This year, I’m pleased to drop the administrative hat and concentrate on teaching. Catching up will take a little bit.  I’ve hundreds of blog posts to read waiting in my RSS feeder, and new (to me) products and services to evaluate (for instance, what are the latest options for student blogging? It’s been a year since I checked that out!).  I’ll be checking back in with the people and blogs who were so inspiring to me to start with–everyone from Will Richardson to Rick Biche.  I have a new colleague or two who I expect will be leading me into new, cool tools and effective practices, too.  I want to read about what has been going on with gaming and online collaboration. I want to experiment with “wow” services like Twitter and see if they’ll really be useful and who they will be useful to. I’m really looking forward to resuming reflective practice.

(A moment of reflection)

I have three tech chore lists going:

1. the regular (mostly maintenance) chores,
2. the “keep up” and “keep advancing” with tech changes chores,
3. and the end of school year chores.

Blogging is actually on the “keep up” and “keep advancing” list.  At least, that’s where it was when I started blogging.   Re-evaluating where it belongs is on my end of school year chore list.

My end of school year chore list has a lot of annual maintenance (back up or clear out files, clean up desktops (oh, those icons!), write the annual thank you letters to tech volunteers).  It includes reflection and planning (what worked, what didn’t work, review the AUP and bullying pieces, who do I need to reach differently).

There are a lot of reflective pieces, and planning pieces, in the “keep advancing” chore list, too.  Finding teacher planning and training time to integrate and support the advances is always a big piece of this.

Challenges include not letting the regular chore list crowd out the others!  Our school year’s almost over, and my “teacher” chore list includes writing Individualized Student Evaluations for all of the students at our school.  But, I’ve given myself a brief hour here to look at the other chore lists, hence this little post!

I’ve been commiserating with my peers about the difficulty of writing curriculum for the moving target that is tech these days! I’ve found it helpful to think about how I have adapted things for my multiage groupings with a three year rotation. I’ve also found it heartening to think back about the best “performance pieces” we’ve done–because, by and large, even if the program names and the computer operating systems change, most of these pieces are STILL what I want my students to produce!

So, I have decided to give a few reports of favorite products and projects, complete with work samples, the next time I get a moment to blog. I may continue this over the summer as I look over and rethink (as I do every summer) my curriculum. I hope you find something useful, and would love if anyone wanted to share their favorites here!

I’ve been digging around for some favorite samples to share this week, and I hope to post some good things this weekend.

Thanks again for reading and sharing.

No, we’ll actually be contacting the physics department online, rather than face-to-face. The three of us are using some teacher technology training funding to enroll in an online course together. The course allows up to four teachers to work together, on their own schedule, as they are guided in a science course and develop hands-on activities we can use in our own classes. We’re doing “Force, Motion, and Energy.”

I’m thinking I’ll get a chance to help facilitate the tech end and get some genuine planning time with these teachers (!!) as we build a unit plan or two that they will use. I’m looking forward to facilitating the online learning experience for them (actually, they are web savvy and won’t need any help, I’ll bet); documenting the experience (digitally); and smoothly integrating tech into the lesson work, of course!

Perhaps every generation that experiences a major, powerful change faces this same dilemma. Powerful tools can be dangerous, even when they are extremely useful. Gunpowder. Lasers. Cell phones with cameras.

Cell phones, being fraught with danger? I’m not talking about brain tumors from overuse, either. The recent New York Times article, Teenagers Misbehaving, for All Online to Watch – New York Times has me thinking.

The article details that children are misbehaving for the camera phone–the images are then uploaded onto the web. They are hoping for notoriety. Is this notoriety causing students to act in new and more dangerous ways? It’s worrisome. I appreciated Chris Lehman’s thoughtful post about this article, especially:

We have no choice but to teach students to own the stories they tell about themselves and to consider thoughtfully and powerfully the way in which they allow their online persona to be created — much like we would talk to them about the way they portray themselves offline. We cannot pretend these things aren’t happening, and we cannot pretend that the curriculum of schools cannot teach kids about all of this.

The Dark Side of Web 2.0 and Kids – Practical Theory

He’s right, we have no choice. And we can’t pretend these things aren’t happening. I appreciate the imperative nature of Chris’ statements, since I know there are parents and teachers out there who will be hoping to put the issue off for later. We have a duty to our students and children, a duty not to sidestep the issue and let our young people explore these new tools unaccompanied by older guides who care about them–even if, sometimes, the older people have less web2.0 presence than the younger!

It is difficult to have discussions about behavior when it is behavior you don’t expect or anticipate. That’s one reason why we parents and teachers need to explore these new tools, too. And why it is good to be sure our children have a balanced introduction to these web2.0 things.

Balance. We don’t want to encourage misbehavior by glamorizing or inspiring it, but we have to talk about the possibilities and responsibilities. It is not good to broach some important topics too late OR too soon (educators and parents must work out when to introduce some often hot-button topics, such as gun safety, stranger danger, and online safety and behavior). We won’t be able to anticipate all of the possibilities. We have some naive parents, teachers, and kids in the mix, with some students out there in the web20 world before we expect them to be.

My Quaker and librarian background doesn’t look lightly on censorship. We can’t hope to respond just by restricting cell phones and filtering the internet at school (that’s only putting the responsibility for teaching web wisdom off onto others). Our students are using these tools at home, on the bus, in the cafe or public library–even those students without home access get some exposure.

I think we older people need to prepare to be good guides by exploring the powerful, useful practices web20 will allow. As Will Richardson says, we need to get out there and use these tools ourselves. In addition, we need to keep up to date and knowledgeable about what our young people are doing. One powerful way: begin a conversation with them. Explore alongside them. Ask them to show you what they know and do online.

I have an example that shows how clever some of our children are, and how hard it is to see all the possible wrinkles before they do. It’s also an example of how important it is to have the conversation, and anticipate good responses with them. Some 9 to 11 year old students were talking about the very popular Club Penguin site with me. I mentioned some of the features of the site that help protect kids and help parents feel good about letting their children play there. I asserted that some people would always try and see what they could get away with, and that no site will be perfect. One 11 year old offered a tale of being invited to a “bad word” party at someone’s igloo. She went, not thinking it would be anything really bad (yes, we talked about avoiding the urge to check out this kind of thing, later). The igloo owner had avoided the chat filters by arranging his furniture into a bad word! She was quite shocked, and responded appropriately by reporting the igloo owner. I was glad that she shared her experience with her classmates. We had a good conversation.

It was about a week later when I noticed my son seeking attention on that same website. He had sent a chat message out to everyone at a popular gathering spot. He asked the other penguins nearby, “Who wants to hear a ghost story?” Phew. That kind of notoriety I can deal with.

• 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 been busy adding an art installation to my technology studio this week, and I’m really excited about it. Not only does it add warmth and interest to the studio’s biggest, blankest wall, I think it embodies what I want our students’ technology studio experiences to be.

Namely: Student-centered. World-aware. Definitely not flat–and never just black and white. Experienced by people working in tandem, exploring and sharing specific tools and skills, to accomplish something “other.”

Deborah Diana, a talented artist, created silhouettes of the students and teachers at the school. The edges of the white shapes were defined by a black script of each person’s name. The black and white images were arranged in two banks, and each face was raised off the surface of the backdrop enough to give it shadow and dimension. Each of the two banks looks across a colorful world, towards the group of silhouettes on the opposite side. The colorful world in the center was a collage put together by our students during an art class. The finished project is almost 20 feet long.

I’ve dubbed the work Connections. Like all great art concepts, it is so simple, and yet rewards examination and very complex interpretations. I think all great artists create something that communicates to us on a level that invites us to bring our own meanings and complexities–so rather than worry that I am over-interpreting the artist’s concept, I am happily adopting it as a symbol.

I can’t wait for my students to come “find themselves” in the tech studio, when they get back from break. I am sure that most of us will want to go and locate our own silhouette.

… (Time passes)… Ah ha, the wisdom of the forum explains that I want a wiki if I want many pages to edit.  On a blog, there is a blog page, and then “static” pages may be attached (but only static ones). I need to make a wiki for my resources links!

Meanwhile, I’m about to break for the holidays.  When I get back, I want to spend more time on the lesson planning and less on the how-to’s of blogging.  I think I am far enough along to get some good tools and tips for my students, now to devise how to give them relevant experiences to practice with.

The teacher page came first, out of self-defense, when I found myself flagging things at home and then printing and stuffing mailboxes or passing papers around at staff meetings or setting up “resource folders” … Well, you get the idea. I set up a tag for each teaching team:FYI-Primary, FYI-Intermediate, etc. I also set up a “to-print-share” tag, as well.

Another cool thing–we have a tag for each class and have dragged it onto our browser toolbar as a button the kids can click to get to the websites we want them to find. The computers in the technology studio all have buttons in the Firefox browser that say “Primary” and “Craig’s Links”–soooo much easier.

Each of the middle school students has a tag for their name, and can use it to sort the bookmarks and display just the ones they have tagged. I thought of that after we started, so it isn’t consistently used yet. To start with, I had all students take a turn tagging something in class, and since then they have been using it completely independently of assignments from me. They really enjoy seeing their work out on the web. Once I counted up how many tags they added and rewarded them with a chocolate kiss for each tag. Sweet!

One thing that could be a drawback is that one student might delete the links of others, since they all have access. This group of students is motivated and behaving well. I could save the links to a spreadsheet using a plugin if that becomes a concern.

I chose delicious rather than other services (though I gave magnolia a whirl) because it is fast, easy, and shows a lot of links on the display page. My students and colleagues can find their tags without so much clicking and sorting. I found Scott Gilbertson’s article really helpful, it let me see the top 10 bookmarking services to choose from. As Scott says, “There’s a score of services out there, and no single service has it all.”

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