Evaluating Web 2.0, sort of

I'm not 100% sure I need to do this assignment and I'm pretty sure I'm about to do it in the wrong way, but here goes:

Instead of hunting for a new Web 2.0 tool, I'm going to use the 2.0 evaluation form to assess my use (and my colleague Amy's use) of our school's own wiki/blog site to post instructional grammar videos as part of a "flipped classroom" experiment. We use our wiki daily to post homework assignments and important documents; this particular unit was/is more singular, though, and that's all I'm really discussing for the moment.

So...

1. How does this advance my curriculum and apply to my content area?
The wiki itself advances my curriculum in practical terms, because I use it to post assignments and, particularly, to post instructional videos designed to provide students with content (in this case, about grammar) outside of class so that they can practice applying it in class, where they can work together and I can help them. Amy and I made the videos ourselves, so we had control over the content and relevance -- the videos are just as relevant as class itself.2. Is it secure?
Yes. Students must sign on, and only those given direct permission by the tech department (class members and teachers, essentially) have access.
(easy to get to questionable content?)
No, because it's not a search engine. If I (but I wouldn't) or a student (rare but not unheard of) posted something inappropriate, everyone with access to the wiki would be able to see it until someone with administrative privileges -- not me, actually, but again, the tech department -- removed it.  (will the student work remain private?)
Yes, aside from the fact that it is visible to others with permission to access our wiki (65-100 people total, depending on the year).3. Does it enable students to gain a deeper understanding of the content in a critical, creative manner?
Yes, for the reasons listed above. Also yes because I believe that the flipped instruction model worked fine, even well, in our classes this year.


I also think that this tool (the wiki vehicle) and the model of instruction we're using it to foster (flipped instruction) could work much better if we took more full advantage of the interactive nature of the wiki. Our plans for next year include requiring both old-fashioned moves, such as evidence that each student took notes while watching the videos, and more new-fangled, such as daily or weekly discussion board participation that might take the form of posting questions about that night's new concepts or posting answers to other students' questions about those new comments. We will make other changes to flesh out the skeleton we developed this year. I'd be happy to explain them, should anyone be interested. 


For the moment, assume I'm pro-2.0.

EDMS 550: To love or not to love...that is the question.

EDMS 550:
This class was, in general, terrific...and I didn't enter the course believing that this would be the case; I had heard horror stories from students with a different instructor. I do think that much of what made the course great was shaped by our instructor's approach and choices. Every time we met, I felt like we were introduced to new technology, encouraged to discuss and ask questions and share, and steered away from unnecessary or obsolete work whenever possible. I work in a technology-rich environment and would describe myself as "on the sunny side but not on the skinny part of the sunny side of the bell curve" in terms of technology comfort and classroom use. Still, I did not feel patronized to, I did not feel bored, and I did not feel overwhelmed. As a Mac user, I also really appreciated the extent to which Sir Michael Becksfort (yes, I just knighted you temporarily, if you're reading this) nobly worked to help me find, learn about, and employ applications that would be the most useful for me personally, although Xavier, Mariemont, and most of my classmates are PC-oriented. I can tell from other posters that we all shared this same general feeling: we appreciated the relaxed atmosphere, we learned a lot, and we felt personally served and enriched -- differentiated instruction: so fashionable, so pedagogically sound!

The only downside of the course was the redundancy of the blog and portfolio. I don't have a great solution and I don't mind per se. Our professional lives are not always efficient. If I had to choose, I would choose the blog format, especially given that I am not on Xavier's campus regularly outside of class and it's not easy for me to get there and work freely. Editing my portfolio requires that I be there, of course. There's a certain amount of hassle in the Mac-PC conversion that portfolio documents require, and that's obviously a further annoyance. I can blog from my own computer, whenever and wherever I have access, which is clearly preferable. I don't particularly know the solution to this problem, in that the portfolio is required by Xavier as part of our licensure (still murky to me, but I am pursuing licensure, so I suppose I should both care and become more fully informed) and the blogging is more comfortable but also less controlled so perhaps not a great idea for all learners. What to do, what to do....

That said, I probably should have made that second paragraph shorter because its length suggests that I had real issues with this course, and I didn't. It has proven immediately relevant for me, it will continue to be helpful, and I enjoyed the course, my classmates, and the instructor's chipper company (can temporarily knighted people be chipper?) immensely.

PLN: So personal, so full of learning. No really, I mean it!

I joined the personal learning network English Companion, englishcompanion.ning.com, one of the PLNs that our instructor, Mr. BeckSfort (I made a typo and left out the S in his name the other day in something I wrote and he called me on it) in his infinite wisdom showed us in class. It's great for me. Even though I do not have immediate curricular needs, my teaching partner and I will be looking for a new play for our ninth graders next school year, and this PLN seems like a useful venue for seeking out good ideas. I even commented on someone else's post earlier today, offering up some ideas for non-fiction works that 9th grade English students might enjoy.

I love the PLN concept -- it is relevant, low-key (or at least can be if we wish for it to be), and useful.

By the way, you, too, should read Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk, the non-fiction work I recommended. While you're at it, read The Laughing Sutra, a fictional novel by the same author. I'll tell you in the fall what our students think of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, The Glass Castle, and The Other Wes Moore.

Blogs and comments and reflections: oh my!

I posted comments on a couple of my classmates' blogs today. It was pleasant and, at least the way I chose to approach the task, not too burdensome.

I enjoyed this opportunity in the sense that I had never had occasion to comment on another teacher's or professional's blog or other online written work before. Of course, my subjects, remarks, and audience were shaped almost entirely by my own choice, so the process didn't feel too burdensome.

I was struck by the artificial safety of the exercises, though. We are all teachers or past or prospective teachers, and classmates, even friends. We chose comfortable topics on which to make (minimal, usually) comments. Furthermore, our blog IDs keep our posts from being anonymous, or at least from being entirely anonymous. All these choices and circumstances feel right to me -- I am terribly uncomfortable when people do not claim their public written work and of course I'd rather comment on that which interests me -- but at some level, such an exercise is practice.

I have just the merest smattering of experience commenting publicly, by which I mean beyond the confines of my school's own wiki/blog network. Literally no more than five times, I have commented on articles that are part of an online publication of some sort. I have been tempted hundreds of times; I have regretted it the few times I caved to the urge. The reason I have wanted so badly to add my remarks, the reason I have resisted, and the reason I have regretted (even unnoticed) any commentary I have added are all the same: the vitriol. The two types of threads that I have struggled over the years, wisely, to avoid other than under the most extreme of circumstances are the following: threads directed at my mother or family, and threads that attack my almost-as-dearly-beloved Kansas Jayhawks and their sports teams and legacies. One of these issues is easier to explain and, I suppose, of less moral import. Sports chatter of all sorts -- at the bar, on a radio call-in show, in the stands, and on the internet -- is passionate at best; insubstantial and insignificant and illogical much of the time; hate-filled and slanderous at its worst. My mother, on the other hand, served as a public school board member in my hometown for 20 of the 24 years of my life that stretched from my eighth grade year until last summer. She never earned a dime doing so, I might add. While Lawrence is not a grand political landscape, it is a college town, disproportionately peopled with educated, invested individuals who have opinions. In so many years of work, my mom was, of course, part of decisions with which people, often many people, disagreed; for some individuals, specific decisions remained the defining element of my mother's character years and years after the matter in question was settled. To my knowledge, only one of those decisions was ever just her decision, and it was still hers and my fathers (a decision about my youngest sibling's high school enrollment, a choice I do happen to think I would have handled differently but that never would, under other circumstances, have mattered to anyone). Attacks based on that decision, made in 1997, cropped up again as recently as last spring and of course pertained to my whole family, or at least half of it, rather than just my mother. One of the two times I ever commented in a forum in my hometown were in response to some of those remarks last spring, because I felt helpless and angry and wanted to defend my mother, my sister, and public service in general. I identified myself in my comment, because that seems more honorable to me, and I wrote one detailed remark, never responding to any others. Still, to comment is to partake, and to partake is to support. It's gross to me that I even yielded: it feels like any impulse buy or late night food choice, only momentarily satisfying and then deeply mortifying. Had I jumped in earlier in the dialogue about this particular boundary or budget issue (I don't even remember which), I might have made the SMALL, DISTORTED, LARGELY VAPID ELECTRONIC maelstrom -- see that I have to remind myself that none of it matters a whit -- worse, not better. Even now, talking about it makes me feel like I need to take a shower.

Lesson: never comment...

...on that sort of discussion board. But these happy teacher blogs are A-OK, and so are all sorts of other happy Personal Learning Networks (more on that soon).

21st Century Skills: Yes please!

Every morning, before I go to school, I stare deep, deep into the mirror and ask myself, "Am I a 21st century teacher fostering 21st century learning of 21st century skills to 21st century learners? YES I AM."

OK, I don't do that.

But our school has been in conversation about 21st century skills for several years, to the point that among us as a faculty, the term has become something of a joke, as most aggressively employed teacher-speak terms do at some point (though the ideas are not a joke). I feel strongly that I have been encouraging this 21st century style of learning in my classroom since the 20th century, at least the last couple years of it. Further, I believe that by nature and by discipline, I am well equipped for a classroom structured to foster this sort of thinking.

Rather than write on and on, let me list a few elements of the English classes I teach or have recently taught that fall into this "21st century learning" model:

• Critical Thinking: Close reading exercises in which we explicate an excerpt from a work of literature; analysis of 'texts' from the broader culture (speeches, advertisements, political cartoons, propaganda posters); role playing exercises, such as when my students adopted specific roles in a "school board" debate about whether to keep Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a high school curriculum; students teaching class, as when my honors American literature students became responsible for a movement or era in American literature and had to formulate and post a handout and teach the key points of that movement's beliefs or writerly traits to their classmates; any analytical and argumentative essays
• Creativity/Problem Solving: Mimetic writing assignments, as when English 11 students write an original poem in the style or Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson; Creative extensions or alternate scenes, as when our English 9 students might choose to write "Book 25" of Homer's Odyssey; illustrations of literary works, as when, for the same Odyssey creative assignment, other students chose to make a comic book version of part of Odysseus' journey (Book 22, so gory!); group projects that pose a "problem" or creative task with high expectations and few limits, as when English 7 students have to make a poster illustrating a part of speech in several specific ways or English 9 students have to develop an advertising portfolio for a fictitious product or English 11 students have to design their own utopia or develop a biographical film celebrating the presidential qualifications of a faculty member.
• Communication: Daily discussion-based classes; extensive and varied writing assignments, described in small part above and below; class presentations and speeches and instruction, such as today when individual students had to stand up in front of the class, plug in their iPads, and explain how one of the advertisements they chose for homework exemplified rhetorical techniques such as logos, pathos, or bandwagon appeal; online commentary via wiki posts; group work (see above and below).
• Collaboration: informal small-group work (working together on grammar exercises, analyzing a poem or image, etc.); more extensive and formal group work, as is required by any of the group work described above, which is a mere smattering of the kinds of collaborative challenges our kids face.

As a part of our school's effort to be more conscious and intentional in equipping students with 21st century skills, I have also worked to do the following:

• Use technology in a meaningful, dynamic, not-unnecessarily-burdensome-and-not-superfluous way. My students all have school-issued iPads. We use them as often as makes sense for the classroom, for planning, notetaking, research, collaboration, writing...you name it. I have worked to equip them with information that will make them more informed, skillful consumers of the internet and captains of their personal iPads. Just in recent weeks, for example, we have used Explain Everything and Creative Commons, two options my students did not know about before I told or showed them (thank you, EDMS 550). I have also been experimenting with a 'flipped classroom' model for grammar.
• Help students gain greater self-knowledge so that each understands better what his or her individual strengths and weaknesses are. This kind of understanding is meaningful in many ways. It is most relevant in terms of 21st century skills because of the importance of successful collaboration (do I need to explain how? I hope not.)

I could go on and on. In fact, it would seem I already have. In short, when I look in the mirror, I can (if I so choose) answer the question Are you a 21st century teacher with "YES. YES, I AM."

Free Write: Yea! English class is fun today.

Late last week, my colleague Amy and I began our final unit in English 9: advertising as text, aka rhetoric in advertising. Our students are visibly excited. We're talking about advertisement, after all: shopping, flipping through magazines, watching TV, going to Reds games, playing around on the Internet, and chatting it up on Facebook are all relevant activities from a curricular standpoint. But now that I've heard my first handful of This is so much more fun than reading a novel-type remarks for the year, I'm going to write freely, a 'free write,' as it were, about my ambivalence.

To be clear, I'm not actually ambivalent about the unit itself or any of the assignments we have been giving or will give (these include readings from Picturing Texts, an advertising scavenger hunt, the task of finding advertisements that illustrate different types of persuasion, eventually a huge group project in which students develop a series of advertisements for a hypothetical product). It's a great facet of our course, in my opinion: interesting, new, relevant to the students' lives, sophisticated in its expectations, forward-looking in its design and principles. The students sharpen critical tools they were unaware they had and learn terminology and concepts that they will use as students, businesspeople, and consumers. The emotions I vent here will lead me to change exactly NOTHING of substance in this unit.

But I am torn about this pesky notion of "fun." First of all, my class is ALWAYS FUN. We laugh, we enjoy one another's company, I make silly jokes and do awkward things, the kids enjoy a reasonable amount of license to lead discussion (even astray) and generally to be themselves while being academic. Secondly, we have consciously designed the entire English 9 course -- which is only two years old in its current form, so it has maintained its original character -- with student engagement in mind. I'll grant you that engagement does not strictly mean or require fun. Reading Homer's Odyssey is not fun per se, although the issues the epic raises echo throughout literature and our own experiences; Much Ado About Nothing, while hilarious to comfortable consumers of Shakespearean English, may again not be fun for a more challenged reader. But we just read a comedy, for heaven's sake, and I don't mean Much Ado About Nothing! We read The Laughing Sutra! It's hilarious! Ridiculous stuff happens left and right! The title even says 'laughing'! How much do you need, people?

One more thing: Since when does English class, or any class, need to be fun? Academia is good for your soul, or something like that.

OK, somewhere in all of that ranting, I said some things that I don't really mean. I won't identify which those are.

What I really believe is that the sort of backhanded insult constituted by This is so much more fun than reading a novel (or reading poems, or just reading) is instructive and ultimately of only as much consequence as I choose for it to bear. It's great that our current unit feels fun to kids -- how often does school, work, or even day-to-day, get-the-laundry-done housework feel fun? I know this; the kids know it too. Secondly, kids have short memories, and the simple fact that we just finished a novel that was, in fact, a pleasurable read does not make them remember "f-u-n." The daily deadlines or final essay test involved in our study of that novel are also not particularly fun (in other words, fun reading and fun reading for school with deadlines are two different things), and in general one "fun novel" does not the new belief "It's so fun to read novels" make.

Furthermore and for the moment finally, looking at advertisement is fun. My students (and yours) are shoppers and magazine readers and TV watchers and sports consumers. So are we. It's interesting and valuable to learn more about how the advertisements we see in the venues work. Learning about this rhetoric in school does feel like a secret vacation in our lives outside of school -- fun, in a word.

So fun it is (imagine a curmudgeonly voice here).

PS: Novels and poems and plays ARE fun too. THEY ARE.

Seeing myself on film: "Oh dahhhling, I just LOVED it."

Obviously I'm kidding. Does anyone short of a full-blown narcissist enjoy seeing himself or herself filmed? I suspect that few enjoy it.

So first, let me address the many things I did not enjoy about this experience. I did not enjoy seeing my physical person on film. The camera angle could hardly have been less flattering. This is a personal issue, I know. In terms of the teaching itself, the main weakness that I noticed is something I already know about myself: that I repeat myself and fall into "verbal filler" habits. Usually, I tend to fall back on um and uh. In this case, for whatever reason, I clapped as a segue, which isn't something I particularly believe I do in the classroom unless I am trying to send subtle cues to a sleepy, chatty class. In this case, I was filming in front of...no one. I suspect I was behaving a little strangely because I was trying to present the appearance of my usual style and self without actual students there. I also repeat myself from time to time (see below). Finally, I noted at one point, in a segment that may have been edited out of the final product, that as I was modulating my voice, I emphasized an odd syllable or word that probably would have made the sentence harder for students to understand or follow had they been present.

Since I'm also supposed to discuss the strengths of my presentation, I think it's safe to call it "solid." My lesson made sense and was manageable; at the same time, it would have required some time to browsing the Library of Congress collection and editing the class wiki heading to students, and my video shows me in the midst of allowing that time.  I also worked hard, as I always work hard, to use the classroom space even when tied in many ways to the computer from which I'm projecting. I believe that I explained the process I was demonstrating clearly, with good volume, and that I pointed to the board and used other means to direct (hypothetical) student attention to relevant elements of the display on the board. I also believe that this assignment, although not an actual task for my class, would be a valid and meaningful assignment; I might well use it in a later year. The target audience for this lesson would be my English 9 students, in their first year at the upper school at Seven Hills, and so introducing them to important resources like the Library of Congress electronic collections serves a purpose for them as learners beyond the mere significance of this particular collection for this particular assignment. I would even say that points of weakness noted above are not wholly weaknesses: I do tend to repeat myself as I talk in class, but that is in part an adaptation because I seem unable to make myself consistently speak more slowly (when I repeat key ideas, that gives kids a second chance to catch that essential point); and my verbal modulation -- loud and soft, higher and lower pitches -- serves to draw and keep student attention and, usually, to help me emphasize key points.

All in all...it was fine to see myself on film, but certainly not a pleasure. I do believe that any teacher stands to learn from this sort of experience, every now and again.