Technology: more than just flashy and cool

Leave it to Scott Adams to illustrate one of the main reasons why we need  to integrate technology in our classrooms NOW:




I have heard the arguments that technology as motivational tool is not an acceptable reason to embrace it, because the newest tools will lose their novelty for students long before the teachers (in some cases) have even begun to understand how to use them.  We should not look to technology as a shiny new toy that students will ooh and ahh over and miraculously want to learn the same dull stuff we taught them last year.  That is missing the point.

The point is this:  technology is where our students live.  It is what they choose to do the moment they leave our classrooms.  They text, they facebook, they blog, they tweet.  They learn new things without being "taught".  They seek out knowledge because it is part of THEIR culture to do so.  My school district bought Robyn Jackson to speak for a PD session at the start of the last school year, and one of her primary themes was about currency.  "Currency is a medium of exchange. Any behavior that students use to acquire the knowledge and skills important to your class functions as currency."  This quote comes from Ms. Jackson's article Meeting Students Where They Are  The behavior that our students are choosing to use to acquire the knowledge and skills that are important to THEM is clearly cell phones, ipods, tablets, TECHNOLOGY.  We need to harness the power of what they already know.  Activation of prior knowledge is a pedagogic necessity that precedes even the TRS-80s that I was using when I was in 6th grade.  Why should this be limited to content?  We need to activate students prior knowledge of information curation, digital communication and creation and direct this power toward the content we want them to learn.


If we meet them where they are, perhaps they will WANT to come along with us where we want to take them.

Education Reform and the Current Model

I recently watched this video "Where Good Ideas Come From" by Stephen Johnson



It really hit home for me.  I'm the type of person who always has numerous unfinished projects that I am working on, some of which I finish promptly, some of which I abandon before completion, and others that I revisit periodically, mull over, change, and adapt...sometimes over a period of years before they are implemented.  In the last few months since I started building my PLN on Twitter, I have literally been bombarded with a constant stream of ideas from some amazing educators -- information overload!  But themes are replayed and rewoven among other themes, and the best of these end up taking root, and ultimately blossom into a blog post (like this one) or something less philosophical and more concrete that I can apply in the classroom.

I've been saying for years that our educational system needs to be razed and rebuilt from ground zero, but until recently, only had the vaguest beginnings of ideas of what the new system should look like.  Last week I did the summary for the #edchat topic "In light of education reform, what will a teacher look like and be doing in 10 years?" (note:  if you think participating in an #edchat is informative, try writing a summary -- reading and rereading the posts really solidifies things!)  Josh Stumpenhorst (@stumpteacher) pointed out that it's more important to focus on what education will look like in 10 minutes, presumably since we will be there first, and while that's certainly a valid point, I think the question that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later, is what should teaching look like?  Don't get me wrong, imagining the future is a great exercise in creativity, but if we want to make real change happen, we need to be the directors of change rather than mere reactors to the change that happens to us.

I'm going to start with some quotes and conversations I've been involved with from administrators and colleagues throughout my career that provide me, at least, with some clear starting points for where I'd like to see change.

1.  "That's education!"

That was an administrator's response to a push by myself and several of my colleagues to change the structure of our foreign language program to allow students to repeat a course they had failed, rather than be systematically pushed to the next level of study with little hope for success.  I have come to realize the tragic truth in that administrator's statement of frustration intended to shut down our request.  That is education in a very broad sense.  The arbitrary grouping of students by age and the too common practice of social promotion ensures that many students will arrive at the next level of instruction in at least one subject area without having sufficiently mastered the material from the previous level.  What happens to a house build on a faulty foundation?  How about when a hurricane hits?  The same thing that happens to a child's education that is build on a foundation with significant learning gaps, especially when that child hits an emotional hurricane like parents divorcing, moving, change in economic situation, or simply the emotional storm we call puberty.  So why do we continue to try to reform a system that is so fundamentally flawed?  Meaningful reform cannot take place as long as we connect academic progress to a student's age.

2.  "She doesn't have the necessary work ethic to move to the next level"

An ironic contradiction to the above example, but our program while moving unprepared students along from level 1 to level 2, "weeded students out" before level 3.  This quote is from a conversation with a colleague and our department leader at that time in regard to one of my students who scored in the 90s on her final exam, but whose overall grades for the course were failing. Myron Dueck covered this issue quite well in his June blog post She met the learning outcomes, but she doesn't deserve to pass. My questions are these:  are we really assessing what we should be? or even what we want to be?  Is success based on learning or compliance?  Why do we hold back students who have mastered the material?  Where's the logic?  What in the world would motivate this student to repeat a course in which she passed the final exam, do the "work" for a course whose content she has already clearly mastered?

3.  Although I don't remember the exact quote, the gist of a conversation with an administrator and my former department leader was that I needed to stop focusing on student comprehension, and move more quickly so that I "covered the curriculum".  I know I didn't misunderstand, because I incredulously asked for clarification.  Again, where's the logic?  But this is an educational model that is enforced by standardized tests, the message to teachers being "Don't teach to the test, just make sure everybody passes".  The reform that is being pressed upon us now does nothing more than punctuate the initial message with a resounding "or else".

So here is what I propose to turn this broken system on its head and start making real change that can lead to real learning:


1.  We need to recognize the difference between having high standards and standardizing.  Standardizing makes the assumption that all students are the same.  Having taught for a year in a school whose population was 85% children from military families who had lived in Alaska, Germany, Korea, and many places in between, while the remaining 15% were children from the farming community many of whom had never been more than 10 miles from home, I can tell you firsthand that children are not all the same. Their life experiences are different, and their talents and abilities certainly are varied.  With standardization, if the bar is too high for Suzy, she shuts down in frustration and falls short.  Johnny, on the other hand, is capable of surpassing the standard, but slacks off when the standard is met because he has no motivation to achieve more.  The reality is that if our standards are tailored to each student, everyone achieves higher.  Standardization fits no one.  Individualized instruction plans need to become the norm

2.  The Space-Time Continuum

We continue to hang on to the 10 month agriculturally-based calendar that no longer has any functional purpose, and inevitably results in significant loss of learning during the summer months.  Technology (you knew it was coming) makes the classroom walls at best irrelevant, at worst confining and inhibiting to learning.  We need to mobilize and globalize our students' learning experiences.  Students need no longer be restricted to classroom connections.  Students should be texting, tweeting, skyping, blogging, communicating and collaborating with their peers around the world -- not just during class time, but "just in time" so that learning becomes a continuous passionate process that students want to continue on their "own" time.

Even locally, communities should be directly involved in student learning, so the lines become blurred between school and the "real world".  Authentic experience should be embedded into the curriculum.  Bring the "real world" into the classroom, and take the classroom out into the real world.  Hillary Clinton used the African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child" in her 1996 book title.  If that is truly the case, then it takes at least that to educate our children.

These changes I suggest may seem radical, but who can deny that radical change is needed to solve the crises plaguing our educational system as it currently exists.  How do we get there?  The best each of us can do as professionals in our own learning communities is to effect change in our realm of control.  It starts in our own learning spaces, and it starts today.  If not us, then who?

Memrise for Vocabulary Development in the FL Classroom

Well, I just found this empty title saved in my drafts, and I think it's time to bring it to the light of day.  Memrise.com is a vocabulary building site that I discovered several months ago. I absolutely fell in love with it, as did my students, although for different reasons. I love the fact that I can build my own vocab lists, and they are collaborative. By that I mean that I can start a vocab list on, for example, food words, and I can invite my students to add words that they are interested in learning that I left off my list. I also love the fact that sound files can be added along with each word, so students can hear the pronunciations as they study: a step up from your average flashcard. Memrise also has the capability for me (or preferably my students) to add "mems"to each word.

What's a mem? A mem is basically a mnemonic device: a short, often silly cue that student create to help them remember the word.  Something along the line of Every Good Boy Does Fine for music students to remember the names of the line notes, or "I before e..." to help remember a spelling rule. I tell my students the sillier the better, and I much prefer if the mems come from them, although I do have a few in my bag of tricks.

The last reason I really love this site is the way practice is structured. Each word is introduced along with its accompanying sound file and/or mem. Then a multiple choice question is asked to practice the word and its definition. A second word is introduced, more multiple choice, then more words, multiple choice becomes interspersed with short answer questions requiring students to type in the target language vocabulary word, and missed words are reintroduced and repeated more frequently.  Progress is tracked, and students who sign up for an account receive periodic emails reminding them to refresh their learning before their memories "die".

Now for the reasons my students love memrise:  learning takes place in a somewhat game-based environment.  Difficulty increases as students make progress.  Students are ranked and reranked based on the number of words they view and the amount of correct responses, so it is competitive.  Too much time away from memrise, and your ranking starts to drop.

I am very excited to use this tool more with my students next year!

What do you think?

To Grade or Not to Grade...But Is That Really the Question?

Tuesday night's #edchat was really hopping with opinions about how to make grading more meaningful, and in many cases how to abolish grading altogether.  I have long been of the opinion that our current system of educating our children is at best largely irrelevant to a good percentage of the population, and at worst outright damaging.  I think, however, that "to grade or not to grade" needs to be looked at in terms of the bigger picture.  Given the system as it stands, the current push is to grade teachers based on how their students scores look.  That said, for many of us, grading is a matter of self-preservation.  I am all for pushing the limits and thinking outside the box, but at the end of the day, I still need my job to support my family, so I need to remain somewhat within the boundaries set by the powers that be.

Philosophically, I guess I fall somewhere in the middle of "to grade or not to grade".  Evaluation is a part of life.  It's something our students will deal with in varying degrees throughout their working lives, and so should not be totally absent from their educational experience.  Ultimately, students will leave high school, and need to have met certain benchmarks, to have mastered certain skills/concepts in order to receive a diploma.  Colleges won't necessarily change how they do business simply because some high schools stop giving grades.  Employers will continue to evaluate employees based on the quality of work, in many cases independent of effort, and part of what we do is prepare our students to be productive citizens in the "real world", so grades maybe aren't such a horrible thing on face.

More concerning to me than grades, though, is the fact of the arbitrariness of the 13 year quest to earn this all-important diploma.  Certainly there are students who "graduate early" and there are "super seniors" who return for an extra semester or year, but those are outside the norm.  Why do we expect that our students will all learn at the same pace?  Why do we expect that all 5th grade students will master the 5th grade skills/concepts in a wide range of content areas in the same amount of time -- one year?  This has never made sense to me.  Perhaps, (and here is where I climb onto my techie soapbox) this is where the flipped classroom, differentiated instruction, and mobile learning can make the most difference.  If each student is treated as an individual, beginning each school year with an individualized learning plan, mastering skills/concepts at his/her own pace, what would that do to the concept of grading?  Grade levels would cease to exist, curricula would be fluid, Suzy might be 10 mastery levels ahead of Johnny in math, but 3 behind him in reading, and at the same level in science, and they would both be learning "just in time" to meet their needs.  Report cards would be issued "as needed" for each content area at a logical point, rather than tailoring units to fit an (again arbitrary) 10 week time period.  Learning is continuous -- a journey with checkpoints along the way. These are things that could be possible if school systems -- yes, it will take more than a teacher revolution -- are willing to build flexibility into their programs, allow students to bring their own devices and learn in ways unique to each of them.  This is the glimmer of the ideal school that I see for the future.

And then I wake up and remember that I still have to give a number grade every 10 weeks based on homework, quizzes, tests and classwork.  But when I identify a student that is learning at a significantly higher rate than his peers, I fight to have him appropriately placed -- even if it's off grade level.  If I have a student with a particular interest but no time in her schedule, I fight to be able to offer an independent study that will meet her needs.  And my grades are never final until the ink is dry (and sometimes not even then) because if the goal is mastery, then we need to be flexible with our time limits because our students ARE individuals, and mastery just might not come in exactly 10 weeks.

What do you think?

Glogster

I have to admit that prior to finding this Teacher challenge, I had already used glogster with my students. They loved it!  I had them create campaign posters for a mock election for French class president.  Students were required to include a "photo" (real or otherwise), a French music clip, a logo, 10 campaign promises (using the conditional tense) and 2 (made-up) statistics defending their promises.  They then presented their glogs to the class, who voted to narrow the field to 2 candidates.  The feedback I got from students was positive, with the exception of the music, which quite a few had difficulty embedding.

In accordance with this challenge, I created my own glog on a topic that has been in my tweetstream for the last several days -- American Stereotypes of the French.  I'm happy to have a forum in particular for the "Cliché" video, which is a tad too risqué for me to put on my class blog.

What do you think?

DoInk

Soooo...Free Tools challenge #6:  DoInk.  After using Bitstrips for comics and Goanimate for animations, I wondered if DoInk could offer me anything new, different, and/or better.  The answer is no, DoInk has nothing to offer ME.  That is not a deficiency on the part of DoInk, however, but a complete and utter dearth of artistic talent on my part.  I tried, and I tried, but the effort it required for me to create something resembling ANYTHING...well...I'm embarrassed to even admit it. I have no doubt that I have students who would take to DoInk like ducks to water, and create beautiful, sophisticated graphics and animations that would make me proud.  I also know, however, that there are a fair number of students who, while they certainly have more artistic talent than I do, might be intimidated by this tool in conjunction with their own lacking confidence.  So given these variables, I'll be sticking to apps that are a bit less DIY and a bit more "use what we have to offer and make it your own".

Here's my test animation (try not to look directly at it -- you might go blind!)


my pathetic attempt by mmebrady, made at DoInk.com

Edmodo, Wikispaces, Collaborize Classroom

This is not intended by any means to be a comprehensive review of these platforms.

I'm really liking this challenge, because it fits right in with one of my goals, which is to find a way to  accomplish what I want to accomplish using as few different platforms as possible.  I am currently using 5 different platforms at different depth levels (2 of them are required by my school district; Edmodo is not one of them), and would ideally like to reduce that to 3.

That I will continue to use the school website (through SchoolWorld) to disseminate information to students and parents is a given, so at the very least that will remain a platform that I use.  Our district uses schooltool for management of internal data, including grades.  This includes a student/parent portal feature which allows ongoing access to information about assignments and grades.

Aside from the platforms used district-wide, I have also embraced wikispaces.  I like that students can collaborate with one another via messages, and can edit one another's work.  I LOVE that all changes to any page are forwarded to me via email, and a history is available.  This was particularly useful when a well-meaning student accidentally deleted the home page for his class, and it was an unbelievably simple fix for me -- I don't even think he ever knew what he had done. 

I also love the capability of wikispaces to be used as an eportfolio for digital student work.  It supports embedding many different types of work (goanimate, voki, wallwisher -- although due to repeated "glitches" I have switched to linoit for an online blackboard, glogster, slideshare, bitstrips, and screencastomatic, to name the ones I have used).  I have had issues with certain cloud apps:  empressr and sketchcast, but I have posted links to the student work, so it is still a worthwhile option in my opinion.  Image files are also very easily embeddable.

Collaborize Classroom is another platform I have dabbled with.  It's format seems to be more or less a directed class blog.  What I like about it is the capability to create class polls, and get ongoing data.  For example, with a French 3 class working on the future tense, I put forth several specific questions about what life will be like in 25 years (will people be vacationing on the moon? etc.) and students voted whether they thought it was impossible, unlikely, possible, or definite, then we discussed the results in class.  For the same poll questions, they had to post longer comments giving reasons why they voted the way they did.  However, with blogpolls, I will be able to do the same thing in wikispaces. Also, student feedback on Collaborize Classroom was that many had difficulty logging in, even though I had sent invitations.  So, bottom line, I will likely not be using this platform in the future.

Which brings me to Edmodo.  It's a great site for teachers whose districts have not made the leap to digital information storage, but for me, it just seems to be redundant.  I do like the community aspect, and as I did sign up for an account, I will check that periodically if for no other reason than to continue building my PLN, but beyond that, probably not.