Equal Access to the Digital World!

Equal Access to the Digital World!

What does it mean to "provide equal access to the digital world"?

To provide equal access to the digital world means that all students, regardless of ability, have the same access to resources online, and resources embodied by specialized technologies (digital cameras, scanners, etc). The digital world itself contains most of the software technologies necessary to equalize access. A student for whom typing is difficult can use transcription programs like Dragon. Students with low vision can take advantage of intra-device vision enhancing software. A blind student might use a screen reader. A student with hearing issues can take use the closed-captioning feature of internet videos. A teacher's role in providing equal access to digital media is to ensure that the resources she is selecting for her lesson plan either fit, or can be modified to fit her students' abilities.

Teachers need training in providing equal access. They need training in digital lesson planning for multiple ability levels, and they need training in the programs and software that are available online that will enhance UDL lesson planning. However, it is administrators and politicians (from the Secretary of Education to local school boards) who make the final decisions about whether a school or district provides their students with equal access to the digital world. Equal access costs money. Equal access to the digital world for all students will come only when the people who control the budgets develop the political will to promote and ensure it.

Training teachers in digital lesson planning for multiple ability levels takes time and money. Time has to made for teachers not only to train, and renew they're training at frequent intervals, but also time has to be made in their planning schedules. A lesson crafted on the principles embodied in UD learning takes longer to craft than a lesson using a reading from the textbook and an end-of-chapter written quiz. Teacher prep-time needs to reflect that - and while the unions might do what they can, ultimately it is administrators and school-boards that will have to understand that.

Equal access to the digital world takes hardware, and that takes money. A child might need a keyboard with larger keys, or a computer desk that a wheelchair can fit under - or a wheelchair attached tablet holder. The blind student using the screen reader may also require a braille keyboard. A student with limited hand mobility could require a typing aid,  as could a student who needed to type using her feet or her mouth. All those devices take money. Special devices would most likely be coming out of the special education department's budget. In these cases, the law would most likely mandate their purchase. Administrators need to be prepared to adjust budgets accordingly.

Finally, are administrators and politicians willing to spend the time, sweat, and money it will take to reconcile UD equal access learning with their rigid adherence to standardized testing? Standardized tests are not universal design. Most of us have probably seen this cartoon:

Yes, certain supports and modifications can be enacted for the child with coded disabilities who is taking the high stakes standardized test, but is that really equal access? Are standardized tests equally accessible to all students, all learning styles, or all of the different "intelligences". The cartoon is an excellent way of pointing out that the answer to that question in no. Universal design learning is by it's nature a pedagogical approach that encourages higher order thinking. Using multiple but equal assessments or final products for the same lesson is a significant part of UDL, but entirely antithetical to standardized testing, where as the name implies, the idea is that students will be able to produce a standardized answer. I believe that public education, Janus-like, currently has two faces. Students and teachers suffer as a result. One face is convinced that reliable data on student progress can only be gleaned by traditional standardized testing. this face is strongly supported by, among others, the very profitable standardized testing industry. The other face of public education pedagogy is interested in providing the best possible education for each individual student. That education of necessity employs universal access UD learning. There are good people with the best of intentions on either side of this rift, but until political will at the local, state, and national level supports it, equal access to the digital world for all of our students will not happen.

Sources:

Edtechdigest (2013).Student access to digital learning devices. [Infographic]. Retrieved from: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/462393086712113698/

For a fair selection. [Comic] Artist & date unknown. Retrieved from: http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/thisweekineducation/2012/08/cartoons-climb-that-tree.html#.U-wRwKMvPng

Newmarket Days on Facebook

NEWMARKET DAYS on FACEBOOK

Follow the Newmarket Days page on Facebook by clicking here.

 

Dear Parents and Guardians of the Class of 2019 -

As you can see by the link above, the Newmarket Days Project is now on Facebook. Please feel free to 'friend' us. This will be a great way for you and your student to keep up with developments. We are also posting much of the background material we will be using for our webquest here - the full list is posted on our Prezi site.

Students who are away from their computer, or simply find Facebook an easier platform to navigate, will be able to access important content here. You might find it interesting yourself: There are links to albums full of New Market Historical Society photos from the 18 & early 1900s, and I know that at least one or two of them include pictures of the great+ grandparents of some of our current students. It's also just fun to see what you recognise from back in the day!

It should be emphasised that this facebook page is here simply as another way to deliver program content to you and your student. We know that not all of our students and parents are on Facebook (though many are!), and we want to assure you that anything posted here will also appear on the Newmarket Days Website.  

Social media comes with some concerns when used in school related projects. Cyberbullying and the disclosure of personal information are two very good reasons to proceed with caution (Lederer, 2012). The security setting on this page are such that it will only be available for viewing by people who are already "Friends". That friends list will be curated by teachers, and users of the site are responsible for adhering to the same internet guidelines and policies established by the school in our student handbook. Misuse of the site will result in serious consequences. Any issues or complaints should be addressed immediately to me. 

Social media also brings some huge pluses into the classroom, which is why we are choosing to use it.  We feel that by using electronic media your students are already familiar with, we increase their comfort level with the material, as well as creating impulse access points. It takes some time to log into the school's website, but if your student is already on Facebook on their phone, this makes it easy for them to check in with Newmarket Days. It is a tool to improve communication between students and teachers, and between the students themselves (Bynum, 2012)

We are choosing to use Facebook as a part of Newmarket Days for one other reason. Our students are already living in a digital world. Please take a look at the infographic below (Bard, 2012). As they move through school and prepare to enter the workforce, that digital immersion will only have grown (Lederer, 2012). As a result, State and Federal education standards are shifting to reflect a need for our students to be literate in all forms of online media. By using social media in this project we are creating a learning opportunity for your students whereby they gain experience, flexibility, and responsibility using social media.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or complaints, please e-mail me right away.

 

 

Sources:

Bard, M. (2012). The social web. [Infographic]. www.mirnabard.com. Retrieved from: http://bpiwmecliteracyandtechnologypilot.blogspot.com/2012/07/social-media-enhances-classroom.html 

Bynum, S.L. (2012). Utilizing social media to increase student engagement: A study of Kern County public schools. Bakersfield, CA: California State University. Retrieved from: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED526312.pdf

Lederer, K. (2012). Pros and cons of social media in the classroom. [web article]. Campus Technology Journal. Retrieved from:  http://campustechnology.com/articles/2012/01/19/pros-and-cons-of-social-media-in-the-classroom.aspx

Letter to Parents & Guardians

Surface archaeology at the mouth of Moonlit Brook

Dear Parents and Guardians of the Class of 2019 -

    As you may already know from your student, those of us not going on the trip to Washington, D.C. will be spending three exciting days exploring the town and environment of Newmarket. Most of our time will be spent outside, and we have an impressive range of activities planned. We'll be doing science at Moonlight Brook and down at the Lamprey River, exploring local history with a visit to the New Market Historical Society, dropping in at the Newmarket Mills for more history (and ice cream!), and looking into the area's natural history during a stroll in the Heron Point Woods.

    Some things that you should know:

• In order for your student to participate, they will need to bring in their copy of the permission form, signed by you, WHICH THEY ALREADY HAVE. If, perchance, you haven't seen this yet you might want to ask them. In case your student has misplaced it, you can download a copy here. 

• We will be outside much of each day. Students should wear comfortable walking shoes and weather appropriate clothing,  Having a water bottle and sunscreen will be important.

• Should you need to contact your child during the day, please call the front office as usual (793-4455). They will be able to relay any messages to us.

Academics: 

• Even though we'll be out and about most of these three days, it IS still school, and students will be responsible for completing a number of assignments for their LA, Social Studies, and Science classes. Assignments not finished during the day should be worked on as homework, and can be accessed through our class website. 

• All of our academic assignments during Newmarket Days are set up as a series of WebQuests. A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented learning format where much of the information we'll be using is found in various formats on-line. Assignments will also be completed and turned in on-line. This works perfectly for Newmarket Days, since we will be out and about.Additionally, parents and guardians will be able to access our site and follow along with what we're doing and learning. YOUR CHILD IS ENCOURAGED TO BRING THEIR PHONE, TABLET, OR OTHER INTERNET-LINKING DEVICE. We'll also have school tablets available, of course.

• You can find all the information your student will be working with at our class web site, or skip to the main web-quest instructions, which are posted using an innovative application called Prezi. That link is here. You'll find all sorts of interesting information about our town's life and history, and I believe you'll be impressed with the kinds of things your student is up to. If you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to e-mail me here.

Educational Value of (Animoto or VoiceThread)

Well, this was an interesting project. I continue to be frustrated by how difficult it is to find and collate all the information about specific assignments in our class using Blackboard. That took quite a while:

Open mysnhu

Open Blackboard

Open class: “Learning Through Technology”

            Open “Module 3 announcements” and watch

Open “Modules”

Open “Module 3”

            Open “3-2 Discussion: Link to Blog”

            Read “3-3 Blog: Picture Project”

Look for “Assignment Guidelines and Rubrics”

            Open “Class Tools” – not there

            Open “Research & Writing” – not there

            Open “Course Information” – there it is.

                        Open “Assignment Guidelines and Rubrics”

                                    Download “Blog Rubric”

                                                Open “Blog Rubric” & read

* Discover later that this is also posted at the very bottom of “Module 3”

Open “Animoto”

Sign up by giving personal details, proceed with learning program and building assignment.

                        Review “3-3 Blog: Picture Project” for details and title, etc.

                        Review “module 3” – what am I posting where?

Confusion: I am linking to my Blog in the 3-2 discussion, and using the links in other peoples’ discussion posts to go to their blogs, and then going back to the discussion page to comment on those blogs?

However, I don’t have to actually post or link to the Animoto project I created? In my blog I just talk about using the app.?

Be that as it may, I found Animoto relatively easy to use. I was disappointed by the amount of bait-and-switch clicks designed to get you to sign up for a paying accound, but I suppose that's business.  At the basic/free level, it works pretty well. Text is limited - there seemed to be a really small amount of text I could add as captions - but being able to upload a soundtrack, change fonts  and styles, etc., was interesting. It wouldn't work with some of the image formatting I wanted to use, but there are work-arounds for that.

I would use this application in the classroom as an assessment tool, rather than a teacher aid. There are easier ways for me to create a slideshow, if I want to summarize information this way for my students (Windows picture and fax viewer being the simplest, or Imgur, or the slideshow function on Weebly).
As a way for students to present a report this is a neat tool. I would use this in a setting where I had asked the class to do individual or group reports on different aspects of a single topic: for example, Notable People of the Harlem Renaissance, or Battles of the Revolutionary War. Animoto could be used as a way for them to present their finding to me and to the rest of the class. As usual with tech in the classroom, I would rig the procedures and  rubric to de-emphasize the "glitter & bubble-letters" effect, where a student spends all her time on making the presentation pop, and not enough time on actual research and the presentation of relevant information. I can also see this being a useful tool to embed in a parent accessible blog, as a light and feel-good way of showcasing elements of class in general or some specific project the kids had been working on.

* With that usage, it is very important to remain within your districts rules about showing student faces or personal information in publicly accessible formats.

As you can see, I figured out a way to embed the Animoto work into the blog here, and also how to embed it onto the Google Sites page I created for class. That was a useful and new learning experience, and something I will use in the future.

My Google Sites Webquest with embedded Animoto

Educational Value of Wordle

 

Bog Post #1, June 24, 2014

I am very far from being a Luddite. I use all sorts of tech, in my life and in my classrooms. I believe strongly that tech has the ability to bring new tools, oceans of information, and amplified individualized instruction to my teaching.

However.

The tech has to work. It has to be easy and intuitive. I have a lesson to teach, and it is not about the technology - the technology is the canvas my students are going to work on. If making the tech work becomes their major cognitive focus, my lesson about...Bunker Hill, for example, becomes purely secondary. What they will remember about the exercise is that they were on the computer.

What I remember about this exercise so far is that I was on the computer. 

I have a printer, so I printed the instructions for setting up a Blogger blog, and embedding it into my Google Site. Flipping back and forth between screens to read the instructions doesn't work very well for me.The Blogger set up pages that I got did not look anything like the screen capture pages in the instructions. I figured it out, but this is important: If this were an exercise I was doing with a middle school class, and I had given them the instructions I was working with, we'd be done right there. With the instructions not matching what they saw on the screen, the rest of the period would be spent giving one on one, step by step instructions to every single child in the class.

A few of the more intellectually advanced students would figure it out in spite of the mismatched instructions, and I could press one or two of them into service showing others. Most of the students would bog down, hands in the air. Their hands would go up again at every single step that looked or read differently from the instructions. The lowest quartile of my class would simply stop working and talk instead, or open a new screen and play Mongolian Death Worm (or whatever). Class would end, and only half of the kids would have successfully created a blog, and of that half, perhaps five would have been able to move on to the exercise I had in mind for them.

So that's an issue.

Wordle did not work for me. It led me through all the steps to create the image. I spent some time picking out just the right text to include, pasted it, and clicked create....and it didn't work. Wordle wanted me to download Java Runtime. My computer wouldn't do it. Firefox gave me this message: "Important: Firefox has stopped the Java plugin from running automatically because of security issues. However, you can still use Java on trusted sites."  Inquiring further of Wordle, I got this page here:

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So. That's game over with a middle school class, or even most high school classes. Class is now about futzing around with the firewalls on our tablets (and I can practically hear the anguished moans of my IT guys if I even allowed a class to do this with school tablets or laptops). I wasn't going to do this because a) I had other options, and b) Wordle had already salted my computer with pop-ups, so it was not, in fact, a "trusted site". Wordle was a wash.

Moving on to Tagxedo, things went smoother. Walking a sixth grade class through the process would still take a class period (including word selection, typing, etc). The kids would be able to figure it out. I created the graphic below, from a biography of one of the people whose history will come up in my critical task.

Technology in the classroom is fantastic, when it works. When it doesn't it's incredibly counterproductive, to student learning, and to classroom management. I speak from painful experience. As to the educational value of Wordle/Tagxedo, I don't think there is much, at least not in my discipline (Social Studies). I liked Prof. Drolet's suggestion regarding using it as a way for students to check word repetition in their writing. That would be a cool exercise. Barring that, however, I see this as the electronic equivalent of a "make a poster" assignment: there's not a lot of learning value in relation to the amount of time a student invests in the exercise.  The students spend most of their time getting the bubble letters in the title just right, and adding glitter, and the lesson content is relegated to something they just have to copy on to it. Working with Social Studies content, I think I would have them write Quizlet tests and test each other instead, or use some other application with more academic punch.