Think Like a Teacher

Teaching is personal, and so is this post.

This week is the anniversary of MLK’s I Have a Dream speech, the moment that gave impetus to so much good (and so much good left to be done). Yes, I am old enough to remember that time period. But no, this post is not about civil rights. It is about having a dream and what that dream can become.

As a brand new teacher several years after King’s speech, I had a dream to bring new ideas about learning and creativity into my classroom.  I was sure I’d be the perfect teacher. I had a dream to make all kids like to write. I dreamed that kids would write and create not just “papers” (so thin a substance!),  but media: television shows or radio shows or photoessays with accompanying writings, anything that could express themselves clearly. I had a dream to change kids’ view of school and get them excited, even amid hard work.

I was sure I could do better than the “dead wood” teachers I read about and occasionally saw in classrooms around me. Most new teachers have a similar dream. For sure, I would never be like the “old” teachers who — to my young view — had decided that change was not worth their effort. I remember looking at those teachers who had not only children, but grandchildren and thinking they would never try my new ideas.

Like many dreamers, I was surprised. I discovered that some of the grandparent-teachers were the most willing to get excited about something new. When I suggested making a six week minicourse in the TV studio part of sixth grade language arts curriculum, the teacher said, “Great! How can I help?” When the kids suggested an Emmy-type awards ceremony (we called them Televiddy awards) at the end of the year, entire teams of teachers jumped in to help pull it off. The dream was alive, and the second year the kids’ writing got even better because they wanted to win a Televiddy. The best part was that it wasn’t my dream anymore. It was our dream.

Fast forward through a long teaching career, and I ask myself whether my dream is accomplished. Never. But I think I have given impetus to some good — and so much good left to be done. I look at the challenges facing enthusiastic, green teachers today and hope they have permission to engage in their dreams. Our kids need the dreams of teachers. They need the chance to feel it, see it, and join in the dream together. I can only hope that those who drive educational change today can see the value of dreams over minutiae and uniformity.

Unpack those funky little boxes. Embed widgets are a very handy tool for teachers.

The What of widgets:

Widgets are clever little gadgets you can add to your class web site, blog, or wiki using funky looking gobbledeegook called embed code. They are little boxes that automatically fill with content provided by someone else from somewhere else on the web. This means that your site can show something new all the time without any time and effort by you. It automatically appears in the little box (widget) on your  page/blog/wiki.

Widgets are embedded content, an empty box on your site that fills itself with “stuff” from somewhere else. Some embedded content is simply that: a piece of “stuff” that appears in your empty box but really LIVES someplace else on the web. It might be an embedded version of a video that actually “lives” on YouTube, like the one in this post. It might be the Google Map on a restaurant web page.

Widgets are a special kind of  embedded content because the content DOES something. It changes and updates periodically and automatically. The Cluster Map widget on the right of this blog counts how many people have visited this blog lately. The LIVE Feed one tells where visitors come from and when. Some widgets let the site visitors do something (see the weather widget below), but the site owner doesn’t do anything to make them work. They are embedded widgets that load content provided by someone else.

The Why of widgets (Why go through all this geeky stuff?):

You might be tempted simply because your students will say, “COOL!” That’s certainly OK. but move beyond cool to meaningful by embedding widgets that connect to your curriculum (weather, news from the country you are studying, phases of the moon, news about congress, quote of the day, reading tips, etc.).

The HOW:

HOW you embed a widget depends on both the widget embed code and the site/blog/wiki where you want to put it. For starters, try this blog post on how to embed almost anything. Often the site offering the embed code for the widget will give you tips and directions. But the place where you are going to PUT the code may need to help a bit. If you are using a school web site, try clicking help and searching for “embed.” If you use Wikispaces, they offer help when you click the little icon that looks like a TV set:  It even says “embed code” when you roll your mouse over it.

The general rule is that you need to COPY a chunk of code filled with  marks like <> / etc. and paste it into a place on your site that accepts CODE. On this blog, I have to click the text editing view instead of the visual editing view. An important skill for copy/paste is knowing how to select a block of stuff, COPY by pressing Control+C, (Command+C on a Mac), then PASTE in you desired location by pressing Control+V (Command+ V on a Mac).

Widget wisdom: Be careful who you trust.

One potentially dangerous thing about widgets is that you do not control what shows up inside that box. Make sure your widget is a trusted source. TeachersFirst recently introduced a Featured SItes widget for teachers to put on class, school, media center, or other educator web pages.  Those who know TeachersFirst know that our reviewed resources are vetted thoroughly by a team of experienced teacher leaders. In short, we will not embarrass you by sharing anything bad. We will enhance your web page with new, useful content every week, and you don’t have to do anything. See an example of our widget below, and get one for yourself here.

Want more ideas? Here are search results for the term widget on TeachersFirst. This barely scratches the surface of the widgets available out there.  These are a few reviewed sites that offer widgets. Add an embedded Google Map to your class web page showing the country you are studying or the route that a certain explorer followed. Here’s how.

As you get to like any site, watch for widgets they might offer.  Watch for cool widgets on other teachers’ site and click “get this widget,” usually offered below the widget. As your students learn new creative tools, watch for the ability to share their products using embed code— not a widget as much as simply embedded content, but it is YOURstudents’ creative work, pulled into your web page or wiki. You can gather tproducst from many places into ONE class web page or wiki using embed codes. The ability to share products using embed code is one of the Edge Features mentioned at the end of TeachersFirst reviews.

Just to get your brain going, here are some examples of embedded widgets:

Weather widget for world language teachers or classrooms studying geography, weather, or temperature conversions:

Here is the TeachersFirst Featured Sites widget looks, available here:

And here is a helpful Reading Rockets widget for parent tips, from among several options on this page:

Are you ready to widget yet?

As the new school year begins, teachers attending OK2Ask® sessions are noticeably more stressed and overwhelmed. During these sessions, we share many, many resources and teaching ideas. We pack the sessions with choices: so many tools, so many interactives, so many strategies for organizing lessons that put technology tools to work for learners. Those of us who prepare and teach these sessions are steeped in the stuff. We can name (or at least retrieve) dozens of creative tools and strategies for any learning need : tools to make multimedia presentations, tools to comment and interact with peers, tools to learn about vocabulary and word choice, ways to improve digital citizenship. Honestly, even we are overwhelmed as we narrow down our offerings to fit 75 or 90 minute OK2Ask sessions with eager teachers from all over the world. Practically speaking, none of us can do it all. It is time to give yourself permission to limit your attention to a chosen few.

No, I don’t mean a few students or a few curriculum concepts. I mean give yourself permission to master a chosen few new tools and lesson strategies. Choose one– and only one –of each:

tool for collaborative writing

tool for graphic organizers

tool for sharing images and adding text to images

tool for “collecting” things like web links, pieces of text, images, drawings

tool for creating or clipping video

Is this enough? A handful is plenty. If you are in a BYOD school, you might want to find DATs (device agnostic tools) to do each of these so every kid can use the same tool and collaborate across devices. Or you can assign your students to find and learn one of each type that they can use on their own device. If you are using school machines and network, be sure your chosen few all work inside your web filter.

Then what? Make your choices meaningful by focusing on the learning instead of the tool. Challenge yourself to complete a chosen few “bingo” board that has five tools by five learning strategies that students will do (the possibilities are endless — I just chose 5):

Collaborate to create a group product

Prioritize/choose and justify choices

Practice and teach a skill

Publish, then respond to others’ reactions

Discover new information and organize it in an intentional, understandable way

Make a bingo board for yourself and keep it handy on your desk (or computer desktop). Or use this freebie I am sharing on Google Docs. (Open it and SAVE A COPY for yourself so you can edit.) As you plan an activity this year where students use one of your chosen few tools in one of the learning strategies, put a brief description of the activity  and date in the square. Aim for Blackout Bingo by spring! Think of it as your personal professional development plan. Happy New Year!

As teachers, we all work to balance high expectations while differentiating for various abilities and needs. When we set “requirements” in a digital, social learning community, it is indeed a delicate dance.

Example: You set a high bar for all students in your science class for written expression students in a shared learning community with other schools like MySciLife. Posts must use complete sentences and correct conventions of written English.  The powerful tools of authentic, social learning today: online learning communities, blogs, wikis, and collaborative projects, all motivate kids to show their best writing. Alas, one student’s “best” may invite embarrassment, comparison,  or — and this is the worst — digital muting by his peers. Kids simply ignore posts they cannot understand or that they deem “dumb.”  They even exclaim,” Hey! This kid didn’t use complete sentences, and you said we had to!” Either way, the struggling poster’s voice goes unheard.

Students who struggle with writing — for whatever reason — need more scaffolding and support outside the social stream. Few content area teachers are familiar with strategies for writing help, and many do not realize how much they may hurt. Dealing with a student’s writing is like doing surgery on his larynx. You are dealing with a voice here!

Struggling students want to be heard and to join in the  online conversations — and they should, but they need time to build to a level of competence that does not invite criticism or giggles.  As teachers, we dance delicately. We can suggest offline drafts (think Google docs or even — gasp– paper?) so the struggling student  can improve his/her writing before he posts. We can encourage him to have a peer read it back to him aloud to be sure it “sounds right.” Offer some sentence starters in a Word doc,  diminishing this support over time. Even use his own sentence starters derived from his previous posts. We can focus on major conventions, but we also need to focus on the science content. Offer some words he can drag and drop to form sentences, including required science terms.

Remember that larynx! We do not want to mute his voice by over moderating, rewriting, or constantly disapproving his posts. He needs the posting and social learning experience even more than others. So we eventually allow him to post in the stream and hope that others will be kind. Our delicate teaching dance includes promoting digital citizenship so other students do not demean or digitally “mute” those who struggle. Encourage kids to reply to posts who have received no comments. Reply to a post with a thoughtful question that will help you learn more from that person. Give bonus points for interactions that go above and beyond by asking questions that help another student explain more clearly.

Writing is tough. Writing is personal. Remember the larynx and tread carefully as you tiptoe the delicate dance!

Our classrooms face the same engagement challenges that the Wall Street Journal describes at historic sites across the U.S. More and more, consumers enter school doors with digital devices glued in their hands or tethered to their brains. BYOD/BYOT (Bring your own device/technology) is here. Even if the devices are NOT officially allowed, they are here, hidden under desks or behind books.

Historic sites have responded more quickly than most schools. You can play a texting game in Williamsburg, scan QR codes to learn more at almost every museum these days, or load an app to let you interact while physically standing at historic sites. Curators and education staff worry about the invasive juxtaposition of technology in a Shaker barn and the constant need to update their apps to avoid appearing “outdated.” Teachers face the same concerns managing new technologies. If they believe they must “stay ahead.” they are doomed to fail. We will never “stay ahead” of  what enters the school in students’ pockets.

Historic sites must woo consumers to perpetuate their income stream. They face a digital challenge: “How do we continue to appeal to consumers armed with — and distracted by– devices? What activities and apps can we make that will engage them via those devices?” But schools are more or less guaranteed  our “consumers” for longer periods of time. We therefore have a chance to flip the digital challenge around, asking ourselves, “How can we make students active participants in making the ‘school’ experience one where we not only participate, but create,  leaving a legacy for future learners?” Historic sites have little chance for participant legacy beyond good reviews on TripAdvisor. The difference between a historic site “visitor” and our “learners” is the legacy our learners can leave for those to come.

As I read about the digital experiences at Williamsburg, I wonder if we could gradually make school a digital immersion. Imagine a classroom filled with QR codes — that the teacher does not have to make. The learners make them. Imagine texting games or QR treasure hunts that kids embed in the physical space of a classroom.  Image simple apps, games,  and interactive maps created by kids. As current technologies age, they could be replaced by later student projects. Instead of “turning in” student projects for a grade, we could “turn on” student projects for future audiences of learners. In many classrooms, teachers already have students creating digital projects. The missing step is making them part of a perpetual learning place called school.  Imagine how much harder kids would work for such a vast audience. It would be interesting to find out whether a seventh grader would continue to monitor responses that come in to his fifth grade game about Explorers or would monitor the number of times her QR Treasure hunt was accessed. I am not sure, but I’d sure love to find out. If I were in charge of a physical learning space today, I’d be one of the learners alongside my students, plastering it with digital experiences for any learning consumer who walks in.