Congratulations, Dee House, you are the proud owner of a new iPad2!
For me, Dee House, age 50+, born in the turbulent decade of the 60’s to 3rd & 4th generation descendants of the settlers to eastern Maine, this Spring 2011 semester of EDC 533 has been an incredible introduction to the fast-paced world of curriculum and technology. Earlier this week I jumped into the new-fangled gadget pond of 21st century technology and pulled out my very first iPad on which I’m writing this post right now.
What’s even more amazing is that I can proudly say that this isn’t my first gadget of the semester. I started in January with a new Android powered cell phone. I immediately adapted to the possibilities for this course by adding the Kindle app which allowed my to download this course’s text from Amazon. The 50 year old English major was no longer reading “books” as I knew them. There were no pages to turn. Instead I had to learn to flick the screen with a left motion sweep. Page numbers had disappeared making citations tricky. I loved the lit screen for reading in bed and on car trips. I hated trying to return to something I’d previously read until I learned that I could highlight and bookmark pages by applying pressure to the screen. I don’t know yet if I will be able to “sync” my new iPad2 with my Kindle.
For Christmas my daughter bought me an iPod Nano. That’s a cute little one inch square music player that syncs with iTunes. Now I had to learn to naviage a new software. I downloaded a few songs, mostly Zumba, since that’s become my new world of workout. Zumba is a Latin dance aerobic workout. For years, as a Spanish teacher, I had worried about how the very undiverse people of eastern Penobscot County were ever going to enter the global arena. My neighbors and family tend to be very ethnocentric which has always made it a challenge to “sell” the importance of learning new languages and cultures to them. Because of Zumba, I can see that they will eventually do just fine entering the global economy. I’ve been a Zumba student in 3 towns: E. Millinocket, Lincoln, and Lee. Every class is packed with 30 – 50 students: women from the town who have fallen in love with Zumba despite not knowing the Spanish language or the Latina dance culture. I have been using my Nana mostly to learn 2 new languages as I drive across the most treacherous of rural roads every day to work. I’m learning Chinese because the school in my town already receives nearly 100 Asian students annually and because the school I teach in plans to accept 60 Chinese students next year to save themselves from closure. I’m also learning some Swahili because last year I connected with an orphanage in Mombassa, Kenya. I couldn’t go to Kenya but thanks to the computer and Internet I’ve been able to build them a website so people from around the world can learn about their needs. Without leaving the USA I’ve been able to affect positive change in the world.
I’m not sharing all these new technologically related phases in my life with you to beep my own horn. One of the questions posed this semester was about should curriculum be the same content and assessments for every student? What would it look like if it wasn’t? How would teachers assess individual learning? A graduate class in education seemed like a great chance for me to explore these questions, especially since Ed, the professor seemed willing to cut us some slack around turning in assignments. I am confessing right now that I didn’t do a great job on keeping up with required activities this semester.
One of the issues we are going to have to face as educators is that we can’t expect our students to challenge themselves to do advanced work AND do all the assignments that the other students have to do. It would be too exhausting. I learned that this semester when I accepted an invitation to run for my Maine House of Representative’s vacant seat. There’s a kind of unstated truth when one leads a life of learning: you can do CHOICE A or you can do CHOICE B, but you can’t do both. To take on a serious campaign in mid winter meant that I would have to cut out some other equally valuable activity from my life. Since I couldn’t quit my job, that meant I had to scale back on something. It was some of the required activities from this class.
Another issue that pops up when a student undertakes a new learning is known as the learning curve. Everything gets done at a slower pace and production initially lags behind the rate we are accustomed to performing at. This happened to me all semester long. When I was reading on my cell phone, when I was navigating around an online learning platform like Moodle (I hadn’t thought to mention this in my earlier paragraphs). An activity from this semester seems like the perfect example of how slow new learning can feel and how stressful the student can feel if s/he doesn’t meet production quotas, ie. assignment deadlines. Earlier this semester we had to read a book and give a 5 – 10 minute book report using the podcasting software Garage Band that is installed on the Maine LapTop Initiative (MLTI) MacBooks. First, I had to download a book from Kindle and sync it to my phone. Next I had to read it and learn how to mark text that I might want to use in my report. I thought about writing the report and reading it, but I wanted to go from the written medium to the audio medium without depending on my writing. The GarageBand software was not intuitive at all. I read some directions and watched some YouTube videos. I had asked my technology coordinator to help but wasn’t even sure what questions I would have later. At some point during the weekend that it was due, I had a technology meltdown and I did return to the familiar world of writing. I wrote out in one of our class forums what steps I had done and what frustrations I was experiencing. It was quite lengthy and had taken me about an hour and half to write. When I hit “post to forum” I got an error message. I’d lost everything and the Moodle platform didn’t maintain the content when I tried backing.into the page. Today as I write this on my iPad2 I know I need to learn how to copy and paste. Fortunately, it’s the same logic I learned to use with my book report when I used my cell phone. If I press on the screen, I pop up displays that allows me to copy and paste. Every paragraph now, I copy. back to my report. I actually took it to school the next day and planned to work on it after schoo when I could find the tech coordinator. I had learned the basic commands for recording my voice. I started talking. I talked like I write- with lots of typos/stammers. I would say a sentence and play it back. It usually took me 3 or 4 takes to get it right. I hated the sound of my own voice. One of the features of GB is that it provides a wave length of the voice. I learned to recognize the wave pattern with phrases like “and um” or “um”. When I finished I went back and cut out those wave lengths. It took about an hour to finish plus all the hours before to get to this place. Finally I had to learn to upload the podcast to Moodle which required saving it in iTunes–something new I hadn’t known about iTunes. For that I had to find the tech coordinator. After it was all done, I felt really happy. I’m looking forward to doing GB again and again.
One other tech project I worked on the semester that I can briefly contrast to the previous one. We had to interview someone from our school about it’s curriculum. I used a lot of technology for this project, as well. The difference was that I had previously used all the elements and so the project went quicker and with much less frustration. The first thing I did was email potential interviewees to see who might be able and willing to give me some time. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been emailing now for a decade and a half. I went on the interview with Stearns High School principal Jed Petsinger. I used paper and pencil, a technology so old for must of us that we can not remember a time when we didn’t use them. But paper and pencils are relatively new technologies which came into wide usage during the early parts of the last century. Hayes-Jacob had talked about the potential for Web 2.0 and wikis. I have a classroom wiki that I learned to create 3 years ago. I decided I needed to do something with that. I thought what I eventually decided to do was kind of cute. I created animated text to speech character for Mr. Pet singer. These are called Vokis. Creating a Voki isn’t hard but it is time consuming. I remember when I first started playing with this technology that it was frustrating but now it went kind of fast. On the Wikispaces platform is a command that let’s you convert the HTML code of the Voki into a usable widget on the page. Wikispaces has the most extensive use of widget creators for any website template I’ve come across on the web. I’ll provide a link to this later because I’m afraid of losing my content he if I navigate away from this forum.
Today as I write, I’ve revisited some of the learning highlights from this semester. Without realizing it, I designed my own inquiry problem: what does an individualized curriculum consist of? What issues do educators need to be aware of? How can we account for the slower production speed that the learning curve entails? I have only created a dozen or so new questions for myself: is an individualized curriculum appropriate for all students? If not, which age groups and learning abilities and skills would be appropriate? How would I assess the learning undertaking by my students involved in their own creation of learning? What issues will arise in convincing other stakeholders-students, parents, administration, school boards, taxpayers, etc.- about the instructional value of individualized curriculum?
Now I’m ready to post. I say a little pray to the technology gods that if I h ave timed out that the copy/paste feature will work as I think it should. I am going to try printing to my new wireless printer just in case I lose my work. I haven’t gone through the entire post to correct typos because moving the cursor around isn’t easy for me yet. I have caught the iPad changing some of my spelling mistakes when they weren’t actually spelling mistakes. Here goes the brand new technology driven by the not so brand new teacher. 
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