Category Archives: K-12

Why men are choosing not to be K-12 Teachers

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I saw this article posted on USATODAY this morning. Its an opinion piece but it attempts to address a very important issue we are seeing in K-12 education right now: Boys are not doing well in school and have do not have role models in school because there are not men in schools.

Article

As this article notes:

“…boys in particular benefit from the presence of male role models in the classroom. As Stanford University professor Thomas Dee has documented, in a study of more than 20,000 middle-school students, boys perform better when they have a male teacher, and girls perform better when they have a female teacher. If we want to do something about boys’ often sluggish classroom performance, more male teachers could be a useful step.” Source

While this article addresses some other issues as well and not all that I agree with, we do agree that more men are needed in K-12 education. Women are outperforming men in school by leaps and bounds. While this is great and we need to continue to do more to keep our girls performing well, we need to also start doing things to help our boys do well too. One of those is getting more men into schools. I have heard all kinds of stats but in elementary schools it seems like there is 1 male teacher for every 10 female (sometimes even more like 1 to 15). I have seen this first hand. I teach one undergraduate technology for education class and every semester there are 20 girls and maybe 1-3 guys. Some classes have no guys. Guys are not going into teaching. Why?

Well here is the main reason I would not go into K-12 education: low pay (there are others but if this happened I believe the others would be solved or at least we would going in the right direction). If you pay teachers 15k-30k to start, who is going to want to do it? Yes, I see my students getting offers for less than 20k a year to start. Heck my first job out of college was 50k with full benefits+401k in the corporate world. I was making 65k after 1 year out in the corporate world and over the course of a few more years my salary was significantly higher than that. The average teacher makes 46k a year at retirement in the US (source). How are you going to get the best by paying 46k a year? I dont even think I could pay rent on that better yet support a family, and that is the national average in retirement. Sure there are some districts around cities that pay teachers upwards of 100k, but that is not normal and not close to the national average. I often hear, well teachers get summer off. Sure they get 8 weeks of unpaid vacation. Guess what? I got 3-5 weeks of paid vacation at my various jobs. Yep, when I left the corporate world and went into higher education I had 5 weeks of paid vacation a year so that extra 3 weeks that teachers had was nothing special considering it was unpaid. You want men, pay for them. Here is a video that addresses this issue much better than I can:

PhoneGap: Building an app and classroom use

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Well I have built my first mobile app using PhoneGap. Here are my thoughts:

Usability: Setting the software up was pretty easy although I did think the PhoneGap tutorials were not very good and had to look elsewhere to get the software installed on both Eclipse and Xcode. However once I was set up, all I needed to do was to drop HTML files into my WWW folder. Additionally, it was not easy to figure out how to publish my apps to the Android/iOS stores but very easy once I did figure it out. I would recommend one be familiar with Eclipse and Xcode before working with PhoneGap. Now onto building an app – very easy. Building an app using HTML was pretty easy. PhoneGap does have the ability to interact with the phone’s internal hardware just like a native app, which is nice. It does require javascript though, so be prepared to program if using PhoneGap.I did have to also modify things in both Eclipse and Xcode in order to get certain things to work, for instance, just adding external links to my app in Xcode required modification. I honestly think PhoneGap needs to work on their tutorials, for many things their software could do, and it would used by many more people. They are limiting themselves with the poor tutorials they have on their site.

Publishing – Publishing on multiple devices was pretty easy. After I had finished my app for Android, it took me maybe 30-45 mins to get it ready for publishing on iOS, which is pretty impressive. Keep in mind though that in order to publish on Apple (or even get your app on your iPad/iPhone) you need to pay the $99 developer fee. On Android, that fee is only $25 which is much more reasonable. Also, Android lets you publish your app without review, Apple needs to review (takes weeks at a minimum) and might actually reject your app.

Education use: I think this would be a very good tool for the classroom but there are a few things that an instructor needs to be ready for. The first thing is setting up this software. It was not that easy to set up. You have to download and install like 5 things for Android and like 5 things for Apple. Not only do you have to download/install but you need to create directories and move files around. While this was pretty easy for myself (and it did take a while), this is a nightmare waiting to happen in the classroom. You will have to walk your students through this process and I would expect errors. This process alone will turn off non technical students who will never use this tool after class due to this set up process. Once all set up though, its HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I do believe your students should thoroughly understand HTML and CSS with intro level javascript knowledge before attempting to use this tool. You at least need to know how to find/modify javascript to really do  anything ‘fun’ with the tool (unless you are just creating static HTML pages). Now, if you can look past all of that (and I probably can for my non programmer/non technical students even though I did sound rather negative in my review), I would recommend to require all students buy an Android develop account for $25 (vs iOS $99 due to cost) and let them each publish their apps to the Android Martketplace (Google Play). I think students would love to see their apps on the app store.

Kinect cameras being used to help detect autism in children

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Very cool what gaming software and hardware can do. Kinect and Wii motion technologies are powerful and will be doing much more in the near future.

From the article:

“Detecting autism in children can be a difficult, expensive, and time-consuming process that requires the trained eye of a medical professional. But researchers Guillermo Sapiro and Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos believe that the Microsoft Kinect gaming sensor could assist in that task.

As part of an experiment at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, Sapiro and Papanikolopoulos set up a series of five Microsoft Kinect sensors in the playroom of a school. There, the motion-detecting cameras recorded the movements of the children, aged 3 to 5, and sent the collected data to a series of PCs. The computers then calculated what children were most at risk for autism based on their hand movements and activity levels. Children whose activity levels differed greatly from their peers were flagged for further study by medical professionals.

Researchers admit the cameras are no substitute for the opinion of a real doctor, but say they could still help determine which children require closer examination for signs of autism. “The same way a good teacher flags a problem child, the system will do automatic flagging and say, ‘Hey, this kid needs to see an expert,'” says Shapiro.”

More of the article here

NYC passes social media law for K-12 Educators

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I cannot say this is a bad law. While I wish it wasnt needed, unfortunately there are just so many problems that something like this needs to be in place. In fact, this probably just makes it easier for the teacher to say ‘no’ when their students ask because many students do ask their teachers to be facebook friends and it puts the teacher in an uncomfortable situation. Here is what the law says:

“NYC DOE Teachers cannot use social media accounts unaffiliated to the school on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and Flickr to contact students regardless of the nature of the message.”

Source: http://mashable.com/2012/05/02/social-media-student-teacher-contact/

Now the good thing to point out here: These services can still be used as long as its for educational purposes. So the schools are not banning the tools. If they were, I would have a major problem with this. They are simply banning personal connections, which I believe is fine. I warn all of my K-12 pre-service to teachers to say ‘No’ to any student that requests them on facebook. Not that I think its bad in all cases but that it just avoids a potential future problem.

Here is a video on the topic:

Free Educational Games at PBS

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I really love PBS and not because I worked there while I was getting my Ph.D. They offer some great educational tools for educators. Last week in my courses we discussed gaming and gamification in K-12 Education. One of the sites my students were able to ‘play’ with during our game playing session was at PBS. This site offers tons of free educational games, so check it out and try to implement some into your lessons where you can. Keep in mind some are better than others so be sure to try out several:

pbskids.org/games/

Smartboards in the classroom

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This post is more of a reflection on today’s class: I have always been pretty pessimistic when it comes to purchasing smartboards for classrooms. I tend to feel that a computer with projector might just be easier to manage and I really do not like the smartboard software that much as its not nearly as good as say PPT. However, my opinion may have been swayed this afternoon.

In my Educational Technology course with undergraduate students we went over ‘how to use the smartboard’. It was my normal lesson on smartboards and we talked about their implementation and use. My main question to the students was how can these improve learning? Anyway, while students were playing around with the software I had them go up in groups of 2-3 students and use the smartboard to get a feel for it. After 5-10 minutes I noticed many students were surrounding the smartboard, laughing, and having a blast using it. They really had a great time playing with this technology. I was impressed by the motivation it gave them to interact with anything in the classroom. If my college aged students are that excited to use something like that I would bet that K-12 students would appreciate it even more. Thus I now am beginning to see more potential in this technology that I always thought was a bit much for a classroom.

Facebook launches ‘Groups for Schools’ for Educators and Students

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Facebook launches a new tool for Educators. It requires a ‘.edu’ email address and allows schools to create groups. Within these groups the schools can send emails, upload files, create calendars, post messages, etc. – pretty much everything you can do on Facebook but it’s private for your school. I would love to hear from a school that ends up using this as I am sure many are very apprehensive considering Facebook is ‘Taboo’ in most schools and universities.

Here is a link: https://www.facebook.com/about/groups/schools

Another article with more information at Mashable