IT For the Young Mind

I find that a lot of my blogs have to deal with the Grade 2 classes I teach, but that’s just because so much of what I’m doing with those youngins relates quite well to what I’m doing in the online course I’ve been taking.

A couple days ago it came to my attention that one of those students, under my direction at the time, used one of the schools computers to rant about how much he hated school in a 2 minute video which he decided to save to the laptop’s desktop.  In the video he dropped a couple of F-bombs to emphasize his displeasure for school – which shocked another student who had watched his video and brought it to the attention of school administrators.

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When he made that video, the task I had given the class was to blog about anything on their own so their teachers would know who could log in and blog on their own, and who still needed assistance getting to their blogs.

He took that liberty to blog about anything…and because I was trying to keep my hands off to see who was truly able to blog independently, I wasn’t around to catch swearing.

Interestingly, many people at my school recommended that we take his computer privileges away for a week for recording his swearing. I was against this at first: would you take away pencils for a week if he had written it on a piece of paper? I’m willing to bet that you wouldn’t.  I’m trying to treat the computer as another tool, like a ruler or an eraser.  But where a computer is different is that this tool is being shared by every child in elementary.  Anything offensive created on a computer is potentially shared with everyone in the school.

In the end, we didn’t take away computer privileges.  There was no sense in making that student fall behind any further (he didn’t know how to blog independently). But rather, we fell back to his classroom rules which stated that he was to only use kind words – and since he didn’t, he lost a couple of recesses.

As for my part to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again, the Grade 2 teachers and I sat down with the class and came up with some essential agreements for computer use.  These agreements came from suggestions from the students, so there was a lot of mention about treating the computer like a newborn baby; but some students mentioned that computers are to be used to produce your best work – and that includes not using the technology to record swearing, bullying, or something that will hurt others.

Coming up with essential agreements is something that I’ll have to remind myself to do at the beginning of the next school year.  Rules are better followed when they’re made up by the people that actually have to follow the rules.  Handing out detentions or whatever is easier when the students themselves come up with the consequences.  I’m just not sure how tricky it’ll be to get the students to come up with essential agreements that will look just like the acceptable user policy I’m trying to design for the school.

I can imagine teaching kids about plagiarism has to be one of the most painful things to teach an inquisitive mind.  I can remember my own teacher back in the day ‘teaching’ me how to reference sources and write bibliographies and how much I really didn’t care – and because I didn’t care, I didn’t do very well in it.  Teaching how to source has got to be the exact opposite of teaching by inquiry, because I’m not sure how anyone can get children to be interested in writing authors’ names and their publishers’ cities.

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Fast forward to 2012, where up until a month ago I’ve been teaching kids how to grab images from Google Images and how to manipulate those photos so it would like my head on Wayne Gretzky’s body holding up the Stanley Cup.  I demoed how I did it, and encouraged them to do the same, with the only instructions being “the more you make me laugh, the higher imaginary marks you get! Make me laugh!”

But it’s coming to a time where we need to teach the kids how to be good digital citizens.  It’s going to be painful getting them to understand what Creative Commons is and why we can’t just rip off pictures and post them to our e-portfolios and call the work our own.  Not only because it will be like reminding them to put the date on everything, but because if this is going to be done right, everyone in the school is going to have to do it – the students, the teachers, and the administration.

The saying goes that teachers are the worst students.  That worries me, because we have a lot of great teachers here at my school, but if I can’t get them to use work with Creative Commons rights, how can I expect the kids to do so? If I can’t get the teachers to give credit to the authors of the work, the students won’t either, and it’ll feel like I’m running in quicksand.

This feels like a big mission.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

As a ten year old kid, I can remember my parents telling me and my friends that they hired a stranger to watch our behaviour as we rode the subway to and from school every day.  That scared the living daylights out of me.  No more swinging on the subway bars, no more yelling to my friends in crowded subways, and a lot more giving up our seats to the elderly in the hopes that my parents’ spy would relay just how nice I was when I was left ‘unsupervised.’

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To me, that was a voice in the back of my head on top of my conscience reminding me to do the right thing.  I had envisioned this spy taking pictures and writing reports about our actions on our daily trips to school and submitting them to my parents in a manila envelope.  A strange imagination I had, yes – but never did it cross my mind that my parents were invading my privacy (I had to share a bedroom with my younger brother, so privacy didn’t really exist anyways).

Now today, I still have my parents telling me to be careful with my actions.  They’ve read too many newspaper articles about how a photo of them was taken and then posted onto facebook and now nothing goes unforgotten, especially now with the growing amount of digital cameras out there.  Stories like this about Michael Phelps’s bong scandal or this about a teacher who was fired for posting pics of her holding alcohol remind my parents about the dangers of doing anything for the fear of cameras catching me.  Nothing seems to be private anymore; evidence on anything can be spread all over the world in a matter of seconds. While I do try to have a life, I also think twice when I think of doing anything remotely stupid, and because of that I think all the lack of privacy has helped me become what I hope is a better person.

The director of IT at my school once told me that it’s better that kids understand that anything they do can be saved digitally forever; it’s better that they make the mistake of posting a picture on their blog about them picking their nose while they’re eight and learn from it rather than sharing a picture of themselves in their undies while they’re much older and when it’s too late to stop something so private from spreading.  It’s a tough subject to teach the kids because we didn’t really grow up in an age where everything you do could potentially be documented forever.  It feels as though if we want to teach our children about the internet, we have to prepare them for a world where privacy is dead.  The future may sound scary, but if you ask any of these students I’m sure you’ll find that they’re really excited to jump right into the future.

I understand that this post will be a little hard to follow.  My apologies, but I wanted to get my story out there just in case anyone else tried to do e-portfolios the same way I did them.

A funny thing happened to me last Thursday.  Apparently, my school Gmail account had been disabled – Gmail had booted me from their system for “violating their terms of service for exceeding quotas.”

It became clear to me that what I had done wrong was related to the blogs that I had set up for the grade 2 and 5 classes at my school.  When I ventured into the world of e-portfolios using blogs, the biggest issue and concern was that pf privacy.  I wasn’t sure if the parents and staff in the school community was ready for children as young as seven to

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have their pictures, names and work up on the Internet for everyone to see, so I needed another security measure.  I thought that if I was the administrator of all their blogs, that would allow me to set the security settings on then blogs so that only those that I think should be able to see their blogs can be viewers.  I initially invited all their classmates to be viewers of each others’ blogs so that they would be able to provide feedback and refections on everyone’s work.  Teachers were invited to be administrators of their blogs as well so that they could add parents or grandparents to the “allow to view” list if family members ever requested it.

Unforunately, these invitations resulted in a lot of emails going to the kids.  Each student would receive an email from me saying “Mr. Nonato has invited you to view grade5jackie’s blog” for each student.   This meant that if there were 40 kids in grade 5, they would recieve 39 emails from me inviting them to view another one of their classmate’s blogs.  That’s a lot of emails at one time for grade 2 or 5 students that weren’t really clear on what they were.

My suspicions are that one of the students decided to mark all my emails – all 39 of them, as spam, and that triggered an alert to Google, which resulted in my account being suspended.

At the time of starting up these blog e-portfolios, I thought by owning each blog my kids’ e-portfolios would be guarded in a way that will keep my administration happy, while at the same time allowing students’ work to be shared with students, teachers, and parents.  But instead, by owning the blogs and keeping privacy settings fairly high I instead created a headache for myself and anyone at my school that has been trying to get a hold of me via email.

My next step (after getting Google to reactivate my email account) is to give a few lessons in privacy to the second and fifth graders, and soon after hand over ownership of their blog accounts to them.  I’ll have to go over a few lessons on how to allow viewers and how to add contributors, and I’ll have to illustrate the idea that the Internet and privacy is almost mutually exclusive.  This will be a couple of big steps, but I believe it’s better that they learn this lesson now while their mistakes will be minor, rather than in the future where their mistakes may be major.

My online course requires that I produce a lesson or unit plan for every course that I take.  As this is the end of Course 1, I was tasked to come up with a lesson plan that tied in what I’ve been learning during my time spent in this course, as well as the things I have been doing in the classroom.

What I find really interesting about my program is how much of it is built on viewing content that has been created and posted on the Internet for the world to see.  All this content is being published all over the world for you to take what you want from it.  It seems to be always fresh, and new ideas are popping up everywhere to be shared and tried out by anyone that is willing.  I find it’s almost hard to keep up – I’ll try one thing, and a day or two later there’s a better way of doing it which forces me to change.  All this quick change…it’s exciting and challenging, and I can only wish I was a student on the receiving end of the cutting edge of education during this time.

This lesson is a reading lesson which uses student blogs as a place where the evidence of learning is held.  On the tech side of things, the students learn 1) a skill that we take for granted, as well as 2) a skill that has become increasingly important, especially in this course and in adding to online conversations.

The second grade students have previously recorded themselves reading using vocaroo and have posted their read-alouds onto their blog.  Students have become familiar with logging into their email accounts and then to their Gmail linked Blogger accounts, but the have never even thought about viewing other students’ blogs.  This will be their first time getting to view other blogs, and the only way to do so will be to properly type out URLs in the address bar.  An emphasis on making sure there are no spaces and that the ‘dots’ are in the proper places will be made.

When they have reached a peer’s blog, they will listen to their classmate’s read-aloud and comment on what they do well and what they can do to improve their reading.  Using terminology taught during literacy blocks will be encouraged, like “I like how fluent your reading is” or “during the climax of the story, raising your voice will show excitement when you read.”

After a visiting and commenting on a few blogs, students will be allowed to visit their own blogs to view the comments left on their blogs.  Students keen to improve will learn from posts left by their classmates.

This will be also be an opportune time to discuss how public their work is becoming.  While I am hesitant to allow student blogs to be viewed to the public, I do share the blogs with other teachers, parents, and people in the school community.  Posting something that can be viewed as bullying or unfair can be viewed by anyone in the world, and teaching students this lesson at the age of 7 or 8 is something I hope they are lucky to learn.

After having seen a few examples of blogs as e-portfolios, I went to the second grade teachers at my school to ask them if they wanted to be the guinea pigs for the primary’s venture into blog e-portfolios.  They had previously approached me with ideas of having their portfolios kept on a USB flash drive, and seeing the blogs as a chance to improve on the idea, I asked them to try it out and they seemed more than happy to go along with this project.

I had it all mapped out:

Step 1: Set up these seven year olds with gmail accounts.

Step 2: Get them used to logging in to email, uploading and downloading photos to and from email, and making sure they log out properly.

Step 3: Set them up with Blogger accounts (linked to their gmail accounts) and practice having them log in to Blogger.

Step 4: Have them upload photos, videos, and audio clips into their blogs.  Have them take pictures of their work and get them to reflect on their pieces.

Step 5: Introduce commenting on other kids’ work.

A simple five step process.  If only it were that easy. 

Problem 1: Many of these second graders couldn’t remember their usernames and email addresses.  We set them up so that their usernames would be the (year they graduate)+(their first name)+(their first letter of their last name)@school.com which is my school’s standard.  This was crazy.  I guess to these kids the year 2022 is so far away for them those numbers don’t carry any significance, and therefore they don’t remember it.  I found that they like to put periods in random places in their email addresses, and spaces here and there mess things up.  Making things worse, if they logged in incorrectly several times Gmail would require them to enter a captcha which just confused them.

Problem 2: We had them make their passwords “4321″ plus their favourite day of the week.  They would often forget how to spell the days of the week, and having those round dots appear instead of letters in the password box doesn’t make things easier for 7 year olds.

Problem 3: Setting up security settings for the second graders.  This was a bit of a nightmare.  Our school required that we keep these blogs as secure as possible, so right now only teachers and fellow students can see the kids’ blogs.  But this meant I had to invite each child to view each other child’s blog individually via email.  This meant they received a hundred view-blog invitation emails which they needed to accept individually.  But thanks to my anti spam email lesson I gave the week before, many deleted all these emails.

Problem 4: E-portfolios are so much more time consuming than old fashioned portfolios…it just takes too much time for a student to turn on a laptop, log onto the computer, log into blogger, take a photo of their art work, upload it, then comment on it, and then log off and return the computer to the cart.  That’s minimum 20 minutes right there.

Problem 5: Every time I go into the second grade classroom to help with their blogs, it just feels like it’s all chaos and like I’m doing something wrong.

So, feeling a litte discouraged, I asked a second grade teacher what her feelings on the blogs were.  When I asked her if getting second graders to blog was a bit overambitious, Ms. Johnson said “no, not insofar as it gets them used to the process and starts them doing something they may very well keep doing for the next few years.  I think it does require teacher support at this age but they’d have to learn those skills at some point.”

“They’re all doing it,” she continued. “It’s not like we don’t teach them how to write because they can’t do it perfectly at first. You show them, get them used to the idea and then help them practice.”

Of course I could have done so many things differently and so many things better. But despite all the problems I thought I was having, these kids were in fact learning a lot of skills while I was in the background ready to rip my hair out. To be honest, each time we get these learners to blog it gets better.  The quality of their work improves and they learn a new tech skill almost every time they log on.  It really isn’t a waste of time; they’ll use the skills they learn here in the future. And yeah, it’s hard for everyone involved because they’ve never done anything like this before – but like Ms. Johnson said, it’s not like we don’t teach them how to write because they can’t do it perfectly at first.

After attending an ECIS conference in Portugal a few months ago, I deceided to try out something new that I learned from Ms. Hos-McGrane’s workshop on IT in the PYP: I decided to try e-portfolios.

Like many schools, my school encourages each teacher to have their students create portfolios of their work.  Each student has a big blue folder in which they put their best pieces of work into, along with reflections on each piece and perhaps some fellow student reflections as well.  But every year these portfolios are discussed, it seemed like the issue of where these portfolios were to be kept in the summer time or when our students moved on from out school would always came up.  These portfolios are big bulky things that often have work fall out of them.  They can’t easily fit into a student’s back pack, so they have to be hand carried…which results in them being left behind on metros or falling in the mud.

Just before I went to this conference, the classroom teachers I work with were thinking about creating e-portfolios on USB flash drives.  Each student would have one, and for every piece of work that they do, we would photograph it or make a Word copy of their writing and save it to the flash drive. Over time this thumb drive would become their pensive of work and hold everything that they did.  We went ahead and purchased one thumb drive per student in preparation for launching this type of e-portfolio. We had our worries about these flash drive portfolios: we knew file management would be a bit of a headache, but it would be my job to teach them how to keep things organized; we knew that there was always the risk of the flash drives becoming misplaced, but we would be sure to make back-up copies every month or so; we were worried about how we would be able to keep track of what was going where and how students would contribute to it even from home among other things.  How would other students see it? How would grandparents from overseas see it? We didn’t really have a solution for those last few points.

The workshop I attended pointed me in the direction of better e-portfolios – certainly better than using thumb drives.  How Ms. Hos-McGrane did them was a revelation to me.  She advised that I do them on some form of blog service like Blogger or WordPress.  I couldn’t wait to return back to my school to try this out.

These blogs were a game changer.  Students could access them from anywhere the Internet can reach.  Blogs make it hard to delete things, but make it easy to add work (especially after being shown how a couple of times).   Videos can easily be made and posted.  Audio work using services like vocaroo.com can be conveniently posted.  Comments can be left by teachers and fellow students.  Teachers can add their students to their Google Readers to keep track of who’s posting what.  Reflection can be done on photographed art work.  Urls can be given out to grandparents on other continents.  Maybe best of all, these blogs can be continued year after year.  In a few years, the student will be able to look back at their first blogs and see how much they’ve grown.

I have had some students record themselves read on vocaroo and post their reading on their blogs.  At the end of the year, I’ll have them read again, and I’m sure their reading will have improved.  They’ll be able to see evidence of how much they’ve grown as learners, and by doing so they’ll reflect on how much they have done.  It’ll be digital evidence of how much they’ve done.

Last November at an ECIS conference in Portugal I attended a session run by Maggie Hos-McGrane.  Her session has helped me greatly with my profession, especially with the way I handle e-portfolios.  Her blog Tech Transformation is a great read with frequent posts if you’re interested.

A couple of weeks back she posted an article titled TGIM -v- TGIF where in her first paragraph she ponders how people can look at their work as an obstacle they must overcome so they can start doing whatever it is that they really want to do.  That got me thinking about all the jobs that I’ve had and all the ones where I did really look forward to those Freedom Fridays and the ones where I didn’t mind those Mondays.

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It should be of note that I used to have a factory job as a university student. Back when I was an economics major looking to work in a big bank to make big money, I would toil my summers away bending prices of scrap metal after piece of scrap metal, forming server boxes and power cables. I was very good at what I did. As a young kid (20 or so) I was allowed to run the million dollar machine that only the lifers were allowed to run. But that was the biggest highlight of my job. I would spend the other days just wishing that I had something new to learn while I pressed buttons on a machine over and over again. I would pump the radio so loud just to hear the DJs talk so I could feel like I was part of a conversation. It was partially there where I realized I needed to do something more with my life – something more interactive, something where I could learn everything every day. There, I feared the Mondays.

Everyone else there at the factory came in to bend sheet metal. I doubt that it was their dream job. Rather, it felt like they came to work to earn cash while a boss ordered them around. It was hard for these people to create, but they needed to earn money somehow.

More often than not these guys went home on the weekends and had home garages. I had buddies that worked on their cars and painted their motorcycles. They created their dream garages and turned them into man caves. Of course they had their wives and kids. They spent time with them…but the things you’d hear about most is how they fixed up their T-Bird by making a part from old parts, or how they modified their lawnmowers so it could simultaneously spread fertilizer while cutting grass.

These guys wanted to create. They’re not given that chance from Monday to Friday. I think for some there’s that saying, thank God it’s Friday…but maybe it should be followed up with “I need the freedom to create.”

Educators are pretty blessed people.  We’re given the chance to create and to experiment and to try new things with the chance of failure and to be allowed to learn from it.  I believe in good schools principals encourage it.  It can be exciting, thrilling and fulfilling. Maybe that’s why I don’t mind the Mondays now.  Yeah, I look forward to the Fridays too; it’s then I can hack around on my piano, learn songs on guitar.  I’m still free to learn and try new things then. But when those Mondays come around, I can see it as just another week of creating, trying, and learning.

As an educator, I have to remind myself that I can’t be the big boss telling people what to do without letting them spread their wings.  Kids need to be able to create.  They should be able to try things without worrying about failure.  And if they fail: good for them.  Maybe they learn from it, maybe they improve on what they’re doing.  In doing so, I’m willing to bet they’ll fear the Mondays less, and they won’t long for those Fridays too.