21st Century Schooling According to Alfie Kohn

Ben Rimes, over at the Tech Savvy Educator, posted a link to an article about 21st Century Education and and a silly graphic making fun of the title "21st Century Tool". It *is* pretty funny, but the required reading he included for the post is the more salient part. When “21st-Century Schooling”Just Isn’t Good Enough: A Modest Proposal by Alfie Kohn examines what is really behind the drive for this new "brand." Good for introspection and self-examination.

The Free-To-Paid Apps Problem

My colleague Sarah shared a new link with me yesterday on Google chat. She does that often because she reads a lot of blogs and twitters, and likes to share the same way I do, because that's how we learn. But I digress. The link she sent me was for a new "text-to-movie maker" called Xtranormal. I followed her link and checked the app out and it does indeed look pretty fantastic. It is a download, instead of web-based, which I suppose is neither here nor there. The Web site is very professional looking and the product itself seems slick and well-made. Maybe too well made. The "download" button is marked with a big, screaming BETA stamp. Immediately, I messaged her back that I wagered they'd be no longer free within a matter of months. That is a response of a wounded tech user, I realized almost immediately.

Although I do understand the process of alpha testing and beta testing a free product that will eventually be a paid product, the part I abhor is when the early-adopters are then penalized by losing rights to use the product for free. Yack Pack comes to mind. A few years ago, I was ALL ABOUT this product. I used it in my classroom for myriad projects and only about a year later, they went to a paid format. My school does not have a bursting budget. My organization doesn't either. We can't just add in expenses as they pop up. I think that if I have invested in the product from the start, they should honor that investment by allowing the early users to continue to use it for free. Voicethread is another example of a product that was completely free before, but has moved to fee-based if you want to use it on a class-wide basis. To be fair, they do still offer FREE individual accounts and FREE educator accounts. I use the heck out of mine and I'm so grateful for that option.

I might try Xtranormal out and I might fall in love with it. But what are the chances that I'll not be able to use it next year, after I've added projects to my curriculum based on the tool? Maybe this is all the lament of the side of me that resists change. Yes, I'm an early adopter but once I've adopted it, I hold on tight. Maybe the problem is mine.

Photo used with Creative Commons Permission: A Magill

Blog Action Day: Climate Change

Everybody raise your hands in the air, and wave 'em like you just don't care! It's Blog Action Day 2009! This is an effort to bring attention to a given issue by asking bloggers to focus on a specific topic. This year's topic is climate change, which is e-a-s-y for me to blog about, given my new job. The World Leadership School's primary function is to educate students on the various issues they will soon face and encourage them to grapple with possible solutions to those problems. Climate change is the focus of many of our trips to places like Belize, Costa Rica and Kenya. My job is to help schools create year-round relationships with schools *in* those countries that are most affected by climate change.

Students at my school traveled to Belize last year to learn about climate change, but they also worked with students at the school they visited beforehand. Here is our class blog. We're going back this year and the plan is Postcards for Profits (the students came up with that one). We donated laptops to the school last year, and this year, the school is holding a contest for all grades for the best images that represent Belize. Belizean students are using MS Paint to create these images, and the winning images will be emailed to us, so we can create postcards and greeting cards from them. We'll then sell those at our school, but also they can be shipped down to the village's "market" (a small fruit stand) to sell for more profits for the village. What's best about this idea is that the kids came up with it themselves through a special "Marketplace of Ideas" activity.

Actually, what's best about this idea is that students came up with it all on their own, and are implementing it all on their own. That's how to empower a student to solve important problems! Go us! (Pat on back complete).

Computers for Peace--Captology

Thanks to a profile note on Matt Montagne's Skype page, I learned about Stanford's captology department. According to the site, "Captology is the study of computers as persuasive technologies. This includes the design, research, and analysis of interactive computing products created for the purpose of changing people's attitudes or behaviors." They're convinced that technology can be used to forge peace. On October 27th, they are hosting an event in Palo Alto, California called Peace Dot, that "will show how innovators are creating empathy and harmony in the world. It will show how we're making progress toward peace in concrete, measurable ways." I could go for some of that right now.