Darren Kuropatwas last blog post..David After 5 Years

Karl Fischs last blog post..I Read the (Rocky Mountain) News Today, Oh Boy

Karl – So many good questions, as always, which is why I’m bugging you via e-mail about the next podcast, the one where we talk through your questions.

Michael & Scott – Some good points. Yes, we do some work that’s throwaway, and that we don’t need to worry about after the fact. And, no, free and good are not polar opposites. Plenty of free stuff is good and plenty of good stuff isn’t free. And vice versa, I think.

George – One thing that teachers shouldn’t have to do is to go into their own pockets to handle the data that should be handled by their schools and/or districts.

Dean – You’re getting into some of the reasons I think we should be saving work in the first place. Certainly, we are not talking about keeping everything, and there’s plenty of practice that happens that might not need to stick around.

And yet.

We can’t say that we need lots and lots of data to measure student growth out of one side of our mouths and then say that their work isn’t precious out of the other side.

We can’t say that the work our students do is unimportant and not worth keeping and looking at later and they say that their educations are so important.

We can’t ask kids to do meaningless and unimportant work, work not worth looking at and saving, day in and day out for 13 years.

As a language arts teacher, I rarely asked for something that wasn’t precious. What kind of schools are we providing if all our students do is throwaway busy work?

And if we are only asking kids to do meaningless stuff, then I want that documented, too, so that we can change.

Our kids deserve that. And so do our societies.

Bud Hunts last blog post..I’ll Miss You, Rocky. Thanks for Everything.

While I agree that we should be thinking more seriously about digital content, I think that most work of students is done in a sandbox. Disposable.

How much of my work or even my own kids work has been saved over the years. Pretty much nothing. The odd cute drawing maybe. Recently my kids have done a few video projects that have been kept on our home network.

In reality, very little work of our students is so precious, it needs archiving. I’m waiting for a push back on that.

I’ve also increasingly moved away from the thinking that all the tools we use in class should be free. I think the price that many Web 2.0 services are asking is more than fair. For example, I paid $60 for a Vimeo Pro account and it’s been an amazing place for us to host and share our videos this year.

I also think it’s important to save your content in more than one place ( as Scott states). Most of the videos we host on Vimeo, Google Video, and YouTube are also backed up on external hard drives and DVD’s. Some students also make it a point to get copies of their digital work for their own keeping.

What I find interesting is that most schools really don’t talk about this stuff. So if you want to save and organize digital content, the burden is on you as a teacher to figure it out.

Your point is well taken that “free” does not imply “good” and that we have to be careful with who owns our stuff. I also am embarrassed by educators who sell themselves short by basically selling out for whatever is “free” that day. (Do NOT get me started about people who go to education technology conferences for the “free stuff…”)

I would also argue, though, that “free” does not necessarily mean “bad” — especially in terms of a product like Google Apps for Education that is vetted and in use by some well-known colleges, universities, and K12 districts.

Naturally, there needs to be some coaching around that, too, and that’s our job as teachers and educators. Would I keep a working chapter of my dissertation on GDocs so I could access it from different computers? Sure. Would I keep the one-and-only copy of my dissertation in GDocs? No way. It’ll be backed up on 3 memory sticks, my NAS, my Dropbox, and on every computer I own.

So I guess what I’m not-very-eloquently trying to say is that, as usual, we need the best tool for the job. Just because something does not cost anything does not mean that it’s “the first free thing that comes along.” And just because something has a cost doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good thing.

Great thoughts, Bud! Thanks for making me think!