Reflections of a Techie

July's reflection comes true

In scrambling across the web, I've found a treasure chest of opportunity.  Science for citizens is actually the name of the chest.  And it was a bit of a treasure hunt that brought me to their front door...more about that later.

Science for Citizens offers regular folks like me (if I'm regular I guess) the chance to participate in science projects from right where we live, doing pretty normal stuff and then sending in what we learn to the principal investigators.  Here's their nutshell of a mission

In a nutshell...

If you're a citizen: This is the place to find out about, take part in, and contribute to science through recreational activities and research projects.

How cool is that?  And the mission statement is this

ScienceForCitizens.net will bring together the millions of citizen scientists in the world; the thousands of potential projects offered by researchers, organizations, and companies; and the resources, products, and services that enable citizens to pursue and enjoy these activities. We aim to:

• Enable and encourage people to learn about, participate in, and contribute to science through both informal recreational activities and formal research efforts.
• Inspire greater appreciation and promote a better understanding of science and technology among the general public.
• Create a shared space where scientists can talk with citizens interested in working on or learning about their research projects.
• Satisfy the popular urge to tinker, build, and explore by making it simple and fun for people—singles, parents, grandparents, kids—to jump in and get their hands dirty with science.

Who could resist something like that?  To be sure, not me!!!  So I've nosed around the website and found at least a couple of projects that I'm already working on.  The first one is very low key and super easy.  Robins.  Yep the birds that hop around my yard all day and night...little brown and orange-breasted birds.   They are sweet, they love my bird bath in the front yards, although it's very hard to photograph them there. 

The idea is for citizens everywhere to document where and when someone sees a robin and then upload the observation report.  There's a very cool map that locates your robin observation and you can see where the robins can be found in the United States.  The scientists running the project are monitoring climate change and weather changes on where these little guys migrate.

Then on June 21st, I'm getting excited for another super simple, easy to participate in science project.   From the Science for Citizens Blog comes "Snap a picture and mesure albedo!!!"  By taking a picture of a piece of white paper...yes, a picture of white paper...you could help scientist to take measurements from all over the world on albedo.

But what's albedo, Marsha?  Albedo is the solar energy that bounces back back to space after it hits the Earth's surface.  Not all of what the sun sends out and that makes it thru the atmosphere all the way to the surface, stays on the surface.  Some of it richocets off the earth's surface & back out of the atmosphere.   

"For three years Dr. Kathleen Gorski and her students at Wilbraham and Monson Academy near Springfield, MA have been snapping pictures of white paper and using them to measure albedo by comparing the white paper to the surrounding ground surface. "  the blog reports.  So how much fun would it be to participate in a project that tries to take the most accurate measurement of something as scientific as this?  And simple.

If you're like me....well, just remember June 21st between 5-8pm is the time and place.  Snap your picture and you're in the loop....a citizen scientist.  I first came across this idea of albedo when we were studying climate...and learned the more that the earth absorbs, the hotter we become in theory.  So studying things like how much is reflected back, helps to monitor how climate change is or is not happening.

 

Treasure Hunt    So how did I find this jewel?  Well, thanks to my newly acquired Twitter skills, I'm beginning to read the Tweets of very interesting people.

Responding to those Small Strategic Steps

A teacher that I follow closely is  Shelley Wright.  I somehow feel we must have separated at teacher's college as I feel she's my twin science teacher.  Doesn't matter that she teaches AP Physics and I teach 11 and 12 year olds....we struggle with lots of the same things?

Take her most recent article at Voice From the Learning Revolution she talks a series of small strategic steps.  Right off the bat, I'm in....because I can do almost anything that's small and if it's strategic, all the better.

She talks about the shift towards being a student-centered classroom as a roller coaster ride.  This describes my personal journey towards becoming a teacher who does more coaching of students towards our science learning targets than one who pours into them.  It's full of bends in the road...you don't expect students to react in a certain way and you really have to become a nimble responder.

Students need lots of help to make this transition and when you see them struggling, you have to change your course in a heartbeat.  Doesn't that remind you of some of these corkscrew kinds of curves?

Shelley recommends

You can jump in and change everything at once like I did, but that’s slightly crazy. Instead, if you design one unit in one subject, at the end of each day, or week, you can analyze what worked and what didn’t.

While I see the wisdom in this approach, I also needed to have a strong understanding of how this learning would fit into everything else I'm doing.  I couldn't do just one.  For me, I had to conceptually get how this one change was going to fit into the bigger picture.

I think my reasoning goes something like this....my little guys are so inexperienced at science that you can be doing things differently without causing them to falter around.  So if I'm going to do inquiry, I have to do in such a way that it doesn't jolt them.  So maybe I could design a series of inquiry experiences that ease into the different skills they are going to need to do inquiry.

For example, I might need to teach them how to write a whole sentence or draw a picture with diagrams.....so when they tell others what they learned there will be information there.  Honestly my students arrive....masters at the one or two word answers.  It's back to the whole fill-in-the-blank mentality.

As some of my other colleagues say....I have to help my students "unlearn" first.  Then they can do inquiry.  And as Shelley recommends....talk about the learning.  Boy there couldn't be any better advice than this.  No matter how well or how badly something has gone...having the chance to discuss it with students to get their perspective and reaction...helps so much.  It develops their voice as a learner, as an important member of the classroom and I get more insight by chatting with them in  a class debrief for 10 minutes than if they write for that same period of time.

Strategic steps are critical to any kind of instructional strategy you're going to deploy.  Inquiry because it emphasizes student independence and pushes them to be question-askers as well as question-answerers......depends on taking small steps.

Right on Shelley.

 

Thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/682213181/sizes/s/in/photostream/  for their CC license rollercoaster picture.

How do you help students improving the quality of their questions?

Practice and processing of that practice....is the simple answer.

We practice it a lot. 

We take a topic and start thinking about questions that are interesting...and then they start brainstorming a big list.  Topics trend up and down...and the longer the brainstorming goes the better the questions get.  Students hear a good idea and use that good idea in building their question.

We process a lot.

Once we have a pretty long list and everyone is just repeating, we start processing.  I ask them what are questions that are easily Googled and which ones are ones that will require more thought.  It's a simple filter...but a good one.  It's actually a skill that is sort of invisible but very useful if you stop and think about it.

Ususally the processing ends up with min-conversations about what they think or where they'll go to find out more.  I believe it's a great way to incorporate vocabulary development....just slipping the words that I know as their teacher that are relevant to the topics.  Sometimes we leave it there. 

Sometimes we save the list because we use it throughout the set of lessons.  Answering them.  Keeping them on the unanswered list.  Using them for inquiry projects.

Practice and process.  The simple keys to getting better at asking quality questions.

 

Connectedness...what does that mean for a school leader?

Almost from the first sentence, I'm hooked on these ideas that school leadership is complex and that it can be an enigma.  Lyn Hilt then proceeds to discuss how skillful use of digital tools can improve and expand the way in which we interact with our communities.  Her post called "Successful School Leaders Today Need to Harness Technology and Social Media" was a wonderful early Christmas present.

As a teacher, I jumped for joy as I read one of the first suggestions how to improve the daily staff email....

Use a staff blog to highlight resources, ideas, and post important informational items; help staff subscribe via RSS to be notified of blog updates. Send out weekly “must-reads” posts to inspire your staff. Create a Diigo group for your school to fluidly share resources – all staff can contribute.

I know that if other teachers are like me this would be shockingly revolutionary.  I can't imagine having weekly or daily tangible examples of resources, being encouraged to build my professional skill set by subscribing to RSS feeds and/or social bookmarking.  Imagine if you were a struggling teacher who was afraid of technology.  Sure this would be intimidating, but if you were given the adjustment time to "lurk" and just absorb and watch this example unfold everyday, it has to creep into professional conversations and that conversation builds ways for us to help each other.  Also wouldn't this be a terrific living example of what you could turn around and use with your students....creating this epistle of student work, announcements about class happenings and collecting important resources?

If I was jumping before, I'm turing cartwheels at this point when Lyn says "Establish meeting norms that include “banning the use of computers or phones during meetings” (p. 37)".  Oh my gosh....do you know how many meetings I last through because I am expected as a fully functioning adult to sit quietly and be a pillar of inactivity.  Usually as someone speaks, I'm thinking about how what they are saying does or doesn't work for my classroom....and how I could customize the information to make it even better.  I can't imagine how rapidly ideas would be disseminated if, during these meetings we could be 

Encourage relevant use of technology during meetings. Establish backchannels  for discussions during meetings. Consider the use of Today’s Meet or the chat features of Google Docs to capture the flow of ideas. Empower your teachers as part of the conversation.

I know this is scary for the people holding the meetings.  But honestly if you can't keep their attention, commanding obedience isn't going to work.  Just like kids, adults will look atttentive on their outsides while inside their heads they are making their grocery lists, thinking what's for dinner, their workout routine at the gym or any one of a million things.  How much more a meeting convener could determine if people were "getting" the idea by seeing who was engaged with the idea and who might have questions from reading a backchannel conversation.

Really, go and read Lyn's post and see if you aren't ready to sign onto a school where teachers are pushed to learn more technology....where tried and true leadership techniques are evolved into even better tools....where the use of digital tools is modeled for teachers and stakeholders. 

With a focus on learning how could something like these ideas not elevate a faculty...being inspired by their leadership and gently encouraged to do more and to be better?

Lettting them Choose....Getting Students ready to effectively use tools

Was reading an excellent post called I Did Leave it Up to Them.  This is someone after my own heart because this is precisely what I'm trying to do too.  I knew this was going to be a great post; listen to this

I gave the students a choice of tools (i.e., iPod Touch, Nintendo DS, iPad, and Livescribe Pen), and they were able to use any of the tools in any way that they wanted, as long as they shared their learning with me.

I think this is so smart.  Give them a number of tools that they know how to use and then let them decide on the best way of giving you back the information.  I did this with our Mastodon Project but since it was so early in the year, we didn't have network resrouces working yet, so very few of them utilized technology options.

Aviva is a 1st grade teacher, so her post really is evidence for people who might be skeptical that young children can use technology.  But probably the key to making this work is the modeling step she speaks about so well.  It seems to me that it is a forgotten step quite often.  You have to use the instructional tool so often in front of students that they get quite familiar with it.  I know that I had to not only show how to use the temperature probes, but also them use them in several demos before I asked students to use them for their own investigations.

I experience this in the past couple of weeks in my own room.  I wanted students to use probeware as an efficient means of data collection....which should free up time to help them focus on the analysis of what was happening.  The first couple of weeks they struggled to see how the graphs and tables revealed any patterns....and now don't even notice that they're using a tool.  They are focused on the science.  Even when I didn't have laptops on which to use the software and had to transfer them to a different interface on a handheld device, they were still able to do the analysis.

I think both of us are focused on empowering students to find their voice and to communicate with us.  Choice is a huge motivator and incorporating new technology tools with appropriate modeling makes it all possible.  I love the idea of "Letting Them Choose".

On a completely different note:

Another huge idea that this post included was I've been thinking about reflection, too.  And Aviva speaks about using smaller size paper to get students to write more.  I've done this when we read.....students are very resistant to reader logs in science class.  But they're totally content with creating mini-summaries and WOW facts (thanks Stephanie Harvey for this great idea).  Aviva read about it from  Zoe Branigan-Pipe wrote  how to improve audio feedback for her students who were writing their first lesson plans...she used sticky notes to amp it up.

Don't you just love how all good teaching circles around and around?