“…the less I listen to what people say and the more I look at what they do.”

My resume doesn’t look like yours.  It’s deliberately meant to be non-traditional, both to vet you, dear potential employer and collaborator, and to help me stand out from the pack.

The title of this blog post is part of an Andrew Carnegie quote that frames the second and final page of my resume which simply contains a timeline of the last ten years of my professional life.  As the medium is the message, let me put this blog to use showing you what I do: not only do I plan un/conferences such as #L2BB2L and present on using technology to regional and national teachers, but I also take the time to learn.  What follows are examples of professional learning I am currently participating in and professional learning I am looking forward to participating in this summer.

I want to use collaborative technology with students but… I don’t know what our policy is (part 3 of 4)

In a recent post, I pointed to places within the Common Core (CCSS) that beg for teachers to design activities that integrate collaborative technology, especially using the Internet, into lessons for students as early as 6th grade.

This is the third of four blog posts addressing a few of the most common reasons teachers cite as to why connected classrooms are a good idea in theory, but not something they can implement:

Impediment #3:

I can’t take them online during school because our policy doesn’t allow it.

Baloney.  I’m venturing a guess that you haven’t looked into it and are simply assuming that your parents, your leader, or your Board thinks the Big Bad Wolf is waiting just beyond your Firewall.  He’s not, first of all.  Once you’ve stopped fearing the unknown, you can baby step into taking your students online by doing the following:

• Pay no attention to your nay-saying colleagues.  Remember, as you encounter disbelieving scoffs and raised eyebrows, what a well-developed claim includes – reference to specific and relevant evidence: your colleagues will be wont to offer that to you.
• Start conducting research.  Your goal is to read all policy documents regarding instruction of students, student interaction, and the protection of student privacy and identity.  They’re on your school’s website, probably in the Administration or Board or Education tabs.  Your goal is to determine how you know which parents have asked for their students’ work not to be published and their photos not to be taken, what (if any) paperwork needs to be on file before students work online, and what steps you are supposed to take to ensure student safety online.

I want to explicitly mention that the purpose of this research is more than simply CYA: putting your students online is authentic learning, but includes authentic consequences: while the Big Bad Wolf – a metaphorical unknown evil – might not be waiting outside your firewall, a non-custodial parent, or a teenage student’s deranged ex, or even the Copyright Police very well may be.

• If, after conducting this research, you actually find that no clear policy exists, talk to your direct supervisor about your intentions, their connection to the standards, and frame your question and conversation carefully: What is the procedure for alerting parents that students will be collaborating online?  not How do I get permission to for students to blog?  Being purposeful about asking for his or her help in facilitating this good work rather than permission to pursue it is critical to gaining support as you move forward and face the last remaining hurdle to student tech-enabled collaboration.

In closing, knowing your district’s policy, not relying on others’ interpretations of interpretations of policy, is critical in finding the space to do innovative work.

Read yesterday’s post about integrating collaborative technology even when the school-issued computers are less than ideal.

What other impediments keep you from integrating technology into your lessons?

I want to use collaborative technology with students but… the school’s computers don’t work well (part 2 of 4)

In a recent post, I pointed to places within the Common Core (CCSS) that beg for teachers to design activities that integrate collaborative technology, especially using the Internet, into lessons for students as early as 6th grade.

This is the second of four blog posts addressing a few of the most common reasons teachers cite as to why connected classrooms are a good idea in theory, but not something they can implement:

Impediment #2:

I can’t take them online during school because the school-issued computers are a problem.

This excuse can also appear in a variety of related statements.

• They take too long to long on.
• The computer labs are always booked.
• The right software isn’t installed.
• The laptops always crash.
• Our network is painfully slow and everything is blocked anyway.
• I have 25 kids and there are only 12 seats in the lab.
• My kids don’t know how to use those machines.

The answer to all of the tech-based excuses is easy, and it seamlessly includes the un-connected students.  BYOD: bring your own device.  Those who do have a personal electronic device are allowed – encouraged and instructed – to use this device educationally.  Those without a device of their own and those whose devices aren’t well suited to this particular task simply make the best of the school-issued computers or partner with someone else.

The most magical thing about BYOD is not the fact that suddenly the school’s connectivity issues become a mute point; the magical thing is the way students to begin to see their own personal electronic devices in a new light because it has Drive as well as Snapchat.  When students begin creating and sharing folders with each other to practice their evaluative skills while selecting prom dresses or colleges, you know you’ve offered them a valuable 21st Century skill.

Read yesterday’s post about building supports to connect your students who are not online at home, and chime in.

What other impediments keep you from using collaborative technology with your students?

I want to use collaborative technology with students but… they can’t connect at home (part 1 of 4)

In my last post, I pointed to places within the Common Core (CCSS) that beg for teachers to design activities that integrate collaborative technology, especially using the Internet, into lessons for students as early as 6th grade.

I am acutely aware of the impediments to the kind of connected classrooms I imagine, and I’d encourage you, dear reader, to begin making plans to integrate technology instead of excuses as to why you can’t.  This is the first of four blog posts addressing a few of the most common reasons teachers cite as to why connected classrooms are a good idea in theory, but not something they can implement:

Impediment #1:

Some of my students don’t have access to the Internet at home, not even on a smart phone.

Professional Collaboration in the 21st Century

A very interesting professional collaboration is in the works.  While I’m not going to discuss the specifics of the work itself in this post, I am going to discuss the fascinating manner in which this work is occurring and the potential for this work to be a model for others who are also similarly aligned.

We let our avocation be our vocation.  

I get annoyed with colleagues who suggest my wee hour weekend tweets are evidence of a work-life imbalance.  When you do what you love for a living, you simply get paid a portion of the time you are doing the thing you love: you still do what you love 24/7.  Michael tweeted his close-reading work surrounding “Royals” Thursday evening; Kristen and I discussed the creation of a mini-unit Friday afternoon.  Kristen reached out both to me, her collaborator, and Michael, the originator of the material, with one fell swoop on Twitter Friday evening.  With this one sub-140 character action, a team had been assembled.

We use a variety of collaboration tools to suit the task at hand.

After browsing Michael’s work, I saw what Kristen did: that he had already done a lion’s share of writing text-dependent questions and finding entry points into the text that we might now build upon.  Because of our itinerant coaching assignments, Kristen and I don’t actually work face-to-face, elbow-to-elbow like we did on Friday more than once a month.  Not to be stymied by physical distance, I suggested we work in Google Docs too, and Kristen agreed.  We had connected to each other and to the material on Twitter, but recognizing that ongoing collaboration can be clunky in 140-character messages, had migrated to Google Docs, matching the right tool to the task at hand.

We literally speak the same language.

A strength of the Common Core is certainly this: that educators everywhere now speak the same language.  When Michael expressed a curiosity with what Kristen and I might be building on top of his work, I was able to communicate it to him clearly and succinctly.  It turns out he’s from Buffalo, an hour or two from us; but he could have been from California. I was able to get Michael up to speed in less than 140 characters, even, knowing that either he’d know what RL2, RL7, and RL9 were, or that he wouldn’t – but would recognize them as standards and go look them up.  Because of this common language, we could all access the same schema regarding expectations for students, and could move immediately into the work of building the unit, not the ceaseless talking about building the unit.

We value the collaboration of like-minded individuals.

None of this tech-enabled collaboration surprised me up until this point.  Of course Kristen was thinking about the mini-unit Friday evening, and of course she saw Michael’s tweet with fresh eyes after that conversation.  Of course she forwarded it to me and of course I browsed it, loved it, and then set up a Doc on which we can collaborate.

But I didn’t expect Michael to want to collaborate with us.

And in retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised.  I wonder how many other opportunities to collaborate in this manner – asynchronously, with someone from outside your district or organization, and using only collaborative technologies –  I’ve missed, simply because I didn’t know to look for them.

Conditions for Success

The work that is resulting — a mini-unit tailored to the needs of a specific subset of the student population — wouldn’t be possible without collaborating with others, using a variety of collaboration tools to fulfill various tasks,  speaking a common language surrounding goals and practice, and making one’s passion one’s life work. 

Facilitative Teaching and Learning

Underlying my pedadogy is a strong desire to get out of the way of my learners, be they students in my high school English classes or adults I coach or who participate in professional development courses I’ve designed.  I’ve found that being more facilitative than directive communicates both a clear investment in the continued growth of the learner and a belief that the learner is indeed capable of solving his or her own problems, the ultimate goal of any effective teacher.  What follows are four tips for getting out of the way of your learners.

Don’t answer their questions.

Power to the Edge

Public charters that assume any part of the traditional educational system into their daily operations are a missed opportunity, and the educational approach is no exception.

Power to the Edge is a text that suggests pushing much of the traditional tasks of leader to the literal troops on the ground.  It is a 2003 Department of Defense (DoD) publication that is part of the Command and Control Research Program (CCRP) which seeks specifically to understand the security issues inherent in the Information Age and how the military can embrace emerging technologies to maintain safety and security.  In the Foreword, however, John Stenbit almost suggests it be given a discipline-specific close reading:

This book explores a leap now in progress, one that will transform not only the U.S. military but all human interactions and collaborative endeavors.  Power to the edge is a results of technological advances that will… free us from the need to know a lot in order to share a lot, unfetter us from the requirement to be synchronous in time and space, and remove the last remaining technical barriers to information sharing and collaboration.

We would be smart to consider these issues when reimagining public education.  An educational interpretation of the text is fruitful to explore.  In the Foreword, Stenbit describes the benefits of shifting from a smart smart push to a smart pull approach in information dissemination, a topic very relevant to educators seeking to shift the heavy lifting of learning from the teacher to the student, moving from an educational approach in which content is pushed to (at?) students by teachers to one in which relevant information is pulled to students based on their interests, understanding of content, and preferred delivery method.

What should a 21st Century school look like? A proposal for a public charter makerspace in Rochester, NY.

This post is my initial long-winded version of an attempt to communicate the methodology behind the makerspace public charter (middle?) school that I will be opening in Rochester, NY in 2015.  It’s a draft of what will become a 1-2 page concept paper that I will distribute to potential stakeholders as I seek to build my board of directors, secure funding, and demonstrate wide community support before submitting a letter of intent to NYSED in September 2014.

Why Rochester is ripe for innovation in education:

Recent reports evaluating the quality of education in the City of Rochester, NY show some of the lowest achievement rates in New York State; for young black males, the 2012 graduation rates are the worst in the entire nation.  Truancy rates for elementary school students are high (20% each day as early as Kindergarten), and 550 students haven’t attended school at all yet this 2013-2014 school-year and an average of 2500 absent on any given day, today’s news reported.  Literacy and numeracy skills in 3rd through 8th grade are abyssmal (5.4% of students achieved proficiency in ELA last year, and 5% in math) and the bureaucratic inertia inherent in a system the size of Rochester’s mires most strategic improvement plans.  The City of Rochester’s geography, specifically the border created by the “Inner Loop” divides many who “have” from those who “have-less”.  Within the City, the homicide rate per 100,000 for 2012 was 17.1, three times higher than NYC.   Immediately to the south and west of the City, however, are affluent suburbs, thriving industrial complexes, and technological leaders such as Bausch and Lomb, RIT, and the U of R and Strong Memorial Hospital  While the challenges facing young people in Rochester are many, the intellectual, material, and human resources available within and across communities are equally plentiful.  The public educational system in Rochester, NY is ripe for a truly innovative public charter school to enter the market: the KnowledgeCraft Makerspace.

Can educational technology hinder instruction?

Nearing the end of my second week in a paperlite classroom, I am realizing what a complete game- changer this mode of operation is and just how steep the learning curve is, even for someone someone relatively ed tech savvy. I’ve learned that if I’m not very, very careful and purposeful, sound pedagogy is too easily forgotten for the glitz of taking shiny new tools online.

Is 700 saved pages a week worth the paperlite transition headache?

In a previous post, I laid out my professional learning objectives for #thisyear. With the first week of school completed, I want to reflect on one:

I will go paperlite #thisyear. I purposefully say paperlite instead of paperless because I recognize that there is value at actually putting pen to physical paper to, for instance, practice annotating a passage, especially when students are tested until at least 2015 on physical paper. Post-PARCC, a completely paperless classroom will make more sense. To clarify, unless there is an educational value to actually physically handing students a paper copy of any document, save test prep as explained, they will access it electronically.

25 iPads for my scholars to use in our IB course.

Because I have a class set of iPads, at the end of the first week of school, I printed 14 pieces of paper, which is in line with the stated purpose of the paperlite classroom.

• 2 copies of each of my 6 class rosters, which were almost immediately irrelevant due to last-minute student schedule changes. 12 pages.
• 2 copies of my schedule to post for students seeking me for help: one on the bulletin board; the other near my desk for my own reference. 2 pages.

In retrospect, rather than printing up the rosters, which were not particularly helpful and I see now were just a kind of back-to-school safety blanket, I would have printed up just a class set of the two documents I wanted students to have before attempting to go paperlite.

I also did NOT print the following:

• A class set (26 copies + 1 for me) of the 7-page IB Learner Profile document
• Another class set of the 7-page IB Language Course A guide
• 110 individual copies of the 1-page IB Learner Profile assignment
• 110 individual copies of the 1-page IB Diploma Programme assignment
• 110 individual copies of a formative assessment asking students to list all 10 traits

Students in my 6th set class use our iPads to take a paperless assessment.

Total pages of paper saved in week 1? 708!

So, the successes were many.

I saved more than 700 pages of paper. Much of the work this week was effective in establishing the kind of classroom environment and rapport that I expect.

But, I was not successful in sharing two documents digitally with one class. Something went wonky with Doctopus that I was certain had to do with my inexperience with the tool, but try and try and try as I might, I could not figure it out and I could NOT get the documents to the students in my 7th set class electronically.

While I am not pleased that students had a clunky beginning, this failure actually reinforces my resolve that transitioning to an electronic classroom is an important move for me and my students. At the end of my first week, I recognize that what I thought were going to be my own learning goals are intrinsically related to my student learning objectives. What’s ironic is that while the documents I was trying to get to them were questions and prompts about documents about the IB Learner Profile and the IB Diploma Programme, instead they saw someone attempting to be reflective, knowledgeable, principled, open-minded, caring, balanced and a thinker, communicator, risk-taker and inquirer.

I was able to project a copy of the document onto the board, and students were able to take pictures of it and work in another medium: in Notes, in e-mail, on paper if they chose to (about 1/4 did) . After I made sure they had both documents, I let the projector run while I tried to troubleshoot the problem on my own. After about 10 (oft-interrupted to help students) minutes, I realized I could not solve it on my own, and instead checked in with each and every group personally. This gave me the opportunity to personally let them know that I get this week was clunky, that I was extending a deadline for them because of our hiccups, and that I was looking forward to their feedback next week on how the experience is going, what additional hiccups we need to address, and what’s working well for us. It also gave me the opportunity to focus on something other than a malfunctioning script that was making me increasingly frustrated. In a tech-fail, empathizing with students and adjusting deadlines goes a long way.

After touching base with everyone and realizing that sure, they had been exploring the cool new toy that is the iPad we’re using, I also realized they had been hard at work as well. Unfortunately, I’m sure that the experience of having something projected they have to copy down and then complete is not uncommon for them: while I was a fish out of water, they knew what to do. They used their cell phones and iPads and double-deviced it. They created and shared documents with each other they could co-edit, and then used a phone to look things up. They searched Google and found the same links that I did — I thought downloading the documents as PDF files and dropping them in a shared folder was guiding them just the right amount; instead, I found that it was too confusing. They didn’t create the organization system of folders within folders, so they didn’t get it. They don’t use Drive in their budding professional lives, so they didn’t know to search it to find something. While they weren’t able to perform the task in the manner in which I had designed, they were able to perform the task. And I extended the deadline anyway, as promised.

And while they were chatting and working, I sent a Tweet, knowing that a few of the students follow me. It was a kind of note-to-self tweet, something to remind me to work on the “7th set glitch” later this weekend. I intend to unpack for them the work I did this weekend to fix the problem we encountered and provide venues for communicating about tech hiccups that will certainly occur again in our transition to our paperlite classroom. After some Tweets back and forth with Doctopus creator, Andrew Stillman, I found out that my “7th set glitch” was actually a global glitch due to an unprecedented spike in Doctopus usage with more than 10,000 requests per day. He had already fixed the problem and published information explaining it, and nonetheless, he responded to Tweet after Tweet, urging teachers like me to get back to him immediately if his fix didn’t address the situation. It did, and I have already sent out Monday’s classwork via Doctopus.

In addition to the real-world learning that I demonstrated for my students by troubleshooting the glitch, I have further validation from students that this transition is valuable, despite the growing pains. At 9:35 Saturday night, after sending Monday’s work via Doctopus successfully, I got an e-mail from a student clarifying if it was weekend homework or not. I wrote her back at 9:45, and at 9:50, I got this response, which I’ve already starred for my “I need a pick-me up today” folder…

Thanks so much! I love being able to communicate so quickly 🙂

See you Monday!

I thought that e-mail was going to win the night owl award, but then I woke up this morning to another e-mail, sent at 2:16 am responding to the 1-minute long how-to-access-your-Google-account-from-home video I made Saturday morning after so many asked me Friday in class (I know…). This student’s e-mail indicated he had indeed been able to access his account, as he was quoting the assignment and asking for help locating resources to look up the answers, in true Common Core style. By 9:42am I had responded. And then there was evidence that two siblings were already on Infinite Campus checking their grades — this e-mail alerted me to a Gradebook set-up error that has also been corrected.

At the end of my first week experimenting with a paperlite instructional environment, I am confident that this is a valuable transition for both me and my students. We learned that, though not everything will be perfect, by seeking help from those farther along than we, we can accomplish our goals.