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.

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.

If all goes well, I will be moving this blog to a new “home” over the coming weekend.  The blog will disappear for a while, but hopefully I will be able to use more up to date blog tools after the transition. Like most people who live comfortably in an old house, I have been lazy about packing up and moving. I hope you will help with a “housewarming” for my new blog home after the weekend!

Happy New Year! (See my Geogreeting* to you)

This time of year, everyone offers carefully studied retrospectives,  the “Top Ten” this or that from the past year. I see so many amazing sites every year that I could never choose a top ten. Instead, I offer this random, personal collection — just some of the many visual, interactive sites that intrigued me for more than a moment during 2011, at least long enough to say, “WOW!”

TeachersFirst reviews them — so I don’t need to explain them further. My job lead me to find these WOWs among the 714 Featured Sites on TeachersFirst during 2011.  [Actually, one was featudurian late 2010, but it remains a Tip Top Fav of mine.] On any given day, I could close my eyes and click on a dozen or more from among the Featured Sites archives and experience the same “WOW!”

How fortunate I am to have a job where I experience WOW every week.

———————-

Random, personal  WOWs from 2011 – in alphabetical order. (The titles within reviews are links to WOW.)

60 sec recap (review) Definitely ad-heavy, but the concept is great. I once had a hilarious cassette tape of literature classics in two minutes, including Hamlet, but this is even better. Makes me want to create my own or do one with a group of gifted kiddos.

Exhibition Monet (review) Breathtaking. Steep in it.

Foldplay (review) Put anything in a visual container, even abstract concepts and experiences. This is the way I think.

Font de Music (review) Because music and words make poetry together.

Gettysburg Address (review) I live not far from Gettysburg and find this speech moves me more and more as I grow up. I think I finally am starting to get it.

Google Search stories (review) * actually from 2010, but an all time fav. I find myself imagining new stories while sitting in traffic or waiting rooms. This should be an app for my phone.

Information is beautiful (review) The title says it all.

Instagrok (review) I love learning new things, and Instagrok invites me in.

Newscred (review) Learn and read just what I want. To think I used to have to ride my bike two miles to experience this wave of knowledge in the stacks of the public library when I was a kid.

Spicy Nodes (review) As I have said many times, I am a visual person. Concepts = images. Cool.

TeacherWall (review) Morale booster! Not only do I see great teachers. I also feel our profession lifting up and taking me with it.

Virtualswim (review) OK. I like to swim. I think under water. This one is just for me. Aquaphobes, stay away.

Wondersay (review) Because message is about both words and visuals. See a poem.

Yulia Brodskaya (review) I love art, and visually rich sites lure me in for hours. This one is striking.

*The tool that made my greeting above is reviewed here.

TeAching is tech that has earned an “A.” I hope to improve my peer teaching performance to earn that “A.” Last week I wrote of my resolve to improve the way I share edtech expertise with tech-challenged teaching peers in 2012, to help the tech-challenged in a way that enables and respects their ability to help themselves. So I may actually stick to this resolution, I propose five simple “insteads” of respect:

Five Insteads to earn an A:
1. Instead of,  “It’s easy, let me show you,”  I will try, “You have the skills to do that. I remember you showed me … (fill in something my new techie did the last time we met).”

2. Instead of,  “You haven’t tried X?”  I will try, “I just heard about X, but I haven’t had time to even look at it. Can we figure it out together”

3. Instead of touching the mouse, I will keep my hands in my pockets and try to contain my twitching. When I am about to blurt something out, I will offer to fetch us each a cup of coffee so my new techie can play on his/her own. No coffee? I’ll go to the rest room! I will leave for a few minutes so the new techie can explore without a witness. But I’ll be sure to return soon enough to prevent meltdown.

4. Instead of, “Yeah, I’ve done that,” I’ll confide the list of tech tasks I haven’t learned yet or can’t figure out. This will also apply when a fellow edtech guru boasts about a new tool. I will admit what I do not know.

5. Instead of, “Just let your students show you,” I’ll  ask, “Which of your students needs the boost of knowing something the rest of the class does not? Maybe the three of us can do it together first.”

I hope that these “insteads” will encourage a new wave of teAcher techies who have earned the golden A as tech evangelists who support, encourage, and empower. We owe it that respect to our hardworking teaching peers as we pay our expertise forward.

We are all aware of our digital footprints these days, and we caution our students to be aware of the potential future impact of their digital droppings. I wonder, however, about the opposite problem:  the footprints we leave in sands to wash away with changing tides. How can we, as children or adults, plan and preserve the digital archive we want without having to reformat or create new versions every 24 months or so? If a student today wants to be able to retrace his/her own path, what shoes should he/she wear on the trail? How can we avoid having to reformat our lives to fit ever changing media so we can preserve a digital footpath to be retraced in the future?

In the past couple of months, I have helped my husband sift through family archive photo albums as we emptied out an apartment of a loved one who had passed away. I have mourned the changes to the recently aired version of A Charlie Brown Christmas (an heirloom of a sort in this family) as compared to the original 1965 version. I realized that no two are alike: the 1965 version I have memorized (and sang in), the VHS tape for which we longer have a player, the recently remastered BluRay version, and the current on-air version. I even tried  the iTunes version…all different. Stashed around our technojunkyard house we have LP’s, CDs, MP3s, Hi-8 video tapes, VHS tapes, DVDs, BluRays, 3 1/2 inch floppies, USB sticks, zip disks, negatives, paper prints, scans, digpix, SD cards, compact flash cards, iCloud files, Win files, Mac files, Facebook pages, Picasa pages, Google+ photos, and — yes — some very old photo albums from the days when photography was new, hanging precariously from black corners that have lost their adhesive.

I want my four year old grandson to learn to build a digital pathway instead of leaving random droppings. Unless he/we constantly revisit(s), reformat(s), and re-collect(s) the footprints of his life, we will never have the same kind of treasury that once resided in smelly old photo albums. And as we revisit, we will be tempted to change the versions just a bit. I wonder about the ethics of being a revisionist vs an archivist. And selecting the tools will never be a “final answer,” but simply a prediction of today’s high and low tide media. This is the other side of digital footprints. Something more to teach and learn.

This is a story of powerful teacher collaboration. It is the story of TeachersFirst. A comment by a colleague yesterday made me stop and think about what an amazing, living organism TeachersFirst really is, thanks to care and feeding of an amazing team of teachers. Teachersfirst may not be as sophisticated at the human body, but look what this team of teacher-leaders has wrought:

A database of  over 13,000 TEACHER-reviewed resources

Each review (example) begins with and passes under the eyes of at least three different teachers and includes title, creator, description, classroom use ideas from real, thinking teachers who know what it’s like in the jungle out there,  subjects, grades, tips to address the many safety/school policy concerns of web 2.0 tools, information on plug ins and media types, tags to connect to related resources. This is teacher-friendly information designed to help fellow teachers quickly find and use what other teachers recommend. This is collaboration.

Scores of teacher-tested units, lessons, and interactive “ready to go” activities, all TeachersFirst “exclusives”:

Each lesson, unit, or interactive piece, such as The Interactive Raven and Dates That Matter, is created by a classroom teacher (or two), often after that teacher tested, adapted, tweaked, improved, and  used the activity/lesson/unit for years in the classroom. These lessons work. If J.D. Power and Associates rated them, they’d rank #1 in reliability. Over half a million teachers and students used the Interactive Raven last month. The TeachersFirst organism thrives on sharing, just as humans thrive on social interaction.

Regenerating and growing, all the time:

Every week, these teachers collaborate to add 25-40 new reviewed resources. They select a dozen or more as “Featured Sites.” Our standards for what is a “feature” keeps rising as we collaborate in looking at all that the web has to offer,  filtering our excitement for that innovation through practical realities of the classroom and the needs of today’s students. Every week there is a new Brain Twister, Weekly Poll, Across the World Once a Week question,  TeachersFirst Update, editor’s blog post (here) by yours truly, and often a new Special Topics collection. Growing, growing. Every living organism continues growing.

Healing when we are sick or “break something”:

The Thinking Teachers know that wellness is important, including web site wellness. We have a trusted team of primary care and specialist geeks who listen as we describe symptoms and ailments. Even the nasty effects of predators attacking servers are held at bay. Fortunately, we heal quickly, usually within an hour. This organism is also fortunate to have guaranteed health care (funding) and nurturing from our generous, non-profit “parent,” The Source for Learning. (And we keep our healthcare costs under control!)

Surviving and thriving through adolescence:

TeachersFirst, age 13 and a half, recently passed through the challenges of adolescence as we matured to TeachersFirst 3.0 in summer, 2011. Like any middle schooler, we still allow vestiges of our childhood to show through occasionally, but we have  matured remarkably, thanks to the joint efforts of a team of Thinking Teachers from California to Florida, from Colorado to Australia. Teachersfirst 3.0 is a twenty-first century teen, strapping and strong. Like any young adult, we still need positive reinforcement and a few kind words to keep us going, so we relish the messages we receive through Twitter and “contact us” emails.

Our stem cells are teacher-leaders:

The DNA of TeachersFirst lies in its team of teacher leaders. Typing and cross-matching to infuse new content is careful and deliberate. It takes over 80 candidates to match a new member to our review team. But the shared DNA is that of Thinking Teachers, the ones you admire and listen to because they are willing to share and grow alongside their peers and their students.

Healthy and agile:

Like any healthy organism, TeachersFirst adapts. None of us knows what will be the next big thing in technology or the next mandate or pendulum swing in education. But the power of teacher collaboration that grew TeachersFirst is fit and prepared for whatever comes next — together:

Thinking Teachers  – Teaching Thinkers.

iPad, laptop, or paper? The decision is worse than choosing between carry-on only and baggage fee.

Do I do my pre-meeting prep based on the others who will be there, the weight and portability of my various devices, my profound paper hatred, the great Flash/iOS divide, the weather forecast, or what’s  digitally “in” ?

I am traveling 2500+ miles next week to meet some folks I have never spoken with face to face. I am accustomed to having everything at my electronic fingertips all the time: wifi connection, synched iPhone and iPad, and so many accounts “remembered” on my MacBook Pro that I would struggle to name the most important. (At least I have a consistent personal password policy so I can usually log in once I know I have an account on a given web tool.)  I will be traveling with two colleagues: a pure paper person and a willing, Blackberry-toting office person. I am a teacher turned teachertechiewritercreativeperson. We are a diverse trio.
In a dream world, I’d tote along nothing but the iPhone and iPad, and my shoulder would be happy for the lighter weight. If it rains, I can simply zip the bag. But I don’t know what I will encounter at our meetings or in the car/airport/hotel on the way. Will we need to connect to a projector? Will there be free wifi — or would 3G be better? Will I need to demo something that requires Flash? Will I need my Diigo links (OK, I know that PW and can get to it from anything). How quickly can I pull up whatever I might be asked to share…and how much does speed matter? Will I be judged by the way I store and retrieve? If I carry paper (yuck) to help out my one colleague, will it make me less credible in the eyes of the techies I am meeting for the first time?

How much does my digital tote bag matter in my professional credibility?

Is there digital oneupmanship in today’s business environment? I feel like a teenager preparing for a dance. I just have to guess what everyone else will be wearing.

I came across this wonderful Sunni Brown video today about the power of doodling in formulating and refining ideas. As a perennial doodler, I feel validated. As a teacher, I feel challenged. How do I usually react to a student who is doodling in class? (How do you?) Do I ever celebrate the doodle or even ask about it? I tend to use the old favorite “ignore it if it is not disturbing anyone” tactic when I see elaborate scribbles where student notes are supposed to be.  A less doodle-tolerant teacher might say that doodle laissez-faire will allow the student to discover the logical consequences of his/her inattention. As a more visual/artistic person, I secretly delight in seeing original cartoon figures and 3D graffiti in notebook or handout margins. But I honestly have never celebrated them as visual representations of thinking related to what we are discussing in class.

I wonder whether the student who draws would be willing/able to share about what he was thinking, perhaps on an illustrated blog post or Voicethread. I wonder what would happen if we posted the images on a class wiki, or collected many on Wallwisher or a bulletin board and asked others  for their reactions. I also wonder whether seemingly UNrelated doodles actually would help the artist retell or explain a concept that was in his/her auditory space while he/she was drawing.

Fast forward to a faculty meeting (or dreaded, day-long inservice). My agenda pages are always filled with doodles. When I pull them from the file folder months later, I look at the doodles and their relationship to the text, and I remember what I was thinking. This video says we each progress through various developmental steps as doodlers,  though at different rates. Surely the doodle-to-reenact-thinking  level is a one we would like our students to achieve. But first we must allow and respect the doodle, and make it clear that we expect doodlaccountability. Leave a little more white space. Ask about doodle meaning. Respect and share the doodle. Maybe even frame a few. Oh, and start paying attention to what you do(odle). We all might learn something.

I admit it; I was  “jock” in high school.  Actually, I went to an all girls school before Title IX (don’t start doing the math now…). It was OK to be athletic when there were no boys around. I was a good student, too– lots of academic accolades and all that– but my classmates remember me most for being captain of this or that and for getting out of the scary Algebra II teacher’s classes as many afternoons as possible to leave early for games. I did a lot of other activities, from glee club to yearbook, but 3 varsity sports a year really defined my reputation.  As a college freshman, I continued on to the first women’s field hockey and lacrosse teams at a formerly all-male college. I was not afraid to try anything, from sports to being a T.A. for a revered prof. Those who know me now would say that all of this “fits” with what they know of me today. My high school extracurriculars did help define who I became and how I approach adult life.

So I read with great interest on Education Next about the Academic Value of Non-Academics. Unlike many articles that correlate extracurriculars to student/life success, this analysis does a great job of critically analyzing whether either is a cause or effect. It probes into what makes a student decide to participate in an afterschool activity. What makes him/her stick with it? The research about the impact of extracurriculars intrigues me. As budgets shave away at students’ opportunities to participate, I worry. If I had been asked to pay for my activities, would I have chosen to try almost anything? Probably not. There was no extra money in my two-teacher family. My scholarship to the all-girls school was as a “professional courtesy,” and I attended school with many whose families had a hundred times more money. But I had confidence and an identity among them, in part because of being a “jock.” We played on the same team. We lost together (a lot).

EdNext’s article is on the right track in suggesting that the extra adult contact of extracurriculars could be a major factor in why participating students are more successful. But so is the extra contact and social parity of simply being in the same activity with other students you might not otherwise socialize with. We talk a lot now about how social learning really is. Employers want collaborators. Extracurriculars are often a much better suited environment to learn collaboration than a forced “group” project. Being a jock is not a frill. It is part of the same broadbased, personal, and ubiquitous learning that we advocate as “21st century.” I hope the kids who attend schools where “jocks” and bandmembers are being asked to pay up (or even lose the chance to have a team or band altogether) can find another way to play.