Cool Tools

Technology can be a stern taskmaster. As in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, our tools may seem a bit overwhelming. As library media specialists, we need to keep abreast of the latest technologies and be prepared to assist our teaching colleagues with the tools that can improve their instructional practice. And then there’s keeping up with the resident techno wizards that we also serve—our students.

Like Mickey Mouse, you need to take control of that broom. To help you get organized for the coming year—and beyond—I’ve composed a cheat sheet on the tech tools that I believe will have a big impact on schools.

Some, like the ubiquitous iPod, are popular personal accessories that are migrating into classrooms, while others, such as RFID technology, are still looming on the horizon, at least for schools. But all are worth examining for their potential to play a meaningful role in libraries, computer labs, and classrooms. So let’s don our geek glasses and gaze boldly at our ever-increasingly techno world.

Ask any English or language arts teacher and they’ll tell you they spend so much time reading and providing feedback on their students’ writing—there simply isn’t enough daylight to do much more. But with No Child Left Behind requiring evidence of student achievement in writing and an essay question now part of the SAT, the pressure is on educators to get students writing more, and to score and track their progress. Enter automated essay scoring. Just a few years ago, teachers would have called such a concept crazy, says Donna Blessing, a sales manager for Vantage Learning, creator of MY Access!, a Web-based writing instruction suite. “But now,” she says, “people are kind of catching up with this.”

Automated essay-scoring systems do far more than just spell check text. The software, which employs natural-language processing, a form of artificial intelligence, can provide students with instant feedback about the nuts and bolts of their essays and stories—grammar, spelling, and the like—as well as rhetorical structure, and prompt them to make targeted revisions—all without having to wait for their teacher to get around to grading them. According to Harry Barfoot III, Vantage’s vice president of sales and marketing, essay-scoring software will enable writing instructors to make a necessary shift in their thinking and practice. “A teacher can now say 'we’re going to have 12,000 pieces of writing graded in my classroom this year,’” he says. “That would have been unthinkable a few years ago.”

Another vendor in the automated essay grading game, ETS (Educational Testing Service), has just released version 4 of its Criterion Online Writing Evaluation. The Web-based product, which debuted in 2001, boasts half a million elementary- through college-level users nationwide, according to Linda Reitzel, director of Criterion development, who says that there are only about five other competitors in this market.

So will the technology doom thoughtful writing teachers into obsolescence? Certainly not, according to Reitzel. “We emphasize that teachers are an integral part of the process,” she says. “[Criterion] is an instructional tool that saves teachers a lot of time because it takes care of the mechanics.”

MY Access!, available for grades four and up, not only evaluates essays and tracks student progress, but provides curriculum-aligned writing prompts. Barfoot was good enough to walk me through a demo of MY Access! over the phone. While I found the product impressive, I was a little disappointed when I didn’t get an opportunity to wax eloquent on a prescribed topic and receive an automated score. In the spirit of investigative journalism, I snuck back into MY Access! following our conversation and composed an upper-secondary-level essay on whether or not parents should allow their children to work during their high school years. Moments later I had my score.

How’d I do? I scored high marks on mechanics, conventions, and vocabulary, but I’m afraid the software found me, well, a bit wishy-washy. Next time, I’ll make sure to drive home that first paragraph with a boldly declarative thesis statement.

RFID (radio frequency identification) is among the hottest topics in libraryland, and library media specialists—especially those who might be involved in opening a new media center in the next few years—should definitely take notice.

RFID is the heir apparent to the bar code technology that started making its way into school libraries in the 1980s and, like bar-code technology, it’s being driven by the retail sector, where little advances in inventory control and check-out speed can make big differences in profit. Big-box behemoth Wal-Mart, for example, has required that its top 100 suppliers ship their products with RFID tags starting this year. When you consider the volume of goods that that single mandate entails, it seems pretty clear that RFID is here to stay. Moreover, with staff cutbacks and increasing circulation rates, public libraries are increasingly turning to RFID systems to manage their collections, according to Connie Thompson, spokesperson for 3M, manufacturer of RFID Tracking Solutions.

The major advantage of RFID over bar codes is that RFID readers don’t need line-of-sight contact to read RFID tags. Instead, they send out a radio signal that momentarily energizes the RFID tag, which measures about one square inch and contains a tiny transmitter. The tag then sends its data back to the reader. Being notoriously simpleminded, I like to reduce these things down to preschool similes. Think of an RFID reader as a mama duck and RFID tags as cute little ducklings. When the mama duck quacks, “Where are all my babies?” all the ducklings within earshot quack back: “I’m here, it’s me!”

What can RFID do for school librarians? Help you keep all your ducks in a row. Imagine doing your entire inventory in a couple hours by simply walking your scanner past the shelves. Something misplaced on the shelf? Use your RFID reader to find it. RFID will also streamline the check-out/check-in process, as well as help facilitate self-checkout. Besides 3M, there are about five other companies that market RFID systems, says Thompson, including Checkpoint and Libramation.

However, RFID is controversial. Privacy watchdogs like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are concerned that RFID will enable “Big Brother” to find out who is checking out what. Though it’s hard to imagine this kind of snooping occurring in school libraries, those seeking to protect the privacy rights of their K–12 patrons should understand that RFID technology itself doesn’t create any new privacy issues. As long as we ensure that our RFID tags—just like the bar codes most of us currently employ—contain no personal or bibliographic information, there’s nothing new to worry about.

While RFID is clearly the wave of the future, don’t expect bar codes to disappear from school libraries overnight. “Currently, K–12 institutions are finding these systems too expensive,” says Thompson. Little wonder. An RFID scanner will set you back about $3,000 and the tags, 70 cents each. Still, the technology is expected to become less expensive with more widespread use.

The iPod MP3 player was definitely the coolest geek gadget-cum-fashion accessory of 2005, but could the same device that served up the latest Green Day song to scores of sullen sophomores become the hottest piece of educational technology? Certainly Apple would like to think so, and at least one forward-thinking higher-ed institution seems to agree. More than 1,600 freshmen arriving at Duke University in the fall of 2004 were no doubt totally stoked to receive a free iPod, preloaded with schedules and campus information. Following the successful pilot program, the university now provides iPods to students to record lectures, among other instructional uses.

Younger kids, too, can do more with iPods than just crank tunes. The sleek personal jukebox doubles as a portable storage device—a digital backpack, if you will. And with the addition of a $40 voice recorder, it can be used to do all the things once done with cassette recorders. That makes it especially useful for language, literature, journalism, and music instruction. With an iPod, students can listen to audiobooks and famous speeches, record interviews, and store photos and video clips to create multimedia projects. For more examples of classroom use of the iPod, check out the lesson plans at www.apple.com/au/education/ipod/lessons.

Educators are also beginning to explore “podcasting,” a means of creating audio content which is posted on the Web, usually on blogs, or online journals. These digital “radio shows” can then be downloaded onto an iPod or any other MP3 player. Many podcasters employ RSS, a Web syndication format, to “subscribe” to podcasts, which they then receive automatically. Besides providing teachers with a handy way to distribute instructional content, podcasts also function as a novel format for student assignments. Intrigued? Then visit the Educational Podcast Network’s Web site at www.epnweb.org, where you can sample podcasts on a range of subjects for students in elementary through high school.

Though certainly nothing new, Weblogs or “blogs” are suddenly catching on with educators, who recognize the technology as a powerful, dynamic writing platform that also accommodates the easy inclusion of hyperlinks and multimedia content. In the near future, I expect educational blogs will do for student prose what slams did for student poetry: generate enthusiasm by upping the “cool factor.”

Jay McDowell, who teaches courses on government and world religions at the Howell (MI) High School Freshman Campus, has used a blog for the past two years as a vehicle for his students to post their opinions on local and global social issues. “Why employ blogging as a teaching tool?” I asked. McDowell’s response cut right to the heart of the medium’s potential: “Sure, these assignments are all things I could have kids submit to me individually, on paper,” he says. “But I think it’s a bit of an arrogant delusion to assume that today’s kids actually care what I—a teacher—think of their work. On the other hand, when they post to our blog, they know that not only will their peers be scrutinizing their material, but so will people all over the world. They seem especially aware that older students will be reading their posts and that, if they haven’t done their homework, readers are going to respond by clicking the “comment” option and posting their criticisms. That’s the educational power of blogs: instant global publication, spontaneous feedback, and the built-in accountability that comes with that.”

Sarah Chauncey, a library media specialist at Grandview Elementary, a K–3 school in Monsey, NY, is another avid blogger. She “does everything” with blogs, she says, using online entries to update content on her library’s Web site, share classroom news with parents, and organize lesson plans. Chauncey’s eventual goal, in fact, is to “do away with paper-based lesson plans entirely.” (For more on Chauncey’s work, see “Tell Me a Story,” pp. 24–25.) Like McDowell, Chauncey believes that blogs, used in a thoughtful way, can increase the quality and the quantity of student writing. “I think it’s really about teaching a new generation in a language and context that they accept and embrace,” she says. “Blogs are their notebooks; this is how they’ll communicate in the future.”

Die-hard pedagogical idealists, those old-school educators who still doggedly believe that learning is an inherently collective activity, should consider tapping the power of wiki to get entire classes involved in cooperative projects.

Like its more popular cousin, the blog, wikis provide a universally accessible publishing space where users can easily post to a Web site without knowledge of HTML, the Web’s basic code. With blogs, personal postings appear in reverse chronological order, while wikis are arranged by content. Most notably, any member of a wiki community can access and edit any post. That makes wikis a natural platform for projects in which the focus is on collaboration and/or compilation. Students can use wikis to assemble lists of helpful resource links on a given topic, for example, or work in teams to collectively craft a short story.

The most famous wiki of all, Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), is a freely editable, Web-based encyclopedia, which, since its inception in 2001, has grown to about a million entries in over 100 languages. But wikis can certainly be created for smaller communities, such as classrooms, and they can incorporate password protection to limit access. That’s important for insuring student privacy and curtailing wiki vandalism—the willful sabotage of otherwise legitimate wiki postings.

While wikis are still fairly rare in K–12 education that may begin to change as blogs incorporate wiki’s key feature, the capacity for any user to edit content. Editable blogs—a hybrid known as “bliki,” or alternatively, “wogs”—may be the wave of the future. Educators interested in experimenting with wiki projects should check out the many “wikifarms” that host wikis for free or for a small fee. At least one, SeedWiki (www.seedwiki.com), supports bliki.

Everything old is new again and, who knows, the hottest new computer platform on the horizon just may resemble that time-honored writing utensil: the pen. LeapFrog Enterprises has developed a pentop computer—the FLY—and it’ll be hitting stores and pilot schools this fall. In a promotional DVD, LeapFrog’s executive vice president of content, Jim Marggraff, boldly predicts that “in 10 or 15 years we’ll look back at the definition of the pentop computer and declare this as a watershed in human thought and communication.” Marketing hyperbole or visionary genius? We shall see.

The core technology in the $99 talking pentop computer is an optical sensor that tracks the motion of the pen across special paper, which contains a barely visible grid of dots. Kids can write stuff and their writing becomes interactive. Draw a calculator on the paper, for instance, and it becomes functional; write a word in English, click on it, and a natural-sounding voice gives you a Spanish translation. Educational applications for the FLY span the typical grade 3–8 curriculum, but the FLY is not strictly a learning tool; there are games, personal productivity tools, and entertainment features built in. Though designed for tweens, the FLY will have applications for teens and adults, according to LeapFrog.

Like all the technologies I’ve outlined, the FLY is definitely one to watch. While I’m itching to get my paws on a FLY and review it in full detail in an upcoming Test Drive column, I also have to admit that, unlike the other tech trends and tools profiled here, the prospect of the pentop becoming the dominant computing platform in the future frankly scares the living heck out of me. In a given school year, I lose an average of one pen per hour. And if the nifty little device actually does fly, I’ll really be in big trouble.