Think Like a Teacher

I had a conversation this week with a sixth grade teacher/university teacher-educator about the concept of “seatwork.” Many years ago, after teaching in middle school for nine years, I moved to an elementary gifted teacher position and was stunned to hear this term. “Seatwork” simply was not part of my teaching vocabulary or repertoire.  Frankly, I choke on the term and the idea of keeping kids busy during transitional times using pieces of paper whose primary value was to fill time.  I do not mean to offend or condemn teachers’ need to preserve their sanity during bus arrivals and instructional times while they pay attention to a small group and others are working on something “in their seats.”  We all plan lesson times where students work independently — from kindergarten to high school seniors. But let’s get rid of “seatwork” for the sake of soaking up time. Let’s gamify ” seatwork into Gameworks! (A tribute to #iste13)

Kids love games and invent their own all the time. (Watch a playground!) Even teens invent challenges for each other (not necessarily safe or positive ones). Instead of handing out “worksheets”  and filling time with “seatwork,” have kids create games and challenge their peers with their creations. Yes, you will may have to show the littlest ones how to make a game, but having an audience and purpose for their efforts will generate more meaningful practice with the spelling words or colors or numbers. The game creator and the subsequent players all benefit as you create a community of game-players (and even build some sportsmanship). Arrange the “seats” into  game circles or pairs. Bingo! (oops, pun),  you have gamified “seatwork” into Gameworks. In single computer elementary classrooms, use student computer center time for students to create games, then share them during Gameworks time.

Here are some simple tools to get you started  gamifying seatwork into Gameworks in a non-tech classroom. The TeachersFirst reviews give more details and the links.

Puzzle maker (TeachersFirst review) Use this oldie but goodie to make traditional paper puzzles or get a little tricky and use them electroncially on an interactive whiteboard “gamespace” for student gamers.

Bingo Baker (TeachersFirst review) Create Bingo games. Yes, Gameworks bingo will make some noise, but it will be on-task, productive noise.

Word Search Builder  (TeachersFirst review) Another word search maker. This one makes both printable and online versions you solve by clicking the letters to highlight them in yellow. There is no way to SAVE the online version, though. This is great for game-making on the fly. Try it on tablets for student gamemakers to pass to a neighbor to solve (does not use Flash).

How do You Play (TeachersFirst review) Find rules and ideas for nearly every game you ever knew and some you never did! Gameworks creators can invent their own games on ANY topic using these ideas. There are even simple games for little ones.

Tools for Educators (TeachersFirst review)  Among the many useful items on this site are game board makers and more. Kids will LOVE being the new Parker Brothers!

Online Egg Timer  (TeachersFirst review)  Handy for game players or to declare the end of Gameworks time.

Timer-Tab  (TeachersFirst review) Online alarm clock/timer for your Gameworks that displays the countdown in the actual browser TAB

Countdown Timer (TeachersFirst review) An online timer that looks like the kitchen classic. (Don’t forget to turn up your speakers.)

Next week I will share some “tech” tools for classrooms where students have access to laptops or other devices to play the games.

Today’s rapid-fire, tweeting world loves lists. We see numbered lists on Twitter, in headlines, on magazine covers, among the “popular” stories on our Google News sidebar, among our Facebook friends’ links, on blogs or sites we follow, and even on television. The lists often outnumber any significant substance. The headlines read “Ten best ways to do this,” “Top seven blunders of that,” “50 Best blah-blah,” “100 top whatever.” I admit that I have fallen into the numbered list trap when in a hurry. It’s simply easier and quicker to list a bunch of stuff than it is to finely craft a single idea.

I am tired of lists. Give me one solid, deep article or critique any time over a long list that allows the author to avoid a firm decision or  investigation of  one option in full detail. I would like a supported opinion on one book, a recommended investment, a classroom management strategy, or tip to deal with an ornery two year old, not a long list of possibilities that I must sort, probe, or filter. Yes, I like choices, but I also like to hear an opinion supported by evidence and flavored by nuance. Numbered lists are quick, but they share as much subtlety as an all you can eat buffet. They scream,” My smorgasbord is impressive because it has so many serving dishes, not because any dish can actually stand  on its own culinary merit.”

As teachers, we expect our students to provide visible steps for their solutions to equations, solid evidence for the thesis of their essays, and connections between data and conclusion in their lab reports. Would we allow a “Top ten options in solving for X”? or “Seven possible reasons for the Civil War”? I hope not. Numbered lists have value as brainstorms and for idea gathering — as preliminary investigations, not as ends in themselves.

We should model what we expect. If we write lists for our students (or parents), we should prioritize the items and explain why. If we allow Top Ten lists from our students, at the very least we should ask,”Now that you have chosen ten, can you rank them, explaining why you chose that order?”  If we write articles or blogs, we should skip lists and focus on one thorough critique or discussion.

Ready to go listless? Here is a teaching idea to promote 21st century skills and an opportunity for authentic learning: Have students collect as many examples as they can of numbered lists from their own experience of the media, web surfing, or social networking: articles, blog posts, videos, etc. Then ask them to select one list they care about, research it, and rewrite it based on evidence to support a specific rank order. Of course, they will need to write their explanation in a manner  understandable to the list’s intended audience, including all the supporting evidence, appropriate voice, and conventions needed for publishing in that venue. Have them share it as a comment, blog post, or in-kind response to the original author.

“Listless” could become a very productive oxymoron.

I must share this awesome foursome of writing resources that grabbed my creative eye as I prepare for an online OK2Ask session  in August. 

Gone Google Story Builder (reviewed here). Layer writing on top of digital storytelling about writing using this tool that plays back the writing and editing process as a video. Here is a tongue in cheek (?) example. Imagine assigning students to write s story about writing, portraying two or more characters in the process. Suddenly, the writing matters because we are highlighting the actual process of writing. But the metalayer is that we can “see” the persona doing the writing. What a wonderful way to make students aware of narrative persona and of the thinking processes involved with writing. It would be great fun for a student to show an internal tug of war as he/she writes, such as the impulse to be wildly creative and the impulse to please admissions committees reading a college essay. To actually use this in class, you might have to start by simply brainstorming characters who could be writing and editing a piece together:  a parent and a teen, Jekyll and Hyde, a dog and a cat, Hemingway and Dickens, etc. It also might be easier to make this a partner project. Then ask students to jump back and describe the message of the writing “story” they have told. Layer on layer…

Five Sentences (reviewed here). This is simply a challenge to become more succinct and get to the point in emails. Email is a boring old people medium, but it is also a workplace (and adult) reality.  It is a very practical way to focus writing for a purpose. Students could start with examples of long emails they or their parents have received, rewriting them in five sentences.  Then they could write their own five sentence emails for a real purpose. [Five sentence end here…got the gist?] Many web sites have “contact us” boxes with limited text fields, so the five sentence limit is good practice. Brainstorm things teens might be asking for: a refund, a replacement for a defective product, information about something, etc. Then have them write the five sentences. Make a five sentence rule for emails to YOU as the teacher, and promise to respond in five sentences. Do you think parents would comply?

750 Words (reviewed here) Everybody needs a place to mind-dump. This private space is a good one to vent, collect pieces of writing you don’t know what to do with, lines from songs you like, or angry words you should never actually send via email or text. If your students have email accounts, they can have 750 words accounts. These personal spaces are great for daily write-to-think time, but they are even more likely to be used if students have permission to write off topic at last part of the time. Instead of having them write for you, have them write for themselves.  Keep a class 750 words account where students can enter simply the TOPIC they  wrote about with their own 750 Words today. That list will become inspiration for others.

Quest (reviewed here) Write a game. A long time ago on devices with small black and green screens, there was a game called Adventure. Players made choices about their moves based on text descriptions of where they were and what their options were. The writing must be very clear and consistent, but the option to use vivid description and clever plot twists makes text-based game-creation addictive. A science or history teacher could incorporate writing and gaming to reinforce concepts. For example, a game written by students could include accurate geologic formations or chemical reactions. A game set in a certain place and time in history could include encounters with actual historic figures. This seems a perfect collaborative task for a group of 2-3. Just realize that it could spin into weeks of game obsession. Got gifted? Toss this one at them as a way to use what they know and write their way much further.

I love summer for getting the creative juices flowing.

David Brooks recent column, “Why They Fought,” describes a bygone era of bloodborn patriotism and passion for a cause, a time when men (and women) faced unthinkable circumstances at Gettysburg, firm in “a belief that they were born in a state of indebtedness to an ongoing project” [the noble Union called the United States]. It is certainly hard for us to imagine this pervasive sense of mission in a day when YouTube talking puppy videos garner more attention than hard news.

We rarely witness such shared sense of mission among today’s citizens. I do, however, witness a safer but parallel passion among educators whose ongoing project is re-visioning education. These teachers converse, blog, and adamantly promote reframing education into 24/7, global, student-centered learning enabled by today’s technologies. I do not see any teachers willing to die for the cause (thank goodness), but I do hear more and more articulate voices joining in to explain the vision, punctuated with viable examples and thoughtful questions. They converse and retweet in #edchat on Twitter. They convene at EdubloggerCon, Hackeducation, EduCon, or the many unconference venues where they can find like souls.  They host discussions like Deeper Thinking w/ EdTech: Do we know it when we see it?  They inhabit endless blogs and social networks. They proffer articulate spokespeople whose posts and interviews occasionally find their way into mainstream media (whatever that means). Some of these spokespeople build second careers offering keynotes and inspirational talks to paying school districts. Some are passionate enough to stand alone offering TED Talks. They can be heard in nearly every session at ISTE, and certainly in the Blogger’s Cafe. But most of them (us) are simply teachers who enter the fray every day, willing to continue the passionate construction of true learning communities where our students can find their voices and become self-directed, motivated learners for life.  Though the unthinkable circumstances of our “battlefield” do not  include anything like Gettysburg, the circumstances of teaching grind and disable many.

Thinking Teachers simply don’t give up. They/we have a sense of  “indebtedness to an ongoing project,” the metamorphosis of education from an industrial era model to an information era model of thinking, questioning, and learning anywhere, any time — for life. Given the pace of change in public policy and in education’s institutions, this sounds like a pipedream. But I don’t hear anyone giving up. If you have not heard the voices and you care about the future of education, you owe it to yourself to listen more carefully. Start at #edchat and build your network to learn about this ongoing project. What history will say in 150 years, who knows.

Happy Independence Day.

I am back from ISTE 2013, the annual conference for the International Society for Technology in Education. It was enormous, collaborative, and agile. My colleagues and I think of ISTE as the preview of what will become commonplace in 2-3 years. Imagine about 20,000 people, all passionate about learning and using educational technology to make learning both possible and powerful. Imagine 20,000 people, each with at least one device to take notes, tweet, take pictures, vote, save bookmarks, post to Facebook, text, question, and generally share. 

Every line you stand in at ISTE  is a collaborative opportunity, even the inevitable lines in the women’s restrooms. Sadly, the ubiquitous devices tempted some attendees to share via device, ignoring actual humans close by, but that was their loss.

My observations during ISTE bring our own device sessions reinforce my thoughts about my own iPad and iPhone.  Mobile devices force us to be connoisseurs of DITs and DATs.

DIT: do it tool

DAT: device agnostic tool

Whether using school-owned or “bring your own” devices, teachers and students need Do It Tools for each task we face.  It might be an app or a web tool, but the DIT must match the demands of the task: I need to draw and add text labels. I need to annotate an image. I need to collect poll results via smartphone. I need to take notes and be able to access them from my laptop, my iPad, and my phone. I need to track a twitter hash tag. We need to collect urls and citations along with them. Some DITs simply solve the problem of getting “stuff” from one device to another or sharing “stuff” among multiple people. Startup DITs appear daily and die off nearly as quickly.

My experience tells me that the app version of a DIT is often a willing compromise to gain mobility at some loss of ability. Over and over at ISTE I hear, “The app version does this, but the web version does these other things as well.” Using a mobile app reminds me of shopping at Walmart. I enter Walmart looking for something to accomplish a certain task or meet a certain need, and I end up purchasing something that meets about 80% of the need. Mobile DITs therefore must be DATs to ameliorate the Walmart effect.

Device agnostic tools (DATs) allow us to access the work begun on a phone and continued it on an iPad or a laptop. A DAT lets us share the file with an Android user or reopen it in a laptop to finalize the task, often using enhanced or quicker tools. The web version is mostly likely the most able while being the least mobile.

At ISTE connected educators vocally share solutions to the DIT and DAT challenges that emerge during BYOD sessions. ISTE attendees are collaborative problem solvers. As our world becomes a full time BYOD environment across work, school and personal life, all of us must be fluent finding DITs and DATs to simply live and certainly to learn. Once again, ISTE is the preview of the world to come, a world of DITs and DATs.

Everybody loves a summer beach book. We all need time to sit, draw with our toes in the sand,  and enjoy a paperback (or ebook) with an engaging plot, transparent characters, and a marketable title. We need to linger and muse.

My role as a Thinking Teacher splashes hundreds of web resources and apps onto my various screens. At this time of year, I am drawn to those resources that are the technology equivalent of a “beach book,”  those that may have valuable learning potential but — above all — are engaging to me personally. They make me want to linger and muse. So I share a few of my favs from TeachersFirst’s recent Featured Sites.

Question Generator  is a powerful tool for teaching at higher levels of thinking. It can be the technology equivalent of a visiting three year old grandson. Imagine the questions you can make — and debate. We could even make this an evening beach party game! Close your eyes and point to a word in your beach book, then spin the question generator to turn it into a question. I enjoy musing about the many ways to spin this thinking game.

The Literacy Shed brings the movies into learning, using the power of visual media oh so intentionally. I love the way the ideas are sorted into “sheds.” I have a feeling I will be building “sheds” in my head as I watch movies from now on. I want to just hang out and explore the sheds.

OhLife is the antithesis of this blog. You are reading where I “blog” professionally, playing my professional role and trying not roam outside that role or reveal too much “personal stuff.”  Oh Life is a like blog BFF. It asks you about your day and keeps the answers to itself. In today’s post-and-tweet world, that’s as refreshing as a beach book, for sure!

Quotesome is a shell collection of quotes for beach days. I love to collect quotes. I have always used colorful, electronic sticky notes to collect quotes as I come upon them. Quotesome lets you do that in their online space.  I can now take them  home in my Quotesome shell-bucket, rinse them off, and arrange them into any containers I wish.

I’ll share a few more beach books as the summer goes on. For now, I wish everyone a great start to summer as I head off to ISTE 2013 (#iste13). Hope to see you there.

Recently I have heard the same message from teachers in meetings, TeachersFirst user surveys, and OK2Ask® sessions: “I would love to do more technology-infused lessons with my students, but  the computers/devices in our building are completely booked doing test practice, online testing,  and remediation software. They simply are not available for anything else.” [I can hear your groaning now.] I wish I could say these are isolated incidents, but, alas, they are not.

Trying to be dispassionate and analytical about this for a moment, why would this be the case?

• Schedule drives school. We would like to think that individual needs drive instruction, but any principal will tell you that the schedule drives everything. Scheduling technology access is part of that same engine.
• Schools pay a lot for that software to help bring kids up to grade level. They therefore make using it a priority.
• Schools pay dearly if their students are NOT up to grade level, and these packages can “fix” them, right?
• High quality, sophisticated software packages do a good job of observing student response patterns, collecting data about weaknesses, and presenting material aimed at the individual student’s needs. That’s what data-driven software is all about, right?
• Some folks (administrators?) simply have never seen technology used any way other than drill and practice.

All these reasons are understandable, even if regretable. The problem is that those who allow such monopoly on technology access do not realize the high price they and their students are paying.  I wonder: what is the cost in lost growth for students unable to partake of student-directed learning projects, unable to generate digital products to build and demonstrate deep understanding, unable to interact with peers from other times/locations to learn collaboratively, and unable to build “21st century skills” that require access to digital tools?

I have no idea how this “study” could be done, but I would love to do a bang for the buck comparison:

On the one hand, create a fancy formula that combines:

• Costs to the school for remediation/ test prep/testing software
• Gains in student achievement from said software
• Financial benefit (or loss prevention) to the school from this increased student achievement

On the other hand, generate a similar formula combining:

• Cost to the school for ongoing edtech coaching PD (peer to peer, please) so teachers can generate meaningful, student-directed, challenging learning experiences—knowing students will have access to the technology they need
• Costs to highly able or motivated students (and the community outside the school) for limiting student access to go above and beyond, to innovate and explore, to blast past the ceiling of standardized tests
• Cost to the school for network improvements and initiatives allowing student BYOD (bring your own device) where students may have them
• Financial benefit (or loss prevention) to the school from resulting increased student achievement in REAL terms (may include testing as ONE of several measures)

This last is the tough one. If any of us had the  dollars and cents formula to prove what our gut tells us is right, I would not be hearing the teacher complaints about lack of access. I keep hoping to be hit in the back of the head with a pendulum that takes education funding (and therefore priorities and schedule “engines”) back to seeing learning as something we must build, observe, and measure in many, many ways, each valued ($) and respected. But I don’t hear anybody yelling “DUCK!” yet.

The Last Day of School. There is nothing like it.

For kids, it has loads of meaning. It is the start of a temporary state of euphoria, often followed by boredom 72 hours later. For non-educator adults, it is a fond but distant memory of pool parties, bad preteen pranks, and high school get-togethers punctuated by teen excess and who-is-dating-whom.

For teachers, Last Day of School means much more. We are one of few professions that enjoys a built-in day to reflect and learn from our own hard work. I would assume that builders feel somewhat the same way when they complete a house, but their houses do not build lives of their own. Last Day of School is much more, and we are blessed to have it — not for the vacation it heralds, but for the prism of perspective.

Top Ten Reasons to Be Grateful for Last Day of School

10. Summer vacation. But this ranks only #10.

9. Kids who stop by to visit before they graduate.

8. Finding a handwritten thank you note on your desk. Ignore the misspellings. It still makes you cry.

7. Realizing, as you peel off the name stickers off the cubbies, that Bubba and Boopsie (you insert the names) really did come a long way this year.

6. Entering nothing but positive comments on a report card previously filled with “needs improvement.”

5. Packing up the classroom plant that seems to already miss the extra CO2 emanating from all the mouths in the room.

4. Finding that list of  “someday” ideas you started last fall and knowing you have a fresh start to use at least some of them in a couple of months.

3. Realizing that you are singing under your breath for the first time since spring madness set in.

2. Laughing and crying with your kids — at the same time.

1. Having a chance to stop and appreciate the things you and your students did that WORKED.

I love teachers. We are so immersed that we do not recognize our own laser-like focus. (Notice that I use a positive term, not the pejorative one, “blinders.”) First grade teachers notice whether people wait patiently in line at the checkout and count their express line items. English teachers notice all the incorrect apostrophes on billboards and news headlines. Biology teachers see microbes when someone rests a hand on a railing. Geometry teachers grumble when the guy at Lowe’s cannot cut the lumber at the correct angle.

The same focus of passion grows greater among university professors and successful professionals:  If the world only realized how important it is for kids to learn X. Why aren’t the schools teaching X? Studies come out promoting the importance of X in the future of our country and the world. Many of these studies make valid points about our changing world and the need for schools — and kids — to continuously adapt and change.

One current focus of passion is the movement to teach code in schools. With all the news about cybersecurity and hacking, there are those crying out for code to be a high school requirement. I have written about it before. I see value in this initiative, too. But reading an Edsurge post by Shuchi Grover  — and the Jeannette Wing article Gover refers to about teaching computational thinking —  made me stop and think. First, I want to know exactly what computational thinking is in layman’s terms. Wing explains that, sort of.  Grover argues that we should be teaching the thinking, not so much the code.

I wonder how much of the basics of computational thinking IS going on in schools by another name or under a different curricular (or non-curricular) umbrella. More importantly, I wonder about the precursors that lead to the actual named “computational thinking” terms and skills. The examples Wing gives make me look for points where students have opportunity and challenge to develop these skills. Wing’s example of organizing a backpack as analogous to “prefetching and caching” are actually what we teachers call “organizational skills.” Though not part of mega-tested curriculum, organizational skills are part of every elementary student’s classroom experience. Many of the other concepts she mentions are there in middle or high school: modeling, analyzing, planning, hypothesis-testing, etc. The compthinking terms are definitely not used in high school, but the skills are. Through the lens of our passion as K-12 teachers, we see each with a different label from what the university prof might call it. I would have to sit down and talk at length with a computer science/computational thinking person to discover the learning experiences we call by different names. But I do believe many of them are there for at least some of our students. I  know they were in the classes I taught for gifted.

What was not always there was the conversation about how the challenges we did related to things people do in real life. As a teacher, I did not know that the “higher level thinking challenges” I wrote into GIEPs and shared in my classroom were the skills my students-turned-scientists might later call “parallel processing” or “recursive thinking.” Teachers cannot possibly know all the ways the learning from their classroom can be morphed, renamed, and combined into an evolving career and contribution to the world.  I wish I had known thirty years ago about all the ways that logic games can play into lives in engineering, computers, writing, art, and more. As a grown up, I keep learning about careers and fields I did not know about ten years ago. This does not devalue what happens in our classrooms. What we need is the conversations between practicing professionals from the real world and those in classrooms to connections in what we each do. Instead of telling us to teach X, help us see how what our students do actually leads to X. And help the proponents of X see and hear what happens in schools that they may not realize. We need first to translate and underscore what happens within our respective lens of passion so students, parents, and professionals might see how it all connects. Instead of another requirement, let’s find where the seeds are already planted. As a lifelong learner, I would really like to know where computational thinking is already happening in classrooms and to validate and highlight it so kids could be able to say, “I am good at X and want to know more about it. We may call it something different at school but this is something I want to do with my life.”

In the meantime, I will try not to judge billboards or people in the checkout line, at least not out loud.

There is another kind of digital divide: when kids go from a “connected” learning environment back to a traditional classroom. Yesterday I visited a sixth grade classroom filled with students about to make an uncertain (and possibly sad) transition. Their current class is connected. They know the experience of collaborating and learning with students from schools across the country. For the past year, they have lived their roles in MySciLife (more info here).  They know how to approach a question,  look for information both digitally and in print, learn, then reshape what they have learned into a creative and personal connection. They talk about the challenge of taking a set of knowledge and an unlikely prompt that forces them to look at things from within a different role: as a force of nature, an obscure animal, or a weather phenomenon. They talk about how these creative challenges, nestled into an online community, have helped them learn from what other students have said and by asking about or commenting on others’ ideas. They flow smoothly from online tool to tool with the help of self-taught student “experts” within their class or by “teching it out” on their own. They stop and think about which tool best suits the task. These kids are connected at so many levels.

One of the students began talking about next year (a favorite topic among kids about to graduate into a new building). He was talking about what he would do in MySciLife next year. I did not have the heart to tell him that he won’t be in MySciLife next year. Why? First, because MySciLife is a limited pilot for now. More disturbingly, who knows whether he will have a science teacher who is as comfortable with breaking out of the usual teaching patterns and putting students in charge of their learning (helped by technology, of course).  Teachers operate at such widely varying  levels of technology comfort and availability that — even within the same district — a student may move back and forth from connected to disconnected and back again during the same school day or from year to year. The digital faultlines could cause a learning earthquake for anyone.

I wonder how long it will be before kids can expect a minimal level of “connectednesss” no matter where they are learning. I wonder how long it will take the slowly moving plates to stop dangerously rubbing against each other and settle to support learning without the divides. Kids are resilient and adjust to many teaching and learning approaches, but we owe them greater consistency. Think about the kids who suffer when we pull the plug. Then ask yourself how you can help a tech-timid colleague.