To wit, here are the questions going through my mind this week.

1. Is it possible for reading and writing to get in the way of learning?
2. Do struggling readers and writers get rich, authentic instruction in parallel to intervention?
3. That is to say, are we certain that struggling readers and writers are also struggling learners, or are we setting up a debilitating environment by keeping rich, authentic instruction from capable learners who don’t behave in accordance with our expectations of their reading and writing? Another way to put it: given the combined life experiences of everyone in a classroom, is what we set out to achieve the best learning we can imagine?
4. Is school a monoculture of text? Or, rather, will students’ workplaces be monocultures of text?
5. Do texts in school in any way resemble the texts students might find in their workplaces?
6. In what ways does an over-dependence on text limit school, classrooms, students, and teachers?
7. Is school prone to a system crash because of its textual monoculture?
8. How can text be used in new-to-school ways to maximize learning time? For example, can a COPA-friendly version of Twitter (or whatever – let kids invent it) let kids collaborate with peers around the world to instantaneously retrieve information and subsequently collaborate on applications and the analysis, synthesis, and evaluation involved in peer-juried project-based work? Can teachers let kids use such social media and/or collaborate thusly face-to-face onsite? Can school become less about protecting the right answers for the right people and more about posing the right questions to bring us together in work that provides lasting value to us and our communities?
9. Is text the end of human communication or a mass-produced place-holder that has codified what we’ve learned while we’ve waited for technology to provide us with similarly produceable and preservable oral and graphic communications technologies?
10. How do I balance my duties to improve kids’ reading and writing with my responsibilities to prepare them for a world unlike school?

School is a legacy system. I wonder if text is, too. I love it, but it isn’t the end of teaching of learning; nor should reading and writing be the sole purpose of instructional technology in a class or building.

In civics class we learn that our duties are what we have to do; our responsibilities are what we should do. Is it the same for teaching?

Computing has survived all its platforms to become more mobile and customizable, which makes it more robust and democratic. How do we help our classrooms do the same given where we are? We don’t need to subvert universal public education to bring it down; we need to subvert it to help it survive.

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!

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.