo Island/140/62/504/

Begin your journey by heading north. Read all the posters you see. What are silicates? What percentage of minerals are silicates, and how much of the Earth’s crust is made up of them? What are the 7 listed types of crystal systems?

After you’ve explored this area, head to the western part of the region. Find the model of “Normal Faults” and touch it to see what happens. Look at the representation of rock layers. What is the difference between DIP and STRIKE?

Go to the far southeast area of the region. View all the slides. Describe the types of weathering. Where was the magnetic north pole 500 million years ago? On the Mohs Hardness scale, which mineral is listed as the softest, and which is the hardest?

What’s interesting, however, is that some research suggests the human interface control is not as relevant as one might think. A study in Aymerich-Franch (2010) revealed that participants who played a game by using their whole body did not experience any significant difference in presence or emotions than participants who played with a joystick. This implies that body-dependent systems such as the Wii and Kinect may not necessarily be more “immersive” to players, if we define immersion as a combination of social presence and emotions, and that we should look to other attributes when determining what makes one game more immersive than another. I would suggest that we should look more at the content of the virtual environment itself, than the human interface used to connect to it.

In another article by Lin (2010), an exploration of gender differences on game enjoyment is examined, as well as personal identification with the character. I feel this article misses the point, particularly when it claims that players are more likely to enjoy a game when the character they are playing is “morally justified” in the story or plot. In other words, a hero fighting for some sort of moral good. This seems logical, until one realizes that some of the top selling games like Grand Theft Auto don’t fit this mold, though one could argue that much of the villainous violence in these games follow a storyline causing the player to sympathize with the character. The genius of games like World of Warcraft is that both sides have sympathetic characters and heroes, and reasons for engaging the rival. The article sidesteps this issue by admitting that yes, some players are the opposite — even a significant number — and attempts to explain why. It seems self-contradictory.

I’ve been sporadically on Second Life since 2005, though only started taking it seriously since 2010, taking time to identify important locations, learn some scripting, and so on. I figured this was all worthy of a “rebirth” so I ditched my old character and created a new one. I think Second Life profiles are an important, yet perhaps underused element of social presence in a virtual world. They can serve to tie the avatar to a real user behind the screen.

People are a lot more prone to do things in Second Life they wouldn’t normally do in person. This is really nothing new, and applies to virtually all communication on the Internet. I think there is a degree of accountability that comes into play and prevents some severely offensive behavior when avatars are specifically identified with real people, but when there is full anonymity, it is rather chaotic and anarchic.

References

Aragon, S. R. (2003). Creating social presence in online environments. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 2003(100), 57-68.

Aymerich-Franch, L. (2010). Presence and emotions in playing a group game in a virtual environment: The influence of body participation. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 13(6), 649-654.

Lin, S. (2010). Gender differences and the effect of contextual features on game enjoyment and responses. Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, 13(5), 533-537.

It’s just one of many practical uses of virtual worlds in an educational setting, which goes beyond simply exploring the environment, to actually constructing content that can be assessed and evaluated. However, being able to import models constructed in third party utilities requires some additional work.

In Second Life and OpenSim, content is made using primitives: basic building blocks consisting of boxes, cylinders, cubes, pyramids, etc. that can be twisted, stretched, and otherwise manipulated, then linked to other primitives to create sophisticated objects. The method has a fairly low learning curve, but is limiting in how detailed models can be.

The texture map for the "sculptie"

An example of a "sculptie" image

Second Life and OpenSim also support “sculpties.” Sculpties are 3d models derived from colored graphic maps. In OpenSim, you can import terrain files composed of grayscale images. White indicates the highest elevations, while black indicates the lowest elevations. Sculptie maps are kind of like that, except with the additional colors more detail can be passed into the program to represent complex 3d models.

I’ve had mixed results with sculptie creation, particularly in OpenSim. At best, the tools for easily creating them are overly simplistic and don’t contain the features many students would probably require. At worst, the setup for sculptie support is more complicated than it should be. It’s certainly doable, but we have to keep in mind the less technical teachers and students when integrating this technology into the classroom, and the last thing we want is a teacher spending an inordinate amount of time trying to cross the bridge between the 3d modeling software and the virtual world.

The same model in OpenSim

A model made in Plopp SL

One tool I found intriguing is Plopp SL, a very easy-to-use program for simple 3d modeling and sculptie creation, aimed at young kids. Most modeling programs use a simulated three-dimensional space for sculpting objects, but Plopp SL allows users to just draw their objects the traditional pencil way, and the program then “inflates” the object like a balloon so it takes on a three-dimensional quality.

After that, you can export the sculptie map and the texture map, and load them up in OpenSim with the Imprudence Viewer (soon to be the Kokua Viewer). However, when I tried this, I ran into some problems when I tried importing the model. Shown here is an example of a doll I made in Plopp SL, which created the above sculptie textures, and how it looks in OpenSim itself. As you can see, it doesn’t quite render correctly in OpenSim. Maybe there’s some configuration setting that needs to be tweaked, but needless to say, I’m not entirely thrilled with sculpties after these experiments.

However, Second Life and OpenSim have now added basic support for meshes. A mesh is a collection of different shapes that make up a whole object. In most 3d modeling applications these are developed using wireframe models. Both virtual world applications still have a ways to go, but progress is being rapidly made.

A rendered model contrasted with its wireframe. Created by Jocelyn Zeller.

So why do we want meshes instead of sculpties? Manipulating and linking primitives together has allowed the creation of some amazing work in Second Life/OpenSim, but there’s tremendous value to being able to create models using standard industry tools. Meshes allow direct compatibility with third-party 3d modeling programs our students use like Maya, Sketchup, and AutoCAD. All a student has to do is save their model in Maya (in the COLLADA format), and upload it directly through the Second Life viewer.

Other open source virtual world applications such as realXtend, a fork of OpenSim, and Open Wonderland have had mesh support for a long time. But Second Life Viewer 2 is the first Second Life viewer to support the mesh environment. OpenSim is not fully compatible with it yet, but it’s getting there. The Kokua project is building a new viewer based on Second Life Viewer 2. It has a sleeker interface than the old viewer upon which others like Imprudence, Hippo, and Phoenix are based. support. Kokua is the successor to Imprudence, and will be incorporating many new features, while remaining fully compatible with OpenSim and Second Life.

I believe there will be value to allowing our students to access Second Life in the future, so having a viewer compatible with both Second Life and OpenSim will be important. This may involve modifying the viewer with a whitelist of acceptable regions, or putting some other filtering utilities in place, but gaining access to the learning opportunities in Second Life will become an invaluable asset in our students’ future learning. This is one thing which prevents me from adopting realXtend. Which it is immensely cool, feature-rich, and visually appealing, it is heading in a different direction than OpenSim. It has its own viewer which is not compatible with Second Life, although the ModRex project aims to allow realXtend-OpenSim compatibility. It is still new, and whether that will translate to Second Life remains to be seen.

Check out this presentation that was delivered to administrators detailing some of the aspects of this migration.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be releasing some follow-ups to this evaluation. Addendums, if you will. I was originally planning to supply personal assessments of each participating online course in the initial report, using a rubric for hybrid course design. After some thought I scratched this idea, because much of the rubric falls outside the scope of the district’s objectives for using Moodle, which were included in the report from the outset.

Instead, I will be delivering each a brief mini-report to teachers who participated in the survey (there were 17), with suggestions and recommendations stemming from a combination of the rubric and the survey assessments, tailored specifically to your courses and instruction.

There’s a few things I’ve learned, that I’ll have to remember for the next time we do an evaluation like this.

1. Don’t underestimate your turn-out. I was expecting 100, maybe 200 survey participants tops. What I did not expect was receiving 800 survey submissions that I had to comb through and analyze. There were some duplicate data that had to be cleaned up as well, since a few of you got a little “click-happy” when submitting your surveys. I also had to run some queries on the survey database to figure out what some of the courses reported in the student survey actually were, since apparently students don’t always call their courses by the names we have in our system. Since this was a graduate school project, there was a clear deadline that I had to meet, and it was a little more than difficult to manage all that data in the amount of time I had. I should have anticipated that our Moodle-using teachers, being the awesome group they are, would actively encourage all their students to participate in this project. I will not make that mistake again.
2. Keep qualitative and quantitative data in their rightful place. Although I provided graphs with ratings on each of the courses, I had to remind myself that these were not strict numerical rankings, as they were directly converted from Likert scaled questions. The degrees between “Strongly Disagree” and “Strongly Agree” are not necessarily the same in everyone’s mind, so when discussing results, one has to look at qualitative differences and speak in those terms. For example, if the collaboration “ratings” for two courses are 3.3 and 3.5 respectively, one can’t necessarily say that people “agreed more” with Course 2 than Course 1. There may be some tendencies that cause one to make that assumption, but one shouldn’t rely on the numerical data alone. To brazenly declare such a statement is hasty. If the difference had been significant, such as 1.5 vs. 4.5, then there would likely be some room for stronger comparisons.
3. Always remember the objectives. When analyzing the data, it’s easy to get sidetracked with other interesting, but ultimately useful data. For example, a number of students and teachers complained about Moodle going down. This was a problem awhile ago, and it caused some major grief among people. However, it was not relevant to any of the objectives for the evaluation, even though it was tempting to explain/comment/defend this area. I take it personally when people criticize my servers! (Just kidding.)
4. If the questions aren’t right, the whole evaluation will falter. Even though I had the objectives in mind when I designed the survey, I still found it difficult to know which were the right questions to ask. I’ve been assured that this aspect gets easier the more you do it. In the end, there was some extraneous “fluff” that I simply did not use or report on, because it wasn’t relevant (e.g. “Do the online activities provide fewer/more/the same opportunities to learn the subject matter?” My initial inclination was to include this in the Delivery, but when I finally looked at the finished responses, I realized it didn’t really fit anywhere and wasn’t relevant to any of the objectives.

Right now, being the lowly web manager that I am — and I only use the term “web manager” because “webmaster” is so 1990s; I don’t actually “manage” anyone — I don’t get many opportunities to do projects like this. But I’m aspiring to do more as a future educational technologist. Evaluations are more than just big formal projects … they underscore every aspect of what we as educators do. Teachers would do well to perform evaluations of their own instructional practices. When we add new programs or processes in our district, evaluations should accompany them. And as I complained in my mini-evaluation of BrainBlast 2010 a few days ago, all too often the survey data we gather just aren’t properly analyzed and used. We have some of the brightest minds in the state of Utah working in our Technical Services Department, but often we just perform “mental evaluations” and make judgments of the direction things should go, when we would do well to formalize the process, gather sufficient feedback, and use it to make informed decisions.

It’s a ways off still, and nothing is set in stone, but last weekend I installed and messed around with a new "WeberSim." I borrowed a couple models from some sims others made — namely the ship and the castle — but it’s pretty cool how easy it is to create vibrant landscapes. Here’s the first video of undoubtedly many more.

The real power is being able to script your own objects and events. With this, the virtual world can be shaped into anything you can imagine. I scripted a couple things: The rippling mountain pond water, and a flashlight (not shown), and tried to model a couple bridges (they need work).

I’ll be experimenting more with scripting in future videos.

The survey questions assess four categories: (1) Participant Attitudes, (2) Collaboration, (3) Instructional Preparation, and (4) Instructional Delivery. There are a few goals I’m keeping in mind. One is to help determine the collaborative effect of our usage of Moodle. During the last BrainBlast, we taught a session to (almost) every secondary teacher in attendance: “Creating Collaborators with Moodle.” This begs the question, “Just how well are we currently using Moodle for collaboration?” Where can we improve? Our teachers have had the opportunity to put what they learned in the Moodle class into practice, so has the collaboration aspect improved? The survey addresses this.

Another goal is to address if Moodle actually reduces instructional preparation time. Our teachers have commonly criticized Moodle for being too time-consuming. This is a valid concern, and there are questions addressing the preparation time of the two major activities our teachers use in Moodle: assignments and quizzes. The delivery aspect of Moodle is important, too. Are students more engaged when they use Moodle? Is it easier for them to submit their homework? Does using Moodle save them time as well?

Originally, I was planning on correlating Moodle usage with academic performance, but after consulting with my professor, Dr. Ross Perkins, I realized that there are too many factors involved to even suggest some sort of link between the two. Moreover, the instruction itself is key, not necessarily the tool of delivery. What’s more, I think such a question starts crossing territory into more of a research project than an actual evaluation. It would be incredibly useful to research and establish best practices for online course delivery; the present scholarship in this area is huge and constantly evolving, but a lot of work remains to be done. However, it is outside the scope of this evaluation.

Most of the Moodle survey uses a Likert scale (Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree) for the questions. There’s considerable debate over whether scales like this should employ a middle ground (e.g. Neither Agree nor Disagree) by providing an odd number of answers, or force participants to choose a position by providing an even number of answers. After tossing the two options back and forth in my mind, I decided on providing a middle option for the questions. I’m wondering now if that was a mistake. I believe it introduces a degree of apathy into the survey that, in hindsight, I didn’t really want. A lot of the participants are choosing “Neither Agree nor Disagree” for some of their answers, when I suspect they probably mean “Disagree.”

Ultimately, though, the data are still valuable. Apparently, most students do not feel that they are given many opportunities to collaborate in Moodle. Teachers generally agree that they don’t bother to provide these opportunities for collaboration. Perhaps as a follow-up, I should ask the teachers why they don’t provide collaborative opportunities, especially those teachers who attended the BrainBlast session.

The data also indicate that both students and teachers generally agree that Moodle saves time in both preparation and instruction. The disagreements here come mainly from math teachers who complain about Moodle’s general lack of support for math questions (DragMath is integrated into our Moodle system, but this isn’t enough), and the inability to provide equations and mathematical formulas in quiz answers. This is undoubtedly worth further investigation. I came across a book on Amazon (Wild, 2009) that may provide some valuable insights.

The participants are prompted to provide open-ended comments as well. Answers fell all across the spectrum, from highly positive (e.g. “I love taking online courses; it’s easy, organized, and efficient…”) to extremely negative (e.g. “I hate everything about it; online schooling is the worst idea for school…”). The diverse answers will be addressed in the final report.

The survey isn’t the only measurement tool I’m using. I’m also going to employ a rubric to assess each online course represented in the survey. There are few enough (in this case, about 20) that this is a reasonable amount to assess within the given time. After that, I just have to write up the final report, create some graphs of the data, analyze the results, and provide recommendations.

References

Wild, I. (2009). Moodle 1.9 Math. Packt Publishing.

General Statistics

218 people participated in the survey. This number comprises 63% of the attendees, specifically 210 (70%) of the teachers, and 8 (18%) of the administrators. Table 1 indicates the highest-ranking courses, with the average scores for each on a scale of 1 to 4.

Table 1: Course Rankings and Approval

Mark Kastleman was a huge hit both in his first-day keynote session and the two follow-up sessions he held with the administrators. Barely outranked only by Nick Harris’ PowerPoint session, he delivered quite a dynamic keynote presentation about the relationship between the brain and learning. We were fortunate and appreciative that he and Mike King were able to share their insights at BrainBlast, and that Mark was able to provide follow-up sessions for the administrators.

This year we made sure to collect data on what people didn’t like about the conference. That was a major focus of the survey results, and we intentionally gathered negative feedback, which constituted most of the comments returned. We want to know what we’re not doing right. Constructive criticism will be one of the most helpful things to guide future BrainBlasts. The following information is not intended to be a “slam” against BrainBlast or anyone involved in organizing this excellent training event. Instead, I hope the comments prove helpful in optimizing and enhancing the learning experience for all BrainBlast participants. Some of the most common themes that popped up in the survey results are highlighted below.

Irrelevancy of the Classes

“I would have liked to actually been in the classes that I registered for. There were only two classes on my schedule that I wanted to be in. The others I did not register for, which was kind of annoying.”

“The hardest thing is when you are signed up for classes that you are not interested in at all. I have no desire to do Moodle and I was enrolled in the class for a second year in a row. Last year was fine, but this year I had no desire to listen. Is there a way we could let you know what classes we don’t want to take along with the ones we do?”

“Design [the] number of classes to accommodate number of students asking for them so you get the choices you want.”

“I felt that I was already pretty versed in [MyStudent] and didn’t learn anything new. I was not happy with having to take it over courses like Blogs!”

Many participants commented that they already knew the material in the classes they were selected for, or that they didn’t get any of the classes they wanted and that the material wasn’t relevant to them at all. This was an especially common concern in the Lulu class, as well as a few others. “It was not made clear how we would use the websites offered in [the Lulu] course,” one participant noted. “The online books seem too expensive to use in the classroom.” Another stated that Lulu “did not really apply to my curriculum.” “I didn’t really see the practical application of how I could use [Lulu] in class,” agreed yet another teacher. The common concern was that Lulu books tend to be too expensive for most parents.

A couple factors are directly related to the participants having been placed into classes not relevant to them:

1. We did not collect much information at registration about teachers’ existing skill sets, let alone use this information to place teachers in classes that would be suitable for them.
2. We did not use the wishlisted courses to determine how many sessions to offer. Last year, the average participant got 68% of the courses they wishlisted. This year, the participants only got 16%. The reason is this: When participants initially registered, they specified up to 6 courses they would like to take. They did this last year, too, except this year we did not delineate these courses by their track (elementary, secondary, or administrator). As a result, a lot of participants were wishlisting courses in tracks that would not be available to them. Elementary teachers were wishlisting courses in the secondary track, secondary teachers were wishlisting courses in the elementary track, and all teachers were wishlisting courses in the administrator track.

The bottom line is, we may as well have not even bothered with a wishlist, since it hardly determined which classes were assigned to whom.

Table 2 indicates the preferred courses per track, as well as whether or not the course was even available in the track. The second column in each table shows the number of times the course was wishlisted during the initial registration, and the third column shows how many slots we actually provided for the course for the entire conference.

Table 2: Preferred Courses vs. Available Seats (click to enlarge)

Bling Your Blog! was one of the most requested classes (246 participants requested it), yet we only made room for 2 sessions (40 participants, or 16% of the requesters), and only in the elementary track. “I would have liked to attend a course on blogs,” remarked one teacher. “That was the one I wanted the most, but didn’t get to go to it.” “Please have a course on creating blogs for beginners,” begged another, “and have enough sessions [so] all who want it can have it.” Conversely, Lulu was one of the most unrequested classes. Only 76 requested it, yet we provided room for 5 sessions (100 participants). And we provided 6 sessions (120 participants) of Keeping in Touch with Google for elementary teachers, yet only 21 in the elementary track actually requested it! It’s hardly a surprise that these two ended up as some of the lowest ranking courses in the survey results, with so many disinterested people forced into them.

Recommendations for Improvement

Even if it means we need to open up BrainBlast registration earlier to allow for more planning time, we should consider the wishlisted classes and provide a suitable number of sessions to accommodate them. However, there is still value to a strictly randomized scheduling process. Teachers may attend classes they would not have normally requested due to an unfamiliarity with the material, but once they participate in the class they acquire new knowledge and skills directly relevant to their subject, classroom, and instructional strategies. At least, that’s one factor that has driven the design and development of BrainBlast. Every class should be relevant to everyone. Clearly, we did not accomplish that this year.

We should not discount the role a teacher’s general disinterest plays. If they simply don’t care about the subject material when they walk into the class, this preconception will carry all the way through, and stifle any engagement and learning they may experience. We need to find a way to identify which courses may be most relevant to a teacher, even if they don’t know it themselves. At the very least, a middle ground should be found between encouraging teachers to explore new technologies, and supplying the correct number of classes they specifically choose and feel are most relevant to them. As one teacher helpfully recommended, “Make sure that the courses are relevant to the participant . . . the majority of the courses were not very applicable to me. Plus, I only received 1 out of 6 courses that I had selected. The ones I had chosen would have been extremely relevant!”

Separation of Beginner and Advanced Classes

“It is frustrating to be in a course and want to learn more than you already know and it is based around the beginner.”

“Within the first part of the class I had things figured out, but we couldn’t move into more depth because there were other people in there that struggled.”

“Please, please, please have a beginners track and an advanced track. It is SO frustrating to not be able to learn anything new because the instructor runs out of time due to the fact there are people in the class that can’t even open the program they are talking about. ‘Wait! Slow down! How did you open Windows Movie Maker?!’ Very frustrating!”

“Some of the presenters tried to teach too much and I was way behind and couldn’t keep up.”

“Make a track that separates those who have little / no experience and those who have more experience and want to go deeper.”

The suggestion to divide classes by skill sets was very common this year. “Organize the classes by beginner, intermediate, advanced as well as by subject,” a teacher recommended. “It gets very frustrating to be in a class where the teacher is trying to explain a more complex subject and some of the students can’t even remember how to login or what the Internet icon looks like.” “I really feel that classes need to start being identified as beginner classes and classes for more advanced learners,” commented another. “A couple of the classes attended were not as helpful because they are skills I have learned at previous BrainBlasts.”

This is not a bad suggestion, and there’s no denying that teachers attending BrainBlast have a wide range of abilities. Some come to the conference as technology experts, others as beginners, and this creates problems and negative feelings from different people in the classroom. “Have the instructors not wait for the one or two that don’t get it or are behind to catch up with the class,” recommended one teacher. “It really wastes time for those (the bulk of the class) that are ready to move to the next step.” The in-room techs should be able to help teachers catch up so the teacher doesn’t have to stop and wait, and perhaps we need to make that role more clear to them. However, it is rather difficult to create classes that appeal to everyone, when a few people are holding things back. It also creates a poor learning experience if some participants are constantly behind and relying on the school techs to assist them, just to keep up with the teacher.

Recommendations for Improvement

There is a need to organize classes into beginner and advanced, even if these are subdivisions within the elementary and secondary tracks. Our teachers have widely varied skill sets, and if we’re going to be randomly assigning them to classes, we shouldn’t operate under the assumption that “one class fits all.” Evaluating different technical skills is tricky, but well-crafted skill assessments should occur at registration time. At the very least, the random assignments should occur within subsets of designated beginner and advanced classes.

No More Shirts!

“Please get rid of the shirts and use that money for prizes.”

“If you must keep the shirt, make it a t-shirt. They’re cheaper.”

“Use the money spent on shirts to go towards equipment to be used in the classroom.”

“Give us more useful tech stuff. I would rather have had a tripod than a shirt.”

“No more shirts, they are atrocious and they are a waste of money.”

The general disdain for shirts was yet another common manifestation. I believe there is value to making BrainBlast shirts available to all who want it, but perhaps for next year participants could opt out of receiving a shirt when they register.

Other Ideas: Workshops

“I would like to have the option of being able to take the full two days to have a working workshop in Moodle,” suggested one teacher, “so that I can come away with tangible material that I can use in the classroom.” Day-long workshops are not uncommon to technology conferences, and some will provide this option, typically on an optional last day. Other times this is done during the regular conference schedule, so the participant enrolls in day-long workshops in lieu of a diversity of classes. Generally, the idea for BrainBlast has been to provide a good range of classes to expose teachers to multiple technologies, and to set aside workshop-oriented instruction for E-volve and iLead classes. However, many participants mentioned that the class time was too short to reasonably cover the material:

“Most of the classes went by too fast, especially on wikis. I had never even heard of one and there was just not enough time to really understand.”

“Make more ‘beginning level’ classes available and expand time on some of the sessions so we have more time to ‘create’ or to produce a finished product.”

“Some classes need to spend more time on basics. Go deep instead of broad.”

“Got Media & Stuff was the weakest because it contained so much info and not enough time to explain about each site.”

“Student Created Video would have been better if there was enough time. The time was cut short due to the general session going over a bit.”

“Could have used more time in Bling My Blog….and Google…”

Whether or not longer, focused workshops would incorporate well into BrainBlast remains to be determined. With our training efforts, it would probably be more suitable to divide workshop-based courses into other training venues, such as E-volve or iLead.

Other Ideas: Virtual BrainBlast

“It would be nice to have this more than once a year,” suggested another teacher. I’m reminded of FETC, which is one of the largest annual educational technology conferences in the U.S. Most educators are probably familiar with it, but many do not know that they also host Virtual FETC conferences a couple times throughout the year. The online version of FETC is portrayed in a virtual web-based environment with INXPO’s Virtual Events & Conferences. Participants can travel around the virtual conference setting, viewing products and communicating with vendors in real-time, collecting virtual memorabilia, taking notes, and interacting with other educators online. Sessions are broadcast at set times, typically chosen from archived recordings of the last FETC, though live streams are possible, too. During the sessions, participants can, and are even encouraged to chat amongst each other about the topic being presented. Some have claimed that the best learning during a conference happens before and after the sessions, when everyone networks together to talk about what was learned, explore how they can apply the new information, and share their own insights to a group of eager-to-listen professionals in their field. Collaboration is a hugely beneficial aspect of any conference, and virtual conferences are ideal for this form of collaboration. Many participants can gather together in the same room, more than would be possible in a physical setting, and have the opportunity to collaborate with the group in a way that might not be as easily accomplished at a large meeting of educators.

Virtual conferences are not unusual. Second Life is another popular platform for delivering virtual conferences such as Virtual Worlds: Best Practices in Education (WBPE), SLanguages, UNC: Teaching and Learning with Technology, SLACTIONS, and others. While I wouldn’t advocate opening up Second Life to all teachers inside the district (not at this point, at least), this could be a viable platform for a virtual BrainBlast. But on the other hand, a virtual BrainBlast wouldn’t need to be so sophisticated. Just gathering teachers in a basic web-based environment where they can communicate and participate in great training has tremendous benefits. And it would be a considerably more cost-effective supplement to BrainBlast than the summer event at Weber High School.

Evaluating Learning

One obvious question we may be overlooking is, “How well do we assess the learning of the participants?” BrainBlast is designed to be a highly constructionist, hands-on learning experience. Every classroom is equipped with a computer lab, and during the sessions the participants are expected to produce concrete artifacts and gain both conceptual and procedural knowledge of specific technology tools. Yet no official learning evaluation process is in place that I’m aware of. At the very least, the instructors and school techs stationed in each room should take notes during or after the training sessions of the overall learning experience, common problems that arose, and answer questions regarding the effectiveness of the session. The direct observation would prove invaluable in determining which instructional strategies do and do not work.

There are three particular aspects we should measure in any evaluation: efficiency, effectiveness, and impact. BrainBlast is undeniably efficient: all participants are given a wide range of training within a 12-hour timeframe over 2 days. The effectiveness is a little more debatable. Do all participants leave the sessions knowing the material they were supposed to learn? Are there always clear objectives in each class that should be accomplished by each participant? While we don’t want participants to take a grueling multiple choice quiz at the end of each session to determine if they actually learned anything, we can assess their learning by viewing their completed artifacts.

However, does BrainBlast actually have an impact? After a teacher takes a blogging class at BrainBlast, do they become an active blogger throughout the school year? If a teacher receives training on using Flip Video cameras, do they start using this in their class, and finding ways to engage students with video creation? 140 secondary teachers received training in Moodle. And now, a few months later, we still only have about 30-40 teachers actively using our Moodle system. This is about the same number of teachers that were using Moodle last year. Did BrainBlast actually have an impact on Moodle usage?

Granted, we shouldn’t expect teachers to use all the educational technology tools they have learned about in their daily instruction, but currently we do not formally measure if teachers are using what they learned a month, three months, or six months after the event. From past experience, and having received the most basic questions on how to blog, upload WeberTube videos, use a document camera, etc. from teachers that knowingly have participated in BrainBlast’s related training venues, the effectiveness and impact of BrainBlast needs to be determined.

Where is Social Bookmarking?

I commented on this topic 2 years ago after BrainBlast 2008. Classes on social bookmarking have been strangely absent from BrainBlast’s course offerings. Since 2007, Delicious, the most popular social bookmarking tool, has been consistently ranked as the top #1 and #2 most useful tools for learning by the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, which gathers data and feedback from educators all over the world. Why is social bookmarking such an important tool for teachers? There are numerous educational resources on the web, and social bookmarking is the most popular and effective way for teachers to share them amongst each other. It’s not just ordinary things like math manipulatives or quiz sheets that are shared, but links to videos, podcasts, desktop applications, helpful teacher blogs, educational trends, and bleeding-edge teaching ideas. The worldwide teacher network is opened up through social bookmarks, and our teachers can tap into this learning network by taking their bookmarks online.

Saving social bookmarks is as easy as installing the Delicious add-on in your browser and clicking Save. It’s no more complicated than clicking “Add to Favorites” in Internet Explorer. Plus, you can access your bookmarks from any computer, so you don’t have to panic when you realize that cool link to the video you wanted to show your class was bookmarked on your home computer, but not your work computer. Social bookmarking is such an invaluable asset. No longer do you have to hunt for your own resources for your classroom lessons, but you can tap into the research that thousands of other teachers have done and find existing links that others have shared. New links can be emailed to you daily, or you can subscribe to RSS feeds of bookmarks shared by different users, or bookmark groups that are created around topics. 99% of Weber School District’s Links of the Day come from Delicious and Diigo (another popular social bookmarking service which has some great extra features like highlighting and annotating pages). And about 99.9% of the links that get sent to my inbox are never put up on the Links of the Day page, so it would be beneficial if teachers have access to these other links themselves.

The bottom line is this: Our teachers are going to a technology conference, to learn about tools for learning and teaching. They are sitting in computer labs and learning about great web sites. But what do they do when they want to save these links? They whip out their notebooks and pens and write them down. These could easily be saved with a simple click and the teacher could access it later from any computer. The final step in the process is absent. All the BrainBlast links could even be merged into a shared bookmark group that anyone, anywhere can access for future reference. It’s rather strange that one of the top tools for learning has never even been mentioned at BrainBlast.

Conclusion

Overall, participants were quite happy with how the conference played out. There is clearly some room for improvement, particularly in ensuring the classes are relevant to everyone, and taking unique skillsets and aptitudes into account when the participants’ classes are assigned. We must improve our evaluation procedures as well, and pay careful attention to collecting good, reliable data if we are to determine how best to improve this event. There may be some value to including an online venue to supplement BrainBlast, and making sure that all the materials are easily accessible at a later date.

And finally, the best suggestion we received from the survey:

“Free massages would be nice.”

Analyzing a problem is the intermediary step between recognizing the problem and arriving at a solution, and it involves using data collection and forming decision-making strategies. Defining clear goals and objectives is important, too. For BrainBlast 2010 last summer, we had all the attendees participate in a survey on the final day of the conference. The goal was to collect data to enhance the quality of instruction for future conferences, and we collected some valuable information to this end, through a combination of Likert scale questions, and prompted constructive criticism. With these data, we can form the necessary decisions to improve future BrainBlasts, and avoid repeating any mistakes we made in the past.^*

An evaluator must assess aspects such as the needs of the program and its users. It’s important to be aware of the different data-collection tools at one’s disposal as well. My own forthcoming Moodle evaluation will be largely interview-based, with some backend data collection assessing general academic performance averages and usage of online course activities. Interviews in particular are useful formative evaluation tools. It’s important to not neglect formative evaluation during a program, as it can reveal scenarios, ideas, and possible venues for improvement before the conclusion.

Objectivity is important as well when analyzing a problem. After all, if an evaluation isn’t objective and free of bias, it is worthless. While it’s likely not possible that an evaluator can completely cast their biases aside, especially when offering professional recommendations, it’s important they make every effort to do so. Also, detailing the steps the analysis took and the efforts to collect objective data goes a long way.

^* An analysis of the BrainBlast 2010 survey results will be posted in a few days. (Update: survey results are now available.)

The data analysis for Everyday Math contains excellent visuals. A valid point is raised that performance data in education is difficult to evaluate, since there is often not a control group. Both the parent and teacher surveys cover the most pertinent aspects involved in the program, and are in accordance with the National Mathematics Advisory Panel’s report in Appendix B. However, the recommendation to pilot alternatives to Everyday Math is not necessarily the next logical step based on the evidence. The evaluation consists primarily of attitude assessments, rather than performance assessments. There are multiple reasons why a program would fail, and Everyday Math’s problem might simply be due to improper training among the teachers, a factor which wasn’t considered in the report. The Executive Summary itself isn’t necessarily supported by the text, and at best refers to vague references to math scores consistently improving over time, and the lack of evidence that Everyday Math leads to better performance.

The Technology in Teacher Education—Nevada: Project TITE-N report contains a diverse selection of data which appears to adequately cover the pertinent topics relevant to pre-service teachers. Measurement tools are very well-documented, and referenced frequently throughout the text, particularly in the informative visual displays of the data. There is, however, the necessity to familiarize oneself with the abbreviations before reading the data analyses charts. Figure 10 contains colors that are too close to distinguish, and Figure 14 contains blank items in the legend. Overall, the evaluation was well-done, with dissimilar groups being surveyed to ensure breadth of applicability, and with conclusions that accurately match the data portrayed.

1. How student engagement in our classes is impacted when Moodle is used
2. If the most popular activities our teachers use in Moodle (in ascending order: quizzes, assignments, and forums) actually reduce teacher preparation time
3. How the usage of Moodle activities impacts attitudes among teachers and students, such as quiz-building, assignments, over the traditional forms of delivery, and
4. How Moodle affects the academic performance of students

I’m interested in hard data on how the groups perform compared to non-Moodle-using groups. We only have between 20 and 30 teachers actively using Moodle, which isn’t significant enough for gathering districtwide data. However, I can gauge the results on an individual course basis by comparing academic performance of the students in the teacher’s class with the usage of Moodle, to how the students performed before the teacher used Moodle to supplement the learning environment.

With the help of some of my classmates I’ve evaluated a few other web sites, or web-based learning environments to be exact. A rubric designed by Baya’a, Shehade, & Baya’a (2009) was used to assess usability, content, value, and vividness of each site, to produce a criterion-referenced evaluation report. It did help me understand some of the strengths of using a rubric to assess content, when there are identifiable criteria to evaluate. It also helped me recognize this is probably not the way I want to go for the WSD Online evaluation, since any criteria I assign will be fairly arbitrary at this point. The norm-referenced approach will probably be more useful, because I can directly compare our Moodle-using teachers and students to non-Moodlers.

References

Baya’a, N., Shehade, H. M., & Baya’a, A. R. (2009). A rubric for evaluating web-based learning environments. British Journal of Educational Technology, 40(4), 761-763.

We also use Moodle to deliver the annual instruction, required for all district employees, on Blood Borne Pathogens, hazardous materials in the workplace, and the district’s policy on harassment and discrimination. Moodle will continue to be the chosen means to deliver these forms of online professional development.

However, I think we can do better. I question the effectiveness of these self-directed courses, for a few reasons:

1. There is no measurement of preexisting skills and knowledge to use as a baseline, to evaluate learning.
2. The short 10-question assessment accompanying each course’s section does not properly measure the effectiveness of the courses. Users are free to retake the quiz as many times as they need to get it right. There is no penalty for retaking the quiz.
3. We have no data on the impact of these courses. In fact, from personal experience I can vouch that many of the participants who passed some of these courses, are later stumped on very basic aspects of the tools in question. An adequate instructional program should minimize these instances. But more importantly, we should be able to assess how many people are experiencing these post-training difficulties.
4. Some of the courses haven’t been revised in over 3 years.

Without proper assessment, a self-directed course isn’t much different than just posting the tutorials on WeberTube. There is value to self-directed learning, but we need to take a more active role in evaluating these courses. Participants need to be given the chance to put their knowledge into practice. Follow-up surveys could be conducted to determine if the training impacted their behavior 1 month, 3 months, or even 6 months down the road. And revisions to the courses should be frequent and consistent with the data gathered.

Summary

• This is the “condensed” version of your entire report. Write this section last, to give yourself time to mentally process and work through all the elements of your evaluation, and get a clear picture in your head of the most important points.
• Remember, some will only read the summary — and in many cases these may unfortunately be the key figures in the organization or among your stakeholders — so keep it concise. Preferably no more than two pages.

Introduction

• Remember who the stakeholders are, and for whom the report is being written. Target the introduction and only write what will interest them.
• Write the purposes for the evaluation. Answer questions like: “What did the evaluation intend to accomplish?” “Why was an evaluation necessary?”
• Write about the program being evaluated. Identify the origins of the program, objectives and goals, internal activities, technology used, successes, shortcomings, any staff members involved, and so on. This will make sure the evaluator understands what’s going on.
• Implicitly identify the evaluation model being used. This will be addressed in more detail in the next section.
• Briefly outline what will be covered in the rest of the report here.

Methodology

• Describe the sampling method(s) used. Who is the target population, and how was the sample randomized (if it was randomized)?
• Describe the evaluation model (goal-based, decision-making, discrepancy, etc.), and why it was chosen.
• Describe the data sources, and the instruments used to obtain the data. Explain the right tools for the job. If you gathered qualitative data, describe the interviews, observation, etc. and gathered nominal and ordinal data. If you gathered quantitative data, describe the measurements that gathered interval and ratio data. Include the specific measurement tools in appendices, if necessary.
• Describe the data analysis procedures used, such as statistical calculations and how scores were derived from the data.
• Keep graphs and charts to a minimum, as these will be presented in the next section.

Results

• Outline the objectives one by one, and describe how the program accomplished those objectives.
• Refer to the instruments used in the results, and make it clear which instruments were used to achieve which results.
• Descriptive and well-designed tables and charts are always nice. The more visually explanatory a table or chart is, the better, because it means you need less of a verbal description.
• Write the results only after all the data have been collected and organized into the visual displays, or analyzed for content.
• Describe the implications the results have for the targeted stakeholders.
• Make sure both positive and negative results are written. This may include cost/time/productivity benefits or disadvantages. Make sure any personal biases don’t skew the description of the results.
• Verify that the program actually caused the results, and that extraneous unanticipated factors did not contribute to the results.

Recommendations

• This section can act as both a conclusion as well as a place to put professional recommendations.
• Ensure that every objective and goal stated in the introduction is addressed.
• Although you made sure not to let your biases skew the results, you still have your own biases. Tactfully make clear your own biases in the report, and let the target readers know why your recommendations may differ from another evaluator’s. Justify your recommendations as best as possible, but make sure your unique perspective is clearly presented.

I’ve been writing a report about the survey results we collected last month at BrainBlast, our district’s annual technology conference. It’s a fantastic event that we put on every year in the summer. Up to 300 teachers and administrators attend the conference, participate in hands-on workshops, and win cool prizes. And every year we try to get good feedback about how the year’s conference went, by encouraging everyone to take a survey.

I started my report of BrainBlast 2010′s survey back in August, without realizing what I was doing was an evaluation report. However, I’ve since realized I made quite a few mistakes in my methodology, and I’ll probably need to start again from square one. For one, my evaluation was based largely on data that was improperly quantified. We collected some ordinal data in that we prompted each participant to rate their courses as Poor, Fair, Good, or Outstanding, but then I converted these to numerical quantities — 1 for Poor, 2 for Fair, 3 for Good, 4 for Outstanding — even though the division between each level is not necessarily equal. A lot of my report was based on this faulty assumption, and I made the same mistake a couple years ago in my comments about the BrainBlast 2008 survey. As a result I’ll need to reassess the data we collected this year.

In general, the survey we administered wasn’t really comprehensive and designed with a full-scale evaluation in mind, but I’ll do the best I can. Boulmetis & Dutwin (2005) outline a good format for writing evaluation reports, consisting of sections for a  summary, evaluation purpose, program description, background, evaluation design, results, interpretation and discussion of the results, and recommendations. I think this is a good model to follow for any evaluations. At the very least it will be good practice for me as I hone my evaluation skills, and next year I’ll make sure I play a more important role in how we evaluate BrainBlast. Putting on BrainBlast is a significant financial investment for the district, albeit a very worthwhile one. It’s important that we make the most of how we conduct this valuable form of professional development.

References

Boulmetis, J., & Dutman, P. (2005). The ABCs of evaluation. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.

A goal-based evaluation would be ideal for our online inservice. This type of evaluation measures efficiency (the timeliness in which the learning is conducted), effectiveness (whether the participants actually learned the material following the instruction), and impact (how their behavior is affected long-term). There is value to both qualitative and quantitative measurement tools, and the data we gather should consist of both.

It’s important to understand the stakeholders involved as well. I would like to tie our online inservice with curricular standards, particularly if any online learning is extended to students, and not just employees. We already allow our teachers to earn state CACTUS credit through our inservice portal, but I think without proper assessments the credit given does not demonstrate actual learning.

It’s strange that we have overlooked evaluation in a lot of our online professional development. It seems obvious now. We should set clear goals and objectives, outlining what we wish to accomplish. Evaluation should occur every step of the way, through both formative and summative assessments. Self-directed courses should be kept to a minimum, since it can be more difficult to collect formative assessment in this venue. In directed courses, the instructor can observe how the learners interact with the material, and take notes. I tend to favor project-oriented learning, so I don’t necessarily prefer quiz-based summative assessments. Final projects which effectively demonstrate all the material learned in the online class could be constructed instead, and assessed through a rubric. Another assessment, perhaps conducted through observation only, should also provide a means to determine the impact of the training one, three, or six months down the road. Has the material been applied to the participant’s instructional practices? Has their behavior changed? For example, if they participated in introductory blog training, are they now actively using their blog for instructional purposes and parent outreach?

Determining exactly how to form these assessments is what I’m still unclear about, and I still struggle with deciding how to form the questions in an evaluation, and knowing what to ask. I would like to focus more and get some practice determining and writing questions that lead to clear process descriptions and goal statements.

I’ve written a paper (embedded below) which outlines the rationale for using games for learning purposes, and proposes a problem-based constructivist gaming model for educational game design. Aspects of the model include stating well-defined goals and problems, promoting student hypotheses for solutions to the problems, encouraging experimentation in the game world, delivering prompt feedback, and allowing students to reflect on their learning experiences. Simulations and virtual worlds are particularly appropriate game genres for constructivist activities. The games Civilization, Hephaestus, and Second Life are explained with the problem-based gaming model. A particular focus is placed on K-12 learning environments, illustrating how teachers may use these games to support young students’ constructivist learning.

I’ve already determined that using Second Life in our school district won’t be possible at this time, due to the adult content. There doesn’t seem to be any way for our district’s firewall to filter specific regions. We could actually customize our own Second Life viewer to whitelist a selection of regions that we’ve pre-approved, but this still won’t stop clever students from realizing they can download the standard viewer and access the inappropriate regions anyway. Teen Second Life also won’t work, since it’s intended for adolescents from 13-17 years of age, and apparently it’s rather difficult to even get Linden Lab to allow teachers on the site. Plus, none of these sites allow access for students 12 and younger, and the district never directly has any control over the actual content. The requirement for direct control is a policy we won’t be able to get around at the current time.

For this reason, the best alternative is to host our own virtual world server. OpenSim, an open source re-engineering of Second Life, appears to be a good bet. Version 0.7 was just released a few days ago with some pretty exciting updates. The drawback to a self-hosted virtual world, however, is that our students won’t have access to the vast array of pre-built regions in Second Life that contain undeniable educational value. What this means is that we’ll need to approach our use of OpenSim from another perspective.

This is where learning theories come into play. We don’t have to wildly speculate what the best practices for using a multi-user virtual environment might be. We can draw from a deep pool of theoretical frameworks to make informed, educated decisions about how to create the most effective, engaging, motivating learning opportunities. Our young students do seem to be particularly fond of online gaming in general. Massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) have increasingly become the dominant form of entertainment for children and adolescents (Paraskeva, Mysirlaki, & Papagianni, 2010).

It seems natural that a self-hosted virtual environment which has in-game modeling and scripting tools would naturally be an ideal playground for allowing students to become creators. Constructivist learning theories are a good fit, as they place the focus on learners, and cast them in active roles responsible for their own knowledge construction. Students can generate shareable artifacts in the virtual world. The teacher supports students’ learning, rather than dictates the information to them, and in the case of a virtual world, this would be accomplished by setting up virtual learning environments in which students can discover aspects the teacher wishes them to learn, and probably a few things they don’t expect, and allocating different tasks to students as they explore, test their theories to solve the tasks, and reflect on their learning.

In the game Spore by Electronic Arts/Maxis, for example, players guide the evolution of a species from a single-celled organism to fully sentient, intelligent, communicative beings that colonize the galaxy. Unlike scientific evolution, in which species are primarily the products of adaptive change, players have control over the appearance and many of the evolutionary characteristics of their creatures. Teachers could have their students form hypotheses about advantageous creature traits, and test them in the game world by building the creature accordingly through a simulated, albeit simplified evolutionary process. Through the process of discovery, students can learn:

• Basic principles of evolution as they advance through the different stages of the game
• Microbiology as they explore the primordial sea as a microorganism propelled by its flagella
• Zoology when they have to choose through their actions whether their creature is an herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore (this affects the primary cultural characteristics of the species later in the game)
• Astronomy as they explore other solar systems
• Politics when they encounter rival civilizations and are forced to coexist.

When things don’t go as planned, the students reform their hypotheses and test again. Part of this constructivist-based problem-solving model includes periods of reflection. It’s important that students, since they are their own knowledge constructors, have a chance to adequately reflect on what they are learning, and make the proper connections.

It’s almost inevitable that games not designed specifically for curricular learning will introduce inaccuracies, since there’s often a trade-off between entertainment value and realism. However, these points of inaccuracy can be teaching moments as well. For instance, asking “How is the evolution portrayed in Spore different from scientific evolution?” could prompt a great discussion in class. Spore is a rather fun tool for hypothesizing and fantasizing about how intelligent space-faring species might evolve, since as of now, humans are the only point of reference. But ultimately this demonstrates the advantage a fully-controllable virtual world provides, where you can design the simulation from the ground up so it follows particular curriculum standards and objectives, rather than having to mold a preexisting game around the curriculum.

I’m already considering the changes I’ll make to my paper for the final draft. It’s been nice to be able to draw on my past video game experience (and my parents thought I was just wasting time by playing them!) and adjust my perspectives with a new outlook.

References

Paraskeva, F., Mysirlaki, S., & Papagianni, A. (2010). Multiplayer online games as educational tools: Facing new challenges in learning. Computers & Education, 54(2), 498-505.

I really like Moodle. It’s one of the most functionally-rich learning management systems out there today. It’s not a replacement for a web site, and it’s not a replacement for a blog. It’s a way to easily organize your classes and reduce the work you, as a teacher, are required to do.

Our approach has been to use Moodle as a classroom management system. We’ve made it clear to teachers that their job isn’t in jeopardy, and the physical classroom isn’t being replaced, but rather enhanced and extended by Moodle. Teachers can finally have paperless classrooms by putting all their material on Moodle for students to download (what teacher wouldn’t want to be free of papers?), and allowing them to submit their assignments online. Grading papers is easy — just go down the list of submitted assignments, write a few comments, assign a grade, and you’re done. No more shuffling through papers and scribbling notes, then handing them back to your students every day. Feedback is instantaneous. And unless your quizzes are complex and have essay parts, they actually auto-grade themselves, too.

What’s more, Moodle has its own built-in gradebook. Many districts have their own gradebook program, and with any districtwide deployment of Moodle, you should make sure it integrates with your existing grading software, if applicable. If it doesn’t integrate, it suddenly becomes extra work for the teacher to maintain grades both in Moodle and in their gradebook. You don’t want that. Moodle does contain a lot of export options, but not any that integrate with MyGrades, WSD’s grading program. Until now, this has probably been a major reason for slow adoption and resistance in our district. Fortunately, this school year Moodle will integrate directly with MyGrades through an extra “Link to Moodle” feature available from every gradebook.

We’ve found that a great use of Moodle is also the simplest — setting up an online forum for your students. It’s a closed, private, moderated space for your students to talk amongst each other. It’s amazing how much kids today love talking to each online, and what’s highly beneficial is how well it levels the playing field. Even the reserved, reticent, detached students who normally wouldn’t utter a peep in class, suddenly open up in the online forum, just spilling their guts. It’s a great way for shy students to finally have a voice and communicate with their peers in a way that’s less awkward for them. You can get your students talking about class-related topics, and you may find they log in late at night at home to continue the conversations.

I’m convinced that any resistance to Moodle is just a combination of uncertainty and ignorance. If teachers realize how much easier their jobs can be with Moodle, many will gladly and graciously adopt it. There’s certainly few, if any, reasons that it shouldn’t appeal to teachers.

I’ll admit, I’m not sure I ever accepted across-the-board categorizations such as these. Derribo & Howard (2007) seem inclined to agree, and take it a step further. They argue that there are no reliable instruments to determine or measure learning styles, and that there is no substantial evidence that students’ learning improves when the teacher understands their alleged learning styles. They advocate focusing on learning strategies instead. One key point the authors make is that there is such an abundance of theoretical perspectives and proposed learning instruments that it negates the effectiveness of using learning styles at all. The authors also reference some studies which demonstrate matching learners to styles simply does not lead to more effective learning.

The problem I see with the article is that Derribo & Howard use a narrow scope of scholarship to demonstrate their point, and ignore other studies. They even go so far as to poison the well by writing, “An instructor may argue that he or she has found . . . studies [which support learning styles]. The problem is that most of these investigations are poorly designed” (p. 106).

However, I can see how some readers may misinterpret the authors’ intentions. They are not proposing everyone learns the same way. They are not falling into the trap of assuming that a lack of evidence is evidence against learning styles. What they are suggesting is that trying to categorize learners into neatly-fitted slots may stifle teachers’ willingness to experiment with new learning strategies, and cause teachers to be reluctant to engage students in ways the students don’t necessarily prefer. They note that “students simply may not benefit from certain instructional approaches whether they like them or not” (p. 106). “The problem,” they write, “is simply that instructors have not learned that their teaching styles are not appropriate for a small percentage of students” (p. 107). Questioning whether our categorical associations are correct or incorrect is not the same as saying we shouldn’t categorize at all, and from the article, I don’t think the authors are suggesting any categorizations are necessarily false or misleading. Just that we haven’t figured out the right way to do it yet, and that our time could be spent on better pursuits to engage students.

The ultimate message is good advice for any teacher. Think outside the box, and don’t assume that you sufficiently understand your students’ unique learning needs, because they may surprise you. Good teaching is an endlessly, richly complex field of study, and a teacher should always focus on improving his or her instructional knowledge, techniques, approaches, and strategies.

I’ve been poring over articles about constructivist theories and how they influence educational games, since I’ve been writing a research paper on the topic. It’s quite a fascinating body of literature, and I’ve discovered I sympathize the most with a constructivist approach to learning tasks, though my preference does depend on the situation and context. For learning that can be accomplished by directly involving students and making them active participants in the learning process, constructivist approaches are generally favorable, as they provide opportunities to work in collaborative, often technology-enhanced environments, which is great preparation for entering the 21st century workforce. A proper constructivist approach also provides ample opportunity for reflection during the learning process, which I believe is a seriously needed aspect in our day of “memorize-this-to-pass-the-final-exam” style of teaching.

In Stager (2007), the author describes a “branch” of constructivism called constructionism. Constructionism is an extension of constructivism, with some notable differences. Mainly, while constructivism outlines that learning consists of building knowledge structures, constructionism describes the applied practice of the constructing as creating something tangible and shareable. One criticism of constructivism from the constructionist perspsective is that constructivism provides the means by which knowledge is formed, but fails to provide a context. Indeed, any constructivist approach should include a context, and constructionism is an approach that makes sure this happens.

The author describes a specific instance in which a constructionist learning environment enabled at-risk students to find ways to learn material they would normally have struggled to grasp, and engaged them by directly involving them in the learning process. The students were given tasks to accomplish, and created machines and robotics with LEGO MINDSTORMS bricks to accomplish those tasks. An example may be students were to  create a vehicle which could ascend a specific steep incline. During the process, the students would learn that their major stumbling blocks were natural principles like friction, gravity, structural flaws, and lack of force. Through their trial-and-error experiments, these principles became more than just abstract concepts, but actual obstacles they had to understand, address, and overcome.

I would suggest that constructionism, with its heavy emphasis on technology usage, is an approach well-suited for “digital natives,” or students who are familiar and comfortable with emerging technology, having grown up with it their entire lives. The example of the LEGO MINDSTORMS vehicles could also be accomplished in an appropriate simulation, which is quite relevant as far as educational game design is concerned. Constructionism is also suitable for teaching playwriting, video production, music composition, graphic design, character animation, woodworking, newspaper production, and other instructional tasks in which students produce artifacts.

Maybe it’s just my “learning style,” but I certainly understand the value of not just learning by doing, but learning by doing and producing. As an undergraduate Computer Science student, I took a number of Unix classes. Yet when I entered a career in which I actually had to apply the knowledge, I was at a loss. It wasn’t until I started creating functioning systems, such as a network infrastructure, web server setup, or backup script, did any of the knowledge make sense. Being given a chance to accomplish tasks while I learned was a far more effective learning experience.

References

Derribo, M. H., & Howard, K. (2007). Advice about the use of learning styles: A major myth in education. Journal of College Reading and Learning, 37(2), 101-109.

Stager, G. S. (2001). Constructionism as a high-tech intervention strategy for at-risk learners. Paper delivered at National Educational Computing Conference, Building on the Future, July 25-27, 2001, Chicago, IL.

During this time, when technology is growing by leaps and bounds, it’s increasingly apparent that we need a good approach to use our modern technology tools for learning, and harness their educational potential. Constructivism seems to be particularly suited for computer-based learning.

Technology teaching is well served by adopting a constructivist approach. A lot of the activities taught in technology classes are hands-on with guided instruction. The students are required to actually delve into the technology tools and actively use them by creating 3d character models, writing programs, designing graphics, and so on. Students only learn so much by watching someone build a character in Maya or code a simple game in Visual Basic, and learn much more by actually going through the steps themselves.

If the end goal is for a student to do something, then it’s not very productive to make them simply observe. If I’m training a teacher to use their new blog, I don’t want them make them sit and watch me do all the work. I want them to actually dive right into their blog’s dashboard and start using it, and help them make the mental connections to figure out how they can use it in their own classroom. Recognizing that their professional experience is different than mine, I want them to be able to construct what they learn in relation to their own experience. (And at the very least, they’ll have created some original content at the end of the instruction, and made some progress in getting their blog underway).

When I assisted with the founding of Venture Academy, a charter school in my area, I attended a lot of meetings about the expeditionary learning approach the school espouses. I have very positive feelings about expeditionary learning, but I didn’t realize at the time I was favoring a highly-constructivist style of learning. At Venture Academy, most of the learning is hands-on, with the teacher guiding and providing direction, rather than standing at the front of the classroom lecturing. Field trips, or “expeditions” as they’re called, are frequent, as the philosophy is that students learn best by experiencing the subject matter in a real-world context. Students are responsible for collecting their own data and finding ways to relate to what they’re learning during these expeditions. In the classroom, students are always working in collaborative groups — the desks are never arranged in rows, but in clusters to encourage communication. Children host their own parent-teacher conferences, with the teacher acting as a facilitator and prompting the students to share what they’ve learned in class, and where they could improve. The reflection on what has been learned is another key process in the constructivist approach.

There are those who claim the effectiveness of constructivism is lacking. For example, Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark (2006) claim that the evidence “almost uniformly supports direct, strong instructional guidance rather than constructivist-based minimal guidance during the instruction of novice to intermediate learners” (p. 83). I will agree that in many instances students learn best when the teacher has a strong presence as a guide, but I don’t think constructivism necessarily excludes strong guidance. If anything, constructivism encourages an intense commitment from the instructor. They must constantly evaluate and revise the learning environment to make sure the students’ learning is always relevant.

There’s a lot more to constructivism than simply letting students “do all the work.” Nanjappa & Grant (2003) note that as a “facilitator of learning, the teacher is not ineffectual and on the sidelines. On the contrary, the teacher is free to use a variety of constructivist strategies, such as coaching, modeling, and scaffolding, to aid each learner” (p. 49). A facilitator is a support person, someone who stimulates and encourages the cognitive growth of the learner. The teacher must know how to create a learning environment in which students can actively practice and reflect on what they are learning, rather than merely listening to instruction being delivered.

References

Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75-86.

Nanjappa, A., & Grant, M. M. (2003). Constructing on constructivism: The role of technology. Electronic Journal for the Integration of Technology in Education, 2(1), 38-56.

The law can also determine what is appropriate. Copyright and fair use laws must be followed. Educators should also be aware of what is culturally and socially appropriate. Racial or sexually offensive language should not be included in instructional materials. Students must be aware that there are real-world consequences when they abuse technological systems. Safety issues, public concerns, and legalities may hinder the adoption of some technologies that contain educational value. Allowing access to YouTube, for instance, is a hotly-debated topic in many schools, since this site contains undeniable educational potential. There are numerous instructional videos on YouTube, but also a wide range of controversial material most parents would not want their children viewing.

Some teachers see no redeeming value to collaborative authoring tools such as wikis or Google Docs, or think that if they have a Facebook account, their students will inevitably use it against them. Some parents refuse to allow their children to use the Internet in school, because they don’t understand the academic advantage, and don’t share the vision of encouraging responsible, appropriate Internet usage. Many educators lack even basic awareness of educational technologies, let alone their appropriateness.

One issue I’m concerned about is where we’re headed with our enforcement of appropriate usage among K-12 students. Most schools have some sort of filtering software that prevents students from accessing inappropriate sites on the Internet. I support this, but I believe many educators consider this a solution when it’s really just a bandage. Students with ill intent will routinely try — and succeed — to find ways around any filter set up to keep them out. Also, with the way mobile trends are heading, it’s only a matter of time before nearly every student has an advanced smart phone with a data plan, which will render all school Internet filters useless. Banning cell phones typically has the effect of driving them underground in schools.

I believe it’s the responsibility of educators to help students understand appropriate usage of technology, encourage responsibility in using the resources with which students are provided, and stay alert of possible misuse. This is a crucial component that is missing from many educational environments. A conversation has to occur on two fronts: (1) educators must be aware of the technologies, their benefits, and the potential dangers and abuses, and (2) parents should know what technology tools their children are using, and be informed of the educational potential of these tools.

Educators and parents are the ones who elect the legislators that pass laws concerning student safety in our schools. If they do not understand the difference between encouraging appropriate usage, and banning any potentially offensive technology, we will see an increase in filtered sites, decrease the access to sites with learning potential, and relinquish the opportunity to teach students educational value for many emerging tools.

Now, just how closely these animal studies relate to humans is up for debate, and I recognize our students have quite a bit more advanced brains than mere rats. But how do you think our schools fare? Do we create “complex environments” involving a rich set of experiences from which our students can draw information? Or are we still stuck in the boring lecture rut, where students stare aimlessly at yet another meaningless PowerPoint while an instructor drones on about who-knows-what?

I’ve been redesigning our district’s online professional development portal, and it occurred to me that online learning can’t simply fall within the same routine pattern either. This is, of course, much easier said than done. It’s almost impossible to avoid if we’re providing self-directed, instructor-free classes, which has basically been the extent of our online learning delivery in the past. It can make formative evaluation less effective and difficult when direct interaction is not possible. Technology tools such as video conferencing could provide visual cues, and requiring the learners to produce reflective updates can illuminate personal growth, but there is something to be said about being in a physical classroom interacting with actual students in person.

On a related note, I’ve been reading and considering how adopting a cognitive load theory can influence how online learning is developed. Cognitive load theory refers to the “mental burden” of accomplishing various tasks. Think of it like the CPU of a computer. If you start loading up a ton of programs, the system is going to slow down because all the applications are hogging the CPU’s processing power. It’s the same idea here. The brain can only handle so much thinking at a time. The idea is to minimize the “cognitive load” on the learners. This isn’t to say that “cognitive load” is something that happens as instantaneously as a computer’s CPU, as the load can be spread out over time, but the solution is straightforward. Simplify the tasks, so to speak, by identifying different forms of instruction which have a similar effect on learning, and choosing the simplest one. As it relates to online learning, the “variability of problem situations encourages learners to construct cognitive schemas, because it increases the probability that similar features can be identified, and that relevant features can be distinguished from irrelevant ones” (Van Merrienboer & Ayres, 2005, p. 7). It’s a similar issue to the necessity of creating a complex environment. We want to create a variety of situations that will increase the chances that the learning will “take hold.” The focus should be on creating a variable environment to stimulate more learning opportunities.

One aspect that cognitive load theory implies for instructional design is that methods which work well for novice learners may have no effect, or even a negative effect on experienced learners (Van Merrienboer & Ayres, 2005, p. 8). This could provide a rather valuable insight to one of our district’s professional development events. In our yearly BrainBlast conference, the general goal is to provide workshop-based classes suitable for all learners. We do not let the participants choose their own classes. Instead, we randomly choose classes for them. We want to give teachers exposure to topics to which they may not initially see the value. The downside is that this necessitates a nonexclusive course design.

Our approach requires a trade-off, because if we accept the statement that teaching methods work differently for different levels of learners, the instructional effectiveness is stifled by the fact that we must resort to a limited set of general methods that we believe will work well for everyone. At the very least, in the coming years we should request all participants fill out a survey to determine their technological aptitude. Then our courses can be divided into different levels of learning (e.g. beginner, intermediate, advanced). Ideally, we would subdivide these into different skills our participants possess for different technology tools.

A complex learning environment does not refer to a situation where there is over-stimulation. We don’t want cognitive overload, after all. Learning should be reduced to the simplest cognitive form, but also provide complexity in the form of a diversity of learning stimuli and experiential opportunities.

References

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school (pp. 102-116). Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. Retrieved from http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6160&page=102

Yet now, as I’ve been restudying and reexamining the major theories of learning — i.e. behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism — I find it interesting how knowledge that once seemed so non-applicable suddenly has a deeper meaning, and you have a reason to learn and comprehend it, when it directly relates to your career.

I’ve been reading Burton, Moore, & Magliaro (1996), a basic primer on behaviorism and how it relates to instructional technology. Behaviorism is often dismissed as an “outdated” theory, yet its principles are still highly relevant. A couple things have occurred to me. One is that even B.F. Skinner wrote that “knowledge is action.” In other words, the behaviorist view isn’t one of passive absorption of knowledge, though this is a common misconception. It is one where the learner actively engages the world around him, and learns through experience (p. 9). The emphasis is on all the active responses of the learner, and validation of learning occurs only when action has taken place. How is this focus much different than what we currently practice in our schools? We require engagement from our students. An idle student learns nothing. Also, behaviorism is very relevant to modern instructional design, particularly the systems approach. Needs assessments and task analyses are necessarily behaviorist in design. We can’t as easily gauge cognitive patterns or assess thought processes.

Rabinowitz & Thaw (2005) provides further illumination on the behaviorist perspective’s relationship to educational technology. Skinner believed that machines are useful for instruction, since students should immediately know whether they are doing something correct or not, and receive appropriate rewards for right answers (p. 50). This is an area in which computers are quite proficient, and they are only becoming more adept at delivering instantaneous feedback to increasingly larger numbers of students at once. A study of behaviorism is useful when evaluating computer-based teaching methods, that much is clear.

On the other hand, Rabinowitz & Thaw (2005) suggest that theoretical perspectives have undergone an “evolution” or “progression” (p. 49). I’m not sure I agree with this. If we are progressing, what are we progressing toward? At its core, particularly in the realm of science, evolution represents adaptive change, not advancement. Approaching theoretical perspectives from a non-progressive angle may provide a more useful framework, because we are not tempted to dismiss the advantages older theories provide simply because we feel we’ve moved on to something better. I think perceiving new theories as a progression undermines the point of learning past theories in the first place, because we may be less inclined to explore the benefits they once and still could bring to the ever-changing field of educational technology.

I will be paying a lot more attention to theories of the past and exploring the effects they have had upon our current knowledge of instructional technology, and the advantages and insights they may yet bring to the table, particularly as they relate to computer-based instruction. Reopening a study of behaviorism has particularly been useful for me.

Lastly, this past week I was able to lead a lively discussion about a possible shift in epistemological perspectives that is underway. Namely, how knowledge seems to be shifting from being the sole domain of academics and scholars to community-approved in resources such as Wikipedia, and how the Internet is facilitating this shift. This was quite an insightful discussion which demonstrated to me just how powerful the effects of social media have been. If the credibility or weight of academic knowledge (such as in Encyclopedia Britannica) starts carrying the same weight as a Wikipedia article — as many of our students today seem to think — how will this affect the ways K-12 and higher education schools teach students to research? It is possible that citing Wikipedia will not be as taboo in the future as it is now. Since students are using the Internet for learning at younger and younger ages, it’s becoming increasingly necessary to teach our students proper research skills early on, so they understand that even though there may be a shift of what’s “acceptable information,” it does not necessarily mean the information is correct.

References

Burton, J. K., Moore, D. M., & Magliaro, S. G. (1996). Behaviorism and instructional technology. Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology, 46–73.

Rabinowitz, M., & Thaw, E. (2005). Psychology, instructional design, and the use of technology: Behavioral,  cognitive, and affordances perspectives. Educational Technology, 45(3), 49-53.

Spector (2005) outlines four theoretical foundations for educational technology research: (1) learning psychology, (2) communications theory, (3) human-computer interaction (i.e. how humans learn from computed-based instruction), and (4) instructional design and development. Spector mentions an instructional theory I wasn’t familiar with beforehand: component display theory. The theory provides “guidelines for when control should pass from the instructional computing system to the learner and what should be included in that control” (p. 25).

I researched component display theory (CDT) a little more, and learned that the theory outlines four main forms of presentation: rules, recall, practice, and example. Learning itself consists of interaction between two areas: concepts (e.g. the facts and concepts one learns), and performance (i.e. how the learner uses the learned material). An important aspect of the CDT model is that it allows for the learner to control the instructional strategies that are used. In other words, the learner can adapt them to meet his own learning style.

This really interests me. The main area of focus in my job has traditionally been in human-computer interaction, and CDT applies quite directly to this foundation. Lately, I’ve been musing over how we can improve our district’s online learning. Currently, our only source of purely online learning is our self-directed professional development portal on Moodle, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s woefully inadequate. We do provide some good tutorials on our technology tools like the staff blogs and our employee leave reporting program, but proper assessments are not performed (I don’t count taking a simple five-question multiple choice quiz with the correct answer being the only “serious” one in the set an “assessment”). In other words, we’re not doing a very good job of evaluating learning. What’s more, our online instruction isn’t subject to revision. Our employees have very different preferences for learning. Our district does quite a good job of trying to accommodate them all, but we can be doing more. The way I see it, our staff should have their choice between online self-directed learning and live webinars. We could also explore the possibility of hosting an online conference for our district. Giving users multiple options is the key.

Dede (2008) offers an interesting article, in which he argues that we are seeing a shift in knowledge, from an organized system dictated by recognized experts, to community-oriented and collectively-approved. Wikipedia, which is one of the top 10 most visited sites on the Internet (according to Alexa), has blurred the line between academically-approved knowledge and information deemed acceptable by a worldwide social network. People have settled for knowledge that’s just “good enough” and no longer turn to the “sages on stage” delivering their incontrovertible wisdom from their ivory towers.

Two things occur to me. The first is that students must be taught how to recognize potentially false information, and how to recognize bias. They need to learn how to correlate any community-approved “knowledge” with other sources. Students use social media every day, creating their own communities and sharing knowledge that’s relevant to them. The Internet has made everyone a potential expert with a worldwide audience, and we must teach our students that not every self-proclaimed “expert” out there necessarily speaks the truth. There is still value to peer-review among established scholars, though even they have their own biases and are prone to misinformation. However, there is an undeniable gradient of reputability, and the established scholars still occupy the top. The question is, will they stay there?

The second is that we need to actually encourage students to form their own knowledge-sharing communities. Rather than sweep this under the rug, we can use this to our advantage. In my own district, I would like to see online student learning networks take hold and become hubs for the sharing of information, stimulate thoughtful inquiry, and help foster budding content experts. I think few teachers would deny there are many things they can learn from their own students. We need to encourage students to continue learning the things they are passionate about, and guide them to correspond more with established academicians. The world wide web has made it easy to reach out and communicate to anyone, and I think our schools are only beginning to explore the massive social possibilities the Internet has to offer.

References

Dede, C. (2008, May/June). A seismic shift in epistemology. EDUCAUSE Review, 80–81.

Giles, J. (2005). Internet encyclopaedias go head to head. Nature, 438(7070), 900-901. doi:10.1038/438900a.

And now, WeberTube has some brand new features that I think are pretty exciting.

Document Sharing

This has been a much-needed feature for a long time. Videos are hardly the only useful form of media to teachers. Now, you can upload your Word files, spreadsheets, text files, PDFs, PowerPoints (note that animations currently won’t convert, but this feature will be implemented in the near future), and pretty much any type of document. WeberTube will convert and display your document in a viewer that you can embed anywhere. Within the document viewer you can zoom in and out, print pages, search for text, and more. Just copy/paste the embed code as normal.

The document viewer should automatically adjust to the size of any web page or blog post you add it to, but here’s a little trick you can do. If you want to use a manual width and height, simply add &width=###&height=### inside the embed code. Here’s an example:

Original embed code:

Modified embed code:

Note that both a width and height must be present for a manual size adjustment to work (this may change in the future).

To encourage users to start using WeberTube Docs, we’ve disabled document uploads on the blogs. To post your documents on your blog, users will now use WeberTube.

Instant Blog Publishing

If you’re one of those teachers that feels they don’t have time to maintain a blog, hopefully this next feature will help change your mind a little. Anything you upload to WeberTube can now be INSTANTLY published to your WSD blog by simply clicking the new “Publish to My Blog” checkbox at the bottom of the Upload page, before you click “Save.” If you already write class newsletters, make activity calendars, write up spelling lists, or anything that you hand out to your students, it literally takes just a few seconds to upload them to WeberTube and automatically publish them to your blog. WeberTube will take the title and description of the media you upload, create a post out of it, then place the embedded media underneath.

You can also publish ANY media content from WeberTube directly to your blog. Whenever you click on any video, photo, audio, or document you will now see a list of Actions on the right side menu. Simply click “Publish to My Blog” and the content will instantly be posted. Please note that you need to be logged in to WeberTube with your Novell username and password to take advantage of this.

Original Content Downloading

You’ll notice that directly below “Publish to My Blog” in the Actions menu is “Download Original.” This will download the original file that the user uploaded to WeberTube. For example, if they uploaded a movie in AVI format, you can download the AVI. If a PowerPoint was uploaded, you’ll download the PPT. This is handy if you want to use or edit the actual file, rather than the embedded version. Not all the content on WeberTube has originals available, and the “Download Original” link will only appear if there is an actual original file to download.

Private Embedded Media Passcodes

There may be an instance in which you want to share a video on your blog, but put it behind a password-protected post. Or perhaps you have a video you only want to share with your class on Moodle. You normally couldn’t (and wouldn’t) simply upload the video to WeberTube and embed it, since the video would still be publicly accessible on WeberTube. Or you may have a video that was public, but later you wanted to make it private. To make sure no one can view the video even if they know the (public) key, the (private) passcode is provided in the embed tags if your media is set to private. Kind of a funky, confusing, and possibly useless feature, but it provides a small extra layer of security for videos you don’t want being shown everywhere. When you click “Publish to My Blog” on private media, the passcode will be posted as well, though privatizing the post will be up to you.

Better Search Results

YES! Finally! WeberTube used to return search results that had absolutely no bearing on relevancy, so this new improvement isn’t so much an “enhancement” as it is a “making WeberTube the way it should’ve always been” feature. You should see better results. You may notice that results are sorted by “Relevance” by default now, rather than “Upload Date.”

What’s nice is that any document uploaded is fully indexed as well, if possible, so these are considered in the search results as well. WeberTube’s search functionality will only continue to improve as time goes on. I’ll implement some smart algorithms soon, so the system “learns” as more people search.

——————–

We have a lot of new features planned for the future, and our goal is to make WeberTube a truly teacher-oriented media sharing site, that goes above and beyond what YouTube, TeacherTube, SchoolTube, or any other media service can provide. If you have any suggestions for WeberTube, please leave a comment, or send them to suggestions@webertube.com.

The following is a brief instructional video by Justin McFarland about the changes.

Some new plugins have been added as well:

Admin Management Xtended

Enabling this plugin will alter your Dashboard, and provide some extra features that you may enjoy. You can more easily change page orders, manage categories, toggle post and link visibilities, and a lot of other changes. Try it out, and if you don’t like it, you can always deactivate it.

Advanced Spoiler

This plugin allows you to hide parts of your posts and pages, by placing them inside spoiler tags. The reader can click a “Show” link to display the hidden text. This is great if you want to save space on your blog, by providing a brief summary of your post at the beginning, then the full content in a hidden spoiler.

Google AJAX Translation

This plugin replaces the old Translate plugin, and provides a lot more languages a reader can translate your posts to. This plugin can translate on a post-by-post basis or a sitewide basis (use the widget for sitewide functionality), and can even translate comments, whereas the old plugin was a sitewide-or-nothing deal.

Quick Search

If your blog theme has a search box, this provides very nice real-time search results that goes beyond what WordPress offers natively. Search results are broken out into Posts, Pages, and Comments.

WP-Archives

This plugin allows you to create a nice, cleanly-formatted archives page. Just add <!–wp_archives–> anywhere on a blog page or post, and it’ll make a list of all your posts, organized by date. Click the “Archives” tab at the top of my blog for an example.

Snazzy Archives

Try Snazzy Archives if WP-Archives isn’t flashy enough for you. It’s another way to create an archive, but with a graphical twist. It has different layout options to organize your posts. There’s quite a few options available for it. Snazzy Archives seems to work better on blogs with wide pagespace.

Tweet Blender

This is a plugin that lets you enter specific users, hashtags, and more from Twitter, and display them as a real-time feed in a sidebar widget. You can see I’m currently using this under “Tweeting Educators” with the “#edchat” hashtag, which many educators on Twitter use to discuss educational topics.

WP-PageNavi

If you don’t like the “Newer Posts” and “Older Posts” link that appear at the bottom of the page, try activating this plugin. It provides numbered pagination boxes for easier navigation.

WordPress Hashcash

This is a good spam prevention plugin. In the near future, I’ll probably force it to be turned on for everyone’s blog. It basically requires that a commenter have Javascript capability in their browser. The vast majority of human web surfers in 2010 have Javascript-enabled browsers. However, spambots usually ignore Javascript, which means that spambot comments will be automatically flagged and pushed to the spam folder. This is quite different from normal spam prevention techniques, which typically read the message itself, look at IP addresses, user-agents, or other things to determine if a comment was written by a human or not.

Firestats

This plugin was actually added awhile ago, but I should note that this is now automatically turned on for everyone. It is available under the “Dashboard” menu item. You can turn it off, but I highly recommend you leave it on, because it is now used to calculate the “Visitors per Day” ranking on the WSD Blog Statistics page. This plugin helps you see who visits your blog, how many hits you get each day, the search terms people use to find it, other sites that are linking to your blog, and a lot of other helpful information. You may have been using the Slimstat plugin before. That has been removed and replaced by Firestats.

If you notice any problems with the new blogs or the plugins, please let me know. Also remember, if you find a theme you like and would like to see added, let me know about it as well. Make sure it is “widget-enabled” first, because we won’t add any that aren’t.

My original role in Digital Parent was simply to provide technical support. However, since I’ve been learning quite a bit about instructional design, I plan on taking the initiative and helping the team form organized models to develop and assess future workshops.

Below is the instructional design document for “Facing Facebook,” a workshop to help parents better understand how children use Facebook, and how to talk to their kids about the service. The document is a little long (it was written for a graduate school class), and I feel it could use some trimming so it only addresses the basic needs of any Digital Parent instructor who downloads and uses it.

I’ve realized that Digital Parent will need both formative and summative evaluations included in the process, which will be a daunting yet important task since the workshops will be delivered as downloadable “modules,” so the instructional designers will likely never see the instruction put into practice. We can still hold our own one-to-one and small group evaluations, however, but any field trials will likely consist of an actual instructor presenting the content to an actual group of interested parents, without the presence or the knowledge of the instructional design team. Every workshop module should have a summative assessment for all participants (teachers and students), accessible on the Digital Parent web site, that is automatically reported back to the Digital Parent team. This will allow us to keep a careful watch over the effectiveness of our instructional design projects, and be able to revise and improve our work.

As I first started following educators, I found there were many sharing tips and techniques for teaching in the classroom. One thing educators on Twitter seem to love doing is sharing links with others. You can watch how they communicate with others, too, and find even more followers this way. Many educators tweet their new blog posts, so Twitter can be a great tool for finding new blogs you may not be reading. There are also sites like Twellow and Mr. Tweet which can you help find many more (for a more exhaustive list created by educators of great Twitter apps, see Twitter Freaks on Diigo).

What I’ve also found useful is when educators attend technology conferences such as NECC (now ISTE) or FETC. Many of them take along their webcams, set them up during presentations they attend, and tweet the Ustream links. As a result, I can watch some great professional development sessions from the comfort of my office or home, without paying a dime.

Twitter is great for learning about emerging technologies. As soon as a teacher catches wind of a great new site that just came out, you can bet it’ll make its rounds on Twitter. Whenever I need help figuring out the best tool for a particular job, or tracking down a video I remembered seeing several months ago, I can always count on my Twitter network to help me. I just ask a question and within a few minutes I may get a dozen responses back. One way to think of Twitter is like a chat room you can take anywhere you want, filled with people you choose (since most people you follow will follow you back). It can turn into quite a vast learning network.

I recommend checking out the following session by Jeff Utecht at the 2007 K-12 Online Conference: http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=205 Twitter was still brand new at this time, but there were already teachers flocking to it. During this presentation Jeff has Twitter open and casually uses it to connect with educators and has them share insights. It quite aptly demonstrates just how connected Twitter can make you. It’s what made Twitter click for me, at least.

Resources

• Nine Great Reasons Why Teachers Should Use Twitter
• Top 100 Tools for the Twittering Teacher
• Twitter for Teachers and Experts
• Twitter in the Classroom?
• Twitter Tutorial for Teachers
• Twitter4Teachers Wiki – Giant list of Twittering teachers to follow

I felt like I was getting stuck in a learning rut. For no particular reason other than being occupied with work, I’ve become a little distanced from Twitter, which used to be my #1 source of professional learning. Now, I’m glad I forced myself to start learning in an academic environment again. I needed it.

The last online course I’d taken was back in 2001, when I was an undergrad. I remember how clumsy and detached the experience was. The professor just assigned readings then posted quizzes online. If you needed help, your only option was to try emailing the teacher, and hope he responded within a week or two. If there was a class forum, it was barely used. Online courses only had the bare minimum. That was pretty much my experience.

Skip ahead 9 years. When I started my two classes for this semester, the first thing my professors did was make everyone discuss and get to know each other in the online class forums. Every week there was a new topic to talk about in the forums with the fellow learners. I even had the opportunity to lead some discussions in my Instructional Design class (I shared the “Never Lecture in Class Again” video and had a lively discussion about how using podcasting for teaching would affect the instructional design process).

Also, and maybe it’s just because now I’ve finally settled on a career working in the Technical Services Department for my school district, but everything I’ve been learning has been highly relevant. Being an IT (information technology) professional, I almost enrolled in an IT program instead of ed tech, but that would’ve been a mistake. A HUGE mistake. Nothing I would have learned would have been as relevant or as helpful to my career as what I’m learning now.

I soon realized that I’d picked the best possible online degree program that would guarantee the online courses would be phenomenal. After all, part of educational technology is realizing the best practices for using technology to address students’ unique learning needs. The instructors in the Ed Tech department are content experts in the very thing they’re doing. They know the best practices, because they’re teaching the best practices, and they’re going to use them when they teach.

In just one class — Intro to Ed Tech — I’ve learned about some important tech trends and how to identify them, a great academic research and indexing tool (Zotero), how to write a technology use plan, professional development models, a good rubric for evaluating a school or district’s technology, why technology is important in education, and a lot more. I got to learn from a motivating, vibrant professor who never hesitated to assist the students or host impromptu webinars to provide additional instruction whenever we needed help.

And in my other class — Instructional Design — holy crap! Who knew there was so much involved? If you’d asked me what instructional design was just a few months ago, I probably would’ve replied it had to do with building better PowerPoints. I have to admit, I struggled with this class. I don’t know if it had to do with not coming from a teaching background, but it was 100% new to me (I had to look up Bloom’s Taxonomy just to see what the heck it was!). There was a lot of material that was a little hard to grasp — types of learning, learning strategies, task analyses, learning theories. When I finally got around to actually writing an instructional design document, I found myself referring back to old chapters in the textbook — a lot more than I wish I had to – to review the stuff I had learned but never really clicked. It just didn’t register in my brain until I actually had to use it. There’s a huge difference between learning the definitions associated with instructional design, and actually understanding them well enough to use. I plan on doing a lot more instructional design in my career, so I expect to be referring to my notes often.

I’m looking forward to my two summer semester classes: Internet for Educators, and Theoretical Foundations of Educational Technology. BRING IT ON!!!!!

What is Educational Technology?

So there’s no ambiguity, let’s define exactly what is meant by “educational technology.” According to the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT), it is “the study and ethical practice of facilitating learning and improving performance by creating, using, and managing appropriate technological processes and resources” (Januszewski & Molenda, 2008, p. 2). What this means in a nutshell is that educational technology exists specifically to help students become better learners. If it does not help them in this capacity, it is not an appropriate technology.

Insisting we shouldn’t be using technology in a school is like saying we shouldn’t be driving cars because we have perfectly good horses. There are things a car can do that a horse can’t, such as travel 80 miles per hour and get people to their destinations faster. On the other hand, a horse can travel on rugged terrain most cars can’t reach.

Perhaps it’s ironic that the parent who sent the complaint did so through email. Why was email used instead of the traditional postal service? Because modern technology advances allow near-instantaneous communication across the world, and since my email address was readily available to this parent, it was the obvious choice. It was the best tool for the job, just like depending on the situation, a car or horse may be the best means of transportation.

A proper study of educational technology identifies the best tools that will create optimal learning experiences for students, or benefit teachers in some way that helps them communicate their instruction more efficiently and effectively. One important fact should be kept in mind: Technology is not a replacement for a teacher. There is no time in the foreseeable future when a teacher’s job will be made obsolete. Instead, when placed in the hands of a good teacher, technology can improve teaching skills and cultivate an improvement in students’ learning.

Technology Transforms the K-12 School System

Most of our students are already immersed in a technological world. They’re skilled users who have grown up with technology in their daily lives. They’re users of cell phones, iPods, video games, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and many other technology tools. Prensky (2001) refers to these children as “digital natives,” young people who are adept users of technology and have always been surrounded by it. They are familiar and competent with the digital tools, and embrace new technologies as they appear. Contrasted with “digital natives” are the “digital immigrants,” the older generation who recall a time when modern technology tools did not exist, and who often have an awkward time adopting them. Students today have different expectations of technological engagement than students used to, and they may expect the same level of engagement in their schools.

Fortunately, there is a wide spectrum of technology tools that can benefit learning in a K-12 environment. For example, teachers can use podcasting to improve their students’ reading, literacy, and language skills, and use auditory playback to identify where they need additional instructional assistance. Podcasting can also be used to share lectures that students may have missed (Hew, 2009). Document cameras and digital projectors allow teachers to display papers, photographs, books, and lab specimens on a big screen (Doe, 2008). Google Earth allows students to instantly explore the world, locate famous landmarks, and watch embedded instructional videos. Blogs allow both students and parents to instantly communicate with the teachers, and provide a window into the classroom. When used by students, they can increase literacy skills and promote global citizenship (Witte, 2007). Augmented reality devices project images over real-life objects, creating visual, highly-engaging activities (Dunleavy, Dede, & Mitchell, 2007). Even the video games students like to play online have educational promise because “they immerse students in complex communities of practice” and “invite extended engagement with course material” (Delwiche, 2006). Our youngest learners can benefit from technology, too, as one study showed that preschoolers who were introduced to video and educational games experienced marked improvement in literacy and conceptualizing skills over students who did not have access to these technology tools (Penuel, Pasnik, Bates, Townsend, Gallagher, Llorente, & Hupert, 2009).

Students with disabilities also benefit from using technology tools. Rhodes & Milby (2007) found that students with disabilities are often proficient with using technology to accomplish learning tasks and interactive activities they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. Electronic books, with their text-to-speech capabilities, animation, and interactivity can boost their confidence, and encourage fluency, comprehension, and language skills.

Technology is more than just a gimmick. It can improve the cognitive learning abilities of students, and support and enhance their learning capabilities (Krentler & Willis-Flurry, 2007). Even students who generally struggle with learning or have disciplinary problems show improvement when technology is used (Dunleavy, et al., 2007). Technology can stimulate children’s cognitive development by improving logical thinking, classification, and concept visualization skills, and creating intellectually stimulating hands-on learning activities. Skills such as literacy, mathematics, and writing are improved and reinforced by a technology-oriented education (Mouza, 2005). Students who recognize technology’s educational benefits are more likely to become engaged in the learning process, seek out their own learning opportunities, maintain a stronger focus on accomplishing their learning tasks, and improve their higher-order thinking skills that allow them to become better problem-solvers (Hopson, Simms, & Knezek, 2001).

One benefit of the Internet is that students have an easy way to share their hard work with a wide audience. Students gain confidence and pride when they see their products in a visual form. The online social aspect can also reduce feelings of isolation, and encourage discussions and peer instruction (Mouza, 2005). One researcher commented, “Youth could benefit from educators being more open to forms of experimentation and social exploration that are generally not characteristic of educational institutions” (Ito, Horst, Bittanti, Boyd, Herr-Stephenson, & Lange, 2009). So important is technology to a K-12 school environment that the National Association for the Education of Young Children states that technology should be used as an active part of the learning process (Rhodes & Milby, 2007).

Technology Enhances Professional Development

Professional development refers to any skills or knowledge obtained that benefits one in their career. We are experiencing an unusual phenomenon in our school systems. For once, most of our students possess a greater knowledge and skill in a field than many teachers do. It’s important that teachers engage in professional development opportunities so they can “keep up” with the students’ extensive experience with technology.

Not long ago, the extent of a teacher’s learning didn’t stretch beyond the walls of the school. Teachers would gather in the teachers’ lounge to discuss their instructional strategies. One way to motivate teachers and provide ongoing work-related educational support is through online communities, where peers support each others’ learning. Hausman and Goldring (2001) found that teachers are most committed to their schools when they have a sense of community, and are offered opportunities to learn.

In an online community, a teacher can post a question and receive back insightful answers with minimal effort on their part. Teachers can also share their experiences, and gather evidence of the success of new techniques (Duncan-Howell, 2010). Online courses are prevalent, podcasts are available to extend learning, professional-oriented chat rooms spring up, educators share their thoughts on their blogs, and teachers set up and share webcam feeds at conferences so other members of the online community can learn the new techniques and skills necessary for teaching modern students. Technology has allowed teachers to figuratively break through the walls of their schools and engage a vast community of like-minded individuals who come together to interact, learn, and share knowledge with each other.

Technology is Necessary in the Outside World

One of the expectations of our education system is that students will be taught the skills necessary to be productive and competitive members of society and the modern workplace. As Harris (1996) pointed out, “Information Age citizens must learn not only how to access information, but more importantly how to manage, analyze, critique, cross-reference, and transform it into usable knowledge” (p. 15). Businesses are rapidly adopting new technologies to simplify and enhance their processes, and are demanding higher-order critical thinking skills of their job candidates. Adults who use the Internet have greater success at obtaining jobs, and have higher salaries (DiMaggio, Hargittai, Celeste, & Shafer, 2004), and technology prepares students for the modern-day jobs they will obtain by teaching them skills such as motivation, engagement, and online collaboration (Ringstaff & Kelley, 2002). If students are not taught the necessary skills they need during their K-12 education, they will be at a severe disadvantage when they are ready to enter the workforce.

Face-to-face communication skills are and likely always will be important in the workplace, but social business skills have expanded to include more than just face-to-face communication. Teleconferencing, collaborative document authoring, online correspondence, video conferencing, and more are common in modern workplaces. While parents think their children are wasting their time talking to others online, our youth are acquiring basic social and technological skills they need to fully participate in contemporary society (Ito, et al., 2009). If we restrict our children from using these online social forms of learning, we are stifling their future careers, and preventing them from being able to compete in this digital age.

Conclusion

In the parent’s message at the beginning of this paper there was one fundamental misconception: that technology and learning are at odds with each other. This is simply not the case, and the research paints a very different picture. We are experiencing a “shrinking world” as technology has opened lines of communication that just 20 years ago were either impossible or a monumentally expensive feat. Students should realize the educational potential of technology, and we must be prepared to create learning opportunities that encourage them to use technology in their education. Ultimately, if we wish to create motivated, lifelong learners with the necessary knowledge and skills that give them a competitive advantage in modern careers, we must embrace technology in our schools.

References

Delwiche, A. (2006). Massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) in the new media classroom. Educational Technology & Society, 9(3), 160-172.

DiMaggio, P., Hargittai, E., Celeste, C., & Shafer, S. (2004). From unequal access to differentiated use: A literature review and agenda for research on digital inequality. Social inequality, 355–400.

Doe, C. (2008). A look at document cameras. MultiMedia & Internet@Schools, 15(5), 30-33.

Duncan-Howell, J. (2010). Teachers making connections: Online communities as a source of professional learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(2), 324-340. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.00953.x

Dunleavy, M., Dede, C., & Mitchell, R. (2009). Affordances and limitations of immersive participatory augmented reality simulations for teaching and learning. Journal of Science Education & Technology, 18(1), 7-22. doi:10.1007/s10956-008-9119-1

Harris, J. (1996). Information is forever in formation, knowledge is the knower: Global connectivity in K-12 classrooms.  Computers in the Schools, 72(1-2), 11-22.

Hausman, C. S., & Goldring, E. B. (2001). Sustaining teacher commitment: The role of professional communities. Peabody Journal of Education, 76(2), 30-51.

Hew, K. (2009). Use of audio podcast in K-12 and higher education: A review of research topics and methodologies. Educational Technology Research & Development, 57(3), 333-357. doi:10.1007/s11423-008-9108-3

Hopson, M. H., Simms, R. L., & Knezek, G. A. (2001). Using a technology-enriched environment to improve higher-order thinking skills. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 34(2), 109-120.

Januszewski, A., & Molenda, M. (2008). Educational technology: A definition with commentary. New York, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum, Inc.

Ito, M., Horst, H., Bittanti, M., Boyd, D., Herr-Stephenson, B., & Lange, P. G. (2008). Living and learning with new media: Summary of findings from the digital youth project. Retrieved May 4, 2010, from http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/report/digitalyouth-WhitePaper.pdf.

Krentler, K. A. & Willis-Flurry, L. A. (2005). Does technology enhance actual student learning? The case of online discussion boards. Journal of Education for Business, 80(6), 316-321. doi:10.3200/JOEB.80.6.316-321

Mouza, C. (2005). Using technology to enhance early childhood learning: The 100 days of school project. Educational Research & Evaluation, 11(6), 513-528.

Penuel, W. R., Pasnik, S., Bates, L., Townsend, E., Gallagher, L. P., Llorente, C., & Hupert, N. (2009). Preschool teachers can use a media-rich curriculum to prepare low-income children for school success: Results of a randomized controlled trial. Summative evaluation of the “Ready to learn initiative”. Education Development Center. Retrieved May 4, 2010 from http://cct.edc.org/rtl/pdf/RTLEvalReport.pdf.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5). Retrieved May 4, 2010, from http://www.hfmboces.org/HFMDistrictServices/TechYES/PrenskyDigitalNatives.pdf

Rhodes, J., & Milby, T. (2007). Teacher-created electronic books: Integrating technology to support readers with disabilities. Reading Teacher, 61(3), 255-259.

Ringstaff, C., & Kelley, L. (2002). The learning return on our education technology investment: A review of findings from  research. San Francisco: WestEd. Retrieved May 4, 2010, from https://www.msu.edu/~corleywi/documents/Positive_impact_tech/The%20learning%20return%20on%20our%20educational%20technology%20investment.pdf

Witte, S. (2007). “That’s online writing, not boring school writing”: Writing with blogs and the talkback project. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 51(2), 92-96.

Learning Online with Games, Simulations, and Virtual Worlds: Strategies for Online Instruction

There are three parts to this book. Part 1 argues for the use of games in education, and posits that virtual environments are actually a natural part of human thinking. Research and studies are referenced, demonstrating the effectiveness of games in education, and showing quite clearly how and why they work.

Different types of interactive learning activities are defined, and divided into three primary categories: games, simulations, and virtual worlds. Games are simpler activities that are meant to be engaging and encourage awareness, while simulations focus more on skill-building. Educational simulations are “structured environments, abstracted from some specific real-life activity, with stated levels and goals” (p. 7). Virtual worlds are “3-D environments where participants from different locations can meet with each other at the same time” (p. 8). Virtual worlds are noted for their detailed interactive models and real-time collaborative learning environment. Visual cues can play a part in virtual world learning, whereas they may not in the other types of interactive learning activities. These different types of activities are not mutually exclusive; there may be overlap among their components. Different types of simulations are broken down into several genres, and the author does a great job classifying the different aspects of games and levels of interaction.

The real meat of the book is in Part 2, which describes how to put highly interactive content into practice. These interactive learning activities are referred to as “Highly Interactive Virtual Environments” (HIVEs). The book mentions stumbling blocks that may be encountered from both students and teachers, and how to overcome them. Detailed steps are provided on how to use HIVEs, including preparing instructional material, obtaining technical support, how to build them or recruit others (such as students) to build the content, and how to determine the best courses of action. The book has a heavy focus on Second Life, and most of the discussion of virtual worlds directly references how to plan and accomplish tasks in Second Life. A lot of the tasks described are often best suited for a higher education environment, so someone in the K-12 field will naturally have to read through the filter of their own unique student safety and appropriate use policies.

A hypothetical setup and process for engaging students in a sim is described, with information about game interfaces, how to draw everyone in, setting the tone, determining learning objectives and outcomes, how to determine appropriate coaching during use, and the value of including competition as a game element to trigger motivation. The author also discusses how to deal with disinterested and frustrated students, and emphasizes the importance of tying the sim to real life.

Of course, knowing all this information about HIVEs is meaningless if you can’t convince your stakeholders that they’re worthwhile. Part 3 contains some much-appreciated and much-needed tactics for convincing administrators, parents, and politicians of the value of HIVEs. The author points out that advocating HIVEs requires that we don’t defend them blindly, but evolve them intelligently. Many people have the misconception that games “dumb down” learning material, simplifying it to a point that entertainment comes before usefulness. We must be able to demonstrate exactly how and why simulations can enrich, rather than flatten content.

The author also spends a good deal of time discussing methods for evaluating instruction in the simulations. In fact, an entire chapter is dedicated to this topic, with references to it throughout the entire book. The psychomotor skills that are often learned through sims can’t be measured through a multiple choice post-test. This is where formative evaluation comes in handy.

The book is shorter than one might expect, but it’s packed with information, and written concisely and informatively. The author gets right to the point. The main concepts are not over-simplified, and there’s a lot of detail specifically about how to approach different types of learning in HIVEs. The author drove home a good point for me: The goal is not to just recreate the classroom in a virtual world environment, but to provide an extension of the classroom that uses the virtual world’s advantages.

After reading this, my thoughts on virtual worlds have changed. I used to think that virtual worlds were just a good way to increase student engagement. Students like games, so naturally many of them would become more involved in the learning process if games were used, right? Well, it’s a lot more than that. There are times when an educational game, simulation, or virtual world is THE best form of instruction. What this book attempts to do is equip the reader with enough tools to recognize WHEN a game, simulation, or virtual world is the best form of instruction, and I think it does a good job of this.

References

Aldrich, C. (2009). Learning online with games, simulations, and virtual worlds: Strategies for online instruction. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

We’re still exploring different readers. It’s an exciting project, though I can’t help but think we’re narrowing our scope by limiting it to ebooks. iPads especially can do a lot more, and HP has a new slate that actually supports Flash (take a note, Apple). These devices can go far beyond what a simple ebook reader can do, though for quite a larger cost.

The advantage, though, is that slates can be web-enabled through a wireless connection and can access a much wider range of content, play videos, podcasts, and more. Students could use them to take online quizzes in a computer-less classroom. This would allow teachers to use classroom management tools like Moodle without having to send everyone down to the computer lab. Students could also take notes, view instructional videos during the teacher’s lecture, and even engage in web-based augmented reality activities by taking their slates outside and around the school campus.

There are four main venues of PD in our district. We have an online self-directed learning portal, two site-based PD programs — one for administrators, one for teachers, and an annual [site-based] summer conference where hundreds of our district’s teachers and administrators come for intensive workshop-based training on a variety of technology tools. I realize the value of ongoing professional development. Teachers should not simply learn something then not have it reinforced. While self-motivation is essential for any teacher’s PD, districts should also find ways to create learning opportunities that directly benefit their careers.

I don’t think our teachers have responded that well to our online inservice portal, though that’s largely because of a lack of summative evaluation and revision in the instructional material. This will need some revising before it gets to an acceptable state. I’d also like to explore more models of professional development and put them to use in our district. One particular PD model is almost completely unused: live web conferencing. The state provides everyone with free Wimba accounts, but no one I’m aware of even uses them. I’d like to start organizing weekly/biweekly live professional development sessions just for our employees, perhaps during prep hours or after school is released.

Three Professional Development Models

Duncan-Howell, J. (2010). Teachers making connections: Online communities as a source of professional learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(2), 324-340. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.00953.x

The author, Jennifer Duncan-Howell, discusses the benefits of online communities for professional development. Social networking is a valuable model for professional development, and has increased the depth of online learning available to teachers. This article shares the results of a study on three online learning communities, and demonstrates that teachers can benefit from engaging community-oriented learning environments, as 86.7% of the teachers surveyed considered their online communities a valuable form of professional learning.

There’s a few good things to think about in this article. My district could be doing a lot more to involve teachers in online communities. I set up a Moodle-based forum a couple years ago for all our district’s teachers and administrators, but there is only about one new post every other month. This seems unacceptable coming from a district with 1500+ teachers. A potential goldmine of collaborative information is sitting there, unused. Few will disagree that being connected to like-minded educators is absolutely invaluable for teachers. Being able to stay on top of emerging trends, and share resources, lesson plans, ideas for integrating technology into the classroom, inservice opportunities, and strategies for engaging students are important. The problem is, many teachers don’t realize they can establish a venue of collaboration outside the walls of their own school. Teachers should realize they don’t have to work inside a box, and that there’s a worldwide learning network out there waiting for them, filled with thousands of educators willing to step in and help them out.

Mushayikwa, E., & Lubben, F. (2009). Self-directed professional development: Hope for teachers working in deprived environments? Teaching and Teacher Education, 25(3), 375-382. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2008.12.003

This article explores self-directed learning in technologically underprivileged educational systems, specifically among teachers in Zimbabwe. I was particularly interested in the comments made by the teachers, as they share how they currently use technology for learning (e.g. using email because they lack travel funds to come together in groups, using the Internet to make lesson plan organization easier), and the concerns behind self-directed professional development. The model presented in the article is really a model of concerns. It first addresses the basic needs of feeling that professional learning and collaboration is worthwhile in the first place, followed by concerns over career development and content knowledge. When these are met, the teacher is guided toward professional efficacy and efficacy in their classroom, and finally becomes an effective teacher.

This article made me think about our own school district’s self-paced inservice site. It’s Moodle-based, and teachers can use it to earn state certification credit. I didn’t design any of the courses — one of our techs did — and now after several weeks in my instructional design class now I’m starting to notice that the courses could be developed much better. There were no needs or learner analyses conducted when the courses were created, and there’s no form of evaluation on the effectiveness of the learning. I’ll need to get more involved in the instructional design process for our online learning opportunities, and use what I’ve been learning about to benefit my district’s teachers. There is much more to professional development than simply providing a few training exercises and a printable, pixelated certificate they can hang on their wall.

Gerber, B. L., Brovey, A. J., & Price, C. B. (2001). Site-based professional development: Learning cycle and technology integration. Retrieved from http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=ED472987

This article intrigued me because it directly analyzes how professional development impacts not only teachers, but students as well. The authors approach the study from an empirical perspective: “Students learn most readily about things that are directly accessible to their senses – tactile, kinesthetic, visual, and auditory. Teaching should be consistent with the nature of scientific inquiry” (Gerber et al., 2001, p. 6). The authors also make a good point when they write, “Cognitive research strongly suggests students know less than we think they do following instruction. The quality of student understanding should be emphasized rather than the quantity of information presented” (Ibid).

Following this particular study, teachers reported that students were finding more ways to foster their own creativity, were more inquisitive in the learning process, and that their mutual relationships with their teachers improved significantly.I think more studies like this would be worthwhile, because sometimes we forget that the final intended beneficiary of any professional development opportunity is not the teacher, but ultimately the student. Professional development should help teachers become better at their job, and in return students should benefit from the extra skills and techniques the teacher has developed.

I like the story (p. 6-7) about the elementary student who started a debate over odd and even numbers, suggesting that a number can be both. Rather than immediately correcting the misunderstanding, the teacher allowed the students to discuss this basic of math for themselves, devise their own definition of “even and odd” through experimenting with adding different types of numbers, and reach their own conclusions. The end result was an improvised spontaneous lesson the students directed themselves.

References

Green, E. (2010, March 7). Building a better teacher. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html

• Share a video-based Principal’s message to your teachers and students once a week
• Live stream morning announcements hosted by your students (Roy High has already used the server to do this twice).
• Broadcast school assemblies into other classrooms. Some of our schools have too large a student body for their auditoriums, and the live stream could be shown in designated overflow areas. Since live streams can actually be transmitted across the district, you could even share your assembly with other schools, if appropriate.

The server uses the open source Red5 Flash streaming server. To transmit, we are using the free Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder application. In the future, the live streaming application will be moved to WeberTube, so the Flash Media Live Encoder will no longer be needed, and people can simply broadcast and watch live streams off the web site.

If you’re a Weber School District administrator or teacher, and want to try live streaming and broadcasting video throughout your school, please leave a comment on this post, or email me. Again, all you need is a webcam and a microphone.

Mouza, C. (2005). Using technology to enhance early childhood learning: The 100 days of school project. Educational Research & Evaluation, 11(6), 513-528.

Rhodes, J., & Milby, T. (2007). Teacher-created electronic books: Integrating technology to support readers with disabilities. Reading Teacher, 61(3), 255-259.

Squire, K., Barnett, M., & Grant, J. (2004). Electromagnetism supercharged! Learning physics with digital simulation games. Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference of the Learning Sciences. Los Angeles, CA.

Wall, K., Higgins, S., & Smith, H. (2005). “The visual helps me understand the complicated things”: Pupil views of teaching and learning with interactive whiteboards. British Journal of Educational Technology, 36(5), 851-867.

Wenglinsky, H. (2005). Technology and achievement: The bottom line. Educational Leadership, 63(4), 29-32.

I’ve only done a cursory examination of virtual world tools out there, and I hope by the end of my graduate school career, I’ll be able to write a full technology proposal for implementing this. As far as I’m concerned, Second Life is no good for a K-12 district-wide deployment, and here’s why:

• You’re stuck with either the teen grid or the adult grid.
• On the teen grid, parents and teachers aren’t even allowed.
• On the adult grid, students can run into inappropriate content.
• The teacher and district doesn’t have direct control over what students can do.
• Students less than 13 years old aren’t even allowed to be on Second Life.

There are other commercial providers that allow you to create your own virtual worlds. Active Worlds is probably the best one, but their educational pricing is quite steep: http://www.activeworlds.com/edu/awedu_pricing.asp $650/yr for a classroom of 20, and $395/yr after that. Assuming there aren’t bulk rates, for our school district that would be an initial investment of about $1 million, and $600,000 yearly after that. It’s completely unreasonable for a K-12 school system.

I found two that seem the most promising:

• Multiverse: This is a hosted (cloud) solution, and has a completely free educational license. There is also an additional license that may be able to integrate with registered students. It appears to require a quote from Multiverse, and I haven’t followed up on this yet so I’m not sure how much it cost.

  Models can be imported from Google Sketchup and Blender, which are both free 3d modeling applications, which means that schools wouldn’t need to invest huge chunks of money to provide modeling tools to students, and students could download these at home.

• OpenSim: This is basically THE open source Second Life. You can install OpenSim on your own servers, and have complete control over it, and you can even use the Second Life viewer to access it. It’s still in early development, but it’s already creating quite a buzz. What’s more, the SLOODLE plugin, which integrates Moodle with Second Life and lets users take quizzes in the virtual world and submit virtual objects as assignments, generally works with OpenSim (though a few bugs still need to be worked out).

  Google Sketchup models can also be imported into OpenSim, through realXtend (which itself may be a viable virtual world engine). If trying to maintain your own OpenSim server is too much of a burden, there are companies like ReactionGrid that provide hosted OpenSim solutions.

I’m excited to explore the possibilities with virtual worlds, and watch how the products mature. Hopefully we can come up with a solution that works well for everyone in our district, creates focused learning activities, and protects student safety all at the same time.

This is really quite slick. I think augmented reality has great potential in the classroom. What’s more, it can lead to engaging hands-on activities that go beyond the two-dimensional computer screen most of us are used to. I watched a YouTube video one of my classmates posted about AR being used to teach chemistry: http://www.youtube.com/v/iT2ek8N0VlY. It actually reminds me of all the virtual reality hype back in the 1980s, and how the future would all be immersed in virtual reality. I don’t think we’re quite there yet (the current reality’s just fine), but this opens quite a few doors, especially if the simulations are done in 3d space. Imagine, for example, being able to teach medical students how to perform surgeries on a plastic cadaver, with AR showing all the incisions and sutures.

What I would like to see is an open source framework that makes it possible for K-12 teachers to easily create their own AR scenarios. It should be compatible with any PC or smart phone, and users should be able to select from a range of templates that have different features like GPS geocaching, setting up interactions with a simple graphical scripting engine, the ability to share AR programs with others through a central repository, and anything else that might be useful for educators.

I also tried out Google Sketchup, and I’m kind of shocked that I skipped over this until now, because it has enormous potential. I’ve seen the models in the 3d warehouse and plenty of Sketchup projects made by educators. I love how easy it is to import models directly into the program, though it doesn’t integrate very well with other applications like 3d Studio Max or Maya unless you have the Pro version. Student discounts are available, though: http://sketchup.google.com/industries/edu/students.html

All this particularly interests me because our district has been exploring the possibility of setting up our own virtual world server. The first time I heard about virtual worlds was in reference to Harvard’s “River City Project” cited, again, in an article in THE Journal: http://thejournal.com/articles/2006/09/01/educational-gaming–all-the-right-muves.aspx. Most teachers I find familiar with virtual worlds take exception to referring to them as “games” but I don’t think students know the difference. Right now, I see them as potential extensions of online learning systems, where teachers can interact directly with students in a secure space, but give them a lot more options. For example, drafting students could bring their blueprints to life and create architectures within the virtual world. Students could participate in virtual science fairs. What’s more, a school or district could have a public area showcasing the best work from their students.

I did actually have a minor familiarity with the digital divide and digital inequality. Digital inequality is a problem with many of our district’s students, since our district almost exclusively covers suburban and rural areas. In many of the outer areas, high-speed Internet access isn’t even available, and households are still limited to dial-up.

I believe it’s important for teachers to be aware of this issue, and be able to adapt their lessons and homework to the students who may not be able to access computer-based content at home. In our district, many of our teachers make use of online classrooms, blogs, videos through our media sharing site, and more. Our state, like many others, requires that up-to-date records of student grades and attendance be provided to parents via the web. We invest a lot of effort in making sure parents have ready access to their students’ information, even though many of them simply will never log in because they don’t have the means to.

On the other hand, there are people who insist that digital inequality isn’t really much of an issue anymore (see, e.g. http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2007/09/12/02divide.h01.html). Internet coverage is expanding, ISP prices are dropping, smart phones are becoming more and more advanced and connecting to the Internet faster, open wi-fi hotspots are popping up all over the place, and many businesses and fast food restaurants provide free wireless access. Some schools (not Weber yet) are even providing 1:1 programs which allow students to take laptops home. Is it possible that one day digital inequality will be a complete nonissue, much like the digital divide is now? I certainly think so.

10 PRINT “LITTLE BO-PEEP LOST HER SHEEP”
20 PRINT “BOO-HOO”
30 GOTO 20

The result was seeing the screen filled with endless “BOO-HOOs” line after line — the “LITTLE BO-PEEP” line was only noticed with a quick eye — and a group of gasping, excited 7 year-olds.

That was my first exposure to an educational technology, and my first introduction to programming. I don’t recall any instruction in BASIC after that, but not long after this exercise, my parents bought me an Atari 1200XL and a BASIC programming manual. I started learning more about how programs follow logical patterns, how algorithms can be used to achieve desired results, how to perform simple mathematical calculations, and even how to create the most simple games. What was extremely helpful were the issues of 3-2-1 Contact magazine I received which contained BASIC programs other readers had written. Whenever a new issue came in the mail, I would boot up the computer and feverishly copy the lines of code out of the magazine, anxious to see the results.

It’s kind of funny that I ended up becoming a programmer by profession. It makes me wonder if my career would have turned out differently if my teacher had decided not to have her students type up those little three lines of code 23 years ago.

References

• Wikipedia article: “BASIC”
• History of the BASIC family of languages

I realize all that is probably more technical than anyone cares about or is necessarily capable of doing. Most teachers aren’t school webmasters, and just want a simple way to share links on their web site or blog. There are alternatives. Most sites and blogs have some way to display RSS feeds. If you use the feed of your Delicious bookmarks, you could stick your bookmarks on your site. This method doesn’t exactly provide an automatic “Link of the Day” but you can add a “Featured Links” to your site:

1. Grab your Delicious account’s RSS feed: http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/{username} (replace {username} with your Delicious username).
2. If you’d rather pull links in from a Delicious group, from a specific tag, etc. see this page for other feed options: http://delicious.com/help/json
3. Stick this on, e.g., your blog sidebar as an RSS widget.

If your site doesn’t have native RSS functionality, or is just plain HTML code that gets uploaded and updated, you can embed a third-party widget like this one: http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/rss Grab the embed codes and just stick them on your site where you want it to show up. Links will now appear on your site as soon as you add them to Delicious. It’s not exactly a “Link of the Day” but at least you can share links with others in a simple way on your own site.

If you would rather have a “daily” link, you could do the following to get some semblance of this functionality. This method involves using a Twitter account, too:

1. Create an account on TwitterFeed.
2. Click “Create New Feed” and add your Delicious RSS feed as the new feed.
3. Set the new feed contents to retrieve only every 24 hours, and only 1 item at a time.
4. Connect this to your Twitter account in the “Configure Your Publishing Services” option.
5. Use http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/rss or another RSS widget to embed this on your site.

Now only 1 new link per day will show on your site. Problem with this, at least 1 new link needs to be bookmarked per day for this to work. If you’re pulling these links from a large Ed Tech-themed Delicious group, where 100+ people are adding links all the time, it probably wouldn’t be a problem, though of course then you don’t have control over what shows up.

Do I see myself using Google Squared very often? Probably not. But can it be useful in some circumstances? Definitely. It requires a different way of approaching how you’re going to search.

Usually when I search for something in Google, I just enter a list of the most relevant keywords, with the goal of obtaining very specific results. With Google Squared, though, you don’t want specific results. You want a broad range of results, organized into neat categories. Google Squared is more geared toward those who want to compare information, rather than obtain specific information.

As an example, I typed “Big Band Musicians” into Google Squared, and it came up with this spreadsheet:

With minimal effort, a nice table of data is created for us, with information like dates of birth and death, short bios, and photos of the musicians. You can see that some faulty information may creep in, like the “Library of Congress” on the last row. These can be easily and quickly removed from the list by just clicking the X next to the row. Or if you click on some individual cells, you may get alternative text that makes more sense in the context, and it’s just a simple click to change how the erroneous fields are populated.

The real power of Google Squared comes in the ability to add your own columns. So let’s say I want to get some more information on each musician, like:

1. Which instrument each musician played.
2. The name of their spouse.
3. Some of their famous works.
4. How they died.

I simply add columns like “Instrument”, “Married”, “Famous For”, and “Cause of Death.” The columns are auto-populated with data, and the result is this modified spreadsheet:

This can be a pretty powerful tool, if you have a need to organize your search results together. Perhaps you’re looking for ski resorts, or local restaurants, and need a way to compare them to make a decision. Or maybe one of your students is writing a paper on insects, or Greek philosophers. A simple Google Squared search can make the collection of tabular data much simpler. Granted, a student will want to fine-tune the data that’s provided if they’re going to use this as a visual aid in a research paper, but it’s a very quick and easy way to jumpstart research on a broad topic. Not to mention Google Squared is certainly much more organized than the straight-down list Google traditionally provides.

Here’s a few MySQL queries you can use on your own Moodle server to get some statistics on the most popular activities, the most active users, and the most active courses. These have been tested with Moodle 1.9. I’m not a MySQL master, so they could probably use some further optimization, but overall they should work well enough:

Find the most popular activities:

SELECT COUNT(l.id) hits, module
FROM mdl_log l
WHERE module != 'login' AND module != 'course' AND module != 'role'
GROUP BY module
ORDER BY hits DESC

Find the most active users over the past 7 days (change the “604800″ to the number of the appropriate number of seconds if you want to adjust this interval):

SELECT COUNT(l.id) hits, l.userid, u.username, u.firstname, u.lastname
FROM mdl_log l INNER JOIN mdl_user u ON l.userid = u.id
WHERE l.time > UNIX_TIMESTAMP(NOW()) - 604800
GROUP BY l.userid
ORDER BY hits DESC

Find the most active courses:

SELECT COUNT(l.id) hits, l.course courseId, c.fullname coursename
FROM mdl_log l INNER JOIN mdl_course c ON l.course = c.id
GROUP BY courseId
ORDER BY hits DESC

(You may need to change the second line to FROM mdl_log l INNER JOIN mdl_course c ON l.course = c.id AND c.id != ’1′ to omit home page hits)

A student, on the other hand, logs in, and explores everything. One of the first things they’ll notice is their Profile page. They’ll edit their profile, upload a photo of themselves, and may even get creative and embed a cool Flash widget they like. Then they’ll pop into the class forum and post a message. They will return to this forum a few times throughout the day to continue talking to their classmates. They will then download the teacher’s course material, study it, and take the teacher’s quiz that’s been set up. They may then return to the forum to see if anyone responded to their messages, and maybe post another message to someone else, before uploading their daily homework assignment.

See a pattern here?  Students are the power users. The technology is familiar to our “digital natives,” and they enjoy using it.  Some of our students have even panicked when the technology wasn’t available. Once our Moodle server went down for a reboot, and was offline only about 2 minutes when I received an IM from a teacher. She said the students were freaking out and asking “When will Moodle be back up?”

So I had a thought the other day:

Teachers can manage classes in Moodle, but why not students? People often learn best when they teach, and it seems like we’re only targeting half our potential audience here. We could turn the students into teachers, and let them teach their classmates. It would be a great way to create effective learners.

A teacher could use this as a classroom activity. They could assign students to “teach” a particular topic they’re studying in class, and the student could create video presentations, quizzes, wikis, and other course material in their own Moodle course. They will become better learners through teaching, and we will be preparing them for college by introducing them to their online classroom space.

Not Just for In-Class

But online student-teaching could extend beyond the classroom as well. Under the sponsorship and mentoring of a teacher, a student could teach about any subject that interests them, whether it be athletics, books, auto repair, video games, woodworking, painting, animation, music, and more. Imagine a whole network of students teaching about a diverse range of topics. Other students could browse the available courses their peers are instructing, enroll, and contribute to a system where student interests and knowledge are shared in a constructive, educational manner. Moodle could become the focal point of a vibrant student learning network.

A rewards system may provide an added incentive to this “Young Teachers” program. Example: for every student that signs up for a course, the student-teacher earns points. If enrollees pass the course by taking an exam, the student-teacher earns even more points. Those who pass a student-made course could earn “attendee points” and receive certificates for passing. At the end of the year, we could give out prizes for those who’ve earned the most points, or hold an awards ceremony to recognize the best student-teachers.

With the right motivation, we would have no problem finding students interested in teaching their own classes.

Is This Really “Educational?”

The very nature of having students teaching courses is educational, because we’d be placing them in managerial roles as they organize their online classrooms. They would set up their course how they want, determine the best method of teaching and presenting the material, and create quizzes to make sure the other students understand what they are teaching. They could even organize activities through their online classroom. For example, a student teaching a class on theatre arts could set up a date to have everyone attend a local play. A student teaching a class on poetry could set up an online chat session with an English professor his family knows. There are numerous possibilities here.

At the same time, some questions need to be asked. Since this may be extracurricular for students, do we need to worry about keeping all student-taught courses within the state core curriculum? Also, it might not really be considered “educational” to let students teach a class on, e.g., video games, and just discuss strategies for Halo 3, when they could be teaching concepts of video game design and providing helpful tutorials and tools for independent game development. Clear goals should be outlined and standards set forth, so the teacher mentors can guide the students toward education-appropriate courses.

Benefits

• Students would become more actively involved in the educational process, both on the receiving and giving end.
• We would be preparing students for college by promoting self-directed learning, and introducing them to the online class environment.
• Studies have shown that online learning opportunities can encourage even the normally reticent students to participate in class.
• The beginnings of a student learning network would be created.
• Students would develop organizational leadership skills.
• Students would earn the recognition of their teachers, parents, and peers.
• Students would find it motivating and empowering to maintain their own online classroom about a subject that interests them.
• Students would have a valuable portfolio of their work.
• Parents could visit their student’s course and follow the progress.

Teacher Mentors

Each school could have one or two teacher mentors for these student-created courses. They would be responsible for the following:

• Hearing and approving student course requests.
• Creating the student course in Moodle.
• Making sure students understand the rules for their course, such as appropriate behavior (no offensive material or language) and resources they can use, breadth requirements for the “passing” exam, etc.
• Being available for questions about appropriate course material and helping students with extracurricular activity planning if necessary.
• Periodically checking up on the students’ courses.

The feedback we received from the teachers we surveyed was generally quite positive. We asked everyone to answer some general questions about the conference, followed by some specific questions about each class. I’ve processed the results we received and came up with some average statistics. All the ratings below are on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest.

Conference Ratings

Just the fact that the average ranking for the conference overall, out of 222 survey-takers, was a high 4.76 is especially pleasing. We had some great keynote speakers: Kevin Eubank, Jim Vanides, and Ken Sardoni. In retrospect, we should have had each keynote speaker ranked separately in the survey, rather than all together. We’ll make sure we do that for next year. The food from Iron Gate Grill wasn’t bad, but nothing to write home about, so I basically agree with the rating there. And the Maintenance Department did a great job getting Weber High ready. Kudos to everyone who helped put everything together.

We offered 19 different classes in all. The following statistics show the most well-received classes:

It’s not surprising to see the class on WeberTube, our new media sharing site, at #1. Shawn Potokar debuted this excellent new system at BrainBlast, and it received a great response. This is what teachers have been waiting for. I’ve mentioned this before, but I believe that if we block something that’s useful for educational purposes, we’re obligated to provide an alternative. Due to inappropriate content we must block YouTube, but WeberTube is our answer to that. And in his session, Shawn even showed the attendees how to pull videos off YouTube at home and upload them to WeberTube (see this post by Justin McFarland for a summary of this method). I’ve enjoyed seeing the videos our teachers have uploaded so far this school year.

Shawn Potokar also taught the Video U class, the #4 rated class, and showed some basic tips with Windows Movie Maker. Honestly, I wasn’t all that familiar with Movie Maker, but now I regret it. Last July I was assigned the task of creating a 30-minute video compilation for my grandmother’s 90th birthday, and I wrestled with various tools, mostly Adobe Premiere, trying to slap a working product together. Movie Maker would have been so much easier, and I wish Shawn could have shown me the ease and benefits of this product sooner.

Jennifer Boyer-Thurgood presented the Document Cameras class, which came in as #2. She was also one of the key organizers of the conference, so if you thought BrainBlast was awesome, you can thank her for it. Document cameras are extremely cool and extremely useful, and it was great to see first-hand how a teacher might use them in the classroom setting. I wish they had them when I was in the public school system. I’m excited to see more and more teachers get them in our district, and hope that they can use them in creative ways.

Bryce Ballif’s clickers class came in #3. I wasn’t really too familiar with the clickers, and this is the best introduction to them I could have hoped for. What a great tool these are for classrooms! Instant responses, statistical feedback…I wish he had more time to go into advanced usages for them, or that more of the attendees could share how the clickers had impacted their teaching.

Moodle Problems

Ryan James introduced WSD Online, our own Moodle system. We launched this at BrainBlast along with WeberTube, but unfortunately it came in second to last. Some teachers commented to me that they were very impressed with WSD Online, and that there was a lot they still could learn there. This itself was the problem and the reason for the low ranking, since it implies how steep the learning curve for Moodle actually is. The steeper the learning curve, the less likely our teachers will use the product.

A few technical problems with our Moodle system reared their ugly heads during the conference, too. First of all, I didn’t anticipate administrators being in the class, though I should have seen it coming! All our Moodle class data is pulled from our AS400, and since only teachers have classes in the system, administrators were left with no classes to see and nothing to do. As a result, I ended up creating a BrainBlast sandbox after the first “Online Classes” session, so administrators could log in, and at least have a class to create content in.

I’m considering a solution for the administrators, possibly creating a one-click install where they can set up their own unique Moodle system, and do whatever they want with it. In effect, this would give administrators even more flexibility over their courses than teachers currently get, and they could create training courses with those both inside and outside the district, if necessary. (I’ll have to consult with upper management about this one, and hash out a few more ideas.) In the meantime, for those administrators looking for a way to implement online classes, you might want to check out WiZiQ or HotChalk.

Second of all, somehow Two Rivers High School didn’t get their classes added to WSD Online when I upgraded to version 1.9 several weeks ago — I had a few teachers track me down to voice their concerns about this. (My apologies to the Two Rivers teachers.)

Third of all, apparently Moodle spammed a bunch of teachers (sorry!). When we set up the BrainBlast 2008 forum in Moodle, we apparently didn’t turn off the “email every comment everyone posts to everyone who has touched Moodle at any point in time” setting. Why that’s turned on by default, I have no idea!

Live Streams

This is the first time we’ve streamed some of the BrainBlast sessions live over the Internet. We even set up a chat room that viewers could visit while the sessions were going on, and though we didn’t take the time to advertise this as well as we could have, since it was mostly experimental, I feel it was very useful. We had a few people come and go, and then some recurring visitors, namely Brent Ludlow from Hooper Elementary, and Mrs. Durff from my Twitter network. I was just streaming off my dinky little webcam, but maybe next year we can install ManyCam or something on the presenters’ desktops and stream better presentations that way. Equipping the presenters with a wireless mic may be a good investment, too.

Some of the sessions have been uploaded to the BrainBlast WeberTube group. I’ll finish uploading the rest I was able to record soon.

Where Can We Improve?

As mentioned earlier, Moodle’s learning curve is too steep for some. Perhaps we should consider having two Moodle classes for next year’s BrainBlast, to cover all possible topics. I personally think William Rice’s Moodle Teaching Techniques would be an excellent resource to pattern any further training we do for Moodle. Another possibility would be to explore a lighter, simpler solution for the teachers who don’t want the vast functionality Moodle offers. More on that in an upcoming post.

Nothing is necessarily set in stone, but the current plan for BrainBlast 2009 is to have only two days of training rather than four, and join together the elementary and secondary teachers. In turn, we will increase the number of courses we offer, and expand the usage of the facilities to accommodate all the attendees at once. Frankly, I’m glad that we’re planning on this (I don’t think I can come up with four days worth of jokes about Vinnie again).

It seems that we’ve kind of stuck ourselves into a trend of providing only introductory classes. After spending time in the classes, and following some conversations with our presenters, I realized that the workshop-style subject material didn’t suit all the attendees. Some in the classes were already fairly proficient in Office 2007, PowerPoint, blogging, clickers, and the other technologies we offer in the district, and had to wait for other less-skilled but still eager-to-learn attendees to “catch up.” There wasn’t much room for our presenters to venture into advanced discussions of their topics.

It’s great that we’re offering training to those with such a wide range of skill sets, but at the same time, we need to find a way to group our teachers together based on their skills in particular technologies. It hardly makes sense to teach seasoned bloggers how to set up a blog, use the Dashboard, and write a simple post, when we could be teaching them about great widgets they can use, how to use RSS feeds, the importance of using a plugin like Slimstat to track visitor statistics, and using the blog as a platform to engage the educational community by leaving comments, using pingbacks, trackbacks, and growing your personal learning network.

So I hope that we can do something different this year. In lieu of “elementary” and “secondary” tracks, we could have two different types of classes: “beginner” and “advanced.” I think this would be a good move, as the teachers who want to explore the tools in more depth could do so. This way, those who are already proficient document camera users, SMART Board users, bloggers, Moodlers, Powerpointers, and so on, could learn more advanced tricks without having to wait for their less-proficient (but still eager to learn!) classmates to catch up.

A couple issues come to mind about this approach, though:

1. How would we be able to estimate the number of classroom sizes? Could we guarantee full classrooms in all our advanced classes?
2. We’d have to very clearly distinguish what an “advanced user” is, so everyone would be on roughly the same page in the class. We don’t want someone who thinks they’re qualified to join the “Advanced Podcasting” class struggling with basic things like recording in Audacity and posting MP3s on their blog. All attendees should be able to jump right into advanced topics without waiting too long for others. Perhaps a simple survey could help registrants determine which track they belong in.

And finally, maybe it’s just just me, but it seems silly that we have teachers going to a technology conference, sitting in a computer lab, and learning about cool web sites, only to write down the web links on paper. Why are we not showing them how to use social bookmarking sites like Delicious or Diigo (especially with the new Diigo accounts for Educators that was just released)? These sites let you store all your bookmarks online, and share them with others in your learning network. They could simply pull up their bookmarks in any class they’re in. Diigo is especially awesome, because it lets you also highlight text on your bookmarked web sites, so you can share specific snippets of text, point to especially relevant passages in long web pages, or even annotate them with your own comments.

I’m already looking forward to BrainBlast 2009. If the trend continues, it will be even more exciting and better than this year’s conference.

Hi – I had something interesting happen on my blog today.  I received an e-mail to moderate.  The post left was from a student in Alabama that had come across my blog while doing some research for her class.  It had me a bit concerned because I thought I had blocked my blog from this?  Should I be concerned?  She gave me a link to her blog and on her blog she had posted a link back to mine.  I am not sure how I feel about that?  What should I do?  Thanks.

Whether this is good or bad really depends on your point of view. Here’s my two cents. Note that what I say here is just my opinion, and doesn’t represent any official district view, but I hope it provides some perspective.

Keep in mind that the blogs are public, not private. They’ve always been accessible to everyone on the web, and there’s nothing you can really “block” your blog from. Maybe you don’t post links to your blog on all sorts of web sites, but you still don’t have full control over how much it’s publicized. You can password-protect your posts if you want to, but I think that would be missing the point of the blog’s purpose: connectedness and communication. Google indexes your blog so anyone can search it, and we list the latest posts and blog rankings on our district site. We actually do this so people CAN be made more aware of your blog. It’s open to everyone, and it’s a fantastic way to communicate with your students and their parents, and let them communicate with you in turn by leaving comments. Sometimes parents may share your blog with their family and friends, and they in turn may share it with others.

But the blogs can do more than connect you with just your own students and parents. They can also break down the walls of the classroom and connect you to an online learning community, as this student from Alabama demonstrated. I don’t know exactly what this student put in her comment, but she apparently found something very useful on your blog, and liked it enough to not just leave a comment, but link to your blog from her own. That’s a compliment to you. This student’s link will drive more visitors to your blog, and your ranking on the “Visitors per Day” stat will go up.

And if you want to take it further, by following the links your commenters leave, you may find yourself drawn to more sites such as other class blogs, Ning networks, Facebook groups, wikis, Twitter, or wherever educators are gathering on the web. In fact, this is what I’ve found most enjoyable with my own blog, that I can connect with a wide range of people. Most of my visitors aren’t even from within the district; they’re teachers, technology specialists, and school administrators from all over the world. I’ve even been able to meet a few of them face-to-face after connecting with them online. My blog can be a catalyst for stimulating wider conversations and growing my own personal learning network of educators.

There are also teachers out there who are engaged in activities like the Flat Classroom Project – they use wikis and learning networks to synchronize two or more classrooms, and let students from all across the world work with each other on projects. I’ve seen Kindergarten class blogs that have a YackPack button, which lets students and teachers from other classes just click and start talking with the classroom. And here’s some elementary students using Skype to video conference with other students several states away, and doing a collaborative writing project with them in Google Docs, while the teachers and administrators are standing by in amazement. It IS very cool, because it shows you’re not confined to the walls of your classroom anymore.

So my opinion is that this student linking to your blog is a GOOD thing, because it’s just one step to opening you to a larger learning community. And if all this leaves you feeling paranoid, don’t let it! Other teachers are going through many of the same experiences you are, regardless of where they come from, and you can connect with them as well. We want you to have fun with your blog. Be creative with it, and share your classroom experiences, fun activities you do with your students, and more. If other teachers and students outside your class are visiting your blog, that’s just an added bonus.

I also recommend you activate the WP-Slimstat plugin (go to your blog Dashboard, click “Plugins” and then “Activate” next to WP-Slimstat). This will start to gather more detailed statistics on exactly how many people are visiting your blog, what search strings are being used to find your blog, your most popular posts and pages, and so on. If you want some assistance accessing and analyzing all these statistics, let me know.

I hope this helps add a little insight on the wide scope of the blogs. There’s a giant online world out there of online networking and collaboration. Our students are using it already. Perhaps it’s time we start using it, too.

Thanks for the question.

A magnitude 6.1 earthquake this morning off the coast of Vancouver Island was not felt on land, despite being the biggest yet in a swarm of quakes that have hit the region this week. This latest earthquake was reported at 5:37 this morning, centred 152 kilometres west-southwest of Port Hardy and about 10-kilometres below the ocean floor. Calls to businesses in the town so far show no one felt it, and there was no damage and no tsunami. There have been 18 quakes since Tuesday (see map below), all around the Juan de Fuca Ridge. They’ve ranged between magnitude four to five, until today’s quake. (Link)

Maybe this just shows what a geek I am, but after reading this, my first thought right after “Glad no one was hurt!” was “Let’s track this on Google Earth!” If you go to this page on the U.S. Geological Survey’s web site, you can download a KML which will display earthquake data, updated every 5 minutes. A KML is just some geographic data that Google Earth can use, and if you already have Google Earth installed, just downloading it will open it automatically. Once it opens, you will see a series of colored dots, each of which indicate earthquake activity. Corresponding times and magnitudes are available when you move the cursor over the dots.

As with all Weber School District technologies, please use the blogs responsibly and keep their educational purpose in mind. We’re not concerned if you post some personal pictures of yourself and maybe even your family, so the students and parents can get to know you better. However, don’t use them to post religious content, or sell products for a business, and make sure you keep your language clean. Remember, elementary students have access to and may be reading your blog! If you wish to post class pictures or videos of students on your blog, PLEASE get parental waivers first and work with your school administration on proper procedures to follow through with this. Make sure you don’t at any time post both a student’s photo and name together. If you post a student’s photo, do not include a name. If you post a student’s name, do not include a photo. One or the other, not both.

On to the cool new features. Blog statistics are available for anyone to see! Our employees can see how their blogs rank compared to others. I hope this encourages more active blogging, and well-thought-out content on the posts. I wish to see the blogs transition from being “a place to upload my assignments” to “a place to have conversations with parents, staff, and students.” All statistics are updated daily. Here’s how they work:

Visitors per Day

This is the average number of daily visitors each blog receives, from data collected over the past 30 days. This is kind of a tricky thing to track, and due to the nature of standard web logging techniques, will only be about 98% accurate at best. This tracks unique IP addresses for a given day. So if you have a user who visits your blog from the same computer multiple times during the day, it will only be counted once. If another user hops on to that same computer and visits your blog that day, it will not be counted. If a single user uses two different computers to visit your blog during the day, it will be counted twice. This particular statistic does not omit bots that may come across your site, so all your visitors may not be human (usually just 2 or 3 of your daily visitors will be bots).

Posts per Month

This is the average number of posts each user makes a month, from data collected over the past 90 days. Keep in mind that all posts you make appear on the Latest Blog Posts page, so write relevant content that users will want to read.

Inside Comments

One of the most powerful features of a blog is the ability to leave comments on it. A great way to respond to feedback and encourage discussion is by responding to the people who leave comments on your own blog, and this statistic tracks that. It counts the total number of comments you’ve left on your own blog. The way this is tracked is by the email address which is entered when you leave a comment. Make sure you use your district email, so the blog statistics can recognize you. Also, this doesn’t count unapproved comments. Always make sure you check and approve appropriate comments that are left on your blog, if you are moderating them.

Outside Comments

These are the total number of comments that employees have left on others’ blogs inside the district. Blog-centered conversations would not be possible if it weren’t for people leaving comments on others’ blogs. For now, this statistic only counts employees (not yet students or parents); the reason being that we’re trying to encourage employees across the district to network with each other a little more, and the blogs are a good starting point for this. Again, make sure you use your district email when commenting, so the blog statistics can recognize you. This statistic also doesn’t count unapproved comments.

New Blog Search

Lastly, the Blog Search feature now does more than just return matching names. You can enter any keywords and it will scan the blog posts themselves and return a list of the most relevant results.

Students and parents at Windsor High School are outraged after a Wyoming police officer doing a presentation on Internet safety scrutinized individual students’ MySpace pages. . . . The officer, John F. Gay III of the Cheyenne Police Department, picked out six or seven Windsor High School students’ MySpace pages and began to criticize photos, comments and other content until one student left the room crying.

The students say he made very inappropriate remarks, claimed he had sent the student’s pictures to an inmate in prison, and launched into a discussion about the crimes that result from stalkers finding photos on Myspace. The officer disputes most of the allegations made by the students, and the principal and other faculty members back up the officer, so there is still some question over what actually happened. Regardless, the officer admits to some allegations, and in my opinion, these admitted statements should have been left out.

Well-intentioned, but poorly executed. The student he humiliated DID immediately delete her Myspace profile, but how could this have been presented better, without such blatant scare tactics? Realistically, this has the potential to be a good way to show kids just how public their open Myspace profile is, but the officer was just winging it. He needed to use better judgment, and the support of more parties. We can probably learn a few things from this officer’s mistakes. A few ideas come to mind:

1. This should have only been done in front of a small group of students, such as a single classroom; not the entire student body in the auditorium.
2. He could have worked with the parents, and received their permission first.
3. He could have selectively chosen the profiles beforehand, and found some that didn’t have compromising content. Just having an authority figure pull up the public information, even inoffensive information, and showing it in front of everyone, may have driven the point home well enough.
4. In the small classroom setting, it would be appropriate to select several student profiles, and not single any one out. Incidentally, he showed about six or seven, but that seems meaningless when compared with a student body of hundreds.
5. He shouldn’t have dwelled too long on any profile, extracting information like phone numbers and other personal data. If the students see someone accessing their profile, they’ll immediately start thinking about what sort of content is on there. You can’t force a student to use the web responsibly, but you can show them reasons they should. Just watching an adult looking at their profile could be good incentive.
6. An officer, someone the children have never met, was not the best choice. How much better would it have been if the person was a teacher, someone the students respect?
7. The presenter could have ended on a humorous note by showing his own Myspace profile, with a strategically planted “humiliating” photo from his younger days.

What do you think? Does this sort of presentation, well thought-out, have potential to explain Internet safety, or is this just a case of “scare tactics” that should be avoided altogether?

The conference was actually a good kick in the pants for me, since I wasn’t as aware of the Web 2.0 world as I should have been, and what a powerful tool it was becoming. It exposed me to the importance of collaborative environments, the current trends with the web, and really shifted my mind toward embracing Web 2.0 technologies. I thought the term “Web 2.0″ was kind of stupid (actually, I still do) but I can acknowledge that it represents an important shift in how we perceive interaction and collaboration. I wouldn’t attend the conference again, because I pretty much got what I needed out of it, and from the agenda it looks like the sessions haven’t changed much, but I’m grateful for the opportunity I had.

I don’t even agree with everything I wrote in the following document anymore. My knowledge has certainly grown since then. It looks like I didn’t understand OpenSocial, and I’m not entirely sure where I was going with the document storage idea. I also didn’t have a decent approach to social/learning networks — this is still an issue which is going to be difficult to tackle in our district. We had just launched our blogging system using WordPress MU, and were gearing up for deployments of our Moodle system and WeberTube. I’m anxious to see how widely these two services are used now that we’ve launched them.

I do, however, still think that our portal should take a cue from customizable widget-based sites like iGoogle, Netvibes, or Pageflakes. We are creating a new MyWeber portal from the ground up, though we’ve altered our course a little and are now going with a non-Java route. One thing I don’t like about many SISs is that you can’t even see a demo of it unless you have an account set up. How is this any sort of incentive to sign up for the system, if you can’t see an idea of what it’s about? This is why I would like to have both a public face and a private face to the next MyWeber. The public face anyone could visit and create a temporary customizable view and watch WeberTube videos, read district and school news from an RSS widget, look up a specific teacher’s public course assignments, look up Google Maps-based boundary maps for their school, and anything not containing sensitive information. The private face would let appropriate users see student grades, lunch account balances, transcripts — basic stuff for an SIS — but also let them view and write blog posts or leave comments on posts, make or take Moodle quizzes, upload videos, create podcasts, make a calendar, cast votes in a class poll, or anything else we make available.

THE FOLLOWING IDEAS WERE DATED DECEMBER 11, 2007

The [WebBuilder 2.0] conference was immensely useful. There was a tremendous amount of information geared toward developers, designers, and supervisors seeking to bring their web presence into the Web 2.0 world. I wish they hadn’t scheduled so many simultaneous seminars, as I would have liked to attend more of them, but I have uploaded all the conference slides to http://www.justinreeve.com/webbuilder/agenda.html.

Following is a selective summary of my notes, with some ideas on how to best direct our future portal development.

Web 2.0 is a model for a collaborative, user-friendly, socially networked web. Ajax has largely made this possible. Any evolution that takes place in web-based applications in the coming years will be derived from the Ajax framework, services-oriented architecture, and Web 2.0 philosophy. In other words, what has been dubbed “Web 2.0” is not just a fad. It will continue to shape what the future of the web will look like.

Web users now want to be able to do more than just find information. They want to participate and help shape the web. They’ve come to expect that web sites should provide collaborative and social networking opportunities, simple interfaces which mimic desktop applications, and mashups to enhance their experience.

DASHBOARD

I’m convinced the proper setup for the next major version of MyWeber will be the customizable dashboard view, which integrates all our applications into one place. The integration would include simplified Java-based translations of the PHP applications we have in place. While the same PHP backends for WordPress, Moodle, etc. would remain, the portal will provide a simple framework to accomplish basic tasks, such as:

• Viewing assignments for a class.
• Adding a new blog entry.
• Uploading a video to WeberTube.
• Taking a Moodle quiz.

In addition, widgets would be available for all the other functions we have and then some, e.g. user searching, progress reporting, podcasting, video streaming, taking surveys, etc.

MASHUPS

We’re already adopting most of the technologies that are needed to stay up to date on the current trends, and to enable our users to have the kind of interactive experience they expect. We need to decide what goals we want to accomplish, and what applications will help us reach them. Being able to integrate the different applications together is key.

Mashups are web applications that help integrate different sites together, combining data from other sources into a single, integrated tool. For example:

• A single “Videos” widget in the portal could grab relevant videos uploaded to Moodle, WordPress, WeberTube, YouTube, TeacherTube, and even the Video Portal if we want, and display them all seamlessly in MyWeber, so the user never has to question where they come from.
• When a user hovers over the name of a school or event in the portal, a Google Map could instantly pop up, and the map could give them the location. We could even let them enter their street address, and keep a list of addresses on file for the user, so they can receive directions to the school/event from wherever they are.
• A teacher could have some photos on Flickr they want to share with their students in Moodle as part of a lesson plan. Rather than force them to manually download each photo, a Flickr mashup could connect to their account, let them select a group of photos, and automatically transfer them to Moodle, their blog, a whiteboard (mentioned below), or any other web-based service.

AJAX LIBRARY

Ideally, the user should never have to reload the page, except when they first log in. This can be accomplished through a combination of Ajax and modal windows. The recommended way to develop an Ajax application is to use an existing Ajax library, since otherwise there’s a host of issues to worry about with getting Ajax to function properly. I’m planning on using ICEfaces or Oracle’s ADF Faces since they provide all the basic functionality that I think we’ll need to accomplish this, plus they shift the load more to the server than the clients. LightWindow may be useful for popups such as progress reports, user details, transcripts, and so on, although ADF Faces has modal window support already built-in.

SOCIAL NETWORKS

There is one major feature we’re missing, and that’s social networking. Users have to come to expect a social networking application in the new generation of web applications. When they can shape the web sites, they have a more enjoyable experience. This means they will keep returning, and recommend the site to others. A social network can be anything from seeing a simple list of other people who are logged in, to having full-fledged forums where you can directly interact and, more importantly, collaborate with others on various projects. It also includes being able to participate in surveys, leave comments on songs or videos another user has uploaded, and anything which contributes to a shared user experience.

I don’t know if there’s an easy solution for us. We’ve addressed the issue of giving students, parents, and teachers access to a social network in varying forms before, and security concerns always seem to come up. Perhaps when employees use the forums, they could opt to be a volunteer moderator, or maybe we could put each student on a probation period once they sign up (e.g., all their posts are moderated for one month and at least 20 posts) while we make sure they aren’t using the system inappropriately. We could also require parental consent before a student can use any communication system. In other words, the parent would have to first activate an account, and then be given access to logs of their students’ correspondence.

We could have forums for users to interact with other users. Different types of groups could be set up, e.g. a teacher-students group, an administrator-administrator group, a teacher-tech group, a tech-parents group, and so on. We could convert a forum backend to a real-time RSS-based chat-style display, for simplified viewing in the portal.

Another route would be a selective user-based system. Let users talk to a select group of other users in the simplest form possible. Since this format is basically an instant messenger with a buddy list, we could set up a Jabber server for all the portal users, including parents, and develop a web-based interface. Employees could talk to their co-workers, teachers could host online parent-teacher conferences, department heads could hold online Q&A sessions, and students could talk to their friends. And none of the data need be viewable to those who aren’t allowed to see it, all of it would be logged, and anyone could set up their own unique group of portal users to communicate with.

Users could also use their cell phones to send text messages to the portal in this way, to contribute to a group discussion. We might want to also consider integrating other social networks into our interface, such as Yahoo! for Teachers using Google’s OpenSocial.

Whatever the answer may be, and if it’s not overly idealistic, creating a social network for all our users will be one of the best assets of the district.

COLLABORATION

It would be invaluable to give our staff and students access to a portal-based teaming and conferencing system, particularly something with a collaborative whiteboard and a document sharing system (e.g. Hiveboard). A couple provisions are in order:

1. Others would need to be able to see exactly who’s editing the whiteboard, and
2. A moderator (such as a teacher) would need to be able to prohibit access to specified users. All correspondence and collaboration should be savable and exportable to some simple form, too.

There may even be a way to tie in the online whiteboard with Smartboards, so combined with our audio streaming server, students at home can follow the lesson along with the in-class students.

BLOGS

Integrating a social network into a site is one of the best ways to get people to use the site, and our blogs are a good step toward this. The next step is to provide a blog aggregator. The portal should include a widget which aggregates all the blog RSS feeds relevant to the user by default, such as all blog feeds for a student’s teachers, or the technology blog for employees, and lets the user add any other blogs to the aggregator they want.

Our blogs should also have some easy statistical information associated with them, a simplistic version of MeasureMap, if you will. This way users can see right off how popular they are, and with any luck employees will be encouraged to use them more frequently.

Since users don’t always want to just go hunting through the content, a great way to bring all these together is to let users search through the blogs (Technorati is a good example of a blog search tool), as well as their Moodle courses, events, and so on.

CALENDAR

Every school regularly puts their events into the Groupwise calendar, and many departments do as well. There’s no reason not to include a calendar on the portal, and to provide each user a customized view of events relevant to them. A student should be able to see when the next holiday is, when the next football game is, what’s happening at the next assembly, and employees should be able to see when department meetings are being held, and so on. The calendar could also be merged with users’ birthdays for optional display, or perhaps each user could set up a list of friends and share information across calendars. What a user is able to see on the calendar should be customizable, and they should be able to import any public events they want into Groupwise, or another iCal-based scheduling system.

INTEGRATED DOCUMENT STORAGE

There should be a central filesystem for storing all staff (and possibly student) files. We have this already with the wwwstaff volume we’ve set up for the portal, but right now uploaded content for WordPress, Moodle, etc. stays on their own fileservers. The solution may be as simple as creating soft-links and mounts from our other web sites to wwwstaff, but more likely would involve some crafty filesystem manipulation and some way of identifying the type of information. An even simpler solution may be to have a process that goes out and identifies all the pertinent files on our web servers, then stores necessary linking data in XML or a database.

The benefit of doing this would be that ALL our documents would be indexable and searchable.

MOBILE DEVICES

Creating a mobile version of the portal is becoming increasingly necessary. While the portal is currently viewable on PocketPCs, it is not at the point I’d like it to be just yet, and it can be much, much better. The rate of growth of mobile web users is outpacing that of standard web users. More 16 year-olds now want an iPhone rather than a car. The next generation of phones will take their cue from the iPhone (Google Android has already started down this path) and future phones will provide full browser and full Ajax capability. I don’t think it’s necessary to focus on the iPhone just yet, but this focus should be reevaluated in a year.

We should concentrate on the older smart phones and PDAs and concurrently develop a version of the portal best suited to them. With some good development practices in place, it will be easy to make a mobile version of MyWeber v8 alongside the regular portal. We can include features like leaving text messages to a web service on the portal (such as a teacher’s blog, or on WeberTube, through an SMS message.

There are many possibilities involved in “mobilizing” the portal. A few examples follow:

• Many of our teachers give a simple assignment to “Leave a comment on my blog.” Rather than require students to log into a computer, they could simply send a text message to the teacher’s blog, and the comment would be posted. Enabling text message input could be extended to other services, too, such as a portal-based conferencing utility or social network.
• Students and employees could use the teaming and conferencing system directly from their phone or PDA.
• Teachers could send a reminder to students that a homework assignment is due. A student could set up their phone to receive notices like this.
• WordPress has a plugin that lets you support multiple template types, which would let any of our employees enable their blogs for mobile devices.

Introductory Session

Social Networking Session

A Survey of Great Google Tools Session

Web 2.0 Smackdown!

VoiceThread, Slideshare, Jing & Others

WSD Online, which is based on Moodle, will be a huge hit because it’s so convenient for teachers to create an online quiz to have their students take tests, or create a forum to facilitate a group discussion, or provide a space to let students upload their homework assignments. WSD Online can very well be the solution for paperless classrooms. What teacher wouldn’t love that? However, I do think its acceptance and gradual usage will be a little slow due to its learning curve.

This year we also launched WeberTube, our media sharing portal for the employees. I foresee it becoming an extremely valuable service to our teachers, as media can be easily uploaded and then streamed right to the classroom. WeberTube kind of happened by accident, when I stumbled upon the open source PHPmotion media sharing script. I instantly saw the possibilities for such a service in the district, and though I ended up choosing osTube as the script for WeberTube, its presence in the district makes sense. My philosophy is that when we block access to a web site that is useful for educational purposes, however good our intentions are, we have an obligation to provide an alternative. Since we are blocking YouTube, which has plenty of “good” stuff mixed in with the “bad,” we should provide something to fill that void. WeberTube is our answer. In some ways it’s actually better than YouTube, since it allows audio, pictures, and documents in addition to video. Users can rate and leave comments on media, and groups can be created to better organize the content. The interface needs some cleaning up before it can become as smooth an experience as it should be, and there’s constant ongoing development with it, but overall it’s an excellent resource.

This evening I was listening to episode 13 of the Shifting Our Schools podcast. A topic about change vs. transition came up which I thought was especially good. Change is easy. For instance, we can introduce blogs into our district with very little effort. All we have to do is allocate some server space, bandwidth, and install WordPress MU with an LDAP plugin. Voila! We’ve created change, and now all teachers have blogs. The harder part is transition. How do you get everyone to actually use the blogs? How do you address the people who resist the change? How do you make sure they know how to use the new services? People need to be allowed some time to learn the new technology, adapt to the changes, and even grieve the loss of their old methods. This is the transitioning period.

I believe we are doing the right things to help our users transition. BrainBlast has been a key player. Teachers can come and learn about cool new technologies we’re offering and be given a push to making the transition. Yet you can’t push a teacher through that door — they have to walk through themselves. Cliche but true. This is why it’s important to identify the key technical teachers, the ones who are willing to shift to new methods, new ideas, and embrace the changes we are making in our instructional technology. They can be the ones who help us guide the other teachers through the transition.

E-volve, which we introduced this year, will help the transition as well. Administrators can sign up their staff and faculty for specialized training sessions, headed by an elite team of school techs: Justin McFarland, Casey Dalpias, Jeff Pfister, and Trent Bills. Each tech will organize their schedule and train small groups of employees on the technology available to them.

So what’s the next big change for Weber School District? What will be the next “big thing” for 2009? There are a couple things I would like to see. One is increased podcasting. Another is social networks.

I am hoping to see more and more podcasting projects as we go on. Jennifer Boyer-Thurgood, for example, has been an advocate of podcasting for quite awhile, and uses them with her third grade class. She has found they increase reading and fluency in students, and foster self-direction and self-reflection. Moreover, class podcasting is a fun project, with generally positive parent support.

I’d like to see more podcasting projects that involve “roundtable discussions,” where two or more employees or students talk about a topic. I’d like to see more live streamed podcasts, where the podcasters set up a schedule of when they’ll do the podcast, and use ooVoo or Skype to converse. Then EdCast could stream the podcast to a Shoutcast or Icecast server and relay it over the web, while simultaneously archiving it for later playback. Imagine how amazing it would be if groups of school administrators got together and held monthly podcasts to talk about the directions they wanted to take their schools, or if department heads podcasted about their goals for the year, or even if board meetings were all live-streamed and podcasted.

WeberTube may very well become the center for podcast activity. We could add the ability to organize audio into podcasts, and add subscription services and RSS feeds. I would also like to see Weber School District generating enough content to warrant a presence on the new iTunes K-12, which just launched in July.

As for social networking, this is something we typically block in our school districts (and as with media sharing, when we block something useful I believe we have an obligation to provide an alternative). Often, at best social networks just encourage aimless online meandering among students, idly chitchatting with their online peers when they should be working. At worst students can get mixed up with wholly inappropriate content on social networks.

According to the 2008 Horizon Report, the adoption of social networks in education is imminent. It’s not something we can sweep under the rug anymore. But we need to stray from our preconceptions of social networks for a minute, and figure out what our goals are. How can we create better learners with a social network?

Actually, I don’t even like the term “social network” because it doesn’t convey what we’re trying to accomplish. “Social” implies little or no direction, as if we’re just using it to chat with our friends or upload personal photos. This is why I prefer the term learning network. A learning network has clear goals in mind: engaging the students in a way that’s familiar to them and creating learning opportunities for them around every corner.

Here’s an example of how a learning network could be useful. In social studies, a teacher wants to teach her 6th grade class about Japanese culture. Instead of simply making the students read from a dusty old textbook or showing a boring video from the 1970s, she contacts a teacher from Japan, and sets up a learning network for the classes. Armed with parental waivers , these two classrooms then engage each other, and collaborate on a joint project together. They are given the assignment to work in groups of two — one American student and one Japanese student — and take photos of simple objects from their respective hometowns, such as: mailbox, car, mall, clothing, girl, boy, school, bus, house, restaurant, etc., then create an Animoto video showcasing the objects. The videos are then embedded on a forum, and the learning network becomes the central point of activity for this collaborative project. The project could then be further extended to where the two students on opposite sides of the ocean interview each other and create a media-rich PowerPoint presentation about their partner, which they then present to their class.

How much more exciting is this learning opportunity for a young student than learning the traditional textbook-in-hand way? The students shift from the simple role of student to collaborator, explorer, and teacher. What other projects can you think of that could benefit from a learning network?

Many teachers don’t realize the benefits that can come from student blogging. These teachers may even have blogs themselves, use them in creative ways, such as communicating with other staff members and parents, delivering interactive content for students, and so on. So why wouldn’t we want to extend these same benefits to students?

Here are a few reasons why your students should blog:

1. Paperless Classrooms!

If for no other reason, set up blogs for your students to get rid of some of your overflowing file folders and save a few trees. It seems rather silly to make students go home, type up an assignment in a word processor, then print out that report and hand it in. The report is already in digital form, so why are we moving a step backward and making them print this out? Post that assignment on a blog! Then rather than shuffling through papers later, you can just view their assignment on their web site. With RSS readers, it becomes a fairly simple process to aggregate all the student’s blogs and instantly receive the latest student posts without having to go hunt for them.-

2. Students Enjoy Having Their Own Space

77% of students age 16 to 18 have a profile on a social networking site, such as Myspace, Facebook, Bebo, or Xanga. One reason they are popular is because students have the ability to create their own space on the web, and customize it how they want. They can upload their own photos and videos to share with others, communicate with others, and post updates about their own lives.

3. Interacting with the World

You could actually just have your students email their assignments to you, and achieve a paperless classroom this way. But then they’d be missing out on an important part of blogging: the global community.

Imagine you are the recipient of an award, but there are only two people there to see you win it: you and the award-giver. How much more exhilarating would it be to have a large audience watching and cheering you on? So why is our system:

1. Teacher gives assignment.
2. Student goes home, completes assignment.
3. Student hands assignment to teacher.
4. Teacher grades assignment.
5. Teacher gives assignment back to student.

How many people have seen the student’s assignment? Exactly two, the teacher and student. How rewarding is it for a student to know that the only person who will ever see the project they worked so hard on is their teacher?

Now consider the possible wider level of interaction using a student blog:

• Teacher gives assignment on the Civil War.
• Student posts assignment on the blog.
• Classmates leave comments on the assignment, ask questions, offer insights, and link to their assignments for cross-commenting.
• Parents see and proudly enjoy the work their kids have done.
• Students from 500 miles away find the assignment, post encouraging remarks, and share a similar project they did in class.
• Teacher leaves comments on the assignment.
• Teachers from other schools across the country find the assignment, leave insightful comments, and perhaps a helpful video that complements the assignment.
• Friends of the student find the assignment, and post their own remarks.
• Civil War history buffs find the assignment, share links to supplemental material, and mention an upcoming Civil War exhibit that will be showcased near the student’s hometown.
• A museum curator finds the assignments, and posts a link to the class blog on her own web site, driving more visitors to the student’s blog.

Count the number of readers the student’s assignment has passed on to now, noting the plurals. This one student now may have an audience of hundreds. The student’s blog has stimulated an entire topical discussion. They have started a conversation with an online community, and a larger audience. Better rewards.

Students LOVE getting feedback from their peers. A huge chunk of their lives revolves around this social interaction, and blogs can encourage this. When you encourage students to blog, you are giving them a voice, and encouraging them to share that voice with the world. It’s a great way to motivate them to finish their homework! So break down the walls of the classroom and connect them to like-minded individuals around the world.

Links

• Blogging Safety for Students
• EdTech: Blog Rules
• A Vision for Classroom Blogging
• Some good guidelines for responsible student blogging
• Example consent form for parents about student blogging
• Blogging permission slips
• Another sample list of rules for student blogs

I was able to follow the online activity when the other Twitterers were talking about the Google Teacher Academy and TIE 2008, but the community excitement reached a peak when NECC was approaching. What a great opportunity this proved to be! Never before has there been the means to such an extensive and easily-accessible network that created numerous learning opportunities. Amid the swarm of tweeting, liveblogs, and chat sessions, I enjoyed conversations with other educators, whether they were present at NECC or not. NECC itself was the catalyst for the flow of online discussions in liveblogs and backchannels while presentations were being streamed, and my PLN more than doubled during the conference. I was introduced to many interesting, insightful, and innovative teachers. I’m a newcomer to the online educational community, and have only been actively using Twitter a few months, but at no time did I feel out of place. I connected with people who shared similar goals.

On the downside, I wasn’t able to participate in the other group meetings at NECC. I couldn’t attend EduBloggerCon, or sit in the Bloggers’ Cafe and enjoy thoughtful conversations. Honestly, I probably would have been too starstruck and googoo-eyed from meeting, in a single place, all the bloggers and educational professionals from the web that I’ve come to respect — everyone would have wondered, just who WAS that weird guy drooling over himself in the corner? But it would have been nice to be at the Twitter/EduBlogger dinner, sharing stories and making friends.

I missed out on plenty of the people I could have met. I missed the synergy that comes from face-to-face social networking. The face-to-face aspect is as much a part of the professional connecting as anything. And I missed meeting those who might not have blogs, don’t use Twitter, and don’t connect online. This alone would have made NECC worthwhile. At the same time, I hope that after this conference these same people I missed will be inspired to use these technologies more, and with any luck I’ll see them online soon enough.

I feel my takeaways were significant. The backchannels were a great asset. They were swarming with links, and links are inherently easier to share online than in a face-to-face presentation. I can simply click the link as its presented by a liveblogger or tweeter. If I were sitting in the classroom, I’d have to manually type in the link to view it on my laptop, assuming the laptop’s battery hadn’t died for the day.

What improvements could be made? One problem I see is that the educators who would benefit from an online conference experience are the very ones who may be clueless about how to participate in it. I’m not really prepared to explain to teachers that to virtually attend a conference they should follow this wiki or that wiki, use Summize to find the #necc or #necc2008 hash tags, follow these Twitter users, go to this Ustream or Mogulus feed, follow such-and-such liveblog, and so on. It’s exhausting! I deduced that the NECC Live wikispace was kind of the central hub for all online NECC information, but often I wouldn’t see live streams mentioned until they had already begun and were several minutes into the presentation. Although my Twitter network exploded during the conference, I sometimes simply missed tweets to the live streams. I usually retweeted stream links in case others were having the same problem.

Ideally (and perhaps unrealistically), here’s what I would like to see in the future.

• I should be able to give educators a single web site, be it a wiki or whatever, at least one week in advance, listing the URL to  every:
  • live stream
  • live chat
  • archived stream and chat
• The site should also contain links to users who will be liveblogging about the conference. Granted, many livebloggers may not plan on doing a liveblog ahead of time, but when they do the site should automatically update with this information, preferably without any extra effort on the part of the liveblogger.
• The site should be organized in an orderly fashion, so users aren’t hunting through links and don’t have to guess what to click on next.

I have yet to figure out how all this would be accomplished. 

If you do not download the browser plugin for either Internet Explorer or Firefox, you will be treated to a slideshow format of your media. It’s pretty, to say the least. But download the plugin and you get an immersive 3d viewing experience.

Use PicLens on your interactive whiteboard when you want to show a video or photo to your students, and watch their eyes and ears perk right up.

[flv]http://www.webertube.com/media/video/188.flv[/flv]

From The Scout Report

Yesterday Business Week ran an article about how Twitter has impacted how people communicate. Twitter is a “microblogger.” Microblogs are short text updates; similar to blogs, but shorter and without the “frills.” There are other microblogging services such as Jaiku and Pownce, but Twitter is by far the most popular.

The power of Twitter is that you can effectively construct your own, unique social network of people whose Twitter messages (called “tweets”) you follow. Another strength is that messages can be posted from anywhere, including mobile devices using SMS. When someone in your network posts a message, your RSS reader, or instant messenger, or cell phone, or whatever you may be using to receive tweets is updated. You could use this to receive helpful real-time tips from other teachers, hear what’s currently happening at the latest teachers’ conference, receive instant alerts to your cell phone, and so on. One student even used it to get himself out of jail.

There are some pretty cool applications for Twitter. TwitterVision and TwitterMap use Google Maps to display tweets while TwittEarth displays tweets on a 3d globe. TwitterTroll and TweetScan are search engines that let you find other Twitterers who share your interests, or search through all the latest tweets. TwitterMail and MessageDance integrate Twitter with your email account, so you can receive and send messages directly from your email box. There are many, many other applications as well.

In all honesty, Twitter really isn’t an application for everyone. Not everyone needs the real-time feel of knowing what’s happening in everyone else’s lives, and there are other ways to connect with other people online. Nevertheless, it can be a useful tool in the classroom. There is even a school-based Twitter-like network designed for students, called Youth Twitter. How do you think you could use Twitter in a lesson or homework assignment?

Robert Scoble, PodTech.net‘s Vice President of Media Development, was watching his Twitter account when the May 12, 2008 earthquake began in the Sichuan Province of China. Some in the area were Twittering about the earthquake while it was happening. Over the next few hours, Twitter was flooded with reports, pictures, and videos from people at the ground level.

TwitterLocal is a useful tool that monitors messages coming from a geographic region. If we want to learn what people are currently saying in Sichuan, we visit the site, type in “Sichuan,” and come up with a list of the latest tweets. Most of them are in Chinese, but a visit to Google Translate fixes that.

After selecting “Chinese to English” and entering the TwitterLocal URL after we found the Sichuan tweets, we have this:

This is a powerful tool for students to feel the riveting effects of international incidents, to find out how they are affecting real people, in their own words, through their own photos and videos, and to be even closer to the scene than watching what the news shows.

I’ve been working on a live streaming server for all our teachers. I’ve had this Icecast server sitting here for about two years now, not really doing anything. I’ve been using it occasionally to give live piano performances to a virtual audience, but I’ve been waiting for the time when we could install webcams or something in every classroom. And now the “something” is finally happening. We’re [gradually] equipping every classroom in our district with document cameras. Document cameras by themselves are a great tool, easily making the old light-based projectors obsolete.

Yet it’s kind of a waste of a digital video device to keep it always pointing down at the paper or textbook or biology specimen you’re showing your class. Why not point that lens upward at the teacher or the whiteboard, and stream it so anyone can watch on the web? Or why not video record the students giving their presentations so their parents can watch from home? (Get them to sign a waiver first.) Not to mention this technology would be invaluable for students sick in bed.

Document cameras can function as webcams. As long as their video connects to the computer, they can be captured and sent to Icecast. Icecast uses Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis for the streaming video and audio. I’ve messed around with a few programs that could stream to these formats. I found a program called Visonair Ogg Streamer which probably has the simplest interface, but I couldn’t get it to establish a connection. Plus, the creator hasn’t updated it in about 2 years. I tried EzStream as well, but it’s command-line only, and I only managed to stream an existing OGG file, not a webcam. Finally I settled on VLC, which does the job nicely. The only problem is it crashes a little more frequently than I would like with my webcam and the DirectShow filters, but I’m wondering if that’s a configuration and/or compilation issue I can resolve. It also requires a complicated MRL that has to be entered to properly stream, and it’s going to be a little confusing for the staff. Training will help with that, but it would be nice to have something easier.

Next, to give all the Icecast streams a central hub for users to browse and view, I’ve been integrating Icecast with our media sharing site. We haven’t officially announced the site yet, other than a cursory mentioning in the BrainBlast class lineup, but it uses osTube, an open source script that’s similar to YouTube. The nice thing is that in addition to video, osTube includes support for pictures, audio, and documents. I’ve been able to add LDAP logins to it, so it ties in directly with our LDAP tree. Once I have Icecast fully integrated, I’ll finish an “Import” utility I’ve been working on, which lets users automatically import videos from other sites (like TeacherTube) without having to download the files themselves.

Icecast provides an XML which shows who is currently streaming through the server. This made it easy to create a “Live Streams” page for osTube which automatically displays the currently active streams. After clicking a stream link, osTube goes to the details page where the actual stream plays.

There aren’t many options for web-based Theora players. In fact, the only one I could find is a Java applet called Cortado. I think it will suffice. I haven’t been able to find any Flash Theora players. I ran into some problems with using the Cortado JAR — I kept getting “Access denied” errors — until I realized with a smack of the forehead that the unsigned JAR had to reside on the same server as Icecast. There’s also a PHP wrapper for Cortado called iTheora. The advantage is that it adds “Play,” “Pause,” and “Download” buttons around the player, and supposedly makes it easier to use Cortado. I’m not sure if I’m going to use iTheora or not.

That’s where I am right now. I love that all this technology, which would normally cost THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS of dollar to implement using commercial solutions, can all be done fairly simply with free open source software. Open source options should always be evaluated first, if possible.

If you’ve never heard of thin clients, maybe this analogy will help. Let’s say you have 5 computers in your house. One day, you decide to yank out all the hardware from each computer. Disk drives, RAM, and processors go flying. Then you stuff all the collected hardware into a single empty computer, to make one really powerful computer. Lastly, you connect each of your 5 monitors, keyboards, and mice to this really powerful computer with very long cords.

Now you can still work from each computer in your house, type on the keyboard, use the mouse, open your word processor, play your favorite games, and so on, but you’re no longer using each computer’s internal hardware. Each one is connected to this new powerful computer you made. And each computer still runs just as fast as it used to, even faster if not all 5 are being used at the same time.

Now imagine we have an EXTREMELY powerful computer capable of handling 100 of these bare-bones computers in a school. And that we connect through a network instead of a bunch of long cords lying around. That’s how thin clients work. They’re “thin” because they have very little hardware of their own, and “clients” because they depend on a server to run their operating system and applications.

Thin clients work EXCEPTIONALLY well in a school setting, and can be a lifesaver in schools with strapped budgets. Any old computer, even Pentium 2s and Pentium 3s, can be transformed into a powerful workstation, because they don’t have to run a single application themselves. What’s also cool is that since all the applications are physically located on only system, we pay for ONE license of Windows, or Photoshop, or whatever software we want to use, rather than 100!

It just makes sense for schools to consider thin clients, regardless of their budgets. Thin clients have actually been around since the 1990s (and even earlier in concept), but only within the past several years have they become practical for schools and school districts, and the trend has been growing steadily as more and more schools adopt the technology. The Weber School District has already deployed thin clients in some labs (see this blog post from the district’s Director of Technology).

Cost Savings

Consider a hypothetical example of just how much this can save a school. On the one hand, we could:

• Purchase 100 fully-featured workstations for $500 each.
• Purchase 100 all-new licenses for the operating systems at $100 each.
• Purchase 100 all-new licenses for our commercial software we want to use, including stuff like Photoshop, Acrobat, etc. Let’s say the total of all our software comes out to $400 for each workstation.

The resulting cost of all this? $100,000.

Now look at an example using thin clients. Instead of the last option, we could:

• Purchase 100 bare-bone workstations with minimal hardware, or receive used equipment donations of seemingly obsolete systems (since we barely need anything for a thin client), at an average cost of $50 each.
• Purchase ONE license for the operating system, for $100.
• Purchase ONE license for Photoshop, Acrobat, etc. for $400.
• Purchase a powerful thin client server to manage each workstation, for $2000.

The resulting cost of equipping our entire school with fully-featured workstations using thin clients? $7500.

We just saved over $90,000! In just one school we are literally saving thousands in hardware and software costs. And in an entire school district, the savings can easily venture into the millions.

Summary

The benefits of using thin clients include, but are not limited to:

• Cost only a fraction of what we normally would pay for all our hardware and software.
• Faster workstations, since they are being booted off a high-end server, rather than using their own memory and hard drive.
• Easier maintenance, since only one computer (the thin client server) typically needs to be maintained rather than 100 separate computers spread throughout the school.
• The near-elimination of licensing fees for commercial software. For example, rather than buy 100 licenses for Adobe Photoshop and Windows XP to install on each workstation, we need to buy only ONE.
• When you need an upgrade in your school, rather than buying 100 new $1000 workstations, you only need to spend around $2000 to beef up your servers to accommodate all the computers. You do the math.

I hope you can see the advantages of using thin clients in a school. This is revolutionary stuff we’re talking about, and it’s taking schools across the world by storm.

Here’s some extra reading on how thin clients have impacted educational technology. This is by no means a comprehensive list of articles:

• T.H.E. Journal, “Focus: Thin Client” (June 2001)
• Thin Clients Go to School
• Brandon Elementary transformed by K12LTSP
• How Linux thin-clients benefit schools
• When it comes to desktops, fat is the new thin
• Expert shares secrets to saving thousands with K12LTSP
• Why is Thin-client Linux Such a Good Fit for Schools?