Google Classroom by Mike Siekkinen

Are you and your students using Google Classroom? If you are in a school with one-to-one technology (all students have access to computers, chrome books, tablets, etc.) I highly recommend this application. Google Classroom is an easy-to-use virtual space where a teacher can post messages, assignments, links, etc. Virtually anything can be posted for your students. It's also an easy way to assign students work and they have the ability to turn things into the classroom. You can also grade assignments and post grades and give individual feedback to students. Very powerful and easy to use application at a great price- FREE! Google updates the platform frequently and there are lots of tutorials on the web to teach you how to use google classroom. 

Setup is easy. Sign in for the first time
1. Go to classroom.google.com and click Go to Classroom.
2. Enter your username and click Next.
3. Enter your password and click Next.
4. If there is a welcome message, read it and click Accept.
5. If you're using a G Suite for Education account, click I'm A Student or I'm A Teacher. ...
6. Click Get Started.

Google Classroom also allows you to personalize each classroom with a picture so as you are teaching a certain topic, you can add a background to your classroom related to your subject area. You also have the ability to post assignments ahead of time and have them become available for students on the date you select. Very handy when you may be away from the classroom and are leaving student work.

At the end of each year, I archive my classes and then start new classrooms for the new school year. The process is easy and allows you to keep student work from previous years to be able to show students good and bad examples of assignments. Also if there is ever a question about grades, you have the actual work done by the student. I find teaching 8th grade that my students now come to me familiar with how it works and I have to do virtually no “teaching” students how to operate within the application. In fact, many students show me new things that you can do! 

If you haven't tried it, give it a go!

Dr. Mike Siekkinen, a retired U.S. Navy submariner, became a teacher as a second career. He teaches history at St Marys Middle School as well as Adult and Career Education at Valdosta State in Georgia.

Put Away the Tech, Part 2 by Scott Harris

Attend a lecture at a local college or even look around at pictures internet, and you’ll see nearly every student behind their (usually Apple) laptop. They are allegedly taking notes, but research suggests otherwise. 

A 2010 study (Journal of Information Systems Education, v21 n2 p241-251 2010  Examining the Affects of Student Multitasking with Laptops during the Lecture.  Kraushaar, James M.; Novak, David C.) found that students spent 40% of their time on things unrelated to coursework. Ninety percent of students were engaged in unrelated activities for at least five minutes, and 60% were distracted for half of the class.

While colleges can block the internet in lecture halls, few do. This begs the question of why any professor or teacher would allow their students to take notes on computers. Some like Dr. Laurie Santos at Yale, have banned laptops. Yet even she got so tired of students asking for exceptions, that she made an exception. However, they have to apply, and she quarantines them in the cheap seats, where they can’t distract anyone else. (See picture below) 

Dr. Santos teaches “Psychology and the Good Life,” the most popular course at Yale. She knows the research is wildly against taking notes with computers. Taking notes by hand has many benefits. Students can type much faster than they can write, which would seem to be an advantage. Yet when an experimental and control group are set up, the students taking notes by hand did better on conceptual understanding, both an hour later and seven days later.

But the typists did better on detail, surely? No. The hand writers did better on that, too. It seems that you can’t keep up writing by hand is the beneficial part. That you have to evaluate, synthesize and condense what is being said is the very thing that forms memory hooks. Typists can essentially record verbatim what is being said; thus, the integration necessary for memory formation is not occurring. 

Then it occurred to researchers to tell the typists to synthesize and not record verbatim. It had no effect. It seems we just can’t help ourselves. If we can keep up, we will. Typing allows to record without really thinking.

Scott K. Harris teaches The Moral Sciences: A.P. Macroeconomics, A.P. Psychology, and Philosophy. He holds a B.A. in History/Psychology and a M.Ed. in Teacher Leadership. He has also taught U.S. History, World History, International Baccalaureate’s Theory of Knowledge, and coached swimming and water polo. He piloted curriculum for Stossel-in-the-Classroom and is an associate producer for izzit.org.  

Put Away the Tech, Part 1 by Scott Harris

While I use technology in my classroom, I pride myself on conducting a fair amount of our learning “old school.” 

We write rough drafts by hand, creating word webs, outlines, and other pre-writing on notebook paper. I can then give feedback in real time, and together, we create a wonderfully organic document, from which something beautiful emerges: a clear, concise thesis. 

An endangered species on many campuses, the clear thesis is often discovered accidentally. One way to discern whether a student really knows how to write a solid thesis is, after having written their first paragraph, ask them to underline their thesis. Many aren’t certain, and point to one thing or another, looking for confirmation. I don’t give it. They need to think more about the topic, about what they want to say. They should be able to tell me what they want to say. 

Many point to something so vague that it does not separate itself from any anti-thesis. Or the student in Gifted/Talented English comes with a complex, multi-faceted first paragraph that could really be an outline for a book. They are so used to being praised for such writing that they are often shocked when I tell them that this paragraph won’t work at all. 

When I ask them to underline their thesis, they’re unsure not because they don’t know, but rather because they have managed to squeeze three viable theses into an opening paragraph! When I tell them to pick one, they really don’t want to, because “issues are more complex,” etc. “Do you know what’s not complex?” I ask. “A thesis.” 

When student finally learn to write a clear, concise thesis – and a methodology for doing so – they find it liberating. Too often they’ve had to stumble across a thesis nearly a page in, or had to respond to writing prompts without developing ideas as much as responding to them. 

Doing all of this by hand is much faster than with technology, allows for arrows and redirects to be made, and is teaching process in a non-linear way. Typing pre-writing on a word processor gives the impression that thought falls forth from one’s head like soldiers marching in columns. 

Once students have written what they want by hand in a solid rough draft, it is time to type it up. One of the benefits of a typed rough draft before the final product is the clarity of thought (or lack thereof) emerges, once messy penmanship is eliminated. Development, connections and refinement are easier to see now. So why not start that way? Because development, connections and refinement are second order concerns. If the ideas and clear thesis are not created first, there is nothing to develop, connect, or refine. First things first.

Scott K. Harris teaches The Moral Sciences: A.P. Macroeconomics, A.P. Psychology, and Philosophy. He holds a B.A. in History/Psychology and a M.Ed. in Teacher Leadership. He has also taught U.S. History, World History, International Baccalaureate’s Theory of Knowledge, and coached swimming and water polo. He piloted curriculum for Stossel-in-the-Classroom and is an associate producer for izzit.org. 

econlife - When Cars Have To Decide Whether to Kill Grandma by Elaine Schwartz

Imagine for a moment that an out-of-control streetcar is hurtling toward five people. Sitting at the controls, the driver can do nothing and assume those five individuals will die. He can though flip a switch and instead hit a single person.

Doing nothing results in five fatalities. Acting will cause one person’s death. What to do?

It might all depend on where you live.

But first, the reason we need to know.

Autonomous Vehicles

A group at MIT wanted to identify what people believe is ethical because self-driving vehicles will have to make decisions. Yes, most involve the everyday traffic rules we (are supposed to) observe. However, especially in emergencies, some will be about life and death. A machine will have to decide whether to strike someone who is old or young. It could have to choose between harming men or women, more or fewer people, animals or humans. An autonomous vehicle can act or do nothing.

The Study

To see the ethical driving decisions that should be made by self-driving vehicles, those MIT researchers created a survey. Called the Moral Machine, 13 scenarios were presented to millions of people in 233 countries. All had situations in which someone had to die. Their task was deciding who.

The geography of the Moral Machine:

The Results

Among the participants, there was general agreement about three moral dilemmas:

• humans over animals
• save many rather than a few
• preserve the young instead of the old

However, it wasn’t quite that easy. Moving from general preferences to specific answers, researchers uncovered much more division.

Geographically, the responses to the Moral Machine questions divided into three groups:

• The Western Cluster: Values that related to Christianity characterized the answers from North America and some of Europe.
• The Eastern Cluster: People with a Confucian or Islamic heritage from places that included Japan, Indonesia, and Pakistan tended to have similar opinions.
• The Southern Cluster: The third group, not explicitly tied to specific religious roots, was from Central and South America, France, and former French colonies.

Nature Magazine illustrated the differences through a moral compass:

In addition to geography and religion, ethics varied by gender, age, education, income, and politics. Institutions mattered. In more affluent countries with established institutions (like Finland and Japan), survey participants were more likely to condemn an illegal jaywalker. As for age, respondents in the Southern Cluster tended to spare the young rather than the aged.

Our Bottom Line: Externalities

For self-driving cars, ethical programming has become a reality. Necessitating countless choices, the decisions will create externalities. Defined as the impact on an uninvolved third party, the externality can be positive or negative.

Now though we can see that what people call positive or negative will vary.

I wonder if that means having self-driving cars with a Western, an Eastern, or a Southern personality.

My sources and more: I recommend taking a look at Nature’s article on The Moral Machine Experiment.  From there, you might also enjoy this 99% Invisible podcast and this German Ethics Commission report, and do be sure to take MIT’s moral machine quiz.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - A Dilemma: How Much to Pay for Our Privacy Protection by Elaine Schwartz

There is a doll whose name is Cayla. She has a pink skirt, a denim jacket, and a bluetooth connection. Like many toys, she can have a conversation with us.

While these dolls are all Caylas, their manufacturer says you can program in a new name:

But you won’t be the only one who knows her name.

Whatever we say to Cayla can be stored on a central server and then sold to anyone or any intelligence agency. The German government banned her because she violated their privacy laws.

For us also, Cayla is more than a toy. She takes us to the cost of protecting our privacy.

Privacy

Privacy History

We could say that we were concerned about privacy from people during the 19th century, from government in the 20th century, and now, from the corporation. Before the mid-19th century, privacy was not even a concern. The reason could have been that we had limited photography, no telegraph, no telephone.

The following Google Ngram search shows the word was not used very much in books until the 1960s:

Contemporary Privacy

A Google search, Amazon’s Siri, and a Facebook like all add to a data supply chain that lets corporations collect and sell data about our behavior. So too do our Smart phones, Smart cars, Smart dishwashers.

However, when told how much we share, our response to privacy protection is tepid. In a recent survey, 80% of the participants said they would want to protect themselves from their everyday technology but only 26% said they would pay for that protection. Asked if they would pay to see fewer online ads, 50% of the survey’s participants said no.

Our Bottom Line: The Cost of Privacy Protection

To understand why many of us are minimally concerned with privacy protection,  it might help to see its cost (economically defined as sacrifice) from two perspectives.

Collectively, the cost of losing our privacy is immense. Through our elections, our businesses, our personal and professional relationships, we can corrupt our basic institutions.

As individuals though, when we lose our privacy, life becomes easier. Our appliances work better, we remain in touch with our world, and toys are more fun.

So “bad” things happen as a society when we lose privacy but “good” things happen personally. You can see why we won’t pay to preserve our privacy. One by one, we cannot even fix the problem.

And perhaps that is why Germany banned Cayla. The only way we can and will pay for our privacy is together.

My sources and more: Thanks to a Crazy/Genius podcast on privacy for a good walk yesterday morning. Because of Crazy/Genius, I learned about Cayla the talking doll from the NY Times. As for the survey, it was reported by MarketWatch. And finally, you might enjoy (as did I) pondering what Justice Brandeis said about privacy.

Our featured image is from Pixabay.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

Media Literacy by Jim Triplett

I was out with my family at a restaurant recently and could not help notice how many people were glued to their smartphones rather than engaging in conversation with those seated at their table.  I see this in my classrooms as students enter, find their seats, and wait for class to begin.  Students use their smartphones to connect with others, and they increasingly use them for learning activities; however, just because they are skilled at using their phones to stay connected, they should be careful to not assume this skill applies to information and media literacy. 

Media literacy is one's ability to utilize, examine, and analyze the media. This requires that he or she conduct research and compare information found with different sources using a critical lens. As part of the examination, it is important to evaluate bias within the media and explore how these views impact the information that is reported (Paul & Elder, 2008).  

Media literacy is also important because a good portion of our decision-making today is based on current information typically delivered by social media, among others.

Since social media is a significant source of current events for many, one within which confirmation bias is present, there exists a need for a critical lens for everyday decision-making by those who use it regularly. Confirmation bias is when people look for information that coincides with their established opinion, which can prevent a person from considering plausible views others hold.   Confirmation bias is also referred to as a form of self-deception, as noted in this Psychology Today article.

Media literacy involves knowing how to sort information into what is and is not valid and reliable, and it also involves being aware of the potential for confirmation bias (it can be very subtle).  Actively seeking opposing views is one strategy to address this form of bias.  Another involves creating a process by which information is assessed for validity and reliability, such as whether or not the messenger is credible and if he or she has a vested interest in advancing the information.

Consider who is on your friends list with one or more social media applications to which you subscribe.  Ask yourself where confirmation bias may be present in information you receive and how you may develop effective media literacy skills.

Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2008). The thinker's guide for conscientious citizens on how to detect media bias & propaganda in national and world news. Dillon Beach: CA: Foundation for Critical Thinking Press.

Jim Triplett is an author, instructional designer, and instructor in the areas of finance, economics, ethics, and critical thinking. Jim holds Masters Degrees in Finance, Organizational Leadership, and Instructional Design Technology, is ABD / PhD in Organization and Management, and is currently completing a doctoral degree, Ed.D, in Educational Leadership with a focus on Educational Technology.

econlife - The Surprising Significance of Ping Pong by Elaine Schwartz

Twitter was regularly buying new ping-pong tables until the end of 2014. By 2016, the headlines said that their growth had stalled.

There might be a connection.

Ping Pong and Startups

In tech, playing ping pong is a normal part of the workday. Or, as one chief tech officer said, “If you don’t have a ping-pong table, you’re not a tech company.” We could add that when you stop buying ping-pong tables, your tech company might be declining.

To prove the correlation, one ping-pong table dealer tells us that when his store’s sales declined by 50% during the first quarter of 2016, startup venture capital funding dropped 25%. However, he was quick to point out that the table purchases are not a predictor. Rather they are “coincidental”:

 

Venture Capital (VC) Activity

If VC and ping pong (perhaps) relate, let’s follow the money.

Who?

In the following graphic, you can see that information technology got the most money from the most VC deals:

Where?

The San Francisco Bay Area was by far the top region for startup money and then the Boston/New York/Washington DC corridor.

However, New York is a distant second behind San Francisco:

 

Our Bottom Line: Venture Capital

Yes, we can look at the gargantuan dollar and deal totals for venture capital:

But what actually is venture capital?

Here is the perfect VC primer. I’ve summarized the list from BusinessInsider:

1. Just like Shark Tank, venture capital is the money received by young companies that helps them to grow. In exchange for the dollars, the investors get ownership shares.
2. On the other end, the VC firms get their money from investors like mutual funds and affluent individuals.
3. Entrepreneurs go to the VC firms asking for cash. (You might enjoy Startup.com-an award winning documentary about a tech startup.) The initial stage of funding is called “seed capital.” Snapchat first got $485,000 in 2012.
4. If the firm survives, the next step is the “growth round,” also known as Series A. Then the funding hits the multiple millions. For those millions, the VC investor gets a slice of the company. BusinessInsider compares it to an 8-slice pizza. Assume the pizza (the startup) is valued at $24 with one slice worth 12.5%. If that firm grows, the VC group retains its 12.5% stake and hope they have the next Google.
5. The last stage is the “exit.” If all works out for the VC firm (which is rare), the startup could be acquired or sell its shares to the public through an IPO (Initial Public Offering).

And then, ping-pong table sales skyrocket?

My sources and more: When ping pong and VC connect, that means there is lots more to explore. So, I took the next step with Medium and then the leap in the VC world with VentureSource. But if you want more of the perfect VC overview, do go to the Business Insidersummary.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz's work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

Technology and Critical Thinking by Jim Triplett

Like many others today, I rely on technology for many tasks I once reserved for my brain and a trip to the library, including problem-solving.  Many websites exist that offer to solve problems, including determining the root cause.  Many times the root cause of a problem may be lost in the noise of an issue leaving some to be less-informed than they think.  This bias can diminish the effectiveness of the steps used to refine the solution to a problem. Chabris and Simons (2009) addressed a number of cognitive illusions that lead people to misunderstand the world around them, one of which is the illusion of knowledge, one where a person thinks he or she knows more than he or she does as well as the illusion of cause.  These are also quite common and, thus, lead people to make decisions that are less-than-ideal.

Consider this TED talk from Dr. Simons on illusions.

Now, consider these additional videos from Chabris and Simons, with particular attention to the selective attention test, the movie perception test, and the door study, reminders that when it comes to thinking, we suffer from illusions that interfere with decision-making:

Many thoughts are present at any given time, some more prevalent and others that are subconscious. Research has shown that one's mental framework is a function of their education, experiences, religion, etc and these are also forms of bias as they are the filters by which we analyze and process information (Frew, 1981).  These biases are efficient in that they allow one to process large amounts of information quickly and they typically are pretty good at doing so most of the time (Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman, 2002).  The challenge is when these do not work well for us, especially when trying to identify the cause of a problem.  Being aware is a key to managing biases in critical thinking as it allows one to recognize when a problem may be created and one can then focus on the generation of alternatives with which one may solve the problem.

I’ve been studying biases and heuristics for nearly 15 years now and even with this increased awareness, I’m aware that biases may still be present when I conduct research.  When I’m aware of the presence of bias, I’m also keen to ensure it’s noted in my communications.  As you reflect on this, consider how active listening, as part of an active mind, helps with critical thinking.

Chabris, C. & Simons, D.  (2009).  The invisible gorilla.  New York, NY:  Broadway Paperbacks.

Frew, D. R.  (1981, November).  Diagnosing and dealing with task complexity.  Personnel Administrator, 87-92.

Gilovich, T., Griffin, D., & Kahneman, D.  (2002).  Heuristics and biases:  The psychology of intuitive judgment.  New York:  Cambridge University Press.

Jim Triplett is an author, instructional designer, and instructor in the areas of finance, economics, ethics, and critical thinking. Jim holds Masters Degrees in Finance, Organizational Leadership, and Instructional Design Technology, is ABD / PhD in Organization and Management, and is currently completing a doctoral degree, Ed.D, in Educational Leadership with a focus on Educational Technology.