Ideas for Google Wave in the Classroom

Google Wave has been out long enough now that I think I can start using it in the classroom. I've invited all of my students and most of the invites have gone through. Now all I have to do is figure out what I'm going to do with it.

1. (Stolen from Teachpaperless) A running learning log
2. Keeping track of grades (would be helpful if spreadsheet functionality were included
3. A gradually unfolding online lesson
4. Realtime document collaboration (as cool as this is, it's getting a bit stale)
5. Inviting community expert participation
6. Dialogue journals
7. Your thoughts?

I like to think of Wave and email+chat+Docs, but I wonder if there is any other paradigm stuck in there that I'm missing.

Wiimote Whiteboard on Asus eee running Ubuntu 9.10

The video speaks for itself, but to elaborate on a few points:

1. Sorry I sound so geeky and nervous.
2. It's a demo video, not really a howto video.
3. I did everything I could to NOT use the word democratize
4. I think this technology has a great deal of potential for cash-strapped school districts.

Aus frischen kartoffeln

I did a fresh install of 9.10 on my computer and thus am having to reinstate some things. Including old photos. I was browsing through the past when I came across my photos from my short trip to Berlin in 2005. It was a wonderful getaway.

I hopped on a train early one morning from Poznan and arrived in Berlin a few hours later. I was a bit bleary, but managed to stroll around, find my hostel, and go get fed. The potato pancakes--from fresh potatoes--with applesauce were sehr gut.

Passion for projects

I finished reading Passion for Learning the other day.



I thought I was going to hate it, frankly, but it ended up being one of those books that reached out and grabbed me. The book focuses on the method practiced at the Minnesota New Country School, which is focused largely on independent projects. Students are given a book with all of the state standards and are guided towards crafting projects that explore these standards. Yes, the kids plan their own projects. Advisors are on hand to check and suggest as necessary, but the kids decide what they're going to do.

Something struck me about that. I've had project-based learning shoved down my throat ever since I crossed the threshold, but nowhere in the rhetoric I heard was it ever proposed that students could have a say in what they learn. There are feints at learner autonomy, of course, but as long as teachers are expected to grade each student by the same rubric, then each student must do more or less the same work.

The people at this school completely altered the school paradigm and went to the "open classroom" format that was popular in the 70s. The students have work groups that are not necessarily age-graded and there is plenty of room for independent workspace. The projects described in the book were pretty far-reaching and authentic, and the kids seemed to enjoy the learning, I mean work, I mean...

The cynic is me wondered whether or not the reports were trumped up. Most of the kids profiled listed working out at the gym as a PE project. Of course, they might take data from their workouts and manipulate them, but that wasn't made clear. I wonder if the teachers there are caught in the same trap as many public teachers, that of cooking the lesson plans in order to make the ordinary seem fantastic.

On a tech note, I've got the Wii Whiteboard up and running again. I've been trying to make a decent video, but I can't get it quite right. I'll post one up when it's ready.

Smartboard in a backpack

The dream has finally come true. I can now fit an entire interactive whiteboard system into a backpack. I updated my eee to the newest Ubuntu last night, leaving eeebuntu in the dust, and noticed in the repository a cute little package called gtkwhiteboard. It worked. Right. Out. Of. The. Box.

$200 - eee 901
$500 - projector
$ 50 - wiimote
$ 0 - software (it's free)
--------
$750 Complete interactive whiteboard system

Compare that with 3k for just a Smartboard (no computer or projector). Also, did I mention that the wiiboard can work on any surface, hard or soft?

Video:

Laptop for every pupil in Uruguay

BBC NEWS | Technology | Laptop for every pupil in Uruguay: "'This is not simply the handing out of laptops or an education programme. It is a programme which seeks to reduce the gap between the digital world and the world of knowledge,' explained Miguel Brechner, director of the Technological Laboratory of Uruguay and in charge of Plan Ceibal."

OK. It's game time. An entire country has stepped up to the plate to arm (yes, arm) its students with digital literacy and inquiry skills. Our country arms its students with #2 pencils and shallow thinking skills. I'm not saying that simply sitting kids in front of a computer will do the trick (although Sugar is a great interface that is *wonderful* for kids), but dime for dime I can't think of a more effective method of differentiating instruction, inspiring curiosity, empowering students, and "democratizing" education. I hate the word democratizing, but it's all I could think of at the moment.

Maybe in the 2029 version of Shift Happens, American teachers will be comparing their students to those in Uruguay rather than India.

I had a spirited conversation a few weeks ago with a guy who said that America was a poor country if you gauge a country's wealth by its most vulnerable members. While I didn't agree with him in degree, I can clearly see where he was coming from. We're pumping oodles of dough into bald initiatives that get shoved under teachers' noses while they are already dealing with the pressures that the schools they are measured against simply don't experience. This money could be spent on on addressing those fundamental differences, but instead are spent on programs to drive up standardized test scores, no matter the opportunity cost.

Slowly Spreading

Oh dear, I fear my wild ways may be spreading. I know I've been ranting on and on about Google Docs in my class (which is also why I haven't written in a good long minute--I've been riding the good times), but I'm going to do it one more time. I invited the teacher next door over to have a peek at what my kids were doing and she was positively excited.

My beginner ELLs were analyzing the book they had just read in a spreadsheet. I projected the document from my laptop so she could see better. The book had activities listed on different days of the week and the kids had to type what the main character had done on each particular day. Nothing major, mostly reading practice. I used the GoogleTranslate feature to automatically translate what they were writing back into Spanish so they could get immediate feedback. It worked like a charm. Oh, and did I mention that they were doing this stuff on ten-year-old hardware?

On the hardware front, four of my xubuntu babies are now floating around the school. Now I'm using reconstructor to build a custom distro just for these machines. It's a bit clunky, though. We'll see how it goes with my next convert.

I'm still wondering about Kindles, if anybody is feeling terribly generous. I'm also interested in finding ways to push content directly to my students desktops, but I have no idea how to do this. As it stands, I send them URLs. Any help?

Have picked up a new book called Passion for Learning. It seems to be up my alley.