The Tempered Radical

Technology Professional Development Scenarios

Let's start with a simple truth:  Schools have limited budgets and every time that we make careless spending choices, we tie our own hands behind our backs.

As a result, I've worked HARD over the past several years to encourage both teachers and school leaders to think systematically about just what they want to see happening in classrooms before they spend ANYTHING on technology.

To that end, I've whipped up a set of stories that are designed to start conversations about just what good technology integration is supposed to look like in schools.

You can download the stories here:

2. Handout_TechnologyScenarios

What I plan to do with the stories is ask audiences to engage in Carousel Brainstorming -- moving in small groups from story to story and answering the reflection questions found on the final page of the packet.

My hope is that every participant will see themselves -- both who they are and who they want to be -- somewhere in the stories.  More importantly, my hope is that the conversations started in small groups will help participants to wrestle with the rationale behind their own technology spending choices.

Whaddya' think?

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Related Radical Reads:

Developing Technology Vision Statements

Making Good Technology Choices

Buying Teachers Chainsaws

 

Anti-Bullying PSA Project [LESSON]

Over the past few years, I've become convinced that today's kids are best motivated as learners when they are tackling a real-world issue in a meaningful way.  That's why my #sugarkills blog and my classroom microlending project have been so successful.

As Marc Prensky says, technology gives today's students power that they've never had before.  It's our job to help them learn to use that power to change the world in meaningful ways.

To that end, I spent the day whipping up a new cause for my kids to tackle during a school-wide enrichment period that starts next year.  

 Our cause will be called Speak Up Salem and our goal will be to push for a school culture where bullying isn't tolerated by generating influential Public Service Announcements that pair provocative images with interesting quotes.

Here's a sample:

The notion of creating influential visuals ties directly to several of the language arts goals in the sixth grade curriculum -- and learning to use visuals to be persuasive is probably one of the most important skills for grabbing attention in today's information-soaked world.

I'm also excited about the fact that this lesson will give me a chance to introduce students to the Creative Commons -- a new form of copyright where photographers, musicians, writers, and artists are granting other users permission in advance to use their content.

If this sounds good to you, here is a simple overview of the lesson that is designed to help other teachers get a sense for what I'm going to do:

Lesson_SpeakUpSalemSlides

And here are the materials that I'll be using when we start the project:

 Speak Up Salem Quotes and Statistics - http://bit.ly/speakupsalemquotes

This link connects to a Word document with several statistics and quotes about bullying that students can use when creating their Speak Up Salem slides. 

Encouraging students to select a quote or a statistic from this collection will save time in the creation process simply because they won’t have to find their own statistics and/or quotes connected to bullying.

 

Speak Up Salem Slides - http://bit.ly/speakupsalemslides

This link connects to a PowerPoint presentation with 67 different Creative Commons images that students can use when creating their own Speak Up Salem slides. 

Encouraging students to select an image from this collection will save time in the creation process simply because they won’t have to find their own CC images to use in their final products.

 

Speak Up Salem Directions - http://bit.ly/speakupsalemdirections

This link connects to a set of technical directions on using PowerPoint to create an influential visual.  At a minimum, it can help you to better understand the kinds of things students will need to be able to do when using PowerPoint to create an influential visual. 

You may also want to share one set of directions with each student group OR train a few student leaders that can provide technical support to their peers.

 

Speak Up Salem Scoring Rubric - http://bit.ly/speakupsalemrubric

While I don't plan to grade the work that my students do on this assignment -- honestly, I get sick of living in a world where everything has to have a grade tied to it to be considered worth doing -- I DO plan on having my kids evaluate the overall quality of their final products with this scoring rubric.

Hope this helps -- and more importantly, hope you'll stop back and give me feedback if you use this lesson with YOUR kids!  I'd love to know about any changes that you make.

#alwayspolishing

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Related Radical Reads:

 What Do YOU Know about the Creative Commons?

Using Google Docs to Create Digital Kits for Student Projects

More on Using Digital Kits to Structure Student Projects

Quick Guide to Web 2.0 Services [HANDOUT]

As a guy who has written two books about using technology in schools (see here and here) and who regularly delivers two-day workshops on teaching with technology (see here), one of the questions that I'm asked all the time is, "So what digital tools are YOU using in the classroom?"

While my first reaction is always to explain that choosing tools can only start once a practitioner has a clear vision for what they want their students to know and be able to do (see here), I also understand that having a sense for the kinds of services that other digitally driven teachers have embraced is useful -- particularly to people who are just beginning to integrate technology into their classrooms.

To that end, I've created an annotated Quick Guide to the Web 2.0 services that I find useful as a teacher and a learner. 

You can download it here:

Handout_QuickGuidetoWebTools

You can also bookmark the link to the Quick Guide in my Dropbox here.  That may even more useful to you simply because you'll see new additions and deletions anytime that I make changes to the document.

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Related Radical Reads:

Digital Immigrants Unite

Making Good Technology Choices

Technology Will Kill

 

Technology Will Kill

One of the lessons that teachers working in digital spaces HAVE to learn is that a complete reliance on any ONE digital tool and/or service is a recipe for disaster.

This video by Erik Qualman explains why

The moral of the story is a simple one, isn't it?  Technology is constantly improving and advancing and changing and adapting -- which means those of us who rely on technology need to be constantly improving and advancing and changing and adapting too.

Need an example from my life? 

I've spent the past few years madly in love with RSS feed readers -- simple tools that automatically check my favorite websites for new content and bring that content back to me.

My RSS reader is LITERALLY the first place that I turn every time that I want to learn something new simply because it makes me more efficient. 

Because my reader is automatically collecting new content from my favorite sites, I know that every time I log in, I'm going to find something that is interesting and professionally challenging -- even if I only have five minutes to explore.

Here's the hitch, though:  The first RSS Reader that I fell in love with --- Pageflakes --- went out of business about two years after I started using it, and NOW the replacement service that I found -- Google Reader -- is being killed off in July of this year.

Talk about frustrating!  I literally spent months tinkering with both services -- figuring out just what they could do, customizing settings so that they acted just the way that I wanted them to, and finding ways to incorporate the lessons that I was learning into the work that I do with teachers and with students.

And now I've got to start all over again. I've got to find ANOTHER feed reader and experiment with MORE settings and learn NEW lessons that I can share with teachers.

But that's the nature of living in a digital world, y'all. We have to be digitally resilient.

We have to understand that our lives are not over when our favorite tools and/or services go belly up.  Instead, we need to see the death of trusted tools as opportunities to experiment with something new -- and quite probably, something better than we ever could have expected.

 Any of this make sense?

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Related Radical Reads:

New Slide - Digitally Resilient

Openly Sick of Being Digitally Resilient

Epic Tech Fail Day

Epic Tech Fail Day Summary

 

Three Classroom Blogging Tips for Teachers

As some of you may know, I started a new classroom blog with my students that is designed to raise awareness in tweens and teens about the amount of sugar found in the foods that they are eating.

It's called #SUGARKILLS.  Check it out:

http://sugarkills.us

So far, the project has been a remarkable success.  We've literally posted a new bit every school day for the past month -- and my students are straight jazzed about the notion that THEY have the power to make a difference in the world.

Need proof? 

Then check out this quote from a recent interview that we completed for Middleweb:

A couple weeks ago, Mrs. Swanson left us a comment about how her dad has diabetes and our blog is really helping him.  It makes us feel great to know that we’ve made a difference in someone’s life.  

What if Mrs. Swanson’s father made the decision to say “no” to one candy bar, because of us?  Then he would keep making healthier choices, and that could eventually save his life!  We would have made a huge difference.

We’ve also discovered that other teachers are actually sharing our work with their students, which makes us feel like we really matter to other people.  How many 12 year old students can say that they are changing people’s lives around the world?  

The fact that we can is amazing!

So how can YOU get a great student-driven blog up and running in YOUR classroom? 

Here are three of my favorite tips.

Technology Gives Kids Power [SLIDE]

I've spent the past several weeks grinding my way through several revisions for presentations that I'm giving in the not too distant future and it's left me more than a little emotionally spent. 

In an effort to get back in touch with the creativity that drives me, I grabbed a great Marc Prensky quote and whipped up a new slide tonight:

(Click to dowload slide from Flickr)

Hope you dig it.  More importantly, hope you can use it in your work. 

Rock right on,

Bill

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Related Radical Reads:

Introducing Our Newest Cause: #SUGARKILLS

Change Depends on Something MORE than Shiny iGadgets

Digital Immigrants Unite!

 

Guest Post: @braddo on Digital Footprints and the Brand of Me

A little over a month ago, I wrote a bit on the role that teachers STILL need to play in helping students to take full advantage of the new opportunities that digital tools make possible for today's learners. 

The argument was a simple one:  Just because our students know how to use digital tools without ever opening up an owner's manual doesn't mean they're going to be able to leverage those same tools to do meaningful work without us. 

The piece spotlighted several Tweets from the articulate, intelligent students in Brad Ovenell-Carter's Vancouver-area high school.  Brad had asked them to reflect on a few questions that I'd asked using their classroom hashtag, #tokafe11.  

Tons of people stopped by to leave comments for me on the bit, including a guy who calls himself "Mr. Chips" who took Brad to task for letting his students post on Twitter under their real names. 

Chips wrote:

"Hmmm ... not too smart of your bright-minded friend to post students feeds under their full names. Nothing wrong with the tweets quoted, but students' identities should be protected.

As educators we should be very cautious how we create digital tattoos that my come back to haunt the students."

It's an interesting take, isn't it -- and one that I suspect MOST educators would agree with. 

Are YOU Teaching Kids about Attentional Blink? [SLIDE]--

I don't have a ton of time to write tonight -- I'm busy preparing for a webinar on Literacy and Blogging for the Alaska Staff Development Network -- but I wanted to share a concept that I picked up from Howard Rheingold's newest book, Netsmart- How to Survive and Thrive Online.

It's called Attentional Blink:

 

That's important stuff, isn't it?  I know that I sure struggle to stay focused on a single task in a world where I'm surrounded by interruptions that are waiting to happen.

So what are YOU doing to teach your kids to concentrate?

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Original Image Credit: Untitled by Louis Rabin

Licensed Creative Commons Attribution on February 5, 2013

 

Term Attentional Blink comes from P. Sven Arvidson, “A Lexicon of Attention: From Cognitive Science to Phenomenology,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 2, no. 2 (2003): 99-132

Twitter is MORE than Honey Boo Boo Child

Sometimes it's just plain amazing to see what you can find floating through Twitter. 

 

KNOW WHERE TO LOOK AND YOU CAN FIND HONEY BOO BOO:

AND SPANDEX AND HAIR BOWS:

AND CATS.  LOTS AND LOTS OF CATS.  AND EVEN MORE CATS:

 

 

 

BUT IF YOU KNOW WHERE TO LOOK, YOU'LL ALSO FIND INSPIRATION:

 

CONTENT THAT CHALLENGES YOUR THINKING:

 

INTERESTING QUESTIONS:

CELEBRATIONS:

 

IN DEPTH CONVERSATIONS:

AND NEW CONNECTIONS:

 

MORAL OF THE STORY: Give Twitter a chance.  It's a powerful place where educators are learning together -- and learning together matters.

#simpletruth

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Related Radical Reads:

Twitter as a Tool for Professional Development

Twitter is Only ONE PLN Building Tool

Twitter Can SAVE You Time

Five Twitter Hashtags for School Leaders

Twitter Hashtags for Educators

A Twitter Push-Back

 

Change Depends on More than Shiny iGadgets [SLIDE]

One of the funniest interactions that happened at Educon last weekend took place in the planning document for Patrick Larkin's session on school vision just after Patrick asked: "What does your school look like?" 

Within seconds, an anonymous participant typed, "The same way it looked like 200 years ago, with shiny iProducts added ;-)"

That left me inspired to create a slide with the same theme:

(click to enlarge)

Download Slide_FancyiGadgets

 

That's a simple truth worth remembering, y'all. 

Sure, purchases matter.  I'd be MORE than happy to have a couple of hundred thousand dollars to spend upgrading our school's wireless network and outfitting classrooms with complete sets of iPads and/or laptops.

In fact, I won't turn down ANY digital iCandy that you want to throw my way.  There's room in my room for student responders, 3D printers, digital cameras, and high-end video equipment, too. 

But let's not mistake purchases for progress when reflecting on our efforts to change teaching and learning spaces.

All too often, purchases do nothing to actually move us towards a new vision for what schools should be and -- more importantly -- towards a new vision for what students should be doing while they are with us.

Change depends on leaders with visions that are bigger than their checkbooks. 

#truth

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Related Radical Reads:

The Gadget Happy Classroom Fail [SLIDE]

Teachers, Chainsaws and Interactive Whiteboards [SLIDE]

Digital Immigrants Unite

 

 

Original Image Credit: Search iPad by Elsie esq. -- Licensed Creative Commons Attribution on January 31, 2013

Notion of “adding shiny iProducts” from an anonymous contribution to a Google Doc during Patrick Larkin’s Educon 2.5 presentation