More on "the right tool"

Yesterday, I wrote a post about thinking about the right tool for the job. I wrote it because after working with teachers on a variety of tools like wikis, blogs, document sharing, etc., I am often asked "How do I know which one to use?"

The real answer is not a formulaic pros-and-cons chart, but a deeper understanding of the tools and what they do. Think about other tools we use. When you're getting ready to write something, you inherently know whether the best tool is a pencil, a cheap stick pen, a fancy fountain pen, or a word processor. Why? Because you've used these tools all your life, and you really understand at a deep level which is best for what kind of job.

The conclusion I keep coming to is that we have to use these tools ourselves, both for professional and personal use, to gain a deep appreciation for how they can best be used.

In having these conversations with folks, I often conclude by saying that if we could get kids to grok the tools to the point that they could choose the best tool for the job, then we'd really be doing our job as educators.

I feel this way not only about tech tools, but about other tools as well. I do a lot of work with writing and different tools for prewriting and writing based of the form, genre, and audience of the piece of writing. Often, though, kids are unable to decide for themselves what tool (or approach) will work best for the task at hand. They rely instead on the teacher telling them what tool to use (or what genre or tone to adopt) or failing that, they use whatever tool or format was last assigned in class.

So I'm thinking about all this in the context of teaching real 21st Century skills and then I read Vicki Davis's post on Google docs this morning. In it, she says:

"When do my students and I wiki and when do we Google Doc?
When we want to collaborate and edit, we use the wiki. But, when we're under a tight deadline and need to "crank out a document" or "hash things out quickly" we move over to Google Docs. It just makes sense.

But then again, when we do projects, I don't really TELL students which tool to use. If it is a project, they are to pull from all of their previous tools or find new ones. We focus on getting the project done, not on the tool used."

That gets right to the heart of it. This line of thinking also implies some potentially uncomfortable things to consider:

• Everyone doesn't have to use the same tool for the same task. (differentiation; choice)
• The teacher doesn't have to have mastered (or even be knowledgeable) about all the tools students choose to use.
• We probably need to rethink how and what we are teaching. Knowing how to evaluate and choose the best tool for a job, being able to learn new tools as they go (without pedantic step-by-step instruction), and learning how to learn independently are skills that will bring students future success.
  

Thinking about the right tool for the job at hand

There are so many great technology tools...wikis, blogs, Google docs, podcasts, Moodle sites, VoiceThread, and on and on. Sometimes it's difficult to know which tool to use for a given project or activity.

The best way to approach this problem is to always start with the question "What are the instructional goals?" and then to think about how to accomplish those goals. Sometimes the answer will be technology; other times it may be paper-and-pencil, f2f group discussion, or something else.

Here is a grid that outlines the main differences between things like wikis, blogs, document sharing, etc. with some thoughts on which are best suited to different classroom activities.

If you have your own tips to share about how you choose which tool to use for different activities, post your thoughts here to share with others.

Student blogging - working through the sticky issues

I spend a lot of time talking to people about the benefits of blogging. Students writing for a real audience and purpose leads to better writing, more motivation, critical thinking, collaboration, yada yada.

However, there are some admittedly sticky issues around student blogging. This week I had a chance to work through some of these in collaboration with a progressive district that is encouraging teachers and students to use blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies to develop literacy and critical thinking skills. Some of the issues we're talking about are:

• How do you set up student accounts without having student email accounts?
• If you want students to go beyond commenting on teacher posts to creating their own posts or even hosting their own blogs, how can that be monitored?

Many of the common blogging tools don't really address these issues. I'm a big fan of WordPress, so I started there. WordPress.com (they host) requires a valid and unique email address to get an account. WordPress.org (you host) will accept a bogus email account, but it's a hassle to have a large number of blogs on it. On either of these, if a student is administering their own blog, there is no automated way to see their work.

Some other popular blogging services (e.g. Blogger) are blocked in many schools, making their use less than optimal. Other blogging services that strive to be safe for students (e.g. Class Blogmeister) limit administration and primary authorship to teachers. Others charge a fee. Some school blogging platforms that are free aren't open source, meaning that they may or may not be free or even available next week. Other free services are less than reliable in terms of being up 24/7.

In the course of all this, we looked at WordPress MU, the multi-user version of WordPress. This works like Wordpress.com in that any registered user can create a new blog easily on the fly. (This works by setting up a domain with a wildcard, for example, *.blog.someschool.edu. Then if a student creates a blog, it becomes jsmith.blog.someschool.edu.) And the administrator can easily monitor and manage all blogs under the domain. The only drawback is that you have to host it yourself, but it really isn't very difficult. You just need a box with Apache, MySQL and PHP.

The interface is very slick. It has all the things I love about WordPress plus a whole suite of useful admin tools.


I'll post some updates as we get into using this more.

(Sidenote on student email: A pretty usable workaround on this is the Gmail trick. If your teacher gmail account is ksmithteacher@gmail.com and a student uses the email address ksmithteacher+kjonesstudent@gmail.com, all email to that address will go to you at ksmithteacher@gmail.com. That allows you to register students for services that require a unique and valid email without maintaining or needing to monitor an email account for them.)

The Spam Problem

At a presentation I did last week, Wes Fryer was in the audience and asked me how we deal with spam in our wikis. (I hoped that he asked because he had a brilliant answer himself, but alas not.) For wikis, we try to monitor recent changes and revert spam out as quickly as possible. It's not an ideal solution.

For my blogs, I find that the spam-catching feature on WordPress is very good. (As it tells me every time I log in, it has caught many thousands of spams for me.) Occasionally, it flags one of my own comments as spam (usually one where I've posted a whole slew of links), but that's ok. After I go crazy trying to figure out where my post is, I fix it in a matter of seconds.

Today, I went to a web form that didn't accept anything with any web links (to weed out potential spam). Wow! I had to edit my whole message. It's hard for me to converse about anything without any links. :)

Anyone out there have any other ideas for catching spam on wikis and blogs?

Image credit: David Hegarty; used under a Creative Commons NC license.

Sidenote: Did you know they make sushi out of Spam? This is the kind of thing you could only know because of incredible world of user-generated content.

NSBA-"Explore ways in which [you] could use social networking for educational purposes"

Kudos to the NSBA for a forthcoming report that urges schools to relax restrictions on the use social networking technologies at schools.

It's about time that educational policymakers (and politicians) recognize that these technologies are important tools for differentiating instruction, engaging students, and developing important new (and old) literacy skills.

How we learn

I've been reflecting on how we teach and learn...not with students, but with colleagues in professional development.

Unfortunately, many of us (myself included) don't always model the use of the strategies we know are most effective for learning. Many PD workshops or presentations are the typical "sage of the stage" fair. And I've heard from several different teachers in master's programs about how dry their graduate courses are.

Good teaching and learning involves students being engaged and active in their own learning. Technology isn't a necessary component of this, but it can certainly be a useful tool.

As I've started incorporating tools like blogs and wikis in workshops, I've found that many participants are more engaged. A large part of this is providing options (differentiating instruction). Some people would rather post to a blog; others would rather write notes on post-its; still others would rather just sit and talk. I'm even starting to see the value of Twitter and virtual environments as learning tools.

Everything we can add to the mix provides more tools to reach learners, whether they are peers or students, and that all leads to more engaged learning.