Thinking About Learning

Yesterday I went to Lynch’s Woods to hike. There’s a trail there that is a small section of the Palmetto Trail. I had never been there before, and I ended up on a trail that wasn’t the one I had intended to hike. Even though I had a trail map, there were times when I was pretty clueless about where I was. In many places the trail was covered with a crunchy blanket of fall leaves and was only discernible because the trail was slightly more indented into the earth than the leaf-carpeted forest floor. The trail I was on intersected with several other trails, and there were times when I was unsure of which direction to take. I had the awareness that since I’d never been here before, even if I always took the correct path, I still wouldn’t really know where I was going. It was a lovely experience of silence and solitude, but I had many concerns. According to the map, my trail was 7 1/2 miles long. Was I going the right way? Would I get lost in these acres of woods? Would I get out before it got dark? Would my husband have to alert a search team to find me?

While I was hiking, I also thought of how my uncertainties mirrored some of the current uncertainties in education. There are so many unanswered questions about the future! Will the next president really understand the needs of public education? Will No Child Left Behind be revised to provide a fairer, more balanced system of accountability? Will lawmakers ever “get” that the current framework of the education establishment is decades behind the educational needs of our students and that we need to be preparing them for the 2020’s, not the 1980’s? There’s no way to know for sure if we’re on the right path; no way to know where we’re really headed, and if we’ll find our way. All that I know to do is the same thing I did on the trail…keep moving forward, make the best decisions we can along the way, and head in the direction that our hearts and minds lead us. Hopefully we’ll eventually find our way in the midst of this changing world, and we’ll make a difference in the lives of our students.

Curriculum Connections:
ELA (Word Study): SpellingCity.com is the best online word study tool I’ve seen. I found it on Rambling Reflections. Teachers can create spelling lists, and the 3 components are Teach Me, Play a Game, or Test Me. The voice used is very pleasant and natural sounding. In Teach Me each word is read aloud and a sample sentence is given orally. This website could also be used for sight word recognition. This could be a great intervention for RTI!

Math: Teach using money with Learning to Use Money. This interactive site teaches about the history of money, using coins and bills, and has practice activities.

Technorati: hiking , NCLB, education

The year 2007 is nothing but a memory now! It was a year of many changes for the women in my family. My daughter graduated from college and began a 5 year PhD program. My sister graduated from divinity school and began a new job. It was also a year of change for me. After 20 years of teaching, I left the classroom to become a technology integration specialist. I actually love my new job, but I still feel like I’m “learning the ropes.” It has taken time to get to know a whole new faculty and to learn where they are in their comfort level/use of technology. Just today I posted an online survey for my staff about their technology needs so that I can determine what direction I need to take next.

I’ve decided that 2007 was the year of changes and that 2008 will be a year of letting go. This year my daughter will be getting married, and my son will graduate from high school and move away to college. There are some other things in my life that I need to learn to let go of as well. When I think about school, I think about some ways of thinking that I need to let go. I need to stop expecting all the teachers around me to jump on board with technology my way. Everybody has their own approach and comfort level. After a conversation with a friend a couple of weeks ago, I was reminded that I also need to let go of thinking about Web 2.0 applications in terms of “cool tools.” We were talking about what it means to have technology embedded in the curriculum as opposed to just using technology tools. I have decided to let go of the phrase “cool tools” and instead focus more on the curriculum. In keeping with that thought, instead of listing the new technology tools that I explore, I’m going to try to share some curriculum ideas and ways technology can support them.

ELA Curriculum Ideas:

• Use Shelfari to post the 2008 Children’s Book Award Nominees. Encourage students to post comments and opinions of the books online.
• Do an author study by posting multiple books by a single author on Shelfari. Have students make comments to compare books, identify common details of author’s craft, discuss favorite book and tell why.
• Videotape sample model RTI Intervention lessons to be used for training.

As the Internet becomes increasingly more of an instructional tool in the classroom, school districts are facing the important question of how much open access students should be allowed to the Internet.  Controlling the content of text in the classroom has been a controversial topic for years.  School boards have had bitter arguments over the banning of literature with mature content, health curriculum materials with varying perspectives of sexuality, and the more recent issue of whether or not to include the theory of Intelligent Design in science curriculums. 

Internet filters are a bane to educators.  It is so frustrating to try to access an excellent instructional website and find it blocked.  Filters seem to weed out as many good sites as inappropriate ones.  Something that is here today may well be gone tomorrow.  Internet censorship is a two-edged sword.  Adults have a responsibility to protect the innocence of childhood which is a why a rating system was developed for movies and video games.  Schools must provide a healthy, safe learning environment for students, and that necessarily includes limiting exposure to inappropriate content.  At the same time we have a huge responsibility to teach our students to be responsible digital citizens.  Many of them digitally roam free at home with no guidance about making wise choices related to Internet usage.  Digital citizenship may be one of the most compelling tasks facing educators today.  As the world becomes more digitized everyday, our students need to develop the higher level thinking skills needed for information literacy and decision-making.  How can they develop these skills without some opportunity to put them into practice in a safe, supervised setting?  

I always spend a little time during the Thanksgiving holidays reflecting upon my many blessings. This year in addition to the traditional thoughts of family, friends, good health, an appreciation of the Divine, and meaningful work, I also found myself feeling very thankful for the gifts found in nature. Enjoying the beauty of our world has always been an important part of my life. Staying connected with Mother Earth somehow helps me stay connected with myself in a deeply profound way.

Yesterday I spent Thanksgiving Day at my parents’ home with the rest of my family. After recovering from over-partaking of the family Thanksgiving feast, I decided to take my nieces and nephews out for a healthy dose of nature. My parents live on 15 wooded acres. There’s a natural spring, a pond, an unused pasture, and more woods. Out at the back edge of the property is a small clearing surrounded by trees. Several times a year I like to go back there and camp alone, enjoying the silence and solitude. My nieces and nephews, ages ranging from 8-15 years old, had never been out as far as my campsite. In a rare occurrence, it had rained the day before. My dad said that the pond area would be too muddy to walk around, so we’d need to drive around the road and go in the back way. I loaded the kids into his old fishing van, along with some dry fire wood, some home-made marshmallow skewers, and all the makings for s’mores.

As we drove through the pasture, headed into the woods, and went up the little hill that led to my campsite, I saw an amazing Thanksgiving gift. Perched on a bended branch in the middle my woodland wonderland was a huge wild turkey! I put on the brakes and called my nieces and nephews to crowd to the front windshield to view this amazing sight. They had never before seen a wild turkey, and we were all genuinely filled with awe. Knowing that resuming the drive into the woods would break the magical spell of the moment, I reluctantly shifted from park to drive and stepped on the gas. Immediately, the turkey took flight, and to our complete surprise and delight, four more turkeys had been standing on the ground, hidden from our view. In the span of a minute, one by one, they took to the air. Five wild turkeys taking flight on Thanksgiving Day! It was a gift of nature that we will never forget.

Our spirits were soaring just like those wild turkeys, but as is always the case, reality has a way of pulling us back down. As I accelerated up that muddy hill, my front tires began spinning in the mud. Realizing that I was unable to go up, I shifted to reverse thinking that if I could roll back down to the level pasture, I could restart up the little hill and probably make it if I didn’t pause half-way up this time. I was only able to roll back about two feet, when suddenly my back tire was spinning, and once again I was stuck, unable to go forward or backward. When I got out to investigate, I saw that one of the rear tires was jammed against a tall stump, and the bumper was lodged on top of the stump. We were close enough to the campsite to get out and walk. Refusing to let circumstances ruin our plans, we gathered our supplies, walked to the fire ring, roasted marshmallows, ate s’mores, and laughed about our adventure.

Later, as I was reflected on the experiences of the day, I was struck by a comparison of the place we sometimes find ourselves in as educators. The view of the world ahead of us is an awesome, rapidly-moving thing, just like my wild turkeys. We see the potential of technology integration and Web 2.0 tools to empower our students to become information-literate, problem-solving, 21^st Century learners, who have the ability to soar at their own initiative. But often when we try to move forward and bring others along with us, we find ourselves mired in a 20^th Century educational paradigm. The more we rev our engines, the more we find ourselves just spinning our wheels, going nowhere, mired in frustration and disappointment about our inability to affect change.

Sometimes there’s wisdom in stepping outside of our expectations, and just taking a few baby-steps forward toward the goal. Remembering our vision and not allowing ourselves to get derailed by our current circumstances, we have the power to continue walking forward. As we are purposeful in our actions, persistent in our commitment to the vision, and mindful of the need to sometimes just laugh at the absurdities of resistance to change, we can make a difference in the lives of our students and fellow educators.

After we ate our fill of s’mores and our fire began to wane, I used my cell phone to call my dad and report our dilemma. (Yes, sometimes there is a place for technology in the natural world!) He laughed and said, “It sounds like you could use a tractor!” Shortly he arrived and used his tractor to dislodge the van’s bumper and push it on up the little incline. That old tractor was just the right tool at just the right time. I continue to cherish the hope that eventually a tractor will appear on America’s educational horizon, just the right strategy, at just the right time that will propel us forward toward a new paradigm of education. One that will be fluid, not static. One that will embrace 21^st technologies while teaching an appreciation of the world around us. Let’s keep taking baby-steps while keeping the vision ever before us!

I was first introduced to the concept of Professional Learning Communities (PLC) last October on Jeff Utecht’s Thinking Stick blog (one of my faves). It seems that this idea is finally taking hold in our corner of the world. There’s a lot of research to support this practice as a strategy for improving student achievement. Here’s a link to some supporting online documentation that I located regarding PLCs. My understanding is that generally a PLC is a group of teachers at the same school who are involved in an inquiry-based study of a specific educational topic or practice. Collaboration among teachers has been proven to improve teacher quality. As I have continued to ponder the need to change the way we provide education and how we might go about doing that, I would be very interested in being part of an online PLC that focuses on using web2.0 tools in the classroom. A cool tool that I learned of from Jane’s E-learning Pick of the Day is Xpanity. This application evidently provides a way for users who are reading the same web site to have conversation about it. I’m still trying to work with it, but this potentially seems like a fantastic way to facilitate an online PLC. (I discovered Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day in Widgetbox and have added it to my Pageflakes online learning page.)

Some other cool tools:

Seterra: This is a free download geography game. You can study or take quizzes to learn countries, capitols, and flags of the world. It seems to me that we should be placing a greater emphasis on teaching geography as our world gets flatter and flatter. A great use of time when you have a few minutes left at the end of class!
Slideshare: This application allows you to upload your PowerPoint slides and podcast to create a “slidecast.” This tool be used by teachers to make a lesson available online. It would also be a great way to share professional development presentations.

Technorati:plc thinkingstick elearning edtech cooltools

Last night my family, including my 22 year old daughter and 16 year old son, gathered around the TV for a little family fun and watched the Democratic debate that was taking place right here in SC. (Are we geeky, or what?) As we listened to the candidates and provided our own running commentary, I kept trying to explain to my children what a ground-breaking event this was. For the first time ever, questions in a political debate were being asked by the “common man/woman” via YouTube. I kept saying, “This is so cool!” My children are used to their mother’s fascination with the joys of technology and its power in the world, and as usual, they sort of blew me off. The best I got from them was a comment from my son that there should be some kind of application of You Tube for education, and I told him that it already existed, and it’s called Teacher Tube. With the predictable eye-rolling, that was the end of that line of conversation. But I still find myself amazed at what an awesome thing it was that this debate featured questions from citizens around the nation instead of carefully framed questions from reporters. The Internet is reshaping the political scene of our country, as evidenced by the Obama Girl video which had been viewed 2,663,738 times before I saw it!

I felt the same type of amazement over the Live Earth concert. No other event in history has ever had that level of global participation. Every continent on the planet, even Antarctica, was represented. (As a sidebar, that concert was another example of techno-geek mom having to pull her supposedly “digital native” children into the digital world.)

It’s less than a month before the new school year begins. As I ponder my job transition from a classroom teacher to a technology integration specialist, I’m keenly aware of how far the education establishment has to go to even begin to adequately prepare our students for this flat earth. The way we go about choosing the best candidate for president is being reformatted because of technology. A world-wide audience can now be made aware of important global issues. Communication is no longer “business as usual.” How can we continue to teach in the same old ways, business as usual? Daily it seems, I’m reminded that there is an immediate need for a paradigm shift in American education, or our children will all be left behind. How can we initiate change from the grass-roots level? How can we transform instruction to be more relevant to the needs of our students in the real world of today?

Technorati:
teachertube liveearth edtech

I have decided to try to resurrect this blog. My original purpose was to provide commentary and think aloud about my own personal learning related to educational technology and how that meshes with the realities of our antiquated standards-based educational system. Don’t get me wrong…I’m not opposed to standards and accountability. I just think that our standards need to be updated to reflect the needs of students in our global 21^st Century culture.

The daily demands of teaching seemed to squeeze out any time to do this kind of personal growth learning/writing. Maintaining a blog for my students and parents about daily classroom activities was challenging enough time-wise, and this blog just fell by the wayside.

My professional life is taking a new turn for the coming school year, however. After 20 years of teaching (four of those in a Global Horizons classroom, a technology-centered environment), I am leaving the classroom to become a technology integration specialist. This was a very hard decision for me, because I love teaching. I had been at Red Bank for 14 years, and leaving there is like walking away from part of my family. But sometimes you just know that it’s time for a change, and there were lots of indicators that I had reached that point.

I am very excited about this career change! After spending four years living out technology integration in the classroom, I am looking forward to helping other teachers learn new ways to enhance the curriculum through the use of technology. My new work will push me to more actively pursue my own personal learning. I hope to use this blog as a forum to express what I learn on this new turn in my journey.

I’ve been reading The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers. In the introduction, Campbell says, “Technology is not going to save us. Our computers, our tools, our machines are not enough. We have to rely on our intuition, our true being.” I find myself freqently pondering our rapidly changing world. Technological advances place limitless amounts of information at our fingertips and allow us to communicate with anyone on the planet within seconds. Alexander Graham Bell never imagined such a thing possible, but much later, someone else did. As we find ourselves immersed in the digital world, the possibilities are endless, but in which direction will technology drive us? Life is about making connections…everything meaningful in life is in some way about the connections we make…connections to ourselves, to others, and to the world. Technology and Web 2.0 provide us with powerful tools for learning and connecting with others, but I think that the more our lives become immersed in technology, it is imperative that we become very intentional about connecting with nature and ourselves.

Harold Stone wrote, “The great need of our time is for people to be connected to spirit; for people to be connected to a core of feeling in themselves that makes their lives vital and full of meaning, that makes life a mystery evermore to be uncovered.” In order to save our planet for the future, we need to be teaching our students to love nature. A friend recently shared a site that has some beautiful National Geographic podcasts. These videos are an example of a way technology can move us in healthy directions. Even so, we still need long walks in the woods! Sue Monk Kidd wrote, “Ultimately nature heals because it reminds us that as humans, we are nature.” Nature sparks the imagination and helps us get in touch with our inner core.