Becoming a Connected Educator

Why should you become a connected educator? Check out this infographic I just made on Piktochart.com

Wax On, Wax Off

Remember that great scene from the original "The Karate Kid" movie, where Daniel has been working hard waxing cars, sanding decks, painting fences, etc.? Frustrated, Daniel says "We had a deal. You're supposed to teach and I'm supposed to learn." Then Miagi delivers the famous line "Show me Wax on, wax off" and proceeds to guide Daniel through a demonstration of the karate skills he didn't know he'd learned. I love that scene; probably because it's a great teaching and learning moment.

So I was watching that movie the other day, and it just popped into my head. "The one doing the work is the one doing the learning.*" The great ones are always simple, aren't they? The one doing the work is the one doing the learning. Daniel's understanding of teaching and learning was all wrong, and for good reason. It's the way classrooms have been run for hundreds of years. The teacher does all the heavy lifting. It's why you're so tired the first day of school every year.



CC license - hikingartist.com

Grant Wiggins posted this fantastic article "A Veteran Teacher Turned Coach Shadows 2 Students for 2 Days - a Sobering Lesson Learned" which illustrates very clearly that in a large percentage of classrooms in the U.S., the teacher is doing the work. So it begs the question, "Who's doing the learning?"

Of course, just because it's easy to say, doesn't mean it's easy to do. Even the simplest shift in how we teach can be extremely difficult. But putting it in such simple terms helps. Who's doing the work? Who's active and who's passive? Who is contributing and who is listening? I think just that simple mental shift can make all the difference in the students' experience in our classrooms.

Theory is good, but for teachers, examples are better. Here are some practical ideas you can implement to help you make the shift.

1. Make your lesson more interactive. Socrative is my favorite app for getting students involved, because it's so easy. Students can connect on any device - all they need is a browser and your virtual room number. You can prepare questions ahead of time, or just give them on the fly. Students "vote" on their device for the answer they choose. It can be used to guide a discussion, to find out how well students have understood the topic or for any formative assessment.
2. Screencasting - Have students teach one another. With screencasting, students use voice and images (drawn or graphics) to explain a topic. A great deal of learning takes place as students have to break down the topic visually and narrate the process. Explain Everything is a very popular app for this. However, my favorite is ShowMe, because there's virtually no learning curve for the app, which allows the students to focus on the lesson. In one of my favorite lessons, students chose a topic and then they had to receive their "license" to teach it through an oral interview with me. (They were so proud!) They then had to teach a certain number of students via their screencasts. The students who were "taught" decided whether or not the lesson was effective. If so, they gave the "teacher" a token. The students' grade was based on the number of tokens they received.
3. Blogging - The beauty of blogs is that they instantly change the audience for students' writing. Blog posts also need to be fairly concise, which teaches students another skill. It also increases the interactivity as students comment on other students' posts. Add another dimension by inviting an expert in your field to blog with your students.
4. Teach students to formulate the guiding questions. Think of the process you have to go through to design a good lesson. Those are all skills your students desperately need. Take your topic and guide your students through the process of deriving the guiding questions from it. It will take practice. But eventually, you will be able to offer a topic and the students will determine for themselves the essential questions. When they can do that, you can turn the learning over to them completely and shift your role to guide. Then you have created a truly student-centered classroom.

*I don't know who said this originally, but I've heard it at conferences and on Twitter. If it was you, let me know and I'll give you credit.

No More Papers!

I'm doing an experiment with my students. I teach a blended French class and have taught fully online classes
as well. The experiment comes from a phenomenon I noticed in my face to face time with students. When I pass back corrected papers, the first thing some students do is compare their grades with one another. "I did better than you did this time." And I feel certain many students cringe inwardly during this time.

This never happens in online classes, as grades are visible only to the student and the teacher. So finally the little light bulb appeared over my head. "Why not create the same environment for my blended class?" Complete confidentiality of graded work.

One way of accomplishing this would be to put all assignments in a digital format. But that wasn't really my objective. It is, after all, a blended class. And I have found that students don't want to spend ALL their time with keyboards and screens. Sometimes, they want to use pen and paper. And sometimes I like them too. But I can correct and return those papers digitally - all I have to do is scan the papers. At our school, the photocopiers scan to email, so that's an easy way to digitize the papers. Or if I'm at home, I can scan them with my iPad with an app such as DocScan. I then open and annotate them in an app like Notability. From there, I can either email the document to the student or, what I have done so far, upload them to my LMS, Schoology. Complete confidentiality.

I don't know if this model is sustainable or even a good idea. But I think it's worth a try. I'll keep you posted.

This is Not Your School

I was at a parent meeting recently at our school, the topic of which was technology. Next year, all our 6th

through 8th graders will be bringing iPads to school every day and some parents were nervous about all the changes inherent in such an undertaking. I was impressed by a colleague's comment in response. He said "This is not your school." What he meant was not that the parents had no ownership in the school. He meant that times have changed and schools need to change with them. What he meant was that the school we are creating is not the same "school" we all attended.

I thought that one statement summed up what we as educational leaders are trying to do. The school we are trying to create is not your school or my school. Gone are the days when teachers and textbooks were the sole sources of information. That model doesn't work anymore. When students can find the answer to any content-based question in 30 seconds on their smartphones, why would we continue to act as if they still depended on us for the content? Instead we need a learner-centered model designed to give students the skills they will need for their future. They will need the digital literacy skills to decide what information is valuable and why. They will need the curation and metacognitive skills to organize resources and create portfolios of their learning. They will need the collaboration skills and self-motivation to succeed in online coursework and a collaborative work environment.

It's one thing to understand this need. It is another thing entirely to implement those changes, because as any teacher knows, it is extremely difficult to change the way one teaches. But it can be done with hard work and with the right support from administrators. To implement these changes, teachers need administrators who not only understand the changing face of education, but who will walk the walk. They need administrators who will become fluent in the needs of 21st century students and who will give teachers the time and support to help them develop new curriculum and methodologies - to create a new school for our students.

Note: At the time of writing of this post, I was not familiar with Peter Gow's (@pgow) blog Not Your Father's School. But it is most definitely worth reading.

Multimedia Lesson Ideas for Teachers

Multimedia lesson ideas from corderg

Classroom Management in a BYOD

Vive la Collaboration!

Gail and Jen at OESIS Boston 2013

When I am talking with colleagues at my school about teaching online, one of the things I try to convey to them is that you really can create meaningful relationships with students online. My online students are as much "my kids" as my face to face students are. What I didn't expect was to create a professional relationship that led to a face to face friendship. But that's what happened, thanks to VHS and the OESIS (Online Education Symposium for Independent Schools) Conference in Boston this October.

My new friend Jen Weeks, French Teacher and Academic Technology Coordinator at Kingswood Oxford School in CT is an expert at online learning as she has done all of her graduate coursework online. It was through her graduate work that Jen enrolled in VHS's 21st Century Teaching Series Courses. One of those modules, Becoming an Online Teacher, pairs participants with a master teacher already teaching a VHS course.

Jen was assigned to co-teach my French Language and Culture course in the spring of 2013. As a co-teacher, Jen facilitated discussions, assessed the students' work and built a relationship with the students through her comments and the resources she provided to them. As we co-taught, Jen and I conversed and got to know one another virtually through various online tools such as Skype and Google Hangout.

Then this fall, VHS asked me to participate in a panel presentation at the OESIS conference where Jen was attending. We recognized each other immediately at the first keynote and spent the rest of the conference comparing notes on our technology and language experiences, visiting and even dining out at a French Bistro. French teachers who are also Technology Coordinators are rare, so finding that we have virtually the same job (pun intended), including coordinating online learning at our schools, made it all the more fun and meaningful.

We're now planning an online collaboration between our French classes. So what started online, then became face to face, has now come full circle. It just goes to show you - you never know where online learning will take you.

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