I was checking is with my fellow COETAIL Course 5-ers, perhaps looking for some other poor folks in the same state of disarray, faint panic, or deep procrastination that I think I might be in.  Talking to my colleague Julie (Global Turner) provides me with little solace, as she is rigorous in her organization and meeting of deadlines (self imposed).  She is trucking along with her project.  So am I, but in a different way, less tangible, I think.  I am teaching a non-fiction writing project to my second graders, a unit that I have taught before several times.  This time, I have done a couple of things differently, and the changes have come de to the introduction of technology.  Firstly, they will be publishing their books as iBooks, by using the Book Creator iPad app.  Secondly, I have taught and then subsequently flipped the mini lessons about the features of non fiction writing, as well as a few of the main revision strategy mini lessons.

Photo Credit: slowburn♪ via Compfight cc

So far so good.  I have not finished the unit, or been able to assess the students’ learning yet. The jury (the one that lives in my mind) is still out as to the  redefinition or transformation that these changes might have brought to the unit.  This will be a big piece of my project, I think.  I am not question the ability of technology to transform learning, I am more convinced than ever of this.  Did it happen this time?  I don’t know yet, but have a niggling doubt.  I hope taht the children will be able to help me to sort this out.

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In these months leading up to our delivering our final projects to our COETAIL colleagues and the world, I have been vacillating between several different mindsets and worlds, all of which bear writing about.  Of course, life has dictated that I write about none of them.  Here I begin to try.  Maybe talking about those mindsets and worlds is a start.  I am still a second grade teacher.  There’s one big mindset to work with. I will be the Middle School Learning and Technology coach next year, going 1:1 with iPads.  The work for that has already started, and I am of course heavily involved.  That’s mindset number two.  And my mind wanders there all of the time.  It is an exciting prospect for me, and I find myself going through all of the learning that I have done in these months of COETAIL and re-living it all with the 2nd grade to Middle School shift in my mind.

I find myself caught up in the little picture a lot.  The little picture is about making sure that every day is as close to how I planned it as is possible.  It is about making sure that a certain App is on the iPads.  It is about being certain that I can get a particular writing group through their revision by the end of the week so that they can start to publish.  Much of teaching is small picture.  But I feel like I am unbalanced, and I am craving more time to spend with the big picture.  The big picture, for me, is about questioning how the children are learning.  Are we providing them with the tools that they will need?  Is there a big gap in how we teach, and what their world is asking of them?

I have been reading Literacy is Not Enough, the book by the the 21st Century Fluency Project, and it has really fed my desire to understand what children need.  As Sir Ken Robinson says, we’re guessing at this anyway, because we have no idea what the world will ask of it’s workforce 5 years from now.  The book really speaks to what and how we can provide students with skills that they will be able to apply to every moment of their life, academic, personal, or career.  That, for the moment, is my big picture fix.  Now, to achieve a balance…

photograph by me

AESDelhi has been 1:1 with iPads in their Middle school since August of this year. Hey also have 360 iPads in their Elementary School. They are in deep. They have really placed this tool center stage in their learning plan. The hallways are busy with students moving around, learning in groups, working on projects, their iPads are always within arm’s reach. It was interesting and relieving to see that their notebooks, their whiteboards, and their manipulatives were all equally present.

My future boss (next year I will be our middle school technology integrator) and I visited AES Delhi because we too are going 1:1 with iPads in the middle school. Our 6th grade will get theirs in March (in a few weeks), and the 7th through 10th grades will get theirs next year. David Beaty, AES’s Head of Technology, welcomed us to come and trace their journey so far with them, and perhaps learn about some of the successes that they have had, and to talk through some of the more challenging parts of the process so far. With that in mind we flew out to Delhi and spent a couple of days with David’s remarkable and extremely generous team.  I am now on the plane flying back home to Muscat. My mind is swimming with inspiration as well as frank warnings of what it means to put iPads into the hands of 250 teenagers all at once.

Gary Coyle was generous with his time in the Elementary School, we had the chance to talk to him at length. He asked us great questions about our program and ideas, and when he talks about iPads, his ideas always move on directly  from the iPad to the learning that it can facilitate.  He is all about the learning, and is great to talk to.

With Dana Watts we moved at a different pace. She is, after all, Dana Watts…I feel as if we re-lived the last 8 months of her life in a few hours. She managed to give us such a complete picture of what it really means to venture into the waters that we are fast approaching. We talked about set-up logistics, tech support, iPad boot camp (a huge and amazing project of hers), breakage policy, parent education, parent push back, teacher push back, teacher success, and on and on. She was so frank with us, and gave us complete access to her experiences. Like Gary, she gave us big pieces of her precious time.

Maureen Cullen took us to meet a couple of her High School teachers, Mike Caemmerer (Drama) and David Hoover.  Both of them have been using iPads in their classes, and they took time to articulate what they think that the iPads brought to their class.  They both talked about how they now teach their courses differently than they did before.  They were both able to elaborate on what was challenging for them as well as what was successful.  Maureen Talked with us about the journey that the AES high school is taking, moving through iPads and next year going 1:1 with MacBook Airs.

David Beaty was our guide throughout.  He took us on a tour of the school, introduced us to what seemed like a thousand people, and answered what seemed like a thousand questions.  He and his staff seemed eager to learn from us, and especially  from the reflective process that they were engaged in.  Really, it was a great learning experience.  I guess this post is about the people rather than the iPads.  Maybe I can blog about the logistical solutions that we learned about, but this needs to come first.  Plus, if I am frank with myself as well as you, I will never sit down and translate all of my notes into a blog post.  That would be pretty dry.  If you want to know what we learned, you have a couple of options.  Call up David Beaty in Delhi and ask him if you can visit, or comment below and I can tell you all about it, maybe with a Skype call.

Thanks again to everyone in Delhi.

I have been running different areas of my curriculum through the “redesign with tech” filter for a while now, and I am encouraged at how much of my daily classroom activity would lend itself well to this kind of project.  I recently sat down and made a bunch of new schedule cards for my daily schedule.  Last year when we went to the lab or when I did a project involving technology in the classroom I used this card:

photograph by me

This year I put that card away because I put up these cards when we use technology:

photograph by me

 I feel like having technology present in so many areas gives me some options.  My ideas so far are:

1) Literacy unit:    I would like the children to reflect throughout their personal Narrative Unit.  I think that we are at the point in the year when they are maybe ready to become a little more metacognitive about how they work through the Writing Process.  I would like to be able to gauge where they are in that understanding.  We can do this by having them use the iPads and Explain Everything (iPad App) to take a photo of their draft, their edits, their revision, their list of ideas, etc. They can then comment on the work and show what they have been doing to make their writing grow.  These small movies could then be uploaded and attached to the finished paper project by QR code.

This would work well because we have been working hard at understanding what real reflective thinking is, and the students are familiar with the technology that we will use. The use of this technology will allow the children to be more spontaneous with their reflections, and at grade 2 taking the mechanics of writing out of a reflective exercise allows the students to give a completely different reflection.

Making 3 to 5 QR codes for 18 different children might make for a bit of a heavy couple of nights in front of the computer, but I am not too concerned.  My main efforts (and worries) will be around supporting those students who really have trouble articulating what their thinking is.  Producing a reflection that speaks about your own thinking, for better or for worse, is a very challenging task for many students.

This will be the first time I will have made the reflective piece of the project as important if not more important than the writing piece. But it seems like it should be that way.  It is much more valuable to everyone if the students understands how they learn (again, for better and for worse) rather than if they can kick out a passable personal narrative on demand.

Skills, attitudes?  This one is all about reflection.  The kids will have to draw on all of their reflective and communication skills.

2) The Mini-Flip:  When thinking about the Flipped Classroom, I started talking to Julie Turner (Coetail colleague and 1st grade teacher at my school) about flipping in the lower grades.  What can be flipped?  We started thinking about flipping short small group lessons in literacy that we find ourselves teaching all year long, over and over.  As a new small group of students is ready for a concept, we bring them together at a table and teach it.  Julie and my idea is to make videos of the lessons that the children need the most reinforcement with.  We can QR code those videos and keep the codes in a binder.  Then, with 6 iPads and sets of headphones, a small group can review a lesson on, say capitalization, while I am conferencing with another student, or working with another small group.  You know, the mini-flip.  I don’t think I would ever flip a lesson when I am introducing a new concept.  Or maybe I could.  I will have top see how this works out.

My main concern with this project would be the time involved in making the movies.  But you would only do it once, I guess.  No, I am also concerned that when you make a video of a lesson, and you miss something or a student has a question, you are in trouble.  Live, they just ask you.  I would have to think this piece through.  There would have to be a locked in check-in after they view the video and work independently for a while, so that I could be sure of catching anything that they still found confusing.  I am thinking as I type here, so sorry for the rambling tone.

Shifts in pedagogy required by me:  Flipping is a shift in of itself, right.  I would have to make that adjustment, and find out what it means once I see what it means for my students as well.

The students will have to show that they are risk takers and that they can be independent with their work.

 I am not married to either of these projects, although they both make me excited about getting into it.  We still have some time to think and push some more ideas through the filter.  We’ll see what ends up winning out.

“At this rate, we’ll never get to the future.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

 

I loved taking time to think about the concept of the future when pondering this blog post.  I’m talking about  very idea of the future (in relation to the present and the past), which is such a great, ethereal, almost laughable notion.  But it is a notion that fuels all of our beliefs and motivations.  All but the most enlightened of us lean towards the future (or the past) when we live our lives, rather than stand firmly in the present.  After only a few minutes of entertaining these kinds of thoughts, the clouds of philosophy began to choke the air out of my brain, and I had to stop.  It gets very big very quickly.

So what does the future of education look like? It seems like our world is moving so quickly towards new paradigms that we could never imagine not long ago, that even the near future is difficult to imagine.  The best we can do is to look at present trends in education, and try to determine which trends have legs and which don’t (careful not to pick the trends that we want to have legs), and then extrapolate from there.  This is a very tricky business.  When I began thinking about this, Gary Bass’ post came to mind, and I began to examine my ideas with an overly critical mind.  Gary says:

What is the future of education? and What role will technology play in that future? My first thought is that if I knew the answer to either of those two questions I could write a book, reform education, become famous, and live comfortably off the royalties.

Education in our world holds many, many different futures, just as it is living many different presents.  Communities all demand different outcomes from their educational systems, and have different means resources with which to supply their students with education.  And this has always been the case.  I would leave this blog post at that, a kind of non-answer.  But I do feel that the the world of education has never experienced a technology that is as disruptive as internet access.  And I also believe that this technology is and will become accessible to more and more people at an astounding rate (but I would love to talk to others about this).

The effect of putting the world’s cache of information into the hands of students everywhere is something that can turn education on its ear.  We are really only at the very very beginning of a movement that I believe will eventually take learning out of the hands of teachers and academics, and into the hands of the students.  And that is when the picture becomes too fantastic for me to imagine.

image screenshot of Google definition of fantastic

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Being a second grade teacher, I have never had the opportunity to consider the flipped classroom from a practical perspective.  I have never tried it, the classic flip, the video lecture watched at home followed by class time exploring ideas from the lecture.  When described in that fashion it seems like a no-brainer, great idea, and I found it very exciting.  I remember putting the possibility  to flip my classroom on the “reasons to move into Middle/High school teaching” list when I debated changing jobs. Daniel Pink writes about the flipped model in just these terms:

…you want to slap your forehead at the idea’s inexorable logic. You wonder why more schools aren’t doing it this way. That’s the power of flipping. It melts calcified thinking and leads to solutions that are simple to envision and to implement. - Daniel Pink

Reverse instruction brings certain simple and very tangible advantages.  Students can watch and re-watch a lecture at their own pace, they can watch it with someone else (especially ELL students), and they can dissect the content of a lecture to the extent that they want to.  A further advantage is that then students can make better use of their class time by exploring ideas together with their classmates and teachers.  But we know all of this.  This “home run” view of the flipped classroom is why we all love it.  There is another side to it all.

In following my Twitter stream, and reading my RSS feed, I have come across a good few articles that challenge the flipped approach to teaching.  At first  could not really see how it could be challenged.  It seemed water tight to me.  Then I started to read more articles, and some of the more valid points that challenge the flipped model began to take hold for me.  I have found that when educators challenge the flipped classroom model, what they are really saying is that “the flipped classroom does not work everywhere”.  For example, not everyone has access to the necessary technology at home to make it work.  This is valid.  Another criticism is that “the lecture is bad, however and whenever it is delivered”.  This is very debatable.  And a third, highly debatable point, is that homework of any description is not a valid use of a young person’s time outside of school.  Lisa Nielsen addresses this point in her post about the flipped classroom:

There is a growing number of parents and educators who don’t believe we should rob children of the time after school with mandatory homework. We believe time at home should be for pursuing passions, connecting with friends and family, playing and engaging in physical activity.

- Lisa Nielsen

Ira David Socol quotes Nielsen in his piece that is part paper on the validity of giving homework at all, part paper on the failures of the flipped classroom. He writes at length about the communities in the United States that could never take advantage of a model such as the flipped classroom, as the students in those communities are very disadvantaged.  Flipping the classroom is not the issue in those communities, there are far bigger fish to fry in order to provide those populations with the education that they deserve.

As international educators I think that we  are very privileged.  Our schools are often well funded, and the populations that we service are ones that value education.  These factors alone make our schools ideal places for the flipped classroom model to bring a new dimension to the way that we can teach.  It is not a model that can be used everywhere. As for whether to give homework at all, that might be for another post, but I would love to hear ideas.  It is something that sooner or later I will write about, as it is a debate that keeps surfacing in my thinking.

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How you integrate technology into a classroom depends on so many variables that the term itself, “technology integration”, escapes any attempt to pin a definition on it.  Let me list what  I can see as some of the variables in question:

• the philosophy that your school works under.

• the budget that your school is working with.

• the experience that your staff has working with technology.

• the hardware that you school has, and how it is set up.

• the infrastructure of the country that you are working in (shout out to Coetailers fighting the good fight in Myanmar and Ethiopia…)

  Having said this,  there are plenty of teachers using technology in transformative ways as they do battle with one or more of these variables that might not be working in their favor.  What technology integration looks like just might be different wherever you go. The philosophy of a school really dictates the degree to which technology can be embedded, or integrated into the learning process.  Some schools run a lab, and have scheduled computer lab time, others have devices in the classrooms on a 1:1 basis.  Some schools filter heavily, others are much more permissive with regards to social networks etc. What I have learned from my reading and discussing these ideas is that there are ideas out there about what effective technology integration looks like, and this is what we are trying to get to the root of.

  - What does effective integration of technology look like? -

  I think that what educators have found as we have worked with technology in the classrooms over the last 20 years is that learning must remain the focus of what we do.  As technology advocates, coaches, and classroom teachers, we need to look at what and how we want our students to be learning.  Then, in a second moment, we need to explore how technology can make that learning become richer and deeper.  Maybe it can’t do that in some instances.  In other instances the introduction of technology might take a learning experience to a completely different place.  But what does it look like…literally?  I think that it looks as if there is nothing new or revolutionary going on, it looks as if there is deep learning going on.  It should look as if people are using different ways to gather the information that they need in order to compose their new understandings.

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About a year ago I came across a blog post by Jeff Utecht.  In my teaching I had begun to think more about the role of technology might play in education, and had started to read The Thinking Stick quite regularly. One day Jeff blogged about Standards and Benchmarks.  It was a timing thing.  I was in a new school, trying to adjust my teaching to a whole new set of standards and benchmarks, and it was making me frustrated.  When I read the title of Jeff’s post, Standards and Benchmarks are Crap, and I was all too eager to read what he had written.  Then I was all too eager to agree with everything he had written.  Finally, I was the first to comment on the post,  writing about how much I agreed.  There were several points that Jeff made that resonated with what I was experiencing.

 …we’re getting to the point in many schools where everyone is on the same page at the same time learning the same standard. Forget if kids actually master the concept because we need to move on to the next standard. – Jeff Utecht

A year passed.  A year spent looking at technology in more depth, a year coming to the realization that any discussion about  technology in education is a discussion about learning.   A year spent practicing the work of adopting technology where it can change and enhance learning.   A year spent exchanging ideas and opinions that have in turn shaped my new ideas.   Ultimately, a year spent growing as a learner and as a teacher.

In the light of our focus on technology standards, I revisited Jeff’s post.  I read his writing coming from a slightly different perspective.  What was revealing for me was to read the comments that followed mine.  What I found was an interesting dialogue between Jeff and his readers about standards and benchmarks, about the frustrations that people feel when dealing with them as well as about the important place that people feel they occupy within a schools framework. It is well worth the read.

I learned that there are standards and benchmarks, and there are standards and benchmarks.  Clint Hamada and Adrienne Michetti make the point quite eloquently, and reading their thoughts helped me to begin to see  how standards and benchmarks can represent a strength of a curriculum.  Firstly, Adrienne made the point that the quality and scope of the standards and benchmarks that you are using are a complete game breaker.  This seems obvious, but when a teacher has her head down and is trying to make things work in her classroom, sometimes evaluating the standards and benchmarks themselves is not that obvious.  It is also a big conversation to have at any school.

Standards can give students “autonomy, purpose, and the ability to master things.” Standards can be “not about content but about skills and attitudes.” – Adrienne Michetti

A second, equally  important point was made by Clint.  He talked about how it is crucial to examine the function that standards take on within your curriculum.  They can’t be a checklist.  They can’t be the sole determinant of the path that your learning takes. They can’t dictate every facet of your planning.  This makes it vitally important that you be working with a set of standards and benchmarks that are about skills and attitudes, and not about content.  Otherwise you will be shackled to your frustrations.

The issue is how we use those standards and benchmarks. If they are used as the starting and ending point for planning, as a checklist of things to be covered, and as a shield that schools use to keep from actually thinking too deeply about their ‘definition of learning’, then I agree with Jeff that we are not preparing our students for our current world. – Clint Hamada

So the learning that came about for me over the year I spent with this single post is twofold.  Firstly, I became a more enlightened educator regarding the role that standards and benchmarks can play in a school’s curriculum, for better or for worse.  My second realization was the power of our learning community.  There are 33 comments to Jeff’s post, each one adding to a pool of knowledge that will be available to the 34th commenter.  Awesome.

Photo credit: Mike Hoffman

I use iPads with my class frequently, using a cart that we have access to.  I have started to use QR codes more and more as a quick and simple way to get my students started with their work.

I have made a QR code for every blog that we read and comment on, as well as any other websites that we use regularly.

The children can then take their iPad off the cart, walk up to the SMART Board and simply scan the code that corresponds with the blog that they want to read. 

I am also working with Julie Turner on mini-flipping our classrooms (her 1st grade, my 2nd grade).  Our plan is to record very short  small-group lessons, and make them accessible to student when we work in centers.  These lessons could also be kept as QR codes in a folder.  We can open the folder to the lesson (video) that we want the children to work with, and they can scan the code and  get right to work.

Image taken by me

There are simple things that technology can do that make your teaching more effective.  Something that I have started to do involves using my document camera to change my read alouds.  Before starting a chapter book that has illustrations, I take still pictures of every illustration in the book.  I make sure to zoom in and capture the picture as closely as possible.  If there is a double page illustration, such as a map, sometimes I make that into two images.  Then, as I read to the class I project the pictures onto the SMART board.  The students can then refer to the large and clear photographs as I read.  This is particularly effective with maps as well.  During Poppy, for instance, we refer to the map daily, and the children can stand up and show their ideas about routes that the mouse in the story should follow.

I have done this for 5 or 6 books now, and think that it changes the read aloud experience for the children..