Dangerously Irrelevant

Here’s a comment I just left over at another blog:

Thank you for your thoughtful extension of the conversation at my blog. I always appreciate when others express their misgivings about my posts because it forces me to clarify my own thinking and message.

I don't think the answer to everything in education is technology. But I DO think it's important for schools to be relevant to the age in which they operate. Given that we now live in a digital, globally-interconnected era, I think schools owe it to their students to be up with the times. And we don't do that by having our kids spend 90+% of their time in lecture-, textbook-, and notebook paper-driven learning environments. The gaps between how we learn in the real world and what schools do has never been greater. Those gaps continue to increase every year, as the pace of change inside school is dwarfed by that outside of school. What's our moral / ethical / professional obligation as school leaders to prepare students for the world as it is and will be, not what was? I think it's pretty high.

You note that students aren't using the technology for anything 'meaningful.' Why would they be? Have their schools, teachers, or parents helped them understand the power of using digital technologies for productive work within the relevant discipline of study? Most have not, instead utilizing technology primarily for replicating factory, rather than information age, models of schooling. Absent productive use and modeling by their instructors and/or parents, of course students are going to use technology primarily for social purposes (just like we adults do).

The jab at my advisory board membership is undeserved, particularly given that I have yet to receive a dime from any corporation for that type of service.

Finally, I'll note that the post in question was not a poke-in-the-eye aimed at teachers but rather the educational system as a whole. As school leaders, we have much greater influence over 'the system' than classroom teachers do. And it behooves us to make some radical changes quickly if schools are not to be completely irrelevant to the needs of students, families, and society.

Image credit: 25/365

Thought I’d share these two videos from the launch of the Spirit Lake (IA) Community Schools new 1:1 laptop initiative. Fun!

From Will Richardson:

A new video from New Brunswick, in the Did You Know? (Shift Happens) style. Well worth a watch! 

It’s the first day of school here in Ames, Iowa. In past years, I’ve posted the following checklist, wondering if schools have made any improvement since the previous fall.

This year you have two ways to participate…

1. Download this checklist in Excel. Enter the name of your school organization and fill in your ratings (editable areas are in yellow). Click on the Chart tab at the bottom, then print. Disseminate broadly!
2. Participate in the 2-minute online survey. Fill in your ratings and click on the Submit button. See the aggregated results and compare them to 2008 (125 responses).

Feel free to use and distribute the Excel file and/or the survey link as desired. If you would like to conduct this online survey within your school organization, contact me about hosting a version just for you (at no cost). Hope you made some real progress since last year!

Two pictures of the Edubloggercon group this year at the ISTE conference (Henry was our youngest participant):

The folks who weren’t able to make the first picture (aka the “straggler group”):

More pictures are on Flickr at the ebc10 tag and/or the iste10 tag and/or the ISTE10 Flickr group.

Here are a few resources to help you navigate the ISTE conference:

• Official conference web site
• Conference Ning
• Changes in the conference program
• ISTEVision
• Edubloggercon
• Exploring Excellence lounges (including ISTE Unplugged)
• The Daily Leader (conference newspaper) - Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday

Want to keep up with the absolute latest breaking news and information?

• Follow the #iste10 hashtag on Twitter
• Follow ISTEConnects
• Visit the ISTE Community Ning
• Follow the #ebc10 (Edubloggercon) hashtag on Twitter
• See the bloggers who are at ISTE
• Watch the ISTE Flickr group (also see everything tagged with the iste10 hashtag and see the Where’s the Bear? contest)
• Visit the Facebook ISTE and ISTE Conference walls
• See everything tagged iste10 on Delicious
• See the ISTE 2010 group on Diigo
• See everything tagged iste10 on YouTube

There are numerous information channels for the conference. What important ones did I miss?

I head to Denver tomorrow, eager and excited for the ISTE conference. I’ve got a plan this year; there are some things I want to learn and some conversations I want to have…

Things for which I’m scheduled

• Saturday, June 26 – Are your policies getting in the way of your progress? (at the TIE+ISTE Leadership Bootcamp)
• Sunday, June 27 – ISTE Leadership Symposium
• Monday, June 28 – 1–2–3, CASTLE PD! (at ISTE Unplugged)
• Monday, June 28 – CoSN CTO Leadership Forum

Things I hope will happen (if you can help with any of these, please come say hi!)

• Have my usual rockin’ awesome time at Edubloggercon. Some of my best conversations and learning each year are here.
• Faciliate our proposed discussion at Edubloggercon. Sylvia Martinez and I are proposing a conversation about the challenges of being an outside speaker/consultant. I don’t know if we’ll make the final agenda but I hope so!
• Learn more about Google Voice. I need someone to help me get the most out of my new phone service.
• Learn more about Google Apps for Education. I’m interested in talking with educators who are using this well with students in their school organization.
• Learn more about the School of One. I’d love to talk with someone who’s seen it in action!
• Learn more about robust learning software that does a good job of working with students at higher cognitive levels. These may be more like simulations or video games than traditional computer-based learning programs? Can I find software that’s doing performance assessment, not just fact assessment?
• Learn more about essay grading software. I’d like to see how this software class has changed since last time I looked at it.
• Maybe find funding for some CASTLE projects? This may be what draws me into the vendor area. I need to talk to some larger companies about some potential project sponsorship opportunities.
• Learn new things that aren’t even on my radar. This usually happens a great deal for me, so I’m not too worried. Maybe I’ll pick up some tricks/tips for my new iPad!

Other thoughts

I’m deliberately leaving much of the conference open. I want to reserve space for spur-of-the-moment conversations and serendipitous interactions. If you want to chat - even if we’ve never met before - please come introduce yourself!

Trying to reach me at the conference? Try @mcleod on Twitter or call/text me at 707–722–7853. I’ll also be hanging out a lot in the Bloggers’ Café.

What’s your plan for the ISTE conference? Hope to see you there!

My colleague, Dr. Tyson Marsh, has our Educational Administration graduate students doing autoethnographies. Melissa (Feilmeier) Osborn just finished her Master’s program with us as part of our Atlantic, Iowa cohort. Below is the video she made, which was her first experience using iMovie.

As Marco Torres and others show us, the power of video to capture student voice is pretty compelling. Most schools aren’t doing nearly as much as they could to harness this power for academic and student engagement purposes.

I think Melissa’s story is pretty compelling. If you have time, watch the video (it starts a smidge slow but ends big!). Happy viewing! 

[Warning: this is a long post. Cross-posted at LeaderTalk.]

I’ve been playing around with digital document annotation on various portable computing devices. Here is an overview of where I am right now…

The old way!

First of all, just as a reminder, the image below is the way that we’ve traditionally annotated ink on paper. Some of you like to use pencils or pens to underline, write notes in the margins, etc. In my life I’ve spent a small fortune on yellow highlighters.

Kindle App for the iPad

Will Richardson got me thinking with his post on using the Kindle app, his iPhone, and Evernote together for document annotation and sharing. So I decided to try it myself with the Kindle app. I don’t have an iPhone, but I do have an iPad and two iPod Touches.

Here is what it looks like when you press and hold on a word to begin your highlight (or note) in the Kindle app for the iPad:

Once the word is selected, you can push and drag on either of the dots to resize the selection and cover more text. Note that the magnifying box helps you see where you are.

Once you’ve got your text selected, you click on Highlight or Note and it gets saved with your document. Repeat as desired.

Kindle App for the iPod Touch (or iPhone)

The process is the same for the Kindle App for the iPod Touch (or iPhone). Here are two images that show you what it looks like on the smaller screen. Again, note the draggable dots as well as the magnifying box.

Kindle App for the PC

The Kindle App for the PC essentially works the same way. Use your mouse to click and drag, selecting the text you want in a highlight or note. When you’re done, select the option you want from the popup box. The gray text background then turns to yellow. See in the image below that the Notes & Marks button is selected at the top right, allowing me to see all of my notes and highlights in a scrollable list on the right.

Note: The text you select in the Kindle App for the PC is NOT copyable for future pasting into another document.

Your notes online: Why this is better than marking up ink on paper

So far, so good. The process basically works like a traditional highlighter. Every time I sync the Kindle app with Amazon’s server, my notes and highlights show up on all of my other devices too. I don’t have to lug multiple, heavy books around. I can just carry my ultralight laptop, my svelte iPad, or my pocket-size iPod Touch and have access to my reading and the accompanying highlights / notes.

As Will noted in his post, the beauty of all of this, however, is that Amazon also makes available a web site where you can see all of your Kindle notes and highlights. I can even see an aggregation of others’ highlights if I wish (which is pretty cool).

The text on the web site is selectable, which means you can copy and paste it into other applications. For example, you could put all of your highlights into a Word document, a blog post, or a note in Evernote. Will did the latter, and I’ll walk you through that process…

Using Evernote to publicly share your notes

Here’s what it looks like in Evernote if you just copy-and-paste directly into a new note:

If you clean it up first – using some judicious search-and-replace – then it can look more like this:

You can share your notes and highlights with others by making a public notebook (or tag) in Evernote. In the image below, I’ve right-clicked on the notebook I want to share and then selected Properties.

A popup box appears. Click on Sharing and collaboration options:

The Web version of Evernote launches and you get to choose if you want to share with individuals or the world at large:

If you start sharing with the world, you get a personalized URL to which you can send others (e.g., www.evernote.com/pub/scottmcleod/shared). They can click on the appropriate note and see everything you’ve put in the now-public notebook. Pretty nifty!

Another alternative: iAnnotate PDF

In addition to doing what Will did, I’ve also been experimenting with the iAnnotate PDF app for the iPad. I wanted a way to edit dissertation drafts, online reports and white papers, and other documents in PDF format. Although the GoodReader app (and, maybe soon, the iBooks app?) works great for viewing PDF files, you can’t edit them within the app. I read good things about iAnnotate and decided to try it.

I had some initial trouble getting documents into iAnnotate. I finally figured out, however, that the best way to do it is to synchronize it with a DropBox folder. That works pretty well (for GoodReader too!). Once you open a PDF file within iAnnotate, you have a number of tools at your disposal, including the ability to highlight, underline, strike out text, draw freehand, and leave yourself a pop-up note:

Although iAnnotate doesn’t give you the option of synchronizing to a web page like the Kindle app does, it does let you e-mail your annotations (with or without the document). When the annotation summary is received as an e-mail, it looks like this:

That text is then selectable, which means you can cut and paste it into other applications. Managing documents within iAnnotate is very easy, just as it is for the Kindle apps.

Reflections and implications

Here are a few thoughts:

• The possibilities of all of this for academic work are endless. I will use the Kindle app to read nonfiction books like Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and capture the quotes and notes that I think are important. I’ll use iAnnotate PDF to do the same for those documents and research reports that I’m always digging up online. When my students send me their writing, I’ll quickly convert those documents to PDF and then be able to comfortably annotate anywhere on my iPad, without being tethered to my laptop or desktop computers. And so on…
• I love having all of the text from a book or report that I think is important – and ONLY that text – in one place. It’s searchable, it’s editable, it’s MINE. No more flipping through pages trying to find something. No more using multiple bookmarks and Post-It flags. A quick search and the text I want is there.
• It would be nice if you could cut and paste from the Kindle App (particularly the one for the PC) into other applications.
• The Pogo Sketchup Stylus - a special stylus for the iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch - is worth every penny when it comes to annotation. Highlighting text - particularly on the iPad - is a breeze compared to using my (apparently too fat) finger because the stylus has a smaller surface area and thus is more precise.

• As digital annotation and sharing tools continue to become more robust, it becomes much more feasible to use iPads and other mobile computing devices as replacements for books and textbooks.
• Like Will, I may never buy a nonfiction book on paper again (unless I have to).
• I like Will’s idea of getting notes off of the Amazon web page and into Evernote. If iAnnote or the iBooks app or other e-book readers and annotation tools also make available online or e-mail versions of highlights and notes, I’ll do the same for those too. That way I won’t have to worry about particular proprietary formats becoming obsolete. Now, if Evernote ever goes out of style, I’m in big trouble!

So this is where I am right now with all of this. Although digital annotation using these tools is not yet as smooth as I would like, I’m deriving a lot of benefit from the new capabilities that I do have.

How about you? How are you annotating digital documents on portable computing devices? Got any tips or suggestions?