EdTechTrek

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”.

Space is limited. Bandwidth is limited. I ran across this article from MacWorld and thought I would share it with you, as I found it a useful resource. The tidbit that I liked the most was learning about Vimeo, which offers a “family friendly” viewing option, as we all know that using free resources often exposes our viewers to advertisements, hyperlinks, and limited control. That option could be very useful with posting video for students as well. Of course, posting your videos on wiki or blog will do the trick, assuming you have enough storage space to host your own video content and sufficient bandwidth to deliver the content to your audience. Below is a table that you will find in the article that summarizes basic features.

Sorry for the corny title (from Fiddler On the Roof, if you missed it). I couldn’t resist. A tweet came by last night from Kathy Schrock asking to follow a URL to try out a new chat service called ChatMaker. I bit and had a little fun. Within minutes there were a dozen or more folks entering the chat. It was amazing to see how quickly a tweet could spark a “conversation”. I put that in quotation marks because it was pretty disjunct. After trying it for a few minutes, I went and set up my own chat to give it a whirl. I then tweeted the URL and within minutes a few followers had joined and we chatted about the tool and some possibilities. A pleasant surprise was when a new acquaintance from NYSCATE ‘08 entered the chat and we were actually able to have a meaningful discussion.

So, what do I think about this chat tool? Well, it couldn’t be easier to set up. All you need to do is give your chat a name and the service generates a URL that you can share. There are no other settings or configurations. That’s it. Those who have the URL can join and specify their name or handle when they enter the chat. So, for ease of use, I would give it a 10. However, I do have some concerns after exploring a few things. First of all, once you title your chat, it remains even after you finish the chat. You have no way do modify it or delete it. If you called it something like I did (TechTalk), someone can easily find it by experimenting with chat titles. Although the entire chat may not be retrievable if it was a long one, much of it remains and is visible. This alone makes me think twice about how I would use it. My advice would be to title your chat with random letters, numbers, dashes and underscores (like sjdkl_16_tjl-9) so that those fishing could not stuble across it if privacy was somewhat of a concern.

Give it a try. It is a quick way to set up a local software-free, browser-based, OS independent chat. But, if security or privacy is a concern, name it wisely. And remember, if it is on-line, it is not private!

“Once the technology is sunk deep enough into the culture, the social effects that get built on it simultaneously require the technology and aren’t about the technology.”

~Clay Shirkey

So true.

Yet we must continually examine those “social effects” rather than get too giddy about the required technologies. Too many discussions are focused on these required technologies (and a google alternatives) rather than looking hard at the social effects that result from new technological “enablers”. Taking the view of Neil Postman and others, technology is not always enabling “good” things. Seamless, transparent technology is certainly the goal in the classroom so that it is the learning that is the focus, not the technology. Otherwise, learning outcomes become secondary to the exciting new technologies and users become blinded by the “technology delusion”. This reminded my of an article worth reading and thinking about, written by Todd Oppenheimer in 1997, titled, The Computer Delusion. Things have evolved since he wrote it, but it is still worth reading. I love this last quotation:

“The purpose of the schools [is] to, as one teacher argues, ‘Teach carpentry, not hammer,’” he testified. “We need to teach the whys and ways of the world. Tools come and tools go. Teaching our children tools limits their knowledge to these tools and hence limits their futures.”

A good reminder…