I was referred to this site during EduCon, and this video was one that really caught my attention...
I am trying to implement a more project based approach at my own school, and this video has great examples of what a PBL environment can really be.
While there was lots of thinking happening while I watched the video, the most profound moment was when I realized that PBL just felt... Right.
With all this talk about students owning their own education and doing things that relate to the real world and how it works, PBL is like that elusive puzzle piece. The one you need to write the company for because it contains the head of Jimi Hendrix from your vintage Woodstock collectors edition puzzle. Until that piece is in place the whole thing was just a waste of time.
Have successfully initiated Project Based Education in your own classrooms? Any tips on how to make it happen easier?
My professor made an interesting comment recently. As a principal for over 9 years he realized that the best way to discover if a teacher has created a "community of learners" is to look at how the classroom acts when the teacher is not there. Does learning continue? Are the students able to continue doing what they are asked to do without the regular teacher in place?
This struck me as a very interesting idea. As a teacher, how will my students react when I am not around? Do they continue to work regularly? Do they act out and attempt to do their own thing instead of staying on task? This is a very interesting measure of the effectiveness of your community. How does yours measure up?
Like many of you out there I spent this past weekend at EduCon in Philadelphia. I have learned so much and took away many positive ideas about the future of education.
One thought kept eating at me though.
Although EduCon is not a technology conference, it is obvious that most of us that attend are at least above average in our use of technology. As I heard many people discuss and share ideas, much of what they spoke about included an assumption that technology was necessary in the schools. I agree with this, but are we creating a divide between those of us who understand things like Twitter, Diigo, Blogging, etc and those who don't?
Later that night those thoughts literally hit home. As I was talking to my wife (also a teacher) about all the things that were racing through my head about education reform and everything that needs to change she looked me square in the eyes and said "right now, I just want to not be a teacher." As weird as that was for me to hear (I live and breathe #edreform and #edtech). It showed me that while the things happening are powerful to us, it is nothing compared to what is being thrown about by the people actually in charge of most schools.
This type of change is what the term "grass roots" was made for. We have an obligation to those around us (teacher, parent, student, administrator) to prove that the things we are discussing are real and entirely possible. But we need to be willing to change the way we communicate those ideas to those around us (David Timony made a great Encienda presentation about this at EduCon).
Maybe we need to change the language, or the way we disseminate the ideas. But I think the most important thing we must realize is that some people are not buying what we are selling. I can't claim to know how to do it, but I know that we can figure it out.
Hopefully you have seen the "Scrollwheel" video based on this Reddit comic. If not view it now (it's short)...
I have experienced this feeling many times before, the following 3 things are comments I have been known to yell at people (I know it's rude but they really bug me). Follow these pointers and I can promise you that I will be polite as you use the scroll bar to move down the page.
"Don't Click The Arrows in PowerPoint!" There are enough technical mistakes a person can make before they even step up to make their presentation. I can take a poorly designed PowerPoint (not all of us can be presentation Gods), I can take a person stumbling through their presentation because they are ill prepared, but what I can't stand is when somebody changes to the next slide by walking over, grabbing the mouse, looking to the screen, scrolling over and clicking the "next" arrow. There are so many quicker ways to advance slide it is literally not funny. Here is a list of ways to advance to the next slide (available by pressing F1 in the slide show):
1) Click the mouse: Click it anywhere, it will advance
2) Use the Arrow Keys: Up/Down or Left/Right will advance the slide or take a step back to the previous.
3) Pg UP/Pg Down: This will also advance forward or backward.
4) Space Bar: Also advances forward
5) "N"/"P": Advances forward or backward
6) Press Enter: Advances forward
7) Slam Your Hand on the Keyboard: I actually tried this. When in doubt aim for the lower half of the keyboard.
8) Get a Presentation Remote: I recommend this. It's under $10 with shipping.
"TAB to Advance!" Few things are more gut wrenchingly boring than watching someone else fill out an online form. Please know the following; If you are filling out a form in any browser, you can press TAB to advance to the next fillable area in the form. Trust me, it makes things much faster.
"F11 For Full-Screen Browsing!" When I use "the internetz" as my students call it to present a new article or application to my class the first thing I do after getting to the page is press "F11". This button will rid your window of all the superfluous items your browser application uses (and in the case of Internet Explorer those dreaded toolbars).
I have witnessed this atrocity in person
Not only does this make whatever you are presenting look better, it also keeps people from discovering any other tabs you might have open. Try it now to experience the difference. You can easily press "F11" or "ESC" to quickly return back to standard browsing.
There are many more tech things that bug but I think that is enough for now. Let me know in the comments about things that bug you.
I am always looking for ways to get my least active students to participate in class discussions. Many time the student that talks the least will have the most relevant question or comment relating to the topic at hand, however due to fear of being wrong or asking a stupid question they refuse to communicate it out loud. Below are 2 tools that I have had lots of success with in getting those non-communicative students talking and discussing in class.
TodaysMeet.com TodaysMeet.com (thats with 2 e's, won't make that mistake twice) is a site that facilitates what is known as a "back-channel" chat. The students participate in a closed chat room with a 140 character limit to each message. TodaysMeet could not be easier to set-up and use. Simply navigate to the site, choose your room name, how long it's available for and (optionally) a Twitter Hashtag; hit "Create Room" and your ready to roll. Now you only need to send that link to your class and they can begin commenting. If you have a projector in the front of your room there is a "projector mode" which will display the chat full screen in order to better fit on the projector in the front of the room. I love this site for quick introductions to topics. I ask a question or for a definition of a term and let the students use any resources they can find to create a concise (remember 140 characters) answer that requires them to synthesize the information they gather into a short but sweet answer. A warning when using this site: The students are able to create their own user name each time they sign-in. I have each student post their real name next to their user name so that we all know who everyone is. The smart ones will navigate away from the page and return to create a new name but proper moderation will keep this to a minimum.
Google Moderator Google Moderator is similar to TodaysMeet but with an interesting twist. The students are able to not only able to ask questions and make comments, they can respond to other comments and vote on the questions they want to see answered. This may seem familiar to those of you that have heard of Purdue University's collaborative micro-discussion application HotSeat. Google Moderator brings that incredible power to your classroom (or speaking engagement). While it's mobile functionality seems limited to Android devices if you have an audience that has netbooks or access to a computer lab this can be very useful.
I have used it in several instances for class reviews. Students are able to post any questions they have about our current unit and they then vote on the questions they want answered. We then go from the most popular to the least popular questions and discuss each one.
While setup is not quite as simple as TodaysMeet it is still a very useful and viable way to facilitate class discussion. A word of warning: This application requires a Google account to use. My school uses Google for their email system however we did have some trouble getting some students signed in (luckily Google accounts are free and you can use an existing email address to sign-up).
Both of these sites are very powerful and extremely helpful in facilitating class discussions. I like to use TodaysMeet for the introductions to topics, and Moderator to conclude them. Try them out and see for yourself which you prefer.
Let me start this by saying that at the time of this writing I am a first year teacher. I currently teach in a private school where tenure doesn't really exist. So the comments I make here are simply me thinking (and typing) out loud. In no way should my musings be mistaken for professional political discourse. Thank You.
Not to long ago I got into a pretty heated debate with my then fiancée (now wife) about tenured teachers. My wife was a teacher at the time of this debate and she stood on the pro tenure side. I myself represented tenure reform side of the debate. We eventually had to stop the discussion because our food arrived and the subject mostly slipped from my mind, until I came across this article. NJ Governor Chris Christie is calling for an end to teacher tenure. Suddenly the memory of that argument came rushing back.
Before I was a teacher I worked in small design shop. I knew that if I did not do my job than I would face being fired. This was known and understood by everyone in my place of employment and nobody really thought anything of it. We did our job, got our paycheck and went home. At that time I thought that the school system should work the same way. Successful Teacher = Learned Student; if that simple equation was not fulfilled than the teacher was not doing their job and should risk being fired. As I began studying to be a teacher however I realized that the equation may be much more complicated than that. I'm no math professor but I think it could look a little more like this: where t=teacher, s=student, p=parent, m=available materials, x=student performance, e=environment; (t+(s*p^2))/-m = x/e. Correct me if I'm wrong but that is to many variables to put on the shoulders of a teacher alone. I do however still believe that the tenure process is too protective in many ways. Check out this chart below to see what a worst case scenario looks like for a tenured teacher who is not doing their job (click image for a larger version);
This is a problem
A teacher that is blatantly not doing their job does not deserve 2-5 years to continue not doing that job. Very few (if any) jobs offer that kind of protection.
One of my professors related a story to me from when he was a principal. He had a tenured teacher who would literally clip his nails during class while the students copied from the text book. My professor (we will call him Mr. A) attempted to start the process of getting this teacher fired. He was unable to get sufficient evidence that he was not doing his job and therefore was unable to proceed. Eventually Mr. A witnessed this teacher push a student into the lockers and Mr. A was finally able to move forward with the process of firing the teacher. Because the accusation involved physical student contact the teacher was suspended with pay while the process began. It took 2 years for the evidence to be gathered, and all the paper to be signed and verified. After all of this, the day before the hearing the teacher's lawyer called the school district and said the teacher would be willing to tender his resignation if the school would simply pay one more year of salary. The school was forced to accept the offer seeing as if the trial went to court the teacher could have appealed and cost the school much more than that one year of salary.
The above story is a worst case scenario, however the opposite can be true as well. Teachers must be protected from arbitrary action against them. One of my excellent friends is a very capable teacher in the public school system and facing the possibility of being fired by the new principal of her school. The principal does not get along with my friend and because she is not tenured she has little protection from an arbitrary dismissal. Without tenure our students face a possible problem with schools attempting to slash budgets and do so by releasing their highest paid (and commonly most effective) teachers.
As I said above I am a first year teacher in a school that does not have to worry about tenure. I am unsure of where I stand on the line. I find myself however balanced very precariously. If someone was able to present a viable option of tenure that did not protect the teachers that were simply incompetent I would probably fall on the side of tenure reform.
Where do you fall on this issue? Do you think that teachers should be protected just as they are? Do you think that there should be a little wiggle room for principals to purge teachers that are under-performing or even prove to be making the school worse?
As I was watching my students work collaboratively on a review packet I couldn't help but feel as if they might be cheating. I suddenly realized that I had never really though about the difference between collaborating and cheating. Sir Ken Robinson briefly mentions (10m:05s) collaborating vs. cheating in his RSA talk but while I knew there was a difference I hadn't yet decided what the line was. Can they copy answers from one another? Can they split the work in sections and then group the work together? They have done all of this in my classroom but I've never really considered it cheating.
Before being a teacher I worked for a private business and in that business we constantly collaborated. We know that each person understood a specific set of information and that we could rely on that person to understand their aspect of the project. This can be seen as similar to students in the classroom. When given a group project or told they can work in groups I notice that some students split the work into sections and then once each section is finished they combine the work together. Is there anything wrong with this? I am really not sure. I want the students to learn collaborative skills but I also want them to be able to do well on the tests they need to pass. What bothers me is that I understand that humans naturally collaborate (we evolved to do so), but when all parties involved must learn all of the same facts, is collaboration really beneficial?
