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This Monday we dedicated a station to analyzing our data from last week’s small-group gaming.

Yoshi by Yoshi Huang

• Students used a formula to determine each group’s live lost to levels won ratio.
• Students analyzed the differences in observed and noted behaviors between the groups with the highest and lowest ratios.
• Students analyzed their own behavior to see if it aligned more with the highest ratio group or the lowest.
• Students identified strategies from the lowest ratio group to try this week in class.
• Students explained how playing the game was like and unlike class.
• Students suggested ways by which they and the teachers could make class more game-like.

Here are some student quotes that caught my eye:

• “It was like class because some succeeded, and some didn’t.”
• “It was more fun than class.”
• “You can fail like in class.”
• “We all need more team work.”
• “We should play on Monday when we need more fun.”

Obviously, I have some hearts and minds work to do here in my allegedly mastery-learning classroom.

This afternoon in class, two usually antagonistic students had this interchange about today’s game play:

Student 1: “Wow.  You did a good job.”
Student 2: “Thank you.”

Maybe my students don’t often compliment one another on their work like that because it’s not relevant enough for them to assess or value it.  Also, I couldn’t engage 2 students with the gaming this week.  More work to do and social learning opportunities to design.

Here’s a comparison of each group’s performance last week and this week:

Group 1 greatly improved positive communication and finished more levels this week than last, but spent a few more lives doing so.  I wonder about how much of the other groups’  improvement is due to reflection about collaboration and how much is due to learning the levels.  I have to think about switching games or levels next week and measuring work in such a way that the qualitative observations on collaboration count for as much as the ratios without making me seem subjective to the students.  Help, PLN! Ideas?

NB: Group 6 consisted of a lone gamer today.  Apparently working alone greatly increases collaboration.

Super Mario Brothers Candy by sonson

Here’s a quick post on an imperfect start to using video games in the classroom for teaching the soft-skills necessary for collaboration in a manner (hopefully) authentic and relevant to students’ media experience.

• Teams of 3-4 students played New Super Mario Bros. Wii at a classroom station.
• Teams were asked to win the most levels possible with the fewest lives lost in 20 minutes.
• A teacher kept track of lives lost and levels won on a graphic organizer and took notes, as well, about groups’ pro- and anti-social behavior.
• Lives could also be lost on paper for trash-talking.
• Trash-talking was addressed whenever it occurred, and serial trash-talkers were asked to stop playing.
• The group with the lowest lives lost to levels won ratio was awarded 3 lunch periods on the Wii.

Here are our results (lives lost:levels beat, reduced to the lowest equivalent ratio):

• Group 1 – 10:1
• Group 2 – 6:1
• Group 3 – 50:1
• Group 4 – 22: 1
• Group 5 – 15:1
• Group 6 – 10:1

Here are comments from the groups with the lowest and highest ratios, respectively:

• Comments from Group 2: “Backed up to easier levels; good teamwork and talk; [Student A] led them through the levels and made sure all followed.”
• Comments from Group 3: “Students fought each other and never started working together.”

I can see that Group 3 needs some social stories work before playing together again, and that the difference between Groups 2 and 3 wasn’t necessarily the amount of communication, but the type of communication that went on between group members.  Before the next contest, I’ll use the data and observations from this activity to pose questions for students about the value of strategic thinking, positive communication, and leadership to social learning.  To help make the discussion more personally meaningful to students, I might begin by asking students to figure out the ratios and results from the data after I make it anonymous.

What do you think?  Does the competition undercut the collaboration?  Is the reward appropriate? I’ll follow up later so we can see where the activity goes and whether or not it impacts soft-skills and collaboration in the classroom.

IMG_4672 by cdslug

[Author's note: I love Foyble.com and its potential to add relevance and voice to students' community service. I greatly appreciate the opportunities I have to work with Foyble.com, but I am in no way compensated by the site.]

Monday night I Skyped with Brian Foy (@Foyble_org), a co-founder of Foyble.com, and Jack King (@drjackking), founder of the North Fork Center for Servant Leadership.  Brian and Jack are working on what will be an amazing community service curriculum that trains teachers and students in using social media for good.  Our conversation inspired me to think about community service requirements in our schools and how we could leverage them further to inspire more and more students to do good and to share their work in hope of inspiring others.  The earthquake in Haiti has me thinking further about what it means to serve a community.  If I was a teacher in Haiti, what would I want to do today?  I can only imagine what my answers would be.  Find my loved ones; find my students; recover; rebuild; help and be helped.  (We can help here.)

As teachers, how can we respond to humanitarian disasters? How do we help our students become leaders who can face catastrophe and reach out to the people affected by it?  I think we have to offer students practice time spent facing problems that they can help their communities solve.  I think they have to see that they can help and that they have the power to change the world for the better at a young age.  I think they need a chance to develop the habit of doing good.

And I think Foyble.com can help.

Foyble.com is a social media platform for blogging and mapping your good deeds.  (You can learn more about Foyble.com here.) Foyble also threads the charitable acts others commit in response to your good deeds.  I think Foyble is phenomenal and timely.  I can see Foyble connecting local charities and volunteers.  I can see Foyble sparking flash mobs for community clean-ups.  I can see Foyble members forming new partnerships to address community needs.  I can see Foyble giving students a voice for the good they do.

When I think of community service at the middle school level, I think of hours requirements for social studies courses.  I applaud the requirements.  I recognize that it can be difficult for kids and families to meet them.  I think it must also be challenging for teachers to assess the impact of service hours on students and the communities they serve.  How do you assess for the growth of empathy in a student? Schools and PLCs aren’t always set up to support qualitative assessment of students’ school work or good works.  I don’t find any fault here, but I see both a need and opportunity for letting go of traditional curriculum, instruction, and assessment to make room for student learning that’s about people and how they meet one another’s needs.  I’m also eager to hear from you about examples of this kind of work that are already happening in our schools.

As a platform for blogging and tracking good deeds, Foyble offers classrooms a tool that teachers and students can use to reflect on their work, give one another feedback, and inspire one another to do even more good deeds through the variety of service opportunities blogged by a class. With some assruance of participation, blogs and comments are great for collecting qualitative data and reacting to it.  The democracy that blogging and commenting make possible are also great for teacher/student collaboration.  Imagine participating in community service opportunities that your students organize or suggest in the comments on your Foyble blog.  Imagine the kind of trust and relationships you can build with students inside and outside school thorugh service learning and usig social media for good.

Since Foyble is a social media platform, it also provides teachers and students with a way to publish and interact over their work with community partners.  With enough participation in a division, state, or region, classes and organizaions using Foyble to document their service could even team up and create partnerships to serve larger numbers of people.  Maybe Foyble could even help connect classes and other groups through an algorithm that matches Foyble Friends by analyzing the types of deeds and users active in a specific area.

There was healthy debate on #edchat this week about technology, the tasks to which it’s best suited, and the responsibilities that guide its use.  I think if we match classroom technology to doing good our kids will learn a lot about service, about their responsibilities to their communities, and about themselves.  If we don’t plan lessons around doing good, we run the risk of not seeing the good our students can do.

One more idea: explore other sites dedicated to doing good and imagine how students could use them as motivators and platforms for good deeds that could be blogged, mapped, and threaded on Foyble.  Could your students agree on a DoGood idea for the entire class each day?  Could they find a local niche for work at which they could become expert, like charity: water?

Do we need to teach social studies to do this?  What interdisciplinary connections can we make to doing good?  What are kids at our schools already doing that might find voice on Foyble.com and inspire others?

Teachers and students interested in Foyble.com: please join the Eductors’ Give group.

PS: My work with Brian and Jack came about because I met Jack via Twitter and then over coffe, and because I knew a guy named Justin Lebanowski in college, who knew Brian Foy around the same time even though I didn’t.  When Justin mentioned Foyble.com.com on FaceBook, I tweeted the link to Jack, who contacted Brian via Twitter, email, and Skype to create synergies between Foyble and the North Fork Center for Servant Leadership.  I never expected to be brainstorming about a social media service learning curriculum, nor did I really think about the need for one before meeting Jack and then Brian.  Sometimes technology helps us make discoveries that we can’t imagine living without after we make them.  I suspect technology can do the same for students.  As we match our tech to the tasks at hand, we have to remember to make a little room for play and the possibility that students will discover new, authentic, and personally meaningful work we could never have imagined assigning them.

My sources say these predictions for 2010 are pretty sound.  Network macronodes will ditch the hubs and spokes and explode into clouds as learners carry new learning with them from opportunity to opportunity.

Dandelion Invasion by ®DS

Social reading

I want synched e-readers with color screens and robust tablet features for annotation and audio/visual mark-up, and I want them licensed to download the latest young adult lit. I want to pay smart phone prices for the devices and download prices for the books. The trouble with marking up a class set of books is that the books have to be used again by the next class. I want to invest in one social reader per student that follows him or her throughout an elementary, middle, high school, or K12 career. I want each student to leave school with not only a record of their reading, but also an archive of the connections they’ve made between texts, their lives, and the teachers and classmates learning with them. I want interactions with the text and between readers to appear synchronously across a synched set of readers. I want publishers to host databases of who’s reading what when so that connecting with another class or reader near the same page is a search-and-click away on the reader. I want new networks of readers to revisit texts after a unit or course. I want to be able to tag and rate pages, passages, and characters, and to be able to upload those tags and ratings to publishers’ databases. Let’s go, Bezos; make it happen: evolving humanities flexbooks with site-based social licensing of new works available on demand.

Webpage Challenge Policies

No more social media firewalls. Take best-practice book challenge practices and apply them to classroom use of the Internet. Trust teachers and students to use good judgment; expect teachers to manage behavior and provide engaging instruction that’s augmented – and not replaced – by technology. If a student objects to a particular website, have alternatives ready. If a parent objects to a webpage after an alternative assignment is made available, invite the parent to review the page thoroughly and fill out a complaint to be reviewed by a committee including the parent, a subject-area coordinator, a subject-area teacher, and a representative from tech support. Require students and parents to object to single instances or pages of defensible sites or services so a school or system doesn’t lose access to an entire, appropriately used product with proven educational value.

Social media goes local

I have a folderful of shared papers and proposals on Google Docs co-authored by educators in a half-dozen states. This year our humanities class has tweeted Tanzania, begun a whole-class Edmodo book club with @engltchrleo’s class in New Mexico, and started another, smaller book club with @kperry’s students in Oklahoma. However, we haven’t read and blogged along with another middle school class in our division. We haven’t Skyped read-alouds to elementary school students or worked on our own fluency with high school mentors. We haven’t used VoiceThread to comment on electronic galleries of political cartoons made by students in local social studies classes. We haven’t asked for feedback on our class wiki from other sixth and seventh graders in our system. I wonder why not. I hope that the strides we’re making in connecting with classrooms online will help us form tighter PLCs and more meaningful learning partnerships locally.

Innovation gets cloudy

Entrepreneurship, invention, and workplace best practices appear in more and more K12 classes. The classes find voice and find one another online. More administrators, teachers, and students join the ongoing work of reforming classroom practice. Teachers and students become more systematic about documenting and sharing planning and work. Administrators and teachers find ways to schedule standards-aligned classes focused on authentic work. They work with legal to draft new permissions policies for publishing and selling student work to sustain such classes. Public education teachers pick up on blended-instruction, distance learning, and the radical differentiation offered by competitors like virtual, independent, and home schools. Conversations online broker local discussions that lead to real change in how teachers, departments, schools, and divisions approach teaching and learning. New definitions and widespread rollout of CTE help American public schools become a part of the world instead of remaining apart from it. Teachers begin treating classrooms like work spaces and students like collaborators. Vision, mission, and strategy work at the classroom level creates accountability, responsibility, and interdependency between learners of all ages. Regardless of school tracking and scheduling schemes, teachers find more meaningful ways to structure physical space and grouping in the classroom – campfire, watering hole, cave; entrepreneurs, inventors, artists. A wider variety of richly authentic, self-selected tags apply to teacher and students alike creating new relational connections inside and between classrooms – and between learning inside and outside school – so process, product, and feedback become better differentiated to meet students needs. Learning becomes quantum as learners use flexible grouping and social media to learn in several ways and “places” at once.  Imagine a school where learners use 1:1 network access to determine inquiry-based daily schedules built around tags and ratings from administrators, teachers, current students, and alumni.  Imagine K12 public education distance learning built around following microblogs of other students attending classes at other learning sites.  Inquiry by RSS becomes common practice for building differentiated textbooks.

Teacher evaluation gets the NCLB treatment

Regardless of local outcomes, RttT assurance efforts and value-added debates spur deep local conversations about teacher evaluation, tenure, and the disparities between different teacher pay schemes and between teacher salaries and the value of the time and results they produce. New pay menus and branching career paths come into play as it becomes obvious that imposing new terms on obsolete learning models and career progressions is unfair and unworkable. Teachers and administrators work through messy conversations about where teacher value comes from, and teachers have to decide between joining pay pilots, waiting for whatever gets implemented, or being grandfathered into current systems that cap pay and annual increases. New opportunities for different types of pay increases encourage teachers to become project-based and develop versatile career portfolios like those of Gen Y professionals in other fields.

Yeah. That’s right – next year. Bam. Done. All five predictions. 2010. Love those round numbers. Something wonderful is going to happen.

Students engaged in creating media that they value mostly do so either outside of school or underground at school. Many teams of teachers and students create work together that both value, but too often the “fun stuff” is either cut out of the school day or limited to what @budtheteacher calls “semi-school environments” in this reflection on Day 1 of the National Writing Project’s meeting at this year’s NCTE conference.

Respect by arimoore

The major obstacle here is relationship-based. What teachers value in students’ work isn’t necessarily what students value. Would a student resist work he or she found authentically engaging and personally meaningful? Think of the difference in quality between work a student chooses to do and work a student has to do. Think of the difference in quality between work that connects to students’ lives and work that does not. Clearly, digitally speaking or not, one way to reduce student resistance to work is to make it matter to them. To do so, we teachers have to redefine what we value, as well as recognize and celebrate distinct qualities of work that students value. We have to value the content, processes, and products students bring to class during the regular school day.

We can’t rely on ourselves as the single means of valuing student work. We can’t armor ourselves in standards or expectations that serve only to separate us from our students.

We have to create learning spaces where authentic engagement and meaningful expectations combine in a symbiosis of learning. Our students need to matter more than the standards, while at the same time we need to reduce the distance between our students lives and the standards to zero. For students to find personal meaning in the work we ask of them, the standards we hold for students have to overlap with their lives.

If it takes “semi-school environments” to do so, then our classrooms should become semi-school environments that host a large audience of F2F and networked assessors or and collaborators with student work. We need to create contexts during the day that give students’ a sense of meaning in school work. If school work needs to change in order to create meaning, then change school work. Create opportunities for publication and entrepreneurship. Bring in expert coaches who can help kids create quality work in media outside your own expertise. Create a team of caring adults and engaged students who share a variety of interests, but a common purpose: authentic learning during the course of the regular school day.

It is not an admission of defeat to open up our classrooms and notions of what learning should be and look like. It’s the most important internal, professional victory we can win. It is not a loss of control. It’s a creation of – and bringing together of – an interdependent symphony of learners. It is not soft or fuzzy. It’s the beginning of the difficult work it takes to articulate what our classrooms value, as well as what we have to do so that our work at long last reflects our values, including joy.  A classroom should look more joyful when full than empty.

Grading is easy; teaching is hard.  Real accountability is interpersonal rather than statistical.

NB: in addition to @budtheteacher’s post, a conversation I had with @beckyfisher73 and this video have me hungering for partnerships between classrooms to create audience, context, and meaning for student work. What if elementary school students created their own mixes of prompts for a tool like this, and then a HS computer science class built a new tool for them and then joined class for a morning of writing and sharing? What if a HS English class story-boarded phone apps for kids books, sent the story-boards to a university engineering program to be built, and then joined the engineers to share the apps with students in lower grades?

I’m sure many of you are familiar with the TwitterKids of Tanzania – students tweeting in English with followers from around the world. I’m also sure many of you are much more adept than I am at breaking down the walls of the classroom with tools like Twitter, Skype, Google for Educators, wikis, and blogs. To follow in your footsteps, in the interest of advancing authentic engagement with our classwork on narrative, writing, and questioning, today we started tweeting to Tanzania.

We began with a simple interactive whiteboard activity. This week we’ve been learning the terms and definitions of plot structure and matching them up together along the St. Louis arch, U2’s Popmart arch, and roller-coasters. We’ve been using the terms to write and our own stories and analyze those we’re reading. Today, we looked at a scrambled narrative adapted from the Epic Change blog to learn the TwitterKids’ story. We ordered the pieces according to plot structure on the SmartBoard, and then used Google Earth to get us from here (Charlottesville, Virginia, USA) to there (Arusha, Tanzania) in our minds. Finally, we brain-dumped a bunch of questions for the TwitterKids and chose a few per class to tweet in hopes of responses to read and respond to later in class.

Here are some of our interactive whiteboard and Twitter artifacts from class (via Seesmic):

TwitterKids Plot Structure Exercise - Before

Twitterkids from Tanzania Plot Structure - After

Tweeting with the Twitterkids of Tanzania

You can follow the Twitter Kids here; you can follow our class account here.

For me as a teacher, the big idea here is to act. There are great models out there of how to bring the world into your classroom and how to broadcast your classroom to the world. Find one that seems manageable to you. Find an idea, lesson, or unit that you can emulate with success and try it. The small steps you take for your classroom’s engagement with the world will help American education make the giant leap into relevance that we teachers and our students need, desire, and deserve.