Technology – Page 9 – Montessori Muddle

Idea Sketch: Graphic organizer for the iPod

I’m quite happy for students to use their handheld devices if they’re being productive. They’ve used them to take text-based notes (I’m still not sure how they are able to type so fast), make flashcards (I need to find or make an app for notecards and bibliography cards for the IRP), and now they’ve discovered one for making graphic organizers called Idea Sketch (thanks go to J. for showing me, and M. for finding it).

I’ve been using graphic organizers (GOs) a lot at the beginning of the year and students are getting the idea that we will inevitably put one together to summarize the weekly themes. So today, during our Needs of People discussion/lesson, when I did a quick spot check to see what the the iPod users were doing with their devices, they showed me that they were already putting together GOs. Because I really want them to develop the skill themselves, I’ve not been giving them GOs ahead of time, and we’ve been practicing putting them together. I was quite happy to see them being proactive. Maybe the lesson helped after all.

Idea Sketch is simple, seems to work pretty well, and is a free download at least at them moment.

Financial reports and statistics

Sally, our school’s business manager, was kind enough to come in last month to help the financial department of the student run business organize its books. It was long overdue. We’d been improving our record keeping over the last couple years, but now we have much more detailed records of our income and expenses.

This is great for a number of reasons, the first of which is that students get some good experience working with spreadsheets. We use Excel, which in my opinion is far and away Microsoft’s best product (I’ve been using OpenOffice predominantly for the last year or so because, it improved quite a bit recently, and I’m a glutton for certain kinds of punishment.) I’ve been surprised by how many students get into college unable to do basic tables and charts, but hopefully this is changing.

The second reason is that the Finance committee can now use the data to give regular reports; income, expenses, profit, loss, all on a weekly basis. I expect the Bread division to benefit the most, since it has regular income and expenses, offering students frequent feedback on their progress. We’re now collecting a long-term, time-series data-set that will be very nice when we get to working on statistics in math later on.

In fact, we should be able to use this data to make simple financial projections. Linear projections of how much money we’ll have for our end-of-year trip will tie into algebra quite nicely, and, if we’re feeling ambitious, we can also get into linear regressions and the wave-like properties of the time series of data.

Enjoying the silence

That was one of the most poignant moments for me—conversations I had with a class of kids in a school in a tough neighborhood who simply had no positive associations at all with the idea of silence.
– George Prochnik (Gorney, 2010)

In constructing the Montessori classroom we aim for an open, uncluttered environment. George Prochnik has an interesting little interview in the Atlantic about the value of silence in our noisy world. He points out that there has been a movement away from the sound deadening carpets, tablecloths and wall hanging in the interior design of restaurants, in an effort to generate more energy. Of course that makes things louder. Thinking about the interior design of the classroom, I can see how there might be a trade-off between creating an uncluttered environment and designing for a quiet classroom.

Of course, in a classroom of adolescents, some prefer to work in quiet, while others favor the energy and noise in the background. I try to create nooks and crannies where students can get out of the noise but are still visible to the rest of the room. I also allow students to use headsets during individual work time.

Thinking about it now, the nooks were designed to fit small groups of three, but the students only really migrated toward them as individuals. So it may be that their primary value has been to provide small cones of silence and I should make more of them but smaller ones.

Website design

Teaching website design can be done in two ways. The easy way is to use one the the many, very good, software packages. Adobe Dreamweaver is a fairly popular commercial package, while Mozilla’s SeaMonkey (from the creators of Firefox) is a free, open-source alternative.

The longer way to teach web design, which I prefer, is to start with HTML and CSS and build a fundamental understanding of how webpages work.

Chakita J., who teaches technology at the Hazelwood School District in St. Louis and shares my approach to the subject recommends , “The Complete Reference HTML” by Thomas Powell.

Fractured thinking – How the internet affects how you think

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers. Richtel, 2010

Matt Richtel has an intriguing article in the New York Times on how multitasking on computers is affecting the way people think. I don’t have a whole lot of time to get into it is a well resourced article citing work from researchers such as Clifford Nass, Eyal Ophir and Melina Uncapher at Stanford, Steven Yantis at Johns Hopkins, Daphne Bavelier at the University of Rochester, Gary Small at UCLA and Adam Gazzaley at UCSF.

Other choice quotes:

[Multi-taskers] had trouble filtering out … the irrelevant information.

multitaskers tended to search for new information rather than accept a reward for putting older, more valuable information to work.

that people interrupted by e-mail reported significantly increased stress compared with those left to focus. Stress hormones have been shown to reduce short-term memory

Finally, the article ends with a thought about how technology use affects our ability to relate to others.

Mr. Nass at Stanford thinks the ultimate risk of heavy technology use is that it diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another, even in the same room.

“The way we become more human is by paying attention to each other,” he said. “It shows how much you care.”

That empathy, Mr. Nass said, is essential to the human condition. “We are at an inflection point,” he said. “A significant fraction of people’s experiences are now fragmented.”

This work of course ties in with Nicholas Carr’s thesis that asks the question, “Is Google Making Us Stupid“. Carr’s book, “The Shallows” takes up the argument that we should spend less time online. While I tend to agree with Carr that we would benefit from more time offline, I really think his explanation that the invention of the press, and cheap books, lead to more deeper concentration (and that’s what we’re loosing now) needs a lot more evidence to back it up.

Segway lessons

From playing with robots we tried an actual application of robotics. We had the Segways 101 course at the St. Louis Science Center.

The lesson itself was fun, with an entertaining video of people falling off Segways. They also had a little obstacle course to let you try doing all of the things the video told you not to do (but most of it was for the more advanced class).

Afterward, we discussed the fact that this too was robotics and a pretty advanced application at that. We did not talk much about how the Segways were supposed to revolutionize urban transportation but students did recognize the fact that aesthetics were a major impediment to their broader adoption.

The price was a bit steep however, and I’m a little conflicted about if it was worth it.