Tinkerings

In our last post we talked about the first three of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and how they relate to Project Based Learning (PBL).  Today, we’ll briefly go through the last 4 together.

Habit #4 – Think Win-Win

Project Based Learning cannot be a rigid demand of results from the teacher.  By its very nature, the student owns the work and the results.  If the teacher has laid out a set of guidelines for providing a finished product for assessment, he or she should realize that they are just that: guidelines.  Allow the student to offer tweaks to your expectations that relate more directly to his own interests, learning style, or abilities.  Compromise.  Make exceptions.  Believe me, you will enjoy the finished product so much more.

Habit #5 – Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood

Hand in hand with Habit #4 comes this nugget of wisdom.  As the student is working her way through the steps of the project, make it a priority to understand what her concerns are, where her limitations lie, and where her knowledge needs broadening.  By understanding where your students are, you will more powerfully propel them to success.  There is no need to pound your rubric into their heads if they genuinely need help or guidance.

Habit #6 – Synergize

This is a powerful habit.  It is the power of 1 plus 1 equals 3.  We have greatly abilities working together than we could ever have working alone.  Project Based Learning should be a community effort.  Students need to work in pairs or small groups.  They will need your guidance and direction certainly in order to stay on task, but the lessons they will learn about life far outweigh the possibilities of being off task.

Habit #7 – Sharpening the Saw

It is imperative that an assessment be done of the total project when you are finished.  Get feed back from the students.  Write your own notes as you move along through the project.  Think about what is working and what isn’t.  What would you change?  How would you change it?  This summative assessment piece is crucial to future success.

Project Based Learning can be a wonderful experience for students, teachers, parents, and other stakeholders.  It can be the greatest of experiences when handled with the right guiding principles.  The 7 Habits of Highly Effective PBL will help.

I have been a fan of Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People for many years now.  Like most fans I know, it is easier to be a fan than it is a fully devoted follower of these habits.  Yet the principles espoused in this perennial bestseller fit with so many aspects of life.  They fit most especially well in the classroom.

As teachers look at creating authentic assessments in their classrooms using Project Based Learning (PBL), these 7 Habits are indispensable for maintaining student engagement and keeping one’s sanity.

Habit 1: Be Proactive

In this age of standardized assessments, many teachers and administrators are afraid of Project Based Learning because they worry that it “won’t be on the test.”  As a teacher, you will have to be proactive in beginning the process.  Tie your project to the standards.  Demonstrate to your administrators how kids will, in turn, demonstrate proficiency through the project.

Habit #2: Begin With The End In Mind

This is crucial.  Don’t think about PBL in terms of “the kids will do this, this, and this.  Now let’s think about how they can demonstrate that.”  Instead, think about the finished product.  Is this a video? A letter? A tutorial?  What do you want kids to do at the end? Then, build backwards.  Fill in the blanks.

Habit #3: Put First Things FIrst

PBL is cool.  It is fun.  Kids love it.  But never forget that it does have to be tied to your state standards.  Establish those up front.  Make sure you know what you are going to assess, how you will assess it, and why you are assessing it.

These are the first 3 Habits.  We’ll cover the last 4 in our next blog post.

Join the conversation!  Leave me a comment.

Even before reading Nicholas Carr’s poignant article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the Atlantic, I have been struck with the gnawing realization that we are slowly but surely degrading critical thinking skills through technology.  This is not the fault of schools or parents or even kids.  It is a naturally occurring phenomenon that is both insipid and insidious.

When I was a child in the 60s (born in 1958), technology was pretty limited.  We had 3 channels on the TV (sometimes 4 if you count the local UHF channel), a radio, and a record player.  Yes, those were the days when kids played outside with one another and the ear bud, if thought of at all, was a gnat that flew into your ear canal.

Kids had imaginations.  They thought.  They figured things out.

Think about it in terms of music alone.

When I was young, music was something we heard.  We had to use our minds to imagine what the band looked like.  We made up mini-movies in our heads that went with the lyrics.  Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds had a different video for each mind that hummed it.

Then came the Midnight Special and MTV.  Suddenly, we weren’t forced to make this stuff up any longer.  The band was in our living room in all their sweaty, long-haired, torn-clothes glory.  Video Killed the Radio Star didn’t just kill a star.  It killed our need to imagine a story.  And our brains got stupid.

Today, we have no need to commit facts to our brains.  Let Me Google That For You is not only a modern catch phrase, but a fantastic site to use for those too lazy to even look stuff up for themselves.  6th graders arrive at middle school with few, if any, multiplication facts committed to memory.  Why would they?  They have calculators (or WolframAlpha).  There is no need to remember important dates or historical facts.  Wikipedia stands at the ready.

Henri Nouwen, my 2nd favorite author behind Kurt Vonnegut, Jr (what a combination), wrote that all decisions are laden with life and death.  The key to successful living is to make decisions that contain more life than death.

Technology comes with life and death.  We must integrate technology into the classroom.  It is the future, and the future is now.  We cannot ignore it.  But we must also realize the death that comes with it and be prepared to combat that with every sinew of our educational beings.

We have to find a way to allow the technology to spawn creativity again (see Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on how education is killing creativity).  It is through creativity that critical thinking is born, enhanced, and maintained.

Is Google making us stupid?  Is technology destroying critical thinking?  What do you think?  Leave me a comment.

I like to listen to NPR in the mornings and afternoons.  I sometimes find the news to be refreshing, but always interesting.  Today’s feature was on the way Nielsen is falling behind in the way it calculates viewership for television shows.  The move to watching TV on Tivo, Hulu, and other media outlets might just be making Nielsen’s ratings obsolete.  Currently, Nielsen is not doing much, if anything, to calculate the eyeballs viewing a show in these formats.

But Tivo and Hulu can.

They can tell viewership based on time watched, commercials watched and fast-forwarded, and more.  To do this, they have to look at a show over time. People don’t watch these shows on the nights they air.  Viewers have found a way to watch when they want to, as long as they want to, in as many snippets as they want to, and they fast-forward through parts that are boring.  What we often forget is that everything we do on Tivo and Hulu is being watched by someone.  Every log-in is tracked by our IP address, and that tells them (if nothing else) where we live.

We shouldn’t be surprised that we are watched so closely over time.  Groceries stores and big box stores have done this for years.  Did you really think they gave you that discount card to save you money?  Think again.  With a discount card they have your demographic data and track every purchase your make whether you have a credit card or not.  Using these cards stores determine what products are selling.  They determine which aisles are working.  They determine which shelf is going gangbusters.  And, like advertisers, they charge their suppliers to get their products in those aisles and on those shelves.

So, in education, we do the same right?  We track student scores over time.  We look at how they behave in a certain class.  We look at interactions between students and teachers.  We calculate time on task every period.  We assess how one student relates to another.  We look closely at whether they are late or early to class or school.  If they are absent, we tabulate the reasons.  We factor in how many minutes or days they spend in In-School Suspension.  We look at whether they completed all of their homework, half, or none.  We’ve even looked at whether their parents are involved in their schooling or not.  And once we’ve looked at all these data points throughout the school year, we determine whether the student is working or not, learning or not, behaving or not.

What’s that you say?  We don’t do this?  Well, pray tell, what do we do?

We look at one test on one day for an entire year.

Let’s flip that around for a minute.

Let’s say that Nielsen decided to measure a show’s impact on one night only rather than an entire season.  Let’s hypothesize that Tivo and Hulu will do the same.  Or that grocery stores will determine the impact of their store layout by calculating customer purchases on one day out of the entire year.

Kind of silly isn’t it?

Don’t misunderstand me.  I’m not saying to throw away standardized tests.  They tell us a lot.  They can help us determine what we should teach or reteach.  They can show us if a student “gets it.”  We are doing this in the classroom with tests, quizzes, warm-ups, and more.  We are collecting many, many data points and using them to fine tune our classroom instructions.  We need these tests, but we need more as well.

If we truly want authentic assessment that measures not only the learning of children but the effectiveness of teachers, we are going to need a lot more information than what a standardized test can give us.

What is your opinion?  What data points would you gather to assess student learning?  Teacher effectiveness?  Leave me a comment.

Tomorrow is February 2nd: Groundhog Day.  It is the day when we finally learn if we will have more winter weather or if spring is about to start.  And that decision rests entirely on the shoulders of one groundhog somewhere up in Pennsylvania.

I can’t think of Groundhog Day without letting my mind wonder to the classic movie starring Bill Murray. In the movie, Murray plays a weatherman who wakes up at 6:00 AM each morning and is doomed to relive the same day over and over again until he gets it right.  It is up there in my top 20 movies of all time I suppose.

Sometimes I think about this movie when I get up on days that are not February 2nd.  The alarm goes off at the same time it did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.  I lay in bed and wonder how the classes of the day will go.  Will it be more of the same?  Will I just live yesterday over again?  Or will something extraordinary happen?

This is not a fair thing to do.  After all, my students are all waking up to a new day as well.  The circumstances of their lives will have an impact on whether they wake up happy or angry, peaceful or sad, hungry or full, fulfilled or longing.  Currently, I have about 135 students during the day.  That’s 135 different variables that come to bear on my day.  I am not that good at math, but I would say that gives me somewhere in the billions of chances for a unique blend of personalities and events to make this day totally unlike any other.

So why do I wake up wondering if I’m in the Groundhog Day movie?  That fault, my friends, lies totally with me.  I am either open to a new set of circumstances, or I manipulate my own fate to make my day boring and repetitive.

I have the power to create the day I want to have.  I can choose Yogi Berra’s “Deja Vu all over again,” or I can embrace “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

And so can you.

See you in the morning around the Groundhog Hole.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced the newest product in the burgeoning Apple line up: the iPad.  News of this announcement has been leaking to the press for some time, and people like me have been expecting to see the Apple version of a Tablet PC.  What we got was something totally different.  And for education, it is the next level of student engagement.

I have been watching the announcement on Apple’s website a day later to “see” what I could only hear during the live event.  The iPad is not necessarily a computer in the way we think of one.  But it is a great interactive tool.  Jobs seemed a little unsure of himself at times, and the crowd wasn’t as spontaneously exuberant as they have been over the iPod or the iPhone.  Maybe that’s because everytime Jobs said “amazing” or “beautiful” or “fantastic” we all can now hear his brain going “Cha-Ching!”  After all, for Apple every tool they make is about adding money to the bottom line.  But as an educator, I was watching for particular classroom applications, and it did not disappoint.

Around the 50 to 52 minute mark in the presentation, Jobs demonstrated their newest collection called iBooks.  Apple is going to try to do with books what they’ve already done with music: turn the world upside down.  While Google is trying to digitize every book in the world into flat, readable PDF files, and Amazon is trying to sell a hardware device that only reads books called the Kindle, Apple has unleashed the power of totally interactivity.  And that’s what people want.

I’ve already blogged about this previously, but thought it was more a “pie-in-the-sky” wish list based on current hardware available to schools.  Online textbooks will eventually revolutionize education and student engagement.  No, not the kind that takes the current text and simply digitizes it for easy of use.  No, I’m talking about an iBook.  Textbooks that embed in them videos, podcasts, pictures, websites, field trips, interviews, music, and more.

And what if these textbooks enabled kids to create their own blogs? Allowed them to write to an authentic audience?  Allowed them to take pictures and create videos of their own?

And what if schools could use textbooks like Wikipedia and add their own content?  Their own videos?  Their own local flavor?

Enter the iPad.

The basic, stripped down version of the iPad starts at $499.  Imagine slipping one of those into the backpacks of every 3rd grader in the nation at the beginning of next year.  And then, every year after that, a new generation of 3rd graders gets one while the others get to keep theirs.  Upgrade them in 6th grade and 9th grade.  Suddenly, kids have a tool they want to use in the classroom.  They have a tool that is theirs.

And that, my friends, makes this education thing a whole new ballgame.

We are less than one week away from the TCAP Writing Assessment for our 8th grade students.  The Language Arts teachers have been working tirelessly all year to have nearly 350 kids ready to show everything they know about expository writing in 35 short minutes.

Our students have practiced writing essays throughout the year, both in Language Arts classes and our computer labs.  We have tag teamed with those teachers since the beginning of this semester to double up on the training, tips, and tries that kids get before February 2nd.

I think the work is paying off.

This year we’ve done two things differently in our labs.  First, we purchased a trial number of log-ins for Write to Learn, an essay grading program from Pearson.  While we’ve found a few flaws along the way (nothing can take the place of a pair of eyes scanning a page), for the most part this program has done a fairly decent job of demonstrating the skills of our students.  Some score a little higher than we would expect.  Some score a little lower.  Over all, however, it seems to do the job.  And the immediate feedback the kids get cannot be replaced.  It has been fun to watch their eyes light up when they see how their score increases when they make just a few improvements here and there.

Second, we produced a short number of videos for kids to watch based on the theme of “Cheat Codes.”  Kids that play games online are looking for websites that offer cheat codes, a series of tutorials on how to get from one level to another.  We decided to do the same thing. We’ve harped on adding similes and metaphors, anecdotes, quotes, vivid verbs, and more.  It has been fun to see their reaction when we tell them we are going to teach them how to “cheat” the test (in reality, there is no way to do this).  Through a little slight-of-hand teaching, kids have started to do better on first drafts, spend more time editing and revising during testing time, and seem to have more of a desire to do better up front.

Only time will tell how well we’ve done.  What about your school?  What are you doing to help kids improve writing skills?

This morning, as many mornings go, I was looking at YouTube videos recommended to me by the unseen forces of video sharing.  One of them was a 5 minute clip of Seth Godin speaking on the power of Tribes.  If you have read many of my blogs, or seen status updates on my Facebook account, you will know I am a fan of Seth Godin.  Seth is a marketing expert, motivational speaker, and author.

Today, the video was looking at the history of advertising.  My focus was drawn in when he got to television advertising.  Companies who sell products spend a lot of money each year to do one thing: interrupt you.  For years the major method of advertising a product or brand was through a continual interruption of other things you would rather be doing.  In this case, the network creates something you want to see, even see passionately, and marketers create something with which to interrupt you.

And for years it worked.

Now, however, the social power of the Internet, and the humongous failure of the Jay Leno Show, has diminished the power of interruption.  Tribes have taken over.  Marketers find a small cadre of passionate followers and help them spread the word to their friends and friends of friends.  We are no longer interested in being interrupted. We now seek out the advice of our friends.  These friends are our Tribe.  We find them on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Diigo, and more.

Take Facebook as an example.  Marketers are piling ads up down the right column of our pages one after another.  They’re even using the power of Google Ad Words to place just the write captions in those ads.  In the time I’ve had a Facebook account, I think I’ve clicked on two of them just to see what the scam is really all about.  I don’t want them to interrupt me.

BUT…

Let a friend post a link to a website or video.  Let a friend post new pictures.  Let a friend write a new Note.  I will gladly stop what I am doing to take a look.

In fact, one of the main reasons I use Twitter is for the Twibe (in education we call this Personal Learning Networks).  I go to find the links provided by my friends.  I go there to add my own.

Marketing has changed forever.  And if TV networks and newspapers and magazines don’t figure that out, they will go the way of all dinosaurs.

But what about teaching?

Many are still stuck in the interrupting paradigm of teaching.  Stop using your cell phone and pay attention.  Stop passing notes and look up here.  Stop talking and listen to me.  I’m guilty.  We interrupt kids from doing what they want to do and try to get them to do what we want them to do.  It is easy.  It is the “sage on the stage” syndrome, and many days I have it.  And it is ineffective.

BUT…

What if teachers found the right mix of students to form a tribe?  I’m not talking about the kids making straight A’s.  They are going to learn the material if the teacher never came to class in the first place.  They are self-starters.  Self-motivators.  Think lower.  Think about the disinterested kids.  The ones who struggle.  Not to learn, but to pay attention long enough to learn.  What if we captured just 3 or 4 of those in each class?  What if we developed a passion in them about learning and living and leading?

What if we form a Tribe?

What do you think?

Recently I applied for a new level of recognition within the Discovery Educator Network (DEN) community: The DEN Guru.  The application process was very competitive, and after I sent in my materials I waited to see which five educators from around the country would be announced.

I can hear your question already.  Tim, exactly what is a DEN Guru?  I’m glad you asked.  From the National DEN Blog, there is this:

“DEN Gurus are STAR Discovery Educators who possess expertise of one or more pedagogical topics (e.g., Differentiated Instruction, Project Based Learning, etc.), have demonstrated their expertise through a variety of professional experiences, and advocate for the meaningful integration of Discovery Education digital content across their area(s) of expertise.

DEN Gurus will be promoted throughout the community as thought leaders in the educational field and have the opportunity to share their expertise in a variety of ways.”

So you can imagine my surprise when I opened my email on my Blackberry in our school’s administration offices and saw my name on the list of five.  I can’t really print here the words that escaped my mouth, so let me just say that I was not just surprised, I was totally floored.  Here is the list of five and the categories for which we were recognized:

• Traci Blazosky
  Creative Construction with Multimedia
  Clarion Area School District, PA

• Tim Childers
  Project Based Learning
  Bradley County Schools, TN

• Patricia Duncan
  Science
  Wallenpaupack School District, PA

• Lee Kolbert
  Personal Learning Networks
  Palm Beach County, FL

• Nancy Sharoff
  Visual Literacy
  Ellenville Central Schools, NY

I know these people.  They are fantastic educators.  They are top level DEN members.  And I am very thankful to be listed alongside them.

I am not comfortable with this kind of recognition at times.  It is a heavy mantle.  The position is important not only because teachers may want to look to me for direction regarding Project Based Learning, but because this is the inaugural year for the position.  I trust I will be able to live up to the expectations.

It is always nice to be recognized by a group of your peers.  So to the DEN leaders who poured through dozens and dozens and dozens of applications, I say thank you.  Or, to quote one of my favorite actresses, “You like me! You really like me!”

Today I spent about 15 minutes of each class period teaching a mini-lesson on essay writing live over the Internet on our TN DEN Leadership Council’s Livestream page.  I have to admit, it was sort of fun.  One of our regular teachers was out, so the idea was to help teach her class for the day and then let kids work on editing their essays.  As it turned out, I had several visitors from around the country, and the other two lab classes also tuned in at least one period on their own.

The technology worked great.  Livestream is a great site to do this sort of work.  I was using my Macbook Pro, but added a Logitech Pro 9000 webcam to the mix to get a little better video stream.  The audio was clear, and the other classes could still see the pages I was using in my Promethean flip chart.

The difficulties came in being online a couple of minutes before the lesson actually started.  In the embedded video below, the actual lesson starts 2 minutes into the video, so just go ahead and fast forward there if you choose to watch it.  We also had a small problem when the office came over the intercom and asked for a student by name.  The announcement was to tell that student to be a car rider.  Obviously, I didn’t really want that information going out over the Internet.  I wasn’t able to stop it on the live feed, but did delete that clip from the library.  Finally, we had the wonderful experience of having a fire drill in the middle of one lesson.  Oh yeah.  It was fun.

You can see the lesson below.  As I mentioned earlier, fast forward to 2 minutes in and you’ll see where we are starting.  And if you dropped by today….thanks!