iSean

Apple, Detroit schools team up

The Detroit Public Schools and Apple Computer Inc. have inked an up to $1.2 million, four-year deal in which the district will lease computer equipment for a new small technology-focused school inside Crockett High School.

Apple in turn will give the district more than 100 days worth of technology and teaching support, including on-site help in classrooms as teachers and students learn to use the laptops, said the district’s Chief Academic Officer Juanita Clay Chambers. Detroit is using federal dollars to pay for the lease.

The district will get about 780 laptops, as well as iPods, digital cameras and computer software. About 240 of the computers will go to the freshman class of the new Detroit Digital Learning Community High School at Crockett. And another 14 Detroit middle schools will get the remaining laptops, in hopes that many of those students go on to enroll in the new school once they get older.

Chambers said this new high school will be a wireless environment where students do everything from take notes to create multimedia book reports with their computer equipment.

personally, i like the idea of providing laptop computers to students. i also like that apple computer is going to provide more than 100 days of technology and teaching support. apple has sponsored much research in the past in educational settings and they have a history of valuing the successful implementation and integration of technology into the curriculum. however, i can already see the results of this program — or, let me rephrase, i can already see how this program is going to be evaluated. michigan has a big state test like every state as required by NCLB and our test is called the MEAP test. this technology initiative is going to be evaluated based on scores on the MEAP test. i am one of the biggest ‘technology in education’ rah-rah guys around, but i don’t pretend to believe that teaching technology literacy skills is most beneficial to stuff that gets tested on the MEAP. that’s not to say that i don’t think technology can help — it clearly can, but i think the benefit of having and using technology is far more important.

our society has entered into the information age. sure, much that was taught in the previous century is still very relevant and still crucial to the future success of our students — the 3 Rs aren’t going away. on the other hand, the information age has brought with it a new paradigm that goes beyond what we previously stressed. we have a new way of doing business and far more ways communicating with each other. the MEAP test does not assess how well students are going to enter the information age. the MEAP test does not assess how well students can find accurate information using a search engine. the MEAP test does not assess how well students can determine the validity of the information they find online. yet, these skills are crucial for students who are entering the world of work and technology initiatives (like the one in Detroit) are going to be key steps towards actually trying to educate our students for the world in which they will encounter.

and, moments after posting that last entry, i actually read the ed tech posse paragraph that contained spurl and realize that it appears as though furl was more highly regarded. LookSmart’s Furl - About Furl

Furl is a free service that saves the important items you find on the Web and enables you to quickly find them again. Furl archives a personal copy of every page you save. When you want to recall it, you can find it instantly by searching the full text your archived items. Each member has a personal archive of 5 gigabytes (GB), large enough to store tens of thousands of searchable items.
Furl recommends new Web pages that may interest you, guided by the sites you’ve already “Furled,” or saved.
Furl also offers the best ways to share the content you find on the Web. Send a daily email newsletter of links to friends and colleagues, use Furl to generate RSS feeds for your links, or integrate them quickly and easily into an existing Web site.

personally, i am still trying to figure out the value of social bookmarking for myself.

okay, i just came across a new (new to me anyway) tool on the internet that helps to make browsing something that anyone can manage from any connected computer. while this isn’t much use to me since i have a laptop that i take everywhere i go, i do think this is something that many of my students could benefit from using . . . especially those students who find themselves using lab computers from time to time. the service is called spurl.net and it’s free. what is it? i’ll let them answer: Spurl.net 1.0 - Free online bookmarks with so much more…

Spurl.net is a free on-line bookmarking service and search engine. It allows you to store and quickly access again all the interesting pages you find on the web from any Internet connected computer.
With Spurl.net you will never have to lose a good link again. You can search your links, notes and in fact the entire text of all the pages you’ve ever “spurled”.
You can start by uploading the bookmarks from all your computers - after that all your bookmarks will be accessible in one place.
And because thousands of other users are using Spurl.net as well, you will discover interesting links through recommendations, hot lists and more.

fwiw, i found this tool by visiting the ed tech posse website (link over on the right), so you might visit their site to find their latest podcast where they discuss this tool and others.

this story goes right along with a story i posted a few weeks ago . . . that teachers aren’t using technology appropriately in the classroom. this report comes to us from England, but confirms what we know about American teachers as well.

Report reveals teachers’ fear of classroom technology

The four-year research project at the University of Bristol confirms recent Ofsted reports which found use of information communication technology (ICT) in schools to be “sporadic” and disappointing”. Some 30% of teachers surveyed failed to make good use of computers in the classroom - despite the government’s 1 billion dollar investment.

The study, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, reveals that many teachers fear computers will interfere with ‘genuine’ or book-based learning, particularly in the humanities and creative subjects, and use ICT only for administration and routine tasks.The report says that many teachers lack the confidence to take the risk of using technology in their subject areas, although they have reasonable facilities at school and they use computers at home.Rosamund Sutherland, who led the research, said that teachers could be helped to make more effective use of computers in a wide range of subject areas.

i find it interesting, not surprising, that teachers would value book-based learning = “genuine” learning. i know we don’t teach our preservice educators to pick a nice little textbook that is perfectly aligned with the curriculum (as if such a thing exists) and stick to it, but i have a sneaking suspicion that “book-based” is a codeword for, “i am a lazy teacher.” anyone disagree? can a lazy teacher be a good teacher?

but, there is hope in the last paragraph of the above snippet . . . teachers CAN be helped to make more effective use of computers. the difficult thing is breaking into the cycle of teachers wanting to teach how they were taught, especially if they weren’t taught in an environment that valued technology.

this morning, i came across andy kessler’s blog. kessler is a frequent contributor to the wall street journal’s op-ed page as well as many other rags. he has an expertise in investment trends in technology and communications. well, the current blog entry deals with the issue of municipalities versus the telecommunications industry with regard to providing wireless internet access.

the telecommunications industry (e.g., SBC, Verizon, etc.) is fighting tooth-and-nail to keep cities out of the business of providing wireless on their own because they stand to lose a gazillion dollars, at least. cities, meanwhile, are tired of waiting for the big telecommunication corporations to provide cheap and wireless technologies for its residents. so, many cities and communities are starting their own efforts to go wireless. free market capitalists are claiming that this isn’t something that the gov’t should do (e.g., like most cities do with water — is internet access as basic as water?). and, communities are fighting back saying that even the poorest of their citizens should have access to information (via wireless). but, kessler examines the behind the scenes nooks and crannies and this blog entry is quite enlightening and worth a read. Andy Kessler: WSJ: Philadel-Fi

here’s a snippet:

But it turns out cities get to sort of cheat, cite eminent domain, and place a lot of gear on their own light poles and radio towers. No startup gets that deal. And new mesh technologies mean Philly can plug into the Internet just once, paying wholesale rates, unlike the folks that run Starbucks or hotel hotspots, who overpay (probably to Verizon) for the Internet connection their Wi-Fi users share.

But the real whopper is that - as Ms. Neff claims - by the third year, Philly will be saving $2 million a year on their $150 million IT budget by not having to pay Verizon for Internet access at their 24,000-employee city offices. Hmmm. That whole disadvantaged thing is just icing. Sounds like some sort of arbitrage.

It is, and its not going to be pretty for Verizon. By rigging the city with wireless hotspots, under the guise of helping the disadvantaged, Philadelphia may completely bypass Verizon. A T-1 line from Verizon, which is 1.5 megabits of data per second, runs anywhere from $400 to $1300 dollars a month. With Municipal Wi-Fi (Mu-Fi), that could drop to $300, heck, maybe even $20 a month. Consumers (read voters) are happy and small businesses will save tons of money. No wonder phone companies are circling the wagons. Think of it as a Telco tax cut. Cheese steak sales are gonna boom.

Its about time (for cheaper access, not cheese steaks). If municipalities across the U.S. are willing to lose $1 million a year to save $2 million, this is going to spread like wildfire.

week 1 is now behind us. as i’ve written earlier, i am teaching 3 sections of our undergraduate ed tech course (ED 205 — Computers in Education). two of sections are online courses and 1 section is face-to-face. i have given all of my students the option of attending the face-to-face session whenever they want OR completing the online session whenever they want. should be interesting to see how things play out over time.

in our first session, we covered much. we went over the syllabus, discussion parameters, took a survey on technology proficiency and how that relates to teaching, learned how to use the phpBB forums, and got signed up for the blogsome blogging tool. i think most students are figuring things out, but the blogging tool appears to be the most confusing part of the first week. as students signed up to use it, i would guess that the site just failed (e.g., critical database errors) with about 3 - 4 students per 25. nothing seemed to work and they were forced to just create a whole new account. other students received 2 passwords (they likely hit submit twice) and found that neither password then worked. i am not sure how this gets fixed. i’ve suggested requesting another new password, but they might be forced to create a new account as well. so, needless-to-say, i am holding off on our first blogging activities until we get the accounts set up completely. that’s really the only bump in the road.

i do survey my students at the end of each week. i learn much from the anonymous responses. for example, this week i saw more of this than i’d like, “Everything worked fine with the web site and with the class discussion forum. (If that is the right term). But I had a lot of trouble creating and logging into my Blog site.” i know i could have used Blackboard and this would have been a tool that most of my students were familiar with. it would also have been a tool that our university IT staff could have provided technical support to my students, but i really, really want my students (future teachers) to see that there are alternatives on the Internet that they can implement on their own, especially if their school does not provide Blackboard or similar tools to them. i also want them to see how i help them work through difficulties and how they can figure many things out on their own when push comes to shove. all in all, i think the blogsome site will work well, but it’s certainly not without its little bumps in the road early on.