What's Our Excuse?

This past weekend I set up a Google account for my daughter, Sidney.  She is under 13, but I am monitoring what she does, who she emails and who she shares things with from her account.  Sidney has friends in California, Arizona, Maryland and Pennsylvania, who she wants to keep in touch with through email.  She has been pen pals with these girls for 3 years and I felt it was time to give her a new way to be in touch with them.  After adding the girls' emails to her account, she sent them all messages.  Then she asked about Google Docs.

Sidney has seen me using Google Apps in my teaching life to work with students, write sub plans and collaborate with colleagues.  She has seen how powerful Google Apps are and she wanted to get started. I showed her how to start a new document and how to share it with me.  We were both on the doc and I wrote something from another computer.  Her eyes lit up!  She continued with writing her story about how Darth Vader comes to Hogwarts.  I'm not sure where that is going, but I can tell you that my daughter opened my eyes to just what a 3rd grade student can do when given the tools.

While I was making dinner, Sidney started a Google Presentation about recycling.  She came out to the kitchen to inform my that she shared her presentation with me and she added a video.  "You added a video?" Do you remember how hard it used to be to add video to Microsoft Power Point?  It was so volatile and you never knew if your Power Point would crash in the middle of the presentation because the video was to big and bloated the file.  I remember those days with fear and trepidation.  But my 8 year old daughter just added a video to her 5 page presentation about recycling.  I had to see it.  So I opened it up and immediately thought, what is our excuse from letting kids create this way?  It's not rocket science.  It's so much more simplistic then that. Sidney was pleased with herself and I was impressed that she figured it out.

Sidney quickly when back to start another presentation on Matisse.  This really opened my eyes to natural lessons about Digital Citizenship and how to find images that work with a presentation.  Sidney was adding images she had searched for in Google and they were not all Matisse images.  It was so natural to have this conversation with her about knowing what you are looking for and verifying that you have indeed found it. It seems to me that in school we often make up scenarios of how/when this type of thing could happen and teach students from those made up scenarios.  But if we are doing real life work with them then the real life conversations will ensue.

I would not say that either of Sidney's presentations follow any rules and Seth Godin might think there are too many words on a slide, but that is not the point in all of this.  The point is that I did not have to teach my daughter anything about the tools.  She picked them up and started using them.  The instruction that took place was more about thinking through the process of creating, verifying sources and sharing information she knew.

My excuse for not working with my students in the way I worked with my daughter has been permission.  It still is. We have not been given permission, as elementary teachers, to use Google Apps with our students on a regular basis.  I believe times are changing here.  At least that is the sense I'm getting.  There is so much we can be teaching students in real world, real time incidents that will make a more lasting impression than "once upon a time" type lessons.

Do we really have an excuse anymore?

Breaking Down

Communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity.  As we move through each day, we all tap into our abilities to communicate, collaborate, think critically and be creative. I'm thinking about my morning and reflecting on the use of each skill:

• Communication: successfully rousing my two children (5 and 8), touching base with friends across the country, and clearly laying out ideas about GAFE in a fifth grade meeting

• Collaboration: working with a fifth grade editor to complete our news show, planning agenda topics with a colleague, planning use of the mobile devices in our school for a grade level

• Critical Thinking:  answering all of my son's questions on the drive into school, writing this post

• Creativity: figuring out what to wear on this dreary spring day

And this was all with in the first 4 hours of my day.

Do we teach our students all the various was we use the 4C's in our everyday life?  Our use of the 4C's permeates our lives.  As we teach students how to be better communicators, ease their collaboration, challenge their critical thinking and magnifying their creativity, are we showing them our use of these skills? Pointing them out? Being transparent about our struggles and shortcomings as we strive to do all these things?  Are we breaking down the skills we want to see in our students?

I want my students to see me as a learner and coach.  I have not evolved to the perfect state as their teacher.  I am learning new things everyday.  Sometimes there are bumps in the road, but they are part of the messy beauty of learning.

Fifth grade students will be arriving to my door shortly.  We are working through some tough planning for the rest of their year with me.  As I attempt to teach them critical thinking and communication skills today, I do not want to be thinking "how am I preparing them for next year?".  I want to have in the forefront of my thinking, "how am I preparing them for today?"  Time to push the envelope of thinking!

Second Grade Experts

Second graders eagerly working on "expert" writing for News from the Nest segments. 

Students at my school are always excited to be featured on our news show.  Typically third, fourth and fifth graders create the content for News from the Nest.  However, this trimester, second graders are taking over.

It all started with a conversation about what the second graders knew, what they are experts on.  We listed ideas and then students organized into small groups around like ideas. In those small groups, students began to record their knowledge using a KWHLQA chart.  I the horizontal chart for my students. After groups determined what they knew, what they wanted to find out more about and how they would go about doing that, they started researching.  I have students use links at our only2clicks site.

After researching, the students began creating a plan of action for how they would present their expert information on News from the Nest.  Students are in the process of writing scripts.  We will begin filming in the next few classes.

I have to say that I love the thinking that is happening during the 40 minutes that the students are with me.  They are asking questions and challenging each other without even realizing it.  I feel like so much learning is taking place right under their noses!

Our work flow for writing scripts.

The Urgency to Change

I like change. One might say that I live for and even thrive on change.  I've willingly changed my teaching position just because I feel the need to do so.  I was a first grade teacher, a second grade teacher and now a technology teacher.  A few years into my career as a technology teacher, a colleague shared the Technology Integration Matrix (I found the link in my diigo.  I tagged it on April 18, 2008.) I remember feeling somewhat overwhelmed by it as a Technology Teacher/Coach newbie.  I had a huge sense of "wow" looking at it and trying to dissect it.  But I was up for the challenge and excited about how I could use the information to move teachers and students into 21st Century learning.  Fast forward 6 years and here I am seeing it again in a MOOCed, shared out on twitter.  When I saw it again, it stopped me in my tracks, like seeing an image of an old friend who you've lost touch with.  My first thought was, "I am a total failure at this coaching thing. I've been at this for over six years and I dropped the ball with helping teachers truly integrate technology."  Seeing it made me feel like I just bombed the final.

When I first took this position, I was excited about teaching others the possibilities of how technology can make our teaching lives easier and we can engage students in a way like never before.  I started out eager to share all of what I was learning and get 21st Century Skills a basic part of our everyday teaching and learning.  I'm sad to say that it didn't go down like that.  Instead my excitement was met with all the usual thinking of the day: "I don't have time to learn that," "That won't work", "What we are doing is just fine, why change it?" and one of my favorites, "we need equality in what is being done, work with everyone equally".  It was quite a laundry list of reasons not to integrate technology, so I quietly found teachers interested in learning and just focused on them, not wanting to disturb the delicate balance of being a teacher/coach.  Not stepping over the bounds of being a peer.  I lost the will to fight for what I thought was important.  I lost the urgency to generate change.

Today I am seeing more clearly that I let the teachers down, but more importantly, I let down all the students that have passed through these halls since I took this position.  I allowed others negativity, influence and wishy-washy leadership effect my own learning and desires to see change take place in my school. It's time for change.  It's time to no longer accept the weak excuses of many who don't even know the discussion happening beyond their classroom walls.  It's time to move people beyond themselves and their classroom.

My plan is to use a faculty meeting to start conversations.  From those conversations, my hope is that teachers will start asking more questions and start rethinking what they've always done. How are you sharing out and coaching teachers? What is your plan?

Peer-Over Coaching

Watcha doin'?

I had started a different post earlier today, but after tonight's #CDL_MOOCed twitter chat, I have a new topic to discuss...how to best roll out TPACK/SMAR, digital age skills, 4Cs, 21st Century Skills...whatever you want to call them!

I don't believe that the top-down model is the most effective way to get teachers moving in new direction like the above mentioned list because it's often done in an ineffective way: little PD, lots of list of what to do and what not to do and little time to master the ideas.  Instead, a peer-over coaching manner seems to be more effective and longer lasting.  So what is the peer-over coaching method? Let me share a story:

Seven years ago, I became the technology teacher/coach in a K-5 elementary school.  There was one floating Smartboard and one hanging in the lab. (This is by no means a plug for a tool...hang in there.)  After chatting with one of the fifth grade teachers, who was very interested in trying new things in her classroom, I encouraged her to house the smartboard in her classroom so it would not collect dust in the pod and just try using it for one thing during her day.  Every few days I would check in with her, give her some tips for using the board, creating a notebook or accessing some resource to use with her class. Over the course of just a few months, she was using the board and notebooks for all subject areas and teaching her students to create notebooks to present information to their classmates. Other fifth grade teachers noticed.  The board was shared out and by the end of that year, the fifth grade teachers were writing grants for smartboards and projectors.

The other fifth grade teachers peered over to a what a peer was doing and wanted in on it.  They saw the benefits, the ease of information delivery and the future possibilities.  In later years, all of our teachers received Smartboards and these 4 fifth grade teachers became "go tos" for many of the other teachers in the building.  So I give you the peer-over method.  Sometimes, allowing peers to learn from each other and not necessarily the authority figure creates more meaningful learning and application of what we are trying to teach.

This may mean letting go of a little control for some coaches or digital leaders.  I'm ok with that because I know that the most important thing is not WHO teaches the new idea or concept but just that it's ACQUIRED by the learner.

Have you learned from a peer and then shared with another?  You are part of peer-over coaching!