Reflections of a Techie

Good tidings abound in my halls

I think I must be on a roll because usually I write about assessment or technology...today I have more than those usual topics to write about.  I have to tell you what a cool bunch of colleagues I teach with.

My mother is old, 87 years young right now.  She fell about 3 weeks ago and she's in pain.  More pain everyday and it is heartbreaking watching her get worse and worse.  Over the weekend, I found in her a state when I checked on her early Saturday morning...a state better left to one's imagination.  I knew I had to get her seen by a physician.

Early Monday morning (my first day of school at the middle school and in teaching my grad school classes), I called to get her an appointment...first time they could see was today at 2pm.  So on the 2nd day of school, I had to get a half day sub.  Normally I am never absent.  I'm the one everyone else asks for favors.

Today I had to ask others for favors.  Boy did they respond.  instead of having to write out sub plans, they told me to combine my class with theirs and they'd take care of it.  I couldn't have appreciated it more and it relieved my fears that while I was taking care of my mom, my students would be lost with a sub.  Mind you, we're still at the critical phase where they tend to cry because they're overwhelmed with starting in a new school.

Cutiest story of the day...one of my little guys didn't show up for class.  We looked for him in the hall and in others classes and he wasn't anywhere.  We were going to the pod to combine with another class so we weren't in our classroom.  When I went back in about 20 minutes later, there he sat.  Big crockodile tears in his eyes because he didn't know where we were or what to do.  So he sat very quietly in the back of the room, hoping someone would eventually come back for him.  he had gone to PE instead of my class because they are alternate day classes.  He was so relieved to see me, I thought he might hug me.  So sweet they are in this first week of school.

So sweet are my teammates who helped me out and saved my kids from the dreaded substitute video lesson plan!!!!

Lifelong learning is a personal responsibility....

My dear friend Bill Ferriter is writing about another one of my hot topics!!!  Go Bill.  His wondering is about how we will change our profession into lifelong learners.  I have to say that this is a topic that is very close to my heart...probably because I really believe in the whole idea of lifelong learner and how it keeps me young and curious....

Also this fall I am teaching another grad school class on Teaching and Learning with Technology.  My introductory unit is all about Lifelong Learning.  I make the case for it by citing some pretty well known stats....only 7% of teachers who use technology use it effectively (ie seamlessly and appropriate for the learning target).  Parker Palmer says it so well.....“good teaching is rather more than technique: 'good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher'.  This is where we find the push to be better than we are today...when it comes from our identity and the integrity of finding out who we are as a teacher.  That is the heart of the reflection process and that I learned during my National Board process almost 10 years ago.  The folks in these grad school classes, for the most part, are very motivated, committed individuals...they are smart and have developed a good sense of their cohort community.  I think they are really helpful to each other although they are mostly online, virtual classmates.  Their discussion forums last summer were inspiring, so I'm excited to see what they do with this kind of challenge.

I am going to be bold in this class I'm teaching.  I designed a learning activity where my grad students will have to join a virtual community.  I picked Classroom 2.0 because it fits the wide range of content areas and age groups that are reflected in my class demographics...and because it offers something for the beginning to the experienced user.  What is bold is that they must pick one aspect of the community to investigate each week and then use a reflection blog to record what they learned.  Many may believe this is too much to do...many may believe I should be more directive...and I'm hoping that many will enjoy the freedom to define for themselves what it is they want to learn while....many will benefit from the requirement to reflectively blog.  I'm not "grading" the blog so we'll see how many will do it.... 
For 6 weeks they'll investigate, try things out and write about it...then we'll post our individual conclusions and do an online discussion to try and generalize the experience beyond what each person found out by themselves.

I think if we gave teachers more learning experiences like this, we might begin to develop more independence.  Yes, they'll hate that it's not more defined and prescriptive.  But as we do more and more like this...places where we can't really fail or there isn't one single path to follow, we can develop a culture that embraces this kind of learning.  How many PD experiences have you attended where this open-ended, long term learning is the target or objective?  I can tell you I haven't been to many.

Great question Bill.  I'll let you know how my 6 week experiment goes.

Note-taking and skimming

It seems that my school is about to take on another new program.  It's that time of year so we need to do something more than we did last year...right?

So the focus is on literacy and notetaking.  I have no problem with this whole idea EXCEPT that the people in charge of deciding haven't talked to teachers.  Big surprise!!!!  For example....Cornell Notetaking.  Who is against something like that?  Not me, in fact I think it's a wonderfully efficient way to get at the heart of the content and what the teacher wants you to know.  You can skim through your notes and effectively study for tests.

The problem lies in that my students don't take notes yet.  As 6th graders, they are prepared to do lots beyond copying down what I write on my SmartBoard.  Even teaching them that if I write it on the board they should write it in their spiral journals is a task unto itself.

If anyone had asked me, I think the place if this is what we want to do...would be to teach students how to take notes from their textbooks.  They need to know how to use the text features of the book to organize their notes and then to summarize what they've read there.  Right now if I asked my students to do this...they'd pretty much copy down everything in the book or at  ever bolded word/sentence they see.  They aren't cognitively at the place where they read it well enough to take notes.

I sugggested we read and work through Rick Wormeli's book on Summarizing as our first step.  Once we had those strategies down for summarizing (and not paraphrasing Rick!!!), then we could branch out into notetaking strategies.  Maybe this is what the 6th grade could focus on and master....then the 7th grade could layer on notetaking from the textbook using the summarization strategies we mastered in 6th grade and followed by the 8th graders really pulling it all together with Cornell Notetaking.

But then...no one asked me.

Another Episode in the Continuing Soap Opera of Getting Technology to Work...Voicethread and webcams

The soap opera continues.

I've gotten my Triangles Scavenger Hunt started, have successfully added some pictures that students have sent me and even added comments.  The Voicethread site is the easy part.  I just have had a million problems getting the devices needed to do all this working....the webcam has been difficult.  Probably should have bought a more expensive one (I tried to go cheap since this experiment is all out of my meager pocketbook) and that had some reasonable documentation.   Go and see our first try and leave a comment.  The kids would appreciate it....so would I. 

Nevertheless, we have triangle pictures up there and the kids were thrilled to make some comments on how they believed a couple of triangles should be classified.  Now I know this isn't the deepest of conversations to have but I believe it is a good, safe beginning project.

We also created a broadcast of our Evaporation lab yesterday.  Got the camera working and forgot to click the record button during the first science class.  Now isn't that a classic goof-up???  Then I remembered the click the record button during the second science class but realized afterwards that the microphone we used isn't powerful enough to pick up sound in the midst of a whole class work.   They look great but it's a silent movie!!!  Probably another classic goof-up.

I never realized how much learning would go into this.  Even something as simple as making the introductory comment on our VT was challenging.  First of all...does every hate the way they look and sound?  I'm no exception.  My first attempt had the camera angle so low that I could only see how big my nose was....no ability to think about what I was saying.   So I moved the camera higher.  That was difficult to get all the duct tape to stick.  THEN I realized those little prongs are so it hooks onto the monitor.  Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!

Honestly I think all those mistakes are the things that keep many teachers from continuing.  You feel so dumb and helpless...I asked my Twitter friends for help and some of them actually offered ideas. thank you everyone...you're the best.   But the most basic of my concerns went unanswered as I am sure that people couldn't believe I was so dense.  It is way easier than when I was pioneering in the early 1990s but it is still not easy enough to get mass adoption.

Solving how to get this stuff into the classroom easily is the hurdle that 21st century learning advocates must conqueror.  I think if you're a techie it seems easy...just keep trying and eventually it will work.  But that's not the case with most people....they can't tolerate feeling inadequate and they quit.

Can you hear the organ music starting up....this must be the end of this episode of our soap opera but don't worry...there will be another episode undoubtably next week when we try again!!!!

Shifting Theory into Practice--Web 2.0 Interactivity

By George I really think I've not only got it but I'm really getting it.

Twitter and Voicethread may be the mediums of my understanding, but I think I'm finally moving into the next phase of growth.  OK I've always gotten that Web 2.0 is interactive but I never fully understood how that might happen for me....and the students that I serve.

Just been working with Twitter.  At first it seemed like I  wasn't really interested in the same things that "my" network was writing about.  So I deleted some people and added some others.  Eureka....then I got it.  "My network" started to have more things about which I care.  I am being transformed from the passive member into a dynamic learning environment for me.  Tom Barrett has written about this idea and has some terrific graphics that cemented my own thinking.  And that's the crux of what a personal learning network does...it helps you flesh out what you think, helps you formulate the ideas you want to persue and gives you feedback in doing that.

Voicethread is where I think I'm putting those same notions into action with my students.  We are developing a simple, first time project on classifying triangles.  It's something that stumps many 6th graders...so why not let them take photos from their worlds, post them and have a conversation about which method of classification best describes these triangles.

Will it help them on the state assessment?  You know that's the question that everyone wants you to answer before you do anything.  Honestly I don't know.  But I don't think it could hurt and maybe it will be 1) more engaging for them and 2) help us incorporate more authoring tools for them.  Now I know this project is very teacher directed and doesn't have its origin from students.  You have to start somewhere and this is my where.

I can tell you that one of my early adopter kids has taken the seeds sown by the Triangle project (in its still infancy stage) and create his own account.  He is doing a social studies project about ancient China and got my teaching partner to let him use VT to present his research.  So it begins!!!!!

Homework, Feedback and Improving Grades

I've been working on turning over responsibility for grades to my students.  This is a complex and very puzzling dance we've been doing.

I started the year by announcing I was no longer grading homework.  I told students that I thought homework was their practice sessions and they needed to not face the pressure of getting a grade for practice.  We talked all sorts of analogies (soccer practice, piano lesson practice etc etc etc) and I think they "got it".  I also believe that the practice that you do at the beginning of a concept shouldn't show the same quality of product as when you are nearing the end....hopefully they're getting better over time.

Actually this has worked out pretty well.  We still grade everything in class the next day.  I have them review their answers with a shoulder partner and they decide which problems they want worked on the board.  Gosh this used to take what seemed like hours.  Now we've gotten pretty efficient at it.  (You also figure out that if you assign 30 problems it's going to take the whole hour!!!)  Part way through the 2nd quarter, we started trying to categorize the types of problems that they needed me to clarify to see if there were patterns.  Sometimes it is very clear what they dont' get...and it becomes a great source of data information for me...and sometimes it's just a bunch of stuff.  The one thing they've gotten really good about knowing...is their error a result of "not getting" it or rushing through/careless mistake.

I think that was one of my first successes.  Helping students to have a way to know about their set of math skills...helping them be able to describe how well they could/couldn't do something that had no correlation to a grade!!!!!  My colleague, Bill, has written about how students have felt like the challenger in American Gladiator...beat about the head with grades.  He asks the question...where does that get either the student or the teacher and concludes that it does little if anything.

It's been grueling to design all the formative pieces that go along the way.  I teach with another person and we've gotten it together....I seem to be really good at designing the pre-assessments and the tiered assignments and she is really good at the review lessons and finding practice problems from which to pick.  Without her help to share the burden, both of us would have drowned by now.

The other big hurdle is for the kids to realize that they get fewer grades so they mean so much more.  I think they were nervous about this.  They had different kinds of experiences with assessments...maybe not knowing what to expect on the test or what kinds of problems they really need to be able to work/answer.  Now I think they believe me when we pass out the targets at the beginning...they sort of check those off as they know they can do the skill there...and then they know that they better be good at the review packet.

One student yesterday told me that there was nothing new on the test..he smiled and added, as always.  Cracked me up.  But I think he was trying to tell me that he felt like he was in control of his learning.  He knew what to expect and he'd studied for those things.

My class average is actually up this year even though last year's students were much stronger math students.  I think I have a better system of collecting feedback and I think students are beginning to see that I don't "give them" a grade, they "earn it".