Tag Archives: Education

Random Friday Round Up

A gloomy day here.  The rain brought down the leaves and it is starting to look like winter.  The dogs are sprawled around me, snoozing, and I can’t muster the energy for a thoughtful blog post.  But, I do have a few sites to share on several different topics so here’s the random Friday round up:

Miami Book Fair Celebrates 25 Years:  I heard this story on NPR yesterday as I drove back and forth across the state.  The founder of the fair is an independent book store owner in Miami and he reflects on how things have changed since 1983.  When asked about the challenge of selling analog books in an increasingly digital age, he comments that he is “selling the past.”

Guest Blogger on Eduwonk:  I credit Andrew Rotherman (aka Eduwonk) with helping me pass my comprehensive exams at William and Mary.  Today, his guest blogger is none other than Margaret Spellings, soon-to-be former Secretary of Education.  She writes about a new report from the Department of Education that details five areas in which federal, state and local goverments can collaborate to support the use of technology in education.

I Think I’m Musing My Mind:  I’m sorry that I can’t remember who steered me to this piece by Roger Ebert but I’ve read and re-read it several times since.  I found myself highlighting several of his key ideas that resonated with me in this thoughtful reflection on his writing:

The Muse visits during the process of creation, not before.

Of course I don’t think only about writing. I spend time with my wife, family and friends. I read a lot, watch a lot of politics on TV. But prose is beavering along beneath, writing itself. When it comes time to type it is an expression, not a process. My mind has improved so much at this that it’s become clearly apparent to me. The words, as e. e. cummings wrote, come out like a ribbon and lie flat on the brush. He wasn’t writing about toothpaste. In my fancy, I like to think he could have been writing about prose.

Collaborating with Diigo:  From jdtravers, an excellent video with practical tips for using Diigo to comment on student work.  My own experience with Diigo expanded this week.  I blogged about the Bauerlein article and then used the highlights from Ruben Van Havermaet to explore more about new media, including spending a few hours reading Andrew Plotkin’s interactive fiction game Shade.   And, Jeremy Douglass’s website made me think about what it means to be an English major in the 21st century as I approach the 25th anniversary of my own graduation.

Cross Post: Check Out Our Voice Threads

I posted this in the VSTE Ning site where my undegraduates are sharing their learning this semester.  But, I thought it might be of interest to a wider audience.

This semester, I added Voice Thread to my course and I’m glad I did. They are all tied to the Standards of Learning, Virginia’s standards. Most of my students are planning to use them as part of their student teaching experience.

Here’s the list with the links:

Simple and Compound Machines: http://voicethread.com/share/207443/

Weather Instruments: http://voicethread.com/share/207433/

Who Eats What: http://voicethread.com/#q.b207433.i1089152<

Magnets: http://voicethread.com/share/213467/

By the way, here’s the one I created for them. It reviews the different tools we have studied and asks them to think about how they can be integrated into the classroom. Please feel free to add your comments:

I’ll end with a thank you to my Twitter buddies who had excellent ideas for how the students can easily allow their students to comment on their threads. I am reminded of the power of my professional learning network and I hope my students are coming to see its power as well.

A Little Freedom and Personal Space, Is That So Bad?

I finally got a free minute to look at my “unread” list in Diigo and found this article from a 9th grade teacher in which she describes experimenting with allowing her students to listen to their PEDs* during independent work time. I’ll admit to some qualms about it as I imagined each kid in her own little world, pacified by music, while she works.  But, the writer made a good argument for how it helped some of her students focus in a way they had trouble with otherwise.  She was also using it as an incentive for the students and has developed some classroom management rules around the practice:

Only one ear bud allowed, during independent work only, as a privilege that could easily be revoked if I decided a student wasn’t working diligently enough. I thought it would be a one-time incidence of rule tweaking, but it worked so effectively that it became a Friday ritual that we all looked forward to. I appreciated the tranquil environment and productivity of my students during a time that could easily be lost to early weekend syndrome; my students simply enjoyed listening to their music.

Of course, you can probably  guess the end of the story.  When she went to a veteran teacher for advice about her Friday experiment, she was told that it was against the rules, mostly out of concern about what they might be listening to.  So, she stopped the practice and lost something in her classroom:

The death of iPod Fridays saddens me. I’ve had to return to the old management standbys: cajoling and threatening. I’ve tried other rewards (granola bar, anyone?), but none hold the same allure that just thirty minutes of the freedom to listen to the music of one’s choice did. And ironically, without this music, Fridays haven’t been as quiet since.

It was her comment about the allure of the thirty minutes of freedom that really hit home for me.  This was a simple way to give kids some personal space and allow them to make some choices about how they learn best.  She did not require that they listen to PEDs but allowed them to if they wished.

The comments to the piece are interesting.  They range from supportive to dismissive. One commenter provides links to research related to using music.  Another describes using PEDs successfully in an alternative setting.  Yet another gets at my original qualms, calling PEDs “pacifiers.”  Finally, another makes what I think is an essential comment:  “Unfortunately the administration felt it more important to enforce the ‘no electronic device’ policy rather than encourage success in the classroom.”  While I know that it’s hard to make any definitive statements about education, it seems to me that we are coming to recognize that everyone works and learn differently. So, zero tolerance policies, especially about something that might impact instruction, just don’t make any sense to me.    If I reflect on my own use of media, I know that I enjoy listening to music when I am working but not always.  Sometimes, especially when I am doing academic writing, I like the silence. But when I’m doing flash programming, I prefer watching videos as they seem to entertain some part of my brain that otherwise might distract me.  Being able to choose is important to me and it seems an easy compromise to make with our students as well.

A little freedom and personal space, is that so bad?

*Personal Electronic Devices

Using Twitter in Education

From today’s ASCD SmartBrief, a link to an interesting piece on using Twitter in education by Ron Jones in Search Engine Watch.  It provides several examples of how Twitter was used to support teaching and learning, from fostering classroom discussion to writing collaborative books.   He links to several good blog entries and articles, including Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Twitter and a list of possible uses of Twitter in academia by David Parry that could easily be adapted to K-12.  If you’re considering the potential for Twitter in education, this is a good starting point.

I do get a little queasy when I hear someone say they gave a “Twitter” assignment since it takes a techno-centric approach, something with which I struggle myself.  The point isn’t to start with technology but to think about our instructional strategies and learning goals and then determining a tool that might help support them.  However, the techy part of me wonders that if we don’t occassionally start with the tool, we may never have an opportunity to explore its use.  And, for someone whose job is to help student teachers figure out how to use the tools in the classroom, I am constantly trying to balance concerns with technology, pedagogy and content.  Part of having my pre-service teachers becoming part of VSTE’s ning community is to give them a place to discuss these issues with practicing educators.

I have not included Twitter as part of my course and probably won’t any time soon.  But I’m interested in what others discover as they do incorporate this tool to support teaching and learning in their classrooms.

A Pragmatist In a Progressive World

This year, I have the opportunity to be part of an online professional learning community.  While I will be taking on the role of facilitator, I believe this will be as much a learning experience for me as well as for the other participants.  And, the opportunity has already gotten me thinking about where I fit into the sometimes confusing but always intriguing world of “educational technology.”

Here’s what I know:

Educational technology is about much more than just technology.  In a way, technology is the easy part.  It’s easy for me to show you how to use a flip camera to capture video or a digital microscope to find Abraham Lincoln on a penny.  It’s easy for me to post a link to a wonderful interactive website.  And while all these things may be cool, most teachers want more than just cool.  They want to know that the time and energy it is going to take them to set up microscopes or plug in projectors or to have them or their students create videos will have some positive influence on their students and their learning.  That’s the hard part: helping teachers figure out how to use these technologies in powerful ways in their classrooms.  So, while I may like to explore new technologies myself, my focus with others is on the educational part.  How/why/when to use those computers and gadgets and websites to improve teaching and learning.  This might seem like an elementary idea, but I still go to lots of “educational technology” presentations at conferences where the heavy emphasis is on the technology rather than the education.

Here’s what else I know:

I have a deeply held bias. I believe that technology offers ways to improve teaching and learning.  Even if it’s only because it engages the kids in ways that textbooks and lectures and worksheets do not.  And, most of the educators I talk to seem to share this two-part belief with me.  Part one: technology engages kids.  Part two: engaged kids are better learners.  But they also share a concern about doing it the right way.  They don’t want to just use technology for technology’s sake.  And, I find myself working with them in very practical ways.  Have you thought about using a smartboard to let your kids interact with a sentence?  Do you know that you can put a video in a powerpoint presentation to show to your kids?  Have you accessed the data from the student response system to better differentiate instruction? Have you considered having your students create a digital video or multimedia presentation as an alternative assessment?

I also use this practical approach when I work with technology coaches and school administrators in helping them to encourage technology use.  I’ve created a presentation called Strategies for the Non-Choir.  It draws from Rogers’ work in diffusions of innovations as well as Mishra and Koehler’s Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) model to provide coaches with ideas for how to approach the early and late majority adopters who, according to Rogers, make up some 68% of the population.  I talk to the coaches about the need to consider the relative advantage of a technology as well as how compatible it is with what the strategies already used by a teacher.  In addition, as part of the workshop, we play the TPACK game where we match technologies, pedagogies, and content areas to come up with ideas for using technology in the classroom.

So, I am very much a pragmatist, trying to work with teachers where I find them, helping them use technologies in ways that support what they are doing in their classrooms.  This is a viewpoint that is often in direct opposition to the visionaries in the educational technology blogosphere.  They tend to be progressives who are looking past the current times to a different world where powerful technologies support student-centered, constructivist learning.  One of my favorites, Tim over at Assorted Stuff, summarizes the viewpoint quite nicely, I think:

The powerful tools we now have available make it possible to go way beyond simple reinforcing what we’re already doing. They provide communications links that enable teachers and students to connect with and learn from the world.

If all we do with the computers and networks put in our schools over the past decade is multiply the status quo, then we’ve wasted a lot of money, time and effort.

I know much of the crap I write is very idealistic, maybe even unrealistic. But while we are making small incremental changes, it would be nice to keep a vision of what education could and should be in the viewfinders.

I don’t disagree with Tim.  And I admire his idealism. I am also always inspired by Sheryl Nussbaum Beach. One of Sheryl’s most recent posts over at 21st Century Learning gives some great examples of how are kids are learning to learn on their own, and she calls to us to roll up our sleeves and get to work on creating a learning environment for them.  I try to keep her vision in my mind and for awhile I move into that progressive world.

But then I go to a school or talk to a teacher and hear about the sorts of barriers–time, access, not to mention high-stakes testing–that they face and how excited they get when someone gives them an interactive whiteboard or even just a projector and the pragmatist returns.   To borrow a phrase from Tyack and Cuban, we are “tinkering toward utopia.”  I think I’m more the tinkerer, standing with a wrench in my hand, rather than the utopian, envisioning the future.