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Researcher dispels myths about cyberbullying

Myth or Fact?

  • There is more online bullying than in-person bullying
  • Cyberbullying is more distressing because it follows you home and is on all your digital devices
  • Cyberbullying is getting worse
  • Teen suicide is a growing epidemic due to cyberbullying and the dangers of the Internet

According to Michele Ybarra, president of the Center for Innovative Public Health and a leading researcher on youth risk, these are ALL MYTHS.

Read the real facts in this article and radio interview by Larry Magid of Safekids.com.

Sylvia

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Student Voices at SETDA Leadership Summit

Parker High School  from the Janesville School District in Wisconsin was  highlighted at the Student Voices Luncheon at the SETDA Leadership Summit on October 15, 2012 in Washington, DC.

During the luncheon, school/district administrators, teachers and a diverse group of students from Parker HS explained and demonstrated how teaching and learning have been transformed with technology, how this meets the needs of each student, and creates inclusion through the use of UDL and assistive technology. Selected from entries from across the United States, the Janesville nomination showcased how young people and educators working together can create more and better opportunities for all.


Adobe Flash is required.

Click here to link to the video if you can’t see it embedded above.

Presenters

  • Robert Getka, Junior, George S. Parker High School
  • Colin Murdy, Senior, George S. Parker High School
  • Correy Winke, Junior, George S. Parker High School
  • Christopher Laue, Principal, George S. Parker High School
  • Kathy White, Assistive Technology Specialist, Janesville School District
  • Introduction: Stuart Ciske, Education Consultant, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction

The Student Voices Luncheon at the State Educational Technology Directors Association’s (SETDA) Leadership Summit was an opportunity for state and national education leaders to learn directly from students about the positive impact technology has on teaching and learning. I hope they were listening!

Be sure you listen to the wide variety of ways these students see technology as imperative for their learning.

Sylvia

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Student Techs Have Their Heads in the Cloud

From THE Journal: There is a positive environmental impact in bypassing printed materials, but the time savings and increased communication are what really makes the cloud indispensable for educators as well as students, according to Debbie Kovesdy, a media specialist and GenYES advisor at Shadow Mountain High School in Phoenix.

Kovesdy teaches three technology classes a day using the GenYES curriculum. She uses the cloud to teach and she expects her students to be cloud-savvy users when it comes to doing their work.

“I teach entirely from a website. ‘Handouts’ are accessed on this site,” she said. “I simply put a short link on their assignment calendar (or on the [message] board if the day is on the fly), and kids access the site and do the assignment.”

Purchase Project
Purchase Project

Recently, Kovesdy was looking at buying several dozen new tablets for her campus, but hadn’t decided on which ones. In the end, she decided to pass the task of figuring out the most cost-effective solution on to her students. The lesson, called Purchase Project, was completed digitally and turned in via the shared Google Drive. Students researched devices, computing power, and costs and then filed a report. A filter sent the completed assignments to Kovesdy’s document folder. After she graded them, she sent them back to the students via their private e-mail account, also created and controlled by the school via the Google-based Website.

Great ideas!
Sylvia

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New Jersey students build crowdsourced map to help find open gas stations

From the Huffington Post – The millions out of power in areas affected by Superstorm Sandy have been struggling to find gas stations still open with resources. But one group of high school students in New Jersey have — overnight — devised a solution.

Members of IMSOCIO at Franklin High School gathered Wednesday night to launch a crowdsourced map that locates open gas stations in the New York-New Jersey area. Stations are identified by green, red or yellow pins — each representing an open, sold out or charging station.

The map has now identified nearly 100 stations in the area, and has garnered attention from local news stations — so much so that the site crashed for a few hours Thursday afternoon due to high traffic. Dayana Bustamante graduated from Franklin High this May and now attends Raritan Valley Community College in Branchburg, N.J. She remains active in IMSOCIO — short for Scholars Organizing Culturally Innovative Opportunities — and has been the most vocal online advocate of the group’s latest mapping initiative.

“I’m a bit shocked, I didn’t think it’d be such a big hit,” Bustamante told The Huffington Post Thursday afternoon. “We started this up last night, we just wanted to help. It was a small idea, I personally needed gas, we all needed gas. So we started out with five points and just had more friends and high school students get involved.”

The group started as a summer program for underprivileged students, particularly those of Latino backgrounds, to keep them academically engaged during school off-months, IMSOCIO organizer Wansoo Im says. The Rutgers University adjunct professor leads the teens in planning projects that map the community.

“This is a service learning project, by using community mapping students can use technology to serve the community,” Im told HuffPost. In the past, IMSOCIO members have created maps that, for example, chart out safe routes to school.

Read the rest of the article…

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Dennis Harper – 5 Things I’ve Learned

Generation YES founder and CEO Dennis Harper is profiled in the latest post on 5 Things I’ve Learned, a collection of personal reflections from education leaders devoted to improving the fortunes of others through learning.

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Here’s #1: Kids are here now.

Yes, kids are our future but they are also here now. For the most part, schools ignore what students can do now. Take the case of three fourteen year olds: Jordan Romero scaled Mt. Everest and the highest peak on each continent, Alexander the Great ruled over the largest empire in history, and Anne Frank wrote a diary that has sold 30 million copies. Schools are full of students with similar capabilities but they are held back by “standardized” tests and “common” core. Schools that trust and empower students are the ones that will make all our futures better.

Read all five things from Dennis!

Sylvia

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In the face of disaster…

Last week many US and Caribbean schools, including some of our own Generation YES schools were closed while people deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Our thoughts are with you at this time, and we hope that things get back to normal as quickly as possible.

In times of crisis, young people need facts of course (see Hurricane Sandy resources) and they need reassurance that the world is a good place with people who care. As schools resume, it’s never more important for educators to first be caregivers.

Mr. Rogers told stories about his own mother who would point out the helpful neighbors who appear when bad things happen. Volunteers, firefighters, doctors, utility workers – most people are helpful and generous. Disasters like this provide opportunities to find those people and learn about what they do or to even pitch in yourself.

But even more so for those directly affected, young people need to talk about their experiences and share them with others. The digital world provides new avenues for these kinds of collaboration like this one: The Natural Disaster Youth Summit Forum 2013 hosted by iEARN.

This is a year-long event with the theme: Climate Change and Disaster Reduction – timely, eh? Events, forums, sharing, activities and much more are planned for the entire year.

Another idea is to create your own digital space for student sharing, perhaps in collaboration with other educators near or far.

Read about Quakestories, a collaborative writing project for students to share their stories after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March 2011.

Kim Coffino, one of the project organizers writes, “Quakestories is a collaborative project connecting several international schools in Japan to collect and share student-created works (writing, multimedia, visual arts) about their experiences during and after the earthquake. First, all student-created works will be posted on a central website. Then, once we have a diverse collection of student work, we will select certain pieces to be published in both a paper and electronic book, with the proceeds of both going towards Tohoko relief (to help those most directly affected by the tsunami).”

And finally, don’t forget the power of play. Gerald Jones, cartoonist and author of Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, says “When something troubles children, they have to play with it until it feels safer.”

Smashing, crashing, and playing at being a monster or the super-hero who saves the day can help kids whose lives have been smashed and crashed.

Be safe –

Sylvia

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Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves

“Earlier this year, OLPC [One Laptop Per Child] workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.” – MIT Technology Review

It’s an educational experiment that could impact billions of children around the world. Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the One Laptop Per Child program, says there are 100 million six-year-olds with NO access to school. Poor and profoundly isolated, many of these children not only do not have access to school, but have no access to ANY reading material.

So what can we learn from this experiment?
Lots. It harkens back to Sugata Mitra’s Hole in the Wall experiments on Minimally Invasive Education (my blog post about that here). We can learn that unstructured learning is indeed a powerful force, and that classroom and curriculum design need to be careful to stay out of the way of a child’s natural desire to learn.

What can’t we learn from this experiment?
Lots as well. Much will be made about how this “proves” that teachers aren’t necessary, or that computers can replace teachers. Alternately, we will read that it’s a dead-end, that the children won’t progress beyond poking and playing, only a few kids will really stick with it, the equipment will break, or that we should send food instead. Some will say what we really need is more teachers, more professional development for those teachers, and more ministers of education to administer those programs.

But mostly what it uncovers is our own bias and inability to escape our own cultural context. We in developed countries can’t imagine what it’s like anywhere else. We can’t imagine what NO schools and no hope of every having a school looks like. We can’t imagine what the tiny seed of learning could blossom into under those conditions. We can’t imagine that even if one and only one child learned to read and was able to find information that saved her mother’s life, it would change an entire village and entire generations.

This photo is not from the same OLPC deployment as above, but is in Ehtiopia

This is about changing the paradigm of poverty and illiteracy as destiny. As Nicholas Negroponte (the founder of OLPC) says, “If they can learn to read, then they can read to learn.” This is a profoundly different stance than hoping that someday somebody will build a school there. Why do we assume that they need to be taught? They need access. That we can give them.

I find it interesting and encouraging that OLPC is moving forward in trying to address global disparity in educational opportunities. They were being criticized, unfairly, I believe, for trying to work with existing school systems in  countries like Peru. As Ben Grey points out in his post, We Need to Think Very, Very Seriously About This,

“It’s intriguing to compare the new approach OLPC is taking with the tablets to the approach they took in Peru. Reading through the reflections on the failure in Peru brings to the surface two immediate observations. The hardware/software wasn’t ready for the task. And the adults continued getting in the way.”

I agree with Ben–the adults and their entrenched concepts of the “right way” to do school get in the way. But we all have those entrenched concepts, it’s nearly impossible to stop seeing the world through me-colored glasses.

However, I do not think that OLPC is saying this is a “new” approach, implying that they are not going to work with schools any longer. It’s not even the only OLPC project going on in Ethiopia, many of which are classroom based. It’s just different. There will never be a one-size-fits-all approach to solving global problems. By the way, I do not believe that OLPC in Peru is a “failure” just because a few people are critical of parts of the operation.

Finding the appropriate path to create learning opportunities is something we all face. I believe there are two important lessons to learn here:

1) Context matters

2) Young people are better able to see things without the blinders of “we’ve always done it that way” than adults.

But – and this is a big caveat, youthful zeal and open-mindedness works best when guided by adults who care about them. The youthful ability to see the world anew, combined with the wisdom of age can revolutionize learning. That’s certainly the mission of Generation YES – Youth and Educators Succeeding.

Sylvia

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2012 election resources

The election is a national teachable moment — don’t let it go by without your students diving in!

Other lists of election 2012 resources for teaching and learning:

Sylvia

 

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Hurricane Sandy resources for the classroom

Students across the US have been listening to news about Hurricane Sandy, or perhaps even experiencing it live! There is no better way to introduce subjects than to start with students’ own experience. Here are some sites from Edutopia – Eight Classroom Resources to Help Teach About Hurricane Sandy.

Sylvia

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Call out to the network! What’s the best format for a student-run help desk resource?

OK all you smart people out there, I need your help!

I have a new resource to share about creating student-run help desks in schools, something like you find in Apple stores called Genius Bars. It’s currently in draft as a PDF of about 6,000 words The Genius Bar Goes to School. I’d love for you to to take a look at it… if you promise to help me with these questions.

In the “olden days” (like last year) I would have made it into a PDF, uploaded it to the Generation YES Free Resources website section, written a blog post or two about it, tweeted a bit, and that would be that.

But times have changed and I need to know if that’s the best I can do. There are so many new formats. There are all kinds of new things happening with sharing, remixing, repurposing that could happen around the concept of student-run help desks. There could be a shared tag, a hashtag, a number of tools like Scoop.it, wikis, etc.

So I’m thinking out loud and asking you – what’s the best way to get the most out of this document?

So – here are my current thoughts and questions. Please help me out by adding comments or challenging my assumptions.

1. Format. It’s a PDF right now, created from a Word document. The thing I like about a PDF is that it’s a compact, nice looking format. Everyone can read it, download it, share it. It prints nicely and emails easily. It’s a pretty universal format for all computers and devices.

Assumptions: I assume that people who are interested in the subject need something like a PDF to download, print out, and share with others. Is this a valid assumption?

Questions: What IS the best format? If you are an educator and you want to walk into a meeting and share this with your colleagues, what works best? Am I right to assume this scenario actually happens? If not, what would most help a person who wants to advocate for setting up a student-led help desk at their school?

Is printing important? (Because e-books don’t print easily or nicely.)

But these days are e-books the way to go no matter about printing? Which format(s)? How many different ones do I have to do?

Should I make it a Google doc? If so, should it be editable? What if I don’t like the changes people make? Do I have to worry about spam? Is a Google doc worth doing if it’s not editable?

Should I post it as HTML? As a blog post? (It’s a bit long for a single post.)

I would appreciate input on what formats are the most useful for both reading and for sharing. Because the most important thing I want to do with this document is to help people take action.

2. Community input. I would love it if there was a way people could contribute their ideas, experiences, photos, videos, or other things. How could I facilitate this? What tools, sites, etc. are best?  On the other hand, there is nothing sadder than an empty social site begging for involvement. What if people don’t want to share or need to share? I’m assuming that there is a lot of interest in this and a need to share models – is that a valid assumption?

3. Copyright, creative commons, or what? Yes that is a copyright on the document. But I’m open to changing it. Tell me why – is the copyright preventing you from doing something with this document that would really be great? Would a creative commons license be better? Which of the creative commons flavors is right for this? (I would probably choose this one: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) – but do you agree?)

4. Just one big contraint — it can’t take too much time. I’m not being lazy, but I have to be realistic about this. Yes I could make it a Kindle book, an ibook, e-book, a whole new website, a podcast, videos etc, but I need to be sure it’s worth the time and effort. Nor do I want to create a headache if I have to change something, and then have to worry about 27 different versions that have to be changed. And finally, I wish I did, but I don’t have time to do anything that involves vetting or editing other people’s content, getting permissions, or things like that.

In short, I want to do the least amount of work to create the most effective, convenient resource(s) for people who want to implement student-led help desks and I need your help to figure out what that means!

Thanks in advance…

Sylvia