1/22 Assignment: Sport in Belize!

This is a picture of my brother, Sport, in front of Mayan ruins, in Belize.

Well.... Not really.

It is my brother, Sport, but he's not really in Belize. He's really in front of the fireplace at the Appalachian Mountain Club Highland Center lin the White Mountains (thus the sweater). To do our "manipulated digital image" assignment, I cut his image out and superimposed it onto a background of the Mayan ruins we're planning to visit this summer, on a trip we really hope he joins us for.

Well... Not really.

We really do hope he joins us, but this particular picture isn't really Belize. I couldn't find a non-copyright-protected image of the sites we're actually planning to visit, that I could use for this purpose. These are Mayan ruins, but they're really from Tulum, Mexico. I got the background picture from a site called pics4learning.com, which is full of all sorts of copyright-free images that are down- and up-loadable for various educational purposes.

Pretty cool, huh? I'm a little vague on what I actually did to do this -- there was a good deal of random clicking about and hoping for the best -- but, there it is.

Whaddaya say, Sport?

UDL Postscript

I just wanted to add how surprised and delighted I was to come across ee cummings' poem "maggie and milly and molly and may" in an article that was otherwise rather, er, technical. I've never much read ee cummings, not generally being able to get past his punctuation, but this one is just lovely, and I'm so glad to have discovered it, however serendipitous the route. I'd copy the whole thing here, but Elizabeth scared me about copyright infringements in our last class, so I'll just include the last two lines:

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)

it's always ourselves we find in the sea.

In every venture, 

we get out... 

what we put in.

post-PS: So Mom, I changed the background just for you. How do you like the new one??

1/22 Assignment: Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

Concept Map: Background to UDL:

Background: Universal Design for Learning (UDL) first evolved from an architectural movement. After the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 imposed requirements that public buildings be accessible to individuals with disabilities, many buildings were "retrofitted" with access ramps and other modifications that were in many cases unattractive. Universal Design was a movement which emphasized the concept of full accessibility from the earliest planning phase; and the integration of access with aesthetics. Designers quickly realized that the concept of "access" gave rise to unexpected benefits to a much wider constituency than was originally intended: curb cuts initially intended to enable wheelchair access turned out also to benefit parents pushing strollers and kids wheeling on Heelies; closed captioning technologies initially developed for the deaf turned out also to benefit yuppies exercising in gyms and opera lovers who don't speak Italian. It was inspirational.

Concept Map: Philosophy of UDL

Applying Universal Design to Education: The Universal Design to Learning (UDL) movement seeks to extent the concepts of "full access" beyond physical access to buildings to access to the curriculum itself. In so doing, it seeks to utilize technologies such as voice recognition and text-to-speech software that remove barriers to content that students with disabilities such as limited sight might experience (this would be analogous to the wheelchair-bound and deaf individuals in the architectural examples above); but also to look more broadly and apply lessons from recent brain research about learner differences and determine how technology might serve their access needs as well (this would translate to the mothers with strollers and the opera lovers in the example).

Brain research suggests that learning is distributed across three interconnected networks: recognition (which are specialized to sense and assign meaning to patterns, and allow us to identify information and concepts); strategic (which generate and oversee mental and motor patterns and plans); and affective (which are associated with emotional responses, and enable us to engage with tasks, learning and people). In each of these networks, the brain utilizes both "hierarchical" (gestalt and parts-to-whole) processing; and "lateral" (multiple simultaneous thoughts, such as recognizing multiple colors simultaneously) processing. All people utilize all three networks and both types of processing; however, individuals vary widely in both which network is best developed and in which type of processing is easier; which results in considerable learning differences.

Having identified those differences, UDL seeks to broaden access to learning through adherence to three principles: to use multiple formats to present information and enable students to demonstrate mastery; to draw upon multiple pathways such that learners are presented with the same material through formats that "hit" upon multiple senses to reinforce learning; and to draw on multiple forms of motivation to engage students.

Concept Map: Implementing UDL

Implementation of UDL: Effective implementation of UDL hearkens back to many of the same principles that Sara Dexter outlined in her eTIPs article in last week's reading. Educators must start with crystalline clarity about their instructional goals, as well as detailed knowledge about their students' individual needs and the media options that might support them. Thereafter, the educator develops a plan for differentiated instruction; drawing upon a full range of access-oriented technologies (such as text-to-speech), media that allow multiple formats to demonstrate mastery (such as allowing students to present material in a digital presentation rather than paper-and-pencil test), and formats that support multiple sensory pathways (such as using video and audio clips in addition to text-based sources). Supporting all of this, and again consistent with Dexter's eTIPS, must be sufficient support in terms of both infrastructure and professional development.

"When Teddy Bears Go Blogging"....

... unintended audiences applaud.

Lucky kids, these second graders.  Their teachers invite djembe drummers into the classroom.  Let them get wet messing around with water wheels.  Devote hours of instructional time building Ms. Frizzle-style panoramas of Bat Caves and the Great Barrier Reef.  Organize storyteller visits.  Take them to puppet shows.  Muck around with K'Nex in class.  Drip maple syrup onto the carpet.  Wear pajamas to school.

Of course we're lucky too, that these energetic and inspired teachers put up a blog so we all can see what they've done, and learn from and be inspired by it.  Surely the kids' families and friends also enjoyed seeing the pictures on line.  Technology allows Ms. Sherry and Ms. Sawyer to document and disseminate the fabulous activities they've done with their classes, easily, quickly, and cheaply.  Which is terrific!

But it's the Doing, rather than the Documenting and Disseminating, that is the primary instructional point.  

The idea warrants underscoring.  It is easily lost.  It illustrates the point that Sara Dexter made in her eTips article, that educational technology does not possess inherent instructional value.  These kids' teachers gave them the time, material, and freedom to make a mess, to bang loudly, to go outdoors, to conduct their own experiments.  That is what makes these students fortunate.  That is how their imaginations were captured and their spirits sent to soar.  That is what supported what Dexter calls the "learning outcomes."  That the activities were attractively blogged is an extra bonus, a bonus whose value accrues principally to us, a largely unintended audience.

Certainly, kids do benefit from making a record of their activities, and referring back to it, and thereby reinforcing their learning.  And the blog effects that consolidation beautifully; that is the piece that is, in Dexter's terms, the "value added."  However, had the kids put together an old-fashioned lap book with pasted-in snapshots, that too would have done the job (albeit more expensively, and less portably, and with far less audience reach).  We, the anonymous Internet public, are actually the principal beneficiaries of the blog.  The kids benefit from...

Good teaching.

Always worth remembering, that.

The Guinea Pigs and I have a tradition....

Every Martin Luther King's day, I read them the full text of "I have a dream."

We use this extraordinary book.  Coretta Scott King wrote its forward; fifteen different illustrators (including Leo & Diane Dillon, James Ransome, Jerry Pinkney, and Carole Byard) each selected and illustrated a specific line (a tableaux, to use the language of our last class session).  Each of the illustrators include a short paragraph explaining what compelled them to select the moment they did.  There is a short biography of King's life at the end.

Collectively, the illustrations stand as an abbreviated history of the civil rights struggle: Jerry Pinkney matched the prelude to the speech in which King spoke of Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation to a painting of a black Union regiment.  The next painting, by Pat Cummings, shows the back of a black man walking down a modern urban street.  It takes the kids a moment to realize that his shadow has broken shackles on; the selected text is "(still) an exile in his own land." Other illustrations show the Woolworth counter sit-ins ("meeting physical force with soul force", police beatings ("unspeakable horrors"), the March on Washington ("whirlwinds of revolt"), and the scene of the speech itself ("the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation").   Each page sparks questions and discussions.  Every year, one of the kids points out something new in either King's language or in one of the illustrations.  Truly, it is a book that every single classroom in America should have.

This year, for the first time, we added King's own voice.   (Just the voice.  Not the video images.  But that's another story for another day.)

The inspiration for this came last night, when I was posting the Roosevelt link.  I happened to be at my parents' house, and my mother (who had been successfully blocking out the cacophony of my family) perked right up and tuned right in the instant she heard Roosevelt's voice.  It made me think of the Radio Age, and wonder if maybe people listened more carefully, when they had fewer images to look at. 

Educational Technology Still Life No. 1

I think I'll call this one....

The Only Thing We Have to Fear, is Fear, Itself.

A few highlights:

1. The Mac my husband gave me for Chanukah. I've never used a Mac before. So far I haven't really approached the full extent of its capabilities.
   
2. My husband's old digital camera. He has subsequently gotten a new one, so I'm allowed to muck around with the retired one.
3. My nine year old son's iPod. He got it early last summer, right before we traveled to Southeast Asia. My husband downloaded the audio versions of the first six Harry Potter books so he (my son, I mean) had something to do on the plane and could "train" before Book 7 came out in July. (Jim Dale, by the way, who narrates all the books, is a marvel.) Me, I have no idea how to download anything onto it.
4. Several blank disks, which I more or less know how to use.
5. A "flash drive," which I've really wondered about for quite some time now.
6. A "card reader," which again has always sparked a vague curiosity in me. At a distance.
7. The manual for Adobe PhotoShop, which either we have on one of our other computers, or came installed on my Mac.
8. Several other books, including The Muse in the Machine, which I found on the library shelves right near the Dummies' Guides to web design and whose cover I really liked. I just started it, but I can tell already it's my kind of book. Perhaps I'll write a review here once I've finished.

Wandering around the library shelves, catching a glimpse of a surprisingly different, very possibly misfiled, volume and taking it home to read it -- that's what "hyperlinking" looked like, not so very long ago.

Hyperlinking, now that I love.

Confronting Fear, Itself
Check out this Very Cool link to an audio clip of the actual inaugural speech.

I like this picture because there aren't so many that show Roosevelt in his wheelchair. It reminds me of the time a few years ago when we took the Guinea Pigs to Hyde Park, and my son Guinea Pig #2 was riveted by the chair, which Roosevelt had retrofitted from a regular straight-back caned chair.}

You Gotta BE the Book...

When I told Guinea Pig #3 about the principles of Jeffrey Wilhelm's opus, You Gotta BE the Book, she was quite enthusiastic.

I had a lot of ideas. My first thought was that she could enact this week's Torah portion (this week happens to be one of the Greatest Hits, the presentation of the Ten Commandments...). When that failed to inspire her, I suggested that she might want to act out the story of Vasilisa, the type of good strong heroine who warms modern mothers' hearts. No, not her thing. Really, I would have been fine with Hermione.

But no, if GP#3 was gonna BE the Book, she was gonna be... a princess. This is her idea of what a princess looks like. (It's actually her enactment of a specific princess, a Desert Princess, from a particular page of the well-beloved book. Having not yet had the Copyright Law class session yet, I had my doubts about scanning the illustration in and loading it onto the blog. Nor would I have had the faintest idea of how to do so, even if I could.)

Anyway. Drama, to lure reluctant readers in. Read-alouds with exaggerated voices, to make the characters come alive. Physical enactment of the stories, to get kids to internalize the core of the narratives. Costumes!

Well. How great is that? What kind of crank-o-head could possibly find fault, with that?

And yet. The gestalt of the thing -- a bright, motivated teacher going to great lengths to find a way to reach his most reluctant readers and, in large measure, succeeding in sparking their enthusiasm through the use of drama -- is, obviously, terrific. The devil is in the details.

It is really, really great to get reluctant readers to understand that There Be Treasure Here, in literature. It is really great, to use drama to get them inside characters' motivations and to enable them to fill in the unstated parts and to form images of the characters and the worlds and the actions inside their heads. It is really great, to motivate them to go on to the library and pick out books to read on their own, outside of class.

Wonderful, all of it. But not to be confused with actually teaching them to read, with the long slow slog of teaching that sizable segment of every school population to whom reading comes hard, how to decode. How to develop fluency. How to tackle multisyllable and weird-looking words. How to develop automaticity, which really is a precondition to the enjoyment of reading. Honest.

That young readers be motivated is necessary. But it is not sufficient. Reading is a skill, with specific subskills that need to be mastered by all, and directly taught to those who need it. The marvelous activities with which Wilhelm engaged his reluctant readers help set the context in which kids will be willing to put in the long hard effort to gain that mastery. Particularly the kids with learning disabilities, who have to put in many more hours of greater effort. As educators, we have to do all that we can to help them understand that all that work is worth it.

Because, of course, it is. Truly, there be treasure here.

Then they (and we) still, alas, have got to do the work.

1/15 Assignment: Response to Sara Dexter's article

On eTIPs - Educatonal Technology Integration and Implementation Principles, by Sara Dexter

Early in her article, almost as an aside, Sara Dexter tosses off a comment that to my mind merits closer and more careful focus than she herself gives in.  She writes: Educational technology does not possess inherent instructional value..."

I'm a Big Picture kind of gal.  I like to start off with a rock-solid crystal-clear laying-out-of-the-fundamentals before plunging into the minutiae.  And this point is very fundamental indeed; so fundamental that I truly wished Dexter had honored it with at least a full paragraph of its own.  

Educational technology does not possess inherent instructional value.  It is, in other words, a means, not an end in itself.  The mere presence of technology in a classroom does nothing at all, if not used; and nothing of instructional value, if not used with thought and care to support educational objectives beyond the technology itself.  Technology provides tools: no more, no less.  With tools, we can do things -- draw upon information from disparate sources; aggregate and present data; stitch together images and words and sounds; communicate quickly and cheaply.  Today's technology offers tools of great potential, which like all other tools are only as useful as the person wielding them is skillful.  And, also like many other tools, can be misused and even dangerous.

I wish Dexter had laid that sort of thing out, explicitly, in her prelude.   From the rest of her text it is clear that she does, indeed, believe it.

That said, much of what she did write makes good sense.  In the article, Dexter lays out two broad principles for the selection, implementation and integration of technology:

1. The teacher must act as an instructional designer, planning the use of the technology so it will support student learning; and
2. The school environment must support teachers in this role by providing adequate technology support.

The second point is plain common sense: at the most basic, physical level, the classroom must have enough outlets and Internet connections and so on; at the nearly-as-basic (but immensely harder to achieve, particularly in large institutions) level, teachers must be allowed the autonomy to determine which technologies support their instructional objectives (what Dexter calls "learning outcomes").

The first point is the nub of the matter, and is very hard indeed.  What Dexter is saying, rightly, is that in order for technology to serve education, its purpose has to be planned in a manner that supports learning, and its execution has to be managed in a manner consistent with the plan.  Otherwise you are left either with: a) dusty and poorly functioning machines languishing in the back of the classroom; or b) a handful of boys racing through their seatwork so as to jostle over computer games.

At the very outset, the teacher must have succinct clarity about what the "learning outcomes" are -- the teacher must do what Steven Covey, in Principle-Centered Leadership, calls Beginning with the End in Mind.  In school as in business, this is far easier to articulate than to do.  Thereafter, the teacher must realistically assess what Dexter calls the "cognitive demands of the user" -- that is, what the student must be able to do to use the technology effectively.  This requires both a detailed flowchart-like understanding of each small step in the utilization of the technology and a realistic understanding about the capabilities among the students.  (Even just locating an Internet address requires accurate spelling, keyboarding, and ability to scan.  Young kids with reading difficulties may not be able to do this most basic step on their own.)  As well, she must be able to discern what is true "value added" in Dexter's terms -- what the technology is actually doing in support of the "learning outcome" -- from the whiz-bang that can be seductive to students and adults alike, but does not necessarily support instructional objectives.

It is easy, and tempting, to label "quiet and occupied in front of their terminals" as "learning."  But the labeling doesn't actually make it so.  Dexter's article is a useful reminder to keep thinking through the difference.

A Little More About Me

(Turns out that Blogspot limits About Me entries to 1200 characters.  Ha!)

"I Am Not a Luddite."

My dear friend Ruth calls me a Luddite, but it's not, strictly speaking, accurate.

The Luddites , as everyone knows, were skilled textile artisans of the 1810s hailing from Nottingham (a town already famous for its other great critic of the existing economic order, Robin Hood).  Faced with emergent technology that they feared threatened their livelihood, the Luddites took matters into their own hands.  Literally.  Armed with crowbars and hand axes, they lay waste to the offending machine-driven looms, thereby striking dread into the souls of factory owners across England and beyond.  Needless to say, the inexorable logic of the Industrial Revolution ultimately prevailed, and the Luddites morphed from a Greenpeace precursor to a historical footnote.   

But the term itself has endured, and the very fact that it has suggests that the story still has relevance in today's very different world.  Ambivalence about technology persists.  The extent to which the indisputable benefits are tempered by the risks and costs, which often take longer to be recognized but which always are there, remains a real issue even today. 

I certainly share that ambivalence, and while Ruth mocks me for it, I do take comfort knowing that I am among the august company of both Lord Byron and  Thomas Pynchon.  I first met Ruth back in an earlier millennium, when we both worked at a Fortune 100 company that prided itself on its cutting-edge technologies.  It turned out to be a somewhat uneasy fit for me, there.  It is true that I was probably the last employee in the entire corporation to activate my email.  It is true that to this day I have neither call-waiting nor cable TV in my house.  It is true that I firmly believe that the invention of the Blackberry was a Great Step Backward in the History of Mankind.

But I don't want to destroy the machines.  Just to keep 'em in their place: subordinate to, and supporting, the Things That Matter.  Technology is supposed to serve us.  All of my many objections to Blackberries can be summarized thusly: who's master over whom?

The education of children is surely at the very top of the list of Things That Matter.  Therefore, I truly look forward to this course.  I can tell, already, both that I will learn a great deal, and also have a great deal of fun.  I can also tell, just from my response to the first week's readings, that I will likely keep coming back to a short list of related themes: what are the ends vs. the means; how can technology support the ends rather than be viewed as an end in itself; how can technology support content areas differently from skills acquisition and motivational issues.  Those questions will, I believe, be the lenses through which I experience much of the content of the course, and serve as unifying threads of my reading responses and decisions about other coursework.  And that's fine.

A final reflection from  Robert Calvert (Freq, 1984):

They said Ned Ludd was an idiot boy

That all he could do was wreck and destroy

He turned to his workmates and said: Death to Machines!

They tread on our future and stamp on our dreams!

(The Nottingham weavers and lacemakers really were displaced by the machines, by the way.  And the Industrial Revolution that the Luddites attempted to hold back really did let loose a Pandora's Box of abusive child labor, pollution, landscape desecration, and global warming.   Always, there are losers as well as winners; always, there are costs as well as benefits.)

A Few Firsts....

This is the first time I ever learned how to do hyperlinks.  Oh boy, I do expect I'll have good fun with that....

This is the first picture I ever posted off a website.  It is an illustration of irritated textile workers Smashing the Machine.  I uploaded the image through a website called creativecommons.org 

The putatively original (?!) source of the engraving is 

thegreatgeekmanual.com

I quite proud that I did it.  I'm not quite sure how I did it.

This is a picture I uploaded from my laptop.  It's of my eldest daughter, Guinea Pig 1, acting goofy.

Strictly speaking, I don't count this as as great a personal triumph as the Luddite, above, because I did not put the picture onto my laptop in the first place.  My husband did.  He's always been in charge of that sort of thing.  Every marriage has its division of labor.  In mine, I plan the activities, I book the activities, I take the kids on the activities, I photograph the activities... and my husband, he puts the pictures onto the computer.

Until this course, I guess.