Room With A View

Our grade seven students spent three days in Chengde last week. I went along and took along my hand held GPS. I used it to mark the places we went and now they can be loaded into Google Earth. Here are the technical details of how I did it.

As I said above I used my GPS to mark some of the places we went. Next I used GPS Babel to download the waypoints to my computer and convert the file to .gpx format which can be read by Google Earth. Next I dragged and dropped the .gpx file onto an open Google Earth window and voila. I could see everything marked on the map. Finally, I uploaded the file to my class wiki so the kids can access it from home.

This is a tip for Mac users.

Lately, my son and I have been working on separate video projects. As a result, hard drive space has been at a premium. GrandPerspective is an open source utility that graphically shows what’s taking up space on a hard drive. When I first heard about it I thought it sounded goofy but after giving it a try it’s great. (Pictures work for me.) It showed me quickly what was taking up all the space on my drive. Some of the files I didn’t need and so just deleted them. Others I burned to dvd. I went from using 96 gigs on my hard drive to 55 in no time. It’s well worth checking out.

(Thanks to Bob LeVitus and Chuck Joiner at the MacNotables podcast for this.)

For the last two weeks I’ve had one of next year’s new pc’s in my room for testing. Several students have asked why it doesn’t have Vista as its operating system. The decision was made to stay with XP because the IT department felt that Vista is not ready for prime time. There’s a difference between being on the leading edge of technology and being on the bleeding edge. It looks like we’re not the only ones to think this. According to a report by the British Communications and Technology Agency there are no “must have” features in Vista that make it worth the financial and organizational challenges its adoption would require. [Link]

An article in the NY Times entitled Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops regarding Liverpool Central School District’s decision to pull the plug on their 1 to 1 laptop program has created quite a stir. It’s easy to see the flaws in the article. I won‘t do so here because it’s already been done by David Warlick, Stephen Downes, Justin Medved and many others. My concern is that in our world where decisions are made based on shallow analysis and thirty second sound bites, districts considering the merits of a 1 to 1 laptop program may use this article in their deliberations. That would be scandalous.

Quickmuse is a beatnik like poetry site. Poets are given a prompt and fifteen minutes to create a poem. Through the miracle of modern technology, the process is recorded in real time. Poems are archived. They can be viewed as finished pieces or in “playback” mode. Playback gives one a glimpse into the process the poet went through keystroke by keystroke. I’m not certain of the ties to K-12 education but Secondary English and Theory of Knowledge come to mind.

A couple of weekends ago I found myself on the Assessment Committee at ISB’s Middle School Planning Summit. Assessment is on my mind a lot these days. I have Robert Marzano’s recent book Classroom Assessment and Grading that Work on the table in front of me. I’ve read a couple of chapters so far. It’s very good.

Assessment in the area of technology is especially challenging. For example, games and simulations are a very effective ways to learn but how can we assess them? Traditionally, students move through content linearly. Formal and informal assessment is administered as students progress through a unit and a final assessment is given at the end of a unit. The challenge with games and simulations is that students do not move through material linearly. Instead they weave their way through material and may or may not end up in the same place with the same knowledge and understandings at the end. How then should this be assessed? If students don’t end up in the same place at the end, do games and simulations have a place in K-12 education? How does one teach with games or simulations when one is held accountable through standardized tests or IB exams?

The Horizon report recognizes these challenges when it states that:

Assessment of new forms of work continues to present a challenge to educators and peer reviewers. Both at the student and at the professional level, assessment is lagging behind creative work. Learning that takes place in interdisciplinary, context-rich environments such as games and simulations is still difficult to evaluate. Capturing a portfolio of work, when much of that work takes place in new media forms like blogs, podcasts, and videos, poses a problem for learners and for professors seeking tenure.

Hmmm, no answers here, just a recognition of the challenges.