Think Like a Teacher

I posted about flipping the way we, as teachers, focus our thinking through our subdivided subjects and need to consider a more connected view of learning for our students’ sake. I admit that Swap Week may be a pipe dream,  but I thought of a couple more possibilities to connect our own teaching expertise with what is happening down the locker-lined hall and out there in the real world where people never think in “subjects.”

Just ask. In an elementary classroom where kids are more likely to have the same teacher for social studies that they have for math, it could be fairly easy. But how often do we stop and ask,” What could you say about the explorers we just read about that might fit in our math class?” Silence. “Is there anything we learned in math recently that the explorers might have used?”  “Yeah… adding up the miles.” Bingo. When the concepts are relatively simple, the connections are simpler. Just ask.

A middle school teacher may not know what kids are studying in other subjects. Just ask. Now that kids are accustomed to points for grades, offer extra credit for any connection they can explain between what you are discussing in class and something else they learned in another class. If a student can explain a connection out loud, 5 points. If he/she writes about it, 10 points. Who knows who will learn more: the students or the teacher.  We know time is sacred, so once the kids get in the habit of sharing their own connections, make a Connections graffiti wall so you don’t always have to stop class. Add a connections section to your class wiki. 5 points, 10 points… isn’t it worth it to reward student-made flips? Just ask.

In high school, it gets trickier. The concepts seem so distant. How can we possibly connect Hamlet and oxidation/reduction reactions? Analogies. If a student can explain her idea using an analogy from another subject, 10 points. If he can make you, the English teacher, understand the concept from chemistry class to you via Hamlet, 15 points! At the end of every test, just ask: What character (concept/function/process) from this unit connects in your mind to something you  recently learned in another class? Explain.

The greatest challenge: the faculty room. It might take a happy hour at the local pub to start this, but just ask. What connection to my subject can you find in your subject? An adult beverage bonus for the best suggestion from the group. Just ask. You might even learn from that science (or art or math) teacher. Imagine that.

Try this creative mind game:  What if everyone — past and present — had a hard wired Twitter account sharing their thoughts. Who would you “follow”?

My first impulse is to go for Leonardo DaVinci or Vincent Van Gogh or Claude Monet or  Shakespeare or David Macaulay of The Way Things Work fame. I simply want to listen to their thoughts because I so admire them all. But these folks had avenues to express their most distilled thinking. Perhaps there are more productive ways to use Twitter-brain-listening.

How about today’s politicians? Could we make more informed decisions about our votes if  their tweeting thoughts were unedited and unmediated? I find the idea a bit frightening, but maybe I could follow for a day or two to solidify my voting decisions.

I would love to use this imaginary tool to simply learn. I would crash Tweetdeck and never do much of anything else. Of course, I’d be tempted to DM back with my retorts and questions: D wshakespeare R U sure 2b or not 2b is the ?

I think the better curiosity might be to follow the Twitter mindstream emanating from that student with crossed arms, closed eyes, and/or no homework. These students are not really trying to “hide” their thoughts, just veil them behind a socially patterned signal system. Yesterday I discovered a secret “tweet” from a student who posted a finished infographic assignment on a class wiki a few months ago. This student had resisted the whole idea of infographics in my colleague’s class but by the end of the year had decided that making infographics was the coolest way to learn. His teacher and I roared aloud to discover that he had named one of his midyear assignment files “stupidinfographic.jpg”  That was his DM to his teacher. With the magic Twitterminder, we might not have missed it.

I can hear you cringing now, ” I would not want to hear all the thoughts that are flying in my classroom.” I wouldn’t either, but wouldn’t it be  a learning experience to set a Tweetdeck column to our class hashtag and hear the thoughts for just a little while? Talk about formative assessment!

Happy summer to many. Take this creative mindgame to the beach with you.

No idea is unique. The difference is what we do with our dandelion-down thoughts that fly by while we are doing other things. Most of us ignore them. Maybe we should be showing our students the simple step of wetting a finger to catch fleeting ideas before they escape. The wet finger is the difference that innovators share. While temporarily stuck to the tip of a moistened finger, that downy seed is ours for a moment to do with what we wish. We might carefully plant it to watch it grow.  We might simply allow it to dry and blow away again. But once it is gone, it belongs to anyone and no one.

A week ago, I mused in a post about a new way to “track” what we learn in a post-post-secondary education world. A few weeks earlier, I posted about the trade-offs we make, giving our privacy to Google. My musings were certainly not unique. Within the last day or two, I have read about a potentially new way to preserve privacy — even from Google — and a start-up that hopes to containerize what we learn from open sources of “education.”  My fleeting, dandelion-down ideas most certainly did not implant themselves so quickly into others’ blossoming flower pots, but we all know how ubiquitous dandelions are! Someone else had these same ideas and took the time to wet a finger.

In our classrooms, we cannot see the dandelion down blowing about all those heads. In our society, often we mistake dandelions for weeds. But we secretly love to see the first dandelions come up in spring, a sign of new life and a warm summer to come.  We need to ask about the ideas our students allow to escape — or leave at home because school does not value them. As we let fly our own new ideas, we need to pause, wet-fingered, to publicly give them a chance in front of our students. We need to think aloud about them and model capturing them into blog posts or idea bins or sketchbooks or voice bubbles or — something. Not every idea is worth keeping, but none of us can decide that in the short time it takes for them to fly away.

If we have one great, untapped resource, it is all the ideas that fly away from our classrooms, ignored. STEM education is supposed to promote innovation, but ANY classroom can. Have you caught any dandelion down today?

I have never protected my privacy so fiercely that no one could learn about me. On the contrary, I value my professional digital footprint. When I Google myself, I see thousands of results, and I am OK with that. It’s even OK that the ads on Facebook seem to know I frequent certain online vendors or like to swim.  Seems harmless enough.

Recently, however, the OK2Ask®  team at TeachersFirst has been developing a new professional development offering, Web Worries: What teachers should know about online behavior. That got me thinking about what advice I would give to teachers trying to separate personal and professional personnas online. About the same time, Google announced upcoming changes to its Terms of Use. These two related events spurred me to think further about the tradeoffs teachers make when using online tools, establishing memberships, and generally “sharing” our thoughts, bookmarks, creations, and lives online.

The real tradeoff is not about giving up privacy in order to be social. It is about trading  privacy for time. Each steals from the other, in a nasty currency exchange. If we, as teachers, choose to use the timesaving tools that help us learn, teach, or communicate with parents, students,  and colleagues, we pay with our privacy. If we use iGoogle, Google Reader, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube, or Gmail accounts, the data about what we say and do there is open to cross-pollination about us in an aggregate form that Google does not fully explain.  It may not be personal, but it is based on the personal. If we work diligently to protect our privacy, we spend extra time — not only to cloak our identities, but possibly in using inefficient means to accomplish the same necessary tasks. Having tools that talk to each other, posting information on one tool and allowing access for use of that info by another tool, saves us a lot of time.  But the web of our information means that we are more easily traceable, searchable, and less private. It becomes more and more difficult to check to be sure we have not slipped up and allowed our personal lives to ooze into our professional personnas or vice versa. Simply monitoring the cross-pollination of our data by swarms of technology bees takes time. Aggravating the privacy trade-off is the fact that time is a teacher’s most precious commodity — beyond her family’s love and her paycheck.

I present this not as a problem-solution scenario, but as food for thought.  We need  not “solve” the privacy/time tradeoff. Rather, we should be aware of it.  As who we are becomes a gestalt in a virtual cloud, the one thing we still hold as our own is the ability to think, question, and decide. Decide how much privacy you are willing to pay to save time. Decide which times of your life are too precious to relinquish to the screen. It is no coincidence that the expression says we “spend” time.  The exchange rate for privacy is still up in the air cloud.

When an Apple falls from the Cupertino tree, the world listens to the earthquake and reports each aftershock. In the ramp-up to an anticipated Apple “event,” the predicto-blogs and tech columnists crank out preshocks. Edtechers from every basket, including Apple core-owners, Apple picker-enviers, and rotten Apple sighters, all stop and pay attention. This week was no exception. Predictions of Apple’s Thursday  “event” at New York’s Guggenheim tallied over 4000 Google News results 20 hours before the event. By the time you read this, that number could easily exceed 10,000. Exciting but sad.

What if we and our students anticipated school as an “event” as widely discussed. What if the buzz about what we’d be learning were a topic for bloggers, consumers of learning, and every basket of self-proclaimed “expert”? Wouldn’t it be nice if just the kids in our classes generated as much excitement about what was going to happen Thursday at 10 am?

What if we asked our students: What will happen next Thursday at ten? What do you predict? What do you really wish it would be? Knowing what you know as a seasoned school-goer, what will you tell your audience to expect? Could you possibly shape the “event” simply through your predictions?

As teachers, how will we react to what they say, especially if they are brutally honest and predict something as unprecedented as peanut butter and jelly? Are we willing to allow some of their more unique or intriguing prophecies to come true? Are we willing to let our students make their own visions happen? Are we willing to act on their responses to, “What do YOU think?” It certainly is worth asking them to play the role of expert prognosticators. Try that as a writing/thinking prompt this week, if you dare.

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.

If  our students are the digital natives, and policymaking powerful are the arriving settlers in the New Digital World,  what kind of feast are we celebrating this Thanksgiving?

After a long year (or decade) of trying to understand each other and make peace about what learning really is, are we finally sitting around the same table to celebrate a bountiful harvest? As some spokespeople from the Old World seem to be wavering about  using exclusively test-driven methods, we see signs that some have come to appreciate alternate ways of harvesting learning. The corn of this New Digital World is the creating/sharing web. Look at the bountiful spread on the table this Thanksgiving. We truly have much to give thanks for:

• Free tools for teachers and students. Beyond the freemium munchies, we actually have heaping servings of wikispaces and Edmodo and so many dishes we cannot fit them on the table, some without advertising garnish.
• Mashed up potatoes of every kind. The Goo(d)gle Earth has brought forth quite a harvest.
• The centerpiece: A turkey we all agree IS a turkey and need not weigh and measure to tell that is ready. At least for today we can call it learning without measuring its precise statistics. Breathe in the aroma of learning.

Oh yes, the cranberry sauce: the teachers. Without cranberries, the feast lacks color and the catalyst to so many tastes.

May this feast continue and become a tradition. We would have reason to give thanks for a long time.

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.

For most of my 27 years in the classroom, I taught gifted students. I was the “gifted program specialist” whom these children trusted to provide their weekly respite from ordinary school. It was a privilege to learn from them and later to see what became of them. They did not all become doctors or lawyers or college professors. Few became rich. Some have suffered and wandered and have not yet found a happy medium between functioning around other people and the intellectual play they so enjoy. There are few I do not remember in detail from my time knowing them as elementary and middle school students. Among the hundreds (maybe a couple thousand?), there were perhaps a score who brought me up short with their vision. I looked forward to the days when they would bound (or shuffle) through the door of my borrowed, “itinerant” classroom space.

As Steve Jobs passed away this week, I wondered where his teachers are. Surely there are some still alive who watched this adopted son of a working class couple through elementary and middle school. I wonder: how did he articulate his vision as a young man? I am guessing he had some tough times on the playground and in the cafeteria. I am guessing he irritated more than one  straight-arrow teacher who found his opinions inappropriate coming from a young mouth. I wonder whether he was the one who read and absorbed quietly, then tinkered in the garage, or whether he blurted out unthinkable mental connections to peers (and adults) who did not understand. Surely, Steve Jobs was what I call “severely and profoundly gifted.”

As a teacher, I love to mentally rewind adults into what I hypothesize they might have been like as a child.  I never really research or verify my musings. I do enjoy thinking about little people I have known and unrelated adults, playing a mental matching game with no correct answers. I just enjoy flipping over the two cards: one child, one adult, and questioning in my mind whether this could be the precursor to that.

I have no matching child card for Steve Jobs, though I think I have some partial matches in my Former Student deck. But somewhere there is an aged teacher or two who knew this man as a boy. I envy them.

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.