Teachers Love to Share. So Start Blogging!

Recently I had the privilege of hearing Dean Shareski in person give his celebrated "Sharing: the Moral Imperative" presentation. If you haven't seen it, at least watch the first few minutes of his video in which he states "I am a Giant Derivative." You'll get the message quickly.



Dean's point is that we are all the sum of all the information we have read and consumed. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Aren't we impelled therefore to share our own knowledge and experience with others? Surely so. So why don't we? Teachers love to share. I think it's in our DNA. And yet many teachers are reluctant to share their ideas online.

Well, I get why many teachers are gun shy about tweeting, blogging and otherwise sharing information online.

1. You're exhausted. You're already giving everything you have. How can you do one more thing?
2. Alternative version of #1, you don't have time.
3. You feel that what you have to say isn't of value to others.

I've been there. I was fortunate enough to have a year long professional development experience through PLP (Powerful Learning Practice.) which helped me to develop a professional learning network and to understand the importance of sharing. Yet even after that transformative year in which I started blogging and tweeting, I soon went back to my old insular habits and fears. It took me a couple more years to get past them and really start sharing my ideas and resources online on a regular basis.

So how do you get past your reservations? Here are some things to consider:

1. Think you don't have time for blogging? Tweeting is microblogging. It's putting your ideas or links to your resources out there to share in 140 characters or less. Surely you have time for that once in a while.
2. Once you get validation from other people who retweet or favorite your tweets, or seeing that people from other continents have visited your blog, suddenly it becomes enjoyable. It's much easier to make time for what we enjoy.
3. One of the points Dean makes in his presentation is that while your ideas may seem ordinary to you, they are revelations to other people. You do have something to share, believe me.
4. If you do decide to blog, one thing that helps me is the Blogger app on my phone. If I get an idea, I can jot it into Blogger quickly and easily from anywhere. Then I can flesh out the post later on my computer. I did that with this article.

Where will the sharing lead you? That's actually the fun part - you don't know. But at a minimum it's sure to lead you to meeting other educators who share your ideals. And since we reap what we sow, the more you share, the more you will receive.

Still unconvinced? Leave a comment and tell me why you're not sharing online. Maybe we can learn from one another.

Online Teaching and Fairness

I teach one fully online class through VHS and one blended class. It was through my online class that I realized something about fairness that I had not noticed until now - that the concerns I often have with fairness with a f2f or blended class disappear in the online class.

I teach high school students, and it's well-known that adolescents have a keenly defined sense of justice. So I always strive to be fair in my dealings with them. But there are challenges especially with regard to missed work. There's always the athlete who didn't get home from the away game until 10 pm and didn't get to study for the quiz. Do I allow her to take the make-up quiz, when in the same room is the drama student who didn't get home from rehearsal till 10 pm but DID manage to study? What is fair?

I've only just realized that there are few fairness issues in the online class because all those encounters take place in the LMS in private between the student and teacher. So if I have an online student who started off on the wrong foot, but is now working hard to catch up, I have no problem excusing a few assignments to help him get out of the hole faster. Only he and I know.

What this means, then, is that the online teacher can truly individualize the learning experience for students. Not just through interaction with the content, but through interpersonal experiences.

It's not earth-shattering, but it's another advantage to online teaching and learning that I had not realized previously.

Now I'm excited, not only to better personlize the experience for my online students, but to carry this concept over to my blended class as well. These are the same students with whom I have struggled to provide a fair learning environment. Perhaps the answer is within the online portion of that class.

Stay tuned for the results.

Teaching in a BYOD. What? Like it's hard?

I love movie quotes, so the "Legally Blonde" quote came to mind. I wanted to write this post for those teachers out there who are afraid of a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) program. The first thing many teachers say is "But how can I assign something if I don't know if they all have Word or iMovie or (fill in the blank here with the app du jour)?" My answer is simple. To paraphrase another famous quote, "There's a site for that!"

Your job as the teacher is to help your students gain the skills and master the content in your subject area, right? Now, take a look at the top of the Bloom's Taxonomy pyramid.

Create. That's where we're aiming. The recognized best use of technology in your classes is to have your students develop and demonstrate mastery by creating a product. So set the parameters of the assignment - what you want them to demonstrate - but let them get there in different ways. And no matter what wireless device they are using if they have Internet access, they can get there.There's a site for it.

For a recent summative assignment in my blended French class I wanted my students to show mastery of several structures such as comparisons, advanced negations and interrogatives and demonstratives. To tie it all together, I set the theme for the assignment as 'cars', ensuring the use of that vocabulary. I gave them some ideas for showcasing their knowledge such as an Xtranormal video, a comic strip, an animation, a Voice Thread and others. I pointed them to some iPad apps they could use if they chose, but everything they needed to do could be done with a web site. The students love having the autonomy of being able to choose the type of product they create. And studies show that that positive affect positively impacts the learning process.

That is not to say that you need to limit yourself to web sites. You don't. If there's a specific iPad app that you really want your students to use, there is always more than one way to skin a cat. Check out your school's iPad cart if you have one for that lesson. Or put the students in groups for that particular activity and group them by device so that they all have exposure to the app.

For the rest of the work, Google Drive or Open Office will handle the heavy lifting. And don't forget the power of creating a new audience for your students' work by having them blog.

Once you start thinking of ideas you can use in your BYOD classroom, the creative juices will start to flow and you'll have more than you can assign. Your students will have good ideas too, and they'll appreciate it when you validate those ideas by making a lesson which incorporates them.

For more ideas about teaching in a BYOD, checkout this article from Edutopia.

Online and Blended Learning at ISAST 2013

Here's a link to my Prezi on Online and Blended Learning from ISAST 2013