If your school leadership is interested in building a larger and stronger community around your school, there are many online tools that can help.

Facebook
Facebook is the largest social network in the world with over 300 million active users and growing. Students have widely adopted Facebook as a tool to communicate with their friends, while the 35 and over age group is the fastest growing group on Facebook. A Facebook group for your school can be a place where students and parents can go to connect with other members of the community. Facebook groups also have a discussion board where members of the community can discuss topics.

Tandem
Tandem for Schools is an online school calendar that displays all the school’s events in one place. Parents and students can go to the real time online calendar to find out what events are going on, which increases participation. For instance, if parents know when and where PTSA meetings are being held, it is much easier to plan on attending. It also helps students find out about clubs that are meeting so they can participate in the extracurricular events they are interested in. When parents and students are more involved in school activities, it strengthens the school community.

Blogs
Blogs, which originated as online journals, have become powerful communication tools which can also be used by schools to build community. For instance teachers typically have a distant relationship with parents. They may talk a couple times a year at a parent-student conference. However, this is an important relationship that can be developed through online social tools like a blog. A teacher can post on their blog to explain what concepts they are studying, what students should be working on, and how parents can help. Parents can post comments on the blog posts, to provide feedback or discuss topics.

Twitter
Twitter, like many of the other tools, is a one to many communication tool. A principal can send a Tweet that will be read by parents, teachers, and students. It can also build community because of the retweet feature. Say you are following the principal who retweets (RT) a message by the PTSA (parent teacher student association) that they need volunteers. Followers of the principal can now follow the PTSA’s tweets and a new connection is created in the community. Twitter is most useful via SMS on your cellphone, where you can follow what people are talking about in your community and join the conversation, even if you are away from your computer.

MindMeister is a neat web application that provides a set of tools any school, teacher, student, or parent could use on a daily basis as well as for planning special projects and assignments. MindMeister puts a technological twist on the classic English class staple known as brainstorming or cluster mapping while allowing for more collaboration.

The basic features of MindMeister are free and allow for up to three Mind Maps to be created and utilized at any given time. A Mind Mapper with an iPhone or iPod touch can also install (for $4.99) an application that allows them to brainstorm on the go.

The educational possibilities of MindMeister are really limitless. An English teacher can suggest mind maps to facilitate students’ brainstorming or outlining for a research paper. If a student is conducting a significant amount of their original research online, the MindMeister map bubbles will allow for easy storing of “notes” which can include URLs or attachments. Students can also create a mind map for a subject that they are learning to create a visual representation of concepts and how they connect like a mindmap on the Civil War or the cardiovascular system. Students can also search delicious and Wikipedia for topic tags that relate to the content of any bubble on their map.

MindMeister can also be utilized in classes that rely heavy on group projects, like social studies or science. Students can share Mind Maps with each other and collaborate. Changes are automatically saved, so students will never be working over each other, and MindMeister provides a list (at the bottom of the window) of users who are accessing a MindMap at any particular time.

An online school calendar can be very beneficial for a school, parents, and students. Here are 5 things you may not know that online school calendars can do.

1. Subscribe to an RSS feed

Online school calendars can have an RSS feed which will allow you to receive updates in any RSS feed reader such as Google Reader, MyYahoo, Bloglines, etc.

2. Sync your personal calendar with school events

Chances are that you use some type of online calendar or desktop based calendar client like Outlook. Wouldn’t it be great if you could automatically populate the calendar you already use with important school events? Additionally, with Tandem for Schools, if you are only interested in the High School Varsity Soccer schedule, you can filter and sync only these events to your calendar.

3. Get automatic email updates and reminders

You can request to receive an email if there are any changes to an event. In Tandem you would click on the event on the calendar and when the details come up you would click on “Email Me Updates”. You can also click on “Set Reminder” to receive an email reminder before an event.

4. Reserve a facility for a event or meeting

If you are a coach, club leader, PTSA leader, ect, you can request a school facility for an event. Once the calendar manager approves the request you will have the room or gym reserved. Tandem for Schools automatically ensures that another party doesn’t book the same facility at the same time. Also, school facilities could be better utilized by the community and the school could even raise money by renting out facilities.

5. Create a custom personal school calendar

You may not be interested in all the groups at the school. Tandem for Schools makes it easy to create a custom calendar that tracks only the groups that you are interested in. For instance if a parent has a child that participates in soccer and jazz band, and they want to be involved in the PTSA, they can create a custom calendar with only events from those groups.

Some schools are attempting to get laptops assigned to every student to help students prepare for a world where computer literacy is becoming an increasingly important ingredient for success. With netbooks costing as low as $250, it seems like a no brainer to equip every child with a portable PC. But then there is the question of whether computer literacy is more important than book literacy. Reading is still an essential part of learning and a lot can be learned from reading books. If you think reading is more important, then you might advocate that every student get assigned a kindle e-book reader.

Here’s a quote from a Scholastic article

Kindles stocked with well-chosen e-books would also allow teachers to flex new teaching strategies, according to Cornelia Brunner, the deputy director at the Center for Children and Technology in New York City. “You could have a very nicely selected group of readings. . . . Kids could read, annotate, and actually clip and be asked to make connections among those clippings,” says Brunner.

Other possible benefits include providing students with more books electronically than is practical in print, reducing photocopying, relieving the unhealthy weight of student backpacks, and—though this case is far from proven—saving school districts money on textbooks.

An education think-tank led be former Clinton advisor Thomas Z. Freedman, even proposed giving a Kindle to every student in the country in a paper titled A Kindle in Every Backpack. According to the paper:

We shouldn’t wait a decade or two to begin to achieve what is inevitable — an education system where each American schoolchild has an eTextbook, like Amazon’s Kindle, loaded with the most up-to-date and interactive teaching materials and texts available,” the paper argues. “The ‘Kindle in every backpack’ concept isn’t just an educational gimmick—it could improve education quality and save money.

One solution may be to use an ebook reader application on the laptops so students can have the best of both technologies.

Do you think it would be more effective for students to have laptops or ebook readers?

Photo by Yutaka Tsutano

Jay Mathews from The Washington Post reviews a book that argues that GDP is directly connected to student performance.

The book, Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America’s Public Schools by Eric A. Hanushek and Alfred A. Lindseth, describes some noteworthy research in education conducted by Hanushek.

But his data also show productivity growing at the same pace as the rising education level of our work force, and international comparisons reveal a consistent pattern that strongly reinforces the notion that rising student achievement can make us all richer.

Here is his main point (excuse the jargon): “According to the existing evidence, each one standard deviation difference on test performance is related to a 1 percent difference in annual growth rates of per capita GDP.

The authors conclude that despite the government throwing large sums of money at the problem of student achievement, they have generally failed to improve schools.

While the connection with student performance and economic growth is intuitive, it is interesting to see research that finds a significant correlation. There doesn’t appear to be evidence of causation, as it could be possible that richer nations have better student achievement. Despite this, the data is a pretty compelling reason for the need for educational reform as the nation deals with the worst economic recession in decades.

Paul Bloom’s, highly recommended Intro to Psychology course is available to watch for free online. He is a very engaging and interesting lecturer. Even if you can’t get into Yale, you can still attend class or at least experience lecture by watching the 20 video lectures from this course. You may not be able to ask questions or take the exams but you can do the assigned reading from Peter Gray’s Psychology (5th Edition).

1. Save Paper/Reduce Carbon Footprint
A school can be more environmentally friendly by not printing out all their school calendars for all the students or printing out reminder fliers for upcoming events. Instead by directing everyone to the online school calendar, students and parents can get all the school event information in one place and schools can reduce their carbon footprint.

2. Save Time for School Administrators
Creating a paper school calendar can be very time consuming. A school can have over a hundred different groups, including clubs and sports teams. To create a central school calendar means organizing all the different groups into one calendar and working out time conflicts. When you think you’re done, a group may need to make a change, which can mean reworking the entire calendar. Sometimes a group may try to request an event in a facility that has already been reserved by another group and you are required to play phone or email tag to get the conflict resolved.

An online school calendar like Tandem streamlines the event management process. Groups can submit requests to add events, and the administrator can accept or reject with a click of the mouse. The software automatically checks for schedule conflicts before an event is added to the schedule.

3. Reduce Phone Calls to the School
One labor cost that schools often face is calls from parents, due to uncertainty about the school schedule. They may want clarification on when school will start on a given day, or the time of early dismissal. They may call to see if a baseball game has been rained out, or for the place of that days sporting event. These types of calls can be reduced by having an online school calendar that parents can access for answers to these simple questions. Often Tandem users inform us that setting up an online school calendar has greatly reduced the number of calls to the office.

4. More Effective School to Parent Communication
When a paper school calendar is sent out to parents, they may post in on their fridge or it may get lost. If they lose the paper or do not receive it, they are often left in the dark. Usually a paper calendar is good for informing parents about school vacations, but little else. A paper calendar can not alert the parent when an event has been rescheduled.

In contrast, an online school calendar is a living document. Parents can access the most up to date version of the school calendar in minutes. When changes are made to the time or place of an event, it is reflected to the online calendar as soon as it is posted. With Tandem, the school events can be synced with the parent’s Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, or Cozi, so events will show up in their work or personal calendar as well. An online school calendar is much more convenient for parents, and provides them with instant information that they need.

5. More Effective School to Student Communication
Students also want information about what is going on at the school, both during school hours and after. An online school calendar is a great source of information on events that students want to be involved in. They can also learn about clubs that they might otherwise not know about, but would like to join to build their college resume and make new friends.

Tandem also provides a feature to where students can post pictures and news about school events and groups. This feature can be used by students to share photos and news with peers, like the math club hoisting the first place trophy or the stats of last Friday’s football game.

Sliderocket is an internet based presentation software that can be utilized by anyone with access to the internet. As files do not have to be stored within a specific hard drive, on a CD, or in a USB device, Sliderocket is perfect for use in an educational setting.

Educators have always realized the importance of collaborative school projects as tools to help shape communication and coordination skills in students.

With Sliderocket, all a student needs to collaborate with their classmates on a project is an internet connection. All files and assets acquired are stored in the “cloud” on-line which means every student assigned to a particular account has full access to their project at any moment.

SlideRocket has a few assets (graphic and photographic) built-in to their program, but for any research paper or project, a student can bring in photos from Flickr and import videos from YouTube.com to create a true multimedia presentation.

Photos, graphics, clip-art, and video can also be uploaded from any PC into the asset library. A free account includes 250 MB worth of virtual storage space, which should be more than ample for any school related assignment.

When the project is complete and ready to be turned in, student’s can create a personalized link and send their teacher an e-mail invitation to view their finished presentation. Unless a creator decides to publish a presentation on a blog or web-page, the completed work remains 100% secure and can only be viewed by third parties with an invitation.

SlideRocket is a secure application that can bring the idea of group presentations back into schools and education at large while providing students a unique opportunity to experience the growing trend of “cloud computing.” Giving a technologically advanced twist to classic school reports and projects ensures that student’s are prepared for not only their future educational challenges but the technological challenges of the future as well.

The following article from Open Education discusses whether textbooks are becoming less relevant in education due to advances in digital media.

There was a large touch of irony in an August NY Times post discussing the demise of a fixture in the world of education, the school textbook. The article, In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History, predicts the death of an industry that is becoming “antiquated” with each passing tech innovation.

Though always considered exceedingly expensive, textbooks were once considered as fundamental to the classroom learning experience as the teacher. These tombs were the source of knowledge, the drivers of curriculum, and the teacher’s most important resource.

But all that has changed in the digital world. According to experts, there are two critical factors.

First, there is the assessment of the value (learning produced per dollar) of these texts:

Dollars in the books, isolated on white background, business tra“They are expensive,” writes Seth Godin. “$50 is the low end, $200 is more typical.”

Yet,

“Textbooks have very little narrative,” writes Godin. “They don’t take you from a place of ignorance to a place of insight. Instead, even the best … textbooks surround you with a fairly non-connected series of vocabulary words, oversimplified problems and random examples.”

And of course, in today’s lightening-fast world, they are out of date before the ink is even dry.

Second, while the books are essentially considered less than ideal, we are seeing an enormous change in students based on the fact they have grown up with technology. From the NY Times:

“Kids are wired differently these days,” said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. “They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite.

“They don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear and rote,” Dr. Abshire continued. “Teachers need digital resources to find those documents, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks.”

Beyond Textbooks

Today we offer a Q & A with Andy Chlup of the Vail School District. With experience as a classroom teacher and technology coordinator, Andy is a perfect choice to head up one of the digital learning movements cited in the aforementioned NY Times article, Beyond Textbooks.

Andy notes he has been passionate about utilizing technology in the classroom from the first day he walked into a classroom. His interest in digital learning was spurred on by the wide-spread availability of open-source web-based tools such as WordpressMU, Moodle, DekiWiki, and many more.

Below, Andy discusses the move to a digital learning model, one that actually transcends any discussion of textbooks.

What would you categorize as the three biggest advantages to moving away from textbooks and replacing that tradition with a digital learning model?

• Instant updates. Our superintendent, Calvin Baker, proudly sent out an email message to the school board when Pluto was demoted. In the message he said, we are one of the only districts in the country who’s textbooks are not obsolete.

• Collaboration. At this phase the primary collaboration is happening between teachers but as the tools become more familiar students will be working with each other, their teachers, and the community more and more.

• Costs. While the technology that enables digital learning still costs slightly more than a set of textbooks, it can do so much more. A digital device provides access to content and gives students a platform to create, share, and work.

You can see the full interview with Andy Chlup over at Open Education.

Photo credit:http://www.flickr.com/photos/gingerblokey/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Evernote.com is a site that will be infinitely handy for any student taking a class requiring research. It is the internet equivalent of the bulletin board and more, allowing students to virtually clip and organize web-site articles, facts, and pictures.

A technologically inclined student can also use a version of Evernote on an iPhone, Palm Pre, Sony Ericsson or Blackberry cell phone as well as with Windows Mobile and the iPod touch, which will allow them to store information acquired within physical books or displays in an electronic format.

In an educational context, Evernote is a perfect tool to assist in crafting a report, research paper, or science project. For instance, if a student were to be assigned a research paper on George Washington, Evernote could be their organizational hub.

Any internet research on Washington could be quickly catalogued by copying and pasting a new Evernote into their virtual notebook. This can be done from any PC using the Evernote browsing window. Research materials obtained online at either home, school, or the library will be accessible online at all times.

All new notes retain information relating to the source URL, and each user has the ability to add specially assigned personalized tags (such as subject name) to the notes (these features will ensure key information remains at hand to aid in filling out footnotes and forming a bibliography).

If a student visits a museum or exhibit to acquire information about their topic, photographs can be snapped and added to Evernote. Evernote contains a unique photo searching tool that will scan a picture of sufficient quality for any words present and will identify them in a search of a user’s notebook. This allows quick sifting of all information, which leaves more time for actual research and presentation of a paper or report.

For the student user who may still be operating on a dial-up connection, Evernote can also be ran as a desktop application on Mac or PC. At launch, the program can synchronize with Evernote.com or be ran with the notes already stored.

With so many different methods of access available, from mobile to internet to desktop, Evernote.com can be utilized by almost every student and is a definite asset when putting together a comprehensive school paper or project.