Left Eye vs Right Eye Dominance

A few years back we took a group of fifth graders to a camp.  While we were there we got to try out archery. One of my students was a lefty so I asked for a lefty bow for him. The instructor said to me, it isn’t about right or left handedness, but eye dominance. That clicked for me. Growing up in the south I couldn’t shoot the broad side of a barn and never could figure out why when I aimed I missed but if I just threw up a BB gun without aiming I could hit something. I had been aiming with the wrong eye the whole time!

Flash forward to a few weeks ago when one of the IT guys was working on my computer. I have the dock on the right side of my screen. He made the comment about how I had everything all messed up. 

I said, “What have I messed up, the dock you can move it to the bottom.” 

To which he responded, “No, it is on the wrong side.” 

That is when I realized that I work on the left side of my screen, which is why my dock is on the right. If I ever have two documents open at the same time. The dominant document will be on the left and the other is on the right. 

Then I thought about my iPad and my phone. All of my heavy usage apps are either on my doc or on the left side of my screens. 

This got me thinking about what it might mean for students. Especially when they are scanning a screen for an app. Or splitting a screen on a desktop to do work. Is eye dominance something that we need to consider? Should we teach them to work with their dominant eye? Or is this something that comes naturally.  

One thing that we don’t do with the iPads in grades three-five is, tell them how to organize them. We leave that up to the students. We might tell them to have an app on the doc for a period of time because we are using it frequently, but we don’t dictate how they choose to arrange their iPad. But this makes me wonder if it is something that we should point out to them, to help them understand better ways to organize themselves. 

Even in the course of writing this blog, I noticed that in my blog posts I always put the pictures in the center or on the right. This is probably the first where I have put it on the left, and it bugs me!

 

 

Teacher PD

Tomorrow I am holding a teacher PD session for the lower school teachers.  I am going to structure it in a similar way to a TeachMeet.  So there will be 10 apps/programs introduced in two to seven minute presentations.  Then at the end there will be two mini breakout sessions where teachers can  learn more about one of the apps that has been introduced.

I originally had about 15 things to introduced but I have cut it back so that hopefully it won’t be too much all at once.  The focus is not an in-depth look at these apps/programs but more of a quick look.  Then if the teachers want to know more they can go to the break out sessions or come to see me later to have a more detailed session.

One part that I am very excited about is that at least 4 of my Geek Squad will be there.  The Geek Squad is an after school club that I am running for grades three through five.  We are looking at computers, ways to help teachers and students and programming.  The students in the club are having a great time spending an hour with me once a week while we talk about coding and computers and all things tech. When I asked if anyone could help out, several offered to skip their Wednesday activities to come to the meeting!

TeachMeet BETT 2014

On the Friday night of the BETT expo I participated in my first ever TeachMeet.  I think I am hooked, what a great way to get loads of ideas in one quick period of time.  There were 650 teachers registered and it is the largest TeachMeet in the world.  But I can see the potential in going to smaller ones.  Even having ones within a school.

A friend in Saudi Arabia did basically this kind of thing at his school just with longer sessions, but all run by teachers at the school.  Using the idea that teachers were sharing something that they were already using and doing in the classroom.

I liked the idea of teachers sharing what they are doing without it being a big, overly organized event.  While some of the teachers at the TeachMeet were big names that had been around the block, a few were first time presenters who just wanted to share an app, an idea or a tool that they have found helpful.

Another thing that was done at this TeachMeet was a presenter bingo.  Instead of a raffle you could buy a bingo card for a £1 and then if you got bingo you won a prize.  These were donated by presenters at the BETT conference.  That would be another great idea to just do small prizes.

I already have a session planned with my staff where I was planning a similar type of ting based around the iPads and apps.  This has made me think that I should consider opening the session up to other IT related presentations.

This is the link to the TeachMeet website if anyone would like to see how it is organized.

Work/Life Balance

After reading the article “7 ways to fight the Sunday Blues” I got to thinking.  The article made me think about how with the introduction of student emails, Edmodo, VLNs and other school related social media, teachers around the world are beginning to have more blurred lines between work and life.  I know that I spend a lot of “outside school time” on school email, twitter, Edmodo and other things.  I am not worried about my balance but I hear teachers worry about this when I introduce another communication option to them and their students.

I do think that it is important to take time “off” from school work.  But how you do that needs to be personal to you.  Many teachers I know go in fits and starts, where they participate heavily in the social networking related to school outside of school hours. Then they can go for periods of time where the school stuff stays at school.

The article had some very good points to it and is something worth sharing with teachers who might be stressing about their balance.  Another thing that I have found is that the more experience I get, the less stress I have about getting school work done. I know that I will get it done and I know that I will have to give up something (maybe a small something, like having a relaxing non working lunch, ha ha!) along the way to get it done.  I have come to understand and accept that, instead of worry and stress about it.  I am sure this attitude is true with many jobs and experience.

I think that you just have to find your balance.  Mine comes from horses.  Spending time near them keeps me sane!  Find the thing that allows you to have balance and do it whenever you can. 

The Pause

I read a post today by Jeff Utecht titled “Taking Advantage of the Pause”.  In it Jeff talks about that we are currently in a “pause” between the development of new technology.  That there are improvements being made to the newest technology but that “new” things are not being created at the moment.  He suggests that this time in the Pause allows us to develop deeper understandings of how to use the existing technology for teaching and learning.

I have to say that I am happy that we are in a pause.  I think that the teachers at my school would kill me if I said, you know how we just got the iPads all rolled out and working, well guess what we have a new piece of tech coming for the classroom!  I think I would have to take a couple of personal days to survive that!

Teachers and students need a bit of time to explore and learn with the technologies that we have.  One of the things that I have had to manage is teachers wanting me to fill their iPads up with apps.  They haven’t had enough time to use and explore the possibilities within the apps that they have.  Adding more is just going to create problems.  I have also found that a good 25% of all of the apps that I like the look of at first, don’t last long on my iPad.  Because of this I am trying to steer my teachers towards ways to use the apps that they have, to do different types of things.  This gives them a good grasp of many ways to use one app and at the same time helps them understand the things that they need and want from an app.

I am very thankful to the people I have met in the last two years that have helped me to understand this idea so that when I started rolling out iPads to teachers I knew where the end goal was.  I think if I hadn’t had that insight we would have loads of unused apps on iPads in our school!

Ever Changing Technology

When I went home this March I took my mom a laptop with Windows 7 on it.  After a day or so of working on it she began to complain about “why do they always change everything.”  I reminder her that change has always been happening and that when she was younger she worked on one of the first computers in Memphis.  She worked on it because all of the older ladies in the office wouldn’t work on “that new fangaled thing.”  She relented and said that’s right.

She did have a bit of an argument though.  While change IS always happening and will always happen, what is new is the speed of that change.  Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors and circuits in a computer doubles every two years.  This means the speed of change with technology is doubled every two years because the speed of the ability of the technology to process information doubles.  This is what my mom was struggling with.  Because during her generation things improved and changed at a slower rate.  She didn’t realise how far behind she had gotten in her tech skills because she didn’t realise how fast and dramatically things were changing.  This is why I upgraded her equipment.

The speed with which technology is changing is only going to get faster.  We have to keep up by doing what we can to teach ourselves about the changes.  As teachers we have to be ready and willing to grow and change.  Our students are using technologies that are sometimes 2 or 3 years ahead of what we ourselves use.  If we allow ourselves to fall behind then we will loose a link to a major part of our students lives.

I moved to an iPhone only 2 years ago, but that simple move allowed me to be able to learn the ins and outs of the Apple IOS system, before I received my iPad.  Doing that made the move to an iPad easier because I knew some of what to expect.  That being said, I know nothing about the android market because I own no android devices.

Keeping on top of the latest technologies can be difficult but even if you choose one and keep that updated, then you will be able to more easily move between devices. Find a way to stay on top of things, a blog you like, a twitter feed, a teacher friend, a techy friend, or a student any one of these can be a good source of tech support. But whatever you do find a way, standing still is no longer an option.

Thank you Suzanne McCluskey for the idea for this post.

Google Shortner

I discovered Google Shortener a few years ago and I fell in love.

 If you have ever tried to give a group of students a web address to copy then you will love this too!  Google shortener allows you to take a web address and make it shorter.  All google shortened addresses begin with goo.gl/ then end in 5 or 6 characters.  You don’t need to have the “www.” or the “http://” in front of it.  Just click in the address bar and start with the goo.gl.  You can imagine how much easier that is for kids to copy.

The biggest trick is to teach the kids that they have to use case sensitivity.  They must make capital letters, capital and lower case letters, lower case.  Some kids get that straight away and others, well they struggle.  Once they get it sorted though it helps them with other types of addresses too.  I have used this with children as young as grade one and they have been able to successfully link to a website by typing in a google shortened address.  

I have also found that this is a good resource when emailing addresses to people or putting web addresses in newsletters.  It saves loads of space and leads to less mistakes when people copy the address.

Photo Credit: http://kinlane-productions.s3.amazonaws.com/google/google-url-shortner-logo.jpg

Community Trumps Content

I was first introduced to Jeff Utecht at the ECIS Tech conference in March 2013.  Since then I have kept track of him, through twitter.  I happened to revisit his website recently and saw this video on the bottom of the page.  http://youtu.be/S8djV8slDN0  After watching it I got to thinking about what he was saying.  Then I checked the date.

I was shocked to find that the keynote was given in Bangkok 3 years ago!  3 years, wow was all I could think.  How accurate he was then and how relevant he still is today.  After a bit more thinking (I’m not straining myself, promise!)  I considered the student body of the school I am teaching at now. Do I need to reconsider how I think about their understanding of technology and what they expect technology to deliver to them.

Then this past weekend I supervised a group of kids at a debate tournament.  While there I took the deck of cards from the table and began playing solitaire.  One of the kids asked me what game I was playing.  I said solitaire, to which she sort of went “humm”.

I said “What, have you never seen solitaire?”

She responded, “Yes, but not like that.”

That made me pause and then I realised that she had never seen anyone play solitaire with actual cards and that made me think back to this video.

It is time for teachers to start changing their understanding of the world that kids are growing up in and consider the possibilities for the future.

I am still thinking about all of this and still trying to wrap my head around it so that I can help the teachers in my lower school understand it.