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5 Signs Your Network Needs an Overhaul | EdTech Magazine on 2012-05-07
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5 Signs Your Network Needs an Overhaul
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posted March 29, 2012 | Appears in the Spring 2012 issue of EdTech Magazine.
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The proliferation of technology in classrooms has made clear a reality with which many network administrators struggle: You can never have too much bandwidth.
In this age of one-to-one computing and “bring your own device” programs, distance learning and cloud-based applications, students, teachers and staff have come to expect that the network on which they rely during the school day will deliver the resources they need, when they need them. But making do with a patchwork network is no longer enough. As many school IT departments have discovered, at some point, the demands these emerging technologies exert on a network make a major overhaul imperative.
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Today, Power over Ethernet switches accommodate everything from video cameras to wireless access points, and the entire network runs at gigabit speeds. The school also adopted a four- to five-year rotation cycle to replace switches as they age.
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Here are signs that yours needs an overhaul.
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1. You have an old, unmanageable infrastructure. Any equipment that’s been in place for eight years or more is simply too old, says Mark Tauschek, a lead research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group. Eight-port small office/home office–class hubs, old Category-5 cabling and network speeds of less than 100 megabits per second, for example, are dated and should be upgraded. If possible, school networks should offer speeds of a gigabit or better, Tauschek adds.
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2. You don’t have a wireless network. “The future of networks is wireless, and we are going to see fewer blue cables,” Tauschek says. Particularly in a school environment, where users are nomadic and somewhat mobile, wireless access is becoming crucial.
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3. Your network is unreliable. When a school’s network screeches to a halt, the repercussions are huge.
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If you don’t know when part of your network is in trouble or is becoming increasingly unreliable, it’s a big tip-off that an upgrade is in order. “If you hit seven or eight years, you’ll start to see that ports or switches will start failing more regularly,”
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4. Your network isn’t secure. Schools are legally and morally obligated to secure private student data, including grades and personal information. Security breaches expose a school not only to potential legal action, but also to viruses and other malware that can destroy or damage the network and the files that administrators, teachers and staff rely on to do their jobs. Disruptions of any kind indicate that your network is vulnerable.
“If you aren’t aware of the traffic that’s passing through your network, and you don’t have visibility into where that traffic is going, then it’s probably time to think about upgrading and possibly adding some layers to the network,” Tauschek advises.
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5. Your network isn’t ready for the future. If your network can’t handle the network-intensive applications that enliven learning in today’s classrooms, then it’s time to upgrade.
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Often, district networks have more horsepower than their administrators realize, either because they aren’t configured properly or because they aren’t being used fully. “I call it the ‘Wizard of Oz effect,’ ” says Stein, the consultant. “Dorothy always had the capability to go home — she just had to click her heels together. But she didn’t know it.”
With the new contract, Hoboken’s Internet connections will increase from 50Mbps to 300Mbps. Crocamo also is upgrading the district’s firewall and web content filter so it can accommodate the faster speeds.
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Assess your needs and formulate a plan. Begin by conducting an internal review of existing resources and anticipated requirements. Among the questions to consider are these: How much bandwidth do you need? Do you have sufficient wireless access? Are your network security measures as comprehensive as they could be?
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hire networking experts who can help determine which components are most in need of an upgrade and how best to execute that transformation.
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Secure buy-in from stakeholders.
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When it comes to technology investments, people tend to be more supportive of purchases that have an immediate impact on students, so be prepared to make the case for why a stronger network will enhance their learning experience.
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Find the money. Consider your E-Rate eligibility and other grant sources. Budgets should include funds for initial one-time costs, hardware maintenance and future upgrades. Because school budgets are so tight these days, most districts will have to forgo some purchases in order to make others.
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Districts that struggle to pay for recurring costs, such as maintenance and software upgrades, sometimes find leasing to be a good solution. Most leasing arrangements amortize overall costs via a monthly payment.
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JOLT - Journal of Online Learning and Teaching on 2012-04-23
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MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching
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Vol. 7, No.4, December 2011
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Digital Natives: Ten Years After
Apostolos Koutropoulos
University of Massachusetts
Boston, MA 02125 USA
a.koutropoulos@umb.edu -
The digital native became a rallying cry for change in education, (expensive) technological infusion at all levels of education, and broad-changes in institutions that are providing learning opportunities and environments to these digital natives.
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Other overgeneralizations put forth by authors like Prensky, is that the digital natives prefer images over text, they prefer games over ”serious work,” they function best when networked, digital natives can’t pay attention (or they choose not to!), and finally digital natives have skills, with digital technologies, that they’ve perfected.
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most people prefer to do fun things rather than something that they perceive of as work.
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Prensky doesn’t provide facts or empirical evidence, just suppositions. When Prensky writes about his preferred method of teaching (2001a) he writes that he prefers to invent video games, but he never considers that this may not be the most appropriate method of instruction, and that it might not be the learner’s preferred method for instruction. Thus in the same article he talks about the needs of the learner, while at the same time ignoring the needs of learners by imposing his own preferred method of teaching.
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rensky’s technological determinism culminates in a biological determinism in part 2 of his introduction to the concept of the digital native (2001b). Prensky argues that the brain’s neuroplasticity makes it so that the brain adapts to the environment that it is in, so in a technology-infused environment the brain will adapt to better use the tools that are available in that environment. While this may be true, there are two things that Prensky does not take into account. The first is that as human beings our brain is continuously rewiring itself throughout our lives. We don’t fossilize at a specific state of our lives, but we learn to use the tools that are available to us, thus digital natives should also exploit that physical ability to learn to function in environments that don’t necessarily have the tools that they are used to. The second thing that Prensky never questions, in either article, is the need to impose radical change on our educational system.
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This, taken together with the, unknown at the time, numbers of technology use within the digital native population, means that we weren’t really talking about pedagogy, and what’s really good for the learners, but rather, perhaps, change for change’s sake, or the technological equivalent of “throwing money at the educational problem.”
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Oblinger (2005) for instance portrays a vision of technological utopia, something that supposedly exists today, where students are proactively using their iPods to learn, snap photos everywhere they go and use these tools for impromptu study meet-ups.
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First, experiential learning, another name for learning by trial and error, goes back at least to the early 1900s with the work of Piaget. Presky’s later proposals (2006a, 2006b; 2010) for using peer groups, allowing students to pursue their passions, and essentially going from a sage on the stage to a guide on the side aren’t new, but they go back to Piaget (Singer & Revenson, 1996), Vygotsky (1978) and even Socrates (Karasmanis, 2002), just to name a few. If Piaget, Vygotsky and Socrates thought of these notions, this means that these traits aren’t inherent to a population who grew up in a digital age, but rather these are traits inherent in humans as a whole, and everything else is just a tool that we can utilize.
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Another trait that is ascribed to digital natives is that they are multitaskers, moreover they are efficient at it, and it is technology that encourages this multitasking.
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Has the efficiency of multitasking been proven? And how much brainpower are we giving to each individual task?
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According to Tapscott (1999) digital natives are non-sequential with their use of information, going back and forth between programs and sources and their learning style is an outgrowth of these ingrained habits of seeking and retrieving information from the Internet. This marks a striking contrast to previous generation of students, who tend to acquire info more passively from authority figures (Tapscott as quoted in Barnes, Marateo & Ferris, 2007). Perhaps one of the bigger claims made is that this generation (i.e. digital natives) exists across the world and across socio-economic conditions, not just in advanced economies (Tapscott as cited in Jones & Healing, 2010).
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The devil is in the details and unfortunately the early literature on digital natives that built upon the work of Presky, Oblinger, Tapscott, Dede and Frand lacked that fine attention to detail; they seemed to rework the same old assumptions, and fit their data within the Weltsaschauung of the digital native proponents.
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digital natives are described as striving “to stay ahead of the technology curve in ways that often exhaust older generations,” and to achieve this they “rarely pick up the instruction pack to learn programming or a technique. Instead, spurred by our youthful exploration of the Internet, we tend to learn things ourselves, to experiment with new technology until we get it right, and to build by touch rather than tutorial” (Windham, 2005).
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Digital Natives may indeed start without looking at a manual, but when what they are using is not intuitive, they either get the manual, as is exemplified by the great numbers of computer game walkthroughs online; they will give up, as we shall see digital natives aren’t that great at adapting when compared to older students; or they stick to what they know, which means not experimenting and goes counter the claims of digital native evangelists.
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VanSlyke (2003) had originally questioned the global reach of the digital native, and Prensky, in a rebutal, disagreed with him stating that he expected children in much of the rest of the world to exhibit the behaviors of the digital native (2003). Research, however, has shown that the location does matter. In the US (Smith & Caruso, 2010) we see different levels of computer and web technology usage among the same demographic of digital natives in Australia (Kennedy, et al., 2010; Margaryan & Littlejohn, 2008) and than those in the UK (Stoerger, 2009). In South Africa, as well, we see that only 26% of the population might be described as having grown up digital (Brown & Czerniewicz, 2010).
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, this digital divide has spurred a Moral Panic, calling for radical change in education where arguments are articulated in dramatic language, with no empirical evidence or theoretical foundations, based only on “common sense” and personal anecdotes (Bennett & Maton, 2010). Anyone who resists or questions these calls radical change is said to be out of touch, lazy, or just dismissed as not having legitimate concerns (Jones & Healing, 2010).
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College students don’t represent whole populations because they tend to be from a segment of the population that has the financial capacity to afford to be able to go to college (Bradley, et al., 2008 in Bennett & Maton, 2010). As Brown & Czerniewicz (2010) framed it: it’s not about a generation but an elite.
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Only 36% of digital native students contribute to blogs, only 40% contribute to wikis, and only 42% contribute to video sites. Social games and social bookmarking sites are only used by 25% of these digital natives. Fewer that 20% of the students said that they used course lecture podcasts or videos (Smith & Caruso, 2010). Similar results were also found by the Corrin, Bennett & Lockyer in the Australian academic context (2010) and the Pew Internet Internet and American Life Project in the broader US context (Fox & Madden, 2006; Jones & Fox, 2009; Zickuhr, 2010; Rainie, 2011).
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over 80% of first year students reported a “slight confidence” and “basic skills” with presentation software and online library resources - sources that they were familiar with.
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only a minority of students felt like it was important to them to share and upload content.
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In Australia a study found that
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only 15% of the digital natives were “power users” and 45% were rudimentary technology users
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(Kennedy, et al., 2010). In a related study, more than 70% of Australian first year students never kept a blog, more than 80% had never produced a podcast and have never contributed to a wiki (Kennedy, et al., 2007). Similar results were reported by Corrin, Bennett and Lockyer (2010) indicating that only 23% of students self-reported as advanced computer users, 66% never had a blog, 69% did not maintain a website, video editing or creation was rare, and they seldom (31%) or never (41%) listened to podcasts.
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the digital natives are missing out on this rich environment because they have poorly developed information-seeking skills, in other words they consume from sources that they already know.
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the collected statistics from a variety of studies paint a different picture; the fact is that the average “digital native” entering college is not technologically sophisticated; this digital native is not a power user. Even in countries where there is more access to a computer and the Internet, usage of these technologies tends to be read-only, checking facebook or looking things up on Wikipedia (Selwyn, 2010; Margaryan & Littlejohn, 2008); in other words passive interaction.
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One final element to consider is student locus of control and the independence to experiment freely (and without consequence) with the technology. Kvavik (2005) found that in quantitative studies students say that they have the skills that they need, however qualitative data contradicts the collected quantitative data. Students only have very basic office suite skills, and they have difficulty moving beyond those basic activities; it would appear that these students don’t recognize that their applications have enhanced functionalities that they can use.
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digital natives are mystified by technology and some are afraid to putz around, to experiment, for fear that they will do something wrong and break the computer
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Educators are perhaps falling into the same trap as parents are; that is that we have a tacit expectation that kids will have spontaneous engagement with schooled interests spurred by the availability of the computer as a tool (Kerwalla & Crook, 2002),
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Looking at the research, however, we see that there is no one, monolithic, group that we can point to and say that those are digital natives. As a matter of fact, the individuals who would fit the stereotype of the digital native appear to be in the minority of the population.
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From a US context, in a post-No Child Left Behind USA, if our digital native learners aren’t engaged, they have no incentive to work around the problem and find a solution. In contrast, older learners, I would posit, are more engaged and thus do work at changing their approach in order to find solutions.
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Instead of having education professionals focus on the technology aspect of the debate and in certain digital native behaviors, which “common sense” has told us, are immutable, we ought to be focusing on proper pedagogy and exposing our students to information retrieval and critical information analysis skills that are in both the digital and the analog realms
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We out to teach our students to actually change their approaches to learning when what they are trying out is not working for them, instead of assuming that they possess this “Nintendo over logic” which enables them to modify their learning plans when things aren’t working out.
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we need to move away from this fetish of insisting in naming this generation the Digital/Net/Google Generation because those terms don’t describe them, and have the potential of keeping this group of students from realizing personal growth by assuming that they’ve already grown in areas that they so clearly have not.
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Learners don’t know what they don’t know (Christensen, 2006), but if they come to the table from a position of superiority, like they are better than the so-called digital immigrants (Roberts, 2005; Windham, 2005) they lose an opportunity to learn something that they don’t know that they don’t know, something that may be beneficial to them. Let’s resist “common sense” because common sense isn’t all that common.
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This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike License
For details please go to: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
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You Shouldn’t Use Social Media If… on 2012-03-19
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You Shouldn’t Use Social Media If…
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- Increasing Brand Recognition
- Developing a Community & Conversation around the Brand’s Industry
- Establishing Rapport & Garnering Trust in The Marketplace
- Becoming the Go-To Resource for Information Related to the Brand’s Industry
- Keeping the Brand Top of Mind for Prospects and Past Customers
- Providing Value to Keep Current Customers Loyal
- Offering Enhanced Customer Service
In order to help my clients better understand some of what I will be helping them achieve via their social channels, I give them this starter list of goals:
By focusing on any of the above items, increased sales becomes a possibility.
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JOLT - Journal of Online Learning and Teaching on 2012-03-19
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Crowdsourcing Higher Education: A Design Proposal for Distributed Learning
Michael Anderson
Director of Online Learning
University of Texas at San Antonio
San Antonio, TX USA
Michael.Anderson1@utsa.edu -
Texas ranks 35th in the nation for graduation within six years (Austin American-Statesman, 2010, July 13).
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the cost of public higher education has risen even faster than the cost of healthcare (Langfitt, 1990). Increased costs have primarily impacted the pocketbooks of students as public appropriations for universities over the last decade have declined an average of 5.6% annually adjusted for inflation (Southern Regional Education Board, 2010). Private universities are not significantly better off.
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The combination of rising costs and perceived low performance is reflected in the public's lack of confidence in higher education to deliver a worthwhile service (Texas Public Policy Foundation, December 6, 2010).
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While the path of instructional technology is littered with the unfulfilled promises of all-encompassing answers, a possible solution is emerging. The growing availability of low-cost computer networks, capable of linking novices and experts in social and contextual environments, reduces the inherent friction of production and elaboration in higher education. Learners no longer need travel to Cambridge to take a media literacy course from Henry Jenkins; they can watch his lecture on an iPhone™ or friend him on Facebook™ and chat about the utility of social networks. Using networks for distributed learning can solve the efficiency challenge if the academy can embed that learning in effective instruction.
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Effective instruction requires constant adjustment to the learner, reinforcing mastered concepts and holding out new concepts that are barely able to be mastered by the learner at that point in his or her concept knowledge trajectory. Computers can constantly evaluate and adjust to inputs in an efficient manner, providing personalized instruction. Computers can also track performance at a granular level and match learners with experts on the basis of fine-grained competencies for the purpose of targeted mentoring. Embedding these metrics within a networked environment facilitates the computer's information management capabilities across multiple characteristics of learning interactions and within a computer-mediated socialized network.
However, humans can better interpret a lack of understanding of the intermediate steps in a problem-solving process, and humans can offer complementary explanations easily adjusted based on feedback. Digital capture of these explanations can be archived for use by other students, and the quality of those digital artifacts can be verified by the performance of the student consumers, resulting in a collection of diverse and proven solutions.
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Crowdsourcing views humans as processing units which can be integrated with computer processors to draw on the unique strengths of each (Alonso, 2011). Crowdsourcing is not a group of people performing a task typically performed by an individual, but rather an approach that leverages the individual strengths of human and machine processing.
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Brabham (2008) argues that crowdsourcing offers a solution to complex problems that require both types of computing: human and machine, interpreting and manipulating.
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Surowiecki (2004) maintains that crowdsourcing "wisdom" requires independent, decentralized answers with cognitive variety, properties that are characteristic of a collection of solutions created and rated by individuals.
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It's 10 pm, and Will is working on his assigned Chemistry 101 homework. He logs into his personal learning system (PLS), and the Chemistry course menu shows he left off his last session at "Balancing Equations" so he decides to tackle that topic this evening. The PLS assigns random problems from the "balancing" topic, and Will works a couple of problems correctly, then misses a couple. After working on the problem set and failing to correctly answer four consecutive questions, the PLS soon offers him the choice of watching a video or talking with another student. Will watches the video, but when he tries the problem set again, he is still unable to correctly answer four problems in a row and decides he needs to talk with someone. The system matches him randomly with Miguel, another Chemistry 101 student who is online and who has already mastered the topic. The system launches a semi-private (first names only) voice-enabled whiteboard with the last problem Will missed on the screen. Miguel talks Will through the problem and offers hints on how he (Miguel) approaches the "balancing" topic, in this case, by starting with the atom with the largest coefficient.
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If Miguel's solution engenders Will’s success, Miguel is credited with a point on the Chemistry leader board. If Miguel accumulates enough points, he may be offered a teaching assistant job next year. Miguel's and Will's video session was recorded and added to the library of videos for the "balancing" topic and awarded a point if it was successful. Over time, if other students are similarly successful with the "balancing" topic after watching Miguel's and Will's video, the session will be publicly recognized as an effective instructional segment for the topic and will rise to the top of recommended content objects for that topic.
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Vygotsky determined that learning occurs primarily through social mechanisms. Wertsch & Sohmer (1995) trace two additional themes from Vygotsky's work: the requirement of a coach (or "more knowledgeable other") and the identification that learning occurs in the "zone of proximal development," the region between the learner's ability to perform a task under the guidance of a coach and the learner's ability to solve the problem independently.
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Lave & Wenger (1990) added the role of environment by showing that learning occurs in contextual situations, evolving from "legitimate peripheral participation" to full participation in an authentic community of practice.
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John Seely Brown (1989) extended situated learning to emphasize the role of cognitive apprenticeship.
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The crowdsourced PLS is based on social learning experiences embedded in an authentic "just in time" community of learning: the online mentor provides apprenticeship, and the dynamic menu continues to increase the depth of the topic to the level needed by each student individually (for example, an Engineering major needs more depth in Calculus than a Journalism major).
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a distributed learning network. An online system that combines the motivation of personal goal achievement with the socialization aspects of peer mentoring offers an effective solution.
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Distributed work teams and community evaluation and guidance have emerged as accepted methods for solving problems over geographical distances (Resta & Laferrière, 2007).
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open educational resources provide course materials for direct access and reuse. Learners are encouraged to utilize and in some cases, modify and share improvements in a content collaboration similar to Wikipedia.
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Extending the open content model, the University of Manitoba offered an open online course in 2008 which enrolled more than 2,300 students (Fini, 2009). The PLS solutions library functions as an open resource, at least for that class at a specific institution, with diverse content which can be directed to students on the basis of demographic data, learning patterns, and other performance metrics captured and indexed by the crowdsourced PLS.
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Jenkins (2006) argues that students are digital residents who live in a participatory age. Participation in the content construction aspect of learning environments is often characterized by the use of blogs or discussion boards that ask student to analyze and summarize core readings in a discipline and encourage (or require) peer responses to those posts. The pedagogical affordance of analysis by each student reduces faculty member workload by shifting the responsibility for knowledge acquisition to each individual learner. The formalization of blogs and other student-created content is realized in the advent of student portfolios.
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The crowdsourced PLS situates students directly in the learning environment at the moment of need and relies on human communication to interpret complex problems. Faculty workload is reduced through the engagement of external mentors (in real-time or as a content resource from the stored sessions) who fill the role traditionally assigned to discussion leaders. Situating these communications in virtual environments, whether fictional (Liu, 2006) or real (Doering, Scharber, Miller, & Veletsianos, 2009), provides intrinsic motivation for learners to remain personally engaged.
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Table 1. Instructional Design Approaches
Approach
Advantages for learners
System disadvantages
Collaborative projects
Socialization within group
Potential for no individual accountability
Supplemental Instruction (SI)
Socialization within group
Content placed in immediate problem context
User-initiated (not embedded)
Open Educational Resources (OER)
Socialization within group
User control
Lack of personal direction
Public content
Opportunity for reflection
Motivation from participation
Absence of assessment and feedback
Peer assessment
Motivation from participation
Possible system manipulation
Problem-Based Learning (PBL)
Motivation from participation
Socialization within group
Content placed in immediate problem context
Requires external experts
Serious games
Motivation from participation
Socialization within group
Content placed in immediate problem context
Intrinsic motivation for learners and mentors
Expensive to develop
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students must accept communal responsibility and provide mentoring in a quid pro quo environment where payment is non-material. Empowered by proven techniques in social learning design and crowdsourcing, these new responsibilities promise more effective and efficient learning outcomes.
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This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike License
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Technology Director Turns Cellphones Into Classrooms - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education on 2012-03-07
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Technology Director Turns Cellphones Into Classrooms
Katherine Traut, University of Cape Town
Laura Czerniewicz
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Katherine Traut, University of Cape Town
Laura Czerniewicz
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And, as in much of Africa, cellphones are ubiquitous. A 2007 study found that 98.5 percent of the country's university students had one.
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Instead of looking at such behavior as a disruptive use of technology, she argues, institutions need to embrace it. At Cape Town, the university is working to make recorded lectures mobile friendly, for instance, and Ms. Czerniewicz and her colleagues have designed an SMS mobile-learning tool that lets students in a course ask questions and compare notes, anonymously if they want to. It works on any cellphone, not just smartphones. In the university sphere, "there is a disjuncture between how we design for the use of technology and what students are already doing with technology," Ms. Czerniewicz says. "Higher education is missing an opportunity."
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JOLT - Journal of Online Learning and Teaching on 2012-03-05
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MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching
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Vol. 7, No.4, December 2011
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Social Media Use in Higher Education: Key Areas to Consider for Educators
Julia E. Rodriguez
Assistant Professor
Information Literacy and Educational Technology Librarian
Oakland University
Rochester, MI 48309 USA
juliar@oakland.edu -
The ubiquitous term “social media” has become inherently connected to the popular YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook websites. Describing media as “social” implies that it exists in a social space and/or users interact in some way with the media. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) defined social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content” (p.61).
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social media is the arena where users can “engage in the creation and development of content and gather online to share knowledge, information, and opinions using web-based applications and tools” (Grover & Stewart, 2010, p. 9).
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This call to users to become content creators radically challenges the traditional authoritatively-driven teaching and learning model.
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When students actively participate in knowledge creation for themselves and their peers by employing the tools they use every day, they are changing the flow of information from “unidirectional to multidirectional,” (Grover & Stewart, 2010, p. 10-11) and defining a new Learning 2.0 paradigm .
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Lee and McLoughlin (2007) noted that this reality is one where teachers/educators relinquish some control to embrace the informal leaner-centered pedagogies empowering twenty-first century learners; they went on to state, “these changes are inevitable and unavoidable, given the morphing nature of higher education.”
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Advocates feel that the wide acceptance of social media sites outside the higher education arena establishes a congruity easily transferable to community building in e-learning, which has the potential to transform higher education as a whole (Hoffman, 2009)
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case studies demonstrate “multiple benefits for using SNS [social networking software], including, retention, socialization, collaborative learning, student engagement, sense of control and ownership” (p.3), along with a list of other perks for students and instructors.
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lexander (2006) introduced a variety of social media tools and explains how they could be used in higher education classes. Yet, he also challenged the community to look at how higher education faculty currently put forward “a complex, contradictory mix of openness and restriction, public engagement and cloistering” (p. 42). Duffy and Bruns (2006) detailed the possibilities for using social software tools such as blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds in educational settings, stating that our new ‘social’ and ‘mobile’ reality of delivering educational content to students must match what they will encounter after graduation.
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Wheeler, Yeomans, and Wheeler (2008) evaluated collaborative learning by students who use a wiki to create user-generated content for their learning experience. Despite students’ hesitation to create work in a public setting, or to work as a group and the limitations of evaluating individual contributions, they still felt the tool held great potential to transform education. They emphasized that the primary benefit of using the tool is for collaboration or extending engagement outside the classroom and advised teachers to act only as facilitators or moderators in this environment.
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faculty attitudes strongly predicted whether or not they actually adopted a new method. Their recommendations called on administrators to promote the use of new social software , emphasizing their gradual learning curve and congruity with current practices. Further, they suggest that efforts should be made to build educators’ overall confidence and comfort with new technologies (Aijan & Hartshorne, 2008 ).
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data demonstrate that students using Twitter “had a significantly greater increase in engagement than the control group, as well as higher semester grade point averages” (p. 1). The researchers strongly feel these results are evidence to support the educational usefulness of the tool and social media as a means to reach higher educational outcomes.
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The European Commission, interested in promoting innovation in higher education, has funded a three year iCamp research project which “ investigated how Web 2.0 technologies can be implemented in higher education settings.” (n.d., p. 6). This has resulted in the free published handbook, How to Use Social Software in Higher Education. The handbook is aimed at educators who are interested in incorporating social software into the learning process.
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Missing from this dialogue, however, is discussion of how best to tackle some of the practical, less paradigm-shifting questions about ownership, privacy and security, access, accessibility and compliance, stability of technology, intellectual property rights, and copyright law.
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When using social media tools in the classroom, the strict definition of original author or owner is blurred. For example, who owns the IP rights to a class-created wiki or blog, or the items developed for an island in Second Life? As faculty members recognize the possibilities of using these Web 2.0 tools to engage students, they are becoming co-authors/creators alongside their students. Students begin to see these creations as portfolio work, and desire some ownership of what they’ve created.
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Further complicating the ownership question is the fact that these new creations are often hosted on servers and services owned by for-profit companies. Most users of these services are not aware that the providers of these free tools may claim ownership of the work created and residing on their servers
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What is perhaps the most well-known controversy of this nature arose in 2009 when Facebook changed its terms of service agreement with its users, granting itself the rights to use photos, posts and content that users make available on the system in any way it desires--even in cases where users have terminated their accounts. Facebook’s explanation was that this change was necessary to maintain cohesion and system functionality, but the public perception was that Facebook was staking claim to users’ copyrighted materials. The outcry was so great that Facebook returned to their original policy (Stone & Stelter, 2009; McCarthy, 2009).
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While faculty members may understand that having access to another’s work does not make them owners or give them rights to freely use the content as they wish, this concept may not be so clear for students. Recognizing the ease with which digital content can be copied, remixed, and reused, it is wise to facilitate discussions or assign readings about ownership and attribution, addressing ethical and legal content use.
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Intellectual property rights and ownership questions are at the center of a complex web, overlapped by issues encompassing the use of copyrighted materials. Stuck in this web are other important concerns that must be considered such as matters of privacy rights; the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA); security; accessibility; access; compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA); and the longevity and stability of these tools and services .
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Even though social media tools being used do not collect enough personally identifiable data to threaten FERPA laws in most cases, the issue of student privacy in the broader context is still one that should be strongly considered.
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Should faculty ask or require students to use public systems that gather preference data on users, which the sites then sell to other companies as valuable targeted marketing data? Facebook has repeatedly made news headlines about privacy issues and access to user profiles. Lately, the concern has been third party applications misusing information without users even knowing that their information is being made available (Young, 2008). But perhaps this new Google-infused culture renders the privacy issue moot, as Google appears to be the search engine of choice and has long been mining user emails and search histories without widespread dissent. If nothing else, faculty can use these issues as teaching topics that aim to enhance students’ media literacy.
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Common sense would dictate that even when an online space is restricted to a specific classroom, it is never wise to publicly discuss student grades or put forth any critical review or feedback of an individual student’s performance.
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The stability of the technology and the systems professors use for teaching and research is often taken for granted. Unless there is an outage, accessing the network from anywhere, using technology in the classroom, or teaching with a course management system (CMS) are usually effortless tasks that happen repeatedly throughout the day without much thought. However, if the network goes down in the middle of a lecture or files that were uploaded to the CMS disappear or are somehow corrupted, the reliability and stability of these systems quickly become an issue.
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Campus systems need to establish support mechanisms: there should always be someone to call, be it the university technology services department or the technology help desk. However, when faculty members use off-site, in-the-cloud software, the reliability and stability of these systems are all outside the traditional support structure. New start-up companies (and even some well-established ones) can disappear overnight, can be bought by competitors, or change their use agreements without notice, all of which jeopardize the users’ content.
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Social media and remixing of creative expressions inherently challenges the third exclusive right of creating derivative works based on the original. All of these activities can take place daily in a modern classroom that incorporates new media tools.
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Many groups have joined together in challenging the evasive permission culture (Lessig, 2004) in defense of fair use and the ability to retain access to cultural objects not just for educational purposes but continuing our tradition of “free culture– not free as in free beer but free as in free speech, free markets, free trade, free enterprise, free will, free elections. A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators” (Lessig, 2004, preface xiv).
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this time the technological change isn’t arriving as carefully planned and sanctioned institutional initiatives but more as a grassroots movement. Adventurous educators see how the new communication and networking tools used by the masses can be adapted and utilized for teaching purposes. The free, easy-to-use social media that has now permeated so much of daily life brings with it the opportunity to enhance learning, participation, communication, and engagement; to extend the classroom experience; and/or to enrich the online classroom.
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Choosing to use social media software and integrate UGC with the intention of enhancing engagement, interaction, and excitement is a very worthwhile effort but one should ensure that the trade-offs are equitable and ethical.
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Faculty can benefit from sharing experiences with colleagues and developing assignments that engage students in thoughtful discussions of new media’s challenges relating to privacy, ownership of intellectual property, and use of copyrighted materials which are teaching topics that can enhance students’ media literacy.
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This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike License
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Education Week Teacher: Redefining Instruction With Technology: Five Essential Steps on 2012-01-26
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Redefining Instruction With Technology: Five Essential Steps
By Jennie Magiera -
First, I had to learn a hard lesson: Just bringing new technology in your classroom and working it into day-to-day routines isn’t enough.
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The iPads were not helping my students make substantial progress toward self-efficacy, academic achievement, or social-emotional growth.
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"What have we been doing so far with this technology?" Students used math apps instead of math card games. They’d made slideshow presentations for isolated units. They’d done some research on the Internet. In short, things were going ... OK. Nothing to write home about. Not what I would consider "worthy" of a $20,000 grant.
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The problem, I began to realize, was my own understanding of how the iPads should be utilized in the classroom. I had seen them as a supplement to my pre-existing curriculum, trying to fit them into the structure of what I’d always done. This was the wrong approach: To truly change how my classroom worked, I needed a technology-based redefinition of my practice.
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Break down to rebuild.
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I would have to be willing to depart from what I had "always done" or "always taught."
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By setting aside my pre-conceived notions of how my classroom "should" look, sound, and feel, I was able to transform my practice from the ground up.
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Redefine with a goal in mind.
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When rethinking your curriculum and classroom, identify the goals you have for yourself and your students. I focused on two important goals: increased differentiation and robust, efficient assessment. Next, I asked myself, "Can the iPads help me reach those goals?
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a few examples:
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I created interactive video mini-lessons to increase differentiation.
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I used online student surveys and audio/visual apps such as Toontastic to allow my students to voice their emotions, curiosities, and academic goals in private.
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To redefine assessment and differentiation, I employed websites such as Google Docs and Edmodo to create a faster feedback loop. These sites utilize color coding, instantaneous feedback, and automatic student grouping to allow me to immediately analyze data.
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Get more app for your money.
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I moved away from content apps, such as Rocket Math or Math Ninja, which are very engaging but only address a handful of standards.
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I focused on student-creation apps.
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students are now creating their own math videos, writing math blogs, and conducting challenge-based-learning math projects.
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the app Educreations allows students to record notations on a virtual whiteboard along with their narration, generating a multimedia lesson or problem explanation. This app can be used to address standards in all subjects and engages students at the highest level of Bloom's Taxonomy: creation. Other versatile creation apps and programs include Toontastic, iMovie, Garage Band, PaperPort Notes, Kabaam, Popplet, and Aurasma Lite.
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Embrace failure.
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encourage risk taking—and greater achievements.
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After redefining my classroom, the iPads were out all day, every day. They were being pushed to their limit so that my students could be pushed to theirs. This effort paid off: 10 times as many of my students scored at the 90th percentile or above on the 2011 state test as compared to the 2010 state test.
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Enjoy the results, reflect towards the future.
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"[iPads] make me want to come to school every day because I know that Ms. Magiera has a lesson just for me."
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Classroom redefinition is an ongoing process, and I can’t wait to discover what tomorrow brings.
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Jennie Magiera is a 4th and 5th grade math teacher and a technology and mathematics curriculum coach in Chicago Public Schools. A Teacher Leaders Network member, Golden Apple Teacher of Distinction, and Apple Distinguished Educator, she explores best practices in math pedagogy and technology in her blog, Teaching Like It’s 2999, and on Twitter @msmagiera.
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Educational Leadership:The Resourceful School:Stretching Your Technology Dollar on 2011-12-27
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Stretching Your Technology Dollar
Doug Johnson
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As district budgets shrink, technology departments will most certainly be affected. Here are 10 strategies to help you make the most of your technology dollar.
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1. Use effective budgeting techniques.
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Budgets ought to be a subset of a larger technology plan that's tied directly to district and school goals.
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do zero-based budgeting every year. This means starting from scratch and itemizing every technology expense that the district needs to cover in the coming school year.
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Include
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stakeholder input.
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Did expending funds in this way have the anticipated result?
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Take advantage of the (buying) power of groups.
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A sustainable technology practice means
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Not purchasing more technology than a school can regularly maintain, upgrade, and replace.
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Rotating the technology. Let's give almost everyone a new computer for the price of a single computer lab.
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Purchase the right tool for the right job.
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To prevent overbuying, I consider these questions:
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Is this a job for technology at all?
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What exactly will users do with the equipment?
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Where will the machine be used?
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Will a reconditioned machine serve as well as a new one?
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Could families rather than the school provide this item?
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Take advantage of free software.
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take a serious look at some high-quality software that's now available at no cost. There are basically three types of no-cost software:
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Open-source software uses code that the creator has placed in the public domain and that a large body of users then rewrites and extends. The Linux operating system is probably the most famous open-source product available.
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Minimally featured versions of commercial products are made available by a producer who then hopes that features or capacity available only in the purchased version will sell the software. Animoto and Dropbox work this way.
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Web-based software applications that derive revenue from advertising are growing in popularity. Yahoo mail uses this economic model.
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Head to the cloud.
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Tools such as Google Apps for Education often have a surprisingly full feature set and are compatible with commercial programs.
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I estimate that by using Google Apps for Education, our district of 7,300 students and 3,000 computers saves about $200,000 a year in hardware, software, storage, printing, and support costs.
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Enforce standardization through single-point purchasing.
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I've yet to see one activity, one teaching style, or even one type of schooling that works for everyone.
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The only way to create such standardization is by having an enforced policy that states that all technology purchases need to be made through a single department.
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Maximize your E-Rate funding.
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Use an E-Rate consultant.
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Work with regional telecommunication consortiums.
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Save everything.
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Take the process seriously.
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Lobby your U.S. representative and senators.
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Stop supporting obsolete technologies.
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You should also be phasing out these obsolescent technologies:
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desktop, rather than web-based, software
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Provide sufficient training.
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- Why it's useful.
- How to use it.
- How to use it to support teaching and learning.
Technology training has three simple but important components. Every device, application, and system needs to come with instructions on
If serious, formal training isn't part of your technology budget, don't worry much about the rest of it. The shiny things won't get used well anyway.
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Doug Johnson is director of media and technology at Mankato Area Public Schools, Mankato, Minnesota.
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There's Arsenic in Your Kids' Apple Juice | Mother Jones on 2011-12-05
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<!-- /#content-header -->
There's Arsenic in Your Kids' Apple Juice
—By Tom Philpott
| Wed Nov. 30, 2011 11:08 AM PST -
The FDA currently does not regulate arsenic levels in fruit juices, CR reports. But for bottled and tap water, the agency enforces a standard of no more than 10 parts per billion of arsenic.
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Samples were drawn from juice in both concentrate and ready-to-drink forms, including juice boxes. All of the samples contained discernible arsenic samples; nine of them, or 10 percent of the total, were found to have arsenic levels that exceeded the drinking-water limit of 10 parts per billion. The samples were also tested for lead—and 25 percent showed levels higher than the FDA's lead standard for bottled water, which is 5 ppb.
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"most" of the arsenic it found in juices was of the toxic inorganic variety. And while in an online Q&A about apple juice and arsenic, the FDA calls organic arsenic "essentially harmless," it adds a few paragraphs later that "some scientific studies have shown that two forms of organic arsenic found in apple juice could also be harmful, and because of this, the FDA counts these two forms of organic arsenic in with the overall content for inorganic arsenic."
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the FDA is in fact "seriously considering" setting limits on the amount of arsenic it will allow in juice and is "collecting all relevant information to evaluate and determine an appropriate level."
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And steady exposure to low levels of arsenic is linked to reduced intellectual capacity. Consumer Reports points to a 2004 study by Columbia University researchers showing decreased intellectual function in children exposed to drinking water with arsenic levels above 5 ppb as well as a 2011 study by Texas researchers finding that low-level arsenic exposure is "significantly related to poorer scores in language, visuospatial skills, and executive functioning" and "poorer scores in global cognition, processing speed, and immediate memory."
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"Recent studies have shown that early childhood exposure to arsenic carries the most serious long term risk," researcher Joshua Hamilton of the Marine Biological Laboratory told Consumer Reports. "So even though reducing arsenic exposure is important for everyone, we need to pay special attention to protecting pregnant moms, babies, and young kids."
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The brands that fared worst (again, I should stress the caveat about sample size) were Walgreens grape juice, Welch's grape juice, Walmart's Great Value apple juice, and Mott's apple juice in juice boxes. Samples of the two organic brands in the test, Whole Foods' 365 Everyday Value organic apple juice and Gerber Organic apple juice, had arsenic content of around 7 parts per billion (Whole Foods) and 5 parts per billion (Gerber)—well above Consumer Union's desired threshold, but below the FDA's drinking-water standard.
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Tom Philpott is the food and ag blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. To follow him on Twitter, click here. Get Tom Philpott's RSS feed.
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Despite $10M allocation, story of HISD libraries looks grim - Houston Chronicle on 2011-11-21
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Despite $10M allocation, story of HISD libraries looks grim
<!-- e src/business/templates/hearst/article/headline.tpl --> <!-- src/business/templates/hearst/article/types/byline.tpl --><!-- By JENNIFER RADCLIFFE, HOUSTON CHRONICLE --> JENNIFER RADCLIFF, HOUSTON CHRONICLE <!-- src/business/templates/hearst/article/news_registry/beacon.tpl -->Copyright 2011 HOUSTON CHRONICLE. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. <!-- e src/business/templates/hearst/article/news_registry/beacon.tpl -->
By JENNIFER RADCLIFFE, HOUSTON CHRONICLE
<!-- e src/business/templates/hearst/article/types/byline.tpl -->Updated 09:49 p.m., Sunday, November 20, 2011
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Houston ISD libraries have slipped into further disrepair, despite a $10 million investment over the last three years.
More than 80 percent of HISD libraries fail to meet state guidelines for staffing and book collections, and an additional 20 percent of the district's 289 schools don't even have functioning libraries, according to Houston Independent School District data.
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"It's incredibly disheartening when the largest district in Texas has librarians at less than half of its campuses," said Gloria Meraz, Texas Library Association spokeswoman.
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