As with any new technology, there are challenges (legal and technical) to its implementation. Additionally, some are more apt to embrace its use while others are more cautious or even try to block them. We will discuss this in depth in future posts. For now, I’ve posted our presentations below. Feel free to use them, we only ask that you attribute them to us.

I wish I had this when I was in school!

The new social networking site is designed to help teachers create, organize and share lesson plans. Unlike traditional curriculum sharing websites, BetterLesson incorporates a unique curriculum organizing and filing system that enables teachers to easily create, store, and share information related to lessons they create.

According to BetterLesson, the product enables teachers to

1. organize and share their entire curriculum for a particular course,
2. easily connect and innovate with other educators,
3. tag and search lessons using state standards,
4. access files and instructional content from anywhere in the world,
5. utilize privacy settings to control who can access their curriculum,
6. easily identify high quality curriculum.

One of the interesting design elements of BetterLesson is its cloud computing infrastructure, which enables teachers to easily transfer information from one location to another. This is an exciting idea for teachers, who know firsthand how difficult it can be to easily store, quickly access, and share lesson plans with colleagues.

Another interesting aspect of BetterLesson is its social networking design. This unique design enables teachers to easily share and find high quality curriculum. The problem with many open source curriculum sharing platforms is they can be overwhelming and, often times, ineffective. Busy teachers don’t have time to search for hours to find a helpful lesson. The social networking design of BetterLesson enables teachers to build their own profiles, join groups and networks, and, most importantly, rank the quality of the lessons or curriculum they view. This means teachers can quickly find experienced teachers who design effective lessons and utilize them.

Although BetterLesson has been in private beta, the organization is currently working directly with schools throughout the United States to build curriculum and improve the effectiveness of the site. By summer 2010, BetterLesson hopes to fully launch the product by providing members with access to a content-rich site with first class teacher support.

Check out BetterLesson for yourself and let us know your thoughts.

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With a growing expectation that both the Federal and State governments will provide a large infusion of funds in 2010 to facilitate school reform, it is important that school leaders consider the extent to which technology will shape this effort.  The purpose of the list, then, is to provide a general framework for educators and policy makers as they consider the role technology should play in educational reform moving forward.

According to ISTE, educatonal leaders and policy makers must

1. “Establish technology in education as the backbone of school improvement.” According to ISTE, effective ans sustainable school reform must involve a significant commitment to technology. The authors argue, “technology must permeate every corner of the learning process.” This includes not only student learning but other important areas, including professional development and school administration.
2. Effectively utilize technology to better prepare students for post-secondary learning and increase college attendance rates. According to the authors, “we must embrace new instructional approaches that both increase the college-going rates and the high school graduation rates. By effectively engaging learning through technology, teachers can demonstrate the relevance of 21st century education, keeping more children in the pipeline as they pursue a rigorous, interesting and pertinent PK-12 public education.”
3. “Ensure technology expertise is infused throughout our schools and classrooms.” District leaders must ensure each school in their districts have access to technology experts who can effectively build the organization’s capacity to effectively utilize technology to improve student achievement.
4. “Continuously upgrade educators’ classroom technology skills as a pre-requisite of “highly effective” teaching.” According to the authors, “[Educational leaders] must commit that all P-12 educators have the skills to use modern information tools and digital content to support student learning in content areas and for student assessment. Effective teachers in the 21st Century should be, by definition, technologically savvy teachers.”
5. Ensure all new teachers are prepared and able to use technology to educate students.
6. Use technology to “scale improvement” and “accelerate reform.” “School districts that have successfully led school turnaround and improvement efforts recognize that education technology is one of the best ways to accelerate reform, providing the immediate tools to ensure that all teachers and students have access to the latest innovative instructional pathways.”
7. Ensure broadband access for all students and teachers.
8. Utilize technology to more effectively collect and assess relevant data. Teachers must use technology to help them tailor instruction to meet individual student learning needs. In addition, teachers must utilize technology to collect the sort of data that can be used to inform their instruction.
9. Invest in research and development. “Increased investment in education R&D, particularly with regard to innovation in teaching and learning, ensures that we remain a global leader in education. By stimulating meaningful, broad-based research and the dissemination of such research, we can ensure that the quality of teaching and learning in our classrooms keeps up with the goals and expectations we set for our students.”
10. “Promote global digital citizenship.”

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I’ve compiled a short list of a few TED Talk favorites.

John Wooden on True Success: “With profound simplicity, Coach John Wooden redefines success and urges us all to pursue the best in ourselves. In this inspiring talk he shares the advice he gave his players at UCLA, quotes poetry and remembers his father’s wisdom.”

Bill Gates on Mosquitos, Malaria and Education: “Bill Gates hopes to solve some of the world’s biggest problems using a new kind of philanthropy. In a passionate and, yes, funny 18 minutes, he asks us to consider two big questions and how we might answer them.”

Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity: “Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.”

Jimmy Wales on The Birth of Wikipedia: “Jimmy Wales recalls how he assembled “a ragtag band of volunteers,” gave them tools for collaborating and created Wikipedia, the self-organizing, self-correcting, never-finished online encyclopedia.”

Clay Shirky, How Social Media Can Make History: “While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.”

Pranav Mistry: The Thrilling Potential of Sixth Sense Technology: “At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data — including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper “laptop.” In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he’ll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.”

Danial Pink on the Surprising Science of Motivation: “Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories — and maybe, a way forward.”

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According to Bramble,

“Researchers have already enumerated the benefits that kids can get from traditional media. Watching Sesame Street or Blue’s Clues improves children’s problem-solving skills and school readiness. Teaching students how to use word-processing software, Web-design programs, and video-production tools is a proven way of refocusing at-risk teens on school, and, eventually, getting them jobs. Social networks can also pull in students who are otherwise disengaged, because they draw on kids’ often intense interest in finding new ways to communicate with one another.”

Putting aside the potential pitfalls of utilizing social networking tools in a traditional school setting (i.e., privacy issues, inappropriate student behavior, etc.), how can educators effectively do it? Here’s Bramble’s suggestion,

“For starters, students could talk about what they’re doing on Facebook and company, map out the ways they’re making connections with one another, and share videos and software they’ve created. Once the conversation gets going, teachers could figure out whether some kids were being left out and find ways to increase those students’ media literacy and bring them into the fold. Teachers can manage the project by selecting the best content and conversations, and incorporating it into other parts of the curriculum. If a student created an entry on Wikipedia for a local band or sports team, other students could work on revising the entry and building it into a larger local history project. The audience for school projects need no longer be one hurried teacher.”

Some of Bramble’s ideas sound good, but his suggestion that teachers should set aside valuable instructional time so students can discuss how they are using applications like Facebook to connect with one another seems very simplistic, to say the least. Simply having kids share the content they created over the weekend, for instance, is certainly not effective in terms of  improving student achievement. If social networking technology is going to be used successfully in the classroom, it must be implemented in a systematic way, in a way that directly and clearly supports academic learning. It’s nice to use social media technology as a way to link curriculum to student prior knowledge at the beginning of a lesson, let’s say, or as a discussion starter or wrap up to a lesson, but this sort of approach is only marginally beneficial. Considering the potential pitfalls, most teachers are left wondering, “Is using this technology really worth the hassle?”

Bramble also argues teachers should take advantage of our students’ desire to produce things using this technology. Why not have them use it to do something productive? Bramble suggests schools have students

” produce a school-sanctioned video[s]—the re-enactment of a literary or historical scene, for example. This isn’t as simple as a teacher saying, “Why don’t you write a poem about your frustration, rap it on video, and put it on YouTube?” Instead, a teacher could assign students the task of filming a scene from The Scarlet Letter in the stairwell, identifying the dynamic of shaming in the novel, and writing about how it might be playing out in their Facebook news feeds. In math class, students could develop statistical models and graphs of the patterns of information flow in their social networks. To understand how advertising works, students from different backgrounds and with different online habits could compare what’s being hawked to them. And for a school journalism project, teams of students could aggregate other students’ narratives from blogs, Facebook, and Twitter and compile a real-time collective analysis of the state of their educational union.”

This sort of approach makes sense. As I noted in a recent post, having students actually “do” something with their learning is a very effective way to utilize social media technology in the classroom. In other words, social media technology provides an easy way to enable students to actually demonstrate their learning. The “doing” part is the last phase of what Curtis Bonk refers to as a learning wheel– read, reflect, display, and do.

Social networking technology certainly has a place in schools. The hard part is finding truly beneficial applications that promote student learning or foster positive communication between members of the school community.

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1. Who can see the things you share (status updates, photos, videos, etc.)?

“Probably the most critical of the “privacy” changes (yes, we mean those quotes sarcastically) was the change made to status updates. Although there’s now a button beneath the status update field that lets you select who can view any particular update, the new Facebook default for this setting is “Everyone.” And by everyone, they mean everyone.”

“If you accepted the new recommended settings then you voluntarily gave Facebook the right to share the information about the items you post with any user or application on the site. Depending on your search settings, you may have also given Facebook the right to share that information with search engines, too.”

“To change this setting back to something of a more private nature, do the following:

• From your Profile page, hover your mouse over the Settings menu at the top right and click “Privacy Settings” from the list that appears.Click “Profile Information” from the list of choices on the next page.
• Scroll down to the setting “Posts by Me.” This encompasses anything you post, including status updates, links, notes, photos, and videos.
• Change this setting using the drop-down box on the right. We recommend the “Only Friends” setting to ensure that only those people you’ve specifically added as a friend on the network can see the things you post.”

2. Who can see your personal info?

“Facebook has a section of your profile called “personal info,” but it only includes your interests, activities, and favorites. Other arguably more personal information is not encompassed by the “personal info” setting on Facebook’s Privacy Settings page. That other information includes things like your birthday, your religious and political views, and your relationship status.”

“After last month’s privacy changes, Facebook set the new defaults for this other information to viewable by either “Everyone” (for family and relationships, aka relationship status) or to “Friends of Friends” (birthday, religious and political views). Depending on your own preferences, you can update each of these fields as you see fit. However, we would bet that many will want to set these to “Only Friends” as well. To do so:

• From your Profile page, hover your mouse over the Settings menu at the top right and click “Privacy Settings” from the list that appears.
• Click “Profile Information” from the list of choices on the next page.
• The third, fourth, and fifth item listed on this page are as follows: “birthday,” “religious and political views,” and “family and relationship.” Locking down birthday to “Only Friends” is wise here, especially considering information such as this is often used in identity theft.
• Depending on your own personal preferences, you may or may not feel comfortable sharing your relationship status and religious and political views with complete strangers. And keep in mind, any setting besides “Only Friends” is just that – a stranger. While “Friends of Friends” sounds innocuous enough, it refers to everyone your friends have added as friends, a large group containing hundreds if not thousands of people you don’t know. All it takes is one less-than-selective friend in your network to give an unsavory person access to this information.”

3. What Google can see– Keep your data off the search engine.

“When you visit Facebook’s Search Settings page, a warning message pops up. Apparently, Facebook wants to clear the air about what info is being indexed by Google. The message reads:

‘There have been misleading rumors recently about Facebook indexing all your information on Google. This is not true. Facebook created public search listings in 2007 to enable people to search for your name and see a link to your Facebook profile. They will still only see a basic set of information.’ ”

“While that may be true to a point, the second setting listed on this Search Settings page refers to exactly what you’re allowing Google to index. If the box next to “Allow” is checked, you’re giving search engines the ability to access and index any information you’ve marked as visible by “Everyone.” As you can see from the settings discussed above, if you had not made some changes to certain fields, you would be sharing quite a bit with the search engines…probably more information than you were comfortable with. To keep your data private and out of the search engines, do the following:

• From your Profile page, hover your mouse over the Settings menu at the top right and click “Privacy Settings” from the list that appears.
• Click “Search” from the list of choices on the next page.
• Click “Close” on the pop-up message that appears.
• On this page, uncheck the box labeled “Allow” next to the second setting “Public Search Results.” That keeps all your publicly shared information (items set to viewable by “Everyone”) out of the search engines. If you want to see what the end result looks like, click the “see preview” link in blue underneath this setting.”

Although taking these three small steps may not seem very important, they are certainly worth considering. If educators are utilizing Facebook to interact with parents and students, it’s important they fully understand how information is being disseminated by Facebook. Furthermore, as educators we have a special responsibility to to protect the privacy of our parents, students, and staff members.

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