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plan b by alangutierrez

The explosion of Web 2.0 and social media has given us and our students a prodigious number of tools to use for collaboration. We have an exponentially growing number of Plans B-Z to use when something doesn’t work.  This week, our end of the Skype book club we’ve created with Karin Perry’s (@kperry) students fell apart just because.  This time it wasn’t about accountability or technology or really anything we share control over in the classroom.  Things just fell apart, but the center of our collaboration – students’ desire to connect and share their reading experiences with one another – has held firm.  We’re going to Plan B with the idea that it will help us return to Plan A – small-group Skyping.

What is Plan B?  For us, it’s a Ning.  While we regroup, Karin’s students will be building a Ning to which they’ll invite us. We’ll all use the Ning asynchronously to share posts and comment on one another’s insights until – here at our end – we’re caught up and able to contribute as we want to. (As I want us to?  Have to check on that.)

Despite the challenges we could not meet through our own actions, I’m greatly excited about what the Ning will bring to the reading group.  Students will be able to blog – to compose, revise, revisit, an add to their thoughts about boos and reading. Splinter groups can form by book or genre using the groups feature. Students who happen to be posting at the same time can chat. The calendar can be used by students to share power together in drafting reading schedules and in scheduling Skype sessions later on when both groups are ready.  I think the Ning will transfer power from the emails and tweets Karin and I have been sending one another into the students’ own social network built around their love of reading.  Once we see when we can Skype or chat during the school day – or outside school – students can manage their interactions over reading using multiple social media platforms suited to their purposes with minimal oversight from us adults. The Ning should give students ownership over the Skyping.

While I’m sorry that we’ve hit another temporary FAIL, I’m remain so very grateful for our Skype book club because its teaching us how to persist with challenging tasks and to WIN together.

Thanks to Karin’s students for starting work on the Ning!

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.

Longleat Hedge Maze by Howard?Gees

Today we had a great time introducing ourselves to Laura Oldham’s (@engltchrleo) new reading classes via Edmodo; our small-group Skyping cohort also happily reconnected with Karin Perry’s (@kperry) students to discuss James Dashner’s The Maze Runner.  We used 1:1 iPods Touch and m.Edmodo.com for our introductions; we gathered around Skype on a MacBook for our book club.  We posted our introductions mostly asynchronously with some nearly synchronous replying via Edmodo, back and forth with Laura’s enthusiastic students; our Skype session was live with Karin’s.  Students had a list of questions to focus their introductions on reading, but not exclusively so; we used teacher generated questions planned over Gmail for the Skype discussion as our two groups came to today’s discussion having read different amounts of The Maze Runner.

That is to say, Karin’s group had finished the book and was ready to start discussing our next book, Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies.  Our group members had reached chapter 2 of The Maze Runner.  While we had opted-in and committed to read The Maze Runner over Winter Break, we did not do so.  Therefore, instead of discussing the entire book today, we responded to some broader, abstract questions about the book’s premise:

• How would you run a world with no adults?
• Have you ever been confronted by an unsolveable problem?
• Is it fair for teachers to assign problems with no clear solutions?
• Would you rather have an adventurous, dangerous job, or a safe, dirty one?

The students huddled at each end of the videoconference and then shared out their answers over Skype.  There was a great deal of nuanced thinking and middle-school humor.  Some highlights:

• “We would need a democracy.”
• “We would need leaders.”
• “We wouldn’t want a tyrancy [sic].”
• “It’s not fair for a teacher to assign you a problem you can’t solve if it’s going to be graded.”
• “It’s okay if the problem imparts some larger life lesson.”
• “I guess we know who the heroes are in these groups.”
• “I would stay in the kitchen and save the world with treats.”

After the Skype session ended, our group talked about accountability.  We did not draft a reading schedule before break.  We did not keep in touch via Edmodo or our class Google Voice line, though we could have. Before break, we opted in to read The Maze Runner, committed ourselves to Skyping again today, and went home with our books.  We could have done more – I could have done more – to make sure we were finished with the book by today, but after our talk today I’m not sure that I would have changed a thing.  We didn’t do our part; while that’s not okay, per se, everything was ok thanks to our partners’ kindness and our discoveries about accountability.

I’m chagrined that we didn’t uphold our end of the bargain.  I’m vexed we didn’t do what we said we were going to do.  I’m sorry we hadn’t read enough to engage with the questions and conclusions our partners were ready to ask and share.  However, I’m kind of thrilled that today we discovered personal accountability because of our audience of peers.  There was no life lesson I had to impart (and on Friday who’s ready to do that?); no metaphor connecting schoolwork to real work (but the book was about a maze full of monsters that kids had to escape).  There were no excuses (no dogs were harmed in the eating of our books); there was no external consequence handed down by the teacher (you’ll never be allowed to teleconference again!).  There was common personal regret and embarrassment, but also a very vital and genuine determination to meet our partners half-way next time.

Our partners were exceptionally gracious today – kindly helping us with characters’ names and really engaging with us in the general questions that made possible our participation in the conversation.  We recognized that and appreciated it greatly.  We owe them one heck of a book club.  We had fun with reading today because of them.

And we found personal meaning in preparing for class thanks to peer & personal accountability.  We want to do better so we feel better about our contributions to collaborative projects with peers.

It might not get any better than that.

Except, you know, for reading (finishing) really good books.

We’ll let you know in a few weeks.

My kids today also gave me an opportunity to see again how we can turn any situation into a learning opportunity if we all come to the social media platform with open hearts and minds.  What cuts learning short when students aren’t prepared isn’t so much their lack of preparation, but a teacher’s insistance that they be prepared before being allowed to move forward with learning.  Aren’t we always ready to learn?  Isn’t there another question we could ask?  Haven’t we all failed at a task before finding a solution – one of many?

Finally, here’s an idea for next year to harness the power of social media for peer accountability in the classroom: 1:1 accountability partners.

It’s hard to find meaning in doing work because a teacher says so.  It’s hard to find meaning in letting down your group when you’re horsing around again by recess.  It’s hard to listen to an authority figure talk about what you should have done.

What if we tried this instead?

• Partner classes across schools for semi-quarterly projects, but weekly or semi-daily blogging.
• Connect students with 1:1 partners sharing similar interests and ideas about school.
• Ask partners to post weekly or semi-daily to a blog shared between the two of them.
• Ask partners to post each Monday on what they want to accomplish academically over the next five days at school.
• Ask students to report each Friday on their progress towards their goals.
• Ask partners to post a positive comment about a success each week and to pose an encouraging question about a work in progress.
• Ask partners to send one another supportive Tweets, Yams, or Edmodula (?)  regarding their goals throughout the week.

I think we could come up with a reasonable permissions and assessment framework for this, and maybe succeed in part in decentralizing accountability in the classroom, making for less coercive teacher-student relationships.  I bet we could even do this with the classes next door.

We could experiment with “do what you say you’re going to do” being the law of the land, rather than “do what the teacher/rubric/calendar says to do.”

Anyone want to opt-in?

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.

What is Skype? by malthe

Today one of my reading groups started “small-group Skyping” (thanks for the phrase, @bjnichols) with some of Karin Perry’s (@kperry) students. The students met on Skype and then watched three book trailers before settling on Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies as the novel they wanted to read and discuss together after winter break. I thought the entire experience was awesome and illustrative of how teachers can use social media for familiar things like reading groups or lit circles. I think proof-of-concept successes with common practices bridged across classrooms by new technologies have great potential for attracting skeptical teachers to embrace meaningful uses of classroom technology. Certainly small-group Skyping can be the gateway to re-imagining several common classroom practices like character tea-parties or interviews.

Karin and I met at Teri Lesense’s (@professornana) #NCTE09 presentation on new classics. We sat next to each other at a table in the back corner. I arrived after Karin and thought she had picked the best spot for live-tweeting. We followed one another on Twitter, exchanged blog URLs, and kept in touch about the possibility of a Skyped reading group. Neither of us had much experience with Skype, but we set up our accounts, put together a pool of books, tweeted back and forth about our meet & greet/book-trailer lesson plan, tested our Skype connection at school, recruited kids and brought them together, and then got out of the way. The kids did a great job. They commented on the moods and tones of the trailers; they talked about taking into account everyone’s genre preferences, they set up an opt-in agreement to read one book over break, and they all agreed to read another book together afterwards. I can’t wait to read with them and hear what they say. I can’t wait to figure out how to scale up what works. I most enjoyed watching the students’ synchronous engagement with discovery and learning.

We watched trailers for American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang, The Maze Runner, by James Dashner, and Uglies. Uglies won as the book group, while The Maze Runner became the opt-in title over break.  Each trailer was unique in its approach and production values.  It was cool to watch the fan made trailer for Uglies and think about having students undertake a similar project for a book.

Here are initial student comments:

• “It was fun to talk with different people from different places.”
• “I liked meeting new people on Skype because I didn’t have to write to people or type numbers on a phone.”
• “It was interesting. It draws your attention.”

I’m looking forward to students’ reflections on their books and their new partnership at the end of our project, whenever that will be.  Hopefully, the students will resist an endpoint.  Today’s activity had a lot of splash, but for me, the lasting educational benefits of small-group Skyping and other communications technologies come from the relationships formed around learning long after the novelty of the technology fades.  I hope students will feel the same way.