Think Like a Teacher

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.

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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.

This is the traditional time of year for charitable giving. We try to share our good fortune with those less fortunate. Then we make resolutions to be better people on the New Year. Some of us are fortunate enough to have strong ed tech skills (and/or tech bravado) and can easily be lulled into a sense of superiority as we help others throughout the year. The approaching New Year is the perfect time for us to pay our knowledge forward, but try to do so without the bravado that undermines our very help.

So I resolve in 2012 to improve the way I offer tech help: to help the tech-challenged in a way that enables and respects their ability to help themselves. This post is the first of two installments as I mull ways to improve my tech help offerings and follow through with my “pay it forward” resolution. May this warm up my muscles for edtech help to the needy while respecting dignity, frustrations, and phobias. Three empathy exercises come to mind. Each has happened to me in some form, and I learned from it. Perhaps you have some empathy exercises of your own.

Three EdTech Empathy Exercises

1. Phone techs
   Try giving computer directions over the phone — blind.  Select a task such as learning to put an attachment on email or save an attachment with a new name in a new folder inside at least three other folders. For extra variety, do this on an operating system you have not used for two years. The computer in use at the other end of the phone must be one you have never seen (no school district issued “models” allowed).  If you are seething after just a few instructions and begging just to see what is happening, that’s what your tech-challenged peer feels like every time you start giving directions about “click on this” or “minimize that.” Improve your empathy (and verbal directions)  further by extending this exercise to an octogenarian at the other end of the phone.
   
   
2. Why’s Guys
   Pretend you have a three year old with you at all times, asking, “Why?” Do not move forward to the next step until you answer the question — every time. If you forget to explain to your invisible three year old, you must restart the entire task but may never repeat the same explanation or analogy to explain “why?” you did that step.
3. Timed Tech Taboo
   Just as in the party game of the same name, try to avoid forbidden words. Appoint an independent (non-geek) judge to prepare you for a session with a tech-challenged person. Speak for five minutes about the tasks you will be doing with your needy case — without uttering any and all computer terms. Set the timer on your iPhone or Android. Every time you slip, restart the timer. How much concentration did it take to last for five minutes? That’s how hard your tech-challenged peer works to focus on the directions you rattle off  as he/she tries to keep up. If the task you plan to teach takes ten minutes, practice until you can achieve ten minutes on your timer. THEN approach the needy person and teach the task.

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.

A sixth grader in rural Pennsylvania — we’ll call her Hayley — is excited to have an assignment she can do online. Her new social studies teacher has asked her group to create a multimedia presentation explaining the impact of steam power on the economics of 19th century Pennsylvania. The group has two class periods to work together in school and must find the remaining time outside of class. Hayley is one of the 28%*

A second grader in urban anywhere– we’ll call him Sam — needs practice with sight words and phonics sounds. His parents are learning English and are very eager for their son to do well in school. Sam is one of the 3%*

Neither Hayley nor Sam has Internet access at home except for Hayley’s family cell phone.  Their teachers are very understanding and offer an extra 15 minutes during recess and a half hour before or after school for them to use a computer in the classroom, lab,  or library. Sometimes Hayley can even work on her project using the family phone, though she finds it more fun to try texting. The local public library also has a computer for students to use. Problem solved, right?

Now fast forward two or three years.  Sam is in fifth grade, and Hayley is in high school. Their teachers have had extensive inservice and have enthusiastically adopted new teaching strategies. Finally, the world of teaching and learning has moved into the 21st century. Hayley’s high school is encouraging teachers to use collaborative online tools which it has subscribed to, and Sam’s elementary teachers are pressing all students to write on their blogs at least once a week. In a given week, Hayley must complete a group science project, an English blog post, and submit examples of algebra use in the real world. Total online time needed outside of class: at least 5 hours. Sam struggles to word process his longer language arts assignments and spends every recess indoors. The public library has reduced its evening hours to Thursdays only and is never open on Sundays. To make matters worse, the library is a ten mile drive from Hayley’s home and a long bus ride for Sam’s mom and her three other children.

Sam’s parents try to share their new cell phone, but Sam and his siblings compete for a few minutes here or there. The phone is also their family lifeline for their dad’s odd jobs. Sam’s school faculty is considering eliminating online assignments, since so many students lack access. Scheduling the computer time for so many creative ideas and reinforcement activities is too much of a burden on teachers, and there is no one else to help. Sam and his school may simply be “left behind.” Total population of elementary kids needing computer time: 200, times three kids per family… and we have a problem.

Hayley’s school must decide whether to shift back to paper/pencil tasks for all or to ration teachers’ online assignments. There simply are not enough places for so many disconnected students to complete connected assignments. And the cable and phone companies have no plans to expand coverage in such a thinly populated rural area where there is no chance to make a profit. Total disconnected population of 250 times 5 hours each = 1250 needed hours of computer time per week.

Sam and Hayley are individual examples of a massive chasm forming beneath the surface of 21st century learning.  The “haves”  schools (those with a small number of disconnected students) move forward in technology adoption, professional development, and effective use of the tools for learning. The “have nots” (those with many disconnecteds and/or many assignments times fewer disconnecteds) are trying to keep up. Even if successful teacher PD wins over the rural teachers, the students of the “have not” schools are still doomed by their local infrastructure.

Small problems grow. Cracks get bigger. Is anyone watching the chasm beneath the feet of our best efforts?

* related info from T.H.E. Journal http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/1105/journal_201110/#/22/OnePage :

Thanks to my friend Ollie Dreon, a former teaching colleague turned teacher ed prof, for sharing a video from the Chronicle of Higher Ed on his blog a couple of weeks ago. We K-12 people don’t often read what the grown ups in higher ed are doing, but this one definitely translates to K-12 land. Ollie spans these two worlds well and models what teaching and learning should be for all of us.

The video in the Chronicle for Higher Ed post shares a Google Plus “hangout” of college students  talking about the ways their profs use technology well (and not so well). At the higher ed level, students can articulate what works for learning and what doesn’t. My question for K-12 teachers is this: Would you try this with your students? If you asked them to tell about the highs and lows of  technology use in your classroom, what would they say? Even kindergarteners remember seeing adults who are stressed. If the web site you wanted to share did not work, they remember that day — perhaps better than the concept they were supposed to be learning. Would you risk asking them to retell the tech highs and lows of Room 12?  My former middle schoolers reveled in the tech disasters I invited by trying to outsmart a brand new network by “sharing” files or having too many kids “sucking the bandwidth” in the fledgling days of classroom Internet connections. But I never asked them about the highs and lows of learning with technology in my classes. I wonder what they would have said about learning because of — or in spite of — the technology.

Certainly, today’s high school students could make a video much like this one. They are intellectually able to describe how they learn best or “when gadgets feel gimmicky or class time is wasted as instructors fumble with gear.” Would you take the risk to ask? The safest time would be to ask now, at the start of the school year, since they would be talking about some “other” teachers they had in the past and not about you–yet. What an amazing “getting to know you” revelation this would be in early September. Would you repeat it in May to find out how well you did?

It certainly would be a learning experience. If you do try it, please share what you discover.

My husband inherited his great grandfather’s wooden tool chest from pre-1900, filled with beautiful hand tools. The wooden surfaces of the brace and bit shine from hours of rubbing against carpenter’s palms as he built shelves and homes for doctors, businesses, and scores of names. Each of the jobs is carefully penciled into small notebooks tucked into the tool chest tray, seasoned with sawdust. When we pull out a tool, we never say, “It does this.” Instead, we imagine the places it has built, feel how it fits in our hands, and assume it can do anything we are brave enough to envision.

When I see a new tool on the web, even one so simple and “old fashioned” that it lingers from a previous millenium, I do not label its place or task. I  wonder about it just as I do the tools in that chest. Somehow, I always come up with more ideas than it offers for itself. Last week I looked at a review of Box Templates. This simple site offers printable patterns for folded boxes. Like a brace and bit, it has obvious uses. But what if… they could be templates for mystery boxes that students make about themselves as a “getting to know you” activity the first week of school? The outside could be decorated with words or images of significance to the student, the inside filled with small objects or symbols or slips of paper with favorite quotes or song lyrics or… What if we challenged students to make their own box templates for other box shapes? What if we invited students to create a 3D container representing a concept we are studying: government by the people or cells or energy or biodiversity? Some might even render it virtually in SketchUp. Others will need to touch it and crease the folds with their fingernails.

Box Templates is my brace and bit this week. The palms that smooth this brace and bit each bring new materials and new products. This tool does what? Anything.

As today’s budgets make us ponder each available tool a little longer,  we can enjoy the smell of sawdust and inscribe a few notes in our own idea notebooks. It’s just a matter of vision.

In “reading” through a fitful string of blog posts sparked by a tweet, I ran across this post about the changes to our reading habits due to technology. It actually struck such a chord of guilt — as I was about to skim and run — that I stopped to read the entire post. I am living what Patrick Kingsley describes:

our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information. Round-the-clock news feeds leave us hyperlinking from one article to the next – without necessarily engaging fully with any of the content; our reading is frequently interrupted by the ping of the latest email; and we are now absorbing short bursts of words on Twitter and Facebook more regularly than longer texts.

We know our students are even more likely to skim and run, since their standards for full web site attention are more demandingly fickle and their reading skills more spotty. As Jakob Nielsen points out:

Teens’ poor performance [at web site “success“]  is caused by three factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level.

So what does all this rather intriguing research tell me, aside from the fact that I am a true edtech readerwritergeek?  It makes me wonder:

How can we create incentives for Slow Reading?

An iPad zone with comfortable chairs might be the 21st century equivalent of the bean bags in the 1980s middle school media center where I once worked: comfy, inviting, and reading ready. But the physical space and gadgets do not make Slow Readers. The desire to stick with one article, post, or thread of thought long enough to see it through to a conclusion is what we are all missing.

What could make a teen stick with a thread of thought throughout an entire article and related discussions? It is much easier to toss the links into a class wiki or Diigo group after skimming two sentences, perhaps with a pithy comment.  Done. Next assignment, please.

I would like to try confronting some students with Nielsen’s analysis of teen site navigation. I would like to ask them whether his findings of 2005 are still true or more exaggerated today. I would like to share Kingsley’s post with the same group and ask them what they think. Of course, they’d have to READ both to be able to respond, and the only initial incentive might be a grade.  I really wonder what would happen if we confronted teens with these two posts to form framing questions for an entire semester in almost any course: social studies, English, even science:

What are your incentives for Slow Reading in today’s world? Where/how can it happen? Does it matter any more?

We might be surprised to hear what our kids have to say about all this.  Instead of telling them why they must Slow Read (for a test), ask them why they might want to. They might even create Slow Reading places and incentives of their own. How would that be for 21st century learning?

I met a great group of motivated, creative teachers in our OK2Ask ™ Guided Wiki Walk sessions this week. (OK2Ask ™ is a series of free, online professional development “snack sessions” for teachers offered by TeachersFirst. We use an online classroom space from Blackboard/Collaborate, formerly Elluminate.) The teachers were creating their first wikis or improving on ones they had recently begun.  This two meeting offering included time between for the teachers to work on their wikis, then return in 48 hours to learn more, share, and ask a million questions.

One group was so quick to learn and so gregarious, they quickly had their own backchannel running in the chat space, helping answer each other’s questions during demonstrations. They even asked if they could critique each others’ work on the second day. So we diverted widely from our original plans  and let them go. Their enthusiasm was EXCITING. Their critique was insightful and discriminating. They talked about pedagogy and practicality. They fed each other ideas. They did everything we want our students to do. These teachers who had never met– a probably never will — scored an #eduwin. Their students are getting the best of the best.

One of the conversations I especially enjoyed was about using templates in wikispaces to differentiate for different learners.  You can create a “template” wiki page, such as the skeleton for a student project, but you could also create several templates or options for different levels of project challenge. Students click to create a new page, select the template and — ta-da — their wiki project  is started. Right away, the chat buzzed about how to do this without appearing to single out one student over another. Should we perhaps offer all the various templates as options? Or perhaps name them with evens/odds that do not show a clear “level,” so it is easy to simply say, “Sam why don’t you try one of the even numbered templates.” We also talked about using a past student project as a sample or use it to create a template. You can click to create a new template “from” any page that already exists in that wiki, then edit the template as you wish. So if past students have generated unprecedented project options, you can add them to the bank of templates, perhaps stripping out the finished work to reveal the skeleton of a new project format.

As a teacher, I always fear offering a “sample”project. The teacher-pleasers make theirs identical. The perfectionists think they can ONLY do theirs the same way. The minimalists will never go further, and even creative kids often squelch the urge to do something different to conform to the model of school success. The helicopter parents compare their child’s work against the example and tweak it, thinking no one is looking.

Just as our OK2Ask™ session diverted from its original template thanks to participant input, I love the flexibility of any tool that allows projects and products to become springboards to unexpected, broader options. Thanks wikispaces and thanks to the teachers who continue to make OK2Ask™ a load of collaborative fun. #eduwin.

Do more with less. We keep hearing that. In school, as in any other workplace, it means adding more responsibilities to your already full plate.  It also means making supplies go further, doing without tech support (or waiting longer to get it), and having no money available for professional development. Even if you find a regional conference that addresses the very problems we are being asked to solve, you must pay for it yourself.

There is perhaps one silver lining to doing more with less. We get very good using the tools we do have.  And we don’t have to apologize for knowing only a tool or two for making online projects. If the school only pays for one, it is the one we will become expert at. If we as teachers must pay for online tool subscriptions for our own classes, we either stick with the inconveniences of the “freemium”  tools, beg for money from parents or PTO, or shell out the bucks to “do” with one tool.

Doing more with less time matters, too — more precisely, using less time to accomplish the most.  I want my students to move past the tech toybox stage and into the nitty-gritty thinking of creating and evaluating their own information. What if  a class were to simplify to a max of three tools?

As I prepare for an OK2Ask ™ session next month on three Editors’ Choice tools, I wonder which tools I would choose as my triad. I love Bookemon, Glogster, and Voicethread, but Google Earth is completely free. I think I would want a balanced triad: one very visual tool, one that is ideal for verbal/language, and one that offers a broad and perhaps unexpected perspective, such as the “world view” of Google Earth.

What couldn’t we do with these three? Concept maps we could do in a visual tool. Writing and sharing of words in a verbal tool, numbers and quantities we might have to represent in a real or symbolic context: applied in visuals or written in number sentences. We could use a visual tool to represent temporal concepts such as timelines. We could “place” events on the earth and in our hometowns using Google Earth. What other concepts have I missed? I haven’t though about things that require sound, though we could add sounds to our visuals, if we chose the right tool.

Doing more with FEWER may be a good way to create our own classroom taxonomy of priorities and content. Yes, we need to teach kids to choose the right tools, but don’t we also need to teach them to dig deeper and become expert with a tool repertoire? Think of the mental flexibility it will take to use one of the three to show what they know about a sonnet or mitosis or three branches of government. How could you use Google Earth to represented an underlying concept of our constitution? Hint: think analogies.

I’d love to know which triad other teachers would choose.