Think Like a Teacher

My current obsession: infographics. So what’s fueling this?

Louise Maine (aka @hurricanemaine) and I have worked on our ISTE 2012 presentation since last fall, a year long journey using infographics in her ninth grade bio class. This is also evolving into several new pages of content for TeachersFirst (TBA).  I find myself grabbing more and more great infographic examples, tools, and discussions: what makes a “good” infographic, how they can structure and assess learning, and who is creating good ones out there in marketing land.

I have always liked infographics, and I don’t think it is because I am a visual/design person. I think it is more because infographics are like an all-you-can-eat hors d’oeuvres buffet. JP Rangaswami gave a terrific TED talk, Information is Food, where he explained his gustatory analogy. His question about whether information will start coming with nutritional labeling to indicate its “fact” ( fat?) percentage is particularly appropriate and witty. Funny how my mental analogy independently went to infographics also something edible. Imagine how validated I felt to find the TED video!

At the infographic hors d’oeuvre buffet,  you can sample small bits of information, take an extra serving of the stuff you like, and walk past the chicken livers. You can stop to savor one bit of data like a foodie or enjoy taking all of it in. None of the servings is so large that it fills you up,  but you might overstuff yourself if you try to absorb too many databits. (Try the Cool Infographics blog to overindulge.) I think we like infographics because they don’t commit us to a full meal, but we can satisfy our cravings.

I do wonder how many of us actually read everything in an infographic, especially the text-heavy ones like this. I much prefer the less textual ones like this. I would guess that the typical read-rate is about 20%. That’s about what we try at an appetizer buffet, right? It’s probably a good thing that none of us receives either a nutrition profile or a comprehension rating on what we ingest from infographics. We simply enjoy the tastes.

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.

I learn something from every ten minute Twitter dose I allow myself. Our students can, too. This week Twitter is The Great Debunker.

Debunk 1: Find a debunking tool

Yesterday I saw an intriguing tweet about Million Short, a search engine that removes the first million, most popular results for your search terms (also can be set to remove 100, 1000, etc.) Why bother? In a world full of SEO (search engine optimization) pros, the sites with money and geeks-on-staff rise to the top of Google. In fact, they can clog the top. Google uses more than just popularity to generate results, so Million Short is not exactly Google Minus. No one knows precisely how Google’s algorithm decides the creme de la creme, but there are people who study it and do nothing but help web sites get there. (Full disclosure: Yes, TeachersFirst does our non-profit best to reach the pinnacle page of search results, too.) The idea of an anti-SEO search engine appeals to the defiant, creative side of me. Million Short just might reveal some lesser known treasures — as well as some real junk — that do not make it into the top million.  Adding to the intrigue is the display of the sites that Million Short removed from the results and the ability to customize results using that list.

Million Short debunks Google’s ownership of what we should and should not see on the web. It also invites us to explore or debunk the sites that fall so far down the results. (Beyond a million!?  That would be page  100,000+ of Google results at ten per page!). As a teacher, I want to challenge students to flip the Million Short results both ways:

1. Look for reputable, valuable, creative  but lesser-known sites that fall well below the bar but could perhaps bring something unexpected to our Google-mediated world. Are there any hidden treasures here, trapped by their lack of SEO expertise?
2. Compare Million Short results to those at the pinnacle of Google. What is better about Google Goodness? Can you find evidence that these are more reputable, have less bias, are more up to date, etc?

Talk about a lesson in information literacy for the 21st century! Thanks, Twitter, for Infolit lesson #1.

Debunk 2: Tweet out your doubts

This morning, I saw a trio of tweets from @ransomtech (shown in reverse order):

Twitter sent me on a mission to help. A few moments later, I had thousands of search results all quoting from the same article, one without citation for the factoid in question in paragraph three. Then I found this and replied: 

Twitter did not actually do the debunking, but it gave @ransomtech a stream to send the tweet below within 30 minutes of his initial inquiry. In the process, Twitter shared a major debunk of an unattributed, oft-cited factoid:

Twitter could do the same for our students. Let them use a class account to tweet out their critical thinking and ask for help finding evidence. Thanks, Twitter, for Infolit lesson #2.

From a dusty basement into the palm of my hand comes the story of TeachersFirst, snapped into a plastic case. As one usually impatient to have “archives” of anything important in electronic format, I will attempt to share the feel of this artifact with you virtually.  What I cannot convey is the stunning moment of impact I felt seeing what this puzzle has to say about teachers and teaching during the fourteen years since it announced the 1998 mission of TeachersFirst.

The question, “Puzzled by the Internet?” on the top of the box says it all. Many of today’s teachers were not in the classroom in 1998 — except possibly as students. It was a time when only about half of the teachers I knew had ever used Google and many were innocently hooked on AOL. Web pages were text-heavy, and no one anticipated Twitter or blogs. How all this Internet stuff was supposed to fit into the world of chalk, worksheets, and VCRs was a mystery. The people at the Network for Instructional Television (NITV), now called The Source for Learning, talked to teachers and found out that they wanted help navigating and understanding how this new-ish thing called the Internet could help them teach (and learn). So TeachersFirst happened.

I hear you laughing now. When I saw the box, I laughed out loud. I remembered that TeachersFirst had given away these cute (and challenging) tangram-type puzzles, but somehow I had forgotten the question that had been printed on the top. This little puzzle is Teaching 1998 in a time capsule. I think I had better keep it in my desk drawer as a reminder of all that has happened since.

My mind fast-forwards to 2012. We would need a new promotional giveaway every three to six months of we want to snap the mysteries of changing technologies into a box with a cute question on top. Even the messages of last summer are too old, though teachers quietly confide that they haven’t had time to “catch up” yet!  I wonder what we will be laughing at in 2015. One thing is for sure: we should back up our blogs and keep archives of what we say today.  Maybe we should bury digital time capsules of the giveaways at ISTE 2012. If nothing else, it will be good for humor therapy, assuming the file formats are even legible.

Happy 14th birthday, TeachersFirst.

As one who runs a web site and offers free services to teachers, I am bombarded by offers from social network marketing companies. Everyone wants to make a pitch via social networks. Get people to “like” you on Facebook, pin you on Pinterest, comment about you on blogs, tweet you to the heavens, and generally fill digital space with noise about you. And it does work. Sales come from social networks. Of course, TeachersFirst isn’t selling anything, but we are always trying to get the word out so teachers benefit from timesaving and thought-provoking ideas from our Thinking Teachers®.

When I look for more than a few minutes at the many networks I belong to (conservatively in the hundreds) and even at some comments left on TeachersFirst resources, I see the same pattern. Thinly veiled impostors are creating their own digital fauxprints to hawk the wares of commercial clients. Others simply play the role of something they are not, in order to lure users to new web startups or build the traffic on another site.  How many of the “members” of social networks are actually what they say they are?

I am not talking about cyber stalkers claiming to be teenagers in order to lure our kids into unhealthy relationships. I am talking about self-sculpted digital “experts” and frequent commenters. Spammers are trapped by Akismet and similar tools, but others spend their days creating and maintaining infomercial identities. This would make a fascinating digital (and ethical) exercise for our students (and ourselves as students of the digital world). I’d love to try this challenge with a class or two.

Digital Footprints and Fauxprints

Choose a site where users leave frequent comments. You might choose a popular technology blog, entertainment blog, newspaper site (if open access), food/restaurant review site, Ning or other “community” related to an interest you have, or even a shopping site such as Amazon. Explore some frequent commenters: how many comments have they left? What kind of profile information can you find about them? Can you find the same username on a related or competitor site that also has social features? What evidence can you find that this user might be the same person?  Create a collection of comments by this persona along with the questions they raise for you. You may wonder whether this person has a political agenda, a history of bad experiences, or some other motivation for his/her comments and posts.

Now the big question: Is there any evidence that this persona is, perhaps, a fictitious identity creating a “faux print” to accomplish a certain task? For example, does he/she always send you to see another site that is selling something? Or is he/she trying to generate ad revenue from site traffic (hits)?  Is it possible that this persona is not what he/she pretends to be? Create a digital presentation in support of your fauxprint hypothesis.

Variation: Conduct a class fauxprint scavenger hunt on ONE large site such as Amazon or the Washington Post ( I would have said New York Times, but they charge for access). See how many obvious sales-pitch or agenda-pushing identities you can find during one class period.  What evidence can you show that they may be false identities, hired for a purpose? Award a digital Fauxprint Finder badge to the student with the most, most creative, or most discerning observations.

If you have ever done this or a similar activity, please share it (and a link to any results). I doubt I am the first to wonder about this. I promise to approve REAL comments!

I occasionally play a minor but useful role among my adult peers. I am the Grammar Police…or the Comma Patrol. Of course, I delighted to read Fanfare for the Comma Man in the New York Times this week. I enjoy helping people sculpt messages so their readers will not furrow foreheads from fuzziness. I don’t delight in correcting my friends, but am willing to contribute my expertise when asked.  In return, my colleagues and friends relish catching my frequent typos as they laugh at my unconventional keyboarding. I try not to embarrass myself with egregious typos, and they try not to give me passages with grammar so terrible it abuses my willingness. We each offer our best efforts, then trade expertise to make them even better.

As the Grammar Police, I need to stay up to date the rules. As the NYT article points out, comma rules vary with the style guide — much as traffic laws vary by state. So acting as Comma Patrol or Grammar Police requires ongoing learning. I have to know where to look for the latest on commas or usage or vocabulary. Expertise requires ongoing diligence.

We expect our students to develop expertise. Standards demand it, and so do the Big Tests. We do not do as well at teaching them two real world corollaries of expertise: trading and ongoing diligence.

We artificially set them up to “trade” expertise. We put them in small groups for projects but we don’t help them discover real expertise of value in each member of the group. Instead we “assign roles” or have them draw lots. In the real world,  adults discover the expertise of our friends and colleagues. Outside of school, kids do too. Somehow when we enter the classroom we often forget to facilitate the same real discovery process. So there is no real “trading” of something they value. To let them find value and trade, we need to offer more choice of products/tasks. That Lego ability might come in handy. We know that teachers teach in their own preferred way of learning, and we typically assign projects that draw on our own best expertise. Ask your students what they can offer in trade.

Curriculum assumes that once our students have developed an expertise, they move on. Rarely do students seize responsibility to maintain expertise so they can be valued as real experts. The curriculum spirals past the topic again in a year or two, so students need not seek sources to stay up to date. They wait to be pushed through it all again at the next level. They are not really the experts. We tell them what comes next.

In my friend’s high school bio class, the students recently completed another round of infographics (here and here), this time with a partner. They chose the partner– most likely because he/she was a friend. But this time their expertise really showed through. They have refined their visual communication skills and science concepts quite a bit since September. The infographics they made this time show both trading and ongoing diligence. Most likely, it is the repeated opportunity to develop and trade expertise that made this last round of projects noticeably better. I am better at being the Grammar Police because I use, trade, and update the skills often. We need to allow our students the same real enjoyment of becoming experts.

No idea is unique. The difference is what we do with our dandelion-down thoughts that fly by while we are doing other things. Most of us ignore them. Maybe we should be showing our students the simple step of wetting a finger to catch fleeting ideas before they escape. The wet finger is the difference that innovators share. While temporarily stuck to the tip of a moistened finger, that downy seed is ours for a moment to do with what we wish. We might carefully plant it to watch it grow.  We might simply allow it to dry and blow away again. But once it is gone, it belongs to anyone and no one.

A week ago, I mused in a post about a new way to “track” what we learn in a post-post-secondary education world. A few weeks earlier, I posted about the trade-offs we make, giving our privacy to Google. My musings were certainly not unique. Within the last day or two, I have read about a potentially new way to preserve privacy — even from Google — and a start-up that hopes to containerize what we learn from open sources of “education.”  My fleeting, dandelion-down ideas most certainly did not implant themselves so quickly into others’ blossoming flower pots, but we all know how ubiquitous dandelions are! Someone else had these same ideas and took the time to wet a finger.

In our classrooms, we cannot see the dandelion down blowing about all those heads. In our society, often we mistake dandelions for weeds. But we secretly love to see the first dandelions come up in spring, a sign of new life and a warm summer to come.  We need to ask about the ideas our students allow to escape — or leave at home because school does not value them. As we let fly our own new ideas, we need to pause, wet-fingered, to publicly give them a chance in front of our students. We need to think aloud about them and model capturing them into blog posts or idea bins or sketchbooks or voice bubbles or — something. Not every idea is worth keeping, but none of us can decide that in the short time it takes for them to fly away.

If we have one great, untapped resource, it is all the ideas that fly away from our classrooms, ignored. STEM education is supposed to promote innovation, but ANY classroom can. Have you caught any dandelion down today?

The WSJ reported on an open course experiment offered by Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun last fall. The results: of the couple hundred on campus students and the 160,000 who “took” the course for free — online, 210 earned perfect scores on the final exam. All of them attended the course via the free, online option. You can read the details, aptly titled “Watching the Ivory Tower Topple” as long as WSJ keeps the article online.

Our society is accustomed to asking about degrees and experience to match people to jobs and opportunities. HR expects the checkboxes: HS, BA/BS, MA/MS, etc.  The currency of learning has always been “credits” (small change) toward “degrees” (larger denominations, i.e. larger BILLS ~ great double entendre!). If education can be delivered openly to anyone, anywhere, how will that change the way we decide who is “qualified” for a job, a volunteer role, even contract work as a landscaper?

It’s not about digital immigrants vs digital natives. It’s about willingness to taste something new.

Five year olds don’t like to try new foods. Some are unwilling to touch a food simply because it is green or “looks funny.” If it does not look like macaroni and/or cheese, the five year old mouth clamps closed. Fortunately, with a little coaxing, that stubborn little macaroni man will grow out of this phase.

Adults who are taste-averse about new applications of technology are worse than five year old macaroni mavens. Yesterday I heard a tale of unwilling technology “taste testers” in a highly respected university setting. This university was asked to evaluate various curricula for use in a certain type of early childhood program. As professionals, their taste testing is more than personal preference. It is a formal assessment of the quality of the curriculum “meals” being offered.

This group of curriculum food critics notified the creator of one curriculum that they simply will not “taste” that curriculum because it is not available entirely in a print format.  The curriculum, in fact, is much more than a print document. It is an interactive tool that uses ongoing formative assessments of student progress to recommend the next curriculum objectives for EACH child and simultaneously offers several possible activities that can be used to help that child (or a class) achieve the next developmentally appropriate objective. Why isn’t it in print? Because it is interactive, data driven, and dynamic. You simply can’t make a print curriculum “book” that flips to the correct page based on what  a child did today in class. This curriculum is steeped in technology to make learning work. Imagine that.

But the highly respected five year olds won’t taste it because it looks funny and is not printed macaroni and cheese.

I have no idea who has given the five year olds permission to run the university evaluation project, but I hope someone will eventually help them outgrow their five-year-old, finnicky attitude. At this rate, they would have us teaching our children to do nothing but string macaroni bracelets well into the 21st century.

Please pardon this bit of a rant. Some weeks end on a sticky note.

I read a great post from Rian van der Merwe, a tech designer/dad in South Africa. He shares four essential guidelines for folks designing iPad apps for his young daughter. His requests make perfect sense, not only for young children on iPads, but for our students using both apps and web resources. I especially like  this one:

If You Try To Trick My Kid Into Buying Stuff, You’re Dead To Me.…The screen is a landmine of carefully placed icons that lead to accidental purchases — not to mention the random animated banner ads that are designed to draw attention away from the app itself….if you try to use persuasive design on my young daughter, all bets are off. Your app will be deleted, and we’ll never do business again.

Does that remind you of experiences you have had with web sites in your classroom? How many have you declared “Dead to Me”?

Rounding out  Mr. van der Merwe’s top four usability guidelines for little fingers and young minds using iPads are these points (paraphrased):

• use visual cues to indicate which things are interactive
• make pagination using arrows: obvious and easy to navigate (even for little fingers)
• make menus secondary: something we seek out and will not open accidentally

While some teachers may not be fortunate to own an iPad or even use them at school, we have parallel expertise on what drives us crazy about web sites OR apps we use with students in our classrooms. I offer my top four guidelines for web resources AND apps to avoid a “Dead to Me” sentence:

1. Bikinis are islands, nothing else.

If you must have ads to keep your app/site free, at least moderate them so there are no scantily clad women. My students are not here for human anatomy visuals or lessons on eating disorders. The same goes for guys with sixpacks in Speedos. Puberty begins earlier and earlier these days, even without your help.

2. Your energetic music is my insanity.

Engaging, perhaps. But your “engaging” music means I have to hand out headphones (lice?) or give the same directions for muting speakers and/or finding the “sound off” icon at least three times EVERY time we open the app/site. Set your music default to OFF.

3. I am not a student, so don’t force me to act like one.

I like to sample every activity/game/app, but I don’t have time to navigate through the whole thing just to know which terms are used or what we will learn. Give me Teacher Information. If your site/app is not intended for school, you can still tell us a bit about it. Call this area  “behind the scenes” if you don’t want to doom your app/site as “educational.” I’ll find the site/app anyway, if it is good. While you are at it, please tell me how long it typically takes to navigate a game and other practical tips. I promise not to send kids into your app/site without previewing and deciding how it fits our curriculum, but I need your help.

4. Remember Josh and Julie in the back row.

I love Josh and Julie. Josh is so bright he makes me laugh when I shouldn’t. He also knows how to break any game or web activity. He shows Julie (or she shows him), as they set their own “learning objectives” for the day. For Josh, the objective usually involves showing the game that he knows more or sleuthing out incorrect information or exceptions he can argue about. Josh needs a way to skip ahead by demonstrating competence and something open ended to intrigue him into productive and extended thinking. Julie has a learning disability. It does not prevent her recalling how to escape learning the terms or avoid thinking about anything that was “too hard” or open ended. Give more than a fleeting thought to Josh and Julie, and be honest in sharing what I may need to do to adapt for them … in the Teacher Info (see #3).

I personally thank any app/web developer who can adhere to at least these four. You’ll be alive and well with me. I am certain every teacher has at least two or three or ten death sentence avoidance guidelines to add. Each Thinking Teacher who writes for TeachersFirst has his/her own. We carry these with us as we write reviews for TeachersFirst, and we always welcome the thoughts and “guidelines” of others. Comment here or on any TeachersFirst resource review.