There and Back Again: Educon 2.7, Part 1

Educon is by far my favorite learning weekend and here's why: the learning is all around us.  It doesn't just happen when we are in the seats of classroom in SLA, it happens wherever there are people gathered.

When I arrived at SLA on Friday, I spent some time eavesdropping in classrooms. As usual the students and teachers showed what SLA is all about, an inquiry-driven, project-based learning environment.  In the robotics class, students were problem solving as they attempted to make their robots play a tune of "Three Blind Mice."  Ms. Hull lead an intriguing discussion around the topic of privacy through reading cautionary tales...I did not write down the title, but if memory serves me well, it was LOL...OMG!  The students in both classrooms were engaged and invested in the conversations around the subject at hand.

Later in the day, I saw a tweet from @jrichardson30 (Jeff Richardson) about inviting attendees to meet up and go to historical Philadelphia.  I decided to go meet up with my Southern twitter friend and his colleagues, Susan and Wendy.  It ended up being the Philly area native (me) taking 7 people (3 from Alabama and 4 from Vermont) on a little walk around the historical hot spots.  I posted pictures of our time together.  

My husband's comment, "That's a weird technology conference". My response, "It's conversations where we learn.  Not locations. ;)"

That was a huge take away for me and it happened only 3 hours into Educon.  Learning spaces are all around when we engage in conversation.  I have been learning more in nontraditional settings than traditional.  I learn more when I am seeking it on my own, than when someone is pushing it on me.  My learning can be on the sidewalks of historic Philadelphia, the tables in a high school lunch room, within the walls of classrooms or anywhere I choose to begin the discussion.

The rest of Educon was amazing...of course, but that is for another post.

How are we encouraging learning to take place anywhere, anytime with our students and colleagues?

Creating Digital Superheroes

This is one of my favorite culminating activities that we do in firth grade, creating digital superheros in Pixie.  Fifth graders have been learning about Digital Citizenship since they started Technology Class with me in Kindergarten.  We have discussed topics that range from navigating websites with ads to dealing with cyberbullies over the past 5 1/2 years.  And now I ask them to take all of that learning, choose one specific topic and create a comic strip about it.  We will use a movie format of the final projects as PSAs on our News from the Nest show.

The Learning: I have been using lots of different resources over the years, but Common Sense Media is the one I go to the most and the one our district has utilized to build our Digital Citizenship curriculum.  There are great lessons for the classroom and tips to share with families.

The Project: Darren Smith, one of our Technology Teachers in the district, originally started this project.  In Pixie, students create a superhero who battles a real digital world problem.

 

• The first class was an introduction and students began the pre-writing with our graphic organizer. We used the Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then reading tool in reverse. Students worked through the organizer from a writer's perspective to organize their writing.  
• Our second class together was focused on creating the superhero.  Some students used pictures of themselves and stickers to create comical characters. Others used stickers and drawing tools to create a superhero.  Many students were able to begin creating pages of their comic strip during this work time. 
• The third class was a writing workshop time for students to actually write the comic strip.
• By week four, many students were ready for editing.  They used the Spell Check in Pixie and Peer-to-Peer Grammar Check. For Peer-to-Peer Grammar Check, students invite a classmate to read through their entire piece.  The classmate is looking for a story that makes sense, capital letters where needed and punctuation.
• Once the details are completed, students will be able to print out their comic strips.  They may also choose to record their story and create a movie for a Public Service Announcement for our school.   

Students Teaching Students and More...

Today I have four classes of fifth grade students creating tutorials about using Google Drive.  We are focusing on the "how tos" of Drive use.  Students are doing how tos about logging into the drive, how to create new documents and presentations and how to share, just to name a few.  Their audience for these tutorials are next year's sixth grade students and teachers in our district just starting out with the use of Google Drive.  One student asked if he could do one specifically for teachers to comment on student work.  YES!  Another student asked if he could compare our network drives to our google drives.  YES!  These students get it.  They are sharing their knowledge from this year of working in google drive and I could not be more proud of how professional they are being!  I will be uploading the student screencasts later this week to share.

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?