The Quest for the EduGrail....Empowering digitally respectful citizens

As our district really begins to explore the uses of the digital world to improve educational opportunities, the powers that be are really grappling with the balance between network and data security and allowing students access to all the tools that empower and engage them.

Currently we see pockets of school administrators and teachers finding ways around the restrictions placed on them. This to me serves only to exasperate the situation. In discussions with our district's Tech managers, the countless number of times that students have abused their internet access are used as justification for the pretty heavy handed censorship that the filters our district has purchased provide. To me the solution lies in our ability to educate and empower our students to be respectful and responsible digital citizens. This is part of a greater goal to work towards intrinsically motivated students. Something that I have been calling our EduGrail. The holy grail of education. We have yet to discover a one stop shop solution to student misuse of the internet. Along the way we have found pieces of the puzzle. One such piece is the ideas that stem from "Choice Theory".

Choice Theory (originally called Control Theory) was first coined so by William Glasser in the early 1970's. The mega-paraphrasical version of Choice Theory, would state that all behaviour has purpose and that the purpose is to meet one of five needs. The five needs being freedom, fun, belonging, power and physical survival. Now you take Glasser's work with choice theory and reality therapy, an understanding of a personal quality world and the circle of courage from the First Nations and you get an excellent base of knowledge that Diane Gossen (a former student of the Glasser Institute) has masterfully woven together and called "Restitution".

Restitution has long been thought of as the pay back. However, the Restitution that Gossen teaches is actually a pay forward. She has constructed many strategies to help students be responsible and respectful in the classroom and on the playground. So it only makes sense to work to bring these ideas into the digital world. Gossen's book, "It's All About We" is an important read for all educators. It helps us understand the motivation behind the behaviour and the path to ensuring that if mistakes are made that blame, shame, and punishment are counterproductive. If a child (or anyone for that matter) can repair the relationship that was damaged by the mistake then he/she returns to that community feeling strengthened as does those who's needs were infringed upon. Gossen's ideas are not only for when a mistake is made, but more relevant to this blog post, her ideas serve as an excellent framework for explicitly teaching what it means to be a digitally respectful and responsible citizen. The next several posts will be break down various key concepts from Gossen's resources and how they apply to elementary students using the internet in a responsible and respectful way. Your thoughts on this matter would be greatly appreciated as it would help shape the conversation. There is nothing better than debate to motivate research.

A caveat to this post. My experience with elementary students using the internet and other digital tools has convinced me that not only do the vast majority of the students use the internet appropriately, but they also are quite savvy when it comes to not being exploited. However, it only takes a minimal number of negative cases to stir up the safety nets. So, really, this is an attempt to create a curriculum that justifies the unfiltered use of the internet to the powers that be.

A New Type of Search Engine

Google has done such an amazing job branding itself. The ease and simplicity of its search engine is spectacular. The challenge faced by educators is how to guide students to use Google in an efficient way. Well what I believe is happening, as it often does, is that the web is morphing to meet the need. New breeds of search engines are being developed. Search engines that endeavour to help the user meta-sort. The following is my experience with three such search engines:

Searchme.com

iTouch meets Google as this search engine allows you to see 1/2 size webpages that match your query. It is currently in public beta. The "new" feature here is the meta sorting that is done for the searcher prior to actually hitting the search button. For example, our grade one students are currently studying butterflies.
As you type in the word butterflies, the search engine provides you with tags to choose from that allow the student to narrow the search. For example, in the case of butterflies, the students are able to narrow the search to the "INSECTS" tag. The extremely visual aspect of the search engine really appeals to the students.


KartOO.com

This is a very interesting concept. KartOO is a metasearch engine with visual display interfaces. When you click on OK, KartOO launches the query to a set of search engines, gathers the results, compiles them and represents them in a series of interactive maps through a proprietary algorithm. Each page displayed in the map is visually linked to the various tags that apply. Again, this allows the user to narrow the search through tags.


Del.icio.us (as a search engine)

The algorithm here is really the number of people who felt this site to be worthy enough to add it to their account. Dollars to donuts this, to me, is the best rating system on the net. The reason I like using del.icio.us as a search engine is because you, not only get a good array of website, but you also end up being able to create a network of people with like interests as you. In addition, if you RSS the particular tag that you are searching, you will continue to get additional search results as people tag good websites.

I have yet to really unearth the algorithm that these search engines use. You can bet that it won't take online commercialism long to figure them out and exploit them to ensure that their product shows up first and/or often. I was showing these to a group of students from grade 1-3 who are in our advanced reading group. We were comparing the various search engines and one of my grade 3 students proceeded to explain to me that if you and your friends create enough accounts on facebook, myspace, various blogs, and various other networking sites and then ensure that they all link to each other you can ensure that when you type your name into Google, you will be at the top of the list. He and his friends couldn't tell me what algorithm meant, but they sure got the concept.

The final piece around searching that is relatively new to the education field is using RSS to extend the life of your search. But this is for another post.

Blogging from F.E.T.C. 2008 Introduces Blogging to my Staff and Students

Even though I knew that the school would be in the capable hands of a great staff, I had great reservations about being away from the school for a whole week. So I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I blogged the experience and linked that blog to our school web-page. The experience introduced the concept to my staff. It also served as a catalyst to remind staff and students to email me to keep me abreast of the comings and goings of our little school.

In addition to archiving all the web-based resources I learned about, the process of blogging my experiences made me reflect on what I was learning. I was taken aback by the real sense of audience that the comments from our students gave me.

Here is the end result

Web 2.0 Assignment Teaches Efficient Collaboration

Our staff was looking to find out what was the community inventory of technology. So rather than me putting together a survey and sending it home to families, I took advantage of the fact that I get to work with an advanced group of mathematicians. This group of gr. 7 students really enjoy being challenged.

We met in the, soon to be dispersed, computer lab around a table and brainstormed strategies for attacking this problem. First issue was what does a survey look like. So rather than reinvent the wheel, the students jumped onto the internet and began using the boolean searching skills they had just learned the day prior. As each student found good examples of questions that we could use for our technology inventory survey, they posted them to a del.icio.us account that one of the students had created. The rule was that each student had to annotate the link so that the other students could evaluate the value of the link. Once they were satisfied with the variety of survey questions, their homework (over the weekend) was to log onto Google Docs and collectively build a 30 question survey.

Originally, the Google Doc was going to be printed off and sent home, but instead, one of the students was simultaneously typing the questions in to surveymonkey.com as the group was adding them to Google Docs. On Monday, the students presented me with a survey that was both in hardcopy and as a link from our school web-page. All I had to do was send out an email request to the parent-listserve asking them to respond to the survey and bingo bango, surveymonkey collected and collated the data over the next two weeks. In two weeks we had a large enough sample to be able to make some decisions.

Two Ways to Digitize Assessment

I'd thought I'd relaunch my blog with a practical and celebratory post. We have recently purchased 4 new digital cameras for our school. In as of itself, this is no big deal. However, the way that our teachers are beginning to use them has gone a long way in shifting the paradigm of what "integrating technology" looks like.

Photos as reflection prompts
This is a strategy that I used as a teacher before becoming a principal and it has really caught the imagination of our staff. Let me set the task first. Our staff has been discussing ways to reduce the paper use in our school. So a possible numeracy task that we could set up for our intermediate students is to calculate the cost (both financial and environmental) of running a school. A task like this one require that students work in groups. It requires them to identify some possible variable and to work collaboratively to solve for those variables. This endeavor, like many numeracy tasks, provides a relevant reason to play with math. The rub for the educator is how to capture this dynamic process in order to be able to evaluate it. Far too often, due to lack of motivation or simply weak written output skills, students are not able to articulate their process in writing. This is where technology enters the scene. During the class, the educator wanders from group to group snapping relevant photos, capturing key progressions in the students' work. Then simply uploads these photos into a word template, prints off the photos with guiding questions like - What was your group's struggle with at this point (as shown by the photo) in the process? Then prints them off and hands them to the group to reflect on. We have found that because of the photo prompt, students are able to articulate their process in far greater detail, thus allowing educators guide the next days lesson and also to evaluate their students' progress. Even better, one of our teachers created private blogs for a number of his students and posted the digital pictures to the blog and the students from each group could reflect on the photo and also comment on each other's reflections.

Vid clips change group dynamics
Recently our grade 5/6 teacher was looking for a way to improve the focus during literature circles. He decided to use a fish bowl activity. In the past, this activity was extremely contrived. He would choose a group to volunteer to be observed by the rest of the class and then comment on the dynamics of the discussion. Because the group was so self-conscious of their classmates watching, the student learning became canned. Students played roles and the observing students identified issues that had been taught in a previous lesson. So rather that do the fish-bowl activity, our teacher popped around to each group and digitized 30 second clips of each group during their discussions. Some groups were aware of the camera, but once this became routine practice, all the groups ignored the camera. The teacher was then able to conference with each group, showing them their group discussion and providing them with feedback on their group dynamics. The change in the level of engagement and respect for opinions has been astronomical. I have been chatting with this teacher about using VoiceThread.com or some other form of networkable application to have the students archive comments about the video clips and have these interactions as part of their online digital portfolio.