Sometimes This Stuff Still Amazes Me

Just a quick post to note that I still find my own personal networked world to be pretty fascinating and amazing. Yesterday I was talking with my wife about a homework assignment Abby had in math where she needed to gather some data. So I threw together a quick Google Form, posted on my blog, and tweeted it out.

Very quickly the responses started coming in, mostly from Twitter I suspect because I doubt that many folks had seen the post at that point. (Next time I may add a question about where they found out about the survey just to confirm that.) About a day later we now have 299 responses (as of this writing) from 43 states and 18 countries (counting the U.S.). (You can see the results embedded in that post.)

Now this particular survey and this particular post are nothing earth-shattering, but it again reminds me of how different the world is from when I was growing up; how easy it is to connect with others around the world, and certainly how easy it is to gather data via Google Forms, a blog and Twitter. While I certainly still need to do a lot of thinking about how best to utilize this capability in meaningful ways, I think we all as educators need to be constantly asking ourselves the question, "What can we do now (that is relevant and meaningful for students) that we couldn't do before?"

Abby playing guitar for Grandma via Skype.

Trivia Survey for a 4th Grade Math Lesson

If you have a moment, please take this short survey (also embedded below). It should take about 2-3 minutes. It's a little contrived as you will only answer some of the questions as there are age requirements in order to manipulate the results to have a different number of responses for each question (this is going to be an intro to percents).

Feel free to take this whenever you read this, but Abby needs her results by Tuesday, March 9th. Thanks in advance.

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Results

Gotcha Day

(Note: This post is personal and a departure from the regularly scheduled content for this blog.)

Today is Gotcha Day in my house - nine years ago today we adopted our daughter Abby in China. We traveled with six other families and tonight four of them were able to come over for dinner. As I was gathering some memories this morning I tweeted out a story and a few pictures and videos, so I thought I would share them here as well. (After all, the 'P' in PLN stands for Personal, right?)

First, a then and now picture.

Then: Now:
Then the famous "red couch" picture from the White Swan Hotel (Abby is on the far right).


Then I found the amazingly Web 1.0 website we created that told the story of our trip to get Abby, I was a little surprised it was still active.

Then, just because I like to make my PLN cry, here's a link to the first iMovie I ever created, Our Trip To Get Abby (.mov, 21 MB). (Fair warning: it's a tear jerker.) For the techies out there (you know who you are), I'm pretty sure that movie was created in iMovie 2 and the camera we purchased for the trip - our first digital camera - was a Sony Mavica CD1000 (partially because the mini-CD's were the cheapest and easiest form of removable storage to take on a two-week trip to China).

Finally, here's a picture of the girls from tonight (five from our travel group plus one older sister).

Nine years ago. Hmm, nine years from now they'll be freshmen in college . . .

How Many People in Your Family?

This post is more of just an extended tweet than it is a blog post, but I thought it might be interesting to share.

My daughter had a math assignment where she was supposed to gather data on how many people were in people's families, then graph it and determine things like median, mode, range, maximum and minimum (interestingly, not the mean, although they've done that for other problems - which is probably good since median makes much more sense for this problem). Just for fun I created a quick Google Form and tweeted it out.



The only required question was "How Many People in Your Family?" with some directions on how to define that for this problem, but then I also asked (just because I was curious) two optional questions: your location and your age.

Well, that quick tweet generated 95 responses (so far). Since Abby is at the point where it's still really hands-on with the data and you generate graphs by hand (to get a better understanding of the concept), that was a little more than she needed, so she decided to just use the first thirty-two. Here are her results:










In case you're curious, here are the results for all 95 data points:

The median and the mode were both 4 and the standard deviation was 1.54.

For those of you curious about the ages of the respondents, the mean was 40.37, the median and mode were both 39, and the standard deviation was 10.96. (It might be interesting for someone to do a more randomized survey of educational tweeters to see if anything could be deduced from the results - both age and family size data.) We had responses from all over the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Thailand.

So, nothing profound here, but I just thought it was interesting in several respects. First, how many folks responded to a tweet that obviously was not going to have much benefit for/impact on them. Second, how easy it was to generate data via a tweet and a Google Form (not randomized, I realize, but still interesting). Finally, I found the age and family size of the folks who responded interesting, even if I can't draw any major conclusions from it. (Perhaps: The mostly educational twitterers who follow me and responded to this tweet are typically between the ages of 30 and 50 and have two to five people in their immediate family - not a huge surprise.)

Thanks to everyone that helped Abby with this assignment and, if you have anything more profound you can generate from this, feel free to leave it in the comments.

Please Help Abby with Her Homework

My eight-year-old, third grade daughter just began an assignment for school. Each child received a composition book to use for their �travelogue journal.� Inside was pasted this greeting:

Dear Friend,

I am a student in the 3rd grade at Renaissance Elementary School in Castle Rock, Colorado, USA. I am learning about U.S. and world geography. With your help, I can learn more about many different places. Here�s how you can help me:

1. Complete one journal entry in my attached journal by writing about the city in which you live.

2. Send a postcard from your city addressed to me at the school address below.

3. Send my journal on to a friend or relative who lives in a different region of the United States or another country.

Then there�s some additional information, a �return by� date of April 15th, 2009, and her school address. Then in the next couple of pages each student wrote a little bit about themselves, what they like to do, and about the Castle Rock area. Each student is supposed to then mail this to someone they know in a different part of the country, that person adds to the journal, then sends it on to another person.

I think this assignment is fine as far as it goes, and we mailed it off to a friend in Kentucky on Friday. But, and you�ve got to know what�s coming, I thought this assignment was ripe to have a �virtual companion� to it. So, I haven�t asked for much on this blog (well, other than changing the world), but I�d like to ask those of you who are still reading this blog to consider contributing to Abby�s travelogue wiki. There�s an explanation on the wiki itself, but here�s the basic idea:

1. Add your information to the wiki (first name, last initial, city, state/province, country).
   
   
2. Upload or link to a picture (a �digital postcard� if you will) that�s representative of your city.
   
   
3. Write a short description of your city.
   
   
4. Then, if you want, send the link to the wiki on to friends or family that you think might be willing to participate. (Note � please not �send this to everyone in your address book!� � I don�t want this to be Fischbowl-generated spam.)
   
   
5. Then, if you really want to go the extra mile, actually send a postcard to Abby at her school (pdf).

Now, I really have no idea if we�ll get five or five hundred responses, but I figured it was worth a shot (and it takes a lot less postage). Not only would you be helping Abby and her classmates learn more about the world, but also helping other students (and adults) that visit the wiki learn about the world. I think it would be especially nice if other students added to the wiki, in addition to adults, but we�ll see what happens.

Update 9-23-08: Wow! The response has been great. Thanks to everyone. That original page on the wiki has so much on it that it's becoming difficult to edit, so please add all new entries to the second page I've created. If you already have info on the first page and need to change/add to it, please email me with the changes and I'll update it (I've locked it now so that people don't accidentally try to add to it). Thanks again to everyone that's participated and, if you haven't yet, please go ahead and contribute.

Digital Native Photo Of The Day

I know many folks are not enamored anymore with the digital natives versus digital immigrants analogy, but that was the most apt description I could come up with for the photo I�ll share with you in a minute.

As many of you know, I have a seven year old daughter. Most folks assume that since she�s my daughter, and because I�m perceived to be technically adept, that she must be immersed in technology. Well, she�s not. She uses a computer some and she does have a blog that she occasionally posts to, but I would guess that she�s less technologically literate than the average seven year old. Actually, I should clarify that comment; she�s less technologically literate than the average American, middle class seven year old. She�s certainly more literate than the millions of seven year olds in the U.S. and around the world that have little or no access to technology, but that�s a topic for a different post.

But she now has a new interest in the computer because a little over a week ago her friend (also seven) introduced her to Webkinz and my daughter decided to spend some of her savings to purchase a Webkinz (in her case, a black lab she named Jack). If you aren�t familiar with Webkinz, the 20-second description is that you purchase a stuffed animal, but you also go online and virtually take care of your Webkinz � play with it, feed it, play games to accumulate Webkinz money to buy it food, furniture, etc. This happened to be two days before we were leaving town for a week. (My wife and daughter are on fall break and my school feels guilty for me working basically all summer so lets me take a week off during the year if I want.)

We went to visit my in-laws in Florida. They live full-time in an RV and spend the winters in Orlando (where they lived before they retired to the RV), so we stayed at an apartment for guests on the RV campground. Like many RV campgrounds, you can get high-speed, wireless Internet access for a fee (often it�s free, but it cost us $20 for the week). I took a laptop with me so that I could do a little work each night after she went to sleep, and we thought that she might like to wind down each night after very full and active days at Disney/Sea World/the beach by spending a little time in Webkinz World.

Well, she did want to do that and that worked pretty well. But on about the third night, her seven year old friend calls on the cell phone and wonders if Abby would like to get on Webkinz World and see her �room� (the room she�s built for one of her Webkinz). So, that led to this picture (not posed). Take a look and then I�ll talk some more about why I thought it blog-worthy.

So, we�re in Florida. Abby�s seven year old friend is in Colorado. They are talking on the cell phone. Abby is sitting in an RV campground using a Dell laptop connected wirelessly to the Internet. Her friend is sitting at home on an iMac that is connected wirelessly to their cable Internet connection. And they are interacting in Webkinz world, with Abby�s friend talking her through a few things since Abby is a newbie and the friend has at least several months of experience (�It works better in Firefox.�) At one point I had to help with something, so I get on the phone and Abby�s friend talks me through it � much to the amusement of my father-in-law. The rest of the time the girls were fine on their own.

Now, this is not an exceptionally powerful example of an educational use of technology (although from what I�ve seen so far, Webkinz World doesn�t look too bad). But it brought home to me once again what a different world my daughter is growing up in compared to the world I grew up in.

Her world at seven: cell phone with free long distance, laptop, wireless broadband access, interactive web-based software. (And if I�d brought a webcam they could�ve videoconferenced as well.)

My world at seven: wired phone (I think just one in the house), we didn�t use long distance except for very special occasions because it was so expensive, no computer, no Internet (much less wireless, broadband, or web-based software), and certainly no videoconferencing. (Coincidentally, when I was seven, Intel released what�s generally considered the first microprocessor � the 4004 with 2300 transistors. Today, Intel is about to release the Penryn chip with 820 million transistors.)

Some folks may argue that they prefer my world at seven, but that�s not what this post is about. What this post is about is the fact that none of this fazed Abby. She doesn�t think it�s fantastic or outrageous, cool or amazing � it just is. She just thinks this is the way the world is � she can connect pretty much effortlessly to others across space and time - and she�s right. That doesn�t negate the fact that she had a great time at Disney/Sea World/the beach, or that she would�ve enjoyed the vacation just as much if she hadn�t happened to be introduced to Webkinz just before we left. But I think this is hugely important as we think about her education, her expectations, her capabilities, and what�s going to be possible as she grows older.

She's a native. She's connected. It just is. Shift Happens.