Think Like a Teacher

I am back from ISTE 2013, the annual conference for the International Society for Technology in Education. It was enormous, collaborative, and agile. My colleagues and I think of ISTE as the preview of what will become commonplace in 2-3 years. Imagine about 20,000 people, all passionate about learning and using educational technology to make learning both possible and powerful. Imagine 20,000 people, each with at least one device to take notes, tweet, take pictures, vote, save bookmarks, post to Facebook, text, question, and generally share. 

Every line you stand in at ISTE  is a collaborative opportunity, even the inevitable lines in the women’s restrooms. Sadly, the ubiquitous devices tempted some attendees to share via device, ignoring actual humans close by, but that was their loss.

My observations during ISTE bring our own device sessions reinforce my thoughts about my own iPad and iPhone.  Mobile devices force us to be connoisseurs of DITs and DATs.

DIT: do it tool

DAT: device agnostic tool

Whether using school-owned or “bring your own” devices, teachers and students need Do It Tools for each task we face.  It might be an app or a web tool, but the DIT must match the demands of the task: I need to draw and add text labels. I need to annotate an image. I need to collect poll results via smartphone. I need to take notes and be able to access them from my laptop, my iPad, and my phone. I need to track a twitter hash tag. We need to collect urls and citations along with them. Some DITs simply solve the problem of getting “stuff” from one device to another or sharing “stuff” among multiple people. Startup DITs appear daily and die off nearly as quickly.

My experience tells me that the app version of a DIT is often a willing compromise to gain mobility at some loss of ability. Over and over at ISTE I hear, “The app version does this, but the web version does these other things as well.” Using a mobile app reminds me of shopping at Walmart. I enter Walmart looking for something to accomplish a certain task or meet a certain need, and I end up purchasing something that meets about 80% of the need. Mobile DITs therefore must be DATs to ameliorate the Walmart effect.

Device agnostic tools (DATs) allow us to access the work begun on a phone and continued it on an iPad or a laptop. A DAT lets us share the file with an Android user or reopen it in a laptop to finalize the task, often using enhanced or quicker tools. The web version is mostly likely the most able while being the least mobile.

At ISTE connected educators vocally share solutions to the DIT and DAT challenges that emerge during BYOD sessions. ISTE attendees are collaborative problem solvers. As our world becomes a full time BYOD environment across work, school and personal life, all of us must be fluent finding DITs and DATs to simply live and certainly to learn. Once again, ISTE is the preview of the world to come, a world of DITs and DATs.

Everybody loves a summer beach book. We all need time to sit, draw with our toes in the sand,  and enjoy a paperback (or ebook) with an engaging plot, transparent characters, and a marketable title. We need to linger and muse.

My role as a Thinking Teacher splashes hundreds of web resources and apps onto my various screens. At this time of year, I am drawn to those resources that are the technology equivalent of a “beach book,”  those that may have valuable learning potential but — above all — are engaging to me personally. They make me want to linger and muse. So I share a few of my favs from TeachersFirst’s recent Featured Sites.

Question Generator  is a powerful tool for teaching at higher levels of thinking. It can be the technology equivalent of a visiting three year old grandson. Imagine the questions you can make — and debate. We could even make this an evening beach party game! Close your eyes and point to a word in your beach book, then spin the question generator to turn it into a question. I enjoy musing about the many ways to spin this thinking game.

The Literacy Shed brings the movies into learning, using the power of visual media oh so intentionally. I love the way the ideas are sorted into “sheds.” I have a feeling I will be building “sheds” in my head as I watch movies from now on. I want to just hang out and explore the sheds.

OhLife is the antithesis of this blog. You are reading where I “blog” professionally, playing my professional role and trying not roam outside that role or reveal too much “personal stuff.”  Oh Life is a like blog BFF. It asks you about your day and keeps the answers to itself. In today’s post-and-tweet world, that’s as refreshing as a beach book, for sure!

Quotesome is a shell collection of quotes for beach days. I love to collect quotes. I have always used colorful, electronic sticky notes to collect quotes as I come upon them. Quotesome lets you do that in their online space.  I can now take them  home in my Quotesome shell-bucket, rinse them off, and arrange them into any containers I wish.

I’ll share a few more beach books as the summer goes on. For now, I wish everyone a great start to summer as I head off to ISTE 2013 (#iste13). Hope to see you there.

Recently I have heard the same message from teachers in meetings, TeachersFirst user surveys, and OK2Ask® sessions: “I would love to do more technology-infused lessons with my students, but  the computers/devices in our building are completely booked doing test practice, online testing,  and remediation software. They simply are not available for anything else.” [I can hear your groaning now.] I wish I could say these are isolated incidents, but, alas, they are not.

Trying to be dispassionate and analytical about this for a moment, why would this be the case?

• Schedule drives school. We would like to think that individual needs drive instruction, but any principal will tell you that the schedule drives everything. Scheduling technology access is part of that same engine.
• Schools pay a lot for that software to help bring kids up to grade level. They therefore make using it a priority.
• Schools pay dearly if their students are NOT up to grade level, and these packages can “fix” them, right?
• High quality, sophisticated software packages do a good job of observing student response patterns, collecting data about weaknesses, and presenting material aimed at the individual student’s needs. That’s what data-driven software is all about, right?
• Some folks (administrators?) simply have never seen technology used any way other than drill and practice.

All these reasons are understandable, even if regretable. The problem is that those who allow such monopoly on technology access do not realize the high price they and their students are paying.  I wonder: what is the cost in lost growth for students unable to partake of student-directed learning projects, unable to generate digital products to build and demonstrate deep understanding, unable to interact with peers from other times/locations to learn collaboratively, and unable to build “21st century skills” that require access to digital tools?

I have no idea how this “study” could be done, but I would love to do a bang for the buck comparison:

On the one hand, create a fancy formula that combines:

• Costs to the school for remediation/ test prep/testing software
• Gains in student achievement from said software
• Financial benefit (or loss prevention) to the school from this increased student achievement

On the other hand, generate a similar formula combining:

• Cost to the school for ongoing edtech coaching PD (peer to peer, please) so teachers can generate meaningful, student-directed, challenging learning experiences—knowing students will have access to the technology they need
• Costs to highly able or motivated students (and the community outside the school) for limiting student access to go above and beyond, to innovate and explore, to blast past the ceiling of standardized tests
• Cost to the school for network improvements and initiatives allowing student BYOD (bring your own device) where students may have them
• Financial benefit (or loss prevention) to the school from resulting increased student achievement in REAL terms (may include testing as ONE of several measures)

This last is the tough one. If any of us had the  dollars and cents formula to prove what our gut tells us is right, I would not be hearing the teacher complaints about lack of access. I keep hoping to be hit in the back of the head with a pendulum that takes education funding (and therefore priorities and schedule “engines”) back to seeing learning as something we must build, observe, and measure in many, many ways, each valued ($) and respected. But I don’t hear anybody yelling “DUCK!” yet.

The Last Day of School. There is nothing like it.

For kids, it has loads of meaning. It is the start of a temporary state of euphoria, often followed by boredom 72 hours later. For non-educator adults, it is a fond but distant memory of pool parties, bad preteen pranks, and high school get-togethers punctuated by teen excess and who-is-dating-whom.

For teachers, Last Day of School means much more. We are one of few professions that enjoys a built-in day to reflect and learn from our own hard work. I would assume that builders feel somewhat the same way when they complete a house, but their houses do not build lives of their own. Last Day of School is much more, and we are blessed to have it — not for the vacation it heralds, but for the prism of perspective.

Top Ten Reasons to Be Grateful for Last Day of School

10. Summer vacation. But this ranks only #10.

9. Kids who stop by to visit before they graduate.

8. Finding a handwritten thank you note on your desk. Ignore the misspellings. It still makes you cry.

7. Realizing, as you peel off the name stickers off the cubbies, that Bubba and Boopsie (you insert the names) really did come a long way this year.

6. Entering nothing but positive comments on a report card previously filled with “needs improvement.”

5. Packing up the classroom plant that seems to already miss the extra CO2 emanating from all the mouths in the room.

4. Finding that list of  “someday” ideas you started last fall and knowing you have a fresh start to use at least some of them in a couple of months.

3. Realizing that you are singing under your breath for the first time since spring madness set in.

2. Laughing and crying with your kids — at the same time.

1. Having a chance to stop and appreciate the things you and your students did that WORKED.