Think Like a Teacher

The WSJ reported on an open course experiment offered by Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun last fall. The results: of the couple hundred on campus students and the 160,000 who “took” the course for free — online, 210 earned perfect scores on the final exam. All of them attended the course via the free, online option. You can read the details, aptly titled “Watching the Ivory Tower Topple” as long as WSJ keeps the article online.

Our society is accustomed to asking about degrees and experience to match people to jobs and opportunities. HR expects the checkboxes: HS, BA/BS, MA/MS, etc.  The currency of learning has always been “credits” (small change) toward “degrees” (larger denominations, i.e. larger BILLS ~ great double entendre!). If education can be delivered openly to anyone, anywhere, how will that change the way we decide who is “qualified” for a job, a volunteer role, even contract work as a landscaper?

It’s not about digital immigrants vs digital natives. It’s about willingness to taste something new.

Five year olds don’t like to try new foods. Some are unwilling to touch a food simply because it is green or “looks funny.” If it does not look like macaroni and/or cheese, the five year old mouth clamps closed. Fortunately, with a little coaxing, that stubborn little macaroni man will grow out of this phase.

Adults who are taste-averse about new applications of technology are worse than five year old macaroni mavens. Yesterday I heard a tale of unwilling technology “taste testers” in a highly respected university setting. This university was asked to evaluate various curricula for use in a certain type of early childhood program. As professionals, their taste testing is more than personal preference. It is a formal assessment of the quality of the curriculum “meals” being offered.

This group of curriculum food critics notified the creator of one curriculum that they simply will not “taste” that curriculum because it is not available entirely in a print format.  The curriculum, in fact, is much more than a print document. It is an interactive tool that uses ongoing formative assessments of student progress to recommend the next curriculum objectives for EACH child and simultaneously offers several possible activities that can be used to help that child (or a class) achieve the next developmentally appropriate objective. Why isn’t it in print? Because it is interactive, data driven, and dynamic. You simply can’t make a print curriculum “book” that flips to the correct page based on what  a child did today in class. This curriculum is steeped in technology to make learning work. Imagine that.

But the highly respected five year olds won’t taste it because it looks funny and is not printed macaroni and cheese.

I have no idea who has given the five year olds permission to run the university evaluation project, but I hope someone will eventually help them outgrow their five-year-old, finnicky attitude. At this rate, they would have us teaching our children to do nothing but string macaroni bracelets well into the 21st century.

Please pardon this bit of a rant. Some weeks end on a sticky note.

I read a great post from Rian van der Merwe, a tech designer/dad in South Africa. He shares four essential guidelines for folks designing iPad apps for his young daughter. His requests make perfect sense, not only for young children on iPads, but for our students using both apps and web resources. I especially like  this one:

If You Try To Trick My Kid Into Buying Stuff, You’re Dead To Me.…The screen is a landmine of carefully placed icons that lead to accidental purchases — not to mention the random animated banner ads that are designed to draw attention away from the app itself….if you try to use persuasive design on my young daughter, all bets are off. Your app will be deleted, and we’ll never do business again.

Does that remind you of experiences you have had with web sites in your classroom? How many have you declared “Dead to Me”?

Rounding out  Mr. van der Merwe’s top four usability guidelines for little fingers and young minds using iPads are these points (paraphrased):

• use visual cues to indicate which things are interactive
• make pagination using arrows: obvious and easy to navigate (even for little fingers)
• make menus secondary: something we seek out and will not open accidentally

While some teachers may not be fortunate to own an iPad or even use them at school, we have parallel expertise on what drives us crazy about web sites OR apps we use with students in our classrooms. I offer my top four guidelines for web resources AND apps to avoid a “Dead to Me” sentence:

1. Bikinis are islands, nothing else.

If you must have ads to keep your app/site free, at least moderate them so there are no scantily clad women. My students are not here for human anatomy visuals or lessons on eating disorders. The same goes for guys with sixpacks in Speedos. Puberty begins earlier and earlier these days, even without your help.

2. Your energetic music is my insanity.

Engaging, perhaps. But your “engaging” music means I have to hand out headphones (lice?) or give the same directions for muting speakers and/or finding the “sound off” icon at least three times EVERY time we open the app/site. Set your music default to OFF.

3. I am not a student, so don’t force me to act like one.

I like to sample every activity/game/app, but I don’t have time to navigate through the whole thing just to know which terms are used or what we will learn. Give me Teacher Information. If your site/app is not intended for school, you can still tell us a bit about it. Call this area  “behind the scenes” if you don’t want to doom your app/site as “educational.” I’ll find the site/app anyway, if it is good. While you are at it, please tell me how long it typically takes to navigate a game and other practical tips. I promise not to send kids into your app/site without previewing and deciding how it fits our curriculum, but I need your help.

4. Remember Josh and Julie in the back row.

I love Josh and Julie. Josh is so bright he makes me laugh when I shouldn’t. He also knows how to break any game or web activity. He shows Julie (or she shows him), as they set their own “learning objectives” for the day. For Josh, the objective usually involves showing the game that he knows more or sleuthing out incorrect information or exceptions he can argue about. Josh needs a way to skip ahead by demonstrating competence and something open ended to intrigue him into productive and extended thinking. Julie has a learning disability. It does not prevent her recalling how to escape learning the terms or avoid thinking about anything that was “too hard” or open ended. Give more than a fleeting thought to Josh and Julie, and be honest in sharing what I may need to do to adapt for them … in the Teacher Info (see #3).

I personally thank any app/web developer who can adhere to at least these four. You’ll be alive and well with me. I am certain every teacher has at least two or three or ten death sentence avoidance guidelines to add. Each Thinking Teacher who writes for TeachersFirst has his/her own. We carry these with us as we write reviews for TeachersFirst, and we always welcome the thoughts and “guidelines” of others. Comment here or on any TeachersFirst resource review.

Once a teacher…

My favorite item on a popular list of “you know you’re a teacher when” lines is that you correct strangers’ children’s behavior in the grocery checkout line.  We take teaching with us into the community every day, whether we intend to or not. We find ourselves paying attention to how people learn (or don’t) everywhere we go. We even analyze the pedagogy of our puppies. There is more to this than grounds for a giggle. We have expertise that extends beyond our schools and classrooms.

I am an officer in our property owners association. We find that our members often do not understand the role of the POA or how/why their money is collected and spent. The teacher in me realizes that handing people a bunch of rules and regs is no different with adults than it is with our students.  They have no motivation to read them. As teachers, we can contribute far more to our communities than our taxes and occasional volunteer days. We can share about how people learn. No lectures, no insidious agendas, just use what we know about learning to help our communities. We are ambassadors for and about learning.

As I have mentioned, I have been working a lot with infographics lately — especially as I get ready for ISTE 2012. I love the way an infographic can SHOW instead of TELL. So my latest experiment is to try using infographics to SHOW my community how our POA works and what it does. In today’s manic, visual world,  our neighbors might stop long enough to look and learn. And infographics are a lot more interesting than a packets of rules and regs.

As I share these graphics with my fellow board members, I realize that they have never thought about how people learn. Most have never thought about how they learn themselves. I am sharing an expertise that is so much a part of me I do not realize everyone else does not have it. I am an inadvertent ambassador for learning. I guess that’s not a bad role. It’s certainly less intrusive than talking to misbehaving tots in the checkout line.