How Low Can You Go?

When Chubby Checker sang "How low can you go?" in his 1962 hit record, "The Limbo Rock," he was talking about dancing, but it's just as appropriate to ask that question in relation to technology. Most teachers encounter technology in their courses by way of what is often called "technology integration." This can mean that technology is used in various mainstream subjects such as English or Social Studies or that it exists as a standalone subject with the goal being to teach students to apply technology to their other classes.

As software gets more powerful and computers get cheaper and more widespread, the temptation is to use the "highest" technology available. This often means using business-oriented software in the classroom. Microsoft Office is the prime, but not the only, example. The theory seems to be that the goal of technology instruction is first and foremost to "prepare our students for the workplace." I hear this from parents, technology teachers, and of course from software vendors. Since many businesses use Office, the theory goes, we need to teach today's students to use Office, otherwise they won't get good jobs. The proof of the fallacy in this argument is that none of today's office workers used MS Word when they were in sixth grade. It didn't exist back then, at least not in it's current incarnation. Similarly, there is no justification for teaching students to use business presentation software such as PowerPoint so they can use it later in their careers. There may be some good educational applications of PowerPoint, but getting them ready to work isn't one of them.

So what is the reason to teach technology in a secondary school, and what is the best software with which to do it? Those are two of the key questions of technology education. I believe that the answer to the first one is that we should teach technology so that students can become more effective at learning. Technology should enable their ability to think, analyze, express, organize, research, understand, and create. Any time spent learning to use the technology is actually at the expense of these skills. There are only forty-five minutes in a class period, after all. If the technology takes too much time, it's in the way.

This runs counter to what many technology teachers think and practice, however. The computer geek in us wants to be able to own and operate the Ferrari of technology--the fastest, most powerful tools available. Most often, however, a Ford Fiesta more than does the trick. Unfortunately, that may not seem like good job security to the technology teachers among us, so we build our curricula around learning advanced programs even though they have little practical benefit in the classroom. Simple software is less intimidating, has a shallower learning curve, and is easier to master.

The second question--What is the best software with which to teach technology?--is a little easier to answer. Although there is no specific list that will satisfy everyone, I believe the guideline should be "err on the side of simplicity." Lets go back to word processing for an example. Students should use a word processor when it facilitates their writing. Sometimes the best means of expressing an idea is a paper and pencil; if so, put the laptop away. Too often I've seen students working at the computer trying to complete a writing assignment. They type the title page; choose the font, then the color. They use the advanced features of Word to twist the title so it's more "attractive." They change the color of the title to a different shade. Twist the text in another direction. Elapsed time--ten minutes, maybe fifteen if they get into more of the "advanced" features. As teachers we should be asking ourselves and our students what this actually has to do with the writing assignment. The answer, of course, is probably, "very little." Yet it's easy to fool ourselves into believing that their technology here is really worthwhile.

MS Word is so powerful and has so many features that students can be overwhelmed with the possibilities, or they just practice "work avoidance" by trying out one option after another. Google Docs (or any other simple word processor that you may prefer) does all of the necessary functions that you need from a word processor. Plus, there are fewer choices, the learning curve is not as steep, and there are fewer opportunities for distractions. Will this guarantee better writing? No, of course not. But it will facilitate better writing. It's up to the teacher to take it from there.

Here's another example. PowerPoint is the most widely used presentation software in the world, yet it has many more features than necessary and generally teaches bad presentation habits to boot. Err on the side of simplicity and choose something better. Consider large sheets of paper and some markers (I'm not kidding.) Or just have the students write on the board. That may be too low tech for some of us to stoop, but give it a try before you laugh at the idea. If the presentation requires an electronic medium, try a simple word processing document with a large font. Microsoft has an excellent program called Photo Story 3 that you can download for free at the Microsoft website here. It's not identical in function to PowerPoint, but it is much more intuitive to use, and students can be more creative because they aren't locked into the five-by-seven-inch-bulleted-slide format that PowerPoint users create ad nauseam.

There are many more examples I might give, but the point is this: Once you've decided that technology will assist your students in a particular lesson, try to pick the simplest, easiest-to-use application. Rarely will you find that it is too underpowered for your needs. If it is, you can always advance to the next higher level. Remember that the point of technology integration isn't to teach technology as an end in itself; it's to teach students to use technology as a means to an end. And when you're looking to use technology, remember the words of Chubby Checker in "Limbo Rock." Ask yourself "How low can you go?"

Next: My Favorite Things

The Philosopher's Stone of Software

In my last post I reviewed some of the free software that Google offers and discussed how one could use it in the classroom. This time, I'd like to talk about another free Google product, but it's one that has a "darker" side to it, at least in terms of its educational applications. I'm referring to Google's Language Tools. There are four tools; three of them are useful but innocuous. The "Translate" feature is my subject here.

Translate gives you a choice of twenty-five language pairs (English/Spanish, French/German, etc.). After choosing your pair, you enter the URL of a website, and Google will translate it from one language to another. (To see TeachingTech in Spanish, for example, click here.) You could also copy text from a Word document or some other source and paste it in for translation. The result in many cases is far from perfect. Too often, it sounds like Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat--strings of three or four words make sense but full sentences are convoluted and unclear. So Google's Translate is the philosopher's stone of language translation--that legendary substance that could transform any material into gold. Never mind that the result isn't twenty-four carat; the quality of the translation will only improve over time.

As you'd expect, the accuracy of the translation is related to the degree of complexity of the source text. Beginning level English-to-Spanish, for example, comes through reasonably well. A Spanish-to-English translation of an article from the technology section of a Venezuelan newspaper is clumsy and fractured. To some degree however, this is true of language translations done by anyone with less than the highest level of fluency in the source and target languages.

For teachers, and especially for language teachers, Google's Translate raises some interesting questions. For example, if a teacher of first-year French asked students to translate a paragraph from English to French, what grade would he give to the paragraph generated by Translate? Probably not an A, but probably not an F either. I showed two paragraphs from this blog to a Spanish teacher at my school. She said that, although she could understand it, it wasn't well written and contained a number of errors. But that's probably what she'd say about my Spanish too. (I've been studying Spanish since moving to Venezuela in 2004.)

There's no point in trying to prevent students from using Translate; if it's available on the web, they'll find it sooner or later. So teachers need to develop strategies to live with it, or better yet, to use it as a tool to teach languages more effectively.

Here's a hypothetical homework assignment that language teachers give regularly: Write a paragraph describing what you did over the weekend. The student could write the paragraph in English and then run it through Translate to get a version in Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, German, Korean, or Japanese. Unquestionably this would be a case of academic dishonesty. And unquestionably it would be trivial for the student to accomplish and difficult for the teacher to detect.

But would it be dishonest for a student to use Translate to get to a starting point, a basic translation, and then clean up the grammar and vocabulary himself? Is it much different than asking a tutor or another student for help? My guess is that language teachers wouldn't all agree either way. Now suppose the teacher gave the original English version plus the Google translation and asked the students to correct the errors. Is that a reasonable assignment?

One day, perhaps in the foreseeable future, Google's Translate will be able to pass the Turing test, and it will be impossible to tell if the translation was done by man or machine. In the meantime, teachers should be aware of what Translate can do and adjust their teaching strategies to accommodate or better yet, use it to their advantage. No technology is inherently bad. Translate has a potential dark side, but with creativity, we teachers can use it as another tool in our technology toolkit.

Next: Worth More Than a Thousand Words

How Suite It Is

Educators know that technology is one of the most expensive parts of the school's budget. History teachers need new books and art teachers need art supplies; but using technology requires computers, servers, broadband connections, and software to list just some of the expensive components. Although the cost of the equipment has gone down per computer over the years, the overall costs can go up as schools adopt more sophisticated installations.

However, this post is not about saving money, although it will save you money. It's about using some of the best software out there which just happens to be free. I'm referring to the suite of software that Google offers. One could argue that there are better programs than each one of these, but there is no collection that is so well integrated. These programs are great for students for a variety of reasons I'll discuss below, and they have enough horsepower for the experienced user as well.

First, get a Google account. There's no charge. Now you've got access to Google's suite of programs. Although I haven't used them all with my students, I've found many of them to be quite useful. Here's a rundown on my favorites:

1. Blogger. I've already written about blogging in the classroom here. Blogger is one of the easiest-to-learn blogging systems out there. It's powerful but not cluttered with unnecessary features. It has been rated as one of the three or four best programs for blogging.
2. Gmail. If you want to use a web-based email program, Gmail is tops. You get nearly three gigabytes of storage, the ability to use POP access, forwarding, an industrial-strength spam filter, and Google's search engine to find anything in your account. The Gmail philosophy is the same as my sister's: "Don't throw anything away because you'll never know when you might need it." With this much storage, you don't need to. Gmail is still in beta, so you need to be "invited" to get an account. Once you've got one, you can invite fifty friends. I've set up each of my students with a Gmail account. Then I created a group for each class. I exported the group and imported it to each student's account. Now we have each other's IDs and can use Gmail even more easily.
   
3. Google Talk. This program is tucked neatly into Gmail. Click on a contact and invite him to join. You can text or voice chat. My students contact me via Google Chat to ask about assignments and what we've done in class.
   
4. Picasa. If you're a professional photo editor, you probably use Adobe Photoshop. If you're a serious amateur, then maybe it's Photoshop Elements. But if you just want to download, organize, edit, and print; try Picasa. My guess is that Picasa does 90% of what any of us, including the pros, would need to do. Unfortunately, there's no Mac OS version, but that's the only disadvantage. The interface is so intuitive that I had my grade 7 students using it within about ten minutes.
5. Picasa Web Albums. Flickr and a number of other services allow you to store photos just as easily as Web Albums. What I like about this service is how nicely it integrates with Picasa and Blogger. My students create an album of their own photos, scans, and graphics that they've taken from the web. Then, when they need them for a project, they can edit them in Picasa, put them in their blogs, or download them for some other use. Students save the URLs of the photos as captions so that they're available for citations.
   
6. Docs and Spreadsheets. These two web-based applications are the equivalent of Microsoft Word and Excel albeit with fewer options. As with Picasa, 90% of what most of us use is there plus some features that don't exist in Word and Excel. Each program can save files in the Microsoft counterparts for easy exchanging with the rest of the world. Both programs work great in the classroom because students don't get over-involved with all of the options and features that they don't need. The feature that particularly lends itself to the classroom is the ability that Docs and Spreadsheets have for collaboration. You can create a word processing document, for example, and then allow others to see it online and even edit it at the same time. Each person sees the changes that the other makes in near-real time. It's great for collaborative projects. You can also review all of the modifications that were made to a document.
7. Page Creator. This is web development made simple. The web-based Page Creator is not quite a responsive as computer-based applications like Contribute or Dreamweaver, but most students don't work that quickly, and they don't need all of the features present in Dreamweaver anyway and Contribute is not available for free. This is another application that is perfect for the classroom. Students get a collection of templates that allows them to create a website that suits their tastes and needs. They can be up and running in no time.
   
8. Google Earth. I'm afraid to admit how much time I've spent cruising the Grand Canyon and checking out the Pyramids. Not to mention my hometown. Google Earth is a computer-based application, but it connects to the Internet to get updates. There are entire websites devoted to some great and some wacky application. One example of the latter: You can zoom in on any of the hundreds of airplanes that happened to be caught when the Google Earth camera zipped by. Google Earth offers great possibilities in the classroom for geography and history.
9. Google SketchUp. I haven't actually used this computer-based one myself, but I know from talking with a fellow teacher that he finds it a great application to use in his classes.
   

There are several other applications in the suite, but you get the idea. The common thread through all of these programs is that they are powerful, easy-to-use, and free. Each application is free of advertisements with the exception of Gmail which does have unobtrusive text ads running down the right side of some screens. Also, the programs have tutorials and/or useful help screens. When you read it, you're not overwhelmed with tons of options and superfluous choices.

The help even has an occasional sense of humor and personality. Here's an example from the Page Creator help. "If any aspect of using Google Page Creator isn't completely obvious, that's our fault, and we'd love to hear about it. Your comments will help us make these features clearer to all future users." When was the last time you read anything like that in a product that you just paid $100+ for? Bill Gates take note.

Aside from my teaching, I've found these applications to be robust enough for much of what I do outside of the classroom. As a teacher, I find them essential in my classes. Most purchased computer applications have an "everything but the kitchen sink" design built into them. More (features) becomes less (functionality). In contrast, the Google suite is built around the philosophy I learned at Boy Scout camp: Pack everything you need and nothing that you don't need.

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