Teachers often use them to direct student learning experiences. When students engage with those same tools and techniques for their own purposes, their successes increase motivation and independent learning.

For example, teachers often tell young students to “read to find out”–setting a purpose for their reading. This focus technique helps students learn to monitor their own comprehension. If, as students progress, instead of the teacher setting the purpose, the students approach their text and set their own purposes for reading, the students engage in self-satisfying strategy use. Setting a purpose, seeking strategies that will help the students to reach their own goals, and then actually using the strategies and fulfilling the goal is highly rewarding. The benefits include increased student comprehension as well as ongoing (hopefully life-long) motivation.

The point at which the students know and have practiced teacher-led focusing strategies enough to began to practice self-regulated reading by choosing for themselves from among their personal repertoire of strategies and tools is the point at which the teacher can move away from setting the purpose for the students and turn to helping the students develop potent purposes of their own. It can be an energy-filled, exciting, and sometimes disconcerting time.

“Powerpoint to show,” and “Blog to explain”

We often tell students we want them to demonstrate their own learning by instructing others, because we know that they need a deep understanding to be able to do so. Having students create a genuine product with real communicative purpose and an audience of peers, where they gain recognition for their knowledge and for their skills can scaffold learning. In the same way as self-directed purpose in reading increases student learning and motivation, I believe self-directed purpose in this creative process can also magnify those benefits for students.

Last year I had middle school students research current technology developments or terms (such as wiki, del.icio.us, urban legends) and produce a short powerpoint about it to present to their classmates. I primed the pump by presenting the students with articles bemoaning Powerpoints as the scourge of modern life or as the answer to everything. We talked about “endless Powerpoints” and read a few articles about what not to do, and saw some cool things that were being done. After making our first, basic, Powerpoint (we continued with this popular activity for a bit, I still have students asking me if we can do more!), the students were required to learn a new Powerpoint technique, and explain it during their presentations, as well.

I presented the students with a list of possible topics, and after our first Powerpoint round, I conferenced with each one about what they wanted to learn, and to learn to do, next. Some chose to add sound, some to design their own backgrounds, some to have transitions, and so on. As each student presented their slide show, their classmates and I had feedback sheets to record constructive criticism and kudos (I collected the sheets and gave the student a summary with my feedback). Students would point out their new technique (often with a second run-through of their presentation), and we would discuss its effect on the overall presentation. Students wound up asking each other “show me how you did that?” and deciding they wanted to try something similar on their next presentation.

I remember one student after her presentation, in the darkened tech studio. Her classmates thought her presentation was cool, and they’d also enjoyed what it included about how to unmask an urban legend… I saw a self-motivated, independent learner. I wanted to tell her about TED Talks and challenge her to learn how to put a video of one in her next slide show. But, we had to move on to another unit.

This year, I’m trying to do something similar with blogging tools and widgets and whatnots, and hoping to open up the results to a wider audience using a blog. We’ve just begun, and just like last year, there’s a good deal of “but how do I do that?” and “what’s a widget?” There are a couple of more experienced students who already blog, and they will be consolidating some learning by sharing their knowledge, but I hope to get them into that exciting, disconcerting new learning zone, too. It’s going to be a wild ride, I hope!

Computer Use Policy (Old Version)

• Get Permission! (To get online, to make changes, to alter anything, even the furniture)
• Do Take Care of the Hardware (Watch out for cords, keep food away)
• Do ASK before making changes
• Do use computer facilities for legitimate schoolwork only
• Respect others’ work and others!

This year, since I want to lead students into creating more content on the web, I took the opportunity to fold several things into the beginning of the year unit on technology safety and behavior guidelines.

We began with discussing these short videos:

This one, the Ad Council’s public service announcement directing teen girls to “Think Before You Post”

Download Video: Posted by mjhasley at TeacherTube.com.

In a brief discussion afterwards, I learned that many students felt that this type of commercial and related news stories were over-emphasizing the dangers and, mostly, serving to make their parents overly fearful. My students felt they understood how to be safe online, and that the dangers were remote.

Obviously, I whipped out two more videos in response–current news stories which I had picked to help us discuss what kinds of things are getting posted, and what very real repercussions they can have. (More examples crop up every day-it’s not hard to pick up current ones.)

I played this story about the alleged blackmail plot against Miss New Jersey, using pictures that she had posted online for “friends only.”

This story of a Pennsylvania college student whose 4 year investment in a teaching career was waylaid at the last moment because she’d posted a picture of herself partying online, even though she was of legal drinking age at the time the picture was taken.

The students and I talked about how families have a very real desire to know that students are not going to be caught by surprise, as the people were in all of these examples. Whether or not what happened to them was unfair or unpredictable, we agreed that parents would like them to minimize risks by putting their best public faces forward.

The middle school students agreed that one good way to reassure their families was to demonstrate that they know how to be safe online by proposing updated rules for our Acceptable Use Policy.

Rules or codes of ethics?

We discussed three models–our old set of rules, a list of 9 rules I had gleaned from another school, and David Warlick’s A Student & Teacher Information Code of Ethics.

David Warlick’s Code of Ethics

points to four areas of concern, and lists proactive considerations that students and teachers should apply to every information decision that they make. …

• Seek Truth and Express It
• Minimize Harm
• Be Accountable
• Respect Information and its Infrastructure

Under each of the four areas, David provided a list of examples of good practice. I really liked David’s work.

The students discussed the three models. They discussed each of David’s four areas. They checked to be sure that everything was addressed that needed to be covered in each of the models. They decided to compose…their own set of rules.

Yep, a set of rules. They felt it will be easier to explain rules to the younger students, and it’ll be simpler to apply. They brainstormed a short but comprehensive set of rules, and are writing them up to propose them to the school. They’ll be posting our rules on their blog, as their first post, as they get adopted.

In the process, the students have formed a valid survey–and experienced how to keep the preschoolers from saying whatever the person before them said, or what to do if they just refuse to talk…and how to explain to the K’s what “favorite kind of movie” means, and how to come up with a few categories that cover the wide range of things we think of when someone says “candy.” That last was a particularly fine discussion!

Each student was to form a valid question, anticipate the nature of the data he or she would collect, and create a colorful and understandable prompt sheet to use during the survey. Pre-primary students were often particularly interesting communication partners during the actual surveys!

After tallying the data, each student entered it into Excel spreadsheets and produced a traditional bar graph or pie chart using that program.

Looking at the results, the student was then asked to find a point that he or she wanted to communicate about the data. For example, one student chose to emphasize the fact that we come from a large number of school districts, rather than highlighting which district supplied the most students. His display became a single school bus, divided into more than a dozen different colored stripes, each color representing a different school district.

We printed the resulting graphics out large, as part of a “who we are” display.

Here are a few samples of the final information graphics:

Willing’s image made a great poster, and he labeled each sports symbol with the number of people who said that sport was their favorite. He decided he did not want to highlight the percentage of the total number of responses for each sport. He imported clipart into a word processing program and changed the page size to be twice as long as normal. We printed it out 4 feet long!

Aidan worked in our photo editing program, and wanted to make the point that, as he says, we love chocolate! His sense of humor comes through, too!

Cassidy did a great job communicating her survey results. Each color strip is labelled with the exact percentages, and even young students can gather that summer had a slight edge. This made a very attractive poster. Cassidy used clip art, imported it into a picture editing program, sliced and colored it, and then imported the new graphic into a word processor.

Students are really enjoying this exercise!

• Siblings have been enjoying commenting on sibling blogs (”You never tried octopus, how can you say you like all seafood?”)
• Some students find it frustrating not knowing who made a comment.
• Students are replying to comments on their “blogs” and inviting conversations.
• Students are discussing the pros and cons of keeping negative or nitpicking comments.
• Some conversations are between students who never knew they had a common passion.
• A bevy of intermediate students asked permission to head for the library to “check their blogs” during their lunch break!
• Favorites include pea soup, and root beer floats with mint chocolate chip ice-cream.

Conversations have opened up about family customs (Monday night milkshakes), ethnic foods, our diversity of taste, and body image. The body image discussion really impressed me, as one student complained that she couldn’t eat her favorite food because she was “too fat”–other students argued that she was lovely and should know that; that she shouldn’t worry about dieting if she usually made good food choices; that there were less-fat versions of her favorite; and one offered a recipe and shared that she was dieting, too.

Having the 5th grade girl and the 3rd grade boy and the 8th grade boy all learning that they share a passion for shrimp with cocktail sauce may not change their lives, but it has been a nice way to connect with each other. As we prepared to leave for Spring Break yesterday, I saw one student crushing a comment slip in a hug before replacing it on her “blog”! I am so glad we are helping these students feel the excitement of blogging in our small community, rather than online.

I could be talking about email, or mobile networking, or IM-ing, or online gaming, or blogging. Pick whichever.

It’s widely available to most of my students, and quite popular.
Therefore, most of my students will learn to use it–whether or not I show them.

What about the other students, who don’t have access? What about the students who do have access but don’t have tech-savvy parents hovering over them and teaching them online safety and savvy?

I devised a safe-chat game on paper, which I posted a little about earlier, to give all of the students in Grade 3 through 5 a chance to practice how to chat online, spot safety issues, and avoid some traps. That practice made me feel good about how the social skills of students transferred easily to the online simulation, so that my youngest and most inexperienced (no access at home) students were very successful in spotting and politely extricating themselves from conversations they should avoid.

I know that it’s good to anticipate, and practice, using any new skill–but I want to do more. I want to give these students lots of successful and confidence-building experiences. Especially the students without access at home. I don’t want those students to feel unprepared and disadvantaged in the online world of their peers. I am keeping my eye out for more “practice on paper” for this young age group. I’ve come across a one paper exercise that I think will transfer well to the students in the Intermediate and Middle School levels:

To provide a hands-on, interactive explanation of (mo)blogging, and the way that blogs can be used in education as powerful learning tools.

Mobile Learning » Workshop Activity: Paper Blogs

(mo) blogging refers to using a mobile device to post your blogs, I believe.

I’m going to try this on paper with the Intermediates, but I think I’ll be trying it in a word-processor with the Middle School level. I want the Middle School students to be thinking about how they compose visual space this week. If it works well, I may try and have the Intermediate students try it on the word processor, too, at a later date.

I will take advantage of the opportunity to have a conversation about passions and learning communities, on-line and in person, too!

1. I ask students to think about what point they want to make before beginning. Examine the data, decide your message, pick an image. It doesn’t have to be a bunch of camera tricks. I like Sony’s Bravia commercial, which  makes the simple point “Color like no other” without any computer trickery. Here’s the link:

In order to capture the vibrant reality of the balls and the way they moved, every single frame was shot on camera – computer graphics weren’t used at all.

Sony : The BRAVIA ‘bouncy balls’ commercial : United Kingdom

It is a beautiful video that my students enjoy. They also enjoy the “making of” explanations linked here next, where they show how they blasted balls out of cannons, were ready with many cameras to catch the quick action, and broke windows in the making…

Behind the scenes How we did it

Sony : The BRAVIA ‘bouncy balls’ commercial : United Kingdom

2. A fun spoof of the Bravia commercial and related website that an ad firm put together, using fruit instead of balls (they have a link on the web page that shows you the “commercial” they are complaining about).

Swansea North Residents Association website

Swansea North Residents Association – Welcome

We are a non-profit organisation that meets every Sunday, around about tea time, to discuss the needs and views of Swansea North residents.

3. Next, here’s a link to a Bravia spoof created as machinima (having “Avatars” in a game or other online world operated by people who arrange to go online to the already existing scenery provided by the game world and meet and act out scenes using their avatars. Having one or more avatars act as the “camera” stationed to observe the mayhem, the action is captured and can be shared). Warning, this is filmed with battlefield avatars, and each character is military, and carries a weapon as part of the gameworld design.

Circulating only throughout the internet, a video filmed by a clan features 64 players simultaneously hopping down a slope and over HMMWVs on the Sharqi Peninsula, a map in Battlefield 2. Instead of “BRAVIA – Color like no other” at the end of the original Bouncy Balls commercial, the clan’s video read “Bunny Hopping – Like no other”

BRAVIA – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an overhead shot from another spoof video/in-game melange. It doesn’t have the Bravia reference (it does include references to the seagulls in “Finding Nemo” (Mine), Monty Python, and CNN news coverage of Iraq). This was also done by the same group, dubbed “Snoken,”as the machinima above. Each avatar on the screen is operated by a different person, and they have coordinated quite a bit to accomplish this. Again, warning, the characters are armed, and in this one, there are some other challenges, like explosions.

Notice that the color is washed out at the beginning and the end? His introduction and conclusion are quite faint. The topic label, and the three informational paragraphs in the middle, are each their own, much brighter color.

Speculation: To this internet-savvy student, color is used to highlight important information and links. Since web pages are frequently a non-linear and uniquely individualized experience (different people will click around the links in their own way), this use of color makes more sense than the linear use of headings and outlines.

In a traditional paper, the titles and headings are used to alert the reader to what important point will be made in the reading which follows directly after. In a traditional paper, the introduction encapsulates the entire argument (this is what I will prove….) and the conclusion often rehashes the argument. Thus, in a traditional paper, the introduction and conclusion carry weight. (And, the author hopes you’ll read the whole thing, but at least she expects you to read the introduction, headings, and conclusion.)

In this student’s more non-linear world, he expects his reader to want to skip what he considers fluff and zero in on his factual information. That’s what his color use is signaling…and all of the other middle school students I asked about the color use got it immediately…”here’s the important bit.”

• I was really excited by Christian Long’s manifesto, and his call for others to join him. I emailed him an idea I had and was pleased with his quick response, which challenged me to take it a bit deeper with my kids. I shared the manifesto idea with another teacher, and we puzzled about how best to use it. At the end of each school year, our Middle School Language Arts teacher asks her students to write a reflective essay about their learning during the past school year. It may be that she will add a beginning of the year manifesto piece.

• I changed my work schedule to allow for a chance to work with a teacher who is beginning two projects I want to support. (Think about the excitement she’s engendered in me to get me to propose that, and the flexibility of my school to allow the mid-year schedule change). Having successfully negotiated trades in recess duties and planning time periods, I now have a different day off (I’m 4/5 time).

• I got severely motion sick from flying too fast while exploring 2d life (I’m still on welcome island)! It lasted for quite a while, and really disappointed me.

• Partook in a most wonderful educational experience as a chaperone on a field trip to the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. The values and message were wonderful (the students were led to examine perspective, diversity, peace, and communication through metaphor and art and then to relate what they learned to present-day reality). The students loved the experience. My son said that he learned how powerful words were.

• Christian Long (how does he find the time?) emailed me a response to an email I sent, after he looked at our older watershed web page, and wondered whether I’d be using Google Earth to update the new data and maps. Good question! It’s been a while since I used Google Earth, and I wonder if they have more features to investigate. Last time, our area had very little focus in the images (not many satellites focus on us, I’ll bet). Another thing for my to-do list!

The question: a colleague asked “How do you deal with all of this? Aren’t you overwhelmed by all of the great stuff out there that you find out about from sharing on the web? How do you not get overwhelmed?” (As I was handing her a printout I thought she’d like to know about.)

I began answering with advice Will Richardson gave at the workshop I attended: pick one thing to start with. He was talking about the tools, and modeling their use. He also talked about the power of blogging and how he’s changed the way he reads in order to process all there is out there. Then, I thought about other discussions that I’ve read recently. About my flying too fast in Second Life. About a teacher, showing us the instructional model that she keeps pinned up on her wall, reminding her of what it looks like when it “works”–when things go well. Some big projects I’ve signed on to help with involving watershed studies, solar power, wiki and web page design. And I began getting a bit dizzy again, myself.

Sunday afternoon I got a big chunk of the answer. I attended a discussion about how my school attempts to incorporate our Quaker values. One teacher mentioned a sense of being aware that she and her students are choosing only a percentage of anything to cover (in history, science, etc.), of needing to teach both how to learn and how to get others to teach you, as our students move on from our school and seek out their own further education in high school and beyond. Example after example featured cross team collaboration, among teachers and between students of various ages. When asked how the wonderful collaboration we do as a faculty gets coordinated, the teachers talked about planning time, rearranging schedules, grabbing conversations and snatches in the hallway or bathroom, that help us all take advantage of opportunities – because we are all aware of and we have a sense of our traveling along this journey together. That our guiding mission and principles mean that when one teacher approaches another and says “You know, I forgot to tell you that we have this wonderful speaker/performer coming in to the my classroom today, and you might want to bring your students because we’ll be talking about ….” the other teacher is likely to say “okay!” and make the schedule work around it, because both teachers in that conversation have a sense of working toward some common mission together.

We’ve had a year of difficult times, personal tragedies suffered by some of our teachers and students, shared burdens that we all found heavy, and some uncomfortable conflicts in attitudes. It’s been a long, full winter. We have missed the chance to gather as a community in celebration of what we are. We have gathered to mourn, we have gathered to react, we have gathered to do good deeds within our community. What really had been missing for that teacher who asked, and for me, was the chance to stop and affirm that sense of being part of something big, the shared values and goals, and to share our success stories with each other, a chance to take stock and see that we are indeed, on a wonderful journey.

Sunday afternoon’s conversations were a chance for teachers to explain to others in the school community our shared mission, our Quaker values, and how they play out in our actions and what we attempt to do at the school. It wound up being a wonderfully affirming experience for us as teachers to be able to share what it is that we are doing, and where we think we are heading.

We need to let the Light within our school shine, and to give ourselves time to celebrate it. As a Quaker teacher, I need to “walk the talk;” I need to demonstrate my belief through my actions. And, I need to learn how to fly a little slower.

We’re enjoying having Rand Whipple, master mind behind Box of Light Theatre, spending mornings with us for two weeks as “artist in residence” at our K-8 school, supporting our all school thematic study.  Our thematic study this year builds on our previous year’s thematic study, and reflects our diversity initiative (there is a whoooole lot of blogging potential there, in how to meet the challenge of seeking out the diversity within the local and larger world that our school faces, including our challenge of being in a small, rural community that is not very diverse). Last’s year’s thematic study was “This is Who We Are” and this year’s is “The Power of Our Stories.”  I can’t help but love that title!  ( I am a fan of Jane Yolen, who advocates teaching classic cultural tales, myths and fairy tales, in her book Touch Magic.)

A Special Role for Middle School Students

All of our students are excited and looking forward to being part of this project. Our middle school students are being the technical staff and assistants for Rand.  A team of middle schoolers is helping each lower school class to tell their stories. The middle school students are also planning on telling a story of their own.  They are eager to learn how to use Rand’s programs to record, morph, “goo,” and otherwise manipulate images, and to eventually produce a dvd.

Working Within Their Own, and Society’s, Limits

They are learning, along the way, that when a group of middle school students accompanies primary students on a field trip to record their stories on videotape, someone should remember to bring along a video camera!  Luckily, Rand thought to check before the bus left… Ah, the challenges of the middle school brain!   They are also learning the frustration of having filmed an event and later discovering that every single shot included a person they did not have permission to record.  Issues of copyright and attribution have also been thoroughly discussed.  I think the middle school students are learning that they have to work within societal and organizational constraints, even during this most creative of exercises–if they are going to be able to share their work.

It has brought to my mind Ilsa Aichinger’s story, The Bound Man.  That might be a good story to use as part of a debriefing when this work has concluded.  These students are certainly beginning to learn how to work within their bonds, and that both limitations and opportunities come with them.

Posting Work in Progress

Instant feedback is wonderful, and it is gratifying for the students to see how their work is coming out.  Rand asked if we had a spot, or if we wanted to use his website, for students to post clips that they have edited and compressed with Rand’s help.  I made a page available on the free wikispace that came with this blog, and it was a learning experience for me!  Since the wiki “insert video image” called for a web location for the image, I checked out free online places. I went with Google Video, since Odeo inserts a watermark and Google did not, plus Google Video allows you to make the file private.  If anyone knows of a better way for me to have done this, please let me know!

The first clip is up, and it is a special story from an interview of our Intermediate team teacher, Audra.  Please take a look–it is at http://matter.wikispaces.com/telling+stories+in+school

May your stories be hopeful ones.

I’ve found this wonderful link to a series of “pictures that lie.” (I’ve been getting a feed on the newly added bookmarks of del.icio.us user LibrarianEdge and this site was added by LibrarianEdge today–Thanks!). I’m extremely excited, because I was looking for a way to broaden the wonderful message of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty (see my earlier post, here) and help it cross over to the male students I have. When I checked out the site, though, it addressed much more than body image issues.

It addressed censorship, political exigencies, propaganda, critical thinking, editing, feminism, media, photoshop ethics, and more (Oh, My!)! It helps place the information media awareness I want students to cultivate, the critical thinking skills they need to harness to be savvy on the web, into a perspective that includes a long history of media manipulation:

Before the invention of the digital image, the Soviets removed Trotsky from News Photos and archives when he fell out of favor and American farmers were shown with truck-sized crickets on their farm equipment. — See images 14 and 17.

The website makes it clear that image manipulation (lies, deceitful lies!) is not something only from the past, as it includes modern day images (Cover photos from Newsweek, Time, and TV Guide; modern icons such as Oprah, Katie Couric, and Martha Stewart).

My students don’t have to feel I am shining a spotlight on them as potentially gullible–these photos were aimed at a wide readership. It will be up to me to help the students realize that they can value Katie Couric and Oprah without being manipulated into putting them onto a “body image” pedestal that really isn’t them (isn’t means, in this case, that their heads were pasted onto model’s bodies for those cover shots). It will be up to the students, actually, but this should help them realize they need to look critically at EVERY image they see. Who put it there, who does it serve, is it touting a political point of view or reinforcing a powerful entity (political or corporate)…or just selling more TV Guides?

In earlier grades, I had students explore a wonderful webquest where they develop their own rubric to “rate” a website using information they researched (about authority, currency, etc.) and then they test their rubric by evaluating a pair of websites: one fake, one real. Students found the fake sights could fool some of them, some of the time…and they were not happy with that! I added additional “fake or fantastic” websites and we explored them as a group followup.

Now, I hope to help my students see how pervasive, and how easily accomplished, are “images that lie.” And that those images aren’t just aimed at fooling them–but at all of us. I’ll tell them that old saw:

Fool me once…

And I’ll mean, ME, too. I’m in there with them.