Be Contagious

"good educators share useful tools with each other."

Several weeks ago, during a PD session with MS teachers, I shared a Web 2.0 tool called Wallwisher.  It wasn't the point and just happen to be a small tool that I used during the time together.  I used it in that specific session because I wanted participant-to-participant interaction, rather than participant-to-facilitator interaction.  It worked well for my purposes.

From there, one of the administrators attending went on to share it with our school leadership team and use it in a meeting.  One of our coordinators then proceeded to use Wallwisher with MS and HS staff during PD days.  From there, some teachers took and applied it to their classrooms and students engaged this tool for learning.

When I first introduced this tool, I had no idea it would spread in this manner.  I'm sure that others may have heard about it from other sources than just inside our community and my original introduction.  However, good educators share useful tools with each other.  I love it when students say they know what we did in professional development because their teachers all tried it out on them the following week.  It means the PD was useful and applicable.

If you are a technology leader (formal or informal), share useful tools with your colleagues.  And don't just share a link, share how you used it to enhance learning.  With many tools or technology integration activities, you can do this in a 5-10 minute casual conversation.  When other educators see how it impacts learning and your enthusiasm of the impact it had on your lesson, they are much more likely to implement it for themselves.    Be intentional in your leadership, regardless of your formal position.


Oh, and by the way, this applies to much more than just technology.  Be contagious.

No More Excuses

It may not be comfortable, but educators have to be savvy enough to quit buying the 2.0 version of the dog ate my homework.

A blog post by Alain Meyer entitled "A New Era of Homework Excuses" caught my attention.  He talks about how students take advantage of teachers and their ignorance when it comes to technology.  Technology becomes the excuse for whatever a student has failed to deliver.  I think he has a point.  We allow students to take advantage of us in our attempts to extend some grace.

CC Aaron Jacobs

I recently sat down at lunch with a student who had failed to give a presentation the previous day for the teacher sitting next to her.  She forgot her laptop that day.  Really?!?  We are 1:1 laptop school.  How do you forget your laptop?  I questioned her further.  I asked her if she really had the presentation done.  Of course, she said, yes.  I questioned her further about what the timestamps on her files might tell me.  She dodged the question and we had a laugh, moving on to other conversation.  I have no doubt that she took advantage of the extra time to work on her presentation to say the least...and probably didn't have it ready to begin with.

While in college, I've worked for hours on a paper and then lost a half day's work.  Did that change the due date?  Nope.  Work faster, stay up later, and make it better the second time around. The other day I was working on a document and lost it (due to my own user error).  That work did not suddenly go away. I had to redo it and still make my deadlines.  It's the real world and although grace is nice, we need to push students away from excuses and toward responsibility.  I suppose having them take responsibility for their own learning is a major goal here.  Life doesn't always wait for the planets to align.  Sometimes we get curveballs at the worst possible times.

As educators, we continue to integrate more technology in the classroom.  We need to hold students accountable.  I'm not advocating losing all understanding and graciousness with students. We just need to use it a little more sparingly and hold ourselves accountable for some learning in this area.  It may not be comfortable, but educators have to be savvy enough to quit buying the 2.0 version of the dog ate my homework.

Overwhelmed?

The more I know, the more I realize I don't know.  The world of technology resources is vast and seemingly endless.  I see many people just overwhelmed by the technology available and it comes out as frustration and a feeling that it's hopeless to even try getting up to speed.

Steven Anderson wrote a nice blog post focused on beginning teachers and those that feel overwhelmed.  He rightly points out that teaching the first few years is vastly different than having a few years of experience under your belt.  Can you imagine walking into many of our schools just out of college with no experience and encountering many of these technology resources for the first time, particularly coming from a teaching program that fails to prepare you for this reality in schools?  And first year teachers are not the only ones overwhelmed.  Experienced teachers can have these exact same feelings in technology.

Some teachers give in and do nothing, resigning themselves to irrelevancy and hopelessness.  I see some tech savvy teachers and professional developers reinforce this by overwhelming teachers with what's available.  It is important to get outside our limited perspectives but those responsible for professional development also need to know their audience.  Sometimes less is more.  For many teachers, focusing on 2-3 things that can powerfully impact their classroom is sufficient for a year of growth.  The depth of use by the teacher can really help students learn and benefit the classroom instead of a surface glaze of many different "cool" tools.

We have to exercise the same discretion and information literacy that we need to be teaching our students.  We need to filter out what is most important in a digital world and determine how to leverage it for learning.  As technology leaders, we also have to help others find balance so teachers are not overwhelmed.  In the midst of our push to move people forward in their journey, we need to do so responsibly so we don't undermine ourselves with a lack of depth.

If you are an overwhelmed teacher, model the goal-setting you ask your students to do.  Don't give up!  Make some manageable strides forward and seek a true learning community that enlists the help of your students!

Plugging Freetech4teachers Blog...and the Google Guide for Educators

I have found the Freetech4teachers Blog to be a bit overwhelming with the amount of content posted there regularly. However, I suppose information glut can be a good thing at times and the key is to skim and read sporadically rather than hitting every post. At least, that is my advice.

Richard Byrne has really done a good job of compiling resources. I particularly like his work to put together a guide to the Google tools available to teachers. With so many schools running Google Apps, this is a great resource for educators around the world.

I encourage you to peruse this blog. Tons of helpful resources are there. For example, Freeology offers printable resources like graphic orgnizers for teachers (see Byrne's blog post for more details). You can find virtual field trip resources and even links to tutorials like Mac for Beginners.

Make sure you are taking some time to explore the many tools available on the web to help students learn and make this type of professional reading part of your regular diet.

More than just computers...

As we partner with Apple, it is a partnership. Unlike our Window vendors, we are getting more than just computers delivered to our door step. Apple supports our school with training and professional development for teachers and for the IT staff. The IT support includes on-site support for our students and staff as well.

Professional development for teachers has several different avenues to impact teachers in the classroom. Some involve attending conferences with other educators. Other options include having educators that specialize in effective technology integration visit our campus and work with teachers. I have attended Apple Professional Development (APD) training sessions and the facilitators are quality educators that can demonstrate classroom uses. Actually, these trainers are required to also be in the classroom at least part of the time with their full-time job assignments. By utilizing Apple training opportunities, we are able to screen out professional development opportunities and participate in high quality, strategic sessions that move our school forward. These training events do more than just focus on Apple applications. Training includes the use of many Web 2.0 tools that can be used with either platform.

In addition to specific professional development, we are connected with other Apple schools that are implementing similar 1:1 laptop programs. The connections to other schools is a powerful way to network with similar schools and build from each other. We are already connected through associations with Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) and the East Asia Regional Council of Overseas Schools (EARCOS). Although Apple is not a specific association, the network and facilitation of Apple to share ideas between schools acts in similar ways. As a result of our exploration of Apple, we have already begun to build partnerships in other areas like IB with 2 others schools running similar programs.

Keynote vs. Powerpoint

In addition to iLife, iWork is another suite of applications offered by Apple. This suite is very affordable for a school license (only a few hundred dollars). iWork includes Pages, which is a combination of Word and Publisher put together. Numbers is a spreadsheet program. Although functioning much like Excel, it allows for easier design of certain documents. Keynote is the 3rd component and perhaps the most powerful of the iWork suite. It is most often compared to PowerPoint. All the iWork applications come with some great templates that can be easily used by students or teachers to help them format their work more easily.

For those that have used it, Keynote is frequently said to be more powerful than PowerPoint. Their functionality is very similar in many ways. PowerPoint can insert media (photos, movies, sounds, etc.), but it isn't always smooth or easy. PowerPoint is designed and heavily used for text-based presentations.

Keynote is much more media-based. It allows for the fluid inclusion of media in many different forms, signifying the major difference from PowerPoint. Keynote smoothly incorporates many types of media in a polished look. It also has some very nice, professional-looking templates. And the difference plays out in important ways when we start talking about engaging students during lessons. It enables teachers to access the many digital resources available to them in our modern digital environment. And again, as previously mentioned, more time can be spent on content than troubleshooting or trying to polish the actual technology.

For example, teachers may want to show a clip from a video on the internet. They can bring that video into iMovie and edit it to the spot where they wish it to start and end. Then they can insert it directly into their presentation. Students do not lose time while the teacher cues the video/DVD but it is readily available, smoothly integrated into the presentation.

Keynote also allows the easy conversion of presentations into podcasts. This can be very useful for absent students or just allowing students to review their notes at home. Below is a presentation of our new campus as depicted by our architects. I already had the slide but in less than 2 minutes I converted it to a short movie to show the different aspects of the campus. (Note: I did not include audio but I easily could have.)

The ease of working with multimedia within Keynote or in other forms is beneficial for students and teachers to improve their lessons and classroom engagement.

I teach, therefore you learn...or do you?

I recently ran across this video... Aside from the content, it also gives some tangible examples of using images in ways to create "hooks" or illustrates concepts with images as opposed to words, which I advocated in my last post.


I teach, therefore you learn... or do you? from José Picardo on Vimeo.

Listening Skills in a Visual World

At what point do visual representations undermine listening(auditory) skills? Listening skills are important. By producing visual presentations, am I undermining the development of that skill? These questions are good and I had the opportunity to reflect upon them recently thanks to a question from a colleague.

At first thought, it seems easy to say these skills are mutually exclusive. Are we not emphasizing one over another? However, I don't think that this is the case. Visuals should not reduce auditory listening. Visuals should be a "hook" for the learner/audience to make the concept being talked about more vivid and easier to recall. Hopefully, the visual brings out some relevant relationship for an unusual way to think about the idea or reinforce the verbal description. If an audience can remember an image, it is much more likely they will remember a concept.

For example, in some presentations, I have recently used this visual:

CC Prescott Pym (Universal Playground)

I picked it up off of Flickr via Creative Commons. It gives some vivid imagery in relation to our students, our world, and our future. I like it. It may not work for everyone but can say more than the words I type. The image provides a hook to a concept I want to articulate.

Back to my focus, if we post less text and more images/media, then more listening is required, not less. Note the stark contrast to straight powerpoint presentations...typically heavy on text. Text-heavy powerpoints can undermine presentations as much as enhance. People become extremely dependent on the words on the screen--they listen less and read more. Why not hand out a sheet with the text and just let them read it if that is the goal? Some would rationalize this because students listen and write it down themselves as a kinesthetic way of learning. Although true, it seems to me that they spend more time making sure they "write" down the right things than understanding the concepts/content.

We need to find ways to use more images and multimedia to engage students and make the content memorable in place of text powerpoints. If we can do this effectively, it seems to me the images require more listening to make the connections and derive the content. However, I don't want to seem naive and say this is easy. It isn't. This is something I am working on in some of my PD work with teachers. It takes time and it is a skill which develops with use, practice, and effort. Effective teaching is not easy.

Let's note an exception...there is a value in helping ESL students by having more text visible. That doesn't necessarily mean less images, but more text may be interspersed. For ESL students, much of their learning extends to language learning and having a language rich environment. Their learning is more than just getting the content. However, images are invaluable to them as they use it for context and depend on it for understanding, perhaps even more than those without language limitations. For ESL students, they may not understand the oral language...again, they need to practice and do it, but in smaller chunks. For them, it is not the listening skill that is so weak as comprehending what is being said. Again, balance is needed.

Listening as a mental discipline. Effective visuals can be a way to engage and "appeal" to students to perform the discipline of listening in some non-painful, enjoyable ways. At the same time, a discipline takes effort and sometimes there is no way around it.

What do you think?

21st Century Skills: A doomed fad?

I recently read an article entitled The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad: 21st Century Skills by Jay Matthews of the Washington Post. The title is really a bit misleading on the content of his article but does lead me to a question...is it a fad that will come and go?

To answer that, I can say for sure it will come to pass...everything does. When we get to the 22nd century, 21st century skills will not be the moniker anymore.

To look at the article in more depth, I'll summarize Matthews' ideas by saying he calls it a trendy buzzword that has the pendulum swinging too far. He sees some value in the ideas but argues they aren't necessarily new nor does delivery or the implementation meet the expectations and rhetoric about it. However, people can't seem to get enough of it. He ends the article by saying:

Great educators tell me that teaching and learning are more about relationships than content, more about asking questions every day of everyone in class than depending on students to soak it up on their own. In our poorest neighborhoods, we still have some of our weakest teachers, either too inexperienced to handle methods like modeling instruction or too cynical to consider 21st-century skills anything more than another doomed fad. There might be a way to turn them around, but if there isn't, instead of engaged and inspired students, we will have just one more big waste of time.

Although I think his article could use more focus and substance for that matter, he hits on an important point of teacher quality. No matter what we are teaching, if we do it ineffectively then it will not be a positive venture. Teachers are the most important factor in improving student learning. The research on this is clear. Schools have to get the right people on the bus and professionally grow these educators.

If you are a teacher reading this, are you the right type of person for 21st century learning? Let me rephrase...are you willing to learn new strategics and techniques to engage students? to model authentic learning? to engage students on their terms rather than your own? To explore new tools available to you? Are you willing to put students at the center of their learning? Are you willing to release control as the expert imparting knowledge and live with a "messy" learning process?

Another point that Matthews touches on is authentic learning. What are students learning? Is it really valuable and driven by the appropriate outcomes? It is not about having students jump through hoops or "do school." We need students to engage in their learning, critically engaging and problem-solving real world challenges.

Lastly, although I may not invite Matthews to my writing class due to stylistic preferences nor may I agree with some ideas that he wrote, the concept of balance is necessary. Our learning environment does need to be transformed into a 21st century learning environment. However, that does not mean all that we have done in the past needs to be thrown out. We need wisdom and discernment to mesh the new and the old together to create something new in its own synthesis of ideas. It is not about what is new or what is old, it is about what is best.

Getting quality teachers to engage students in authentic learning that is relevant to the context of the 21st century era is critical...and it is not a fad. From my reflections on this article, you can see 3 principles that I believe lay the foundations for success, transcending any trendy idea.