The Tempered Radical

Epic Tech Fail Day

Inspired by Scott McLeod’s Leadership Day and Tweets from andyjb and stephe1234 I’d like to announce the first annual Epic Tech Fail Day!

Designed as an effort to raise awareness about the importance of being digitally resilient in the 21st Century Classroom and to help teachers new to technology understand that even digital veterans have computer meltdowns, Epic Tech Fail Day authors should write short pieces about the struggles that they’ve had in their work with technology…and then share lessons learned from their disasters. 

Here’s a sample I wrote this morning.

Submission Details:

1. In your post, include a description of your digital disaster, the reasons your failure occurred, the lessons you learned, and—if appropriate—links to tools that others can use to avoid your disaster.
2. Get your contributions posted online before August 12th.
3. After posting your contribution, fill out this form so that I can find you easily.
4. If you’re Twittering, use #epictechfail as your hashtag so we can find your posts there, too.
5. Once all entries have been collected, I’ll link to the submissions here the Radical.
6. The five best submissions will win a free copy of my newest book, Teaching the iGeneration.

Topics You Might Write About:

Maybe you had a great video-based activity that went horribly wrong because all of the video cameras in your school decided to die at the same time—or a lesson built around digital photographs captured on cameras without USB cords!

Maybe you’ve fought the Flip Camera Codex battle—something that teachers in PC schools have grumbled about more than once in the past few years.  Maybe your class wiki project fell apart in a sea of vandalism from students who weren’t quite ready to take digital projects seriously. 

Maybe you’ve:

• Had the Internet go down more times than you can count when working with kids in the computer lab.
• Found it impossible to even sign up for computer time in your school!
• Stumbled across great sites, developed terrific lessons using new tools, and had all your work go to waste because of “the firewall.”
• Discovered at the last minute that the computers in your school weren’t compatible with the external tools that you were counting on your kids actually using.

If so, consider writing for Epic Tech Fail Day!  Making your struggles transparent will help others to understand that digital efforts aren’t easy—but that glitches aren’t failures in the eyes of a determined teacher.

Overview of Teaching the iGeneration

As most Radical readers know, my second book—titled Teaching the iGeneration—came out in early July. 

Essentially an effort to document everything that I’ve learned about teaching with Web 2.0 tools, Teaching the iGeneration is chock full of practical suggestions for using everything from social bookmarking services to wikis and blogs in today’s classrooms.

What early reviewers have liked the best about TiG, though, is that it ISN’T just a book about technology. 

While you’ll find plenty of handouts detailing best practices for introducing new digital tools to your students, the focus of each chapter—and the strategies that I recommend—stands squarely on the characteristics of good teaching.

Readers will learn about the characteristics of effective persuasion and information management practices.  They’ll explore the characteristics of collaborative dialogue—a communication practice that has been essential for centuries—and take a closer look at the types of problems that students need to solve. 

Poke through the 70+ handouts in TiG—which are all posted for free download here—and you’ll see as many tools supporting the development of traditional skills as there are supporting the use of new tools. 

They include:

• Templates for gathering multiple perspectives around controversial topics.
• Activities designed to introduce students to the changing nature of influence and persuasion in the 21st Century.
• Rubrics for scoring persuasive pieces and influential visual images.
• Role plays that can be used to teach students about productive—and unproductive—conversation practices.
• Materials for evaluating potential solutions to defined problems. 

Does this sound like a book that you might just be able to learn a thing or two from?  Would it make for a good addition to the professional library in your building?  Can you think of a teacher—or a principal—that needs to learn more about how digital tools can be used to support responsible instruction?

If so, then you might be even more interested in winning one of the five free copies of Teaching the iGeneration that I’ve still got to hand out!

Epic Tech Fail: My Trailfire Tirade

One of the new bits of content that I’m going to start to create here on the Radical are short ‘epic tech fail’ bits that detail the digital disasters that I’ve had at school.

Now, the purpose of my Epic Tech Fail series isn’t to discourage you from using technology—I am a bit of a digital junkie, after all.

Instead, the purpose is to highlight the fact that good teachers who are using 21st Century tools have to be digitally resilient.  There are going to be glitches as schools wrestle with the need to keep students safe while exploring new ways to communicate and collaborate online.

There are going to be glitches as schools try to meet the infrastructure needs of 21st Century classrooms.  There are going to be glitches as teachers try to figure out how to blend what they already know about good teaching with what our students already know about new tools.

And we can’t quit every time things get glitchy!

Maybe you’ll learn something from my glitches.  Maybe you’ll see a common trap that you can avoid or take inspiration from the fact that even a guy buried neck deep in new tools is having troubles, too. 

Either way, they’ll be fun for me to write!

Here’s the first in the series:

Read This: Leadership Day 2010 Posts

For the past three years, Scott McLeod---the mind behind the Dangerously Irrelevant blog and one of the most influential educational thinkers in America today---has run what he calls Leadership Day. 

Described as an honest attempt to help administrators imagine the kinds of schools and classrooms that we should be creating in order to prepare students for a poorly defined tomorrow, Leadership Day sees some of the brightest edu-minds writing brilliant posts ranging from the visionary to the practical every year.  

Honestly, there's no better starting point for school leaders trying to learn more about the role that digital tools should be playing in their schools.  

I've written posts for Leadership Day in the past---here's last year's submission---but won't have time this year simply because school starts for me on Monday!  That means I'm neck deep in Meet the Teacher night and lesson planning. 

But I'm certainly going to be following as many of the Leadership Day posts as possible---and you can too!  Just check this Twitter Hashtag out over the next few days:

http://twitter.com/search?q=%23leadershipday10

No joke:  You're bound to learn a TON.

Tools for Successful Digital Conversations

So an interesting email landed in my inbox today.  Anita—an adjunct professor at Kent State and an admitted tech noobie—asked:

I teach an undergrad education course for preservice teachers (also some grad courses for teachers), and want my students to post threaded discussions.

I also need to upload files--both word and pdf, probably even ppts. Has to be a free site. I don't want to use vista or blackboard anymore, which is provided by the university.

I used nicenet. org for a focus group I ran (working on my doctorate), but it doesn't allow for uploading documents. Greatly limited in that way.

Any suggestions?

Here was my reply.  Figured it might be useful to you, too—regardless of the role that you’re filling:

Activity: Helping Students Find New Books

One of the saddest things about being a language arts teacher is watching struggling readers during media checkout time. 

Strange, isn’t it? 

You’d think that media checkout time—one of the few times that students have the complete freedom to choose titles of deep personal interest instead of being force-fed content on required reading lists—would be a GREAT time for struggling readers.

But it’s not. 

Instead, they end up completely overwhelmed by rows and rows of shelves filled with books and magazines on every topic under the sun. 

Paralysis sets in.  “Where should I start?!” they wonder as they wander.  Covers and titles become the primary selection strategy, leading to poor choices made in a hurry.

Changing Views of Privacy

If you’ve read the Radical for any length of time, you know that I’m a real digital junkie.  There aren’t many technologies that I haven’t explored and/or completely embraced, both in my professional and my personal life. 

While others—like my good friend Dina Strasser—are carefully thinking about the impact that technology is having on human interactions, I’m gleefully whizzing off to the gadget store to pick up the latest gizmo.

But for the past few years, I’ve started to wonder about the impact that digital solutions and services are having on privacy rights in our country.

Influencing Leaders in a PLC

As you may have guessed from my posts here on the Radical, I’ve spent the better part of the past two months presenting on professional learning communities for Solution Tree. 

The work has been interesting simply because it’s allowed me to get a sense for the kinds of issues that schools are facing as they work to restructure as collaborative groups. 

One of the questions that is asked time and again in my sessions is, “If we’re classroom teachers working in a building with a principal who is resistant to collaboration—or who just doesn’t get it—what can we do to get the ball rolling in the right direction?”

Interesting question, isn’t it?  And a sad one at that! 

It’s hard to believe that there are still principals who aren’t convinced that colleagues working together are more effective than colleagues working in isolation.  I mean the research base IS pretty clear—and it’s supported by darn near every educational heavyweight in the industry today.

That being said, I’m a realist.  I get that some principals are going to be more motivated by—and effective at leading—collaborative communities than others. 

So what can you do if you’re stuck in a building with a leader struggling to get his or her head wrapped around the important role that collaboration can play in school improvement?

Here are two suggestions:

Lessons Learned from the LeBronathon. . .

In case you haven’t heard (some people still live in caves, you know), the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers lost LeBron James—a hometown boy with the potential to go down in history as one of the best players of all time—to the Miami Heat last week.

The media frenzy over LeBron’s decision has been pretty ridiculous, hasn’t it? 

Even today—days after LeBron’s decision was announced to fanfare in Miami and fires in Cleveland—I can’t go more than a few minutes without seeing a bit on the telly or hearing a bit on the radio about the entire fiasco. 

It’s frustrating for a guy like me who hasn’t watched an NBA game in 10 years, but it’s also instructive! 

That’s right:  Educators and the policymakers working hard to find ways to recruit teachers to high needs schools can learn a TON from the LeBronathon if they’re willing to look carefully and listen.

Here are three lessons I think we can learn from LeBron:

Talented people want to work in circumstances where they know that they’ve got a chance to succeed: 

One of the first lessons that policymakers working to staff high needs schools can learn from LeBron is that money is rarely the deciding factor when talented people are choosing where to work. 

Teaching the iGeneration is Now Available

In the middle of my morning PLC presentation yesterday, a Solution Tree friend dropped into my room holding a fo'-real copy of my newest book, Teaching the iGeneration. 

Co-authored with digital learning expert and Dell consultant Adam Garry, it's a book that I'm pretty proud of because it is designed to show teachers the overlap between the kinds of skills we've always believed in---problem solving, information management, collaboration, communication, persuasion---and the new tools that can make work in each of these areas more efficient and effective. 

Drawing heavily from the resources and ideas that I've shared here on the Radical for years, Teaching the iGeneration is chock full of practical handouts and project suggestions.  My hope is that by the time you're done reading it, you'll be ready to incorporate a new digital project into your instruction for next year. 

You can poke around inside TiG here, exploring the table of contents, the introduction and the first chapter.  Eventually, you'll also be able to download all of the handouts from TiG as well.  When I checked this morning, though, the book's website---a feature that Solution Tree creates for every new title---wasn't up and running yet. 

Looking forward to seeing what you think of it!  I've learned a ton about technology from all of you over the years and I'm hoping to give a little back by sharing what I know. 

I'm also looking forward to putting my own hands on a copy!  The first shipment sold out of the Solution Tree bookstore in Boston before I could get in line.  

Talk about humbling.