if bees are few

Macbeth Unfriends Duncan

2010-11-27T13:22:00.000-05:00

Above is the invitational video to my recent presentation at the National Council of Teachers of English Convention, "Macbeth Unfriends Duncan: Students Creating an Online Social Network for the 'Scottish Play.'"

If you are interested in the idea of creating a parody social network online for Macbeth, any of Shakespeare's plays, or any literary work that has a cast of inter-twining characters, then you may like to check out the online version of my 20-minute presentation here.

At this link, you'll find resources and materials to replicate the project with your students.

Save the Words - Adopt!

2010-09-12T09:27:00.001-05:00

There are needy words out there. Ones looking to be adopted lest they become extinct and end up in one of those esoteric dictionaries sold for half-price at used book stores. You'll see what I mean when you visit Oxford Dictionary's website Save the Words.org. Words like

riviation

primifluous

latibule

Words such as these are literally screaming to be picked up and used in everyday conversation, business meetings, emails and even text messages. Try the site and you'll see what I mean (and that I used literally correctly in the previous sentence).

In my classroom, I often have a word wall composed of words from a source such as American Heritage Dictionary Editors' 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know. This is an informal addition to the words my students are required to learn from the textbooks my school uses. For correctly using the words from the wall in assignments and discussion, students earn extra credit or a small treat from "the treasure box" (a topic I should post on in the future).

I think this could be a fun site for students to visit when we are in the writing center lab or have a few extra minutes in class. Maybe we could adopt an obsolete word each week to augment our word studies. Even if students don't have 1:1 computer-to-student ratios, this could be an engaging activity on one class computer, especially if you have an XGA projector. Each we a student could select a word for the class, we could note etymology (unfortunately not provided by Oxford, but I recommend the Online Etymology Dictionary.), and pay attention to roots, suffixes, and prefixes.

Once you and your students go to the site and the words start calling out to you, it will be much like going to the animal shelter. You'll want to adopt and take that cute little one in the window one home.

If you find a fun and effective way to incorporate SavetheWords into your classes, please share in the comments below.

Macbeth Unfriends Duncan

2010-09-05T20:49:00.000-05:00

Looking forward to presenting at the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention 2010 in Orlando this November. My presentation is part of a panel session to share my Macbethbook project, a parody social network students build in a wiki that is a mashup of Shakespeare's Scottish play and Facebook.

Shakespeare’s theme of versions of reality (appearance versus reality) comes to the fore as students consider versions of self that a social network user puts online. They imagine what "versions" of characters are known among the dramatis personae of "Macbeth."

Using a wiki as the platform for this collaborative project, provides verisimilitude to the look and function of an actual site. In role, students post online journal entries, photos, videos, links, and email among characters from the play that demonstrate their understanding of characters, relationships, action, dialogue, and language. As they examine the thematic implications of appearance v. reality, they realize how social networking fosters varied representations of self in virtual and real lives today.

As recently as December 2009, researchers have noted that 93% of American teens use the Internet and of that number 73% use social networking (Lee Rainie, “Networked Learners,” Pew Internet & American Life Report, 2 Dec. 2009. Web.)

In creating a mock social network for the characters of "Macbeth," students analyze how social networks function: who sees what, what may be shared, hidden, revealed, invented, honest or hypocritical. Traditional literacy skills serve new literacies of working with digital media is a requirement as students construct a social network from the ground up, composing writing, taking photos, making videos, and uploading these to the site, and then linking to “friends” for viewing.

Session participants will be given the opportunity to imagine the social network of "Macbeth" from character points-of-view to add interaction and illustrate the students' learning process of this inquiry-based approach.

Out of a complex intersection of classic literature and contemporary technology come practical lessons of living literate lives. One lesson is the imperative that students come to understand the social relationships and multiplicities of persona in Shakespeare’s play. Next comes the lesson of how we tend to segment our “selves” among our social relationships, yet ultimately must reconcile these selves in one whole human being. Third, there is a recognition that social networks function at once virtually and in reality. And finally, students’ discover that their versions of themselves on offer to others—virtually or in reality—need to be critically selected with agency and be consistent with how they identify themselves—each as a one whole human being.

"Macbeth" is tragedy of a man and woman becoming monsters caused in part by a each separating his or her “self” until he or she became less than human. Thus, this project underscores how teachers and students may live literate and whole lives together, particularly when it comes to representing ourselves in social media.

If you are headed for NCTE 2010 in Orlando this November, look for Session I.25 at 1:15 p.m. on Saturday, November 20.

When Did "Get" Become "Be"?

2010-08-19T20:33:00.000-05:00

Recently I was on website devoted to education, where the author suggested that teachers "Get creative." I bristled. Not at the idea, but the phrasing.

When did "get" become "be"?

Somewhere between the 1980s "Get psyched" and the 1990s "Get amazed." Or do we need to go back to the early 1970s and the Partridge Family's "Come On, Get Happy." Or even further to the depression era tune by Arlen and Koehler, simply "Get Happy."

In all of these phrases, "get" is a verb that should mean "acquire," and therefore, I expect a noun not an adjective to follow. As in:

"Get creativity."
"Get excitement." (I'm guessing at a rather homophonic aural morph from "excited" to "psyched")
"Get amazement."
"Get happiness."

Okay, so these phrases are not the stuff that advertisers or cheerleaders are going to bark any time soon.

The problem is not really with the adjectives, it's with the verb. "Get" has taken over "be."

How does this happen? Perhaps there is something existential going on here. After all "get" is much more aggressive than "be." "Get is active, and "be," well, being intransitive, it just is. The zen of be first, do second, and have third, comes to mind. "Get" puts us in reverse.

I fear, though, in this acquisitive consumerist culture, I'm on a loser. But maybe we can "be creative" and discover something we can do to save "be," and save "get" for those things to be had.

For certain, I would be excited, be amazed and be happy if we could.

What's Old and New and 21?

2010-08-05T16:46:00.002-05:00

Twenty-first Century teaching and learning means 90% of what and how master teachers have been teaching all along and 10% explicit instruction and practice with digital technology. The 21st Century themes as indentified by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills as environment, finance, health, civil and global literacies may have lost some prominence in recent years as reading "content" gave way to "skills." This is a reminder that the what is as important as the how and vice versa. In noticing what is different (the 10%) about 21st Century learning we might miss the core. As ever, what is being read and written (i.e. consumed and produced in a variety of media) is as important as how. If we bear this in mind we need not lose time playing with the toys of technology but use them as tools to literacy.

I believe 21st Century education is a blend of traditional themes and novel technology in service to the enduring and essential questions. It's as much about our common humanity as ever because technology is shrinking the globe. Our students not only are going to have to deal with keeping their batteries charged but also working with or competing agains their peers half a world away. Ethics, civics, and just good ole common sense are values for the post-Me generations. The relationships and relevancy that engage learners are perhaps heightened nowadays, but everpresent in good teaching of yore.

Twenty-first century learning, in toto, may be a reminder of what great English language arts teaching has always been (and a call to realign our practice), as well as a call to work with ICT and audio-visual media with new emphasis.

Image created on "NGA Kids ARTZONE Collage Machine II." National Gallery of Art. Web.

Summer Reading: Techniques & Strategies

2010-07-12T19:23:00.000-05:00

After appreciating the breadth and clarity of Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, I have devoted some of my summer reading to practical matters of technique with two books for K-12 teachers.

First up is Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov. His book describes 49 techniques that teachers can use to shore up their repertoire's effectiveness. Speaking from his vantage as an administrator of Uncommon Schools, Lemov goes into great detail with each strategy from the fundamental to the ingenius. As a teacher with 18 years in the classroom, I marveled at his ability to fill pages with the simplest strategy, but in that sort of detail he makes plain what might be otherwise be missed by the uninitiated. The book is chock-full of great tips, and I'm surprised he didn't have at least one more idea to make it an even 50. The publisher Jossey-Bass markets the book as germane to K-12 and indeed the ideas in this book fit all grades in that range and some beyond.

No doubt teachers will find a few techniques that are already part and parcel of their practice. But I must admit that this old dog learned a few new tricks. Lemov starts off with No. 1, for example, "No Opt Out." This is the idea addresses the scenario of a student unable or unwilling to answer a question and ends with the student answering that question as often as possible. Lemove offers at least four formats to make this technique sequence a successful one. Another technique, No. 3, "Stretch It," entails a sequence of learning that does not end with a right answer; rather, an on-target answer is rewarded with follow-up questions that extend knowledge and test for reliability.

Adding to Lemov's clear descriptions, rationales, and transcripted examples from real classrooms, the book comes with a DVD of clips showing great teachers using the techniques on the fly. You can see some of these at The New York Times feature on "Building a Better Teacher,"which Lemov narrates. The DVD confirms the feasibility when they return to the classroom this fall.

Akin to Lemov's book is Richard Howell Allen's High-Impact Teaching Strategies for the 'XYZ' Era of Education. The title is not only giving props to the Generations teachers are serving but also to the ABC organization of the book's contents. Allen has a strategy for every letter of the alphabet from "Acknowledgement" to "Zones of Instruction." Allen's ideas might be a bit more basic, but no less essential than Lemov's. One is strategies and one is techniques, and though there is overlap with these, a difference becomes distinct.

My summer reading of both will no doubt tighten up my practice and make me more effective. They should be required reading in pre-service education courses and handy to the veteran. If Ravitch's book is a must read backgrounder for the systemic challenges we face, these two books are gotta-have manuals for the first-year and the fortieth-year practitioners on the front lines.

Image credit: "Oil Lamp." By Jason Pearce. 1 June 2006. Flickr. Used by permission via Creative Commons Licensing.

Grammar in Advertising: Hanes Gets Their Gaffe

2010-06-30T11:27:00.000-05:00

You can get away with saying just about anything if you say it with a smile. Even bad grammar.

Hanes' recent advertising campaign for their "lay flat collar tee shirt" is so hilarious that I may have to forgive them for not calling it the "lie-flat collar." I would call Hanes' attention to not only the verb tense but also the adjectival hyphen, except for the fact that they already know about their gaffe. In one of more than a dozen short commercial spots the grammar problem is brought up by a "bacon neck," and dismissed. So Hanes knows the grammar rules. As I tell my students, once you know the rules, you can break 'em if you can score.

And as a former ad exec, I understand lay-flat's appeal. Still, in the smaller copy text they could use the verb lie when referring to what the "lay flat collar" does. I'm afraid of their success, not of selling shirts (they've sold me) but of selling Americans on the use of lay as an intransitive verb in the present tense.

I'm on a loser I know. I still blame Apple every time someone says "think different" or "any verb different." Recently the poster for the film Diary of a Wimpy Kid, with its comma-spliced tag line "It's not a diary, it's a movie" had me chaffing. Guess I need the comfort of Hanes.

Even as Hanes breaks the rules it scores big on the laugh meter with these spots. Hanes has a comedy of manners in an airplane coach, starring basketball legend Michael Jordan, who plays himself and comedic actor Michael Torpey, who plays Rick, a carpet salesman that has read Me 2.0 a few too many times. (Believe me, reading it once is too many times, but I digress.) When Rick finds himself seated next MJ and that they both are wearing Hanes, he figures it kismet. The laughs come from both fellas playing their lines straight as Rick sidles up to Jordan in efforts to ingratiate himself to the basketball great. It's obvious this 15-hour flight just got longer for MJ. It's a sort of humor akin to The Office caused by awkward moments where strangers are forced to deal with each other.

Here's the "Grammar" spot.

You can catch all of Hanes Flight #23 series videos at Hanes "Comfort Air" site. After a brief (no pun intended) introduction by a attendant that seems to be channeling a certain former Alaskan governor, you'll want to select "In-Flight Movies."

The "reality" of series is backed up by layers of simulacra. In the spots Rick mentions his blog, That's So Rick, which is actually up and running here. Read the blog which boast Rick's adventures and insights as a carpet salesman, and the parody continues. On one post you'll find a link to sales of a items that the fictional character is hawking on Cafepress.com, such as a coffee mug with a mobile phone photo of MJ and Rick and tee-shirts with Rick's sales tips.

But what about Rick's carpet samples? Or is that all a lay? Smile.

Let Common Sense Be Your Guide . . .to the Movies and More

2010-06-16T12:58:00.002-05:00

The folks at Common Sense Media recently released their 2010 Summer Movie Guide to help parents judge what's appropriate for their kids at the cinema. The guide is handily divided into the three summer months--June, July, August--and release dates are given along with a brief synopsis.

The best feature of the Summer Movie Guide is the easy to follow content guides, provided with the simple icons shown here. Bear in mind all must be taken with a grain of salt. You'll note they point out Toy Story 3 "might contain consumerism." What's more American than Disney! Yes, maybe consumerism, but sometimes it's hard to tell the difference here in the U.S. Despite this warning, Common Sense Media calls Toy Story 3 a "perfect pick" for all ages.

Movies aren't the only things Common Sense Media monitors. See ratings for games, mobile apps, websites, television, books, and music. So if your are a parent or a teacher considering any of these media, CommonSenseMedia.org is a great starting point.

The Magic of Saving PowerPoints as JPEGs for Collage

2010-06-15T07:24:00.003-05:00

One of the greatest challenges with the incorporation of digital technology into the 21st century classroom is how much time it can take to do so. The exploratory, experimental, and collaborative nature or simply the learning curve students need to climb to use tech in an English language arts classroom can be a real threat to delivery and mastery of content. That's why I'm always looking for ways that tech can either save time, deepen learning, or at least come out even with traditional ways of teaching and learning.

One of my best successes in this regard is using PowerPoint for collage. Especially the 2007 (2008 for Mac) version, PowerPoint can be "a poor man's PhotoShop." The application's editing ribbon boasts oodles of options to reformat text, shapes, and images. With transparency, reflection, rotation, size, and color you can combine images in ways to create meaningful and poignant ways. It takes students a class period to play once they find their images, which brings me to the time-saving aspect of PowerPoint for collage.

For such project I ask the students for one slide to be saved not as a PowerPoint, but as a JPEG. (Yes, you can do that!--just click the format option when you Save As, and the application will let you make every slide a separate image.) To garner copyright-friendly images, they visit Creative Commons Search or Compfight and mark "non-commercial use." Since both sites offer search engines, they find what they are looking for with method rather than madness. Instead of searching blindly through magazines for an image that might do, they consider how what they are looking for might be tagged. My 12th graders found the one, two, or three images they needed in the first class period. A few students did some further searching as homework to find just what they needed.

The particular project for which I used PowerPoint collage last month asked students to identify an instance of magical realism in Laura Esquivel's novel Like Water for Chocolate. The fantastical, archetypal, and mythical aspects of magical realism called for images that were more likely "created" by collage and combination of images, rather than a singular one simply "found." Students were assigned to quote the line, and represent the instance with image (collage encouraged but not required), and of course, credit the source(s) of images. Students spent three class periods in total on the project before submitting their JPEGs to me via our class wiki. (A color printer would work for a classroom display, or you could collect them on a flashdrive, but that might take another period.)

Once I had each JPEG file, I spent an evening casting them into one single PowerPoint and then posting to Slideshare. The next day students could view their individual work amid that of their peers to see the combined effect of the many instances of magical realism in the novel. You can see the results here.

Glad that the project showed students a new way to use a familiar technology, I accomplished both some digital as well as traditional literacy lessons in a timely manner. That's real magic!

Sleep Starved

2010-06-11T09:48:00.001-05:00

When I was an elementary school student, my bedtime was 7:30 p.m., into my PJs and after a bedtime story, and off to the land of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. (Sunday was an exception, when I would have a bath and be ready for bed in time to stay up for The Wonderful World of Disney. But as soon as Tinkerbell blinked into the credits, off I would go.) Over time, my bedtime became later and later. By high school, though I was usually hitting the hay by 10 or 10:30 p.m. Staying up later than 11 p.m. on a school night, maybe to finish up a school project, was a rare occasion.

Nowadays that's when some of my students are just getting off work. They left school at 2:30 p.m. and punched the time clock until this late hour. How much homework can they get done, returning home at eleven o'clock? Worse yet, they drag themselves through the next day, and the next, till they take a day off school to catch up. More interested in making a buck to support fashion, cars, and college funds, school becomes a drag, an interruptive burden in their busy lives. Afterall, when do they have time to catch up on Facebook and Twitter?

A few parents have bemoaned to me that social networking sites are the ruination of their kids' study habits. Students tell me they are up till 2 or 3 a.m. on these sites.

On June 7, 2010, NPR reported on some of the latest sleep research that (again) suggests that we all, but especially children, preschool to college, need more sleep. These reports say that ten hours a night would be beneficial to cognitive development. It likely would make us smarter as well as healthier. I wish I could get that much during the school year myself.

Last night, after my last day of school for the term, I eked out a luxurious eight. I have to admit, I like the recommended ten. Still, most school nights I am lucky to get five or six, but I do try to sneak in a one-to-two-hour nap in the late afternoon, before a few more hours of grading and prep for the next day. I clock at least thirty hours per week of school work in addition to the regular duty, so weekend sleep is key to an exhausting routine for ten months out of the year.

I'm glad that my parents set a strict bedtime when I was young. Getting me off to bed at 7:30 p.m. no doubt gave them some much needed time for their lives as well as providing my brain and body needed rest. As I grew older my parents stressed my trying to get my homework done before dinner. This gave me time to relax, watch television, or play in the neighborhood before a reasonable 9 or 10 o'clock bedtime. Or, on busy homework nights, time to finish up before the parental curfew.

Ah, those halcyon days. As I teach seniors Macbeth, Shakespeare describes slumber so well:

     Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care,
     The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
     Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
     Chief nourisher in life's feast--

"Life feast"--of which most of my students are showing signs of starvation.
Image credit: "Asleep at the Wheel." By Aaron Jacobs. 17 Nov. 2005. Flickr.
Used by permission via Creative Commons: BY-SA.

It's the End of the School Year . . . Hum Loudly

2010-05-31T19:35:00.000-05:00

"Summertime and the living is easy."

I've been humming this frequently lately. Not because I'm out of school session yet, but because I'm still in session.  Humming this phase is a coping strategy. It keeps my cool as times get crazy. I remember my college supervisor warning me that "In education, insanity reins supreme." Agreed, and at this time of the year the sublime and the ridiculous are one.

I find that at this time of year, I am reminding myself more and more: "it's only 10, 9, 8, 7 . . . more days. I can do anything for that long." Grin and bear it. I hum louder.

This Memorial Day Weekend, after grading 75 essays, I picked up Diane Ravitch's new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. I'm just a few chapters in to it. So far I'm in agreement with implication of the title, and Ravitch as education historian has concisely and clearly reviewed U.S. edcuational policy from A Nation at Risk (1983) until today. Having graduated with my education degree two year's later, just as Risk was being digested, and having lived through the fog of policies Ravitch now reviews, I feel something that might be summed up with "okay, so I wasn't crazy--this really was happening." Ravitch tells why.

This is a must read for any American educator, whether you've lived this or are just starting out, and have been reared in a culture of standards and testing. Ravitch helps one find center out of the thirty-year malaise of failing policies. Not only does she bring us up-to-date on what many of us have lived, but also she takes us back to what really matters--not choice and testing, not even standards and accountability--but curriculum. What students should know and know how to do, or again, in a word curriculum, is where true reform is to come.  A Nation at Risk recommended this in 1983 and now after going around the mulberry bush with outcomes, standards, vouchers, and test, we had best get back to it.

As I say, I'm only two or three chapters deep into this book.Thus, I am earger to read not only her postmortem on the Great American School System, but also her ideas for new life for education in the 21st century, which is still ravaged by the market-driven business models. Just having Ravitch diagnose the problems has made me feel a bit better already.

Insanity, as misery, loves company, I guess.

Image credit: "One Room Schoolhouse on the Prairie." By Kansasexplorer 3124. 26 Apr. 2006. Flickr.

Simple Text Reader

2010-05-31T18:57:00.000-05:00

If you're not a native speaker and would like a general audio clue as to how a word might be pronounced in English you can easily make an application for your PC to read text to you.

1. Open Notepad
2. Copy this code:

Dim msg, sapi
msg=InputBox("Enter your text","Message Box")
Set sapi=CreateObject("sapi.spvoice")
sapi.Speak msg

3. Paste it in Notepad.
4. Save the file with any name and the extentions ".vbs"
5. Thus, if you name it "Textspeak," then the filename would be "Textspeak.vbs"

Now, open the file. A dialogue box appears for you to type any text into it.
Click OK and you'll hear the text spoken in English.

Unfortunately, it will only take one short paragraph at a time. You may copy-n-paste a sentence or so to see how it basically would be pronounced in English.

On the Edge?

2010-05-18T20:46:00.002-05:00

What follows is my response to a teacher named Paul, who posted on the English Companion Ning, and expressed the feelings that he was "losing his edge" to teaching with technology, to students learning with technology. As becomes obvious, he strikes with me a chord, a kindred sense of handling the need for clarity in what makes "21st century learning" relevant. Perhaps you, too, feel as if you are losing your edge, a bit out of touch, as Flip cams, document cams, PowerPoints and Prezis, blogs and wikis, netbooks and iPads join our worlds. If so, take heart.

You are not alone. And you're not out of touch. Just the reverse. You're ahead of the pack with regard to sensing the urgency of finding the right balance. Yes, education is embracing technology, at a somewhat slower pace than general culture even, and we need address the whole host of 21st century learning skills and knowledge (by which I mean 90% of what we've known education to be for past twenty centuries).

Keep those strategies of working with words on paper as well as texting on iPads, of looking into students eyes sans webcams, of asking students to talk with note cards as well as with a slide show, of reciting a poem with emotion and meaning in a circle, of improvising a scene of process drama to find out how people might get on in a real-world situation instead of a virtual gaming scenario, of drawing a map or illustrating a episode with paints as well as with video cams, of reading aloud and reading silently, sustained, and deeply, besides browsing a search and clicking through a web reference.

I try technology in my teaching as quickly as the next teacher. I'm chairing the "21st Century Learning Committee" in our K-12 district. I know I'm "perpetual beta." But, I as we move forward with technology, our students will be served with our humanity. Indeed, English class may be one of its last (and first!) reserves. In any case it never becomes irrelevant.

Perhaps you not losing your last edge as much as finding your next groove.

Image credit: "The Edge of My World." By Eye of Einstein. 21 Feb. 2008. Flickr.

Anti-Social Behavior of a Social Network

2010-05-17T20:11:00.000-05:00

Or ways to unfriend everyone at once and lose bragging rights to the Web.

Facebook, once the promise of clean, fun social networking, lately has taken one move after another out of the Orwell playbook.

It is now one of the most cluttered and confusing websites since Yahoo. What was once a relatively sharp, bright interface and simple concept has grown into a complex, non-intuitive, morass of functions that tend to complicate rather than ease contact with others. Perhaps confusion is by design. Months ago Facebook redesigned their simple menus and lately they've been trying to link user's profiles to a host of other third parties. It's privacy policy has become a blank check. Going from annoying to creepy, akin to some psychological horror movie, the site represents your associations and you get the sense from strangers that the call is coming from inside the house.

For example, when one signs in to see "what's on the mind" of his contacts, he wants to see the News Feed of what his friends have posted; rather he's faced with a splash of ways to do something else, often without a "no thanks" button. It's like a childhood bully blocking your way to your locker. Today, I was presented the option to link to pages that were "suggested" by the information I put in my profile. I was prompted as to whether I wanted to link my profile to them. When I deselected the fifteen items, I was in effect (as I soon learned), erasing them from my profile. Back to my hallway bully analogy, I just got "bookchecked." So I can't tell you what I do for a living or my favorite film without linking to some other page, because now I have no profile.

For more than a year, I have not used any of the fun applications or websites, because Facebook shares my information with these outside developers. So no fun, just news from my friends.

With the new design came some wonky, non-intuitiveness. For intance, when I click on "Photos," I expect to see my own. No go. I see everyone's except my own. Once I find my own albums, it's very difficult to find profile photos. I can't tell you how; I just keep clicking about the site till I stumble across a link.

If I want to send an email, it isn't called that. Facebook changed the name to "Messages," arguably a more general term that doesn't distinguish from postings and instant messages, two other things one might do on the site.

Okay, so for the past year the site was again and again going against the grain of user-friendly. It was breaking down social mores as it was touting social-networking. (Hmmmmm. Oedipus, Macbeth, and other tragic heroes and fatal ironies come to mind.)

With 400 million registered users, more than Google users, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to be for the 2010s what America Online was for the 1990s" and dominate the Web. (A-hmm, is that a good business model? to plan to be ignored in a decade?) In any case, it seems we have a good bit of classical hubris, Me-generation myopia, and a whole lot of greed for information and the money they can make for third-parties connecting to it.

But now, this past week, came an outcry over privacy and Facebook's do-first-ask-later practice of sharing the 50 billlion items of personal information with third parties.

What started out as a lively way to keep in touch with friends and family, has turned into an abuse of trust and privacy. Is that what social networks will become? Zuckerberg phrases Facebook's sharing of information as "social experiences." Count me as unsocial, then. Facebook is a popular, but awkard site today, with a clever and untrustworthy leadership.

Zuckerber is 26 (yes, Orwell, born in 1984), and 31 is the average age of FB employees, and I can recall how ready I was at that age to run an international company with 400 million customers.

Ultimately, I figure it's Facebook's site, Zuckerberg and his thirtysomethings can do what they want. But if they take over the world, I'm ready to move planets. Hurt and dissappointed by Facebook, I look forward to the promise of other social networks such as Diaspora (see below), not threat of Big Brother. Orwell, move over, you're getting company.

Image: The "F" design is a trademark of Facebook, used here inverted for commentary.

A Verb That Got Me Worry

2010-05-01T10:04:00.000-05:00

Get worried? I recall my grade school teachers admonishing my peers and me if we used "got" in our papers. "It's dull writing!" the elders decried, and we fledglings were most likely using it incorrectly: She got worried about it.

Every generation has its own scruples. My teachers were looking for correctness and variety.

I don't mind got if it is used to mean acquired. But more and more I'm seeing its being used as an auxilary for some other verb. I know I'm no linguist, and not arbitrator of usage. With regard to cheerleaders' "c'mon get psyched" to advertisers' "get amazed," I can have no sway. I've given up hope on in-the-field, off-the-cuff journalist speech, but please allow me to cringe when it's in a written and obstensibly edited article in an educational journal, such as this month's issue of Educational Leadership. One writer suggested that readers "Get familiar with asynchronous tools" of digital learning. I simply ask, whatever happened to "be," as in "Become familiar with asynchronous tools." Get needs a noun, not a verb. Now my working grammar is not above reproach, but I expect more from edited texts.

Is it too much to ask? I don't expect folks to suddenly add nouns. "Get familiarization," "get amazement," "get readiness," or "get richness" don't roll off the tongue. I imagine the battle of using adverbs rather than adjectives would be won first. Recall Apple Computer's ubiquitous slogan of the 1990s: "Think different." It still bothers me. Language evolves, I know, still it seems a loss, especially when adding -ly to form adverbs or using be or have instead of get is so easy.

Nowadays, I crusade with my students to think of "to get" as "to acquire," and "got" as "acquired." If you can fit acquired into your sentence, then you may use got (sorry, gained, garnered, partook, copped, collected, obtained, and snagged!) I got

What about when got is the main verb? "You've got mail," much groaned over, is fine by me. In this case, Have is the auxilary to the past tense of get. Read as "You have acquired mail." (Remember those halcyon pre-spam days when that was a great thing to hear!)

So get with it! Acquire a new understanding of got. Don't worry. Be amazed. Be psyched. Think differently.

Image credit: "Worried 62/365." By Roberto Bouza. 1 Dec. 2009. Flickr.

Wallisher: Student Response in a Jiffy

2010-04-28T20:42:00.001-05:00

Although it seems to have been around for a few years, I just discovered Wallwisher.com this past week and put it to the test in my English classroom with happy results.

Wallwisher allows you to create a wall (a.k.a. webpage that takes stickynotes by the click of a mouse). Students need not register or login, so you can do this on the fly. Set up your wall with a title, subtitle (maybe a special instruction or focus prompt), graphic, and pick a color design. Name its URL extension and you are ready to have your students point their browsers to it. You may also designate whether comments will be moderated or not (recommended).

It's soooo easy! No need to register students or fuss with passwords.

Since students don't register, they need to type in their names (we use first names and last initials only). Of course, their might be some unwanted guests and students could pose as each other, so I moderated comments. They still have the thrill of seeing their posts immediately, but no one else does until you approve. In addition to 160 character text posts, the stickies will also host images from the web, video, audio, and other media, making this an exciting way for students to collaborate, research, and share information. Conversely, you may embed your wall into a class website, wiki, or Facebook page.

My first go at it was as an asynchronous dialogue of questions and answers related to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Take a peek here.

I look forward to trying it out when the students have each have a laptop and we can have in class responses to questions as a discussion starter.

After posting the above blog on the English Companion Ning I got plenty of other great tips from colleagues, such as:

Brainstorming
Student response
Polling
Reflection
Feedback
Presentation notes (only 160 characters!)
Play scripting/Improvisation

The response from the English teachers has been enthusiastic. If you figure out other ways to use it, I'd be happy to hear.

Planning for Less and More

2010-04-18T21:54:00.000-05:00

"Less is more," an aphorism from 20th century architecture may be watchwords for structuring education in the 21st. Partnership for 21st Century Skills co-chairs, Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel present this as a likely principle for curriculum design in their recently published manifesto, 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times.

"A reasonable goal for most education systems moving from a 20th century model to a 21st century one might be 50 percent time for inquiry, design, and collaborative project learning and 50 percent for more traditional and direct methods of instruction."

"It's like déjà vu all over again" Midway in my teaching career, I sense being back to my first years of teaching. Back then praise came for using process-drama units, project-based assignments, and cooperative learning. Nearly 20 years later, I'm wondering if the novice me was so smart or not. Critics of P21 are wondering, too, including

Less maybe more, but the experienced me knows it is also less. I've spent the past 10 years working with colleagues to teach more in cohesive year-long plans. But as digital technology has come of age, the seams are starting to pull again. (Remember our generation never learned about the Vietnam War because our teachers never go to the end of the book; but boy, those Federalist Papers!) E.D. Hirsch would want me to know both, right?

That was 1977. Likewise, this year's curriculum planning is awash. As my income tax goes into the mail, graduation participation forms and summer reading letters are harolding the tide is going out: do what I can and can the rest is the best I can do. My 12th graders have senioritis, the research paper is due this week, our school is mired in state tests, and teachers are on edge about next year's duties (and a lack of collective bargaining). The curriculum cutting board will be the business of summer. What to cut?

It's not that it's all gold. Or is it? Seems like even if I taught all if it, muchgood is still missed. The 50% of keepers must not only be essential, but it ideally would bring out the essentials of 50 percent left out. Can we handle that?
Before answering, consider this. While calling for less beadth and more depth, Trilling and Fadel, also want us to enrich the core subjects with what they call "21st century themes." Global awareness, civic literacy, financial literacies, and health awareness are to be woven into the core subjects, while information, media, and ICT literacy are to be part and parcel of critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, innovation, communication, collaboration, and contextual learning, plus a slew of nine life and career skills, including ethics, self-direction, and social responsibility. That's a tall order. Nonetheless who better to rise to the occassion but teachers. But it sounds like more of more as well as less of less.

Teaching in Pennsylvania, I'm not in a P21 state, but I can see the stars, and someday the standards, lining up. As states develop standards-aligned systems and the governors come closer on the Common Core, it makes sense that educators "school thyselves" on this stuff. Whether you like to think of it as the latest fad, or as the authors and supporters suggest, as "nothing new" if you think of teachers teaching what students need to know to be successful.

So this summer I plan to plan with 50/50% in mind. Fifty-percent of the traditional, fifty-percent of the inquiry-, performance-, team-, creativity-, project-based learning that are infused with 21st century themes, skills, and digital literacies.Think of it as a mid-summer's road trip, with Trilling and Fadel suggest the model and roadmap, Hirsch making up the sights list and packing a lunch, Ravitch riding in the "been there, done that" back seat, and Richarsdon waving as we pass by a smiling Ken Robinson and the grave of John Dewey. I might end up with 150%. I'll smile back: "Less is more."

Image credit: Remix of "Fifty Fifty Two." By Jeremy Brooks. 17 June 2009. Flickr.

On the Job 24/7 with Social Networking

2010-04-07T21:18:00.000-05:00

Interview question: "Let’s say an employer asks to 'friend' you on Facebook. How do you handle that?" The response should tell an employer much about the applicant, right. (Imagine the education version: "Let's say a student asks to 'friend' you on Facebook. How do you handle that?)

In either case the National Association of Colleges and Employers notes in a recent post that managers and administrators are looking for new-hires with social networking expertise. I have a hunch they are not looking just at texts-per-minute speeds. Some jobs, a NACE article points out, may go to those job-seekers with higher contact counts. Knowing how to use social media effectively and safely is becoming a sought after skill. You need to know how increase sales and decrease scandals.

As social media becomes a normal part of our dealings in all spheres of our lives, the circles we in which we swim become mixed: professional and personal. The many versions of our selves--professional and personal, civic-minded and family-centered--tend to intersect on social networks. Don't we share a side of ourselves with our family that we reserve from our co-workers? How do live authentically on a social network? We needn't fear Big Brother to censor ourselves as much as the fella in the next cubicle as we keep our personal brand up to snuff.

Maybe this is nothing new in the long view. Puritans in colonial towns knew each other's business. Then again, they hanged each other as witches, too.

As teachers, long held to higher standards of civil behavior, we understand personal branding perhaps better than folks whose personal life is more, well, personal.

I have friends, past romances, family, business associates, fellow teachers, former students, and parents of current students among my Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts. I'm figuring how to be diplomatic among disparate groups. So if this teaching thing, doesn't work out, I might at least be up on my social networking skills.

I've got a way to go, though, apparently. The illustration shows my Friend Wheel, a representation of how and my friends interact on Facebook (on the left), in contrast to another user whose wheel I found proudly posted as on Flickr.

With regard to social networking in the classroom, currently it's difficult to teach our students these skills, especially if schools don't allow mobile phones in class and the school filters knock out social networking sites. Texting in the restrooms, not smoking, is le crime du jour. Still we ought to discuss these issues. How to be our best selves and put our best foot forward has always in our purview. Social networking makes it a skill to be practiced 24/7.

Image credit: Wheel on the right posted to Flickr by kk+ on 9 July 2007.

Blended Schools: A Topsy-Turvy Mix of Real and Virtual

2010-03-28T13:41:00.000-05:00

This year I am using blogs and wikis more and more not only for student interaction, but also for instructional delivery and presentation of assignments and activities. As I look toward a blended schools model, I envision that much of what has been traditional homework may become classwork and vice versa. Here's what I mean.

Where now I might present a slideshow in PowerPoint in class, soon students may view it on SlideShare as homework. Where now I might assign a chapter of a novel to read as homework (with dwindling responses), I may require 40 minutes sustained silent reading in class and post a discussion in response to the reading on a blog for homework.

It sounds a bit topsy-turvy, but it will be based on students' needs.

I'm reflecting on recent studies by researchers at Stanford University, and anecdotal reports in the PBS Frontline documentary Digital Nation, that point out the needs of 21st century learners to not only work with technology, but also to abstain from it. In a Digital Nation interview clip, Todd Oppeheimer, author of The Flickering Mind, (click here for a review) reminds us that the school is a sort of sanctuary from the busi-ness of the world and instant gratification of popular culture; rather the academy has always been "a place of discipline and perserverance," where holding a thought, not just scanning data is a valuable activity.

This past summer I studied at the University of Ghana at Legon. Although much more verdant and necessarily tropical in contrast to my other graduate school haunts of NYU's Washington Square or Oxford's Trinity College, I instantly felt that sense of the academy--that sense that I was in the company of scholars, walking about in converstations, hushed or exhuberant, on topics of intellectual importance.

Despite the arrival of cyber schooling, I believe for most students that a real, in-world place called school will have a vital role to play in learning, creating, and demonstrating a world of ideas long into the future. Although I know my students and I will be collaborating more and more in virtual spaces--and what's thought of as homework and classwork might get topsy-turvy, I also know what schools can offer offline is irreplaceable. Schools that genuinely blending the virtual, digital technology with thoughtful purpose will be able to offer that real, traditional sense of belonging, focus, calm, and rigor that can only come at the discipline of school.

Image credit: "Home Row." Detail. By Matt Hurst. 14 Oct. 2008. Uploaded 15 Mar. 2009. Flickr. Web. 3 Mar. 2010. Used by permission via Creative Commons Licensing.

Getting Wiki With Research Paper Drafting

2010-02-11T22:01:00.002-05:00

This year I'm having my students draft their research papers on our class wiki on PBWorks. And I'm loving it.

First, it solves the transfer problem of having to save files at home or at school. It's all online. Students can write in class, in the writing center, in the media center, at home, at the public library, and at Starbucks.

Since we have a campus license, I can set page-level access, so that everyone's draft is private. While all the tentative processes of rough composition take place writers can have their privacy (yet be visible to me for assessing their progress). When the first full rough cut is ready, I can open their pages to one peer mutually.

Moreover, I'm not collecting a variety of handwritten or typed drafts of intro paragraphs, counterarguments, supports and conclusions. All of their progress is not only visible but also documented as to when it was saved, thanks to a page history feature. I can see everyone's progress as soon as he or she clicks save. I can also gage each student's progress (or lack thereof) and add encouragement or warnings along the way.

Students report a few downsides. If they don't save frequently, they leave themselves open to power failures and lost keystrokes (PB Works has a save-and-continue feature in their Beta editor, coming). And they must have Internet access--not such a problem in this digital age, but still a factor for some that share their computers with family, or the power goes off (which did happen this year due some bad weather).

Still, the ability to work at school and at home in a common online medium has more pluses than minuses. Haven't we all heard the refrain "I can't write in class"? Indeed, some students are more productive at home, when they are alone and not hopping from one bell to the next. They can spread out their notes, sip coffee, and hunker down for some quality drafting. For instance, this year, in the week students were working our their first drafts, we had several snow days, and students could keep working away from school. And from home, I could watch their progress during our time away from school and offer coaching in the comment fields. The connectivity seemed to motivate both student and teacher, while helping everyone to beat cabin fever during the blizzard.

As students finish their papers they upload their Word files to the wiki for peer editing thanks to Word's review and comment feautures. Then it's on to the next draft and submit to teacher in Word. Having the papers in electronic form facilitates plagiarism checking; I can simply pass along the paper to a checking service if it looks too good to be true.

Next, I use Word to add my comments and mark the papers, send the amended file back through the wiki, and wait for the third and final draft.

Let it Snow!

2010-02-10T22:24:00.002-05:00

Like many teachers and students in the Mid-Atlantic States, I've been experiencing a week of snow days. After quickly reminding my envious friends that I must make these days up on fairer days, I settle in to catching up on grading papers, replying to student blogs, and prepping for next week's classes. Then calm.

A chance to think, to mull, to surf, and to read unlike what I had been accustomed to save my salad days of grad school or dog days of summer. Being unable to get out of the house, with two feet of fluff on the ground and a few more inches falling, I'm granted that rarest of commodities--time unscheduled.

Time to be reflective, creative, thoughtful, intellectual, sentimental, and focused. I'm catching up with the September issue of Educational Leadership and the November issue of English Journal. I'm chairing a curriculum committee on 21st Century Learning Standards and both have periodical have offerings on the topic.

In EL, Terrence Clark's article "21st Century Scholars" tell of a program inspired by the curriculum framework of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. "The district's high school developed a program that gives students the opportunity to build an impressive electronic portfolio documenting an array of mind-stretching experiences, which take place outside of regular school hours in the afternoon, evening, on weekends, or during vacations."

In EJ, Jim Burke's piece for the English Journal's "From the Secondary Section" column, presents "Reimagining English: The Seven Personae of the Future." He gives Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future an English teacher's perspective and profiles a lucky seven archetypes for the Millennials in our English courses. These personae have one common denominator: imagination. Burke lists:

storyteller, philosopher, historian, anthropollogist, reporter, critic, designer.

It may seem that some of these are far afield from how we English teachers have thought of our craft. Burke argues:

This is the future we must imagine, the one in which our students will live. These are the personae they will adopt and adapt as society and the workplace evolve. Some will wonder where literature is, where culture can be found in this model. Yet I see our rich tradition of literature and language, rhetoric and composition, prose and poetry already existent in all these roles. It is simply time to reimagine how our discipline might be reenvisioned.

Even without these personae in mind, many English teachers know that their work has helped students who have gone on to create, innovate, and cope with cultural change. Now to remain relevant our cultural change Burke joins the chorus of Daniel Pink and Ken Robinson (and many others) in calling us to make imaginarion, creativity, and collaboration the brain, heart, and soul of our courses. More on the challenge of this in a future post.

Right now I have some shoveling to do.

The Marvel of a Hand-Held Gadget

2010-02-05T20:01:00.002-05:00

With the iPad introduced this week, I'm urged to publish about a strong competitor in the hand-held device market.

I'm in love with my alternative. Having an amazing ability to store and index information, it is not only user-friendly for reading but also great at catching my thoughts for when I want to jot and save short short notes, questions, musings and other marginalia. It also will store nicely small add-ins like sticky notes. I've tabbed the most commonly used information for future reference. One feature I really like is random access; I can bring up any topic, literally at my fingertips.

Green devices like this are all the rage these days. It's not great in the dark, but it's reading surface actually uses available light or solar to make text and visuals pop out in full color, so it never needs to be recharged. There are no cords to get tangled or that need to be toted about with it.

My model comes in a durable shell and I've found (by accident) it can withstand dropping from heights from as great at ten feet or more without damage to its core data. In fact, I think the data is likely to last for years and years . The information stays organized and never requires defragging.

Snazzy skins are available from the manufacturer, or you can make your own to personalize and for some added protection and style. Currently there are no known viruses and only some extremely rare worms that trouble the hardware, so I'm don't waste money on expensive security subscriptions.

These gadgets come in so many versions. There's one for just about every need. And the omnivore can also find ones that are have encyclopedic data. While such versions are bundled with a variety of data, most come customized to fulfill a particular need, so you needn't carry along a bunch of important data that you don't need.

Perhaps the greatest thing compared to similar data technologies is the price. I like it so much I've got shelves of them. Yes, there's nothing like a good book.

Image: "The Sun in My Hand 1." By Whatever. 29 Jan. 2009. Flickr. Used by permission via Creative Commons License: BY, NC, SA.

What's at the Top?

2010-01-31T21:52:00.001-05:00

THE ONE NEEDFUL THING

'NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!'

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker's square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker's obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders,-nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was,-all helped the emphasis.

'In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!'

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.

--Chapter 1, Hard Times by Charles Dickens
Image: "Secretary Duncan as Mr. Gradgrind."

Education Put to the Test, Students Be Damned

2010-01-27T23:04:00.001-05:00

Here's a story problem for you: "If the federal government establishes a 500-point system and awards 138 points to states that increase a measure of teacher effectiveness by using student performance as the criteria and pay-incentive, how long will it take teachers to teach the test and not the student?"

My guess is not long. Speaking about the $4 billion "Race to Top" deal U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan puts it crassly."All of this money is voluntary," he says. "If states don't want to apply or compete they have every right not to do that. But I will tell you that when we put billions of dollars on the table, you'll see people more than step up" (National Public Radio, 1/19/10, bold mine).

It would be laughable if it weren't so damnable to quality in our schools, damnable to the educators in their halls, and damnable to the students most of all. Oh, don't get me wrong. Scores will increase; that much is all but certain. Learning--except how to whiz the test--will not. It will be reduced to skills and facts delivered by clerks and online programs, not educators. In fact, I predict a lot will be lost. If not school systems altogether, then we will lose the following: Creativity, productivity, industry, innovation, performance in the arts, entertainment, and sports arenas, and curiosity in the maths and sciences.

Teachers can inspire those talents in students . . . but not with standardized tests. These are the attributes of America's success and prosperity. And they are not standardizable--they are as revolutionary as the spirit of 1776. Standardized tests by their very essence are antithetical to the creativity, productivity, industry, artistic performance, entertainment, and sports, and curiousity in the mathematics and sciences. Our citizens have led the world in these pursuits for the past century--despite the fact that our standardized scores have lagged.

As more an more standarized tests are added to the school year, students learn less and less that will be meaningful to their lives, liberty, or happiness, much less to our country's success. Before a student is graduated from high school, he will have spent more than 180 days devoted to standardized testing; that is, more than a whole year--gone. A year of teachable moments that might have expanded his world with hope and curiosity. How can we forfeit so much for these tests, now promised in multifolds, and bearing such damage?

According to the bibliographic information giant Bowker, who tracks reading trends, a quarter of our population did not read a book in 2008. And less than half did not read more than one. Do we imagine that standardized tests with their overworked passages and hackneyed, insipid prompts will inspire a love rather a fear and dread of reading and writng? Last year's statistics will seem halcyon when viewed from 2022.

Why do our legislators yearn to standardize and hold our students and teachers accountable to international systems that are arguably inferior to ours? Ease. Scores are easy. Not terribly meaningful, but easy. You can publish the results and say "there." The politician says, "See, now relect me." Though low on meaning, they are high on stakes. If you don't believe it, we'll bribe you. That's another easy answer. Confuse the issue with funding.

Pay teachers more for so-called effectiveness of so-called student achievement and you provide the meanest incentive to the basest gain. Funding for scores that are so limited in their meaningfulnes--that is, save the injury of demeaning communities which don't make the grade and then the insult of not funding them so they go defunct--insults the very professionalism of the discipline.

As for me personally, I see that, as I head toward retirement pensions based on my salary, I could fatten my wallet by teaching less. Rather than teaching students, I could teach the test. Rather than working on concepts and skills that will prepare students for their futures yet unimagined, I can work to the bubble test defined for the here and now. Rather than a career professional who has strived for decades to appeal to the hearts and minds of the next generation, I'll become a clerk and time-keeper. The whole deal is one to be made with the devil.

States are signing on to "Race to the Top" with Faustian panic and expectation. It's a race afterall, not a thoughtful, meaningful process of learning. Governors seek funding in exchange for doing the devil's work. Signing on the dotted line of a moral blank check with the testing companies (and their lobbyists) playing banker. Districts be shamed. Teachers be pressed. Students be damned.

Image: "Test: Arne Duncan." Created with Obamaconme.

A Note Pinned to Your Underpants Suffice?

2010-01-26T22:47:00.001-05:00

In the past month I've had the experience of students not turning in project work and having the excuse that they weren't here the day it was assigned. "I wasn't here the day you gave the assignment." I think this is akin to a toddler who closes his eyes and thinks you can't see him. Invisibility by experience."I see nothing, ergo nothing sees me."

"How could you miss it?" I state in the course syllabus that "students are responsible for missed classes," parroting the school's policy on the matter. And a project assignment is given at least one week advance notice. These students were in class since "that day." It's an honors class for the college bound senior.

Furthermore to defend my amazement let me say that I distribute all project assignments in writing, mark the deadline on a dry erase board in the classroom, post the same on our class wiki, provide handouts on the class website, and add reminders on Twitter. So I'm a bit snarky in responding to "I wasn't there the day you assigned this."

What about some individual responsibility? How do you cope? How do we serve students without enabling poor behaviors?

Image: "I See Nothing, Nothing Sees Me." By Lindasslund. 17 Nov. 2008. Flickr. Used by permission of Creative Commons License.

The Vegas Principle

2010-01-23T13:24:00.002-05:00

In the ever-changing world of the Web, there is one constant. I call it the Vegas Principle: What happens here, stays here. Despite the public service announcements warning teens to "Think before you post" and my senior students not recalling a world without the Internet, I found this week that I needed to remind them of this simple principle. They may be digital natives, but yet do not know the lay of the land.

The lesson became very clear when I introduced students to Etherpad, a web-based word processor that allows people to work together in real-time simultaneously. In hindsight my introduction was a poor one. I might have demonstrated all of the features of the site first, including the timeline feature that replays all of the versions and revisions--every keystroke participants make. Rather I went with the let's dive in method.

My plan was to have students type in their answers to their homework all at once and we could see them all projected on the interactive white board in the Etherpad.

Before I knew it a couple of students profaned the pad. One girl, apparently not realizing that her text was going to be visible to the entire class typed "f*** this class." And her friend across the room started with "m***** f*****." The next line was a lewd reference to male anatomy and appeared just as the projector bulb warmed up the screen. A quick reprimand and the type disappeared--and not.

What students did not realize was that Etherpad was recording all of the keystrokes and who made what contributions every second. Not wanting to encourage a replaying frenzy I left out instruction on this feature till I could see it for myself and divine who said what.

Disappointed to find my two honors girls used such language recklessly, but even more so to find these were the very first words they used with a technology of which they had no familiarity. I do not believe they meant any of what they said but was disturbed at the disregard for context. The next class got the pre-demonstration and I got no mishaps; rather I captured a new timeline to demonstrate the feature the next day, complete with lecture on my two-fold concerns: profanity and the archival nature of electronic data.

Sounding the alarm and warning that electronic media does not ever completely delete information, that it is likely to be found by others whom we might want to impress (referencing cautionary tales of grad school denials and job recruiters), and that as much as we must embrace technology, we must do so with our best selves. "So if you can't imagine doing this with your mom, grandma, priest, employer, and future children (or the 'creepers' out there) looking over your shoulder and being proud, it's probably an indication that you ought not." I had the impression that such was some new information for these students. (Refer to the Ad Council for educational materials on "Think Before You Post": Bulletin Board, Everyone Knows Your Name.)

I continued in the mantles of both school master and literacy coach to question my students' use of profanity, to spend such low and practical words haphazardly as first utterances and with no good use. I chastised them for the "mal-or" of their tongues and implored them to save such "gold" inherited from the Old English for a time and place that called up a worthy purpose. This view took off some edge of my prudishness, as they considered my idea of saving such words for something apropos.

The lesson came home for the errant class, and especially for the recreant girls, who saw the other class' timeline play out every keystroke the next day. Whoops!

In retrospect, I'm glad we dove in and picked up an important lesson, more salient than the answers to the homework.

As for Etherpad? It is a helpful tool in the classroom as designed. Students can work simultaneously in a workspace and then convert their work into a printable, publishable document. The timeline feature offers a record of process and notes who contributes what. The only downside is only sixteen users can contribute at a time. And there is no delete button, per se; you can revert to a previous time, deleting all subsequent revisions. But this is all likely to improve as Google has purchased Etherpad with the intention of incorporating it into Google Wave.

You just might want to have a talk about the Vegas principle pre-use.

Image credit: "Vegas Principle of the Web" created with ImageChef. "Etherpad Screenshot." By Charles Youngs. Creative Commons License: Non-commercial reuse allowed with attribution.

Mini Video Documentaries and Music Videos to Inspire Student Research

2010-01-16T11:20:00.002-05:00

Motivating 9th Grade students of the millennial generation to read nonfiction to research Shakespeare takes more than a trip to the library. A year ago I developed a 9th grade project on Shakespeare that combines a traditional research paper assignment on a with PhotoStory video groups, thus classic meets 21st century.

The assignment:

students read texts and research on individual topics related to Shakespeare’s life, times, and work in service to
subsequent small group work to produce mini-video documentaries that are in turn
posted to the Internet

Introducing the research unit and positioning the mini-video documentary as the end-game, excites students about gathering source information and insists on their being sticklers about getting it right and documented correctly. They ask questions to check their own understanding of their reading. Students immerse themselves in source documents via “the mantle of expert” strategy (Heathcote qtd. in Wagner, 1999), and thus, approach the task with interest, ownership, and attention to detail.

Students read between the lines to find key information to include in their paper and video. Efferent reading as a way of knowing (Rosenblatt, 1978) becomes critical as students previously unfamiliar with Shakespearean topics learn of his plays, poems, songs, and aspects of his biography (e.g. students initially can’t tell that “Antony and Cleopatra” is a play whereas “Venus and Adonis” is a narrative poem, and “Stratford-upon-Avon” is a place). Lessons in critical reading, research technique, media literacy, visual representation, and audio speaking skills come to the fore of this multimodal project.

Products include a mix of old and new: individual evidence of reading and research (note-taking) and writing of a documented source research paper, and collaborative media work of storyboard, script, PhotoStory video. A closing activity consists of a class screening of all of the videos, in which students take notes on key points, and use a rubric to vote for the best “Willy”-winning mini-documentary.

For 12th Grade, I've used Animoto for music videos, each based on a soliloquy of Macbeth.

The assignment:

cull key lines from the soliloquy at hand
consider theme and imagery
collect copyright friendly images
upload images and text to Animoto, select music and mix

In addition you can see the12th Grade's music videos for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales pilgrims.
It's all part of link (below) to my presentation at NCTE's 2009 Annual Convention in Philadelphia. It featured ways and materials teachers can inspire research and analysis of Shakespeare's life and works through digital media, particularly PhotoStory and Animoto.

Some updates since the presentation are worth mentioning. Windows PhotoStory, that I used, is not to be had on newer computer operating systems, as its feature have been worked into Windows Movie Maker. This is a bit of shame because PhotoStory was so intuitive and idiot-proofed. At any rate, depending on your school's computer operating system, I'd suggest using PhotoStory (XP), Movie Maker (Vista, Windows 7), or iMovie (Apple Mac OS X). Regarding Animoto, it now not only takes still images, but short clips of recorded video.

You are welcome to revisit this session as it is slidecast with video clips and 40 pages of PDF files. Click Here . If you try these ideas, I've love to hear about how it works for you.

References: Wagner, Betty Jane. Dorothy Heathcote: Drama as a Learning Medium. 1999. Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem. 1978.

Re-Captcha-ring Old Texts One Word at a Time

2010-01-15T23:17:00.004-05:00

Frustrated by typing captchas--those distorted, blotched, wiggly, struck-through words to prove you are a human user of a website? They do help keep sites from spammers and their automated emails.

And I've noticed I'm recognizing real words more than I used to. Perhaps this has something to do with a hidden task at our fingertips that we are performing without knowing it. The new captchas--called re-captchas--are actually words from archival texts that computers have difficulty transcribing digitally.

At a rate of 20 million-a-day, according to ScienCentral News, Internet users are solving the mysteries by picking out the letters from noisy speckles, blotches, and lines. Captcha inventor, Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University, here in Pittsburgh, notes in this video how much time per day is used by humanity while sorting out these digital keys, part of the motivation for turning this task into something doubly useful.

So where the ink is bleeding through, where the bookworm has had its lunch, where mold had left its mark, or air had darkened the page, re-captcha is sorting the wheat from the chaff with my help. It's nice to know that next time I work out a captcha riddle I may be doing my part to save an ancient text.

Ning in the New Year

2010-01-12T22:30:00.001-05:00

Posting at the New Year's about my Personal/Pro Learning Network, I noted two Nings.

The NCTE Ning
and the Jim Burke's English Companion Ning.

I joined NCTE's in 2008 and EC's in 2009. Two years, two Nings. Still, when I mention Nings to colleagues I have to explain.

1. Ning is a site offering social networks that are more customized than ones on sites like Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace and geared for group discussion and sharing content as well as the random idea.

2. Nings are to social networks what wikis are to websites.

3. Cousins to blogs with reverse-chronological listings and posts, descendants of discussion threads.

4. Perhaps best of they can share multimedia podcasts, including slides, video, audio, and documents. (Great for catching presentations and lesson ideas and plans!) It's as if I have scores of talented colleagues across the hall, even though they are across the nation, and beyond.

If you are new to Ning, I'd suggest giving it a try and giving it some time. (As I uploaded these Ning screenshots and revisited the sites, I noticed that I had actually belonged to three other Ning Networks. I guess they were just not holding my interest.)

So I have actually belonged to Ning for four years! I just didn't "get it." They became part of my PLN when they started to attract meaningful, useful content. After the NCTE Convention in November 2009, the Ning called for presentation materials from event. Now it's rich with media. And Jim Burke's, which recently won honors from the Edublog Awards, is brimming with meaningful conversations and effective ideas.

PLN 2009: Looking Back at My Personal/Professional Learning Network

2009-12-31T23:16:00.002-05:00

As the Year 2009 comes to a close, I'm thinking about how wide my Personal/Professional Learning Network is compared to its reach in previous years. It's grown much larger than 1984 student teaching files in manilla folders and much more digital than a decade ago as we began 21st Century learning, just getting the hang of email before the Web 2.0 wave. Still the ideas of colleagues, experts, and students are the lynchpins of my PLN.

I've included incoming and outgoing directions of the learning-teaching dynamic. Of course, I learn as much by teaching, if not more than anything else. For Auld Lang Syne, my friends.

$4 Billion Race

2009-12-16T21:29:00.018-05:00

I've read several articles in recent weeks about the $4 billion that the U.S. government is planning to spend on the department of education's "Race to the Top" program. Looking up from the magazine articles or the online reports, I see my administrators scurrying off to meetings on this very topic. Talk is about funding, hustling, standards, performance pay, incentives, and how this is all going to look.

To this country boy it already doesn't look good.

I've never known throwing money at people to bring out the best in them. I'm all for a fair wage for an honest day's work. As an English teacher I coach students through about 2,000 pages of essays and research papers a year. Helping students read critically and write effectively, I figure I do my fair share. But it's not just about English teachers. What all teachers do day-in-day-out is vital to our collective, democratic future. It's important work to be valued and compensated handsomely, but not to be pimped and whored with pay incentives and extortion of headlines of "failed schools."

Some fifty years ago, my uncle, a farmer, had a cheeky motto: "You can buy better, but you can't pay any more." He had it printed on yardsticks and we all got a chuckle out of the nonsense. Nowadays, I'm beginning to see the joke, but I'm not laughing.

This is what I mean: I am passionate about my students, their future, and the discipline we share. But those are the reasons I teach. I'm not some salesperson who will teach longer, faster, more to reach a quota. I already work 80 hours a week on my craft. In the past year I've garnered top honors in my state for my teaching and National Board certification without pecuniary incentive or end-of-the-year bonus. Throwing money at me won't provide me with more time and motivation, especially as more of what is being asked is to be devoid-of-passion standards that have little to do with my students, their future, and the discipline. Rather so called "initiatives" will work to sap it from all authentic meaning and purpose with bubble test items: What is the best meaning of the word "craft" in this paragraph? A boat, B writing, C art, D work.

Throwing money at educators, won't bring out the best in them or in their students. We've seen what money has done to the standard of living in our culture; we've seen what a concern for "how it looks" has done for "what it is" and "how it feels," sacrificing style for substance, standards for understanding. Now we are asking teachers, some of our most optimistic and idealistic citizens--those workers who have been shown to be the least motivated by pay incentives--to go for the buck a.k.a. to race for the top. Ostensibly, to be the best. It doesn't make sense. We know from experience in every sector--but most notably of late the financial sector where dollar signs reign--we know, the most idealistic will be maligned, the lesser will fall for the bribe, and the least of these will cheat for it.

Placing more pressure, attention, and importance on poor measurements of students is a miscarriage of pedagogical planning. The tests show more about social, economic, and cultural advantage and disadvantage than about intelligence, and less about purposeful learning or teacher value-added effect. Moreover, the tests are skewed to favor certain verbal and math skills and are mute on others.

Much knowledge and skills so important to our students future defy being boxed in on such tests. Would not only the students that are born to excel in these vital disciplines be discouraged from pursuing and developing their given talents, but also the teachers who teach these subject be denied the incentives? What might happen to our country's lead in creativity, innovation, sports, arts, entertainment industries--none of which are tested by standardized tests? (Could that be a reason they are so good?)

These questions about varying disciplines point to the problem of teaching teams and collaboration among professionals. Merit pay promises to make competitors of us all. Why should one teacher share the strategies that are going to give her an edge on the year-end bonus even if it means greater learning for all students? It's taken the decades of my experience to see teachers become less territorial and open to team-planning; this "race" is poised to undermine such joint efforts posthaste and take us back a generation.

A parent of one of my students recently asked me what can we do? I'm not sure there's much to be done so long as lobbyists for the testing companies loiter in our capitol buildings, so long as the politicians long for a simplistic message, so long as citizens are fooled to by test results, and so long as universites do not stem the tide with better research and measures that can offer the alternatives. The last of these is probably our best hope. We need policy makers to reverse the trend. But in my more fearful moments, I worry that many policy makers are in fact hoping that we teach less not more to our students. It's insidious.

I'm not under the illusion that there's much I can do about this save quit teaching, and little that will solve. So I'll keep teaching to the test as nominal as possible, stay in the race so to speak, but try to do as much as possible to teach around the test in effort to serve students' futures. I don't have $4 billion to reward schools that help students innovate, create, and solve, let alone the billion that will be spent on misinformation about "racing to the top." Nor am I under the illusion that that those schools, teachers, and students that will be acclaimed as the top will be substantially better than the ones below--they'll only get paid off for spending so much time prepping for a test. A short term gain for a loss of a generation of learning.

The ones who don't make it will be maligned but what will be worse is the learning lost in teaching to the test that they failed. It's a lose-lose proposition. With $4 billion on this Race to the Top, my uncle's adage sadly takes on new meaning.

"You can buy better, but you can't pay any more."

Learning: The Burn-out Antidote

2009-11-30T14:31:00.009-05:00

I happened to find uplifting the comments of a public school teacher, Louise Abrams, writing in a letter to the editor of The New York Times, November 3, 2009.

Her brief letter bears reading again and again, but I'd like to quote two of her sentences here:

The interdependent relationship between teaching and learning is a priceless labor of love and a joy that must be experienced to be believed.

Show me a teacher who actively pursues through love the art of learning, and I’ll show you a teacher who will never burn out of the teaching profession.

In the first quote Abrams is referring to the dynamic of 21st century learning and how we teachers can find relish in the sometimes unsettling realization that we can learn from our students especially when it comes to technology, and that they have much to learn from us especially when it comes to technology.

The second quote reminds me of my college methods supervisor, Hilda A. Kring, doubting that there was such a thing as teacher as well as their students can never, ever burnout. Of course there are many mitigating factors--supplies, funds, bureaucracies, misunderstandings, societal ills--but some of our best teachers come from schools where supplies and funds are low or bureaucracies and other ills run rampant. Or said another way, perhaps a burnt out teacher is one that has ceased to learn.

Image created at ImageChef.com

The Darnedest Thing About Multitasking

2009-11-26T21:04:00.013-05:00

Kids say the darnedest things. They say they can multitask. For a decade, as they grew up in the digital age, we adults thought "kids these days!" and believed them. I believed them, too. In fact, I envied them.

But then I read Brain Rules, by John J. Medina, a molecular biologist, who points to research that shows our brains and our students' brains don't work on two things as at a one. Like the computers we created in our own image, we are binary thinkers. We sequence. We this then that.

So multitasking is a myth. Stephen Henshaw, Chair/Professor of Psychology at University of California, Berkley, correctly names the activity of processing more than one media at a time as quicktasking. His comments are part of a new video feature at Common Sense Media. While quicktasking may be useful at times, constantly moving from one thing-task-idea to the next leaves our students without the skills of concentration and focus.

Two tips offered by Common Sense Media include:

Limit distractions, turn off the electronics
Encourage more reading

What makes this multitasking myth more insidious is the fact that it seems as if it's not a problem. Kids (and adults) think they are doing just fine. The National Academy of Sciences finds that heavy media multitasking students lack focus, understanding, and retention while trying to attend to two or more activities at one time. Time seemingly gained by doing or learning two things at once is actually lost if they are not able to be recalled later.

A study at Stanford University, showed that multitaskers were the worst at multitasking. By frequently multitasking, students are not only suffering when it comes to focusing on one thing, but are less able to focus on anything whether there's one, two, or more things. They scan but do not internalize information presented, perhaps because they treat all information with equal attention and do not focus, prioritize, or otherwise sort it out.

As much as I love to revel in our media world and the creativity it invites, I'd shudder to think that my students live a life without getting lost in a book for an hour or two or sit and write a journal or a poem without interruption. Beyond these romanticist ideals, as a teacher, I am concerned that our students are not able to "turn it on" when focus could mean the most. It is not an enviable situation. Focus, concentration, and retention are benefits too important to be winked at.

The darnedest thing is our students don't know what they are missing.

Image credit: Reformatted from"Multi-tasking." By Atonal. 27 Nov. 2007. Flickr/cc.

Ready to Explore

2009-11-07T20:01:00.010-05:00

One of my longtime laments is that most film documentaries are too long for classroom use. Fifteen minutes is a maximum usefulness of a video that I'm trying to fit into a 40 minute period, and I tend to get excited by a good 30-minute film. So when introduced to Explore with a variety of high-quality films designed "to champion the selfless acts of others, " I was pleased to find varying lengths of clips from 2 minutes to 48.

These films, found at Explore.org, are developed under the leadership of Charles Annenberg Weingarten with the support of the Annenberg Foundation. I have long been a fan of Anneberg Media's American Passages, Literary Visions, and Voices and Visions online features for Americna literature at Learner.org.

My first impression of the site's concept--films deal with particular individuals in specific nonprofit pursuits around the globe--was that this site was going to be too esoteric for classroom use, but I was mistaken. Although each short film does feature an individual, this approach presents an engaging human element to the topic. The focus is not on the individual so much as the individual's passion. His or her passion sheds light on some cultural, political, and ecological aspect of our world.

The documentaries are arranged by geographical region. As a teacher of world literatures I am especially drawn to the 2-to-8-minute short features that enrich my students' study of a culture. They can be viewed from the site or streamed through a class website or wiki and launch to a full screen view. Unfortunately, they cannot be downloaded for more remote use, and I don't see any mention of DVD options.

Several of documentaries have printed transcripts of the interviews with experts that can be downloaded and there are online viewable files of dramatic and instructive scenes from the documentaries.

I use shorts on Indian Dance with Bhagavad Gita, on Blue Mosque with poetry of Rumi, and Caligraphy Master with Chinese Philosophers. And I'm signed up to get updates when new films are added. On my wish list: Mexico, Norway, Greece, Iraq, Japan, Peru.

Idealistic, Content, Disheartened? (Or Burnt Out?)

2009-11-01T21:12:00.010-05:00

"I don't know whether I believe in teacher burn out," my college supervisor Hilda A. Kring, Ph.D. said to me more than twenty years ago. She called herself a "realistic idealist" when it came to most matters, including the topic at hand. One of her proteges, I would say the same of myself, and as for her comment, ditto.

A recent comment by a reader prompted my consideration about this idea of "burnout." He suggested that I get out of teacher if I'm burnt out. Agreed, but I'm still not sure about the idea of burnout. (And if you're wondering, I don't think I am nor in denial.)

While I was thinking about this, I see a recent study by the Public Agenda has released a report on a related topic: Teaching for a Living: How Teachers See the Profession Today. The study sheds light on what makes teachers feel valued and less likely to quit. It mentions things like:

offering career paths in education,

ensuring technology is available to aid instruction,

and increasing teacher salaries to levels of other professional jobs such as lawyers and doctors.

More interesting to me, the study separates the 890 teachers surveyed into three groups: contended, disheartened, and idealists. When I heard the three monikers, I instantly thought this made sense. Don't we fall into one of the three categories?

Well, in the study 40% fell into the disheartened category, 37% contented, and 23% idealist.

I've already tipped my hand. You know I fall in to the minority--which brings me back to my wondering if there is burnout. Maybe there is such a thing--and dishearteneds are the best ones to ask about it, 77% of those studied who have been teaching for more than 10 years. But this realistic idealist can't see it.

Although I'm "way older" than most idealists teachers recorded in the study (77% of idealists identified by the study are Gen. Y'ers with fewer than 10 years in the classroom), I'll find a path for my career (36% of idealist teachers said this would be in education but outside of the classroom for them), a way to get the tech, and take whatever raise my union can muster.

Remember

2009-10-30T19:13:00.007-05:00

Let's be honest. Kids aren't going to remember what we teach them. Not the content at least and not most of it any way.

Think of how little we remember as adults of our school days? How many of high school lessons come to mind? If you're like me, not many. Over the years, over the lessons, the lectures, the seminars, the books--ideas atop of ideas--it's impossible to sift through the layers of learning. Yet, I bet there are at least 10 days you remember.

My memorable lessons of high school:

When my 9th Grade English teacher caught me watching the snow fall and just said "pretty, huh."

My typing teacher assessing my practice: "There is no pattern to your errors."

Parallel parking in driver's ed, successfully, after a night of practicing in the driveway.

My French teacher singing "Edelweiss" a cappella (in French) and teaching us to do so, too.

Running so close to the side of the track that I knocked the stopwatch out of my coach's hand, and his not getting angry.

The compliment "You have a natural sense of rhythm and movement" from my senior English teacher after I presented a dance interpretation (my first and only one) at a drama club assembly.

The day the principal approved of our starting a student newspaper, after his hesitancy and hedging.

My journalism teacher's allowing me to decide whether to print a damning editorial against an administrator at the risk of her job because "it was all true." (And trusting me not to.)

When my graphic arts teacher suggested I should put my first woodcut in a show.

All of the modern novels my 10th Grade English teacher had me read and that would change my life.

These might seem like small and random moments. Indeed, they are, but in each there's a teacher trusting, reaching, boosting, sharing, or simply being honest with me. I don't remember all my teachers taught me. I remember who they were.

Likewise, your students might not remember Fermat's last theorem, the Battle of Hastings, or the subjunctive tense. But they'll remember you.

Image credit: "Love, Teach, Imagine." By Denise Carbonell. 9 Dec. 2007. Flickr.

The Gift the Guest Artist

2009-10-23T20:41:00.008-05:00

This month we celebrated National Writing Day at our school with a special guest, an alumna, Kristin Bair O'Keeffe, who had just given birth to her first novel, Thirsty. It was a great time for our students and aspiring writers.

It took me back to times when writers visited the high school I attended as a youth. I recall hanging on their every word as they described the writing life. Once, I read James Weldon Johnson's "The Creation" from God's Trombones. It's a poem, the cadence of which sings from the Negro Spiritual. I let the rhythm carry me as I read, but I did not fall in to parody. I didn't realize this, though, until the visiting artist (whose name I can't recall) told me so.

That one moment of critique has stayed with me ever since. I consider the praise and its inherent admonition whenever I practice a recitation of poetry before my students. Having a guest artist is such a priceless gift to students. Now how wonderful your teaching, a guest has the novelty to capture your students rapt attention for a day or two, and their memories for a lifetime. They have clout of experience and an authentic voice to say "good work" completely detached from scores.

O'Keeffe gave our students many treasures during her fleeting visit: ideas, stories, hints, and tips. No doubt some of these gifts will be as lasting in the students' hearts and minds for many years hence.

If you haven't experience the magic a guest artist--a writer, a poet, an actor, a musician, a painter, a dancer--then now is the time to figure one or two into your schedule. For your students' sakes, and for yours.

Image Credit: "Tiffany Gift Box." By Jill Clardy. 26 May 2008. Flickr.

Drilling Down

2009-10-15T22:04:00.006-05:00

This has been a difficult start to another year of teaching. Seems demands are more numerous and trying out new, innovative strategies with technology are paradoxically piling up next to outdated testing pressures. On one hand we teachers are being held accountable by standardized testing and drill down into the data; and on the other hand we are being told that technology, creative, and performative skills are the way to go. It's like trying to get the moon by digging to the Earth's core: as ineffective and as frustrating.

This past month I've been drilling down on a standardized reading test that is sampling our state's standards. Pennsylvania has 3 reading standards with a total of 35 specific skills defined. Of those 35 skills, 12 have been translated to assessment anchors, or ways of measuring a third of the defined skills. Of those 12, the test samples 9. Of those 9, the questions sample 3 skills 3 times as much, while sampling others only once or twice. So as I drill down on 120 students individually--taking 5-10 minutes on each--my mind wanders and wonders if knowing so little about so little is worth the effort, let alone the time: 10-20 hours, if you do the math. Taking into consideration that the student might not have felt well, had had a difficult time that morning at home, or just didn't care so much to take the test seriously and the worth of standardized test scores wanes in my estimation.

So we've headed the wrong vehicle in the wrong direction to the wrong address.

I worry about my next dozen years or in the classroom, not because of the future, but my past. Before teaching I was in advertising, first the creative end and then the business end. I couldn't stand the marketing numbers. So then I worked for a family run book retailer which emphasized the love of books and knowledge. But they sold they went public and became a national corporate concern--and the concern was price points. I got out and returned to my first love--teaching. Now after 20 years of the testing movement and despite the call for 21st century skills, a dinosaur of data-driven decision-making is starting to bang at my classroom door. Is it time to move on? Or face the dragon? A lesson life keeps presenting might be a lesson worth learning.

Image Credit. "Free Mixed Numbers Texture for Layers." By D. Sharon Pruitt. 18 Nov. 2008. Flickr. Used by permission of Creative Commons License.

Technology Never Promised to Take Less Time

2009-09-20T20:29:00.007-05:00

Technology never promised to take less time. Well, if it did that was back in the '70s when we thought 2001 would never come and by then we'd all be wearing white zippered polyester suits a la Star Trek. This week I spent four days doing with Web 2.0 what used to take ten minutes the old-fashioned way.

Okay, now, to do it again, I could probably accomplish it in two-days, given what I learned in the process.

My students had made what I call "Beowulf Tapestries," panels of muslin fabric on which the students depict a scene from Beowulf on each panel. Together they roughly make up a project in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry, which we study as well. Each panel is to depict a moment from a particular canto and quote text. Then students identify themes that resonate from this scene.

In my early years, I would stitch the panels together for a wall hanging. One year I had a panel for each of the hundred-some cantos. Lately, I've stapled them together on a bulletin board for a similar effect. This year I decided to go digital.

Rather than present their work in the room, I had my students snap a picture with the web cams in their laptops and maneuver the file into our PB Works wiki for an online ensemble. No sweat, right?

No. . . sweat! Computers didn't log on. User names were mispelt. And my students had never played in a wiki space before. So it took four days and we learned along the way. By the third day I realized that I should have started by having everyone make a sandbox page first. This facilitates them all working at once and uploading their files simultaneously--a huge time saver. They also can "play" in their sandboxes! while waiting for others to finish.

All in all the project turned out. My students and I have a few more digital skills in our respective repertoires and Beowulf is still our hero.

iPod Curriculum

2009-09-07T06:04:00.005-05:00

First let me say, for those who don’t know me from previous posts, I’m a digital media literacy advocate. I believe that it’s imperative for media literacy and digital skills to be taught in the English Language Arts classrooms, and elsewhere. But I also believe that students must be taught these skills in tandem with traditional literacies of reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and representing. The new media expand these literacies, but first they stand on them.
Without the traditional skills and understandings of basic language arts, digital literacies become just so much pushing buttons, tinkering with software (soon to be updated and outmoded), and presenting the superficial.

I am reminded of Mike Schmoker’s essay “The Crayola Curriculum,” published nearly a decade ago in Education Week. A professional stickler for academic results, Schmoker raises the alarm for classroom activity without learning, products that lack process, and process that lacks rigor.
Technology in education often has the allure of that was once held by the diorama, the poster, and the book jacket project. Nowadays, we see PhotoStories, iMovies, and PowerPoints accepted without anything more critical than “Wow!” “Cool!” and “Neat!” Not only are digitally made projects new and glitzy, they may even beyond the can-do of the teacher, which grants them special but superficial esteem. Add to this the mandate that the teacher-learn-along-with-if-not-from-the-students, and it’s tough to develop best practices, let alone be sure that language arts our being taught and learned at a deep level.

As an advocate for media literacy and digital skills in the English Language Arts classroom, I must constantly remind myself to plan backwards using essential questions, outcomes, and objectives that use technology in service to reading and writing and other traditional literacies. Although digital literacy is part of literacy, the tools of the trade are still thinking and practice, expression and audience. Another factor in the equation is time. Figuring out how much time to teach, which skills, and what is relevant to the curricular unit at hand is key. Sometimes the Crayolas make more sense than the computers.

Students, too, are a strong motivating factor. They love the technology, especially if they can check surf a few of their favorite sites in lieu of staying on task. What teacher doesn’t want to be popular not only with administrators pushing the tech but also with students who gravitate toward the cool teacher that brings out the laptops daily. The question for us professionals is –now as ever--what and how is being taught effectively and efficiently?

Technology has become part and parcel to English Language Arts. Perhaps it’s been that way since stylus and clay, stage and theatron, Gutenberg and moveable type. Today, skills of expression, representation, and reception are multiplying at a blurred pace. Teaching our students the basics is still essential to teaching the latest device, lest our students produce creative and satisfying but mindless and vain Power Points, iMovies and video games, and become casualties of “The iPod Curriculum,” unable to read, write, and think about texts critically.

Image credit: Remix of "Sweet Sweet Phone." By Miss Karen. 10 June 2007 and "Crayola Lineup." By Laffy4k. 26 Feb. 2007. Flickr. Used by permission provided by Creative Commons License: BY.

Respect, Kindess, and Empathy in Social Media

2009-09-05T10:02:00.009-05:00

Can social-networking technology actually be social? I've worried, not just about anti-social behavior like bullying and ranting, but about people substituting face-to-face, or ear-to-ear, and hand-in-hand communication. Much is lost in the media.

Will the next generation be burrowed in their own niches, texting in syllables, with only like-minded fbfs--completely incable of geniune social skills?* No tubs of ice cream in this picture.

Yet I saw a glimmer of hope in the words of Himanshu Nigam, chief security officer at News Corp. and MySpace. In an article posted by Cnet, Nigam made the following points about the potential of social networking sites to promote certain social behaviors:

Post with respect: photos are a great way to share wonderful experiences. If you're posting a photo of you and your friends, put yourself in your friends' shoes and ask would your friends want that photo to be public to everyone. If yes, then you're uploading photos with respect.

Comment with kindness: compliments are like smiles, they're contagious. When you comment on a profile, share a kind word, others will too.

Update with empathy: sharing updates lets us tell people what we think. When you give an opinion on your status updates, show empathy towards your friends and help them see the world with understanding eyes.

So with lessons in media literacy can come lessons of social literacy. What an engaging and unsexpected arena to teach caring for ourselves and others! Conversations about fair, just, generous, and kind dealings naturally can be reasoned out as we teach our students how to best interact on the web. Alas, maybe with media can be geniunely social, even if the ice cream must be served separately.

_____________________

*fbfs - Facebook friends

Image credit: "Goat Milk Ice Cream." By Stu Spivak. 29 May 2007. Flickr. Licensed under Creative Commons: BY, SA.

Anticipating the Rubber Hitting the Road

2009-08-23T07:47:00.010-05:00

I find myself in the same quandary every year. I can't recall what teaching teens is really like. By now, my eighteenth year of teaching, I feel like Dante at the beginning of The Inferno, midway in life's path with a dark woods, threat of beasts, and a bit off the trail. No, teaching is not a journey through hell despite its rough moments, piles of essays, and lost weekends of work. It's just that I never can recall the pace or timing of teaching until the rubber hits the road.

Maybe I'm not supposed to. Every year is different as every class, every student is unique. And I'm changed, too. Every encounter with students is a new one despite my experience, the tricks in my bag, my attempts to keep up with slang, and the four four-drawer file cabinets filled with instructional materials. I've traveled to Africa this summer to steel the authority of my teaching Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart, and read a couple of books on "understanding by design" and "differentiation of instruction" to hone my practice in general.

Yet, students always show me the way. Rather than Virgil, a shade of reason to guide my journey, it's the rationale of student inquiry more than standards, student character more than habits of the mind, and student energy more than AYP (annual yearly progress) that charts the scope and sequence of the year.

Until there are twenty-five students--expectant, tired, nonplussed--facing me and I say "let's see who's here" will I know what teaching is really like again.

Out in Africa

2009-08-22T08:24:00.006-05:00

Since 2007 when I started this blog, I don’t think I’ve let a month go by without a post. This year I’ve found it difficult to keep up. I’d like to post at least once a week, but working on National Board Certification took its toll and posts dwindled in number and last month I was in Ghana on a Fulbright-Hays group project abroad with little chance to stop at the rare Internet cafes.

Our group of twelve educators participated in fifteen lectures by top experts and visited four regions of Ghana, a country that is a vibrant mix of old and new, urban and rural, a democracy that is reaching toward the future, while remembering its past.

For all Ghananians’ optimism and earnest endeavor to become one of the leading countries of Africa (and a population that is nearly fifty-percent under the age of eighteen), their government apparently underfunds its schools. I found in all of the half dozen schools, students seated at wooden desks, chairs attached that look as if they were there when Ghana achieved independence in 1957. Although a few fluorescent tubes were mounted on the walls and fans hung from the ceilings, all were off to conserve electricity. Students wore bright, clean uniforms and carried oak tag covered notebooks; these I understand are supplied by themselves and not the school.

As much as one can tell from a tour of schools, the students seemed earnest and the teachers dedicated, and they all had the trademark Ghanaian good humor toward life and its problems. Of course, insomuch as bricks and books don’t make a school, the teachers and students achieve despite the lack of both. I saw elementary student notebooks that were printed and illustrated nearly as neatly as a Word document and a high school class of boys studying science unattended while they waited for their teacher to arrive, delayed because of heavy rains.

Yet, in a country that is freckled with cellular phone company kiosks and billboards, I fear the lack of technology in the schools is once again going to leave Ghanaian students without digital skills and more importantly digital paradigms—ways for thinking about and connecting in the world—as my home school wavers over glass and copper fibers for its ethernet.

The contrasts between the schools I visited pale somewhat when compared with the kinship of teachers brought about by the challenges we face, the work we do, and the students we love. When it comes to what these schools lack versus what I find missing in my own classroom, I’m not convinced we’d agree to exchange U.S. electricity and Internet access for the high-valuing education, triumphant sense of community, and focus of mission that I met with the lights out in Africa.

A Meter of Happiness and Success

2009-06-26T10:28:00.006-05:00

A few years ago I blogged about "booby-trapping your day for happiness," or at least some happy moments. Now research backs up this idea. And it's not just good advice for teachers. Kids too, and in fact everyone benefits from at least three positive experiences for every one negative.

In a recent U.S. News and World Report article, "Positive Psychology for Kids: Teaching Resilience with Positive Education," points to experts' findings of how accenting the positive in experiences can help students cope with the stress of learning. And that means learning how to deal with failure as well as success.

This goes much better than mere self-esteem. In the past decade or so, I've seen the hollow sense of self-esteem students have been given by the empty words of "great job" and "excellent" no matter what the outcome. Rather than our gilding every effort no matter how weak or futile, students need to learn to find the silver-lining in the clouds of their mistakes and missteps.

The article also links to a free website to test your own happiness ratio, designed by Barbara Frederickson, a professor at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

"Doing so might help you learn the sources of your positive emotions and the
triggers for you negative ones. 'The truth emerging from the science is that
feeling good as it is a wise investment in our future,' she says."

Studies are showing that teaching our students as well as ourselves how to interrupt the negative scripts we have in self-talk and with each other can lead to greater achievements in the long run and longer life. Resiliency.

As a result of inflated grades and so called lessons in self-esteem, I've seen students in my office in tears over the "first B" and dealt with parents who complain about a score because they "know" their child is an "A student." What ridiculous--pressure on students with all the emphasis not on achievement and learning but on scores and false ideas of esteem.

Remembering the maxims about learning more from our mistakes than from our success, I ask whether students did their best, what they learned from the activity, what they learned from the score, and what they can do to make their best better. Only be being honest with children, with what is expected and what is accomplished can we truly accentuate the positive, teach the positive, and teach resiliency--all which is much more lasting and fulfilling than a cliche high-five for mediocrity.

A Dry Spell?

2009-06-24T20:25:00.005-05:00

I think of the students who say "I don't have anything to write about." I coax, I cajole, I tell them to get busy. But it nags me, could it be true?

I'm having a dry spell myself. The crush of this past school year. The end-of -the -year burn. I feel like I just want to lie in a hammock. So what about my students? How would I know if they really don't have anything to write about?

I say things like "write that you don't have anything to write about." Not original. Pliny the Younger said as much. Most of the time they are just not trying, right? Or just out of practice.

Could that be with all the practice of Twittering and texting and updating their status? Have they worn themselves out? Have we asked for so much writing they are tapped dry?

At any rate and back to my own dearth, I recall Franklin's charge: "Either write things worth reading or do things worth writing about." This summer I am headed on a Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad to do research on West African Culture in Africa.

And it's the rainy season!

Image credit: "'Dry' Season Road." By hoyasmeg. 19 Feb. 2009. Flickr. Used by permission of Creative Commons License: BY.

Information Highway: Country Roads, Take Me Home

2009-06-10T08:19:00.009-05:00

For a short time I moved to Texas in the late 1980s. It was after the crash of the oil boom that preceded it. I lived in a suburban townhouse plan that had an exit of I-30 specifically built for the suburban sprawl right before the economic downturn; thus, the exit became specific to a few plans and a four-lane highway that went about four blocks in each direction before the black and white fence and sign reading "End of Expressway."

I am reminded of that roadway as I contemplate the information highway. As a teacher I often jump on the Internet to gain or refresh about topics in the curriculum. (What did teachers do before the Internet?) We can find websites, webquests, and lesson plans at our fingertips. Yet I was reminded such how fast and short those journeys can be when, after reviewing a few websites on a poet's work that I was reviewing for class, I consulted the hard copy leatherbound set of Encycolpaedia Britannica in my home library.

Was I reading about the same poet? Britannica led me into three and a half pages of fine print that gave so much breadth and depth on the subject that it almost seemed like a different biography altogether. I laughed. How many times during student research projects had I led my class to the literary criticism shelves of the nonfiction section and feigned amazement: "Lo! What have we here? Books, whole chapters--indeed whole books--on books!" (Seldom is my enthusiasm shared by my students--ah, but sometimes those "country roads of knowledge" are found serviceable by the earnest learner.)

As I pored over the Britannica entry and added to my lecture notes I enjoyed the scenery of one of those country roads, catching so much more than the information highway typically affords.

This month Microsoft curtails its Encarta program, stating:

People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past. As part of Microsoft’s goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today’s consumer, it has made the decision to exit the Encarta business.

Is this a surrender to Wikipedia? I wonder . . . and worry.

Perhaps Encarta is off-mission for Microsoft in the long-term and I shouldn't fret. Still to loose an accessible, popular, and reliable reference tool is sad. Do we need to fear Britannica will follow suit, giving way to Wikipedia? Don't take this the wrong way: I myself love Wikipedia for a fast drive across contemporary knowledge and items not worth a encyclopedia's consideration, but when I want to get to know a subject in some depth I turn to a more established road. Wikipedia might get me there, but it's rather like asking a passerby for directions. In reaching my destination, if I don't suffer wrong turns, I still might not realize where I am along the way.

Image credit: Remix of Microsoft Encarta trademark and "Around the Bend." By Erica Marshall. 11 July 2008. Flickr.

Insert Key to Overwrite -- Baby Come Back!

2009-05-13T20:29:00.007-05:00

Okay, I'm slow on the uptake. I see blogs from two years ago discussing this. But it's been only a few weeks that the school where I work updated to MS Word 2007. I purchased the application for my home office shortly thereafter and soon learned that the Insert key no longer functioned to overwrite text.

If I was dismayed to find this out, I was shocked to find bloggers celebrating this change and--further insult!--suggesting that MS dispatch the Caps Lock button next! I happen to find both Insert (to overwrite) and Caps Lock PERFECTLY USEFUL! As a teacher, I am frequently titling worksheets with capital letters and renumbering alternate versions of tests with the insert to overwrite function. I didn't take well to having to cursor over type to overwrite it. Well, fortunately on other online sources, I learned that all was not lost despite such calls for anarchy. If like, me you like to use the Insert key to overwrite, here's the fix.

I quickly tapped on the MS Office button, located the discreetly embedded Word Options button at the bottom of the dialog box, clicked Advanced, and then ticked the box for Use Insert key for overtype mode.
All again is right with the world. And don't worry, Caps Lock, I'll come back after you, too, if need be.

Spinning Plates

2009-05-12T19:52:00.009-05:00

My blogging presence has been much less persistent in the past few months. In March, I completed the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards portfolio entry, and in April, I took the NB examination. When I began the process I kept wondering "what's so difficult?"

Isn't it just a record of the great teaching I'm all ready doing? Yes, but writing that record and gathering and organizing the documentation of what's happening in the classroom in accordance to the myriad and multiple questions that are posed to standardize the response make the process time-consuming.

It's estimated that 300 hours are spent in preparing the entries. That's two month's worth of forty-hour work weeks atop the thirty-five-hour professional day plus the twenty additional hours of homework. Okay, that leaves only sixty-eight hours per week for sleeping and four hours per week for everything else. Hmmm. Something had to give even though I spread the challenge over more than two months. Describing, analyzing, and reflecting on my practice seemed to take all my words. Ultimately, not just my blogging but also my students' needs suffered some from the process, but they are resilient; my future students' needs will be better served from my processing, questioning, rethinking, and affirming my teaching practice. Time-it-takes is frequently the downside of many worthwhile educational endeavors. So start early and get on with it.

If I had not started in by October, I would not have made it. In November I planned my units, then, in December I completed Entry 4, January Entry 3, February Entry 1, and March Entry 2, and general organization.

Another tremendous help is having a support group of NB coaches. I can't thank them enough nor recommend anyone to find a NB coach enough. It will be a long wait of six months till I learn my scores for the scores, but I know I have fared much better having worked with the folks from the Duquesne University cohort. The definitely helped prepare me with a ten-week introductory course on NBPTS, even before I decided to become a candidate. The cohort's facilitation of state and national funding, moral support, and logistical guidance I found essential, but my coaches' review of written commentaries kept me on track. "Have you answered ALL of the questions?" Best get on with it.

Like all standardized products one of the greatest challenges stems from framing authentic practice is in constraints of artifice. It was a constant struggle--"Who writes this way?" National Board candidates do, best get on with it.

Fortunately, with all of the moving parts to this portfolio, its instructions are available on a hyperlinked CDRom, and the testing centers give you downloadable practice to ease the orientation to the test. These helped a lot, as did Jerry Parks book So You Want to Be a National Board Certified Teacher?. It's packed with helpful lists, not bogged down on theory and details--you get those in the incredibly well-written Standards themselves.

All in all, I was amazed at the number of plates I had to spin between five core principles, sixteen standards, six of the English Language Arts strands, multiple videotaping sessions, and documenting student work. Then formatting, organizing, and responding to dozens of questions about descriptions, analysis, and reflection, all made for a Herculean task. It's not for the faint of heart, nor for the thin-skinned, nor for the egotist, nor for those with inferiority complexes--but, then again, what in education is? Best get on with it.

Image credit: Theremina. Detail of "Spinning Plates." 6 Sep. 2007. Flickr. Used by permission granted through Creative Commons License for attribution, non-commercial use.

Get the Shmoop

2009-04-12T17:09:00.004-05:00

No, that's not a typo. Shmoop is the latest study guide site for students and teachers of literature, poetry, and history. It's put out by professors and grad students at Stanford, Berkley, Harvard, Yale, and other ivy-draped halls of humanities.

English teachers and students are bound to like it for its scholarly-yet-breezy take on literature. It's cheeky in a nice way, comparing Conrad's Heart of Darkness to Lucas' Star Wars rather than Coppola's Apocalypse Now. No snobs to pulp, you'll find Shmoop tells it like it is on everything from Hamlet by Shakespeare to Twilight by who-it-that-wrote-that?

I find it's got more goods and easier to access than Sparknotes, and a great improvement over Cliff Notes. For a free account sign up, you can also save your favorite bits of information, organized in folders. They boast that the information on the site is documented and cited, and they help students cite for MLA, APA, and Chicago styles.

One downside is ads appear in the margins of the site that some teachers might not approve of for their students. At any rate, it can be a guilty pleasure for teachers to have a reference. Looking up Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie for such things as "Brain Snacks" (interesting trivia and allusions), pictures of playwright and performances, lists of literary devices (with examples), and 27 quotes on "Memory."

Williams might agree that Shmoop is one of those "long-delayed but always expected something that we live for."

The Market Price

2009-03-22T09:01:00.003-05:00

An article in The Wall Street Journal reporting on recent speeches given by President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan notes a plan that seems as blind to the causes of the financial crisis as irreverent to the effects it would have on education.

Some may doubt the Obama administration's belief in market forces in other areas, but Mr. Duncan clearly believes those forces can work to his benefit in pushing change in education. He is taking $5 billion of that stimulus money and establishing a Race to the Top Fund that will go to states that show they have both a record and a plan to push the kinds of changes the Obama administration seeks.

But only a "limited number" of states will get funding, Mr. Duncan says, and they will have to compete to win grants. "We're going to work hard with states, but they're going to have to work with us on reform," he says. "The federal government has never had $5 billion to fund excellence....This isn't rhetoric. This is billions of dollars that are at stake." (Gerald F. Seib, reporting for WSJ)

Now, I'm no economist, but market forces seemed to play upon the the lowest natures of humankind. I may be an idealist in thinking that education, especially K-12 plays upon some of the noblest aspirations of people. And call me a cynic, but I am appalled at the idea that government will play a game of carrots (after 8 years of a playing a game of sticks) with school's in the U.S. Can we expect that greed and corruption will not overtake education till we have teacher who care less about fostering the growth of a child and more about boosting scores on a test report (for the margin of profit in paycheck)?

Yes, we need standards, but we need less, not more of standardized testing. I've already seen the loss of more than 180 curricular days go to testing by the time a student graduates high school he or she has missed a full year of hands-on participation in learning staring at bubble sheets and inauthentic writing prompts.

Of course, test scores have gone up over the past two decades. We are reluctantly teaching to the test. It's easier to do, when the testing cartels are lobbying their white-papers to politicians who want a simplified message to wave before the electorate. Teachers are busy professionals with little lobbying power compared to big business of test manufacture. As standardized tests and curriculum to prepare students for them become the main, the professionalism of teachers will become as perfunctory as that of clerks.

If I wanted to games of risk, I would have lost my shirt in Wall Street already. Now, with more than 15 years ahead of me in teaching, I wonder if I will loose my mind (and those of my students).

A Media Literacy Lesson that Matters

2009-02-26T19:47:00.007-05:00

As we teach 21st Century literacies, teaching copyright, copyleft, public domain, and other copyright friendly designations like those from Creative Commons often is met by disbelief if not resistance by the my so-called "digital native" students. (They may be native speakers but their digital literacy sometimes has as many problems as their English grammar!)

In November I noted the Center for Social Media recently release of the "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education" which will help teachers and students in the United States navigate copyright in the digital age. Now there's an interesting case at hand.

While working on video projects, my students point to all of the music and image that is being used on YouTube, while I point to the same as copyright infringement.

"But I bought the album, myself" students argues when I question if one got permission to lay down a commerical track, and "that gives you the privilege of playing it for yourself, not re-posting it in a video on the Web" is my response.

"How do you know if a photo is copyrighted if it doesn't say?" another student asks. "Assume it's 'all rights reserved," I remind. "Ask for permission," I coax. "Whenever I've asked for a photo to use in a non-commerical project I've received a "yes." A collective harrumph, says the digital native as he tromps back to Creative Commnons/Flickr.

Having done lessons on propaganda and advertising in the past, I know sometimes it's difficult to find examples from popular culture that students can understand and care about. Enter the Shepard Fairey /Associated Press /Mannie Garcia squabble over the famous and "Hope" poster of Barack Obama's likeness.

The Associated Press has claimed rights over a photo taken by free lance photographer Mannie Garcia and sought damages from Fairey who found inspiration in the photo for the iconic poster. Fairey has peremptorily sued AP citing "Fair Use" protects his work.

The upcoming ruling on this case may affect creative media use of intellectual property in ways important to digital natives (and immigrants) who use artistic content: how we download, remix and upload media in public spaces including the Internet.

National Public Radio's Fresh Air with Terry Gross presents a synopsis of all sides with fascinating interviews with Shepard and Garcia, a couple of official statements by AP, and commentary by Law Professor Greg Lastowka. All presented in nuggets of audio that can used easily to illuminate the key points and prompt discussion with students about media, artist expression, and copyright. The contemporary hipness and recognizable nature of the Hope poster, the clarity with which Shepard, who started as a skater-street-artist, talks of appropriating images for his graphics, and the implications hanging in the balance for our students and 21st Century media use combine to make this case perfect for students to consider. Thanks to Ms. Gross for her thoughtful, logical line of questions that layout a story's subtleties and nuances.

Obviously this story stands on its own for a lesson on media literacy. Also, it would work in with any study of propaganda--think Animal Farm or 1984. Fairey makes insightful comments on propaganda, the arts, and consumerism throughout. You'll find more of his iconographic street-graphic art at the Obey Giant website, which is a topic of discussion that brings up Orwell as an influence of Fairey's politic.

Image credit: Photo by Mannie Garcia for the Associated Press and Graphic by Shepard Fairey.

Perpetual Beta: Does It Mean Mediocrity?

2009-01-25T13:23:00.007-05:00

It's been quite a while now that I've resigned to the concept of perpetual beta, the idea that technological change is occuring so consitently and with such frequency that resistance if futile or at least frustrating to getting on with teaching and learning.

Though I can't resist rapid change, I wonder if I must resign myself to mediocrity. Working through problems--such as trying to get all of my students on our classroom wireless at one time, or logging on to an essential site for instruction only to find it is blocked by our school's filter or wracking my brain to remember the control "switches" between PC and Mac--and thus taking twice as long to get to the nugget of learning seems counterproductive.

It not limited to lack of competence in using all of the latest tools in the planned course. This month I've noticed systemic breakdowns in websites, rental car stores, retail chains, and don't get me started about my Sprint Instinct mobile phone. Companies and institutions gleefully brag about their twenty-somethings running the technology. Yes, what the geek squad can do is wonderful, but what "the kids" as Apple, calls these uber-underlings, all to often don't have is experience, people-to-people diplomacy, and a "customer is always" right mentality.

So I'm wondering if I am colluding with society that accepts a shoulder shrugged "system's down" excuse for how things are. I have been compelled to accept papers late because of the technical glitches ad nauseam at the nexus of student user and online paper submission system. My "dog ate it" has morphed into a parental note "please excuse this because our computer was not working last night." Hmmmmm. I think I liked the dog excuse better, for the lessons I'm afraid we are teaching our students as we "hang in there" till we're back online.

Image credit: Vingette of "Bulldog." By Pleple2000. June 2007. Wikimedia Commons. 25 Jan. 2009 <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buldog_angielski_000pl.jpg>.

Assessment Winter Solstice

2008-12-24T16:44:00.007-05:00

It somehow seemed fitting that on the Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year, I found myself in a meeting with a few principals and department facilitators answering inane questions from the PA Dept. of Ed. about how our school handles local assessments for students who do not meet proficiency on the state tests in math and reading. In lieu of a state graduation exam that has been approved but not funded, PDE is asking critical questions about local proficiency assessments, particularly in math and reading.

I say inane, not out of indifference to the students, but to the tests. These tests measure so little and yet the stakes are made higher with each passing year, amounting to narrowing of curricula, demoralizing learning communities, and stigmatizing administrators, teachers, and students alike. What's worse is that the students who are not demonstrating well on these tests have the most to lose from added efforts to teach to the test. The majority of these students are already maxed out in the schedule to get the minimum graduation requirements. To add required remediation classes to their schedules, squeezing out technology, art, business, or consumer economics or any core discipline elective, seems like insult to injury. For several such students, there are not enough periods in the day to teach to the test. Everyone in our meeting shrugs "what can we do?"

Students have no voice in this, let alone professional educators. Parents and the general community are led by the media to believe these test results matter more than teaching students authentic skills, practical knowledge, real application, creativity, problem-solving, innovation, fine arts and true science. Those of us who know the damage these tests do seem least equipped to appeal to those who promote them. Test lobbyists are much more organized and funded than test recipients. It seems there is no hope but for the hope that state and federal leaders drop standardized testing as a model.

Brrrrrr! It's cold out here in Western Pennsylvania.

Image Credit: Jon Young UK. "100_00626" (Sun and Silhouetted Trees) . 27 Dec. 2006 Flickr.com. 24 Dec. 2008.

Are You Driving the New Model?

2008-12-02T21:28:00.017-05:00

The National Council of Teachers of English has an updated Framework for 21st Century Curriculum and Assessment that is a clarion call to English educators to embrace and develop skills in digital technology and media. Adroitly the NCTE points out that language changes as the way we communicate changes, and indeed to be a literate person in the coming century requires a new and plastic skill set.

Blurring? Yes. Whereas in medieval times one was literate who could read and write, tomorrow (if not today) one is literate who can read, evaluate, communicate, create messages, develop meaning, and build relationships in myriad, complex, and ever-changing technologically based means.

The NCTE's framework point to such literacy skills as that will allow a 21st Century readers and writers to :

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

The charge for English teachers comes in dozens of questions under each of the above elements. Such questions as:

Do students use technology as a tool for communication, research, and creation of new works
Do students work in groups to create new sources that can’t be created or solved by individuals?

Do students solve real problems and share results with real audiences?

Do students create new ideas using knowledge gained?

Do students evaluate multimedia sources for the effects of visuals, sounds, hyperlinks, and other features on the text’s meaning or emotional impact?

Do students practice the safe and legal use of technology?

I say these amount to a charge for English teachers, because the lessons that these questions point are still emerging and yet becoming germane to language arts study. What percentage of our curriculum and assessment is answering these questions in the affirmative? Surely, we always have held such lofty goals at times and perhaps those "creative" or "dramatic" or "soulful" among us have from time to time veered off the straight and narrow essay assignment track("why don't you submit that poem to a magazine" and "cite your sources" and "how about creating a collage on theme").

Today is a new day, and tomorrow newer still. Technology as a way to read, create, publish, and communicate is tuning-up the English classroom into an all-terrain vehicle--sans brakes! As teachers we must learn much that's new if are students are to learn from us. The NCTE's framework serves as a good table of contents for this new-fangled buggy's user's manual.

Giddyup!

Image credit: ahisgett. "All Terrain Buggies." 22 Aug. 2007 Flickr. 2 Dec. 2008 <http://www.flickr.com/photos/hisgett/1203532051/>. Courtesy of the photographer under Creative Commons License: BY.

Mapping English Skills in the New Millennium

2008-11-29T22:41:00.003-05:00

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has forged alliances with key national organizations that represent the core academic subjects, including Social Studies, English, Math, Science and Geography. As a result of these collaborations, the Partnership has developed this map to illustrate the intersection between 21st Century Skills and English. The maps will enable educators, administrators and policymakers to gain concrete examples of how 21st Century Skills can be integrated into core subjects.

As this map was announced earlier last week, Kylene Beers, president of the National Council of Teachers of English pointed out that the English map includes interdisciplinary themes, outcomes, and examples from best classroom practices when it comes to integrating 21st Century Skills.

Cross-cultural themes of this curriculum are:

Creativity & Innovation
Critical Thinking & Problem Solving
Communication
Collaboration
Information Literacy
Media Literacy
Information & Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy
Flexibility & Adaptability
Initiative & Self-Direction
Social & Cross-Cultural Skills
Productivity & Accountability
Leadership & Responsibility

Very exciting stuff as we see curricular revolution brought on by the contemporary technological advance that determines our disciplines work in tandem and in service to such life skills

At any rate this map will help we educators wrap our minds around what and how 21st Century skills might be best addressed, reassuring to progressive teachers and motivating to ones ready to get up to speed as we head to the first decade milestone of the millennium.

Fair Use Guide for a Digital Age

2008-11-28T23:17:00.008-05:00

The Center for Social Media recently released "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education" which will help teachers and students in the United States navigate copyright in the digital age. At the focus is the U.S. Copyright Office's limit on copyright known as "fair use."

This code comes timely. As the "Code" reports, educators have often erred to liberal and conservative definitions, some believing anything used in the classroom was fair game while others believed they'd find police officers ready with handcuffs at their classroom doors if they so much as showed transparency of a magazine ad to their students and thus they "hyper-comply" to imagined rules.

What is are the limits on copyright, so called "fair use"? Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law states "the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered 'fair', such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. It also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

"The distinction between 'fair use' and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission."

Still, in the digital age which includes internet publishing of information and the natural inclination to encourage students to produce works for global audiences, the copyright office' definition of "fair use" falls short of clearly delineating what is acceptable and legal.

The "Code" document has been reviewed by five attorneys and endorsed by National Association for Media Literacy Education, Action Coalition for Media Education, National Council of Teachers of English, Visual Communication Studies Division of the International Communication Association, and Media Education Foundation.

The process was coordinated by Profs. Renee Hobbs (Media Education Lab, Temple University), Peter Jaszi (ProMedia, American Universitgram on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Washington College of Law, American University) and Patricia Aufderheide (Center for Social Media).

As teachers use the motivation of world-wide audiences for their students' voices by having them use and remix copyrighted material and produce their own copyrighted works (in America copyright is extent at moment of creation) via internet media, it become incumbent that we inform and guide them. The "Code" notes:

"In particular, educators should explore with students the distinction between material that should be licensed, materialthat is in the public domain or otherwise openly available, and copyrighted material that is subject to fair use. The ethical obligation to provide proper attribution alsoshould be examined. And students should be encouraged to understand how their distribution of a work raises other ethical
and social issues, including the privacy of the subjects involved in the media
production."

The "Code" is a sure step for teachers to prepare for such lessons and conversations with their students as consumers and producers of digital media. Get your copy now and school thyself.

Creative Stuff

2008-11-09T04:44:00.005-05:00

Something Ken Robinson writes about in his book Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative has been in my head since I read it about a year ago. He describes the curious aspect of research in English studies as compared to research in say, as he does, physics. At least at the university level, physics profs are expected to do science, whereas English teachers are expected to research about English.

"Professors of English are not employed to produce literature; they are employed
to write about it. They spend much of their time analyzing the lives and
drives of writers and the work they produce. They may write poetry in
their own time: but they're not normally thanked for doing it in university
time. They're expected to produce analytical papers about poetry.
Producing works of art doesn't count as appropriate intellectual work in an arts
department: yet the equivalent in a science department, doing physics or
chemistry does" (65-66).

Point taken. At the high school level it's much worse, isn't it. As a teacher do more talking about English, than do English. That is, I research, and mostly secondary source research at that, on texts, authors, composition, grammar, etc.

Most of the time the curriculum I teach in asks my students to do the same--except for a semester or two when I might have section of Creative Writing or for the occassional assignment in my literature classes when I ask for a script or narrative piece.

A colleague of mine, Mary Culbertson-Stark, art teacher, and working artist, once asked me about my stuff. By this she meant original writing, presumably fiction or poetry, particularly what I going to be working on writing over the summer. I was flattered by the idea that she thought I had stuff. But I shrugged it off. Truth is, I've had a few poems and some short stories, and a couple of essays. Not much stuff.

Of course what concerns me is not only how little writing, acting, storytelling, and videoing my colleagues do ourselves but also how little we ask of our students. Much of literature study is done as a study without any attempt at writing, outside of a personal response of a paragraph or two, or a once a year ritual called the reseach paper. A dearth of writing of any sort by most of us English teachers exists. Some don't even read for pleasure.

I can hear the cry "where the time!" (I'm not sure I have the answer. It's been nearly three weeks since I've even posted to this blog.) We're are already teaching too much, and "covering a subject in instruction" is frequently just that covering, as in hiding and opaquing. Yet, I feel a bit of a hypocrite if I am not reading and writing while asking my students to do so. I challenge you, dear teacher-reader (as Dickens would say), to consider your own practice, in regard to yourself and your students. Begin to fit in the creative work in your life and your teaching and you students' lives and learning.

For every authentic project of writing, acting, or other creative work, about three other units must hit the dustbin. Isn't trade worth it? Our students are going to be called to be creative as much as they are going to be called to be analytical, so teachers might best get on with it and celebrate both. After all, can we teach creativity without critical thinking?

Surely, we've thought we could teach the analytical domain without the creative. And succeeded. On the other hand, creativity skills may, in fact, supercede anything on Bloom's taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). Adding doing your discipline to your own practice as well as to your curriculum can only lead our creativity and that of our students to deeper, more meaningful places of inquiry.

Time is of the Essence: "Our Students are Showing Up Tomorrow"

2008-10-19T10:15:00.013-05:00

Sir Ken Robinson, author of the must-read Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative and advocate for arts and sciences education that is inclusive, expansive, and collaborative, presents compelling arguments against standardized testing and for programs that encourage creative, imaginative, and innovative thinking.

I met him last week at the Regional Arts Collaborative, held near Pittsburgh. It was delight to meet a man knighted for his leadership of a national commission on creativity, education and the economy for the UK government bringing together leading business people, scientists, artists and educators.

Now living in America, Robinson points out that No Child Left Behind, with its regimen of assessments and funding "amounts to leaving millions of children behind" and kills their creativity, while demoralizing and stigmatizing students, educators, and whole learning communities.

He calls this crisis, "a scandalous misuse of human resources," at a time when we need to encourage performative skills in our children more than ever. When, as Sir Ken notes, "a college degree is not a passport, but a visa" to success in a future that we can't predict,it is absurd that educators and students must contend with standardized testing that narrows curriculum to traditional reading, writing, math and science. These subjects are certainly important, yet with high-stakes testing placing incredible emphasis on children being able to demonstrate knowledge that fits into bubble sheets, we see critical thinking, collaborative skills, technology applications, and aesthetic capabilities being pushed out of curriculum.

Sir Ken notes a waste of the most important resource our unsteady economy needs most--human potential, which can be realized in creative, performative pursuits in the arts and sciences. Furthermore, dichotomy arts and sciences is not only artificial but also--and more dangerous--obsolete in this new century. I agree that such tests do more to limit students abilities and potential for learning, while at the same time have the effect of making school irrelevant to our students.

The emphasis for the sort of education Sir Ken calls for, schooling that involves high level applications authentic work in arts and sciences, and that involves collaboration, creativity, problem solving, performance, would produce a relevance and rigor to develop active intelligence and cognitive development that are missing in our schools and needed for our future.

In good measure time and energy of teachers and students are being misfocused on a very limited skill and knowledge set that won't serve our futures. So call your representative? Wait out the upcoming election? No way, says Sir Ken. Legislation of recall or reform will take years. And he flatly points out that this can't wait: "Our students are showing up tomorrow."

We educators are the ones that must work to ensure our curricula are preparing our students for economic, cultural, and personal success. Sir Ken presents a rallying cry in his book and his presentations around the world. He reminds us that sustainable "human organizations are organic not systemic." The time has come--as always has been the case--for the centrality of teachers in educational reform. Curriculum design and assessement design cannot match the wit of teachers to make our schools relevant and rigorous for our students.

Sir Ken's knightly call for educational transformation reminds me of Postman and Weingartner's a generation ago. Effective teachers know of Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Some educational ideas are always right for the practice.

Essences of Teaching: No. 4: Summoning Our Courage

2008-10-09T20:21:00.004-05:00

Fourth in a Series of Three . . . or More

(Review Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

If I may add a fourth "S' along with storytelling, scholarship, and sharing, I would add the essential of summoning our courage to face and meet the challenges of our profession. Unlike random heroes of a dramatic moment, a time of peril or personal tragedy, people whom we hail as "hero" when faced by a non-negotiable situation of extreme circumstance, teachers must summon courage each and every day, with each and every classroom, and with each and every child. Our heroism comes from a steadfast vision of what should be the case, of what future we imagine, and what we know children can do, think and learn.Many Challenges

We must summon our courage inside and outside the classroom. To address the struggles of students can be daunting. Whether our students have learning disabilities, physical disabilities, emotional problems, drug addictions, English as a second language, or are bullied for sexual orientation, religion, or minority ethnicity--the sheer number of variables of what calls a teacher to intervene can make it tempting to "let that one slide." Yet we teachers know if they "let that one slide," then we've let a child slip through the cracks, and so rather great teachers take stands against mediocrity, make eddies in the river of complacency, place roadblocks to bullying and defamation, and shake off the hindrances to learning. As we do so we become exemplars of resiliency and accomplishment – the true sources of self-esteem for ourselves and our students.

A Tsunami of Technology

A great challenge is presented by incredible increase of technology that is reshaping the way students think and learn and therefore demanding we change the way teach. We must summon our courage, for this is not a pedagogical trend or a wave to ride out, it is a tsunami of technology and it is cresting above our heads. To survive, our communities must embrace the use of technology and support its funding. Teachers must be given training support and make every opportunity to learn and work with new and emerging technologies on an on-going basis. "Our schools are going to change more in the next ten years than they have in the last hundred. Everyone reading these words will be part of that change. Get ready." So says James Daly, editor of Edutopia magazine. Summon your courage.

Standardized Tests

With George Orwellian flair of a name and Aldous Huxley's dystopian vision of education, the No Child Left Behind Act has ushered in Big Brother's Brave New World version of teaching and learning—every student to turn out like the next by 2014. Its euphemistic name makes it difficult to argue against its substance, for no teacher, no legislator, no community member would not be in favor of the phrase. But as professionals of in the field, experts in pedagogy, we know a name is a name is a name and that the current plan in practice does not smell like a rose. Standardized tests encourage cookie-cutter curricula that are limited in scope, purpose, and utility, while our students are unlimited in needs, potential, and talent.

Standardized tests, as they are now, with high-stakes emphasis and heavy penalties and few educational rewards are stifling our learning communities while offering little in the way of inquiry, relevance, or the future.

Since standardized tests have been introduced in the 1990s in Pennsylvania, one by one,--writing, then reading and math, now science, and with more proposed on the way--we know the Class of 2009 has sat in a class from Kindergarten to Twelfth Grade preparing for and taking and retaking government mandated standardized tests for at least 180 days. One whole year of their public schooling spent on a standardized testing. A whole year!

Standardized testing by definition negates variables of divergent thinking and innovation. Standardized testing by definition negates the uniqueness of our students, their differentiated abilities, and their varietal talents. Standardized testing by definition negates the ingenuity of our teachers, their ability to develop relevant curriculum, and their professional talents to deliver instruction in meaningful, learning activities and provide real-world assessments. The more we use standardized tests to measure student ability, the less our schools are empowered to offer students opportunities to show their true achievement. Each year that a school meets Annual Yearly Progress of testing, is a milestone of that school's curriculum's regress toward becoming irrelevant.

Such milestones become tombstones to the kind of student performance our state and our nation country needs in order to compete in a global marketplace, a marketplace in which the successes will be built upon creativity as much as productivity, upon designing as much as performing, and upon collaboration as much as invention. When have you seen a standardized test that calls students to be creative, to design, and to collaborate? They don't exist. We must, as Robinson says, be "out of our minds" if we think standardized tests are the measure of whether we have left a child behind. The tests themselves leave children behind.

Thus, we must summon our courage. We teachers must resolve to replace testing with authentic assessments that mean learning for students and accountability for educators.We must summon our stories and our scholarship--what we as professionals know to be true from research and in the life of a classroom and in the life of each child.

When It Comes to Blogging with Students Process is King

2008-10-01T22:38:00.004-05:00

This week, working on blogging and podcasting with students for whom these are new experiences, has taught me just about as much about the process of online writing and producing as they are learning about having an authentic audience, considering self-representation, and getting the I's capitalized and the periods inside the quotes.

The assignments are part of our response to a school visit to Life on Mars, the 55th Carnegie International, hosted by Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. And to-date, we've only just begun with some initial impressions, with plans for more expository, narrative and poetic compositions to follow in the days ahead.

Online writing and podcasting on the fly is not only teaching our students to ply their compositional talents with care for their audiences, but also presenting lessons in process.

You know, I came of age in this profession when "process writing" was being defined, so I guess I should not be surprised to find that emerging venues for writing bring this point home, albeit in new ways. As students conceptualize where their words are fitting into audio files, posted in to blog spaces, they are simultaneously reflecting on and contextualizing their compositions with meta-writing. Figuring out clicks, copy-and-pastes, URLS, hyperlinks, and insert-image buttons all the while creating instantly published works in 42 minutes or less leaves little time for reflection for the moment, but I try to have my students pause and consider the importance of their voices and their choices for what they will post.

The process takes care of itself. But I wonder if it isn't even more important.

Into the Woods

2008-09-21T21:35:00.007-05:00

This past summer I read Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. So I have been thinking about his ideas of "intimate immensity" as they pertain to how students (and well, anyone for that matter) sometimes perceive the World Wide Web. The screen about eighteen inches of my face has the lure of such intimate immensity.

Bachelard provides a metaphor of a forest to explain intimate immensity. It is the experience of being surrounded by the trees closest to you, and therefore, unaware of the vastness of the woods beyond this immediate, intimate circle. Perhaps the woods is as Robert Frost tells us "lovely, dark and deep." Or maybe not. Either way we can't see the forest for the trees. We are lured into a coziness, a security of a verdant canopy and steady bark pillars in our intimate vicinity.

Is that not how comfortable I feel as I type this in my own study, with my own familiar computer screen? Is that not how my students feel when they post pictures of their latest OMG moments with their friends? Sure. It's the intimacy of thinking we are talking only among one's "friends" or writing only to oneself that blogging can be.

Still, it's important before clicking "publish" or "upload" to remember ourselves and remind our students that as intimate as the Web may be when it's eighteen inches away or in one's lap, it and our audience may also be vast and unknown. Indeed, there may be a few "lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!"

Fairy tales warn us about dropping breadcrumbs, straying from the path, and talking to wolves. As we tread into the woods of the World Wide Web and invite our students, these cautionary stories and a mindfulness to Bachelard's sense "intimate immensity" can help us find our way safely.

Image: Nicholas T. “Mossy.” Detail. Flickr. 19 March 2007. CC Licensed: BY-SA-NC

When Tech Works, It Works Wonders

2008-09-17T19:46:00.007-05:00

My previous post was as close to a rant as I plan to get in this blog. Rants usually have an audience of one. Let me make amends, dear reader, by noting some of my wonder when it comes to technology working that pulls me through. I've had several parallel experiences of dealing with online technology-in-education; here I share three.

After six-to-eight hours of reloading my students usernames and passwords to our Edublogs-based blog and then getting my students in successfully, I'm reaping the rewards of the power of scholarly dialogue in our literary discussions. You can take a look for yourself at our English 12 Honors Blog (if you are reading this post within 6 months of its posting). These are great first attempts of students finding their ideas and their audience online. I'm most impressed by the quality not only of the posts but also the comments that go beyond "way to go!" and "I agree." Next I hope to see bloggers bring research and links into support and extend their findings and support their claims.

In addition, for the past few months to I've also been beta-testing an online writing, grammar and research program from Pearson Education. The product is called MyCompLab. It's a poweful, comprehensive web-based resource in grammar, writing, and research and features a dynamic, interactive, collaborative place for composition, peer-review, tutorial, and assessment. We've had some hurdles to surmount with such a rich and complex project. This summer the new MCL was launched and my colleagues and I have been trying to get started with the program, not without several hiccups. Nothing more frustrating than being ready to work in a writing center (after pulling favors and making deals with other teachers for the scheduled time) to not have the students be able to log in. "Okay, class back to the regular classroom!" But in the past week, obstacles flattened, it's been exciting to see students engaging with the media, each other, and me in this online environment.

A particular labor of love has been working with the education department of Carnegie Museum of Art, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, especially during the current exhibition of the 55th Carnegie International "Life on Mars" (now until January 2009). My pet project has been to help teachers with online resources for school visits to the museum, or virtual visits. Again, collaborating with web developers, IT departments, artists, curators, funders, and fellow educators can resemble a instructional technology tower of babel; we all have a common goal but speaking a variety of languages. Sometimes it seemed like that we had aliens-among-us, some sort of educational end users encountering technicians from a different world who we depend upon us launch us into the blogosphere. (I'm sure this resonates with many teachers and IT departments throughout the universe.) After more than a year in the making. the International's online complement is offering unprecedent resources to reach out to students, teachers, and the general public via the Web.

Not only is Carnegie Museum of Art inaugurating it's first blog for this exhibition, which celebrates the finest contemporary art from around the world, but also it has no fewer than five! Museum staff sends its Signals blog to an general public audience who can send back blog posts in Soundings. A group of teen interns offers Zero Gravity blog. Teachers share ideas for the classroom and the exhibition on Ideas & Updates blog. And finally, teachers and students can augment their school visits with private or public blogs devoted to their own school group.

With this many opportunities for writing and reading online in response to one of the world's most significant and historical art traditions--the Carnegie International--it's been worth sweating the details of how to tweak the tech to make it work. My students are gearing up for their visit later this month. We use school-museum visits to inspire narrative writing and other compositions. Stay tuned for their posts.

I invite teachers from around the world to virtually visit the Carnegie International and the works of forty of today's top artists, the "old Masters of Tomorrow," with their students. And if you are in the Western Pennsylvania region, plan a school visit. Leave your teaching suggestions in Ideas & Updates and create a classroom blog with your students via the Classroom Resources. They'll be sharing their ideas on the art of their age for audiences now and in the future.

You know the cliche about "teachers touch the future." Well, when it comes to instructional technology, it's great when the future taps you back.

Image: View from inside Richard Serra's cor-ten steel scupture Carnegie, located in front of the entrance to Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. (cc) 2007 Charles Youngs. Some rights reserved: BY-NC-SA.

Hack or Crack?

2008-09-09T20:59:00.006-05:00

I'm far from a hack with computers. But I do enjoy figuring out how to do things with technology for the classroom. Today, I'm not sure if I'm more a crackbrained fool than any kind of hack. I guess it comes with the territory of perpetual beta that comes with trying to keep up.

Let me explain. This year I am trying my class blogs with Edublogs. Having used another basic provider since 2003, I'm lured by the bells and widgets of Edublogs and what I thought would be the stability of using a popular site designed for educators and powered by the respected WordPress. Tonight I'm not sure.

A fellow teacher down the hall has switched to EB with me. A few weeks ago he noted that the site when down and we all had to reset our passwords. This afternoon, he stopped by again to see whether I had noticed that Edublogs had suffered another attack and was requiring its users to reset their passwords, again. Ugh, I had just set up sixty student accounts! Not that big of a deal, unless you have your student users all wired to one Gmail account.

It's actually a hack technique suggested by Edublogs, and it's a clever way of getting by not having your students sign up with third-party services. You can set up the blog user accounts without requiring students to have their own email accounts. Students at our district cannot access email at school. So trying to recover passwords can be an impass during the day.

But a teacher can create an email account on Gmail and simply add the student user names to the formula of Gmailaccountname + studentusername @ gmail . com. Gmail ignores anything between the plus sign and the at sign, and all the mail comes to you, the holder of the Gmail account. Thus websites requiring accounts get a real email address and your students get the accounts without disclosing emails, and you get control over retrieving passwords, spam, and errant messages. Nifty, yes.

That is until something like what happened at Edublogs today. All of the passwords need to be reset. This involves a login, an email, a hyperlink, another email, and resetting the password to something the students will understand and remember. This painstaking process made worse by the slowness of the site (perhaps because of everyone resetting their accounts). It's slow-going. Each account adds up about 10 minutes to reset and then redo the profile, maybe more. A process that's taken me five hours and counting. I'm a git more than half way, and I've had to . stop working on the redo because Edublogs seems to have gone off line again. Yikes!

I'm not sure I can endure another crash and run at this process. Better to start fresh, no? As I've said before (here and here) teaching with technology is not for the feint at heart. Times like these I gotta wonder whether I can hack it.

Image remix: Red envelope is a trademark of Google's Gmail and the blue "eb" is a trademark of Edublogs.

Dive Right In!

2008-08-31T10:47:00.004-05:00

Whew! Made if through the first week of school with students. Usually there's a half-week beginning, but for the first time in nearly two decades of teaching I was jumping in the deep end of the pool for five full days!

What did I learn form this Monday-to-Friday dive? Well, it was great to actually get past the rules of the road and orientation lessons and start discussing some content in the first week. In English 12 Honors, Arjuna is debating with Krishna in Bhagavad Gita, in British Literature, Beowulf is battling Grendel, and in Writing Skills "I Am From" poems are listing our lives. So school life is good.

The grace period hasn't worn off. I'm still on summer-lag from switching my body clock to getting up at 4:45 a.m. (Isn't it amazing that in the 21st century American schools still start so early as to 7:30! Where's the science?) And the U.S. celebrates Labor Day weekend with a Monday off. An extra day of planning for the four-day week ahead. We are underway and the water's fine.

Image credit: Shlevich, Benny. "Go!" Flickr. Creative Commons Pool. 18 Aug. 2007. 31 Aug. 2008 <http://flickr.com/photos/shlevich/1157425215/in/photostream/ >. By permission via Creative Commons Licensing (BY-SA).

Lexiophiles' Top 100 Language Blogs

2008-08-26T17:18:00.004-05:00

If Bees Are Few has just been listed #81 of the Top 100 Language Blogs on Lexiophiles. I'm excited and honestly surprised to that the Hamburg-based site, which places a strong emphasis on sites for English language learning selected this blog. The folks at Lexiophiles are dedicated to language and learning generally, and so is If Bees Are Few, of course. Our love for words is definitely shared.

Lexiophiles' list presents some other great places for language lovers to surf. It's an unexpected honor to be in such good company.

The Lexiophiles staff cites selection criteria of content, consistency and interactivity on the topic of language and learning. I enjoyed sampling some of the other sites in this special blogroll.

Look to This Day! And the Convention of the Class of 2009

2008-08-25T20:49:00.008-05:00

Today, on my first day of school I started class by asking my senior English students if they were excited to get up today. It was afterall the first day of their senior year. Before they could answer, I told them I was.

If they had started with Kindergarten, by my figuring this was the occasion of the thirteenth year that the Class of 2009 convenes--and the last. I could tell by their reactions they had not thought of it that way before, but in that instant I had underscored the importance of our meeting. I told them they were born the year I started teaching. This also got their attention. So they and I had been on an eighteen-year trajectory. I had thought of them in 1991 when they had only been a thought.

To me teaching is a special calling. To teach literature and its power, nothing less than sacred. I explain this to my students with the example of the Sankrit "The Salutation of the Dawn," reciting it to them from memory as one of my great teachers had done to me:

Listen to the salutation to the dawn,
Look to this day for it is life, the very life of life,
In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of our existence.
The bliss of growth, the splendour of beauty,
For yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision,
But today well spent makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day.
Such is the salutation to the dawn.

The same sun that dawned on the Class of 2009 today, rose on the same eastern horizon some 3200 years ago and one of our great-great-great ancestors realized the miracle of the ever-returning sun, ever-beginning day, and took out a slab of wet clay and reed, and carved this poem for our inheritance. That's what excites me about teaching ever-returning students, ever-beginning years. The human conversation over time and space is both our inheritance and our duty.

In this class, in this convention of the Class of 2009, we shall celebrate such conversations across cultures as take a literary travel around the world in 180 days.

We are the only species that saves its stories, I remind my students. We are stories told together. By the time my students are my age, it will be 2037 and they may have seniors of their own graduating. (This frightens them a bit--they can't imagine being my age let alone the year 2037 or having teenagers of their own.)

I tell them this is important and a key mission of this convention. They must pass on our stories. In 2060, I tell them, they'll be headed for retirement, and I'll be dead. I count on them to save the stories and share them.

"Look to this day!" It was written 3200 years ago. It's up to teachers and their students to see it through for the next 3200. "Look to this day"

Be-Attitudes for the Start of the Year

2008-08-09T09:39:00.004-05:00

This past week I spent a few hours in my classroom, moving desks, rearranging bookshelves, setting up bulletin boards. I pulled out my "Be-Attitudes Poster," a one-foot by four-foot poster I made years ago and have used as my reminders of how to Be-have in class. I call them Be-attitudes because attitude really shapes behavior. Get the attitude right and you've got behavior taken care of. So up go the "Be-Attitudes" on the front wall of my classroom.

Mr. Youngs' 12 Be-Attitudes, or Ways of BE-ing in Class
1. BE on time.
2. BE ready.
3. BE safe.
4. BE courteous.
5. BE heard.
6. BE hungry for ideas!
7. BE-autiful already.
9. BE personal.
8. BE done already with the restroom.
10. BE silent during tests.
11. BE original.
12. BE civil.

The poster is shorthand for what is on my syllabus and class policies orientation sheet.
1. BE on time. Have book bags stowed, English notebooks, textbooks, and any homework ready.
2. BE ready. Study before class. Don't simply read assignments, study them, know them. Bring materials--notebook, pencil, completed homework, books as assigned. Sit in assigned seats or as directed. The instructor plans to start at the bell; you should, also.
3. BE safe. No horseplay; stay alert--no slouching.
4. BE courteous. No side-talking, back-talk, blurting out, pointless noise nor distraction. No profanity, harassment, hate-speech, vulgarity! Use good manners, etiquette, and courtesy. No hats--show others respect. If you have something to say, raise your hand.
5. BE heard. Speak up! Practice public speaking skills and care enough to be heard.
6. BE hungry for ideas! No candy, food or drink. Any snack items will be discarded.
7. BE-autiful already. No vanity items such as mirrors, lipstick, makeup or brushes. Why embarrass yourself and others by seeming vain? Let only your hair stylist know your secrets.
8. BE done already with the restroom. Plan to use the restroom virtually NEVER during class time. Do so between classes and during lunch--that's eighty minutes of rest! Furthermore, asking to leave class is a bothersome interruption to the teacher and the whole class to issue a pass. If one were to use the restroom once a week, he would miss nearly a full week of class time in the year; once-a-day and he would miss more than the equivalent of twenty-two classes! Don't flush your education away.
9. BE personal. Never submit homework or other assignments on the teacher's desk. Submit work to a person, such as the instructor or the Building #4 secretary.
10. BE silent during tests. No communicating or cheating anytime during test days until all tests are collected. First offense is a penalty of 7% on your score; second offense is a penalty of receiving zero for a grade. Cheating is reported to the principal.
11. BE original. Plagiarism is "copying someone's words, work, or ideas" and is not tolerated. It is cheating; it is theft. To repeat: rewording someone's words or ideas is plagiarism. Nothing is duller than using someone else's work. Be brilliant! Be original!
12. BE civil. The instructor dismisses the class, not the bell. Let whomever is talking at the end of class finish--chance are information that'll be important to you is being offered. In any case, offer other people human dignity by showing your civility. In short, BE NICE. You will find the teacher responds well to courtesy, friendliness, scholarship, and hard work. Good attitudes and good class participation count along with good results toward good grades, especially when you really need it.

A Wordle of Web Tools

2008-07-31T16:58:00.006-05:00

Here's a Wordle image of the Web tools we are exploring at PBwiki Summer Camp. Click image to expand.

How Cool is That!

2008-07-31T09:02:00.005-05:00

Pardon my youthful burst of enthusiasm but I'm at PBwiki Summer Camp for Educators. Blame it on the fact that as a kid I never when to real summer camp. Maybe it was a fear of mountain lions. Maybe a fear of three-legged races.

This is Week Two of PBwiki's six-week event and I haven't had the need for mosquito netting. You see, it's all virtual. About 1,000 teachers interested in wikis and learning how they can be jazzed for the classroom are logging on and collaborating in what is turning out to be an awesome learning experience. There is weekly homework though that comes with this camp. Think of it as "arts and crafts" or more like "survival training." Hey, there's extra credit, too.

Always up for trying out the next Web 2.0 gizmo to engage my students ever-demanding attention spans, I'm wowed at the list of mostly free resources available to teachers. Well, today I'm jazzed about a new application at Animoto.com. Animoto makes mini-movies with rockin' appeal. All I had to do is create an account, upload some images (in the public domain or my own), select from some great music available on the site, and Animoto takes it from there. About 10 minutes later they send me a link and embed code for this >>

Now, how cool is that!

Almost as cool as the educational possibilities . . .(stay tuned).

Loading Content . . . Reflection Optional

2008-07-26T08:28:00.007-05:00

What Nicholas Carr is afraid that what happened to time will happen to knowledge. In his July/August Atlantic Monthly essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" he points to how before the clock, time had a human element. We told time by means of sun and moon, seasons and harvest, births and deaths, and in general natural and human events. He points out that Socrates, decried the writing down of ideas, said without the contemplation of discourse, wisdom would be lost. Partially true, but look at what we gain by storing the accumulated wealth of words.

Carr notes that the Internet is mostly designed to browse, not to read, and that our very ability or desire to read long texts, to become immersed in say the world of a novel is fading with each click of the mouse. More troubling, while at the same time somewhat amusing, is Carr's mention of Google's stated mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." It seeks to create a search engine that "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want."

Futurists have predicted that nanochips encyclopedic volumes of information will someday connected to our brains. The assumption is that we'll all be better off with every bit of information. What I find worthy of concern is Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page's belief that "certainly if you had all the world's information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you'd be better off." Carr notes:

In Google's world, the world we enter when we go online, there's little place
for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for
insight but a bug to be fixed.

Information is a resource, but it's not knowledge and it's not intelligent, artificial or otherwise. So much meaning can come, from ambiguity, fuzziness, subtlety, and nuance, recollected with clarity. As a reader and teacher of literary texts, whether fiction or non, I believe the most rewarding parts come from the spaces where all the dots don't line up, where there is room for multiple interpretation and that kind of knowing that can only survive in a human consciousness.
I do find it troubling that we are encouraged to browse rather than digest information. I see it in my students approach to literary texts—they scan and skim for the headlines, and when a novel doesn't work that way, and most of them don't, my students give up, and go to Sparknotes—online no less—to get the gist of the text. Like Prospero, "this swift business I must uneasy make, lest too light winning, make the prize light." I know my students will spend much more time with computers than books, despite the equally revolutionariness of both inventions. Still, I'd like them to relish the reward of thought and enlightenment that comes from deep reading.
Carr points out that:

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable
not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the
intellectual vibrations those words set off within our minds. In the quiet
spaces opened up the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other
act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our
own inferences and analogies, forster our own ideas.

Yes, reading and thinking are changing with technology. I share Carr's concern for the loss of reflection and in fact the ability of reflection in my students. The Internet itself doesn't foster thought the way books do. And books don't foster reflection the way a teacher can. With Plato's writing we got to know Socrates and settled with less rhetoric, with Gutenberg we quit illuminated manuscripts in lieu of plain type. As Google perfects its search engines, knowledge is more accessible, wisdom remains rare.

I'm no Socrates, the Internet is not a book—but as teachers we must endeavor to foster reflection's power. Reflection is perhaps the best kind of intelligence and furthest from artificial. It's what develops and changes our thinking whether we are speaking in groups, reading books, or surfing the Web.

The Essences of Teaching: No. 3 -- Share, Spread, Show

2008-07-21T22:23:00.009-05:00

Third in a Series of Three

(Review Part 1, Part 2)

And thirdly, great teachers, share what their doing—the pitfalls and panaceas—with others. The best teachers serve as resource not only for the students in their classrooms to other teachers down the hall, and beyond. They build bridges of collaboration and reflection, of experience and experimentation, and strategies and support. Teachers who share ideas, concerns, plans and materials redouble their own ability to create meaningful lessons for their classes.

Great teachers spread the word of their students' work (and their own expertise) by showcasing it with their administrators, parents, and community as their audience. It's important personally and professionally to let the world know what we accomplish with our students—how we strive and thrive in the classroom. Having stakeholders see us at our best can take the edge off when we risk a plan that doesn't turn out was well as we had hoped. Somewhere along the line, teachers as a profession became shy about telling others about the excellent work they do. Today we can't afford to be reclusive.

In this age, it's key to success of our profession to invite others into our classrooms and to show them what school is like nowadays. (My, how different from a decade ago!) Explain how we meet the challenges in creative, effective ways, and how we foster meaning and achievement for our students. Some teachers would argue that this is showing off. Well, yes it is, but as the old saying goes, "quality doesn't sell itself." Teachers must share their stories as well as their scholarship with other stakeholders besides their students.

Showing others our good work despite myriad challenges of low funding, lacking prestige, rising numbers of learning disabilities, and infrequent moral support from media, is good for everybody's sake. Students gain security and motivation knowing they're in the care of pros. Parents can rest assured their students will be equipped for tomorrow. And teachers can enjoy receiving some credit for their labors. Everyone benefits when teachers show the many, many ways we are effectively meeting students differentiated needs.

Now as the back-to-school season starts, is time to reflect, and shape ways to tell our stories, lay claim to our scholarship for the love of learning, and share the good news about teaching and learning in today's schools with everyone who will listen and then some.

The Essences of Teaching: No. 2 Scholarship, or "Teacher, School Thyself"

2008-07-14T16:53:00.009-05:00

Part Two in a Series of Three

(Review Part 1)

To be a great storyteller, a bard must learn his tale, and make some of it up as he goes along. Storytellers are always on the alert for another great story to add to their repertoires. Likewise, great teachers are always ready to learn something new. Indeed, they seek it. To truly succeed at their profession, teachers must be life-long scholars.

Pre-service teachers know this, or learn quickly that this is the case. I can recall an occasion when planning an upcoming unit with a student-teacher, she blanched "I don't know anything about the medieval period."
"Wonderful, but you will. Now! is the time to learn, " I replied.
"Teacher, school thyself" is a motto that means you'll never be limited, never get rusty.

Great teachers are avid readers, adventurers, and students themselves. This is true for their whole career, if they are lucky, because it means life is full of discovery. Scholars look for and are drawn to experts. If one doesn't know the taxonomy of art criticism, she seeks a curator; if another needs the decade's influenza statistics, he calls the health department. Master teachers collaborate with teams of colleagues who, like them, are hot for discoveries. Working together across the disciplines can mean new insights for teachers and students alike.

Teachers-as-scholars are travelers, pilgrims, inventors, dabblers, and doers. For instance, an American literature or social studies teacher might visit Lexington and Concord, the stomping grounds of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Stowe, as well as the beginnings of the American Revolutionary War, all a stone's throw from Salem and Boston and more stories and lessons from history. Or a science teacher might embark on a trek through the rain forest of Peru. Such exploratory teachers find professional development closer to home as well in conferences, classes, tours, events, concerts, dramas, and mini-expeditions to keep their spark for learning (and teaching) alive. Volunteer work not only serves the community, but also informs teachers of local issues, additional skills, and networks of experts to invite into their classrooms.

As scholars, teachers delight in educational challenges, whether its an additional degree or certification, or just for their kind of fun—the joy of knowledge for knowledge's sake. Yet, of course, we all know that this knowledge is for their students' sakes as well. Students love teachers who know how to learn. Such teacher-learners model the adventure of learning, and share knowledge in depth and breath from first-hand study. Next, sharing, spreading, and showing . . .

The Essence of Teaching, er, the S's of Teaching: No. 1 - Story

2008-07-08T22:43:00.006-05:00

Part One in a Series of Three

First is storytelling. Teachers are natural-born storytellers. Whether its anticipatory bellringer to catch the attention of sometimes reluctant learners or a personal anecdote to illuminate a point, teachers are telling stories. Of course some of us are reading or English teachers and "story" is in the job description. Our collegial cousins, the social studies instructors have "his-story-ical" accounts to retell. Yet, teachers in science, technology, and art, too, are storytellers of matter, microchips, and media.
Stories shape understanding.

As a first grade teacher plants seeds in half-pint milk cartons and the class watches the marigolds bloom by Mother's Day, a story of nature and nurture is demonstrated. As a geometry teacher gives a makeup exam, a story of second-chances it taught. As a coach rallies her team for the championship, a narrative of hard work, results, and love of the game is told.

Stories help teachers and students make meaning of the curriculum, ideas, and life. If you've never thought of it this way, then consider the stories you tell and how they tell you and your subject to your students. Next, scholarship . . .

Teaching Tips Blog

2008-07-07T19:59:00.004-05:00

Teachingtips.com is a blog in the traditional sense. That is it is a resource that lists other resources. With archives dating back to last month, this is tight contemporary resource that's quick to scan.

While it seems supported by advertising from institutions of higher learning and offers a search tool to find programs for education and professional development, the love-at-first-sight part is the blog that contains posts like "100 Best Resources and Guides for ESL Teachers," "100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You’ve Never Heard Of," and "50 Must-Read Up and Coming Blogs by Teachers." The last of which included "If Bees Are Few" and so, I figured I'd post for some cross-pollenization.

The "Must-Read" list links to blogs from teachers across the spectrum of rants, to rationalizations, to reality-checks. Good stuff.

And I thought the pile of books in my home office was enough summer reading, already!

Read'em Good

2008-06-23T19:15:00.005-05:00

A lively discussion is underway at Teacher Magazine's online discussion forum. The topic du jour is about whether or not reading aloud to high schoolers is good for them. Apparently a high school teacher's administrator doesn't think so. When I sat stopped in on the forum today, it looked like the "good"s were in the lead. And I'm among them.

I often read to my high schoolers--especially key passages, poetry, parts of dialogue. Although I'm no great orator from the late 1800s, but with a degree or two in communication arts, I do all right. I figure, it's not often my students get to hear a professional reader of literature. That's my first volley.

Here are my top 10 reasons for reading aloud to teens, or at least all I can think of on this beautiful summer's eve.

They love it.

They'll hear the words spoken in an effective (not definitive) way.

I know they are reading the text and not just the Sparknotes. Who knows they might even notice the incredible difference and stick to reading the texts in toto.

I can model how reading inspires one to pause and muse and question, or reflect and elaborate on a moment in a text.

We can discuss an important point, or debrief on difficult part.

Some students are auditory learners; it helps all students to digest a text not to be decoding the letters on the page.

It works in the mind's eye and on the imagination just as well, if not better.

Students can take notes or make art related to the reading while I read aloud.

Spoken vocabulary meets written text.

Research says students (even at the college level) who are read to read more.

As I noted above, I do not lay claim to reading texts "the right way." A pitfall of reading aloud is interpreting the text in a particular way. So, I also encourage (read: give extra credit) for students who agree to read the night before (and complete a chart of verbs of how each page is to be read and dictionary checks on vocabulary) and read in class. This way there is not the stumbling, staccato, flat and mispronounced, tortured reading, yet a student voice interprets the work.

On last point, I remember reading Great Expectations aloud as a 9th Grade. My 14-year-old voice cracked and the class laughed. I also remember my teacher Mr. Allison's mellifluous tones when he read Romeo and Juliet with us. Ah, youth.

Image credit: "Reading Along with Mr. Youngs" by Victoria Lecci

Grading Blog Posts

2008-06-20T12:18:00.006-05:00

A bit of a blogevangelist for education, whether speaking to colleagues down the hall or at conferences, I'm often asked "how do you grade a blog, do you have a rubric?" The short answer is "Yes."

Academic blogging is different from MySpace or Facebook. There are rules. Insert groan. I keep it simple for my sake as well as for that of my students. Students earn points under the categories of courtesy, communication, focus, scholarship, and thinking. You can take a look at the rubric I use for my students--click here.

In a recent articlein Campus Technology, Learning in the Webiverse: How Do You Grade a Conversation?, MIT's Trent Batson offers these tips that fit with most things we look for in good writing, conversational and academic:

coehesion of elements

awareness of audience

purpose

diction

It's clear from Baston's explanations of these components, there is a powerful difference from writing in a blog and writing a traditional essay. The stakes are higher when students are writing for authentic audience of peers in a public space. Purpose is torqued, too. To write for a class blog, students are called to not merely demonstrate knowledge but to share it meaningfully. Diction and coherency come into play as essential skills to accomplish the message.

I'd say this all adds up to much more engagement, thinking, and motivation to write well.

Image credit: "Conversations Silhouette" by b d solis @flickr.com, Creative Commons Copyright -- Attribution

Think or Swim

2008-06-18T09:09:00.006-05:00

In his introduction to How to See Yourself as You Really Are by the Dalai Lama, His Holiness notes "the most serious problems emanate from industrially advanced societies, where unprecedented literacy only seems to have fostered restlessness and discontent."

I see this in my students (and teachers, and just about everyone) as they obsessively check their mobile phones for texts, missed calls. I hear it in sound bytes from the latest news cycle that are taken without anything but superficial consideration and repeated as deep truths of what's happening today. Common sense, refection, and reverence are replaced by these sound bytes repeated as if mantras for a news cycle, and then replaced by the next gossip in the next moment.

Literacy, and here I am thinking of media literacy, must be stressed with our students to mean more than merely how to read a text or how to blog or make a video. Literacy is more than mere expression and understanding of a message.

Being teachers of English and across the disciplines, we teach our students how to read and write in a variety of media. It seems such a struggle to teach students to wade through myriad messages and identify propaganda and selected framing of ideas, let alone to dive into rhetoric and logic, then swim among questions and rise above to see things in larger contexts.

Of course, the total glut of media works against all of this. One might sit next to a lake and consider it for a long time without knowing its contents, yet today we seem awash in a tsunami. Ironically, survival in the latter is proportionally more crucial than in the former. One must not only be taught what water is, but also how to swim in it.

As we develop our students' abilities to digest media, some great emphasis must be given not only to forms but also to content. Knowledge isn't enough, thinking about the knowledge or lack thereof must be the focus. Perhaps if we ask our students to consider the messenger first, the message second, and then media third, we will be better equipping our students to find peace and contentment.

Image credit: "Grace Bay Beach Pier" 2007 by WisDoc used with permission of Creative Commons Copyright

O What I Don't Know (But Will)

2008-04-27T20:51:00.004-05:00

Entry #3 in a periodic series on National Board Certification

It's always a slap in the face to find out what you don't know you don't know.

Well, in typical "get outa your comfort zone" fashion, I took an assessement center practice session using retired questions and got a wake up call, if not a full smack down.

The first question involved a scenario about an type of student I have had few of and a novel I had not read. Actually, I think after the OMG moment of reading the question, I recovered rather nicely. Still the greater lesson is that if one is going to be a master teacher, he or she must excel at areas of which one has little experience as well as those areas that one has much.

So I can see my reading list growing for the summer so that I can learn more about issues, students, and subjects that I now know I don't know.

The Power of Art to Get Inside a Play

2008-04-16T22:00:00.008-05:00

Today I included a favorite lesson, one I learned from Anthony Cappa, last year's student teacher in my class. The lesson involves Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll House and the work of his contemporary and acquaintance Edvard Munch. By examining a half dozen of Munch's works through the lens of Ibsen's play, students unfold both--sets of images and scenes from the play.

We start with "The Scream." Familiar territory and a moment of recognition. They find connections that bridge the playwright's realism and the painter's expressionism. Themes, moods, characters, episodes, and bits of dialogue resonate outward from Munch's pictures.

By the time we get to Munch's portrait of Ibsen himself, we need the momentary chuckle over his mutton chops to shake the despair, longing, and alienation that stem from our better understanding the meaning of what Nora, Torvald and all go through.

Art has that power. Couple drama with painting--wow!

Teaching and Self-Loathing

2008-04-13T20:33:00.006-05:00

Entry #2 from a periodic series on National Board Certification

For all the buzz of past decades on self-esteem for students, teachers could use a boost. When I got to my second installment of NBPTS pre-candidate classes, I was nearly stymied to find that cancelling the program was a real possibility. Why? Lack of funding? No. Lack of teacher interest in taking the challenge of becoming National Board Certified.

I was crushed. I had tried to get into last year's class to find I was too late. Now that I was in, was I going to be denied the chance because no one else wanted to?

Fortunately, the happy few of us that showed up were able to commit, cross our hearts and hope to die, and convince the leaders to hang in there with us.

But this got me to thinking why? Why aren't teachers clamoring to become Board Certified? With the promise of state funding, money can't be the excuse? Time? Sure, time is always precious for good teachers. Yet, I think it has to do with fear of not measuring up and low self-esteem.

Teachers have so many nay-sayers to their talents. Media, administrators, parents, even students' criticism can get a teacher down. (Why this week alone, I was obliquely called a "goat," " a fool," and "cruel" by students.) So, of course, why would they want a National Board to give 'em one more hit? It's easy to see their view.

Ironically, that's exactly the opposite of the NBPTS's intent. It's to take account and certify all of "what teachers should know and be able to do." It's portfolio assignments and assessments are aimed at acknowledging the great things teachers who become candidates already are doing well.

Our National Board advisor tells me we are thirty years away from when National Board Certification will have established itself as the hallmark of educators' professionalism. Maybe by then teachers will be less fearful and more proud.

Midway in My Career

2008-04-03T20:46:00.006-05:00

Entry #1 from a periodic series on National Board Certification

I've decided to record some of my reflections on a process toward National Board Certification for Teaching. I considered starting a separate blog for this, but have decided to have it be part of If Bees Are Few, color code it blue and tag it "National Board." In this way, perhaps it will show how the process integrates with other aspects of my reveries.

This is my seventeenth year in the classroom as a career. Sixteen down and sixteen to go, God-willing. I'm not sure I'll stop teaching then, but I'll probably retire from the public school system as I reach 60. Thus, if all goes well, this is my hump year.
This week I "celebrated" by beginning pre-candidate classes for becoming a National Board Certified Teacher from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. The first step was printing nearly 400 pages of standards and portfolio requirements and the panic of "what am I getting myself into? I'm an award-winning teacher, lead of my department, consultant . . . why do I want to be board certification?"
Well, I love teaching and I express my love through the quality of my teaching. I also like reflective practice. So this seems like an arena in which I can heighten my reflection, challenge myself, and improve the quality of what I love and do well. So binder in hand I head off, a bit daunted by the work ahead I know it represents.
Locally, Duquesne University is a host center for NBCT/NBPTS. At our first meeting which previewed the foundation and five core propositions, I was reassured to find out that "Standards" for our profession are much more authentic than "standards and standardized testing" that is been limiting education's scope, creativity, relevancy, rigor, and ways we assess students. Here they are:

Policy Statement: What Teachers Should Know and Be Able to Do
1. Teachers are Committed to Students and Learning.
2. Teachers Know the Subjects They Teach and How to Teach Those Subjects to
Students.
3. Teachers are Responsible for Managing and Monitoring Student
Learning.
4. Teachers Think Systematically about Their Practice and Learn from
Experience.
5. Teachers are Members of Learning Communities.

Moreover, I was reassured by the level of inquiry I sense in a half a dozen fellow teachers in our class. What we lack in numbers, we will make up for in quality. After three hours of working with them and our experienced and enthusiastic leaders, I may not have yet have a clear idea of "what I'm getting into," but I'm more confident I want to "get into it." What an incredible boost to one's motivation to have the time and space and structure and interest with colleagues to talk about "what teachers should know and be able to do." I left heartened that the NBCT process will be an exhausting but energizing experience. Sort of like teaching itself.

Grading, Online Reporting, and Good Enough

2008-03-20T11:57:00.004-05:00

I've been experiencing the same sort of thing Traci Gardner mentions in her blog post for NCTE "What's My Grade?" My school started using an online grade reporting program. It's stable if terribly clunky--6 clicks and two sign-ins to post each class. Just as Traci notes, students rarely ask how they are doing in class. Instead they want to know why they have a zero for a homework. "Well, let's take a look." Most often it is because the assignment was turned in after the "all call" and though it's in my gradebook, it hasn't been entered into GradeQuick, or it's made it that far but not uploaded to EdLine. Teachers are to upload to EdLine every two weeks. That's a good thing.

I think Traci would agree. Her school's system is more instantaneous. By now, students (and parents) at my disctrict are getting used to the two-week schedule. And I have some time to grade the assignment, record it in my book, and enter it into GradeQuick, before I upload it to EdLine. All this takes time.

We have a seven-and-a-half-hour grading day every quarter. Every time contract talks come along, it is a bone of contention. "Do teachers really need this time?" school directors ask. I don't know about my colleagues but as an English teacher I can do the math: If it takes 10 minutes to grade an essay and I have 120 essays, I need 20 hours. And if I have 5 hours of prep time per week, then if I did nothing else (like parent contact, wrestle with the copier, check-in with a guideance counselor, give makeup exam, ad infinitum) I could have the essays graded (not recorded, just graded) in 4 weeks. So the seven hours of grading days is used for catching up with the makeups, figuring in participation, recording, and double-checking.

Time is time, and teachers never have enough. What is more troubling to me is, for all its efficiency of reporting grades, online reporting systems are nudging the emphasis from learning to earning. The customer service feel of online reporting seems to suggest that students (and parents) have more to demand from their scores. Scores become something to micro-manage from home and interrupt the learning process. And in some ways the very reporting of every point takes the effect of professional judgment out of the teacher's power. How can I give an C to a struggling, but deserving student who knows he has an 69 (one point away) because he's been watching his record?

There's a trickle down effect to this. As the students realize every hundredths of a point matter, every homework assignment and its score matters. Again, the focus is not on the learning, it's on a number. Grades become a fixed timeline of scores instead of a representative process of progress.

I was fortunate to grow up in the days of hand-written report cards. A time when students trusted their teachers to assess them. And parents who backed the teachers. Though I might have wondered a little a couple of times, I never had to question a teacher about a grade. If the teacher said I got deserved a "C" and I had given it my all, then I got a "C." And my parents only question was "Did you do your best?" regardless of whether of the grade. That was good enough.

And what I learned in the process: what was my best. To this day I know whether I've done my best or not. My best on some things is an A+. Sometimes I can eek out a B-. Other things I fail. But I never have to ask why I got a zero.

Give It Up For, Not On Technology

2008-03-10T18:09:00.003-05:00

Teachers are control freaks. It's true. It comes with the territory. Everytime we walk into a classroom we know someone is going to set the agenda. And it better be me. It's all we know.

Enter technology. Ever have a projector that wouldn't sync with a DVD player? How about an online video presentation scheduled for a day the school server goes down? Or your blog site is 404?

Just the idea that we are outsourcing our content to a third-party makes us squeamish. And there are concerns about copyright, propriety of documents uploaded to Google, sites that link, remixed media, ad nauseum. Control?

If we are going to be moving (with our students) to the 21st Century we've got to give it up. I have found that my students understand completely. Whereas in years past, if something didn't go quite right, they'd panic and look at me like it was some kind of crime, nowadays they are cool with it. They know what it's like to be out of control with technology. It's a temporary setback. In a few minutes or the next day, the power will come up, the site will be online, the bug will be patched, and all will be good. Learning will go on.

Don't Stop Reading!

2008-02-24T21:40:00.003-05:00

Whew! Howard Gardner, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, writing in the Feb. 17 Washington Post, reassures us English teachers and bibliophiles (we happy few) that the burgeoning new literacies will not eradicate the book.

I've often marveled at its portability and solarpowered independence, say nothing of its ability to house data in print along with my marginalia, sticky notes, and an occassional post card, train ticket, or clipping.

Despite Gardner's seeing that the book will hold its own among pods, laptops, and cellphones, he's not as confident about length of plots and complexity of story. He alludes to a scenario that thanks to social networking finds the readers of the future not alone long enough to find themselves lost in a novel for an hour or two, say nothing of three or four.

So perhaps plots will be chunked, serialized, or mini.

The Outsourcing of Knowledge

2008-02-12T07:18:00.000-05:00

Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what
we know today. A real challenge for any learning theory is to actuate known
knowledge at the point of application. When knowledge, however, is needed, but
not known, the ability to plug into sources to meet the requirements becomes a
vital skill. As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what is needed
is more important than what the learner currently possesses.
-- George Siemens, 2004

A couple of years ago my students scoffed when I told them I didn't want a cell phone. Their chins dropped when I pointed out that "there are times when I don't want to be able to be reached."

I guess I am literally "out of touch." Well, not quite. It's been just over a year that I have a cell phone. I use it basically for long-distance calls (that are included in my plan) and for emergency calls (in stores: do we need milk?) I only agreed to get one to have in case of emergency on the highways and for travel. Still, I am not a phone-talker. Never was, probably never will be, brought up in the age of party lines and only using the phone for a dire purpose.

After reading George Siemens article on connectivism, I'm wondering if I'm cutting my phone to spite by future. Maybe my students are just practicing the skill of a lifelong learner. They are preparing themselves for the age when it's not what you know but who you know who knows it. Knowledge is outsourced to their friends in a lifetime of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire--Is that your final answer?

Networking surpasses Boolean searches. In fact, my students, despite all their tech savvy, seem to have no interest in learning how to do advanced Google searches, let alone learn Boolean techniques. Perhaps they are just waiting for the technology to catch up with their incompetence with technology. Futurist Ian Pearson predicts that by 2040 nanotechnology will be providing brain-machine connections. As we will think, we will know--heck, we won't have to think, just know. (As a reader of Orwell, I don't like the sound of that.) At any rate, our students for their ignorance, not despite it, turn out to be more savvy than un- after all.

Surely search engine engineers are going to figure out how to sidestep a researchers misteps. They already know whether we've misspelled a word, rite? But I digress.

In the interim, as a teacher I am muddling about the best ways to teach students ways to use technology that they think they already know but don't. They know some tricks, like how to turn a monitor's display upside down, how to switch between on-task and off-task websites as I circulate through the lab, and shortkeys. (Oh the sighs! as they watch me go step-by-step.) Yet they not nonplussed to find they haven't a clue as to how to save to a flashdrive, surf for websites from university sources, or cite a source. Rather, they can wait till there's an application that can do it for them. The wait may not be long. If they can't wait, they'll just text a friend.

"Beyond Here Be Dragons!"

2008-01-30T19:17:00.000-05:00

"Why would anyone want to blog!" First, this is a question screamed at me today by a colleague. Second, notice I do not punctuate it with a question mark. The scream made it rhetorical.

I had been talking about a student who had recently removed a blog that included posts, though heartfelt and honest in tone and style, were perhaps so personal so as to compromise the author and his subjects in a less than perfect, not so understanding world. Although the young blogger had removed his blog, other bloggers were pulling up its contents in Google Reader and reposting them. Our world may not be understanding, but unlike the virtual world it could be more ephemeral. What we post can virsist on without us.

It is to this nonrecantable, uncontrollable existence of our posts to the blogosphere my colleague objects. She gave me pause. As she objected, I reflected.

Several thoughts came to mind. Of how she was right--it does seem unfair that once we publish, to others we cannot see, cannot know, who can abuse, misuse, and reuse our contributions in ways we cannot immediately imagine. I also thought of how I find the process of blogging--and publishing--to be almost as enriching and rewarding as reading the blogs of countless other educators who are doing the same. I have the sense that publishing my "reveries" is dues for reading the "buzz" of other bees. That together we create the prairie.

Indeed, I know that my metaphor is romantic. After all , the blogosphere is more a woods than a prairie. It offers what the 20th Century French philosopher Gaston Bachelard calls the "immediate immensity." To sit in front of a computer screen, less than a meter between you and the rest of the world, in the comfort of your own home, and not realize that it translates to billions of other screens (now and into the future) is to forget the forest for the tree. The forest may be lovely, but it is dark and deep. And there may even be wolves.

"Beyond here be dragons!" This makes me think of yet another topographical metaphor for cyber-space. The sea. But like the explorers before us we students and teachers set sail to explore while others cozy up to a cup of tea and a good book back at home. Nothing wrong with the latter, and someday I hope to make it home safely, so save a cup for me. In the meantime, I'm off.

Struggles of Trying to Be Tech Competent

2008-01-17T20:38:00.000-05:00

Not sure I'd call myself a technology-in-the-classroom vanguard, I am at least a risk-taker, but this week I can see why more teachers aren't. The frustrations of scarcity of equipment, equipment failure, system failures, and professional development learning curve can be daunting.

As a team leader, I've spent this week in mind-boggling discussions that have included litanies of why teachers need technology and why they can't expect to get it, and I've spent class periods working with ninth graders struggling to learn creative processes for researching multi-media, remixing, and documenting information for a series of documentaries on Shakespeare's life, times, and works we are creating with Photo Story video and will broadcast on the Web. (Stay tuned.)

I'm struggling along with my students. We are learning together. From some perspectives that is the best way to learn. But for many teachers, and at times myself, the confusion and frustration makes the ole halcyon days of book-learning look like a welcome retreat. I'm rather comfortable with trying the new technologies and feel that they offer great relevancy and motivation for today's learners--and yet I'm frustrated and confused at times with my wanting tech savvy and lack of tech support.

Atop this, I'm finding great disparities in what some students know and what others do not. Even wider are the gaps in what parents are able to know and do and provide in terms of everything from understanding, encouragement, and support, to hardware, and software.

Yesterday as I walked down the hall I heard a cry of desperation from young teacher. This teacher, one from the digital generation, couldn't get a laptop signal to jibe with an LCD projector that is shared from room-to-room screamed "That's it! I'm done with this hassle. I get it all ready and then it goes down in class." I hope this is just a momentary fit and she'll gather her nerve another day.

I understand. I have to gather mine for tomorrow.

Every generation of good teachers take their stripes. These are ours, while we don't delay media literacy to our students despite a lacking critical mass of support from the learning community at large. Not only must we take the risk of trying emergent instructional technologies, develop reflective pedagogy to guide our continued practices with them, and work in a state of "perpetual beta," but also must we advocate with administrations, parents, students, and communities for the changes in school and system design needed to support, fund, equip. and sustain the sort of progress that will allow our students to gain competencies and remain competitive (as governments and schools around the world move ahead with greater celerity than we).

Image created with NGA Collage Machine

Notes on Narrative Inquiry Discoveries

2008-01-13T15:48:00.000-05:00

Ever since participating in a Narrative Inquiry group at the IDIERI 2003 Conference in Northampton, UK, I've found it's approach accessible and expansive for my 12th Grade literature students. I have to admit I didn't know what Narrative Inquiry was when I signed up for the research module--I just like the sound of it. To me it said "story."

True enough story is part of it, but it's how the story is told or discovered that makes the research approach deliniated by Connelly and Clandinin (1990) so worthwhile for my classes. Students generally know one way to represent information--a straight outline or Cornell notetaking form. The Narrative Inquiry model provides a less linear, more layered approach. Albeit offputting at first, the layered approach is much more fitting with our postmodern times, our multi-multi thinking, and moves away from either-or analysis of things.

As their publisher notes:

"Understanding experience as lived and told stories--also known as narrative
inquiry--has gained popularity and credence in qualitative research. Unlike more
traditional methods, narrative inquiry successfully captures personal and human
dimensions that cannot be quantified into dry facts and numerical data."

It takes students a while to become accustomed to thinking of texts (at least in school--don't they do it all the time elsewhere?) in four directions (forward, backward, inward, outward) while considering three points (time, action, place). Add to this the fragility of memory and they are not sure at first that they can trust that they are doing it right--but it's hard not to do it right as they begin metacognition on a text. Some students rely on facts without feelings at first, and need to be nudged into trusting their visceral notions of texts.

Then widening the definition of "text" to any element one can consider is another stretch at first for students, but soon they are using the text-reader-author conceit as well as any graduate student. And constructing concepts that make sense out of the curricular content unlike--and unlikely--as with traditional models.

Students like the subjective aspects of the "inward" and what they "remember." They love the drawing outside the outlines, once they do it and see my smile not reprimand.

We've recently returned from a tour of the U of Pittsburgh's Nationality Rooms. Here's part of one student's meaning-making.

I like the qualitative thinking and expression it evokes and gives me a better measure of the depth of student thinking than regular reporting of knowledge and comprehension. Narrative inquiry calls a student higher up Bloom's ladder of the cognitive domain and integrates some of the affective domain as well. I find, as a reader of thousands of projects a year, I welcome the variety and depth of thinking. Much more interesting reading.

Good New and the Bad News Is . . .

2007-12-31T22:31:00.000-05:00

It's the close of the year and the close of the Winter Break. So it was time to pull out my bag and mark papers. I had plenty. But I figured the time-consuming ones, the ones that would really take some thought, were going to be my honors students' research paper outlines. I sighed as I thought about how I had work but I had given all of my students a work-free holiday. Poor me. As I went through my freshman papers, my Brit lit projects, and some other homework sheets from my honors students, the task ahead was looming. Or was it. Turns out I must have left the pile at school and will have to wait for another day. The good and the bad news is I can't grade them today. Enjoy what's left of the holiday. Happy New Year!
Image: remix from a Microsoft graphic.

Blogging: More Than a Nifty Strategy?

2007-12-08T16:45:00.000-05:00

Last month's National Council of Teachers of English Convention in New York City boasted a session on blogging, podcasting, or wikis, just about every hour. I attended several hoping to cull a few new tips or tricks, or even better, hear some discussion on how and why teachers were using blogs and other Web 2.0 applications. Ultimately, I wanted to know what others are finding their students are learning from this sort of practice.

From research done at our school, we know that writing proficiency improves from students' blogging. And we have some hunches about why. We figure modeling and the writer's confidence and compositional structuring that develops from models have much to do with the improvement of writers over time. But what else?

The sessions on Web 2.0 were lacking in reflective pedagogy. I don't expect to hear all the answers. (Do we ever have them?) But I'd like to hear some questions and inquiry. What I heard instead were cutesy, superficial "and then we have the students' post them (projects, writings, pictures, recordings) to the Web without any consideration as to why or what happens differently when we do this.

I'm not an alarmist--rather I think we are missing an important (teachable and teaching) moment that is actually replete in positive implications for our practice. Maybe that's what concerns me most. What I was hearing was blogs and wikis being regarded as just another "thing you could do," and I think they are more than that. My experience is that teaching/learning, i.e. meaning-making and sharing of meaning in the classroom is significantly changed by the power of collaborative, public posting of ideas and products of learning on the Web.

More research is needed. More discussion is needed. More reflection is needed. For a presentation at U of PR, Cayey I wrote a one-page sheet of some questions with which to start.

Most People Exist, Some Virsist

2007-12-01T09:53:00.000-05:00

Oscar Wilde once said, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” We'll now you can have a Second Life. But I'm not sure that's living.

Recently I've seen a promo on television for a program that examines "the effects on people who persist in virtual reality." I've seen the promo twice and can't recall whether it's a news report or special documentary. I get hung up on the phrase "persist in virtual reality." Does VR take persistance?

Well, maybe. Although I can spend clock-spinning time warps flying about in Second Life, I've yet to lose track of major slices of my first life (and I've heard some people have.) Maybe my RAM isn't hyper enough, but my avatar eventually starts freezing up and the program crashes. So persistence is part of it.

Besides being in Second Life is a sort of Oz. "People come and go so quickly here." I wouldn't call it a place to persist.

I just think "persista" is not "exist," and neither is what you do in VR. How about virsist! Persist, exist, virsist--Wilde had it right. Save some time for living.

Image: Avatar in Second Life.

Being Happy with Writing

2007-11-11T06:26:00.000-05:00

So I'm reflecting this week on the influence Jimmy Britton and Nancy Martin have had on my teaching practice. Later this week I'm headed for New York City for the National Council of Teachers of English Convention and plan to participate in a round table discussion that celebrates New York University such luminaries in the English Education department as Britton and Martin. I had the opportunity to have Jimmy Britton and Nancy Martin as tutors during the Oxford Study Abroad Program for English Education.

As tutors neither never lectured in this program; they had you over for Scotch on the rocks and talked with you. Conversation as learning, learning as conversation.

I remember showing Nancy a handmade book project I put together in response to our group's having seen an RSC production of Romeo and Juliet. It was something I called, "Risk: Mercutio's View of Verona." It was a response that explored the portrayal of Mercutio as a victim of the feud, reading the interpretation of the actor's take as a gay, lighthearted friend of Romeo and his poignant end, essentially that of a victim of a societal events he criticized, participated in but from from which the pundit was marginalized. To accomplish this I layered contemporary graphics clipped from London event flyers and newspapers with lines from Mercutio. It was as esoteric as it was powerful. I was not sure what Nancy thought about the work, in fact, I don't remember her ever passing judgment. As she was looking it over, I wondered whether she "got it." She was in her 70s and the work dealt with plague, intimacy, fantasy, and political injustices in some very esoteric and aesthetic manners. I was unsure, that is, until she finally noticed a part that I knew was weak. She noted, "This page doesn't really fit with the others, does it?" I thought, "Wow! Nancy gets text. Any text. Full stop."

Not to miss the chance in this tutorial, I asked her what she—the one who had already spent more than half-a-century researching the topic—thought was the most important thing about writing. She scoffed at the question, at first. "Charles, oh, I can't answer that." After a pause she reflected that "maybe it is that the most important thing is the writer is happy with what he or she has written." She went on to say of course there are times when we aren't completely satisfied, we know we can do better, but for now at least, it's all right.

Not bad advice for a blogger, I think. Blogging, regularly does not allow the sort of revision process of "sleep on it" or "see how it sounds in a week." Although I must admit a good amount of backspacing, cutting-and-pasting, and on-screen rewrites, blogging means getting thoughts down and hitting the publish key without much of a gestation period.

Perhaps I was just fooling myself with those polished drafts of yore. Writing is never final, right? A blog post connotes a tentative, idea-floating aspect—a fly in amber, in a sediment of chronological posts.

Being happy, having something good enough for now, must be all right.

Image: Nancy Martin and me

Only As Good As Your Last Workshop

2007-11-08T22:35:00.000-05:00

Participating in the Three Rivers Educational Technology Conference, held this week in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, I rediscovered that idea that I blogged about a few posts ago. One of the obstacles for teachers to using technology is knowing about it. It's not a high hurdle. Often you just need a name of a website or piece of free downloadable software. Or maybe to watch a colleague present a how-to and watch click-click-drag-save-file.

But it's a race of a thousand and one of these low hurdles. Learning the user-friendly technology is easy, finding it is the trick.

Bit by bit over the past year, I've gained IT knowledge from other teachers through blogs and conference presentations. It's pizza by the slice. How to podcast, how to screencast, how to photostory, how to scrapblog, how to convert file types, how to create a wiki. One slice at a time.

Yesterday I went to two sessions, one on Photo Story, a free video packaging system and Moviemaker, yet another way to create video presentations in digital form. Two days ago blank slate, tomorrow's potential expert. Just add awareness.

Image created by ceyo at the National Gallery of Art (USA)'s KidZone Collage Machine .