I saw this article in the Washington Post today, and it got me thinking about the days when I was teaching robotics.

In 2002, the director of technology at my school gave me a budget and asked me to set up a program.  I did lots of research and reading and then purchased some Lego Mindstorms kits and lots of miscellaneous Lego sets.  I purchased a mixture of traditional Lego sets and also the ones that go with the Mindstorms bricks (a brick is the basic robotic unit that you build the robot onto), like the intelligent house kit and the amusement park kit.

I also bought lots of different kinds of bins to organize the materials and spent hours, literally, on the floor of my office that year, organizing and categorizing all those tiny bits.

The most fun was developing the curriculum.  My boss and I decided what our goals would be and at what grade levels we thought we could introduce robotics.  We eventually settled on an introductory unit in 4th grade, a fun project in 6th grade and a week-long project for “interim week” in Middle School.

For 4th grade, I developed challenge sheets that helped the students move from simple commands to more complicated tasks. The Washington Post article indicated that only the self-appointed geeks in the class tend to do well with the robots, but I disagree.  By using the challenge sheets and having the students work in small groups, everyone succeeded.

For the 6th grade we used those challenge sheets and then assigned a project: build a Lego float that will be able to navigate a colored tape line on the floor on the day of the parade.  The Robo-Rose Parade was probably the funkiest, strangest project I’ve ever done, and we had a blast.  Some of the floats were too top-heavy, and the kids had to rebuild on the fly.  Some of the robots simply wouldn’t follow the tape line, and they had to scoot into the lab and re-program during the event.

The 7th and 8th graders made a slew of bizarre projects.  One animated a teddy bear and made it dance to music.  We used an unstuffed bear from Build-a-Bear, and she built a Lego skeleton and stuffed it into the bear.  Another group animated a Harry Potter Lego kit; another group created an elaborate intelligent house that featured a scenario where the people come home from work and as the car drives up the driveway, the lights come on, etc. etc.

I miss those days of playing with Legos.  Now, my boss teaches the robotics unit to the 6th graders.  They have these huge wooden structures, and the robot is supposed to be a dog that the students train to do certain things in the structure.  They still have a blast.

I highly recommend using robotics to teach computer programming.  It’s fun, it’s relevant, it’s challenging.  I’m sure it’s one of the highlights of my teaching career.

This is a question I’ve been grappling with since I went to the Google Teacher’s Academy a little less than a year ago.  After a full day of learning all of the marvelous things educators can do with Google, I found out a few weeks later that the Google Terms of Service (TOS) specifically states in section 2.3 that “you may not use the Services and may not accept the Terms if (a) you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with
Google.”

From my limited research, it appears that the age at which you can form a binding contract is 18.

Kind of frustrating that I brought back all these cool ideas to my school to find out that Google didn’t mention to us that they might be illegal for our kids to use.

I’ve spoken with someone at Google, and I’ve participated in a thread in my Google Teachers’ group, but it doesn’t look like there’s a clear answer to the question.  Until there is, I’ve been recommending to teachers who use Google services that they have parents sign a form allowing their children to sign up.

Here’s a good CNET post on the matter, and the links the blogger includes are worthwhile too.

Cody’s Cuentos (Cody’s Stories) is a weekly Spanish-language podcast featuring classic children’s stories told by professional storytellers.

The site is attractive and pretty easy to maneuver. You can either listen to the story on the site, or you can subscribe via iTunes or an RSS feed.  Full text versions of the story are available in Spanish, making the site useful for teachers.

I’m no expert in teaching foreign languages, but this site looks like a user-friendly option for Spanish teachers who are looking to incorporate podcasting into their classrooms.

It’s fascinating to see the Internet, television and new technologies cast in a positive light.  Even Club Penguin, a children’s online play community, gets a little love in this WaPo article about how today’s youth are more savvy and therefore more inclined to engage in philanthropy.

From the article:

Young children and teenagers across the nation are getting involved in philanthropy more than ever, according to research and nonprofit experts, who credit new technologies with the rise of the trend. As young people increasingly become exposed to and connected with the problems of the world via the Internet and television, experts said, parents are finding new ways to instill in their children the value of giving.

I had the lucky privilege of advising a particularly techno-savvy student for her senior project this year.  She was willing to do a little risk-taking and willingly jumped at my whacky idea to put part of her project into Google Earth.

The student, Annarose Mittelstaedt, is a photographer and took some luminous photos of Los Angeles neighborhoods at night.  She posted her photos on her website and also created a beautiful slideshow with music.  (Click here to see the photos on their own; click here to see the slideshow in QuickTime.)

When she would return home from her photo adventures each night, she’d plot her journey into Google Maps and then save it.

We figured out how to transfer her data from Google Maps into Google Earth, and then we figured out how to use Picasa (or Panoramio.com) to create photo popups at each of her shooting stops.  (Click here and then scroll down to download her tour so you can enjoy it in Google Earth.)  Finally, we figured out how to save the whole thing as a tour that could be shared with others.

Soon, I’ll post detailed directions about how to do these things because even though it was easy to do in the end, it took some effort to figure it out in the first place.  I’d like to save other people the trouble.

In any case, I absolutely love these photographs and the tour.  It’s very refreshing to see such lovely photographs of the great city of Los Angeles.

I know I promised to share my thoughts about the Google Teacher Academy and that I haven’t done it yet.  I will, I promise.

But for now, I have a cool Google search trick I learned there — Google Short Messaging Service (SMS) — so I’ll share that.

The next time you’re out and about and dying for a pizza at that new pizza joint, but you can’t, for the life of you, remember the name or phone number, try this with your cell phone:

1.) Open a new text message.
2.) In the place where you’re supposed to type the “to” number, type 466453, which are the numbers that correspond with the letters GOOGLE on your phone’s keypad.
3.) Then, in the body of the text message, type pizza 91105, or whatever the zip code is for the place you’d like to find pizza.
4.) Send the text message and thrill to the results.

You can try this with a number of simple search queries, like population china.  Or weather pasadena, ca.

For the heck of it, I typed in weight frog, and the text message I got back contained a suggestion to visit sms.google.com for a little guidance.  There, you will find all you need to know about what sorts of information you can get from this service.  You can get local listings, flight information, general facts (though not the weight of a frog, I guess), driving directions and much more.

Have fun!  But watch out, it’s a little addicting and I bet you can run up those texting bills.

On the way home from work yesterday, I heard an interesting NPR story about a laptop school in Arizona.

I go back and forth about all-laptop schools.  I think it could be good in the right environment, especially if the teachers are completely committed to, and ready for, the meaningful integration of technology into the curriculum.  And, if the school in question is ready for the substantial infrastructure and organizational obstacles that a laptop program presents.  Thinking about the battery issue alone makes me feel addled.

At the end of this story, though, that little bugaboo pops up, the one about measuring success.  The story made it clear that it’s too early to really tell, but so far there was no detectable difference in achievement between laptop schools and non-laptop schools.

But, there wasn’t much information about how achievement was being measured.  Seems like you need to construct a new reality about what achievement is when you’re measuring the efficacy of a laptop school.  Maybe when kids learn in this kind of environment, the gains aren’t all visible in traditional measures like standardized tests.  Golly.  Fancy that.

Well, at least it sounds like the kids aren’t losing out.  And, the story points out, they don’t have such heavy backpacks full of books.  That can’t be bad.

It’s really difficult to talk with teens about the importance of privacy.  Some have a sense of why it might be important, but since the majority of kids we come across on a daily basis have not generally had their privacy really, truly invaded, they don’t yet understand its importance.  Or what it might mean to have, you know, a reputation.

This subtle Washington Post article about teen athlete Allison Stokke would be a great

discussion-starter.  I think it would offer kids a way to contrast publicity for great accomlishments with unwanted publicity, like the blogs that detail sexual fantasies about Stokke.

And, this article offers teens the opportunity to discuss these issues in a context where their use of social networking sites Facebook and MySpace is not being criticized.

The article is essentially about the long reach of the Internet.

… apparently some are declaring "e-mail bankruptcy," according to this article in the Washington Post.

The article cracked me up, but then I stopped laughing, thinking of how overwhelmed I am by e-mail myself.

Hmmmm …

Well, while I was at the Google Teacher Academy, seems like news broke (Monsters and Critics) that Google is going to ban ads from sites that sell essays.  There’s an interesting comment under this article that reads, "Google should only search the internet, not police it."

This article from the Guardian (UK) has the same news, but adds that

Essay-writing companies join a growing list of content deemed inappropriate by Google. These include adverts for tobacco, prostitution and fake documents.

I wonder about the same thing the Monsters & Critics commenter does, but then again, I guess Google can sell (or not sell) ads to whomever they want.  But, I also wonder how much impact banning ads will have to prevent plagiarism.  Can’t students just use the search engines to find the services just about as easily?

And, I don’t think that this ad-banning will do much to prevent copy-and-paste plagiarism, which I’m guessing is probably more rampant that students buying essays outright.  Click here to read my little rant on how pedagogy is what will ultimately prevent plagiarism.