Final Thoughts About Information and Communication Technology in Education

 (Source for all images in this post:  Google Images - Advanced Settings:  Free to Use and Share)

I believe that the role of Information and Communication Technology in education is of paramount importance in this digital age.  From teaching students to become good digital citizens to helping them establish an effective and positive digital footprint, it must be the responsibility of all divisions within the school system.  Teaching students information and communication technology needs to be ongoing, and delivered at age appropriate stages throughout a student's time in the school system.                          

In the primary grades, teachers could begin by focusing on introducing the internet as an opportunity to visit exciting places, but they need to follow certain rules to stay safe.  Students need to be shown that many websites ask information that is private and should be avoided.  The concept of ownership can be taught by having students put their names and date on their creative work online.  Also, online communication could be introduced through the use of email to other kids within their school or with a penpal class in the community or beyond.

At the junior level, students' online responsibility can be expanded.  Students could learn how to protect their private information using strong passwords.  Online safety should be a major focus at this stage, and that students should not reveal personal information to people they don't know online.  Students can be taught that online messages can be hurtful, and that we should treat others the way we would like to be treated.  Don't forget there is a person behind the screen.  This would lead nicely into cyberbullying.  At this stage, provide students with an introduction to cyberbullying and how it feels, as well as strategies to handle it if it occurs.

In the intermediate grades, the issues really expand and become much more complex.  Not only should there be further education on conducting effective online searches, privacy issues, and the awareness of cyberbullying, but this is where the whole world of social media takes over their lives.  Thus students could be taught appropriate internet behaviour and etiquette.  The whole concept of building your own personal brand online needs to be addressed.  Employers will check the social media profiles of potential job candidates.  Protecting online reputations should be a central theme.  Also, learning how to properly cite online sources as part of respecting digital ownership needs to be a focus of teaching effective digital citizenship in the intermediate grades.

Students in the senior division should begin to evolve their online social activity into more of a career oriented focus.  This would continue to take the form of students working to develop their online presence and establish a positive digital footprint.   An important step in accomplishing this, would involve the creation and development of a Personal Learning Network.  Students could direct their online energy towards what they are passionate about and what they would like to do for the rest of their lives and seek to make connections with experts in that particular field to learn from them and interact with them.  This would serve to inspire and motivate them as well as move them towards fully becoming an active and productive digital citizen.

Preventing Plagiarism

It seems to be the mind-set of many students in this generation that things should be easily accessible and can be obtained for self-use with the simple click of a button.  Look at what they have grown up with music file sharing, copy and pasting, downloading YouTube videos, sending photos back and forth without ever acknowledging ownership.  Maybe this is part of the perception of the Internet by the digital generation that information is authorless.  A study of 20,000 first-year post-secondary students found that nearly three-quarters (73%) admitted to committing acts of academic dishonesty on written work while in high school (Source URL:  http://www.ccl-cca.ca/ccl/Newsroom/Releases/20100706AcademicDishonesty.html)  Addressing this disconnect that exist by the Internet age is an important battle for our schools in order to defend the concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality.

One source of plagiarism that I have witnessed in my school doesn't come from the lazy kid who is looking for an easy solution to getting that large research paper completed.  The students who seems to be getting caught more and more for plagiarizing in their senior years of high school are the academically conscious, high-achieving ones.  The school that I work at is regarded as one of the more academically oriented schools in the area.  The pursuit for high marks is quite competitive.  Many students have personal tutors, not because they are struggling to met a 70% entrance requirement, but rather to maintain their averages in the 90's and earn academic scholarships.  The kind of student that I find is plagiarizing more and more are the ones who put an enormous amount of pressure on themselves to earn high marks, and are overloaded with work, completely stressed about timelines and are struggling to keep their straight A average.  They know what plagiarism is and understand the consequences, but when they weight that against their perception of not getting accepted into the University program of their choice, the moral argument for not plagiarizing doesn't stand a chance.  

 (Source:  Google Images - Users Rights:  Free to Use and Share)

Preventing plagiarism has been quite successful in my department for the past several years.  Being a math teacher, I must admit I encounter cheating on tests and quizzes, more often than plagiarism on essays and reports.  However, one course that I teach called Grade 12 Data Management has a big report component attached to it, worth 25% of the year.  The report requires the student to perform at statistical study on a topic of their choice that is of a statistical nature.  For example students have done studies on "The Correlation of Holding a Part Time Job and Academic Performance" or "How Does Caffeine Consumption by Students Affect Grades?".  The students then have to gather data from fellow students in the school using surveys,  then organize the data, display the data, analyze the data and then draw conclusions from the data and report their findings.  It does require a large investment time and hard work on the part of the students and sometimes students seek to find short-cuts.  

The most common source of plagiarism for this course occurs when students try to acquire a previous years report from a friend who took the course in the past.  Plagiarism was a very big problem for the teachers of this course until a web site called Turn-it-in.com came on the scene around 2005.  Turn-it-in.com provides software to discourage plagiarism.  Students are required to submit their reports to the website by uploading them under the schools account.  The website then creates a database of all submitted reports.  The teacher can then view what percentage of each report is considered "plagiarized".  Ever report no matter how original will receive a "plagiarized" score of about 8% to 14%, due to the unavoidable duplications of such things as stating the mean, median and mode of a set of data, or giving the rules to a game such as badminton, which will be found on the Internet hundreds of times.  Teacher are able to chick on a report and the software displays the student's report and highlights and sections of the text that are plagiarized and provides the name of the sources.  Sometimes the source is a article or study on the Internet, or sometimes it is a report submitted to our ever accumulating database  on Turn-it-in.com several years earlier.  From my experience, just the threat of having to submit the report to a anti-plagiarism website is enough to convince many students that plagiarism isn't worth it.  However, every year students think they can "beat the system" or they leave the assignment to the last minute and opt to plagiarize.  We sometimes encounter plagiarism scores of 40% or more, up to the all-time record at or school of 89% plagiarized.  Once the teacher has established that the student has plagiarized, they are called in to view what the software has highlighted and after a conversation about their actions and a admission of guilt, they are told they will receive a mark of zero for the report.    It took about 4 years for our database to build up enough past reports so that the majority of the reports that potential cheaters were acquiring were already in the database.  In the end this particular anti-plagiarism software really prevents plagiarism and has served our purpose well. 

I strongly believe that it is often the mere threat of repercussions towards plagiarism that will deter students.  Thus it is important for schools and classroom teachers to make it very clear to the students that an Academic Dishonesty policy is in place and outline exactly what form of punishment will be handed out for any offenders of this policy.  A school that is united and who take a very serious position towards preventing plagiarism will be successful.  Students tend to cheat only when they think they can get away with it.

Creative Commons Licensing

While sitting in a movie cinema, waiting for the movie to begin, we have all seen the advertisement that reminds us that downloading music is stealing.  The owner of this video-advertisement has set the permissions of this video to "share" and has made available the embed code for inserting it into blogs, websites, etc..  So here it is:

     (Source:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxtoaTF9hu8)

With the widespread downloading of music and movies form the Internet, it is apparent that most people don't know or understand copyright or choose to ignore it.  Many people are not aware of the fact that whenever you create something, a song, a poem, a piece of art or a story, you automatically own an All Rights Reserved Copyright to that piece of creativity.  This protects your creativity to uses you don't consent to.  However, this isn't always what the author of the piece of creativity had intended when they created it.  Maybe the creator intended to share their work with the world.  What better way is there to get your work noticed than if it can be freely shared with millions and millions of people on the web? 

I picture a young musical band starting up with a few songs to their credit, and how they would love to have DJ's around the world using their songs so they could get signed by a big recording studio.  If the music was good, this would expose their music to a very large audience in a short amount of time.  Then, if the band were to put a video on YouTube, the millions of i-Pod and i-Phone owners could download that video onto their iTube app and awareness of the song by word-of-mouth could spread exponentially.  I believe this is similar to the success story of the South Korean musician Psy, and his song that went viral on YouTube, titled: "Gangnam Style".  Or consider medical researchers who would like to share their work with the medical community in an attempt to find a cure for a disease, such as cancer.  

Sometimes full copyright is too restrictive and so a non-profit organization was formed in 2001, to help make creative work available for others to build upon legally and to share (Creative Commons).  The organization is called Creative Commons, which will provide free licenses to allow the creator to lighten the restrictions of a full copyright.

(Source URL: http://www.dent.umich.edu/site/copyright)

A Creative Commons license gives the creator the opportunity to decide which rights of a full copyright that they would like to waive.  It would allow a photographer to share his/her photos with people to use, but not allow companies to sell them.  It would give the upstart music band a chance to allow their songs to be used and remixed, royalty-free. A Creative Commons license would allow me to share this blog and have readers re-publish it as long as they give me credit.

To help me better understand the process of obtaining a free Creative Commons license I decided to apply for one to refine the rights reserved and the rights I am able to waive under the Creative Commons agreement. 

Here is what the application looked like:

This is what the license looks like that I received:


Information & Computer Technology Blog by James Campbell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.



It basically allows people to use the content of this blog and give appropriate credit for its use.  The "appropriate credit" piece is represented by the person symbol of the license.  The crossed out dollar sign indicates that the content of this blog cannot be used for commercial purposes.  Finally, the equals sign symbol indicates that no derivatives are permitted.  This means that if the material is remixed, transformed, or build upon the user may not distribute the modified material. 


The process was easy and only took about a minute.  By including the license on my blog it now lets visitors know what rights are reserved and what rights are waived for my work.  If you want to apply for your own Creative Commons license just visit:

http://creativecommons.org/choose/

The most permissive of the Creative Commons licenses is called a Free Cultural Works license and is represented by the following asterisk symbol:

                        (Source URL: http://creativecommons.org/freeworks)

It signifies that the work can be used, shared, and remixed by others (Creative Commons).

Digital Footprint

As a parent of a young teenage girl, I find myself very cautious with regards to protecting her identity online.  I would try my best to slow her migration into the cyber universe as much as possible.  A big reason for my over-protective tendency is due to a scary story my colleague shared with me regarding her daughter and the teen social media site Instagram.  She was thirteen years old and had been quite active socializing with friends using her Instagram account.  One day a friend informed her that she tried visiting her Instagram page only to find her page contained inappropriate photos, rude images, and nasty insults directed at friends and teachers, all apparently posted to my colleague's daughter.  She was horrified.  It turns out, her original page still existed but a second one had been created using a shortened version of her name.  Not knowing what to do, she did the only thing that made sense and that was to tell her parents.  My colleague phoned the police who ordered Instagram to take down the postings and provide information on who had done this.  It turns out it was a couple of boys in her school and that they were just doing it as a joke.  

My daughter was only ten at the time this Instagram nightmare took place.  I was somewhat relieved that I wouldn't have to live this Internet nightmare for a few years, but I swore I would protect my daughter by keeping her exposure to social networking to a minimum.  

She is now a teenager and I am really feeling the pressure of a young teen's unyielding need to communicate with her friends via the Internet.    I had no issue with texting and emailing friends.  It was posting private information on a public forum that I objected to.  She promised she would be careful and she claimed all her friends were given permission from their parents.  At the time, I was taking Part I of Information and Computer Technology in Instruction, and decided to ask my instructor for his opinion.  He was the technology consultant for the Toronto Catholic District School Board and I knew he would be well aware of the potential danger in what my daughter wanted to do online.  I was stunned when he gave me his answer.  Not only did he think it was a good thing for my daughter to be doing, he actually told me she needed to start doing it at her age.  He told me it was important for her to begin creating an online presence (in a positive way).  He believed that today's student must work hard to establish their digital footprint during their years in school.  This would act as an online resume for potential employment in the future.  He believes that traditional paper resumes will no longer exist, and that employers will evaluate a person's suitability for a job from the Internet, based on that person's digital footprint.  I totally had to rethink the way I regarded the Internet as a portal for invading my children's privacy, and look at it as a way for them to establish an online identity.  

(Source URL:<http://careerrocketeer.com/2011/07/is-your-digital-footprint-squashing-your-reputation.html>)


It reminds me about what Will Richardson was talking about in his presentation on Personal Learning Networks.  He gave an example of a 17 year old student by the name of Mark Klassen, who is a cinematographer.  Mark has created his own website displaying all his work and it served as his online portfolio.  This would be a very impressive digital footprint for anyone in the film industry considering hiring Mark for a job with their film company.

I have completely changed my view of of the Internet as a dangerous invasion of privacy.  Now I can understand the value in allowing my daughter to gain the early experience of establishing a digital footprint.  However, it has to be done properly.  For every student who is working to create a positive online presence, I am certain there are hundreds that are ruining theirs.  Teenagers, like my daughter, through uploading videos, digital images or posts on online forums are leaving a trail of potentially damaging personal information about themselves that is available for others to see. 

Digital Citizenship

In society, a good citizen is someone who conducts oneself in accordance with the rights, duties, and privileges of being an inhabitant of a region (W. Huitt, January 2005).  In cyberspace, we can define a good Digital Citizen in much the same way -  a person who conducts oneself online in accordance with the norms of appropriate, responsible behavior with regard to technology use (Dr. Mike S. Ribble).  Education is often viewed as the prerequisite to good citizenship, and this also holds true for good Digital Citizenship.  Just as children need to be taught what is acceptable conduct in society, they also must be shown what is acceptable on the Internet.  Digital Citizenship is a complex issue that needs to be introduced in age appropriate stages throughout a student's education. 

To assist educators in implementing a comprehensive strategy on promoting and developing Digital Citizenship in schools, there has been much work done in this area.  To provide a starting point and help teachers grasp the scoop of Digital Citizenship education, an author by the name of Dr. Mike Ribble has identified the 9 key themes surrounding digital citizenship, in his book, "Digital Citizenship in Schools and Raising a Digital Child".  Here is a summary of Dr. Ribble's 
9 Elements of Digital Citizenship:

1. Digital Access:  full electronic participation in society
2. Digital Commerce:  electronic buying and selling of goods
3. Digital Communication:  electronic exchange of information
4. Digital Literacy:  process of teaching and learning about technology and the use of technology
5. Digital Etiquette:  electronic standards of conduct and procedure 
6. Digital Law:  electronic responsibility for actions and deeds
7. Digital Rights & Responsibilities:  those freedoms extended to everyone in the digital world 
8. Digital Health and Wellness:  physical and psychological well-being in a digital technology world
9. Digital Security:  electronic precautions to guarantee safety 

(Source URL:  <http://digitalcitizenship.net/Nine_Elements.html>)

From an education perspective, I believe the main issues surrounding Digital Citizenship are how Internet users should manage online relationships, provide personal protection from online attacks and show accountability for posted online viewpoints and opinions. This would involve focus on cores issues such as access, behaviour, etiquette, cyberbullying, and safety.  Again, the educator has a wealth of online resources they can turn to.  One site I found out of the UK, encourages educators  to use their infographic on teacher blogs or websites.  It deals with reminding students of the Do's and Don'ts of online manner.

(Source URL:  <http://www.knowthenet.org.uk/infographic/be-careful-trolling-can-happen-anyone>)

The message is effective and real:  all Internet users have a personal accountability for how he or she applies technology to digital relationships, activities and personal goals.

Ministry Provided Digital Resources

It has been my experience that most teachers are not aware of the available resources that the Ministry of Education provides for teachers and students.  I didn't take advantage of these resources until I was introduced them after taking Part 1 of the Integration of Information and Computer Technology in Instruction course.  One could spend hours sifting through all of the available resources offered to educators in Ontario.  In this blog entry I am going to highlight three of the resources I have found most valuable to me in my teaching.

OERB

(Ontario Educational Resource Bank)

OERB offers free digital learning resources to teachers and students, for K to 12.  This includes units, lesson plans, activities, and interactive learning resources.

The search features are really well done.  You can select a specific grade, course and strand.  I used OERB to locate math resources on parabolas and was able to find a really good activity done in Microsoft Word that allows students to investigate a rollercoaster at Canada's Wonderland.  From superimposed images of the Behemoth on a grid, students determine the equation of the parabola that would represent the track for one of the hills of the ride.  Students really enjoyed the activity and it gave me and an idea about a great field trip to Wonderland for a grade 10 math class where parabolas are introduced or in Calculus and Vectors when students study derivatives and rates of change.

 

To give you an idea of the sheer amount of resources available on the OERB site, I did a search of a topic to see the number of resources found.  The topic was "War in Europe" and there were 161 items found.  Many of which were PDF's, Word documents, videos, and interactive maps.  A wealth of resources for any teacher putting together a history unit on World War 1 or 2 or the Cold War.  One interactive map that I particularly enjoyed was one on the Cold War.  The link is attached below.

The Cold War

Edugains

Edugains is another site that contains ministry developed resources.  Once on the site there are links to many resources for classroom educators.

One of my favourite teaching resources can be found in the mathematics link.  It is called CLIPS and it is a interactive math resource for all grades.  Students can work on the activities independently in a computer lab or as a class with volunteers taking turns.  The students love to come up to the SMARTBOARD and take part in the games and other activities.

 

I really find it effective to incorporate the CLIPS resources when I am introducing the concept of trigonometric functions to my grade 11 students.  This is a great interactive activity where the students are presented with a Ferris Wheel ride that has changing conditions and students must identify these changing conditions as transformations of periodic functions in context.  For example students are asked to decide if increasing the speed of the Ferris Wheel will change the graph of the trigonometric function.  Then they are asked specifically which transformation has taken place.  It is a great way for students to learn these difficult concepts, and they all enjoy it. I highly recommend it.

EQAO

Having taught grade 9 applied mathematics, which is an EQAO testing year, I have really appreciated the resources that the EQAO websites has made available to both teachers and parents.  Grade 9 applied mathematics has been an area where students are notorious for struggling to succeed on the EQAO assessment.  Leading up to the test I would incorporate a daily routine of reviewing key concepts and providing students with the opportunity to practice the skills and concepts they would be tested on.  I found it effective to visit the EQAO site and locate pasts tests to gather good questions to use in this review process.  The website is quite extensive, with all years and winter versus spring tests available in PDF format.

Questions were in the format students would see on the actual test, such as multiple choice or open response questions.  I would spend the first 10 to 15 minutes of each class on this review.  Students enjoyed the challenge of testing themselves on actual EQAO questions, and they appreciated that when they weren't able to answer some of the questions, we would go through and see how to apply what they had learned in class to be successful.  This built up their confidence and reduced the fear associated with the mystery of the whole process.  

One other EQAO resource that I know parents of students in Ontario take advantage of when moving to a new area, is the ability to access the EQAO tests results by school or board.  We may disagree whether or not this data will accurately identify "good" schools, but many parents use it because it may be all they have.  Parents feel it provides them with some information regarding their perceived chances of success for their child.

Feb. 10 2014 - Personal Learning Networks

To be perfectly honest, I had never heard of PLN's before taking this course.  I wondered if it was something I already did or had in place but I just didn't know it by this name.  Well as it turns out I discovered, quite sadly, I do not have a Personal Learning Network.  I suppose, if I count my colleagues in my Math Department at my school and other math teachers in my School Board who I stay in contact through emails and professional conversations, I do have a sort of low-tech Personal Learning Network.  However, I am afraid I do not have an elaborate online learning network. 

After reading the various articles and watching the many Youtube videos on Personal Learning Networks, I now have a much clearer understanding of what a Personal Learning Networks actually consists of.  From my understanding a Personal Learning Network is a virtual network set up online that connects an individual with a particular interest, to people with similar interests, and to many other sources of knowledge on the web, such as experts in a particular field, media sources providing articles or videos on the desired area of interest.    A Personal Learning Network can bring people together to brainstorm ideas, exchange knowledge, discuss activities, solve problems, deliver advice and stimulate professional growth.  The real power of the PLN is that the connections to people within the network, all have connections of their own.  This will grow the connections of an individual's PLN exponentially.  The amount of knowledge that a individual with a well connected Personal Learning Network would be staggering and would draw from sources all over the planet.  This would be a great exercise for my grade 11 Functions class, who study Exponential Functions.  Below is an illustration of how quickly the connections of a PLN would grow with each person in the network having only 5 connections each:

 

It is easy to see that the network connections can grow very rapidly in a hurry.   Here is an example of an elaborate and well connected Personal Learning Network:

(Source URL:   www.onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/how-to-create-a-robust-and-meaningful-personal-learning-network-pln/)

For somebody who doesn't have a Personal Learning Network this is very intimidating. However, it doesn't have to be this complex.  I found a good website providing tips for building your Personal Learning Network.  The web site is http://www.inspiration.com/blog/2011/03/quick-lesson-tips-for-building-your-pln/.  They also provided a good starting model for how to set up a Personal Learning Network that nicely illustrates the framework of a strong PLN:

(Source URL:   www.inspiration.com/blog/2011/03/quick-lesson-tips-for-building-your-pln/)

Regardless of the size of a Personal Learning Network, it is important to filter the enormous amount of information available on the web and to archive that relevant information into collections locally.  One way I discovered to do this effectively is using technology to support your PLN.  I found two really good examples of media technologies that filter  the "noise" of the web.  They are Google  Alerts and Hootsuite:

Google Alerts   A tool for monitoring the web to identify information of interest.   Within your Google account, you set up a search query and Google Alerts are emailed to you informing you of the latest  results (news, web, etc. based on your query.  It is a "set it and forget it" tool.

Hootsuite   A third party  application for filtering Twitter feeds.  It manages your Twitter streams into columns as shown in the image below.  The Home Feed column  is the basic Twitter stream of who you follow on a regular basis.  The Mentions column are the people following you.  The next column, Direct Message are the Tweets directed to you.  There is a Sent Tweets column.  You can also set up more columns containing hashtags which allows anyone in the world to participate in a conversation related to a topic of interest.  The user then sets refresh frequencies to allow for the filtering of all of the millions of Tweets that are out there.

 (Source URL:  www.ccimtechsupport.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/304/69/manage-your-social-media-networks-on-one-easy-platform)

After watching many videos on Personal Learning Networks the one I enjoyed the most was Will Richardson's key note address at the University of Indiana.   When I first came across it I noticed it was quite long (1 hour) and thought I would just watch part of it.  However, the speaker was so entertaining and his information very interesting that I couldn't turn it off and watched the entire video in one sitting.  If you can spare some time you should really check it out.  I included the video clip below.  You won't be disappointed. 

(Source URL:    www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKnRbhtyjcQ)