CheckItOutOneTime

After the Wave Digital Challenge

2011-02-01T04:41:00.001-08:00

The week before Christmas, the Grade 7 students at International School Bangkok (ISB) participated in a fundraising challenge for After The Wave to help support the students whose school and families were devastated by the tsunami in 2004. After the Wave sponsors over 100 students in a K- 12 school, as well as financially supporting many of these students as they attend college.

For the past three years, ISB Middle School students and faculty have supported After the Wave through fundraising endeavors, particularly through a student club (Grades 6 - 8) and through an annual Grade 7 fundraiser. This year, we wanted to design a fundraiser in which the students would give of themselves.

Last year, after reading, Information Rich and Attention Poor, we had a successful Socratic Seminar with our students about the ways in which the internet has affected our ability to focus, to take our time to learn and whether our society, including its educational practices, is starting to,"value speed over depth." As one of my students wrote, "The internet especially is making us less patient because when we look something up on the internet, we get information right away, but only the part that we want to know. We don’t understand or read the whole story, so our “surrounding” knowledge, as I will call it, has gone down."

After reading Matt Richtel's article, Growing Up Digital: Wired For Distraction in the New York Times, we had an idea. We would have another Socratic Seminar based on issues of focus, distraction and learning. The students would read excerpts from both articles, only this time, instead of just using these texts as their bases for discussion, they would also perform some action research of their own.

Students would raise money for the After the Wave Foundation by going without digital communication for 24 hours (if they could). They would get sponsors to pledge money either per hour or as a lump sum for their participation. Our goal was to raise enough to sponsor 4 students (32,000 baht) for After the Wave. Our students would be making a small sacrifice and giving of themselves for someone else; they would also be documenting their own relationships with digital devices and participating in a Socratic Seminar where they used their own experiences as text and reflected upon their own histories with the internet, video games and social networking.

On December 15, at 7:20 am the After The Wave Digital Challenge began. In the end, we raised over 86,000 baht. Many students went for 24 hours and many did not. On the 16th, we had an interesting Socratic Seminar where some students confessed to video game addictions that prevented them from doing their homework and caused huge rifts between them and their parents. Some students realized how much more time they would have if they didn't always get distracted while they were trying to do something else. Some students blamed parents and said that they should make more rules (and enforce them) with their children and that, "instead of saying they care for their children, they must act, making up rules for a routine schedule, maintaining balance."

In blog posts the next day, students articulated their thoughts, opinions and feelings:

I think technology almost lures us in. It makes us depend on it for something to do, when really we could be doing a million other things that would so much more useful...it (the challenge) was really interesting, because I thought it would be so easy. It wasn’t.

I am very happy that I got to have this experience both because I got to raise money for the After the Wave charity and because I took the chance to take a break from my tiny desktop screen and open up to what is around me even the tiniest bit more.

It’s probably different for other people, but my biggest challenge for the technology-free day was boredom. After sitting around reading the same book over and over again, you just feel like you want to pick something up, hurl it so it flies over the horizon, then run after it until you find it and hurl it back to where it came from. To put it shortly, you just want to actually DO something other than sit around twiddling your thumbs. To some people, I guess that doing something means to do push-ups or start jogging around the track at school, but to me, it basically means going on the computer and logging into Facebook or maybe opening up Call of Duty or some other video game that occupies your time until your mom orders you out of your room for dinner. (12 hours).

Does digital technology actually take us further from reality? Yes; people have told their experiences and some say how they became more imaginative when they didn’t use technology for a whole day. Someone said that because they were using technology so much, they hadn't even noticed their new fish. (24 hours)

It was about 8:00 when I was about to break apart, I couldn’t take it any longer; I decided to just go to sleep early. I went for 24 hours with no technology... I can’t imagine going without technology for a week I think it might destroy me. (24 hours)

During the time when technology was away from me, I could do so many things that I couldn’t when I had technology. I read for the first time in like 3 days. More time, more things I could do and try out, it was good in some way. However, I also suffered from lack of technology,I couldn’t talk to my friends and spend time, I just couldn’t do anything and I felt like I was shunned from the outer world and stuck somewhere where nobody could find me. (21 hours)

They had insights about social networking:

Why we are addicted to things like Facebook or MySpace and other social networks where we spend time looking at people status’s not really caring what they are and just keep on wasting our free time.(7hours)

I think that Facebook can be a good advantage for communicating to long distance people or people that live far away, but I think that it isn’t that good if you're talking to people who you could actually see or hang out with in real life, because it’s like you're blocking or taking away the chance of seeing and meeting real people that are not just in front of the screen.

What really pecked me in the back was that I noticed that people who text and use facebook for social reasons… text in order to not feel lonely.(24 hours)

Most of the students decided that after reading the articles, watching the video and audio slideshow, taking the Digital Challenge and participating in a Socratic Seminar that each one of us needed to learn how to moderate our time ourselves and that schools could help by teaching us how to use technology to maximize learning. Most seemed to emphasize the idea of true communication and time well spent while ALSO continuing to teach students with older, slower and less distracting communication or media such as books, discussions, and lectures/workshops/mini-lessons.

I must confess that I only made it 21 hours in the challenge. By 5 o'clock the next morning, I couldn't or didn't want to keep going. I needed my internet news, my email and my music. I learned a lot about how 'busy' I really am. With so much extra time on my hands for 24 hours, I didn't know what to do with myself.

I will let the students have the last word:

We must understand how to get information that is not just in front of us, waiting to be grabbed.

One thing I didn’t get to talk about today was about how I got my sponsors. It is interesting how I got many of my sponsors by using technology. I sent a message to all my contacts on my phone about the challenge and how I needed sponsors and I also posted a post on Facebook about it. Many of my sponsors knew about the challenge by these ways and they helped sponsor me.(24 hours)

Schools should be teaching kids how to focus, and how to be more creative and more dependent on themselves; I have noticed things about myself too- I depend on my computer and it’s gadgets for almost most of my doings.(24 hours)

Telling students to avoid using technology because it is a distraction from school work is not good; it is worth it for schools to teach students the cause and effect of technology.

If we deny technology too much, it can harm our social and technology skills. However, if we use technology too much, it can also harm our social skills. This is why we should find our balance in using technology.

Infographics, Demographics & Social Studies

2011-02-01T04:41:00.000-08:00

Part of the Grade 7 Social Studies curriculum at ISB is to study the rice-growing regions of South and Southeast Asia through readings, current events, simulations, a teacher-directed novel, Rice Without Rain, and a 3 day-2 night field trip to Korat, a largely rural area in Northeastern Thailand.

Every year we adapt the way we teach the unit, including the ways in which we implement the research tasks and the simulation. We add countries to study (we started with 6 countries four years ago; this year we included 13), we include more internet research, and we encourage more creativity and responsibility for the students in terms of what and how they collect, interpret and present research data.

Since I started teaching at ISB, infographics have really developed and flourished in the media. I have used them quite a bit to teach Social Studies and I follow several sites that feature new infographics every day.

This year we decided to incorporate a lesson on how to make infographics into the social studies part of the unit. We thought that it would add another exciting dimension to the preparation for the rice-negotiation part of the simulation. Instead of writing a report about demographics, students would produce an information graphic that would help them and the other students better understand quality of life issues in their assigned countries.

Our laptops at school do not have any graphic design programs, so I wasn't confident that the kids would be able to really do very much in the way of layout and design. I read some excellent articles in the New York Times about using infographics to teach, to learn and to create in the classroom. I asked Jeff Utecht, our high school tech director, for advice. He recommended Pages and he helped me strategize about how much time I would need for the lessons by breaking down the research and the infographics lessons into steps.

Here are the steps we took as a class:

Part One: Research

Students collected demographic data about their assigned countries.
Students brainstormed definitions of quality of life.
Students selected 2 - 10 statistics that they felt illustrated quality of life.

Part Two: Infographics

We showed students excerpts of the TED Talks by David McCandless and Hans Rosling and we talked about the data and the way it was presented.

I created a Google Doc presentation about data visualization to show the students in parts.

Students spent a whole class just playing in Microsoft Word, learning how to use SmartArt, Word Art and drawing tools while also learning how to arrange and organize these objects and images into layers.

Part C: Putting it All Together

Students spent a week taking the 2 - 10 quality of life demographics they had collected and figuring out how to represent them graphically. We needed plenty of time to make mistakes and to learn. I worked with the students, helping them when they needed it and making my own infographic as we learned together.

When they were finished, we posted them all on the class blog and students used each others' final projects to take notes on quality of life issues in the region. We were now prepared for the simulation.
I assessed their infographics based on the following four questions; Does it have a main idea or thesis? Does the data support the main idea? Do the graphics enhance and support the data? Does the layout and design have a purpose; did you organize the graphics and text to communicate your ideas effectively?

Not all of the students' data was correct. Sometimes they didn't use the best chart possible to represent their information, which resulted in confusion. Some students cut and pasted their graphics and text on paper so that they were better able to see and control what they were doing. All in all, though, we had a successful first experience with infographics and used the mistakes to learn about everything from graphic design, to demographics and to the ways in which data can be misrepresented and misinterpreted.

Here is a link to some of the infographics the students created. The next project I want to try with infographics will be to have students create one about themselves as students before student-led conferences in the spring.

Can We Please Have 5 More Minutes: Reading in Grade 7 at ISB

2011-01-29T15:25:00.000-08:00

A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. ~William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958

In class I want more silent reading time because I think only 15 minutes is too short. Every time when the time is up I want to keep reading more.

- ESL Grade 7 Student in Room 305.

Today I want to sing the praises of setting time aside each class for silent, independent reading. I have been teaching for twenty years in five different countries and have only realized how important it is to preserve this time, in the past 4 years, teaching at the International School Bangkok in Thailand.

At ISB, in Thailand, students come from all over the world and from dozens of international and local schools. They are at various reading levels in their own language and in English. In our Grade 7 Humanities classes, we set aside between 15 and 20 minutes for silent reading each day.

Our students love this reading time so much that they beg for it if I have to skip it whenever we have shorter classes. They discuss the books they are reading with their friends and with me, excitedly. They are so silent that it's almost like meditating for 20 minutes. I can leave the room and come back and no one is trying to sneak anything - they are always just as I left them, reading. They don't need supervision, although I always stay in the room and read myself. It's so peaceful and feels so good to be sharing these moments with the stories and with the students.

Why do students want to read more at ISB?

Students at our school, in every grade level, genuinely love to read. As teachers, we want to help students keep that joy and love of reading AND use reading to help them learn more.

Our reading program in Grade 7 is quite interesting. We have worked hard to try to combine the best elements of reading instruction theory with what we know of our individual classes and students. We have built a program that we are proud of, a program that allows for differentiation, reading workshops, literary analysis, silent reading and book groups or literature circles.

Here is how our program works:

1) Independent Silent Reading

In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation. ~Stéphane Mallarmé

This time is set aside for silent reading from 15 - 20 minutes per class. Students read their books without interruption from a teacher and without direct reading instruction. Students choose their own books from a HUGE library. They can read fiction or non-fiction. They can take books back that they thought they would like but didn't.

Recommendations work this way:

Every six weeks we visit the library for an hour long period, where the librarian gives a book talk on 5-6 books (for about 20 - 30 minutes). She gets the students so excited that the the books she talks are always checked out by the end of the period.

Every two weeks we visit the library to exchange books as a group (students can check out up to 8 books each)

Every time a student finishes a book. they can use their silent reading time to go check out another book (with the librarian) or take out one of my classroom books.

The teachers and the librarian work together for the rest of the period (and every day) to help students choose books. The librarian at our school knows the kids and their readings tastes and reading levels so well that she can make at least a dozen suggestions for what they can read. I take careful notes on the genres they are reading and the authors and plots they like.

Students talk about their books informally during class and somewhat formally at least once a week with like-minded readers. Every few weeks we have a short class discussion where we hold up the books we're reading and talk about what we like about them.

Grade 7 teachers read young adult books to help the kids make choices and to help the kids discuss the books they are reading. Even students in Grade 8 (former students) stop by for book recommendations.

Students are given multiple opportunities to make connections between their reading and the curriculum, their other books and each other. They love sites like Safari because they can see what others are reading and keep track of books they have already read.

2) Book Groups. A second part of our reading program is taught through book clubs or book groups. At least three times per year, students choose books from the teacher book room, classroom sets and/or the library where we have multiple copies at different reading levels in different genres. These are teacher selected titles based on reading levels, genres, themes, plots, character development and ideas. Students read books in groups, assign each other homework. They meet at least twice a week to discuss their books and write about them once a week. They take notes while they are reading, learning and practicing how to do all of the things that good readers do.

It is really exciting helping students choose books here too. We get to book-talk the books, as do students who have already read the books. When we do book groups, we often hear students talking in the hallways and frantically trying to get their first or second choice books. When they finish, we hear them talking about big ideas and how the authors crafted their stories and characters.

3) Teacher-Directed Novels. In this key part of our program, we choose three books per year that students read as a group.

These books are integrated into our Social Studies units, so they help students better understand the more abstract concepts and historic details in the history, geography, and cultures we learn about.

These books are full of characters that middle schoolers can relate to - each one with a main character about their age, so that we can discuss character development in stories as well as character development in teens and adults.

We use this time to do deep literature analysis, with homework, class discussions & debates, reading strategies, partner-work, projects, essays, creative writing, and common assessments. These projects and activities come out of the journey we take together as a class to 'learn how to read' and to better develop the classroom bond through a shared journey or experience into another world.

We have so many reading levels in our classes and such a range of communication abilities that we have found that reading the same book also helps students who struggle to better understand what they are reading. The teacher can teach it, their friends can help them understand and express ideas and they don't feel so alone when they see and hear that someone else doesn't understand. Some of the most beautiful moments in the classroom have come when a student who struggles with vocabulary is able to express their understanding of a complex theme or abstract concept in the book. They feel so good as the students who seem 'smarter' actually learn from them.

An important part of our program to understand is that students are reading silently and independently all year long. While we read a classroom novel, students still have 15 minutes to read their own books in class. During book groups, students can choose to read their independent reading books in class when they finish their discussions for the day; this happens more at the end of the book as some students in each group finish the book before the others.

Recently, the practices of sustained silent reading and teacher-directed novels have been much maligned of late.

Critics of teacher-directed novels believe that students should not read the same book at the same time because they are at different reading levels and that they should have choice.

Well:

We are all at different levels in reading, thinking, multiple intelligences, background,interests, and points of view. That is WHY there is a value in shared experience. We can go through a journey together, helping each other along the way, and have a shared memory and a collective experience. Also, as we continue to explore the essential questions and enduring understanding in our curricular units, we have a common framework with names, settings and plot twists to refer to along the way.

Our free-choice independent reading program accompanies the class novels, which supplements, complements and enhances the teacher-choice novels and book groups.

Some critics of sustained silent reading in the classroom believe that independent reading time should be a time,"where students keep a journal and respond to the literature in terms of what they think or how they feel about what they are reading," and that there should also be a,"sharing time where students share with another person their journal entries and the other person gives feedback. Further, they believe that in a good independent reading program, "the teacher engages in student conferences on an individual or group basis. Teachers can also engage in guided reading with groups of students who need additional support."

A lot of professional development reading workshop advocates and supporters criticize silent reading because they believe it's not, "teaching reading." But, as Nancy Atwell points out in her book, The Reading Zone, in taking away the silence, sometimes,"teachers erect instructional roadblocks between their students and the pure pleasure of the personal art of reading."

Recently I asked my students to write about their silent reading time at school. I asked them if they could design the perfect independent reading program, what would it be? They all wanted it to stay the same (except more time for reading). I was so emotional reading their responses because at ISB they love reading so much.

The other factor that comes into play here is that students in 2011 are surrounded and inundated by technology. This year we have read articles, participated in socratic seminars and done a lot of writing about the fact that Facebook, YouTube, the internet, video games, cell phones and other distractions make it difficult for students today to concentrate. Digital distractions compete for students' time and space with the things they know they should be doing and the things they want to do more of, including reading and truly understanding what they read.

In-class silent reading is so valuable to our students because it is silent and because there are no distractions and they can escape into the world of a book they choose without any mediation or detachment from the experience.

Here are some excerpts from their writing:

"Reading has been a way for me to forget about problems at home or in school, and a way to relax. As I got into Middle School, reading became more of a mandatory assignment. Here in ISB it is different, because you have to separate your independent reading, and class reading, so reading has become fun for me again."

"When I think a lot about a book that is for my pleasure I feel it ruins the excitement and suspense because you are constantly worrying about taking notes and remembering quotes, etc."

"During silent reading I love to read at that time because everyone is quiet and there are no noise. When I go back home I hate to read. Honestly, silent reading in class is the only time I don’t think that its’ wasting my time." ESL student

"Independent reading should just be a casual, silent period of time where you can just concentrate on your book. The only moment of time I can really read my book is in silent reading."

"Native English Learners can speak fluently but because Koreans read English books a lot and learn English a lot by reading texts that are in English, sometimes they write better than Native English Learners. This result tells that reading books helps a lot for children/ students, so the school should require us to read independent books."

"I really think that we should be able to read on our own. If we have to write about it then it takes out all the fun in the reading itself, because its fun to have your thoughts in your mind where you can always change them."

"What I don’t want to do the most is the fact that we have to stop every time where we don’t understand a word and write the word down on a piece of paper. It slows down the reading and make it hard to concentrate on the book."

"I also learn enough already from reading my independent book; my stories are quite good and fluent because of the writing tools I learn from reading books. You can see that I read a lot of books because my writing is fine. After all, writing and reading are very closely connected. A person who didn’t read books would definitely write below average stories."

"Reading a book should not have pressure or any kind of stress on it. If you almost finish reading the book, then start to go ‘’Oh wait, I have to present this book tomorrow.’’, then you probably aren’t reading the book right. "

I have never seen students so engaged with their books on every level. I have never seen a more successful reading program - as gauged by:

Students love of reading.
Students improvement in reading levels, reading strategies and vocabulary.
Students talking about books.
Students taking risks with more challenging books.
Students recognizing the importance of reading and seeing the links between reading and writing and understanding big ideas.
Students making connections to the curriculum and to their lives.
Students being able to articulate why they value reading at school.

Reading means so much more than test scores, getting into college, and improving skills. It is about these things, don't get me wrong, but it is also about appreciating what it is to be human.

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. ~Oscar Wilde

Fun With Film

2010-03-18T05:38:00.000-07:00

This week I did some film workshops with my students. I taught them some film terms related to camera angles, types of shots, types of camera movement and some other smaller details about light, sound and editing. I showed them about a dozen clips from classic movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, and some clips from modern movies with the director talking over the soundtrack. I got these clips from a fantastic New York Times feature called Anatomy of a Scene.

We compared the language of film to the language of stories and essays. Shots are like words, sequences are like sentences, and so on. I wanted them to think about several issues as we studied the film clips:

1) Each shot means something. The choice involved in the image that fills the frame, took a long time to make. Directors think about lighting, sound, camera angle, camera distance, and camera movement among other things. Different choices would change the meaning.

2) Well crafted film and well crafted writing share some characteristics. They are thought out, edited, revised, and either make a point or create a feeling that resonates with a viewer or reader. Additionally, when we analyze a text, whether it is film or a novel, we should pay attention to how it is constructed as well as the more plot and character related elements.

3) Symbols and metaphor play a powerful role in multiple art forms and add to the meaning of a text.

4) Filmmakers have to make difficult choices when adapting novels into films. Students make similar choices when they summarize, synthesize and write about the fiction and non-fiction texts they read.

5) You can apply what you learn about analyzing and creating film to analyzing and writing stories and essays.

With these goals in mind, I spent about two 45 minute periods showing clips, teaching the students film terms and leading a discussion on the issues above. For the third class period, we read the three opening paragraphs from the novel we just finished and we talked about how each of us would shoot that scene if we were the director.

After we discussed possibilities, students spent the next 10 - 15 minutes choosing the top 10 plot points of the book. Each pair of students chose one plot point/scene and had the task of scripting it (with camera directions) AS the opening scene of the book. They had to talk about how to go back and forth in time, what elements of the scene they wanted to keep from the book and how to film it.

It was so fun listening to students' heated debates about what should be in the shot and how to create the most meaning without being able to directly tell the viewer what was important. The choices they made also showed me what they saw as the most significant thematic, setting and character elements of a particular event in the plot.

What is Learning?

2010-03-11T18:54:00.000-08:00

Last week I asked the students to write a blog post about learning. They had to choose an image that symbolized learning for them and write a caption to explain the photo. For their actual post, they had to choose to answer one of the following questions:

What is learning?
How does it feel when you know you’ve learned something?
How can you tell when you’ve learned something?

Here are some excerpts from some of the blog posts:

What is learning?

Learning is a challenging process of acquiring skill or knowledge, and It really is challenging, it takes a lot of patience, time and focus, and I think that humanities learners really need those skills.

Learning is when you get to know something in that helps you live your life the best way possible. If we were to never learn anything in our lives I am nearly 100 percent positive we wouldn’t even live 1 year.

According to the dictionary, learning is ‘knowledge acquired by systematic studying any field of scholarly application’. However, to me it is different. To me, learning is taking facts and making it personal, and being passionate about the knowledge you soak in. Learning is not finding the solution. Learning is everything in between, everything BUT the solution. The solution is just the product of your learning, but learning itself is something different.

Learning is when you know what you didn’t know before. Both living and non living can teach me. Living organisms, such as a teacher, can teach me and non living stuff, such as books can teach me. A teacher can be anybody or anything. Learning is when you understand what the stuff teaches you.

How do you feel when you’ve learned something?

I think that it’s the greatest feeling in the world. For a minute there- you feel secure and that you’ve worked hard on something and it has added to your knowledge. When you learn something that you don’t really care about like shoe sizes in different countries you feel like you’ve wasted your time, but when you have worked hard on something and you know a lot about it- you feel like the king of the world for a second there. You know you have earned that knowledge and that it will help you later in life!

Once you’ve learned something, it feels good because you know that you have more knowledge than before. You feel smarter and that thing that you learned will always be in your memory. Once you have learned something, you will know it forever. But, it really depends on how much you’ve learned something. If you’ve learned it really well, it will be in your long-term memory. If you’ve learned it poorly, then you’ll probably forget it sooner or later. Learning something could be tough, but once you’ve learned it, all the knowledge will pay off.

When I learned something, I proud of myself, because I learned something what I didn’t know. And I felt happy and want to learn more . So when I learned something l felt like this.

I feel a relief when I have just learned something because that also means that I will success more in the future. When you have learned something, you are most likely to make sound such as “ohhh” or “ahh.” This believe that when a kid makes that sound, they have captured something important or that might be helpful later on in the future. I also learned that from my dad because as he was teaching me new math, I abruptly made that sound and he told me that I understood what he was trying to teach me.

I feel really good when we know about something. Maybe when someone is talking about it we would be able to also fit in and discuss about it. It feels that we are getting smarter every time we learn about something new.

I think that when you have learned something you can tell because you have confidence in yourself and you are proud of yourself!

2 things. First is that the topic I learned stays in my head and I keep on remembering the lesson throughout the day.

Second is my head feels kind of more heavier, but enough that I could feel.

Another thing is that sometimes I think about the lesson and connect it to what I already know.

You can tell that you’ve learned something if you know something that you never knew before. If you were reflecting in your mind what you know, you might find out that you’ve learned something. Sometimes a friend or family member might ask you a question of something that you’ve learned and you answered them correctly. That’s also a way that you can learn something. It’s also the way I know I learned something.

Reading my students' answers and looking at the images they chose, helped me gain insight into their thinking and into how they view learning. This is a question we grapple with as teachers. What is learning? How do we know when we've learned something? How does it feel? Students also shared these posts with their parents during the conferences.

Nings and Novels

2010-03-10T01:50:00.001-08:00

This month our 7th grade class is studying the novel, Rice Without Rain. The novel was written by Minfong Ho, who grew up in Singapore and Thailand.

The main character is a 12 year old girl who lives in a village in Thailand that is dependent on rice farming. The story takes place during a tumultuous time in Thailand's history. It was a time of drought and student revolution.

This year, our class is reading the novel at the same time as The Waverly Middle School in Pasadena, California. The Waverly English teacher and I decided to use a Ning for the project because it would allow our students to get to know each other as well as allowing us to have students working together in discussion forums and working independently through blog posts.

First, we assigned each student a buddy in the other class. We asked them to 'Friend' each other and to get to know each other a little bit. When we started the book, the ISB students had just returned from a trip to Korat, a largely rural and agricultural region of Thailand. Students from Waverly watched their ISB buddy's digital stories about their trip and made several comments about the video. Then, Waverly students researched specific aspects of Thailand and posted their paragraphs on the Ning and ISB students read their buddy's posts.

After getting into the novel a little more, we asked students to join a 'Group' based on a character they chose to follow throughout the novel. In each group we assigned blog posts and discussion topics.

We also encouraged students to post their own discussion topics and to participate in as many discussions as they liked. We posted a reading schedule on the Ning and students exchanged opinions and ideas about character, plot, theme and symbolism in the novel.

Students learned and expressed their learning through the site but they also continued to use it as a place to get to know each other better.

The Ning provided a safe, online environment for socializing. It functions as a social networking site, similar to Facebook, where students can post messages, comments and status updates.

Not only are students communicating with their buddies, but they are also communicating with each other. Today is conference day and I just had some parents telling me that as a result of the class Ning, their child became friends with another student who is also their neighbour. The two didn't really talk that much until the Ning provided them with the opportunity. They became online friends and how they are more comfortable talking to each other in the class.

All year, the students at ISB and at Waverly have written blog posts, practiced expressing their opinions and backing them up with evidence and participated in discussions about plot, theme, character and symbolism. Because of this practice, and because the students developed their analytical and writing skills, both of our classes were able to engage in meaningful and timely discussion and collaboration online.

The next time I do this, I hope to plan even more before I start in order to take better advantage of the opportunities the Ning offers to students and teachers in terms of working together. It seems particularly suited to an online book group - and we will use it again this year when students participate in book clubs.

Feeding a Hungry World

2010-03-10T01:49:00.002-08:00

"We had a whole unit about different countries negotiating land, food and money. I was the Chinese diplomat so I needed to listen to my teammates and talk confidently in front of two classes and do anything to help my country. I loved learning about negotiations because I love to debate and be a leader.

That unit was really fun to learn about because not only did we learn what real negotiations are like,

we’ve been part of them."

For the past several years, the 7th grade Social Studies program at ISB has adapted a simulation from Stanford University's Spice Program called Feeding a Hungry World. Each year we adapt it to better suit the needs of our students and to incorporate the opportunities that new technologies afford.

Despite an extraordinary amount of interruptions including student field trips, student illness, special events and activities, professional development days and a three-day weekend, we were able to organize a meaningful simulation of a diplomatic negotiation involving trade issues, food security issues, land use issues and resource equity.

We assigned students to represent major rice-producing and/or consuming nations in Asia. For the first part of the project, students learned some demographic terms and conducted demographic research about the country that they were going to represent in the simulation.

We also assigned students various roles within the simulation, such as farmers, diplomats, citizens, environmental scientists and government officials. We gave each student a list of specific questions to answer related to their roles.

After completing their research, students:

answered higher-level thinking questions about the bigger issues involved in issues of food security and sustainable development.
participated in a meeting with all country representatives to plan a strategy for the negotiation simulation.
participated in negotiation sessions.

At the beginning of the negotiation session, we gave each country a packet containing pieces of paper that represented the area of land in each country, some international currency coupons that represented the GDP of each country and some rice seeds that represented the amount of rice produced in the country. The object of the simulation was for each country to have enough rice to feed its people by 2050.

One student, who is not particularly interested in Social Studies wrote, "Recently, we did a unit about different countries. I was named the farmer of China. I personally think that the farmer's role is the most important for the country's economy."

She felt upset at the beginning of the simulation when she realized how much work farmers do and how little they are appreciated and valued. She thought it was unfair that they often went without food but provided food for others.

Students were so excited between negotiation sessions that they stayed in for break to argue and discuss strategy. Many stayed after class to talk about how unfair it was that some countries had so much land, or so money or so much food. Students seemed to understand what we wanted them to understand and learned so much more than we anticipated this year.

The combination of technology and class discussion worked very well. Students researched the demographic information online and made mashup maps of their data. They got to look at photos, read news and write posts about what they had learned. At the same time, students benefited so much from our in-class discussions, from playing different roles, from participating in a simulation and from engaging in face to face dialogue with other students and with each other.

This project worked so well because students were able to get up to date information on the countries they represented and because they were able to participate in discussions, dialogues and negotiations with other students.

Simulations, discussions and internet research and data mapping worked well to produce a great unit. The unit went perfectly with our novel choice, Rice Without Rain, and our 3 day, 2 night trip to Korat.

"Learning is made out of stairs. Some with opportunities may jump, some who underestimate the opportunity, or have lacking opportunities stay. This semester was the most meaningful semester for me. I was a child and a student who did not thank anything she gained and only wanted more. Korat was absoloutely an incredulous scene. I have never imagined a place like the small village with 499 people. After I got back home I was ashamed of my attitude towards life. My life and environment already is an opportunity. Also, the unbelievable world hunger facts was stunning me. I felt that I neglected this serious issue up until now. This semester let me climb one stair towards my dream."

Conference Time Again

2010-03-10T01:48:00.001-08:00

"I learned that my son is more confident and knows his strong and weak points."

"I learned that my daughter's writing style and voice is really interesting."

"I learned that my child works so hard!"

This week is conference week at ISB and I wanted students to use the class conference wiki to reflect upon the goals they set for themselves in the fall and to write about how they accomplished them or why they didn't reach them. In class last week, students linked their goals and their reflections to other online work including the Rice Without Rain Ning, their creative writing, their blog posts and a reflection about learning. During the conferences, parents could look at the blogs and see the improvement in student writing by comparing old posts to new ones. I felt confident about what the parents would learn at the conferences but I couldn't stop thinking about how quiet the conferences were in the fall.

I remember looking around the room, and seeing so many parents reading and so many students sitting quietly as their parents looked at their work. The laptops helped make the students feel more comfortable and for many parents, this was the first time their children had let them read their writing, so I knew the main part of the process was working. I also asked students had to choose an image to represent how they see themselves in relation to their goal and where they wanted to be in the future, so students spent some time explaining the images and relating them to their goals. The conferences were good in the first semester but I just wanted the conversations to be a little louder.

For the Spring conferences, I added a formal interviewing and writing component to the meeting and a more formal agenda. After sharing their goals and their work with their parents, the parents asked their children which goal, out of all the goals they identified, was the most important to them. Then they asked them what they could do to help them reach that goal. Parents listened carefully to their children and recorded their answers on a handout I left for them.

At that point, I joined the conferences and talked about my goals for their children and shared my view of the progress each student had made so far this semester. Then I left the table as students asked their parents to tell them one thing they had learned during the conference (I meant about their child, but one parent wrote that they also learned that Bangladesh was in danger of losing a large quantity of their land due to rising sea levels). Finally, students asked their parents to tell them a goal they had for them for the rest of the semester. Students recorded these answers as well.

This addition to the process worked to engage students and parents in more of a dialogue. Writing the answers down gave them something to do together and gave me some data to use to help differentiate my instruction and to help the students with general goals such as reading more, reading more fluently and improving the quality of their written work.

Two Digital Stories

2010-02-17T02:41:00.000-08:00

Here are two different takes on the assignment below. The first is an analysis and explanation of Phi Mai, an ancient temple and the second, a poem. Click on the links and go to YouTube to watch them. The sound is better that way too.

Making Meaning with Digital Stories

2010-02-14T13:38:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, when you give students an assignment, it turns out to be much a more difficult one than you originally thought.

A good example of this is when the 7th grade Humanities teachers assigned our students the task of creating digital stories about our trip to Korat.

The stories are about the rural life, culture or history of Thailand but students were free to choose their own theme and/or focus within the general topics.

For the past two years in Grade 7, the students have made slide shows and presentations that looked exactly the same. This year I really wanted them to produce something meaningful, for themselves and for their audience.

One audience for my students (besides myself) is the Waverly Middle School in Pasadena, California. We will be working together this year while we read the same book, Rice Without Rain. I thought it would be a great idea if the Waverly students watched the ISB students' movies before they started reading the book. They will serve as an introduction to Thailand, to some of the themes in the novel and to the students themselves.

The challenge for me is helping students understand how something can be factual, and personal. This threw me for a loop because I have worked so hard with them on making their blog posts factual and personal. They (and I) just couldn't transfer their learning from writing to digital stories.

The most common issues that came up during class last week were students:

Telling what is in each slide, as in, "This is an old man weaving a basket."
Simply listing events in chronological order.
Being too chatty, as in, "OMG - the bus ride was sooooo fun!"
Writing cute captions to accompany randomly cute photos, " What a cute kitty!"
Not understanding the idea of a dramatic question and asking but not answering extremely non-dramatic questions, like, "What is this sculpture for?" or "Did you know how long it takes to grow rice?"
Weaving the photos together into a seamlessly well-organized and well-told story.

To prepare our students before the trip, we taught a lesson, distributed handouts and checklists and posted all the info they needed (with examples) on our class blogs. After the trip, we had large and small group discussions and I showed them more examples. I made two digital stories myself. I gave students two extra days of class time so that they could get advice and feedback while they worked. I scoured the web for good advice and put it all together in a presentation about how to combine themes, topics and ideas.

Digitalstorytellingforbeginners

View more presentations from Robin.

I have definitely learned a lot this past week:

We need to do much more work BEFORE the trip than I originally thought. I should have done all the workshops first and had students watch dozens of digital stories and analyzed the key components and written about what they did and didn't like about them.

I need to find out how students can prepare in terms of the ideas and themes before the visit. We can give them some more facts about the sites they are going to see, so they can start thinking about topics earlier.

I will go through the writing process with students for this project next year and I will be much stricter about making sure that students follow it. They think they can do a good job without planning so much (because they can do it with their writing) but they can't. Movies and writing are not the same in that way.

There are not really any good examples of digital stories of this type by middle school students. If they are out there, they are very difficult to find. Maybe this is for a reason. Maybe it's too difficult for them.

Today and tomorrow, my classes will be screening their rough drafts for friends and/or for me. Tonight they will have one last chance to fix up their stories before turning them in.

I can honestly say that I have no idea what the stories are going to look like but I know that I can't wait until Wednesday. I LOVE teaching!

Essential Questions

2010-02-09T13:12:00.000-08:00

Is there some reason that computer-makers can't put a power cord slot on both sides of a laptop?

Isn't that just an idea that seems too easy and too good?

I could really use one on both sides to accommodate different workspaces.

My power cord always seems to be on the 'wrong' side of my laptop at work and at home.

Marshmallows and Success

2010-01-15T02:01:00.000-08:00

This week we had a lot of fun in the classroom using Joachim de Posada's TED talk video as an inspiration for our journal writing.

First I showed the students the video. Then I asked them to write their thoughts, feelings and/or opinions about it. They could write whatever they wanted, but if they couldn't think of anything, they could think about the following:

1) Did they agree that self-discipline and delaying self-gratification were determinants for success in life?

2) Would they eat the marshmallow or wait?

3) Do they think that it's meaningful to perform the experiment with 4, 5, and/or 6 year old children?

It was so interesting to read their responses. In one class, 2/3 of the students believed that the experiment was not, "fair." They felt that students at 4 years old are given everything they want from their parents and that it's only when children are older that they learn self-discipline and patience. The other 1/3 believed both that having self-discipline was important and that you can have it at 4 years old and keep it for the rest of your life.

In another class, the fraction was reversed. Most of those students thought the experiment was good. Most of them also admitted not only would they have eaten the marshmallow at 4 years old, but they would eat it today too.

The second journal prompt I asked them to do was to identify three personality traits they felt were determinants for success in middle school. Then they had to choose one and explain why they felt it was important. Finally, they had to write about whether or not they thought that the personality trait was also important for adults.

Most of the students in both classes chose: self-discipline, patience, being hard-working, doing your best, and self-confidence. One student said that being interested was the key to success; that people who are interested in what they are doing and learning are more successful. One student said that students who think positively do better in life, and another, that integrity was the key to earning respect both from peers and teachers.

The third prompt was to see if they could design an experiment to determine whether someone had these qualities or not. Students were able to work in groups if they had written about the same personality trait. We began to share these ideas in class and as a group, we discussed whether we thought each idea would be successful.

For example, one student thought that he would design a walk-through maze and tell students that they would get a reward if they made it through to the end. He said the maze would be really difficult and that the students who stuck with the task would be the ones who believed in doing their best. Another student argued that if there was a reward, then how would he know whether or not the subjects of the experiment believed in doing their best? How would he know whether or not they were just doing it for the reward? The student who raised the argument had also identified, "doing your best" as a key to success. The experiment she designed was simple.

She and her partner decided that if you took a group of students and asked them simply to draw a picture of the sun and put all different types of art materials in front of them, the students who believed in doing their best would take the full time allotted to them and use many different materials to make their suns, even if they weren't good artists.

The "positive thinking" student, thought that he would need to follow someone around for a month to see how they felt about things in order to determine if they were a positive thinker. When I told him he couldn't do that, he thought of having a child play with a PlayStation that broke and then ask them to describe a glass filled halfway with water. He wanted to give another child a PlayStation that worked well and have them describe the same glass of water. If they described the glass as half full, then they were positive thinkers. If they said half empty, then they were not.

It was interesting to hear the students' ideas about what they think are important personality traits and about how they think we could test for them. The students would love to see some of their ideas tested out but I'm not sure if we would be allowed to do it.

PicLits for Picture Poems

2009-12-16T14:32:00.000-08:00

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

This week the 7th Grade Humanities team led 2 days of poetry workshops with all of the students. We had six teachers, so we had nice, small groups of students. The challenge was that we had only thirty minutes with each group.

I decided to use PicLits with my group. PicLits provides a scrolling bar of interesting photos, which change throughout the day, as backgrounds to student writing. Students can write haikus, rhyming poems, and free verse or use the PicLit word banks to create interesting and well written poems. The word banks contain lists of words that match the photo, divided up into parts of speech.

You can use the site to:

Teach about imagery, metaphor, similes and figurative language.
Teach the parts of speech.
Help students to enjoy poetry creation.
Talk about what a poem is. As you walk around the room and see what the students are doing, you will end up in many small discussions about this topic. Use it as an opportunity to have a whole group discussion when the poems are finished.

A final use of the site is to have students write their own inspirational or life-sayings on the photos. They do this naturally and some of them are really interesting to read.

Different Ways to Use Blogs and Wikis with Students

2009-12-02T03:52:00.000-08:00

1. Students can write posts about current events. This gives them the opportunity to read news stories, summarize them in their own words and then synthesize and evaluate those stories. From their analyses, they create new 'news' stories, filled with links to the original stories and reporters and with reflections and questions for further research. Current events stories can be linked to curriculum very easily and students can see the connections between their lives and those of the people they are writing about. Here are more examples: Raimy, Paan, and Marc.

2. Writing about a novel. I post questions from various chapters of the novel and students post their answers on my blog. It is interesting to read all their opinions on one page and to see how students differ and and agree about what they are reading.

Sometimes I use the posts for students to just post answers to questions about the novel, sometimes I ask them to read each other's posts and write a reflection about patterns, and sometimes they post questions that other students have to answer. The image below is a screen shot of a page I deleted where students asked and answered each other's questions. I still had the comments though, so I took a screen shot of some of them.

3. As an online learning record or portfolio. Students can use their blogs to post work and reflections from all of their classes. If they keep the blogs for a long time, they can actually see how their thinking, their reading and their worlds have changed over time. Parents can also use the blog to see what their children are doing in school.

4. As a homework, classroom space. I post all the homework, links to websites where students can practice skills, learn new things and publish their writing. Every month I change at least a few links so that students can try new things.

5. As a showcase. On my blog there are usually a few pages dedicated to showcasing student work. Parents, administrators, students and global visitors can look at good quality work and be impressed with students as writers and thinkers. Aside from the class blogs, you can create sites of student writing. Here is one we put together two years ago with all the 7th grade students.

6. As a way to bring students together anonymously. Our class blog has always had an advice column on it. Students can post and answer questions anonymously. This has worked quite well at the beginning of every year to bring students together and to make them realize that they are not the only ones feeling what they're feeling. Here is link to a site created by last year's students to help this year's 7th graders. Students can also go to this book review site (it's an old site and you have to scroll down the page and look to the right to get the genres) and read reviews to help them decide what to read next.

7. To build an online, electronic, interactive and changing hypertextbook for students to use that cover a particular topic. For several years now I have kept wikis dedicated to content learning. Students research topics and post links for next year's students, they can look at work samples from previous years and they can learn from their peers (past 7th graders, who are now all over the world). The wiki gets richer and more interesting each year as new information and perspectives are added to the mix. Here is an example from a novel study. Here is an example from a social studies unit on immigration.

8. Parent Conferences. Students post goals, writing samples and sometimes even letters to their parents. During student-led conferences, students show parents what images they chose to symbolize their goals and back up their choices with real examples of their work. Parents like being able to see their children's work, their goals, their images and their ability to create something (the wiki pages). When they conference a second time, new work and reflections are added and parents can compare and contrast.

9. To collaborate. Two years ago and this year students in one class wrote a collaborative story with students in another class. They wrote at different times and in different places but they continued each other's stories. Other student collaborative sites include a vocabulary studying website, and a digital yearbook.

10. You can also create a space for students to explore outside of class. This is a pilot project I am working on with a few students right now. As students review the sites and explore the programs, interested students will work on this site together to create a central classroom link for students who want to play a little bit more with some of the app creation and animation programs. We will also link to interesting articles and new sites.

Apps We Shouldn't Need

2009-11-29T01:59:00.000-08:00

I've included the links to some of these apps in case you don't believe that they really exist.

1. The Cry Translator: The Cry Translator is an easy to use iPhone app that quickly identifies the five distinct cries made by infants: hungry, sleepy, annoyed, stressed or bored. These five cries are universal to all babies regardless of culture or language.

2. Pocket Girlfriend: Just what it sounds like. She's interactive, she's 'real' and she says exactly what you want her to say, all the time.

3. Sex Offenders Search: Helps you find sex offenders in your neighbourhood, or wherever you travel in the US. Why would you want to find them? Spend your time finding good restaurants, sales, and things to do instead.

4. Find a Starbucks Coffee: Is it really so hard to find a Starbucks that you need to spend a dollar on this app?

5. Virtual Zippo Lighter: When would you ever use this? At least it's free!

6. Conservative Talking Points App: Is this a joke? Unfortunately not. Here is a sales pitch from the makers themselves, "Be armed with the Conservative Talking Points (CTP) iPhone App as your powerful arsenal to debate those emotional and ill-prepared liberals."

Apparently they have, "50 Talking Point Subjects (and growning!)". I know; it's mean to pick on conservatives for their spelling, but I couldn't resist. Actually, maybe this is a necessary app. Emotional and ill-prepared liberals can use it to plan witty retorts against overly-prepared and logical conservatives. One of these non-emotional talking points includes, "Wars – Why We Fight For Freedom."

7. iTalk to God: Select from over 70 emotions describing how you're feeling and then click send. Moments later, a pre-programmed message of bible words comes out of your iPhone and calms you down. If that doesn't satisfy you, press MORE and keep reading. When you're satisfied, exit the application and get on with your life.

8. Concealed Handgun License State Reciprocity List: I'm not including the link for this one because I don't want anyone to find it.

9. Bad Breath Detector: It pretends to test your friends' breath and then tells your friends that they stink. Then you can twitter or Facebook the results for all of your other friends to see, if you have any friends left after using the app, that is.

10. I have to stop looking for Apps now. I am just astounded by how many of the Top Apps in each category are either religious or pornographic.

What Is Knowledge and What Should Schools Teach?

2009-11-27T04:23:00.000-08:00

For this week's Socratic Seminar, I gave the students an article to read called, Information Rich, Attention Poor, by Peter Nicholson. The article was published in The Globe and Mail in September and is no longer available online without a subscription or I would have linked to it from this post. I edited the article from 4 - 5 pages down to 2 and adapted some of the language so that the students could understand it a little better.

The article posits the theory that as information has become faster and cheaper to access, our attention span and ability to learn in an in-depth way has decreased. The author writes, "We may think metaphorically of the production of knowledge as a function of "information" and "attention," with attention understood as the set of activities by which information is ultimately transformed into various forms of knowledge."

Nicholson wonders if this lack of 'attention' has implications for the future of knowledge, learning and teaching.

At the end of the adapted article, I wrote a series of questions for students to think about for discussion:

Do you believe this trend is true?
If so, what effect will this trend have on our new learners, on our students?
Should we, as schools, teach students how to work together to process old knowledge and create new knowledge?
Should we spend our time teaching students how and not what?
Should we be encouraging students to slow down, to take time, to really learn something so that they can go out into the world with some knowledge and ideas that are based on true understanding?
Doesn’t the internet already put this generation of students ‘out into the world’ anyway?
Should we be teaching to the short attention spans or helping students develop more attention?
What should schools be teaching? What should students be learning?

As you can imagine, the conversation was really interesting. After participating in the Socratic Seminar, students spent fifteen minutes or so writing a journal entry inspired by our discussion. When they finished, I asked them to circle the most important phrase, sentence or idea from the journal entry. You can read their words on WallWisher. Each class has their own wall.

Click the posts below to look at their wall comments.

Teach Us How To Think by Room305

2009-11-27T02:14:00.000-08:00

Teach Us How To Think by Room305

Schools Should Teach Us What Humanity Is by Room305

2009-11-27T02:11:00.000-08:00

Schools Should Teach Us What Humanity Is by Room305

Tech Buddies

2009-11-23T17:46:00.000-08:00

This past week, one of my colleagues and I decided to try a little twist on the older child-younger child buddy programs. She teaches Pre-K and was telling me about how her students don't really understand what to do with a computer. My students have been using computers for a long time now and, as such, were in a really good position to teach her students how to use them.

We decided that we would start a tech-buddy program. Once a month, we would bring our classes together to work on the computers. This week we wanted the students to get to know each other, to feel comfortable with each other and to have some fun. We decided that a fun way for them to work together for the first time would be to use the program GoAnimate to create little cartoons.

7th graders showed the Pre-K students the characters, the backgrounds, the props, the music and the animations and let them choose what they wanted to use in their movies. They also worked with the Pre-K to develop a beginning, a middle and an end to their stories. In this way, the Pre-K students participated in creating a story, in making a cartoon, in getting to know their 7th grade buddies and in feeling more comfortable with the computers.

Next time we will work with them on a reading program in the Learning Hub.

The 7th graders loved the experience. Having something to focus on, that they could do well, and that delighted their buddies made them into leaders and movie directors. They also had a good time when their Pre-K buddies came up with ideas for movies like, Exploding Poop. Middle schoolers and Pre-K students have more in common that you think.

Patty said that her students were interested in birthdays and holidays, so my students found appropriate backgrounds, music and props.

GoAnimate.com: The Snow Man and the Birthday Cake by null

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Facebook and Facetime

2009-11-17T05:18:00.000-08:00

As a Humanities teacher, I very much value the role that class discussion plays in learning, in building a supportive academic community and in making a class of individuals feel like a cohesive unit. In our discussions we make meaning together, learn from each other and build on each other's ideas as we analyze literature, history, geography, and current events.

Last week I decided to try out a Socratic Seminar with my Grade 7 students. If it worked, I planned on doing it once, per 8-day cycle. See this link for a good explanation of what a Socratic Seminar is. I was inspired by the idea that when we tackle substantial issues in class, students require a deep level of thought and dialogue before they are able to write meaningfully about the issue.

I created a handout that included two quotations that a colleague created for a homework assignment and one quotation that I found that seemed to match the topic. The first mini-essay was by Isabel Allende, the second was a quote by Albert Einstein, "Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile," and the third was a quote from a character from The Outsiders (our class novel) and it was about wanting so much and never being satisfied. At the bottom of the handout were some questions about the meaning of the texts and the connections between them.

I assigned the reading of the handout for homework. We then had a socratic seminar yesterday and the homework last night was for students to write at least 250 words about their thoughts after the discussion and post it on their blogs. The added bit of techno-fun was that I invited an ill student who I had been emailing during the day to SKYPE into the class and join us. He did and he has tonsillitis, so he couldn't really speak but he could listen.

The student emailed me later in the afternoon and said, "It was definitely worth it because seeing and hearing the class was more helpful than just an email. I would definitely want to do it again as it was fun and interesting."

This morning, as I read through the students' blog posts, I am struck by how the Socratic Seminar poses such a challenge for all of us. It makes us choose our comments wisely. It makes us have to listen to each other. It teaches us patience. It helps us get to know each other. And, I think, after we become good at it, it will help us think more deeply about what we are learning.

So, FaceBook (my metaphor for Web 2.0/Interwebs) or FaceTime (my metaphor for class discussion and student-teacher relationships)? The answer, of course is both. Thanks to FaceBook, students could download the readings at home if they lost them or if they were absent. I could post detailed instructions on the class blog so that they could prepare for the discussion adequately and I didn't have to print out reams of paper. Thanks to FaceTime, we had some really interesting, challenging and, frustrating discussions about literature, philosophy, sociology and our own lives. And then thanks to FaceBook, students published their thoughts on their blogs for me to read, for each other (they regularly comment on each other's blogs now without being asked) and for their audiences in Canada and Doha.

Even though I asked them not to post about the process of the discussion because I wanted to focus on how their thoughts had changed from the night before, this student couldn't help it, "The Socratic seminar to me was nervous. Every time I wanted to talk somebody goes on and talks. Four times when I wanted to speak, somebody else goes and talks. The third time, I was about to say a single letter, then someone else goes and speaks!! It was also kind of stressful, because of that reason and that it takes me a lot of guts to speak in front of the class!!"

And this student introduced her post with, "So in class today, we had our first socratic seminar. I personally love these intellectual discussions and sharing thoughts and knowledge, so I thought this was a great way to learn." She then proceeded to write over 600 words about her ideas, thoughts and feelings about the readings.

Here is a another, "The quote by Albert Einstein, I thought, meant that every life lived by someone was a life worth living, however today I got to hear other people's thoughts on what this quote means and now I have a better understanding." She then connected Einstein's quote to a quotation from the essay by Isabel Allende, "Give, give, give-what is the point of having experience, knowledge, or talent if I don't give it away?"

Another student's interpretation of the quotes, "Only a life that does something or affects other people is a life that is worth living because if you only do things for yourself, you aren’t contacting or really playing a part in the world."

I will leave you with the link to a blog post from one of the students, who summed up the main ideas of the quotes, the discussion and the lesson succinctly. She took the conversation to a different level, and as a result, affected other students' ideas about giving and living.

Laptops & Learning

2009-11-14T22:43:00.000-08:00

This past Friday, the teacher I share the laptop carts with, didn't want to use computers. That meant that I got to keep the laptops for my double block of Humanities. Students were working on several different areas of the curriculum that day; reading, vocabulary, social studies, and current events.

I started the class by telling students what they could work on. Here are the specific activities we were doing:

Reading: Chapter 6 of The Outsiders

Vocabulary: Making flash-cards of the 12 words (either with index cards, PowerPoint or GoAnimate). With PowerPoint, students searched for images online that the word make them think of. They built electronic flashcards they could study from later. With GoAnimate, they made mini-movies to demonstrate or act out the words' meanings.

Social Studies: Working on a character role-sheet for an upcoming immigration simulation. The role-sheet combines questions that students answer based on their imagination and questions that students answer based on research. They began their research with a website that my students worked on last year and the year before. Each year the students add to the site to help the students the following year.

Current Events: Students were writing blog posts based on news stories from the past few weeks that dealt with immigration/migration/ and/or refugee issues.

While they worked, I sat around the tables with them, uploading some of their flash-cards to our class vocabulary site, checking my email to get the GoAnimate videos they were emailing me, using Microsoft Word's Review tabs to help them edit their drafts of current events stories before they posted them to their blogs, and walking around the room helping them with the character role sheet.

We had so much fun. The kids had to finish their vocabulary first, but then they could work on whatever they wanted. Some students worked on index cards because they love drawing and writing and coloring. Some students loved their mini-movies so much that we would all jump up and run over to their computers to see what they had created. Sometimes we were all working on different things but talking casually about school life, while we worked. It was so great to be able to have the students choose what to work on, to share enjoyment in each other's creations, to help them one-on-one and to be able to get to know them a little bit better as people, while we chatted.

The first part of the double block period was interrupted with a fire drill. When the fire drill was over, I deliberately took my time getting back to the classroom so that I would be the last one to the room. I just wanted to see if the students would be running around or sitting in a large group gossiping, or if they would be working quietly.

Guess what?

They were all, and I mean ALL, working.

Of course most of us (students and teachers alike), will stay focused on something when we are engaged and when we want to learn and/or to play. On Friday, the laptops allowed me to have the kids work at their own levels, following up on their own interests, at their own pace and in their own way.

The classes last week included mini-lessons, small group activities, independent activities, reading, writing, class discussion and hands-on activities that lead up to the choices they had on Friday.

I would love to have more opportunities like that and I'm sure that my students would as well.

Why I Don't Trust Standards: A Polemical Argument

2009-11-05T14:05:00.000-08:00

This is not an argument against talking about technology standards, rather, it addresses the education world's push towards using a business model to talk about teaching, learning and school.

These are not words that teachers naturally want to use. In fact, we would rather be teaching and working and learning with students than sitting around with adults talking about teaching. Even when our discussions are productive and exciting, given the choice, many of us would rather be in the classroom with the students.

We particularly don't like talking about teaching, when we have to use these words. They are from the business world and are not about learning and loving and living.

We even more particularly don't trust the words when we think that we are going to be judged based on how many of them:
(a) we know
(b) we use to justify what we're doing in class
(c) we manage to make our students memorize
(d) our students manage to 'meet' on tests

This is not why we became teachers. It is not why we love what we do. It is also, largely, not why we are successful when we are successful.

How can we learn from a novel or a poem or a painting without collecting and interpreting data?

How can we learn from our peers and our families and our experiences without enduring understandings and performance benchmarks?

How can we learn from philosophers, anthropologists, historians and sociologists when there are no clearly identified learning outcomes and standards?

After the recent international banking debacle and recession, I'm wondering how successful the business model of education would work in terms of producing compassionate, ethical students who are open to learning, new ideas, changing what doesn't work and making the world a better place.

Smart Moves

2009-10-19T21:37:00.000-07:00

Our final project consisted of a SmartMovie that students made to learn about and study a list of geography terms they had to memorize at the beginning of a unit on Physical Geography. The unit consisted of a simulation in which students, in groups, created and developed a virtual island. In order to learn and to do well on the simulation, we knew that students would need to understand a vocabulary list of approximately 15 - 20 words related to landforms and mapping.

As an introduction to a unit which involved higher-level thinking, we had students create SmartMovies that demonstrated the words that they were researching. These were almost like photo-stories, in which students combined text, image and sound to create very short films (with audio) that represented each term. In the process of researching the terms, selecting the images and recording the audio, students were actively learning and memorizing the vocabulary. In the process of watching the clips, students learned from and about each other as they asked questions about the selection of specific examples and parts of the world.

In addition to the valuable work students did in making the SmartMovies, they also had resources that they could use for the next part of the process. When deciding where to locate their islands, and/or what effect specific landforms would have on vegetation, etc.., students could watch their smartmovies to trigger their memories and understanding. This was much more effective than having them refresh their memories by looking the words up in the dictionary.

We will definitely use the SmartMovies next year as we refine and develop our geography unit.

We could even add a component of students talking about their memories of a particular place and maybe increase the meaningful aspect of the activity even more.

Random Thoughts About Language and Jargon

2009-10-08T14:39:00.000-07:00

"If one gets rid of these (language) habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers." From Orwell's Politics and the English Language, 1946.

Kraft had a contest to change the name of Vegemite and the winning name was, 'iSnack 2.0.' Within four days, angry Australians had convinced Kraft to change the name.

My journey through jargon this week started one day when I was reading a post on an education blog and reacted to the language/jargon being used by the writer.

As I traveled through the interwebs, I found some interesting articles and decided to post the quotations that best summed up my feelings of the week. All this virtual-talk of jargon made me think about George Orwell, so I posted a few of his quotes as well.

“As the language of performance and management has advanced, so we have lost a language of education which recognises the intrinsic value of pursuing certain sorts of questions, of trying to make sense of reality, of seeking understanding, of exploring through literature and the arts what it means to be human.” ( Nicola Woolcock, Times Online)

I think this is what bothers me the most about jargon in education. We are so busy using the business-world's language, practices and false systems of measurement, that we are missing out on the most profound aspects of teaching and learning.

Education jargon also consists of what I call "noun-droids"—three or more nouns that have been wired together to form big, imposing, but ultimately inhuman phrases. It seems you can't graduate from one of them as a certified teacher unless you can add the suffix "based" to at least 500 words. Thus we have site-based councils and performance-based assessments and computer-based learning. What's next? Desk-based students? (Howard Good, Teacher Magazine)

As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house." George Orwell, Politics of the English Language, 1946

To sum up my own feelings (for this week, at least), I would say:

Jargon can be useful to describe the specifics of a philosophy, field or practice.
Some conservatives and anti-intellectuals decry jargon because they don't want to acknowledge the complexities and specificities of these philosophies, fields and practices.
Jargon can mask what's really going on by hiding the negative aspects of something.
Jargon can make it look like what is going on is professional, thoughtful and rigorous, when it isn't.
Jargon can be really annoying when people don't space it out with enough intelligent words or ideas.
Even when you complain about jargon, you end up using it in your writing.
Jargon is funny.

Now, let's have some fun!

Educational Jargon Bingo!

Educational Jargon Generator

Save Us From Technology: Frankenstein 2.0

2009-10-07T03:20:00.000-07:00

How has the explosion of web-based video changed the teaching and learning landscape?

I didn't know quite what to say about this, so instead I decided to try making a mash-up video.

I was thinking about how many movies there are where robots, computers or computer programs try to kill either the human(s) who made them or the entire human race. It reminds me of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, only worse because her monster didn't try to wipe out humanity.

So I went on YouTube and found some fun movie clips and edited them together in iMovie. It was so much fun.

The Opening title of this mash-up is a quote from a student's journal (Grade 7)
after we watched the Did You Know video on YouTube.

The two slide screenshots are also taken from that movie.

Speed Up and Slow Down

2009-10-01T14:18:00.000-07:00

"We need to speed up (to catch up with technology) and slow down (to enjoy life, our friends and our families)." - excerpt from a journal entry from one of my 7th grade students after watching a video about the pace of change (technological and in general) in the world.

After visiting Jane Hart's E-Learning Pick of the Day blog, I visited the Oxford Union's E-Learning Debate page to read the arguments for and against the motion that, "the e-learning of today is essential for the skills of tomorrow."

I expected to hear the argument that we have to prepare students for jobs that may not yet exist, that we have to adapt to students' 'new ways' of learning, and that we have to prepare students for a world in which most of their contact with others will be virtual.

Then I read this, "the skills of the future require a level of social interaction that isn't provided by today's e-learning. Today's e-learning needs to evolve rapidly if it is to keep up with a rapidly changing world."

I almost jumped out of my chair. For the first time in a few years in public discourse, it was not just we, the teachers, who needed to 'keep up'.

Social interaction is a complex, immediate, and integral part of our daily lives. Social relationships are vital to the learning, health and well-being of our students as individuals and as global citizens.

For over a year now, I have been reading articles and blog posts that express the point of view that teachers are on their way out. They say that our job is going to evolve into one where we teach students how to find information and how to tell good information from bad.

It felt so good to feel validated, not only as a teacher, but as a thinker, who believes that social interaction, relationships and sharing the same time and space are vital elements of learning inside and outside of the classroom.

The arguments in the debate addressed many of the issues my colleagues and I have raised throughout this ongoing debate in education:

access: Not enough people are 'connected'
social interaction: Not enough face-time, not enough time building relationships
leadership skills: decision-making, theorizing, debating, negotiating

The thrust of the e-learning debate was that e-learning is valuable, important and has great potential but, that at this time, it is not living up to its potential.

In the 1980s,video-cameras were supposed to herald a new era of cheaper access to story-telling, which would be the great democratizer. The theory was that if everyone had access to movie-making tools, people would tell their stories and the TV and movie studios would not tell us what and how to think anymore.

Cut to: In 2010 we have YouTube viral videos where people film each other (and themselves) falling down, post it on the internet, and get 1,000,000 hits before the day ends. I am being facetious but the point is that new technology is only as good as the people who use it. Without thought, purpose and the desire to make and produce meaningful art, education and story, we have a parent filming their disoriented son coming off a nitrous oxide high after a dentist's visit and posting it for all the world to see.

In the business and education worlds alike, it is the ideas that matter. In the old days, we had static lessons and/or company education seminars where someone stood up and lectured about boring, old narrow-minded ideas. A decade later, business leaders and teachers made learners play team-building activities to teach those same old ideas. Ten years later, they used Power Points to communicate the same ideas, and now we're using blogs, wikis, nings and emails.

The question is: What are the ideas? The communication tools might change but if the ideas don't, who cares?

Teachers, leaders and learners should have a vision, a plan and a purpose for what they do. We need to continue to make important decisions about what is valuable both in and out of school. Lessons, resources and tools need to be meaningful.

Does a liberal arts education put people at a disadvantage because it might not be oriented towards consumption, business models and 'real world skills'? Or does a good liberal arts education help us learn what it means to be human, to be a part of a community, to have empathy and to want to make a difference in the world?

These questions, like the e-learning questions, need to be asked again and again. We need to hear from many voices. The answers may change over time but we need room to debate, to theorize, and to experiment. As teachers and learners we need the space and time to question what is 'coming at us' no matter who says it or in what form it arrives.

Educators and leaders need to allow time for real questions, for challenge and for alternative hypotheses in order to make our learning and our institutions the best that they can be.

Digital Stories

2009-09-28T05:40:00.001-07:00

"As representations of complex experience reduced to language and images, stories function as symbolic tools, ways of understanding experience as unfolding in time and space (Bruner, 1986)."

Our group was not able to finish our digital story but we know exactly how we can use it with our students. Every year, as part of our second semester studies, we take a 3 day, 2 night trip to Korat. We take the entire 7th grade to Korat to learn about rural life, about rice farming, and hopefully to learn a little bit about and appreciate Thai culture.

Students take photographs of the people and places they see and then usually put together a power point presentation that addresses various geographic themes and topics. My colleagues and I realized that each student's project would be so much more meaningful if the assignment was to compile and narrate a digital story of their experiences. This year, students will use either Photo Story 3, iMovie or PowerPoint to combine sound and image to create an digital narrative of their journies.

"The sort of 'reflecting upon experience' involved in the production of personal narrative can range from a seemingly direct rendering of memory into words, to a self-aware evaluation and interpretation of experience, often constructed in interaction with another." (THEN Journal).

Students will learn about rural Thailand and document their learning in their digital stories. They will also have created a narrative, full of symbolism, interpretation and memories. These symbols, stories, memories, images and sounds will serve as, "an 'object' for reflection and critique." Thus, students will learn about how they represent what they've learned and how those representations reflect, not only what they experienced, but how they view the world.

They will have the opportunity to look at how they construct meaning and then be able to make connections between how they chose to represent their stories and how other filmmakers, tv producers, advertisers, singers, artists, textbook authors and fiction writers choose to represent theirs.

Digital storytelling allows for a kind of critical thinking about narrative, about self and about others that is filled with opportunities for learning.

Presentations

2009-09-27T05:19:00.000-07:00

I never really did a lot of Power Point presentations as a teacher or as a student. When I taught a lesson, or a mini-lesson that required a bit more teacher-talk, I would usually just talk to the kids for a little bit, lead a class discussion, and sometimes use the whiteboard to write a few main ideas down so that the students knew where I was heading.

When I am teaching a lesson with the smartboard, I still don't really 'present'. I tend to use images and text to show them what to do or what to analyze. An example would be that when I introduce the idea of symbols, I have them analyze Death and the Miser, by Hieronymus Bosch. I use the 'boards' to display the text we are analyzing and for visual back up of what we are talking about and doing.

Finding good images takes a lot longer than I'd like but it's been worth it every time. In the past few weeks I've made several presentations including one that introduces the concepts of latitude and longitude (with Prezi), one that introduces the concept of current events and why we study them and one that I am still playing with that tries to get across the mission statement of the school in student-friendly language.

These mini-lessons, introductions and presentations are much more effective than they were when I was talking without images and, I think, much more effective than when people have all kinds of text on the screen.

The image-based presentation still retains the magic of a class lecture/discussion, allows the teacher to move freely around the room and to make eye contact with the students AND the images on the screen help the students understand and connect more to the main ideas we're trying to get across.

In class this week, we worked on our Back to School Night presentation, which was a little too text-heavy. When we finish fixing it up, we can post it on our blogs so that parents can view it and download it for further reference. We want it to truly reflect what we do and what we believe. For this to happen, we need to take more time choosing relevant and eye-catching images and spreading our text out onto different slides.

As teachers learn to be more effective communicators, we are in an even better position to help our students develop their communication and presentation skills.

This power point is one I made today to show students the essence of each of the 6 traits of writing. I recently had students make conference wiki pages for student-led conferences. While helping them and watching them choose images to represent their assessment of themselves as learners, I decided to use images to represent the words in the 6-traits of writing rubric.

Six Traits Of Writing

View more presentations from Robin.

2009-09-21T22:19:00.000-07:00

I used this image with my class for a daily writing prompt. On my Google Reader, I get a daily WikiHow. One of the last week was called How to Be Happy.

The first point on this list was to be optimistic.

I decided to use the post as a DailyWrite for my students. I talked about the post itself and gave them the first item on the list.

I briefly explained what an optimist was while I put this slide on the smartboard. The students understood what I was trying to say, pretty much right away.

For their DailyWrite, I had them answer the question, "Are you an optimist?"

How Have the Courses Changed My Teaching?

2009-09-13T01:52:00.001-07:00

The courses in this program have not changed my teaching. The courses have, however, helped me:

1) Find resources to supplement my teaching.

I have found dozens of amazing websites in all areas thanks to the work of other teachers and web-educators around the world. Some of them were recommended links from our tech class and others were from educators I discovered on my own. These sites have not only become invaluable teaching and learning tools but they also inspired me to share good links with my students both on the class blog and at the beginning of at least one class per week.

2) Connect to other teachers, writers, learners and scholars who are reading, writing and learning about things I'm interested in.

It’s exciting for the students and for me to talk, write, collaborate and share ideas with other people around the world. Last year, our students communicated with bloggers from Global Voices Online. This year we are working with two classes from different countries. In addition, I am able to work with teachers and students from my old school in California and with educators I meet at conferences. Finally, when I am interested in a specific trend in education, I know that I can find good people on line who can help me directly and indirectly as I figure out the pros and cons of the new trend or philosophy.

3) Communicate better with the students.

This year I gave my students the assignment of looking carefully at the class blog and answering questions about how it is structured, how to find older posts and how to navigate through it. I also asked them to click on some links and play.

So far this has been an invaluable assignment. Here is what I have learned:

most students know how to navigate through the blog
some of the comments and previous posts aren't easy enough to find
students want my blog to reflect the class more and not just the homework assignments

This has been an exciting learning moment for me. I agree with what my students wrote and I am now working on making the blog into a more interactive and more fun site as well as one that encourages more learning and creativity.

4) Become even more vigilant about developing lessons with meaning.

When reading so many posts and articles about how fantastic technology is in the classroom, I have been a very critical reader. I demand evidence and I offer counter-evidence as I expect technology educators and advocates to defend their practice. As I adapt my own practice, I take the ideas that can deepen the meaning for my students, and put on hold the ideas that don’t.

Story Endings

2009-05-06T03:38:00.001-07:00

One of my students had a fantastic idea today. He said that he has eighteen stories that he's started and can't finish. He can never seem to come up with good ideas for what to do after he sets the scene and tone.

Today he decided to post a few beginnings on his blog and ask for help from his audience (the people who have been reading his blog regularly and any other random visitors).

I will post a link to his blog when he posts a few story beginnings.

Doing Stuff

2009-05-06T03:31:00.001-07:00

Well, first of all, I have to say that because of the power of the web, I was able to work with several teachers on our final project, without having to meet in a specific time and place. This allowed us to collaborate and to work at our own pace. We came up with an idea that would allow us to work together and work apart at the same time.

Second, I also like the fact that we are sharing our ideas and sharing our creations. It's not mass collaboration because there aren't enough of us working on it, but we are not keeping our ideas to ourselves. We came up with an idea that would allow students and teachers at our school (and anyone else who happens upon our website) to use what we have created. In our wiki, most of us incorporated images, sounds, or text that someone else created. I like this new way of working with others and this new way of sharing works.

Third, we were given the option of adapting our final project into something that would be meaningful and relevant for us. Good teachers know how to give their students these opportunities, especially when they ask for them. All of us appreciate the flexibility of our teachers in this class.

Finally, it was fun creating something that my students can use next year. As the tools change, students can add "How Tos" to our site and make it even better.

Mass Collaboration

2009-04-24T04:49:00.000-07:00

Check this out one time. It's a link to a website about US Now, "a film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet." Their slogan is:

In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power?

I really enjoyed watching the film clips and interviews on this site.

First of all, the purpose of the project is meaningful and clear. It's about collaboration for change. And it's about the transformative nature of the internet and what it allows us to do together.

I learned about collaborative projects like couchsurfing.com, where travelers can locate free couches (in people's homes) to sleep on all over the world, and Ebbsfleet United, a football team run entirely by its fans.

I watched an interview with Sophia Parker, a researcher and consultant who is actively involved in working on ways in which public services, such as health and education, can function as collaborations between service providers and the people who use the services. One of the things she pointed out, was that, "people's perception that they can participate in decision making has a direct correlation with levels of trust." People feel alienated by their governments, schools and businesses because they feel they have no voice and no impact upon them. Yet these institutions have a huge impact on their daily lives and quality of life. The interview focused on participatory budgeting, where people work with city councils to make budgetary decisions.

This reminded me of what one of my students (grade 7) wrote on his blog a few weeks ago about a new social networking site in Poland that he learned about from Global Voices. He wrote, "Citizens are invited to become “e-members” or the parliament. They are invited to take part in e-voting to show the real opinions of the real citizens on topics such as new laws, human rights. As of the beginning of March there is about 700 users. Other than the ability to discuss, the website allows people to see what new laws and/or legislation is going on and what it is all about."

More people know what's going on. More people have access to information. More people can work together across cities, provinces, countries and continents to make change.

The internet is a tool that can allow more people to participate in making decisions that affect them and their communities. It can also allow more people to reach out to each other in actions as well as words, images and sounds.

US Now addresses possibilities for shared power, shared resources and more empowerment in our everyday lives. Mass collaboration can turn mob rule and a mob mentality on its head by giving people access to information, by helping them learn skills, by sharing support and ideas and by giving ordinary citizens real power.

Mass collaboration can help us transform our world in ways we would have never thought possible just a few years ago.

Why Are Teachers So Powerful?

2009-04-23T01:31:00.000-07:00

Book Groups, Whole Class Discussions & Teacher Talk

Book Groups
I want to write about the book groups this week because I have always been somewhat disappointed with the way that book groups/literature circles/reading groups have turned out.

I don't like giving the kids roles. I want them to talk the way adults talk about books they are reading. I want to encourage them to talk spontaneously and independently about what they think and feel as they engage with literature. At the same time, I want them to analyze what they are reading; to learn and understand how symbolism, theme, character development and good writing can make reading so fun and such a rich experience. Leaving students to discuss whatever they want hasn't worked very well in the past either.

For our Connected World Unit, the Humanities 7 teachers decided on a compromise. Students would read quality literature in book groups (students' choices were only limited by the number of books available). We told them to make their own reading schedules, but we gave them end dates (this Friday). We also told them that they had to prepare for each discussion group by writing down at least two good discussion questions, choosing a passage, quote or scene from the text they felt was worth discussing, finding evidence of literary devices and discussing their effect on the reader, and writing down any questions (vocabulary, contextual, etc.) they might have.

Students are not required to hand anything in - just to keep their own notes so that they have the pages marked and their ideas and questions handy for discussion. Students are assessed through teacher observations, peer reviews, two written (individual) reading reflections and an end-of-the-book project.

The teacher's role is to circulate around the room, listening, answering questions and hopefully, helping them take the discussion further. I think our ideas worked well in terms of student engagement. Discussions seem to last most of the period and it is quite exciting to hear the kids talking about the books with each other. I find it frustrating that I can't help further the discussions because I can't just stay with one group and listen well enough to help them deepen their discussion. I think it would be better if every group had an adult mentor, at least for the first book group of the year, to help out.

Writing that last line, made me realize, once again, what a powerful role a teacher can have in a child's life.

Whole Group Discussion

Whole group discussion can be like an orchestra playing. Each student has their own perspective, ideas, opinions, thoughts and feelings about reading, seeing, listening to or engaging with different media and texts. But when we are together and talking as a group with a good teacher-facilitator, we make music! We create together. We learn things and say things and create ideas and understandings that wouldn't necessarily happen in the way that they do if we were blogging, or working in small groups, or making a video. We learn to listen to each other, to hold in our thoughts for a minute, to re-consider, to build on someone's argument, to agree to disagree, to explain what someone else meant, to question and to answer immediately. We make eye contact, we hear voices and rhythm and tone, we see heads nodding as we speak or hands raised high, shaking because others want to question or add on to what we are saying. We connect.

Teacher Talk

Teacher talk can help students understand what matters to them and what is important in a novel, a film and/or an article they are reading. We can teach them about events in the past, and the present so that they understand the facts better and see the big picture. We can model our enthusiasm for reading, for writing, for learning and for analyzing. We can make sure that students are held accountable for their behaviour, their comments, and the way that they treat other people. We can stop a class at any time to deal with an issue that we know from experience needs to be discussed in a safe and moderated place.

Digital Harassment

2009-04-08T03:00:00.000-07:00

Today's topic (in our CoETail class) was cyber-bullying. We had a great discussion at our table that gave me food for thought:

Cyber-bullying needs a new name. The name 'cyber-bully' sounds like a nerdy villain from a cartoon.

We need to help kids do more than just report such things to the authorities. We need to help them get their voices back. How we do this is tricky. We need to work with other students as well as teachers to come up with ideas that work.

The behavior that we call bullying consists of harassment, among other things. In order to stop this kind of thing, we need to talk with kids regularly about what the behaviour is, what the effects are and what the consequences will be for those who engage in it.

We also need to speak as teachers (and parents) regularly to stay informed and share information and to brainstorm ideas together.

Each case of digital harassment needs to be carefully considered because each case is different. What a school does to punish an offender is only one piece of the puzzle. We also need to differentiate the ways in which we help the person who was harassed.

I hope that ultimately, students can help each other get their voices back. As teachers and parents, we need to make it easier for them to do that.

Copyright "Issues"

2009-04-02T00:24:00.000-07:00

I have been trying to think about what to write for this week's blog post. It's so hard to say anything definitive and to be honest, I really don't have any strong opinions about copyright.

If any good lawyer can argue on any side, if mega-corporations are the ones suing to protect 'their' property by claiming they are protecting individual artists, if some of the best art is made by mixing and re-mixing and if the law changes faster than you can formulate an opinion, why should I spend a lot of time thinking about it, anyway? Whew. That was ONE long sentence.

I read this article about You Tube and Warner music using a Content ID tool to detect copyright violation and removing content from You Tube.

And this one from Digg.com about AT & T's new (last night) terms of service on its subsidized netbooks that forbids,"downloading movies using P2P file sharing services, customer initiated redirection of television or other video or audio signals via any technology from a fixed location to a mobile device, web broadcasting, and... any applications that tether the device... to Personal Computers or other equipment."

I found 37,000 links to articles and/or websites that use some variation of the phrase Copyright/Copywrong, which I thought my colleague Matt McGovern made up until I did a Google Search.

I found this remix-video response to a proposed drastic change in New Zealand's copyright laws.

I found this definition from the Creative Freedom Foundation of the aim of copyright, which is "to balance private property rights with specific public rights in a way that encourages innovation in the arts, business, culture, and public commentary."

I also did a Googlism on 'copyright' and made a word cloud from it with Wordle.

I still don't really have anything to say, ironically, because other people have already said it.

Connected World Book Clubs, Story Hunts & Tech Workshops

2009-04-01T23:13:00.000-07:00

Book Clubs
This week students met in their book clubs for the first time. We offered students a choice of twenty books set in different parts of the world including India, Korea, China, New York, England, Kenya, the Dominican Republic, New Mexico, New Zealand, Outer Space, and a few fantasy-like settings. During their first session students met and planned out their reading schedules for the next month. It was interesting to watch how some groups used pen and paper and others made elaborate reading schedules using tables and text in Word or Google Docs.

Tomorrow students will meet for their second session and come to class prepared with passages and questions for discussion. Each teacher has five different book clubs going on at the same time in their classrooms so I am interested to see what kinds of conversations the kids will have.

We didn't want to assign roles because we wanted the kids to participate the way that adults do in their book groups. We basically made everyone a discussion director. We will see how it goes tomorrow.

Story Hunts

Yesterday students worked independently to find stories and authors from various countries within their regions. We didn't give them any websites to begin with. We had the students do the research themselves. They were required to find at least two authors from at least five countries in their region. As a result, some interesting questions came up:

How do we know if an author is really famous or just someone who posted their own stories?
Where do we find links to authors from different countries?
Why do some countries have so many published authors?
Should we use traditional authors from a long time ago or current best-selling authors? Which are more representative of the country?
What if an author is from one country but lives and publishes in another one?
What if an author lived in one country but wrote novels about another country?

Students generated a few answers as well:

If the author has won a prize, s/he probably writes well.
If the author is highly paid, they are probably famous.
If an author is referenced on a lot of web pages, they are probably famous too.
If the author wrote something else, such as a national anthem, they are probably well known.
In order to be representative, they should find traditional (older) and current authors.
If an author lives in their new country, they can be counted as a writer from that country as long as the novel is famous and the person has lived there for a long time.
Some countries have more oral history (folktales) and poetry than novels so we can count those too.
Wikipedia is a great place to start to find authors and literature from different countries.

Next week, students will choose one short story and/or poem to read and blog about.

Tech Workshops

Today students met in their regional groups and then chose from four workshops:

Wiki Design (these students would be responsible for posting all regional information to our online textbook).
Google Earth (these students would be responsible for creating tour files of the regions).
Flickr (these students would be responsible for selecting and organizing representative photos from each region).
Music Research (these students would research traditional and contemporary music from various countries).

Each teacher conducted 15 minute mini-lesson workshops and then worked with the students one-on-one as they played with the technology and worked on their skills. It was great fun. We will have one follow up session next week and then students will meet and teach each other their new skills.

Social Networking and Privacy

2009-03-29T15:04:00.000-07:00

We, my husband, James Denby and I, have always told our students that if they wanted to keep something private, they should write it in a diary, lock it with a key and hide it under their beds.

And even then someone might read it. I'll never forget the time I was house-sitting for some friends and their contractor accosted me one day after school with the words, "Hey! I just read your journal and it's so good!"

I couldn't believe he read it and I couldn't believe he told me. I didn't care how good he thought it was. All my private thoughts and feelings about my life were in there. There was really supposed to be no audience but me.
I was so humiliated that I stopped keeping a journal after that.

So even writing in and hiding a journal is not 100% private. But I do know this: if you have any hopes of keeping your ideas, thoughts and feelings private, you do NOT post them online.

We told our students this back in the day when Live Journal was the most popular social networking site for teenagers.

It's interesting to note the name changes and the semantic meanings of the sites as they became more popular:

Live Journal (sort of a diary, right?),
My Space (it's still mine - even though it's an online space and not a journal)
Facebook (I'm writing on walls, for god's sake - there is not even a hint of privacy here).

Around the time that MTV started changing from a music station to a docu-reality-music station, these sites coincidentally became more popular. We, James Denby and I, started to notice similarities between what our students were writing and taking photos of and posting online and the plots, characters and themes of these new shows.

This was at the beginning of the cyber-bullying-photos of sex-drugs-and-alcohol-talk down-and-dirty-pose-like-you're-really-happy-insult-your-teacher-flirt-with-45 year old men phases of social networking sites for teens.

When someone filming an MTV documentary about teens visited our school to interview willing students, we were all shocked at how much the students revealed to the interviewer and to the cameras. They confessed more than they did to their friends, families and teachers. And this phenomenon is just getting more and more popular. People go on reality shows and confess EVERYTHING!

The public audience became, for some time, the newest 'confession' booth. On MTV's Real World, the show on which many reality shows based themselves in some form or other, the 'confession booth' was a room with a camera in it. Stars on the show would go in there to cry, to complain and/or to share secrets. Yes, the room had a locked door and four walls and it gave the feeling of privacy - but they were confessing to a camera and the footage was going to be shown to millions of people.

What I am trying to say, is that I don't think that today's group of Facebook posters has any desire of privacy online. If they did, they wouldn't post.

In fact, many of them are actually one step ahead of the 'nothing-is-private' people because they spend hours crafting their public image. They are (mostly) quite skilled at this (except for the occasional bong smoking photo of a student who claims never to have done drugs).

They are so good, in fact, that when the need arises for them to change their public image from party-going, popular, sex fiends to technology-savvy, popular, hard-workers, they will have no difficulty.

They are adept at creating, developing, and editing their public image and at incorporating feedback into their creations.

That's not to say that there won't still be people who are fired before they even accept a job (see Cisco & Twitter) and people who are divorced for seeing prostitutes in Second Life, but in general, privacy is the last thing that people want when they 'post'.

Do we want our images used without our permission? Not yet, I guess but I think we will soon...

Connected World: Second Blog Posts

2009-03-19T20:58:00.000-07:00

This past week was a full one for us. Students wrote their second blog posts, listened to an inspiring speech by Ryan Hrejlac, and attended a Global Issues Networking fair.

We began the week with a visitor from the Global Ozone Project.

Next week students begin participating in International Book Clubs. The four Humanities teachers picked twenty books from authors around the world and students will read and discuss books of their choices with students from other classes. Everything seems to be coming together.

Highlights from the blogs this week include:

"I gathered up all this information and made it into a mind map." This student chose to do this before writing her blog post about a woman in Saudi Arabia who was sentenced to 40 lashes and 4 months in prison for 'mingling with men.' Using a mind map helped her organize her thoughts before she wrote and helped her understand and interpret what she was reading.

"He didn’t put many pictures in his blogs but tends to quote people instead. Which thankfully gives me many opinions on one cause! I can’t tell what is his opinion on the matters though. Also he’s been blogging since 2003 on Thirld World View, which is his own blog, like mine."

"In Diana Beach, Kenya, a Humpback Whale was caught in a fishing net donated to the local fisherman by a development NGO. This was actually written as a protest in the Whale Sharks blog, because the Whale Shark Trust, who runs the blog, believes the nets are inappropriate and illegal. If the net was illegal, why didn’t the NGO know? I think they should’ve known that those kinds of nets were illegal, because they were the ones who bought it and gave it to the fishermen. I feel sorry the whale. I hope it survived."

"I actually think it (the right to die) is a very interesting concept. A lot of people in the world are suffering in hospitals, are teriminally ill, and have a low chance of surviving. The only thing keeping these people alive is medicine that is powered through the wall. If the plug that is attached to the medecine is taken out, the person dies, and the people who decide if you live or die are the persons family and the doctors."

"I find it fascinating that you have blogging lessons in the school, meanwhile us in Brazil have to fight against a movement to block blogs in Brazil. It is actually a good contrasting point to write about!" (a student copied and pasted snippets of his online dialogue with the Brazilian blogger he is following. The email subject heading was 'made a new friend.') The student is so excited about being able to engage in a 'conversation' with someone about what they are reporting on.

It's worth reading this whole post about twitter, social networking sites and e-members of parliament in Poland.

And this one about International Women's Day.

I promise this is the last one; it's about how the student followed a link and ended up learning more as a result.

Today I am going to talk with my students about several issues that have come up as a result of their blogging:

What if adults who don't know them read their blogs and get angry at them for their opinions and post nasty comments?
Digital footprints. I found this good video about digital dossiers.
What are different ways in which we as readers can write about big ideas that we don't know enough about to express judgment?
Where and how can we get more information before we write an analysis of a trend or event?

After the break (3 days this week), we are going to open up the research process even more and have the kids break down the types of information you can find about a region and what types of information you can learn from them. For example, we will use the website Taking IT Global to look at artwork by youth all over the world and to read their introductions their particular pieces of art.

We have all learned (again) how important it is that students are reading and writing about what interests them. It's so much more meaningful that way.

This project is working out to be so much better than I thought it would be from the beginning.

Following Footprints

2009-03-19T14:50:00.000-07:00

Digital footprints: Good or Bad?

Good: Businesses can keep your preferences so that when you go back to the stores, websites, etc., they already know what you want.
Bad: People and business will use your information to sell things to you and sell your information to others who will exploit you.

Good: People will want to talk with you about your ideas. People who share your interests and/or who value your writing, will find you and give you positive feedback and engage in dialogue with you and enrich your life and your work.
Bad: Perverts will know where you live and what you do and what you look like and how to find you and then maybe kidnap, assault or even kill you.

Good: People you lost touch with many years ago can find you and you can reunite. This wave of the future helps you keep contact with your past and connects your life in ways you couldn't have imagined before.
Bad: You lost contact with those people for a reason. Now they are digitally stalking you and you don't know how to get rid of them without hurting their feelings. You already did this once and now you have to do it again.

Good: You can have a global audience for your thoughts, opinions and feelings about important issues and societal trends.
Bad: What you write today could come back to haunt you tomorrow. You might write something badly, or make a stupid point or sound pretentious and your words will live on long after you have changed your mind or become a better writer.

Good: You can follow your own footprints! You can see where you have influenced others or contributed to the global dialogue on important issues and trends.
Bad: You can now spend hours reading about YOURSELF online.

Good: You can build an audience and a movement. You can start something big and measure whether or not it's working with cool widgets that tell you who is following you and talking about you.
Bad: MIDDLE SCHOOL MUCH? People are following you and talking about you. You can get obsessed with counting your Clustrmap dots, comparing your blog followers, competing for 'hits.' You spent years trying to forget the effects of a focus on popularity and thought you left it behind - now you are wrapped up in it again.

And the verdict is.............

First Connected World Blogs

2009-03-16T17:16:00.002-07:00

The kids posted their first Connected World blogs yesterday. I loved reading them so much. We had so many great class discussions last week because we are learning together about how to use different websites and how to find articles and blogs that interest the kids.

We had to adapt the first project a little bit because at first we wanted them to research their issue and their region but that was a mistake. As a way into learning more about a place and keeping the interest and engagement high, we had much more success when we told them to just follow a blogger instead. And then we decided (students and teachers together) that they could also change bloggers to read more current stories about the region they are studying. This made the students a lot happier and more comfortable.

We asked them to write about what they learned and to reflect on the process itself. Here are some general themes:

Some students didn't find their iGoogle's and Google Readers useful while others loved them.
Many students were impressed with the quality of the writing by other students in the class. They are also so happy when other people read their blogs and post comments.
Several students noted that bloggers linked to other websites which made it easier to see where they got their information.
Several students read critically and really deconstructed the texts in an interesting way.
Other students struggled to understand some of the terms in the blogs and and as a result, their blogs were a little superficial in terms of content. The interesting thing about this is that when students commented on each others' blogs (last night's homework assignment), they actually pointed this out and asked more probing questions.
I am so excited about this project!

One thing about teaching is that kids will be honest sometimes when adults won't. It's always a reality check when they write something or say something and you realize how silly you look.

Here is my reality check from a students' blog. I'm not saying that she's right, it's just that if she feels this way it tells me how I can do things differently next time around.

If you ask me, all the kids like picking out themes and gadgets and that’s all fun, but when it’s time to actually do the blogging, nobody looks as happy as when they were picking out fun themes. I don’t think that ISB should have so many, many gadgets for all of us children, after all we’re only 12 or 13. But all the teachers are really excited about it so…let’s just see how it goes.

I also know that students get more and more into the project every day. And some more than others, of course. It's so important for students to be honest because then we can adapt and change and together find something that is meaningful to them and/or help them become so comfortable with the tool that they see all that they can do with it. All tools are not for everyone though, and that is why we talk about what we're doing and how we're doing it every single day.

Here are some samples from a range of students. If you want to read more, you can just go to my class blog and choose some blogs from the list on the bottom right of the screen. That is where I've posted links to all of my students' blogs.

James
Nata
David
Yasmeen

2009-03-12T15:20:00.000-07:00

Check this out one time! Sixth sense technology. Scroll forward to the third minute if you don't have time to watch the whole thing.

Connected World: Regional Research

2009-03-12T05:20:00.000-07:00

This past week, students met in groups by world region. Last week they met in world issue groups. These groups were much smaller (4 - 6 students).

We gave them a list of 15 questions we wanted them to answer about their region; very basic information so that when they begin to pose their own questions and find their own answers, they will have a foundation to build on.

We gave them lists of websites they could use and took them to the library to use books as well.

As soon as students sat down in groups, two of the five groups I had with me that morning decided to use Google Docs right away. The students (several of whom had learned to use it in David Healy's class only days before), created the documents and shared it with the others. They copied and pasted the 15 questions into the document and began to work. One student even used the high-lighting tool and told each student what their colour was so that they would remember which three questions they had agreed to research.

The last two questions involved using the website SHOW WORLD. This is a wonderful website. When you select specific demographic, geographic or economic/agricultural subjects, the country and region sizes change to represent the data found. It's a great way for students to visualize and compare regions and countries.

The last question asked students to select two subjects/variables that they felt were important ones, to write about how their world region compared to others using that subject/variable and to explain the reason they chose the subjects they did.

The last task was for students to suggest an area that they would be interested in seeing represented on the map. On the SHOW WORLD map site, you can send them some data in an Excel File along with a Word document explaining why you think they should include the data on the site.

Students have not completed this task yet, but one student from another group was excited about her group's idea to include the subject/topic of Fresh Water. She was so excited by the idea that she came running into the classroom at break to tell me about it.

All the teachers reported similar conversations, excitement and interest. Many students are still struggling with the technology and the research and that is okay. They are still learning how to research and they are excited to learn how to use the new tools. All of them loved the mapping website.

On Monday, my students' first blog posts will be up. One of the students emailed me last night to tell me that he had posted a comment on the Global Voices website and he was so excited about actually communicating with the blogger (from Brazil, blogging about a chemical leak in a river ) and her audience.

Here is his comment:

In my opinion I believe the reason this crisis happen was because of the standard and the procedure that was regulated by the company. They should have stricter rules and standard while processing with the chemical. As a result it would benefit everyone including the company themselves, as there would no loss of money and resources but a gain. This wouldn’t have happen if these safety regulation were pass out.

Think about the mistake that was made. With just one small mistake, it could lead into such a big issues that affects everyone. I feel sympathy for the people who earned a living by using the resources from that river. Since the river is a sources of food. But as the animals and it’s habitat are being wiped out by the toxic waist, it would be impossible to get food as well as water supplies. I thought to myself, what will they do now? Will it affect their lives since the rivers is like a part of their daily life. I also thought about the people drinking that water, what if there are still traces of the chemical?

So if the little mistakes were never made all of this mess wouldn’t be occurring like a chain reaction. In other word it is better to not start it at all.

I Can Tell From Your Facebook That You're Happy

2009-03-09T14:52:00.000-07:00

Who is going to write the first book for parents about how to read between the lines on their child's Facebook pages?

Are they really happy?

Are they really as wild as the photos look?

What hidden stories do Facebook photos and walls tell?

NOT REALLY AN UPDATE BUT...follow this link to a Time Magazine article about how Facebook wants to know what we're really thinking too...

This photo is from the blog
of someone who took
a spot the fake smile quiz.

What Do You Do About Internet Slowdowns?

2009-03-09T03:45:00.000-07:00

The internet stopped working every day last week. It stopped in the middle of the iGoogle and Google Reader workshops and it stopped when students were working in groups to research their issues.

I am curious about what other teachers do when the internet stops. You never know how long it will stop and/or when it will start up again.

Do you have students read a book while they wait? Write something?

It's difficult for us because sometimes we see the kids for one hour a day and sometimes two. We can't always get the computers, so when we get them, we pretty much need them.

What strategies can we have in place to make sure that the kids don't spend valuable class time waiting?

Follow That Blog

2009-03-09T03:21:00.000-07:00

Follow that Blog!
Last week we used Global Voices to show students how to look for blogs in the region and issue they were investigating. After much difficulty finding specific blogs that matched what students were looking for, we decided to follow specific bloggers instead. This week, students will find at least one blogger from their region who they are interested in following. They will write their first blog for the unit after reading one or two posts from the blogger they selected. They were excited by the idea that they could communicate with the blogger by email as well. This seemed to make Part 1 of the project more 'connected' for them. I am excited to read their blogs, which should be ready next Monday.

Working Together and Finding Common Ground
Last week we (7th grade Humanities teachers) grouped our students by issue for one class period. We gave them the task of coming up with a working definition of their issue - which will be posted on the Connected World HyperText Wiki. Even though Part 2 of the unit won't be starting up for another few weeks, we thought it would be good for the students to get a sense of what the issues generally cover. We also wanted them to identify the many sub-topics within each issue so that they could find a particular topic of interest AND so that they could understand the complexity involved in each world issue.

Students worked in groups of 12 or more and organized themselves well. They held whole group discussions, divided up tasks for a period of time and then came together again to work out the common, working definition and sub-topics.

Here is an example:

The Rich/Poor Gap: The population gap of differences, dependencies, and conflicts between the statuses of rich people (people who have more or enough resources, power, money, health, and education) and poor people (people who have less or no access to resources, power, money, health, and education).

Sub-Topics:

Differences in power
Access to resources
Access to education
Access to healthcare
Conflicts between Rich and Poor
Similarities between Rich and Poor
Food Poverty and Shortages
Labor and Jobs

Tomorrow students will meet with other students researching the same region. These groups will be smaller (4 - 7). We want students to find basic information about their region before they begin studying it in-depth.

Connected World Project Begins

2009-03-04T13:47:00.000-08:00

We started the project this week. Here are a few observations:

1) The students are pretty excited about the projects. They are excited about the region and issue they are researching and about working with students from other classes.

2) We realized that we have to help them narrow down their issues AND help them use the Global Voices website. There is so much information out there!

3) Only a few students in each class had iGoogle or Google Reader or had even heard of it before.

4) After loading up the required blogs and RSS feeds for class, we allowed them to add some readings that interested them. We showed them how to search for magazines, blogs and articles and gave them some time to look up and subscribe to any feeds they liked. They were excited to look for feeds about video games, sports, music, popular culture ,etc..

By the end of class, no one had any other feeds. And I am talking about students who are highly motivated both by wanting academic success AND by having a deep interest in learning.

Most of the students were much more interested in adding virus- filled swimming fish and games to their iGoogles than looking for articles of personal interest. They changed their themes several times and added gadgets that moved or that contained games. Everyone wanted the pet cat that when you touch it, it reacts.

So far, our 21st century students seem to be really good at clicking. I am interested to see what they do with their iGoogles as the project continues.

The Cloud

2009-02-28T00:17:00.000-08:00

Today we worked as a group and re-read the section of the Horizon Report about 'The Cloud.'

We made this video.

It was fun.

It will be interesting to see how good teachers apply/integrate this technology in the classrooms.

Just found this good article from Slate about The Cloud. Check it out one time!

Final Post

2009-02-27T23:59:00.000-08:00

Today we spent several hours working together on our Connected World unit of study. We were grateful for the opportunity to spent the time talking, sorting things out and planning the beginning of the unit.

We worked on our timelines, created a blogging introduction and rubric for the students, designed a student guideline for the unit of study and an organized list of websites for students to use for their research.

One of the wonderful things about this was that we got to practice what we want the kids to do next week. We talked a little bit, sorted out some issues and then divided up tasks. We created several shared Google Docs so that we could edit each others' work. We saw what happened when two people were writing at the same time, and what happened when our changes didn't save and what happened when we disagreed.

By the end of the session, we left with our tasks complete and more importantly, we were still excited about teaching the unit. This is not only because we work well together but also because we started out with what we wanted the kids to learn, to understand, to explore and to be able to do. Then, if/when the web-based technology doesn't work, we can still talk about, write about and learn about these issues in a meaningful way. When the technology comes back online, so will we.

Random Questions Influenced by the Advent and Increasing Influence of New Learning Technologies

2009-02-22T02:18:00.001-08:00

1. Should we get rid of capital letters? I still think periods, exclamation points and question marks are important but do we really need capital letters at the beginning of sentences? It's kind of annoying to use them when you're trying to type really quickly.

2. During what types of activities (learning-based) can people successfully multi-task and during what types of activities would people learn more if they just tuned in and focused? I.E. Would you allow instant-messaging, laptops, iPods and cellphones in your yoga/meditation class?

3. If you read your own blog, do you count as a visitor on ClustrMaps? Do your visits become part of the cumulative total of visitors to your blog?

4. How much time will we (and our students) be spending online now? With the massive increase in information and the ability to access it, how much time will we need/want to spend gathering and processing information?

5. And what happens if after all of that gathering and processing, we take a little time to plan powerful and thoughtful lessons but by the time we teach them - we have discovered newer, more up-to-date information? Won't we end up just getting stuck to the screen - unable to move - afraid of missing something?

6. Why does my attention span seem to be shorter than my students' right now? I like this because a selfish reason to come up with meaningful assignments is that it's become so much more difficult to evaluate the other kind now. I don't like it because I get bored WAY too easily and WAY too often when I am with a group of people.

7. Should I let students listen to iPods while they are working independently at school? Researching? Writing? I tend to think that every once in a while, it's good. It blocks out the sound of other students talking and helps them concentrate. I sometimes work better to music. But sometimes I think it's not a good idea because they might get distracted by the songs. They might end up paying more attention to changing the songs than to what they are doing. Also, some students might work better and others might not. How do I let some do it and not others? Finally, am I spoiling them by letting them listen to music?

Implications for Teaching and Learning

2009-02-19T02:19:00.000-08:00

I found myself reading this article and both agreeing and disagreeing with what its author argues.
I deliberately chose not to include his name in my blog because I don't want to contribute to the 'popular is the new smart' phenomenon in educational technology-land.

I disagree that students should start using cell phones, iPods, email, etc. in class just because they use them outside of class. Students smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, smoke drugs, make out, watch bad movies, listen to loud music and treat each other like crap outside of school too. It's good that we ask them to treat each other with respect, stay sober, listen to each other and learn to appreciate good books, music, film, art, essays and research.

I agree that we need to think about "new curricula, new organization, new architecture, new teaching, new student assessments, new parental connections, new administration procedures, and many other elements."

Unlike other trends in education, the changes in technology have significantly impacted the way our students read, think and write. Are these changes good? Bad? Permanent?

One of the questions or themes that is missing from this writing is, 'What kind of adults do we want our students/children to become?' Should they just be able to do things really quickly? Do we merely connect them with good information? What are our values as a society? How can we incorporate those values ie. respect for others, the earth, human rights, etc. into an educational system with multiple pressures, including the new one to 'adopt and adapt'?

I think the article is missing a section. I was looking forward to reading the author's ideas. He wrote what he didn't think was new but he didn't propose anything either.

When the ideas come, whether it is from our students, our peers, people writing about technology in education, or business-people who have a stake in schools purchasing their software, equipment and educational training, we need to remember to think about the kind of people we want our children to grow up to become.

I think that's why so many of us in the class are holding onto the value of real-life experiences, slowing things down, communicating in person and taking the time to think. We want our students to be able to do this so that they can grow up to listen to, respect and care about other people and to contribute to the well being of their communities and the world.

Is Popular the New Smart?

2009-02-18T05:20:00.000-08:00

The quotation above, from Susi Pucci's (Top Contributor) blog, is so perfect that I had to make the title of my post this week.

From reading many other teacher's blogs this past week, I have noticed a common theme. We are reacting to the speed with which we feel some pressure to jump on board the technology train (even those of us who are already passengers feel pressure to never let our feet touch the ground). Is information/knowledge really moving so quickly that if we don't stop teaching in the general way we have been teaching, we are doing our students such a disservice?

Teachers are constantly being attacked in the press for not doing enough to help kids read, do math, learn how to spell, etc.. now we are being held accountable because they are bored when we won't let them use their cell phones in class? I think that pressure is the key word here.

Most of the teachers we are friends with who took the class, took it because they are already very interested in looking at the way they teach and making changes. It is interesting, therefore, that we feel somewhat of the same pressure we do when every new trend in education comes along. We know a lot more is going to be expected of us, much of it will not necessarily benefit the kids, and in a little while, it will pass and something new will take its place.

A key issue for many of us is that we don't want to get wrapped up in a world (or our students to get wrapped up in a world) where they are thinking about themselves all the time. Do we really want to spend a lot of time checking our friend count on Facebook, the size of the red dots on our cluster maps, the number of comments, followers or RSS feeds attached to our blogs and generally reading about how others view what we say, look like and do?

What kind of a culture of people will we have?

Popular was always important, in fact, for most kids, more important than being smart. But if popular becomes smart, that's a whole different kettle of fish. We can't confuse the two or our students won't be able to tell the difference.

Most of the articles we have read for this class argue that we should teach our students critical thinking (are we sure about this?) and provide a rigorous academic program for them while we use technology. This is very important to keep in mind as we think about blogging, nings, and other social networking sites and public forms of writing with our students.

NOTE: One thing I LOVE about blogging/wikis/etc. is that you can link to things without telling anyone what they are. If you click on my link 'critical thinking' you will get an article from Science News called, "Is Technology Producing a Decline in Critical Thinking and Analysis?" This is an article which looks at the wonderful and not-so-wonderful aspects of multi-tasking, technology and learning. If you click on '(are we sure about this?)' you will get an article by Alfie Kohn about the business world co-opting the concept of 'critical thinking' and the education world buying into that co-optation.

It's so fun to connect my ideas to other people's ideas and to make connections from their ideas. The literal manifestation of those connections are 'links'. Our ideas are linked and connected in ways they couldn't have been before.

Connected World - Planning & Preparation

2009-02-17T03:55:00.001-08:00

As teachers, we know that we have a lot of work to do in terms of how to make our Connected World project work effectively. For us, this means that all the kids are working to their full potential and continuing to develop the skills of analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating information and ideas. We also want our students to express their thoughts and opinions in writing (as well as through the use of various forms of media and through speaking) and to be able to back those ideas and opinons up with evidence. We also want students to be fully engaged in and excited by the work that they are doing.

Our first step was to divide up the key tasks amongst the teachers. We created a number of shared Google docs so that we could work together in person and when we didn't have the time to meet. Google docs was a good place for us to start because we are also trying to decide whether or not we want to use it with our students. At one point, when we were all in the same room at a meeting, we spent about five minutes just chatting online with each other and laughing at ourselves before we realized that all of our inane comments were on the smartboard. If we got distracted with the chatting, then we knew our students might do so also. It's not a reason NOT to use Google Docs but gave us something to think about in terms of how to better structure the students' use of the tool.

We decided to use 18 regions for our unit of study and we assigned 1 - 2 students per class (we have 8 classes) to each region. We did this together so that students of differing intelligences would work together (including technological intelligence). Within each region we assigned each student a topic.

We decided to have Chad Bates, our technology guru, come and do a workshop for the students on how to use googlereader, so that the kids could set up the articles that they want to read every week for their blogs. We also want the students to use the reader program to find other articles they are interested in so that they can make the reader experience something that is useful to them outside of school as well.

We set our students up with blogs (some did this earlier in the year and some already had them) in preparation for the new unit.

We also set up the wiki and created pages and sub-topics for each region so that students know where to go to post their findings.

We are in the process of pre-selecting websites for students to visit and will add to this list as our students discover more resources for each other and for us to use.

At this point we are asking ourselves a lot of questions not only about what technological tools to use but also about the process itself. We want to be very honest about what works and what doesn't and about what we are asking the kids to do and why. We are hoping to expand this project so that it becomes a year long endeavour - with some adaptations, of course. We recognize that we need to be honest about its strenghts and potential pitfalls.

We are all quite excited about starting next week but I'm sure we are all a little nervous too.

Project Sketch Itself: Connected World

2009-02-17T03:48:00.000-08:00

At the end of each part of the project, I have identified the NETS Standards that component meets. At this point it feels like every step of the project will demonstrate most of the standards, but minimally, they will include Standard #6. Technology Operations and Concepts.

1) Blog/journalling - Each of the 160+ students in 7th grade will keep a blog, using ideas inspired by Clarence Fisher. We will assign our students one of 19 regions of the world and one of 8 global social issues or problems. We will do this together because we want to make sure that among our 8 classes, we have the students divided into good working groups for the next phases of the project. Each student will work on a different issue for each region. Their blog work will consist of a series of personal reflections/journaling about what they are learning through globalvoicesonline.org, other good websites for MS students to learn about current events and by reading blogs from other countries. This addresses Standard # 3: Research and Information Fluency

2) The second phase of the project is also inspired by Clarence Fisher. Our 160 students will create a link/resource filled 7th Grade online 'hyperText' book about the regions of the world. This will be a resource for next year's students in their regional studies. Students will work online and collaboratively with their regional-counterparts in the various classes. They will work on their section of the wiki - each writing enough about their issues to put together a solid chapter on the region backed up with evidence, examples and sources. One of their required sources will be communicating directly with someone from the region they are studying. This addresses Standard #5 Digital Citizenship. This also addresses Standard #4 Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making.

3) The third phase of the project is based on one of the Flat Classroom projects. We would now group the students by issue, rather than by region. There could be as many as 8 students per issue, so we may divide them into smaller groups for this phase. Each group is responsible for making a 2 - 3 minute (we haven't decided on the length yet) video about their issue/problem. The videos will serve the function of educating their peers about the problem they have identified. Because they will now be working with students studying different regions, they will work together to understand the similarities and differences of how their issues play out in different regions. This will get back to the idea of making connections. They will present their videos to the 7th grade. Standard #1: Creativity and Innovation & Standard #2: Communication and Collaboration & Standard #4 Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making.

4) The final phase of the project will have students working together once again to create a project or action plan that has the kids themselves becoming part of the solution. They will create project ideas/plans to help or address the problem (other than through education) and they will present those ideas at a project symposium to a panel of teachers (maybe experts as well), their fellow students and globally (we're not sure what format to use). This is when students will have made connections between the Essential Questions and the Enduring Understandings. They will have evaluated and synthesized research and information about complex global issues. They will have educated others and finally, they will have come up with a plan that aims to help solve the problem.

This addresses Standard #1: Creativity and Innovation & Standard #2: Communication and Collaboration & Standard #4 Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making.

Project Sketch Reflections

2009-02-13T16:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we had the most productive Humanities 7 team meeting this year. Aside from the fact that we were more efficient than usual with our regular agenda items, what made us work so well was that we were focused on the common goal of designing some project based learning activities for our 160 students. We were also working on curriculum planning, so we started by looking at our essential questions and trying to adapt the curriculum to fit them more perfectly.

Four of the five teachers who met that day are all in the technology class at ISB and we all feel varying degrees of comfort with online teaching and learning. We set aside a few hours to discuss the curriculum and then our project and whether or not we could work them out together. The two essential questions we were focusing on were, "How do places change over time?" and "What do we need to live a comfortable and healthy life?"

The seventh grade Humanities curriculum focuses on various regions of the world. We recently completed an exciting unit on Southeast Asia where the students read Rice Without Rain (a novel about Thailand), participated in a Feeding a Hungry World simulation and just returned from a 3-day, 2-night trip to Korat, where students participated in hands-on activities to learn about rural life. They are currently working on photo essays to sum up what they saw and felt about the trip and preparing to write in-class reflective essays about one aspect of what they learned in the unit.

It was time for us to talk about what region to focus on next and how to do it the best way possible to get the kids to think about the essential questions and enduring understandings.

We wanted students to use regional studies to understand the key issues of least one world problem (hunger, poverty, environment, conflict & peace, etc.) and to be able to make global, regional, local and individual connections through their research and exploration. We also wanted our students to be able to see their role as citizens of the world and their communities and to see how what they do affects others. Finally, we wanted students to contribute to solving a problem, even in some small way.

Together, we designed a multi-faceted project or projects which could cover the curriculum and address our essential questions and enduring understandings. We used a whiteboard rather than a piece of paper to jot down ideas and connections between them. We made a list of tasks for the students and tasks for the teachers. We spent those few hours planning the rest of the year for social studies for our students but all of us making the agreement that as we went through the process, we would be able to meet, reflect and change what was not working.

The next blog posting will be about the Connected World project(s) that we developed.

Reflections onLine Two

2009-02-06T17:14:00.001-08:00

A Few Things in No Particular Order

(1) I am excited to read people's comments this week about the Connectivism article. I hope we have time to have a focused class discussion about it this week. I have already read Margherite's, Vu's, Harvey's and Martin's and have some great food for thought. I am looking forward to reading more.

(2) The New and 'Improved' Bloom's Taxonomy: When I first saw this a while ago, I felt like changing the categories from nouns to verbs took away the power and depth of each category. It seems to alter the meaning and significance to the point that it's not even hierarchical anymore. More abstract gerunds like 'knowledge' and 'evaluation' are replaced by simple actions like, 'listing' and 'monitoring.' In what way is this improved?

It seems that the taxonomy made a transition in accessibility so that the lower order thinking concepts turned into easily identifiable behaviors that aren't necessarily related to real thinking at all. Does one even lead to the other anymore? I don't think so.

(3) Creating? You can create without any of those other verbs. Why is it at the top? I disagree. It seems like the pyramid should be a circle or something.

(4) As for the digital version - turning 'Understanding' into 'Twittering' seems to be a stretch in the wrong direction. It could lead to awkward positions and injuries.

(5) Messing Around. This article seems to follow the progression and evolution of Bloom's Taxonomy. I'm not convinced of the academic value or significance of what the kids are doing and I'm not sure that I would apply those fancy academic terms to 'Messing Around' and 'Hanging Out'. When you look at the quality of what most students do online, I'm not sure that we can should use phrases like, "messing around can function as a transitional genre that leads to more sustained engagements with media and technology." Too much academic lingo to describe a generation of people who are mostly still passive consumers of popular culture.

How are My Thoughts Changing?

2009-02-06T17:13:00.001-08:00

I LOVED THIS ARTICLE!!! Thank you so much for giving us something challenging to read, academic & full of discussion topics and things to think about.

After I read this article I started reading people's blogs to find out what other teachers thought of connectivism. James and I had an hour long conversation about it at dinner. I just looked at the date of the article (2004) and am curious about what else Siemens has written since then.

Some quotes from the article that really made me think are:

The organization and the individual are both learning organisms.
Know-how and know-what is being supplemented with know-where (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed).
These theories do not address learning that occurs outside of people (i.e. learning that is stored and manipulated by technology). They also fail to describe how learning happens within organizations.
The need to evaluate the worthiness of learning something is a meta-skill that is applied before learning itself begins. When knowledge is subject to paucity, the process of assessing worthiness is assumed to be intrinsic to learning. When knowledge is abundant, the rapid evaluation of knowledge is important.
Experience has long been considered the best teacher of knowledge. Since we cannot experience everything, other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge. ‘I store my knowledge in my friends’ is an axiom for collecting knowledge through collecting people (undated).

I'm not sure how my thinking has changed yet. I am just sure that it is changing and I am so interested to see how these new ideas play out. I am excited to be in a profession that has the opportunity to engage directly with these ideas with children and youth. It is an exciting time to be in the field of education.

I have another question about, "the half-life of knowledge." What exactly is this new knowledge about? How are people identifying, quantifying and labeling new and obsolete knowledge? I want more information about this before I just assume that statistic to be true.

One thing I like about the article is that it incorporates the philosophy that connectivisim doesn't just have to take place online - it can be with people in your classroom or people in your workplace. A class discussion where you create together - can be the same thing - depending on what the discussion is about. Small group work too. The example of the senior citizens working with elementary school students is exactly right. New theories of learning from/with technology can be applied to non-technology. They are communication and learning theories.

One thing I have an issue with is the role of history in these theories. Where do they incorporate the importance of a general understanding (memorized) knowledge of history, for example?

Yes, I can look up where France is in one second and see that it is in Europe but what is Europe? What does it mean? What is its history and social make-up? This is background knowledge that may be subject to change but in general helps us properly evaluate and understand 'new' knowledge. What about memorizing the times tables, and poetry and having a general and solid sense of our past, so that we do not repeat the mistakes and so that we can better analyze where we are and where we're going?

I will leave you with this quote from the article, because this is what I am thinking about right now. "Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today. A real challenge for any learning theory is to actuate known knowledge at the point of application. When knowledge, however, is needed, but not known, the ability to plug into sources to meet the requirements becomes a vital skill. As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what is needed is more important than what the learner currently possesses."

Reflections onLine

2009-01-31T16:23:00.000-08:00

When I was an elementary and middle school student, everything about being a student was much more public than it was when I started teaching. My teachers used to read good and bad work aloud and post grades in the halls, etc. Students had to read aloud all the time, from their own writing and from published authors. There were spelling bees and math contests and times tables recitations and poetry readings and whether they liked it or not, students ended up sharing much of their work and many of their ideas with their classmates.

I felt as a student, and as a teacher, that it was important for students to be able to write what they felt and thought, for the most part, to an audience of one, the teacher. The relationship between a teacher and a student is so important. Students should be able to trust that their work is being read by someone who knows quality, who knows them and who is able to provide them with constructive and supportive feedback. Students need to feel safe. When I was in middle school in particular, students were so pressured by 'audience' that they didn't always express their opinions, feelings, thoughts and analyses because they didn't want to take the risk.

When I started teaching, we (my colleagues and myself) believed that if students felt like sharing, either with the class or the school, parents or friends, then of course, they would do that but that it wasn't a requirement all the time. We also knew there were certain times of year that students produced work to be published, either in booklets or on classroom or hallway bulletin boards. Finally, there were students who wrote or painted or analyzed so well that their work was submitted for publication in something outside of the local school community and it was considered an honor to have your work submitted for publication because of the quality of the work produced.

Now everything is turned on its head. It seems like students (and teachers who are students again) must make everything public:

"The process of collaboration begins with our willingness to share our work and our passions publicly -- a frontier that traditional schools have rarely crossed. As Clay Shirky writes in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, "knowingly sharing your work with others is the simplest way to take advantage of the new social tools." Educators can help students open these doors by deliberately involving outsiders in class work early on -- not just showcasing a finished product at the spring open house night. (World Without Walls)"

What happened to privacy? What if we (learners) don't want to share? What if we want to have our own thoughts? To take risks in a safe environment without feeling like everyone is watching? What if we don't want to work with EVERYONE but just with a few people (perhaps even from around the world) who we truly respect and value?

What happens to crafting a finished product? Can writing be so very different from producing art or cooking a meal? What happens to a painting if too many people offer advice on how to 'fix' it? What about too many cooks spoiling the broth? And what about the difference(s) between reading someone's blog about their trip to a place and reading an in-depth article about that place by someone who has done some research as well as some traveling?

What about how writing and thinking for an audience of peers and/or educators can end up with writing tailored to an audience but not necessarily in the voice of the learner? If you look at Facebook for example, you see all kinds of photos, wall postings, etc. that are for public consumption. They create and maintain an image. I have worked with so many kids who have Facebook accounts and the photos, wall postings, etc. sometimes reflect only a small part of themselves, if any part and they so badly want to appear 'cool' and 'happy' and 'popular' that all the postings end up looking identical and superficial.

Similarly, I have seen my students post on blogs for other classes and some self-conscious students post minimal responses because they don't want other students to think they are 'nerds' or that they are too interested in what they are learning.

Conversely, other students post what they think the teachers want to read. Some of these students don't agree with anything they write - there isn't really a place for them to challenge and/or question what they are reading and supposed to be learning. Sometimes the blog question they are supposed to answer is about, 'what they learned.' What if they didn't learn anything? They are being graded for writing that they did, so that is what they do. In some cases students are graded for a posting in which they are supposed to regurgitate what they have read and what is promoted as a new form of communication (blog posting), is, in fact the same type of thing they were being asked to do on paper - only in public. Is this qualitatively different than a teacher reading the student's work aloud? Or is it the same thing but disguised as interactive collaboration and Web 2.0?

These are the questions that I have about the public aspect of the new types of technology. I know that the public nature of schools when I was a student was substantially different. It was competitive and performance based rather than collaborative and networking based.

It's just that I think these ideas, technologies and practices need to be closely examined, teased out, played with and thought of in terms of how they can help us (and our students) as individual learners with individual needs, assignments and challenges.

We need to think very carefully before starting something new and public and we need to think about what types of technology and collaboration will work for specific students, assignments, curricula and outcomes.

Personal learning networks are fantastic and allow all of us to work with so many people on so many ideas. It's how we use them in a school that I think we need to work out carefully. Interestingly enough, I think that the process of working these things out seems ideally suited to collaboration, personal learning networks and public forums. I am looking forward to reading other people's opinions and to learning about the practices of other teachers and students.

Internet Research

2009-01-30T22:44:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of the year we used and adapted this power point with our students.

It's important to adapt these lessons and examples regularly because everything changes so quickly. Also, links expire and it would be a waste of time for students to spend time searching sites and search engines that don't exist anymore.

At the time that the teachers who designed this Power Point created it, it seemed like most schools were using books and just getting into using the internet. At this point, it seems like more people use the internet than use books for research.

Anyway, here is the Power Point. It basically sums up what we do with our kids.

We found the original lesson and power point on the Read, Write Think website.

After looking at the embedded power point (?) in class yesterday, it seems like that would be better and simpler to use with the kids for the detecting bias/accuracy section of the lesson.

Regarding searching: I discovered something funny yesterday in class. I used none of the proper ways to search and instead just typed exact phrases into the google search bar. I found everything really quickly. This is another reason why we have to constantly update our materials. And this updating (of blogs, wikis, lessons, etc.) is definitely more work (even when it's a little bit at a time), than we had before the internet arrived.

Why I Am Taking This Class

2009-01-30T21:53:00.001-08:00

My answer to that question is on my wiki profile page.