Have a Good Life

What is the focus of our schools? What do we talk about most in our schools? Who do we think about the most in our schools? According to "The Equity Project" the focus is clearly on teachers and their salary:

The Equity Project (TEP) Charter School believes that teacher quality is the most important factor in achieving educational equity for low income students. Spurred by this belief, TEP reallocates its public funds by making an unprecedented investment in attracting and retaining great teachers. Plus an annual bonus of up to $25,000.

They further explain that they have refined what will make them a great school:

"These redefined expectations are unified by one principle: student achievement is maximized when teachers have the time and support to constantly improve their craft."

Don't get me wrong. I am all for teachers getting paid more, and I fully support giving them the time they need to "improve their craft". But TEP is going focusing on the wrong thing. This is something I have believed for a long time. The focus of every school should be on the learning of students in the building. Anything else is a waste of time. Schools do not exist to provide adults with a job, a career, or a calling. Schools exist so that kids can learn. If kids don't learn, it doesn't matter how much money teachers make. If kids don't learn, it doesn't matter how much professional development the teachers receive, or how much they observe their peers. How can you make sure students learn?

By focusing on student learning!

TEP says that student achievement is important, and they better show that the low-income students they service do indeed get higher scores if they want all $6 million donated for a school building. The problem is that you don't focus on student learning by focusing nearly completely on your teachers.

Here are my questions for The Equity Project:

1. What do you want your students to learn?

2. How are you going to know if they learned it?

3. What are you going to do (in a systematic, timely way) when they don't learn it?

Without the answers to these questions, we don't know how this or any school will do, regardless of how much other stuff they may claim will "save" education.

As it so often happens, while I was writing this, I saw this BLOGPOST from Harvard Education Publishing, which sums it up much more eloquently than I do.

Have a Good Life.

These thoughts are in response to Darren Draper's post at the Tech and Learning Blog.

I served a mission for my church in Russia for two years. Before I got there I studied the language for at least 8 hours each day for seven weeks. You can imagine how well I thought I spoke when I left for Russia. When I got there, I realzed that I spoke horribly. However, after about six months in the mothellrland, speaking russian as much as possible, I could take care of myself pretty well. After finishing my two years, I arrived. I could tell jokes in Russian. I could make plays on words. I was able to do this because I spoke the language. I learned by doing something.

In schools many teachers expect students to learn by sitting and getting.

There is one place that can and should be a place at schools that students can learn by doing: the library.

The library could be renamed the learning by doing lab. If students want to learn about something, they should be able to do it in the library.

I have been lucky enough to be able to teach many other teachers and students on a variety of topics. A friend and I were recently talking about how people from different generations learn. He mentioned that younger people (like our students) want to dive in and figure things out. Older people (like teachers) want to be told step-by-step how to do things.

When I teach adults and students alike, I adapt my teaching method to whatever seems most comfortable for them. When I teach students, I usually let them play with things and only show or demonstrate when they get stuck. So far, my students have enjoyed this.

Last year, when I did TechnoThursdays, I usually had to go more step-by-step with the adults who came and needed help, which is why I used the wikispace to help them see the step-by-step directions. TechnoThursdays were the ideal setup. I would create a wiki with directions of what we were going to do. Then I would talk to the teachers and walk those who needed it through that web page.

Technology makes that possible. It allows everyone to be on their own page when it comes to learning. They can go slow or they can go fast. This year, I have made many screencasts that show how to do different things with our transition to Google Apps for Education email accounts. The screencasts allow the teachers to view the needed material, often without any audio, and as many times as they personally need. Some people just need to know that a certain functionality exists, and they will do the rest on their own. I am not doing TechnoThursdays this year because I do that in one technology-themed faculty meeting each month. Allowing everyone to go at a speed that is comfortable to them has made those meetings much more effective. It gives people permission to go above and beyond what I am teaching.

The Aloha Team at my school went one step beyond my lesson about blogging on our school web site. They made their own wiki and their own blogs and those blogs are linked on this wiki. Their next step is to create an RSS feed that feeds right on to that page (a challenge for next year). That is something that could not have happened if I did not let them go at their own pace--a vital key to any learning situation.

I think about when I teach in other settings where technology is not available, the learners have no opportunity to go at their own speed. The instructor determines the speed, and they must conform to it. There is no other choice.

Understanding the ways that my students and other adults learn has helped me figure out how I learn the best. I like a mixture of what I give my students and what I give adults. I like the structure of an actual class, but I like being able to go at my own pace. Since I have finished my Masters degree, I have been able to focus more on what I want to learn, when I want to learn it. Using Twitter has also helped me gain more information than I could ever imagine.

The end of the year is fast approaching. I think it is good to reflect on what I have done so far, and what I want to do next year.

Some things I did this year:

• Students made movies
• Students made clicker quizzes
• Recorded video of lessons for students to watch

What I want to do next year:

• Record more videos
• Use the computers on a more consistent basis
• Use the clickers as formative assessment

Making movies wasn't really new to me this year, and it was pretty simple, since I feel comfortable doing it. Clicker quizzes were not new either, as I started doing that last year. It was new for me to create the videos of my lessons. It was really beneficial to try that because it was difficult to figure out to do that best. I still haven't figured it so, it is a work in progress. For next year, I want to spend more time working on that. It is not there, yet, and I think that I can make those videos more interesting and more focused on learning things, and not just focused on recording that class period.

Next year I want to use the computers as more than just word processing. I want to incorporate Google Forms and give the students surveys and have them respond to things in that format.

Perhaps the biggest thing is I want to do next year is use the clickers as a formative assessment, instead of just summative, end-of-unit assessments. I will still use them for Rise and Stretch like I do now, but adding the extra element would be good because we would use a lot more batteries. Essentially, the clickers would be on all day long. As I teach a concept, the students would respond to questions that I ask that are embedded in the lesson. They would be able to show me right away whether they got the concept I was teaching or not.

The problem with this is that I don't teach a lot of concepts in Language Arts. Much of it is stuff they already know, but just need to refine. It would be difficult and time consuming to come up with all this stuff. But, since we do Rise and Stretch and have a different concept they need to know for each week, it would be beneficial to have a "New Concept Day" or something like that, so that they could learn a concept. These are the lessons that I would want kids to make up. Then, they could use that to help them when they need a review.

Atomiclearning.com has taught me a lot this year also. I think the most important thing it has taught me is that I need to make screencasts for students and teachers that are more exciting. I have started doing that already, and I really enjoy making screencasts.

Have a Good Life.

One of my teachers had a problem with her computer. She complained to me in a creative way, which I don't mind. Here it is:



This is from Xtranormal.com, where the tagline is "If you can type, you can make movies."

Have a Good Life.

I just finished putting the finishing touches on my presentation page for the UCET 2009 conference.

Friday and Saturday, I will be presenting about the iPod Touch in the Language Arts 7 classroom. I hope the presentation goes over well. The plan is to let people experiment with the iPods and ask questions. I hope that it works out well and people are not bored to tears. That would stink!

Take a look at the page and feel free to tell me what you think.

Have a Good Life.

I really like the show "24" and being a geek, I always notice the geeky things that are cool in that show. One of the things that I want is to be able to say to someone, "Send the file to my computer" and have them able to actually do it. That would be awesome. Well, I found out how to do that. It is a little program called Dropcopy. Below is a video I made showing how it works. 
That is much faster than finding my hall passes, or a piece of paper, and writing out the same note. And, it is much less of a disruption when the kid comes into class. But, imagine if you use it to collaborate with your teachers. The department chair has a curriculum that she needs everyone to have, but she forgot to send it out. In no time, the other teachers would have the file sent to them, and they would be able to access it. It would be faster and easier than email.