When I think out 20 years from now it is the engagement with ideas that I hope continues. This is a skill that takes a lifetime to tune. And those that do will apply themselves where they are needed and where they do well. And will they remember they boiled water by adding ice? Maybe.

I use a variety of third party tools for my classroom. Thus far the use of these tools has been well supported. Other teachers are adopting some of the same tools too. However, there are no tools provided in the first place (other than basic productivity software).

I think there are times when the supplied product is the right choice to use, even if the product is lacking. For example my school adopted an online grading and reporting system. I need to use this to maintain consistency with other teachers and facilitate communication with families. Whether I like the software or not, we were not reporting student progress online last year and we will be this year, so this is progress. If there is a better solution out there we will be looking for it.

Cellphones still are too far from ubiquitous to be really useful. Last year when we did the ROV simulation that fact was made apparent when we had difficulty getting enough phones together for our groups. Middle school students of course don’t have independent streams of income from part-time jobs as many high school students do so whether or not a student has a phone is probably entirely dependent on his/her parents.

The most interesting aspect of the 41% of students with a social networking account is that at the time of the survey, the percent of students old enough to meet the terms of service was less than 41%. I wonder how many parents really know what their kids are up to online. I expect for most it is very little. I am always reassured when I talk to students and find that their parents are on their friend list. Parents, if your child is on MySpace, Facebook, or other social site then you should be too.

The question now is what to add to the survey. I would like to know more about my student’s online activities. I do know a fair amount just from talking to the kids, for example online gaming and MySpace stories make it to school regularly. But what else do they do? What would you ask? Any suggestions?

You can find the session teasers here.

My main goal for my class site this year is to blog on a science related topic at least weekly. My hope is to model my own curiosity and enthusiasm in this digital environment. I also want to model reading and thinking about science topics. Again this year students will be using Google Reader to keep tabs on science news. I am expecting some writing from them on these assignments so I hope my blog to serve as one model for the process.

So far I have managed three posts on my class site that meet my goal. Hopefully I can revisit this post in the spring and report back successfully.

Working with another 8th grade science class our students are attempting to model the types of communication barriers that occur when dealing with remotely operated vehicles. I got the idea from somewhere, (I wish I could remember, Jason Project maybe?). We added in cellphones and Google Earth to add technology to the challenge. And a challenge it is. Student groups are broken in two, half inside and half in a field well out of view. Student Robots are placed in the center of the field and must simply follow commands, sent as coded text messages. After executing a command, the student simply snaps a picture and sends it back. While inside, the team can rely only on the image sent to them and the images in Google Earth. The goal is to navigate to an assigned location and perform a task.

What worked?

• Code and Texting guidlines. Preset code was limited to 30 characters. This was more than enough. Texts were limited to no more than 10 characters. This seemed to be a good number as well.
• Reflection times. After some guided reflection students were able to work together well to define and propose solutions to the problems they may face. We did this after a trial run so groups had some real experiences.

What were the challenges?

• Cellphone availability. In order for a student to use his/her phone we required a signed permission slip. We did this to ensure students had permission to send text and images and would not incur any additional or unacceptable charges. Turns out that while about half the kids had cellphones, there were very few who had free text and images.
• Attendance. While I would like to think that a motivating activity such as this would keep kids in school each day, there were still numerous absences. Groups quickly realized they needed backup plans for missing people. When the absent student was providing a phone then it was more difficult. Groups lacking phones typically emailed the image and had texts sent via AIM.
• Group planning time. It was difficult for groups to anticipate things they may have to do during the challenge. Most figured that “left, right, straight, and back” would be good enough. In the end what they needed was hands-on experience with their code not working so they could revise.
• TimeThe constant. But really, we are dealing with 43 minute blocks. Our site is a bit of a walk from the other classes so there is about 10 minutes lost to transition. More time would give students a chance to do more reflection right when problems arise. A single class block however, allowed for little more than one or the other.

What would we do differently?

• Scaffold. Students need more practice working with each other. Groups should complete some other low level task before hand that emphasizes communication. This should be an activity without technology, which invariably presents its own challenges. So start simple.
• I would consider not using the phones inside at all, but rather have the mission control students receive the images on email and text back using some form of IM. This would cut the number of needed phones in half.

At the end of the day, the kids thought it was a worthwhile activity but thought there was too much down time waiting for texts or images to go through. I felt the activity presented a good degree of challenge for the students while tying in to a few key standards. This does work nicely as an end of the year activity but would certianly work well at the beginning too. When it comes to the technology involved we were certainly pushing the abilities of our communication devices (unlimited text and messages are currently an upgrade feature on plans) and our own resources (middle school students with phones) here.

Working with another 8th grade science class our students are attempting to model the types of communication barriers that occur when dealing with remotely operated vehicles. I got the idea from somewhere, (I wish I could remember, Jason Project maybe?). We added in cellphones and Google Earth to add technology to the challenge. And a challenge it is. Student groups are broken in two, half inside and half in a field well out of view. Student Robots are placed in the center of the field and must simply follow commands, sent as coded text messages. After executing a command, the student simply snaps a picture and sends it back. While inside, the team can rely only on the image sent to them and the images in Google Earth. The goal is to navigate to an assigned location and perform a task.

We have only just started; the kids are in the planning phases. While the opportunity to use their phones definitely has their interest levels up, the need for focused practice in communication skills is apparent. Its funny but to the kids, cell phones are so common to them that they assume this will be easy. Those groups who have begun testing out their strategies have found just the opposite. Watching them regroup and reorganize has been satisfying. I will try to post more on this project as we fine tune the implementation.