Category: Google

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Five Simple Skills

There always seems to be a lot of talk about the need for more teachers to embrace “21st Century skills”. Of course, there’s a lot of discussion about what these “21st Century skills” actually are. Many people have debated and discussed this issue, asking the question of what exactly should today’s learners know in order to function in the “21st Century”.

I’m sure there are a whole lot of really good answers to these questions that dig deeply into effective pedagogy and the deeper philosophy of education. This post is not about those things.

Instead, here is a list of simple, easily-learnable skills that I think would make life as a teacher in the 21st Century simpler and much more productive. While they’re not exactly earth-shatteringly profound in terms of the big issues of education, they are greatly useful skills to have… and in my experience they are also skills that all too few teachers seem to actually possess. I find that possession of these skills is often a reasonable indicator of a teacher’s progress along the “21st Century teaching” pathway – if they can do these things, they often “get” the bigger picture about technology and its role in modern learning.

Actually, I think I’d go beyond just calling them just “skills”… I’d tend to see these as entirely new types of literacies, because the ability to do these things is beginning to define our ability to function with fluency in these times we live in.

  • Learn to search. It’s amazing how many people cannot do even a moderately complex search, using some sort of boolean thinking to narrow search results. What’s even more surprising is the number of people who do not even think to use a web-based search engine to find answers to questions that puzzle them. I find it astounding that so many people wonder about the answers to questions that are just a quick Google search away, but they never think to do it. Learn to use a search engine to find a simple answer, a fact, a quote, a statistic, a song lyric, a recipe, a price, or any other useful snippet of information. The time taken to learn this simple skill will pay for itself many times over.
  • Learn to resize and crop a digital photo. Being able to crop and resize a digital photo is an incredibly useful skill that has applications in so many areas. There’s not a lot to it, and it doesn’t require any particularly exotic or expensive software. It’s useful to understand issues like how to make an image suitable for use in print versus the web. We live in a very visual world and once you know how do simple image manipulation you will find uses for this skill everywhere.
  • Learn how to edit video. I once heard Hall Davidson say, given the right 2 minutes of video footage, you can teach anybody anything. Video really is shaping up to be the next important literacy, and for a teacher, the ability to manipulate short chunks of moving images is extremely valuable. Video editing is quick and easy to learn these days, and has many, many applications. Spend a little time with free tools like iMovie or Movie Maker and work out how to edit and remix video footage. You won’t regret it.
  • Learn to use a HTML Editor. If you want to participate in the 21st Century you need to know how to create content for the web. And while there’s no real need to know how to write raw HTML code, it’s hugely valuable to be able to competently use a web-based HTML editor. Every web-based environment has one, whether it’s WordPress, Moodle, Wikispaces or something else, and every time you add content to a site you need to interact with the rows of buttons above the text input field called the HTML Editor. Beyond just making things bold and italic, it’s really worth understanding the function of other tools for adding tables, embedding web media, adding images and so on. If you believe that the web has an important role to play in our future, then learn how to create simple content for it with a HTML Editor.
  • Learn to think in hyperlinks. I was going to include this in the previous item, since a HTML Editor is where you’d normally create hyperlinks, but I think this skill is important enough to have its own category. Hyperlinks ARE the web. In a world that is becoming more and more reliant on the web for every aspect of our lives, you really do need to know how to create these links that help us tie ideas together. For teachers, connecting students to ideas is what we do, and the ability to create a hyperlink should be a fundamental skill. Hyperlinking totally changes the way a reader interacts with text and is therefore an important new literacy, yet so many teachers have still not come to terms with the importance of explicitly teaching their students to read using hypertext. Hyperlinking is easy to do, but it requires a different mindset to constantly think in terms of hypertext. Learn to link!

So there you have it. Five simple, easy-to-learn skills (or literacies) that will help you function better in “the 21st Century”. How many do you possess? And are there any others that you think should be on the list?

CC Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/3196112134/

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Where does cheating begin?

Imagine this scenario… you are suddenly diagnosed with a life threatening disease, something very dangerous but quite curable if you have the right information about how to do so.  Your doctor knows that there is an answer to your serious problem, but cannot recall what drug is required to treat it.  He remembers reading something about it a long time ago, but can no longer recall the exact name of the drug.

He reaches towards the mouse on his computer, and begins to click a link that will take him to the online medical directory where he will find the answer he needs to cure your condition.

“Stop!”, you declare.  “That’s cheating!  If you can’t remember the name of that drug without looking it up, then what sort of doctor are you?  I want you to just remember it without looking it up.”

Of course, I imagine that if this situation were real you would be only too happy for the doctor to do whatever was required to find the cure for your disease.  You wouldn’t think twice about whether it might be considered “cheating” to look up the information needed to save your life… in fact you’d better hope that you have a doctor who a) knows there is an answer out there somewhere, and b) knows how to find it quickly.

I pondered this scenario today because I went to a dinner party with about 40 other people and we were presented with a trivia quiz on the table, something to keep us busy and entertained between food courses.  Being a celebration of Canadian Thanksgiving, the questions were all about Canada.  Now, I actually know quite a bit about Canada… I lived there for a year, travelled quite extensively through the historic eastern provinces, read a few books about Canadian history, and I have a Canadian girlfriend.  So I did know the answer to quite a few of the questions.

Of course, there were also questions I didn’t know the answer to.  And being the curious type who likes a challenge and to always learn more, I reached for my Nokia N95, pointed it to Google, and started looking for the answers to the questions I didn’t know.  If you have reasonable information literacy skills and can come up with good search keywords, finding answers to simple recall-style questions with Google is pretty easy.  In fact, you can usually find the answers just from the Google search results page without even going to the websites they link to.  It was not long before I had the elusive answers… in fact, I actually stumbled across the exact quiz that the questions were lifted from. Whoever put the quiz together had not changed anything, just used it directly from this website.  I casually copied down all the unknown answers onto the sheet and waited until it needed to be submitted.

Of course, when the sheets were finally collected and tallied, there was general astonishment that someone could have actually gotten all the questions 100% correct! A few people who knew what I’d done bandied about words like “cheating” and “unfair”.

For the record, I did not accept the prize – a lovely bottle of red wine – because I willingly admitted I had some help from my friends Mr Google and Mr Wikipedia, and I figured it would not have been fair to accept the prize.  I guess I just like to be a bit of a stirrer sometimes in order to make a point, even if only to myself.

But seriously, why do we build entire education systems based on rewarding people who can respond with the correct answers to questions, but then assume that any use of a tool to help them do this is cheating?   Why would a doctor in the scenario above get applauded for doing whatever was necessary to find an answer to the problem, but a student who does the same thing is considered a cheat.

If basic recall of facts is all that matters, a tool like Google can make you the smartest person in the room.  Today’s trivia quiz proved that.  If finding answers anywhere at anytime is a valuable thing to be able to do, then a mobile phone should be a standard tool you carry everywhere.

What I think people were really saying was that, if I was allowed to use my phone to find answers and everyone else wasn’t, then that would give me an unfair advantage.  And that may be true if I was the only person with access to Google, but the fact is that I didn’t do anything that every other person in that room could have done if they’d have chosen to.  The fact is, I was the only one in the room who used a tool that we all potentially had access to, but because I used that tool it made me a “cheat”.

And here’s the real point… mostly we ban these tools in our classrooms.  And we generally consider any student that uses such tools to find answers to our narrow questions to be a cheat.  And we drill into kids that when we ask them questions, when we set up those “exam conditions”, they better not even think about being “enterprising” or “creative” or “problem solvers”… Just know the answers to the questions, and show all your working too, dammit.

And you’d better hope that if one of those students ever grows up to be your doctor, the rigid thinking we may have instilled in them about “knowing the answers” has been replaced with a far more flexible skill for “finding the answers”.   Let’s hope that our kids don’t have too much trouble unlearning all the bizarre thinking that schools spend so much time drilling into them.

What do you think?  At what point does the ability to find answers cross the line and become cheating?

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A Letter to Teachers about Learning

I’m running a course for our school staff at the moment called 23 Things. I borrowed the idea from the very successful 23 Things program run by the San Jose library, but have adapted it slightly for our particular school situation.

Essentially, the teachers work their way through 23 separate tasks, some as simple as reading a blog post or watching an online video tutorial, while some are a little more complicated such as setting up their own blog, feedreader and delicious accounts. The course runs over 9 weeks in total, and each week they are asked to do 3 or 4 “Things” – 23 in total – that will expose them to a wide range of Web 2.0 tools and ideas by the time it’s over.

I’m running the course internally using our school Moodle, and have set it up in such a way that people must sign up for the course and work their way through it a week at a time.  I thought it sounded like a good idea, and  so did they it seems… 14 teachers signed up for the course very soon after I announced it.

For all the palaver that teachers carry on with to students about the importance of time management, committment, and handing work in on time, it amazes me just how “flexible” a group of teachers expects a course to be. So far I’ve had one official drop-out, and really only 3 or 4 people who appear to be doing much at all. If this was their students that were taking such a relaxed approach to a course of study, I wonder if they would be quite so flexible and understanding.

I can’t write a note home to their parents, so instead I wrote a note to them… here’s what it said.

Some folk feel a little awkward or intimidated when they feel they don’t know how to do something… doing a course like this must feel a bit strange because you’re getting asked to do things that you have no idea how to do.

Let me remind you of something… the reason you are in this course (one can only surmise) is that you DON’T know how to do these things, but that you’d like to learn. So it’s ok not to know how to do them, or to not understand them. Applaud yourself for taking the plunge and signing up for 23 Things in an attempt to learn more about these things you don’t know.

Now, here’s a secret… if you have the Internet, you can learn to do almost anything. Try going to www.youtube.com and in the search box, type the thing you want to learn how to do… so, if you want to know how to set up Google Reader, go to YouTube and type “set up google reader“… you’ll find a bunch of tutorials to show you how. If you want to know how to make a Caesar salad, try typing in “how to make caesar salad” and viola! Dinner is almost served!

One of the unavoidable facts of life in the 21st Century is that Information is Abundant. If simple facts and data is what you need, or you want instructions on how to do something, then there is no shortage of information about it. In a previous age, school was predicated on the notion that Information is Scarce. Thanks to the Internet and tools like Google it no longer is, and this has changed the very nature of education. One of our greatest challenges in education nowadays is to deal with this idea that Information is no longer scarce… our students can (potentially) know as much (or more) than us about a particular topic. It doesn’t matter how much we know, there will always be more we don’t know.

For this reason we have to be continual learners, and we have to learn how to find answers to things that we don’t yet know. If this course was delivered face to face, I’d be able to explain and show you a lot of this stuff… but it’s not. And so you need to figure some things out for yourself and motivate yourself to find answers to problems that crop up.

By all means, I will help you if you get stuck and need a hand. But sometimes working it out for yourself can be the best thing you can do for yourself.

I have no idea whether it will make a difference or not, but I felt better after writing it.