I’ve had the iPad for a couple of months but haven’t really been able to use it as a blogging tool. The wordpress app was one of the first that I downloaded but I hadn’t used it much (at all, really) because I couldn’t find a way to make links. But – tada – I have just figured it out. Just in case I’m not the last person to figure it out, I’ll share my findings with you as well as a general review of the ease of blogging with it.
I hadn’t realized that the wordpress app accepts HTML input. Once I did, I thought i could create a link by typing in the good old HREF code. I’ve done a fair bit of coding in raw HTML, but really hoped there was a better solution. There is, but I didn’t find it until I started typing in the HREF tag. A helpful little dialog box opened up asking if I wanted help making a link. Yes, by gosh, that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I tapped on “make a link” and yet another little dialog box popped up with fields for me to enter the link text and the URL. After doing that, there appeared a nice little snippet of perfectly formatted HTML for my link.
What I am find lacking is the user interface, which surprises me given the ease of use of the web interface for wordpress. There are a number of features that I needed to look up on the wordpress iPad app website. Adding images also seems less than intuitive. Images can be automagically replaced, but appear only at the end of the post, not anywhere else.
If you are only blogging to a wordpress blog and you generally don’t include images in your blog posts, this is a good app to use. If you do want to add images, this might not meet your needs as your sole blogging tool since you will probably need to touch up your posts in your web browse after the initial writing.
I’ll write up my review of blogpress after I’ve used it for a few days.
PS – WTF? There doesn’t seem to be a post or publish button here. The publishing feature should be obvious, not part of a scavenger hunt.
PPS – The status of the post needs to be changed in the write window. I would never have checked that on my own but found out how by looking at the WP website. Given these problems in the user interface of the app, I would be tempted to use Simplenote or Evernote to write my blog posts then just copy and paste into the web interface. #usabilityfail
I’ve had many good conversations with brilliant people during the past two pre-ISTE conference days and any one of them would be worth writing about. The one that keeps whirling around my head tonight is a serendipitous conversation with Don (last name unknown). It started as I was getting ready to say good night to The Kids™ via Google Talk using the iPad.
On a side note, I’ve made an interesting iPad observation. I’ve seen more people using iPads than laptops over the past two days. I would agree wholeheartedly with anyone who says that it is not a laptop replacement, but on the other hand a laptop is not an iPad replacement. There are affordances using the iPad – the weight and size, the simplicity of the interface, the unitasking (which can sometimes be a feature instead of a shortcoming) – that laptops don’t have. but until less than three months ago, we didn’t have iPads (or any other kind of touch interface tablets that may be forthcoming) so laptops were the best approximation we had. My analogy that I tweeted was “Does iPAd replace laptop” is like asking “does Twitter replace blogs” – they resemble each other but they do different things. At one time we used our blogs as a way of twitter like conversation, but once twitter came along we didn’t need to use blogs to do that since twitter did a better job. Similarly laptops don’t need to be our iPad proxies now that we have the actual technology in our hands.
But I digress …
Don asked if I was enjoying my iPad and what sorts of things I used it for. This led us into a discussion of the difficulty of getting teachers to change the way the taught and their concepts of what their job is. I pointed out that just 50 years ago, teachers – indeed the entire education system – embraced and actively pursued change (this is my understanding of it, but correct me if I’m mistaken). Don asked what the catalyst for the change; I said it was a reaction to Sputnik and the shock of suddenly losing hegemony in the area of science research and technology. Then Don asked the question that has been niggling away at me since then – what kind of event would it require to be the Sputnik event for education and teachers today? What needs to happen to catalyze a massive re-evaluation of the role of schools and teachers? Sorry Don, no answers yet but maybe some smart folks might share some ideas with us here. (Yes, that is a massive plea for comments so start sharing some ideas!)
A netbook program was discussed at today’s staff meeting. Year 1 of the program would involve providing each teacher in the school (grades 9 – 12) with a netbook so they could have a year to experiment. It was emphasized that a netbook doesn’t have the same capabilities as a full laptop, so teachers should get familiar with the limitations and possibilities afforded by the netbooks. Several colleagues raised an excellent question – what would I or my students use it for? I try not to be too much of a fan of implementing technology just because it’s new and shiny and cool, although I have on occasion fallen victim to BSOS. I know of some of the uses for my classes, but when teachers in other subject areas are asking this I don’t have any answers to give them.
I’ll explain the title for this post in a moment. First, I want to point out that if anyone would contend (as I sometimes do) that twitter and microblogging have wiped out the engaged discourse that was once the hallmark of good blogging, I direct you to read through Jim Groom’s writing, and the ensuing comments, on Networked Study. If you follow that link and get so engaged in the conversation that you don’t come back here, I won’t be offended.
Now back to the explanation of the title. About 18 years ago, I was finishing up my first teaching contract. The principal made sure he had some time to sit down with me at the end of the year to see how my first year had gone. Something he said stuck with me all this time. “Rob, teaching is a funny kind of career. It’s a strange kind of job because we teach other people’s children – instead of parents teaching their own kids, they send them to us.” I think what stuck with me about this was that it is kind of strange, isn’t it, that I earn my living by teaching other people’s children, usually the children of people I don’t even know. I don’t think there are any other species of parenting animal (that is, those who care for their young through a period of infancy) that will let an unknown and unrelated member of the population raise their young. Even amongst humans, for most of our history as a species we taught our own. Children learned by being with their parents and learning what their parents did.
I was reminded of this as I was reading Will Richardson’s Opportunity, Not Threat (which Will wrote partly in response to the conversation resulting from Jim’s post I mention above). He is drawn to this thought from Michael Feldstein:
It’s hard to change the culture of education without getting the kids before their thinking processes begin to ossify, but in order to do that, you have to contend with their parents who, however well-intended, didn’t have the benefit of the kind education you’re trying to provide their kids and often see it as more of a threat than an opportunity.
Maybe part of the threat seen by parents is that some of the current ideas about K-12 education reform imply that teachers stop having sole or prime responsibility for the childrens’ learning (resulting, no doubt, in a garrison mentality amongst teachers who see their sphere of influence being eroded) . This implies that some of that responsibility maybe goes back to the parents. I don’t think parents know how to teach their kids the way we used to – showing and teaching the skills and knowledge that we used to carry out our activities of daily living. I have a pretty shallow set of skills outside of what I do at work. I can cook a few decent meals, I can take care of some necessary household tasks, but for anything bigger than that – like building an addition to the house or planting and keeping a garden, I’m totally clueless. (Notable exception – I can configure and secure a home data network pretty damn well. It might not be too impressive, but it’s the best skill that I have). I don’t know if I have many life survival skills to show my kids, and I suspect many parents feel the same way. Giving me more responsibility for teaching my children life skills is much more frightening than giving me the strange job of teaching a narrow, specialized set of knowledge domains to other people’s (or mine – The Girl™’s teacher is sometimes surprised at how much she already knows about science).
So, what are your thoughts? Is part of the resistance on the part of parents a reluctance on their part to take back some of the responsibility for their children’s learning?
Enough writing. Time to get some lunch ready for the kids. That’s a responsibility that I can deal with.
I’m early into my Easter Break from school right now so I’ve been getting back in touch with some of my online world – a bit of twitter and taking time to read some of the info in my Google Reader account. The last month has been crazy busy with family stuff so between that and work I’ve had almost no time to have some virtual me time. I think the time away has been good for letting me think about some things from a different perspective.
Whenever I head back to the twitter-stream, I am amazed and overwhelmed by the number of amazing tools there are for teachers to use. More than I can possibly keep track of, partially because of the rapid pace of development and widespread familiarity with them and partially because my attention span is becoming more ferret-like as I get older. I remember (yeah, whenever you start a sentence with “I remember …” you are definitely becoming old) when there were two web-based tools that I could make use of for or with students – blogs and wikis. Then came RSS readers (like Bloglines – remember good old bloglines?) and podcasts. That pretty much summed up the contents of the educational technology utility belt in 1995. I was pretty adept at using all of these and occasionally gave conference presentations or worked with staff at my school to encourage them to start using some of these tools. I led a PD session with Donna DesRoches entitled How to Drink Water from a Fire Hose (slowly being migrated over to a wikispaces version), which I considered to be a pretty good overview of the state of the art tools available in ed-tech at that time.
There are now a cornucopia of tools available for teachers to use. Most often when I hear about them (or I’m talking about them) the conversation starts with “Here’s a tool you can use to …”. Use cases have their value when describing a new tool, but I think I need to look at the tools in a larger context. The use case describes problems/situations that are addressed by the tool, but it’s easy, for me at least, to let the use case shape my perceptions of the situations I need addressed. I think it’s far more effective for my students if I have a clear idea of the learning objectives I have for them then find the tools that do the best job of meeting them. Basically, this is just good instructional design like Rick Schwier taught me back in my M.Ed. days. In current educational lingo, it’s called Understanding by Design. Whatever label you want to attach to it, the goal is the same. Develop clearly expressed objectives first, then develop the methods that will achieve those objectives. The pedagogical horse needs to be in front of the cart full of resources, leading down the learning road to the whatever the destination might be. (Crappy metaphor, I know, but cut me some slack since it is getting close to 1 a.m. as I write this).
If I want to clearly keep that horse in front, I need to be very clear about where I want it to go. Another way to put it is that I need to have distinct objectives for travelling that path. So what is the final destination I’m heading to, the destination that our schools are heading to? The horse is going to wander all over the place if I let it. I think that schools can only give a good answer to that question if there is some deep introspection about what our institutional goals are. I’m hoping to have the chance for some introspection of reasonable depth for my own benefit. As time allows, I want to get some of those thoughts down here just to help fix my ideas in place so they don’t wander all over the place. If you have any answers to my questions, or some other questions I might need to consider, I encourage (plead?) you to put some of them in the comments as I muse aloud.
The show felt a little like the crowded cabin sketch from A Night at the Opera.
The conversation started small with just Heather Ross and I talking mostly about the glorious gold medal victory of the Canadian women’s hockey team at the 2010 Olympics. Dean Shareski came onboard and described the Powerful Learning Practice professional development opportunity. Rick Schwier joined us as we were winding up that topic and starting to promote the TLt and IT Summit educational technology conferences that will be happening in Saskatoon in May. Alec Couros joined us and we wrapped up our conversation by talking about implementing a one to one laptop program (as is currently being considered by the Living Sky School Division).
Thanks to the dynamic Donna DesRoches, digital resource consultant for Living Sky School Division, I had the good fortune last night to have dinner with David Warlick along with other members of the division instructional technology in-school teacher support (or something like that – we just call it the iSiTS group for short), a couple of our superintendents and some school based administrators. I was impressed not only with David’s grasp of many of the opportunities for improving student learning using some new digital tools (I’m trying to avoid the “21st century” prefix or “2.0″ suffix wherever possible because I still don’t know what those *really* mean) but also with his ability to find the right questions to provoke a really good conversation.
My short-term memory being somewhat diminished as I grow older, I wrote down a few well-stated ideas that came up during the evening.
Teachers need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable.
I think this one came from Kelly Christopherson. Teachers have become used to, indeed they have traditionally been trained to although that is starting to change, being the expert on what happens in class. Teachers like to master not only the content of the class but also the processes, including the use of newer devices like interactive white boards. Adapting ourselves to new ways of doing things might mean giving up that feeling of control. The change in paradigm might be temporary as new generations of teachers move into the classroom gradually replacing us old dogs. Or it might be a permanent change. New tools are developing so quickly that we might be in an era of perpetual change in which this year’s new tools become next year’s old tools. I’m not advocating change for the sake of change but I feel pretty sure that some of the new tools that get developed will be beneficial for our students’ learning. As a professional, I’m going to need to be open to embracing new ways of teaching if it’s better for my students.
If you can measure it, is it creative?
That was David’s comment regarding developing rubrics for assessing student creativity. There was discussion of teaching/encouraging creativity in students’ work, including how rubrics could be developed that can be used to assess creativity. David says he prefers to use the term “inventiveness”. He didn’t give any sort of method to assess it, but he did say that his instruction to students to encourage inventiveness is “surprise me”, a directive I often give my students.
Time to play
With regards to implementing the change in teaching to include digital tools, there were multiple perspectives regarding how mandatory the change in teaching should be as well as how teachers will be supported. One of our superintendents pointed out that in every other profession or job, there is no opportunity to opt out of using new ways of doing things. Health care workers, for example, are not given a choice of using the mandated health care record system. Personally, I’m pretty happy with that being a non-negotiable edict. It was pointed out, by Kelly once again if memory serves, that in every other profession or job, there is sufficient support and training given to the workers to do the job. (My wife works in health care and she disputes the literal accuracy of that claim.) So how can teachers be supported? Time always seems to be included as a limiting factor, often described as “time to play” with the tools we are being asked to use.
Play is tough to assess. What can we set as expected outcomes for playing? (I encourage your comments if you have any answers). But it is vitally important if we want to continue to learn and develop as professionals. It’s also important for our students’ learning as well. I like very much David’s aphorism on the importance for play so I’ll give him the last words for this post:
People don’t stop playing games because they get old. They get old because they stop playing games
cc licensed flickr photo by Tom Raftery: http://flickr.com/photos/traftery/4311797662/
It’s been over two week since the grand unveiling, although it won’t be released and available for sale until late March. Since that announcement, I have been reading the many critiques and accolades of the device. And yes, just like Stephen, I want one. I am an unrepentant gadget lover and the iPad is the ultimate electronic gadget.
I’ve been trying to justify why I would need an iPad and thinking about that has led me to some insight about what the iPad is. I already my usage of the iPod touch as a portable browser/communication device/game machine. For creative projects, I have my MacBook (although the reworked iWork apps make a good case that the iPad is also a good productivity device). Steve Jobs positioned the iPad as being a category in between the iPhone/iPod touch and the full MacBook. I think that being ‘in between’ doesn’t mean it is a sort of average of the other two products or that it is a mix of the characteristics of them. More than anything else, I think the iPad is an exquisitely well designed interface in its most pure, idealized form with the technology being almost completely abstracted out of the experience.
My iPod Touch, my previous iPod Touch and the Nano before that are some of the most reliable devices I’ve owned. The inner workings of the system were completely sealed off to me and served only as an interface to my media and some other apps loaded onto the iPod Touches. Some of the apps are remote controls for programs on my MacBook which turns the iPod Touch into an interface to those computer applications. A couple of the apps are for remote viewing/controlling of a Mac or PC that has some version of VNC running on it. When working with all the various interfaces that the Touch gives me, I’ve never had a single instance where I’ve needed to understand anything about the inner workings of it. Being a geeky sort of person, I’ve enjoyed poking my fingers around the physical and software workings of several computers. A great deal of my understanding about computers has come from playing with, sometimes with painful consequences, different versions of Linux. That sort of play with my iPod Touch has been denied to me, unless I jailbreak it. I’m not upset about that, though, because I just want the thing to be work reliably for me.
The iPad with its larger screen gives more room for an interface to be presented to the user. I have to say that if I’m using VNC to remote control a computer, the larger real estate will make the choice of an iPad a no-brainer. VNC on the iPod Touch is possible, but not my preferred method for doing that. Imagine what will happen when the iPad is used as an interface for multimedia content as imagined by Sports Illustrated.
Imagine what happens when students have access to that kind of material instead of printed textbooks? Netbooks are being considered as an option in more and more schools with the main goal being to give students access to the web and a word processor. If Google Docs (or Pages which will be available for the iPad) is available to them, the iPad becomes a much better solution because, unlike netbooks which are prone to tech difficulties, the iPad will have the same virtue as my iPods – It Just Works (IJW).
Beyond education, what will medicine be like when doctors and other medical professionals have access to patient records and up to date medical reference materials on a device that has that IJW quality. Or automotive mechanics. Or stockbrokers. Or farmers. Or construction workers. Or my parents? How enabling will it be if everyone had a device that serves as an interface to almost anything and IJW?
I shared some information in the comments there that I’d like to repeat here in case anyone reading this (all 5 of you) have been wanting to do something.
If you are Canadian, our federal government has pledged to match donations made by Canadians through registered charities, up to a maximum of $50 million. (Why they don’t just donate the whole amount is a question that could and should be asked, but for now I’ll just commend their incentive for people to donate)
In the latest EdTech Posse podcast (No tech after 5 p.m.), I pointed out that modern media make it easier to connect and know about people around the world than we often know about our own community. I would encourage that in addition to helping out the people of Haiti in any way you are able and willing to do, you also take a look at the community where you live and asking yourself how you can help those around you.
Mike Wesch presented at the University of Saskatchewan and University of Regina earlier this week. We discussed his presentations and reflected on some of the changes that might result from educators becoming aware of his work/message.
