Category Archives: blogging

A Few Random Notes for the New Year

It is warm enough here on the farm to have the doors open. I sat on the rocking chair on the porch and started reading my first book for the year: Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding. The first chapter pulled me in: an informal history that manages to celebrate not just birds but explorers and wilderness. I am, admittedly, a bird nerd so this may not be general interest, but it goes along with my desire to learn more about some of my hobbies.

I  chose this book as part of a challenge on LibraryThing, a reading community that I have belonged to since 2005. I have met a few of the folks in real life but most are virtual friends who share my love of reading and books. I want to spend more time here in 2019: again, an opportunity to focus on more deeply on reading, one of my lifelong hobbies.

I was surprised and honored to be mentioned by Jennifer Orr who included one of my recent posts in her year end review. I did a bit more blogging at the end of 2018 and knowing at least one person read and thought about my post might be enough to keep me going into the new year. Plus, Jennifer’s reviews provide a great start to my reading list for 2019. I plan to be much more intentional with my online time in the coming year. Less mindless scrolling and more meaningful interaction.

I am most excited about sponsoring a 4H special interest group related to coding in my local community. I live in one of the poorest counties in Virginia, underserved in many ways. But there are champions, and I have been able to connect with a few to sponsor the after school club in January. I spent my holiday break doing curriculum and lesson planning for our work together.

I think my biggest challenge is finding a work/life balance, especially when there is a huge overlap between those two things.

But I also love to play music and want to become more proficient on the guitar and ukelele, maybe even connect with a face to face group of musicians.

And I want to make time to create in all kinds of ways: crocheting, paper cutting, electronics. One of my best moments from 2018 was participating in the local library’s Trunk or Treat event on Halloween and getting folks to interact with the screaming pumpkins and the joke telling hat, both powered by Makey Makey.

Walking the Walk

woman at podiumOn Tuesday, I stood in front of a lot of people and encouraged them to take action to tell their stories and to connect with the larger community. I asked them to tweet, blog, and advocate. I do all of these but not with any consistency so I decided that if I was going to lecture others about what they should be doing, I should do the same.
It is time to organize a consistent twitter and blogging practice. I am an active advocate but could be more connected with my own local legislators.
So…here is my first blog post in that direction…mostly a public commitment to connect more intentionally.
I have written about my commitment to 10,000 steps and one thing I have learned is that you must plan ahead in order to meet the challenge. With the excuse of the conference behind me, it is time to start scheduling these commitments.
And…I have now been doing the steps for 243 days…

Green Screen Practice

For Tuesday’s class, my students are thinking about leadership, vision and the standards. As part of the class, they will work in groups to create a slide about one of the Education Leader standards and how it relates to the other sets of standards. Once they create their slide, they will use Do Ink to narrate the slide in front of a green screen either using video of themselves or paper avatars. I have two green screen stations: one with a table cloth and one with a pizza box. Both items came from @gemilltime  who gave them to me after her presentation about using green screens in the classroom.

My sample was for the ISTE certification course and featured a paper doll of Emily Dickinson talking about flipgrid and how I use it as a check in tool for the genius project. Pretty dull stuff…it was proof of concept to make sure I had a basic understanding of how it works. I’m relying on at least some of my students being familiar with it. I think, as an exit ticket each week, I need to see how familiar students are with the coming tech activities. It will help gauge how far we might go and who might need extra support. I have some pretty techy folks this semester.

We are going to do a “stations” approach next week. There will be five groups–one for each standard–and all of them will spend the first 20 minutes planning their slide and their video. Then, two groups will work on their videos in the classroom while the rest of the students head out to the library to work independently on developing the twitter PLN, part of their passion project. They will find and follow experts in the area they want to pursue, identify potential twitter chats and then spend some time just interacting with Twitter. I feel like I used to as a reading teacher: if I wanted you to read, I needed to give you time. If I want you to use Twitter, I need to give it class time and priority.

As groups finish their videos, the other groups will rotate through with the goal of being done in time to watch them in class. If not, I’ll post them to the course site later.

My own attempt is not for prime time but I may play a bit tomorrow. I have these great paper dolls of famous American writers along with props that would make fun tableau. Maybe Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Mark Twain spend some time chatting.

What Comes Easily to You?

I am just a few hours away from teaching the first class of the semester. I have a limited number of face to face sessions so I think this first class is even more critical than in a K-12 classroom. Every moment together counts.

Katie Martin’s pic of six questions to ask your students showed up in my Twitter feed. I followed the link to her blog post about four ways to create a learner-centered classroom. Both are worth a look. I completely agree with her that reviewing the rules or the syllabus are important but should not be the first thing a teacher does no matter the grade level. When I taught middle school, we started working on the first day and I either wove the rules in as part of our activities or spent some time with the students creating classroom rules and norms together. I wanted the message to be that this was an interactive class where we worked hard, played hard, and learned hard.

The goal of Martin’s six questions are to help teachers build relationships with their students. They are reasonable questions that would certainly help a teacher personalize classroom learning for students.

But, I did wonder about one of the questions: What comes easily to you? This is a potentially powerful question. But as with all things: it is all in what we do with. If the answer is used to customize activities so Suzie always gets to write and Billy always gets to draw because it comes easily to them, I think we could be taking student choice too far.

Given a choice in how to respond, I’m probably going to choose the way that comes easiest to me, in my case by writing text. In fact, publishing my little sketchnote/infographics and committing to public writing has been my way of moving away from what comes easily and pushing myself outside the proverbial comfort zone.  (I probably add 750 words a day to my journal…writing isn’t the problem for me, publishing is.)

I shared my course outline with some colleagues and at least one pushed back on requiring a “TED style talk” to present the work from their passion project. Wouldn’t some people be uncomfortable doing that, he asked. Yes, I’m sure they will, and I might tone down the “TED talk” rhetoric so it eases the pressure a bit, but the students WILL do a stand up presentation about their semester-long project. They are going to become school administrators and education leaders, and they need to get comfortable presenting ideas in front of groups of stakeholders.

We do lots of things that make people uncomfortable in my class at one point or another, from coding to recording videos of ourselves to solving challenges. For some people, just taking a course called School Technology causes anxiety. I combat that by being as supportive and reassuring as I can that while they will be expected to try out tools, failure will not affect their grades. (I don’t grade anyway really but that’s a whole other blog post.)

I am offering lots of choices this semester: from pursuing your passion to choosing from various tools to “writing” to your blog using a variety of media. But, I also am planning whole group activities around topics and tools, and I will expect participation from every student to some degree.

I think we should use the answer to the question of what comes easily to a student as a foundation for supporting them and a springboard for pushing them beyond the walls created by their preferences. I am a huge fan of Seymour Papert’s idea of hard fun where learning is challenging, but we find satisfaction in that challenge. He comments:

My whole career in education has been devoted to finding kinds of work that will harness the passion of the learner to the hard work needed to master difficult material and acquire habits of self-discipline. But it is not easy to find the right language to explain how I think I am different from the “touchy feely … make it fun make it easy” approaches to education.

My class is not easy in many ways and does require students to do more than a typical textbook, lecture, discussion kind of graduate class. You will get metaphorically dirty in this class but if you’re willing to try out things that may be difficult for you, I can promise you hard fun.


Blog Challenge Update:

Bad news: I had just turned out the light and plumped the pillow last night when I realized I had not posted a blog entry. I made a futile attempt to see if I could do it from my phone if only to keep the very short streak going but gave up pretty quickly and went to sleep. And slept soundly so clearly wasn’t too upset about missing.

Good news: In an effort to be more public about my blogging (honestly, I could probably write away here for months without anyone knowing), I shared my 10,000 Steps post on Facebook and got some nice feedback.

 

First Day of School Visual Agenda

My first class for School Technology is Tuesday night. I always feel a lot of pressure that night: I need to address lots of differing objectives, including making sure they can connect to wifi, login in to the course site and create a blog post using text and images (something they need to be able do before the next class), while introducing them to the big picture ideas and questions around educational technology. I’m working through the agenda and did a visual draft ala Linda Barry’s Syllabus:

Class Agenda

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I just did this with a regular pen and then tried to do a fancier, full color version but the pressure to make it perfect proved too much for me. I know many sketchnoters use a digital tool so I may start exploring, although I love the feel of pen on paper.