Name: Jason
Web Site: http://www.welkerswikinomics.com/blog
Bio: Jason Welker is a teacher at Zurich International School in Switzerland, where he teaches Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate Economics. Jason was an international school student in Malaysia before studying economics at Seattle University then earning his Masters in Education. In addition to maintaining an economics wiki and this blog for economics student and educators, Jason also gives presentations on using Web 2.0 tools in education at workshops and conferences around the world. His economics wiki won the 2007 "Best Educational Wiki" award from the "EduBlog Awards".
Posts by Jason Welker:
- The right choice: First you need to convince your admin that tablets are the way to go today. I’m at my third international school, having previously taught at one school with a laptop program and another school that has spent three years developing a plan for launching a laptop program, I can say after one quarter of using tablets that NO SCHOOL SHOULD CONSIDER ADOPTING LAPTOPS IN A WORLD WHERE TABLET TECHNOLOGY EXISTS! I cannot think of a single benefit laptops have over tablets for educational use. If you can, please leave a comment explaning why laptops are better than tablets for the classroom.
- The right hardware: Once you’ve convinced your admin team to adopt laptops, next make sure that whatever model you choose is compact and durable enough for constant use by clumsy teenagers. We use the Lenovo X61 ThinkPad Tablet, a lightweight, compact machine with a 12″ monitor, about the size and weight of a high school level text book. The keyboard has a drainage channel so that when drinks are spilled the fluid drains out the side. I have seen kids drop these things in the hallway, swing them around by the screen, and toss them onto couches… they seem indestructable. While the casings take a beating, the software keeps running.
- The right software: Make sure you have the essential software so the machine meets as many academic needs as possible. Two programs I would recommend for student computers are: Microsoft OneNote: This is what students spend 90% of their
time on in class. Students create folders for each of their classes,
and organize all their notes through one interface. Every student in my
classes is using OneNote for organization, and I haven’t had a single
student complain about the program. Windows Journal: This is a
very basic note taking program. I use it for tests and quizzes. It’s
just like having a blank sheet of paper in front of you. I want
students to take quizzes on Journal because they cannot have their
OneNote notes open in front of them, i.e. no cheating! - Get SMART: The SMART Board and the tablets make for an amazing combination. Teachers can project their tablets onto a SMART Board from anywhere in the room through the school’s network using LinQ software. This liberates the teacher from the front of the room, and frees you up to roam among the students while continuing a lecture based on PowerPoint or SMART Notebook slides projected onto the board. Furthermore, with the next program I describe, student tablets can also be projected to the SMART Board, allowing for excellent lessons where student complete tasks on their tablets, then demonstrate their understanding to the class, without depending on thumb drives, network folders, or other ways of getting files from one computer to another.
- Get EYES: One of the biggest challenges for teachers in any laptop or tablet school is classroom management. How do we know kids are not surfing the web, “Facebooking”, chatting, emailing, etc. during class? How can you give a test on a tablet when all of their notes are on that same computer? All of these issues and more are resolved by a single program: SynchronEYES, the ultimate classroom management tool for the tablet teacher. This software allows each student in my classroom to connect to my tablet. Once they’re connected, a small icon of everyone’s desktop shows up on my screen, and I can see in real time every move the students make on their tablets. Even better, I can block certain programs, or allow access to only one program. I can block access to the internet, or lock out their tablets so only the message “Eyes to the front, please” appears on their screens. Students can NOT disconnect themselves from the program, only the teacher can. Basically, SynchronEYES gives the teacher ultimate control of all the students’ tablets. In fact, the teacher can take control of any individual’s computer and even shut a computer down if necessary.
- SmartBoard in every classroom: In fact, there is not a single white board on campus. Teachers haven’t a choice between old and new, it’s all new. Teachers’ tablets can be synchronized wirelessly using the LinQ software from anywhere in the classroom with the SmartBoard in the front. This allows for maximum mobility, meaning lectures can be delivered via the board while the teacher roams the room, monitoring student progress.
- Tablets for every student: Lenovo Thinkpad X61 Tablet PCs, to be precise. Students use Microsoft OneNote or Windows Live Journal for note taking. .pdf’s can be distributed to students via Moodle and edited using OneNote or Live Journal. Many classes have gone to e-books, which can also be annotated using one of the programs installed on the tablets.
- Synchronize software for displaying student work on SmartBoard: This is still to be introduced, but soon teachers will be able to monitor each student’s work on his or her tablet from the teacher’s own tablet. When desired, any individual student’s workspace can be projected onto the Smart Board for the class to see. In economics, I envision using this feature often to allow students to share graphs and other illustrations without having to come to the board.
- Networked Cannon printer/scanner/photocopiers: The school is serious about cutting down on paper use. Teachers are encouraged to scan all documents using the amazing Canon scanners which automatically send an email to our school accounts of any scanned document as an attached .pdf. Rather than photocopying a handout, worksheet or reading, teachers are expected to scan to their emails and post documents to Moodle for students to access on their tablets for reading and annotating.
ASB Unplugged Mumbai – a teacher’s impressions
March 9th, 2010A couple of weeks ago teachers from around the world congregated at the American School of Bombay in India for the bi-annual ASB Unplugged 1-1 laptop conference. The week proved very helpful for teachers at schools either exploring the introduction of a 1-1 laptop program as well as for those of us who already work at 1-1 schools.
Zurich International School, where I teach, is in its second year of its 1-1 tablet computer program. Below are my reflections on the week in Mumbai. I am sure many visitors to this blog were also at the conference, and I’d love to hear some of your impressions in the comment section below!
The secret to success in the blogosphere – “Blog your public and your private passions”
December 10th, 2008Arianna Huffington | The Daily Show | Comedy Central
I like Arianna’s advice to bloggers: The secret to a successful blog is to write about your public and your private passions.
The best blogs, in my opinion, are those in which the author’s passion for his or her subject is obvious. In my own blogging, I attempt two seemingly opposing feats: to remain as objective as possible in my analysis of economic events while expressing as much passion and energy in my writing as possible. As a teacher I try not to express my bias, while simultaneously expressing my excitement and passion for economics, the subject about which I blog. The dichotomy of passionate objectivism results in, I hope, an enjoyable and educational read for those who choose to follow my blog.
Newsmap – viewing the news in a whole new way!
October 29th, 2008Newsmap
Here’s another fascinating tool that could be used for analyzing the news in classes at the middle school or high school level. Much like Wordle, Newsmap creates a cluster cloud of news stories from Google News; the bigger the story in the day’s news, the larger its shape in the cluster cloud.
One cool feature of Newsmap is that the use can view the biggest stories by nation. This could be a fun way to analyze the day’s events from a multi-national perspective.
Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.
Top five tablet tips for teachers!
October 28th, 2008It has been two and a half months since I started teaching with tablets in my classroom here at Zurich International School. I can now take a moment and reflect on and share some of the things I have learned, in the hope that some of you readers out there will be able to learn from my experience if you happen to be at a school that is using tablets or thinking of adopting them.
Below are my top five tips for teaching with tablets:
If you follow these five tips, your school can get the ball rolling on a successful tablet program. As I said above, laptops were great, three or four years ago. Today, in the era of e-books, digital ink, networked classrooms and digital SMART Boards, laptops offer little more than the computer labs of yesterday for teachers eager to embed technology in their instruction. The tablet is a truly tranformational educational tool.
Which brings up another imporant question: does the tablet change the way we teach or do we simply teach the same way using a new tool? My response to this question is YES, and YES. As with any new technology, the degree to which the tablet changes the way teachers teach and students learn depends on the teacher. Students will continue to take notes in basically the same way they always have, exept the stacks of paper and three-ring binders will be replace with Microsoft OneNote. Teachers will still prepare notes to put on the board for students to take down, except the chalk or white board is replaced with the SMART Board and SMART Notebook software.
But these superficial changes are not all that tablets offer us as teachers. Beyond these obvious changes, the tablets offer teachers new ways to connect students to one another, both in the classroom and beyond its walls. New forms of expression and creativity are made possible when digital ink appears beneath a student’s stylus. Showcasing a student’s work during class is possible through the “observe” and “broadcast” functions on SynchronEYES. Students begin to take a new pride in the presentation of their notes and the quality of their work, whether it is an economics graph, a maths equation, a chemical formula or an artistic sketch. The possibilities for extending teaching and learning into new realms are there, it is only up to the teacher to discover the myriad ways to do so using tablet technology.
Will free open-source texts and online e-books mark the end of printed textbooks?
September 18th, 2008Link by Link – Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free – NYTimes.com
My friend and fellow UTT contributor David Gran sent me a link to an article he knew would strike home with me. This NYT piece looks at the phenomenon of the free, online textbook, which recently has emerged in several academic areas and is beginning to pose a real threat to the traditional printed textbook industry.
In analyzing the textbook industry, Cal Tech economics professor Preston McAfee touches on a basic economic problem that results in students, families and tax-payers shouldering the absorbatant price of traditional print texts: that of moral hazard.
…both textbook publishers and drug makers benefit from the problem of “moral hazards” — that is, the doctor who prescribes medication and the professor who requires a textbook don’t have to bear the cost and thus usually don’t think twice about it.“The person who pays for the book, the parent or the student, doesn’t choose it,” he said. “There is this sort of creep. It’s always O.K. to add $5.”
McAfee has done something about it in his academic area, and published his own introductory economics textbook, which he has made avalable online for free (http://www.introecon.com/). The entire .pdf of the text can be downloaded, printed or read on the computer, and he even offers a printed and bound version for the price of just $11. The entire 328 page text took me 12 seconds to download. I’ve looked it over, and amazingly, it’s REALLY GOOD.
In fact, my school paid McGraw Hill around $90 per student this year for the rights to distribute .pdf versions of that company’s well known Econ text. With over 100 Econ students at my school, that put our school (and the families that send there kids here) back over $9000. And that was for digital copies of the text, we did not receive a single printed edition!
Five weeks into the school year, and I’m beginning to wonder if it was a wise decision to purchase e-books. Yes, the kids can read and annotate them on their computers, great. But is the $100 e-book (not to mention the $200 printed text) even necessary in this era of online and open source information?
In fact, my own students at my last school, Shanghai American School, collaborated on an open-source econ text of their own (http://welkerswikinomics.com/wiki) and the more I think about it, the more I realize that in this day and age, students can easily create their OWN textbook. As long as the teacher can teach the content well enough, students can collaborate through wikis, Ning sites, or other online media to create a nearly perfect (and perfectly free) substitute to the traditional textbook.
This sort of open-source textbook experiment is already going on:
A broader effort to publish free textbooks is called Connexions (http://cnx.org), which was the brainchild of Richard G. Baraniuk, an engineering professor at Rice University, which has received $6 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. In addition to being a repository for textbooks covering a wide range of subjects and educational levels, its ethic is taken from the digital music world, he said — rip, burn and mash.Unlike other projects that share course materials, notably OpenCourseWare at M.I.T., Connexions uses broader Creative Commons license allowing students and teachers to rewrite and edit material as long as the originator is credited. Teachers put up material, called “modules,” and then mix and match their work with others’ to create a collection of material for students. “We are changing textbook publishing from a pipeline to an ecosystem,” he said.
When I began using wikis in my Econ classes two years ago, I never initially thought of our collaborative experiment as actually becoming a valid substitute for a textbook. But the more I think about it, the more I begin to believe I can teach everything I do using the technology available for free, and spare my students and their families and our school the thousands they spend on textbooks each year. I thought by ordering e-books this year, I was taking a huge technological leap away from traditional text-oriented instruction. But now I’m having “buyer’s remorse” and think that next year I’ll abandon the traditional text-book altogether.
My question for readers is this: what online resources and collaborative tools have you discovered that could potentially replace your textbook. Wikis? Nings? Social networks? Blogs? Will tomorrow’s classroom be one full of shelves covered with heavy, $200 hard-bound textbooks? Or one full of students connected to one another through tablets, laptops, Kindles, Smart Phones, interactive white boards, or some other digital technology yet to emerge, collaborating through online environments on authentic learning, liberated from the grasp of publishing houses and their over-priced textbooks? Thoughts? Comments?
Flat World Knowledge: home of the free textbook
Technorati Tags: e-books, textbooks, wikis, blogs, Ning, social networks, open-source
“You’re No One if You’re not on Twitter”
September 17th, 2008YouTube – Ben Walker – You’re No One If You’re Not On Twitter
Ben Walker – You’re No One If You’re Not On Twitter
Have you been “bookmarked, re-tweeted and blogged?”
I’m on Twitter, and I’d love it if you’d follow me! http://www.twitter.com/jasonwelker
Please post a comment and include your Twitter name so I can follow you too! For those of you heading to Learning 2.008 in Shanghai this week, I wish I could be there to participate in this amazing educational technology conference! The organizers put on an outstanding weekend last year, and I am sure this week’s will be even better. I will be following it closely, yes, on TWITTER!
http://www.twitter.com/learn2cn
Taking IT to a whole new level at Zurich International School
August 28th, 2008It’s been a while since I’ve posted here at UTT. Jeff Utecht and I no longer work at the same school; he’s moved on to Thailand and I to Switzerland. In many ways, both of us made the right move, to schools where technology integration lies at the heart of educational philosophy.
Here in Switzerland, the Zurich International School’s 9-12th graders have just begun the school year in a new, state of the art building in which technology was at the core of design principles. As a one-to-one tablet school with a digital SmartBoard in front of each and every classroom, ZIS has taken giant leaps in the direction of paperless, tablet-based learning. Here are a few examples of how technology is embedded in every class:
Many other projects are in the wings here at ZIS, including a Wordpress MU site for student and teacher blogs and a Google Docs account for online management of student and teacher work. For some teachers, these technological endeavors seem daunting, but overall I have been blown away by the attitude of even the most experienced, longest-serving teachers at ZIS, almost all of whom seem overwhelmingly excited about the steps the school has taken to embed technology at every level of our teaching and learning.
Personally, I’m thrilled to be a part of Zurich International School’s IT experiment. As a firm believer in the power of online and e-learning, as well as the utility of laptops in the classroom, ZIS is a perfect fit for me as I continue using wikis, blogs, and now tablets and SmartBoards in my own instruction.
Take your students on the flight of their lives!
June 2nd, 2008What is the benefit of technology in the classroom if it’s not to broaden our view of the world? With web 2.0 tools the four walls of our classroom are torn down and a universe of adventure and learning is opened up. I am continuously blow away by Google Earth and the amazing new features that seem to pop up in each new version of this powerful (and FREE) program.
In the latest version, Google has given users an incredible (and FUN) way to tour the world’s sites from the air. The flight simulator feature lets users chose either an F-16 fighter jet (which at full throttle will top 1100 miles per hour and fly to 50,000 feet), or a smaller S-22 stunt plane (for those leisurely flights where you want to soak up the sites from a lower altitude and slower speed.) That’s right, you can now fly over any place on earth with a frighteningly realistic flight simulator in Google Earth.
I say frighteningly, because the first time I got into the cockpit, I crashed four times in a row into the “earth’s” surface. My virtual debri is scattered over the Shanghai suburbs, the Northern Idaho mountains, the flanks of Mount Rainier and the foothills of the Swiss Alps! After an hour or so of crashing millions of dollars worth of airplanes, however, I finally began getting the hang of the controls and am now a qualified “pilot” and have made successful flights on three continents!
Check out Google Earth’s flight simulator, and just imagine how this could be used in conjunction with a SMART Board or laptops in the classroom (can you say kinesthetic learning?!) On my 13 inch Mac the experience is awe-inspiring, I cannot wait to hook this up to my 37″ TV and then my 72″ SMART Board and get the kids into the cockpit as we begin to explore the myriad spectacles Google Earth presents its users!
Here’s the view as I fly over my new apartment in Zurich, Switzerland! What a way to get oriented to a new home!
Web 2.0 and intelligent beer drinking
June 2nd, 2008pintprice.com – the price of beer anywhere in the world
It’s really best to be totally informed about a potential travel destination when planning a vacation. Just like you’d hate to show up to a “beach front” resort to find out that it’s actually a 10 minute walk from the sand, you’d also hate to arrive in your own “paradise lost” to find that a cold beer will cost you $14 (as it would in the Marshall Islands).
Well, fear expensive beer no more! At pintprice.com, travelers are using the tools of Web 2.0 to educate one another on the price of a “cold one” in every country in the world. Anyone (including you or me) can update the site with the price of a pint of lager in whatever city and country we find ourselves in. In a way, this is like the Wikipedia of beer prices, created by users for users to be a resource for travelers and residents overseas.
A little research of my own found some surprising results. For example, while a pint in China averages only $2.35 US, here in Shanghai the average is more than double that at $5.15. My hometown of Seattle, with its many micro breweries and countless hole in the wall watering holes, averages only $3.25 per pint, a pittance compared my soon to be home of Zurich, Switzerland where a cold one will set me back $6.57!
Whether you’re traveling in a remote corner of the world or simply ordering a draft beer during a baseball game at your local pub, do your part to educate the world on one of the most important indicators of humanity’s very well-being, the price of beer. Check out pintprice.com to see how your hometown compares… who knows, it may just be time to relocate (wait till you see how cheap beer is in North Korea and Rwanda! I hear there’s a new international school in Pyong Yang!)
One version of Windows XP per child…
May 20th, 2008The cute little green alien-looking computer that is the XO PC (aka the “$100 computer” that costs $200) is now available with Windows XP. For anyone who’s had a chance to play with one of these machines, the Linux based operating system takes some getting used to for those of use used to the familiarity of Windows.
As it would turn out, education ministries in the developing world, the market the “one laptop per child” program targets for its cheap, durable PC, prefer machines with Windows on them over the unfamiliar Linux system as well:
…some countries, such as Egypt, want machines that run Windows, the most common personal computer operating system in the developed world.
“They said we would be in a much better position with a Windows-capable machine,” he said.
Meanwhile, Microsoft was working on a version of its Windows XP operating system that would work on the relatively low-powered XO computer.
“Lo and behold, they finalized [it] and have a very crisp-running machine with XP on it,” Kane said.
A statement from Microsoft said the Windows XP version of the XO will be capable of using hundreds of thousands of Windows-compatible programs and hardware accessories.
My first thought at this news was, “well, there goes any chance at achieving a $100 laptop for poor children in the developing world…” Windows XP, which retails for aroudn $250 in the rich world, would push the price of an XO from $200 to $450, if Microsoft were to charge the retail price for its operating system, that is.
In fact, Microsoft is making its popular operating system available for $3 per XO, which is probably close to the actual marginal cost to Microsoft of producing additional copies of XP. What’s the incentive for Microsoft to make this apparently charitable gesture to the OLPC program?
Mike Cherry, lead analyst for Windows at Directions on Microsoft, an independent software-research firm in Kirkland, Wash., said Microsoft doesn’t want cheap Linux-based computers to threaten the dominance of Windows.
“Let’s say they put Linux on there, and people say, ‘Hey this works pretty good,’ and they start looking at it for other applications as well,” he said. Getting Windows onto the XO laptop is one way to prevent this.
“I think it’s along the lines of not allowing anybody else to get a toehold,” Cherry said.
Sometimes when companies like Microsoft act in the pursuit of their own self-interest, society as a whole benefits. In economics we call this predatory pricing. Two firms, Microsoft and Linux, are competing for a larger foothold in developing countries where more new PC users are expected to emerge in the coming decades than anywhere else.
In the name of competition and its desire to maintain market share, Microsoft has taken a product that it usually charges the full monopolist price of $250 for and reduced its price to the marginal cost of $3. To prevent all PC users from taking advantage of this massive price reduction, however, the company will only make the $3 version of XP available on the XO, assuring that only the poorest, most technologically deprived consumers benefit from the company’s price discrimination.
While the price of the XP ready XOs will be about $10 higher, the ability to run thousands of Window’s programs will surely give the OLPC program a greater appeal to education ministers and government officials in the developing world. Don’t be surprised if in the near future we begin to see more and more of the little green alien machines in the hands of the developing world’s school children.
Battle of the bloggers in Malaysia
May 12th, 2008Asia Sentinel – Malaysia Ponders How to Handle its Bloggers
Anyone who questions the influence bloggers can have on political, social and economic sentiments should read this article. Malaysia (where freedom of the internet has been embraced due to the government’s desire to make Malaysia an information technology hub attractive to foreign investors) has begun to back peddle on its commitment to and uncensored blogosphere.
What impresses me about this situation, however, is that in the face of intense anti-government sentiment, the ruling party has until recently hesitated to crack down through the means regularly employed by many other repressive governments, namely the Chinese Communist Party. Here in China around 50,000 “technicians” are employed in censoring all online content and dissident bloggers are regularly harassed, bullied and even thrown in jail because of their subversive online activities.
In Malaysia, on the other hand, the ruling party has tried fighting anti-government bloggers by encouraging parliamentarians to join the blogosphere themselves.
In addition to the apparent crackdown by police, others have sought to cope with the new media environment. The Barisan has reacted by calling for members of the ruling political parties to start their own blogs in an attempt to explain government actions to their constituents. Even the venerable Mahathir Mohamad, the former prime minister who gave up power in 2002, has started his own blog called Chedet, using his onetime pen name as a journalist, in which he has continued his impassioned attacks on the government of his successor, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.Some… leaders also have sought to institute media reforms. The new Information Minister… offered an olive branch to a small group of bloggers who attacked (prime minister) Abdullah Badawi… Chik has met with bloggers and started a new 20-minute segment every Sunday for bloggers on the national broadcasting station, Radio Television Malaysia, in contrast to the previous minister, Zainuddin Maidin, who locked horns with bloggers and even the government-controlled media.
I love this. Legendary political strong man Mahathir Mohamad, credited with bringing Malaysia from its status a struggling tin and palm oil producing nation of poor villagers to the level of advanced technological, global economic integration that it has achieved today, is a blogger, just like me!
By engaging bloggers, rather than imprisoning them, Malaysia’s ruling parties have shown that freedom of the internet and the political discourse that takes place online can enhance and strengthen democracy and the public’s respect for its elected officials. The recent arrest of a prominent blogger in Malaysia on sedition charges is a mistake, and represents a reverse in an otherwise progressive and enlightened policy towards political and social liberty in Malaysia.
