Power of the audience...

Groove Salad

So, today was an amazing example of the power of the web and more so the power of a real audience. I have only been blogging for a couple of weeks. Don't really have an "audience" yet as I haven't been particularly public about my blog, at least not until today...

I found myself frustrated as I have been grappling with a tool, Glogster to be specific, for some time now. I love the tool but keep running up against the same wall when I try using it with my own students and helping teachers to use it. I have spent too much time trying to figure out how to "get around" the problem since I can't get through it. I couldn't find a forum on their website or any real way to contact them but I knew I couldn't just complain and do nothing.

Today, about five hours ago I blogged  about it in Glogster are you listening... Then, I tweeted it. Just the title and the link. I wondered if anyone from glogster might catch it. Within two and a half hours, I had a comment back from them.

This is the power of an audience.

I hope that they will in fact take my issues with their tool under consideration thus making the .edu version as embed friendly as the regular version.

Most importantly what I have learned is that it is possible to affect change, or at least a response, by using our voices. There is an audience for all of us.

Thank you glogster, for listening...

Glogster are you listening...

Well glogster, are you listening. I'm not sure as there is no spot for a user forum/help on your website so I'm not sure you are willing to hear feedback. I can only hope I'm not writing this for myself alone...
In review and for those of you unfamiliar with it, glogster is a great way for students to demonstrate what they have learned in the form of a very easy to create poster. While it has many built in graphics, you may also upload your own or link to items that you want from other sites. You can record your own audio and video directly into glogster as well. All around a great idea. Once your posters are created you can embed them into a wiki or blog. Awesome! Now my students, and yours, can still keep all the wonderful things they create in one location behind a password protected site. That's our responsibility as teachers in keeping students identities and information safe. (Although in my case, it is student work not pictures of them or personal data so nothing really to hide or protect IMO.)

Glogster has also created a great section for educators. It is a bit more protected so students won't be seeing inappropriate general content as they are choosing what to add to their glogs. Glogs are also automatically set to private in this area. No advertising cluttering the screen or bombarding students. Thank you for that!

However, the folks at glogster for some reason decided that there was a reason to alter the embed code for these glogs in the education area. I can't for the life of me figure out why but it makes embedding in my course wiki by my students impossible and even if I were to do it for them, it incapacitates the glog. Let me explain...

The embedded image is so large that it gets cut off by the wiki window so that you can't see the entire glog. This is NOT the case with the regular glogster version, only the edu version.

Now, you can change the code in the edu version, assuming you are comfortable looking at code, which I am but not all children can find the correct place to make the change without accidentally deleting the wrong thing. I'm not really interested in doing all the embedding for ALL of my students.

For the sake of argument, let's say I do change each student glog so that is 50% of the original size and can be viewed in the wiki page. Doing so makes the text so small it can't be easily read. Unfortunately the fix for this, available ONLY in the NON-edu version is an automatic dropdown that allows you to view the full version.

They tell me it is for protection, but from what am I protecting myself and my students? Viewing their work? If the glog is set to private and only available by entering a password protected wiki where once found by the authenticated user, that user clicks on the "view full size" link, which takes you to the full size version (marked as private) what on earth are they protecting? PLEASE PLEASE GLOGSTER, reconsider putting the same embed options in the .edu version as you have in the regular version. This is a show stopper as far as user friendliness in the .edu community.

On another note, perhaps less important, why am I not able to create usernames for my students? You have a crazy assigning system. I realize you are trying to protect student identities but that is really my job as the teacher. My students have more than enough different IDs to remember for things. Give me the option of uploading my classlist or naming my students the way that I want to, OR using your naming convention. PBWorks figured out how to do that for eductators, why can't you?

So glogster, you really do have a great product but I fear that the developers have lost track of our reality in the classroom. Please don't force me back to using paper and limiting my student's audience again...

Project funds, slowly but surely...

This morning as I was reading one of the many links provided to me by one of the people in my PLN, I stumbled upon Donors Choose. What a phenomenal idea. We no longer can sit back and complain about what we don't have for that cool thing that we want to do in our classrooms or with our students. There is now a website out there where we can write up what our project is, our learning goals, and what exactly we need to make it happen. So, let's no longer sit back and wait for it to come to us. Let's motive and make it happen for our students!

 Photo: Cambodia
--By Talea Miller, Online NewsHour

Begin blogging...with students

So in my last post at the end I mentioned a blogging tool for kids. Today, my PLN (professional learning network-ie. twitter) pointed me to an old post from October 2008 entitled 33 Ways to use blogs in your classroom. A a couple things struck me about this post so I thought I would point them out to those of you who might be just beginning to blog.

1. These are great ideas but in most cases I would change the words "blog about" to post about. I say this because there are so many great ideas that could all be placed into a single blog. Create a class blog in edublogs which uses wordpress, kidblogs, or blogger and you have the ability to create pages. Adding pages for different topics and allowing students to post about those topics through the year creates an e-portfolio. Can you say formative and summative assessment?
2. It's been 2.5 years since the post was put out there. The ideas are still great ones and not much has changed. I think this tool is around for a long time and it is simply a matter of deciding how you want to use it and what works best for your environment.

So, again the best way to decide is to start blogging on your own and before you do that, start reading and commenting on other blogs to get a feel for it. The more comfortable you are when you get started the more natural it becomes. Just write what you are thinking, feeling or reading. If a tool inspires you share it. You can build your own PLN to make up for that lack of time you have to connect with you colleagues during the school day. If you are looking for more resources to determine everything from the pedagogy of blogging to ways to assess it, safety concerns, and to view other class examples, check out this post that covers resources for those educators who want to learn more. 

Right tool, right task

I'm constantly challenged to find the right tool for the right task. I have the pleasure and privilege of working with educators at all levels from elementary to higher ed. Interestingly enough, I find the elementary and secondary educators to be the most innovative and interested in testing out new tools. They do this despite the fact that they are the ones with the most limited access and the greatest battles when it comes to filters. They also have far less time for playing. Do they feel they have less to lose? Are they just more focused on finding the best for their students? Are higher ed educators too tied up in tenure expectations? Maybe it's all of these.

Regardless of the answer, as I delve into working more closely with elementary educators I find new challenges. Many of their students don't have email addresses, or at least not addresses that they know and use. There are many concerns, and rightly so, about safety and privacy. These restrictions make it that much more difficulty to find the right tool for the right task.

An article I read also brought up an interesting example of where restrictions for safety of the students isn't always in their best interest. The blog entry Robbing Students of Recognition demonstrates the intersection between trying to keep our children safe and keeping them from being proud of what they do. The internet is one of the first places people search to learn about people. So, shouldn't the internet also be a place where students demonstrate to the world how amazing they are? Where should that line be drawn? Are we protecting them from the world, from themselves, or from the education system that's in fear of a law suit? And at what cost?

My job, as one who keeps looking for the right tool for the right task, is to keep searching for what will make everyone happy. Today's tool of choice is a blogging tool made just for elementary and middle school students who don't have email addresses. Check out Kidblog for a really easy to set up easy to use blog that you can jump into in no time with your students. It does offer very simple to use protection and privacy settings so that student content can be as open to the world or as hidden as the teacher chooses to make it. Students can have their own logins without an email address so they can each lay personal claim to the content they create rather than all posting under a single class login. If you're looking to blog, give it a whirl and see what you think. If you have another tool that you would recommend for this task, I'd love to hear about it so please share.

Is it time to integrate & collaborate in technology education?

I recently was introduced by a colleague to a couple of books that may be of interest to elementary educators. Both books are published by ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education). The first one, IT's Elementary! Integrating Technology in the Primary Grades covers everything from infrastructure for your tech team to curricular redesign and lesson plans. The chapters include indicators for grade levels at which different types of technology skills might be taught. While the copyright indicates 2007 and technology changes at the speed of light, I believe there are still some great overall approaches that would be helpful to elementary educators as they decide what direction they want to go with technology.

The second book, The Computer Lab Teacher’s Survival Guide: K–6 Units for the Whole Year, Second Edition came out in 2009. This book strikes me as the REACH teachers textbook in terms of the title. However, in looking at the table of starting from about Chapter 4 or 6, what I see are skills that students need to learn as part of computing but rather activities that are intricately connected to the content learned in the "regular" classroom. Perhaps it is time for REACH to not be it's own "pull out" special but be almost entirely connected to the learning that is happening in each grade level classroom.

Take a look, see what you think. How might you change "remodel" your curriculum? How might you work more closely and collaboratively with your specials?

Skills vs. Assessment

This is the first year that my daughter has experienced rigorous testing. As a third grader she lost somewhere around three weeks to learn how to take standardized tests. Yes there is a skill to test taking, and there are some people who are much better at it than others. But are we teaching to the test?  Personally, I'm an over-thinker. I do horribly on those tests. However, give me a real project, an essay question, or any other substantial content to produce from scratch and you will find a completely different person underneath that low-test-score exterior.  Will my daughter suffer as I did? Or will she be more like her dad, a genius at multiple guess but it takes every ounce of energy and brain power in his body to write a paragraph. Learning styles, did anyone say learning styles? According to Michael Simkins,"we can get some initial gains on tests by teaching to the test and practicing test taking skills. Ultimately, though, we're going to hit an achievement wall." He goes on to suggest that teaching higher order thinking skills is really the way to get over that achievement wall.

Meanwhile in our school district some schools have already started Saturday school programs to help students who aren't testing to the required level. I've been told that Saturday school will be a requirement soon for many children. So, let's take a huge number of students with ELL backgrounds, difficulty focusing and any number of other barriers and put them in school more to simply aggravate their feelings of inadequacy. I wonder how those ELL students might do on the same test given to them in their first language. What if the kids who had trouble concentrating had more time to burn off energy so they could come back to focusing (oh, wait, we just took that time away because we took their Saturday...) All of this extra school is linked to the fear of lost funding and NCLB. Do we really need more seat time or could it be the quality of the seat time that students get that should be adjusted? Smaller class sizes might help the struggling kids but the funding was pulled for that... As an educator I have never agreed with standardized testing as a means to determine applicable knowledge and even less so when I consider the skills today's students need to lead in tomorrow's world.

Arthur C. Clarke questioned, "How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 - and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?" So how do we know what to teach our kids? Perhaps that's the point. It isn't the content that is important so much as the set of skills that go along with the content. According to the article 21st Century Skills: Will Our Students Be Prepared? written in the Tech & Learning Journal back in 2003, we are continuing to look for the same skills as were needed in 2001. Those skills are focused more on higher order thinking. Time to revisit Blooms Taxonomy, revised.

Anyone remember the last time they needed to take a multiple guess test at work? I don't. But, just a few days ago I had to make a complete presentation to a room full of university administrators demonstrating both knowledge and creative ways of approaching difficult situations. I had to defend/sell my approach to get their buy in on making some changes to a program currently in place. The following day I needed to write a memorandum of understanding. Nope. No multiple-guess skills needed.

As Alvin Toffler so succinctly stated, "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." So, if we want to close the gap in our divide and we want our struggling students to "catch up" is it really more hours of school that they need in order to learn how to learn. Are we going at this the right way by giving them more seat time? Does cutting funding to existing art, music and language programs to add 4 year old kindergarten really "fix the problem?" What do you think?

Hopes and Challenges

I'm excited about the opportunity to work with Thoreau teachers as they begin exploring the world of emerging technology and thinking about the possibilities it may offer them and their learning and teaching environment. When I first walked into the school 4 years ago, I wondered if this school would prepare my kids to face the world in front of them. Will they be engaged? Will they develop skills for inquiry? Will they become lifelong learners? Then I started to meet the teachers. There was no question that my children would be able to learn a tremendous amount in our neighborhood school.

However, the question still lingered as to whether or not they would be prepared to demonstrate what they know in ways that their peers, other 21st century learners, are already doing in much of the country. What I didn't see were 21st century tools that would allow today's children to learn in school the way that they learn outside of school. Today's children are living in a world where collaboration happens on a global scale, where we are surrounded by/bombarded with media, and computers are so small they fit in a pocket. The problem was never the teachers, it was the lack of useful tools to help them meet the needs and learning styles of today's students and families.

I'm excited to be a part of the change that is now happening in our public schools and at Thoreau in particular. Part of teaching is learning from your students. What I'm most looking forward to is learning from Thoreau teachers. I only have a cursory knowledge of what goes on in their classrooms and what challenges they are now facing. I look forward to learning about their challenges and having them challenge me to find solutions. I look forward to building a relationship with more Thoreau teachers and hope to help them beyond the scope of this course as they begin to integrate a variety of emerging technologies into their curriculum.