WatsonCommon

Shakespeare and Student Engagement

2009-12-10T13:01:00.002-10:00

For the last four classes, my class has been working their way into Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Funny how much I love the play, and how challenging I find teaching it. This time through, I'm trying to apply two brain-based strategies that have been serendipitously orbiting around my professional circles:

1. Using pre-assessment of knowledge to determine an appropriate point of entry into the content and skills, and as a way to activate students' long-term memory.

2. Per an international and longitudinal study of math classrooms, employing not a specific set of pedagogical strategies, but strategies that I know get students engaged in my class.

So I started the first day with a "quiz," which never really has any consequence in my class:
What do you know about Shakespeare's life?
Where and when did he live and write? And what do you know about these times?
Name as many of his plays as you can.
Make a list of the Shakespeare plays you've read. Then, for each:

* Summarize the plot
* Describe the main characters
* Make a comparison to another story, film, or experience

Can you make any observations about Shakespeare's language?
Is it more important to follow a parent's wish than follow your heart?
What do you know about love?
Is it okay to be with somebody because they have things you want?
What do you know about marriage?
Is it okay to be deceptive if it gets you what you deserve and maybe helps somebody else out too?
Are intentions more or less important than results?

I hoped to prove to students that they already have a lot of, let's say cultural, experience with Shakespeare, and they carry a lot of assumptions based on their prior experience with his works. I also wanted to get them thinking about the assumptions they have about some of the themes in MOV. Great discussion ensued.

Next, I decided to do all the "reading" (it's a play) of the text in collaborative groups. And I gave the groups a protocol that involved keeping a rather complex web of characters, plot, and language, and self-checking for understanding. With their assumptions recalled in the quiz, this collaborative reading has been a great success.

Interspersed with the collaborative reading sessions have been days working in self-selected character study groups. All the while students are helping each other build their MOV webs of understanding. And I've put the focus on engaging with the language, reading for language.

On the fourth day, every student used their webs to generate divergent questions about the plot, language, and characters. We put all the questions on the wall and used them to do a one-page character exploration.

Next move: active experiencing.

I'm left wondering what I've given up in handing so much over to the students. Intuitively, I can feel the heightened level of engagement. Have I lost something?

Examining the "Work" Day

2009-11-30T10:46:00.003-10:00

Since my last post, a description of a two-part free-choice reading final paper and project, my class has had two structured work days and one day of presentations (no homework over the holiday weekend)! My office partner and I were jokingly talking about the nature of project work days, how students often say, when asked about what they did in class, "oh nothing, we had a work day." Yet, these are the days that can actually be the most productive, in terms of individualized learning and formative assessment. I get to see where each student is in the process, how each student is chunking his/her work, where he/she is getting stuck and unstuck, etc. So I have a new attentive to these kinds of class sessions, and I invited my office partner, and fellow "Curriculum Resource Teacher" to visit on a work day (coincidentally).

He's visited my class one other time, that's how much context he has, in addition to our discussions of each others' classes. Here are some of the things that he noted and we debriefed:

1. Work days are based on a carefully scaffolded element of choice.

2. There has to be something that holds everybody together. In the case of my class: an exploration of textual themes using questioning and critical thinking.

3. There are more opportunities for significant interactions and observations, by students and teachers, during work days.

4. The high achievers are being individually challenged as appropriately as all other students in the class.

5. I highlighted some good project ideas. We wondered how these students felt about having their work highlighted. This kind of move demands the right kind of environment.

6. I had one-on-one face time with every student, a chance to discuss their projects.

7. Finally, we started pondering the number and nature of decisions made by teachers during one hour of class.

Mahalo Dan!

From SAT Prompt to Book Project

2009-11-18T14:02:00.002-10:00

Following a class of strategizing and writing SAT essays, I began Monday's class with a warm-up that asked students to identify the most effective and most challenging elements of executing a timed writing. Many professed new-found love for brainstorming and planning before writing. We also discussed what you lose in this kind of writing situation: revisions, time to write conclusions.

From there, I tried to make a somewhat tenuous transition from SAT to final free choice book projects. The link was that students would be using the spirit of SAT prompts to compose an ethical question to be used in exploration of their book. I spent a few minutes drawing a web diagram that went from universal theme/essential question to individual stories to specific characters and events.

The last fifteen minutes of class, students worked to frame these questions. They also worked on project proposals, for which I gave them several standard guidelines. Some interesting proposal so far:
-Make a telescreen message to the class for 1984.
-Build a kite for Kite Runner
-Create an eHarmony profile page for a book I can't recall.

Same, Same, SAT

2009-11-16T13:48:00.002-10:00

I have mixed feelings about Friday's class, mostly because it's a lesson on SAT essay writing that I really haven't changed much over the years. The 55 minutes are pretty simple. The students arrived with outlines prepared for each of the prompts. I gave them the option to write about one of the prompts for which they had prepared or write about a prompt they hadn't seen; they could decide how much challenge they wanted. The next 25 minutes is writing. As a guideline, I post this time management strategy on the board:

5 minutes - Analyze question, identify themes/ ethical dilemma, brainstorm applicable examples.

10 minutes - Prewrite: web/outline.

10 minutes - Write.

By the way, everybody who writes for 25 minutes gets full points.

After time expires, I arranged the students back into the same groups. They went to the collegeboard website and read two scored and annotated example essay and identified characteristics of more successful essays, at the same time, discussing what they had just written.

Homework was to revise their essay accordingly.

I'm clear with the students about my goals for them: be able to move through the writing process strategically; be able to see what's happening in the essays, successful and unsuccessful.

SAT Prep With Meaning and Meta-Cognition

2009-11-13T08:52:00.004-10:00

Yesterday's class was about bringing together the critical thinking skills we've been rehearsing, more or less, in isolation. I asked the students to consider the CT wheel similar to the color wheel, combine primary elements for infinite possible angles from which to think. Specifically, today was about recognizing patterns in the different books they're reading, naming those patterns, and making connections to other things they've read, learned in other classes, or experienced in life. The next move is to be able to then apply these patterns (concepts/themes/etc.) to new problems, in this case the ethical questions posing as SAT writing prompts.

As homework from the previous class meeting, students came to class prepared with maps or some other kind of visual representing and organizing a structural aspect of their book: timeline, narrative structure, character development, etc. (this was the move between the activity described in my last post and what's being described here). I assigned groups of 3 and 4 (I'll save a discussion of groupings I had in a small group with Michael Thompson for another post), and students spent the first five minutes of class sharing and articulating the ideas in their visuals. For the next ten minutes, each group had to come up with a list of common themes/elements derived from their individual maps/visuals. Step three was to spend five more minutes adding to each theme with examples from other readings and experiences that also illustrated the themes. Very good group discussions, practicing questioning for depth and breadth is paying off.

Once groups had these thematic lists prepared, I congratulated them on performing the cognitive process necessary for preparing to address a question at hand or, in this case, write an SAT essay. For five minutes or so we returned to a diagram of input-working memory-long term memory from Willingham's Why Students Don't Like School? I argued that an SAT prompt presents them with a pattern/theme, they need to identify it, then retrieve relevant examples from their long-term memory. Finally, they put together a set of coherent ideas making connections between their own reading and experience and the imposed theme. As a final exercise, each group had ten minutes to outline each of three current SAT practice essay prompts, a little bit of a race.

Today, we rehearse writing essays and examine the components that score well. I'm actually not all that interested in teaching SAT writing, but I like shaping into a cognitive rehearsal, meta-cognitive exercise, and fun little competition. And really, I was surprised by pretty decent prompts, easily comparable to real life dilemmas.

Reading as Writers

2009-11-12T13:06:00.003-10:00

My sophomore English class is in the middle of a free-choice book project. The question for me is: what happens during class time? How is this project not simply an independent project? So, for the first week, we're reading as writers for universal elements (there's been a lot of build-up to this all quarter).

We stared with first sentences. In groups, students did what I call: sentence-level work. Basically, we ask: what can we learn from the first sentence? In what order are the ideas presented? What's the point of view? What do we learn about time? And what questions does the first sentence beg us to ask?

Every cycle, students submit a one-pager of their choice. In conference, I point out two things that they've done well, and give them one thing to work on for the next one-pager. This cycle, the twist was to start with the first sentence (as opposed to an idea or question). They had to write a first sentence based on the first sentence of their books. Then their group members did the same sentence-level work with each student's sentence. The writing task became figuring out how to write the rest of the one-pager with the awareness of audience, from which they already had comments and expectations, and questions.

The next move was to identify, in the same group, three passages that were especially interesting for some reason, in each book. Together, the group had to discuss what the author did to create the effect, then give the writerly move a creative name. Of course, they had to incorporate three of the moves into their own writing.

Here are some of my fav first sentences:

"I'd be lying if I said I knew what I was doing."
"Stars will explode."
"We see what we imagine."
"Back when hairdos were higher and clothes were brighter and dancing required skill, Scanty Sanctuary was where juveniles would be after the sun set."

Yes, the sentences are fun. But what I learned was that to scaffold some writerly risk-taking paid off with a lot of purposeful student writing.

On The Fifth Day...

2009-09-04T12:23:00.003-10:00

I've been reading (slowly) this book, Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, about how people make decisions. And I've been struck by how many ideas from the book are applicable in my classroom. So today, on the fifth day of class, I'm going to try something, not revolutionary, but different than I've done before.

Throughout the first week of school, I haven't touched the course syllabus (we call it the Expectations). Instead, I've been telling my class each day that I'm "showing" them what the course is all about with the kinds of activities we're doing. Today, I want to present the students with a set of bullet points summarizing the points I was trying to make, and I want to use that to lead into a discussion of grading policy and expectations.

In his book, Ariely has a chapter specifically about expectations, and the power they have over the way we go on to react to something. He runs several experiments where he "primes" peoples' expectations, which affects the way they make further decisions. For example, he asks people to recall the Ten Commandments before giving them an opportunity to cheat without getting caught. Those in the control group, not asked to recall the 10 C's, do cheat. Those that think about the 10 C's don't cheat. Mind my oversimplification. So that's what I'm going to try in my class.

To begin with, I'm going to give a short quiz, questions ranging from what does it mean to learn to what should homework assignments be to how should classmates help each other. Then, I'm going to to talk about my expectations, the Expectations. I have no idea whether anything will change.

My plan is to do something similar for each of the more important moments, projects, and assignments throughout the semester. It's not really something I didn't do before. I've always had the "anticipatory set," but it's a shift in rationale and focus. It's a move towards ownership and relevance.

2009-08-31T11:20:00.002-10:00

I'm in a new group this year called the Curriculum Resource Teachers (formerly Technology Resource Teacher), and our role is to support professional development and best practices. We have a new physical space for all kinds of work and collaboration. Although we're figuring it out as we go, it's clear that we want to re-define how a group of teachers works together. A colleague and I were given the job of assigning some homework for the group that in some way gets us working and thinking differently. He suggested this new talk by Dan Pink. So we're pretending that every time Dan says "business" what he really means is "school." And we're asking our fellow CRTs to think about what his case has to do with schools? What does it have to do with how we think about professional development and supporting teachers and students?

If there's time to watch the 18:00 talk, here is an article for juxtaposition on the power of free-choice reading programs.

Starting Fresh Again

2009-08-27T13:12:00.002-10:00

I haven't posted to this blog for a long time for good reasons: the birth of my first child and a master's program and project. But the master's is done, and we have a babysitter during the school day. So here I am.

If you've ever seen this blog before, you might have noticed that all the sidebar items are gone, the links, the bookmarks, the pictures, and whatever other clutter I had there. I no longer have a twitter account; I came keystrokes away from deleting my facebook account; and I don't look at my google reader feeds anymore.

Instead, I'm holding myself accountable to a clear vision and focused minimalism. I'll be writing about my classroom and the work of creating a professional learning community at my school.

So today is the first day of school, and I used the same simplified approach to planning my sophomore English curriculum as to reviving this blog. With every move and activity I planned, I demanded to know whether it was necessary in accomplishing my goal for the class. Everything else had to go. There are some basic moves that good readers, writers, thinkers, and speakers make. These moves can be practiced in infinite combination. That's what I want to do.

My goal for today's English class is simple: students start thinking about the responsibilities of being a learner and start practicing one of the habits of mind of a good learner, asking questions. To warm-up, I'm asking students to define "learner" in their own words. What are they bringing to the table? What are their assumptions? Then, for both fun and substance, I'm showing this clip, followed by discussion of the concept of process, practice, and finding meaning.
And to introduce questioning, I'm using an activity called "7 Minute Interviews." It's simple. One student asks questions to keep the other student talking for 7 minutes, then switch roles. After the 14 minutes, students write together about the process. Where did they start? Where did they end up? What observations can they make about the questions and answers and process? Their homework is to carry around a sheet of paper to write down all the questions they think about for the next four days (until our next class).

Links 1-12-09

2009-01-12T14:43:00.002-10:00

A Whole New Mind Project - I'm trying to adapt this project to The Poisonwood Bible.

Learner vs. Curriculum-Centered - A question I ask myself daily.

21st Century Handouts - I think that's an oxymoron, but it's useful.

Online Reading - Glad to see somebody else struggles with online reading the same way I do.

Links 1-8-08

2009-01-08T09:56:00.003-10:00

Here are some links that I've found useful. They all came to me via Twitter. Thanks.

The Digital Narrative - A nice one-stop for resources and ideas for creating diginarratives. I wish I would've found this link before my students started final project.

The Online Disinhibition Effect - My Plan B is steering me towards the social culture of technology at my school. This is a pretty interesting skim.

Blog Design 2009 - In '08 cybersprawl got me down. I like minimalism and try to keep my online activity managed through a single-point of entry. This post has me inspired to reorganize.

Brainy Flix - A cool idea/contest for vocabulary or any other concept.

(Re)Creating Culture: Cell-Phone Novels

2009-01-07T13:26:00.004-10:00

Last year, our freshman English sub department decided to stop teaching The Odyssey. This year is being spent reevaluating the kinds of literature that make sense for our technology-enhanced students. I don't teach the course this year, so I'm not sure what they're finding out. I was the leader of the group throughout the process, and sometimes I feel a pull, a guilt, for abandoning a classic, especially one that has meant so much to me at different times in my life. But I spent a chunk of time today reading an article that Bruce forwarded to me. It's from the New Yorker and takes a fascinating look at Japanese cell-phone novels and how they've shaped culture and modern publishing. All that, of course, interesting. But what got me thinking, or what aligned with what I think about a lot, is down near the end of the article, a comparison of cell-phone novels to The Tale of Genji. Here's an excerpt:

“The Tale of Genji,” considered by many to be the world’s first novel, was written a thousand years ago, in the Heian period, by a retainer of Empress Akiko at the Imperial Palace, in present-day Kyoto. The Heian was a time of literary productivity that also saw the composition of “The Pillow Book,” Sei Shonagon’s exquisitely detailed and refined record of court life, and a wealth of tanka poems. We know “Genji” ’s author by the name Murasaki Shikibu—Murasaki, or Purple, being the name she gave her story’s heroine, and Shikibu the name of the department (Bureau of Ceremonial) where her father at one time worked. Told episodically, and written mostly in hiragana, as women at the time were not supposed to learn kanji, it is the story of Genji, the beautiful son of the Emperor by a courtesan, who serially charms, seduces, and jilts women, from his rival’s daughter to his stepmother and her young niece Murasaki. “Genji” is the epitome of official high culture—it is to the Japanese what the Odyssey is to the Greeks—but some have noticed certain parallels with Japan’s new literary boom. “You have the intimate world of the court, and within that you have unwanted pregnancies, people picking on each other, jealousy,” the managing director of a large publisher said. “If you simply translate the court for the school, you have the same jealousies and dramas. The structure of ‘The Tale of Genji’ is essentially the same as a cell-phone novel.”

Yesterday, I was working on the "technology's effect on school culture" section of my Plan B literature review, and it got me thinking about how we might start to build unpredictability and cultural change into curriculum. For example, the guiding questions for our freshman English course are: Who Am I? How does my use of language shape me? What if they started to sound more like: Who Am I in person? Who Am I online? How does my creation of digital media and text shape?
Our sophomore questions are: What kind of world is this? How should we live in it? What about: What kind of world is this? How does technology shape and change our world? I don't know, something to that effect.
Point is: I get excited about the idea of taking classic sensibilities (literary structures, as discussed in the NYer article) and holding them up to modern uses of language. I moved a little in this direction this past semester by asking my students to analyze facebook correspondence as a way to improve the way they give feedback to each others' writing and ideas on blogs.

New Year, New Ideas From Literature Review

2009-01-06T13:25:00.007-10:00

Winter break was nice. A trip to the mainland always makes me appreciate returning to the islands and to my work. While in the Bay Area, I had the opportunity to spend some time with a friend and colleague who's working in an education policy doctoral program. He's certainly busier than me, but we could commiserate over our respective grad school experiences thus far. We both agreed that's it's really hard as teachers to understand the sterile nature of education research. For some reason, we know that it "just doesn't work that way in a real classroom." So what's the purpose of the research. I find myself, 30 pages or so deep into writing my literature review, asking the question:

What can my school do with the research I'm reading and writing about?

How do I reconcile my own mistrust of numbers and standards based research findings?

How can I, once reconciled, translate the findings into a relevant recommendation?

My plan B project began having something to do with testing the viability of Tablet PCs in our evolving one-to-one laptop program. Four months later, the project has become an observation of our program's current reality and a set of next steps that I'm hoping will be useful in shaping the vision and implementation of 1700 laptop strong program.

An hour a night, I'm building a set of contentions about how a school might start thinking about a program of the sort we've committed to. And here's an attempt at sorting out and presenting some of the emerging themes:

-Technology is changing our culture in predictable and unpredictable ways. Introducing and "integrating" technology into schools will change school culture. There is a capability for transparency and meta-cognition unattainable up to this point in schools. Content is not scarce. Teachers can be bypassed in acquiring information. Teaching becomes more about learning how to learn, and learning how to make sense and meaning of information.

-Most of what schools have done with technology up to this point has been digitizing what they've always done. Social networking, collaboration, and communication are the real transformative technologies. While teaching and learning has been a traditionally isolated activity.

-The barrier between school and the outside world has been broken down. See cell phone videos of school hallways on YouTube; read real-time Facebook updates, for example.

-High expectations and standards can easily start to mean taking on more tasks, since technology continues to automate and cut down the time it takes to accomplish tasks.

-Committing a school to technology is committing to the unpredictable. That's hard to quantify.

-Ostensibly technology in schools was supposed to improve achievement. It's not having that effect, in general. But it is having an effect. What is it? What can/should we do with it?

-The biggest factor in a technology (delete the word "technology" because it's really about teaching and learning) program's success is in a school's ability to provide meaningful professional development and teachers' willingness to embrace school cultural change.

These are not my opinions necessary. They are themes that have emerged across the educational research. Now I have a set of look-fors to carry around with me on my campus. We've said that our one-to-one program will make learning more flexible, collaborative, and individualized. But what does that mean? And how does it intersect with what the research is reporting? How can we contribute what we're learning? The school culture will change? What change are we anticipating and or steering our school towards?

For A Friday: My Blog Wordle

2008-12-12T13:31:00.007-10:00

Yesterday, in a sophomore English meeting, we broke into small groups to identify themes in quotes we all collected from our common reading: Proust and the Squid. With my partner, a conversation began to take shape around these questions: at what point does English class become effective communication class? In an English class, is the highest priority a students' development as a pen-to-paper/finger-to-keyboard writer? Or, is it more important for students to engage with and grasp the concepts and complexities of stories and essential questions? How important is the act of writing? Is dictating to a computer the same? Is it of equal value to us if a student does a better job expressing the complexities of an idea with a multimedia project vs. a written essay? And more questions along those lines. Of course, we have no answers...that's good. But the discussion of awareness of one's own use of language and the visual-ness of the digital world reminded me of what I'd seen on some blogs lately: Wordle. What a cool way for a student/writer to get a sense of the kind of words they use and how they create a certain kind of impact. Here's a Wordle for this blog:

Just Read Some Books And Call It A Class

2008-12-11T13:31:00.004-10:00

Today at lunch, several colleagues and I were discussing a unit in our freshman and sophomore English courses known as the limited free choice book project, which equates to varying levels of choice depending on the teacher. I like to think of the way I frame the project in my class as "guided" free choice. The book choices are not limited or governed by me, but I move the students through a process focusing on making an informed choice about the book they're going to read.

Anyway, what I want to post about today is what I offered to the group over teri-tofu and chicken long rice soup: a class that was simply independent reading and blogging. This idea comes after a very successful three weeks of guided free choice reading and blogging in my class (and a free choice project). After the process of choosing books, we studied facebook and came up with a protocol for leaving comments and expanding others' ideas with conversation. This led to some really impressive student blogs. In addition, we studied the elements of books: first chapters, centers of gravity, questions that authors seem to be trying to answer in their chapters, metaphorizing, amongst other things. It didn't matter that we weren't reading the same stories because we had a common language for talking about literature. Along the way, students get a sense of their reading interests, strengths, and challenges, monitored and guided by me when necessary. I used the metaphor of a book universe that they create and explore. And it was all about using brain research to scaffold activities offering students differing paths to literacy and expert reading.

So many heads in books.

So, for the course I'm imagining, my colleagues challenged me on whether students could read graphic novels, children's books, Twilight and Harry Potter. The classic questions. So I thought I'd have them read from all genres: fiction, non-fiction, classic, graphic novel, fanfiction, etc., in any order they please. This is going to lead me to learning more about fanfiction, as well as books that accompany video games.

Are there courses like this out there? What do they look like? How well do they work?

Schools Of The Future Debrief Part 2: Innovation Management

2008-12-10T11:36:00.005-10:00

I keep thinking about the concepts from Don Richardson's breakout session on "innovation management," in an attempt to transfer them to my K-12 school context. Richardson is Microsoft's Innovation Manager and is responsible for making the capturing of new ideas part of the work flow process at Microsoft. Their biggest fear is that good ideas walk out the door everyday just because somebody decided not to listen. He made the following claims before describing Microsoft's "idea grab" system.

-Research and development does not mean innovation. Innovation needs a shared framework.

-The best ideas come from inside organizations but have no process for being nurtured.

-The least amount of good ideas are generated externally.

-It's important to have a culture of innovation.

Microsoft's Process Looks Like:

Sounds a lot like the elements of critical thinking to me. So any employee can access this innovation process via portal/social network/collaborative workspace. And each idea gets entered, tracked, tagged, and peer reviewed as it moves its way through the process.

What if I had something like this interactive innovation database as part of my class curriculum? Students could enter ideas for learning opportunities and environments, and we could collaboratively work on them. The course would be collaboratively designed and amorphous.

In this spirit, today, I asked a student that I know is interested in architecture to think about and sketch his ideal classroom. We'll see what I get.

Or what if we had something like this as a network of teachers in a school (or across many schools). We'd build curriculum collaboratively. I could go back to ideas of teachers from 10 years ago and work with them with a fresh perspective. Maybe the school just wasn't ready for the idea, but now they are...

Don pointed to some examples in education:
Cosmic Blogs - for younger students
Lego Mindstorm
Both are examples of what Richard called "open innovation."

Other examples and ideas?

Schools Of The Future Debrief Part 1: "Disrupting Class"

2008-12-09T12:50:00.002-10:00

Micheal Horn was the first keynote speaker at the conference (and one that made an impression on me), there to discuss the ideas in his book Disrupting Class, co-authored with Clayton Christensen (link's to their blog). Horn began with the question: why do successful organizations fail? This anchor question led to a discussion of the theory of disruptive innovation. Basically, that technology moves faster than what people need and/or want. So real innovation happens when there are areas of non-consumption that are ripe for a new model, new way of being. And this led to his discussion of technology in education.

He says, and so does all of the latest education research that I've been reading, that computers in classrooms have essentially failed, they haven't made a difference. At best, the most digital of conventional schools are simply digitizing the same old teaching and learning techniques. Or, they're cramming disruptive technologies into old paradigms. Sure, small gains have been made in small pockets (charter schools mostly). But on the whole, not much meaningful innovation in schools.

In his slides he presents an argument for 50% of education being online by 2019, using some pretty complex graphs and charts. The basis for this contention was mainly the usual suspect: mandates vs. the way we really learn. And, that what are disruptive technologies now will reach innovative status in education by 2019 or so. In online education, as the technology and vision catch up, it's easy to see that I could teach all 18 students in my sophomore English class, for example, according to their individual learning styles and needs, and I could track those learning needs, and teach them how they learn best and how to be the best learner they can be.

In addition, Horn listed areas of non-consumption in education, just waiting for a little educational entrepreneurship:
-Credit Recovery
-Drop Outs
-AP courses
-Schedule Conflicts
-Homeschool and Homebound Students (over 2 million of them today)
-Small Urban and Rural Schools
-Tutoring
-Pre-K

He goes on to name areas of global education non-consumption:
-3 million worldwide that don't attend primary school
-200+ million worldwide that don't attend secondary school
-Budget Pressures
-Barriers of distance, security, and infrastructure

Finally, Horn named some examples of places and companies that seem to be getting it:
-Singapore
-K-12 ed in Dubai
-Rubicon
-Mobile Solutions
-NACOL

Now excuse me while I go start planning my online school:)

Jam Session Learning

2008-12-08T11:52:00.006-10:00

For me, going to a conference is not really about the conference, per se, it's more about the juxtaposition of the travel, conference events, visits with friends and other schools, and mostly stepping outside of individual school context for a fresh perspective. So while I'll go on to post and share about some specific conference sessions and related reflections and ideas, I first want to frame those posts with some of the extracurricular experiences I had while spending 8 days in my Washington state hometown and commuting by ferry boat each morning to the Schools of the Future World Summit hosted by Microsoft.

One of the highlights of my trip (besides the conference) was spending an afternoon and evening with two of my best friends. The three of us went to school together K-college, and spent just about every free minute outside of class in any given basement, writing music in the form of several permutations of rock band. We called ourselves Injured By Green, then Wish Cotton Was A Monkey, then The Chucks.

I bring this up for two reasons:
1. In the process of writing the literature for my MEd Plan B, I came across a metaphor for learning in the 21st century that I've been expanding ever since: "Jam Session Learning." So I talked about this with my buddies, one the leader of a development group for a high profile technology company, the other a professional jazz musician. Amongst a lot of ideas, several floated to the surface for the purpose of this post.

First, having a band sticks out to all of us as one of the most significant learning experiences of our "school" careers. Our jam sessions were a time and place to debrief and process all the information we had gathered during the day or week, and make something new, make sense of it. And for contrived school projects, we had a natural group of diverse learners playing off each others' strengths and compensating for challenges. We remembered taking our English class vocabulary list and writing song lyrics around them. Similarly, as high school freshman, it was hard to get into the music scene in our little county, so we decided to put on our own rock show, giving our band a place to play. In the process, we had to acquire a venue, rent a PA system, hire the bands, market the concert, and have a cause. We did all of this ourselves, and by the end of the show, each band (6) walked away with over $1000 and we donated truckloads of food to our local Food Bank. Funny that we didn't really think anything of this experience until later in life, as I'm hearing about schools like Hip Hop High and High Tech High. The concert bleeped on our collective radar screen when a Facebook group popped up for people throughout the years that had in some way been a part of the music scene in our county, and the concert was the subject of random reminiscing. These are concepts that I plan to explore in more depth as I synthesize my conference week and blog here.

Reason #2. I haven't blogged much lately. I think it started to feel like it wasn't part of my job, just something extra. I'm going to grad school full-time and teaching full-time and expecting a child for the first time. But mostly I've let myself get stuck in a place that David Foster Wallace describes in "The Nature of the Fun." Basically, he describes how writing starts off as really fun because it's honest. Soon, once an audience develops, self-consciousness challenges the original fun. The writer has some expectation of the audience's expectations, and just like that, the writing becomes "shitty."

So every year, my band entered the school talent show. Freshman year, we were the defending champions. During the rehearsal, there was a double controversy with our performance. First, we wanted to play two songs but were only allowed one. Second, we had a particular lyric that was objectionable to the school, not because of any "swear" words just because of the idea. Naturally, we problem solved and made a tough decision. We used a cymbal roll to make two songs into one; and, we said we'd change the lyric, but on stage, we didn't change it.
I'm not inspired to be inappropriate, but after the SOTF conference, I've realized how significant this blog is to my professional development and how important it is to remember the nature of this fun.

Socrates Would Go... 2.0

2008-10-15T13:20:00.003-10:00

I've been dropping knowledge from Proust and the Squid in just about every conversation for the last week or so, and using the research and questions to drive my lesson planning. I'm only 90 pages deep but just finished a section about Socrates's protests of written language. It's not in front of me to quote (and I gotta blog when I have time) but he essentially said that written language will destroy the memory, for one, and that it gives words and ideas an authority that they shouldn't necessarily be afforded. Dialogue, on the other hand, requires memorization and analysis of all hitherto cultural knowledge, and leaves ideas up for challenge and revision. Wolf points out that Socrates's concerns are the same as our modern concerns about digital literacy and communication.

But there's a different comparison that has me thinking and questioning. She also points out that Plato, all the while, is putting Socrates's dialogues to writing. He had a better guess at what might be possible with the written word. Socrates didn't live long enough to see writing past its infancy. That's where I find myself and my school one year into a one-to-one laptop initiative. There are so many issues: distraction, bullying, superficial knowledge, reliance on Google, memorization-what's that. And there are maybe just a few places where the integration of technology has made better, after the cost-benefit analysis, teaching and learning. And mostly, I think we find ourselves doing the same things, just digitally.

I find myself in a funny place, between the two camps. I love my noteback and paperback, but don't have whole poems or books memorized. I can see the benefits of digital literacy, but how do I balance it all, helping my students navigate a new form of communication meaningfully. Sometimes it feels like a lot of guesswork, in the company of Plato, I guess I can deal. I think Socrates would have a blog too, since the written word has been networked. Authority of voice and content is a different matter now. Conversation doesn't necessarily entail only the auditory.

Can't wait to make it through the next few chapters and the discussion of how to purposefully teach new and old literacies.

"Bawds of Euphony"

2008-10-07T13:15:00.003-10:00

Today, we had a Sophomore English: Critical Thinking sub department meeting. There are ten of us, and we take turns each meeting running through a lesson from our respective class. Hopefully, the lesson leverages our one-to-one laptop environment in some way. The lesson today was a critical thinking exercise using Wallace Steven's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."

The subject of this post is not really the lesson, rather, something that came up within the activity. A very 21st century question. The activity had us in partners, posting ideas about a stanza to a Moodle forum, where other sets of partners answer meta questions about our original ideas.

My partner and I had stanza ten, which includes the phrase "bawds of euphony." Better look that one up. As a phrase search, Google takes us straight to a scholarly (or maybe pseudo-scholarly) essay explicating the stanza. There we go. Being the fun-loving English teachers we are, we continued the activity by looking up each words individually in the dictionary. These definitions helped us form our own idea.

So the question is: how do we teach critical thinking if students have easy access to somebody else's (an expert's?) critical thinking?

It doesn't work to say "don't use those sites." That'll be as effective as scaring students away from Sparksnotes.

Finding somebody's thinking isn't the same as doing your own thinking.

My initial idea was, well, you do the activity. Then, you teach students how to conduct a scholarly search, find some materials, and hold them up to the class's discussion to identify similarities and differences.

BTW - that's a pic of an albino blackbird

Reinventing My Job

2008-10-06T14:19:00.004-10:00

Well, I've been busy, and the blog was one of the first things to neglect. But I've realized that its penchant for helping me reflect and synthesize is actually exactly what I need. So I'm starting with what I'm doing for my school this year and the big questions for each project.

Project
Leading a pilot of Tablet PCs in a school of all Macs. (This is also my M.Ed. plan B).
Questions
What do students and teachers gain/lose in a cross-platform environment?
What will it take to support?
What kinds of learners will benefit from a different interface? And how?

Project
Coaching 10th grade teachers in their first year of teaching in one-to-one laptop environment.
Questions
What kinds of technology enhanced activities support good teaching and learning?
What do we need to know about reading and the brain when we consider online texts and materials?

Project
Stay out in front of new and effective tools, practices, and research while being one of four Technology Resource Teachers in a high school with more than 150 teachers and 800 students in the one-to-one program.
Questions
How to balance?

2008-07-22T07:03:00.004-10:00

I've spent the last four days working pretty much non-stop on two final presentations. Up until I started this graduate program, I really hadn't used Powerpoint or Keynote very much, as a presenter or a teacher. But the slideshow format has been extremely popular with my instructors, giving me some time to fine-tune my skills and thoughts about the use of this tool. What I realized first, actually it was just reinforced, I already thought it, was that slides can be the most agonizing method of presenting information when they're full of bullet-points that get read back to you.

Luckily, I remembered a book that Howard Levin mentioned in a session at this year's Kamehameha technology conference in Honolulu: Presentation Zen. Promptly, I bought the book and started reading. I love the guidelines about not asking people to read slides and listen at the same time, including no more than six words per slide, and using high quality images that demonstrate ideas. Finally, Reynolds explains that if you don't need to be there to explain the slides, the material shouldn't be communicated in the form of a presentation.

What I've learned and practiced has me excited to bring presentations into my curriculum. Working on my own presentation has been the perfect critical thinking exercise, the decisions about the precision of words, the search for just the right image to convey emotion and idea, not to mention that preparedness to speak that all this preparation instills. And I'm wondering if there are others out there that use presentations as this kind of thinking exercise?

Dewey For Dummies

2008-07-18T08:36:00.003-10:00

This is education philosopher week in my grad program. And I'm busy working on an essay in which I'm supposed to examine, based on my readings, the role of independent schools and their intersection with public interest and purpose. The philosopher that's been most interesting to me is John Dewey, not because of his timeless influence on American schools but because of the contradictions between his philosophy and the way it's interpreted and put into practice.

Watered down, my understanding of Dewey's philosophy is that education has no end; it's an end in itself. The more education a person has, the better equipped he/she is to make decisions and live life based on a broad, global perspective that empathizes with the most peoples' needs and ideas. His explanation of the interdependence of the individual and society reminded me of my recent rereading of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and its discussion of the same interdependence, not the individual, not the whole, something else. Dewey attempts to do away with the usual duality in education.

In practice, Dewey's vision looks like a series of ever-expanding, diverse experiences (ideas and interactions included). And what strikes me, based on my experience as a public school teacher in the NCLB era, is that this is exactly what public school is not, in many cases. Diversity is valued as a buzz word but not a reality; variety in ideas is neglected for practice of testable skills and aptitudes...

After A 4-Month Vacation

2008-07-17T13:50:00.002-10:00

It's been exactly four months since my last post, at which point I was feeling like I'd lost my focus. Originally, I started this blog to figure out whether it was viable to use with my students. It was/is. Then, I joined in with others writing about educational technology. That still interests me but it's confining as I'm not really a tech person; I'm a teacher, and now I'm getting an M.Ed. in private school leadership. I can feel my role and perspective transforming daily.
I've missed my blog the whole time but also felt as though it had taken time away from some of the things that I love and need for balance, namely surfing. But the graduate program has helped me see blogging differently. And being a student again in a program that's condensed an entire year of course work into six intense weeks has taught me a lot about myself as a learner, and even more about being a student in the 21st century. Needless to say, I have a lot to talk about, perfect time to revive WatsonCommon.
Related to keeping this blog, what I know about myself is that I need routine and commitment. I can't just say I'll post when I have something to post. So my renewed commitment to this blog is 500 words (max), 4 times a week. We'll see how that goes…
I want to start today by relating one thing I've been experiencing as a student, and hopefully some of you (if you're still out there) will have some anecdotes to share too.
A few weeks ago, I skyped from Hawaii to Boston with my colleague as he was giving an introduction to web 2.0 tools during an edtech conference session. He wanted me to talk about my favorite web2 tool and give some examples of how I use it. I went with wikis because I think they're so flexible, easy, and secure. I talked a little about global collaborations I've been a part of, and I described how I'd started a wiki for my grad school cohort (the same 29 people go through all the courses and Plan B action research project together). I thought the cohort could share resources and notes, follow up with more discussion, and organize a resource to use forever. It' been a great exercise for me to see how students make use of the wiki. For the first five weeks (remember, only six), the wiki was me taking notes, occasionally somebody would send me something they thought would be worth posting, and I would post it. But late last week, and more and more this week, others are starting to post links and ideas. The lesson for me is that when I ask my classes to use wikis, which I've done a bunch of times, I don't really know what I'm asking them to do because I had never done it until now. Does anybody else have experience using a wiki? I think it's different than using it with a professional learning community.

My Wife Wrote The Post I'd Been Working On. And I Had A Blogger Format Blowout

2008-03-17T14:34:00.004-10:00

My wife made her first iMovie as part of the learning differences/student support fellowship work she's been doing this year. The film asked students and teachers to address the same four prompts:

1. Describe a successful learning experience.

2. Describe an unsuccessful learning experience.

3. Describe the steps you take to learn something new.

4. An effective learner is...

Some thought-provoking patters emerged, as summarized in my wife's post.

Remixing Curriculum: An Interview With Lisa Stewart

2008-03-12T08:58:00.008-10:00

Last month, I had the opportunity to attend the Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco. The areas of focus were: brain plasticity, learning styles, reading development, emotional responses, and mindsets. If you're interested in more details in these areas, I've been posting my notes, albeit slowly, to Watsoncommon. What I want to write about in this post is a question I asked at the conference for which there wasn't a research-based answer.

It goes like this:

I was in a session about engaging students emotions with curriculum and leveraging their brain's social needs with activities in class. As you can imagine, the examples covered in the session were things like group work, task-specific stations, anticipatory sets that give students the opportunity to generate the essential questions for a unit. And there was all kinds of brain research to show that these kinds of activities trigger the best hormone balance for long-term, meaningful learning to happen. My question was if virtual social environments and activities also create the same ideal brain chemistry for learning.

Apparently, there is no research in this area yet, according to the presenter. So at my school, this has become somewhat of a guiding question. What are effective practices with technology and what are the results? And there are a handful of teachers who are purposefully employing and reflecting on new kinds of activities with these questions in mind. To frame the creation of these activities, we've been using Marzano's research on effective instruction as structure: Identifying similarities and differences, Summarizing, Reinforcing efforts and providing recognition, Practice, Nonlinguistic representations, Cooperative learning, Setting objectives and providing feedback, Generating and testing hypotheses, Cues, questions, and advanced organizers. Let me know if you're interested in the full article.

Lisa, mentioned in my first guest post, is one of the teachers (she's a technology resource teacher too) designing and implementing activities in her class that not only use the technology but explore these essential questions. The other week, I subbed her class and learned about a remix project that she'd given to her students. It was an opportunity to create a nonlinguistic representation of their understanding of Holden Caulfield. In this podcasted interview, Lisa describes the design of the assignment, some observations of the products, and how it led to a different kind of essay. Also embedded below are some example projects, one of which she references in the interview. The Voicethread blew me away! Enjoy.

First Guest Post For Beyond School

2008-03-11T08:59:00.004-10:00

Well, I'm supposed to be guest blogging over at Beyond School starting today. But Clay and I are still working out some login problems. So I'm going ahead and posting what I will be posting over there:

How I Came To Blog: Talking Story As Integration

I work as, what we call here, a Technology Resource Teacher. Essentially, I'm an English teacher that's been willing to experiment with integrating technology into curriculum, and I've been asked to only teach one class so during the rest of the day I can collaborate with other teachers on all things tech. The high school side of my school has a brand new 1:1 program this year, and there are 4 others that do what I do to help 150 or so faculty (we have 3700 student K-12). What I quickly learned this year is that no matter how many and what kind of workshops we run, how many emails with links and descriptions we send, or who we bring to speak at our curriculum days (these are all amazing resources!), what works best and what people seem to appreciate most is one on one time to work together and talk story about classes, students, curriculum, and where the laptops fit. So I thought I'd do a little of that here in my first guest post. Congratulations Clay!

Two years ago, I hardly knew what a blog was, and, frankly, I didn't feel the need to spend any more time in front of my computer than absolutely necessary. Then, at the beginning of last school year (06-07), I was assigned to teach an upper level Composition course. Pretty generic title, which really should have read: creative non-fiction essay writing. In an English department of nearly 30 teachers, there was only one other person teaching the course that semester. Our weekly meetings were talking story about writing, student writing, the purpose of writing, authenticity of audience, amongst other Englishy (not schooly) topics. At some point Lisa, my colleague, started to tell me about having her students blog their compositions and journals. She explained the idea of a blogosphere, a network of writers interested more or less in the same topics, reading and commenting on each others' posts. Then, it was the concept of the blogroll, something called del.icio.us. Organically, the next move seemed to be to try this thing out for myself and my students. Where blogs seemed like they'd fit best was as digital commonplace books; we ask all sophomore to keep an analog version for a quarter to follow and reflect on essential questions and critical thinking exercises. That sounded good, and Watsoncommon began.

I realized a lot of things during the first few months of blogging. Namely, it could easily take over my life. But I welcomed the intellectual insurgency. I didn't write great stuff, but I had a reason (and an audience of 1, maybe 2) to pay patient attention to what happened during my day, in my class. I needed material. This went on, and in early 2007, my wife stumbled on a wiki where edubloggers and blogging classes were listing themselves.(Do you remember this one Clay?) Near the top: "B"eyond School, where there was a call for blogging classes to collaborate. I replied.

Creating our own 2-class blogosphere was a noble first effort, and some really interesting conversations emerged here and there. What became apparent after this collaboration was that the web 2.0 tools were more powerful than we knew, yet the challenge was the same as ever: getting students to be active participants in their own education. Clay's 1001 Flat World Tales writing project on a wiki came next. Being far more teacher-driven, the students had an easier time moving through the project. But Clay, Michelle, and I spent many weekends skyping at respective odd hours and driving the wiki for the kids. Not to mention we had committed ourselves to a grueling 6 week time frame. In the end, we had an annotated and podcasted trail of breadcrumbs, an ebook, some good stories, some engaged students, and a lot of new ideas for the next collaboration. Now, I'm a week deep in 1001 Flat World #2 with Deb Baker's class in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, and I'm getting far more sleep this time around.

Since that semester of enlightenment, it's been Moodle, Twitter, Diigo, Ning, the list goes on. Not to mention planning and implementing the vision for our 1:1 program. At some point a couple months ago, I found myself coming full-circle, away from the tools, widgets, and gadgets to stories. The story of collaboration, the story of communication, the story of empowerment, the story of sustainability and stewardship, the story of apprenticeship, the stories of learners. And the stories have me asking these questions:
What is an education?
How can we engage the emotions, passions, and original ideas of students more?
How does a large, successful independent school become a culture of technology?
How can we empower students with an understanding of the way they learn and then nurture it daily?

Okay, I Get It Know: Asynchronous Audio

2008-03-10T10:24:00.005-10:00

I sat down to do one thing and ended up doing something completely different. Planning to prep some podcastable media for my guest blogging appearance on Beyond School later this week, I transfered some voice memos that I'd captured on my iPod with my Belkin mic to my iTunes. And I realized that I have 31 untitled voice memo files that at some point I had grand plans for but now sit unrealized. So I decided to listen to a few seconds of each and give them searchable, intuitive titles. Well, a few seconds of each turned in to listening to entire conversations, class discussions, class readings of essays, tour guides from professional development trips, and so on.

This stuff is good. I've always known in theory that it'd be great to have an audio inventory of all the voices from a class or a conversation. But until today, I didn't understand how it could affect learning. I have a hard time getting into podcasting, in general. Not enough time, long episodes, unfamiliar voices, indulgent subject matter, etc. But all that was totally different when I started listening to familiar voices from my own experiences. I was right back on that trip to see Kent Koth at Seattle U's Center For Community Engagement; right back to that outdoor lecture with a docent at Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park; right back to those student-led Harkness discussions of The Poisonwood Bible; right back to close and active reading of creative non-fiction essays in composition last year. (I'm not even halfway through the voice memos at this point). And as a teacher, it's helping me find that elusive-at-the-two-weeks-before-spring-break center for my curriculum and projects. It's empirical, primary source material straight from my class, and in some ways it's a little different than the way my memory molded the anecdotes. As a student, I can only imagine how helpful this resource would be and the ways in which asynchronous audio can be leveraged as a learning tool.

flickr credit: mishkaoutofcontrol

Is A Culture Of Technology Synonymous WIth A 1:1 Laptop Program?

2008-03-07T13:53:00.003-10:00

Today I sat with a colleague and watched a webinar on emerging technologies and how to plan for them in a school context. One of the interesting ideas that was presented had to do with what they called mLearning, the m standing for mobile. One of the tools referenced was the U3 Smart Drive.
Carrying one around in my pocket all year, I had no idea that I could transport more than my files. What I learned is that I can store applications like Firefox and Skype. So the concept is that all I need is my drive, and I can plug into any computer anywhere and access my own apps and settings. Lots of implications. I wonder if there are schools out there leveraging these instead of asking their students/parents to pay for laptops?

PGC In Australia

2008-03-06T12:07:00.003-10:00

I'm not going to lie, Project Global Cooling in Hawaii was really stressing me out. I thought that maybe I had gotten myself into something I wouldn't be able to finish. But students have come to the rescue. We've got a club going. We're starting to gather sustainability projects and post them to the PGC site. Our concert planning continues to move forward. And best of all, PGC has led to new collaborations with schools around the world.

Yesterday's Skype with Jenny Luca's class in Melbourne, Australia came just in time. Lately, my days have been filled with meetings, leaving barely enough time for my own class, and next to no time for professional development 2.0. So thanks Jenny for inviting us to talk with your class about our school's sustainability initiative.

flickr photo credit: emptybelly

Technorati Tags: projectglobalcooling, collaboration

Schooliness is: Open Thread

2008-03-05T10:30:00.003-10:00

For awhile I've been reading Beyond School where Clay Burell uses the word schooliness in his description of his blog and personal learning mission. I've always felt like I knew exactly what he meant by it. But I was excited to see Wes Fryer's interview with Clay and his open thread invite to ruminate and define the word. I've actually had a hard time while thinking about it since it could easily become a list of complaints about constraints in our respective school contexts. Here are some of my ideas:

Schooliness is a system where grade negotiation is the main motivator for students to come conference and visit with teachers.

Schooliness is the void between what teachers know about how to learn and what students have to guess about how they learn.

Schooliness is the fear of evaluation when colleagues visit your classroom.

Schooliness is believing that there are certain texts that all students need to read.

Schooliness is teaching English as if all the students are on a literature professor career track.

Schooliness is the assumption that becoming a doctor or a lawyer is the pinnacle of academic accomplishment, and the purpose of secondary education.

Technorati Tags: schooliness, openthread, education, standards, school

flickr photo credit: duconihilum

Depth vs. Breadth: English and Technology

2008-02-28T14:26:00.004-10:00

Lately, I've had two thought experiments running in my mind, and now they seem to have converged into one theme: depth vs. breadth. First, my life as a technology resource teacher has changed dramatically since the beginning of the second semester. The backstory is that this is our high school's first year with a 1:1 program for freshman, next year sophomore, and so on.

So first semester, there wasn't a lot of action for me, just a few classroom visits to set up blog accounts or help an early-adopter with an innovative project. Besides that, with my reduced teaching load, I had at least a couple hours a day to read and comment on blogs, explore their links and ideas, employ them in my own class, and keep up with my own blog. I felt like I was really in the pocket of the educational technology wave.

Now, my department is off and running, leading the school in the ways they're employing technology: blogs, wikis, moodle, Ning, Diigo, del.icio.us. And my calendar no longer allows for that exploration time I described above. This is a really good thing! However, I find myself rushing around a lot, trying to fit it all in: exploration and implementation. And in my own class, I find myself less willing to give myself permission for new ideas to be messy and maybe even fail. Although just identifying this has allowed me to get back to being real with myself.

That's all just about the situation that has allowed me to extend my thinking to the question of breadth and depth in implementing technology in a school. What I mean is I could really get behind a schoolwide blogging initiative, and I could focus all my attention on figuring out how blogs can be educationally transformative in all kinds of ways. Or, is it good to keep pushing and pushing forward. Blogs are great in school, but there must be a bunch of other tools that are just as good and better.

It's easy to see that the answer is both. So I guess the question becomes how do you know when you've struck on something that you should keep around and build on?
Just needed to write it to think about it. I'm happy to surf it.

The second line of thinking is similar but has to do with text selection in freshman English. The first comparison is that every new thing for the past few year at least seems to have made sense to put into the freshman curriculum. Now, there's too much, and it's too disconnected. Each of us teachers pick from the menu something different, and leave out the rest. Or else, in the name of being a good soldier, we try to cram it all in. There's talk about a project-based common experience. And there's talk about the value of common reading. And there's talk about whether there are particular texts that freshman need to read. And again, all of it is really good, and it all should be included. So how do you pick the best of what's really great? In the end, I feel lucky that I'm in a place where I get to spend time considering such important questions.

And This Is 19th Century Education

2008-02-26T12:38:00.004-10:00

I've made it a goal to get back to posting to my blog every school day. So, not knowing what to post today, I took a scroll through my email and came across a strand that seemed to juxtapose nicely with yesterday's post. An 8th grade final exam from 1895 was being forwarded around and discussed. I'm not really interested in what it shows about education then and now, just thinking about the differences and similarities. Here it is:

Grammar (Time, one hour)

1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.

2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no Modifications.

3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.

4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb. Give Principal Parts of. lie, lay and run.

5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.

6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.

7. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)

1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.

2. A wagon box is 2 ft deep, 10 feet long! , and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?

3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?

4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?

5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton

6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.

7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per meter?

8 Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent

9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods

10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

U. S. History (Time, 45 minutes)

1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.

2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.

3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.

4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.

5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.

6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.

7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?

8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865

Orthography (Time, one hour)

1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?

2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?

3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, sub vocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?

4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.

5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e'. Name two exceptions under each rule.

6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.

7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.

8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.

9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.

10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)

1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?

2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?

3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?

4. Describe the mountains of North America.

5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.

6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S

7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.

8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?

9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.

10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.

Apparently, this test has been in circulation on the web for awhile. It's original intent was to show how education in America had declined since 1895. Here's some more discussion and background.

Flickr Photo Credit: Scott Crouse
Technorati Tags: education, 21stcenturylearning, standards, standardizedtests, school

This Is 21st Century Learning

2008-02-25T14:01:00.004-10:00

At my school, we're most interested in the question:
How does technology transform instruction?
Well, here's how:
Lindsea started blogging last year in my sophomore English class. Unfortunately, a lot of what she had to blog was my assignments. But the class also had opportunities to start their own conversations on their blogs, and we were lucky enough to blog with Clay Burell's class in South Korea. We were all trying to figure it out.
Fast forward to the beginning of this school year, I noticed that there are new items in my "students" Reader folder. A few students are writing on their own. A few more are using their blogs for other classes.
Lindsea becomes a sophisticated web2.0 regular. She write for Students 2.0 and organizes grassroots fundraisers using her networks.
Then she writes this post in which she describes Project Global Cooling, student-owned collaborative web space, and sustainability at our school. Within the conversation about her post, she connects with a middle school teacher in Qatar. They decide to collaborate. She Skypes with his class at 2:30 in the morning, teaching them about environmental issues in Hawaii, and what we're trying to do about them.
Now, she's planning her senior independent project for next year. Not only is the project going to be for her, but she's designing a project that will lay the foundation for other students here to find their own Personal Learning Networks.
Transformative.

Flickr photo credit: iurikothe
Technorati Tags: ProjectGlobalCooling, Lessonplans, differentiatedinstruction, sustainability, web2.0,

Curriculum Day With Alan November

2008-02-21T10:17:00.003-10:00

Alan November was here to address our faculty and parents on Tuesday, and lead small workshops with various groups yesterday. For the edtech set, it was confirmation of the power of connective learning. What was interesting to me was the discussion of how to get more people engaged in web communication and collaboration technologies, especially in a K-12 school with a democratic leadership structure, 4000 students, and a high school faculty of 150+. Essentially, he laid out six things that should be happening in classrooms:

1. There should be a curriculum review team made up of four students, assigned jobs like: writer, mixer, editor. They produce a podcast each week reviewing the lessons and content.

2. There should be a tutorial design team that creates screencasts for further review. Alan suggested using Jing for screencasting. (I used to use screencast-o-matic, but Jing can do more, and screencasts are easy to embed in a Moodle page or blog or anything else.)

3. Student questions should not be answered by the teacher. Instead students should be charged with finding the answers and using social bookmarking tools to organize resources. In addition, students teachers and students should become expert web researchers and create their own custom search engines for class topics and questions.

4. Three to four students should be official scribes for the class, collaborating to write and share notes in Google Docs.

5. Each class should have a global communications team, leveraging tools like: ePals, Skype, Technorati.

6. Students should manage RSS feeds relevant to curriculum and communications.

Learning And The Brain: Keynote by Larry Cahill Ph.D.

2008-02-14T16:19:00.003-10:00

I tried to tap into Dr. Cahill's research on emotional memories in my last post, but here are the notes I took during his keynote at Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco, which also addresses gender, hormones, and brain hemispheres. Some of my notes are in my own words and some phrases are Dr. Cahill's. I apologize for not quoting well here.

Basic Premise: Memory (the brain function) creates self. And, emotion disproportionately sculpts the brain. So, how, again, can we leverage this for effective teaching and learning? And how can this knowledge empower students?

Part I: Background – Brain Mechanism of Emotional Memory
•Memory is active, constructive, and based on orientation. Throughout the building process, perceptions are created.

•Amygdala is the structure in brain that's central for making strong memories of emotional events. It works together with stress hormone response: during and after events, feeds information back to brain. Amygdala works harder in emotionally arousing situations; doesn't care about neutral situations.

•Stress hormones enhance memory storage.

•New technique for measuring response is brain imaging, which is leading to awareness of difference between men/women brain.

•Activation happening on different sides of the brain: right side in men; left side=only women in response to stress hormone.

Part II: Sex Influences On The Brain

•What does it mean for education and learning?
•Classical difference, no debate:
On average men can rotate images better (visual fluency).
Women have more verbal fluency.
Many differences on the psychological level.

What about on the brain level?

1970 hippothalmus was difference.

Differences are ubiquitous
Incluences everything

Differences now:

Size of brain regions
Levels of neurotransmitter
Females have lower levels of serotonin
Women more depressed 2 to 1; drugs boost it for depression
Uncovering differences that aren't understood yet
Hippocampus cell experiments with knocking out molecules
Results in memory deficits in male mice, not female
Cell cultures – differences on this level

Neurons die, why?
Different depending on where they came from: male or female

Part III: The Blinders Come Off: Sex Influences On Brain Mechanism Of Emotional Memory
• Sexes are not two different groups; two groups with overlap
• What are the findings?

Right hemisphere is gist of situation
left hemisphere better at details
Amygdala can be blocked, beta blockers
Experiment with emotional story:

Females remembered gist
Men remembered details

There are memory differences:

Women have better memory than men in general
Better for details
Outperform on these kinds of tests
Left side is more engaged when emotions are involved
What about without emotional stories?

Amygdala works with left side in women, right side in men

more notes soon...

Technorati Tags: brain, research,, learning

Leveraging Emotions For Learning And Brain-Based Activities With The Cather In The Rye

2008-02-05T14:22:00.006-10:00

(This post has been under construction for a week (that's how busy it is here). Hence, the dates are off a bit)

I got back to Honolulu yesterday after attending the west coast Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco. There's a lot to process and disseminate after three days of learning about the latest in neuroscience research and how it's applicable to education and specific classroom practices. Of course, the first people I wanted to talk to about all this were my students. So I shelved Catcher In The Rye for a day (maybe for a few more days) to empower them with some understanding of how they can leverage their intelligences, learning styles, emotions, and the plasticity of certain parts of their brain. Here's what I did:

Activity:
Monday morning, I announced pop quiz on the first three chapters of Catcher In The Rye.
Brain-based connection:
As they reacted in fear to my announcement, I explained that I wanted to let them in on some secrets about their brain and the way they learn. Their emotional and physical reaction to my announcement was a change in their brain chemistry. Cortizol had washed their brain, hindering their ability to learn and access their long-term memory. The best thing they can do about it is drink water.

Activity:
I explained that this was a two part quiz, and there was no way to fail. Part 1: List ten summary statements about what they read over the weekend. Look for details.
Part 2: They had to clap out a rhythm together, then go around the circle giving new facts about the chapters.
Brain-based connection:
The rhythm engages the right brain, the summaries engage the left. To do both forces connections between the two hemispheres, which foster better long-term memory learning. Not to mention that it was fun and active. We continued to talk about leveraging their brain chemistry and identifying what they can do for themselves.

Transition:
Now that I had their interests piqued, I wanted to connect more brain secrets to effectively exploring The Catcher In The Rye, so I asked them to free write about specific emotional highs and lows in their lives. The homework extension was to collect visuals symbolic of their highs and lows and construct a "high/low" collage.

Extension/Connection:
The next day, we had a gallery walk to view everybody's collages. Specifically, I asked the students to look for and record patterns they see in the collages. Next, I asked them to translate their observations into questions about what it's like to be a teenager. They came up with questions like: why are friends so important to happiness? Why are so many emotional lows connected with anxiety over grades? What is the importance of outdoor activities in a person's life? And so on.
My pitch was that now that they are invested emotionally in a thinking about their experiences as a teenager, they are better equipped to interact with the novel they're reading.
Brain-based connection:
I learned that the most effective learning environment for teenagers is social, interactive, and emotionally engaging. Reading, as my students agreed, can easily be none of these if not properly framed. So not that they were engaged, I led them through some active reading strategies that would help create interaction with the text and put them at the center of the reading experience.
Questions
Assumptions
Observations
Inferences

more soon...

flickr photo credit 1: krischall
flickr photo credit 2: revcruz

Story of Stuff

2008-02-01T10:16:00.000-10:00

A lot has happened in my inbox this week. First, a few Commoncraft videos were passed around and discussed. Couple that with a workshop on creating and podcasting class lectures and multimedia through Moodle, and it's propelled to think more about teachers and students as producers, rather than consumers. So a group of colleagues and I were discussing the premise of Commoncraft, creating simple analogies and explanation of fairly complex concepts, AKA demonstrating understanding. And that rang a bell, demonstrating understanding is that measurable things we're always looking for from students. But it has to be authentic and relevant. So I realized, I guess maybe I already knew, that the work of teachers and students is becoming more about the back and forth creation and exchange of these kinds of learning objects that demonstrate understanding. That's all for Friday.
And, check out this amazing website and 20 minute navigable video: Story of Stuff

Language Barriers?

2008-01-30T13:37:00.000-10:00

Last week, I met with Alexander, head research consultant for the E-learning support project at the National Training Foundation for teachers in Moscow, Russia. He and Gregory, a vice principal he works with, were visiting our campus to learn more about the ways to get technology more integrated into their school culture. Today, I Bruce Schauble and I presented to a group of 26 visiting teachers from Beijing, China. In both cases, we gave a brief show-and-tell of the ways our school uses blogs, wikis, Moodle, and a few other software applications. And what's been most interesting to a few of the groups is the 1001 Flat World Tales Project.

What struck me today was that all of our schools, irregardless of our contexts, are asking the same questions about technology, and we all seem to be moving in the same direction. It's exciting to think about the network of schools that will soon be connected and collaborating. Here are the questions that keep coming up:

How can a school create an environment where technology enhances communication rather than creates a barrier, physical or otherwise?

How do we define responsible (mindful) consumption of media? How much time online is the right amount?

How does a school mandate integration of technology in classes without mandating it?

What does the support system look like for faculty and staff?

How are results measured?

How does a school manage their digital assets?

Notes On First Student-Teacher Course Design Collaboration

2008-01-29T14:17:00.000-10:00

Lindsey, of student2.0 notoriety, and I met today for our first work session. Our goal is to design and propose a new kind of course at our school, described on Twitter by Clay Burell. The idea is that students will create their own learning networks and apprentice in an area of interest. So far, we're also thinking that designing, maintaining, and modeling for a student network would be part of the course, as well as aggregating all the sustainability-related work that happens across our campus and figuring out how to best manage and publish it. We plan to podcast our meetings, and I hope we can create and post materials too. Just an update.

Mindful Consumption Of Media And Cyber Sprawl

2008-01-29T12:51:00.001-10:00

Since I started this blog and found a network of educators with which I collaborate, it's been a constant dialog with myself about my level of involvement in Web2.0. There are times, for the example, the past month or so, when I'm pretty much uninvolved besides working through my reader. And there are other times when I large chunks of my work days blogging, reading blogs, tweeting, etc. And then I spend weekends and evenings Skyping and collaborating and blogging. It's sort of the job I get paid to do, but sometimes it feels like web2.0 pulls me away from my immediate community and collaborators. And sometimes still, I sacrifice personal time to 'work.' I can see the benefits of balancing my teacher self at school and on the web. And lately, I've been taking inventory of all the places where I'm kind of involved and trying to prioritize and follow through before jumping into another project. I feel good about it, and I feel guilty and uninvolved about it. Okay, so what?

Well, I've written a little lately about structuring my class around communication competency levels, starting with words, then sentences, then dialogs, then paragraph, etc. Using this approach, I hope to teach a little grammar (all encompassing term for usage, conventions, punctuation, etc. And I'm still figuring out what I mean by it in this context), and I hope to help students find their voices by looking at the components. Okay, stay with me.

My wife just got back from a conference about adaptive technologies for differentiation. And speaking of words, she was sharing with me the taglines of the different seminars offered at the conference. And there was one that has helped me get this post out of my draft folder: Mindful Consumption of Media. I don't really know what the presentation was about, but just the words, in the context of my class's focus on the connotations of words, struck me. First, the idea of mindful as I know it is the slowing down of attention (I'll have to consult my copy of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind when I get home today), immersion and engagement as attention. I've noticed personally that when I work online, I tend to feel some kind of urgency to get it out there? Probably just me. Then, the word consumption. Do we use this word when we talk about reading books or attending live classes? There's something one-way about it. To me, it implies input without output (is web2.0 different?). Also, consumption is for the purpose of nutrition. I know I get tons of good stuff from the web, but are we teaching students how to watch what they consume and examine what they input? Lastly, media is so different now. I guess I think of media as being just a small part of a class a few years back. Now media of all kinds can make up the majority of a course and its curriculum.
Good to get these thoughts out, still need refining.

Work Flow, Lesson Design, And Differentiation

2008-01-28T17:58:00.000-10:00

When I started teaching I used to dread the mundane task of filling out the lesson or unit plan sheet: numbering the objectives, making sure they aligned with state standards, spelling out student objectives, breaking down the activities by calendar, tweaking the rubric to align with everything I just listed, and so on. It seemed to take away from the natural flow of a unit or lesson. And nobody really check on that stuff anyway, except when I put in three years of weeknights to get my "professional" teaching certificate.

A luxury of teaching at an independent school is I you really feel independent in the way I craft lessons. I no longer fill in numbers from a grid of skills and standards. Instead, I try to create as flexible and dynamic of a learning environment as I can, and I look to capitalize on the teachable moments. Not to mention, I have time to work with students individually during the school day. All this sounds great. In fact, I remember saying to myself and to some colleagues from the public school where I began my career that all of the excuses and reasons for students not being able to achieve were non-existent here.

Yet a simple word has changed the kind of attention I'm now paying to lesson design. The word, the title of this post, is work flow (is it one word or two?) I've heard it before but I'm hearing it a lot more now from laptop vendors, software companies, and teachers, and I'm starting to use it myself because, well, it flows. It just a way to define how we work, how we take and idea and turn it into a product. Very appropriate for 21st century learning since it's more about producing. I find myself talking about products: digital assets, learning objects.

Next move, I examine my own work flow. I think it's pretty standard. I have a small moleskin cahier that I carry everywhere. In it, I make lists and webs and brainstorms (I get the graphed paper). Then I have my notebook where lists become prose, then my blog, slideshow, word-processed document. Couple this with the results of my Strength Finder 2.0, and my work flow makes a lot of sense for how I think and my areas of strength. And as I think about the kinds of lessons that I create, they all follow the same framework as my personal work flow.

This is where I find myself as I write units in the second semester. How can I understand my students' work flows and write assignments that allow them to engage in a successful process? Are there steps that need to be in everybody's work flow? How should this affect the way I deliver information?

Reflections On The First Days Of A New Semester With A New Group Of Students

2008-01-25T14:41:00.001-10:00

Well, I'm feeling some pressure from Lindsea, and she channeled in some pressure from Clay to get my act together and start posting again. I was planning to. So I'll start with a somewhat counterintuitive observation from the first day of my new class.

I always begin with a new group by having them fill out some basic information on index cards. These cards serve several purposes: they help me get to know the students faster; they can be shuffled and arranged to help create small groups easily; and they can be shuffled for random, equitable questioning. So on the cards I have students write their names, AIMs, something interesting about themselves, a perceived strength in English, and something in English class that's most challenging that they'd like to work on this semester. Overwhelmingly (all but one or two students) wrote that they want to work on grammar. Here, we call it "architecture of a sentence."

I've taken their feedback to heart and am trying a new design in my second semester freshman English course. I'm adapting an idea that came from a colleague's question of what would happen is we set up our courses based around competencies, starting with words, then sentences, then dialogue, then paragraphs, and so on. As a class, I'm arranging each unit in the aforementioned sequence; and individually the idea is that students don't move on to the next competency level until they are proficient in the previous level.

In hopes that this approach will slow students down and help them pay more attention to the precision of language, here's what my class looked like this week: We started by listening to several selections of music, chosen for the singer's unique voice. Students created lists of words that describe the voices they hear ("what is my voice?" is an essential question of the course, and, I think, directly related to word choice and usage). From there, they used Visual Thesaurus to a)learn how to use the resource, and b)see the possibilities of words. They left with an assignment to write a narrative about themselves starting with the first line from The Catcher In The Rye (they don't yet know where the line comes from): "If you really want to hear about, the first thing you'll probably want to know is..."

The next class, I asked them to share their narrative in small groups and to keep a list of the most powerful words they hear in other people's narratives. Then the small groups had to chose five words from all their lists that they feel represent them the best. I collected these words in a document, and we framed them as descriptors and examples of our voice as a class.

The next question (today) is what is our school's voice? To explore this question, I had small groups navigate through the websites of several other independent schools from around the world, creating two new word lists: one list of words that describe the overall impression of the school' site, the second list of words that the school uses to describe itself. Over the weekend, I've asked them to complete the same activity with our class website. On Monday, the plan is to record everybody in the class reading all of our words and to use the recording as a soundtrack to a collaborative slideshow of pictures that represent our voices as individuals, a class, and school. I'm trying to accomplish a lot with this first collaborative mini-project. But my questions are: will this design allow for direct teaching of the architecture of a sentence in context with concrete steps, skills, and scaffolding? And, will the students think mindfully enough about their words, since there's no other consideration, like writing a paragraph, that they accurately describe our voices? We'll see; more to come.

I also have a ton of drafts ranging from cyber sprawl to my visit with Apple and Stanford two days ago. I'm still blogging.

3D Printing "Democratizing Innovation"

2007-12-14T13:50:00.000-10:00

Perspective Before Three Weeks Of Holiday Break Part 1: Marathoning and Apprenticeship Education

2007-12-14T11:58:00.000-10:00

I haven't posted in awhile, not because I haven't had anything to say, but because things here have been busy. The way my school's schedule works pretty much the entire semester needs to be wrapped up (please excuse the holiday pun) before winter break. When we come back in '08, we get about a week of class before finals week begins.
In the time between my last post and now, there have been a series of events upon which I'd like to reflect and that will hopefully provide me with somewhere to start when I come back from the mainland in January.

1. I finished my 3rd marathon on Sunday. While I was running, I couldn't help thinking about the experience as metaphor for the work I've been doing this year, and for the past 7 years, actually. The Honolulu marathon is known as the people's marathon. It prides itself on not having a finishing time limit. This year, the last finisher came in somewhere around 14 hours. While the winning time was around 2:17. The frontrunners would have eaten 3 meals and gone to bed by the time the last finisher makes it across the finish line. This is a lot like the experience of education in the 21st century. What I enjoyed most was making my way back to the finish line after crossing it myself and encouraging runners still on the course. And I think that's an important part of being an educator. It's a people's endeavor. Some are well trained, some aren't. Some finish sooner, some later. But the runner's high is the same. The feeling of accomplishment bonds all finishers.
This year, there was another interesting twist. It seems that the timing system failed, meaning everybody's times might be incorrect. And this really has made me think about the reasons I run. At mile 23 this year, I really didn't think there was any reason to run another marathon. But by today, now that I can walk down stairs unassisted, I'm already thinking about another race. In an undertaking like a marathon, does time really matter? It's just a way to measure what you've done. But is it measurable to anybody but me. This year I wanted to run a personal best, since the last marathon caused an injury that kept me from running for over a year. I missed that time (by my watch, not the official clock) by about 2 minutes. But I still feel like this was a much better race. I think I trained more efficiently, at healthier, enjoyed the experience, finished feeling good, and have been enjoying the recovery. Another metaphor that I want to remember as I encourage my students and colleagues.

2. Last week, after connecting via Twitter, I hosted Wes Fryer and Dr. Dana Owens for a day on our campus, meeting with Technology Resource Teachers and Director, as well as working with teachers to incorporate more authentic learning experiences. The conversations were, of course, excellent and edifying. But there was something else about that day that's been ineffable for me until I was able to juxtapose what I learned from them about their WWII Digital Storytelling project with several conversations with colleagues here. What Wes is doing, and what technology allows us to do is bring education back to true experiential learning: apprenticeship. Thanks to Lisa for articulating this idea. Wes has involved 8000 students in collecting the stories of veterans from their communities. Commercial news would be hard-pressed to collect 8 stories. Students are apprenticing as archivists, storytellers, community activists. This is also what's happening over at Students2.0, where students are apprenticing as educational writers and thinkers. Lindsey and I spoke earlier this week about how meaningful the experience has been for both of us. I wish I could have her apprentice as an educator. For more visionary thinking on the idea of education as apprenticeship, check out The End of Education by Neil Postman.
Part 2 coming soon...

Students 2.0 In 3 Days!

2007-12-07T08:00:00.000-10:00

The edublogosphere has developed me professionally more than any other experience in my teaching career so far. And Clay's Student 2.0 project is cranking this whole thing up several notches. The idea of having conversations with students around the world about effective learning has changed the way I interact with my class here, and the way I think about the role of young adults in education. Get ready. Check it out in 3 days.
Technorati Tags: education, students2.0, blog,

Checklist Stoke: Creating A Caring Classroom

2007-12-06T14:38:00.000-10:00

There are some new bloggers and seasoned bloggers writing less about tech-tools and more about classroom instruction and anecdotes. And they're getting me stoked every time I open my reader. On of those blogs is Slam Teaching (is there an Edublog award for coolest title?). There, in a post about the fundamental calling of teaching, I found the following checklist that after a few frustrating tech-filled days centered me again. Besides, a good list to check always makes me feel better.

* I provide opportunities for success to each child in the classroom, encouraging growth from wherever they start.
* I assess student ability and adjust instruction to maintain an appropriate level of challenge for each.
* I offer students a variety of ways to demonstrate their knowledge, intelligence, and mastery.
* I attempt to build interpersonal skills, positive social behaviors, character skills, and resistance to failure.
* I attempt to accommodate a variety of interests, motivators, modality strengths, and learning preferences in my directions, instructions, and assignments.
* I attempt to accommodate tactile, kinesthetic, visual, verbal, and auditory learners.
* I make sure kids have ample opportunities to move around and help them learn to maintain an appropriate level of alertness without disturbing others.
* I avoid using humiliation, sarcasm, ridicule, anger, impatience, or manifestations of disappointment in dealing with students.
* I honor students' needs for respect, dignity, purpose, success, acceptance, attention, and motivation.
* I model standards of behavior, language, and tone of voice that I expect from my students.
* I work to eliminate prejudice toward students based on racial or cultural background; physical appearance; sexual orientation; academic, artistic, or athletic competence.
* I strive to stay aware of put-downs or slurs expressed by students or staff, responding immediately.
* I sometimes allow and encourage students to make decisions about their learning (what, where, with whom, how, or how much).
* I sometimes allow students to create, design, or renegotiate assignments to make them personally meaningful.
* I motivate through access to positive outcomes, rather than avoidance or fear of negative outcomes. I emphasize the positive consequences of cooperation.
* I consciously anticipate what students, teachers, and parents will need in various situations in order to prevent problems from occurring.
* I follow through immediately, avoiding warnings and threats.
* I make students and their parents aware of changes in behavior or performance that could affect grades or promotion.
* I utilize parents, administration, and support staff for feedback and support (not for punishing students).
* I attempt to meet students' needs for attention in positive, constructive, and proactive ways.
* I reinforce positive behavior with positive outcomes.
* I communicate with parents, regularly and frequently, about what their children are doing well.
* I respect students' affective needs and am committed to listening and supporting their feelings and problem-solving skills in positive ways.
* I respect confidentiality to the degree that doing so will not put anyone in danger.
* I immediately respond to incidents involving any form of bullying, harassment, or threat to safety.

Flickr Credit: I Na Aina E
Technorati Tags: classroom, bestpractice, blog, teaching

Literature Circles 2.0

2007-12-06T07:58:00.000-10:00

When I'm at my best as a Technology Resource Teacher I'm thinking about instruction first, technology second. I tried to use this approach in a new literature circle group project that I assigned my class this week.

First, I put together groups of four, arranging students based on learning styles and learning strengths. Then, they had to figure out who was going to do which of the following jobs within the group: (I had particular students in mind for each job; it was interesting to see who picked that job and who didn't)
*Lead Designer
*Documentarian
*Technician
*Spokesperson
In these jobs and the descriptions I attached to them, I was trying to use conceptual age framework based on Pink and Gardner.

Each group was assigned a 2-3 page section of what we've read so far in The Woman Warrior.
From there, I told the groups that they needed to create a multi-sensory resource for their section of the story (each 2-3 page section equates to an small episode within the story). We've been talking about vision and design all semester so I reminded them to think about the product before thinking about the tool. All the while the documentarians are recording the groups' process and dynamics.
We just finished the second work session, and here's what's different from literature circles as I used to use them:
*Create a resource instead of collect information.
*Design holistically instead of focus on small parts.
*Technology as a tool instead of...well, there was no technology before.
*Authorship (we're publishing to a wikispaces: link soon) as ownership rather than grade as accountability.
Technorati Tags: literature, literaturecircles, lessonplan, english, instruction, thewomanwarrior

Some Inspirational And Sustainable Design

2007-12-04T10:51:00.000-10:00

One of my goals this year is to start to consider how English curriculum can be centered around collaboration, flexibility, individualization, and sustainability. Thinking about inspiration, there have been a number of books and thinkers that have changed the way I think and behave personally and professionally. One of the latest is Cradle To Cradle. I described Mcdonough's design ideas to my students, and they wanted me to post his TED talk. So here it is:

Technorati Tags: sustainability, green, williammcdonough, cradletocradle, TED

New Edition To Our School's Blogosphere

2007-12-04T08:49:00.000-10:00

...that makes five blogs. Check out Laura Davis's blog Flint To Spark.
Technorati Tags: blog, teacher, edublog

Another Creative Video About The Power Of Blogging

2007-12-03T14:47:00.000-10:00

I came across this video on Rachel Boyd's blog. Once on YouTube I found that there's a whole series of "...In Plan English" videos.

Technorati Tags: commoncraft, blog, leelefever, rachelboyd, inplainenglish

The Best Meeting Ever: Visualizing A 1:1 School

2007-12-03T13:27:00.000-10:00

I think it was because I was fresh from an hour with James Toole, learning to take advantage of the fact that we use language to create the world around us, framing everything using the questions: what's right with this? how can we do more of it? But last week, I was in the best meeting ever...

The purpose of the meeting was to have a proactive discussion about our school's laptop program. There were two questions that framed the meeting:
1. What do we hope for our students in a 1:1 environment?
2. What is the story of the laptop program?
The reason the meeting was so good was because it was about dreaming. Here are the dreams, in no particular order:

-Prepare students for 21st century workplace, including media and information literacy.
-Enhance existing learning environments.
-More engagement.
-See learning as more holistic vs. departmentalized.
-Employ and develop conceptual age skills.
-Develop confidant user, willing to take risks.
-Student and environment are more collaborative, individualized, flexible.
-More ability to personalize assignments around learning strengths.
-Foster online responsibility.
-Empowerment.
-See technology as a tool.
-Model all this as a faculty.
-Share and collaborate outside our school: "private school with a public purpose."
-Teachers and students collaborate.
-Technology as facilitation of communication.

I'm thankful for all the ideas my colleagues generated. Looking forward to implementing them.

Flickr Photo Credit: Matthew Clark
Technorati Tags: onlinelearning, 1:1school, laptops, educationtechnology

Learnerblogs Blues

2007-11-26T09:58:00.000-10:00

In the name of blogland security, I've been trying to make decisions, as Technology Resource Teacher, that represent my school's interest in carefully dealing with the privacy-security-student-blogging-online-learning-environment issues. So I went with Learnerblogs (I have really started to dig WordPress) instead of Blogger, which I used last year with little to no issues. My school has Moveable Type on our server. But it has proven hard to set up, difficult to customize, and all together pretty inflexible and inconvenient. But now that we're up and blogging, Learnerblogs is beginning to disappoint. I like to move from my Google Reader to original posts for commenting. And I want to comment on nearly every post that my students write. But, man, Learnerblogs is so slow, both to load and to post comments.

Restructuring Homework In My Class, Starting Today

2007-11-26T08:56:00.001-10:00

The philosophy, practice, and dividends of homework are perpetual topics of discussion at my school. For me, they meld with other questions of what it means to be a serious student, what it means to be a learner, and what it's going to take to be successful and happy in the 21st century. To move beyond discussion, I decided to make some fairly significant changes in the way I assign, collect, and assess homework. The seed for this change was planted a couple weeks ago when I was in a meeting listening to a proposal for a 'hybrid' course, which (at my school) means less class time, more independent work and individualized instruction via Moodle and various chat and videoconferencing tools. Personally, my favorite hour of the day is class. I couldn't do less of it. But what occurred to me was that homework in an online course is inherently more independent, individualized, and flexible. These are the values that drive our school's technology initiative. And I want my homework assignments to embrace these values. So here's what I changed:

*First, I set up every student with a Learnerblog and Bloglines account (for more on this, see Clay Burell's post visionary student blogging). Each student put together their own blog reading list consisting of 5-10 feeds, and proposed a purpose or topic for their own blog.

*They are required to publish one thoughtful post a cycle (our 6-day version of a week).

*In addition, during class time each cycle, they meet in small groups to report on their reading of feeds.

Okay, here's the homework part:

*On the first day of each cycle, I post 5 items to our class Moodle page:
1. A prompt for this cycle's post. (They can use it or not).
2. Required reading and viewing. This cycle, for example, I posted a TED talk, a YouTube video, and a link to an educational post.
3. Cool Tools. I post links to tools they might like or find useful. This cycle: Quotiki and del.icio.us.
4. And a mini-lesson. This cycle is commenting on blogs: why do it, why not to do it, and opportunity to practice.
5. A forum for discussion of any of the cycle's homework activities.

What's in it for me:
*I feed their posts to my reader and leave individualized comments.
*I can see when and how often they access the homework activities in Moodle. Doing this allows me to monitor and coach students in the art of time management.
*Now, we all do the same kinds of homework, which creates a different kind of learning environment.
*My class time is freed up to do the things I always feel I don't have time to do, like sit in a circle and read literature together, slowly (10 pages in 3 classes - this is a good thing) and critically.
*I always know they've done the reading (no need for punitive quizzes:)

Resource Teacher Outreach: Freshman English Moodle Workshop #1

2007-11-21T10:19:00.000-10:00

The hardest part of being a Technology Resource Teacher is outreach. It's easy to work with other teachers when they come to me with a specific questions or ideas for using or integrating technology into their classroom. But how do I present ideas to others without adding to peoples' plates? This blog, I hope, is one way.
Another idea that came to fruition yesterday was to plan and host a Moodle Retreat for all Freshman English teachers. So my Department Head arranged for them to have subs for half a day, and I put together an agenda, examples, and test courses. Here's what the half-day looked like.

1st Hour: Moodle Basics And Demonstrations

* What is a course management system?
* The vocabulary of Moodle
* How it works: basic functions and navigation
* Demonstrations of English I and other courses in Moodle

2nd Hour: Putting Together Test Courses

* Examples of each activity you might use and how to create them from scratch
* Create resources, activities, and 'blocks' in your own test course (blog, wiki,
forum, glossary, quizzes, etc.)
* Experience Moodle as a student

3rd Hour: Translate Your Next Cycle Plan Into Moodle
(please bring unit/lesson plans that you already use, tech or no tech)

* Collaborative planning
* One-on-one Moodling
* Time to work

30 minutes to reflect and/or use the time however we choose.

I'm hoping to debrief with everybody and get suggestions on how to improve the workshop. Overall, this was a very successful way to create time for teachers to learn new tools. I also had four other TRTs with me to support. Thanks to all involved.

Blog Reading Level Or Student Writing Level

2007-11-15T13:23:00.001-10:00

I've always struggled with teaching grammar and vocabulary in and out of context. I don't know if this tool could be helpful, but it's sparked a few ideas to help students direct their own mastering of these necessary communication skills. I ran across the Blog Readability Test on Jeff Utecht's blog, and I think it could be an interesting feedback tool for student bloggers. Although, I'm suspicious of it's calibration.

What Is A Serious Student?

2007-11-15T12:37:00.000-10:00

Every other week, the English department meets a large group (largest dept. in the school) to discuss courses, initiatives, school business, and overarching questions. Yesterday, we revisited a conversation about homework that's been going on school-wide for a few years. How do we use it? Why do students gain from it? Could we get by without it? And so on. And we ended up discussing what some of us perceived as a move towards a school culture that doesn't foster serious students, specifically in English. Physics and Math maybe a different story?

Many great questions came out of the discussion:
*Is there a difference between being good at something and being a student of something? Waterpolo was the analogy.
*How do we balance encouraging the skills of a good student with the necessary pace of the curriculum?
*Should we expect all student to have passion for English? For example, do we expect all student in orchestra to be serious musicians?
*Is being a serious student, a mastery of skills or an investment in content?

So I left the meeting thinking about these questions, and thinking about how I might present some ideas in a post here at WatsonCommon. Considering myself a serious student of several things, English, leadership, educational technology, surfing, mountaineering, racquetball, marathoning, I thought I'd take inventory of all the things I do as a serious student (maybe learner is a better term).

1. I keep a small notebook with me at all times to quickly jot down ideas, reflections, and observations. This is also where raw ideas are born. Often, what's written here is in the form of lists, pictures, webs.

2. I write in a personal journal, at least 10 minutes a day, for nobody but me.

3. I keep a professional blog and read blogs of people who do similar work, creating a network of creative collaborators. Before blogging, I documented all my work and organized it in binders and folders, ready to reference and share.

4. I try to build a professional library of thought-provoking reading. I think this too is encompassed by the read/write web.

I'm probably missing things. But these are the habits (I wouldn't call them skills) that I believe make me serious. Is this what we expect of students? Or is it something else? Something more?

A Different Take On Teaching The Thesis (With Just A Little Technology)

2007-11-13T08:46:00.000-10:00

To oversimplify and make a generalization based on not much, English and Language Arts instruction seems to follow one of two mantras when working with the thesis essay. 1) The 5 (or however many) paragraph model: Thesis, supporting statements, evidence, and discussion, and some kind of conclusion. Or, 2) Rejection of this kind of formulaic writing with something more narrative-based or creative in its place. I've tried both, and I've tried teaching from somewhere in the middle, but that gets tough because of the inherent contradictions. Where teaching the middle worked well was in an upper-level composition course (one of my favorite courses to teach). For this post though, I'm thinking about teaching the thesis to freshman.

The context is that my class just finished reading The Odyssey with which we did some very engaging writing about names, family, self, home, journey but neglected to work on anything that resembled thesis writing or literary analysis. So as an afterthought steeped in guilt, I decided to run what I called a "Group Thesis Challenge Relay."

1. I divided the class into 5 groups of 4 and explained briefly that a thesis is essentially identifying a literary device and its impact on something thematic or character-based. Other traits of a thesis might be that it's disagreeable and beyond a summary.
2. I gave them this stem: Homer uses _________ to show _________.
3. The groups had 10 minutes to dig through the text and compose as many workable statements as possible.
4. I determined a random order for the groups to present then had them designate a spokesperson.
5. The first group presented their thesis statement.
6. Any other group could challenge the thesis. They had to provide reasoning behind their challenge. And the challenged team gets a chance to respond. Challenges had to be justified by the text.
7. Unsuccessful challenges result in loss of points (I had just watched NFL Sunday).
8. After each challenge, the whole class revised the thesis. I word-processed and projected the statements. With highlights, comments, and revisions, I'm going to post the document as a future reference.
*This activity segued into a discussion of a wiki document we've been working on to examine the differences between blogging, journaling, writing for school. They saw the connection.

Throughout the thesis activity, I was increasingly impressed by the student-led challenges and discussions. In order to make valid challenges, students discussed how an essay would be constructed around particular statements, why a statement wasn't specific enough, how to revise, what parts of the story support and/or disprove statements. The activity became much more than an afterthought.

Students Starting To Blog And I'm Considering Critical Thinking, Creative Commons And Innovative Mash-Up: A Couple TEDs To Juxtapose

2007-11-08T10:20:00.001-10:00

My latest side project idea is to start to put together a presentation for my school's sophomore English teachers in anticipation of our 1:1 laptop program moving into the 10th grade next year. I'm working on this in conjunction with the work I'm doing with the four other technology resource teachers, which is to determine a set of hardware and software functionalities necessary for our students, as we begin the process of renegotiating our laptop lease. So I want to try, in this post, to connect these two projects, and point to a couple powerful TED videos.

Our sophomore English course, along with all courses at our school, values critical thinking and writing skills, and asks students to exercise these skills while exploring these essential questions: What kind of world is this? How should I live in it? In my presentation to the group, I'm hoping to show how the critical thinking skills translate to all the elements of keeping a self-directed, academic, student blog, much like the long-standing sophomore English assignment of the commonplace book.

The difference being that all that collected, hyperlinked, referenced, reorganized information is being shared publicly; copyright must be an issue. And the connection to my school's functionalities selection process is that our Director of K-12 Instruction suggested that we seek a tool that allows students to create and design "innovative mashups--empowering students to interact with traditional curricular content in ways that will nurture and develop and expand their creative and innovative capacities." So here are the TED videos: first, innovative mashups; second, creative commons.

1001 Flat World Tales: Honolulu, Seoul, Denver Winner Tales eBook Available

2007-11-05T09:12:00.000-10:00

Last year's 1001 Flat World Tales writing project on a wiki was a huge success. Now, the eBook is available. Read more and get involved in the project here.

Another Differentiated Quiz: Quick Observations

2007-11-05T08:47:00.000-10:00

My class is almost finished with The Odyssey. We've discussed and written about the themes of self, name, reputation, and home. Now, we're starting to talk about the idea of the journey, which is an appropriate segue to keeping blogs as a way to think about where they've been and where they want to go. So today I set up what I called a quiz/activity (funny how tagging assignments changes them so much). It was a quiz in the sense that it checked their weekend reading; it was an activity in the sense that it introduced and helped them think about their own journeys through school and life.

The quiz:
-Identify important stops in Odysseus' journey, cite the Book in which they occurred.
-Draw comparisons to events from your own journey. (My example: Odysseus is stuck on Calypso's island at the beginning of the story. This is sort of like the girl I dated for way too long in high school, which led to us both missing out on things).
-More specific = More points.
-No required amount of events.
-Use whatever tool you feel is most appropriate to the task.

Observations:
-5 students used paper and pencil.
-8 students created some kind of mindmap using Inspiration.
-5 students wrote in narrative form.
-2 students used Excel charts.
-2 students used web resources (after I reported my observation to my students, many said, "we didn't know we could use the internet." I hadn't said anything about it.)

Software Applications vs. Web-Based Tools: How Do Schools Choose?

2007-11-01T10:25:00.000-10:00

For the last two days, I've been working my way through a PDF document that Bruce emailed me. It was created by Ben Wilkoff of the Douglas County School District as a concrete list of useful web tools, software applications, online resources, and authentic learning environments. From his list of 101 tools, I pared down to a list of 30 that I'm going to explore further. But that's not exactly what I want to write about in this post.

This morning I attended a presentation of DyKnow, an online synchronous classroom tool for 1:1 tablet environments. The software allows for communication with student computers, screen control, private notetaking, session playback, document exchange, desktop sharing, anonymous polling, among other features. During the presentation, I kept saying to myself: almost all these features are available for free on the web (most documented in Ben's PDF).

Our school, being in the first year of a laptop program in the high school, but a program that's been in our junior school (a separate area of the campus and a different culture) for better than 5 years already, is trying to navigate through all the questions of privacy, security, and pedagogy on its way to policy. And I'm on the steering committee and planning a M.Ed. proposal around this process. So how does a school decide when to go with purchased software and when to go with web-based tools? Here's a quick comparison chart I sketched out during the meeting:

*I've been reading and listening in hopes of adding to this cursory list. I'm hoping edubloggers from schools that have been through this can offer some feedback.

Purchased Software:
-Managed and supported within school IT dept.
-Content is owned and archived on school server.
-Maybe this software is more powerful and reliable.
-Easier to drive initiatives.
-Universal tools across classrooms and grade levels.

Web-Based Tools:
-Free.
-Flexible.
-Take 'em or leave 'em.
-Specialized.
-Small.
-Exists outside school.

Designing Rubrics For 21st Century Assignments

2007-10-31T12:03:00.000-10:00

After starting to grade the digital essays my student authored (I'd love to share them but...), I realized that it was going to be hard to grade them because the process was so transparent, making it easy to see the challenges each student faced and the ways they negotiated those challenges. Of course, as an English teacher, I've graded piles of essays, according to six-trait rubrics, mode-specific rubrics, holistically, summatively, formatively, insert any assessment tool you like. And in digital essays I'm still trying to accurately assess the effectiveness of communicating ideas and having a voice, but the vehicle drives differently now. So what else could I do but ask the students to help me design a rubric for digital essays, and we're working together on it using a wiki. This activity in addition to the structured reflection I ask them to complete shows me a lot about what they value and what they expect from themselves when it comes to using the digital tools on their iBooks. This could be very valuable for teachers in my school who still aren't sure what they can expect from students with these tools.

The way I started the wiki was to simply list the six-traits of writing, then ask my students what an "A" looks like, what a "B" looks like, and so on for each of the six traits. They've already started to talk about voice, pace, matching pictures to written content, having music in the background to emphasize mood, clearly signposting ideas and using visuals to reinforce. We're not finished yet, but at the end of the week, I'll post the rubric.

The next step will be to compare their rubric to NETS for students and revise accordingly, then consult NETS for teachers and rethink the assignment.
Technorati Tags: differentiatedinstruction,, edtech,, professionaldevelopment

An iPod Instead Of That Stack Of Essays

2007-10-26T13:29:00.000-10:00

I've posted several times about a digital essay project my students have been working on. Well, today it was due. Since it could be either an iMovie or an enhanced podcast, I gave them several options for turning it in (maybe one of them I actually knew how to do; I figured they'd help me figure it out, which they did).

The options:
*stream it to their page on Ning.
*email it to me as a quicktime video.
*burn it to disc.
*export to iTunes, then zap it to my video iPod.

The last is now my favorite. I have a few essays as enhanced podcasts on my iPod. These run for about 4 or 5 minutes. Forget the stack of essays!

Chang-Rae Lee Visits My Freshman English Class

2007-10-24T08:37:00.000-10:00

This morning, Chang-Rae Lee visited my freshman English class; he's our scholar-in-residence this year at Punahou. I asked him to talk to my students about writing, specifically, writing about themselves, their home, their parents. The timing couldn't have been better since my students are in the final stages of a digital essay about the idea of home. The process of the digital essay was as follows:

1. Freewrite about places that are 'homes.'
2. Mini lesson on photography.
3. Take pictures of places, items, people that are 'home.'
4. Fine tune the piece of writing, work through 6 trait revision process.
5. Record audio essay using Garageband.
6. Use either Garageband enhanced podcast or iMovie to sync pictures with words.

Before his visit, Chang suggested we read his New Yorker essay "Coming Home Again," and the students should generate questions for discussion. So we read together in class, then spent two days in a Moodle forum fleshing out ideas and questions.

I rue that I didn't podcast or take video or even pictures of Chang's visit. But I can say that there have been 4 times in my life when I've been able to hear a celebrated author/poet read their work then have a question and answer session with them. And each time, I'm enthralled and inspired. I'm glad that this time my students could have that kind of an experience. I did have my little Moleskin, and I jotted down some of the ideas he left with us about writing:

*Stories are catalogs of pictures purposefully chosen to address a particular feeling. A piece of writing doesn't just come out and tell readers what they should feel.

*Be a reader of your own words.

*Anticipate when a reader's curiosity will be piqued.

*Keep coming back to what's dramatic.

*Have a clear sense of purpose or the feeling you want to write about, but allow the writing to go where it needs to go. He analogized planning a piece of writing to planning a road trip. You can map it all out, but you might get somewhere and realize you need to go somewhere different, and you might arrive at the same destination using a different route than first anticipated or planned.

*Endings aren't summaries; they might do that a little bit. They should leave you with a feeling. And a reader shouldn't feel that the story has ended. It should continue to live on.

*Don't try to come up with great words. We all have a great sense of storytelling. Use it. Write it like you would tell it.

*Don't tell a reader what to think, instead, offer purposefully chosen observations. "Just look around in the museum of your life."

As an aside, I'd like to add that Clay Burell (Chang's former student in Oregon) and I used an excerpt from Chang's novel Native Speaker last year as an example for students working on the 1001 Flat World Tales Project.

Mahalo Chang

Essential Functionality: Desktop Sharing

2007-10-19T09:11:00.001-10:00

A couple weeks ago, I sat down with two other teachers to play with Yugma. Clay Burell realized the potential of desktop sharing a long time ago, but it's taken me awhile to figure out how to enhance existing curriculum with this particular functionality. Today, I set up my students on Yugma so they'd be able to collaborate and peer edit a multimedia essay they're publishing with iMovie. In the name of efficiency, I had one student start a sharing session early, invite me, then we projected on a screen for the rest of the class to see. Ten minutes later, everybody was signed in with a free account. The whole class was humming with excitement over the possibilities, and I overheard a lot of great ideas for how this tool could be used in my class and others. I can't wait to see the collaboration that happens over the weekend and the resulting products. Next week, I'll post student reflections and ideas.

1:1 Learning Management: SchoolVue

2007-10-16T13:39:00.000-10:00

One of the initial challenges of transitioning to a 1:1 high school has been classroom management. Conversations about managing the online learning environments, both in classrooms and on the web, are happening in many areas of the school. There are so many variables to consider: planning using 1:1 tools, seating arrangements, modes of learning, teaching laptop behavior, honesty and integrity. The conversations will continue...
In the meantime, I ran across CrossTec School Vue on Wes Fryer's blog, software that integrates all computers in a classroom. In addition to making laptop class usage more transparent for teachers, School Vue offers some interesting collaborative features. Here are some screenshots from CrossTec's website. They might be too small, but they show a teacher screen monitoring all student desktops and a list of applications and sites visited by students.

"A Vision Of Students Today"

2007-10-16T09:21:00.000-10:00

This video came to me in an email from one of our IT programmers. While watching, I was reminded of the Web 2.0...The Machine Is Us video, reinforcing the power of technology and web2.0 in classrooms and education. Then, I scrolled down to read some of the comments, which I've pasted below. Not sure what to make of them.

these college students struck me as direction-less in life. maybe thats why they feel like they're wasting so much time?
what was the point of this video again? no more technology in the classroom?

It's not ironic but sad that instead of doing your homework *YOU* choose to come on to youtube and waste your time.

Interesting video, but I spent the whole time wanting to yell at the students holding up the 'averaged' responses. I would say its an accurate representation of most of the college students in the three different universities I went to over the last 8 years. The sad part is that so few students care/try. It would be better if they didn't bother. They don't learn anything and they slow the whole academic process down.

I like this video,it basically says(to me) that college is just another perk to put on your resume.You don't even learn much about things in real life anymore,just bookwork and research papers.I've learned more things by doing my own research than what I've learned in school. I've often thought about whether college is a waste of my time or not.

Public Education - where information is transferred from the teacher to the student without passing through the minds of either.

And private education is where they tell students what to think and what to believe, all based on ancient mythology and pseudo science. Curricula of public education are based on reason, logic, and real science.

Maps Of War: Interactive Maps That Lead To Inquiry

2007-10-15T14:13:00.000-10:00

I believe that the power of a lesson or unit is established within the first five minutes of its introduction. So, everyday I employ an opening set, bell-ringer, warm-up, whatever you want to call the activity that sets the tone for the class or unit, gets the students engaged, and stokes the questions that will lead to inquiry, exploration and learning. This year, I've been using YouTube videos (Homer Simpson on the River Styx), New Yorker comics, Ning forums, amongst other things. Today in my Reader, I came across Maps of War on Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy. The post linked to a 90 second interactive map of the expansion of world religions. From there, I watched Leadership and War (embedded below) and explored several other maps. These, I think, even though I haven't taught a history course in a few years, make for great opening sets.

I Hate Reading Quizzes, But They Seem Unavoidable; Here's A Collaborative Workaround

2007-10-09T11:06:00.001-10:00

Discoverer's Day holiday kept us away from class yesterday, so I figured that I needed to keep my students accountable for the readings from The Odyssey that I assigned over the weekend. Typically, we have a reading quiz once a week or so, and I always try to not make them about memorizing arbitrary details from the text. Instead, I have them retrieve quotes and write responses that connect the quotes they've chosen to the themes under discussion.
Pretty effective on a couple levels.
Other times, I'll ask them to list 5 events from the chapter in order and explain why each is significant to the rest of the story.
Okay.
Still I'm not satisfied with the differentiation of these approaches. In an ideal world, we'd read everything in class, explore all of it together. But I only see my class 4 of 6 days for 50 minutes. Hence, the reading quizzes. Yet, the Ning question from my last post kept nagging me to change up the quiz format. Can a quiz still hold students accountable if it's collaborative? Can a student's comprehension be shown in something other than written paragraphs?
Yes.
The quiz:
Products:
Create a timeline of events in the two books.
Create a piece of artwork representative of characters and/or events from the books.
Identify uses of figurative language, explain its effect.
Design a set of critical questions for further exploration of the ideas in the books.

Process:
Everybody has to contribute. Ten minutes to get it done. One minute to present each products. Reflection on contribution.

Reflection With Class:
We discussed the division of labor and how it accorded with learning styles and intelligences. We were also able to discuss ideas from the books that the students found interesting and of value. I also segued to the Ning makeover discussed in my last post.

Moodle Is Great; Ning Is Different: Managing Learning and Creating Learning Managers

2007-10-04T13:50:00.001-10:00

More and more of my course content is on my Moodle page, and I'm feeling guilty about neglecting my class Ning, where I saw so much good thinking and learning happening at the beginning of the semester. While in the process of reading a couple of Innovate articles on the subject of social networks as course management systems that a colleague forwarded me, I had some ideas for different kinds of Ning activities, exercises that take advantage of the power and uniqueness of a social network as learning environment. Starting next week, I'm going to assign each of my students a cycle (our version of a week = 4 class meetings) when they will be in charge of running some forums and exercises on our Ning page. They'll meet with me initially to discuss their ideas and go from there. I'm hoping to take advantage of the fact that Ning is owned by all of us, as opposed to Moodle, which is owned by me. Updates to follow.

Ironing Out Wrinkles In Digital Peer Editing

2007-10-02T08:43:00.000-10:00

After a little over a month as a 1:1 high school, one of the most popular uses of the laptops in my department (English) has been the ability to peer edit in real time using a variety of forms of feedback. Teachers have made use of several tools, including: Google Docs, Wikispaces, Moodle Wiki, and passing laptops with Word documents open. Surprisingly, the last option of physically passing laptops has been most seamless. While Google Docs and the wiki options seems most geared for the activity, they're not yet real-time and without face to face coordination of editing, material and formatting gets erased and lost. The activity still works, however, if students have two documents open, only one of which is collaborative, and before any edits are made to the latter doc., it's refreshed, and only one student edits at a time with a little 5-10 second buffer before and after. Maybe a bit to manage in a classroom full of freshman.

In search of a more effective tool, I sat down with Bruce and another 1:1 English teacher, Ben, for our first Yugma session. Wow, I'm not sure if we figured anything out, but this tool is impressive. We took turns being what Yugma calls "The Presenter," which means this person's desktop is shared with the other collaborators. Everybody has control of the desktop, but Yugma only allows mouse controls one person at a time. So, instead of a shared document environment, students could be working on the same document in real-time on Word.

But for the "best of all," I need to back up a little and mention my dubious feelings about the peer editing activity in general. Whenever, I set up this activity in class (how can you facilitate an English class without some permutation of the peer edit) I always empathize with what I think we all experience, which is the gamble of peer editing. Maybe you get the best writer in class who's willing to give your essay the thought and feedback it deserves. But your chances are even better to get a "good job." at the bottom of the paper. Looking at it this way, the activity becomes more about teaching feedback than about a writer getting feedback that will improve their final draft. So Yugma's "best of all," only available if you pay, is that the entire editing session can be recorded, filed, and played back. That would make a great class lesson on giving feedback, even allowing a discussion of feedback that addresses different learning styes, i.e. voice comments, attaching visuals, working in a mind map, linking to a web resource, Visual Thesaurus, etc. Not to mention how much easier it would make the assessment of the process.

Best Practices 2.0: Collaborating With Clay

2007-09-28T14:07:00.000-10:00

Speaking of multiple intelligences, best practices, and the power of planning and learning with collaborative tools, contribute to Clay's latest collaboration.

"Language Is A Way Of Negotiating Human Relationships": Students Really Get This

2007-09-28T13:35:00.000-10:00

In yesterday's post, I listed the parts of a discussion-based lesson plan. During that discussion, the students identified several elements of the idea of "home." One of which was that members of a close community develop their own way of communicating. Certain tones and vocabularies are appropriate in communications between certain family (the example of a close community that we discussed) members, and all members of the "home" understand the intricacies of the language.
It wasn't until I attended a virtual Microsoft Sharepoint presentation later in the day, in which I was mostly confused because of my lack of understanding of coding and programming jargon, that I thought more about my students' observations from The Odyssey. Then, I chose a random TED videopodcast to watch today; it's Friday. And my choice happened to be Steven Pinker's discussion of the construction of language in which he states the quote I used as the title of this post and that "language emerges from human minds interacting with one another."

Now, this post is being written pretty quickly, and these ideas seem obvious and enormous at the same time. But I was already thinking about how lesson-planning is different with the ability to use social networking and collaborative software. Pinker's talk gave my thoughts a little more of a center. If we think about where language comes from and what its basic function is, I think students will be way more tuned in. But, usually, I think, we don't teach that way, there's a different, more convoluted message that's conveyed about the function of language, something that comes more from our, as English teachers, love of language. And we'd probably do more to appreciate communication based on different intelligences. More related material and more organized thinking to come...

On Developing And Differentiating Discussion Skills

2007-09-27T13:18:00.000-10:00

I teach one section of freshman English at 7:30am, in addition to my position as Technology Resource Teacher. This morning, I was expecting an observation from my department head and principal. Our laptop program just rolled out to our freshman class, and they want to see how things are going in the classrooms. Although I work and come from a school culture of collaboration and classroom visits, I still was anxious to make their visit 15 minutes of high tech engagement. Well, they didn't show up, but I did put together a high tech version of a timeless, low tech instructional technique: Harkness Discussion. My problem with this method in the past is that it sets forth a set of high level hoops for students to jump through, essentially a checklist to be executed for a grade, things like: everybody talks, listening skills are exercised in order to exhaust one idea before moving onto the next, specific references are made to the text (in this case, The Odyssey). So the questions to myself became: how do I include more people? How do I scaffold the discussion properly to try to eliminate the hoop-jumping feeling that the students must have? How do I provide a way to effectively debrief and assess the discussion?

Before I explore these questions and describe the lesson plan, I want to mention that I'd pretty much abandoned the Harkness Discussion technique until reading Barbara Ganley's post about her talk at Exeter on Harkness in the 21st century.

The Lesson Plan:
1. Anticipatory Set: Individually, students were assigned two books from what we've read in The Odyssey so far (up to Book 9). In their assigned books they looked for any kind of reference to the idea of "home." (Home is an element of the essential questions for the course).

2. Using a Ning forum (I was dissatisfied with Moodle's wiki, otherwise it would have happened there), they stockpiled all the quotes and specific examples, cited parenthetically, of course).

3. In our class Moodle, I posted a text resource listing simple discussion guidelines, as well as discussion stems that I asked them to use. Basically, I'm asking them to do two things when they contribute to a discussion: identify who's idea they're responding to and paraphrase that idea, explaining how it leads to their idea. We discussed this quickly.

4. We sat on the floor in a circle around my Belkin-mic-outfitted iPod and commenced discussion of the elements that make up the idea of "home" as shown by Telemachus, Odysseus, and the people and places they've visited. This lasted about 15 minutes.

5. My plan was to post the audio recording of the discussion to our Moodle. (It didn't work due to the fact that the voice memo was 150 mb and our Moodle upload limit is 2mb). They were going to listen to it, find a place to expand and/or respond, and leave another, more developed audio recording of their response.

6. The next class, we're going to go back to these new comments, rate them, and identify what kinds of thinking they represent.

Technology Update: Ning, Moodle, Project Global Cooling

2007-09-26T12:27:00.000-10:00

It's been awhile since I've posted, and there's certainly a lot to write about. The last couple weeks I've scudded past open house, Moodle meetings and collaboration, the first debate tournament of the year, the first grade reporting period, letters of recommendations for seniors, and planning for my own class. Feeling like a blog-slacker, I've reminded myself of what a colleague pointed out to my wife after she finished the 42-mile Molokai to Oahu outrigger canoe race last weekend: that no matter what, you're taking part in a world championship, like being in the draw at Wimbledon. So that's the analogy that's motivated me to get back to the blog this afternoon. Here's what been going on:

Visit The Global Cooling Collective
Project Global Cooling:
Here in Honolulu, we're starting a school club, which will be advised by me and led by a student who last year for the culminating project in my class, learned how to plan a concert for charity. So far, she's contacted local venues, met with our center for public service, and has started to make contact with others on the PGC Ning. I think both of us will join Clay's tutorial on setting up a website. In addition, students in my class have started to rally on our class Ning site and slowly move those conversations to the PGC Ning.

Ning Has Been The Thing:
In the last two or three weeks, I've helped four teachers at my school set up Ning communities for their classes for very different purposes. And I'm planning on presenting the ideas behind Ning (teaching using social networks) to this year's group of student teachers and mentors, and new-to-our-school teachers at the end of this week. So far, I'm using Ning as our class social network, for all the reasons one might join a social network, except it's an extension of our classroom community; a computer science teacher is using Ning for his students to share, test, and collaborate on their programs; another English teacher is using Ning as a course management tool; and in an English/Social Studies block course, the teachers are using Ning to run a simulation activity called Ada Valley in which three tribes have to successfully negotiate a government that fairly represents the interests of all groups (I'm planning a future post that will discuss this project more completely, including an interview with project creator, our own Dan Mindich).

Moodle:
Our school has been working through a "soft" pilot of Moodle for the last year or so. Now, we're starting to formalize, and Moodle is being used to bridge the gap between lower and upper grades, as well as being a solid course management system. My frustration so far is with Moodle's wiki. It overwrites and deletes work if students are working on a document simultaneously.

Random Thoughts On 1:1 And How Its Changed My Assessment Practices
I've been writing and thinking about the ways a 1:1 program changes the classroom experience, in terms of physical layout, and now, assessment. Today, I finished the first round of grade reporting, and I noticed a few things. It used to be that grades fell pretty much along a standard bell curve, a few outstanding students, most of the students in the "good" range, and a few strugglers. But planning with a 1:1 environment seems to have changed things a bit. I've really been trying to write lessons and assign homework that takes advantage of technology's ability to provide a more collaborative, flexible, and individualized learning environment. We work in forums a lot more, group work is much more transparent, the hard-to-assess quiet students' voices are being heard. Because of all this, the grades have spread out. They seem to me much more of an accurate report of what the student is learning and demonstrating. But there's a big problem with that: grades aren't perceived, especially in a competitive prep school, as a report; they're perceived as an evaluation of the "goodness" or academic worth of a student, or a statement of status and achievement. What should grades mean? Who are they for? And where do I, as the teacher, report authentic, individualized assessment, now that it's more authentic and individualized?

Ways Communication Technologies Bring Us Together: Pangea Day

2007-09-14T13:44:00.000-10:00

Probably, many people online know about Pangea Day. I didn't until a few minutes ago. Thanks Lisa. The idea of contributing and sharing powerful films globally is an adult version of collaborative student projects like 1001 Flat World Tales and Project Global Cooling. These projects are the most powerful ways to learn in the 21st century.

Animoto Test

2007-09-12T12:41:00.001-10:00

I was cruising my Google Reader and came across a website called ANIMOTO in a post by Wesley Fryer. The webtool lets you upload pictures and music, then uses some magical algorithm to create a quick, unique slideshow. I haven't decided whether or not to pay the $30 for unlimited videos (for free, you can create 30 second shows), but here's a slideshow based on a recent surf trip to Peru. It took about 10 minutes to create.

Designing A Classroom For Digital Learning

2007-09-07T12:16:00.000-10:00

The building where I teach and work was built in 1894, and, with the exception of paint, crown-molding, and air conditioning, not much has changed, in terms of classroom design. Obviously, optimizing a 1:1 laptop learning environment was not a concern. I've been thinking for awhile about how the physical dynamics of classrooms change when every student and teacher has a laptop, for that matter every student is a "digital native" and all the learning/working style implications that come with. But all of my ideas were pretty random and based on nothing.

Then, I came across a brief exchange in "The Talk Of The Town" in last week's New Yorker. (I marked the quote but left it at home, will post later). The discussion was about the renovation of newrooms, specifically The New York Times and Washington Post (if I remember correctly). The times had designed what they thought would be a workroom that encouraged the most collaborative and productive kinds of interactions amongst employees. The space was described as one huge room, no offices, no cubicles, just open table with work stations, and flat screen TVs and tickers all over. Sounds 21st century right? Vs. offices and printing presses, the scene from the movies, as the article reminds. But in the following issue, there was a response to the article, citing design research, which says that the big room design is, in fact, counterproductive. The most efficient 21st century space is more expensive, of course, and it is a perimeter of closed offices, looking into an open, middle space. The offices are for solo work, and the open space is for spontaneous and planned collaboration. I got excited and started to think about how this would look in a classroom.

So today, I married two ideas. The modern work space, and what I learned as a first-year teacher, which is that students at this level (in my case, first semester freshman) need to transition often to remain engaged, even if it's just breaking the same activity into several parts). First, we continued a small group activity from the previous class, which involved creating an Inspiration web of direct quotes from the story "Powder" and the inferences, observations, assumptions, questions, and connections that accompany them. These were posted as forum topics on our class Ning. Next, the students transitioned to solo work. We don't have private offices so we simply turned the desks to face out (we normally sit in a circle of desks). I also allowed them to plug in headphones and listen to music. The assignment was to read each group web, and build on the ideas in the forum, including a new direct quote that relates. What I saw was: every single screen at once and total engagement. Lastly, we moved from the formal, directed, solo work to the floor space in the middle for a more casual slide show I had put together about a man I met in Costa Rica who showed me the power of story. End of class.
As a follow-up, I posted a forum question about how the students liked the arrangement and asking them what other ideas they have for classroom design.

What's Been Going On This Week: Project Global Cooling

2007-09-06T11:58:00.000-10:00

View my profile on The Global Cooling Collective

Visit The Global Cooling Collective

This week, I've been trying to get my school involved in Clay Burell's (I think he would object to it being called his project, but he started it. The idea is that it will belong to the students) Project Global Cooling (and here's the Ning link too--it explains everything and is where much of the planning is happening). Today, Clay, Gary in Kazakhstan, and I are going to Skype and discuss the project, as well as our similar roles as tech resource teachers in first year 1:1 Apple laptop schools. I think we'll Skype about once a week, inviting others, and these conversations will become resourceful (hopefully) and reflective (definitely) podcasts.

On my end in Hawaii, I've met with Econ teachers, our center for public service, my department head, and the other tech resource teachers. Our school is a big place, and we already have a sustainability initiative and annual fair, in addition to our middle school being named one of the "greenest" campuses in the nation. This year, sustainability is being incorporated deliberately into the curriculum. So I'm hoping that all the work that our students are already doing can be funneled and featured on Project Global Cooling.

My First Foray Into Second Life

2007-08-29T12:57:00.000-10:00

I'm not a gamer, and I think the best technology allows us to forget about the technology and focus on community building. And, like many of the colleagues I've been talking to about Second Life, I don't know where it fits in, and I find some aspects of it a little troublesome (scroll down for a funny YouTube video). But after some encouragement from a colleague with much more SL experience, I decided to check it out.

Actually, I should back up a few steps. Part of my job is to meet with teachers, discuss, plan, and collaborate in the development of technology-enhanced curriculum. Recently, I had the opportunity to work with two teachers of American Studies (junior level block of English and Social Studies). They have an amazing, comprehensive project that culminates in student-created museums, showcasing their specific area of study and involvement. They're going to use a wikispace as a virtual staging area, and incorporate blogs as a commonplace of ideas, open for ongoing discussion. And they were wondering if blogs might also work as places for their museum projects to live. That's when SecondLife popped into my head, and that's when I started to consider joining and exploring.

So I joined a few days (it's taken me several days to put together my thoughts enough for a semi-coherent post about it), and after about an hour of learning all the basics of navigation and communication, I entered the virtual world. Dodging distractions is tough, but I made my way to my first stop: Vassar (this link has a nice description of Vassar's SecondLife involvement). I ran up against my self-imposed time limit and haven't had much of a chance to explore. More to come...here's my list of places to see, feel free to comment and add: EduIslands, Harvard, San Francisco MOMA, Global Kids, Suffern Middle School's Ramapo Island.

Now, I'm starting to ask and explore more questions about Second Life's use? I'd love to learn more from anybody out there with experience. On my own, I started by reading the Vassar information (linked above), then I moved on to what Will Richardson had to say. He seemed to echo my own thoughts: it's fascinating. What's going to be done with it? Within on of his posts, I found The Story of My "Second Life," which I haven't had a chance to dig into but holds the promise of edification. I still have a lot of first and second life research to do, more to follow...

The Seven C's of Learning

2007-08-27T08:56:00.001-10:00

The Seven C's of Learning Annotated

Quote from article: Odds are pretty good that if you're talking about changes to teaching and learning that the new Read/Write Web is bringing about, many of the words you are using start with "C." There's a whole new world out there with a whole new set of skills our kids need to manage. I guess you could call it a "C change."

My comment: I like this quick explanation of the learning opportunities provided by Web2.0. Even more, the emphasis is on community engagement through communication and collaboration.

- post by cwatson

Clipped from: District Adminstration

A Plug For Affect

2007-08-24T13:38:00.001-10:00

This year my wife is working on a fellowship to help enhance differentiated instruction and reach all learners. She's familiar with blogging as her English classes were online last year. Now, she's joining the edublogosphere with her blog Affect. She's hoping to build a network with people doing the same kinds of work and research. Drop in and read about her work.

Universe By Jonathan Harris

2007-08-24T13:20:00.000-10:00

Today, I was talking to a student in my office about the writing program he attended over the summer, the books he read, concerts he attended, and the writings of one of his grandfather's teachers, Masahiro Yasuoka. From there we started talking about thinkers and our mutual love for TED. Then he showed me a website called Universe that was featured on TED. I just started playing with it. It reminds me a little of Visual Thesaurus, and I think students will really like it.

Here's An Example Of Why I Love My School

2007-08-22T13:06:00.000-10:00

After seeing this motivational short starring our faculty, how can you not be inspired and excited to start building relationships with students and classes on the first day of school (tomorrow).

First Meeting With First Time 1:1 Teachers

2007-08-21T10:52:00.000-10:00

I'd like to open this post with a quote from Will Richardson's book, which I just started reading. I clipped this section because it got me excited about 1:1 computing and made me feel comfortable in not knowing exactly how everything is going to happen this year:

"Not every educator will use every tool discussed in this book. But every educator needs to understand the potential impact of these tools, nonetheless, because our students will be using them (or newer iterations) more and more, and because the underlying concepts they are built on are tremendously important. The social connections that students are now making on the Web, the ability to share and contribute ideas and work, the new expectation of collaboration, the ability to truly extend the walls of our classrooms…these ideas are at the core of this new Web. As educators, it's imperative we understand the implications of these capabilities for our classrooms…For most, however, the significance of these changes is just starting to be realized. We are no longer limited to being independent readers or consumers of information; as we'll see, we can be collaborators in the creation of large storehouses of information. In the process, we can learn much about ourselves and our world. In almost every area of life, the Read/Write Web is changing our relationship to technology and rewriting the age old paradigms of how things work. No doubt, these changes will take many years to process. In fact, as author Dan Gillmor writes, "the people who'll understand this best are probably just being born" (Gillmor, 2005)."

This morning, with two days until students arrive, I met with my freshman English sub department for two hours to discuss first day plans and questions, now that every freshman will have an iBook. And I came away with a list of great activities that I'd like to share. Thanks English 1 Team!

- Create a Ning community for the class using anagrams for each members' name, spend a little time customizing pages, list maybe 4 or so random facts (each student). This becomes a teachable moment to discuss how to decide what kinds of information is appropriate to put online. Then, spend time trying to figure out who's who, a little get-to-know-each-other activity.

- Follow this up by bringing in our librarian for a lesson on reliable sources and citations. Then, students find a poem, YouTube video, photo, whatever, that evokes some sort of emotion in them, post it, describe, and cite/link to it.

- Have students compose an introductory letter or something to that effect (about their summer maybe), then convert into ComicLife or ToonDo comic strip with narrative, or even use a different poetic form to describe each picture.

- We read The Odyssey, and ComicLife could again be used to illustrate several epithets about the self.

- And, Inspiration could be used to research and put together family trees as a pre-reading activity.

Anybody want to add?

I'm Officially Back Online

2007-08-20T15:32:00.000-10:00

A summer spent chasing waves in Hawaii, Southern California, Mexico, and Peru was just what I needed to recharge my batteries after a challenging and busy 06-07 school year. And I'm back to my blog with a renewed sense of direction, not to mention that it is now my official job as Technology Resource Teacher to help teachers explore ways technology can enhance curriculum (now that the roll-out of our school's 1:1 laptop initiative is beginning with freshman). Last year, while teaching a full schedule of English courses, I feel like I just dabbled on my blog. This year, with the opportunity to visit classrooms in all disciplines and work with faculty on all kinds of explorations, I hope WatsonCommon becomes more of a resource and classroom collaboration jump-off point.

I'd like to start by addressing a question raised by a fellow freshman English teacher. Some context first. In our English department, blogs have been the starting point for most teachers when it comes to integrating technology into curriculum. It just makes tons of sense in English class. So last year, many teachers set up their students on blogs and used them for a range of assignments, from journaling to documenting project to commonplace books. But the students didn't have laptops. Things are a little different now, and I suspect the use of blogs will become even more integrated into classes, hopefully, beyond English classes. There are all kinds of questions for our school now. I'm not going to get into them in this post. But I will pose the questions I find most interesting and imperative. Clay Burellfirst brought it up with me last year during one of our first Skype sessions: How do blogs not just become another place to do homework? How can they not lose the sense of ownership that they foster inherently?

Sorry, all of that to get to the question raised by my colleague: Should we use Blogger or Moveable Type--which is hosted on our school's server and is, therefore, private? So my assignment became to create a simple comparison between the blog engines with which I had some experience. But the real question becomes where does the blog fit in the curriculum? For example, there are obvious reasons for maintaining secure, private blogs. But for my classes, the public nature of the blog is the piece that connects to the curriculum. So here's a rundown of the blog engines I've tried.

Blogger: I think it's the easiest to set-up and maintain. And once you have a Google account, Reader goes really well with Blogger. For most of the more advanced feature it lacks, there are free html badges. However, I've heard that setting up a private set of blogs, say a whole class, makes things a lot more complicated.

TeraPad: I started to play around with it last year. For the tech-savvy, I think it could be very effective. It can host files and forums, amongst other features. I don't know much else about it. Anyone?

Edublogs/Learnerblogs: I've gone back and forth between Blogger and Edublogs, and I've ended up at Blogger each time. The one time I had a class with edublogs, there were some problems with reliability. But those seem to be worked out. And WordPress is a great tool. It's also kind of nice to be on an education-specific blog engine.

I'd love feedback and/or testimonials on any of the tools listed and others.

From Blog To Book

2007-05-16T09:51:00.000-10:00

One of the most accomplished student-bloggers in my class sent me the link to this new book. Clay and I have been talking lately about his idea that student-bloggers should get recognition and readership beyond just being associated with a class of blogger. I think this is a move in that directions. We've also been wondering about how to publish the winning Flat World Stories. Now, if only the paper at lulu was tree-free.

It's Been Too Long

2007-05-15T14:23:00.000-10:00

Well, I haven't posted or blogged my bookmarks for over two weeks. 91 student essays, final projects, finishing the 1001 Flat World Writing Project, and the last two weeks of school in general will do that. But I've had a lot of time to reflect, and I've been cruising the blogosphere regularly, starring items on my reader from the periphery. So, I can see the table under the stack of essays, and I'm looking forward to posting my reflections and ideas again, on a more regular basis.

...As I Blog On My iBook...

2007-05-03T08:28:00.001-10:00

An Even Greener Apple: Innovate! (TreeHugger)

I've always been conflicted about how sustainable we are if we use laptops and upgrade them every three years. Here's an article on TreeHugger's blog (one of my favorites) updating on Apple's slow start at going green.

More on Islandwood

2007-04-25T12:24:00.001-10:00

kitsapsun.com: Local

Environmentalists from China come to IslandWood in search of ideas to curb their country's pollution problem.

The Hot Zone

2007-04-20T07:00:00.000-10:00

On the ferry back and forth from Seattle to the Kitsap Peninsula, I finished The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. At some point last year, my wife bought it in a 3 for 2 deal at Borders, and I just grabbed it from our bookshelf one day. This is a book about level 4 viruses, Marburg, Ebola, and some others, and the the people that work to contain them. What I had to keep reminding myself was that this is a work of non-fiction. Otherwise, it reads something like a Dean Koontz novel. The book begins and ends in a place called Kitum Cave in the flanks of Mt. Elgon between Kenya and Uganda. This cave is where scientists and doctors suspect Ebola lives in nature, but they never do find out. Between cave episodes, the reader is treated to several graphic vignettes of people dying from the first known cases, as well as short-lived breakouts that don't necessarily get contained. They just disappear naturally. The main storyline is the appearance of a new strain of Ebola in a monkey house (holding place for the more than 16,000 monkeys a year imported for biomedical research and testing) in Virginia. As you can imagine, this is a page turner and cringe inducer. Pick it up and finish it in a day or so.

"Where Inspiration Comes Naturally"

2007-04-16T07:12:00.000-10:00

And that's (the post title) what we learned really happens at Islandwood (this website is extensive, sit down with a cup of fair trade coffee) outdoor education center. Already, after simply driving up the windy, evergreen-canopied driveway, we'd been transported to some place familiar and futuristic yet ancient and forgotten. Sleepy gray skies held at bay by giant fir trees, and the pace of life slowed down to match the rhythms of the forest, set by the deer, slugs, geese, and birds (maybe a cougar) that share this space with the humans. Everything softened by green moss. It's easy to forget that the city is a 35-minute ferry ride away.

Okay, so that's the parking lot, and we finally did make our way to the actual school where we had a few minutes to read the information on the walls and models in the visitor's center while we waited for our tour guide Caryl. We read about recycled glass counter tops, recycled yogurt container counter tops, cork floors, fiber boards, certified wood, buildings and windows placed to maximize natural energy, on-site water treatment, organic gardening, and technology. We also learned that this week we were sharing the grounds with one retreat group and University of Washington education graduate students who live there for a year to develop and teach the curriculum to the visiting 4th-6th grade students.

Next, we set out on our tour, which covered a couple of the more than 4 miles of former oxen trails, now for humans. There were streams, lakes, native and invasive species, dorms, outdoor classrooms, a suspension bridge, composting toilets, and 3 tree houses. A student (or adult on a retreat or attending a seminar) at Islandwood experiences all of the amenities, man-made and natural. Technology is used as a means of communication, as well as a tool to help maintain and sustain the ecosystem at Islandwood and wherever the visitors live, hopefully. Each day, after each meal, food waste is measured and recorded. And students spend a tremendous part of their free time journaling in quiet spaces. Something Greg and I would have loved to do, although simply walking the trails in silence with Caryl was awe-inspiring and inspirational.

The Eye Of The Techno-Storm

2007-04-13T14:16:00.000-10:00

My morning started with a breakfast conversation with a man named Charlie who traveled to Seattle this week to judge a book contest. He’s a book publisher, so we discussed book design, layout, paper and other pleasantries. Sufficiently caffeinated, I met Greg on 1st avenue and we walked down to Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park. We stopped in the café for a debrief of the previous day at Seattle University then made our way along the Z-shaped walkways of the park with a little guidance from John, a Seattle Art Museum docent.
We learned that the 9-acre park used to be inhabited by 82 million gallons of toxic waste (I think that's the correct amount). Not only is the park an example of urban design but community clean up. In addition, along the beach, the museum set several tons of the kind of rock that the baby Salmon from the Duwamish River now use as a safe place to rest on their way out to sea, another Seattle example of environmental living.

Next stop was the sales office for Mosler Condominiums, one of several eco-friendly, LEED certified condo buildings in the downtown area. Although the sales rep wasn’t much help and wasn’t too interested in the green aspects of the condos (other than the fact that they had a bigger pricetag), still we were able to learn about the green materials, energy-saving construction and appliances, hybrid plug-in stations, and a few other key features. What I found cool about the project was that it was the developer’s first building, and he’s a 5th generation Washingtonian. There's a newspaper article pinned on the wall of the Pensione titled "A City That Likes Itself." Pretty simple concept.

After probably the best pizza I’ve ever had at Serious Pie, Greg and I hopped in the car (for the first time of the trip—we could’ve taken public transportation, but I had a ferry to catch after our visit) and headed to DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, nestled between Nintendo and Microsoft. Greg described our visit pretty accurately when he said it was like going into the eye of the storm. This is a college that offers degrees in computer programming, real-time simulation, and animation. They have an interesting, mostly-male enrollment, with their first Bachelor’s candidates slated to graduate in April, several have already been hired at leading video game design firms, including Microsoft of course. It was great talking to Angela, our tour guide, about her background as a middle school language arts/social studies teacher and the story of her journey to DigiPen from the east coast. But schools 2.0 and the video game industry are two worlds that have yet to collide, even though both of us can imagine the possibilities. I’m going to keep in touch with them and see what happens in the future.

Service Learning At Seattle University

2007-04-11T14:29:00.000-10:00

Teaching can be isolating. Although I have an office now and have to leave it to get to my classes, I once had a classroom that was easy to never leave. And a lot of times, it can feel as though the profession of education lives in its own bubble, irrelevant to the rest of the world. That's why I'm so excited to be taking advantage of what Punahou School offers its teachers, a few days each year to go somewhere else, meet new people, get inspired, and bring back new ideas. So right now, I'm in my hometown, Seattle, Washington with Greg, visiting several schools and places that deal in service, sustainability, and technology. As a way to process what we see, I'm using my blog, and Greg and I are going to podcast our reflections and interviews.

After a particularly brutal red-eye out of Honolulu (I think I broke a fever on the flight), Greg and I picked up our rental car at 5:30am after 3 or 4 hours of neck-wrenching, knee-cramping sleep on the flight and headed to the Pensione Nichols where I'm spending the next four nights. Greg couldn't check in at the Westin until 4pm or so, but Lindsey at the Pensione hooked him up with some breakfast, which I'm pretty sure was fresh from the Pike Place Market, and a bed. Those next 3 hours of sleep were invaluable.

We hopped the Metro and found our way up First Hill to Seattle University's Center for Service and Community Engagement. There we met with Kent Koth, a friend of Greg's after his visits to Punahou to help plan The Luke Center for Public Service. We learned a lot about what Kent's done at Seattle U. All of which is discussed in the accompanying podcast. Quickly though, Kent pointed us in several new directions with regards to how technology is being used both in service programs and sustainability initiatives and development. First, he mentioned a program that Kjell Rye has put together at Garfield High School called Global Technology Academy. It's amazingly organized, and without knowing much, I'd summarize it as a program that teaches students hardware, software, and programming, sends them to areas around the globe, and these same students teach the community there how to use/repair these computer that they then donate to the community. Kent talked about S.U.'s own computer recycling program with Nicaragua, and the way he's integrated undergraduate and graduate level web design and computer science programs in working with non-profit institutions. All very exciting ideas and programs.

Blogging About Thinking

2007-04-05T14:04:00.001-10:00

The thinking is...: Math-magical thinking

The post and linked website are cool. More importantly, I just found out about this blog by Mark Hannington. Bruce posted the link.

"Learning is something that happens when you're doing something else."

2007-03-30T08:44:00.001-10:00

Educational Games Annotated

Quote: You don't have to be a genius to understand the work of the Nobel Laureates. These games and simulations, based on Nobel Prize-awarded achievements, will teach and inspire you while you're having FUN! Students, teachers and non-professionals of all ages will enjoy testing and building their knowledge in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, peace and economics. So, go ahead, Explore and Learn!

Watson'sComment: In our technology meeting yesterday, we talked a little about gaming in education. I game across this link on Academic Commons.

XPlane

2007-03-30T08:35:00.001-10:00

XPLANE | The visual thinking company

I ran across this link on Karl Fisch's blog (found him through 1001 Flat World Project). After attending an Apple digital storytelling workshop, this site really stoked my interest.

Long, Strange Trip...Not Really With Google Earth

2007-03-29T08:58:00.001-10:00

GoogleLit Trips

Quote:

A Different Way to Read Great Literature!This site is an experiment in teaching great literature in a very different way. Using Google Earth, students discover where in the world.

My annotation:

I've spent my spring break away from my laptop. And I'm back with a renewed sense of balancing use of technology and authentic inquiry and thinking. Judy forwarded this example of using Google Earth in English class. A few weeks ago, my class tried using it to explore the Congo as we read The Poisonwood Bible.

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2007-03-16T10:23:00.001-10:00

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