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Atomic Learning is offering a free series of videos about blogging using Blogger through the month of February.  This is a great opportunity to learn something new or brush up your skills if you’re a Blogger user!

The prolific and insightful blogger Vicki Davis added her two cents to the Social Networking in Education debate. I’d like to comment on a few points.

1. Lose the term social. Love this idea. Something as simple as a name change can make a world of difference in the adoption and acceptance of a platform. It’s much easier to explain the benefits of an educational network than a social one.
2. Private School-Wide Networks are the greatest opportunity for school building and digital literacy ever created. I’m not ready to go that extreme of hyperbole in describing it’s potential but it is promising. The chance to expose more people: students, staff, parents, and friends of the school to what is going on in the classroom and around the school. Personally I like the idea of the walled garden where students can make mistakes in front of people they know rather than complete strangers.
3. Advertising kills the model for education. Sites like Ning that incorporate advertising with no way of suppressing it for students severely limit their model. While I can’t argue with the need to generate revenue, they do need to come up with options. A suggestion would be special “student accounts” that suppress the advertising for those accounts.

Educational network solutions that address the monitoring, advertising, and functional issues will be successful in the space. Ones that don’t will be left by the wayside to be replaced by the next big thing.

Cool Cat Teacher Blog: It is about Educational Networking NOT Social Networking

If you’re striving to push your classes into new realms of technology and are secretly lusting after the idea of a classroom full of ultra-mini PCs for your students, then I’ve got news for you!

To get the funding you need…you need to sell the children.

Not literally of course. You need to market them, their projects, their skills, and their learnings. As educators we spend a lot of time talking with our peers about the cool things we’ve done. We share the web links, show the vlog postings, comment on the blogs, all reveling in how far we’re coming.

Administrators need to be able to justify budgetary expenditures and it’s much easier when we can show what is accomplished for the money put out. How can you help us help you get the funding necessary to keep all the cool things happening?

A I D A

In marketing parlance, AIDA refers to Awareness Interest Desire Action. It is the buying path for most consumer goods and can be put to very effective use when the “product” you’re selling is the success of your students.

Awareness

Administrators live in the world of meetings, emails, discussions, and committees. For the most part they don’t and can’t have the time to be in the classroom. As such they’re not aware of what is possible and what is being accomplished in classrooms all over the world. Make them aware of what’s going on. Send them emails with links to successful sites. Show them videos of what is happening in other schools. Set meetings with them not to beg for money but to share with them your successes. You’re giving them the ammunition to go hunt down your funds, an appreciation for what is successful, and demonstrating that your requests are justified by more than an “I want this.”

Interest

Once they’re aware of what’s possible and what’s being done you need to foster their interest in it and get their buy in. Showing what other schools are accomplishing is a great way since no administrator wants to be behind the others in their peer group. It’s more psychodynamic than it is scholastic. Talk with them and find out what their drivers are and direct your message to them.

Desire

Helping to foster their desire for success for the students, the school, the teachers, and themselves motivates administration to do what’s necessary to meet the needs that have been identified. Take the interest you spurred earlier and fan the flames. Get them worked up about a topic or idea that carries you towards your goal and help them share your desire to accomplish it.

Action

When you get to the point of taking the actions necessary to achieve your goal, help your administration out again. Do some of the leg work. Show them actual examples of technology that will do what you need. Put together a plan that results in the accomplishments you have been getting them fired up about. Most administrators are most effective as decision makers, so put the work in so all they need to do is make the decisions.

Your classroom projects and successes often are based on the level of technology you have on hand. If you need more, you need to justify why. The next time you’re in a staff meeting and says “How will we get this?” you can answer, “We’ll sell the children!”

edtechNOT.com Blog: What would my ideal education ultraportable look like?

The Best education notebook is no notebook I question the value of notebooks in schools period. It’s a crutch for a bunch of lazy kids to do little, or surf to their websites of interest.

School achievement is completely based on the desire of the individual student to do the necessary reading and study to learn. Many schools, including the one I currently work in has PC’s in every classroom, and two computer labs. But the students don’t use the Internet, or the study materials for PC’s to learn anything, or enrich their studies. they use it to find a source for a paper, many times some dumpy bogus web site, then type a paper full of grammar mistakes, misspellings, and bad formatting, and then expect an A.

If you can’t read well, have no mastery of grammar other than “txt msg 2 u”, and have no interest in the study and work of learning, then a PC Notebook in their hand is a waste. It will do them no good. If their family can’t afford a PC, then go to a library, filled with PC’s paid for by people who use a phone.

If they are overseas in poverty, then you have a whole different set of problems to deal with. But in the US today, you have a bunch of lazy kids who are addicted to pictures and music. A PC won’t change them.

This response by a classroom teacher to the concept of ultraportable notebooks for students concerns me.  Not from the standpoint of this being the best technological solution for the developing world, but the preconceived perception of failure that is being attached.

My opinion:  sell the machines to whomever wants them.  Develop the programs and curriculum to teach teachers how to use these tools.  I’m sure similar arguments were made on the side of the slide rule and the fountain pen but does it mean we must continue them?

If we want to make the greatest difference in the world, educate that teacher first.  Let the education spread through the system from the top down, not the bottom up.

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Skellie over at skelliewag has a great posting about using Flickr and Creative Commons images to enhance your blog postings. I’d say take it even further. Every teacher using technology should be familiar with Creative Commons and leverage these image libraries to get their point across. Nothing is a greater turn-off for students or an audience than page after page of text with no visual stimuli. Jump out there, get some pictures, and make your content interesting for crying out loud!