The Tempered Radical

Why Teachers "Give Up."

In one of the more interesting twists of digital fate, my recent post on interactive whiteboards has been making a bit of a splash in cyberspace over the past few days.  It was first picked up by Teacher Magazine.  Then, the Washington Post spotlighted it in their Answer Sheet blog. 

And while the majority of the comments in both places have been surprisingly supportive of my argument that IWBs are a waste of cash, there have been a few negative arrows slung my way.  One in particular---added to the Teacher Magazine post by a guy named Mr. D---caught my attention.

He wrote: 

I think the problems is that either you are resistant to technology ie change, or you have not been exposed on how to integrate it properly.  Bill why would you give up so quickly in trying to implement it in your classroom? Don't you have higher expectations for your students? Would you let them give up so quickly?

What bothers me in Mr. D's comment is an attitude towards teachers that I see often in conversations about school change.  "Teachers all resistant to change and lazy!" the argument goes.  "If they'd just be persistent and determined, our schools would be saved."

Performance Pay Will Kill Our Schools

Ever since the board of the Houston Independent School District voted to use standardized test scores to reward and punish teachers, I’ve been wrapped in a dark, dark funk. 

I guess I can’t really blame HISD.  After all, they’re just one of many educational organizations (see here, here and here) influenced by states that are scrambling to grab some of the billions of dollars made available to schools through Race to the Top grants—which must all include redesigned teacher compensation and evaluation plans. 

Obama made ‘em do it. 

Now, I’ve got a billion complaints with any state and/or district that ties teacher compensation to standardized test scores—and I’ve written about them more than once.  My greatest concern, though, has always been the impact that an undue emphasis on testing will have on the instructional practices in our classrooms.

Exploring Good Wikis

After posting Part One and Part Two in my Teacher Tips for Wiki Projects series last week, I had several friends and colleagues—both here on the Radical and in my work in the real world—ask me to provide some samples of good wikis that they could explore with their students. 

Here are some of my favorites:

Carbon Fighters:  This wiki was created by a middle grades language arts class in North Carolina. It was designed to give students opportunities to practice problem-solution essay writing while studying issues related to alternative energy and the use of fossil fuels.

Be sure to explore the “For Teachers” page which gives an extensive overview of the rationale behind this project.

Horizon Project 2007:  This wiki—recognized as a finalist in the 2007 Edublogs award competition—was a collaborative project between high school students in five different countries who were developing a vision of what classrooms of the future might look like after studying the 2007 Horizon Report released by the New Media Consortium and Educase.

Be sure to explore the “Project Review” link which provides extensive details about how this wiki was organized and developed.

British Romanticism:  This high school English wiki was created as a part of a study of British Romanticism. It includes 500-700 word articles detailing the art, music and poetry of the British Romantic area.

Be sure to explore the “Discussion” tab of each page in this wiki, which provide an interesting look into how students can use the discussion boards on wikis to plan their collective efforts—and to build a sense of community with their peers.

Monster Project:  This fun wiki project is being created by a collection of second and third grade computer students from five different states.

Participating students designed a monster using digital tools and wrote a set of directions for redrawing their monsters. Then, students from another state attempted to recreate the same monsters by following the written directions provided. Final images of rendered drawings were uploaded to the Monster Project wiki for comparison.

Some of the best examples of final products can be found on “Ms. Graham’s 2nd Grade” page.

Remember that you can also use this handout to learn more about the characteristics of quality wiki pages and this handout to track your thinking while looking at several specific wiki pages. 

Also, remember to share examples of good wikis in action in the comment section of this post.  The larger the library of high quality work that we build, the better our chances are of seeing wiki work spread across classrooms. 

Part Two: Teacher Tips for Wiki Projects

On Wednesday, I posted an excerpt from a book I’m writing about teaching with technology titled Part One:  Teacher Tips for Wiki Projects.  Here’s the second—and final—post in that series, detailing four additional thoughts for teachers interested in using wikis with their students:

Discussing wiki vandalism: The openness encouraged in communities that embrace wikis as a tool for knowledge building can also lead to the intentional destruction of content. Users with no real attachment to wiki projects sometimes decide to delete entire pages or to add inaccurate—or inappropriate—content to wiki pages on purpose. Work that students have spent hours creating can literally be erased in an instant.

Users who intentionally destroy the work done on wikis are called vandals—and any teacher interested in wikis must reassure their students that vandalism is not a cause for major concern. Because wikis save every version of each page separately, work can be quickly restored as soon as vandalism occurs. While replacing damaged pages can be frustrating, it is important for students to know that nothing is lost forever on a wiki.

Part One: Teacher Tips for Wiki Projects

If you’ve noticed even more technology entries here on the Radical than normal, that’s because I’ve been doing a lot of writing recently for my second book. 

Titled Plug Us In: 5 Easy Steps to Integrate Technology into Your Classroom and scheduled to be published by Solution Tree in the fall of 2010, my goal is to show teachers how to use technology to introduce students to the kinds of enduring skills that we all value—information management, collaboration, communication, problem solving etc.

Today, I finished polishing a set of teacher tips for wiki projects that resembles my recent series of teacher tips for classroom blogging projects.  I figured you’d be interested in seeing an excerpt from Plug Us In where I share a series of 8 suggestions with teachers interested in integrating wikis into their work with students. 

Here are the first four suggestions:

Once your students are comfortable with the characteristics of good wiki work and aware of a set of specific, defined roles for participation, you will be ready to start projects using wikis as a tool for the coproduction of content. To make this work more approachable and productive, consider:

Starting with one classroom wiki: At their core, wikis are about sharing information. Students working together can use wikis to document what they are learning about concepts connected to the curriculum, to organize their thinking on topics of deep personal interest, or to generate shared solutions to problems built from the collective intelligence of a group. The challenge, however, is finding enough content to fill a wiki!

That’s why it is best to keep your initial efforts simple and clean, creating wiki projects that are completed by entire classes instead of individual students. Consider having small groups design, monitor and manage stand-alone pages in shared classroom wikis focused on classroom content instead of creating and maintaining entire wikis on their own. Doing so will ensure that your wiki builds quickly without overwhelming anyone with your first digital efforts!

More on Interactive Whiteboards. . .

I’ve enjoyed the conversation that we had here on the Radical this week about whether or not Interactive Whiteboards are really valuable tools for redesigning schools.  Our timing couldn’t have been more perfect, considering that Ed Week ran this article on the impact of whiteboards on Friday. 

While there were dozens—literally—of great comments left by Radical readers sharing the full range of perspectives on the role of IWBs in teaching and learning, I wanted to spotlight and respond to a few in particular. 

First, Karen R. noticed an all-too-common phenomena that occurs in IWB classrooms when she wrote:

I do know teachers who love their whiteboards as they lend an air of interactivity to their lessons without fundamentally changing the way the classroom functions.

Acreelman agreed, writing:

Good discussion. It's another case of how we use technology to maintain the traditional classroom paradigm instead of radically rethinking the whole process of learning and education. We use technology to support familiar methods instead of starting from scratch and seeing what new things we can do with the amazing resources available today.

For me, this is really the crux of the issue.  Teachers like to talk about how IWBs have changed their instruction, but then they give descriptions of classrooms that sound pretty darn traditional to me.

Wasting Money on Whiteboards. . .

Blogger’s Note:  I’m a bit worked up today, so this post has rant written all over it.  It’s heavy on the Radical and light on the Tempered.  Read at your own risk. 

I’ll admit that there aren’t many topics that I’m more passionate about than Interactive Whiteboards in the classroom. 

Seen as the first step towards “21st Century teaching and learning,” schools and districts run out and spend THOUSANDS of dollars on whiteboards, hanging them on walls and showing them off like proud hens that just laid the golden instructional egg. 

I gave mine away last summer. After about a year’s worth of experimenting, I determined that it was basically useless. 

Sure, my students thought it was nifty, but it didn’t make teaching my required curriculum any easier.  I probably crafted two or three neat lessons with it, but there was nothing unique about those activities—I could have easily crafted similar lessons using the computer stations I already have in class and any number of free online tools. 

That’s why I spent last night following Twitter’s Ed Chat about Interactive Whiteboards even after an appliance meltdown, a minor flood, and a 2 hour trip to the Laundromat.  There’s no way that I’m going to watch a conversation on whiteboards slip away—even if I’m exhausted and wearing dirty clothes!

iTunes Playlists = Stronger Relationships

For Christmas, my in-laws gave me one of my favorite gifts:  An iTunes gift card!  Ever since buying my first iPod—which strangely enough was only two years ago—I’ve been consumed by finding interesting new music to listen to.

That’s the beauty of iTunes, I figure.  With about a bajillion songs to choose from—and with gadgets and gizmos that recommend new songs every time you make a purchase—you can spend hours browsing and buying. 

(Don’t tell my wife, huh?!)

One of my favorite ways to find new songs is to ask groups of people that I know to make recommendations for dedicated playlists.  I’ve got an entire alternative collection—complete with bands like Atreyu, The Used and Four Year Strong—recommended by a niche group of eighth graders that look up to me.

I’ve got a playlist recommended by my middle school soccer team—which for some strange reason is loaded with hip-hop and Mexican rappers—and a playlist full of suggestions from this year’s language arts and social studies students. 

What’s been fun—outside of listening to new music that I would have never found without the help of my iTunes Army—is the sense of community that each playlist has helped to develop.  In their simplest form, each song tells me a bit more about the individuals who recommended them.  I can see inside their minds, learning about their experiences and their attitudes.