Sunday, July 31, 2011
Young Readers Club
I got an idea for creating a student-driven content about reading. What might happen if students had a forum to review books they'd read, discuss genres, and reflect on their reading? Would it generate more interest and expand Accelerated Reader's read-for-points system? I hope to put this into action for the 2011-12 school year. Here's a sample flow chart to pitch it. Look for more about this in September.
Growing a Personal Learning Environment (PLE)
I've been doing something all my life; blind to the fact there was a phrase to describe it. PLE is a term that's been bounced around in educational technology for the past few years and I hadn't paid much attention to it until the past few months, even though I've always had PLE's, and I've created opportunities for my students and my own children to have them.
I grew up in the era when McDonald's was the only fast food and even it wasn't easily available. Everyone cooked. I was allowed in the kitchen at an early age and wanted to learn how to cook better than average, although I knew I didn't want a career in cooking. Growing older, I asked other cooks a lot of questions and worked in a restaurant a couple of summers. Cutting out recipes, buying cookbooks, watching cooking shows on TV, and experimenting in the kitchen developed my cooking abilities--a PLE in action. Surrounding myself with opportunities to learn was my PLE.
Fast-forward to now: It's amazing how many resources the Internet provides for people with hobbies. I can literally find any published recipe in a click or two; it's usually free. Connection to millions of people with the same interest has multiplied my cooking PLE beyond what I could have ever imagined in my youth.
This summer I made a personal commitment to expand my teaching PLE through a PLN (network). On Twitter, I searched for global experts in educational technology and followed their posts. I connected to many others in the field using LinkedIn, followed discussions on a daily basis and downloaded several digital literacy books from Amazon (most authors now share their Twitter and blog). I expanded my RSS feeds in Google Reader, read some amazing blogs and gave myself the opportunity to view multiple perspectives about what's happening--incredibly fast-- in ed tech. In June I took a huge breath, jumped in an ocean, and now I'm surfacing: refreshed, renewed and really, really excited about helping my students create their own PLE's with some crazy-free digital tools out there.
On the list:
I grew up in the era when McDonald's was the only fast food and even it wasn't easily available. Everyone cooked. I was allowed in the kitchen at an early age and wanted to learn how to cook better than average, although I knew I didn't want a career in cooking. Growing older, I asked other cooks a lot of questions and worked in a restaurant a couple of summers. Cutting out recipes, buying cookbooks, watching cooking shows on TV, and experimenting in the kitchen developed my cooking abilities--a PLE in action. Surrounding myself with opportunities to learn was my PLE.
Fast-forward to now: It's amazing how many resources the Internet provides for people with hobbies. I can literally find any published recipe in a click or two; it's usually free. Connection to millions of people with the same interest has multiplied my cooking PLE beyond what I could have ever imagined in my youth.
This summer I made a personal commitment to expand my teaching PLE through a PLN (network). On Twitter, I searched for global experts in educational technology and followed their posts. I connected to many others in the field using LinkedIn, followed discussions on a daily basis and downloaded several digital literacy books from Amazon (most authors now share their Twitter and blog). I expanded my RSS feeds in Google Reader, read some amazing blogs and gave myself the opportunity to view multiple perspectives about what's happening--incredibly fast-- in ed tech. In June I took a huge breath, jumped in an ocean, and now I'm surfacing: refreshed, renewed and really, really excited about helping my students create their own PLE's with some crazy-free digital tools out there.
On the list:
- Pearltrees--social bookmarking; here's mine
- Google Apps for Ed--includes Reader for RSS feeds and sharing features within most the apps
- Spicynodes--non-linear concept mapping with collaborative abilities
- Kidblog--moderated blogging
- Twiducate--discussion forum / online space
- Wikispaces--free web publication
I've chosen the word "Growing" in the title of this blog for a definite reason. We know a child learns best when nurtured through the growing progress. Look at this amazing model by a 7th grade science student. There is opportunity right now to move massive information in our classrooms. We cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that younger and younger children have devices for social media placed in their hands by parents. Using tech with students means also guiding them into a PLE. Generally speaking, I think if students are engrossed in learning "good stuff" they're interested in, they won't be distracted by "bad stuff"--the kind that surfaces when they're bored. Take this chance to prove it by giving them constructive environments to develop their own PLE.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Student Blogging: It's Time You Began
One of the roadblocks to teaching children how to blog is that many of us teachers don't know how to do it ourselves. Should that be a requirement? Not necessarily. Teachers need to embrace the authenticity that is derived from blogging, though, and make that their goal. Kids need to write, (we all know that) and blogging provides a great venue. I won't dive into the enormous topic of why you should have students blog due to the exhaustive supportive reasons you can find online if you search for the cognitive whys--the purpose of this blog is to persuade you that it's time to quit postponing what you should be teaching.
Ask your students: Do you read online? Do you have a Facebook or Twitter account (or any other) in which you have dialogue with many people? Do you SMS / IM with people? Do you follow any online magazine or blog? Chances are they will answer "yes" to at least one of those questions; middle school students may surprise you by answering yes to all of them. Want to make this conversation more interesting? Ask those same questions in an online survey (Google Form), then review the questions with students and reveal the answers statistically. Then you will have support for why students need to practice their online voice + share information they are really interested in learning about (themselves) + a quick lesson in stats if you want to squeeze that into the lesson.
So, what's stopping you from having students blog? I bet they're the same reasons that stopped me initially. Someone will be hurtful, there are privacy issues, some students will refuse or barely try, and I bet most teachers ask themselves these two: With what (safe) platform? and About what topics? How big an investment is this, anyway, to teach blogging?
First of all, there are plenty of platforms where you can set up a class, moderate student blogs, and then publish them after review. Kidblog and Edublogs are two of the most popular. That solves the privacy issues because you can control how student information is viewed and moderate hurtful or bullying comments. Visit their sites to explore how they work but rest assured that they make student blogging incredibly easy.
Second hurdle: what to write about. There are plenty of resources for ideas. Here's a great one that Miguel Guhlin shared in his blog Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org: Stuff to Keep, and I've written about this before myself with Visualize the Web and The Digital Writing Workshop. Students initially need you to lead the way on topics, but then turn them loose to explore their personal interests.
Don't stifle them by too-strict writing standards (ignore a typo, non-capitalized proper noun, or misused comma). Severe standards can lead to "shy" writing; they'll be so afraid of penalization that they will write minimally. Use writing models that demonstrate great writing for an editing lesson. Focus on changing what students know by showing them great examples. Jeff Anderson addresses this beautifully in Everyday Editing, one of the best books I've read about teaching students how to edit. (Here's an interview with Jeff at Education News.) I begin every school year with a couple of brief writing assignments that carry no grading assessment for the express purpose of evaluating what each student needs to address to improve individual writing. Anderson additionally explores this in depth with Mechanically Inclined.
Your personal investment as a teacher I can't really help you resolve, but I want to encourage you. Find one or two bloggers you enjoy following. Share that with your students. Try blogging yourself. Once you blog, you'll realize how important it is to reflect and most importantly, you'll see the benefits of blogging--you must address a topic, demonstrate understanding, and map how you'll write (opener, main content, closer--my processes for this blog). The subject matter is not nearly as important as the motivation when it comes to writing. We need to allow blogging for the pure pleasure of providing student expressiveness.
Ask your students: Do you read online? Do you have a Facebook or Twitter account (or any other) in which you have dialogue with many people? Do you SMS / IM with people? Do you follow any online magazine or blog? Chances are they will answer "yes" to at least one of those questions; middle school students may surprise you by answering yes to all of them. Want to make this conversation more interesting? Ask those same questions in an online survey (Google Form), then review the questions with students and reveal the answers statistically. Then you will have support for why students need to practice their online voice + share information they are really interested in learning about (themselves) + a quick lesson in stats if you want to squeeze that into the lesson.
So, what's stopping you from having students blog? I bet they're the same reasons that stopped me initially. Someone will be hurtful, there are privacy issues, some students will refuse or barely try, and I bet most teachers ask themselves these two: With what (safe) platform? and About what topics? How big an investment is this, anyway, to teach blogging?
First of all, there are plenty of platforms where you can set up a class, moderate student blogs, and then publish them after review. Kidblog and Edublogs are two of the most popular. That solves the privacy issues because you can control how student information is viewed and moderate hurtful or bullying comments. Visit their sites to explore how they work but rest assured that they make student blogging incredibly easy.
Second hurdle: what to write about. There are plenty of resources for ideas. Here's a great one that Miguel Guhlin shared in his blog Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org: Stuff to Keep, and I've written about this before myself with Visualize the Web and The Digital Writing Workshop. Students initially need you to lead the way on topics, but then turn them loose to explore their personal interests.
Don't stifle them by too-strict writing standards (ignore a typo, non-capitalized proper noun, or misused comma). Severe standards can lead to "shy" writing; they'll be so afraid of penalization that they will write minimally. Use writing models that demonstrate great writing for an editing lesson. Focus on changing what students know by showing them great examples. Jeff Anderson addresses this beautifully in Everyday Editing, one of the best books I've read about teaching students how to edit. (Here's an interview with Jeff at Education News.) I begin every school year with a couple of brief writing assignments that carry no grading assessment for the express purpose of evaluating what each student needs to address to improve individual writing. Anderson additionally explores this in depth with Mechanically Inclined.
Your personal investment as a teacher I can't really help you resolve, but I want to encourage you. Find one or two bloggers you enjoy following. Share that with your students. Try blogging yourself. Once you blog, you'll realize how important it is to reflect and most importantly, you'll see the benefits of blogging--you must address a topic, demonstrate understanding, and map how you'll write (opener, main content, closer--my processes for this blog). The subject matter is not nearly as important as the motivation when it comes to writing. We need to allow blogging for the pure pleasure of providing student expressiveness.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Visualize the Web
Do you like concept maps? I do because I'm a "visual learner." I read a rather funny Twitter back and forth between two people the other day about in which one stated "We are all visual learners, so quit calling yourself that!" Funny and accurate.
Concept maps were new to me before I began my M.Ed., and I fell in love quickly with Webspiration. I have found that it is a difficult transition for students to go from traditional outlining to concept mapping but Pearltrees is going to bridge that for me in the fall. Read this article to learn how it's different from other bookmarking tools like your web browser or Diigo.
My plan is to implement Pearltrees as students use their RSS feeds (via Google Reader) to explore topics of interest for their writing activities. As they find sites they want to bookmark, they'll create a pearl for that site attached to a pearltree, which represents the topic, and they'll share that with me either through Pearltrees, blog, text, or email. Once they've mastered organizing pearltrees (visual folders), they should understand concept mapping by simple osmosis. From there I can introduce c-mapping for writing outlines. I think using Pearltrees will be an eventful way to make concept mapping a no-brainer.
Concept maps were new to me before I began my M.Ed., and I fell in love quickly with Webspiration. I have found that it is a difficult transition for students to go from traditional outlining to concept mapping but Pearltrees is going to bridge that for me in the fall. Read this article to learn how it's different from other bookmarking tools like your web browser or Diigo.
My plan is to implement Pearltrees as students use their RSS feeds (via Google Reader) to explore topics of interest for their writing activities. As they find sites they want to bookmark, they'll create a pearl for that site attached to a pearltree, which represents the topic, and they'll share that with me either through Pearltrees, blog, text, or email. Once they've mastered organizing pearltrees (visual folders), they should understand concept mapping by simple osmosis. From there I can introduce c-mapping for writing outlines. I think using Pearltrees will be an eventful way to make concept mapping a no-brainer.
Friday, July 1, 2011
The Siren Call of New Digital Tools
Most people might begin their 51st birthday glumly, but mine began very, very well. I headed downstairs straight to the coffee machine, stood and waited until I got a cup, (literally, a fire would have to break out for me to consider leaving) and then I sat down to my laptop in the comfortable armchair. This is the same chair in which my mother graded English essays during my childhood. It has 10-inch arms. Why don't they make chairs like this anymore?
First check was my Google Reader RSS. Browsing through Tech & Learning magazine's feed, a link caught my eye. Here it is for your enjoyment: TeachersFirstEdge. But wait, finish reading this first.
This site holds the same intention I have for my own site (tinyurl.com/lkjohnson), and that is to provide a resource for teachers. There are several reasons why the Teacher's First Edge page is great. It can be searched by grade level. The digital tools are cutting edge (I don't have that kind of network). It's well-organized and well-stocked. I couldn't control my ADD, which insisted I explore every single link and Don't forget to share this stuff! raced through my head.
So here I was simultaneously clicking through links, reading, checking them out, opening up my own site to document, and Twittering about my great find. One page would load and I would open another while it loaded. I barely heard my daughter when she came downstairs and said "Happy birthday!" I think she even had to say it twice. She began drifting out of the room and I finally answered, "I'm so excited! You can't believe this technology!"
"Did you get it?" she asked. What? Oh, she must have asked me, "Where did you get it?" I rapidly began explaining my find to her without taking my eyes of the laptop screen. Chelsea's little slip of the tongue went unnoticed and I had to disappointingly quit within a half hour for the birthday plans we'd made. Cut to the rest of the day: I went to the city, shopped for clothes, got a pedicure, and ate out with my sister, daughter and parents. These were the activities we'd planned. All day long I'm thinking I can't wait to get back and keep checking out all those digital tools...
At evening dinner with the rest of my family, I unwrapped an iPad2, explaining Chelsea's slip. Instant absorption. I have bounced back and forth between it and the above site for days. My birthday was last Sunday, today is Friday, and I'm still out on my technology island. I'm running the house, barely. I really need to work on next year's curriculum but I need to explore all these new digital tools first. This is the thought I've had running through my head for 5 days now.
It's unsettling that emerging technology does this to me. I often wonder if technology is most addictive to ADD people like me or if those of us with it are naturally drawn to it. I get annoyed when I can't work as long with new digital tools as I want. I get annoyed when people prevent me from exploring them. I think maybe I'm not fun company to be around while I answer technology's siren call. My next thoughts are If I'm this way as an adult, how must students who haven't had as much practice at disciplining their time deal with it? How often should we be implementing new tools? How does this affect Web 2.0 education? And shouldn't we explain our purposes? Are we accountable? (A rhetorical question, of course.)
To address the teaching implications, I do need to allow more time for students to explore new tools without directives, but I also need students to understand when I call for exploration to end. I don't think exploration time looks too good on my lesson plans (Wednesday: explore Psykopaint) or to a classroom visitor ("What are you doing?" "Oh, we're playing around with Psykopaint.") However, I learn from my students often. I don't have time to understand every nook and cranny of a new tool before I've understood the possible impact it may have on their learning (engagement impact is in there, but that's a happy coincidence when it happens). Is it a constructive tool? What are its creative and authentic possibilities? These are the criteria that technology teachers must address. When you are at funding's edge and it's tight, you have to make certain decisions. Teaching exploration can be a good thing (rubrics keep it controlled), and we also must discuss with parents, teachers, and students the benefits of the tool while we're at it. We should share why we use it and how to recognize a good one, because these tools I'm going crazy with today will be different ones in five years.
First check was my Google Reader RSS. Browsing through Tech & Learning magazine's feed, a link caught my eye. Here it is for your enjoyment: TeachersFirstEdge. But wait, finish reading this first.
This site holds the same intention I have for my own site (tinyurl.com/lkjohnson), and that is to provide a resource for teachers. There are several reasons why the Teacher's First Edge page is great. It can be searched by grade level. The digital tools are cutting edge (I don't have that kind of network). It's well-organized and well-stocked. I couldn't control my ADD, which insisted I explore every single link and Don't forget to share this stuff! raced through my head.
So here I was simultaneously clicking through links, reading, checking them out, opening up my own site to document, and Twittering about my great find. One page would load and I would open another while it loaded. I barely heard my daughter when she came downstairs and said "Happy birthday!" I think she even had to say it twice. She began drifting out of the room and I finally answered, "I'm so excited! You can't believe this technology!"
"Did you get it?" she asked. What? Oh, she must have asked me, "Where did you get it?" I rapidly began explaining my find to her without taking my eyes of the laptop screen. Chelsea's little slip of the tongue went unnoticed and I had to disappointingly quit within a half hour for the birthday plans we'd made. Cut to the rest of the day: I went to the city, shopped for clothes, got a pedicure, and ate out with my sister, daughter and parents. These were the activities we'd planned. All day long I'm thinking I can't wait to get back and keep checking out all those digital tools...
At evening dinner with the rest of my family, I unwrapped an iPad2, explaining Chelsea's slip. Instant absorption. I have bounced back and forth between it and the above site for days. My birthday was last Sunday, today is Friday, and I'm still out on my technology island. I'm running the house, barely. I really need to work on next year's curriculum but I need to explore all these new digital tools first. This is the thought I've had running through my head for 5 days now.
It's unsettling that emerging technology does this to me. I often wonder if technology is most addictive to ADD people like me or if those of us with it are naturally drawn to it. I get annoyed when I can't work as long with new digital tools as I want. I get annoyed when people prevent me from exploring them. I think maybe I'm not fun company to be around while I answer technology's siren call. My next thoughts are If I'm this way as an adult, how must students who haven't had as much practice at disciplining their time deal with it? How often should we be implementing new tools? How does this affect Web 2.0 education? And shouldn't we explain our purposes? Are we accountable? (A rhetorical question, of course.)
To address the teaching implications, I do need to allow more time for students to explore new tools without directives, but I also need students to understand when I call for exploration to end. I don't think exploration time looks too good on my lesson plans (Wednesday: explore Psykopaint) or to a classroom visitor ("What are you doing?" "Oh, we're playing around with Psykopaint.") However, I learn from my students often. I don't have time to understand every nook and cranny of a new tool before I've understood the possible impact it may have on their learning (engagement impact is in there, but that's a happy coincidence when it happens). Is it a constructive tool? What are its creative and authentic possibilities? These are the criteria that technology teachers must address. When you are at funding's edge and it's tight, you have to make certain decisions. Teaching exploration can be a good thing (rubrics keep it controlled), and we also must discuss with parents, teachers, and students the benefits of the tool while we're at it. We should share why we use it and how to recognize a good one, because these tools I'm going crazy with today will be different ones in five years.
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