Let’s Stop Revolutionizing – and get on with teaching

I’ve been teaching for sixteen years. I’ve heard over and over how one technology or another will save education.

I’m still waiting.

Let me first say, I’m not one to distance myself from new technology. I don’t hold it at arms length, I embrace it. I love technology. It’s fair to say, I’m a nerd.

I had a smart board a decade before our county embraced them. It was awesome. Sure, the markers were too big to hold. The adapter would often fall off the board, and I still  had to stand at the front of the room, but I loved it.

 

 

I bought a touch screen convertible laptop back in 2005. The stylus worked great, when it worked. It was a little slow. It would bog down a little when I used massive programs like Notepad. The screen was finicky and often the entire system crashed, but I loved it. It was rumored I could even share the screen wirelessly, but that never panned out.

 

I could go on and on with new technologies I’ve tried, but they all pan out the same for me. I use them, some I keep, others slowly fall away if they don’t help much. But for  each one, the change is iterative. Not one has “revolutionized” the way I teach. The bad ones waste time for me or my students. The good ones help me do my job better, or help my students learn more quickly or with more depth. None of them though have lived up to the buzz that surrounds them.

We, as educators, move from one technology to another and get caught up in the shininess and potential, a potential that is often visualized by those who are selling it.  Then we embrace the potential and dive in. Administrations spend money on the new thing. The good administrations invest in training, and then ask or compel teachers to get on board with the new tech. Then we all wait for the new tech to change everything, and it never does.

As Derek Muller points out, we’ve been doing the same thing since the blackboard, and we’ve yet to see the revolution.

It seems that the information age has brought even more claims of the technology elixir that will cure all our woes. I understand the excitement. New technology can help us change what we do. It can make our jobs easier, help us connect to students outside the classroom, appeal to multiple modalities of learning, give students control over pacing and direction of learning. All of these things are good, but none of them are revolutionary. We’ve always been able to do them, it’s just that technology provides so many new tools to do it. We have new tools every day rather than every year, or decade.

But that’s just it, isn’t it. Technology provides us with new tools to do the same job. We can use them to improve education for our students, but the change is iterative, not revolutionary.  The electric drill didn’t revolutionize building, it just helped improve the time it took to build things.

Anointing technology as the savior of education is fraught with problems. Not the least of which is teachers are weary of the grandiose claims that never pan out. Teachers also don’t have to feel like it’s an all in proposition. Let them try new technology like the try new tools. Let them see the little ways it can improve their lessons or their students learning. Those changes will give teachers the confidence to try the next tool, and we will all slowly and with deliberate purpose change the face of education.

Ed Camp Savannah

I just wanted to say thanks to Cindy Dixon and crew for hosting Ed Camp Savannah. I am so excited for Ed Camp Roswell in March. It’s refreshing to hang out with great educators who are doing great things in their classrooms.

Here are a few topics we covered:

Gamification: Marvin Fuller a technology teacher in Savannah shared a great session on gamifying the classroom and the reasons kids respond so well. Even if you don’t want to go full throttle on a gamified classroom, there are some good take-aways that are worth considering.

• Badges: In English class, I’m going to introduce a badge board for accomplishments.
  • Long Jumper – Someone who’s essay score improves significantly.
  • Researcher – Someone who consistently uses data to support their claims.
  • Editor – Someone who’s essays improve dramatically between rough and final drafts.
  • Explorer – Someone who reads associated sources for a novel or text we are studying.
• Points instead of grades – For some assignments, assign points rather than grades. I can see doing this in novel studies. Think of the old games with hidden things. Get points for “uncovering” textual evidence from texts.

Gamification is much more robust than these things, but interspersing even these small changes can capture the interest of your students. In my AP Computer Science class, I am considering restructuring the whole course next year to focus on gamification. It allows a lot of opportunities for true differentiation that is necessary in AP CS.

---

Adobe Voice – It was presented as focusing on teachers using it in the classroom, but I can see using it as a great resource for quick student visual presentations. (iPad only right now.)

---

Improving online discussions: This was a round table focusing on improving online engagement. Some of the take-aways:

• Offer enough options for students to be legitimately interested. Don’t just post one article. Post several and let them respond in one forum. This also reduces the amount of people participating in any given discussion which keeps some participants from “hiding.”
• Consider micro-conversations, e.g. Twitter.
• If you use rubrics, make sure they are meaningful and specific.
• A lot of options for technology were shared.
  • Google Groups – Seemed most common, but pretty simple options. You can use this with Google Apps for Education.
  • TitanPad
  • Babblizer – I think this is iPad only.
  • TodaysMeet – Free to use. No sign in for students – Just give them a room code.
  • VoiceThread – Expensive. Prohibitively for me, but if you have a school that will get it, go for it. It has a lot of cool features.

---

Creating a Growth Mindset in the Classroom: This presentation was great. It’s something I’ve heard a lot about from administrators, but Kelley Waldron did a great job focusing on the science and talking about simple ways, like changing your language, can help your students have a less fixed perception of their intelligence.

She focused on Carol Dweck’s research.

---

All in all, the ed camp was awesome. No administrators with an agenda or checklist. No one was there that didn’t want to be. People came from all over and shared their passions with each other.

This is the way professional development should be. We’ll take a lot of what they did and incorporate it in our upcoming Ed Camp in Roswell.

Ed Camps / Honing the craft

An Ed Camp in Roswell, GA focusing on the teaching of English

I’m loving the new movement towards Ed Camps. The idea of taking control of our own staff development is a long time overdue. I’m so excited, a colleague and I are going to host our own Ed Camp in March.

I don’t mind that administrators try to ensure that we continue honing our craft. In fact, I think it’s an often overlooked component of what we do. We talk about being “life-long learners,” but with a family, attempts at outside hobbies, papers to grade, lessons to plan (even if only in my head), and life to live, it’s tough to get find time to work on being a better teacher. Sometimes I’m blown away by the books others read, the conferences attended, and projects completed by so many of my peers. If I’m honest, they make me somewhat self-conscious. I don’t like having my inadequacies pointed out by someone else’s competency.

So, I’m glad that we have staff development, excuse me, professional development. No one asked me, but I would have gone with Staff Training and Development just for fun.

The problem though is that this well intended element of our profession is dominated by people who don’t do what we do. They taught one to twenty-five years ago, but we all know how quickly teacher amnesia sets in. Heck, I forget how to teach over Spring Break.

So Ed Camps are the way to go. To be clear, not the Ed Camps that are really Staff Training and Development with a new name, but the REAL Ed Camps. Those lead by teachers with teachers as students and collaborators.

Ownership and relevance are important for meaningful learning.

We know that ownership and relevance are important when learning. If we do our jobs right, we’re trying to give these things to our students. The question though is if we know what’s important for learning, why am I sitting in a theater listening to someone go over differentiation for the fifteenth time without the presenter even attempting to discuss relevance.

Jack Hussard says meaningful learning comes from the following:

• Non-arbitrary, non-verbatim, substantive incorporation of new knowledge into cognitive structure.
• Deliberate effort to link new knowledge with higher order concepts in cognitive structure
• Learning related to experiences with events or objects.
• Affective commitment to relate new knowledge to prior learning.

Ed Camps, by giving teachers control of their learning, do these things. I’m going to my first Ed Camp next weekend. In my sixteen years of teaching, I’ve never been more excited about a training or conference.

There are many ways teachers can take back control of our profession. I’m excited to be a part of whatever comes next.

No Better Time?

I was looking around for resources on Ed Camps today, and I stumbled across Ronen Habib’s post, “There Is No Better Time to Be an Educator.”

What an optimistic look at where we are in education today. He focuses on the opportunities that await students and teachers.

With the advent of Ed Camps and Ed Chats, we see teachers pulling the reigns of education out of the hands of administrators and politicians.

Technology can arguably open up better learning opportunities for our students.

I won’t rehash the post, but what I was most taken with was the positive perspective he has. Too often, I get bogged down in all the negativity, but he’s right. The opportunities that await us are awesome.

Minecraft – Lord of the Flies – IT Dept

One of the many things I’m trying to change is to slow down and let the kids absorb a lesson. With such a huge focus on standards and curriculum, it’s easy for me to get lost in getting everything done. 

I’ve tried many things over the years to introduce Lord of the Flies to them. Giving them time alone, thought experiments, prewrites about war. It’s usually mildly successful, but meh…take it or leave it. I just haven’t taken the time to do it right. This year, I used Minecraft to introduce the novel.

If you’re not sure what Minecraft is, or how it could work in your classroom, watch this intro to MinecraftEDU.

This year, I created a map of the island in WorldPainter, a program that lets you build custom Minecraft maps. Then I let the kids explore the island for two days. 

Here’s a quick tour of the island and the actual world I made.

They had to journal about each day’s experience as if they were actually trying to survive. Quick time out to say, EVERYONE did their journals! The only instructions were to pretend like it was a real survival situation and really try to survive.

The first day, they all gathered resources and worked on building houses. They teamed up. Kids that knew Minecraft helped the others. On day two, a few of the kids started attacking each other and burning down houses, just as I had expected.

I struggled with whether to let them attack one another, but the level of violence is minimal, and it isn’t graphic. I eventually decided to allow them to play against each other. On the second day, they did just that. A few of the kids ran around attacking each other, and burning houses. That led to a great discussion about human nature and the real world parallels. 

We’ll revisit the island throughout the book to reenact scenes, or try to fine tune the map to more closely fit. I’m hoping these exercises help them read closely and visualize the island better.

I see a lot of other opportunities for my tenth graders.

• Create the ranch in Of Mice and Men paying a lot of attention to each location. Curly and his wife’s room, the bunk house, the barn, the dream ranch.
• Macbeth’s castle – There are a TON of castle maps.
• Download a map of the Globe theater and have the kids screencast (Jing – Free) scenes from the play.

Finally, a quick note about working with your IT department. It’s easy to feel like the central office doesn’t care about trying new things. Sometimes that’s true. Bureaucracies are inherently change averse. Usually though, that’s only because either they don’t know why the thing you want is beneficial or because they are overloaded like we are.  

My advice, get a name. After going around and around, I reached out to one of the Techs who had his phone number in his email signature. Once I got to talk to Dennis and explained what I wanted to do and why, he worked day and night to help me get the project up and running. 

---

Update: Here’s a quick video of the kids actually interacting on the island. I use this to talk about how quickly they went from cooperation to competition and destruction. 

 

a.wry.teach.er

Ok. Here we go.

I’ve thought about it for years, but I’ve never taken the plunge. There’s so much out there. There’s so many great teachers, doing great things. What could I add?

Yet in my English classes, I implore my students to take part in the conversation. If you care, be a part of it.

So, as when my students drug me out on the floor to dance at the pep rally, echoing my advice to step out of my comfort zone, I’m going to give it a shot.

Here is my blogging manifesto:

• I will post less often than I think I should.
• I will assume good will on the part of administration and central office personnel.
• I will try to be obvious with my sarcasm.
• I will try to share ideas I have and accept the feedback that comes my way.
• I will join the conversation.