Make Ear Contact

A few weeks ago I went on vacation in New York City. Naturally, I used the subway as my major mode of transportation. There’s an unwritten rule on the subway- no eye contact. I’m not saying New Yorkers are unfriendly but people keep to themselves while in transit by staring off into space or keep their head down in an exhausted stance.

New since my last NYC visit is the increased use of headphones. It looks like the new rule is don’t make ear contact. I suppose it’s good practice if you want a peaceful, uninterrupted commute to your next destination but it’s not a behavior you should employ when interacting with other.

Yet I see more and more students doing this. They’ll come to me before school and try to talk to me with headphones still in their ears. I’ve seen students walking home from school with plugged ears while carrying out a conversation. It’s like telling your friend, “I’m listening to you until my iPod serves up something better.”

We’ll no more. The new Gadget School rule is Make Ear Contact.

Explain to students that it is rude to talk to others with headphones on. When in conversation, they must give others their full attention. Eyes AND ears.

Overall, college students use Wikipedia. But, they do so knowing its limitation. They use Wikipedia just as most of us do — because it is a quick way to get started and it has some, but not deep, credibility.

This research suggests that college students are not using Wikipedia as a way out of an assignment but more likely as a way into an assignment.

Why do students use Wikipedia for course–related research?

I would like to see a similar study done at the high school level.

Every movie, musical and play starts with a reminder for us to turn off gadgets such as cellphones. I think we should do this in our classrooms too. The gadgets our students carry are not going away. Exclaiming that “they shouldn’t even have them in class” isn’t realistic. We must work with these devices. Schools need to stop the bad technology behavior not the technology. 

Enter Gadget School. If we don’t show students proper gadget etiquette, who will? Just imagine restaurants in the future if we don’t teach tomorrow’s diners that it is not okay to jabber away on your cellphone between the salad and the main course. 

Here are a few simply Gadget School posters to get things start.

Please Silence Your Cellphones

Silencing a cellphone seems like common sense. Or is it? Some students put their phone on vibrate but during a quiz this can still be noisy. Talk to your students. Let them know that you’re trying to ban distractions not devices.

Ask permission to record others

Insist that students ask before they take pictures, record audio or grab a video using their gadget. It’s rude to record others without their knowledge. Students need to learn this or our future will be one giant paparazzi world.

That’s it for Gadget School for now but there will be more to come. Please share your suggests for other Gadget School topics in the comments below.

…we have decided to change the default font for Outlook across campus to Century Gothic. Of course, you may change back to a different default font if you wish, but we hope you will “think green” as you make your choice.

There are a lot of questions here and number one is, “Who still prints email?” Perhaps removing the ‘Print’ button from the default toolbar in Outlook would make more sense. I think that changing users’ behavior, while more difficult, will result in a larger savings because users carry the conservation strategies they’ve learned into other areas of their life. I think it would be better if UWGB spent some time encouraging users to look before they print. (Or they could ban those half page signatures that some people put at the bottom of every email message they send that includes all 14 ways to contact them, a cutesy logo and their three favorite Lombardi quotes.)

Another problem with this simple font change is the increased space the new font takes up. The study UWGB cited ranks 10pt Century Gothic higher than a 11pt Arial font.

UWGB is choosing a smaller font over a larger font while the smaller font still takes up more space and therefore more paper. A page of text printed in Arial will often take up two pages when printed out in Century Gothic.

UWGB might be excited to ‘think green’ but are they actually doing anything? How will they even know if this move is worth it? I didn’t see their plan to measure the results (intended or unintended) from this experiment.

The font change did get them some press but it also supported the idea that conservation and sustainable living is easy. That it can be achieved with a click of a mouse. Typical efficiency changes are not like this. They require a larger cost up front with the hopes of a long-term pay-off. Even the simple act of changing an incandescent light bulb to a compact florescent lamp requires the initial investment for the new bulbs and a lesson about how to properly handle breakage and dispose of them.

Along with teaching users to print less, perhaps UWGB should replace those ink jet printers with more efficient laser printers or convert all their printers so they print on both sides of the paper by default. Measures that ‘invest green’ and ‘teach green’ are more effective long-term approaches.

P.S. I can’t stand how the question mark looks in Century Gothic

For example, the other day I needed to know what date is 60 days after February 11th. Sure I could get a calendar and start counting but it only takes seconds to do this:

Below are a few of my other recent inquiries:

• beef consumption U.S. vs India
• calories in three strawberries
• how old is Ricky Gervais
• compare Mythbuster names

Start your own investigation or check out their examples to get an idea of Wolfram Alpha’s power.

What amazes me is that some of these programs can run quickly right in your browser.

Sumo Paint, Pixlr Editor and Aviary Phoenix each look like promising tools for simple (and in some cases not-so-simple) image editing.

Such may have been the disapproving sigh of an observer watching a busload of teenagers tour Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory last week. The 11^th and 12^th graders from Appleton, Wisconsin, spent an awful lot of time typing away on their cell phones. But be not dismayed, O horrified observer. They were just doing their homework. [read on...]

In two years, making this project work has gotten a lot easier. Here’s why:

• a lot more students have cellphones with unlimited texting- and they all know how to text
• many students have smart phones that allow easier tweeting via an app
• students with iPod Touches just hopped on the public wifi they found available during the trip (we even had wifi on the bus!)
• I didn’t have to explain Twitter to any of  the students- they all knew what it was and no one asked how to setup an account this time around
• Twitter’s lists feature made grouping our field trip tweets super easy

This makes me think about what we’ll be able to do in two more years.

I do have two more things to add to my list of things that teachers should consider when using Twitter:

• remind students that anyone will be able to read their tweets- they should never post about others unless they’re comfortable having that person read what they wrote
• instruct the students to be discrete when they’re using their cellphone- ringers should be off and the activity of texting shouldn’t be any more disruptive than traditional note-taking

Lastly, check out the students’ tweets from this year’s trip.

Britannica Online School Edition

To test the resource, I searched for my favorite physicist- Richard Feynman.

While Britannica gave me a brief summary of Feynman’s physics career, I was disappointed by the questions that Britannica could not answer.

• Was he married?
• What did he do for fun?
• What did he sound like?
• Did he have kids?

They also neglected to include Feynman’s involvement with the Challenger explosion and the popular books that he wrote.

Some teacher’s give Wikipedia a hard time for it’s openness but it does a much better job at showing us the more interesting and human elements of historical figures.

Two more things that annoy me…

1. We pay for Britannica while a simple search at Google or Wikipedia is free and provides richer results.
2. Britannica provides MLA and APA citations at the bottom of each article. Since when is it a good idea to cite an encyclopedia? I wish they would provide references (like Wikipedia does) so students can cite the primary sources that are related to the subject and more authoritative.

The one-stop-shop argument…

Others defend resources like Britannica because they are an easy-to-use place for students to find things without having to search all over the web for what they need.

But isn’t the skill of effectively searching all over the web what our students need?

If your students are elementary level…

Then I take it all back. Britannica does a nice job getting little kids started with material that is written at their level. They also have some quasi-educational games at the Britannica Learning Zone that are worth a look.

A survey by Common Sense Media of more than 1,000 students ages 13 to 18 found that 48% of teens with cell phones call or text friends to warn them about pop quizzes.

I say, “who cares?”

If a pop quiz is given to offer students a chance to review past material or to provide teacher feedback on how the class is doing then the text warning is only going to trigger more students to study. That’s a good thing, right?

However, if the pop quiz is given to punish students who haven’t been studying, stifle bad behavior or just take up some class time, then Who’s Cheating Whom?

Some have criticized Wordle by suggesting that Wordle’s only attribute is that it is eye-catching.

I’m okay with that. I can work with eye-catching. Below is a Wordle I made using all the text from a recent test.

Wordle the test at Wordle.net

A few days before the test, I shared this with my students. They were eager to hypothesize as to how words like “astronaut” or “gravy” would be used to access there knowledge of friction and momentum. Some student suggested possible questions that used the terms from the word cloud. A few of their questions were so good that I plan to use them next year.

While Woodle wasn’t able to teach physics, it was able to start a conversation. That’s perfect. I can take it from there.