A colleague and I have been saying for some time now that cool technology + poor instruction = poor academic outcomes (and lots of wasted money).  How do we overcome this?  First, we need to make sure teachers are trained and armed with tons of research based teaching strategies.  Only then can we expect them to use the strategies with technology.

Once we are sure educators are comfortable with the strategies, we start to slowly introduce new technology.  When I say introduce, I do not mean hook a smartboard up in the classroom and leave.  I mean start with one piece of technology (like a smartboard), train the teacher how to use the technology, then how to integrate it with the instructional strategies.  Be sure to give adequate time to practice and follow up with them on a weekly basis to ensure it is working out.  Once this piece of technology is mastered, consider introducing something new.

This isn’t rocket science, but I can’t count the number of “smart” classrooms I’ve come across over the last couple of years.  These classrooms have the latest technology, but few know how to use any of it and even fewer understand how to integrate it with sound instructional strategies.   And this is not a knock on teachers.  If they are not trained appropriately, how can we expect them to use it effectively?

To help with this, there are two websites I use when I need to grab a video from the web and save it on my computer to include in a presentation.  There’s been countless times when I found the perfect video to share while presenting at a conference only to find out there was no internet service, leaving my links useless.

• Zamzar – www.zamzar.com
• Media Converter – www.mediaconverter.org

Both resources are similar in the way they work.  First, find the youtube or other video you would like to download.  Next, simply visit one of these sites and paste the url of the video in and choose a file format.  If you are using windows, choose .avi or .wmv.  For macs, choose .mov.  Click submit and in no time you will have a copy of the video available for download.

Would love to hear your favorite resources in the comments section below.

To experiment, I downloaded one of the apps (pocketphonics) recommended in the article and turned my 2 year old loose with it (she’s familiar with the iphone already).  In no time she was following along with the program and learning to write letters.

So this got me thinking about the larger picture of mobile devices in classrooms.  There’s the iPhone, iPod touch, and now the iPad from Apple.  Then there are the droid smartphones that Google has a part in, not to mention the growth of affordable netbooks.  A recent survey showed that over 70% of kids already have access to these devices, but unfortunately are not allowed to use them in schools.

Without writing a book, here are a few of the reasons I think that schools should be seriously considering the use of mobile devices in classrooms:

• Cost (Hardware) – A laptop computer runs close to $1000 on most state bid contracts.  An 8 GB iPod touch is under $200.  In fact, you can buy an iPod touch station that comes with 30 touches and a macbook pro for substantially less that it would cost to buy a few laptops.
• Cost (Software) – Software may be more expensive than computers by the time you add up all the software that needs to be on every computer.  Many apps on the other hand cost .99 cents to a few bucks.  And if I’m not mistaken, with iPods, you sync all of the touches up to one computer… So if you buy an app once for .99 cents, you can then load it onto all of your touches.
• Fidelity – Not all classrooms I visit are using research based strategies.  I know that with RTI, “research based” is kind of a buzz phrase right now, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important.  Something is researched based because it works.  Things that aren’t researched based may work, but we don’t know that for sure.  If you download an app that uses a research based strategy, you know that each student is getting that strategy every time he or she uses it.  This isn’t the case in classrooms where lecture is the primary medium used.
• Cost (technology support staff) – I work quite a bit with Assistive Technology.  It can be a pain to install, maintain, troubleshoot, etc… A friend of mine in the software world was just telling me that the cost of supporting software in schools is actually more than the software itself.  With apps, they are downloaded, maintained and updated through a system separate from the school.  Other than a quick how-to tutorial, the technology support team can spend their time on other projects.
• Access – Many kids already have these devices.  They can use them at home, school and anywhere in between.

Having said all of the above, there are still all sorts of things that can cause this to not work.  For one thing, there is a cost involved.  Although computers are more expensive, those are probably already in the district.  Setting up an iPod touch or iPad station would have a significant start up cost.  Then there is figuring out how to go about purchasing apps, letting students check the devices out, etc…

Of course, we can always think of reasons to not do something, but I challenge people to come up with solutions to make it work rather than why it can’t.

There’s more to this from a global perspective than what I am writing here.   I’ll save that for another post.  In the meantime, I am working on a session for a few upcoming national conferences.  Hope to see you at one of them.

I’ve included in this post a few places to check out.  The best thing to do is just CLICK HERE to download the Word document.  I can’t take credit for developing it, but it’s been past around so many times I cannot credit the original author.  I did however remove several out of date links and check the others to ensure accuracy.  This of course doesn’t include every resource out there, so if you can think of something else I encourage you to post it as a comment on this blog post.

Here are a few of the included resources along with descriptions (usually from the site itself).  Note that this is for free/non-copyright text.  Therefore they will not include links to textbooks or other copyrighted literature.  Those types of texts will many times need to be purchased separately or only used with students with specific disabilities.

Bookshare – http://www.bookshare.org

Bookshare offers more than 42,000 digital books, textbooks, teacher-recommended reading, periodicals and assistive technology tools. It is free for all U.S. students with qualifying disabilities.

Project Gutenberg – http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

There are over 27,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog

Bibliomania – http://www.bibliomania.com/

Free Online Literature with more than 2000 Classic Texts

AcademicInfo – http://www.academicinfo.net/

AcademicInfo is an online education resource center with extensive subject guides and distance learning information. Our mission is to provide free, independent and accurate information and resources for prospective and current students (and other researchers).

ReadPrint.com – http://www.readprint.com/

Offers thousands of free books for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast

Kids Corner – http://wiredforbooks.org/kids.htm

Contains a collection of Beatrix Potter’s books with text available in English, German, Japanese, and French.

WorldWideSchool.org – http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/catalogs/bysubject-top.html

The Intersect – http://intersect.uoregon.edu/

A Library of “Supported Text” books incorporating resources and study strategies that help students learn more from what they read.

Bartleby.com – http://www.bartleby.com/

Alex catalogue of electronic text – http://infomotions.com/alex/

The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a collection of about 14,000 “classic” public domain documents from American and English literature as well as Western philosophy.

Page by Page Books – http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/

Offers hundreds of free classic books with frequent additions to the collection

SchoolLibrary.com – http://www.schoollibrary.com

Offers public access to over 27,000 books and materials (choose public access from menu at top of page to access). Paying a nominal membership fee of $8.95 per year allows access to over 100,000 additional books and materials. Reading lists prepared by the University of Hawaii sort books by grade level.

20-20 – http://www.2020site.org/

Provides free books and other materials covering a wide array of areas. Topics include history, garden, children’s books, how-to books, home repair and decoration and fashion.

Classic Reader – http://www.classicreader.com/

Offers a large collection of free classic books by authors such as Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare and many others. You can read, search and even add your own annotations to any of the classic books. A selection of author biographies and portraits are also available.

I viewed a demo of the software and found it very well put together.  Although it is recommended that you use a tablet PC or WACOM (input device you for computers that you can use a digitized pen with), you could always use a regular PC with a mouse (just know it may be a bit frustrating).

The software gives you multiple boards so that you don’t have to include your entire lecture on one board.  It also allows you to record audio.  When finished, it saves as a .swf or flash file, which is compatible with almost all web browsers.  From there, you can post it to your site, blog, eLearning course or whatever floats your boat. Currently the software is PC only.

Oh, and did I mention it’s FREE!  Check it out at http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~bcdean/lscribe/.

The wiki is maintained by Karen Janowski, who also happens to have a cool blog I read on a normal basis at http://teachingeverystudent.blogspot.com/

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars.  Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

The colleges you can visit include the most pretigous in the United States.   Here’s a list:

• Berkley
• Yale
• Harvard
• MIT
• Princeton
• Stanford

The lectures are great and users can rate the lectures after watching.  I have never been one of the YouTube types that can sit around watching videos on the web all day, but I literally spent an hour (56 minutes to be exact) today listening to Paul Brown at Yale discuss Sigmund Freud.  I learned more in 56 minutes than I can remember from my entire college psych class and found the whole thing very enjoyable.

So in addition to giving you something useful to do during your free time, what else can Academic Earth be used for?  Just think of the opportunities this gives many of our students.  Not all of us are able to go to Yale or MIT, but viewing lectures from some of the worlds greatest professors gives us opportunities we may have never gotten otherwise.  This is just another example of how education is becoming more accessible.  You’ve probably heard of California’s Open Source Textbook Iniative or MIT’s Open Courseware project.  Academic Earth is another one of those great free resources to add to the list.

The only major downfall to these programs is that a student must be sitting in front of a computer to use them.  Having one computer with text to speech capabilities doesn’t do you much good when 15 kids need it at the same time.

To help remedy this, there are several products out there that allow you to turn text into an audio file (typically an mp3 or wav file).  Once created, students can listen to it on their portable mp3 player, cd player, or even their computer at home.  Granted, this isn’t always as effective as being able to see the text as it’s being read out loud, but it does work for many students.  Surely you’ve seen all of the earbuds hanging out of kids’ ears haven’t you?

Before I list some options, I should mention one concern I consistently get is that not all students have the mp3 players.  This is true, but according to a recent report specializing in tracking the use of digital music and digital music players, over 70% of respondents ages 12-17 already have some type of portable music player.  This is up from 54% last year.  What’s more is that not all portable media players are as expensive as iPods.  A recent search on WalMart.com showed a 2GB video and audio portable media player for under $30!

Now that that’s out of the way, how do we turn text into audio files?  Well, there are really 2 ways: a software application (or one feature of a software application) and a web site.  Let’s look at each…

On the Web:  These websites allow you to paste digital text in and they will automatically create the audio file for you.

• Vozme.com
• HearWho.com (only free for limited amount of text)

Software Applications:

• Read&Write Gold – Contains a “Speech Maker” feature that turns text into a wav or mp3 file
• Text to Speech Maker
• Other options – a website containing several low cost text to audio programs

If you know of any additional programs, especially free programs, be sure to post in the comments section or send me an email.