No Looking Back — Wilkes IM Blog of Sue Hellman

[Image source: Journal 74 - The Novice Birder (2-07-2005 in Nanaimo, BC at http://www.vancouverislandbirds.com/Journal74.html]

It’s Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada and the first weekend of the Diwali festival of lights. A colder wind is blowing, and the local farmer’s markets are packing it in for the season, but the air has been brilliantly clear and the ‘bird tree’ outside my north window has been full of cedar waxwings. This ‘diner’ of a tree — an English Hawthorne — has become a regular stop on the flypast of birds migrating south. After about a week of them gorging on the berries in the warmth of the afternoon sun the tree will be completely stripped. The cedar waxwings and all the other little birds that summer here will be gone, and the crows who’ve been kept out of the neighbourhood since spring will gleefully return for the winter.

I’m sitting at my computer watching the late afternoon light fade and beginning this weekend’s homework. I’ve been doing homework since I started school at six, which makes for a total of over 50 years! Wondering how much time that worked out to, and using a conservative estimate of an average of 4 hours a day x 200 school days a year x 50 years, I worked it out to be at least 40,000 hours. Dividing that by the number of hours in a year,showed me that I’ve invested at least 4.6 years of my life in doing homework. I don’t have children of my own and it seems that doing schoolwork after hours has become the habit of a life time.

I can probably add to that at least another 6 months spent convincing ,my students that doing their homework is a good and necessary thing, but recently I’ve started to ask myself if I shouldn’t have taught them instead how to use their out of school time to get fit and be healthier, to volunteer their help others, to enjoy nature, or to learn something new about the world and figure out a creative way to share that with the class the next day. Instead I suspect, they may have learned from me how to procrastinate, avoid, and feel guilty.

Oh, the power of unintended outcomes … may I even have contributed unknowingly to their living shorter lives by contributing to the notion that living in a perpetual state of cortisol-inducing stress is normal?

“Written into our bodies is a lifetime of conditions … that can determine who will be sicker and who will die sooner.” (Unnatural Causes, PBS, rebroadcast 10- 2009) In Episode One (previewed below) there is a connection made between stress >> cortisol levels >> and disease and early death. Short bursts of this chemical in response to life-threatening events can help keep us safe. Presumably, it enables the body to direct all its resources to surviving. However, living our lives in a constant state of high stress is accompanied by a perpetually elevated cortisol level which apparently wears our bodies out earlier by constantly suppressing the immune system. Presumably (again) constant stress is neither natural nor healthy. The body never feels safe.

There is a movement to question assumptions about homework – its value in engendering a positive work ethic, its place in the real world, its impact on family dynamics, its contribution to learning,and its effect on young people. What follows is an interesting San Fransisco Chronicle podcast that looks at the question of whether assigning more homework is the ‘good thing’ so many teachers assume it to be.

Do you have any thoughts on whether homework is good for children? Is it necessary for learning? Does it develop a love of learning in students? Is it contributing to a healthy way of living? 

Why are secondary math teachers so reluctant to try Web 2.0 tools?  First I think this results from the perception that Math is qualitatively different from other subjects. In some ways learning math has more in common with the skills development aspects of PE or some of the practical arts and trades-based classes than with other content area courses. Web 2.0 tools which enhance learning through creative self-expression, presenting to a real audience, or sharing ideas may seem to have no place in math class. To the skeptical teacher these can seem like add-ons that take valuable time away from instruction and guided practice rather than having the power to enhance math learning in a completely new way.

Also, good website can be hard to find (to paraphrase an old song). Online games that reinforce skills or websites that provide instruction often don’t match the content a teacher wants students to practise or the steps by which a skill has been taught in class. The questions may not be sufficiently varied or at the right level. Finally, because math teachers have not traditionally made a lot of use of computers with students in their classrooms, they may have limited access which is not particularly conducive to trying new initiatives.

Finding a starting Web 2.0 tool for secondary math teachers involves leading them to a comfortable starting point.

Start too far along the continuum of tool or use or comfort level, and math teachers (or beginners from other departments) feel overwhelmed. It all seems just a little too “wild and woolly.” It’s important to remember that no tool feels intuitive or user-friendly to the person who feels out of his/her depth. The potential for increasing student achievement or engaging in interesting professional growth must far exceed the barriers. There can seem to be just too many alligators lurking beneath the surface of the swamp to justify jumping in.

[Image adapted from: I.H.S. Consulting Group @ http://www.ihsconsulting.org/guide/index.htm]

I’m beginning a new collaboration with a young woman tackling the new Math 8 curriculum here in BC. She is conscientiously trying to incorporate new constructivist approaches as directed by the district helping teacher, to meet her school’s goal of increasing literacy, and to collaborate with her department by organising in school-wide math events. We had talked about the new program and some possible starting points, but when I appeared at her door and starting throwing ideas around, I could see her wilt under the weight of what seemed yet another add-on that was going to compound her needs rather than help her meet the ones she already had.

We started looking at what she felt to be a set of unique problems associated with math teaching, but it turned out that she didn’t need better ‘math tools’ as such. After about an hour of chatting back and forth we settled on three that are by now pretty familiar to people in this course: PowerPoint, ToonDoo, and Voicethread. She’ll be able to use them to deliver instruction as well as give them to students to use. These tools will also help her address the problem-solving and literacy building initiatives by involving students in using words to processes, giving each other feedback about solutions, incorporating some creative reinforcement of learning, and publishing their work for others to see. Students who learn these in math will also be able to use them in other courses and may for once be able to say that they learned something in math that helped them in their real lives.

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References:

Blog of Charischak, G. Found at http://climeconnections.blogspot.com/2009/08/math-20-making-virtual-splash-in-san.html. He writes from experience of the lack of initiatives that reluctant math teachers can buy into.

Blog of Anderson, Maria. Found at http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=97-1 AND http://teachingcollegemath.com/?p=1498. She provides insight into math teachers’ being among the most reluctant to try using tech tools and resources AND lists tech skills students will need in the post secondary and work world.

[Image Source: popeye the sailorman cartoon @ http://popeye-the-sailorman.blogspot.com/]

Mp3 Free

Popeye was “strong to the finich” because he ate his spinach. Math is kind of like the spinach of school subjects — most students do it because it’s good for them, not because it’s inherently enjoyable or meaningful. Out of school long enough to understand the challenges that lie ahead, parents know how many doors close when students are not successful in academic math classes. They want their kids to tough it out. However, teens are often more familiar with — the frustration that results from poor understanding, disconnection from the content, and lack of skills mastery. Many just want to get out’.

Given many students’ difficulty learning math and its importance in securing their futures, math class should be a natural place for trying new strategies, tools, and ideas to enhance learning. But math teachers are often the last in schools to try 21st century tools and strategies. Although math should be about problem-solving and communication, it can devolve into repetition and memorization of skills or solving of story problems that seem to students to have little to do with the real world. For them, what’s learned in math class, stays in math class.

Math teachers all agree that more we get students doing math, the more math they’ll learn. However, what secondary math teachers often don’t realize is that many of these new technologies will give them ways to actually accomplish that — by getting students talking about and doing more math. The value of Web 2.0 tools lies in their ability to help math teachers:

• ensure old skills gaps are filled and new skills are well understood and well learned,
• build math reading comprehension skills so that students are not baffled by the way language is used in math questions,
• engage students in communication and collaborative problem-solving so they have to ‘speak’ math,
• encourage higher order thinking skills by making intriguing connections between math and the world outside the math classroom,
• provide students practice using tools they will need for study and work after high school, and
• connect with other math teachers who are also trying these new approaches.

If we secondary math teachers can turn the part of the day students spend in our classes into a part of the day students look forward to, the time, effort, and deep thought that will be required of us to find, learn, and create compelling uses of Web 2.0 tools and resources will reward us with gold.

In my early years of teaching, about every three or four years, I would engage in a summer of renewal of myself as a teacher. After a year during which my shortcomings seemed more often to be leading my interactions with students, I would feel I’d lost perspective and that I wasn’t satisfied I was giving the kids my best so I would buy books and read for answers.

During one of those summers about ten years ago, two of the books I read were by Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot: The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Courage (1983) and Beyond Bias: Perspective in Classrooms (1978). Before there were mashups or digital story telling, Lightfoot melded old-fashioned story telling with a sociologist’s curiosity to find out what makes people and their relationships and the institutions they inhabit tick. She came up with a process sometimes referred to as “human archeology.” Start with questions that she was wondering about, she’d find people who were interested in engaging in conversations and then spend a lot of time listening and helping them reveal their stories.

To write her “Portraits,” Lightfoot immersed herself deeply in the lives of the people in six different US secondary schools. Before edublogs, Classroom 2.0, and threaded discussions, Sara Lawrence Lightfoot gave a voice to school people and students, to parents and community members in a way that opened the heart of each school to her readers. By becoming part of each school’s landscape, she was able to “bust through” the bricks and mortar and the widely held stereotypes of the time and told stories of people struggling to do their best — some succeeding and others not so much — but all caring about education and trying to do better.

My copies of Lightfoot’s books are in now a box somewhere downstairs, but there is one message that I very clearly recall. Whether it was spoken by a teacher who was interviewed or part of a conclusion drawn by Lightfoot herself, I’m no longer sure — but it had to do with not taking the stuff that kids do and say personally. Whenever I have lost my way with students, it’s almost always because I have forgotten that important bit of guidance.

By the time they arrive at my school, my students have become masterful at finding and pressing all the hot buttons the adults in their lives carry. When I forget that this testing behaviour is their way of trying to assert a little control in a world that threatens to ignore or even drown them — when I lose the ability to think inside the moment and just react — that’s when I get lost.

At my most vulnerable moments during challenging encounters it’s terribly important to maintain enough perspective see that, when acting out, students are actually letting their guard down. They are making themselves themselves vulnerable by inadvertantly giving me a glimpse of their deeper selves. When I simply react from a place of feeling misunderstood, overtaxed, unappreciated, or unacceptably challenged, I blow an opportunity to reach out and create a meeting of minds that will lead to greater mutual understanding. I miss a true teachable moment (for them) and a ‘learnable’ moment (for me).

This transitional year (as I wrote last week) is for me about reflection and regaining a sense of grace. It’s about reconnecting with my students, but it’s also about taking risks in this old/new role as a student to be a little like my students and ask challenging questions. It’s about pushing my personal and professional learning to the limits. It’s also about using the feelings I experience from being back in the student role after twenty0 years to better understand my students.

Lightfoot’s newest book is entitled The Third Chapter: the Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50Once again she’s apparently telling my story. I can’t wait to read the book and find out how I’m doing! Ironically my own “new adventure” is taking me back to earlier roles. (Image is linked.)

[Image Source: http://fusion-industries4.tripod.com/]

My own new risks involve actually trying on behaviours and attitudes I didn’t have the confidence to express when I was younger. For the “burn out” Lightfoot speaks of in the video interview below came from an exhaustion of spirit brought on by a life of speaking old scripts that had never really worked for me because they were constructed out of my guesses about the way others wanted me to be. For my whole life I’ve been trying out behaviours on others and constructing myself out of their reactions. If at fifty-seven, I can’t finally just put what I think and feel and believe and want and wonder out there and leave the reacting to others, I never will. Time could be getting short.

Some people after fifty yearn to live out their childhood dreams by buying expensive motorcycles or jumping out of airplanes. They feel “the thrill is gone,” and they want it back. Others after a lifetime of meeting other people’s needs express a deep need to find out who they really are and may even leave their homes and families to do that. I know that in my case, this finding of my new self can only be accomplished if I redefine myself as a teacher and as a student first. Once that is done, I will be able to close that door knowing that I’ve given it all I had and taken from it all that I need in order to finally not have to relive the old cycles and relearn the old lessons.

P.S. 2 wishes — First, I wish I could find the earlier interview that Bill Moyers speaks of in the clip so that we could hear what Lightfoot had to say about schools back in 1983, and second, I wish she had the time to go back to those 6 schools and update her portraits in light of the changes in American education since then. Here’s the clip of Bill Moyers interviewing Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot. If you want more there is a video of her speaking to a group of colleagues at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdTULrlQn20.

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References:

Moyers, B. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot in Bill Moyers’ Journal at 05-08-2009. Found 10-04-2009.

Sussman, A. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot in Answers.com at >. Found 10-04-2009.

This week I’ve been reading Will Richardson, watching Larry Lessig (video below), and thinking about the events in Honduras. This has lead to a brain mash-up that is finally expressing itself as a question: what are fences for — to keep trespassers out or to keep the occupants in?

Physical fences make us feel secure. By delineating mine from yours, safe from unsafe, and friendly from unfriendly they help us know who we are, where we belong, and what we own. When I lived in the Yukon, for example, the territory north of the 60th parallel was referred to as ‘inside’. The unfortunates who did not live north of 60 were ‘from outside’. The line was invisible, but to those of us who lived Inside and knew the fence was there, the divide was great. We insiders shared a way of life and a fellowship that made us a tribe. That fence gave us a way of defining ourselves by proclaiming our isolation from everyone else.

Intellectual fences on the other hand are less trusted. Who does not recoil at the thought of the Honduran military shutting down broadcasters with accusations of spreading dissent? The curtailing of people’s basic freedoms of speech, thought, and choice is an affront to those of us who enjoy a free society. Yet the new government feels justified in shutting down activities and voices that “attack peace and public order.”

So then how are we to react to the growing prohibitions on internet use and access in public schools? Are they protective or coercive?

In his article Don’t, Don’t, Don’t vs. Do, Do, Do (2009) in Weblogg-ed, Will Richardson reflects about the ways in which many school districts are trying to protect their students and presumably themselves by compiling extensive “Acceptable Use” technology policy manuals that enumerate for staff, students, and parents “the many transgressions” that will not be tolerated and handing them out on Day One.

There are three problematic implications associated with this kind of intellectual prohibition that come to mind. First it gives parents a false sense of security by suggesting that it’s possible to build a fence that is big enough and so impenetrable as to keep their children safe. As well, it starts from the premise that cutting off all access (to social networks for example) by all people to prevent a few from going to the ‘wrong parts of town’ is justified.

[Image Source: No Chaser, 07/26/2009]

Finally, these manuals seem to alleviate school leaders from having to take responsibility for keeping children safe and also make it easy to blame the kids if they get into trouble.

Lessig’s take on these kinds of prohibitions is even more sinister. In his view, the use of laws and regulations to erect a fence between young people and what they consider to be full and natural participation in the democratized read/write web is to rob them of their freedom to collaborate, to speak, and even to be. Extreme protectionism on one side of the fence engenders extreme ‘law breaking’ by young people. “You can’t kill the instinct that technology produces, says Lessig,”you can only criminalize it. You can’t make our kids passive again; you can only make them pirates . . . who live life against the law.”

Richardson muses that it would be much more enticing to students to receive a list of “Admirable Uses” instead of the standard ‘Don’ts’. This approach would engage their sense of wonder and get them considering ‘the possible’ from their first moment back in school. I’d also say that if we don’t want schools to become places that put the lie to the value of education, we have to stop extending the promise of openness and inquiry to students with one hand and taking it away with the other.

[Image Source: s.l.o.w.p.o.k.e in Flickr. 05/03/2008]

So how do we make a start? We take a realistic look at what is possible under the current conditions and start “Do use the network to” lists of our own. To the items on Will Richardson’s list, I’d add for students:

• Do use the network to find what you have in common with people who at first do not seem like you.
• Do use the network in a way that is respectful of other people, their ideas, and their work.
• Do use the network to get meaningful feedback that can help you to do better.
• Do use the network to engage in conversations with people who will challenge your ideas.
• Do use the network to share your reflections about your learning.

and for teachers:

• Do use the network to take a step into your students’ world. It’s worth the work and you may even have some fun.

Young people’s way of making sense of the world and expressing themselves may be changing with new technology, but they experience the same emotions and have the same dreams that we do. They are not as far from our reach as some ‘new education’ thinkers would have us believe.
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References:

Don’t Go There, Dpeaker. Don’t. Go. There. Digital image. NO Chaser. 26 July 2009. Web. 2 Oct. 2009. .

“Honduran Attack on Embassy would be ‘Disaster: UN Official.” Cbc.ca. 02 Oct. 2009. Web. 2 Oct. 2009. .

Larry Lessig on Laws that Choke Creativity. Ted Talks. Nov. 2007. Web. 2 Oct. 2009. .

Richardson, Will. “Don’t, Don’t, Don’t vs. Do, Do, Do.” Weblogg-ed: On My Mind. 20 Sept. 2009. Web. 2 Oct. 2009. .

S.l.o.w.p.o.k.e. 6 Years Later, Same Spot, One Curious Boy. Digital image. Flickr Commons. 03 May 2008. Web. 2 Oct. 2009.

This week I’ve  been thinking deeply about differentiation and the need to listen to my students. The video that follows below shows a former student of mine named Christine. I use this clip during professional development workshops to illustrate how the creative use of new tools has given me a powerful means to meet individual students’ needs and help them overcome serious barriers to success.

Christine had failed senior science twice before coming to the Learning Centre, but even though our program is individualised and she was taking an easier course, she was once again struggling. I kept trying to reassure her that she could do the work, but this was the last course that had to be completed before she graduated, time was getting short, and she was becoming more and more frozen. She had even begun to hyperventilate and experience panic attacks.

At about the same time that dropping out looked to Christine like the only way she’d be able to escape science, two other events occurred: the Phoenix successfully landed on Mars and Squidoo (about the least technical online program available for making websites) landed in on my digital desktop. The three events converged in that place of creative inspiration we all tap into as teachers and I came up with an idea that helped me rescue this drowning student. As she began to work on it, she even forgot to be afraid of science.

Christine is now working and happy in her new life after high school, but her plea for teachers to listen to our students still haunts me sometimes. Students want to do well but also carry a lot of fears. They don’t want to draw attention to themselves. They don’t want to risk drawing the ire of the teacher or taunts of their peers. They don’t want to appear lacking in skill or understanding. As a result, by trying to do what they think the teacher wants, they miss out on getting their own needs met.

I regret that over 35 years of teaching that I left some students trapped in the isolation of silence because I didn’t tune in to their cues. When they were off task and behaving ‘badly’, too often I responded to the behaviour rather than stop and ask myself if it was a symptom of a learning deficit or long term frustration. Were they not learning because they were unmotivated or were they unmotivated because they weren’t learning?

Now, I try to counsel the students in my classes on the importance of being good consumers of education. I ask if they’d ever let a salesperson in a store persuade them to buy a garment that was not the right size. (They laugh at the thought.) Wouldn’t they’d ask ask the clerk to keep looking until he/she had found them what they need? (They nod.) I go on to say that not getting their needs met in a class is the same thing and that they must speak up in the same way to make sure their teacher is doing her job for them — meeting their needs and ensuring they end up understanding a skill or concept even if it takes many questions and requires a lot of time.

I haven’t always been very good at anticipating the assumptions students are making about learning priorities and acceptable responses. Now, with Christine’s words ringing in my ears whenever I make up a new activity or write a new unit study, I do my best to see it through Christine’s eyes. I ask myself if she would experience my lesson as a way to achieve breakthroughs and “walk around the circle” or whether it would trap her inside, hold her down, and make her hyperventilate again.

And so Christine, I have two things to say to you: first, I’m so sorry it took me so long to find a way to make education work for you, and also I’ve taken up your words to heart. I’m doing my best each day to remember that I’m not teaching skills, content, and subjects — I’m teaching people, and that I’m in the business of helping my students come to value learning as an act of empowerment — one that should help them too feel free.

[Postscript: For some reason when I began working this weekend, I oversaved the original piece on Christine. I've reconstructed it as best I can, but if you read the orignal this version may not seem quite the same. The original was lost in the Bermuda triangle of technology.]

Several of my Learning Centre students are currently involved in a project-based learning experience about empathy called the Kinship Project. They have volunteered to partner with a class of autistic teens in a school in Pennsylvania. The two groups of students will exchange short personal portraits (slide shows of no more than 60 seconds) to introduce themselves as well as videos to show what their schools are like. Mine will also create a Voicethread portraying 6 strong facial expressions through original photographs and movie trailers for the Pennsylvania students to use as a learning and response tool. Finally the two groups will meet their online partners through Elluminate.

Interestingly, what these 2 groups have in common is that they are both challenged to experience empathy — albeit in different ways. Children “on the Spectrum” are thought to lack empathy because they struggle to make sense of facial expressions, verbal expressions, and body language. For my students empathy is a commodity most often reserved for people they think deserve it. When these students do flick on their empathy switch, they can become so completely involved in the feelings of the other person that their self-worth is measured by the intensity of the bond that develops.

The big questions for my students are: What if you were beamed into an ‘alien’ world where you could not tell what others were feeling and there was no one to share your experiences with? Why is empathy important? How can we use empathy more to guide our interactions with others?

I. What are the key organizational and management challenges of doing a group project in the SS/WR Learning Centre?

a) Group work in an individualized program — In our school students are not really classmates. They work in rooms on completely individualized programs. When my students work on projects, they must also continue to fulfill regular course responsibilities, and I have to divide my time between guiding the ‘project people’ and teaching my regular students.

b) Maintaining the energy — Because project participants are typically scattered in different classrooms, it’s easy for the initial excitement of the project to become diluted.

c) Reality all too often intervenes — Illness, attendance problems, fluctuating levels of personal commitment, and competing priorities (jobs, provincial exams, other outside opportunities) all make the task of keeping the project going more complex. The work can seem to progress in fits and starts. The participants can leave mid-project. Steering the project to a successful conclusion for all can be a challenge.

d) Struggles with the technology — We have very limited bandwidth so often run into trouble when streaming live from the internet.

e) Respecting the work of others — Students think that everything on the net is fair game for ‘grab and remix’ so it’s important to use largely original material and make it easy to cite any other sources.

f) Choice of tools — All software must be permitted by the district and easy for the students to learn so that they can teach each other and so a minimum amount of my time will be required for troubleshooting. We also prefer tools that can be used in other courses at our school or at home on family projects so the tech skills acquired are transferable.

g) Connections to other courses — Project work has generally been done outside the normal courses students take, and it can be a struggle to find ways to give them course credit for this. Not all courses are flexible enough to permit substitution of project work for regular units.

h) Creating more Learning Centre interest in PBL — In the school we can keep the ‘buzz’ going among students, staff, and visitors by connecting the students to the large screen or whiteboard as they work. Unfortunately, not all teachers have equal access to the hardware, so this means asking another busy teacher to unlock and lock up the connecting cables and screen controls once or twice a day.

II. What does all this mean in terms of specific organizational and planning details and choice of tools?

This project has rather sputtered to a stop because the teachers (both in BC and Pennsylvania) are in this Wilkes IM class and we’ve both lost our in-class project focus a little. On the plus side however, this has given me time to get a handle on the critical organization and management steps needed to reinvigorate the project. This will be important so that my students (in BC) finish what they started and so that the students with autism (in Pennsylvania) are not disappointed by their Canadian counterparts.

First I need to light a fire under my students. Several things will accomplish this. My Pennsylvania colleague and I need to set a firm due date so I can hold a planning meeting and create a large planning calendar with my students. I need them to renew their commitment to this project by establishing exactly what course credit each can earn and making clear the work that must be done to qualify for that.Each day a different student needs to be working publicly so that everyone in the school can see what we’re working on this year.

Next I need to make each day’s working time more valuable to the students by reducing the minutes per day that can be spent on the project. Some have spent long hours in needless editing to avoid regular work; others have lost their way and let their project commitments slide and so have accomplished little. My students are used to working from individual tracking sheets. I need to make up a tracking sheet/checklist for the project. A master list with calendar should be posted on the wall. Each student should tick of ‘jobs done’ each day so I can know at a glance what needs to be done next and can help keep the work moving forward.

Finally my students will be more motivated if they have a more personal connection to the Pennsylvania class. We should provide a way for them to make contact with each other through posting personal profiles in the wiki.

Although I have been using Wikispaces and originally thought I’d set up a Ning, given time, I’d now prefer to move the whole project over to Grou.ps as there is unlimited media storage and it provides in one place all the applications we might want to use: of a wiki, a calendar, social network, blogs, and chatrooms.

An IT class in the US has volunteered to do some website customizing for us, so we could ask them to come up with interesting designs and layouts.

Embedding TokBox will enable students to have video chats. The IT students would then be able to communicate directly with both classes about the overall appearance of the site.

I would like to find a tool such as this Forever Journal for the students to record their reflections, but a Google Doc in which I could post responses would be a good alternative.

We have just enough time left this year to bring this project to a successful conclusion. If I make use of the management and organizational strategies above, I know I can ‘get my students stoked’ about the project again and have something interesting to showcase for parents at the Year-End Celebration.

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“Myth: Autistic People Lack Empathy.” GRASP: the Global and Regional Asperger Sybndrome Partnership. 17 Apr. 2009 . PDF file written by a person “on the spectrum” — sources of one of the ‘big questions.

NET-S stands for the National Educational Technology Standards for Students. Grouped under the 5 categories listed below are the objectives set out by ISTE as critical to ensuring students leave school well equipped “to work, live, and contribute to the social and civic fabric of their communities . . ., to learn effectively for a lifetime, and [to] live productively in our emerging global society.”

1. Creativity and Innovation
2. Communication and Collaboration
3. Research and Information Fluency
4. Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making
5. Digital Citizenship
6. Technology Operations and Concepts

This week’s second question as was to explain how the use of Web 2.0 communication, collaboration, and publishing tools can help students meet the these standards. ISTE’s work is based on the philosopy that students will be better prepared to lead successful lives in the world they will claim as adults if we give them opportunities in school to learn how to to ‘get it right’.

There is a difference between understanding and being able to give back, between knowing intellectually and emotionally what to do and being able to put one’s knowledge into action. I sometimes ask students struggling to appreciate the difference between passive and active learning if they think their dad or mum would let them take out a new car for a drive on their own.  “After all,” I say, ” you’ve been a passenger all your life. You know quite a lot about what it is to be a driver. Doesn’t it make sense that your parents should trust you with that new car?” They snort. I continue. “What if  you’ve watched all the training films and discussed the manual with your parents or even a driving instructor? What if you went to a class and took notes?”  They laugh and shake their heads. The students know that in order to really learn to drive, they need plenty of guided practice behind the wheel out on the road. This is what using communication, collaboration, and publishing tools does for them in the classroom.  In the context of a project-based learning experience, these tools promote a holistic approach for guiding students from being passive passengers towards becoming the active drivers of their own  educational experiences while still in a supportive classroom environment where mistakes in judgment become opportunities for growth. Using these kinds of tools as they address issues, solve problems and examine larger questions, students not only learn by doing but ‘by being’. In the words of Cary Grant: “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until I finally became that person.”

I. Communication applications are those through which knowledge is shared and conversation is fostered.  When working as a group, students need to learn how to learn from each other. Whether sharing or struggling, whether expressing what you know or what you need,  students have to be able communicate effectively so conversation becomes a tool for learning, not just so much social chit-chat. If this is going to occur with people at a distance, students must also begin to appreciate how much slippage there can be between what you ‘say’ and what is actually ‘heard’. This is further complicated  by cultural differences whether the students are physically sitting side by side or linked up online. Many young people today seem to feel the onus is on the ‘other person’ to understand or respect them first. Using these kinds of platforms is one way to teach students that it is their responsibility to make their own communications clear and respectful first. Otherwise there will be no basis for developing partnership or teamwork.
II. Collaboration platforms involve the construction of knowledge and understanding by groups of people. To become involved in “collaborative authoring”, students have to figure out what they collectively know and can help each other learn and what they need to find out from other sources. They have to develop a plan for further inquiry so the needed information or skills can be obtained and shared. They need to be able to sift the true nuggets out of all the sources they amass and from these glean the knowledge they need to complete their understanding. This is easy for some and difficult for others, but an expectation that everyone will make a valued contribution puts group members into the position of having to work out how to give everyone responsibilities they can handle and how to ensure everyone contributes. It’s hard to hide the fact that one or two people did most of the work given the activity ‘histories’ the teacher can look at in many of these applications.

III. Publishing tools give us a way to present information and ideas to a world that is interested in what we have to say and that will respond.  This experience says to the student that learning is not a process that goes on in the isolation of a classroom. It does not occur only between 8 and 3, 5 days a week, 10 months of the year until you’re old enough to escape or someone says you’ve learned enough to be let go. Connecting with the world through publishing tools turns learning into an interactive process. What the students have to contribute enriches others, and they in turn are enriched by the contributions of others. Through these tools creativity and innovation can be practiced as students put their critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making skills to the test in order to create a presentation that will show what they have learned in a unique way. This is where organization and synthesis become very important and leaders emerge. Students may also confront issues of ethics as they decide whether they’ll remix the work of others because no one will ever find out or whether they’ll ‘plan B’ the project and use Creative Ccommons sources even if they’re not as good.

To discuss and come to a consensus about ow to proceed when such questions arise, the students have to put their communication skills and tools to work again, and so instead of plodding up Bloom’s hierarchical staircase, they are carried up  spiral of learning (as illustrated below). As they move close to the top, students who may have simply paid lip service to the values and ideals memorialized in the standards at first, over time can come to internalize them and leave us knowing that doing their best work and living their best lives was something they got better at in school.

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“The Learning Spiral”  (http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/abc/undcur/p50.htm). Diagram in Understanding Curriculum Development in the Workplace: A Resource for Educators stored in the National Adult Literacy Database (Canada’s Literacy and Essential Skills Network).

Imagine it’s Saturday morning. The week’s course Moodle discussions have concluded; the blogs have been posted; other assignments have been submitted. Where will you find me? I’ll be in an Elluminate room together with 50 to 100 other teachers who have come to listen, learn, and ask questions at a session of Classroom 2.0 Live. This meeting has become my weekly dose of pro-d. The hosts invite people you’d normally have to pay big money to see to share their best practices. Although it’s clear from the ‘chat’ that there are lots of experienced users who’ve come to pick up tips, the programs are really offered as a way to help beginners make a start at using online tools and resources with their students. The sessions are archived together with a Sharetabs record of all the links people contributed through the chat room. It’s amazing how much you can learn in an hour!

My three picks for this week’s blog are tools recently demonstrated in Classroom 2.0 Live:

• Communications — Diigo with Jennifer Dorman
• Collaboration — Ning with Steve Hargado
• Publishing — Voicethread with Colette Cassinelli

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DIIGO

Using this social bookmarking tool is kind of like having your own shelf in a vast library.  There you can create your own sub-collection, annotate your entries, add highlighting and sticky notes to record your thoughts on the fly, and share collections with other friend and groups.  When you’re looking at websites you can bookmark them for personal use or to share to one ore more groups. You can also look for members and groups with similar intrests to whe what they’ve slready forund. Installing the Diigo toolbar is recommended for ease of use and the greatest number of features, but it’s also possible to use the drag-and-drop Diigolet bookmarklet tool which requires no download or installation. This is not a commercial service, so there is no age restriction or requirement for parental permission that I could find. Diigo provides step-by-step tutorials, easy-to access information on how to use the features, links to blogs of experts for more help, and an Educator User Forum.

One of the most interesting comments Jennifer Doorman made when illustrating how to use Diigo in her Classroom 2.0 Live session (linked above) was that most people don’t go any farther than 3 pages when doing a Google search. In addition, few students know how to frame their search terms well. As a result, even though my students think of themselves as living in a web-rich universe, few search past Wikipedia because they think it has everything. 

In the old days to make expanding a librarly search more manageable I would collaborate with the school librarian ahead of time to pull books, magazines, videos, and periodical files onto a cart we could wheel out when my classes went to the library. Now instead I can set up Diigo group, bookmark a collection of online resources for any project or topic, and make searching beyond Wikipedia a much more manageable task for the students. I can control the reading levels, the variety of sources, and the relevance to our topic. I can leave questions for further thought on sticky notes. I can ask the students to develop their own Wikipedia-style entries.

The other way I would use Diigo is as a place for students to collect additional resources — either individually or collaboratively. Tags become very important here. They are designed to make for faster searching of Diigo lists. I would start projects by working with the class to develop a set of project tags. Students would suggest and try out classifications that would make searching my master list more efficient. Once we had agreed on the final set, the students could quickly tag my collection and then use the same tags when creating their own project lists. Tags can also make assessing individual and group contributions to collecting research sources much easier for teachers. Having students add personal and group identity tags to all bookmarks makes it easy to pull up their specific contributions. Finally if I want groups to present their sources to the class and talk about how they made their choices, their bookmarks can be turned into an interactive slide show of live pages using the Webslides feature.

Educator accounts are Diigo’s way of ensuring students’ safety and privacy are protected. Once a teacher has been approved for such an account, individual student accounts are created through the Teacher Console. Students in the same class automatically become each others’ friends, and interaction is limited to the classroom group. “Student profiles are not indexed for ‘People Searches’ and not made available to public search engines.” Teachers can also collaborate and combine their students into one big class group. Pre-existing student accounts can be transferred from class to class so students can take all their bookmarks with them, and after graduation, they can apply to have their student accounts converted to regular accounts.

My main concern with Diigo is how to exert some control over the entries that students add to their lists. I would not want students using their accounts to store or share inappropriate bookmarks or use sticky notes to leave personal or distasteful remarks on others’ bookmarks. I would have to contact the user forum before I used this in my classes to see what could be done to prevent that.

NING

Ning is a networking format that brings together familiar online tools in one place with the goal of “building community and content.” Growing a list of friends and creating or joining groups; communicating through forums and discussions, blogging, and email, and chat rooms; uploading files for sharing; adding tabs that link to outside sources — these are all features that make Ning Networks a much a faster way than using a blog or a wiki “for people to find you or for you to develop and audience.” Ning websites are relatively easy to set up and customize and can be designated private or for members only. It is possible accept or refuse members and to moderate all content before it’s posted. Unless one applies for an educator account, Google ads will appear on the network page because Ning is a commercial enterprise. As such it is governed by COPPA, the Child Online Privacy and Protection Act in the US, and can admit only members 13 yr. and over even to its education division.

I would find it cumbersome to maintain a NIng for a regular classroom, although I can see some value in having an online space to post assignments and announcements, to add tabs for fast links to other class webpages, or to provide a forum for students to ask and answer questions and develop learning networks. The most important thing about setting up a Ning is to keep in mind that social networks are all about facilitating conversations, so a class Ning might be a lot of work to accomplish what you can easily do with a Google Calendar and a personal blog.

On the other hand, when involving students in projects with partners in different schools or cities, or trying to find ways to forge connections between students in e-learning situations, setting up a Ning network makes a lot of sense. The profile page is a way of introducing participants to each other. Groups can be formed that cross geographical boundaries. Students can communicate on comment walls, by email, or in a chatroom. Blogs can be used by teachers to post general guidelines and reflections to all students. Projects can be posted online. Forums and discussions encourage asynchronous dialogue. It’s easy for teachers to assess the level of participation of individuals by looking at their profiles which can be set to show all student activity. The Classroom 2.0 Wiki is the best place to look for ideas about how to use social networks in classes. There is not much help on the Ning website. If you want to figure out the best design and features to include,  Jane Hart’s Guide to Social Learning in her C4LPT website gives some straight forward starting suggestions, or you can look at the Ning Developer Network.

Before going to the trouble of setting up a Ning network for your class, it makes sense to see whether it can be accessed from your school. Apparently Ning is widely blocked throughout the US. Steve Hargadon suggests that many network administrators will unblock specific teachers’ Nings on request because it is possible to keep them completely private. It is also possible to purchase a domain name, and Steve will help you set that up if you email him. Also it can be worthwhile to set up a generic classroom g-mail account for yourself if using a Ning network. You can create dummy accounts for the students by taking part of your g-mail address and adding + sign so it forwards their messages to your gmail account. That way you can filter their emails.

VOICETHREAD

Voicethread (VT) is a very popular interactive multimedia publishing platform that offers teachers and students the ability to control the content of their presentations and get responses from all over the world. You can upload text files, PowerPoints, Images, and Videos. You can comment by adding text or audio or via webcam. There is a ‘Doodling’ tool for drawing viewers’ attention to parts of the presentation while you comment verbally. Final products can be embedded in other websites, published for everyone to view, kept for private viewing, or downloaded in a format that can be stored and played offline if the VT is instructional only. Three K-12 educator options offer different levels of service and amojunts of storge storage. Using the ProEducator account (one time $10 fee), the teacher can create unlimited student accounts which offer tight content monitoring controls. Students never have to use their own email addresses.

VT offers several tutorials to get you started. The FAQ is spot on, and there is an extensive help forum, although sometimes it can be hard to know where to look for the answer you need. I found the staff very responsive when I wrote for help. They either gave me a fresh answer or directed me to the right page in the forum. I’d advise you to bookmark these as it can be hard to retrace your steps and get back to the specific help topics later.

I think Voicethread lends itself well to the teaching of math or science. In my individualized program, the same questions come up over and over. I could create mini-lessons using simple PowerPoints, a tablet computer, and the doodling tool. Once posted I could add verbal instructions (which appear as little bubbles around the edges of the presentation) and invite students to ask clarifying questions. These could be answered by other students. VT also lends itself well to discussions in e-learning courses. If you started with an inspiring presentation and had students record their responses, they could watch the dialogue grow. Language teachers like VT because it helps students practice their pronunciation. Using VT could also be a more interesting way to handle response journals in the Humanities.

The VT Terms of Use states: “You must be at least 13 years or older to register and use this Service. If you are under the age of 13, you must use an account created by a parent or guardian, and you must have the explicit permission of a parent or guardian to use the Service.” I know a lot of elementary teachers make use of this program, but I would advise anyone doing so even under an Educators’ account to have parent/guardian letters.

Until this year, several people could work on one VT at the same time. Students sometimes deleted each others’ work and even entire accounts because the moderation feature did not work properly. Now only one identity can be adding content. This means students or groups must prepare their slides and rehearse or pre-record their comments and add these to the file one at a time. (If the slides are assembled into a powerpoint, they could be uploaded all at once.) This could create logistical problems, but if you keep one station open for adding content and have students follow some sort of queuing system, I think they could manage it.

Whatever tool you choose, be clear about your purpose for using it and match the tool to the job. Also, if you don’t have time to properly test drive the application at home, give that task to a few students to do for you when they have spare time in class so you can talkwih them about what you really want the class to be able to do.  Anything that you could have figured out easily on your own, they’ll be able to do. When they run into trouble, you’ll know where you have to put our prep and problem solving efforts.