On the Easter weekend, CTV news aired a broadcast where a news reporter interviewed a high school principal, a university “lecturer”, and some sort of a psychologist. All were lamenting how unprepared students are for post secondary school.
Interestingly, none of them really focussed on the Wikipedia generation. They discussed values and upbringing, work habits and discipline. The one thing they did suggest is that students nowadays live in a “NOW” generation where they have SOOOO much information available at their fingertips that it creates bad habits. It creates sloppy research habits, laziness, and carelessness. (consider spelling in the average email…)
More frequently cited in the interview was the direction taken by the ministry and the boards (as they take their direction from the ministry). It was felt by the panellists that high schools are moving to a “no-fail” system. Students may have multiple chances to pass things that they fail. Students who do fail something need not repeat the entire course, but only re-do that portion which they failed. No late marks in many schools. Countless opportunities to hand in work. These are the real things that the panellists felt were detrimental to learning of our youth.
I expected more attacks on computers, games, wikipedia, etc., but it was not forthcoming.
Cheers,
Dan
Monday, April 20, 2009
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Let's talk about Power Point
One article mentioned how the misuse of computer resources could be a black-hole. I completely agree with this sentiment and one of the biggest wastes of time can be powerpoint presentations. You've all seen them. You know what they look like. And we ALL know that many presenters are HOOKED on power point. They use it when it is not necessary, they break all the rules (text too small, too much text, talk to screen, read their own slides, distracting animation, clutter, noise, etc)
In many circles it is an expectation that powerpoint is a necessary part of a presentation. This is patently silly. A decent power point, with animation, some colour, a few pictures can take hours to make. The investment in time is rarely worth the effort to create it. Some teachers require students to prepare presentations on power point and this costs the students hours of time. Sadly, often teachers themselves misuse the program and so are not really in any position to lecture students about its proper use.
A friend of mine who is a surgeon at Kingston General hospital told me that powerpoints are banned from all staff meetings. They take too long to make, they (often) add very little to their professional discussion. They require expensive equipment and time to set up.
Now there is a time and a place for power point. If used properly it can be a powerful tool. I use it for art history lessons where I want to put up slides of vases and Roman temples. But the presentation has NO text. I do all the talking and control the pace of the presentation.
I do a hieroglyphs presentation using powerpoint because it would be too time-consuming to draw all the hieroglyphs on the board during a lesson.
Sometimes, using some animation, I can piece together a puzzle or show how things should be assembled like sentences, clauses etc. But honestly, powerpoint slides full of text are not the best way to go. The technology is excellent, but as many of us have already said, we need to use it properly or we will waste our time.
On one of my last army courses we were encouraged to use powerpoint to show battle maps. So students spent hours putting military symbols onto maps. I accomplished the same amount of clarity using a white board and about 2 minutes of drawing. Pretty is not always better. Fancy is not always clearer.
There is a video of a stand-up comic who mocks powerpoint and all the misuses that people succumb to. Go to youtube and type "how not to use powerpoint" It is hilarious.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cagxPlVqrtM
Cheers,
Dan
In many circles it is an expectation that powerpoint is a necessary part of a presentation. This is patently silly. A decent power point, with animation, some colour, a few pictures can take hours to make. The investment in time is rarely worth the effort to create it. Some teachers require students to prepare presentations on power point and this costs the students hours of time. Sadly, often teachers themselves misuse the program and so are not really in any position to lecture students about its proper use.
A friend of mine who is a surgeon at Kingston General hospital told me that powerpoints are banned from all staff meetings. They take too long to make, they (often) add very little to their professional discussion. They require expensive equipment and time to set up.
Now there is a time and a place for power point. If used properly it can be a powerful tool. I use it for art history lessons where I want to put up slides of vases and Roman temples. But the presentation has NO text. I do all the talking and control the pace of the presentation.
I do a hieroglyphs presentation using powerpoint because it would be too time-consuming to draw all the hieroglyphs on the board during a lesson.
Sometimes, using some animation, I can piece together a puzzle or show how things should be assembled like sentences, clauses etc. But honestly, powerpoint slides full of text are not the best way to go. The technology is excellent, but as many of us have already said, we need to use it properly or we will waste our time.
On one of my last army courses we were encouraged to use powerpoint to show battle maps. So students spent hours putting military symbols onto maps. I accomplished the same amount of clarity using a white board and about 2 minutes of drawing. Pretty is not always better. Fancy is not always clearer.
There is a video of a stand-up comic who mocks powerpoint and all the misuses that people succumb to. Go to youtube and type "how not to use powerpoint" It is hilarious.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cagxPlVqrtM
Cheers,
Dan
On Wikipedia
I think that Wikipedia gets a bad rap too often. We have all heard of the instances where a teacher creates a fake wikipedia entry and some student cites it as a source in an essay. Wikipedia also has errors, but so does Encylcopedia Britannica (which students are encouraged to use). In fact, you can type Errors in Encyclopedia Britannica into Wikipedia and you will get pages and pages of errors.This is not to say that we should encourage students to use wikipedia indiscriminantly. It does have its limitations.
It is unedited. Yeah Yeah, it is edited by other users, but not by professionals with credentials and so your wikipedia entry may be altered by a 10 year old.
Seondly, wikipedia does not have entries for all kinds of topics. If it is not popular enough to get someone to write an entry, it doesn't exist.
Thirdly, wikipedia does not know how to deal with sensitive or controversial topics. If you examine the Yom Kippur war or any of the Israeli conflicts, you will see that Arabs and Israelis are constantly trying to change the tone of the page by "spinning" things in their own favour.
All this said, the site does contain a lot of decent information. I encourage students to use the site to get started and then to switch to more reputable sources. For the record, I tell the students not to use any encyclopedia as a source, Britannica or otherwise. They are all superficial sources.
So maybe we need to cool our jets on the use of wikipedia. It has its limitations, but also has good uses. Let's be honest now. How many of us use it regularly too. I bet the number is quite high.
I have found that doing research on some topics is becoming increasingly difficult. First of all, as we know, the sites that appear first in Google are sites that pay for the privilege of coming high on the list. Many of those sites are marketing sites, but many more are book sites ie. buy my book.
So if you type for example, "blog impair literacy" into your google search window, many of the top hits are sites which sell books or political sites that you have to subscribe to. The internet isn't as free as it once was. Wikipedia is usually near the top of the list. Google also allows stupid things to happen. Sometimes you will type, "dammit it's hot out" into a google search window and the first hit back is from ebay saying, "Buy dammit it's hot out NOW on ebay."
People have rightly learned that the web can be used for commerce and they are jigging it in such a way that many of our search attempts return sales sites first.
It just makes research skills more important for the student in the classroom.
Cheers,Dan
It is unedited. Yeah Yeah, it is edited by other users, but not by professionals with credentials and so your wikipedia entry may be altered by a 10 year old.
Seondly, wikipedia does not have entries for all kinds of topics. If it is not popular enough to get someone to write an entry, it doesn't exist.
Thirdly, wikipedia does not know how to deal with sensitive or controversial topics. If you examine the Yom Kippur war or any of the Israeli conflicts, you will see that Arabs and Israelis are constantly trying to change the tone of the page by "spinning" things in their own favour.
All this said, the site does contain a lot of decent information. I encourage students to use the site to get started and then to switch to more reputable sources. For the record, I tell the students not to use any encyclopedia as a source, Britannica or otherwise. They are all superficial sources.
So maybe we need to cool our jets on the use of wikipedia. It has its limitations, but also has good uses. Let's be honest now. How many of us use it regularly too. I bet the number is quite high.
I have found that doing research on some topics is becoming increasingly difficult. First of all, as we know, the sites that appear first in Google are sites that pay for the privilege of coming high on the list. Many of those sites are marketing sites, but many more are book sites ie. buy my book.
So if you type for example, "blog impair literacy" into your google search window, many of the top hits are sites which sell books or political sites that you have to subscribe to. The internet isn't as free as it once was. Wikipedia is usually near the top of the list. Google also allows stupid things to happen. Sometimes you will type, "dammit it's hot out" into a google search window and the first hit back is from ebay saying, "Buy dammit it's hot out NOW on ebay."
People have rightly learned that the web can be used for commerce and they are jigging it in such a way that many of our search attempts return sales sites first.
It just makes research skills more important for the student in the classroom.
Cheers,Dan
Sunday, April 5, 2009
The Perseus Project
One of the challenges of a high school teacher and in particular a teacher of history is to find good and legitimate sources online.
Well there is nothing like a primary source. The Perseus Project by Tufts University is a collection of ancient sources, some in the original language, others in translation. Since I teach Latin, the ones in Latin are useful. But all of the texts in translation are also valuable. The challenge with this site is that it may be too overwhelming for some students. It does have a search capability so that a student doesn't have to read all of Caesar's The Gallic Wars to find references to Vercingetorix. The student can conduct a search.
An excellent resource, but recommended mostly for students in senior grades.
The site is:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cache/perscoll_Greco-Roman.html
Cheers,
Dan
Well there is nothing like a primary source. The Perseus Project by Tufts University is a collection of ancient sources, some in the original language, others in translation. Since I teach Latin, the ones in Latin are useful. But all of the texts in translation are also valuable. The challenge with this site is that it may be too overwhelming for some students. It does have a search capability so that a student doesn't have to read all of Caesar's The Gallic Wars to find references to Vercingetorix. The student can conduct a search.
An excellent resource, but recommended mostly for students in senior grades.
The site is:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cache/perscoll_Greco-Roman.html
Cheers,
Dan
On the Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone is premier software designed to teach foreign languages. It is used in schools, but often by business personnel as well who want to learn a foreign language.
It has great graphics and wonderful step-by-step lessons. Unfortunately, the program is HUGELY expensive. I have entered into discussions with Rosetta Stone on a couple of occasions and both times their quotes were through the roof.
They do assert that you are getting value for money. But their product for a single lab in my school has been quoted back to me at twice the amount of my departmental annual budget. And that would be a licence for only a single year....I'd have to rebuy the online support again next year, and so on.
Within the school, the program has minor challenges. You do need a lab where all the CD-ROM's work. You need headsets with microphones that work. This means that a teacher has to keep the microphones and hetsets in a box and remove them after the lesson. If these fragile items are kept in a lab, they will be mangled and destroyed. As for the CD-ROM's, this is a challenge. Students abuse them and they do not work. So in any given computer lab at any time, 3 or 4 of the computers may not have workable CD ROM's.
This, by the way, is a perfect reason to support on-line resources and supports. They do depend on an internet connection, but they are not dependent on the disk drives, headsets, USB outlets on a computer which can be damaged. If a student does find good information and needs to save it, they can always email it home.
The bottom line of this post is that Rosetta Stone is an excellent language software product, but it is, for the present, much too expensive to use and unless we can secure sources of private funding our students will never get to use the program in the class.
If someone from Rosetta reads this post, I seriously urge you to consider reducing your prices for classroom settings. I can assure you that if your product is too expensive for our high school, it is too expensive for many high schools too.
Cheers,
Dan
It has great graphics and wonderful step-by-step lessons. Unfortunately, the program is HUGELY expensive. I have entered into discussions with Rosetta Stone on a couple of occasions and both times their quotes were through the roof.
They do assert that you are getting value for money. But their product for a single lab in my school has been quoted back to me at twice the amount of my departmental annual budget. And that would be a licence for only a single year....I'd have to rebuy the online support again next year, and so on.
Within the school, the program has minor challenges. You do need a lab where all the CD-ROM's work. You need headsets with microphones that work. This means that a teacher has to keep the microphones and hetsets in a box and remove them after the lesson. If these fragile items are kept in a lab, they will be mangled and destroyed. As for the CD-ROM's, this is a challenge. Students abuse them and they do not work. So in any given computer lab at any time, 3 or 4 of the computers may not have workable CD ROM's.
This, by the way, is a perfect reason to support on-line resources and supports. They do depend on an internet connection, but they are not dependent on the disk drives, headsets, USB outlets on a computer which can be damaged. If a student does find good information and needs to save it, they can always email it home.
The bottom line of this post is that Rosetta Stone is an excellent language software product, but it is, for the present, much too expensive to use and unless we can secure sources of private funding our students will never get to use the program in the class.
If someone from Rosetta reads this post, I seriously urge you to consider reducing your prices for classroom settings. I can assure you that if your product is too expensive for our high school, it is too expensive for many high schools too.
Cheers,
Dan
Centaur Software in the Latin Classroom
In the Latin Classroom I use the Cambridge Latin Course which is a series of text books. Another company has developed software that goes hand-in-hand with the text books.
The computer program allows students to practice vocabulary, noun forms, verb forms, and other grammar forms and word-endings. For this, the program is pretty good. The programs are actually called "drills" and that is really what they do.
The programs do have some limitations though and they can be very frustrating. First of all, the board will not put the software onto the board server. So when I use it, I have top copy the program onto each and every computer in a lab. That is time consuming. Also, the board can re-image the computers at any given time and when that happens, my program is eliminated and I have to start again. Imagine having to reload your software four times a year.....
Next, the program requires a student to identify words and word-endings exactly. For word endings this is fine, but for vocabulary words, this doesn't always work. The Latin word iubeo means "to order" but it can also mean "to command". If a student writes the wrong one down, the computer will not accept the answer. If a student forgets to write the word "to" the computer will not accept the answer. Now there is a mechanism whereby a teacher can add to the vocabulary choices for given words, but there is a maximum number of entries. But some Latin words can have 6 or more vocabulary meanings. So allowing me to add 3 extra meanings is good, but still doesn't give the students full options. Also, remember how the board can wipe my program off the computer when they reimage the system? I would have to manually walk around and add the additional words, one word at a time to every computer in a lab. And then I could only use that one lab in the school.
Nevertheless, it is a good tool, but it is VERY time consuming for the reasons above and there are entire semesters when I just do not have the energy to reload the computer program - yet again - for my students.
Cheers,
Dan
The computer program allows students to practice vocabulary, noun forms, verb forms, and other grammar forms and word-endings. For this, the program is pretty good. The programs are actually called "drills" and that is really what they do.
The programs do have some limitations though and they can be very frustrating. First of all, the board will not put the software onto the board server. So when I use it, I have top copy the program onto each and every computer in a lab. That is time consuming. Also, the board can re-image the computers at any given time and when that happens, my program is eliminated and I have to start again. Imagine having to reload your software four times a year.....
Next, the program requires a student to identify words and word-endings exactly. For word endings this is fine, but for vocabulary words, this doesn't always work. The Latin word iubeo means "to order" but it can also mean "to command". If a student writes the wrong one down, the computer will not accept the answer. If a student forgets to write the word "to" the computer will not accept the answer. Now there is a mechanism whereby a teacher can add to the vocabulary choices for given words, but there is a maximum number of entries. But some Latin words can have 6 or more vocabulary meanings. So allowing me to add 3 extra meanings is good, but still doesn't give the students full options. Also, remember how the board can wipe my program off the computer when they reimage the system? I would have to manually walk around and add the additional words, one word at a time to every computer in a lab. And then I could only use that one lab in the school.
Nevertheless, it is a good tool, but it is VERY time consuming for the reasons above and there are entire semesters when I just do not have the energy to reload the computer program - yet again - for my students.
Cheers,
Dan
Saturday, April 4, 2009
On "Internet Safety"
I hope I am not the lone nay-sayer, but I shall play the devil's advocate and say that I wasn't particularly impressed with the article. First of all, the article is full of impressive sounding statistics. 49 % say this....10% do that.....etc.
We do not actually know what the total sample size was and so percent statistics actually tell us very little. And, since we do not know the nature of the actual questions, the posted replies may be misleading.
A number of students were asked for personal information and a number gave personal information. Was this from strangers? Perhaps friends asked for a phone number. That could constitute personal information and will skew the results of the survey. I typically participate in any survey that is aksed of me and I usually find glaring flaws in the types, quantity, and nature of the questions.
Here's an example: at my last school, the principal conducted a survey amongst staff. There were about 100 staff at that school. Following the survey, the principal published the results.
RESULT: of the staff who participated, 50% feel that parking is a concern at the school.
Well. That sounds very impressive. 50% is a big number. Until you realize that only 2 staff answered that particular question and so 50% of those who "participated" is only 1 person.......
This is not to suggest that the researcher is making bad points. But without more data, we cannot actually tell if he is making "good" points. Personally, I never like to use a % where the sample size is less than 100. This makes the data misleading. I do teach philosophy and logic at my school and statistics are a bit of a pet peeve. I find that many people who use them deliberately or stupidly misrepresent the numbers or clump data into certain categories to make numbers look inflated where necessary or deflated in other areas where they deem it necessary.
We also have to be aware of a curious use of vocabulary and mathematics. The author says that 25% of students (unknown sample) reported that someone had asked to meet them. Of that number (namely 25%) 12 percent said they had a bad experience. That is 12% of 25%....why does the author not simply say that 3% had a bad experience.....but we take a percent of a percent and the numbers become very small. I'm afraid to say that this is deliberately misleading. Why are we using the number 12 when the actual number is 3?
The next problem that I have is the apparent comfort that the author has in using student teachers to gather data. He claims that they consider themselves to be teachers (which they are not until they are hired by a board and members of a bargaining unit and the college of teachers). Now I have been a teacher associate for student teachers for a number of years. A student teacher is seldom on site for more than 4 weeks. That four week block may not include any computer lab time at all. The student teachers are typically very busy and often overwhelmed with curriculum and lessons. For those student teachers to offer intelligent or accurate evaluations about internet usage, supervision, or board policies seems to be downright sloppy research. Why not contact the boards for their policies? Or ask school IT committees about policies etc?
Watch the vocabulary again. The survey results do not claim to be accurate. He only claims to report what the student teachers "perceived" which is akin to asking a passenger why a plane crashed instead of asking the pilot. He also prefaces his remarks by saying "those who responded to the survey" meaning that some may not have responded. Apparently only 9% of schools give students talks on safe computer use.....(according to the new, uncertified, never-worked-in-this-school, unfamiliar with the school's policies, student teacher) Or maybe that student teacher never observed a safe computer use lesson, or never asked the right questions etc.
The obvious implication here is that we are flying with no radar in the fog. I will not go so far to the other extreme to say that we do all these things 100% of the time. Surely we don't and surely we can always do better. Of course we can also do this 100% of the time and students may still put themselves at risk regardless.
I think we need to do some things where it comes to internet safety:
1. stop fear-mongering. Yes there are risks and that is where education comes into play. Without any statistics to support this, I would be willing to bet that more students are seriously injured riding bikes without helmets or injured in car accidents with no seatbelts than are injured or abducted through wreckless internet use. Does your school have a bike helmet education session?
2. Prohibition does not work. Does anyone read history? Al Capone? Booze? Or how about Chretien's taxes on cigarettes? Banning students or trying to "control" their usage invariably fails. Our school adopted a new system with safeguards. On the first day of its activation I was in the school library and a student had disabled the net-nanny in about 10 seconds. Maybe less. So too tight controls may not work. But education about safe practices, education for parents, some filters will help. In another post I have commented on potential problems with blogs. But a good feature is that a teacher can actually be the blog moderator if it is their blog. So students can read, post, comment, in a semi-controlled and safe environment. How about introducing students to known and moderated chat sites?
3. Use technology in your class and allow the students to become comfortable and familiar with it. The students probably already know more than many teachers. But if the students have many opportunities to use labs, then it increases the opportunities for teachers to drive the messages home about risks and threats. Now internet safety is not actually a ministry expectation of any course that I teach. But research is and so it is easy to seamlessly blend our lessons in the labs with mini-lessons on safety, ethics, and good conduct.
4. Hand in hand with net safety we should begin to protect our students from identity theft, fraud and phishing. Many students actually have credit cards and we should caution them about the use of personal information on-line.
Cheers,
Dan
We do not actually know what the total sample size was and so percent statistics actually tell us very little. And, since we do not know the nature of the actual questions, the posted replies may be misleading.
A number of students were asked for personal information and a number gave personal information. Was this from strangers? Perhaps friends asked for a phone number. That could constitute personal information and will skew the results of the survey. I typically participate in any survey that is aksed of me and I usually find glaring flaws in the types, quantity, and nature of the questions.
Here's an example: at my last school, the principal conducted a survey amongst staff. There were about 100 staff at that school. Following the survey, the principal published the results.
RESULT: of the staff who participated, 50% feel that parking is a concern at the school.
Well. That sounds very impressive. 50% is a big number. Until you realize that only 2 staff answered that particular question and so 50% of those who "participated" is only 1 person.......
This is not to suggest that the researcher is making bad points. But without more data, we cannot actually tell if he is making "good" points. Personally, I never like to use a % where the sample size is less than 100. This makes the data misleading. I do teach philosophy and logic at my school and statistics are a bit of a pet peeve. I find that many people who use them deliberately or stupidly misrepresent the numbers or clump data into certain categories to make numbers look inflated where necessary or deflated in other areas where they deem it necessary.
We also have to be aware of a curious use of vocabulary and mathematics. The author says that 25% of students (unknown sample) reported that someone had asked to meet them. Of that number (namely 25%) 12 percent said they had a bad experience. That is 12% of 25%....why does the author not simply say that 3% had a bad experience.....but we take a percent of a percent and the numbers become very small. I'm afraid to say that this is deliberately misleading. Why are we using the number 12 when the actual number is 3?
The next problem that I have is the apparent comfort that the author has in using student teachers to gather data. He claims that they consider themselves to be teachers (which they are not until they are hired by a board and members of a bargaining unit and the college of teachers). Now I have been a teacher associate for student teachers for a number of years. A student teacher is seldom on site for more than 4 weeks. That four week block may not include any computer lab time at all. The student teachers are typically very busy and often overwhelmed with curriculum and lessons. For those student teachers to offer intelligent or accurate evaluations about internet usage, supervision, or board policies seems to be downright sloppy research. Why not contact the boards for their policies? Or ask school IT committees about policies etc?
Watch the vocabulary again. The survey results do not claim to be accurate. He only claims to report what the student teachers "perceived" which is akin to asking a passenger why a plane crashed instead of asking the pilot. He also prefaces his remarks by saying "those who responded to the survey" meaning that some may not have responded. Apparently only 9% of schools give students talks on safe computer use.....(according to the new, uncertified, never-worked-in-this-school, unfamiliar with the school's policies, student teacher) Or maybe that student teacher never observed a safe computer use lesson, or never asked the right questions etc.
The obvious implication here is that we are flying with no radar in the fog. I will not go so far to the other extreme to say that we do all these things 100% of the time. Surely we don't and surely we can always do better. Of course we can also do this 100% of the time and students may still put themselves at risk regardless.
I think we need to do some things where it comes to internet safety:
1. stop fear-mongering. Yes there are risks and that is where education comes into play. Without any statistics to support this, I would be willing to bet that more students are seriously injured riding bikes without helmets or injured in car accidents with no seatbelts than are injured or abducted through wreckless internet use. Does your school have a bike helmet education session?
2. Prohibition does not work. Does anyone read history? Al Capone? Booze? Or how about Chretien's taxes on cigarettes? Banning students or trying to "control" their usage invariably fails. Our school adopted a new system with safeguards. On the first day of its activation I was in the school library and a student had disabled the net-nanny in about 10 seconds. Maybe less. So too tight controls may not work. But education about safe practices, education for parents, some filters will help. In another post I have commented on potential problems with blogs. But a good feature is that a teacher can actually be the blog moderator if it is their blog. So students can read, post, comment, in a semi-controlled and safe environment. How about introducing students to known and moderated chat sites?
3. Use technology in your class and allow the students to become comfortable and familiar with it. The students probably already know more than many teachers. But if the students have many opportunities to use labs, then it increases the opportunities for teachers to drive the messages home about risks and threats. Now internet safety is not actually a ministry expectation of any course that I teach. But research is and so it is easy to seamlessly blend our lessons in the labs with mini-lessons on safety, ethics, and good conduct.
4. Hand in hand with net safety we should begin to protect our students from identity theft, fraud and phishing. Many students actually have credit cards and we should caution them about the use of personal information on-line.
Cheers,
Dan
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