EdTechTrek

The concept of creativity and the great opportunities for problem solving that present themselves when individuals are given the luxury to be creative in schools has been on my mind for the past few days. I have been watching my son “play” with the design game, Phun, and it has been very interesting. If you are not familiar with Phun, it is a free, cross-platform creative design environment where the  user can draw what he/she conceives and watch it work. David Perkins would describe this type of software as a “construction kit“. David Jonassen would define it as a “mindtool“. Physical attributes like gravity, wind, water, slope, motor speed and direction… and so much more can all be manipulated. The Phun website describes it in this way:

“The playful synergy of science and art is novel, and makes Phun as educational as it is entertaining.”

and

“Phun is a fantastic toy for children, where they can learn and appreciate physics, science and simulations in an open ended gameplay with rich creative and artistic freedom, including colorful freehand drawing.”

But, the name is so well chosen because it is just so much fun! My son has now spent a great deal of time trying to design creations that work according to his ideas. Because he has had no formal lessons in how to use Phun, it is all trial-and-error and studying some of the predesigned scenes that come with Phun. Through his creative exploration and problem-solving, he is wrestling with concepts that drive the physical world, like gravity, surface tension of water, how water takes the shape of it’s container, how motors can drive actions that get work done, cause and effect - and I could never list them all. We have also been working at things together because I have been so engaged with it as well and want to figure out how to design things that I can conceive in my mind. The social and collaborative aspect of this has been fantastic as we learn together. He shows me as much as I show him. However, my knowledge and experience allows me to ask him the questions he need to be thinking about and considering as he builds… a perfect scaffolding opportunity and chance to make metacognition explicit.

So, how much will happen like this in school this year? How much room is there in the tightly controlled curriculum with preparation for the myriad of tests he will have to take this year for creative problem-solving and strategic opportunities for social, collaborative metacognitive problem-solving and scaffolding? I like the following quoation found on NCREL’s website:

“Recognizing what you do know in a problem, as well as what you don’t yet understand, are aspects of metacognition in problem solving that are similar to a scaffolding approach. Perkins & Solomon (1989) point out that an expert’s behavior appears to be strongly driven by prior knowledge. When faced with an unfamiliar problem, he or she may construct a similar but simpler problem. In this way, the expert learner manages his/her own gradual self-regulation and enables him/herself to grow to meet the new task successfully.”

So, watch the video below, and, if you can indulge yourself, download it and have some Phun. Challenge your students, your children, your neighbors… to have some Phun. It may be the only opportunity for this type of learning they get all year.

I revisited an old tool today - Wordle. I had forgotten about it and wanted to give it a whirl. Wordle creates word clouds from a variety of sources, including text that you paste in, the URL of any blog, blog feed, or any other web page that has an Atom or RSS feed, or it can create a del.icio.us word cloud from a user’s tags.

So, I entered my blog’s URL and the result was this word cloud, which can be customized in many different ways (font, color, layout…). In theory, it visually represents tags or keywords larger than others based upon their frequency of use. I have to admit, I was pleased to see how my cloud displayed in many respects. It would be interesting to do this every month or so and see the evolution (or stagnation) of thought. I wonder if it would accurately represent the main idea or thesis of students’ written work.

The headline “Are Google Maps good or evil?” caught my eye in eschoolnews today. The short piece describes how a tool like Google Maps can be used for both good and evil purposes. The evil is that child predators can use maps, and especially street view with 360 degree panoramas to scope out potential sites, learn routes and hidden nooks and crannies where they can potentially victimize children. The good is that the same tool provides locations and related data of all documented child predators. You can search by state, zip, and even particular address.

The group, StopInternetPredators.org even has a video explaining the potential misuse of this powerful tool when in the hands of predators.

This is a perfect example of a neutral tool that can be used in both positive and negative ways; in positive and powerful ways or in evil and destructive ways. The power of the tool is in the hands of the tool user. We know this to be true in the classroom as well. We have to be so careful in presenting new tools to teachers and make sure that we make the pedagogical case for the tool’s use, not just the trendy or cool uses of the tools. If we don’t give exemplars of powerful learning and ways to manage such messy learning opportunities, then we are simply the educational technology “drug pushers”, getting folks hooked on the “geek factor” rather than the “learning factor”. The former is much easier than the latter, isn’t it (from a true geek at heart)?
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Just thought I would play around a little with live blogging and live video feed all-in-one. Coveritlive now allows this feature of embedding a live video feed from uStream, Mogulus, Qik (from  your phone) video or video from YouTube (that feature already existed… didn’t know) right into your live blog. Below is a screenshot of my tinkering around… was a little slugging, but I was not connected to the best of networks when trying it out.

What it facilitates is a single window in which one can view live video and participate in the conversation with whoever is conducting the live blog. Of course, uStream itself has a live commenting feature if enabled, so I am not sure what the advantage would be here yet, but if you have any thoughts, let me know. On first pass, it does enable the live blogger to be in charge of what is blogged and who’s comments get posted. That can be a great advantage, as I find many times while trying to participate in commenting within uStream that there is a great deal of “noise” and distracting, disjunct conversation. Coveritlive has a number of great producer and panelist features to help manage discussions going on.

Here is another review of these features.

I have been thinking lately of the onslaught of new tools and related learning potential that they hold. Over the past few years there has just been an onslaught of new tools and services out there. Some are still around, some have fallen by the wayside. Many of these tools fall in the Web 2.0 category. (here and here, to list a “few”). The discussions and implementations with EdTech folks have been just as numerous. I totally understand the desire to find those “perfect” tools and tools to transform “same-old” learning into learning that is culturally relevant and personally meaningful. I get that. I think about these things all the time. However, there is something innate in the tech “geek” that drives us on to try every new thing coming down the pike and to abandon tools that worked just fine for newer, shinier, cooler tools that have that one (or 100) extra feature that just makes it superior. Yet, often they are not advantages that the average teacher would take advantage of - or would even care about. Sometimes I think we are doing the typical teacher a disservice with our insatiable appetite for new tools. And, I do get the need in this time to be able to quickly adapt to new tools as old ones become extinct. However, many teachers need simple tools tied to powerful learning opportunities. I think that they feel the same inundation of innovation and simply shut down. We need to sell them on the pedagogical, not the technical. On the true learning innovation, not the innovative tools. On the passion and excitement of being in control of learning, not on controlling learning. On the power of creative production of meaningful learning artifacts, not on glitzy but empty products.

Here is a iPhone product called FriendBook that caught my eye and drove me on to write this post. I used this example in one of my comments on Will Richardson’s latest blog posts titled, “What I Hate About Twitter“. It is an interesting conversation on the value of a tool like Twitter. It is interesting to the the diversity of responses to Will’s initial thoughts. But back to my point - Friendbook allows iPhone users to “beam” to each other their contact information/address book cards.
The headline of the promo states “Business cards are so last year.” There will always be new (communication) tools out there that have advantages and disadvantages. However, we all need to get past those and seek after what is important - not simply cast aside old tools in search of the latest greatest ones. It’s not the business card per se, but the message it conveys and the audience it reaches. I think it is the same with Twitter. It is not the tool per se, but the messages that get conveyed and the audiences who choose to listen and participate.

No tool will do it all FOR us. There is no “Holy Grail” of tools that will make good teaching easy. It takes sweat, tears, devotion, passion, dedication, intelligence, skill, professionalism, continued learning and growth, collaboration, risk-taking, networking, wide reading, deep reading,… and you could add many attributes to this list as well. It does not require a trendy approach to computer applications. There is nothing wrong with the traditional business card if it gets desired results. I fear we are communicating too much that “traditional” = bad and that “cutting edge” = good. This is so wrong, so distorted, so deceptive. My previous post on Good Vs. Effective relates to this a great deal here.

So, let’s get more passionate about learning and less passionate about needing to be “up” on every new tool that gets churned out. Let’s help reading teachers become more effective and passionate about teaching the language arts in powerful and relevant ways. Let’s help math and science teachers become more effective and passionate about teaching and reaching kids in effective ways - in realistic ways. Yes - these ways should include relevant technologies. Don’t abandon digital microscopes or data probes just because they don’t carry a Web 2.0 label. Don’t ignore programming just because it is not your thing. And, don’t get so hung up on tools like Twitter. Get hung up on powerful learning.

To quote Mariana Umaschi Bers who cites Seymour Papert:

“The power of computers for education lies in their potential to assist children in encountering powerful ideas and to engage them in experimenting with and testing these ideas”.