Today I read that Governor Schwarzenegger announced an initiative aimed at exploring the digitalization of California’s K-12 textbooks. 
Immediately, something inside me felt betrayed; perhaps it’s my fondness for the smell of an old book, or the romantic notion of staying up late in the library chest-deep in a stack of ancient tomes.
This is strange, because I'm a man whose job is to help schools to computerize their daily tasks. I get shamelessly excited when I see our existing customers kicking the tires on our other products, like the web-based Discipline Tracking and Student Stats programs.
Inside I’m screaming, ‘Get them ALL!! You'll be blown away when you see how great a full software suite can be!!!!’
A paradox emerges. As I think of digital textbooks, I’m seized by the fear that comes from realizing that I may be on a very slippery slope. But is it really so slippery?
The nerdish excitement I described earlier comes from seeing that once a teacher has turned over their redundant jobs to computer systems, they can attend more fully to the incontrovertibly human task of teaching kids. This is why the OnCourse System seems to get better and better as more modules are attached. But where will this lead?
To My Luddite Friends
I’m sure that there folks like me (with my mild distaste for cell phones and sandwich-ordering computers) in whom exists a healthy skepticism about the suggestion of a full-automated school of the future. It recalls visions of programmed teacherbots and lunch machines that dispense chicken-patty pills.
But what’s actually emerging is not binary and bleak; rather, its warmer and more human than many of us had anticipated. Instead of encroaching upon the pedagogy of our teachers, technology is supporting and informing the strategies already in place and helping teachers to put more energy into the intuition, enthusiasm, and adaptation that can make a classroom so amazing.
And suddenly I find traction on that slippery slope. Even with the best information system, the onus is still on the user to utilize the indispensable skill of critical thinking. As the Internet floods the American household with terabytes of information at light speed, the need for critical analysis becomes…well…critical. The value of thoughtful human interaction is becoming MORE necessary as computers advance towards ubiquity, and it’s in this fact that I believe the strength of computing is tempered by the necessity of good ol’ fashioned human integrity.
It’s in these households and classrooms that teachers and parents are hearing the call to help guide the youth as to the proper uses of information technologies. We are obligated to answer the call, lest we leave our youths to fend for themselves in a sea of dubious information. In the distance I hear the rumble of teachers across the US saying in one voice, ‘DUH!”
Bridging Tradition and Technology
Ok teachers, I admit I'm new to this field, but I'm a student of the information age and my mother is a teacher, so I'm in a great position to be a bridge between technology and tradition.
Just today I spoke with a Florida teacher who has been teaching for 33 years, but who had nothing but great things to say about her OnCourse System. She is new to the program, but she revealed some enthusiasm when she told me that she was in the process of creating her own personal website.
I was ecstatic! It seems that the synthesis of generations lie in parents and educators staying abreast of the Information Age by creating their own content, and applying their older, wiser critical faculties to the task of generating resources for their children. With a tool like the OnCourse Teacher Websites, a non-technical person can create an engaging multimedia website with streaming videos and scholarly resources and educational games, and the difference between now and 1995 is that now it can be done EASILY.
In the picture I've loaded, you can see a teacher who has a streaming video of a recent Presidential speech on his OnCourse Teacher Website. A few days ago, I heard a rumor that there is a school out there posting class podcasts and video training materials on their websites also!
If your school is using the OnCourse System in some great innovative way like this, please send me an e-mail and let me know about it! Or, if you’d like some expert tips on how to step up your game, I’d be glad to do a webinar or a Live Chat session and show you some tricks. I’m at mgonzalez@oncoursesystems.com.
For the TIP OF THE DAY, I’ll include instructions on how to embed YouTube videos in your OnCourse Website!!!
1) Find (or upload) the video on YouTube. In the information box in the top right of the screen, there will be an 'Embed' code. Copy that information.
2) Go to your OnCourse Website Editor, into the page you want for the video, and click the HTML button
3) This will take you into the code of the the website. The inner circuitry. Don't touch it! Just put the cursor at the very beginning of the code, the tippity-top left corner, and paste the 'Embed' Code.
4) Click Update
5) This should put the video in the top of your website (in the editor, it will look like a placeholder) - now you can drag it around, resize it, and align it as you like.
6) If you didn't listen to my advice and you messed up the HTML code, just use the Version drop-down box in the top-right hand corner of the site to roll your page back to this morning before you before you decided to get crazy with the webpage code.
7) Still got problems? Send me an email at mgonzalez@oncoursesystems.com :)
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