Think Like a Teacher

Since April, I have been involved in a project that has stretched my thinking, my imagination, and — at times– my patience. After over three years of looking, The Source for Learning (SFL), the non-profit parent company where I work and direct TeachersFirst, has found a developer to help us create a customized platform for MySciLife®. Perhaps I should offer some background…

You remember MySciLife, the project I led to finalist status in the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition 2010? I have occasionally written about it here. Three of us (Ollie Dreon, Louise Maine, and I) cooked up the idea one wintry afternoon in an online meeting. We hustled to become finalists. Then we did not get funded.  Since 2010,  SFL has managed sufficient funding to launch MySciLife, and we are now beginning our third year of a research pilot with teachers and students across the U.S.. For the first two years, we used a well-accepted, safe social learning platform as the “home” for MySciLife. This “home,” however, was a candidate for a full Property Brothers makeover to really suit our needs. Unfortunately, the platform was NOT designed for the kind of student roles (we call them “identities”) and interschool interactions that happen in MySciLife. Our tech-savvy teachers and their clever students were troopers at devising work-arounds to accomplish MySciLife tasks. The research came back showing that MySciLife works — and kids LOVE it.

The gist of MySciLife is that students LIVE as a science concept, creating their identities in a safe, social learning environment using status updates, interactions, and a full range of digital media within the MySciLife platform. MySciLife is personal, dynamic science learning, interaction, and assessment. Imagine living your life as a cell…(think Facebook).

We shared about MySciLife at ISTE 2013, thanks to our curriculum experts, MySciLife creative collaborators, teachers, a student, and a parent. Later that summer I ran across a relatively new tool called Mashplant Studio, the third or fourth tool I had encountered that showed promise to possibly be adapted for MySciLife. After MONTHS of discussion and negotiation… we had a deal.

Fast forward to spring and summer, 2014. Code writers are building the new platform as I write this. We have used a very messy version of it (dubbed MyMashedUpLife) for our summer Boot Camp and have 23 teachers AND their middle school science students from across the U.S. starting the school year in MySciLife right now.  We are literally laying the track in front of the train to make all the features work THIS school year instead of waiting until 2015-16.

So what have I/we learned so far? (This may have to be part 1 of many…)

• Teachers need time for Boot Camp style PD and even more time to absorb and collaborate when they are radically changing the way they teach.
• Students need far less time!
• Developers/code folks re-order lists to their view of what comes first. Users have a different view, and ed tech coaches yet another. Add the visual designer, and you have cacophony!
• No level of list making can keep track of a project perfectly.
• Bugs reproduce.
• Online meetings only work after you get to know the “sound” of your collaborators’ true feelings.
• Timelines sound great, but imagination and innovation resist such limits.
• More details and to-do items rear their ugly heads between 3 and 4 a.m. than at any other time of day or night.
• Creating a new learning “space” is just like lesson planning. You will never get it “just right.”

Stay tuned for further updates in My(insertadjectivehere)Life. Happy Labor Day!

Two Truths and a Lie. You may have played it as an icebreaker during a professional development session or even a party. It is a terrific “Getting to know you” activity for the first day of school with middle or high schoolers. In thinking about it, I decided to offer My Two TECH Truths and a Lie as a way for ed tech coaches and teachers to break the ice this back to school season. It’s simple. Offer up two TECH truths and a lie about yourself. Share them on a wiki, blog post, or Twitter post — with #2techtruths as a hashtag. Choose your sharing method depending on the learning tool(s) you are trying to introduce. Or allow teachers to choose their OWN tool and figure out how to share it with the rest of the group. For the simplest version, try using  chat tool like Todaysmeet for people to share. Imagine trying this on the first day in a BYOD classroom or workshop for soon-to-be-BYOD teachers!

Have everyone in the session to do the same. Then have everyone browse, read, comment, discuss, or tweet back their guesses as to which is each person’s LIE. You will not only teach social learning, you will build trust among a cohort of learners, including yourself. Isn’t that what learning with technology is supposed to be all about?

Here are my Two Tech Truths and Lie:

A. I once co-wrote a text-based, “adventure” style game called Ice Cream Mountain to play on Apple IIc.

B. I once shared a porn site on the projection screen in a teacher inservice session.

C. I once shared resources for teaching gifted with the US DOE.

Guesses? Tweet @cshively with hashtag #2techtruths or comment here.

I recently ran across both a post and an article that made me think about how teachers act during inservice sessions. I have decided that in many cases, what you see us doing ain’t misbehavin’ even though it often looks like it.  Mark Anderson’s ICTEvangelist  blog shares a guest post from Rachel Jones on the 10 Things all teachers do – even though they might not admit it. I enjoyed reading the UK equivalents of education jargon [see translations in brackets] and laughed out loud knowingly at item 4:

4 – All teachers – all of them – exhibit signs of what would be called behaviour management issues in very long INSET [translation for US teachers] days. I have seen some teachers looking very official taking ‘notes’ with their iPads when in fact they were tinkering on Pinterest or playing Minecraft. I like the irony that you can see everyone from PGCE  [translation for US teachers] students to SLT [speech and language therapists?] exhibiting signs that some would find ‘inadequate’ yet as professionals they are listening. Teachers can multitask. Fact.

Yup. Been there, done that. Until fairly recently, I was one of those “exhibiting signs that some would find ‘inadequate.'” Usually I was guilty of doing meaningful team planning with colleagues from other buildings while listening with one ear to the latest and greatest in behavior management plans or some other paperwork wonder. Did I master the paperwork? Sure. Was I misbehaving? Yes. Did I accomplish two tasks in one inservice session? You betcha. Even worse, I doodled.

Enter the best article I have read about thinking, focus, and memory in a long time. When I look at the notebooks I have from grad school, the notes I have from VERY meaningful and useful collaboration meetings, or even phone calls with my boss (whom I respect and love working for), I see doodles. One of the things I miss when I use Evernote is doodling in the margins (maybe they’d consider that for an upcoming version?). Doodling IS thinking, sorting, and connecting thoughts. It ain’t misbehavin’ ! The Wall Street Journal says so! Research says so!

Maybe we should have an inservice on Doodling. It’s a thought.

Last week I posted about Beginning the Year On Our Devices, or BYOOD. Finding simple tools to accomplish this list of tasks can seem a bit intimidating if you have never taught (or learned) in a BYOD or 1:1 classroom:

1. Find, read, and sign the school or class AUP.
2. Find the Who am I?  tool suggestions on the class web page.
3. Create a Who Am I? of stickies, images, or simple text notes.
4. Bookmark your own Who Am I? board.
5. Share the link to your Who Am I? board so classmates can see it– without knowing who made it!
6. Correctly match at least five Who Am I boards to the classmates who made them.
7. Save your matches in a note, word processing file, or other text FILE.
8. Send your match file to the class OR teacher.

So here are ideas for each task:

STARTER FOR ALL STUDENTS, have them OPEN your class web page on their devices. With the very young, you can open it for them. If you need to, make a shortened url to minimize student typing errors. Have them Create a BOOKMARK or SHORTCUT to that page ON the device. With young students, walk around the room and do it for them  by using “Send to >> Home screen (iPad)” or by dragging the icon next to the address in their web browser onto the desktop to become a shortcut.  Have them try this same skill while you watch. Then delete the duplicate from the home screen or desktop since you will have made TWO of the same thing.

1A. For OLDER students, make a Google Doc of your AUP. Set sharing to “anyone with the link”  can “view.” Copy the LINK to the doc. Put that link on your class web page with the following instructions:

Go to this document [make these words a link to the AUP doc]. Read it carefully or have someone read it to you. When you are certain you understand it and all the consequences of the policies,  Write an email or MESSAGE to your teacher at [teacheremailaddress@school.org] indicating “I have read and agree to the Acceptable Use Policy as accessed [insert todays date] from this url [paste doc link here].

1B. For younger students, make a Google Doc of your AUP. Set sharing to “anyone with the link”  can “view.” Copy the LINK to the doc. Put that link on your class web page with the following instructions (not completely paperless, but…):

For homework tonight go to this document [make these words a link to the AUP doc]. Read it carefully together with your mom or dad and talk about it together. When you are certain you understand it and all the consequences of the policies,  print out a copy that you both can sign and bring it in to school tomorrow.

2. Who Am I directions (put on your class web page):

Create a sticky note board that tells some things about you but keeps your identity a secret. Include what you LIKE BEST about  school/this subject and  at least one idea about how you might use what you learn this year. Add anything you want to say about yourself and your interests, as long as you do not give away who you are! Be as creative as you wish.

2A. On your class web page for OLDER students, copy/paste the links below for reviewed tools  to use for “Who Am I?”:

Lino (and  a “how to” Lino)-  a Device Agnostic Tool!

Mural.ly

Padlet – a Device Agnostic Tool!

2B. On your class web page for younger students, make a link to Lino, and provide the information to LOG INTO a WHOLE CLASS account you have set up in advance. Make a Lino together on your projector or interactive whiteboard — with a STUDENT operating the tools — so students see how to create notes. Have them save their LINOs with a “secret” name.

3. Allow time for students to create their boards. Allow them to help each other with tech challenges and how-tos, such as installing an app version of a tool. With very young students, let them make just ONE sticky note with creative spelling!

4. Have students help each other figure out how to create BOOKMARK to their Who Am I board. Hint: if you helped younger students bookmark the class web page, at least some of them will remember how you did it!

5. Show students how to select and COPY the url to their Who AM I board (or let them figure it out if they are grades 4+). Have them SEND it to YOU or paste it onto a class wiki page. They can SEND via email, iMessage, a Google form for homework turn-in links— prepared by you ahead of time, or even a contact me link on your class web page. (Think ahead: How will you have them “turn in” links to their completed work throughout the year? Have them learn that method NOW!)

Steps 6-8 are good solve-it-yourself tasks for grades 7+ or those who are more savvy. If your students are not there yet, stop after step 5 and share the links YOURSELF on the class web page for them to discuss and “match” in small groups tomorrow.

If this sounds like a LOT… ask your ed tech coach or savvy colleague for help or work with together a colleague to create the teacher web page instructions, etc. You CAN do it — and so can your kids!! You do NOT need to personally know how to do everything on every device. Learn together. Your kids will learn more about learning by watching you learn than by listening to any directions!