Touchdown: Optimizing Acer Aspire Netbook for SMARTBoard Technology

As an Educational Technologist, I think of myself a bit like an offense man in a Vince Lombardi play: my job is to seal off a running lane for my students and faculty to get to their technological end zone with maximum efficiency and minimum damage. I should take the brunt of the grunt work. Today I earned my keep.

My colleague David wanted to use our SMART Sympodium—a kind of tablet version of a SMART board—in one of the university classrooms starting next semester ( just after New Year’s). We needed to connect the Sympodium to a laptop and pass it through to the ceiling mounted projector. Sounds simple, but we wanted to do a walk through today. This is our last working day before Christmas break. David’s first class is the first day campus reopens—a Tuesday and I don’t work Tuesdays. This would be his first time using it, so we had to get it right today. Off David & I went to set up the relatively simple equipment configuration. Never count your chickens….

Plan A: Set up David’s laptop, connect it to the Sympodium and the Sympodium to a projector. Our first issue was that David’s personal laptop had a buggy version of the SMART software: when he ran the floating tools, they’d disappear. We’d get them back and it would happen again. Online I discovered that this was a bug in an earlier version of the SMART Software, so we tried to update David’s SMART Software. Unfortunately, the installer hung up for an eternity. That was not good. I baled on Plan A.

Plan B was next—use one of the Faculty owned Acer Aspire 10.1″ laptops with the Sympodium. David could transfer his files to the Acer—be they PowerPoint of SMART Notebook—and work from there. Sounded easy, until we discovered that the Acer would not let us copy (clone) its desktop display onto the SMART Sympodium at the optimal size for the Sympodium. It looked sort of like an iPad running an iPhone/iPod app—a bit scrunched in the middle. The Acer’s resolution is 1024×600 pixels, and the Sympodium runs at 1024×768. No matter what I tried—changing the Intel Graphics settings, making the Sympodium the primary monitor and the Acer’s display the secondary one—I could not get the desktop to display on the Sympodium at full resolution. To make it weirder—if I didn’t want to clone (copy) the Acer desktop, but was willing to run the Sympodium as an ‘extended desktop’ (think of pulling up alongside the netbook’s desktop with a table for extra space), the system recognized that the Sympodium used 1024x768px resolution & a big blue desktop covered the entire display surface of the Sympodium. Really? David doesn’t have a lot of experience yet with secondary displays—having to run the SMART tools, etc., across 2 displays as an extended desktop would not be a good start to learning to use the Sympodium. Arrgh.

Plan C—Call our IT Department. I called IT but they were swamped as the Christmas holidays are starting and people have booked off. They didn’t think they could get to it today, unfortunately, David needed to get it done today.

Plan D—Fix it myself. I figured I couldn’t be alone with this Acer issue. I surfed the net and found a utility—hack—that someone built for Acer Aspires to display at different resolutions—ac1ctl http://nodadev.wordpress.com/pc-projects/a1ctl/ . (The utility also gives you other additional controls, but at this point the display settings were the only thing of interest for me.) Woot! I downloaded it—but then the Acer didn’t have a program that would open the downloaded RAR file. Arggh. So next I downloaded a trial version of WinZip. I rapidly figured I had to extract the ac1ctl’s files to a folder on my Acer’s C: drive—I stuck it in “Program Files”. Launched the little utility, changed the Screen setting to 1024×768 and HURRAY! I could clone the desktop and we got optimal size resolution on the SMART Sympodium. One small issue was that anyone using the Acer’s display would need to do a little vertical scrolling. David & I felt confident he could handle that—as long as all else was working properly.

As you might imagine, at various points David let me know I could give up if it didn’t look like it was going to work. David is a new faculty member keen on expanding his tech skills. I didn’t want to disappoint him. I wanted to make sure he could use this new device with his students and start of the new year with a minimum of fuss. We were both excited when I got the system to work. I look forward to seeing what David will do with the Sympodium in the current months.

Touchdown for Julia’s team!

I just hope his next technology challenge for me is a bit simpler.

Magic Beans for Families Raising Readers To Do Well in School

I thought this was an ed tech blog, what’s up?

While technology is my main gig right now, being a teacher is in my blood–and I’m a dedicated parent. While this post is a bit out of the ordinary for my blog, I felt I needed to write it as a teacher and a mom of 2 young boys…
What if someone gave you a handful of magic bean to help you grow your child’s success in school and later life by increasing their ability to read? I say ‘magic’ because magic is associated with getting something you want without a lot of work. What if those ‘magic beans’ were actions that didn’t require advanced degrees or intense efforts? What if they were backed by research that showed they were effective across the world? Would you do them? Would any loving parent/guardian commit to them? I think so. I found out about them via two articles on how to do just that:

T. Friedman’s NY Times piece, “How about better parents?” discussing the results of the 2009 PISA report, “PISA 2009 Results: Overcoming Social Background: Equity in Learning and Outcomes (Vol. II)”.

and

The easy to digest overview of the PISA test findings in “What can parents do to help their children succeed in school?”.

What is PISA?

PISA is an organization that tests students (age 15) globally and ranks countries on their performance. PISA has been doing this since 2000, but in their 2009 testing PISA also collected data from the students’ parents/guardians regarding what they did with their children at home. When PISA looked into parent/guardian activities and student achievement, they found that regardless of how much money or social status a student’s family had, students scored better in reading if parents/guardians were doing a few key simple things.

What Counts Most In the First & Early School Years?

PISA research determined the trifecta for student reading achievement to be:

Reading with children in the first year of school–regularly and often

Talking with children about what they did in their day

Telling stories to children

Not having an advanced degree, doing handstands, or spending hours tutoring–plain old reading, talking and telling stories. Sounds simple, no?

One of the most important activities that parents/guardians could do with their children that made the most impact on their later achievement was when parents/guardians read to children in their first year of primary school–regularly and often. On average, simply reading regularly to a child during that first year in school made ‘well over’ 1/2 year’s difference in achievement (on average 25 points different on PISA test). [I would hazard a guess that families didn't suddenly start reading often and regularly in that first year--but likely would have been doing it for some time.] Now people might say, rich and educated people would be the ones to really benefit from that, but when compared in similar socio-economic brackets, parents/guardians reading to students regularly and often in the first year of school accounted for a 14 point difference in PISA test scores when the students were 15! When that was combined with talking to children and discussing their day with them, as well as telling stories with them, the impact was amplified.

What Counts Most in the Teen Years?
The research said that when parents/guardians did these 5 things with their children, they made a significant impact on their reading test scores:

Discussing social or political issues regularly

Discussing books, movies or TV programs

Discussing how well children are doing at school

Eating meals together

Spending time just talking together

Of these, PISA found the activity with the greatest impact was when parents/guardians discussed social or political issues with their children weekly or daily. In these families, students scored 28 points higher on average–well over 1/2 year’s worth of achievement.

What Can You Do About It?
Here are a few ideas I can think of…
Get to the Kids Before Official School Starts:

Work with local preschools, daycares, playgroups, community centres, etc to send out flyers encouraging reading–giving book suggestions, etc. Flyer might even have a full story on it.

Create postcards with storytelling games and prompts.

Over the summer, a school could create a package–activites or ideas for preschool/daycare/community support programs to hand out weekly or bi-weekly. They could also be posted on website.

Early School Years:

At beginning of each year, school administration & teachers should make a statement introducing their plan for encouraging parent/guardian support through simple, low impact means. For example, something like, “This year/semester, you’ll be receiving prompts and activities that you can do with your children at home. These types of simple activities have been proven to improve reading–even in high school–and improve their test scores–and have been shown to work around the world. Look for them in ….[name deliver means]“

Encourage every teacher to send home an “Ask your child about…” with a list of 3 things or more regularly (weekly–at beginning of week). It could be things students are doing in class, something good they did that day, etc. Determine if technology is appropriate for disseminating this type of information or whether it will reinforce socio-economic stratification.

Encourage teachers to regularly send prompts for storytelling–biographical, fictional–home for famiiles. Teacher can prepare the students to “Ask your parent/guardian about…” and have each student share one interesting detail the following day.

Where students do not have a reliable adult presence at home, think of starting a ‘breakfast club” or ‘snack club’ where a teacher or volunteer cleared by the school offers to do these things with students over some food at regularly scheduled times.

Teen Years:

At beginning of each year, school administration & teachers should make a statement introducing their plan for encouraging parent/guardian support through simple, low impact means. For example, something like, “This year/semester, you’ll be receiving prompts and activities that you can do with your children at home. These types of simple activities have been proven to improve reading–even in high school–and improve their test scores–and have been shown to work around the world. Look for them in ….[name deliver means]“

Teachers can send home prompts re. social or political discussions related to materials students are reading. Reading “Romeo and Juliet”? Why not have students ask their parents/guardians, “Do you know any families that ever feuded? Why do you think that happens?

Survey the student body re. movies, books, and films that are popular. Provide some critical thinking questions that parents/guardians could ask kids–without having to really know the item. For example, “I heard “Twilight” was about vampires. Is it just about vampires killing people”?Or, “I saw a promo for Glee, do the students in that show act like real high school kids?” Or, “Do you think I would like that book you read? Why/why not?”

Suggest families ask students, “What was the best thing that happened to you at school today?What made it good?” and “What was your biggest challenge at school today? Why do you think that was?

Send home an “Eating Together” commitment sheet. Ask families to commit as best as possible to eat at least 3 meals a week together (pick your number). Provide some type of tally or recording sheet.

Where students do not have a reliable adult presence at home, think of starting a ‘breakfast club” or ‘snack club’ where a teacher or volunteer cleared by the school offers to do these things with students over some food at regularly scheduled times.

What other things are you doing–or could do–to encourage families to plant a few magic reading beans of their own?

Concerned: The Flip Model, Mobile Tech, and Achieving Balance

This summer, a colleague in SD 10 (Arrow Lakes, BC) Sally McLean (@sallynmclean) had me in to present to her district on digital footprints. From our discussions during my visit, it was evident she was very excited about the “flip model” of education. (For a bit more on this model see The Flipped Classroom Model: A Full Picture). More recently, I’ve been chatting to my colleague, George Kelly, more about this model as he looks at ways to apply it in his classroom. A great deal of our latest chats have been on developing the personal responsibility of the learner in a flip model–self-direction/self-actualization–so that they actual do the requisite materials outside of classroom time. Today, an article from Australia on the flip model, has me a bit concerned about the potential for promoting hyper-responsiblity (a.k.a workaholism) through an unhealthy combination of mobile technologies and the flip model. The article is “Technology brings the classroom back home in role reversal”from the Sydney Morning Herald.

Am I in favour of the model? You bet. In fact, I taught a substantial amount of my distributed learning program this way for a number of years while I worked in the Gulf Islands School District (SD 64, BC). Students worked through curriculum using me as a resource, facilitator, and support as necessary. Sometimes I filled information gaps, explained things differently, referred students to extension materials, or just plain paced them (or pushed them to complete by their goal time. That was a number of years ago when technology was not as prevalent–or as hand-held–as today.

Am I in favour of mobile technologies? Definitely. I believe that they enrich our personal and professional lives, learning opportunities and more. I think that having access to information technologies everywhere/anytime is a benefit when used wisely. I use my iphone and ipad often, have brought ipods into my faculty and hope to bring in some ipads soon. I am constantly looking at how mobile technologies can optimize learning and teaching in the classroom. (I’m not an extremist, though. There is a time and place for everything. The QR codes on the notices placed on the inside of our VIU bathroom stalls by our student health group? Not a place and time I endorse re. using mobile technology for obvious reasons.)

So why the concern? The combination of mobile technologies & access to education is a great thing, but it needs to be framed appropriately. I think that the Sydney Herald article hit on something we haven’t anticipated in shifting education to an everywhere/anytime paradigm–at least as not as far as kids are concerned in a mobile friendly world. While not the thrust of the article, the concept of the classroom extending far beyond the physical classroom is exciting & problematic now–in a way it wasn’t before highly mobile technologies. For me, it raised the question of how we avoid developing a culture of workaholics who can’t establish boundaries between ‘work’ and personal time.

Technology as a venue for workaholics isn’t new. I think the issue hit the business sector hard first as mobile technology–Blackberries–infiltrated that market. With the advent of smartphones, you didn’t have to be a workaholic staying in the office, you could be one anywhere–even on vacation with your family. I bet we all know people who can’t stop themselves from answering work emails when not working, continuing to work because technology has reached them everywhere/anytime. I think it first hit the education sector hard with the proliferation of online learning & the rise of digital communications. Those early online instructors were barraged with email & other digital communications 24/7–in a way no F2F (face-to-face) teacher had to deal with (unless you live in a small rural community–but that’s another issue).

Managing time efficiently is one of the techniques that needs to be taught to those taking up online instruction–or those who have a heavy technology component to their educational roles–or even just those educators who are very into digital communications, social networking, & mobile computing. My colleague & friend, Rachel Moll (@rfmoll) says she thinks I’m very good at setting boundaries between my “work” time and my personal life–as I trail around with my computer, or iphone, or ipad. (Rachel catches me on my good days! It’s all relative–ask my husband, Arnie, and he might disagree.) Though I love my job, am passionate about technology, and like to go above & beyond, I believe I am getting better balancing when I work and when I don’t. (At least I hope that’s how my dean and faculty members perceive it–as well as my two young sons and my husband.)

Do I think that learning shouldn’t occur everywhere/anytime? I’m totally in favour of learning everywhere and anytime. It’s a very Zen concept. However, I think it’s different when it’s a passion or personal interest versus when it’s driven by outside forces–your boss, your 9th grade science teacher, etc., under deadlines, pressure, etc. moving into time that was previously reserved for other important items that make us healthy humans. As we move ourselves and our students into the everywhere/anytime paradigm, we need to teach ourselves and our students to achieve balance and establish boundaries–allowing time for personal lives, families, friends, working out, resting, being spiritual–goofing around. As we look to move to a flip model, we must ever be aware of ‘reasonable’ workloads based on student capacity–general or specific to an individual–and work to establish boundaries.

My recent conversations with George on the flip model were centred on the need to build up students’ personal responsibility and commitment with regard to their own learning so that the work assigned outside of class got done–without the teacher acting as a heavy handed overseer, administering quizzes, etc. During those conversations, I didn’t look at the other end of the spectrum that the Herald article brought to mind. Some of our students can become overwhelmed, become compulsive about completing content. Some educators can be over zealous in assigning homework–let alone learning–outside the bounds of the physical classroom.

Boundaries don’t need to be rigid–they can be flexible or fluid, but when when we look at the balance of what we do, that balance should always be healthy for the individual. If you’re using an everywhere/anytime approach with a flip model using mobile technologies, help yourself and your students manage their time and efforts in a healthy manner. Check-in with yourself and your students: Is the workload or activity manageable in a reasonable timeframe? If not, be flexible and fluid: adjust them. I included the picture of the acrobats as a reminder of what amazing things can be achieved when we are experts at achieving balance. Technology and changing our pedagogical approaches should ultimately make teaching and learning better and help us achieve amazing things–when well balanced.