Think Like a Teacher

As Thanksgiving approaches, I thought it appropriate to talk about the blessings of educational technology for which we should all be thankful.

I talked with several teachers this week about what concerns them most as they plan a technology-infused activity or project with their students. As part of an OK2Ask online professional development “snack session” TeachersFirst conducted, we asked teachers, both preservice and experienced, what challenges they encounter in these activities.

The sampling of attendees in these online sessions came was a non-scientific one, comprised of about 25 preservice folks: teacher-interns, undergrad and graduate level teacher certification candidates,  and about 25 current classroom teachers.  The results knocked me down with a wave of deja vu. Almost every teacher currently in the classroom emphasized concern over availability and reliability of the hardware and Internet connection needed to do the activity. The 25 newbies voiced similar concern along with general management and planning issues.

When I moved full time into a role as an instructional technology specialist/technology integrator about ten years ago, this was the cry I heard from teachers. Before that, when I was just another teacher trying to convince fellow teachers to try using the Internet, the cry was the same.  Has nothing changed? Even in schools blessed with better-than-average facilities, the demand is higher, so the barriers grow proportionately. Will we ever get past the wall of “I can’t get the (reliable) computer time I need”? Is this barrier real or perceived? Has this complaint become a habit, or do teachers still have trouble with the Internet going down mid-class? My experience was that if a lesson”failed” once, it took ten times the effort to convince that teacher to try again. And I can’t say that blame them. It is a nightmare to have thirty eighth graders off task while you trouble-shoot the wireless or make up new directions on the fly because the Internet is glitchy. And you end up planning two lessons: the ideal and the back-up.

So where are the blessings here? In the last ten years, the students have come to the rescue. We are blessed with kids who can help figure things out. We are blessed that the demand has grown to use technology in the schools. We are blessed that bandwidth has improved dramatically,  even in poorer schools, but so has demand.  With every blessing comes another barrier. When a Humpty Dumpty of a lesson idea falls down, we have better tools to rebuild him, but he will probably fall off his new and improved wall again and again. We can rebuild our bionic Humpty Dumpty over and over. New barrier, new fall, new blessing. Teaching really hasn’t changed. We just have faster-evolving blessings and barriers these days.

For the past 18 months or so, I have been a big fan of a certain web 2.0 tool that allowed students to create online books that could be viewed interactively and shared by URL. In a big email push this past week, they revised their user agreement. I read it carefuly, but even my skeptical eye did not catch the fact that they had removed the capability to see the book interactively unless you are actually logged into that “personal” account. No longer can teachers have students create books and share them electronically with family and friends at no cost. No longer can teachers create interactive ways for students to understand new content. No longer can all the teachers to whom we have “plugged” this tool use it with their classes in any functional way.

Some of the other changes related to content ownership are even more disturbing, but this one is the deal breaker right up front. If it is not free, TeachersFirst cannot review and recommend it. The sad thing is that I thought their business model MIGHT actually work: provide the tool for free, but ask parents and teachers to pay if they wanted a printed copy of the book. In an ordinary economy, it should have worked. Seeing your child’s (or grandchild’s) clever writing would be enough for parents to shell out the bucks. The school library or a teacher  might select the very best books created by a class for actual printing and permanent display on school shelves. Even in an era where reading has become more and more electronic and less tactile, people can be overcome by the urge to make a moment in a child’s life “permanent.” It should have worked.

But the economy strikes again. So we will be removing mention of this once-amazing tool for scaffolded or open writing experiences from over 80 reviews on TeachersFirst. Instead of recommending that students create online books, we will recommend another content-authoring tool…until that one dies, too. Let’s hope the economy improves before it sucks all creativity out of learning. There are enough forces at work trying to do just that. Economics should not be one of them.

This is the time of year when weather fronts spawn nasty thunderstorms or stall out over my part of the world, sending gray-green clouds across  a calm lake, whipping up whitecaps in five minutes like one of those television chefs creating meringue. At the same time I hear from teacher-friends about how they have “had it.” They are stressed, can’t sleep, want to resign every activity that has brought them joy, and just can’t be very nice to each other. I call it “crabby season.” As the final weeks of school stall over them, they spin off storms of their own, whipping up waves over what would have been a pebble-drop in January and turning gray-green from their own exhaustion.

But there are good things that come of thunderstorms and unstable weather: the grass really gets growing, and the annual flowers so tender at planting are suddenly three times the size. The release of that “pressure system” explodes into summer’s best growth, both for the plants and for the teachers. There are high winds for a short while that kick up the white caps, but — in surprisingly short time — the waters calm. The silver maple leaves turn back right-side-out and flutter calmly where they had been bashing into each other a few moments before.

Teachers often ignore TeachersFirst for about three weeks while the winds (and their crabbiness) subside. The exact timing varies, depending on their school calendar. Soon they turn themselves back right-side-out and find green growth that lasts throughout a long, hot summer. After mid-July, they are back, prowling through new beds of ideas, admiring new blossoms and tossing together summer thinking-salads. Many of them have other jobs, but these are often a sort of brain-refreshing Miracle Gro to their real gardens of thought. Somehow the crabby season seems to disappear as if it never happened.

If your hallway seems filled with the crabbiness, close your eyes and remember that  these storms pass quickly. Join me on the covered porch to watch the thunder and lightning across the lake, knowing how beautiful the garden will be tomorrow.

I talked this morning with a representative from a university where I earned a graduate degree, and he asked me to describe my dream scenario for an event I would like to see happen on their campus, something that would follow my passion. Always willing to brainstorm and dream on a moment’s notice, I spun a scenario on the spot, and I continue to allow the idea to incubate. So here is how it looks so far (incubation time: 2 hours, ten minutes). Feel free to add to the dream. Of course, this might someday become a reality, so please don’t rip off my ideas without at least talking to me first. Think of this as Creative Commons with attribution and limited distribution for ideas (I know…you can’t copyright an idea, anyway…).

When/where: one week, summer — sometime (indefinite year), on the university campus but simultaneously via virtual experience from anywhere on the web

Who: a combination of classroom teachers (K-12), teachers-to-be, articulate high school and middle school kids, maybe some kids involved in on-campus summer programs for K-12 kids, people from TeachersFirst, people (ANY level) who infuse technology well in their teaching and learning, anyone who wants to join in online

What: A replicable “Infusion Project.” Modeled loosely after the National Writer’s Project, teachers come to learn together. The special feature of this project: they collaborate and learn alongside kids who could be their students, other teachers, and quasi-experts: people who are excited, experienced, articulate, and supportive about effective use of technology as a tool for learning. In a non-threatening environment, teachers can learn about tools and learning from students who are comfortable with the tools and eager to use them. The experienced “experts” can share and support other teachers who are just feeling out new ways to teach (and learn). In small groups of mixed expertise, the project can use good theory and practical knowledge and experience to let new ideas explode into the curriculum of local teachers and those at a distance. Groups would include: a K-12 student (or two), a teacher who wants to learn, an “expert” (teacher who has had some success), a teacher-to-be,  and one or more other teachers who join in virtually. That’s as far as I have gotten, but I am thinking about how we could structure the tasks and exchanges so the whole  experienced in each group is greater than the parts and how the same experience could be replicated all over the world.

How: I need to think more about this part… money, stakeholders, politics, all that fun stuff.

Why: Here is a start on a bulleted stream-of consciousness (is that an oxymoron or what?) of reasons so far…

• Kids are comfortable with the tools but can benefit from hearing how teachers make decisions about teaching….and they can contribute their “side” of these decisions.
• Putting different points of view on ways to learn together can force all to talk about the “why” as well as the “how”
• Teachers uncomfortable with “looking stupid” might be willing to learn from students who are not in their own classes
• Including people from other locations allows the spread of ideas and injectsideas outside the local experience
• Creating a model that blends F2F and virtual collaboration will let teachers experience it wihtout being forced to plan it themselves

and more…

But I need to get back to today’s Tasks. I will let this one incubate a bit more (total incubation time now a little over three hours). Feel free to add to the dream.

Apologies for no new posts recently. Family-member health and wellness trumped everything for a bit, but things are back on track for now…and so I have time to post.

I did something new and risky last week and the week before. I ran the first few sessions of TeachersFirst’s OK2Ask: free, online, self-directed professional development sessions for teachers. I learned at least as much as the attendees did. And I am left with more questions.

The questions:

How bad is it not to be perfect when sharing in an online venue with total strangers? Does it make TeachersFirst “look bad” if I admit that the tools (in this case Elluminate) are new to me as a presenter? Is this any different from what teachers do every day  when they risk trying a new way of teaching or a new tool to make learning more personal and all-encompassing for the LEARNERS?  Isn’t it good that I model a willingness to make mistakes publicly? Granted, I did practice a lot and play with the tools over and over. But the second session was ALWAYS better than the first. Was it wrong to allow myself to do less than “nail it” the first time?

Geez I hope not.

What I learned:

Teachers are supportive, eager learners and cheerleaders, even to total strangers whom they cannot see. I knew this. I have seen it over and over for years. But to see teachers willing to get excited about small discoveries and to tell total strangers about them via text chat in a virtual “room” is very cool. Most of those involved had never done  a session like this, and they dove right in. And some came back the next week.

Nothing I did was that unusual. People have been trying out online teaching and learning for several years. There is loads of how-to wisdom out there on “best practices” in online learning. I read a lot of it. I play with the tools and imagine scenarios as I swim laps at 6 am (or lie awake at 4 am). The bottom line, IMHO,  is that the learning, online or other, goes best when we do it together. This is just as much fun as the first few classes I taught as a brand new teacher decades ago. Yes, I said FUN. I just hope my fellow learners keep on coming.

The greatest luxury I have in this job since leaving the classroom is permission to play. After 27 years of completely scheduled or overscheduled time, I can dedicate a morning to comparing tools in search of the ideal one for a given technology task. I can play at will and seek answers: on my own, from help screens, among online forums, or from my PLN (personal learning network). What a luxury to have “permission” to learn from play.

This week I spent several hours comparing different ways to deliver the upcoming OK2Ask sessions on TeachersFirst. I started with a desire to model entirely free tools that any teacher could use without TOO much trouble. I played with all sorts of freebies, all with jibberish names that are de rigeur these days. I embedded myself, recorded myself, shared myself, chatted with myself (on several computers at once, rolling my chair back and forth), gave myself tours, denied myself privileges, gave myself control (and took it away), took polls of myself, clicked myself, made innumerable profiles of myself, moderated myself, muted myself, dragged and dropped myself, tagged myself, explained myself, reverted myself, and even broadcast myself looking stupid as I played on Mogulus.com. (I guess that was “channeling” myself.) It was pretty funny when– for a bit — I could not figure out how to STOP channeling myself.

But I learned. And I found what I sought. In the process, I refined my search, defined my criteria, and even articulated them several times to  complete strangers. I was so glad to have permission to play and learn. And teacher-guilt made me feel bad that others are not allowed to do the same.

Our kids play this way all the time. They play with any available tool and toy. They may not be systematic, but they are comfortable. They know how to play. [At this point the early childhood people I work with would be yelling ,”Of COURSE they do. Play IS learning!]

As the OK2Ask sessions approach, I wonder if we should have named them “OK2Play” instead. I also wonder if teachers have forgotten how to play because they are simply never been given the time to do so.  I have a fundamental belief that teachers try to do the best they can for and with their students. They have been schooled in the Best Practices, research-based methods, etc. But I hope the denial of play time has not removed it from their repertoire.

I don’t really believe they have forgotten how because I have run innumerable inservice sessions where teachers have been as excited (and disruptive) as little kids as they have played with a newly-introduced technology.  I have always given them permission to play. This may not appear to be the most cost-effective, responsible, mature adult thing to do while being paid taxpayer dollars, but I would assert that these same teachers, give a meaningful mission such as I had in selecting a tool for Ok2Ask, would make permission to play into permission to learn. All it took was a focused goal.

I will find out in a couple of weeks whether my recent play time went between the goalposts or veered wildly out of bounds. Either way, I will learn from the experience.

As someone who works on a web site for teachers, I often stop to wonder about the disconnect between the way most adults think of education and the vision of 21st century learning that is growing as an invasive species amid the education establishment. For over three years I have been aware of the changes being promoted and adopted in forward-thinking schools and universities as they rethink what it means to be a 21st century learner/citizen.  But so many are completely unaware of this surge. Today I received an email with links to two videos — videos very much in the same vein as Karl Fisch’s watershed moment in 2006. Those who see these pause. Those who send them to me pause.  I watch and think, “This is what I have been trying to tell you about.” So I wrote back:

This is the core of what the edubloggers and online conference folks I “lurk” around have been saying for the past three years. The really frightening thing is how many teachers (the VAST majority) are completely oblivious to it.  They are so busy they don’t even notice (and is that their “fault”?).  TeachersFirst has taken the “infiltrate as a trusted source and instigate change” approach to opening some of their eyes. As we review many wonderful but “old school” drill-and-practice (20th century) web sites, we throw in 21st century approaches to going further, suggesting ways to ask students to take the initiative and design a review/practice activity of their own, look for local examples and document them, etc. The “in the classroom” portion of reviews has moved to “in the 21st century.”I am sure that in many cases the teachers see the suggestions and say, “I don’t have time for that” or “I don’t know how to do that” or –worse– “those tools are blocked in my school.” The teachers who take on the challenge are widening the gap between new and old, engaged and canned, active and passive, meaningful and “tested.” It makes me worry a lot about gaps that legislators and those over 40 are completely unaware of… that will make this economic crisis look puny in 30 years as the adult products of the testing era wander around, unable to discriminate between web-myth and reality because no one spent any time helping them evaluate and sift all that they have encountered (and created) on their own time while supposedly “learning” in school.

The most encouraging thing is that the grassroots teachers, students,  and profs who are making these videos (starting with Karl Fish of “Did You Know” fame) are getting better and better organized via the web. Those who want to know more have LOADS of company. The rest close their classroom doors and pull out the worksheets.

My editorial for today. Think I’ll paste this into my blog.

So here it is. Which side of the gap are you on? Can you be an invasive species?

How often do you, as an educator, have the chance to provide a vision for a new technology before it is even available?  Or contribute ideas for anything coming “down the pike”?

How often do industry innovators put learning first in their vision for a new technology?

Here is your chance.

The parent company of TeachersFirst , The Source for Learning, has just teamed with the National Educational Broadband Services Association (NEBSA) to create a competition that puts first things first: educator before techie, learning before “glitz.” The whole idea is to ask the innovative minds out there who constantly think up new ways to engage, inspire, motivate, lure, cajole, launch, fascinate, steer, elevate, redirect, hatch, etc. how they envision a technology that isn’t even readily available yet. This is a dreamers chance to learn and a learners chance to dream.

We pulled this competition together very quickly and, unfortunately, the entries are due rather quickly. I hope people will spread the word quickly, since the actual entry is NOT that complicated (500 words– a middle teacher says that much just getting the notebooks out or computers fired up!). What really excites me, though, is the very idea of asking the educators instead of telling them. A sharp teacher might even ask the KIDS for their ideas to make up the entry!

So if you read this blog..tell a friend. Twit it, blog it, email it, listserv it …even post it in the teachers room. This is YOUR chance. Dream big.

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The full text of the “announcement” I sent in email:

The Source for Learning Teams with NEBSA on Wireless Broadband Education Competition Two nonprofit organizations—both leaders in educational technology—have teamed to sponsor a contest that will explore exciting educational uses for the next revolutionary technology: wireless broadband. The Source for Learning, Inc. (www.sourceforlearning.org) and the National Educational Broadband Service Association (www.nebsa.org) have for years been instrumental in helping educators enhance teaching and learning through technology.  The Wireless Broadband Education Competition will create a showcase for innovative educational uses of one of the newest dimensions of the learning experience: mobility. High-quality wireless connectivity is coming soon, and it will have a major impact on education—“anytime/anywhere” learning. But how will it actually be used? Exciting possibilities are starting to emerge—imagine, for instance: 

•  A class goes to a field behind the school to research native animals and habitats. While there, with no wires needed, they use the web to learn more about what they find, and share the experience via live video feed with other classrooms—from the same school or from many schools, anywhere in the world.
• A few students visit a location—for instance a “wind farm” where clean energy is generated. Other classrooms watch the visit live; they ask questions in real time as the students meet an expert and see the workings of the site. The students upload the GPS coordinates of the site; that data is merged with Google Earth layers showing wind patterns and electric power needs, for a comprehensive understanding of the experience.
• Older, non-wired school buildings add fast Internet access from any room, with no wires and virtually no capital expense.
• Students use digital equipment to measure on-site water quality in real time from multiple locations without leaving their classrooms. 

To stimulate creative thinking about learning supported by this new technology, SFL and NEBSA announce a competition for U.S. educators (Pre-K – 16), asking them to use their imaginations about ways in which wireless broadband could support and enhance teaching and learning. Three Grand Prize winners will receive scholarships to present their proposals at the National EBS Association Annual Convention, which will be held in Boca Raton, Florida from February 23-25, 2009. Each of the winners’ schools will also receive a $200 reimbursement to cover related school substitute costs.  

Visit the competition site for full details: http://wirelessbroadbandeducation.com/. Phase One submissions are due November 1, 2008, via a simple online entry form.

TeachersFirst is fortunate to have a reviewer/contributor who is building a significant learning network among edubloggers, school reformers, and edtech proponents. Louise Maine not only was the focus of articles on wikis in the classroom in the current Edutopia, she will also be presenting for the K-12 Online Conference coming up in October. Louise’s level of involvement as part of a network of enthusiastic educators involved in edtech-as-part-of-ed-reform movement makes me both optimistic and concerned.  I wonder how many teachers even know about the opportunities for virtual conferences, online professional learning networks, and edublogs that spark discussion with thought-provoking reading. Wouldn’t it be great if we could both spread the word and have some means of tracking the spread?

Steve Hargaddon’s efforts at Classroom 2.0 provide one helpful stat: the number of members (11,474 as I write this) . The number of free edu-wikispaces surpassed 100K last week, another meaningful stat. But what do these numbers mean…and do most teachers know that the opportunities are virtually limitless?

I hope that this year’s K-12 Online conference will provide two things: a way to get a picture of the spread of virtual professional development and resultant CHANGE in education and more ideas for reaching the stressed and buried among teachers. While I do believe there is an obligation for teachers to seek new ideas and learn about new trends, I also know that the barriers for many are simply impossible. What will K-12 Onliners do to make the message virtually limitless?  Can we brainstorm efficient, clever ways to reach the teachers who suffer with unreliable infrastructure, resistant administration, untenable working conditions, and immense personal pressures?  Just as we talk about removing barriers for student success, we need to look at the big picture of teachers’ lives and help them access the virtually limitless opportunities being enjoyed by this energized* bunch.

*Louise and I have been emailing about energy and entropy as she plans her K-12 Online presentation. I have thoroughly enjoyed the dialog…and am spreading the energy here in honor of her efforts.

I just read a thought-provoking article on course blogging by Sarah Hurlburt, a college professor of foreign languages and literature. Her analysis of the issues swirling around setting up and evaluating the success of a classroom social blogosphere are dead on. It makes me sense a hollowness in attempting any use of web 2.0 without a strong basis in pedagogy and analysis of the intricate relationships defined and created by each tool. These tools really do require rethinking. We aren’t just shaping the soft clay of learning into differently-shaped vessels. When we use these tools, we throw the clay into a communal lump and let everyone have at it at once. And if no one ever even told us about the foibles of clay in the first place (cracks easily if not dried the right way, requires glaze to hold liquids, etc.), we as teachers are likely to end up with a useless –though possible pretty — BLOB. We at TeachersFirst (especially the Edge team) can review tools and place them in a context familiar to teachers and students, but we risk missing the point entirely in doing so.

Perhaps the real power of some tools lies outside of any known classroom context. And the classroom context one teacher knows is different from that another knows. The chemistry teacher is not a writing teacher. So, as Hurlburt points implies, the chem teacher would not know the pedagogy of writing that an English teacher or Writers’ Project fellow might find intuitive.

Blogs were tacitly tossed aside as “passé”  by many attending NECC this year, even though blogging was the hottest topic in 2006. I do not believe that this was because wikis or Second Life are so much better. I personally believe that writing is so high-level a constellation of processes that many never “get it.”  And many are intimidated by it. And if you don’t “get” writing, you’ll never be able to create a successful, authentically social blogging community.

Hurlburt’s analysis is from a post-secondary context. What if we took blogging down to the little ones where writing process is less encumbered by self-consciousness? If  ever there were an opportunity to build an extended writers’ response group, this would be it. Start with a bunch of third graders (they might have some keyboarding skills), and let them customize their blogs (Hurlburt is right about the personalization!). learn about response and revision as social creative processes, and build a supportive mini-blogosphere. I can’t think of a better way to lead kids into seeing the tools as extensions of themselves , helping them learn positive ways to interact in virtual spaces, and building their vocabulary about language and message before they venture into collaboration on a wiki or other, more complex social tool. (Of course, we’ll have to get the school to stop blocking blog tools…)

I suspect that those who learned to blog at age 8 would never stop. And wouldn’t that be a dream world: people able to express themselves instead of hitting each other? They might even be able to form a beautiful sculpture out of all that messy clay. I can dream. can’t I?