Twittering Away The Weekend

Bursts” by Sonny Abesamis is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I have a great fondness for the quick burst of inspiration, so it comes as no surprise to me that I like Twitter as a PD tool.  I especially love Twitter chats. Twitter chats are ones in which a group of people use the same # and discuss series of prepared questions. I follow #Catholicedchat, #leadlap, #hacklearning, and #sunchat.

Twitter chats go fast, and have a lot of side conversations. Be prepared to scroll up and down the chat for the questions, and to get distracted from questions by answers. It can seem a bit confusing in real time, but  the conversations are also “frozen” in Twitter for you to pursue afterward. In real-time, I find I do best answering the Qs when I have something to say, and following the side conversations when they interest me. I have connected with many educators who are doing great things, large and small, that teach me something.

When I say connected, I mean just that – I am interested in what they say, and feel a bond to them. They are colleagues. Their comments cause me to reflect on what I think and believe and practice.  We talk about things I am deeply interested in –  relationships as key to learning, student voice and choice, ditch the textbooks, authenticity, feedback. People share quick and clever ideas, blog posts and their beliefs.  Over the time I have been participating in Tweet chats, I feel I have added to my PLN in a way I never could have otherwise.  I recommend it.

Here are a few of the interesting ideas and inspiration I received this weekend during the two chats I participated in.

You can find me on Twitter @JoanJTracy.

100 Years and an Unchanged System

A lot has changed over the last 100 years (here are some interesting facts). “We’ve gone from a typewriter to a touch screen. From a switchboard to a smartphone. From silent film to virtual reality. But American high schools have remained frozen in time” (USA Today).


Think about it…  


Cars 

Telephones


However, not much has changed in the classroom 

I’ve been following XQ Super School and loved this short video clip that was part of their XQ Live event on September 8, 2017.  If you haven’t head of the XQ Super School Project, they are a “community of people mobilizing America to reimagine high school” and preparing students for success in college, career, and life (XQ Super School).  

Check out the Knowledge Modules from XQ Super School – lots of good info here! I’m still working my way through the pdfs. 

Chaos in the Library

This week we have been having Frosh English classes into the library for a short library orientation and to choose their outside reading book.

During third period on Wednesday, as the students swarmed the stacks,  I became overwhelmed with answering questions and checking out books. Mary Beth Dittrich who was working at a table during her prep started to help students locate books and answer questions.

Thanks to her several students found the books they wanted and also had an interesting conversation along the way.

In the end, over 50 books were checked out to students for their outside reading enjoyment and our shelves have more space. Which the interns like–it is easier to re-shelve the books.

Tech Training Take Two

In his work, Disrupting Class, Clayton Christensen posits that students come to school for only two reasons:

  1. To interact with peers
  2. To feel successful

Every year, 200 students enter Carondelet.  Every year, we spend time before school getting them acquainted with their iPad and learning the systems that teachers expect them to use for class.

For the last two years, Joan and I have tried to find ways that would allow us to deliver this information in a way that would fulfill both of Christensen’s two reasons students come to school.

We decided to rethink how we provided information about what students need to do with their device.  In essence, we made tech the excuse that would allow students to accomplish the Christensen goals instead of making their day here about us and our need to teach them certain tools.

We accomplish this we adopted a Sugatra Mitra approach to learning (his amazing TedTalk below).

The challenge each year is to design a class that renders the two of us all but obsolete and forces them to interact and engage with each other.

Joan Tracy and I discuss what the students need to do.  Joan gets inspired and builds magic resources using Schoology as the platform.

Both years the course is different but the format is pretty much identical.  We basically want them to struggle with each other and to figure things out and not depend on us to be the purveyors of knowledge.

Why?  Because “I Can, and I Will” is our battle cry after all, right?

The fear with these systems, is people think it renders the teacher obsolete… I would beg to differ… It makes the teacher more indispensable.  Designing, creating, providing an environment of trust in which they can explore and learn does not happen in a vacuum.  True, Joan and I are not center stage, but the reality is, we probably never should have been…

One Ring to Rule Them


Here is something I know: there is no one piece of technology that does it all.  I gave up believing in one a while ago.  I now look for the Fellowship of the Tools.  Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin, Legolas, Gimli, Aragorn, Gandalf and Boromir. *  I think of them when I look at ed tech tools.  What does this one add to the Fellowship? 
“The Fellowship of the Ring”
by

Jukka Zitting

is licensed under

CC BY 2.0

I love having a place to hang my hat on the internet.  It is so convenient to be able to save information and send it out.  It is so great to be able  to direct people to my place and say, “You can find it there” or “You can send it there”. Schoology provides that space for me at school, and while it does a lot more, if it did only that, I welcome it into my fellowship. It is my Frodo, I suppose. The bearer.

Google is the Samwise Gamgee of my internet.  Endlessly useful, surprisingly cheerful, and completely necessary.  Great when working with Schoology and so many other tools.  I love the ability to use my Google signing with so many tools. This makes the Fellowship so much more efficient.

I find things easier to both explain and understand with visuals. Lately I have been using Canva as a graphics maker because it is so easy to use and has so many ready to go designs. And it works great on an iPad.   But I can’t add charts easily in Canva so I use Piktochart.  I love their app, but charts are only available in their browser view. Two tools to do a better job. And all I had to do is accept that I needed to use two tools! Legolas and Gimli, the entertaining ones!
Luna Pic  and PicMonkey are two of my favorite online photo editors.  Luna Pic has a great transparent background tool , and Picmonkey has great framing, overlay  and text editor.  I often use both when working with images. Here I used the transparency tool at LunaPic and the  overlay and text tool at PicMonkey. I can’t do this with 1 tool, but can quickly do it with 2.  Merry and Pippin, surprising even themselves.

I really love Google Slides both on my computer and on my iPad.  On my iPad, I find it to be a great journaling tool, easy to read , and easy to access and organize.  I especially like how easily it can work with the iPad camera to curate photos and record phenomena. It is a easy addition to the fellowship when I use Schoology to distribute.

On my computer, in Google Slides,  I love the ability to add shape frames to images.  This is a great tool when the shape of an image adds understanding, such as hexagonal thinking.  I also love the trick of replacing the final/edit in a Google slide with /copy and thus distributing templates of slides to students. I can only do this on my computer.  So… I use Google Slides on computer and Schoology  to send this to students. Students use Schoology and Google Slides on iPads to deliver content.  Gandalf the Grey and Gandalf the White or maybe the split  Gollum?* I  add Gollum in, because he is the tragic hero, and also the most interesting character.

In edtech there probably never will be  be one ring to rule them. I don’t think I really want one ring.  I’d rather have the creativity and richness of the fellowship. 

Tech Standards? Really?

When we throw around the term 21st Century Learner, we tend to immediately connect that to technology.   Despite my proclivity for tech, I have to say that is so reductionist that I almost dislike using the term and wish something else would come in its place.  For me tech is the tool that allows us to approach teaching and learning differently, shifting the balance of power from teacher to student.

I attended the ISTE conference this summer and was pleasantly surprised when they revealed their new standards for students and teachers (admin standards coming soon)…

I want to share a couple of the resources here (the whole batch is on the Schoology Intranet) as I think they are extremely useful for teachers struggling with what it means to best use tech in their classroom… hint, it is a mindset not a formula…

First:  The Rap, What is a 21st Century Learner

Students Teaching Students

This is what I love to see in my classes: students helping and instructing their classmates.

In Graphic Publications, a graduate from the class of 2017 returned for a week to help the new editors settle in. It was great to have Sam in class working with the yearbook editors, Lauren and Grace while I worked on lessons with all the new students.

Im my Costume & Fashion Design class, I had 2 students who joined class after the first, so they needed to do a little catch up. Classmates taught them the skills they needed (separating thread & threading a needle) to catch up on the assignments.

Using Blocks to Learn about Computers



This past week, as part of the AP Computer Science Principals class, I had my students playing with wooden blocks.  What do wooden blocks have to do with technology and computer science?  Well, the activity was designed to give students hands-on experience giving directions and acting like a computer.  


In this group exercise, students wrote and executed their first “program.”  Since most students haven’t already learned any programming languages, we used English.  And instead of executing the programs on an actual computer (which wouldn’t understand English as well as people do), the groups role-played the parts of a simulated computer as they attempted to execute the program in much the same way a real computer would run a real program.  

Untangling Tech from Procedure

Many moons ago, as an elementary school librarian, I read and adopted Harry Wong’s classroom management strategies. I was working at a library that had a fixed schedule for library visits.  I, of course, wanted to create excitement for the library and the wonders it held, but I learned if I took the time at the beginning of the year to explain and implement processes and procedures, the class visits yielded so much more wonder and excitement to students over the year. Taking the time to adjust and to provide quick feedback when things started to go awry as students learned these procedures caused a slower start to what I knew was the great stuff. But when we got to the great stuff, the rules of the road established early allowed for greater freedom as year progressed.

I was reminded of all this at a recent training. I hadn’t taken the time to secure the procedures. I made the assumption all would have the Schoology and Adobe apps on their iPads. I did not think through some screenshots. I had to work through the miasma of forgotten passwords. It was painful and a little embarrassing. It took up time I could not spare.

I had to remember, though, that this was a failure in procedure, not technology. What felt like a disastrous waste of time could be seen, in a classroom, as the slow start to creating a procedure. Yes, it took a half hour for everyone to download the apps. In a classroom that means the next time the iPads would have the apps. Yes, passwords are forgotten, but if they are used daily they are not forgotten. Yes, not all the could complete the assignment. But in a classroom, next time they could.

Passwords and registrations, downloads and installs may be the bane of the ed tech world. But they are the necessary procedures that allow for the magic to happen.