iPhone functionality fail

I’ve written about Apple’s new iPad here and here, and I thought I’d do a few tests of my iPhone.  If the iPad is merely the iPod Touch writ large, with more screen space and a thinner body, then the iPhone ought to do some of the tricks that I expect an iPad to do.  So I put it through a few tests:  reading and editing my school’s wiki, using Wikispaces.com, running this blog, and using Google Docs accounts, two things I want to be able to do on the iPad.

And as much as I hate to say it, the iPhone 3G failed all but one of these tasks — running this blog, which it doesn’t do particularly well.

It shouldn’t.

The wiki server my school uses is the standard server that comes with an Apple server.  I hate AppleWiki with an indifferent passion, because it’s not MediaWiki that runs Wikipedia; and the blogging software is wiki-like rather than WordPress or LiveJournal-like.  Both pieces of software are kind of slow and clunky to begin with, on any computer.

To have them not work with the iPhone Safari program, though, isn’t really acceptable.  If the goal is interoperability, and the objective is cloud computing, then the iPad has to work with cloud computing applications, like wikis and blogs.  Currently, it doesn’t.  I can read the pages fine — score one out of two.  Except that editing a wiki is more than 80% of the fun — so Fail.

Wikispaces.com wasn’t much better (I’m ABWatt there, but I don’t do much on it other than help monitor and administer http://cais21stcentury.wikispaces.com — which is the wiki website of the statewide professional development commission I’m on.   And no, I can’t edit this website either.  iPhone OS Safari is not built to handle wiki websites, apparently.

I can run this blog using a WordPress client application, so that’s OK, I guess.  The functionality is not great; it’s certainly not as powerful as doing it from a browser running on my laptop.

Finally, Google Docs.  I have found (and in one case bought) a client application for Google Docs for the iPhone. These clients allow me to read Google Docs items that I have permission to read or ownership of, but I don’t seem to have the ability to modify files.  Moreover, my powers to “read” documentation is still limited — spreadsheets and presentations are both off limits to both programs.  Maybe I just have the wrong program.

It still feels like the iPad’s usefulness and functionality are seriously compromised, though.  If I can’t use it for editing my wikis, if I have only limited control over my blog, and if I can’t access Google Docs (either standard GD or the specialty site my school is setting up), then maybe the machine’s functionality is pretty well compromised as a learning device for my purposes and intentions in class.

It’s not to say that it’s not a useful tool or that I don’t still want one as a reading device.  But I’m less enamored of it as a teaching and learning tool in the classroom, unless I have some demonstrated improvements to the ability to work with wikis, blogs and Google Docs.

More on the iPad: students weigh in

Well.

My students had some interesting perspectives on the iPad, which I think are worth exploring further, and using them as a reflection on my earlier comments on the new gadget from Apple.

Mitch (names changed to protect minors, innocent or guilty as they may be), complained loudly that it was not a new device.  It was a souped-up iPod Touch with a large screen, and little more.  He agreed with my assessment that the lack of a camera and a microphone prevented it from being a fully useful multimedia device.  He thought the Kindle was a piece of c&$p (he used stronger language than that), but this wasn’t much of an improvement.  Plus, as a non-reader (he knows how, he just doesn’t), the notion of having instant access to a bookstore matters not at all to him.

Basil is thrilled, and wants one today.  The idea of doing his school work using it, as well as a digital textbook on board, is mighty cool to him.  He’s keen on the idea of Electronics Arts sports games being accessible through this machine, and playing them through an accelerometer like the Wii.  What he wants to know, is the WiFi going to be robust enough for two or more players to network their machines to play games like World of Warcraft or some of the other combat games?

Finn MacCool is prepared to own one today, but feels kind of iffy about it.  “It needs a camera and microphone, so people can make software apps for it that allow multimedia.”  And he felt that adding a microphone and camera would do great things for games, because you could chat with partners on a side channel.

Davi felt that the iBooks program was silly. “I don’t want to read my textbooks at all. Why would I want to read them on an iPad?”  His friend Jachin remarked that having a book on an iPad was not the same thing as having a dead-tree copy that he could give to his friends. “Just because I buy it doesn’t mean I want to own it forever. Most books aren’t that good.”

He’s certainly right about that.

So there you are.  Some teenage voices about the iPad, all them reacting essentially the same way as the major news media does — It’s cool, it sucks, it doesn’t suck but it’s not cool either — and in about equal measure the last time I checked.

Tuesday Homework

On Tuesday I visited a friend, and I wound up helping her daughter with homework. She goes to a school with block scheduling, so Monday had been her first day with her new 90-minute subject classes — including history and geometry, two of my favorite things.

In high school, I got low Bs and Cs in every math class I ever took — except Geometry. Spatial relationships appealed to me, and I “got” a lot of the systems intuitively. So will she, eventually. She has that kind of mind.

But she was a little concerned about Geometry, so we worked through fifteen problems together. I thought the homework was a little long, especially for the second day, and given how many steps some of the later problems had. But it was relatively simple stuff — the Additive Line Segment postulate.

As she did the homework, and I watched her write out the answers to the problems, I had a chance to see what I imagine, but rarely actually see, every day. Here was a student doing her homework at home. She was sitting on the floor, her notebook and worksheet on a coffee table, and working under a bright light in an otherwise-dark room.

Here at school, students work in their own rooms at a desk or in a large room together during study hall each evening. Boarding students work entirely differently than day school or public schools, I guess.

Anyway, back to the homework. I realized, watching her, that the habits she set now for Geometry would have a lot to do with how successful she was in the rest of the term. But the teacher hadn’t provided any guidance about how to do geometry problems, or how to show your work. Which was D-U-M-B: dumb. We put kids through years of addition, subtraction, fractions, decimals, and parentheses, and train teachers and students alike to show their work algebraically.

But this is Geometry. There’s a completely different notation, a completely different set of assumptions, and a much better set of tools (like graph paper, blank paper, a ruler, a compass and more). So, first I set her up with a notebook (not for tonight’s homework, but for the future), with graph paper on one side and blank paper on the other. A friend of mine brought it to me from Germany; it’s fancy paper for engineers, I think.

And then I talked her through drawing lines and lettering points.

Now. You may ask (especially as a mathematics teacher) why bother doing this sort of work on the first day? Just measure the lines, record the length of the lines in millimeters as it says, and move on to the next problem.

Oh, but poor little girl! She’s never taken geometry before! The way to learn geometry is to learn how to visualize lines and figured. The easiest way to visualize these is to draw them and then follow those lines to logical conclusions.

Only, she wasn’t going to draw the lines. The geometry teacher didn’t teach them that.

So I taught her. Dumb math teacher, I thought, doesn’t know to teach his kids how to draw lines from day one on their homework, so they get into the habit of thinking “it’s geometry, I can solve the problem if I draw it and look at it.”

Then I thought, hey! If it’s the first day of school, she has her homework from the world history teacher, and I can see his day-one handouts and papers. So I asked my friend’s daughter to let me see them, and she did.

Oh.

Did you ever have one of those moments when you realize that another teacher has shown you up, badly, by doing things you never thought of doing? Her history teacher did that to me. I was blown away by his day-one works. Why?

He had — a list of earlier historical research papers, and a worksheet for the students to fill out saying what they wanted to research this term and why — along with a little checklist on how to tell if you’ve chosen the right topic for yourself. There was a list of about 60 historical lenses, based on the six basic concepts of Technology, Politics, Environment, Social, Cultural, and Economic viewpoints. There was a list of the six basic types of Historical Questions, along with examples of each and a written description of each question.

In short, a lot.

I intended to spend most of the evening grading papers, but instead I wound up making my own versions of his documents, and making them into PDFs for my class wiki, and putting them into the wikitext.

ClustrMaps

I’m really liking this ClustrMaps graph, that archives the visits to my website monthly.  It keeps me humble, and makes me remember that my readers number in the mid-hundreds, not low thousands.

But it also reminds me that I’m a teacher with a (small) international audience, and that helps me be more internationalist in my thinking and my worldview.  The little red dots in India, China and South America help keep me more honest, I think.  Thanks for continuing to read, even when I get on a political/economic rant about life in America.

Thoughts on the iPad

Well.

It’s not green and covered in a layer of cholorphyll so that it recharges in the presence of sunlight, and it’s not a infinite in saecula saeculorum kind of tool — I won’t be passing this device over to my great-great-great-grandchildren.

Do I want one anyway? Yes.

I’ve seen people complain that it’s not a multimedia tool.  I agree that it may not be that.  I agree that the lack of a camera is upsetting.

Is it future shock?  Yes. Yes, it is.

I have a gradebook program on my iPhone.  It’s clunky, it doesn’t handle enough students, and the interface is lousy.  Will this change with a device this lovely? Yes.  I’ll be unshackled from my desk in the classroom.

I can carry it through the halls and make notes on student behavior, and record their doings (this is why a camera would be so useful).  I don’t have to carry books anywhere again; with that much memory, I could get rid of almost every paper book I own, and never have to worry about losing the card-catalog again.  I would watch more movies and TV, maybe, but I wouldn’t worry about losing data with this, because I’d do most everything in Google Apps or iWork.

With a screen this big, my Brushes paintings will be much better. My painting kit may well go out the window, eventually, except that I like painting with actual brushes.  I’ll do more on-the-fly diagrams with my students, especially if this computer will work with a projector, which I think it will.  The BENQ projector has a similar input port.  I hope it does work.

I can store my recipes by photographing cards, and building a related Bento database, and use the iPad as my recipe book.  Then I can compile the family cookbook I’ve always dreamed of doing.

Apparently I still need a desktop machine for multimedia purposes.  Oh, well.  This will change in time; it looks like they broke through a couple of technical barriers to build this thing anyway.

Students still need a multimedia classroom, sure.  But OK, that’s fine.  They can still do things with network folders and cloud computing.  In the meantime, let’s see… my students no longer carry a 20-pound World History book.  My writing videos will be legible enough on this device for students to read them; they can switch back and forth easily between an e-mail or wiki program, and the videos.

The lack of Flash operability is still a problem.

The vast amounts of data you can store on this…  you could give kids a plaintext archive of every single book from ancient history in English from Project Gutenberg on the first day of school, and it would barely make a dent. The library of Alexandria in an SD chip, and a tablet that is to all intents and purposes a scroll — all of classical literature in a single scroll, forever.  You wouldn’t have to ask students to look up Biblical citations; they would have the Bible and the Quran and all of sacred literature on their machines, all the time. A dictionary of symbols, too. A periodic table of elements, too. A library of images of art history, categorized and tagged.

With this 10″ screen, you could create a Laboratory book program to keep a lab book for a science class in… design it to share with other students, so that data is automatically transferred… what happens in one experiment is trasmitted to all involved experimenters.  They still have to learn to be good record-keepers, but they learn.  Wikilabs, maybe.  Similar programs for other subjects, too.

The price.  $499 for the base machine, almost $900 for the top of the line.  I want TotL, myself, but may have to settle for mid-range.  We’ll see (Mom and Dad, what I’d like for Christmas is….)  But the Kindle, it’s not.  I’ve used a Kindle, and they’re clunky and awkward.  Just what you’d expect from some slapdash engineering squadthat didn’t think big picture.

My one serious complaint?  No chlorophyll.  And no hover generators, so I can hang it in the air to follow me around school, and be solid in the air when I want to type with two hands.

Maybe next year.

Terror in the library

Today I needed to find a book in the library. So I went to find it. I knew we owned it. But I didn’t know its Dewey Decimal number, nor could I remember if it was filed under art history, history or mythology. But I figured I’d find it pretty easily. So I went.

Unfortunately it was Tuesday, and our librarian leaves early on Tuesdays. Fortunately one of our volunteers was there, and after my initial perusal failed to find it, I asked her how I called up the card catalog on one of the computers in the library.

She stared at me blankly. “I don’t know,” she said.

She was, to her credit, horrified that she didn’t know.

I soothed her alarm, and asked her to call it up on the librarian’s computer. It’s the core program on her computer after all. Right? Right?

“I don’t know how to do that either,” she said.

With a little puzzlement and a call to IT, we were able to get it up and running. No problem. I found my book and went on my way.

But it nags at me, a lot. Our librarian is the only one who knows how to find and access hidden books through the catalog in our collection any more. The rest of us do it so infrequently that it doesn’t matter to our learning if we know how to do it or not.

If you needed proof that paper tech is on its way out, ask yourself: do you know how to use your school’s digital catalog? Or did that slip out of your “need to know” file in the last few years?

Australia Day

In addition to today being Old Calendar Festivus, it is also Australia Day, when the First Fleet arrived in Port Jackson (now Sydney Harbor) to establish the first permanent European settlement on the sixth continent.

A warm welcome and happy holiday to any Australian visitors.  Unless you think of it as Invasion Day, of course.

It’s also the anniversary of the Rum Rebellion of 1808, the only armed takeover of government in Australia’s history.  I’m reading of John McArthur’s takeover of the government of William Bligh (yes, of “Mutiny on the Bounty” fame) from Wikipedia.  Australian history is a lot more colorful than I thought.

Festivus, Part II

It happened to me at breakfast, as well.  Kid grabs my ear, starts pulling.

I grab his wrist, bend it up and behind him, and squeeze. “Do not lay hands on an adult.  Do not start fights.  You don’t know where a fight will take you, but usually it’s to bad and painful places.”

Like, you know, prison.

Or Afghanistan.

Why the heck does this keep happening to me?

Old Calendar Festivus

Some of you may know about Festivus. It’s a theoretical midwinter holiday from Seinfeld or something like that. You set up the aluminum pole in the corner, perform the annual airing of grievances, and then proceed to feats of strength.

What you may not have known is that by the Old Calendar, today was Festivus. No, I didn’t know it either. I was at a fencing match until 8:30, so I missed the pole and the Airing of Grievances. But I walked right into the feast, when a horde of dorm kids asked to use the microwave.

Then came the feats of strength. “here, hold up this 15-pound dumbbell while we time you.”. And so, 50 seconds with my left arm, 57 with my right. Most of them couldn’t do it for more than 20; they were duly impressed.

Then came the ninja style wrestling match. The lights went out. Suddenly there were five kids rolling around in the dark, working up the courage to attack me. I was about to get jumped.

I’ve made it sound more serious than it actually is. I honestly think they were not out to attack me, only to test themselves. My friend Amanda once said I was eminently attackable, though, and every dorm I’ve ever run here at school tries it eventually. Maybe my weariness tonight invited it, or maybe it’s been building for a while. There’s something about 15-year-old boys in the winter term, though, with wrestling season underway and not wanting to go to bed at lights out. So I got attacked.

It is important as the teacher in this situation to win. It is important to win in a way that is painful, but not injurious, to the student. It has to convey the real risks of starting a real fight in a place not governed by the rules of sanctioned fighting, like a dojo or a boxing club. And it has to end quickly, because when you face four there’s always the risk of something getting out of hand. I mean, really more out of hand than one teacher getting jumped by four students. When they come at you in the dark, in a small common room lined with hard-angled wooden benches, the variables for everyone become very difficult and health-threatening.

You, as the adult, must know and bear these things in mind, because the teenagers’ brains reckon on immortality. Nevertheless there’s a certain inevitability to it all. These things have to happen, because as Norman McLean points out in a river runs through it, some boyhood questions have to be settled before too much time passes.

One of those questions is, “should I physically gang up with my friends on older adults?” and it must be answered decisively NO.

There may have been pretty-boy hair pulled. A young teen inordinately proud of his manhood may have had his legs crossed in a manner uncomfortable to his private bits. A very good wrestler on the small side may have been sat on, to demonstrate the differential of a 180-pound weight disadvantage. An arm or two may have been bent at an unpleasant angle of repose. A kicking foot may have been seized and the toes squeezed while the kicker swayed unnerved on one awkward ball of the foot.

It is important to fight dirty.  Not to the point of damage, but damaging to self-esteem. Sometimes they pretend to be cowboys. Sometimes boxers. Sometimes ninjas, like tonight. There is always a vague sense of a code of honor in them – a code which gives them permission to come after you. Don’t obey their code. Obey yours. It is important for children to understand that adults don’t fight cleanly, they fight meanly — and they are not to be attacked because of that.

And then they’re all in a pile on the floor. One is groaning.  My hand flips on the light switch to find four boys inexplicably on the floor in a tumbled pile. In a voice more bear than human, I say, “Bed time. Now.”

And curiously enough, it is. No argument, no desire to prolong the “fun” here. But no one is threatening legal action or to call their parents or bleeding. And I haven’t had my thumb wrenched, like in ’99 or my Achilles tendon pulled like in ’01, or my face scratched in ’04 or my gut punched like two years ago. I haven’t had my arm bent against a bench like last year.

With luck, this is the last fight they ever inititate again. As near as I can tell, I have an OK track record with this. When I’ve lost, I’ve given a Pyrrhic victory less valuable than it really appears; when I win correctly, there’s neither joy nor happiness for me in the victory, only a sense I’ve done my part for society.

But gods, I wish that I didn’t have to do it at all. How do you handle it? Have you ever been jumped by a group of students? What was the result?

Digital Textbooks? No.

Shelly Blake-Plock, in a recent article, argues that we don’t really need digital textbooks any more than we needed paper textbooks.

He’s right.  We need kids to be familiar with primary sources far more than we need textbooks.  One of his commenters argues that it will be a long time before parents, students, teachers and administrators feel comfortable with not having textbooks.  But the truth is, parents and administrators embrace textbook-less programs because they provide an essential differential from what “everyone else is doing.”

This week, I went to another CAIS 21st Century Learning conference at Chase Collegiate School, in Waterbury, CT.  (We’ll be holding two more conferences in this series, tentatively scheduled for October 21, 2010, and January 20, 2011… please consider coming, to hear teachers talking to teachers.)  One of the schools that presented was the Independent Day School in Middlefield, CT, about their capstone project for 8th grade.

So get this.  Their eighth grade studies American history and literature from the perspective of the nearest major town, Middletown, CT.  They learn about colonization by studying Wethersfield (settled 1635 AD), federalism from studying a couple of local court cases, literature from local poets, slavery from the Amistad trial, the civil war from local tombstones and newspapers, industrialisation from the local mills and factories, immigration from the local Italian community and so on. They study art history and architectural history using real buildings they see every day. They learn how to visit probate court and the clerk of deeds in their hometowns.  They collect oral histories about World War Two from neighborhood residents.

The first year, parents were cranky for the first few months. This project-based learning process was much harder for their kids to do.  They were much more seriously challenged by the work, and there were some kids who skimped on the work — leaving their partners high and dry.  Several students experienced deep embarrassment when the day arrived for their presentation, and they weren’t ready to talk to the whole school about their learning.

Then curious things began to happen.  One kid filled a school hallway with photographs he’d taken of important buildings around Middletown, with little blurbs about each one written by a classmate.   Another student used his cellphone to take pictures of a millpond behind a friend’s house, and sent an email to his class, “Look! This is a mill pond, just like the one we saw on our field trip.” A group of students researched the history of a mill that wasn’t even there any more.  And they found out one of the richest men in the Middletown of the 1840s was a former pirate-made-good who’d made a fortune selling opium to the Chinese and buying silk.  Who says drug dealers only live in Colombia?   One girl, whose daily commute to school takes her right down Route 9 south, became startled to realize that the large lake she drove next to every single day was the CONNECTICUT RIVER.

By slow degrees, these students woke up to the reality that they lived in Connecticut, and that Connecticut was part of the history of the nation, and had affected every part of the nation’s history, from First Contact through the War on Terror, and that their hometowns were part and parcel of a style, a mentality, a pattern of thinking and living that evolved over years, decades and centuries.

It had nothing to do with a textbook, and everything to do with a mindset on the part of the teachers.  They said (admittedly with some serious prodding from their new head, John Barrengos), “we want our eighth grade year to be a total summation of everything they’ve learned in their years at our school.  Not textbook learning, but integration of book learning, interpersonal learning, visual learning, mathematical learning, scientific thinking and awareness of ethical and social realities.”  They built a capstone project to acheive that, and threw their resources and attention behind the project.

The result was and is an extraordinary project-based learning experience for their students.  And it sounds like they have total buy-in from the parents, and the students. Everyone involved understands that the kids who come out of this program are better, stronger, and intellectually richer than they were before.

And you can’t buy a digital textbook that teaches that. You can’t even buy a paper textbook that teaches that.  Indeed, the only digital textbook that comes out of this kind of experience is the digital textbook the kids produced themselves to show what they learned — not a text to teach from, but a digital artifact that demonstrates what was learned.