Literacy, Technology, Learning

Innovation--who is doing it? What if?

2012-01-14T17:16:00.001-08:00

This Thursday's #isedchat Everyone's talking innovation. Who's doing it? and @dwillard's Schools don't innovate? Do they?comment got me thinking.

In the "no duh" category, I had a thought this morning doing what I call jogging while listening to 21st Century Learning podcasts. Derek Willard and Josie Holford (Schools are conservative entities) are right--schools don't innovate. However, people do, both individually and collaboratively. While it's tempting to point out the wildly disruptive innovations such as, well, iAnything, most innovations/inventions aren't in that category.

Instead, some schools are intentionally creating environments that foster teachers and students who innovate. They are places where questions beginning with "what if" are met with "tell me more" or "try it" instead of "no" And that, I think, makes all the difference.

Today I listened to two leaders (Brad Rathgeber, Director of the Online School for Girls and Michael Nachbar, Director of the Global Online Academy) in the world of independent online education share the stories of their schools. How did I listen? Via downloaded podcasts while doing the aforementioned "jog." Innovative? Well, the voice interview has been around for quite a while now. The medium that allowed me to listen, not quite as long.

In a similar vein, what I learned was that not everything about these schools was wildly innovative. But something about them was--in this case it was the delivery again. Do schools need to be completely redone? Nope. Is the saying "there's nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9) still true? Yep. Do these two statements mean that there's no such thing as innovation? No. It's just that it's hard to define. Innovation isn't a set thing--a new idea, uncharted territory. Instead, it is an esprit of "let's try" that can exist in even the most tradition-bound environments. If we let it.

Nonplussed--doesn't happen to me often (but it probably should)

2011-07-19T17:28:00.000-07:00

Last week, I returned from the Lausanne Laptop Institute in Memphis. This is always one of my favorite conferences when I go--it's well organized, the sessions are long enough not to feel rushed, and the presenters are always prepared and are masters in their areas. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

While at the institute, I live-blogged many of the presentations I attended. One of my blogs caught the attention of the keynote, Jeff Utecht. This is a conference with a pretty lively back channel and I ran into some trouble with monitoring the twitter feed and keeping up with my liveblog. Thank goodness for Bill Campbell @billcamp who stepped in to manage the twitter feed.

I'm working on a post about the value of the backchannel (not yet finished) when I realized that I had more readers of my live blogs (either live or later) of the sessions I attended, including the keynote, than I did attendees at my presentations. I'm a bit nonplussed about this fact. Could it be that I have more to contribute as a reporter than as a presenter?

Jeff Utecht The Changing Nature of Communication

2011-07-12T12:28:00.000-07:00

Session Summary: Being a leader in the 21st Century means going beyond e-mail and newsletters into the new digital world of communicating with parents and students. Understanding that society today wants information in short and more frequent bursts is the first step in utilizing tools that allow you to communicate using the new web. This presentation demonstrates and discusses the different ways schools and school leaders can harness the power of the Internet to communicate with their school communities

The Changing Nature of Communication

Elizabeth Hellfant at Laptop Institute

2011-07-12T09:48:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Helfant TPACK and SAMR as Evaluative, Unifying, and Goal-Setting Framework.

TPACK from LI11

There's an App for That

2011-07-11T12:19:00.000-07:00

Julene Reed, Dir. of Academic Tech., St. George's Indep. School was so good this morning, I thought I'd come back for more!

There's an app for that

QR Codes, connecting the physical and digital worlds with Jeff Utecht

2011-07-11T08:57:00.000-07:00

I decided this one was too good an opportunity to pass up.

QR Codes

E-Books

2011-07-11T08:02:00.000-07:00

Session on EBooks

Digital Texts and E-Books

Laptop Institute 2011

2011-07-11T06:01:00.000-07:00

I'm back at the Laptop Institute at Lausanne this year. I missed the conference last year and it feels great to be back!

Jeff Utecht (@jutecht) is giving the keynote and I'll be liveblogging. . .surprise.

Jeff Utecht Keynote

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Women who lead

2011-06-20T18:12:00.001-07:00

On Tuesday, June 21, 2011, I'll have the chance to discuss a fascinating question with a small group of women from other NC independent schools. Why aren’t more women moving up the ranks of leadership in independent school communities to become school heads?

The question was posed in the opening of an article in the Fall 2010 edition of Independent School Leadership by Susan Feibelman and Martha Haakmat titled: A Gendered Experience.

When I read the article, I discussed it with a number of other women working in independent schools. I can only imagine that many others did the same. Shortly afterwards, in December, a TED talk (embedded at the end of this post) by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg titled Why we have too few women leaders went viral, at least among the same group. Sandberg looks at why a smaller percentage of women than men reach the top of their professions -- and offers 3 powerful pieces of advice to women.

Sandberg alludes to some cultural factors that Feibelman and Haakmat describe in their article:

The low number of women leaders, it turns out, is directly connected to cultural attitudes toward women as leaders.

Two women with successful school headships in their careers will keynote this gathering of women interested in learning more about leadership in independent schools. They are:

Sandra Adams, Former Head of Summit School

Doreen Kelly, Head of Ravenscroft School

As is my wont, I'll be liveblogging the keynote addresses and possibly some of the later sessions as well, right here, starting at 9:15.

Women in Indep. School Leadership

Ode to Pink

2011-06-15T10:39:00.000-07:00

Both of my daughters love the color pink. We recently moved, and they had a hand in helping to decorate their new room. It came as no surprise to me that their room is now pinkified--pink curtains, drapes, throw pillows, wall art. . . you name it, it's pink.

I'm (professionally) infatuated with another shade of pink these days. Dan Pink's Drive. When I read A Whole New Mind, the first of Pink's books to come to my attention, I will admit to being a little underwhelmed. Why it was pleasantly put together, I didn't feel that I learned anything new from AWNM. I had a completely different experience while reading Drive. Yes, Drive referenced and distilled the work of others I'd already read, most notably Carol Dweck's thought-provoking work published in Mindset. However, in Drive, Pink put his thoughts about what motivates us (people, humanity, etc)together in a way that gets the people in my school talking on a high level about topics such as motivation, assessment, student autonomy. . . conversations well worth having.

One nice thing about Drive is that Pink and others have done some of the work to help get conversations going with a group. His Two Questions video is perfect for opening a discussion.

Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

At my school, we felt like the second question was not one we wanted to encourage. I'll talk more about that more in another post in the future.

Once the group has discussed the first video, it is worth seeing this collection of responses made by people from around the world to the prompt "what's your sentence."

Who knows--as a group, you may be inspired to make your own video of sentences. We've started our own--there's much more to come.

Finally, if anyone read the book a while back and needs a brief refresher/overview, I highly recommend these two videos:

NAIS Annual Conference

2011-02-24T04:43:00.000-08:00

I'm so excited to be attending the NAIS Annual Conference again this year. Thanks to Jason Ramsden of Ravenscroft School, I'm able to live blog the sessions I attend. Those are hosted on another blog, and I'd welcome visitors, comments, observations, etc.

So far, the conference has been exciting and invigorating. I've already had one big take-away. Peter Gow showed Beaver Country Day School's new teacher wiki. I don't have the link yet, but I think everyone in the room is planning to go home and set one up at their school. The site includes short video welcomes from key people at the school, links to information about books that have been all faculty reads recently, and a host of other information that takes a while to learn when one is new, such as a BCDS lexicon.

This post will definitely be edited later today to include links!

What if we taught spelling with adaptive expertise in mind?

2011-02-20T20:10:00.000-08:00

What if we taught spelling with adaptive expertise in mind?

Such an approach would incorporate Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development along with the best practices of differentiation and would include the habits of mind associated with adaptive expertise.

We would begin with the end in mind. Students would learn common orthological spelling patterns in sequential order; learning to apply the patterns they know when they encounter words in their writing that they want to include, but are uncertain how to spell.

According to Invernizzi, Johnston, Bear et. al, each student should be working to master a spelling pattern s/he is “using but confusing.” Such a spelling program will be differentiated and developmentally appropriate for each learner in the classroom.

What would this look like in practice?

Step One: Each class would take a developmental spelling inventory to determine groupings for spelling instruction.

Step Two: Word study units for each group of students based on their developmental stage of spelling. Typically, there are 4 or 5 groups in a classroom of 20 students. Word study includes reading and writing activities such as word sorts, games, and writing activities. The words included follow the spelling patterns being studied. At this point in the fully differentiated classroom, each student would move at his/her own pace. In a partially differentiated classroom, groups would progress together, but students would move between groups depending on ongoing formative assessment.

Step Three: A summative assessment of each student’s ability to use the pattern s/he studied. This assessment should include words that students have and have not seen before but that follow the same patterns as those studied. This will allow students to demonstrate mastery and adaptive expertise. For example, if the student was learning to spell words with r controlled vowels, word study might include words such as fir and fur. During the assessment, the word furry would appear. A sentence might be “my pet cat is very furry.” Students who have mastered fir and fur should be able to generalize that the new word is spelled with the letter u.

In sum, students demonstrate mastery of a pattern before moving on to study a new pattern. There is no abandonment of skills not mastered. No student spends time studying patterns s/he has already mastered.

Sounds simple. Why is it so hard?

Preparing for NAIS

2011-02-20T19:07:00.000-08:00

Wow--in just two days I am heading up I85 to the NAIS annual conference. I've set up liveblogs at http://cannonpep.blogspot.com/, which is the blog that the teachers at my school are familiar with. However, it is certainly not an exclusive group--anyone is welcome!

I've spent this weekend getting ready for the sessions I'm leading or, in the case of the panel I'm moderating, sessions where I just need to stay out of the way and feed the panel questions. This is going to be a great conference!

Pick your popsicle?

2011-02-05T17:26:00.000-08:00

This past week, my daughter caught some kind of viral bug. At one point, I offered her a choice of popsicles as part of the campaign to keep her from getting dehydrated. Her response left me nonplussed. She looked in the box and mused aloud "Well, I threw up a green one. I saw some orange in my puke the other time, so I guess I'll pick purple."

Fortunately, the purple stayed down.

Lately, I'm collecting stories that happen in my life and trying to think how I can use them or make them meaningful. This one got me thinking about faculty development. How?

All to often, teachers approach faculty development "choices" the same way my daughter approached the popsicle box. Which ones haven't already been, well, nauseating.

Why? That takes me back to Dan Pink's Purpose, Mastery, Autonomy.

The experiment I did recently with unstructured time for faculty developmentwas well-received, but I'm not sure what the results are going to be. That's okay. For a while. The waiting is tough. But, that's what I'll have to do.

Wouldn't it have been easier just to make everyone "learn" about something I picked for 3 hours with a series of moderately engaging or entertaining activities? Then I wouldn't be waiting. . .

Look out--PD coming!

2011-01-20T18:38:00.000-08:00

Tonight's inaugural #isedchat addressed the question: "What does successful professional development look like at your school?"

I missed the chat--7pm with two little kids in the house is just not twitter chat friendly. So, I perused the thread tonight with a goal in mind. What should we do at school for our next scheduled PD time?

Periodically we have a half day for professional development at our school. I've been thinking about our upcoming day for a while now, and here's what I've come up with. This stems in part from the thinking that led to the "why are we teaching this stuff" post.

Now, what with being a fan of stealing, I mean researching, others' ideas, I went looking for someone who'd tried this and blogged about it. Bingo! Lyn Hilt, a K-6 principal in Pennsylvania who blogs at The Principal's Posts gave the teachers at her school time for self directed learning. Not a free day, but a day with purpose and accountability, and autonomy. Her description of how she organized the day inspired me.

Here's part of the email message I wrote to the other deans and the division director:

I've been thinking about this day. Here's what I'd like to propose:

Implementing a form of the Google 20% time. There's been a lot written
about this since Dan Pink mentioned it in Drive and his speech. We
could ask folks ahead of time what they needed to learn more about.
Some groups might naturally emerge. I would work to provide resources
for those who need them. We could also put together a "sit and get" for
those who insist. The big part is that 20% time still has some
accountability. Participants are supposed to DELIVER at the end of
their time. What would that delivery look like at Cannon? I am
thinking the delivery would be in small groups spread throughout campus,
with one of us in each group.
Sarah

I suggested some reading on the concept of 20% time:

From Dan Pink:

One school leader's experience:

Let's see what they say!

Why are we teaching this stuff?

2011-01-16T13:40:00.000-08:00

I follow with avid interest the musings and ideas of leaders in the Independent Curriculum Group. The NY Times article about changes to the AP.

Great--I'm reading good stuff. Now what am I going to do about it?? That's the question I'm asking myself. Because if I'm not doing anything about it. . .

On Connected Principals, Dave Truss wrote a brilliant post Less is more. Teach less, learn more. I left a comment and he wrote me back--causing that thrill that happens when a nobody like me gets a comment from someone who is a somebody. DT is the creator of the Brave New World Wide Web Video seen by just about everybody.

In our exchange (I had an exchange w/ Dave Truss!) I thought of something that made me realize it was time to blog. We must be wary of teaching kids that the academic grindstone is the way to ensure life-long success. That is clearly not true for many now. But, to break that grindstone for students, we’ll have to free the teachers first.

What are the essentials?

Give teachers time to collaborate and learn. I can do that. But it isn't just about time. Given time, even good teachers will often fill it with the tasks of teaching rather than expanding their own thinking. "There are so many papers to grade. If I have more time, I can read each draft as well as the final copy to help students be better writers." What do we need besides time? How do we create an expectation of learning and collaborating in that time?

Access to resources that expand teachers' worlds and provide tools for collaboration. I admit it, I'm a professional media junkie. I want to drag more folks into my world. I need to make sure that I'm not neglecting other realms though. Why on earth do teachers have to buy books about learning with their own money? Where are the professional libraries at most schools? How old are the books in them? Do teachers read and discuss books as part of their professional day or is that supposed to be done "on your own time?"

Authentic accountability. What if each teacher set some indicators to show how s/he has grown as a learner at the beginning of the school year and was evaluated with those in mind? Some schools approach teacher evaluation this way, how does it work?

Finally, that 20% time Daniel Pink espouses (see video below). Started (?) by Google, educators have been talking about it. we keep hearing about. Do we give teachers and students 20% time? How about 10%? 5%?

Hathaway Brown Innovation Summit

2010-11-07T17:15:00.000-08:00

I am absolutely determined not to feel overwhelmed by my experience at Hathaway Brown's Innovation Summit this weekend. Why? Because that leads to passivity. Bill Christ, the head of school at Hathaway warned attendees that what matters most is what we do after we leave.

@Sedson was at the conference and I am now following her on twitter, which led me today to this video:

In today's paper, I read a post-election editorial that referenced the Bloomberg poll that showed the majority of voters believed that middle class taxes had been raised during the last two years, when, in fact, they fell. Those asked also believed that the economy was shrinking, not growing.

The article blames Democrats for not making the message clear to voters.

Not me--I blame education. How did we get to the point in this country where being informed means listening to infotainment that echos what you already think? Why don't adults in this country ask questions and do research with the primary documents readily accessible online? Could it be because we don't teach students to ask questions in school? Because we use textbooks to teach them instead of primary sources? Yes, primary sources are harder to read. They don't have reading guides or comprehension questions already prepared. Who read the health care bill? Who read even extracts of it? (Confession, not me either).

What does school look like when we decide to prepare students to run the world instead of prepare them to have a job/go to college?

So, tomorrow, I start. First up? The kids. They need to know that I'm counting on them to be able to solve some of the pretty big problems they are about to encounter. I also want to talk with students about motivation. Both Pink's autonomy, mastery, and purpose along with the success and fun they are apparently seeking. We'll see how it goes.

Why social media for educators?

2010-08-30T17:18:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted (and better looking) at NCAIS Innovate. Not sure why I'm struggling with Blogger and succeeding with Wordpress, but I definitely am.

Once upon a very hot August almost-back-to-school day, I came upon a tweet. A tweet that traveled across the country, from North Carolina to Oregon (and maybe beyond) in a flash.

I was not the only one. . .

Within a few days, at least 10 (and I suspect far more) teachers asked the same two questions of the fresh faces gathering in front of them: When do you feel most engaged/interested/curious in school? and When do you feel most checked out/bored/uninterested in school?

The result? You can see my class's responses here:

They resemble, but are not identical to the responses Ms Stewart's students gave.

Sharing ideas among teachers is nothing new. Back when I began teaching, it sometimes (often?) took a semester or more for an idea to make it down the hallway. This shared question went from North Carolina to Iowa to Utah in moments. Next, the questions, along with their accompanying images, sparked a spirited conversation on the English Companion Ning, as well as a less feisty but just as heart-felt series of responses on Ms Stewart's blog, In For Good. So what's the value of this rapid spread of an idea?

First, every teacher who asked the questions spent a some time thinking about knowing the students they encounter a little better as learners. Which means that a few hundred students learned that their teachers care how they learn.

Second, a few teachers engaged in a lively conversation that involved debating the value of pedagogical methods, sharing professional resources, and critiquing said resources with intellectual vigor. Teachers are busy this time of year with activities that can seem decidedly unintellectual. To have teachers engage in visible intellectual discourse can only be described as heartening! And this happened without a course, a scholarly journal article, or a professional development session!

The American Lit students in my course and I had an interesting conversation about their thoughts as they looked at the Wordles. I'm sure that the other classes that answered the same questions did too. Is the next step connecting the students together to see what they have in common with students across the country (and maybe across the world?) That would be yet another value add.

Creating a positive herd

2010-08-22T19:05:00.000-07:00

In Switch, Dan and Chip Heath discuss how to convince individuals and organizations to change the ways they operate when the initial inclination is to resist change at all costs.

There's a lot that is interesting in the book--I received my copy as a gift at the NAIS conference in San Francisco last year. Instead of reading it all at once, I've been reading it in quick snippets for months. I'm not totally sure how that happened, in the intervening time I've read a number of other books in the more traditional (start in the front and work your way through to the end, one book at a time) methods.

The upshot of this though, is that I reached the section on the power of the herd just as the school year was beginning at Cannon School. At the end of the first week, I said to our Dean of Students "You know, I haven't seen a single sullen face all week."

Now, I'm sure there were at least a couple of students who weren't quite ready for summer to end. However, the culture at the school is "we're happy to be here with each other." I saw smiles, heard many offers of help from/to students and adults, and witnessed more helping hands than I could count.

Not all the new students wanted to be here. Yet, when I checked in with the new students during the week, the universal observation was "I'm feeling happy to be here, everyone here is so great." It's hard to be sullen when those around you are cheerfully showing you where to put your stuff, helping you navigate the lunch line just because they can tell they haven't seen you before, and translating words to you in whispers during class (we have several international students). In other words, the herd at Cannon gives the message that here, we look out for ways to help each other. There's an ad for a financial or insurance company that implies the same thing-folks in the ad see someone help a stranger struggling with a package, then go on to restore a baby's fallen toy to the stroller, someone else sees that and so on.

I credit the two Deans of Students with creating the kind of "herd" that encourages new students to enter the community with a positive outlook. They are, without a doubt two of the most positive, yet non-Pollyanna educators I've met. They act as a team, make their contributions unselfishly, all of which makes them role models for everyone else in the community (students and faculty).

Earth shattering research? No, we all sort of knew this already, but seeing it in action is powerful. It's going

The What If Game

2010-08-03T06:02:00.000-07:00

The what if game is totally underrated. It's so much more that a tool 5 year olds use to annoy their parents from the backseat!

Google's 20% rule is a derivative of the back seat game for grown ups--don't just wonder what if, try to bring into existence that which you imagine. Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s head of product management, advised students in a blog post.
Google, he said, is looking for “non-routine problem-solving skills.” I found that on Jeff Jarvis's blog transcript of his TedXNY talk. Google engineers are encouraged to spend twenty percent of their work time on projects that interest them.

So. . . how do you play "what if?" professionally?

Why now?

This isn't usually a time of year for philosophical musing--it's practical time in education, make the schedules, get the room ready, laminate, copy. . .

This post originated from an assignment to write a sentence describing yourself based on your top 5 Strengths. We're going to have all the students start the year by thinking about what they do well and how to use their strengths to their advantage all year. I can't wait for school to start!

My sentence

Let's find out! What, why, how, and, while we're at it, what if. . .

Day Two (don't ask about day one!)

2010-07-20T18:08:00.000-07:00

Well, if you must know, day one just plain got away from me. I'm not sure how that happened, but suddenly it was Tuesday night and I just thought about the blogging course that I was all keen for just two days ago.

The assignment for day one involved doing some analysis of design and layout and clarifying the purpose of your blog. Honestly, my purpose is to put some of my ideas into writing so that I am forced to clarify my thinking. I'm not trying to generate business for my infinitesimal consulting business or start debates with people who are better known than I am. I'm thrilled when I get into a conversation here though, don't get me wrong.

On to Day Two

See--I separated that with bold text! Did it look better??

The assignment for day two is to write a list post. At first I thought I just didn't have a list in me, but then I remembered that just this morning I was making a list of magazines I think make great reading for 11th grade students. One of the assignments I hope to give early on in the year will involve reading an entire magazine from cover to cover in several settings. I don't want kids to just power through in an hour but dip in for several shorter reading sessions. (I think this has to be a paper assignment). Then students will do a reading level analysis, and share thoughts about writing quality, audience, and style. We'll make a bulletin board of favorite articles.

On to the list:

Magazines I'd like to have in my classroom:

Scientific Mind. Cool stuff in here!

The Week. A global perspective on the news that most students haven't seen before. Plus interesting, well-written feature articles.

Sports Illustrated. The writing is usually strong--especially with the features rather than the weekly "news" of sports.

People. Yes, People. While there are some issues that make me cringe, there are other profiles that can be touching, inspirational, instructive and even cautionary. Good material for teens!

Wired. I'm not sure about this one. I like it, but I don't know if students would.

Reader's Digest. Fun and usually pretty easy to read. The "breaks" with the little jokes were always a favorite of mine when I was a teen. I haven't read this in years.

Both People and Sports Illustrated have extensive websites with content that is not the same as the paper issue. I suspect many students are only familiar with the sites.

What's not on the list: Harper's, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek. I won't get into why, but they are definitely NOT on the list.

What am I missing??

Reflection: What kinds of lists might be appropriate for this blog?

In the past, perhaps lists of sites or resources. Now I'm not so sure. I think professional resources for teachers might make a good list.

Being a better blogger...in just 7 days!

2010-07-18T18:27:00.001-07:00

I've signed up for a minicourse on being a better blogger. Stephanie Sandifer offered this via twitter and I impulsively signed up. It just happens to be running during a week in which my kids are enrolled in camp, we're all moved into our new (temporary) home, and my new job starts August 2nd. I also thought I needed something besides reading to keep me thinking and learning since I'm missing the Laptop Institute this year and feeling just a touch sorry for myself.

What am I hoping to get out of the course? I'd like to get better at learning how to cut it short and make my point in a more focused way. I think I'd write more frequent entries if I were more succinct. It takes me too long to write and then that de-motivates me to start another entry anytime soon.

I'd also like to learn when to link and when not to bother. How much does it matter?

Related to the above, I'm not much experienced with design, but I know it matters and I appreciate it when others have strong design. Meredith Stewart talks about how "pretty matters" and her blog is a testament to sparse yet lovely design. Her photography and other visual elements really work for me.

I'm sure I'll learn more than this, but that's my initial list. Now back to my reading! Right now, I'm reading Leadership the Outward Bound Way. It's thick, but very readable. I'm in chapter six, which focuses on fear and "learning to cope with those fears and move beyond them into action, rather than letting them limit you."

Not just another middle school closing

2010-06-10T11:36:00.000-07:00

Today was the middle school closing. I haven't written in several months. Today and tomorrow are my last days at Greensboro Day School and I'm feeling emotional about it. In the fall, I'll be at The Cannon School, and I'm thrilled and excited about this opportunity. But before the new adventure begins, today was about saying goodbye. I was honored to be asked to give a talk at the 8th grade closing today. Here's what I wrote, though not necessarily exactly what I said.

I want to assure all the students that this speech has been through multiple drafts using track changes and I’ve done peer and self-rehearsals using Audacity. Earlier this week, I was packing, sniffling a little bit, and going through some of my files. I found a few old academic journals written by 8th grade students during my first year when I taught study skills. Since you guys hadn’t been born yet when I arrived here in 1994, I thought you might find some of what these students wrote interesting. Do you know who the 8th grade math teacher was in 1994? Here’s an excerpt from one journal: August 28th “Math is really easy.” October 9th. I don’t need to say what I got on my math test. All that I’ll say is that it’s lower than my shoe size.” January 22nd “I don’t have a clue what we are doing in math. I think I better go to extra help.” March 4th “I received a 102% on the math quiz on Monday. I’m studying every day now.” You can see that the formula for success in Mrs. Love’s class hasn’t changed much. . .

The classmates of the student who wrote those words are all grown up now, and are older than I was then when I started teaching here. Some of them are even parents themselves. In many ways, I feel like I grew up here myself. This is a special place, and it didn’t take me 16 years to realize that. Originally, my plan to work here for a year while I figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Clearly, plans change. I want to thank all the teachers and Dr. Dickinson who, while teaching and guiding the students entrusted to us, were also teaching and guiding me through all these years. I am more grateful than I can say for your kindness, your patience with me, and most of all, for your friendship.

When I look at the gathered 8th graders, I think back not quite so far, but to almost three years ago when this crew entered middle school. You were still children at the beginning of the sixth grade. You were so cute! You didn’t take up nearly as much room and the boys didn’t reek after playing battleball at lunch. Your growth isn’t just physical. Remember your first blogs about reading? When I see the insights you shared on your 8th grade Ning, I’m impressed at your intellectual growth. I’m not surprised, but impressed nonetheless.

Do you remember starting sixth grade by drawing your own illustrations of main ideas from your summer reading books for the bulletin boards? I have a question for the 8th graders—how many of you are geniuses? Raise your hand if you consider yourself an genius.

Now, think way back to kindergarten. Back then if I asked the same question, I bet all of you would raise your hands. If I asked those kindergarteners “who can sing?”—you would have raised your hands immediately and you would have been happy to sing loudly, right then and there, to prove it. A few of you attention seekers might do that right now.

What is it about growing up that makes people forget that they are artists and singers? That they are brilliant? This is not what your teachers and parents want to happen. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, maybe because I have two six year olds and that gives me a chance to see how their minds work, full of nothing but possibilities. Why is it that we forget those possibilities and forget that we are all artists? It is our ideas and our visions that make us artists, not our hands or our voices.

That’s what I want to talk about today, that each and every one of us here, old and young, is an artist. And a brilliant artist at that. In fact, you’re a genius! Seth Godin says that a genius is someone who looks at a problem that others are stuck on and gets the world unstuck. He asks you to think about a few questions: Have you ever found a shortcut that others didn’t see? Have you solved a family argument by thinking up a compromise when everyone else thought they had to keep fighting? Have you seen a way to fix something that wasn’t working? Maybe you have made a connection to someone who seemed completely different from you? Have you done any of these things even once? Then you’re a genius!

Now, how to get the rest of the world to realize this? Last year, a teacher directly asked you “what’s the big idea.” This wasn’t a one time question! You need to keep practicing having big ideas with your artistic, creative genius brain. There’s some interesting research about happiness. It turns we are most satisfied and learn the most when we persist at trying to do things that are challenging for us, not when we just do the things that we find come easily to us.
So ask yourself regularly, “what’s the big idea?” Your English teachers like to call those big ideas themes. Big ideas can scare people. Big ideas are hard to evaluate with a standardized test. A high standardized test score can’t figure out how to stop the flow of oil from the ocean floor. Yet those are the ideas for which this world is most desperate.

You are headed into the world of high school. A world where fitting in and making the grades can seem like the most important things in the world. Please please remember that the person next to you in class is really a genius, disguised as an insecure or bored or possibly even self-centered adolescent. Take her ideas seriously. Encourage him to persist when he is discouraged.

Geniuses. All of you! Don't forget!

At 35,000 feet

2010-02-27T07:37:00.000-08:00

Blogging as an act of defying gravity this morning! I'm on the plane, headed home from 3 days in San Francisco at the NAIS annual conference. The wifi on the plane is such a bonus--I'm not the world's happiest flyer and the attractions of playing around online do a fabulous job of distracting me from the stresses of worrying about "what was that bump?" every few minutes. Of course, I've already tweeted that I'm pondering the fact that wifi is easier at 35000 ft. than at the Moscone Center.

Today's post is an extended thank you note to a number of people who have inspired me to think and build new connections in my brain lately. It's not a reflection on the many wonderful, thought-provoking sessions I attended--that's coming later.

This is the third time I've attended this conference and the second time I've presented. It's a conference that can be a little intimidating--lots of heads of schools and senior administrators in attendance. I co-presented with Jason Ramsden of Ravenscroft School, who is one of those fast-thinking, fast-talking, million miles a minute people who are just fun to listen to. It was an honor to be invited to present with him.

As so often happens, while the session went well, the thought and planning that went into creating the session was the most professionally satisfying part. Jason and I have been having an ongoing conversation about innovation for almost two years. We've been talking (along with Sam Morris, Meredith Stewart, and Matt Scully and a few thousand other eduthinkers) via podcast chat rooms, twitter, email, skype and occasionally we're even in the same place at the same time.

The conversations take on different flavors, depending on the focus, the type of school, current events, student needs. . . but there are recurring themes. What do students need and deserve from educators? They need our A game, every day, every period. How do we keep getting better at what we do? We need to be creative and forward-thinking in our professional practice. Are these notions in conflict? How can we be at our best every day if we are also supposed to be taking risks and accepting that we'll fail sometimes?

I'm not sure we solved that dilemma in our session, but I hope we brought the right questions. The truth is that our students leave every class with (we hope) new meanings and connections in their minds. We can't put this meaning in those minds, they have to make it. The same is true of attendees at a conference session. And that's why we encourage innovating (and accept responsible failure). Because if it is done intentionally, a la Peter Gow, then students will be empowered to make meaning out of the experiences we share with them. And so will we.

I tried something new for me and included some unscientific drawings in the session. I was inspired by Jessica Hagy, whose brilliant blog first came to my attention with her Why Teachers Drink post. I'm not the only person who has been inspired by Hagy's work, but I bet I was the only one at NAIS with completely data-free graphs in my presentation :) To the left is my favorite, inspired by Ralph Davison's "Think small, big ideas scare people."
And, because it's my blog, here's one more on how good things (autonomy, feedback) can become problems (neglect, micromanagement) without intentionality. I'm going to try making more of these in the future because drawing them forces me to reflect on my thoughts in a non-language way that I'm not accustomed to doing. It's unbelievable how many drafts of these simple diagrams I created along the way. New dendrites!

I was grateful that the group arrived ready to talk--we had several pair-share times built into the session, and I should have known that a room full of independent school educators would have no trouble making the most of that time! We also had a live-blogger in the room, many thanks to Chris Bigenho for sharing his talents with us.

One of the comments that was shared during the discussion time focused on not letting the pace of surviving the day and its challenges keep us from reflecting on our practice and growing intellectually. That is a constant challenge for me and, I think, for many others. I am grateful to be an educator in the web 2.0 era. I benefit every day from the tools that make it so easy to participate in a network of "smart happy people" who push me to reflect on my practice.

So--to those I've mentioned and many others I haven't, a heartfelt thank you, this session couldn't have happened without you! You defy gravity every day!

Sarah

Why students should model themselves after experts.

2010-02-10T05:46:00.001-08:00

Some of the material I've been reading lately has helped me clarify my thinking, but not completely. So there's a bit of digestion going on in this post, with more to come after I finish Curriculum 21.

I've been struggling with Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School? I wouldn't presume to question Willingham's discussion of the cognitive science behind memory and the structure of how the brain learns; that part of his book is instructive and very interesting. Instead, I'm struggling instead with some of the conclusions Willingham draws, such as Students Are Ready to Comprehend but Not to create Knowledge, which is a subtopic in one of his chapters. Another is that we can't effectively teach children about a subject by having them do what experts in the field are doing. He calls this Don't Expect Novices to Learn by Doing What Experts Do.

Just over a week ago, I was fortunate enough to attend Educon and tour the Science Leadership Academy where students do indeed learn by doing what experts do. In fact, one group of students is seeking a patent for a process that they wouldn't tell me very much about (smart kids!) Willingham makes a good case for the value of direct instruction. Sometimes, educators sound like we are eschewing direct instruction when what we're really doing is assuming it. Kids need some explicit instruction in order to be able to engage in meaningful project-based-learning. But, what value does the direction instruction have without application?

I like Willingham's call to clearly teach students about learning, and not just about content. I try to actually use the terms for the types of teaching I'm using and make the process more >> trendy term alert>>transparent for students. For example. my students know the term Imaginative Rehearsal and that it means they are using fiction and role play to imagine scenarios and the possible outcomes.

Just recently, someone pointed me towards How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School (1999), specifically, chapter two: How Experts Differ From Novices. There's a fascinating description of an historical puzzle and the different approaches to solving the puzzle that experts and novices took. What constituted expertise? High content knowledge and strong process knowledge. The experts in the process of historical research were more likely to find the solution than were those with just high content knowledge. Those with both process expertise and high content knowledge in another area were able to solve the puzzle, but needed more time than the experts who already had relevant content knowledge. Those with only content knowledge did not solve the puzzle.

This finding encourages me. Willingham asserts that novices can't learn by imitating experts because their cognition isn't the same. But he never describes how to teach cognition. In contrast, the authors of How People Learn spend a great deal of time stressing the importance of metacognition, or thinking about your thinking. The virtuosos they describe were self-reflective enough to understand what they didn't know, to realize what they needed to learn, and then how to go about that learning. This is a process that even young students can learn. I've learned that when I work with teachers on improving their professional practice, it's important to find a way for them to be reflective. Not everyone is a blogger (writer), but that's not the only method for reflection. Michael Wesch, of has done fascinating work on video diary experience.

Most of the talk today about what makes meaningful learning are based in what Demitri Orlando and others call "any-century skills." I'm not one to think that only new books have implications for the classroom experience. The idea that students need intellectual agility didn't originate with Tony Wagner, although he does a masterful job of articulating why this matters. While I was completing my reading specialist work, there was research from decades ago that was meaningful and important.

I decided to ask a group of our sixth grade students what they thought about the idea that they weren't ready to "imitate experts yet." They had a lot to say! They gave me example after example of times they exhibited what I would call expert-like behavior. I wish I'd thought to video their responses. They also talked about how meaningful they find projects such as the student organized blood drive we're engaged in right now. This is a project that makes me proud of our students and our school every year!

Educon in 5 minutes?

2010-02-04T06:16:00.000-08:00

So--I've been asked to explain my Educon trip in less than 5 minutes to our PDT (curriculum) group this afternoon. The email asking me to do this was sent at 10:19pm last night! Now, I'm sometimes a late night kind of gal, so I picked it up then and went into panic mode. I immediately turned to my network for help.

Of course, the network came through! First, I received a link to the perfect article about Educon in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Why perfect? It's short, has a nice summary of the history, and includes this quote from Chris Lehman, the founding (and current) principal of Science Leadership Academy It is fundamentally an educational forum that looks at the intersection of progressive pedagogy and 21st-century tools

I've diigoed the article, along with my highlights to share with the curriculum group. More than half of them will have read it by the time we meet. I also made a Wordle out of the article:

I tried making a wordle out of my live-blogs, but there was too much editing required.

Then, @jasonmkern led me to visible tweets. So cool! Not sure what to do with it though. No projector at this gathering.

My favorite Chris Lehman quote is "Technology should be like oxygen; ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible." So there's my starter. It's not a 2010 Educon quote, he's been saying this for a while, but it's worth saying over and over. Wash, rinse, repeat.

While my head is still wrapping around much of what I learned, I did come back with one immediate take-away. Dave Bill and Basil Kolani at the Dwight School led a conversation about creating a model for online participatory learning. Their model + the conversation in the room led me to start bugging a group of our teachers. We're going to start teaching the kids we have in the classroom, online. Next week. Well, later this month anyway. I really like what Bill and Basil accomplished by using online methods with on-campus kids. It makes for a nice transition into the world of online learning.

We know that by the time they get to college, most of these students will take a significant portion of their coursework online. How will they cope? By introducing them to online learning while we still have physical access to them, we can help students with an eye to their developmental readiness. Plus, the students and the teachers can defy gravity but still have a safety net. This image is actually of a trampoline, but I loved it and time pressure means. . .

So there it is! Think I can do it in 5?

Lacrosse?

2010-01-17T19:07:00.000-08:00

A few years ago when I was teaching in a middle school resource room, I noticed how many lacrosse sticks were leaning in the corner (I was a sucker for letting students store stuff that didn’t fit in their lockers in my room). Why were so many LD/ADHD boys (the majority of my students) playing lacrosse?

At first, I thought it was the coach; he was a true charismatic. However, the draw of lacrosse remained even when the coaching staff changed. Why? I attended a couple of their practices and a quite a few games to see if I could figure out the appeal. What was it about lacrosse that attracted these boys?

After more primary research (interviews with my students) I came to a conclusion. There wasn’t anything special about lacrosse. Instead, it was the timing. See, most of the middle school kids were soccer players. Many of them were obsessed with soccer, playing on two or three teams at a time. Soccer culture starts early here in NC, with some kids joining Soccer Tots at 18months old! By the time they are six or seven years old, these kids have developed some serious skills. At this age, the developmentally delayed child may still be learning to run without falling along with mastering left and right. The soccer teams quickly leave such kids behind.

Lacrosse, on the other hand, isn’t available around here until children are eleven or twelve years old. By that time, the kids with developmental delays have mastered the skills they were still struggling with at age five (that’s why we call them delays, btw). Lacrosse puts everyone on an even playing field.

The challenge is, how do we continue to provide opportunities to level the field at multiple places in school? There are so many times that we need to provide a new entry point for students. Development is one reason; increased maturity and changes in affinities are others.

I am starting to believe that a project based program of study can do this better than any other model of curriculum. As I delve into the world of PBL (Educon 2.2 here I come!) I expect I’ll write more about that. I would welcome any suggestions or comments about where to look for further learning.

Summarizing--which century?

2010-01-11T16:08:00.000-08:00

How's this for a 21st century skill: summarizing! Yep, that's the 21st century skill my students focused on last week. Rather involuntarily on their part, but sometimes the oldest (I can't say tallest) person in the room gets to set the agenda!

Clay Shirky says there's no such thing as information overload but instead we're suffering from "filter failure." How then do I help my students build their filters? Once they are grown and transition to a life/career as an adult who is supposed to be on top of potentially limitless input, how will they manage?

Enter the 18th (15th) century skill of taking a large amount of information, reading and comprehending it, and putting it into a few succinct sentences. I love my students. They totally got that this is really a reading strategy, not a writing exercise. Even more importantly, they were able to intelligently discuss the conversation prompt "summarizing can be a political act" after minimal explanation on my part. I'm still grateful to the college professor who taught me that whole class discussion is usually not a discussion at all. There are so many kids who don't know what they think until they hear what they say that setting them up to have table conversations is essential.

If we accept that distilling information (we focused on non-fiction) is important, there is still a question. How is it a 21st century skill? Well, twitter comes to mind. I have learned so much from the twitterverse. Why? Because the folks I follow have mastered the art of saying much with just a few words. When they can't capture all they have to say, they know how to write just enough to convince me that I need to click the link included. Akin to the art of writing the pithy slogan or the captivating headline that's been around for a few centuries.

Next week, I'll post some Wordles of their summaries. We've been looking at biographical sketches and blogs kept by clients of food banks. Pretty powerful stuff.

Putting it all together #fail

2009-11-09T16:58:00.000-08:00

This fall, I've been teaching a class called 21 skills for 21st century teachers. I'm aware of how cheesy the title is, but there you have it. The teachers who have attended are an amazing bunch! There are teachers of kindergartners and teachers of seniors and everything in between. The age range is from early 20's to mid 60's and you certainly can't tell who is most willing to innovate by checking their birthdates.

This Thursday is our last class, and I've titled it putting it all together. The catch is, I'm not sure I can explain how to do that. I certainly don't have it all together myself! I Twitter, and I learn a ton from my twitter network but I haven't figured out the twitter lists yet. I haven't checked for new twitter followers to follow back in way too long. On some Nings I'm a pretty enthusiastic participant, on others I just lurk and there are more than a few I joined and haven't visited in ages.

There are so many exciting tools that I "sorta" get. I "sorta" Diigo, but I mostly use it for myself rather than collaboratively. Google docs? Yep, sorta. I just learned today that I can create a form and send it out to students without having to embed it in a blog or wiki. Who knew? Not me, but I bet a thousand other people did. Don't even get me started on what I don't know about Google Wave.

I love TED talks but have downloaded far more than I've actually seen. I'd really like to organize a supper club around TED talks. Or at least drinks/apps. My Goodreads page is woefully behind, but I'm up to date on reading my friends' reviews (I think). My RSS was overflowing, but in the upgrade to Windows 7 last month, I opted not to transfer my Flock info over and am slowly rebuilding my RSS in Google Reader. I'm much more selective now about adding a blog to my reader, and while I'm sure I'm missing some great conversations, I'm at peace with it.

Where do I seem to have it together at this particular point in time is podcasts. I've been running a bit more than usual, so I've listened to some podcasts that way, plus I've been listening live (and hanging out in the chat rooms) more as well and learning a ton. It's just what's working for me right now.

As I compiled this list, I've come to realize that this may be what the next 20 years is going to be like. There is no "inbox 0" in my virtual life. It's messy and it's going to stay that way, with ebb and flow between resources depending on what my intellectual needs are and what is going on in the non-virtual part of my life. There is no "all together" in the 21st century, but there is constant growth and learning and that's the best I can do. Learning to live with that ambiguity is possibly the most important of the skills we're all learning.

Collaboration = Good?

2009-10-25T16:46:00.000-07:00

I am thinking about collaboration quite a bit lately. There can be such a disconnect between what we ask students to do and what actually happens in the adult world. When do adults work together? Some recent examples I've seen: my husband calls on a potential client with a colleague, writes a rough draft of his analysis alone (but says he needs to make several phone calls along the way). The draft then gets read by everyone else involved and changed (sometimes dramatically). Finally, he meets again with his colleagues to frame an approach.

The teacher of my favorite exercise class told us yesterday that our new routine was one she practiced and learned with two other teachers.

As we write our report cards and prepare for conferences, I meet with the other teachers on my team and we run down the list of students, sharing concerns, examples, etc so that we are all informed. However, we write the drafts of the reports alone, then pass them around for comments and editing.

Life is collaborative, isn't it? Many athletic teams certainly experience this (though not all).

BUT--should writing be collaborative? I'm going to play around with etherpad next week with my students. It looks a bit less cumbersome than creating a whole Google Doc for just a paragraph of shared text. I like the examples I've seen and the ability to have a sidebar conversation during the writing.

At this point though, I'm not sold on writing as a collaborative act. Maybe just every now and then? We'll see.

Does blogging make for better writing?

2009-09-28T17:41:00.000-07:00

I'm struggling with this question right now. MS Stewart led me to this article by Stanley Fish in which he says "all courses listed as courses in composition {should} teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else." The discussion in the comments section would probably bore most people, but I was intrigued by the different points of view. I've also been thinking about (and re-watching) the Seth Godin video about blogging I posted on my last entry. The essential question is: is it enough to write, and to write in quantity, or do students need repeated formal instruction in writing?

The obvious answer is "it depends" but I don't really want to cop out like that. I do know that when I worked in publishing, I was astounded at how poorly constructed some of the (eventually published) manuscripts were.

I work with young adolescents, many of whom don't feel like they have anything to say in writing. It takes a long time and a lot of room to convince them to put a piece of themselves down on paper or on the screen in a blog. If they do have something to say, students often feel that their words will be poorly received. Blogging changes this dynamic. Powerfully changes this dynamic, my lament last year notwithstanding.

Where then, does formal instruction fit it? Particularly rigorous formal instruction? I know that my writing is better for having been critiqued. How can we be rigorous and yet supportive? When does our rigor lead to squelching student voices?

I'm not the only one who disagrees with using formulaic writing, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Writing Center has a page devoted to helping students break away from the five paragraph essay, with a guiding question "How do I break out of writing five-paragraphs themes?" I do wonder why the authors wrote the section in which they say that high school teachers have good reasons for teaching these essays.

I have no answers to these questions right now. I'm just hoping that it is true that writing more will make my writing better (although Seth Godin would disagree that it is just those 10,000 hours that matter). We'll see.

Happy New Year!

2009-09-19T18:19:00.000-07:00

An appropriate title this weekend, and for this time of year. This year, the start of school has brought more than the usual number of to-do lists for me. My children started kindergarten and I went back to work full time. These are both good things, but bring with them little suitcases of emotion responses I wasn't expecting as well as some out and out physical challenges. If you've never taught, you probably don't realize that the first couple of weeks of school is actually physically difficult--the body has to adjust to all that standing, smiling, explaining, and late nights (planning and parent meetings).

That all being said, I'm really excited about some of the changes this year is going to bring. I'm an advisor again; a part of teaching I have truly missed over the last few years. I've helped plan a unit on the nature of the heroic journey. For our intro session, we're going to watch Star Wars (the real first one, now called Episode 4) and then discuss Luke's progress from brat to hero. I'm so excited about this, I can hardly stand it! I hope the students will engage in the movie and then make the transition to thinking about themselves and the journey through adolescence they are experiencing.

We've re-designed our blogs with an install of multi-user Word Press. It looks gorgeous and I'm optimistic that we'll recapture our fervor for blogging that faded last year. The class wiki is up and running too--let's hope that the parents join in our conversation a bit more this year. I welcome any suggestions for the types of wiki pages that encourage parent conversation!

That's all for now--it's going to be a great year! I'm blogging with the students and will be starting to blog more at Ed Social Media, but my goal is still to write here every other week this year. This is still the only spot that feels "away" from my school life for my thoughts. So, I'll close with this quote from Seth Godin on why blogging is good for you.

Why your school or district needs guidelines for social networking--Before the start of school this fall.

2009-07-28T14:55:00.000-07:00

Over coffee and the Sunday New York Times we were still finishing Thursday morning of our beach week my sister asked. “Have you heard that some teachers are friends with their students on Facebook?”

“Um, yes.” I was thinking "surely there’s a punchline coming," but it was a serious question.

My sister had come across an Ethicist column in which the writer was opining concerning the behavior of a teacher who had “friended” students on Facebook and was now seeking advice about what to do after having seen clear evidence of adolescent misbehavior, of the illegal as well as merely irresponsible type.

When she caught a glimpse of my expression before I ducked behind my mug, my sister rolled her eyes.

“Just because you are totally into all this weird tech stuff doesn’t mean the rest of us are. I’m sure there are tons of schools where all this is really new stuff to the teachers.” (I feel compelled to point out that my sister who claims not to be “into” weird tech stuff has an iPhone, a blog, and a Facebook account.)

I wonder if she’s right. It seems to me that anyone who has read a magazine or newspaper (let alone a website) in the last two years is aware of the impact of social networking on not just American but international culture. I hope this describes almost all the teachers in this country! Certainly anyone working with adolescents (the teacher in question teaches eighth graders) should have at least a rudimentary knowledge of sites such as Facebook or MySpace.

Or am I making assumptions?

One aspect of the article that interested me most was the inference that the teacher would be acting alone in determining what to do. The author never suggested that the teacher check with administration about complying with any district or school requirements. Given the recent spate of headlines about teachers being fired for their poor social networking choices (read this or this) or just google the terms “teacher disciplined facebook” and peruse the results.

Shouldn’t we have moved beyond the idea that this is completely new territory by now? I’ve been following a recent discussion on a listserv that leads me to think that we haven’t quite gotten there yet. If school leadership hasn’t at least released some suggested guidelines if not more stringent rules concerning appropriate online contact between students and teachers then there’s no time better than this summer to start.

While the technology is new(ish), the awareness of the need for appropriate interactions and information flow between teachers and students has been around for a long time. I remember discussing what constitutes appropriate subject matter for student writing in graduate school in the last century. The professor was preparing us to set boundaries with students who might choose to write elaborate descriptions of their out-of-school adventures for assignments. Her recommendation was to make it clear to students that there are parts of their lives that, if they share them with a teacher, they need to know the information may need to go further than they intend.

The same applies to social networking sites. Teachers and students both need to protect their privacy for many reasons.

So, what constitutes reasonable guidelines? The good news is that this is not new territory, there are resources available to use as a starting point and then modify to suit your organization’s needs. Appropriately, there is a wiki that is “a collaborative project to generate Social Media Guidelines for school districts.” Steve Taffee the Director of Technology at Director of Technology at Castilleja School has written a thorough description of their policies.

The guidelines are just the beginning though. Faculty and students need a true understanding of security and how to manage the settings of the various social media they use. Who is teaching students about how to manage their online lives? Not all parents are capable of this. So often I hear “oh, my daughter is the one who taught me how to Facebook.” Students may have savvy, but they may not have discernment. Parents and teachers have the discretion, but they are intimidated by the technology. Of the two, I would say discernment is more critical than savvy.

Having guidelines doesn’t mean there won’t be problems. Teachers who confuse, blur or completely ignore the lines they should draw clearly for students have always existed and will continue to turn up from time to time. Those teachers should be subject to Guidelines should exist to prevent as many problems as possible and provide a framework for dealing with issues that do arise.

So, get started writing your school guidelines, today!

The power of imaginative rehearsal

2009-07-25T11:45:00.000-07:00

How did he do it?

I asked a group at a conference this question about the landing (not crash) of flight 1549 recently. The answers that come back are usually "training" and "practice." That's not quite enough of an explanation though. No one "practices" water landings in passenger jets. What did Captain Sully's training look like, and what can K-12 teachers learn from his heroic success?

Time: Captain Sully got his initial license at age 14. He's been flying for years, he's experienced. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes 10,000 hours to develop a skill to the level of expert. Captain Sully has been at this for a long time. Time isn't enough though, that time has to be well-spent. Kids are in school for thousands of hours in their lifetimes. Are we spending that time well? There are two components that deserve more time than most schools give them.

Reflection: On more than one occasion, Captain Sully studied and reviewed the evidence of airline accidents. He wrote reports designed to help improve the safety of commercial flying. These sound almost like traditional school activities, don't they? It is critical that reports in school include a true synthesis of primary sources and a reflective, future-thinking, component.

Role playing: Pilots train for hours on flight simulators for scenarios that can't be practiced in real life. In his book Teaching for Tomorrow, Ted McCain discusses the importance of having students engage in projects via role play assignments.

Young children learn about the world and the roles of people in the world through imaginative play. They dress up like firefighters, princesses, and superheros. This type of play ends all too soon. This imaginative role play is important for developing practical skills such as making a presentation that closes a sale, designing a building that will survive an earthquake, or landing an airplane without any engines. Yet even more critical is the importance of developing students moral compass through role play, or imaginative rehearsal as Kelly Gallagher calls it. Teachers must design learning environments in which students can imagine themselves in situations where a choice must be made. Well-designed re-creation of historical scenarios can provide children and teens authentic opportunities to learn the consequences of cruelty vs. kindness, selfishness vs. generosity.

This kind of teaching isn't easy. There is a lot of work involved and teachers need to be supported in doing this work. What tools and resources can help? That's the subject for my next post!

PS I've watched this video dozens of times now, and my heart still races each time. It was created by the folks at Scene Systems. Their website says that they are specialists in digital recreation for litigation. I think, though I am not sure, that the re-creation in this case was to help them market their product.

Blogging is Boring??!!

2009-06-02T07:07:00.000-07:00

Students in my classes have been blogging about their independent reading books for a few years now. I remember when we first started blogging. The students and I were agog with excitement! Most of the entries were delightfully reflective. The comments were flying back and forth.

I hesitate to say this in the open, but it’s getting, well, boring. Recently, a group of students and I were in a chat room discussing the novel The Door in the Wall. Towards the end, our conversation evolved into a general discussion of the technology we use in class. The students brought up that they were “bored” by their independent reading blogs. After the first tentative use of the B word didn’t get anyone in trouble, a number of the students agreed. They did try to put it nicely and not hurt my feelings.

Here’s the worst part, I’m with them. It feels like a drill to read and respond to the zillions of posts that have been generated and it shouldn’t. It didn’t used to. I think I know why, but I’m not sure what to do about it.

We’ve lost the spirit of discovery, the feeling that we were breaking new ground. We also lost our voices. Our reading blogs are not the conversations they used to be. Instead, they are just assigned mini-essays about the books each student is reading. They’re writing for their teacher without engaging each other in conversation. These kids love to talk to each other though, so the failure is mine, not theirs.

There are two reasons for their lack of engagement that I can identify. One is that the format for the blogs is dreadful with the software we use. Students have no opportunity to personalize their pages and project their personalities through their design. A couple of years ago, blogging was so new to this age group that it didn’t matter that the only design choices they have are font and text color. Not anymore, this lack of customization is completely inadequate for their 21^st Century visual cortexes!

The other barrier to engagement is the lack of authenticity. I can see how unnatural our class model for blogging is when I consider my own modest, but successful efforts at blogging. I don’t write my personal blog at two week intervals. Nor do I “respond to a colleague’s blog entry in 2-3 sentences” for homework. Ugh. While I wish I were more disciplined, I write when the spirit moves me, although I am for two entries a month. My responses are even more fickle. I might write voluminous comments one evening, and then become a passive reader for a week or more.

How can we blog independently and authentically? We need to comply with school rules, legalities, etc, but it has to be real and meaningful!

Reunions in the Facebook Age

2009-04-24T19:49:00.000-07:00

I just went to my 20th reunion. I will not bore anyone with my ruminations on age.

What was fascinating was the difference I felt in connection to those people I had virtually friended in the last couple of years. I've seen pictures of their kids and know a little ,about their day-to-day lives political views, and maybe favorite books.

My university (Duke) has a pretty far-flung alumni base, so many people fly in without kids/spouses. So, when I encountered people who are friends on FB, we didn't have to have the "so, what have you been doing for the past 20 years. . . " conversation.

Even better was the connection to people I have kept more close contact with over the years. Even when you do your best to talk periodically and email, life can make it hard to feel close to someone who lives three thousand miles and a few time zones away. Facebook can make it easier.

I know this isn't the way the young whippersnappers use Facebook, but it works for me. There are no wild parties portrayed on my college friends' pages (well, mostly not). Instead, there is a lot of political commentary and many pictures of children.

Social Networking helps strengthen bonds that were already there and reconnect those that have been stretched thin.

Too many books, blogs, and tweets!

2009-04-12T18:24:00.001-07:00

I may not have written a blog entry in a month, but. . .

I've tweeted, Ning'ed, live-blogged, chat roomed, and even been interviewed for (geek alert here: EdTechTalk's 21st Century Learning) a podcast. I also wrote two papers and took an exam, btw.

What does all this mean?

It means I've been so reflective about my personal practice that I'm not sure I can stand it much longer. Right now I feel like a total sham as a teacher and an integrationist.

Why? Well, one of my papers was to fully transcribe a one-hour lesson. Now, I've known I talk too much all my sentient life. I can't remember the first time someone said to me "can you just NOT TALK for a little while?" Ironically, I was a shy kid, so I did all my talking around my family who just wanted a little peace and quiet. All this goes to say that I was trying so hard during my recorded lesson not to talk too much. After listening to the recording and writing the transcription, guess who had the most to say during the hour? Yep, yours truly. I've got to find and buy one of those posters that says "the one doing all the talking is doing all the learning" and hang it somewhere prominent in the classroom. Sigh.

Here's another reason I feel like a sham. I gave an assignment that didn't work out. Not an epic fail, where grand lessons were learned, just a whimpering, pathetic failure. Why did we (my students and I) fail? Because, after all these years of knowing what happens when I wing it, I still failed to plan thoroughly! (See the above re--papers and exams.) We tried something new, Comic Life, as a way for students to demonstrate their understanding of any aspect of medieval life by making a comic book. It seemed so appealing, so 21st Century, so cool. Surely they would get it. Did I have examples? Did I have a thorough instructions? No and no. Guess what I got back? Stick drawings with no discernible medieval connection, just some sketched in blood, gore, and fighting.

And for the final entry, we'll go to the "you really only learn something when you teach it" category. I've just written my steps to successfully completing a writing assignment in the technology rich classroom. Now, I really like these steps. They're good. So good, they are worth their own post (soon, maybe tomorrow since I can't imagine I'll want this post to be the front page for long). I'll be presenting this list in a couple of weeks at a workshop, and therein lies the rub. I've never written this down before! Seriously, it's just the looming, ahem, approaching workshop that has made me reflect enough to pull together documentation of what I believe to be most powerful about the writing teaching I've done. Sigh yet again.

Actually, I'm writing this post tonight just because I can't bear the thought of going a whole month without a post. Maybe it would have been better to just let the month go by, but I don't think so.

I'm looking for a great closing now, but none is coming to me, so I'll just put in a plug for one of my other blogs. If you have children under 6, I've been keeping a blog as a class assignment. My premise is that you don't need to feel guilty for not getting a Leapster, Tag, whatever electronic gadget that will teach your kid to read. There's a lot you can do with your child to promote reading and reading readiness besides the "just read to your child" that we hear. So, check it out if you have time, I welcome comments, suggestions, ideas, etc.

Swimming Without Drowning

2009-03-13T19:18:00.000-07:00

I went to a session at a conference recently with the above title. The session was led by a second year teacher (only halfway through her second year!) and the title referred to ways early career teachers could use technology (specifically web 2.0 technology) successfully. The session was, in a word, brilliant.

The leader took us through a number of strategies and tools she'd used in the classroom successfully and they were interesting and well-designed. What was brilliant though, was the philosophy that this young teacher has already developed well enough to be able to articulate it. Some highlights for me from the session:

Don't be afraid of the epic fail. If you type define: epic into Google (yes, you can do that, you get a page full of definitions from various web dictionaries/references) one of the first phrases to appear is "of heroic proportions." In other words, an epic fail is one for the books, in which the role of hero is played by a teacher. If you set out to write an epic with your students, even if you fail, there will be reflection, discussion, thinking going on. Your students will see you struggle, fail, and think about what to do next time. Isn't that what we want for our students? Lifelong learning? Persistence in the face of difficulty? That ephemeral "pick yourself up, dust off, and try again" ness? So why do we let fear keep us from trying something new? I'm not just talking about technology here either!

Create a window into your classroom. Blogging rocks. I already knew that. My students blog about what they read, their projects, and discuss their posts with each other. I personally blog in three different places for entirely different purposes, not counting the occasional Ning blog post. What I haven't done though, is start a lively, student-run blog with my students. Kinda, sorta knew I wanted to, but just haven't gotten it done. This phrase "a window into the classroom" hooked me. So, the infrastructure is in place, the students are invited and just wait until spring break is over!

Cultivate support. Duh, right? But so easy to forget. We're all about PLNs now, but that's only part of having a strong, collaborative support network. A supportive community doesn't just happen. More importantly, they don't stay strong without regular nurturing. Venting over lunch in the teachers lounge, while it has its place, is not a support network.

Ever since this session, I've been thinking about it in conjunction with a session I attended earlier this month at NAIS that was led by Peter Gow. Truly an illuminating session (I don't blog the boring ones). Peter focused on revitalizing veteran teachers. Peter's session was pretty crowded. Unfortunately, there were only four attendees at the session led by this brilliant early-career teacher. If more of the veteran teachers I saw walking around the conference were attending sessions like Swimming Without Drowning, there might be less of a need for sessions on how to revitalize them!

Imaginative rehearsal or the second half of books.

2009-02-21T06:45:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking more and more about the literacy part of my "literacy, technology, learning" mantra. This may be because I'm nearing the end of my reading specialist coursework.

From page 44 of Kelly Gallagher's Readicide: = "struggling readers who do not read voraciously will never catch up." I've been thinking about the simplicity of this line since I first read it. There is abundant research available on the gaps among and between the various groups of children who enter kindergarten.

So how do we get children to read at all, let alone read "voraciously?" One thing that is clear, we must make time for this reading during the school day, we can't just say "go home and read." What must we give up during the school day to allow substantial reading? Gallagher has some suggestions that I want to start implementing tomorrow. He talks about the Article of the Week program he instituted when he realized that none of his students could identify the vice president of the US. Straightforward, doable, and ready for class tomorrow. I really can't recommend this book enough.

So, back to the title of this post, "Imaginative Rehearsal." In Influencer, Patterson et. al. discuss the fact that the most powerful method of behavior change is through experience. While direct experience is best, vicarious experience can be nearly as motivational. I know that film can have enormous impact on viewers, but I would argue that it is in books that good readers can best immerse themselves and truly become someone else for a while. Gallagher calls this an "imaginative rehearsal." I hadn't heard the term before, but it is perfect for capturing the ways in which reading a good book can help the reader become a better person. Repeatedly imagining oneself in the role of hero can lead to courage when life brings a challenge that calls for it.

How then, do we choose the books we ask students to read? If they are too slight, yet engaging, we may get the voraciousness we seek but at what cost? Clique books come to mind. What impact does light reading have on students' chances for imaginative rehearsal? When I read Thread of Grace, by Mary Doria Russell, I was fully engaged in imaginative rehearsal. The book is an achingly beautiful story set in WWII Italy and centered around the fact that the Italians largely did their best to protect the Jews in their population from the Nazis. The book demands the reader think "could I, would I" over and over. Studies such as the Milgrim experiment from the 60's show how inhumanely humans can behave. Reading literature that asks us to be better than we are must be a part of education if we are to rise above our baser instincts.

There's an interesting debate going on in several threads on the English Companion ning on this very topic. Is it only the canonical classics that can best inspire deep thinking?

I'm not actually finished with either book yet, but I'm so engrossed I had to share. . .

Half Book Reviews

2009-02-02T17:03:00.000-08:00

As in reviews of books I haven't finished yet, but have me thinking so much I need to write about them.

I'm reading a book that I didn't want to read. It landed on my desk (while I was away, sneaky) sporting a post-it with my name in big letters. An email arrived shortly thereafter, informing me that I needed to have read the book before an all-day meeting coming up in just a few days. All this combined to make me feel resistant to opening the cover and I usually am thrilled when I get a new book. The book is titled The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner.

Now that I'm halfway through (I'm such a reader I can't NOT read an assigned book) I am fascinated and thoroughly engrossed. I do feel the title is completely unfortunate. It implies that the book is going to bemoan the difference in test scores among American students and their counterparts in China and India, a la 2 Million Minutes.

Instead, Wagner efficiently describes some of the biggest flaws in education today and then goes on to actually detail a plan for fixing them. More interestingly, Wagner focuses on schools that most Americans would describe as working. Successful as in suburban public schools and expensive private schools with well-educated and well-paid parent populations. Schools that send almost all their graduates to college.

In one section, Wagner criticizes the formulas for writing that students are taught, then use to get 4's and 5's on AP tests, by pointing out that once students get beyond high school they will not be asked to write for 25 minutes on a topic they've never seen. I recently Diigo'd a page on the UNC writing center website that tells students to unlearn the 5 paragraph essay. I would take it a step further and contrast formula writing with, well, anything actually published that people read voluntarily. I'll never forget one of my professors telling me "don't assign anything you won't want to read in 72 versions."

At the moment, I'm deep into Wagner's thoughts on teacher education and improvement of instruction. Many teachers will be uncomfortable with what Wagner says, but he's right when he says that "many teachers and principals still think of themselves as independent subcontractors." He has some interesting ideas about improving instruction that involve videotapes of lessons and constructive, analytic discussion. Sounds intense, frightening, and productive.

The other book that I'm halfway through is Readercide by Kelly Gallagher. Gallagher argues that schools and teachers have destroyed students enjoyment of reading by simultaneously over and under teaching reading, then testing students within an inch of their lives.

I'm not the only one blogging about this important book right now. Bill Ferriter has the entire book available for download and hosted an interview and voicethread conversation with Gallagher. So, instead of going on, I'll just say that reading Readicide is making me really sad and angry for children who deserve better.

On a final note, I found a website that evaluates the reading level of a blog! Not sure what formula they are using, but I was glad to know that my blog was written at a high school level.

TV Reviews

Time for some little ideas!

2009-01-28T06:40:00.001-08:00

By little, I mean narrowly focused, not unimportant!

I've been frustrated lately by reading assignments that are way too difficult for students. I bet they have been even more frustrated than I have! This is particularly difficult when content area teachers are doing their best to bring in authentic reading material such as current news in the field. The problem is that such material is written at a level that precludes independent reading. Instead, students end up needing a great deal of support.

When teachers assign reading material, sometimes it is difficult to know until after students have done the reading whether the material is too easy or too advanced. Here are two tools that can make evaluating the reading level of text a little easier.

For a rough estimate, Microsoft Word has the option to evaluate readability statistics as part of the grammar and spelling check. You turn this feature on by clicking on the MS Office button in the upper left hand corner, clicking on Word Options, choosing "proofing", and checking the box that says "show readability statistics."

Copy and paste or type about 100 words of the text into MS Word and save. Then, when you are in a document, go to the reviewing toolbar and run the spelling and grammar check. At the very end of the check, you get a window with a Flesch-Kinkaid reading level. It's not perfect, and I personally think it skews a little low, particularly if the text has a lot of dialogue. However, it is a great quick and easy check that a reading selection isn't way off base.

The second tool is a program that you can download called Reading Rater that is free. It's nice to sometimes do a cross check between the two, but I have found them to be consistent.

Hope these are useful for you!

Are they or aren't they?

2009-01-10T09:45:00.000-08:00

New literacies? Is 21st Century Literacy about something new? Or are they the same literacies that educators have always valued. I'm going to work some of the skills I hear about most throughout this entry, the terms will be in italics.

I like some of the work presented on the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, particularly the social studies curriculum they've presented. But I also agree with Jay Matthews at the Washington Post (I'm sure he'll be thrilled to know of my support) when he says that "young Plato and his classmates did the same thing in ancient Greece." Communicating effectively is hardly a new skill.

So what's changed? Maybe it's the urgency? Some might think so, but the developing the ability to innovate has always been urgent for a child seeking to rise out of poverty. Same for problem solving.

So what is new? Developing media (or information) literacy means that students need to learn to analyze media for bias, artifice, motive. . . that's not so new, is it? However, given the ability of technology to simulate reality like never before, I think there's something to calling this a new literacy.

Creating knowledge used to be for the elite. For those who struggled through the "system" and made it to the pinnacle of higher learned and moved into the ivory towers or the glass towers of business. Now it's for everybody, a la Clay Shirky. I think this is where we start to see the promise of the conjunction of technology and knowledge in the 21st century. The fall of the gatekeepers. This era started when college dropouts built multi-billion dollar empires based on intellectual capital. I have a teacher friend who argues that saving money for a four-year old to go to college is pointless (I'm pretty sure she's doing it anyway). She says "no one is going to need to go to college to succeed in 14 years." Is she right? Is the time frame right?

Literacy in the old fashioned sense, the ability to read, still reigns as the most powerful 21st century skill in my mind. Reading is part of so many learning paths. Technology does not make reading unnecessary, technology makes reading even more essential. Knowledge is still stored and retrieved primarily in text form.

A few thoughts about why text still rules: Reading is faster than listening. Faster than watching video. A movie starts with a script (or it should). A good reader can skim or extract partial information. The reader has control and determines the pace with text--fast forwarding doesn't have the same effect. None of this means non-text media aren't also valuable, important, and fascinating.

So, back to the beginning--are these new literacies or not? Does it matter?

Here Comes Everybody, my version

2009-01-01T17:17:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! You'll have to visit someone else's blog to get a top 10 list, resolutions, or anything particularly introspective. While on break, I like to have little ideas!

Over the holiday, we visited with my family in Florida. I'm not from there, but my parents moved there after they retired. While I was there, I was reading Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky. I'm a big fan of his book and his talks, which are available on blip and YouTube. It's a great book and you should read it, but it's not what this post is about.

My mom commented on the cover, and I told her the story from the first chapter, about a woman who lost her cell phone in a taxi, the teen who found it, and the friend who made it his mission to use social networking to get the phone back. It's a good story, and you can read a brief version here.

Part of the story involves texting, which I knew my mom had heard of, but assumed she wasn't a user. I soon learned that my assumption was completely wrong. My mom and her friends have indeed been texting. They started as a way to quickly let each other know that surgeries had gone well/poorly from hospital waiting rooms. Texting got the word out quickly and allowed for more privacy than a call did. From there, texting has become part of this group's communication strategy just as it has for so many others.

I think of all the grousing teachers can do about technology and learning new tools. This group of retirees would put them to shame!

Who knew? I certainly didn't. Goes to show the truth of what they say about assumptions. . .

Wordle Meme

2008-12-17T18:43:00.001-08:00

I've never been "tagged" by one of these, but this one looks too fun not to try. I'm a big fan of Wordle already and I've used it with students and their writing and with journal articles, but never with my own writing. So, here's the Wordle for my blog's RSS feed

The first thing I noticed is that I really need to stop saying "really" so often! The other is that students is my most used word, which makes me really happy (ha!). Since today was my last day at school until next year, that seems like a happy note to go out on!

Cheers!

Meeting is not collaborating!

2008-12-14T19:59:00.000-08:00

Really, it isn't. So why do so many of us think that we are collaborating when we are engaged in nothing more than discussion of how to best accomplish some piece of "administrivia?"

I think that the main reason is our lack of understanding how to collaborate. If communicating and collaborating are essential 21st Century literacies, then our students are in trouble. Teaching can be one of the least collaborative endeavors ever. Teachers enter their classrooms everyday with the mindset that they stand alone in a sea of children (whatever their age).

It doesn't have to be that way. We can learn to collaborate, but we'll have to be teaching ourselves how. I don't think that many administrators know much more about working and teaming than anyone else in education.

Having made that optimistic statement, I need to admit that I'm not sure how I'm going to teach myself more collaborative skills, but I'm going to start by doing some reading and talking, my favorite methodologies for learning something new. Peter Gow has a great post on the lost potential of department heads and he's onto something there. I think the same could be said for middle school teaming structures.

Kim Cofino writes a lot about the work she's doing, and while I don't think she specifically talks about the structure of collaboration, its there. So, I'm going to catch up on what she's written as part of my research. It's as good a start as any, and better than many!

Reading with Diigo and Dragons

2008-11-16T17:19:00.000-08:00

Literacy and technology have been intersecting in class this week in great ways!

I am a big fan of Harvey and Gouvis' work on the need to teach students reading strategies. Last year, students mentioned in their end of year surveys that we read too much non-fiction for our short texts and they missed reading short stories. Looking over the year, I realized they were right, we read very little short fiction although we still read novels.

In an effort to correct this, I decided to incorporate fairy and folk tales into our reading strategy instruction. I found two great resources for tales online. My teaching partner received a grant several years ago to explore the world of the Grimm Brothers. Usually, we like to use one or two of those tales in class. This year I found Professor D. L. Ashliman's collection of tales. These tales are, well, much "Grimmer" than the sanitized versions students are usually familiar with. Their background knowledge gives them the boost they need for comprehending these stories though, which have more complex vocabulary.

The other site is a more general collection of folk and fairy tales, from many cultures and time periods. It's part of the 4to40 website.

Here's the really cool part. The kids used the tools built in to Diigo to demonstrate their use of the reading strategies that we've been practicing with paper text. I used the Diigo for educators feature to set all the students up with an account that meets COPPA requirements. When it came time to assess the students' work I had such a great time. With all the stories to choose from, the students really felt that they genuine choices. Part of their grade was choosing a story that was appropriately challenging, but not too hard. (Differentiation, anyone?).

I try really hard not to give assignments that I'll dread grading. These were just plain fun to grade since I got to read a huge variety of stories through the students eyes. I hadn't read most of the stories in these versions before, so while it took a while to grade them, is was also truly pleasure reading for me. BTW, the students did beautifully and many mentioned that they really enjoyed the assignment. Wow--fun to complete and a pleasure to grade. In my world, that's about as good as it gets!

Now for the dragons. The students have been blogging about their independent reading. So many have become absorbed in the Inheritance series by Christopher Paolini that I felt I needed to check them out. WOW--I'm now almost finished with book two and I can't wait to get started on number three. I just love the feeling of being buried deep in another world!

Talking about web 2.0, in theory only!

2008-11-09T18:13:00.001-08:00

I've given two talks recently about Web 2.0 features without Internet access in the venue. In other words, let's talk about the interactivity that is so powerful right now by using screen shots and downloaded videos. Weird.

What bothers me most though, is that the talks pretty much went fine. Of course, it was a pain to get all the videos downloaded (thank you DownloadHelper and Applian!). The thing is though, that the very nature of networking is participatory, not voyeuristic. So, watching a video about a flash mob, while entertaining, is not at all the same thing as participating in a flash mob (caveat--I haven't).

It's kind of like watching Paula Deen make Thanksgiving Dinner on Food TV--fun, but you don't get to eat anything!

So, I've decided that while I might still give a talk or two, I'm really going to focus on hands-on opportunities to draw folks in. I truly believe that parents and educators have to participate in virtual communities in some way (not all) in order to guide and help the children in our care. I'm a little astonished at the number of people who raised their hands during one talk when I asked how many people agreed with the statement "you should never use your real name on the Internet." As someone who blogs, tweets, comments, and Nings as "herself" I find this fear worrying. It's also a disconnect.

Maybe I am the one who is disconnected? Am I too open and optimistic? Should adults be obscuring their identities when communicating professionally with others in their field?

Yay, somebody is reading!

2008-09-21T17:12:00.000-07:00

I do feel a little like I'm talking to myself here on this blog. Which is fine, because I started it as a place to be reflective about what I am doing with literacy and technology in my classroom.

However, on September 18, I got a message from screencast that I had exceeded my bandwidth for the month for my Jing files. On the 18th! Lots of month left after the 18th. This has never happened before and it worried me because I had just uploaded a video to show the new sixth graders. Ironically, the topic of my jing dealt with file compression. I wanted to show students how to compress their photographs before they inserted them into other documents. I wanted to make the video so that I can refer students to it repeatedly since reminders for 11 year olds are, well, essential!

At first, I thought that the new jing was the one that put me over the limit. I tweeted out an "oh no" just because I'm trying to remember to twitter my ed tech life a little more. Dave McCollom from Techsmith saw my tweet, contacted me, found my account before I had a chance to answer and upped my bandwidth allotment! Wow!

Now, I have no connection to Techsmith at all except as a customer (and I do have a paid for copy of Camtasia that I don't use), but now I am an even bigger fan than I was before. The whole scenario is a great example of 21st century marketing (which doesn't actually interest me that much as an educator, but does as a customer) which my classmate Jim Tobin would be interested in. Techsmith met my need as a customer without me having to ask for "technical support."

When I tweeted a little more with Dave, he sent me a message " If you want to dig a little deeper and see where your bandwidth is going check this out." He made me a jing showing me that it was actually my blog post on Jing vs Camtasia that was generating the traffic to my screencast account (which is where the Jingproject videos get posted). That made me feel good about my blog, maybe it is occasionally helpful for people. It made me feel even more positive about Dave and Techsmith that he would take the trouble to help me out so much with what is a free application and hosting service.

This video by David Truss does a nice job of communicating the power of networking for educators. Dave is much, much more connected than I am, and I'm not comparing myself to him by any means. His video inspired me to keep working on my PLN though!

PS While I'm writing this, I'm listening to EdTechTalk Weekly and have my Facebook and Twitter streams up. Did I mention looking for my attention span lately?

What happened to my attention span?

2008-08-31T17:08:00.000-07:00

This week, I was traveling and had the opportunity to read the same book for 3 hours in a row with minimal interruption. It felt so good, and the experience made me realize that this kind of reading has been missing from my life for quite a while. In fact, I don't think I've done any one thing (except sleep and sit in faculty meetings) for 3 hours straight in a really, really long time.

Over the summer, the July issue of The Atlantic cover story was titled Is Google Making Us Stoopid? The article wasn't really about Google so much as the fact that reading is changing in ways that need to be examined. Being a huge fan of literacy, I've said often that the only part of the phrase "21st Century Literacy" that matters is, in fact, literacy. Reading this article helped me realize that I'm only partly right. The world is more text dependent than ever before and being illiterate is clearly a terrible handicap.

One of the less obvious risks of reading electronic text and watching electronically distributed video is the deterioration of attention. I know that I'm not reading nearly as many books as I used to, particularly non-fiction. I like to think that I'm learning what I need to know via the web, Nings, blogs, etc. But I suspect that is not entirely true. I've had trouble reading two non-fiction books this summer that really interest me: Working With Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goldman and Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson et al. Neither is particularly difficult and I've enjoyed the 2/3rds of both that I've read so far. I suspect that so much work online has made it hard for me to engage in the deep reading of these that I would have done in years past. In the past, I also wouldn't have started one without finishing the other.

The attention issue translates to video as well. I don't even attempt to watch mini-series anymore. I heard great things about Planet Earth when it was on, but didn't even attempt it. I've watched the first half of Michael Wesch's An anthropological introduction to YouTube which is brilliant and fascinating. And, an hour long. I've got to get to the second half!

The 20 minute TED talks seem to be right at my maximum. I tried a new trick today though--they are downloadable, so I put 2 on my iPod and watched them at the gym on the elliptical. I have high hopes for taking myself through quite a few of the talks at the gym.

So, the ability to focus and learn new material in more than a 20 minute spurt is a problem for me. I hope that my recognition of the issue will, along with some thought, help me learn to manage myself and my attention a little better. What about students in school now though? How will they learn the satisfaction that is "flow?" They certainly will have difficulty learning about it in 45 minute class periods.

Bemoaning the issue or making silly stands like "you may not use Wikipedia as a resource for this project" isn't going to help students. I'm just not sure what will.

Happy New (School) Year

2008-08-13T17:24:00.000-07:00

This time of year feels so much more like a new year than January 1! August has brought a flurry of workshops, shopping for fresh school supplies, a new corkboard (I realized the old one is more hole than cork), lists and more lists, ahh. As Mimi says "I heart me a good list!" There's something so optimistic about start of school lists. In contrast, the end of school lists that were dashed off just a couple of months ago were exercises in "please don't let me lose my mind or forget to pick up my kids at daycare by 6" panic.

I've led a couple of workshops this week for teachers. I tried to infuse them with some optimistic spirit. We did a cut/color/sort of web 2.0 logos in one workshop that led us into setting up RSS feeds (for real, not with crayons!) In a tablet workshop, we traced our hands to do a 5 finger writing activity. I have to remember that adults are as stimulated by hands on learning activities as are children. The teachers shared ideas about how to use similar strategies to teach the sophisticated elements of the AP/IB/Otherwise Impossibly Difficult courses they teach.

As for me, I'm looking forward to the arrival of my sixth graders next week. Happy New Year!

Wordle

2008-07-31T13:20:00.000-07:00

I tried something interesting today. Our diversity director sent out two different articles written about the the U.S. House of Representatives issuing an apology for slavery and for Jim Crow. His point was that the two articles were quite different. I had heard about Wordle, which makes the images based on the frequency with which words appear in the article. So, I made images of the two articles. The first article was written by Darryl Fears and appeared in the Washington Post. Here's the Wordle for that article.

The second article was written by Jim Abrams for the Associated Press and distributed widely. Here's the Wordle for it.

I left out the headlines for both because those are seldom written by the journalists who write the articles.
Discussion fodder in conjunction with reading the articles? I think so.

Wouldn't it be interesting to have students create something similar with two pieces, either historical, literary, or current?

Teachers as Learners

2008-07-24T07:44:00.000-07:00

I wrote recently about building an interactive whiteboard using a wiimote and wondering what to do with it. What I didn't write about though, was the process. It was fun--I made a couple of trips to Radio Shack, dismantled several defenseless pens and flashlights, used a soldering iron for the first time in years, and shrank insulation using my hairdryer. I have made three pens now, each one a little better than the previous one. A couple of teachers at school made them too. Clay Burell recently tweeted that he is going to build one using a Korean wiimote. Cool.

Why did I enjoy the process so much? Because it was hands on learning. It reminded me of how the kids respond to the Lego Mindstorms Robots when we first pull them out. I felt something similar when I built my own worm bin (vermiculture!) following directions I found on YouTube. More power tools!

How often do teachers get to engage in hands on learning? Not often enough according to Bill Ferriter in his depressingly insightful post about adult learning in schools. Ferriter quotes Richard Elmore saying that "the brutal irony of our present circumstance is that schools are hostile and inhospitable places for learning." He doesn't end his post without offering an antidote though, a very do-able assignment asking leaders (administrators, or teacher-leaders) to teach teachers how to use an RSS.
This is one of the fabulous Commoncraft videos, I like the one on social networking too.

Next year, our "improvement of instruction" focus is going to be 21st Century Learners, with learners defined as teachers and students. To help our faculty engage as learners, we're going to offer a variety of activities, one of which is going to be "build your own interactive whiteboard." I hope it goes over well. I'd love more ideas for hands-on learning topics for teachers. I wonder if some of them would like to build a worm bin???

I've been in the garden lately. . .

2008-07-17T18:05:00.000-07:00

This summer has been textbook in terms of renewal for me. After the students left school, I spent a little time getting everything finished up, played with my wiimote, and attempted to tidy up a bit. Since then, I've been in the backyard with my children, vacationed at the beach, and returned to the backyard. In an effort to improve our family's carbon footprint, I put up a clothesline and have found that the change of pace that brings to the day amazingly therapeutic. No longer do we have laundry day. Instead, we do one or two loads (very weather dependent) over the course of a day. Hanging the laundry outside and taking it down is actually a pleasure, my children help a little and play a lot and I love the peace of listening to them as I'm engaged in the rhythm of the clothesline. We just got a bill, and in less than a month, we'd reduced our kilowatt hours over the same time last year by just over 100! I'm no Doug Fine, but it's a start.

So what does this have to do with literacy and technology? Hmmm--I've been doing some reading. I just finished Girls Like Us a very big book about three singer-songwriters of the 60's/70's. Reading it led me to break out Carole King's Tapestry and teach my children to enjoy singing along and dancing around the living room. Of course, I've been reading children's books aloud by the dozen each day too.

While I didn't go "off-grid" except at the beach, I did back way off. The blogs I read (and commented on, thanks Kim Cofino) the most were gardening blogs. I've struggled with some rabbits and squirrels who seem to think my garden is their personal salad bowl. This may have something to do with our yard being the only one without a resident dog or cat, but it has gotten really annoying. We seem to have found a way to keep them eating only a small share with the combination of a fence, dried fox urine (really!), and creative trellising.

The end result of all this backyard time was that by the time I was due to head for the airport to catch a flight to Memphis and the Laptop Institute at Lausanne, I was having trouble remembering exactly what it is that I do professionally. However, seeing old friends at the opening and talking with some fascinating new (to me) folks at dinner the first night, I felt myself begin to shift. This is really a fantastic conference and I'm so impressed with Stewart Crais who directs it. Everything was of high quality and the vendor presence is very low-key. This is a conference driven by philosophical exchanges among educators about the power of technology to empower students and inspire teachers. I'd like to write more about it soon. I've written a new (and huge) "to do" list that excites me rather than fills me with dread.

So here's my question: What does renewal look like for you?

wiimote, youmote, now what?

2008-06-07T18:18:00.001-07:00

I have had a great time letting my inner geek come out to play this week. I learned about Johnny Lee's wii remote tricks several weeks ago, but with the end of school . . . This week, we wrapped it all up so I bought a wii remote, went on a shopping spree at Radio Shack and built the infrared pen that works with the wii remote and Johnny Lee's software to make an interactive whiteboard. It all worked! For far less than $100! Thank you Johnny Lee!

Clearly, I need to make more of these with students next year. I did invite a couple to try it out with me, but they were busy with their newfound love for karaoke--we'd just learned how to turn our computers into karaoke machines via Karafun. Fluency lessons, that's what we were doing, fluency! I highly recommend a fluency lesson via karaoke, especially at this time of year.

What I'm really struggling with though, is what to do with my new interactive whiteboard. After I played around a bit, I couldn't think of anything that I wanted to teach differently. I'm really fortunate to have a tablet and a projector while my students have laptops. Maybe that's why I'm struggling? I'm making another one right now for our art teacher who is really excited about having an interactive whiteboard, and I'm hoping she'll give me some ideas. Could it be the subject (I teach language arts)? Maybe there's something about the software that comes with the commercial whiteboards that makes educators find them so powerful? I need to visit in a classroom and see a teacher who is a power user. I'd love suggestions for resources.

I'd love to hear from others. When they were expensive, I could just dismiss interactive whiteboards as a cost that we just couldn't do, but at around $60, I need to investigate and find out if I should use this technology to help my students learn.

Can we play Webkins and call it professional development?

2008-05-11T10:09:00.000-07:00

Actually, I have never even seen a Webkin, so I've never played with one. I think I need to though! I know some cute 7 year olds who are big fans, so I know where to get help. Has anyone out there played Webkins or Club Penguin? Will I have fun? As a point of reference, I can have fun playing Candyland with two four-year-olds, which is essentially a 3 way game with myself. I think playing with these might be fun and powerful experiences.

There have been a couple of comments on my blog that have gotten me to change the way I think about and design professional development. Kim Cofino's comment about her "wired Wednesdays" made me realize that teachers need to engage in meaningful conversations, not just show teachers "a plethora of tools they may not know [how to use]" I can think of a few conversation starters. I was at a graduation yesterday in which the speaker listed many of the snippets from the Did You Know video. I think of that video as so ubiquitous that "everyone" has seen it, but it turned out that I was the only one in my group who had. (Side question--if the speaker doesn't mention the video, does that constitute plagiarism?) Do other ed tech types have similar experiences? Which leads to the old quote about assumptions. . . I need to work on not making assumptions about what "everyone" has seen/read/heard/done. That leads to Intrepid Flame's comment on the same page asking "How can we slowly encourage people to understand that the future is hear with a sense of urgency, but at the same time not allow them to become defensive?" His words capture the essence of edtech, don't they? The first step is to not act like a "Know it All" as Michele Martin points out on her blog. Not making assumptions is the first step in not acting like a know it all.

I think I can come across as a know it all, even though I regularly feel totally overwhelmed by all I don't know (Google Earth, GPS's, GIS, Scratch, and ArtSnacks come to mind immediately, and I'd love pointers on any/all of those). Is this defensiveness endemic to educational technology?

Technology can make confident, experienced professionals feel uncertain and "dumb." Maybe people forced to take a workshop walk in making assumptions about the people who are leading it (and vice versa). Is it because the solution to a tech tangle can sometimes involve just one or two clicks? This makes the tangled one feel dumb and the "untangler" look like that dreaded know it all. I sometimes remind folks that there are a million things I can't do that they can. I need to get better about emphasizing that when I am providing support.

So, back to the webkins (and Facebook, MySpace, Club Penguin, etc). Aren't these types of activity here to stay? Can teachers hide from understanding them and stay effective and relevant? "Social networking" is a bit of a misnomer to me, since it implies that nothing of intellectual importance is going on within the network. Hey, we're just hanging out, right? For educators, social networking can be a powerful tool for professional growth. There are videos, blogs and wikis on just about any topic one can imagine. How do I find the ones that will help me (as a teacher) learn about ___________? What is the role of technology in encouraging connections among practitioners? When new research emerges, it hits the web long before it reaches the teacher journals that can have more than a year's lag time. Does this matter? Does it matter enough to ask teachers to move out of their comfort zones? It does, but again, fear of the future leads to defensiveness. Maybe play is the answer to breaking down the defensive barrier. So, I'm thinking about going shopping for a few Webkins. Anyone want to play?

Two posts in one day!

2008-05-07T18:17:00.000-07:00

Two totally different topics though. I've been participating in the Comment Challenge 08, otherwise seen around these parts as comment08 What an experience already. I've done more commenting in the past week than in the past month. There are daily challenges involved. Here is today's challenge:

For today's task, I want you to come up with three lessons you've learned from your experiences so far. Consider what you've learned about yourself as a commenter, what you've learned about the act of commenting, and how you think your recent commenting activities have impacted you as commenter and a blogger

Two days ago, the task was to make a comment when you disagreed with someone. There's a young student teacher who has been keeping a blog of his experiences. I've been reading his entries occasionally and was generally impressed with not only his ideas about teaching, but his capacity to be reflective. I remember being assigned to journal when I was a student teacher and hating it--I would make up entries just before turning it in. However, there are times when I though hmmm while reading. I decided to comment on one of the hmm entries and it's led to an entire conversation. I like to think, but don't really know, that he's learned something, but I've learned a great deal through our conversation. I've revisited the Bill of Rights, some of the cognitive psychology concepts from grad school round one (yikes, I'm old) and just generally had a good time refining my thoughts about assessment and student learning. The assessments I give students tend to be rather non-traditional these days, although there are still good old vocabulary quizzes on occasion. So it was nice to feel myself articulating why I feel so strongly about making sure that assessment gives students the opportunity to show me what they can do as well as point out what they can't. I also relived some student teaching nightmares. My mentor teacher disappeared into the teacher's lounge the first day I was there, and got mad when it was time for me to hand classes back to her. She complained, thinking I was trying to get out early, not realizing that the university's semester ended well before the school year. I would never have done this without the comment challenge and so I have already benefited far more than I had thought I would (well, not so much with re-living the student teaching days. . . )

I've also engaged in a little bit of conversation with Bill Farren at Education for Well-Being. I've been able to introduce his ideas to a few people I know who were really impressed. Bill's work demonstrates a passion for making a better world for all of us. He has a vision I want to incorporate into every aspect of my life, professional and personal. He's got a fan club in me, and I'm out to recruit everyone I can!

Finally, I left Danah Boyd a comment. I really like her blog, although I find her scary-smart and much cooler than me. I have never even considered leaving a comment on her blog. She's someone I cite, not someone I talk with. I sound a little junior high here, but there it is. Anyway, I basically wrote her a fan letter and she emailed me back a one-word answer that made my hour. Well worth it.

So, my three lessons are: (1) don't be afraid to engage someone in conversation. Posts can be dialog starters, not just statements. That means mine too. (2) follow up by going back. Drop off comments are not so helpful. (3) a fan letter can be a great thing. 2 and 3 seem in conflict, but they aren't, they are just situational.

Jing vs Camtasia: Nothing exciting to report here, but this one's for Tara

2008-05-07T17:42:00.000-07:00

I was fortunate enough to be given a copy of Camtasia earlier this week. I am already a big fan of Jing, so I jumped right in to check out "big brother." There's nothing better than tormenting my sixth graders with my ability to follow them home! I link my videos to the homework calendar so that students can get help using software if they need it.

Also, this one's for Tara who commented that she couldn't get to the earlier videos because her school blocked them (more about that later). These are Flash videos hosted on our school server.

I used the two programs to make the two parts of a training series for new faculty on how to make a blog using First Class, our email system. Here's part one, which covers how to set up the blog, including assigning permissions for commenting (important for blogs by younger students). I made this one with Camtasia (expensive):

Part two shows how to view the blog online and post a comment. I made this one with Jing (free):

They don't seem that different to me. Judge for yourself. I feel incredibly self-conscious about my voice, so please don't make fun of me (for that, anyway). Now, I admit that there are about 500+ features of Camtasia that I haven't even touched. If I decide to go there, I'm sure I'll appreciate Camtasia more. Both are quick and easy though, which is important to me. I'm not a perfectionist, I think that getting the job done, and accepting a few flaws, means that I'll try more than if I insist everything I produce be perfect.

About Tara not being able to see the Jing videos I blogged about last month. I find it sad and infuriating that there are teachers who can't utilize the power of the web through the short-sightedness of their school policies. In my graduate school class this semester, I was the only one in my group who had the rights to download software onto the laptop my school provided for me. The rest (including an administrator!) had to ask someone in their technology department to do it. They told me that it got done when the tech people had time, and then the answer might be no. So much for spontaneity. So much for empowering teachers to be independent learners. One of the teachers told me that her tech people were just too busy to get people out of the messes they would get themselves into. I'm sure she was repeating what she'd been told. Honestly, how on earth are we going to inspire teachers to continue to learn new technologies if we block them from experimenting and making "social" connections with other educators?? No wonder folks sit around and wait for a workshop.

I am so grateful to be teaching at my school. First--faculty have a different level of filtering than students. It's minimal. Students are blocked from YouTube, but teachers aren't, so if there's a video a teacher wants to share, they just broadcast it using a projector. Last week I found out about Animoto's free for education program (which rocks, btw) on Classroom2.0. I emailed the network guy who manages our filter and in less than 30 minutes Animoto was unblocked. No forms, no justification, just "I need to check this out for our students." I can download anything I want and completely trash my system anytime I want and get it re-imaged back to the way it was when I got it without a lecture. Of course, I'm the tech integrationist, so everything I download is thoroughly checked out prior to yes, yes, okay, I accept. What's that sound? Oh, our help desk manager is laughing hysterically. Well, maybe I experiment, a little. I figure in order to teach adolescents about technology, I need to use it the way they do, right? In any case, I am truly grateful for the technology access that encourages me to teach myself, teach the kids, and trusts me to behave professionally because I am a professional and not because someone is making me. Will mistakes me made along the way? Sure. It's worth it.

Does teacher "training" get in the way of real learning?

2008-05-01T17:54:00.001-07:00

Monday our "improvement of instruction" committee met. We discussed the students "these kids today"" and 21st Century Literacy/Learning (still designated as "the future"). We watched a couple of videos, the ubiquitous A Vision of Students Today and Did You Ever Wonder?

We started by discussing the concept of a Personal Learning Network (see David Warlick's excellent discussion). I was disappointed to see that when we got to our "to do" list for next year, it started to become a list of workshops we ought to give to teachers on using various forms of technology. I certainly love to share technology with teachers, and do it often, but , I was hoping for something more visionary. How do we need to transform our school for this new century? We're running behind here since we're 8 years into it, btw.

I think that just as I'd like to see the classroom evolve, we need to see professional development for faculty transform too. I believe that when faculty model independent learning for students, the kids benefit in so many ways.

So, in the spirit of modeling, I'll write here about the comment challenge I've just joined. The questions for today are:

How often do you comment on other blogs during a typical week? Do you track your blog comments? How? What do you do with your tracking? Do you tend to comment at the same blogs or do you try to comment on at least one new blog per week?

I'm embarrassed to admit that I can't even say once a week. I read and follow a lot of blogs, and I feel like I *know* some of the authors pretty well, but they have no idea how they've influenced me. I need to be more appreciative!

Clearly, this means I'm not tracking my comments, not is there a lot of variety. The blog I have commented on lately that I believe really deserves a lot of attention from us is the Education for Well Being. I am showing that video to our "improvement of instruction" committee to get them to realize that 21st century education is about vision, not skill specific training. So, thank you to all the bloggers out there that are inspiring me to seek a vision. And if you are part of The Comment Challenge remember to tag your posts "comment08"

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Education for Well-Being

2008-04-26T18:13:00.000-07:00

Wandering around in the education twitter/blogosphere led me to Education for Well-Being, which is Bill Farren's blog. He's an educator in the Dominican Republic and has put together this video:

that I would like to make a part of any workshop or talk on 21st century learning I do. Farren's site deserves better than a brief summary here, so please visit his site and get it straight from him. I'll just bring up a few points that really struck me. Education for Well-Being. Farren pushes educators to re-think their view of 21st century literacy. We should embrace web 2.0's collaborative nature to improve the lives of all our planet's residents. If we place our student's well-being at the center of our educational endeavors, then our classrooms is necessarily be centered around their needs (note: this may not always align with what they believe to be their needs!) What Farren most emphatically believes students do not need is to be prepared to provide low-cost labor in a global economy!

The economy needs to support people, not the other way around. Therefore, education needs to support economic well-being. We need our planet to support us, therefore education needs to support planetary well-being. In the 21st century, we have got to use collaboration to find ways to end the cycle of economy vs. planet that has us trapped. In the same vein, we have to stop labeling and categorizing our knowledge. Reality does not fit neatly into disciplines. Is it really possible to own knowledge?

Farren's writings helped my brain put together some other thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head that were seemingly disconnected before I got to Education for Well-Being. I read Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains about Dr. Paul Farmer's work in Haiti and around the world fighting to provide healthcare for the poorest citizens of impoverished nations. It's a book that can make the reader feel guilty for having enough to eat, but that isn't Farmer's desire or point. Instead, he's trying to change our hearts and minds to realize that every sick child deserves the dignity of the best health care possible. I wonder if Farren and Farmer have ever met? I'd love to listen to that conversation.

The needs of children is also the major theme of Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. Farren references Louv's "nature deficit disorder" on his site, and uses the term "biophobia" too. It may sound strange, but I believe that technology can really save us here. Innovation, collaboration, and connections built across the barriers of the world through "21st century literacy" can lead to a new relationship with and respect for the physical world around us. For example, the best resources for finding out about permaculture gardening are online wikis or forums. These "long tails" help what might start as a fringe group grow into the mainstream more quickly than ever before. Geocaching is environmentally sustainable, has a tech component, connects people who otherwise would never meet, and gets an ever-growing number of American and European families outdoors together.

My next book will be Farewell My Subaru, by Doug Fine. I don't know a lot about him except that he writes about trying to be carbon neutral without giving up the essentials of American life, which for him includes items such as wireless internet, Netflix, and thumping sub-woofers. While I personally know how to live a happy life without the last two, I get his point, and I can't wait to get the book.

A Sense of Urgency

2008-04-24T19:03:00.001-07:00

I started this blog because I hit a personal tipping point during the last few weeks. I'm feeling a real sense of urgency about bringing change to schools, teaching, and student learning. If we do not find a way to push a sizable chunk (not necessarily a majority, but a good chunk) of educators into the 21st Century and Web 2.0 thinking, our students are going to figure out that school is irrelevant to their "PLCs." Sure, the college bound will still show up, take the SATs, ERBs, EOG's, APs and whatever else we shove at them, but they will be going through the motions even more than they have been. The tragic part of this that I don't see discussed as much as I'd like is that while these students may know how to use read/write/create web, but they are still in desperate need of guidance. It reminds me of a poem by John Ciardi I memorized in grade school that went something like this:

The old crow is getting slow,
the young crow is not.
Of what the young crow does not know,
the old crow knows a lot.

What does the old slow crow not know?
How to go faster.
What does the young fast crow not know?
Where to go.

These kids know how--but they don't know why and for far too many, the only ones teaching them are each other. I was lurking on a gaming discussion board, and found a long thread in which the students were discussing the various APs they were taking and comparing notes. I know an AP teacher who has started a private Ning with his students and has had a great experience. I'm hoping he'll expand to collaborate with other schools next year, but he's not sure yet. If we don't help the students, they'll create their own learning communities without us, but I truly believe they will learn far more if we participate with them. Steve Hargadon puts it more eloquently here. We have the opportunity to get students involved in extended intellectual discourse and we must seize it before they believe we can't. Lord of the Flies, only the island is virtual.

One of the moms in one of the workshops I've led looked me in the eye and said "There is no way I'm putting my real name on Facebook and I don't think anyone else here should either." Another mom in a different workshop (with older children) asked me if she'd be making her kid a social outcast if she just absolutely forbade participation in social networking. I was honest--I told her no, because her child would just learn to lie and hide an online life. Unless a middle class family decides to move out of town, disconnect from the grid, and grow their own food, I don't see a way to keep a teen from participating. Fear-driven decision making has never really worked to stop the flow of information once it is started. Hmm--actually I'm not so sure about that sentence. Fear-driven decision making leads to a lot of repression, agony and pain before the inevitable revolution. That's a better analogy. It describes a lot of other teen/parent interactions too.

So, if this is urgent, how do we move that sizable chunk of teachers? This is sounding sort of Who Moved My Cheeseish now. The good news is that the number of educators participating in web 2.0 is growing exponentially. I listened to Stewart Crais of the Laptop Institute on a recent Edtechtalk 21st Century Learning podcast (disclosure, I love the conference and will present there this year) discuss the fact that the main purpose of the conference is to connect teachers with other teachers and that more and more teachers (as opposed to technology staff) are coming each year. What I find compelling about this is that it means these teachers are changing their own model of dealing with technology. They are going, finding out and seeking each other like never before (IRL and online) instead of just waiting for the technology coordinator to show up at their door with a gadget or piece of software. So leadership--take note of these teachers--get them and their students the tools they need, unblock the websites they use, and let the kids publish. Participate yourself Understand what they're doing so that you can protect the teacher when the fearful show up marching with doomsday signs.

Something I've been doing is thinking about what a 21st Century Literacy Specialist can look like. To see one vision, read Kim Cofino's blog (Cofino's is a 21st Century Literacy Specialist at the International School Bangkok in Thailand is). She is impressive and inspirational. Most schools can't necessarily fund a specific position like this, but they can find their internal visionaries and find ways to support and promote what they're doing (see above). What is fantastic about Web 2.0 is that the technology itself is very doable. Which means that it really is about the literacy and not the technology. It always comes back to the literacy. Movable type changed the world.

And finally, because I love Tom Chapin's Not on the Test and started this entry with a grade school poem

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Moms Online

2008-04-22T08:01:00.001-07:00

Moms online. That's the title of the workshop I'm leading tonight. I wrote a real soapbox sermon to some of my old friends who have young children a few months ago after the Frontline special Growing Up Online first aired. I've given "Facebook workshops" to a couple of groups of moms of young children and tonight I'm going to try to do the same thing with a group of moms of older children. They are both more fearful and feel a greater sense of urgency about the issues. I think (although I'm not sure) that their tech skills are not as strong as the other groups I've worked with.

Some issues I see:

The gap between kids and their parents is real, but not limited to technology. Technology just intensifies it. The parents consider themselves "web savvy" but what they really mean is that they can find content they want on the internet--travel, stocks, recipes, etc. They send email. BUT--they don't socialize online. They don't realize (or are just beginning to) that they haven't taught their children how to behave online. They don't generate or manage content themselves. Web 2.0 escapes these parents and they don't even realize it until their kids do something inappropriate--the kid who posts a scantily clad picture of her friend taken at a slumber party. Nobody ever told them early on that it wasn't acceptable behavior because their parents couldn't imagine it happening until after it already started.

Another thing that struck me was the sense of entitlement kids have about their online lives and their "right" to privacy. If you have a secret, you might tell one friend. If you have a website that 400 of your friends (some of whom you haven't ever met) can visit, it's not personal or private. It's a club. A closed club, but a club nonetheless. I've diigoed (is that a verb now?) some resources I've found that discuss the appropriateness of actually social networking with your child and their friends as opposed to engaging in social networking in order to understand their world better. In tonight's talk, I'll use these pictures to explain the concept. Remember the skate rink in the 80's? Well. . .

Mom just can't be cool at the skate rink.

I am optimistic that young children (the under 10 set) will not only grow up with constant internet (we can't change that), but will also grow up with parents who aren't caught by surprise by what they are doing (this we can change) and who expect them to be open with their families about what they are doing (this can be part of a family's culture from the beginning). I am strongly encouraging all of my friends with children to participate in social networks. Because we need to stay on the bus (or hop back on if we dropped off at googling recipe ingredients and emailing baby pictures). It's going to be hard to get on the bus in 9 or 10 years if we don't.

Not that this is magic. We've been telling kids not to drink and drive forever and some still die every year in tragic wrecks. They assure us as 5th graders that they will never, ever smoke, then sneak cigarettes as teens. It's the nature of some teens to rebel, sneak around, experiment. It's the nature of parents to try to keep them safe while they do that. I'd love to know what people think.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Why Stay "On Site" For Blogging?

2008-04-17T05:21:00.001-07:00

For our sixth grade reading blogs, I've chosen to limit them to our website using First Class's blogging feature. Their audience is limited to their teachers and classmates, and only those people can respond. I've thought about this quite a bit lately. Should we move over to David Warlick's fantastic blogmeister and let the students write for a larger audience, but anonymously? I don't think so, and here's why. Daniel Pink talks about the importance of empathy in his book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. It seems to me that, before we take on the anonymity of the web, we need to teach students that behind each blog, each opinion, each thought, is a living, breathing person. Later on, we can explore the idea of a persona as opposed to a person. There are 72 sixth graders, and several faculty in our blog group. That's a pretty big audience for an 11-year old. Probably big enough for something as personal as your thoughts and ideas about what you read. I've seen such growth in their writing and reflection in the last few months. I'm convinced this is the way to go. BTW--First Class is a wonderful program, so much more than email if anyone is interested.

Does this mean I don't think they should publish to a broader audience ever? No, and I really need to work on that. There are some awesome mp3's that the students have made about our blood drive that I'd like to publish (I don't think I'll call them podcasts, although I guess that is technically what they are). So there's my next goal--getting a few works published to a larger audience and discussing to the students the differences.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Jing--a very cool tool

2008-04-16T06:47:00.000-07:00

Jing is one cool tool! Screencasting for free. I've written a few, but many of them are GDS specific, like how to deal with our gradebook system First Class email help. Here's a screencast I made to teach students how to record themselves using Audacity. We use this all the time to have students read their work aloud prior to turning it in. Why? Several reasons. We are working on their reading fluency, we want them to read with expression, we want them to revise their written work more carefully. They have to turn the mp3 in with their final draft. This has had a dramatic impact on student writing. Much more so than peer editing, although we still use that.

Note--this is not a professional screencast. If I were afraid to share it with students unless it was perfect, I'd never do this stuff. There's a point where I get a frog in my throat (I hit pause for the major throat clearing though) and another where I can't find the file I want. I like to think these imperfections make it more human and help foster my connection with the kids. To me, this embodies 21st century literacy--try it, don't be afraid to be imperfect, and share. The kids have no interest in making screencasts about schoolwork, but they sure did about some of their gaming features. I tremble to think that there might be some screencasts out there about how to use a proxy server...

Moving Over Here

2008-04-16T06:01:00.000-07:00

I mentioned that I've failed at blogging on more than one occasion. Below are some posts from a blog I started on my school site in the fall (07)when I began immersion teaching in a sixth grade language arts class. I'm re-ordering them so they are in chronological order, then adding my commentary.

August 21, 2007
I'm so excited to start the school year this year.
We're doing some new and different things with the laptops and reading and writing that are based on the research Mrs. Jones and I have been doing for the past year. I hope the students will enjoy this course.

Sixth grade is the first year of our 1:1 program, so that was a natural fit for this experiment in immersing the technology integrationist in the classroom.

August 29th, 2007
What's the difference between Google, Wikipedia, and a subscription-based online encyclopedia? This was the guiding question for today's classes as we looked for the answers to questions the students generated after reading about Eliza's escape to freedom via the Underground Railroad. This article by Roy Rosenzweig that originally appeared in The Journal of American History Volume 93, Number 1 (June, 2006) does as good a job as any discussing the academic validity of Wikipedia. My take on Wikipedia is that it can be an okay jumping off point for students, but it really serves as the "go to" resource for certain types of information, say information about old sci fi films and their special effects. Why? Think about the population intersection between Internet nerd and sci fi geek!

This was the beginning of our year-long effort to think critically about information sources. We did and still do a great deal of reading on paper (short stories, magazines, books) along with web research.

August 27 and 28, 2007
Today we introduced the Inspiration™ software to the students via my laptop as we created a KWL (What I Know, What I Wonder or Want to Know, What I Learned) in preparation for a guided reading activity with a short story about an exciting escape via the Underground Railroad. I think the students enjoyed the class. Even though the block is 90 minutes long, the pace changes as we move their desks to different formations (we'll have to do desk drills some rainy day) for the activities.

Inspiration is fabulous software. It's become part of our general productivity toolbelt. I want to make sure this spreads beyond the sixth grade.

September 17th, 2007
Wow--I am behind already! The students are really enjoying their laptops. Today we finished updating everyone's anti-[all bad stuff] software. I missed them while they were on their trip. Now we're finally doing the summer reading activities and benchmark assessments for reading fluency. We're using Read Naturally to evaluate/improve reading fluency with a particular focus on non-fiction text for the beginning of the year.

Aha, my first acknowledgment that I am a lousy blogger. More to come, I'm sure. Read Naturally was interesting, but what we really ended up using to evaluate reading comprehension and fluency:
DRA2, QRI and Scholastic Reading Inventory. None of them are tech tools, which speaks to my point about how difficult it can be to explain what I do.

November 27, 2007
Well, October was a great month. Busy. Now we're at the end of November and it is time to think about the skid into Winter Break that happens every year.

Ah yes, the final cry of defeat. Busy. It's my excuse for all sorts of failings, never mind that it happens to be true too. It reminds me that I need to be more sympathetic to those who tell me they are "too busy" to learn about technology.

Next post--tools I use and love this year.

21st Century Literacy

2008-04-15T17:43:00.001-07:00

My last post for the night, I promise. What is 21st Century Literacy? First, and foremost, it is a literacy. Not a skill. When we teach skills, and I know we have to, that is only the beginning. When we teach them literacy, we've set them free. 21st Century Literacy?

Think. Communicate your thoughts. Collaborate with other thinkers. Think some more. Create. None of these are technology skills. But technology makes all of them happen far faster, better, and deeper than ever before.

Literacy starts with reading. A generation ago, the common wisdom was that reading would become less and less necessary. I would argue that reading is more important than ever.

Yes, the cliché is true that we have to prepare students for careers that haven’t been invented yet. But it is also true that we have to prepare them to re-invent themselves and their skill set again at 30, 40, 50; long after they’ve left "schooling." How many of us are modeling this? How many of us are still relying mainly on the skills we were taught? When we need to know how to do something new, what do we do? Ask to be taught or jump in and start learning? (Have you ever heard "I'd really like to learn something about this Web 2.0 stuff, will you offer a workshop?") I know I'm being unfair, workshops definitely have their place, but the best workshops offer just a touch of teaching and lots of discovery and engagement with a resource (me) available for help.

Today in class students blogged their reading books and responded to other blogs. Would reading journals serve the same purpose? Maybe to the teacher, but not to the students. Teens are desperate to talk to each other. We've given them a higher plane to carry on the conversation and they are engaged in discussing, evaluating and comparing books. We had an oral discussion of what makes a blog entry interesting and worth commenting on. Moving on, students used some advanced word processing features to collaboratively analyze the differences between a summary and a synthesis of a non-fiction article. They then pulled up the webs they'd made of their articles (there had summarized one of 10 articles pre-selected) and expanded the webs to include their thinking about their reading (metacognition). Tonight they'll finish their rough drafts. They'll use software to record an mp3 of their synthesis and practice reading with expression. Then they'll listen to themselves as they re-read and revise their draft. Is any of this the "shock and awe" use of technology Sam Morris of Cary Academy describes so well? Nope. Is it powerful? Yes! Transformative? Yes!

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

2008-04-15T17:16:00.000-07:00

Digital Native vs. Digital Immigrant, while certainly a great attention-getter/catch phrase, isn’t a helpful designation in terms of educational technology. Why? Because history teaches us that some immigrants are far better equipped to thrive in a new land than the natives. Once they know the language, even if they keep an accent for the rest of their lives (I’ll never be able to use “i” to mean ME) they will flourish. I think most of Prensky's critiques apply more to what I'd call Digital Tourists. Why? Here's my guess.

Prensky says that

Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet

My experience is that this is not necessarily true. The student who is completely absorbed in WoW may not know how to find non-gaming information on the web in any organized, helpful way. The avid filmmaker may never have a single programming experience in her K-12 career. Terms such as "technology" and "digital language" are sweeping umbrella terms for fields as varied as pottery, medicine, and trucking. Expertise in one does not translate into or prevent facility in another. Educators know this. They are overwhelmed by the vastness of what they do not know and they shut down. This does not need to be!

I'm an immigrant in the digital world Prensky describes . However, because I was fortunate enough to be well-educated by dedicated public school teachers and a life-long learning parent, I'm a pretty darn comfortable immigrant. I don't "do" second life, even a little bit. Not a gamer. I contribute to several Nings and Wikis regularly, and feel free to edit others I visit when the spirit moves me. I follow several bloggers, use Flock to track them, along with my friends in Facebook. I make fabulous Christmas cards, digital and paper. I used YouTube recently to convince a friend to buy a new carseat. I stay connected with my family via video skype calls, tweet my friends and professional contacts. I exercise while listening to Women of Web 2.0 podcasts (I know, very, very nerdy). This is sounding like a "me, me, me, look at me" so I'll stop here. My point is that, among my education peers and my age group, I do a lot and yet I don't come anywhere near "doing it all" in terms of technology. I talk with kids every day, and none of them do it all either. The difference is, they're comfortable with it.

Next question: What does it take to teach 21st Century Literacy?

I'm not a blogger

2008-04-15T16:53:00.000-07:00

I've tried. Three, four entries with increasing timespan between them until the trickle stops completely. I'm not much of one for journaling and that is what blogging has seemed to be to me, although I am fascinated by and follow many bloggers (I'll set that up later). I write all the time, but my words are usually directed somewhere external.

Why a new blog now? It is time for a manifesto of sorts, and none of my Nings seem to be the place to put such a thing. I came close to doing a major edit on a Wiki I am involved with, but I wanted this signed and dated and MINE. I don't want to post these particular ideas on my school hosted site since I'm not limiting myself to discussion of technology there, so here I am.

My latest frustration is that I can't seem to answer the simplest of questions "what do you do?" I am involved with the instructional use of technology to help students learn and teachers teach. Seems straightforward. My non-technology education background includes special education, middle school, science, language arts and reading. It's not as mixed up as it seems, most of those happened in conjunction with one another. My technology education background evolved over the last 15 years as it did for many of us who started with 10 Macs in a makeshift lab in a converted storage closet. So maybe that is my point. If I'm a tech integrationist, then aren't I also a teacher of reading and writing? A teacher of problem-solving? A teacher who uses differentiation? Of course. But recognition of dual functionality is hard to communicate in academia and, apparently, hard to budget. How do I explain the value I add to an educational program? Why is the already excellent classroom in which I've been immersed this year better now than it was before I arrived? That sounds like another post. . .