Small Changes; BIG RETURNS

[Image Source: Matt 21/07/97 at http://www.deepblue.uk.net/site/node/380]

The people at TED have an inspirational project underway. This first is called the Charter for Compassion which was the idea of the first winner of the TEDPrize -- Karen Armstrong.

The Charter which embodies the ideas, words, and spirit of collaborators from all over the world is a "cry for return to the central principle" of the Golden Rule. It requires that we use "empathy ... to put ourselves in others' shoes." When I scrolled through the list of participants and their projects, I was struck by the lack of entries from schools. My school's November ceremony ties in with this theme and so I will be adding our name to the list. Perhaps we can invite our students to read the document: Reflections on Compassion and add their own reflections to the Charter website or join the Facebook group, the Flickr Group, or the YouTube Channel and post a contribution.

CHARTER FOR COMPASSION TRAILER from TED Prize on Vimeo.

Finally here's a video project done with cell phones that we should be able to get kids to try. It's mostly images of words, but assembled this way, they communicate a powerful message about empathy and compassion.

When I was a young (younger?) teacher, about every third or fourth year I would engage in a summer of renewal. After a difficult period when my shortcomings seemed too often to determine my interactions with students, I would know I'd lost perspective. Not satisfied I was giving the kids my best, I would buy books and read for answers.

During one of those summers over twenty years ago, two of the books I read were by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot: The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Courage (1983) and Beyond Bias: Perspective in Classrooms (1978). Before there were mashups or digital story telling, Lawrence-Lightfoot melded old-fashioned story telling with a sociologist's curiosity to find out what makes people and their relationships and the institutions they inhabit tick. She came up with a process sometimes referred to as "human archeology." Starting with questions and 'wonderings', she'd find people who were interested in engaging in conversations and then spend a lot of time listening and helping them reveal their stories.

To write her "Portraits," Lawrence-Lightfoot immersed herself deeply in the lives of the people in six different US secondary schools. Before edublogs, Classroom 2.0, and threaded discussions, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot gave a voice to school people and students, to parents and community members in a way that opened the heart of each school to her readers. By becoming part of each school's landscape, she was able to "bust through" the bricks and mortar and the widely held stereotypes of the time to find the stories of people struggling to do their best -- some succeeding and others not doing so well -- but all caring about their work.

My copies of Lightfoot's books are in now a box somewhere downstairs, but there is one message that I very clearly recall: never take what students do or say personally. Whether this was said by a teacher who was interviewed or part of a conclusion drawn by Lightfoot herself, I'm no longer sure -- but whenever I have lost my way with students, it's almost always because I have forgotten that important bit of guidance.

I work in an alternative program for high maintenance teens. By the time they arrive in my class, these students have become masterful at finding and pressing all the hot buttons the adults in their lives carry. When I forget that this testing behaviour is their way of trying to assert a little control in a world that threatens to ignore or even drown them -- when I lose the ability to think inside the moment and just react -- that's when I get lost.

At my most vulnerable moments during challenging encounters it's terribly important to maintain enough perspective see that, when acting out, students are actually letting their guard down. They are making themselves themselves vulnerable by inadvertently giving me a glimpse of their deeper selves. When I simply react from a place of feeling misunderstood, overtaxed, unappreciated, or unacceptably challenged, I blow an opportunity to reach out and create a meeting of minds that will lead to greater mutual understanding. I miss a true teachable moment (for them) and a 'learnable' moment (for me).

This transitional year (as I wrote last week) is for me about reflection and regaining a sense of grace. It's about reconnecting with my students, but it's also about taking risks in my old/new role as a grad student and, as my own students do, ask the challenging questions. It's about pushing my personal and professional learning to the limits. It's also about using the feelings I experience from being back in the student role myself to better understand my own kids.

Lawrence-Lightfoot's newest book is entitled The Third Chapter: the Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50. Once again she's apparently telling my story. I can't wait to read the book and find out how I'm doing! My own "new adventure" is also taking me back to earlier roles. (Image is linked.)

[Image Source: http://fusion-industries4.tripod.com/]

My own new risks involve actually trying on behaviours and attitudes I didn't have the confidence to express when I was younger. For me the "burn out" Lightfoot speaks of in the video interview below came from an exhaustion of spirit brought on by a life of speaking old scripts that had never really worked for me because they were constructed out of my guesses about the way others wanted me to be. For my whole life I've been trying out behaviours on others and constructing myself out of their reactions. If, at fifty-seven, I can't finally just put what I think and feel and believe and want and wonder out there and leave the reacting to others, I never will. Time could be getting short.

Some people after fifty yearn to live out their childhood dreams by heading for the open road on expensive motorcycles or jumping out of airplanes. They feel "the thrill is gone," and they want it back. Others, after a lifetime of meeting other people's needs, express a deep need to find out who they really are and may even leave their homes and families to do that. I know that in my case this finding of my new self can only be accomplished if I redefine myself as a teacher and as a student first. Once that is done, I will be able to close that door knowing that I've given my students all I had and taken from my work all that I need in order to finally not have to relive the old cycles and relearn the old lessons.

P.S. 2 wishes -- First, I wish I could find the earlier interview that Bill Moyers speaks of in the clip so that we could hear what Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot had to say about schools back in 1983, and second, I wish she had the time to go back to those 6 schools and update her portraits in light of the changes in American education since then. Here's the clip of Bill Moyers interviewing Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot.

If you want to see more of her,  there is a video of her speaking to a group of colleagues available on YouTube. I'm going out to buy the book.

 

I am currently on a half time leave from my job. Over the past 2 years my life's work has become very hard to do well, so I've decided to make time to hit my personal and professional reset button and figure out how to go forward.

In the book Success is the Quality of Your Journey, Alene Morris is quoted as saying that "self-knowledge is for the purpose of contributing," However, I'm beginning to believe that, at least when it comes to teaching, it is contributing that is for the purpose of self-knowledge. I have always felt that teaching is the most self-reflective profession there is. The best and worst of you is reflected back in your students' eyes immediately, but lately I have not been happy with what I've been seeing there. As usual, my challenges in the current Wilkes course have led to a realization that I think is an important part of this redefinition of myself as an educator. I thought when I began this degree program that I wanted was make what I was already doing better. I thought when I started my leave, that what I wanted was to find my way back to the teacher I was. What I am learning from both is that what I really want is to move forward to the teacher I can become -- whoever she turns out to be. So this week I've been thinking deeply about differentiation and the need to listen to my students.

Right now there are: 6 contests including one to come up with a podcast theme for Indaba and another to create a mix for Stephen Colbert. 4 artists in residence will work with website members. There are numerous musicians and bands looking for people to collaborate on their projects and many special interest groups to join. (I even find an event going on next weekend very close to where I live here in Vancouver, BC.) There is a library of CC music clips to work with so you need not worry about copyright infringement. This website has even been endorsed by Discovery!

As they say on the Indaba web page: "It starts with an idea >> people come together >> they record and mix online >> a song is created." The free version has some limitations: you can only have one temporary session going at a time. For the Pro ($5 per month), you get 3 sessions that don't seem to have limits and their top rate is $25 per month for unlimited sessions. It might be possible to work out a deal for educators, but I haven't yet tried to negotiate that. How could you use this in school?

• Come up with a theme and open a session for your class: math rap, song of science, create an original composition,remix a collection of CC music found online for a project theme song. They can collaborate with each other online.
• Start a group for teachers or music educators.
• Invite an artist to do a webinar for your class.
• Remix your school's song.
• Have the students make a how-to video for using some of their tools an post it online.
• Open a session for students all over your city or country to create a song for a special event. Post a notice on Classroom 2.0 that you're looking for partners.
• Collaborate internationally to create an Earth Day song. To find out how to broadcast it to the world, get in touch with the people at the Earth Day Network or Earth Day Interactive.

Please add your ideas to the mix by leaving a comment below! OR even better, get back to me with links to your class creations. I'd love to share them online.

I going to start this post with an admission: for about a month I've had an unusual and unexpected bout of 'blogger's block'.

[Image Source: Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use at We Blog Cartoons ]

Until today, I wasn't able to pinpoint why or what had changed, but I think I may have the answer. In August as part of a Wilkes assignment, I spent an afternoon moving most of my blog and newsletter email subscriptions over to an RSS feed. Instead of clicking back and forth between my email and each blogging site, I now use a a feed reader (mine is Google Reader) which bundles them up for me and delivers them to one location. Each day, abstracts of the day's new articles appear in a list making it really easy to scan for the choicest tidbits.

"What a wonderful discovery!!!" I thought as I transferred everything over and unsubscribed from email delivery. In theory this switch to RSS should have made it much faster for me to get through all the day's articles and kept the number of unread emails in my inbox from creeping up towards 2000! But it didn't work out quite the way I had envisioned. What actually happened was that using RSS just made it easier to ignore the subscription influx altogether. The end result seems to have been that as I stopped reading, my own dependable flow of ideas just gradually shut off. I have come to the conclusion that in order to grow ideas my brain requires regular nourishment from other sources. I guess I'm not the original thinker I believed myself to be. It seems that I'm more of a remixer and masher-up of stuff I take in from all sorts of sources: from my experiences at school and conversations with other grad students, from what I read and the technical challenges I face when things don't work. Of all of those, the reading seems to be the most powerful component. Perhaps my subconscious seizes on new information delivered to my brain through reading and turns it into lightning fast links between previous experiences which then register in my conscious mind as inspiration and new ideas.

I know that a synapse fires in the brain when the threshold has been reached (so everything is ready) and the right chemicals have been delivered. Are ideas just complex brain signals that need the right combination of readiness and new inputs to set them in motion?

If that is the case we have an absolute responsibility to foster the upwelling of ideas in our students by creating for them a learning environment that is rich with experiences and challenges and nourished by plenty of reading and conversation. We have to sensitize them to the way it feels when ideas come and help them learn to give their brains time out from the sensory overload of constant entertainment and chit-chat that can flood the neural pathways and block the birth of insight. Here we are at the beginning of a new school year. It's easy to for me to let ideas get buried beneath the weight of old habits and new pressures, so I have to keep reading -- yes -- but I also have to make time to turn at least one idea per term into a new experience for my students. Otherwise even the greatest ideas will evaporate, and I might as well retire.

I’ve been struggling with 3 problems with Firefox for about a month. They’ve been driving me nuts!

[Image Source: http://www.enviroaction.com.au/your-procedures-etc.html]

First, my Bookmarks Toolbar has been disappearing and the “back” button has been inaccessible. Tonight I had to either find a way to fix this problem or go back to an earlier version or FF that actually worked. Fortunately, I discovered a patch at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11325. My gratitude goes out to Alice 0775 in Osaka, Japan for her work on this problem.

Second, I have been getting a message that “Firefox is already running …” that will not go away until I either log off or shut down & restart.

I found 3 articles about this common complaint:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_in_use

• http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox+is+already+running+but+is+not+responding

•  http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Firefox+hangs#Hang_at_exit

Having skimmed through a lot of technical language I didn’t really understand, I picked what seemed to be the easiest fix to try first and installed the newest version of Java. The problem seems to have been fixed for now – but if you’re seeing more typos than usual in this post, it’s because I’m keyboarding with my fingers crossed.

Now I’m wondering why Voicethread doesn’t work very well in Firefox. I find occasionally that I have to switch to IE to get some applications to function properly. A case in point is my Wilkes University Wordpress student blog. When I first set it up, other students could see everything (in FF) but the professor could not. I found I had to access it from IE and then write and edit it from there. Then it could be seen in any browser.

Finally, I my gmail account has been loading either very slowly or not at all. Sending a short gmail with no attachements can take up to a minute  (sending . . . . sending  . . .  sending  . . . ). I thought it was because the inbox was overstuffed, but according to the message at the bottom of the page I’m using only 26 mb (0%) of the 7363 mb available to me.

Tonight I tried it in Internet Explorer. It worked smoothly and fast!!  I don’t want to keep switching browsers,  and Firefox has been my first choice for quite a while, so determined to stick with it, I went back to it and tried another route in. Instead of working my way through the menu,

I tried Googling ‘gmail’ and used the first link. This worked really well, but I have no idea why.

Now  2 more issues are baffling me: 

• I can’t upload most videos to Voicethread in FF, although they go up fine in IE. I’ve followed the VT instructions for formatting (converted to flv files; 600x450; 15 fps; increased the bit rate to get to medium quality), but they just will not load in Firefox. As soon as I switch to Internet Explorer, everything works beautifully and my Voicethread account page seems to be generally more stable. Does anyone know why?
  

• Last of all,  Firefox doesn’t seem to want to keep me signed into my Google account. Is it time to switch to a new browser?

I picked up an item about Wordle from Jane Hart's E-Learning Pick of the Day. For those of you not yet familiar with this Web 2.0 tool, the description from their website says :

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

I did the one above about my feelings and thoughts about going back to school. There are all sorts of websites that can give you ideas for uses of Wordle in your classroom:

• Angela Maiers -- http://www.angelamaiers.com/2008/11/wordle-in-the-c.html
• A Wordle Diigo group (you can search their bookmarks for ideas) -- http://groups.diigo.com/groups/wordle

This last presentation from Tom Barrett (found in a blog called Clif's Notes) is my favourite because it's a collaborative effort in Google Docs. You can write Tom and contribute a slide if you have an idea to share.

What prompted me today was this item in Jane's blog about actions Jonathon Feinberg (Wordle's creator) has taken in response to one teacher's concern about coming across inappropriate word clouds on this website. He now ensures educators and parents that the Wordle front page will never feature such images or links and has made it possible for administrators to "configure a school's site-blocking software to keep Wordle safe for classroom use." His instructions (which can be found in the FAQ) are as follows:

"Simply have your networking administrator block the following base URLs¹:

• http://www.wordle.net/gallery
• http://www.wordle.net/next
• http://www.wordle.net/random

and your users will not see anything that's not safe for classrooms. You’ll still be able to save your work, bookmark your individual Wordle creations, print them out, and share the URLs of saved Wordles with each other and with families.Please let me know whether this works out for you in your school or other institution."

If you have a moment, click his name (above) to go to his blog and leave a comment. I know how many of you especially in the US struggle with prohibitive blocking by your districts and I think this guy has shown some real leadership in responding to all of our needs for safer sites for kids.

I am the sort of person who tends to react first and then think about things later -- especially when it comes to trying frustrating Web 2.0 applications for which I see no immediate personal need or use. Last week's assignment was to try image editing with a free online application called Picnik. I'm not a photography person. In fact I've been on my first vacation away from home in 20 years in eastern Canada's most beautiful areas  -- Cape Breton and the Gaspe -- and neither my point-&-shoot nor my video cam have come out of their bag.

Last week's Wilkes assignment was to edit 10 images in preparation for creating an online presentation. I was rushed and the free version of Picnik strips out a lot of the more interesting functions such as cloning and layering, so I tried a few effects, wrote the week's reflection paper, and put the rest off. However, this week, feeling that I missed an opportunity to learn more about processes and applications some of my kids would probably enjoy using, I decided to start over. I switched topics so I could select new photos that would lend themselves better to editing.

Here then are the text of this weeks' reflection paper and my online presentation. [Each of the photos has been edited using Picnik. On the last slide are the links to the original images so you can do before and after comparisons and judge whether you think the hours I put into this were well spent. Most of the images are licensed under Flickr's Creative Commons Share and Share Alike License, so in that spirit I've opened my presentation to downloading for non-commercial purposes. The only requirment is that if you use it in your classroom you wave a Canadian flag (lol!)]:

This week I resolved to approach the ‘problem’ of using this software in the same way one of my best student mentors would. I am thinking particularly of a fellow named Tom. Since I’ve introduced the use of Web 2.0 tools at our school, he has created some of the most stunning work I’ve ever seen. Tom’s approach to trying new software is first playful and then thoughtful. He begins by just exploring.  Because he’s just playing, during this part of the process he’s completely open-minded and in short order discovers what is new and interesting in the program. As he plays, a vision of what’s possible for the project that I will have invited him to work on begins to coalesce. At some point he’ll transition from apparently directionless fooling around and experimentation to planning and producing his final product.

I have learned from watching Tom and other students work that I have to provide time for this unstructured discovery. It’s necessary if they are going to step outside their comfort zone when they take on the task of doing an assignment or project. Playing without the pressure of deadlines and grades allows students to just goof around and get to know the software and each other (if they’re going to work as a team). If I surround them with the normal structures of instructions and expectations too soon, they tend to stick with what they already know and never get to that new place of creativity and self-learning that can turn project creation into a journey of personal growth.

When I knew that the fossil topic could not be reasonably handled with 10 images, I recalled an old ‘script’ I had previously partially developed for a piece on ethical uses of online resources but had never finished. For this topic I knew that less would lead to more. The message had to be presented in a way that was stark and memorable to my students. I could have listed all the do’s and don’ts, but I’ve tried this before and it doesn’t stick with my kids. They think that because they see everyone else treating the internet like a free store, they can download and use anything they like.

Unfortunately, my students often have to learn the hard way that this is not acceptable. One of these instances occurred when several of them developed slides for PowerPoint for Peace. When I asked those who’d used internet images to show me their sources and bibliographies, they had to admit they hadn’t followed the guidelines. In fact they felt that people who post work on the net are asking to have it stolen if they don’t make it available to everyone to use. Needless to say these wonderful pieces of work were not submitted to the website because they did not meet the project requirements, and there were several very disappointed students who felt I was being completely unreasonable.

Those 3 experiences -- feeling I’d ducked out on last week’s assignment, reflecting on Tom’s creative process as he works, and having to disappoint the kids who wanted to see their work online -- were the impetus for this piece.

This week’s work has given me a greater appreciation for the creativity involved in building on the work of others -- i.e. using it to create something new that people will respond to in a positive way. It’s also beginning to please me to think that other people may want to use it not only as is but also as a starting place for building something new of their own. I know in September my students will look at me with different eyes when they learn that I was the one who created this presentation. Doing this kind of work gives me a footing in their tech-savvy world and an opportunity to share creative moments with them. That makes offering them these kinds of activities very special to me.

I am in the fortunate position of working in an alternative, individualized education program so ways can usually be found to give our students course credits for completing Web 2.0  projects. Now that I am gaining a feeling for project-based work as well, I can build more of these experiences into my courses. Having tried them myself, I’ll be able to talk ‘artist to artist’ when I set and enforce the standards and limits within which the students must work. There is no better way to gain this kind of credibility in their eyes than to be a fellow struggler and to be able to speak from my own experiences about the power of discovering that inside the constraints lie the challenges that make success even sweeter. That’s what Tom can knows and what I am learning. 

(Note: the presentation is best viewed full screen.)

I am sitting at the door of a cabin in the Markland Coastal Resort looking out over Aspy Bay which is near the northern tip of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.

We've put in here so I can get my course work up to date before Friday. Below the cliff outside my door, the surf pounds in on the beach. Here the beach is sandy, but go a little north or south and it turns rocky. If I look to the right (south) I see the sandy spit and the cliffs over by Neil Harbour.

If I look right (north) I'll see the point of land we're going to for more whale watching in a couple of hours.

2 days ago we spotted our first ever whale(?s) from a gravel road atop a cliff on the way into a town called Meat Cove. I've lived on the west coast for over 20 years and had never seen a whale before. It was so exciting to catch sight of a water spout as the whale came up for air and then watch the arch of its back and tail as it dove under the surface. The weather is clouding over now and there may be thunder and lightning and torrents of rain later in the afternoon, but that should wait until after we get back into the harbour at Bay St. Lawrence. The tour operators have even invited Thelma, the wonder dog, along on their boat. She always travels with her own life jacket, just in case.

This trip is turning into a journey of contradictions. Some days we hunt for fossils (the oldest we'll see are over 500, 000, 000 years); on others we search for whales; and in about a week we'll be looking for another an idyllic spot with wifi service so I can get the next assignments done. What's amazing to me is that I'm perched on a bluff in the middle of 'Nowhere', Canada doing my homework which will be submitted to my university in Pennsylvania and marked by an instructor who lives in California. In Dingwall the water supply is doubtful (Thelma would not drink, and the locals say that gypsum from an old mine is leaching into the groundwater) and there's no fresh lettuce to be found in the town, but they have high speed wifi internet and cell phone service!

I wasn't asked to attend Google Academy.Oh well, it's their loss! I've registered instead for a 3 day workshop on making pod/vodcasts.

I wandered across the website of these 2 Woodland Park, Colorado, teachers some time ago and then managed to see them when I was at the CUE conference in San Jose last fall. If I were going back to classroom teaching, this is the paradigm I'd move towards. It uses technolgy to transform what is going on in math and science classes. These guys deliver the general instructional part of their lessons via vodcast and then use class time for Q & A, guided practice, and tests. They also work on a mastery model, so students cannot move from one unit to the next until they have achieved a grade that indicates they truly understand the material.

What's unique here is that instead of telling the students what they need to know in school and then sending them home to struggle with the questions on their own, Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams, let the kids watch and take notes on the instructional material on their own and then work through the assignments in class. Students do what they can most easily handle on their own (i.e. watch a lesson and take notes) on their own. Class time is reserved for for what gives kids the most trouble -- working with the skills and concepts. This is such a simple idea it's almost scary. How powerful would the learning be in all our high school classes if we orchestrated the learning process by giving help and guidance to individuals and small groups during class time instead just dispensing information like so many talking heads?

The fact that kids are also held to a higher level of accountability -- i.e. they do not receive credit for incomplete understanding and inconsistently applied skills -- adds to the effectiveness of this model. Going through the motions of learning --  getting something on paper that shows an assignment has been tried,  doing questions but never correcting them,  listening but never formulating or verbalizing  answers in class -- this just isn't good enough under a mastery model. The kids now have the chance to get the help they need, but they're also required to produce high quality work. It's a win-win.

Finally there are teachers who've figured out how to make the time to really give students the instruction they need and then how to hold those students accountable for their learning. And I'm going to hear all their secrets next month from Aug. 4-6. The workshop is called 21st Century Learning that Works. I'm so glad the Google Academy people turned me down!