Category Archives: inspiration

The Revolution Continues: Edcamphome 2.0

Posted on by under 21st century learning, edcamp, Edtech, habits of lifelong learners, inspiration, resources for teachers

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Last July I attended the first Edcamphome , and today those same amazing organizers brought us back together along with some new folks for the second edcamphome. Armed with experience, Kelly, Shawn, David and Karl created an even richer experience for the participants who gathered to talk about everything from GAFE in the classroom to the Concept and Practice of Rebellion. The sessions were all published on youtube, and you should definitely check them out if you have the time (session 1 and session 2).

I’ve written before on the unconference format of edcamps and its virtues. Online edcamps like edcamphome or edcamp online take edcamp to a whole other level. Although there are obvious technical challenges to hosting synchronous google hangouts (challenges dealt with brilliantly  by our organizers), the ability to connect with teachers from across the nation and even the globe about shared concerns, challenges, and sources of inspiration is mindblowingly awesome. This edcamp experience was by far the most valuable one I have had to date mainly because I connected with teachers and began really vital conversations about questions that have long been on my mind. 

The session I was most excited to attend was one suggested by Peter Gow who posed a question that has been on my mind for as long as I’ve been an educator: What do independent and traditional public schools have to say to one another?”  Although the conversation only included independent school educators, we had a rich conversation about some of the challenges we face as connected independent school educators in terms of creating deeper connections both amongst ourselves and with our public school peers. Discussing the seeming dearth of independent school educators connected on twitter or attending events like Edcamp home with  Chris Thinnes, Chuck Maddox and Vicky Sedgwick was fantastic, and we began a conversation that I hope will continue via a new, yet to be determined hashtag and twitterchat.  We all left the session excited to meet up again and perhaps begin to bridge the divide both between independent school educators and public school educators, and address the gap that exists between connected independent school educators and those who aren’t yet. Talking with such passionate, experienced, indy school educators certainly made my day, and inspired me to get back to the work of this blog which I have been long absent from, and for which I am exceedingly grateful. 

The second session I attended was on the subject of rebellion, and although I did not have the chance to participate for the full session, I again left feeling inspired and energized by the fantastic educators who shared their time to talk about the role of rebellion in education. The greatest conclusion we came to when addressing the question, how do teachers become accepting of rebellion in the class was to pose rebellion as really just critical thinking in action. We want our classes to be places where students question and examine all sources, ideas, and assignments with a critical eye. Believing that education is the basis of informed citizenship, I left the chat thinking that actually what we meant by rebellion was really active participation. We want our students to actively participate in every aspect of our classes even if that means questioning our assignments or our ideas, and if we build a community that allows for this type of questioning then we have done a good part of our jobs. 

So again edcamphome was revolutionary. It was definitely a great way to wind up winter break.  I look forward to future edcamphome experiences and to maybe even using the experience as a platform to bring more independent school teachers into the fold. So again, we all want to change the world and edcamphome  has allowed us to find comrades with whom to take a few small steps in our own edurevolutions.  We are, afterall, always #bettertogether. 

For Further Reading: 

Peter Gow’s post on Edcamphome and the dialog we need

Markette Pierce on “Chillin’ with my edcamp Homies”

 

 

Discovering the Wonderful World of Wiki’s: Part 1

Posted on by under 21st century learning, humanities, inspiration, teaching, Uncategorized, Wikis

Wordle: WIki
I consider myself pretty tech savvy, but I haven’t until now delved into the world of Wikis. Sure like the rest of the internet using world I have used Wikipedia, and  I have also seen them used to a great deal of success by my PLN on twitter and have visited various Wikis that archive twitter chats, but I haven’t ever created a Wiki or used one in a class. That is all about to change and I am so grateful to Shelley Paul @lottascales and her 23 things class for pushing me in the Wiki Direction.

So for those of you who are new to Wiki’s like myself I thought I would chart my learning process. I began by viewing this video: Intro to Wikis and by exploring some great Wiki’s Shelley had selected for us. I really appreciated Thousand and One Flat World Tales where I found the stories written by Korean students incredibly insightful and informative given my ESL teaching experience with our wonderful Korean students. What I most liked about Wiki’s is the ability for many people to collaborate in real time and to create something together. I plan on using a Wiki with my ESL History students this year and may even start one to help students find resources for their research papers.

A few other interesting Wikis for those teaching Social Studies:
Resources for History Teachers is an award Winning wiki with boatloads of great resources. I found the APUSH resources especially good.

Cool Tools For Schools is another award winning Wiki that is incredibly well organized and links to tools students can use to collaborate, create presentations, film and edit movies, record podcasts, organize projects, and stay on top of homework.

So what is your favorite Wiki and how do you use them in your classes? Leave a comment to start a conversation!

Sifting Through The Sea pt. 2: More Edtech that Works

Posted on by under 21st century learning, Edtech, inspiration, Wikis

images-1Here are some free web 2.0 tools I’ve discovered or just gotten more proficient with because of our 23 things class.

1.Bubbl.us– is a cool concept mapping tool that allows you to brainstorm, visually outline ideas, and has some easy to use shortcuts that make the processes simple. I have used Inspiration with visual students in the past, but you have to pay, and bubbl.us is free. I will definitely turn my kids onto this tool especially when we begin the research project this fall.
2. Haiku Deck– A wonderful presentation creation app that is free and visually beautiful. I have seen some really terrific presentations from ISTE and on twitter. This is a tool I will definitely use this year and teach my students.
3. Timetoast- Since xtimeline no longer seems to work well, perhaps we will use timetoast this year instead. Although you cannot create collaborative timelines, students can create individual timelines and then put them on our class blog. The interface is really easy to use and I can see the utility of this tool for group and individual projects in the upcoming year.
4. Voicethread– A great tool that allows you to record voice comments to videos, pictures or documents. There are so many possibilities for this tool. You could use it to give feedback to students, have them give feedback to each other, or create a narrative for a picture or video. The possibilities are endless and this is the tool I am probably most exited about using this year. I think my ESL students will love using it to practice their spoken English and interact with each other. I think we may use it this year with our WPA poster project in American Studies.
5. Weebly– Our school has used Weebly in several classes, and this year we will go back to having students create a website based on an artifact from Special Collections at the University of Virginia. We did this two years ago and it went really well, but we had to rely on google sites and they just aren’t as slick as what students can create with Weebly. I am also going to have my ESL History students creating sites based on famous Supreme Court cases as a way to introduce them to the constitution and the Judicial Branch of government.

Great Places to Find More Tools:

Dirt– “This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively.  Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you’re looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool’s features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.”

Webtools4utouse Wiki – A great site with a terrific layout that provides you with great tools to do everything from screen casting to pod casting, web sharing, and curating. I will be spending a great deal of time exploring this site in the coming weeks.

Please be a teacher: A Response to Warnings and Resignation Letters

Posted on by under habits of lifelong learners, inspiration, teaching, teaching literature

The last couple of weeks have been rough in terms of the media coverage of the teaching profession. First there was Jerry Conti’s Resignation Letter and then Randy Turner’s A Warning to Young People: Don’t Become a Teacher. 

Each article paints a bleak picture of the teaching profession today and an even bleaker picture of the role of the humanities teacher in today’s education system. As Conti writes:

I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered.

First a disclaimer: I teach at an Independent School where we do not face near the number nor depth of challenges facing by my public school teaching peers.  All students of any tax bracket face struggles and ours are no different. But they come to school every day well-fed, confident of a safe home, and with the resources, technological and otherwise, to be able to focus on their studies. Furthermore, Independent School teachers have an immense amount of control over their curriculum including what content we teach and what kind of assessments we give. Standardized tests do not drive our curriculum although the SAT and AP tests are extremely important to our college admissions minded population. Certainly, we have been under a tremendous amount of pressure to adopt “21st Century” practices, but how we adopt them is not mandated by the state.

I know, mainly from my friends who do teach in public schools, my PLN on twitter, and the media that the past 10-15 years have posed tremendous challenges and that recent reform impulses  have frustrated and disheartened too many teachers. I cannot speak for their experience or to their frustration, and frankly it would be incredibly unjust and arrogant for me to even begin to try to address these concerns in this post. Instead, I am just going to outline the reasons why, despite so much evidence to the contrary, talented  young people interested in social justice should still go into teaching and why it is the most fulfilling, life affirming job anyone could choose.

I fell into teaching somewhat accidentally. Just having finished my masters in American Studies at UVA and considering law school, I was lucky to get a part time job teaching Upper School English in 2002. I was looking for a job, but what I found was my calling. And that is what teaching is, not a job or a profession, but a calling. I was lucky to find mine at an early age, and it has been, aside from my children and family, the true blessing of my life.

The sacred relationship between student and teacher based on the shared experience of learning is the main reason why despite all the negative press teaching is still one of the best and most rewarding jobs in the world. Where else could I get to spend all day talking about books, words, and ideas with students whose eyes are just opening to the possibility and importance of all of the above? What other job offers the opportunity to start over every year and a new chance to get “it” right? Where else does one spend all day being asked questions about everything from the mundane i.e. what is the assignment to the transcendent i.e. what makes a meaningful life? Every day is new and every year is new, a new chance to learn and to teach, a new opportunity to grow and develop strong, caring, intelligent, well-educated future citizens.

No one goes into teaching for the money or the accolades.  We teach to help young people realize that learning matters, that knowing your world is as important as impacting it, and that empathy is the most important of all human virtues. We teach to change the future and the present. Furthermore, we teach in America because we are patriots and as Thomas Jefferson famously stated “an educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”

“Democracy” as FDR argued,  “simply cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.” This has not changed and nothing, not the Common Core, not the well intentioned if sometimes misinformed reform movement, or the emphasis on standardized testing in public schools will or can ever change the primacy of the role education in our country.

So to those who think that teaching is just too hard or that the system is just too irrevocably broken, I say this: The “profession” as Conti suggests may not be what we want it to be right now, but the calling-that’s timeless and no disfunction in the educational system will ever destroy it.   So please future teachers everywhere, for the sake of our country, our children, and our world, become teachers. Certainly, go in with your eyes wide open. Know that you’re facing huge challenges and that one of the biggest will be societies lack of respect for the excellent work you will do. But also know this, there is no more meaningful, albeit frustrating and challenging job you could have. You may never be able to change the world of education as much as you might want. You may find yourself hopelessly frustrated with the system, but I guarantee you will change lives for the better including your own.

Pass it on: On The Importance of Owning Knowledge in the Digital Age

Posted on by under 21st century learning, amstuds, habits of lifelong learners, humanities, inspiration, reading, teaching, teaching literature

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Let me start by saying, I am a fan of Tony Wagner. I follow him on twitter, and I read and enjoyed his The Global Achievement Gap. He is a wise man who makes many good observations about education, but continually I have balked at his theory that owning knowledge is increasingly less important in the digital age. Recently, in a op-ed for the New York Times. Thomas Friedman quoted him as saying:

“Because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know.

This sentiment is echoed throughout the modern dialog about education and exemplified in the new common core standards currently driving public school reform.  Consider this quote from The Innovation Unit:

Now that many mobile phones can access more information than is held in any library, the idea of school as the place you go to acquire knowledge is an anachronism.

Perhaps it is because I am at heart an English teacher or maybe it is just my own education, but to me the idea that we no longer need to own knowledge because we can always google the answer to any question  is depriving education and, for that matter educators and students, of soul. Of course developing 21st century skills is a vital and central part of education today, but the seeming acceptance that schools are not a place where students acquire knowledge both for its own sake and for their own edification as human beings is detrimental to the entire educational process and to our students.
Luckily, although my school is determined to educate students for the 21st century and impart 21st century skills, we have not moved away from the belief that the students do actually need to own knowledge. We are not forced simply to show children how to use the mountains of information at their finger tips. I am allowed and encouraged  to turn kids on to books, words, and histories that will inform their being and to hold them accountable for the knowledge we impart in our courses. While analysis is key and central, students are expected to leave our class knowing basic civics including the bill of rights, the separation of powers,  a few poems by heart, and the basic trajectory of all of American History. We hope they leave with more, but our goal  is to make them active, curious and engaged citizens.  To become engaged citizens, they must possess more than a device to access knowledge. They must own knowledge itself.

As Hector, the incredibly flawed yet idealistic old school teacher  from Alan Bennett’s The History Boys who believes in knowledge for its own sake, articulates:

The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things — that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

You can’t google that experience, and you can’t duplicate it by looking it up. You have to experience it, and you have to have teachers who help you acquire to knowledge to access that skill, that level of empathy. How can one truly know and love a poem if he/she can’t recall from memory two or three lines? How can you understand history if you don’t know some major dates and ideas without turning to wikipedia?

Another great moment in the play comes when one of the students expresses his hatred for poetry. Hector explains that what he is teaching these boys isn’t for any test. He tells them “to learn it now, know it now and you’ll understand it whenever” they need it. They are, according to Hector, “making their deathbeds.” It is because education is about so much more than test preparation and 21st century skills. It is about preparing for a life of meaning, and I do not think any student now matter how good their 21st century skills are can find that on a search engine.

So on this point, I have to respectfully disagree with Tony Wagner and his echoes. Students do need more than just schools that teach 21st century skills. They need schools to be places where they acquire knowledge. They need help “making their deathbeds” and preparing for a life of meaning.