I am full of angst.
I am working full-out, but not even remotely teaching the way I want to be teaching.
Re-entry into US public school teaching has been jarring and disheartening.
Be it real or imagined, I feel a crushing pressure to teach to the test, teach what is familiar to the parents of my students, teach the Prescribed Curriculum, leave No Child Behind.
And so that is what I’m doing with worksheets and textbooks. And my students buy into it [or not] in varying degrees. And we are all playing school, except that this is their real lives, real childhoods.
At some level, they sense that what we are doing isn’t relevant to their lives. If their families place a high priority on school, they get some satisfaction from playing school well. Some days I am able to make what we are doing fun, engaging. That doesn’t hide that this is an old, disjointed, largely irrelevant curriculum.
But at night, I read edublogs. Today Clarence Fisher over at Remote Access discusses three vital pieces that need to be in place to restructure our classrooms so that they meet the future needs of our students. As usual, he clearly and succinctly draws the essentials into focus.
Articles like Clarence’s depress me because my practice is so far from what those bloggers are doing in their classrooms. They also give me the kick I need to get moving. Tonight I sent and e-mail to David Warlick requesting a pass code for Blog Meister so that I can begin to blog with my students.
Even the elation of that small step is tempered by exhaustion. Where will I find the time and energy to get this up and running? How will I inform families, build support AND use the blogs to empower my students through their writing?
I used to sling around the unattributed quote,
Anything worth doing, is worth doing poorly [rather than not at all].
I wonder if I can take my own advice.
A few days ago I was stumbling around in my head, trying to get a handle Web 2.0. Then a friend sent me to the O’Reilly website to read Tim O’Reilly’s article What is Web 2.0. Even if you are already familiar with the term, this easy to read article clearly lays out the paradigm shift inherent in moving from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Enjoy!
Quite a few years back, Apple Computer ran its “Think Different” campaign. I was fortunate enough to get posters of the campaign and they are still hanging in the classroom I taught in back them– the current user refuses to give them back because they are such great posters.
The posters featured large, black and white photos of people who had thought differently from their contemporaries, such as Cesar Chavez, Picasso, Jim Henson, Einstein, and Amelia Earhart. In the corner of the poster was the Apple logo and the words “Think Different.” Many times those posters served as segues to conversations about these people who changed the world through their unconventional thoughts and actions.
I am pleased to say that after all this time, Apple has returned to this format to include one more very important person. Even if you hate all things Mac, take the time to check it out on their home page. [Update: Apple moved it from their home page to here.]
I’m supposed to be contacting parents who haven’t yet signed up for conferences.
I’m supposed to be looking over the pile of collected assignments.
I’m supposed to be repairing my dodgy gradebook.
But I’m not.
I was all ready to go to bed, too tired to dig into any of those projects. But first, I checked my Bloglines and read about that Alex Halavais’ students are creating their own communications theory textbook. They are using a wiki as their collaborative space for this venture.
That got me thinking about the power of a learning community that is actively constructing knowledge. Which in turn lead me to my science lesson today. We are using the FOSS Landforms science kit. My students were crowded around stream tables for the second day. Yesterday they “discovered” erosion. Today, we added food coloring to the water source so they could more clearly see the water’s movement through the earth materials. They observed lakes, rivers, waterfalls, flood plains, beaches and deltas being formed. They were entranced.
The concepts being taught here are more important than the terminology being introduced, but I’d love for them to acquire both. That lead me to visit Flickr. I found great photos of meander and plateau. It would be powerful for my class to make a wiki of landforms. But how to credit the sources? I explored the Creative Commons explanations page of the Flickr site, but I don’t understand it. Is it possible to just search the Creative Commons photos? I didn’t figure out a way to do that, but none of the photos I found had any of the Creative Commons marks besides them.
Next I went to Google Images and was immersed in visuals. How rich for my students to search for images of plateau. Scrolling through the search results is guaranteed to expand almost anyone’s scheme of plateau. Just doing this will be helpful. How much more powerful if my students could use the most evocative of those images on a wiki page that explains that landform. But can I do it? If our wiki is just internal or only accessed by a password, can we use the images if we credit the photographer or the web page if the photographer isn’t identified?
After that I looked at wiki’s. I know Clarence Fisher is using PBWiki with his students. Free PBWiki’s have a size limit of 1 MB. If we add photos, even photos scaled for the web, we will quickly exceed that limit. I have my own web space through BlueHost. I checked my control panel and found that I can easily install either TWiki or PhpWiki using Fantastico on my site. Poking around for reviews on the web, it looks like TWiki is going to be the easiest to use and the more aesthetically pleasing of the two. I’d love to hear from anyone who has experience with both– should I go with PBWiki or try to run TWiki or Phpwiki on my own? I’d greatly value hearing from teachers with experience in this area.
And so, that’s how it gets to be two hours later than when I started going to bed. I’m still awake. None of my work is done, and I really don’t want to wake up early to do it. All I want to do is further explore these ideas.
We have new toys. A colleague noticed that his building was dumping their eMate computers. WE contacted the district Tech Department and they said we could have them. They arrived last Monday. As luck would have it, 1/2 of my communications class was at a reading coach inservice for most of the period on Tuesday, so the rest of us dug in.
Overall, I am very impressed with this tool. They are rugged. They charge quickly and run for hours on a charge. They come with a wonderful tutorial and with a practice program to get the users quickly up to speed. They have a built in word processor, drawing program and spreadsheet. The children are very excited to use them. I hope I can leverage that into some good writing.
Another wonderful aspect is that one of my students is already making himself the eMate Expert. This will be an opportunity for him to shine, as other students come to rely on him for assistance. I was wishing for just such an opportunity for him.
Of course, I receive this windfall and I immediately want more, including…
- one eMate per student instead of just ten eMates total
- an IR printer
- an IR dongle– we can download using a serial cable, but my students would absolutely love beaming their writing through the air to another computer.
That brings me to what I foresee as problems.
- The eMates can beam files to other eMates. I can see this being a very distracting activity as kids send messages back and forth. I need to figure out how to use this natural urge into a positive learning experience rather than something I try to control. (Any ideas, anyone?)
- I need to figure out how to assign the eMates to pairs of kids. I want to be able to be teaching mini-lessons to small groups while other groups are working on the eMates. The eMates are so easy to use, that this should work. However, I need to figure out which groups I have them in. Their spelling groups? Their as of yet uncreated reading groups? Behavior groups? I’ll keep thinking about it.
- I need to figure out how to keep the eMates charged with only three over-used electrical outlets in the entire classroom. And of course, while they are charging, I’d prefer they not get walked on or otherwise broken.
- And speaking of broken, I just found out about a known defect in these nifty devices. The hinge spring bends and pokes a hole in the display cable, leading to all sorts of problems such as dead lines on the screen or the stylus no longer working. A number of kind people on the NewtonTalk discussion list sent me directions on how to head this problem off. It looks really complicated and time consuming. I feel intimidated now!
If these work, they could help us get to blogging. The old, broken down lab that is almost always available during my communications class, doesn’t have enough computers. Having children work on their blog pieces from the classroom on eMates might ease the crunch. Or it might become too confusing. We’ll have to see.
I’ve been having trouble getting my brain around Web 2.0. Today, two things happened to clarify it for me. First, this morning I was listening to an EdTechTalk.com podcast. Their guests were Stephen Downes and Will Richardson. As they discussed Web 2.0 I started to get the vision. It made me think about Steve Job’s idea a few years ago of your Mac being “your digital hub”. He was envisioning our Macs connected to the our cameras, our MP3 players, and such. To support that, came the iLife apps such as iPhoto, iMovie and iTunes.
Instead of being a hub for hardware, Web 2.0 is your digital hub for online life, such as your blogs, your feeds, your bookmarks and tags, your to-do lists, your photos. It will be the hub for not just your personal read/write web, but also your social one.
So then after listening to the podcast, what should I find in my e-mail box but notice that Flock is distributing a beta of it’s Web 2.0 browser? They make no stability claims at this point, but take a moment to peruse this list of 13 things you can do with Flock. Amazing! I’m creating this post directly from it without even going to Blogger. It inspired me to finally get a del.iciou.us account. With Flock’s help, I can see myself seamlessly integrating many aspects of my digital life.
Flock probably isn’t stable enough yet to be a student browser, but it will be. I can hardly wait to see where Web 2.0 takes us.
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