I am responsible for the writing lab here at my school four nights a week. In essence, I am in charge of a space in the library that contains sixteen desktop computers mounted on closely spaced computer desks. Naturally, students come to me for help with the various forms of writing that we ask them to produce: research papers, arguments, poetry, presentations and so on. But then there are others struggling with all of the academic problems you might imagine in a group of high school students. Reading is what I want to talk about here.
In my classes each year, I do a timed reading assignment in class. This is a private school, so we supposedly don’t have many students who have pronounced learning disabilities, but even so, in a ten minute period of time the difference in the amount of reading that students in my classes demonstrate (almost always juniors and seniors) can vary by a factor of three or four, sometimes more. In the lab, I see students who have what is supposedly a 45 minute reading assignment who may have been struggling with that assignment for 30 minutes and are not a third of the way through it. I see other students who are not even dealing with the assignments; they are trying to find ways to sneak into Facebook when I am not looking. Most of them have not read a word; some of them may go to any of a number of sites on the web and take a look at a summary. Some of them have been cautioned by their teachers that such actions are honor code violations, so of course it is better to do nothing to learn the material than to be guilty of that trespass. I find this situation of missed reading and learning opportunities to be appalling.
The variation in reading abilities is a 900 pound gorilla. It sits in the room, and we ignore it. Maybe we insist that our students find their own way around the problem — being careful about the possibility of an honor violation. Some of us frown on the use of technology such as text to speech programs. I don’t know why. Of course reading is a necessary skill for survival in the modern world; that idea is a given. We humans are good at inventing tools to make it possible for us to do things that we could not do otherwise. We need to tell our students to use whatever tools they need to use to master the materials we ask them to master, and we need to help them find those tools.
In my classes, I ask my students to give me an honest twenty to twenty-five minutes of reading for homework — with or without help. If they do not finish the assignment, we work on it in class. I cannot guarantee that all of the students in my class will read every word in the literature that I am charged with teaching, but I can guarantee that they will be exposed to the language and that they will be exposed to the incredible ideas of the writers that we study. The faster readers will probably read most of the assigned work. I do not know that such will be the case, but I do know that other teachers that I have spoken to are not getting much more than half of the students in their charge to do all of the required reading. Could it be that we are asking for too much material to be covered in the time that we have? I don’t think so; I think that we are not being very intelligent when we do not allow the students to use the tools that are available — either technology or help from their peers. That is why I require twenty to twenty-five minutes of honest reading and combine that requirement with other means of learning the ideas in class. After all, they have five other classes.
Okay. Some will think that I am anti-academic, and I don’t understand the importance of having to dig out the meanings of all of these texts on my own. They may say that I miss the importance of the honor of doing that work individually. I don’t see that it is better not to know any of the material at all than to find any but the lonely, individual skull sweat methods of building understanding. If there is only that one way, then it is absolutely true: I don’t understand. I want my students to succeed and I encourage them to find creative ways to do so. The method that I describe is working. Am I missing something here? Am I making judgments about some of my fellow teaching professionals that are unwarranted. I wonder. All I do know is what I see in the lab and in my classroom. Something does need to change.
Like most teachers, each summer finds me taking some sort of course or going to some workshop or another. This course is changing the way I teach; I can think of no higher praise. I have played with some of the ideas that this course covers, but until I worked through the information here, it was difficult to find the time to master the tools and put them to work. Now, I feel comfortable; I know how to find the information that I need, the people I might need to bounce ideas off of, the new tools, the ways to network with my students and parents and other professionals. This course has opened my eyes to many new toys. Where I was walking through the forest and bumping into trees, I now am able to see the marks that others have made to show me a path.
Direct results of the course are that I have begun the process of making good use of the Google Reader to keep up with information that I find useful and fun; I am using Delicious and beginning to explore Diigo to organize and share the tons of information that I run into; I will be using Jing to create training videos for my students and other teachers here at Rabun Gap; my students in American Literature will be creating wikis and blogs; I am exploring the use of PageFlakes though I am not quite sure how to use it just yet. I am not sure what else I may explore with my students and fellow teachers. And I guess it is clear to all of us that new things will continue to show up.
I guess that the most important thing that remains to be said here is that my fellow student and I here at Rabun Gap think that everyone at our school should take this course. If we are serious about being life-long learners, constantly looking for better ways to engage our students, then the information presented in this course is essential.
I explored Classroom 2.0 in Ning, and I am happy with the material that I found. I learned a couple of new uses for PageFlakes, saw some interesting discussions of the relative usefulness of wikis and blogs, and learned about some creative uses for websites. After a night of thinking and reading, I went to a meeting with a fellow teacher this morning, and we have decided to set up groups of four or five students in our classes and have them to be responsible for creating wikis about the materials we study. Students will be required to keep a journal — which might have been done in the form of a blog if we had better access to computers — and use those journals in the creation of the wikis. The guidelines that we have chosen to use grew after reading through a number of comments from various teachers in Classroom 2.0 about using these tools; those discussions made it clear that we should make ourselves clarify the purposes we are trying to address and then choose the proper tool to fit. Of course, then there is the matter of serendipity, but that is another discussion.
I have posed the idea to a couple of teachers of creating a Ning site at our school to explore ideas about using technology in the classroom. I spent some time looking over descriptions of sites that are similar in focus as well as descriptions of sites created for students in specific classes at schools from elementary through high school. Unfortunately, many of these sites were open only to those who were in the specific communities that use them. Even so, the ideas are intriguing: A Ning site for an elementary science class, a site for a history class, a site for events in Darfur, a site for a library, a site for science fiction, a site for Magical Realism. I don’t know if all of these exist in the land of Ning, but I have seen them in the blogs and sites that I have been exposed to in the Reader as well as in the Ning forums. Maybe Ning is the best tool to bring us together; the best thing we can do is to explore the possibilities.
To begin — I had some trouble copying the Page Flakes template from K 12 Learning; for some reason it refused to copy to my page. I am not sure what I did wrong. In order to complete the task, I worked from the sample page provided by Page Flakes. It was fairly simple to refer to the K 12 page and place some of the flakes onto my page. I have not really played with this tool as much as I would like to yet, but I see some possibilities. For my literature classes, I can see setting up a page for each of the sections that we study — perhaps for movements or philosophies, for example. I guess that the ways of breaking up the information are nearly endless. Perhaps it would work best as an adjunct to Diigo or Delicious as a resting place for entries that have been vetted as the best. I am not sure; I would like to involve my students in the decision-making process for the use of this and other tools.
It might be useful to create a page for other teachers at our school to take a look at resources available in our network environment. All of us could add sources of information that we think useful, and we could cull the things that prove to be poor fits. I can foresee this kind of thing getting out of hand, but I think it would be fun to try.
The lessons of this course seem to say one thing very clearly: we need to work together and help each other to filter the incredible flood of information that we face each day. As we have learned, we are the ones who must organize this flood. Each of the ‘Things’ we have studied is a tool. I have just run across an idea to use PageFlakes to set up a page to keep up with the blogs of individual students in a given class. What a great idea.
I have been using the word processing tool of Google Docs for a bit more than a year. Last year, all of my students had a Google Docs account, and all essays were submitted through that tool. I encouraged collaborations between my students, and I offered to work with them online as they revised the papers. I set a cut off date, but up to that point papers could be revised as often as the student had time and inclination. It was actually fun to sit at my home and collaborate with a student who might be working from a dorm or home as revisions grew into finished work. One paper that was submitted at the end of the year had changes spread out over two weeks and fourteen different collaborators from the classes. The quality of the writing was very good at the end, and the history tool enabled me to track the changes; the incremental improvements were then easy to see.
As I have learned more about the capabilities of this set of tools, I have begun to think about other ideas. For example, I think that I could do simple quizzes online using the forms and spreadsheet. I have not had the time to explore this possibility very well just yet, but I am thinking about it. I have had my classes to create presentations several times before, and it appears that the collaborative features of the entire Google Docs set up could work well in that area.
Last year, I worked with my American Literature classes on a semester-long research project. We took advantage of the word processing tool to polish papers, but I also allowed my students to plan the due dates for things like note cards, outlines and drafts — setting their own schedules within the parameters of my master schedule. They then shared those calendars with me; I could track everyone’s progress easily and remind students when they had an important deadline approaching. Interestingly enough, I had to do very little reminding since the students had set their own schedules allowing for other things that they had on their plates.
This course has been all about getting a handle on the incredible flow of information that besieges us. Some of the tools that we have been asked to explore should push us all to re evaluate how we approach tasks like creating research projects and writing essays. The knowledge should push us to think again about what is important for our students to know — what it is important for us to know as teachers. More than ever, my thoughts are running to the idea of teacher as collaborator, constantly learning with our students and finding new ways to handle the information we can find.
To begin with, I have spent far too much time playing in YouTube. I have been having a blast, but I have spent hours looking through videos. I have tried to stay within the area(s) that have something to do with my area, but, even so, I have been sitting for far too long. I finally trimmed the American Literature field down to Mark Twain. I found an excerpt from one of my favorite performances, and that is what I am going to embed here. If you have never seen Mark Twain Tonight starring Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain, you have missed a treat. Here is a seven minute section of the show. Hope you don’t mind the use of the word ‘jackass’ to start the proceedings. The rest of the Twain commentary is sharp and to the point.
I have been using You Tube in my classes for a while now, picking excerpts from readings and presentations to illustrate certain points to my classes. It is an efficient and engaging method. Tune in to the fun.
I have done radio and television production before, but it has been a long time since I have put something serious together. For this post, I went back into my journals several years to find a description of a visit to Charles Bridge in Prague. My wife and I had some fun talking about that trip and remembering. On this particular day, we saw a puppet show on the bridge; the image of that man and his puppets has been stuck in my mind since. It was a magical performance. Here is the link to our podcasts for this class; mine is called ‘Puppet Master.’ I hope it manages to catch a little of that magic.
Jiri Sebek — Charles Bridge in Fog (B&W); Ben – King Charles Bridge anno 1357; Paolo Margari – Charles Bridge, Prague; Hannes R – Prague, Charles Bridge; szeke – Charles Bridge statue, Prague; beatbull – Charles Bridge, Prague, Czech Republic; TJFlex2 – The Charles Bridge (Karlov Most); Ryan Hadley – Charles Bridge (long shot); Juan J – Charles Bridge Statue
I love to read. I love science fiction as well as literature that is perhaps more solidly in the canon. I may be missing the point, but so far this particular resource seems to be bringing me more books to read than I have the time to read. I will die with many unread books on my wish list — a poor restatement of ‘so many good books — so little time.’ However, it is a good thing to be able to see what others are reading and to peruse the author pages offered by this project. For example, I sought out Orson Scott Card’s page. I have been an occasional reader of his Hatrack River site. To my fascination and joy, I found that he is responsible for yet another site called Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show — an online magazine.
I can imagine myself researching an author and wondering if an idea that I have might have occurred to some other reader. I might look at the reviews. Or I may have read a book and wonder if there are other books similar to the one I enjoyed so much. The connections offered by Library Thing could be helpful, but ultimately, at least given what I am seeing so far, it just seems to be a ton of fun for a person who likes to read. The usefulness in classes strikes me as an offering of several ways to encourage reading.
I have been slow about posting for this particular exercise because I have been making such extensive use of Delicious. I am still learning, and I want to take a look at Diigo now. One of the things that I wanted to do when I began this course is to explore the way I make connections with other thinkers, writers and learners on the web — people who are thinking and learning about the things that are important to me. I am a teacher, and I am interested in the impact of technology on my life’s work. I find Diane Ravitch’s remarks about the Partnership for 19th Century Skills to be an amazing, cautionary statement; I get so excited about the new tools that we are studying in this course, and Diane Ravitch invites me to go back and remember why these new tools might be important to our larger work. She invites everyone to think about the why’s so we don’t get stuck on just the how’s.
I think that it is good to think of all these things that we are learning as many have suggested; these are tools for our toolbox. I wondered how I might keep up with all these new tools and others that I might find in the future. Through the reader and through Delicious I have found two clean, clear listings of the tools available — or at least some of them — organized. One of these listings has dependable links, and it is called Cool Tools for Schools. During the last week, I have spent more time than I really should have exploring some of these links.
For the commitment to being a life-long learner, this thing called Delicious and the other tools like it may be the most important of the discoveries that I have made this summer. It affects everything else.
My Delicious account is linked. I would love to hear from some of you.
Standardized tests seem useful to me, but I worry about the way those scores are used at times. Carrying on from the point I made in the last entry here, it is easy to forget what we are trying to accomplish with our educational system; it is easy to assume that we can script out a single simple method for addressing each and every human being. It is easy to give more importance to the numbers than they deserve. I always imagine a conversation between two people where one says something about his number being higher than some number that the other has. Those numbers could be blood pressure, credit score, waist size, calories consumed — but the two people are not concerned because all that is needed for one to win over the other is a higher number. Should SAT scores be used to compare the effectiveness of one school over another? How well do these tests predict success? The literature is full of arguments about these two questions and many others concerning testing and interpretation of those tests.
I have stolen the title for this post from Bill Ferriter’s The Tempered Radical blog post titled “Why Test Scores Are ALMOST Useless to Me.” He tells a story about a middle school student who presents scores that seem completely contradictory — the first attempt far below ‘normal’ and the second far above. He wonders which of the scores he should learn from. I think of the previous post here and Dweck’s contention that perhaps we are looking at the wrong things when we evaluate our students. She thinks we reward the wrong things.
Ferriter also points to a study presented by Malcom Gladwell in his book Outliers. Gladwell reports a study conducted by Erling Boe at the University of Pennsylvania concerning the TIMSS exam, a test of math and science given in many countries to fourth and eighth grade students. In part, Boe concludes that the test is as much one of concentration and endurance as it is of math and science.
Standardized tests are important, in my opinion, but their interpretation is not simple. Their application cannot be allowed to run amok. The problem is that we are not sure what we are trying to create with our educational process. Are we trying to create good workers for our industry? Are we trying to create good citizens for our democracy? Are we trying to create college professors? Do we want to create a group of people who are truly thinkers and leaders? Should we encourage creativity or not?
Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk is important to this exploration. Watch Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity. In the end, he says that we must educate for creativity. How far can standardized tests take us in this direction? I think, on their own, not very far.
In the end, it appears that we need to keep looking at standardized tests, but we should be careful. Teaching is an art which is informed by science. We still have to be very careful about what we really know about teaching these incredibly variable human beings. The magic bubbles really don’t carry very much magic.
