Think Like a Teacher

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?

A new school year provokes two conflicting impulses: to survive on the tried-and-true or to seize the chance to change. Teachers everywhere feel the push-me-pull-you of these two forces every fall (at least I know I did for 27 years).  This week I enjoyed reading about the changes one of our TeachersFirst review team members made. It got me thinking about the energy and courage required to change, especially in isolation. I am not sure anyone can go it alone.

A  base-runner deciding whether to go for another looks to a coach before changing his/her path (Little League world series in my mind…).  A widow or widower after the death of a life-long spouse must decide what to do the same way and what to change– and friends support them in the process. Middle schoolers decide where they sit for lunch on the first day of school: last year’s friends or new ones? They are steered by peers.

Where does a teacher get the support to change? For some risk-taker teachers, it happens every year, but they are most likely the minority. Risk-taking personalities don’t usually choose teaching as a career. For many, “change” is thrust upon them by the latest initiative from the top, leading to performance of the same script in a new costume, a teacher exercise in “let’s pretend.”

Teachers are usually left to find their own support if they elect to try changes. They use peers, online communities, resources from web sites, and their own inner strength to guide the decisions and test new ideas. The courage they show is heroic. No wonder so many turn away and choose to remain in safe sameness. One person has only a finite amount of energy, and this heroic effort is exhausting.

Pro-Keds (ROYAL COURT BOMP POP)Originally uploaded by linguistone

If I could wish teachers one thing as this new school year begins, it would be the smell of new sneakers and the jungle gym we had when we were seven: the feeling that we could jump higher and climb anything this first day of school. Being on the playground with so many others  AND my new sneakers made me feel safe enough to risk things I had never tried before.

Once again I find myself (as TeachersFirst editor) and our entire web site playing the role of a utensil, in this case a sifter. We just completed a “chunk” of new content for the site on Internet filtering in schools: Sifting Through the Filters. Why? because we see a need to help “sift” the information about filtering into a teacher’s context and experience, perhaps providing ways for teachers to open dialog about it “within the system” they deal with daily. I especially like the section on “Key Issues About Filtering” for providing a variety of perspectives. I hope it will help some folks who are trying to make changes to the way their students learn.

I don’t think any topic was more vehemently discussed by frustrated educators at the Princeton conference, NECC, and TF’s most recent advisory board meeting than filtering. But I rarely hear any “average” teacher do more than express frustration and  occasional confusion about web filters and why they seem to do everything except HELP students learn wise use of the web. Some teachers erroneously believe that the filters will prevent any “bad” stuff from entering their classrooms. Others simply have no idea what the tech magicians behind the curtains do or think in setting up this “filter” and how it blocks certain content. Just about every savvy teacher has encountered the dowsing of fired-up lesson plans that comes from finding a terrific site at home on Sunday night, then discovering (in front of 30 itchy sixth graders) that it is inaccessible in school. Shame on them for not checking, but come on…sometimes we get so busy we forget.

I hope TeachersFirst’s role as a utensil is exactly that: useful, practical, and accessible. We know our audience pretty well: willing teachers who may or may not be “cooks” with technology on their own but who constantly seek new recipes and who learn from each time they cook up a new way to use technology as a learning tool. We do not seek to inspire the most chic technology chef, but we know our utensils well. And we know good technology cooking. Eventually anyone can create a master recipe with the right utensils and some practice.

Bon appetit! I’d love to hear your reviews of this new utensil.

Pearson and CoSN published a video on YouTube and elsewhere: “Learning to Change/Changing to Learn,” all about 21st Century learning and reimaging what education is.  I always have my suspicions about any commercial entity (especially one as HUGE as Pearson) publishing such a a video — and the inevitable product launch likely to follow).  I have to say, however,  that I love the words Stephen Heppel of the UK uses to describe students who use the tools of collaboration, synthesis, problem-solving, validation, etc. to LEARN, not memorize or capture a stream of facts. He calls them “ingenious, collaborative, gregarious, brave children”[my emphasis].

When I think about the willingness to accept uncertainty, to manipulate information that slips through the fingers like glycerin, to be wrong and keep on going, to proffer shared ownership in ideas, all of these ARE brave characteristics. Perhaps the new character education is about being learning-brave. This would make all the adults who “figure stuff out” using the web as  much brave students as the younger ones who do so in a formal setting or at home at night when “school” is over. What we need as more “brave” learners and more hero-worship of  that bravery instead of building fortifications of certainty and standards.

True learning IS brave. So eat your intellectual wheaties and build some bravery. This “land of the brave” is world-wide and moving fast. I know I need to keep up my strength, too, but I am very excited to see where we go — in even another year.

I am following up on my previous post about TagUrIt, my mythical tool to pull all outside feedback and response into a single place for a learner to synthesize feedback received from all products and projects, no matter what the medium. Lifestream apparently does this. (I have a vague memory of reading about Lifestream a couple of months ago….so my “dream” tool in the previous post may really have been a figment of foggy memory.) Once again, somebody already thought of my great idea. I wonder if it can pull a feed from tagged email, as well. For a TRULY one-stop shop, I’d want to be able to include feedback emails, too.

 Of course, I don’t see Lifestream rushing to market themselves as a tool for education or personal learning network/professional development. If they are interested in a powerful use of their tool, they should talk to our team at the TeachersFirst Edge. We know how to learn from web2.0 play: bridging the gap from web2.0 into learning. I guess there’s a better market in building customers’ egos or helping them track their social web presence than there is in making webworld a wide-open classroom. Or maybe they never thought of it?

Thank goodness for teachers (like those on our Edge team and the earlyadoptereducators who hang out in places like Twitter) who see the freebies and find amazing power in applying them in new ways. I can’t wait to see them all at NECC where the bloggers cafe and laptop users seated on the floor in public spaces are always abuzz with new toys. It’s hyperstimulation of the highest order: Thoughtstream.

Last Friday I spent the day at a conference in Princeton on Children and Electronic Media: Teaching in the Technological Age. There were presentations on current research concerning the impact of electronic media on children and youth, innovative uses of technology in classrooms, and professional development using electronic media (synchronous and asynchronous). The presenters were all recognized voices; many in the auditorium were also recognized “eyes and ears,” as well as practitioners. Kevin Jarrett, one of the presenters and “Mr.  Second Life” of education [my nickname], blogged the event today, and his reverence for the minds in the room is quite appropriate. It was an energizing gathering — one that seems destined to echo in orange.

I spent a good part of the weekend letting the conference incubate in my head. The issues of implementing teacher professional development in rigorous, differentiated, yet supportive and respectful formats are so critical to the future success of our students, and there is simply SO much for so many to learn, and never “be done.” The ProfDev concerns I have been mulling:

1. Time. How can we streamline the start-up and personalization of PD in a one-size-fits-all mindset? So many administrations simply want “all staff” to “complete” this or that Prof Dev “training,” whether it is on special ed procedures, a new language arts program, or –oh yeah– we have to do the technology stuff (Why so many do technology “training” in isolation is a major issue, as well!)

2. Respect and expect. How do we shift to a  model that allows differentiation hand in hand with rigor: respect where teachers say they are (“I need to learn more about teaching xxx in a project-based approach but am also nervous about doing anything with technology”) yet expect them to step outside of their comfort zones with respectful support and encouragement. Without both, you waste your money and their time. With both, change can actually happen.

3. Hanging together. In a standard, hierarchical arrangement of admin and teachers, there may well be administrators placed in the position of evaluating and approving personalized Prof Dev plans who know the topics no better than the novice participants. Shouldn’t they simply do it together as part of the cohort,  just as we would like students and teacher to be able to work together as learners? What better way to model a new way of “building learners”?

4. Real life. Different teachers have varying degrees of “free” time. There are stages of life when doing anything after 4 or 5 pm is extremely difficult for a teacher: infant at home, aging or dying parents, carpools and coaching for their own kids, moonlighting jobs to pay kids’ tuition, and innumerable other pressures spread and stress so many teachers. This is where the asynchronous options actually make a difference, assuming the 3 concerns above have been resolved wisely. Kevin says

Who has time for PD? We all do. It’s a matter of deciding what’s important. When you’re personally vested in the process, somehow, it gets done!

It’s the “personally vested” part that is tough to achieve in stressed people. We need to respect the limits of real life and expect progress without expecting the same level of expertise from all in the same time frame (NTLB?). If  life’s pressures are unreasonable, teachers will never be “vested.” Humans protect their own survival by fighting.

5. Making it meaningful. We are supposed to do this with our students and should expect that our own learning should be the same way. It is our own responsibility to be sure that our OWN prof dev is meaningful. If it isn’t, speak up and ask if you can adjust it (respectfully of course).

6. Vastness. We will never be “done.” We can’t even stay even. We can sift, sort, listen, and ask questions. David Brooks wrote Saturday about The Cognitive Age:

The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. [my italics]

Teachers need to not only do this absorbing, processing, and combining and with their own skills; they must do it well enough to teach it to tomorrow’s adults. The vastness of this task is huge.

Bright orange is the color of fire, of lively energy and hope, and of sunsets. I hope the fire from this conference will burn brightly as we who were there light some flames in others,  and avoid sunset.

As teachers, we sometimes forget how large a public window opens into our lives. The Washington Post today tells tales of intrepid teachers in the Washington suburbs who apparently think frosted web-glass obcures all public view of their web presence. Wrong. I wonder, though: Is it wrong to provide a consciously open window, even to keep it crystal-clear on purpose?

Thinking about any web presence requires the same approach as your bathroom blind:

• If I keep it open, who will see?
• If I do reveal something, it implies that I want it to be seen by anyone.
• Is there a good reason to share?
• What others will inadvertently see it?

As a lifelong teacher, however, I ask one more:

• What can I teach this way that I cannot teach any other way?

My first decision would be to post a “See next window” sign on the outside of the bathroom blind, directing people, instead,  to a slightly-less-voyeuresque view of my living room. Now, I ask:

• What can I teach from my web “living room” that I cannot teach any other way?

I can teach that I am an art quilter and a writer, a side of me that splashes into  view immediately on the walls and in this blog window. My visual-spatial students and colleagues ask: how does this connect with what she does all day? Should I connect art  and/or writing into what I do all day?

I can teach that books  and TV can share a space in my life. Can they in YOUR life?

I can teach that family is at the center, and a dog closeby. My students and colleagues ask themselves what forms the center of their world.

I can teach that teaching and work sometimes make me tired (is that me on the couch, asleep?). The voyeurs ask: What is it that drives her to work so hard? What drives me?

I can teach that nothing is finished, even the space for the imaginary fireplace still down the list on our “ten year plan.” They ask: What am I willing to wait for? Are time and imagination as important as the final, tangible item?

I can teach that I don’t mind being honest and human, but that I will always try to present my best. A little dust is OK, though.

I even wash the windows (inside and out) occasionally. My windows are frames for viewing both ways, and I welcome the voyeurs. I have thought about what I will show them. I hope other teachers will do the same.

Why frost the glass when we can shed such light?

I was away at a conference for several days over last weekend and early this week(LONG hours in the exhibit hall). But for the last two days I have been mulling over my plans for a pre-conference workshop for teachers at Pennsylvania Association for Gifted Education’s (PAGE) annual conference. Back in the days when I taught gifted (for over a dozen years), our group of teachers often talked about our role as “guide on the side” and on gifted ed’s propensity to try out new ideas before general ed and teacher ed picked them up. We were, many  times, a proving ground, and we pretty much exclusively taught using constructivist, project-based models. I was a “general contractor” on site as my classes built learning. The students did the heavy lifting, crafting everything from the actual foundations to the cabinetry trim of learning. I planned the schedule, made sure the materials were there, and gently but firmly redirected the process when it appeared that the structures might fail.

This week brings me a new chance to promote the model of teachers as general contractors: both at the PAGE workshop and in the announcement of a FREE cooperative pilot project from TeachersFirst and TRIntuition’s workBench: The Building Learners Project. (Actually, the logo image for this project was what got me started on the contractor analogy.) I could not be more pleased to see such opportunities for teachers to act as general contractors for the learning in their classrooms– even some learning of their own. Learning new tech toys/tools is part of being a good contractor, and it’s OK to figure them out along with the craftspeople on the job site. I am looking forward to getting my hands a little dirty, as well.