One Month in the Cloud

It’s been a month with the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook.  In late December, I made the move away from my Macbook and decided I’d test out whether or not I could use the cloud solely as a means to get my work done.  Granted, moving to an internet-only machine was a big leap, as I could have done it gradually via a regular machine.  Or was it?

To provide some backing to this, here’s a quick pro/con list:

Pros:

• It works, mostly. I have some issues with the wireless network at my office, but other than that, it hangs in there really well.
• Integration of all things Google. The ability to work within Google Docs seamlessly and create my file structure so that regardless of the machine I am on I can access my exact browser is amazing. I know you can do this with other non-Chromebook type machines through the browser, but this simplifies things.
• Form factor. It’s lean, light, and solid–one of those machines you wouldn’t worry too much about dropping by accident.
• Independence.  I’ve never been one to rely heavily on a “networked” machine, but this takes the cake.  The only reliance I had was to use the desktop machine in my office to set up the printer via Google Cloud Print.  Once that was done, I was able to live solely on the wireless within the buildings I work in.

Cons:

• Hangs when I am really pushing it with open tabs. I’ve never been one to watch the CPU performance of a machine, but with this, I am aware of how many open tabs I am running. Which, when you think about it, is just good practice anyway–teaches me to bite off only what I plan to chew on in the short term.
• Extensions cause more problems than they solve. Most of the crashes or hangups I have seem to be coming from extensions that hang up or just die.
• Graphics chip. I use a larger monitor at work, and I love to extend my desktop. The graphics in the chromebook don’t allow for that, only mirroring.

After one month the pros definitely outweigh the cons.  This machine works exactly as I need it to, when I need it to.  I’ve presented from it, written from it, uploaded photos and videos, and asked it to do everything I need from a machine at this point.  True, video editing and anything requiring Java are not options, but in one month, the only time I needed to do either was to view a webinar, and in retrospect it really wasn’t worth it (are they ever?).

The next big step with these is to see how they roll out to staff and students.  Where do they fit?  Are they legitimate teacher machines?  Or are they a better fit for students?  Would love some feedback.

Advertisement

Battling One-Size-Fits-All

We’ve all been there.

It’s the annual or semi-annual professional day for staff, and you are dreading it.  What will I have to sit through this year?

We know it’s the wrong thing to do, to have the entire staff go through the same “training,” yet inevitably it happens.  What we know is that sustained, job-embedded professional events work.  We know that working with colleagues whose opinions we trust and feedback we value has lasting effect on our practice as teachers and leaders.

The problem lies in the design.  Why just one day?  Why make it “destination” PD, like we’ve arrived at this time of the year and it follows that we should have one day for “training?”

We’ve just completed ours, so these thoughts are fresh in my mind, and I am trying to think about what I’ll do differently going forward.

These days are not without merit, I should say, in that various groups that don’t often get to plan together can.  For example, world language teachers from various levels can gather together to discuss their program, and we can arrange the day to include FedEx type events.

But what if we could do this whole system much differently?  What if we could do it so that days like this are days where we spend time celebrating the work we’ve been doing all year as professionals?  If we embrace the PLC idea and model, can we use days like this to share the findings and work that we’ve spent the past year creating and researching?

Today, I was in charge of planning the day for the district, and I attempted to do that in a small way.  I asked several of the staff to share things they were “experts” in.  Here’s the list of choices that staff had:

• The TED Series: Sir Ken Robinson’s “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” 
• Tablets, Tablets, Everywhere: A Preview of the Tablet Grant Program 
• Extending Your Classroom Using Edmodo
• Online Grades: Good Idea or Bad Idea? 
• Web Tools from A to Z
• Using Socratic Questioning and Fishbowl Dialogues in Your Classroom
• The TED Series: Daniel Pink “The Surprising Science of What Motivates You” 
• Using Literature to Educate About Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying

Each staff member that was not involved in a curriculum project could choose three sessions to attend in the morning, and they had the option for the afternoon of these two sessions:

The Holy Grail of Teaching

Regardless of where you turn, the topic of education and educational reform seems tobe there. People from all walks of life are typically not shy about sharing their feelings on this subject. Ideas range from class size, standardized testing, ability grouping, the number of computers in the classroom, homework and the home environment, just to name a few. Research has shown, however, that teacher effectiveness has, by far, the most powerful influence upon students and student learning.In this workshop, we will explore the very powerful effects that a teacher has upon his/her students. We will take a close look at some of the research compiled that clearly delineates what has the most dramatic influence upon student achievement.

or

Learn Like Our Students Do

Background:  Have you ever seen a kid taking a technology class or reading a manual for a new gadget?  Of course not.  They learn as kids these days do: on their own, “playing”, and if needed, asking a buddy for advice. When it comes to technology or learning how to use new tools, they generally don’t need an “expert” or a workshop to attend.

Most adults are a little different. We have always had a consultant (“expert”) come in or have an administrator lead a session for staff on an initiative, program, or curriculum. Adults listen, hopefully engage, and it is hoped that the skill is applied for student learning.  Does it work?  Sometimes.

As we have for the past three years, we are call it “Learn Like Our Students” day. Staff otherwise unassigned to the previously listed activities form themselves into groups of two or more of their choosing. At the conclusion of the day they will complete an outcomes review.

Educators often say that there is never enough time to learn or improve skills, ideas, or instructional strategies.  Here is an opportunity for over two hours to teach yourselves something new, improve a skill, or gain new knowledge in a collaborative way.

While I cannot take credit for either of the two session titles or content (one was my predecessor’s idea, and the other my colleagues’), I feel both begin to drive our staff towards the type of day I would envision for them going forward.

Other People’s Moments

Five years ago, I remember leaving a conference with my head squarely in my hands, staring back up at me in sheer wonder at everything I had seen to.  Eavesdropping on some conversations today at Classroom Reset, and following the twitter conversations around it, I was reminded of that moment when my thinking and my direction in education tipped.

See, we all need to have days where big ideas and impossible plans run amok and take us down corridors that had not seemed all that worth exploring before.  We also all need days of epic failure, where our supposed best ideas crash and burn and our belief in those big ideas is tested.

But today was not that day for anyone.

Everyone I met today was there for the single purpose of pushing themselves to try new things and look at their practice in a profoundly different way.  One of the afternoon sessions I attended (presented by a teacher from my district!) summed up the tone of the sessions: “Technology Integration: how to add meaning to the Language Arts classroom instead of bells and whistles.”  Today’s sessions were about pedagogy and not tools, about leveraging the capabilities of our technology to make us more human and not less.  It was about interconnectedness and how to take advantage of it.

For me, it was also a great reminder that I still have so much more to learn, not only about how we match traditional pedagogy with emerging social technologies, but also about the decisions we make regarding the uses.  Several conversations I have had lately deal with the age-old problem of “just because we can doesn’t mean we should.”  Two examples stick out in my mind:

• during my session, I took an informal poll of the room about a service that came across my radar the other day, called Remind101.  It allows teachers to gather the cell phone numbers of parents and students and send text blasts through a web portal, allowing teachers to keep their private numbers private.  Some in the room felt that was only allowing for a further shirking of responsibilities by students.  “Why pay attention to that part of class when we know it’s being sent to our phones?”  Also, is it creating more work for the teacher to do this?
• at the end of the session, I also asked the group about the availability of grades for students and parents online–a classic example of the “we can/should we?” dilemma.  The room was split there. Some felt that it was a great way to foster communication between parent and child, while others felt that it enabled parents to remove the child from the equation and just go straight from online gradebook to teacher contact, thereby bypassing the student, whose responsibility it is to track their grades.

Those two questions made me realized that we have some great conversations ahead of us.  And they also made me realize that questions like those should never, ever, get in the way of student learning.  While emotionally charged on both sides, neither has any real impact on how and what students learn.  Those type questions are the ones I am ready to tackle.

Space

Over the break, I took the liberty to actually move into my new office.  We cleaned out drawers that had not been cleaned in the months I had been there, we moved the ubiquitous curriculum binders to a place where they can gather dust less conspicuously, and we removed some aging pieces of furniture.

It’s that last piece that made the most difference to the space.  Over the last few years, mainly since I’ve known my wife, I’ve come to understand much more about what it means to have a “space,” and to cultivate it to fit your needs.  Having jumped into this position somewhat midstream while schools were beginning and routines were already established, I struggled with the space I was working in.  It defined the job, and thus, by default, had begun to define me.  Because I had not changed that space and made it workable for me, I truly felt a bit hamstrung from establishing myself here.

By removing some of the bigger pieces of furniture in the room and putting up a twelve-foot whiteboard, we in effect opened up the usable space tremendously.  What does that mean for me and those I work with?  More room to collaborate, more space to think and do, and fewer constraints on the ideas we have and actions we take.  It may sound a bit pie-in-the-sky, but after spending my first full day in the new space, I’m convinced that my thinking and activity will change for the better.

 

A New Year, A New List of Trends

As has been said elsewhere, it’s list season, and being that I am working through some serious writing muscle atrophy, I’ll use this opportunity to join the fray.

Each year, we dig up what we’ve thought a lot about over the course of the past year, what we noticed, and what we feel will make the most impact on our lives, and our schools in the new year.  In looking through so many of the posts that have been written on this subject, I can find none better, in both honesty and clarity, than Larry Cuban’s, which you can read here.  Larry’s honesty about what is coming down the pike is refreshing amid all the talk about the demise of American public schools.

There are myriad pitfalls we run into when we jump too soon into the latest and greatest when it comes to educational technology.   Someone  finds the hottest item out there, the idea catches fire and before we know it, we now have it in our schools.  Oftentimes, sadly, very little thought is given to how well that gadget will impact student learning, or if our staff/IT Department/infrastructure is ready to leverage the gadget to really impact the outcomes we are looking for.  

Larry points out two in his post:

• Digital Texts
• Online Courses

both of which are incredibly interesting to me, and both can easily be wrapped up into one package.  Last year, I worked with a social science teacher to produce an online textbook for United States History I, and what we found was that it became inherently easier to have the students writing where they were reading, and not having the students reading their material online, and writing their responses/reactions to the reading on paper to hand in.  Housing the reading and responses in the same place led to the type of dialogue around primary and secondary sources that we wanted to see.  We ended up using Moodle, but this could have been done using so many different, free platforms.

Also, what we found was similar to what Audrey Watters wrote about over at Edutopia a while back.  By moving away from the traditional textbook for the work we were doing, we had the opportunity to pull in multiple points of view on subjects without abandoning the commitment to the content.  We also had the ability to draw from other talented teachers who had taken the leap to create their own textbooks (we relied pretty heavily on Hippocampus, but also looked at Flexbooks, and some of the content in places like Shmoop and OER).

We have talented staff members in each of our districts who are more than capable of producing digital texts and courses for our students and for students in other schools.  Let’s hope this year is one in which we all begin to leverage that ability.

Re-Post

This afternoon, my phone made the familiar ping telling me that somewhere among the various networks out there, someone was mentioning me.  To my surprise, Kevin Jarrett had unearthed something I had written back in 2008 after attending his session (which he co-presented with Sylvia Martinez).

I’ll be the first to admit how easy it is to get lost in the minutiae of the work we do, to lose sight of the overall reason we are here and the bigger goals we have for the students and staff we work with.  Thank you, Kevin, for reminding that I do have these thoughts, I do have these goals, and that we can work to make learning, and the schools that go with it, an unbelievable experience.  Reposted, in its entirety:

Change is a loaded word. It strikes fear into the hearts of even the most secure of professionals. In looking at the idea of change, I see it as coming from one of two directions: either top-down, where those in charge of your program, your superintendent, building administrator, or your supervisor bring it about, or bottom-up, also termed “organic, or “grass-roots,” where change comes from the classrooms and spreads throughout a school building or district based on the practices of teachers and the work of students.

What I am seeing
When I started the process if looking at pedagogy rather than looking at tools as ways to help engage students, the world of technology became small. Granted, I really began this process in earnest about 5 months ago, so the sample size here is small, but nonetheless, what I see is what Chris Lehmann so aptly termed in his session at EduCon: “It’s not the product, it’s the process.” Learning experience matters infinitely more than the result. Focusing on that process rather than the final paper or diorama or wiki is a difficult thing to do when the tools that take us there are so unbelievably slick.

Our situation in regards to change
Our process of change that is occurring has been and continues to be top-down, where we as administrators and tech coordinators are introducing teachers to tools and pedagogies that are transformative and engaging, but we are relying on their trust and their willingness to open themselves to developing expertise. How well will this continue to work? It remains to be seen whether it is a model for systemic change with our staff. We are working within 5 buildings, each with varying levels of both adoption and readiness. When that is the case, your strategy involves as much trust-building as it does introduction to new ideas. We have worked hard on that, but there are elements that are lacking in our design:

• overarching curricular goals written directly into our curriculum plans at the start. Technology and the pedagogy to use it transformatively is often left out of that process.

• teacher’s as vocal advocates for change a building-level plan for helping teachers teach with these adapted methodologies (notice I said adapted methodologies because we are not re-inventing the wheel here; the methods we advocate are still the same we have touted for years: differentiating, cooperative learning, co-teaching, questioning skills, etc. Only now we are truly elevating their effectiveness through the use of social, collaborative and expressive technologies.)
• An environment that allows teachers to be free from the fear of failure and it’s supposed administrative repercussions. If we expect our students to learn, unlearn, and re-learn, then we must give our teachers the freedom to create, experiment and play with content and its delivery to students.

I sat in Kevin Jarrett and Sylvia Martinez’s session about creating lasting change within a school district using the Future Search Process, and I remember thinking about all the ideas that were flying about the room in terms of gathering the necessary parties needed for creating change. The one that keeps sticking with me is the reference they made to something called “The Burning Platform,” whereby an individual is placed in a situation (a burning oil platform) where they must choose either certain death (staying on the platform) or the likelihood of death (jumping into the water). The analogy to education is that there is a situation whereby the outcome of staying still is obvious: student apathy and loss of engagement, but the outcome of changing and moving is less obvious but possibly a salvation.

I am looking at a situation where I don’t know if teachers understand that the platform is burning. They don’t know whether to jump, stay still, or get marshmallows. I want to create a community that is not afraid of change, that feels like they have a stake in the change process, and is willing to help create that change even if makes their role in the classroom change to one that is better capable of creating methods to solve rather than providing answers.

Culling the Story from the Sources

If ever there was a time to be good at telling stories, it is now.

For the past two weeks, I have been attending the James Madison Seminar in American History at Princeton University.  We’ve been immersed in the elements surrounding the birth of our nation, most specifically how the ideas of Republicanism, Liberalism, and the Enlightenment all had tremendous influence over the founding of our nation.

Most of what we have done has been fairly traditional: we’ve sat in class and been talked to, albeit by some talented and learned folks.

Today, however, looked and felt very different.

We spent the day at the Philadelphia Museum of Art exploring collections within the museum and architecture in nearby Fairmount Park.  Doing so amounted, in my opinion to some real moments of clarity regarding what we do as teachers, and specifically as teachers of history.

One of our guides, Justina Barrett, took us through two homes in Fairmount Park managed by the museum: Mount Pleasant and Cedar Grove.  The houses were distinctly different in their architecture and function, but Ms. Barrett, in her discussion of the homes crystallized something for me.  On the second floor of Mount Pleasant, she asked us a simple question about how they came to know what each of the rooms functioned as during the initial life of the home (over 225 years ago).  With that question as a springboard, she spoke about how the job of a historian, especially art/architectural historians is to cull the story from the homes, the historical record, and each room individually.  Her main role, and that of teachers of history for that matter, is to deduce an interpretation of what happened right from the primary sources.

Think about that.

We laugh at how little people in later life remember of the “stuff” of history, but I ask, if they forgot a good amount of the stuff, but could still distill a relevant story from several sources, was the stuff important?

Secondly, during our time in the museum itself, we examined the following works:

• Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mifflin, John Singleton Copley
• John Bee Holmes, John Singleton Copley
• Rachel Weeping, Charles Willson Peale
• Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle and Titian Ramsey Peale), Charles Willson Peale

I’d forgotten what it was like to sit around with a group of intelligent folks and dissect a work of art, fully basking in the multitude of perspectives each one of us brings to the painting.  The work of Peale astounded me, and as our guide, Mary Teeling, explained, brought forth so many of the ideals we have spent time studying over the course of the last two weeks.  Peale was a natural philosopher, a true enlightened man, who brought into his work the polymathic principles of the period.

Ms. Teeling asked us to examine these pieces with playfulness, to see what came to us and what struck us.  We took stabs, we built off of one another, we contradicted one another.  I thought for a while on the way home about how much fun that was to project out those thoughts and then listen as the group interpreted them or rejected them.

Sadly, in education, whether in teaching our students or in collaborating with colleagues, we rarely get that time to build what is known as neuroplasticity–that time we take to re-shape our minds through engaging play.  Today provided a window into that for me once again, and gave me that time to wrangle with some conflicting ideas, and it took a visual medium to do that.

What’s Your Story?

I love Summify.  In a time in my life right now where my time is limited in terms of how much I can comb through the various feeds that push information into my network, Summify does a lot of the work for me by delivering the most popular stories from Twitter and Facebook right into an easy app on my phone.  I check it once a day and always leave the experience having learned something worthwhile.

Today was no different.

Presenting is something I have done a fair amount of over the last three or four years.  For one reason or another, I’ll get up in front of a group of people, some who have paid to be there, others who are forced, and speak about a topic that was mutually agreed upon by the people who asked me to be there and myself.  David Jakes is someone who I have seen do the same, and who I have paid to see speak.  He wrote the other day, in “Words Matter:Presentation” about the core of what do do if you ever find yourself in the situation where you are in front of a room presenting.

Rather than go through each of the ideas he stresses, I’ll steal them outright:

1. Passion, heart and soul. Believe in what you are speaking about.  Let that show.
2. Tell me stories.  I like them, and it allows me to relate to you as a person.
3. Convince me.
4. Make it visual.  Not clip art.  Use visuals to communicate, not to decorate.
5. Oh, and use some words.  But no bullet lists.  And avoid the global killer of using Comic Sans…
6. Limit yourself.  One Hour = 45 slides…or maybe just 10.
7. I came to hear you.  So, why exactly are you up on the stage and have the big picture in the program?
8. Practice.  I’ll know if you didn’t.
9. Perform.  Have some fun up there.  Make me want to check my email later.
10. Share your ideas.

In my eyes, because David follows these rules (and very well, if you have had the pleasure of listening to him) he has enormous credibility.  He references Godin’s heirarchy of presentation types as well, which stresses the idea that a presentation is a chance for you to change someone’s mind.

So if you find yourself in that position, do so.  Change my mind.  Have ideas that have weight, and believe in them.  Because when you are done, I might too.

Give Me Something That Matters

In November of 2007, I found myself in the audience at TechForum, wondering what I’d gotten myself into as I had just recently taken the position of technology coordinator in the district I was working in at the time.  There were lots of things I did not know (I still hate you Adobe CS series) and I never felt like I knew the answers to the questions I was being asked.  Alan November was giving the keynote that day, and I’d not really heard of him much at all, only that people either loved him or hated him.  Needless to say, his message that day became a pivotal moment for me in that I really haven’t looked at education or learning the same way ever since.

Alan talked about ownership and outsourcing that day in regards to the work we do as teachers.  Essentially, teachers do too much of the work of learning, and students can and should do more of the work.  That work, however, had to be owned by them.

Yesterday, I revisited that moment with a group of teachers during the second of our spring TED Series when we showed Alan November’s “Who Owns the Learning?” talk from this year’s TEDxNYED.  Alan shared a few anecdotal stories from his past with the audience, none that I haven’t heard versions of, but it was clear to me that although his message hadn’t changed much, it was still holding its value now.

About five minutes into the opening activity, the room turned its eyes to the locked door, indicating to me that we had a late arriving participant, and upon first glance I was taken back.

It was a student.

I had opened all of my Spring workshops up to students this year, and I’ll be completely honest, I didn’t fully expect to be taken up on it.  She came in and introduced herself to those in the room that did not know who she was and from that point on became as much as contributor to the discussion as any of us.  In fact, there were several junctures where we all fully leaned on her as the expert on certain matters.  At one point, after we had watched the talk, she said what to me, has become some an obsession lately:

“I mean, I agree with everything he (November) is saying.  If you’d given me the choice in my last two years to work on something that I could select, that was my interest and passion, I’d work on that non-stop.”

Dumbstruck, I was.  Why hadn’t we done this sooner?  Why did I wait so long to invite these voices into the room?  Shame on me.

To that end, my thinking since yesterday has been on fire, with ideas and hopes and dreams pinned on this new vision of creating opportunities for meaningful work to take place in my schools.  During my run this morning, I was full of ideas to try out and to push out into this space for vetting and hashing out, all predicated on these things:

• Tangible artifacts of learning: the things our students create should be usable by others, and should serve not only their passions but their communities as well.
• Globally available: accessible by anyone, anywhere.
• Lasting: we feel different when we know that the work we create will live on after we are gone.

In closing, during the beginning of the session yesterday, I asked the teachers in the room to quickly craft ideas for projects they would do if they were unfettered by the current curricular restraints.  They had to abide by the above three rules.  Here’s a brief sample of what we quickly crafted:

• run a political campaign for a student to be in town office.
• Feature magazine to include all aspects of creative culture within a school.
• Architecture: designing your own schools.
• Forms of communication: how did societies communicate with one another in the past and how did it evolve over time?
• Special Ed students to leave a legacy behind to other special ed students.
• Collect the oral histories of the residents of our town and feature them on the web.

I don’t know how many of these will come to fruition, but I know it’s important for us to have these ideas and let them breathe for a while.  I do know this, my goal is to help them grow legs within our current structures, and hope they help us morph our schools into what we think they should be.

What Blue Zones Can Tell us About Ourselves.

Yesterday began the first of our Spring TED Series and a group of teachers from our district and a neighboring district got together to watch Dan Buettner’s TEDxTC talk about his work with the Blue Zones.  Blue Zones are defined as:

a region of the world where people commonly live active lives past the age of 100 years. Scientists and demographers have classified these longevity hot-spots by having common healthy traits and life practices that result in higher-than-normal longevity. The name Blue zone seems to be first employed in a scientific article by a team of demographers working on centenarians in Sardinia in 2004.

and are the topic of Buettner’s work with Quest Network and National Geographic.

While not the stuff of our usual TED talks, which focus more on education and related issues, this talk immediately resonated with the group. Our discussion of Buettner’s description of the three Blue Zones he profiled in the talk brought out some uniquely personal insights from many of the members.  Several of the group shared insight into how the characteristics found in the communities in the Blue Zones are so foreign to our lives here in the United States.

Prior to the talk, we spoke about factors such as genetics, geography, exercise, diet, and lifestyle as the prevailing elements that contribute to longevity, and we argued about which one played the most prominent role.  Following the video, we spoke mainly about how our lifestyles were in such stark contrast to the communities in Sardinia, Italy, Okinawa, and Lorma Linda, California.  How we live our lives, and who we choose to live our lives with have such profound affects on how long our lives last.  Yes, genetics are a factor, but there are other elements that these communities all share.  Garr Reynolds created a succinct graphic to depict the points that Buettner distilled in the talk.

Interestingly, some members of the group had recently screened Race to Nowhere, and were able to draw some stark contrasts between the lives of our children today and the lives of the members of the communities in the Blue Zones.   I have not seen the film, but their concern was rooted in the fact that we have essentially eliminated much of the Blue Zone ideals for our children when we place such pressure on them to succeed.

On a personal level, having watched this talk several times now, I expressed to the group that what most impressed me was a section of the talk in which Buettner talked about the term “ikigai” (生き甲斐 literally: life + value, be worth while–the reason you wake up in the morning) in Okinawa.  One of the surveys given to members of these communities by the research team asked each of them what their ikigai was and, Buettner stated, none of them hesitated.  They all knew exactly what their purpose was in life.

Do I?  I’ve asked myself several times since the first time I watched this, and I’m put off by my hesitancy.  I know my reason for waking up is to help make my family’s life the most beautiful it can possibly be, but I wonder if it changes as you move through life?  Also, throughout the talk, the term “plant-based diet” was uttered countless times, and in looking at my own life, I could do much better there.

Poulain M.; Pes G.M., Grasland C., Carru C., Ferucci L., Baggio G., Franceschi C., Deiana L. (2004). “Identification of a Geographic Area Characterized by Extreme Longevity in the Sardinia Island: the AKEA study”. Experimental Gerontology, 39 39 (9): 1423–1429. doi:10.1016/j.exger.2004.06.016. PMID 15489066.