Monthly Archives: November 2009

Here comes Linux, part 1

Linux, ,

Here comes Linux, part 1

by Richard White

2009-11-29

“Are you kidding me???” Dee shouted in disbelief.

I’d just told her that I–a faithful Mac user for the last twenty years–had ordered a Dell Mini 10v.

“Are you KIDDING ME??? she shouted again, thinking perhaps that I hadn’t heard her the first time.

“Yeah, I know…” I went on to explain that I’m not giving up the MacbookPro. And I’m definitely not using Windows (no offense). I’ve been looking for a decent portable on which to install Linux Mint, and after passing on the idea of a Lenovo ThinkPad (high quality, but a little higher-priced especially for a second machine), I fell for the “$100 off, free shipping” email that I’d gotten for the Dell.

This is more than just Black Friday extravagance. I’ve been intrigued by the idea of working with Linux on a laptop for a number of years now, ever since Mark Pilgrim famously made his own switch from the Mac three years ago. His reasons included Apple’s proprietary file-formatting and Digital Rights Management (DRM) lockdowns that make playing by their rules occasionally difficult. The hardware, although of high-quality, is known for being expensive, placing it out-of-reach for many students, and a number of teachers. The question became, is it reasonable for me, as an educational technologist to run most, if not all, of my digital life using Free / Open Source Software?

In addition to other topics being discussed here, I’ll be covering the journey here once the new machine arrives in a couple of weeks. For now, though, I’m anticipating using the following software:

Mac Linux
Operating System OS 10.6.2 Linux Mint 8
Browser Safari, Firefox Firefox (pre-installed w/LinuxMint)
Mail client Apple’s Mail.app Mozilla’s Thunderbird (pre-installed w/LinuxMint)
Chat client iChat, Adium, Skype Pidgin (pre-installed w/LinuxMint)
Web development client Panic’s Coda Quanta Plus?
Calendar program iCal Mozilla’s Lightning?
Text editor emacs, BBEdit emacs (must be installed using apt-get), gedit (pre-installed w/LinuxMint)
Office apps Word, Excel, PowerPoint Open Office? (pre-installed w/LinuxMint)
Music playing iTunes Pick one
Music editing Garage Band, Amadeus, Audacity Audacity
Image Processing iPhoto, Photoshop Elements, Acorn, Graphic Converter GIMP

Any suggestions out there? Let me know!

Playing Well with Others… and Charging for It

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PLAYING WELL WITH OTHERS… AND CHARGING FOR IT

2009-11-24

by Richard White

ch6_cover
We’ve already discussed opening up your classroom content to the world, and what the advantages and risks might be there. There were three events in the last week that reminded me of what an interesting process this has the potential to be.

One of the first was an email that I finally got around to answering, a courteous email from a colleague previously unknown to me in the east.

…I happened upon your most excellent site and was wondering if you’d be will to share your materials with me.

I really like your practice tests and presentations and was wondering if you’d be willing to send the originals to me (it’s hard to use the PDF’s) as well as the answers…

So now I’ve got to put my money PowerPoint slides where my mouth is. I don’t know how much time I’ve got for an open-ended collaboration with someone–I can’t be the only one here who feels like I’m running just to stand still–but it’ll be interesting to see what comes of this.

The second thing that happened makes me wonder if giving “my stuff” away for free just makes me a great big sucker. The New York Times published this article, Selling Lessons Online Raises Cash and Questions, reporting on how some teachers are making money on the side selling their lesson plans to other teachers. I was a little surprised by some of the figures in the story–tens of thousands of dollars made selling lessons for one teacher–and I have to admit to more than a little curiosity about the specifics here: What do these lessons actually look like? Don’t teachers have the capability of creating their own lessons? What teacher has the discretionary budget to purchase sight-unseen lesson plans in hopes that they might satisfy some need? And perhaps most significantly, will someone pay me $30k+ for my stuff? Because, you know, I don’t have a problem with that.

Apparently there were a few people who did have a problem with that, in the letters to the editor after the article’s publication. As my tech director points out, however, when teachers tutor students in the evenings, we certainly don’t expect them to have to do that gratis. And if that’s the case, then why would we expect them to give away content that they’ve created for free, particularly when those lessons were created–as they almost always are–on the teacher’s own time, at home?

Finally, a conversation with my school director today wandered into the topic of “students producing original work,” and whether it wasn’t perhaps a bit naive on the part of teachers to expect that student X this year is going to have something new and exciting to relate on, say, “Macbeth,” given all the research and thinking that has already been devoted to its study. This directly led to some consideration of the New York Times article: if we expect original work from students (whatever that may mean), might we not expect something similar from teachers? Don’t we want something more from teachers than someone to stand at the front of the room, clicking through a PowerPoint presentation? And what does it say about your capabilities as a professional educator if you have to rely on someone else’s material for inspiration?

Perhaps you see the straw man here. Educators–indeed, professionals of all types–don’t work in isolation, and aren’t expected to. Opening up discussion of all kinds–sharing of research, discoveries, materials–benefits all concerned, and at its best, has the potential to help teachers improve their craft, and students improve their understanding of the material. Indeed, at most of the schools I’ve worked at, an informal electronic archive of resource materials is kept for some classes, including:

  • PowerPoint presentations
  • videos
  • worksheets
  • labs
  • independent projects
  • rubrics
  • syllabi

So yeah, sharing and collaborating is an important part of professional development, and I don’t see anything wrong with charging what the market will bear, if that’s what you choose to do.

Anyone want to buy a lesson on Circular Motion?! :)

Workflow – Emailing Groups

Workflow

WORKFLOW – Emailing Groups

by Richard White

2009-11-18

Okay, we’ve been going on for a few weeks now… I’ve been waving my hands about, talking about “technology this” and “productivity that,” and so far, all I’ve really done is waste your time reading this silly blog.

Perhaps it’s about time that we get serious and start looking at some specific Hybrid Classroom techniques that you can use. Let’s start with an easy one.

Email is the backbone of electronic communication, and is the single most important way that I communicate with students (when I’m not in the classroom) and parents. One of the best uses for email that I’ve found is simply using it to keep in touch with my students (and occasionally their parents) on a semi-regular basis.

For most teachers, it’s not practical to email an individual message to every single student. But you CAN easily email a single message to everyone, if you have their email addresses in a group. The brief video demonstration showing how to do this was created using a Gmail account, but the same principle applies to any other email program that allows you to create groups of contacts.

Briefly:

  1. Get a list of student email addresses.
    The easiest way is to have them send you an email with a Subject Line like “Conceptual Physics”.
  2. Include those email addresses into a custom group…
    perhaps called “Conceptual Physics”.
  3. When you want to send out an email to those students…
    enter the group name into the To: field of your email program. You should see the addresses of all the students on that list appear.
  4. Compose email…
    being sure to include a good subject line.

It’s up to you what you’ll actually do with your new email prowess. Teachers who see their students more-or-less everyday might choose to reserve the group email for special occasions: giving them a hint on a hard homework problem, last-minute cancellation of a test, etc. Other teachers like to make it a more regular thing, with course schedules for the week, information that didn’t get mentioned in class, etc.

Next time:
The easy way to Email Parents

Zero-Sum

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ZERO-SUM

2009-11-09

by Richard White
roadracer
When I was a young boy of 11, I was a little bit of a geek (go figure), and for a while there, I really wanted to be a mathematician when I grew up. My main inspiration at the time was the Time-Life book of Mathematics, with pictures of a roomful of glowing computers, and a transistor, and logic tables, and logarithmic spirals, and a Klein bottle (not really, of course), and… well, I never did become a mathematician. Kind of like my brief fling with racing motorcycles, it turned out to be one of those things that seemed really cool and do-able at the time, but then later on turned out to be a really bad idea. For me, anyway. (I had one look at Grand Prix roadracer Kenny Roberts dropping a knee on turn 11 at Laguna Seca, turned to my friend Dave, and said, “I am NEVER doing THAT!”

It was somewhere in that Time-Life Book of Mathematics that I learned a little game theory, and probably there that I first heard of a zero-sum game. The general idea is that–in games, economics, and in daily life–many things are zero-sum: wins and losses balance out and add to zero. Not ALL situations are like this, of course, but some things–playing chess, or betting in poker–are. If White is checkmated, Black has won. If I lose $5 in a hand, my opponent wins $5. Those things are zero-sum.

And the workday is zero-sum as well, of course. The hours, minutes, and seconds add up to a day worth 24 hours and change, and time I spend sleeping is time that I don’t get to spend reading. Time I spend working is time I don’t get to spend playing (usually). We all make choices about where we devote our time and energy. To quote a former district superintendent of mine (who I didn’t like very much, but she was right about this one thing): “You can have anything you want. But you can’t have EVERYTHING you want.”

So a few years ago, anytime someone at work suggested I start doing something new, I decided it was time for me to acknowledge the zero-sum day. “That’s fine, I’ll start doing XYZ, just as soon as you tell me what I DON’T have to do anymore. I’ve got a limited amount of time here, so…what do you want me to STOP doing, so that I can do your new thing?”

This isn’t just brash impertinence or a snotty case of “you can’t make me.” It’s an honest question, with increasingly important consequences. You want me to email parents regularly? That’s fine, as long as I can give up calling them. I’ll take on Facebook, and give up MySpace. I’ll start blogging for friends, if I can use the blog to replace writing the majority of my personal letters. But in a world that makes increasing demands on my time, it’s increasingly important that I take an active stand in not parceling out my life to the detriment of my family, my friends, my health…

The one exception I’ll make for this rule is this: I’ll consider investing time upfront, with the understanding that I’ll have a good chance of reducing time/energy expended on the back end. I few years ago, I decided to transition from using a whiteboard in class to using PowerPoint-based presentations, and I knew that moving three 3-inch-thick ring binders worth of material into electronic form would require some time. The payoff came the following year: lesson preparation was a simple matter of tweaking a few slides that I wasn’t happy with, and I was now in a position to be able to distribute copies of discussion materials in-class or online, as desired.

Here’s an interesting exercise. Assuming that you ARE going to have to incorporate some new activity, process, or technology into your life in the next few days… what would you give up? What are you ready to let go of in your workflow? What previous commitment are you ready to say “goodbye” to?

P.S. Just a quick follow-up to this post: Will Richardson over at Weblogg-ed laments that many teachers have difficulty in being “selfish”: taking time from the day to learn something new for themselves, rather than always focusing on delivering in the classroom. He wonders if it’s “just not in our DNA?”

I think that’s about right, at least metaphorically speaking. Teachers do tend to be caring, giving, nurturing people–those that aren’t get out of the profession fast; it doesn’t pay well enough! If I’ve got 30 minutes in the evening, I might:
a. Spend it with my family / friends,
b. Grade those papers, or
c. Spend that time reflecting on my practice and thoughtfully reading blogs from my Personal Learning Network (PLN).

In the Zero-Sum day, it’s not hard to see which of these tends to get neglected.

Gedanken Me This: Why not open up your classroom content?

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GEDANKEN ME THIS: Why not open up your classroom content?

2009-11-01

by Richard White

Richard teaching at Berkeley High School
Richard teaching at Berkeley High School

In the process of slowly putting aspects of my face-to-face teaching up onto the Web, I’ve been asked this single question more than any other:

“Can I get a copy of your PowerPoint slides?”

The presentation slides that I use to structure my classroom discussions contain just about what you’d expect from a carefully considered deck. I’ve got graphics and diagrams, important definitions, sample problems that I want to go over with the students, and an impressive lack of the dreaded “bullet points.” I’m a faithful acolyte of Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery is amazing) and Nancy Duarte (buy slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations
NOW), and I have enough experience to know that the slides are not my presentation–I’m the presentation; the slides are just a tool that make it easier for me to present to a larger number of people.

One of the main reasons I began using presentation software (which can include Microsoft’s PowerPoint, Apple’s Keynote, OpenOffice’s Impress, Google’s Docs, etc.) was to make my “lecture notes,” graphics, and material covered in class available to students who had been absent, or for those who just wanted copies to review with. I made PDF printouts of the slides available for download on the course website, but was reluctant to share the actual slides themselves. Because… well, those are MY slides.

I’ve been working on MY slides for YEARS now, refining them a little almost every time I use them. I feel suprisingly attached to those slides, and protective, and I’m not alone in this. At least two of my colleagues–one where I currently teach, and one at a former school–feel exactly the same way. The colleague in Northern California is about as hybrid as it gets: this guy–my best friend Aaron, and partner in edtech crime–actually records video of his lectures every day, and posts it on the Internet for his students to see.

But you can’t get him to share his slides with you to save your life. It’s funny.

So here’s your Gedanken for the day. Why NOT share your slides?

Seriously. Why not? Why not share your slides, and your handouts, and just about everything else that you use in your class? What do you think is going to happen if you do?

In software development, this idea of opening up your source code for the world to see (and for others to potentially collaborate on) is called “open sourcing,” and we teachers have been doing this for years. “Steal from the best” is the advice my mentor teacher gave to me, inviting me to watch and learn from others, and freely incorporate whatever ideas I thought would assist my own development as an educator. We do this informally (“Hey, how are YOU teaching “Macbeth” this year?”), formally (“We need to sit down to plan this next unit together…”), and institutionally (“Richard, how’d you like to work with a student teacher this semester?”). And frankly, all this sharing? I love that about our profession. So I don’t know why I’m so protective of my course materials.

In discussing this, my friends and I came up with lots of great pretend-excuses.

  1. “I worked hard on these slides–I’m not just going to give them away.”
  2. “What if someone uses my slides… ‘incorrectly’?”
  3. “It’s the responsibility of every teacher to create their own presentations.”
  4. “I want students to have to copy down the information by hand–that way, they’ll learn better.”

I’m not convinced that any of these points stands up to much scrutiny, though. In the end, making slides available to students and colleagues enhances your ability to communicate with them, and does absolutely no harm to you or your teaching that I can think of.

Ask yourself this question: if you were to die tomorrow, would you prefer that your slides pass into the afterlife with you, or would you like them to be available for the potential benefit of others?

I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea yet myself, but… I’m opening up my class. Not EVERYTHING, of course. I can’t post online materials that I AM allowed to use in class under Fair Use doctrines of U.S. copyright law. I’m not going to publicly post students’ grades, or other materials to which I don’t think students should have free access (next week’s test comes to mind here).

But my syllabus? Of course! My grading policies? Sure? The handout and grading rubric for next week’s Independent Project. Yup. The schedule for the next unit? That only makes sense…

And my PowerPoint slides? Well… okay. I’m in.

You convinced me. (Download Chapter 4 PowerPoint deck, 1.7MB)