How transparent are we as teachers?

As I finished Will Richardson’s Why School? this week, the concept that stood out to me the most was teachers being transparent learners. Richardson (2012) reflects back to his son’s academic history, analyzing how many of his teachers were truly transparent learners. Upon reflection, Richardson cannot recall many teachers that showed his son how to learn as opposed to what to learn. Image 1 highlights a note I bookmarked where I ask myself how I can design my professional development plan around being fluent in technology that still allows me to be transparent as a learner to my students. I believe this is all about balance. As a high school teacher in America, I feel it’s my responsibility to seek the training and resources I need to be fluent in digital tools or technological devices that are common among my students. This does not mean mastery, but a working knowledge. Remaining transparent as I continue to learn from my students about such resources or devices exhibits a healthy learning disposition that students will internalize. 

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Being a transparent learner was an idea that made me a bit uncomfortable at first, since I have observed the traditional role of a teacher to deliver content. Transparency also means vulnerability. Being honest with your students that you are learning something for the first time is a vulnerable act that students will appreciate, not judge. I also think modeling my own learning behaviors can assist those struggling with methods of their own. For example, I often share with the class that I am a visual learner and need to see something written or displayed in front of me. I utilize this truth during lessons by organizing content on the board not only for myself but for other visual learners in the room. By sharing my own individual style of learning, I am attempting to introduce students to methods or perspectives of learning that may assist them in being more successful in the academic setting. 

Using my device this week went smoothly, I feel confident in my skills when it comes to reading, scanning, bookmarking and highlighting. My next goal in using my iPad for texts or studying is to experiment using a pencil to highlight, circle or take notes of certain sections. Image 2 shows the pencil I am borrowing from a friend to continue extending my confidence using a tablet for academic purposes. 

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Richardson, W. (2012). Why school? How education must change when learning and information are everywhere (TED Books) [Kindle]. Retrieved July, 2014.

Socrative: isn’t instant feedback the best feedback?

This week I explored Socrative, a (free) digital tool for teachers that enables them to personalize classroom assessments, administer classroom exit tickets, offer team-based learning activities and access and analyze reports and data produced by students. Socrative does a fantastic job at introducing their tools to teachers in a method that makes it clear and simple. 

After creating my free profile on Socrative, I began to play around with the dashboard (image 1) which gives teachers four different options: start a quiz, ask students a quick question, start a space race or administer an exit ticket.

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I chose to create a quiz to begin testing the software. Image 2 shows the easy quiz-design process offered on Socrative. From scratch, I was able to create a 5-question mini-quiz for my freshman Health students to evaluate what knowledge they took away from our unit on the Five Components of Fitness (a Washington state essential academic learning requirement). The process was quick and easy since the quiz-design platform offered a simple template and allowed me to choose from multiple choice, true/false or short answer. After I finished writing 5 different questions with mixed formats, I found that the website allows me to download and print the newly created quiz (see image 3). 

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After exploring Socrative on my laptop, I decided to install it onto my iPhone to see what the digital tool would be like in a real-classroom situation for both teachers and students. Downloading the app (both teacher and student versions) were quick and free; I easily logged into my existing account on my iPhone to find my newly created quiz uploaded. Images 4 and 5 are screenshots taken from my iPhone showing the teacher’s perspective of administering an exit ticket question and monitoring a “space race” (team-based quiz game). 

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My favorite feature about Socrative is the data analysis feature. After administering exit tickets, quizzes or “space races” to students, it’s easy for teachers to pull data from these activities and analyze it to modify and enhance future learning activities (image 6). This enables teachers to offer students instant feedback, allowing them to make any needed adjustments instead of waiting until the next school day to discuss any misconceptions. 

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Since I do not have a classroom of students to practice with, I am unable to fully test the functions. If using this app in class, I think it would be best to introduce it on a block period day where students are in class for 90 minutes. This would allow me to spend the first half of the class guiding students on how to download it, log in and access resources while spending the second half of the class with a trial “space race” on previously learned content so students can begin building confidence using the new resource. 

BrainPOP: animated learning hub

This week I explored BrainPOP, a website hosting animated content to support educators and engage students (grades 3 and above). BrainPop offers movies, quizzes, games, mobile apps, experiments and prepared activity pages in the following subjects: Math, Science, Social Studies, English, Technology, Arts & Music, and Health. While many of BrainPOP’s resources required a paid subscription (I tried setting up a teacher account and a basic subscription would have cost $220), they offer lots of free resources in each subject area.

I explored BrainPOP as an educator looking for content (see Image 1) related to intended curriculum for 9th grade Health. I searched for content via keyword search on muscles, nutrition and gender identity-all these topics were covered (but few of them for free).

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A great feature about BrainPOP is that all its content is aligned with Common Core state standards through its partner website BrainPOP Educators. Instead of searching via keyword search, the site allows also teachers to filter content by state, subject area and standard. In Images 2 and 3 you can see that I searched for Washington state standards for 9th grade Health education and found resources on obesity and eating disorders. This is a great feature that I value about this resource since Common Core state standards for Health education are relatively new.

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BrainPOP would be great for middle school aged students and high school freshman. I feel that the animation is aimed at a young age group that students ages 16-18 would not appreciate (which is unfortunate since the content is well-researched). I would use BrainPOP in my 9th grade Health classroom to supplement learning activities so that students could assess their knowledge before and after watching content.

Switching roles from master teacher to master learner

As I continued Will Richardson’s discussion of Why School? there were two specific concepts that spoke loudly to how I will define my role as a teacher, they both have to do with rethinking current practices. The first addresses how we need to rethink assessments in our schools; the second is how we need to rethink our traditional role in the classrooms.

Richardson (2012) discusses our modern day assessment and how meaningless it is when it teaches our students nothing relevant for the future. Often times, assessments are designed to offer good-looking data to administration and in turn end up not benefitting the student like it could if we designed the questions differrently. In Image 1, Richardson (2012) urges us to “stop asking questions on tests that can be answered by a Google search. Or, if you have to ask them, let kids use their technology to answer them” (Richardson, pg. 23). In asking our students questions easily answered by a simple online search, students tend to not hold onto the information as tightly, since they can always re-access it. What if instead, we designed assessments that asked questions students were no longer worried about getting right or wrong? What if the questions we asked on assessments allowed students to explore their learning strategies using technology to come up with an answer supported by their own research? Wouldn’t these kinds of questions be more relevant for students’ lives outside our classrooms so that they can continue using the skill-set we assess them on? These are questions influenced by Image 2.

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The second concept that spoke to me was influenced by Richardson’s (2012) suggestion to use technology to learn by talking to strangers. Before the power behind connecting with other learners in this excerpt is presented, he recalls one of the first things he learned when his classes gained access to the Internet: he was no longer the smartest person in the room. Image 3 demonstrates a specific connection this provided for me regarding my traditional role as master teacher. Now that our students have access to the abundance of information, we can no longer secure the role as master teacher, when we all have access to many other more qualified teachers through the Internet. This realization has asked me to battle a role redesign and to consider become a master learner instead. Isn’t this what students need anyways? A role model who can teach them how to learn not what to learn? Rethinking our traditional role from master teacher to master learner could in fact benefit their academic development more than we are willing to admit.

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Finishing this text on my iPad this week, using the iBooks app, went smoothly as I continued to highlight quotes and passages I wanted to feature in my reflection. I also began to highlight educators and resources Richardson provided as influences on his mission to elevate the “Why School” conversation. I took screenshots of quotes which I felt applied to my inner debate of what my role is as a high school teacher next year, which are helpful since they are easily accessbile in my iPad photo library.

Richardson, W. (2012). Why school? How education must change when learning and information are everywhere (TED Books) [Kindle]. Retrieved July, 2014.

Is traditional curriculum holding our students back?

As I began to read Will Richardson’s Why School? this week, he presents the ongoing conversation of education reform in a way that makes it hard to argue to with him. Education reform has taken many forms over the years, and this conversation will likely never end since parents, educators and politicians always seem to know what’s best (better) for our kids. Richardson tells his side using his own teenage son as evidence of how our youth has taken their learning into their own hands, because they can.

Traditionally, the role of educators was to prepare students for the outside world; educate them on what they need to know to land a job and how to survive in our developing society. Because the job market has changed significantly (see image 1), so should the standards. Richardson points out that in 2020, there will be close to 70 million freelancers, consultants and independent workers representing our employed population. As of today, our schools are not utilizing standards that prepare our students for this future.

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Richardson speaks a lot about the “test” we demand students pass in order to prove they have mastered content. He explains that often the results and data taken from these tests are used to measure how intelligent our students are in America. His argument is that this “test” inaccurately measures both of these. We are currently offering students a curriculum that is no longer relevant, Richardson believes we need to rethink this. This caused me to think about the curriculum I offered my students last year: Was it relevant? Did they need it? Image 2 highlights a reminder to myself when writing curriculum: Can they use this? Will they use this? Why teach it? Asking these questions as I prepare modules for my high school students will help me reflect on the intention behind my own curriculum, ensuring that content is focused and relevant.

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Using my iPad this week to being Why School? went smoothly. Other than having to charge up the battery from nothing again, there were no road bumps in my experience. I continue to look forward to the time I set aside to read eTexts on my iPad since it is still a new experience that I am settling into. Since this is my final text for this course, I have began to think about what texts I will purchase off of the Kindle app next. I cannot strictly convert to e-reading but I certainly will continue to supplement with it.

Richardson, W. (2012). Why school? How education must change when learning and information are everywhere (TED Books) [Kindle]. Retrieved July, 2014.

Animoto: celebrating students’ digital footprints

The digital world continues to advance rapidly, which means it is crucial for parents and educators to teach our youth about becoming digital citizens. Mike Ripple (2012) explains, “digital citizenship is not meant to be a set of rules. Its goal is to provide a framework to help parents and educators to define the issues concerning technology” (Ripple, pg. 1). By providing parents and educators with Ripple’s nine pillars of digital citizenship, students can begin to understand what it means to be digitally literate while being digitally responsible. It is important to educate students on the appropriateness of the digital footprint they are leaving behind, but equally important to allow them the freedom to explore what that digital footprint looks like.

Animoto, an online resource that allows users to share photos and video content in the form of a musical slideshow, is one great way students can explore their digital footprint. This idea was presented by Common Sense Media, a resource hub for educators providing news, tips and professional development resources. Common Sense Media introduced a learning activity where students use Animoto to create a “digital life smile”. Animoto provides a platform for students to express themselves through pictures, videos and text in a short 30-second video.

After exploring Animoto, I found it very user-friendly. The website layout makes project design steps easy to follow and I was able to create and design a 30-second video in about 15 minutes. While I appreciated Animoto’s simple layout and fast production process, the music choices concern me as a high school teacher. Animoto provides about 300 pre-licensed songs users can select for their slideshow or video. None of the songs available are recognizable popular artists, other than Beethoven. Music is one of the most important things to my students; it is a common method of communication and expression. My concern is that students will be less engaged in the project (which is meant to be individual to who they are) if they do not have freedom over the music selection.

Sources:

Ribble, M. (February, 2010). Raising a Digital Child. Digital Citizenship. Retrieved July 25, 2014, from http://www.digitalcitizenship.net/uploads/09-0489_AWAY__26_DIGKIDS_.pdf

The Power of (too) Many

As I concluded Howard Rheingold’s Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter? there were a few specific concepts worth questioning that stood out to me as an educator in a digital age.

The first is the concept Rheingold discusses in his chapter, “The Power of Many” (see image 1). Rheingold (2012) introduces stimergy: when complex activities or structures emerge without any planned efforts. He uses ant colonies as an analogy comparing the complexity of wikipedia. When ants find a food source, they leave trails of pheromones so that other ants can follow along on the same path; this path becomes easier to find the more ants that travel down it. Compare this example to wikipedia, where users lead each other to sources of information; the path becoming more developed and complex the more people contribute to it. Analyzing the stimergy taking place on the Internet, where the power of many contribute to digital content, concerns me as an educator. While this power could be exercised in a great way if the collective efforts are appropriately maintained, this power could also be misused. My concern with collective power present in our digital age is that it makes it more challenging for students to find and evaluate reliable information.

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Rheingold (2012) speaks to some of these concerns when he presents Ostrom’s eight principles for collective action (see image 2). Ostrom suggests clear defined boundaries for groups in order to collaborate efficiently.

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My eText experience this week went fairly smooth. I continued to use iBooks to read my text so that I could easily keep track of my page numbers rather than “location” on Kindle. I continued to use highlighting and notes to capture the ideas that I wanted to explore in my reflection. One amateur but valid observation I made this week in regards to reading a digital text pertains to my iPad and its battery life. My iPad, the device I have chosen to read my texts on, seems to have a fairly short battery life if you keep the device on when not using it. This created an issue for me several times throughout the week since I set aside time to read but my device was dead. Since I don’t have a hard copy of the text, this creates a obstacle. My experience translates to potential classroom situations. Does relying on technology as a means of delivering content provide students with an excuse to not complete assigned reading? In my experiences, my high school students have found creative ways to request for more time to complete an assignment, and a fear of mine is that digital texts may serve as a justified excuse. Are actual books the most reliable form of media for students? How can we rely on technology and specifically digital texts?

Technology: the villain and the hero

This week I explored the power of technology as I began Howard Rheingold’s Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter? Rheingold (2012) lays the foundation of the discussion as what technology can do for human being’s intelligences by analyzing our histories. Rheingold (2012) discusses humans’ history of building tools to enhance their intelligence, in turn influencing their evolution. Tools such as alphabets, speech and writing are all milestones that have attributed to the development of the human race.

Before Rheingold (2012) suggests how we can use digital tools to positively influence society and human function, he admits the faults of its current state: “Every day we see tremendous and societal enthusiasm for an enormous range of networked electronic communication gadgets that provide quick access to ideas and people everywhere. At the same time, there is an understandable apprehension that an addictive dependency on these same deices, which often provide so much, can also numb our minds and motions, making people and culture shallow” (Rheingold, pg. 3). This honest illustration of technology’s reputation motivated me to analyze if this is true in regards to current youth. In class, I can firmly state that the single most fought battle every day is a student’s cell phone interfering with their engagement. The school’s no-phone policy in class is not upheld and therefore widely disrespected my students. Smart phones have become so normal and accessible to teenagers that those against having them in classrooms are the ones being targeted as wrong or misguided. Further, as Rheingold (2012) questions, is technology numbing people’s minds and emotions? I worry that the quality of technological tools or resources that my students are being exposed to are perhaps numbing their minds to issues that should take precedence (see Image 1). For example, when a student chooses to play a mindless game on their phone secretly under their desk instead of listening to our lesson on HIV and ways you can avoid infection, I wonder what it is about technology that makes it so hard for them to look away and engage.

 

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As I continue to explore Rheingold’s Mind Amplifier next week, I am interested to read about his suggestions on how we can “build media that will enable people to think and collaborate in ways like never before” (Rheingold, pg. 4). With tools like Google Docs, Skype and ePals how can we assist our students to collaborate more efficiently?

 

Rheingold, H. (2012).  Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter? TED Conferences, Kindle Edition.

The Learnist: a social discovery site for students and teachers

Designing a curriculum for high school Health that is engaging and effective in preparing students to live healthy lifestyles can be a challenge. Currently, in the state of Washington, state standards focus on students learning about how to make healthy decisions that will positively affect their physical, mental and social well being. This can include modules on nutrition, social relationships, exercise, mental health, and diseases. To assist students in understanding how to make healthy decisions, it’s important that they have access to reliable research. By providing students with resources that can assist their information literacy development, students can develop the necessary tools to access, analyze and apply information.

The Learnist is a website where users can search by category or interest to discover different articles, photos, videos or resources. The site is built similarly to Pinterest in the sense that it operates with “boards”. For example, if you are looking to learn more about vitamins, or how to rotate your tires or even how to remember your students in names in class these questions are loosely categorized (see image 1) by different boards that users have created as a platform for “learnings” (places you go looking for answers).

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This resource would fit nicely in a high school Health classroom in two ways. First, it could act as a resource for students to use when they have a question slightly related, but off topic from the day’s lesson. I sometimes find that when students become truly engaged in a lesson, they begin extending their curiosity on the subject by asking “what if questions”. These are always great learning opportunities, but if the lesson plan doesn’t allow for an off-track conversation on if northwest inhabitants are all deficient from vitamin D since we don’t have many sunny months, than the Learnist could be a great place to send students to explore the question and report back the next day. Secondly, the Learnist allows users to create profiles and boards where they can post learning on a specific, searchable topic. These boards are searchable by users via categories and keywords but are also accessible to non-users who have the link.

Below you can see my profile (image 2) as well as an example board I created that would be a helpful resource in our exercise module when I discuss the tabata fitness method. In image 3, you can see my tabata board has two different uploaded learnings: one is a tabata article from Men’s Health magazine explaining the method and providing an example workout. The other is an app that students can download when they tabata which provides pre-programmed music for tabta-specific workouts. Both of these learnings were easily uploaded and shared to my board.

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The Learnist is an easy resource to use and would be a great way to both stimulate students during modules they may not have significant history exploring as well share articles or media on a specific topic. My only concern in using this resource for its research function is the credibility of its findings. Since anyone can upload anything to their boards, it would be up to the students to filter sources for reliable data from the ones that are biased or unsupported. For this reason, I would introduce this website to students with caution and remind them to utilize their information literacy tools we reviewed.

 

Redesigning the role of a teacher

As I continued Sugata Mitra’s Beyond the Hole in the Wall: Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning, the idea of offering SOLEs (self-organized learning environments) in schools was discussed deeper. After so many technological trials with young children that confirmed learning is possible without guidance, Mitra introduces a new curriculum and a redefinition of a teacher’s role in the classroom. He calls this MIE or Minimally Invasive Education (see Image 1).

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Mitra states the teacher’s role should be to provide stimulus or “big” questions. This shift in a teacher’s role would drastically change the curriculum of a general education classroom. Mitra suggests the following redesign of current primary education:

1. Reading comprehension

2. Information search and analysis

3. A rational system of belief

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Beyond these three components (shown in image 2), Mitra explains that computers can give our students the answers but not provide the questions, which would be the sole role of the teacher within the SOLE.

Image 3 highlights what teachers should expect when SOLE’s are first being established in classrooms. Mitra reminds teachers to: be patient with students as they will have less control, to accept the chaos in the beginning as they get used to the educational freedom and to tolerate the noise levels as they tend to rise and fall throughout their experience.

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After finishing Mitra’s proposal on SOLEs and MIE, I remain perplexed. I fully support the idea of implementing SOLEs in schools with resources and budgets that will support it. At the same time, I do not fully support the idea that SOLEs should (almost) replace teachers or traditional curriculum. While I agree with Mitra on so many levels on redesigning curriculums so that students develop deeper learning on their own, I do not believe that redefining the role of an educator is one many districts or governments would readily accept. This kind of transformation brings up the following questions:

• Who would finance the SOLE?
• Who redesigns the curriculum standards? Would these be district or state wide?
• How can we assess students on learning produced from SOLE projects if we do not know the answers or outcomes to their questions?
• Would teachers get paid the same amount if their role changed from master to supporter?

There are so many things to consider with such a big change. That being said, I do support SOLEs as an addition or a replacement of other kinds of instructional methods. It would be a dream of mine to teach for a school that could financially offer SOLE resources to teachers in a public high school. Unfortunately, this dream seems out of reach for now.

In the meantime, I will do my best to design and implement my own version of Mitra’s SOLE into my classroom next year, as I admire his vision to give up some of our control over students’ journey to learn.