This morning I watched part of a conversation about teaching practices, and application of constructivism to those teaching practices, between @teachpaperless and @drtimony. It started with a question put out by @teachpaperless to no one in particular, just to all of his Twitter followers.

@drtimony responded pretty quickly. I’d say from the way Shelly phrased the question, and the response from @drtimony, that these two gentlemen have a lot of agreement on this topic.

Their conversation continued from there. This is in reverse order, since they how it can be viewed on Twitter, so I recommend starting from the bottom and then reading up.

Both of these people are deep thinkers. They actively deconstruct other people’s ideas and challenge contemporary models of viewing learning. In my opinion, they are both educational theorist leaders. While neither has the cultural authority and historical context of either Bruner or Piaget, maybe one day one or both of them might. I would not be surprised.

While I was watching the exchange, I felt compelled to jump in, and I did, and both of them responded to my query. The point is, Twitter enabled this conversation to happen, and allowed me to both be a passive observer, or an active participant. The choice was up to me. This is a lot like reading a series of letters between two great thinkers, but then being able to add to their conversation and ask questions. What a difference the technology here makes to the conversation itself!

What would a conversation between Bruner and Piaget looked like, if it had ever happened? Will future historians look back on conversations like these and wonder how ever survived without them?

This is a video that was shared with me of an autistic child I know singing. He doesn’t have as large a vocabulary yet compared to other children his age but he listens to a lot of music and loves it. I’ve listened to a few children sing at this age, and while most of them have better pronunciation of what they are saying, few of them have tonality yet in their singing.

I’m amazed by the progress this little guy has made in the last year. The woman he is living with is doing an awesome job with him, and I’m constantly grateful for her involvement in his life. She has found a gift he has and based on what I saw a year ago, I didn’t think that would happen.

I really believe now that every child has a talent for something, and that it is our job as educators to find these talents. We need to expose children to experiences in life which will help them uncover their talent.

My school recently purchased two class sets of clickers which have already started seeing use in the classroom, mostly with teachers who were part of the trial last year. My thought? They will probably change how I teach as the amount of authentic feedback I can get back from students can be greatly increased, especially as I find ways of making the questions I ask through clickers more effective.

Here’s a presentation I just found which describes what clickers are, and then gives some potential uses.

I’ve noticed some issues with using clickers that I should point out.

1. Students need to learn how to use them. This doesn’t take too long, but expect some occasional gaming of the system and inappropriate responses if you allow for text responses.
2. You need to take more time to prepare your lessons with the use of the clickers in mind. You have to establish questions ahead of time as the on-the-fly questions really can be difficult to ask in advance. One way to counteract this is to have a stock question you can go back to which is blank and you fill in the question itself on the spot, either orally or by writing it on the board.
3. It takes students more time to answer the questions you pose via a clicker than when you ask them to raise their hands. Given that you get more honest answers and a greater level of participation, this delay is probably worth it, but you will notice it in your lesson plans.
4. It is tempting to just keep going with the clickers in a lesson and lose some of the valuable inquiry time in lessons, but remember that they are a shallow form of participation and interactivity. Use them sparingly and when you want to find student misconceptions, rather than a way to facilitate pure lecture style teaching.

If you want to read some of the research on clickers, check out this study. There are I’m sure lots of studies out there that discuss the use of clickers, this one was just convenient to find. If you have other research you’d like to share, please do so in the comment section and we can all look at it.

I get asked a fair bit, are interactive whiteboards (IWB) a worthwhile investment for schools? The answer I have to say, is no. To follow my reasoning, first ask the question for whom are they interactive?

They seem like they are interactive for teachers. They give the teacher the opportunity to interact with material and to demonstrate materials for students in a more engaging way than the traditional white board. This is provided that the teacher has the time to develop the materials in advance for the students, or the time to find said resources that have been shared by other teachers. It is also provided that the teachers have been given some training on how to use the IWB as very few teachers will experiment and figure out the full potential use on their own.

This is a false interaction though since given that the teacher has invested the time and training into developing the materials themselves, they are not interacting, they are intraactive instead. The teacher is reacting to their own creation, rather than something new created by someone else which we could really call interactive.

If we allow students to use the IWB a real problem is suddenly you’ve turned a parallel activity (as in an activity in which all of the students are doing something) into a series activity (each student takes a turn doing something). Changing parallel activities into series activities is inherently inefficient and in the classroom, inefficiencies lead to kids who are not engaged, who do not have something to do. The activity will be interactive, but only for the small number of students who are actually engaged in using the IWB.

So don’t spend your money on IWB for your school. Spend it on individual devices for the student, or a class set of video cameras, or some other device which is really interactive. Spend it on staff training in the use of technology for all of your teachers. Spend it on anything which will introduce real interactivity into your classrooms.

Update: There are students who have a variety of different issues with fine motor skills and one large advantage of interactive whiteboards for these students is that they can actually manipulate mathematical objects and even type whereas pencil and paper or laptops may not be useful for them. When the technology is being used for the purpose it is designed (as an interactive surface) then I think my objections above do not apply.

I just watched @Nardwuar at #TEDxVancouver. He is amazing, and I can’t believe I had never heard of him before. What an inspiration!

Nardwuar is a citizen journalist who interviews music stars and politicians. He has a couple of suggestions for life which he shared which I think are excellent advice.

1. Just ask. Don’t be afraid to ask because the worst thing that can happen is that you can be rejected.
    
2. Do your research in advance and find ways to be creative.
    
3. You will learn something in every thing you do. If you think you know everything, it’s time to quit.
    
4. Be curious

I think this is good advice for our students too.
 

I had a student, let’s call him Jose, who had 100% attendance all the way through school. He attended almost all of his classes, he participated in class discussions, he did everything he could to understand and learn what we were teaching. Jose worked very hard, at least during class, and always made sure to turn in his homework. He was a nice kid. He was very polite and was well respected by his peers. He graduated, a feat only matched by about 35% of the freshmen with whom he started high school.

The problem was, Jose was illiterate and we all knew it. He struggled to complete even the most basic of sentences in his writing and couldn’t read the side of a cereal box. However Jose managed to meet the requirements for graduation because of a few simple things he had learned.

1. Always do your homework, even if you have no idea how to complete it. It’s okay, teachers are grading for effort anyway.
2. Never cheat. It makes teachers mad at you and people are mad at you are less likely to pass you.
3. Come to class and ask questions and try your best all the time. Your participation mark will be excellent!
4. You can take your Regent’s exams (NY state exams) multiple times.
5. A 65% is the official passing percentage (at least in NY) but no one fails with a 60%.
6. 20% for participation and 20% for homework is 40% leaving the final 20% to come from assessments in class, or 20/60 (which is close to 33%).
7. You can get 33% on tests if you fill in everything with whatever you know and guess for the multiple choice, with a little bit of luck.

I don’t think Jose ever got more than 65% for anything he turned in, or for any of his classes. He met the minimum requirements which, honestly in the school I was in, were not that stringent. He failed some of his classes, but because of our credit system, he could easily retake classes, even multiple times, and still graduate in four years.

We failed Jose though because he left high school completely unprepared for the real world. We had certainly not given him any skills he could use because our school focused on "getting students to pass the Regent’s exams". He didn’t learn enough academic skills to continue his studies, although he did attempt University, at least for a semester and yes there were universities which accepted him, thanks to open enrollment.

Jose came to school and wanted to learn. He really respected teachers and did everything he knew how to do to be successful. He was a model student in every way, except he struggled with the written word. There is something seriously wrong with a system which lets a student like Jose graduate unprepared for life. 

I don’t have any answers for this problem but I do know that Jose would have been far more successful if we had not accepted the absolute minimum from him. We needed to set higher standards and then provide him with additional support to meet those higher standards. We needed to invest more in Jose’s future rather than just passing him onto the next person.

Article directed at our school’s parent population, reposted with permission from my school’s monthly magazine, The Imprint

Twitter is what is known as a micro-blogging site and social media tool. The idea is that each person that signs up has the ability to post short messages of no more than 140 characters to the service, either through a web browser, a special program, or directly by sending text messages to the service. Some people have used the service to publish inane updates about their breakfasts and other uninteresting things, but increasingly it is being used by professionals who want to connect with other people in their field.

Twitter has become a real-time human-driven search engine. The results that are posted are primarily the result of real people deciding what information is relevant and what information is irrelevant. Unlike Google, the information posted is not ranked by popularity, but instead it is all carefully chronologically arranged. As well, many mobile phones today can receive updates from Twitter directly, turning it into a mobile search tool.

If you want to know more about the Twitter service and how it works, check out this video by Common Craft called “Twitter in Plain English”: http://www.commoncraft.com/twitter

I’ve been using Twitter for a little over two years now and it has transformed the way I gather information and resources. I use it as a filter on the Internet that helps deliver the most relevant and most useful resources to my fingertips. I’ve learned that I can make Twitter useful by being selective about what I share.

Currently, I have 3392 people I am “following” on Twitter and 3102 people who are “following” me. This is my personal network on Twitter. How the system works is that I only view updates from the people that I am following, and updates I post get sent to the people that are following me. I follow educators from around the world, and most of the people who are following me are, themselves, educators.

When I post updates to Twitter, I talk about useful things I’ve found. I don’t talk about what’s going on in my life, I talk about issues that are relevant to my career. As a result, people consider me a reliable source of information on educational technology, assessment, mathematics education, and other areas in which I have expertise.

Think of the people I’m following as my personal team of research assistants, who filter through the Internet and post relevant information for me to find. On the other hand, when I post a question, I generally get multiple responses. Think of the people that are following me as an army of educators, who collectively can answer any question I pose to them.

I also use Twitter as a direct communication tool with other Twitter educators. There are a large number of Twitter users that I connect with on a regular basis, and every week we have a discussion about issues in education using the #edchat hashtag. You can check out what #edchat is by checking out this website: http://edchat.pbworks.com/

Teachers all over the world have started using Twitter as a major source of information about their profession. I very rarely have to do my own Google searches anymore, I rely on the fact that the educators in my personal network are willing to share. This tool can be incredibly powerful and can transform your own search habits, provided it is leveraged effectively.