AUGH! Online Math Classes

I'm taking an Algebra II class this semester. Doing Math online is interesting. Here is one of the error messages I got today.



I tried plotting the lines as best I could, but where do you think 1.66666666 is on the X axis? I guess I wasn't close enough!

Kim

Video Sharing

We have an Educational account at Google for Greenport School district. Email is going great. We are slowly getting students and teachers to use the documents feature. Another aspect of the package is Video Sharing. We've started using this part of the educational package.

Each educational account is given space to upload and share videos. Only teachers can upload and as administrator, I have to give them permission to upload. So far we have a dozen or so videos loaded. I'm trying hard to limit the videos to ones that are produced by Greenport Students and staff.

We dubbed the service "PorterTube" after the school mascot. Google lets you choose the URL you use, so http://portertube.gufsd.org will take you to our video sharing site. It is a closed site. You must have a Greenport school login to access the videos.

We'll see how it goes. I like the control that we have with our own video sharing site. Hopefully it will grow.

Finally an MS!

I completed my studies at Stony Brook and I have my MS degree. I think I'm one of the oldest graduates this year, but I'm glad I finally got to it. This blog was originally started when I began my studies. Now that my course work is completed, I think I'll keep the blog going.

I modified the blog's headline to reflect this change.

Cloud Computing Revolution in K-12

After spending so much time trying to bring Cloud computing to my school district, it is nice to get some positive feedback. District Administration magazine just published a front page article on how cloud computing is an education revolution! Yea, someone agrees with me.




You can click the picture above to go to the magazine's website, or click this link for the article

The Start of a Tech Revolution

The article says:

and many believe K12 education will completely embrace this technology structure in the coming years, revolutionizing how educators, students and administrators use software, hardware and the Internet. But many are unaware of the paradigm shift that they are participating in every day: it’s called “cloud computing.

A Teacher's Guide to Cloud Computing - Part6

Part 6 –Setting Up Documents and Lesson Plan

Let’s take a look at how a teacher sets up an online document in google docs.

Document Type 1 – all students edit the same document.

Set up a document. Log into the google account and set up the bones of a document. You can start with just a heading, question or outline of the project.

Share the document. Once the document is set up the teacher needs to share it to the students. The teacher clicks the share tab and types in the google accounts of each student. To make this process faster, the teacher can create a “group” that contains all the e-mail addresses of the students in her class. The one group address will add all the students at once. The teacher has the choice to add the students to the document as “readers” or collaborators. A collaborator can edit and change the document. In most cases the students need to be access to the document as a collaborator.

Let the students know. The document will appear in each student’s document list. Although it appears that each student has a copy of the document, there is actually one document. The teacher can also send an e-mail to the students to let them know a document has been shared with them.

Once the assignment is finished, the teacher can remove the student collaborators and just make them readers. That way the students can not continue to work on the assignment after it is due. There is no need for the students to print their documents. The teacher can simply access the document online. Being “Green” is an added bonus. When the teacher is grading the paper, she can simply do it online. Like the teachers of old, she can switch to red “ink” so her comments stand out. The teacher can annotate, correct and mark the document. Since the students are still shared as readers of the document, they can see that teacher’s comments and grade. There is no need to print out assignments or hand them back.

Document Type 2 – each student produces their own paper.

In this example, the teacher has a document for each student. An efficient way to do this is to require the student to create the assignment document and share it with their teacher. The teacher would give an assignment like this:

Create a document in your google documents account called “Your name - how I spend my summer vacation". The document must be shared with the teacher as soon as it is created. Go to share document and add smith@gufsd.org as a collaborator immediately.

As the students start the assignment, their documents appear in the teacher’s document list. She can tell right away who has done their homework and who hasn’t. There will be a document for each student in the class. Even though the document shows who you are sharing it with, having the student name in the title makes it even easier. Here is how a teacher’s document list will look with student docs in the mix.

The documents appear in the teacher’s list when the students create and share the document. The teacher can sort the files into a “Summer Vacation” folder to keep that assignment together. As the student work on their themes, the teacher can see how they are progressing and offer comments and help to struggling students. She is also able to see a revision history for each document. She can see how often the student accessed the file and what was added each time. For students who are struggling, this can be a valuable teaching tool.

LESSON PLANS:

Lesson plans can be adopted for use with online Docs. Here is a standard lesson plan for Middle school science:

LESSON 1 - Middle School Science

This lesson uses Google Spreadsheet to have the students pull together shared data gathering.

Hazardous Chemicals at Home

Brief Overview:

Students find potentially hazardous common household chemicals and classify them into categories.

Curriculum: Science
Standards: 6-8

Goals: Students will learn that common substances in the home are chemical compounds. Students will learn that many household substances are dangerous (poison or toxic). Students will group household chemicals into categories according to whether they are toxic, corrosive or poisons.

Lesson: Following class discussion about chemical elements and compounds and chemical families, there will be a discussion about types of hazardous chemicals and categories of such.

Students will be asked to make a chart with categories of "toxic', "corrosive", and "flammable". We will discuss the meanings of these words and give a few examples in class.

Students will be asked to go home and search the cleaning closet, basement, garage, etc. and see what kinds of "hazardous chemicals" are at their homes. Students will be encouraged to use the computer to make a chart or graph showing their results.

The teacher sets up a Google Spreadsheet Document detailing the lesson. She shares the document with the class . Each student adds a row to the spreadsheet for each chemical they find at home. Student who do not have internet access at home, will bring a written copy and enter their findings into the spreadsheet at school. Here is the spreadsheet:

The students are collaborating on the project immediately. They can see what other student have entered. Once the table is completed, it can be published as the students' "Findings".

Conclusion –

School can change the way students do their computer work by joining the cloud computing boom. In researching this paper, it seemed like there was new information on this topic coming online daily. It is an exciting time to be in education and I’m hopeful that this new trend towards cloud computing will see some very positive benefits for school districts.

Notes about the production of the paper

I started researching this topic in the fall of 2007 after learning about Google applications in a class at Stony Brook in July of 2007. Initially I did not realize that the term cloud computing applied to storing student documents online, which is were my focus was.

I presented my initial research and findings at “the Campus of Excellence”, in June of 2008. This conference was held in the Canary Islands and gave an opportunity for graduate students to present their work to experts in the field.

The feedback I received was mixed. Richard J. Roberts, 1993 Nobel prize winner for Physiology, talked about the importance for scientific information to be posted on the web for all to share. I talked to him about the student’s posting their work and he was concerned that the student papers would “dilute” the more important information posted on the Internet.

A fellow graduate student from Canada, Annemarie Lesage, felt that students were opening themselves up for ridicule if they put documents online. She felt peer review was a bad idea.

But I pressed on. My school district was very supportive of me trying out cloud computing in our district. I was give a staff development day in September of 2008 to show the staff how it all worked. I created the accounts for teachers and staff and did the training.

I wish I could say that it has been an unqualified success. The problem is the staff doesn’t want to change. They like using Microsoft Office products and so they continue on they way they have.

I decided to present my finding at another conference. The A.S.S.E.T. Conference (Association of Suffolk County Supervisors for Education Technology) on Monday, March 16th, 2009 gave me another place to present my ideas. My talk was attended by many administrators as well as teachers. That group was concerned with saving money. Economics was not a huge motivator for me when Istarted this project, but it has become a big priority. Cloud computing can definitely save a district money.

So this project just kept going and going as more information on Cloud computing seemed to be coming out every day. Today as I was finalizing this paper for e-mail to my Dean, another white paper arrived in my mailbox from e-school news “Cloud Computing: The Economic Imperative”. I had to force myself not to read it and to submit this project as is. I think I have been living in the clouds for too long!

Bibliography

Hoover, J. Nicholas. "A Stake in the Clouds." Informationweek 3 Nov. 2008: 22-26.

D'Orio, Wayne. "Working Together". EdTech November/December 2008: 33-36

Johna Till Johnson, “Are Young Workers really all that different?”, Network World Magazine, October 27, 2008, 28

Horrigan, John B., Pew Internet and American Life Project, “Data Memo, Use of Cloud Computing Applications and Services”, September 2008

Oishi, Lindsay, “Working Together”, techLearning.com, 11/22/2008,

Google Apps Education Deployment Pack, 2008, Google.com

National Geographic Society, “Inventors and Discoverers” National Geographic Society, 1988

Part 5 - Collaboration, Sharing, Peer Review and Project Based Learning

Cloud Computing - Part 5

In this section, I’ll address benefits that cloud computing can provide that the traditional computer/application model does not provide, namely increased collaboration.

There is a trend in education today to move students to project-based learning. Students are put in teams to solve a task. This collaborative learning style is shown to improve student
performance. Howard Mahoney, a California high School principal says, "[Students] can't just repeat what their teacher said. They have to learn how to work cooperatively in
a group". (D'Orio, Wayne. "Working Together". EdTech November/December 2008: 35 ). Having students work together to solve a problem is as a growing trend. Cloud computing is the perfect vehicle to
facilitate this collaborative learning style.

Teachers can set up spreadsheets, documents, presentations in Google docs. These documents are shared with student teams. Each student can edit, add to and access the document, from school or home. The teacher can check the revision history for any document and see which students are contributing and which students are not. It is a perfect vehicle for managed collaboration.

Another aspect of putting document online is providing peer review. Online documents can be shared. Envision Schools is a group of four charter schools in the San Francisco area. The schools are tasked with helping their students become the first in their family to attend college. Although the four schools have different themes, the all share a technology-rich environment. This environment combines project-based learning with regular exhibitions of student work. (D'Orio, Wayne. "Working Together". EdTech November/December 2008: 34 )

This student work can be easily shared by publishing it online using Google docs. The five core values that project based learning can foster are: inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection. Google documents makes collaboration and presentation much easier than with standard computer models.

Another aspect of putting student work online is that students are more accountable with an online document tool. Their work is tracked with a document revision history. Here is a screen-print of a documents revision history.

As you can see, each time the student logs into the document it is noted. If more than one student edits a document, their names go into the revision history as well. This revision history is a valuable tool for teachers to use with their students.

Teachers can access a student documents and look at the review history. Then can see how much time the student put in to the project, what date they started, what date they finished and what editing changes were made. If a document was accessed once, and a large block of text pasted into the document, it is a red flag that the student is plagiarizing (copying) other work. If a student is required too work in an online document, the teacher can access the document and check on the student’s progress, make comments and guiding the student along. If a document is a team project, each student who is assigned to the project has their own login. The teacher can see what students accessed the document, when and what changes they made.

Sharing information with Parents – Another Benefit

Moving student documents online not only benefits students, but also their parents. Parents can see how the work is graded and see the work that the students are producing. As a parent of three teenagers, I can testify that my children rarely bring their work home for me to see. If parents are included in the access to google docs, they can see what their children are doing.

All the teacher needs is a parent’s e-mail address and the parent can be added to any document as a viewer or collaborator. I personally would be reluctant to add a parent as more than a viewer. The old problem with parent’s doing their children’s work would take on new meaning. Of course with the revision history, the teacher could see just who (parent or child) was doing
the editing.

Sharing the documents with the Online Community

Another advantage of having the students do their work is the “share” feature. After all the collaboration is done and the document is finished, it can be shared. Google docs gives teachers the option of sharing document with just members of the school community or with
anyone with Internet access. For a student, having their work compared to the work or others is a powerful motivator. This Peer Review has been proven to increase student production.

If a student submits a writing assignment using paper and pencil, the usually is little or no revision Using the model that teachers set up the assignment and share it with their students is also valuable to assignments that require Internet research. Students tend to stray off topic when web surfing. A teacher can create a hotlist with links to websites. Since the document is already online, students can click to go to the places on thw Internet that the teacher wants. Students stay on task.

Using Google docs with your students also opens up another way too communicate. Since the document sharing, e-mail is all online, students have another way to ask questions of the teacher. If a student is too shy to ask in class, they can contact the teacher through the Google e-mail platform.

The online platform does not have to be the final “resting Place” for a google document. Google give the user many choices for storing the document. A document can be downloaded as a Word Document, web page, PDF file, plain Text, rich text or Open office. If a document needs to accessed while the computer is offline or if the document needs to be attached to an e-mail, it is simple to download the file and deal with it in the traditional ways.

Online documents also is beneficial in case of a disaster. When schools were destroyed in Hurricaine Kattrina in New Orleans, those districts who had set up online communications outsourced from their districts found a great benefit.

If a district sets up Google Docs and the district building is damaged or destroyed by a disaster, they still have their documents and work. Teachers can continue to communicate with their students through the google interface. A off-site solution like google docs provides this benefit

In the Next Section, we'll look at some sample lesson plans that you can use in your classroom.

A teachers' Guide to Cloud Computing - Part 4

The steps to applying the Google Apps cloud computing model at a school district

Since Google is offering an Education edition for schools for free, there are currently few other options that can compete. As technology moves forward, I'm sure this will not always be thecase. But for the timing of this paper and blog posting, early 2009, Google is the major player. Here are the steps that I've taken to bring Google Documents to my School District.

1. Apply for an educational Account at Google. You need to prove that you are an education institution to receive benefits from Google. Advertisement will be turned off on all pages for educational organizations. Google will also provide 500 free accounts for use with Google Docs. If you district needs more than 500 accounts, they can be purchased.

To apply for the account, you need to start at Google's website:
http://www.google.com/educators/p_apps.html

You will need a web address for your school. Google will be using that web address for
the name of your google domain. My school district was currently using Greenport.k12.ny.us to point to a web server that held the district’s website. The address was also used to point to a
Microsoft Exchange server where district e-mail was sent. Both of these services were housed in the school district and supported by district staff.

When you create a google document account, you also create e-mail accounts. Google has married the services together and google docs is no available without email. I did not want to disrupt the services that we already had running at the district, so I registered a second domain to use with our new google system. Gufsd.org (Greenport Union Free School District) was registed for $10 per year. Domain name registration has become a very cost effective thing to do.

We pointed the domain name to the google services. Google has many pages of instructions to help you do that.

After the account is set up with Google, you will need to create accounts for your students and staff. I downloaded names from my student information system and created a spreadsheet. I had to provide the first and last name, desired e-mail account, and initial password. Once this
was completed, the file was uploaded to google and all the accounts were created at once. Here is a sample of what the file looks like:

If you don't provide initial passwords, google will assign them.

You can read more about creating accounts at google’s website here:
Http://mail.google.com/support/vin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=12119

Once the accounts are created, you need to train your students and staff. My district held a “google Documents training session as part of staff development day. The teachers were shown how to log in and use their accounts. They were provided with the account lists and passwords of their students, so they could show their students how to access their accounts.

Changing the climate at a district can be difficult. At my September 30^th, 2008 staff training day, I trained 35 teachers on the use of Google Apps. Teachers were given their accounts, lesson plan ideas and a day of training on how it works. Student accounts were set up for each student in grades 7 – 12. Since Microsoft word licenses exist for most machines in the district, teachers had no incentive to switch over. As of this writing in April 2009, students are still doing their work in the traditional way using the Microsoft office that is installed on each PC.

In the teacher training session, there was a bit of confusion as to how the system worked. Teachers understood how to create new documents, change fonts, spell check and traditional word-processing tasks with no problems. But when it came to learning the collaboration tools,things didn’t go as smoothly. Collaboration tools are not available in traditional word processing documents. To work together on a document, it had to physically be place in a file on a floppy disk or flash drive. The document had to be transferred from one student to another so the student could add their part of the document. This type of document sharing was called “sneaker net” as you had to walk the document from one person to another.

I had one group of four teachers who set up a collaborative document. They were each viewing it on their screens simultaneously. For the training each teacher had their own laptop computer, and were logged into their own google account. Once teacher would make a change to the
common-shared document and then say to the other “did you get the message yet”, like they were using a sort of on-line chat room. I explained that they were editing one document. When one teacher would edit anothers words, it surprised them that the changes showed on all screens, not just theirs. I left the training thinking that they didn’t quite “get it”.

Once you’ve rolled out the accounts to staff, it is important to keep training.

I have pushed into several classrooms to teach the students how to use their google docs accounts. Students have taken to the technology is a very rapid way. Once they discover they can work on their documents at home, they are interested.

Google points out on their website how Google Documents can benefit schools. The google website says:

"Students, teachers and staff can share ideas more quickly and get things done more effectively when they have access to the same powerful communication and sharing
tools. Google Apps Education Edition lets tech administrators provide email, sharable online calendars, instant messaging tools and even a dedicated website to faculty, students and staff for free. There's no hardware or software to install or maintain, since everything is delivered through a standard web browser -- anytime,
from anyplace."

The bulk of what students use google docs for will be document processing. The computers that are provided for Student Use at my district are used mainly for internet research and document processing. Students use a set of tools when they use word processing software. I was concerned
that student would feel they are losing options and functions when their switch from a full-functioning wordprocessing program like Microsoft Office to a web-based program like Google Docs.

There are fewer menu options available in Google docs then there is in Microsoft Office.

However, I feel the set of tools that Google document provides to the students is adequate.

To test my belief that google docs tool set is adequate, I surveyed students and teachers to see what features of a WordProcessing program they use. I listed several WordProcessing features and asked whether or not students use them. There is a belief that people only use a small percentage of the features that their software applications provide. My finding bear that out.

The chart below detail what features students use. It is clear that Google Documents (the online model) provides all the tools needed to produce student work.

Feature	Percentage of Survey responders who use this feature	Provided by Google Docs	Provided by Microsoft Word
Spell Check	86.8%	Yes	Yes
Printing	86.8%	Yes	Yes
Change Font	78.9%	Yes	Yes
Insert Footnote	13.2%	Yes	Yes
Insert Image	52.6%	Yes	Yes
Insert table	23.7%	Yes	Yes
Insert Headers	39.5%	Yes	Yes
Insert Footers	13.2%	Yes	Yes
Create a Table of Contents	18.4%	Yes	Yes
Text Search and Replace	21.1%	Yes	Yes
Add Watermark	2.6%	No	Yes
Use Multiple Columns	26.3%	No	Yes
Alphabetize (sort) columns of Words	18.4%	No	Yes
Mail Merge	13.2%	No	Yes

As you can see from the table above, the features provided by Google Docs are adequate for most users in a K – 12 environment.

I also asked students if they work on document from multiple locations. An overwhelming amount, 74.3% do. But asked if they collaborate on document creation, a majority (60%) said they produce documents without the help of others.

My informal survey was facilitated by the website SurveyMonkey. If you wish to take
the survey, it is still online here:
Click Here to take survey

I have stopped analyzing responses, but withe the link above, you can see how the survey was taken.

The question on the survey about multiple document authors ties in with the trend in
education toward collaborative project based learning. In my next section of this paper, I will explore the benefits of cloud computing that are not available with the old model.