Every teacher dreams of Christmas gifts, and it’s not just sugarplums that dance in our heads. As edtech coaches, we often play the role of “gift givers,” especially during major rollouts. Of course, our “gifts” come with expectations and enticements — anything to leverage meaningful learning, emboldened and empowered by the tools of technology. So this Christmas season I thought it appropriate to imagine a tech-willing teacher’s Twelve Days of Edtech Coach Christmas:

On the first day of Christmas my tech coach gave to me: an iPad just for me.

On the second day of Christmas my tech coach gave to me: two creative colleagues and an iPad just for me.

On the third day of Christmas my tech coach gave to me: three freebie apps, two creative colleagues, and an iPad just for me.

On the fourth day of Christmas my tech coach gave to me: four helpful screencasts, three freebie apps, two creative colleagues, and an iPad just for me.

On the fifth day of Christmas my tech coach gave to me: five student geeks, four helpful screencasts, three freebie apps, two creative colleagues, and an iPad just for me.

On the sixth day of Christmas my tech coach gave to me: six kmz files, five student geeks, four helpful screencasts, three freebie apps, two creative colleagues, and an iPad just for me.

On the seventh day of Christmas my tech coach gave to me: seven YouTube channels, six kmz files, five student geeks, four helpful screencasts, three freebie apps, two creative colleagues, and an iPad just for me.

On the eighth day of Christmas my tech coach gave to me: eight Gigs cloud storage, seven YouTube channels, six kmz files, five student geeks, four helpful screencasts, three freebie apps, two creative colleagues, and an iPad just for me.

On the ninth day of Christmas my tech coach gave to me: nine PLN hashtags, eight Gigs cloud storage, seven YouTube channels, six kmz files, five student geeks, four helpful screencasts, three freebie apps, two creative colleagues, and an iPad just for me.

On the tenth day of Christmas my tech coach gave to me: ten Gmail subaccounts, nine PLN hashtags, eight Gigs cloud storage, seven YouTube channels, six kmz files, five student geeks, four helpful screencasts, three freebie apps, two creative colleagues, and an iPad just for me.

On the eleventh day of Christmas my tech coach gave to me: eleven Flipboard feeds, ten Gmail subaccounts, nine PLN hashtags, eight Gigs cloud storage, seven YouTube channels, six kmz files, five student geeks, four helpful screencasts, three freebie apps, two creative colleagues, and an iPad just for me.

On the twelfth day of Christmas my tech coach gave to me: twelve new twitter followers, eleven Flipboard feeds, ten Gmail subaccounts, nine PLN hashtags, eight Gigs cloud storage, seven YouTube channels, six kmz files, five student geeks, four helpful screencasts, three freebie apps, two creative colleagues, and an iPad just for me.

HoHoHo!

(See you after the holidays)

Wow.

I have worked face to face or side by side with at least 30,000 to 50,000 teachers in my career — at least if you count each teacher-year as “one.” That does not include the Thinking Teachers I encounter in my role as sort of  24/7 “edtech coach” via a free web service I am in charge of. Of those, I am privileged to know so many GREAT teachers, and yet every day I discover more. Sometimes I wonder why we don’t tag them in a global geocaching game for “Amazing Teacher Here- X marks the spot.” I read their blogs, I watch their students’ videos, I work together with them on an ISTE SIG, I meet them in OK2Ask online professional development sessions. I want to scream to the post-PISA media,”You guys, LOOK! These teachers are AMAZING! Did you see what that kid just did? Did you see what the teacher did to make it happen!?”

Wow.

So today I am thrilled and humbled to discover this blog among those named as finalists for the 1oth annual Edublog Awards.

Wow.

One of the real standouts among those 30-5o,ooo-teachers-I-have-known nominated me. I have thanked her by email, on Twitter, and now on this blog. I worked with her virtually for a couple of years before we actually met face to face. She is one of the teachers I point to, exclaiming, “You guys, LOOK! These teachers are AMAZING! Did you see what her bio class just did? Did you see what Louise Maine did to make it happen!?”

Thanks again, Louise.

I suggest that every teacher look at all the nominees. You, too, will say, “Wow” at the amazing things your fellow Thinking Teachers have to say and share. If, after losing yourself in the nominees,  you think this blog deserves a vote in the crowd-driven selection of “Best Individual Blog” from Edublog Awards, find Think Like a Teacher on the list here. Then follow these steps:

1. Click the up-vote arrow bottom-left of the post. A pop-up from List.ly (the voting tool) will appear.
2. Sign in to List.ly with your Twitter, LinkedIn,Facebook, or Google + account.
2*. You’ll need to provide your name and email if this is your first time using List.ly.
3. The window will disappear.
4. Click on the up-vote arrow one more time to cast your vote.

Wow.
Pass it on.

When learning works, it feels like a Super Bowl victory to a teacher. Unlike the Super Bowl, we receive no media hype, give no interviews, wear no ring, never have a sexy half time show, and certainly don’t make a profit on clever commercials. But we celebrate as best we can, and it feels GOOD. We WON! #eduwin!

Today I celebrate a BIG victory: MySciLife WORKS! And now we can share the report that proves it. Both the documented learning and the act of publishing the report are victories. Believe me, I am celebrating!

Key findings in the report:

• When asked to compare MySciLife to their experience with traditional methods of science instruction, most students replied that MySciLife helped them understand content, that they enjoyed the social interaction, and that MySciLife was fun and creative.
• Three out of four groups using MySciLife showed a statistically significant increase in students’ science content knowledge as compared to the control groups using traditional instruction.

The background:

Almost four years ago, three creative teachers got together and dreamed up MySciLife, an entry in the 2010 MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning competition. A few months later, we were finalists. Then we “lost.” We did not receive the funding. I blogged throughout the process and have shared more as the project moved ahead in new venues. Fast forward to 2012, and we had enough funding to conduct a limited research pilot of MySciLife with middle school science teachers, collecting data throughout the 2012-13 school year. We watched the dream unfold and shared it at the ISTE conference 2013.

Unlike the Super Bowl, the learning game does not end. As MySciLife moves well into its second year and a much-expanded control group study, the players are going without a huddle, eager to engage with each other inside MySciLife. The teachers meet for monthly collaboration where learning also happens. Unlike the Super Bowl, the “coaches” cooperate and share strategies. Unlike a football game, there are no losers. We share the triumph as we watch learning unfold.

Today feels like a Super Bowl victory for social media-based learning, and we won unopposed. Here’s to us!

I get lost in web resources that intrigue me, and I love the feeling. If there were one thing I could wish upon every child, it would be the experience of losing all track of time and place,  teleporting into an alternate era or experience where curiosity takes complete control. The time-travel hole that forms the central premise of Stephen King’s novel, November 22, 1963, is a perfect parallel to the timeless-learning experience I have when whirled into certain sites.

My current learning vortex is the JFK Library’s interactive, The President’s Desk. (How appropriate to time-travel just as Stephen King imagines, landing the oval office during JFK’s presidency.) As a big fan of West Wing and The American President  and a child of the 1960s, I am powerless to resist. I click and experience sounds and artifacts of the era. JFK makes a phone call in my ear. His diary shows where he was and when, and I follow him along. I am gone for hours. Every click makes me curious about the next one. I regret not having someone alongside me, since my impulse is to share, “Look at this! Remember phones like this? Listen to him talk about the sea from this scrimshaw thing. He’s here.”

Is it the lure of the Camelot fantasy that holds me at this desk? I think not. It is the layering of experience: a school child stunned to hear that the president has been shot, the touch of artifacts made real by sound and voice, the connections between what I knew, what I know, and what I want to know. Just weeks from now, we will pause to observe and struggle to explain that day 50 years ago to many who have no connection or recollection. But this virtual desk tips up like a floorboard, dropping us into a time and place where we wonder and touch and learn. If there were one thing I could wish upon every child, it would be this feeling, this experience — as often as possible and on whatever topic draws him/her as Kennedy was drawn to the sea (click on the scrimshaw to hear it).

This is a fable — of sorts.

After sharing the joy of figuring out a new tech toy for online professional development sessions, the tech geek (TG) and the edtech coach (ETC) stopped for a quick chat.

TG: Looks perfectly simple. Shouldn’t be any problems.

ETC: I wonder if the iOS app version looks the same.

TG: I’m sure it’s close enough.

ETC: Did we test to be sure the links in chat were clickable? We do send teachers off to explore things then come back to share a lot during these sessions. That gets them involved as learners.

TG: Who can’t figure out how to use a link?

ETC: IF the links are clickable, that’s great.

TG: They can copy/paste, can’t they?

ETC: I’ll have to test to be sure that the iOS copy handles are available inside the app chat box.

TG: I don’t have time to load an app just to check that.

ETC: I’d rather check now than start a session with people saying things don’t work. Do you know if the Android app looks like the web interface? Or the iOS version?

TG: You’ve gotta be kidding me.

ETC: I know some people have trouble using the little text selection handles to copy in iOS. And that’s if  the copy tool works at all in this app.

TG: Just show them how when they get to the session.

ETC: We aren’t screensharing from a tablet…. Wait, do you know how they enter a session if they are on the app version?

TG: No idea. They’ll figure it out.

ETC: Yeah, except for the ones who need professional development the MOST. This gives them an excuse not to try.

TG: They’ll get some kid to help.

ETC: I hope so. But this is after school.

TG: You’ve gotta be kidding me.

ETC: I’ll check both apps and give the hesitant teachers a few screenshots on our wiki — or email to them.

TG: You’ve gotta be kidding me.

ETC: I can see why they get frustrated when they didn’t even have the tablets to play with until the first week of school. I wish they’d take one home… Maybe I can host an online play session one evening and give them prizes for coming.

TG:  You’ve gotta be kidding me. You coddle them.

ETC: No, I respect them. I expect them to learn, but I know where they’re coming from. And every one of them is different. Like the kids in their classrooms.

TG: Kids aren’t that different. They’ll figure it out.

ETC: Glad you weren’t my teacher.

TG: Be a teacher?  You’ve gotta be kidding me.

————

Moral: Effective edtech coaching means constantly imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes. 

If you frequent this blog, you know that writing matters to me. As a teacher, I helped many a student improve his/her writing skills, even when the subject was not “English” or “Language Arts.” As a college prof helping educate teachers-to-be, I emphasized the importance of writing for a teacher’s professional presence, even in the short notes scribbled to go home in a backpack or in the short paragraph of directions at the start of an assignment. Today’s Common Core underscores writing across the curriculum as part of college and career readiness. If you cannot write, you are very limited in what you can accomplish. Even the carpenter who left notes during my basement  renovation had to write understandably so I knew what he was asking. So, yes, writing is a passion of mine. In this post I share two recent Featured Sites from TeachersFirst that sing out to me.

One focuses on poetry. Poetry, while not a life skill, certainly celebrates the power of a single, carefully selected word. Like the scarf that picks up the blue in your eyes or the bright orange sweat socks that define your persona as a tennis player, a single word can relate far more than its own meaning. A tool like Tranquillity  lets us play with poetry. Poems are infinite jigsaw puzzles of ideas: the piece with a green edge and one with a curly, jagged side fitting together after you flip them around until they make sense. Tranquility lets you play with words and shows the value of one word to fulfill a rhyme and hit the final note of your thought melody. Play with some words in Tranquillity. (This really should be an iPhone app to de-stress people waiting in lines!) Share it in a science class, and challenge students to write poems to explain Newton’s Laws or to tell the tale of oxidation/reduction in chemistry. Even self-described “tech nerds”  like those who created Tranquillity enjoy poetry.

The second, Slick Write, is my dream tool. I have been looking for this tool since I was fellow in the Capital Area Writing Project in the early 1990’s. I tested a simple piece of software back then that could tell a writer about such things as the number of prepositional phrases in a passage. Why bother?  A surfeit of prepositional phrases means you have weak or imprecise word choice. As a statistician would put it, conciseness of writing varies inversely with the number of prepositional phrases. (Take that, data mongers!). Slick Write also targets other writing foibles: passive voice, cliches, and much more. You can configure it to focus your writing self-analysis on one area at a time. (Sports coaches know the importance of focused correction in skill building.)

I like Slick Write I so much I’d like to politely share it with my adult friends and colleagues, especially those who… well, don’t get me started on the amount of passive voice I read. Try it secretly and see if it makes a difference in how you write.

—————Stop reading here if you don’t care about the example——————-

Slick Write analysis of the above: (I have bolded the things I wish to improve)

Words: 508
Function words: 217 (42.72%)
Adverbs: 22 (4.33%)
Pronouns: 66 (12.99%)
Uncommon words: 69 (13.58%)
Filter words: 9 (1.77%)

Teachers don’t brag. In fact, most teachers usually minimize their accomplishments by pointing out the shortcomings. When complimented on a really cool lesson or activity, the first thing they usually tell you is what went wrong or took too long or didn’t come out exactly as planned. After that, they tell you about the one student who didn’t finish or the parent who complained. If none of these problems occurred, the teacher will surely tell you what he/she needs to do to make it better next time or that it wasn’t really his/her idea in the first place. He/she saw it on… (TeachersFirst… or Pinterest?)

Declare victory! Share your student’s successes, however small they might seem to an outsider, via “What is your #eduwin?”  I have written about #eduwin before, but it bears repeating. And now there is even more reason to report an #eduwin.

If you have seen an #eduwin occur in a colleague’s (or your own child’s) classroom, now you have a chance to highlight that success and send that teacher where he/she belongs. You can nominate someone for an #eduwin award — a chance for that teacher to share the #eduwin at the Annual CUE conference in March, 2014 in Palm Springs, CA. (CUE is the California group of Computer-Using Educators, a strong and creative edtech bunch made up of teachers and edtech users/coaches like you.) You can declare the learning victory of students who “get it,” of a culminating or motivator project that sings, or of a small win over confusion… even something as small as kids who finally use there, their, and they’re correctly!

As October spins headlong toward Thanksgiving, help the rest of the world know,”There are amazing things happening in education every minute.” As the #eduwin site asks, “What did you see?”

You could be sending a very deserving (and self-effacing) teacher on a professional trip that will be his/her personal learning #eduwin! At the very least, you tried.

Teachers deal with the unexpected every day in every class. Somebody throws up, the fire alarm goes off, or the Internet goes down. If not something that obvious, perhaps half the students did not understand yesterday’s lesson or the copy machine broke down before you could run off the quiz. (Hope you aren’t using paper if you have 1:1 or BYOD computer access…) Maybe the entire cheerleading squad is released from class for pictures, and seven of them are in this class… so why start something new?

Those of us who work with teachers as edtech coaches deal with the unexpected compounded by glitchiness, personalities, and — in some cases — fear.  So whether we are planning for a rollout of new technology or collaborating on a lesson idea, we must plan for OOPS. As an edtech coach, we should plan for different kinds of OOPS:

1. Teacher changes mind about priorities, objective, or date of tech event we plan to support (possibly due to aforementioned fire alarm the day before).

2. Students show up without devices or without their materials to do the tech project you and the teacher so carefully planned.

3. Kids outsmart the school-supplied device and prevent it from functioning as expected.

4. Teacher gets nervous or backs down because he/she has not fully “mastered” tech tool/device.

5. Tech support forgets to unblock the web tool you requested 6 weeks ago for access from student log-ins.

6. Principal announces this is his/her day to observe, and teacher drops back to a traditional, safer lesson plan.

…and the list goes on. Generally speaking, the larger the project and the higher the stakes, the greater the chance of OOPS. Take the case of Los Angeles roll out of iPads for every student. Kids see a new device as a challenge to their intelligence and deviousness. More than any academic benchmark or inspirational teacher, a new device is  motivation to really think through the possibilities and to problem solve until you can break it and take control over that which the authorities have tried to block from your control.

A savvy tech coach or planner will therefore start with two essential test cases: a very savvy kid and a very skeptical teacher. Ask them to describe and simulate the worst possible case of OOPS with the project you have planned. What could break? Can you beat this? Then ask BOTH of them to tell you how they would prevent that scenario from happening. What can the student suggest to defeat his/her clever peers? What can that same student suggest to the teacher to avoid his/her feared pitfall? Think of the POWER that student will feel while actually aiding the “other side.” It’s like using a double agent to defeat the OOPS. Having taught the gifted kids, I can picture the pleasure they would take as double agents.  Maybe you can start an OOPS Team of student double agents dedicated to creating and defeating scenarios in a team-like competition. Make it a new student club?

It’s worth a shot. What’s the worst that can happen? Another OOPS?

So ends another week with me musing — and being somewhat serious.

New tech tools appear at an astounding rate. (If TeachersFirst had a dollar for every flashcard maker, quiz maker, or memory jogger we have seen –and reviewed — in the past seven or eight years, we’d be taking the entire review team on a Mediterranean cruise this fall.) These days, many web tools are loss leaders to get us to buy the $2.99 app version — even when the web version is still free! Whether we meet up with new tools on old fashioned computers or on our tablets and mobile devices, these encounters feel more and more like speed dating. As teachers or edtech coaches, each of us has our own approach to our potential tech “dates.” Find your speed dating style here (or comment with another approach):

What do you do first when you see a new tool (or app)?

• Look for and actually read the step by step directions
• Watch the first 15 seconds of the intro video
• Join, play, and defeat it
• Try to use it in a way it was not intended
• Try to break it
• See how pretty it looks before proceeding
• Wonder how they coded it
• Name the seventeen others you know that are so similar it doesn’t matter
• Flip its purpose on its head
• Begin a sample called “test”
• Make and send a funny sample project to a friend
• Think of a lesson where you could use it
• Add it to today’s lesson plans
• Look to see how much “free”  is inside its “freemium”
• Look for the teacher guide
• Look for standards correlations (really?)
• Look for Android/iOS app versions
• Read the terms of service
• Read the PRICING — first
• Look at all the examples to see what it is used for
• Check for obscene or inappropriate public examples and rule it out for school
• Walk away when it asks for your email
• Hypothesize how long it will last
• Wonder how long it will be before Google buys it up (or stomps it out)

As in speed dating, we each bring different expectations and seek different kinds of enjoyment from the encounter. What do enjoy most about these first encounters? (Some of these have scary analogies with dating)

• Figuring it out — and using it once
• Showing a friend
• Making someone laugh with it
• Comparing/contrasting it with similar tools
• Filing, bookmarking, or categorizing it
• Tweeting about it
• Laughing at the poorly translated English in the directions
• Matching it to tasks you do or need to do
• Adding it to your collection
• “Pinning” it
• Pondering whether it could be “the One” to change your life

Next time you face a new tool (probably sometime today), stop to think about your approach. Ask your students how they “meet up” with new tools. The conversations you may have about digital life could be pretty intriguing and branch into good discussions about digital citizenship and the role of technology in our lives.

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?