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Jeff Utecht

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I have a lot of plans this summer as most international educators do. Toping the list as always is visiting friends and family back home. But other than that I’m looking forward to the NECC conference. This will be my first time attending the conference as before moving overseas I could never afford it, and now that I’m overseas, I still can’t afford it. 🙂 At least my school is helping to pick up part of the bill putting much less strain on the old bank account.

I’m excited to meet new people and others who I’ve had conversations with here and other places on the web. If you’re going to be at NECC please feel free to look me up and have a chat. I’ll try and post my schedule here before the conference starts…there’s just to many good things to do and see and of course I want to do it all.

Other then NECC my summer is shaping up to be a full load of fun again with an around the world trip that includes:

2 nights in Singapore
3 Days in Cape Town diving with Great Whites
10 Days in Durban and the wild coast following the sardine run
NECC for 4 days
and who knows what else!

It’s a rough life, but somebody has to live it. 🙂

This seems to be the thing at the moment so I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon. Go to this site and put in a web address and enjoy looking at your personal network.

The Thinking Stick

U Tech Tips-Technology for Educators

U Tech Tips is a much larger network as we link to Edtech articles and other resources on the web. What a great tool to use when explaining the power of networks to both educators and students.

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Clarence Fisher posted this picture today from Gaping Void and states:

zzaaaaaaa05.jpg
Â…this says what education is all about these days.

I couldnÂ’t agree more. IÂ’ve been thinking about my posting a while back on education being perpetual beta.

Perpetual Schools: A theme for many educators is the idea that schools are ever evolving to meet the real-time demands of students. Rather than release scheduled theory updates. Educators like Google will add features as they become available and adapt dynamically to their students’ requirements, which are in turn de facto ‘testers.’

Instead of looking like the Gaping Void picture perpetual education looks like this:

Perpetual Learning


Not just re-inventing but continually improving. That is the theory behind beta products. In a beta product you donÂ’t just continually improve the options within the product, but you continually look for new things to add to the product that improve it, make it more relevant and more user friendly. In education that would mean not just looking at writing for example and the writing process, but how you could expand that writing to more audiences. To cover different types of writing and improve the writing system that already exists. The evolution of blogs in the classroom is a perfect example. Clarence and his students continue to find new ways to improve their blogs and to reflect on the writing process.

This week we’ve gone one step further by having the blog posts of the week not have to be written by someone in our class.

This is just one more step the students have made. ItÂ’s been fun to watch ClarenceÂ’s students grow with the blogs and continually find new ways to use them and improve them. From podcasting to linking to other classes the students, when giving the freedom to do so will create their own learning situations.

The kids wanted to expand the network, asking why the blog posts of the week had to come from our class. Could they not consider the work of others?

The kids become the driving force behind the education, as a teacher you just need to get out of their way and let them learn. David Warlick touched on this as well in Curriculum is Dead:

Anyway, the point is this. Education, defined by its limits, required a curriculum that was packaged into products that could be easily used in the classroom. We used textbooks with scope and sequence, pacing guides, and a teacherÂ’s guide with the answers.

Education, defined by it’s lack of limits, requires no such packaging. It’s based on experiences, tied to real-world, real-time information that spans the entire spectrum of media — crafted an facilitated by skilled teachers, who become more like tour guides than assembly-line workers.

When you take the limits of education away and just allow learning to take place, the real perpetual activities begin. Once you allow education to become perpetual then perpetual learning takes place.

Perpetual Learning: An idea that knowledge is ever evolving to meet the real-time demands of learners. Rather than release scheduled theory updates, learners, like Google, will add features as they become available and adapt dynamically to their ever changing environment, which in turn makes learners de facto ‘testers.’

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Read this on techcrunch today:

San Francisco based Bebo popped a
few bottles of champagne and announced a very healthy $15 million round
of financing, led by Benchmark Capital. Bebo is one of the largest and
fastest growing social networks, with 24 million users and 2.5 billion
page views per month.

More from PaidContent and Jeff Clavier.

This is a deeply funded market niche. Market leader Myspace is owned by News Corp. Facebook is funded to the hilt. Friendster is backed by Kleiner Perkins (and Benchmark before the recap). Newcomer Tagworld raised a healthy $7.5 million from DFJ. And tagged, focused on much younger audiences, raised $7m from Mayfield.

Bebo is focusing on non-U.S. growth, particularly the UK. That makes
a lot of sense. The U.S. market is completely saturated between Myspace
and Facebook.

If you can’t add that fast, let me help you. That’s 29.5 million dollars that has just been invested in online social sites. Myspace was only the beginning. We better find a way to use these tools in the classroom or we are going to loose our students to a social world. If we think banning these sites is an option whether through laws like DOPA or by filtering think again. Bebo has 2.5 billion pages viewed per month…I wonder how many of those are during school?

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sms competition

Originally uploaded by GuyBrighton.

Just had to share this. I was on the bus home today, having a little fun texting my Chinese teacher (in Chinese Pingyin of course) when I looked at the seat diagonal to me and saw an 8th grader texting as well. The difference: I texted one message in the same amount of time he texted about 5. His thumbs where moving so fast, that I couldn’t even see which keys he was pressing. Also, I noticed that his phone was nothing new; in fact the screen cover was half ripped off leaving half the screen exposed. He didn’t seem to care, he was to busy texting. I hope I catch him on the bus again tomorrow so we can have a chat.

I’m also amazed at the extra 45 minutes of Chinese lessons I got today texting my teacher. We went back and forth about making plans to have dinner before I leave for the summer. She was on a different bus with about an hour ride as well, so it was time well spent. Learning in motion, pretty soon she’s gonna charge me for these lessons. 🙂

My 25% PD came in the form of an hour bus ride this morning. There was enough thought provoking information in that 1 hour, I feel, to be considered my 25% PD for the week.

I’m really starting to love this hour bus ride I have in the morning. Of course I’m not driving which makes all the difference, and I’m finally getting a system down for loading podcasts on my Palm T5. So yesterday I read Will’s post Engaging Teachers, and then went to Ewan’s site to get the link to the Marc Prensky podcast (There’s connectivism for ya!). So this morning I was excited to jump on the bus sit back and listen. Listen I did, but the sitting back part lasted about 2 minutes as I found myself quickly scrambling for a piece of paper to take notes on.

A Flat World: This hit me about 5 minutes into the podcast. Here I sit on a bus in Shanghai listening to a presentation that I would have never had the opportunity to listen to with such ease just 5 years ago. On top of that we talk about how information is becoming free, but in this case it’s actually saving me money. If I were to fly to Shropshire to actually attend Prensky’s presentation the flight alone would have cost me about $1,000. That doesn’t include hotel, food, etc. So I’m sure it’s about $2,000 by the time everything is said and done. Instead, I’ll spend that $2,000 while in South Africa this summer and still get the information. I thank Marc and the Shropshire County Council for saving me $2,000 and allowing me to listen in on the presentation.

“If people want to learn, they will find a way.”
Prensky says this at one point at the beginning of the podcast and makes reference to China. He is absolutely correct. I’m telling you, if you want to test out just how strong your firewall and proxy servers are, have an exchange student from China join your school. I have learned way more than I ever wanted to know about ways to get around a proxy or firewall. China is doing all it can to filter the information, but if you want to learn something or really want to go to this or that site, there’s a way to do it. If we engage our students in the learning process, make learning meaningful for them, they’ll learn it. ItÂ’s that “If you build it, they will come” attitude. If you put in place the educational structures for students to be engaged in learning, to have fun and for the learning to be relevant to their lives, than education takes on a whole new meaning.

Immigrants vs. Natives:
I know that most people feel this analogy is over done, and it probably is. But it still hits home with me. I wonder if that’s because I’ve been an immigrant and can relate to what Prensky is talking about. Have you ever been an immigrant? I was an immigrant to Saudi Arabia and now to China, and so maybe I have a different take on the message. When Prensky talks about ‘having an accent’ and that we carry that accent with us I understand what he’s talking about. I’m sure that others who have immigrated do as well. For me I think of it as taking a piece of the homeland with you. My favorite one lately is, “E-books are OK, but they’ll never replace a paper book.” That’s an immigrant that can’t let go of the homeland and has an accent. They’ve tried the new way, but it just can’t beat what they know. When you are immigrating to a new country, your home country all of a sudden doesn’t seem so bad. I only remember the good things about living in American and now in Saudi Arabia. Yesterday when it was raining my wife and I said on a number of occasions “I sure miss Saudi!” something we never thought we would say. We talk about customer service and how back in America the customer service is ‘wonderfu’ ‘awesome’ ‘customer’s always right’ etc. But we forget the three months it took just to get our cell phone bill’s address changed.

Not only do you have an accent the old way becomes better over time.

Will e-books ever replace paper books for immigrants? Not for those who have an accent in paper books. For them the hard to read, always looking for the right light, loosing your page number paper book is the only proper way to read a book. Immigrants have accents in different areas. We don’t all harp on the same thing. Some still print off e-mails, others will never use SMS, and Wikipedia will always be an unedited unreliable source. So maybe it’s because I live as an immigrant every day. The difference in language, in communication, and in knowing your way around, or your lack of it that leaves you with an accent whether it be technology or another country.

Prensky, with a couple slides, tells teachers not to waste time mastering new technology tools. That change is too rapid and by the time we learn how to use the tool and then how to implement the tool, the tool will be out of use. Instead allow the students to learn and use the tools. Something I’ve been thinking about is focusing on short term content. With content changing at such a rapid pace, should we not be teaching students how to find the information they need, use it, and then forget it? Isn’t this what we do in real life? A perfect example is my trip to South Africa this summer. Right now I can give you the best web site for finding flights, the different routes to and from Cape Town and who has the best rental car rates. But ask me in 3 months, I probably won’t be able to remember. That information is only relevant to me at this point in time. Another example: The 5th graders are deep into a Million Dollar Project created by the 5th grade team. These kids have to spend 1 million dollar with the only stipulation that they have to “do good” so we’re saving the tiger in India, building orphanages in China and bringing medicine to children in Zimbabwe. But after this project is over in two weeks what will they remember? They learned everything they needed to know about starving people in Zimbabwe, what they need, and how to help them. But when the project is over will they need that content? Or better yet, will they remember that content 1 year from now? Probably not, but will they remember the skills they learned about Excel and PowerPoint; how to create a graph and use multiple worksheets and how to put together a presentation that you don’t read slide by slide? Those are the skills they will walk away with. The content is just the vehicle to learn the skills. I’m not saying that content is not important, just less important than the skills learned. When this project is said and done the presenter might remember something about Zimbabwe, but there’s a pretty good chance the audience won’t.

We need to engage students in the learning process. Every good teacher knows that, but what we fail to do is engage them using their tools, their skills, and their knowledge. Instead we take our immigrant accent and how we believe things should be, and force it on the natives…I’d make an analogy here, but IÂ’ll leave politics out of this. 😉

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PC World in it’s May 2006 magazine has release 101 Fabulous Freebies. Some great tools, most I’ve heard of, but as usual many I have missed out on and want to try. They even have a whole category on Blogging Tools, RSS Readers, and Video Sharing.  A good resource when talking to teachers about how the web is changing. Thanks to Open-Source and Creative Common licensing these tool  just keep getting better and better.

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I received an e-mail today from next year’s principal asking us to create and give a short description of the electives we want to teach next year. So this got me thinking what would be the perfect technology elective? If you had unlimited budget and flexibility, what would you teach to 6,7,8 graders?

I haven’t written the description yet for the class I want to teach, and it hasn’t even been approved yet. But here is the elective I submitted:

Media 2.0

The class would consist of everything 2.0. Really bring all these new tools into the hands of the students and let them experiment with them. At this point I envision a blog with a title Tech for Teens or something like that. The students would create podcasts about technology tools, do how to screencasts for teens, talk about research skills  and other sites besides Google to use for researching homework. I would love to have a weekly video podcast doing like a CNET style review of the latest teen gadgets. The new cell phone, the new mp3 player, or the hottest new online game. Of course being in China would mean looking at the option of having the site both in English and Chinese.

The elective of course would be aimed at the techno student. Allowing students an opportunity to experience these new tools and review them for others. I believe it falls within the guidelines of the middle school elective philosophy:

Middle School Electives allow students to choose an additional courses which are intended to enrich or allow a student to specialize in a particular subject area of their choice.  Middle school students are encouraged to explore curricular and personal interests that they found motivational and interesting in their regular coursework within the elective format.

Thoughts?

I’ve been having problems with Tim Lauer’s feed for awhile now and thought maybe Tim was the latest victim of the China filter. But today the feed started working again, so I’m back reading Education/Technology.

Tim posted about a comment he found on iTunes when looking for podcasts. Tim came across a recording of The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin and one of the comments reads:

200604162214

How great is that? And where was iTunes when I was reading the Grapes of Wrath?

Here’s the thing. What do you do with this kid? Is he/she cheating? Is there a difference between reading a book and listening to a book? I’m a huge fan of audible.com and usually have one or two audio books on my T5 at any given time. I have always found reading difficult and spent most of my elementary life in the ‘resource room’ getting extra help in reading and writing. So I understand how this student might feel.

I guess it comes down to the reason for reading the book. If the purpose for reading the book was to further reading development then yes the student would be cheating. But if the reason for reading the book is to have a dialog about characters, about U.S. history and the time period and comprehending the literature, then would listening to the book be sufficient?

Should this student be punished or should they be commended on their resourcefulness?

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Time got away from me today. But here is what I consider my PD for the week.

Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog
Doin’ something about DOPA  (and all the links that go with it!)
Interview questions

David Warlick’s 2 cents worth Blog
Why Kids Blog
The Cost of Information

Christopher Harris (Infomancy )
School Library 2.0

http://www.overduemedia.com/ If you’re a librarian and not reading this you are missing out on a daily laugh. My personal favorite:

From gapingvoid

youcannothaveitall.jpg

imagination allows.jpg

http://www.bitsplitter.net/vagablog/  a piece of software I’m trying to get to work on my Palm T5 for moblogging at NECC so I don’t have to carry around my laptop. So far I’ve been unsuccessful. Not sure if it’s the schools network or if I have something set up wrong.

Using RSS feeds and RSS feed readers  A screencast I made this week for U Tech Tips. No better way to learn something than to teach it to others.