Think Like a Teacher

For the past 18 months or so, I have been a big fan of a certain web 2.0 tool that allowed students to create online books that could be viewed interactively and shared by URL. In a big email push this past week, they revised their user agreement. I read it carefuly, but even my skeptical eye did not catch the fact that they had removed the capability to see the book interactively unless you are actually logged into that “personal” account. No longer can teachers have students create books and share them electronically with family and friends at no cost. No longer can teachers create interactive ways for students to understand new content. No longer can all the teachers to whom we have “plugged” this tool use it with their classes in any functional way.

Some of the other changes related to content ownership are even more disturbing, but this one is the deal breaker right up front. If it is not free, TeachersFirst cannot review and recommend it. The sad thing is that I thought their business model MIGHT actually work: provide the tool for free, but ask parents and teachers to pay if they wanted a printed copy of the book. In an ordinary economy, it should have worked. Seeing your child’s (or grandchild’s) clever writing would be enough for parents to shell out the bucks. The school library or a teacher  might select the very best books created by a class for actual printing and permanent display on school shelves. Even in an era where reading has become more and more electronic and less tactile, people can be overcome by the urge to make a moment in a child’s life “permanent.” It should have worked.

But the economy strikes again. So we will be removing mention of this once-amazing tool for scaffolded or open writing experiences from over 80 reviews on TeachersFirst. Instead of recommending that students create online books, we will recommend another content-authoring tool…until that one dies, too. Let’s hope the economy improves before it sucks all creativity out of learning. There are enough forces at work trying to do just that. Economics should not be one of them.

For those of us accustomed to being told when to talk, walk, eat, and even go to the bathroom (in 41 minute increments with 3 minutes between), the shift in culture between our familiar schoolworld and the broader e-world is as difficult as right-brain/left brain shift. Forget the digital native/immigrant thing. All of us are living a tectonic shift in time/space reality.  This may sound like an easy excuse for the life-by-the-bell set to claim disability, but envisioning a lack of time definitions and physical locations is hard on the brain. We can accept them when we see and experience them, but moving counterclickwise to IMAGINING the potential experience of tools such as Skype and Twitter is much harder when we have spent most of our daylight memory since age 5 in school-scheduled time (a time zone of its own, for sure!).

This post is an informal exercise to help your brain, much like drawing with your non-dominant hand or covering one eye to see how it changes your vision. I start by giving a few thoughts on the shifts in time and space envisionable via just two vehicles: Skype and Twitter. As you read, close your eyes and picture each of them occurring.  See the faces, hear the voices and words. Then, after experiencing a few,  add your own visions in a comment on this post.

For those who find this easy, add as many as you can. For others, read more and add only a few. The goal is to help your brain shift back and forth in time and space enough that it MIGHT even start to do so on its own. All of a sudden one day, you and your class might spontaneously shift without thinking about it in advance. And this shift will cause neither earthquake nor cerebral hemorrhage. You might end up late to your next class, but you won’t even notice.

What Skype is Really For:

a two year old trying to make sentences when he sees his deployed daddy during brief shore leave

an octogenarian in Vermont telling stories to a grandson in Dubai- landline to Skype connection

a former student co-presenting at a conference with a former teacher - both colleagues far from home, one in person, one not

a humor break for a grieving parent from their child’s long-long  friend

Tehran to CNN eyewitness reports

witnessing a lab experiment

sharing the first picture of the baby on ultrasound

What Twitter is Really For:

hashtagged #skool2day mentions of what is new in “morning meeting” in classrooms (where?)- popping up on multiple Tweetdecks (where?)

quotes of the day from people you know only as @thinkr or @ideaman

cries for help with a software program or scary error message

a quick idea for a substitute from someone she does not know

debunking…anything

telling disembodied anybodies about the cool idea you just read

singing a thought in 140 characters

playing “telephone” in the modern day (if U R old enuf 2 know what telephone game was)

telling people you are from Alaska when you really live in Mississippi

deciding who you trust

David Brooks column on genius leaves me gesticulating and arguing aloud at my computer screen. Once again someone has attempted to quantify a magnificent phenomenon into something measurable and, in the process, created a well-organized data set that, at best, partially describes the topic at hand. Just as “Advanced” and “Proficient” on state tests define academic success, so does  Brooks’ description of “genius” as a function of repeated and highly-focused practice.  There are enough points unplotted on his graph to generate an entirely separate curve.

My argument draws on years of  learning as the “teacher” of gifted kids. While many of my students had very talented minds and exactly the drive and perfectionism  Brooks describes to “develop a deliberate, strenuous and boring practice routine,” a series of intriguing others showed entirely different patterns of genius. Some vaulted over practice routine to perfection on the first attempt. Others dove into disconnected ventures inside diverse idea-caves. Brooks’ description (with all due credit to his sources,  Colvin and Coyle) ignores both the Intuiting Vaulter and an Intellectual Spelunker model of genius. Yet both have sat in my classroom, dropped by my house after college, or emailed me a generation later to tell me what they have wrought. Their genius moves like spring white-water, making it far more difficult to describe or quantify. The only point on which I can agree with Brooks about their genius is that it was only remotely measured by I.Q.

The Intuiting Vaulter just KNOWS how things work without hearing it, seeing it, or watching YouTube explain it. She does not need practice. After only slight exposure to the venue and powered by a run-up of her own ideas and the grace of exceptional understanding, her vault takes her high over the bar in a parabolic leap past those practicing hard to achieve lower measurements of genius. Her ideas simply hit the mark the first time, though she cannot tell you why. She rarely boasts of the heights she reaches.

The Intellectual Spelunker  explores and tries out too many ideas, including those far from the main stream. She hears about and explores a never-ending series of new idea caves with no apparent pattern or map. She practices within none for more than a moment before she moves on to another twisted passage into murky, wet thinking. Occasionally she plays in the mud at the bottom of the cave, then leaves her finger marks for the water to wash away. One day she emerges with a book of poems or a concert that only hints at  connections between the caves  at some level far below the ground. But before she finishes reading the poems or singing the songs, she leaves at  intermission, lured by another cave. We stay behind, marveling at the words and music she leaves. The only things  she “practices” are changing direction and asking questions.

Brooks, Colvin, and Coyle, your vision of genius robs the world of  immeasurable wonders. In today’s connected world of user-generated information and understanding, the Intuiting Vaulter can land in soft cushions after a soaring blog post that stuns the rest of us. The Intellectual Spelunker has many more caves to explore, places to “play,”  and tools to express unmapped connections beyond our understanding, thanks to the web. This is an age to unleash and appreciate genius, not quantify it.

Reading has definitely changed. Trent Batson and Nicholas Carr both know it, and so do all of us who pass through places like Think Like a Teacher.  Batson’s response and the original Carr piece, ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ have me ready to click “write a post” before I finish bouncing between them. As soon as one piece has my attention (I found it on a trusted RSS feed),  I mentally highlight favorite quotes a la English major  and look for juicy bits to read and re-read. Carr is right that I am “power browsing,” but Batson is also right that the “loss” of books is actually a gain for critical thinking. I would go even further and say that reading has become an invitation to DO something.

When I taught elementary gifted kids, there were two distinct groups that emerged during independent project season each year: the Tell-alls  and the Sponges. The Tell-alls wanted to tell everyone everything they read and could not enjoy learning without the telling. During quiet research time in class, they called out, narrating each new discovery as they read or browsed the web. It wasn’t new knowledge until they shared it. The Sponges worked alone, never speaking a word, often so absorbed that they lost all their notes and personal belongings as if transported to an entirely separate location, living among the subjects of their research. When called back to our world and asked to prepare their choice of presentation to “show what you know,” the Sponges were at a loss and uttered malformed bits and pieces until I squeezed the sponge of their awkwardness with many prompts. The Sponges saw no need to DO anything with what they learned. The pleasure was purely personal.

I see the new way we read– thanks to technology — as a cure to both. The Tell-alls are web 1.0. They get their pleasure from the suck-in-and-spit-out of info, but the rest of us gain little from their pleasure. The Sponges are stand-alone processors without a network. Only with the evolution of multiple-tabs (I still have Carr and Batson open right now), feeds, blogs, and doo-dads can I have the very real pleasure of reading until I feel I must DO something. I once had a prof who always asked, “Now what will you DO with it?” as he handed back a good paper. The web (and email and RSS feeds and Facebook and cell phones…) ask that every time we READ.

Now what will you DO with this?

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?

I can’t help thinking that perhaps “quarantine” denotes disease instead of wellness, and therefore Scott McLeod may have chosen the wrong word. Nevertheless, his advocacy for an ed tech “quarantine” to sort out meaningful technology innovations from the latest “tech toys” is dead on.

I note with some humor that my busy life prevented me from READING his post for 6 weeks, but such is the speed and volume of technology. No RSS reader can really allow me to “catch up” or “stay abreast.” Time is often my ed tech quarantine.

But back to the concept: Teachers don’t have time to play with toys– ANY toys, including the latest way to twit, tweet, snick, bleat, or whatever a developer in Romania or the Bay Area calls its latest doo-dad. But there are early adopters willing to waste a Friday night figuring them out and ready to come into school Monday morning after redesigning an entire marking period’s goals to use the innovative tool so intriguing. Without the adventurers, we would still eat library paste and chalkdust.

Scott’s commenters add dimension to the concept, including the need to include practicing teachers, even students into the “quarantine” process to figure out if/how/under what circumstances the tool might actually be useful for learning. I regularly look for these people to join the TeachersFirst Edge team: to play, review, and imagine with new tools. They experiment, imagine how the tools might fit into their classroom context (these are “real teachers,” after all), and add the dimension of managing within the dreaded school policies and filtering. In the end, the review process takes time- a temporal “quarantine” before a TeachersFirst Edge review appears. Does the TF Edge review process meet Scott’s specifications for the quarantine and the additional recommendations of his commenters?

Pilot-test-experiment? Yup.

Identify mainstream uses? Yup.

Pilot-test-experiment again? Yes, some. Sometimes by sharing a useful example as part of the review.

Identify best ways to train/introduce staff? Well, we assume that our teacher-friendly way works at least with the willing followers who come to us as a trusted source (yes- we still “push out” info…). We could do better here.

Include students? Sometimes, depending on the reviewer. Would LOVE to do more!

Translation into language that makes sense to teachers? Absolutely.

Answer essential questions:

Why should I do it, is it worth it? (What is the benefit to me and to my students?)
Can I do it? (Where do I use it and how do I use it?)

Definitely! 

Sure, even the Edge team is occasionally guilty of getting too excited too fast. Our mistakes are marvelously balanced by the financial realities that make both good and bad web tools disappear just as we become excited. I always figure that’s our reminder that our TF Edge “quarantine” will never be the panacea for moving education forward, just another positive force.

Anybody who would like to join our disease-free quarantine will contact me, I hope. Think of the TeachersFirst Edge as an edtech petri dish, allowing ideas to grow in a healthy lab setting.

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.

I spent the morning sorting through old emails for pull-quotes to use on some promotional materials, and the process brought on a surge of reflection. I have been in this job since 2006 and have always kept a “teachers out there” folder within my email for messages that tell me good and bad about how TeachersFirst is doing. I even have subfolders for mail from college faculty users or those who comment on the Interactive Raven. I make folders as a reference system to find emails later , but I had no idea of their impact as a tool for reflection. Bear with me as I muse on…

Imagine if every student had an email account (yes, I know…. archiving, server space, bullying, etc…everyone has a reason NOT to provide these). Imagine if they could file emails from peers and teachers all year as a way to sort out reactions to major projects (like my Interactive Raven folder), comments from outsiders (like my webmaster email or “teachers out there” folders), and feedback from specific professionals (like my college faculty folder). Then when the time came to “pull quotes” (verb, not noun) to share as part of an end-of year reflection, each student could read back through and see progress, consensus and even direction. A new personally-organized learning network.

Taking it further: Maybe students don’t need email to do this. After all, so much of their input likely comes in the form of web 2.0 “comments” and can be sorted by “tags.” Perhaps what they (we) need  for School (or Work) 2.0 is a tool that allows us to organize responses to ANY and all media we create (email, wiki, blog post, dig pix, online comic strip, YouTube video, podcast, or cute web2.0 doo-dad) in a single location by tag or “folder.” Suddenly we have “Response Central,” a place to see trends among very diverse products and to allow meta-analysis of our own strengths and needs for improvement. If EVERY tool provided RSS feeds for comments, that would be one way to do it: by tagging the responses within the reader using a consistent system.  We could have our personal RSS (Response Sorting System) Reader. Not every tool provides RSS for responses or comments, though. Many do.

I wonder if anyone has ever done this. Of course, setting up the tagging system could be the kicker. The first few times we did it, we’d discover that some tags did not “work” over time. But the second year would be a lot easier. We could make New Years Day the unofficial tag reorganization day as we watch parades and football…but I am getting carried away.

So there’s a skill to add to School 2.0/Work 2.0 so we can reflect on all those marvelous comments and actually learn from them. Anybody have a cute name for it yet? (TagUrIt?) I am sure some developer is working on it.

We’ve been pretty busy planning a new project at TeachersFirst called Building Learners. We’re working together with a new web2.0 tool developer to offer an amazing project. The announcement is scheduled for about ten days from now, and I am actually pretty excited. It’s free, it’s creative, and it’s open-ended. I would love nothing more than to have it grow beyond what we have imagined (or are capable of “managing.”) It really is intended as a launch more like a solar-powered passenger balloon: theoretically self-sustaining and destined to go where the wind takes it and the passengers steer it. We’ll stay on the ground, ready to radio up help and tracking via every means possible. But the kids and the teachers will be driving this puppy. In a very real sense, they ARE the pilot(s). Can’t wait!

Recently, I have had several conversations with teachers and the TeachersFirst Educator Advisory Board about school Internet filtering. I even dreamed about it one night (ARRRGH!) Today I find that Teachers Teaching Teachers has a terrific (though long) podcast on Locating the Tyranny of Filtering, including interviews of several people who hold the reins on web filtering in  schools of various locations and sizes, even New York City schools. For a teacher who has no idea how sites magically “disappear,” the podcast gives an intermediate level explanation of how the technology works. It also provides a few examples of HOW teachers can request an “unblock” of a web site in some schools. One especially productive discussion occurs about 26-27 minutes into the discussion, addressing teacher perceptions and feelings about finding a resource blocked and the feeling of powerlessness that comes with this “hand slap.” Several bottom lines from the podcast:

1. Teachers balk at any barrier that adds bureaucratic steps to their day (see the principal to request an unblock).

2. Timeliness matters.

3. Teachers do not understand the technologies behind the filtering and may assume that sites that only work partially do so because they (the teachers) are doing something “wrong.” Voicethread, for example, may SHOW on the screen but not actually play the sound, all because of filtering settings.

4. More enlightened filtering models favor the judgment of actual educators over technology experts.

5. The philosophical issues behind filtering run long and deep (Do we limit students’ vision with blindfolds or teach them how to look critically and decide? Is filtering merely a substitute for classroom management?).

6. There has to be a PROCESS in place (thank you to this voice on the podcast–Lee Baber?).

7. Teachers leave workshops (or web sites, or new articles) having learned about web2.0 tools, only to find that these very tools are blocked.

8. The power to make decisions locally is quite legal and practicable. Teachers need to ask questions and ask for transparency in the processes. As the speakers put it, teachers need to “be brave.” That includes less tech-savvy teachers who are not entirely comfortable with computers as well as those who traditionally speak first and loudest.

TeachersFirst plans to follow up with this discussion, trying to help teachers:

• understand what is magically happening in the filter (in a 30 second explanation)
• be aware of the legal requirements and how far they do/do not go
• be able to share examples of filtering models that work for instruction
• know how to advocate positively for flexible, responsive filtering
• remove emotional reactions from the barrier-lowering process
• be able to access the terrific tools reviewed in the TeachersFirst Edge!

As always, we’ll try to make it quick, understandable, and practical. Watch for this discussion, coming SOON.