When learning works, it feels like a Super Bowl victory to a teacher. Unlike the Super Bowl, we receive no media hype, give no interviews, wear no ring, never have a sexy half time show, and certainly don’t make a profit on clever commercials. But we celebrate as best we can, and it feels GOOD. We WON! #eduwin!
Today I celebrate a BIG victory: MySciLife WORKS! And now we can share the report that proves it. Both the documented learning and the act of publishing the report are victories. Believe me, I am celebrating!
Key findings in the report:
When asked to compare MySciLife to their experience with traditional methods of science instruction, most students replied that MySciLife helped them understand content, that they enjoyed the social interaction, and that MySciLife was fun and creative.
Three out of four groups using MySciLife showed a statistically significant increase in students’ science content knowledge as compared to the control groups using traditional instruction.
The background:
Almost four years ago, three creative teachers got together and dreamed up MySciLife, an entry in the 2010 MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning competition. A few months later, we were finalists. Then we “lost.” We did not receive the funding. I blogged throughout the process and have shared more as the project moved ahead in new venues. Fast forward to 2012, and we had enough funding to conduct a limited research pilot of MySciLife with middle school science teachers, collecting data throughout the 2012-13 school year. We watched the dream unfold and shared it at the ISTE conference 2013.
Unlike the Super Bowl, the learning game does not end. As MySciLife moves well into its second year and a much-expanded control group study, the players are going without a huddle, eager to engage with each other inside MySciLife. The teachers meet for monthly collaboration where learning also happens. Unlike the Super Bowl, the “coaches” cooperate and share strategies. Unlike a football game, there are no losers. We share the triumph as we watch learning unfold.
Today feels like a Super Bowl victory for social media-based learning, and we won unopposed. Here’s to us!
I get lost in web resources that intrigue me, and I love the feeling. If there were one thing I could wish upon every child, it would be the experience of losing all track of time and place, teleporting into an alternate era or experience where curiosity takes complete control. The time-travel hole that forms the central premise of Stephen King’s novel, November 22, 1963, is a perfect parallel to the timeless-learning experience I have when whirled into certain sites.
My current learning vortex is the JFK Library’s interactive, The President’s Desk. (How appropriate to time-travel just as Stephen King imagines, landing the oval office during JFK’s presidency.) As a big fan of West Wing and The American President and a child of the 1960s, I am powerless to resist. I click and experience sounds and artifacts of the era. JFK makes a phone call in my ear. His diary shows where he was and when, and I follow him along. I am gone for hours. Every click makes me curious about the next one. I regret not having someone alongside me, since my impulse is to share, “Look at this! Remember phones like this? Listen to him talk about the sea from this scrimshaw thing. He’s here.”
Is it the lure of the Camelot fantasy that holds me at this desk? I think not. It is the layering of experience: a school child stunned to hear that the president has been shot, the touch of artifacts made real by sound and voice, the connections between what I knew, what I know, and what I want to know. Just weeks from now, we will pause to observe and struggle to explain that day 50 years ago to many who have no connection or recollection. But this virtual desk tips up like a floorboard, dropping us into a time and place where we wonder and touch and learn. If there were one thing I could wish upon every child, it would be this feeling, this experience — as often as possible and on whatever topic draws him/her as Kennedy was drawn to the sea (click on the scrimshaw to hear it).
After sharing the joy of figuring out a new tech toy for online professional development sessions, the tech geek (TG) and the edtech coach (ETC) stopped for a quick chat.
TG: Looks perfectly simple. Shouldn’t be any problems.
ETC: I wonder if the iOS app version looks the same.
TG: I’m sure it’s close enough.
ETC: Did we test to be sure the links in chat were clickable? We do send teachers off to explore things then come back to share a lot during these sessions. That gets them involved as learners.
TG: Who can’t figure out how to use a link?
ETC: IF the links are clickable, that’s great.
TG: They can copy/paste, can’t they?
ETC: I’ll have to test to be sure that the iOS copy handles are available inside the app chat box.
TG: I don’t have time to load an app just to check that.
ETC: I’d rather check now than start a session with people saying things don’t work. Do you know if the Android app looks like the web interface? Or the iOS version?
TG: You’ve gotta be kidding me.
ETC: I know some people have trouble using the little text selection handles to copy in iOS. And that’s if the copy tool works at all in this app.
TG: Just show them how when they get to the session.
ETC: We aren’t screensharing from a tablet…. Wait, do you know how they enter a session if they are on the app version?
TG: No idea. They’ll figure it out.
ETC: Yeah, except for the ones who need professional development the MOST. This gives them an excuse not to try.
TG: They’ll get some kid to help.
ETC: I hope so. But this is after school.
TG: You’ve gotta be kidding me.
ETC: I’ll check both apps and give the hesitant teachers a few screenshots on our wiki — or email to them.
TG: You’ve gotta be kidding me.
ETC: I can see why they get frustrated when they didn’t even have the tablets to play with until the first week of school. I wish they’d take one home… Maybe I can host an online play session one evening and give them prizes for coming.
TG: You’ve gotta be kidding me. You coddle them.
ETC: No, I respect them. I expect them to learn, but I know where they’re coming from. And every one of them is different. Like the kids in their classrooms.
TG: Kids aren’t that different. They’ll figure it out.
ETC: Glad you weren’t my teacher.
TG: Be a teacher? You’ve gotta be kidding me.
————
Moral: Effective edtech coaching means constantly imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes.
If you frequent this blog, you know that writing matters to me. As a teacher, I helped many a student improve his/her writing skills, even when the subject was not “English” or “Language Arts.” As a college prof helping educate teachers-to-be, I emphasized the importance of writing for a teacher’s professional presence, even in the short notes scribbled to go home in a backpack or in the short paragraph of directions at the start of an assignment. Today’s Common Core underscores writing across the curriculum as part of college and career readiness. If you cannot write, you are very limited in what you can accomplish. Even the carpenter who left notes during my basement renovation had to write understandably so I knew what he was asking. So, yes, writing is a passion of mine. In this post I share two recent Featured Sites from TeachersFirst that sing out to me.
One focuses on poetry. Poetry, while not a life skill, certainly celebrates the power of a single, carefully selected word. Like the scarf that picks up the blue in your eyes or the bright orange sweat socks that define your persona as a tennis player, a single word can relate far more than its own meaning. A tool like Tranquillity lets us play with poetry. Poems are infinite jigsaw puzzles of ideas: the piece with a green edge and one with a curly, jagged side fitting together after you flip them around until they make sense. Tranquility lets you play with words and shows the value of one word to fulfill a rhyme and hit the final note of your thought melody. Play with some words in Tranquillity. (This really should be an iPhone app to de-stress people waiting in lines!) Share it in a science class, and challenge students to write poems to explain Newton’s Laws or to tell the tale of oxidation/reduction in chemistry. Even self-described “tech nerds” like those who created Tranquillity enjoy poetry.
The second, Slick Write, is my dream tool. I have been looking for this tool since I was fellow in the Capital Area Writing Project in the early 1990’s. I tested a simple piece of software back then that could tell a writer about such things as the number of prepositional phrases in a passage. Why bother? A surfeit of prepositional phrases means you have weak or imprecise word choice. As a statistician would put it, conciseness of writing varies inversely with the number of prepositional phrases. (Take that, data mongers!). Slick Write also targets other writing foibles: passive voice, cliches, and much more. You can configure it to focus your writing self-analysis on one area at a time. (Sports coaches know the importance of focused correction in skill building.)
I like Slick Write I so much I’d like to politely share it with my adult friends and colleagues, especially those who… well, don’t get me started on the amount of passive voice I read. Try it secretly and see if it makes a difference in how you write.
—————Stop reading here if you don’t care about the example——————-
Slick Write analysis of the above: (I have bolded the things I wish to improve)
Teachers don’t brag. In fact, most teachers usually minimize their accomplishments by pointing out the shortcomings. When complimented on a really cool lesson or activity, the first thing they usually tell you is what went wrong or took too long or didn’t come out exactly as planned. After that, they tell you about the one student who didn’t finish or the parent who complained. If none of these problems occurred, the teacher will surely tell you what he/she needs to do to make it better next time or that it wasn’t really his/her idea in the first place. He/she saw it on… (TeachersFirst… or Pinterest?)
Declare victory! Share your student’s successes, however small they might seem to an outsider, via “What is your #eduwin?” I have written about #eduwin before, but it bears repeating. And now there is even more reason to report an #eduwin.
If you have seen an #eduwin occur in a colleague’s (or your own child’s) classroom, now you have a chance to highlight that success and send that teacher where he/she belongs. You can nominate someone for an #eduwin award — a chance for that teacher to share the #eduwin at the Annual CUE conference in March, 2014 in Palm Springs, CA. (CUE is the California group of Computer-Using Educators, a strong and creative edtech bunch made up of teachers and edtech users/coaches like you.) You can declare the learning victory of students who “get it,” of a culminating or motivator project that sings, or of a small win over confusion… even something as small as kids who finally use there, their, and they’re correctly!
As October spins headlong toward Thanksgiving, help the rest of the world know,”There are amazing things happening in education every minute.” As the #eduwin site asks, “What did you see?”
You could be sending a very deserving (and self-effacing) teacher on a professional trip that will be his/her personal learning #eduwin! At the very least, you tried.
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In high school, we take a language to get credit, get into college, and maybe use it when visiting another country. As teachers, we learn a language I call edu-ese to speak among ourselves about professional strategies, the latest research, or best practices. We use edu-eseas a common professional language that allows both precision and shared understanding. Terms such as those found on this generator or this one are for teacher-to-teacher talk, much the way that doctors talk to each other about the surgical approach they will take to fix that heart valve or remove that appendix. Eduese is not intended for public consumption. Doctors do not expect us to know what a transaortic valve implantation is, and we should not expect a parent, grandparent, or student to know what scaffolding is or what tiers of intervention are. So why do we impose edu-ese on parents?
If you have been around hospitals with sick relatives enough, you have experienced the varied manners of doctors in explaining things. The good ones never use medical terms without paraphrasing them in the same sentence (providing what teachers might call context clues ). Some docs are not so good at this, and we all hope they will be reading xrays in some dark room, not explaining our choices for valve replacement! Yet we, as teachers, are as guilty as doctors of poor “parent-side manner.” I read this post with great sympathy and felt a twinge of guilt for the times I may have sent a parent home wondering what the heck I was talking about. I therefore offer my six edu-ese commandments for myself going forward:
1. Thou shalt always paraphrase any edu-ese within the same sentence — or not use it at all.
2. Thou shalt offer an edu-ese translation of all terms used in printed handouts sent home or posted on the class web page.
3. Thou shalt provide and reply to an anonymous-submission “edu-ese translate” form (kind of like Google Translate but in an online Google docs form where people can submit anything they wish). This form shall be readily available via a link from the school and class web page so parents and students can anonymously request a translation of ANY term they hear in reference to teaching/learning/education, even if it is not from a source within your class or school.
Perhaps your school PTO/PTA could take on this last idea as a project to serve the entire school community. Ask your teachers with the BEST parent-side manner to act as translators for the edu-ese submissions. Encourage parents to paste or enter ANYTHING they read into the form. Share translations, responses, and explanations on the school web page for all to see.
4. Thou shalt not assume that you know which terms are “foreign” or misunderstood by your audience. Language is very personal and comes with its own baggage of experience. If you are not sure, use an alternate word and look or listen for understanding.
5. Thou shalt never use edu-ese in email. Email is hard enough to understand without complicating it with a foreign language. If you must use edu-ese, reserve it for live, preferably face-to-face interaction. Faces tell a lot.
6. Share these commandments with your colleagues and pledge to remind each other about them when you slip.
And to Dahlia Lithwick, the lady who feels left behind, maybe you can take these commandments with you to your next parent conference.
I posted last week about playing with words and the ways wordplay can build vocabulary, enrich word choice, or simply enhance appreciation for our own language. Although I am pretty good at mental math, I find it a little tougher to imagine “gamifying” math with as much enjoyment. So I challenged myself to rediscover some of the resources that open my mental playspace for math. Some are sites that let us play with number sense, some that connect math with graphical representations of geography and places (maps), and some that show math applied in real world settings we might not think of as “mathematical.” Hopefully, any imaginative gamer can find ways to play with math among these.
Number Sense-ations
Every Second on the Internet simply gets you thinking about HUGE numbers (and time), all related to the phenomenal growth and use of technology around us all the time. This one begs us to ask each other, “So how many xx do you think appear each second on the Internet?” in a sort of stump-your-friends style of oneupmanship with tech statistics.
Virtual Number Rack is just what it sounds like: a virtual manipulative (aka hands-on toy) where you slide beads back and forth on rods. You can add multiple rods, thus creating “place value” to please your math teacher. You can also invent games to play: create patterns, ascribe meanings to the negative spaces (and spans) between the beads. or even invent a digital “code” to send messages using beads. As you play with red, white, and space, you are playing with math. Shhh. Don’t tell kids that. You’ll ruin their fun.
If It Were My Home gives more statistics than you can imagine about places all over the world. Compare where you live with another place. Look at all those statistics. What do they mean? Which country has twice as much? Which one has half as many? As you wonder about the reasons behind the stats, you start to play mental games with the comparisons.This is real world math with a bonus: all that comparison builds number sense, too.
Mapping Math
Overlap maps. What a cool way to care about area! The concept of “square miles” never meant much to me, but this does, especially if I use a place I know well. I have driven across Pennsylvania or Massachusetts enough times to know what each “area” feels like. If you put Iowa on top of Iran, which would be bigger? What about Colorado and Tibet? Challenge your friends to predict which map would be larger than the other… and prove it here.
Maths Maps is Tom Barrett’s project to merge math and Google Maps. This one begs for your contribution. I personally like the idea of locating shapes in various places and making placemarkers for them. But I could see mapping all sorts of mathematical concepts. What about a creating a treasure hunt using maps and math?
Yummy Math has math problems related to today (or this week), but they are not simply :George has seven pumpkins” for an October “word problem.” They are REAL events or people. MY immediate reaction is to try some but to quickly move to inventing some. What math problem can you create from today’s lead story in Google News? The questions might be a bit shocking, especially when the lead story is about chemical weapons or a Navy Yard shooting, but math certainly takes on meaning this way. Make reality into a math game. It might have a secondary benefit of helping us cope with nasty news.
Get the Math makes math hip. Here comes a math teacher’s favorite question: Where will I actually USE this? Answers: In fashion? Check. Music? Check. Video Games? Check. Forget justifying math. Just go play in the many places where math sings its own tunes.
Homestyler is one of my very favorites. Design a dream home in 3D. You have to know about measurement and proportion, of course, but who cares. I want a cool kitchen and big windows. Hoe many homes can your design? Can you design a home for someone who is 6 foot 7? What about a mini-house for kids to play in? Design a “fun house” with weird proportions to confuse people who enter. Make design a game, and it will never feel like “math.”
Arounder See and imagine all that travel entails: plan the travel costs, count the miles, choose the best route, and more, all inspired y these amazing 360 tours. Invent your own world math challenge beginning here.
I thought it would be hard to generate a list for gamifying math, but now I find myself wanting to GO PLAY.
This week is the anniversary of MLK’s I Have a Dream speech, the moment that gave impetus to so much good (and so much good left to be done). Yes, I am old enough to remember that time period. But no, this post is not about civil rights. It is about having a dream and what that dream can become.
As a brand new teacher several years after King’s speech, I had a dream to bring new ideas about learning and creativity into my classroom. I was sure I’d be the perfect teacher. I had a dream to make all kids like to write. I dreamed that kids would write and create not just “papers” (so thin a substance!), but media: television shows or radio shows or photoessays with accompanying writings, anything that could express themselves clearly. I had a dream to change kids’ view of school and get them excited, even amid hard work.
I was sure I could do better than the “dead wood” teachers I read about and occasionally saw in classrooms around me. Most new teachers have a similar dream. For sure, I would never be like the “old” teachers who — to my young view — had decided that change was not worth their effort. I remember looking at those teachers who had not only children, but grandchildren and thinking they would never try my new ideas.
Like many dreamers, I was surprised. I discovered that some of the grandparent-teachers were the most willing to get excited about something new. When I suggested making a six week minicourse in the TV studio part of sixth grade language arts curriculum, the teacher said, “Great! How can I help?” When the kids suggested an Emmy-type awards ceremony (we called them Televiddy awards) at the end of the year, entire teams of teachers jumped in to help pull it off. The dream was alive, and the second year the kids’ writing got even better because they wanted to win a Televiddy. The best part was that it wasn’t my dream anymore. It was our dream.
Fast forward through a long teaching career, and I ask myself whether my dream is accomplished. Never. But I think I have given impetus to some good — and so much good left to be done. I look at the challenges facing enthusiastic, green teachers today and hope they have permission to engage in their dreams. Our kids need the dreams of teachers. They need the chance to feel it, see it, and join in the dream together. I can only hope that those who drive educational change today can see the value of dreams over minutiae and uniformity.
Unpack those funky little boxes. Embed widgets are a very handy tool for teachers.
The What of widgets:
Widgets are clever little gadgets you can add to your class web site, blog, or wiki using funky looking gobbledeegook called embed code. They are little boxes that automatically fill with content provided by someone else from somewhere else on the web. This means that your site can show something new all the time without any time and effort by you. It automatically appears in the little box (widget) on your page/blog/wiki.
Widgets are embedded content, an empty box on your site that fills itself with “stuff” from somewhere else. Some embedded content is simply that: a piece of “stuff” that appears in your empty box but really LIVES someplace else on the web. It might be an embedded version of a video that actually “lives” on YouTube, like the one in this post. It might be the Google Map on a restaurant web page.
Widgets are a special kind of embedded content because the content DOES something. It changes and updates periodically and automatically. The Cluster Map widget on the right of this blog counts how many people have visited this blog lately. The LIVE Feed one tells where visitors come from and when. Some widgets let the site visitors do something (see the weather widget below), but the site owner doesn’t do anything to make them work. They are embedded widgets that load content provided by someone else.
The Why of widgets (Why go through all this geeky stuff?):
You might be tempted simply because your students will say, “COOL!” That’s certainly OK. but move beyond cool to meaningful by embedding widgets that connect to your curriculum (weather, news from the country you are studying, phases of the moon, news about congress, quote of the day, reading tips, etc.).
The HOW:
HOW you embed a widget depends on both the widget embed code and the site/blog/wiki where you want to put it. For starters, try this blog post on how to embed almost anything. Often the site offering the embed code for the widget will give you tips and directions. But the place where you are going to PUT the code may need to help a bit. If you are using a school web site, try clicking help and searching for “embed.” If you use Wikispaces, they offer help when you click the little icon that looks like a TV set: It even says “embed code” when you roll your mouse over it.
The general rule is that you need to COPY a chunk of code filled with marks like <> / etc. and paste it into a place on your site that accepts CODE. On this blog, I have to click the text editing view instead of the visual editing view. An important skill for copy/paste is knowing how to select a block of stuff, COPY by pressing Control+C, (Command+C on a Mac), then PASTE in you desired location by pressing Control+V (Command+ V on a Mac).
Widget wisdom: Be careful who you trust.
One potentially dangerous thing about widgets is that you do not control what shows up inside that box. Make sure your widget is a trusted source. TeachersFirst recently introduced a Featured SItes widget for teachers to put on class, school, media center, or other educator web pages. Those who know TeachersFirst know that our reviewed resources are vetted thoroughly by a team of experienced teacher leaders. In short, we will not embarrass you by sharing anything bad. We will enhance your web page with new, useful content every week, and you don’t have to do anything. See an example of our widget below, and get one for yourself here.
Want more ideas? Here are search results for the term widget on TeachersFirst. This barely scratches the surface of the widgets available out there. These are a few reviewed sites that offer widgets. Add an embedded Google Map to your class web page showing the country you are studying or the route that a certain explorer followed. Here’s how.
As you get to like any site, watch for widgets they might offer. Watch for cool widgets on other teachers’ site and click “get this widget,” usually offered below the widget. As your students learn new creative tools, watch for the ability to share their products using embed code— not a widget as much as simply embedded content, but it is YOURstudents’ creative work, pulled into your web page or wiki. You can gather tproducst from many places into ONE class web page or wiki using embed codes. The ability to share products using embed code is one of the Edge Features mentioned at the end of TeachersFirst reviews.
Just to get your brain going, here are some examples of embedded widgets:
Weather widget for world language teachers or classrooms studying geography, weather, or temperature conversions:
Here is the TeachersFirst Featured Sites widget looks, available here:
And here is a helpful Reading Rockets widget for parent tips, from among several options on this page:
Are you ready to widget yet?
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As the new school year begins, teachers attending OK2Ask® sessions are noticeably more stressed and overwhelmed. During these sessions, we share many, many resources and teaching ideas. We pack the sessions with choices: so many tools, so many interactives, so many strategies for organizing lessons that put technology tools to work for learners. Those of us who prepare and teach these sessions are steeped in the stuff. We can name (or at least retrieve) dozens of creative tools and strategies for any learning need : tools to make multimedia presentations, tools to comment and interact with peers, tools to learn about vocabulary and word choice, ways to improve digital citizenship. Honestly, even we are overwhelmed as we narrow down our offerings to fit 75 or 90 minute OK2Ask sessions with eager teachers from all over the world. Practically speaking, none of us can do it all. It is time to give yourself permission to limit your attention to a chosen few.
No, I don’t mean a few students or a few curriculum concepts. I mean give yourself permission to master a chosen few new tools and lesson strategies. Choose one– and only one –of each:
tool for collaborative writing
tool for graphic organizers
tool for sharing images and adding text to images
tool for “collecting” things like web links, pieces of text, images, drawings
tool for creating or clipping video
Is this enough? A handful is plenty. If you are in a BYOD school, you might want to find DATs (device agnostic tools) to do each of these so every kid can use the same tool and collaborate across devices. Or you can assign your students to find and learn one of each type that they can use on their own device. If you are using school machines and network, be sure your chosen few all work inside your web filter.
Then what? Make your choices meaningful by focusing on the learning instead of the tool. Challenge yourself to complete a chosen few “bingo” board that has five tools by five learning strategies that students will do (the possibilities are endless — I just chose 5):
Collaborate to create a group product
Prioritize/choose and justify choices
Practice and teach a skill
Publish, then respond to others’ reactions
Discover new information and organize it in an intentional, understandable way
Make a bingo board for yourself and keep it handy on your desk (or computer desktop). Or use this freebie I am sharing on Google Docs. (Open it and SAVE A COPY for yourself so you can edit.) As you plan an activity this year where students use one of your chosen few tools in one of the learning strategies, put a brief description of the activity and date in the square. Aim for Blackout Bingo by spring! Think of it as your personal professional development plan. Happy New Year!
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This is a fable — of sorts.
Teachers don’t brag. In fact, most teachers usually minimize their accomplishments by pointing out the shortcomings. When complimented on a really cool lesson or activity, the first thing they usually tell you is what went wrong or took too long or didn’t come out exactly as planned. After that, they tell you about the one student who didn’t finish or the parent who complained. If none of these problems occurred, the teacher will surely tell you what he/she needs to do to make it better next time or that it wasn’t really his/her idea in the first place. He/she saw it on… (
). Some docs are not so good at this, and we all hope they will be reading xrays in some dark room, not explaining our choices for valve replacement! Yet we, as teachers, are as guilty as doctors of poor “parent-side manner.” I read 
