edtechs info blog – Page 2 – Resources for parents with children at home, compiled by Mandy Honeyman MA FHEA

Spring cleaning social media accounts

It’s been a long time since I first stood up at an INSET day and promoted the idea to colleagues that teachers should maintain separate social media accounts. The main purpose remains keeping one’s professional interests separate from one’s personal ones and to maintain different privacy settings for these. Worst case scenarios have been reports of teachers refused jobs because of FB posts or friending students – also FB. Some people might find it easy to switch privacy settings as they go and to “just say no” to friendship requests, but those pesky privacy settings are very easy to ignore.

For several years I experimented with different configurations in order to try to show the way. It was pretty simple really, one just needs different email addresses. However, over the course of a couple of job changes, a country change, a career change, multiple accounts on Twitter, Facebook (FB) and Google, and eight years later things had got a little messy. This post describes some of the mistakes I made along the way, lots you may already have worked through but I hope some lessons might be useful and save you time.

FACEBOOK

In the summer of 2012, when I stopped teaching at secondary level, I found myself with four different FB accounts:

For friends
For work
For use in the classroom with children aged 12+ for teaching
For the school’s page

The first two weren’t an issue and I kept these going and still have them, more of this later. The third was easy, I just deleted the account, but the fourth was annoying because it involved creating a new id, including an email address within the college’s domain.

Lesson One: Create a fictitious ID within the work domain from the start which can be passed between whoever is or becomes responsible for social media. The main problem is that FB bans certain words from user names like “Web Master” and tries to maintain that all FB users are authentic identities. It’s a toss-up between seeing this as an opportunity to get creative or just being an irritating waste of time.

TWITTER

I started a Twitter account in 2009 but really got going with it in 2010. Mostly work related stuff. But by 2015 I ended up with another four accounts – three of which remain:

Quite a while ago I linked my Twitter account to FB; I felt that it was a great way to keep my work FB timeline active, though I also have a feeling that some of my work friends might hide those automated posts when I am in a particularly fervent tweeting period, like during conferences. I also created an automated publication linked to Twitter which collected various stories and collated them together. This gained me lots of new followers and is even pretty successful in finding stories that I am interested in myself.

While establishing edtechsInfo I changed my Twitter account to match. This meant I could keep all my followers and Twitter history intact. This made sense to me as this account was always primarily about work and edtech anyway. But I also wanted all my email accounts to be matched to the right Twitter accounts – makes sense right? This was more complicated because I had an extra account using one of my main email addresses. Nevertheless, after quite a bit of massaging of account settings in Twitter, I achieved my streamlined objective.

Lesson Two: Having created a FB page linked to my work FB account for edtechsInfo, I switched my Twitter account link to auto post to that page, however and I also wanted @MandyHoneyman to post automatically to my work FB timeline. Twitter doesn’t allow two separate accounts to link to the same FB account. The workaround for this was to use an old IFTTT account. So now, theoretically, I can post general work stuff via Twitter to FB timeline and edtech specific stuff to the edtechsInfo FB page. This is a new experiment so we will see how well that works in time.

GOOGLE

None of this would be possible without multiple email addresses and now I am self-employed I am only using Gmail. But with multiple Gmail accounts come multiple Google IDs and so to my final social media playpen – Google Plus. I don’t use G+ that much… yet and most of my activity is on my very old (and kind of inappropriate) email address. But I still have tried to separate out my IDs – again based on work, edtechsInfo and play. Most important is to know that YouTube channels are also based on G+ IDs. So, for example, edtechsInfo’s G+ presence is firmly attached to edtechsInfo’s YouTube channel.

Lesson Three: Moving video around is boring and time consuming. There is, unfortunately, no way I can find to avoid having to download videos from one YouTube account and then upload to another in order to switch videos to different channels. If anyone knows of an easier way, please share.

Everything I am I owe to learning touch-typing

Last night I met a middle school technology teacher and I asked her what her students learnt in class. She shocked me by replying “keyboarding”. The heightened level of shock may have been due to the St Patrick’s Day drinking that preceded my question but I had expected her to say digital literacy, e-safety, perhaps a little programming, or worst case scenario, that her students learnt how to use different software packages, perhaps Google Apps or Microsoft Office. The last thing I expected to hear was “keyboarding”.

My shock turned to frustration on behalf of her kids. How boring to be drilling through qwerty keyboard exercises – exercises that haven’t significantly changed since I learnt to type in 1976! How can these kids possibly be engaged! They must be using games like tux-typing (open source option) or other games like 2Type (I first tried this out in 2005), or maybe they have gone all out and bought TTRS ? My new tech teacher friend (NTTF) responded that the problem with typing games are that the kids get too into trying to achieve success in the game and forget that they are aiming to “master the home keys”, though she did mention Dance Mat, from the BBC and, ironically, just one small part of its great looking KS2 (grades 2-6) Computer Science and ICT course.

My NTTF obviously uses games sometimes but mainly relies on repetition whilst walking around the class correcting posture and fingering errors. Horrendous memories flooded back of drilling on a manual keyboard belonging to a big black monster object which looked similar to this:

From http://clickthing.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/unsound.html

Aaaa, ssss, dddd, ffff, asdf, asdf, qaz, wsx, edc, rfv tgb – oh the joy of graduating to “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. If I can’t type that phrase now quickly and comfortably on a new keyboard then that keyboard just ain’t good enough.

But this morning, when the effects of the St Patrick’s day Guinness had worn off, I questioned my knee-jerk response to my NTTF. After all it was only 10 years ago that I visited my own secondary school’s feeder primary schools in the UK strongly recommending that they use some of their ICT teaching time with their years 5 and 6 to teaching typing skills. My argument was that students who were able to touch type were more confident on computers in KS3 (grades 7-9) and finding it easier, and much faster, to produce the coursework requirements for GCSEs (grades 10/11) – and in the KS3 ICT curriculum at secondary school there was no space for teaching typing skills (there still isn’t).

Fom my own history – if I hadn’t done those drills back in 1976, I would never have become a typesetter, would never have got a job at The Independent newspaper, would never have learned web development, would never have become a teacher, would never have worked at the Open University and certainly wouldn’t be writing this!

Do I think children need to be able to touch type on a qwerty keyboard? Yes. Do I think they are learning a skill they will use for the rest of their lives? Probably. Could they learn a different keyboard layout, i.e. Dvorak or alphabetic, and also type faster? Possibly. Will we ever know? Not any time soon. For fun do check out the Open Steno Project – after all these guys are the very fastest typists on earth.

So on that basis, I think that parents need to help their kids learn touch typing, starting on small keyboards for small hands. Some interesting articles worth reading about this are listed below. But do I think middle schools should spend 90 hours of kids time learning to touch type — at the expense of some other very important digital literacy subject matter? No. Make it homework, make it a lunchtime club, make it a valued skill? Yes.

typing certificate — Health Warning – difficult application for anyone with Dyslexia – letters swim across the screen.

Teaching Keyboarding: More Than Just Typing by Linda Star, Education World
Elementary students learn keyboard typing ahead of new Common Core tests by Lyndsey Layton, The Washington Post

#altc winter conference 2015

All the links from my presentation at #altc, given today

The background story went more like this though….

3.45am huge crashing sound, monsoon rain and howling gale…. really scary…. followed by

3.55am BLACKOUT …. phoned it in (on 1 bar phone access) …. went back to bed…. lay there….

4.35 am decided to drive to Starbucks, could still get there by 5.30am if I moved it…..

5.05 on my way out the door, the leccy flickered back on…..

5.07 and off….

5.20ish and on…..on…. phew… omg… I needed coffee so bad!

pouring coffee — animated coffee (lost attribution, so sorry!)

5.45am (have faffed around with mic for 10 minutes – I h8 windows 8)

6am Gave presentation , lots of people, not a lot of questions.

6.30am phew its over….. another cup of coffee

6.45am some really useful comments on my draft paper (see link above)

Thanks #altc… that was fun!

Yet another blog

But this one will be interesting because it is part of a much bigger federated wiki’s (federated library ) project.

Check out short posts here.

Following on from this post yesterday, which was just for fun:

Student achievement dashboard borrowed from #WoW idea from @maha4learning during @VConnecting at #EDU15 pic.twitter.com/5ixd0kKsAc

— Mandy Honeyman (@edtechsInfo) October 29, 2015

I wondered what it might really look like if mashed up with JISC’s student learning app… And this is the result:

software to use for video feedback (assessment)

This goes alongside my paper about using video feedback for assessment with students. This is the correct link.

Evaluating software we can use to give video feedback to students:

edtech timeline

Using the rather nice tiki-toki, I produced this edtech timeline a couple of years ago. I remembered it today when I was trying to disprove the idea that edtech stalled in 2008. I failed.

#dlrn – indie edtech – punk

There’s a bit of a jam going on, interpreting the riffs created by Jim Groom and Adam Croom (is the poetry why these guys got together in the first place? I’d like to think that.) at #dlrn. Doug Belshaw, Greg McVerry and several followers of #dlrn15 and #indieedtech joining in.

It’s Sunday here, raining steadily outside so instead of that hike I’d promised myself I have been inspired by Adam to watch the BBC’s Music for Misfits: the Story of Indie in three parts. It’s been helpful, partly because I was able to get to grips with my niggling discomfort with Adam’s USA centric presentation of Indie music; it turns out the UK and USA stories are very different. Jim and punk, well that’s another story – punk was all about DIY – fashion, art, even enterprise which eventually killed it. So these guys were conflating edupunk and indieedtech and all I kept coming back to was the phrase “long tail of edtech” and even Minds On Fire (Seeley Brown and Adler 2008). No mistake, I loved the #dlrn15 presentation and was carried away by their brilliant and fun analogies, but I was wondering where all the other genres, the little guys, fit in, you know, like _____ (insert own preferred genre) jazz?

So one of the things that the BBC programme made clear about the 80s indie scene in the UK was that it was funded, for distribution purposes, by the huge companies – EMI – Heavenly, Sony – Creation. The Indie scene changed and is still changing, but we still need people to find the quality. Is this is a bit like VC or HE funding the thinkers and dreamers Mike Caulfield mentioned during the final #dlrn session? I had forgotten that entrepreneurial part of the tale, instead remembering the earlier 70s indie story as being one of self-publishing and distribution (Zoo Records), which did resonate more closely with Jim and Adam’s narrative.

I was reminding myself about edupunk and it became clearer why Mike Caulfield stated that edtech was stuck in 2008; possibly the statement that kicked me in the gut harder than any other during #dlrn. Jim first coined edupunk in 2008, the Minds on Fire article was published in 2008, MOOCs erupted 2008, but does that really mean that there have been no new edtech ideas, or is it something else, what else is Mike thinking of? I resisted Mike’s statement which has kept echoing around my brain; selfishly personal because I don’t want to feel that now, when I finally have some time and space to think, write, connect about edtech rather than adopt, teach and fight for it, there isn’t anything new to think about. Really? No, I just don’t and will not accept that. It’s why I keep listening out for new voices in music – I don’t care about the big genres, any genre will do, just let me hear something that moves me or gets me moving. Like 3 For Silver (genre = anti-Americana), playing at the harvest festival in Camas a couple of weeks ago. First I saw the bass… DIY’d out of a galvanised wash tub and then I heard the guy sing, this band were so brilliant even my metal head partner (Metallica fan) was dancing rather than head-banging. But each to their own, you might hate the sound, who knows.

Perhaps the big idea side of edtech has slowed down (too much money embedded in the body not enough in the long tail), but perhaps it just means we now have to play the music; we have to use the ideas and technologies to educate, to reach the promise that many of us embraced edtech for in the first place. To fund the long tail with our time and energy. To turn our thinking onto the pedagogy, on using the tech, improving the tech, in order to spread education, openly beyond the cultural silos of the English-speaking nations, so abundantly represented at #dlrn.

An evaluation of the use of screencasting and video for assessment feedback in online higher education

1st Draft Video Feedback Paper

This is the first draft re-write of a paper I wrote last year. My intention is to present this within the context an evaluation of specific software and applications that teachers can use for making screencasts and videos of feedback for their students.