MACUL 2015 and the magic of Google Cardboard

For this, my final blogpost under the auspices of EDUC 504, I would like to discuss not a session at MACUL, per se, but a unique opportunity I had to play around with one of the weirdest, most under-appreciated Google products of the last couple of years, Google Cardboard. Announced during Google I/O 2014, Google Cardboard is a low-cost DIY virtual reality headset, which uses your existing smartphone as the display, effectively updating the old-fashioned stereoscope for the 21st Century. Cool, but not something I was really willing to invest 30 or so dollars in to assemble and test out.

During a lull in between sessions, I had the good fortune to wander down to the Maker space, fully expecting to breeze through, take a gander and move on, not having an enormous interest in the more robotics-focused side of the technology sphere (until we as a society can make my own personal C-3PO a reality, I'm not interested. Get on it science!) Amongst the various robotics booths, and 3-D printing examples, I happened to notice that several demo "units" (let's be honest, we're talking about a piece of cardboard here) of Google Cardboard were available to be played with. Figuring now was my chance, I slotted my phone in and gave it a whirl. My thoughts? This thing is awesome (and not just because it turns watching YouTube videos into a swirling Minority-Report-style sphere). This has very real classroom applications, especially of the Social Studies. All the way back in the summer, I can remember sketching out my "ideal" technology classroom, and plopping an Oculus Rift off in one corner of the drawing, reasoning that the ability to take virtual, three-dimensional tours of historical sites could prove invaluable in the classroom. When I initially wrote up that description, I knew that such a device was really more of a pipe-dream than anything else, based on the price of such devices, and the specialized apps and software requirements. In short, even if you managed to get one, the apps and services available for it were not going to be targeting education, unless by education, you meant Call of Duty. Cardboard makes my pipe dream a reality.

In fact, Google is already suggesting this kind of use-case, through their demo software, which includes a short, 3-D tour of the Palais de Versailles, complete with audio-guide, that can easily be piped through a set of headphones. Imagine, as a social studies teacher being able to download other people's photosphere pictures¹ of the Coliseum (believe me, there are plenty of those,) or even to take one yourself, and guide your students through a tour of some of the world's most remote sites without ever having to leave the classroom. In the interests of proving merit in a variety of contexts,I would be remiss in failing to mention the benefits inherent in fields such as science or world languages, where three dimensional explorations of the human vascular system, or guided foreign language tours of important monuments and countries become a reality. The possibilities are truly endless.

The sessions I attended were useful in their own ways as well, but for me, this conference provided me with an invaluable opportunity to test out a piece of equipment which I had written ff as something of a bizarre side-show, and which I now feel has real pedagogical benefit in my classroom.
^{1. Photospheres are essentially self-made Google Streetview photos; the functionality is available on any Android phone running Android OS version 4.4 and above, or any iOS device running iOS 7.0 or higher.↩}

Tech Teach-In with Google Forms

Brief lesson outline:

As part of the opening salvo for my unit on Ancient Egypt, I decided to follow the lead of my mentor teacher and administer a vocabulary pre-test which would give me a better idea of what kinds of terms my students were familiar with, and what kinds of terms they were going to need me to explain for them in more depth.

The crux of the lesson was this:

I trooped the students over to the computer lab across the hall, sat them down in front of their computers, and told them all to login and go to their school provided Gmail accounts.

(I had printed out all of their logins ahead of time, as well as a paper copy of the pre-test just in case my 7th graders started to have some "issues." Some of my sixth graders have previously had issues with stuff like saving documents or using their email, so I really didn't know quite what to expect here.)

Much to my admiration and surprise, my students were on and logged in in about 2-3 minutes.  These computers are something of a pain to work with, and seem to require updating more often than an Xbox One on launch day, so having "only" a 2-3 minute launch time seemed fabulous.  I then used a pre-created group in my teacher Gmail account to mass email the link to the Google Form to everyone all at once.  They clicked it, and started typing.  Faces were happy.  I felt like a boss.  This is when things start to go south.

So, quick pro-tip:  When Google Forms asks if you want to use data validation on a pre-test.  Tell it no. Tell it no HARD. Why, you might ask?  Because data validation, used in the way I used it (for specific term-matching) does not do what I thought it did, (activate the ability to collate results) No, what it does is check to see if the information entered matches what should go in the form, and then both a) refuses to accept any answer other than the correct one, "Mr. Morrow, it won't let us submit, it shows all of these red boxes around things" and b) will helpfully tell you the answer so that you can put the right term into the slot.  Yeah.  That last one was all kinds of fun.

Realizing my mistake thanks to some very helpful (and understanding) students, I quickly went through each and every question, removing data validation, hoping it would live update the form.  It did not.

New pro-tip:  If you have to change stuff like this, be prepared to re-send the form.  And hope you have a very willing,  (or very captive) group of students.  In this case, I had very willing ones.  With nary a groan to be hear, I re-sent the form and had them copy their answers from one into the other, informing them that Mr. Morrow made a mistake, and apologizing for the inconvenience.  The irony in all of this?  The very reason I had chosen to do it this way was I had just finished grading the pst-tests from the 6th grade classes and realized that a) I was really bad at following a list of words with my eyes and b) I hated grading these things, and a computer could be more accurate and provide faster feedback than I ever could.   So, this entire exercise, which ended up increasing the amount of time it took me to administer the test, was intended to save me time, and increase the speed of feedback.


So what did I learn from this experience? Well, the feedback part turned out to work just as wonderfully as I intended, and I now have a beautifully broken out record of their pre-test vocabulary recognition which I have referenced several times over the course of the unit.  I also learned a lot more about the syntax Google Forms uses for things, (which really, I should have been familiar with already) and am confident that the next time I do this (I will be doing it again for the post-test), things will go much more smoothly.  I may even, crazy idea, be able to save actual time all around!  I also, last but not least, learned that my students are some of the most charitable, wonderful people on the planet.  They filled out a pre-test twice for me.  They are the best.

My Edublogging experience

Well, seeing as if you read the title you already have an idea of what I'm about to talk about, let's just dive in shall we?

My experience was a little weird.

When I went on the hunt for edublogger to respond to, I initially ended up finding a couple of them that really spoke to me as both a tech nerd and an aspiring teacher.  One of them even asked for suggestions about what to do with his new iPhone 6 (apparently this man had been living in some kind of hellish Mad Max type reality in which phones only had access to EDGE speeds.  I have heard whispers of such torture).   This seemed great!  I could proselytize about one of my favorite mobile devices, AND help a colleague puzzle through how to better use the booming number of student mobile devices in the classroom.

But alas, the comments section was closed.

This would turn out to be a familiar theme (which, If I have to be honest simply means these people are smart; have you seen the comments section on stuff like YouTube?  It's the worst.  It is truly why we cannot have nice things, like open comments sections on blogs- but I digress.)

When I finally did find a blog that interested me, and had open comments however, I discovered that it was something of a comforting experience.  The blogging teacher in question was publishing his own insecurities and fears, which I realized were MY insecurities and fears.  Knowing that I was not alone, and that even practicing teachers were puzzling through the problems of how to, (for example) keep the quality consistent in a lesson from one class period to the next (this particular teacher was struggling with the realization that his first hour class always got the rough version of his lessons.) was really eye-opening, and comforting in that misery-loves-company kind of way.  If I had to really nail down what it was that I got out of this part of the blogging assignment, it would have to be that feeling of shared community and struggle.

It's nice not to be alone.

Tech Tools in Use

I have to say, out of all the tools which were presented, the one which I was most intrigued to hear about was Audacity, due in no small part to the fact that podcasting as a medium is something which is near and dear to my heart.  I must say, after having seen Audacity, and had the opportunity to think through the possibilities presented by internet-published audio,  I couldn't be more enthused.

Let me be clear, I don't necessarily think that this is an everyday-use kind of tool.  I feel like it really only needs to come out for "special occasions." As a result, I think the complexity that it brings to the table (ordinarily something which would make me reticent to use it in the classroom) can be offset by its use, long-term, around a single, special activity.  I'm thinking of a summative assessment type thing, where students r-enact famous moments in history through their voices, or produce radio interviews surrounding historical personnages or events (my focus here is history, but I think the possibilities content-wise are pretty broad.  You could even use it as a group presentation medium, where groups are asked to produce an "episode" of a podcast which their fellow classmates can then listen in on, rather than bore people to death (and take up class-time) with your standard stand-at-the-front-of-the-room-shaking-like-a-leaf reports.  Again, ordinarily a tool with a learning curve as steep as this one (i.e. more than about 5 minutes) is ordinarily something I would shy away from using with students, but for longer-term projects I think it would be worth it.

Prior to this presentation, I never really considered audio productions as something which could be brought into the classroom, but now, I am wholly intrigued.

Guest Speaker- Liz Kolb

So, first, let me just say that Liz was an absolutely wonderful speaker, and I think her insights on teaching with technology in classroom are particularly useful, especially given the role which she played as the ad-hoc IT department for her local school back in the early aughts, when such a thing really didn't exist.  I am a self-identifying mobile device nerd, and so I was very interested to hear her thoughts about the use of such devices in an academic setting, and I have to say I was not disappointed.

One of the concerns that instantly comes to mind when I think of using mobile devices (or really any student-owned device) in the classroom for educational purposes is less about students messing around on their phones (twitter and Facebook are usually blocked, and, lets be honest, if it wasn't their phone, it was going to be something else.), but rather I was more concerned about the technical back-end of ensuring that whatever activity I was doing, everybody would be able to participate, and do so at roughly the same speed.  These days we are fortunately reaching a point in smartphone (or information phone, as I have heard them called) performance is "good enough" to accomplish most basic tasks in roughly the same amount of time (browsing the web, sending an SMS, pulling in email, etc.) However, even among these basic tasks, there are little idiosyncrasies which are nothing about nothing on their own, but which represent a vast minefield of potential problems if they are being relied upon.  What browser do they use? Does it work in one and not the other? Does it work in one version of said browser and not the other? Is the device too old to upgrade to a version that does work?  Does one phone have a tweak which wreaks havoc on school WiFi connectivity, while another student's phone runs like a dream?

I guess the long and short of this is that I don't want to be an IT department for my class each and every time we have to whip these things out.  On top of that, because most schools have building wide policies restricting use of mobile devices unless specifically invited in by the teacher, there is the problem to consider wherein students could be bringing their device into the building only for my class.  For me, (after I get done with the fun, shiny 'oooh look at that 60 fps opening animation' phase,) technology is fundamentally about "scratching an itch" or solving a problem. As of right now, I have not seen a burning problem which persistent or consistent, routinized use of a mobile device in the classroom solves for me.

Now, granted, this comes with the caveat that I am currently in a district where the technology is up to date and readily available.  If the ONLY access to a reliable internet connection was through a mobile device, or if school machines were simply too antiquated to perform the tasks I needed, that would be "problem" enough.  But as it is, in my situation, I think that mobile devices in the classroom are still a solution in search of a problem.

The tech found in my placement: A less horrible experience than I anticipated.

So this topic actually touches on a hobby of mine- armchair critiquing of technology implementations in large institutions!  I have had a couple of diet pepsis and a coffee as I write this, so this journey could get real interesting real quick.  Let's see where this goes.

To kick things off, it should be noted that my placement actually has a vast array of technology available for both students and staff, and, with the exception of the Promethean boards (I have never really been sold on the value-add of those over a simple projector screen- I mean sure, you could have students experience the pain and frustration of using 90's ATM touch-screens while trying to teach historical concepts, but why would you?) But anyway, I digress.  With the exception of the boards-which-shall-not-be-named, the technology in my placement seems to all have a purpose, and be reasonably well supported by the district IT department.  As a district, we use Google Apps (google hosted email, google docs, sheets, presentations and calendar), which means that for the most part, email and other things function as expected.  For staff, we have pretty much full access to the web, including YouTube, which has proved indispensable to my mentor teacher on numerous occasions.  Twitter and Facebook are not supported (i.e. they're blocked) , but hey Google+ works just fine, so, well, there you go,  When it comes to the students, I have noted that their email is, while still Google Apps, hosted on a different domain (.net vs. .org), and has additional restrictions, such as YouTube blocking.  When it comes to students working with computers, I have found that, while plentiful, computer access is not terribly convenient on a day-to-day basis, requiring teachers to plan ahead and sign out either a Chromebook cart, the library, one of the Windows-based computer labs, or the single Chromebook lab.  As a result, while there is a lot of tech in the school, the day to day usage is mostly restricted to teachers, and using smart boards for instruction.

In the end, while the attitude of tech acceptance is encouraging, I can't help but feel that to a certain extent "technology" is simply the latest buzz-word, and a way for schools to remind everyone that they are relevant and keeping up with the times.  If so, this enthusiasm for technology will eventually fade (but not disappear), eventually simply becoming an unremarkable part of everyday classroom instruction, rather than a separate topic unto itself.  And, as much of a tech fan as I am, I think that can only be a good thing.

Connection Across the Disciplines: Bringing Your Own Device to Discover New Tree Species

When reading through the lesson plan for the group of Sarah Adcock, Jesse Antuma Wilbur Tong and Sara Abraham,  one thing which struck me was its practicality.  It brings student devices into the classroom (something which always seems to prove popular) while emphasizing their use as a tool, and allowing for much more direct interaction with nature than the traditional classroom bound activities.  From a pedagogical standpoint, the lesson is interesting as it has the opportunity to promote student construction of knowledge, in opposition to the more traditional teacher-provided model.
On element in particular which I find very admirable, is the promotion of technology as a tool for academic work, as opposed to a toy which has no place in the life of a "serious" student,  I feel all too often that we as teachers and adults come across as "anti-technology," or "begrudgingly accepting" of technology in the classrooms, giving the impression to our students that we don't see the potential for such devices to work as anything other than toys.  Students intrinsically know that their iPhone or
Android device is not merely some toy, and I think they resent the implication that as adults we sometimes tend to give.  This lesson plan provides the opportunity for students to not only use their technology, but use it in an active, outdoor setting, and have a concrete example of its use as a tool in the real world, doing real academic work.