Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

Happy Monday, dear readers. To ease you back into the work week, I thought we’d begin with a fun ice breaker. (Well, I think it’s fun. Your actual fun may vary.)

Consider the tattoo in the picture. Someone, quite possibly a mad scientist, has gotten the entire periodic table tattooed on his arm. For the sake of argument, let’s assume it’s a real tattoo.

Now say you’re a science teacher about to give a test on the elements. Do you make this student cover up the tattoo? Why or why not?

Photo credit: o2b on Flickr.

BY BILL FERRIS

I think Twitter is a hoot. It’s a good way to keep track of what other educators are up to. Also, I love a witty one-liner, and 140 characters is the perfect format for that. There are plenty of reasons teachers should use Twitter.

What I want to know is whether Twitter is useful enough to teach with it? Do any of you use Twitter in your lesson plans? Any Twitter-based assignments? Again, I think Twitter is highly useful and fun for teachers, but “fun new app” isn’t always synonymous with “great teaching tool” (see Wordle). If you use Twitter in your teaching, please share your ideas in the comments. Oh, and follow us on Twitter.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Google announced yesterday their plans to roll out a new operating system, Chrome OS. They’re designing it to run on netbooks initially, desktops eventually, beginning in the latter half of 2010.

According to the Official Google Blog, “Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds.” The code will be open-source, to boot.

The question: what possibilities does this operating system hold for educators? As more and more computing happens online, does this development set the stage for schools to shrink their technology budgets by buying Chrome-packed netbooks instead of laptops or desktops? And if so, how will this run up against filters, firewalls and internet censorship that’s so common in many schools. It’s all fair game here. Let’s hear your opinion in the comments!

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

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Since I got an Android phone for Christmas, I’ve been yammering to anyone who will listen about how cell phones are the great technology equalizer — you can use phones to surf the internet, send email, create podcasts, share photos, as well as, you know, talk to people. Even high-end phones are much less expensive than a decent laptop, and they can fit in your pocket.

Folks in the cell phone industry feel the same way, and that’s why they’d like to see more cell phone use in schools. Matt Richtel of the New York Times deals with the issues of using phones in class in his article, Industry Makes Pitch That Smartphones Belong in Classroom.

Many educators regard students’ cell phones as mobile alert systems that let the teacher know that a student would like some detention, please. Phones also present problems ranging from cheating to increasing potential distractions in class. However, it’s hard to dispute the capabilities and cost-effectiveness of smart phones, even if the people crowing about them the loudest are doing so out of naked self-interest. The article notes that a few schools have decided to try programs in which students are issued phones for educational purposes, with positive results:

“Suzette Kliewer, the teacher who administered the Digital Millennial program at Southwest High School in Jacksonville, N.C., said the phones excited her students and made them collaborate and focus on their studies, even outside of school hours. ‘They took average-level kids and made them into honors-level kids,’ she said.

“But Ms. Kliewer also said that she spent much of her own time at night, and during weekends and holidays, monitoring the students’ phone use and occasionally disconnecting phones remotely when students broke the rules.”

Another drawback, addressed by education and technology analyst Bill Rust, is that while smart phones can do a lot, the large screens and keyboards found on computers offer an advantage that phones simply can’t overcome. If you’ve ever written a lengthy email on your phone, even if it has a keypad, you know what he means.

As the benefits of smart phones become more…well, beneficial, will schools loosen their rules on phone usage in class? What’s your school’s cell phone policy? Are you doing anything with phones in class? If that’s not allowed, are you doing anything to try to change the policy? Tell us about it in the comments. -BILL FERRIS

Industry Makes Pitch That Smartphones Belong in Classroom via the New York Times

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There’s a lively discussion in the comments over at the Reference Extract planning site: some visitors are skeptical (to say the least) about the need for a search engine that gives results “weighted towards sites most often referred to by librarians at institutions such as the Library of Congress.”

But both teachers and librarians know that students encounter a great deal of non-credible and un-credible as well as incredible content on the web, content that students are all too prone to take at face value. And there are similar projects out there: KidZui, which we covered last month, is not just a search engine but an entire browser built to lead kids toward websites approved by teachers. New search engines such as Cuil, which we covered back in August, do emerge. So a project like this — and Reference Extract is an ambitious project–isn’t out in left field, whether or not it’s a Google-killer.

If you read through the proposal, there’s lots of interesting data to support the project, and there’s some good geek food for those who’d like to know how the search engine will work (they’re going to pull out and index the URLs from QuestionPoint and use the Find retrieval engine from OCLC, or possibly Nutch . . . oh, never mind). The folks who are going to build this search engine prove with studies and pretty graphs that librarians are perceived as credible and that different librarians do tend to send researchers to the same websites.

So what do you think? Would you be likely to use and encourage your students to use a search engine “built for maximum credibility”? -AMANDA FRENCH

Reference Extract planning site

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I misspelled a word in the title of the first research paper I ever wrote in school (”The Death Penalty Contraversy”). That’s when my teacher, Mr. Goedken, told me about this magical thing called “spell check” (don’t laugh, this was quite a novel concept for me at the time). As a result, I became a better speller, wound up with an English degree and get to edit this blog.

Sometimes a clever piece of technology can help students learn a difficult concept or shore up a few weaknesses they have. At Instructify, we want to hear what nifty tech toys you’ve used in 2008 to help your students, whether they’re stand-alone programs, web sites, class movie projects, whatever. Tell us about it in the comments. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: Matthew Clark Photography & Design on Flickr

An Instructify reader is looking for some information on Smart Boards — she’s very interested in finding someone who could share ideas on how school administrators could use Smart Boards in their jobs. This could cover presentations at staff meetings, developing mind maps, or anything over, under and in-between that would show how administrators can integrate this technology into their jobs.

Not only is this a decent way to spice up staff meetings, but it’s also an opportunity to show that technology can enhance the ways in which schools operate. If you’ve got ideas, please share your thoughts in the comments. -BILL FERRIS

If you have a question you’d like to put to our readers, send it to instructify[at]learnnc.org.

Photo credit: Earl - What I Saw 2.0 on flickr