Minecraft, Microsoft, and Education: A Dysfunctional Polygamy Made In Heaven

It's summer!

A time to enjoy so many flavors of equality!

This was the most pertinent image I could find

when I Googled "Affordable healthcare act, gay marriage, confederate flag"

Summer also means that it's that special time of year when I can write again. 

I'm excited too, because after a fairly professional and technical stagnant 2014-15 school year, 4th grade at ISP is ringing in the new school year with a 1-to-1 iPad program... 

...A mere 5 years since the iPad was launched, 2 years since the Los Angeles school district adopted them, a year since the Los Angles School district abandoned their iPad program, and only a handful of months since the Los Angeles School district asked for a refund.

I say this without hyperbole or sarcasm: I'm pretty excited.

Clone Zone: Put Your Content On Any Website You Want

The world of digital literacy just got murkier. Today I learned about Clone Zone, a website that allows users to annotate any website they want.

This means that you can change any online newspaper to your version of The Onion.

A USA Today Paper I Made

I used the existing photos from the USA Today website in the above example, but I changed the text. If I wanted, I could have changed the photos as well. 

That's great for teachers, but probably not-so-great for Facebook users. 

Full Disclosure: 

I'm Not Sure The Comments To This Fake Article Aren't Fake As Well

Besides the fun of making your own fake content, there's a lot of potential to teach digital literacy with Clone Zone. Now teachers can stretch their students' digital literacy muscles even more with customizable websites that can look like anything the teacher wants.

This means it's now a little easier to customize my resources when teaching about online authorship and content. 
Teaching Research, by salamanca

The one thing that doesn't seem possible yet with Clone Zone is to change the links of the webpage. If users (teachers) could do that, they could create a whole online ecosystem for digital literacy. 


Yesterday Clone Zone went into closed Beta, and if you want to try it out, check out the link to find out how to sign up. 

The Right To Vote: A Case Study In American Territories

A governments' authority comes from the will of the people. People must show what they want their government to do by voting. Everyone has the right to vote.


For several posts I'm featuring case studies that illustrate an article from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that children and adults find interesting and illuminating.

The goal is to identify examples that I can use with my 4th grade class. 

I get the Czech Republic version of HBO, and can never really figure out when anything is on. I think John Oliver is on at sometime, but I'm not sure. But there's Youtube, and there's this brilliant critique of US citizens who aren't allowed to vote. John Oliver brilliantly critiques the hypocrisy and ignorance that much of America has with its territories.  



Not all of our territories allow even citizenship though. 
If you're born on America Samoa, you're a US national, but not a citizen.  As John Oliver put it, "they can't run for president, serve on a federal journal, or, depending on where they live, even become a public school teacher." Yet they serve on our army, where a commander-in-chief who they couldn't possibly vote for, send them to war. 

America Samoa, you belong in my "right to country" post.

The Right To Not Be Bullied: A Cyber-Bully Case Study

No one is to be hurt or to be punished in cruel or unusual ways.

For several posts I'm featuring case studies that illustrate an article from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that children and adults find interesting and illuminating.

The goal is to identify examples that I can use with my 4th grade class. 

Most kids hear this right and immediately think of physical pain. I think this right can be a gateway into bullying in general, and specifically cyber bullying. 

Anyone who has read my blog on a regular basis...

 I'm looking at you, me

...knows that I'm really interested in teaching digital literacy in elementary school.
There's this post, for instance. Or this one. 

Case Study 1: Invisibilia: How To Grow A Bully


The second half of Invisibila's episode "Our Machines, Ourselves" details the story of Pete, a commuter on the N train in New York. Here's a quick summary:

• Pete was fed up with rude behavior he saw on his daily commute. He decided to start a twitter account to capture the rudeness and to vent his frustrations.

For example spreading your legs so that the person to your right is smashed against a pole.

• Pete didn't find rude behavior all the time, but he wanted to keep his twitter account active, so he also snapped and posted photos of people who looked strange, or was caught doing something embarrasing, or didn't fit his definition of normal.

• What started out as a way to expose bad behavior became an outlet for bad behavior. In short, Pete became the cyberbully of the N Train.

• Pete didn't stop when his anonymity was exposed and fellow N Train commuters encouraged each other to snap photos of Pete on the N Train and post them online. Instead that kind of energized him even more.

• What made Pete eventually stop posting was a moment of self awareness. He realized that his online activity was making him angrier, not calmer, as he was constantly looking for things to be outraged by. 

There are a lot of teachable moments in that story. But another strong aspect about this episode is that  Invisibilia talked to Dr. Ryan Martin, the chair of the psychology program at UW-Green Bay and Arthur Santana from the University of Houston. They identified specific ways interacting online is different than interacting offline:

1) Online you are primarily communing through text. So we don't have these social cues. We don't have inflections of voice. We don't have facial cues.

2) Online it is easier to go through the process of deindividuation, which apparently is a word. It means losing one's self-awareness in a group setting.

3) Online there are time delays. So you can drop something into the world and not stick around to see how it lands.

4) Online interactions are taking place through a screen. They can all feel like a game.

And often times they are a game

5) There's anonymity, which Santana found makes you nearly twice as likely to be cruel.

6) We are more likely to retweet or share things that are angering than anything else. This comes from a study that classified the emotions of more than 70 million tweets. What they found is that anger spread faster online than joy or sadness or disgust. 

The problem, says Doctor Martin, is that over time, using that online vent to cure your anger actually makes us more likely to become aggressive later on.

The WSJ makes a parallel to Catholic confession

All of these factors lead to something called the online disinhibition effect. Which, according to Wikipedia means a loosening (or complete abandonment) of social restrictions and inhibitions that would otherwise be present in normal face-to-face interaction during interactions with others on the Internet.

The Right To Country: A Sea Gypsy Case Study

No person or people shall have their nationality taken away from them. This means everyone has the right to belong to a nation. And they also have the right to change their nationality, if they want to.

For the next several posts, I'll be featuring case studies that illustrate an article from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that children and adults find interesting and illuminating.

The goal is to identify examples that I can use with my 4th grade class. 

The 26th of this December marked the 10 year anniversary of the Boxing Day Tsunami that ended 230,000 lives. I was living on Ko Phayam at the time, a small Thailand island about 300 km north of Phuket, and when the wave hit, I should have been swimming, because I swam every morning. Except not on the 26th, because I took a boat to the mainland to pick up my brother at Ranong’s airport. The boat reached Ranong, and the wave reached the island about a half hour later. 

The months that followed was an interesting time for relief work, as the world pulled together to help and support affected regions in as many ways as there were ruses.  Michael Douglas, for example, decided the best way that Hollywood could help was to give a million baht directly to the now deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. 

Foreigners eager to assist paid shady, fly-by-night NGOs for the privilege to pick up garbage on the beaches as the locals sat on their porches and watched. 

One of the more interesting predicaments I saw was on the small island of Kho Lao. The island was comprised of a steep hill, surrounded by a narrow shore.  

Kho Lao. The school is on the left.

This was kind of a problem for the island inhabitants, because it meant that anything they built jutted out into the sea on stilts and wooden planks. 

The island held two villages positioned on opposite ends and split by the mountain that made crossing the island on foot essentially impossible. One of these villages, the Thai side, has a school. It could potentially teach around 200 students. 

The Thai side of the island

The other village, I’ll call it Morgan village, did not. If children want to go to school from Morgan village, a small boat picks them up everyday. At the end of the school day, they are taken back. 

Morgan village was not made up of Thais. They were a settlement of sea gypsies, until recently nomadic on the water. Sea gypsies had no nationality, even though generations have lived on and around the shores of Thailand, and many had permanent residence on the banks of Thailand. The Thai government allowed sea gypsy children to attend Thai schools, but they weren’t citizens. Morgan village wanted citizenship- a fact confirmed by a quick glance around the village- every house and boat has a Thai flag hoisted above it. 

The Sea Gypsy side of the island

The village looked like a forgotten beachside carnival. 

But the Thai government hadn’t granted that privilege yet. As a result, the sea gypsies were foreigners in their homeland, among some of the poorest people in Thailand, save for the illegal Burmese immigrants. Without country or education, they had slipped into a level of poverty and hygiene that is at once horrific and heart-tugging.

In theory the children in Morgan village could go to the Thai village school. But there were several obstacles. 

Transportation was one. Although it is only a five minute boat ride, there was only one small long-tail available to transport the children to and from school everyday. 

Another obstacle was food. But not in the way you may think. A relief organization has decided to supply the sea gypsy children with a lunch program directly in their village. This took away the one motivation poor, uneducated families have for sending their children to school- the promise of lunch. With lunches being given directly to the homes, no one saw the need for school. The few students that were going to the Thai side for school just stopped going.  

Free lunch from an NGO took away the incentive to go to school

So this was an interesting problem. Actually a problem within a problem. Problems that as a foreigner and a guest of the island I could not fully comprehend. 

But stripping the problems within problems away, what's interesting about this to a 4th grader studying "The Right To Country," is that there are people that are born without a country. Until recently they couldn't go to school. And even then because they don't get any type of government support, there's a cycle of poverty that is very difficult to break.