Here is an infographic that I built for my EDD703 course. I focused it on our rollout of Google Apps and Chromebooks in SUSD and was very surprised by the numbers from the start of school to current month.
For a larger view, click here: https://magic.piktochart.com/output/4438045-2015-gapps-and-cbs-in-susd
That’s why I always say that teaching is an art form. It’s not a delivery system. I don’t know when we started confusing teaching with FedEx. Teaching is an arts practice. It’s about connoisseurship and judgment and intuition. We all remember the great teachers in our lives. The ones who kind of woke us up and that we’re still thinking about because they said something to us or they gave us an angle on something that we’ve never forgotten. Sir Ken Robinson
We lost the art of teaching during the years of NCLB and within SUSD as we started to teach on day 1 of school. We lost that sense of community and building relationships and transformed teachers into curriculum deliverers. I frequently asked my principal to take off the handcuffs and allow me to teach or buy me a white coat as my classroom had been sanitized and sterilized. I look forward to changes that Common Core will bring and hope that we are able to resurrect that art of teaching in the coming years.
Edutopia
Reflection is such a meaningful process and sadly, one that is under utilized in education, at all levels. Educators should reflect on an annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily basis. Not just on the surface reflection, but honest, deep reflections as we work to improve our craft. I teach tech courses for interns, teachers, administrators and masters candidates at our local teachers college. I can honestly say that I have never taught any of the 4 courses the same way, even classes which occur in the same semester. Of course, tech changes quickly. True! That is one reason, but I am always looking for new articles for best practices and /or reflection to use with students.
This was true of my years as a classroom teacher too. I regularly gave myself grades too as I evaluated my students performance in class and on standardized tests. Deficiencies became my focus for the summer and for conferences as I looked to strengthen my instruction to address the shortcomings.
The screenshot includes 40 questions that teachers can use to get students reflecting on their work and activities. You can find the pdf linked here: https://www.edutopia.org/pdfs/stw/edutopia-stw-replicatingPBL-21stCAcad-reflection-questions.pdf . There is also a great article about getting students engaged in self-reflection, which can be found here: http://www.edutopia.org/discussion/scaffolding-student-reflections-sample-questions
How frequently do you reflect? Have you incorporated student reflection in your classroom?
Logan LaPlante is an amazing kid. Check out this TED talk about HackSchooling. Everyone in education can learn something from the talk. Logan is a 13 year old, home schooled kid, that lives in the Tahoe area. In this presentation, Logan discusses his response when asked what he wants to be when he grows up. His response Happy! He goes on to discuss that being happy isnt really taught or valued in schools. It is almost just assumed that after you go to college, get a job, and get married, that happiness naturally follows. Logan continues and describes the 8 Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes or TLCs to be happy and healthy. You have to love any kid that quotes Sir Ken Robinson. Hacking is a mindset. In schools, we need to focus more on mindsets, than skill sets. The closing discussion of education and comparison of a the unlimited runs down a slope is life changing and he is correct. If traditional education were to select the path down the mountain it would be the same line for all, the safest, most efficient, and most boring of the potential runs, while the powder goes untouched. I love the giddiness that my daughter Audrey has on powder days and want that same excitement toward her school and education.
There it is! The teaches favorite F word. Free! You can now download Google Earth (GE) Pro for Free. Check out the post from CNET. My download is running concurrently with this post. I have used the Pro version for many years. A perk of being a Google Certified Teacher at the time. Then Google started clamping down on giving the $400 version of Google Earth away for free and I was back amongst the masses. Some of the Pro features I enjoyed were better measurement tools and the ability to save your tour and export it as a movie for PC or Mac. A very cool feature when combined with the Google Lit Trips. Check out the website here. Google Lit Trips is the brain child of Jerome Burg and was hatched at the original Google Teacher Academy attended by many of my OG (Original Google) friends. I am still waiting on that backpack! I digress. A Google Lit Trip is a downloadable GE tour that follows the events of literature and could include music of the day, authentic sources, or potential in class discussion starters.
People tell me all the time that they don’t want to be on Twitter. Heck. I even heard it from members of my doctoral cohort. The reasons are consistent. What do I have to talk about that others would want to read about? Who would follow me? I don’t want to know what everyone is doing all day every day. The team at SuperNews does a great job of portraying those concerns in this funny Twitter parody. Check it out.
Some of those ideas are taken further in this comparison of Twitter having jumped the shark, which is the sign that a TV show is now on the decline.
As I have shared with my cohort, Education is the single biggest sector of tweets each day. In this article from Ed Surge, a Twitter exec shares that out of the half billion tweets per day, 4.2 million of them are focused on education. As 21st Century educators, if we are not on Twitter, we are not involved in the conversation and may soon be on the way of the Dodo. If a teacher can be replaced by a machine, the should be. Sugata Mitra
In this article, from Emerging EdTech, Foo Fighters Lead Singer Dave Grohl. He was also the drummer in Nirvana. This blog post from Emerging EdTech contains such nuggets as:
I am reminded her too of a quote attributed to MLK that goes like this. “Find something that you love to do so much that you would do it for free, but do it so well that they pay you to do it.” It is something that I shared each year with my students on the opening day of school as that quote for me has always described teaching and being an educator. Teaching is my passion and the thing that I get up each day excited to go again. I want the same feeling for my students, my nieces, and my daughter. Love what you do and you wont have to work a day in your life. Confucius.
Storytelling has been a valuable skill and method for conveying history since the beginning of man. For generations, clan or tribal history, life skills, the seasons, and celestial navigation were passed down verbally through the art of storytelling. This skill has been valued across cultures and time, except in the modern business world and classroom where the focus on statistics and use of PowerPoint has killed audience engagement. We have all experienced death by PowerPoint before as a presenter reads the text on their slides to us. In the 2012 TED talk by Garr Reynolds entitled Story, Imagery, and the Art of the 21st Century Presentation, Reynolds encourages the audience to embrace multimedia and to embrace storytelling. Reynolds makes reference to the book, Brain Rules, by Dr. John Medina and quotes Medina’s rule #10 which includes “vision trumps all other senses”.
I haven’t read the Brain Works book but it reminds me of others I have read and one of my favorite conference presenters, Dr. Lynell Burmark. In her book, Visual Literacy, the author describes how the brain process images many times faster (60000x) than text and how the use of imagery, narrated by the teacher, substantially improves retention and transfer of content for students. The statistics provided by Burmark are staggering. For another great resource, I encourage you to take the opportunity if you have a chance to listen to Ken Shelton and his Presentation Design session. Heck, you can’t go wrong with anything that Ken or Lynell is presenting.
This is an oft-quoted movie line and has several iterations and variations. In fact, I really had no idea of the origin and the many shows and movies in which it has been used. From Blazing Saddles, Gotcha, WKRP in Cincinnati and the Monkees. See more here. But when it comes to social media, it is amazing what people will do for a digital badge. Whether it is the mayor of some hot spot or unlocking badges on Foursquare, gathering stickers or digital badges at conferences, showing competency in Edmodo, or rewarding positive behaviors using Class Dojo. Heck! One only needs to look at my laptop to see how badges can be used to establish some nerd street cred.
Some of the ways that badges can be used in the classroom are presented above in the case of Edmodo and Class Dojo. Others include a site called Credly where you can design and distribute digital badges easily to groups. Brandman University has just announced they will provide digital badges for students to demonstrate mastery in their online competency based degrees and programs. Per the article, the university is being told by employers they require the need to validate applicants skills and these digital badges are one way to do this. Credly allows the university to assign badges to students, which are connected and validated by Brandman. This is a relatively new approach and I wonder how long before it trickles down to the K-12 environment. It could make for a nice addition to my personalized PD model that I am working on for my dissertation. I am going to give them a shot using these Avery labels.
We had a PD with our Site Tech Cadre (STC) this week and kicked it off with an icebreaker. I do not enjoy these when I am in the audience, but we had many new members since we last convened our STC, I thought we needed it. Participants seemed to enjoy our tech themed icebreaker and I wanted to share it. If you can use it, feel free to modify it to fit your audience.
Here is the link to the Google Doc