Tuesday's iPad Tips III

- Finger Swipes: These are short cuts (not an app :) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDKIk1Upkys

- Midjet Maps is an app that creates mind maps; good for students organizing their writing or for you organizing a project or anything, really
- Keynote:
for you apple product junkies, you can use your iPhone to control -- clicker! -- your keynote presentation.

-iAnnotate PDF:

like the name suggests, you can import PDF's into this app and annotate them (I think it's about $10)

Songify:

a completely ridiculous non-education app but quite fun. You talk into it and it "songifies" your voice and puts music to it. It's free.

iCloud:

in settings, iCloud allows you to backup things such as Mail, Contacts and Calendar. You can also sync these with other apple devices.

New Millennium, New Teachers: New Schools, Please

I love science fiction.  I’m a bit of a gadget junkie.  So when I watch a sci-fi movie and I see virtual computers or hovercrafts, I get very excited.  Case in point: Cloud Atlas.  Great movie and, so far, equally great book. 

I get even more excited about ideas.  So when I put all these seemingly disparate thoughts together, I love the possibility of positive innovation in education in which technology plays a large role.

In keeping with this, a thought occurred to me just the other day.  Many of the “kids” who are starting their teaching careers this year were born anywhere between 1987 and 1990 depending on whether they fast-tracked or meandered.  By most liberal estimates, digital natives were born in 1980.  By more conservative estimates, you could argue that our digital natives were born in the late 80’s. 

By the time this generation was  “reading”, the commercial World Wide Web had already been born.  By the time these same young people were 10-yrs-old, we had Google, Wikipedia and MySpace (remember that?). By the time they were into their early to mid-teens, we had Facebook and YouTube.  All this is to give some context to the thought that occurred to me regarding those who are now starting their teaching careers. These folks are our first generation of teachers who are digital natives.

In her article “Generation Y”, Sally Kane argues that Millennials are the fastest growing segment of the working population. She describes them as family-centric, achievement-oriented, team-oriented, attention-craving and tech-savvy.  What does this mean for the teaching profession and the future of our education system?  

Let’s start with the obvious given the nature of this post: Tech-savvy.  The strength here is that – unlike us digital immigrants – technologies will be naturally integrated into the classroom.  They won’t be add-ons. There won’t be, for example, the debating, arguing, cajoling and convincing that kids should be allowed to use cell phones in the classroom.  It’ll be as obvious as blackboards and gestetner machines were to those of us who started teaching in the 1980’s. 

Next.  Let’s look at one of the seemingly negative descriptors:  Attention-craving.  Kane describes this as follows:

“Generation Y craves attention in the forms of feedback and guidance. They appreciate being kept in the loop and seek frequent praise and reassurance. Generation Y may benefit greatly from mentors who can help guide and develop their young careers.”

How good is that?  Where do I even begin to unravel all the great stuff here? Here’s what I envision for classrooms and professional development for which these individuals will be responsible.  Assessment for and as learning will be as natural as grading papers were for us pedagogical veterans.  Frequent feedback and mentoring relationships will be the norms.  

            Let’s look at family-centric and achievement-oriented together.  I think the polemic almost speaks for itself.  It reminds me of industry leading, progressive companies who get the whole employee wellness piece to the point of having their own exercise facilities and time built into their schedules for non-work related activity. The irony is that these companies understand that by looking after their employees holistically, they’ll get more productivity out of them.  It’s also an issue of trust – the anti-Big Brother factor.

            Our educational policy documents talk about the gradual release of responsibility of learning to students.  The documents are too nice to talk about the other half of the equation: many teachers feel that they need to keep control.  This is well intentioned and I certainly don’t want to downplay teacher as expert, but given all the learning about how generation Y learns, we need to move toward teacher as facilitator and co-learner and away from Socratic teacher, font of all wisdom and knowledge at the front of the class.

And, in case I’m not being clear, Generation Y will be our principals, consultants, superintendents and directors of education in the years to come.  So their work and learning fluencies will become their teaching and leading fluencies.

Finally: team-oriented.  Arguably the singular most damaging criticism against the teaching profession from all the current research is the lack of collaboration.  All the learning around coaching, professional learning communities and professional development can be summed up as follows:  Top-down directives don’t work.  The “top” should be facilitating, supporting and co-learning. Lasting, deep change, however, happens a) in the context of team and b) when the change is owned and driven at the ground level.  

There are a plethora of other studies on Generation Y and, to be fair, it’s not all good.  They – like all generations before them and like generations who are yet to come – will have their challenges.  But when I look at the strengths above, along with a slew of others I haven’t mentioned (creativity, flexibility and adaptability but to name a few more) I’m very excited to imagine the schools of 2027.  Schools plural being intentional.  I’m imagining schools that are structured to fit the learning needs of the students, which means there won’t be a one-size fits all school. 

I’ll leave you with these links of some very innovative, forward-thinking schools where the environment fits the students as opposed to our traditional 20^th century schools which arguably haven’t changed much in the past 100+ years. 

Future Forums, Waterloo Canada:  an inquiry-based, cross-curricular, project-based approach in which students from several schools do their work online.  Their motto is learn anywhere, anytime, anyplace from anyone.

http://vimeo.com/47757100

The Independent Learning Project, Massachusetts, USA: “A powerful example of students taking ownership in their education, students at a public high school in Massachusetts designed and ran a school-within-a-school for a year with support and guidance from the administration and teachers at the school.”

http://democraticeducation.org/index.php/library/resource/the_independent_project/

“Academy C60 [Toronto, Canada] is an alternative, independent, ministry-inspected high school located at Avenue Road and Lawrence in midtown Toronto [who empower[s] [their] students to take charge of their destiny. [Their] students achieve Ontario curriculum expectations, guided by their own passions, interests, and strengths. Along with gaining their credits, they also acquire invaluable study habits, leadership skills, and the power to take responsibility for their future.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mbtI9l9kHo

Tuesday's iPad Tips II

Calendar

- if you have other iDevices, you can go to Settings/iCloud; find "Calendars" and switch the tab to "on"

- perform steps above on all your devices

- this will sync your calendars on all your selected Apple devices

- you can do the same for other apps such as "Reminders"

Socrative

(teacher and student; separate apps)

- assuming one day in the near future all your students will have their own devices -- or if you're in a lab -- the Socrative app works like clickers

- go into the teacher Socrative app, set up your questionaire, quiz or survey; students log into their student Socrative app and away you go!

(I'm not sure how or even if this would work in our DSBN PC labs)

VoiceThread

Blurb below is directly from iTunes

-

Create and share dynamic conversations around documents, snapshots, diagrams and videos -- basically anything there is to talk about. You can talk, type, and draw right on the screen. VoiceThread takes your conversations to the next level, capturing your presence, not just your comments. Anyone can join the discussion from their iPhone, iPad,

- A teacher at Eden, as part of the TLP from Eden, had his students create VoiceThreads instead of ppt's (much more engaging :)

ShowMe

- ShowMe turns your iPad into an interactive white-board. Like VoiceThread, you can doodle and record your voice during your show. Check out this example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhcBpLhxppk&feature=relmfu

Tuesday's iPad Tips

Reading:  

- Kobo

- Free Books

- Kindle

- OverDrive (lets you pick your library of choice and download e-books or audiobooks)

If you're not aware, you don't need a Kobo or a Kindle to get books. Also, there are a ton of free Public Domain books you can get from the above 3 apps.

Browsers:

- Chrome

- DiigoBrowser

- Skyfire

- Diigo

iPad comes with Safaari. The other above browsers are also availalbe. I think the advantage of skyfire is that it'll load some videos that Safari won't. Diigo? If you don't use it, it's pretty powerful. What it allows you to do is bookmark, highlight, annotate, etc. So, if you're reading stuff and it's noteworthy, it's saved and annotated. ps - get Diigo on all your computer browsers as well.

TIP

If there's a website that you go to often, you can put if on your homescreen as follows:

- click on the envolope with the arrow icon next to your URL line

- click add to homescreen

- give it a new name (if you don't like the default)

- done :)

I'm a Teacher not an Entertainer!

It’s 6 pm.  Tuesday night.  Church directors board meeting.  One of the members walks in, drops his computer bag and unceremoniously lowers himself into a chair, exhaling something between a huff and a sigh.  “What’s wrong?” someone asks.

 “I’m tired of my students wanting me to entertain them,” he replies.

There are a lot of things I could’ve said in response.  But did I really want to get into a discussion regarding student engagement after a long day of work where that very thought occupies much of what I do for a living? No.  Hence this blog. 

                  I am committed, however, to sharing this installment with my friend, the exasperated teacher, because in fairness: 1) he’s an excellent teacher and 2) I think he’ll agree with much of what I’m about to say.

                  The thing is, he’s right.  He should be tired of trying to entertain students to keep them engaged.  Trying to entertain students is a losing proposition.  It only happens for the likes of Robin William and Sidney Poitier in movies because, well, it’s Hollywood and I hate to break it to you, but Hollywood isn’t real.

                  Here’s another way of looking at it.  Check out this YouTube piece of the very entertaining Walter Lewis, university Physics professor. He says that he spends hours rehearsing for each class; in fact, he runs through each lecture three times before trying it out on his students.  At first glance, you’d think, Who wouldn’t want a teacher like this?  Surely students would learn given his highly entertaining/engaging manner?  As it turns out, not so much. 

“…what [happens] as the semester [progresses]? Attendance at his physics lectures [falls] 40% by the end of the term and an average of 10% of students [fail] Mechanics and 14% [fail] E&M” (http://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/pt-pseudoteaching-mit-physics/).

                  The above blogger coins the word pseudoteaching to describe what Professor Lewis and others like him do.

 “Pseudoteaching is something you realize you’re doing after you’ve attempted a lesson which from the outset looks like it should result in student learning, but upon further reflection, you realize that the very lesson itself was flawed and involved minimal learning” (fnoschese.wordpress.com).

                  My spin on pseudo-teaching is teacher as entertainer.  Entertaining teachers are engaging, but not all engagement equals learning.  Teacher as entertainer engages students emotionally on some level, I suppose, but it’s mostly passive on the part of the students.

                  I think Tony Danza’s A&E reality TV show Teach makes the point even more strongly.  In it, 60-yr-old actor Tony Danza – mostly known for his 80’s TV show, Who’s the Boss? – lives out his life-long dream of becoming a high school English teacher.  Give him credit; he has regular meetings with his principal, instructional coach and other colleagues.  In his debriefs, he’s quite self-aware. In fact, he spends a fair bit of time in tears because, in his words, “I had no idea teaching was so hard.”

But at the end of the day, he approaches his students like an actor approaches an audience; a single spotlight is on Tony the teacher-performer who is on centre stage of his very own Philadelphia educational theatre. 

                  During a particular cut-away, a student astutely says, “We don’t want him to change.  We don’t want him to become like some of our other strict teachers.  That wouldn’t be good.”  You could argue that that’s just a slacker student not wanting to do any work.  True as that may be, I’m hearing something else: students liked Tony. They connected with him.  That, in and of itself, is not nearly enough, but it’s a powerful start.  You can’t deny the regularity of sentiments like:

We like Mr. So-and-so.  He’s funny or

Ms. Insert-name-here is cool.  She tells great stories.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s much learning going.  In one of the first schools I taught, students often said that all you’d have to do in Mr. _______’s class was ask him about last night’s hockey game and you could kiss 45 minutes good-bye.

I fear I’m being redundant.  I’m simply trying to make this point:  I don’t think we can deny that it’s good to be funny, entertaining and/or likeable.  It’s good to connect with students about things they’re interested in – sports, music, fashion, and so on.  But these things don’t guarantee that learning will ensue.  I would argue that, to use a farming metaphor, you till the soil when you make personal connections with students.  And that’s really important.  But there is still more hard work of learning and teaching to be done; it comes through planting, watering – insert more agricultural tropes here – and harvesting. 

If connecting with kids on a personal level is tilling, engaging students socially, physically and intellectually is the rest of the process – the really hard work of learning and teaching.  I could go on and on, but I won’t.  If you’re interested, check out the work of Robert Marzano and our very own Canadian critical thinking people at http://www.tc2.ca/ but to name a few.  Or, simpler yet, google “student engagement”.