A movement underway called Save our Schools (SOS) seeks to remind our elected officials that public education is crucial, important and worth saving. There was a rally this week in Washington and a blogging effort out of the Cooperative Catalyst collaborative blog space is underway. They are asking bloggers to write about public education and then link to their site. The hope is to show support for public education in a myriad of ways.
I thought about writing something serious, such as my feelings that public education touches more lives than just about any institution in our culture; about how public education does more to equalize opportunity than other other program in the private or public sector; that public education seems increasingly under attack from the government we turn to for support. You know … serious stuff.
But I imagine all that is being said, so then I figured, why not add a little levity. So, here are a series of Boolean Squared comics that I had created around standardized testing, which has become the hallmark and lodestone of so much of educational reform. I have mixed feelings about the testing (the data is useful, the carrot-stick approach is stressful) and I hope that gets captured a bit with these comics.
I came across this story contest through Twitter and given that it is a partnership between the National Writing Project and a story writing site called Figment, I thought it was worth checking out. It is, and I want to invite you to join in, too. The idea here is that published author Courtney Sheinmel has created the first line of a story. You need to finish it, using the Figment website to do so. The writing concept behind the partnership is all about the craft of catching the reader with an opening hook.
Here’s what Courtney came up with:
“I wish spoken words were things that could be erased, forgotten. But now I knew, and we could never go back.”
The contest is open to anyone on Figment, which apparently is a boatload of interesting writers writing interesting stories. There are already lots of stories in the contest. I wrote mine about the end of a relationship and the balancing act between letting go and hanging on. (read Plugged/Unplugged)
1. Sign up for an account on Figment
2. Create something new based on the opening lines given
3. Tag it “NWPstarter” (in the tab called “details”)
4. Press “Publish Now”
The deadline is Sunday, July 17 at 9PM EST. Come on and write. And good luck.
I stumbled on this at Vimeo, and was completely shaken by the stories starting to unfold in this upcoming documentary. You know, bullying took on a lot of weight this year in our schools — more than usual, thanks to a new state law mandating reporting and intervention — and I feel at times that the students began tuning it out because the concept was so prevalent. But what does impact them are personal stories of kids, and adults reacting, and I think this video documentary might have some good potential for making a difference.
Check out the trailer:
The Bully Project: a year in the life of America’s bullying crisis
This year, over 18 million American kids will be bullied, making it the most common form of violence young people in the U.S. experience.
Directed by Sundance- and Emmy-award winning filmmaker, Lee Hirsch, The Bully Project is a beautifully cinematic, character-driven documentary—at its heart are those with the most at stake and whose stories each represent a different facet of this bullying crisis.
Following five kids and families over the course of a school year, the film confronts bullying’s most tragic outcomes, including the stories of two families who’ve lost children to suicide and a mother who waits to learn the fate of her 14 –year-old daughter, incarcerated after bringing a gun on her school bus. With rare access to the Sioux City Community School District, the film also gives an intimate glimpse into school busses, classrooms, cafeterias and even principles offices, offering insight into the often-cruel world of children, as teachers, administrators and parents struggle to find answers.
While the stories examine the dire consequences of bullying, they also give testimony to the courage and strength of the victims of bullying and seek to inspire real changes in the way we deal with bullying as parents, teachers, children, and in society as a whole. Through the power of these stories, The Bully Project aims to be a catalyst for change and to turn the tide on an epidemic of violence that has touched every community in the United States—and far beyond.
You need to check this project out from Prof. Wesch and his students as they continue to explore the impact of technology on students. (Did one student say that 75 percent of what he knows he learned from Youtube?)
Today the Digital Ethnography Research Team of 2011 is proud to announce the release of the Visions of Students Today: a “video collage” about student life created by students themselves and presented using the wonders of HTML5, allowing us to “cite” books and videos that are being presented in the remix as they are being shown.
Since the call for submissions went out in January we have received hundreds of submissions. The remix in the middle of the screen is in many ways a video of my own experience viewing these videos, shot from my own point of view. You see me sifting through videos, putting them in piles, checking resources, reading and re-reading the lines that have informed and inspired me. It took me 3 months to sift through these materials; you get to race through them in 5 minutes.
But just as important, check out all of the other various strands that come alive with this project, as students take the videos and ideas in different directions. You will have to read the blog post there to get a better sense of what I am talking about, or click inside the video collage itself to follow other strands (wow — html5 does open up some new possibilities, doesn’t it?).
What comes through loud and clear is a growing transformation of the daily lives of young people, and the question of whether traditional education is meeting their needs for learning, exploring and making a difference on the world. And we get to hear that story directly from the students.
Tonight, my son’s Little League team plays in the city’s Championship Game. I am one of the assistant coaches, but to be honest, if you had asked me mid-season if we were going to go deep in the playoffs, I am not sure what I would have said. We had some erratic games and error-prone losses. But something clicked with these kids in the past two weeks. Our team ended up near the bottom of the regular season standings, but they have been on a tear through the playoffs — hitting, fielding, pitching, etc. We took on the top seed team that went undefeated all year and, twice, we handed them two decisive losses to knock them out of the playoffs.
The other day, the head coach sent us an email about positive comments that he has received from some parents about our style of coaching, which is to keep things fun and positive, and the parents’ appreciation for how we show support even for the players who might make an occasional mistake or lack bat skills at this point in time. It may sound obvious that you would do those sorts of supportive things with 11 and 12 year kids but I can say from experience that some teams have kids sit on the bench for even minor infractions or mistakes. I’ve watched more than my share of kids on opposing teams kicking at the dirt in the dugout.
Last winter, I wrote a post about my lessons learned from the basketball court as I watched my sons play. This morning, I was thinking a bit about lessons learned from this Little League team, and how those lessons have some resonance with how we approach our classroom environment.
Starting the season out with some bonding activities (we held a picnic) set the tone early on that we would be playing together — through thick and thin, with an emphasis on “playing”– and that they should at least respect each other, if not become good baseball friends. Most have.
Everybody gets their chance to shine, and not just once — but all season. Even the kids who struggle at this level of baseball play have had plenty of time in the infield and outfield, and at bat. No one is feeling left behind by the team. Win or lose, they know they have a chance to contribute.
Practice is important. We’ve had many practices — where we mix serious skills with games, serious with fun — and that seems to have really paid off in many ways. I can hopefully say that every player seems much better as a player now than when we started the season in early Spring (during our rainy season).
Keeping things in perspective has been important. It’s a baseball game, after all. The balance of the world doesn’t teeter on the caught or not caught fly ball. We show support for the kids who make that catch just as we do for the kids who don’t make that catch. We set that tone early as coaches, and the team picked up on it, giving everyone high fives when an inning ends or begins.
But, there are always teaching moments. Our head coach is great at identifying small moments for teaching individual kids what he knows. Not everything is learned in practice. Sometimes, it is the one-to-one connection that makes all the difference in the world. I’ve watched him get on a knee and have a quiet conversation with just about every player our team.
Keep trying. Boy, we’ve come back from a bunch of games just because the team refused to believe the game was over. This mindset that anything may be possible at any given moment is such an intangible thing to try to teach but it is also so important to instill in young people. It’s what we call resilience, right?
We’ll see how tonight goes when the Championship Game gets underway. Win or lose, it’s been a magical season for the boys, including my son. I hope they can savor the moment.
I find it hard to believe, but technology never lies, right? According to my blog dashboard, this post is my 2,000th post that I have written and published here at Kevin’s Meandering Mind. Oh sure, I write in other places, too, but this is my digital home — the place where I see the most of own online identity. The screen for my voice.
2,000.
Good Lord.
That’s a lot of writing, and while I notice the trend of many other bloggers stepping back from their blogs with the advent of Facebook and Twitter, I still find blogging a useful venue for reflection and sharing my thinking about teaching, writing, music, books and more. I still find it useful to have folks out there in RSS land who read what I write (you’re a bunch of saints, my friends, and there are close to 4,000 comments approved here) and I give thanks to those colleagues and acquaintances of mine who periodically add their own thoughts to the conversation.
I began this blog after a week-long technology retreat with the National Writing Project back in 2006 (I think), thanks to the encouragement of my friend, Maria, from DC, who knew I was blogging with my students and asked why I wasn’t blogging as a teacher. Why not, indeed? I jumped in, and never really stopped writing and blogging since. I’ve since added podcasting, and video production, and more experiments than you can shake a virtual stick at. Even with the uncertain future of the NWP, I still have many of those NWP folks in mind whenever I sit down to write. What sharing can I bring to the table? What ideas can I garner from them? That reciprocal nature is how I envisioned this blog, even if a lot of days it is just me typing for myself.
Thanks for hanging out with me. I appreciate your company.
Peace (in the posts),
Kevin
PS — it was just by chance that I peeked at my Dashboard this morning. Otherwise, the celebration post would have come and gone with no notice from me.
This is a sort of follow-up post from Thursday’s TEP Conference here in Western Massachusetts. I wrote the other day about Alan November, and the second keynote was by Jim Moulton, who was one of the planners behind Maine’s 1-1 Laptop Initiative, is a former teacher, and is now is an educational consultant for Apple.
Moulton focused his talk around Maine’s laptop program, and he argued that putting devices in the hands of all middle school students has changed the ecology of the educational system in his state. This doesn’t mean that every element of teaching and learning has been transformed, but Moulton said that putting the tools of creativity in the hands of students, and their teachers, have established collaboration, audience and creativity has key components to many classrooms and libraries in the Maine school system.
While some worried that technology might replace teachers (or the need for good teachers), Moulton argued that it is, in fact, quite the opposite. The technology has opened up even more doors of opportunity for teachers to work with engaged students.
“The (technology) device drives a profound need for human interaction with kids. It’s a return to a Socratic method of teaching,” Moulton explained, and although he did not refer to the Digital Native/Digital Immigrant dichotomy, he is right in debunking the perception that young people “get” technology and know how to use it wisely.
The heart of Moulton’s talk was not about the devices, although he is now an Apple consultant in a state that has bought all Apple products (through a bidding process), but about the networks of connections of people that spring up around the technology, and how powerful those connections can be for teachers and students.
He cited examples that were born from the 1-1 initiative, such as regional technology integrators’ meetings to share best practices, teacher groups coming together to explore and plan curriculum, connections from schools to many other organizations (around science and history), partnerships with universities to support the technology learning and the students themselves. An annual conference at the end of the year brings together more than 1,000 students to share their work around technology with each other.
“We have the technology, but that’s not enough,” Moulton said. “It is about the social networks that spring up and the way we choose to leverage the unbelievable resources in our schools” for student learning and achievement.
In other words, it is not about the device. It is about the learning. He cited a recent ad campaign by Apple that seems to drive this home. (Remember, he is an Apple consultant now). The advertisement’s focus is that when technology becomes invisible, incredible thing are possible. At the risk of sounding like I am endorsing Apple, I wanted to share the ad Moulton referred to. Sure, it is selling the iPad, but the message is interesting.
Our state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released information this week on its schedule to merge the Common Core curriculum with our own Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks. The focus is on college-ready literacy and mathematics, with emphasis on informational/persuasive writing and content-area reading. Narrative writing takes a back seat to expository writing, I think. The actual frameworks are not yet out, but will be soon.
Here are a couple of slides from the state’s report, which shows that we are in a transition year next year and then quickly, we will be right into a Common Core-aligned curriculum. Many of us are wondering when our standardized test will reflect the shift, and it looks like a partial implementation of the new test will be next year, and then a full implementation the following year.
As it turns out, I will be talking a bit about the Common Core shift on Thursday, when I co-present a session entitled Technology Across the Curriculum with two Western Massachusetts Writing Project colleagues (Tom and Tina) at a new conference entitled Technology in Education Partnership (TEP), where Alan November is the keynote speaker. (And can I say that this conference seems very vendor-driven, so I am not sure how it will be.) We’re happy to have an event like this in our part of the state, however.
After writing a post the other day about what DIDN’T work for an online writing space that I am part of for the Massachusetts New Literacies Initiative, I realized that I probably should come at the topic from the opposite direction: What DOES work for creating a strong online network?
Here are a few ideas that I have mulled over in my role as a participant and facilitator of various spaces. Some of the concepts here also stem from a book that my friend, Paul Oh, recommended many years back. The book — Design for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Spaces, by Derek Powazek — was published in 2002 and the world has changed considerably since then (of course). Still, much of what Powazek wrote about lingers in the back of my mind.
My ideas for creating and supporting and extending an online writing community:
The most obvious idea is that users need to have some sort of shared connections. Disparate interests might bring folks together for the short term, but unless they find things to write about, to learn about and to share about, it seems unlikely that the community can last for the long haul. The thread that binds us together in online communities is the thread that leads us back there again and again. Sometimes, this might be groups within networks, or the entire network itself. We yearn to self-identify, don’t we? An online space can meet those needs that we have to be part of something meaningful.
One of the ideas that Powazek writes about is the idea of a gated entry, which is the concept that a user must go through some process (registration, answer questions, etc.) before becoming part of the networking space. While you might assume this is to keep spam bots out, Powazek contends that by having a person invest time in the process, they are investing themselves in the network. Once invested, a person is more likely to think of themselves as part of the network itself, and not just a fly-by-night passerby. At the time I read this, I th0ught it to be counter-intuitive. Don’t we want the walls to be low? But over time, I have come to believe that he is right. A little work goes a long way to envisioning the importance of membership. Otherwise, you have people dropping anchor and never really becoming part of the network. They just take up virtual space.
An obvious element of a strong network is the concept of the “welcome wagon,” which is someone who says “hello” to newcomers, offers some advice on where to begin and is available for questions. Steve Hargadon did this at Classroom 2.0 in its early years, and I thought it so important that in the networks that I manage, I always have that in place. This gives instant feedback to new folks, and lets them know there are people who care about them in the space. In larger networks, you’d have to deputize folks to help with the welcome wagon. But don’t push it aside. It gives a humanizing approach to a virtual community.
Design matters, and you want the design of a site to be friendly, reflective of the values of the connections, and (even with the initial membership obstacle discussed above) easy to use. Most people don’t have patience. It’s sort of like a first-impression. Make it difficult to add a post, or submit a comment, and you may have already lost the battle for folks already uncomfortable with technology. The trick here is that most of us (me) are not programmers, so we use sites that have built-in templates, with some wiggle room for changes. Even so, we can make choices that reflect our communities.
I find it useful to have some sort of notifications of new activity going out to users. The trick is to find the balance between useful information and blabber that will turn people off. But notifications are a good tool for drawing someone back to a site for participation and reminds them of why they joined in the first place. It’s beneficial to allow users to opt out of notification alerts, too.
Create paths for leadership by being open to members becoming leaders of the site you have created. This can be difficult if you have a vision for the site, and then suddenly, you realize that users have a much different vision. But their leadership and activity is what keeps the space alive, not you (not me). At some point, you need to slowly give up some of the reins if you want your site to be more than just a kingdom in which you are the undisputed ruler.
The corollary of that point is to be ready for change and accept it as a natural progression of a site. This has sort of happened at a writing site that I helped create, in that the places that I thought would be high interest are not always high interest, and an unexpected idea has suddenly flourished and thrived. It took me the longest time to realize, “this is what our site is about right now,” but that realization gave me satisfaction, too. The members spoke their minds with their actions.
Activities matter, particularly when a site is built around the writing of users. Having regular activities that folks can participate in provides them with an invitation to come back and contribute. Many people will respond to that kind of invitation. We can’t expect that folks will constantly live at the site (unless you are a Facebook community, I suppose).
While we are shifting into the age of multimedia, the fact is that writing is still the main form of communication for most networking sites. A good site allows for images and video and audio, but still provides an easy way to write and respond to writing. In a few years, this may no longer be the case that writing is the center of a network, but it is right now. Make sure a user can tap into the inner writer.
Remember that most sites have a lifespan, which means that your site (your idea) might die out naturally. You might go through the grieving process, and even get frustrated at your members. Don’t. I can list a few blogs and communities that I have been part of that were valuable for a time, but then, disappeared off my radar. They served a purpose for the time and then, didn’t. That happens. Be ready for it.
I hope this is a bit more positive than my last post, and it sure has helped me think through more things related to online communities. I value the ones I am in and look forward to the ones I may be in and fondly remembers the ones that I was part of. What more can you ask for.
And, of course, what have I missed? What works for you in your networks?
