Think Like a Teacher

Happy New Year! (See my Geogreeting* to you)

This time of year, everyone offers carefully studied retrospectives,  the “Top Ten” this or that from the past year. I see so many amazing sites every year that I could never choose a top ten. Instead, I offer this random, personal collection — just some of the many visual, interactive sites that intrigued me for more than a moment during 2011, at least long enough to say, “WOW!”

TeachersFirst reviews them — so I don’t need to explain them further. My job lead me to find these WOWs among the 714 Featured Sites on TeachersFirst during 2011.  [Actually, one was featudurian late 2010, but it remains a Tip Top Fav of mine.] On any given day, I could close my eyes and click on a dozen or more from among the Featured Sites archives and experience the same “WOW!”

How fortunate I am to have a job where I experience WOW every week.

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Random, personal  WOWs from 2011 – in alphabetical order. (The titles within reviews are links to WOW.)

60 sec recap (review) Definitely ad-heavy, but the concept is great. I once had a hilarious cassette tape of literature classics in two minutes, including Hamlet, but this is even better. Makes me want to create my own or do one with a group of gifted kiddos.

Exhibition Monet (review) Breathtaking. Steep in it.

Foldplay (review) Put anything in a visual container, even abstract concepts and experiences. This is the way I think.

Font de Music (review) Because music and words make poetry together.

Gettysburg Address (review) I live not far from Gettysburg and find this speech moves me more and more as I grow up. I think I finally am starting to get it.

Google Search stories (review) * actually from 2010, but an all time fav. I find myself imagining new stories while sitting in traffic or waiting rooms. This should be an app for my phone.

Information is beautiful (review) The title says it all.

Instagrok (review) I love learning new things, and Instagrok invites me in.

Newscred (review) Learn and read just what I want. To think I used to have to ride my bike two miles to experience this wave of knowledge in the stacks of the public library when I was a kid.

Spicy Nodes (review) As I have said many times, I am a visual person. Concepts = images. Cool.

TeacherWall (review) Morale booster! Not only do I see great teachers. I also feel our profession lifting up and taking me with it.

Virtualswim (review) OK. I like to swim. I think under water. This one is just for me. Aquaphobes, stay away.

Wondersay (review) Because message is about both words and visuals. See a poem.

Yulia Brodskaya (review) I love art, and visually rich sites lure me in for hours. This one is striking.

*The tool that made my greeting above is reviewed here.

TeAching is tech that has earned an “A.” I hope to improve my peer teaching performance to earn that “A.” Last week I wrote of my resolve to improve the way I share edtech expertise with tech-challenged teaching peers in 2012, to help the tech-challenged in a way that enables and respects their ability to help themselves. So I may actually stick to this resolution, I propose five simple “insteads” of respect:

Five Insteads to earn an A:
1. Instead of,  “It’s easy, let me show you,”  I will try, “You have the skills to do that. I remember you showed me … (fill in something my new techie did the last time we met).”

2. Instead of,  “You haven’t tried X?”  I will try, “I just heard about X, but I haven’t had time to even look at it. Can we figure it out together”

3. Instead of touching the mouse, I will keep my hands in my pockets and try to contain my twitching. When I am about to blurt something out, I will offer to fetch us each a cup of coffee so my new techie can play on his/her own. No coffee? I’ll go to the rest room! I will leave for a few minutes so the new techie can explore without a witness. But I’ll be sure to return soon enough to prevent meltdown.

4. Instead of, “Yeah, I’ve done that,” I’ll confide the list of tech tasks I haven’t learned yet or can’t figure out. This will also apply when a fellow edtech guru boasts about a new tool. I will admit what I do not know.

5. Instead of, “Just let your students show you,” I’ll  ask, “Which of your students needs the boost of knowing something the rest of the class does not? Maybe the three of us can do it together first.”

I hope that these “insteads” will encourage a new wave of teAcher techies who have earned the golden A as tech evangelists who support, encourage, and empower. We owe it that respect to our hardworking teaching peers as we pay our expertise forward.

This is the traditional time of year for charitable giving. We try to share our good fortune with those less fortunate. Then we make resolutions to be better people on the New Year. Some of us are fortunate enough to have strong ed tech skills (and/or tech bravado) and can easily be lulled into a sense of superiority as we help others throughout the year. The approaching New Year is the perfect time for us to pay our knowledge forward, but try to do so without the bravado that undermines our very help.

So I resolve in 2012 to improve the way I offer tech help: to help the tech-challenged in a way that enables and respects their ability to help themselves. This post is the first of two installments as I mull ways to improve my tech help offerings and follow through with my “pay it forward” resolution. May this warm up my muscles for edtech help to the needy while respecting dignity, frustrations, and phobias. Three empathy exercises come to mind. Each has happened to me in some form, and I learned from it. Perhaps you have some empathy exercises of your own.

Three EdTech Empathy Exercises

1. Phone techs
   Try giving computer directions over the phone — blind.  Select a task such as learning to put an attachment on email or save an attachment with a new name in a new folder inside at least three other folders. For extra variety, do this on an operating system you have not used for two years. The computer in use at the other end of the phone must be one you have never seen (no school district issued “models” allowed).  If you are seething after just a few instructions and begging just to see what is happening, that’s what your tech-challenged peer feels like every time you start giving directions about “click on this” or “minimize that.” Improve your empathy (and verbal directions)  further by extending this exercise to an octogenarian at the other end of the phone.
   
   
2. Why’s Guys
   Pretend you have a three year old with you at all times, asking, “Why?” Do not move forward to the next step until you answer the question — every time. If you forget to explain to your invisible three year old, you must restart the entire task but may never repeat the same explanation or analogy to explain “why?” you did that step.
3. Timed Tech Taboo
   Just as in the party game of the same name, try to avoid forbidden words. Appoint an independent (non-geek) judge to prepare you for a session with a tech-challenged person. Speak for five minutes about the tasks you will be doing with your needy case — without uttering any and all computer terms. Set the timer on your iPhone or Android. Every time you slip, restart the timer. How much concentration did it take to last for five minutes? That’s how hard your tech-challenged peer works to focus on the directions you rattle off  as he/she tries to keep up. If the task you plan to teach takes ten minutes, practice until you can achieve ten minutes on your timer. THEN approach the needy person and teach the task.

We are all aware of our digital footprints these days, and we caution our students to be aware of the potential future impact of their digital droppings. I wonder, however, about the opposite problem:  the footprints we leave in sands to wash away with changing tides. How can we, as children or adults, plan and preserve the digital archive we want without having to reformat or create new versions every 24 months or so? If a student today wants to be able to retrace his/her own path, what shoes should he/she wear on the trail? How can we avoid having to reformat our lives to fit ever changing media so we can preserve a digital footpath to be retraced in the future?

In the past couple of months, I have helped my husband sift through family archive photo albums as we emptied out an apartment of a loved one who had passed away. I have mourned the changes to the recently aired version of A Charlie Brown Christmas (an heirloom of a sort in this family) as compared to the original 1965 version. I realized that no two are alike: the 1965 version I have memorized (and sang in), the VHS tape for which we longer have a player, the recently remastered BluRay version, and the current on-air version. I even tried  the iTunes version…all different. Stashed around our technojunkyard house we have LP’s, CDs, MP3s, Hi-8 video tapes, VHS tapes, DVDs, BluRays, 3 1/2 inch floppies, USB sticks, zip disks, negatives, paper prints, scans, digpix, SD cards, compact flash cards, iCloud files, Win files, Mac files, Facebook pages, Picasa pages, Google+ photos, and — yes — some very old photo albums from the days when photography was new, hanging precariously from black corners that have lost their adhesive.

I want my four year old grandson to learn to build a digital pathway instead of leaving random droppings. Unless he/we constantly revisit(s), reformat(s), and re-collect(s) the footprints of his life, we will never have the same kind of treasury that once resided in smelly old photo albums. And as we revisit, we will be tempted to change the versions just a bit. I wonder about the ethics of being a revisionist vs an archivist. And selecting the tools will never be a “final answer,” but simply a prediction of today’s high and low tide media. This is the other side of digital footprints. Something more to teach and learn.