My Wife Wrote The Post I'd Been Working On. And I Had A Blogger Format Blowout

My wife made her first iMovie as part of the learning differences/student support fellowship work she's been doing this year. The film asked students and teachers to address the same four prompts:

1. Describe a successful learning experience.

2. Describe an unsuccessful learning experience.

3. Describe the steps you take to learn something new.

4. An effective learner is...

Some thought-provoking patters emerged, as summarized in my wife's post.

Remixing Curriculum: An Interview With Lisa Stewart

Last month, I had the opportunity to attend the Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco. The areas of focus were: brain plasticity, learning styles, reading development, emotional responses, and mindsets. If you're interested in more details in these areas, I've been posting my notes, albeit slowly, to Watsoncommon. What I want to write about in this post is a question I asked at the conference for which there wasn't a research-based answer.

It goes like this:

I was in a session about engaging students emotions with curriculum and leveraging their brain's social needs with activities in class. As you can imagine, the examples covered in the session were things like group work, task-specific stations, anticipatory sets that give students the opportunity to generate the essential questions for a unit. And there was all kinds of brain research to show that these kinds of activities trigger the best hormone balance for long-term, meaningful learning to happen. My question was if virtual social environments and activities also create the same ideal brain chemistry for learning.

Apparently, there is no research in this area yet, according to the presenter. So at my school, this has become somewhat of a guiding question. What are effective practices with technology and what are the results? And there are a handful of teachers who are purposefully employing and reflecting on new kinds of activities with these questions in mind. To frame the creation of these activities, we've been using Marzano's research on effective instruction as structure: Identifying similarities and differences, Summarizing, Reinforcing efforts and providing recognition, Practice, Nonlinguistic representations, Cooperative learning, Setting objectives and providing feedback, Generating and testing hypotheses, Cues, questions, and advanced organizers. Let me know if you're interested in the full article.

Lisa, mentioned in my first guest post, is one of the teachers (she's a technology resource teacher too) designing and implementing activities in her class that not only use the technology but explore these essential questions. The other week, I subbed her class and learned about a remix project that she'd given to her students. It was an opportunity to create a nonlinguistic representation of their understanding of Holden Caulfield. In this podcasted interview, Lisa describes the design of the assignment, some observations of the products, and how it led to a different kind of essay. Also embedded below are some example projects, one of which she references in the interview. The Voicethread blew me away! Enjoy.

First Guest Post For Beyond School

Well, I'm supposed to be guest blogging over at Beyond School starting today. But Clay and I are still working out some login problems. So I'm going ahead and posting what I will be posting over there:

How I Came To Blog: Talking Story As Integration

I work as, what we call here, a Technology Resource Teacher. Essentially, I'm an English teacher that's been willing to experiment with integrating technology into curriculum, and I've been asked to only teach one class so during the rest of the day I can collaborate with other teachers on all things tech. The high school side of my school has a brand new 1:1 program this year, and there are 4 others that do what I do to help 150 or so faculty (we have 3700 student K-12). What I quickly learned this year is that no matter how many and what kind of workshops we run, how many emails with links and descriptions we send, or who we bring to speak at our curriculum days (these are all amazing resources!), what works best and what people seem to appreciate most is one on one time to work together and talk story about classes, students, curriculum, and where the laptops fit. So I thought I'd do a little of that here in my first guest post. Congratulations Clay!

Two years ago, I hardly knew what a blog was, and, frankly, I didn't feel the need to spend any more time in front of my computer than absolutely necessary. Then, at the beginning of last school year (06-07), I was assigned to teach an upper level Composition course. Pretty generic title, which really should have read: creative non-fiction essay writing. In an English department of nearly 30 teachers, there was only one other person teaching the course that semester. Our weekly meetings were talking story about writing, student writing, the purpose of writing, authenticity of audience, amongst other Englishy (not schooly) topics. At some point Lisa, my colleague, started to tell me about having her students blog their compositions and journals. She explained the idea of a blogosphere, a network of writers interested more or less in the same topics, reading and commenting on each others' posts. Then, it was the concept of the blogroll, something called del.icio.us. Organically, the next move seemed to be to try this thing out for myself and my students. Where blogs seemed like they'd fit best was as digital commonplace books; we ask all sophomore to keep an analog version for a quarter to follow and reflect on essential questions and critical thinking exercises. That sounded good, and Watsoncommon began.

I realized a lot of things during the first few months of blogging. Namely, it could easily take over my life. But I welcomed the intellectual insurgency. I didn't write great stuff, but I had a reason (and an audience of 1, maybe 2) to pay patient attention to what happened during my day, in my class. I needed material. This went on, and in early 2007, my wife stumbled on a wiki where edubloggers and blogging classes were listing themselves.(Do you remember this one Clay?) Near the top: "B"eyond School, where there was a call for blogging classes to collaborate. I replied.

Creating our own 2-class blogosphere was a noble first effort, and some really interesting conversations emerged here and there. What became apparent after this collaboration was that the web 2.0 tools were more powerful than we knew, yet the challenge was the same as ever: getting students to be active participants in their own education. Clay's 1001 Flat World Tales writing project on a wiki came next. Being far more teacher-driven, the students had an easier time moving through the project. But Clay, Michelle, and I spent many weekends skyping at respective odd hours and driving the wiki for the kids. Not to mention we had committed ourselves to a grueling 6 week time frame. In the end, we had an annotated and podcasted trail of breadcrumbs, an ebook, some good stories, some engaged students, and a lot of new ideas for the next collaboration. Now, I'm a week deep in 1001 Flat World #2 with Deb Baker's class in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, and I'm getting far more sleep this time around.

Since that semester of enlightenment, it's been Moodle, Twitter, Diigo, Ning, the list goes on. Not to mention planning and implementing the vision for our 1:1 program. At some point a couple months ago, I found myself coming full-circle, away from the tools, widgets, and gadgets to stories. The story of collaboration, the story of communication, the story of empowerment, the story of sustainability and stewardship, the story of apprenticeship, the stories of learners. And the stories have me asking these questions:
What is an education?
How can we engage the emotions, passions, and original ideas of students more?
How does a large, successful independent school become a culture of technology?
How can we empower students with an understanding of the way they learn and then nurture it daily?

Okay, I Get It Know: Asynchronous Audio

I sat down to do one thing and ended up doing something completely different. Planning to prep some podcastable media for my guest blogging appearance on Beyond School later this week, I transfered some voice memos that I'd captured on my iPod with my Belkin mic to my iTunes. And I realized that I have 31 untitled voice memo files that at some point I had grand plans for but now sit unrealized. So I decided to listen to a few seconds of each and give them searchable, intuitive titles. Well, a few seconds of each turned in to listening to entire conversations, class discussions, class readings of essays, tour guides from professional development trips, and so on.

This stuff is good. I've always known in theory that it'd be great to have an audio inventory of all the voices from a class or a conversation. But until today, I didn't understand how it could affect learning. I have a hard time getting into podcasting, in general. Not enough time, long episodes, unfamiliar voices, indulgent subject matter, etc. But all that was totally different when I started listening to familiar voices from my own experiences. I was right back on that trip to see Kent Koth at Seattle U's Center For Community Engagement; right back to that outdoor lecture with a docent at Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park; right back to those student-led Harkness discussions of The Poisonwood Bible; right back to close and active reading of creative non-fiction essays in composition last year. (I'm not even halfway through the voice memos at this point). And as a teacher, it's helping me find that elusive-at-the-two-weeks-before-spring-break center for my curriculum and projects. It's empirical, primary source material straight from my class, and in some ways it's a little different than the way my memory molded the anecdotes. As a student, I can only imagine how helpful this resource would be and the ways in which asynchronous audio can be leveraged as a learning tool.

flickr credit: mishkaoutofcontrol

Is A Culture Of Technology Synonymous WIth A 1:1 Laptop Program?

Today I sat with a colleague and watched a webinar on emerging technologies and how to plan for them in a school context. One of the interesting ideas that was presented had to do with what they called mLearning, the m standing for mobile. One of the tools referenced was the U3 Smart Drive.
Carrying one around in my pocket all year, I had no idea that I could transport more than my files. What I learned is that I can store applications like Firefox and Skype. So the concept is that all I need is my drive, and I can plug into any computer anywhere and access my own apps and settings. Lots of implications. I wonder if there are schools out there leveraging these instead of asking their students/parents to pay for laptops?

PGC In Australia

I'm not going to lie, Project Global Cooling in Hawaii was really stressing me out. I thought that maybe I had gotten myself into something I wouldn't be able to finish. But students have come to the rescue. We've got a club going. We're starting to gather sustainability projects and post them to the PGC site. Our concert planning continues to move forward. And best of all, PGC has led to new collaborations with schools around the world.

Yesterday's Skype with Jenny Luca's class in Melbourne, Australia came just in time. Lately, my days have been filled with meetings, leaving barely enough time for my own class, and next to no time for professional development 2.0. So thanks Jenny for inviting us to talk with your class about our school's sustainability initiative.

flickr photo credit: emptybelly

Technorati Tags: projectglobalcooling, collaboration

Schooliness is: Open Thread

For awhile I've been reading Beyond School where Clay Burell uses the word schooliness in his description of his blog and personal learning mission. I've always felt like I knew exactly what he meant by it. But I was excited to see Wes Fryer's interview with Clay and his open thread invite to ruminate and define the word. I've actually had a hard time while thinking about it since it could easily become a list of complaints about constraints in our respective school contexts. Here are some of my ideas:

Schooliness is a system where grade negotiation is the main motivator for students to come conference and visit with teachers.

Schooliness is the void between what teachers know about how to learn and what students have to guess about how they learn.

Schooliness is the fear of evaluation when colleagues visit your classroom.

Schooliness is believing that there are certain texts that all students need to read.

Schooliness is teaching English as if all the students are on a literature professor career track.

Schooliness is the assumption that becoming a doctor or a lawyer is the pinnacle of academic accomplishment, and the purpose of secondary education.

Technorati Tags: schooliness, openthread, education, standards, school

flickr photo credit: duconihilum

Depth vs. Breadth: English and Technology

Lately, I've had two thought experiments running in my mind, and now they seem to have converged into one theme: depth vs. breadth. First, my life as a technology resource teacher has changed dramatically since the beginning of the second semester. The backstory is that this is our high school's first year with a 1:1 program for freshman, next year sophomore, and so on.

So first semester, there wasn't a lot of action for me, just a few classroom visits to set up blog accounts or help an early-adopter with an innovative project. Besides that, with my reduced teaching load, I had at least a couple hours a day to read and comment on blogs, explore their links and ideas, employ them in my own class, and keep up with my own blog. I felt like I was really in the pocket of the educational technology wave.

Now, my department is off and running, leading the school in the ways they're employing technology: blogs, wikis, moodle, Ning, Diigo, del.icio.us. And my calendar no longer allows for that exploration time I described above. This is a really good thing! However, I find myself rushing around a lot, trying to fit it all in: exploration and implementation. And in my own class, I find myself less willing to give myself permission for new ideas to be messy and maybe even fail. Although just identifying this has allowed me to get back to being real with myself.

That's all just about the situation that has allowed me to extend my thinking to the question of breadth and depth in implementing technology in a school. What I mean is I could really get behind a schoolwide blogging initiative, and I could focus all my attention on figuring out how blogs can be educationally transformative in all kinds of ways. Or, is it good to keep pushing and pushing forward. Blogs are great in school, but there must be a bunch of other tools that are just as good and better.

It's easy to see that the answer is both. So I guess the question becomes how do you know when you've struck on something that you should keep around and build on?
Just needed to write it to think about it. I'm happy to surf it.

The second line of thinking is similar but has to do with text selection in freshman English. The first comparison is that every new thing for the past few year at least seems to have made sense to put into the freshman curriculum. Now, there's too much, and it's too disconnected. Each of us teachers pick from the menu something different, and leave out the rest. Or else, in the name of being a good soldier, we try to cram it all in. There's talk about a project-based common experience. And there's talk about the value of common reading. And there's talk about whether there are particular texts that freshman need to read. And again, all of it is really good, and it all should be included. So how do you pick the best of what's really great? In the end, I feel lucky that I'm in a place where I get to spend time considering such important questions.

And This Is 19th Century Education

I've made it a goal to get back to posting to my blog every school day. So, not knowing what to post today, I took a scroll through my email and came across a strand that seemed to juxtapose nicely with yesterday's post. An 8th grade final exam from 1895 was being forwarded around and discussed. I'm not really interested in what it shows about education then and now, just thinking about the differences and similarities. Here it is:

Grammar (Time, one hour)

1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.

2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no Modifications.

3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.

4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb. Give Principal Parts of. lie, lay and run.

5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.

6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.

7. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)

1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.

2. A wagon box is 2 ft deep, 10 feet long! , and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?

3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?

4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?

5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton

6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.

7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per meter?

8 Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent

9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods

10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

U. S. History (Time, 45 minutes)

1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.

2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.

3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.

4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.

5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.

6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.

7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?

8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865

Orthography (Time, one hour)

1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?

2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?

3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, sub vocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?

4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.

5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e'. Name two exceptions under each rule.

6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.

7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.

8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.

9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.

10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)

1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?

2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?

3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?

4. Describe the mountains of North America.

5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.

6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S

7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.

8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?

9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.

10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.

Apparently, this test has been in circulation on the web for awhile. It's original intent was to show how education in America had declined since 1895. Here's some more discussion and background.

Flickr Photo Credit: Scott Crouse
Technorati Tags: education, 21stcenturylearning, standards, standardizedtests, school

This Is 21st Century Learning

At my school, we're most interested in the question:
How does technology transform instruction?
Well, here's how:
Lindsea started blogging last year in my sophomore English class. Unfortunately, a lot of what she had to blog was my assignments. But the class also had opportunities to start their own conversations on their blogs, and we were lucky enough to blog with Clay Burell's class in South Korea. We were all trying to figure it out.
Fast forward to the beginning of this school year, I noticed that there are new items in my "students" Reader folder. A few students are writing on their own. A few more are using their blogs for other classes.
Lindsea becomes a sophisticated web2.0 regular. She write for Students 2.0 and organizes grassroots fundraisers using her networks.
Then she writes this post in which she describes Project Global Cooling, student-owned collaborative web space, and sustainability at our school. Within the conversation about her post, she connects with a middle school teacher in Qatar. They decide to collaborate. She Skypes with his class at 2:30 in the morning, teaching them about environmental issues in Hawaii, and what we're trying to do about them.
Now, she's planning her senior independent project for next year. Not only is the project going to be for her, but she's designing a project that will lay the foundation for other students here to find their own Personal Learning Networks.
Transformative.

Flickr photo credit: iurikothe
Technorati Tags: ProjectGlobalCooling, Lessonplans, differentiatedinstruction, sustainability, web2.0,

Curriculum Day With Alan November

Alan November was here to address our faculty and parents on Tuesday, and lead small workshops with various groups yesterday. For the edtech set, it was confirmation of the power of connective learning. What was interesting to me was the discussion of how to get more people engaged in web communication and collaboration technologies, especially in a K-12 school with a democratic leadership structure, 4000 students, and a high school faculty of 150+. Essentially, he laid out six things that should be happening in classrooms:

1. There should be a curriculum review team made up of four students, assigned jobs like: writer, mixer, editor. They produce a podcast each week reviewing the lessons and content.

2. There should be a tutorial design team that creates screencasts for further review. Alan suggested using Jing for screencasting. (I used to use screencast-o-matic, but Jing can do more, and screencasts are easy to embed in a Moodle page or blog or anything else.)

3. Student questions should not be answered by the teacher. Instead students should be charged with finding the answers and using social bookmarking tools to organize resources. In addition, students teachers and students should become expert web researchers and create their own custom search engines for class topics and questions.

4. Three to four students should be official scribes for the class, collaborating to write and share notes in Google Docs.

5. Each class should have a global communications team, leveraging tools like: ePals, Skype, Technorati.

6. Students should manage RSS feeds relevant to curriculum and communications.

Learning And The Brain: Keynote by Larry Cahill Ph.D.

I tried to tap into Dr. Cahill's research on emotional memories in my last post, but here are the notes I took during his keynote at Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco, which also addresses gender, hormones, and brain hemispheres. Some of my notes are in my own words and some phrases are Dr. Cahill's. I apologize for not quoting well here.

Basic Premise: Memory (the brain function) creates self. And, emotion disproportionately sculpts the brain. So, how, again, can we leverage this for effective teaching and learning? And how can this knowledge empower students?

Part I: Background – Brain Mechanism of Emotional Memory
•Memory is active, constructive, and based on orientation. Throughout the building process, perceptions are created.

•Amygdala is the structure in brain that's central for making strong memories of emotional events. It works together with stress hormone response: during and after events, feeds information back to brain. Amygdala works harder in emotionally arousing situations; doesn't care about neutral situations.

•Stress hormones enhance memory storage.

•New technique for measuring response is brain imaging, which is leading to awareness of difference between men/women brain.

•Activation happening on different sides of the brain: right side in men; left side=only women in response to stress hormone.


Part II: Sex Influences On The Brain

•What does it mean for education and learning?
•Classical difference, no debate:
On average men can rotate images better (visual fluency).
Women have more verbal fluency.
Many differences on the psychological level.

What about on the brain level?

• 1970 hippothalmus was difference.
• Differences are ubiquitous
• Incluences everything
  

• Differences now:
• Size of brain regions
• Levels of neurotransmitter
• Females have lower levels of serotonin
  
• Women more depressed 2 to 1; drugs boost it for depression
• Uncovering differences that aren't understood yet
• Hippocampus cell experiments with knocking out molecules
• Results in memory deficits in male mice, not female
• Cell cultures – differences on this level
• Neurons die, why?
• Different depending on where they came from: male or female

Part III: The Blinders Come Off: Sex Influences On Brain Mechanism Of Emotional Memory
• Sexes are not two different groups; two groups with overlap
• What are the findings?

• Right hemisphere is gist of situation
  
• left hemisphere better at details
• Amygdala can be blocked, beta blockers
• Experiment with emotional story:
• Females remembered gist
• Men remembered details

• There are memory differences:
• Women have better memory than men in general
• Better for details
• Outperform on these kinds of tests
• Left side is more engaged when emotions are involved
• What about without emotional stories?
• Amygdala works with left side in women, right side in men
  

more notes soon...

Technorati Tags: brain, research,, learning

Leveraging Emotions For Learning And Brain-Based Activities With The Cather In The Rye

(This post has been under construction for a week (that's how busy it is here). Hence, the dates are off a bit)

I got back to Honolulu yesterday after attending the west coast Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco. There's a lot to process and disseminate after three days of learning about the latest in neuroscience research and how it's applicable to education and specific classroom practices. Of course, the first people I wanted to talk to about all this were my students. So I shelved Catcher In The Rye for a day (maybe for a few more days) to empower them with some understanding of how they can leverage their intelligences, learning styles, emotions, and the plasticity of certain parts of their brain. Here's what I did:

Activity:
Monday morning, I announced pop quiz on the first three chapters of Catcher In The Rye.
Brain-based connection:
As they reacted in fear to my announcement, I explained that I wanted to let them in on some secrets about their brain and the way they learn. Their emotional and physical reaction to my announcement was a change in their brain chemistry. Cortizol had washed their brain, hindering their ability to learn and access their long-term memory. The best thing they can do about it is drink water.

Activity:
I explained that this was a two part quiz, and there was no way to fail. Part 1: List ten summary statements about what they read over the weekend. Look for details.
Part 2: They had to clap out a rhythm together, then go around the circle giving new facts about the chapters.
Brain-based connection:
The rhythm engages the right brain, the summaries engage the left. To do both forces connections between the two hemispheres, which foster better long-term memory learning. Not to mention that it was fun and active. We continued to talk about leveraging their brain chemistry and identifying what they can do for themselves.

Transition:
Now that I had their interests piqued, I wanted to connect more brain secrets to effectively exploring The Catcher In The Rye, so I asked them to free write about specific emotional highs and lows in their lives. The homework extension was to collect visuals symbolic of their highs and lows and construct a "high/low" collage.

Extension/Connection:
The next day, we had a gallery walk to view everybody's collages. Specifically, I asked the students to look for and record patterns they see in the collages. Next, I asked them to translate their observations into questions about what it's like to be a teenager. They came up with questions like: why are friends so important to happiness? Why are so many emotional lows connected with anxiety over grades? What is the importance of outdoor activities in a person's life? And so on.
My pitch was that now that they are invested emotionally in a thinking about their experiences as a teenager, they are better equipped to interact with the novel they're reading.
Brain-based connection:
I learned that the most effective learning environment for teenagers is social, interactive, and emotionally engaging. Reading, as my students agreed, can easily be none of these if not properly framed. So not that they were engaged, I led them through some active reading strategies that would help create interaction with the text and put them at the center of the reading experience.
Questions
Assumptions
Observations
Inferences

more soon...

flickr photo credit 1: krischall
flickr photo credit 2: revcruz