Tonight's Top Ten List: ED 521 Takeaways

Dave:  So I saw a guy on the subway yesterday, I was coming to the show, you know, I ride the subway.

Paul:  Well you're a regular Joe, you ride the subway.  (sporadic laughter)

Dave:  Yeah, I mean, what else am I gonna do, hop in my hot rod?  Who am I, Leno?  (laughter).  Let's switch to the street camera, could we?  Get a view of the...(camera shows bumper-to-bumper traffic outside)OOOOHHHHHHH!!!!...There it is, yeah, see?  I'm not gonna drive, you kiddin me?

Paul:  So you take the subway!

Dave:  I take the subway.  So I'm on the subway, and here's this guy looking at me, which happens, you know, I'm, what can I say, (looks at the camera, straightens his tie) a striking gentleman.  (laughter, applause as he flattens his lapels, smooths his suit coat, and sits up straight).  Anyway, this gentleman asks me, (lowering his voice a register) "So, uh, Dave, uh..." (laughter), "Uh, Dave, so, what's on the list tonight?"

Paul:  He wants ta know!

Dave:  He wants to know!  So, I suppose that's where we're at, with the show tonight, and so.  Without further ado, tonight's Top Ten List! (Cheering, applause)

(Top Ten List animation, Paul singing obnoxiously in the background)

Dave:  (Impatiently shuffling his cards), Allllright, and tonight's Top Ten is...Things I learned in ED 521.  Things...I learned...in ED 521.

Paul:  You're a student?

Dave:  (ignoring Paul) Number ten:  Edmodo is not just the name of Edward James Olmos's fan club.  (sporadic laughter, some clapping, a lonely "woohoo!")

Number nine:   Diigo: for yougo, for miigo, for Viggo (Viggo Mortensen peeks his head around the corner of a curtain; the camera zooms in to wild applause and cheers from the audience).

Number eight:  I tried Wallwisher when I was younger, but I wasn't wishing, and it wasn't a wall (raises eyebrows suggestively) eh?  Eh?  (silence, a trio of claps)

Dave:  Eeehhhh, gotta get ridda that one (biting his lip, winds up and throws the card off-camera to a smattering of laughter).  Alright, let's pick up the pieces, here.

Nummmmmber seven:  I typed my name into Wolfram Alpha, and all I got was the closest interpretation:  Davis Guggenheim.  (laughter).  Goo-gen-heim.  (More laughter).

Number six:  My wife found my Grammar Girl subscription, so I've been sleeping on the couch for a week.  OUCH.  (Laughter, applause).

Number five:  I told my friends I started using Glogster, and they asked who my dealer was. (Some laughter)

Number four:  I used Screenr to show my nephew how to clear his browsing history (Laughter, some shouts, applause).  Saved his mom from an...awkward conversation.  (Laughter)

Number three:  Made a Wordle out of the script for "Transformers."  The biggest words?  "Explosions" and "Robots,"  (laughter).

Number two:  Found out that Mendeley is not a gay dating service (pause, some "ooohhhs," increasing laughter turning into applause).

(drumroll) Aaaand the number one thing I learned in ED 521:  When you gaze into the Twitterverse, the Twitterverse gazes into you.

(Paul and the band start up, applause and cheering).

Oh, technology: I'd be jobless without you, and will someday be jobless because of you.

I felt like such a techie dude the first day I walked into my classroom and saw a Smart board.  I thought, I can reach so many young minds with this wonderful piece of magic!  You touch it, and it does stuff!  WOW!

Then I sat down at my desk, and looked at my wonderful desktop computer, a (semi-) new Mac, all the components built in, all shiny and white.  I thought, wow, someone is trusting me with a publicly-owned computer!

Then I saw my document camera, and thought, I bet that's incredibly useful!

Then I was given a school-issued iPad.  I thought, how do I rate, to receive such a gift?  I am truly a lucky, lucky teacher.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, my teaching and my grasp on technology are not mutually exclusive.  I was lucky enough to step into a technology-rich environment, and I use it at every turn.  I have access to such a variety of tools that to attempt to name them here would be foolhardy, since I haven't done an inventory on Evernote, which has effectively taken the place of my memory.  I really don't know what kind of teacher I would be without the technology that surrounds me.

And yet, in many ways, I am already behind.  I have an intense desire (one endlessly fueled by taking a technology in teaching course) to keep up with all the latest devices and trends, but I also have an intense desire to maintain my sanity.  I still need to learn how to filter the vast amount of information and tools available, to choose what I'm going to keep and what I'm going to trash.

So, in short, technology is such a part of my teaching, that, not to doubt my adaptability, I don't know how effective of a teacher I would be without it.

Article review: a tirade

Three years.  I have been in this profession for three tiny years, three years of immeasurable growth and unfathomable darkness and self-pity and ice cream at inhuman times.  And I'm already sick of the game.

I don't know how you do this for twenty, thirty, forty years.  I really don't.

Reading Emily Moore's article, "Why Teachers Are Not 'Those Who Can't,'" I was reminded both of the reasons I became a teacher and the reasons that, sometimes, I feel as ridiculous and weak as an ice cube dropped in an erupting volcano.  She mentions the amount of disdain she experienced as a Princeton graduate who decided to become, God save her, a teacher.

I know what you're thinking:  what is Princeton doing offering teaching degrees?  Are they joking?  How could they sink so low?

And, based on her article, that is how people outside of teaching (who, for the most part, are people who believe they have zero stake in the public education system in this country) view educators.  We are a bunch of has-beens at best; a cadre of fools who tell ourselves we are touching lives while simultaneously ticking off the minutes until our next vacation.

Oh, also, we are all encased in the adamantium shield of teaching unions, an association with which is on par with marrying into the Corleone family in the eyes of the public.

All joking aside, Mrs. Moore's experience is a reflection of how many in this country view the education profession: as the ultimate sieve.  All those who fail at the "real" jobs will eventually wash down to the great crap trap that is teaching.  One step above the sewer.

As I read Anthony Mullen's account of his experience with the windbaggery of politics in "Teachers Should be Seen and not Heard," I noticed this lack of respect extending into the political sector.  He expertly points out the biggest problem facing teachers: the people who make decisions about how we should be doing our jobs have never done our job.  That, or they are so far removed from the actual practice of teaching so as to render their opinion antiquated and almost entirely theoretical.

I don't have the guts to walk up to an auto mechanic and slap the wrench out of his hand, then proceed to tell him how he should be doing his job, according to a teacher, a street musician, a cop, and an exotic dancer.  None of us know the ins and outs of his work; why in blue hell would we ever be allowed a say in the standards by which he is measured?  Yet such is the nature of the teaching profession.

To teachers' infinite credit, though, we all soldier on. 

Our profession is questioned, ridiculed, and changed without our say.  We continue to teach.

Parents we have never met rage at us for the failings of their offspring, the children they have been raising and taking care of for the sixteen hours a day, forty-eight hours a weekend, and three months every summer that they aren't in school.  We continue to teach.

Because there are days like the one I had today, where students come in to my room for parent-teacher conferences and are excited to share their writing with their parents.  Where I find out that I am the only person who has been allowed to read the novel-in-progress of a shy, erudite, uniquely gifted student of mine.  Not even her parents have seen it.  Where I can choke up a little bit when a student mentions that he wants his parents to come to my classroom first, because he has an "A" in my class, and because he knows that "I'm probably the only teacher who will have something good to say" about him.

So yeah, pass your laws and make your judgments.  Three small years, and my heart has broken and mended and expanded beyond all logical boundaries thanks to the only people who really matter in this situation: the students.

I guess I understand, now, how I'll do this for the next twenty, thirty, forty years.

Three Stories: A Review

"Stone Soup: A Classroom Parable"

Okay, at first my viewpoint on this story was poisoned by my kindergarten understanding of the children's book, "Stone Soup," which, as far as I could discern when I was a wittle boy, was about delicious-looking soup, and how hungry I was, and how much I wished we were having soup for lunch that day, and how sad I was when I found out that it was chicken nuggets again, and how much I liked Super Mario Bros., and how that girl is pretty and I want to push her in the mud to let her know.

As I read it, though, the true moral seemed pretty blunt-force-trauma-to-the-melon straightforward.  Be adaptable.  Don't be afraid of the new and strange.  If you're a teacher, you're going to need to change, and change often.

All things I have learned the hard way in the past three years.  Still, good to see them in parable form.

"The B.O.O.K."

There once was a time when books probably freaked people the hell out.  Especially in those devil-may-care illiterate Dark Ages (and Middle Ages, and other Ages).  I'm sure the old-timers were pissed about "ye devyce moste cruele, waerdes within for fooles."  I'm sure there were some staunch chisel-and-cave-wall hipsters who insisted that they liked the smell of limestone, and you just don't get that from these soulless books, and all that.

I'm willing to bet someone held on to all their old slabs, grumbling about how reading "Cave Wall Love Anthem" on paper just isn't the same as good old granite.

"Pencils Across the Curriculum"

Now this one, I couldn't really identify with.  I remember only having one computer in my classroom, back in 1995.  It was a green-screen Mac with Oregon Trail, and that's as far as I remember.  Some nicer computers were available in the lab, and they could run sweet, sweet Hyperstudio, but we never did much with them.  Our teacher was old-school...like, "write this sentence fifty times because you did a naughty" old school.

Thirteen years later, once I started teaching, computers were herpes and classrooms were the entire population of coastal Mexico in mid-March.  There are laptop carts, computer labs (which themselves are slowly going the way of the dodo), iPads, and more.  We still aren't quite to the 1:1 computer utopia that I'm sure we are headed towards, but we are steaming ahead.

So yeah, I didn't really identify with the story about the single pencil.  I understood the point (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAPUN!), but it didn't make much sense to me.

I guess I can just......erase....it...from my....memory?  No?  Two pencil puns is too much?

The future of the library; the library....of the future!

There it is, in all its splendor!  The future library!

Wait...the future is already upon us.  Turns out we just need the funding to make it the present.

My graduate class on technology integration was discussing the future of libraries just the other day.  I know, I know; what a serendipitous blog post this is!  Anyway, we talked about how the librarian of the future (and the present) needs to be more of an "information technology specialist" than a classic "librarian."  What does this mean?

Simply put, it means that millions of adolescent boys will need to start having information technology specialist fantasies.

It also means that future librarians will still need to be expert managers of information, as they are now, but they will need to do it in a different medium.  In this case, in the 1s and 0s of code, as opposed to the whole range of numbers and letters employed by the Dewey Decimal system.

 I feel like current librarians are probably facing the same issues that current teachers are: the push towards technology, the questions of relevancy, and the sinking feeling of the path you decided to follow suddenly changing directions.


Like teachers, I'm sure librarians will grow and change with the changing times.  Some will be left behind, some will be overwhelmed, and some will be forced into retirement.


But what comes out the other side will be the librarians we need to keep information organized, to keep reading relevant, and to keep the whole exchange of ideas and literature flowing freely.

The 21st Century: Where Free Time Goes to Die

Into the classroom I walk...nay, saunter.  I got swagger, I got moxie.  I got a brand-new technological pair of rollerskates, as it were.

I am a teacher in a golden age of computerized doodads.  Life is sweet.

Then, as quick as I saunter, I begin to sway.  I wobble.  I swoon.

Blogs.  Vlogs.  Flipped classrooms.  Vodcasting.  Podcasting.  Glogster.  Google docs, maps, translate, calendar, et cetera ad nauseum, not to mention the 46,000 or so other technologies I am omitting.

Oh, plus screencasting.  There's that, too.

There are so many new and magical tools to use, and so little day to learn how to use them.

Sometimes I wish I had a convenient drug habit that kept me up all night.  I could do so much.

But I digress.  Oh, do I ever digress.  I digress so very, very much.  Digress to a fault, you could say.  Digression.  Oppression.  Depression.  Regression.  Concession.

Ugh.

Anyway, we teachers need to include these tools in order to hold our students' fleeting attentions.  We can't pretend they don't exist, and we can no longer mourn the loss of our precious free time.  We just have to dive in with both feet.  It's more about overcoming your own fear and exasperation with the instantaneous pace of technology than it is about the technology being an inconvenience.

For example, I was a bit intimidated by Google docs the first time I learned about it.  Yeah, I took the summer Google institute (twice) in consecutive Junes, but I was still nervous about the implementation of it in my classroom.  I felt like I would forget to check it, that I would let students down with the slowness of my feedback.  Mostly, I felt like my feeble brain would not be able to handle keeping track of yet another thing.

And yeah, I forgot to check it for weeks on end.  I forgot, and felt terrible, and caught reprimands from students who wanted my input on their writing.  But, eventually (very eventually), I began to remember.  Just like I finally learned, sometime during my third year, to do attendance, so, too, did I learn to check my Google account daily.

I haven't made the leap to full-fledged online publishing of assignments, but I am a sloth in a speedboat world.  I am getting there.  I have to.

We owe it to our students to make classrooms a place that are connected to the world they know, that operate under the same set of rules.  The longer we cling to our antiquated practices, the more we risk obsolescence.

Our students are social monsters, or are at least in the grips of the social monster the world has become.  In order to cater to the mindset that everyone out there wants to know about everything you do, we need to focus more on publishing content to the world than we do on producing work for a single, sad, lonely human stuffed behind a desk like a wad of cotton stuffed in...some kind of orifice.  A mouth, maybe.

Those aforementioned swoon-inducers that I mentioned are just the tools we need in order to reach this lofty goal.  Blogging as a teacher, and supporting student-created blogs and websites, is one important way we can support the publishing of students' work.  Google docs and its ability to share a single document among multiple users has been an invaluable resource for me personally when it comes to peer-editing and conferencing in my classroom.

Those other tools I mentioned, the vodcasts and screencasts and all of that goodness...well, that's all in the works for me.  All things in time, as they say.

For now, it's one technological baby-step at a time.  That's the best I can do, and it's all I can promise myself at this time.  No drugs.  No time-turner (yet).

We owe a lot to our students, but we owe it to ourselves, as well, to take these things slowly.

Saunter.  Swagger.  Swoon.

Smart Board? Let me just pull this plug...ain't so smart now, is ya?

I try to be a resourceful teacher, one of those dynamos who can just whip out a lesson plan in five minutes if need be.  One of those teachers who never get rattled when something doesn't work, who always have a contingency plan for their contingency plan.  You know, a smart teacher.

That ain't me.

I tend to put a lot (i.e. too many) of my eggs in the technological basket when it comes to lesson planning and resources.  I use my Smart Board for almost everything.  I do all my presentations in Keynote or Notebook, and I never print back-up copies.  Ever.  I try to help students figure out iMovie, Garageband, Edmodo, and various other marvels of the modern world.

I other words, I am a teaching cyborg.  Well, maybe more like a parasite.  I suck all the life out of technology and give nothing back.

And what do I do when my plans go to hell, when my presentation software crashes, or my computer is simply running gaddawful slow and the kids are getting restless?

I go right to hell with it.  I crash, I slow down, I sweat and turn red and stutter out little conciliatory phrases about being patient while I fiddle with the starboard stabilizing allertuder, or what have you, as I try desperately to overcome my utter inability to fix a funky computer.

Oops.

I can't help it.  The power of these tools is too great.  A document camera is still a little piece of magic to me.  It displays anything on the board.  Anything at all.  My face?  On the board.  My chicken scratch notes that my students are supposed to copy?  On the board.  What a wonderful thing.

The idea that there are so few limitations to what can be done with this technology is a little daunting, but it also allows for so much creativity in not only my work, but in the students' work, as well.  For example, I recently had students doing a vocabulary project where they were tasked with teaching the rest of the class some words that they thought were worth knowing (swear words weren't allowed, thankfully).  I had students using the document camera to correct a worksheet they assigned to the class.  I had students doing formative assessment using their words on the Smart Board with Notebook software.  They inherently knew that they had no limitations.  It wasn't just pencil and paper.  They could use almost anything to teach their words.

Some of them assigned crosswords.  Don't worry, I threw stuff at them.

So yes, I am too focused on technology.  I rely on it.  I live and breathe and die by it, in the classroom.  I just can't in good conscience pretend that I can be as effective without it.  I would rather wait to do a lesson with my beloved technological partners (Ol' Smartie, Doc, and Surso (that's surround sound...duh)) than teach it traditionally.

Well, maybe we should call the old, pencil-and-paper way the "classical" teaching method, now.