The Tempered Radical

Why are we STILL Wasting Money on Whiteboards?

If you’ve spent any time reading the Radical, you know that I hate Interactive Whiteboards—and the companies that sell them as instructional silver bullets—with an unhealthy passion. 

Recently, though, I’ve dialed back that passion.  I guess that’s because—thankfully—conversations about teaching with technology have started to shift into healthier places. 

I hear less and less from educators who just HAVE to have an IWB.

More importantly, I hear less and less from school leaders who are ready to plunk down their schools’ already limited technology budgets on a small handful of glorified presentation tools that do NOTHING to change teaching and learning in our schools.

That lull in the lunacy ended this week.

You see, I bumped into a friend who is a well respected instructional technology leader in his large middle school.  He was completely jazzed because his principal had asked him to help spend the school’s technology budget.

That excitement was short-lived, though.  Turns out that his principal—who’d recently attended a conference and seen a slick presentation in the vendor hall—had already bought and paid for 6 IWBs.

Total cost:  $18,000.

Stew in that for a minute, would you?  Do you have ANY idea what you could do with $18 THOUSAND dollars?

Here are 5 different ways I would spend that cash:

Do Your Students Know How to Search with a Purpose? [slide]

I don't have a ton of time to write today----I'm grading papers----but wanted to give y'all something to think about:

 

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Adapted from The 19th is Getting Closer by Untitled Blue

http://www.flickr.com/photos/untitlism/2580895574/sizes/z/

Licensed Creative Commons Attribution on May 14, 2011

New Teacher Evaluation Models for New Millennium Teachers

So I’ve finally stolen a few minutes from my incredibly hectic life to poke through a new report titled Making Teacher Evaluation Work for Students that was crafted by the 32 accomplished practitioners in the Denver New Millennium Initiative (DNMI).

With the help of the Center for Teaching Quality—my blog’s sponsors and long-time professional mentors—these teachers spent a solid chunk of time studying the ins-and-outs of teacher evaluation with some real heavyweights including Linda Darling-Hammond, Jennifer Jennings, and Tom Kane.

Then, they offered a series of policy suggestions to Colorado legislators on ways in which the Ensuring Quality Instruction Through Educator Effectiveness Act—statewide legislation that requires student growth to count for at least 50% of a teacher’s annual evaluation—can be implemented effectively at the school level. 

My first reaction to the report is a great big HOO-RAH.

The way I figure, it’s about time that teachers asserted themselves when it comes to the choices being made that govern our profession. 

After all, I haven’t met a legislator yet who has any idea what schools are really like, so spoon-feeding a bit of classroom truth to those who are crafting policies that will impact the lives of our nation’s kids CAN’T be a bad thing.

Lessons Learned on Cell Phones in School

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been conducting a bit of a mini-experiment on using student-owned cell phones—a tool that I believe are disrupting the learning environment—as responders in my sixth grade classroom. 

Specifically, I’m using Poll Everywhere—a service that provides free educator accounts—to gather, sort and report student responses on a few quick formative assessments.

I wanted to sit down for a minute and process some of the lessons that I’ve learned mostly because it will help me to get my head wrapped around the role that cell phones can play in our school.

Here are a few important takeaways.

Are Your Students Frozen in Intellectual Amber?

One of my best digital friends is Steve Muth—one of brilliant minds behind VoiceThread, my favorite Web 2.0 tool of all time. 

Steve and I have been interacting for years now. 

He’s always thankful of the work that I’m doing with VoiceThread because it helps other teachers to see just what’s possible with his tool and I’m always thankful for his interest in creating a great tool for teachers and students—and for keeping that tool affordable for schools.

It’s a symbiotic relationship, I think.

Steve saw my post on managing information as an essential skill and dropped me an email that you’ve GOT to read.

Managing Information in the 21st Century [slide]

I don't have a whole heck of a lot of time to write today, but I figured you might be interested in this slide that I've created for an upcoming presentation on teaching in the 21st Century:

(click to enlarge)

The way I see it, one of our primary responsibilities should be to teach kids to manage individuals, ideas and information efficiently. 

How often do those skills and behaviors play a role in YOUR classroom conversations?

(Sadly even my answer would be, "Not often enough.")

 

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Original Image Credit: Found by idogcow

http://www.flickr.com/photos/idogcow/85427943/sizes/m/

Licensed Creative Commons Attribution on May 7, 2011

More on the Challenges of Wondering in Schools

So my recent post detailing how limited technology budgets leave my students wondering grabbed a bunch of attention today—and the comments y’all are leaving are fantastic. 

I wanted to address a few of them directly in a new post simply because I think the answers are important enough to stand alone. 

Here are three in particular that I think are worth drawing attention to:

In an email I got early today, a reader named Tom wrote, “You’re being awful hard on your school, don’t you think? Most systems are doing the best they can with what they have.”

After rereading my piece, I agreed with Tom. 

My original draft did make it seem like the blame for the lack of access to information in my school was the fault of the people who work for our system. 

So I did some revising and rewording to try to make it clear that many of the challenges that we face are the result of working with limited technology budgets. 

Today’s schools are forced to make tradeoffs all the time—and often, technology comes up on the short end of the stick.

Now, that doesn’t change my belief that districts have got to look into bring your own device programs. 

There’s just no excuse for cash-strapped systems to overlook the tools that our students can bring to class with them.

Sure, it’ll require some investments in infrastructure.  Sure, it’ll require some careful policy crafting.  Sure, it’ll require some new thinking on the part of IT staffers.

But an inevitable digital shift is occurring all around us that’s just plain impossible to ignore.

How Limited Technology Budgets Failed My Students

Cranky Blogger's Warning:  I'm tired of the broader public demanding that teachers be "held accountable" for student performance.  The truth is that our "productivity" is dependent on a ton of factors that are out of our control. 

This blog post is just one example of how my work is hampered and my hands are tied by budgets that limit our access to digital devices, IT experts and wireless infrastructure.

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There’s NOTHING that I love more than wondering with the kids in my sixth grade science class.

You heard me right:  Wondering.

Almost every day, we pause and share the things that leave us curious—and last week, my kids were WAY curious about their eyes.  Specifically, they wanted to know things like:

• Does the color of your iris have anything to do with your ability to see?
• What exactly is eye strain?  How does staring at a screen—or reading in the dark—cause eye strain?
• If a person were born with an unusually high number of rods, would they be able to see better at night?
• Why does vision get worse over time? 

Cool questions for a bunch of eleven-year-olds, huh?  And if you could have felt the energy in our classroom while we were thinking together, you would have stopped doubting the commitment of today’s kids to learning. 

In 20 minutes, we would have proven what I’ve long believed:  Give kids an engaging topic, an excited teacher, and a bunch of really great questions and schools can be relevant again. 

Here’s the thing, though: The textbook—which is still the primary knowledge container in my classroom—didn’t answer ANY of the wonder questions my kids had. 

Guest Blogger: Rewarding Teachers for Doing More.

A few weeks back, I was digitally introduced to Ryan Niman, a high school social studies and English teacher in the Edmonds School District north of Seattle. 

Ryan’s a brilliant guy—and more importantly, he’s a brilliant writer. 

He’s also one of the new voices that the Center for Teaching Quality—my long-time mentors and blog benefactors—has landed for their soon-to-go-live TransformED blog, which will give several real-live, full-time classroom teachers a platform for talking about the realities of educational policy from perspective of practitioners.

I wanted to introduce y’all to Ryan because I love his voice—and I think you will too—so I asked him to write a guest post for the Radical. 

The following bit is his take on our struggles to recognize and reward teachers for bringing intangibles to the table in their schools. 

Check it out and tell him what you think—both of his point of view and his voice!

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Rewarding Teachers for Doing More

By Ryan Niman

I spent my spring break as the stereotype of the overpaid teacher who gets tons of time off: lounging on a beach in Mexico. It felt like a long, long way from “Cribs: Teacher Edition” on The Daily Show.

While there I read Charles Kenny’s book Getting Better.

I won’t get into how I feel about his thesis (succinctly encapsulated in the subtitle: ‘Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More’), but suffice it to say that I was feeling very privileged about my position in the world.

Of course, the trip itself had more to do with the kindness of family than my outlandish public school teacher salary.

Furthermore, reality came crashing in upon my return.

Communicating and Connecting with Social Media [excerpt]

Let’s get something straight, y’all:  While social media spaces are consuming an increasingly large percentage of our days—61 percent of all Americans report spending at least 6 hours a month connecting, sharing, and networking online—schools still routinely ignore the potential for communicating and connecting in places like Facebook and Twitter.

How bad has it gotten?

Consider these stats:

• 60 percent of Fortune 500 businesses are using social media spaces to reach out to customers.
• 95 percent of colleges and universities are using social media spaces to reach out to customers.
• 70 percent of school districts have policies that specifically ban social networking in schools.

#outoftouch

Now don’t get me wrong:  I can understand why social media spaces scare school leaders.  The VAST majority of stories about school-based social media efforts are centered around disasters—students bullying each other, cyber-predators, or teachers making bad choices.

That’s just not good for building public support!

Here’s the thing, though:  Social media spaces—when used systematically—can be GREAT forums for building public support for our schools.  What’s more, they can make customized professional development opportunities possible—and affordable—for every teacher.

Those are the points Eric Sheninger , Jason Ramsden and I make in Essentials for Principals:  Communicating and Connecting with Social Media, a new Solution Tree title that’s due to hit bookshelves on May 19th.

We decided that it was time to start detailing the specific steps that schools can take to leverage the power of social media spaces in their work with adults. 

While we believe that social media spaces have great potential to change the work we do with students, we focused our book on using social media spaces to change the way that schools reach out to parents and the way that teachers learn because those practices are safe and approachable.

Our hope is that as more educators explore social media spaces for communicating and connecting with one another, they’ll naturally look for ways to incorporate the lessons that they learn into their instruction.

Interested in seeing a short excerpt from the first chapter of our book, which details the way that innovative principals are using Twitter and Facebook to reach out important stakeholders in their communities? 

Then keep reading!