New Projects: Busy as Little Bees

What am I doing? Busy as a bee. I thought I'd just share some recent projects and tools we are using:

Preschool: We visit PBSkids Games section. Not exactly ground breaking, I know.

Kindergarten: They just started learning about patterns so we visit the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives and complete their various patterning activities.

First Grade: They're learning about money/making change/selling items so we use Jump Start First Grade, The Money Challenge and The Lemonade Stand to reinforce those skills.

Second Grade: We just finished a several week unit using Scratch programming to create animations of the bean plant life cycle. Here is an example of one. Now, we are beginning Martin Luther King Jr timelines using Timeline Maker or SumoPaint (the kids choose).

Third Grade: They just finished a Microsoft Word unit (not terribly exciting) and are now beginning keyboarding. We use Type to Learn 3 and some old school keyboarding drills as well. I even have a very old word processor I show them and give them a chance to try out!

Fourth Grade: They just finished a copyright unit that I designed and described here. Now they are starting a keyboarding unit of practice.

Fifth Grade: These students just created blogs for the book Kokopelli's Flute. Each student chose a character from the book and composed one blog post per chapter as if they were keeping a journal. They were graded on creativity (did they use a song or poem instead of just text?) and communication skill. They were also graded on their commenting skills with other kids...they had to comment on at least 10 other blogs. We used Kidblog. They're set to private at this point. So we can't share here.  Now they are using Masher to create short travel videos for South Africa. It's our very first time using this tool and I'm nervous. Our tools in this year have not always gone well (Glogster shut down mid project, MyFakewall functioned horribly, Nota had glitches). Kidblog was awesome so I'm hoping for another score.

Free Educational Software List/Description

Just reposting the "Free Classroom Software" page that Thane Terrill posted on his "Technology on a Shoestring" blog. What's neat about this list is that it's categorized by subject and all are applicable to education. Idea: Have my students in 5th grade choose one to research, review and then submit the review to a content-area teachers here in our school. Love it so far!!

Evaluations for Digital Projects

As Understanding By Design, and backwards planning teaches us, the goals and assessments should be the point from which we start when designing curriculum. Although I do not follow this exclusively, I do think it's a good practice and one of the areas in which I feel most challenged is grading. Admittedly, I don't grade as rigorously as I would like. This is the result of many different reasons, not just laziness. However one of the reasons is that I've never had it made as straightforward a process as I recently discovered it COULD be: The September/October 2010 Learning and Leading with Technology featured an article about this topic entitled "Where's the Beef?: Adding Rigor to Student Digital Projects." The author, Bernajean Porter, cites the NCREL "Nine Scoring Traits for Digital Projects." Each scoring guide is divided into two parts that make total sense: content and craftsmanship. Perfecto! It's exactly the combination I seek in all the projects I design for students.

The article goes over other important facets of project design but I got the most out of the scoring traits. I'll be trying these out immediately for sure.

A New Online Master's Degree Program

In the past, I have shied away from Educational Technology master's degree programs mostly because I felt that I had so much familiarity with the offered coursework, I would be just "legitimizing" my own knowledge with an expensive piece of paper. This week, I read about a new program, one about which I could get excited: An Instructional Media master's degree comprised of 10 online courses with topics like Digital Storytelling, Digital Media in the Classroom, and Using Technology to Support Creativity. Wilkes University and Discovery Education have teamed up to offer the program and although I have given it only a cursory glance so far, I'm definitely going to look into it further.

Tech Integration Online Curriculum NOW Free!

A parent at our school sent me a heads-up from a company called SAS that has now made their online curriculum available free of charge to all schools. Here's a blurb from their site:
"SAS Curriculum Pathways is a free Web-based software designed to enhance student achievement and teacher effectiveness by providing online curriculum resources in all the core disciplines: English, math, science, social studies/history and Spanish. Appropriate for middle schools, high schools, community colleges, virtual schools, home school, and other teaching and learning environments."
I requested a free subscription for our school and their online lesson plans and web resources look pretty great for a school looking to get serious about technology integration. The Writing Reviser is a particularly neat feature, as well as the Math Interactives. You can watch demos of these features here: http://www.sas.com/govedu/edu/curriculum/demos.html
It has won several awards, including from Technology and Learning, a resource I trust.

A Vision of Students Today

Although I do not often embed videos, I find myself posting TWO this week alone. I've seen this before, but it just returned to me via email, so I'm thinking it holds something of value for us all. It's from a Spring 2007 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology Class at Kansas State University.

Judi Harris and Professional Development

A while back I mentioned contacting Professor Judi Harris at the College of William and Mary about how we might better manage Educational Technology Development at our school. A few weeks ago, my colleague Joan Jones and I finally made it there. Joan is our school's curriculum coordinator, so I thought she'd benefit from Dr. Harris' wisdom as well. It's not exaggerating to say that what we learned was profound. Dr. Harris is one of the most down-to-earth, yet engaging and well read persons with whom I have had the pleasure to work. She referred frequently to the Diffusion of Innovations model as a way to understand how all professional development/innovation in general evolves as it is implemented. What's significant about that is understanding that you'll only reach a small percentage at first, but then with time, others will adopt and that new skill or technology will be diffused throughout the environment eventually--excepting the farthest reaches, those folks called laggers.

We developed a plan for addressing overall professional development at our school based on a two hour conversation with Dr. Harris. She helped us to see that we must first begin by helping our teachers the same way we'd help students--by identifying the ways they learn best and by creating a common vocabulary for a professional learning community.

Steps:
1. Use one of our contacts at Organizational and Professional Development Services. This company has worked for the county in which our school is located, as well as on the state level. He specifically addresses learning styles, communication techniques and team building skills and change management.
2. Contact Judi Harris about speaking at our Inservice Day in Fall.
3. Organize Fall Inservice, including a long-term plan for faculty to demonstrate our long-term commitment to the process. (learning styles, communication techniques and brainstorming curriculum development themes). Possibly a survey?
4. Create committee for curriculum development.
5. Committee led by Joan conducts research (common vocabulary) about related curriculum themes suggested by the teachers and present to faculty at first whole-school faculty meetings after school begins.
a. Devise ways for teachers to engage with the new curriculum themes during the year.

I don't know how this will all go, but it's exciting to be around at the inception of a large-scale redevelopment process. We are hugely grateful to Dr. Harris for the time she spent with us.

Professional Development

Yesterday, I had a great skype meeting with the middle school technology director of the University of Milwaukee School. I wanted to pick his brain about his professional development program, especially as it pertained to technology and curriculum integration. It helped to reinforce two central ideas I have about ed tech prof development:

1. Ed Tech professional development is simply general professional development. The days of training teachers on software en masse are over. So much of what we do is simply part and parcel of the digital native's world that it necessarily pervades the curriculum. It should not be a separate subject any longer.

2. All schools regardless of money, space or staffing face the same issues of how to make professional development in general become an efficient, ongoing and daily experience for educators.

I'll be meeting with Judi Harris, at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va next month. She has spoken at NECC about Educational Technology Professional Development models. Ms. Harris has made herself available to me and a colleague for a couple of HOURS to discuss professional development models and how we can pick and choose from those models to shape one for our own community! Such generosity and spirit of sharing...

Her work, although I am only superficially familiar with it thus far, reinforces a lesson that is central to my growth as a teacher, as a wife, as a human being: there is almost no simple solution to complex problems. It's not a binary code. The best solution will be composed of bits of hands-on, small-group, peer mentoring, online and more. It's a postmodern solution for our postmodern world. I have to keep learning that over and over. Living in the gray zones.

Image Credit: www.yourgaragepros.com

Friend or Frustration?

A friend, Sarah, sent me a New York Times article entitled New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology about how a greater and greater number of teachers (mostly high school and college) are seeing phones, computers and other technology as distractions without educational component. Of course, I can see their point. If I am sitting in a meeting with a computer, I am more likely to become distracted than if I did not have one. It's a draw, a lure away from the events transpiring in front of me.

The only time that does not apply is when the discussion or lesson is so very thrilling that I simply must watch and listen. So, as a teacher, does that mean that every one of my lessons has to be so very thrilling that a student cannot not listen? Must I, as Neil Postman puts it, amuse them to death?--my death, that is, since I would kill myself just trying to make every single lesson amazingly entertaining. And isn't that doing our children a disservice, because when, in the real work world, are they going to be entertained in meetings? It's the most I can do not to walk out when my time is being wasted.

Effectiveness of Technology in Education

Great article from T.H.E. Journal about The Effectiveness of Technology in Education. Basically, she says it's an irrelevent question. Check it out:
http://www.thejournal.com/articles/21544_5

More on Identity

Sherry Turkle (MIT) wrote an article entitled "How Computers Change the Way We Think" in the Jan 2004 Chronicle of Higher Education. I thought this snippet was particularly interesting and conflicts with the somewhat relieving information I posted about last....

"Avatars or a self? Chat rooms, role-playing games, and other technological venues offer us many different contexts for presenting ourselves online. Those possibilities are particularly important for adolescents because they offer what Erik Erikson described as a moratorium, a time out or safe space for the personal experimentation that is so crucial for adolescent development. Our dangerous world -- with crime, terrorism, drugs, and AIDS -- offers little in the way of safe spaces. Online worlds can provide valuable spaces for identity play.
But some people who gain fluency in expressing multiple aspects of self may find it harder to develop authentic selves. Some children who write narratives for their screen avatars may grow up with too little experience of how to share their real feelings with other people. For those who are lonely yet afraid of intimacy, information technology has made it possible to have the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship."

Hmm....the research continues.
Image Credit: http://web.mit.edu/sturkle/www/

Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink

For my "Fiction and Film of the 1980s" graduate class at Loyola, I am reading a book called Amusing Oursevles to Death by Neil Postman. It's from the 80s (duh), and mostly focused on how the shift from a literary culture to a visual (tv) culture has degraded our public conversation. He speaks about how the information glut has decreased our "information-action ratio".

Here's how it works: the more information we have about the world that is irrelevant to our lives, the less action we can take in response to it. For instance, we learn that there are Buddhist monks protesting in Burma. What can we, here in America, as regular folks, really DO about that situation? Our options are limited. Back in the day, when all news was relevant to our geographic locale (like with regional newspapers) we felt less impotent, felt a sense of more control over our lives. Postman's theory states that we are left asking ourselves: "What I am I to do with all of this irrelevant, decontextualized information?" Make it into a diversion, an amusement, like crossword puzzles, Trivial Pursuit, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? This creates a pseudo-context, a "last refuge of a culture overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence and impotence." (p. 76)

So what's the answer? I dunno. I'm only half way through the book. I can hazard a guess. Follow folk-singer John Prine's advice in his song "Spanish Pipedream": "Blow up your T.V., throw away your paper, move to the country and build you a home, plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches, and you'll find Jesus on your own." The more I learn about my job, the more I realize I'm teaching children how to wield a sword. It's still a weapon made for a war they will inevitably face; my only recourse is to teach them how to use it with honor.

Image credit: www.methuen.co.uk

Social Networks Research

Marc Prensky posted on his Weblogg-ed Blog about the new National School Boards Association report "Creating and Connecting: Research and Guidelines on Online Social--and Educational--Networking." This 10-page report outlines the positives and what they call the "gaps", as well as guidance and recommendations. It is targeted for School Board members, but the data and recommendations within are helpful for any parent or teacher.

Monke Ain't No Monk (No Matter His Disguise)

It's one of the blessings of my life and occupation that interesting folks are always sending me interesting things: books, music, movies, magazine articles. This week, I received in the mail at school an article from Orion Magazine (September/October 2005) called "Charlotte's Webpage," by Lowell Monke. The subtitle: "Why children shouldn't have the world at their fingertips." A parent I met at one of my speaking engagements wanted to know what I thought of it.

Well, I have to say, I can't really comment objectively about it. Of course, before I offer any opinion at all, I always consider the source, so I Googled him. Lowell Monke is a notorious critic of technology education--after having spent 15 years in the field himself. Here's why I can't really comment objectively (but, oh yes, I will comment...later): Imagine you're a chef who really loves her job. You get up in the morning psyched to go to your restaurant and you feel fulfilled at the end of the day. Imagine someone hands you an article about how all of society's ills are caused by folks eating out too much. You're going to have quite a difficult time reading the article, but you'll do so because you know you can't (shouldn't) just block out things that don't reinforce your worldview. Then, you'll concoct a brilliant defense because, after all, debate is nothing more than making the other person wrong--not necessarily to show yourself to be right. You just end up being "right" by default (which is why typical debates bore me.)

Here's where my opinion of the article begins. At it's core, behind all of the stinging rhetoric and giant leaps of logical fallacy, I agree with Monke. He's not the iconoclast he appears to be. After we get past all of his false comparisons (placing a sentence about a decrease in the number of minutes children get for recess these days right before a sentence about the national increase in technology spending--proximity in language does not equal correlation) and all of his self-righteous, didactic rants that only serve to demonstrate how his thinking is radically different from 21st century learners, we get to what he really thinks. He thinks the real problem lies in the fact that schools often try to substitute computers for inspired teachers. "Poorly trained, unenthusiastic teachers, using poor methods based on faulty philosophical foundations to teach irrelevant material makes for boring education. The computer has sounded the alarm for all to hear, but that does not meant that in it lies the solution to the problem."

Monke is right. Without question, the largest challenge I face as a technology educator is helping teachers to understand how to design curriculum that requires students to synthesize information--not just to report it. The world is a different place than the one in which Monke grew up in (rural Iowa), where it was considered a skill to be able to locate information in the library. We are all awash in information. Thinking critically about that information is the skill we need to teach children. Admittedly, most teachers have not yet begun to design their curriculum differently to suit "digital natives."

Monke's real thesis comes in after six needless pages: "It is crucial that we increase our efforts to help people recognize and accept the immense responsibility they have to use those machines for the good of humanity." He is absolutely right and this societal responsibility applies to more than just computers...it applies to all media. Not to get all esoteric, but isn't this the primary struggle of humanity? To overcome our baser instincts and rise to the challenge of creating and sustaining a peaceful and honorable community? Monke references a Descartes quote about his desire to "seize nature by the throat." It's really man against himself, not man against machine.

Near the end of the article, Monke concedes that "it's not necessary or sensible to teach children to reject computers. What is necessary is to confront the challenges the technology poses with wisdom and great care."

Now, if Monke had just started out with that thesis and dropped the inflammatory rhetoric, I would have answered with a resounding, "ABSOLUTELY." Most technology educators would. But then, that wouldn't be quite as sexy or alluring in the age of sensationalistic media, hmmmmmm? Wouldn't sell as many articles, hmmmm? He's just an idealist in disguise as a naysayer. Guilty as charged, I judge.

(Thank you to D.T., the parent who sent me the article...it was great fun to read and consider.) Image credit: www.jupiterimages.com

Getting It All Right

Mea culpa. I got it all wrong in my last blog post "The Death of Crayons." I ruminated on it some more yesterday and I suppose I had an epiphany. What's the whole point of this blog? Helping children to merge their educational use of technology with their personal use of technology. So, that's exactly what The PowerPoint Kid was doing. He was merging his interest in dinosaurs with his interest in PowerPoint and producing new media on the matter. It's my dream outcome, really, and what do I do when faced with my dream? Miss the point!

The good news is that I didn't miss it altogether. I got it loud and clear today. My work is moving forward and that child is proof positive. I hear he's out boogie-boarding today. Just goes to show you, Rousseau was right. "Do not judge, and you will never be mistaken."

Image credit: www.noappp.org

Ahhhhhhh Summertime

It's finally over. All the children who attend my school are now whooping it up in summer camps, European vacations and on couches with thumbs firmly attached to game console controllers. I changed the BIOS settings on all of the computers in my classroom so that they do not automatically come on every weekday morning at 7:45. I put all the CDROMs back in their cases and sent out emails to several teachers at my school asking them to arrange a time to meet with me to discuss curriculum over the summer. My strategy for solving the integration issue has shifted to a purely project-based approach and that's tough to hammer out in a 10 minute hallway meeting. Thankfully most of the teachers have acquiesced to meeting me this summer so that we might be able to lay the groundwork for those projects this summer. When September rolls around, we'll have only smiles to exchange.

In the meantime, I'm off to Boston tomorrow for a roadtrip with my cousin. She and I have taken three roadtrips in four years, once a summer. This year, it's Boston, Salem Massachusetts and Portland Maine--all in six days. Yes, we're ambitious. I'll be taking along my digital voice recorder so that the children in 5th grade who read "The Witch of Blackbird Pond" can hear the Salem tour guide's witticisms and insight. I'll also be taping a discussion about Episcopal School identity with the former Reverend of our school to bring back to the current administrative team. As we grapple with what an Episcopal School identity might be composed of, his words will certainly provide valuable input. So, I'm not leaving it all behind, but it's also not the driving force of our trip. I guess we all take who we are with us, as integrated individuals. Isn't that the whole idea of what we're all doing here anyway?

Image credit: www.photo.net

Skyping My Head Off

This has been an exciting week for me, as I have had two conversations with educators in Holland and Ethiopia. We're working on a project I'm starting at my school called the World Village Project. Although there are sites like Epals that will help connect you to international schools, I'm fortunate enough to have made these connections myself. We're designing curriculum for our children so that their exchanges will be about more than "how much homework do you have a night." Of course, those types of personal questions are important to ask when making connections, but working together on a mutually agreed-upon project makes learning meaningful.

Some folks have been trying to get me to lead a NAIS Challenge 20/20 Project, which I will do if I have to. My objection to the program is that it's dealing with issues raised in Jean Francois Rischard's book High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them. I think these are all quite obviously important issues to address, but only AFTER our children know one another and have worked together on shared content. If integration really is rule #1 in technology education, then why are we manufacturing relevance for these topics in our curriculum? I'm the first to admit that these issues should BE in our curriculum, but they're just not at our school. I suppose I should admit that participating in the program would help to integrate those discussions into our programs, to introduce a context for the discussions. At the heart of it, I still feel that the conversations like that will be richer once our schools have a relationship in place. Those issues seem like second year topics for discussion.

Either way, I'm thrilled that my school is taking steps towards forming these partnerships. This is the way. This is how we will help kids incorporate both sides of their technological axis.

Early Childhood Computer Use

One of friends is a technological Luddite. The computer she and her husband have in their home is about as old as I am, and they don't plan on getting another one anytime soon. She has a two year old little girl, Emily. Emily's an average child, funny and athletic, learning a lot every day. One day, I brought my laptop with me to their house and pulled it out to show something I had been working on and Emily was very curious about it. She wobbled over to me and watched what I was doing with my tiny portable mouse for about a minute, then grabbed it out of my hand and started navigating the menu on the screen. I kid you not. It took her about a minute to figure out what her parents insist they had never before shown her.

I'm reading a great deal lately about introducing computers to younger and younger students, including preschool students. At a conference I am helping to plan, two of the sessions address this very topic--at the teachers' requests I might add. Parents of our students constantly ask me for resources they can use with their 2 or 3 year old children.

On the one hand, I attended a great lecture by Dr. William Stixrud "How Today's Technology Affects a Child's Brain, Personality and Social Development" that pretty much said children are often not neurologically ready for computer use at this age period! He cites Jane Healy's 1999 book "Failure to Connect" and the Waldorf School approach to the issue. On the other hand, you have brain research on multitasking, like the NPR article "How Multitasking Affects Human Learning" which basically says that while it decreases the quality of the information learned, it can be done fairly well. A different part of the brain is accessed when trying to incorporate information acquired during focused versus multitask environments.

That leaves me with the question, will our brains evolve to multitask at greater and greater rates and increase the quality of information? If children are engaged in this process from the earliest ages, will it become innate the same way that it seems to be innate for a child to grab a mouse and move it around?

Will Our Kids Be Deaf at 20?

This morning as I was listening to my Bible, otherwise known as NPR Morning Edition, I heard a segement called "Kids' Use of Earbuds Worries Hearing Experts" about how kids are seriously damaging their hearing by listening to their MP3 players at decibel levels equivalent to chainsaws.

I need to start addressing this issue in my classes. Honestly, I haven't even started the process. But on the more laughable side, there's a rap you can listen to called "Turn It To The Left" that Ben Jackson performs for the kids about hearing loss. It's so awesome in its lameness the kids must love it. Give a listen on the NPR page link above. It'll make your day.

Generation Y's Goal

This week, I have been reading Elizabeth Gilbert's book Eat, Pray Love. I've only read part one so far about how she learns to experience sensual (note: different from sexual) pleasure in Italy, mostly through food. It made me think about how the children I teach in technology class are soooooo all about gratifying their own pleasures. Every game we play or lesson they learn, they want to know how they will be rewarded. For a hard-working, internally driven person like myself, I see this as selfishness and weakness. A USA article I read recently helped me to see it differently:
Generation Y's Goal? Wealth and Fame
Essentially, 81% of 18-25 year olds cite being rich as their #1 goal and 51% said being famous. This is the first generation who is growing up seeing themselves as stars on American Idol, The Real World and the Apprentice. They think their lives are suitable for entertaining consumption on My Space and Facebook. Each is a modern day Narcissus. How do we help children whose worldview is shaped by this outlook?