That rocked!

Author Seth Godin, however, says something about this.

You don’t rock all the time. No one does. No one is a rock star, superstar, world-changing artist all the time. In fact, it’s a self-defeating goal. You can’t do it.

His point? Try “rocking” at something for just 5 minutes. A day. Don’t aim to be doing profound things all the time, but instead, baby-step those things you can do an extraordinary job at.

I think the advice also fits in line with something else Godin said earlier this month:

Very few people wake up in the morning and feel like taking big risks or feel like digging deep for something that has eluded them. People don’t usually feel like pushing themselves harder than they’ve pushed before or having conversations that might be uncomfortable.

You might not feel like climbing the big mountains all the time. What’s important is mounting small hills, each one in stride, not conquering everything, just little things that you can do that make a difference.

Karen has had a wide variety of experiences in education including classroom teaching in middle school, high school and, now, higher education. She also has extensive experience with teaching and learning online. She is a certified online instructor for PBS Teacherline and CaseNEX and has both developed and taught content for these organizations. She is teaching an online Master’s level course for Virginia Commonwealth University. These experiences, as well as her recent doctorate in Curriculum and Educational Technology from The College of William and Mary, provide a unique, insightful perspective on public education, particularly in Virginia, which will be of great benefit to VSTE and its membership.

Karen has been to Goochland more than once in her role as a professional developer for VITAL. For teachers not sure what VSTE is–membership is free and the organization is doing great things. Visit their website today and sign-up for membership. I know I’m glad I did back in 1999!

(Rotates the entire webpage in Safari 4.)

The class was on MIT’s Scratch, and six teachers from Goochland participated at GES library media center. I’m currently going through the export process now. I will likely share it online, but restrict it to Goochland personnel only. It captured my voice and everything we did at the Promethean board.

We saw this technique being used and promoted recently at EdTech 2010 in Ashland, VA by keynoter Dr. Tim Tyson.

This resource might be your cup of tea.

He compares most of the well-known (and some not so well known) RSS readers. I use both NetNewsWire and Google Reader (web version).

1. Be sure to clean the two filters on your orange projector at least monthly to ensure the proper amount of air is being circulated through the projector for cooling. Your ITRT can show you how to access the two areas on the projector that require this regular maintenance.

2. When not using the projector for extended periods of time, turn the projector off. “Extended” periods would be 25 minutes or longer.

3. If you’re projecting in a dark environment without window or overhead light, consider running the projector in a reduced-brightness mode. This may be toggled through the remote. See your ITRT for details. If you run the projector in “Auto Brightness” mode, it will automatically choose the setting by using the projector’s ambient light sensor.

What we need to do is have more teachers teach actively… we need more active learning at [insert school name].

I assume what this means is an education experience taken from the following sundry list:

• student-centered,
• project-based,
• problem-based,
• hands-on,
• students are continuously engaged,
• practice of the myriad, so-called 21st century skills.

The more I think about all of those concepts above, I come to the conclusion that I think I recognize teaching and learning in this class. This approach might be labeled progressive, after the ideas of John Dewey, or even constructivist after Piaget or constructionist after Papert. Those who know their education history realize these concepts of learning are not new. Yet, it is refreshing that they are continuing to be heralded in discussions of education reform.

Unless, of course, you’re A. Duncan.

So the problem is… where is this type or style of pedagogy (in some cases you wouldn’t even label it pedagogy, but perhaps self-pedagogy or anti-pedagogy) effectively being championed? The reason I ask, and the crux of the problem, is because making this succeed in schools today is a taxing enterprise for the aspiring trainer or professional developer.

There are all these little camps, of course, which aim to attack the problem from their various viewpoints and angles. Let me list just a few:

• 21st century learning,
• Constructivist learning,
• habits of the mind,
• brain-based learning,
• the Montessori method,
• inquiry-based learning,
• challenge-based learning,
• game-based learning,
• Children’s Engineering.

A real challenge for me (or any education student) might be to construct a diagram that somehow showed the overlaps and differences between all these approaches. One of the problems is that some are better-defined than others. Another problem is that one methodology may look or work very differently between different subject areas.

And, of course, some may not very well stay within the bounds of one subject area. And we can’t have that. High school English teachers know English. We don’t expect them to know geography or Earth science as well. The solution to that old problem is teacher collaboration. Sometimes that works towards great ends. Other times it is far too inconvenient to be realistic.

We might also call collective goodies between these approaches “hot” learning. One system of measuring “hot” learning is the LoTI HEAT scale. A giant amalgamation of letters standing-in for bigger concepts, it’s a model by which one can measure the quality of learning, perhaps how “active” it is, by taking a “temperature” along four criteria.

I find all of this theoretically fascinating. But when you walk into a school classroom today, despite the cute posters on the walls that may profess “We learn by doing,” or “An active mind makes a wise man,” or any other similar polemic, we’re going to see examples of (for lack of a better word) inactive learning.

For those of us who belong in departments with the word “technology” included, many of us have already resigned ourselves to the fact that doing anything meaningful with technology requires some take on active learning strategies. To make them succeed, everyone has to be on board. It tends not to work out as well when:

• state assessments reward memorized facts,
• you’re out on your own trying the active “thing,”
• when there’s a lack of instructional support for active pedagogy, and
• administrative reviews or oversight make no reference to an active style of learning.

So, granted, the education system has a lot of challenges towards a more progressive approach to learning, at least here in public schools in America. But it’s a good sign, right, when administrators are calling for more active learning experiences to be taking place in their schools? But is that change possible?

I’ll say I think it is. Last school year I designed an activity where by teachers did some “active” learning together. Granted, it was a 3.5 hour professional development activity that didn’t depend heavily on their subject area or grade level, but it got them working together. They had to solve problems. They had to make mini-presentations for feedback. And, with multiple modes of popcorn poppery going, we tried our best at making the experience hands-on and multi-sensory.

So what holds us back from day to day?

Two things, I think. A freedom to fail and the so-called luxury of time. Creating active learning experiences for students, I firmly believe, requires creative educators. Creativity takes time. Lots of it! Unfortunately, teacher training programs fill young teachers-to-be with a lot of theory, some methods for getting-by, and then some practice before pushing them into a profession where they’ll be under-valued, stifled against attempting change, and asked to work miracles in unreasonable spans of time.

I’ve found in working with folks that “freedom to fail” is never a popular term. No one wants to fail. So, let’s re-word it. How about… incentives to innovate? And giving professionals enough time to complete an important task is just that… professional.

So, I think that’s the formula for starting a professional development program geared towards more “active learning” in a public school: incentives to innovate and ample professional time for planning and preparation. The question is, how do you make active learning experiences work in your school(s)?

You can see professor Craig Cunningham’s presentation online via Google. He did a great job, and there was great discussion!

The Wall Street Journal recently listed ten tips for making better use of e-mail, and they directed it towards business managers. I’ll share a few from columnist Tim Flood:

1. Don’t use vague subject lines.
2. Don’t bury the news. Put important details up front, in the beginning (dates, times).
3. Don’t make e-mails unnecessarily long.
4. Don’t send attached documents when a simple copy-paste of text will do.
5. Don’t forget e-mails can last forever. Deliver negative feedback in person, or over the phone… or wait until your temper has eased.

One of the things I’ve been noticing over the past year is how e-mail is an “old world” tool compared to “new world” alternatives. For instance, these tips (or this newsletter) really belongs in my blog. There’s nothing really to reply to, unless you like a tip, or wish to add your own. Then, the blog should be the place for that. But, I also want to make sure folks read these tips, and so, sending an e-mail is the most efficient way of mimicking my placement of these tips on a sheet of paper in your box at school.

Yet this efficiency has a price. Too many people buy-in to the efficiency of e-mail that you, the teacher, or you, the principal (or if you are neither, imagine you in your own role) have too many things to read and deal with. Better technology tips might be great for a snowy day off, but in the throws of a regular school week, it’s hard to decide which 15 e-mails you’re going to read in the 20 minutes of time you have before you collapse into bed at night.

I learned about Flood’s e-mail tips via Twitter, a microblogging service that shares a current popularity with social networking site Facebook. Anywhere you go, you’ll see the Facebook “f” and the Twitter “t” next to signs and advertisements. At Ukrop’s for instance, I can receive information about specials via Twitter or Facebook. But what makes these new world tools better than e-mail?

For one, we have a physical analogue to e-mail: a note or a letter. I don’t even open “junk mail” at home in my mailbox, and consequently, I pay for a program at home to take all of the “spam” out of my e-mail. So, while a company like Ukrop’s might get my e-mail address when I sign up for their loyalty card (was I that silly to give it to them in the first place?), it seems tedious to get their daily specials in my in-box. I either mark it as spam and eventually spend money to a) receive, b) filter, c) store, and d) delete these notices, or else, I can “follow” them using a service which allows me to pay attention when I want.

While e-mail is efficient at delivering messages which ultimately solve a number of tasks, the fact that everyone is using the same tool to do so many things ultimately kills the system. So, here’s my call towards letting e-mail do what e-mail does best: send personalized, even formal communication between individuals. We have new social tools for broadcasting information, we have our blogs for sharing content within our community, and we have iChat to virtually knock on a colleague’s door to ask a piece of advice.

Getting to the new world isn’t easy—it takes both time and patience. So this won’t be my last e-mail to you in the forms of a TechnologyTimes newsletter, the future ones may simply remind you to visit my blog.

Update: RES teacher Karen Neylan adds: Not to reply all when a msg is sent to a group and you have an individual reply. We could also defray the number of emails by showing teachers how to create groups to send emails: eg. second grade, res staff, res teachers. Only those people will receive instead of the entire county!

Thanks, Karen. I think I have a short video to create!

We studied Dr. Medina’s Brain Rules this past school year. I don’t think the tool is evil, but we’d be better off doing a lot less presentation and a lot more interactive instruction where teachers are able to modify their role.

His handout was recently featured in an ISTE e-mail, and I’d like to thank him for sharing his resources online!

Currently, some teachers are exploring Google Apps for Education with our students at GMS and GHS.

The ten things aren’t particularly profound revelations, as they are things I already instinctually knew about our Proboards. However, they got me thinking about them in a new way, and doing things like tracing you hand were things I’d never even tried. Perhaps the list will inspire you to think about your board in a new way!

Picture it: a bunch of educators are in a room trying to define what “smart” is. No, not the boards, but the concept as it relates to school. One of the suggestions that really pops-out for me is the concept of smart being “specialization” and something you follow because you are “passionate.” When you think about it, successful people (also something that appears in the diagram) are also passionate. I am sure one is likely to find exceptions to this, but generally speaking, people who find success in life find something they are passionate about.

Which, of course, brings up some good questions.

1. Should school be organized in the “liberal arts” tradition where students can experience a variety of learning experiences in the spirit of becoming well-rounded?
2. Should school be specialized so that students can gain fast expertise in one area they show early interest?

It seems to me that American schools better embrace the first option, despite the fact that almost all the learning experiences we have in school are very similar, i.e., we learn about the world passively in rows of chairs, guided by a expert-mentor. While the second one scares me, because I can’t imagine a fourth grader, let’s say, know what area of specialization he/she needs, it is the model prevalent in other cultures. My good friend who attended school in China through college didn’t choose his area of study. His schooling filtered him through into a world of finance, then eventually economics. The two areas of employ he expressed interest in early on was a theatrical performer and a librarian. While a successful economist today, and generally referred to as “smart,” I can’t say he’s necessarily passionate about his field. One example, of course doesn’t make a rule.

I can only imagine why all these educators gathered together to discuss “smart”ness. As educators, we often use the term. “This is a smart group,” or “she’s a smart one!” Does it mean they earn good grades? Does it mean they seem to be successful at what they attempt to accomplish? Does it mean they exhibit a passion about their pursuit of knowledge?

I am not sure any of this matters. We can’t change what people think about the term smart anymore than changing their minds about big social issues. What does matter here is that we ought to be looking for students who haven’t found a passion in life and help guide them on a path to find it. It need not be a prescription for the rest of their schooling, but it may help them grow intellectually. I know kids who don’t find something they are interested in are often bored, over-challenged, or un-motivated in our schools. Whether or not we’re following path #1 or path #2 here in the U.S., we ought to be flexible enough to both provide more specialized instruction that caters to the interests of students and maintains the best facets of a liberal arts education.

Doing so will be expensive. Not doing so will be more expensive and detrimental.

This is my first attempt at trying out Prezi. If you like it, I’d recommend picking up one of their free Enjoy EDU accounts.

But more often today I’m sending my favorite sites to a social bookmarking service. The two I like are delicious.com and diigo.com. Both urge you to install a special link into your bookmarks bar in Safari or Firefox, which is about the most complex thing about the process. It’s easy.

After it’s installed, you click on this link whenever you get to a site you like. It sends it to the service, and keeps track of it for you. But better than folders, it organizes the bookmarks by keyword tags. So if I find a site on education that deals with math, I might tag it “education” and “math.” I can always return to the site to later find all the sites I’ve found that deal with “math,” and sure enough, it pops up.

The process is also cool because of the social aspect. As with Facebook, it’s about who you know. If you know my username, you can see my public bookmarks – sites I like to visit or have saved. It’s a really great way to find new sites of interest.

Diigo has one feature Delicious lacks – and that’s annotations and highlighting. It remembers what you liked about a particular site when you bookmark it, and if you signup for a free education account, you can share these sites with students. Imagine – students arrive to a bookmarked page with the important content already highlighted and annotated.

If you’d like to get started with social bookmarking, let me or one of our ITRTs know!

One such tool is an RSS-reader. These news reader applications allow us to subscribe to changes on a website or blog. By creating your own collection of content sources, you can more easily browse through what’s new, read what you want, and dump the rest. One of the better RSS-readers out there is Google’s own Reader.

They recently added a new feature in Reader that allows you to track changes to your favorite site, even when there is no RSS feed! To use Reader, you need your own personal Google account. Next, just tell it which websites you like, and it will automatically collect new content. Add a colleague’s blog, the RSS feed from our front page news, and now, any site!

It’s the best way, I think, to stay on top of news, changes to wikis, and more. If you want to teach your students about RSS readers, we have one installed on our laptops called NetNewsWire. Instead of running in a webpage, it’s an application that you can launch from /Applications.

I think it’s a great tool (and research based!) for upper elementary and middle school students.

Let me, Amanda, or Bea know if you’d like to get started using it.

Check out the simulations for science & math for elementary, middle, and high school students at the University of Colorado.

Teachers: do you like to draw? This simple-to-use, Web 2.0 drawing tool called Sketchfu may be for you! Unlike the Promethean board, you can play-back your drawing in real (or speedy) time! There’s also a wiki set up with lesson ideas for teachers!

Check out my drawing of a simple atom.

They did a poll, and 65% of respondents said “yes!” Yet–the support for memorization alone wasn’t strong. Jeremy Hendrix from Glendale, Arizona suggests aiming higher with an assignment to include creativity. And Julia Poole of Surrey, British Columbia in Canada wonders if there isn’t just too much information to go around.

I’m in a place in my life that I know I rely upon having factual knowledge about a variety of things, and of course, knowing some basic facts is apropos for living in any century. But I likewise take great comfort in knowing how to look up and filter content that is found online. Having ready-access to the Web, either through my phone or my computer, is an invaluable tool.

I believe that in the 21st century we must still provide students with basic knowledge and facts, but just as important, we must arm them with the tools and techniques required to look beyond the facts and put them into service for solving problems.

By the time I got shampoo into my hair, the reality hit that “wait a minute!, you just had a dream… the Apple event is today, not last night!”

It wasn’t until I had washed the shampoo out that I finally believed it. “But it was all so real… Steve… the tablet… the software… the books… the magazines…”

Yeah, just a little too obsessed might be the operative word. In order to really know if I was channeled by Uncle Steve or simply wildly dreaming, let me provide the details:

• the name was never revealed,
• it was beautiful,
• the “product” was really just new software – it would seemingly run on Macs, iPhones, and a new slab;
• there was a lot of gray UI “chrome,” gunmetal and holes (like the Dashboard Dock in Mac OS X).

And yes, there were many “beautifuls,” and “bams!”, and “just swipe here, and…” from Steve.

If you haven’t seen the video about Apple’s slate and education, check it out, circa 1995.

Typing? Texting? Handwriting?

This guy set out to find out which. I won’t spoil it, but the results and comparisons may surprise you!

His message was clear. It was about change, and not doing our jobs just because that’s the way it has always been done. He gave a great example in the theories as to why railroad ties are spaced at a standard of a little over 4 feet. He traces the origin of this measurement to Roman times, which means we’ve been building railroads the same width for reasons that go back thousands of years. Why? That’s the width that became standardized back then because it accommodated the width of two horses in front of a chariot.

What was more impressive is that the booster rockets of the space shuttle were confined to a size not much wider than 4 feet because they had to travel by train from Utah, where they are made, to Florida. That’s right, the space shuttle program was contingent upon the measurement of the backside of two horses, side by side.

Change can happen, and then he weaved in why we need to change the ways we provide learning experience. Science, brain research, and the digital world we live in are revealing new understanding about the climate in which our students thrive. It’s a lot of what I’ve heard and professed in the past here with teachers, but everyone from Goochland who attended I think picked up on something new. I’m sure we all left inspired.

You can check out Mr. Juke’s website and blog for more information. The “important stuff” from last night’s talk can be found here.

Dear ones, EASE UP. Pump the brakes. Take a step back. Seriously. Take two steps back. Turn off all your electronics and surrender over all your aspirations and do absolutely nothing for a spell. I know, I know – we all need to save the world. But trust me: The world will still need saving tomorrow. In the meantime, you’re going to have a stroke soon (or cause a stroke in somebody else) if you don’t calm the hell down.

– Elizabeth Gilbert

Sure, from the techie standpoint, he lets them use their cell phones. And Google. Is he teaching them math here? No, he’s teaching them a twenty-first century skill: you can use the tech in your pocket to contact the Oracle, né Google, for help. I like it.

But then, yes, he is teaching math skills in the bigger picture.

He’s got unit conversion, he’s got engaging discussion, and he’s got an answer that simply amazes you: HP printer ink is more expensive than blood, than water, than oil, than just about anything other liquid you can think of.

But really, I like the opener. Check it out by visiting the link above.