Content Has Been Free For A Long Time

A recent post brings up a nagging question that I have had while reading a lot of edubloggers and even more mainstream media in the last six months. I agree that the Mechanical Universe is excellent. If you watched and understood them you would know a lot of physics. The same of course can be said of reading or listening to all of Feyman's Lectures or even watching Kahn Academy. Then I think to myself, I would learn a lot of physics if I just read Giancoli's Physics (the text for my course). Content being essentially free (say approximately $100, or bus fare to the nearest library) is nothing new. It has been true for my entire life. Why then does free content seem so new to so many people?

Physics teachers make all the physics that is revealed in all the resources above fun, relevant and engaging for students. Teachers make physics matter. Teachers include student stories with their own story and weave in the story that is physics. Teachers nurture a openness to the mysteries of physics that lets us all imagine a new world. Careful, loving, thoughtful, inventive story weaving makes every participant, the teacher, the student and physics itself a new creation.

A Posture Of Listening

Listening is important. I have only been married four years, but I know that closing the laptop and listening makes or breaks a conversation with my wife. The same is true at school, especially in my job as a technology coordinator, where I regularly listen to teachers talk about their classes and the lessons they would like to add technology into. 

I think listening is most important because it honors the image of God in the person you are talking to. There is something of God that is revealed in each of us, and truly listening to another person can uncover that nugget of God you would have otherwise missed. 

As I thought about this during a class this summer I reinvented my workspace to reflect the importance of listening. The pictures are before and after pictures of my desk. Screens no longer get in the way of my view of the other technology coordinator, with whom I plan all sorts of different events, lessons and technology implementations. I also removed the screen that was in the way of me actually using the conference end of our desks, I will be able to stay at my desk and join a conversation on the semicircle without distraction. I am using both inputs on the monitor still on my desk to use my desktop and add to my laptop if needed. 

I also adressed some issues of equity related to those I am listening to. There is now gigabit ethernet for them to connect their laptops to. There are more comfortable chairs on wheels for guests. There is a power adapter for a teacher or student to charge their laptop while at a meeting. 

I am hoping that these changes make listening physically easier, and thereby will increase my effectiveness in helping teachers and students be creative technology users. By allowing them greater creativity I will be allowing them to reflect the image of God better in themselves. 

Blog, forum or journal?

Today I got this email...

For this class, I have to create a website for an assignment, and am struggling with how to do this and not just be reinventing the wheel since we already do Moodle, Quia, Posterous...   I want it to be useful, and I've been wanting to do on-line journals for some time now. 

Can I pick your brains for ideas?  I'd like to do something interactive and get them writing a lot more in Spanish.   It would be my dream to have students keep on-line journals where they'd have to write 1x or 2x/week in Spanish responding to in-class topics and discussions.   It would be great if the students could decide if each entry would be private or public (but obviously I'd like to read them all).  I'm not sure if a blogger site would be the best option for this.  Do you know of any site where I could, as a teacher, manage their journals? It would be sort of a mix between a forum and a blog. I'd like for them to be able to log in and have all their journals on one page so they could see their progress, like a blog.  It would be great for me as a teacher to be able to see each student's entry to a particular discussion all on one page as well so I don't have to click on 70 different blogs to give them a grade. 


Here is my response, what would you have said?

Thanks for asking. First of all what a great idea to have a space where kids can share widely but also share with just you. I think that will allow kids who are not as confident in their voice to get started and make mistakes and eventually come out of their shell as Spanish writers and share with a wider audience. You can also share blog links with parents so they can keep up as well.

I have a couple of ideas. There is no perfect solution to your problem, just thinking off the top of my head. Posterous allows kids to have posts be private. If they would then invite you to be a contributor I think you can see the private posts as well. You can the either subscribe in Posterous and get an email whenever there is a new post, or add them to Google Reader and read them there (that is what I do with student blogs).

Everyone at school has a google apps account now. You could have them keep a journal in a google doc that they share with you. That would be completely private to the two of you. Then they could keep a separate blog (any blog software they like: we have had kids use our internal blog server, Posterous, Blogger, Shutterfly, and every student has a blog in moodle as well) where they would post pieces of the journal that they desire getting public comment on.

I would think about using our internal blog server as well. Everyone has a blog there by default, but for this we would create new ones with you and the student as a blogging group. Then posts could be marked private to the group only or public.

I have to admit the private/public nature of your request is a little different. Most teachers want either one or the other. From reading about the process of blogging by some of the people who have opened up about their work flow I think that the Google Docs option mimics most closely what bloggers do. They write many things for themselves and a few of them show up as public pieces that they actually post. To me this model make that option very attractive, but it would require following two different places that they post.

If you get any other ideas please tell me. Thanks for asking.

What Is Curriculum?

I am a big fan of not using paper. I have to admit I am not sure how to duplicate in a technical way these 4 most essential posters created during the curriculum class that I just took. At any time anyone could go over to the poster and write on the wall what curriculum is. It created a space where we as a class opened up our ideas of curriculum. It kept that fundamental questions in front of us all the time. 

Project Based Learning Resources

I had great conversation yesterday about project based learning. I think a well designed project with an authentic audience is the thing that all students need. The conversation surrounded the benefits to honors students. I followed up with this email.

Here is a blog post with some project resources. Specifically this document mentioned in that post is a document I read over before finalizing any plans for a project.

Edutopia.org, in spite of the very idealistic name, is also an excellent resource. Here is a great reading list of their favorite articles on project based learning.

Two last things, both of them personal. Here is a link to my blog. Here is a link to where I keep my web bookmarks on projects. It will update as I find new interesting things.