A Paper is Born

If you had been wondering what happened to ol’ oakville boy over the past 20 days, most of you probably can guess.  Besides marks deadlines, parent-teacher interviews, SAG and other life events, I have managed to finish my paper.  Yeah!!!

Although given the experience, there wasn’t one piece of paper evident in the process (Ok, I lie…but more later).  Creating the paper in Google Docs was quite an experience.  I was quite leery about being able to create a paper in the way suggested, but I found that the tools were more robust than I thought and it wasn’t long before I was typing away with less trepidation.  Speaking of which it has a decent spell checker built in and pretty much all the tools you need for a paper.  Although I think WordPress has more options and a slicker interface – tell me if I’m wrong.

I have to admit though that I did slip into some old habits of printing out articles I was using for my paper and also using Word on my computer as a backup.  I guess it is hard to give up old habits.  Somehow not seeing actual page breaks on my document was not quite right since these things give you clues as to the length of sections and the pacing of your arguments.

What I did find really useful was the tracking revisions feature.  As any teacher will tell you, many times students use the ol’ cut and paste method of essay writing to try and make their work a little less laborious and their own.  By being able to track revisions, you can easily tell whether they have done a lots of cutting and pasting.  Just that feature alone is worth using it.  Instead of failing students who blatantly plagiarize and dealing with that rigmarole, get them to create their papers in Google docs where they can share their work with you and you can see the creation of their papers.

Given that feature I was a little worried that being able to peek in on our paper creation might taint the impression of the final product.  All writers work a bit differently.  I tend to organize well first then let it all flow from start to finish, whereas others just start writing and revise, move stuff scrap stuff and even start all over if things are going badly.  However the approach, both extremes can result in excellent papers.  If teachers think your writing approach is confusing or disorganized but the final product is fine, do they see your work differently?  Sometimes it is indeed black magic that has resulted in some of my papers.  It is the old analogy of sausage.  Everyone likes sausage, but if you ever saw how it was made you might have a completely different opinion of it.

Anyway, my paper is about what I had talked about previously, that is, the inclusion of controversial technologies into the classroom.  I specifically wrote about Facebook and cell phones.  Because Facebook is so new, of course, it was hard finding peer reviewed articles on it.  I however managed to conduct my own primary research using my students to gauge their thoughts on Facebook as an educational tool.  I was pleasantly surprised at the maturity level of some students in recognizing its potential.  Cell phone usage is an even harder one to crack since most high schools have an outright ban on their use in school.  But I was also able to survey about that and discuss some productive uses for them.

All these document are readily available here:

Final Paper for ICT 07:598

Survey on Facebook with Results

I shouldn’t have to say this but… With respect to intellectual property rights, please do not freely distribute these documents.  If you wish to distribute, post or publish or use these documents for other purposes, please ask my permission. 

Survey on Facebook

If you wish to use the blank survey above, by all means.  I would actually be curious to see if anyone else would get similar results.

And by all means, please comment on the paper as I will be on yours.

Casting for Pod

I enjoy fishing.  So when the opportunity to go Podcasting came up I thought I’d give it a go.  Do Pod taste like Cod with a slight apple flavor?  What happened to the “i” part when Podcasting?  Is it because you are sharing and not being selfish with your Pod? (Drum fill)

Anyway, I have gotten around to creating a Podcast on Blended Learning.  I created it using MyPodcast Recorder.  I set up an account with MyPostcast.com and used their software to upload, but alas more technical difficulties.  Since I’m not one to beat my head against the wall too many times, I decided to host the podcast back on Screencast.

Check it out here:

http://www.screencast.com/users/oakvilleboy/folders/Default/media/c405f975-f4aa-46d1-9aed-7b29837d21ef

Gettin’ Jingy with it

Well, after many technical glitches I have produced an instructional video podcast that I could use in my video classes.  You can find it at http://www.screencast.com/users/oakvilleboy

You may see a familar face in the video.  Enjoy.

The Digital Divide (A Case Study)

I’ve told some of you my deep dark secret, but I think it has some relevance to ICT and inclusion.  Please get your nose off the screen – it’s not that kind of deep dark secret although to serious techies it might be the ultimate sin.  And I thought I might be able to hide it from the rest of you but with all the collaboration and using all the new tools an explanation for my behavior may be in order.Now I’d really like to set up Skype sessions with you and look at your Jing lessons and all your wonderful podcasts.  The fact is it’s not really possible to do many of the activities, especially downloading all the new software on my home computer.  Well, beside the fact that my two kids take up a lot of my evenings, there is one more compelling reason…

Ok, ok, I’ll say it for all to hear.  My internet connection at home is…(sigh) dial-up.  Yeah, yeah, I hear you, and after you recover from fainting, it’s something we could discuss.  When I signed up for the course I saw the list of activities to complete and thought: “Hey, I could do all that,” and I decided to do the course on my school computer (I actually have a lab of 28 computers all connected to DSL).

When the pressure was put on us to have much more collaboration, that’s when my strategy was not working so well.  Adding and installing and playing with software can be done on an ad hoc nature whenever you have a second here or there, but collaborating using Skype is just not possible during the school day with all the demands on my time.  And of course with dial up at home, it is simply impossible.

So I find myself between a tech and hard place.  Which illustrates that even in this day and age, someone can be stumped by access problems.  I thoroughly examined my requirements to take this course and because of the nature of interaction, I am finding myself left out of part of the equation.

This is of course the Digital Divide in action.  It may not be a dial-up situation for your students, it may be the fact that they have no computer at all!  What I’ve found over the years of teaching technology that its often basic literacy skills that prevents students from learning technology.  (What reading levels are the Lawrenceville Press books or Adobe’s Classroom in a Book series if you use those as resources?).  I’m sure there is a continuum of accessibility problems for students which leaves many of them unable to use many of our “cute” tools.  Some kids are just hoping they get breakfast and that their step-dad won’t beat them today.

Teachers themselves are often stymied by their computer systems at work for security reasons.  At our school, most teachers do not have program install rights and have to call the school technician to install any software.  Just that fact alone would exclude most teachers in our school doing what I’m doing.  Luckily, I’m a teacher technician (teacher tech mentor, etc.) and have install rights on my lab computers.

We also have filters applied to the internet which helps to filter out inappropriate sites which is good for the school.  However, in using some of the services and tools, there have been anomalies when doing certain things which usually involves embedded content.  For example, I could upload a Picassa Web album, but I couldn’t view them because the filters were disallowing the embedded slideshow viewer.  I have been having trouble viewing Jing presentations because of the embedded player being blocked.  Luckily, I have been able to get around the filters (like the kids!) in some cases and not in others.  (I’ve tried to break through but flickr.com will not budge.)  And when in crap adapt, so I used alternate tools that the filters don’t bother with.

My point is that most teachers would not have the access or experience to work around some of these difficulties and to change the current security model to allow teachers to install software for whatever purpose would be like pushing adapt uphill.  Even if you had a completely open system with DSL, I doubt that many teachers would be able to progress as far as the majority of us have.  The technical aspects of installing and using the tools is enough of an obstacle for most teachers who are not nearly as enthusiastic as our geekish cohort.

What do we do about this disparity of access?  We do what teachers have always done when teaching – we compromise.  We cannot exclude certain students from activities because they don’t have access to tools others have.  You must consider what technology students are comfortable using or can be trained to use easily.  When I first started as an enthusiastic tech teacher teaching HTML, I would give HTML assignments for homework because all you need is a computer with Windows which had notepad included.  Bada Bing Bada…Bad… Of course, many students didn’t even have computers, that’s why they came to the class in the first place – to use a computer!

So before you get anyone to blog or wiki or Skype or podcast or Jing or Transmorgify (don’t look it up – I just made it up) make sure it is an all-inclusive activity.  Because there could be someone like me sitting in your classrooms (CUE:  violins).

Addendum:  Perhaps that is one thing that could be included on the next course outline when this course is run again – a set of technical requirements.

I’ve been Skyped again!

I continue to explore tools and applications and I think I’m well past the 20^th account I’ve setup for one service or another.  I really like Skype as a free tool, however, I’ve experienced an annoying habit it has.  On more than one occasion, Skype has alerted me to an instant message to which I responded immediately with a text message.  Little did I know or explore more in depth to find that the “instant” message or invitation was sent days ago.  My apologies to Saskatoon.slice and Negra Linda for distemporal Skyping.  Does anyone else have similar stories of “interesting” behavious from these tools we’ve been using.  I’ve noticed that the MyPodcast podcasts come with a free ad for (you guessed it) MyPodcast.