Think Like a Teacher

From a dusty basement into the palm of my hand comes the story of TeachersFirst, snapped into a plastic case. As one usually impatient to have “archives” of anything important in electronic format, I will attempt to share the feel of this artifact with you virtually.  What I cannot convey is the stunning moment of impact I felt seeing what this puzzle has to say about teachers and teaching during the fourteen years since it announced the 1998 mission of TeachersFirst.

The question, “Puzzled by the Internet?” on the top of the box says it all. Many of today’s teachers were not in the classroom in 1998 — except possibly as students. It was a time when only about half of the teachers I knew had ever used Google and many were innocently hooked on AOL. Web pages were text-heavy, and no one anticipated Twitter or blogs. How all this Internet stuff was supposed to fit into the world of chalk, worksheets, and VCRs was a mystery. The people at the Network for Instructional Television (NITV), now called The Source for Learning, talked to teachers and found out that they wanted help navigating and understanding how this new-ish thing called the Internet could help them teach (and learn). So TeachersFirst happened.

I hear you laughing now. When I saw the box, I laughed out loud. I remembered that TeachersFirst had given away these cute (and challenging) tangram-type puzzles, but somehow I had forgotten the question that had been printed on the top. This little puzzle is Teaching 1998 in a time capsule. I think I had better keep it in my desk drawer as a reminder of all that has happened since.

My mind fast-forwards to 2012. We would need a new promotional giveaway every three to six months of we want to snap the mysteries of changing technologies into a box with a cute question on top. Even the messages of last summer are too old, though teachers quietly confide that they haven’t had time to “catch up” yet!  I wonder what we will be laughing at in 2015. One thing is for sure: we should back up our blogs and keep archives of what we say today.  Maybe we should bury digital time capsules of the giveaways at ISTE 2012. If nothing else, it will be good for humor therapy, assuming the file formats are even legible.

Happy 14th birthday, TeachersFirst.

As one who runs a web site and offers free services to teachers, I am bombarded by offers from social network marketing companies. Everyone wants to make a pitch via social networks. Get people to “like” you on Facebook, pin you on Pinterest, comment about you on blogs, tweet you to the heavens, and generally fill digital space with noise about you. And it does work. Sales come from social networks. Of course, TeachersFirst isn’t selling anything, but we are always trying to get the word out so teachers benefit from timesaving and thought-provoking ideas from our Thinking Teachers®.

When I look for more than a few minutes at the many networks I belong to (conservatively in the hundreds) and even at some comments left on TeachersFirst resources, I see the same pattern. Thinly veiled impostors are creating their own digital fauxprints to hawk the wares of commercial clients. Others simply play the role of something they are not, in order to lure users to new web startups or build the traffic on another site.  How many of the “members” of social networks are actually what they say they are?

I am not talking about cyber stalkers claiming to be teenagers in order to lure our kids into unhealthy relationships. I am talking about self-sculpted digital “experts” and frequent commenters. Spammers are trapped by Akismet and similar tools, but others spend their days creating and maintaining infomercial identities. This would make a fascinating digital (and ethical) exercise for our students (and ourselves as students of the digital world). I’d love to try this challenge with a class or two.

Digital Footprints and Fauxprints

Choose a site where users leave frequent comments. You might choose a popular technology blog, entertainment blog, newspaper site (if open access), food/restaurant review site, Ning or other “community” related to an interest you have, or even a shopping site such as Amazon. Explore some frequent commenters: how many comments have they left? What kind of profile information can you find about them? Can you find the same username on a related or competitor site that also has social features? What evidence can you find that this user might be the same person?  Create a collection of comments by this persona along with the questions they raise for you. You may wonder whether this person has a political agenda, a history of bad experiences, or some other motivation for his/her comments and posts.

Now the big question: Is there any evidence that this persona is, perhaps, a fictitious identity creating a “faux print” to accomplish a certain task? For example, does he/she always send you to see another site that is selling something? Or is he/she trying to generate ad revenue from site traffic (hits)?  Is it possible that this persona is not what he/she pretends to be? Create a digital presentation in support of your fauxprint hypothesis.

Variation: Conduct a class fauxprint scavenger hunt on ONE large site such as Amazon or the Washington Post ( I would have said New York Times, but they charge for access). See how many obvious sales-pitch or agenda-pushing identities you can find during one class period.  What evidence can you show that they may be false identities, hired for a purpose? Award a digital Fauxprint Finder badge to the student with the most, most creative, or most discerning observations.

If you have ever done this or a similar activity, please share it (and a link to any results). I doubt I am the first to wonder about this. I promise to approve REAL comments!

I occasionally play a minor but useful role among my adult peers. I am the Grammar Police…or the Comma Patrol. Of course, I delighted to read Fanfare for the Comma Man in the New York Times this week. I enjoy helping people sculpt messages so their readers will not furrow foreheads from fuzziness. I don’t delight in correcting my friends, but am willing to contribute my expertise when asked.  In return, my colleagues and friends relish catching my frequent typos as they laugh at my unconventional keyboarding. I try not to embarrass myself with egregious typos, and they try not to give me passages with grammar so terrible it abuses my willingness. We each offer our best efforts, then trade expertise to make them even better.

As the Grammar Police, I need to stay up to date the rules. As the NYT article points out, comma rules vary with the style guide — much as traffic laws vary by state. So acting as Comma Patrol or Grammar Police requires ongoing learning. I have to know where to look for the latest on commas or usage or vocabulary. Expertise requires ongoing diligence.

We expect our students to develop expertise. Standards demand it, and so do the Big Tests. We do not do as well at teaching them two real world corollaries of expertise: trading and ongoing diligence.

We artificially set them up to “trade” expertise. We put them in small groups for projects but we don’t help them discover real expertise of value in each member of the group. Instead we “assign roles” or have them draw lots. In the real world,  adults discover the expertise of our friends and colleagues. Outside of school, kids do too. Somehow when we enter the classroom we often forget to facilitate the same real discovery process. So there is no real “trading” of something they value. To let them find value and trade, we need to offer more choice of products/tasks. That Lego ability might come in handy. We know that teachers teach in their own preferred way of learning, and we typically assign projects that draw on our own best expertise. Ask your students what they can offer in trade.

Curriculum assumes that once our students have developed an expertise, they move on. Rarely do students seize responsibility to maintain expertise so they can be valued as real experts. The curriculum spirals past the topic again in a year or two, so students need not seek sources to stay up to date. They wait to be pushed through it all again at the next level. They are not really the experts. We tell them what comes next.

In my friend’s high school bio class, the students recently completed another round of infographics (here and here), this time with a partner. They chose the partner– most likely because he/she was a friend. But this time their expertise really showed through. They have refined their visual communication skills and science concepts quite a bit since September. The infographics they made this time show both trading and ongoing diligence. Most likely, it is the repeated opportunity to develop and trade expertise that made this last round of projects noticeably better. I am better at being the Grammar Police because I use, trade, and update the skills often. We need to allow our students the same real enjoyment of becoming experts.

No idea is unique. The difference is what we do with our dandelion-down thoughts that fly by while we are doing other things. Most of us ignore them. Maybe we should be showing our students the simple step of wetting a finger to catch fleeting ideas before they escape. The wet finger is the difference that innovators share. While temporarily stuck to the tip of a moistened finger, that downy seed is ours for a moment to do with what we wish. We might carefully plant it to watch it grow.  We might simply allow it to dry and blow away again. But once it is gone, it belongs to anyone and no one.

A week ago, I mused in a post about a new way to “track” what we learn in a post-post-secondary education world. A few weeks earlier, I posted about the trade-offs we make, giving our privacy to Google. My musings were certainly not unique. Within the last day or two, I have read about a potentially new way to preserve privacy — even from Google — and a start-up that hopes to containerize what we learn from open sources of “education.”  My fleeting, dandelion-down ideas most certainly did not implant themselves so quickly into others’ blossoming flower pots, but we all know how ubiquitous dandelions are! Someone else had these same ideas and took the time to wet a finger.

In our classrooms, we cannot see the dandelion down blowing about all those heads. In our society, often we mistake dandelions for weeds. But we secretly love to see the first dandelions come up in spring, a sign of new life and a warm summer to come.  We need to ask about the ideas our students allow to escape — or leave at home because school does not value them. As we let fly our own new ideas, we need to pause, wet-fingered, to publicly give them a chance in front of our students. We need to think aloud about them and model capturing them into blog posts or idea bins or sketchbooks or voice bubbles or — something. Not every idea is worth keeping, but none of us can decide that in the short time it takes for them to fly away.

If we have one great, untapped resource, it is all the ideas that fly away from our classrooms, ignored. STEM education is supposed to promote innovation, but ANY classroom can. Have you caught any dandelion down today?