Google Docs: How I Love Thee, Let Me Count The Ways...

Just working on a huge assignment for Language Arts course involving collaborating with two colleagues to devise a unit plan on Community Helpers for Grade 1.  This is huge as it involves the design and resource selection and lesson planning, flow and assessment tools for a 10-day balanced literacy program.  I know what you're thinking, 10 days is nothing and wait until you have a whole year and all the subjects to plan for!  Nevertheless, this is great practice for me as a lesson planner and organizer and also for the skill of team teaching and collaborating.  I must say, I couldn't do this without Google Docs and I want to thank Zoe Branigan-Pipe for introducing it to me at the beginning of the year.  It allows me to access all my resources and organize my thoughts, edit ideas of others, keep in constant contact beyond the "school day" and work on it as ideas occur to me.  I haven't a clue how you would go about keeping this organized and flowing smoothly without such an awesome tool.  I am using it now for ALL of my group assignments (of which I have 16 different, with different group members and configurations).  Thank Googleness for Web 2.0!

Embedding Web 2.0 Tools into Google Sites

I am excited to be co-presenting Popplet and Google Sites tomorrow at Brock University's Tech Showcase with Amanda Hodgins and Stacey Robinson, colleagues also in the Educational Technology Leadership Cohort.

We present at 9:00 AM in Room 14 at the Hamilton Campus.  We will be discussing sharing Popplet on Google Sites, using Popplet in the classroom (for teaching, learning and organization) as well as sharing classroom applications for the tool including mind maps and unit plans and study guides.

Hope to see you there.

A Vision of the 21st Century Classroom

Prior to entering the Faculty of Education at Brock this past September, I kept hearing this idea of “The 21st Century Classroom” bouncing around the halls at UofT, in the blogosphere and on various social networking sites and workshops. Its a pretty hot topic. I’ll admit that the first image that came to my mind is something straight from The Jetsons. Others have confirmed this with references to The Matrix or even Back to the Future. I tended to think only about the physical technology apparatuses that were present in “lucky classes” like headphones, digital projectors and SMART boards. I thought that the 21st century classroom merely meant being “plugged in” and having broadband connections or even sweeter, WiFi. I pictured kids sitting at their desks with bluetooth devices on and laptops in front of them. For some reason I pictured them wearing shades.

Then I learned about the 21st century fluencies and found out that the classroom isn’t just about being “futuristic” and decked out with all the bells and whistles that learning technology companies have invented (now who doesn’t love Livescribe and FrontRow and Kinect and SMART technologies? More on these guys later). I’ve come to discover that the crux of being a 21st Century Teacher depends more on the teacher and what he or she wants to have happen above and beyond strictly delivering curriculum within 4 walls of a publicly funded classroom 10 months out of the year than it does on the actual pieces of tech available in the classroom. A lot of it depends on the vision the teacher leader has for his or her students and the broader community in our fast-paced and ever-changing digital world.

As of this month, 11 years and almost a month of the 21st century have passed. So here we are, a decade into the 21st century, but are our classrooms where they should be? Are our teachers? Why does the 21st century still sound as if its a far off land? Who, ultimately, decides what the 21st century classroom SHOULD look like? Who should have a say? As educators in Ontario, we’ve got a wonderful curriculum to deliver. It has a LOT in it. We know we have a variety of learning styles and ways of teaching, so we need to know our students and become differentiated instruction experts. We, as educators are of course to be creative, organized and passionate with existing curricula, but what about the 21st century fluencies? We need to prepare these kids for the jobs of the future -the jobs that aren’t even created yet!

As leaders for our community (students, parents, fellow teachers, etc.) we need to expand our PLNs. collaborate and share our resources with our peers and be passionate about digital fluency. We need to team teach and offer PD sessions to one another and remove the fear.

We need to listen to our students and actively involve them in the process of learning. The assignments and lessons need to be varied, complex with pathways for success, challenging yet achievable, experiential, and meaningful. There needs to be student choice and we need to let them guide us at times. Even if this means letting them use their smartphones in class? I don’t know.

I’ve discussed just one arm of the 21st Century Classroom - the academic arm. There is still the cultural atmosphere of the classroom (TRIBES), technological integration (SMART boards please!) and the physical layout of the space left to address (bean bag chairs, desks on wheels, etc.) What ties these all together is the engagement, equity and individual focus on the success and achievement of 21st century learner.

An excerpt from Alfie Kohn’s essay What to Look for in a Classroom...And Other Essays. is a great starting point, but I am on a mission to create an extended, up to date table to build on this - incorporating things that make the classroom truly 21st century. What do you think the 21st century classroom should look like?

bansho: board writing and collective knowledge production

One of my math instructors mottos, nay, mantras at the Brock Faculty of Ed is “no fear”. She wants to instill in us aspiring math teachers a positive view of math and to leave any math anxiety scars from our own educational experiences (bells and cells) behind so as not to spread that contagion to our future students.

One of the ways we are taught to do this is to entice and challenge students to love math by engaging them in rich learning tasks and meaningful problem-solving based lessons. Another way to leave the fear behind? Creating a “safe math-talk community”.

 A recent strategy we learned does just that, its called bansho.

Bansho is a Japanese teaching strategy which asks students to solve problems and illustrate their thinking, solve problems in a variety of ways and to identify and explain theirs and others’ strategies used during the problem solving process. The teacher has a central role in organizing the student work to show variety and commonality - the entire “range of student thinking” and to facilitate discourse that guides student reflection and learning about the procedures and concepts used in the problem solving context.

 Last math class we learned by doing a “bansho” by solving the area of an L-shaped geometric shape. We were told to take the “worksheet” (I know what you’re thinking and no, we were not supposed to do a mad minute or drill worksheet quietly in our desks for the remainder of the math class). No indeed. We were told to work cooperatively in groups and to produce as many ways to solve the area problem as we could. For a group of pre-service teacher candidates this was a seemingly easy problem. Everyone knows how to calculate the area of a rectangle, right? Not so. We had to be producers of a variety of ways to solve the problem. This was harder than it sounds. Each time we were solving the problem differently we were to document our work on a new worksheet. As we produced our solutions we were to hand them over to the teacher and she worked hard to review and sort them for the bansho. As we worked, the teacher created “types” or “ways of solving” categories and spread them out across the back wall gallery as “headings” or “titles” (in this case she numbered the ways 1-9). To do this she had to have done some pre-work and thought through the variety of anticipated student responses she’d receive.

 As we (rather factory like, actually) produced our solutions, we naturally glanced around the room, seeing what others were doing (not stealing their strategies, just seeing the volume they were coming up with, this pushed us on in a somewhat competitive, game-like challenge). When we petered out, we gathered at the back where our instructor had sorted our work and was finishing taping up the last examples. She then facilitated a rich discussion of our work, by asking students to explain why they had solved it the way they had. We saw the most “popular ways” and the ways which really expanded our minds as we hadn’t thought of that!

We were able to see commonalities and rarities and everything in between. We started to see neat work, good ways to organize, efficient strategies. We were analyzing work like real mathematicians and this was extremely empowering and engaging on many levels.

I am eager to try bansho with my students in math and in other subjects which require solutions to a problem. This is an innovative, collaborative and creative task that engages the students to think in different ways, to talk about their work (explaining and justifying) and to internalize and understand the work of others in a rich learning community.

Furthermore, as a future teacher, I feel it is important that we teach the 21st century fluencies.  I believe that bansho is a wonderful method of teaching that touches on 3 21st century fluencies: solution, collaboration and information fluency. I am keen to adapt bansho so that it can be carried out digitally and across a broader learning network not just within the 4 walls of a traditional classroom.

For more information on bansho: http://professionallyspeaking.oct.ca/march_2010/features/lesson_study/bansho.aspx http://alibull.edublogs.org/files/2010/01/Ontario-Bansho.pdf http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/inspire/research/CBS_bansho.pdf http://southeast1math.blogspot.com/2010/04/what-is-bansho.html

Reflections on Teaching Block A

Its been a few weeks since saying goodbye to my Block A Grade 3 class and amazingly supportive associate teacher and staff. I’ve had a long time to reflect back on my first “real” teaching experience, my evaluation and my gut reactions. I am relieved to realize that, yes, I’m actually a pretty good teacher (this is where I will try to restrict the self-congratulatory remarks to a short paragraph). I also was happy to learn that, yes, I really do want to be in a classroom. (not that I ever really doubted this, but I’ve heard that Block A will set you straight if you were in dream land about the whole teacher lifestyle). Also, impressing, (if I do say so myself) is that I can make connections and build community feeling in 4 short weeks. That, yes, I was able to engage the students and they paid attention to me (most of them, most of the time). That, yes, despite all anxiety and fear of failure, I was able to teach them new concepts so that they learned them and were able to apply them to real world situations (well...simulated real world - which is almost real world!) Bottom line - no falling flat-on-my-face (yet - Block B is around the corner) and no student casualties with me at the helm.

 What I did not do, what I feel I failed to do, and I’ll admit it here to my (granted, fairly limited audience) is that I didn’t incorporate as much educational technology as I would have liked to into my day-to-day lessons. Why? It wasn’t because the school wasn’t equipped. We did have access to a SMART board in the library which, given time and pre-planning, we were able to reserve on a first-come-first-serve basis. Its not because I didn’t have access to tech. Being a pre-service Brocktechie, I did have lots of great ed tech to sign out from Brock and bring with me to my placement.

 No, the access wasn’t the issue. It was because I wasn’t exactly sure a) if I could teach at all, tech or no tech b) how I was going to make sure I covered all my associate teacher and faculty adviser and curriculum expectations c) how I was going to engage and authentically assess the students d) keep a thorough and well-organized daybook and yadda yadda yadda. I could keep going all the way through the alphabet here. I, shamefully, let tech slide because I was trying to learn to be a teacher first. I thought it would come naturally to me, that it would flow from my finger tips, like some magic digital fairy. Not. It has to be planned, it has to make sense and it has to fit. The students and the content and the situation. And you have to want it.

 I’m not trying to make excuses either. Being a brocktechie, I had fully intended to weave the most fascinating, 21st century-fluent, rich, integrated, digital, empowering, engaging, differentiated learning experiences imaginable for a variety of cross-curricular, cross-strand lessons. But then I got in there and was paralyzed by possibility. Every lesson I thought of I spun into 12 more lessons and ways of teaching the concept. My first line of thinking was always tech-based - even if the concept didn’t need it, and GASP! even if the concept being taught didn’t benefit from tech-integration - i wanted so badly to go there.

 I did take a TON of pictures using my iPhone. I did do my microteaching lesson on making connections using an Epson Document Camera to do a Modeled Reading. I did download sound effects from the iTunes store to aid in audio transitions for my Math money unit centers, but that, my friends, is where the tech magic ended in my Placement A. It is my personal goal to incorporate tech into more of my teaching in Block B. Livescribe, SMART boards and even X-Box Kinect are all in the line-up for tech-enhanced lessons. Even Front Row could make an appearance - who knows. With 4 weeks of teaching under my belt, I feel like now I have the confidence to spice it up with some tech. Also, this time around I’m in a Grade 6 class. Any readers out there have experience using tech in a Grade 6 class? I’d love to hear.

Unpacking the Tpack Backpack

You hear about it everywhere you go. Tpack this. Tpack that. But to really wrap your noodle around it (especially if you’re a visual learner) you need this ultra handy Venn diagram. (Thanks Dr. Matthew J. Koehler!)

I hope I'm not totally missing the mark here, but what it boils down to, for me, is that what you teach, why you teach, how you teach, what you use to execute what you teach is all interrelated and cyclical. They all interplay and influence each other.

And this really makes me think of the concept of the reflective practitioner. If something doesn’t go well or “as planned” (does it ever really go exactly as planned?) in a lesson, we need to sit down at the end of it and actually analyze why that might have been so that we can try to improve it for the next time. And referencing the TPACK theory (and diagram!) can help. A lot.

I am finding the need for this self-disciplined practice (reflection) is even greater now that we’re teaching in the 21st century. We are lucky enough to have access to some pretty amazing technology (hopefully) to aid instruction or even to take a lesson to an entirely new plane of reality. But when the promise is so large, it better deliver.

Let’s face it, when technology-enhanced or technology-based lessons fail, they fail HARD. I’ve seen it a million times. In-class demos, presentations. Something isn’t plugged in. You have the wrong cord or no adapter. You can find the “source” button. You don’t know “really” the ins and outs of the SMART board. You use it mainly as a projection screen. It sucks. You feel embarrassed that you weren’t prepared. Or even if you had prepped, now the tech gods were against you. You look bad. Now put yourself in the student/ viewing audiences’ shoes. That's easy. We’ve all been in the audience and whatever engagement or attention we may have been directing at the speaker is now totally gone and the presenter is left with Classroom Management 101 duty because we’re now rowdy and bored. It needs to be slick. It needs to work. We, as educators, need to know how to make it work.

But this isn’t the only FAIL that can happen when tech is in the mix. Because ultimately the A/V guy is called in and plugs something in, is crowned “hero” and then goes back to _____ (fill in the blank). There are bigger fails than this. Fails that the Techie can’t fix for you. And this happens when you haven’t thought about TPACK. This happens when you incorporate tech for tech’s sake or you use something with good intentions, and it backfires. Kids aren’t tall enough to reach the SMART board, their tiny hands can’t create enough pressure to pop that balloon. You do a science demo on the document camera involving a liquid and your shaky nerves spill the substance and total the camera. You use Bitstrips to teach about Upper Canada and discover that a) settlers aren’t that funny and b) you’re not a natural-born comic strip writer.

Going even deeper than this, your peers or faculty advisors or principals, witnessing your tech failure, feel that your taking-a-risk-and-trying-it-out-with-technology lesson could have enlightened, engaged, and expanded some minds had you just left OUT the technology in the first-place. This is a bigger problem because its a way of thinking about technology that is insidious and still fairly widespread - and not just in the “old-school” generations either! It may be safer not to fail, but is it wiser? Is it wiser not to use technology in the classroom? We need to put a stop to this kind of questioning or we'll never move forward. We need to lead. We need know TPACK inside and out.

Or maybe we expect too much from technology. Now that society can do everything with an iPhone except for shave with it, have we - as a supposedly, digitally native generation - set our standards too high for tech-related teaching tools? Is a tech-based lesson necessarily better than an ‘old school’ chalkboard or pencil and paper lesson? You can’t argue that there is a unique kind of anticipation and built-in expectation that teaching with new, shiny tech toys will make the lesson 10x more engaging and help students to understand the content better. If we ignore TPACK and don’t stop to reflect using TPACK, this assumption will come back to bite us every time we fail.

http://www.tpck.org/

Class Generated Anchor Chart

During my internship days, the Grade three class I'm observing co-created, through brainstorming, the character traits they thought would make a "good student". We talked a little bit about the personality types, practices and behaviours that are best for learning, being an active participant in the learning process and getting along with peers and teachers. We wrote the traits up on chart paper and this became our "ground rules" page for behaviour or, if you prefer, a nice goal to aim for (even on murky dismal days) in terms of attitude. I used the wonderful collage application Wordle to put the class generated anchor chart into a visually-pleasing poster for our classroom wall.