Wallisher: Student Response in a Jiffy

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

"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

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

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

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!

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

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?

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

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?

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.