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Voices We Can’t Hear Without Technology

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The technology that we use in classrooms, at it’s best, should empower students to share their voices with the world. It should allow people to be both creative and critical thinkers. It should allow us to hear from people and places around the world that we wouldn’t usually hear from. We should hear voices emrging from nations that are largely ignored by “normal” media outlets. It should help us to hear from “regular” people, allowing us the privilege of taking a look into the lives of others.

Three examples of resources you could use in your classroom.

The first is the Instagram account of Global Post. Added to by people around the world, this account gives us an everyday look at many places around the world.


Work in progress on Hollywood Road in Hong Kong


The Seoul Commute

The second place is Al Jazeera’s Viewfinder. A constantly updated set of documentary films made by filmmakers around the world, Viewfinder shows us the lives of regular people around the world. The example below goes one step further as it delves into the world of 16 year old girl in India who is a journalist on her own, sharing her view of her place with people around her.

The final place, and one that I use in my classroom each year is Global Voices. This site compiles the blogs of people from around the world and allows you to search them by subject (photography, environment, human rights, etc) or by country. Global Voices has been invaluable for me and for the students in my classroom.

This is what I want from technology for my students. I want them gain a wider perspective on the world. I want them to look more deeply and critically at emerging issues and I’d like for them to know about the lives of people around the globe.

 

Back to School Books – The Smartest Kids in the World

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As most of us in the Northern hemisphere slide back into school, it is worth taking some time to look at a few books that might give us some thought about the organization of our classrooms and our buildings.

The first book that I want to recommend is called The Smartest Kids in the World. Written by Amanda Ripley, who freely admits that she did all that she could in her career in the past to avoid stories about education, this book is a fairly quick read and won’t overwhelm you with theory. This is a fairly slim book firmly focused in real schools, lives and classrooms.

The basic premise is that US schools (and yes, it is very heavily focused on US schools) are doing a poor job. From that starting point, the author goes on to look at a lot of PISA information and three countries who’s scores are consistently near the top of the world:

Korea, Finland, and rising star, Poland.

Ms. Ripley from that point follows three American teenagers through a year as a Rotary exchange student in each of these countries. For those of us involved in education, the stories that follow are fairly predictable and well worn:

- The lives of Korean students are hell as they careen from school, to study halls, to cram schools in the evening.
- Finnish teenagers have a lot of freedom in what they learn and how they learn.
- Polish teens are treated as adults. Their schooling is difficult, kids often do poorly and buckling down and studying is the only way to really pull through.

As educators, many people are probably aware of the general outlines of these stories. But I still think that this quick read is worth your money. First of all, it is one thing to know something about the school system in another country, it is something altogether different to follow a student for a year through their lives and experiences in these places. This puts these stories into some context.

Second, and much more interestingly in my mind, is Ms. Ripley’s look at PISA data, educational policy in each of these places, and the decisions that need to be made along the way for schools and students to achieve at a global level. For example, I didn’t know that Finland’s educational “miracle” is very recent, only 10% of Finns graduated from high school in the 1950s. As well, PISA data goes on to show that educational superpowers are not the nations that spent the most money on education. In fact, in very dramatic fashion, Ms. Ripley points out in each of the schools that she visits in Finland, Poland and Korea, technology is almost completely absent and interactive whiteboards are mentioned repeatedly and specifically as being common in the US and absolutely nowhere to be found in other places.

Ripley places great stock in the importance of two things throughout the book: the importance of setting, reaching for, and testing students on high standards, and, second, on the importance of teacher education systems only accepting high achieving candidates who are willing to undergo a rigorous program of learning in order to become teachers.

Another point that Ms. Ripley raises is the actual job of teachers and schools. In the US (and Canada as well), the school is not only the place for academic learning takes place, but also a place for students to take part in sports and other activities. In fact, in some schools, these “other” activities have taken over being the main concern of the schools. In places like Korea, Finland and Poland, students certainly take part in sports, dance and other activities just as they do in the US and Canada. But these activities are more often tied to the community than the school. The schools focus on being places of learning and academics.

In the book, Ms. Ripley goes on to tackle myths of parental involvement (read to your kids, don’t just join the PTA), testing (Korean airlines change their schedules around national testing days), interviews a teacher who makes $4 million a year, and gives us a look at a whole host of other bits and pieces that together make up the total picture of how education happens in each of these places.

Overall, I thought this was an interesting, big picture kind of book. It made me think about the hows and whys of doing things in my own classroom. I’m also going to pass it along to my principal.

 

It’s Still About Communities

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You know what inspires me?

People saying stuff like this:

jimgroom

If you don’t know Jim Groom, you should. While I’ve never had the privilege to meet him in person. I’ve followed much of his work pretty closely. Tonight he was justifiably celebrating the success of the Domain of One’s Own project and posted this on twitter to go along with it.

I’d like to open up Jim’s tweet a little bit. You could rewrite it in a few ways:

“What remains truly compelling about an open source project is it’s everything an iPad launch is not. It’s an ethos. We need to build it together.”

and as I’m moving my own brain into back to school mode and thinking about rebuilding my own classroom WordPress and Buddypress communities, it can even hit closer to your own classroom:

“What remains truly compelling about a classroom community is it’s everything an iPad launch is not. It’s an ethos. We need to build it together.”

Anything personalized and customized for your own students and your own school, that you build yourself is something that you can be proud of. It’s the difference between buying something off the rack and getting something tailored just for you, your kids and your situation.

And that is never a bad thing.

Choices I’ve Made

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As a small town mayor and a teacher, I am an absolute realist. I live in a world of budget constraints, committees and compromise. I live in a complex world that is filled with data, with the realities of sometimes difficult lives and with constantly competing priorities.

But I’m also an idealist. This brings out the other side of my teaching hat where I want the very best for the kids I work with and it also shows up in my time as a Roman Catholic lay minister in my local parish church. As an idealist, I like to work in small ways at building a better world. A world that is more fair and just and a world where there is potential for change in all of our lives.

Over the past few months I’ve become increasingly concerned at revelations over online privacy. While I was never naive enough to believe that what I was doing online was completely private, I was surprised to learn about the scale of those operations. As a realist, I struggle to understand the need for control over this kind of data. As an idealist, I worry about the long term consequences of these programs and question their morality.

As one person I can’t change the world, but I can make changes in my own life.

1.) I’ve moved both of my websites to new servers and hosts outside of the US. My wesbsites (this blog and ideahive.org, my classroom community) have been hosted in the US with Bluehost ever since I made the move to self hosting and working with WordPress. Bluehost is a good host with great customer service who helped me get back on my feet several times after those technical bumps in the road that we all have. But in the end, I wanted to move my sites to a place where the laws are written more carefully to respect the creation of digital works. So over the past several weeks I’ve moved both of these sites to a hosting company called 1984 (irony fully intended) in Iceland. As a Canadian, Iceland may be a strange choice, but this has to do with my idealist side. Since their economic crash in 2008, Iceland has enacted the IMMI (Iceland Modern Media Initiative), which are the strongest set of laws in the world protecting the freedom of digital information and communication. My websites are innocuous. The blog of a classroom teacher in a small remote Canadian community and a classroom community built for middle school students. There is nothing needing whistleblower or dissident protection. But I’ve decided to support this initiative of modern laws and protections by bringing my business to a hosting company in Iceland. Consider it my $70 contribution to the cause.

2.) I’ve switched browsers from Chrome to Firefox. Chrome is fast and slick and I moved to it pretty quickly once it got moving. But I wanted to support a company working on open source initiatives and education. I wanted a browser that was easier to use in a do-not-track mode. I used to be a fan of Firefox when it first came out and I have been very pleased with it since I’ve moved back. I haven’t found any difference in speed between it and Chrome at all. It is stable and solid. Mozilla is also a company that is pushing for the web to be more open and transparent. They are pushing initiatives such as Open Badges and Webmakers. As an educator, these are things I can get behind.

3.) I’ve moved (mostly) from using Google to DuckDuckGo. This search engine has received a lot of press about their do-not-track initiatives, and, as with any business, they are running with it. I don’t blame them. Take the good publicity when you can. For the most part, DuckDuckGo is a powerful tool that searches up any information that I need as fast as I can get it from Google. This is true of basic stuff. I still head back to Google occasionally when I am looking for a specific piece of news or an image, but for most everything else, I’m breaking the habit.

4.) I’ve reaffirmed my belief in the power of open source projects. As I’ve written and spoken about at conferences previously, much of educational technology’s history was founded on open source projects. In the past few years I think we’ve lost much of that and given away control over many of our tools. There is no doubt that many corporations have designed powerful software for use in education. But I believe that we have given up a lot of control over both our own and our student’s data as a result. As well, we have also lost control over the design and capabilities of our learning environments. I think we are moving towards closed off proprietary silos. In my mind, education and learning are about sharing our perspectives and connecting with others. Closed platforms only let us see other people like us who are willing to pay the same bills we are.

I would like to say that I have plans in my classroom to leave all of the closed spaces behind. But I can’t. We aren’t there yet. There is no good open source substitute for a Skype call or a Google Hangout. Google docs (which is a cornerstone of collaboration in my classroom) doesn’t have an open source alternate. But I will keep searching for these things and work with open tools as a first choice. I’m not alone in this. Since the beginning of the NSA / Snowden scandal, the use of cloud computing facilities is down over 10% and some people are predicting a $35 billion loss to the cloud computing industry.

5.) Finally, I am leaving Gmail behind. I’ve been on gmail for years. I was one of the people who needed an invite to score up one of the coveted accounts at the beginning. But just as I set up my own hosting account to run my websites from, I’ve decided to move my email to the same space.

My new main email address will be: glassbeed@evenfromhere.org

I’ve decided to preserve the prefix (spelling error and all) and keep the story.

My gmail address is still functioning and will forward email to this new account. I’m sure it will take some time to get everything moved in that direction. It’s a process.

I live in the real world and tackle complex, real problems. But I also see the need for us to make careful choices in how we work and what we do. I’m making some choices and voting with my feet and my wallet.

 

Choosing a 3D Printer for the Classroom

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3D printing is an exploding technology. The printers are definitely one of the hottest things on the technology market right now that you can buy. While some schools have had these printers for a few years, there are many more which are considering buying one to put in a classroom or a computer lab.

I’ve recently found out that I am receiving a grant in my classroom to buy a 3D printer. This drove me to do a lot of research on printers to make sure that I fully understood what I was buying. After doing all of this work, I thought I should share what I learned.

HISTORY

3D printing is exploding as an industry, but it has been around since at least the early 90′s as a  community. Beginning in places like MIT, the community expanded out after that to people interested in hacking / design / DIY.  This community still exists and is stronger than ever as the rest of the industry has gain international attention. It is centred around the concept of RepRap or self replicating manufacturing machines. A still fairly technical hobby, RepRap printers involve having a knowledge of building, electronics, soldering and software. It is from this community of tinkerers and hobbyists that today’s growing industry is emerging out of.

TODAY

The 3D printing industry today is changing and becoming much more mainstream. This is based mostly around ease of use. 3D printers in the past were sold mainly as kits (or even just lists of parts that you had to find yourself) that involved a fair amount of construction and soldering. Each printer had to be built, the electronics needed to be soldered, and the machines themselves, once they were put together, needed an extensive software set up and calibration process. The difference now is that some companies such as Makerbot, Printrbot, CubeX, Makibox and Afina are selling machines that are already constructed and ready to go out of the box. This has opened 3D printing up to a much larger market.

THINGS TO THINK ABOUT

Bringing a 3D printer into a school or classroom needs to be first and foremost about pedagogy and opportunity. As with any other technology, it will do little good to spend valuable budget dollars on technology that you haven’t got a solid plan to use. Shiny gadgets that sit in the corners of rooms and are not used do little to enhance learning.

Assuming that you have that significant hurdle tackled, you then need to move on to other questions and concerns. 3D printers are still a growing, changing technology that is moving quickly and is not as stable and reliable as, say, laptops are. This means that concerns such as reliability, the availability of spare parts, supplies and software upgrades are important. A 3D printer is not like a computer which you buy, install, and upgrades happen automatically and usually easily. These are machines which will need a time investment and some looking after. Unfortunately, there isn’t yet a good, solid measure of all of these factors. As fast as I found this blog post outlining reviews and different factors, I found this post debunking it.

One thing I learned that I was surprised about was that there are actually few differences in the quality of the models that the printers will produce. 3D printing was an open source hobby for years. Many of the commercial products that you buy are not that many generations away from the days of being open source, hobbyist projects. In fact, two of the best known companies, Makerbot and Printrbot, grew directly out of the RepRap community. While Printrbot was financed through a popular Kickstartr campaign and still uses open source software, Makerbot was heavily criticized for moving to proprietary licensing in its latest models. Overall, most of the models of machines that are available will print models of a very similar quality. Paying more money for a printer will probably not get you a higher quality machine. In fact, most discussions on 3D printers insist that the quality of what you build is much more dependent on the time that you spend in tinkering and calibration then the budget you spend on the machine. Paying more money at this point, will get you a machine that is already assembled and may be easier to use, but it will not get you a machine that will necessarily make higher quality models. The only other significant difference between most printers is the size of model that they will produce. Smaller, lower cost machines  such as the Printrbot Simple (only $399 assembled) will print an approximately 100mm (4 inch) cube, while a larger model as the Makerbot Replicator will print much larger items that are 250mm X 150mm X 150mm (11 inches X 6 inches X 6 inches). You may also want to consider the cost of a professional development course as an important part of integrating a printer into your building.

WHAT I DECIDED

When I first considered buying a 3D printer, I had my heart set on a Makerbot. The name was well known, the printers are attractive looking, and Bre Pettis is well known as the face of the industry. But as I looked deeper into the printers and the industry, I found that while Makerbot has a reputation for building a good printer, the models it produces are no better than others on the market. Makerbot did not invent the technology, but they did make it more attractive, marketable, and easier to use.  Once I started comparing printers and learned that most of them print at similar qualities and resolutions, I found that the $2 199 price of the Makerbot Replicator was high.

From there, I started to look around.

There are many companies that are producing printers. Many of them I had never heard of in the past. From hours of looking around, I settled on purchasing two different models:

1.) Printrbot Plus. I settled on a Printrbot for a number of reasons. First of all, they are reasonably priced. While the Makerbot Replicator is worth $2 199, the Printrbot can be purchased for $999. Second of all, the Printrbot can be purchased fully assembled. While it will still need calibrating and tinkering with, this is a machine that will get us moving into fabricating quickly.

2.) MendelMax. This is an open source RepRap printer. There are a few common models of RepRaps and they are constantly being tinkered with and improved by the community. There are a number of places that sell RepRaps and they vary in price and design, but overall, they are fairly similar. The MendelMax is going to be much more of a construction and design project for us, but these machines are much more “future – proof.” As all of the software is open source, it is easily upgraded. The same goes for the design of the printer itself. As improvements are made to the printer by people in the community, the improvements are shared and placed online. Once they are here, you can simply print off most of the parts you will need using your own printer.

These two printers are each approximately $1 000. I was amazed how much they have fallen in price. The cost of a decent laptop or two, they are becoming much more affordable and this will see them move into schools much more quickly than in the past. The two machines will cost approximately $2 000, but I am also going to order a few spare parts and the printing supplies (rolls of plastic filament) that we will need as well. I have read in a few places that one of the commonly used filaments (PLA plastic) ages and cracks over time so there is no use laying in store a large supply that will only be wasted if not used fairly quickly.

I thought this was a good visual of how far a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of PLA filament will go:


When you are deciding to buy a 3D printer for your school or classroom, make sure that you first take pedagogical and learning goals into account. These printers are no different than any other gadget and you must ensure that you have a solid plan in place for their use. After this, there are a number of other factors that you need to think about: budget, supplies, models, suppliers, reliability, time you want to spend on the machine itself, etc. These are all factors to consider. 3D printing is a powerful concept and my hope is that alongside with other things that we already have like a Makey Makey, Lego Mindstorms, Raspberry Pi computers and software such as Scratch, it will allow the students in my class to understand that they can control the technology they have access to and use it for creative goals of their own.

3D Printers and Classrooms

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I made a move last year in my classroom towards making things using technology. While I’ve been an advocate of this philosophy for a while, last school year I tried to work on this more “formally,” introducing students to programming, working with a Makey Make that I ordered, doing some Scratch projects and using the two Raspberry Pi computers that I ordered. Like anything else it was frustrating at times and incredibly fun at others.

One more step this year. I just received word that I am going to be receiving a grant that I applied for that will be used to buy a 3D printer for my classroom. I have been waiting on this news for a few months so I am very excited to finally get it.

First of course…. I need to go shopping! I’ve been looking around while I’vekept my fingers crossed waiting for the news of this grant so I have a few ideas about what I’d like to buy. But, as usual, I am always looking for suggestions from anyone who has a printer already. Pros, cons, maintenance issues, cost of supplies, etc. All advice appreciated.

The second, much bigger challenge will be integrating a new device like this into the life of my classroom in a meaningful way. Sylvia Libow Martinez had it right

when she tweeted:

sylvia2
I need to find ways to have students work with all of these opportunities (Scratch, Raspberry Pi, a 3D printer, etc) in ways that will enhance and extend their learning in personal ways. I wan them to think of technology as something they can work with, design, and have some control over instead of it simply being something that you use.

What I don’t want is:

sylvia1
This is the danger of course. The fact that powerful technologies can be coopted into becoming “canned” learning experiences meant to fit an evaluation or assessment instead of being meaningful for the individual learner. As with any addition to my classroom, I need to find ways to work within my curriculum documents to extend and expand the possibilities for my students.

Another step in the life of my classroom. Another step in my own learning.

Handcrafted Education

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I’ve been doing more thinking this week about what I learned from writing my Education and Venture Capital Funding post. I also took some time to look around on twitter to see what kinds of ipad apps people are recommending to use in classrooms for the upcoming school year. Given the trend of apps and software that adapt to what learners are doing when they use them, changing what they present depending on the results of the learner, this has me thinking about automating teaching and learning. When this trend travels further down the line, where some software algorithm is making the decisions about what kind of content the learners in your classroom are presented with in a variety of subjects, I wonder what the role of the teacher will be?

It makes me wonder if there will be a market in schools and classrooms that reject this trend? A sort of handcrafting in education movement where decisions about learning, skills and content are made by trained and experienced professionals instead of by apps and software?

Think of it as etsy for education.

How Do Good Ideas Spread?

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“In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, “turnkey” solutions to the major difficulties of the world—hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability.

But technology and incentive programs are not enough. “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process.”

This quote comes from a long and impressive article about the spread of good ideas. It starts with a historical look at anesthesia and disinfectants in the medical practice and how one of these ideas spread relatively rapidly (anesthesia) while the other took a great deal of time until it was generally accepted practice.

“So what were the key differences? First, one combated a visible and immediate problem (pain); the other combated an invisible problem (germs) whose effects wouldn’t be manifest until well after the operation. Second, although both made life better for patients, only one made life better for doctors.”

“This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas. They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful. The global destruction wrought by a warming climate, the health damage from our over-sugared modern diet, the economic and social disaster of our trillion dollars in unpaid student debt—these things worsen imperceptibly every day. Meanwhile, the remedies to them, all requiring individual sacrifice of one kind or another, struggle to get anywhere.”

I read this article thinking about technology and its spread in schools, in learning and in education in general. Are we using technology to change teaching, or to enhance learning? My last post on venture capital funding would suggest that a lot of money is being spent on teaching, but little on learning.

In the internet age we expect good ideas to move extremely quickly, to adopt wide spread acceptance almost immediately and to spread at the speed of a viral outbreak. But it doesn’t always happen that way. Ideas take time to form, to percolate. I once listened to a podcast interview of one of my favourite authors, William Gibson, who talked about our society not allowing things to grow and mature and he lamented that many of our ideas and innovations are “veal” as opposed to well thought out concepts. This idea reminded me of the slow blogging movement.

A long read, but worth your time to think about. Keep your school or classroom in mind as you work your way through this article.

Education and Venture Capital Funding

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This isn’t my usual kind of post.

After all, I’m a classroom teacher.

But as I’ve been writing about lately, I’m thinking more about the tools that we are using in our classrooms and the costs (economic, moral and privacy) of using them.

This has brought me back around with a sense of perspective to the industry of education. Lets make no mistake, education is a big business. There are are dozens of companies making millions (and possibly billions) of dollars from schools. This isn’t new. Textbook, desk and chalk companies used to make lots of money from the business of education as well.

I understand that and I am comfortable with that. Just as I, as a teacher, expect to get a pay cheque every two weeks for the hours that I work in my classroom, companies need to get paid for the work they do and for the supplies and resources that they deliver.

But I’ve been thinking about the companies that choose to involve themselves with education. Of course there are major companies which have been involved with education for years: Apple, Microsoft and Pearson come to mind. These three multinationals have arms stretching in many directions and have involved themselves with education in areas as diverse as software, hardware, teacher training, online courses and textbooks. They each need to be seriously examined and held to account regarding their policies and products surrounding teaching and learning. But they aren’t who this post is about. This post is about the small companies, the start ups and what they are bringing to education.

When companies first start up, they are often a side project or a labour of love from someone’s garage. Over time however, when people want to expand their company, they often try to acquire venture capital (VC) funding. Venture capitalists are people who are willing to take a large risk on a new company, often in exchange for owning a portion of that company. High risks sometimes lead to big losses, but they can also lead to big payouts if companies do well.

As our industry has changed, there are many more small companies looking to acquire some of the dollars that schools and school divisions spend. A walk through the trade show floor of any major conference will bring you into contact with dozens or even hundreds of different companies. While some of these are large booths staffed by a dozen or more people who work for a major company, many of these companies are small and are trying to break in to the business.

This is where my curiosity lies. Who are the companies that have been receiving VC funding lately? How do they want to change and improve education? What is the value that they hope to add to the enterprise of education?

I did a number of Google searches as well as tracking down information in a few other places and here are a few examples of  what I’ve found:

Coursera – Acquires $43M in additional funding (July 10)

Brightbytes – $2.5M in new funding (July 15)

Desire2Learn – Opening a US Base in Boston after acquiring $80M in funding (July 15)

Engrade - Lands $5M in funding (July 3)

Top Hat Monocle – Closed an $8M round of funding (Sept. 2012)

Lumos Labs – Pulls in $31.5M in funding (Jan. 2013)

(the final link to the Lumos Labs story is well worth exploring as it contains,  among other things, a list of the biggest edtech deals of 2012)

There are dozens of news and financial stories regarding edtech companies out there. This is a miniscule sampling of them. There are other stories that outline mergers and new products coming online. There are many press releases outlining new educational apps that are available.

But from all of these stories, there is a trend. And it is a trend that worries me. Each of the companies covered in this small sampling of stories, with the exception of Coursera, are regarding companies who look at education in a specific way. Each of these companies creates a product (or products) which circle around helping students to learn basic skills. Now, before everyone jumps on me, I understand that basic skills are important. I believe that students need to read and write at higher levels at this point in history than they ever have in the past. What worries me is that the grand majority of new products and investment money in education is not going to companies looking at the “big picture” of education. Again, with the exception of Coursera, none of the companies in my small list are concerned with connecting students in new or better ways. None of them are helping students to become more engaged with the important problems that our society faces. None of them are helping students to become more passionate learners. None of them are focused on creativity. Instead, millions of dollars is being invested in companies who are offering products to help students learn old skills more efficiently.

We talk about changes in education. We talk about a renewed, responsive and changing industry to meet the needs of a globalized, diverse society; but where are the millions of dollars headed in educational technology? To better A, B, Cs and 1, 2, 3s.

Once again, I get it. I know all about the need for basics and the pressure that legislation such as NCLB creates. But with funding heading to these types of companies, technology is not gaining any opportunity to change education. You may be able to argue that these dollars are producing better schooled children, but they certainly aren’t going to companies that will allow children the opportunity to become better educated, more passionate, or more connected.

Are there companies out there that do create products that connect students around the world in new ways and with new and different empowering sources of information? I believe there are. I think that Discovery is doing this. I believe that Edmodo creates a platform which can be used effectively in these ways. I would argue that some of the basic tools we had almost a decade ago have yet to be surpassed: Skype, WordPress and wikis in all of their various forms offer teachers the tools they need to transform education.

Data is important. Better data that we have never had consistent access to in the past will help teachers to be more efficient and effective. But better data will not transform education, or schools, or classrooms. It will not help students to have a broader, more global understanding of world cultures. It will not make students more creative or help them to become better at finding and solving problems.

Our best opportunity for all of those things still lies with talented, connected teachers.

 

 

 

The Moral Side of the Edtech Story

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Over the years that I’ve been involved with edtech, I’ve taken great pride in the fact that all of the international connections I’ve made has cost me little actual money in my classroom. I teach in a small school so (as with most places) budgets are tight. Ten years ago it was tough to get people to understand what I was doing in my classroom and the benefits of actually spending time on those projects. This made it difficult to get administrators to agree to commit money to some of the projects I wanted to work on in my classroom. This meant I had to spend my own money. That was fine. It was a choice I made, I was interested in seeing where these things would lead, so I was willing to put some of my money up. But I was also conscious of how much I was spending. I was willing to pay for a pro level flickr account, but not for wikis. I found free blogging services, but would pay for a few other basic pieces.

I used to enjoy telling people at conferences that I was able to connect the kids in my small town classroom with others around the globe for about $50 / year.

But these days I’m more conscious of the costs of connecting my classroom in lost privacy and in the data that we have been unknowingly sharing.

My $50 budget pushed me to use a lot of free cloud based services. This meant signing kids up each year for a host of free accounts at services scattered across the web. On one hand, this meant that we were constantly under threat of these services disappearing. This also meant email accounts filled with spam and putting up with advertising that followed us around the web as it tracked our activity from place to place. It also of course meant that we were unknowingly sharing everything we did online with governments around the world.

Free wasn’t free and these days those costs are more apparent.

I believe it’s time that we think beyond the simple financial costs of these services and put them into perspective against the moral costs of educating our kids using these tools. Google apps is the most obvious example, but it is by no means alone. A behemoth of a program that (according to this infographic) involves over 7 million K – 12 students in the US alone. The quality and breadth of the tools available in Google apps is undeniable. School districts save millions of dollars by signing up for this program. But what are the other costs of using this single suite of tools? What is the morality of enrolling our students in an advanced twenty first century surveillance program? By having our students sign up for a simple Google account, we enroll our students in the the world’s most advanced surveillance – corporate ecosystem. This isn’t a possibility or a vague theory. It’s a proven fact.

Is that worth it?

People will of course argue that it is. They will argue that we have nothing to fear if we aren’t doing anything wrong. People will argue that our students will find their own way into this system on their own since it is so persuasive in our society anyway. But I think that’s different. If individuals make their own informed choice to use these tools that is different then us enrolling them en masse.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not the post where I reveal that I want all of my students to wear tinfoil hats while we retreat out to cabins in the bush and avoid the reality of the world. But I do believe that as educators, just as we need to be about much more than content, we also need to be about much more than economics and the availability of tools. Schools and educators are supposed to be about the business of building a better world. A more informed, safer world where we help students to enhance the quality of their lives through the time that we spend with them and the opportunities that we explore together. Digital connections are part of that. I am not planning on turning my back on opportunities for my students and the skills they need. These things are vital for our students. But I am planning on exploring the tools we use in a more thought – full way, being more cognizant of the choices that I make in my classroom. Discussions and lessons surrounding online privacy will become just as important as ones about online safety. Just as we talk about the differences between copyright and creative commons, we will be taking the time to talk about the costs of software that we pay to use, software that is cloud based, and software that is open source.

We are a community of tech people who like stats and facts and figures to back up what we do. We like stories of connections about bringing kids and teachers together. The morality of what we do is something that hasn’t often intruded into our conversations. We like to believe that technology is morally agnostic. But this isn’t the case. We make choices about what we do and how we accomplish our goals every day.

Edtech is not new, but in the past few years our picture of it has become largely corporate controlled and has narrowed in focus. It has become shallow and in many cases, more immature as we have given up control of many of our tools. All you need to do is spend some time on the trade show floor of many conferences to see what I’m talking about. We’ve largely given up control over the design of our tools in a trade off over ease of use.

The tools we need are still out there. They have never gone away. We’ve just given up on many of them in exchange for making things easier. So here’s my suggestion to you: spend your own $50. Get a server. Set up your own WordPress system. Change your default search engine to Duckduckgo, the search engine that doesn’t track how you use it. Learn some html and javascript. You don’t need to be a coding wizard, but a few basics go a long ways.

We’ve got work to do to make sure that we are not educating a generation of people who think using the internet is only typing into a box and pushing the share button.