My webmentor badge

• Packing my classroom and moving out of my “old” school and division.
• Helping my co-facilitators launch #CLMOOC, the making learning connected collaboration from the National Writing Project and Mozilla.
• Joining #teachtheweb as able. Need to do more in the next few weeks.
• Reflecting on project-based learning in my classroom this year.
• Baking “ice flower” cookies for my son’s birthday party.
• Qualifying for my webmentor badge.
• Starting a summer vacation full of make.

What will you make with us this summer?

Windows to learning

Project-based learning (7th grade)

This past year I had the unique opportunity to run a project-based learning (PBL) class at my last school. While I structured the course around #ds106-like assignments for middle schoolers, I tried to keep as much choice open as possible throughout a few design lessons and several new media projects in image editing, sound editing, game-making, and coding HTML. Six of eight students completed hand-coded web portfolios. You can find them here:

• Student A Portfolio
• Student B Portfolio
• Student C Portfolio
• Student D Portfolio
• Student E Portfolio
• Student F Portfolio

A post dsecribing some of our work is here.

I’m happy that several kids discovered an affinity and love for code. A few even worked on programming in Processing with an Arduino board or two by year’s end. In between our game project and final code sprint – called “code camp” – we did do-it-yourself (DIY) projects, and kids found the Arduino during that DIY time. Other kids dove into DIY.org. We created “project playlists” for DIY time – short lists of one- or two-day low cost, low-risk projects in areas of affinity and inquiry. I really like the way the playlists structured kids’ worksflows during DIY time.

I am in the middle on relying so heavily on technology to frame kids’ work. I wholeheartedly believe that all kids deserve and need access to learning and resources that reflect the world as it is, not as schools say it was. However, thinking of Dean Groom here, I wonder if I couldn’t have pushed myself further to go where the kids are. HTML sometimes feels more like where I am than where kids are, but there isn’t a lot of programming or production where most of my kids began the year. Still, what would a text-chat reflection look like? Could we have just built a script to pump all our work into Minecraft? Should we have stuck to learning to code or otherwise build students’ dream-projects throughout the year, or did learning some specific skills lead to learning that wouldn’t have happened otherwise until kids had access to stuff that could inspire daydreams?

I wonder also if I could have gone further to engage some kids who lost steam during code camp. The end of the year, weirdly (or maybe not), doesn’t seem like the best time to complete or revise portfolios. I probably should have explored ways to do smaller code camps and revisions after each project to keep portfolios up-to-date with students’ coding knowledge. Asking them redesign their portfolios and change a whole bunch of formatting was not the best “ask” I could have made at year’s end.

Looking back, I would have asked kids to spend more time with me on the elements of design, as well.

Language Arts (6th and 7th grade)

Likewise, in my most traditional language arts class, I planned a pretty complex project after testing. I chunked it and paced it according to what I thought my kids could so, but the results of the project were wildly uneven. Maybe it should have been a three to five day sprint with a lot of direct instruction instead of a two-week affair. Nearly ll of the kids in this class figured out how to animate sprites, record and play sound, and keybind triggers and events, so I am happy they had the chance to use Scratch. A few got to incorporate a MaKey MaKaey into the works, and that really thrilled a few kids, so the project worked in that it taught me about my kids and where they are with mashing up the writing process, storytelling, coding, and physical computing. The mix of new media and traditional work in this class left me kind of unsettled about what to assess and how to assess it. Mostly, I’m frustrated with myself for failing, yet again, to find the grand theory of teaching everything awesomely, yet in purely interest- and inquiry-driven ways. It’s vexing. I feel kind of like Chris Farley on the Chris Farley Show.

Language Arts (8th grade)

In my inquiry-based 8th grade language arts class, I had another fairly rare opportunity in that I taught kids with whom I’d looped for two or three years. Moreover, these kids and I understood one another, our community, and what was possible to do and learn in it. Everybody did something different and no one wanted it any differently (I think). I am deeply privileged to have learned alongside the kids in this class. Some of the Web-published standouts of their PBL work include:

• This Minecraft Controller, documented by a kid who denies being a reader or writer, despite also writing hundreds of lines of code to make this work.

• This game (WASD, mouse-aim, spacebar):

• And also this one (use the spacebar):

• And this kiln:

  

Take-aways

In no particular order, here are some of the ideas I’m taking with me to my new school and civics classes next year.

For teachers:

• Pursue your own professional development in new media and open-source, production-centered technologies. See #ds106, #teachtheweb, #learntocode, #clmooc, #makesummer, et al. Avoid professional development that trends towards apps and instructional consumerism as interventions.
• Don’t think about helping kids master content; think about using content to help kids move along a continuum from teacher-dependency to independent inquiry. All sorts of scaffolding and instruction are needed every step of the way; kids will go as far as they can; serve them well.
• If you have to grade, make the grades small; to the extent that time and circumstances allow, make personalized feedback and kids’ interactions with authentic audiences the vehicles of assessment in your classroom.
• Put interesting things in front of kids and ask them to connect those things back to your content. Don’t think of your classroom as a content classroom; think of it as a wunderkammer.
• Making, coding, and physical computing: if there’s no evidence of any of these things in your classroom or school, ask yourself and others why not.

For administrators:

• Making, coding, and physical computing: if there’s no evidence of any of these things in your school or division, ask yourself and others why not.
• Foster as much buy-in as you can into student-directed, inquiry-based, project-based learning across content-areas and grade-levels. This is not picking three projects from a tic-tac-toe sheet or doing the end-of-year research project. It takes a lot of instrutional- and adminsitrative-tolerance to let teachers and students build enough trust and common experience to see what happens when they ask questions and attempt projects of which they are not certain. Find a cohort of adults and kids who can support one another and resource and schedule them accordingly across the years. Real change is a marathon no company will run for us.
• Be wary of putting the PBL class or portfolio into one or two teachers’ hands. PBL will be seen as their turf – something that others therefore don’t need to do -, and it will go away when those teachers go away if there are too few of them.
• Establish pro-open and pro-production guidelines for technology adoptions or purchases: is this something open to kids? Can they make something new with this? Is there more to do here than consume or provide the right answer? Am I putting a closed product or an open platform into my kids’ hands? Can what’s happening on the screen connect to the physical world in any way? Can this work with what we have, or will we have to buy more or subscribe to more to keep it working in the near future?
• Learn alongside teachers and kids. Try to make time to put together a student, parent, teacher, and administrator, F2F cohort for something like #makesummer. Practice transparent learnership.

That’s all I’ve got for now.

With thanks to

• My family for putting up with my near-constant unpacking of what is and what’s possible in my work.
• My kids, colleagues, and supervisors for letting me teach and learn with these classes as I did.
• Mozilla, the National Writing Project, and their people, supporters, and partners for surfacing – inside and outside school – the kind of work of work to which I aspire.
• The countless folks who’ve helped me figure out what I’m doing here through Twitter, #nerdcamp, and all the rest.

Stay tuned for Act II, in which kids teach me how all this works in a large, public-school civics classroom.

Arduino Miro by ada fruit

• Worrying how to motivate kids to finish their web portfolios until peer mentors stepped in and helped classmates get the job done.
• Cutting over a thousand words from an article I overwrote.
• Composing a hacktivity kit around remix, drawing games, and webmaking.
• Joining conversations on the #teachtheweb G+ community and Twitter chat.
• Prepping for the upcoming #CLMOOC launch.
• Playing with an Arduino Micro.
• Drafting and delivering remarks for our 8th graders’ end-of-year ceremony.

How are you closing out the school year?

We are nearly ready to close out the year; I have a post or two left about the work we’ll wrap in a just a few days time.

Before I get to any of that, here is the text of my remarks for this class along with all my hopes for them:

There’s a Buddy Mondlock song I like called “The Kid.” I really don’t know any other Buddy Mondlock songs, and I’ve never heard him sing it – I’ve only caught a couple of covers. Nevertheless, I love the song. One year, several teaching lifetimes ago, I wrote a verse on my classroom window using glass markers. The verse goes something like this:

I’m the 
kid who
always looked out the window,
failing tests
in geography,
but I’ve seen things
far beyond just the school yard
distant shores
of exotic lands.

In many ways,  I was – and still am – this kid, even though I tend to look inside instead of outside. I get lost in my imagination. I get to drawing or writing or coding or whatever and – poof – I’m gone.

As I’ve told some of you – even though you refuse to believe me –  when I was a kid we didn’t have those smart phone contraptions; we didn’t even have cellphones that would fit in anything but a military surplus backpack. Instead, we had text books that we covered with inside-out, paper grocery bags. My friends and I doodled on those thing obsessively – they were our tap-tap games, our escapes, our windows out of the classroom. These days I mark up my faculty meeting notes the same way – you can ask any of your teachers if you don’t believe that.

So, at this point, my little talk probably feels a lot like class – what the hey is Chad talking about this time?

I’m talking about how I learned to step outside myself. I’m talking about how I learned to pay attention to what is right and good inside the classroom. I’m talking about giving up the security of the window and the book cover and the doodle to really connect with the people around me.

I’m talking about how you all have taught me to teach. You have taught me to pay attention to our shared work in the classroom – not just to a standard or curriculum – but to our questions, wonder, and joy in learning something new – in doing something awesome. It’s not that you’ve convinced me we should never read and write; it’s that you’ve convinced me that reading and writing are two of a kajillion paths that can lead us to accomplish great things together in the here and now – no window, doodle, or day-dream required.

You are not just “a kid” or even “the kid.” You are brave kids. You have learned to be yourselves and to learn as yourselves. You are becoming the heroes and heroines of your own ballads, not just members of the chorus in another production of the musical called “school.” You’ve cooked, composed, created, and cared for one another across the years. You’ve stuck together and you’ve stuck to what you think is most important even when we adults may have disagreed. When I have wondered, “Can we do this? Will this work in our classroom – in any classroom?”, you and your actions have answered, “Yes,” and you have built wondrous things.

Remember those things. Remember each other. Remember which choices have taught you the most. Remember yourselves. High school is another verse in the song you are writing about you. Make it a song that you will remember happily. Make it a song you want to sing.

And before I start singing “The Kid” – or even “Puff the Magic Dragon” – let me say thank you, congratulations, and godspeed.

I feel profoundly grateful for the opportunity to take what I’ve learned about teaching, learning, and myself at the Community Public Charter School and to apply it in a larger, “micropolitan” school. I feel like I’ve been given the chance to aspire to be the teacher I wish I was when I started out in a larger school nearly a dozen years ago.

I cannot overstate the importance of my Albemarle County colleagues and kids in teaching me to be a better teacher, learner, and person than I was when I began. At each prior stage of my career, Albemarle County Public Schools somehow offered me exactly the right work at the right time to change me for the better. I treasure my time with the division and the opportunity to do different and important kinds of work in each of my placements. Certainly, the opportunity to help develop the Community Public Charter School was a unique gift.

Now it’s time to change again, and I’m grateful to Staunton City Schools and to Shelburne’s administration for offering me the chance to do so. I anticipate all kinds of new learning for myself as I reacclimate to a big school and approach its kids’ needs through the democratic and participatory pedagogies I hold close to heart.

Programmable walkway

Crunch time. This week I whiled away the hours

• Learning to program small Python scripts for Minecraft: Pi Edition.
• Dropping in on #teachtheweb as often as possible.
• Watching the #ds106 zone from afar.
• Playing with the LED patterns in a student’s Arduino mediated 3×3 matrix.
• Planning for the upcoming #clmooc from the National Writing Project.
• Researching and writing about coding and physical computing for an article due shortly.
• Messing around with novice-level Java string tutorials and getting inspired to revise a bit of Run, Sandwich, Run!
• Talking with Kim Wilkens while she visits and mentors our project-based learning class.
• Imagining coding tutorials that explicitly tell you how many windows of what type you should have open for what you want to accomplish.
• Ordering my to-do list and helping kids do the same to wrap the year.

Are things any calmer in your neck of the woods?

LED 3×3

• Learning to make LEDs blink using Python, IDLE, Terminal, Raspberry Pi, and its Cobbler kit.
• Playing with Minecraft on the Raspberry Pi using Python commands in Terminal
• Watching the first 3×3 LED matrix of a student’s 3x3x3 Arduino light cube project come to life.
• Catching up on writing for a handful of upcoming deadlines.
• Starting language arts kids on a Humument inspired book-hacking project.
• Helping project-based learning kids compile the folders for their e-portfolios. Look for them soon.
• Covering classes and proctoring tests.

The rest of the week just went. Hopefully, time and I will be more present with one another next week.

What have you been making?

The License

If you have any questions or other feedback, please comment below or join the conversation on CoöpCatalyst where “The License” originally appeared.

However, I haven’t really slowed down to reflect on Laura Hilliger’s original post about the open web, so here goes.

Decentralization

I believe that learning is at its best when it’s decentralized and in the hands of each learner. I believe that the most important groups we form are the ones we create for ourselves, not the ones in which other place us. I believe that true authority comes from mutual trust held between people and never in one place or institution.

My classes go best when each kid tackles work in which she believes. They go poorly when I demand too much attention and protest the “importance” of things that are not important at all when delivered as curriculum. Teaching and learning can be decentralized even in schools with hundreds of students. It is not the community that makes it difficult to decentralize and differentiate in schools; rather, it is how we let authority devalue and disassemble community amongst our kids that is the problem.

Transparency

I believe that teaching is at its best when it is transparent and of clear and honest use to the learner. I believe that the most important lessons we teach are the ones that have immediate connections to our lives and dreams for the future, not the ones that reference standards. I believe that true teaching comes from following, mapping, and predicting where learners will go.

My classes go best when I learn how to teach my kids by watching them learn. They go poorly when I pick a strategy or teacherly trope to obfuscate the triviality of a decontextualized lesson. Teaching and learning can be transparent and, in fact, they are at their very best when teaching clearly matters and students’ work stands for itself as evidence of excellence or inquiry. When teaching and learning aren’t transparent, I think we move toward a future like that of The Evaluation.

Hackability

I believe that the best lessons are adaptable and remixable by design – they are approaches to opening multiple pathways – and that the best learning is transferrable across contexts – much like problem-solving carries over from activism to code. I believe that the most important hacks we make are those that invite people in to learn things the system wants to keep from them in places the system wants to keep them from occupying. I believe that true hackability comes from the courage to say, “This does not work and it could.”

My classes go best when I put hackable materials and ideas on the classroom kitchen table. They go poorly when I ask students to do exactly what I do. Teaching and learning can be hackable if we think of education as a process of discovery, documentation, and publication of content by students, rather than as a scripted set of teacher-delivered standards and tests.

Here are some of the ways I work in the open:

• I blog frequently on what we do in the classroom – on how I approach my work and how students go about theirs.
• I tweet the ideas, practices, and experiences that spark something for me or my kids.
• I travel and speak about unpacking the power of play to transform professional practice.
• I stay nerdy and child-like regarding wonder.
• I hold my anger about the way things are in one hand and my hope for how they could be in the other. I try to keep the angry hand behind my back and the hopeful hand open in front of me.
• I open my room and experience to as many people as I think I can at once.
• I accept the risks of working this way in the open inside a closed system and protect space for my kids to make as many choices as possible for themselves and their learning.
• I ignore as many of the false distinctions between subjects and structures as I can so that my kids can reason for themselves how their chosen work connects to reading, making, and communicating.
• I try to learn new things in spaces that are new to me, especially as I age.
• I never take myself too seriously, cause everybody knows fat birds don’t fly.

Essentially I hold absolutely to the judgment that learning is good and I refrain as much as possible from making relative judgments about what students want to learn – or from shorting out students’ inquiry from a position of illegitimate, institutional authority. I trust my kids to learn about things that bring them wonder. Even in classes in which I feel less able to compromise with the system than I would like, I try to bring in, hack, remix, and graft what’s working in more independent classes to the circumscribed teaching and learning in more traditional spaces.

I get better at teaching and learning from watching my kids learn, play, struggle, and problem-solve in the open. They generate the solutions that I cannot.

I license most of my work as CC-By, with some of it tagged Non-Commercial (NC) and No-Derivatives (ND) in cases in which I haven’t decided what to do with what I’m sharing. I just want to share it as early as possible.

Here are some pieces of my work that I think capture how I go about openness:

• “Building readiness”
• “The methods behind our #educon madness”
• “Open schools, open source, open world”
• “Beyond the teaching crisis”
• “Teacher remixed”
• “People, problems, and wonder”
• “#nerdcamp and the new educational transcendentalism”

I have stopped making strident stands against our system of public education, though I do wholeheartedly support and invite you to take part in building #openschools. I would rather make something than destroy it; I would rather help those stuck in the system than tear it down around them. I am, as I once was (always have been?), a clown, but one who pays increasingly careful attention to people and to how we learn and create, discover, and organize our selves through play. If I can help you and help you help others do the same, I am a tweet away.

And given how much I’ve said and learned in the open over the past half-decade, I’m sure that in this post or that I’ve put lies to much of what I say here, but here I am, and all the rest is an invitation to talk openly about how we change when we find ourselves and our selves in the open.

While I learned joyfully this week in community over the open web, my joy is like a beacon reminding me to hold close to my heart the values, people, and sacrifices that made the open web, that keep it open, and that make it possible for people to stand beside one another the world over when joy is nowhere to be found.

We are rediscovering that the world is makeable. We should be open about that and about how we can help each other get past traditions of teaching and learning that insist, hypocritically, that knowledge is at once and only sacrosanct, dissectible, and consumable.

Best. Card. Evah.

This week I spent time…

• Collaborating on an open learning web comic and web app prototype with #teachtheweb friends.
• Remixing a kindergarten Star Wars stop-motion film into “Are you my Star Wars?”
• Working on a short, splashy, silly webpage-as-mix-tape for an upcoming event.
• Sewing conductive thread, LEDs, and a not-yet-functional photo-receptor into Flappy the Sea Ray.
• Helping kids code with z-index and font styling and otherwise get through e-portfolio “code camp” in our project-based learning class.
• Helping kids continue their cyber-book projects and individual work in language arts.
• Learning how transistors work.
• Explaining how to write a for/if/else loop.
• Covering classes for test proctors and proctoring tests.
• Working on a review.
• Missing #nerdcamp.

I also finished You and started Necessary Evil. How have you been geeking out?