ENGLISHED!

The "Natives" Are Restless

2009-01-13T20:45:00.005-06:00

The title of this entry links to an article that brings to mind all of the conversations I've had with friends, family, and co-workers about the idea of "Digital Natives" and "Digital Immigrants" that was first presented by Marc Prensky. Chris Betcher of Betchablog makes a great point that stands alongside other comments made by those, like myself, who are not sold on the idea of a digital native as someone who has a natural ability to use technology in ways that are above and beyond their poor hapless teachers.

I particularly enjoyed his examples of students, as well as his own children, who would be considered "digital natives," but do not live up to the level of expertise ascribed to "natives" by Prensky and others. The most frustrating conversations I've had in the last couple of years have been with other teachers or those within the field of education who just can't believe there are children out there who aren't excited by or aren't experts on technology. They might be able to out-text me. They might have an iPhone and an iPod Touch at age 12 (which I still think is crazy, but I won't rant on that just yet), while I own an iPod that's already 2 generations old. It really doesn't matter. They might know what a thing is, but they are certainly not light-years ahead of me in terms of understanding it or applying their knowledge to other uses for their technology.

I does bother me when teachers assume they are in a losing battle against the digital natives because everything they read tells them they will always be behind the times. Everything I've read or been told, by people who keep up on these things, has been pretty discouraging. It makes me feel like I'm not doing enough to keep up with the students. Then I'm shocked when we can't even create an iTunes playlist for a class project!

I'm not even sure what I would be considered. I'm old enough to remember a time before the Internet, but since my dad worked at Texas Instruments, we always had some kind of computer or technology in the house. I'm not sure if I'm a native or an immigrant. Does that make me "undocumented"? I've decided to give up on these labels. Most times they aren't even true, which makes them even less helpful.

So, take heart "digital immigrants," and move over "digital natives." We're all in the same boat... but it's the immigrants who have done more traveling and understand how to steer.

On your mark... get set...

2008-08-13T08:08:00.004-05:00

Here it is... year 3. New room, new teaching assignment, new grade level, new team... so I almost feel like calling this Year 1: The Sequel.

I've decided to changed the focus of this blog slightly. Instead of having people wade through my rants about my school district, I thought it might be more edifying to move beyond my own situation and join the discussion on technology, professional development, and shifting schools.

With some vacancies left by teachers who moved on to other districts and administrative positions, here I am in my third year as the co-chair of the Language Arts department. I've also taken a position on the school's leadership team (working on our school improvement plan.) Taking all of those things into consideration, I've taken on quite a bit this year and I feel a renewed sense of interest in helping my school develop effective and worthwhile PD. After attending the NSDC conference in Orlando this summer I brought back some ideas for our staff, and the LA department in particular, to adopt.

For the first time many teachers are being asked to track what they're doing in the classroom using actual data. We're attempting to collect data on student learning through common assessments, action research, and regular pre- and post-assessments. While this can be done in a useful way, I'm afraid many of our teachers see it as busywork and they're concerned about viewing students as numbers rather than human beings. To be honest, I'm so new at some of this that I don't know what to do to allay their fears.

Many of them have been in this district for so long, they've seen initiatives come and go, and come back again. Many of them are disillusioned and suffering from "new initiative fatigue." We bring in speakers who say the same things over and over, we're doing things that were ended ten years ago because they "weren't working..." I can understand their frustration. I suppose my goal with this blog is to engage others in conversation about motivating teachers and influencing administration to enact effective and worthwhile PD.

So... any suggestions?

Some thoughts on "Year Two"

2008-06-07T11:04:00.002-05:00

Well, my second year of teaching is coming to an end. The students have graduated and all that's left is paperwork and packing. I'll be changing assignments -- yet again -- next year as I move to 7th grade Language Arts. As I get ready to spend the summer preparing for a new curriculum, new novels, etc. I thought I should make some final comments about this year.

1. I've learned that I need to e-mail messages to everyone, whether I've spoken to them in person or not. If I speak to someone in person and I have no "hardcopy" record of it, I learned this year that it could come down to my word versus theirs if they decide to accuse me of something. I won't say more than that, but I'm going to spend next year perfecting professional redundancy.

2. I'm finally learning how to manage grades, parents, behavior, etc. It's only taken two years, but I'm finally starting to get it. A little less pressure from higher up would have helped this year, since I'm still new and still learning, but that just comes with the job, I guess. Next year should be interesting, with three different preps and a new set of novels to teach. I suppose life would get boring if there was no change. Still, I'd like to do the same thing for at least 2-3 years so I can reflect on my teaching instead of always coming up with something new.

3. I'm going to SERIOUSLY tone down the amount of technology I try to use in class. This year I went a little nuts and got overwhelmed by the amount of new tech tools I was trying to use. Next year, I'll follow Thoreau's advice: "Simplify, simplify, simplify." Though I may be getting a Promethean or SMART board next year, I'm going to try and get back to basics with regard to tech in the classroom.

4. "No." I had to start toward the end of this year, but next year I will be working on my ability to say, "No." As a new teacher, I need to work on my teaching, not running a club or some other after-school activity. Again... back to basics.

5. I'm going to have more fun than I did this year. I love my job, but this year was NOT fun.

6. As much as possible, the school work is going to stay at school.

There it is... bring on Year Three.

Classroom blogging

2008-04-11T08:00:00.003-05:00

After-school meetings are usually the last thing on my mind following a long day in the classroom. This last meeting, however, left me encouraged to keep on keepin' on. Just the other day we had scheduled a "tech fair" at our school, which is probably simpler than it sounds. It was really four teachers who had attended the IL-TCE conference back in February presenting some of what they learned to the rest of the faculty. Myself and one other faculty member presented Blogs & Wikis... and received some very positive feedback.

I've been working with our district's tech department to look into school-wide blogging for next year, and the response from this tech fair told me that a good deal of teachers would be willing to try blogging and are actually excited about the idea. I think the key is to get teachers to believe that blogging will, if not revolutionize, then streamline their ability to get and give feedback from students and parents. It has certainly saved a lot of extra paper in my classroom; I carry my laptop home some nights and that's it.

With Spring Break over and the kids already talking Summer, it's been a busy and tiring two weeks. The feedback from our teachers on this presentation, though, has me reinvigorated. I'm excited about getting this set up for next year and anxious to see how each classroom teacher will take this idea of classroom blogging and make it uniquely their own.

(I think I'll go order David Warlick's book now.)

Just got blog-blocked...

2008-04-02T08:01:00.002-05:00

I'm wondering how many other teachers/students out there have the problem of their district blocking web sites at the first sign of student mis-use. Last year we were able to use some YouTube videos to complement our lessons. This year they blocked it. I helped a Special Ed. teacher find a site that allowed students to "create their own superhero," which tied into a lesson she was doing in Language Arts. That site is blocked too. After attending the ICE conference in St. Charles, Illinois, in February I was introduced to Netvibes as a way of keeping track of blogs or podcasts that I might want to follow as a means of building a Personal Learning Community. This morning, I try to open my Netvibes page... I'll give you three guesses. You'll only need one.

I'm on the tech committee for our building and I'm a contributor to some of our district tech meetings, and we've even discussed the problem of blocking sites purely for the sake of keeping kids away. We came to the conclusion that instead of blocking everything, we should be educating the students on how to use the Internet appropriately. This is beginning to remind me of 2-3 weeks ago when China started blocking YouTube for the videos related to Tibet. There's great information out there, but if we just block it instead of exploring it as an educational opportunity, we're losing a great tool.

Perhaps my question should be this... are there districts that have come up with a good way of teaching their students appropriate uses of the technology? I'm finding that's not happening here, as far as I can tell from my Language Arts classroom in this little corner of the building, and instead we're opting for the quick fix.

This is a quick post, but I want to make sure to publish it before they start blocking my blog!

Adopting (and interpreting) Web 2.0

2008-03-13T14:40:00.006-05:00

I've been listening regularly to Jeff Utecht's podcast ("On Deck": Shifting Our Schools) and I've been impressed with the caliber of the discussions that have come out of that forum. While I've always been interested in projects that connect students with others around the globe, I've never really heard any clear-cut and practical examples of how to do that. The great thing about their podcast is the international nature of the guests. There are teachers from the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. I highly recommend it to any teachers interested in adopting new technologies in your classroom.

The most intriguing thing about their recent discussions is something that should be obvious to teachers, but I'm afraid it's not for most -- what the students are learning and producing should be relevant outside of school. In fact, if students are not producing their writing or other projects to be shared with the outside world, it's next to useless. I'll turn that finger on myself, as well, and say I haven't been encouraging that concept of student-published work as much as I should. I'm encouraged by the idea that podcasting, wikis, and blogs can do this. While I feel I'm a fairly tech-savvy person, I'm new at using this Web 2.0 technology in the classroom.

I'm trying this now with introducing blogging to my 8th graders. My plan for the next couple of years is to create a school-wide blog system in which the students can use blogs to write journals for Language Arts, lab reports for Science, etc. I want to start by getting all the Language Arts teachers on board with blogging. Not only does blogging get the students' work "out there" and published for an audience, but it would also ease their teachers' workload. Not everyone might agree, but I find it much easier to post a comment to a blog as a response to something a student has written, as opposed to writing up comments on a hardcopy essay. That's not to say we should get rid of essays all together, but I think blogging could be a great way to help students establish voice in their writing and help teachers get immediate feedback to their students.

I think the big drawback, at least as most of the teachers in my building might view it, is understanding what a blog is, or a wiki... they know web sites and e-mail, but ask any one of them what moodle, twitter, or skype is and they would look at you as if you were from Mars. The first step, I think, to getting this to work is to help translate some of this for the other teachers, as well as finding one or two new applications they could really use effectively in the classroom and narrow down their options for them, to avoid overwhelming them.

All ideas and no assistance...

2008-03-05T08:20:00.005-06:00

I've had some great ideas lately for projects involving the use of technology -- most notably Web 2.0 technology -- that I think would really engage the kids with the material. Multiple problems arise when I try to plan out these projects and implement them.

Problem #1: I've never worked with some of these tools before...
The Web 2.0 tools that are available are just mind-boggling. (Or should that be mind-blogging?) Blogs, Wikis, social networks, etc... the possibilities seem endless, and I think that's where I'm running into a few problems. The possibilities do seem endless, and that's probably making it more difficult for me to narrow down my focus and intent. There are so many things the kids can do with these different tools, it's difficult to pick just one or two components and use those effectively. So many of the teachers in my building are either anti-technology or simply afraid to try using it, that there is very little building-level support for coming up with tech-related lessons and projects.

Problem #2: This takes a lot of setup and instruction before the kids even know how to use a Web 2.0 effectively...
At one of our last district meetings on implementing technology and 21st century literacies in the classroom, part of the discussion focused on teachers' fears that they couldn't use technology because the kids were already "masters" of the Internet. As "digital natives" they already knew so much more about the digital world than we (the immigrants) did. I don't think this is true at all. The kids know of the digital world, but I don't believe for a second that they are masters of it. I used that assumption that they were masters at the beginning of the year, but many of them, even at the 8th grade level, don't know how to post something on a blog unless it's MySpace. I can't even remember how many times I told them to e-mail their essay to themselves so they could work on it at home and the response back was, "How do I do that?"

It takes a lot of setup and pre-instruction to get the students ready to use Web 2.0 tools, and my problem with that is the lack of tech support at the building level here. So far, this year, we've had two different tech coordinators for our building, with long periods of no tech coordinator in-between. We currently have no tech coordinator for our building. Even the ones we do get are not necessarily teachers, so when I go to conferences and hear about the LA teacher working with their building's tech coordinator to prepare students for a Wiki project, that doesn't seem like a reality here (at least not yet.) The district-level tech facilitators have been great, but they can't come to your building every day to help out with something. It is nice to see people getting excited about some of the ideas I have for integrating Web 2.0 tools into the Language Arts curriculum. Most other teachers are so freaked out by words like "blog" or "moodle" that they don't want to have anything to do with them. That's completely understandable... when I didn't know what they were, they confused me too.

Problem #3: I'm still new and this and I'm overwhelmed...
I know this is coming off as being a long and rambling complaint with a list of excuses... a new baby at home, increased responsibilities and a leadership role at school, family health problems... I don't want to make excuses, but with all that's going on in personal-life and professional-life, I don't have time to run a one-man show with regard to coming up with lessons and projects that use 21st century tools.

If anyone has any solutions or suggestions, I am all ears (or eyes, as this is a blog and not a podcast!)

I'm a bad blogger

2008-02-29T13:57:00.002-06:00

I seem to lose track of time, get overwhelmed by work, and so on and so forth... and the blog gets neglected. To go from September to March without a post is pretty sad. After the Illinois Computing Educators conference yesterday, I'm inspired to try and keep up with posting. We'll see how it goes. This next week is ISAT testing, so I will have a little time on my hands.

One thing I'll take some time to gripe about... or more appropriately, seek guidance on... is dealing with students who chronically turn work in late. Classroom discipline is not a problem, expectations are clear, etc., but the majority of my students this year have yet to turn an assignment in on time. Any thoughts on this?

Not even on top of things...

2007-09-11T10:12:00.001-05:00

I thought, "Sure, keep a blog. Talk about things that are going on." Yeah, right.

I think I've had all of two minutes with my own thoughts since the school year began. It doesn't take much to throw me off this year -- new baby, semi-new teaching assignment, new responsibilities, etc. At least I feel a little prepared. At least this year I know what's expected of me, I know what district tests are coming up, how to get a herd of 8th graders down to the gym for Picture Day, how to safely break up a fist fight in my classroom, etc.

This year's students appear to be more well-behaved than last year's group. I'm not sure if there are quite as many "actors" this year, though, which I know I will miss. Perhaps it's just the first two weeks of school and everyone is still getting adjusted.

The one thing that has me excited for this year is the start of the school Podcast Club that I'm heading up. I think we've got a group of kids signed up that will make it a fun experience for the club members, listeners, and me.

Curriculum Night is tonight, so I should be spending this time getting my room and my presentation ready. Oh well... the blogging will have to wait for another day.

Don't make me teach it!

2007-08-06T22:14:00.000-05:00

There is one subject, though I think I know the material fairly well, I am absolutely terrified to teach: GRAMMAR.

It's unreasonable. I know how to write grammatically correct sentences, I can identify mistakes and make suggestions, but I do... not... like... teaching it!

I typically teach it in the context of whatever we're reading at the time, but I'm specifically thinking of those times when the grammar lessons are those stand-alone, let's-talk-about-the-significance-of-commas lessons.

So I'm putting myself in the hands of the other teachers out there. What do you do to make grammar fun or interesting for your students to learn and for you to teach? I need some ideas because no matter how many "cool" illustrations they put in our grammar textbooks, I'm not excited.

Feeling prepared... sorta

2007-08-06T08:24:00.000-05:00

Twenty-one days from the start of school and I think I'm feeling ready this time. I should explain that when I was hired last year, it was one week before the start of the school year. That might not sound like a bad thing, but I spent my entire summer (in-between submitting applications) believing I would be teaching at the high school level. I planned for 9th-10th grade novels and discussions and whatnot.

Then I was hired to teach 8th grade Language Arts and Social Studies. That threw a whole new wrench into the works. I had never taught Social Studies and being a first year teacher, I'd never done Language Arts on my own either. So this time around I feel a little bit better about my situation. I'm only doing Language Arts this year, which simplifies things despite the fact that I will sorely miss teaching the Twentieth Century history. I actually have my units semi-planned, as opposed to the week-at-a-time planning of last year.

I also spent my first year taking advantage of a good deal of the extra training they provide for our teachers, and I think that's elevated me fairly quickly to a person others come to for help. I'm already the default tech-guy for our portion of the building when the normal tech person is gone. It's been nice to have that extra degree of responsibility, even so early in my career, because I think it distracts me from just how terrified I might otherwise be.

Eventually I'll get around to adding some lessons/units to this blog and (hopefully) get some constructive criticism on them from all you lovely fellow teachers out there.

The school year looms...

2007-08-05T03:37:00.000-05:00

Once again the start of the school year is upon us. This year I've decided to try keeping a blog for myself, not just for the classroom work. I've visited so many other teachers' blogs that have helped me when I'm out of ideas or just need a little boost in the encouragement/creativity department. That being said, there are a few things here and there that I'm sure I can offer to someone else, should they come wandering onto my page.

So as the year approaches, I may throw out some ideas on this blog. Comments, suggestions, etc. are ALWAYS welcome. After all, I am only in my second year of teaching, so I still need all the help I can get.