Article Assessment #2: The Educators Guide to the Read/Write Web by Will Richardson

I.  My Info

Megan Fitzpatrick

mfitzpatrick@sisd.org

December 8, 2008

The Educator's Guide to the Read/Write Web  by Bill Richardson

II.  Overview of the Article

The internet is not just for consuming information anymore.  Users can produce their own writings/creations/knowledge.  Rather than passively receiving information students can be active participants in presenting what is going on in their minds.  How does this affect curriculum?  Students need to become editors as well as readers.

III.  Bulleted Reference Points

• Blogs--Weblogs rather than just a diary.  Blogs can draw out critical thinking, reading and writing skills.  Class resources can be accessed and students are creating.
• Wikis--Hawaiian for "quick".  This is an online encyclopedia edited anonymously.  THe beauty is that it is a commons that maintains the information.
• RSS--Really Simple Syndication.  Gives people the ability to subscribe to feeds of information.
• Del.icio.us--Provides a means to subscribe to people's bookmarks.  Give you access to like minded people on the internet.
• Podcasting--Home Radio Distribution Web.  Allows listener to listen on their own schedule.
• Literate internet users need strategies for sorting out, storing and using relevant information from this outpouring.  
• The author calls on teachers to become guides rather than  content experts, modeling the appropriate use of the technology.  
• Read only web--OUT
• New read/write web--IN

IV.  Reflection and Significance

Until I read this article, I had never reflected on my own addiction to education over the years as a form of consumption.  And my resistance and adversion to academic writing as a failure to give back to what I have been taking all these years.  Teaching in a small school where I teach five different subjects, the concept of being a guide rather than a content master reached me. However, I wonder how this statement could be approved in the time of NCLB endorsements and highly qualified teachers .  There are days where I am just enthralled with the information the students are giving back to me.  I have to wonder, are they reciprocating? Our school has participated in the Apple 1 to 1 program for three years.  I see the students on their computers all day everyday. I has been an effort to get them producing blogs and podcasts beyond MySpace. But the beauty of the technology is that as soon as one student sees the cool work of another they get motivated and se what the potential can be.  They seem to rolling, but it is a challenge to keep them on task and the bandwidth down.

Cabin Energy Consumption Spreadsheet

We have completed a list of all of our electrical appliances. Click here for the Excel spreadsheet version with formulas.  For the purposes of my investigation I really only need to know how many watts each appliance uses, but I included the weekly and yearly use to calculate yearly kWh. The primary use of this document will be for sticking on the refrigerator, so our 14 year old daughter can refer to it to see if there are enough watts available to run her curling iron when the refrigerator, lights, oven and computer are on.  (The answer is no.)

By looking at the UL electric nameplates I got the maximum wattage each appliance uses.  For example, when a refrigerator starts up it surges a bit and then settles into a lower energy use cycle.  Our inverter is designed for this, 6000 watts max with a 2400 watt continuous load.  So the watts I have listed on the spreadsheet really represent the maximum input the appliance would ever require.  For example, for my desktop PC tower to ever use 600 watts, everything would have to be running: all of the drives and some intensive number crunching.  I also have an old school CRT monitor.

I included the (potential) annual kilowatt hours from each appliance to get an idea of the savings we could incur by going off of the 52 cent per kWh grid. This annual calculation would be better served by looking at the power bills from our last residence, roughly $250-$300 per month.  

Energy Conservation Project--Our New Water Wheel

We currently have a water wheel that we made ourselves that charges some batteries. When we moved full time into the cabin, we realized that we needed to supplement our water wheel with a generator or two to provide enough charge for everything we needed.  With fuel at $4.00 a gallon or grid tied electricity at $.52 a Kilowatt Hour(kWh) and $6000 worth of utility poles, we're hoping to take advantage of the raging creek in front of the house more efficiently than the home brew water wheel we have now (see picture at left). So we ordered a new system: waterwheel, inverter, controller, meters, batteries, 300 feet of 3"pipe, etc.  I have lots of questions about this new set up and alas everything has arrived and been installed but the new wheel.  

Step 1-Ask a Question

For this project I want to take an inventory of our household electrical appliances and their associated watts and KWh.   My question is: How many and which appliances will we be able to use at a time with our new microhydro system's 6000 watt inverter?

Step 2-Google

As we have been into this project for a few years now, we already have some favorite sites, OtherPower.com, HomePower.com, Energystar.gov,  aceee.org,  need.org.  But a project I did with the school district kept running through my head.  The superintendent challenged the students to reduce the schools' electrical bill.  My job was to go around to the schools and teach the students about Underwriter's Laboratory and how to read the electric nameplate on every electrical appliance in the US, or at least in their school.  

With this information, the students were able to identify the power hogs at their school and the phantom loads (the energy appliances use even when turned off).  For every dollar of savings on the electrical bill the superintendent gave the money back to the students to spend how their classroom decided.  It took a little Googling, but page 28 on this site gave me the idea for the lesson plans about a year ago.  I have adapted that lesson to work for this exercise at our home.

Step 3-Determine data needed to answer question

I need to figure the wattage and time used for every electrical appliance in my house.  From this, figuring the KWh is easy enough to see how much savings we are getting from using our own system.  I also need to figure out which appliances have phantom loads or wall warts and figure this into the 6000 watt ceiling.

Step 4-Determine methodology for collecting data

Using the Underwriters Laboratory electric nameplates, I can find each appliance's amp and volts or it's watts.  Some formulas I will use in the spreadsheet will be:

Amps x Volts = Watts.  

Watts / 1000W/kW = kW   (kilowatts)

kW x hours used=kWh  (kilowatt hours)

I will also have to determine roughly how much phantom charge, if any, is being used by the appliance (Lawrence Berkeley Lab has a good list). Then I will figure the amount of time we use the appliance each year. The result will be kWh per appliance.   This will give me a figure of kWh to compare to our old electric bill (@ $300/month).  But more importantly it will give us a way to prioritize the appliances that can be used at one time given the 6000 watt inverter ceiling. I hope to figure out which appliance we can get rid of or which ones need to be replaced with more energy efficient ones.

Anthropological Assessment of Thorne Bay School's Technology

Over the last month and a half I have been swamped by the technology culture at our school. In order to complete this assignment I actually got it done early in the semester anticipating a flood of work into the quarter.  So as the the deadline approached, I went to figure out the Google docs and prepared to post my anthropological observations.  I observed that I had no idea where or how I saved them.  Since that unfortunate experience I have completely familiarized myself with the searching capabilities on my computer.  

In an attempt to make my VTC Biology class more user friendly, I have the students on accounts with several websites that go along with their textbooks.  I developed my own website for the class and got it published to our server. At the same time I crashed the school's calendar system because I added too many attachments. I have been working with the tech department to get applications installed on my computer in order to take advantage of some of the online Biology programs.  The grading for the quarter was challenging as I was just given an account with the online gradebook.  The database for entering grades through our school was also a challenge as I hadn't been put into the database.  During a routine screen sharing to monitor students I observed some violations of their user agreements for their computers.  That turned into a huge issue that took up a lot of my time, but also brought attention to the rest of the students that they are responsible for the material on their computers.  My students have developed podcasts, started their own blogs, do PowerPoints routinely, and are constantly.  

So as the time rolled on and the due date was maonths behind I have delved deeply into my schools technology culture.  So now that I have revisited the technology culture of my school I really didn't have to do any research I relied completely on participant observation, I had been through the trenches and here it is, the document on Google that is also saved in several locations on my computer, a thumb drive and also an external hard drive.

Digital Natives--An Assessment

I.  Megan Fitzpatrick     mfitzpatrick@sisd.org    October 11, 2008

    Listen to the Natives  by Marc Prensky

II.  Overview of the Article

Prensky refers to today's students as digital natives, born and raised in the technological world. Students are contrasted with todays teachers as digital immigrants, who "retain an accent"  when using technology.  A shifting of gears is called for in curriculum in schools today to address this change in the population.  In an effort to hand over the reins and accept the evolution of student learning, Prensky makes several suggestions of how teachers may do this.  

III.  10 Points Prensky Makes on How to Hand Over the Reins to the Natives

1. Teachers needn't worry about content knowledge, they should do what they do best "lead discussions in the classroom"
2. Engage students electronically through "gameplay" and finding knowledge from each other because teachers who can teach are rare.
3. Work with students as guides for decision making rather than making decisions for them .
4. Move away from herding and towards one-to-one personal instruction and allow students to choose who they study with and the groups they belong to.
5. Incorporate digital tools into the classroom.
6. Students need to learn how to program
7. The "legacy" of today's curriculum should be consolidated to make room for 21st century knowledge.
8. After school education is taking precedence to the school day learning
9. Cookies on students laptops know more about a students interests than the teachers do.
10. Students don't have meaningful voices in their schools.  As the customers, this is unacceptable.

IV.  Reflection on the Article and Significance to Me.

This article had me torn.  On the one hand, the terms digital natives and digital immigrants are catchy.  Students are advanced in some aspects of the use of technology.  This doesn't lead me to believe that they should make their own decisions in directing their own education a la SpringHill existentialist school of thought.  I think this kind of freedom leaves serious gaps in their learning development.  Current unguided use of technology doesn't lead directly to quality transmission of knowledge based in critical thinking.  I see more gut reaction to the technology rather than creating a structured message.  Also, the article was utopian in striving for one-to-one personalized instruction for all students.  Even in schools with a small number of students like in bush communities at single teacher sites with multi grade levels in one class, this is nearly impossible, even with adequate technology available.  Yes incorporate technology in education but don't confuse this with allowing students to talk on their cellphones during class as a democratic form of voting "when educators fail to deliver compelling content."  Part of being in an institution is learning how to deal with people. Give other students the opportunity to learn without disrupting everyone.

Futuring Assignment

How would you grade or assess Fox Becomes a Better Person and School Train?

These presentations show the students' ability to meet the requirements of the assignments and to demonstrate that they understand the material.  In School Train, the students clearly demonstrated that they understand what a metaphore is.  The remarkable part of the exercise is that the students were able to complete many steps and put them together to tell a story, the story of how school is like a train.  I would grade this project with an enthusiastic A or Exemplary.  

Hannah's presentation of Fox becomes a better person was also excellent. She knew the story without any notes and used sound-effects and lots of gestures to illustrate the action in the story.  It seemed like she had presented the story without the background drawings and they were edited in for the final recording.  Her presentation was strong alone but the drawings add more for the audience.  She would definitely pass the assignment.

What impacts could the developments portrayed in epic2015 have on your classroom, particularly with respect to things like podcasting?

The developments in technology in the classroom represent a departure from the five paragraph essay with pen and paper.  They also represent multistep activities towards a complex final product: school train. The simpler presentation by Hannah seems much more approachable for students working independently rather than in groups.  

EDIT:  I would definitely like to use Podcasts in two different ways. 

1) I would like to have students produce a podcast to preset their perspective in a civics class.  This could give them the opportunity to completely express themselves on a topic without being interrupted it also gives them a chance to formulate thier thoughts and opinions on the subject.

2)  I would liketo produce my own Podcasts during lab in science class.  This could be helpful to students who miss school that day and for students to review while writing their final write-up of the lab report.

How might you use Sabrina's piece as a model for something you would do with your own students?  

In Sabrina's piece, she uses a voiceover on a slide show.  I could see this type of presentation as a great model for a biology lesson that could pop with photographs and the lecture would benefit from some differentiated instruction.  EDIT: I could use the example from Sabrina "Do I Belong Here"  except during a lesson on invasive species.  I would put up images of different organisms in their environment and ask "Do I Belong Here?"