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.

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.

I know you. I have known you since you were 7 (or 8 or 10). You can act like an idiot, dress like a hooker, talk like a sailor, and saunter through these school halls flexing your freshly-sprouted muscles, but I knew you when you sat on the floor for story time and whispered in my ear that there really is no Santa Claus.

I am excited for you. I see you questioning who you are and trying out new identities. I see you beginning to dream of a world beyond school. You ask me questions about that world that I cannot answer, but we can explore them together. As long as we who pretend to control your life make our classes seem relevant to that world, you humor us by participating. Occasionally, you let us see that you actually like learning.

Does it matter that I knew you before grade 6? It helps. Could a teacher new to you know you as well? Probably. Does the very act of transition to this middle school  threaten your progress just by removing you from the K-5 learning home where you sat on the floor?  There is a study that says it hurts your academic progress to move to this middle school instead of remaining in the same building where you abandoned Santa Claus. I am fortunate that my job as teacher of gifted spans grades 2-8 in several buildings. So I know you, no matter which grades are in the building around us.

I would argue that it is relationship that defines your learning experience. You need someone who knows you. You need someone who knows that today’s cocktail party outfit is just a trial balloon of your sexuality (and who will tell you when it is not appropriate for school). On the inside, you are still the person who pretended to be a cat for the class play and who likes to read Shel Silverstein poems. You are also the mathematician who showed me a different way to solve that word problem and the computer geek who figured out html as a hobby.

You are the lucky one. You achieve because you have adults who know you and notice you. You have history with us. Your parents who know us, too. No matter how much the experts study and mine the data about you and your classmates, I know you. I cannot wait to see what you become long after our time together 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.

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 :

I came across this wonderful Sunni Brown video today about the power of doodling in formulating and refining ideas. As a perennial doodler, I feel validated. As a teacher, I feel challenged. How do I usually react to a student who is doodling in class? (How do you?) Do I ever celebrate the doodle or even ask about it? I tend to use the old favorite “ignore it if it is not disturbing anyone” tactic when I see elaborate scribbles where student notes are supposed to be.  A less doodle-tolerant teacher might say that doodle laissez-faire will allow the student to discover the logical consequences of his/her inattention. As a more visual/artistic person, I secretly delight in seeing original cartoon figures and 3D graffiti in notebook or handout margins. But I honestly have never celebrated them as visual representations of thinking related to what we are discussing in class.

I wonder whether the student who draws would be willing/able to share about what he was thinking, perhaps on an illustrated blog post or Voicethread. I wonder what would happen if we posted the images on a class wiki, or collected many on Wallwisher or a bulletin board and asked others  for their reactions. I also wonder whether seemingly UNrelated doodles actually would help the artist retell or explain a concept that was in his/her auditory space while he/she was drawing.

Fast forward to a faculty meeting (or dreaded, day-long inservice). My agenda pages are always filled with doodles. When I pull them from the file folder months later, I look at the doodles and their relationship to the text, and I remember what I was thinking. This video says we each progress through various developmental steps as doodlers,  though at different rates. Surely the doodle-to-reenact-thinking  level is a one we would like our students to achieve. But first we must allow and respect the doodle, and make it clear that we expect doodlaccountability. Leave a little more white space. Ask about doodle meaning. Respect and share the doodle. Maybe even frame a few. Oh, and start paying attention to what you do(odle). We all might learn something.

I admit it; I was  “jock” in high school.  Actually, I went to an all girls school before Title IX (don’t start doing the math now…). It was OK to be athletic when there were no boys around. I was a good student, too– lots of academic accolades and all that– but my classmates remember me most for being captain of this or that and for getting out of the scary Algebra II teacher’s classes as many afternoons as possible to leave early for games. I did a lot of other activities, from glee club to yearbook, but 3 varsity sports a year really defined my reputation.  As a college freshman, I continued on to the first women’s field hockey and lacrosse teams at a formerly all-male college. I was not afraid to try anything, from sports to being a T.A. for a revered prof. Those who know me now would say that all of this “fits” with what they know of me today. My high school extracurriculars did help define who I became and how I approach adult life.

So I read with great interest on Education Next about the Academic Value of Non-Academics. Unlike many articles that correlate extracurriculars to student/life success, this analysis does a great job of critically analyzing whether either is a cause or effect. It probes into what makes a student decide to participate in an afterschool activity. What makes him/her stick with it? The research about the impact of extracurriculars intrigues me. As budgets shave away at students’ opportunities to participate, I worry. If I had been asked to pay for my activities, would I have chosen to try almost anything? Probably not. There was no extra money in my two-teacher family. My scholarship to the all-girls school was as a “professional courtesy,” and I attended school with many whose families had a hundred times more money. But I had confidence and an identity among them, in part because of being a “jock.” We played on the same team. We lost together (a lot).

EdNext’s article is on the right track in suggesting that the extra adult contact of extracurriculars could be a major factor in why participating students are more successful. But so is the extra contact and social parity of simply being in the same activity with other students you might not otherwise socialize with. We talk a lot now about how social learning really is. Employers want collaborators. Extracurriculars are often a much better suited environment to learn collaboration than a forced “group” project. Being a jock is not a frill. It is part of the same broadbased, personal, and ubiquitous learning that we advocate as “21st century.” I hope the kids who attend schools where “jocks” and bandmembers are being asked to pay up (or even lose the chance to have a team or band altogether) can find another way to play.

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.

Every once in a while, I have an amazing conversation with another teacher. Yesterday was one of the best ever. I have a colleague who teaches science and is dedicated, reflective, and far too self-critical. She is not a visual person. Listen to her talk, and you hear words like “data” and “application.”  Listen to me, and you hear “vivid” or “visually rich” or some sort of metaphor you can picture. We both love seeing kids learn, but we see it so differently.

We are both intrigued by infographics, she as the scientist and I as the artist. She calls them “data visualizations.”   I find that a mouthful. (Today I ran across this blog post on this very topic and chuckled aloud at how fitting it is to the two of us.)  Both of us want to help kids discover ways to critique and create infographics. We don’t just want kids to throw a quick copy/paste or slap a downloaded image together with a too much text or endless numbers in  large serif font, however. We want to see kids create meaning out of what they are learning.

As we conferred about how she might use infographics to scaffold learning in her biology classes and not simply as a culminating assessment, we talked for over an hour about the infographics, but we never approached it from the same orientation. We think as scientist and artist. Fortunately, each of us has great respect for the other approach, sometimes verging on awe. As we bounced ideas around for helping her kids get started and for a presentation proposal we are working on about this, I wondered why more teachers don’t try such a collaboration. Imagine if the artists (and I include writers) among us were to partner with the data people, the scientists. I can help her figure out an approach that will work with her artist students and help draw out (BAD pun!) visual analogies from her scientist students. She can help me see what my scientist/data loving students are looking for. Not only that, we can learn from each other to the benefit of our students. I even mused aloud that it would be very cool if schools facilitated such partnerships between teachers.  But we both paused, cringing to imagine if teachers were “forced” to talk to those on the other side of the worldview fence.

A few hours later, my colleague emailed me with a link from the National Writers Project, a project I know well as a fellow in a local affiliate. It was about helping kids visualize vocabulary.  My scientist colleague gets it. She knows that she is not a visual person, so she seeks out the advice of those with a visual approach either in person or via an online resource. Thus, I have the privilege of  enjoying eye-opening conversations with the scientist as we seek to fill the voids we know we have.

I have to wonder how much more effective we all would be as teachers if we ventured to form friendships or professional partnerships with other teachers who see the world differently. What can a physics teacher and a Spanish teacher learn from each other? Should the math teachers all eat lunch together without ever speaking to the art teacher? Even elementary teachers have very different preferred angles of view,  though they teach every subject. How can we encourage teachers to appreciate, celebrate, and learn from our different world views? I know our students would benefit.

This morning NPR did a story on the Tribute Center Museum opened by 9/11 families across the street from Ground Zero and the thousands of artifacts shared there, found or donated to commemorate and make real the experience of that gut-wrenching day ten years ago. My hand involuntarily slaps over my mouth each time I hear stories of personal details: where were you and what did you see or hear on September 11, 2001?  Those of us who lived through it as adults, whether from 100 feet or 1000 miles away, still taste the cloud of ash in our minds and feel the urge to run or do something now. Somehow television images lined our nostrils with smoke as we watched. 9/11 went into the heart and lungs of every American.

The survivor-father in charge of the Tribute Center talks about a menu from Windows on the World restaurant and a boarding pass from one of the doomed flights that fluttered from the sky in the ash cloud and now are part of the museum. I stop my car to pry my hand from my mouth — again. There is such wisdom in this cloud.

This year’s first year teachers were in middle school. Today’s high school seniors were in second grade and likely were sheltered from the news until they got off the bus to find an adult glued to the tube, breathing distant ash. What are we doing to help today’s students touch the painful wisdom of this cloud?

We have a week until the tenth anniversary of Sept 11. If there were ever a time to stop following a curriculum map or forget about “eligible content,” this is it. [*Note to non-teachers: “eligible content” is the stuff The Tests are about.] Share the wisdom of this cloud. Share artifacts, share stories, tell your students to ask questions about 9/11 to everyone they know over age 25. Let them smell the smoke a bit.

What will you do with your class this week?

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To my regular readers: I will not be able to post as regularly for a couple of weeks, but I will resume soon. I hope  I can return with some new wisdom, as well.