Plain sailing hits the buffers

[caption id="attachment_70" align="alignright" width="300"] Image: dreamstime.com[/caption]

Everything was going smoothly. I was enjoying taking part in CoETaIL; my ideas about education were being gratifyingly confirmed (like a lot of memorable PD, it's about the affirmation as much as it is about any new learning). Ideas for my project were coming together: a chance remark picked up at ISTE; the CoETaIL concepts; my new invigorating Theory of Knowledge teaching assignment. One week to go. Plain sailing. And then I hit the buffers.

The kids didn't get the memo. That's my main idea for this project. We adults (teachers, administrators, many parents) can see that education needs a reboot. We talk about it a lot (some of us) and have developed a few overlapping frameworks, succinctly captured in George Couros' 'Today's Classroom'. But, like old-fashioned Parent-Teacher Conferences, the subject of the discussion is not in the room. The adults sagely ordain how well the child is learning and what should be done to improve matters.

"Why do we have to be creative?" asked one of my students last week when I returned a piece of work in which I had asked them to "make an imaginative digital document". "Because that's what we've agreed young people need", I did not say. This exchange of views reinforced my determination to introduce my students to the ideas which we as educators address daily, but which, although they see the effects of our thinking, the students do not explicitly hear much about. (A disclaimer, here: maybe this is not your school, but it applies to several I have worked in).

"Thoughtful and knowledgeable people may disagree" about essential questions. Wiggins and McTighe, Understanding by Design, 2nd edition (2005) p342. Here's ours:

 

What education do today's teenagers need?

I was wrong to assume it would be plain sailing from there. I hit a mental roadblock. Every time I sat down to think about the activities which would serve this question and the goals I had set, I found myself planning things which I would have found boring if I were in the class. Moreover, when I checked with the rubric:

"Use of technology enhances the Unit Plan by using the computer as a research, collaboration and publishing tool, as well as a communication device", (CoETaIL project rubric)

I was in the embarrassing position for an Ed Tech Coach of trying to fit the technology into the unit and make it look like it was integrated (the mistake we counsel our teachers daily not to make). This went on for days as the deadline loomed.

Then on Friday evening, while enjoying a great jazz concert, a new idea shot into my mind. I had been devising activities which the students and I would do together in the classroom. That's not an authentic audience! But if I could get the students to express knowledgeable and reflective views on contemporary ideas about today's classroom, these could be shared with educators around the world. Someone I read this week (I've lost the source, I'll add an attribution if I find it again) explains how listening to music can help some people to concentrate by providing a low level of distraction which prevents petty thoughts from intruding on the mental activity. I can say that it definitely works for me. If you're looking for inspiration, here is the Mário Laginha Trio.

Since then, I have thought a lot more and written a lot. My UbD plan is on another page on this blog. The thinking behind the lesson is in the slideshow below.


You can read the details in the slides, but the part which I know very little about is the final "Likes League" in which I challenge the students to share their work on social networks and see who can make the greatest impression (I shall play too). I am not prescribing any medium in particular: Twitter, for example, which we educators love, is lagging behind even Google Plus as measured by our school's routers, while Snapchat is the queen of the networks (but for how long?). I would rather see the ingenuity and skill which the students give to the task than attempt to constrain them.

Will it work? I have no idea! This activity is slated for 10th to 16th November and I have been wondering if I can get other classrooms elsewhere in the world involved. I still have to think about things like hashtags and whether all Likes (Favourites, Upvotes) are, well, alike, but I'd love to have company as I set out into the unknown. I am looking for colleagues who would like to join in, or who know how to improve it or who are sure it won't work. If you know someone, please ask them to contact @steveweatherell.

[caption id="attachment_71" align="alignright" width="300"] Egret image wikimedia[/caption]

I have a few options in mind which will develop in different directions depending on the outcome of earlier activities. We must discuss the responsible use of social media. One of the upcoming topics is 'Memory as a way of knowing' and in an age where nothing online can be forgotten, the subject of digital footprint is very relevant.

In fact, even though I would be able to teach the unit tomorrow, there is a month to go, and there are areas, like the rubric which has already been through a cycle of teaching and improvement, which could still be tweaked to align with this particular assignment. That's the way it goes: you're plain sailing, you hit the buffers, you avoid the roadblock, you take flight.

Way of the SAMR eye

Steve talks to himself...

- So how did the lessons go, Steve?

- Which ones?

- You know what I mean. You’ve been procrastinating.

- I don’t call it procrastination when I’m busy with other things.

- I’ll just let that excuse hang in the air.

- OK. I’m still chasing the last five students, but all the 12 pieces of work I’ve received I’ve given feedback to and I’m very happy with them. There was the full range of grades on the IB scale, from 7 down to 1.

- I’m actually asking you to evaluate it.

- That’s what I’m doing. We finished the planned activities, and my fear that the ‘imaginative document’ I’d requested from the class would default to Google Slides in all cases proved unfounded. I got a Canva, Prezi, PDF, Pages, jpg and the rest were in Google. I gave them a mark out of 8 on the rubric I had shared at the start and commented briefly on strengths and weaknesses for each student. I haven’t shared it back to the students yet. I’m waiting for the lesson when I see them next.

- So that’s an evaluation then? Was it a good learning activity? Would you do it again? How would you improve it?

- I’m definitely keen to do it again - if only because I spent a lot of time preparing the materials; I’ve got things I would change, but I see what you’re getting at. If I’m going to evaluate it, I need to have values to compare against.

- Yes. Evaluation is more than just thinking about whether it went well or badly. You should have some sort of process.

- Well as luck would have it, I picked something up from Twitter which might help. My former colleague Matt shared an article last week while he was at Learning 2 in Vietnam.

@steveweatherell @svermeulin @irene_tanya @Txpated Another for you… (Steve, I know your love of ed tech models) https://t.co/EXRGsMs1k6

— Matt Broughton (@broughton_io) October 6, 2016

- Yes, I've heard you questioning SAMR, you heretic.

[caption id="attachment_63" align="alignright" width="331"] SAMR, TPACK, TIM, trudacot, PATER[/caption]

- My problem with SAMR is that it gives you wide abstract terms which categorise desirable outcomes, but no help with what it would look like nor how to get there. Redefinition becomes a goal in itself, when we even have difficulty defining what we already do! I tried to help my colleagues realise that every project may contain elements from S through to R. We even started a gallery of SAMR examples both from our own faculty and around the world. But it hasn't stuck as a helpful concept for teachers beginning to work with ed tech.

- And if I forced you to look at your lesson through a SAMR lens?

- Then I'd say I Augmented the task. Whichever culture in society they chose, the students had instant access to first hand accounts of the beliefs and practices. Also, they had an unlimited range of ways to express themselves imaginatively. And when we discuss the work in class and when I repeat the activity in the future, students will be able to easily consult many exemplars both in the classroom and at home. But looking at the rubric and task, I can't claim either Modification nor Redefinition since in essence it was just a written task for which students were encouraged to be creative.

- Right. So TPACK?

- To be honest, I've never used it before though it always comes up when models are discussed. As I understand it, my lesson did combine knowledge of Content (I wanted the students to consider cultures in society); Pedagogy (I considered how I would get their interest and how they would engage with the concepts); and Technology (I found the stimulus online; presented it using TED Ed; the students' work was created, shared, assessed and returned without using paper).

- But just because you are in the Sweet Spot of the Venn diagram, is that enough to say it was balanced or a good application of the three knowledges?

- No it doesn't. Now you're going to ask me about TIM, in which case I would say my learning environment was Active and my level of integration was between late Adaptation and early Infusion.

- You're being very brief with those models...

- Yes, I know, but I think they are built more as a framework for evaluation of a teacher or school's general practice. As Morpheus says, a model is not a recipe. You have to use it in the right way and although my lesson survives their scrutiny and I can think of ways in which it could score more highly, that would not necessarily make it better.

- So ditch the models...

- No, because there was another process described in the article. It's called PATER and it made a lot of sense to me.

- Aha, finally an acronym which spells a real word! So where are you on the PATER scale?

- I'm everywhere at once.

- ?????

- There is no scale, it's a cycle through Purpose, Activity Structures, Tools, Evaluation and Reflection. It recognises that we are not starting from scratch, but we are reviewing our teaching activities which already exist. Although our templates suggest that planning always starts with goals, that is an ideal which for many reasons, both practical and accidental, does not always happen. I love it when it does, but...

- That's a big topic you could perhaps cover in another blogpost. What about the 'Is it a Culture?' lesson we are discussing?

[caption id="attachment_65" align="alignright" width="300"] Those 7 elements in full[/caption]

- Right. Well by considering what my goals were for the lesson, in order to evaluate it, I realise that there was never a time when I wrote them down. There were seven ingredients which fed into the activity and each dictated a facet of the teaching and assessing, but none of them is an a priori goal. The outcome was dictated by the rubric which I adapted. The other elements all played their part too, but if we were to believe the theory, I should have stopped at number 1, identified all of my goals and then determined whether the other 6 elements were appropriate (and if they weren't, re-write the rubric, find another stimulus and so on...).

- So...

- So what PATER has helped me realise is that I didn't do it perfectly according to the template. I let the rubric dictate the teaching goals. But I don't have to feel bad about that and I shouldn't pretend that it happened otherwise. So long as I learn from it.

- Hurray!

"Finding out why we are doing what we already were doing is an exciting moment." Welcome to Night Vale by Fink and Cranor p99

[caption id="attachment_64" align="aligncenter" width="300"] SAMR + eye = samurai[/caption]

Survival of the Twittest

https://twitter.com/steveweatherell/status/782484974352080897

When talking about Twitter, there's only just enough vocabulary to write a nonsensical haiku. Knowing the lingo can get you on the first rung of the ladder. Yet not everyone gets it. I wanted to find out why.

I confess... I don't do Twitter very well. I mostly lurk; when I post, the ripples are negligible; I overthink retweeting. My total number of Tweets is in between my Follower and Following counts. My Likes broke single figures, but most of them are probably me. And I've got zero Moments (I don't even know what that is). Imagine what it would be like to have a K in one of those numbers!

But I do get it. I think I know why others love Twitter and why my work would benefit if I could fit it into my life. This week, I have been reading a lot of the good advice around, looking for the specific pieces which will help me to move up a level.

routine

"You've got to make some time to use it" (Ted Cowan @tedcowan7 quoted in Twitter: A Cultural Guidebook by Raisdana @intrepidteacher and Beasley @klbeasley).

"I skim through posts for 20 minutes each morning and afternoon." (Ferriter @plugusin in Why Teachers Should Try Twitter)

Whenever you try to fit a new activity into your busy life, something else has got to give. Let's make sure it's not sleep that gives, but even brief and immediate Twitter won't work for you if you don't give it the time. I will have to be deliberate and build it into my routine.

"Monitor the most popular hours for your Twitter followers, then concentrate your most important messages in those hours for more effective tweeting." (The Teacher's Guide to Twitter)

No. Life's too short.

patience

"Be patient, and you’ll build a group of valuable followers." (Teacher's Guide to Twitter)

"The trick is to keep putting it out there" (Louise Phinney @louisephinney in Twitter Cultural Guidebook)

https://twitter.com/steveweatherell/status/782500144335974400

curation

"I have easy access to a stream of customized information and ideas that motivate me" (Ferriter)

"Check out the follow lists of people you find interesting and connect with them." (Teacher's Guide to Twitter)

https://twitter.com/steveweatherell/status/782504199405858816

There's no excuse for a boring Twitter feed, but it doesn't happen by itself. I have been learning from other users' tricks. Interesting people follow other interesting people. Hashtags, chats, trending topics, events, lists are all places to go to find a greater concentration of quality which you can divert into your own stream.

But I follow fewer people on Twitter than I have Facebook friends and that seems the wrong way around. Twitter is not even mutual; you are unlimited in what you can choose to let in. The famous Couros brothers, followed by a quarter of a million Twitter users, also follow between them more than 100 000. They seem to me to have a more sophisticated understanding of the meaning of Twitter.

production

"(As a lurker,) you still aren't sure what is worth sharing and you filter yourself often" (Raisdana and Beasley)

"The real magic happens when you share, too." (Teacher's Guide to Twitter)

Everyone has their own Twitter landscape. Lurking is an option and if I hadn't, I would not have discovered Jing at a very early stage, nor some really great lesson ideas which I now use frequently. Others only ever seem to retweet lists. Who are we though to criticise someone else'e Twitter? But there is a distinction between the consumer and the producer and that is the line I feel I should force myself to cross. One of the beauties of Twitter is its restrictions and learning to express myself and to attract attention is a new challenge.

understanding

Technology is understood largely by metaphor. Most of its language is appropriated from other walks of life (amazingly, a lot of it pre-Gutenburg: scroll, tablet, stylus, file etc). Understanding Twitter also requires some good analogies.

"You have to view Twitter as a river. Whether you’re in it or not, the river is going by. When I have a chance to go dip my toe in, I catch a few big fish. I don’t need to know what I missed." (Patrick Green @pgreensoup in Raisdana and Beasley).

This metaphor has long appealed to me. You only see a small amount of the huge stream that flows by, but so long as you trust that it will continue and that the interesting voices will be amplified so that a great tweet you missed may well be retweeted, there is no stress in the times when you are not busy with Twitter.

But the Twitter river image also has its limits, because the feed is not just linear, (as Manuel Lima says about trees) it is also a network with links along more dimensions than just the arrow of time. What strengthens these links is the power of an idea, what Richard Dawkins called memes. By appealing to other users, everyone's ideas, including your own, are subject to a version of Darwin's Dangerous Idea: The Survival of the Twittest.