Think Like a Teacher

Teachers deal with the unexpected every day in every class. Somebody throws up, the fire alarm goes off, or the Internet goes down. If not something that obvious, perhaps half the students did not understand yesterday’s lesson or the copy machine broke down before you could run off the quiz. (Hope you aren’t using paper if you have 1:1 or BYOD computer access…) Maybe the entire cheerleading squad is released from class for pictures, and seven of them are in this class… so why start something new?

Those of us who work with teachers as edtech coaches deal with the unexpected compounded by glitchiness, personalities, and — in some cases — fear.  So whether we are planning for a rollout of new technology or collaborating on a lesson idea, we must plan for OOPS. As an edtech coach, we should plan for different kinds of OOPS:

1. Teacher changes mind about priorities, objective, or date of tech event we plan to support (possibly due to aforementioned fire alarm the day before).

2. Students show up without devices or without their materials to do the tech project you and the teacher so carefully planned.

3. Kids outsmart the school-supplied device and prevent it from functioning as expected.

4. Teacher gets nervous or backs down because he/she has not fully “mastered” tech tool/device.

5. Tech support forgets to unblock the web tool you requested 6 weeks ago for access from student log-ins.

6. Principal announces this is his/her day to observe, and teacher drops back to a traditional, safer lesson plan.

…and the list goes on. Generally speaking, the larger the project and the higher the stakes, the greater the chance of OOPS. Take the case of Los Angeles roll out of iPads for every student. Kids see a new device as a challenge to their intelligence and deviousness. More than any academic benchmark or inspirational teacher, a new device is  motivation to really think through the possibilities and to problem solve until you can break it and take control over that which the authorities have tried to block from your control.

A savvy tech coach or planner will therefore start with two essential test cases: a very savvy kid and a very skeptical teacher. Ask them to describe and simulate the worst possible case of OOPS with the project you have planned. What could break? Can you beat this? Then ask BOTH of them to tell you how they would prevent that scenario from happening. What can the student suggest to defeat his/her clever peers? What can that same student suggest to the teacher to avoid his/her feared pitfall? Think of the POWER that student will feel while actually aiding the “other side.” It’s like using a double agent to defeat the OOPS. Having taught the gifted kids, I can picture the pleasure they would take as double agents.  Maybe you can start an OOPS Team of student double agents dedicated to creating and defeating scenarios in a team-like competition. Make it a new student club?

It’s worth a shot. What’s the worst that can happen? Another OOPS?

So ends another week with me musing — and being somewhat serious.

Why do we learn a new language?

In high school, we take a language to get credit, get into college, and maybe use it when visiting another country. As teachers, we learn a language I call edu-ese to speak among ourselves about professional strategies, the latest research,  or best practices. We use edu-ese as a common professional language that allows both precision and  shared understanding. Terms such as those found on this generator or this one are for teacher-to-teacher talk, much the way that doctors talk to each other about the surgical approach they will take to fix that heart valve or remove that appendix. Eduese is not intended for public consumption. Doctors do not expect us to know what a transaortic valve implantation is, and we should not expect a parent, grandparent, or student to know what scaffolding is or what tiers of intervention are. So why do we impose edu-ese on parents?

If you have been around hospitals with sick relatives enough, you have experienced the varied manners of doctors in explaining things. The good ones never use medical terms without paraphrasing them in the same sentence (providing what teachers might call context clues  ). Some docs are not so good at this, and we all hope they will be reading xrays in some dark room, not explaining our choices for valve replacement! Yet we, as teachers, are as guilty as doctors of poor “parent-side manner.” I read this post with great sympathy and felt a twinge of guilt for the times I may have sent a parent home wondering what the heck I was talking about. I therefore offer my six edu-ese commandments for myself going forward:

1. Thou shalt always paraphrase any edu-ese within the same sentence — or not use it at all.

2. Thou shalt offer an edu-ese translation of all terms used in printed handouts sent home or posted on the class web page.

3. Thou shalt provide and reply to an anonymous-submission “edu-ese translate” form (kind of like Google Translate but in an online Google docs form where people can submit anything they wish). This form shall be readily available via a link from the school and class web page so parents and students can anonymously request a translation of ANY term they hear in reference to teaching/learning/education, even if it is not from a source within your class or school.

Perhaps your school PTO/PTA could take on this last idea as a project to serve the entire school community. Ask your teachers with the BEST parent-side manner to act as translators for the edu-ese submissions. Encourage parents to paste or enter ANYTHING they read into the form. Share translations, responses, and explanations on the school web page for all to see.

4. Thou shalt not assume that you know which terms are “foreign” or misunderstood by your audience. Language is very personal and comes with its own baggage of experience. If you are not sure, use an alternate word and look or listen for understanding.

5. Thou shalt never use edu-ese in email. Email is hard enough to understand without complicating it with a foreign language. If you must use edu-ese, reserve it for live, preferably face-to-face interaction. Faces tell a lot.

6. Share these commandments with your colleagues and pledge to remind each other about them when you slip.

And to Dahlia Lithwick, the lady who feels left behind, maybe you can take these commandments with you to your next parent conference.

I posted last week about playing with words and the ways wordplay can build vocabulary, enrich word choice, or simply enhance appreciation for our own language. Although I am pretty good at mental math, I find it a little tougher to imagine “gamifying” math with as much enjoyment. So I challenged myself to rediscover some of the resources that open my mental playspace for math. Some are sites that let us play with number sense, some that connect math with graphical representations of geography  and places (maps), and some that show math applied in real world settings we might not think of as “mathematical.” Hopefully, any imaginative gamer can find ways to play with math among these.

Number Sense-ations

Every Second on the Internet  simply gets you thinking about HUGE numbers (and time), all related to the phenomenal growth and use of technology around us all the time. This one begs us to ask each other, “So how many xx do you think  appear each second on the Internet?”  in a sort of stump-your-friends style of oneupmanship with tech statistics.

Virtual Number Rack is just what it sounds like: a virtual manipulative (aka hands-on toy) where you slide beads back and forth on rods. You can add multiple rods, thus creating “place value” to please your math teacher. You can also invent games to play: create patterns, ascribe meanings to the negative spaces (and spans)  between the beads. or even invent a digital “code” to send messages using beads. As you play with red, white, and space, you are playing with math. Shhh. Don’t tell kids that. You’ll ruin their fun.

If It Were My Home gives more statistics than you can imagine about places all over the world. Compare where you live with another place. Look at all those statistics. What do they mean? Which country has twice as much? Which one has half as many? As you wonder about the reasons behind the stats, you start to play mental games with the comparisons.This is real world math with a bonus: all that comparison builds number sense, too.

Mapping Math 

Overlap maps. What a cool way to care about area! The concept of “square miles” never meant much to me, but this does, especially if I use a place I know well. I have driven across Pennsylvania or Massachusetts enough times to know what each “area” feels like. If you put Iowa on top of Iran, which would be bigger? What about Colorado and Tibet? Challenge your friends to predict which map would be larger than the other… and prove it here.

Maths Maps is Tom Barrett’s project to merge math and Google Maps. This one begs for your contribution. I personally like the idea of locating shapes in various places and making placemarkers for them. But I could see mapping all sorts of mathematical concepts. What about a  creating a treasure hunt using maps and math?

Math (invisible or applied) in the real world

9 Most Mathematically Interesting Buildings in the World  and  10 Amazing Examples of Architecture Inspired by Mathematics tell what they are all about. As someone who likes art and thinks visually, these have me at “click.” Can you find a building in your community that uses math creatively? What about that building in London that is melting things because of its curves? Why? What other weird buildings are there — and what is their math?

Yummy Math has math problems related to today (or this week), but they are not simply :George has seven pumpkins” for an October “word problem.” They are REAL events or people. MY immediate reaction is to try some but to quickly move to inventing some. What math problem can you create from today’s lead story in Google News? The questions might be a bit shocking, especially when the lead story is about chemical weapons or a Navy Yard shooting, but math certainly takes on meaning this way. Make reality into a math game. It might have a secondary benefit of helping us cope with nasty news.

Get the Math makes math hip. Here comes a math teacher’s favorite question: Where will I actually USE this? Answers: In fashion? Check. Music? Check. Video Games? Check.  Forget justifying math. Just go play in the many places where math sings its own tunes.

Homestyler is one of my very favorites. Design a dream home in 3D. You have to know about measurement and proportion, of course, but who cares.  I want a cool kitchen and big windows. Hoe many homes can your design? Can you design a home for someone who is 6 foot 7? What about a mini-house for kids to play in? Design a “fun house” with weird proportions to confuse people who enter. Make design a game, and  it will never feel like “math.”

Arounder See and imagine all that travel entails: plan the travel costs, count the miles, choose the best route, and more, all inspired y these amazing 360 tours. Invent your own world math challenge  beginning here.

I thought it would be hard to generate a list for gamifying math, but now I find myself wanting to GO PLAY. 

Sometimes the simplest tools can be the most creative places to play and learn. The trick is approaching them with some curiosity and playfulness — making a game of it.

Try MoreWords. This very simple tool, apparently designed to help you cheat at crossword puzzles, word scrambles, and other word games, is also a lot of fun for finding new words and playing with letter combinations, prefixes, suffixes, and more. (You WILL have to ignore some annoying ads.) I tried entering crypto—— and found several new words all related to codes. What a great way for kids to get hooked on words. Try entering various numbers of blanks before a suffix or around a root. You could even make it a “gambling” challenge: I predict there will be seven words that have seven letters followed by the suffix proof. How many do you predict? Before we enter it, how many can you name?  OK, I was wrong in my prediction. How close were you?

Here’s another one: WordCount. It analyzes English statistically to tell us word frequencies. Sound like something Google would do, right? But imagine predicting or asking which word is used more frequently: wrestle (rank = 25905) or fight (rank = 1484) ?  (To enter a word and find its rank, click just to the right of  the tiny text “find Word” and type it in.) Think of other word pairs you might test. Ask students to choose one word in a draft they have written and suggest a lesser-used word to replace it. How do you know? Use WordCount.

Looking for more word fodder? Try Alan Cooper’s Homonym List. (What’s the difference from “homophones”? Click  Go to All About Homonyms to decide what to call them). This innocent looking, alphabetical list of homonyms begs us to write clever sayings, sentences, or tongue twisters. Can you figure out why some have red squares and some blue? This list could become a series of writing prompts. Choose a set of homonyms . Create a clever, visual way to show them in correct use in writing and show their differences, perhaps with images, comic characters, or even video.

If we gamify word choice and word study through wordplay, words can become as much fun as apps, and a LOT more productive. If all of us played with words as much as with Angry Birds, imagine how articulate the average American could become. Surely, there would be lasting benefit in that.

New tech tools appear at an astounding rate. (If TeachersFirst had a dollar for every flashcard maker, quiz maker, or memory jogger we have seen –and reviewed — in the past seven or eight years, we’d be taking the entire review team on a Mediterranean cruise this fall.) These days, many web tools are loss leaders to get us to buy the $2.99 app version — even when the web version is still free! Whether we meet up with new tools on old fashioned computers or on our tablets and mobile devices, these encounters feel more and more like speed dating. As teachers or edtech coaches, each of us has our own approach to our potential tech “dates.” Find your speed dating style here (or comment with another approach):

What do you do first when you see a new tool (or app)?

• Look for and actually read the step by step directions
• Watch the first 15 seconds of the intro video
• Join, play, and defeat it
• Try to use it in a way it was not intended
• Try to break it
• See how pretty it looks before proceeding
• Wonder how they coded it
• Name the seventeen others you know that are so similar it doesn’t matter
• Flip its purpose on its head
• Begin a sample called “test”
• Make and send a funny sample project to a friend
• Think of a lesson where you could use it
• Add it to today’s lesson plans
• Look to see how much “free”  is inside its “freemium”
• Look for the teacher guide
• Look for standards correlations (really?)
• Look for Android/iOS app versions
• Read the terms of service
• Read the PRICING — first
• Look at all the examples to see what it is used for
• Check for obscene or inappropriate public examples and rule it out for school
• Walk away when it asks for your email
• Hypothesize how long it will last
• Wonder how long it will be before Google buys it up (or stomps it out)

As in speed dating, we each bring different expectations and seek different kinds of enjoyment from the encounter. What do enjoy most about these first encounters? (Some of these have scary analogies with dating)

• Figuring it out — and using it once
• Showing a friend
• Making someone laugh with it
• Comparing/contrasting it with similar tools
• Filing, bookmarking, or categorizing it
• Tweeting about it
• Laughing at the poorly translated English in the directions
• Matching it to tasks you do or need to do
• Adding it to your collection
• “Pinning” it
• Pondering whether it could be “the One” to change your life

Next time you face a new tool (probably sometime today), stop to think about your approach. Ask your students how they “meet up” with new tools. The conversations you may have about digital life could be pretty intriguing and branch into good discussions about digital citizenship and the role of technology in our lives.

Teaching is personal, and so is this post.

This week is the anniversary of MLK’s I Have a Dream speech, the moment that gave impetus to so much good (and so much good left to be done). Yes, I am old enough to remember that time period. But no, this post is not about civil rights. It is about having a dream and what that dream can become.

As a brand new teacher several years after King’s speech, I had a dream to bring new ideas about learning and creativity into my classroom.  I was sure I’d be the perfect teacher. I had a dream to make all kids like to write. I dreamed that kids would write and create not just “papers” (so thin a substance!),  but media: television shows or radio shows or photoessays with accompanying writings, anything that could express themselves clearly. I had a dream to change kids’ view of school and get them excited, even amid hard work.

I was sure I could do better than the “dead wood” teachers I read about and occasionally saw in classrooms around me. Most new teachers have a similar dream. For sure, I would never be like the “old” teachers who — to my young view — had decided that change was not worth their effort. I remember looking at those teachers who had not only children, but grandchildren and thinking they would never try my new ideas.

Like many dreamers, I was surprised. I discovered that some of the grandparent-teachers were the most willing to get excited about something new. When I suggested making a six week minicourse in the TV studio part of sixth grade language arts curriculum, the teacher said, “Great! How can I help?” When the kids suggested an Emmy-type awards ceremony (we called them Televiddy awards) at the end of the year, entire teams of teachers jumped in to help pull it off. The dream was alive, and the second year the kids’ writing got even better because they wanted to win a Televiddy. The best part was that it wasn’t my dream anymore. It was our dream.

Fast forward through a long teaching career, and I ask myself whether my dream is accomplished. Never. But I think I have given impetus to some good — and so much good left to be done. I look at the challenges facing enthusiastic, green teachers today and hope they have permission to engage in their dreams. Our kids need the dreams of teachers. They need the chance to feel it, see it, and join in the dream together. I can only hope that those who drive educational change today can see the value of dreams over minutiae and uniformity.

Unpack those funky little boxes. Embed widgets are a very handy tool for teachers.

The What of widgets:

Widgets are clever little gadgets you can add to your class web site, blog, or wiki using funky looking gobbledeegook called embed code. They are little boxes that automatically fill with content provided by someone else from somewhere else on the web. This means that your site can show something new all the time without any time and effort by you. It automatically appears in the little box (widget) on your  page/blog/wiki.

Widgets are embedded content, an empty box on your site that fills itself with “stuff” from somewhere else. Some embedded content is simply that: a piece of “stuff” that appears in your empty box but really LIVES someplace else on the web. It might be an embedded version of a video that actually “lives” on YouTube, like the one in this post. It might be the Google Map on a restaurant web page.

Widgets are a special kind of  embedded content because the content DOES something. It changes and updates periodically and automatically. The Cluster Map widget on the right of this blog counts how many people have visited this blog lately. The LIVE Feed one tells where visitors come from and when. Some widgets let the site visitors do something (see the weather widget below), but the site owner doesn’t do anything to make them work. They are embedded widgets that load content provided by someone else.

The Why of widgets (Why go through all this geeky stuff?):

You might be tempted simply because your students will say, “COOL!” That’s certainly OK. but move beyond cool to meaningful by embedding widgets that connect to your curriculum (weather, news from the country you are studying, phases of the moon, news about congress, quote of the day, reading tips, etc.).

The HOW:

HOW you embed a widget depends on both the widget embed code and the site/blog/wiki where you want to put it. For starters, try this blog post on how to embed almost anything. Often the site offering the embed code for the widget will give you tips and directions. But the place where you are going to PUT the code may need to help a bit. If you are using a school web site, try clicking help and searching for “embed.” If you use Wikispaces, they offer help when you click the little icon that looks like a TV set:  It even says “embed code” when you roll your mouse over it.

The general rule is that you need to COPY a chunk of code filled with  marks like <> / etc. and paste it into a place on your site that accepts CODE. On this blog, I have to click the text editing view instead of the visual editing view. An important skill for copy/paste is knowing how to select a block of stuff, COPY by pressing Control+C, (Command+C on a Mac), then PASTE in you desired location by pressing Control+V (Command+ V on a Mac).

Widget wisdom: Be careful who you trust.

One potentially dangerous thing about widgets is that you do not control what shows up inside that box. Make sure your widget is a trusted source. TeachersFirst recently introduced a Featured SItes widget for teachers to put on class, school, media center, or other educator web pages.  Those who know TeachersFirst know that our reviewed resources are vetted thoroughly by a team of experienced teacher leaders. In short, we will not embarrass you by sharing anything bad. We will enhance your web page with new, useful content every week, and you don’t have to do anything. See an example of our widget below, and get one for yourself here.

Want more ideas? Here are search results for the term widget on TeachersFirst. This barely scratches the surface of the widgets available out there.  These are a few reviewed sites that offer widgets. Add an embedded Google Map to your class web page showing the country you are studying or the route that a certain explorer followed. Here’s how.

As you get to like any site, watch for widgets they might offer.  Watch for cool widgets on other teachers’ site and click “get this widget,” usually offered below the widget. As your students learn new creative tools, watch for the ability to share their products using embed code— not a widget as much as simply embedded content, but it is YOURstudents’ creative work, pulled into your web page or wiki. You can gather tproducst from many places into ONE class web page or wiki using embed codes. The ability to share products using embed code is one of the Edge Features mentioned at the end of TeachersFirst reviews.

Just to get your brain going, here are some examples of embedded widgets:

Weather widget for world language teachers or classrooms studying geography, weather, or temperature conversions:

Here is the TeachersFirst Featured Sites widget looks, available here:

And here is a helpful Reading Rockets widget for parent tips, from among several options on this page:

Are you ready to widget yet?

As the new school year begins, teachers attending OK2Ask® sessions are noticeably more stressed and overwhelmed. During these sessions, we share many, many resources and teaching ideas. We pack the sessions with choices: so many tools, so many interactives, so many strategies for organizing lessons that put technology tools to work for learners. Those of us who prepare and teach these sessions are steeped in the stuff. We can name (or at least retrieve) dozens of creative tools and strategies for any learning need : tools to make multimedia presentations, tools to comment and interact with peers, tools to learn about vocabulary and word choice, ways to improve digital citizenship. Honestly, even we are overwhelmed as we narrow down our offerings to fit 75 or 90 minute OK2Ask sessions with eager teachers from all over the world. Practically speaking, none of us can do it all. It is time to give yourself permission to limit your attention to a chosen few.

No, I don’t mean a few students or a few curriculum concepts. I mean give yourself permission to master a chosen few new tools and lesson strategies. Choose one– and only one –of each:

tool for collaborative writing

tool for graphic organizers

tool for sharing images and adding text to images

tool for “collecting” things like web links, pieces of text, images, drawings

tool for creating or clipping video

Is this enough? A handful is plenty. If you are in a BYOD school, you might want to find DATs (device agnostic tools) to do each of these so every kid can use the same tool and collaborate across devices. Or you can assign your students to find and learn one of each type that they can use on their own device. If you are using school machines and network, be sure your chosen few all work inside your web filter.

Then what? Make your choices meaningful by focusing on the learning instead of the tool. Challenge yourself to complete a chosen few “bingo” board that has five tools by five learning strategies that students will do (the possibilities are endless — I just chose 5):

Collaborate to create a group product

Prioritize/choose and justify choices

Practice and teach a skill

Publish, then respond to others’ reactions

Discover new information and organize it in an intentional, understandable way

Make a bingo board for yourself and keep it handy on your desk (or computer desktop). Or use this freebie I am sharing on Google Docs. (Open it and SAVE A COPY for yourself so you can edit.) As you plan an activity this year where students use one of your chosen few tools in one of the learning strategies, put a brief description of the activity  and date in the square. Aim for Blackout Bingo by spring! Think of it as your personal professional development plan. Happy New Year!

As teachers, we all work to balance high expectations while differentiating for various abilities and needs. When we set “requirements” in a digital, social learning community, it is indeed a delicate dance.

Example: You set a high bar for all students in your science class for written expression students in a shared learning community with other schools like MySciLife. Posts must use complete sentences and correct conventions of written English.  The powerful tools of authentic, social learning today: online learning communities, blogs, wikis, and collaborative projects, all motivate kids to show their best writing. Alas, one student’s “best” may invite embarrassment, comparison,  or — and this is the worst — digital muting by his peers. Kids simply ignore posts they cannot understand or that they deem “dumb.”  They even exclaim,” Hey! This kid didn’t use complete sentences, and you said we had to!” Either way, the struggling poster’s voice goes unheard.

Students who struggle with writing — for whatever reason — need more scaffolding and support outside the social stream. Few content area teachers are familiar with strategies for writing help, and many do not realize how much they may hurt. Dealing with a student’s writing is like doing surgery on his larynx. You are dealing with a voice here!

Struggling students want to be heard and to join in the  online conversations — and they should, but they need time to build to a level of competence that does not invite criticism or giggles.  As teachers, we dance delicately. We can suggest offline drafts (think Google docs or even — gasp– paper?) so the struggling student  can improve his/her writing before he posts. We can encourage him to have a peer read it back to him aloud to be sure it “sounds right.” Offer some sentence starters in a Word doc,  diminishing this support over time. Even use his own sentence starters derived from his previous posts. We can focus on major conventions, but we also need to focus on the science content. Offer some words he can drag and drop to form sentences, including required science terms.

Remember that larynx! We do not want to mute his voice by over moderating, rewriting, or constantly disapproving his posts. He needs the posting and social learning experience even more than others. So we eventually allow him to post in the stream and hope that others will be kind. Our delicate teaching dance includes promoting digital citizenship so other students do not demean or digitally “mute” those who struggle. Encourage kids to reply to posts who have received no comments. Reply to a post with a thoughtful question that will help you learn more from that person. Give bonus points for interactions that go above and beyond by asking questions that help another student explain more clearly.

Writing is tough. Writing is personal. Remember the larynx and tread carefully as you tiptoe the delicate dance!

Our classrooms face the same engagement challenges that the Wall Street Journal describes at historic sites across the U.S. More and more, consumers enter school doors with digital devices glued in their hands or tethered to their brains. BYOD/BYOT (Bring your own device/technology) is here. Even if the devices are NOT officially allowed, they are here, hidden under desks or behind books.

Historic sites have responded more quickly than most schools. You can play a texting game in Williamsburg, scan QR codes to learn more at almost every museum these days, or load an app to let you interact while physically standing at historic sites. Curators and education staff worry about the invasive juxtaposition of technology in a Shaker barn and the constant need to update their apps to avoid appearing “outdated.” Teachers face the same concerns managing new technologies. If they believe they must “stay ahead.” they are doomed to fail. We will never “stay ahead” of  what enters the school in students’ pockets.

Historic sites must woo consumers to perpetuate their income stream. They face a digital challenge: “How do we continue to appeal to consumers armed with — and distracted by– devices? What activities and apps can we make that will engage them via those devices?” But schools are more or less guaranteed  our “consumers” for longer periods of time. We therefore have a chance to flip the digital challenge around, asking ourselves, “How can we make students active participants in making the ‘school’ experience one where we not only participate, but create,  leaving a legacy for future learners?” Historic sites have little chance for participant legacy beyond good reviews on TripAdvisor. The difference between a historic site “visitor” and our “learners” is the legacy our learners can leave for those to come.

As I read about the digital experiences at Williamsburg, I wonder if we could gradually make school a digital immersion. Imagine a classroom filled with QR codes — that the teacher does not have to make. The learners make them. Imagine texting games or QR treasure hunts that kids embed in the physical space of a classroom.  Image simple apps, games,  and interactive maps created by kids. As current technologies age, they could be replaced by later student projects. Instead of “turning in” student projects for a grade, we could “turn on” student projects for future audiences of learners. In many classrooms, teachers already have students creating digital projects. The missing step is making them part of a perpetual learning place called school.  Imagine how much harder kids would work for such a vast audience. It would be interesting to find out whether a seventh grader would continue to monitor responses that come in to his fifth grade game about Explorers or would monitor the number of times her QR Treasure hunt was accessed. I am not sure, but I’d sure love to find out. If I were in charge of a physical learning space today, I’d be one of the learners alongside my students, plastering it with digital experiences for any learning consumer who walks in.