Think Like a Teacher

I know a five year old boy. He will graduate from high school in 2025, assuming we still have high schools. With all the changes occurring in technology,  funding, and public education policy, who dares to predict what this five year old will see during his K-12 years. (Arguably, education’s slow pace of adaptation could mean we will see very little change!) Each year, Beloit College publishes a mindset list for college faculty about the incoming freshman class. What would be on the mindset  list of today’s five year old? — and what dare we predict may be his mindset in 2025? I venture some wild predictions, knowing full well that they are likely to be laughable long before this five year old is even out of elementary school. My musings are formatted:

2012 – mindset of today’s five year old : 2025 (or another year) – related prediction

Here we go:

2012 -all interfaces are touchable or talkable : 2025 – I just think it and it happens or explains why it cannot happen.

2012 -I swipe away what I don’t like : 2025 – I see, hear, or experience only what I DO like.

2012 – Maps talk : 2018 – There is no such thing as “map skills.” Direction and location are experienced, never represented in 2D.

2012 – Words talk when I touch them: 2025 – Text constantly changes/evolves as I “read” and adapts to my thoughts about what it says

2012 – My fingers change how things look : 2025 – My eyes and mind change how things look.

2012 – I “play a level” to move ahead : 2020 – My level is always a perfect challenge match for me, even at school.

2012 – I can repeat a level if I want to find all the magic coins and tricks : 2017 Levels change so when I return, I must learn something new.

2012 – Books and apps talk : 2015 –  I talk back, and it responds.

2012 – Mom and Dad are “connected” to something via gadgets all the time : 2017 – I am connected to ALL devices from my own device ALL the time — even at school.

2012 – I control the backseat movie, the app, the game :  2020 – I control the start and stop of school.

2012 – My preschool classmates “graduate” with me : 2025 – My “class” has constantly changing membership, and I belong to cohorts for dozens of places, times, interests, and ages.

To be continued…

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.

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!

Flashcards and sticky notes, and quizzes, oh my!

We see a lot of web tools at TeachersFirst. If a tool is free and we think it will be useful for students and teachers, we review it. Lately I have seen so many variations on sites to make quizzes, flashcards, and sticky notes, I am beginning to feel guilty even sharing them.  It’s almost as bad as passing out printable worksheets over and over and over.  I don’t want any teacher to think that “integrating technology” means nothing more than using an online quiz or flashcards for assessment or practice. Yes, these tools have a place (everyone needs to start somewhere), but they are no closer to harnessing the true power of technology than tying a horse to pull your car.
When cars first appeared, no one knew the impact they would have. No one thought of drive thrus or suburban sprawl or  minivans and carpools. Automobiles were “horseless carriages” that happened to go farther and faster,  replacing hay with gasoline. When user-creation tools on the web appeared, friendly and entrepreneurial folks found ways for web tools to simulate favorite classroom routines: flashcards, homework, quizzes, etc. Yes, they are more efficient, more easily shared, collaborative, and even “like” able. But they are still horseless carriages.

What gets me excited are the tools and resources that become activities I have never seen — and am itching to try! I want tools that make learning go, “Ooooooo!” As one of my colleagues said about today’s drill and kill environment, “We used to play more.” As we enter summer, I am on a mission to find more easy-to-use tools that go “Ooooooo” and are not simply electronic versions of what I did in school decades ago. I gravitate to the visual tools for creating and sharing, like Jux (once known as Jux.io). These tools take me, the creator,  into an edge-to-edge visual space where I can show what ideas look like, juxtapose things, contrast or relate images, text, and more. A more basic tool that fits the bill is this simple tool from Critical Layouts that creates virtual picture cubes. Imagine the higher level thinking of creating a six image cube and asking what these images have in common, a la Guess the Google. Or challenging students to build their own cube of  six images — including text — as a political ad or a depiction of the factors that lead to the Great Depression or today’s financial crisis. Or have them show what lures them into a their personal learning passion.

My learning passion is thinking of creative ways to use anything that I find and finding things that make me think in creative ways. Join me in making this the summer where learning goes, “Oooooo!”

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.

Ask a teacher about his/her parents, and quite often you hear about a family of teachers. I focus on one of my teacher-parents this Mothers Day.

What I learned from my mom the teacher:

1. “Proper” English. I still remember being corrected for using the word kids:  ” They are not baby goats.”  And I knew how to mentally “test” for subject vs object (I/me) before grade 3. My brother and me NEVER did anything, but my brother and I did.

2. Play with messy things. Even at age 87, she still finds new hobbies so she can play with messy stuff. Lately, it’s making bead jewelry, a true challenge for arthritic fingers. There was the homemade Easter egg phase which we politely called “chocolate turds.” If I introduced her to Pinterest, her small apartment would be buried in messy things she wants to try.

3. Dress with personality. Striped and polkadot socks together. Anything “wild.” If you dress with personality, even middle schoolers will look at you once in a while. After all, middle schoolers have no sense of taste yet, so this “wild” teacher fits in perfectly. If you can’t show personality with clothes, make/wear “wild” jewelry (See item 2 above).

Click to see source

4. Read what you hear about and tell others what you read about. After discussing The Help with her dermatologist, he recommended a 500 page book about African Americans in the U.S. She bought it the next day. Whatever she hears about or read most recently is prime conversation — with me, with her table mates at dinner in her senior community, with the people at the grocery store. She breathes social learning.

5. School matters. The teachers matter more. First grade and eighth grade matter most. Our entire lives revolved around school. Any wonder that I do what I do today? My only regret is that I do not know what it feels like to grow up in a family where  school is not the core. I work hard to envision how life feels in most households where this is not the case.

6. Have a dog. It better be a cocker spaniel, but some others are tolerable. Dogs give you a chance to talk things through without argument and an excuse to go outside. Every child age 10 and up should have a dog so he/she learns to put someone else’s needs first.

7. Sing. I worry that the cuts in school music programs will mean that kids don’t sing anymore. Singing can be simple expression– brash and loud — or the trained compromise of blending into a unison voice with others. Both are important.

8. Faces tell all. Learning to read faces is more important than making them. Her face always told us when we had gone too far, made her laugh inside even though she was outwardly stern, or hit a nerve. I find face-reading one of my most valuable skills as a teacher, a parent, and a person.

9. Be a mentor. Even as an octogenarian, she shares what she knows but also has an uncanny ability to realize that things are not the same now as they were ten or fifty years ago.  She guides many with her wisdom without telling them what to do or retro-recommending outdated ideas: teenagers, college students, candidates for the clergy, activity directors, parents, anyone in a role where she can contribute expertise. Those of us who have been teaching a long time relish the chance to play this role with young teachers, former students, and others. If I can mentor without adherence to “the old days” as well as she does, I will be proud.

10. Tell people what you think. Yeah, I know. I take after my mother.

Happy Mothers Day to all.

I learn something from every ten minute Twitter dose I allow myself. Our students can, too. This week Twitter is The Great Debunker.

Debunk 1: Find a debunking tool

Yesterday I saw an intriguing tweet about Million Short, a search engine that removes the first million, most popular results for your search terms (also can be set to remove 100, 1000, etc.) Why bother? In a world full of SEO (search engine optimization) pros, the sites with money and geeks-on-staff rise to the top of Google. In fact, they can clog the top. Google uses more than just popularity to generate results, so Million Short is not exactly Google Minus. No one knows precisely how Google’s algorithm decides the creme de la creme, but there are people who study it and do nothing but help web sites get there. (Full disclosure: Yes, TeachersFirst does our non-profit best to reach the pinnacle page of search results, too.) The idea of an anti-SEO search engine appeals to the defiant, creative side of me. Million Short just might reveal some lesser known treasures — as well as some real junk — that do not make it into the top million.  Adding to the intrigue is the display of the sites that Million Short removed from the results and the ability to customize results using that list.

Million Short debunks Google’s ownership of what we should and should not see on the web. It also invites us to explore or debunk the sites that fall so far down the results. (Beyond a million!?  That would be page  100,000+ of Google results at ten per page!). As a teacher, I want to challenge students to flip the Million Short results both ways:

1. Look for reputable, valuable, creative  but lesser-known sites that fall well below the bar but could perhaps bring something unexpected to our Google-mediated world. Are there any hidden treasures here, trapped by their lack of SEO expertise?
2. Compare Million Short results to those at the pinnacle of Google. What is better about Google Goodness? Can you find evidence that these are more reputable, have less bias, are more up to date, etc?

Talk about a lesson in information literacy for the 21st century! Thanks, Twitter, for Infolit lesson #1.

Debunk 2: Tweet out your doubts

This morning, I saw a trio of tweets from @ransomtech (shown in reverse order):

Twitter sent me on a mission to help. A few moments later, I had thousands of search results all quoting from the same article, one without citation for the factoid in question in paragraph three. Then I found this and replied: 

Twitter did not actually do the debunking, but it gave @ransomtech a stream to send the tweet below within 30 minutes of his initial inquiry. In the process, Twitter shared a major debunk of an unattributed, oft-cited factoid:

Twitter could do the same for our students. Let them use a class account to tweet out their critical thinking and ask for help finding evidence. Thanks, Twitter, for Infolit lesson #2.

As one who runs a web site and offers free services to teachers, I am bombarded by offers from social network marketing companies. Everyone wants to make a pitch via social networks. Get people to “like” you on Facebook, pin you on Pinterest, comment about you on blogs, tweet you to the heavens, and generally fill digital space with noise about you. And it does work. Sales come from social networks. Of course, TeachersFirst isn’t selling anything, but we are always trying to get the word out so teachers benefit from timesaving and thought-provoking ideas from our Thinking Teachers®.

When I look for more than a few minutes at the many networks I belong to (conservatively in the hundreds) and even at some comments left on TeachersFirst resources, I see the same pattern. Thinly veiled impostors are creating their own digital fauxprints to hawk the wares of commercial clients. Others simply play the role of something they are not, in order to lure users to new web startups or build the traffic on another site.  How many of the “members” of social networks are actually what they say they are?

I am not talking about cyber stalkers claiming to be teenagers in order to lure our kids into unhealthy relationships. I am talking about self-sculpted digital “experts” and frequent commenters. Spammers are trapped by Akismet and similar tools, but others spend their days creating and maintaining infomercial identities. This would make a fascinating digital (and ethical) exercise for our students (and ourselves as students of the digital world). I’d love to try this challenge with a class or two.

Digital Footprints and Fauxprints

Choose a site where users leave frequent comments. You might choose a popular technology blog, entertainment blog, newspaper site (if open access), food/restaurant review site, Ning or other “community” related to an interest you have, or even a shopping site such as Amazon. Explore some frequent commenters: how many comments have they left? What kind of profile information can you find about them? Can you find the same username on a related or competitor site that also has social features? What evidence can you find that this user might be the same person?  Create a collection of comments by this persona along with the questions they raise for you. You may wonder whether this person has a political agenda, a history of bad experiences, or some other motivation for his/her comments and posts.

Now the big question: Is there any evidence that this persona is, perhaps, a fictitious identity creating a “faux print” to accomplish a certain task? For example, does he/she always send you to see another site that is selling something? Or is he/she trying to generate ad revenue from site traffic (hits)?  Is it possible that this persona is not what he/she pretends to be? Create a digital presentation in support of your fauxprint hypothesis.

Variation: Conduct a class fauxprint scavenger hunt on ONE large site such as Amazon or the Washington Post ( I would have said New York Times, but they charge for access). See how many obvious sales-pitch or agenda-pushing identities you can find during one class period.  What evidence can you show that they may be false identities, hired for a purpose? Award a digital Fauxprint Finder badge to the student with the most, most creative, or most discerning observations.

If you have ever done this or a similar activity, please share it (and a link to any results). I doubt I am the first to wonder about this. I promise to approve REAL comments!

I occasionally play a minor but useful role among my adult peers. I am the Grammar Police…or the Comma Patrol. Of course, I delighted to read Fanfare for the Comma Man in the New York Times this week. I enjoy helping people sculpt messages so their readers will not furrow foreheads from fuzziness. I don’t delight in correcting my friends, but am willing to contribute my expertise when asked.  In return, my colleagues and friends relish catching my frequent typos as they laugh at my unconventional keyboarding. I try not to embarrass myself with egregious typos, and they try not to give me passages with grammar so terrible it abuses my willingness. We each offer our best efforts, then trade expertise to make them even better.

As the Grammar Police, I need to stay up to date the rules. As the NYT article points out, comma rules vary with the style guide — much as traffic laws vary by state. So acting as Comma Patrol or Grammar Police requires ongoing learning. I have to know where to look for the latest on commas or usage or vocabulary. Expertise requires ongoing diligence.

We expect our students to develop expertise. Standards demand it, and so do the Big Tests. We do not do as well at teaching them two real world corollaries of expertise: trading and ongoing diligence.

We artificially set them up to “trade” expertise. We put them in small groups for projects but we don’t help them discover real expertise of value in each member of the group. Instead we “assign roles” or have them draw lots. In the real world,  adults discover the expertise of our friends and colleagues. Outside of school, kids do too. Somehow when we enter the classroom we often forget to facilitate the same real discovery process. So there is no real “trading” of something they value. To let them find value and trade, we need to offer more choice of products/tasks. That Lego ability might come in handy. We know that teachers teach in their own preferred way of learning, and we typically assign projects that draw on our own best expertise. Ask your students what they can offer in trade.

Curriculum assumes that once our students have developed an expertise, they move on. Rarely do students seize responsibility to maintain expertise so they can be valued as real experts. The curriculum spirals past the topic again in a year or two, so students need not seek sources to stay up to date. They wait to be pushed through it all again at the next level. They are not really the experts. We tell them what comes next.

In my friend’s high school bio class, the students recently completed another round of infographics (here and here), this time with a partner. They chose the partner– most likely because he/she was a friend. But this time their expertise really showed through. They have refined their visual communication skills and science concepts quite a bit since September. The infographics they made this time show both trading and ongoing diligence. Most likely, it is the repeated opportunity to develop and trade expertise that made this last round of projects noticeably better. I am better at being the Grammar Police because I use, trade, and update the skills often. We need to allow our students the same real enjoyment of becoming experts.

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?