Screen Time: We’re Asking the Wrong Question

Posted on March 4, 2016 by benschersten

Screen Time: A Quick History

Screen Time started to become a thing in the mid-90s and our awareness of it has taken of since then. With the prevalence of portable screens on smart phones and tables, screen time has become an important issue.

Use of the phrase “screen time” as cataloged by Google Book’s ngram viewer .

What Does Did “Screen Time” Mean?

When the idea of screen time started to take off 20 years ago it’s important to remember what screens were like back then. Screens were mostly passive, and they were a consumption activity. Screen time meant watching TV, watching a movie, or paying a video game. It was the early days of the internet when being online meant consuming someone else’s content. Screens were not a creative space.

What Does “Screen Time” Mean Now?

Screens have changed though. First, screens are much smaller and more portable; we carry them with us everywhere. This makes the screen time conversation that much more important. But, there is a second way screens have changed, and this is important. Screens, and screen time, no longer just support consumption; screens now support creation.

The Right Question Is: What Kind of Screen Time is it?

Screens do so much more today. Because of this, we can no longer lump all screen time into the same category. Passively watching cat videos on YouTube and actively taking an idea from your head and turning it into a video game with Hopscotch are very different things. When we talk about screen time we have to consider whether it’s a consumption or a creation activity.

In September 2014 the Boston Globe posted this graphic.

Click to enlarge, or there’s a linear version of it here (though this version doesn’t differentiate the passive, interactive, and creative sections).

Clearly not all screen time is created equal.

Using iPad Restrictions to Help Students Make Better Choices

Posted on January 15, 2016 by benschersten

We have a rule in my school that if you want to photograph someone with your iPad you must get their permission first. It’s an important rule, but sometimes students break it. This raises an interesting question: if a student is using the iPad inappropriately, should we take the iPad away from them? Since we’re 1:1 with iPads, taking a student’s device away can have ripples of impact.

On the surface, it seems like taking the iPad away makes sense. If a student uses a tool inappropriately, take the tool away. But the iPad isn’t just a tool, it’s a toolbox full of tools. So if a student abuses a tool (such as the camera), is there a way we can take away just that tool? Yes, using iPad Restrictions.

iPad Restrictions

Restrictions allow us (with a password) to enable/disable certain tools in the iPad toolbox. In Burlington, we have some restrictions automatically pushed to every device (for example, we disable FaceTime and the iTunes Store and restrict ratings for videos).

Standard elementary student restrictions.

Standard elementary student restrictions.

In addition, for individual students we can add additional specific restrictions. The iPad is a powerful device because it does so much, and I am certainly in favor of having as few restrictions as reasonably and developmentally appropriate, but if a student is abusing a feature on the iPad I’d much rather disable that feature than take the entire device.

Setting Up Restrictions

In the Settings app, go to General -> Restrictions. Select “Enable Restrictions.” It will ask you to set a passcode. Make sure you remember it. When I set it for kids, I write it down somewhere. From here you can disable features on an individual basis. If a student is abusing the camera, turn just the camera off for a day or so. If a student is downloading apps they shouldn’t, disable Installing Apps. If a student is hanging out on Safari when they should be doing other work, turn Safari off (and get rid of any other browsers they have).

Since these restrictions can be set at the classroom level, you can turn them back on whenever you need to.

Finally

For kids to learn appropriate use it’s important to give them a chance to make mistakes; let’s not over-restrict their iPad experience. But if they make a mistake, let’s deal with that mistake specifically by addressing the specific tool, not the entire toolbox.

lock photo credit: Locked via photopin (license)

It’s Not About Teaching, It’s About Learning

Posted on December 18, 2015 by benschersten

I recently had a teacher tell me one of her students had accused her of not teaching him anything. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“You don’t teach us anything in science.”

What?! The teacher was confused. What about all those experiments we did? What about the weeks of carefully planned lessons? What about all that stuff you learned?

The student responded, “yea, but you didn’t teach me that. I did all that by myself.”

Isn’t this what we want to have happening? Having students play a roll in their education. Not just being lectured to, but actually learning though experience? Something needs to change if we have a culture where students feel cheated out of something if their teachers don’t rely on direct instruction.

Printing Multiple Pictures to a Page, on a Chromebook

Posted on December 15, 2015 by benschersten

We’ve gone from Windows PCs to Chromebooks at my school and for the most part the transition was easy. Most of what we were doing was web-based anyway so being confined to Chrome was no problem. And being able to install apps from the Chrome Web Store and not needing an administrator’s password was an added bonus.

This missing piece for many teachers was being able to print multiple images on a single page (easily). Sure, you can manually insert them in a Google Doc, but it’s not a great solution, especially if you have a bunch of them. In Windows or on a Mac you can print 3, 4, 6, 9 pictures to a page very easily from the Print Pictures dialog box (Windows) or Preview (Mac OSX). Chromebooks just don’t seem to do this. I don’t like doing a lot of printing, but in a elementary school sometimes you need pictures of all your students for things like holiday/Mother’s Day/Father’s Day gifts.

A search of the Chrome forums revealed similar issues. There just isn’t an app or extension that will do it. But online2pdf.com seems to do the trick.

To print multiple images on a single page, head over to online2pdf.com and find the “Select files” button at the bottom.

Click Select Files and you’ll be prompted to upload your pics. Once you upload them (you’re limited to 20 at a time), you’ll see this screen verifying the images you’ve selected. Don’t convert them yet; click the “Image-to-PDF” tab at the bottom first.

In the “Images per page” section, select the the number of image per page. One per page will give you pictures that are about 8×10, two per page is about 5×7, four per page is about 3×5. Then click “Convert” at the bottom.

As it generates your PDF, you’ll get a progress screen.

When done, your PDF will automitally start downloading. If for some reason it doesn’t, there’s a link to manually start the download. Once downloaded, you can open and print the PDF directly from your Chromebook. It will look like the prints you’re used to on a Windows or Mac machine. If you uncheck the “Fit to page” checkbox when printing the pictures will print a little bigger.

TIP: It seems to work better if all your images are portrait orientation or all landscape. If you have both, I’d run two batches – one of your portrait pictures and one of your landscape pictures. Onlie2PDF won’t rotate them for you and they’ll crop weird.

SAFETY: The FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page notes that, “all files and data are treated as strictly confidential, of course. Your files are only temporarily stored on the server of Online2PDF, after the conversion they will be deleted immediately.” This meshes with what I can see from the outside. The link to manually download your PDF stops working after a minute.

I hope this helps.

Who Says Kindergartners Can’t Code?

Posted on December 7, 2015 by benschersten

Hour of Code week started today. As an elementary Technology Integration Specialist, I know I want my students exposed to programming. The questions is, how low do I go? This year, I went all the way down to kindergarten.

Given the potentially short attention span of kindergartners, I shortened the Hour of Code to 45 Minutes of Code. I loaded the free Lightbot: Code Hour app onto a cart of iPads and headed down to the kindergarten wing. I like the Lightbot app a lot becuase the coding blocks are all symbols. For my younger kindergartners who are still learning to read, this levels the playing field. (This also makes Lightbot a great intro-to-coding app for my ELL students.)

I started the lesson talking about computers in general. In addition to being in things like laptops and iPads, they are in phones, microwaves, coffee makers, traffic lights, etc. Computers are, literally, all around us. Because of that, it’s important to have some idea of how they work, how to make them do what we want them to do. That conversation brought us to Lightbot.

We completed the first four challenges in Lightbot together, up on the projector screen. We explored the command blocks and what they did. We made some mistakes (turning is a particularly tricky concept for 5-year-olds to master) and learned from them – which is exactly what I wanted to have happen. Then I turned them loose on Lighbot on their own.

I asked the kids to start by going back and doing the 4 challenges we did together, on their own. Some moved through those challenges quickly, others took more time. Ultimately, they progressed further in the app than we had gone as a whole group – completing tasks they never saw with me. And at the end of my 45 minute block (with about 25 minutes of them coding on their own) we cleaned up. Or tried to; the problem was that the kids weren’t ready. They were totally engaged. They were getting stuck, and having to work through mistakes, but at no point did anyone say, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” When my 45 Minutes of Coding ended, they wanted to keep coding.

They did a great job, and I’m excited to put iPads back in those rooms with Lightbot still loaded. Maybe it can become a center for them. The computational and positional thinking that are involved are great. And no matter what anyone says, kindergartners can code.

Enough With the Elves Already (We Know They Don’t Work)

Posted on December 2, 2015 by benschersten

It’s December again. That means elves on shelves are popping up in elementary classrooms (and living rooms) all over the place. The elf, children are told, keeps an eye on them and reports to Santa. The idea being that even when adults aren’t looking, someone still has their eyes on the children’s behavior.

The goal is simple, and it comes from a good place: teachers (and parents) know the holidays are approaching, children are getting excited, and adults worry (rightfully) that children will have extra difficulty regulating their behavior. So, the adults offer a reward. If you can stay in control and be good this month, even when you think no one is looking, the elf will tell the adults and you’ll be rewarded. Seems like a good idea, right?

The problem is that this kind of external motivation doesn’t help our children learn how to regulate their own behavior; it doesn’t help teach them to do the right thing. And worse, we’ve known about this … for a long time:

In a 1993 Harvard Business Review article entitled Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work, Alfie Kohn noted “when it comes to producing lasting change in attitudes and behavior… rewards, like punishment, are strikingly ineffective. Once the rewards run out, people revert to their old behaviors.”
In a 1999 meta-analysis of 128 studies, Deci, Koestner, and Ryan found that “as predicted, engagement-contingent, completion-contingent, and performance-contingent rewards significantly undermined free-choice intrinsic motivation [the ability to do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing] … as did all rewards, all tangible rewards, and all expected rewards.” They also noted that, “tangible rewards had a significant negative effect on intrinsic motivation … and this effect showed up with participants ranging from preschool to college.”
In his 2009 book Drive, Daniel Pink discussed the seven deadly flaws of extrinsic motivation (what he calls carrots and sticks). These carrots and sticks can:
- extinguish intrinsic motivation
- diminish performance
- crush creativity
- crowd out good behavior
- encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior
- become addictive
- foster short-term thinking

Admittedly, Deci, Koestner, and Ryan point out that “although rewards can control people’s behavior—indeed, that is presumably why they are so widely advocated—the primary negative effect of rewards is that they tend to forestall self-regulation. In other words, reward contingencies undermine people’s taking responsibility for motivating or regulating themselves” (my emphasis). But as teachers, isn’t one of our goals to teach our students to take responsibility and regulate their own behavior (not simply have us control it) – two things that our reward systems actually undermine?

Are there a small percentage of students for whom simply getting through the holidays is the goal? Sure. But should this be the default goal for the entire classroom? Definitely not.

Teachers – we have to do more than just control behavior, we have to teach responsibility and self-regulation. We want to cultivate students who will do the right thing because it’s the right thing, not because we’ll reward them. The Responsive Classroom approach teaches us that effective reinforcing teacher language is, “clear and direct, genuine and respectful, and specific“; it’s not used in a manipulative way like reward systems. Teacher language is a powerful thing; tell your students they are working hard, and how their attention to behavior benefits others. “Verbal rewards – or what is usually labeled positive feedback in the motivation literature – had a significant positive effect on intrinsic motivation” (Deci, Koestner, and Ryan, 1999); this is what we really want. Aim to build a strong and trusting community in your classroom and you won’t need elves to extort good behavior out of your students (and they don’t really work anyway).

Of course, if you’re using an elf for non-coercive strategies like practicing writing letters to your elf or calculating the distance/rate of movement he had to get from one spot to another that’s totally fine. We just need to stop the bribery thing.

photo credit 1: Have I Got a Present for You! [Explored 12/2/2011] via photopin (license)
photo credit 2: Elf on the Shelf via photopin (license)

“Rewards do not create a lasting commitment. They merely, and temporarily, change what we do” Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work, Alfie Kohn. We professionals, have to do better than this (even in December).

Lack of Tech PD Isn’t the Problem

Posted on September 17, 2015 by benschersten

It’s so easy to do. We inject technology into classrooms and schools and offer lots of professional development. Time goes by; in some classes it takes, and in other rooms tech integration still struggles. We hear the teachers cry, “we need more tech PD” and we scramble trying to figure out what we missed and how we can create more effective professional development.

But maybe more tech PD isn’t the solution. Or maybe you’ve already offered more tech PD and things haven’t really gotten better. That’s because it’s not a technology problem.

It happens all the time: we put technology into a classroom, things don’t go as planned, and we blame the technology. That must be it, right? Not necessarily. At what point does it stop being a technology problem and start becoming a classroom management problem.

Teaching strategies from 20, 10, even 5 years ago may no longer work. Our students are different, our strategies must change in response. If you take a room with poor classroom management and introduce an educationally disruptive and potentially addictive device, what do you expect to happen? Of course it won’t go well. But that’s not a technology problem, and because of that all the technology PD in the world won’t fix it.

So what do we do?

We need administrators (evaluators) to help out. They need to work with teachers to refine their classroom management skills. If teachers struggle with teaching reading or math we know how to have those difficult conversations about improving. But too often we seem to look the other way when it comes to classroom management, even though it transcends every lesson we teach! We say to ourselves, “everyone is different,” “everyone has their own style.” Yes, that’s true, but some styles are ineffective. And those styles need to change. We’re not doing our students any favors by overlooking these rooms.

If technology integration, if 1:1 environments, are going to be successful we need classrooms with strong classroom management skills. Period.

My district emphasizes the importance of engaging lessons; I agree that’s extremely important to what we do. But engaging technology-filled lessons with poor classroom management will lead to failure every time. And not because the teachers need more tech PD. If we’re going to solve this problem, we need to address the root causes.

photo credit: source via photopin (license)

Starting an Elementary Student Helpdesk

Posted on July 22, 2015 by benschersten

Last year (2014-2015) Kim Lynch (a 5th grade teacher) and I started a Student Helpdesk at our elementary school. The idea was to have a group of trained students who could help with tech-related issues in the building. Here’s how the Helpdesk came to be, and how I hope it will change in the future:

The Vision

Helpdesk students working in first grade.

The vision was to have a group of students who could help teachers, or other students, or even whole classes when they needed a hand with technology. This could mean them joining me working in a classroom, or they could work without me if I was already teaching in another room.

Since elementary students don’t have study hall, or unscheduled, time this would mean taking them out of class to help out. It was always made clear to teachers that if I wanted to borrow a Helpdesk student from their class, I would seek their permission first. Helpdesk was not meant to be a ticket to get out of class. Each time I would make sure each student was okay academically before taking them. (That said, I definitely believe that when a student helps another student or classroom learn a technological skill, the teaching students learns some valuable skills as well.)

Tech Skills

Since our district is 1:1 with iPads, our skill list is pretty iPad-centric. I developed the list and grouped the skills into categories (most of them correspond to the district’s Foundational Apps). Students came to the computer lab during their recess time to practice the skills, and help each other master them. When they felt they had mastered a category, they would sit with me 1:1 and show me that they could do everything on the list. I kept a running list of who had mastered which apps, so if I needed help with iMovie or Book Creator or Google Drive I could quickly see which students had mastered which apps (and who would be a good student to help out).

On missing recess: Coming to Helpdesk was never required. If it was a nice, sunny day after a week of rain it was fine if kids wanted to be outside. Interestingly (but not entirely surprising), if you look at recess as free time or a way for kids to recharge mid-day, most of the Helpdesk students were just as happy to recharge by learning a new app on the iPad than running around outside. Most mornings I was greeted with, “can we come down at recess today?”

Students

In it’s first year, we hand picked about a dozen fifth graders. Most were boys, which initially we were uncomfortable with. But the more we looked at the specific makeup of that year’s 5th grade class, we felt better about it – it was a group that really didn’t have a lot of tech-interested girls. Looking at the class we had the year before, it would have been a more evenly balanced group simply because it would have been a different population to choose from.

Moving Forward

Changes for the upcoming year:

I want to develop an application process. I want a questionnaire so students can tell my why they think they’re a good fit for the Helpdesk (Why do you want to be a part of the Helpdesk? Are you willing to give up recess time? How do you feel about helping younger students or teachers? If you miss work in class, are you willing to make it up on your own, possibly as homework?). I don’t want to hand pick the team again.
I want to open it up to both 4th and 5th graders. The idea here being in subsequent years I’ll have a crop of kids in the fall who are already trained (trained as 4th graders, now starting 5th grade). They might be able to help train the new students (if their recesses overlap), but more so we’ll be able to start helping classes as soon as the school year starts.

I’m looking forward to a new and better Student Helpdesk this year.

A Better Way to Cite Images

Posted on April 7, 2015 by benschersten

As my students know, I’m big on permissions. If my students want to use an image in a project, they need to pay attention to Creative Commons licensing. Finding an image that is okay to use isn’t hard (you can search through Creative Commons or change the search tools in Google), but citing it properly is a hassle – especially for my younger elementary students.

Enter Photos For Class (www.photosforclass.com)

Photos For Class searches Flickr and does three great things:

Keeps the images G-rated using Flicker’s and their filters
Only grabs images licensed for school use under Creative Commons
and, this is the best part
The citation is automatically added to the image

Also, it’s super easy! Enter your search term, find the image you want, click download, and you get an image with an embedded citation – like these:

And since the citation is part of the image, no matter where students move the image the citation goes with it. Using properly licensed photos is important, but keeping track of citations can be a headache. Photos For Class is a great solution.

Google and Schools

Posted on February 28, 2015 by benschersten

Yesterday I had the opportunity do attend a teacher PD day at the Google offices in Cambridge, MA. At the end of the day there was a panel of Googlers and one of the questions was, “what do you like best about working for Google?”

The answers were much what you would expect from a company that is often rated as one of the best places to work. Things like:

Great people
Being connected to current events
A culture of collaboration
A job where you get to use your brain every
A place where nobody ever says, “I can’t help you, that’s not my job.”

This poses the most obvious question: isn’t this what schools are supposed to be like?

Seriously, if someone asks your teachers why they like their job shouldn’t this be part of their answer too? And if it’s not, why? And how do you start changing that?

http://www.benschersten.com/blog

The world is changing, and so must education. "Because we've always done it that way" can't be the only reason.

Category Archives: #bpschat