July 13, 2012

What would you do for a smooth start?

Filed under: teaching — Candace Hackett Shively @ 8:12 am

Remember the Klondike bar ads of a few years ago? As back to school time approaches, teachers are very much like the people in those commercials. We will do just about anything to be sure the school year gets off to a smooth start. Around the middle of July, the dreams (or nightmares) begin:

  • A first day without any furniture or in a double-booked classroom shared with alternative ed
  • A first day without air conditioning — and you forgot deodorant
  • A first day when someone took down all your bulletin boards and replaced them with brown kraft paper and old staples
  • A first day when every student cries (well, maybe not in high school)
  • A first day with high school students cussing and screaming at you
  • A first day when the fire alarm rings three minutes after the first bell

What would you do to get the school year off to a smooth start? After a couple of years, we each develop our own rituals. Start going to bed early a week before – check. Exercise like a maniac to relieve stress – check. Make two weeks’ worth of copies so you don’t end up waiting in line at the copier on day 1 – check. Send a letter to your new little ones two weeks before school – check.

But there is a danger in ritual. July is a time to consider new back to school rituals and ceremonial starts. You might even find something new to make the start even smoother. I was helping pull together back to school ideas on TeachersFirst today, so I thought I would share a few:

  1. Appeal to the visual. Our kids are bombarded with things to LOOK at in their “real” lives, so your classroom should scream “Look at me!” too. Try Bulletin Board Hangups to grab wandering minds. Find fresh bulletin board ideas using this keyword search. Don’t forget to OPEN the reviews to read the full details and ideas.
  2. First impressions last, so make one. No, teachers should not feel obligated to try out for Comedy Central, but why not plan a great first day with one of these first day ideas?
  3. Make homework a team sport. Get parents involved in supporting their child’s study skills. There are great tools that kids might even enjoy using (though they will never admit it!).
  4. Get everybody organized. Specifically address organizational skills like time management, dividing larger tasks into smaller pieces, making lists, etc. We adults need help with this, so why wouldn’t our students?
  5. Share with a teacher friend. Use tools like Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook,  or a good, old-fashioned face to face lunch to share some new ideas. Share with friends you don’t know yet by making and reading comments on TeachersFirst resources– a free feature with free membership. Simple ideas can make or break that first day.

May your July be filled with positive dreams and a few Klondike bars :)

June 1, 2012

Listening to the Layers of Bloom

Filed under: creativity,iste12,learning,teaching — Candace Hackett Shively @ 1:39 pm

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!

May 11, 2012

What I learned from my mom the teacher

Filed under: about me,teaching — Candace Hackett Shively @ 10:41 am

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.

February 24, 2012

Exchange rate: how we trade for privacy

Filed under: digital footprints,musing,teaching — Candace Hackett Shively @ 11:42 am

I have never protected my privacy so fiercely that no one could learn about me. On the contrary, I value my professional digital footprint. When I Google myself, I see thousands of results, and I am OK with that. It’s even OK that the ads on Facebook seem to know I frequent certain online vendors or like to swim.  Seems harmless enough.

Recently, however, the OK2Ask®  team at TeachersFirst has been developing a new professional development offering, Web Worries: What teachers should know about online behavior. That got me thinking about what advice I would give to teachers trying to separate personal and professional personnas online. About the same time, Google announced upcoming changes to its Terms of Use. These two related events spurred me to think further about the tradeoffs teachers make when using online tools, establishing memberships, and generally “sharing” our thoughts, bookmarks, creations, and lives online.timetrade.jpg

The real tradeoff is not about giving up privacy in order to be social. It is about trading  privacy for time. Each steals from the other, in a nasty currency exchange. If we, as teachers, choose to use the timesaving tools that help us learn, teach, or communicate with parents, students,  and colleagues, we pay with our privacy. If we use iGoogle, Google Reader, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube, or Gmail accounts, the data about what we say and do there is open to cross-pollination about us in an aggregate form that Google does not fully explain.  It may not be personal, but it is based on the personal. If we work diligently to protect our privacy, we spend extra time — not only to cloak our identities, but possibly in using inefficient means to accomplish the same necessary tasks. Having tools that talk to each other, posting information on one tool and allowing access for use of that info by another tool, saves us a lot of time.  But the web of our information means that we are more easily traceable, searchable, and less private. It becomes more and more difficult to check to be sure we have not slipped up and allowed our personal lives to ooze into our professional personnas or vice versa. Simply monitoring the cross-pollination of our data by swarms of technology bees takes time. Aggravating the privacy trade-off is the fact that time is a teacher’s most precious commodity — beyond her family’s love and her paycheck.

I present this not as a problem-solution scenario, but as food for thought.  We need  not “solve” the privacy/time tradeoff. Rather, we should be aware of it.  As who we are becomes a gestalt in a virtual cloud, the one thing we still hold as our own is the ability to think, question, and decide. Decide how much privacy you are willing to pay to save time. Decide which times of your life are too precious to relinquish to the screen. It is no coincidence that the expression says we “spend” time.  The exchange rate for privacy is still up in the air cloud.

October 7, 2011

What I wonder: Did you know Steve Jobs?

Filed under: about me,musing,teaching — Candace Hackett Shively @ 12:47 pm

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.“Steve Jobs” by Diana Walker (born 1942) / Digital inkjet print, 1982 (printed 2011) / (Diana Walker - National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Diana Walker; © Diana Walker)

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.

August 12, 2011

Hyperlinking to Slow Reading

Filed under: edtech,learning,teaching — Candace Hackett Shively @ 9:08 am

In “reading” through a fitful string of blog posts sparked by a tweet, I ran across this post about the changes to our reading habits due to technology. It actually struck such a chord of guilt — as I was about to skim and run — that I stopped to read the entire post. I am living what Patrick Kingsley describes:

our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information. Round-the-clock news feeds leave us hyperlinking from one article to the next – without necessarily engaging fully with any of the content; our reading is frequently interrupted by the ping of the latest email; and we are now absorbing short bursts of words on Twitter and Facebook more regularly than longer texts.

We know our students are even more likely to skim and run, since their standards for full web site attention are more demandingly fickle and their reading skills more spotty. As Jakob Nielsen points out:

Teens’ poor performance [at web site “success“]  is caused by three factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level.

So what does all this rather intriguing research tell me, aside from the fact that I am a true edtech readerwritergeek?  It makes me wonder:snail.jpg

How can we create incentives for Slow Reading?

An iPad zone with comfortable chairs might be the 21st century equivalent of the bean bags in the 1980s middle school media center where I once worked: comfy, inviting, and reading ready. But the physical space and gadgets do not make Slow Readers. The desire to stick with one article, post, or thread of thought long enough to see it through to a conclusion is what we are all missing.

What could make a teen stick with a thread of thought throughout an entire article and related discussions? It is much easier to toss the links into a class wiki or Diigo group after skimming two sentences, perhaps with a pithy comment.  Done. Next assignment, please.

I would like to try confronting some students with Nielsen’s analysis of teen site navigation. I would like to ask them whether his findings of 2005 are still true or more exaggerated today. I would like to share Kingsley’s post with the same group and ask them what they think. Of course, they’d have to READ both to be able to respond, and the only initial incentive might be a grade.  I really wonder what would happen if we confronted teens with these two posts to form framing questions for an entire semester in almost any course: social studies, English, even science:

What are your incentives for Slow Reading in today’s world? Where/how can it happen? Does it matter any more?

We might be surprised to hear what our kids have to say about all this.  Instead of telling them why they must Slow Read (for a test), ask them why they might want to. They might even create Slow Reading places and incentives of their own. How would that be for 21st century learning?

August 5, 2011

Hang ups: information comes to life

Filed under: learning,teaching — Candace Hackett Shively @ 4:17 pm

Teachers everywhere are decorating bulletin boards. That cheesy scalloped edging unrolls again, fencing in neatly printed names pinned into bus lists and birthdays. Posters with wise sayings come out of the closets, their corners perforated into patterns of tiny holes from staples and pushpins of years gone by. Shar Peis with mournful eyes tell us they hate Mondays, and maps depict pastel lands where foreign tongues are spoken. Back to School is here.

I wonder what students would put on a life bulletin board, one that they would actually pause to think about instead of staring out the window at teasing days better suited for swimming pools than desks. Perhaps an infographic of the top ten activities in the day of an American teen. Or the chief environmental damage caused by Americans… or my favorite, the hierarchy of digital distractions:

(I love the informationisbeautiful site!) If we’re going to make bulletin boards invitations to learning something, why not invite kids to contribute some questions? Let’s make information not only beautiful but meaningful. What infographic would best intrigue YOUR students, if you could have one made to order? Maybe you should have students make it on the first day. Give them the raw materials and see what happens.

Have an interactive whiteboard? Build an infographic together there on day 1,  something that shows how life connects to learning in your classroom.  It may be the one thing your students recall about your class ten years from now.

P.S. If you need something to fill some spaces in the meantime, try some quotes from TeachersFirst’s Hang Ups series.

July 29, 2011

Diversions to learning

Filed under: creativity,edtech,teaching — Candace Hackett Shively @ 4:21 pm

I met a great group of motivated, creative teachers in our OK2Ask ™ Guided Wiki Walk sessions this week. (OK2Ask ™ is a series of free, online professional development “snack sessions” for teachers offered by TeachersFirst. We use an online classroom space from Blackboard/Collaborate, formerly Elluminate.) The teachers were creating their first wikis or improving on ones they had recently begun.  This two meeting offering included time between for the teachers to work on their wikis, then return in 48 hours to learn more, share, and ask a million questions.

One group was so quick to learn and so gregarious, they quickly had their own backchannel running in the chat space, helping answer each other’s questions during demonstrations. They even asked if they could critique each others’ work on the second day. So we diverted widely from our original plans  and let them go. Their enthusiasm was EXCITING. Their critique was insightful and discriminating. They talked about pedagogy and practicality. They fed each other ideas. They did everything we want our students to do. These teachers who had never met– a probably never will — scored an #eduwin. Their students are getting the best of the best.

One of the conversations I especially enjoyed was about using templates in wikispaces to differentiate for different learners.  You can create a “template” wiki page, such as the skeleton for a student project, but you could also create several templates or options for different levels of project challenge. Students click to create a new page, select the template and — ta-da — their wiki project  is started. Right away, the chat buzzed about how to do this without appearing to single out one student over another. Should we perhaps offer all the various templates as options? Or perhaps name them with evens/odds that do not show a clear “level,” so it is easy to simply say, “Sam why don’t you try one of the even numbered templates.” We also talked about using a past student project as a sample or use it to create a template. You can click to create a new template “from” any page that already exists in that wiki, then edit the template as you wish. So if past students have generated unprecedented project options, you can add them to the bank of templates, perhaps stripping out the finished work to reveal the skeleton of a new project format.

As a teacher, I always fear offering a “sample”project. The teacher-pleasers make theirs identical. The perfectionists think they can ONLY do theirs the same way. The minimalists will never go further, and even creative kids often squelch the urge to do something different to conform to the model of school success. The helicopter parents compare their child’s work against the example and tweak it, thinking no one is looking.

Just as our OK2Ask™ session diverted from its original template thanks to participant input, I love the flexibility of any tool that allows projects and products to become springboards to unexpected, broader options. Thanks wikispaces and thanks to the teachers who continue to make OK2Ask™ a load of collaborative fun. #eduwin.

July 20, 2011

Doing more with less: Choosing a triad

Filed under: economy,edtech,teaching — Candace Hackett Shively @ 8:06 pm

three.jpgDo more with less. We keep hearing that. In school, as in any other workplace, it means adding more responsibilities to your already full plate.  It also means making supplies go further, doing without tech support (or waiting longer to get it), and having no money available for professional development. Even if you find a regional conference that addresses the very problems we are being asked to solve, you must pay for it yourself.

There is perhaps one silver lining to doing more with less. We get very good using the tools we do have.  And we don’t have to apologize for knowing only a tool or two for making online projects. If the school only pays for one, it is the one we will become expert at. If we as teachers must pay for online tool subscriptions for our own classes, we either stick with the inconveniences of the “freemium”  tools, beg for money from parents or PTO, or shell out the bucks to “do” with one tool.

Doing more with less time matters, too — more precisely, using less time to accomplish the most.  I want my students to move past the tech toybox stage and into the nitty-gritty thinking of creating and evaluating their own information. What if  a class were to simplify to a max of three tools?

As I prepare for an OK2Ask session next month on three Editors’ Choice tools, I wonder which tools I would choose as my triad. I love Bookemon, Glogster, and Voicethread, but Google Earth is completely free. I think I would want a balanced triad: one very visual tool, one that is ideal for verbal/language, and one that offers a broad and perhaps unexpected perspective, such as the “world view” of Google Earth.

What couldn’t we do with these three? Concept maps we could do in a visual tool. Writing and sharing of words in a verbal tool, numbers and quantities we might have to represent in a real or symbolic context: applied in visuals or written in number sentences. We could use a visual tool to represent temporal concepts such as timelines. We could “place” events on the earth and in our hometowns using Google Earth. What other concepts have I missed? I haven’t though about things that require sound, though we could add sounds to our visuals, if we chose the right tool.

Doing more with FEWER may be a good way to create our own classroom taxonomy of priorities and content. Yes, we need to teach kids to choose the right tools, but don’t we also need to teach them to dig deeper and become expert with a tool repertoire? Think of the mental flexibility it will take to use one of the three to show what they know about a sonnet or mitosis or three branches of government. How could you use Google Earth to represented an underlying concept of our constitution? Hint: think analogies.

I’d love to know which triad other teachers would choose.

May 6, 2011

The jury has left the room

Filed under: creativity,teaching,writing — Candace Hackett Shively @ 1:24 pm

Creating is very personal — close to the soul and perilously self-revealing. Those who are moderately successful at creating, people like published writers, performance musicians, and visual artists who are not starving, are generally articulate when asked how they go about their work. I have found some marvelous videos and interviews where people talk about how they go about painting or writing. Artist Kimberly Brooks spells out 8 stages to her painting process, concluding with:

(8) Resolution. Very elusive. The composer Aaron Copland said he didn’t finish compositions so much as abandon them. When it’s finally over, it feels like a whole relationship has ended. And then the anticipated rush of doing it all over begins again. [I love the concept of “abandoning” works at the end. Though cruel, it also implies that the work has a separate life of its own by this time.]

My bookshelves and Diigo account house an ever-growing collection of writers’ and artists’ discussions on how they create. I even have a few scientific analyses from adventurous experimenters explaining how innovations occurred in their lab.  What I notice is that those who are willing to bare their process are already successful and therefore can talk about creating from behind a safe curtain  labeled “success.”

If I were to ask, say — a teacher– how he/she creates things, I  wouldn’t expect to hear as much. Most adults will pooh-pooh the idea that they are ever creative, much less open up about how it happens (if it happens). Having lived for decades in a culture where someone else defines creative success, usually by some sort of juried process, we adults assume the jury knows what they are talking about. So we only talk about our own creativity after receiving the jury’s blessing.

Enter the world of YouTube, web 2.0 tools, and public commenting. Enter a generation (or two or three) willing to spill their guts and show their mental underwear on Facebook. armsup.jpgWill this generation be more willing to talk about their own creative process after the “success” of publishing/performing/exhibiting wherever and whenever they want?  Do they even view their electronically facilitated play as creative process? Are they/we driven to carry creative work through the stages that Kimberly Brooks and others describe? Or is a dropping left on the surface of the web just that:  an abandoned, stillborn product? Are those who create with the toys of the web driven to return again and again, refining, remixing, even storehousing their discarded scraps for use another time? Can these tools be as powerful as any paint, word, or engineering lab? I think so.  But I believe we need the creators to be aware of and talk about their process to reach a higher level, a sort of creative self-actualization (ugh, another old theory, you say…)

I would love to work with some teachers and their students to find out more about creative process among today’s middle and high school kids. But first we need the teachers to recognize creative process in themselves. As I said in a recent post,

Teaching is a blessedly creative process, if we allow it to be. We sculpt a product — a plan for learning. We try it, revise it, tear it apart, remix its pieces, and try it again.

Talk about it. I dare you to ask your colleagues in the faculty room about their latest creative accomplishment.