Two convergences are humming inside my head like songs I cannot shake. I attended SocialEdCon Saturday and the ISTE 2012 opening keynote yesterday. At both the talk was about helping kids find their passion. The hum in my head was still strong — asking me to connect to the post I just did about today’s five year old. He will have the chance to pursue his passion when “left to his own devices.” I’ll just let the personal passion song keep playing in my head as I continue through ISTE.
The second inside song (a clever harmony?) has lyrics about MePortfolios (a distinction form ePortfolios). EPortfolios are for the teacher or principal or department of ed. Meportfolios are for the audience I want to share them with. My five year old will have a MePortfolio, portable, personalized, and completely adaptable to the audience of choice.
Listen to kids talk about a tough project after it is over. You will hear complaints about how long it took, how they wish they had started sooner, how they did not really understand “what the teacher wanted,” how they wish they had read the rubric more carefully before they started, how they wish they had done a little bit each day. Resist the urge to say “I told you so,” and you will hear pride seeping through: pride that they eventually figured it out, pride that they know how to approach such a project the next time, pride that they can even offer advice to other students who “get” you as a teacher next year.
This is the time of year to let the kids talk — and for us, as teachers, to listen. My colleague, Louise Maine, took time during the final days of school to have her students talk about the many infographics they made this year in her ninth grade bio classes (the classes who provide fodder for our upcoming ISTE presentation). This Voicethread illustrates one student infographic as the student comments resonate with deep knowledge. They reflect and think about thinking and learning. What more could we ask? [The comments all appear to be from one Voicethread member because they used the teacher’s log in]:
Shelley Wright recently suggested that we should “flip” Bloom’s Taxonomy to make Creating the first level we approach with our students. She explains that in a science class, “It makes their brain[s] try to fill in the gaps, and the more churn a brain experiences, the more likely it’s going to retain information.” Listen to Louise’s kids in the Voiethread, and you will hear them talk about exactly that experience.
I am not sure we need to have a single, flipped graphic analogy to represent Bloom’s as Shelley suggests. I advocate for something more like the layers in an image editing program such as Photoshop or Fireworks. The layers palette allows me to move Creating to the top or to put it behind Analyzing for a while as I edit my learning (or my students edit their own). Bloom’s levels/layers can be rearranged as needed. They can even be “hidden” temporarily in order to focus on one. But none of them ever really goes away. Click and they reappear, ready to drag up to the top or down into the background. As the students in this Voicethread reflect, they discuss nitty gritty vocabulary terms (Understanding). They talk about visual communication and tools (Creating). Another layer– of affective knowledge– is also present: time skills, work habits, etc.
If we listen, we can hear the layers of learning. What a joy at the end of the school year! #eduwin!
My current obsession: infographics. So what’s fueling this?
Louise Maine (aka @hurricanemaine) and I have worked on our ISTE 2012 presentation since last fall, a year long journey using infographics in her ninth grade bio class. This is also evolving into several new pages of content for TeachersFirst (TBA). I find myself grabbing more and more great infographic examples, tools, and discussions: what makes a “good” infographic, how they can structure and assess learning, and who is creating good ones out there in marketing land.
I have always liked infographics, and I don’t think it is because I am a visual/design person. I think it is more because infographics are like an all-you-can-eat hors d’oeuvres buffet. JP Rangaswami gave a terrific TED talk, Information is Food, where he explained his gustatory analogy. His question about whether information will start coming with nutritional labeling to indicate its “fact” ( fat?) percentage is particularly appropriate and witty. Funny how my mental analogy independently went to infographics also something edible. Imagine how validated I felt to find the TED video!
At the infographic hors d’oeuvre buffet, you can sample small bits of information, take an extra serving of the stuff you like, and walk past the chicken livers. You can stop to savor one bit of data like a foodie or enjoy taking all of it in. None of the servings is so large that it fills you up, but you might overstuff yourself if you try to absorb too many databits. (Try the Cool Infographics blog to overindulge.) I think we like infographics because they don’t commit us to a full meal, but we can satisfy our cravings.
I do wonder how many of us actually read everything in an infographic, especially the text-heavy ones like this. I much prefer the less textual ones like this. I would guess that the typical read-rate is about 20%. That’s about what we try at an appetizer buffet, right? It’s probably a good thing that none of us receives either a nutrition profile or a comprehension rating on what we ingest from infographics. We simply enjoy the tastes.
From a dusty basement into the palm of my hand comes the story of TeachersFirst, snapped into a plastic case. As one usually impatient to have “archives” of anything important in electronic format, I will attempt to share the feel of this artifact with you virtually. What I cannot convey is the stunning moment of impact I felt seeing what this puzzle has to say about teachers and teaching during the fourteen years since it announced the 1998 mission of TeachersFirst.
The question, “Puzzled by the Internet?” on the top of the box says it all. Many of today’s teachers were not in the classroom in 1998 — except possibly as students. It was a time when only about half of the teachers I knew had ever used Google and many were innocently hooked on AOL. Web pages were text-heavy, and no one anticipated Twitter or blogs. How all this Internet stuff was supposed to fit into the world of chalk, worksheets, and VCRs was a mystery. The people at the Network for Instructional Television (NITV), now called The Source for Learning, talked to teachers and found out that they wanted help navigating and understanding how this new-ish thing called the Internet could help them teach (and learn). So TeachersFirst happened.
I hear you laughing now. When I saw the box, I laughed out loud. I remembered that TeachersFirst had given away these cute (and challenging) tangram-type puzzles, but somehow I had forgotten the question that had been printed on the top. This little puzzle is Teaching 1998 in a time capsule. I think I had better keep it in my desk drawer as a reminder of all that has happened since.
My mind fast-forwards to 2012. We would need a new promotional giveaway every three to six months of we want to snap the mysteries of changing technologies into a box with a cute question on top. Even the messages of last summer are too old, though teachers quietly confide that they haven’t had time to “catch up” yet! I wonder what we will be laughing at in 2015. One thing is for sure: we should back up our blogs and keep archives of what we say today. Maybe we should bury digital time capsules of the giveaways at ISTE 2012. If nothing else, it will be good for humor therapy, assuming the file formats are even legible.
Happy 14th birthday, TeachersFirst.
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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.
