Four tools for learning

Over the past six months, I've been thinking quite a bit about my school district's move to 1:1. Specifically, I've been wondering what web-based "tools" my students should have available to them for their learning.

I began by asking myself what tools I need for my own personal and professional learning. Each week I find my use of my RSS reader, Twitter, Diigo, and my professional blog (on weeks when I make time to write) are the tools I use the most. So, I gave my students the student-friendly versions of those.

This school year, my fifth graders have been using:

• Diigo -- to collect bookmarks and share to a private 5th grade group consisting of the three fifth grade classrooms in our hallway
• Edmodo -- to share thinking, questions, and resources within a private class set up for our team
• KidBlog -- for reflection and posting random assignments
  
• PB Wiki -- for publishing their writing

A few reflections on each tool after a couple months of sporadic use (we're not 1:1 yet and available lab time has been scarce in my building the past two months):

• Diigo has been a tool that I've used daily since it was presented to me at a conference back in October. The ability to set up public or private groups has been great for me and for my students. They are still learning how to share useful comments and once we have more regular computer access, I'm sure it's usefulness will grow.
• Edmodo is a tool that, like Diigo, will grow in usefulness when my students have greater access. I've shown my students how I and those I follow use Twitter (after previewing my Twitter feed for kid-friendly tweets) for sharing resources, asking questions, and responding to others tweets. My students have practiced these, but they aren't natural uses yet.
• KidBlog has been my favorite student tool so far from the teacher side. It is simple for both students and teacher alike. I can have total control over what gets posted to our class blogs by approving each post and each comment before they go public. I'm hoping that I can get my students using it more frequently for their own short reflections and writings (remember Type 1 writings?) in the coming months.
  
• This is my second year of using PB Wiki for publishing student writings after I watched how the fifth grade East Dragons out in Littleton, CO used it in their 1:1 classroom. My students really enjoy posting to the wiki and commenting is quite easy. Recently, I've been reading The Power of Less and it has me asking if I can do the same with less. I've been thinking that KidBlog could easily take the place of PB Wiki. I suggested that to my students earlier today and was met with a chorus of "no, we love the wiki." For now, it's staying.

Those are my thoughts at the present. I'm interested to know how you're using these tools with your students or if you've found others that are essential for student learning.

Vasarely: The Visionary

I'm helping my daughter with a little research on Victor Vasarely, "the father of Op-Art." We came across the following quote from Vasarely from 1960. Quite a statement and prediction of our reality from half a century ago.

The individual will never be capable of knowing it all. Therefore, electronics will always help us more and more to hem in the contours of this vast heap of knowledge, to locate the ones in relation to the others, and obtain an intuition of synthesis. No artistic creation of value is any longer conceivable without this global idea of the living world. We must therefore completely rethink the reasons of the creative step and its effect on fellow men. We now know that through the successive levels of the processes of complication of the unit-particle-wave we arrive at the human phenomenon. Art can no longer have a divine explanation, just a beautiful and very materialistic one.

Image by Váradi Zsolt from the Wikipedia Commons.

Practicing Empathy

In a recent post, Will Richardson shared a video of a discussion between himself and Lisa Brady, the superintendent of the district he was formerly employed by and where his kids now attend school. It was a great discussion about the challenges and successes of going 1:1 and the realities of introducing social networking. As Will writes, "I think it’s great opportunity to hear a school leader in the midst of shifting a traditional school to a inquiry-based curriculum grounded in technology and online social learning tools talk about some of her thinking around making those changes."

I highly recommend viewing it.

As I've been thinking about the big shift that is occurring and talking about it with colleagues, I'll admit that I don't always remember to practice empathy and put myself in their shoes. In a comment on the same post from Will, Susan Davis wrote the following:

I am struck by your (our) frequent use of the word “shift.” To many, I think it feels more like a quake. Even as a quake, the earth moving under our feet — the change in the way learning is happening in the world — can make us feel excited (hey, that’s cool, I wonder what that shaking means…) or it can feel pretty scary (hey, my house is falling down around me).

This conversation reminds me to feel a little more empathy for those whose educational houses are falling down around them.

When Lisa Brady asks, as if for those scared and shaken folks, “Where’s my entry point?” we can imagine how they are seeing a world where the doors are moving side to side so fast they can’t see beyond them. Still, there is some urgency, the ground is shaking, and they need to get through one of those passages and safely to the other side.

It was a good reminder to me to practice empathy with my colleagues "whose educational houses are falling down around them."

Reflections from TLC 10

[This post has been adapted from an email I sent to our Technology Plan Implementation Team, a group responsible for overseeing our technology plan which includes the move to 1:1 for students in grades 3-12. I'm posting it here because it explains a lot of the thinking going on inside my head and will give some background to future posts.]

Last Friday I attended the Teaching and Learning in the Cloud Conference. I left the conference with my head spinning and I’ve spent time this weekend trying to figure out why and putting words to what I am feeling.

I went in to the conference with the unanswered question of the week (which device for students - netbooks or a pad/tablet?) on my brain, as I felt the question of the professional development for staff had been answered. Starting with the opening keynote by Wes Fryer, I was quickly reminded that the technology itself will never change learning, only by changing the teaching can we change the learning. As he wrapped up his keynote, he challenged us to look at the web 2.0 tools that were being presented as either accommodating (doing the same thing with a new tool -- ex. typing the same essay in class on a netbook) or transformative (changing the way students learn -- ex. students collaborating to create a unique product that they can share with a global audience). I’ll get back to this point later.

After that session, a colleague had the opportunity to talk with two local ed tech leaders. I started off first asking what device they would choose if they were in our shoes and both of them replied that it isn’t about the device and wanted to know about our goals for the technology. One of them said that he would take whatever funds he had and devote 25% of them to professional development.

Later on, I had the chance to ask the tech director of a local district, about the expectations they have for teachers and 1:1 and how they hold them accountable. He said there some common expectations (i.e. everyone uses Moodle), but they use it to varying degrees. He explained that tech coaches and administrators work together to help set individual goals for staff and staff have quarterly tech goal meetings to discuss the technology they are using. He explained that while they are doing lots of great things, there are cases where parents will call and ask “why is ___ grade at ____ school using more technology than the same grade at another school?” or parents of a high school student calling wondering why their student only plays games on his laptop at night as his teachers don't require use of technology for learning. Once again, the message to me was the tool isn’t important, it is how it is used to transform learning.

During my last session of the day, I had a chance to ask Ben Rimes, a tech specialist, about his district’s plan to go 1:1 next fall. They have an interesting plan for how to train staff that I’ll share later, but here’s what stuck with me. While we were chatting, another person who teaches at a charter school explained that they had been 1:1, but administration found it too difficult to keep everyone invested and are allowing the initiative to die away. I’m sure that school has more issues than just investment in technology, but the key thing that has stuck with me is that staff need to be invested and trained well.

All of these interactions and conversations through the day left me feeling that even with our tech plan outlining 7 instructional/tech coaches, six 1/2 day training sessions, inspirational speakers, etc. is it enough?

Late last week, the Science Leadership Academy, a public magnet school in Philadelphia, considered by many to be a model for tech integration and transformative learning, was featured on the Apple Education website. I mention it here, not because of the tools they are using, but because of the way they continually train staff. Here’s a paragraph from the article:

Although most new teachers arrive at the school already familiar with its learning approach, they participate in a weeklong boot camp that covers curriculum and technology. During the school year, faculty members meet for two hours of professional development each week to examine their own practices and share insights from the classroom. Staff development continues on the school’s website, where teachers discuss tools and resources in forums and blogs and post unit plans that are shared across disciplines.

If I were to synthesize all of my thinking down to one point, it would be this: the shift to transformative learning using technology is huge, for both teachers and students, and much larger than I've imagined. As I try to look at the process with our End Goals in mind, I see that there are so many layers to the professional development piece: learning the tool, integrating curriculum, learning to collaborate digitally, changing instructional practices, to name just a few.
I do believe that I have entered the Valley of Insight. This is going to be quite an adventure....

Now forming: Curriculum 21 Book Club

Hey ZPS folks,

Interested in taking a closer look at "upgrading" your curriculum (assessments, content, etc.) to better prepare your students for the work of the future? Join us (three teachers, one adminstrator - so far) in reading and discussing Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World.

Shoot me an email if you're interested.

Joy in School

Allow me to take you back eighteen years to the fall of 1991.  My high school twelfth grade IB English class was reading The Grapes of Wrath.  Groups of students were assigned the task of creating a product that would help the class further understand the time period in which the book takes place.  My group chose to create a photo essay using iconic, depression-era, black-and-white photos.

This was back in the day when the most we were taught to do on a computer (at least at our high school) was to program a turtle to move around the screen.  So, we headed for the library and checked out several coffee-table books containing photos from the depression and got to work selecting those that we felt had the greatest impact.  Then, we spent a long afternoon at the home of one of my group members using a tripod-mounted video camera to shoot a few seconds of video of each image.  Imagine: find the next image, lay it down flat, zoom in the camera, record for about five seconds, and then repeat.  Over and over for several hours.  It was a laborious process, but there was joy and camaraderie in the collaborative effort.  (Plus, I vividly recall the friend who was hosting our group making me a tape of U2's newly released Achtung Baby with some B-sides and rarities while we worked.  I still have that tape, but no tape player...)

To present the project in class, we played the video and, since we didn't have the capabilities to overdub the video with music, we played a CD of some melancholy bluegrass/folk music.  I can still recall sitting in class watching the video, feeling proud of the product, proud of our accomplishment, and emotional as it sank in what life was really like during the depression. 

So, why the trip down memory lane?  Yesterday morning, Alfie Kohn tweeted a link to a piece that he had written five years ago entitled, Feel-Bad Education: The Cult of Rigor and the Loss of Joy.  As I was home sick in bed, I had the time to read it and found it entered into my thoughts throughout the day.  Then, (and I love it when this happens) later in the day when I opened Google Reader I found a post by Dean Shareski with his reflections on the same article that he had seen on Twitter. 

Rather than share additional comments when I feel some great points have been made, I'd like to raise a few questions.  When I completed the photo essay group project, I felt a great deal of satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment and yes, joy.  Today, given the advances in technology, my fourth graders could create a more professional looking presentation with the same content in a fraction of the time.  But would they feel the same sense of accomplishment?  Can we ensure that our students will feel a sense of accomplishment--and joy--when they complete a project, with technology or without?  Is it all about making the project authentic and relevant?  Is that enough?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Image: Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange from the Wikipedia Commons

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

Yesterday morning, someone shared a link to the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009.  It is a list that is currently being developed by learning professionals and hosted by a group in the UK.  Normally, I would just bookmark it and allow folks to see it in my Delicious list on the side of my blog.  However, I have personally found those items in the top 5 to be powerful tools in my own professional learning.  If you're a ZPS staff person who would like to know more about any of these tools, let me know and I'd be more than happy to get you started.

1. Twitter
2. Delicious
3. Google Reader
4. YouTube
5. Google Docs

Google Reader: Adding Subscriptions

This post was written for a very small audience, namely the members of our Literacy Book Club. If you happen to learn something from it, great. Better yet, if you can help expand the learning by sharing your own experiences with Google Reader, please leave a comment. Thanks!

There are several different ways to add subscriptions to Google Reader. Quite simply, look for the RSS feed icon. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Once you begin to look for it, you'll see it almost everywhere. Here are a few of the places I've found it in the last few minutes...

...on the front page of the ZPS website

...on our Moodle forum








...in the sidebar of Karl Fisch's blog (subscribe to posts for now, we'll talk about comments later in the week)





Once you click on the RSS icon, if you're given a choice, choose the RSS feed and then add it to Google Reader.

There are other ways to subscribe as well:

at the bottom of the e-mail that I sent you via Google Reader






or by clicking "Add a subscription" within Reader, as we practiced on Friday.

The perfectionist in me wants to apologize for the visual appearance of this post. I wish Blogger allowed for the use of tables. Anybody want to give me a lesson in HTML code? :>)

Google Reader: Getting Started

On Friday afternoon, I had the opportunity to share some of the professional learning, thinking, and experiences that have resulted from my use of Google Reader with my colleagues and fellow members of Shari's Literacy Book Club. I've used Google Reader for several years, but mostly for personal use -- following the blogs of family, friends, and writers who write on topics that interest me personally. However, about a year ago, I began following the A Year of Reading blog after reading about it on Choice Literacy.

The chance to read posts from other educators on topics that impacted me directly in the classroom was profound. I began to search out more blogs written by other teachers and I was hooked. Franki Sibberson, one of the bloggers from A Year of Reading, recently wrote a piece for Choice Literacy entitled Beyond Gadgets: What Does It Mean to Be a Literacy Teacher Today? I used the following from that piece to explain to our book club members what I had experienced through my use of Google Reader. She writes:

What is most valuable is that my literacy has expanded my communities. Instead of learning only from literacy leaders and the few authors I've been fortunate enough to hear at an annual conference or two, I can now learn from so many different people on a daily basis by accessing the internet. The thinking that is possible when I interact in new communities has been key to who I have become as a reader, writer and thinker. I love the way that I can become part of a community that I did not even know existed only a few years ago.

Fellow book club members, I hope that you've had a few moments to check in with Reader this weekend and learn something new. I'd love to hear what you find. If my week goes according to plan, I'll post a few additional suggestions in the coming days for using Reader and blogs for your own professional learning.

[Here's a link to the packet that I put together for our small group learning. It includes articles from Choice Literacy, Google Reader, and the ASCD. Why reinvent the wheel, right?]

21st Century Literacies in Elementary Classrooms

[Last week I posted a question on the Elementary Teachers - English Companion Ning. This is part of my reply to my own question.]

As I try to clarify my own thinking on the issue of integrating the 21st Century Literacies into my classroom, I find myself in the middle between the opposing sides of "stick to the basics" and making "tech geeks" out of my students. When I re-read my reply to Michael I felt like I sounded like a Neo-Luddite who didn't see a place for computers. In actuality, prior to coming to 4th grade almost three years ago, I taught at the middle level for ten years, primarily math, science, and computers. We had a two teacher team which allowed for a great deal of integration of technology and cross-curricular projects. In hindsight, I feel like I sometimes went too far to the extreme of integrating technology possibly to the detriment of the curriculum and the development of thinking skills in my students. So when I came to 4th grade I decided that I would focus on my core curriculum without the technology.

As I have moved closer to my personal philosophy of education and have become more comfortable with 4th grade curriculum and workshop philosophy, I have found myself integrating more technology. This time, however, I am making every effort to make sure that the "ends justify the means" and that student thinking and learning are enhanced by the technology they use. What follows are some of the ways that I either am integrating, am planning on integrating, or am brainstorming integrating technology.

1. Moodle. Upper elementary teachers in our district are required to teach half an hour of keyboarding skills to our classes each week (in addition to an hour of computer instruction they receive every other week). Each Friday, my students and I head down to the computer lab where they use All The Right Type for twenty minutes and then we will often login to Moodle for a while to discuss a topic. I used Moodle with my 8th grade students in the past, but had been reluctant to use it with 4th graders. They are learning how to use it quite quickly (although some are more interested in posting 250-point font emoticons of smiling devils than the content they write - thank goodness for the the administrator delete feature). Recent topics have included: "What's the best book you've read this year?" "What's the most important thing you've learned this year?" or the basic "What are your plans over Christmas Break?"
2. "Our Living Minute." This recent article on Choice Literacy has me wondering if adding this structure to our classroom's Morning Meeting routine would allow for opportunities for students to meet some of the standards of the 21st Century Literacies. I'm not sure, but it may be worth a try.
3. Book Review Vodcasts. The reading teacher at my daughter and son's school has recently been creating vodcasts of book reviews by students at the K-2, 3-5, and 6-8 grade levels. I showed them to my students and they were quite interested in the project, but I have been wondering about the management of actually getting the videos recorded and edited. What's the quickest way to do it?
4. Class Wiki. One of our larger 4th grade Science projects involves the study of the animals of the Great Lakes. In the past, students have researched an animal, created a life-like, 3-D model of it, and then written a small book on the attributes of that animal. Lately I have been wondering what it would look like to create a class wiki on the animals of the Great Lakes, incorporating their writing, an image of their model, and possibly some poetry similar to the text insectlopedia. Considering that most of my students are typing around 10 WPM, how long would it take to complete it and how much would I end up doing for them? Probably too much? Would the time spent be worth the learning that results?
   

So, those are a few of my ideas. Your thoughts?

As a proud parent...

My seven year old daughter, Martha, is featured as one of the "Friday Book Reporters" at her school this week.

Two colleagues and I have been chatting about creating podcasts or vodcasts, possibly about the books they are reading. The technology is there... where's the time?

Tech Tips for Teachers 102

[The second post in a series?]

I used to spend far too much time in front of a computer. Then I learned that I was a happier person when I spent less time in front of a screen (duh, right?). Anyway, my goal is now to get what I need from a computer and then get off as soon as possible. Here are two tools that I have found to make my professional life (and personal life) easier and get that information more quickly.

Delicious

Delicious is a web-based application that stores your bookmarks so that you can access them from any computer. I used it for personal bookmarks for a couple of years, but this past summer I lost all of the bookmarks that I had been acquiring here at school since moving to 4th grade. So I began using Delicious for my teaching bookmarks as well. Here are the great things about using it:

• They have a handy toolbar that you can install into any browser that you use (you can see it in the screen shot of Google Reader below)
  
• You create tags that allow your bookmarks to be more easily searched
• Other people can view your book marks unless you decide to keep it private. You can view my public bookmarks if you wish.
• When you first sign up, it will ask if you want to import your bookmarks from your computer. I imported from multiple computers, getting some overlap (and some of my wife's bookmarks), but all of my bookmarks are in one place.

Google Reader

There are many different web-based applications (aka aggregators) available for keeping up with reading blogs or other web pages with RSS. My favorite is Google Reader simply because it integrates with my Gmail account so easily. Once you've added subscriptions, you can quickly view any new posts from any of your favorite blogs all from one page. Check it out.

Tech Tips for Teachers 101

Folks from the book club suggested that I teach a class on technology tips for teachers. In lieu of a class, I'm forwarding along a few suggestions to them. Here are some of the items that we discussed at our book club meeting last Friday.

Setting up multiple tabs:

You can open several tabs that you would want to open each time you open Firefox. At school I have three tabs open up: IC, Gmail, and Moodle. At home I have five tabs open up: Gmail, Google Reader (more on this later), NY Times, ZPS webmail, Moodle. The options are endless.

1. In Firefox, to open multiple tabs go to File -> New Tab and then open the page(s) that you'd like to have open when you launch Firefox.
2. To set them to open up go to Tools -> Options, choose Main, click Use Current Pages, and then click OK.

Easy as that! If you'd like more information, Firefox has a great explanation of how it works.

Google Books:

1. Click Sign In and create a new account for your library
2. Search for a book title and then click Add to Library when you've found the same edition
3. To edit the Labels (for levels, basket names, etc.), click My Library at the top
4. Click Edit Labels and then create your labels, separated by a comma and then click Save.
5. Your library is always being saved as you work so you don't need to worry about that.

Here's the link to my classroom library.