Flickr:David Ortez

Sometimes teachers and administrators need a kick in the pants to see what they perceive as problems re-framed in a different way. Adam S. Bellow, author of The Tech Commandments, and founder of eduTecher, spoke to a roomful of receptive teachers at the recent ISTE 2011 conference, and demonstrated some of the ironies and contradictions the education system is mired in. And he had some advice.

1) DON’T TRAP TECHNOLOGY IN A ROOM. “When I went to school, computers were put in a room called The Lab,” Bellow said. “‘What are they experimenting with in there, I thought.’ Technology wasn’t built into what we were doing. It was farmed off in a room, like it was special. Like we were learning how to code, and in case the Russians came, we’d know what to do.” Technology should be like oxygen, Bellow said, quoting Chris Lehmann, the founding principal of Science Leadership Academy: Ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible.

2) TECHNOLOGY IS WORTHLESS WITHOUT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT. Bellow emphasized the importance of making professional development a priority, the importance of time and money being spent to educate teachers on not just an hour-long how-to session, but ways to integrate technology creatively into educators’ daily teaching practice in meaningful ways. He told the story of an interactive-whiteboard training guide who made one quick appearance at a school, never to return, leaving teachers still unsure of how to use the technology. There’s a world of professional development on YouTube and on Twitter, ironically sites that most schools block (see Number 4.)

3) MOBILE TECHNOLOGY STRETCHES A LONG WAY. “You can get much more out of mobile tech than out of most other technology,” Bellow said. Kids bring it to class everyday, but we tell them to turn it off as soon as they walk in. In New York City, Bellow said he watched as an agonizingly long queue of students waited for 45 minutes to pass through a metal detector and hand over their cell phones, which were then placed in individually labeled manila envelopes. “Can we do something better with those 45 minutes?” he asked. Cell phones can replace expensive reference books, Flip cameras, old calculators, and the list goes on. “Instead of buying those tools, buy an iPod Touch and it’ll be all of those things,” he said.

4) THE NEW ‘F WORD’ IS FEAR. Not Facebook, and not the other expletive you might have expected. Schools fear everything from being replaced by gadgets (“Any teacher who can be replaced by a robot should be,” he said), to kids knowing more about subjects than they do, to collaborative Web tools that are blocked because of a slew of acronyms that haunt administrators. On one hand, “teachers are frustrated because they feel like they’re being handcuffed,” Bellow said, due to crude filters that block out all kinds of useful websites. On the other hand, kids already come to school with phones that have access to everything. “We could block Facebook, but who are we kidding? They’re already on it,” he said. “The world is not a sterile place. Kids need to learn how to deal with it.” And because kids have access to every kind of information at any time, they need to learn about things like Creative Commons and copyright rules. “We’re doing them a major disservice if we don’t teach them good digital citizenship,” he said.

5) TECH TOOLS ARE NOT JUST A PASSING FAD. Bellow said he’s heard countless times from those who don’t want to take risks by finding and investing in new tools. And even when they do, they use only a fraction of the tools’ potential purposes because they haven’t invested enough time to figure it out (see Number 2). Bellow told the story of a school administrator who was able to buy iPads for his teachers, but is only using them to take attendance. He showed a video of a 100-year-old woman learning how to use the iPad to browse the Web, to read books, to watch videos, and how excited she was about it. “We are natural lifelong learners,” he said.

6) MONEY IS NOT THE PROBLEM. Teachers have access to thousands of free Web tools. And even if the free ones do decide to start charging, others will crop up to replace it. The point is not to be afraid of diving in (see Number 4).

7) INVITE EVERY STAKEHOLDER TO THE CONVERSATION. “Who’s at the table?” Bellow asked. “Mostly administrators, some ask teachers. But here’s a novel idea. Let’s have students come to the table, and parents too!”

MindShift readers are familiar with these concepts, but it’s great to have a tidy recap. Thanks, Mr. Bellow.

Flickr:A Trying Youth

Google “photosynthesis” and you’ll see a long list of links to everything from Wikipedia to PBS to the University of Illinois, with plenty of YouTube videos thrown into the mix.

To streamline this somewhat random page of results for both educators and learners, a group of education content providers is teaming up to create a better defined framework for education-related searches online.

In a move that brings together for the first time traditional content companies and free, open content sites, the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) and Creative Commons (CC) are partnering to improve search results online the through the creation of a metadata framework specifically for learning resources. That means teachers looking for content — much of it aligned to Common Core standards — will be able to more easily find information they need. At least that’s the hope.

“Easy access to high-quality learning resources is the end goal of this project,” said Charlene Gaynor, CEO of Association of Education Publishers at the Context in Content conference today.

Many of the big-hitters on both sides of the spectrum are involved, including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), Curriki, McGraw-Hill Education, Monterey Institute for Technology in Education (MITE), Pearson, Promethean, Scholastic Inc., and SMART Technologies, BetterLesson.

“Educators and students miss out on education resources available online because it is takes too long or is too hard to find appropriate content,” said Catherine Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons in a press release. “A common metadata schema will make this search more efficient and effective so educators can quickly discover the educational resources they want, including those they can reuse under Creative Commons licenses.”

Today’s announcement follows on the heels of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Schema.org, a collaboration between the three major search engines that’s billed as a “major step forward in the evolution of search.”

Likewise, this collaboration is meant to “create a learning explosion,” said Shep Ranbom of ISKME. “This can do for students what Dewey did for readers 150 years ago when he created standardized card cataloging.”

The partners are hoping to have the function up and running in between six months to a year.

Flickr:Horia Varlan

Over the last week or so, The Chronicle of Higher Education has written a number of posts detailing some of the battles universities face with regards to copyright issues. Conflicts about copyright are nothing new, and even though there are exceptions for classroom usage for copyrighted material, there’s still plenty of confusion about what constitutes acceptable use — and what’s “Fair Use” — for educational purposes.

According to The Chronicle, confusion about copyright law and fears about lawsuits from publishers and rights owners means that millions of pieces of content are “locked away” — unavailable for researchers and students. This includes both physical and electronic records, but as Marc Parry notes, it’s also preventing many institutions from digitizing their archives and/or making that content available online.

Part of the problem stems from copyright law that pre-dates these digitization efforts and part of it comes from the so-called “orphan works” — those in which the copyright owner cannot be located. And of course part of it stems from the fact that copyright law is simply confusing, and as The Chronicle points out, many schools opt to err on the side of caution, keeping materials unavailable rather than risk lawsuits.

Several schools are already facing lawsuits due to alleged copyright infringement, including UCLA and Georgia State University. In the case of the latter, it’s the practice of “course reserves” that has the university in hot water — making materials for students available via the library’s electronic reserves. In a post on Duke University’s scholarly communications blog, Kevin Smith, the university’s scholarly-communications officer, describes the publishers’ request to limit how much material can be posted to library e-reserves as “a nightmare scenario for higher education.”

In the meantime, what are educators to do about using copyrighted materials in the classroom? The Chronicle lists a number of resources where people can turn to for more information about copyright, including The Copyright Crash Course, Stanford University Libraries’ Copyright and Fair Use guidelines, and the American University Center for Social Media’s Best Practices.

But the flood of questions and concerns about copyrighted materials is also a good reason to turn to openly-licensed content in the classroom. Last month, we looked at 10 Open Education Resources You Might Not Know About (But Should), for example. And today YouTube announced that it was expanding its Creative Commons library — with over 10,000 CC-BY licensed videos now available on the site — and allowing users to label their content as CC-BY when they upload new videos to the site.

Barring getting a law degree to wade through the intricacies of copyright law, turning to openly-licensed content (and licensing one’s own content that way) is probably a good place to start. Educators: how do you handle copyright with your materials?