Think Like a Teacher

Happy New Year! (See my Geogreeting* to you)

This time of year, everyone offers carefully studied retrospectives,  the “Top Ten” this or that from the past year. I see so many amazing sites every year that I could never choose a top ten. Instead, I offer this random, personal collection — just some of the many visual, interactive sites that intrigued me for more than a moment during 2011, at least long enough to say, “WOW!”

TeachersFirst reviews them — so I don’t need to explain them further. My job lead me to find these WOWs among the 714 Featured Sites on TeachersFirst during 2011.  [Actually, one was featudurian late 2010, but it remains a Tip Top Fav of mine.] On any given day, I could close my eyes and click on a dozen or more from among the Featured Sites archives and experience the same “WOW!”

How fortunate I am to have a job where I experience WOW every week.

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Random, personal  WOWs from 2011 – in alphabetical order. (The titles within reviews are links to WOW.)

60 sec recap (review) Definitely ad-heavy, but the concept is great. I once had a hilarious cassette tape of literature classics in two minutes, including Hamlet, but this is even better. Makes me want to create my own or do one with a group of gifted kiddos.

Exhibition Monet (review) Breathtaking. Steep in it.

Foldplay (review) Put anything in a visual container, even abstract concepts and experiences. This is the way I think.

Font de Music (review) Because music and words make poetry together.

Gettysburg Address (review) I live not far from Gettysburg and find this speech moves me more and more as I grow up. I think I finally am starting to get it.

Google Search stories (review) * actually from 2010, but an all time fav. I find myself imagining new stories while sitting in traffic or waiting rooms. This should be an app for my phone.

Information is beautiful (review) The title says it all.

Instagrok (review) I love learning new things, and Instagrok invites me in.

Newscred (review) Learn and read just what I want. To think I used to have to ride my bike two miles to experience this wave of knowledge in the stacks of the public library when I was a kid.

Spicy Nodes (review) As I have said many times, I am a visual person. Concepts = images. Cool.

TeacherWall (review) Morale booster! Not only do I see great teachers. I also feel our profession lifting up and taking me with it.

Virtualswim (review) OK. I like to swim. I think under water. This one is just for me. Aquaphobes, stay away.

Wondersay (review) Because message is about both words and visuals. See a poem.

Yulia Brodskaya (review) I love art, and visually rich sites lure me in for hours. This one is striking.

*The tool that made my greeting above is reviewed here.

TeAching is tech that has earned an “A.” I hope to improve my peer teaching performance to earn that “A.” Last week I wrote of my resolve to improve the way I share edtech expertise with tech-challenged teaching peers in 2012, to help the tech-challenged in a way that enables and respects their ability to help themselves. So I may actually stick to this resolution, I propose five simple “insteads” of respect:

Five Insteads to earn an A:
1. Instead of,  “It’s easy, let me show you,”  I will try, “You have the skills to do that. I remember you showed me … (fill in something my new techie did the last time we met).”

2. Instead of,  “You haven’t tried X?”  I will try, “I just heard about X, but I haven’t had time to even look at it. Can we figure it out together”

3. Instead of touching the mouse, I will keep my hands in my pockets and try to contain my twitching. When I am about to blurt something out, I will offer to fetch us each a cup of coffee so my new techie can play on his/her own. No coffee? I’ll go to the rest room! I will leave for a few minutes so the new techie can explore without a witness. But I’ll be sure to return soon enough to prevent meltdown.

4. Instead of, “Yeah, I’ve done that,” I’ll confide the list of tech tasks I haven’t learned yet or can’t figure out. This will also apply when a fellow edtech guru boasts about a new tool. I will admit what I do not know.

5. Instead of, “Just let your students show you,” I’ll  ask, “Which of your students needs the boost of knowing something the rest of the class does not? Maybe the three of us can do it together first.”

I hope that these “insteads” will encourage a new wave of teAcher techies who have earned the golden A as tech evangelists who support, encourage, and empower. We owe it that respect to our hardworking teaching peers as we pay our expertise forward.

This is the traditional time of year for charitable giving. We try to share our good fortune with those less fortunate. Then we make resolutions to be better people on the New Year. Some of us are fortunate enough to have strong ed tech skills (and/or tech bravado) and can easily be lulled into a sense of superiority as we help others throughout the year. The approaching New Year is the perfect time for us to pay our knowledge forward, but try to do so without the bravado that undermines our very help.

So I resolve in 2012 to improve the way I offer tech help: to help the tech-challenged in a way that enables and respects their ability to help themselves. This post is the first of two installments as I mull ways to improve my tech help offerings and follow through with my “pay it forward” resolution. May this warm up my muscles for edtech help to the needy while respecting dignity, frustrations, and phobias. Three empathy exercises come to mind. Each has happened to me in some form, and I learned from it. Perhaps you have some empathy exercises of your own.

Three EdTech Empathy Exercises

1. Phone techs
   Try giving computer directions over the phone — blind.  Select a task such as learning to put an attachment on email or save an attachment with a new name in a new folder inside at least three other folders. For extra variety, do this on an operating system you have not used for two years. The computer in use at the other end of the phone must be one you have never seen (no school district issued “models” allowed).  If you are seething after just a few instructions and begging just to see what is happening, that’s what your tech-challenged peer feels like every time you start giving directions about “click on this” or “minimize that.” Improve your empathy (and verbal directions)  further by extending this exercise to an octogenarian at the other end of the phone.
   
   
2. Why’s Guys
   Pretend you have a three year old with you at all times, asking, “Why?” Do not move forward to the next step until you answer the question — every time. If you forget to explain to your invisible three year old, you must restart the entire task but may never repeat the same explanation or analogy to explain “why?” you did that step.
3. Timed Tech Taboo
   Just as in the party game of the same name, try to avoid forbidden words. Appoint an independent (non-geek) judge to prepare you for a session with a tech-challenged person. Speak for five minutes about the tasks you will be doing with your needy case — without uttering any and all computer terms. Set the timer on your iPhone or Android. Every time you slip, restart the timer. How much concentration did it take to last for five minutes? That’s how hard your tech-challenged peer works to focus on the directions you rattle off  as he/she tries to keep up. If the task you plan to teach takes ten minutes, practice until you can achieve ten minutes on your timer. THEN approach the needy person and teach the task.

We are all aware of our digital footprints these days, and we caution our students to be aware of the potential future impact of their digital droppings. I wonder, however, about the opposite problem:  the footprints we leave in sands to wash away with changing tides. How can we, as children or adults, plan and preserve the digital archive we want without having to reformat or create new versions every 24 months or so? If a student today wants to be able to retrace his/her own path, what shoes should he/she wear on the trail? How can we avoid having to reformat our lives to fit ever changing media so we can preserve a digital footpath to be retraced in the future?

In the past couple of months, I have helped my husband sift through family archive photo albums as we emptied out an apartment of a loved one who had passed away. I have mourned the changes to the recently aired version of A Charlie Brown Christmas (an heirloom of a sort in this family) as compared to the original 1965 version. I realized that no two are alike: the 1965 version I have memorized (and sang in), the VHS tape for which we longer have a player, the recently remastered BluRay version, and the current on-air version. I even tried  the iTunes version…all different. Stashed around our technojunkyard house we have LP’s, CDs, MP3s, Hi-8 video tapes, VHS tapes, DVDs, BluRays, 3 1/2 inch floppies, USB sticks, zip disks, negatives, paper prints, scans, digpix, SD cards, compact flash cards, iCloud files, Win files, Mac files, Facebook pages, Picasa pages, Google+ photos, and — yes — some very old photo albums from the days when photography was new, hanging precariously from black corners that have lost their adhesive.

I want my four year old grandson to learn to build a digital pathway instead of leaving random droppings. Unless he/we constantly revisit(s), reformat(s), and re-collect(s) the footprints of his life, we will never have the same kind of treasury that once resided in smelly old photo albums. And as we revisit, we will be tempted to change the versions just a bit. I wonder about the ethics of being a revisionist vs an archivist. And selecting the tools will never be a “final answer,” but simply a prediction of today’s high and low tide media. This is the other side of digital footprints. Something more to teach and learn.

I know you. I have known you since you were 7 (or 8 or 10). You can act like an idiot, dress like a hooker, talk like a sailor, and saunter through these school halls flexing your freshly-sprouted muscles, but I knew you when you sat on the floor for story time and whispered in my ear that there really is no Santa Claus.

I am excited for you. I see you questioning who you are and trying out new identities. I see you beginning to dream of a world beyond school. You ask me questions about that world that I cannot answer, but we can explore them together. As long as we who pretend to control your life make our classes seem relevant to that world, you humor us by participating. Occasionally, you let us see that you actually like learning.

Does it matter that I knew you before grade 6? It helps. Could a teacher new to you know you as well? Probably. Does the very act of transition to this middle school  threaten your progress just by removing you from the K-5 learning home where you sat on the floor?  There is a study that says it hurts your academic progress to move to this middle school instead of remaining in the same building where you abandoned Santa Claus. I am fortunate that my job as teacher of gifted spans grades 2-8 in several buildings. So I know you, no matter which grades are in the building around us.

I would argue that it is relationship that defines your learning experience. You need someone who knows you. You need someone who knows that today’s cocktail party outfit is just a trial balloon of your sexuality (and who will tell you when it is not appropriate for school). On the inside, you are still the person who pretended to be a cat for the class play and who likes to read Shel Silverstein poems. You are also the mathematician who showed me a different way to solve that word problem and the computer geek who figured out html as a hobby.

You are the lucky one. You achieve because you have adults who know you and notice you. You have history with us. Your parents who know us, too. No matter how much the experts study and mine the data about you and your classmates, I know you. I cannot wait to see what you become long after our time together here.

If  our students are the digital natives, and policymaking powerful are the arriving settlers in the New Digital World,  what kind of feast are we celebrating this Thanksgiving?

After a long year (or decade) of trying to understand each other and make peace about what learning really is, are we finally sitting around the same table to celebrate a bountiful harvest? As some spokespeople from the Old World seem to be wavering about  using exclusively test-driven methods, we see signs that some have come to appreciate alternate ways of harvesting learning. The corn of this New Digital World is the creating/sharing web. Look at the bountiful spread on the table this Thanksgiving. We truly have much to give thanks for:

• Free tools for teachers and students. Beyond the freemium munchies, we actually have heaping servings of wikispaces and Edmodo and so many dishes we cannot fit them on the table, some without advertising garnish.
• Mashed up potatoes of every kind. The Goo(d)gle Earth has brought forth quite a harvest.
• The centerpiece: A turkey we all agree IS a turkey and need not weigh and measure to tell that is ready. At least for today we can call it learning without measuring its precise statistics. Breathe in the aroma of learning.

Oh yes, the cranberry sauce: the teachers. Without cranberries, the feast lacks color and the catalyst to so many tastes.

May this feast continue and become a tradition. We would have reason to give thanks for a long time.

Where do the best ideas come from? Chinese leaders want to know. U.S. voters  and leaders could benefit from thinking about it, too.

In his post “Teaching Creativity: The Answers Aren’t in the Back of the Book,” Brian Cohen makes an articulate case for arts education and the lessons any student can learn from open ended, achingly prolonged thought that does not lead to a definite answer:

Figuring things out for yourself has a high value. Thinking is the best way to learn. But it’s painful and a lot of work, and lengthy uncertainty is uncomfortable.

His analysis of what students gain from arts programs is dead on: tolerance for ambiguity, willingness to allow a thinking to run beyond the first answer, willingness to risk — then throw away that first answer, recognition that some thought resolutions may be “ugly.” Key to his analysis is a distinction between “knowledge” and “understanding.” (Do I hear Bloom whispering in his ear?). But these lessons need not be reserved just for the arts teachers. All of us should advocate for ambiguity:

As teachers, we imply there are definite answers and that we possess them. Sometimes teachers play a kind of game in which they encourage students to guess the answer in the teacher’s head. It might be better played the other way around.

How often do we encourage ourselves to guess what is inside our students’ heads? How often do we coax students to share the random or strange rumblings that may occur there as we teachers ramble and assign? How often do we ask:

 What do YOU think?

It’s tough to resist the urge to steer students’ answers like cattle drivers funneling the herd into the chutes. Cattle inside fences are easier to manage measure. Besides, we have deadlines, right? As one of the comments on Cohen’s post points out,

we no longer have the luxury of time and uncertainty and having kids think for themselves

Maybe we should “occupy” our schools with our own signs. One benefit: thinking doesn’t cost anything.

This is a story of powerful teacher collaboration. It is the story of TeachersFirst. A comment by a colleague yesterday made me stop and think about what an amazing, living organism TeachersFirst really is, thanks to care and feeding of an amazing team of teachers. Teachersfirst may not be as sophisticated at the human body, but look what this team of teacher-leaders has wrought:

A database of  over 13,000 TEACHER-reviewed resources

Each review (example) begins with and passes under the eyes of at least three different teachers and includes title, creator, description, classroom use ideas from real, thinking teachers who know what it’s like in the jungle out there,  subjects, grades, tips to address the many safety/school policy concerns of web 2.0 tools, information on plug ins and media types, tags to connect to related resources. This is teacher-friendly information designed to help fellow teachers quickly find and use what other teachers recommend. This is collaboration.

Scores of teacher-tested units, lessons, and interactive “ready to go” activities, all TeachersFirst “exclusives”:

Each lesson, unit, or interactive piece, such as The Interactive Raven and Dates That Matter, is created by a classroom teacher (or two), often after that teacher tested, adapted, tweaked, improved, and  used the activity/lesson/unit for years in the classroom. These lessons work. If J.D. Power and Associates rated them, they’d rank #1 in reliability. Over half a million teachers and students used the Interactive Raven last month. The TeachersFirst organism thrives on sharing, just as humans thrive on social interaction.

Regenerating and growing, all the time:

Every week, these teachers collaborate to add 25-40 new reviewed resources. They select a dozen or more as “Featured Sites.” Our standards for what is a “feature” keeps rising as we collaborate in looking at all that the web has to offer,  filtering our excitement for that innovation through practical realities of the classroom and the needs of today’s students. Every week there is a new Brain Twister, Weekly Poll, Across the World Once a Week question,  TeachersFirst Update, editor’s blog post (here) by yours truly, and often a new Special Topics collection. Growing, growing. Every living organism continues growing.

Healing when we are sick or “break something”:

The Thinking Teachers know that wellness is important, including web site wellness. We have a trusted team of primary care and specialist geeks who listen as we describe symptoms and ailments. Even the nasty effects of predators attacking servers are held at bay. Fortunately, we heal quickly, usually within an hour. This organism is also fortunate to have guaranteed health care (funding) and nurturing from our generous, non-profit “parent,” The Source for Learning. (And we keep our healthcare costs under control!)

Surviving and thriving through adolescence:

TeachersFirst, age 13 and a half, recently passed through the challenges of adolescence as we matured to TeachersFirst 3.0 in summer, 2011. Like any middle schooler, we still allow vestiges of our childhood to show through occasionally, but we have  matured remarkably, thanks to the joint efforts of a team of Thinking Teachers from California to Florida, from Colorado to Australia. Teachersfirst 3.0 is a twenty-first century teen, strapping and strong. Like any young adult, we still need positive reinforcement and a few kind words to keep us going, so we relish the messages we receive through Twitter and “contact us” emails.

Our stem cells are teacher-leaders:

The DNA of TeachersFirst lies in its team of teacher leaders. Typing and cross-matching to infuse new content is careful and deliberate. It takes over 80 candidates to match a new member to our review team. But the shared DNA is that of Thinking Teachers, the ones you admire and listen to because they are willing to share and grow alongside their peers and their students.

Healthy and agile:

Like any healthy organism, TeachersFirst adapts. None of us knows what will be the next big thing in technology or the next mandate or pendulum swing in education. But the power of teacher collaboration that grew TeachersFirst is fit and prepared for whatever comes next — together:

Thinking Teachers  – Teaching Thinkers.

A sixth grader in rural Pennsylvania — we’ll call her Hayley — is excited to have an assignment she can do online. Her new social studies teacher has asked her group to create a multimedia presentation explaining the impact of steam power on the economics of 19th century Pennsylvania. The group has two class periods to work together in school and must find the remaining time outside of class. Hayley is one of the 28%*

A second grader in urban anywhere– we’ll call him Sam — needs practice with sight words and phonics sounds. His parents are learning English and are very eager for their son to do well in school. Sam is one of the 3%*

Neither Hayley nor Sam has Internet access at home except for Hayley’s family cell phone.  Their teachers are very understanding and offer an extra 15 minutes during recess and a half hour before or after school for them to use a computer in the classroom, lab,  or library. Sometimes Hayley can even work on her project using the family phone, though she finds it more fun to try texting. The local public library also has a computer for students to use. Problem solved, right?

Now fast forward two or three years.  Sam is in fifth grade, and Hayley is in high school. Their teachers have had extensive inservice and have enthusiastically adopted new teaching strategies. Finally, the world of teaching and learning has moved into the 21st century. Hayley’s high school is encouraging teachers to use collaborative online tools which it has subscribed to, and Sam’s elementary teachers are pressing all students to write on their blogs at least once a week. In a given week, Hayley must complete a group science project, an English blog post, and submit examples of algebra use in the real world. Total online time needed outside of class: at least 5 hours. Sam struggles to word process his longer language arts assignments and spends every recess indoors. The public library has reduced its evening hours to Thursdays only and is never open on Sundays. To make matters worse, the library is a ten mile drive from Hayley’s home and a long bus ride for Sam’s mom and her three other children.

Sam’s parents try to share their new cell phone, but Sam and his siblings compete for a few minutes here or there. The phone is also their family lifeline for their dad’s odd jobs. Sam’s school faculty is considering eliminating online assignments, since so many students lack access. Scheduling the computer time for so many creative ideas and reinforcement activities is too much of a burden on teachers, and there is no one else to help. Sam and his school may simply be “left behind.” Total population of elementary kids needing computer time: 200, times three kids per family… and we have a problem.

Hayley’s school must decide whether to shift back to paper/pencil tasks for all or to ration teachers’ online assignments. There simply are not enough places for so many disconnected students to complete connected assignments. And the cable and phone companies have no plans to expand coverage in such a thinly populated rural area where there is no chance to make a profit. Total disconnected population of 250 times 5 hours each = 1250 needed hours of computer time per week.

Sam and Hayley are individual examples of a massive chasm forming beneath the surface of 21st century learning.  The “haves”  schools (those with a small number of disconnected students) move forward in technology adoption, professional development, and effective use of the tools for learning. The “have nots” (those with many disconnecteds and/or many assignments times fewer disconnecteds) are trying to keep up. Even if successful teacher PD wins over the rural teachers, the students of the “have not” schools are still doomed by their local infrastructure.

Small problems grow. Cracks get bigger. Is anyone watching the chasm beneath the feet of our best efforts?

* related info from T.H.E. Journal http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/1105/journal_201110/#/22/OnePage :

iPad, laptop, or paper? The decision is worse than choosing between carry-on only and baggage fee.

Do I do my pre-meeting prep based on the others who will be there, the weight and portability of my various devices, my profound paper hatred, the great Flash/iOS divide, the weather forecast, or what’s  digitally “in” ?

I am traveling 2500+ miles next week to meet some folks I have never spoken with face to face. I am accustomed to having everything at my electronic fingertips all the time: wifi connection, synched iPhone and iPad, and so many accounts “remembered” on my MacBook Pro that I would struggle to name the most important. (At least I have a consistent personal password policy so I can usually log in once I know I have an account on a given web tool.)  I will be traveling with two colleagues: a pure paper person and a willing, Blackberry-toting office person. I am a teacher turned teachertechiewritercreativeperson. We are a diverse trio.
In a dream world, I’d tote along nothing but the iPhone and iPad, and my shoulder would be happy for the lighter weight. If it rains, I can simply zip the bag. But I don’t know what I will encounter at our meetings or in the car/airport/hotel on the way. Will we need to connect to a projector? Will there be free wifi — or would 3G be better? Will I need to demo something that requires Flash? Will I need my Diigo links (OK, I know that PW and can get to it from anything). How quickly can I pull up whatever I might be asked to share…and how much does speed matter? Will I be judged by the way I store and retrieve? If I carry paper (yuck) to help out my one colleague, will it make me less credible in the eyes of the techies I am meeting for the first time?

How much does my digital tote bag matter in my professional credibility?

Is there digital oneupmanship in today’s business environment? I feel like a teenager preparing for a dance. I just have to guess what everyone else will be wearing.