Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

I’m helping one of my kids with some Spanish homework.  She didn’t know which definition of a word was correct.  I have never had Spanish, but I know how to use several translator web sites.  My daughter says they are not permitted to use a web site to look up words.  They have to use a paper dictionary.

This is crazy.  Why should students be forced to use the old-fashioned slow way to look up words in a paper dictionary?  It takes ten times as long.  I can understand the importance dictionary skills.  Students must know how to use a paper-based dictionary properly.  I think by tenth grade that skill has been mastered.

We are now talking about learning a foreign language.  Time on task should include as little time as possible flipping through pages of a dictionary.  Study time should focus on reading comprehension in context and speaking.  A web-based translator helps all these things.  The free Yahoo Spanish/English dictionary has the definition and an audio file of each word properly spoken.

My daughter says the fear of the teacher is that students will copy whole paragraphs into translators which do not work properly.  Just read any warning label printed on a product made in China.  A teacher can easily identify a paragraph that has been passed through a Google-like translator.  I can identify it and I have not been trained to teach a foreign language.

We have to get our heads out of the old school way of thinking.  We are surrounded by technology that can help us complete the tedious tasks associated with subjects like foreign language.  If we do not use these technologies to help us, our country will continue to lose ground in the global economy.

I spent the afternoon working with colleagues on a project involving a learning management system.  We are coming off summer break and most of the participants had not logged in for three months.  A few of them had forgotten their passwords.

Many got right in because they use the same password for this system as for all systems – university email, yahoo email, calendar, online grade book, student course registration, online banking and that account on the server used to send everyone holiday greeting cards. 

With the number of services requiring a password, no one can know how many times a generic password can circle the earth and hit servers that should never be trusted with “secret” information.  On a typical day I use accounts at Protopage, Slashdot, Digg, Delicious, Flickr, Google plus all my work related sites.  I use a web-based password generator to create strong passwords and Roboform to keep track of all of them. 

With all the identity theft going on, using an assortment of strong passwords just seems obvious to me.