Teacher in Development

I can’t even remember how I came across this blog, but I’m really enjoying the videos by Chris Walsh. They are very entertaining, but also share valuable resources and ideas for the classroom. Check out the Infinitie Thinking Machine.

Taken from their “About” page: “The Infinite Thinking Machine (ITM) is designed to help teachers and students thrive in the 21st century.”

Enjoy.

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Have you ever wanted to show someone what blogging was all about, and you needed to do it without the help of a computer or internet? (Hey, no-tech happens right?)

Head on over to the Bud the Teacher blog. Bud Hunt has a really cool idea to help people see and touch the read/write web.  

His intro post is here. Small Sticky Notes, Loosely Yarned

 I strongly suggest you read through the comments. There’s some really neat ideas there.

He then comes back with a mini update report here:  Yarn Blogging

What I really like about what Bud and his coworker have done here, is that they have found a way to explain an intangible thing in a tangible way. This may be useful for people who like to get their hands and eyes into the learning process. (Visual and hands-on learners.)

 That and it’s just a really imaginative alternative way to explain blogging and the connections that become possible on the 2.0 web.

Really interesting post over at Palimpsest redux on complaints in the classroom around blogging.

I think James’ thoughts are well worth your time to read, especially if you’ve ever had to deal with complaints around blog use in the classroom.

His ideas totally reminded me of my parents’ wisdom. To a kid, washing dishes, cleaning up dirty rooms etc, are just plain NOT FUN. In fact, we do anything possible to get out of such things. But I can still hear my Mom’s voice in my head: “Aaron, sometimes you have to do things you don’t like doing because they’re good for you. They’ll help you become a better person. You’ll thank me someday.”

It’s really true. School, on many occasions, has a lot to do with that whole area of learning how to subject yourself and submit yourself to the wisdom of others. You may not like it, you may not enjoy it instantly, but learning the concepts and gaining the experience - in this case blogging - I think is a very vital part of literacy and basic skills that all should have in our digital environment.

I think James’s opinions are very true. It’s frustrating to hear the complaining, but a mark of a great teacher, I think, is to know when to pay attention to student complaints and act accordingly, or to hear the complaint but stick to the guns anyway because this whole experience will be good for you in the future.

James comments on blogging in the classroom that:

“Excitement quickly fades to apathy, and the complaints begin to surface. In my experience, this has been extremely demoralizing. I take it personally, especially since I have spent a great deal of time researching this process and planning it, but my colleagues and my wife all agree in their advice to me: something along the lines of ‘do students complain when you assign an essay? Do you drop it because of those complaints, or do you push through it because you know it is important for their learning…then why are you hesitating now?’ (by the way, I teach high school English, hence the essay ref.).
A big thank you to people who remind me of that fact. These people are willing to remind me that I am a professional, and that students will complain about things, whether they are cool or not. They are also holding me up, in a sense, reminding me that I am a teacher and that my job is to facilitate learning. Sometimes we need those reminders to trust our judgment and go with our instincts (and all that research and planning that helped test those instincts). If it wasn’t for them, I would be pulled down by this apathy.”

Teachers should never be the “sage on the stage” 100% of the time, but there is wisdom there that has you there in the first place.

Good trajectory coaches know when to bump, nudge and influence the direction of their charges don’t they?

Another great listen from the folks over at EdTechTalk. It’s older, but well worth your time if you’re thinking about the practical side of blogging in the classroom. EdTechTalk #28 - An interview with Bob Sprankle and Bud The Teacher | EdTechTalk.com - Educational technology that talks

A really great few posts { Blogging Rubric and Reflective Commentary } over at Ken Smith’s Weblogs in Higher Education around grading blog work in the classroom. I really enjoyed reading the ideas these guys came up with. What I especially thought to be cool:
1. Grading around audience
2. Grading around freshness
3. Grading around developing a “house style.” - I really thought this was neat. Voice!
4. Grading around how well participants connected and built community.

I post this for those who are trying to incorporate blogs in the classroom - grades, sooner or later, must come into the picture.

James, over at Palimpsest redux has a great post around purposeful blogging that I think speaks very well to this issue. Edu-blogging must be purposeful. (All blogging I think should be purposeful) but because of the school environment, teachers I think need to consider how to give student’s credit for blog work.

“Students should know exactly what is expected of them when it comes to blogs and the topics they blog about. I find this is a hard topic to nail down, especially due to my own personal blog angst over genre limiting. On the one hand, I just want to see students writing about what is important to them. On the other hand, curriculum rarely allows for this in some courses. Students don’t need another assignment or ‘to-do’ item just because the instructor thinks it is an interesting endeavour. What they need is a real learning experience, one they can get credit for (read: not one that is added on top of assigned work). The idea of expecting students to spend, no invest , time blogging meaningful messages without offering credit for that investment is, in my opinion, unrealistic.” (J.M. Purposeful Blogging…

Can I get an “Amen?”

Well said. I would also like to add here that the student should be a part of the assignment of value around their blogging. (See the entries by Ken Smith, his students had a big hand in the grades.)

First of all, sorry everyone for not posting in a long while. Life…and a great deal of it, has been happening to me and well…posting, heck, thinking has been a very difficult thing to do lately.

I just wanted to post this link which I found to be very interesting. For all of us who try to evangelize and spread the good news about blogs , here’s some reall great ideas around explaining the whole RSS side of the coin. (Marshall’s tag line is super: Inhale feeds, Exhale bog posts. )

Enjoy! Marshall Kirkpatrick » Teaching RSS: A Discussion

Blogging. Web 2.0. Social Software. Digital Natives bogged down in outdated classrooms with an outmoded paradigm. Teachers, schools, and curriculums playing catch up: maybe. The future is now, and how do you catch up if your head is in the sand, or just plain turned in another direction?

“Buzzzzzzzzzz.”

How? I think that’s the million dollar question here. The change is now. It’s happening and will continue to happen. The whole conversation around group and personal blogging that has been going on has really gotten me thinking a great deal about our team of teachers, blogging, and just plain helping them into a 2.0 mindset.

The more I’ve thought about it, read about it around the blogsphere, and the more I’ve read the comments to my last post, the more I’ve begun to realize that no matter how digitized our world becomes, no matter how fast knowledge explodes, no matter how much we need to be in touch with, and involved in 2.0 - or however this all evolves next, in the end it’s all about people.

People. Individuals. Personalities. That means, in many cases, that change and adaptation is a time thing. That means, from my end, an ongoing, and personal open invitation to “come and see.”

I’ve realized that I’ve been coming at this all wrong. The teachers and students you and I work with are not “clickable.”

I think at some levels I was wrongly expecting our staff to immediatly take blogging and run with it. To instantly understand that blogs are not just journals, but conversations, where you can read and listen in on what other teachers are saying, think about it, research it, and produce your own twist on your own blog. I wrongly expected that after one or two tentative presentations around blogging, that our teachers would see blogs as an absolute haven for “free-range learning“(Ganley, par. eight) where their professional exploration and learning would take off as they begin connecting to a broader and expanding world of other reflective teachers.

It’s a case of me “seeing it” but not effectively passing on what I see.

I’m not ready to throw in the towel around our team blog, especially after this realization around the tool vs. people. It’s so easy to get sucked into the tool and all it helps you do, to the point where you forget how to effectively relate all that to another living, breathing person.

My mac “learns” new things and can do new things whenever I download and install a new program or file. I just drag and drop the new program into the application folder on my hard drive, run the installation, and presto….my comp just got smarter and more useful. This is perhaps an obvious idea, a “duh” post perhaps, but people are not mac hard drives. You don’t just “drag drop” and presto.

Digital Immigrants, the vast majority of the people I am working with, learn things “slowly, step-by-step, one thing at a time, individually, and above all, seriously.” (Marc Prensky: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Par. 12)

I think that’s a little of what I’ve, perhaps we’ve, been bumping up against here. We’re going to fast. I’ve been going to fast.

My bloglines account daily buzzes with new and exciting ideas that grab my mind and leave me breathless as I try to wrap my head around them. It’s happening fast, but people (read digital immigrants) in many cases, adapt slow. My job is to realize that and stop smacking my head up against it in frustration. Instead I need to slow down. Come along side. Get personal, and above all, use the right language when I try to show, tell and invite.

A year old post over at Alan Levine’s cogdogblog nails this all home.

“Just building an online community, and announcing it will not make it happen. Sure, in a class, you make it required for students, but that carrot is not present.

It takes time, whole lot more than you would ever think is reasonable. Same for patience, and perseverance.
Our faculty co-chairs however are mystified, and wondering why their own colleagues could not spend say 5 minutes to read and post a comment to a discussion board. This underscored my belief that even in this electronic age, we need to go out there and talk to people face to face, or sit down with them at their computers, and spend a lot more time in real conversations to get them “in”. Our initiatives are all brand new, still forming, and people do not yet have a clear picture or set of expectations.

It takes much more than technology to build online communities.”(Levine)

Isn’t that the truth? We’re in a digital age, but real conversations and face to face time is still, and will always be, a part of our reality. Ignore this at your peril. I have, and will do my best to grind to a flintstone stop.

Just fell through a post, and followed a comment or two that really got me thinking. The first one comes from James Farmer at incorporated subversion.

The point: Blogging is the exercise and development of personal presence, and this simply doesn’t happen on group or team blogs.

I then followed the link that sparked Farmer’s post off, Alan Levine’s “Does Not Blog Well With Others” post. Aside from the great title and intro, this post really is a thinker, and raises some great points that I know I want to consider more.

If I were a student in Blog School, the parental note they send home from my blog teachers might bear the comment, “Alan writes a lot, but he does not blog well with others”.

What I hope to get at by the end of this ramble is how, to me, in my opinion, this is not a universal rule… the power and enticement of blogging is the sense of ownership of a place of your own making. You own it, it is a relfection, sometimes fun house mirror distorted, of yourself. It is what the storytellers refer to as “finding your voice” (and using it). You are an editorial board of one, and the review process is instantaneous.

But as your own place, you have a lot of investment in what is there or a lot of reason to focus your energy there. It is yours and yours alone.” (Levine)

I find myself totally agreeing here. To me, one of the best parts of blogging is that it’s my turf. Noone else can tell me what to think, how to think, where to go with my thinking etc.

It is also, as Levine mentions, is where I’ve started to find my own voice, and where I’m free to polish, redefine, and develop it.

I also enjoyed his ideas around investment. When its yours, you invest with great freedom and generosity because it “feels like home.” (Levine par. 5)

From here I scrolled down to the comments where I really found myself identifying with Graham Wegner’s comments around his own efforts to team blog with a group of teachers.

I would like to repost his comment here, as it really speaks to the whole issue that I would like to address:

Alan, I post at two blogs - my own Teaching Generation Z
and one set up for my colleagues here at my school as we work through an IWB program. I am tending to agree with you because the team blog ActivBoarding which I post to regularly as a way of “trying” to encourage my fellow staff members is dominated by my content but is fairly shallow compared to what I explore on my own piece of webspace. It has been mistaken by other bloggers as being one of “my” blogs but actually I wanted ActivBoarding to be everyone putting in their own bits and pieces on a regular basis so you only had to look in one spot to see what was going on in our school. But the fact that they are not means they don’t have the ownership you’re talking about to be committed or even bothered to do so. And I will always “save” my most pressing / important posts for my own blog so you could argue, my commitment to the team thing is a bit superficial as well. Yet a part of me still wants to keep it going! Very though provoking.

The part that really got to me was

“I am tending to agree with you because the team blog ActivBoarding which I post to regularly as a way of “trying” to encourage my fellow staff members is dominated by my content but is fairly shallow compared to what I explore on my own piece of webspace.”

Ouch. I’m in the same boat. Where I work, we’ve set up a “team blog” as a space for our teaching staff to reflect on sessions in our professional development program.

Our teachers have been contributing, but only after much “encouragement” and “whip cracking.”

To their credit, the ones who do participate often create well thought out posts…but they are totally lacking in personality…ownership…authenticity, VOICE!

Their posts answer our PD questions, but in most cases the conversation is lost. This group blog space seems to have downgraded into “take in and vomit out.”

There is a great lack of deepness, of exploration and connecting to rest of the blogsphere. They simply answer their “homework” question and that’s it. Next post is when there is more homework to do.

That realization makes me feel…uncomfortable. I have a sneaky feeling that there may be no rescue for my team blog. Afterall, is blogging when you get a bunch of people to use blogging software? Don’t think so.

Is professional reflection working if you have to chase down and cajole the participants?

My whole point behind the group blog was to have a way to connect our teachers. We are usually scattered about the city teaching English classes. Connecting really happens on paydays when everyone comes in for money. But that’s payday! Our brains aren’t in professional development mode, they’re in “show me the money” mode. So PD talking and reflecting is not an option on these days.

So I thought….team blog. A great way for everyone to stay in touch with everyone else, and jointly explore and talk about what we’ve been covering in our PD sessions.

Sounds great on paper, but I’ve been struggling with getting past the “take off” phase since July of this year.

Just doesn’t seem to be working. It’s not really deep. There isn’t room for voice, at least not yet, and our so called “conversation” has turned into tacking comments onto “question” posts.

This is a weird post, and I do apologize. But more and more I’m starting to agree with Farmer, Levine, and Wegner. Group blogs likely don’t work too well.

I guess I’ve just invited myself to haul out the old drawing board and rethink all this.

I eagerly give you the floor…

More thinking around Brian Alger’s post - Curriculum:The Design of the Prerequisite.

If you’re involved in course/curriculum design, of if you live and work inside of one, you should grab a cup of coffee (make it extra strong!) and try to wade through his post.

All I can say is that my head is still mostly spinning after a third read of this amazing piece. Lots of things to think about and ponder that’s for sure.

“Education and Curriculum are interdependent.” (Alger par.4)

We’ve been discussing the use of blogs in the classroom and the difficulties and walls we seem to be bumping up against from the system we work within. I would like to venture a guess that what we’re running into is the curriculum.

Agler points out that “curriculum is the most basic technology for control and authority in education.” To me, this means that if you are involved in educating - or “training by formal instruction and supervised practice especially in a skill, trade, or profession”(qtd. from Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary) then you are by default, also heavily involved in a curriculum.

Tonight’s thought:
Perhaps curriculum is neither a bad thing nor a good thing. It simply exists. It’s a part of our educational institutions, and is likely to remain so for a very long time. A curriculum can become a bad or good thing depending on the one who wields it.

In the hands of the wrong person, a curriculum becomes a one sided speech that students are forced to listen to and obey. It becomes ” a one-way technology - a push technology - a system of mass communication.”(Agler par. 5) One way. Push. Tune into this program or you fail the year or you fail the big exam at the end. One message to many, and many dialing in on one message.

Curriculum can cooly kill off passion and joy in the classroom as teachers are forced to follow the track and not deviate, and students are downgraded into passive receivers of information.

J.M., a fellow teacher who is also my brother, has written a fantastic post which explores the tension between following the curriculum and blogging.

“Part of my angst is over the seeming contradiction between the inherent open-endedness of the blog platform versus the mandated, closed nature of the literature 12 curriculum. From the research I have done, blogs and social software have been created for a multiple of personal topics. My own blog categories is indicative of this, as it ranges from education to faith and social justice. The blog reflects the blogger.”

“The lit. 12 platform seems to be on the opposite end of this spectrum. It is reflected in the proscribed reading list, and lack of flexibility in teaching (I will give the curriculum this, they do openly state that these are the ‘minimum’ readings and that students should be encouraged to read beyond the course requirements, but as an educator who is trying to equip his students for success in this course–read success on the provincial exam as well as in the course– I have a lot of cognitive dissonance over introducing any ‘extra’ texts into the course package and adding to the workload of all. So, in short, it seems that although ‘going beyond the course’ is encouraged, there is no intrinsic ‘reward’ for classes who do so. In this sense, I find the curriculum, ie the mandated reading list, to be constrictive and confining.” (Palimpsest redux)

It’s personal, social connectedness, and exploration vs. perscribed, lack of flexibility, constriction and confinement.

If we’re at all interested in our students, and being student centered teachers - and boy we had better be because it’s all about them in the first place, then we need to be thinking hard about the curriculum we are working with and under.

Curriculums BY NATURE, according to Agler, are “fundamentally a technology designed to control and impose authority.” (Agler par. 3)

While we do need to follow through with the “must knows,” we need to also make space inside the curriculum for the student and ourselves. If not, we run the terrible risk of falling into a deep joyless void where the curriculum

“exclude(s) the thoughts, ideas and experiences of the students in the educational process, or at least (…) denigrate(s) the role of student to receiver. The effect is much the same for teachers since they do not have any meaningful input into the fundamental structure of curriculum. Often, the best as teacher can do is to try an integrate creative approaches to instructional design. The problem here, of course, is that the nature of this creativity is completely subsumed, framed and shaped by the curriculum - a force that is external to them as well.” (Agler par.5)

Stephen Covey, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, gives a great explanation around the word responsible. We are the only ones on the planet who can be exposed to a stimulus, and choose our response. We can think about what we will do as a result of something that happens OUTSIDE OF OUR CONTROL, and then act. There is a space between the stimulus and our action where we can learn how to think first, and act more responsively. We are a response - able people.

Curriculum is something that is largely out of our control. We can either get run over by it, or learn how to respond in a way that is congruous to our “must knows” but also that is friendly to student and teacher.

To be continued, but until then the floor is yours…

I’m listening to a skypecast over at weblogg-ed that I’m totally enjoying. Right now Barbara Ganley (a vetren classroom blogging teacher) is talking about modeling, portfolios, assessment - wow! If you’re working with blogs in the classroom, or thinking about it…you need to check this skypecast out.

Weblogg-ed Barbara Ganley Skypecast.