edutwist.com - teaching and technology

Washington, DC is swarming with educators and technology lovers as the NECC 2009 conference begins. Today’s crowds should swell even more as attendees arrive in town for the official kickoff of the national conference this afternoon, capped by the opening keynote speaker, Malcom Gladwell, author of Outliers (2008), Blink (2005), and The Tipping Point (2000). The conference center is sitting ready, with Ask Me booths and volunteers, including tech support (”The Doc Is In” stations) prepared to assist attendees.

One thing I noticed as I walked around the convention center yesterday (Saturday) afternoon: almost everyone I passed smiled at me and was friendly. There is a collegiate, collaborative feeling in the air, knowing that we’re embarking on a learning adventure for the next few days and that we all come into the arena from the same point. We’re all educators or in the education field and we all love technology and want to use it more effectively and creatively in the classroom.

But we don’t all come to the conference with the same level of expertise and experience using technology in the classroom. We can’t assume that everyone we talk to or share with in a session has the same knowledge about web 2.0 or software that we do. I know many attendees who do not have delicious or diigo accounts, do not blog, are not on twitter or plurk or use facebook, and, more importantly, do not know why these applications are integral to their professional growth. But they’re here to find out. Be gentle, veterans, and do not judge too harshly or look down upon anyone who knows less than you do. You started somewhere, too!

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Find out what your audience knows!

Veteran attendees, please remember those of us who are attending a NECC conference for the first time. If you’re leading a session or workshop, take a few minutes to find out what the members in the audience know about your topic before you begin. We need you to explain more, perhaps even from the beginning in some cases. If you don’t have time to start from the beginning, suggest resources and — above all — offer encouragement. Explain the rationale so newcomers understand the reason your topic is essential. And remember, it’s not a comfortable feeling to be a newbie, so be gentle.

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Newbies, speak up!

You can’t learn if you don’t ask. Don’t be bullied by the feeling that “everyone else knows this but me.” If you’re attending NECC for the first time, please speak up and ask questions. With a few exceptions, most veterans will offer help and share their expertise with you. They just forget sometimes that everyone doesn’t know what they know. Take careful notes and check out the resources and links provided in sessions. Be willing to take risks and try something new. You have experts around you here to support you as you step out of your comfort zone!

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Be kind to new presenters

There is a middle ground between veterans and newbies, which includes educators who are not brand new to technology but who aren’t quite yet seasoned experts. Some of them submitted proposals for sessions and workshops and will be “on stage” for their first time. Please encourage them and participate in their sessions. If they bomb, give them friendly feedback by emailing them afterward or speaking with them to offer tips. If you are the type of person who doesn’t have patience and feels your time is too valuable to waste in a session that is not helpful to you, please find courteous ways to exit the session without showing off your displeasure. Even better, just quietly work on something else while staying in the session.

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Don’t be a Mac snob

Many of us use PCs, either by choice, by habit, or because our school system or workplace dictates it. I know that Macs are the buzz, and, personally, when I grow up, I want to own a Mac — but for the time being, please do not show arrogance toward those of us at NECC who pull out our Dells in the midst of a sea of MacPros. The apple logo can be intimidating to PC users, especially because Mac people talk in a different language sometimes. It is like traveling in a foreign country. We need translations to understand what you mean when you mention Mac-specific applications such as Keynote or Garage Band.

The next few days will be a mindmeld of useful information and professional growth. As a relative newcomer myself, I’m looking forward to actually meeting friends from twitter and plurk with whom I have only chatted online. I can’t wait to start learning! I’m expecting my head to begin spinning sometime in the next few hours and not stop anytime soon afterward — I know I’ll learn more than I can reasonably hope to digest.

My hope is that every participant at NECC, whether new or seasoned, makes an effort to communicate and share with each other without staying to themselves. I’m looking forward to a professional, collegiate, and collaborative experience that will rock my world!

This blog expresses the personal opinions of the author and is not affiliated
with nor representative of any company, employer, or other entity.
Posted on June 28th, 2009 by Sharon Elin
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

An online friend of mine, Cerese Godfrey, created this VoiceThread slideshow to explain PLNs (Professional or Personal Learning Networks). She asked her friends on Plurk to add comments.

…By the way, can you tell Cerese is from Georgia? (sorry, Cerese, but your Southern drawl is charming!)

I’m not a shy person, so I grabbed my microphone and went at it. I hope others will add their voices or type their thoughts — these comments will be added around the edges of the slideshow along with mine. What do you want to add? I’d love to hear your ideas!

If you haven’t used VoiceThread before, you’ll see that is a creative way to collaborate on a slideshow. Below Cerese’s PLN VoiceThread, I’ll share some other examples of VoiceThreads to demonstrate other uses for the application.

You will need to sign up/log in to add your comments. It is a free web 2.0 application, but you can subscribe for higher levels to obtain more accessibility and features.

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Other Examples:

Transition project from Year 6 to Year 7 involving schools from the UK, Australia and Thailand. Teacher Steve Kirkpatrick:

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Meg Swecker uses VoiceThread to connect her students’ questions with her scuba diving trips. You can find more examples than this one on her website, Giant Stride, on her “Ocean VoiceThread” post.

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This blog expresses the personal opinions of the author and is not affiliated
with nor representative of any company, employer, or other entity.
Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Sharon Elin
Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

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Education is a noble and honorable enterprise — well-meaning, respectable, geared toward progress and success. For all its lofty intentions, though, we have a few glaring problems in education here in America. One of the most pernicious is the dark truth that the profession currently includes too many ineffective, lame, or even neglectful and abusive teachers. They make us all look bad, and, frankly, I’m ready to either clean house and get rid of them or find more assertive methods to remediate their training until they improve.

The first step is to identify weak teachers so we can address their shortfalls. How do we do this? Some districts are judging teachers by their students’ progress, tracking standardized test scores. While this seems to make sense statistically and objectively, this assessment is a shallow, superficial, and misleading measure of a teacher’s effectiveness.

Standardized tests reveal what students know about a collection of facts and concepts, but they can never reveal whether students are rising to their full potential, whether they’re creatively and intellectually stimulated, or whether they are becoming civic-minded, future-oriented, productive citizens. They can never gauge the reach of a teacher’s inspiration or the pull of a teacher’s encouragement. And they can never look inside a classroom to see little Sally-Lou celebrating with Mrs. Jones when she finally has the “aha!” moment and understands fractions and decimals, finally able to complete math problems on her own that she missed on that standardized test.

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Conversely, standardized tests do not show the abusive sarcasm that some teachers use, or the drill and kill rote memorization that they inflict like punishment on their students. They cannot uncover the boredom and the desire for flight from school that such mediocre teaching produce. And they cannot reveal the crushing criticism and put-downs that some teachers carelessly dole out, nor the deflated and demoralized emotions that students suffer as a result.

A few weeks ago, an informal poll on my blog asked how teachers should be evaluated. The most popular answers produced a fairly respectable tie between peer observation and administrative observations. No surprise, because I began my teaching career in a district that encouraged peer observations (although they were difficult because of scheduling constraints) and made common practice of following a formal observation procedure that was tied to staff development and provided consistent feedback, similar to the recommendations in this ERIC document or in Charlotte Danielson’s model of a teacher professional development continuum. It was so common to be observed that students no longer blinked an eye or thought anything of it when a principal, teacher, or school board administrator came in and sat down in the room.

Was my experience with observations typical elsewhere? Curious, I asked a few teachers in a couple of the schools I visit whether their teaching has ever been observed in their classroom. More than one answered that she’s never been observed by the principal! Cursory walk-throughs by assistant principals often were the only classroom visits these teachers had experienced. Their evaluations at year-end were often based on workplace norms (”shows up to work 170 days out of 181″ or “attends staff meetings”) instead of being focused on the actual teaching experience or pedagogy.

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In my opinion, whoever stands in front of a classroom to teach or walks among the students as a leader and guide should face both planned and unannounced classroom observations, followed by discussion, feedback, and reflection — and these evaluations should be conducted by both administrators and by peers.

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One caveat that bears emphasis: The administrators who conduct teacher observations and evaluations should be model teachers themselves. Too often, mediocre teachers escape the classroom by rising to the administrative ranks. These “leaders” are not the ideal role models and instructional leaders that teachers need. They are as much a bane to education as poor teachers are themselves.

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Two steps further

I want to go two steps further, however. Yes, teachers need regular formal evaluations and observations by their administrators. Yes, teachers need to emerge from their isolated classrooms and begin visiting each other’s classes frequently to share ideas, critique each other’s styles, and support each other as a professional community.

But what are the best mirrors of teacher performance? There are two more.

One of the most effective is videotaping and self-reflection. How often have you watched yourself teaching and, even more importantly, analyzed your teaching effectiveness? Watch yourself, listen to yourself, and watch the students’ reactions. It’s an eye-opening experience! Going through the process of becoming a National Board Certified Teacher requires videotaping lessons as part of the judging but also serves as a means for deeper and more analytical professional reflection. According to a publication by the NEA and the AFT, videotaping “will show the ‘total picture’ of your classroom. You want your video to convey—to the extent possible—the classroom climate, student engagement, interactions (both verbal and nonverbal), and your role in promoting classroom discourse.” (p. 35)

I know an administrator who carries a Flip camera to every observation, and records the lessons he observes, filming the students’ reactions as well as the instructor’s delivery. He shares the film with the teacher to reflect on the lesson, and then deletes the footage to protect the students’ privacy.

The second honest mirror is one that is rarely included but is often the most telling source of information — the student, who is a captive audience several hours a day with the teacher. What would happen if students were asked to evaluate their teachers? Would their opinions be useful? Sounds scary, doesn’t it? The worst-case scenario conjures images of vengeful students snickering as they write derogatory, inflamed accusations against their teachers, hoping to get them in trouble or even fired.

But what if negative reactions were rare, and students more often were honest in their appraisals of their teachers? What if their responses to a questionnaire about their teacher were kept private, seen only by the teacher if that were his or her choice? And what if these questionnaires were only used as a formative assessment, not as an evaluation that would “count” or decide a teacher’s fate?

Every year, I gave my students a such questionnaire and held my breath as I tallied the anonymous responses. The students were ruthless with their honesty but helpful with their suggestions. It only hurt a little bit to discover I needed to slow down my rate of speech, avoid micromanaging (stop constantly suggesting changes to their projects and rewording their text), or that the air freshener I plugged in was nauseating and it wasn’t fair that I drank sodas in front of them. I gained valuable insight into their perspectives about my teaching style, their feelings, and the quality of the classroom climate. Best of all, the questionnaires opened frank discussions with my classes about our learning processes. This generated ownership of their learning, an important tenet for my middle schoolers.

Here is a version of my questionnaire that you are welcome to use. You may look at the survey form that the students fill out, and if you want to gain access to the Google Document the form will generate, you have my permission. If you decide to use the questionnaire, please make your own copy so you can generate answers to your own spreadsheet.

Get honest. If you welcome administrators’ and peers’ observations as constructive evaluations, if you videotape your class to picture yourself more accurately as a teacher, if you ask students for their honest opinions, chances are you will see something to be proud of and value. Yes, you might see something you don’t like, but that’s when you put on your big-kid pants and set a path to make things right.

If we start with ourselves and learn to recognize our own weaknesses and work to strengthen our own instructional practice, then we can start organizing professional communities to put pressure on the slackers. It’s time to appraise the ranks and weed out the goldbrickers.

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Photo of student with raised hand:
clickart collection

Photo of student with head down:
‘resting’ www.flickr.com/photos/75016602@N00/199276257

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This blog expresses the personal opinions of the author and is not affiliated
with nor representative of any company, employer, or other entity.
Posted on April 19th, 2009 by Sharon Elin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

I learned a new word this week: sciolism. It’s my new favorite word. Learning about it slapped me in the forehead with a V8 moment, reminding me not to settle for shallow busywork or entertaining (but brainless) activities in my lesson plans.

It reminds me to get to the point.

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Don’t ramble. If there is an objective or goal in mind, point toward it, focus, and head that way. Meandering and wandering are leisure activities, meant for aimless relaxation.

And if you’re going to make a point, make it a point that probes deeply enough to make an impact. Eliminate the trivial riffraff and brush off the fluff. Let’s aim for the jugular.

Are you guilty of sciolism?

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Many of us who integrate technology into our instruction have an especially difficult time staying focused on learning objectives and digging deeply enough for rigor, even if we don’t like to admit it. It’s the nature of our jobs. Since we work with entertaining, dynamic tools, it’s too easy to become playful and veer off the track, overlooking the learning objectives.

We often inadvertently mislead the students. We don’t mean to do it, but they end up thinking that the objective of the lesson is to master the application or tool. We fail to emphasize that their purpose is to learn a concept, explore a topic, or synthesize what they’ve learned. The tool is not the lesson.

Knowing how to produce a claymation movie is impressive, and its production certainly requires many technological skills, but the more critical question is whether that project effectively demonstrates academic achievement– for example, can a student demonstrate through the animated characters that he understands the theme or main ideas of the story he is retelling? Can a student read a series of stories by one author and create an original claymation story modeled after the author’s unique style and genre?

We don’t only mislead our students about the purpose of the projects; we might also mislead ourselves about the quality of the students’ work. Sometimes we’re so impressed with the students’ glitzy results on a project that we tend to grade them by the wow factor rather than by the actual evidence of mastery or learning.

Before you create a technology project, always ask yourself, “What’s the point?”

And before you grade a technology project, ask yourself, “What was the point?”

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We should never forget the standards. They are the point!

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In order to challenge students and bring rigor to lessons, teachers must continually tweak and refine their projects and infuse them with academic, curricular objectives — like it or not, these state-prescribed, content-area standards are the true “goals” of the lesson.

On the other hand, the activity should remain so engaging and well-designed that students learn the concepts almost surreptitiously and vicariously. In other words, although students are aware they’re learning, they shouldn’t really notice that you’re able to systematically check off a list of bulleted learning objectives along the way.

It takes dedicated effort to add academic rigor and challenge to projects that use technology. They’re just too doggone fun! Although projects and products are enjoyable, they should be purposeful and focused. Furthermore, they should be graded and assessed against a rigorous scale or criteria, using detailed rubrics, critical peer review, and/or authentic global exposure and feedback through the internet (as in student blogs, published films, or wikis).

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If you have a point, your lessons will make a difference!

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I recently attended a dynamic presentation by Dr. Tim Tyson, who spoke about transforming the way schools operate and maximizing potential. He asserted that although No Child Left Behind claims to raise the educational standard, it actually stresses minimum standards. Truly effective teachers and progressive schools do much more than expecting minimum achievement. They maximize their students’ abilities.

In reforming Mabry Middle School in Atlanta to the status of a model educational facility, one of the projects Tyson spearheaded encourages students to produce multimedia presentations that educate audiences about a topic of social concern. Students are taught that what they do makes a difference — not just in their grades, but in the world.

One group, for example, was curious about the lesions on elephants at the Atlanta Zoo. “What are these?” a student asked, and a teacher responded, “I don’t know. Why don’t you find out?” This led to a student-produced film documenting the effect of overcrowding and unnatural conditions on elephants and other wildlife at the Atlanta Zoo. As a result of what they learned, students boycotted field tips to the zoo until the animals were given better conditions.

Tyson increased the rigor and challenge for the students by bringing in a professional movie producer to help students critique their multimedia projects. This expert was brutal with his criticism but, interestingly, the students didn’t wither or wilt from his honesty; they accepted it without complaint.

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His first question whenever he looked at their storyboards and scripts was, “What’s the point?” And if the point wasn’t obvious, he balled up the paper and threw it aside like trash. “Start over,” he would say, “and show me your point.”

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He reminded the students that with their films or podcasts, they had only a few moments to convince an audience to do something about a topic they cared about.

The same is true when we plan a lesson or organize a technology integration for a classroom project. We only have a short time to engage our learners and convince them that a concept is worth learning. It is during this critical period that we have an opportunity to hook our students’ imagination, curiosity, and involvement.

What is the point you’re trying to make? Start with the objective and stay on it, even if your activities allow room and time for your students to wander on their own branched paths. What are the learning goals? What is it that students should be able to do or understand as a result of this lesson, and how will the students demonstrate their comprehension?

This “backward design” of lesson planning — beginning with the end in mind — is the basis of Understanding By Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, a model of lesson planning and implementation that focuses on identifying a “big idea” as a main point and stepping through it systematically. I’ve collected a few links here for a quick study, but I highly recommend reading the book thoroughly and adopting its tenents. We should strive to plan lessons and design learning units that make a point and stay focused.

How many times have you heard a student ask, “Why am I learning this?”

What they’re really asking is “What’s the point?”

We owe them an answer.

Oh, and by the way, I like today’s “Word of the Day,” too. Make sure your lessons aren’t edentulous.

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This blog expresses the personal opinions of the author and is not affiliated
with nor representative of any company, employer, or other entity.
Posted on March 24th, 2009 by Sharon Elin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 11 Comments »

Imagine a farmer giving up his John Deere tractor to go back to the hand plow. It’s much cheaper, and he knows how to use it (it’s been used for generations) and it gets the job done. At quick glance, the farm looks like it runs just fine. But watch the comparison with the farm a mile or so away that is still using the tractor and other technologically advanced tools and methods. Guess which farm will have more profits, more productivity, and more time and opportunity for research and development? Which farm will be able to compete globally and will maintain status in the farming community? And which farm will get left in the dust?

The danger in cutting technology in the schools is the same as the risk in returning to the use of a hand plow and trying to compete against tractors. Education will take steps backward. The old ways may save money, but they waste time and squelch progress.

Some policymakers are making compromises, trying to straddle both worlds. They see the value of technology and do not want to eliminate it entirely, so they trim it back severely, like the farmer using his tractor only once a year. These decision makers in the educational systems are cutting the number of instructional technology integrators in the schools to trim the budgets, and they’re rationalizing that teachers should be able to use the technology without the specialists’ help. But a farmer can’t learn how to use a tractor immediately, nor can he learn how to farm efficiently by having a tractor parked in the barn.

Educational technology is not something you learn once and never need to learn again. It is an ongoing, continually evolving progression of skills and methods.

Policymakers who sacrifice technology integrators to reduce or remove employees from the school systems cling to misguided beliefs. While they may admit or give voice to the philosophy that technology is important to emphasize 21st Century skills, for example, they may believe that integrators are “extra support” and should be phased out as teachers learn how to incorporate technology into their lessons themselves.

School boards and superintendents are often naively unaware of the scope, depth, and complexity of instructional technology — and the explosive speed and volume at which new applications are developed and introduced. They may not consider or understand the learning curve, including the profundity of pedagogy and instructional design that must go into the implementation of these tools to be successful. Nor do they comprehend the continual support that is required before teachers can become independent users, not to mention keeping up with the research and mastery of the rapid upgrades and new introduction of software applications.

Many instructional technology integrators earn credentials through graduate-level coursework that specifically teaches the value and the means of assessing, choosing, and integrating technology to supplement or deliver instruction. These additional degrees or certifications are earned in addition to professional teaching credentials. If policymakers think teachers can take all of that specialized knowledge on themselves, develop expertise & skill in the use of various software applications, and keep up with the onslaught of new developments without support (in addition to keeping up with the demands of their classroom), they are (1) overlooking the available wealth of expertise, insight, and skill represented by instructional technologists, (2) undermining their specialized value, and (2) adding overwhelming extra helpings to teachers’ plates without fair compensation in money, time, and supportive resources.

I wonder if teachers realize the implications of these cuts — that they are expected to integrate technology without any help or, at best, with reduced help? Perhaps teachers think they’re off the hook and they aren’t required to use technology because of the reduced number of integrators, but most school boards and superintendents still expect teachers to use technology — only now they expect teachers to be savvy enough to use it without help. This is worth serious consideration and review. Are teachers really ready to do this?

Have most teachers integrated technology without help yet? Not in my experience. There are some teachers who are rocking the technology world with their classroom integrations without any help — but these are exceptions to the rule. Most teachers simply aren’t ready, and the world of technology bewilders, overloads, and distracts them as they expend their professional energy on their classroom responsibilities.

… I think they’re going to miss us when we’re gone.

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John Deere photo by Chris Inside (on flickr); used with permission

This blog expresses the personal opinions of the author and is not affiliated
with nor representative of any company, employer, or other entity.
Posted on March 7th, 2009 by Sharon Elin
Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »