The new blog will be similar, but have less of a technology focus, and instead be more focused on education issues. Please visit me soon!

Although this is a change for him and he will miss the actual direct teaching involvement in education, he is excited about the move. Mayatan currently runs a bilingual school and soon hopes to open a medical clinic and a library. Over the last few weeks he has been working furiously on improving the technology situation for the organization and also designing new websites.

Please check out our sites and check back here to stay informed on our progress.

But, online they have a somewhat extended video that talks a bit more with the kids about their experiences.
Sorry for the links and no embedded video, but apparently wordpress.com things MSNBC videos are dangerous and keeps stripping them from this post.

Billy Hudson, from Vanderbilt University deserves a gold star for his efforts in putting that time on the schoolbus to use through eLearning sites and podcasts. Hopefully school districts will take note of what is being done and decide to make some similar modifications on their own. This should serve as evidence of how feasible it is to get some sort of mLearning into use. Look closely and you can see some of OLPC’s XO machines.

By the way – TeacherJay was going to post on this earlier, but he was too casual in his conversations and he got beat to the punch. Thanks, Allan, really, thanks =P

TeacherJay has long been an advocate for bridging the digital divide – that unfortunate set of circumstances, such as poverty, and access to equipment, that has keeps computers and telecommunications out of the hands of so many of the world’s citizens. He joined the Digital Divide Network, a project of TakingITGlobal, some time ago to read articles and participate in discussions. Just this morning, he learned they have now formed a Causes group on Facebook. With donation amounts as low as $10 US, it’s very easy to show your support for this important cause. Thanks to some special ‘challenges’ on the site, special gifts may be awarded to the organization for having the most new donors.

To learn more about the program, click here.

To learn more about the One Laptop Per Child project, click here.

Lev Vygotsky was a genius developmental psychologist. Perhaps his best known theories relate to the construct of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). TeacherJay is also fascinated with Vygotsky’s work reagarding the connections between thought and language and wanted to post a few words about Vygotsky’s 1934 book with the same title. Thought and Language first discusses the issue at hand, i.e. how language develops, how a child’s intellect develops and how these two processes are inter-related. He brings up the works of Jean Piaget and William Stern, among others. Vygotsky is harshly critical of his predecessors and doesn’t hesitate to point out where they were wrong – even bringing up the question in regards to Piaget’s work if thought precedes language or language precedes thought. He then describes his own theories and describes the methods he used for experimenting to come to his conclusions.

Despite the negativity towards other researchers, Vygotsky’s work is critical in understanding the interplay that is occuring in a student’s mind. We use language to make sense of the world and communicate our thoughts. According to Vygotsky, we even develop an “inner speech” that serves as the language in which our minds communicate internally. When working with language learners, whether they be young children, adults immigrating to a new culture, or students in a bilinguals school, it is important for their instructors to learn just how words are being constructed into ideas that are relevant to the individual.

While this book will not provide teachers with help in the classroom for learners developing literacy in a language, it may provide them with some background on psychological theory to develop some of their own understanding of the phenomenon and to better serve language learners. TeacherJay has used the book and the concept of “inner speech” as the basis for some research that may show how learning a second language in school at a young age may actually increase the ability of a child to think more critically and abstractly at a younger age.

Jeff Bezos, Founder & CEO of Amazon.com, is debuting their newest product, the Kindle, a small paperback-sized electronic book reader. Could this device be the improvement to the book? Even Bezos comments that the book is elegant and ponders if it is even possible to improve upon it. In today’s post, TeacherJay takes a look at the development of eBook readers and has a few words for the practical use of the devices.The Kindle is the newest generation of a series of eBook readers that seem to have failed in the marketplace. The concept is not new and the technology found in the early ones was not very advanced. The basic idea is to have a small device, about the size of a normal paperback book that can have different documents loaded onto it. RCA, Franklin and Casio have all tried these devices and TeacherJay has seen others using them. They do not seem to have mass appeal however. Perhaps this is because the early ones required a lot of battery changes. They used backlights to illuminate the page, much like those Timex Indiglo watches that we all went gaga over 15 years ago. It worked in the watch because we only need to see it for a few seconds, but with a book, the reader needs to have it lit for much longer and this kills the battery. Another issue was the weight and the fact that while the book readers worked great in normal home lighting situation, bright sunlight, or even strong fluorescents would cause the image to be washed out or reflect back a glare.

This new device uses a different technology known as Electronic Paper. With this method, the surface actually reflects light much like a printed page and only needs to use electricity in order to change the image. This saves the batteries as well as eye strain. Another large improvement over previous devices is the method of loading new data. While previous models stored information on flash cards, required a USB cable, Bluetooth or other wireless technology. All of these methods required a computer or at least a hotspot. The Kindle instead uses the EVDO high-speed data network that some phones and PDAs use. This means that anywhere there is data coverage, the Kindle will also be able to pick up the latest New York Times Bestseller, scroll through Wikipedia (for free), and download the latest blog postings – even The Onion, and it weighs only 10.3 ounces. TeacherJay has been intrigued by these devices for quite some time although the $400 price tag is still a bit stiff – and then books still cost $9.99. However, if the prices dropped a little, there more availability of books and the battery life and EVDO connections really do live up to the promises then perhaps this device, or similar, has a future.

Classroom applications of such a device are also fascinating. TeacherJay recently returned from the Mayatan School, a small school in Honduras, where teachers try not to give too much homework from textbooks. For one, there are not always enough books to go around so not everybody would have one, and secondly, bookbags of young children can get very heavy when they are loaded down with books. But, every child could carry home a wireless eBook reader and always have the latest textbook – in fact, s/he could have the entire classroom set, plus 200 books from the library. A school in Maastricht is already experimenting with this idea.  While that price tag is still high, if Amazon, or a competitor were willing to create lower cost devices and spread books to those who don’t have them, this could even turn into a way to defeat the digital divide – much like the One Laptop Per Child project.

Although this particular device probably has its bugs and is not perfect, TeacherJay still feels that Amazon deserves a Gold Star not just for putting the device out there, but for using the latest technology. While Amazon does stand to make a lot of money from the Kindle if it takes off so perhaps their actions are not completely altruistic, it is still an attempt to make the delivery of digital content to a portable reader a reality – perhaps it may even be able to steal some of the attention away from other portable devices such as the PSP and make reading-on-the-go just as fashionable as gaming-on-the-go.

Thanks to Thane over at Technology on a Shoestring, TeacherJay learned about this neat little tool. Having been a big fan of graphic organizers and mind maps for years, TeacherJay had long been interested in finding an application that was easy to use, multi-platform and free. Today’s post takes a quick review of this new site and suggests some potential uses for it in education.

Exploratree is a web-based application that allows the user to create mindmaps of concepts, or simply to organize one’s thoughts in a visual manner. The site is completely free and has a variety of pre-designed formats to choose from, or you can build your own from scratch – it’s really pretty easy. There is a method for uploading images from your own computer as well as the basic shapes that are provided. Perhaps the best feature, and what sets it apart from others, is the ability to create stages in the mindmap. For example, a teacher could create a process flow that shows the brainstorming phase of writing an essay, and then after a mouse-click, the stage of outlining will appear. Sure, this could be done in Powerpoint, and if online collaboration is needed, then even GoogleDocs or Zoho could take its place, so why use this tool? It’s actually built for this purpose and has templates already designed. Many learners will have difficulty when given a blank slate with which to fill-in their ideas, but when shown an organizer to use as a foundation, students are able to become much more strategic with their learning and many find the visual aspect of it as an aid to their learning. For more information on what graphic organizers are, and why to use them, please take a look at this article.

TeacherJay has experimented with Inspiration, their more child-oriented spin-off, Kidspiration and also MindJet’s MindManager. Unfortunately, they are not free – around US$70 for Inspiration and up to US$349 per MindManager license. Some free/open-source alternatives that TeacherJay has tried have been FreeMind and Semantik/KDissert (both on Linux). While they are appealing, and certainly have their uses, they simply haven’t caught on outside of Linux circles, although it will run on other platforms. All of these programs are lacking in features, user-interface, and definitely in their availability. Most people just aren’t using them and even if schools were to purchase them, not many teachers will know how to use them.

Exploratree comes to us from Futurelab and Microsoft UK Education. Although it is still a Beta it functions quite nicely and has a nice, albeit limited, range of features. The site is not without its downfalls however, for one, the registration component in order to obtain a free account and save work has occasionally been down recently, and the process creation component was a little confusing at first. Still, it is early in the development of this tool that should prove valuable for a long time to come.

For some more free software suggestions by TeacherJay, take a look at the Free Software Guide.

TeacherJay has long been fascinated with the experiment that is Wikipedia (see previous post). It is still surprising to him that users all over the world have come together to create a body of knowledge that is responsible when it comes to copyrighted information and accurate, insofar as references and citations are included to verify information. In his daily wandering of Wikipedia (he loves that Random Article link), TeacherJay came across the WikiProject Classroom Coordination page and also information on School and University Projects. These two projects are aimed at encouraging teachers to use Wikipedia not as a research tool, but as an authoring tool by creating lesson plans for students to learn how to contribute to the Wikipedia community. Students can research topics and help to revise articles – this could provide them with much-needed support that their work is actually meaningful and will be used by others, as well as instill in them a responsibility in their work.