Monthly Archives: January 2007

Content Is King

Thanks in no small part to my participation in this community, I have been giving a lot of thought to student engagement and even working on a project with a pair of science teachers that we hope will hook some kids into learning about the ocean.  We met yesterday to hash out some more ideas and to determine the best ways for me to lend my support.

At this point, the science teachers have decided that they are going to divide the students into groups of 3 or 4 and pose to each of them a question or problem related to the ocean: Global warming, over-fishing, drilling in protected waters, etc.  The teachers will start a wiki page with some rough framework and some basic resources to get them started, and the kids will take it from there. 

For those who may need a little more structure, we talked about differentiating instruction by having some students pull pictures of ocean life down from Flickr Creative Commons and create a digital story using BubbleShare.  Those that are more "techno-savvy" can do whatever they feel will best communicate what they learned.

The young man I’m working with brings the energy.  He is chomping at the bit and ready to turn the kids loose on the Internet.  I never rain on his parade, but rather continue to ask questions that will keep the group focused on our endgame: Allowing the students to collaborate on the project without having the technology itself become the project.  I’m sure we’ve all seen the results of turning our students loose on PowerPoint for the first time.  I got on average 27 slides of sound effects along with every whiz-bang transition that Microsoft dreamed up.  But precious little content.

As we are "trailblazers" at our school with this project, it was important to me to keep bringing the conversation back to the most important point: Content is king. 
 

We discussed creating a rubric that would clearly indicate that the emphasis of the project was on researching the ocean and developing a usable resource on the Web that could be tapped by future classes at our school or anywhere else. 

Our question for the next meeting:  How can we help the students understand that bells and whistles might cause people to come and look and maybe even say, "Hey – that’s pretty cool!" but it won’t make them stay?

I continue to think of these tools in light of the coffee cup analogy I’ve used before: Are you enjoying the coffee, or thinking too much about the cup?

Blogging with Common Sense

For the last week or so I’ve seen the PSEA Legal Division’s Blogging 101 document floating around the edu-blogosphere.  While there are definitely some good points in the document, I can’t help but be bothered by the subtext that seems to permeate the entire document:

Go ahead and blog if you really, really want to, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.

As one who is relatively new to the blogging scene, I found Doug Johnson‘s recent post on Blogging and a little common sense to be a great read.  He’s right, of course, in that most of what he suggests is pretty common sense, it’s just good to confirm once in a while that my version of common sense is, indeed, common.

Among Doug’s suggestions:

  • Write assuming your boss is reading.
  • Gripe globally; praise locally.

Click over to The Blue Skunk Blog to read the rest of his post.

My viral marketing campaign continues…

I wrote earlier in the week about a wiki project I am embarking on with a couple of our science teachers.  This afternoon over lunch, one of our outstanding English faculty who heard about what we were working on approached me and asked about the limits and possibilities of using Google Notebook as a research tool for our IB students who are working on their extended essays. 

It appears that without really intending to, I have started my own little viral marketing campaign for some of these Web 2.0 tools and have sparked interest in some of our more inquisitive faculty members.  She arranged for me to come in and speak to her students to get them up and running on Google Notebook in a couple of weeks so I plan to put together something of a tutorial starting with some of the information that Wes Fryer has so generously shared with the community.

My short-term goal is to hook enough teachers into these simple but powerful technologies that they end up becoming the critical mass in our building who will pull others along.

Engaged Teacher Count: 4 as of lunch today

“Do We Have to Take Notes on This?”

When I started this blog way back – well – last week, I thought I’d be posting a lot on technology and educational leadership.  But here I am again posting about "Lo-Fi" note taking.

A recent post on Lifehack.org pointed me to an older blog post by Michael Hyatt of Working Smart regarding the "lost art" of note taking.  I couldn’t help but think of our students when I read item number 1 on his list:

Note-taking enables you to stay engaged. The real benefit is not what happens after the meeting but during the meeting itself. If I don’t take notes, my mind wanders. I daydream. As they say, “the lights are on, but no one is home.” However, when I take notes, I find that I stay more alert, focused, and actively involved. My contribution to the meeting is thus more likely to add value to the topic under discussion. This is why I take notes even if someone is officially taking minutes.

Wow.  Note-taking to stay engaged.  What immediately struck me was how many of our kids are disengaged precisely because they are "taking notes."  There’s a reason for the quotes.  To many of our kids, the "note-taking" they do in school does little to prepare them for the real world precisely because most of them have had little or no preparation in how to take notes.

Copying text from an overhead is what many of our students have been trained to think of as "note-taking."  As I see it, it is an exercise in anxiety for the student who writes slowly and is in a panic that the teacher will move the transparency before he or she is finished copying.  And it is an exercise in boredom for everyone else.  How authentically engaged can that student be with the content?  Some kids are 100% engaged in writing as quickly as possible.  The rest are sitting and figuring out how to pass the time before the teacher slides down the piece of paper they’re using to cover the rest of the notes in order to keep students from "getting ahead."

One of the student teachers in our building this semester was talking to me on Tuesday about a PowerPoint presentation he had used when teaching a social studies class last week.  He was concerned because the students seemed a little confused by exactly what they were supposed to be doing.  Reflecting on the lesson, he arrived at the conclusion that a certain proportion of the students sat and watched as if they were watching a television show or a movie at the theater, while another group treated PowerPoint slides as high-tech overhead transparencies and spent the entire time trying to copy the slides word-for-word.

It comes back to teaching our kids to be consumers of information.  How and when did they get the idea that note-taking meant to copy down everything verbatim?  Our kids need to be able to engage in the lesson instead of being anxiously engaged in trying to capture everything.

Teaching them to critically process and assess all the information they receive through lecture, video, PowerPoint slides, the Internet, and yes, even the occasional overhead transparency, will move them toward becoming intelligent consumers of information.  And before we know it, they will be taking notes to stay engaged.

Web 2.0 Tool: Snipshot

I came across this really cool photo tool this morning.  Perfect for when you need to do some basic photo editing, enhancing or resizing and don’t need or want to open Photoshop or iPhoto.  There’s nothing to download or install — it’s 100% browser-based.

Snipshot

I clicked around and messed with a couple of the pics they have for demo use and it’s pretty powerful! 

Starting Small

My first mini-breakthrough so I have to share…

I had a meeting on Tuesday with a first-year teacher in my charge who is interested in doing "something different" with his science classes.  We talked about what he’s doing now which was pretty "standard" stuff — lecturing and note-taking.  Then we started to brainstorm a bit about what "something different" would look like.  I remembered reading David Warlick‘s posts about the Science Blogging Conference last week so we surfed to his site and to the conference site.  By the end of the conversation, he had decided that he might want to get a free wiki on Wikispaces and have his class build a wiki for his upcoming unit on the ocean.

I gave him the links and told him we would sit down again next week once we’d had a chance to click around and get a "feel" for the limits and possibilities of a class wiki.  This is uncharted area for both of us so I also charged him with beginning to think about a framework he may want to lay out for his students.

Within a half-hour, another science teacher stopped by my office and asked if she could sit down with us on Monday because she was teaching the same unit and thought that her students would like to work collaboratively with the other class on the wiki.  Now the three of us have a shared Google notebook where we are brainstorming asynchronously and posting thoughts, ideas, and links.  I am starting to learn just enough to be dangerous so look out world…

It’s amazing how these things take on a life of their own when you get the right people involved.  Something has been set in motion that I never intended and we’re on an uncharted course that is new to all of us.

I’m posting partly because I’m excited about the possibilities and partly because I’m hoping some of you out there in cyberspace may have some tips, suggestions, or lessons learned from your own experiences.  I’ve done some Googling and seen some great examples of finished products (and works in process), but I’m hoping to gain some insight into how to actually begin the process with teachers and students.

Productivity & GTD in Education

This post has been updated and has become a “page” since I’ve moved to WordPress. Please click here to visit and see what’s new.

There is a plethora of information online about various implementations of David Allen‘s GTD system, but precious few examples in the field of education.  Even fewer than that address the unique aspects of the day-to-day life of the school-based administrator.  Here is my first pass at sharing my system with the community-at-large.

One thing I am asked about quite frequently is the notebook(s) and/or index cards that I carry with me pretty much everywhere on campus.  As a techno-geek, many people are really surprised to find that I use paper as my primary method of capturing ideas, thoughts, and meeting notes.  I even use a hybrid calendaring system which I’ll mention more about later.

I have read David Allen’s excellent book on productivity several times and have tried to incorporate his ideas into my productivity methods. There is no shortage of discussion on the Web about David Allen’s methods, and at first I was a little hesitant to even venture into the religion that is GTD.  Eventually, I realized that despite what some would argue, it is not an all or nothing proposition, especially in the field of education.

First, the hardware.  I was first aware of my bizarre attraction to office supply stores as a middle school student when I was constantly needing a better "Trapper Keeper" or some other notebook that would certainly help me improve my grades.  The thing is, even until recently I spent way too much time trying to build the "perfect" system, and far too little time actually doing the stuff my lists.

In a podcast last July, productivity guru Merlin Mann of 43Folders asks, "Are you enjoying your coffee or just obsessing about the cup you put it in?"  A few months after listening to that podcast, I decided it was time to firm up my trusted system and spend more time doing the work.

My system at this point consists of:

  • Levenger Circa Junior leather notebook with 5 divider tabs - This houses primarily "personal" stuff.  Records of phone calls I’ve made to the bank, to the phone company, to the Toyota dealership, etc. The tabs are divided thusly: My non-school-related action lists, running notes, bigger projects (list of chick flicks my wife would like to own on DVD, list of potential blog posts, etc.), reference (my school phone tree, bank account numbers, insurance policy numbers, critical contacts I might need if my phone crashes), and blank paper. This comes back and forth with me every day and is always on my desk at work. 
  • Levenger Circa Letter-Sized Notebook with 5 divider tabs – My "work life" lives in this one.  In order, the 5 tabs separate sections for: calendar and to-do, this week’s notes (classroom observation to discuss with a teacher, agendas for department meetings), older notes (stuff I may need this week — for example notes from an observation that I need to use to write up an evaluation, working mind map for a particular project that I won’t need this week but for which I may have a brainstorm), reference (another copy of the phone tree, school accountability report, list of teachers I am responsible for evaluating, list of student teachers and their cooperating educator), and blank paper.  This comes home every day in case I need to reference it in the evening.  
  • Microsoft Outlook 2003 - This keeps my "master" calendar and my "@Work" tasks.
  • T-Mobile Dash - Other than the fact that it’s not an iPhone, I think I may have finally found my perfect convergence device.  Small, light, easy to use.  It syncs over-the-air via ActiveSync with my District’s Exchange server which allows me to have my calendar in my pocket all the time.
  • Various and Sundry 3×5 Cards – I tried a Hipster PDA for a while, but didn’t care for it.  Too much printing and cutting. 3×5 cards (especially when used in "portrait" mode), however, are the perfect tool for taking notes when you get a call from a parent or when you have to deal with the student vs. student conflicts that arise from time to time.  The main reason I use them is because when I leave school for the day, the cards stay put.  One of my main concerns when I was tweaking my system is that I didn’t want to be hauling around confidential student information (names, phone numbers, etc.) all the time.  The cards strike a nice balance.  I can keep "working" cards on my desk as a visual reminder until the issue is resolved, and then they are archived in a 3×5 "recipe box" with 12 monthly divider tabs.  At the end of the school year, I throw a rubber band around them and archive them with the rest of our paper records for the year.
  • Pilot G-2 and Pilot G-2 Mini Pens – Simply the best pens you can buy.  I find it is always easier to write and brainstorm if you like what you’re writing with.  

Still to add/incorporate/tweak:

  • I think I’d like to try a fountain pen.  I’ve read good things about the Pilot Knight.  At $35 it’s a great price for a fountain pen.  Thing is, at $35 it’s still a pen.  
  • I would like to purchase the leather cover for my letter-sized notebook, but at $94 that’s a bit steep.  

My Circa system was inspired by Alan Nelson and his Seat 1A blog post about his Circa system.  In particular, I liked the way he created printed versions of his Outlook calendar.  I don’t have a color printer that can print two-sided so I have to do a bit more work than Alan, but my weekly routine includes printing the following from Outlook:

  1. My task list by category (I only keep work tasks in Outlook so it’s less than a page)
  2. Two-page-per-week calendars for the rest of the current month (task list on the left side, notes area on the right)  
  3. Two-page-per-month calendars for the next 4 or 5 months  

The best tool I’ve found to assemble this is the free version of a product called PDF Redirect that creates a virtual printer and allows me to generate 3 PDF files for the items above and virtually "merge" them into a single document for printing.  Since I don’t have a color printer that can do two-sided documents, I have to print the odd pages first, then re-insert and print the even pages (in reverse order – you’ll understand when you try it).  The key is that the first page of a two-page calendar has to be on the left side when you open the calendar.  This requires either a blank page (what a waste of space!) as the first page, or some other single-page document (such as my tasks list).

Circa paper can be expensive so I use a couple of PDF templates that were shared by "Stew," a fellow member of the 43Folders Forum.  I print them onto Office Depot brand color laser paper.  I use some that is slightly weightier (24 lbs) and slightly whiter (115 brightness) than typical office copy paper so it stands up better to being punched, inserted, removed, and abused. 

I’m not going to wax on any longer by bestowing the virtues of Levenger’s Circa system, but if you keep paper notes or think you might like to start, it’s truly the best investment I’ve made in my own productivity.  The ability to move and re-arrange pages within and between notebooks is amazing.  And the covers that fold over make it far superior to standard ring binders.  With some discs and a punch, I can make a notebook for pretty much anything in a few minutes.  They have a new "Starter Kit" available for between $8 and $12 depending on the size.  Doug Johnston of DIYPlanner.com (sort of an "open-source" community for paper planner users) has started a series of reviews of the Circa system for your reading pleasure.

IMAGE_004.jpg

Here is a camera phone shot of my Circas on my desk at work so you can get the basic idea:

For a brief overview of David Allen’s GTD methodology, take a look at Merlin Mann’s outstanding blog post, "Getting Started with GTD."

Following the “Rules” for Personal Electronics

Today’s Rocky Mountain News had a feature on cell phones and portable electronics in schools (see: Readin’, writin’, and textin’).  I have worked in a large district where there was a district-wide "don’t-ask-don’t-tell" policy regarding these devices, and now a smaller district where schools are free to create (and enforce!) their own policies regarding personal electronics.   I can say with some experience that I’ve never seen a "good" policy on electronic devices.

When I read stories like this, I have to wonder whether we’re fighting the right battles.  According to the sidebar, "Connected At School," that accompanied the article, six of the 10 students who were interviewed admitted to using their phones during class even though they knew it was not allowed.  Some have even had their phones taken away so that parents had to come pick them up, but even that hasn’t deterred them from continuing to use them in class.

When I look at discipline I think the intention is to change behavior.  But even after all this "discipline" has been imposed the behavior doesn’t change.  We’re not achieving what we set out to do.  We’re creating a cottage industry around looking for, confiscating, and holding hostage students’ cell phones and iPods.  Yet the purported "desirable" outcome (presumably the complete absence of portable electronic devices) continues to elude us.

Personally, I love text messaging.  I’ve used it with Google Calendar to send and receive updates on appointments,  I’ve used Google SMS to look up addresses, phone numbers, and directions, and I’ve received SMS reminders from Remember the Milk.

Kids can connect with one another and with volumes of information instantly as they sit in class or at lunch.  I have a hard time getting my head around how that’s a "bad" thing.  The simple fact is that our students have more information at their fingertips than most of us had in their high school libraries.

I guess I keep coming back to the same questions.  I’m sure that there is a way to approach this issue that doesn’t involve rules, consequences, and discipline, I’m just not sure I’m clear (yet) on what that "way" is. 

Can electronics be a nuisance?  A distraction?  Certainly.  But so can a paper airplane or a rubber band.  Texting while the teacher is talking?  Sure.  When I was in high school we wrote notes and folded them so they had a little "pull here" tab.  Of course, no one would have dreamed of banning paper because it could be used to write a note to someone. 

Banning paper.  Does that sound ridiculous?  I’m sure it sounds no more ridiculous to us than banning a cell phone sounds to a 21st century kid. 

The more I stew on this, the more I am starting to see this as an issue of engagement.  How can we engage kids so that they are less tempted to use their 21st century distractions to avoid school and more likely to use them to embrace learning?

It’s funny how even after a few days and a couple of blog posts I can already see how everything is related.  Technology.  Engagement.  School 2.0.  Web 2.0.  Communication.  Accessibility.