Category: Thoughts (Page 10 of 19)

The sale of Instructure, the maker of Canas, to the Private Equity Firm Thoma Bravo, seems to include all of the data that Instructure collected.

The State of Michigan bought into Canvas to provide Edupaths (don’t worry, they got a great deal for three years*). I took classes through Edupaths. So, what happens to my data? Does Thoma Bravo now have a good bit of data about me?

I’ve reached out to the State of Michigan asking if they exempted our data from being collected and sold by Instructure. I haven’t heard back yet. If they haven’t/didn’t/don’t, Thoma Bravo has a great treasure trove of teacher data. My data would be included in that.

*Canvas was well known to always be peddling a “great deal” for three years. Their stated intention was to turn those accounts into profit by raising prices after three years. This short-sighted thinking always kind of bothered me. Let’s be honest about what things cost. It seems somewhat unlikely that the Canvas model worked out as planned (though it did work out – they were purchased for $2 billion) as they never actually made money.

Recently, a family member was hospitalized. I was reminded (re-learned?) the power of passion.

He was a very “good” patient. He was not demanding, very cooperative and had a sense of humor about all that was going on.

He also didn’t want to embarrass himself. This required some care and attention. Several of the nurses and assistants helped with this. Most of them truly had passion for what they were doing. They cared. Simple and straight-forward. They cared. They brought passion to their job.

Then there was one who lacked that passion. She wasn’t incompetent. Not at all. She completed her tasks. But she was obviously lacking passion. I’m sure that she completed the task as per the checklist that was developed for her training. However, since sometimes “just enough” isn’t enough to truly prevent some issues. So, the work that she completed didn’t last very long. One could tell that she was being frustrated. Additional procedures were being considered.

Then, someone with passion would pick up the process and all would be right again. I truly don’t think that she meant ill will. I would guess that she would go home and be frustrated as well. I’ll guess that she may have even expressed that frustration to her friends/loved ones. On one hand, she would be correct. She did follow procedures. She was just lacking one thing – passion.

I’m still amazed at the passion and caring that we saw and experienced at the hospital. That passion made a difference. It made a difference for the patient. It made a difference for the family. I’m not sure that you can teach that passion, but I believe that each of us can find it for ourselves.

I also believe that we can hire it in. I’ve tried to always hire people who are truly passionate about what they are about to do. I’ve missed a few times. I’ve hit more times than I’ve missed.

No matter what, we can find/reclaim/develop/foster passion in our work. It can be easy to lose in the demands and responsibilities. It can be tough to hold onto without support. It can be destroyed by negativity.

Keep fighting for your passion.

What do you use for Formative Assessment? A survey was sent out listing fourteen (that’s rigtht 14!) options. Now, this was just one survey, there are several of these out there.

What happens in a survey like this? Users usually will vote for their favorite – obviously. But what counts as their favorite? How many of those voters are really, intimately aware of the strengths and weaknesses of all fourteen options?

For those that are aware of the fourteen options, what did those users give up by researching and trying out all fourteen options? Teacher time is limited. Given that teachers not only need to develop lesson plans, create relationships with students, grade work, spend time with friends and family and so much more, who has time to review fourteen different formative assessment tools?

The reality is that few educators have the time and attention to really review that many options (and there are more that could have been included). That time would be much better spent developing skill in high quality formative assessments. Educators would be much better served delving into a high quality tool that allows for a variety of formative assessments. It isn’t quite as “shiny” and “sparkly” as looking at a bunch of “new” tools, but it can pay off in more focused student learning. Instead of reaching for broad strokes of surface learning, educators should develop some depth to the learning process.

Are you interested in the 14 options?

• Answer Garden
• Crowdsignal
• Formative
• Gimkit
• Google Forms (the ultimate “winner”)
• Kahoot!
• Mentimeter
• Padlet
• Plickers
• Poll Everywhere
• Quizlet
• Seesaw
• Spiral
• Other

Interesting, one of the comments included:

…isn’t as hackable by high schoolers like…

Out of the 14 choices, my favorite (Moodle) is not listed. Moodle does a great job with Formative assessment. However, there really isn’t a sales force pushing the product. Oh, and an educator may have to learn a bit about Moodle.

I’m really not against using paid, commercial products. I do think that we should understand why something is free.

Most of all, I believe that teachers and students are worth a little bit of effort to utilize tools that can effective and not merely “shiny” objects that don’t really impact learning.

ADA compliance is something that we should be working toward. I’ve trained many users on creating ADA compliant documents, but there is at least one thing that is really hard to explain. The difference between Titles and Heading 1.

In coded HTML, Titles are specified. Headings similarly specified. Titles and H1 are functionally similar, but have different purposes in HTML. When writing this by hand, each page written in HTML should have one H1 which functions as the page title. (The title tag is written out but not displayed).

Here is an example of the HTML and the result:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en"> <head>     <title>Testing Heading Code</title>     <meta name="generator" content="BBEdit 12.1" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is Heading 1</h1> In Wordpress, the Title is tagged as a Heading 1. <i>The Title Tag is handled outside a post, in the Theme appearance settings.</i> </body>
</html>

(*Notice that the browser tab has a different name (“Testing Heading Code”) than the  “Title” (“This is a Heading 1”) on the page.

Impact

Basically, title tags appear in search engines, defines the title in browser toolbar, and provides the title for the page when bookmarked. It also becomes the link that the user clicks on in search engine results. (H1 tags normally do not appear in search engines.)
H1 tags are what the end user will see on the web page. 

Very few people hand code pages that are displayed on the web. Almost everyone now uses a visual editor. Most use WordPress or are posting a document written in Google Docs (or Microsoft Word, etc).

ADA

This is all important because titles and headings are used by screen readers. This allows those with visual acuities to access material on the web. The use of headings is part of the ADA guidelines.

WordPress. 

By default, the Title entered is an H1, so users just need to know to start with H2. I’m not even sure why H1 is really available¹ (except that you could have a theme that treats the post title different – ie. not an H1). 

Google Docs

This one is harder. There are style sheets for a Title and a Heading 1. If you don’t use the Title style, ADA checkers will flag the document as not having a Title. If you use a Title AND a Heading 1, ADA checkers will also flag that have more than one Heading 1. 
I don’t see a way to get to Document Properties (where you can enter a Title), without using an external ADA checker². 

Citations

Just to make this even more interesting, headings are used in properly formatted papers. APA has a five level system of headings (plus a Level 0 which equates to a Title Heading). Thus, APA has a somewhat similar structure, but allows for multiple Heading 1 uses.

Conclusion

It really seems to me that we have a single construct trying to meet the needs and perspectives of many different situations. HTML was originally designed and structured (it is, after all, a highly structured approach) to meet a specific environment and use case. As the web was developed, the use case changed. Documents and accessibility became important. The landscape and users of HTML have fundamental shifted.

WordPress seems to have addressed this situation with the latest version of Gutenberg.

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¹ If you use the Gutenberg editor, H1 is not available in the visual editor. So, maybe this is being addressed and solved.

² Grackle Docs is an extension that does really nice, complete ADA checking.

Should I care about your motives? What if I’m a teacher and you are offering me a service? Should I care then?

Teachers are consider parents in the eyes of the law. Teachers can act “in loco parentis” (in place of the parent). This means that teachers are making decisions for parents.

Teachers want to take advantage of popular tools. Teachers want to provide students with as many powerful opportunities as possible. These days, many of those opportunities are offered online. What if we don’t understand why that tool is being offered?

Privacy

Facebook has been in the news many times of the past several years. Facebook offers a “free” service. That is, Facebook doesn’t charge users for an account. Yet, Facebook is worth billions of dollars. Obviously, they are making money somehow. Do we, as consumers, understand what that means? Do we understand the power of information that Facebook has? Do we understand what Facebook is doing with that information?

Examples

Facebook has been in the news many times for privacy issues. Here are a couple of examples:

It turns out that Facebook has manipulated the emotions of their users (successfully) by changing the information that users saw. The Atlantic has a nice write up.

For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700,000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves.

Facebook also shared private messages of users with some companies as well. Those messages were shared with more than 150 companies.

These are but just a coule in many privacy issues that revolve around Facebook. It’s turning out that your data is pretty powerful when it can be tied directly to you.

Facebook is just an example that most people are familiar with. Lots of companies are tracking and/or collecting data. The question is how do we understand this change. One thing that we can understand is that TV has always been free ¹. TV was free because advertisers paid for the content. Those advertisers did research which kind of told them who the market was, but not individuals.

Services

So, let’s say that I offer a teacher a service. This is a great service that offers to help with classroom discipline. I offer it to all teachers for free. Why is it free? Should teachers know or care?

There are costs associted with all services. There are server costs, development costs, bandwidth costs, etc.

How does the company pay for those services? Generally, there are three broad categories of programs that are offered to teachers (and others). (I’ve written about this previously in Free vs Free vs Paid.

• Passion project
• Open Source
• For profit

Passion projects

These are sites/applications that are paid for and shared by an individual (or group of individual) who do so as a hobby. Generally, they want to share with the world. This blog is an example. So is Middle School Matters, the Middle School Matters Podcast, and a few other projects that I’m involved in. I pay for the domain names and hosting because it’s my hobby. I’m certainly not alone in this.

Open Source

Open source projects are similar to passion projects. Really similar. Many open source projects start or exist as a passion project. The difference is that open source allows individuals (or companies) to change, enhance, or develop the project as well.

For profit

You pay to access or use a service. Here the model is pretty straight forward. You are paying so that someone can make a living.

Free

Teachers need to be aware that not all free sites are equal. Some are passion projects. Most are not. Many are not. Many are funded by Venture Capitalists. What does a Venture Capitalist do? A Venture Capitalist invests in a product with the intent of making money. How do these companies make money? Frequently, it is by selling the information that they collect.

Summary

So, should teachers care about the motives of those providing a service? I believe that we should. I believe that we should be making intentional choices. Gone are the days when advertisers marketed to a vast group of people. Now, we stil are not sure where and how the information being collected about us will be used. Now, I’m not in the “tin hat crowd”. However, I do think that we should be discussing and making thoughtful decisions about the services that we are offering.

1: At least until cable TV came in and we started paying for TV. Cable provided additional channels. Importantly for this discussion, that was a revenue model that allowed those channels to exist – even though they also showed advertisements.