Moving from Central to Mobile...

Just like our telephones used to be centrally located but are now mobile and go with us wherever we need them to, so is the trend with computer labs.  I can remember when centrally located labs were really the only option in schools.  Students would periodically, maybe once or twice a week trek to the "computer lab" to play Oregon Trail, or practice keyboarding with Mavis Beacon or some other educational software.  Now, as Picciano (2011) mentions on page 232 "moving students to a central laboratory for several periods per week is effective given limited resources, but it is not ideal."  With the changing standards, most computer use is tied to classroom instruction and mobile labs are more useful and many schools have been able to even implement 1:1 initiatives. When schools decide what type of computer labs they are going to go with they still need to keep the basic concepts of good planning in mind.  When making decisions, the administrators still need to consider the "human needs of people both inside and outside the school- including students, teachers, parents, and taxpayers." (Picciano, 2011, p. 16)  One must always consider what the main goal or objective is with the computer labs.  Are they students learing basic keyboarding and computing skills alone or are teachers incorporating these skills into lessons?  What is the goal of the faculty and administration by adding this technology?  Are the faculty comfortable with technology in their classrooms and incorporating technology into their lessons? These are all questions that must be answered before the decision on a centralized or mobile lab could be made. The current trends in most subject areas require the integration of research, word processing, presentations and technology use within each subject area.  With that being the current trend, I believe mobile or 1:1 is where most schools are headed, but infrastructure and faculty must be supported in this transition.  Today's students must not only be able to produce written work, but they must also be able to produce digital work whether it be videos, blogs, wikis, or other forms of media and to do that we must bring technology into our classrooms. This requires the computers to be with students in the places where the teaching and learning are taking place, which is usually in the classrooms. According to Breedlove (2014) "instead of learning technology in a vacuum, students should be using it the same as paper and pencil." This requires it to be integrated into the classroom activities on a regular basis not as a "token" activity here and there.  The landscape of our homes have most definitely changed in the area of technology, why should our classrooms be any different?  In closing, here is a short clip showing today's kids, with some of those earlier computers I was talking about that we used to play oregon trail on.  This shows us just how far we actually have come in my lifetime, I have to wonder what my son will see.

References:

 Picciano, A. (2011). Educational leadership and planning for technology (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson. 

 Breedlove, H. (2014, September 30). Why You Should Ditch The Computer Lab - Insight ON. Retrieved April 23, 2015, from http://www.insight.com/insighton/education/ditch-computer-lab/  

Social Media.....What did we do without it?

Vintage Social Media

    I like to think that I am not "that" old.  I have only been teaching for thirteen years.  I have a seven year old son, and with spending so much time in middle school, I keep pretty current with music, pop culture and what's new and current.  I use technology, have several social media accounts and try to integrate technology into my classroom successfully.  But then my seven year old loses a tooth, or our cat has kittens and then I realize how the times have changed.  Instead of wanting to call and tell someone or just enjoy the moment, what does he say?  "Hey, take a picture and put it on facebook, you can tag (fill in his friend's parent's names here)" then I know we "aren't in Kansas anymore."  My seven year old will never remember a world without social media.  He loves seeing his friends and their vacations, lost teeth, awards, pets and other things, and for now he sees no negative.  I remember my first experiences with online interaction, in college, with dial up internet service via AOL instant messenger.  It was so exciting sitting waiting for that dial-up process to complete, and, if you were really lucky you got to hear the "you've got mail" when it was complete.  When I started teaching high school, students were already on MySpace.  So the students we teach now are likely much like my seven year old in that social media has always been a part of their reality.  It is, however, our responsibility as educators to support students as they learn digital citizenship. (Hicks, 2013, p.138) As I have discussed in my earlier blog post "when being born digital isn't enough" we must teach our students to be responsible when it comes to social media and the internet in general.  This leads me to the topic of this blog post. This is a screenshot of a tweet that was retweeted by a technology specialist I follow from another system.  It caught my attention because it is a reference to the old "teach a man to fish" proverb.

      I think that this is completely true for our time, in our age, in our classrooms and especially true with social media.  We are teaching students who have access to a mass of information at their fingertips 24/7.  Finding information is not a problem.  We have to teach them how to use these tools responsibly, how to think critically, how to be skeptical of information sources they find online and also to be aware of what they are putting out there for others to see.  When looking at this tweet using the MAPS heuristic I see the following:

The Mode: The mode here could be considered persuasive or argumentative, the author is clearly making a point and strongly encouraging a digital citizenship approach versus a censorship approach.

The Media: The media here is twitter, so the post had to be brief, I like that the actual tweet summed up the photo perfectly by emphasizing the importance of digital citizenship.

The Audience: The audience here is broad as the author has over 27,000 followers but he is a educational technology specialist, so most of his posts relate to technology in education and is geared toward that.

The Purpose: The purpose of this tweet I most likely would be to start conversation and encourage teachers to teach digital citizenship, not locking down the internet so that it is barely useable.  I would think it did that by the number of retweets and favorites.

The Situation: The situation here I am unsure of, there could have been a link to further educational resources on digital citizenship or further information, but with twitter, most posts are quick, brief, overviews, like this one.

Overall, I believe as teachers, we have to follow this approach with our students.  Our students are going to use social media, we use social media, why not use it in a positive way for both?  I have found Google Classroom to be very useful with my students already.  Our school PTO has used facebook as a very successful communication tool.  I have found Google+ and twitter to both be endless sources of technology information and classroom ideas.  Lastly, this article I found retweeted by an administrator in another system fits with the above tweeted graphic perfectly. "Don't Lock it Down"  This also reiterates what Hicks (2013)says in the chapter 2 (about our students) that "we can help them understand how, when and why digital writing matters, both for them as individuals, and for their families and communities.

Resources

Hicks, T. (2013). Crafting digital writing: Composing texts across media and genres. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Lehmann, C. (2015, April 3). Don't Lock it Down. Retrieved April 15, 2015, from http://www.techlearning.com/blogentry/9157#.VSgAZnCdWkA.twitter