After 16 Years
I realized the other day that this year marks the end of my 16th year of teaching. I started when I was 23 and now I'm 39. This should also mark the half way point in my teaching career as I should be eligible to retire when I'm 55.
I was really quite shocked to discover all of this. I've said before that teaching was the last career that I ever thought I would end up in. While I did decently in school, it was a place that I often chafed to be in. I was desperate to be finished school and away from the small town I had grown up in. The 18 year old I was would be quite shocked to see that I'm happily married with two sons, living in this same small town and teaching instead of living on a motorbike out of a backpack in California.
Shows the saying to be true: God laughs when man plans.
The last few years of my teaching practice has been transformative for both my understanding of what teaching is and of what it means to be a "teacher." While blogging and working with a like minded community of educators around the world has been the current phase of the journey, it actually has never really had a beginning point.
Right after I was finished university my wife and I moved to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. This experience opened my eyes to the world and to possibilities. It helped me to understand that the world can be seen through many lenses, all of which are legitimate. It helped me to see that people who live in different parts of the world and live in ways that may be strange to me are not "failed versions" of North Americans; but in fact may be living in ways that make more sense than we do.
After this two year contract we returned to North America and I soon found myself back teaching in my hometown. Teaching grade one in a place where a student told me one day "my mom says men shouldn't teach grade one." I told him that he needed to go home and tell his mom that men could do whatever they wanted to. From there it was on to a grade 2/3 split class, grade 4, grade 6, grade 8 and now a grade 7/8 group that I consider to be a combined class.
Along the way I completed a master's degree that changed how I thought about academics and learning. It was a great experience for me and I fell in love with ideas about the power of teaching and learning and the danger to the status quo that these things can be.
I also began to realize that I have a voice. I thought deeply about literacy first and technology second. The web came along and taught me about connections. Now I'm thinking about networks, about informatics and how information travels across the globe. I have been fortunate enough to work with both a critical audience and a caring community. I have traveled to, and spoken at, conferences in different parts of the world, teaching me ever more about education and context. I have seen schools and systems large and small and I can see the beauty of both.
When I first started this blog post I meant it to be a list of things I've learned, but I realize that there is no way to make that list. There are too many things I've been fortunate enough to do along the way. All I can say to people is:
- Care deeply about everyone around you, both students and colleagues. Even when no one else seems to; care.
- Learn from anyone and everyone. Be willing to talk and listen to anyone.
- Be open to the world and to new ways of seeing it. They are all valid and come from somewhere.
- Be thankful for the people who truly matter most. Like these folks:
A few years old now, but still one of my favourite pictures of my family.
Thanks for being part of my journey.
Tags: life
Techforum Midwest Keynote
I was in Chicago at the end of April to give the keynote presentation for Techforum Midwest.
Hunting around on their website tonight, I see that they have a link posted to a podcast version of my presentation and a link to my slides from the day.
The slides are kind of zen-y so you may need the audio to help you through them.
In any case it was a great day.
The audio can be found here and the slides are here.
Information Warfare and Classrooms
I'm 39.
When I was a kid growing up in a small town, I remember when we a second television channel came to town.
"The news" was a show that was on TV at 6:00 PM that my parents often used to watch. Our community had a newspaper that came out once each week.
As I grew older and both my community and myself became more connected we had more television channels, more magazines and newspapers available. As much as this seemed revolutionary to me, the news still came in drips and drabs, over channels that were broadcast out to the masses by editors who were in control over what we read, heard and saw. I also remember when CNN hit the air. A 24 hour news network, it was supposed to change everything as news moved from being "something that had happened" to "something that is happening."
But over the last few months and especially the last few weeks, I've begun to realize that the landscape is completely shifting again and I'm wondering about how we will begin to work within it in our classrooms.
Having spent two years living in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, I am very interested in events in the middle east. Lebanon and Iran are two nations that are on my "someday I must get there" list. This at least partially explains why I've been glued to my computer following all of the channels I can find about the events taking place in Iran. Although I've been a fairly heavy twitter user since I first signed on, in the last few weeks following first the Air France crash and now the battle for hearts and minds in Iran, I've learned a few new skills. I've learned how to search and filter through the trending topics, focus my searches to specific geographic areas of the globe and live in the middle of an information (and deliberate mis-information) war that is taking place online. Combine twitter with citizen created videos posted to YouTube, pictures posted to flickr and the more official channels of the BBC, CBC, and Al Jazeera and I think I have as solid of an understanding of the conflict that is taking place as anyone else who doesn't speak Farsi can have. In times like this, I wonder which channels are more likely to be more informative; the "official" networks who are being repressed and censored by the governments in power, or the "man on the street" accounts that are filling twitter, flickr, YouTube, blogs, wikipedia, etc.
We have information warfare being handled on a global scale in public as we have never seen before. With people posting server and proxy information for Iranians, open channels that they can get their news out on for the world to see, it makes me think about how these issues are no longer "news," instead they become "events" that we can not only read about, but participate in.
But this also makes me wonder about the kids in my classroom. When I think of classrooms filled with static textbooks that were printed years ago, how will students ever learn to navigate this news landscape? Developing news stories such as the attacks in India in the fall, the recent crash of the Air France flight from Brazil, the outbreak of the Swine Flu and now the growing undrest in Iran are unfolding across innumerable sources; both official and unofficial. Information has become decentralized and diverse. It comes as text, as video, and as still pictures. It comes on blogs, wikis that we can all join and paritcipate on as well as on micro blogging sites such as twitter and through email and instant messaging services. There is no single way to aggregate this information and pull it all together in one place, in all it's forms and filtering out what is true from what is not. A massive mash up of all things dumped online, it is up to each of us to serve as editors and filters of our own news channels.
This is how we must learn to study current world events in our classrooms. This is the state of literacy.
Photo Credit: http://portal.unesco.org/fr/files/8113/11607381033Communication_Information.jpg/Communication%2BInformation.jpg
Tags: informationwarfare, twitter, literacy, iran, criticalthinking, classrooms, currentevents
Playing with Opera
Opera Unite was released today.
Opera is a browser that I played with a few years ago and was pleased with it except for the fact that at that point, there were ads built right in and if you wanted them disabled you had to pay. Even then, I wasn't too happy about paying for software so I moved along to something else.
But today I cam back to Opera to play with Unite, the newest version. Opera is a solid browser. Fast, easy to use and configure, I soon had it up and running. But basic browsing isn't why I went back to Opera, I went back to try out the built in Unite features. Unite is a series of simple to configure web services that you can access from directly within the browser
Unite offers built in services that may prove powerful in the classroom. A built in private, password protected chatroom is one of them. Simply give kids the URL and you host the chat. You can also share files, photos or music easily; no uploading necessary. The first idea that comes to mind for me is that you could set up an entire module of material, hand outs, media, links, spreadsheets, etc; once again giving students the password needed and the URL and they could access all of the material.
For those of you at a higher geek level than I am (and that doesn't honestly take all that much), Opera also allows you to host your own website using the built in software to do this.
For the next few days I'm just playing. I haven't switched browsers since I moved to Flock when it first came out in the developer's version and moving to a new browser kind of makes me feel like I'm swimming in deep water. I'm not sure where everything is and I miss my built in blog editor and media uploader, but these new tools make this worth a try.
Technorati Tags: opera unite, browser, classroom
Engage or Censor?
As teachers we don't always agree with the opinions that students have in our classrooms. But does that mean that they don't have a right to express them?
One of the things I have enjoyed most about my end of year ning experiment has been the ability to engage students in discussion about the things they believe. By being able to hold these discussions it has given me a deeper look into some of my students than would have been possible without it.
For example, this posting was left by a grade eight student in my class in a forum in which students were talking about food aid to developing nations.
This was my response:
Unfortunately, she didn't seem to change her mind about this issue as here was her next posting:
Unfortunately, this being an end of year experiment, I don't have time to further engage this student on this issue on the ning. Her and I have talked further about this face to face in class and while neither of us are able to agree with the other, I still feel that it is important that we have had the opportunity to engage. I would like to see this student continued to be challenged in the hope that her mind could be changed about this issue.
As well, a discussion group has also emerged in our ning regarding issues that concern women. Responding to an earlier posting, this grade seven student wrote:
In my mind this posting was rude and bordered on inappropriate. But again, I chose to engage this student on their beliefs:
Interestingly, after this, several other students now chose to engage in the discussion:
Postings #1 and #3 are both made by the same male student (a different student from the one above) while #2 and #4 are made by the same female student. I was happy to see the results of this conversation. One engaged student challenging the beliefs of another with good results.
This conversation in this thread continued:
Posting #5 was made by the same male student who started this thread while #6 was the same female student from above who posted #2 and #4.
When we first began working in this ning several weeks ago, I was disappointed to see few students involved themselves in this discussion thread. As time went on and a few students began posting questions and comments that were on the edge of inappropriate, I was pleased to see more female students invovled themselves in the discussion and begin to publish their beliefs on the imortance of this issue. This one student for example deserves great credit for being articulate in defending her point of view.
Allowing students to publish online can be challenging as sometimes we cringe to see things in print that we don't agree with. We worry about the views of students gaining ground which we don't agree with. But I think it is vital that we engage these students rather than censoring their views. We also need to be confident that many times students will engage other students about the plausibility and appropriateness of their viewpoints. We do not bear the entire burden of the teaching when we work as a community; we become one voice among many.
This brings me back to ideas that I first began to encounter when I began blogging with students. The importance of the teacher being present in the discussions as both a guide and mentor is vital. We cannot engage students with tools without taking part in the discussions ourselves. We must be present in the space to set the tone of the discussions, to serve as an example, and as a vital voice.
Tags: ning, classroom, conversations
Workaround as Tech Skill
I'm wondering if creating a work around is a valuable tech skill for students to have.
Case in point:
Over the past several weeks we have been creating multiple episodes of podcasts and videos of local events and advice for teens. Over this time we've run into a few problems:
- our Windows machines would not create mp3s using audacity ( yes I know I need the lame plug in and yes I have it installed. Something to do with where audacity is installed compared to lame - a Windows permissions error which apparently I don't have permission to fix)
- we tried multiple options for rendering the movies out of our Pinnacle Studio software. Some were better than others.
- some of our machines which have Pinnacle loaded on them are not being cooperative when it comes to creating titles and transitions.
- other random shut downs and Windows freeze ups that happen when dealing with large file sizes combined with older software and machines that have been around for a few years.
These are regular, everyday sort of troubles that people have when they enter a computer lab with a class. (as a side point, these are also the kinds of trouble that chase teachers trying out new things out of the computer lab and make them promise never to enter again unless they can be guaranteed that things will absolutely work)
For us, these problems took on a more philosophical nature: "this isn't working. What else can we do to get where we need to be?" So we devised a different work arounds. We exported files from audacity elsewhere and made mp3s so we could post our audio products to blip.tv. We played with rendering options until we came up with the smallest file sizes with the best quality that we could send to our YouTube channel. We used Microsoft's pre - installed paint program to make our own title slides for the videos.
All of these are problem solving experiences. Identify the problem. Be analyical about options. Keep the goal in mind. Work through, over and around problems instead of focusing on them. In the end, I'm happy with many of the creations that these grade seven and eight students are completing. Making multiple episodes is a different experience and requires different skills than simply producing something as a single, stand alone experience. Add to that the problem solving experience we are gaining and I believe this has been a valuable project.
Photo Credit: Baby's Birthday Cake: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3649/3408987201_f68818f210.jpg
Tags: tech, skills, classroom, work around, audacity, pinnacle, video, audio, creation
Blogs, Wikis and Ning
This is why I love social tools.
I posted on twitter this AM that I was checking through my classroom's ning for hotspots of activity; places that as a teacher I needed to spend time asking questions and guiding some of the discussions that are happening. Soon I found myself deep into a conversation that began with Jenny Luca in Australia and Jabiz Raisdana in Qatar. The three of us discussed the different possibilities of forming communities using blogs, wikis and ning.
Opening our conversation up to others, we soon had a cascade of people commenting on community building efforts using different 2.0 tools. We found common ground best expressed by John Maklary from Texas who expressed it this way:
and
This second idea is one that was expressed by a few people who joined the discussion. Nings are great places, and in them opportunities abound for communities to grow and emerge. But many people felt that the blog space provided in the social network is a weak point. I understand the philosophy behind their inclusion. The creators of ning possibly felt that providing a blog space would allow people to host discussions in the groups and forums and then use the provided blogs as a place to "head home" to, where they could reflect and comment on what was being written about in the communal spaces. But few found them to work that way. Instead, many people (including myself) called for a wiki to be provided by ning. We felt that in a classroom, a ning is a communal space where discussions are held, but that having a wiki as well would allow documents to be created that are more in the form of final understandings; tieing together what has been discussed.
And through the wonder of technology, what happened next in our twitter discussion is that ning's representative on twitter popped up into our conversation:
First of all, kudos to ning for having a responsive presence on twitter, using the medium in real time to trouble shoot problems and questions.
Second of all, lauraoatning pointed us to an artilce about the launch of ning apps that was recently featured on mashable, providing an (at least partial list) of applications that you will soon be able to embed directly into your ning space. Some of these inlcude a wiki, a ustream channel, google docs, twitter, etc., etc. The full article and the list is here.
This is great news. Using ning in my classroom (even for only this short time this year as an experiment) has allowed me to see the possibilties with kids. But it has been lacking in customization. My vision and throughts for my space, how I want to form and direct it, may be very different from others; but up until now I haven't been able to change the space to fit what I need it to do. Now I'll be able to do that.
Lots to think about today.
Tags: jennyluca, jabiz raisdana, john maklary, ning, classroom, mashable,
Ning Leaders
One thing that has been interesting to watch in the first few days of our classroom work with ning is the emergence of a few online leaders.
Just as I first learned when I began blogging with my classroom 4 full years ago, the leaders are not necessarily those who you would expect. As I have given the kids two specific categories to work within (Significant Contribution and Expanding the Conversation) some of them have been so focused on the first category that they have been missing out on the second. For example, a few students who are true research rock stars have started streaming content into the ning in large quantities. These students are those who have great research skills and can synthesize what they find, putting information together into a usable form quickly. This allows them to contribute large amounts of content in a short period of time.
But these people are not necessarily those who are contributing the most to the conversation.
Ning leaders are those people who add to the content, but just as importantly (if not more so) add to the conversation. In the few days we have been using ning, several of my students have taken charge of groups or discussions. I didn't ask them to, but by contributing good questions and then being generally curious about the answers, these students have begun to pull in other students. I see this in small ways; some students ask questions of others. Some students disagree with something that has been posted and try to clarify their point of view. Others compliment people on what they have written and ask for more information. These are the people who are beginning to lead discussions. Simply looking through the activity on each of their accounts and seeing those who have been active in many places begins to lead me to these kids.
I showed examples in class today of different kinds of things I have seen on the ning. I showed them examples of places where people have posted information or of places where videos have been embedded. I showed them examples of discussion and of disagreement; trying to promote all of these ways of taking part in the conversation and of advancing the learning of the community as whole. It really has been interesting to see the kids begin again in a new space. Even if it is close to the end of the year, it has seemed to renew us and let us see new patterns of work. I'm still wondering about using a ning along with or instead of stand alone classroom blogs over an entire school year but this is something I need to mentally think through.
A new tool creates new patterns of use. Kids finding new pathways through and across a platform and through and across information. Need to keep watching to see what other nuggets emerge in the short time we will have in this space.
Tags: ning, classroom, student, leaders, information
Starting (and Ending) with Ning
As the school year is ending, I'm starting with Ning.
I spent the winter working with a great PLP cohort from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. As a PLP Community Leader, I had spent a lot of time working in the Ning environment and was quite comfortable with the technical aspects of adding members and working with the environment's appearance, but I was worried about the pedagogical aspects of adding another tool to my teaching. As well, with only have three weeks of school left until summer holidays begin; I was worried about helping a community to begin to grow in this time. I decided to begin a Ning on a trial basis, to see if in several intense weeks of class time I could begin to wrap my pedagogical hat around a community of this type.
So I started a community for my classroom.
We've moved in slowly this week, feeling our way through the space. As most of the students in my class have Facebook accounts, they were already familiar with terms such as "comment wall" and with the idea of "groups" that could be formed in a social space such as this. Building on working with a number of Global Issues topics that we were already pursuing in class, I started several groups for students to choose from. I thought this would provide a good scaffold for students and would also jump start the discussion process having only a limited number of weeks.
A few things I've seen so far:
1.) Some students began tackling the social aspects of the space first, spending a significant amount of time setting up their own space before doing anything else. They choose colours, fonts and themes for their own places. Some kids played with their profiles, making themselves 100 years old and uploading three or four different pictures before settling on one. I think this is an important part of the moving in process for some kids. They need time to play, to personalize and make a space their own before they can get into the academics. While we want them to move along, we need to be prepared to give them this time. I've found this to be true working with all online social tools.
2.) Some students jumped straight into the academic side, wanting to post information right away and establish themselves in the space. They also wanted to be the first to post information, this way staking out their space on a topic. While I think this is still a social move on their part, just as designing the space is a social move, it is different for different students.
3.) Students were impressed with all of the ways they could navigate through the ning and see what people have been doing. They checked groups to see who was contributing, they checked the overall activity file on the main page and they also like going through the profiles of their friends to see what they had been doing. I think these tools would be valuable as a teacher as well to see what individual students have been up to and how groups are developing.
4.) Building on the work I have done with wikis in the past, I have given some thought to thinking about the different types of activities that students have been contributing. With wikis, we have talked about significant contributions of material and about constructive modifications. With a ning, I am going to be looking still at significant contributions: times when students contribute a significant amount of material to move our understanding of a topic along. This might be starting a new discussion or adding a new understanding to what is already there. Unlike a wiki, there is no constructive modifications of material so instead I am going to be looking for students who are expanding the conversation. This might be through adding links to further resources, adding a small bit of new material, a link to a video, adding facts to a discussion that is already taking place or asking questions to push the conversation along into new spaces. All of these thingsare essential and need to take place.
5.) I have questions and concerns about students using a ning as a sort of classroom portal for the entire school year as opposed to just one certain project. I am wondering about keeping the space "tidy" over an extended period of time so I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has done this and about your experiences.
Two days into this project and these are my initial thoughts.
